Ryan Time

by Craig Robertson

  “Save yourself the trouble.” It was Jon speaking.

  “I beg your pardon, Dr. Ryan. Please explain to me what a civilian would know about any such matter with more than a passing fancy.”

  “I”m kind of a weapons groupie, don't you know?”

  “I do not know,” she challenged angrily.

  “Look. Chill and listen, okay? Thermonuclear weapons have to be the entry-level ordinance for any advanced civilization. If they would have worked on these bozos, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Plus, in two months you might be able to place those warheads as far away as the Asteroid Belt. Too late. By then, they'd be right on top of us. I'm certain that if they get that close to us, we'll already be timeless, interplanetary debris.”

  “We could ask NASA to help. Maybe increase the total payload and use a massive rocket to accelerate them, farther out. That would pack a walloping punch, Mr. President,” responded Darlene.

  “Sand kicked in their faces at the beach, at best,” scoffed Jon.

  “Do you have any suggestions?” Darlene menaced, growing frustrated.

  “No.”

  “Then I will consider your objections in that light.”

  “What about lasers?” asked a cabinet secretary. “Don't we have big space lasers now?”

  An older woman in a white coat stood. “No. We have some powerful pulse lasers on the ground. They could probably be lifted into orbit in the two month time frame. But they're quite fragile, and have never been used as offensive weapons.”

  “You got what, maybe a megawatt unit or two?” posed Jon. “Chicken feed. And, I say again, that is just another of the basic tools any scientifically savvy society would have. I am certain that has been tried and and it has failed, probably a million times.”

  “Would it hurt to try? Doing nothing and dying is not a very heroic course of action,” Payette responded.

  “Obviously, no. But it would be a tremendous waste of resources. We have little time. If we put our eggs in any wrong basket, none of them will hatch.”

  “What else could we put in low Earth orbit, thereby not wasting our precious resources?” the white coated woman asked.

  “Small volume linear accelerators.”

  All eye turned to Sachiko. She whispered the words.

  “Shaky, what'd we do with low end accelerators? The particles they'd shoot at our enemy would be like blowing them a kiss,” puzzled Tank.

  “I'm not thinking of accelerating particles, Tank.”

  “Dr. Jones, please just say what it is you're thinking,” instructed Payette. “Few of us are experts and none of us have time to spare.”

  “We've been able to produce punctate black holes in the lab for over fifty years. We can keep them stable indefinitely.”

  “Dr. Jones, are you hearing yourself?” spat Darlene. “You told us they eat gigantic black holes. Little ones would be like serving them appetizers.”

  “I'm going to have to side with the wicked witch on this one, Sachiko,” Jon added with a playful tone.

  “No, I'm not proposing we launch tiny black holes at them. I'm thinking we fire tiny worm holes at them.” She had to grin, she was so proud of herself.

  “Why would that matter?” Jon asked. “For one thing, it would be as hard to make them stable as it would be to find a virgin in a whorehouse.”

  That got a few snickers.

  “No, wait,” said Collins. “I get it. Hot damn, Jones, that's well beyond brilliant.” He holstered his pistol and wove his way through the crowd to get to her. He held out his hand to shake. “I want to shake the hand of the most brilliant mind I've ever encountered, ma'am.” He bowed his head.

  “Aw, now this is just plain depressing. What's this gorilla, here, getting that I'm not? This is intolerable,” whined Jon.

  Tank nodded in full sympathy.

  “Don't you see?” said Collins. “These devils eat time, positive time. Wormholes generate negative time. We'd be throwing antimatter at matter.”

  Tank looked at Sachiko like he'd just discovered a new type of pizza. “Damn, kiddo, you're good. They'll have to give you two Nobels for that one. It'll go right to your head, too. There'll be no living with you.”

  “Okay, the self-congratulatory phase of the meeting is over. Please explain what you just said to us little brains, Dr. Jones,” implored Payette.

  “If two black holes are placed just so, they can form what we call a wormhole. They have been documented in labs before, but they're unstable and short-lived. The physics behind how they act is scary. But, suffice it to say, they can result in what we call negative time. I think that might just be a devastating weapon to use on the evil Doozers. They might just explode with any contact.”

