"Great," Yorick breathed, from the heights of euphoria. "It looks just great, Ang."
"Gee, thanks." Angus had a foolish grin and a modest blush. "It ain't much, really, but I like it, and it's kinda... well..." His voice trailed off.
Yorick nodded. "It sure is." He eyed Angus out of the corner of his eye. "What does it do?"
"Well, uh..." Angus pointed at the three coils. "You know how a magnetic field intersecting a piece of wire causes a flow of current, right?"
"Uh..."
"Right. Induction. And how an energized coil can shoot a piece of iron along the axis of the core, right?"
"Yeah, but..."
"A solenoid. Sure. Now, the trick is to get the whole atom moving by induction, instead of just the electrons, so it'll act like a solenoid, but for things that aren't made out of iron."
Yorick lifted a skeptical eyebrow. "It makes a nice analogy, Ang. But is this story-time?"
Angus shrugged. "That's as well as I can explain it. Each coil is wound so that it produces a field that's something like electricity and something like magnetism, and more like something else there isn't a word for—and when you turn on the current, it propels whatever's on the stage—excuse me, the quarter—along the axis of the coil."
"Axis?" Yorick's eyes crossed. "Of those coils?"
"Yeah, well, that's the other thing about those coils," Angus admitted. "In three-dimensional terms, they have about as much of an axis as an oval has a center. But in four-dimensional terms, each coil has one nice straight axis."
"I'll take your word for it." Yorick eyed the coils as though they were tarantulas. "Myself, I never did care to really watch what was happening when I was personality-projection-time-traveling. Matter of fact, I'm beginning to understand why I never wanted a look at the innards of a time machine... Okay, Ang, so each coil has an axis, and it'll shoot any chunk of matter along that axis. Then what?"
Angus shrugged. "Anything at the point of intersection of the three fields—that's George's ear, there—gets projected at a right angle to all three dimensions..."
"Into the fourth dimension!" Yorick hissed, staring at the quarter with eyes just as round.
"Like a pea out of a beanshooter," Angus said happily. "And however much power you shoot it with determines how far it goes, and the variable condenser determines the complex of angles—well, hell, the vector—at which it strikes the choroncline, so that determines which direction you're shooting it, and..."
"Huh?" Yorick's head looped the loop. "Whoa, Ang! Back it up, there! How's the variable condenser give it direction?"
"Well... it..." Angus's hands flapped uselessly. "Well, it sort of... it... moves it around, through—no, that's a straight line, really, in four-dimensional space, and it... uh... no... Damn it, don't ask me how it works! How should I know? I just built the blasted thing!"
"Yeah, that's a good point." Yorick nodded, frowning. "We'll leave the explanations to the theoretical physicists."
"Yeah. I've done my part." Angus turned away, jammed the plug into the wall.
"But how'd you know how to make it do what it does, Ang?"
"Because I've been there."
"And you were watching the scenery." Yorick shuddered. "I never dared; it would've warped my mind."
"Yeah, well, that's the advantage to having a warped way of thinking to being with," Angus said. "The scenery couldn't have done mine much damage."
"There is a certain irregular contour to your thoughts," Yorick admitted. "So you just watched what happened. Should work. I mean..."
"Yeah." Angus turned to the kitchen cabinets. "Once you've ridden in a wagon, you've got the general idea of hooking up a horse to something on wheels."
"If you were watching the horse and looking down at the wagon, instead of keeping your eyes tight shut... uh... Ang? Whatcha looking for?"
"Sugar," Angus said. "Got any cubes?"
"It is about time for a coffee break." Yorick opened a door and took out a box.
"Thanks, I'll take mine plain." Angus took the box and shook out a cube.
Yorick frowned. "Didn't know you had a sweet tooth."
"I don't." Angus turned back and placed the cube on the quarter.
Yorick stared. "Pardon me for asking, but what are you doing?"
"Setting up the first shot." Angus checked to make sure the little white cube was in the precise center of the silver circle.
A slow delighted grin spread over Yorick's face.
"Shall we try it?"
