Book One:   The Starlight Trader

During the day, Professor Anton Tesla Tolstoy, Altoona, Pennsylvania's newest immigrant from the harsh, arctic wind-swept fields outside St. Petersburg, worked at the "Three Cabooses Tavern". Anton spent most of his work day flipping burgers, cooking French-fries and cutting onions into rings. The remainder of his work day consisted of hustling drinks, keeping the serving area clean and waiting on tables.

At night, Anton attended, "English as a Second Language" classes at the Elmer Peabody Institute of Knowledge, where he also worked nights and weekends as a janitor and security guard. It was a convenient arrangement for both parties. The school, located in a rundown section of town known as 'immigrant hill" was a familiar target for the neighborhood's poor and drug addicts looking for anything of value to pawn. It was now a safer place thanks to Dr. Tolstoy, a former Major in the Russian Guard. In exchange for his vigilance, Anton lived rent-free in the apartment located in the Institute's basement. Plus, he got to take his classes for free.

In his spare time, working in his 20 by 30 meter laboratory which also doubled as a bathroom, Anton managed to invent not one, but two faster-than-light drives, a space-folding and multi-dimensional looping warp drive and "The Whooser", a device similar to a stargate or portal, but which used a totally different method of transport. The first drive was built and tested during his vacation in July 2080, on the seventeenth of the month, which also happened to be his thirty-third birthday. 

Once he had solved those preliminary equations, the second drive's invention went much easier than the first Anton finished building and successfully testing the second star drive on the one hundred seventy-third anniversary of his namesake, Count Leo Tolstoy's death, in the year 2083. Those equations lead Anton down a different path where he discovered the theories which developed into the dimensional-looping warp drive and starway portal. That same night he quit his job at the Caboose, agreeing to stay on until his replacement could be hired and trained. Three weeks later, the Triple C's regular customer's gave Anton a farewell party which included beer, pizza, burgers and several teasing farewell choruses of, "So . . . with dat, you will have fries, yes?" 

They were echoing the phrase that had endeared Anton to his loyal customers ever since he first started working at the Triple C four years earlier. No matter what you ordered to eat or drink, Anton always asked you if you wanted fries too. The Triple C's proprietors owned four potato farms, so whenever a new bartender, cook or waiter got hired, the tavern's owners told the new hires, "to push the French fries". They of course meant that this was to be done whenever a customer ordered burgers or shrimp or a sandwich. But Anton took his training to heart and asked, "So wid dat, you want fries, yes?" even if the customer only ordered a shot or a draught beer. It became a standing joke among the tavern's staff and the regular customers.

The farewell party had ended at 1:30 in the morning on a cool August day.  By 11 o'clock the next morning, Dr. Tolstoy had returned from his first trip to the eighth planet circling a blue-white star the inhabitants called, "Basta Chee" which translates into Earth Tongue as, "big, bright light." The planet Isk is four hundred forty-four parsecs from Planet Earth. According to his twelve dollar breast-button watch, Mr. Anton Tolstoy made the journey in forty-seven seconds, Universal Sol Star System Time.