Chapter 1: Something Old - Something New

“Ta-ta-da!” The sound of my job notification made me look up from my computer display and realize I had been sitting in the dark of my lab much longer than I thought.

The analysis job running on my processing cluster typically took four hours to run. I had started the job after my last shot in the fusion generator and then become engrossed in a mathematical paradox from my latest work. The four hours of processing had flown by.

I stretched my arms and shoulders for a second and then called up the data-file and clicked the option to graph the computational results. The image popped open on my monitor and I had to blink away sudden tears. The spike at the end of the graph was well above the break-even line on the chart. These results proved small scale fusion was possible!

“Oh, yeah,” I muttered as I logged back into my test machine and prepared it for another run with the same parameters. If I was able to reproduce the results again, I would have the proof I needed to set the US of A back on a path of energy abundance. I could change so much in my country; right so many wrongs I had seen over the past three decades. It made all of the pain and suffering almost worthwhile.

It would take an hour or two for the accumulators to charge enough for another test, but I could hardly contain my excitement. I fired up my messaging app and sent a quick note to some interested colleagues. “Positive Gigawatt return using linear pinch method. Detailed specs to follow once I’ve re-run test. -PT”.

Physicists in the know would be able to decipher the terse message. They would also know me just from my initials. Paul Taylor was a common name, but not in the small, often banned, fusion research world. I looked at the accumulator percentages and tapped my fingers against the desk impatiently. I needed to do something other than wait.

I thought back to the mathematical paradox I’d uncovered in my performance equations. There was an unaccounted for variable that appeared to cancel out, but had an imaginary number component along the tau axis that implied the cancelation occurred in the past. How was that possible? It couldn’t be.

I stood up from my workstation and its multiple screens and paced for a few minutes. Suddenly, I realized I didn’t need to worry about it if the results were repeatable. I could resolve the math issue before publishing, but having access to cheap power would trump the math for everyone. My thought was interrupted by a rumble in my stomach. I shook my head, glanced at the accumulator percentage, and then grabbed my card from the desk and headed to the break-room. Another dinner of peanuts and cheese crackers washed down with a diet soda.

I thought about going out to get a real meal, maybe a celebratory meal, but decided not to risk it. Theoretically, security on and around campus was good. In reality, you never knew what type of extremist you might run into. There were the fundamental Luddites who hated anyone working with technology, even though their low to modest class of living still depended on high-tech. Then there were the Social Democrat Party members who thought any money diverted from their pet social programs to research was a waste. They took such waste personally, despite recurring proof that their programs wasted more new dollars in bureaucracy than was spent on the scientific research they abhorred. Finally, there were all the flavors of Islam, filled with hate for the west, for non-Islamic lifestyles, or for anything their mullahs preached against. In my mind, they were the worst. And they all seemed to clog the campus quads in the late evening.

It just wasn’t worth having a run-in with any of them. Instead, I would hunker down again in the lab, do my work to save all of their sorry asses, and make it home to my crummy apartment tomorrow morning after classes started up.

In the break room, I settled down on the couch and flipped on the TV, certain I was ruining my dinner with real-world news, but for the first time in a long time, hopeful that things might change if my work was successful.

Something startled me awake. I sat up on the couch and looked at my watch. Three hours. The accumulators should be fully charged. I stood and then heard a muffled thud. It sounded like someone was trying to bust open the door into the lab area from the Physics building. I heard another thud, this time accompanied by the subtle sound of glass cracking. They were trying to break in.

I hurried back to my workstation and saw that everything was set to run. I quickly typed a command and set the output to stream directly to my public cloud account. I locked the workstation as I finally heard the wire reinforced glass of the door shatter. I could now hear their voices. Husky, male, with a lilting, foreign tongue.

“Quiet. The rent-a-cops may ignore the bribe if we are too loud.”

“Do we care? We need to destroy them all for allowing this abomination to take place. The power of the sun is Allah’s, not man’s.”

