1
The mid-December night was dark, calm and balmy. In the absence of the moon, the stars seemed even brighter and more numerous than usual. A shooting star streaked across the heavens like a burning arrow. Everything was pitch black except for the soft light streaming out of the partially-open, double wooden doors and the small, dirty, spiderwebbed window of Zeke’s corrugated-iron shed. The air around the shed was saturated with the sound of Pink Floyd’s, Shine On You Crazy Diamond. It was as if the whole shed was one giant speaker radiating music into the black emptiness around it.
The interior of the dusty, cluttered-up shed was filled with smoke. There was a solitary globe softly glowing above the ancient, heavily-constructed workbench. The enormous speakers, either side of the workbench, wailed and throbbed as Zeke’s distorted body stood hunched over Ben’s prop guard, which was resting on a new set of digital scales that Zeke had bought that very day.
In the corner of the window frame, a black spider pounced on an unfortunate fly that had blundered into its sticky web. Standing in the small circle of light, Zeke weighed and re-weighed the guard. He scribbled some numbers on a piece of dirty paper and then stepped back, out of the light, in animated amazement. He ran his weathered hands through his long, blond hair, making it stick out like that of a mad scientist. He looked around excitedly, as if looking for someone to speak to, but there was no one else there.
Dramatically, he turned back towards the prop guard, which was glittering in the centre of the light, his body language that of a man who had just seen a miraculous vision. He stepped forward to his bench and weighed the guard again, this time standing it on its side. He scribbled down another number. He then scribbled some calculations and stepped back from the bench again. He looked at the smooth, shiny, space-frame shape in total bewilderment. He couldn’t believe what he was looking at. He returned to his bench and repeated the weighing experiment a number of times. He was shocked to find the results the same each time. Completely blown away, he whispered,
‘Ben, what have you left us?’
2
Next morning, Adam’s phone rang at 8.00 o’clock. It was Zeke.
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‘Hey, Adam, what are you doin?’
‘Oh, you know, Zeke, trying to kick-start the motor, having some coffee. I’m always a bit lost on Saturday mornings. Why, what’s up?’
‘Plenty. You gotta come up here an see somethin.’
‘See what?’
‘There’s a lot more to young Ben than either of us ever imagined.’
‘Like what?’
‘You gotta come up an see.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Zeke, will you stop with all the mystery and tell me something.’
‘Naah, I wanna show you. I want you to find it yourself.’
‘Find what?’
‘See you when you get up here.’
Zeke hung up the phone.
As Adam drove into Zeke’s yard, Zeke was already hobbling out of his house carrying two mugs of coffee.
‘We can go straight into me workshop.’
Adam followed Zeke into the shed and sat in his spot, on a box, off to one side of the workbench.
‘So, what has the Zekester discovered? I sense by the look, something urgent.’
‘Urgent ain’t the word, mate. I don’t know what the word is, but I want you to find it the way I did.’
‘Find what?’
Zeke beckoned Adam to come over to the workbench.
‘Does this mean that I have to stand up?’
Zeke beckoned impatiently.
‘Yeah yeah, come over here.’
‘Here?’
‘Yeah. Now weigh the guard, front side down.’
‘Is this the front?’
‘Yeah, that’s it. Put it on the scales.’
‘Wow, Zeke, look at the fancy-new, digital scales.’
‘Accurate to a tenth of a gram. Put it on the scales.’
Adam placed the guard on the scales, front end down.
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‘What’s it weigh? Is this the readout?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is it in grams?’
‘Yeah.’
‘1026.5. Is that 1026.5 grams?’
‘Yeah. Now turn the guard over, back side down, and weigh it.’
Adam did as he was told. He weighed the guard the other way up and read out the number.
‘996.5. It’s lighter!’
‘Surprised?’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘Now weigh it on its side.’
Adam weighed the guard standing it on its side on the sensitive scales. He read out,
‘1011.5 grams. That’s different again. There’s something wrong with your scales, Zeke, they give a different reading every time.’
‘Go ahead, weigh somethin else.’
Adam looked for something asymmetrical. He picked up a hammer and weighed it lying on its side and then standing on its end.
‘It’s the same.’
‘That’s because there’s nothin wrong with the scales. I’m thinkin that maybe Ben might have left us with a little surprise.’
‘I’m still not with you, Zeke.’
