The Invention

“Zack Wright sentenced his wife to death.” That dreadful newspaper headline invaded Zack’s consciousness once again. Again, he dismissed the possibility of Daria’s death from his thoughts, satisfied that the precautions he had taken were enough to protect her. But a part of him remained unconvinced.

He sat at a table on the terrace at the rear of their mansion, his concentration disrupted by ambivalent feelings of exuberant joy conflicting with his sense of guilt of possibly having placed Daria in danger. He labored to update his logbook.

Last night he had experienced the pure joy of success. It worked! “At 11:42 PM,” he wrote, “after thirty-four months of chasing the impossible, the EPIC finally works. It will relegate gasoline to near-extinction, just as surely as the internal combustion engine once replaced horses as a source of mobile power. The EPIC will reduce air pollution and global warming. That is the good news.”

The EPIC, Zack thought, will be at once fortuitous and ominous news to the oil barons. Ominous because they will lose almost all of their oil business within two decades. Fortuitous because as supplies dwindle, the cost of oil will skyrocket. The instant they hear of the EPIC, they’ll move at Mach 4 to control it. They’ve been looking for a cheap and plentiful alternate source of mobile energy, and they will never tolerate my encroachment into their exclusive territory. When they move to gain control of the EPIC, they’ll try to eliminate Daria and me.

Too bad guys, you’re too late. The EPIC is a working, repeat, working entity. I struggled with it too long and too hard to be intimidated by you or anyone else. By the time you find out about it, I will have had various cars and trucks equipped and tested with the EPIC, and I’ll have four or five thousand units ready for market.

An avalanche of wet clay and cold water headed straight for Daria...fast! The wall of clay and water plunging towards her had built up for weeks...had plugged a hole in the passage until just seconds ago, when a tall column of recent rainwater behind the clay had built up enough pressure in a sinkhole to dislodge the clay.

The muddy mess slammed into her before she could react. The onslaught knocked her off her feet, bouncing her down the passage like a beach ball, side to side, feet first. She fought to regain her balance, but the effort was useless. She had to use both hands to protect her mouth and nose, so that she could breathe. The unyielding stream turned her face down, then face up. Jagged edges of the fissure tore at the coverall. The flashlight was gone. The gloves were gone. The safety glasses came off. The hardhat hit something and came off. The light went out. In total darkness she struggled to keep her head above the torrent. In a minute she went down the passage that had taken so much time and effort to climb.

Without warning, she was airborne, in a sitting position, face forward. Instinctively, she raised her arms to protect her head. In a micro-second of terror she feared that she had gone over a cliff, but where? She hadn’t passed any intersecting passages. She must be traveling the same route she had climbed.

Just as quickly as she was airborne, Daria landed. Her left leg plunged through inches of mud, slid down a smooth, slanted plane, and into a knee-deep crevice, where her foot became wedged. Mud cushioned her right knee as her upper body pitched forward, severely straining the wedged foot and ankle. Her right leg folded under her. But for her arms in front of her, her face would have slammed into the mud. She quickly extended her hands into the mud, found solid rock that gave her leverage to push herself upright from the waist. She cupped her mud-covered hands around her mouth.

For what seemed like ages in that helpless position, the advancing water and mud relentlessly attacked her back, surrounded her, and drained off. She held her breath as long as possible, taking only short, intermittent breaths through sticky, muddy fingers.

Abruptly, the onslaught quickly slowed, then stopped, as if someone had shut off a garden hose.

It was then that she suspected where she was...in the mud pit! How close did I come to going down the sinkhole?