The Space Between Time

by Bruce Macfarlane

“I fear in this time line the Martians may not exist or there is no communication with Mars.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we may not be able to rely on their skill to help us return.”

  “So the only way is to build a Tesla Coil and try and reverse what Tesla did.”

  “How will you do that?” Elizabeth said.

  “Good question.”

  I got out my phone and retrieved the photo of the article I’d got at the library on Tesla. It didn’t look easy. I was going to need a lot of gear.

  I said, “Where can I get things like wire, cables, insulators and jam jars?”

  “You could try a local ironmonger,” said Wells.

  “Of course! Worth a try,” I said, “Hope you’ve got lots of money, Wells. Let’s see what I need.”

  I went through the article again.

  “OK. We need at least ten jam jars for the Leyden capacitors you’re going to make for me, Elizabeth.”

  “Ten!” she said.

  “Yep. At least. With plastic lids.”

  “And if there is no plastic in this world?”

  “Anything that isn’t metallic. And, let me think, a box of six-inch nails and brass screws, a screwdriver, a hammer to bang in the nails, loads of tin foil, a few yards of thin copper piping and about - oh, I don’t know - about 50 yards of insulated copper wire. And a wooden block and a round wooden post about three-foot-long and six inches in diameter.”

  “I now understand how your garage became the way it is.”

  “If my garage was here we wouldn’t need to go shopping. Now what else? Oh yes, and a high voltage power supply. And, since I’m a complete coward, a very long wooden stick to poke it with. I can’t think of anything else. Can you?”

  “How about some matches?” she said.

  “What, to set light to it? That’s a bit unfair, I’m trying to get you home.”

  “No, James, to light the candles after we have short-circuited the whole of Midhurst’s electrical power supply and need to find our way out of here.”

  It was a good job someone remembered the important things.

  -------------------

  E.

  When Mr Wells and James entered the ironmongers, I was immediately treated to the spectacle of the antics of two small boys who have been let free in a toy shop without restraint. It was not without considerable effort that I managed to distract them from the gadgets and objects in what James described as an Aladdin’s Cave of things he hadn’t realised he needed, and forcibly direct them to the items we required.

  Eventually, after much discussion with the proprietor, which included a long discourse on the decline in quality of materials caused by the cheap imports of barbarian goods, we acquired the metals and woods for James’ experiment. However, there then arose the question of their conveyance to the cavern for there was more than we could carry.

  It was at this point that I must have succumbed to the beginnings of a brain fever for I found myself agreeing with James that an old rusty perambulator propped up against the corner of the shop would be adequate for our needs.

  My illness did not become apparent, however, until while walking back along the main road pushing the perambulator, an elderly lady stopped us and berated my husband for buying his wife such a dilapidated carriage for our new born child. James forgot himself and his manners and told her it was perfectly adequate and to mind her own business. An argument then ensued which drew in several other women who proceeded to discuss the frugality and selfishness of husbands and fathers. When, in the hope of ending this discussion, I protested that we did not have a baby, the women’s attention turned to me and in a most unsavoury manner demanded to see the child to assess its welfare. Unfortunately, as James tried to manoeuvre the carriage around them to escape, a wheel fell off and in the process spilled the entire contents of the carriage onto the pavement.

  There then followed a terrible commotion amongst the women as they tried in vain to recover the non-existent child from the materials strewn across the road.

  It was at this moment that the brain fever must have taken fully hold for I fainted.

  When I recovered, I found myself in bed with James by my side holding my hand and looking very apologetic. After some close questioning, coupled with a considerable amount of evasion by he whom I sometimes refer to as the love of my life, I discovered that after repairing the wheel they had placed me in the perambulator and pushed me back to the hotel.

  The vision of the Squire of Hamgreen’s daughter plonked in a small cart with legs and arms trailing akimbo, like an intoxicated doxy after a successful afternoon, and pushed in a cart through the streets of Midhurst in broad daylight by two men caused me, I am afraid to say, to faint again.

  ------------------------

  J.

  I thought it best not to use in my defence that she was too heavy to lift and carry back to the hotel and that the pram seemed a good idea at the time. Nor to ask her to thank us for sacrificing all the equipment we had bought to bring her back to the hotel safely.

  And certainly, not to mention that the wheel fell off again and that it required four strong men to lift the pram with her in it while we reattached the wheel.

  In fact, I thought it best to stay very quiet, bring her lunch to the bedroom and sit in the corner studying intently the intricacies of nineteenth century wallpaper.

  -------------------

  E.

  I should record that I am normally of a reasonable and sound constitution and not prone to fainting fits, unlike some ladies I have known who have used it to their advantage with male companions or to escape from embarrassing situations. However, I can only say the state of unconsciousness saved me from a rather severe argument with Captain Dunderhead in which I may have used words which I later regretted!

  -------------------------

  J.

  While I looked after Elizabeth, Wells took the pram to retrieve the equipment we had spilled and replenish the items that had been removed by the crowd. He then went to the chemist on North Street and obtained a dozen empty green jars complete with cork stoppers.

