Angels from Rikenny

By Richard Stein

Richard Dinsmore, the worlds most brilliant physicist, and a paranoid schizophrenic, believes that aliens, led by a beautiful humanoid female, Noraa, are coming from the planet Rikenny, fifteen light years away. Dinsmore claims to be a time traveler, who lived through the dystopian future that followed mankinds accepting a gift from the Rikennians. Since no one believes Dinsmores tale, if he is correct, mankind seems destined to suffer the disasters described in Report from the Future, a handout distributed by Dinsmore to the students in his physics for premedical students class. Brian Brandenburg, a student in the class, doesnt believe Dinsmores tale, but he has an idea of how Dinsmores warningtrue or notcan be brought to the attention of a wider audience.
Angels from Rikenny is a tragicomic science fiction tale written for science fiction fans as well as for people who dont ordinarily read science fiction. It is a time travel tale written for those who enjoy time travel stories as well as for people who get headaches when faced with the paradoxes of time travel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499072976

Richard Stein

Dr. Richard Stein is an emeritus professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University. He and his wife live in the Forest Hills section of Nashville but spend winters in Del Mar, California. He is the author of six previously published novels, including The Dana Twins & Related Matters, Angels from Rikenny, three Jonah Aaron-Elana Grey mysteries, and one previous Caitlin Logan mystery entitled Spoiler Alert.

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Ric3hard Stein.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014916561

ISBN:      Hardcover        978-1-4990-7296-9

                Softcover         978-1-4990-7298-3

                eBook              978-1-4990-7297-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/16/2014

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

674441

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Epilogue

CHAPTER ONE

B Y HIS FIRST birthday, Richard Dinsmore had a vocabulary of over three hundred words. When he was four, his mother, Nora, found him leafing through the pages of her old college algebra text and was shocked that he was able to explain what he was studying. When Richard was five years old, Nora - who had been widowed when Richard was two - took the obviously gifted child for psychological testing. She watched through a one-way mirror as her son excelled in pattern recognition, block design, similarities and vocabulary. The examiner had administered the test hundreds of times, mostly to adults. Never had a test subject performed so masterf ully.

Here’s the last question, Richard. If six men can dig eight holes in sixteen hours, how many holes can nine men dig in twenty-four hours?

Before the examiner could lean back in his chair, Richard Dinsmore answered Eighteen. Why are they digging the holes?

Eighteen is the correct answer. I’m not sure why they are digging holes. But, I’m curious. What steps did you use to solve the problem?

There are no steps. The answer is eighteen.

The examiner smiled. There have to be steps.

For you there are steps. For me the answer is eighteen.

No steps?

The four year old thought it over for a moment. One sets up a matrix in one’s mind and solves it. He saw that the examiner was frowning. Well, the first data set defines a function; the number of holes is man-hours divided by twelve. When that function is applied to the second data set the answer is eighteen. The reason I asked about why they were digging holes is I thought it might be a trick question. If they were digging trying to find something, they would quit when they found it. I suspected that was beyond the scope of the test.

The examiner cleared his throat. Yes. It was beyond the scope of the test. It’s been nice working with you this afternoon.

This wasn’t work. It was fun.

The testing showed that Richard’s IQ was unmeasurable, but at least 200. As his mother worked as a research assistant in a cancer biology laboratory on the campus of Brown University, Richard was enrolled in an experimental school on the university campus. After two months, the child was working at a sixth grade level. Surprisingly, he got along quite well with the students in his class who found that he could often explain things far better than could the teachers. The faculty marveled at the child’s ability.

When Richard Dinsmore was seven, and again when he was eight, he won the National High School Mathematics Contest with the first perfect scores in the history of the competition. While his teachers were capable of keeping the young man’s mind stimulated, the man who determined the savant’s career choice was the local pharmacist, Carl Riley. To drum up business for his pharmacy, which was struggling in competition with the national chains, Mr. Riley placed a huge glass jar filled with jelly beans in the window of his store and asked people to guess the number of jelly beans in the container.

