Between Two Worlds

This story presents a view of today's world through the eyes of someone direct from an era when the technology which came to shape the world as we know it was in its infancy. It presents the reader with the sense of opening an old trunk in the attic, bringing to life the forgotten thoughts and feelings of a bygone time. In 1973, a body is discovered frozen in an Alaskan glacier. Due to the unusual nature of this discovery, it is carefully removed and flown to a federal facility, the Institute of Consolidated Research, in Los Angeles. As the ice is chipped away, the identity of the man entombed within emerges. Papers found on him identify him as one Dusty Dervin, an aviator from the early 1930s. He is thirty years old. The project is successful and Dusty is revived. However, instead of being heralded as a major advancement in science, the recovery is immediately cloaked in a veil of secrecy. He returns to his former home in the Midwest where he reunites with his family. Peg, his wife is now old and lives in a nursing home. His daughter, Lynn, is now almost twenty years older than he is, and Dusty also discovers that he has a teen aged grandson, Mark. He finds out that the director of the Institute, one General Edmund Johns, has gone there before him and managed to steal all evidence of Dusty’s former life. His past is all he has and they have taken it away from him. When he returns to Los Angeles to confront the general over his duplicity, a chain of events is set into motion culminating in the general’s murder. Dusty, the prime suspect, finds himself matching wits with the authorities in a desperate race to catch the killer. Between Two Worlds is a study in contrast between two subcultures separated by time and technology. It does not set out to paint a nostalgic picture of a bygone time, or to compare the virtues of a forgotten era with the uncertainties of today. Its main theme is to present through the eyes of a man suddenly cast from another time, a unique perspective of our own, and in doing so give us pause to reflect upon where we have come, as well as what we have gained... and lost.