It seems to be Fate itself rubbing your nose in the stupidity of your own youth day after day. Who knew that someday Arrowsmith University would become the town's biggest employer? On the one hand, you consider yourself lucky that, in spite of your blowing off high school and scoffing at any chance of going to college, you became so adept as a data clerk that Arrowsmith saw fit to hire you. You've done reasonably well by Arrowsmith, and it by you. Yet you are surrounded on all sides by far more efficient souls who always took education seriously, who are making their way rapidly through the great checklist of life. Rewarding career? Check. Great home? Check. Hot wife? Check. Babies? Check. Not so for you.
As you drive onto the Arrowsmith campus that morning, you already see some students out and about, and that increases the existential torture. Sometimes it feels as if Playboy or Hooters or Sports by Brooks or some such business is really running Arrowsmith. Oh, to be a classmate with some of these fine shapely young women. If only ... if only ...
On a whim, you park briefly outside the small but mysterious CEPTR building. You shake your head, wondering how Dr. Sosthenes Boltflower could get away with such an obvious scam. He was selling "electroportation," the idea that deep space probes need not be launched by rocketed by "projected" deep into space, but rather that their atoms could smashed here on Earth and then reassembled, say, in orbit around a moon of Jupiter. CEPTR, Center for Electroportation Transceiver Research -- really! One of your favorite movies is "The Fly" -- the original, with Vincent Price in a supporting role -- and it seems just as crazy now as then. You think of a joke you once shared with your drinking buddy Steve, concerning the Star Trek transporters. "How do those Heisenberg compensators work, anyway?" "Very well, thank you!"
Still, to be able to get on on some of the cash that Dr. Boltflower was able to squeeze out of his crazy project, that alone would be sweet. You shake your head and then get moving, to another day at your clerical job. |