  When he returned to the inn, Elizabeth had sufficiently recovered to talk to me again on condition that the predicament with the pram, as she put it, was not recounted anywhere and certainly not to her father, her sister or her cousin Henry, on pain of a horrible death.

  However, having retrieved all the items, we still had to get it all to the cave. As we didn’t want to go in via the church vestry we had to resort to bringing it all through the inn and up the passage. Elizabeth decided to stay in our room and refused to join us in this work on the grounds that having arrived at the inn in the form of a drunk strumpet in a cart and been taken up to our room by one man, she did not want to be seen going up and down the stairs to the room accompanied by two men, even though one was her husband.

  I decided not to mention that by staying in her room, while two men made a number of journeys up there, provoked quite a bit of interest amongst the clientele in the lounge.

  Eventually, after several trips we got all the gear into the time cavern.

  I checked all the equipment and was just about to pat myself on the back when I realised the most important item was missing: a high voltage power supply.

  Wells came to our rescue by opening one of the consoles. “You should find adequate power in here. You may be able to connect your apparatus to this.”

  I looked inside and saw a row of junction boxes.

  “How much power supply have we got here?” I asked, not really wanting to touch anything.”

  “I do not know.”

  “AC or DC?”

  “All I know is that it provides some auxiliary power to the machine.”

  Oh, for a multimeter. I examined the junction boxes a little more closely and chose a pair of wires that didn’t look like they could supply current for the whole of Midhurst.

  “OK. It’ll have to do.” I said to no
one in particular.

  “Now for the Tesla coil. Let’s start with the secondary coil. Pass that wooden post and I’ll nail it to this square stand like so. Now I’m going to carefully wrap this shellac coated wire around the post and hope it stays insulated.”

  The problem was I didn’t have anything to hold it on the pole so as I wound it around the pole one way, it unwound itself.

  “Should have bought some glue. Wells, if you hold it here I’ll start winding.”

  After about fifty turns it held. “Good! This is going to take some time so Elizabeth, can you start making those Leyden jars? I think we will start with ten.”

  With Wells’ help, she filled the jars with tin foil and wrapped a sheet of foil around each jar, while I continued to slowly wind the insulated wire around the post. Then I got the copper tubing and gently wound it around the post trying to make sure it didn’t come into contact with itself along its entire length.

  “Now we need the torus. We’ll have to use the tin foil. I’ll make a thick twisted roll of it and turn it into a doughnut.”

  Once I had managed to fashion the foil into roughly the right shape I placed it carefully on top of the wooden post and connected one end of the secondary coil to it. The other end I connected to the nearest console in the hope it would act as an earth. I would dearly have loved to have had a multimeter to test the circuit.

  When they had finished making the Leyden jars, I banged a nail into each of their cork lids so that they connected with the tin foil inside the jars. Then I joined up the nail terminals with a copper wire and another wire looped around the external tin foil of the jars to make ten capacitors in parallel. What the capacitance of all these jars was I had no idea. I attached a wire to the primary coil of copper pipe and the other end to the external foils of one the Leyden jars.

  To make the spark gap I banged two nails about an inch apart into the wooden base and attached a wire to one of these nails and one of the nails in the lid of one of the Leyden jars.

  “OK, now for the scary bit. I’m going to connect one wire from the console power supply hoping it’s AC, to the primary circuit copper pipe and the second to one of the spark gap nails.”

  “James! Do you want to check the power supply is turned off?”

  I felt a small bead of sweat form on my forehead. I looked at the console. It was off. I then gingerly connected the wire to the nail.

  I stood back and looked at my handiwork and hoped that it would never fall into the hands of my students who would no doubt demand less stringent criticism and marking of their experimental work from that point onwards.

  “What do you think?” I said, reconnecting one of the wires which had fallen off.

  “I am thinking,” she said, “why am I allowing the idiot who bought the perambulator to build a machine to alter the fabric of time and space?”

  “Because you have complete faith in him?”

  “I hadn’t realised the advancement of science was dependent on faith.”

  “Rubbish, the advancements have all been made by people not knowing what they were doing. Look at Fleming who discovered penicillin by accidentally leaving some mould on the window ledge. Or Kepler who made a mistake in his calculations of Mars’ orbit then made another mistake which corrected the first one and gave the right answer.”

  “And you will be successful in a similar way?”

  I looked back at the pile of wires, coils and jars. It didn’t inspire confidence. However, after all this effort I wasn’t going back.

  After checking the connections one more time, I said, “Ok, it’s ready. Now let’s all move to the door.” I then flicked the power supply switch and ran to the tunnel. We waited. Nothing happened. After about five minutes, I said, “I think I need to push the spark gap nails closer together.

  As I went back to table to adjust them, Elizabeth shouted. “James! Stop! They might contain charge!”

  I stopped just in time and retrieving the long pole proceeded to first switch off the power supply then bang the nails closer together. It was good to see my five years in research was being put to good use. For some reason, each time I hit it I closed my eyes. I presume this was my body’s natural defence to shield me from either a massive electrocution or my own stupidity.

