Newton's Comeuppance, A Shaggy Dog Story ©1999 David Boyne

I'm a thief.

Call me Robin, like that twelfth century thief with the bow and arrow and green tights. But I don't work a forest, as my worthy predecessor did. I work a beach. In fact, before I became a thief, I was a legitimate beach comber, and I practiced my profession on the rain-soaked Oregon coast. While I've never had a band of Merry Men, I do have a partner, a hundred-pound golden retriever. Call him Newton, like that seventeenth century genius who came up with the theory of universal gravitation.

Although I consider myself the brains of our beach combing partnership, it's Newton who has a real nose for the business. So, of course, it was Newton who found the briefcase.

We had been on the beach since dawn. The weather was still dirty, a three day storm finally blowing itself out. Newton ran circles around something tumbling in the surf, barking until I slogged into the froth and hauled it up the beach. It was one of those silver briefcases with combination locks. It was a bit dented and the handle was missing, but the metal showed no corrosion; it couldn't have been in the water long.

"Probably nothing in it but wet papers, Newton. Leveraged buy outs, initial public offerings, corporate espionage. Much ado about nothing."

Newton growled. He's the optimist of the partnership.

"I'm only being realistic, Newt. A professional should be prepared for disappointment. Could be bags full of cocaine."

I pried my knife into one of the locks. The lid opened a little and Newton pressed close, sniffing like a Frenchman outside a four star bistro. This was not necessarily promising, as more than once I have found my partner in a state of intoxication, blissfully rolling himself on the carcass of a dead skunk or raccoon.

I popped the second lock and pulled up the lid.

"Sneakers?"

Inside were three pairs of large shoes, the kind of high laced sneakers that basketball players and street gangsters favored. I lifted a shoe. Newton lunged for it.

"Whoa!" I wrestled him back. "Sit!" He sat, panting, whining.
"This isn't breakfast, Newt. Retail, shoes like these go for over a hundred bucks a pair. We dry them out right, might get fifty bucks for all three pair."

Ignoring my discourse on the economics of the salvage industry, Newton thrust his head inside the briefcase, aroused to disobedience by the funky smell of the shoes.

"No!" I then let go with a full half of his vocabulary. "Sit!" He sat. "Down!" He lay down. "Stay!" He stayed, watching hungrily, as I examined the shoes.

White, with luminous orange and black tiger stripes, each shoe had a translucent wedge in its heel, the kind filled with gases that emit a red light each time the heel strikes the ground. Nothing new in that, I thought. But on the side of each sneaker was a logo, a red circle enclosing the letter G, with a red line through the G.

The logo was perplexing. "No G?"

Concentrating on deciphering its meaning, I didn't see that Newton had tugged a sneaker from the case until he was slinking away.

"Newton!"

He turned, facing me, a size twelve shoe in his mouth.

"Drop it."

He blinked, looked over the empty beach behind him, looked back at me, as if to say, "Who, me?"

"Drop it!"

He ran. I was so stunned by my partner's disobedience that I didn't even try to call him back. Something about these gamy rubber and leather sneakers had pushed Newton to the brink of rebellion, and over.

I put the remaining two and a half pairs of sneakers in my backpack, leaving the broken metal case on the sand. A half-mile down the beach, Newton had stopped running. He flopped onto the sand and began deconstructing the shoe. By the time I reached him, the toe case had been mauled apart, the laces were shredded, the heel had been ripped open and the gas filled wedge was gone. A sneaker, by Picasso.

"That's coming out of your share of the profits!"

Newton got up, swaying, happy, drunk from his orgy.

"Come on. We're supposed to meet Dayna at the house." My girlfriend Dayna was taking a rare weekend off, leaving the other seventy lawyers of her firm in Seattle to defend their clients' castles from litigious barbarians storming the gates.

Newton and I had left the beach and were under the high pine trees past the dunes when I heard the helicopter. I saw it through the trees, hovering so low it whipped up the surf as it moved slowly along the beach. Painted on its gleaming white side was the logo of a certain shoe manufacturing company. I hoisted my backpack, heavy with the wet shoes inside it. The coincidence was too much.

