Chapter 1

David Evans rode out the storm of deductions in his mind only to have logic tell him, for the umpteenth time, that it would not work. Logic said in wouldn't but his idea and his new math, said it should. He knew the figures were correct. He knew it.

His abilities in mathematics, physics and, most importantly, their practical application, was his talent. I just wish I could come to the corner and turn it, he thought. I'm right there, right freaking there, but I can't find the way to walk around it.

He'd been working on an idea concerning time for sixteen months. To stop it or slow it to a point, that it would seem stopped. Every professor he'd spoken to, on three separate campuses, merely smirked as if to say, How cute--you dumb kid, and then dismissed him and his idea as a dreamer's foolish thought; Or had been just as sickeningly condescending.

"You'd have to have more electrical power than three States could generate to do anything with time," one of them had told him, "to even consider stopping or slowing it down. To hold time in place, as you suggest and try to move through it, would probably kill you. You wouldn't be able to breathe much less maneuver through the air molecules. I'd give up that thought, son, and move on to something more challenging. Don't waste your time," the closed mind of one professor had warned.

'Challenge'! The dolt didn't know the meaning of the word.

David knew that once gained, stasis inside the stoppage of time could safely be negotiated. "It wouldn't be much more different than normal time except you'd be the only mover through it, as long as you had the device on you," he'd tried to tell them; but they wouldn't listen. But the, 'Don't waste your time, young man, ' the professor had counseled, kept David determined and going these many months. Like most upper classes the professors taught, they were almost always a disappointment to him. With two doctorates under his belt, and a third assured, David had little use for professors anymore, except Professor Stiles, who'd become a kind of friend.

But the condescension of other professors only made David that much more determined. Almost every Prof' he'd dealt with or met had no feel for theoretical physics, in his mind, stuck in the accepted ideas of the day. And they're all wrong, he determined. I know they are and I know I'm right. You can't lie to mathematics. It'll catch you every time.

Perhaps it was my presentation? he smoldered. I won't actually be stopping time, just my passage through it. I'll be isolating myself from the general movements of the local quantum world. David had proven this to himself, if to no one else. He had the figures in a folder each time he met with one of the 'elite' of the college professors, to try to prove it to them. But the old men and women wouldn't even look at the math and figures and scoffed when he'd reluctantly admitted he had made up his own branch of math to solve his theory. It hadn't been that hard, for David, because he'd done it before with a subroutine on the same project, but hadn't told anyone. Specialized math for specific problems was not an accepted field, either. But it was only the practical application that was hindering his progress at the moment. Stumping him for the time being.

David knew it to only be the process, this frustration to discovering his goal, but was anxious to find the solution and gain his deserved relief.

After graduation and three dozen companies vying for his brain, and particularly the U.S. Air Force, he'd put his life on hold at the ripe old age of twenty. He'd been able to concentrate on the problem fully the last couple of months of the Spring, but he had to come up with something soon, before this month was out because, I'm running out of money to live on. I'll have to take that stupid assistant teaching job for Professor Thompson, when I do, if I haven't got this thing solved by then.

David looked at the milling machine in the college's engineering facility and again at the new component part he'd just finished, that night. He questioned if he'd made the last mill correctly, concerning the new part, and checked it again with the micrometer. It measured, "Right on the money," he mumbled.

The thought of money made David think again about what Professor Stiles, his friend, and mentor, in the early days of school, had said: "Say you could stop time, David. What would you do with it? Steal money? Watch women take showers? Take revenge on some bully with less abilities than yourself? There's no real reason to stop time. Not an honest one."

"It could give us an advantage in national and international security," he countered.

"What, sell it to the CIA, the FBI? And the government wouldn't take advantage of it, would they?" Professor Stiles suggested. "They would use your genius to disrupt the world to their own particular brand of philosophy?" Professor Stile's position on government grants was well established. He thought they were bad ideas with too many strings attached. "It would be too dangerous an ability for any man, or group of men, to own, not to mention a government."

And that made David think twice, for Stiles, himself, had been burned on two occasions by the military complex that had used his ideas to make who knew what. Weapons were usually the ticket.

David had made his decision, shortly after his excited announcement and subsequent rejection that this invention would be for him. And "Why not," he said to his reflection, shaving one day. "I don't have anything. And it's my idea. I tried to make them see and they refused. Even professor Stiles."

