The Patchwork Quilt: And Other Fateful Tales

By John Margeryson Lord

Another collection of sixteen intriguing stories in which fate plays its cards sometimes to the advantage of the situation in which the characters find themselves but often to upset carefully arranged plans. The tales range from the title story where two nations are at war over a sacred artefact, to The Race with two men vying for the same woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Nov 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466968738

John Margeryson Lord

John Margeryson Lord is a qualified professional engineer, now happily retired and writing books and stories to keep the brain working.

Book preview

THE

PATCHWORK QUILT

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AND OTHER FATEFUL TALES

By

John Margeryson Lord

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©

Copyright 2012 John Margeryson Lord.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4669-6875-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-6874-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-6873-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012921702

Trafford rev. 11/16/2012

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CONTENTS

Notes:

The End Of Everything

A Measure Of Love

As One

The Dream

The Patchwork Quilt

Control By Machine

In Two Minds

All That Glisters

A Murderous Plan

Freedom

Cortain 2114

The Link

Two Much

The Voyage Of The ‘Second Wind’

The Race

Maintaining Standards

NOTES:

Dedication: This book of quite short stories is dedicated to all those who have assisted me in getting my books printed and published, without whom I would never have had the pleasure of seeing my hard work brought into being and for which I owe them all a great debt of thanks.

People: All the characters in the stories are figments of my imagination and are not intended to represent any real individual either alive or dead.

Note: The final tale illustrates my view of the afterlife and is not intended to be taken seriously and as such I trust that it will cause the reader no offence.

JML

THE END OF

EVERYTHING

Ever since he came to live in the village he had this handicap. He was clearly used to it as his ability to complete most tasks demonstrated. In fact many who saw him relaxing in the local with a good pint would be unaware that he had a problem. It was his left arm which was damaged. From the elbow to his wrist, his arm was just a shrivelled black stick, unpleasant to look at, and virtually useless as an arm. A blackened ball was all that was left of his hand. However he kept it well hidden, and being naturally right handed he managed must things quite well. A casual observer knowing of his difficulty would often offer help when non was required.

Richard Simmings was, on the surface, a thoroughly normal male in his prime at a healthy thirty five. Good looking in an intellectual kind of way, he was also blessed with generous personality. Indeed if one ignored his arm he was well built and undoubtedly handsome being very popular with the ladies.

He lived on his own in a house that he had modified extensively to enable him to cope with the usual daily chores. And judging by the always neat garden he managed very well. He was even able to drive his modified sports car which rested gleaming on his drive.

He had had a number of relationships with the opposite sex, but these had stopped short of the intimate physical side, a factor which had always resulted in a sad and sometimes prolonged break up. It was in fact Richard who drew the line in the sand, sensitive as he was to the effect that a sight of his handicap would inevitably have on their love making.

He was also quite well known. His training as a physicist and with a degree in engineering and his ability to create clever solutions to all manner of problems quickly made him locally well known. He even gained approval at the ‘big house’ when he was able to resolve their poorly designed central heating system and with a very clever modification solved their problem.

The cry ‘Have a word with Richard Simmings he will fix it for you—for certain.’ Was the usual response to someone describing some unique failure of some modern item of equipment.

He was specially good with electronic devices and systems, so far with not a single failure to his name.

There was a mystery though—no one knew where he came from. Or where his wealth came from, his background was a complete blank, and his answer to prying questions was the inevitable—‘Sorry I don’t remember—it was so long ago.’

But Richard had a previous life, and a successful one, that is until his ‘accident’ put a stop to it.

In the village he appeared to be well adjusted and pleasantly normal—but there was however obviously something wrong.

His house was situated on its own some distance outside the village. People who had ventured there reported someone screaming loudly as if in great pain. But knocking on the door resulted in a pale faced Richard standing there trembling. ‘It’s OK please don’t worry, I am fine—thanks for calling—Goodbye!’

And they would be faced with a closed door.

The secret, for that is what it was, began early in Richard’s life, where the cause of his withered limb was buried.

His early childhood was normal, a rough and tumble boy grew up into a tough rugby playing youth with a keen interest in everything scientific. Top of the class in physics he won an honours degree in physics and in engineering at one our better red brick universities, where he stayed on to do some fundamental work relating to the structure of matter.

At this time he found himself captain of the university rugby team, and at the local he was known to ‘chuck a good arrow’ but was not selected for the darts team due to a certain inconsistency.

His father new little of the science which was beginning to take a hold on Richard’s imagination, and so was unable to warn him of the potential danger of what he was now beginning to see as a lifetime ambition. His much younger sister was just a bystander.

He was about twenty when one of our industrial giants with associations with the university heard of his interest and offered him a job. And a very good job it was, a well equipped laboratory and associated staff went with the un-refuseable salary. The company tried not to interfere but clearly wanted a return on their investment. And so Richard was constrained to limit some of his more adventurous experiments. But even within these limits he had every opportunity to pursue his ultimate ambition.

