The Whirlwind's Ride. Tom Boone's Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ to leave the room. Cedric was standing right behind me with a questioning look on his face.

      “Cedric, I am going for a very long run. Don’t expect me back till tonight.” I grabbed a shoulder carrier, filled it with hard bread, a block of cheese, and several bottles of wine. Then without looking back I raced out the door.

      As I ran through Mildred’s garden, her dog Pepper saw me and decided to join me on my run. I welcomed the company. I was running with all my might as Pepper just loped along beside me.

      I ran until I was totally exhausted. I made it half way up the mountain the stream runs out of that empties into my private lake. It took only a few moments to find an appropriate tree on a bluff overlooking the stream. I sat with my back against its trunk and shared my lunch with Pepper. The big gentle dog let me pet her until something caught her eyes in the bushes and she was gone.

      I forced my mind back to what had happened with Celeste. As I had looked in everyone’s eyes at breakfast I only saw what I always saw, respect and maybe love. I realized that none of them remembered Celeste or what she had done to me.

      I thought about Fran’s luscious body. Was I being a fool for not taking her to my bed? I thought about how delicious it would be to pull that first orgasm out of her. I wondered how my relationship with Fran would change if we really had sex. I wondered how my relationship would change with all the girls on the estate if I had sex with any of them.

      It was so nice to be surrounded by pretty girls and not have there be any sexual tension. Fran was my favorite, but I really liked them all. I would give everyone working on my estate a raise. Cedric told me that I already had the most highly paid workers on any estate on Cocuru. I didn’t care. I had money coming out of my ears. If my workers shared some of the dangers of my life by working for me, they should share some of the wealth my life has brought me.

      I thought about Fran’s lovely body. There are a great many lovely bodies in the galaxy. I had handled more than my fair share of them. It was the way that Fran looked at me that was special. That was rare. I didn’t want to take the chance that it would change if we had sex. My decision made, I went home.

      CHAPTER 2

      MEETING DR. CARROLL

      In this year of mandatory schooling my teacher was a man who placed a major emphasis on giving his students school projects. The school projects always involved giving a presentation to the class.

      My Uncle took a great deal of interest in my school projects. He felt that obtaining information from a variety of sources and assembling it in a coherent form for presentation to a select audience, either to educate them in something they did not know or to alter their opinion about something they were familiar with, was much more important than parroting facts remembered by rote or determining answers to problems by using procedures explained in a book. My Uncle was somewhat long winded.

      Before my project was due, my Uncle would always have me give my presentation to him. His criticisms were valid and numerous. They left me feeling broken and battered and wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole and suck my thumb.

      This time I felt I had escaped. My ground transport to school would pick me up in a few minutes and my teacher had made it very clear that there was no excuse for tardiness. Even if he had one of the household staff drive me to school, there wasn’t enough time to give my presentation at home to my Uncle.

      I had finished my breakfast and was walking through the great room to get to the door that was closest to the road where the transport would pick me up. I noticed my Uncle sitting in a chair that I would have to pass to get to that door. If I doubled back and went through the kitchen and ran around the house, I just might make it to the pickup point before the transport got there. My Uncle looked up and caught my eye.

      “Bob, come over here. I want you to give me your presentation.”

      “But Uncle, there isn’t time. I don’t want to be late for class.”

      “I talked to your teacher and explained the situation to him. He told me that any reasonable tardiness would be excused. I will have someone drive you to school in one of the estate’s land transports when we are done,” my Uncle said with a ‘you have no way out of this so just do it’ look in his eye. “Please start out by explaining the theme of your presentation,” my Uncle said as he settled into his chair.

      I moved a couch and a couple of chairs out of the way so I would have room for my display projection in the corner. I turned on the projection cube and put it on the small table next to me. When the cube flashed green I knew it had accessed the room’s lighting system and would respond to my verbal cues. I ignored the knot in my stomach as I forced an appropriate smile on my face.

      “The theme of my presentation is how I would explain our method of travel between the stars using Hyperlink Travel between gravity wells, to members of an intelligent species who were on the verge of, but had yet to develop the ability to send manned objects beyond their planet’s gravity dent. This is to be done without using mathematical equations or specific technical details.” I cleared my throat and took a deep breath.

      “My assumption is that they have looked at the stars in their birth planet’s night sky and dreamed of traveling to the stars and that they are every bit as intelligent as we are. I will also refer to any craft designed to travel beyond a planet’s atmosphere as a spaceship. A ship designed to travel the space beyond a planet, as a water ship is designed to travel the waters of a planet’s surface, or an airship is designed to travel in a planet’s atmosphere. This will give my audience a point of reference.”

      I could not believe my good fortune. I had gotten through the first paragraph that I had composed myself without a single criticism, one paragraph down and about a billion to go.

      The first projection was a huge shapeless black mass filled with countless tiny pinpricks of light.

      “This is our universe as we perceive it. This is our galaxy which my species refers to as the Milky Way.”

      All the pinpricks go out accept one pinprick that expands to fill the entire scene with the familiar spiral galaxy.

      “And this is the star around which my home planet circles.”

      One star is briefly highlighted and then shrinks back to blend in with the teaming, sparkling, masses of stars in the Milky Way. Then the galaxy shrinks back to a tiny pinprick of light as all the other countless pinpricks of light come back.

      “And this is our universe as it really exists.”

      The shapeless black mass becomes a huge ball with the pinpricks of light floating on its surface.

      “Our universe is made up of light matter and dark matter. We and everything we can perceive using our five senses is light matter. It is as if we have our three dimensions and the dark matter only has two. Say the dark matter has only height and width, but no depth and we are at such an angle that we can only see the dark matter by looking at its depth, which it doesn’t have. It still has mass, it still has gravity, it still affects the light matter of the universe. That is the only reason we know the dark matter exists. It affects our universe and we use mathematics to describe the dark matter’s size and shape and how it functions.”

      My Uncle raised his hand and I stopped and waited.

      “I thought your presentation was about Hyperlink Travel between gravity wells, СКАЧАТЬ