The Bridge between Galaxies: a Sci-Fi with Imagined Aliens
by Nathaniel Bates
The aliens looked like very small elephants. They often spoke to Carl in a soft voice and Carl had to strain to listen. “The Physics you are teaching to your High School students is all wrong.” According to their still small high pitched voices, the creatures traveled all the way from Andromeda through a wormhole to explain that there was no conservation of energy. If time was properly quantized, then free energy was possible. “Your own Heisenberg Equation states that DE*DT³ h bar/2…” and from there Carl was transfixed. He tried to follow them as their superior minds told of reverse black-holes gushing out energy from what amounted to an infinite sea of energy. That energy could be tapped. Energy would be available to the masses if only the oil companies did not suppress the wisdom of the elephant aliens. It was not only the First Law of Thermodynamics but the Second Law that could be undone also, with entropy becoming order in order to pattern a paradise Earth. Carl had become a bridge between galaxies and the salvation of the human race.
The next day he stood before his classroom and explained what the extraterrestrials from Andromeda had told him. The laughter of his students was not a laughter of recognition. The Head of the Science Department, Dorothy Stahl, was called in to reason with him. “You are teaching pseudo-science,” she said. Her voice was compassionate but adamant. The school had a reputation as it was in a wealthy area. Carl’s “sudden revelation” that Quantum Theory could be reconciled with beliefs in suppressed free energy would bring the disrepute of the scientific world on them. In addition, Carl’s claim that oil executives were in league with the lion shaped aliens trying to eat the elephant shaped aliens would offend those parents that worked as executives for oil companies.
Carl was allowed a medical leave of absence. He checked in to a psychiatric care unit. The head of the Department did not rejoice, but she could see no other option than to encourage Carl to undergo psychiatric treatment if he wanted to keep his job. Coercing him like that was technically illegal, but with the Federal Mental Health Act passed in the 2030’s there was the credible threat of involuntary commitment if someone was deemed to be a potential revolutionary. It was passed in the wake of the attack on the Federal Reserve by the alliance between the neo-Marxist Anarchist left and elements within the libertarian right. If Carl was deemed a threat to the oil companies who had successfully nationalized the armed forces of the United States and put them under themselves, he could be committed to an insane asylum.
Word of Carl’s claims made it to the underground remnants of the “Autonomist” Neo-Marxist Anarchists and their rival underground resistance movement the libertarian Militia of Freedonia. They both wanted freedom from the oligarchy, though with different models to replace it. But both saw Carl as a possible hero. Some among the militia members even believed it was possible the elephant aliens were real and could save humanity. Masses of Americans who remembered the old Republic with nostalgia but who did not identify with either revolutionary camp still wanted free elections. Many of them wanted a Bridge Between Galaxies to lead them. The assault on the mental hospital, like the assault on the Bastille centuries before, was more symbolic than actual but it got Carl freed. The oil Directorate fell and elections were held.
Carl regained his job while a new President of the Second Republic was elected. He walked into his classroom to the cheers of students newly freed from despotism. Meanwhile, in orbit around Earth, a small orbiting disk became a scene of an animated conversation.
“We were just having a little fun with him!” The small elephant aliens protested their innocence. “Besides, their planet is free thanks in part to our little joke!”
The senior commanders yelled at them. “Still, you taught him rubbish pseudo-science. Free energy! Bah! Don’t you know that this will set their science back centuries? The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics are not optional! You crazy nuts may have restored democracy but you have undone their technological advancement. Get down there right now and explain you were only kidding!”
After the elephant aliens let Carl down gently, he expressed disappointment but realized he had to correct the record. The first person he spoke to was Dorothy Stahl. Carl explained everything to her and she shot back, “Pseudo-science. Pure pseudo-science. Have you no understanding of rational science? The only way to obtain free energy is to vibrate the pure sound of crystal lattices through water. It is the secret that the time travelers from the future told me before they disappeared due to altering their own timeline!” Dorothy muttered on about hidden sparks of energy found in water along with warring timelines between good and evil future worlds. She made up her own mind about the real suppression of energy by the Deep State that continued even in to the Second Republic, the new democracy which had already made a disappointing truce with the old oil oligarchy.
Carl decided to keep his “delusion”. It was probable that the aliens were only testing him. It appeared that rationality was in the eye of the beholder. Meanwhile the oil oligarchy’s representatives in Congress were footing bills to defeat alternative energy experiments by mainstream scientists who had no zeal to be lumped in with claims of aliens or time travelers, but who in that way were detrimental to their funding. Indeed, elephant aliens and time travelers had advanced technology while the revolutionaries had zeal. None of them had money.
