The Navigators (6 page)

Roger let his hand hover over the cluster of plastic straws, deciding which one was the right one.

Green, red, blue, yellow, orange. He appeared to study them, searching for some kind of advantage.

Barry bit his nail, waiting for Roger to make his selection.

In a quick move, Roger dropped his hand onto the pile and plucked out a straw.

Blue.

I had to contain myself, so as not to give up the game. Roger did not yet know if he had won or lost.

“Melissa, you’re next,” I said. Barry flashed me a look of panic, then recovered. He wasn’t the only one with a bold move up his sleeve.

She stared at the remaining straws, a world of possibility waiting on the selection. Following Roger’s example, she let her hand hover over the straws, then dropped it like a hawk after a pond fish and scooped out her choice.

Green.

Barry inhaled, more to express relief, but the others probably took it as a sign of getting ready for his turn.

Melissa looked at me. “Now, for Riff?”

Barry had to hold his breath. “Sure.”

“Riffy’s favorite color is…”

Not red
.

“…blue. So, since that’s gone -”

She plucked a straw.

Orange.

Another masked sigh of relief from Barry. There were two left. Red and yellow.

He decided to appear magnanimous. “Peeky, go ahead.”

“No,” I said. “I already know which one is the short one. You go.”

“Okay.” Barry took a deep breath.

He reached out and drew a straw – the red one.

“And that leaves me with yellow,” I said. “Everybody show your straws so we can all see which is the short one.”

I held mine up with two fingers to reveal a full length straw.

Everybody else showed theirs.

“Booyah!” Roger held up the short straw.

Barry shot me a wide-eyed glance as Melissa gave Roger a high five. I went into the kitchen while Roger mused out loud about what he would do on his trip. Barry followed me. “I said it should
appear
more fair,” I whispered, dropping the straws in the trash can where the original short straw rested. “You didn’t watch me closely enough.”

“I won’t make that mistake again.”

I came out of the kitchen. “Yes, you will.”

Always the smartest person in the room, Barry could actually appreciate it when, once in a while, somebody got the better of him. It was like for a moment they understood the game he’d quietly been playing with the world his whole life.

It was hard to sneak one by Barry. He watched as I showed him a red straw, but didn’t keep watching as I turned my back, swapped it out, and cut the blue one. Which made it all seem fair.

Besides, if anything bad happened the first time around, in the test run, it probably shouldn’t happen to my future roommate.

Or me, for that matter. Or Melissa. Roger, on the other hand, was… most expendable.

Just then, the short, thin frame of Chris Findlay burst through the apartment door. “Hey, everybody, do I have some news for you!”

He stopped and put his hands on his boney hips.

“It’s a viewer.”

Chapter Nine

“W
hat the fuck is a viewer?” Roger demanded.

“This is. The machine.” Findlay walked over and put a hand on the metal frame.

“I thought it was a time machine.” Melissa sounded confused.

“It is. Kind of.” Findlay puffed his thin chest out and grinned. “It’s a viewer!” He seemed very proud of this statement. The rest of us were still a little confused.

He ran a hand through his red hair and pointed to the panel in front of the machine’s metal seat. “All these dials and knobs are settings to allow you to see where the reflected light is from a specific moment and view it.”

Melissa held her hand up. “You are totally over my head, Findlay.”

“Okay, okay. Think of it like this.” He took a deep breath and held his hands out. “When you close your eyes and touch that table, or that lamp, your senses feel it and transmit that sensation to your brain. There is actual physical contact between you and the object.” He glanced at a few faces to make sure we were all with him. “But when you
see
something, you are just receiving the reflected light from the object. It may or may not be there, but it doesn’t matter. You’re only
seeing
it, so it only needs to be reflected light to exist in your visual sense.”

Melissa’s mouth hung open. “Uh, okay… so…”

“So the machine isn’t really going to take you through time, but it will take you to the point where the reflected light of what you want to see now exists, and you will be seeing it like a transportable 3D movie or something.” He turned and smiled at the machine. “It’s a viewer. Really, it’s rather ingenious.”

Roger folded his arms and leaned up against the counter. It was quite a departure from what had been said earlier. “That sounds even more insane than it being a time machine. You came up with this all by yourself?”

Findlay’s grinning face froze. “Well…”

Roger pounced. “Findlay! You didn’t tell anybody about it, did you?”

“I was stuck.” Findlay backed a few steps away from Roger. “During that exam I was proctoring, I couldn’t get past this one thing. It was stumping me. I checked over the notes Barry and I had put together, and I couldn’t get it to add up…”

The tension in Roger’s arms and neck showed how hard he resisted the urge to throttle Findlay. He spoke through clenched teeth. “So what did you
do
?”

