Ancient Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sands.”
    “Package. Sign here.”
    Dad looked at the pad, then up at him.
“Why?”
    The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m
supposed to deliver it anyway.” And with that, he opened the back
and eased an enormous wooden crate onto his hover-dolly, then
lowered it onto the ground.
    “You want this somewhere?”
    Dad shrugged back. He was beginning to slip
back into his gray, blank sadness already.
    The delivery man glided the crate over to the
tasting room, where we’d spent our first night. When it still felt
like camping and the start of a new adventure.
    After the truck hummed away, I went up to
look at the box. Dad hadn’t moved.
    I could see the label:
     
    DR. SANDUSKY SANDS
    MOONGLOW REMOTE LAB
    VALLEY OF THE MOON
    SONOMA CO., CALIFORNIA
     
    On the top, instead of a return address, were
some familiar initials:
     
    DARPA
     
    Dad didn’t even open the crate. He just
walked inside, sat down in a plastic chair in the old lunchroom,
and started to cry.
    Not for long, but just enough to scare me.
Not that I think guys shouldn’t ever cry, or anything. But this was
my dad.
    Then suddenly he got up.
    He walked to our truck and took out a crowbar
and began popping slats off the box. Sure enough, there was a
sphere generator inside. They wanted Dad to keep making the time
spheres. And because he knew how to make them, no matter where he
went, there wouldn’t be any escape from Mr. Howe.
    Now, instead of crying, Dad was smiling.
Grownups’ emotions are always so unpredictable.
    “They’ll never be able to make me use it,”
Dad said.
    “Why not?” I asked.
    “No WOMPERs,” he replied.
    “What are ‘WOMPERs’?” They sounded like some
creatures from a Barnstormer game. Like a Frankenstein monster who
could swing a mean bat.
    “I’ll tell you while we make dinner.”
    “Making dinner” was opening a couple cans of
spaghetti and uncorking some wine. Well, Dad had the wine, and I
had some chocolate rice milk. Sandusky had found a few cases of
unopened Moonglow wine a couple days back and, for the first time,
decided to crack open a bottle.
    He was feeling pretty good again, all things
considered, and told me about WOMPERs between bites of noodles and
tomato sauce.
    “WOMPERs stands for ‘Wide Orbital Massless
ParticlE Reversers,’” Dad said, writing it out on the side of a
wine label so I could see where the capital letters fell to make up
its nickname. “They’ve only been recently discovered, in the
farthest parts of space. The oldest parts.
We theorized about them, but couldn’t prove they really existed. We
thought they were only around for a little while after the big
bang, then disappeared.”
    “Why?”
    “It takes too much concentrated energy to
make a WOMPER. And the universe has been spreading itself pretty
thin lately.”
    “What’s a WOMPER do?”
    My dad must’ve been excited by me asking all
these questions. I usually left the science to him and Mom.
    “If it passes through an electron or a
proton, it reverses the charge. It can do this so rapidly that
around any concentration — any buildup — of matter, it acts almost
like an agitator in a washing machine.” He was holding up his hand
and waving it back and forth. “It does even stranger things to a
positron.”
    “You mean the positrons you use for the time
spheres?”
    Those were the backward-traveling particles
Dad used as the “fuel” for his, well, his time machines. Though he
hates it when they’re called that.
    “Right. Since a positron is already a
reversed particle — a backward electron — when it’s hit by a
WOMPER, the positron’s properties are speeded up, made more
intense. It blasts backward through time faster, with more
energy.”
    “They make your time spheres stronger?”
    “Exactly.”
    “So if you had some WOMPERs…”
    “That’s what Mr. Howe thought. Get some
WOMPERs and rev these time spheres up. Make them work at warp
speed.”
    “Would it?”
    “We don’t have to worry. WOMPERs