I grabbed my pad and card and headed deeper into the lab. Maybe I could hide from them long enough for the system to fire and confirm my results. The safety cage around the test machine might keep them out for long enough. Quickly, and as quietly as possible, I entered the code for the cage door, opened it, and slipped inside.

“Look at all this wasted crap.” A voice declared. It sounded like they were near my workstation.

Crash!

“Those are just monitors. We need to destroy the computers he is using and his test set-up, not just monitors. Spread out and let’s get busy. Mullah Azim wants this done quickly. We must destroy this work and the man who would dare this work.”

I tucked myself back under the test bench and looked at my pad. The firing sequence had started.

“Someone is in that cage!” I heard. I pulled my foot in, cursing myself for not hiding better.

“Come out, old man and you will not be hurt.” They must think me an idiot.

“Ari, open that door.”

Boom! A blast shook the air and I heard buckshot scatter against the wire cage and back wall.

“Idiots!” I called. “You’re shooting at a fusion reactor that is about ready to fire!”

Another blast hit the cage door, and then suddenly I was washed in incandescent white light and all sound ceased. My last thought was, “So this is what being inside a fusion explosion is like.”

I awoke slowly, not opening my eyes, but feeling lightness on them. My bed felt unusual, warmer than I recalled ever feeling in my decrepit, drafty Chicago apartment near campus. I rolled my shoulders. They felt different too. No stiffness from my mugging six years ago.

Was it a dream, or was I dead?

I cracked open an eye and decided the answer was something else entirely. I was in my room. Not my apartment, but my bedroom on our family farm. Where I had grown up. I looked at my arm. No wrinkles and liver spots. It was my arm as a young man. Thirteen? Fourteen?

I threw back the covers and looked down at my body. I was young again!

I rolled out of bed and stood. My balance was a little off, but I caught myself easily and stood up straight. Oh, to be young! I glanced at the clock radio I had not seen in decades. Six-ten. Time to get up and do my morning chores. I changed quickly and headed out to the barn. Seeing which cattle I had would tell me how old I was. They were damned near pets when I was growing up. Our loyal dog, Duke followed me out, but I could not tell how old he was. He just looked like Duke.

The barn looked newer and cleaner than the last time I had seen it, as it should. I pulled open the sliding door and headed inside. Blackie stood on the other side of the inside gate, looking back at me. I smiled. Blackie was about a twelve-hundred-pound steer with all black coat and a diamond white blaze on his face. I had bought Blackie the fall of my eighth grade year. Given his size and the temperature outside, it was almost summer. I must be finishing or had just finished eighth grade.

My mind and body seemed to recall the chores. Check the water tank to make sure the autofill valve was working. Fill the feed buckets and dump them into the feed trough, then up to the loft to throw down more hay for the manger.

I slowed my pace as I headed back into the house. How did I get here? Had the past I remembered so vividly been a dream, or was I really sent back in time by an explosion? What day was it? Did I have school?

I opened the door and saw my Mom pulling a box of cereal from the cupboard. I tried not too, but tears welled up in my eyes. Mom was alive still, of course. I pulled off my boots and moved over to give her a quick hug.

“What brought that on?” She asked as I moved away?

“Just wanted to say I love you, Mom.”

Her eyes seemed to moisten, but then she smiled and waved toward the table. “Sit down and eat some breakfast or you’ll be late for school. You wouldn’t want to miss the last day, would you?”

The last day of school was a blur. At least now I knew what day it was. June 1st, 1979. Fifty-four years in the past from what I remembered as “yesterday”. A few of my friends from the bus must have thought me an idiot, since I did not engage them much in conversation. I knew they would not hold it against me. Our typical bus driver did not let us chatter too much to begin with.

I saw people I had not thought of in thirty years, or seen in fifty. I had left my small town and the friendships and entanglements that went with rural life. I had lost touch less from intent and more from neglect. Then, once the troubles started, it was just easier to not think back on the past.

Lucky for me, my class was small enough that we did not have to split classes amongst multiple teachers so I did not have to remember a class schedule from my youth. I just followed the crowd.

I also tried hard not to stare.