"Yeah, why not?" Angus grinned back. He nudged the rheostat, just barely opening it. "Only a little power, this time, a smidgen..."
The transformer hummed.
The cube disappeared.
They both stared pop-eyed at the quarter, not quite able to believe it.
Yorick recovered first. "Quick! Which way did it go?"
"Uh... uh..." Angus glanced at the variable condenser; it was closed tight. "North," he muttered sheepishly. He'd forgotten to set it.
"North! North..." Yorick pivoted in a circle, right arm straight out from the shoulder. "Let's see, the sun rises at the kitchen window, so that's east... The living room! North!"
As one, they leaped for the doorway, craned their necks around the jamb.
Nothing.
"Uh... how far'd y' throw it, Ang?"
"Hell, how should I know? We'll have to calibrate the damn thing by guess and by golly."
Yorick's mouth tightened; he shook his head with conviction. "No sugar cube, Ang."
"None." Angus sagged.
Then he pulled himself together. "Well, maybe a little power went a long way. Let's check the front lawn." He lifted his head, squared his shoulders. "Come on!" He put his best foot forward, and...
Something crunched under his heel.
Angus froze.
Slowly, he turned his head toward Yorick.
Grins spread over both their faces.
Then Angus was hopping away and Yorick was on his knees, hands scrabbling over the floor, and Angus was shouting, "Was that it? Is it sugar? Do we gotta sweep the floor? Are we gonna have cockroaches?"
Yorick licked his forefinger, touched it to the linoleum, then touched it to his tongue and lifted his head with a look of insane glee.
"Sugar!" they both roared together.
Then, for five minutes, the apartment rocked with the whooping and stomping of a victory dance.
They spent the rest of the night calibrating the matter transmitter, the rheostat for distance and the variable condenser for direction, until Angus could put a half-inch cube of sugar precisely on target anywhere within the apartment, the cube obediently disappearing from the quarter and reappearing where it was wanted, three tries out of three, every time.
Then (about four a.m.), they started experimenting with larger amounts of power, checking the range available with the current supplied by a doorbell transformer. Yorick went to a phone booth about two blocks away and called in. Angus bent over the breadboard with one hand on the rheostat and the other on the variable condenser, the phone cradled between ear and shoulder.
"Did I hit you?"
"Nope. Try again."
"Okay... We're gonna need more sugar cubes, Yorick."
"Don't worry about it, I know this all-night cafe..."
"Roger. Okay... There!"
"Where?"
"In your phone booth."
"Wanna bet?"
On the fifth try, Angus managed to place the cube on the palm of Yorick's hand. The Neanderthal came up with a whoop of joy that he must have dredged up whole and bodily out of his chertz-chipping childhood, and Angus was deaf in one ear for a half-hour afterward.
He did a few calculations while Yorick hiked to another phone booth halfway across town (fortunately, the caveman kept a slide rule in the house). Angus worked out a quick rule of thumb, and managed to put the sugar cube in Yorick's hand on the first try. Yorick's victory cry made a permanent dent in the diaphragm of the phone, but Angus had wise
ly laid the receiver half-way across the room before he pushed the button, so his auditory nerves were only slightly overloaded.
Sunrise saw Yorick standing in a neighboring town thirty miles away. Angus opened the rheostat full, pushed the button, and put the sugar cube in Yorick's s palm.
"First try," Yorick trumpeted over the phone.
"Aw, hell, it was easy," Angus muttered, a little embarrassed. And, to forestall further congratulations: "How about breakfast?"
In the next few weeks, Angus experimented blind. He found that the size of the coil had absolutely no relationship to its size or the payload. He beefed up the circuit for house current, ran a few calculations, and decided that the new heavy-duty model should have a range of four thousand miles. To test it out, he built a six-foot-square sign, rigged a jack brace to hold it upright, painted it black and, in flame-red letters on the black background:
SINNERS, REPENT!
WHAT HAPPENED TO KRAKATOA
COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!
He put in the huge poster in the focus of the three coils, set the controls for a remote destination, and pushed the button.
