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Chapter 1. Overtime

It was quite a bit past dark as Sarah wrote equations on the white board, listening to the rain hit the office windows and run down to the metal sill. The marker fumes had become a stench to her nose as she continued to work much longer than she ever expected when she took the job. Her glasses felt like they were becoming heavier with each passing minute and it was getting hard to keep her eyes focused on her notes. Sarah was a highly intelligent overachiever with a love of science who had earned twin doctorates in record time and was quickly working on her third. When she was working through graduate school to get her doctorate in particle physics to add to the doctorates in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics she had already earned, she had dreams of working with great minds to make great discoveries that would revolutionize how mankind understood the universe. Once she got hired for the research assistant position in another university she thought she had it made. After two years, she was rather disenchanted with the work.

Her feelings were fueled by the fact her boss was such a jackass.

"You're still here, Sarah? I'd have thought you would be home hours ago." Her colleague Phil startled her from the half dazed stupor that was slowing her work and making her writing more cryptic.

"Huh?...Oh, hi Phil. Yeah, I have to get this stuff done for Berglund by Friday so he can make his presentation at the conference," said Sarah, stumbling over her words.

"Yeah, loads of credit there," Phil said sarcastically.

Sarah sputtered her lips. "Pfpfpft, that's why Ernest quit last month. He'd had his work stolen one too many times. Just because Berglund is head of the department he thinks he can use the work we do for his publications without putting any name on it but his own. Sometimes I'd just like to..." she said as she jousted her knee upwards.

Phil laughed. "You and me both. I don't know how he gets away with that. And he always makes it seem like an innocent mistake. 'Sorry Ernie, it must have been an oversight by the publisher that your name didn't get printed,'" he imitated with a whiny voice.

Sarah was quite alert now, the conversation having awakened her. "Well, I'm going to finish this last little bit and then head home. The rest can wait until tomorrow."

Phil smiled. "I had no choice to stay. I had an experiment running over in the chem lab that took 5 hours, and I couldn't just shut it off to go home or it would be ruined and I'd have to do it all over again tomorrow. I hope Katie's not too annoyed when I get home."

"She's too much of a sweetheart to not forgive you, Phil," replied Sarah. "You're one of the lucky ones to have found such a perfect mate. I hope to be as lucky some day."

"True," said Phil, smiling again as he looked dreamily to the side. "She is. And keep your hopes up...I'm sure you will find the right one. The thing is to not try, and love will find you."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "I've not tried as hard as I've tried, and it hasn't worked out yet. I wanted to get married, but not to my work!"

"I know the feeling," said Phil. "Well, I have to get going. Have a good night."

"You too, Phil. See you tomorrow," said Sarah, turning back to the board, followed by an exasperated sigh. After a couple more equations were figured out Sarah made comments in her notes to mark where she left off, grabbed her keys, turned off the lights, and headed to her car. She thought to herself that at least the rain had let up to a light drizzle.

When she got home Sarah could hardly believe the late hour. She heated up some leftover casserole from the weekend before to make a modest dinner before bed. It was so big she'd been eating it all week, but it was good enough that she wasn't sick of it yet. It had saved her from having to take much time to cook anything after working so late each day. After dinner she felt quite exhausted from the day, yet too tired to go to bed yet. She poured a cold glass of ginger ale and flopped onto the couch with another exasperated sigh. The research work was not physically demanding other than requiring her to be on her feet most of the day, but the long hours and mental strain were exhausting.

Sarah stared wearily at the wall above the gas fireplace. She lit it when she got home to help take away the chill she felt from the rainy night, and now the dancing flames felt very comfortable. As she sat there she let her head fall back over the top of the couch cushion, closing her eyes to listen to the rain outside and the soft sound of the fire inside, and to simply relax. Her mind was still a blur of activity because of all the work she'd been doing recently but she was finally starting to feel herself wind down.

As she lounged, in the darkness inside her eyelids she saw faint flashes of light. They were nothing that caught her attention, they were so dim. The flashes were occasional, every several seconds and not forming any sort of pattern. After a couple minutes passed the flashes got slightly brighter, enough to make her take notice. Sarah dismissed the light as the flickering of the fireplace, passing cars, or lightning in the rain clouds, yet she didn't notice there was no sound to accompany such explanations.

Without warning a very bright flash of light filled her dark eyelids as if a camera flash went off inches from her face. Her eyes flew open as she looked up, and in the same instant thought to herself, "This is going to be a loud one!" She never did like sudden loud thunder.