He quickly reassembled the parts, all seven of them, and tested it. Nothing. The clock on the wall's second hand was still moving. He took the rather simple construction apart, again, and laid them out once more, thinking. "What am I missing?" he asked himself. "It's right here in front of me and I can't see it."

Frustrated, David sighed. He reassembled the pieces once more and decided to call it a night. His back was aching and his eyes kept watering behind his round lensed granny glasses, like his father used to wear; "When I was a hippy," Dad used to say. Both he and his mother taught mathematics, though she taught at a Jr. college.

David looked at his watch. It was a little after one a.m., now.

The device was the size of an old silver dollar and about three times as thick. It was an elegant looking piece of machined metal. The case was made from an exotic stainless steel, very expensive, and smooth as polished chrome. It had one push button, he'd modeled after an Omega stop watch from the pawn shop, along with a small protective hanger loop for the lanyard. David had made the lanyard from an old hiking boot, an old shoe string. It was thick and black, but it wouldn't unravel at the tie and was strong as hell. He kept the device hung around his neck at all times, except when he was working on it.

On one side of the disc, David had inserted a protective clear crystal and beneath it a small electric scanner that read his own particular code to his body. It wasn't DNA--exactly. That would have been too complicated and taken too long to cycle. It was something entirely different. That's what his other branch of math had been created for. The scanner merely prevented anyone else from using it. It was something, again, he'd figured out and wasn't telling anyone it's details about, like the device, and both being relatively simple ideas, to him. The hardest part of the whole operation was machining the stainless metal, to make it water proof, as well as figuring out exactly how to place the various items in the containment field of the steel casings. The seals that kept the device water proof was a major pain in the butt. David had finally got it but it had been hard to accomplish and very time consuming.

The thinking of the consul, he received from various minds, was so very wrong, David thought. It wasn't about electricity. All one had to do was distort one very small molecule, isolated and held in place with magnets, holding the device, and you and anything nearby could be immune to the restrictions of normal time. Everything else around you would cease to move and the barer would be immune to aging within its field. It was too simple. Way too simple and David couldn't figure why anyone in history hadn't thought of it before this.

He gathered up his things and stuffed them into his narrow hydration backpack, including the small booklet of coded tech data, in mathematics. He put the device around his neck, as usual. Then took his red Firenze bicycle, he'd found in a dumpster and had fixed up, converting it to a single speed from a fifteen for simplicity, and because it was cool, and rolled it to the door. Propping the door open, he went out, locking the shop then dropping the keys in the outside key box. David put on his leather gloves and knitted watch cap as it was a bit too cool to ride without them. It was already approaching Spring, there, near to the border of Canada, on the U.S. side, yet, not quite warm enough for David.

He liked to go through town along Highland Drive, at night. It was the most lit up and he didn't have lights on his bike. They always got stolen when he'd parked the bike outside, as a student. He peddled through the thick cool air, enjoying the feel of the Canadian wind blowing off Superior and on to his face. Peeling off on 29th street he went uphill, two blocks, till he got to his little apartment complex, off campus. He shouldered the bike and was about to climb the stairs to the second floor when he thought of the bike frame and how it hurt his shoulder. It dug into his tendon.

The shoulder-- The Shoulder. YES! THAT WAS IT. He'd solved it.

David put the bike down, almost dropping it, and sat on the steps under the yellow lamp light of the porch. He took off the device and opened the back. With his Swiss Army knife, David adjusted the shoulder about seven degrees more to the right of the stop pin via the concentric screw. If that isn't it, he thought, then I'll just go back one degree at a time. It's somewhere in there. He screwed the back on again and swallowed. This was it, he told himself. Now! Where's a car when you need one.

Hurriedly, David bombed back down hill to Highland Drive on his bike and waited for a couple of minutes before a car appeared in the early morning air. Anxious, he shifted his weight from foot to foot, time and again, till the car was half a block away. Gently, he pushed the button on the device.

Nothing. The car was still coming.

David pushed the device again, harder. It was a stiff spring. The car stopped. The device worked. He yelled and jumped for almost a minute, yahooing and whooping like a lunatic. He pushed the button, once again. The car moved as David bent over laughing.

There was an all night gas-n-go, a block down the road, and David pedaled like mad to it. The attendant was reading, he noticed, riding into the lot. David punched the device then pulled down his ski-mask. The guy hadn't moved or seen him park his bike against the glass or walk in.

