Timemaster

by Robert L. Forward

  Is he going to get the shock of his life! thought Randy. "Surprise ..." he said to Oscar, tapping the fireplace poker in his sooty left hand and waiting for Oscar to recognize him. Randy could see by the look in the youngster's eyes that he still didn't know who Randy was. Like a feisty lapdog to whom all dogs were the same size, the kid thought all men were the same size. Oscar, however, knew only one person four feet eleven inches tall with chestnut-brown hair. It wouldn't take long for him to see through the beard ...

  Oscar's eyes widened, and his face blanched as if he were seeing a ghost. He fainted.

  "Sissy," said Randy. He kicked at the collapsed body with his toe.

  "Thanks, mister," said the youngster with great relief.

  "Help me tie him up. We'll put him in the transfer pod and send him back," said Randy.

  "No need to soil our hands with that animal kisser," said the kid. "I'll have Gidget do it." He touched an icon on his cuff-comp. Off in the distance there came a clatter of metallic manipulators moving toward them down the corridor.

  "We'd better do something about his hand before we send him off," said Randy. He raised his cuff-comp. "Godget. please bring the medical kit. Our guest has suffered a broken hand." Randy paused as he noticed the kid staring at his cuff-comp.

  It won't take long now ... He watched the kid's eyes flicker first to Randy's cuff-comp, then to his own cuff-comp, then to Randy's hair ... The kid turned pale and sat weakly down in the nearest chair.

  "And we'll probably need some smelling salts for the youngster," he continued. He went over to poor frozen Didit, opened a panel on the robobutler's back, and pressed the reset button.

  AFTER podding Oscar back to Earth, still nursing his broken hand, the two of them had a long dinner together. After dinner, the youngster led the way into the living room. There were two glasses of port and a bowl of walnuts waiting for them. A real pine log crackled on top of the artificial gas logs. Randy started to head for the recliner, then thought better of it and sat on the sofa. The young man sat down in the 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 Randy. He knew what was going to happen next. It would be better if the kid didn't think he had influenced it unduly by being aboard when Rose arrived. "I'll stay on my ship and you can tell her about me after she's had a chance to settle down."

  A LITTLE while later, Randy was at the pilot's console on the Errol Flynn, waiting eagerly as the link was opened. He watched as Rose slipped quickly into the chair and looked intently at him over the videolink.

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

  "It's me, all right," said Randy. "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.

  Randy knew he had hooked her. Rose turned and looked off-screen. "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 back and looked again with intense interest at him through the screen.

  Randy heard the voice of the youngster hollering in the background, "Of course I don't mind!" followed by the sound of a door being slammed.

  "I've been so lonely for you, my little flower," started Randy, pouring on the charm. The nice thing about this little tête-à-tête was that he knew he would be successful.

  AS RANDY floated over in his space suit from the Errol Flynn to Timemaster to pick up Rose, he felt as if he were a lusty, dashing pirate rogue abducting a not-too-reluctant woman off a passenger galleon. After Rose had exited the airlock and taken his hand, he looked back and almost felt sorry for the kid. The beardless face in the porthole looked wan and longing, watching forlornly as Randy led his willing wife off by the hand to his ship for the night.

  RANDY and Rose didn't get back until late the next morning. The three had a polite lunch together. The cold fresh salmon was a real treat for Randy after the frozen and canned meats he had endured on his trip out from UV Ceti. After lunch, Rose left the two men talking at the table while she went into the study to talk to the children oyer the yideolink.

  "Being around you makes me nervous," said the youngster. "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 Randy. Another attack of déjà vu came over him. "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 the young man.

  Randy shot his cuff-comp out of his sleeve to look at the time. "It's nearly two o'clock. I'm expecting a shipment, so I'd better get back to my ship," he said.

  "What is it?" asked the kid.

  Randy felt sorry for the other's ignorance. "Why don't you come over to the Errol Flynn with me and see?" The two of them went over to Randy's ship, where Randy explained about Steve Wisneski's invention of the artificial warpgates. While they were there, Hiroshi Tanaka reached through the warpgate from UV Ceti to Errol Flynn and handed Randy a box.

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

  "Something a lot more important than dinner—your and my salvation, sent from the future," said Randy. He opened the long top of the rectangular box and let the eager youngster peer inside.

  "A matched pair of warpgate mouths," said Randy. The kid gasped as Randy stuck his index finger into one of the tiny pentagons. The fingertip instantly appeared coming out of one of the pentagons on the dodecahedron in the next compartment. Randy wiggled his finger.

  "Stop that before you hurt yourself! Us, I mean!" said the kid. Randy removed his finger, then carefully closed and sealed the lid on the vacuum-tight box.

  "Well, I'd better get moving," said Randy. "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 the kid.

  The kid sure has a lot to learn, grumbled Randy to himself. I guess I'm going to have to teach him everything. He sighed. "I'll explain it all to you later when I have the full-grown trap to show you."

  "When will that be?" asked the youngster, looking a little worried.

