Chapter 1: Breakfast Convocation
June 15, 1985. The Guiseman Residence, 25 miles west of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Pine Street in Glendale was a two-mile long stretch of near-identical ranch houses. From these comfortable domiciles, men and women married, had children, and went every day to jobs that gave their lives meaning. Or at least that was the goal that every normal American in 1985 strived for.
Halfway across the world, the Russians had similar goals for themselves; only their goals were to be achieved by Communism instead of by Capitalism.
This was how life was lived in the Atomic Age, a brief period of history which began in a New Mexico desert forty years earlier. And it was fated to end in a trans-Atlantic airliner 13 days in the future.
At the end of Pine Street in Glendale was an ordinary-looking house with an extraordinarily large mailbox. Most people’s mailboxes were designed to receive bills, while this one was designed to receive manuscripts. The manila envelopes arrived on a daily basis, stacked eight to ten high. All of those envelopes were addressed to Gus Guiseman.
Right next to the mailbox was a garbage can—that’s where most of the manila envelopes ended up. If they were addressed to “Nobel-Prize Winner Gus Guiseman” or “Renowned Genius Gus Guiseman” or “PLEASE READ ME, GUS GUISEMAN—THE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE DEPENDS ON IT!!!” they went right in the trash without even being opened. Without fail, these were the manuscripts that attempted to explain the secrets of the universe using paper clips and rubber bands. They would have had a better chance if they were sent to Art Bell instead.
On this particular date, only one manila envelope survived the purge: it was addressed to “Pr. Gus Guiseman”, and it was from GDS Incorporated. Gus had never heard of GDS Incorporated, but it at least looked like a legitimate business. Besides, the manila envelope from GDS had one definite use, as a makeshift holder to collect all the bills—Gus didn’t have the luxury of being able to toss those.
Gus in 1985 was a man of above average height, with pale pink skin and a halo of unruly graying hair. He had a large beak of a nose, slightly twisted from a decades-old fight, and bushy white eyebrows. He wore a plaid-patterned pair of pajamas and bare feet, and didn’t particularly care what anyone thought on seeing him like this.
Before turning to return to his house, Gus stopped to look at the wonderful world around him:
The sun, a ball of broiling plasma 150 million kilometers away, converting hydrogen to helium through the process of fusion—something it’s been doing for four-plus billion years, and will continue to do for another five or so billion years. The thin wispy strands of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere, composed of ice crystals that condensed from super-cooled droplets of water. Poplar and elm trees, stabilizing the soil with their root systems, and providing oxygen to the air. The leaves of those trees, dappling the sunlight on the sidewalk. The sidewalk, made from Portland cement, mixed with gravel, sand and water to form concrete, a complex crystallization process still not completely understood. But there’s also the structure of sunlight, and how little of the spectrum can be seen by the human eye, the sounds of the morning birds and what they mean, the feel of grass under his feet—photosynthesis, the Krebs cycle, the properties of the carbon atom with its nine different oxidation states, making it uniquely suited for underpinning the impossibility that is life…
With a happy sigh, Gus returned to his home. There his wife Gwen, a brunette of slightly below-average height with animated blue eyes, was scrambling some eggs. After kissing her on the cheek, Gus settled into his usual chair at the dinner table. He dropped the mail on the table to his left side, and unfolded the paper to look over the headlines.
The main headline was “President Shooter Unveils Tax Package”, which didn’t really concern him. On the other side of the fold was more disturbing news: Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB [a Russian acronym that translates to the “Committee for State Security”], was now the man running the Soviet Union.
“Breakfast is ready!” Gwen cried out. “Hurry up—we’re going to Synagogue right after.”
Seconds later Gus’ children, Gavin and Gloria, came down the stairs to join him at the table. Gavin was tall and thin, with pink skin, wiry brown hair and an unbroken nose and dark eyebrows that otherwise were exact copies of his father’s. In sharp contrast, Gloria had turquoise skin and short blue hair, a button nose and pencil-thin eyebrows. She was carrying a portable radio that she put down on the table to act as the morning’s entertainment.
