Andrew put his dishes in the sink, planning to wash them later, and turned to go back out to his study in the shed behind his house. It wasn't until he opened the sliding glass door that he looked up and saw the shed engulfed in flames.
He froze for a few moments, then cried out. He ran out into his backyard, but realized immediately there was nothing he could do. Quickly, he turned around, ran back into his house and called the fire department. As soon as told them his address, he hung up, grabbed a fire extinguisher he kept in the house, and ran back out. Pointing the nozzle at the front of the shed, he squeezed the handle. A short stream of what looked like shaving cream spurted out about two meters and then immediately died out. "Dammit! Dammit!" He shook up the extinguisher and then tried again. Nothing.
Andrew looked up at his study and saw his life's work burning away.
He was too close and the heat was too much for him, so he went back inside to put the sliding door between him and the flame. He had spent decades exploring anti-gravity, all of his notes were in the shed, along with the "device" (as he called it) which he had recently constructed. He had been powering it up for several days, and was planning to run an experiment tomorrow to see if he could actually create an anti-gravity field. The applications and benefits would be enormous, as would the monetary value.
All lost. He could try to reduplicate his notes, writing down everything he remembered, but there was no way he could recall all the details, all of his findings that allowed him to hone his measurements and construct the device.
There was a banging on his front door. Andrew ran to it, opened it, and saw a fireman standing there, along with several others running around, some to his back yard with a hose, others to (he supposed) the fire hydrant down the street. The fireman at the door asked him some questions, and Andrew answered them as best he could under the circumstances. His life's work, gone.
He walked back through his house to watch from behind the sliding door as the firemen began to shower water on his shed. It seemed to have no effect, and that confused him, and them as well. The shed was constructed out of lead siding with electrical wires running all through it. Thus, when the device created an anti-gravity field, it would be contained within the shed, the wires and lead creating a sort of boundary that would prevent it from going beyond it. The lead obviously wasn't burning. He had plenty of books and notes in the shed, but not enough to produce the conflagration the firemen were impotently trying to fight.
The police arrived, and came to the back yard. They spoke to one of the firemen at first, then came up to his sliding back door, so Andrew opened it as they approached. They asked many more questions which he tried to answer without going into any detail about his research and the device. When they asked exactly what his research was, he said, "I can't really say; it's under contract by the federal government, and they've labelled it top secret," which was true. Of course, he also didn't want to give away the results of his research so that he could be properly credited with their discovery, but that didn't seem relevant to the policemen's queries.
They thanked him, and he closed the sliding door, as much to escape the situation as the heat, and tried to imagine what could have happened. Could it have been arson? Could someone who knew what Andrew was doing have sabotaged him? It seemed too conspiracy-minded, but he couldn't imagine how else it could have happened. Even if all of the wiring in the walls were suddenly exposed and sent all of their combined electricity into his books and papers, it shouldn't produce an inferno on this level.
There was suddenly some movement among the firefighters, and they began shouting to each other. And within several seconds, the hoses were finally able to do their job, and the fire died down rather quickly. They continued showering the shed with water, but were obviously concerned about something. One of the policemen ran to his back door so Andrew opened it again and said, "Yes, what's going on?"
The policeman answered, "The firemen said they heard someone yelling in there! Who would have been inside?"
"What? Uh ... nobody. I'm the only one with access. There are several locks on the door, I don't see how anyone could get in. But ... that's horrible! How could someone have survived that fire? It was burning for nearly an hour!"
"I know. It doesn't seem possible. And they said that as the fire finally started to die down, the voice became calmer, like the person was angry instead of, well, burning alive."
"Was it just yelling? Or did they hear any words?"
"They said it sounded like someone talking, but they couldn't make any sense of it. Like the person was drunk."
"I don't understand how that could happen."
"I know. Could you come out to the shed to verify that it's still locked?"
"Of course."
They walked out together, and as they approached the shed, one of the firemen handed him a cloth. "You won't want to touch the metal directly. It'll still be very hot." Andrew nodded numbly, took the cloth in one hand, then took his key ring out of his pocket with the other. First, he folded the cloth over several times, then tried to turn the door handle. Nothing.
He turned to the policeman. "It looks like it's still locked. Let me try the deadbolts." Andrew took one of the keys and tried to insert it into the appropriate lock without touching the metal. He failed. He jerked his hand back as soon as he felt the cool metal on his fingers, then opened his eyes in astonishment. He pressed the palm of his hand against the metal. Several of the firemen shouted at him, "Are you crazy? Don't touch it!" But he turned toward them with his hand resting on the metal door.
"It's not hot! I mean, at all! It's cool!"
They looked at him in astonishment, and then started to fan out, gingerly touching the walls at various points. None of it felt hot. It was bizarre.
