The Life magazine was gone. In its place was a buff colored envelope. I took it out and walked over to my desk and opened it. The handwriting was small, tight and masculine:
Nice Job, Ted!
Thought this might help you to align the unit better.
Also a little gift I got from an old friend.
You are ready now, and I think he would want you to have it.
Rufus,
I sat back and looked at the sheets of paper. It was a scaled diagram and a schematic of a time unit, probably some kind of directional locator. It would allow a smaller Time Runner device to be tuned to a specific place in space as well as time, one of the things we had never been able to figure out, when we worked on reducing the size of the great beast at Montauk, all those years ago. No one at Groom Lake had been able to get the "Coordinator”, as it was called, down to any kind of portable size. It still took up fifteen square feet of floor space, was seven feet high and weighed several tons. I marveled at the simplicity of Rufus’s design and laughed out loud. He had by-passed so much of the trivial and hit the heart of the matter, dead on. It made the Time Runner to where it could be portable. The Gadget could be thrown in the trunk of a car and carried anyplace, possibly reduced to fit in a backpack, or maybe, someday in the future, the size of a telephone pager you could just clip on your belt. Wow! Wouldn’t that be something? The massive power input needed was the only problem I needed to work out now, and I didn’t see that getting fixed anytime soon. But it had all worked, just like I said! And here I was, stripped, branded, blackballed and kicked out of the government, but still dealing with Dr. Rufus T. Henry, somewhere up or down the timeline.
I finally shuffled to the last page, which was a different size and much older than all the other leaves in the disheveled stack. It was a very old, yellowed, 5x8 sheet of personal stationary that had been torn off a notepad, the kind you keep on your desk for messages, doodles and various scribblings.
The bottom had a block printed line that read: “Princeton University. ” The header had a more elegant, cursive typeface in gold leaf that said: “From the desk of A. E. ”
Hmm... didn’t know anyone with those initials connected to Rufus. "A little gift I got from an old friend. ” Okay.
In the center of the note page was an equation:
I rubbed my jaw, trying to make heads or tails out of it. It obviously had to be important, or Rufus wouldn’t have bothered to send it back through time. I went over to my desk, cleared it off, and rooted around through the piles and crates till I found a yellow legal pad and flipped over the used scribbled on pages to find some still blank. Using the language of mathematics and physics, I needed to break this down into its elements and integers if I was ever going to make heads or tails out of it.
With the common and standardized notation used: There is a negative reference in the formula in the Lagrangain function, because ψ, becomes the action integral instead of S. In Lagrangian format, which be would be seen as:
Therefore it can be assumed that the Mg particle, or mass/gravity can be seen more generally as Mi. Therefore I could assume that:
All the hair on my body prickled as an electric shock went through me. Stunned, the blood drained out of my face and a space opened at the back of my head. My mouth dropped open and I put my hands over it out of what I could not decipher was either sheer terror or unabashed wonder and amazement.
OH... MY... GOD!
How could I have been so dense?
How could I have not seen this for what it was right away?
An old friend... of Rufus?
The yellowed note pad stationary:
“Princeton University”.
The inscription, “From the desk of A. E. ”
A. E.
Albert Einstein.
This was the actual, original sheet of paper, taken from his desk, probably from right under his head, only moments after he had died.
Complete, elegant, simple, magnificent, and a work of sheer, shining, unadulterated, genius.
It made the whole universe make sense and come into clear view.
It was the Unified Field Theory!
The full and complete formula! What E=MC2 had done to unlock the secrets and power of the atom this equation would allow us to unlock the infinite power and mystery of the universe. We could fold space for superluminal faster than light speed travel or instantaneously communicate with anything or anyone anywhere in the universe. It made distance no factor at all, as it explained the underlying interdimensional interconnections of everything, everywhere. It was the mathematical expression of the face of the Creator!
Oh, and, of course, unlimited travel backwards and forwards in time.
I wanted to send Rufus back a thank you note, but thought better of it. I didn’t know where to begin. I needed to calm down and master the Coordinator problem first. With the Unified Field Theory in hand, it should now be child’s play, which meant I could also locate where, and when, he, and my father, were in the time field. That, in and of its self, would be interesting.
History had been made here today. Future generations would look back on this moment as the day everything changed, if they were ever actually told about it. But I’d find a way for the world to know, somehow, someday. When I died, or just moved ahead in the time stream, I would get this story to one of those crazy researchers the government spent so much time smearing, then they could write a book to tell the
whole story. There was this psychic remote viewer who was also a TV and movie writer/director. He was always my favorite guest on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. Say what you want, Sean David Morton had some serious balls, and I couldn’t believe no one had put a bullet in this guy, the way he messed around with Dulce and Area 51. They had to move the whole Groom operation to Utah because of him. But because he claimed to be "psychic”, with some fantastically accurate predictions, he was easy to discredit by the "mainstream/government stooge media”, so he didn’t wind up dead. Smart! Yeah, he was crazy... like a fox! He had nerves of steel and ice water in his veins, but could tell a great joke and had a grounded sense of humor about himself and the world. I have never heard him lie or back down from anyone. At Five-One he’d been chased, shot at, threatened, harassed and he still kept coming back for more. They’d killed several of his friends who had gotten in too deep like Jim Keith, John Hadley and Danny Cassalero and he still kept at it. I even heard one General say once that they knew his dad and that he was "Too funny to kill”, which was the only thing keeping him alive.
Yeah. He would be the one.
All Sean would have to do was show this equation to a couple of top physicists and they would know right then and there this wasn’t some bullshit made up story. That is only after they fainted. or went nuts. The applications for instantaneous superluminal communications and the transmission of unlimited packets of data, sound and video anywhere in the universe with no infrastructure would be limitless. It would shape the 21st century. To say nothing of travel through space and time. Maybe I could help him from the future like my friends were helping me. Hmmm.
Of course, my story and this equation would probably get this poor kid dead, but that was a long time off. He’d just have to stay alive long enough to see that a book about all this made it to print, or better yet maybe a movie or TV series. And even if they didn’t knock him off, I know the rotten bastards in the government would probably smear him like no one had ever seen!! They just would make something up or set him up. It’s what I would do... if I still worked in the guts of the machine. But I was no longer beholden to "The Man. ”
I was The Lone Ranger out in my desert shack hideout that had just cracked open all of time and space!
I pulled a celebratory beer from the small fridge in the lab I kept there for just such occasions, and popped the top.
"Cheers to you, Uncle Albert! You finally figured out who God was. right before you met Him! ”
I took a long swig.
I felt like a million bucks!
PART FIFTEEN
RETURN FROM EXILE