‘There’s more. I’ve been weighin the guard for about eighteen hours. It weighs somethin different every couple of hours. That’s only when it’s lyin down with either the front or the back down. When it’s on its side, it always weighs the same, 1011.5 grams.’
‘That’s amazing!’
‘Then I did some figurin an worked out that the two variable weights always added up to twice the constant weight, an guess what that is?’
‘Jees, Zeke, that’s twice 1011.5 … which is … 2023, which is the number Ben wrote on the paper.’
‘That’s right. Do you see why I had to call you? An there’s more. At night, when it’s cooler, the weight difference is less, an durin the day, when it’s warmer, it’s more. Are you thinkin what I’m thinkin?’
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‘Zeke, I wouldn’t even attempt something like that.’
‘It’s pushin. You can just feel it.’
Zeke picked up the guard and held it up, lightly moving it from side to side.
‘You can feel it, fifteen grams.’
‘Let me feel it.’
Adam took the guard and held it upright. He moved it from side to side trying to feel fifteen grams of sideways push.
‘It’s so slight. I don’t know if I’m imagining it but I think that I can feel a bit of a push, just like you said.’ Adam rotated through 360 degrees holding up the guard. ‘It pushes all the way around.’
‘Let’s do somethin,’ Zeke suggested.
He began to rummage amongst the piles of junk lying around the perimeter of his workshop. He pulled out an old bicycle wheel and gave it a spin.
‘This’ll do.’
He clamped a set of locking pliers to the end of the wheel axle then fixed the pliers in the vice bolted to his workbench.
‘Can you get me the spirit level, please Adam. It’s over there. I’ve got to get this wheel dead horizontal. Can you give me a hand settin this up.’
Adam placed the spirit level on top of the horizontal wheel rim as Zeke made minute adjustments and turned the wheel, checking the spirit level constantly. When he was satisfied that it was perfectly horizontal, he said to Adam,
‘Tighten up the vice, nice n tight.’
Adam tightened the vice. Zeke picked up the guard and carefully placed it on the wheel rim, standing it on its side, with the front of it pointing in the clockwise direction of the turn of the wheel.
‘Your setup mightn’t hold the weight of the guard, Zeke.’
‘It’ll be touch n go. Is the vice tight?’
Adam gave the vice another tighten.
‘Come here, hold the guard for me.’
Adam held the guard while Zeke cut some fine wire. He then proceeded to tie the outer rim of the guard to the outer part of the spokes of the bicycle wheel. When it was secure, he said,
‘There, you can let go now.’
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Zeke grabbed Adam’s shirtsleeve and stepped back, pulling Adam back with him.
Neither of them said anything as they stood there watching the wheel. The light, half-metre-wide propeller guard sat in position, wired to the spokes. Suddenly, as if by magic, the wheel, ever so slowly at first, began to turn in the clockwise direction. It gradually increased speed until it settled into a steady, silent, spontaneous, unassisted rotation. The two friends’ eyes bulged clear out of their sockets.
‘It’s turning … by itself!’
Zeke’s jaw hung open as he stared at a vision he knew no human on Earth had ever seen before. He started to mumble,
‘It looks like fifteen grams is enough to break the friction of the wheel bearins. I thought we’d have to give it a push to get it goin.’
‘Look at it, Zeke, it’s just going round and round, all by itself.’
‘Look at what your son left behind, Adam, a prop guard that generates fifteen grams of thrust.’
Adam wanted to say a couple of things but he couldn’t make any words come out, so Zeke kept talking.
‘Listen, we need another cup of coffee and a puff. What do you reckon? Don’t you think we’ve earned it?’
Adam sat on his box, not saying a word, staring at the slowly-rotating bicycle wheel with the guard silently going round and round on top of it. Zeke disappeared into his house and returned a few minutes later with fresh coffee, biscuits and his bowl and pipe.
He placed it all down on an upturned milk crate and sat on his chair.
‘I see it’s still goin round.’
‘Yeah, about one revolution every nine seconds.’
‘If it is what I think it is, it’ll keep goin round an round forever. You know, Adam, Lib an Ben used to come up here heaps. She often dropped him off up here if she went shoppin or surfin. We spent a lot of time talkin about the gravity sail. Ben said that he’d use one with his rollerblades, but it was just a dream. I had no idea where to start. Now all this happens, an we end up lookin right at it like magic. Look at it. It just keeps turnin, seemingly for no reason. It’s like a bloody windmill. We’ve just built a bloody gravity windmill, the first one on Earth. I reckon it must be time for that puff.’