The policeman said to him, "OK, look, try the rest of the locks. Maybe someone broke in there and then locked themselves in."
But Andrew was shaking his head. "It's a double door. Two of the locks are not accessible from the inside. You can't lock yourself in with them."
"Why the hell would you build it like that? You could lock someone in so that they couldn't get out!"
He sighed. "I figured someone wouldn't try to break in if I was there, so the extra locks were for when I wasn't there. Besides, no one ever went in there except me. No one has the keys except me. I wasn't worried about it."
"I'm worried about it. I'm wondering whether there was more to your research than you're telling me. How do I know you didn't keep someone locked up in there?"
"Oh for God's sake! That's crazy!"
"Then what about the shouting they heard from inside?"
Andrew didn't have an answer to that. He quickly unlocked all of the locks, and opened the door. As soon as he did, something fell out at his feet. It was smoking and burned, but he could tell it used to be a human body.
The policeman put his hand on his holster and said, "Sir I'm going to have to ask you to come down to the station with me."
Andrew couldn't take his eyes off the body. After several seconds he shook his head, and said, "Wait, just let me go inside and see what happened, OK? You can see that this is the only way in, there's no way I'll be able to escape." The policeman looked skeptical, so he said, "Look, this is my life's work! I'd have a better idea of what happened than anyone else. How would me locking someone in there explain why the walls cooled down so quickly? How would it explain that the person didn't start yelling until the fire had been burning for nearly an hour? Something's going on, and if you want to find out what it is, I'm the best person to do it."
The policeman still looked skeptical, but then briskly nodded his head. Andrew turned towards the door and realized he had to step over the body to get inside. He felt he had to say something about the loss of life in order to avoid looking like a murderer, so he asked, "Is there any way to find out who that is? Was?"
The policeman nodded again. "Dental records. Perhaps some DNA survived, although with that blaze I don't see how."
Andrew tried to look inside the shed. It was dark, he couldn't see more than a few inches past the doorframe. He stepped over the body, cautiously, and then stepped inside.
It didn't smell burnt. The floor was covered with water. He walked around, trying to see if anything survived the inferno, but there were only ashes. The bookshelves and his desk had been completely burned up. He dimly registered the door closing behind him, and wondered why they would do that. But he could hear voices talking outside and wasn't worried. His mind was preoccupied with the destruction before him.
What about the table? Andrew turned and saw that it was still intact. It was also made of iron, and the device was lying on its side, on the floor next to it. It was no longer plugged into the wall socket. He bent over to look at it. It was about fifteen inches wide and tall, and twice that deep. The front was dominated by a cone going into the device. The cone would spin around, at very high speeds, and would (theoretically) create an anti-gravity field. He would have been able to test it for the first time tomorrow.
As he stared at the device, trying to figure out what happened, he was suddenly struck with a spray of water. The firemen must be hosing the shed down again. "Hey! I'm still in here! There's no fire, stop with the water!" This had the opposite effect, as he was soon being hit with water from all sides. He sputtered, continued yelling at the firemen to stop, and was trying to get out of the line of fire when he realized something.
The water was not coming from above. It was coming off the floor. It rose to the roof of the shed in large quantities. It ran up the walls, and in places he could see small drops of water. Falling up, not down.
At first, Andrew was elated. Somehow the anti-gravity was working. But if there were anti-gravity, the water wouldn't be the only thing falling up towards the ceiling. He would fall up as well, as would the device and the iron table and the ashes. And when he glanced over at the device, the cone was not spinning. It wasn't even plugged in. So it couldn't be producing anti-gravity.
Then, as he watched, the cone slowly started to turn. Which was impossible. Suddenly the device began to rock back and forth. The electrical cord started moving. Nothing was making sense. And then he had several sudden insights, one right after the other.
First, he realized that relativity showed that there is a relation between gravity and the passage of time: the greater the gravity, the slower time passed. And if you reversed gravity -- if you had anti-gravity -- then you'd reverse time as well.
Second, he realized that the device made no allowance for this fact. So if the device produced an anti-gravity force, and time began to run backward, the energy it had been storing up for several days would be explosively released.
Third, he realized who the dead body was.
And with that, the device sprang into the air, its cone spinning faster and faster. It settled itself onto the table as a spray of water emerged from it, while the cord jumped around wildly and plugged itself in. And a spiral jet of flame emerged from the cone.
Andrew screamed and ran toward the door. But the whole room was engulfed in flame, and he knew he only had seconds to live. He reached the door and realized that, of course, it would be locked from the outside, and there was no way to get out.
He was disappointed at how long it took to burn to death. His last thought was that the policeman would be very surprised at the results of the dental records.