by Pliss, Todd
Wayne scoffed. What was the big deal? He couldn’t even remember even being late to her class.
“Yes, I’m a punctual person.”
“Good. I want to show you something.”
Wayne followed Dr. Hoffmann as she led him over to a corner of the messy lab. A dirty bed sheet covered a large square object. Dr. Hoffmann slowly removed it to reveal a washing machine, or at least the shell of one, with small circuit boards attached to the outside of the front side. There was a strange looking contraption with wires that led to a computer terminal on the shelf above it. Hanging on the wall nearby were two protective suits
“This is what I wanted to show you,” Dr. Hoffmann said proudly.
“And what a lovely washing machine it is,” Wayne retorted. “What did you do, turbocharge it?”
“What you are now viewing, Mr. Goldberg, is the world’s first working time machine.”
“TIME MACHINE!” Wayne started to laugh. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”
“I do not,” Dr. Hoffmann said straight faced.
Wayne stopped laughing. He stared at his professor, searching for some sign that she was pulling a practical joke on him. Was she trying to prove that she wasn’t as straight-laced as everyone said she was?
“I have worked on this for the past eight years,” Dr. Hoffmann said. “I have spent every free moment that I had between teaching and publishing papers on this project.
“Come on, a time machine!” Wayne practically yelled at her. “That’s impossible.”
“It is not,” she counteracted.
Wayne did not want to insult her, but he felt he had to speak his mind. “I know you’re brilliant, Dr. Hoffmann. You have won a lot of awards and have published all sorts of articles in journals that nobody reads, but a time machine? That’s a little hard to swallow.”
“Time is just one plane on the three-dimensional sphere that we call Earth,” Dr. Hoffmann stated. “Now, I have devised a way to travel on that plane. Much like the way one would travel on a jet airliner.”
Wayne ran his hand through his short hair, not sure what she was really up to. One thing he knew for sure was that he had more important things to do at the moment then listen to Hoffmann blab on about the impossible. “That sounds good, but what proof do you have?”
Dr. Hoffmann picked up a newspaper that appeared to be no more than a day old. “Look at the date on this newspaper,” she instructed Wayne as she handed the newspaper to him.
“October 27th, 1922,” he read out loud. Then he viewed the headline. “CAPONE’S GANG SUSPECTED IN HIGHLAND PARK SLAYING.” Wayne put the paper down. “That’s cute. Where did you get it printed up?”
“I sent a dog that I had trained to fetch a newspaper, back to the point on the time plane October 27th, 1922,” Dr. Hoffmann said, “and that is exactly what the canine did when he arrived there. Then he was transported back to our point on the time plane, 1995.”
“You’re trying to tell me that you sent a dog back to 1922 just so it could go fetch a newspaper for you? And that you did this with this turbo-charged washing machine?” Wayne asked incredulously.
“Yes. Precisely.”
“And what does this time machine of yours run on?” Wayne asked. “Gas? Oil? Batteries?”
“A special radioactive material that the army has developed for atomic weapons that is made up primarily of Gadolinium and Iridium.”
“And where do you get this material - at the local Seven Eleven?” Wayne said sardonically.
“A colleague of mine at the defense department has been able to supply me with the minute quantity necessary to run it.”
“Look, Dr. Hoffmann, I value your scientific opinions very much, but this is really hard to accept. I mean, come on, a time machine?”
“Precisely why I have summoned you here. I want you to be the first human being that I transport back in time. That is, if you do not mind acting as a guinea pig.”
Wayne studied Dr. Hoffmann’s face hard for some sign that she was about to get to the punch line of the joke that she had been playing on him. He couldn’t detect anything. And as far as Dr. Hoffmann’s proposition was concerned, what could be the worst thing that would happen? Dr. Hoffmann would be embarrassed when nothing transpired with her “time machine”.
“Oink, oink. I’m your pig.”
“Excellent.”
Dr. Hoffmann opened the lid of the alleged time machine.
“Mister Goldberg, step-.”
“Please, Doc, call me Wayne. We might actually be making history together.”