“It, uh, seemed like a numbers problem.” Findlay squirmed. “You know, like solving for three or more unknowns in an equation.”

I grabbed my stomach. This was bad. Really bad.

Roger pressed. “So you…”

“I…asked a mathematician.”

“Findlay!” Roger grabbed his head with both hands. “You idiot! You’re giving everything away before we even know what we have!”

Barry held up a hand. “Hold on, hold on. Who did you talk to? One of your MIT buddies?”

“MIT!” Roger shook his head. “Oh, my God, there it goes!”

“Roger, calm down.” Barry turned to back Findlay. “Who?”

Findlay shrugged. “Yeah, one of my buddies at MIT.”

“Jesus!”

“A pirate, okay? An illegal hacker guy. He won’t go above ground with it.”

“How much does he know?” Melissa asked.

“I put it to him theoretically.”

Roger pointed a finger. “Don’t play games with us, twerp.”

“Look.” Findlay threw his hands up. “I said I had a theory problem, and he approached it like that. For all he knows it’s for a book.”

“Except it’s not for a book, you asshole.” Roger rubbed his forehead. “Barry, this is why I didn’t want any outside help. The minute you let these hackers in, they start fucking everything up and telling the whole world.”

Findlay bristled, pointing back at Roger. “You guys were up against it, asshole. I solved your problem.”

Barry cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“You had the machine, and you had some ideas of what it was, okay? But that’s all you had. Ideas.” He softened his tone and leaned into Barry’s line of sight. “You guys are diggers, man. Math guys, and physics guys, they bring ideas to life. Sometimes they can reverse engineer a whole concept into something that works.” He looked around at the rest of us, then back at Barry. “But here, you didn’t know what you had. You figured out some of the concepts, but you didn’t know how to make them
live
.”

Excitement crept into Findlay’s voice now. His small, wiry frame stood taller and he spoke with more force. “Check out all of these dials and knobs.” He put a hand on the machine and pointed at its panel of dials. “Barry asked
how
you’d make them or
who
could make them, okay? Was it ancient Mayans or some futuristic descendant of the human race? It’s a good question, but it’s the wrong question.”

Findlay pulled his head from the machine to address us, wrapping his hands around the piping. “The real question is
why
did they make the number of dials they made? And when you approach it as a math problem, the answer jumps right out at you. Watch.”

He strode to Barry’s desk and picked up a pencil and a pad of paper. “Melissa, here. Write down a date. Any date.”

She scribbled on the pad.

“Aha, okay.” Findlay picked up the pad and showing it to us. “12/25/2014. Month, day, year, separated by slashes. This date works for us as we stand here in Tampa, Florida, United States… We’re eastern standard time, too. But what does the military use? They put the day first, not the month, and they utilize a 24-hour clock so there’s no AM or PM. That makes it more universal. More
mathematical
. Okay? The language of math knows no limits.”

Melissa pushed her hair behind her ear. “Okay.”

“Okay. Now . . . ” Findlay tapped the pad with a finger. “If you need to be more precise about your selected date, you’d need to know the time, too. Hours, minutes.” He laid the notepad on the coffee table and grinned at Melissa, holding up his hand. “So, count with me.” With each word, he touched a finger of the open hand with the index finger of the other. “Year, month, day, hour, minute… Five variables.”

Then he pointed at the dials on the machine’s panel. There were five big dials.

Findlay had cracked the first code.

“Oh, my God,” Melissa gasped. “Findlay, you figured it out!”

Findlay beamed. “That’s just one of the unknowns we were able to solve. And check out the little raised bumps around the dials. Like, this one has twelve.”

“Months?”

“Right. And this one has thirty-one.”

“Days.” Her mouth hung open. “So they used our dating system?”

“Or they knew we would be using it.” Findlay shrugged. “But check out the subdials here for the years.” The panel had an inset space there for a dial like the other ones, where it contained a set of smaller dials. Like wheels within a wheel.

“This is for the years,” he said, sounding slightly amazed. “Look how it counts.”

I added up the smaller wheels that sat in the space for the year dial. There were eight.

“A nice round number,” Findlay said quietly, only half joking.

“Eight…” Melissa was thinking out loud. “If seven digits is a million, and eight is ten million…”

“Eight digits could get you to ninety-nine million,” I whispered. “If you maxed the first two out at nine.”

“If you maxed all eight out, you’d be at almost a hundred million. Think about that.” Findlay smiled. “A hundred million years.”

“I wonder why only eight?” I asked. “Why not ten? Or twelve?”

Barry leaned forward. “I imagine it takes a lot of power to go back in time at all. A hundred million years might be the most a machine this size can do. Maybe less.”

“Maybe more, though.” Roger put his hand on the bronze frame.

“Yeah.” Barry bit his fingernail. “Maybe.”