“Good morning, Gavin. Good morning, little lady,” said Gwen.
Gus put down his paper to address his daughter. “You do know that you’ll have to start paying taxes now that you’ve come of age,” he joked.
Gloria picked up his paper to swat him on the head.
Gus took it back with an exaggerated huff. He noticed that the song the radio was playing was an upbeat reggae song. Then he worked out that the name of this particular upbeat reggae song was “Party at Ground Zero”.
Gus was convinced that he would never be able to figure out the Eighties.
As soon as they had taken their places, Gavin continued an argument that had obviously begun upstairs. “It doesn’t really make a difference, of course,” he said with a superior air. “The questionable benefits of that mark of yours can’t really stand up to the vagaries of the universe. Bad things happen to good people.”
“Right, but why do they happen?” Gloria countered. “Isn’t God supposed to be kind and just?”
“Ah, the question of theodicy.”
“Is that pronounced the-idiocy? Or perhaps the-odicy?” asked Gloria playfully. “As in Greek for ‘God is an idiot’, or Greek for ‘God likes to go on epic ten-year journeys in the Mediterranean’?”
“No, it’s about God’s reasoning,” Gavin answered with a scowl.
“Which we as faithful believers aren’t supposed to question,” Gloria countered jokingly.
“I’m serious!” Gavin protested. “Besides, according to Voltaire, it’s entirely possible that…”
This was the point when Gus had completely tuned out the conversation. “What have I done wrong?” he asked his wife melodramatically as she served out the breakfast she had finished making. “I was supposed to raise scientists and artists, not philosophers.”
The smile on his face faded as the plate of eggs, hash browns and toast was supplemented by a veritable pile of pills.
Looking for a distraction from the ongoing debate between his children, Gus’ eyes wandered over to the manila envelope…only to see Gwen trying to slide said envelope towards the nearby garbage can.
Gwen smiled sheepishly. “One of the rejects, right?”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Gus said, grabbing the envelope and tearing it open.
Gwen sighed and went to fill the plates of her children.
“There is something going on here,” Gus said that night, gesturing at the five page packet included in the envelope from GDS Incorporated. The day had passed, and the Guisemans were lying in bed together, Gus in his pajamas, and Gwen in a matching pair of her own. Both of them were wearing their reading glasses, although Gwen’s choice of nighttime reading material was a Harlequin romance.
She put down her book and took off her reading glasses. “Yes?” she asked in a resigned tone.
“This is a contract to buy out my share of artisanal plates from Ship’s Petroleum & Chemicals—my little chemistry project last year.”
Gwen nodded.
“This buyout offer is completely unnecessary—I already sold my rights to SP&C at the time, so why would somebody else want to buy them a second time? Unless they don’t want me collecting 20% anymore, without saying it outright. Are these mysterious buyers that sure they are going to make an enormous profit off of these things? The cover letter from Steady Ship manages to hint that they didn’t want to contact me at all—to try and cut me a check without explaining what it’s for. He wouldn’t stand for it, of course. Good old Ship. And the weirdest part is we never sold any plates to GDS Incorporated. We’ve only sold, like three plates total, and those were to private individuals.”
Gwen sighed deeply. “I told them not to bother you,” she said. “Looks like you’re getting involved despite them doing the right thing.”
“Gwen, were you hiding something from me?”
“Yes, Dear,” she admitted. “Gabe came to me back in March. He said he had been interviewed by GDS Incorporated to find out more about you.”
“About me?”
“Yes. They wanted to know if you would make a good consultant to hire on a sensitive chemical matter.”
Gus laughed. “Let me guess—he told them that ‘Chemistry is reserved for lesser beings—I wouldn’t even waste time calling them scientists, as only Physicists truly deserve the exalted descriptor.’” Gus dropped into an impersonation of Gabriel Gell-Mann, his co-worker at Caltech, using an exaggerated yet exact Eastern European accent, where the capital at the beginning of “Physicists” was clearly heard.
