1
Adam and Nancy had been best friends for nearly two years. During that period, Adam had bought a brand-new, two-bedroom unit. It was situated on the seventh floor of a new block of units in Ocean Street, on top of the hill, about a mile back from Bondi Beach.
It had a large balcony with an open, panoramic view of all of Bondi with the beach in the distance. He managed to purchase the unit with the aid of a twenty-thousand-dollar deposit, which was a gift from his loving parents, and a loan from the bank. As it turned out, Adam had a good eye for desirable property and this stood him in good stead a few years later when, during a real-estate boom, he made a handy profit on the sale of the unit.
Although Adam and Nancy saw each other regularly, and often spent the night at each other’s place, they never contemplated moving in with each other. They loved their independence and the general feel of their relationship. They were more like two friends, who really loved each other, than lovers. Or maybe they were just lovers. It’s a fine line.
One thing was for sure, though, their relationship excluded expectations. Adam just never adopted the attitude that Nancy was exclusively his. To him she was still the independent girl who could do what she wanted and see who she wanted no questions asked. He was grateful just for her presence in his life. He felt that to expect anything would just drive her away. So they bypassed the quagmire of expectations and stayed friends and basically took life day by day. They both shared one common, sweet feeling, though, and that was a constant, subtle, underlying craving to be with one another.
Over time, Nancy told Adam about her tragic past. She told him how, when she was sixteen, her mum left her dad and took her with her. Her dad became so distraught that he threw himself under a train at Central Station. Her mum got a new boyfriend who got drunk all the time. One night, they got into a huge fight and, in a fit of rage, he accidentally killed her with a half-empty bottle of port. Nancy ran away and moved in with her friend Melissa who was renting a little gardener’s cottage, situated in a corner of a large estate located about half way up the Vaucluse S bends. The two girls got on like a house on fire and it didn’t take long for Nancy, with her looks and personality, to get a job in a city
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record shop. She loved it there. She loved everything about the work. After about a year, she found that little boathouse in Point Piper and moved in on her own.
2
Adam and Nancy continued to experiment with Nitrous Oxide with rarely a week going by without them having a ‘serious session’. They each approached the task with a focus. It was becoming something like a personal discipline for them. He had found a connection between his breathing and his experiences and he strived to make his breathing more perfect. He had figured out that the desired state to be in was perfect stillness. After another lengthy session, he removed the hose from his mouth and whispered,
‘That was Scott!’
There was no reply. He wasn’t seeking one. He made the statement to himself in typical astonishment.
Half an hour later, reclining in the patient’s chair with a cup of hot tea that Adam made for her, Nancy was still trying to make sense of the big mystery.
‘You know, Adam, a more fundamental question is; does the universe have to have meaning? And anyway, what is the meaning of meaning? If it does, then life goes on, but if it doesn’t, then this is all there is. There is nothing else. Say you write a book; the most fundamental question has to be; what is the point? When you’re dead, you won’t remember any of it anyhow, and all the people who read it will die and any knowledge gained from your book will have died as well. In the end even the Earth will cease to exist, so everything that ever happened on it will be rendered meaningless. And that could be OK, I suppose everything could still work the same, but there just wouldn’t be much point to any of it. Then there is the case for meaning. In a universe that had meaning, everything that happened, great and horrible deeds, heroic adventures, everything would be remembered forever. Pervading everything in a universe like that there would have to be something there as part of it, something that lasts forever, is everywhere and is undetectable, even to itself, because it is like an invisible fog. What do you reckon, Adam?’
‘What? … Who me? … Oh … sorry, Nancy, I was lost in thought. What did you say?’
There was a protracted silence in the darkened, locked dental surgery. It was August, 1976, on a cold, wet, windy Saturday morning. Outside, in the glossy canyons, anonymous, grey figures sprinted from awning to awning, wrestling with their upturned umbrellas and leaping like startled hares over the wide puddles formed around the drains
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that were blocked by a plethora of carelessly discarded litter. Occasionally, Adam and Nancy could hear the wind whistle around the old wooden window frames causing a subtle movement in the discoloured venetians. That was followed by the feeling on their skin of an icy draught cutting through the warmth of the room.
