The Gravity of Anti-Gravity (2 page)

“Pops, do you think the machine that we gave our hearts, soul and sweat to for almost two years won’t work?”

“Actually Billy, I think it will work. I think it did work. And I think, at least for now, we need to keep quiet about it. Before we pick up the pieces here, there is something about this barn that you don’t know,” Pops said with an eerie seriousness.

“What could you possibly tell me about this old barn that I don’t already know?” I asked. “I’ve only spent half my life here the last seven years.”

“Billy, do you remember when I built this barn?” Pops asked. “You were only about four years old. When I was about twelve, I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and it scared the crap out of me. The fact was that Russian nukes were 90 miles off our shores caused most of the country to think we were all on the brink of annihilation. When things calmed down, that memory fostered a rash of construction of fall-out shelters. I decided at the age of twelve, that when I got my own place, I would build myself one.”

“Pops, you’re not going to tell me you’ve got a bomb shelter here are you?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I am!” Pops said proudly, “Pretty well hidden don’t you think? If you, Mr. Brainiac, have no idea where it is, then no one else should be able to figure it out either. Follow me please.”

Pops led me over to a dark corner of the barn. It had a bunch of junk stacked in front of a kind of make-shift bookcase. There was no electric light in the area – only a little light shining in from the main part of the barn. The bookcase was crooked and looked like if anything was moved around it, it would collapse. The left side of the bookcase appeared to be supported by the side of the barn. On the right side, there was a wall about three feet deep mounted at a right angle to the back wall which looked to be supporting the other side of the bookcase.

“Come on Billy, help me move some of this stuff over a little bit.” Pops requested.

After we cleared the junk out from in front the bookcase, I still had no idea where a bomb shelter might be. Then Pops reached behind what looked like some old dusty tools on one shelf of the bookcase. He moved a lever and as smooth as silk, the crooked old bookcase swung outward to reveal the back wall of the barn.

“Great Pops, looks like somebody made off with your bomb shelter” I commented.

“Look a little closer smart ass,” he said.

I did and I didn’t see a thing. Then Pops had me step back as he reached for the old round Coke sign that had been in the same place on the barn wall ever since I could remember. He rotated the sign 90 degrees to the right, then he rotated the sign to the left about 30 degrees past center and then rotated it back to the right to its starting position.

I heard some mechanical rumblings and watched a three foot wide by six foot long section of the floor gently move down about four inches. Then after about a two second delay, it began to slowly move to the right. In about 20 seconds, it had moved completely out of the way revealing a set of concrete stairs leading down.

Even though I hadn’t seen the rest of Pop’s bomb shelter, I was absolutely stunned and humbled by the clever technical ingenuity I was witnessing.

“Now I see why I didn’t pick up on the opening” I said slowly as I considered what I was looking at. “The right, the left and the back edge of the door in the floor are concealed underneath the walls. And the front edge looks like just another plank in this old wood floor. I knew you were clever but I am totally blown away! I can’t wait to see the rest.”

“Billy, have you thought about why I am showing you this now?”

“Not really. Oh my god, you’re not dying and need to show someone, are you Pops?”

“Billy we’re all dying but as far as I know I’ve got another decade or two to go before I’m shovel ready,” Pops answered with a half smile.

“Why now then? Tell me, what’s on your mind Pops?”

“Billy I have a lot of confidence in you,” Pops went on. “And I have a lot of confidence in the real world. I have confidence that you might actually pull off this anti-gravity fantasy, pardon the expression. And I have confidence that, if it works, there are evil people all over the world who will try to take it from you. I’ve been thinking about this for months now, and I am certain that we need to keep our experiments strictly between you and me. Do not, under any circumstances, tell your friends, professors, class mates or anyone else what we are working on. Don’t tell Joanna or your Grandma. If your brainchild works to even the smallest degree, the people with any knowledge of it could be in danger.”

“Pops, aren’t you being a little overly dramatic?” I argued. “If it actually works, the benefit to the world would be huge. Transportation would be revolutionized. The energy required to move freight and people from point to point would be a fraction of what it is now.”

“Stop right there!” Pops said emphatically. “You are talking about fundamentally tearing down and rebuilding a gigantic industry. Transportation includes not only the manufacturing of vehicles including trains, planes and automobiles but it would also have a profound effect on industries like big oil. Do you think big industrial corporations would go down without a fight? Everyone and everything that would be affected would weigh in – sometimes honorably, many times not. And that’s just two industries. The ripple effect would touch everyone in the world to some extent. It’s both exciting and scary to think about”.

“OK, OK, I get it. Now show me the bomb shelter,” I demanded.

“Go ahead and go downstairs,” Pops said as he unfolded his hand and arm and pointed downstairs.

The solid concrete stairs went down about eight feet to a landing where they turned in the opposite direction and continued down. They led to a steel door about three feet wide and six feet high.

“Where did you get this door?” I asked.”

“I got this door, the one on the other side of the room plus the hatch at the end of the escape tunnel off an old submarine,” Pops answered. “There used to be a marine salvage place in San Pedro that sold most of the stuff that I used here and real cheap too. Turns out, there wasn’t much demand for used submarine parts in those days. Today it would all be sold for scrap and sent to
China for reprocessing.”

“Door on the other side? Escape tunnel? Hatch?” I stammered.

Pops rotated the large circular handle on the door and opened it with a hefty shove.

“Come into my lair Billy boy and mind your head,” Pops said in a serious yet joyful way.

I ducked down to miss the top of the door and stepped over the rail at the bottom. Once inside, Pops turned on the light, closed the door behind us and rotated the handle. I watched while the metal pins moved outward and secured the door to the frame. He then slid a large steel bar into the round handle effectively keeping it from being rotated from either side of the door.

