The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (3 page)

The knapsack stored, the Box and its two remaining rods safely sealed, and the computers giving the green light following their diagnostic, Garison turned to the cameras he had positioned about the room to record his every move. Turning on the hand-held model on the dashboard—a wonder in the burgeoning field of video tape, pioneered by its maker, the Tesla Corporation—Garison cleared his throat and stood up.

Once more making sure that the blue safety light indicated that the nuclear plant's housing was containing all the radioactive isotopes and that the green light on each of the cameras was glowing, Garison spoke like a showman. "Ahem," he cleared his throat again. "Hello, once again this is Garison Fitch. I am recording this so that it will be a record for what I am about to do here today for everyone to see and know that it truly happened. In the event that this experiment is a failure and you are witnessing my death, I apologize if it was gruesome. I do not believe such will be the case, but there is always that possibility when dealing with the many unknowns this experiment entails.

"What you see behind me is my machine. I have not named it, because I never was good at naming things. I once had a pet kitten who was blessed with the nomenclature of 'Kitten' until his death at the age of sixteen. I digress. Should you think of a suitable name for my machine, feel free to submit it. In the meantime, I will call it...Bob."

Garison walked around Bob as he spoke to the camera, "If you have watched my previous video tape, made three days ago, you are already familiar with my initial voyage into another dimension. You are also aware that it was only a two minute voyage due to battery drainage and that the video from two days ago is fundamentally useless. I believe I have solved the power problem by replacing the batteries with this: the Fitch-Plant, as I call it; I could never think of a good name for it, either. If any of you have somehow become familiar with the possible power output of a Fitch-Plant following my demise and the release of all my secrets, let me calm your fears. I have installed a regulator of my own invention to keep me from blowing up La Plata Canyon. I am also using the filament wire I invented for use with the power plant as conventional wiring would not withstand the power output. In addition..." The next few minutes were taken up with Garison explaining what he was attempting to do. Since most of it was of a highly technical nature, that part can be skipped over. Of all the people who could have seen that tape, only Garison would have understood all of it. We will, then, jump to the end of his presentation.

"No matter how long I travel through the other dimensions, I will return here at the moment I left. Those of you watching on video tape will see only a brief disappearance of Bob and me, followed by our reappearance seconds later. In fact, you may not see a disappearance at all as the travel will be instantaneous to this dimension. Or should be. There's an element of uncertainty when dealing with variables of this magnitude.

"Because of that, I have mounted a video camera on Bob's dashboard which I will use to video tape where I go. Or when I go, or however you choose to look at it." He laughed and added, "I guess I can't stay out more than eight hours because that's all the tape I have in the machine. I'll have to work on that for the next trip.

"I am getting into Bob and strapping myself into the seat. The straps are more of a precaution than anything, because my previous trip contained no movement whatsoever. I felt as if I were sitting still the entire time—which, in a manner of speaking—I guess I was. However, I felt it best to plan for contingencies. If nothing else, there is the possibility of seeing things the human mind has never encountered and suffering from a—'visual overload', if you will. The straps will then, hopefully, keep me from falling over—should I pass out—and doing serious damage to either myself or the machine, were I to pitch forward and hit my head on the control panel.

"I am now switching on Bob's camera which will monitor activity in the cockpit until and while we are in another dimension.

"I am placing this oxygen mask over my face as a precaution, also. There are so many unknowns to this voyage that the installation of this seemed wise. I have, however, opted not to wear any sort of protective suit other than this leather jacket. I had considered wearing a helmet and a protective suit of some sort, but I decided to leave such clown suits to the cosmonauts. While my earlier test was far from conclusive, it is my thought that even the oxygen mask is unnecessary."

He began to flick switches and said, "I am turning on the power plant, now. I am disconnecting Bob from the lab power source and preparing to transfer to internal power. In a moment, I will turn Bob on and allow him to get used to his new source of power. This will only take a second, then I will be ready to go. When I press this red button on the control panel, the voyage will begin. I would ask you to cross your fingers for me, but you will be seeing this long after the fact. And, even if you were here, by the time you got your fingers crossed, I would be back." He added, "Or, so it would seem to you." He turned briefly to the camera, giving the viewers he didn't know if he would ever meet a slight smile.

He reached under the seat to make sure two items were in place: a change of clothes (presumed unnecessary, but he liked to be prepared) and a gallon of water. He had no idea what they drank in other dimensions, if anything, so he thought it best that he bring his own. It again crossed his mind that everything he was bringing might be so useless as to be humorous for his whole perception of extra-dimensionality might be incredibly flawed,.

He watched the display on his console go to "ready" and he gave the thumbs up sign to the cameras, turning lastly to the Teslavision portable mounted in front of him. This thumbs up signal had been the "OK" sign for the old Royal Air Force pilots in the first World War and, feeling like a pioneer aviator, Garison had resurrected it in modern times.

Garison bowed his head, took a deep breath, and said a silent prayer. He had never been taught to pray, but had taken to doing the best he could since reading and copying the Bible. With a barely audible, "Amen," he raised his head and said to the cameras, "Well, here goes."

His fingers hovered over the keyboard for just a second, then he hit the button designated to start the countdown. Five agonizingly slow seconds passed by before some unfathomable level of his psyche detected the power build-up that would soon propel him into another dimension.

The electricity generated by the nuclear power plant was in the billions of watts range and, as Garison had explained, required a special coupling to keep the enormously high voltage from destroying the wiring on contact. Even with Garison's specially designed ceramic superconductors, his regulator was an absolute necessity.

The regulator had been built in an area of the lab Garison had designed to be especially dust free. Since being assembled, in fact, the regulator had never been in contact with natural air. Even the miniature cooling system which surrounded the regulator used recycled and filtered air.

