by D. J. Gelner
Contents
Kindle Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Thanks For Reading!
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Kindle Copyright Page
Copyright 2012 D.J. Gelner. All rights reserved.
Orion’s Comet LLC publishes this work under a limited, exclusive license, obtained from the author. Rights obtained by Orion’s Comet LLC reserved to Orion’s Comet LLC for the term of the license.
This is a work of fiction. If it’s not painfully obvious that any of the characters within are just that— fictionalized characters— and not meant to be actual representations of any persons, living or dead… well… I’m not sure what to tell you. Get a sense of humor (or “humour,” as Dr. Templeton might say).
Cover Art by Derek Murphy, Creativeindie Book Covers, www.creativeindie.com, 2012.
Orion’s Comet logo designed by Grant Gelner, 2012.
ISBN: 1-939417-02-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-939417-02-2
To Mom, Dad, Grant, Jenga, and Sully
Chapter One
“Shlama, Bar Enosh!” I stroked my now richly-bearded chin.
“Better! Much better!” Avi Naris beamed. “Of course, I have no idea why you want to greet the Son of Man, but—”
“Just a Bible nut is all, I suppose,” I hoped some of my English charm would disarm the swarthy, ex-Israeli commando-turned Aramaic scholar who now sat across the table.
“Hey, whatever floats your boat, buddy,” the man was surprisingly good-natured despite his student’s shortcomings. “The person who’s bringing me in here must think it’s worthwhile, for what they’re paying me.” He gathered up the various tablets he had scattered across the desk.
“Yes—quite. About that…” I waited several uncomfortable moments for Avi to say something, but his expression remained stony as his eyes focused on mine with the intensity of one of the nearby tunneling lasers. “You’re fired.”
Avi glared at me for one of the (to that point) tensest moments of my life. Just when I thought he was about to smash his tablet over my head, he shook a phony smile onto his face.
“Hey, no problem, my friend! I was meaning to talk with your boss about this, anyway. With what your Benefactor has paid me, I can afford to take an extended vacation. But indulge me on one thing; may I ask why? Why hire me? Where might you be going where you’d need to know ancient Aramaic?”
“No, you may not,” I tried to project as much firmness with the man as I possibly could, despite my sheer terror only moments before. Avi stared at me, mouth agape. For a brief moment, I thought he might bolt from behind his chair and snap my neck. I cooly took out a roll of hundred dollar bills and snapped off four or five.
The smile returned to Avi’s face, “I got it, I got it. Super secret spy stuff, right? Well, if you’re going to the Middle East, be careful, my friend. Fallout is nothing to fuck around with.”
“Goodbye, Avi,” I extended my hand along with a curt smile and a nod. The Israeli took it and grinned. He whipped an expensive-looking pair of Ray Bans to his face with his off-hand.
“Goodbye, Finny.” He walked to the large set of double-doors that led to the long hallway outside of my lab and exited. The heavy, steel door crashed shut with a satisfying “ka-CHINK.” I followed Avi and put three steel bars across the doorway before I engaged the magnetic lock. My Benefactor always said that you could never be too careful, and though I had often poo-poohed the eccentric old-timer, as the zero hour drew nigh, I was beginning to think that he had a point.
Before I go any further, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Phineas Templeton, and though you should know my name, unless you’re a close family friend, you’re probably as blissfully unaware of my existence as everyone else in this world.
I write this little travelogue not for fame or fortune; I’m well aware that it will be somewhat less than successful, either due to poor sales or some mishap that will befall the poor courier carting this manuscript to its intended destination. That’s just the way the universe—this universe—works.
Nor do I write this screed as an indictment of others whom I have met along the way. Though there are those toward whom I bear some ill will, and understandably so, dear reader, as will soon become apparent, I have never been the vindictive sort. Jealous? Sure. Arrogant? Perhaps at times.
But vindictiveness is a special type of response, a reaction that combines jealousy and rage with some necessity of action. It is that compulsion with which, outside of the field of advanced theoretical physics, I was not born. Or rather, I should say, I wasn’t born with the capacity to follow vindictiveness to its natural ends.
No, I write this book as a purely selfish endeavor. The first aim of this story is an attempt to achieve some sort of catharsis, some measure of solace despite all of the slings and arrows suffered by my rather fragile frame and ego over the past several months.
But perhaps more importantly, I write so that hopefully someone out there will finally discover the truth. As unassailable, static, and unforgiving as that truth may seem from my point of view, know that even when the mysteries of time and space have apparently been all but unraveled, when the man behind the curtain has been exposed as a charlatan, there are still bits of the truth, not as a space-time construct, but as the absolute, “this is what happened” concept that may still leak through the cracks.
