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have some sort of visible identification other than just my dog tags," she
said.
"Ready. Now, can you run with your ribs?" I asked.
"Yeah, I'm just a little sore. Are you going to make it? Any more dizziness?"
"I'm fine. Let's get out of here," I responded.
"Which way?" she asked as she scanned the area.
"Path of least resistance," I said pointing to the tornado's track.
We started running at a slow pace and watching our footing. At least we were
on sand. The Spandex footies in the LCVGs helped some. I wish we would've had
shoes.
"Tabitha," I started, "if we have ten miles to run, and to be safe say, we
have an hour and forty-five minutes to do it, then we better run nine minute
miles. No problem with shoes on and no bruised ribs.
Can you make it?"
"The ribs aren't hurting so bad right now. The sand is okay to run in. Let's
hope that we stay in the sand. How are you doing?"
"Good. Nausea is completely gone now and my nappy old karate feet will take a
lot more damage than this. Besides, I invented the warp drive!" I mentally
patted myself on the back.
"I was thinking about that. Are you sure?" Tabitha asked.
"Sure about what?"
"How do you know that you broke the speed of light? We didn't have any of the
science instrumentation operational to measure our velocity."
"Couldn't you just have kept that to yourself!" I joked. "Okay let's do the
math for worst case. We were about three hundred kilometers from Earth. The
Earth blinked out and then we were here. The time inside the bubble seemed to
me to be about a second or two. Do you agree?" I took a sip of water from the
tube hanging over my right shoulder.
"Yes, I agree with that. Even if you consider the start time when we saw the
blue light flashes around us, there was still a second of delay." Tabitha saw
me drinking water and decided to do the same.
"All right, then we'll call that three hundred kilometers per second or three
times ten to the five meters
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per second. Light speed is three times ten to the eight meters per second. We
were three orders of magnitude short. Hey that's still faster than any human
has ever traveled."
"Maybe the transit time really only took a millisecond but we have no way of
ever knowing that do we?" She asked.
"None that I can see. The blue light probably was Cerenkov radiation but who
knows. Whether we broke the speed of light or not, our propulsion came from
warping space. We were still the first humans to travel with warp drive." I
looked at my watch. We had been running for about twelve minutes. We still had
a long way to go.
An hour or so had passed when I noticed a break in the trees at the edge of
the
Finger of God path that the tornadoes had made. "Let's veer toward that
opening in the trees."
The opening turned out to be a logging road. This was most definitely a
planned timber grove. It could possibly be a state forest. Sometimes when
fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. tear through a park pine trees are planted
to fill the holes and protect from erosion.
"I need to breathe for just a second Anson. My side is -hurting."
"Only for a minute or two Tabitha. We have to keep -moving."
"Okay. We'll keep walking, just slowly for a minute or so." She held her side.
We stopped for a second. Then started walking.
"So, any ideas where we are?" I asked her.
"Not really. The air feels like the southeastern United States to me though.
It has to be ninety-five degrees and at least eighty percent humidity. It is
almost like Titusville. Every now and then I even think that I can smell the
ocean." She continued to hold her side.
"Yeah, I thought I could smell salt earlier also. Are you sure you're okay?"
"I have to be, don't I." She made the last statement as more of an order to
herself. It was definitely not a question.
"Hey stop!" I yelled. "Don't step any further." Tabitha obeyed but she looked
at me very confused.
"What is it?" She took a defensive posture.
"Tabitha, without moving look down about two feet in front of you." She did
and if it were possible to sweat more than we already were, she did so.
"Anson, I hate snakes!"
A small colorful snake was sunning itself in the sand on Tabitha's side of the
logging road. I slipped way around so as not to startle the snake and found a
tree limb that was about four feet long. I broke it off a sapling that was
overhanging the road.
"Come here, fella! You're all right, mate!" I did my best Steve Irwin
impression. I made a slight disturbance behind the snake with the stick and it
turned away from Tabitha. "Okay, Tabitha, slowly back up, then come around to
me mate. Whoa, you're okay, mate." The snake struck at the twig a few times.
"Would you quit talking like that!" She did just as I had told her although
she was obviously annoyed by my sense of humor.
"Red touching black you can pet him on the back. Red -touching yellow will
kill a fellow." I recited the poem that my dad had told me when I was a kid.
"You mean that thing is poisonous, right?" Tabitha held my shoulder, keeping
me between her and the snake.
"Well, at least I know where we are now. With this vegetation, the sand, and
this little coral snake, which by the way is more poisonous than a
rattlesnake or at least as poisonous. Though it is kind of like comparing
apples and oranges since they carry different types of toxins. I digress.
Anyway," I
continued, "I would guess that we're in south Alabama, Georgia, or northern
Florida. I'm not quite sure
why we missed our mark so far. Probably a miscalculation of the frame dragging
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effect or something.
Maybe somebody is fiddling with the laws of physics and not telling us." I
laughed at the thought of that.
Then I remembered that Tabitha's parents lived in Florida and began to wonder
just how much damage our return home had caused, would cause. I hoped that the
tornadoes had blown themselves out before they reached population centers. I
started to bring it up but Tabitha had enough on her mind with the physical
pain and all not to mention the mental pain of losing several of her long time
friends in the
Shuttle explosion. We didn't dare think about that.
Keep moving soldiers; we'll mourn our brothers later.
"We better get back to moving," Tabitha nudged me away from the little snake.
"G'day mate." I said, tossed the stick away, and we began running again.
We ran quietly for the next four or five minutes. I let Tabitha set the pace.
She must have been feeling better because we were cranking out probably
seven-and-a-half-minute miles. The terrain was rather flat.
It was easy running except that we had no shoes and were both wearing Spandex
long johns. The sandy roadbed became slightly more compacted and there were
fresh tire tracks on it.
"Tire tracks," I said.
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