Transmat World: Chapter 1, Episode 3
Tujunga,CA; 2137 A.D.
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Before negotiations got into their final stage, Nancy ushered Vince off to bed. Disappointed, he slumped off to the stairs, grabbed Lord Greystoke as consolation and scratched him behind the ear in a successful gambit for a purr. Besides, the cat seemed skittish around Beasener.
As a kitten it was drinking upstream of the runoff pond across the road, fell in, and got washed away from the brood and everything it knew. Vince spied it just beyond the outlet of the rain-swelled creek, paddling for its life. The Hit wiped out so many species that to be protective of any animal became an automatic response taught from infancy. He had to save it.
He stripped down to his underwear and arced over the rocky shore. The water proved cold and murky. He glimpsed gravel and sand eight feet down past swirls of mud from the swollen creek. The cat was reached in seconds, and he lifted it out of the water. The sodden fur ball instantly attached itself to Vince’s flesh with all ten stickers. Soaked feline held high with one hand, he swam to shore and dried it with his T-shirt. Not good enough by cat standards, the damp gray creature licked fur back into place. After an hour-long search upstream for its mother and litter mates, he gave up and brought it home. A little food and milk sealed the deal. Vince belonged to a cat.
Vince finished his and several other people’s homework, carefully checking spelling without using Spel-Rite, and watched old 2D Star Trek episodes. His 3D hologram projector compressed the image into a flat rectangle the size of a kitchen sink above the bed. With his omni, Vince alternated the TV image with video in real time of Lord Greystoke. The cat paced figure eights, tail straight up and fluffed out, making throaty noises at the huge flying cat.
Hank knocked, opening the door and framing his head between door and jamb. “Finish your homework?”
“Yeah, Dad, come on in. Are we rich?”
“No, we are not rich. The Board was good enough to keep me — and by ‘me’ I mean me, you, your mom, and fur butt there — in beans and catnip while I iron out this little problem making teleportation a practicality.”
“Kidding about the bike, Dad.”
“I’ll bet you were half kidding.”
“Two to one odds,” said Vince, glancing at the holo. Captain Kirk and his crew were being accidentally switched to another universe during a beam-up.
“You know teleportation won’t be quite like that, don’t you?”
“Well, of course not, Dad, it’s a show for heaven’s sake … but then again, how different could it be if it works?” Vince looked genuinely curious.
“Oh, sure, it’ll be used for moving people around, but that’s the only thing I ever see it used for on this silly show. In reality, teleportation will move everything — food, cargo, water, air, merchandise, trash — and there has to be a receiving unit as well as a sending unit. That and all those aliens running around makes the show more like science fantasy than fiction.”
“You don’t think there’s life out there somewhere?” inquired a stricken Vince. “We can’t be alone in the universe. That doesn’t make sense.” Vince felt there was something alien about not believing in the possibility of aliens.
“Son, even if there is intelligent life out there, we’re separated from them not only by the enormity of space but by an even greater expanse of time. The Hit proved it’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’ humanity, perhaps all life on Earth, is wiped out. Even if a catastrophe doesn’t get us, mankind is well on its way to doing itself in. Even with the Board of Agreement, we’re sliding back into Pre-Hit ways — no population checks, not enough research on energy alternatives. That is going to be true for every civilization, human or not. If mankind is any gauge, alien civilizations are tiny blips in time separated from us by millions of years.”
“But Dad, if you assume a civilization can survive the things humans are going through now, like climate change and asteroid strikes, their technology could build upon itself to a point where the impossible is possible. They could survive through time.”
“It’s kind of like wondering if we will ever invent time travel,” Hank responded. “We never do because we’ve never found watches next to arrowheads in an archaeological dig. If what you say is so, we would see evidence, but we don’t, except for lunatics going on about strange lights and lizard people with big eyes. If there are civilizations, they never survive, Son. Time is against them.”
Vince turned reticent and pretended to be totally involved in a 150-year old science fairy tale.
“Well, don’t let that keep you from enjoying the show,” Hank said. “Good night. Sleep tight.”
“Night, Dad.”
Vince respected his dad’s intellect, but he wasn’t giving up his dream of discovering an alien civilization that easy. There had to be a way to go far enough, fast enough. A way would be found. He had to be smarter in school. He had to learn things they didn’t teach.
School was different now from Pre-Hit days. For one thing, it was more like a job with eight-hour days, five days a week, all year long. Besides reading, writing, and arithmetic, they taught how to fish, carpenter, sew, cook, build and manage virtual real estate, hunt, forge metal, sail, draw, paint, sculpt, fly a plane, rig a solar panel, wire a motor, farm (mushrooms in particular), read music, play an instrument, and ride a horse. Spaceships101 was not on the curriculum. He drifted off to sleep, dreaming of roaming the depths of space and finding worlds of wonder.
Hank took over the basement. Out of the hundreds of old houses, Hank picked this one because of the basement. The reasons for having one in southern Californian were lost to antiquity. Hank didn’t really care why. Cool and quiet, the space reminded him of growing up in Minnesota.
Equipment arrived by electric van daily, and his work consumed enormous amounts of time and effort. Nobody but Hank could go in the basement. Not even Lord Greystoke could get a pass into the makeshift laboratory, which did not sit well with the cat.
It was not the carefree, Board-sponsored life of leisurely intellectual pursuit Vince imagined. The lines in his dad’s face that disappeared when he quit JPL returned with a vengeance. A boss-free Hank became more driven than under any manager at the lab. Vince and Nancy gave Hank space to work. Vince went to school. Nancy did the shopping and fed them. As days turned into weeks, then months, they fell into a routine. Hank emerged from his laboratory cocoon at the end of ten and twelve-hour days to join them for supper and watch 3D news blogs. The only breaks were business trips to Mexico, about which he divulged nothing. Vince did his homework and went to bed. Summer offered no respite from school in the year 2137. It was an earnest existence. It would not last.
