by T.A. Barron
The walls were cluttered with star maps and computer-enhanced images of various celestial bodies, as well as Grandfather’s Oxford University diploma, now so faded with age that most of its Latin script was indecipherable. Next to it was posted a piece of yellow paper with the words, written in crayon several years ago: “Dear Grandfather, Thank You For The Pretty Butterfly. Love, Kate.”
In the far corner stood a new invention: a large device designed to measure the health and longevity of stars. Right now, it was clattering relentlessly as it analyzed some recent data on the Sun.
The lone bookshelf in the lab was tilting dangerously; it contained mostly notebooks of many colors and thicknesses. The only exceptions were tattered copies of the Old and New Testaments (King James Version), The Once and Future King, and The Wind in the Willows. (Aristotle’s collected writings, sometimes also found there, were currently being employed as a lamp stand.)
Next to the bookshelf, directly beneath the lab’s open window, stood his bureau of butterflies, holding thirty-five specimens in each of its eighteen slim drawers. Against one side were piled several nets, jars, and other trappings of lepidopterology; on its top, an unfinished chess game waited patiently for someone to make the next move. Carefully placed on the windowsill were a plaster cast of a polar bear paw print and a fossil of a trilobite. Next to them rested a small stack of dinner plates, permanently bound together with the glue of petrified cheese sandwiches.
Leaning precariously against the wall, a large wooden table sagged beneath the weight of hundreds of specialized tools, prisms, cannisters, and components—so many that not even Grandfather could remember what all of them were meant for. His portraits of Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Robert H. Goddard, once in clear view, were now totally obscured by the rising tide of clutter on the table.
Grandfather’s gaze returned to his desk, and to the green metal box resting atop his minicomputer. The surface of the box shone with an electric luster and it vibrated, humming faintly, like the voice of a Tibetan monk chanting a mantra. Behind the minicomputer, a crowded rack of beakers and flasks, filled with brightly colored liquids, rattled continuously from the vibration of the green box.
“Almost,” he whispered, perspiration gathering in the wild eyebrows on his forehead. “Steady now. Steady …”
Concentrating intently, he adjusted several of the wires and silicon chips protruding from the box, using a slender pair of tweezers. But for the occasional pause to check a formula on his clipboard or punch a few keys on the minicomputer, Grandfather worked without interruption until, at last, he heaved a sigh that had been building for more than fifty years.
“Ah, yes,” he whispered, placing the tweezers on a stack of computer printouts next to his desk.
His hands trembling, Grandfather removed several wires and closed the lid of the green box. Then, with an excited gleam in his eye, he pushed the key on the minicomputer marked Enter.
He sank back in his chair, feeling strangely drained, at a moment when he had always imagined he would feel triumphant. Wearily, he raised his wrinkled hands before his face and regarded them ruefully. How quickly the time had flown since those hands had first thrown a baseball or toyed with a telescope …
Then he turned again to the green box, and his energy started to return. “It’s here,” he said softly. “My moment in the Sun is finally here.”
“Grandfather!”
At first he thought he had just imagined the cry. Then it came again, this time louder than before.
“Grandfather!”
Someone began battering on the door to the lab.
“Kaitlyn!” he exclaimed. “What on Earth are you yelling about?”
He swiftly covered the green box with a ragged cloth, then walked over to the door. He turned the latch and started to open it—when suddenly a violent push shoved both him and the door aside.
“Oh, Grandfather!” she cried, running to him and hugging him tightly. “Grandfather, I’m scared!”
The old man knelt down and peered into her frightened eyes. She was quivering with fear. “What is it, Kaitlyn? What happened?”
“There’s—there’s something here in the house, Grandfather! Something like—like a ghost. I’m sure of it. I felt it.”
Grandfather drew her close and stroked her long braid. “I’m sure you did, my child. This is an old house, and sometimes it does strange things.”
