The Gravity of Anti-Gravity Read Free

down. They led to a steel door about three feet wide and six feet high.
    “Where did you get this door?” I asked.”
    “I got this door, the one on the other side of the room plus the hatch at the end of the escape tunnel off an old submarine,” Pops answered. “There used to be a marine salvage place in San Pedro that sold most of the stuff that I used here and real cheap too. Turns out, there wasn’t much demand for used submarine parts in those days. Today it would all be sold for scrap and sent to China for reprocessing.”
    “Door on the other side? Escape tunnel? Hatch?” I stammered.
    Pops rotated the large circular handle on the door and opened it with a hefty shove.
    “Come into my lair Billy boy and mind your head,” Pops said in a serious yet joyful way.
    I ducked down to miss the top of the door and stepped over the rail at the bottom. Once inside, Pops turned on the light, closed the door behind us and rotated the handle. I watched while the metal pins moved outward and secured the door to the frame. He then slid a large steel bar into the round handle effectively keeping it from being rotated from either side of the door.
    “What in the hell are you afraid of Pops? It looks like nothing short of the direct hit from a nuke would get you here.” I commented.
    “Let’s continue the tour. I’ll answer your questions later,” Pops responded.
    Pops showed me around the 15 by 20 foot single room with concrete walls, floors and ceiling. There was a small, walled-off area in the corner that contained a toilet and a tiny sink. There was a large tank of water in the other corner with some serious filtering equipment attached. In between the water tank and the commode were two groups of bunk beds stacked three high with one row on each side of a narrow aisle for a total of six beds. A thin mattress, suitable for a jail cell, was rolled up, sealed in plastic and lying on each bed. A similarly packaged bundle of blankets and a pillow had been placed neatly next to each mattress.
    “What do you do for back-up power?” I asked. “If there’s a nuke attack, the electric company will certainly be out of commission.”
    Then Pops walked to the opposite corner of the room to a cabinet that looked like a closet about four feet wide by two feet deep and a little over feet high. When Pops opened the double doors, I saw it was filled with car batteries, all wired together.
    Knowing Pops I commented “I’ll bet you salvaged these batteries too.”
    “Yep, all of them have been refurbished,” Pops explained. “I check every one of them once a year and replace the weak ones. Remember when I bought those solar panels on the top of the barn? I installed them to supply these batteries. Even if the panels stopped working, this place would be habitable for about three months.”
    “What about ventilation?” I asked “Those batteries put out small amounts of toxic fumes that would build up quickly in a small place like this.”
    “True. I guess you didn’t notice the exhaust pipe above the battery closet. Also there is an elaborate ventilation system that filters all incoming air from all toxins including nuclear fallout. That’s where I had to spend some serious money. Turns out, there aren’t any salvaged nuclear filters available.” Pops said.
    Then I turned around and saw something I hadn’t noticed when I first came in. It looked like a thick black metal post in the middle of the room.
    “What’s that, Pops?”
    Pops went over to the wall and flipped a switch. The pole in the middle of the room moved upward to reveal a periscope, right out of a World War II submarine movie.
    “I bought so much stuff the guy in the salvage yard threw this in for two hundred bucks,” Pops boasted. “It was so cool I couldn’t turn it down. If you look through the viewfinder you’ll get a view of the outside.”
    When I walked over and peered into the viewfinder, I grabbed the handles and rotated the apparatus around.