Chip Kendrick

Vision

	Joshua Allen was a gifted man.  He was perhaps the only man alive who really 
understood field theory, and who could play with curving 3-dimensional space in his 
head in the same way that the best geometricians can play with a plane.
	As soon as Josh had understood his gift, he had gone into the physics of field 
interaction, simultaneously developing the theory and the practice.  He had spent his 
years since graduation from Princeton in pristine basement labs, plugging in immense 
power supplies to watch magnetic fields glaze and ripple as they touched each other.  
They were alive to him.  They had an emotion to them, they were sensual, they could 
panic and they could die.
	Right now, if everything went right, two fields were going to merge and give birth 
to a third.  In fact, if everything went right, all travel over any significant distance would 
be instantaneous and pollution from transportation would virtually end.
	He was about to invent the Jaunt.  Basically, it was the old dream of teleportation.  
If the field generators worked the way they were supposed to, Allen's latest equations 
said that space would be warped in such a way that two vertical planes would share a 
single position, so that you could stick your hand into one field and reach out of the 
other, no matter what the distance between the two field generators.  Most scientists 
would have viewed this as a lifelong goal: it was, after all, going to have a far greater 
impact than speedy transit and lowered pollution.  It would mean instant transport of 
anything.  It would mean instant, face to face conferences.  It would mean the end of war, 
as it would be ridiculously hard to stop any threatened invasion.  It would mean an era of 
admitting secrets, as suddenly the best computer hackers used their skills to break 
passwords and jaunt into people's homes and offices, and into government buildings 
where filing cabinets were holding information that people would die, and had died, to 
know.
	It would mean, essentially, completely reorganizing society.  But Allen wasn't 
interested in this.  Allen was interested in space, in the world of worlds.
	The invention of the Jaunt would mean that all man would have to do to get from 
one planet to the next is build a power supply, a place to plug in a Jaunt, and build a line 
of Jaunts to the stars without ever having to physically cross distance more than once.  
This is what interested Allen.  Human interaction was just foreplay.  Allen wanted to 
journey into God's infinite firmament, and shake the little green hand of the rest of 
creation.
	Allen sat in a corner of his basement lab, bent over a circuit board, while old 
fluorescent lights flickered and whirred softly overhead.  He was fixing what he was sure 
must be the final problem with the system:  Murphy's law had proven itself enough times 
throughout the last few weeks.
	Behind Allen was the prototype Jaunt.  Two conducting metal frames, sitting on 
wooden tables, faced each other across a distance of ten feet.  Each frame was 
surrounded by a mess of circuits and wires that created the powerful fields necessary for 
the singularity Allen was shooting for.  The goal, incredibly simplistic on the face of it, 
was to send a block of wood ( now sitting near one of the frames ) 10 feet.
	10 feet across a room, a million miles for mankind.  He had it all planned out.  
Demonstrating the jaunt in a public showing, saying that, he would sound just like 
Armstrong.  For a moment the world would view him as both hero and brilliant scientist, 
and no idea of his would ever be questioned.  If he said jump, they would ask how high, 
and if he said space by Jaunting, they would listen.
	Allen stood and playfully flipped the circuitboard he had just fixed before moving 
to the back of the central controlling computer and sliding the circuit back into it's slot. 
Everything was ready.  This was the big cheesy moment.  Or at least, another one.  Many 
of these moments had passed without glory.  If this one was any more important, it was 
because Allen didn't know exactly what he would do next if the Jaunt didn't work.  
Gripping the master power switch, Allen thought briefly pass or fail, and pulled.
	Nothing happened.
	And nothing was supposed to happen, really.  When the fields were on you could 
sometimes sense a little haze right near the metal frames if your eyes were good enough, 
but you usually couldn't distinguish the buzz of electricity in the frames from the 
annoying buzz of the flickering fluorescents.
	And so it was now, a faint accompaniment to the fluorescents and little haze.  
Yippee.  Pass or fail was sticking the wooden block through the frame, and watching it 
come out of the other frame across the room.
	Or maybe you would be left standing there for the umpteenth time with your arm 
sticking through a metal frame on a desk, holding out a piece of wood, feeling like God's 
favorite joke as the hairs on your forearm stood at attention in the failed field.  Allen had 
picked up the wood, and was tossing it back in forth in front of the frame, envisioning 
just that.  Already feeling like a joke, he thrust his arm through the frame to get it over 
with, and get back to troubleshooting.
	And watched his arm disappear to the elbow.
	Fear, understanding, delight, and rapture.

	Forty years ago today had been the best day of his life, and today was the worst.
	Forty years ago had been the invention of the Jaunt.  At the moment of his 
discovery, wonder had exploded into his mind, and he had felt on the verge of godhood 
as well as on the verge of a sudden, stupefying expansion of man's knowledge.  He was 
so full of himself he had had to simply jump around for a while until the endorphins 
stopped pumping and he could think again.  When he finally calmed down, he turned 
back to the Jaunt and began to play.
