He shook the match to extinction. A billowing stream of blue-gray smoke drifted above his head as he exhaled slowly.
There were only two kinds of people in this world, Jim thought; Cigar-people and non-cigar people. It was one of those smells and tastes you either acquired immediately or just never developed a liking for. He had never met anyone who had ever said they didn’t mind cigar smoke or they thought cigars were okay. Invariably, on asking if his company would be bothered if he lit a cigar they either enthusiastically encouraged him while basking in the aromatic smoke themselves or, conversely, give a shudder of horror.
Strange to say, he had always found women more accepting of cigars than men. Perhaps it was a subconscious homophobic reaction to putting something so phallic in their mouths that turned certain men off.
At a nod from Jim, the waiter brought him another drink. Jim handed him his empty glass, took one more long pull off the cigar and settled in to watch the old year die.
In the moments leading up to midnight it seemed to Jim the city had found its voice as thousands counted down the final seconds together at the top of their lungs.
Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, it exclaimed, Five, Four, Three, Two, One. Fireworks erupted into the night sky, exploding in great flourishes of color, glorious in their beautifully short life.
Raising his half-full glass to the lightshow high above the city, Jim spoke quietly to the night air. “Happy New Year, Lark,” he whispered, before downing his drink in one swift gulp, and setting the empty glass back on the table.
Jim arrived back at his room just after one in the morning. His head buzzed pleasantly from the three drinks and the cigar, the taste of which still lingered agreeably on his palate and in his nostrils. He dropped his raincoat over the back of a chair still dry, the threatening storm never having materialized. Maybe that was a good omen for the new year.
Standing at the window, he looked out over the city. It was almost silent now, the throngs of revelers having made their way back to their hotel rooms.
“Jim! You have a call from your agent in Los Angeles.”
The sudden sound of his computer’s AI voice made him jump. He was half-tempted not to take the call. He knew Archie would be disappointed with his lack of progress but he also knew if he did not take his agent’s call he would be pestering him until he got what he wanted.
“Put it on speaker,” he said eventually.
There was a faint click and then the voice of Archibald Krogh filled the room.
“Hey Jim! Sorry to call so late, or is it early? Anyway, happy New Year.” His voice sounded nasal, he probably had a cold.
“Happy New Year to you, too, Archie. Don’t you have better things to do than harass your clients in the middle of the night?”
His remark was met with a chuckle which rapidly deteriorated into a coughing fit. “Good God,” Krogh said finally, “I swear this Flu is going to kill me one of these days… So tell me, how’s the book coming along?”
Jim was not comfortable lying but he decided that for the sake of both his own sanity and his over stressed agent’s health he would make the exception this time.
“It’s doing just…”
Everything changed.
Five
A little science estranges man from God, much science leads them back to him.
At 1.30 a.m., the laboratory was finally prepped and ready.
The transmitter sat on a plain wooden table in the center of the laboratory. About the size of two paperbacks stacked one on top of the other, it was enclosed in a black impact—resistant plastic case. It looked clunky and utilitarian. There were no sleek curves or shaded coloring, no logos or trendy advertising motifs; just a solid black box with a connector for a microphone on its front fascia. Next to that was a plug for a VR-keyboard, and from the rear of the box a two-inch thick red high-voltage lead snaked across the floor to a huge transformer sitting in a locked cage in the opposite corner of the lab.
A young woman wearing a white lab coat, her blond hair tied back in a ponytail that stretched down to the middle of her back, approached the table with a portable microphone in her left hand and its corresponding stand in her right. She placed both items on the table next to the box, careful not to jostle the delicate piece of equipment.
“Doctor Lorentz, would you like me to connect the microphone now?” she asked.
Dr. Mitchell Lorentz looked up from his VR-Comp and regarded the girl over his pince-nez glasses.
“Yes, please do, Doctor Drake. The sooner we get this over and done with the sooner we can get on our way, yes?” He smiled warmly at his assistant before turning back to his VR-comp.
Lorentz was a distinguished looking man. At seventy, he still had a full head of hair, sparingly peppered here-and-there with the odd brush stroke of gray, which he insisted on keeping slicked back across his head. Although he liked to dress casually, he always gave the impression he would have felt just at ease in a business suit or a tuxedo rather than the khaki slacks and polo shirt he wore beneath his white lab coat. A full mouth that was quick to grin and rarely frowned, complemented his lean face and long Romanic nose.
Well known around the lab for being a stickler for his daily exercise, the professor would routinely break off a meeting if it interrupted his lunchtime workout regimen. Fit and lean, he was still a good-looking man for his age, his broad shoulders and toned arms often allowing him to be mistaken for a decade less than his actual age.
There was no Mrs. Lorentz. When asked why he had never married, he would reply in his most charming voice “Not married? Have you not met my wife?” while gesturing around the lab with a sweeping hand.
Those close to him, of which there were few, knew he was too dedicated to his work to inflict his obsessive pursuits and eccentric time-tables on a wife. Not that there had been a lack of interest on the opposite sex’s part, but it became quickly apparent to any woman who entered his life that work was his first and only true love.
He had started out as a research assistant almost fifty-years earlier, working for JPL out of California after graduating summa-cum-laude at Cal-Tech with a degree in Advanced Applied and Theoretical Physics. Part of the original NASA team that formulated the design of the first manned mission to Mars, he had left the agency after the disastrous loss of the ship and its four man crew in 2017.
Despite the failure of the Mars project he quickly advanced, thanks in part to his capability as a project-manager, but in no small way to his work on theoretical particles. Within ten years, he had gone on to head-up the research department at TachDyne Research Industries where he had received his first of two Nobel prizes for Science.
In 2030, just a few years after leaving TachDyne to open his own research lab in Pasadena, he had received his second Nobel Prize for his company’s work on superluminal propagation, proving finally the existence of that long disputed particle, the Tachyon.
Long thought to be the equivalent of a scientific Snipe hunt, Lorentz proved its existence beyond a doubt when he simultaneously disproved the paradox of Gödel’s time-travel in a rotating-Universe theory and proved the veracity of the reinterpretation principle, a theorem now known as the Lorentz Effect.