‘What do you think is doing it? The metal? Do you think it’s some special alloy?’
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‘I wouldn’t be surprised, although I’m wonderin if the shape might have somethin to do with it. See the triangles an rectangles in it, an part of it looks like a tetrahedron. It might pay to take some accurate measurements. Do you think we should tell Doyle?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that. He keeps secrets from us.’
‘Hang on, I’ve got an idea.’
Zeke had another rummage in the pile of junk in the corner of his shed and produced an old, two-bar, electric heater. He plugged it in and held it close to the guard as it came around.
‘Are you trying to heat the guard up?’
‘Yeah, to see if it does anythin … look it’s speedin up!’
‘Are you sure? It looks the same to me.’
‘No no no, it’s speedin up, only slightly, but it’s speedin up. I’ve got a stopwatch somewhere. Switch off the heater.’ Adam did as he was told. ‘Let’s put that small box under the heater, on the bench here, that’s it, that’s good. Where’s that bloody stopwatch?’
Zeke hunted for his stopwatch while Adam juggled some figures.
‘If it weighs 1011.5 grams, then it would have to generate 1011.5 grams of thrust to levitate. That’s a lot more than fifteen.’
Zeke found his stopwatch and stepped up to the experiment. He grabbed a pen and some paper and said,
‘It should have cooled down enough. I’ll measure one rotation.’
Zeke timed one rotation of the wheel then got Adam to switch on the heater again.
As the guard warmed up, Zeke noted,
‘It’s speedin up. Before, it was 9.1 seconds for one turn, now it’s 8.5 an it’s still speedin up … now it’s 7.9 … you can see it’s spinnin faster. We can switch off the heater now.’
Zeke put the heater away, sat down and lit his pipe. The wheel, with the guard wired to it, continued to silently spin in a clockwise direction at one revolution every 9.1
seconds. Zeke asked the question,
‘How well do you know Doyle?’
‘No better than you. I slept in his house, but he’s basically still an enigma to me. I still haven’t worked out his true motives. What’s he trying to do? He’s created this whole mad reality with his bloody facts, but now we’ve got a fact for him.’
‘Who does he talk to?’
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‘Who doesn’t he talk to. His connections are a complete mystery to me. What isn’t a mystery is that he’s got lots of them.’
‘This is pretty big, mate. It’s only gonna be fun while no one knows about it. As soon as somebody finds out, we’re stuffed. They’ll take it off us straight away, no doubt.’
‘What if we got Doyle to promise not to tell?’
Zeke pointed at the rotating guard.
‘This is the biggest discovery in history. This is free energy. This is what takes the place of fuel. Can you imagine what this news would do to the world’s stock markets? Can you imagine it in the hands of just one country, especially as a secret? They could develop it and achieve total world domination.’
‘You might want to take it easy on that pipe, Zeke. You’ve gone from an old bicycle wheel to world domination in three sentences.’
‘Do we trust Doyle or not?’
‘I think so. After all, if it wasn’t for him we never would have thought twice about the prop guard and we never would have thought of Libby being an … you know, it’s still hard to say it … an alien. And Doyle probably still knows things we don’t and who knows what else he might come up with. He might be able to help.’
‘To do what?’
‘I don’t know, make it fly? He’s got all the books.’
‘There’s lots to do before we can make it fly.’
‘So, Doyle is in?’
‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
Zeke thought for a while, finally coming up with a decision.
‘I’m gonna need the bottom half of a forty-four-gallon drum, or maybe a big garbage bin. I’ve got to go to the tip.’
3
Adam decided to go back home for a while. He called Doyle and told him that they had something to show him. Doyle’s voice always made Adam feel a bit edgy.
‘That’s a turn-up. It’s usually me showing you things. What is it?’
‘I think you should see this for yourself.’
‘A bit of mystery as well, eh? I was waiting for something like this. I can be at Zeke’s in about two hours.’
‘OK, we’ll see you there in two hours.’
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Adam drove back up to Zeke’s place after eating a sandwich. When he rolled up, he saw Zeke busy in his back yard building a wood fire. He got out of his car and walked over.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Settin up experiment number two.’