‘You seem so far away,’ Nancy observed.
‘I know … I am,’ he said. ‘I met this guy, back in ‘68 I think, that’s right, it was after my Higher School Certificate exams. I went away, up north. I stayed at a little place called Broken Head, just south of Byron. I camped there for a whole month and while I was there, I met this really friendly guy from California. We surfed together and to this day I haven’t experienced surfing days like that. They seem like a dream now.’
‘Like one of our gas trips?’
‘Well, yeah, kind of. Definitely on a higher plane … mystical. If you don’t surf, even if you do, I don’t think that you could appreciate the aesthetic …’ Adam struggled to find a word, ‘the ecstatic of those perfect days … but that’s actually another story. I’m sidetracking myself here.’
‘How often plain old everyday reality can manifest as pure heaven, don’t you think, Adam?’
‘Just as often as it manifests as pure hell, I imagine. You know, when I’m flying my hang glider …’
‘I still don’t know how you can do that.’
‘When I’m flying, the air around me is either going up or going down. It’s called lift and sink. Well, if you want to keep flying, you have to manoeuvre around strategically and search out the lift, and when you have found it, you have to try to stay in it as long as possible. So, you do circles or figure eights and stay in the lifting air, and as a consequence you gain in altitude. If you hit sink, you fly straight and get out of there as fast as possible.
Here’s my point. The world is like the air. The lift represents heaven and the sink represents hell. They are both there all the time, equal in quantity, quality and intensity, just opposite to each other, perfectly balancing each other out, and life, I mean our lives
… do you know what I mean, Nancy?’
‘Yes, this is brilliant, Adam, it’s, it’s …’
‘Nah, not really. Anyway, living is negotiating the world’s heaven-hell … I don’t know
… life space. Like air space, but it’s life space. It all depends on how good a pilot we are,
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how good we are at life, how well we’ve got it all worked out. In hang gliding, the lousy pilots just keep bombing out. They never really figure it out.’
‘I guess the bomb-out in life is death.’
‘Yeah, like seeing your last ray of Earthlight stuck to the end of a needle in some stinking alley. But that’s probably the most extreme example. I think there are varying degrees of failure as well. In the end it all relates to how much time we spend in sink, in the hell part.’
‘But Adam, everyone dies in the end. Does that mean that we all blunder into hell in the end?’
‘Well no, not really. Taking flying as an analogy again, at the end of the day, when the sun goes down, the whole sky shuts down. All the lift and sink just stops and the air becomes like velvet and everyone still flying gradually glides to the earth in the most unimaginably beautiful tranquillity. At the end of the day it’s as if heaven and hell just shut down and there is nothing but peace, and you have to still be flying to experience that. The reality is that the lift and sink is the engine that makes it possible for us to soar, and heaven and hell is the engine that makes it possible for us to live. But it’s all perfectly balanced, and all perfect. Part of the hell is thinking that there is something wrong with the world. It would be like thinking that there is something wrong with the air because there is sink in it. They want it all going up, all the time. Well, that’s impossible. People who think like that are on their way to bombing out early.’
‘So, perfect balance is a prerequisite for existence.’ Nancy glanced through the venetians. ‘Look at the misery outside. There is no point in doing anything. Could I have another cup of tea, please?’
‘Sure.’
‘You started telling me about a guy from California.’
Adam began speaking from the tiny back room with his voice raised slightly above the tinkles of the teaspoon mixing the sugar with the tea.
‘It’s the trip I had today. It was so different. I saw Scott, the Californian I met all those years ago at Broken Head. I saw him walking down a narrow foot-trail, kind of across a small, open meadow. He was barefoot, wearing a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt. It was a bright, sunny day. I remember marvelling at the richness of all the colours and the easy natural setting. It reminded me of the ambience of life at Broken Head when I was there.
As I saw Scott, and this is the weird part, it’s as if he saw me at the same time because he
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looked straight at me and gave me a huge smile, and then he waved to me like he saw me.
That’s never happened before.’
‘Wow!’
