RS01. The Reluctant Sorcerer (2 page)

Not just anyone could play with Buckyballs. The existence of this substance had first been postulated by Buckminster Fuller (hence, the name) and it was, in fact, an incredibly dense black powder composed of a single atom of iron surrounded by diamond, the ash from a supernova. Its density rendered it extremely heavy. A mere handful weighed about two hundred pounds. It was magnetic and completely frictionless. Needless to say, this wasn’t the sort of stuff one could pick up at the local Radio Shack. In fact, one couldn’t really pick it up at all without a forklift. It sort of had to fall into one’s hands-like, from outer space-which this particular batch had done, contained inside a meteor, a small piece of an asteroid that had been floating around in the Big Empty for a length of time that had more zeroes in it than even Carl Sagan could imagine.

Brewster got his hands on this stuff with some difficulty. The meteor in question had fallen on a small Pacific Island that now had one very large hole. It had wiped out a small village, and a number of small villagers who were descended from a group of canoe-worshipers that had settled on this island some three thousand years ago and lived there in abject poverty and squalor ever since. One of their legends had it that someday their wealth would fall from the skies. It did. Now the survivors of this windfall were all living in luxury apartments and driving Mercedes-Benz convertibles. This had, needless to say, cost EnGulfCo quite a bundle, but they figured that if Brewster needed this stuff, chances were that he was onto something that was liable to be very profitable in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, they had obtained exclusive offshore drilling rights.

What made this substance special was that if it was started spinning on the inside of the tube, with magnetic coils preventing it from contacting the sides, somewhat like in a cyclotron, theory had it that if the Buckyballs went fast enough, at the speed approaching that of light, it would create a warp in space/time. And whatever was inside the field would drop through.

To where? Good question. This was what Brewster intended to find out. You see, he had done this before. A couple of times, in fact. The first time traveler in history was a lop-eared rabbit Brewster had purchased in a pet shop and named Bugs. (What else?) The experiment that Brewster had set up went something like this: (Actually, it went exactly like this, but it’s complicated, so pay close attention.) He placed Bugs inside a cage and then he placed the cage inside the time machine, which he then programmed to travel back in time ten minutes for ten seconds. Before he did this, he used a forklift (which he’d needed for the Buckyballs, remember?) to move the time machine about fifteen feet to one side, so that when it appeared ten minutes in the past, it would not appear on the exact same spot where it had been sitting earlier. (Confusing? Wait. It gets worse.) Theoretically (that is, assuming it all worked), Brewster should have wound up with two time machines sitting side by side, about fifteen feet apart. Now, this might seem like something of a paradox, since if he sent the machine back ten minutes into the past, then it should have made the journey and appeared ten minutes before it had ever left. Which meant that there would be two time machines and two lop-eared rabbits named Bugs sitting on the floor of Brewster’s laboratory ten minutes before he’d ever sent the first one back.

But... wait a minute. That doesn’t make sense. (At least, not logically, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with temporal physics, but let’s not get into that right now, because you’re probably confused enough.) Before Brewster sent the machine back into the past, there had to be a past in which he hadn’t sent it back at all. The moment that he sent it back, he would, in effect, have altered history. At least his history, which meant that the moment he programmed the machine and tripped the switch to send it back ten minutes for ten seconds, at the very instant that it disappeared, he should have suddenly acquired a memory of standing in the lab and seeing two time machines, standing side by side. At least, that’s how he thought it would work. He was not exactly sure. But then, in scientific experiments, one never is, is one? The problem was, that wasn’t how it worked in practice. What happened was that Brewster had programmed the machine, entered the auto-return sequence, and tripped the timer switch to send it back. And it had disappeared. Only Brewster did not suddenly acquire a memory of having seen two time machines sitting side by side, ten minutes earlier. The machine had simply disappeared, complete with Bugs, and reappeared on the exact same spot ten seconds later. Where had it been? Brewster had no way of knowing. He had repeated the experiment with more or less the same results.