“What in the hell are you afraid of Pops? It looks like nothing short of the direct hit from a nuke would get you here.” I commented.

“Let’s continue the tour. I’ll answer your questions later,” Pops responded.

Pops showed me around the 15 by 20 foot single room with concrete walls, floors and ceiling. There was a small, walled-off area in the corner that contained a toilet and a tiny sink. There was a large tank of water in the other corner with some serious filtering equipment attached. In between the water tank and the commode were two groups of bunk beds stacked three high with one row on each side of a narrow aisle for a total of six beds. A thin mattress, suitable for a jail cell, was rolled up, sealed in plastic and lying on each bed. A similarly packaged bundle of blankets and a pillow had been placed neatly next to each mattress.

“What do you do for back-up power?” I asked. “If there’s a nuke attack, the electric company will certainly be out of commission.”

Then Pops walked to the opposite corner of the room to a cabinet that looked like a closet about four feet wide by two feet deep and a little over feet high. When Pops opened the double doors, I saw it was filled with car batteries, all wired together.

Knowing Pops I commented “I’ll bet you salvaged these batteries too.”

“Yep, all of them have been refurbished,” Pops explained. “I check every one of them once a year and replace the weak ones. Remember when I bought those solar panels on the top of the barn? I installed them to supply these batteries. Even if the panels stopped working, this place would be habitable for about three months.”

“What about ventilation?” I asked “Those batteries put out small amounts of toxic fumes that would build up quickly in a small place like this.”

“True. I guess you didn’t notice the exhaust pipe above the battery closet. Also there is an elaborate ventilation system that filters all incoming air from all toxins including nuclear fallout. That’s where I had to spend some serious money. Turns out, there aren’t any salvaged nuclear filters available.” Pops said.

Then I turned around and saw something I hadn’t noticed when I first came in. It looked like a thick black metal post in the middle of the room.

“What’s that, Pops?”

Pops went over to the wall and flipped a switch. The pole in the middle of the room moved upward to reveal a periscope, right out of a World War II submarine movie.

“I bought so much stuff the guy in the salvage yard threw this in for two hundred bucks,” Pops boasted. “It was so cool I couldn’t turn it down. If you look through the viewfinder you’ll get a view of the outside.”

When I walked over and peered into the viewfinder, I grabbed the handles and rotated the apparatus around. I couldn’t resist the temptation.

“Dive! Dive! Take cover men we’re under attack!” I yelled.

Pops smiled, saluted and answered back, “Aye, aye Captain.”

We both had a good laugh while I continued to look around in wonderment.

“There is also a listening system that gives us ears to what’s going on outside.” Pops added. “You can use this switch to change between listening to the front entrance, the rear door and the outside.”

“Pops I’m amazed. I never knew you were so paranoid. So where does that door at the back of the room go?” I asked.

The back door was the same design as the front. When Pops rotated the handle and opened it, there was a small concrete room that was connected to a concrete drainage pipe about five feet in diameter. Pops grabbed a flashlight from a nearby shelf and motioned for me to follow him. We both bent down and stepped into the pipe turned tunnel. We walked down the tunnel about 80 feet and came to a wall. Then Pops shined the light on the wall and it revealed an iron ladder leading up toward the surface. At the top was a hatch. It had a large rotating wheel lock similar to the front and back doors. Pops climbed up the ladder, rotated the wheel, pushed open the hatch and climbed out.

After I followed Pops up the ladder and stepped out, I noticed that he had attached fake plants to the top of the hatch to camouflage it. The faux plants blended in nicely with the surrounding native plants.

As I stood there in wonderment at what had been revealed to me, I looked up at the night sky. It was a beautiful clear evening with lots of stars shining. At first I felt a calm come over me but that soon changed to a strong feeling of foreboding. I tried to imagine where my life was taking me. Something told me that even my most wild fantasies would pale in comparison to the perils my future held.

“It’s beautiful tonight Pops and nice to be outside again. I can’t believe what you’ve done here. This is an astonishing accomplishment” I commented.

Pops said nothing except “Let’s get back.” From there we climbed back into the tunnel. Pops went ahead of me so that I would have to close and lock the hatch. As we reentered the shelter, he had me close and lock the back door. When we exited from the front door, I shut off the lights, closed the front door, rotated the wheel and we both proceeded up the steps to the barn. Then he had me rotate the coke sign the opposite way he had done it and the floor moved back to its role of just being a floor. We rotated the bookcase and it clicked into place. Everything again looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.

“O.K. Pops, I’m, dying to know. Why did you decide to show me the bomb shelter tonight?”

“That’s a story for another time. Let’s go to bed Bill, I’m tired.”

-3-

Pops, now sixty-two, kept in excellent shape by jogging five mile each morning. He was an ex Marine, just short of six feet tall and a trim 175 pounds. His full head of hair was always trimmed in a crew cut style. It was mostly gray with a little white starting to show around the temples. He was drafted right out of high school and did two tours of duty in Vietnam. Even though at times he demonstrated the gruff exterior of his Marine Corps Sergeant past, to me he was always Pops, my grandfather.

Pops and Grandma adopted my younger sister Joanna and me when our parents were killed by a drunk driver seven years earlier. Although devastating at the time, Joanna and I had made a home with Pops and Grandma and we were loved and we loved them.

Pops had recently retired from his job as a machinist for Lockheed Aircraft where he had worked over 30 years.

When
they were young, Pops and Grandma invested in a small house on three acres in Altadena. He loved it because it backed up to public land that quickly rose to become the San Gabriel Mountains. He especially appreciated the fact that no one could build behind him.