by Phil Wheeler
“It won't be long before you're rich and famous”, his assistant said with a grin, “and then I can be rich and famous, too.”
“Not gonna' happen, Dave.”, retorted Dylan, “The first thing I'll do is hire someone that dresses normal, the second thing I'll do is fire you.”
“You're just jealous that I can pull off this look, and you can't. So, when are the big boys coming in?”
Dylan looked at his day planner for the hundredth time, checking to see if the numbers had somehow changed. “I leave for the airport around 10 – we'll grab a bite someplace nice, I'm assuming they will be hungry, and then I'll drive them back here for the grand tour.” Samuelson and two of his top physicist were coming in to review his findings. The visit was going to be a short one, literally just that day. After the lab visit he would drop them off at the hotel, then return later to join them for dinner. The next day he would take them back to the airport for an early morning flight out.
After some more small talk David stood up and announced that he had some work to do and, unlike his boss, couldn't afford the luxury of sitting around all morning. David left and Dylan sat there, not doing anything. He had about two hours to fill, but he knew that he was too preoccupied to get any productive work done. He started a game of Bridge on his computer, quickly making three bids in a row – one a small slam in hearts – decided that he was bored, exited the game, and closed the cover on his laptop. Glancing down, his eyes fixed on a picture frame that had an honored place on his desk. It held two pictures, almost identical, of a smiling couple standing in front of a car. They were a before and after montage. In the before the car was ratty and rusted, and in the after the car was a beautifully restored vintage classic.
He still remembered the day that the before picture had been taken. The tow truck had just delivered dad's new car, a beat up old mustang. If it had been a real horse someone would have put it out of its misery years before. Mom came out with a camera, and had Dylan take a dozen pictures of her, dad, and that old car. Dad was smiling ear to ear, and mom was happy because dad was happy.
Other than mom and Dylan, dad had two passions – fishing, and that car. His dad loved to fish, and he loved to find small farm ponds to fish in, they were like undiscovered gems. 11 years ago, they'd been bouncing along in Dylan's pickup truck on a back road in Wayne County, south of Cleveland, looking for a place to fish. Passing an old farm house, his dad noticed a big pond behind it and told Dylan to pull in so they could ask permission to fish it. The two fishing buddies had learned from experience that small ponds could hold monster bluegills, and permission to fish in return for the promise of a few filets was rarely turned down. A fun filled few hours of battling 9-plus inch 'gills ensued, following which they'd shared some of the catch, cleaned and ready for the pan, with the farmer named Davidson. With large amounts of tasty fillets and iced tea filling their bellies, they'd sat on a porch badly in need of some paint and talked about life. Remembering back to his youth, Mr. Davidson had talked about his time in the Navy, and his time spent in the Mediterranean on the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. “The Kennedy was the flagship for the 6th fleet”, said Davidson, “and they used to call her the head of the Med as a joke. Ya see, bathrooms in the navy are called heads.” Returning home, he had been billeted at Norfolk, Virginia as he went through out – processing, and had bought himself a car. The car hadn't been new, but it was his first car, paid for with money from his paychecks saved while on the cruise. He'd driven that car home to Akron, and started back to work on the family farm, eventually inheriting it when his father passed. The car was still there, tucked away in a barn at the back of the property.
Dad mentioned he'd like to see it, so they walked out to the barn and pulled off the bird dung covered tarp to reveal a classic 60's Ford Mustang badly in need of some lovin' – and, it was love at first sight. A fair price had been negotiated, and his father was the proud owner of a sweet ride from his youth. Dylan researched the early Mustangs and found out that his dad's car was one of the first ever built, a '64 ½. Officially, Ford never called it a 64 ½, all Mustangs were marketed as 65's and were stamped with a 1965 VIN. To be called a ’64 ½ a Mustang had to come factory equipped with a generator charging system rather than an alternator. Large horns mounted down on the frame behind the radiator, a break light pressure switch on the master cylinder, a center off heater fan switch, and a generator charge light also marked differences. Over the next two years the car sat in his dad's garage in various stages of in-completion. The two of them rebuilt it from bumper to bumper, and everything in between. All new interior parts, including covers in black leather for the bucket seats, were purchased from the company that had bought the original Ford factory molds. The 289 cubic inch V8 with a 4-barrel was meticulously torn apart, and the guts replaced. The old 4-barrel carburetor was history; a Weiand Stealth aluminum intake manifold and a Holley 4-barrel taking its place. It was the only concession in the restoration to modern engineering in the car other than the brakes, rims, and tires.
Finally, the car was sent to the painters for a midnight blue paint job with silver specks, and 10 coats of clear lacquer for a finish that danced in the sunlight. His dad only drove it when the roads were dry, and no chance of precipitation was in the forecast. That's why it came as a total shock to Dylan when he'd received the phone call from the State Highway patrol just over two years ago. His parents had been in a car accident with another vehicle, and could he please come down to Cleveland hospital? Arriving at the emergency room, he was met by a Trooper who quietly took him aside. Dylan looked into the man's eyes and knew the truth immediately. His parents were dead.