While most of the citizens of Warwick, Rhode Island were content to guess, eight year old Richard Dinsmore, using calculus, derived the formulas for the volume of an elliptical solid, such as a jelly bean, and for the volume of the container. Once that was done, it was a simple matter to divide the volume of the cylinder by the volume of a jelly bean and get the correct answer -or so Richard thought. His answer of 1167 had not taken into account the fact that jelly beans would not occupy all of the cylinder; there would be some air left between the jelly beans. A local postman, with less than a high school education, had guessed 1161 - the exact number - and had won a one hundred dollar prize.

Richard Dinsmore became fascinated with the concept of absolute precision and he became interested in the notion of seemingly empty space – at all levels. He decided that physics would be his life’s work. In the fall of 1992, four months before his ninth birthday, he entered the freshman class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While Nora Dinsmore was proud of her son, she was also frustrated with the situation. Nora was doing her best to provide for Richard and for her twin girls, Bethany and Laura, who were a year older than their brother. Scholarships paid for her brilliant son’s education so while money was not hemorrhaging out, neither was it flowing in. However, almost every day, Nora Dinsmore complained, Richie, what good is all that theoretical nonsense about time travel or travel at the speed of light? There doesn’t seem to be any practical application. Can’t you do something that has some value? Those two boys are no older than you and they are making their family wealthy. Those two boys, as Nora referred to them, were the Dana Twins, a country-pop crossover act. Like many girls their age, Bethany and Laura slept under posters of the two androgynous pre-teenagers.

Richard Dinsmore resented having his life’s work called nonsense; he resented the fact that his mother called him Richie instead of Richard; most of all, he resented being compared to two boys whose total IQ, he suspected, was less than his own. Richard couldn’t have cared less that the young boys with the dulcet sound were putting hit after hit into the top ten and would eventually sell eight million albums in the process.

Ironically, Richard Dinsmore’s fortunes would be forever linked to the Dana Twins although the two young boys pictured in the posters and on the cover of their two best-selling CD’s had one major shortcoming – they did not exist.

One summer night in 1995, Cory Bayliss, a talented songwriter from Poplarville, Mississippi, had arranged for a prepaid recording session at Nashville’s Lightning Bug Studios. Unfortunately for Mr. Bayliss’ singing career, he arrived in Nashville an hour early, went to a strip club, and before leaving the premises, urinated on the side of the building. He was arrested for disorderly conduct and, as a result, missed his appointment at the recording studio.

The musicians had prepared the arrangements for Cory Bayliss’ songs and the sound engineer and his assistant, a sixteen year old boy named Jonah Aaron, had been awaiting Cory’s arrival. Jonah had even invited his cousin, Brian Brandenburg, also sixteen, to observe the session. Jonah and Brian were not as intelligent as Richard Dinsmore. Then again, no one was. However, the boys ranked among the top five students at Nashville’s Andrew Jackson Academic Magnet High School, one of the finest public schools in the nation.

Some new computerized sound equipment had recently been installed at Lightning Bug Studios and when Cory Bayliss failed to show, Jackson Daniels decided to experiment. Using the voices of Jonah Aaron and Brian Brandenburg, along with Jonah Aaron’s computer wizardry, the sweet, innocent sound of the Dana Twins was produced. Despite the fact that the work reflected the songwriting genius of Cory Bayliss and the technical competence of the musicians and engineers, no one at the recording session felt that anything of significance had been accomplished - except for Jonah. Having a precocious sense of commercial potential, Jonah believed that the album would sell, if marketed appropriately.

Still, if not for the fact that Brian’s father, Milton Brandenburg, was a promoter and a major figure in the Nashville entertainment business, nothing would have come of the recording. Brian and Jonah were both nearly six feet tall. Brian was thin and pale. Jonah had shoulder length hair and looked as if he hadn’t shaved in days. Their appearance was totally incongruent with the computer adjusted sound that would bear the name The Dana Twins. However, when the sweet music was paired with a photo-shopped picture of two blonde eleven year old boys, the jangle pop sound exceeded even Jonah’s expectations. Having signed a favorable royalty deal, both Jonah and Brian - unlike many recording artists who had been exploited on Music Row - became millionaires. Due to the foresight of their parents, the money was held in trust until they were twenty-one. Considering that the success of the Dana Twins depended on their image, neither of the boys ever took the credit - or what Richard Dinsmore would have considered the blame - for the sweet sound of the Dana Twins.