Perhaps I was oblivious my first time through, but the girls in my class seemed much more attractive and mature than I remembered for eighth graders. They were in the early blossom of womanhood; beginning to develop the curves and comely shapes I remembered from high-school. Watching firm, tightly jean-clad bottoms in the hallways between classes was definitely a fine way to get from class to class. I had to laugh at myself as I realized I was not the only boy navigating by that method.

I know our school was not normal, in the sense that most schools had a lot more people in them than we did. By the time I graduated the first time through, my senior class was a stupendous forty-two people, with only ten of us being boys. On average, classes next year would be ten to twelve students. Growing up in the country and going to school in a small town had some educational benefits that larger school systems would never enjoy. I like to think that a sound primary education had set me up for academic achievement later in life. I may have squandered some of those benefits before getting into my research stage, but that had been my personality faults, not an educational defect.

As I settled into an open seat in the last class of the day, my thoughts left my female classmates and shifted to another woman I had not recalled in ages. Mrs. Janet Salaway. She was a petite brunette with a slim figure, but incredibly attractive. I had always paid attention in her math classes, and not just because I enjoyed math. Her smile was always warm and open and she seemed to have a laugh in her eyes for our class in particular. She was mesmerizing to me and featured prominently in my nocturnal fantasies, along with her three daughters.

I listened to her with half a mind as she had us pass in our books and finish up the administrative items for the school year. The other half of my mind was thinking about these attractive neighbors of mine, since the Salaways lived a few miles away on a farm near ours. All three girls would be in high-school next year.

Jordan, the eldest was already a dark haired beauty who took after her mother; slim, athletic, but with a delicious figure. She would be a senior this coming year. While I had lusted after her with puppy love, she had always been unattainable in both my mind and reality. Her beauty was reserved for the star jock of the school. Not for a nobody freshmen like me.

Jyl was the middle daughter, just a year ahead of me. She apparently took more after her father with lighter hair and complexion. I remembered her being the tomboy of the family. Very attractive, but almost unaware of it. She was the most athletic of the threesome, playing volleyball, softball, and being a cheerleader, but being quite smart as well. I had gotten to know her well enough to consider her a friend the first time through when we were on a scholastic bowl team together.

Jeryl was the youngest, and in my class. She was cut in her mother’s mold as well, slim and athletic. Her eyes were always serious. I found her to be incredibly attractive, but had never had the courage to be more than just a friendly classmate to her. Perhaps this time through that would change, I thought.

The Salaway girls had always ended up with the jocks, but I knew they were all smart too. Maybe this time through I needed to focus a little more on athletics. In the high-school I remembered, I had always been competent in the pick-up basketball games that were played over lunch, and had run cross country a couple of years, but I never really got serious about athletics. The game I had dreamed of playing was football, but our school was not big enough to field a team.

Of course, an opportunity was coming up for me. My mother taught Spanish and French at a larger high school in a neighboring town. The road we lived on was literally the dividing line for the school districts. Before, being independent of Mom had made me turn down the option of going to high school there instead of here. They had football.

Jeryl Salaway dated boys from other schools, almost exclusively.

It was something to think about.

“You had better get a move on, or you’ll miss the final assembly, Paul.” Mrs. Salaway’s sweet voice broke my reverie. I found myself blushing as I looked up and focused on her eyes.

“Sorry, ma’am.” I stood awkwardly, and silently cursed the blush I felt on my cheeks. “I just wanted to thank you for a great year,” I said trying to hide my lack of attention.

She smiled. “It’s been my pleasure, Paul. You’re a good student. I look forward to having you in algebra next year.”

I dropped my eyes. “Um, I’m thinking about going to Fieldcrest next year.”

“I can understand. Your mother would enjoy seeing you there. I know I’d be disappointed if my girls chose to not come here.” The Salaways were on the boarder line of the districts as well. “I’m sure you’ll do well in their math courses. I think they even have a few more advanced course that might suit your talents better as well.”

I felt a pang of regret that she seemed to be happy I was choosing a different program. Didn’t she want me in her class? I cursed my boyish fantasies and hormones and forced a smile. “Thanks. I just wanted to say thanks anyway.” I felt my cheeks blushing again and grabbed my backpack.