‘Yeah, and he wasn’t alone. With him, walking by his side, was the most beautiful girl. She had long, brown hair, like him, and she spotted me as well and gave me a wave like she knew me. All of a sudden I felt a surge of emotion in my heart, not just emotion, er, this sounds really corny but it felt like love, like affection, deep and strong … really …
I don’t know … and it was coming from them to me. It was absolutely wonderful. You can’t imagine it.’
‘I feel I get this from you, Adam, all the time.’
‘Oh, Nancy, you’re so in my heart, but this was something totally different … totally.
The girl, she might have been thirteen or fourteen, so stunningly gorgeous, she was wearing this one-piece, skin-tight outfit. It looked kind of metallic. Actually, come to think of it, it looked like it was made of fish scales, and as she moved, parts of it changed colour, like every colour of the rainbow. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Adam passed Nancy her tea. She thanked him for it then fell into silence hanging on his every word.
‘I didn’t move. I didn’t even think. It’s what I’ve been practicing all the time. To do or to think anything stops the trip, I know that much, and I think they knew it as well.
There just seemed to be an exchange of pure emotion and we could see each other. It was like … it was like …’
‘Telepathy?’
‘Yeah, telepathy.’
Adam half-dreamily stared into nothingness as he relived his unique experience to Nancy, who was, as usual, totally enchanted by his story. After a short pause, he took a sip of his tea then asked,
‘I wonder where Scott is right now?’
3
Adam parked his Charger behind Zeke’s hut. The sun had just set allowing the evening chill to descend over the high plateau like a huge blanket. He had been flying all day in the cold, gusty, southerly wind, which was so typical of early September. A warm, orange light shone through the small, square windows and grey smoke was streaming from the old, sandstone chimney. As Adam stepped out of his car into the icy, purple
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twilight, he heard the mellow harmonies of America’s, Ventura Highway seeping out of the hut. He knocked on the heavy, wooden door. After a brief pause, he heard the clanking of the latch. As the door opened, Adam felt a burst of warm air, which was promptly followed by Zeke who appeared from behind the door wearing a broad, welcoming smile.
‘You good for a visit, Zeke?’
‘Anytime, mate. Come in an get out of the cold.’
‘Boy, you’ve really got the fireplace going.’
‘Yeah, it’s still the best way to get rid of all the deadwood off me place.’
‘I didn’t see you on the hill today.’
‘Naah, didn’t feel like flyin. I’ve got somethin goin in the workshop. Hey, I was just gonna go out an dig somethin up. You wanna come with me?’
‘Sure. You better put on your parka, don’t you think, it’s freezing out there.’
‘I’ll have to get me shovel out of the shed. Come on.’
‘Think you’ll need a torch? It’s getting dark. So, what have you got to dig up? There isn’t a sinister side to Zeke, is there? It’s not some dead body, is it? I’d really prefer not to have to deal with that sort of thing tonight.’
Zeke gave a low, baritone chuckle as he looked Adam right in the eyes. Adam always thought Zeke’s eyes looked so defiantly untamed, full of blue light, making him think of distant lightning bolts and thunder, and Vikings raping and pillaging. But he could always look into his eyes easily because he felt totally embraced by his friendship. To almost everybody else, Zeke was a psychotic enigma, a crazy hermit who looked like a savage, wild animal, unkempt and untidy, and most likely capable of anything.
They stepped outside into the cold. Adam marvelled at the clarity of the evening sky as Zeke grabbed his shovel from the shed.
‘You wanna follow me with that torch, mate?’
They walked about thirty feet through Zeke’s vegetable garden towards a thick post sticking about six feet out of the ground. Adam watched Zeke stand himself up against the post and line himself up with an old, rotten tree stump, just visible in the dim light, about twenty yards to the east. He began stepping out towards it using his enormous, old leather boots as measuring lengths.
‘One, two, three, four … eleven, twelve, thirteen. OK, mate, this is the spot. You wanna shine the torch on this spot?’
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Adam shone the torch onto the spot Zeke pointed out and watched him spin on his heel, making a round mark in the ground.
‘This is the spot. This is where I dig.’
‘Jees, Zeke, this is freaking me out a bit. I half expect to see an arm or a leg come sticking out of the ground. I just came over for a friendly visit, you know.’
Zeke chuckled away as he buried his shovel in the soft, sandy soil.
