Chapter 1 (partial)

I had received a hand-delivered message that one of my teams had a possible lead on creating anti-gravity. Sending it by hand was the only safe way to the moon.

We had codes upon codes at this point, but we had groups like the secretive NSA working full-time to break our codes. There is no doubt that they could do this. Most people had never heard of this agency. The only reason I knew of them was an off comment made by a President.

I wasn’t even going to say which President. I didn’t think NSA was aware I even knew they existed, which is fine. The UK and China have agencies like that, but I don’t know their names. All I can do is act as though they exist and act appropriately.

Such a change from Hollywood actor to Head of State. Don’t they know it is not polite to read another person’s mail?

That reminded me I had to check up on our program to intercept all messages sent through Earth satellites and a computer center on the moon to decrypt them. Yeah, I’m becoming a hypocrite.

Back to the anti-gravity, I made a quick trip to Earth to check up on May-ling. That was my Announced reason.

Upon landing on Earth at the launch center, I was approached by a supervisor I knew well.

“This way, Your Majesty, we have a conference room arranged for a briefing.”

“Thank you.”

Waiting in the room were two people I had met before. They were from Jackson Research. They were older, in their early thirties.

“Thank you for meeting with us, Your Majesty.”

“Forget the titles, and I’m Rick.”

They both relaxed their stiff posture at that. I suppose they had never met a King before.

“I’m Tom, the Division Manager, and this is John from the team which made the discovery. Rick, you sent a sample of exotic ore found in the asteroid belt. We had several teams working on them. John’s team came up with some curious results. John, would you share those with Rick?”

“Your, uh, Rick, We refined some of the sample and then made a thin coating out of it. We wanted to see how it would adhere to other substances. A one-meter square of steel was coated with the refined metal, which still has to be named.”

“We hadn’t tried to control its thickness at this point. Once the melted metal solidified, we ran several tests to see if the materials were bonded or if the ore would peel off easily. It didn’t want to separate at all.”

“We needed to bring the ore back to red hot before we could begin to scrape it off. Even that was a long and tedious process. A technician was assigned to heat the metal and use a chisel to remove the ore coating.”

“The technician went on his lunch break. He left a piece of test equipment on the workbench. He didn’t realize that the electric cord was in contact with the coated steel plate. Since the plate was hot, it melted the electric cord.”

Cast in Time Book 6 Available in June 2024!

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More details coming soon.

Earl E. (Ed) Nelson

I have always wanted to be an author. I had my first rejection slip in about 1965. Wish I had saved it. For many years the only writing I did was technical as pesky things like three children, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren came along.

My technical writing was in the field of quality in several different journals. I worked in the field of quality for over fifty years, starting as a line inspector and ending up as a Vice-President of Quality and elected a Fellow of the American Society for Quality.

Then a wonderful thing happened. I lost my job and was out of work for almost eight months. To keep from going crazy I wrote. I posted my stories on an online site, and lo and behold people read them and said nice things. Fast forward about eight years and I am retired and writing for the fun of it.

A lot of what is in my stories is based on my life experiences, gasp! Give or take a lie or two that is. The one fortunate thing in my career is that I got to travel worldwide and have been to most of the locations I write about.

In my younger days, I tried hot air ballooning, sky diving, white water rafting, spelunking, and target shooting. I have collected stamps, drove in road rallies, lowly rated by the US Chess federation. I built a Kentucky long rifle and a dueling pistol. I am a licensed HAM radio operator. My hobby is having hobbies.

My true passion is reading. Trapped in a hotel room I would read the telephone book. The TV would not be turned on. I have averaged 200 books a year for the last sixty years. I knew those long flights were good for something.

BTW I was born in the middle of an air raid in England during World War II, the house next door was destroyed and our windows were blown out. That is probably the most interesting thing I have been involved with. Mum never forgave me. Happily married for 56 years I hope my wife doesn’t catch on to what a goof I am.