The Mendelssohnian Theory: Action Adventure, Sci-Fi, Apocalyptic ,Y/A (2 page)

A shrill whistle punctured the silence of the trunk and woke
the boy up from his unconscious state. He opened his eyes, but could see
nothing. The black cloth still covered his aching head. While trying to stretch
himself in the small space he was lying in, a loud blast diverted the vehicle
from its course. The vehicle, a ground hovercraft (Lowfly ©) as he’d guessed,
spun round and round until finally, it rolled over. The trunk door bent and
opened and Adam was thrown outside his jail cell. He landed heavily on the
viscous road, whose softness testified to the fact it was paved after the year
of fifty-nine. It was the softytar (softytar ©) that had absorbed most of the
blow’s intensity, but the one that Adam’s lungs absorbed while he’d hit the
ground was enough for a black tidal wave to drown his consciousness once more.

When he woke up from his unconscious state, darkness still
surrounded Adam. The cover was removed from his head, but the skies were dark
during that late hour of the night. He lay still for a few moments, trying to
organize his thoughts and recreate all that he had recently undergone. When he
finally lifted his head, he noticed a man crouching behind a large rock and
peeking beyond it. The man ignored his presence and for a moment, Adam
considered leaping to his feet and running away. But then the man turned his
gaze toward him. The man’s eyes spoke of strength and determination and Adam
realized at once that he had no chance of escaping. The man hurried to direct
his eyes back to the place he had viewed earlier. Adam recreated the elderly
visage of the stranger in his mind and said to himself that he never trusted
bearded people.

“Who are you?” Adam barked at him.

“Someone who just saved you,” the elderly man answered,
without even bothering to look at the boy again. Adam was confused. Were there
two different kidnappers? And if this man had kidnapped him from his
kidnappers, does that mean he was for him, or against him? What in hell could
anyone have against him? He’d realized some time ago that he meant nothing to
everyone around him. He was not depressed by that fact and mostly did not
suffer from low self-esteem, perhaps only occasionally, but he could not
imagine any reason that would cause someone to want to kidnap him. And Naomi…
where was Naomi?

“Let me go,” called Adam who was lying on the damp earth, his
head leaning on a large backpack.

“Shh…” the man shushed him, and after a moment added,
“they’re still around.”

“Who?” the boy asked, but the stranger didn’t answer. He
continued to examine the area close to their hiding place. Heavily, not
entirely trusting his muscles, Adam rose to his feet and approached the
stranger. His hands were bound, his chest was aching and his head was brimming
with questions.

“Keep your head down,” whispered the man and Adam immediately
lowered himself. He turned his eyes toward the place the stranger was looking
with concentration and saw the lights of two hovercrafts (Highfly 7 ©),
scanning the ground below them back and forth.

“Where’s Naomi?” whispered the boy, but the man did not
bother to answer. The hovercrafts continued to cut the darkness with their
lights for a few more moments until they turned and disappeared into the
darkness of the night. The man waited until the sound of their engines could no
longer be heard, and then he relaxed his muscles and sat beside Adam.

“What do you want from me?” the boy asked.

“At the moment, the important question is what do they want
from you?” asked the man. Adam examined him carefully. From up close his captor
appeared to be about fifty, tall, lean and bearded. Actually, he could be any
age because the routine anti-aging treatments (Your Age©), became available for
all more than a century ago and have caused the age factor to disappear from
human culture. Therefore, Adam assumed that the man was much older than he
appeared to be, and his exhausted and penetrating eyes strengthened this
evaluation. The stranger breathed heavily, sweat was pouring down his face and
Adam assumed that he was tired or sick. Adam could not fathom how the stranger
had managed to overcome his captors by himself.

“Where’s Naomi?” he asked again.

“I don’t know,” the stranger answered and returned to look at
Adam. The boy felt that his jailor’s gaze dismembered him into little pieces.
His eyes looked as if they had seen it all and had known no less. Now the
stranger did not seem weak or old anymore. “You’re the one that’s important,”
said the man and Adam felt confused. ‘I’m important? Why? For whom?’

“She’s important to me,” he said hesitantly, before realizing
it was the truth. She is important to him!

“She does not appear in your probability,” the man answered,
“you are the first priority.”