It wasn't until more than three weeks had passed, long after the memorial service and burial, that Dylan could read the police report. His dad had been driving the Mustang down Interstate 71, with mom in the passenger-side seat. A pickup truck driving the other direction had apparently swerved across the grassy medium, and hit them head on. The weather had been perfect, with blue sky and warm sun, so the report only speculated on why the pickup had swerved to hit his parents' car. An autopsy from the coroner's report said the cause of death was massive trauma to the head and chest for all three of the occupants of the vehicles involved. Blood tests showed no alcohol levels in any of the victims. The Mustang had been wrecked beyond repair.
After speaking with the wife of the man in the pickup, the investigator's conclusion was he had fallen asleep at the wheel while returning to his home from a double shift at the metal shop where he worked. It was likely that Dylan's parents had died instantaneously. At least that was something, they had not suffered very long. From that day to now Dylan had immersed himself in his research. Now, that research was paying off, he'd done it. That, at least, was one good thing that had come out of tragedy. He smiled sadly, and spoke the words quietly to himself, “This is for you mom and dad.”
Chapter 4
2550 BC Giza, Egypt
The Pharaoh Khufu looked at the drawings on the table in front of him, reviewing the architectural plans lying on the table under a brightly colored tent erected in the sands of Giza. The people of this land called this place kher neter, the city of the dead. He looked at the drawings, reviewing the inner chambers of the Pyramid. From the main entrance on the north face was a long narrow corridor with a low roof, the corridor lead to a chamber located 80 feet below ground level; an unfinished stasis chamber. Another corridor led to the heart of the Pyramid. This ascending corridor ended at the Grand Gallery, a rectangular hall 161 feet long, 34 feet wide, and 28 feet high. At the end of the Grand Gallery was an entrance to a third chamber, a burial chamber. Rectangular in form and with a flat roof, it was built out of granite brought from the city of Assuan, nearly 625 miles away. The roof was constructed of 9 slabs of granite; each one nearly 50 tons in weight. In the roof of the burial chamber 5 small relieving chambers were constructed so that the huge pressure of the sto
nes above it would not cause the burial chamber to collapse. The King's chamber was 34 feet long, 17 feet wide, and was 17 feet to the ceiling; a fitting resting place for a god.
He lifted his gaze, the pyramid at Giza stood like a great sentinel and the desert spread around it for as far as a hawk could fly in a three – day journey. The arid climate collided with the humidity from the Nile River and wind storms were frequent, bringing Saharan dust to this place for months at a time, but the native sandstone of the area made excellent building material, and this was where he had chosen to build his resting place. It was truly a wonder, almost 500 feet tall, each base side was over 750 feet long, and each casing stone and inner chamber block was fit together with extreme precision. The sides of the square base were closely aligned to the four points of the compass.
Over 2.2 million individual stones were used in its construction. Each one, excepting those used in his burial chamber, weighed as much as 15 tons. The stones came from several different quarries - the bulk from limestone quarries on the Giza plateau itself, then white limestone for the outer stones from Tura, upriver, and granite from Assuan. Smaller amounts of basalt and Graywacke were also used.
Assuan, far to the south of Giza and up the Nile river, had provided the granite quarries for the base; only building stones in perfect condition, and that, only a stone which had been split off. Rounded weathered granite boulders had small fissures and can break apart easily, so they were unsuitable for use as a building stone. The Maasara quarries to the south and on the eastern shore of the Nile, a little over 8 miles distant, provided limestone of a very high quality - white, very fine-grained, not very porous and somewhat harder than the limestone from Giza. These stones had provided the smooth outer surface. Even using the anti-gravitic devices left to him, it had taken five years and hundreds of builders to complete.
He mused to himself about the possible explanations that would be given in the centuries to come over the construction of such a magnificent edifice. There was no way that it could have been built without the use of technology far exceeding the grasp of this primitive culture that he found himself in, but his legacy would be lost in the sands of history. This culture was too primitive to truly grasp the language of Dracon; a highly developed picture language, both descriptive and elegant. Everything that had been Draconion would end with his death, and he thought about that for a moment. The natives that he ruled over considered him a god, and rightly so, for he was not of their world. Every evening, he searched the night sky for Thuban, known to the primitives that inhabited this land as the pole star shinning in the night sky above them. His home world of Dracon still circled that star, and many centuries before he'd named the constellation in the night sky that contained that star Draco, after a creature from his own world called a dragon. The pole star never set and the people of this land described it as imperishable, undying. At his death, Khufu was expected to join not only with the Sun, but with the pole star Thuban as well, maintaining order in the celestial realm, just as he had on Earth. He would become the dragon.