To the non-existent observer they would have looked like two shadowy figures in the darkness, devoid of colour, like in one of those old English, black and white movies about sly, hunched-over old men who stole dead bodies from the local cemetery for the university in the village, earning perhaps a shilling per body, payable on delivery.
As Zeke zealously dug the hole in the chosen spot, Adam’s eyes bulged almost completely out of their sockets in expectant trepidation. Then, suddenly, they heard the sound of the shovel hitting something metal.
‘I think we’ve found it.’
‘Oh, that’s good, Zeke, I think.’
Zeke dug around the object and eventually pried it out of the hole.
‘What is that? It looks like an old paint tin.’
‘That’s because it is an old paint tin.’ Zeke replied, now continuously chuckling to himself. He pushed the dug-up dirt back into the now-empty hole and brushed the tin as clean as he could. Adam’s job was to shine the torch.
‘It’s never boring coming to visit you, Zeke.’
Zeke just kept chuckling away, seeming to be extremely pleased with himself. He put his shovel back in the shed, came back out and stopped for a moment. Holding his treasure under his arm, he looked up into the crisp, clear, night sky, which was perfectly dissected by the trillions of stars of the Milky Way, and declared,
‘Now that’s a big hole, eh Adam?’
Adam had no answer for that one. His mind was too distracted by the tin and its possible contents.
‘Let’s get out of this cold. Come, I’ll make us a hot Milo.’
‘Capital idea, Zeke, I certainly concur with that notion.’
‘Oh, you concur?’
‘Yes, I concur.’
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The two friends were feeling their spirits lifting. They naturally engendered happiness in each other. They were so different, yet to both of them there seemed to be a deep commonality of spirit, simple and uncontrived.
They hadn’t invented a word cosy enough to describe the feeling one felt inside Zeke’s hut in the middle of a winter’s night. Watching him tend to his fire was like watching an artist at work. The hot Milos just kept coming, the music kept playing and the conversations were as unbridled as the spirits that shared them. And in the dim, flickering light of the fireplace, their stories brought memorable adventures from the past back to life. On some nights, philosophy, glorious, magnificent philosophy, paid them a visit and dwelt there amongst them and soared with them, high and far, as high and as far as the wings of their minds could possibly take them.
The paint tin stood on the old, wooden, coffee table like mysterious salvage. Adam couldn’t take his eyes off it. Zeke, sensing his friend’s obviously agonising curiosity, only prolonged the torment by avoiding any conversation about it. He made the sweet, hot drinks and placed them on the coffee table either side of the tin. He finally sat down and began to speak.
‘Nature, mate, nature …’
He paused and took a sip of his drink. Adam was hanging on his last word and just wanted to blurt out, yeah, yeah, what about nature, but he held his tongue and let Zeke take the conversation at his own, naturally lethargic pace.
‘In the end … in the end, mate …’
‘Yeah?’
‘It all turns to shit.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Yeah. … And out of shit …’
‘Yeah?’
‘Out of shit, mate …’
Zeke paused again and took another sip of Milo. He then leaned forward and picked up the metal poker with which he manipulated the logs in the fire.
‘Out of stinkin shit, mate …’
‘Yeah?’
‘Comes gold.’
‘Gold?’
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‘Yeah, mate.’
Zeke took an old screwdriver off the shelf above the fireplace and picked up the paint tin. With a snap of his wrist he pried the lid open.
‘Illawarra Gold, mate. Check this out.’
Adam’s nose told him what was in the tin way before he laid his eyes on the plumpest, stickiest heads he’d ever seen.
‘It’s the pick of last summer’s crop, only the best heads, nothin average.’
Adam laughed out loud,
‘Boy, you sure had me going for a while there, Zeke. Wow, I can smell how strong they are from here.’
‘Go ahead, stick your finger in the tin.’
Adam stuck his finger in the tin and pulled it out with half a dozen sticky heads glued to it.
‘You won’t need much of this stuff. I’ve got some good baccy to go with it as well. It’s the only way to smoke it, mate.’
‘You’re something else, Zeke.’
‘Ain’t I just.’
Zeke took his pipe and a small, wooden bowl from the shelf and began mixing minute amounts of the sticky, green stuff with some of his own, home-grown tobacco.
