Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  Anne didn’t know what to say.

  Ruth turned her face toward her. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I understand,” Anne said. So, what am I going to do with this gift? She thought. Save lives like I did Johnny’s? Anne, of course, didn’t know that for certain, wouldn’t know for another ten days, maybe longer because ship sinkings and great losses of men weren’t immediately reported. How would she even find out? “I guess I don’t know what you wanted to be selfish with. Other than advising Johnny to leave a ship that I think will be sunk, I don’t know what else my visions can do for you. If there’s something, I would be more than happy to do it. You’ve taken me into your home and have made every attempt to make me feel like I’m part of your family, so if there’s something, please ask.”

  Ruth shook her head. “No, it wouldn’t be right. I would be... there’s a word for using someone’s abilities or skills for your own benefit.”

  “Exploit?”

  “Yes. I would be exploiting you.”

  “So there is something, isn’t there? What is it?”

  Ruth didn’t answer.

  “I give my permission. You do not own me so I give my permission of my own free will. At least ask me. If I don’t like it, I have the power to say no.”

  “But part of me feels it wouldn’t be right because I’ll gain unfair advantage.”

  “Unfair advantage? How so?”

  Ruth smoothed invisible wrinkles in her dress. “It’s like Johnny and the USS Plymouth. There are lots of mothers who would give their own lives to know what I know. Because they don’t know, their sons will die. I may be comforted in the knowledge that John is safe but I also feel very guilty, very bad for those other mothers, those other boys.”

  “But you know that neither of us could change what will happen. If we went to the Navy and tried, they would laugh us off the base.”

  “I know. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. I’ve resigned myself to knowing there’s nothing I can do. Doesn’t stop me from feeling guilty though.”

  “You were only using the Plymouth as an example. You still have something else in mind and you’ve said enough to get my curiosity up. No choice now, so come out with it.”

  “Okay,” Ruth said. “Remember. You said you could say no. I’ll totally understand if you do.” She stood. “Come downstairs with me.”

  After bringing a kitchen chair into the living room for Anne, Ruth pushed up the cover to the roll-top desk. She moved her chair to the side so Anne could get closer and then together they peered at the place Ruth was pointing. It was only several seconds before Anne understood. She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.

  Ruth said, “Do you have knowledge in this and do you have visions?”

  “Yes. I’ve some knowledge, not a lot, but some. Visions?” Anne considered that for a bit. “No, not in the sense that I can read from a list like that of the Plymouth sinking.”

  “Can you, will you assist me then?”

  Anne placed her hand on Ruth’s arm. “Yes, I can help, and yes, I will.”

  Chapter 26

  Wednesday ~ August 3, 1987

  “What about right here?” Howard poked with a white-tip pointer at the middle of an integration spread across the blackboard. To James they may as well have been working in Greek

  “No! No!” Steven picked up an eraser and forcefully cleared a corner of the board, creating a cloud of dust around his head. “I’ve already looked at that.” He scratched and banged more numbers, letters and Greek symbols, for a good half minute. “That,” he pointed to what Howard was referring to, “is nothing more than this derivation. Do you not agree?”

  Howard stared at it for a while then leafed through a stack of papers in his hand. He stopped at one, looked between it and the board and then said, “Right. There’s not a damn thing in there. That leaves us absolutely nowhere.” The two of them, Steven and Howard, slumped down in a couple chairs and stared at the chalk scribble. James wondered if Steven was even remotely aware of the chalk dust on his clothes and chalk streaks across his face.

  James had moved into the spare room of Steven’s house, even though he didn’t need to. He could well afford to stay anywhere for the time he knew it would take, but he wanted to be close. He needed to be close. Since the night of sending the letter, he had not returned to the lab until this morning. For more than two weeks he had seen no point. Why he came today, he wasn’t sure because it would still be months before the time-travel system would be ready again. He spent his time visiting old friends and colleagues, walking downtown streets, looking at the historic houses, and visiting the library and bookstores, which he did because he wanted to understand how Steven had managed time travel. When he asked late one night, Steven went into a long explanation that was just as clear as what was on the chalkboard. He did pick up that it had something to do with Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which somehow was different from his better-known Theory of Relativity. General Relativity described gravity by a curvature of space-time. More mental chalk scratch.

  So, to better understand, James decided to research what Einstein was talking about. He called it his “Layman’s Time-Travel Research.” What he found was anything but laymen. He spent hours at the library reading and making his own chalk scratches, but with pencil on paper. Nearly every physicist he read about concluded that time travel was possible, but only in a forward direction, and then only by traveling in a spaceship some hundreds or thousands or more light-years and back. To actually construct such a system would require energy and mass equivalent, in the words of one physicist, to that of the sun. No matter how much he studied and read and analyzed, the diagrams, charts and formulas made absolutely no sense. After two weeks of reading about black holes, worm holes, infinity long tubes that spun at near the speed of light, parallel dimensions and the fourth dimension, James still had no idea how Steven and his small team of scientists and physicists managed to transport Anne Waring 44 years back in time.