“Okay. Wayne, please step inside here.”
Wayne stepped up unto a small stool, then into the “time machine” so that only his body from the waist up was visible. He looked around uncomfortably and hoped no one saw him.
Dr. Hoffmann started to type instructions into the computer terminal. “I have only been able to garner enough energy through the reactor to go as far back as the year 1915,” she said.
“While I’m here, I’ll take my whites washed in cold water, the colors in warm water, and go easy on the starch,” Wayne joked, “I hate that cardboard feel.”
Dr. Hoffmann busied herself by adjusting various controls. “I am sending you to 1937,” she explained. “You will be there for a few minutes. Make the best of it.” Dr. Hoffmann hesitated. “And...”
“And what?” Wayne asked.
Dr. Hoffmann looked somewhat nervous and apprehensive to Wayne, which he attributed to her about to be embarrassed by her silly experiment. “And, I should warn you,” she continued, “there is some risk involved.”
“That’s part of life,” Wayne responded. “Let’s do it.”
“Mr. Goldberg, excuse me, Wayne,” Dr. Hoffmann paused briefly, “thank you.”
Wayne closed his eyes and laughed to himself.
Dr. Hoffmann pulled up on a lever and a crackling noise rang out, much like that of dry twigs breaking. And all of a sudden, in a flash, Wayne vanished.
“I still don’t feel anything...” Wayne started to say as he opened his eyes. He gazed around, his jaw dropping open. He now appeared to be in some kind of sumptuous dining room area, like the ballroom of a swank hotel. A piano player played as the diners enjoyed their lavish meals. The guests here, wherever it was, seemed to be an older, well-moneyed crowd and the ladies wore impressive jewelry.
An elderly couple drinking wine turned to Wayne. “Have a couple of these and you sure will, young fella,” the old gentleman said to Wayne.
“What?” Wayne mumbled, barely able to get the word out.
The old man raised his glass of wine to Wayne’s face.
“You tell him, George,” the woman giggled.
Wayne looked around and blinked slowly. He was sure this had to be some sort of hypnotic suggestion or hallucination.
Wayne went over to the piano player, “What are you doing here?” he asked him.
The piano man gave Wayne a funny look and responded, “Sir?”
Wayne turned around and bumped into a waiter holding a full tray of food. The tray tumbled out of his hands.
The waiter hurriedly cleaned everything up as Wayne fled.
Just outside the dining area, Wayne noticed a sign. It read: MARLO HENDERSON, 1937’S NEWEST SINGING SENSATION, WILL BE THE FEATURED PERFORMER ON THE NEXT VOYAGE OF THE HINDENBURG.
“Hindenburg!” Wayne exclaimed in shock. He ran over to a small round window and surveyed the view. There was nothing but water 10,000 feet below him. “I can’t fuckin’ believe this.”
A loudspeaker crackled, “This is Captain Moore speaking,” he said in a deep voice that most airline captains seem to possess. “Our estimated arrival time is ten minutes,” the captain continued. “We are ninety miles east of our landing site in beautiful Lakehurst, New Jersey. I’ll try and make it as smooth a landing as possible. Thank you for traveling on the Hindenburg.”
“Landing! The Hindenburg about to land!” Wayne was getting frantic. “This can’
t be. Don’t they know this blimp’s going to explode? I’ve got to warn them.”
Noticing a steward, Wayne ran over to him.
“Look, man, this ship can't land,” Wayne ranted hysterically. “If it does, it’ll blow up. There’s a leak of hydrogen.”
The steward eyed Wayne from top to bottom and then asked him, “Sir, have you been drinking?”
“No, I have not been drinking,” Wayne snapped back. “Did you hear what I said? This. Ship. Must. Not. Land,” he panicked.
“There is nothing to worry about,” the steward countered. “Airship travel is the safest form of travel that there is.”
Wayne grabbed the steward and shook him, “Tell the captain. NOW! There is a hydrogen leak!”
“Sir, if you are not able to restrain yourself, I will have to call security.”