‘I called Doyle. He’ll be here in about half an hour.’
‘I suppose I better not dismantle the gravity windmill until he gets here. How do you think he’ll react?’
‘I doubt that he’s ever seen anything like it before, but with him you just can’t be sure.’
‘You can bet it’s all he thinks about. It’s all everybody thinks about. Antigravity an free energy. That’s why they all get interested in witness accounts of UFOs. They just want to get closer to the unimaginable technology. You wanna give me a hand with this drum?’
Zeke pointed to a bottom third of a forty-four-gallon drum that he had just scavenged at the rubbish tip.
‘Oh, I see you found your drum.’
They sat the drum over the firewood, supported by three large bricks. Zeke turned on the garden hose and began filling the drum with water. Just about when it was nearly full, Doyle’s car rattled into the yard. Doyle clambered out, lit a cigarette and wandered over to the two boys.
‘What’s on the menu?’
‘Nothing, Doyle,’ said Adam, ‘I hope you took your pills today.’
‘You boys shouldn’t gee me up like this if you’ve got nothing good to back it up with.’
‘Go take a look in me shed.’
Doyle walked into the shed. Adam and Zeke stayed outside and waited for his reaction. They soon heard Doyle yelling from inside the shed.
‘How are you doing this, Zeke? What kind of bullshit is this? Will you boys come in here.’
The boys stepped into the shed, grinning from ear to ear. They all sat in wonderment, watching the spinning wheel, as Zeke explained how he accidentally discovered the amazing phenomenon.
‘You’ve found the bloody Holy Grail,’ exclaimed Doyle, ‘the future of the human race!’
‘It wasn’t us, it was Ben,’ explained Adam.
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‘So, the guard is making it go round?’
‘Yeah, the guard pushes,’ explained Adam.
‘Fifteen grams at room temperature,’ Zeke added.
‘Whoa, Zeke, you’re losing me.’
‘The guard, on the wheel, generates fifteen grams of thrust, and the hotter it gets the more it pushes. That’s what we’re testing next. We wanna see how much thrust it has when it’s hot,’ Zeke looked at Adam, ‘or should I be callin it lift?’
‘Lift sounds better,’ responded Adam. ‘Thrust sounds too much like burning fuel.’
‘Yeah, I agree. Lift, like a sail. I’m goin out to light the fire.’
They all went outside and watched Zeke light the fire. He then went into the shed, unwired the guard from the wheel, brought it out and dropped it, back down, into the drum of cold water. Doyle remarked,
‘You’re going to cook the guard.’
‘Yeah, Doyle, to one hundred degrees centigrade.’
‘What do you think will happen?’ Doyle asked.
‘I don’t know. The heat should increase the lift generated by the guard. Actually, I’ve got a thermometer somewhere. I’ll go find it. I can measure the water temperature as it’s gettin hotter.’
Zeke disappeared into his shed as the fire began to take hold and make a huge amount of smoke. Adam and Doyle kept moving around the fire.
‘Isn’t it amazing how smoke always follows you around a fire, Doyle.’
‘I’ve been meaning to call you, Adam.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. I’ve been going over the records and uncovered an interesting, statistical aberration.’
‘More intrigue?’
‘Well, what did you expect? You know all the fathers that got left behind, like you?’
‘Yeah?’
‘A disproportionate number of them just happened to be dentists.’
‘Wha…?’
‘Lost for words, Adam? I fail to see any logical connection, but then I am not a dentist and you are. What could it be about dentists that would cause them to attract beautiful, alien women to breed with them? Maybe they fall in love with their smell.’
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‘I can’t think of anything at the moment, Doyle.’
Zeke reappeared carrying a thermometer. ‘Got it. I see the fire’s a bit smoky. Some of the wood’s still a bit green.’ He placed the thermometer into the water, stepped back and declared, ‘We might see the most amazin thing in about half an hour. Listen, seein as we’re all here, we might as well all agree to keep this a secret. How about it, Doyle?’
‘Don’t worry, boys, this is my private investigation not a public inquiry. Anyway, this doesn’t tell us what it’s all about. It doesn’t answer the big question. There’s a reason why they came to this planet and there’s a reason why they took the hybrids. There’s a big reason. I want the whole loaf. All these other things are just the crumbs.’
