The automated message came through as he was taking a shower: something had appeared in the accelerator. Dr. Wegner grabbed a towel and ran over to his laptop. Rows of numbers scrolled across the screen. He�d have to wait for confirmation, but it looked like success. He began to put together a few ideas for the press release. The first thing any physicist learns about traveling faster than light is that it is impossible. Try and accelerate an object to near-light speeds, and instead of increasing the speed, you increase the mass. Chasing light, Dr. Wegner liked to say, just makes you heavy. So rather than chase light, he was going to leap-frog over it. He theorized that objects traveling near the speed of light could be made to bore through the fabric of space-time and jump to faster than light speeds, missing out the tricky part in between. It was a process he had named �Wegner tunneling�. That was the theory, all he had to do was get the conditions right. Temperature, pressure and field strength all mattered and without the correct environment, the jump wouldn�t happen. So Dr. Wegner had been experimenting. An accelerator had been built, wound around some mountains in a former Soviet republic where tiresome safety regulations were relaxed. He had been firing small metallic spheres round it, attempting to get the correct setup. The first issue Dr. Wegner had to deal with was that objects moving faster than light would also travel back in time. This was a problem because the results of a successful experiment would occur earlier in time than the experiment itself. What�s more, there was no way of predicting how far before the experiment the result would happen. If one of the spheres successfully decelerated in the test apparatus on a Monday, was that because he got the conditions right next Wednesday or two weeks from then? The only way to deal with this was a rigorous test plan. Because the process tended to crush anything put through it into individual atoms, Dr. Wegner varied the composition of the spheres. A particular mix of metals (say, 61% nickel, 39% copper) was tied to a particular set of conditions. If a sphere did successfully reappear, by noting its composition and sticking to the test plan, he would know which experiment would succeed. While this worked well in theory, in four years of trying no sphere had reappeared. It was particularly depressing because, by the time you began an experiment, you already knew it hadn�t succeeded. But he had refused to quit and today he had changed the world. The spectrometers were already analyzing the mix of elements in the reappeared sphere. 56% iron, 44% lead. Matching that with the test plan, it was the result of an experiment he was due to perform two weeks from now. He could already hear the accolades, the admiration and jealousy of his peers. But the readings continued. In addition to the sphere, some other elements had materialized. Silicon, boron. There were no spheres planned that included those elements. Those were the elements used to make the accelerator casing. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. Organic. Not large quantities, about the amount of matter found in an adult male.