“Anyway,” Findlay pulled himself back from his daydream, “once you program in the date using the universal system, it’s just a matter of throwing a switch and the show starts!” Plopping into the chair at the desk, he lifted aside Barry’s computer and made space for his feet. He gestured to the long rods positioned along each side of the machine’s seat. “Probably one of those big levers, there.”

We stared at the machine. The possibilities were amazing.

Roger cleared his throat and clapped his hands together. “Well, thanks for dropping by, Findlay. Time to go.”

“What!” Findlay’s jaw dropped. Roger walked over and grabbed him by the back of the collar.

Melissa stood up and put her hands out. “Roger, don’t.”

“Time to go.” Roger stood Findlay up. “You’re out.”

“Out? No way!” Findlay shook off Roger’s grip. “Like I said, you guys were up against it. I solved your problem. This whole thing was going nowhere without me!”

“But it did.” Barry held onto the machine’s bronze frame and eased himself onto the metal seat.

“Huh?”

“It did go somewhere without you. You said so yourself.” Barry’s eyes scanned the dials and knobs. “It’s a math problem, not a computer problem. The math guys solved it, not you.” He glanced at Findlay. “You dealt yourself out.”

“I’m not out! Nobody’s out!” Red-faced, Findlay glanced around the room. “Not now. Not since I know what you have. You can’t deal me out.”

“I can knock you the fuck out.” Roger grabbed Findlay’s collar again. “That would be pretty ‘out,’ as far as I’m concerned.”

“You can’t deal me out!”

“Why not?” Roger growled.

“Because!”

“Because why?”

“Because he hasn’t told us how he figured out how to power it,” I said. “You must have gotten that answer, too, Findlay, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Jesus.” Roger gritted his teeth. “Who the fuck did you tell to get
that
information, Findlay?”

“Am I right?” I asked.

Findlay held silent. He studied each of us, like he no longer knew if he stood in a room full of friends or enemies.

“Yes.” He swallowed. “I figured out how it’s powered.”

“No, you didn’t.” Barry sounded impatient. “Your big brain isn’t mechanical. You got help. From who?”

Findlay sighed. “Coopersmith.”

“The engineering professor?”

“Jesus, Findlay!” Roger turned and put his hands over his face. “Barry, we have lost all control now.”

Barry bit his nail. Findlay’s answers were unsettling.

Barry stood and went over to a nervous Findlay, patting him on the back. Barry may have been looking at Findlay, but he was addressing all of us.

“It’s okay. Findlay here, like most hackers, is a lot of talk and little action. Nobody worth a shit will take him seriously. However…”

Barry moved away. He glanced at Roger and nodded.

Roger immediately strode up to the computer geek and punched him in the gut, dropping him.

Melissa shrieked, putting her hands over her mouth. Findlay lay on the floor, gasping.

“I think we can all agree that Findlay won’t be talking to anybody else about our little project again. Will you Findlay?”

He couldn’t talk yet, but he could move his head. And from the floor, Findlay bobbed his coconut up and down eagerly.

“So we go ahead as planned,” Barry said. “Findlay, once he can breathe again, will tell us how the thing is powered, and then he will quietly walk away, forgetting he ever heard of our little project. Right Findlay?”

Findlay’s gaze drifted up, eyes agape.

“Otherwise, Roger here is going to stop being so nice about all these transgressions you’ve been making. They trusted me. I trusted you. Get it? Didn’t we agree to keep this thing quiet?”

“Barry,” Melissa began. He ignored her, staring down at Findlay. Too much was at stake.

“Mmmmph,” was all Findlay could muster.

Roger growled. “That sounds like a ‘yes.’ Is it a ‘yes,’ Findlay?”

Findlay nodded.

“Okay,” Roger said. “Then there’s just one more thing. How is it powered?”

Findlay gasped long enough to get out a few words. “Self-contained system.”

“Try it again in non-computer speak, Findlay.”

“It’s self-contained.” He rose to his knees. “Coopersmith… thinks it’s a magnetic system in a vacuum, with storage cells, but I disagree.” He took a deep breath, pausing to rub his belly. “Whoever built it took into consideration that it might use a lot of energy getting to where it’s going, but that there might not be an abundance of fuel available for it when it was time to return home.”

Roger narrowed his eyes. “So-”

“So it was made with a self-contained, self-limiting system, like the way they reuse oxygen and water on the space shuttle or the space station.”

“So it re-uses its fuel?” Roger asked. “How?”

“No fuel is consumed with 100% efficiency. Like on the space station, you drink water, but it’s recaptured, so you’d drink reclaimed piss if they could filter it back down to just H2O. So they do. They filter it and remove the piss. Am I going slow enough, you damned fucking cro-magnon?”