The Gravity of Anti-Gravity Read Free Page A

I couldn’t resist the temptation.
    “Dive! Dive! Take cover men we’re under attack!” I yelled.
    Pops smiled, saluted and answered back, “Aye, aye Captain.”
    We both had a good laugh while I continued to look around in wonderment.
    “There is also a listening system that gives us ears to what’s going on outside.” Pops added. “You can use this switch to change between listening to the front entrance, the rear door and the outside.”
    “Pops I’m amazed. I never knew you were so paranoid. So where does that door at the back of the room go?” I asked.
    The back door was the same design as the front. When Pops rotated the handle and opened it, there was a small concrete room that was connected to a concrete drainage pipe about five feet in diameter. Pops grabbed a flashlight from a nearby shelf and motioned for me to follow him. We both bent down and stepped into the pipe turned tunnel. We walked down the tunnel about 80 feet and came to a wall. Then Pops shined the light on the wall and it revealed an iron ladder leading up toward the surface. At the top was a hatch. It had a large rotating wheel lock similar to the front and back doors. Pops climbed up the ladder, rotated the wheel, pushed open the hatch and climbed out.
    After I followed Pops up the ladder and stepped out, I noticed that he had attached fake plants to the top of the hatch to camouflage it. The faux plants blended in nicely with the surrounding native plants.
    As I stood there in wonderment at what had been revealed to me, I looked up at the night sky. It was a beautiful clear evening with lots of stars shining. At first I felt a calm come over me but that soon changed to a strong feeling of foreboding. I tried to imagine where my life was taking me. Something told me that even my most wild fantasies would pale in comparison to the perils my future held.
     
    “It’s beautiful tonight Pops and nice to be outside again. I can’t believe what you’ve done here. This is an astonishing accomplishment” I commented.
    Pops said nothing except “Let’s get back.” From there we climbed back into the tunnel. Pops went ahead of me so that I would have to close and lock the hatch. As we reentered the shelter, he had me close and lock the back door. When we exited from the front door, I shut off the lights, closed the front door, rotated the wheel and we both proceeded up the steps to the barn. Then he had me rotate the coke sign the opposite way he had done it and the floor moved back to its role of just being a floor. We rotated the bookcase and it clicked into place. Everything again looked like it hadn’t been touched in years.
    “O.K. Pops, I’m, dying to know. Why did you decide to show me the bomb shelter tonight?”
    “That’s a story for another time. Let’s go to bed Bill, I’m tired.”

 
    -3-
     
    Pops, now sixty-two, kept in excellent shape by jogging five mile each morning. He was an ex Marine, just short of six feet tall and a trim 175 pounds. His full head of hair was always trimmed in a crew cut style. It was mostly gray with a little white starting to show around the temples. He was drafted right out of high school and did two tours of duty in Vietnam. Even though at times he demonstrated the gruff exterior of his Marine Corps Sergeant past, to me he was always Pops, my grandfather.
    Pops and Grandma adopted my younger sister Joanna and me when our parents were killed by a drunk driver seven years earlier. Although devastating at the time, Joanna and I had made a home with Pops and Grandma and we were loved and we loved them.
    Pops had recently retired from his job as a machinist for Lockheed Aircraft where he had worked over 30 years.
    When they were young, Pops and Grandma invested in a small house on three acres in Altadena. He loved it because it backed up to public land that quickly rose to become the San Gabriel Mountains. He especially appreciated the fact that no one could build behind him.
    Over the years he