Timemaster

by Robert L. Forward

  "Convinced?" he asked.

  Randy hesitated for a long moment as he thought. "Up in the hayloft at the stables ..." he said, a challenging note in his voice as he dredged up a very embarrassing incident that only a certain young lady and he knew about.

  The bearded man instantly blushed all over his body at the long-suppressed memory, the old scar standing out in white contrast on his pink belly.

  "With a very sympathetic but very frustrated Mary Lou Preswick," he said, shaking his head at lost opportunities. He hooked down between his legs and hollered. "She was willing ... why weren't you!"

  "Convinced," said Randy.

  "Say, can I borrow some underwear?" said the bearded man. "Mine are all back on my ship."

  "I don't know," started Randy hesitantly, then broke into a broad grin. "I'm a little short ..."

  He ducked as a sweaty, sooty tightsuit flew across the dressing room at his head.

  After dinner, Randy led the way into the living room. Didit had put out two glasses of port and a bowl of walnuts. A real pine log was crackling on top of the artificial gas logs. The bearded man started to head for Randy's recliner, then changed his mind and sat on the sofa. Randy sat down in his chair, reclined slightly, took a sip of port, then reached for the nutcracker.

  "Rose will be podding in tomorrow," he said after a while.

  "You'd better meet her by yourself," said the bearded man. "I'll stay on my ship and you can tell her about me after she's had a chance to settle down."

  "YOU OUGHT to warp through more often, Rose," said Randy as he downed the last of the gewürztraminer in his glass. "That fresh salmon you brought with you was superb."

  "I had Franklin stop by the fish market in New York City before going on to the airport," said Rose.

  "Franklin?" said Randy.

  "Our new chauffeur."

  "Oh ..." Randy had put the death of William out of his mind. Unpleasant memories now flooded back, most of them involving Oscar.

  "How did your visit with Senator Barkham go yesterday?" she asked, her mind moving in the same channels as his.

  "Come on into the living room," said Randy, getting up from the dining room table, "and I'll tell you about it."

  "... AND SO I was saved by my own self—from the future," Randy recounted, taking another sip from his snifter of cognac.

  "Unbelievable ..." whispered Rose, eyes wide with wonder. She stared at her snifter. It was still full, untouched as she had listened to Randy's tale. She took a large gulp of cognac and let it slowly slide down her throat, burning on the way.

  "Where is he?" Rose asked finally.

  "In his ship," skid Randy. "You can see it from the porthole in my study." Rose quickly got up off the sofa and headed for the study while he followed along after her.

  "Down to the left," he said as Rose approached the porthole.

  "It doesn't look like a typical Reinhold ship," said Rose.

  "It's a third- or fourth-generation model," said Randy. "Don't forget, he's from the future."

  "How fascinating!" Rose turned to look at Randy. "Is it OK for me to talk to him?" she asked.

  A twinge of jealousy shot through Randy. He tried to rationalize it away. After all, the man was himself. Why shouldn't Rose be allowed to talk to her husband? Then the thought that the man was her husband evoked even stronger stings of unreasoning jealousy.

  "Sure ..." he said, trying to be nonchalant. He went to his desk and activated the videoscreen. A few flicks on the screen icons and the bearded face of the man on the other spaceship appeared. He had obviously been sitting at his pilot's console, waiting for the link to be opened. Rose slipped quickly into the chair in front of the desk and looked intently at the image.

  "It's hard to tell for sure because of the beard," she said. "But the eyes sure look like Randy's."

  "It's me, all right," said the bearded man. "Just a little older, a little wiser, and a lot hairier. It's good to see you again, my lovely rosebud."

  "It sure sounds like you!" giggled Rose.

  The pangs of jealousy came flooding back into Randy.

  Rose turned and looked at him. "I'd like to ask him a few personal questions ... just to make sure," she said. "Would you mind leaving the room? It won't be long." She turned her back on him and looked again with intense interest at the man on the screen.

  "Of course I don't mind!" replied Randy, minding furiously. He stalked from the study and closed the door loudly behind him.

