Clyde

One of the characters from THE REZ (my novel-in-progress) is the ghost of Clyde Tolson, widely considered to be J.Edgar Hoover's long-time lover. One grabs inspiration from where one can find it.

As vile as they come.

I ran the image through the Dream Deeply program. This was my favorite of the lot.

Mockup

Migraine day. Going to hibernate.

Posting this mockup for a project-in-progress.

Later...

THE REZ

Another sample from my current writing project, THE REZ.

THE REZ

Chapter One

By James Robert Smith

Represented by Robert Fleck of The Fleck Agency.

“Max. Heads up. Someone’s going to call,” Clyde said to him.

David Maxwell cringed at the sound of the voice. It was a good, deep, regular voice with a nice tone-- just the shade of a mid-western accent that had been mainly filed away from decades of government work. But it still got on his nerves when it crept up on him that way.

Instead of replying, he just sat for a moment and considered. He knew without asking what was coming and who (roughly speaking) would appear and why they would want to see him. It never changed. Instead of asking for verification, though, he considered the glass tumbler full of Jameson whiskey, trying to remember if it was his second glass or third. He didn’t feel all that drunk, so he was thinking it was only two glasses. It wasn’t quite ten in the morning.

“I know what you’re going to ask me,” Clyde said. “And, yes, they want you to help them sneak into the Rez to find someone they love.”

Max stood up. He was a very tall man—six-foot-four as they used to say in the day. For a moment he considered that tumbler again and downed most of its contents before he could come up with a reason not to drink it. And if someone was coming, he should probably get dressed. As it was, he was standing in his kitchen wearing briefs and a tank top and nothing else. If he’d thought that Clyde was going to show up, he would at least have put on a robe.

“Tell me again how you and Edgar met,” he asked his friend.

Through whatever barrier that separated Clyde’s exact position in this world from David’s, he heard the ghost of the former Assistant Director give out with a sigh. “I applied for a position. Unlike my other—unsuccessful—attempt to join the Bureau, this time Edgar saw the file personally and asked to see me.”

“Because…”

“Because he saw my photo. Yes, because he saw my photo and found me attractive. He asked to see me. We met.” There was that ephemeral sigh again that hinted at more than just mild frustration. There was sweet nostalgia in it, too. “And the rest, as they say, is history. But unlike with other people…me and Edgar…we really lived history. And made it,” he added.

Max turned and scanned the reaches of the house that he could see. He was searching for sign of his friend. And that was certainly what Clyde was, these days. Initially the presence of him had been a horror and then a bother. But the fellow had grown on him. In the absence of anyone else of substance (ha ha) in his life, Clyde served in the role of as good a friend as any. So far, he had no reason to doubt that friendship.

“Clyde?” David’s eyes bounced around the kitchen, looking. There were times when he couldn’t figure exactly where the voice was coming from. Especially if there was not corresponding input from his other senses. Once, his ghostly pal had laid a hand on his shoulder. The act had been comforting at the moment. It was the only time they’d touched one another.

“Yes?” Clyde responded.

And, ah, there he was. Wearing a white suit, white hat, black shoes. And spats. That was something one rarely saw these days. His face was long, with a strong jaw and a mildly bulbous nose above a smiling mouth. He was the young Clyde and not the aged one who had died long ago in DC. Max figured if you were a ghost you could be your younger self, if you felt like it. But he’d never asked him about that detail. Clyde’s eyes were bright this morning, unlike David’s which were bloodshot from another night of lousy sleep.

“And why is it that you haunt me?” Max asked the ghost of Clyde Tolson, one-time lover of arguably one of the most powerful men who ever lived in the USA: J. Edgar Hoover.

“Because you are a strikingly handsome man, Max. I like looking at you.”

“Well, if only I was gay and If only you were alive,” he said, raising the tumbler to the ghost and then draining the last little bit of the fine whiskey.

Quickly, then, Max put his long legs to work and strode across the dining room and down the hall toward the master bedroom where the shower was waiting for him. “Don’t look at my ass while I’m taking a shower,” he warned Tolson.

“I am, as always, a perfect gentleman,” the ghost told him.

In the bathroom Max decided that he would probably not have time for a soak and just programmed the shower for eighty-five degrees and waited while the water heated as he adjusted the jet for a massage effect. With the water pattering on pale marble he slid the opaque glass door aside, stepped out of his sweat-soaked underwear and into the loving embrace of the warm water. It was wonderful.

Above the racket of streams on the pale marble surface, he called out. “And who are these people who are going to want to see me?”

