By the turn of the century, it had been well known for several years that elementary particles have virtually no respect for the speed limit set by Einstein and his fellow physicists. Yet, though annoying, the individual violations were so incredibly slight as to constitute more of a parlor trick than a serious challenge to relativity.
As it happens, photons depart the starting gate, then arrive a single second later at the finish line, one hundred and eighty six thousand miles away. However, a few of them will inevitably manage to shave off an infinitessimally tiny fraction from the elapsed time and arrive before all the others in what might be refered to as the penultimate photo-finish.
As we all know, this is the unfortunate consequence of quantum uncertainty: a phenomenon which photons are damn well willing to prove, even if it means pissing off everyone in the Einstein bunch.
Now as a theoretical basis for a faster-than-light space drive, this odd quirk would seem to have little practical application. Even if it could be harnessed into the design of a space ship, our intrepid explorers, or their descendents, could look forward to arriving at their destination 500 light years away in something less than two tenths of a second less time than their competition in a ship limited to the mere speed of light: hardly a basis for pre-selling tickets on the first excursion boat to Aldebaran.
Undeterred, one Terrence Middleton, an obscure physics professor who retired from a Midwestern community college, devoted the better part of his golden years investigating this phenomenon.
What bothered Mr. Middleton was the same thing which bothers nearly all lovers of science fiction. This was the sheer injustice of being compelled to explore the universe entirely within the perverse confines of the imagination, while millions of worlds, each filled with wonders beyond count, circled the myriad suns clearly visible every evening in the night sky.
Though not a particularly religious man, Mr. Middleton railed at the presumption of a God who carelessly dangled great plums of mystery and wonder before Man's eyes, yet witheld from him the means to reach for them. This could not possibly be, thought Mr. Middleton, and so concluded that God must have encoded the design for a practical spaceship somewhere in the laws of physics.
Mr. Middleton's optimism rested entirely on the aforementioned habits of the mischevious photon. He reasoned: if he could create a field in which all paticles behaved as faster than light photons do, what then? Could these particles be coaxed to even greater feats? Could they travel fast enough to knock off, not milliseconds, but years from a trip to the nearest star?
Sadly, Mr. Middleton never found out. After twenty years of an unproductive life, according at least to Mrs. Middleton, he passed away quietly in his sleep, dreaming, now doubt, of hacking his way through the jungles of Mongo.
But happily our story doesn't end there. While still alive, Mr. Middleton had managed to acquire a son-in-law, one Delmer Hackney, who Mrs. Middleton eventually put in charge of disposing of Mr. Middleton's personal effects. The mounds of scientific curiousa were instantly consigned to a yard sale, except for the 30 or so notebooks which Mr. Middleton had filled with notes and calculations, and which Mr. Hackney found oddly compelling.
Not that he could understand any of it. Mr. Hackney was neither a Great Thinker nor a Man of Vision. His job as night watchman at the local foundry actually exceeded his financial ambitions. Yet for all that, he was also an inveterate tinkerer. He was constantly taking things apart and putting them back together differently so as to make them work better, whereupon, mostly, they not only failed to work better, but at all.
All this lifetime of tinkering and failing had resulted in a basement full to the bursting with boxes and shelves of spare parts from every conceivable domestic apparatus, appliance and gadget - and more on the way.
It was in this millieu that Mr. Hackney subsequently spent his evening poring over his late father-in-law's notebooks - dreaming of the day he would transform theory into practice, and the stars suddenly as close as the neighbor's back yard.
Now here is where our story jumps vertically off the rails and into Looking Glass Land. Because, patient reader, there were two rather obvious reasons why Mr. Hackney could never design and build a faster-than-light space drive. No, make that three. First, Mr. Hackney was himself a man of no great skill or intelligence. Second, Mr. Middleton's notebooks might just as well have been written in Mayan pictographs, for all Mr. Hackney could make of them. And third, even if Mr. Hackney had been a certified genius, there was absolutely no way, as latter experiments have proven, that any of Mr. Middleton's theories could have produced an above average Pinewood Derby car, let alone a space drive.
God, we must assume, had grown weary of Mankind's greatest inventors failing, time after time, to find a vehicle suitable for getting out there and exploring His universe. Thereupon, it would appear, in a fit of divine petulance, he flung the answer down to Earth where it landed, willy nilly, in the basement of Delbert Hackney. It happened like this:
Late one evening, after an unusually tiresome bout with Mr. Middleton's notebooks, Mr. Hackney cleared off a workbench and began to construct a working prototype of a space drive. There's no telling what was going through his mind at the time. To this day, his biographers record his claim that the notebooks had given him a "Clear Vision" of what an interstellar space drive should look like. Clear vision or no, what emerged early the next morning from that work bench had nothing whatsoever in common with Mr. Middleton's theories. Yet - it worked.
Now let's pause here for a moment to catch our breath and briefly review this astounding chain of causation. Physicists uncover a cabal of particles behaving naughtily. This inspires a second rate physics teacher to embark on a fruitless search for the will-o-the-wisp of economy space travel. Finally, this sparks a mere hobbyist to slap together a four foot tall working model of an interstellar space ship in his basement.