Wayne went to the window again and peered out. Land was fast approaching as the airship rapidly descended. Wayne started to sweat.
Wayne started to shake; he wasn’t ready to die.
He ran back over to the steward and yelled at him, “You must listen! Time is running out...this ship...”
A very powerful explosion rocked the ship. An instant later, a thin crackling noise sounded out and Wayne disappeared from where he was standing. As a spectacular fireball engulfed the airship, the Hindenburg faded into history.
Inside Dr. Hoffmann’s laboratory, Wayne reappeared in the time machine. “...THEY MUST NOT LAND...” Wayne yelled, but closed his mouth as he looked around and realized that he was not on the Hindenburg anymore.
“Ah, it worked exactly as I had planned,” Dr. Hoffmann exclaimed.
Wayne took a slow, long look around at his current surroundings, and wiped the dripping sweat off his face with his shirt. “I can’t get over what just happened,” he said wearily. “I thought I was on the Hindenburg and we, I mean, they, were about to land, and...”
“I know. The experiment was a success. A complete success,” Dr. Hoffmann stated.
Wayne climbed out of the time machine, feeling totally sapped of all his energy, as if he just run the New York City Marathon in record time. “Was that an hallucination?” he asked. “Or was I really there?”
Dr. Hoffmann started to write notes in her journal. “You were most certainly there. I purposely sent you back to that doomed airship to prove to you that, yes indeed, this is a time machine.”
“You had to send me to the Hindenburg? Couldn’t you have sent me to a ball game or something a little less dangerous? You know, if I was sitting in Yankee Stadium watching Babe Ruth hitting home runs out of the ballpark, I might have gotten the message.
Dr. Hoffmann put down her journal, “I did not think of that.”
“This is abso-fucking-lutley amazing, though,” Wayne said, getting some of his natural energy back. “You’re a genius, Dr. Hoffmann. Do you realize what this could mean? We could go back in time and meet some of the greatest minds of out time - Lincoln, Socrates, Julius Caesar, even Jimi Hendrix.”
“I have thought about that. Though not exactly those particular individuals.”
Wayne started to pace. “Hell, we could get rich, too. Go back and buy real estate at a fraction of what it’s worth today. The same thing with stocks,” Wayne said with a glow in his eyes.
“Wayne...”
“No, no, no, you didn’t merely build a time machine, what you really built was a money machine. This is better!”
“Wayne,” Dr. Hoffmann interrupted him.
“Yes?”
“It will not be used for that purpose.”
“It won’t?”
“No. I have other plans for its use. Can you be at my house tonight at eight o’clock?”
“Yeah, sure. But why?”
Dr. Hoffmann handed Wayne a piece of paper. “Here is the address.”
Dr. Hoffmann’s two-story brick house was in dire need of a paint job in a very middle class neighborhood. At five minutes of eight, Wayne knocked on the door. A few seconds later, he was invited inside.
The interior of the house was a mess. The furnishings, or what passed for furnishings, were so well worn and so outdated that they looked like they might have come from the set of a 1950’s television sitcom.
“Thank you for coming, Wayne. Please sit down,” Dr. Hoffmann instructed him.
Wayne was about to sit down in an easy chair when he noticed a thin, greenish substance on the seat. He carefully picked it up with his fingertips and saw what it really was-a moldy piece of salami. Wayne dropped the moldy piece of meat on the floor and sat down. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
“Did you know that I am German?” Dr. Hoffmann asked.
“You don’t have an accent.”
“I came to the United States when I was a small child.”
“Is this what you wanted to tell me?” Wayne said annoyed.
“Let me say what I have to.”
Dr. Hoffmann sat down on the couch across from Wayne silently for a few moments, deep in thought. “I was born in 1933 in a small village near Frankfurt,” she said softly. “By the time I was four, Adolf Hitler was in full control of Germany,” she continued, “ He controlled the government, the media, everything. My parents, being Jewish, had virtually no rights. My father was still able to run his small food market, though. He thought Hitler was simply another phase that Germany was going through and that he would soon be overthrown. He thought that Hitler’s talk of ridding Europe of all Jews was just posturing. But, just in case, he sent my brother and I here to live with our aunt. That was in 1937.”
