Chapter 1

Paul Sheppard awoke in his bed, alone (no one could stand to be around him for long because he was an asshole and a jerk). Maybe half of his graduate students had been able to stomach him long enough to get their degrees but none would collaborate with him afterwards. He left his eyes closed, not ready to face the world this morning.

He hadn't been bad looking and women were attracted to him (after he became famous), but he treated them like shit and they didn't hang around long. Those that did disgusted him and he dumped them. The most recent one had left last week. Her name was Carol. How many Carols had there been.

He knew he was a jerk and he saw no reason to change because at 75 years old and in bad health, he wouldn't be around much longer.

He realized he was miserable. Deep down he knew that his scathing, 'Ignorance is bliss, ' delivered to some happy person was more because he was unhappy than because it was true.

Two hundred years from now, if you picked up a physics book, his name would be in it. That was enough when he was younger but now his fame didn't give him any solace.

He had been an atheist most of his life. He could tear apart religious beliefs. He knew the Bible well and knew all the inconsistencies. He had enjoyed humiliating more than one believer. Now he wasn't so sure.

Was he just afraid of death?

Atheism - the worship of one's own smug sense of superiority.

Well, that had fit him. Yes, he had become increasingly aware of his mortality and his inevitable demise. It was humiliating to acknowledge the accompanying fear.

He hadn't been humiliated in a long time. Not after learning in college that he could dominate with his mind. He could destroy a person with his intellect more easily than a boxer could an opponent with his gloves. He understood the protocol and subtleties required for socializing, but disdained using them.

"Paul, breakfast is ready. Hurry up or you're going to be late to school again," a woman's voice called to him. It was familiar but he couldn't place it. Late to school, what did that mean?

He opened his eyes and was amazed. The room was crisp, clear, and in focus. The colors were vibrant. He didn't ache. No one warns about that; old age means constant pain. Why is the old man next door so cranky? Because he hurts all the time.

The room was his childhood room. He remembered the smell, the feeling of the night table and the texture of the wall. He slipped out of bed and stood in front of the dresser mirror. A tall thin teenager looked back at him. He had blond hair, long and greasy. He remembered he once wore it slicked back in a ducktail.

What the hell was going on? He saw a National Geographic on the nightstand. It was dated April 1957. If it was really 1957, he was 16 years old. He had already grown to his adult height of 6 feet and weighed around 135 pounds.

He was a freaking beanpole.

The fan was on, the steady click, click, click etched into his brain. There was no air conditioner in this house. It was miserable at night. You could get used to sweating all day long but it was hard to sleep when the temperature in your bedroom was 85º. Paul turned off the fan. School wasn't air conditioned either. No wonder Florida's education was so bad.

"Paul, I mean it. Get ready." Now he recognized the voice. It was his mother. She had been the last person he had loved. Maybe the only person he had ever loved. His father had died in the war and his mother had never remarried. He headed to the bathroom, quickly dressed in whatever he could grab, and headed downstairs.

Norma Sheppard was sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee in her hand. She was lovely. She was dressed for work, a wide blue skirt and a white blouse. Her breasts were shaped like bullets in the bra common in the 50s. She had blond hair and blue eyes.

She looked like she had stepped out of a television commercial except that she didn't wear the expensive jewelry that TV censors insisted on. America couldn't win the cold war if our propaganda wasn't better than the commie's. Doesn't every woman wear pearls while she vacuums? She was 36 years old; she looked beautiful. Paul walked to her and hugged her, a knot in his throat as he said, "I love you Mom."

"What did you do now?" she laughed. "Is that what you're planning on wearing?" she said as he moved around the table to sit down. Paul had a pair of dark blue slacks and a knit shirt with a collar.

"Isn't this OK?"

"Yes, it's fine. It's better than fine. I'm glad you're not wearing that leather jacket." She thought the jacket made him look like a hoodlum.

First time around he had thought the jacket was cool daddy-o. It hid how skinny he was and that was a real bonus. Now it reminded him of the group Sha-na-na and Randy Newman's song Mikey's. Do-wop music was not really worth listening to. After a dozen times, The Duke of Earl was going to start doing brain damage.

Paul was lost at school. He had no idea what his schedule was; he had no idea where his locker was. Although some people looked familiar, he couldn't recall their names. He needed time. He had hoped something would jog his memory but it hadn't. Time to come up with some kind of plan.

He couldn't bring himself to tell his mother what was happening. It didn't seem right. Even when he looked at it from her point of view he wasn't sure it was right. He was already enough of a freak. A plan was taking shape and it called for drama. He had loved being dramatic the first time around, and it ought to work for him this time.

His plan would give him time and an excuse for his memory. It would cause his mom some pain and he regretted that. He wanted to treat her right this time around but could see no other way out of his predicament. The pain would be short-lived and he'd be a good son after that.

He walked over to where the grass was lush as it gets in September. After checking for sandspurs and ants, he weakened his knees and fell forward lifeless.

The school nurse was easy to fool and she called an ambulance as soon as she found that she couldn't wake him. He acted semi-conscious for her and for the ambulance crew. He hoped they didn't notice that his lucidity improved when they looked in his eyes. At the hospital he dropped the act completely. There was nothing wrong and he wasn't going to fool anyone.

I remember waking up this morning and going to school. Everything before that is fuzzy until I woke-up in the hospital. That was his story and he was sticking to it. Only one lie; he remembered everything from that day. It's hard to make a mistake if you keep the lies simple.

Of course his mom was worried. The school had called her at work and she had rushed to the hospital. "Are you sure you're OK?"

"Mom, I can't remember when I've felt better," he said with a smile.

"Paul, I don't know what I would do if you were..."

