Jim Baen's Universe Volume 1 Number 5 Read online

  He gibbered and sputtered as the gremlin reached up his nostril and started poking around in his brain. "Need more monopoles, need more monopoles. The fossilization takes too much power—" Then he peeled the gremlin off his nose and flung it to the floor, where it broke open, spilling tiny ratchets and lubricating oil onto the ground. A flock of inch-high Class One gremlins appeared and gathered up the remains of their comrade, then vanished, squeaking in grief.

  "What the hell was that for?" shouted Calverley.

  I avoided his gaze and concentrated on shutting down the other devices. "Sorry. I knew the gremlin would make you say the thing you most wanted to keep quiet. I thought if you had anything to do with Rankin's disappearance, it would come out then. Obviously, you're innocent and I apologize."

  Calverley's face was flushed with outrage. "You nearly made me give away my demonstration." And indeed the other scientists were already whispering to each other, wondering what "fossilization" meant and saying it didn't sound very exciting.

  "Sorry," I said again, while under the table my hand closed on a titanium strut in case he went for me. "I was concerned about Rankin—"

  "You should be more concerned about yourself," said Calverley, still seething. "Selling overpriced, dodgy equipment is bad enough, but assaulting the customers is going too far. I want you out of this convention. At tomorrow's AGM I'm going to propose that you be barred from all Association events—forever."

  "So you don't want to buy my overpriced, dodgy monopoles?" I wasn't going to let him show how much his threat worried me.

  He frowned, clearly needing the monopoles but hating to back down. Concern for his demonstration won out. "Yes, I'll buy them—if they're up to scratch. But it'll be the last sale you ever make."

  I bagged the 'poles and took his cash. I dearly wanted to jack up the price, but other scientists were watching the scene, and I knew I couldn't afford to alienate anyone by blatant profiteering. Tomorrow I'd need all the votes I could get.

  And now was the time to start campaigning, by advertizing my unique wares. "Gremlin traps! Special offer on gremlin traps, all sizes up to Class Nine. Come on chaps, buy gremlin traps!"

  Business was brisk. I was pleased, until I realized people were buying because they thought I wouldn't be around for much longer.

  * * *

  Late afternoon, custom dried up as people began gathering for the Demonstration Day show. The traditional start is 5:00 p.m., but the scientists always arrive early to fight for a good heckling position, and nowadays the demonstration often begins as soon as everyone's assembled.

  I let the rush subside and followed at my own pace, taking up a seat near the back and listening to the excited buzz of the scientists as they contemplated Calverley's apparatus. I recognised the high-spec generator I'd sold him, but I knew nothing about the case or the silver cube with a door in the front and a control panel on the side. This looked very like a large microwave oven and provoked a shout of, "I'll have a jacket potato please," from the audience.

  Vanzetti called for order. "Gentlemen. Thank you all for attending this year's convention. The Association has a proud tradition of demonstrating the practical applications of the latest scientific advances. . . ." The speech is so familiar I swear I can hear tape hiss, and so few people bother to listen that he could announce discovery of the Final Theory without raising a flicker. It just gives the waiting scientist time to worry about everything that could possibly go wrong with his demonstration.

  Relieved applause marked the end of the speech, and Calverley walked onto the stage.

  "Thank you. I will begin by showing you all what this apparatus can do; you may like to guess how it's doing it." He reached into his case. "I have here an ordinary hen's egg—I'll pass it round so you can see it's normal in every respect."

  This took some time, as many of the scientists wanted to scrutinize it with magnifying glasses and detectors of every sort, from Geiger counters to spectrometers. As the egg moved from hand to eager hand, tension and anticipation rose within the hall. Then someone dropped the egg, which caused a few giggles. While two people argued over who hadn't had hold of it, others gathered round to inspect the debris. But the shell fragments, the albumen, and the yoke with its black dot were all, indeed, perfectly normal.

  Calverley reached into his case again. "I have here another ordinary hen's egg," he said, offering it to the front row.

  "Get on with it!" cried several voices, and Calverley dispensed with the inspection.

  He opened the door of the silver cube. "Look: completely empty." The cube was mirrored silver on the inside as well, but was definitely empty. Calverley put the egg inside the cube. He closed the door and pressed a button on the control panel. The generator hummed briefly, then the On light glowed for about five seconds.

  Calverley knocked on the top of the cube three times and said, "Abracadabra!" He opened the door. Tottering around inside the cube was a tiny, downy chicken.

  There was scattered applause and a cry of, "I wanted an omelette."

  He acknowledged the applause, then removed the chick and wrung its neck. "Is it red wine or white with chicken? I can never remember. But here are two bottles of white, fresh from my cousin's vineyard." He presented them to Vanzetti. "Pick a bottle, any bottle."

  Vanzetti tapped them both—what he hoped to learn I have no idea—then selected the one on the right.

  "Open it," invited Calverley, distributing glasses among the front row.