  After about 10 minutes of watching Howard and Steven scribble between the chalkboard and notebooks while punching numbers into calculators, the buttons of which alone were but more Greek, James decided to get some coffee. As part of his visit he had brought in a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts, so down to the conference room he went. He was there about ten minutes, trying to talk himself out of a second Bavarian cream, when Steven and Howard came in. Howard grabbed a coffee and the donut James had been eyeing. Steven refilled the coffee cup he brought in with him. Then the three of them sat at the table in silence while Howard inhaled the donut. James assumed the two of them were still mentally working on their problem.

  “So,” Steven finally said, “how is Susan?”

  “She’s fine,” Howard said.

  “The kids?”

  “Good.”

  “Suppose school starts up again pretty soon.”

  “Couple of weeks. Susan has already broken the budget on clothes and supplies.”

  “We’ll have to have you guys over soon for barbeque and cards or something.”

  Howard looked at James and raised his eyebrows. “Yeah. Good idea.”

  James watched Steven’s face suddenly change as he apparently realized the error of his statement. There was no “we” in Steven’s life right now and no certainty there ever would be in the future.

  “I’ve spent the last two weeks living in the library and bookstores,” James said, “and I’ve done no more than become thoroughly confused by time travel. In theory it appears that most scientists agree it’s possible, but in reality, it’s impossible.”

  “That’s true,” Steven said.

  “Yep. Right on the money,” Howard agreed.

  “Then how did you do it?” James asked.

  “Have you been to the University libraries?” Steven asked.

  “No.”

  “Then you’ve barely touched upon it. Of course, I’m not saying that would help you any. They all come up with the same c
onclusion. It has been shown, on paper, that forward time travel is possible, but as you probably assessed, not without a great expenditure of energy. For several different reasons, traveling back in time has only been a possibility in Science Fiction. Even if you were a physicist just studying time travel for the first time, there’s no way in just two weeks to grasp, with reasonable understanding, even a fraction of the theories. I’ve been reading about and then later studying time travel and the concepts since I was old enough to hold a book in both hands. When I was twelve, I heard there was something called the International Journal of Theoretical Physics. It published papers on time travel written by actual physicists, so I talked my mother into taking me to the university library. That opened up an entirely new world to me.”

  “Twelve years old?” James was astonished.

  “While other kids were playing ball, getting ready to chase girls and delving into the more exciting art of faking mom’s handwriting so they could play hooky from school, I was graduating from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and books like, Super Science Stories, Astounding Stories, Marvel Science Stories, Wonder stories – I loved that old pulp fiction stuff – to Einstein, Minkowski, Gödel, Kerr, Lorentz, Hawking, Schwarzschild, and Feynman. I wanted to know if any of that science fiction stuff that I had been filling my head with was real.”

  “I did the same thing,” Howard said. “I used to dig through old, dusty book stores looking for the pulp magazines. I ate up anything science fiction, but the idea of time travel fascinated me the most. I wish I had gotten into the university library earlier like you, Steven. It was a physics teacher in high school who turned me on to the professional journals.”

  “I shiver sometimes at how off the mark most of the writers were,” Steven said.

  “They’re just stories,” Howard reminded Steven. “Just good entertaining pulp fiction.”

  “No. I’m talking about the physicists whose papers I basked in.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Howard laughed. “I think a few of the science fiction writers were closer though, like John Taine’s...”

  “The Time Stream,” they both said in unison.

  “You know that was just a pen name,” Steven said.

  “Eric Bell,” Howard nodded his head. “He really wasn’t all that close, but close enough to get my attention. I agreed with the physicists, that time travel could only be done into the future, and there was no returning. It wasn’t until I met you, Steven, up at MIT that I began to realize that we were wrong. It was then that I learned of the Waring Four Dimensional Tube Theory.”

  “Tube theory?” James said. “You mean like the tube, or cylinder I think it was called, which rotates at something close to the speed of light?”

  Steven said, “You’re talking about Frank Tipler’s rotating cylinder – infinitely long, very dense. Very interesting but totally impossible to construct, and nothing like my tube.”

  “The Waring tube is not an actual constructed device, but just a pencil and paper diagram of what we think actually takes place. There really is not a “Time Machine” per se. We just create an atmosphere in which a special variance of quantum physics is applied under highly controlled conditions.” Howard pointed at Steven. “Dr. Waring here joined with another physicist to work on a theory they both developed independently some ten years apart. That actually falls under two names. Hair’s Nuclear Tri–generation and Waring’s Triple Jump Deviation. I like to call it the Hair-Waring Tri-Generation deviation.”

  “I prefer Hair’s Nuclear Tri-Generation,” Steven said. “Robert really had it nailed down better. All I did was put it to practical use.”

  “Steven is just being modest. It’s the one bit of credit he can give to his father-in-law.”

  James looked at Steven. “Anne’s father?”

  “Yep,” Howard said for Steven. “Dr. Robert Hair.”

  Steven turned quiet and stared into his coffee cup.

  “He doesn’t know does he?” James said. “He doesn’t know his daughter is gone 44 years.”

  Howard shook his head. “He doesn’t know about this project. Just the seven of us, and of course, you.”

  “But if he helped develop the theory...”

