Glide

A blinding flash followed by a soft pop startled Dr. Magigate. He lurched, teetered, then fell back with a clatter. Lying on his back, his feet tangled in the stool, it took Magigate several moments to orient himself and verify that no bones had been broken and that the flash had not burned him. Then he noticed the light. Just as he'd predicted: a floating orb of cool pastel colors, predominantly blue, throbbed and flashed nearby. But the gentle pulse did not come from his apparatus; it emanated from the center of the room, where a glowing bubble glided slowly but steadily away. He rubbed his eyes; the sight remained. A genuine smile—the first in countless days and nights—swept his face. Otherworldly it looked, something straight out of a fairy tale. A vessel Glinda the Good might favor.

He couldn't help but admire the beauty, the perfection of the small globe of light, buoyed like a Lilliputian sun by its own physics: at its center nothing more complex than a speck of polymeric substrate generating concentric quantum rings charged and oriented precisely to counter the burden of Earth's gravity. Magigate wallowed in the elegance of invention, which, at its best, could train nature's most elusive laws to defy themselves—at least, in appearance.

With the slightest breath of air, he pushed the bubble around the room; it glided like a puck on ice. Magigate imagined a world where cars, buses, trains, and planes glided to their destinations without the roar of combustion, without the noxious plume and squeal. He imagined massive turbines fueled by nothing more than a trickle of water, spinning out enough electricity to power cities. He imagined shuttles traveling to the moon and beyond with the regularity and accessibility of cruise ships to the Bahamas.

His eyes grew glassy as he allowed himself to fantasize a world no longer confined by the yoke of gravity. Possibilities rushed at him with the tumult and festivity of a parade. A new industry—the Gravity Reduction Industry, or, better yet, the Glide Industry—would be born. Raw material suppliers would continuously improve upon Magigate's superconductive sample. New pharmaceutical divisions would be dedicated to improving his Polyena virus. Glide cell manufacturers would pack these gyroscopes into bikes, cars, boats, and planes—all of which would need to be reinvented too.

Without gravity, a calculator-sized solar cell could supply enough energy to propel a family sedan or even a taxi from New York to London at Mach speeds—no need to travel by plane. And the best part: besides a small charge injected into the Glide cell just before it left the loading docks, there would be no other energy requirements and no waste. No oil, no gas, no carbon dioxide, no ozone.

As Magigate's first wave of thrill receded, into its wake washed the dark curls of doubt. He imagined energy cartels seizing his invention. Even worse, and more likely under his present circumstances, he glimpsed its pernicious military exploits in the hands of the Academy and Biggs Industries. If concealed by an elite axis of leaders, the balance of power might be forever skewed. The dark side of antigravity could easily eclipse nuclear fission's. He imagined armies marching—no, gliding across broken, smashed plains, over smoking hills, and through burning cities with terrible speed and fury; he saw a black web of tropospheric satellites choking the earth, lasers like deadly red eyes staring down from the sky; he saw missiles hurtling around the planet, unhindered by distance or speed, arriving at their targets with silent and merciless precision. Magigate could not bear these visions. Though he had tried to prepare for this moment of success, he had never willed himself to acknowledge the reaches of an invention that reduced gravity to near zero. Now that it was upon him, he could not accept that he might be responsible for spawning such a dark and dastardly world.

Just then, another blast, louder and more violent, blew his lab door from its hinges. For an instant, Magigate thought his experiment had gone terribly wrong. Then he saw three silhouettes rush in through the smoke-filled doorway.