  Vanzetti opened the bottle and there was a dash for the free drink, which soon stopped when Vanzetti tasted his and promptly spat it out. "It's disgusting!"

  "Then let's see if we can improve it," said Calverley. He put the other bottle in the silver cube and made a few mystic passes with one hand while programming the panel with the other. "A little sprinkle of magic dust, and—Prestidigitarium!"

  He removed the bottle and handed it to Vanzetti, who smiled sourly and made rather a meal of opening it.

  "Surely we could invent something more efficient," mused Calverley as Vanzetti struggled ostentatiously with the corkscrew. "Maybe we ought to have a convention at which we all turn our hands to something useful. . . . What do you think?" he asked.

  Vanzetti couldn't quite keep the surprise out of his voice as he said, "It's drinkable, very drinkable. Is it really the same wine?" The dash for the drink resumed on this vote of confidence, and all the scientists marveled at the instant improvement.

  Calverley moved to the blackboard. "It's the same wine. The only added ingredient is time. You've just seen the world's first Chronoplus! Inside the cube, the t component of spacetime is accelerated by a factor of rho squared, where rho is defined by. . . ."

  He began scribbling equations, and I popped out for a smoke.

  I'd intended to loiter on the porch and return before Calverley filled up the board with his theorems, because I do a lot of business just after demonstrations, when the audience is fired up with enthusiasm and the desire to finally iron out the niggling flaws in their perpetual motion machines. But it was so cold that I had to move around, so I walked down to the lake, crunching snow crystals underfoot. In the late afternoon twilight, all color had drained out of the world: the sky and everything under it were test-card shades of gray. A thin film of ice smoothed the surface of the water, and I tossed a few stones just for the tiny thrill of breaking it up.

  The convention was nearly over now. After tomorrow's AGM the scientists would all return to their labs for another year of persuading the mute cosmos not to be so shy. There was still no sign of Rankin, nor any clue to his fate. What could I tell his daughter, after my promise to investigate and my grand hints that the case was as good as solved?

  No one had seen him, no one had heard from him. If the blueprints did show a vessel of some sort, as Vanzetti thought, then he'd built it, climbed inside, and vanished. What kind of vessel could it be? If it was going anywhere dangerous, like outer space, he would have left a note or said good-bye.
He wasn't a loner with no ties: he had a daughter. To leave unannounced, as if popping out for a pint of milk, he must have had a safe destination in mind. But where?

  He'd disappeared, but he'd applied for Demonstration Day, which was probably the most prestigious event of his life. So he'd want to turn up for it, surely, not go gallivanting across spacetime. Spacetime. Space? Time!

  I dashed back inside and rushed into the hall, where Calverley had abandoned the blackboard for a final, end-of-show extravaganza.

  "—To see how they will look as fossils, let me first set the timer for one million years." The generator began to groan.

  Everyone turned to look at me as I charged in, uttering incoherent warnings which were drowned out by the increasing hum of the generator. No one else, therefore, saw Rankin appear center stage, behind Calverley and his equipment, in the vessel I recognized from the blueprints. He looked enormously pleased with himself and said, "Gentlemen—"

  Still running forward, I heard the generator stop and saw the On light appear.

  "—it gives me great pleasure—"

  Rankin's voice began descending in pitch like a tape played with exhausted batteries.

  "—to demonstrate—"

  The scientists looked back to the stage, where Rankin began to fade out in a cinematic slow dissolve.

  "—time travel!"

  He was transparent now, and his voice growled down into a subsonic rumble like the rattling chains of a ghost.

  By now I was at the front of the hall. I leapt onto the stage and pressed the big red button on Calverley's device, trusting it meant what I thought it meant.

  "What is it now?" he cried. "Stop persecuting me!"

  "Rankin! You must have noticed," I accused, forgetting he'd been facing the wrong way.

  A mob of scientists clambered on the stage to investigate the apparition. Vanzetti poked the faint shimmer that marked Rankin's presence or absence, then sucked his finger and shrugged. "Clear the area!"

  That took far longer to do than say, and even when we all congregated in the bar, the air still buzzed with questions and speculations. But the assembled brainpower didn't take long to thrash out what had happened.

  Vanzetti waved his glass as he expounded, spilling beer onto discarded convention programs. "Rankin's traveler arrived just as Calverley's accelerator started up. The two time machines so close together created an interference effect and Calverley's dragged Rankin off into the future. How long elapsed in yours?" he asked Calverley.

  "At the cutoff, just over a hundred thousand years had passed."

  There was a moment's silence as we all imagined Rankin's voyage and wondered what he'd see.

  "I don't think Rankin will go that far," said Vanzetti. "He's like a cat that's walked into the road, been hit by a car, and dragged along on the bumper. Just because the car's going a long way, that doesn't mean the cat will. I could probably work it out, given the distance between the time-drives and the ratio of their powers." Give a theorist a problem to solve, and he's happy.