In return, I ask only for three indulgences on your part. First, forgive my manner of speech and cadence. Though I was born an American, and that is where my life and laboratory reside (or resided, I should say), I grew up in London for many years—until university, actually—and I still consider myself a Britton, thus though my accent is decidedly English, my speech (and spelling, for that matter) is a somewhat bastardised combination of American colloquialisms and lapses into the King’s.
Secondly, I have visited three separate doctors within the walls of this fine university, and after a battery of tests involving all manner of flashing tablets and poking and prodding electrodes and rods, I have been diagnosed with a condition referred to as “hyper vigilance.” Though you will receive the benefit of this dastardly illness in the form of my mind’s tape-recorder-like precision in recalling places and conversations, do know that it is a positively dreadful way to go through life. I’ve never been able to sleep without the benefit of eyeshades, a pair of foam earplugs, and perhaps a nip or two of fine scotch. And yes, I’ve even tried the new holoprograms that profess to help such a condition by thoroughly depriving the senses. For whatever reason, when I’m in one of those ghastly, coffin-like chambers, I can’t shake the
feeling that someone is watching me.
The third allowance is connected to the second; if you haven’t been able to tell as of yet, I do have a propensity to go off on the odd tangent or two. I apologise in advance if this is disconcerting, but do know that I have thoroughly edited this manuscript by hand (as I’d surely be locked up in an asylum should I have provided it to a proper editor for review), and only those deviations that are absolutely necessary to the story and its veracity have been left untouched so that you may enjoy better context for my (at times questionable) actions.
I suppose your first question is likely “what the devil was Avi doing in my lab?” I’m not Jewish. I say that not as a slight or indictment, simply as a fact that is, and one that may allow you to better flesh out my tale. Far be it from me to try to editorialise as far as “who shot first,” but I firmly maintain that the war was no fault of the Israelis. At any rate, it’s not like Avi is a guy with whom I’d pal around on my off-hours under usual circumstances. He’s more than a little uptight, and his phony-baloney “my friend” routine is as transparent as a whore’s raincoat, though judging by his rather offensive odor, he could afford to be caught in a storm with said whore.
Personal failings aside, Avi happened to be one of the foremost scholars of ancient Aramaic in the world. After his stint in the Mossad, he decided to take up (of all things) archaeology, and, being a rather intense fellow, threw himself into the study of all things old and Assyrian—know your enemy and whatnot, I suppose.
When the shit really hit the fan in the Middle East, Avi bolted to America; say what you will about the Americans, but their lavish military spending finally seemed positively prudent after the Battle of Mecca. That’s why they remain one of the truly safe places in the world, and why I relocated my research at the behest of my Benefactor to the relative safety of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Back to Avi—he set up a rather successful “security consulting” business (which I fear may have been a front for organised crime of some sort), and, when the price was right, taught ancient Aramaic to mad scientists with wealthy Benefactors on the side.
Let me back up once more: my father was a banker. I was born before the turn of the century, and raised during the “Great Correction” of the late aughts. My father kept his job because he had relocated the family to London when his bank asked him right around the dawn of the millennium. Unfortunately, my mother was a bit more of a free spirit, and got into the Neo Boho scene and eloped with an artist she met on the street in Spitalfields when I was quite young, named “Varden” or “Mannix” or some such sort.
My father was devastated, but threw himself into his work with renewed vigor. He was wildly successful, and was able to retire at forty, though soon thereafter he suffered a rather severe heart attack, and died at a tragically young age.
Through the early years in London, we had been inseparable; I would often sit in on calls where he would lounge in his chair, chain smoke, and scream at and berate whomever was on the other end of the line. I would be left asking innocent questions at the end like, “Daddy, what’s a cocksucker?” I distinctly remember that he would often take a deep breath, force a smile, and swing me around the room wildly until he thought I had forgotten the question.
I never did.
His lone “hobby,” if you want to call it that, was ancient history; Egyptology and the like. On Sundays, we would take long, circuitous walks to the British Museum by way of the Thames. He’d engineer the enterprise so that we’d pass the same stretch every week, right by the candy floss vendor, so that my father could “indulge” me with a treat. In an alleyway nearby, the same beggar would sit, week after week, pitiable in his shaggy beard and decrepit clothing. “Any spare change, pop?” the bum would ask.
My father would invariably use the episode as a teaching moment, “Now Finny, that’s a bum. You work hard because you don’t want to end up like him.” Right in front of the wretch’s face! And for some reason, the filthy begging bastard would always smile and nod like an idiot, even though my father never passed him a single schilling.
But as I grew older and my father’s responsibilities compounded, we drifted further and further apart. He had his finance, and I had my physics, and apart from the holidays, when we would send each other rather merriless Christmas cards and exchange a brief phone call to check in on one another, I didn’t have much contact with the man. It was a bit of a running joke that we’d travel together to see the pyramids “someday.” Of course, our schedules being what they were, there was precious little time to take off, and our “low periods” seemingly never aligned.