"Newton, I'll bet you a dozen racquetballs to a fifth of scotch that a whole freight container of shoes went overboard in the storm."

Newton sat down hard in the sand and hiccupped, oblivious to my wager and the loud helicopter.

"And I'll bet they're trying to gather up whatever reaches shore before word gets out. Fine with us, right? Fewer competitors. Besides, we beat them fair and square. Salvager's rights."

The helicopter was hovering over the spot where I had left the briefcase. I decided it was time to go.

"Come on, Newton." He sat, swaying. "If you're going to puke, partner, do it now, not when we get home."

He looked up at me, and belched. Fumes from his belch, smelling like burnt rubber, wafted up. I was concerned, but Newton had ingested an amazing assortment of materials in the past, from television remotes and video cassettes, to eyeglasses and chunks of a bicycle tire, never showing any lasting ill effect.

"You ate a sixth of our day's profits. If there's any justice, you will get good and sick."

When we reached the paved road Newton stopped and looked at me, expectantly.

"You want your ball?"

In answer, he tilted his head, amazed at how dense I could be. I took the ball out of my pocket. Newton held himself poised like a runner on first base yearning for the sign to steal second.

"Sick as you are, you want to chase a ball?"

He growled impatiently. I was happy; he was fine, after all. I made sure no cars were coming, then threw the ball hard into the pavement. It bounced twenty feet into the air, arcing over the road. Newton ran. For such a huge dog, he can do amazing things when in hot pursuit of a bouncing ball. At the apex of a three foot high leap, he chomped onto the ball. He landed hard on all four feet. The next moment, Newton was hovering above the road.

Yes, that's what I said, he was hovering.

I stared across the road and saw my hundred-pound Golden Retriever suspended three feet in the air.

Newton looked down, and the ball dropped from his mouth. He began spinning, like he would do when chasing a flea that was dining on the tip of his tail. He revolved, faster and faster, then tried to stop, but his momentum kept him spinning. Finally, he slowed. Panting hard, he shook his head, then lay down—in mid air.

At no point, from the moment I saw Newton hovering in mid-air, until he finished his whirling dervish dance, had I moved. I don't think I had even blinked. Now, I could not stop blinking. I walked up to my partner. He sat up, his paws at my waist, his head just below eye level. I patted his head. "It's okay."

Then I changed my mind. "No. It's not okay. It is definitely not okay."

Realizing we were in the middle of the road, me standing, Newton hovering, I grabbed his collar, thinking I would ease him through the air, over to the gravel shoulder of the road. He licked my face and belched. The burned rubber smell puffed over me. Before the noxious fumes had dissipated, I understood. I thought of the logo on the sneakers, the letter G inside the red circle with the red line through it.

"Anti-gravity!"

I heard tires shrieking and looked up to see a familiar purple jeep, skidding, trying to avoid smashing into us. I froze, holding Newt by his collar. The shiny jeep humped to a stop on the shoulder of the road, sending up a cloud of gritty dust.

Through the dust, inside the idling jeep, I saw my girlfriend Dayna staring at us, for once, speechless, her mouth hanging open in shock. I gently pushed Newton through the air. I lifted the canvas cover and eased him into the back of the jeep, under the roll bar.

"Dayna, it's incredible."

She said, "Incredible."

"I'll explain," I said.

"Explain," she echoed, not blinking.

"Drive to my house, Dayna. And drive slow."

"Slow."

"Right, slow. I'll hold Newton down. Watch out for bumps in the road."

"Bumps."

"Are you okay, Dayna?"

She blinked. "I'm okay. You okay?"

I jumped into the back as Dayna ground the transmission into gear. I put my arms around my drunk, bewildered, floating dog.

It was chilly in my rustic house. Dayna and I drank brandy to keep warm. I let Newton out only once, on a leash, and he peed in his favorite spot deep in the scrub bushes and trees about a hundred yards from the house.