‘We’ll just ease into it, eh mate?’
‘I’m all for easing into it, Zeke. I don’t want to end up on the bathroom floor thinking that I’m going to have a heart attack.’
They both laughed.
‘Yeah, I’ve been there too, mate, a few times. Gotta go easy with this stuff.’
The two friends kicked back in front of the open fireplace, passed the pipe to each other and engaged themselves in casual conversation.
‘Don’t you ever get lonely living by yourself without any neighbours around, Zeke?’
‘I don’t get lonely, mate, I just get stoned.’
After a few more pipes,
‘What do you mean gravity is particles raining down on us, pressing us to the Earth?
Matter sucks, doesn’t it?’
‘Naah. Trillions upon trillions of super-small particles are rainin down on us all the time, an they’re pushin us against the Earth.’
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‘I just don’t get it, Zeke. Where did you hear this theory?’
‘It ain’t no theory, it’s fact, an I didn’t hear it from nobody. I figured it out all by myself.’
‘Do you want to run it past me one more time, slowly, from the beginning, please.
I’m not so smart, you know.’
‘Oh, you’re plenty smart enough. OK, now imagine empty space, no planets, no stars, no dust, nothin, just space. You got that?’
‘Yeah, I’m with you so far. Nothingness.’
‘This empty space is filled with gravity, like a field, but it’s imperceptible.’
‘Oh, you’re losing me now.’
‘Stay with me, it’ll start to make sense. It’s actually very simple. You heard of neutrinos?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Neutrinos are really small, they travel at the speed of light, they have no charge and they pass through everythin. Well, they’re powder puffs compared to gravitons. Now, you’ve heard of photons?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, imagine that the size of gravitons is so small that they’re like light shining on photons.’
‘Light shining on photons?’
‘They can’t even measure the mass of neutrinos, which are giants compared to gravitons.’
Zeke started packing another pipe as he continued explaining his theory.
‘Gravitons exist on a scale so small that they can basically be considered to be in another dimension, but they also exist in this dimension. Actually, in this discussion we are travelling along the axis of the fourth dimension, the bigness-smallness axis. That’s infinite as well, like all dimensions. Basically, if you could keep shrinkin, you could keep shrinkin forever. The universe is designed to accommodate that. The same goes for expandin. Bigness an smallness are the fourth dimension, an it’s infinite.’
‘Whoah, my poor brain.’
‘It’s all right mate, just remember that gravitons are virtually infinitely smaller than neutrinos or photons, but they pack a punch because of their speed, an as a result, their momentum. They travel at the speed of light squared.’
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‘The speed of light squared? I thought that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.’
‘Well, it can’t an it can. Remember, gravitons are like light shinin on photons, an photons are already travellin at the speed of light.’
‘Ahhh, the speed of light times the speed of light … ah … you mind passing me that pipe, Zeke?’
‘Sure, sure, here you go. What do you think of me dope?’
‘Oh, I’m not sure what’s spacing me out more, your dope or your theory.’
Zeke laughed as he passed the pipe to Adam. He continued,
‘So, let’s go back to that empty space with nothin in it.’
Zeke was starting to get slightly excited as he related his gravity theory to Adam. As he spoke, he gestured with his hands trying as hard as he could to maintain simplicity in his explanation. At once he was relating the theory to Adam while at the same time polishing it for himself. He went on.
‘Imagine this empty void filled with a thick soup of gravitons travellin through it, in all directions equally, at the speed of light squared. They don’t seem to interact with each other because, to the casual observer, there is nothin apparent goin on. You with me?’
‘Actually, amazingly, I can see this space now, with the little bullets flying around equally in all directions.’ Adam looked at the pipe in his hand and confessed, ‘You know Zeke, I think this could be the best dope I’ve ever smoked.’
‘I think it’s the chicken shit I get from the chook farm up the road.’
‘Well, it’s obviously good shit, mate.’
Zeke continued,
‘So, remember, gravitons are really, really small. Like a photon compared to a planet is a graviton compared to a photon, and they probably oscillate between energy and some kind of matter. Most of the time they’re pure energy, like waves, but some of the time they’re, as you put it, little bullets. They’re right on the edge.’
