The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time Read Online Free Page A

meet a slight smile.
    He reached under the seat to make sure two items were in place: a change of clothes (presumed unnecessary, but he liked to be prepared) and a gallon of water. He had no idea what they drank in other dimensions, if anything, so he thought it best that he bring his own. It again crossed his mind that everything he was bringing might be so useless as to be humorous for his whole perception of extra-dimensionality might be incredibly flawed,.
    He watched the display on his console go to "ready" and he gave the thumbs up sign to the cameras, turning lastly to the Teslavision portable mounted in front of him. This thumbs up signal had been the "OK" sign for the old Royal Air Force pilots in the first World War and, feeling like a pioneer aviator, Garison had resurrected it in modern times.
    Garison bowed his head, took a deep breath, and said a silent prayer. He had never been taught to pray, but had taken to doing the best he could since reading and copying the Bible. With a barely audible, "Amen," he raised his head and said to the cameras, "Well, here goes."
    His fingers hovered over the keyboard for just a second, then he hit the button designated to start the countdown. Five agonizingly slow seconds passed by before some unfathomable level of his psyche detected the power build-up that would soon propel him into another dimension.
    The electricity generated by the nuclear power plant was in the billions of watts range and, as Garison had explained, required a special coupling to keep the enormously high voltage from destroying the wiring on contact. Even with Garison's specially designed ceramic superconductors, his regulator was an absolute necessity.
    The regulator had been built in an area of the lab Garison had designed to be especially dust free. Since being assembled, in fact, the regulator had never been in contact with natural air. Even the miniature cooling system which surrounded the regulator used recycled and filtered air.
    But, as Garison knew, there is no such thing as a one hundred percent sterile environment. Small particles of dust and molecules of foreign material are all around in the natural air and the greatest filters in the world will not catch every single one. And somehow, that one molecule in a billion which escapes every filter, had found its way into the regulator. It had drifted around in the microscopic concealed space of the regulator's housing for the six months since its construction, bouncing about as atoms do.
    At the moment when the electricity first encountered the regulator, the foreign molecule passed between two conductor heads and was vaporized in less than an instant. But that one one-millionth of a second caused a back-wash of power which then surged through the regulator and into the circuits of the interdimensional machine.
    In that briefest of moments, a moment so small the human mind cannot comprehend it let alone recognize it, Garison Fitch was propelled somewhere he had no idea he could go.
     
     
     
     
    Excerpt from A Fitch Family History by Maureen Fitch Carnes
    Traveling on foot, as most people did in those days due to the lack of trails suitable even for horses, Darius set out for the western lands. According to his account of the journey in his diary, it was almost a month after departure before he left "civilization" behind.
    Even then, the last few settlements Darius passed, we would hardly think of as such. They were congregations of four or five shanties gathered in the same valley, sometimes a mile or more between houses, out on the frontiers of present day Kentucky and Tennessee. Darius's writings and those of his contemporaries describe these "villages" as made up of hard-working, pioneering people who had left the east coast because it was either becoming too crowded or out of a desire to push ever westward and till new soil.
    Their cabins were made from the woods around them and from the porches hung meat they had killed in the nearby woods.