	He had put whatever objects he found in the room that weren't part of the Jaunt 
machinery through the Jaunt to see if anything would go wrong.  When nothing did he 
jumped up the stairs out of the basement and hopped into his car.
	In thirty minutes he was back with the ideal test for the Jaunt: some live mice.  
Carrying 6 mice in a small cage he had trotted down the stairs to the basement, still 
dripping with excitement.  He put the cage down on one of the tables and swung the cage 
door open right through the Jaunt field.  The mice were nervous about the humming 
electricity at first but he coaxed one through after a moment.  The mouse came out 
through the other frame just fine, but Allen had had to scramble to keep it from falling 
off the table.
	Laughing, Allen had cradled the first animal ever to teleport in shivering hands, 
and nudged it's nose with his own.  When he looked up he saw that four of the other five 
mice had jaunted as well, and that the last mouse had his head through and was sniffing 
nervously.  Allen rounded up the mice and put them back in the cage before sitting down 
to watch them for 20 minutes.  If the Jaunt incorrectly transported any significant 
percentage of the matter in the mice, chances were there would be something wrong with 
the delicate biology of at least one mouse, and it would die or begin to die in front of his 
eyes.
	None did.
	Allen had done a little more analysis on the field he had created, and then gone to 
his best friend's house.  He had announced his discovery before he announced himself on 
his friend's doorstep, and after demonstrating the Jaunt to his astounded friend Michael 
Parks, he had gone out to celebrate.
	The next day Uncle Sam paid a visit.
	Allen had never been told how the government had kept such close tabs on him 
that they knew the moment he got them results for their funding, and he had always 
wondered whether they used surveillance on everyone, or just him.  In either case, Uncle 
Sam had come down around the Jaunt and blanketed all the leaks.  Allen knew that his 
friend Michael had been rounded up and he knew that there had at the very least been an 
investigation of the diners of the restaurant they had partied at.  They might have gone 
further, but they never told Allen.
	Instead Allen was forced to divulge his beautiful theories to a roomful of the 
government's finest physicists, the ultimate hodgepodge of people.  Mostly there were 
college-aged guys looking at him through horn rimmed glasses with lenses like 
windshields, and older men wearing egg-yellow paper-thin collared shirts with khaki 
slacks.  Then there were the total originals.  There was a guy in the back row looking at 
him over mountainous pecs whose biceps would have fit Allen's slacks nicely, who 
somehow wasn't part of the watchful security team.  Then there was the guy near the 
front with hair down to his middle back, wearing a tie-dye and a line of earrings, 
bouncing interesting theoretical questions at him while Allen kept trying to shake the 
stereotype, so strong in his mind that he kept translating 'power' to 'flower' before he 
could think.
	Weird as they were, they were rather stunningly brilliant, and followed his ideas 
to their conclusions ( though Allen was sure none of them could have invented the Jaunt 
without it being explained to them ).  At the end, each of them shook his hand and 
congratulated him, the hippie smelling of patchouli and the big guy swallowing Allen's 
outstretched hand in his meaty palm.  As they all filed out of the room, Allen was left 
facing the security squad and wondering what now?
	An hour later, he was in a safe house with Michael Parks.  He was told he would 
be there for six months, guarded by the secret service.  After a few days of anger and one 
easily frustrated escape attempt, Allen saw he didn't have a choice, and the next day he 
was palling around with Mike and the secret service agents assigned to the inside of the 
house, eating popcorn, watching football and playing cards.  For about a week it was 
completely surreal, and then the normalness of the secret service guys began to sink in at 
about the same time as Allen began to understand Uncle Sam's motives.  It was a well 
equipped safe house, and Allen worked on his tennis game when he wasn't swimming or 
reading.
	When he left the safe-house, the world was a totally different place, and the 
surrealness of entering this new world matched the surrealness of the safe house.
	There had been a few tests with Jaunting various solids, and then several tests 
with Jaunting variously more complex life forms.  Finally, a man had been sent through.  
He had emerged normal in all visible aspects, but he had stumbled off the platform of the 
receiving Jaunt frame, holding his head.
	He had come out with an ear-splitting headache.
	Psychoanalysis showed no problems.  Intelligence tests ranked him the same as he 
ever was.  In haste to put the Jaunt to use government scientists had come up with the 
idea of sleeping patients before Jaunting them, and this worked.  No headaches were 
reported in sleeping Jaunters.
	It had been a week, and the Jaunt was ready to go.  While Jaunts were installed in 
various key positions around the globe the government did a little research on stimulants 
and sedatives, coming up with a pair of drugs that could bring a Jaunter from waking to 
sleeping to waking in about 30 seconds.
