OK. It was like this: Django Twipp had what he thought was a really cool idea and spent a good portion of his father’s money setting it up. The idea was simple: project a huge force field around the Earth and in one fell swoop protect everyone from meteors, radiation and alien invasion.

Saying it out loud like that does make it sound daft doesn’t it? But, you know, Django can be very persuasive when he wants to be. I mean, he once convinced NASA to loan him those astronauts, remember? So he could collect that ice ball asteroid for his Hydrogen power generation scheme? Big hoo-har on the net about misuse of funding etcetera?

Anyway.

He’d read about my experiments on the web somewhere and came to see me. In person. I mean, I was seriously flattered. The son of the designer of the first laptop quantum computer! In my garage! I was using a Twipp to control my experiment, for goodness sake. Nothing else could do the job. OK, the Blink-Pad has the extra Quantronic port but … OK. OK.

I showed him the fields I could generate. He was really nice. Genuinely fascinated. It was the spherical fields which really interested him. Obvious now, of course.

Have you seen them? I did that piece on channel seventeen. He encouraged me to do it. I was so nervous I nearly fainted.

The presenter picked a spot in the room, in the air, and I’d tune the projector to cast a spherical field about the size of a football at that point. Then she’d throw an orange – no I don’t know why she picked an orange – she’d throw an orange at it and it would bounce off. Then she’d throw an apple, shine a red light, then a blue light, and throw a ping-pong ball at it, I think. Not sure of the order. But I’d retune the projector and sometimes the apple would bounce off and the red light would go through. Then sometimes the blue light would bounce off and the red light and the apple would go through and so on. Different combinations you see? Showing the field can differentiate colours and objects? Geddit?

The – I nearly said coup de grace but I mean dénouement – no I don’t – anyway – the final demonstration was catching the orange.

Catching it.

Yes, she’d throw the orange, underhand, sorry, underarm, at a spot and I’d switch on the projector and the orange would be captured inside the field. Fruit in a Brambling Field. Looked cool. That’s my name, by the way. Harry Brambling. The orange just seemed to stop dead in mid-air and roll around in an invisible fruit bowl.

No. I didn’t get paid for that. Should I? I just thought it was great publicity. Didn’t know then that I’d be tied up with Django’s project, of course.

Anyway.

Almost from the start Django was interested in scale. How big a sphere could I project? Well there’s no theoretical limit. Power equals size. Straight line graph. Double the power double the size. That’s size in terms of surface area of the sphere, of course.

Well, he had the contacts, the gigantic ball of ice in orbit, the power plant to convert the ice. He had it all.

I’d get trained as an astronaut, save the world and be given a huge pile of cash.

All I had to do was build him his projector, hook it up to the plant in orbit and throw the switch.

Who could resist that?

So I did.

That was me. Yes. I did the calculations. Have to own up to that one.

Must have dropped a decimal point, or something. I didn’t stick around to find out. As soon as I realized the damn field was too small I headed here. Going to keep on going to Saturn, if I can.

Was quite a sight though. Seeing all those mountain tops being chopped off. Looks like I clipped off every mountain on Earth over seven thousand feet high.

A lot of seriously pissed off people back there and I’m buggered if I’m going back to turn the thing off.

Isn’t it your round?