Nothing.

The lightning she was sure struck right outside her house made no noise at all. Sarah sat there perplexed, wondering what happened. She got up and went over to the window to look out at the dark sky. The pitch black sky had no flashes, no lightning, and she saw no light except for the nearby streetlight that made the raindrops glow like countless tiny meteors. She saw nobody outside who could have made so much light. For several minutes she watched the night sky trying to figure out what could have made such a flash.

After several more moments passed her curiosity was replaced by the exhaustion of the day, and Sarah remembered the comfortable sofa. Before returning to it she went to her bedroom, traded the day's clothes for her fuzzy bathrobe, and went back to the living room with her alarm clock. She could have gone to bed but was feeling especially comfortable on the couch earlier, and she didn't want to risk falling asleep there without an alarm for the next morning. Sarah set the alarm, took a few more sips of her ginger ale, and laid down on the couch while pulling the thick blanket off the back of the couch. Even if she wouldn't admit it to herself, she knew that's where she'd be sleeping that night.

While she laid there with her eyes closed, Sarah kept seeing flashes in the dark. They varied from the faint dim flashes of earlier to bright flashes like the latest one. Every time she would open her eyes the lights quit and nothing was there to cause them. Even in the darkness of the room or when she pulled the blanket up over her face to be in complete darkness, she could not see any flashes. As soon as she closed her eyes again, they would continue.

"What in the world is this?" she thought. Aside from needing to wear glasses she never had eye problems before. "It must be all the work and long hours I've been putting in lately. Stress, it must be stress." She did her best to ignore the flashing light in her eyes and eventually she fell asleep.

Chapter 2. Meeting new friends

The alarm clock seemed to shriek when it awoke Sarah from her deep sleep. She felt it couldn't possibly be 6:30 already but the numbers on the clock didn't change when she hit the snooze button. Eight more minutes and she'd be ready to go. As quickly as she turned off the alarm her head was back on her pillow, desperate to sleep for a few days more. As she fought the morning battle of trying to fall back asleep while trying to wake up, Sarah noticed after several minutes of darkness that the faint flashing of light resumed. This was enough to force her awake and to get up before the second alarm.

"That's it...I'm calling the eye doctor today to get an appointment," she thought to herself. "I can't risk problems with my eyes."

After a meager breakfast of toast and cantaloupe, Sarah took the shower she didn't have the energy for the night before and got ready for work. During the entire time she kept close attention to her eyesight, blinking her eyes to see if there were any more flashes of light. None returned, so by the time she left the house she had dismissed the flashes as symptoms of how tired she'd been. The sun rose above the horizon during the drive to the university and the day was feeling unseasonably balmy, due to the warm front that had caused the rain the night before.

Moments after Sarah punched in at the time clock, her boss, Conway Berglund, began his usual routine of subtle intimidation. "Miss Shepherd, are you finished with the presentation?"

She hated the nameConway. It wasn't the fault of the name; in grade school she had a good friend namedConway. She always called him by his nickname Connor but still knew of his full name. Now after two years of working for a despicable man namedConway, she learned to despise the name as well. He was so adept at taking credit for other peoples' work or outright stealing their research, she and everybody she worked with thought of him as Con Man.

"Not yet, Dr. Berglund, but I expect to have the problems ironed out in the theory's equations by this afternoon and the full presentation will be on your desk by tomorrow morning before you leave for the energy physics conference."

"I expect the same, Miss Shepherd," replied Berglund.

Conwayinsisted everybody refer to him as Doctor Berglund--staff at the university, his family, and especially colleagues who worked under him in his department. Even his wife was required to refer to him as Doctor in social situations and could only use his first name in private. It wasn't necessary. All his correspondence, whether a formal document, casual letter to family, or note to his wife taped to the refrigerator, had a signature ending in "PhD." Everybody knew he had doctorates in particle and energy physics, tenure at the university, and was the head of a very prestigious research department, but that didn't stop him from reminding them on a daily basis. He was a pompous ass and such acknowledgements fed his swollen ego.

Sarah sat heavily in her office chair, contemplating the day's tasks. Then it hit her: "Caffeine...must have coffee," she thought for her own amusement. She got her coffee, retrieved the notes from her desk, and returned to the white board she left the night before. With slightly renewed energy and an endless desire to get the work done, Sarah worked furiously through the day to solve the problems with the energy physics theory they were developing. She held out a weak hope that she would receive some recognition for all the work she put into fixing the theorem and making the math work as they hoped, but she knew it wouldn't happen because Berglund and his secretary were the only ones from the university attending the conference.

