Chapter No. 87. Weird Stuff.

It was a typical Monday. Janet was at work, James, Sylvia and Amy were busy creating gems and jewelry, and Robert was making improvements to the house. Vincent and Sally, on the other hand, were sitting on the patio discussing things.

"So, how did you end up getting killed?" Sally asked.

"My unit came under fire at Kandahar. I got hit and I don't remember anything after that."

"I wish I could have been killed like that. Maybe I wouldn't have had to suffer like I did."

"I can't imagine wanting to die. It's weird."

"We're living a fantasy," she said. "Who could have imagined something like this."

"I assume that the scumbag that kidnapped you violated you."

"Actually, he didn't. I think he thought that he could get ransom money, but he was killed by a drug pusher ring. I think he owed them money."

"So, that's when you got into pushing drugs."

"No. I escaped and went on the run for a while, but they caught up to me. They needed someone like me to be a mule."

"So, you carried drugs across borders."

"Yes, I got caught in Australia, but I escaped. I didn't have that luck in Cambodia. They tortured me to get me to finger my associates."

Vincent shook his head. "That's ridiculous!"

"It's what happens if you do crimes in shitty countries."

"Well, you don't have to worry about that now."

Sally gave him an ornery smirk. "I understand that you've been assigned to me."

Vincent's eyes enlarged briefly before he settled down. "Is that a problem?"

"Not at all," she said, grinning.

That brought a smile to Vincent's lips.

Later on, when the Steris family had gathered for lunch, Baby Jack had news that both baffled and surprised everyone. "Sparky claims that he can detect high frequency gravity waves."

"Is that something we could use to track down demons?" Robert asked.

"High frequency gravity waves are what would be left over from the cosmic expansion that occurred in the initial microsecond after the Big Bang. The waves would be the only thing that escaped the recombination of matter stage."

"So, what you're telling us is that Sparky has detected something that happened almost immediately after the Big Bang?"

"Yes, Grand Dad."

Robert turned to James. "I wonder if NASA would be interested in that?"

"The problem I see," James said. "Is them believing that a dog detected something like this, which I might add has not yet been accomplished by astrophysicists."

"Well, it won't hurt to ask them."

"Yeah, why not," Amy said. "They already think we're loony."

"What I want to know is how the dog is so . . . intelligent?" Sally asked.

"How are we able to fly around in space?" Robert asked rhetorically. "We could ask a lot of questions, but the ultimate answer is that God is responsible. It's divine gifts that allow us to do what we do."

A sudden loud sound startled them.

"What the hell was that?" Amy asked.

"I think it's the sound of chaos!" James said.

The Steris family teleported outside in their backyard, and what they saw disturbed them. A glowing sky glared with an eerie golden color streaked with bright red.

"That's a meteor!" James said, and it's headed this way!"

"Let's take care of it!" Robert said.

They changed into their outfits and flew up into the sky to intercept the meteor. Despite the fact that the giant rock was glowing red and ablating burning debris, they were able to use their powers to sling it out into space, but not before James had managed to catch a section of it. He allowed the stone to cool while he and the others returned to their home.

"Maybe NASA can figure out where this came from," he said.

"Take it to them," Robert said.

James teleported to the JPL Mission room where he found Kim Wu busy at a computer station. Kim looked up at him. "Where's the rest of your group?"

"They sent me to give you this." He held the stone fragment up. "This is from a meteor that almost got through to our house. We sent it out into space, and I caught this fragment."

Kim took it and turned it around in her hands. "So, this never hit the ground."

"No. I snatched it at about thirty thousand feet."

"How did you know that a meteor was coming down?"

"We heard the boom."

"Thanks for the sample," Kim said with a subtle smile.

James nodded, but before he was about to teleport back home, Jason came into the mission room. "Where's your buddies?"

"They told me to deliver a meteor fragment that we intercepted and sent back into space."

Jason looked over at Kim, who held up the sample.

"We appreciate that," Jason said.

"Ah, I have a question," James said. "Our dog has informed us that he can detect high frequency gravity waves. As we understand it, those would be the only gravity waves that could escape from the cosmic expansion event that occurred during the first microsecond after the Big Bang."

Jason exchanged glances with Kim before he turned back to James. "Are you telling me that your dog is intelligent?"

"Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but evidently he is. We don't really understand why that would be the case, but so far, old Sparky has saved our butts on more than one occasion."

Jason stared at James for several minutes before he replied. "Yes, that is the currently accepted theory, although there are other causes for high frequency gravity waves. Do you think that your dog could produce a detailed map of those gravity waves as they appear all over the sky?"

"He might. I'll get back to you on that," he said before he returned home.

Jason turned to Kim. "Yes, I realize that what he said sounds crazy, but I adhere to the old adage; 'Never look a gift horse in the mouth' only in this case it would be a dog."

Kim laughed.

