It was Christmas Eve, although it wasn’t the eve of anything and I wondered, as usual, why the day, from early morning until the sun went down, was still referred to as the eve of Christmas when it was simply the day before. My thoughts turned to the single subject that continued to overwhelm almost all other thoughts that ran back and forth through my brain. The artifact. First, when Gularte accidentally dropped the box, the concrete had cracked when it struck, and then, when I’d taken the small object from its ‘nest’ the thing had penetrated inches into the hard concrete from a fall of only a few feet, if that. Instead of accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second, which was the accelerating speed of any object’s fall inside earth’s gravity well, the thing had acted like it was shot out of a gun…but without seeming to have added anything to its speed of fall at all. It simply wasn’t possible for it to have gained what appeared to be tons of weight without dramatically increasing its speed, but there’d been no increase, of that I was pretty certain, at least not of the speed it would have to have been traveling to do the kind of damage it did.

The day was to be partially to be taken up by Mary’s visit with Paul, which Paul hadn’t bothered to cancel. My wife didn’t seem to mind having a good chunk of her Christmas Eve day eaten up in getting ready and then visiting with my therapist. We drove to Dana Point, Steve Bro, one of the Dwarfs working normally as a lifeguard, babysat with Julie. The big tough-looking physical specimen of a man, although possessed of a significant intellect for such a developed athlete was an amazingly gentle and entertaining babysitter. Julie, and even Bozo, seemed to love him.

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