Hangtime

Hangtime

  Jack Thompson

  Copyright 2010 Jack Thompson

  Published by Crackerjack Publishing

  Cover Art: © Rolffimages | Dreamstime.com

  Author Website: JackWrites.com

  Contents

  Hangtime

  Godmachine Preview

  About the Author

  Other Titles by Jack Thompson

  Contact Jack

  Hangtime

  Contrary to the popular notion of the mindless, boob-tube-watching couch potato, Dr. Laslo Reingard was watching television when he made a most amazing scientific breakthrough. It had come unexpectedly, all in a rush, as those kinds of things sometimes do.

  Although testing polymer-based vaccines on cultures of viruses was not his idea of cutting edge research, it’s what he did eight hours a day, five days a week. Theoretical physics was his passion, but theories didn’t pay the rent. After one particularly long and frustrating day in the laboratory at the Maryland research center where he worked, Dr. Laslo Reingard had finally gotten home. He wearily climbed the stairs to his second floor apartment, and undid the two deadbolts on the ugly gray door with the number 233 in corroded brass letters. He put some birdseed in the feeder hanging just inside the room, and whistled to Fred, his blue-green parakeet. Fred said no more and no less than he always did, which was nothing, and hopped over to the seed.

  Laslo munched a cheese sandwich and slurped down a bowl of chicken barley soup, and then plopped down in his easy chair, where he liked to contemplate the pet projects he worked on during his off hours.

  He also liked to watch sports, partially because his own world of books and research was so different, and partially because he found it quite relaxing to calculate force, velocity and momentum vectors of the players and balls while he watched. On this night, he was watching a sports special on ESPN2 that featured video of two basketball players named Jordan and Dr. J jumping and flying through the air with something described as hang time, which the announcer spoke of in reverent tones.

  Laslo was about to start another calculation exercise when his eyes suddenly popped wide and his mouth flopped open as he leaned toward the TV screen. “That’s it!” he shouted. He began to scribble furiously in the notebook he always carried with him. While he wrote intently, his tongue stuck out the side of his mouth, much like the tongue of one of the basketball players in the video. Laslo never noticed. Every so often he would mumble to himself, and then nod as if agreeing with someone else. Sweat beaded on his brow as the gears in his head whirred at maximum speed.

  He had been working for months on a theory about time. Clearly, time travel was out of the question, at least in the H. G. Wells sense. The Roman centurions of two millennia past were not still marching their men around Rome, not in this universe at least. However, he had read an account of Nikola Tesla’s experiments with time and the variations of time sense he observed. Laslo was sure there was a change to time experience, an aspect of relativity that could be consciously controlled. Dreams functioned this way, with hours or days of experience happening in seconds of real time, yet being experienced in detail and at normal time rates. The participants often described critical emergencies, such as car crashes, as happening in slow motion, but these were uncontrolled effects.

  He knew the basketball players in the video moved through the air as a simple function of their upward force and their horizontal velocity. They did not defy gravity as the announcer suggested, a fact easily proven with a simple physics calculation. However, there was a mysterious and apparent time extension to their flight. This he thought was not a supernatural feat, but was a direct result of the time experience of the player himself, as compared to that of the people around him. If a player could span more consecutive “nows” simultaneously, then his own time experience would slow down allowing for a more controlled activity. In addition, while the time stream would slow for the spanner, it would accelerate for any observers.

  This explained the success some sports players have, not merely through physical prowess, but also as a function of their time spanning ability. They didn’t necessarily go faster, but they appeared to go faster to those around them. Moreover, since time is relative, they were “faster.” Since their “now” included a moment ago and a moment into the future, all three moments would seem faster to the slower, single-moment observer. It was as if the spanner was pulling himself through time, while the others were themselves merely passengers, moved by the march of time itself.

  Dr. Reingard had finally made the calculations he needed to test his theory. He concentrated on the glass of water standing on the table next to his chair. Then he deliberately knocked it over with a sweep of his arm, and tried to save it from falling. Instead, he managed to knock it onto the ground where it shattered. This is going to be a little difficult, he thought to himself.

  After spending several hours trying, Laslo was ready to give up. In the excitement of discovery, it never dawned on him to try using something unbreakable. Two kitchen cabinet shelves were now empty of glasses, and broken glass and water covered the floor. He found one more iced tea glass in his sink. He filled it halfway with water and set it on the table. He focused on the moment and let his attention span. He felt a subtle shift in his perception. He swung his arm again knocking into the glass, but this time he was easily able to grab it and right it before anything spilled. It worked! He had spanned enough time to see exactly where the glass fell and see himself catch it. It was almost as if he had momentarily stepped outside of time. Laslo was giddy. He raced back to his notebook and wrote furiously into the wee hours of the morning.

  The next day he showed up for work looking more haggard than usual, but the exuberance he felt over his discovery put a bounce in his step. He had determined to keep things to himself until he could do further testing, and decided that maintaining a business-as-usual, low profile at the lab was his best option.

  “Good morning, Laslo.” It was the familiar but annoying voice of one of the lab assistants, Marion Mulroney, who had made a habit of greeting Laslo each morning.

  “Good morning, Marion,” he returned with uncharacteristic enthusiasm before adding, “I’m in a bit of a hurry today,” as a pre-emptive strike against any attempt at conversation he feared might come. He hurried on to his station without further interaction.

  For the next two weeks, Laslo punched in dutifully to work every day, measured out vaccines and recorded the results, as he always did. However, he thought of nothing except his time spanning discovery, and couldn’t wait to get home every evening to continue his experiments. There was still the matter of testing his theory with others observing, but first he wanted to hone his skill with time spanning. After two weeks he could throw a tennis ball at the wall and arrive there to catch it, or drop an apple off the second floor landing and beat it to the ground floor. He managed to juggle several objects easily with his eyes closed. The spanning was done with the mind’s eye. He tested it predicting traffic successfully, enabling him to walk across four lanes of traffic unharmed. He even came up with a name for it. In honor of the video he was watching when the revelation came to him, he called it Hangtime.

  Laslo would likely have had plenty of time to perfect his discovery had it not been for a random event during his lunchtime walk. As he headed down an elm-shaded avenue in Chevy Chase, he saw an anxious young woman tending to her crying baby in a push stroller at the corner. She was making every attempt to pacify the child, and her frustration was clearly growing. Finally she gave up and was about to push the stroller off the curb to cross the street. Laslo was watching the scene intently while practicing his time spanning technique. A bus that had been stopped about two hundred and fifty feet up the street was about to pull out. The woman was too absorbed
with her wailing baby to notice. The bus started to roll, picking up speed. Laslo could see that the woman, baby and bus were destined to meet with disastrous results. He raced over and grabbed the stroller’s handle just in time to prevent the woman and baby from stepping off the curb in front of the bus. The bus roared by only inches from the curb with the driver honking almost as an after thought. The commotion seemed to pull the baby out of his fit, and now he gurgled happily. The woman, realizing her near miss, thanked Laslo profusely. Laslo nodded self-consciously, his face turning red. He was clearly not used to a hero’s role. Laslo broke away as soon as he could and headed down the street. Neither he nor the woman noticed that a man who had been videoing his wife and kids on the sidewalk had captured the whole incident