Kate pushed herself away. “No, but this was real! I’m sure! I’m not just imagining things.” She glanced behind herself at the open door to the hallway. Nothing looked at all unusual; the hallway now seemed quiet, even inviting.
Kate swallowed hard and started to continue—when suddenly she noticed the strangely contented look on the old astronomer’s face. “Grandfather, what is it?”
The lab was dim, lit only by the shaded table lamp next to the desk, but the sparkle in Grandfather’s eyes was unmistakable. “If there are any ghosts in this house tonight, dear child, they must be good ones.”
“What do you mean?”
Pushing back a handful of white hair, he answered: “I mean that I have just made a breakthrough that has taken me more than fifty years to accomplish.”
“Is this the project you told me about after the picnic?”
“Yes, Kaitlyn.” A sudden recollection clouded Grandfather’s face and he added: “Oh, I missed our date for supper, didn’t I? Sorry about that.”
“That’s all right.” Slowly, Kate’s concerns about ghosts were being overcome by curiosity. “Go on, Grandfather. Tell me about this breakthrough.”
Stiffly, Grandfather stepped across the floor to his desk. “Ever since I was a student at Oxford, I have suspected that deep in the core of every star there is a special substance—a substance that holds the key to explaining how stars really function.”
“Isn’t that the stuff you’ve written so much about? The stuff you call PLC?”
“PCL,” corrected Grandfather. “It stands for Pure Condensed Light.”
Kate nodded, but her attention had focused on the ragged cloth covering something on the minicomputer. A mysterious humming sound, accompanied by the constant rattling of beakers, seemed to come from beneath the cloth.
“Of course,” continued Grandfather, “that was only a theory. There was no way I could prove that PCL actually exists—let alone that it might also have some rather peculiar properties.”
“Like traveling faster than light?”
“Yes, Kaitlyn.” The old man’s eyes shone like beacons. “It won’t be long before I will unveil a discovery that will one day make spacecraft obsolete. At last, PCL’s existence will finally be treated as a fact, and my own maligned reputation will be restored.” His eyes darkened. “Most people allow themselves to be herded around like sheep, I’m afraid, in science just as much as in religion or politics. They prefer a daily dose of predictable rules—with a touch of self-righteousness—to the often unpredictable truth. So the general opinion that I’ve been wrong about PCL hasn’t really bothered me. But, in recent years, even my closest colleagues have started to doubt my sanity, and that’s hurt a bit.”
“Is that why they wouldn’t let you speak to their meeting?” asked Kate, taking her eyes from the cloth and studying Grandfather sympathetically. “That’s the rudest thing I ever heard of.”
A half-smile creased the astronomer’s face. “You read the Royal Society letter, didn’t you?”
Kate nodded guiltily.
“That’s all right. I should never have kept it anyway. Couldn’t throw it away for some reason. But the last laugh is going to be mine.”
“I still don’t understand why they’d treat you that way. Why do they hate you so much?”
“They don’t hate me. They’re just frightened.”
“What’s so frightening about traveling faster than light?”
Grandfather laughed. “What’s so frightening? Nothing at all, except that it could alter the whole way we think about the univer
se! It could destroy hundreds of old theories and build new bridges between relativity and quantum mechanics that now seem impossible.”
“I still don’t think they should have treated you like that,” objected Kate. “If you ask me, the Royal Society is a bunch of royal jerks!”
“Old Ratchet would have agreed with you,” replied Grandfather. “He used to fondly call them ‘brain-dead Neanderthals.’” He turned to a dusty photograph on the wall of a thin, hairless man in a wheelchair. “Ah, Ratchet! If only you were still around to witness this moment! You never doubted that PCL exists, or that it powers the energy of every star, although I doubt that even you realized what other powers it might also have.” Grandfather chortled to himself. “Perhaps it’s for the best you’re not still here. I don’t think you could stand the idea that I—someone you saw as your lowly student—crossed the finish line before you did.”