“The usual,” Tolson’s voice, volume slightly louder. “There’s someone…over there. In the Rez. Innocent, of course. Whole thing is a misunderstanding and they just want to rescue them. If that’s possible. And your name, of course, came up.”

“Of course,” Max whispered.

“What’s that?”

Max wasn’t sure if Clyde was really being a gentleman or if he was just pretending. But in the steamy air of the bath it really didn’t matter, he figured. All the ghost would see of him would be a tower of flesh tones hiding in the swirling bit of billowing vapor.

“Nothing,” Max called out. And as the water removed the soap he’d lathered on to his now cleansed body, he stepped out of the shower and grabbed one of the rough, cotton towels and swabbed himself dry. Reaching out with the cloth, he dried off a bit of the mirror and tried to look at himself in the polished surface. All of his life he’d been told that he was good-looking. Sometimes he was described as ‘devastatingly handsome’, whatever the Hell that meant. Once, Clyde had told him that Max had reminded him of Cary Grant. Who even knew who Cary Grant was, these days?

Max made a puffing sound at his image and turned. Cary Grant, my ass, he thought.

The stubble that had been sprouting from his chiseled features was soon swirling down the drain of his sink—polished granite of gray tones with bits of quartzite mixed in. He’d paid a lot for that damned sink. He brushed his teeth with a regular old toothbrush and washed his mouth out with Listerine to cleanse his palate of that good whiskey. Later, he’d reintroduce himself to that bottle and kill it off. He could be a real bastard that way, he knew.

Minutes later he was once again in the midst of his house. This time he was in what passed as his office: a couple of laptop computers, a desk, some portable hard drives, and a stack of notebooks. And, of course, there were the boxes of collectible comic books arranged on the floor, along with the various tallies of that collection and want lists for future purchases. And next to the desk were some very old-fashioned file boxes made of corrugated cardboard where he stored what were now over two thousand recipes for all manner of dishes and breads that he sometimes cooked.

Those recipe files and comic book lists had been Clyde’s idea. Max had to admit that it was all very clever. Actually, he cared not one whit for old comic books and had to force himself to cook any of the vast arrays of recipes over which he only seemed to obsess.

“Well, I guess you’d better tell me more about these people who want to see me,” he said to the ghost. But there was no reply. Clyde was like that. Sometimes he was there, and other times he was not. Max had yet to figure out the manner of the ghost’s manifestations. Tolson had come out of the Rez with him once, and had never quite left. Max hadn’t figured out how the shade of the dead former Assistant Director of the FBI had managed to squeeze out of that place when nothing else could. But he had. He’d tagged along somehow, and that was all there was to it.

Nothing else had ever done that—crossed over from the Rez into the real world. Nothing else, of course, but David Maxwell and those he was sometimes able to rescue. But generally speaking, you had to be alive to cross back over.

At the point when Max figured that Clyde was gone for a while, the voice finally spoke up, again in the same room, and again making David flinch a bit. He really did wish that Clyde would cut that shit out.

“Too late,” Tolson said to him. “They’re already here.”

And with that, the doorbell chimed: a quick and cheerful pinging of electronic notes that sang something that had always been familiar to Max but which he had never quite placed. It had come with the joint and he’d never had the bells replaced.

He turned and could see his image reflected in the glass of one of the landscape paintings on the office wall. It was an image of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Superimposed over that striking peak delineated in imaginative strokes of grey and blue, he could see himself standing there: white shirt, blue tie, navy slacks to match, white sneakers.

Max adjusted his cuffs, turned on his heel and went to answer the door.

THE REZ

Time Out!

I'm going to take some time off from active blogging for a little while. I have to finish THE REZ so that my agent can start shopping it around. To that end, I need to stop devoting so much of my energy to the blog and reserve it for my now-precious writing time.

I'll still post some things here--maybe even on a daily basis. But they will be very brief. Perhaps limited to a photo or two.

But not so many outdoors reports or essays.

This cover amazed me when I was a kid. First time I saw it I realized that photos were involved but I couldn't quite figure out how Jack Kirby had done it. As with all such things art-related, I went to my mom for answers. And she explained to me how collages were created. Kirby went through a period during which he did a lot of collage work in his stories. He made this kid stop and think. Always.

THE REZ (Chapter from a work in progress)

I'm blazing away on the new novel. I want to get this one in a finished state and to my agent. It's really flowing along at a good rate.