“Good luck, Paul, whatever you decide. I hope you aren’t a stranger.”

I headed for the door and wondered what she meant by that.

The rest of the day it was like I was on autopilot as my mind pondered who and when I was. What would happen if I changed my past and switched high schools? Could I? Would the universe force me to repeat my previous choices? My thoughts kept returning to the mathematical paradox I had been studying before the explosion. Was that formula what sent me back? If it did, what did it imply?

I got home and took care of my chores before ducking into my room and furiously scribbling that formula in one of my notebooks. I looked at it and tried to isolate the imaginary tau variable, but could not do it. I could not fathom how it could be responsible for my return to the past. But unless I was living a complete delusion in the millisecond of my dying, it appeared that my mind had been flung into my body in the past.

“Paul?” Mom was standing in the door of my room with a frown on her face.

“Yes, ma’am?” She smiled. She liked it when I was polite to her or any lady. Since dad had died, she had told me I was the man of the house, and manners were what separated men from boys.

“I was wondering how your day went. You didn’t come out when I got home, so I was worried.”

“Nothing to worry about, just thinking about the summer and school next year.”

She laughed. “You just finished this year. I think you can take an evening off,” she said with a smile.

“Maybe, but maybe not.” I took a deep breath. “What would you say if I wanted to go to Fieldcrest?” I asked.

“Why? Did something happen?”

“No. Mrs. Salaway mentioned they have some better math classes, and they also have football. I think I’d like to try that.”

Mom frowned. She taught foreign languages. I know what she thought of many of the jocks in the school. Lord knows I had heard enough of her comments about them in my past life. “What if you don’t make the team? Are you sure you want to leave all your friends behind for that? We can always get you into a few college math classes if you need advanced classes.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “So you don’t want me to transfer?”

“I didn’t say that. I just want to make sure you’ve thought it all the way through. None of your cousins go there. You won’t know anyone.”

“Except you.”

“But you can’t have lunch with me, or go to classes with me, or do any of the other things you would do with your friends. What about Sam or Scott?”

She was right, but while I had fond memories of my friends from the first time through, this time would be different. I had already graduated college, and won a masters and doctorate in physics. I could not re-live my prior high-school experience knowing what I now knew.

“I just want to think about it and know that you’ll support my decision.”

“If you think about it and show you are serious about wanting to play football, of course I’ll support you.”

“What do you mean, show you I’m serious?”

“You know Fieldcrest has a week of school left. I want you to come with me next week and talk to the coach of the JV team. He’ll give you a workout routine for the summer and tell you what fitness test you have to pass to make the team tryouts. If you can pass that test before the enrollment cut-off, I’ll know you’re serious. Deal?”

I thought about it for a second. Beyond a childish desire to have a chance to play a sport that my prior decisions had denied me, I knew I had to find out if I could change my own fate. With that desire in mind, I knew I really had no choice. “Deal.”

“Okay, let’s get some dinner for my soon to be freshman,” Mom said with a smile.

Coach Miller was not impressed with me, but I think he liked my Mom.

“I know you farm boys can put on shows of strength, son, but football is different from baling hay or shucking corn. You have to be strong, fast, and have endurance. If you want to make my team, you’ll have to show me everyday that you have what it takes. I won’t let you take up a spot on my bench as a favor to your Mom. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir. I just want to know what I need to do to be competitive.” I had never shown much in the way in people skills in the past twenty years, but I was intelligent. I knew I was smarter than the coach. I also knew that if I even hinted that fact, I would lose any chance of making he team.

“Okay. Day one of the tryouts is a standard Marine Corps PT test. As many sit-ups as you can do in two minutes, as many pushups in the next two minutes, then pull-ups, then a three mile timed run. There is a scale for each event. Each sit-up and push-up is worth a point. Each pull-up is worth five. Eighteen minutes for the three miles is one hundred points. We deduct a point for every ten seconds over eighteen minutes. A perfect score is four hundred points. If you can’t make a score higher than one-fifty, you don’t make it to day two. On day two, we do it all again, and the top forty scores will start practicing. In early practices, we’ll look at your sprinting speed in the forty and some other strength tests. Thirty-six boys will suit up for the first game.” He paused and stared me in the eye. “Will you be one of those thirty-six, Taylor?”

