Preview: New Chapter 3

                Altair Grus was just finishing his first day on the job at with the Mendel’s space agency. His job description was pretty simple—all he had to do was stand guard outside the elevator on Mendel’s floor, four thousand feet below the Earth’s surface, and don’t let anyone but Mendel and his technicians through the door. Occasionally, there would be visiting dignitaries or other authorized officials, but Grus just could not see the point of securing an elevator lobby inside a secured facility, especially since there were already three levels of security to get to the elevator lobby on the ground floor level. It was going to be a boring job full of long days of, well, nothing.

                The secured facility was inside a fenced compound situated about thirty miles from the nearest town. Grus had been interviewed at a coffee shop in that town, by a man who came heavily armed and driving an old and non-descript car. He wondered if this interview was even legitimate, and that fear was reinforced when he went to the address on the business card he got from the interviewer. He drove the thirty miles out into the desert, and when he got there, there was only a chain link fence. It was padlocked, and posted with several government-type signs giving various “enter at your own risk” statements, and other veiled warnings about staying off the premises. He waited for five or ten minutes. He wasn’t sure whether to just sit there, or turn around and go home. He checked his wristwatch, and when he looked up and looked back through the chain link fence, he saw what looked like a cloud of dust swiftly approaching him from somewhere behind the fence.

                When the dust settled, a round vehicle appeared before him. There were no wheels that he could see, and he couldn’t remember seeing any tracks of any kind.

“Is that a hovercraft?”

The driver or pilot or whatever he was called didn’t respond to the question. He walked calmly to the gate, removed the padlock, and spoke to Grus.

“Pull your car inside the fence and pull up next to the transport.”

“The transport? What is that thing?” Grus made another attempt at finding out what the vehicle was, but again, got no response.

“Move your vehicle now, please. We’re on a very tight schedule.”

“Okay, I’ll move it already.”

Grus moved his car next to the “transport” and got out. The man climbed into the transport from the top center through what looked like a manhole cover, and simply motioned to Grus with a hand out of the hole to climb in after him. He couldn’t see how to climb on top, and struggled to get on top. Finally, the man emerged half way from the transport and offered a hand to Grus, and pulled him up, and they were both inside. The top sealed behind them. Grus couldn’t believe what he saw. The top of the transport sealed by fading to black with a final burst of bright white light much like when you turned off a really old television set and the image recedes into darkness with a burst of residual radiation.

Preview: New Chapter 2

          It was noon the day after Mendel had stayed late at work with Charlie going over his team’s discovery. Mendel was about to reach for the lunch he’d hurriedly thrown together on his way out the door, but the morning’s events were racing through his mind. He couldn’t tell his wife what was bothering him; he came to the same conclusion he always came to. I’m going to call Vela. I have to tell someone about what’s going on, and my brother is the only one I can talk to that understands what I’m dealing with, AND has the security clearance to hear what I’ve got to say.
          Vela Omichron, Mendel’s brother had volunteered to be one of the first off-world colonists from Earth. The government offered to provide the colonists with everything they would ever need during their lifetime in exchange for their services as pioneers on other worlds, and preservers of the human race. While money would be of no value to early colonists, the money they earned as colonists accumulated throughout their lifetimes, and upon their deaths, the money was divided equally among designated beneficiaries who were also colonists. This “salary” of sorts would continue through the third generation until the colonies had become cities with economies of scale and trade with other worlds begun.

Preview: New Chapter One

          It was around six o’clock in the evening when Mendel found himself looking out the window of his office, watching the sun go down from behind his desk instead of from the living room in his home. His faint reflection glared back at him from the shiny surface, showing his medium length jet-black hair, prominent nose, and square cheek bones. His office was not lavish, but was well appointed with all of the things a very good physicist would need. So, all he really had in his office was a desk, his chair, sofa, and a cabinet about five feet wide and eight feet tall with a myriad of electronic gadgetry neatly organized inside. His gaze returned to his office walls which were, of course, covered in dry-erase board which themselves were covered with a lacework of equations, molecular diagrams, and multi-colored fingerprints and smudges where markings had been erased unsuccessfully. 

          Mendel turned his gaze back to marking on the wall he had been previously examining, and when he couldn’t regain concentration momentarily, he turned his neck to the right to look out his window again. He knew the sunset he was looking at was not real, but was a computer generated recreation of what was actually happening four thousand feet above his head on the surface. He hated the feeling of being locked deep underground in his own personal mausoleum that his agency called an office. He understood the need for security, as his interstellar travel research would be highly prized by any government or private organization looking to find a way to move between colonized planets faster than the three years that was the current norm between neighboring planets. He once again tried to turn his mind back to his work, this time by turning his head back towards the holo-display on the desk. After a few moments, when something didn’t seem to make sense, he noticed that there was a portion of the hologram missing. Mendel reached out in front of him and cleared the notepad from the corner of the projection area allowing the image to refresh and fully display. Ah. Now that’s better.