"Hello," David said. There was no response. He took the magazine, laying on the counter in front of the guy, and turned it upside down, went to the back of the store and watched. He punched the device. The guy drew back, seeing the upside down magazine. He straightened it and David hit the button again. He repeated the sequence twice more, laughing more each time. He took a picture of the guys frozen face as he left. He always had a little digital camera in his tee shirt pocket. Then he took off.

When he had ridden up the street some distance, he stopped the bicycle and pulled the device out, again. David let time return to normal, pushing the button, lifted, and refolded his ski-mask. There were cameras inside and he didn't want his face recorded, even for this. I don't know what kind of tech is being invented everywhere, all the time. I've got to be extra careful. They just might be able to reconstruct a blur. You never know.

The following morning, David realized his need for money, again. David had less than three hundred dollars in his account.

The First National Bank of Ireland had done him a number the first year of college, at the tender age of 13, and David had never forgotten it. The bank itself had nothing whatsoever to do with Ireland, he'd found out long ago, just a snappy commercial name to make some fat cats fatter. David chose them for his little joke and that very morning, after just four hours of inadvertent anxious sleep, he went down town.

As before, he wore his gloves and ski mask pulled down, a block before he got there, even though it was getting warm. Stopping time, he walked into the bank and then the vault and took bundles of ones and fives, denominations that would less likely be on record. Some bundles were the badly worn ones, some were new, and some just wrinkled. He stuffed them all in a big backpack and left on his bicycle. He did this once on that bank, then rightly considered, If I come back to the same place, every day, they might start recording the numbers. So for almost three weeks straight, he went to a different bank each time, collecting small bills only, and caused quite a ruckus in the papers, but he'd amassed a small fortune by then. He'd quit when he'd had enough, depositing only a few ones in his little account, in small increments, though, it now amounted to quite a sizeable figure of almost a thousand dollars. That was enough for day to day bills. But he had amassed almost a hundred thousand altogether. It looked more innocent that way, too. The bulk of his money, he kept in safe deposit boxes scattered all over the city.

David's apartment had gotten too small for him and he rented a medium size house and filled it with stuff he'd always wanted. All the silly dreams he'd ever had concerning material goods had been fulfilled, especially with computers and games and almost anything electronic. There were comic/movie conventions he'd never been able to attend and there was always one, somewhere. He took advantage of his new wealth in sci-fi and gaming gatherings, in computers and DVD's, and sci-fi books, wide screen TV's, and one gigantic stereo system that was guaranteed to cause deafness in three hours or less, and of course, a dream motorcycle, which he thought long and hard about.

He always wanted a Harely-Davidson Sportster like his dad once owned. He liked the old style racy look of the engine and their sound. David had seen something on TV, last year, about the worlds fastest street Sportster. It was a dragster, but still, something like it could be made street usable. He thought, before he'd ordered it, "What's stopping me?" He called up the shop, in California that had built the dragster. After almost an hour of talking and idea exchanging, David had made arrangements for one to be built somewhat along the same lines as their 'naked bike', the drag bike, only he wanted an engine less racy and more dependable--and licensed for the street. "Money was no object," he'd told them and suddenly, they were very very cooperative, extending the call to get more and more detail out of him. They had now been working on it for over six weeks and it wasn't suppose to be finished for a month or more. It was very specialized, what he'd asked for, and couldn't wait to take delivery.

David had been an avid fan of bikes, for years. He'd done research, interviews, and followed motorcycle racing, flat-track and road racing, mostly, making notes, piecing together his dream bike but never having the money to get it built, though hoping he would, someday, when he was done with school. He had stacks of performance magazines scattered all over the place, dreaming about it, but now that he could actually afford one, he was excited, to say the least.

David went home, after one shopping spree for video games, thinking about his dream bike, and ordered a full set of custom made leathers via the Internet. They were street-racing leathers called the, Stealth-Combo. They were the very best for motorcyclist riding on the road, in his opinion, but unlike out and out racing leathers, they were a two piece system with built in armor and vents for hot weather, a zipper, built in belt connected the pants and jacket pieces. And they were skin tight. They looked sick. He got knee high racing shoes, too, that covered his shins. They were dirt bike boots but he liked the look of the five buckle straps on the side and they matched the black theme of the outfit. A thousand dollar black helmet and gauntlet gloves, from Japan, rounded out the riding leathers. The helmet, especially, looked great and was the best he knew of. It weighed less than two pounds. He was gonna be bad looking.