“Probability?” asked Adam, confused, “what probability?” but
the stranger didn’t answer. He stood up, pulled Adam and raised him to his
feet.

“Come on,” he instructed, “we need to get to our destination
before sunrise,” and he began to march away.

“No,” said Adam, and stubbornly planted his feet in the
ground, “I’m not going anywhere before you explain everything to me.” The
disinterest with which the man had waved off his concern for Naomi angered Adam
and he was determined to resist him. The man quickly turned around to approach
Adam. He was short-tempered and it appeared he did not have time for Adam’s
adolescent games. “You can either come on foot and of your own free will, which
is going to be quick and brief, or you can refuse and make things heavy and
awkward. I’ll have to carry you and I really prefer not to.”

“Where are you taking me?” asked Adam.

“Over there,” the man pointed westward.

“Back to the city?” the boy was surprised, “they’ll be able to
find me there easily, whoever they are.”

“We’re not going back to the city,” answered the man and as
if to offer further explanation, he added, “it’s still not in your
probability.” He did not wait for Adam and began to stride between the rocks
strewn all over the area, evidence of the great mountain blast that had taken
place during the unforgettable events at the beginning of the century. Adam
hesitated for a moment, then turned and followed the stranger.

“Tell me anyway,” the boy said when he’d caught up with the
stranger, “where are we going?”

The man did not hurry to answer. They circled the hill in
front of them to the right, then, only after the deserted ghostly valley,
separating the city and the transit station leading beyond the reservation and
the trans-European hover-train complex (Eutrain ©) was revealed to them, did
the stranger stop and say, “we have a ride to catch.” Beyond the transparent
wall of the dome, in the dim light of dawn, the train station was revealed to
Adam’s eyes. Beyond it, he saw the huge water pipe that belonged to ‘Central
Water Industries’ (CWAT Industries ©), the company importing the reservation’s
water. Without being told anything, Adam realized the man was directing them
toward the pipe and not toward the official transit terminal that was protected
from intruders seven days a week and guarded by the reservation police
twenty-four hours a day. He had no idea how the man would manage to pass them
both beyond the dome wall without being detected by the high electronic fence.
They stood only a few hundred feet from the station, partly concealed by a
group of low pine trees.

Adam was agitated by the thought of leaving the reservation.
The chance of undergoing such an adventure easily overcame his apprehension of
the man he had considered to be one of his kidnappers up until a few minutes
ago. But his concern for Naomi and the fear something bad might have happened
to her overcame him once more and he called, “I’m not leaving without Naomi.”

The elderly man spoke quietly and Adam could sense the
intensity of the threat concealed in his words. “You can’t choose,” he
announced to the boy, “your only chance of surviving lies with me. Now, before
it is too late,” then he added in a slightly softer tone, “Chances are, they released
her after I took you away from them.” But Adam knew it wasn’t true. He felt the
man was lying to him, at least about Naomi. She was in great danger and there
was no one to help her.

“What do they want from me?” he asked and immediately added,
“What do you want from me?”

“You’re the last base,” said the man without offering an
explanation to his vague words. “Come on,” he urged Adam, “our window of
opportunity is about to close,” and when Adam persisted in his refusal, the
stranger took out a drill-like instrument (Drill ©) and attached it to the
boy’s neck.

“What are you doing?” Adam recoiled with fear. The man did
not reply and pressed a black button on the side of the instrument. Adam
immediately collapsed. Black-brown spots appeared and quickly spread on his
skin, covering him with a thin, sealed elastic layer. The man easily hauled the
boy onto his shoulder and carried him as if he was a parcel toward the
electronic fence (Fence ©). An additional press of a button, with the
instrument directed at the fence, created an opening in the energy lines
stretched between the power poles. The man and his human cargo passed through.
Once they arrived in the vicinity of the train complex, the kidnapper inserted
the drill into a hole in a small control box located on the bubble’s wall. An
invisible door was torn into the edge of the dome and the man, along with his
booty, passed through. The door hermetically closed behind them and became
invisible once more. The man motioned with his hand and a small, quick upper
hovercraft (Highfly 7 ©) lifted from the ground. He hurled Adam into the
hovercraft and hurried to get inside as well. The aircraft rotated, tilted its
nose upward and quickly took up to the sky, whose color gradually whitened to
the light of a rising summer sun.