He had some trouble adapting to his elevated position in the world. He would trot across the living room to see what I was doing in the kitchen, but, unable to stop himself, he would slide through the air, crash into the cabinets, carom off into the refrigerator, and spin to rest over the table. Soon, he was exhausted. Being a dog, he did a smart thing; he went to sleep.

Maybe it was the brandy we were drinking to keep the chill off, but as Newton slept, hovering over his favorite spot near the door, Dayna and I began gently pushing him around the room. The slightest push sent him floating, the only resistance coming from the air. I confess, I was the one who started making race car sounds. But it was Dayna's idea to pass him between us, like a medicine ball, and talk in Arnold Schwarzenegger accents.Eventually, we both collapsed, a little drunk and laughing so hard it was difficult to breathe.

The helicopters passed overhead a dozen times that day and into the early evening, their rotors knocking the rain from the dense fir trees hiding my house. Newton slept through it all. It was well past midnight when Dayna and I put the sneakers on. Newton woke up when he heard the door open. He followed us onto the deck.

"Can we take him?"

"It's too risky, Dayna. He could get hurt."

"We could get hurt."

Dayna, who had wanted to be a lawyer since she was five, was ready to argue. I tried to express my perspective in terms she would appreciate. "He could cause an accident, Dayna. We'd be liable."

When Newton sighed loudly and flopped down in mid-air, immediately asleep, Dayna chose not to argue my point.

It was my theory that the anti-gravity wedge needed a jolt to be turned on. Yet, I couldn't think of how to turn it off.

"Just take the shoes off," Dayna said.

"Oh. Right."

We walked through the soft sand, down to the tarred road.
"Now. Newton ran—" I ran. "Then jumped—" I jumped as high as I could. I hit the pavement on my heels. Instantly, I shot upward.

"Incredible!" Dayna said.

""Watch this." I shuffled like a wobbly tap dancer, floating three feet above the ground. I said, "One small step for man—" and jumped hard.

I zoomed in a high arc over the road, past the opposite gravel shoulder, and over the bushes at the top of the cliff. I heard Dayna shriek as I felt myself falling through the darkness. I thought I was about to die. The next moment I had stopped falling. I was hovering three feet above the sand on the beach.

Grinning stupidly, I looked up to see Dayna leaning over the cliff edge, thirty feet above me. She shouted, "Here I come!"

I saw her dark form arc over the bushes along the cliff and come dropping down. A moment later, she hovered over the sand, a few feet from me.

She squealed,"I like this!"

We ran and jumped, never touching the sand, but sometimes dipping to within a foot of it. We learned to keep upright when flying through the air. Dayna, a gymnast from her girlhood to the time she began law school, did cartwheels and somersaults and cheerleader splits. I just ran and jumped, sometimes sliding two hundred feet into an imaginary home plate. The harder wet sand nearer the surf gave us twenty feet of height in a single bounce. If hard sand yielded twenty foot high arcs, we reasoned, pavement might send us fifty or more feet upward.

"Think anyone's awake in town?" Dana asked.

"Only the drunks at Sassy's bar."

She grinned. "They might sober up after seeing a pair of human kangaroos."

We held hands, making twenty foot bounces in tandem, all the way to town.

In the parking lot of Sassy's, two very drunk fishermen were arguing over whether they should drive the fifteen miles to an illegal after-hours bar, or drive home and continue drinking there.

"Can you believe it?" Dayna was pissed. She jumped ahead of me, shot up from the parking lot about forty feet high, in a long arc, and landed between the two drunks. Both men stumbled backward, "W-what the—"

"You are not driving tonight," Dayna scolded, as she bounced in place.

I hopped over and tapped the closest drunk on the shoulder. He spun, and looked straight into my knees.

"Up here," I said.

He looked up. His mouth dropped open. I reached down and plucked the car keys from his hand. I turned and looked down on the other drunk. He was already holding his keys aloft.

He asked, "Will St. Peter let us in?"

Dayna laughed. Before I could think of an answer, we both heard the helicopter.

"Dayna! Run! I mean, bounce!"