Her only real motivation, besides being done with it, was her love of solving problems like a challenging puzzle. She felt satisfaction in such work, one of the few reasons she kept the job for two years. That day she worked straight through lunch because she knew she was getting close to the end. After finishing the technical details of the presentation and making sure their theory was as close to a proof as possible, a small lunch in the late afternoon kept Sarah going to finish the rest of the presentation in the early evening.

Shortly before 5:00 PM Sarah had the main body of the presentation finished and only had the conclusion and additional notes to complete. That was a good time to take a short break before finishing it up, she decided. The harsh office lighting and flicker of her old computer monitor was taking its toll on her eyes, making them feel like they were coated in gravel. After saving her work Sarah looked up at the figurine of a German Shepherd that sat on top of her monitor, and smiled. It was her daily reminder of the dog she had as a girl and always cheered her up with its cute pose. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes for several minutes, wishing she could doze off but knowing she couldn't. The office sounds and noise of the ventilation system wouldn't allow it.

Like a long stroke of lightning a lingering bright flash in her eyes scared Sarah enough to make her jump out of her chair. In the fraction of a second it lasted, it began brilliant white and quickly faded to what looked like stars just before her eyes flew open. None of the flashes had ever been painful but now she was afraid for her health. Without hesitating one more second she picked up the phone and called the office of her eye doctor just before their closing time.

"Hello, this is Sarah Shepherd. I need to make an appointment as soon as possible..... Flashing lights in my eyes.... Yes, but only when I have them closed. I don't know if it's stress or blood pressure or what.... No, not when blinking, just when they are closed.... Monday at three will be fine..... Thanks, I appreciate it."

She thought about the phenomenon for another minute. "If this job is stressing me out bad enough to give me eye problems, it sure is incentive to find something else."

"But where could I find another job researching theoretical physics, energy, space-time...it's not like jobs like this show up in the newspaper listings," her thoughts continued. Reluctantly, Sarah returned to the presentation and hurried her work to complete it. It took another hour to make sure everything was just right, printed correctly, and put together meticulously to look as professional as all her previous assignments.

When Sarah brought the document down to Berglund's office she was relieved to see he was not there even though she knew he always left promptly at 5:00 while he expected his staff to work late. The presentation was on his desk as promised and she felt as free as a paroled felon.

As quickly as she could move she dumped out her cold coffee, snatched her attaché from under her desk, shut off the lights, and closed her office. She was nearly running through the halls to leave, she wanted to go home so badly. As she ran, she passed the chemistry lab, stopped abruptly, and backed up to the door. Phil looked up from the mass of glass and tubes he used to run his current experiment.

"Fin-al-ly done!" Sarah said energetically, followed by an expression with a wide open mouth and a nearly silent "Hah!" Phil let out a laugh as Sarah sprang from the door to continue her race to her car. "G'night, Sarah," Phil called out.

"'Night, Phil," he heard echo back from the hallway.

On the way home Sarah stopped at the small grocery store near her house to pick up a large salad from the deli. She had been so overworked on her job recently that she had no time for grocery shopping and there was nothing at home to make for dinner. She didn't feel like having leftover casserole again and wanted something different. She was quite health conscious and always ate a lot of fruits, vegetables, and salads to make up for her mostly sedentary job. Her weakness was barbecued ribs, something she'd loved since she was very young.

Once at home Sarah left her salad in the kitchen and went to take a quick shower, somewhat of a daily ritual to help relax. As she bathed she thought how nice the next day would be; Berglund would be away the entire day, she could return to her own project that she had to postpone to complete her most recent one, and she wouldn't be under a deadline. For the first time in weeks, she felt relaxed.

The relaxation reminded her of the stress she'd been dealing with, and that reminded her of the puzzling eye problem. She closed her eyes for a few seconds and saw nothing. A moment later she tried again, and still saw nothing but darkness. "Good," she thought to herself, "it must have been nothing but stress."

After her shower Sarah put on her favorite fuzzy pink bathrobe before heading back downstairs for dinner. Despite being quite lovely and keeping herself fit, she never felt comfortable with her body and always wore at least her robe even when she was alone. Since she thought herself somewhat unattractive she thought that was how everybody else viewed her, a vice that rarely allowed her to believe men to be serious when they showed interest in her. But such thoughts were far from her mind that night. On that occasion it didn't matter. She didn't want to worry about anything, didn't want to care.