  “What's an evil doozer?” asked the POTUS.

  “Don't you remember the Doozers, sir? Doozer is as doozer does? Fraggle Rock?”

  “Clearly I do not!” he replied, tersely.

  “They were busy little SOBs, Frank. Always working and working,” clarified Jon.

  Sachiko gasped out loud. Jon had just called his CIC by his first name. What metallic balls he had.

  “Ah. And can we get these accelerators and black holes in space fast enough?”

  “I think so,” she replied.

  “Thinking's not good enough, Dr. Jones. I must have results.”

  “We will do it,” proclaimed Darlene. “So help me, it will be done.”

  “I hate to rain on this lovefest,” said Jon, “but those damn things, in these times, are going to be so unstable!”

  “Well, we have a month and a half to figure out how to change that inconvenient aspect of quantum physics, don't we?” responded Tank.

  The president stood. “Two final matters. He turned to Darlene. “General Masterson, please see that Sherman gets a set of four stars for his uniform. As for you, General Collins, he'll bring you a set of four, as well. I suggest you wear that appropriate uniform for the duration. It opens doors quickly, and quickly is what we sorely need.”

  Tank saluted the president. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Collins did likewise.

  “Finally,” he addressed his chief of staff, Rita Davidson, “Call the chancellor at Dr. Jones's school. I noticed Tank slipped that one in like the sneaky bastard he is. Let's make her doctoral degree official. And let's get her a full professor spot there, too. Only the top people work for me. And Rita,” he angled a finger at her, “if whoever you talk to has the slightest reservation, hand the phone to me. You got that?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  The room cleared. Tank, Collins, Jon, Sapale, and Sachiko were the last ones present.

  “That was intense,” declared Sachiko.

  “You ain't seen nothing, yet, kiddo,” Tank teased. “This is going to get so intense we'll need to wear fireproof underwear.” He turned to Collins. “I want to make this point clear. The POTUS gave me the campaign promotion before he gave you yours. You got that?”

  “Oh, so I suppose you're going to lord it over me, now, that you outrank me?”

  “Damn skippy, Marvin. Don't ever forget it.”

  Sachiko was fairly certain Tank was playing around. He had to be, right? They were all on the same team, facing almost certain death, and … wait. It had be a guy thing. She hated guy things.

  “General Sherman, with all due respect, if you ever refer to me by my first name again, badness will befall you. Not a threat, a promise. In practice, if you feel the need to address me casually, I go by my middle name, Jon.”

  Tank gave him a crooked grin. “You got it Marvjon.”

  Fortunately, Sachiko was able to drag Tank away before fisticuffs broke out.

  Oh, how she hated those guy things!

  TEN

  The mobilization effort was impressive. It far exceeded my expectations. It was even more focused and intensive than the one I would witness in a few years, when Jupiter threatened Earth. Two separate sites were designated as ground-zeros for the research and
production of the accelerators and the work to stabilize the wormholes. CERN in Switzerland and Stanford in California. Anyone who was anyone in any related field went to one of those immediately. If someone important showed the slightest reservations or, God forbid, declined, they were basically lifted off their feet by MIBs and taken to the campus farthest from their location. Lesson being: Play nice, and work nearer to home. Be uncooperative, you get a worse commute. Either way, participation was not your choice, but the government's.

  It was decided by all the world's governments that there was no room for selfishness in saving humankind. I know. Sounds too good to be true, but even enemies of a thousand generations fell in line and marched to the collective beat. If some sovereign nation decided not to participate at a maximum level, UN-coordinated troops very quickly helped them see and correct the error of their ways. As harsh as that was, I agreed with the policy. We were facing a no-joke dire situation. Failure, and extinction, were basically guaranteed. In fact, even if our crazy plans worked better than we could dream they would, we were probably goners, already. Everybody needed to grab an oar and row, and everybody was going to grab an oar and row, right now.

