“Not everything of this world can be explained by science or
anything else for that matter.” He
pinned her again with his laser blue eyes. “I don’t discount anything, there is something
in you Clair that is beyond the norm and it glows off of you like a beacon, it
attracts me.”
Clair knew she was staring at him in the oddest fashion but
she couldn’t seem to control the instinct to do so. All of her life she just knew that talking
about the eccentric nature of her family line would be a bad ideal for a first
date. It would be a bad ideal before
marriage but she had admitted to herself that she would’ve volunteered the
information if Jonny had ever asked her to be his wife. She had never guessed that the secrets of her
lineage permeated off of her and someone open to those ideals would be able to
associate and see how she was different from most people.
“To be honest, I have a family history that would imply that
extra sensory perception was an ability I should have, but you are the first person
I’ve ever had even a blip of activity with.” Clair admitted.
Sergei frowned slightly. “Really?
I find that very interesting. Not
a single occurrence before?”
Clair shrugged sheepishly, “Not involving anything else
besides music.”
Sergei sat silently for a moment the question burning in his
form as he softly asked, “How bad was it, Clair?”
Clair was very solemn and couldn’t hide the fear in her voice
as she said slowly, “Bad.”
He nodded. “I thought
so, had a gut feeling about it.”
Clair finally asked, “Is there any reason to believe that
someone would want to hurt you?”
He nodded quickly. “Yeah, this project that I’m here for is under
much scrutiny and debate.” He leveled
his impressive eyes at her. “There are
people who would rather not see it done.”
“How pertinent are you to its completion?” Clair said in a
very direct way.
“There’s the thing Clair, without me, it doesn’t happen.”
Sergei laid hard.
“You want to talk about it?” Clair asked earnestly.
He hesitated for only a moment, “Virgin launch. The ideal has been humming around the
aerospace industry since we first got people on the moon.” His eyes started to glow again as he started
talking with his hands. “What if we
could charter people into space, like airline carriers charter people around
the world? It’s a huge undertaking
because you would have to be able to eliminate a bulk of the physical
limitations to being in space that astronauts train years for.”
“Okay,” Clair inserted following.
“What is the one thing missing from space that makes it so
damn difficult for people?” Sergei asked in an ironic way.
Clair thought for a second. “Gravity.”
Sergei smiled at her then. “I have developed a rather crude and
preliminary gravitational system that would not alter regardless of the
gravity, or lack thereof, in space. Currently it can be isolated to a single
hub.” He shrugged, “So far I’ve only been able to stabilize a hub the size of a
Lear jet, but that’s just the beginning.”
Clair felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. “You’ve found a way to create gravity?” she
said in a disbelieving fashion.
Sergei nodded a bit as he responded. “Sort of, I’ve mostly
found a way to borrow gravity. Gravity
is one of the big four forces of the Universe, it just exists, the trick is
tapping into it.”
“How?” Clair asked honestly intrigued.
He was casual but confident as he continued. “Same way it
exists now, orbiting bodies in a circular pattern, centrifugal force meeting
rotating atoms.”
Abruptly he grabbed a napkin and pulled a pen out of his jacket
pocket. He drew a crude looking cigar
shaped vessel and drew several rings around it.
On each ring he attached various circular objects of varying size, and
with arrows he displayed the directions each ring would move and the directions
each circular object would rotate in.
He showed her the crude drawing. “Mankind’s problem is that we always think we
need to reinvent the wheel, we don’t need anything new, the solution is in the
application.”
Clair’s mind wrapped around it instantly. “A roving solar system, with the hub as the
sun.”
Sergei nodded. “It
would move in space just like our galaxy does, creating its own gravity as it
goes.”
Clair shook her head. “That’s
so simple it’s brilliant.”
Sergei nodded. “I had
this thought for quite a while and I often thought that it really couldn’t be
this simple so I never brought it up.
But people are chomping at the bit to get into space.” He paused before finishing. “So I put a little
more time and planning into it, mapped out the physics of it all and I was able
to generate a gravitational field on a model airplane.”
Clair was holding the napkin, staring at it blankly not
really believing how unerringly brilliant this man was. “Talk about thinking outside of the box.”
“I find the only issues with science are all the rules, we’ve
made things too complicated. None of us
can see the forest for the trees.” He stated
like it was obvious “God had it all right in the beginning, why mess with that?”
Her thoughts got captured by his mention of God. “Don’t tell me you’re a scientist that
believes in God.”
He fixed her with a very serious look. “No true scientist can look at the evidence
and not. It’s too balanced, everything
is. I don’t know if religion has it
right but I do know that something holds this all together. We’ve broken things down to their smallest
component and we have no idea why everything doesn’t just fall apart. That’s either magic or some other divine
force.” He fixed her with a knowing
look. “And I don’t have to tell you
about all else in this world that is unexplainable.”
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