  ROSE WAS still bubbling with excitement when she finally opened the study door two hours later.

  "It really is you," she said, smiling happily. "From almost four years in the future. We're still happily married, and the children are doing well, and so is the rest of the world in general."

  "I know, he told me," Randy said curtly.

  "He also told me about his long, harrowing trip through space to get to you in time to save you from Oscar," she said. "Weeks at a time at thirty gees, drowning all the time in a high-gee protective tank."

  "I've been through it," said Randy unsympathetically. "It's not so bad."

  "The poor dear," said Rose. "He's been all alone for eight months." She paused, then added hesitantly, "I felt sorry for him and told him I'd go over to visit and keep him company for a while. I hope you don't mind."

  "I've been all alone too," Randy protested. "And it was for nine months, not eight months."

  "But he said that he has to leave again tomorrow. Oscar is still trying to stop you and he has to go ahead and arrange some sort of protection."

  "I don't like it!"

  "He saved your life!" said Rose, starting to get annoyed. She looked him in the eyes. "Say, you aren't jealous, are you?" she asked. "How can you be jealous of your own self?" She came up to him, put her hand on his chest, and gave him a peck on the cheek. "Besides, it will only be one night. After he leaves tomorrow I'll be with you every day for four months."

  "Well ... OK," Randy agreed reluctantly.

  RANDY went down with Rose to the dressing room to help her get into her space suit for the short trip over to the other ship. His groin began to tingle as he watched her strip until she was naked. Her custom-molded antibind protector was much narrower than a man's, for in women all it had to do was fill in the concave crevasses in the crotch area so the tightsuit would fit tightly without binding or pinching. He helped shake her into her leggings, then slowly released the relaxing voltage on the electrolastic as she smoothed out the last wrinkles in the tightsuit and set the fingers on the built-in gloves.

  With a resigned smile, Randy helped Rose on with her outeralls, boots, and helmet, then cycled her through the airlock. He watched through the porthole as she was met on the other side of the airlock by a space-suited figure. Randy continued to watch—his body flooded with frustrated jealousy stronger than any emotion he had ever felt before—as the bearded man led his willing wife off by the hand to his ship for the night.

  ROSE AND the other man didn't get back until late the next morning. The three had a polite but strained lunch together, eating the remainder of the poached salmon from yesterday's dinner as a cold entree. After lunch, Rose left the two men talking at the table while she went to the study to talk to the children over the videolink.

  "Being around you makes me nervous," Randy said. "Not that I'm not glad you came when you did, mind you."

  "You're right. It's like talking to yourself in a mirror," said the bearded man. "Plus the fact that I've heard all this conversation before. Besides, I'm sure you'd like me to leave so you can have Rose all to yourself. I know I did when I was sitting there."

  "Stop that!" said Randy, a little irritated at the cocksure attitude that foreknowledge gave the other man.

  The bearded man shot his cuff-comp out of his sleeve to look at the time. Randy noticed once again how brilliant the diamonds were on the jet-black plastic clasp. Because the diamonds on his cuff-comp were on the outside of his wrist, he never saw them himself except when he combed his hair
in front of a mirror.

  "It's nearly two o'clock. I'm expecting a shipment, so I'd better get back to my ship," said the bearded man.

  "What is it?" asked Randy.

  "Why don't you come over to the Errol Flynn with me and see?" said the other man, getting up and leading the way to the elevator down to the dressing room.

  WHEN THEY arrived at the Errol Flynn, they didn't bother taking off their tightsuits, but just hung up their packs, outeralls, space gauntlets, and boots in the suit rack. In a storage net above the suit rack were two green metal boxes with strange lettering on them. Randy was going to ask about them, but the bearded man was already on his way out the door. They made their way through the narrow corridors to the warpgate deck.

  As they exited the lock into the evacuated warpgate chamber, the bearded man pointed to the center of the room. "An artificial warpgate," he said. "Just what you ordered—back when you got tired of dancing with the Silverhair."