THE REZ

Trademark and copyright 2013

By James Robert Smith

Chapter Three

The boss was angry.

That was always interesting, but it was also generally scary.

Boyd Withers often just kept his head low when the Chief was blowing through the building like a hurricane in the Gulf. If you were on the edges of that storm you could generally watch in either horror or with some humor, glad that you weren’t in the worst of it. But if you were close to that low pressure point, hiding was probably the worst thing to do. If Hauser noticed you cowering, there would be Hell to pay.

“What in the Night of the Goddamned Living Dead do you mean?” That was a new one. Boyd hadn’t ever heard that one before. That meant that the Chief was particularly angry, so there would probably be some things worth writing down for later. To tell your grandkids. If you survived. “You can’t find him? We’re the goddamned Bureau! We can find anyone! We could find Jimmy-fucking-Hoffa if I told you to do it!”

Boyd heard someone trying to make an excuse. The voice was muffled behind the Chief’s partially opened door and the thick panels of at least two cubicles. Boyd didn’t know who that was on the receiving end, but he obviously didn’t know the top cop very well, because the man purely hated excuses. All he wanted were the facts, and if you tried to equivocate then you were toast.  Young Withers reached for his hat—he was just about the only agent in the office who bothered to wear a hat—and he was actually thinking of pulling it down over his ears to try to blunt the wind that he just knew was about to blow.

And, yes, it came roaring up out of those cigar-stained lungs like the release of a dinosaur’s rumble.

“I don’t give the first molecular speck of a rat’s shitty GOTT-damned ass about that lame crap.” Boyd didn’t know what that lame crap referred to, and would make it a point to never find out. “But I’m telling you to discover that motherfucker and nail down his location so that I will know exactly where he is.” There was a very brief pause while the object of the Chief’s wrath probably thought he was safe. He was not.

“I am giving you just half of a fucking hour to find his location and bring it back to me. Right here. Don’t phone it in. Don’t send a proxy to tell me. And whatever you do, don’t you fucking GOTT-damned email it to me. You come and stand right here!” Boyd rose from his seat to try to see who had made the boss so terribly angry. But all he spotted was Hauser’s gigantic shoulders and the back of his baggy, rumpled trousers and those huge size fourteen brown shoes he always wore. The man had the biggest feet Boyd had ever seen on a man who did not play pro basketball.

Hauser was pointing at the floor at an area that Boyd figured was between the feet of the man cowering before him. “You see that spot? Huh? That’s not a hole in the ground! It’s a fucking spot on my office floor! Do you know your ass from that spot? Yeah, that’s right! That fucking spot! In thirty minutes you will be standing on that spot telling where the FUCK that bastard is hiding out! NOW GET THE HOLY ROMAN FUCK OUT OF MY FUCKING OFFICE!”

The guy must have fled, because when Boyd looked again, Hauser was slamming the door shut. But not before the boss caught a glimpse of Agent Boyd Withers trying to get a peek at what was going on. He knew that because Hauser’s voice suddenly boomed over the PA system—like the voice of God, or of Lucifer—and he heard his name.

“Withers! Now!”

Sighing, he marched through the little maze of cubicles until he was at the door of the office of Chief Grady Hauser. Realizing he still had his hat in his hands, Boyd put it on his head. For some reason, Hauser liked for men to wear hats, even inside the office. He was pretty sure that fact had saved him from a couple of Hauser’s rages and maybe had something to do with the fact that Hauser liked him. Of course there wasn’t a lot of difference in how he treated people he liked from people whose guts he would like to spill.

Withers went in and closed the door behind him. In contrast to what had just occurred, the room was very damned quiet. Hauser wasn’t even breathing hard. The man probably had the constitution of a bull gorilla, which frankly speaking wasn’t too far off the mark of how you would describe him.

(Terrible Turpin created by Jack Kirby, copyright by DC Comics.)

 Hauser seemed to be wearing the same old rumpled suit that he always wore. People in the Department used to wonder if it was the same one, but it couldn’t be. He obviously had ten or twelve of the things and just liked the look. Because, bull ape aside, what Hauser really looked like to Boyd was one of those pugnacious cops that Jack Kirby would draw in those old Silver Age comic books that Withers collected. Hauser looked just like that—down to the loose, rumpled suits, trench coat, and chomping a big cigar. Withers had always kept that analog to himself, because none of the other agents seemed to read old comic books and there probably wasn’t anyone within a mile of him who even knew who Jack Kirby was.

“Chief?” His voice was low, and Boyd tried not to let it crack.