‘A bit like me smoking this dope and listening to this theory.’
‘Now, let’s put somethin into this huge, empty space, say a planet like the Earth.
What will happen?’
Adam could see it coming. He couldn’t believe that he was actually seeing Zeke’s theory of gravitational effect clearly imaging itself in his head. He said nothing however, not wishing to take anything away from his friend’s pleasure of telling it.
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‘Atoms, in matter, probably cause a graviton wave to become a graviton particle the same way a shallow reef causes an ocean wave to break and release its energy. Gravitons behave, kind of, like neutrinos, not really, but for the purpose of this discussion, most of them basically pass through all matter because they are so small an matter is mainly empty space. But some of them collide with a nucleus an bury themselves in it, an lose their energy in it, an give it a little push.’
‘So, let me get this straight, Zeke. Most of the bullets pass straight through an object, but some collide and transfer their momentum to that object, giving it a little push?’
‘Yep! They go in one end an don’t come out the other. Now, let’s go back to our big, empty space with one single object in it. What do you think happens to that object?’
‘Obviously nothing because it’s getting hit evenly from all sides. It just stays in the same place because all the vectors of force acting on the object cancel themselves out.’
‘Go to the top of the class, Adam. Gravitons are flyin into the object the same from all sides, but there are slightly fewer of em comin out of the object on all sides, cause some of em got caught up inside.’
‘So, there’s like a spherical graviton shadow all around the object.’
‘Jees, Adam, you’re scarin me. I call it a gravity shadow, an you are right, it is spherical provided the object is spherical. In a ubiquitous, uniform graviton field all objects will form into spheres if they form from liquid, gas, dust or even rocky debris. OK, now let’s do somethin really interestin an try to work out what happens if we place another object near the first one, so that now we have two objects, both about the size of the Earth, floatin in space near each other. What do you reckon’s gonna happen?’
‘Am I allowed to say? I don’t want to steal your thunder.’
‘Steal away, mate.’
‘Well, let’s call the two objects, A and B. Object A is getting hit by gravitons from all sides equally, except from the side where object B is. That’s because object B has absorbed some of the gravitons as they passed through it. So, therefore, there is an imbalance of force acting on object A. There is a positive vector of force pushing object A towards object B. And the same applies to object B. They both exist in each other’s gravity shadows. It’s absolutely brilliant, Zeke. It’s so clear. I’m just so blown away. They just get pushed towards each other because they literally create a graviton hole between each other.’
‘That deserves another puff, mate.’
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‘So, when I jump in the air, the reason I come back down is because there are more gravitons hitting me from above than from below, because some of the ones from below never made it through the planet.’
‘That’s pretty much it.’
‘And the reason heavy objects are heavy is because they have larger, denser nuclei in their atoms, thus presenting a bigger target to the graviton field. Weight, therefore, is equal to the lost energy of gravitons. But wait, Zeke, you can’t just keep pumping energy into something. Eventually something’s got to give.’
‘Tell me, Adam, how good does your car accelerate?’
‘Pretty good, it’s got a 265 hemi in it. Why?’
‘What do you have to do to keep it acceleratin?’
‘I have to keep my foot planted.’
‘That’s right, you have to keep feedin it fuel; you have to keep feedin it energy. As soon as you stop feedin it energy, the acceleration stops. And what is gravity?’
‘It’s acceleration. Ahhh, of course. For there to be gravity in the universe there has to be a constant input of energy into it, massive amounts of energy to keep the acceleration of gravity going. And it’s all coming in with gravitons flying in at the speed of light squared. And because it’s perfectly symmetrical, and mostly waves, it’s completely undetectable, with a final vector of force of zero. Like two arm wrestlers of equal strength, sort of.’
‘It’s got to be at the speed of light squared in order to put enough energy into the tiny little bastards. An they’ve got to be tiny little bastards so that enough of em can get through, so that the ratio between how many get through an how many don’t is big enough. If it ain’t big enough, it won’t work. It can actually be worked out mathematically.
It’s such a fine balance, it’s incredible.’
‘Another one of those God things.’