  Randy looked around in amazement. The evacuated spherical room was similar to the ones used to hold Silverhairs, but slightly smaller. There were the six electrodes that kept the negmatter warpmouth in the center of the room, but instead of a large living ball with long silvery tendrils, the artificial warpmouth was a small frame of what looked like thick silver wire in the shape of a dodecahedron, twelve pentagons enclosing a nearly spherical volume.

  The warpmouth was hard to look at, for each pentagon presented a different view through the warpgate into a large spherical room similar to the one they were in, and the different views didn't match up with each other or the background. Randy then noticed that the containment room was not exactly spherical, but was also in the shape of a dodecahedron, with twelve flat pentagonal walls that seemed to be lined up with the pentagons in the warpmouth frame.

  "The first artificial warpgates were cubical in shape," said the bearded man. "Later it was found that any regular solid will do for a negmatter Visser frame. The main idea is to hold the warpgate throat open with a rigidized frame of solid negmatter rather than completely filling the throat with fluid negmatter like the Silverhair does. Hiroshi and Steve found it was slightly easier and faster to expand the pentagons in a dodecahedron than the squares in a cube."

  "Who invented it?" asked Randy. "Steve?"

  "Of course," said the bearded man. "Late last year. His invention is based on some ancient papers published by two scientists named Garfunkle and Simon ... or something like that. They showed that, in theory, you could create a wormhole through space if you started with ultradense, oppositely charged matter in a strong electromagnetic field. They did their calculations assuming two black holes with opposite magnetic charge in a strong magnetic field. The theory of quantum gravity hadn't been.developed yet, so they couldn't take their calculations very far. Then Elena Polikova and her University of Moscow colleagues discovered the negatively charged Silverhair. It produces negmatter with an electrical charge that is opposite to the Silverhairs we have."

  "Where is this new Silverhair?" asked Randy, a little overwhelmed.

  "Somewhere in the Boötes Void, they tell me. When Steve heard about the negatively charged Silverhairs, he said 'Of course!' and within less than a day he had used Nakashima's Theory of Quantum Gravity to figure out not only how the Silverhairs worked, but how to build an artificial space warp without having to use Silverhairs."

  '"Of course ..."' said Randy, tossing up his hands in amazement.

  "Of course ..." the bearded man repeated, imitating Randy's motions. "Then the Russians added a radio transmitter to their TV probe, sent it into the Silverhair with a negative electric charge, and broadcast the Big Ben carillon and one o'clock bong. The Silverhair, having learned the proper response from our positive-electric-charge Silverhairs, dumped a multiton blob of ultradense negative matter with negative electric charge. The Russians fished it back through the spacewarp using electric fields, while at the same time squirting through an equal amount of positively charged negmatter to equalize the mass flow and excess electrons to equalize the charge flow. Once they had significant quantities of negative matter with both positive and negative electric charge, it was simplicity itself to follow Steve's prescription and make a small spacewarp out of nonliving negative matter."

  "I see," said Randy, shaking his head slowly in disbelief at the rapid evolution of technology. "Simplicity itself ..."

  "Well," admitted the bearded man, "getting the necessary very strong electric fields took some time, but the work went quite fast. The nice thing about the Wisneski Warps is that you can expand them fairly rapidly to any size you want."

  The bearded man went to a control panel and activated some controls with his tightsuit-gloved fingers. The Errol Flynn stopped accelerating and the two men went into free-fall. The tiny warpgate in the center of the room then expanded until the pentagons were about a foot across. A figure in a tightsuit appeared on the other side of the warpgate. Randy recognized Hiroshi Tanaka inside the bubble helmet. Hiroshi passed through a rectangular metal box and the bearded man reached for it.

  "Watch out!" shouted Randy. "The negmatter will nullify your fingers!"

  "No negmatter needed," said the bearded man, taking the box in his fingers. "That's the other nice thing about the Wisneski Warps. Since they are made of rigid negmatter instead of liquid negmatter like Silverhairs, they can withstand the stresses induced when you transmit matter through warpgates with the two mouths moving at different velocities. No negmatter pods needed." He pushed some other buttons on the control panel, the warpgate shrank, and the Errol Flynn resumed acceleration.

