Elsewhen

By Gary Bullock

True romantics and science geeks, the love story you have been waiting for!

A scientist makes two stunning discoveries: First, his lost soul mate is alive in an alternate universe, and second, the Earth is doomed.

Science prodigies Lije (Elijah) Grant and Laura Bess Austin have been soul mates since they were kids. But as Laura Bess is flying off to college, the plane goes down and all aboard are lost. Lije is devastated; the love of his life is gone.

Lije grows up to become an astrophysicist, living a minimal existence, tracking boring space junk, night after tedious night at a radar station. Then one evening, he notices a satellite suddenly veering off course, disappearing into deep space.

Investigating, he discovers that it is the work of a small black hole, and it is coming closer. The Earth has maybe two weeks before Armageddon.

And thats when Laura Bess walks up to Lije in a coffee shop and says "Hello, stranger." The future just isn't what it used to be. Neither is the past.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gary-bullock/elsewhen/

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: May 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781458203939

Gary Bullock

Originally from eastern Tennessee, Gary Bullock is an actor and writer. In past lives, he has been a software engineer, radar operator, Hollywood apartment manager, and DJ. One of his passions is building and flying model airplanes. He lives in western North Carolina with his soul mate, Mil Nicholson.

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Copyright © 2012 by Gary Bullock.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0395-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0393-9 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0394-6 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012909079

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Abbott Press rev. date: 05/29/12

CONTENTS

Preface

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Epilogue

Notes

For Mil

Here’s looking at you, Love.

The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

Sir Arthur Eddington

British astronomer, 1882-1944

Preface

This story had its beginnings several years ago, when I worked at a radio astronomy site. Although a science-fiction story, it is at heart a romance, and is based on my belief that nothing truly good ever dies, that Love is all that really matters, and second chances are always possible, in any universe.

I owe a debt of gratitude to many dear people: Irene Bedard, good friend and consultant for the American Indian elements of the story, also Playwrights 6, the writer-actor workshop in Hollywood, where I developed Elsewhen, my fellow actor members of P6 who gave it its first reading, and Barbara Niemczak for her insightful and invaluable detailed notes on the manuscript.

Finally, thanks to my partner in all things, and the light of my life for many years, the incomparable Mil Nicholson, for her support in just about any cockamamie project I want to try.

Prologue

It was a crystalline night crowded with stars, the sort of sky rarely seen except far from the diseased fumes and light of cities; a sight that can make even the most celebrated of our species feel awestruck, and small.

Suddenly a large dark wedge plowed through that night, scattering stars, planets, and galaxies alike in its wake, as the prow of a birch bark canoe slid across the glassy lake, reflecting the rippled, glittering sky.

The silence was broken by the strokes of a paddle wielded by an Indian woman. Clad in buckskin, she wore a fetish charm of a white bird on a rawhide thong around her neck.

Her wise and ancient eyes gazed from a young and sublime face toward a glow in the sky, where an enormous comet arched over the horizon. She stopped stroking, and let the canoe drift toward a growing mist in the center of the lake.

The mist glowed faintly as she entered it, enveloping her, until nothing else was visible, blinding, and then blending into the billowing cumulus clouds of a spring morning.

As the clouds broke open, she found herself wingtip to wingtip in a flight of Snow Geese returning to their spring mating grounds, honking among themselves, soaring over the greening patchwork quilt of a prairie farm community hundreds of feet below. In the distance, a white dot on the corner of a green patch grew larger as her flock winged its way toward a small white country church.

Chapter 1

1970

The Reverend Timothy Thurston paused in mid-sermon, the silence broken by the distant honking of a flight of spring-migrating geese, and the soft snoring of—there she is—Mrs. Harken. If only she would, he thought, looking down at his notes to stifle a grin at his private pun.

His topic was Eternity. Perhaps this best described the length of the sermon, since most of the congregation was by this point, semi-somnolent. Funny, he thought, it’s like a scoreless baseball game, or worse, cricket, (which could go on for days). An experience not unlike eternity, as the old seminary joke went.

Tim Thurston was a recently minted Reverend, graduating from Union Theological Seminary in New York, magna cum laude. He was the white sheep in a family of black sheep, from the wilds of urban Pittsburgh, and the only one in his family to attend any center of learning beyond the second year of high school. His undergraduate major had been English literature, during which time he fully fed on Dickens, Trollope, Milton (of course), and Lewis Carroll, among others. This was his first parish and, after a year, he had finally gotten used to the rural pace of life. And his congregation was slowly growing accustomed to his use of literary references other than the King James Version of the Bible.

But there were two in his flock riveted on his sermon. Three, actually, but he didn’t count Mr. Osborne, a little elderly man with a perpetual smile on his face, immaculately dressed always, with a Roman Catholic rosary worn as a necklace. Mr. Osborne was not your typical protestant. Not typical at all. The rest of the congregation charitably pretended not to notice.

The two shining little faces, all of eight years old, hungrily absorbed his every word. Laura Elizabeth Austin and Elijah Grant sat together, their parents on either side.

Laura Bess had the penetrating gaze of intelligence, with a serenity of wisdom beyond her years, which could switch in an instant to mischievous laughter. Her large blue eyes dominated her face, framed by Nordic blonde hair, usually in pigtails. She was also an athletic little tomboy, wearing at least two Band-Aids at any given time. Today she wore her best Sunday white dress. Any other day of the week she would be uniformed in mud-caked jeans and a flannel shirt, and boys had better beware—except for Elijah Grant.

Elijah, or more often Lije, was her best friend. He seemed always serious, with a little-old-man way about him. When he wasn’t looking at the ground with a wrinkled brow, he had the thousand-yard stare of a combat veteran. Lije was always studying something. If not Thurston’s sermon, then it might be a problem in beginning calculus, or the physics of hyperspace. He often became so absorbed that he would see things he couldn’t explain. He didn’t worry his parents about it, but it sometimes made him a little queasy. He too was dressed in his Sunday best.

Both sets of parents eked out a living as farmers, but they didn’t expect their children to follow in their footsteps. They knew that both Laura Bess and Lije were special.

They were geniuses.

As long as I am reaching those two, thought Reverend Thurston.

"And what is eternity? he continued, looking directly at the two children, Try to imagine it—endless time. Imagine yourself going down a road that disappears in the distance over a hill. Just like our long, long prairie roads that stretch from horizon to horizon. Now, no matter how long you walk or how fast you run, you never reach that distant hill."

He opened a small book and held it up to read.

"In Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice to run:

‘Faster! Faster!’ And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. …Alice looked round her in great surprise. ‘Why, I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!’

‘Of course it is,’ said the Queen, ‘what would you have it?’

‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d