!
As you are most likely aware, the Delbert Hackney residence has now long since been declared a precious and extraordinary historical monument, and is only accessible to well credentialed historians, archivists and scientists. However a complete facsimile, right down to the last loose floorboard and rusty nail, has been constructed a mile or so from the Lincoln Memorial and is accessible to the public, although tickets are harder to come by than an interview with the Pope.
If by some miracle you ever get a chance to visit that facsimile, do take a moment to drink in what is probably the most astonishing link in this unending chronicle of impossible coincidences. There you will see, sitting on top of a Craftsman tool box next to Mr. Hackney's workbench, a spiral bound notebook, open to display a grease smudged page filled with Mr. Hackney's own hand writing.
And why, you ask, does this seemingly insignificant bit of flotsam play so prominent a role in Mankind's quest for the stars? I'll tell you why in due course, but first:
Well, there, upon completion, the finished prototype of Mr. Hackney's interstellar spaceship sat. It being the weekend - about 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning - all Mr. Hackney had left to do was stumble upstairs to bed.
And that was that. Men who fail repeatedly aren't necessarily conditioned to expect failure, but throw in a good night's sleep, followed by a hot shower and a football game or two and suddenly the prospects of interstellar space travel abruptly begin to dim. By Sunday afternoon, Mr. Hackney had decided to put off testing his space ship until he had time to re-check a few of his calculations.
Months went by. Winter turned to spring, spring to summer. The little spaceship found a nice, cozy corner in the basement, where it was, indeed, like the first issue of Action Comics among piles of recent National Geographics. Then came the 4th of July, and Mr. Hackney's date with history.
On a whim, which was of course the only reliable motivator of Terrence Middleton's son-in-law, Mr. Hackney resolved, by hook or crook, to take the darn space ship down to the park and set it off at dusk before the annual fire works display. Accordingly, around 6 P.M. he hauled it out and put it in the back of the pick-up, and he and the Missus headed out for the park.
The park was already beginning to fill up with eager spectators and the fire works guys were just starting to set up. Mr. Hackney carried his interstellar space ship over next to the fireworks, sat it down on the ground, and attached about 30 feet of wire hooked to a remote. The fire works guys asked if the thing was dangerous but Mr. Hackney just laughed and said no, no it wasn't, and that it probably wouldn't go off anyway so they might as well have some fun with it. It looked for all the world like a bunch of PVC drain pipe strapped together, with four crude fins attached at the base. For the occassion, Mr. Hackney had painted it silver and stenciled "X-9" on the side. Don't ask.
But by golly X-9 was dangerous, as the two mile wide crater which had been the former site of Middletown, Michigan would have testified if Mr. Hackney had misplaced one tiny transister. More on that later.
Anyway, while it was still dusk, everyone backed off and Mr. Hackney pushed the little red button on the remote. There was a lot of smoke, or maybe more like steam, and X-9: Mr. Delbert Hackney's interstellar spaceship prototype began to rise majesticlly off the ground. Everyone agreed it looked pretty cool.
When it got about 15 or 20 feet in the air, there was a brilliant flash and the whole park became brighter than a summer day at noon. Then the spaceship, well, just went. It was like a silver column which instantly bored into the sky up to beyond the limits of vision. There followed an ear splitting clap of thunder as the air rushed in fill the void. You've heard real thunderclaps before. Well, this was a lot worse.
Needless to say, the whole crowd was struck dumbfounded, including Mr. Hackney. Babies wailed, dogs barked, and the fireworks show afterwards was as anti-climactic as the last episode of The X-Files.
Fortunately (or not, take your pick) for Mankind, present in the crowd was a chemistry professor from Middletown Junior College, who had the sense to understand what had just happened. The rest, as they say, is history. Which brings us back to that notebook sitting on top of the Craftsman tool box in the basement of Mr. Hackney's facsimile house in Washington.
Well, one thing led to another. The chemistry professor asked the dazed Mr. Hackney a whole bunch of questions. Then he called so and so, and so and so called so and so, and pretty soon the government guys with the coke bottle glasses and pocket protectors got involved. At the time it was all very hush hush, "eyes only", burn after reading, and so on.
But what we know now is that recreating Mr. Hackney's interstellar space ship prototype would have been damn near impossible if they only had Mr. Hackney's own dubious recollections to go on. And here's the thing. Mr. Hackney never kept records or made schematics of the stuff he whipped together in his basement. Never that is, except on this one, single occassion. And that's why the value of that notebook, now kept under twenty four hour guard in a bunker at an Air Force base outside Tempe, Arizona, is greater by far than all the first editions of all the plays Shakespeare wrote, or whoever it was who actually wrote them.
As it was, it turns out Mr. Hackney was not, shall we say, a meticulous record keeper. Remember the two mile wide crater that Middletown barely escaped becoming on that historical July 4th evening? Well, there are more than a few of those out in the Arizona
