Many Moons

Gravitational Escape

After another two hours of questions, they finally had me drawing pictures and helping them to create computer models. Ms. Parminder's fingers flew over the laptop and she was able to create almost instantaneous images of whatever I described to her. It was very impressive and, it occurred to me, not terribly unlike the butterfly demonstration. They just used technology as a crutch, to enhance their belief that something they imagined in their mind would manifest, only in this case two-dimensionally.

Finally, the questions stopped and the laptop closed, and I was taken to a large theater-style room with a sixty foot projection screen and seating for over a hundred people. Almost every seat in the room was full. The people all looked more like the two doctors and the miss and less like agents.

On a long, folding table were assorted parts of machinery and equipment. I recognized them from the workbench in my garage.

I was escorted to the front of the room by Agent Necessiter, and told to have a seat. Dr. Epping was set to address the crowd when Agent Necessiter approached him.

"Dr. Salarico will address." Necessiter said quietly. Dr. Epping looked like this was a most absurd scenario.

"But—"

"Salarico believes, Doctor Epping. And if what the kid says is true, that's an important part, maybe the most important, of making this work. We need them to believe too."

Dr. Epping was about to object when the agent put his hand on his elbow. The doctor shrugged off the assistance and took a seat at the far end of the stage.

Necessiter approached Salarico, who a few seconds later approached the stage. Ms. Parminder was running her laptop again, projecting an image of my initial sketch of gravity onto the massive screen. The lights dimmed and the show started.

The sketch morphed into a high-definition computer model of how gravity worked in Dirk Matter's Omniverse. It was all based on five simple panels in the comics that I had actually forgotten about writing until they showed them to me.

When they slid the two open pages in front of me, I remembered why I had bothered in the first place. Dirk Matter flew in a Gravity Class spaceship that was capable of entering and exiting not only wormholes, but black holes.

The ship was cool as hell, too, with these red stripes and a huge center engine thing that could double as a gun if it backfired. The cockpit area was off center which was an obvious homage to the Millennium Falcon, but the rest of it was a lot of stuff I created.

Since this defied the conventionally accepted laws of physics, and by that I mean the wormhole part, not the off center cockpit or the red stripes, I needed a convenient device whereby a ship could enter and exit black holes.

As it turns out, those five panels were the reason for my abduction, and in them rested the hope of the scientists in the room.

During the interrogation they admitted that conventionally accepted laws of physics could not explain why the moon left, where the universal sound came from, and how we were going to get the moon back. Somehow, years earlier, my comic had been flagged by the National Security Agency for follow-up but sat, unnoticed and uninvestigated, in an archive and on a database.

After the moon drifted away words like gravity and dark matter and thousands of other words were tagged for immediate follow-up. My comics were pretty low on the overall list for review, but they had exhausted the other leads. Ironically, near the end of the particular issue where I explained why gravity exists and how it actually works, I also describe how to move a moon after it's been knocked off orbit.

In the comic the shift was caused by an alien race who were trying to use the moon as a missile to destroy the planet below, but I suppose the theory of how Dirk put the moon back into orbit was the same as they were hoping it would be for our own moon.