Writing Night
This is what passed for TV in Dabbs’ home when the kids were young.
We raised our kids without television. They, predictably, hated that. However, as a result, we had to make our own entertainment. Part of that was writing night.
On writing night, we went around the room, and each kid picked a component of our narrative. One chose a central character, another the setting, and the third picked an era.
In this case, the hero was somebody named Luscow Larue, the setting was the American Midwest, and the era was the 1970s during the Cold War. There was a 40-minute time limit. Everybody had a laptop. Here was my effort.
Luscow Larue, Ph.D., was fairly pathetic. Forty-two years old, brilliant, pathologically introverted, and destined to be forever single, Dr. Larue lost himself in his work. Like most guys, he had difficulty carrying on a sensible conversation with an attractive woman. Larue had once tried disco with a soft-hearted co-worker named Phyllis but didn’t care for it. He felt like some kind of epileptic carp.
Luscow’s job was his life. That was just as well. It was 1977, and the specter of nuclear annihilation was never more than half an hour distant. That is what drove him. What he was doing was important. His work gave him purpose.
Dr. Larue was a theoretical physicist working for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Everything DARPA did was shielded from the public eye. Luscow’s specialty was radar. His mandate was to apply the burgeoning field of quantum mechanics to advanced radar detection technology. His project required simply immense amounts of power. This was why it was located in the middle of no place. They could draw down the power grid without browning out New Hampshire.
Luscow’s coworkers tolerated him. He was a nice guy and a respected scientist, but he had been tragically born without a personality. They understood him for what he was.
Sometimes science can take us in some unexpected directions.
(Source: Public domain)
On the big day, the iridium coils were fully synchronized, and the total output of the Quentin Mount nuclear reactor was dedicated to powering the control loop. Luscow hoped to bend physics in a way that mankind had never before experienced. In the process, he expected to be able to detect the takeoff of a Tupelov bomber from its base outside of Moscow all the way from Iowa. Luscow hoped his work would tip the balance of power in the Cold War.
There was an undeniable degree of risk to this experiment, so Luscow cleared everyone else out of the building. With the closed-circuit TV monitoring proceedings, he sat in his big swivel chair at the control board and got his head in the game. The control board was at the center of the quantum field. As he powered up the systems sequentially, he could feel the hair stand up on his neck. The ancillary static made his ears ring, and he began to smell ozone.
With all instruments in the green, he disengaged the safety toggles and inserted his control key. “For God and America,” he muttered as he gave the key a twist.
Bystanders later described the explosion as being akin to staring into the sun. The blast removed more than half of the building’s roof and left a four-foot crater in what had been the concrete slab. For his part, Luscow Larue, Ph.D., was simply gone. His teammates raced into the remains of the building as soon as they were able but could find no sign of the disintegrated physicist.
The blast had destroyed all communications to the facility. Getting the remains of the apparatus secured had taken the rest of the day. As Phyllis pulled her AMC Hornet out onto the highway to go home, she was beset with oppressive melancholia. Luscow was a geek, but he was a sweet geek. She hated to see him go out this way — literally vaporized in a physics experiment gone sideways.
Before you can do it, somebody has to dream it.
(Source: Public domain)
Phyllis reached the outskirts of Des Moines and was shocked to find that everything had inexplicably changed. The buildings were brighter and cleaner, while the architecture was completely transformed. Nothing was as it had been when she had come into work that morning. She pulled over at her favorite gas station only to find a sign reading, “Larueberg Fusion Charging Center — The Best in Pure Free Energy.”
Phyllis was horribly confused. There was no way she could have known that Luscow had, in trying to create a cutting-edge radar, actually inadvertently built a time displacement device instead. It is breathtaking the impact a single introverted physics nerd can have on the world when he is unexpectedly dropped into 17th-century Iowa.