Dr. Hoffmann picked up an old scrapbook that was laying on a small coffee table in front of her and started to flip through the yellowed pages.
She removed an aged looking letter from the scrapbook. “This is a letter that my father wrote to me shortly before my brother and I left Germany,” she said. “Dear Lisa,” she read from the letter, “You and your brother, Arnold, are about to embark on a journey. This journey will take the two of you to America, where you will be able to get a good education and live happily with your Aunt Rose until we can send for you. If something should ever happen to your mother and me, I want you to remember that we will always love you. Please try to understand why we did this. Goodbye. Your father, Josef Hoffmann.” Dr. Hoffmann put the letter down. “Three years later, after a raid on our village by the Gestapo, both my mother and father were sent to Dachau.” Dr. Hoffmann’s eyes teared up. “I never saw them again.”
Wayne had never seen his professor so emotional before. He understood now where most, if not all, of her emotional and inner pain had come from. Maybe, Wayne figured, that is why she had never gotten married and had never let herself get close to anybody in her life, even as far as simply having a close friend or two as people normally do. Her parents left her very early in her life. In a sense abandoned her. Lisa Hoffmann, at a young age, had decided that she’d be damned if anybody would ever hurt her that way again. No, it was better as a kid to throw herself into her hobbies in a fanatical way, as she had done with her stamp and butterfly collections. Then, in college, neither dating nor having any fun, but rather compulsively working at maintaining her perfect 4.0 average. And, for the past 27 years, working on her research and experiments. Her work would never leave her, never abandon her, the way her parents had so long ago.
Wayne gave her a supportive hug. “I am very sorry to hear that.”
Dr. Hoffmann cleared her throat and collected herself. “Thank you,” she said. “I want to use the time machine to send you back in time to kill Adolf Hitler before he has the chance to destroy millions of lives.”
“Kill Hitler! Adolf Hitler?” Wayne could not grasp what he had heard.
“That is correct.”
“I couldn’t kill anyone, even a psychopath like Hitler.”
Dr. Hoffmann stood up and started to pace around the room. “Think about it,” she said convincingly, “you would be eliminating one man to save twenty million others, including nine million i
nnocent victims who perished in the camps. You would also save dozens, hundreds, of European towns from having been destroyed during the war.”
“Why me?”
Dr. Hoffmann remained silent and looked away from Wayne. Finally, after a minute, she talked, “You are a level headed person. That will be important. I feel that you can keep your calm in what might be a tough situation. I also feel that you can get the job done quickly, without arousing suspicion. For those reasons, I feel I can entrust this very important task, the culmination of a lifetime’s work, to you.”
“Are there any other reasons?” Wayne’s gut instinct told him she was keeping something from him.
“No.”
Wayne was reluctant to press the issue. “I wonder,” he questioned, “if it’s right for the past to be tinkered with. We don’t really know what we’re dealing with here.”
Dr. Hoffmann sat down beside Wayne. “I think, that for the good of humanity, it would be wrong not to change the past. Do you not agree?”
“Yes. And no. I mean, maybe things in history happened for a purpose. Maybe they were lessons for mankind.”
“I doubt it. Have we learned anything since the war? One only has to look at what has occurred in Cambodia, Vietnam, Bosnia, and many other places of war and mass murder to see that nothing has changed since Hitler’s era. The mistakes of history keep repeating themselves.” Dr. Hoffmann saw she would have to talk him on a more personal basis. “Wayne, you’re Jewish. Was your family in any way affected by the Holocaust?”
“Well, sure, I lost family. My grandparents came from Europe. There were a lot of people who waited too long to flee; they didn’t make it. .”
“Tell me, what one good thing for humanity came from Nazism?”
“What if something goes wrong?”
“I have been planning this for many years. Nothing can go wrong.” “Will you do it, Wayne? Will you be the one to erase the saddest chapter in the history of the human race?”
