Chapter 15

David was watching a group of small herbaceous Theropods grazing on what looked like some ferns. He was looking for a pet of some kind and the odder, the better. Most Theropods were carnivorous, he knew from researching Wikipedia about dinosaurs, but some, like these little guys, were plant eaters. He didn't know what they were called and didn't care. He just wanted a pet.

David thought he was in the late Cretaceous as he'd seen plenty of flying Pteranodons, large herds of Triceratops, and Parasaurolophus, those big noisy trumpeting guys with mouths that somewhat resembled ducks bills, that made such a racket, all of them roaming in herds out on the flat lands near drainage areas or hovering over the ancient cliffs he would later live on himself.

David was in and around home, though millions of years in the past, and had merely gone back in time, using the device, looking around and taking videos he'd post for public view and speculation, on some far away library computer on a video site, or from a campus, somewhere, just to stir the pot and mess with professor's minds and theories, which he knew from observing, where all so off the mark that they should have their PHD's rescinded. I guess they're doing the best they can, he thought, with the information they have available, but boy were they wrong about almost everything from the past.

David had hoped to catch some video of a large predator but didn't see any. With the stasis ring turned up high, he was in a bubble and in slightly moved up speed, he was invisible at the moment. He wanted to see how scared these smaller guys would be of him and turned off the device. His sudden appearance startled a few, but they didn't run from him. They merely watched him for a while and when he didn't display any aggressive movements, they just sort of moved along, eating as the went. They were cute little things, about half the size of a grown kangaroo and colored like the sky and the plants they were eating with dark vertical stripes on their sides and long tails. They were quick, too. They'd have to be to survive in a violent world like this, David knew.

He wondered if he should take any of them, at all, back with him because with Britney and Angela as regular guests, wouldn't this peg him as one of the guys that had exotic animals on his property? And through that, draw attention to himself as the possible culprit who was bringing animals from the past back to this day and age, which he didn't want in any form, such as in criminal law suits or accolades? He knew somehow, somewhere, someone would say something if they saw some dinosaurs in the cage up slope from his house. Girls just didn't keep things to themselves, he'd experienced.

He'd, of course, been bringing back several species of extinct animals for some time and setting them loose in their old areas or giving them to collages, etcetera and etcetera. Ever since he'd discovered how to tweak the device's tech to travel through time, he'd been having a lot of fun with that ... Their was an uproar of controversy going on in academia, too, but he didn't care much about that, except for comic relief. Where they came from and how they had suddenly come back from extinction, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah was raised to such a level of in fighting amongst professors, it only proved to David once again how inept the academic system really was ... If they would merely quit fighting each other and squabbling over who was right, or, who's paper was right about whatever subject, or, who's name was on it, science would be leagues ahead of where it now was, and that was why he had excelled when so many others had fallen in line with everyday theories of the past and especially in physics, his field of specialty. But it was fun hearing about those debates among the 'learned people' in universities across the globe, yet, he had remained quiet. He had to keep himself isolated from such stupid, run of the mill, locked in educated knowns, and all the self limiting thinking, as well as its scrutiny. He just enjoyed all their squabbling, to some extent, how vanity and ego ruined, stifled, misled, or stopped completely the progress in scientific investigations.

Those little guys on his property, he'd once kept, some tiny dinosaurs that multiplied like rabbits, he'd given them all away, too, or let them loose. And another species of unidentified dinosaur he'd brought back, once, had proven too much for him, even though it was only a small meat eater, the fearless little sucker liked attacking him too much, even though he enjoyed having his head scratched. After several new pairs of jeans had been torn up, not to mention skin scratches, David had take that little guy back in time and put him back where he belonged. But these guys he was looking at, he wasn't too sure about them, now. They might be a bit too much to handle. They were larger and heavier than any of the dinosaurs he'd brought back. Maybe he'd go look for a pet dinosaur, or something, somewhere else, in time. Besides, he didn't relish the idea of trying to house train something like one of those active things, neat freak that he was; and he'd hate the smell they'd probably give off, after time. Reptiles were not meant to be caged.

He finally gave up on bringing anything back, this time, and continued to record a lot of visuals with his camera. Of some interest to him was the way those flying reptiles, the Pteranodon's, moved around in the sky. They looked so clumsy on land, or even hanging from their cliffs but up in the air, they were graceful and interesting to watch.