  Within three days, the areas around the two centers were transformed into major tent cities. Mobile hospitals, temporary housing, massive latrine assemblies, and mess tents appeared as if by magic. Fences went up and guards prowled the perimeters on both sides of the barriers. Warehouses sprang up like weeds and were immediately jammed full with every conceivable technical tool and material. Cost was not an issue. It was like trucks backed up to any unoccupied space and dumped piles of money. If someone even thought you might need something, you got three of them before the ink was dry on your request.

  As the high-level players arrived, they were assigned to pods. Generally, those had three to five senior scientists, five to ten engineers, and a hundred technicians, and countless support personnel. The pods received specific assignments and went right to work. General Sherman—whose head didn't swell, as I imagined it might have—organized the entire project, in both venues. His favorite part was that he didn't have to give the effort a stupid name. He said it was the project and that was the end of the story. Of course, it very quickly became known as The Project, because there was no stopping human nature. He was excited as a bridegroom that he didn't have to report to anyone. He had “people” to keep heads of state apprised as to The Project's progress. After a lifetime in academics and the military, for him, that was better than three desserts a night.

  Also, everything that could make low Earth orbit was prepped or sent off with the supplies anticipated to be needed. The four large permanent space labs already up there became the centers in space for the linear accelerator preparation. But, they were way too small to accommodate the volume of resources required. So hundreds of capsules were put in orbit and cobbled together as work and housing spaces. The assembly of the linear accelerators themselves began at several locations on the ground. They also had the most frantic pace of any arm of the project. Money, materials, and people, people, people were set to work like a 4X-forward on a video.

  I wasn't sure all the efforts, herculean as they were, to say the least, would bear fruit. Firing stable wormholes into the path of the Edoozers was still a pipe dream, in my opinion. Oh, yeah, that name stuck immediately. Whatever that mighty alien race called itself, to us they were Evil-Doozers, or simply Edoozers. There was a short-lived attempt to call them EDs, but erectile dysfunction already owned that abbreviation. Many a reporter got laughs, not the quiet respect they anticipated, when they said something along the lines of, ED is the worst thing that has ever happen to man. Really? Ever try having a period? How about childbirth? Yeah, Edoozers it was.

  Since I knew one hell of a lot more about everything scientific than the time locals, I passed Tank and Sachiko many a spoiler alert as to how to fabricate and stabilize the final products. While it was possibly they could complete the enormous task themselves, I wasn't ready to bet humankind's future on it. I tipped the scales in our direction, when and where it was needed.

  It was maybe three or four days after that meeting in the Situation Room that the public was told, or otherwise finally figured out, what was happening. To my very great surprise it took two full days for civil unrest to boil over and for massive riots to begin. If the apocalypse was coming, a goodly portion of humankind was going to damn sure act badly. I was so disappointed in my species. I mean, if you're sure we're all going to die, why do you need a bigger-screened TV? If we're all doomed, why kill strangers in the streets? They'll be dead anyway, real soon without some yahoo's help. At least enough of the civil defense complex remained together to ensure some stability. In the areas surrounding the key research and manufacturing sections, there were so many troops, no riotous horde was going to get within miles of an important outpost.

  Tank, Sachiko, Sapale, and I settled in at Stanford. As time went on, my wife complained more and more bitterly about the burqa. Though I understood her frustration, if anyone got a look at her, we were in trouble. Once an alien was discovered among us—yeah, that'd be problematic. So, Dr. Sadozi wore her outfit twenty four seven, because she was just that devoted to her cultural norms.

  There was a 7:00 a.m. teleconference with all pod leaders, daily. After that, most groups worked without breaks until they fell asleep at their work stations. And they only woke up because it was time for the next 7:00 a.m. meeting. Wash, rinse, repeat. Ten days into the project, Tank scheduled a face-to-face morning meeting with the pod leaders.

  “Morning, folks. I have the final estimates as to the arrival time of the void tunnel headed toward our collective asses. We have thirty eight days left to our collective lives.”

  He paused to let the finality of that curse settle in.