To Khufu, Dracon was a home that he would never see again. The ship that had brought him to this world would not be returning him to his for it no longer functioned. Their predicament was of their own making. In creating a life free from responsibility they had raped their home world, wantonly used its resources and destroyed the atmosphere, polluted the water. Their world was dying, so they had created a ship; an ark to carry their life, culture, and technology to a new beginning. Massive in size, the ark had been finished, the accommodations completed, and people selected by lottery, but no one had foreseen the terrible nature of what they had created. They had not traveled for very long before the sickness manifested itself, causing terrible sores and eating away at victims, turning their insides to a black pus – a black death. At first, the doctors could find no cause, and there was no cure. So many died, until, finally, the cause was determined, the star drive itself. The power source used was different than any before it, and they had been in such a hurry and so sure of themselves that they were careless; the side effects were unforeseen and unaccounted for. Exposed to its emanations within the confines of the ship a common germ had mutated, growing into a deadly killer; where a family of 3 had been only 1 now remained alive. For so many the reason was found far too late, the star drive was death. During the flight out of their solar system, those closest to the drive died first; the engineers and the technicians. The elite, the ruling class, in the luxury of the ship farthest from the engines, grew ill next, but being far from the engines and its deadly power supply had saved some of them. Life support for the ship came from a second power source, one that was not deadly, and some developed a natural immunity to the horrible disease. Unfortunately, other deadly side effects manifested themselves; the males were now mostly sterile and the females barren; a tragic and unforeseen result.
He had been their leader, the responsibility and the blame was his. He'd failed. The advances they'd made had come with too heavy of a price. Their technology was a two-edged sword; providing an escape from the drudgery of everyday tasks and responsibilities, while creating a people stifled by its own discoveries. Each gain meant more distance from the creativeness that made them great. Apart from a small minority, learning had stopped, devices taking the place of the need to truly understand the technology that they used. They were advanced, sophisticated, possessing magic in a black box and totally unable as a populous to understand what was inside that black box. Their new computers created new devices on demand. Very few understood the inner working of those computers, and those few were gone. The technology was lost because of the stupidity and vanity of his people. By the time they had reached this world, the ships power supply was burning out and there was only a small remnant of the original travelers left. The great ark would no longer be able to move through space, but it didn't really matter for there was no one to solve the problem of the power which killed. Their only option was to try and build a new home on the green, cloud covered world beneath them.
He remembered still the day he'd arrived here so long ago. Dropping down to the surface of this unknown world he had been greeted by a band of humanoids barely capable of speech and possessing no more tools than simple stone knifes, spears, and axes. His landing craft was like a magical beast, for any technology sufficiently advanced would appear that way to a primitive society. The primitives had dropped at his spacesuit covered feet in abject worship. He was their god, their Bright Sky Rider, and even here, far from their home world, he found that the spark of life was not very different than their own. A head and a trunk connecting two arms and two legs appeared to be the universe's formula for success. A carbon base provided the common blank, the genetic blueprint was only slightly dissimilar, and it became the canvas upon which a new people would be painted.
Females were taken to the ship and they were successfully inseminated with sperm from the few males that remained capable of reproduction. It had been their salvation. Working through the centuries, they had reduced the time frame evolution had set by many thousands of years and created a new race, if not equal to theirs in longevity, than a least one that could contain their intellect. It was this race that would carry on his people's memory. This select few would be the seed for a great jump in the planets evolution. A breeding program was begun and the strongest, most intelligent specimens were kept separated to replenish the Draconian race. The others were left to themselves, creating a new, more advanced people that spread across the planet. This had the effect of creating two very different genealogies. Both groups were identical at the genetic level, but his people had continued to secure the foremost bloodlines, creating a group that was more intelligent, and with longer lives. A race of supermen, they would be the rulers, the kings and conquerors, the elite of the planet long after his death. This was his only legacy, for all else would be forgotten in the fog of time.
His people were stranded on this world. They had come down from their now non-functioning spaceship to this planet at the beginning of its evolutionary journey, and had traveled to every corner of it. He had come to this land in the desert, and he had become the god of this people.
True, each generation was less long lived, but they would be far superior to the other inhabitants of this world. Everywhere that they went they began their breeding program with the primitives of that area, and over the many centuries they propagated much of their beliefs into the people that they subjugated. Draconians worshiped the Dragon as the protector of their race, and in the centuries to come Dragons would play a central role in many creation myths of many lands. In these stories the gods would often battle such creatures for control of the Earth. When defeated, many times the dragons were flung up into the skies. The Roman myth would call this dragon Ladon, who guarded the golden apples on a tree in a garden. Greek legend would tell the story of a horrible dragon that guarded a sacred spring. From a Chinese tale, the stars were a dragon who eats the Sun and Moon.