This posed certain problems. Did this mean that there was a sort of linear factor to time, where there was now a past in which Brewster had, in fact, seen a pair of time machines sitting side by side, complete with two rabbit passengers, but he could not remember it because he only had that experience further back along the timestream? And since he had repeated the experiment, did this suggest that there were now two past segments of the timestream, one in which he had seen two time machines and two rabbits, and another, slightly further back, in which he had seen three time machines and three rabbits? The whole thing gave Brewster quite a headache. (And if you feel like putting down the book right now and taking a couple of aspirin, your narrator doesn’t mind at all. Go ahead. I’ll wait.) The only solution to this dilemma that Brewster could devise was to actually get inside the time machine himself, so that he could find out where it went after he tripped the switch. (A video camera might have been an excellent solution to this problem, but he had tried that and discovered that the temporal field caused interference.) He had actually planned to make the trip himself all along, though he would have liked having some solid data before he made the attempt. However, Bugs seemed none the worse for wear after his two journeys, so Brewster felt the risk was justified. After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He had set everything up again, carefully following the same procedure, and he had programmed in the sequence, complete with auto-return commands. He had then set the timer, and turned around to pick up his notepad and his pen before getting into the machine... only when he turned around again, the thing had disappeared. The trouble was, this time, it did not come back. This was why Brewster had been so distracted during the past two months, while Pamela had been trying to get him to the church. She wanted him to say “I do,” only he kept repeating, “I don’t get it.” The first time he had missed the wedding, he’d been sequestered in the library, combing through the work of Albert Einstein to see if maybe there was something he’d missed. There wasn’t. The second time he blew it, when he’d made the trip to Liverpool, he had gone to pick up the special microchip component that would allow him to assemble several more circuit boards for the auto-return modules, so he could run tests to see where the thing might have malfunctioned. The third time, the occasion of Pamela’s breakdown in communications with her father, he’d been locked up in the lab, putting the circuit boards together and assembling the modules. And so far as he could tell, there were no problems in the wiring or the assembly.

He found the whole experience extremely frustrating and he had taken to carrying at least one of the modules around with him, taking it apart and putting it back together again repeatedly, running tests and scratching his head and generally being off in the ozone somewhere, which Pamela found rather trying. However, she was a patient woman and she knew that as soon as Brewster managed to clear up whatever problem was presently occupying his attention, there would be a space of time, however short, in which he would be receptive to new ideas. Such as getting married, for instance. So Pamela didn’t press. But the moment he worked out whatever it was that he was working on, she was going to pounce.

The commercial ended and Brewster set the little black box that he had reassembled back down on the coffee table. Almost absently, he tripped a little switch on it. And an instant after he did it, it quietly clicked back to its original position.

“Damn!” Brewster suddenly exclaimed, leaping to his feet and sending popcorn tumbling all over the rug and Pamela’s hair. “Thafs it!” “Marvin!” Pamela protested, brushing greasy kernels of unpopped corn out of her hair, but Brewster was already rushing across the room and flinging open the front door of their apartment. “Marvin, where are you going? Marvin! Your shoes!” The door slammed shut behind him. She sighed heavily. A moment later he came barging back in his stocking feet, swept up his brown tasseled loafers, pecked her on the cheek, and said, “I’ve just got to check this out, dear, but it may take a while. Love you. Don’t wait up.” ‘ ‘Marvin...” But he’d stormed out again, carrying the little black box under his arm, only this time forgetting to close the door behind him.

“Oh, Marvin...” she said. With an air of resignation, she got up and closed the door. She was more or less accustomed to this sort of thing, but this time, whatever it was that had been frustrating him so, he must have gotten it licked, because he had run out in the middle of the movie, and he’d never done that before.