  Howard held up his hand. “Tri-Generation Deviation is only the nuclear energy source for the quantum jump, as we call it. Tri-Gen has many more applications because it’s nothing more than high energy, high power output from an extremely small nuclear substance. We are the first to actually apply it, probably because we’re not subject to all the bureaucratic red tape.”

  James looked around. “You’ve a nuclear power plant in this building?”

  Howard laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s perfectly safe. It’s extremely stable and with the shielding and encasement, puts out virtually no radiation. Believe me. We monitor it closely.”

  “Then this entire building is powered by your nuclear plant?”

  “No. We use conventional power for about 95% of our needs. Because it’s very unstable, we have a state-of-the-art stabilization and distribution system that takes the 220 volts coming in and distributes it throughout the building. Tri-Gen runs only the photon tube and the actual quantum jump event. There’s laboratory development going on for both military and civilian applications. Dr. Hair is the head of a NASA Tri-Gen research group. This could bring long distance space travel within a realm of realism.”

  “You mean like Star Trek?”

  Howard laughed. “I don’t think we’re looking at anything close to warp speed in order to get to other galaxies, but being able to push our current speeds out 100-fold for excursions to our own planets is certainly a possibility.”

  Steven came out of his trance. “I’d say that ‘beam me up Scotty,’ is certainly more than a writer’s imagination.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Funny you should say that, James,” Howard said. “You’re the one who presented that to us.”

  “Me?” James said.

  “Well, not so much as presented it to us, but forced our hand, forced us to look at what we had only dreamed might be possible. We knew such a thing could be an offshoot if we were successful but we could only focus on one thing at a time. Up until now we have been doing quantum jump experiments with the source and target coordinates being the same. As a matter of fact we didn’t even build the coordinate selection into the system. The only variable we used was time; after all, that’s what this is all about. In the case of Anne, the time was 44 years. The coordinates were hard wired, you might say, to the location of the photon cylinder in the lab, which, 44 years ago, was the center of the barracks berthing area.

  “Now suppose we left the time unchanged and made a way to vary only the coordinates.”

  “Oh,” James said.

  “In theory, of course,” Steven said, “because we haven’t tried it. In theory we could transport you from here to Times Square in a matter of seconds.”

  Howard added, “Unfortunately, to get back, you would have to hail a cab to Kennedy International Airport.”

  “And that’s what you’re working on right now, getting her back,” James said.

  “Right. But our problem is twofold. We have to grab her not only from another location but also from another time. Jim Kirk could talk into his little communication device and say, ‘Beam me up.’ Easy to do for Scotty. Now put the captain of the Star Ship Enterprise not only on the planet below the star ship, but also a hundred years away. ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ doesn’t mean a thing because the communication devices don’t work across time. This operation to bring Anne home is like two people, each deaf, blind and dumb, trying to find one another on the moon.” Howard considered his words for a few seconds. “No. That’s not true really. We can talk to her but we can’t hear her. She can hear us but can’t talk to us. And I guess we aren’t totally blind either. We know when and where she’ll be, but until you showed up, didn’t know if she could receive our instructions, or even what our instructions should be. And, after that
, all you have been able to tell us is that Anne and her daughter disappear, and that there may be some other reason she disappears, other than that we bring them back.”

  James found both Steven and Howard looking at him, waiting for an answer, waiting for him to tell them what the other reason was. 44 years and the visions of what might have happened still waken him many a night. That was the reason he was here – to find the answer – to find out if she returned. If she did, he would finally be able to rest. But, if she didn’t, he would never rest because he would never know.

  How could he tell Steven what the other possibility might be? He wanted to. Steven is her husband. He has the right to know. He should tell him, prepare him for the worst. It’s what he would have wanted himself.

  James opened his mouth, “I just didn’t see her... them leave. I can’t give witness to her disappearing in a flash of light, or photon tube, right before my eyes, because I didn’t see it. When I became aware they were gone, I searched everywhere and found only her and Elizabeth Anne’s clothes and personal affects in her house.”

  “Then, like I said before,” Steven said, “what other explanation is there?”

  James shrugged his shoulders.

  Howard asked, “You told us that we’ll be successful because...”

  James held up his hand. “No. I said it appeared you were successful in rebuilding the system because you sent several messages that you were calibrating and testing. You successfully brought the rabbit back, and then gave a date and time you would bring her home.”

  “And when might that be?”

  James looked back and forth between them. “I’m not so sure I should tell you. Don’t want to influence your work.”

  Steven laid his cup down hard. Coffee slopped onto the table. “You walk into my home and hand me a set of coordinates and say, ‘You can pick her up here.’ I think that’s a major piece of influence, Mr. Lamric. I certainly don’t see why sharing the date with us should make all that much more of a big deal. After all, history is history, and I don’t believe history can be changed. I don’t think this ranks as a paradox. As a matter of fact, I don’t think anything like a paradox can take place. A paradox is something for science fiction writers and those who need reason to believe why time travel into the past cannot take place or shouldn’t take place. Consider action and effect and the chain reaction of actions and effects that follow. I’m sure you read about the standard argument of the Grandfather Paradox.”