Sarah read a three-week-old newspaper as she ate her dinner on the sofa. With no free time outside work they had been collecting in a pile under the end table. She didn't really care about the news, though. It was a continuous stream of war, destruction, violence, corruption, death... all manner of things she'd grown very tired of reading. All she was after was the comic pages, forgetting the issues of the workplace and remembering once again how good it is to laugh.

Soft music filled the room from the stereo as she read and ate. After finishing the salad and some bland cantaloupe she put the deli container on the end table and leaned back to finish the last few comics on the page. The glow of the setting sun still lit the room enough to read so she left the lights off. After a few more laughs she tossed the newspaper under the coffee table and stretched out on the length of the couch. She wasn't planning on sleeping there for another night, but just wanted to hear the music and unwind. Without giving any thought to the previous night, Sarah closed her eyes.

As her eyelids swept down across her field of vision, Sarah was presented with a view of countless stars. She flung her eyes open with a gasp and immediately exclaimed, "What the hell was that?" After several moments to compose herself and relax her overworked pulse she decided to venture another look, and closed her eyes again.

There in front of her, as real as anything she'd ever seen, she saw stars. Without having to look very far in any direction she saw more stars than she could imagine, several nearby galaxies, and filling most of her field of view was a nebula, glowing brightly with enormous clouds of gas and dust in shades of red and light purple. Inside the nebula were several hot blue stars, very young in the scope of cosmic age.

After several seconds she opened her eyes again and was confronted with the dimly lit living room she knew she was in. Sarah was filled with utter amazement at what she had seen inside her eyelids, breathlessly awestruck at the beauty of the astronomical figures she saw.

"I must be losing my mind," she said out loud. Yet silently, she knew she had to look again. As a scientist she was driven to observe and study the universe. As a woman with an artistic heart, she needed to see such beauty again.

Sarah laid her head back down on the pillow and with overwhelming anticipation she slowly closed her eyes again. Like a movie screen being lowered into the path of the projector's image, she was again presented with the astronomical view she'd seen before. Feeling unafraid and more at ease she didn't open her eyes again to leave the place she saw, but realized that wherever she was, her eyes were open and she was looking at those heavenly bodies. She blinked the eyes she felt she had there, and they blinked just the same as the millions of previous times she blinked in her life. The image was still there, the eyes she possessed to see it were open, but she felt her eyes still closed as she laid on the couch.

As she continued to look at the view of deep space her eyes shifted around to different angles. Sarah realized she was looking through a large window of some sort, separating her from the vacuum of space. She slowly reached out to touch the window and it felt solid, yet somehow electric. Equally slowly she pulled her hand back, not touching the metal frame that surrounded the window.

At that point Sarah realized she was standing. While she knew and could feel she was lying on the couch in her living room, she felt her weight on her feet and the force of gravity holding her down as she stood upright. Slowly she began to turn around to figure out where she was or what it was she was seeing. She saw the edge of the window, the wall, a corner--she was in a room somewhere. As she continued to turn around, her eyes were met with the sight of two beings standing upright and facing her.

Before she could get any sort of good look at them her eyes flung open again with a heavy gasp and a short yelping scream. Once again she was in her living room, right were she knew she was all along. Terror and anxiety filled her mind and body, driving her nearly to tears and leaving her desperately searching her mind for answers. She looked around frantically, trying to find the beings she had just seen, but saw nothing but her familiar surroundings and a scene of dusk out the large divided windows in the front.

Being a scientist Sarah used every bit of logic and rational thinking she had to figure out what she saw, who she saw, and why she saw them when her eyes were closed. In the end she could find no reason that made any sense to her. She felt the beings were in her head, and the fear was the unanswered questions of how or why they were in there. Her fear was fading again as she looked around her living room, thinking what she would do. Again, as a scientist, she felt she had to look again to figure out what she saw. She didn't know if it was real, or a hallucination, or some mental illness she was developing. "I can escape if I have to," she rationalized. "All I have to do is open my eyes."

Once more Sarah laid her head back on the pillow and tried to calm herself as she mustered up a bit of courage. With sudden resolve she slammed her eyes shut and dove into the darkness.

There in front of her, just as before, stood two beings like she'd never seen before, though familiar in appearance. Looking carefully at one and then the other, Sarah saw they stood upright like she was, but their faces did not look human. The one on the left looked like a wolf. The other looked like a fox.