  When I was satisfied that the gap was close enough (this just happened to coincide with the moment I broke the pole) I said, “Right, let’s try again.”

  I switched on the power with the three-foot remains of the pole and ran back to the door. Again, nothing happened. My heart sank. Then suddenly a spark crossed the gap with a thwack. Then another and another until it was firing sparks at about five a second.

  “Now what happens?” Elizabeth said.

  “God knows. Wait.”

  So we waited and waited. The sparks came faster and faster. Then I noticed Elizabeth’s hair was rising and fanning out. The same was happening to Wells. I put my hand up to my head and heard my hair crackle and noticed the hands of my watch were turning. It was at that point I remembered Gauss’s theory and the advantages of Faraday cages and wished I had thought to buy some metal chain mailed suits and rubber boots for protection.

  Elizabeth shouted through the noise, “What is happening to us?”

  I yelled back, “The room is filling with charge!”

  Wells shouted, “You must turn it off before we are electrocuted!”

  “What, go back in there?” They both looked at me. “Ok. I’ll have a go”.

  I picked up the broken pole and slowly entered the cavern, earnestly praying that the coil didn’t use me to discharge its voltage. Then, my god! A massive flash of lightning shot across the room to the Martian globe and I was out of the room and running down the passage, followed by the other two. After about fifty yards we paused to catch our breaths. I noticed Elizabeth’s hair had subsided back to its usual resting position.

  “What do we now?”

  “You must turn it off.”

  I wasn’t enjoying this ‘you’ bit.

  I slowly returned down the passage followed at some distance by Wells and Elizabeth. The light around the door was a blue green flashing glow and the air was thick with the smell of ozone. I gingerly approached the door holding my stick in front of me. Then just as I was about to enter I suddenly remembered something about the conductivity of wood and the perils of holding a long pointy thing in the air during a lightning storm. I dropped it quickly.

  The thunderous flashes and the smell of ozone became stronger. Nevertheless I went up to the door and peered through.

  A great arc of plasma emanating from the torus was playing on one of the consoles. Then another hit the gantry. More flashes of lightning shot from the torus until there were five continuous blue-white snakes of plasma playing around the room. I stood transfixed, not daring to move until suddenly I felt a tingling sensation in my arm which slowly gripped my arm tight. I thought I was having a seizure. I jumped back and fell straight into Elizabeth’s arms. “Are you alright, James?”

  “God, it’s only your hand. I thought for a moment I’d been electrocuted!”

  But before I could recover, all the lights went out. Only the plasma illuminated us like a strobe light. Our movements were caught in jerky images. For a moment, I felt we were actually in one of those early Frankenstein horror movies. All that was missing was a dead body rising from the table.

  Just as suddenly, everything went black and silent. No bang, explosion or fire. Just quiet and total blackness.

  Elizabeth was still holding my arm. I felt her breath on my neck. It was hot and rapid. “Where is your lamp?” she whispered.

  I searched my pockets. Normal people put things in a pocket with one hand and retrieve it later with the same hand. If you are ambidextrous like me, you put things in your pocket with one hand and then later search for it with your other. What’s worse, the other hand actually thinks it put it there! I eventually found it and switched it on. The weak beam traversed the room. The apparatus seem
ed to be all in one piece though the spark gap nails had melted into stumps. I continued to sweep the beam around searching for any signs of damage. But when I pointed at the Mars globe, a flash of lightning from the torus suddenly struck it and knocked the torch out of my hand. How I didn’t pass out I don’t know for in the last light of the weak beam I’d seen a small cat or rabbit-like creature with gossamer wings sitting on the globe - a Martian!

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  Chapter Seven

  E.

  It took a little time to find each other in the pitch black when James dropped the torch. Luckily, one of us had remembered to bring some candles. And Mr Wells, who on occasion smoked a pipe, produced some matches.

  Thus, by candle light we were able to see a little way along the passage down which we had retreated after James claimed he had seen a Martian.

  We were not convinced by his vision as he was a little deranged after his experiment. Mr. Wells, who seemed more composed than we, offered to go back into the cavern. We did not argue with him but gave him a candle and watched him walk back towards the cavern. This did nothing to help steady our nerves for his shadow playing on the walls gave the impression of another being and I expected any moment to see a Martian hovering before us. He soon vanished through the door to the cavern. We waited with bated breath. There was no sound and more disconcertingly, he did not return.

  “Do you think we should follow?”

  James didn’t answer. In the pale candle light, I saw his hands were trembling a little and his face was deathly pale. I pulled him to me for comfort. Tiny sparks of electricity leapt from our clothes as we touched.

  “Are you alright?”

  “I think so. I keep on imagining those lightning bolts striking me.” Then he regarded me quite closely, puzzled. “Your hair, Elizabeth.”

  “What of it?” I said. I put my hand to my head. I felt my hair crackle and adhere to my fingers.

  “I presume by your look I am not presentable for receiving guests?”

  “Just - try not to touch any metal objects for a while. I think we’re still highly charged.”