Kate remembered well the mysterious saga of Dr. Ratchet, which she had heard so often from Grandfather. Suffering from a degenerative nervous disease, which had struck him in his thirties and left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, Ratchet had developed an amazing ability to perform four-dimensional mathematics in his head. Ultimately he came to rely heavily on Grandfather, his best student, to translate his visionary theories into practice, which is why the young Miles Prancer had first trained his telescope on a little-known star called Trethoniel. Despite his genius, however, Ratchet remained an embittered and angry man, haunted always by the fear of death. He never missed an opportunity to berate a colleague or squash a student. Consequently, few tears were shed when he died in a mysterious fire that destroyed Oxford’s entire physics complex and left behind little more than the scorched wreck of his wheelchair.
“So you’ve finally proved that PCL exists?” asked Kate.
“Even better,” answered Grandfather, and his eyebrows lifted like rising white clouds. “I have identified all of its ingredients. I now possess the recipe for PCL.”
“Wow!” exclaimed Kate. “But how?”
“Perseverance, Kaitlyn. That’s how. If there is any quality I wish for you, it’s perseverance.” With a swipe of his hand, Grandfather removed the cloth, revealing the gleaming green box. “This box represents my entire life’s work—and Ratchet’s as well. On the day he died, I vowed to find out whether there was any truth to his revolutionary theory about pure condensed light—no matter how long it took. And here I am, fifty years later, still working on it. Until tonight, all my conjectures about PCL and its role in explaining the evolution of stars were nothing but that: conjectures. Until I could actually identify its ingredients, I couldn’t convince anyone it exists. I didn’t have a ghost of a chance.”
The mention of that word caused Kate to glance again over her shoulder at the hallway. Seeing no sign of anything unusual, she turned back to Grandfather.
“Have you tested the box yet?” she asked.
“Not yet,” the old astronomer replied excitedly. “But the time is near.”
“I still don’t get it. How does making some substance that’s found in stars allow you to travel faster than light?”
“Well,” answered the inventor as he studied the humming box closely, “during my years of work on PCL I’ve learned enough about it to predict that it has some rather unusual properties. For example, it ought to melt anything frozen that touches it. But very recently—purely by accident—I discovered that it also has another property. An absolutely astonishing property.”
Kate could feel his swelling enthusiasm and it stirred her own. “What property is that?”
Grandfather straightened his tall frame and looked squarely at her. “PCL has the ability to liberate the part of us most similar to pure light.”
“You mean our souls?” asked Kate in wonderment.
“You could call it that,” answered Grandfather. “People have given it many names in many languages across the ages. I call it our heartlight.”
“But how, Grandfather? How does it work?”
“Only God knows the answer to that one, Kaitlyn. But if you keep asking—”
“Perhaps He’ll give us a hint!” finished Kate, grinning. “But what does all this have to do with traveling faster than light?”
“Everything,” replied Grandfather, taking her hands in his own. “When PCL is allowed to react with your inner light—with your heartlight—then you can travel anywhere in the universe, faster than light.”
“I still don’t understand how you could travel into outer space without a spaceship to take you there.”
Grandfather’s brow furrowed. “How can I explain it to you? Think of it like—like your imagination. All you need to do to go someplace in your imagination is to imagine it. Right? Then—presto!—you arrive there, faster than light. That’s how heartlight works.”
Kate leaned against the desk in utter amazement. Even if she didn’t understand how heartlight worked, she finally understood why Grandfather had been working so hard.
“So this is why you wanted to study the wings of the morpho?” she asked quietly.
“Yes, Kaitlyn.” His voice was almost a whisper. “It was the morpho who gave me the first clue that there is indeed a connection between the nature of light and the nature of the soul.”
“You’re saying that our souls and the stars and the wings of a butterfly are all somehow connected?”
“Yes,” the old man agreed, nodding thoughtfully. “They are all part of God’s great Pattern.”
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The only sounds were the humming of the green box, the vibrating of the beakers, and the continuous clattering of the machine in the corner of the lab.
