I discovered a gem hidden on my hard drive the other day. "This Quintessence of Dust"

By way of explanation; when I first started with the internet, I had a dial-up connection. (AOL the internet with training wheels.) That of course tied up my phone line and AOL complained if you stayed on very long because they had a finite number of openings for connection. So when I went in search of reading material, I would cut and past it into my word processor and read it off line. A habit that persisted even after I got DSL. So it was in 2007 when I first saw "This Quintessence of Dust". I downloaded it like always, but when I saved it, it ended up in the wrong file and lay fallow on my hard drive until I discovered it a couple of days ago. When I found it,quite by accident, I was at a loss to understand where it came from and how I happened to have it. I've downloaded a couple of thousand TG stories over the years, but I didn't remember ever downloading any Sci-Fi and that's what the story looked like; pure Sci-Fi.

Mind you my other love in reading is Sci-Fi and Fantasy, so I decided to give it a read.

A new propulsion drive for spacecraft, a drive that would make interstellar travel practical, needed to be proved. Adam and Evan drew the lucky straws. They got the privilege of making the maiden voyage on the first ship equipped with the new drive. I was to be a short eighteen months for them on board, but the theory of relativity, which would become a proven law if they succeeded, would mean that fifty years would have elapsed back on Earth.

Disaster strikes for them when an unforeseen complication brought a fast moving object on a collision course with them. The resulting damage was minimal… their complete communications array was wiped out. That meant there would be no progress reports sent back to base and no messages to intercept on the return flight. In all likelihood, Earth would assume that their communication blackout would mean they had met with a fatal accident. Their return was likely to have the same impact as Amelia Erhardt suddenly landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford.

This tale is a good, no great Sci-Fi story, ranking right up there with some of the great works I’ve read. Laika has woven a tale steeped in plausible future technology and just enough strife to make you keep reading to discover what the two adventurers would come up against next and how they would overcome the problems of the drastically changed world on their return to Earth.

Laika skillfully gives hints without revealing the ending which is the twist finally got me to understand how it ended up on my hard drive. A twist that I can confidently say will put a smile on your face as the story draws to an end.

Well done Laika. "This Quintessence of Dust" was masterfully written. I’ll be reading more of your work.