* * * *
Spring was my favorite time of year. It was muddy and frequently cold and wet but it was also spring. I
just finished blocking into firewood one of the trees downed in the firefight from last year with my new chainsaw. I sat on one of the blocks absorbing the warm spring sunlight and the small noises of the forest creatures. I sat until the sweat evaporating caused a shiver to travel up my arms. I got out the six-pound maul and started splitting the green wood. I sensed Tabitha walking to me.
She smiled as she swayed into my arms. She buried her face into the base of my neck and inhaled deeply. “What are you doing?'
“I am smelling your sweat.'
“What for?'
“Don't you like the smell of me when I sweat?'
I had never thought of it that way before. She was right. There is an eroticism with the aroma of fresh sweat dripping off a clean body. Before I had the time to think more, we were rolling around on the only dry spot of ground. Unfortunately for us, it was also the spot where I had finished blocking the tree. It is fun rolling around in fresh sawdust but you will spend the rest of the day fighting the little wood chips in your clothes and clinging to most unusual crevices of the body.
We were walking back to my trailer pulling at the irritations in both our shorts when I asked, “I am going to start the cabin next month. I want you to look over the plans. You need to make sure everything is there that you want.'
“Daniel. Are you asking something of me?'
“I sure am. I just asked you to make sure the cabin has everything you want in it.'
“Daniel!” She followed that by reaching behind my back and pulling up on the back of my shorts.
“Okay. Okay. No more violence. I want to marry you. And if you don't want to marry me, I want you to live with me. I just want you.'
Laughing she replied, “That's better. I will think about it. But I want to see the plans first. Where did you say you were going to put this cabin?'
I told her about putting the cabin deep into the woods on a small rise. The road back to the cabin would travel past the current trailer and lab buildings. The cabin was going to be on the small size with large windows looking in every direction. But underneath the cabin there was going to be a large complex, a full computer lab, a research lab, library, etc.
Tabby wanted to know how I could afford everything. When I told her that since my patents were granted, I was making over a million dollars a day, her mouth dropped. “Aren't you afraid I might marry you just for your money?'
“So what. I want you any way I can have you.'
The rest of the afternoon was spent in the pleasant task of picking little pieces of sawdust off our bodies.
It was much later and we were standing together in the field watching the star filled sky. My hand had wormed its way past Tabby's clothes and was resting on the warm curve of her thigh. Move-over had followed us out to the field and was weaving a pattern between our legs. Small clouds moved in darkening the stars but not blotting them out completely.
“Do you remember how things darkened when I jammed the controls on the sub to ram that flying alien?'
“I wasn't looking out but I remember something happening to the lights. Could it have been the battery drain under full power?'
“Think back. Was there something unusual about the way the darkness happened?'
“I think your right. It seemed darker when we got off the axis of motion.'
“Let's go to the lab. I need some serious computer time.'
Since my stereo was destroyed with the farmhouse, all I had for music was a boombox and a dozen CDs that I had purchased over the last few months. Tabby kept the music playing while I waded through the information that I had backed up on secure servers before the attack.
I knew back in high school about Einstein's rubber sheet theory of the universe and gravity. He explained that the universe was like a rubber sheet and every object in the universe was like someone underneath the sheet pulling it down. A planet would make a small dimple in the sheet, a star a larger one. A galaxy would make a large section of the sheet lower than the rest. Anything traveling through the universe would act like a marble being rolled on the sheet. If the marble was far enough away from a dimple, it would travel nearly in a straight line. If the marble was closer, the dimple would bend the motion so it would bend off course. If the marble came too close, it would circle the dimple in orbit and eventually fall into the hole caused by the body making the dimple. Einstein also said that the combined forces of all the objects in the universe would bend the whole universe around itself in a massive curve. Making it possible to go in one direction until you came back to where you started.
Why Einstein's rubber sheet theory got to be so interesting to me in high school was Star Trek. As all nerdy kids in school did, we talked about the latest science fiction TV shows and all those things that made interstellar travel possible, things such as wormholes and tears in the universe. Because the rubber sheet that was the universe was pulled so much by the large gravitational bodies such as stars, the theory goes—if the bent sheet came close to touching another portion of the bent sheet, you could make a wormhole or even a tear in the sheet and go from one point to another in the universe. An obvious choice to find a wormhole or a tear would be to look for them near large gravitational bodies such as stars or black holes. It is known that black holes have enough gravity to pull even light into them. The gravity we were producing in my kantele was not anywhere near the strength of a black hole but the gradient or the shape of the bent rubber sheet might be similar to being near a black hole. If that was true, the darkening of light we saw might have been because we were on the very edge of making a moving wormhole in space.
I started the process by making pictures of the gravitational gradients near the surface of planets and stars. I then compared the gradient caused by the kantele. Although the total force generated by the mass of the planet was a million times greater than the force of the kantele, the gradient for the planet was different. It was just a factor of the planet taking up so much space. The interesting thing I found was that the gradient near a large object like our sun was close to the gradient caused by the power I fed into the kantele. How could I find out if the gradient was enough to make a wormhole possible?
I ran parallel lines of research. One was with string theories and generalized Big Bang expansion theories. The other was with topography. I was looking for when the points of dichotomy in the equations matched with regions where the topography of a multidimensional universe overlapped.
Nothing was happening. Nothing matched.
Every few hours, Tabby would put on the boombox a rock song and pull me away from the computer
for food or rest. She would then shove me back online. I vaguely remember that the kids from U of M were back. This registered to my consciousness when some of the labor intensive sorting of information was completed by them between the times Tabby would drag me away and when I can back.
I was about ready to give up until I realized that what I was looking for were chaos dichotomies. I then had the kids map the equations visually on the computer screens. About a week later, I found it. Sitting in the corner of one of the new string theory equations was a Mandelbrot curve. I had found a dichotomy between spatial dimensions. I continued looking and found two more Mandelbrot curves within another possible string theory and two more Julia sets in a Quantum representation of the Big Bang Theory.
I examined the parameters of when the dichotomies would occur. They all appeared within the same part of the gravitational gradient curve. One of the Mandelbrot curves and one of the Julia sets required a high-energy plasma source to produce the dichotomy. The remaining Julia set needed an extreme velocity. But the two remaining Mandelbrot curves occurred when a constant was varied and there was no way to find out if anything other than the gravitational gradient was required to induce the dichotomy.
Tabby must have bought a new CD because I heard the guitars and voice of Jonny Lang coming from the speakers. I suddenly realized how long I had been sitting in front of the computer as my full bladder started to hurt. Not again! I ran to the bathroom.
* * * *
The quadrant meeting of the Users was called to order. The problem with planet H14-D102 was seventh on