In June 1996, Richard Dinsmore graduated first in his class at MIT with a B.S. in Physics. By that time, he had completed the coursework necessary to obtain his doctorate and had only to complete his dissertation, a paper entitled, The Feasibility of Using a Matter-Anti-Matter Drive to Facilitate Travel near the Speed of Light. That same day the headlines in USA Today read Dana Twins Missing. The boys appeared to have vanished on the way to their first concert tour.

There were rumors that the plane carrying the Dana Twins had crashed and that the fact was being concealed to protect the sensibilities of their young fans. Another theory was that the boys’ father, a Fundamentalist preacher, had decided at the last minute to prevent his sons from going on tour. The simple truth, however, was that Milton Brandenburg had known from the beginning that he could never put Jonah and Brian on-stage as the Dana Twins. Instead of auditioning for alternatives, he had used what he privately called the tour that can never happen and the planned disappearance as a way to promote the album Dana Twins 2. It worked. The album sold five million copies.

The following spring, the Dana Twins’ final single, their version of the Mary Chapin Carpenter song, Quitting Time, failed to crack the top ten and the Dana Twins were on the road to oblivion. Brian Brandenburg, the president of his senior class, headed to New Haven, Connecticut, to attend Yale. Jonah Aaron, much to the chagrin of his parents, chose to delay his matriculation at Vanderbilt to work as a talent scout and investigator for Milton Brandenburg.

Hailed by some as the most brilliant theoretician since Einstein, Richard Dinsmore completed his dissertation. In 1998, he received both his doctorate in physics from MIT and an appointment as the youngest Assistant Professor in the history of that institution. In the months following his appointment, he published nine papers in scientific journals. Most of the manuscripts dealt with matter-anti-matter interactions, two of them dealt with the subject of time travel which the young savant described as highly improbable wishful thinking on the part of science fiction writers and a topic not worthy of consideration by serious physicists – at this time. Dinsmore’s future in physics looked bright indeed.

Sadly, on New Year’s Day, 2000, his sixteenth birthday, Doctor Dinsmore had a psychotic episode characterized by visual and auditory hallucinations and was admitted to the psychiatric service at Boston’s Mt. Moriah Hospital. After he had been there for a week, the doctors informed his mother that even with medications her son might spend his life in and out of institutions. Nora Dinsmore was devastated. She loved her son and realized that his social skills were limited, that his creative mind was all he had. She understood that not being able to trust his mind, not being able to tell reality from delusion, was the worst possible thing that could happen to her son. With good reason, she feared for his future.

Nearly two months after he was hospitalized. Richard Dinsmore left Mt. Moriah Hospital on an authorized home visit and vanished. Six days later, he was found wandering naked and alone in a farmer’s field on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine, in what had once been the village of Rikney. The Nazis had destroyed the village and slaughtered its mostly Jewish inhabitants during World War II.

Because of the military potential of Dinsmore’s scientific theories, Lowell Huntington, a psychiatrist on the staff of the Central Intelligence Agency, was flown to Kiev on Air Force Two in order to meet with the gangly physics savant. The interview took place at the Kiev City Jail in a small conference room with bloodstains on the walls and floor. The room smelled of tobacco and sweat. After introducing himself, Dr. Huntington asked the obvious question.

How did you get from your mother’s apartment in Warwick, Rhode Island to a field in Rikney?

I didn’t.

But you were on a home visit from Mt. Moriah Hospital’s Psychiatric Unit and you were found naked and alone in a farmer’s field in Rikney, on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine. That is correct, isn’t it?

Of course it is. But I didn’t come from Warwick, Rhode Island. I came from the future. I came from the year 2055 to be exact.

So it’s not true that you arrived on a trans-Atlantic flight like the Ukrainian authorities told the American ambassador?

Dinsmore shook his head. They couldn’t explain my presence, so they made that up. I came from the future.

Lowell Huntington had read Dinsmore’s hospital records from Mt. Moriah. While Richard Dinsmore’s research had dealt with time travel and travel near the speed of light, the delusions he had previously shared with his psychiatrists had made no mention of being a time traveler. Primarily, his hallucinations had involved an attractive blonde woman in her late twenties who generally advised the scholar to leave academia, get out and live. However, on other occasions, she told Dinsmore that he should work harder as when the time comes, you will be the only one who can save humanity.