  “What's the wiggle room on those numbers?” asked Janet Craig, a theoretical physicist from Cal Tech.

  “Consider them gospel, Jan. I've tweaked the data to give us the most certain shortest time prediction. Any error will be on the long side. I want the word passed to everyone that we have no more than thirty-eight shopping days until anti-Christmas.”

  A few grumbles were heard. Tank's numbers were, by the way, Al's numbers, and, barring a course change, they were absolutely accurate.

  “AIS, how soon can we fire our first shot?”

  Lenn Carlson was in charge of actually getting functioning accelerators in space, hence AIS. “We have a handful of working units up there already. In a week—”

  “Stop,” snapped Tank. “From now on, no weeks or months. Days only. We got thirty eight. Everybody focus on that number.”

  “In seven days I think we'll have a couple hundred accelerators upstairs and hot. You give me stable wormholes, and I'll fire them as fast as the laws of physics will allow.”

  “Lenn, I expect you to have a hundred units ready in four point five days. If it's impossible, I do not care. Just do it.”

  Lenn's head dropped. “You got it, Tank.”

  “Socorro, how's it looking along those lines?”

  Socorro Núñez was the head of Particle Physics at Oxford. She chose to work at Stanford because of her long friendship with Tank. “Geneva has had a couple breakthroughs already,” she said in a weary voice. “A few wormholes persisted for up to ten seconds. Locally, no such luck yet. I've handed out the basics of the Geneva progress for those interested to review.”

  “I need the magic to be easily reproducible, Soco. When will I have truly stable ones?”

  “Who can say?”

  “Ah, that would be you, princess,” he shot back firmly.

  “Personally, I feel in ten days we will either achieve our goal, or prove it is unattainable.”

  “I can live with the first part, only. Make it so. I'm going to keep saying this as long as I have to. I do not care if it can't be done. Make it happen.” He turned to a small group seated together. “Logistics?”

  “We have way too much of everything,” whined
Grayson Chambers, an Army major general. “I even jokingly asked for Beluga caviar in five kilo cans. Those're around twenty-five thousand bucks, each. Seriously, I was punchy and it must have seemed funny, at the time. Ten cans were on my desk in ninety minutes. PS, I don't know what the hell to do with fifty kilograms of caviar. Anybody interested, see me.”

  “Dang, Grayson, you really messed up,” Tank said in a low tone. He let the words hang a few seconds. “You forgot to request a thousand mother-of-pearl spoons and half a ton of blini.”

  Laughs all around. It was nice. No one laughed much, anymore.

  “Okay, I guess that's it for now, unless anyone's got something,” stated Tank. “If not—”

  “What if we rotate them while they spin?” I said as soon as the merriment died down.

  “You want to spin those cans of fish eggs, Jon?” Tank teased.

  “No.” I held up the Geneva summary papers. “What if after we form quasi-stable wormholes, we rotate them? Look, when they're formed, they're spinning. Some are twirling slowly, some at near the speed of light, and they're all in random orientations. That has to contribute greatly to their instability. But, if we got the individual wormholes to rotate along their semi-major axes, that may stabilize the configuration.”

  No, I am not a brilliant scientist and I couldn't take credit for the discovery. It was common knowledge where I came from. It was called The Jones Effect, in fact. Yeah, Sachiko Jones discovered it herself, about ten years hence, normal time. If I added that factoid, I imagined there would be embarrassing questions to answer.

  Tank twisted his mouth. “Let me ponder that a moment.” A few seconds later he said, “Soco, what do you think?”

  She was already writing equations frantically on the back of a handout. “Just a moment.” She held up a finger.

  “Take all the—”

  “Yes. It … I think that will help tremendously. Thank you, Dr. Ryan. That's brilliant, yet simple. We might also tumble the pair, along with rotating it.” She squeezed her chin. “That might further constrain the degrees of freedom in a stabilizing manner.” She scribbled a few more lines. “With a couple sets of superconducting magnets, it should be doable.” Socorro looked over to Tank. “I have to go.” With that she turned and jogged out the door. No mean feat when wearing three inch heels.