Dayna was at the far end of the dimly lighted parking lot in a moment, heading for the beach. I ran toward Dayna, and tripped over my own feet. Even as I sailed through the air, three feet above the empty parking lot, the two sets of keys flying from my hands, I wondered if I was the first man ever to trip in mid-air.

The searchlight from the helicopter caught Dayna even before I could straighten up. The noise from the machine's rotors was deafening.

I bounced as fast and hard as I could, toward Dayna and the dark beach beyond. I was sick with worry that Dayna might bounce too high and be chopped up in the helicopter's rotors. In the searchlight I could see the sand whirling up all around her.

I was fifty yards behind, but my ears hurt from the pressure of sound waves. Then a voice crackled over a loudspeaker, shouting commands I had heard a thousand times in B movies and on television. "Stop! Halt! Do not— uh, jump! You are instructed to halt immediately!"

When the second helicopter came I knew we didn't have a chance. I tried to reach Dayna, but she was too far ahead. One helicopter set itself in her path on the beach, waiting. As she began to angle her jumps around it, she had to go higher up the beach, and the softer sand slowed her and diminished her jumps. The other helicopter came up fast and in the full glare of two spot lights, I saw a weighted net drop over Dayna.

She was caught. I couldn't leave her. I skipped up to her, yelling, "Don't tell them anything!"

If she answered, I couldn't hear; the helicopters were too loud. The next moment I was knocked into the sand, trapped inside a heavy fishing net.

They took us to the town's only motel. Dayna was in one room, I was in another. Soldiers, in battle fatigues and with automatic rifles, stood outside each door. I supposed that, since my town hadn't any police force, the shoe corporation had gotten the National Guard to assist in recovering their precious property.

A man and a woman came into the room, sat at the table across from me and said they would "interview" me. They ignored me when I asked who they were. They already knew who I was. They wore suits and gold watches and were smug. I figured they were lawyers.

The woman said, "We have the two pairs of shoes you and your accomplice were wearing when you were... netted." She got a kick out of my having been caught, like a pitiful dolphin, in a fishing net dropped from a helicopter.

The man said, "We have one shoe of the third pair." He waited, watching my reaction to this bit of news. I showed no emotion, although I knew they had to have searched my house to have found the odd shoe. They must have seen Newton, hovering on the deck, but for some reason they didn't mention him.

"Where's the missing shoe?" the man asked.

I smiled. "My dog ate it."

The man frowned. The woman said, "Where?"

"On the beach," I said.

"We know that," she said.

I shrugged. "Then you've recovered all your shoes."

The man pushed back his chair. I could tell he had hoped the sudden movement would startle me. I watched politely as he left the room.

"You're in serious trouble," the woman said.

"Those shoes were washed up on the beach," I said. "They're legitimate salvage. All the laws support me."

She seemed tickled by my outburst. "Do you intend to engage an attorney?"

"I already have," I said. "You're violating her constitutional rights in the other room."

Her face went blank.

"You have refused to identify yourself, to tell me why I'm here," I said. "On what grounds, what authority do you hold me against my will?" I was working myself into a self-righteous anger when the man returned, carrying a cardboard box. He slid the box onto the table.

"This is what we found."

I stared at the remnants of the shoe Newton had pulverized.
"Which proves what I said. My dog chewed up your missing shoe." I stood up, "I'll be going now."

The door opened and a man entered the room. He was thin, had skin the color of caramel, and wore jeans and a tweed jacket. He looked professorial, but the two attorneys stood up as if they were going to salute.

"I think we have everything," the man said, quietly. He had left the door wide open. I thought of running, but saw the soldiers with the guns. The quiet man smiled at me. His dark eyes showed an intelligence on a plane far above my own. He made me fidget.

"He says his dog ate the shoe." The woman's suspicion of me was clear.

"That is apparent, I should think," the quiet man said. I could have sworn he was suppressing a smile.

The woman said, "The dog could have ingested the cushioning device. We must—"

"If so, the animal would be dead in minutes."

He hadn't raised his voice, but the impact of his words deafened me.

"The cushioning device is highly toxic. Lethal."