But, as Garison knew, there is no such thing as a one hundred percent sterile environment. Small particles of dust and molecules of foreign material are all around in the natural air and the greatest filters in the world will not catch every single one. And somehow, that one molecule in a billion which escapes every filter, had found its way into the regulator. It had drifted around in the microscopic concealed space of the regulator's housing for the six months since its construction, bouncing about as atoms do.

At the moment when the electricity first encountered the regulator, the foreign molecule passed between two conductor heads and was vaporized in less than an instant. But that one one-millionth of a second caused a back-wash of power which then surged through the regulator and into the circuits of the interdimensional machine.

In that briefest of moments, a moment so small the human mind cannot comprehend it let alone recognize it, Garison Fitch was propelled somewhere he had no idea he could go.

Excerpt from
A Fitch Family History by Maureen Fitch Carnes

Traveling on foot, as most people did in those days due to the lack of trails suitable even for horses, Darius set out for the western lands. According to his account of the journey in his diary, it was almost a month after departure before he left "civilization" behind.

Even then, the last few settlements Darius passed, we would hardly think of as such. They were congregations of four or five shanties gathered in the same valley, sometimes a mile or more between houses, out on the frontiers of present day Kentucky and Tennessee. Darius's writings and those of his contemporaries describe these "villages" as made up of hard-working, pioneering people who had left the east coast because it was either becoming too crowded or out of a desire to push ever westward and till new soil.

Their cabins were made from the woods around them and from the porches hung meat they had killed in the nearby woods. They grew their own patches of corn and maize and sometimes potatoes and they were unquestionably a hardy lot. Many of these backwoodsmen were God-fearing people and Darius wrote of enjoying a Sunday morning church service attended by families who had—in some cases—started out long before daybreak to arrive at the farm where services would be held that week.

Between these settlements, Darius found many more people living in isolation. For one reason or another, single men or even entire families had decided to risk Indian attack and all sorts of other deprivations for the chance to plow virgin soil, or just to live where no neighbor's smoke could even be seen. Among these people Darius remarks that he met all kinds, from sullen, cantankerous old men who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, to gregarious women braving the frontier without the aid of menfolks, to even an old dutchmen who had papers showing he had once been a baron and a man of some importance in Europe.

Darius found burned-out cabins, as well, proving the catastrophic turns life on the frontier could present. On two occasions he found the remains of white people who had been killed and scalped, he presumed by Indians. He also came across an Indian camp in which the fires still smoldered and the evidence there led him to believe it was white men who had done the slaughtering.

Darius wrote in one of his diary entries of having spoken with several of these pioneers who claimed to have—years before—met a tribe of Indians who were fairer of skin than most, boasted the occasional red-head, had green eyes, and spoke a language remarkably like Welsh. Darius writes of hearing that some members of the Mandan tribe fit these descriptions but says he has never met them himself. In one of the many notes to himself that he never came back to follow up on, Darius "resolves" to track down these rumors and see if there really are Welsh-speaking Indians.

The frontier was not an easy place to live, but even amid such hard conditions, Darius writes of falling in love with the land, and it's people. He told of his admiration for the undaunted pioneers and even for the noble Indians he saw some of which he shared a meal with, while never losing his hold on his knife or his hair. He speaks of standing on the top of hills and looking across tree-carpeted valleys, unbroken by a single road or path, such as we can only imagine nowadays. Reading his journal, it is almost as if one can see Darius becoming less and less of a colonist and more and more of a new kind of man. A mountain man? A frontiersman? A woodsman? A long hunter? All of these, yes. But most of all, a westerner.

Chapter Three

Garison Fitch was a handsome man, though he would never have admitted to the fact himself. He stood right at six foot two, with straight dark hair and a matching mustache. He had the build of an athlete, which he had been, but his muscles came these days from hard labor rather than lifting weights.

When trying to wrestle with a problem in the world of particle physics, or think through a particularly vexing legal matter, Garison went to work with his hands. He enjoyed getting out with the post-hole diggers and repairing his fence-line (a never-ending job in a land with so many deer and elk). He loved the feel of a good piece of wood beneath his foot on a sawhorse while he held his father's old hand-saw and began to cut. And he had found that few jobs in the world gave him as much chance to work his muscles and his mind than cutting wood, hauling it to his yard, then splitting it for use in the fireplace. All the while, the same activity that provided plenty of time for thinking and contemplating served the ever-practical (and, thus, Garison-like) quality of heating his house.

Garison was a western man, and maybe that was part of why he could not make himself fit into the Soviet ideal. The important people and significant events of Soviet society were closely tied to metropolitan areas, and the country—where Garison felt most at home—was viewed as a place for the working class to ply their trade and provide sustenance to the important people of the cities. Certainly, many of the rich and highly placed had dachas out in the country, but they were for retreat purposes only. No one who was anyone lived so far from power.

A century and a half before, Garison would have fit in just perfectly on the frontier of the Americas and that same pioneer spirit flowed through his veins still, making him an excellent man to probe the frontiers of science. Only his fading idealism had prevented him from being the ideal Soviet man in truth and there was only one thing that kept him from being an ideal western man: a strong—one might even say "profound"—allergy to horses.

Even if he were not the perfectly ideal western man, he was still thought by those who didn't know him (which included almost everyone) to be the ideal Soviet man. Born and raised in Marx—the furthest province in the far-out reaches of the mighty empire—Garison had completed secondary school by the time he was nine years old. At eleven he had his bachelor's degree, at twelve his masters—both in particle physics. By fourteen, Garison had his Doctorate and, on a whim, had also passed the Bar.