"Did they like the sample?" Robert asked when he saw James materialize.

"Yes. I asked them about Sparky's revelation."

"What did they say?"

"Jason wants to know if Sparky can create a sky map of the gravity waves."

"What, like the Cosmic Background Radiation Map?"

"I think that's what he meant."

"The only way that there are gravity waves from the expansion epoch is if the expansion was not symmetrical. Maybe Sparky can answer that question."

"I think that Baby Jack and Sparky are already working on it," Sylvia said.

Robert shook his head. "Who would ever imagine that a child and a dog would work on a major cosmology problem."

"That's because we are the Incredibles," James said.

"Or the Unbelievable Bunch," Robert retorted.

"I wonder what people are calling us," Janet said.

"It doesn't matter. As long as they don't reveal our true identities."

"So far, so good. I think that the government is oaky with what we're doing, and that's all we need."

Baby Jack and Sparky came into the front room.

"Sparky says that we need to go out into space to produce a Cosmic Gravity Wave Background scan."

"Yeah, that makes sense. We all don't have to go."

"No problem," James said.

"We'll go with you," Sally said.

James, Sylvia, Sally, Vincent, Baby Jack and Sparky vanished.

"Do you think they'll get what they want?" Janet asked.

"Hard to tell, but I would think that the chances are good that they will," Robert replied.

The Sparky mission materialized ten thousand light years above the galaxy.

"Why'd we end up this far away?" Sally asked.

"I think it's because Sparky wants a location that's not busy," James said. "It will make the reception clearer."

"Speaking of busy," Vincent said, pointing. "What's that?"

James looked at where he was pointing. "That looks like a star that has lost its way."

"It has a planet orbiting it," Sylvia said. "It's a rogue solar system. It probably got kicked out of our galaxy, or maybe a nearby galaxy."

"When Sparky gets done scanning for gravity waves, we'll go check it out."

They had to wait for a half hour before Baby Jack revealed what Sparky had discovered. "Sparky claims he has a decent map of high frequency gravity waves."

"Good," James said. "Let's go check out that rogue star and its planet."

They teleported to a location a million kilometers out from the planet that was orbiting the rogue star. It appeared as a dark blue water world.

"Get some photos of this," James told Sylvia. "It'll give NASA a better idea of what a lost solar system looks like."

After Sylvia took some photos, she and the others teleported to near the planet.

"This is mostly oceans, but there is a rather large land mass poking up from the water," James said.

"That's weird," Sylvia said. "You have to wonder how that is even possible."

"Wouldn't that make the planet lopsided?" Vincent asked.

"You would think that, but the planet seems to be stable." James said. "Let's get a better look at it."

They flew down into the planet's atmosphere and headed to the land mass. What they saw was a pointy mountain sticking up into the clouds. Down at the base of the mountain, a lush valley encircled it like a ring of dark green. The land beyond the mountain was also lush with vegetation.

"Get good photos of this," James said. "This is wild."

"Sparky claims he is detecting things crawling around down there," Baby Jack said.

"We better get photos of that," James said. "But I think we should avoid actually landing on the ground. We don't want to transfer some alien bug back to Earth."

They swept down and began a scan of the alien forest. The creatures that were crawling around looked like large multilegged insects. They had large mandibles, probably to catch smaller prey. Sylvia got great videos of them crawling around on alien soil that appeared yellow.

"The star looks a lot like the Sun," Sylvia said. "I wonder how it survived being kicked out of a galaxy."

"Maybe it's blessed," Sally said.

"Could be," James said. "Let's go back to NASA and show them what we found."

They appeared in the JPL Mission room, where Jason and Kim were still waiting.

"Sparky says he has the data for a high frequency gravity wave map. He'll transfer it to your computer system."

Neither Jason nor Kim reacted to that.

"While we were twenty thousand light years above the galaxy, we spotted a rogue star that had a planet. We checked it out and we'll download the photos of it."

Jason and Kim stood and watched the photos appear on a large screen. Many other people gathered to view them.

"Do you have any idea where this came from?" Jason asked.

"Not really, but it might have escaped from our galaxy or a small galaxy that's gravitationally associated with it."

"Fascinating!"

"It has life," Kim said. "Something you wouldn't expect on a rogue solar system."

"Intergalactic space isn't all that safe, but it's much safer than interstellar space."

"Yes, but it's just hard to imagine something like this."

"Maybe there are more rogue solar systems than we realize."

That represented a new source of life in the universe. The Sparky mission returned home.

"How did it go?" Robert asked.

"Good," James said. "We spotted a rogue solar system and went to it. It had primitive life. We took some photos and downloaded them to NASA's system. They seemed more fascinated with them than Sparky's cosmic map."

"I'm sure they'll get back to it."

As it turned out, the Sparky cosmic map initiated a protracted discussion among cosmologists because it intimated that the Big Bang was the result of the contraction of a previous universe.