We had been walking for more than thirty minutes before we came to a paved road. I was feeling weak. I was so weak that each step took all of my will power and strength to accomplish. I felt like I was about to "bonk."
For you non-athletes out there "bonking" might mean something else,—something, erh, sexual—but to the athletes you know what I'm getting at. I had bonked before once when 'Becca and Jim and I were mountain bike riding in Tsali, North Carolina. Tsali has some of the most beautiful single track in the country. Well, we had been riding for most of the day. I remember being on top of 'Becca's wheel, then we hit a hard climb. My muscles started aching halfway up. Then I had no more energy to turn the cranks. No matter how hard I tried to stroke the pedals, there was no strength in my legs. The next thing I knew Jim was standing over me squirting his water bottle in my face.
"What happened?" 'Becca asked. "You were right on my ass then you just died and fell over. I looked back and you were on the ground."
"I don't know?" I told her.
"Drink this, Doc." Jim handed me his bottle.
My hands were too shaky to hold on to it and I felt sick to my stomach. "I don't understand what is wrong with me." I stated.
"Have you eaten anything, Doc?" 'Becca asked.
"Well I ate lunch with you guys."
"Anson, she means have you eaten anything while you were on the bike. We have been riding for over three hours and your hydration system only has water in it." Jim pointed to my pack.
"You mean, I'm supposed to eat while on the bike?" That was the weirdest thing I had ever heard.
"Newbie!" 'Becca laughed and shook her head.
"You never read the magazines I give you, do you, Doc?" Jim asked. "Never you mind. Eat this." He handed me a sports bar. "If you're riding for more than a couple of hours, you need to restore your energy supplies here and there. You've used up all the glycogen in your muscles and your body is now trying to use your excess body fat for energy."
"Yeah, good. What is wrong with that?" I interrupted him.
"Newbie!" 'Becca laughed again.
"Well Doc, nothing is wrong with that. In fact that's where you do some really good fat burning. But, your body cannot convert stored fat to energy fast enough to keep up with the demands of a hard riding pace. Hence, the need to supplement with external calories." Jim took the sports bar wrapper from me and stuck it in his jersey pocket.
"Here Doc, drink some of my sports drink. It will get into your system faster. You basically had a low blood sugar crash like diabetics do. It is called bonking. Good news is that you'll live. Bad news is that Jim and I are going to leave you here for the bears to eat." She helped me up and winked at me.
We rode back to the parking lot at a much slower pace. I didn't fully recover for at least fifteen minutes or more. Even then I was tired. I chilled in the air-conditioned car while Jim and 'Becca made a lap on another section of the single track. I had a completely new respect and sympathy for diabetics. Moreover, I felt very bad about missing some of that awesome single track due to my own ignorance.
This's how I was feeling now as Tabitha and I crawled onto the pavement. Then I started getting cold and my feet were falling to sleep. The tips of my fingers felt like ice and it was well over ninety degrees. It was getting harder to breathe.
"Tabitha, I don't think I'm gonna make it. I think I'm gonna pass out." I told her.
"Enough of that! You will make it do you hear me?" Colonel Ames ordered.
"Yes Colonel . . ." I fell flat on my face and didn't get up.
I don't think that I passed out either, because I can remember watching Tabitha, and I could hear her also.
"Anson! Anson, wake up," she cried. Then she slapped me on the face a few times. "Anson can you hear me?"
I continued to stare up at her. I tried hard to move or say something, anything. No motion or sound came from my lifeless body. I tried harder and harder to speak. I couldn't.
Tabitha held her right ear over my mouth and then my chest. Then she held her fingers to my neck as if she were checking my pulse. I remember watching all of this. Then she leaned over closer as if she were going to kiss me. I tried to ask her what she was doing. I still couldn't move. Then the sunlight faded out and Tabitha seemed to be far away from me looking at me through a long dark tube. Then she was gone.
Bright lights hit me from all sides. A thumping sound filled my ears. I was hearing my own heart beat arhythmically, then it stopped. The lights went out again. Then I felt a serious pain throughout my body. For a second I thought that I was back at the ECC trying to short it out and getting electrocuted. Then the light came back and I could see that I was still on the side of the road with Tabitha and three other people I had never met before. I could hear again.
"Anson! Oh my God, Anson, wake up." Tabitha was crying now.
"Dr. Clemons, can you hear me?" one of the men asked. Then the second man held a breather over my face.
The lights went out again. Everything was dark. Then I realized that I was sitting in my study back in Huntsville, Alabama. For some reason that didn't seem strange to me. It felt right. Why, I cannot explain.
"So you finally did it, did you?" Albert asked.
I turned to Professor Einstein and responded, "What? I did what finally?"
"You fixed my blunder," he said and pointed to the whiteboard.
The whiteboard had the complete story spelled out in undergraduate math. From beginning to end in front of me was The Grand Unification of All Forces of Nature. Everything was described, gravity was a simple ungauging of the electromagnetic field, inertia was due to the vacuum energy fluctuations and something similar to Mach's principle, renormalization of the Standard Model wasn't required, and Einstein's Cosmological Constant when moved to the right rest frame turned out to be proportional to Hubble's constant for the expansion of spacetime. It was beautiful, absolutely magnificent!
"I didn't do that," I told him.
"But of course you did. In one experiment, you accomplished all of that. You just have yet to write it all down." He smiled and shook my hand approvingly. "I just wish," he began, "that such a large sacrifice didn't have to be made for such great achievements."
"Large sacrifice?" I shrugged.
"The death and destruction!" He pointed out. "The tornadoes caused by the experiment destroyed countless lives and property. The blast from the ECC must have killed any survivors. My guess is that the blast was larger than Nagasaki."
"Jesus! Al, I killed them all didn't I? I should have never attempted to warp the probe back to Earth. But, I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't let Tabitha die." I justified my actions.
"Ah, I see. But wasn't she going to be saved by the Crew Return Vehicle if you sacrificed yourself?"
"Well, uh . . ."
"Yes she was! You could have prevented the destruction couldn't you?"
"Oh my God! I could have. I should have. If only I would have known I—"
"No! You wouldn't have! You shouldn't have! And you couldn't have!" Einstein slammed his fists down against the arms of my reading chair where he always sits.
"But you just said that I could have saved her."
"Anson my dear fellow she might have been saved. But as we now know there was a Chinese spacecraft being fueled and prepared to rendezvous with the spacetime distortion device." He never would say warp drive.
"So?"
"The device would have been used for the gain of power, Anson. That type of power shouldn't fall into the wrong hands. This is why I signed the letter to President Roosevelt endorsing atom bomb research. I feared a madman might gain that knowledge first. Although I will never forgive myself for the evil device that I took part in creating, I wouldn't have been able to forgive myself for letting it fall into the wrong hands either."