‘Yeah, an I think that there’s a fair chance that ol Albert Einstein left somethin out of his famous equation, E=Mc2.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Yeah. He left out the G, for gravity.’
‘You’ll have to explain that one to me, Zeke.’
‘E=Mc2=G. Mass at the speed of light squared is pure energy. That is what gravity is, an pure energy has no mass.’
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‘Your theory explains the insane gravity of black holes. Matter is packed in so tight that not many gravitons can get through. That would make a huge gravity shadow.’
‘Yeah, an they ain’t holes, they’re lumps, very dense lumps. There just ain’t no space for gravitons to get through. Some blokes reckon that if you took all the empty space out of the whole universe, you could fit everythin that’s left into a thimble. That’s what I call engineerin.’
The two friends took a break from their frenetic, high-voltage conversation. Adam thought to himself,
‘What difference does it make if Zeke is right or wrong. Nobody else has come up with anything better, and what fun it is to explore such lofty ideas.’
Zeke boiled some more water for more Milo and put another log on the fire. He then took another pinch of the sticky, green stuff and a bit more tobacco leaf and proceeded to cut it up into a fine mix with a pair of scissors.
‘The way I see it, Zeke, there’s some pretty big implications if your theory is right.
The first thing that strikes me is that we are surrounded with an abundance of free, clean energy. Literally, the air is full of it and it’s everywhere in the universe. We’ve just got to figure out how to tap into it. But you’ve taken the first step in that direction, if you’re right.
First you’ve got to understand how gravity happens before you can do anything else.’
‘Yeah, mate, an all we gotta do is figure out some kind of membrane that lets gravitons pass through it easier goin one way than the other an we’ve got ourselves a gravity sail.’
‘Kind of like a one-way mirror.’
‘Yeah, an if we could control the mirrorness we could vary the push. That would make it possible to use gravity sails in all kinds of applications.’
‘Like space ships?’
‘Yeah, but that’s just the most obvious. There are other much more useful an needed applications.’
‘Like what?’
‘Our civilization is based on burnin up masses of stored energy in the form of coal an oil, which comes from millions an millions of years worth of dead trees. Trees are the energy of the sun captured an stored an ultimately buried in the earth to turn into coal an oil.’
‘So, the Earth is like a huge energy battery.’
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‘Yeah, an it only seems logical that one day the coal an oil are gonna run out. You know, the Earth’s population ain’t much different to a smack addict. We’re all on a big high, pumpin oil into our veins, an the Arabs are the smackees who actually control all the governments in the world, without appearin to do so, cause they’ve got the drug.’
‘You know, if you don’t see gravity as an effect of gravitons, you’re nowhere. You’ll never go anywhere. You’ll forever be like those apes in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the ones that got beat up by the other apes with the bones.’
‘Yeah, headed for certain extinction.’
‘What about the scientists, what are they doing?’
‘Sweet FA, mate, awardin each other Nobel prizes while humanity slides towards almost certain oblivion. The morons keep inventin better ways for all of us to blow ourselves away an to poison the whole planet for hundreds of thousands of years.’
‘So, tell me about some of your ideas about the applications of gravity sails.’
‘OK. The most immediate need would be to invent a gravity engine, to turn a shaft, to power electric generators. As I see it, you’d only need two smallish gravity sails hangin off a shaft. As you powered up the mirrorness, they would start turnin the shaft. No fuel, no pollution, free energy forever, as much as you need an as powerful as you like. It would kill the energy companies overnight. They’d probably start a war over it, the greedy bastards. Imagine huge water pumps, all over the world, pumpin excess water from the wetlands into the deserts. Imagine the poor countries gettin free energy an heaps of water, an growin heaps of food, an imagine the filthy septics tryin to stop em.’
‘I can see that happening, Zeke.’
‘We could get rid of internal-combustion engines an all the fuel-burnin machines, forever. We could make heat by putting a friction module on the end of one of those gravity engine shafts, you know, like a metal disk spinnin inside some metal plates, makin friction an heat.’
‘Like how your car brakes get hot?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah, and we could have cars with just a small gravity sail in the boot, pushing them along, no fuel, no engine, just brakes.’