  "A couple of months," said Randy. "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?" asked the kid.

  "I don't remember me telling you anything else," said Randy. "So I guess not." He stuck out his hand. "Good luck—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." An annoyed look appeared on the kid's face. Randy smiled and gave the poor young man a brotherly pat on the shoulder. "You give it to her for me," he said.

  RANDY accelerated the Errol Flynn at thirty gees until it was way ahead of Timemaster. He then decelerated until he had reached a cruise speed of ninety-eight-percent cee. After getting out of the tank suit and back into dry clothing he went to the control console and put the ship into free-fall. He looked at the icon of the ship's persona on the viewscreen.

  "Time to start building our rat trap, Leslie," said Randy.

  "I have Godget in the airlock with the warpgate box," said Leslie.

  "Dump one of them out," said Randy. "And make sure you mark the spot." He watched, using the video monitor on the outside of the airlock door, as the yellow body of Godget exited the airlock and moved a short distance from the ship. Some of its manipulators had been re
placed with electrodes. The robomechanic opened the box and used strong electric fields on its electrode manipulators to extract one of the dodecahedral warpgate mouths from one side of the box. It resealed the box and came back inside, leaving the warpmouth floating in space.

  "Off we go on a visit to the fountain of youth," said Randy as he accelerated the Errol Flynn again at one gee. He needed a time difference of only a little more than a second, so there was no need to make himself uncomfortable by accelerating at high gees.

  A few days later, the Errol Flynn returned to the waiting warpmouth. The boxed warpmouth that had traveled on the ship was now 1.6 seconds younger than the warpmouth that had stayed behind.

  The timetrap is nearly ready, Randy thought. Now all we have to do is make it big enough to catch our very big rat. He made his way to the dressing room to don his space suit. He could have let the robomechanics handle everything while he watched from inside, but he didn't want to be left out.

  Gadget followed him out of the airlock carrying one of the green feeder boxes. Randy opened the feeder box for the first time and looked in. The inside of the box was similar to one of the compartments in the warpmouth box, with electrodes coming from the walls to levitate the structure inside. In the lid of the feeder box, however, was a control panel with four buttons. Suspended in the center of the box was a frame of silvery rods of rigidized negmatter. The frame was about the size of a softball and was made of a large number of triangles.

  "It looks very much like a standard warpgate mouth," Randy muttered, "except it's not a dodecahedron." He turned to Gadget. "Take it out and let's count the sides."

  Gadget used its electrodes to remove the negmatter frame from the box and held it up.

  "Twenty sides," said Gadget in its baritone voice. "It is an icosahedron." The robomechanic released the object so that it floated in space a few feet away from the warpmouth.

  "That's funny," said Randy. "I wonder why they picked an icosahedron instead of the standard dodecahedron?" He stared at the control panel in the lid of the box. "Hmmm ... I wonder what I do next?"

  The control buttons had words below them. The letters were in a very strange font, with all the line ends and intersections tapering away to almost nothing, leaving just the center portions of the lines. Almost antiserif, thought Randy, looking at the futuristic letters.

  The operating instructions were straightforward. One button said activate, another said grow, the third said shrink, and the fourth said stop.

  I feel like Alice in Wonderland. Randy mused as he pushed the activate button. Instantly, twenty flexible metallic tubes grew out of the twenty triangles of the icosahedron until it began to look like a caricature of a Silverhair. Each tube was about the size of a small garden hose and had a complex, trilobed, flared connector at the end. Although the tubes were shiny, they didn't have the impossible sheen of negmatter, but instead looked like stainless steel made of normal matter. The twenty hoses avoided Randy and Gadget, and stretched out for the distant warpmouth as if they had eyes. Within a few seconds, each of the twenty hoses had positioned itself next to one of the twenty vertices in the dodecahedral warpmouth.

  "Oh ..." said Randy, now understanding why the feeders had twenty sides. He waited for a second, but nothing else happened. He pushed the grow button. Almost instantly the pentagonal sides of the warpmouth started to thicken and extend in length as more and more negmatter spewed from the ends of the tubes into the frame.

  Randy watched in amazement. Somewhere, at some far distant time and place, large amounts of negative matter were somehow being gathered and warped over decades of time and light-years of space to feed his warpmouth. He wouldn't be surprised if the other end of the feeder were connected to a negative-matter collector set up in the Boötes Void, a third of the universe away. The amount of effort involved must be enormous. Randy was truly impressed. He left Gadget with the control box to monitor the growth of the warpmouth, while he went back to the airlock so Leslie could carry him over to where he would start the other warpmouth growing.

  "THIS ONE has to be positioned and oriented just right," said Randy to Gidget. "One axis must point along the line to the other warpmouth, and it must be rotated a hundred and eighty degrees with respect to the axis of the other one." Gidget took some sightings through a few of the warpmouth pentagons and made a few adjustments using its electrode manipulators, while Godget removed the feeder from its box and set it floating in space. Randy took the feeder control box and pushed the buttons in the lid to start the warpmouth growing. After it had gotten large enough that one of the pentagons could pass a robomechanic, he pushed the stop button. Gidget passed through a pentagon, made a number of sightings, passed back again and made some more sightings, then rotated the now room-sized structure a tiny bit.