Actually, Grady Hauser’s proper title was Director. But he couldn’t stand being called Director. He’d been a police chief in two large cities (Atlanta and Chicago) before he’d been appointed two years before as acting Director of the nation’s new domestic espionage division. That had all arisen from the various storms of shit that had hit the fan in the years since the Rez had been constructed and all the world’s horrors tossed within its unbreakable borders.

Or almost unbreakable.

Someone had been sneaking in and then sneaking back out, with former inmates in tow.

This pissed off the folk in charge of the country, which meant that it was a problem for the Director to solve, which meant that it made Grady Hauser pretty goddamned cranky.

“Boyd,” he liked using an agent’s first name, especially if he liked that agent, or especially if he hated that agent and wanted to crush him like a fat bug on his office floor.

“Yes, Chief?”

The concrete block of a man turned to face Withers. He reached up with crowbar fingers and extricated the smoldering cigar from his James Cagney lips. He looked at the half-smoked cigar for a second, stuck it back in his mouth, and took a deep drag. Then he blew out the wonderful smoke and considered the world around him for a couple of more seconds.

“What do you think of us using the Rez as a prison?” Cigar now clenched firmly in his jowly mug, he glared at his young, blonde-headed, otherwise average-looking agent.

“That’s not for me to say, Chief.” Silence and cigar smoke descended around Boyd.

“It’s not?”

“No, sir.” He cleared his throat. “I’m an investigator for the Department of Internal Espionage and it’s my job to follow orders, to discover if laws are being broken, and to occasionally enforce those laws.”

“You don’t think we’re Fascist bastards, Boyd? You don’t think we’re all part of a burgeoning police state bound and determined to put our jack-booted heels on the throats of America?” To emphasize, he planted one of those enormous size-fourteen shoes firmly on the pale tiled floor of his office. If ever there had been a man born to jam his jack-booted heel in the collective throat of America, it was Grady Hauser. “According to the liberal fucking press we’re a bunch of dirty Fascist bastards intent on destroying our precious fucking freedom.” He blew another stream of smoke. “Do you agree with that?”

“No, sir, I do not.” Actually, though, Boyd figured the liberal press might have a point.

“You know what I think?”

“No, sir. Would you like to tell me?”

“Yes, I think I would.” He grinned, and seeing that was kind of scary. The guy was a great Director and a great police Chief, but damned if he wouldn’t have made a better actor. Monster movies. He wouldn’t have needed any makeup, either.

“What I think is that it doesn’t fucking matter if we’re Fascist bastards or not. Because we’re here, we’re in charge, and we have a fucking job to do. And, hell.” He stared at the floor, trying to recall the precise spot where he had told the agent to report within thirty minutes with that information. Because he wanted that guy to stand exactly where he had told him to stand. “I don’t really know what a Fascist is. Do you, Agent Withers?”

“I know the official definition, Chief, but I don’t really think that anyone knows exactly what they mean when they say the word.”

“Precisely, Withers. You’re a smart fucking kid, and that’s why I fucking like you.” That and the hat. The Chief walked over to his desk, located an ink marker and tossed it to Boyd.

“See that spot on the floor, Agent Withers?” He pointed one of those enormous sausage fingers at the tiles.

In fact, Withers knew exactly the spot, because he’d seen where the Chief had been pointing when he’d been covering the invisible agent with his breath and spit. “Yes, sir, I do, sir.”

“Take this pen and draw an ‘X’ there. Not too big. Someone’s gonna have to scrub it off later. But draw an ‘X’ on the floor and then get the high holy hell out of my office.” That was a new one, too. Boyd would have to make a note of that one.

“Yes, sir, I will sir.” And Boyd crouched, put the mark on the floor, returned the pen to Hauser’s desk and exited the office.

Outside, safe, he felt his anus unclench.

Overwhelming.

Well, that didn't take long.

The modern fantasy novel has overpowered the Iron Age fantasy.

One of my long-simmering projects has been a novel I call THE REZ. The concept is solid and the professionals I've asked to take a look have all had positive things to say about it. But I never could find the right way to tell the story. Initially the chapters I'd written seemed kind of dull, in a way. There was nothing bright about the prose at all and I couldn't figure out what was missing. But I knew that something was indeed lacking in the text.

And then, it hit me. It hit me like a beam of white light. I had to drop what I was doing at the time and run to the word processor and get it down. A couple of hours later I had it! Some of the best writing I have ever done, and certainly the finest hook I've ever put into a novel. Even better than the hook I planted in the reader with THE FLOCK.