"You'd do what you needed to do. Just like you've always done," he interrupted before she could finish the sentence. "I love you. Nothing's going to happen to me, but if it did, I'd want you to go on with your life and be happy. You're still young and beautiful. More importantly, you're kind and considerate. Someone would be lucky to find you." She looked surprised at what he had said

He was kept in the hospital for 5 days. This was before the advent of HMOs. Your doctor decided how long you stayed in the hospital. There weren't many tests that could be run; MRIs and CAT scans were decades away. Epilepsy? A brain tumor? Only the future would tell.

A psychologist could find nothing wrong. Nor could he measure Paul's IQ. What is the IQ of a 75-year-old genius in a 16-year-old body? IQ test were useless anyway. He had been proof of that: he had a high IQ but wasn't much of a person.

Paul had known a man who could do tensor and spinor mathematics in his head but hadn't been able to remember multiplication tables. The man understood Einstein's equation but didn't know that 6 times 8 was 48. How do you measure that person's intelligence? You certainly couldn't do it with a single number.

It was near the end of the school year, just three weeks left. Paul's grades were good and his teachers were happy to give him the grades that he had before the incident. Now all he needed to do was find a way out of finishing high school.

Why?

Because it would be boring beyond belief. He couldn't imagine sitting through the classes again. It would kill him. OK, maybe a bit dramatic but it would be a pain.

Skip a grade. That was the way to go. All he had to do was sell his mom on it. His plans didn't include being a recluse. Not this time. He would make friends and experience things he hadn't the first time. Going through a high school yearbook brought back few memories. Maybe the names of his friends had just been forgotten over 57 years. Maybe he hadn't had any friends.

It was probably a little bit of both.

Paul had never paid much attention to psychiatry. Freud still loomed over the 50s but Skinner was gaining more converts. Once medications become available, another paradigm shift. Paul had known a man who had gone bonkers, the whole nine yards: souls speaking to him, some imaginary person living in his garage, messiah complex, everything. His physician's response? Dope him until he drooled. Don't let those thought patterns become fixed in his brain.

Could Paul do something similar? No, not with drugs, that would be the 60s. Could he try to care about others: act as if he cared about others, and begin to really care about them? Could he learn empathy or would he just be a psychopath?

Enough depressing thoughts; 1957 was a great year. The Hula Hoop. The Frisbee. Play dough. The '57 Chevy. The Schawlow-Townes equation. Don't know the last one? Schawlow and Townes took a minor equation of Einstein's for spontaneous and stimulated emission then derived an equation that calculated the conditions needed to make a laser.

Picture an atom as a small solar system with electrons moving around it in orbits, not exactly right but close enough. Electrons can only be in the orbits of the planets. That is a rule that nature has set.

An electron needs energy to move from Earth's orbit to Jupiter's orbit and it gives away energy when it moves from Jupiter's orbit to Earth's orbit. So a photon of light (energy) is emitted when an electron moves from Jupiter's to Earth's orbit. A photon of light is adsorbed when the electron moves from Earth's orbit to Jupiter's orbit. The color of the light is characteristic of the element. Red is easier to make than orange or green and so that is the color of most helium (neon) lasers.

Nature has another rule: at thermal equilibrium, there can't be more electrons in Jupiter's orbit than in Earth's orbit. Mother Nature is fickle, but that is one of her rules. The more you heat neon, the more electrons there are in Jupiter's orbit, but never more than are in Earth's orbit.

It may not be nice to trick Mother Nature but you can do it. In a helium (neon) laser, you add a bunch of helium, a lot more helium than neon. The helium collides with the neon and gives enough energy to move an electron to Neptune's orbit without adsorbing any light, just by colliding with the neon atoms. The electrons don't like to be in Neptune's orbit: neon's odd that way, so those electrons drop to Jupiter's orbit. Now you have more electrons in Jupiter's orbit than in Earth's orbit. You have what is called a population inversion and you can coax the electrons to emit their light in a single direction as they fall back to Earth's orbit. Schawlow and Townes calculated how big the inversion needed to be for any color of light.

There was a business in town that made neon signs. With a little help, Paul would be able to build and patent the world's first laser. If he did it this summer, his mom might consider letting him skip a grade. At first opportunity, he drove to University of Florida.

No copiers in the 50s, no overnight delivery, no email, no cell phones, no blackberries, and a long distance phone call was a big deal. In the library, he hand-copied the important parts of the Schawlow-Townes paper. His hand was cramped before he finished. He needed a typewriter.

The first time around, Paul had watched his mother struggle to get by every week. Her job didn't pay her enough to make ends meet. She had put him through college by working two jobs. He had never thanked her for it. She was dead by the time he became rich, killed in an auto accident. This time she wasn't going to struggle while the rich bastards in town threw money away.

This time she would have enough money.

He didn't want to change the course of the world. Fall of 1962 was too close to nuclear war as it was to risk changing very much. Surely this wouldn't affect that, would it? How long before precision guided bombs? It'd better be after Curtis LeMay had retired or World War III was a real possibility.

"Mom, I want to get a head start on my science fair project this year." It sounded like an innocent request on the first day of summer. Money was tight. Paul needed help and his mother wouldn't be able to come up with the money.

"That's good honey. Will it interfere with getting a job?"

"I'm not sure. I'm going to go talk to Mr. Lawton."

Mr. Lawton made neon signs. His shop was downtown near their bank. Paul had worked for Mr. Lawton last year. The job hadn't paid much but it was something.

Mr. Lawton was about 5 foot 9 inches, slightly overweight, bald, and red-faced from the heat, but not really that bad looking... He was dressed in a grey suit. He had taken his jacket off and thrown it on a chair. He had a white short sleeve shirt with a T-shirt under it. His building was about 95 degrees. He must be cooking in those clothes.

"Mr. Lawton?" Paul inquired. "Is there sometime I can talk to you about a business proposition?"