Johnny Mack Hood
A serial killer is loose. The President is dead in the locked Oval Office. Others die and no one has ever seen the killer or knows how many he has killed. Henry Morris is a peculiar psychopath – hard to remember and never noticed as he comes and goes. He was like the Astronomer’s concept of Dark Matter, 95% of the known Universe, unseen but with a profound influence on how the galaxies move and the stars take their positions. San Diego and the surrounding area are the principal venues for the pursuit of this madman. It takes a mild-mannered Washington bureaucrat, unschooled in police work, to come up with the right stuff. Even then Henry manages a few unexpected tricks. This tale will have you wondering whether that person you never noticed at the mall or in the supermarket has changed your life forever. Maybe tomorrow you should give a prayer of thanks that you survived that unnoticed meeting.
Hood is a retired physicist. After a start in life in the Navy in WWII aboard a destroyer and two degrees from the University of Colorado he found his way into aerospace engineering star trackers for ancient versions of intercontinental air-breathing missiles. He soon jumped at a chance to join a laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and became deeply embroiled in camouflage and visibility both in the atmosphere and under the sea. The Navy snagged him to do camouflage for the Navy and put him as head of electro optics technology at the Navy's Electronics Laboratory Center in San Diego. During that period the discovery of the laser and the advent of fiber optics stimulated him to take the prudent step to take leave to study for his Ph.D. in England. In 1975 He left Navy service and joined the faculty of San Diego State University where he taught Natural Science courses and Physics for 23 years. Currently he is active in the local section of the Optical Society of America and is a past President of the Friends of the Library Board at the University. Along the way he taught in the school of business and studied and lectured Jungian psychology. In addition to published work in physics and psychology he has published a book of short stories about such disparate subjects as a children’s fairy tale, a short horror tale, the humorous and satiric adventures of a modern Dr. Panglos with the unlikely name, Mr. Throttlebottom, and a Sci Fi alternate history about a different fate for the old Queen Mary and Mr. Howard Hughes.
Foreword
Astronomers tell us that the Universe is queerer than anyone might suppose. The motion of the billions of galaxies each containing their billions of stars is easily observable with the sophisticated giant instruments now available on earth and on satellites in the far reaches of outer space. What is not known is why and how these motions can exist. The only explanation they can make, and it is not really an explanation but only a means of rationalizing the pattern that is observed, is that there must be a pervasive mass of unseeable matter that affects everything. They estimate that this stupendous quantity of matter, Dark Matter, represents 96 percent of all the matter in the universe. All the stars and dust and gas observed with their exquisitely powerful instruments constitute only four percent of all the matter in existence. The rest is unseeable but felt. Maybe there are forces among us in our society here on earth that ape this astronomical mystery.
If the basic premise of this tale is a challenge to credulity one should just suspend disbelief and enjoy the tale of the making and unmaking of a psychotic killer. Being easily forgotten or not noticed is a quality that every secret service and spy agency on Earth values highly. MI5 and MI6 in Great Britain make a special effort to avoid enlisting and training handsome six-foot athletic types. Sky Marshals today complain that they give away their identity aboard aircraft with their suits and ties.
Then there is a chamber opera, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, which deals with a Doctor who has a peculiar visual disability, which the layman would hold unbelievable if it were not based on a serious psychiatric account of the peculiarities of the human mind. If a man could think that his wife was a hat might not most people think they really did not see anyone at all if that person was very ordinary and had a special unconscious talent for blending with the background?
Steven Pinker, Julian Jaynes, and countless other reputable scientists have described and concluded that the eye and mind are notoriously unreliable witnesses. Ask any legal professional about the value of the eyewitness. We see Henry Morris everywhere every day and never notice.
The major portion of this tale is set in Southern California on or about the teens of the twenty-first century. The San Diego Trolley has been extended to Escondido to relieve the traffic on Interstate 15. The Zoo is the same and easily recognized as is the constantly growing and improving San Diego State University campus. Nothing has disturbed the Star of India at its anchorage along the harbor front. Airport operations and accommodations have changed but Lindbergh is still the major location for most traffic.