The question to which he addressed his main curiosity was—MATTER—stuff—substance—what were the ultimate building blocks.

The firm was so universally powerful that Richard had access to all the latest results from the LHC—the Large Hadron Collider. This undoubtedly gave him the edge over others working in the same field.

As he delved into the structure of atoms and then the behaviour of those particles which made up those atoms he began to wonder what would happen if we were to change just one of the immutable governing constants like Plank’s Constant.

Currently thought to be around—

6.626068 x 10-34 m Kg/S² i.e very, very small.

Or Pauli’s Principle which states no two electrons can occupy identical energy states no matter where they happen to be—not just in an atom but in the whole universe!

It happened, like these things sometimes do, by accident. Richard was performing a routine experiment in which the frequency of the applied field had to be set at a specific value obtained from a chart of theoretical numbers derived from a series presented in a book of tables. In his eagerness to get going Richard inadvertently turned over an extra page in the reference book and set the wrong value. He had performed this procedure many times. The equipment he was using had been put together over several years and had cost a great deal of money. High powered laser beams were fired into a special vacuum field which was kept electronically neutral. It was hoped that two electrons in the target might be persuaded by means of a very high powered magnetic field to occupy a single energy state, thus breaking Pauli’s principle. No one knew what would happen should this succeed and dire warnings had been voiced by the usual sceptics, which he ignored.

He had conducted this routine a number of times and already had several months of data to check. In each run the target was dismantled and examined under a powerful electron microscope for significant changes, but so far none were seen.

However on this occasion the result was TOTALLY UNEXPECTED. When Richard came to examine the target instead of a tiny pellet of Palladium with a smooth clean surface, The Palladium exhibited a minute black spot so tiny he almost missed it.

Richards next move was a mistake.

He had a date with an attractive lady colleague for which he was already late. He therefore ran the equipment down and placed the target with the others for later examination.

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The date was a success and an engagement was hinted at. However they sensibly decided to take a holiday together in order to be sure. Sensible people these scientists.

It was therefore a lengthy and pleasurable two weeks before Richard returned to the experiment. And a further two weeks before that particular target was due for examination.

Richard was again working on his own, although in keeping with the rules there were two other employees in the office next door.

It was then that Richard got a shock. It was to change his life.

The target still had the black spot but then turning his blood to ice Richard saw that the black spot had GROWN. It was still very small but it had doubled in size. Before it was just visible with the naked eye but now it was quite noticeable.

Richard was shaking, his mind exploding with theories and possibilities. But first, he told himself, the facts must be recorded. He set to writing the results as he saw them, but he was still unaware of chosing the wrong page when setting up the experiment.

Unsure as to what to do next Richard decided that he needed time to think.

He therefore placed the strange target in its own box in the sample safe, switched off the equipment and left the lab.

But he had started off an extremely fundamental reaction, of which he was still unaware.

HE HAD STARTED THE END OF THE UNIVERSE.

Further vists to the lab convinced Richard that the hole in the target was growing and that inside the hole was a very very empty nothing—not even a vacuum. He noted the change of size of the hole over a period of several days and although its rate of increase was slow it was nevertheless exponential, and would speed up to an unstoppable speed.

He was now thoroughly frightened and had no idea to whom to turn for help.

Think. He had to think. Surely if this thing could be created it could be destroyed—BUT HOW?

Rough calculations suggested that it would have consumed the safe in which it was presently contained in about eighteen months give or take a month or two.

His biggest doubt was—should he involve someone else? If so who? Could they be trusted not to try and employ the phenomenon to make money? Also to do so would use up extremely valuable time.

No he decided—he and only he could be trusted to do the right thing AND DESTROY THE HOLE. Or at least stop its growth.

Richard decided to devote two weeks to trying to find out how it happened in the first instance. And so he began to retrace every move of that day when he calculated the hole must have come into being. In doing this it came to him that the only variable was the frequency chart and he cleverly assumed that it must have been the page before or the one after the one he should have used.

This he determined had resulted in a wrong choice of frequency. And using new values he stumbled on one which would, under the conditions of the experiment create a point in space-time in which nothing could exist.

And which—WOULD START TO GROW.

BUT HOW TO STOP IT?

The raw mathematics he had employed to create the problem had to be the key. He realised that this would take time—TIME WHICH HE MIGHT NOT HAVE. But he had no choice. And so began his fight against sleep and loss of accuracy as he re-did the calculations adopting one for each frequence on the two pages of the tables.

AND THE HOLE EXPANDED—EATING, if that’s the right word, EVERYTHING HE USED TO TRY AND CONTAIN IT.

Richard was a driven man.

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