“Don’t wait up,” he’d said. Like hell she wouldn’t wait up. If it took all night, she’d wait for him to return, doubtless brimming over with enthusiasm over whatever gadget it was that he’d finally managed to get working, wanting to tell her all about it. She would sit there and she’d listen and she’d share his pleasure and then, when he stopped to catch his breath (by then it would be dawn, most likely), she would put a tie and freshly laundered shirt on him, take him by the hand, and lead him down the nearest aisle she could find.

She picked up a handful of spilled popcorn from the carpet and popped it in her mouth, then glanced at the clock atop the mantelpiece. Almost two A.M. It was late. Too late, in fact.

Brewster rode the elevator up to his private laboratory atop the corporate headquarters building of EnGulfCo International, all the while thinking. God, it was so simple! A faulty counter in the timing switch, that was all it was. He was certain of it. He had tried everything else that he could think of in an attempt to reproduce the malfunction that had sent the first time machine off on the journey from which it had never returned and now he was certain that he had it. Everything else had checked out perfectly, with each and every one of the duplicate circuit boards for the autoreturn module he had assembled, but this one had a faulty timing switch. The moment he tripped it, instead of the counter sequentially going backward from “30” to “O,” the settings he’d selected, it went from “30” directly to “O,” without going through all the numbers in between, so no sooner had he tripped the switch than it clicked back again to its original position. That must have been what happened with the original machine. Some of the switches had been faulty and the auto-return had simply turned itself off an instant after he’d activated it. Damned English electronics, he thought, should have gone with Japanese components. No wonder the damn thing hadn’t come back. It had departed on a one-way trip! He passed the scanner and entered his laboratory, where the second time machine, the one he’d painstakingly recreated during the past two months, sat waiting in the center of the room. He stood there for a moment, staring at it and chewing on his lower lip. He had to be right this time. He’d used up the very last of the Buckyballs in putting the second one together. If it didn’t work right this time, that would be the end of it, at least until another obliging meteor containing fragments of a supernova from some other galaxy happened to smack into some unsuspecting piece of earthly real estate. And that could take a while.

“It has to work this time,” he mumbled to himself, “it has to!” Just to make sure, he double-, triple-, and quadruple checked all the other switches for the duplicate auto-return modules he had assembled. He found two more that had the same malfunction, but all the others worked properly.

“That’s it,” he said to himself. “That’s got to be it.” So simple. He had thought something had gone wrong in the assembly of the board, and he had done it over and over and over again, and all the time, it had just been a faulty switch.

He rechecked all the working switches several more times, just to make certain, then. he selected one and snapped the module into the control panel. That’s all there was to it.

‘Wow,” he said. He turned to look at Bugs, sitting in his wire cage, looking fat and healthy and munching contentedly on a piece of lettuce. “Now we find out where you’ve been off to. Bugs, old buddy. And we go back and get the first machine... wherever the hell it is.” That thought brought him up short for a moment. Certainly, that first machine had to be somewhere. Only where? It should have merely traveled back into the past ten minutes, from the time he’d sent it off, right in that very selfsame lab, and only been gone for ten seconds. Only, of course, since the auto-return module had switched itself off, it hadn’t returned ten seconds later and was undoubtedly still there. Which meant he had to work out the precise settings so that he would go back into the past exactly ten minutes from the time he had originally sent the first machine back. Or did he? If it was still in the lab, and time was sort of linear, and the new past he had altered by sending back the machine was running about ten minutes behind him, then it was probably still there, only ten minutes ago.

Unless I’ve moved it, he thought. Only why would I do that? If I sent it back and the past me saw it appear, and not return, then obviously the past me in that new, altered linear past would have figured out that something had gone wrong and would undoubtedly be waiting for the future me to figure it all out.

“Is that what I’d do?” he asked himself aloud. “Well, yes, of course, since I thought of it, then that’s exactly what I’d do, since I’m me and I know how I think, whether I’m the present me or the past me. Right?” He glanced at Bugs and nodded. “Right. Of course. That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Bugs merely continued munching on his lettuce leaf.