Doyle lit another cigarette as Zeke made some coffee and brought out a mix and his pipe. The water in the drum was beginning to steam on the surface. Zeke looked at the thermometer and announced,
‘Seventy degrees.’
Smoke belched from the fire as the three men hovered around the drum, keeping it under intense scrutiny.
‘A watched pot never boils,’ blurted Adam.
‘This one’s gonna boil, buddy.’
‘You should have supplied gas masks, Zeke,’ Doyle joked.
‘Look, it’s breakin the surface of the water.’
As the water began to bubble, the three men stared spellbound as the metal guard slowly rose out of the water.
‘Bloody hell, Zeke!’ exclaimed Doyle.
When everything stabilised, with the water in the drum boiling furiously and the smoke spiralling and rotating in the swirling breeze, Zeke observed,
‘Look, it’s levitatin just above the water. It’s generatin … how much lift, Adam?’
‘1011.5 grams, Zeke, the same as its end-on weight.’
Zeke postulated, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it generated a tiny amount of lift right down to absolute zero.’
‘How much lift could it generate if it got hotter?’ Adam asked.
‘You could only take it up to the meltin point of the metal, then it would lose its shape. Let’s try somethin else.’
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Zeke suddenly got all excited. He went into his shed and brought out an old towel.
He folded it over a few times and picked the hot guard up with it. He held the guard in front of himself and exclaimed,
‘Whoah! You can really feel the push now. It feels like a bloody kilo. Here, Adam, feel it.’
Zeke handed the hot guard to Adam who felt its forward thrust.
‘Oh, man, that’s a solid push. I reckon it would push you along on skates. I can feel the push getting lighter, though, as it’s getting cooler. Here, Doyle, feel it before it cools down too much.’
Doyle took the towel-wrapped guard and held it out in front of himself.
‘So, this is how they propel themselves through space, eh?’
Zeke postulated, ‘If this guard was floatin somewhere out in deepest outer space, a long way from anythin, it would start acceleratin ever so gradually, even though it was only generatin the minutest amount of lift in the super-cold environment of space. Even with the miniscule lift, it would keep acceleratin for years an years, right up to the speed of light squared, the speed at which it would ultimately transform itself into pure energy.
After that, your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, Zeke.’
Adam couldn’t resist the opportunity.
‘Your ideas are about as ancient as your car, Doyle.’
‘My car? I will have you know that you are casting aspersions on one of the finest vehicles ever built.’
Zeke disappeared into his kitchen and reappeared carrying a portable, electric hotplate. He limped into his shed saying,
‘Would you mind bringin the guard into the workshop? Experiment number three is about to begin momentarily.’
‘Hotplate! Great idea, Zeke.’
‘I wonder if we can make it pick up the hotplate?’
‘What’s the hotplate weigh?’
‘A couple of kilos, I reckon, so we’ll need about three kilos of lift.’
Doyle just stood back, watching in silence, as Adam and Zeke bounced ideas off each other. Zeke tied the guard to the hotplate with some wire. He placed it on the ground in the middle of the shed and plugged the end of the lead into a power socket.
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‘OK, stand back, I’m gonna switch it on.’
‘Is there a thermostat control on it, Zeke?’
‘There is, Adam, but I’ve got it set on full. I figure I can control it with the on-off switch. We can always find a stable heat for it later.’
Zeke flipped the switch. They watched the hotplate begin to glow red-hot.
‘It’s got to be over 100 degrees by now.’
‘Yeah, but that’s only one kilo of lift. We need three. We don’t know how hot it’s gotta get for that.’
Then suddenly,
‘Look, it’s movin. It’s liftin the hotplate!’
‘Bullshit!’ exclaimed Doyle.
‘Three kilos of lift!’ said Adam, astonished.
They watched the guard and hotplate slowly rise off the ground, first just an inch, then a few inches, then a foot, then, as it got hotter, Ben’s prop guard lifted the red-hot hotplate right up to the ceiling. Just as it was about to make contact with the corrugated iron roof, Zeke switched off the power. He stepped out to the levitating contraption and said,
‘It’ll start comin down as it cools. I’ll switch it back on when it gets half way down an try to set the thermostat at that temperature. We should be able to stabilise the temperature, an thus the lift, at a point where the guard is floatin about four or five feet off the ground.’