  "I notice that we still have to stop accelerating before we can use the warpgate," said Randy.

  "I'm afraid so," said the bearded man. "Even artificial warpgates can't be dilated very far while they are under acceleration. They can, however, pass objects while they are moving at constant relative velocity, like this box."

  "What's in the box? Something for tomorrow's dinner?"

  "Something a lot more important than dinner—your and my salvation, sent from the future," said the bearded man. He opened the long top of the rectangular box and let Randy peer inside. The box was divided into two compartments. In each compartment there was a tiny dodecahedral frame made of silvery metal. The two frames were levitated in the center of the compartments by electrostatic fields generated by electrodes sticking out from the walls of each compartment. In many of the pentagons Randy could see either a portion of his helmet or a portion of the bearded man's helmet—each view seeming to be at a different angle.

  "A matched pair of warpgate mouths," said the bearded man. Randy gasped as the man stuck his tightsuit-gloved index finger into one of the tiny pentagons. Then he felt slightly sick as the fingertip appeared out of one of the pentagons on the dodecahedron in the next compartment. The finger wiggled at him.

  "Stop that before you hurt yourself! Us, I mean!" said Randy. The bearded man removed his finger, none the worse for the experience, then carefully closed the lid on the box.

  "Well, I'd better get moving," said the bearded man. "I have to build the trap for the rat that's following us. It has to be a big trap for such a big rat, and it'll take some time to grow it."

  "Grow it?" asked Randy.

  The bearded man sighed. "I'll explain it all to you later when I have the full-grown trap to show you."

  "When will that be?" asked Randy. He was a little worried about being left alone.

  "A couple of months," said the bearded man. "I'm going to run on ahead at high gees and set up the trap. Timemaster couldn't match Errol Flynn's acceleration anyway, so you might as well take it easy. Just stay on your present course, decelerating at one gee, until you catch up with me. By the time you get there, I'll have the trap built and you can be the cheese that attracts the rat to the trap."

  "Anything else I should know before you go?"

  "I don't remember me telling you anything else," said the bearded man. "So I guess not." He stuck out his hand. "Good l
uck—I know you had it. Speaking of luck, I'm not going to press mine by coming back to your ship to give Rose a good-bye kiss." He smiled at the annoyed look that suddenly appeared on Randy's face. "You give it to her for me," he said, patting him on the shoulder in a brotherly fashion while leading him to the vacuum lock.

  Chapter 10

  Avenger

  WHEN OSCAR podded through from Timemaster to the Reinhold Space Station, which contained the Silverhair at the other end of the warpgate, he was met in the dressing room by Alan Davidson and two security guards.

  "My instructions are to see that you are returned to Earth as rapidly as possible," said Alan curtly. "I'm sure you will want a doctor to examine that hand." His tone changed to one of mock sympathy. "We are terribly sorry about your accident."

  As Oscar was led away by the security guards, Alan raised his cuff-comp and said, "Get me the head of security." Almost instantly, the security officer of the day was on his screen.

  "For the next month, I want a red intruder alert at all Reinhold installations, especially those containing warpgate mouths and spaceship docking ports. In addition, I want you to personally contact each Reinhold spaceship. Make it clear that unless I give personal authorization, no non-Reinhold employees are to be allowed aboard any Reinhold ship."

  A LITTLE while later, the security officer of the day was halfway through the list of spaceships on his screen. While he was waiting for Icarus to respond from its orbit near Mars, he looked at the next name on the list. It was the freighter Jupiter.

  "I wonder if I should bother?" he muttered. "It's still under construction and it doesn't even have its radiation shields installed. A person would have to be crazy to fly it in that condition ..." He decided he would call it anyway—just to be on the safe side. Just then, his relief came in.

  "Time for your break," she said. He got up and pointed to a message at the top of the screen. Below the message was the list of ship names.