Chapter 1

Hello, I'm Adam Hutchins. If you are reading this, it means that we were successful. So, I'm going to tell you my story. It's sort of a long story, so you might as well make yourself comfortable.

First off, I'll give you a little history, though I know that some of it won't make much sense because you don't have the right background to appreciate everything that I'm going to say, but it's my story, so I'm going to tell it my way. I met and married Eve Weston when we were both graduate students at Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, in 2037. We were both a little older than the average grad student because we were both military vets, she had been in the Seals and I had been an Army Special Ops. We were both discharged for medical reasons, me, because I had lost two toes to an IED in Syria, and her, because ... well, she's not supposed to talk about it. Suffice it to say that we both thought that we were fine, but the military said that we were not near enough to perfect to fit the "profile."

We neither one looked like movie or TV stars, but we were both nice enough looking that you wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen with us. We shared a love for camping and hunting and fishing and almost anything else that could be done in the wild, so it was kind of odd that we were both physics majors, but there's no accounting for taste.

We were studying under the same professor, Dr. John Smith, at Auburn, working on different phases of a stasis field. In case you don't know what that is: a stasis field will make anything inside it come to a complete stop while the field is turned on. In other words, zero time passes within the field, though normal time passes outside it. The field had the interesting property that nothing, even light, could pass through it. This barrier effect was the subject of my PhD thesis, and Eve was studying some of the mathematical effects of stopping time.

We had built a small prototype machine to generate the field, a sphere about 30 cm in diameter. It was a real lash up of a machine, and it had still taken us a year to build it. We did a lot of experiments with it, some of them serious and some of them foolish, just for fun. One of the fun experiments had been to put a mouse inside the field and leave it there for a long weekend. It exited apparently totally unharmed, so we concluded that stasis had to be harmless to life. I know, it was a silly conclusion to jump to, but we were physicists, not physicians. What did we know?

We continued to work on the stasis field and kind of fell in love with the concept. As a result, after graduation, we stayed on at Auburn as postgraduate fellows and continued to work on the stasis field. We build a couple of larger models of the field generator, one to produce a field about three meters in diameter and one to produce a field about eight meters in diameter. You'll notice that the dimensions I gave were approximations, but that's because we didn't have instruments to measure the exact dimensions; you try to measure the exact diameter of a sphere over 26 feet in diameter; it ain't easy!

In January, 2040, the impossible happened, Auburn defeated Ohio State for the BCS football championship. It had been a long, hard row to hoe, but we did it! WAR EAGLE! Of course, the whole state shut down for the celebration, except for those sore heads at the University of Alabama, but what can you say about them? Everywhere you turned, there was a party, and Eve and I tried to attend them all!

From our point of view, the most important party was the one held, jointly, by the Physics and Chemistry schools. The laboratory alcohol flowed like water, and we pretended that it was vodka. One of the nice things about pure ethyl alcohol is that it does not produce the hangover that normal liquor does, so we were not afraid to indulge to the limit.

Eve and I drank too much, just as did everybody else, so it was not surprising that we adjourned to our laboratory to demonstrate our stasis field to our friends. We played around with various demonstrations for a few minutes, then somebody asked what was the effect on living things. With the bravado of too much alcohol, Eve and I insisted that it was perfectly safe, and we would demonstrate on ourselves! A friend volunteered to operate the controls while we stepped into the range of the three-meter machine. Unfortunately, when the drunken operator set the timer, he set it for five days instead of five minutes. When the field didn't collapse and release us after five minutes, the onlookers got bored and returned to the party.

We were stuck in that field for the full five days, but we weren't missed. As postgraduate fellows, we pretty well set our own hours, so everyone assumed, when we didn't show up during the day, that we were home resting after working all night. We had been forgotten by the party-goers, so we were left undisturbed for the full time of five days. We popped out of the machine when the field collapsed and wondered what had happened to our friends. Of course, we had no idea that we had been in the machine for so long. I suggested to Eve that we go home, since I was getting tired of the non-stop partying, and she agreed.

It wasn't until we woke up the next morning that we discovered that we had lost five days instead of five minutes. We rushed to the college infirmary for a quick checkup. When we explained what had happened, the checkup was not so quick. Every specialist in the state must have descended on us and given us a going over of the type never before experienced by a human being. Two weeks later, when all of the laboratory tests were back, nobody could find anything wrong with either of us. We were given a clean bill of health, in fact, some of the physicians wondered if the stasis machine had cured some of the ailments they had expected to find.

The only result of the escapade was that Dr. Smith chastised us for our foolishness, but activities quickly returned to normal for us. Then it happened!

A comet was discovered headed for a collision with Earth. Impact was expected in two months, and the comet was large enough "to wipe out all life" according to the media reports. It was another extinction just like the one that had killed off the dinosaurs, only projected to be bigger. Naturally, there was wide spread panic and calls for the government to "do something." But there was nothing to be done! Congress had already killed off the NASA program which had been intended to solve this problem in favor of using the money for a national beautification program, so there was nothing that they could do.

Dr. Smith was in the communication chain for classified and sensitive information, so we knew whatever anybody else knew about the emergency. The upshot was that life on earth was going to die! We had less than two months to live, so most people started to party. However, it occurred to Dr. Smith that the stasis machine might hold out some hope. If two people, one male and one female, were put into stasis with whatever materials and supplies they might need, it was slightly possible that the human race could survive the impact with the comet. Once the field was established, it was self sustaining, so no external power was needed to keep it going. If the control panel were destroyed, the field would sustain itself for roughly 50 million years before it shut itself off.

The whole university was drafted to prepare for shipping two people into the far future with enough supplies to enable them to survive once they got there. Meanwhile, we got busy on synchronizing the three existing fields to one control so that they would all open at the same time. The real question was: who would go? There were a lot of candidates, but the simple fact that Eve and I had already had an experience in stasis made us the logical ones to make the trip. The fact that we were both experienced in survival techniques eliminated the necessity for a training course; therefore, it was decided, we would be the ones to save the human race from extinction.

Six hectic weeks were spent in making plans and gathering materials for us to take with us. It was decided that we would take a dog and a cat, each with a litter, a pregnant mare with the necessary supplies for artificial insemination, and weapons, tools, and seeds to tide us over until we could become established.

Believe it or not, some idiots wanted to take us to court because we had failed to file an Environmental Impact Statement!