“Yes, coach.” As I said, I knew what he wanted to hear.

“Really? You’re telling me now that you are going to beat out twenty sophomores that are returning to the team as well as sixteen other freshmen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We shall see, mister Taylor. We shall see.” He looked at a calendar on his desk. “Day one of tryouts is August sixth at 7:00 AM. We’ll see then if you have what it takes.”

Even though I had spent the last twenty years of my life in the soft halls of academia surrounded by the hard streets that had engulfed the United States, I had not always been soft or sluggish. My first time through I had won a Naval ROTC scholarship and spent five years in the Navy. I knew how to workout, even if I did not like it.

I started the same day I talked to the coach. Stretching my body carefully and doing a mile jog to warm up felt good in my youthful frame. I then did sit-ups, push-ups and pull-ups before hitting the road again for a timed three miles. My theoretical score was dreadful at first, but I stuck with it. My two older cousins and my Uncle Ben gave me a natural ribbing about getting up early to run around in the dark, but that just made my stubborn streak kick in and make me more committed. In addition to what became my morning workouts, I still had plenty of farm chores that required strength and endurance. Winter wheat left straw to be baled, and hay soon followed. Fifty-pound bags of seed had to be loaded, off-loaded, and put into the planter. My cousins soon noticed that I was carrying more than my normal load of the lifting and toting. By the end of June, I was accompanying them to neighboring farms baling hay. In those days, that was how teenaged boys made money over the summer. We helped out farmers that didn’t have sons to help with the work. It was two years earlier than my first time through.

“Where we working today, Uncle Ben?” I asked. Uncle Ben had been a cornerstone of my life after Dad died. He was my father’s older brother. He was gruff, and weathered, but just as quick to praise as punish. With three kids of his own, he never played favorites, but in the past month I had seen him look differently at me. He gave me a chance to do things that I didn’t remember from the first time through.

“Baling hay at the Salaways.” I smiled. I had thought of the lovely Salaway girls just last night. “Drive the tractor over there after lunch and me and the boys will meet you there with with baler.” We had un-hitched the baler in the last field we had baled yesterday and just pulled the loaded hay racks to the barn to unload this morning.

“We taking our racks?” I asked.

“Nope. Jerry has his own racks. Make sure you bring all the baling hooks though.”

“Yes, sir.” I had always been respectful to Uncle Ben. He had always earned it.

I wiped the sweat and hay off me as best as I could and headed inside to eat. Mom was out, so I made a sandwich and drank some milk. I refilled my half-gallon water jug before heading back outside and hopping on the tractor. The four miles to the Salaway’s would take longer on the tractor than Uncle Ben would need with his truck, even with stopping for the baler, and I did not want to be the last one over there. Besides, driving a tractor was some of my favorite thinking time.

I still had no explanation for what had happened to me, but I was determined to make the most of the opportunity. I was working hard this summer to get some money that I could leverage with my knowledge of my past/future. I knew Apple Computer was having its IPO in 1980. I wanted to be part of that.

But I had also decided I could not just pursue money. Yes, I could get money with my knowledge, but I was proving that the past was not fixed. I could not rely just on my foreknowledge. I also knew that if I was successful in changing my own fate, then I also had a chance to change the fate of the country and possibly the world. The last ten years of my life had not been pleasant times for mankind. Resource scarcity and the rise of many flavors of militant fundamentalism had lead to ever increasing cycles of violence and conflict. I had been working on changing that trajectory with my fusion research. Now, I could possibly have a longer lever to move the world.

I had thought of quickly reviving my research, but the material sciences were not ready to produce much of what I would need. I would need capital to invest to guide those foundational developments first, then I could revisit fusion.