I showed it to my agent (Bob Fleck) and he was impressed. THE REZ has now glommed all of the energy that I had apportioned to ONE CURSE, ONE BLESSING.

One thing I'd like to do is show the first chapter to everyone who reads this blog. But I'm going to hold off for a bit. It really is the finest fiction I've ever written. I want to make sure the train keeps rolling and I don't want to do anything to derail this beauty.

Work-in-progress

Here's a bit of a teaser from my current work-in-progress:

THE REZ

By

James Robert Smith

Copyright 2011.

“You know what they’re saying, don’t you?” The reporter would have jammed a microphone into Professor Maxwell’s face if they still had that kind of thing. As it was, the so-called journalist merely leaned into the scientist’s personal space, causing him to cringe a bit.

“Yes, I’m quite aware of what they’re saying,” the Professor replied. He stood tall and rather imposing over the news man, not at all the type of person one generally thought of when it came to String Theory and thermodynamics and the utilization of anti-matter.

Since the scientist had not taken the bait, the reporter pressed on. “There are those who say that when you flip your switches tomorrow afternoon, the world is going to come to end. They claim that you’re trying to harness energies that are untested and which cannot be contained no matter what safeguards you may have in place.” He paused, a look of false concern on his pale face. “What do you say to those people?”

Maxwell smiled his perfect smile, showing the great dimples and cleft chin that could have landed him roles in Hollywood (or so he’d been told). His eyes crinkled in amusement and his brow lifted his perfectly combed blonde hair a few millimeters. “I’d tell them what we’ve been telling them all along. There’s nothing even remotely dangerous about what we’re doing here at Concentrated Dynamics. We’re hoping to solve a lot of problems and begin to answer a lot of questions by a lot of the most talented minds on this planet.”

“And that’s all? You expect those words to salve the concerns of hundreds of scientists the world over?” Once again the reporter leaned in too close to the Professor.

Maxwell frowned, and he wanted to push the little weasel away from him, but he bit down and kept his impatience at bay. “Those concerns are unfounded,” he said, his voice deep and heroic and nothing like the bookworm nebbish most often conjured in the minds of those who thought at all about physicists and theoreticians and their type. “And it’s hardly the hundreds you mention, and I might add that these are the same kinds of people who were worried about the super-collider in Lucerne before it started operation. Nothing happened then and there, and I assure you that nothing unfortunate will happen here in Missouri when we start our operations in just a few hours.”

At that, the reporter turned to the camera man and made a slashing motion with his hand. He looked up at the towering figure of the scientist and smiled wanly. “Thanks, Prof,” he said. “We’ll have a bit on the news this evening if you want to check it out. News at Six and probably again later in the evening.”

“I’ll probably be much too busy to watch,” Maxwell admitted. It was true. But he could imagine that this fellow and his editors would add something inappropriate and ominous to the report, to suggest that the fate of the world was hanging in the balance of what they were trying to achieve, and over what they were going to do when next the planet turned on its axis.

“Well, thanks for your time,” he said. And quickly the reporter and his camera man were hustling into a plain white car of recent make—a hybrid, Maxwell noticed. Soon they were gone, the auto easing soundlessly away on its electric engine.

David Maxwell sighed in relief. That was the last of them, he knew, until the next day, of course. But he and his investors had refused any more press requests until after the dynamo was operational. It wasn’t as if the rubes could do more than glean the basics of what he and his associates were trying to achieve, so he had grown weary of the almost constant questioning and cajoling among the press.

As it was, he and the rest of the crew had fended off the endless requests for reporters to be present the next day when the system went automated. So far, they’d only run various computer simulations of what kinds of results they were going to get when they finally did flip that final switch and use the gigawats of energy they’d managed to procure from Danforth Power and Light. One of their chief investors sat on the board of that company and they’d managed to get what they needed:

For a little more than an hour, between 8:00 am and 9:12 am the following day, the entire output of the Lake Simmon Nuclear Plant would be at their disposal. Coal-fired steam plants would take up the slack during that time, so the average customer would never notice that one of the most advanced power facilities in the Midwest was going to be effectively offline for a short time.

But in that time Maxwell and his colleagues hoped to make history.

They were going to show that it was possible to harness unlimited energy production through the creation and utilization of anti-matter. And all done within the confines of a space not much larger than a child’s bedroom. He and the other researchers and theoreticians hoped to form a magnetic sphere within that space, and to fill it with a speck of energy that would create enough electricity to power the entire grid for a few moments, before the experiment was ended and the process was halted.