In the year two thousand and seventy-two AD, a scientist named
Dr. Lawrence published a new theory that merged all the known great doctrines
and scientific knowledge into a single formula, a single blueprint with which
the universe and the development of mankind could be understood. He called it
‘The Mendelssohnian Theory’, and that is the way it is referred to since.

Dr. John Reuel Lawrence was the great-great-grandson of
Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the particle accelerator, the cyclotron, and
the first one to successfully conduct nuclear fission. Following a public
scandal in which young Lawrence was quite literally exposed, he was abandoned
by all his lovers and loved ones and dismissed from his work. He returned to
his parents’ house, where he was cared for by his mother who nurtured him until
he was able to recuperate.

Mrs. Lawrence was a small and vigorous woman who loved the
Christian Son of God almost as much as she loved her only son and tried to
bridge these two loves of hers any way she could. She placed a collection of
religious magazines and newspapers next to her son’s bed, in the hope that he
would read them and ‘see the light’, get closer to God and recuperate.
Lawrence, occupied with his personal problems, did not demonstrate any desire
to discuss the existence of God with his mother and did not even glance at the
magazines. But after a few days of idly lying in bed and staring at the
ceiling, when boredom threatened to drown his mind, the doctor randomly drew
one of the church leaflets from the high stack next to his bed and flipped
through its pages. Several days later, Lawrence finished reading all the
leaflets and religious magazines.

When Lawrence finally rose from his bed and went out of the
small room, it appeared to his mother that a tiny spark of light had returned
to his eyes. She was convinced that the leaflets she had left beside his bed
played a crucial part in his quick recovery and believed that in a short time
her son would overcome his troubles, get back to himself and find his belief in
God. And indeed, in the following days, Lawrence began to leave his mother’s
apartment and wander the streets of New York, his hometown.

Lawrence did not want to
insult his mother, who did her best to make his time more pleasant, therefore,
he did not reveal to her the real reason he had left the apartment was boredom.
The doctor had always deeply hated idleness. He’d read his mother’s magazines
because he was tired of staring at the ceiling of the room. Later on, he had
risen from his bed and began to wander the big city because he’d finished
reading all the magazines.

During his extended bouts of wandering, he didn’t know what
he was seeking, certainly not redemption or forgiveness of the type his mother
yearned for, but he enjoyed searching for literary treasures on the shelves of
ancient bookstores in which printed volumes could still be found. The doctor
loved the sensation that accompanied leafing through the pages of printed
books.

Later on, the doctor rented a small flat on the border of
Brooklyn and Queens. He was lonely, but loved his loneliness, nurtured it,
accepted it and the loneliness, so he thought, peacefully lived with him as
well. Other than his neighbor’s ginger colored cat, which habitually entered
with pomposity through the always open window above the kitchen sink, he wasn’t
bothered by men nor by animals.

Because of his contract, he continued to receive his salary
from the university, had no need to worry about his livelihood and was free to
continue and conduct his travels in the city, in which he enriched his
bookshelves with various treasures. He might have continued with his wanderings
and shopping sprees forever, but during one of his visits to the shop of the
ancient Jew, Pesach Goldstein, he accidentally encountered a thin volume,
printed more than fifty before, called ‘Theories about Creation’ by M.
Mendelssohn. As soon as he’d begun to read the first page, Lawrence felt he was
holding a ticking time bomb. The tale Mendelssohn had told (he was unfamiliar
with the man and his work) was written as a science fiction story, even though
it had probably been first written and printed almost three hundred years
earlier. From the opening sentence, it was clear to Lawrence it contained much
more than the science fiction genre that his time had to offer.

Mendelssohn’s short book combined well with the ideas that
had lately risen in the scientist’s mind and had given them a name and a
number, as he would later say. He bargained with the old seller and purchased
the book for a few cents. Right before he exited the shop, his eyes encountered
the battered cardboard box of a jigsaw puzzle bearing the image of a realistic
painting of the Earth. The doctor, who was a sworn fan of jigsaw puzzles, took
it out of the display window. He purchased the fifteen hundred part jigsaw
puzzle from the hunched Jew for half the price of the book. The seller did not
even attempt to bargain with him, perhaps because he knew no one but this odd
scientist would purchase such archaic artifacts.