David reversed time and quickly sped back to his time in the world, enduring the swift passage of time through the ice ages, the swift graying of the sky, and watched his house instantly appear as he slowed down in time. He walked into the garage, seeing that the door he'd left open was still open, and went in to count down the exact day and hour he had left, and now returned into it. It was quite precise with the sophisticated timer he had on display, just inside the door, as he liked returning to the exact moment he'd left.

The air always seemed so much thicker when he returned to the twenty-first century, but knew it was nothing more than less oxygen in the air than back then. He shut the door with an electronic switch, listening to the steel rollers crunch pieces of sand along the iron rails. It sounded like grinding but it didn't hurt anything. He sat heavily on a high stool, next to the long work bench in the garage, and leaned on his elbows over some blank engineering sheets.

David considered the silica, that dust and dirt under the wheels of his door. He thought of all the angles and facets to small particles like them, tiny bits of sand that could move light around so vividly, though in less intensities, and considered if a propulsion system could be made by incorporating their properties of diffusion, in a different kind of propulsion system. He doubted he could top the devices ability, as it was unlimited, but it would be some metal exercise, and he needed that every day. There was nothing wrong with the device's propulsion as it was costless, limitless, didn't give off heat, pollute, and was easy to use, but he had been thinking about light, off and on, as something that could work, too.

The sun produced energy and particles came flowing and exploding off its surface continually, though they would be vastly different than what he was thinking about, so why not try to build something that could do the same, in some way? Move things, objects, just like a star, or a jet engine, only in a radically different manner.

The concept seemed all to easy and why he hadn't considered it before was surprising to him. He made some sketches on paper, wrote out a couple of formulas, used his new mathematics, using his mind to calculate what it would take to move one gram of matter with light and came up with a workable theory.

But having figured out that is was possible, how could he multiply the light into so much flowing energy and to such an intense degree that he could build something that would actually work? The challenge fascinated him.

He knew he would need things other than what he could build in his shop, maybe, with something like engine parts out of jet planes that might work well, especially for the nozzle technology, but configured uniquely, or would he? His device only had a few moving parts. He would need a multiplier, too, something that would boost the initial light source into something scary, in terms of power. The first step was to build a working engine and see if it actually could do what he thought it should, even with all the impurities in stones and minerals. Knowing it would work, to some degree, David started going through his steel supplies in the back end of the garage. He found a big ingot of forged molybdenum steel and took it over to his sophisticated machining table, on a small trolly, of course. It was quite heavy. There was some trouble getting it up on the main milling surface but he went to work on the piece right away, figuring most of the initial design out in his head. For several days, he worked on it alone, though the two girls interrupted his work, a little, but he'd gotten pretty far along.

More days passed by and before too many and come and gone, David had a crude model made up for test firing. He added just a particle of sand and spread it out in the inner chamber. The light hitting the facets of the granules would scatter the light, multiply its exit points and increase the light, in theory. From there, the multiplier would take that light and increase it by several hundred millions of times and there you were, thrust. Again, in theory, but he was certain it would work. The math was right, the engine should function, he thought, adjusting last minute things. At the last second, as he was almost ready to flip the last switch, and David rushed to open a garage door, then tilted the bean down into the dirt and gravel, outside the garage. The beam should hit a spot about seventy yards away.

It kicked up the dirt and rock but melted the ground into a black, semi-opaque glass. Sheeze! And that was just a little bit of sand. He looked at the table he had the engine on and was glad he had it bolted to the concrete flooring. It would have shot the heavy metal engine out through the back wall if he hadn't, if his readings from the computer, nearby, were correct about the thrust this thing had created. Cool. His idea worked.

The next few days, David tried several other substances and found that ordinary table salt seemed to work better than most things, and it was quite inexpensive. He would order some more exotic transparent granules of other minerals in weeks to come, but for now, he was satisfied with the engines performance. He wondered if he should give this tech' to area 51, or some other branch of the military, and then thought better of it. Naw. They'd just use it for military stuff and destroy people and things with it. The more he thought about it, the more he became less enthused and again, decided to keep the idea to himself.

"What is this thing, David?" Britney asked one day, walking in through the garage with him, on a visit to her new and only boyfriend, ever. David usually kept a tarp over it, but hadn't covered it up when she called. He probably had to be more worried about Angela. She knew engineering and might figure a few things out.