Less frequently, Dinsmore had claimed to see a young man who looked at him with a facial expression suggesting either disapproval or dyspepsia. In contrast to the blonde woman, the young man never spoke a single word despite Dinsmore’s efforts to engage him in conversation.

Dr. Huntington had considerable experience dealing with delusional schizophrenics, but none as intelligent as Dinsmore was reputed to be. Okay. You came from the future. How did you get there?

By living fifty-five years in what was the present, one day at a time. How else would one get to the future? Time travel is a one way road. One can only go backwards! Dinsmore paused. If my tone just now was disrespectful, I apologize. As I have grown older, I have become less tolerant at times.

Apology accepted, but I have to ask, you look to be about sixteen years old. If you came from the year 2055, wouldn’t you be, he looked down at Dinsmore’s dossier and made a quick calculation, seventy-one?

Dinsmore nodded. I was seventy-one on January 1, 2055. I look sixteen because time travel backwards in time makes one younger.

Huntington sighed. Why is that? Why did you become younger?

I’m not certain why. It just happens that way.

Or maybe you are sixteen because you never have been to the future and since you claim to be a time traveler you need a convenient theory to get around the fact that you are only sixteen.

I can see why you would think that, but that isn’t so.

Dr. Huntington realized that he wasn’t getting anywhere and decided to try another tack. So if you are from the future, then somewhere back in Rhode Island, there is another one of you walking around, right?

No. No. NO! Dinsmore banged his fist on the table. A guard looked through the small window in the metal door to check that there was no problem. Dinsmore resumed speaking in a calm tone and Dr. Huntington motioned to the guard that everything was fine. When I arrived here in the past, the other version of me ceased to exist. Two of the same person cannot exist on the same planet at the same time. Didn’t you study the physics of time travel in college? Dinsmore looked down at the table. When he looked up, he was smiling. I apologize again. It momentarily skipped my mind that the quantum theory of animate objects wasn’t published until 2044. Of course you had no way of knowing that.

Dinsmore hadn’t heard the door open but he noticed that someone had joined them. Can you ask him to leave? This should be a confidential discussion between a patient and his doctor and even though he never talks to me, I doubt that he can be trusted with what I’m going to tell you.

Ask whom to leave?

Him. The young man standing by the door.

Except for Lowell Huntington and Richard Dinsmore, the room was empty.

There’s no one there.

Don’t you see him?

No, I don’t.

Dinsmore shook his head. Damn. He’s back. I knew I should have arranged to get back on my medications when I returned to the past. I mean it’s the present for you, but it’s both the present and the past for me.

Could you describe him for me, please?

Dinsmore stared in the direction of the door. He’s in his mid-twenties. He’s handsome. He’s well-dressed. He has a very sad expression on his face. I think he’s very unhappy with me.

Is there anything else you want to tell me about him?

Dinsmore shook his head.

Does he have a name?

He’s never told me. He never says anything. He’s never said a single word.

Dr. Huntington decided to take a wild stab at what the young man might represent. Do you think that he might be an older version of yourself?

Dinsmore shook his head. No. There’s no way he could be me from the future. He’s much better looking than I could ever hope to be and he’s older than I am. If he came from the future, time-travel would have made him younger and he’d be just as old as I am now.

That would be true if he were real, but would that apply to a hallucination?

Dinsmore thought it over. That’s an excellent point, but he’s not me.

Lowell Huntington made a note to get Dinsmore back on his meds. Why do you think he’s unhappy with you?

Dinsmore looked down at the table. He never has said. However, I used to think that he was unhappy with me because I worked so hard and didn’t have a personal life. Now, I think he may simply be unhappy because of the death of my wife and the fact that I’m still so attached to her memory. Like that hit country song goes, ‘I Forget to Remember to Forget.’

Dr. Huntington had read Dinsmore’s file during the transatlantic flight. He knew nothing about a marriage or even about a significant relationship. You were married?

From 2025 to 2040. She died… I’d rather not talk about it.

Can you tell me about your wife?

Dinsmore raised his voice. I said that I’d rather not talk about it. Is that okay?

That’s fine. Dr. Huntington knew when not to pursue a delicate line of questioning with a patient. He decided that he would instead focus on Dinsmore’s view of the future and would keep asking questions until he found a logical flaw in Dinsmore’s delusions regarding time travel. However, Dinsmore seemed to have an answer for everything. Lowell Huntington soon realized that if there were logical inconsistencies in Dinsmore’s story, only a physicist would be able to recognize them.

