CHAPTER 1: A Meeting
The first time I saw Jack Faust I knew for sure he was a pilot. He stepped out of his truck right in front of the main entrance of one of the test sites on the tip of Florida, the farthest eastern tip; right on the Keys. It was a bright day, and a swift breeze from the south blew dust past the strips of lights scattered for miles on the ground. This was back when I still carried a leather brief case around, and at that point I was still very fond of it, so as I walked to meet him I turned slightly and hobbled against the wind, trying to protect my leather brief case from the whipping wind and sand. “Hello!” He cried out, very cheerful. That is the way it is with pilots; they don’t say very much, but when they do talk it is very cheerful and short and to the point. His manner of speaking was very crisp, and I felt a little like an idiot when I responded, “How are you?” It seemed as if my words got lost in the miniature dust storm that had whipped up around us.
I could tell a lot about Jack from the truck he drove. It was very old, but not in a nice antique way. It was just old, like the men you meet outside of barbershops waiting to get their weekly haircut, despite the fact that their hair is very white and thin around the edges. Some cars and trucks are old in the way that old people on television are. Polished old. Jack’s truck was ancient, and it seemed to be falling apart slightly. When he exited the driver’s door, the suspension creaked and groaned and small avalanches of rust cascades off the bottom and the sides by the wheels.
He was wearing a black leather jacket over a worn gray t-shirt. You could tell it was a shirt that he worked with; it was thin in places where vigorous washing and bleach had been utilized in a constant war waged against drops of machine oil, grease, and dirt. That was the way it was in general with Jack. He was very clean, very neat, but thin in certain places. He was worn, well used, and his personality reflected that. He acted like a man that had seen a lot of the world, and met a lot of people, and made his conclusions and was confident that nothing he would experience stood a chance of changing those opinions that he had worked so hard to make. I don’t mean to say that he was stubborn in his ways, or negative in his intolerance. He was just well worn, like a belt that bends at the notch where you have tied it every day for 20 years.
I was a bit more of a mess than Jack. I had just gotten out of college at that point and was still reeling from the tremendous influx of knowledge that had poured through my brain. That is the way it is with college; they pour knowledge over your brain and you try to suck up as much as you can like a thirsty plant. At the end of it all, they wring you out and see how much you have absorbed. If you’re lucky, they slap you on the back and hand you a diploma and leave you lying on the side of the road trying to reabsorb as much learning as you can from the dirt before the sun evaporates it up. My friends say that my narcissistic attitude about college was in fact just one small part of my larger cynical nature, but I can assure you that I am overall quite an optimistic guy, and that the events of this story will prove that to be the case. I just don’t much like college, that’s all.
So, like I said, I had just gotten out of college when I first met Jack. I had studied aeronautics and engineering, and I could recite equations in my sleep. During my final year in school, I had in fact become a bit of a robot, and like a machine I would process variables and situations like a lightning bolt, quick and fast. Of course, in the process of all of this education, my social skills became slightly degraded, and so I will be the first one to admit that I wasn’t the coolest cat for the first couple years after I had gotten out. I had, only a few months earlier, published my first paper. I had been working with an old professor, Dr. Michael Iota, in developing a brand new way of cooling engines. It involved a lot of magnets, and rotating ion channels, and a lot of subatomic particles that whizzed by a series of conical convections tunnels made out of some really great brand new carbon material. It was fantastic and brand new, and the entire experience of developing it and testing it was very fun and exciting for me, considering at the time I figured I could get my name out there and secure myself in the scientific community.
A few weeks after we published, I got a call from someone named Mr. Shepard who said he represented a Mr. Bento who worked in the military, but firmly insisted I call him Mr. Bento, and not Major Bento or Colonel Bento or whatever rank he was. I can’t remember for the life of me. He may have even been a General for all I know, but I finally got the chance to meet with Mr. Bento approximately ten minutes before I met Jack Faust. Apparently, by some fluke of chance, my paper had landed on the desk of some bigwig, and they wanted to see me in person to discuss an issue of material science that was relevant to some new program or project. They flew me down to San Antonio from Dallas, where I was met at the airport by a couple of Air Force officers who carried my bags for me and addressed me as Doctor. This was an extremely exciting experience for me, as I had only two months before earned my doctorate and still was having trouble adjusting to the new title. Anyway, they drove me down to another smaller airport. I could tell that this was a military airport because there were no children anywhere, and the only people in civilian clothes either looked very angry or very sad. My two officer-chauffeurs brought me to a dusty tarmac where a small two-engined plane was waiting. Inside there was a small man dressed in a very neat suit who kept talking to me and asking me how I was. I eventually learned that this man was a Mr. Karl Dagen and that he was one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists of all time. At the time though, all I could pay attention to was the brilliant blonde sitting across the copious aisle from me.
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