The next evening, Yorick came sauntering in chewing on his lower lip looking at a newspaper. "Funny thing here, Ang..."
Angus put down his book and looked up. "Oh? What?"
"Seems some nut put up a sign in the middle of Honolulu prophesying doom for the island."
"Yeah, well, y' know, mysticism's making a comeback."
"'Course." Yorick sat down, lit a cigar. "Cops think somebody musta snuck in during the night and left it. But there's witnesses claim it wasn't there at midnight, or at three a.m., or at dawn, even."
"Don't say!"
"Do. And there's a coupla nut cases claim they saw the sign just appear outa thin air."
"They're all over the place these days."
"Guess so." Yorick knocked the ash off his cigar with exaggerated care. "Never know, though, Ang—might be some truth in what they say."
"Flying saucer," Angus offered. "Outa season."
Yorick nodded.
With the test phases done, Angus made up a clean workman-like version of the machine, destroyed the breadboard circuit, and built the new one into a cabinet four inches high, sixteen inches wide, and a foot deep. He used standard indicators on the front, so the whole thing looked like a do-it-yourself stereo radio. The camouflage seemed appropriate, so he built in an FM radio and stereo amplifier that was in no way connected with the matter transmitter (though it would have taken an engineer with a First Class FCC certificate to realize that) and wired the whole thing into his real stereo system.
The next week, Yorick took a short vacation and went to the Rockies, getting the exact co-ordinates for the subterranean cavern. It only took three days, counting travel time, but when he walked in the apartment door, Angus exploded, "What took you so damn long!"
"Easy, Ang." Yorick backed off warily. "Takes a little time to drive that far, y' know. I shaved it as close as I could and I'm dead on my feet, but still it takes time."
Angus swallowed as much of his pride as he could stomach, muttered an apology, and turned away to his bedroom.
He took the three coils out of his desk drawer, put one on the bed, one on the chair, hung the third from the light fixture, checked their focus, and plugged them into his "stereo." Angus set up the co-ordinates while Yorick strapped himself into a parachute (in case Angus was a little off on the settings), cradled a second matter-transmitter in his arms, and took his courage in his teeth. After all, Angus was still new to the game. "What happens if we figured wrong?"
"Don't worry, I built in a sort of radar that checks to make sure there's nothing in your destination zone before it lets you go through."
"A 'sort of' radar?"
"Four-dimensional," Angus explained.
"That still doesn't seem like much of a guarantee that I won't materialize inside solid rock."
"Relax," Angus said sourly. "A sphere three hundred feet in diameter—could I miss a target that large?"
Yorick swallowed heavily and said, "I'm trusting you, Ang."
Angus snarled and pushed the button. Yorick disappeared.
Then Angus let himself tremble, let his eyes blur.
He waited.
And waited.
And waited and waited and waited.
He'd worked through his fingernails and was down to the cuticle by the time Yorick reappeared. Angus stared, stupefied.
Yorick grinned.
"What took you so long!" Angus screamed. Then he threw his arms around the Neanderthal and hugged him like a brother. "Damnation! I thought I'd misfired!"
"Not a chance." Yorick waved a hand in deprecation. "Nothing to it. You put me in there two inches above floor level—perfect landing. But it took a while to set up the battery pack and hook it up—by the way, the batteries are probably drained just from that one shot. You better send through the generator."
"Huh...? Oh! Oh, yeah!" Angus yanked the small gasoline generator up onto a small table. He and Yorick manhandled the table into the focus of the three coils. Yorick stepped back; Angus pushed the button. The generator disappeared; so did the table.
Angus stared.
Then he blinked, looked up at Yorick. "Got a few bugs to iron out, yet... I take it the air was okay?"
"Iyuch!" Yorick's nose wrinkled. "Still a lotta sulfur dioxide in there, Ang—but I didn't need the gas mask. There was air enough coming through the machine, as long as I didn't get too far away from it."
"Hmm..." Angus tugged at his chin. "Looks like we'll have to leave the machine open a while, then, doesn't it?"