Over the next thirty minutes, Dinsmore told Dr. Huntington about the arrival of aliens from a planet called Rikenny in the year 2020. He informed the CIA psychiatrist that the alien leader was a woman named Noraa and that a dystopian planetary future began when the Rikennians gave us a gift, a wonder drug that turned out to be far from wonderful. Dr. Huntington considered it an imaginative tale, but he didn’t believe a word of it.

Excuse me for pointing out the obvious, Professor Dinsmore, but your mother’s name is Nora and the leader of the aliens was… is… I mean will be, Noraa. You were found in a place that was once Rikney and that you say the aliens were from Rikenny. It sounds to me like you have worked your life experiences into a rather complex delusional system.

"No. My mother’s name is pronounced NOR-uh and the leader of the aliens was No-RAH. The names are completely different. We set up the time machine in Rikney as an ironic comment on the name of the alien’s home planet."

Regardless of whether Dinsmore was a psychotic or a time traveler, not that the two were mutually exclusive, Dinsmore was an American citizen. Lowell Huntington arranged for him to be repatriated to the United States where he was re-hospitalized on the Psychiatric Service at Mt. Moriah Hospital. A transcript of the interview was redacted by the CIA then forwarded to the hospital to assist the doctors in dealing with their patient. Two months later, after he had been placed on higher doses of anti-psychotic medications, Richard Dinsmore was discharged from the hospital to be followed in the out-patient clinic. Though his non-tenured appointment at MIT was not renewed, Yale University offered him a teaching position.

Instead of being assigned to teach a graduate seminar or an advanced physics course, tasks for which he felt extremely well suited, Dinsmore was given what he regarded as the odious task of teaching Introductory Physics for Pre-Medical Students. He knew that no one taking the course had a serious interest in physics. However, the Medical College Admission Test included a section on physics as if physics had anything to do with the practice of medicine. Having spent time in hospitals, Dinsmore thought that future patients would be far better served if their doctors were required to take courses in psychology or even acting classes that taught them how to pretend to show compassion. However, he accepted his assignment.

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Richard Dinsmore walked six blocks from his apartment to the Physics Lecture Hall on the Yale campus. On the Friday morning before the midterm exam, the foliage had started to turn autumn colors and there was a faint smell of burning leaves in the air. I haven’t seen as beautiful a fall day since… 2049, he thought.

Suddenly, an attractive woman with blonde hair began to walk beside him. No, Richard. I remember the day to which you refer. It was in 2048, exactly eight years to the day after your wife’s death. You were walking to the cemetery. You know, you should have them decrease the dose of your medications. The fate of two planets is in your hands, and the way you are now, you are never going to come up with a solution.

You’re right. It was 2048 not 2049. And you will be pleased to know that I cut back on the dosage of my medications on my own. Trying to do complex physics on that much medication was like thinking through a web of cotton candy.

Good. When the time comes for you to save the people of Earth, you have to be up to the task.

The hallucination vanished as quickly as she had appeared.

Sedated by his anti-psychotic medications, some of which he was still taking, Dinsmore barely managed to smile at the custodian who let him in the rear entrance to the science building. He ascended the stairs to the stage, stood behind the podium at the left side of the auditorium, and looked at the American flag at the right side of the room. Without making eye contact with a single student he gave a fifty minute lecture without once looking at his notes.

Dinsmore concluded the lecture with the same words he used to conclude every lecture. If you have any questions, the answers are in the handouts. The handouts were superb and, in 2006, they would be compiled to become Dinsmore’s best-selling textbook, Physics and the Theory of Time.

After every other lecture, Dinsmore had immediately left the building through the same rear entrance by which he had entered the lecture hall. On this morning, however, after taking a few steps towards the exit, he stopped in his tracks. I almost forgot. He returned to the podium. I have a special handout. It’s called ‘Report from the Future.’ None of the material is on the exam, but you should read it anyway. It describes the future of the planet. Well, it’s the future for you but it’s the past for me. Hopefully one of you will think up a way to keep it from happening.

In a mere six paragraphs, Report from the Future described the key aspects of the dystopian future that Dinsmore had described to the CIA. He had attempted to publish