	A month of preparation, and the U.S. had simply announced that the world was 
going to form a single nation, under the current U.S. system, with some minor changes to 
make it suitable for some of the more outlandish religions.
	The first to protest, surprisingly, was Greece.  20 minutes later U.S. troops held 
Athens, and the message of conquest was repeated as if to say anyone else?
	There had been no one else.
	Parts of the world erupted into chaos and parts followed in silent obedience.  U.S. 
troops dealt with problem regions.  The infrequency of resistance was astounding, but in 
the end made sense.  The U.S. was offering world peace, under the most successful 
government on Earth, and in any case had displayed an almost Godly power and 
quickness that was daunting to oppose.  A few guerrilla groups, based on religious 
principle for the most part, fought brief battles and lost.
	The new 'nation', officially founded March 9, 1998 ( 80 days after the invention of 
the Jaunt ), named itself the Hegemony of Man.  By Late April most former sovereigns 
had been fully assimilated or were well along in the process.  In the continental US 
Jaunts had begun to replace freeways and other mass transport systems, and the economy 
was doing loops.  Huge booms in Jaunt manufacturing and Jaunt based inventions tried to 
balance the total fallout of every airline company and car manufacturer in the world.
	Everything was entirely different.  For about a month and a half, no one could do 
anything but reel and react to the changes around them, and several people had simple 
ideas that, patented, insured their families would be the next Rockefellers.
	Somewhere in Arkansas, someone invented a perpetual motion machine using the 
Jaunt and finally collected the age old reward.  The story made page 3 of the LA Times.
	Allen stepped out into the world just as things were starting to spin down.  There 
were still amazing inventions every week, but the economy and had settled into a 
constant rise and most of the former nations of the world were being modernized with 
Jaunts.
	Allen went straight to NASA and found out they were already on top of his ideas 
for space exploration by Jaunt.
	He realized, suddenly, that he was obsolete.  He had done his thing with the 
fields, and now it was up to the other scientists to apply it.  He had failed to carve out his 
leadership role in the implementation of the Jaunt, and would never have his Armstrong 
moment.  Now he could only watch.
	For twenty years he had watched the new conglomerate of NASA and her Russian 
equivalent colonize the solar system.  It hadn't been as quick as he had thought.  They had 
two failed launches in the first 5 years, and had this annoying tendency to want to explore 
ever satellite of every planet in the system before moving out to another star, despite 
landing problems.
	This was understandable after a little closer analysis however.  Interstellar 
journeys took years, and even though the crew was replaceable with Earth crew who 
could Jaunt into the ship at any time, NASA was as anal as ever about infallibility.
	He had applied more than once to crew something, anything, for the space 
program.  For a while they rejected him, then they finally let him crew a Jupiter 
exploration pod which was so automated all he and the rest of the crew could do was 
watch the computer take in data.  He tried a few more times, got a few more useless jobs, 
and quit trying at about the same time that NASA was going to give him the boot for 
being too old.
	He was forty.  It was time for one mother of a mid-life crisis.
	Uncle Sam had left him rich, as recompense for spreading the credit for the Jaunt 
among nameless government scientists.  He had done the thrills for about 10 years, then 
for a little while he had done some heavy narcotics.  When he hit bottom, Mike had given 
him to a rehab clinic, and he had found religion for about 5 years.
	Then had been the hobby stage.  He had tried remote control cars for a while, then 
some Dungeons and Dragons, and spun out of that stage onto his couch.  TV had been his 
life for a year.
	In total desperation and on the verge of ending his life, he had turned to memory.  
Flipping open his ancient notebooks, he had read his calculations and equations and tried 
to recapture his old, near religious fervor.  For a little while there was nothing, and then 
sensation began to seep through the mist that illegal drugs had left in his mind.  He began 
to visualize the fields again, and they were beautiful.  By the time he reached the 
conclusions of his notes, those taken the moment before the Jaunt had actually worked, 
he was feeling the old fervor, and he was thirsty to think.
	He began to play with his equations, now implicitly using the fact that the Jaunt 
had worked as constructed in order to help him move in new directions.  Suddenly, a 
critical equation, so large and covered with calculus terms it was daunting to behold, 
simplified into a double-decker fraction and canceled.
	There was another solution.
	He had gone for the tool drawer, sweating and crying softly as he waddled, and 
gathered everything he needed in front of his home Jaunt portal.  The adjustments took 
him four minutes.
	Still crying he stood and stepped through the modified field.
	Somewhere a computer beeped that a Jaunt had malfunctioned, and a technician 
used voice-command to find out where the traveler had been missent.
	Four days later it was determined as an absolute certainty that the traveler had not 
emerged from any Jaunt portal in the Hegemony, and that the traveler had actually, 
somehow, gone to the coordinates listed on the Jaunt in his home.
	Which were outside Einsteinian space.
	Somewhere, somewhen, Joshua Allen was laughing.