  "He's going to slide through every Demonstration Day from now on," Audran said.

  "He'll be a permanent demonstration in himself," said Vanzetti. "I think he'd have liked that."

  "He'd have liked that?" I asked, incredulous. "Why are you talking about him in the past tense?"

  "You think the future tense would be more appropriate?"

  "No, I think rescuing him would be more appropriate."

  I looked into a circle of blank stares.

  "Rescue him? Does he want rescuing? He built the thing, so he must have wanted to travel in it. And we all know we experiment at our own risk," said Vanzetti.

  I didn't bother pointing out that Vanzetti never experimented at all. "He expected to turn up here, not thousands of years in the future in an unknown environment. He won't be prepared—he won't have food or drink. And the machine might not have enough power to come back."

  "Just how do you propose we rescue him?" said Vanzetti.

  "You're the scientists. Figure it out!"

  "We'll think about it," Vanzetti said. "There's no rush. If he's traveling forward in time, it hardly matters whether we start now or tomorrow or next year. Hastiness is the enemy of good science."

  I saw the sense in that, but I knew that if the task was put off now, it could be put off again tomorrow, and again next year. "Fair enough—postpone it as long as you like. But his daughter's been mad with worry. Which of you wants to tell her what happened to him? Which of you wants to tell her that you'll eventually get round to thinking about rescuing him when you've all wrapped up your own far more important projects?"

  "Look, we're not heartless—we're not opposed to rescuing him. But what can we do? He has the only time machine," said Vanzetti.

  "What about the Chronoplus?" I asked.

  "That's not the same thing at all," said Calverley indignantly.

  "It's the same principle, isn't it?"

  "It may be the same principle, but just because a radio and a computer both use electricity that doesn't mean you can convert one into the other with a few bits of string and an adjustable spanner."

  I pointed to my catalog with its vast range of stock. "I think I can provide a bit more than that."

  This brought a few surprised looks and a sarcastic comment from the crowd. "Mr. Markup is offering to underwrite the rescue costs? Now I have seen everything!"

  "I'll charge it to Rankin," I said. "If he's got a time machine and a bank account, he won't have any trouble paying."

  Audran spoke up. "The two time machines probably have a quantum entanglement. I might be able to detect him with the Quent, if I can rework the equations to include the temporal displacement."

  The prospect of a blank check galvanized the scientists. Others said their own research might be able to help. Vanzetti pored over Calverley's papers, saying that a full understanding of the underlying theory would be necessary before any dangerous rescue attempts, and Calverley himself basked in the attention that his device had brought him.

  Having bullied everyone into thinking, I felt I ought to shut up and let them get on with it. I bought a round of coffee and carried the blackboard into the bar so that people could contemplate Calverley's scrawled lecture notes. Despite the unusual events of the day, the convention soon took on its normal evening atmosphere of learned disputation. The only difference from last night was that, faced with a substantive issue to engage with, the scientists didn't indulge themselves with their usual long-winded anecdotes.

  Anecdotes. . . . Somewhere in my brain a neuron yelled for attention, and my own mental time machine transported me back to last night. "Remember Hogg?—invented the Practical Angel Trap."

  I marched over to the table where Calverley was deep in discussion. "What happens if you reverse the polarity?"

  He stared at me as if I were a rat querying the design of his maze: not being a scientist myself, I usually confine my technical suggestions to buying more expensive equipment. A babble of responses rose from the others.

  "Time would slow down instead of speeding up."

  "No, time would go backward instead of forward."

  "No, the thing would blow up."

  "Whatever, it wouldn't affect Rankin."

  Audran shook his head and said, "It would if they were still entangled."

  Vanzetti waited for everyone else's instant opinion before saying, "Let's ask the equations." He added a minus sign near the top of the blackboard and started following it through, until Calverley seized the chalk from him.

  "That doesn't follow—it's squared, so the minus disappears."

  "No, look, it goes through here—"

  "No way!"

  I recognised the situation from conventions past: they would never agree. It wasn't that it was my suggestion; it would have been the same had any of the scientists suggested it, perhaps worse as professional rivalry took hold. They were all too individualistic, too keen on the primacy of their own opinion, too convince
d of their own genius to agree with lesser mortals. I realized that the scientists would never agree on any rescue plan. It was up to me to take action, and if one polarity had sent Rankin away, the reverse might bring him back.

  I waited until the mle round the blackboard became absorbed in argument, and tiptoed out of the bar back into the hall. Calverley's device was still on the stage.

  "Don't touch it!" Audran had followed me. "Before you start fiddling, don't you want to be sure of success? You've already annoyed Calverley; you don't want to mess about with his apparatus if it's not going to do any good."

  "Calverley can't become angrier than he is already. And I won't know if this'll do any good until I try it, will I?"

  "There's no point in trying unless the two time-engines are still interfering. Let me test for quantum entanglement: if they're still connected, you can go ahead."