David wanted desperately to tell Professor Stiles of his success, that the device actually worked like he said it would, but couldn't, now. He was a thief and living on stolen money. David felt some shame concerning the matter. "No. This was best. But I can never tell anyone about the device." He didn't want for anything. Except, maybe, a girlfriend. But that would come when the time was right. He was only twenty after all. "I'm having too much fun without one," he thought. "'Women just confuse you and take you from the things you love doing'." He'd heard it a thousand times before, from other students more experienced than himself. But he still liked looking at them. Often, after buying things down at the mall, he'd just sit on a bench and watch girls, his age, prancing by in their summer-light clothes. Often he'd take detailed digital photographs of them, after stopping time. "Something about them always gets to me," he thought. "Bouncing boobs, mostly, I suppose." But even women got boring after a time, and irritating. They just couldn't keep from constantly chattering away about nothing.

Something Professor Stiles had told him once came to mind, one day in the mall, watching girls. Why he'd thought of it then, David didn't know. He'd said to him, "Everything in nature or a person's life has an opposite: Light and dark; Pleasure and pain; Ease and difficulty..." It gave David pause thinking how easy getting the money had been. If what Stiles said is true, then I'm due for some kind of balance. Some kind of trouble. This HAS been way too easy. It worried him not just a little. But wasn't the difficulty getting the device to work, his balance? He respected Stiles and his thoughts but he wasn't certain about any of it. He had been right, after all, about the idea of stopping time. There was no honest reason for trying to make it happen, even though he'd succeeded in making his device a reality. He shrugged it off, forgetting about it, as two pretty girls approached.

Playing a driving motorcycle video game at the mall, another day, David realized something, mumbling to himself. "Waite a minute. I don't really know how to ride a motorcycle."

He dropped what he was doing and went to the local Kawasaki shop and talked to a sales person about learning. She was a girl and claimed to have a racing license. She had no boobs, he couldn't help but notice, and wondered why athletic women never did. He told her about his ignorance of riding and she signed him up for a riding course on the spot. Then she sold him an Enduro style street/dirt bike. It took three days to complete the course and then he took delivery on his bike.

It was a medium size motor, in c.c.'s, (cubic centimeters), just a 650, but a tall bike. At five ten, David was just the right size for it. It had plenty of power to learn with. As his salesperson had said, "It's something you can grow into. Just respect the power of it, at first, and you'll slowly get a good feel for what you can and can't do, and how to maneuver the bike safely in traffic. Practice as much as you can in the dirt. It'll teach you skills you'll need for the street."

And learn, David did. He was out in traffic somewhere every day or in the hills east of town. He got so he could fish-tail the rear, do U-turns on the spot, hop it, jump over rises, maneuver around objects, and almost do a feet up donut. They were the hardest. He saw what other riders were doing, out there and tried doing the same, practicing the things he saw them do over and over. He even got to the point where wheelies were easy because they were. Like doing wheelies on his old BMX bike.

He rode out into the country side, too, on and off roads, learning the joy of fast high speed touring. He camped out in national forests and campgrounds learning what it was to ride solo. And what it was like be your own independent man, at one with your machine and the landscape. He was having a ball.

He went through one front and two rear tires before the phone rang one day from California. His Sporster was done. Ecstatic, David dropped the video controls, for a game he was on the verge of cracking the final sequence to, and made a call to one of the airlines. Tomorrow at eleven he'd leave to get his new bike, his dream machine.

The flight was inconsequential except for the woman who got on in Los Vegas. She was shorter than David so when he looked in her direction, all was revealed. She wore a low cut flimsy dress with her deep cleavage falling out of her thin as paper bra that seemed to show every contour and image of her breasts. They were very distracting on the way to L.A. She was always leaning over for this or that in her hand bag at the right of her feet giving David full views. David naturally gawked but looked back into his paperback book when she began to straighten back up. He almost wanted to talk to her and get to know her better, but he was way too shy. Plus, she had to be at least fifteen or twenty years older than he was. Boobs or not, that was way too old for him.

It was almost fun, not caring about money, on his trip. He flashed it around without a care, taking a taxi seventeen miles to the shop near long beach, paying in cash. Arriving at 3:37 p.m. that afternoon. He lavishly tipped the driver a hundred dollars with twenty fives.

The shop, from street side, was particularly unimpressive, even with three finished, shiny racing bikes on display in the small front lobby. It belied the fact of the garage area, where he was taken, after paying for all the odds and ends and final payment for the bike. It took long enough to count it all out. All he had was a big bundle of fives. But everything in the shop was clean and professional looking, as if it, in its self, were the showroom.