And there lay the fears, of course. A few of their rivals claimed that the process, once begun, could not be stopped. They feared that a constant and growing stream of anti-matter would be siphoned into the magnetic sphere and eventually overwhelm that area and spill out of it. Dylan Maxwell grunted and his Hollywood face was marred with a frown. He was tired of dealing with the doomsayers.

And, too, he had to admit to himself that one of the computer models that he and his fellows had run indicated something very much like that could happen. The chance was very small—less than one in ten billion. But it was there, and that’s why some men feared the coming experiment. Those men had figured it was the last such effort Mankind would ever make.

Shrugging to no one and to the World, he walked up to the door of the building that housed the whole of Concentrated Dynamics and keyed in his personal six-figure code. The lock disengaged for him, and the first thing he saw when he opened that door was Millie’s smiling face. He smiled back. She was, in addition to being one of the finest physicists he knew, also his lover, his wife, and the mother of their two children.

“Did you have much trouble with him?” she asked, her right arm reaching out to take him by the waist. She was wearing a white coat and slacks, and her hands were in latex gloves. She’d obviously just come from one of the clean rooms.

“No. He tried a few leading questions, but I avoided them.” His own arm was around her slim shoulders and he leaned over to kiss the top of her head and get a whiff of her hair. He loved the smell of her.

“I hate that little bastard,” she admitted. “He’s really a creep.”

“You’re talking about the reporter.”

“Yes. Stossel. What a shithook.”

Maxwell nodded his head and grinned with some guilt. He never had been able to quite get over his wife’s potty mouth. She could curse with the best of them, he was forced to admit, and there had been plenty of occasions when she’d embarrassed him completely. And now he feared the kids were going to take up her form of speech. They were both boys—seven and nine—and he didn’t quite know who they most took after: himself or his wife. So far, though, the cursing had not manifested itself in public.

“Well, I suspect that we’re done with that bunch until tomorrow around 9:15 in the morning.”

“As long as we don’t answer the goddamned phone,” she added.

Maxwell winced, and Millie saw the reaction. “Dear,” he said.

“Sorry,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “I’m just sick to death of those bas...those guys. If I don’t have to talk to another reporter for the next ten years it’ll still be a sore spot with me.” By then they had moved down the hallway and were preparing to go into the control room, the spot where, soon, David Maxwell and his crew would make history. If they were successful, the world would never hear the end of it. If they failed, their little group would never live it down.

A lot of money was tied up in this venture. Not as much as in something like the CERN reactor. But still plenty. That was the beauty of this project. It utilized a series of supercomputers to synthesize what others were trying to achieve with pure mechanics and raw energy. “If everything works, we’ll all wake up to a new world in twenty-four hours.”

Once again Maxwell found himself keying in a six-figure code and exposing himself to a face recognition camera. The door hissed open pneumatically and the Maxwells were greeted with a puff of sterile air as the high pressure in the room blew out into the low pressure of the hallway, admitting them, and leaving out the dust.

The rest of them were all there, working madly in the absence of their glorious leader.

Lewis Steiner was at his desk checking his software. Arnold Drake was going through a stack of schematics, his pen racing across the paperwork while he talked at a staccato pace into his cell phone, his head tilted at an odd angle to keep the phone in place. Carole Crain looked up from her own workstation and smiled at the married couple, waving from her spot in the clean room where the magnetic field would be created. And Larry Scofield was leaning against the wall, having taken up one of the few spots in the room that consisted of a bare space. He was, as usual, brooding silently, his genius mind working through the possibilities and the millions of conclusions that they might all face come tomorrow.

Going to his own desk Maxwell looked down at the red button that they’d all installed there. It was something grand and old-fashioned. It was true that the actual circuit would be computer activated, but they had hooked up the garish button as a kind of joke, and a nod to the physicists of old who had actually pressed such things to initiate a reaction. In a few hours, when he pressed that button, he would start a chain reaction that was going, he knew, to change the world for the better.

When the rest of the crew were secreted away in a lower bunker buried in the earth beneath the facility, he would be braving the experiment above ground, where he’d have to face the music up close and in person.

Later, he would wonder if it was his proximity to the workings of the experiment that saved him from the worst of it. At that point, though, he was only looking forward to the things that would soon take place, and he was filled with optimism and the promises their research offered. And he would always tell himself that all of the others, even the perennially gloomy Scofield, were likewise happy and expecting nothing but success. Success and flowers.