The Prodigal Hour: A Time Travel Novel by Entrekin Will

Author:Entrekin, Will [Entrekin, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Exciting Press
Published: 2011-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

23

Dennis Sowin’s ears pop when Chance and Cassie vanish into the ether like mundane guardian angels. He presses his cane to the floor switch to make the bookcase swing aside, then crosses his office to the basement. By the time he arrives at the landing where the limp body sprawls, his son has reached the door to the basement, and Dennis looks up the stairs at him.

“Dad? Are you—?”

“I’m fine.”

“What’s going on?”

Dennis hesitates then, because though he had always assumed this moment would come, he hadn’t thought it would come soon. One doesn’t build a secret room to keep people from finding it but rather to keep people from finding it right now. Dennis moves carefully around Geisel’s body, up the stairs and into the kitchen.

“I called the cops,” Chance says.

“We need to talk before they get here.”

And so Dennis Sowin will begin to tell his son about his research and the laboratory he concealed in the basement. He will not feel guilty, and he will not explain every detail, only enough that his son will understand what he did, and why, and that they might be in danger. Dennis will not realize soon enough just how much danger they are in, not until the doorbell rings and he opens the door to find Richard Hanley standing on his doorstep.

Hanley will already have his silencered pistol in his hand, and Dennis will find himself staring into its elongated barrel before, suddenly, the world will go black.

*

Hanley will step quickly around Dennis Sowin’s body as it slumps to the ground, walking through the hallway and into the kitchen, where he will find Chance sitting with his back to the doorway. He will fire three shots, each higher than the last. The first will strike Chance through the spine and perforate his lungs; the second through his neck to burst through his throat; the third through the back of Chance’s head.

Hanley will turn and walk down the stairs, where he will shake his head in disgust upon sight of Geisel’s lifeless body. He will step around it to cross the basement toward Dennis Sowin’s office. He will rifle through the drawers in the desk, pull them out and turn them over, examine the bookcase, searching each text for Dennis Sowin’s research.

He will find nothing.

Frustrated, he will kick a shelf toward the bottom of the bookcase, and it will crack through the backboard, wedging through to reveal darkness.

When he sees that darkness, Richard Hanley will smile.

*

Richard Hanley will be handsomely rewarded for locating Dennis Sowin’s laboratory and confiscating Sowin’s research. The government will dole out the research in discrete quanta to various institutions so that no single one will possess enough to understand the nature of the greater whole, while at the same time revealing information to the public in slow but substantial increments: the first of which will come when Ford Motor Company wins the Higgs engine in an auction. The implementation of the new technology will relieve the world’s dependence on fossil fuel, altering the economy as Ford himself did with the Model T and the assembly line.

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