When he died, though, I felt a profound sadness, like a part of me had also if not passed away, then passed me by. I had never married, and he had never had a chance to see any grandchildren. All of those “firsts” that I had never had a chance to share with the man, first graduation, first grant proposal accepted, first new discovery—all of those possibilities that fathers so often share with their sons, were blinked out of existence in a single, silent moment, by a clogged artery that refused to fire any longer.
They say that daughters eventually end up like their mums given enough time. What they don’t tell you is that the same usually applies to fathers and sons, if not in looks, then most certainly in comportment. Maybe I was already “too British,” stiff upper lip and all that, but the sadness passed, and eventually I was back to working too hard in the lab, fully aware of the irony. What can I say? Those walks by the Thames had quite an impact on young Phineas.
My father left me with a small fortune, and a roomful of antiquities and journals that he had collected over the course of his life. In cleaning out his flat, my love of history was rekindled; it wasn’t so much that I was interested in the numerous masks, tablets (stone tablets, I should clarify), and the odd sarcophagus or two, beautiful as they may be. Rather it was the information that those items represented, the stories behind them, and all of the history associated with them that we would never know. Those are the kinds of things that would make my mind race like only physics could at the time. I would pour over some random carving to memorialise a Sumerian nobleman’s wedding and wonder “What were these people like? Were they so different than you and I?”
As only a fool might, I spent countless nights pondering the course of my research, how I could bring my two loves, physics and history, together in one grand, unifying, brilliant project that would overshadow even the greatest titans in the field. Newton? An idiot with an apple tree. Einstein? A mere stepping stone to my greatness. No, one day, people would use “Templeton” to mean the apex of human achievement, the ideal of the human mind to which others may only aspire. It would be a fitting tribute to my father, if I could only decide on what course of research to pursue.
And, one night, after perhaps a couple too many refills of scotch, with the force (and in hindsight, bad luck) of a lightning bolt, it hit me.
Time travel.
No one in history (aside from Dr. Ronald Mallett, to whom I am eternally grateful for his pioneering research) had ever tried to harness the power of time itself. No one attempted to bend the stream of time to his will, to master and control it, then release it on its new course like a wound-up car.
My research had already bordered on focused laser space-time tunneling in the most tangential way possible, but I would have to refocus all of my energies on the matter, and dip into my now rather considerable resources to tackle the problem. Once I had mastered space-time tunneling, I moved on to rotational mechanics and alternative propulsion, and the picture began to come into focus. (I discuss this, dear reader, so as to prove that I’m not entirely a quack; should you wait until a later date to find out for yourself, you will see how eerily close I am to the mark).
Fifteen years (of my thirty-six in all) of hard work and sacrifice. Fifteen years and countless experiments on arcane, extraordinarily theoretical concepts like antigravity and string theory, a decade and a half of trying to mani
fest the impossible as possible.
Most of my colleagues thought I had lost my mind. Eventually, as my coffers ran low, I even questioned my own sanity. I called in a favor from a friend, who was happy to give me lab space at Hopkins if I agreed to serve as an “Adjunct Faculty Advisor,” which consisted of their full-time faculty being granted one hour a week to ask me questions of their own research. It wasn’t much, but it gave me a place to spend my rapidly-dwindling cache in relative peace.
Enter my Benefactor.
For all you know at the moment, dear reader, “he” may not be a man at all, nor may “he” be old. “He” could be a fabulously wealthy bikini model with a keen interest in theoretical physics. Regardless, my Benefactor is obviously a bit of a recluse, and had his reasons for wanting to unlock the secrets of time travel; something about manipulating time to create some sort of financial windfall for himself. It is only in hindsight that these types of moments can be seen for the “chicken-or-the-egg” types of paradoxes that they truly are. Before you ponder the concept too deeply, know that your universe doesn’t care about such “trivial” matters.
Also, if you’re waiting for a singular “Aha!” moment from my research, I can break the suspense, and enlighten you that there was not one. Rather there were a series of amazing breakthroughs, each made all the more awful by the fact that I could never claim credit for any of them, per the terms of my agreement with my Benefactor. The results of my research were for him, and him alone. Besides, I always thought that if I was ultimately successful, I could just go back in time and prove my brilliance to the world by showing up in a bloody time machine.
If only it was so simple!
The end result of all of the experimentation sat neatly in the corner of my laboratory, protected from the great unwashed masses only by the three steel bars and magnetic lock on the door, as well as the sheet I haphazardly threw over the curiosity whenever Avi or another potential lookie-loo would stop by.
After I was sure that Avi was gone, I walked over to the large sheet in the corner. I gripped the fabric in my well-worn hands and gave it a quick tug to reveal...well, nothing, I suppose. The craft’s cloaking device had been engaged for quite some time, which, in hindsight, would have made the hovering sheet far more remarkable should anyone else have occasion to remove it.