I pulled into the Salaway’s farm yard as I saw my uncle turn onto their road a half mile behind me. I spotted the hayracks in the yard and pulled up in front of them. I quickly backed up to the tongues sticking from under the first rack, making sure the hitch was lined up properly, before dropping the diesel into idle and climbing down from the tractor to hook up the flat racks.

“Hey, Paul.” I looked up to see Jyl, the middle sister walking over to me. “I didn’t know you were helping your uncle this summer.”

She looked cute in her cut-off jeans, canvas sneakers, and loose gray shirt. I caught a glimpse of a pink bikini top through her partially buttoned top. Her dirty blonde hair was pulled through the back of her Caterpillar ball cap. I smiled.

“Yep. John and Ryan and I are all getting a workout this year. How’s your summer going?” I was not sure what the three girls did during the summers. I thought they attended some cheerleading camps, but that was a couple of weeks time at most.

“Oh, we just got back from visiting Mom’s Mom in Michigan. We got to spend some time on the lake. It was cool. How about you?”

“Nothing much except working and working out. I’m thinking about going out for football this year.”

I could see the wheels turning. “You’re going to Fieldcrest?”

I nodded.

“That’s too bad. I’ve heard most of the girls that go there are bitches.”

I was too shocked to respond. I did not recall Jyl ever saying a bad word about our neighboring school. In fact, I’m pretty sure she dated a football player from that school in my past life.

“I-- I don’t know,” I stammered. “I just want a chance to play football. Your Mom thought they might have some more advanced math classes that I could take later on as well.”

Jyl frowned. “Mom would think that way.” She forced a smile as my uncle pulled into the yard. “Well, maybe I’ll see you later when you finish up baling. Mom will probably have one of us make a jug of lemonade for you and your cousins and uncle, so stop by the house before you take off.”

With that she turned and skipped away. I couldn’t help but admire her rear-end as my cousins hopped out of the truck and came over to me.

“Chatting up Jyl, Paul?” John the older of my twin cousins asked.

“Just being friendly,” I replied.

“Well, Jyl is cute,” Ryan said. “But Jordan is beautiful. I’d rather be friendly with her,” he said.

John laughed. “As if you stood a chance while Steve is still alive.” Steve was the head jock and Jordan’s boyfriend. John and I knew Ryan had a terrible crush on Jordan.

I laughed at Ryan’s blush and then winced when he caught me with a punch to the arm. “You might be getting stronger, Paul, but I’ll still knock you into next week if say anything. Not one word. I mean it.”

Luckily, Ryan’s dad climbed out of the truck finally. “Stop playing grab-ass and let’s get to work, boys. Forecast is for rain tonight. I don’t want to have to re-rake Jerry’s hay, so let’s get busy.”

The third rack was loaded high by the time we finished and thunder clouds were on the horizon by the time we had all three racks tucked under Mr. Salaway’s lean-to by his barn. I almost forgot Jyl’s promise of lemonade, but Uncle Ben sent me up to the house to see if Mr. Salaway wanted to check where we had parked things.

“Hi, Paul,” Jeryl greeted me softly. “Jordan had me make you guys some lemonade, if you’d like some.” She had a pitcher and four large glasses of lemonade already poured, sitting in the shade on their porch. She was in an outfit similar to her sisters, but with no loose top covering her bikini top. She was not yet as curvy as her sisters, but it did not stop my from admiring her smooth, tanned skin and tight belly.

“Thanks, Jeryl. Does your dad want to check where we parked things before the rain?” I asked.

“Dad’s gone to town with Mom, so I guess not.”

I picked up a glass of the lemonade and waved to my cousins and uncle. I took a quick sip. “Thanks. That hits the spot.”

“You’re welcome. So I hear you’re going to Fieldcrest instead of Standard next year.”

I was surprised at her interest. “I think so. We’ll see how my training and tryouts for football go before committing.”

“You want to play football?”

To read this story you need a Registration + Premier Membership
If you have an account, then please Log In or Register (Why register?)

Support the author's future writing by purchasing this book from Bookapy

A New Past (The Complete Trilogy)

Charlie Foxtrot

$26.99