At last Kate whispered: “If you’re right about PCL and how it can free your heartlight to travel anywhere in the universe …”
“Where would I choose to go first?” finished Grandfather, his eyes alight. “Let me show you.”
He led her across the room to a massive monitor screen next to his telescope. He switched it on, then began twirling one of the dials. Like a young child playing with his favorite toy, he typed some coordinates onto the keyboard.
With a flash, a highly magnified star appeared suddenly on the monitor. It radiated powerfully, and its shimmering red light seemed to reach right out of the screen and into the room itself. Behind Grandfather, the prisms on the table began to glow dimly red.
As he twisted more dials, the brightly colored gases of a great nebula surrounding the star came into view. They spiraled around it like a brilliant veil of incandescent clouds, finally fading into the deep darkness of space.
“It’s beautiful,” sighed Kate.
“That it is,” replied Grandfather. “No other star is as beautiful as Trethoniel.”
Pressing a button, he brought the swirling clouds into sharper focus, revealing several planets which orbited through the glowing gases of the star’s system. One of them gleamed with a pearly white color. In the center of the spiraling veil, the great red star Trethoniel sat like an imperious queen upon her throne, unaging and untouchable.
“No other star in the sky radiates so strongly, Kaitlyn. And here is the puzzle of puzzles: How can Trethoniel possibly stay so bright, without burning out completely and collapsing into a black hole? Scientists from all over the world—myself included—have failed to answer that important question. All I can say for sure is that it has something to do with its supply of PCL. Trethoniel is more advanced in manufacturing PCL than any star in the known universe. Meanwhile, it continues to flame, so powerfully that you can see it without a telescope even on full-moon nights.”
Grandfather spun another dial, and the seething, scorching surface of the star completely filled the screen. Towers of superheated gases danced thousands of miles out into space. “On our world I am believed to know much,” he said softly. “But one glimpse of this star reminds me how little, how very little, I truly understand. There is so much to learn about the Pattern.”
He
turned to the girl standing beside him. Her face, like his own, had been touched with a new and lovely light.
“Someday, Kaitlyn, if I’m right, people will explore Trethoniel and learn some of its secrets.” He touched her braid gently. “Maybe you and I will be the very first to go.”
“Me?” Kate shook her head. “Not a chance! I’m no explorer and I’m certainly no scientist! You’d be a lot better off going by yourself.”
“What if I asked you to join me?” questioned Grandfather playfully.
“I guess I’d have to think about it,” Kate replied with a grin. “But I’d rather you just sent me a postcard.”
Her gaze returned to the image on the screen. “Trethoniel is full of mysteries, isn’t it?”
“Right you are,” agreed the old astronomer. “As Einstein said, mystery is the essence of beauty. No one can explain how Trethoniel could swell up like a giant red balloon—expanding to a thousand times its former size—then resist collapsing into a bottomless black hole. Traditional physics says that should have happened long ago. But Trethoniel has done exactly the opposite! Against every law of physics, it’s grown steadily brighter, actually gaining luminosity with time. Its curve of binding energy is beyond anything we’ve ever known.”
Grandfather studied the image on the screen. “When I first started observing you, Great Star, I watched you ceaselessly, like a vulture circling over some near-dead prey. Then, with time, I came to respect you more and more. I came to admire your beauty, your power, your desire to live.”
“I’m glad Trethoniel is alive, too,” said Kate quietly. “Somehow it makes me feel … well, hopeful.”
“Yes,” nodded Grandfather. He glanced at his own wrinkled hands, then turned back to the screen. “At least somewhere in the universe, mortality and death have been held at bay, if not entirely beaten.” With a sigh, he continued: “One of the reasons Trethoniel is so intriguing is that it shares some extraordinary similarities with the Sun. Both stars are nearly the same age, probably condensed out of the same original cloud of swirling gases. And, before Trethoniel suddenly expanded and turned upside down all the laws of physics, it was a typical yellow star, just like the Sun.”