  "You may continue growth, Mr. Hunter," said Gidget, and Randy pressed the grow button.

  Leaving Gidget and Gadget to monitor the growth of the warpmouths, Randy and Godget headed back to the Errol Flynn. Soon the ship was under acceleration again as it headed back to link up with Timemaster.

  WHEN RANDY entered the airlock door back on Timemaster, Rose and the other two men were waiting for him. Rose grabbed him and gave him a big hug and kiss.

  "Say," she said, stepping back to look at Randy's beard. "You've let it grow longer, haven't you? Looks very nice now—not like you forgot to shave—but distinguished-looking."

  Randy felt pleased. He sure felt more distinguished-looking than the two bare-cheeked youngsters standing behind Rose. She scratched him under the chin the way she had done when they had spent the night together on his ship, and he responded with a deep-throated purr.

  After some polite conversation, the other three went off to the living room to wait, while Randy went upstairs to dress in something comfortable. The only thing left in the bedroom closet was his white "cricket outfit". Randy always considered it slightly effeminate, but at least it gave him a chance to show off Venus's Tear.

  "I'm glad you could join us," said the kid from his recliner chair as Randy came down the circular staircase and entered the living room. The youngster with the mustache was sitting on the sofa on one side of Rose.

  "I wouldn't miss this night for anything," Randy said as he sat down on the other side.

  "WELL, GOOD-bye, young man," said the mustached man from inside his tightsuit helmet as he shook hands with the youngster. He slapped Randy on the shoulder. "I know I'm leaving you in good hands." Randy and the kid tucked the man and Rose into the transfer pod and shot them through the Silverhair back to Earth.

  "I feel a lot better with her out of danger," said the kid.

  "Me too," said Randy.

  The two looked at each other. Randy was used to being alone, and he knew the kid was uncomfortable having him around, but he wouldn't look forward to another couple of months in the cramped quarters of Errol Flynn.

  "Why don't you stay here in comfort while we catch up to the warpmouths you left behind?" offered the kid.

  THREE MONTHS later, after a leisurely Chateaubriand dinner, the two settled down in the living room and Randy adjusted the view-wall with his cuff-comp.

  "There it is ... the timetrap!" he said. He manipulated the icons on his cuff-comp and the view zoomed in to one of the warpmouths. Even Randy was amazed with the results. The growth of the warpmouths had slowed as they had become larger, but they were now approaching two thousand kilometers in diameter, as big as a small moon. Although the warpmouths had gotten larger and the feeder hoses had lengthened to compensate, the feeder frames were still only the size of a softball. Randy, by adjusting the view with the icons on his cuff-comp, took the youngster on a tour of the timetrap and explained how it worked.

  "Amazing!" said the kid, obviously impressed.

  IT WAS a month and a half later when Oscar finally caught up with them. Randy had gone to the kitchen, found some beer and canned pretzels, and taken them into the living room. With Albert's assistance, he soon had a picture of
Oscar's ship on the large view-wall screen, along with split-screen scenes showing what was happening near both warpmouths. The youngster had been slaving away in the study on Reinhold Astroengineering Company business all morning and Randy had to remind him to come into the living room to watch the action.

  "Here he comes," Randy said. "He must have had some trouble with the high-gee protection tank. His acceleration for the past few months has been only five gees. Even though he's going at over ninety-eight-percent cee, his relative velocity with respect to us is only four percent of cee."

  "That's still pretty damn fast!" said the kid, beginning to sound concerned. "Don't you think that we ought to be in the control room in our tightsuits and helmets, at least?"

  "Naw," said Randy. "Nothing is going to happen to us, and the view-wall here in the living room will give us a panoramic view of the action." He leaned back in the sofa with his beer and pretzels.

  "Our lives are in danger, and you sit there like a sofa sausage watching Sunday afternoon football!" exploded the youngster.

  "Relax ..." said Randy, having another pretzel. "The only one getting kicked around today is Oscar." Suddenly he saw some silver missiles streaking from the end of the long cannon on the nose of Oscar's ship. "He's opened fire!" he said, sitting up on the edge of the sofa.

  Randy watched, admittedly with a little apprehension, as the silver buckets came closer. He held his breath while he kept an anxious eye on the split-screen showing the younger warpmouth. Finally he was relieved to see first one, then another, then a whole swarm of buckets coming out the warpmouth, heading straight for the incoming missiles.

  "Beautiful!" Randy cried as he watched each capsule being deflected by its twin. "Their high acceleration capability and the built-in magnetic 'spring' surrounding them make them nearly ideal billiard balls."

  "That kind of precision is impossible!" said the youngster as he stared in disbelief at the screen.