“Yes,” said Gwen with a laugh, “those were pretty much his exact words. He told me about it in hopes that I could convince them to back down after he failed. I went to the library to do my research, and I couldn’t really find anything about GDS, good or bad. Just that it’s run by Markists. But it certainly set off my smell detector.
“So I marched over there—they were working out of a crummy little five-story building in downtown L.A.—and gave them a piece of my mind.
“I told them that you probably would take the job if they made it sound interesting enough, but that didn’t change the fact that there were much better chemists out there if that was what they wanted. I accused them of wanting you purely because of how famous you are, and I guilted them into backing down.”
“You didn’t bring up the cancer, did you?” Gus asked in a small voice.
“I brought the x-rays with me,” Gwen said smugly.
Gus groaned.
“Admit it,” Gwen said. “Thanks to that Trinity test you just had to watch, you haven’t got that much time left to live. You’re lucky that the pills are keeping you pain-free and lucid, but that’s not going to last. Cancer is nasty, and liposarcoma in particular is extra-nasty. So I painted the whole picture: of you in a medically-induced coma with your wife and loving children surrounding you, wishing they could have had more time while you were off gallivanting with some fly-by-night glory-mongering corporation before it was too late. Or there’s the alternative to the coma: you screaming morning and night, the pain too intense to medicate without causing brain damage.”
“Enough, Gwen.”
“I convinced them to back down. And it looks like they held to their end of the deal. It’s your friend Steady Ship that wants you to get involved. And am I wrong? Would you have turned them down if they asked?”
Gus hung his head. “You know the answer to that. When I see a mystery, I just have to chase after it until I find a solution. And Steady does look like he’s in a real pickle here. GDS has enough money to buy his company outright if he puts up a struggle.” Gus picked up the letter and flipped through a couple of pages. “It says here that they’re going to do their final testing this Tuesday. I can have Gabe taking over the teaching for what’s left of the quarter, and get plane tickets to Neighagra for tomorrow night—enough time to talk to Steady. And then I’ll come right back.”
“Gus,” Gwen said flatly. “Tomorrow is Father’s Day.”
“Oh…right. Alright, I’ll leave on Monday morning.”
“See? I was right. Do you really have to do this?” Gwen asked desperately, reaching out and grasping Gus gently by the shoulders. “It’s just some lousy plates. You can’t save the world with plates!”
Gus looked away. “But…you can’t deny that it needs saving. Andropov became Secretary-General yesterday. The Butcher of Bucharest! That man was single-handedly responsible for crushing the anti-Soviet uprisings in both Hungary and Czechoslovakia. He locked both Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in insane asylums after pushing through a law defining the desire for reform as a type of mental illness! It’s Gaddafi all over again, only this time it won’t be plane hijackings and nightclub bombings, but total nuclear annihilation!”
Gwen pulled her husband into a hug. “And saner heads will prevail, just like always.” She paused for a bit before nervously continuing. “Besides, if we really are looking at the ‘End of Days’, as the Christians call it, shouldn’t you be here with your family? Using Caltech’s resources to find a nuclear solution to a nuclear problem?”
Gus pulled away from the embrace. “It’s no good. I’ve spent decades on all the obvious paths, and there’s no way out. Stellar wants me to sign off on his solution, a top-secret project that I expect the President to announce to the world any day now. But I looked it over thoroughly—it’s Stellar’s usual brand of madness, and the only possible way it can prevent World War III is if both sides invest in it so thoroughly that they bankrupt themselves trying to pay for it.
“No, the solution has to come from somewhere unexpected, somewhere no one can predict. And maybe, maybe if I’m lucky, it’s going to be this Tuesday and some lousy plates. I’ll go down there, take a look, and be right back. Twenty four hour trip at most.”
Gwen flopped back into bed and turned off her light without saying another word.
She knew in her gut that he wasn’t coming back, and there was nothing she could do to stop him.