When he had reached his apartment, Lawrence opened the book
first and read it with fervor. When he had finished reading, he put down the
book and turned to the jigsaw puzzle box. He was thrilled and enthusiastic
about what he’d read and while constructing the puzzle, piecing together North America,
then continuing to the southern part of the continent, an idea formed in his
head that connected the book he had just finished reading and the puzzle he was
busy putting together. He immediately left the jigsaw puzzle and sat at his
writing desk in his study. On a battered writing pad, Lawrence began to
scribble bits and pieces of his ideas and conclusions until he fell asleep on
his own writings. When he woke up, several hours later, his muscles ached
because of the uncomfortable position in which he’d slept, but his heart welled
with joy. He felt an elation he had not experienced for a decade, since he’d
developed his last invention, and he knew, in the same way a sailor knows his
ship is close to its home port, that he was on the verge of a new discovery. To
the casual onlooker, his notes would have probably appeared to be meaningless,
but as he returned to look at them, a wide smile stretched across his face. He
took out a new notebook from the writing desk drawer and wrote on its cover
with bold letters ‘The Mendelssohnian Theory’. Later, he opened the notebook
and began to write in an orderly and rounded calligraphy.

The doctor had worked a long time on his theory before he
dared to publish it. He knew that it would raise a lot of objections among the
scientific community of which he was a part, because it had a theological
aspect, and he also knew that the church would be wrathful of the heresy it
contained, but Lawrence did not relent. He was convinced the theory should be
published and related to and, therefore, insisted on bringing it to the
public’s knowledge.

And indeed, and even to a greater extent than the doctor had
anticipated, right after its publication, the theory shocked the scientific
world, mainly because it was seemingly simple, yet easily proven and backed up
by easy to check and analyze observations. Dr. Lawrence had proven, with the
aid of precise flow charts, how the placing of a cornerstone to an Aztec
pyramid in southern Mexico by an almost forgotten young slave, had led, stage
by stage, to the discovery of electricity almost two hundred years later, and
later on to the invention of the electric bulb by Edison.

In his theory, Lawrence had mapped the history of the Earth
as a jigsaw pattern, in which the shifting of each of its parts in a correct
way causes a chain reaction, until a development and a human breakthrough are
achieved.

For some reason, and in contrast to his own experience, the
Doctor felt that the world was ready to receive and appreciate his great
research. The fact that he had based large parts of it on a booklet he’d
purchased at a used bookstore did not bother him in the least. He did not know
how right and how wrong he was.

In retrospect, it turned out that the doctor’s main
contribution to the establishment of the Mendelssohnian theory had been in
finding a measurable way to consider the theory and to prove it with scientific
methods, and mainly in his joining together historical, geographical,
theocratic and Social analysis. To be fair, one has to admit Lawrence had used
a great deal of conspiracy newspapers and cheap science fiction books, in
addition to the great databases he could access in the worldwide-web.
Scientists and researchers who examined and upgraded the Mendelssohnian theory
have reached similar results to those of the doctor and have established and
verified Dr. L’s research. The findings were less in agreement about the second
part of his research that dealt with the way in which the Earth was formed.
Some say that this more problematic part had prevented the members of the Nobel
Prize committee to award Lawrence with the coveted prize.

In that part of his research, Lawrence had developed a theory
that offered a kind of code for the understanding of processes in the world,
like a map that could help one with orientation inside a maze. It defined the
relation between various events with the aid of probability chains. According
to Lawrence, the Earth was planned and created by intelligent creatures, which
Lawrence had called “the creators” and therefore had established their name for
all eternity, or at least the eternity of the human race. Dr. Lawrence claimed
creators originated from a planet created by one of the secondary blasts
following the first known Big Bang, close to the center of the universe, which
means close to the birthplace of the star-strewn space.

Sixty-three years more will pass before the Doctor’s theory
will cease to be regarded as a metaphor and be scientifically proven with the
aid of the discovery of the basic chain of Earth’s jigsaw puzzle.