My knees went soft. The room seemed to tilt. "Where's my dog," I choked.

They ignored me. The quiet man told the lawyers, "Continue searching the beach, taking into consideration the effects of tide and drag, as I calculated. In all likelihood, the cushioning unit is lost in the ocean. Which is a safe place for it, if you stop to think."

He looked at me. "I would like to offer you and your friend a ride home, if you're prepared to leave."

I hated him, but if he could get me out of that room, I wouldn't make him offer twice. Dayna was waiting outside the door. We let our eyes meet, but didn't touch or say anything. We walked with the thin, quiet man down the dim hallway of the motel.

The soldiers and lawyers didn't follow us.

I whispered to Dayna, "Did they mention Newton?"

"No."

"Bastards."

As we came into the parking lot, the man turned and asked, "Where might we go for some breakfast?"

"Just take us home," I said.

"I must talk to you, both of you," he said.

"Take me to my house."

"Your house will be bugged."

"Bugged?"

"Under electronic surveillance," he said. "Listening devices. Cameras."

Dayna squeezed my arm. "We'll sue these creeps. We'll sue their—"

"With all due respect, Counselor," the man even interrupted quietly. "Lawsuits are brought by the powerless, against the powerful, and, while a wonderfully rational process for settling disagreements, a suit requires the cooperation of both parties."

"What are you saying?" I asked.

"These creeps cannot be sued," he said.

There was something sad in his voice, but I countered, "You are one of these creeps. And from the look of it, the creep in charge."

I thought of my missing dog. I was ready to break this quiet bastard's nose.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Call me... Isaac." He smiled. "Listen. You do not have to come with me. But if you want to know what you have gotten mixed up in, I'm willing to tell you. But only over breakfast. Like you, I'm human. I've been up all night. I'm hungry."

I couldn't stop thinking of Newton. Had they taken him? Were they even now dissecting my poor partner, looking for their damn anti-gravity wedge?

"Where's my dog?"

He walked across the parking lot. I followed. He stopped at a white rental car, fumbled with the key, and unlocked the door. Newton bounded out of the car. All four of his feet touched on the pavement, then he jumped. He jumped only high enough to swipe his tongue across my face. "Newton, sit!" I said in reflex. He sat, panting, happy, healthy, and most importantly, with his butt firmly on the pavement.

Isaac said, "I'm sorry I had to tell you the wedge was toxic. I did so for the benefit of those two goons. If ingested, the wedge passes, intact, through the digestive system and is excreted."

Even as I relaxed with relief, knowing my business partner was safe, alive, with nothing more than a case of bad gas, another train of thought was racing though my mind. "Excreted?"

"Yes," Isaac said, watching me closely. He went to the back of the car.

"Then—?" I didn't finish my thought. I didn't have to. I could tell that Dayna understood, too. We went and stood behind Isaac as he unlocked the trunk. Before he opened it, he turned and put one finger over his lips, miming for us to be silent.

When the trunk was raised we saw a plastic bag filled with an ample amount of dog excrement— hovering in air.

I said, "Holy shit."

Isaac said, "Shhhhh!"

Dayna laughed.

Newton barked.

When we reached the diner in the next town, the sun had begun to bleach the darkness from the sky.

We left Newton in the car, no trace of the burnt rubber smell on his hot breath.

Isaac said the ambient sound of the diner, its clattering crockery and utensils and voices, would screen our whispering from any eavesdroppers of the human or electronic kind.

"I got to your house twenty minutes before the search team. Newton greeted me— eye to eye."

"So he was still in the air?"

"Quite. I hustled him into my car, drove for the first logging road I could find, stopping only briefly at the town's pharmacy—"

"Pharmacy?" I interrupted. "Why?"

"Materials. I mixed a rather strong purgative for Newton." Isaac grinned. "Very effective."

I sat back in my chair, understanding.

Dayna asked him, "Did you invent the shoes?"

"Sort of." He explained that he had invented a process that produced a gaseous material that subverts some of the energy, the force, of gravity. "Although I haven't a real understanding of how it does so."