Doyle began getting slightly emotional, an unusual thing for him.
‘This is such bullshit, Zeke. Do you know that there are governments spending trillions of secret dollars on classified, black projects doing research, in unimaginably hi-tech labs, searching for exactly this? Have you got any idea?’ Doyle looked around at all the junk with a nauseous look on his face. ‘And in the end, it happens here, completely secret from all of them. If they found out,’ he shook his head like he knew something, ‘if they found out it would be like the whole fucking world coming down on your heads.’
Zeke fine-tuned the thermostat control on the hotplate. The contraption ended up stabilising, levitating silently about three feet off the ground.
‘There it is,’ declared Zeke, ‘three kilos of lift. Three times its own weight an it’ll keep doin it forever as long as it stays at that temperature.’
Doyle began steering the conversation in his direction.
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‘I guess I can assume that any doubts either of you had about Liberty and Ben’s true identities have been completely dispelled by current events. I can assume that I don’t need to expend any more energy convincing you of that.’
Adam responded, ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Doyle, I’m convinced.’
‘Good, because I’ve got to ask you some more questions, although I might save them for another day.’
They spent the rest of the afternoon, and evening, getting stoned in Zeke’s shed.
They watched the guard levitating in front of them and enjoyed themselves speculating on possible designs of space ship incorporating what Zeke called ‘gravity drive’. He postulated,
‘You’d only need a gravity-driven, variable-friction turbine to generate the heat, to keep the gravity drive hot, an you’d be away.’
Adam asked,
‘How would you stop yourself being squashed, like roadkill, by all the G-forces?’
‘It must have somethin to do with the shape. Maybe if you sit inside the shape you don’t feel any G-forces. You couldn’t accelerate from zero to the speed of light squared in a few minutes, or maybe in just a few seconds, without gettin pancaked. Maybe you somehow lose your mass inside one of those ships. Come to think of it, you’d have to.
Maybe mass is an effect of gravitons as well, just like weight. Maybe matter actually has no mass when it’s not in a graviton field.’
Doyle cleared the air.
‘One thing is an undeniable fact. Liberty flew here from at least four light years away.’
Adam considered,
‘Libby wouldn’t have spent four years in a space ship. She was only nineteen when she arrived here. There can’t be any doubt that she travelled faster than the speed of light.’
‘She flew at the speed of light squared,’ Zeke declared, ‘because she used a gravity sail, because gravitons travel at the speed of light squared, as pure energy, because E=mc2=G. There are two kinds of matter in the universe, the kind you can see an the kind you can’t see. The stuff you can see is sub-light-squared, symmetrical matter. The stuff you can’t see is light-squared an probably some kind of asymmetrical matter. It’s very fine, finer than photons, an there’s an ocean of it. All the sub-light-squared stuff floats in it. The light-squared stuff is the missin mass of the universe, except it’s all in the form of
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pure energy, perfectly balanced, a fraction of it manifestin as the effect of gravitational attraction, an probably a fraction of it manifestin as the effect of mass in all the sub-light-squared matter as well.’
‘So, you think that you have solved the riddle of the missing mass of the universe, Zeke?’
‘Well, Doyle, let me try to explain it to you in simpler terms. Imagine the universe as a glass of frozen water. The ice weighs so much, say 10 units. Over time, 91% of the ice melts. The remainin 9% floats in the 91% that is now water. Now, the genius scientists come along an say, the universe should weigh 10 units but we can only see 9% of it. Get it? They’re only seein the ice an not the water it’s floatin in.’
‘So, you’re saying that gravity is the missing mass.’
‘No, the ocean of gravitons is.’
‘You should write a paper.’
‘What good would that do, Doyle? An anyway, I don’t write papers, I keep it all in me head.’
They spoke late into the night, about such subjects as they would have never imagined speaking about before. They spoke with confidence and certainty, each of them occasionally glancing at the levitating guard in front of them as an affirmation to the new reality. It was well after midnight before they managed to tear themselves away from the gravity sail. As soon as Adam left and began driving down the hill, a particular sentence of Doyle’s surfaced into his conscious thought and repeated itself, over and over.
‘A disproportionate number of them just happened to be dentists, dentists, dentists …’
‘What could that mean?’ he whispered to himself. ‘It could only be one thing … the gas!’
…….
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