"Quite a while," Yorick agreed, "and rig a remote switch on the machine in the cavern, so we can shut it off from here. Otherwise the whole house'll stink like rotten eggs."
"Yeah." Angus frowned. "And sooner or later, we'll have to put in hydroponics beds, to keep the air fresh."
"Always wondered how we managed to have fresh vegetables." Yorick nodded, musing. "Well, that's for the future. For now, I better get back there and hook up that generator. See ya in a few minutes, Ang."
He sauntered into the focus and disappeared. Angus blinked.
He turned away trying to still a shudder. After all, it was a normal means of transportation, to Yorick...
And it kind of beat hitch-hiking.
The long-toothed cat growled in darkness. The stars were stabs of ice. Aachtuu turned from the glowing coal that would not flame and lifted his spear.
"Get out!" roared his father.
Aacthuu threw himself forward as the long-tooth sprang. His shoulder struck its chest, but its fangs sank into his back. He gasped and thrust with his spear, then thrust and heaved with his arms. The great claws flailed for his face and throat; he threw, and heard the body jar and snap. The cat screamed once before Aacthuu felt the welling, sticky warmth at his own throat, saw the meadows blur and fade.
The stars winked once in passing.
It was a few days before Angus managed to work up the nerve to step into the focus himself. When he did, he was amazed at how simple it was—a moment of dizziness, and there he was, standing in a pool of flashlight with darkness all around.
"Welcome to home, Ang!"
Angus turned, saw Yorick sitting at the kitchen table he'd brought through the day before, with a bottle or bourbon at his elbow and a cigar in his mouth.
Angus shuddered; it was pretty bad when the cigar was definitely an improvement. There was still a lot of sulfur dioxide in the air. He took a seat near Yorick to get within the noxious but bearable shield of cigar smoke. "So," he said softly, looking around at the darkness, "this is GRIPE headquarters."
"Will be, will be," Yorick said complacently.
He took a swig from the bottle. "Doesn't look like much now, I'll admit—but in ten years, this little hole'll be busier than Grand Central at rush hour."
Angus frowned, puzzled. "I thought most of the GRIPE personnel were going to be sentries, living in
their own time."
"No way." Yorick waved expansively at the darkness. "This place'll be full of mobile time agents, Ang."
Angus's lips tightened. "If I invent the time machine!"
Yorick stilled. Slowly, he turned to Angus. "Still haven't decided on that?"
"How can I?" Angus snapped. "How can I even begin to? I don't even know how to build it yet!"
"As to that..." Yorick levered the top off a small cooler. "Time can work wonders, Ang." He poured some bourbon in a paper cup, mixed it with an ice cube, handed it to Angus. "But how about 'if'? If you figure out how to make a time machine—will you?"
"I don't know!" Angus barked. He shoved himself to his feet, began pacing.
Yorick fixed himself another drink, closed the cooler, and leaned back.
"The responsibility's too big," Angus growled.
"Do tell," Yorick murmured.
"Yes, damn it!" Angus took a long sip. "F'rinstance—this business about mobile agents. If we recruit a man as a time agent, take him out of his own age and place, what's going to happen to all the things he did, all the people he influenced, all the rest of his 'life'?"
Yorick nodded judiciously. "Might be pretty bad if you snagged, say, an eight-year-old kid who turned out to be Oliver Cromwell's grandfather. Then, no Oliver Cromwell. I admit, Charles I would probably be grateful—but how about the rest of England?"
"And all Charles II's illegitimate French children." Angus nodded glumly. "So we'd have to choose a man who's not going to have any effect on anybody, after the time we grab him. Which means..."
"...a dead man," Yorick finished. "Or a man who would have been dead, about thirty seconds after we grabbed him."
Angus nodded. "And if we're going to pull this time-style kidnapping without creating legends about evil trolls who steal children in broad daylight..."
"Or," Yorick interjected, "getting the New York City Police Force of 1892 rather worked up. And possibly getting Sherlock Holmes called across the Atlantic to chase our wild goose..."
Angus nodded. "So we've got to grab the kid while he's alone, and nobody's watching."
Mind Out of Time Page 6