"How did such a revolutionary technology wind up in a damn shoe?" Dayna whispered.

"Money," Isaac said. "Five years ago, the shoe corporation began work to replace its patents that were going to expire. They sought new cushioning technologies, new designs they could patent, then market exclusively. I was one of many scientists they funded. They gave me a lot of money. And, I had an extraordinary amount of dumb luck."

Isaac told us that the shoe corporation, giddy with its miraculous good fortune, assembled its brightest minds. They mulled over the infinite avenues for profit. Surprisingly, ingeniously, they decided the anti-gravity technology was too radical, too valuable to maintain their exclusive control of. Rather than wait for the government to muscle in, and probably seize everything on grounds of national security, the shoe corporation initiated high-level, secret negotiations within the Defense and Commerce departments. An agreement was reached. The corporation patriotically assigned all rights to the new technology, to the government. The government graciously awarded the corporation a ninety-nine year monopoly for the manufacture of the new technology. The corporation's only client would be the government.

Isaac said the briefcase I found had been chained to the wrist of a military courier, the shoes in it the first and only of their kind. The jet carrying the courier had gone off radar, disappeared, for still undetermined reasons. A huge, secret search had been mounted to recover the briefcase.

Dayna whispered, "Armies." She sounded as if someone was squeezing her throat. "Imagine armies in these shoes."

Images of warfare, of slaughter, came to all of our minds. But for Isaac, the terrible images were not new. He said, "Imagine fighter jets, guided missiles, tanks, all with anti-gravitational systems." He talked fast, but precisely, for nearly twenty minutes. He drew a stark picture of a world in which the anti-gravity technology was used only by governments, only for military purposes.

Dayna and I were too stunned to speak. But Isaac continued, only now he outlined the tremendous disruption, the chaos, that would result if the anti-gravity technology were disseminated across all national, geographic, political and economic boundaries.

"Not one aspect of life would be unchanged," he whispered. "Transportation. Crime. Sports. Art. Sex."

He hesitated, and his dark eyes were seeing things I could not imagine. "It will be a terrible mess," he said. "Yet, I prefer that mess of a future, to a well-ordered, oppressive future."

That is when I became a thief, a smuggler, a Robin Hood of revolutionary technology. When Isaac dropped us at my house, he gave me the plastic bag from his trunk.

Isaac pretended to befriend Dayna and me for purposes of continuing the government's surveillance of us. It allowed him, three months later, to smuggle one high-density compact disk to Dayna. The disk contained everything anyone with a few million dollars and a staff of brilliant scientists would need to reproduce Isaac's anti-gravity system.

Dayna sent duplicates of the disk to three hundred corporations, non-profit organizations, scientists, inventors, universities, newspapers and poets around the planet. Then she put it on the Internet for everyone else.

Dayna has a new career, a new, all-consuming love: spreading Isaac's technology. The last time I saw her she was on CNN, demonstrating, from a secure, remote location, the anti-gravity wedge that Newton had saved for humanity.

Opinion polls show only forty percent of Americans support Dayna's publishing of the anti-gravity technology, but over ninety percent are ready to buy anti-gravity sneakers and sundry products. The shoe corporation is trying to get the jump, so to speak, on their competitors. Knowing its secret deal with the government is worthless, it's hired Isaac as a research and development consultant. Isaac has refused some incredible offers from various bureaus of the government to work for them.

The state of Oregon has hired Dayna to lead its campaign to induce entrepreneurs to locate their new firms in an Anti-Gravity Valley near Beaverton. Nothing has hit the market yet, but it's only a matter of time.

Months ago, knowing what was about to be sprung on the world, I sold my battered house, bought stock in a few companies I guessed would soon be doing booming business in the anti-gravity field, and moved to a new ocean.

Newton's adjusted well, falling for a local girl, a svelte sixty pound Black Labrador. Eight weeks ago, he sired a brood of puppies.

When Isaac came to visit last week we gave him the pick of Newton's litter. Isaac chose the large, light golden male, and named the pup Lazy.

He said it was short for laissez faire.

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