‘Bloody good brakes, mate. An then, when we’ve got all the problems of the world basically licked, then, an only then, we could look to the stars. Why do you reckon the universe is so big? Why do you reckon everythin is so far away from everythin else?’
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‘I don’t know, why?’
‘Cause it’s possible to cruise around at the speed of light squared, that’s why. No engines, no fuel, just the ship. A sailin ship, a gravity-sailin ship.’
‘Boy, Zeke, the inventing of that one-way membrane will be the biggest thing that has ever happened to this planet. Humans will break out of the Earth nursery and take off to the stars. How long do you reckon it would take to get to some place like Andromeda?’
‘I’d have to work it out, but off the top of me head, I reckon maybe an hour if you were cruisin.’
‘Jees, that’s hardly enough time to get through one album.’
‘I reckon that the gravity sail ain’t far away. Pretty soon some crazy inventor in some backyard shed will stumble on it. He’ll make up a small contraption an strap it on his back, like a backpack, an levitate around in his shed. Then, if he’s smart, he won’t tell anyone about it. He’ll have a bit of fun with it first, just by himself. When he eventually announces it, the whole world will go nuts an people will go to war over it. I reckon nine tenths of the population could get taken out by the subsequent hysteria.’
‘Boy, that’s a pessimistic view, Zeke.’
‘Yeah, it probably won’t happen, but the gravity sail has got to be the Holy Grail of all inventions. There’s nothin better, absolutely nothin. I’d give just about anythin to be the one to get it … anythin! ’
‘You know, Zeke, this has been a pretty memorable evening for me. I don’t think that I’ll ever forget your theory of gravitational effect. I’ll be thinking about this for the rest of my life. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me. I don’t know much about anything, but it’s fired up my heart for the future of humanity. There seems to be hope for a magnificent, exciting, glorious future where we live in abundance and set out to explore the whole universe, and only God knows what we’ll find out there. Hey, look at the time.
I’ve still got an hour drive in front of me.’
‘One last puff before you go?’
‘One for the road.’
The two friends enjoyed a last couple of quiet drags of Zeke’s pipe in silence. They both imagined having a contraption that could utilise gravity for lift. As he rose and put on his parka, in preparation for the cold outside, Adam took one last absorbing look around the warm, friendly space of Zeke’s tiny home. He took a couple of deep breaths, as if trying to take in a small store of the homely ambience to take with him on the road.
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Zeke rose to his feet and put on his parka as well. They both stepped into the clear, black night outside.
‘Before you go, you wanna see what I’ve been workin on in me shed?’
‘Sure, but first let me get my beanie from the car. It’s freezing out here.’
Zeke went into his shed and turned on the light. Adam followed him in after getting his beanie. Lying on the floor, in the centre of his corrugated-iron workshop, in a state of partial construction, was Zeke’s latest flying creation.
‘Oh, you’re working on a new hang glider.’
Zeke just grinned proudly as Adam walked around the mass of tubes and sailcloth spread out in disarray in front of him. He nodded his head in approval as he tried to think of an intelligent question to ask.
‘Is it another Zekester special?’
‘Mate, this is the most radical wing anybody’s ever made. It’s a supership. In this machine I’m gonna be the first bloke in the world to do a loop in a hang glider.’
‘Whoah, Zeke!’
‘Every tube is double sleeved, every bolt an wire is thicker gauge an the sail is heavier. An check the plan shape.’
Zeke referred Adam to a plan drawing spread out on his workbench. Adam’s eyebrows shot skyward as he realised the radically-futuristic vision in Zeke’s head.
‘This looks totally insane. When do you reckon you’re going to be ready to fly it?’
‘About three to four weeks. I’m gonna take it to Kurnell. I’ve gotta find the right CG
an make sure that it flies right before I jump off Stanwell with it. But one thing’s for sure, this ship’s gonna be fast, super fast. Fast enough to do a loop.’
‘I want to be there when you do it, Zeke. I want to help you off the hill. I’ve got to go, mate. Thanks for the great night, really, thanks heaps.’
As they stepped back out into the night, they both instinctively looked up into the dark, star-filled void. Almost immediately they both noticed something unusual.
‘Did you see that, Zeke? Did you see that star fly along and then do a right angle?’
‘Yeah, mate.’
…….
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