Blake marveled at the stark mood change between the professor’s lab and his neglected house. The sterile laboratory with its white walls, hard linoleum floors and absence of decor also contrasted the adjacent domicile by lacking a scrap of paper or speck of dust. Any evidence that the professor’s life and mind were diminishing didn’t exist in the microcosm environment of his lab.
“You’ve got to admire the way I let the yard grow to hide this place from the courtyard,” the professor said, proud his remodeling addition was hardly evident from outside, and in.
“I just thought you didn’t care about the yard anymore.”
“That’s true too.” After hyping Blake’s entrance into the lab, he did little to point out the finer details and expert craftsmanship, like the hidden storage cabinets in the walls and floor for his cherished research. Instead he offered Blake a stool at a long worktable.
Anxious to begin, and absent the smile that had accompanied his jovial attitude about his yard, the professor asked, “How familiar are you with wormholes, Blake?”
“Wormholes?” he mused, recalling past astronomy and physics classes, and realizing the dynamic of the professor’s work if it involved wormholes. “I think that sometime in the eighties physicists began theorizing that tunnels linking black holes existed in the spacetime continuum. Kind of like shortcuts through space, and they called them wormholes.”
“Decent answer,” the professor complimented. “Their popularity caught on in the eighties, but the term was coined decades ago. I knew the details about wormholes in 1951! But we called them gravity tunnels back then.”
“That’s what the government had you working on?”
“Our program evolved from theories about traveling through deep space. We knew finding a way to travel at the speed of light was still too slow for mankind to explore the vast reaches of space in a lifetime, so we searched for alternatives. After Einstein’s early relativity equations were introduced in 1915, physicists began working with the concept that a black hole has two portals, each representing a different point in spacetime and linked by a tunnel, or wormhole. The government collected over three decades of research on the theory and provided it to us. Upon studying the mathematics we discovered you don’t need a black hole to create a wormhole. The calculations show we can take any two points in the spacetime continuum and link them with a wormhole.”
“So why did it take so long for wormholes to become a mainstream topic?”
“Because when we started crunching the numbers in the fifties, the government didn’t want the results lending credence to the UFO talk they were attempting to suppress. But more importantly, the government didn’t want someone else developing the technology, so they classified it.”
“If I remember correctly, a wormhole will collapse if foreign matter, such as a spaceship, disrupts the gravitational balance.”
“That we realized in the fifties too, and someone proposed an answer.”
“Anti-gravity,” Blake realized.
“Precisely. So in totality, a functional anti-gravity craft can generate wormholes and then sustain them as it traverses the shortcut.”
“Are you going to tell me that UFOs use wormholes to warp between two points in space and that’s how they visit earth?”
“All this talk about UFOs, don’t get caught up with that. Whether extraterrestrials exist or not, considering they did allowed us to open our minds to the possibility that man can travel through deep space, and the medium to transport us was within our understanding. Even 50-years later, wormholes and anti-gravity propulsion are still the most advanced idea presented thus far. It doesn’t matter if the resulting technology is back-engineered from captured UFOs, inspired by actual UFO sightings, or inspired by imaginary sightings if UFOs don’t exist. The undeniable truth is that 50-years ago we had the mathematical and theoretical foundation to pursue developing the technology, and the government has been perfecting it ever since.”
Blake’s mind raced to process all the professor had discussed — UFO sightings, relativity theories, wormholes, space travel, anti-gravity — topics he was familiar with or had heard of independently, but not in synchronicity. “What I find most unbelievable is that you’ve never said anything to me about this.”
“I never said anything to anyone for reasons I’ve already explained. And I thought long and hard about saying anything to you now because I was concerned for your wellbeing. But I’ve been careful, and I just want you to help me with some collateral research, nothing dangerous.”
Danger intrigued Blake the greatest.
“What you must realize is that I’m not trying to convince you of the possibilities, but what has been done. Anti-gravity already exists. The technology is out there.”
Any underlying skepticism Blake had was being replaced by keen interests, fascination and a desire to get involved. The project was like a hot stock to him, and if he didn’t jump on the opportunity, he thought he might miss out. “It almost sounds too good to be true,” he said. “You’re going to pay me to work on this?”
“And get your Ph.D. Is that a problem?”
“I know at least a half dozen qualified students who would volunteer to work with you on this,” he answered, still unsure why he should receive such a windfall.
“So do I, but none are as trustworthy as you are. As far as it being too good to be true, I’m going to show you how true it is.” With that, the professor shooed Blake off the stool and out of the lab, telling him to brew a pot of coffee in the kitchen while he readied the lab.
Blake had always considered the professor’s style unique, which was a polite way of calling him goofy. He didn’t question the validity of what the professor had told him about the past. It was the drastic change in his cognitive state that worried Blake most. Was the professor still able to think rationally? Was he becoming senile? Or, as the professor claimed, did God leave him on Earth to work on this project? Blake at least owed him the benefit of the doubt in return for his past support.
When Blake returned to the lab with coffee he found the professor at the long table where he had left him, except a stack of documents was now arranged in front of him.
“Earlier I mentioned a German scientist named Fritzy.”
“The one who vanished with the documents.”
“Well not all of them,” he answered with a wink. “Fritzy always wanted my opinion, but never offered his. Once he gave me a document to study. I was busy and set it aside, and somehow took it home with me by mistake. Fritzy went berserk and showed up at my apartment in a tirade looking for it — screaming at me in German. I thought his reaction was so strange that I quickly traced the figures onto another sheet while he waited outside, and ultimately hid it in a box where it sat for decades.” He turned over the top sheet in his stack to reveal an aged piece of paper with fading pencil markings, and slid it in front of Blake.
“These look like crop circles,” Blake said, looking at a series of geometric images, lines and curves, arranged in an unnatural, uniformed fashion on the paper.
“We didn’t have crop circles back then.”
“Are they hieroglyphics?” Blake wondered allowed, trying to ascertain if they were an ancient form of written language.
“Fritzy insisted they were not Egyptian, and wouldn’t say much beyond that.”
“What’s their correlation to anti-gravity technology?”
“I never knew if they were related at all, until recently. A while back I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for anti-gravity related materials. They recently sent me four boxes of assorted documents, the origins of which stem from various sources: Army, Navy, CIA, Air Force, congressional testimony. Unfortunately, most declassified documents are like dead men which tell no tales.” He presented Blake a three-page document with everything blacked out except the page numbers. A second example offered a little more to read: