by P. W. Child
“Miss Richards, it is Albert Tägtgren.”
“Albert, did you speak to Sam Cleave yesterday?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. I told him what I knew and then he left,” Albert said.
“Good. We do have one problem, though. We have reason to believe that there are more than a few moles in your section, so we would like you to listen and observe, see if anyone is acting strangely. We have a lot of money invested in this mission, so we cannot afford to have more hold ups by our opposition, understand?” she told the engineer.
“I will. So far I have not detected any odd doings,” he reported.
“Just stay on your toes. Time is running out on all levels, so you know that soon something, somewhere, will transpire. The closer we get to the activation of the Super Collider the more trouble we can expect to surface,” Penny reminded him with a tone of warning, fraught with worry. “And please don’t let anyone guess at your true reasons for being there, Al. You would be in deep trouble if they knew that you were involved in the Tesla Experiment.”
“Yes, Miss Richards. Don’t worry. Nobody has any idea what I am doing here,” he comforted her concerns. He ended the call with a renewed worry about the facts he gave that Scottish journalist the day before. Albert could kick himself for his cavalier disclosure of such a sensitive matter, but he could not help himself. Never before had he been in such an important position or known such weighty things and it felt good to be able to tell the secret. To share such an awe inspiring fact such as witnessing someone employ quantum mechanics in front of his eyes was just too much of a temptation. Besides, the journalist did not take pictures or film him, so there was always the comfort that he could deny anything Cleave placed on him, although Penny Richards would get word of it without a doubt, and he would be fired by the Institute.
“Tägtgren!” the Alice head engineer shouted. For a brisk moment Albert’s guilt ridden heart stopped in fear of having been discovered. “Quick, come with me!”
“What is the matter, sir?” the covert engineer asked.
He walked with the head of the section’s staff as the man went on about bad security and how his hide was up for tanning now. “I’m going to be in some deep shit, my friend. I hope you know what happened here of we are going to have a bloody media mess on our hands!”
“What happened?” he asked again as they approached the remnants of the burnt mess behind the security barriers where Tägtgren remembered showing the secret evidence to the journalist.
His heart pounded. The fact that he did not know what was amiss was almost worse than knowing how guilty he was of abetting the trespassing journalist. He lamented Penny Richards sending the man in the first place he would not have had to suffer this sheer stress. Why did she have to send Sam Cleave to probe the secret just so that she could find out how probable discovery of the true story would be by the media? Richards reckoned that, if a potent investigative journalist like Cleave could not figure out what really caused the fire, then the Institute’s secret was safe against the lesser media vultures.
Now he, Albert Tägtgren was in hot water from all sides, because what Penny Richards did not know was that he was a double agent. The opposition of the Cornwall Institute paid better and they were aware that he worked for Penny, so he had no fear of being exposed from that side. Still, he was not supposed to entertain the journalist, let alone disclose the details of the truth to him.
All Tägtgren could do now, was to hope that neither Penny nor her opposition would find out that he showed Sam Cleave the cordoned off site of the Alice detector, there where no-one was supposed to go. All he was supposed to do after Penny told him to speak to Cleave, was to play dumb and keep to the short circuit story, according to the other faction he worked for. But in his fascination and the thrill of knowing what others did not, the first-time spy appeared to have royally fucked himself. He could recover from this heinous mistake only if his revelation remained undetected.
“Look,” Albert’s superior announced, “look over there, but the storage pod. Do you see what I see?”
Albert’s skull started pounding under the torment of a terrible headache. In all honesty he could not see what his boss referred to, which gave him a faintly soothing feeling of sincere innocence. Any ignorance would be true while he could not discern what he was supposed to. “I see nothing out of the ordinary, sir.”
“Listen Al, during your shift last night a fully functional capacitor disappeared from the little amount of operational material we still had left after the bloody fire,” the man noted angrily. He stared furiously at Albert, waiting for an answer. “Do you know that anything missing on you watch will be charged to you? Worse yet, you might be sited for theft.”
“No!” Albert cried inadvertently. “I’m sorry. I just…I am not responsible for this.”
“You damn well are responsible for it!” his boss sneered.
“No, I mean. I did not steal it. I am not responsible for the theft. I do realize that I must be at fault for allowing it to be taken, indirectly, I suppose,” he confessed in disappointment.
“I’m going to have to write a report about this to the company. I will let you know tomorrow what the board decided to do about this,” the head engineer sighed. Shaking his head, he walked away, “You are excused for today, Tägtgren. Go home.”
“I wish I could. Wish I never left Sweden,” he retorted just soft enough not to be heard by the livid supervisor who disappeared among the staff. “That goddamn journalist stole it.”
He took the boss’ advice and truthfully he was quite relieved about the dismissal for the day. There was too much going on at work that added to his constant anxiety and a break would do him well. In fact, in this angry weather Albert elected to drop in on one of the local bars in Meyrin that was not too far from his apartment. It was his intention to get hammered and forget about his troubles, at least for the day. But not before he called Sam Cleave to pick that bone.
He was met with more disappointment, getting only Sam’s voicemail.
“This is Albert Tägtgren, the idiot who foolishly trusted you yesterday. You are a coward, Cleave! You don’t even have the balls to pick up the phone, you bastard! I know what you did! And you knew I could not implicate you, because then my employers would know that I told you about the storage container and what I saw there,” he shouted on the phone. Albert was livid. “I am going to track you down and we will sort this out, you and I. You can count on that!” He ended the call there and flung his phone on the passenger seat of his car as he neared the checkpoint from his section.
From the perimeter of the compound the Volvo roared, liberated from the security check and leaving behind a myriad of questions, cover-ups and clandestine espionage. Albert finally allowed himself to smile as he looked in his rear view mirror, watching the particle physics laboratory grow smaller in his wake. It felt wonderful, even with the sudden shower of rain that assaulted the area with a positively vicious trajectory that clapped against his wind shield. He winced at the impact, hoping there would not be any impending hail to damage his luxury car before he got to park it under cover.
Thunder shook the ground as the heavy electrical storm system spread out as predicted by the weather bureau. By nightfall torrential havoc would apparently have reached a radius spanning Lyon, Tarare and Villefranche-sur-Saône in neighboring France.
In the near distance two gray figures came into view from the predominantly white environment of mist and showers. They came into view as he slowly drew closer. Two traffic officers were redirecting cars into the detour set up away from the main road.
“Now? In the rain we have to take some shitty pot-hole path?” he grunted, vexed by the extra time he would have to spend on the road. His phone rang. He stopped his car. Was it Sam Cleave?
Albert placed his phone on the hands-free station and answered as he slowly pulled away from the shoulder of the road again. A scratchy sound came across the speaker, then the voice he dreaded most
– his other employer, the man who paid him more than Penny did.
“Albert, you told the journalist things you shouldn’t have.”
“No. No, I told him nothing, sir. Nothing.”
“Really? Then what was he doing in the prohibited area with you?” the stern man asked, provoking a renewed panic in Tägtgren. He stopped his car again, barely 200m from the detour sign.
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” he swallowed hard.
“CCTV, you blithering idiot!” his employer roared. “For an engineer you are exceedingly stupid! But worse, Albert, you are a liar.”
With that the call was cut and the engineer swore he could hear his heart clamoring in his body. His transgression was discovered. It was time to get away, go back home to his country.
Albert decided to turn up the radio to drown out the din of the downpour as he carefully navigated the rather narrow tarmac ribbon he had turned off on toward Meyrin. He reduced speed as he allowed the music to lull his sensibilities and calm his nerves, even when his hands refused to stop shaking.
He looked back to see the unfortunate officers having to stand in the rain and wait for the next cars to direct away. Albert watched the dwindling figures in his rear view mirror. But when the next cars came they had removed the detour sign. The rest of the cars passed on the highway. Completely perplexed the engineer frowned, paying too much attention to what was going on behind him to see what was coming from ahead.
Chapter 12
Lydia labored away at the programming of the so-called co-ordinates she had created for the experiment. She marked each field and measured the intensity and propulsion from each generator on the grid of the machine. Sam was busy mocking Purdue’s getup in the background while she finalized the second stage of the experiment. Healy was on stand-by to do all the heavy lifting – the levers, the multiple vacuum locks and the door, since Sam would be occupied by his filming.
“Purdue, come, let me give you these,” Lydia summoned, holding out two small gadgets. “Sam, you may film this is you wish.”
“Aye. On it,” he replied, following Purdue to record the revelation of what Lydia called ‘necessary aids for communication and safe return.’ Sam and Purdue exchanged a look. “But it is just an experiment, right?”
“Yes, Sam,” she sighed, “but if it works Purdue will need these to not get lost in the timespace continuum, see?”
“Get lost?” Purdue asked.
“Think of these two devices as the physics counterpart of a floatation kit, gentlemen,” Lydia explained. “This is a communication device of sorts, should you need to contact me from wherever you are.”
“Or whenever you are,” Sam chipped through his almost pursed lips.
“You’re so funny,” Purdue remarked, looking slightly worried at last. He saw how meticulously she handled the experiment, almost as if she had done it a hundred times before. With this level of dedication she must have been under the impression that her theory was actually plausible in a practical sense.
“This is called the BAT,” she announced.
“An abbreviation?” Sam asked.
“No, it uses luminiferous ether like a bat uses echolocation. It will allow you to leave a message in the ether, but you only have thirty seconds of every twenty four hours to do so, provided you have access to chronology, of course,” she described to Purdue, occasionally looking straight at Sam’s lens as if she wanted it recorded as instruction. Lydia gave Purdue the small box, covered in black fabric. “The mic is concealed under the material and the record button is…” she took his thumb in her hands and ran it along the one side until he felt the button, “…there.”
“Got it,” Purdue affirmed, memorizing where it was.
“Very important,” she warned loudly, “once you press that button, Purdue, you have to put the device down or it will dissolve your hand on a cellular level. POOF!”
Sam’s eyes left the view finder and he looked at Purdue. The billionaire was ashen, staring back at Sam. They shared an unspoken exclamation of alarm before Purdue frowned at Lydia, “Excuse me?”
“Oh come now, Purdue!” she said, throwing back her head.
“Why the hellish disintegration, for those of us who do not possess the aptitude for particle freakishness?” Sam jested, but under it he was quite serious.
Lydia was clearly extremely annoyed by their sudden inquisitiveness and doubt in her system. “Sam, this little box has to make a call before Purdue can talk, right?”
“Aye, that I get.”
She continued in a deliberately slow manner to patronize the journalist properly. “And to make that call it has to heat up and manipulate the sound waves in the microphone to find their way on a molecular basis…much as the particles you are made up of communicates among a vast network of nerves and cells inside the landscape that is your body. Are you with me so far?”
“Jesus.”
“Right,” she went on, “so if your molecules are in contact with an object…the little box…that heats up hotter than the sun, you will not have the ability to say shit, will you?”
Purdue’s eyes remained frozen in their cases as he glared at the floor in thought.
“She didn’t have to be so utterly condescending,” Sam mumbled to himself.
“Healy! Bring me that other velvet bag, please,” she called.
“Christ, Purdue! Are you sure you want to do this?” Sam whispered, pausing his recording.
“It’s unlikely time travel is even practically viable, Sam. Let’s just humor her,” Purdue shrugged, but Sam persisted in his urgency. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“What if nothing happens?” Purdue played devil’s advocate.
“Purdue,” Sam whispered, “what if it works?”
“Purdue,” Lydia snapped, “we are running out of time. It’s almost evening and here we are fucking about all day with petty hold-ups! This is a very important experiment, for God’s sake, so let’s make it happen.”
“And what is that?” Purdue asked quickly, distracting Lydia from a definite brewing tantrum that would soon merit another tirade. He pointed at the bag she held.
“This is your way back,” she informed him. “You have only three days before your BAT runs out of power and will not be able to accelerate enough to send you back.
“So the BAT is also my capacitor?” Purdue asked, as Sam once more moved silently around them to record the proceedings.
“Yes, you have at most three 24-hour periods before it loses its juice, each allowing only 30 seconds of communication per 12-hour pop. That gives you at most six opportunities to communicate, probably half that, depending on its power. When you have to come back, press the button twice and put the BAT down. Purdue, there is no undo button once you have done that. Trust me. Make sure you are ready to return before you press that button twice.”
Her eyes pierced him with urgency and serious caution.
“Now…at the moment you transcend from this point this device here will record your unified fields’ references and keep it saved in its data bank,” she continued. In her hand she held a delicate item, a pinkish, semi-transparent dental plate fashioned from the roof of Purdue’s mouth. “You need to remove this and used the wire that hooks around your two canines to plug it into the BAT before that double-button activation, are you clear on that?”
“My God,” Sam whispered.
“What’s wrong, Sam?” she asked him.
“I am just…in absolute awe of your planning, your inventions,” he exalted her, hitting that welcome zone of narcissism in Lydia. “It blows my mind!”
Purdue smiled at Sam’s clever manipulation by means of that familiar charm that stole Nina from Purdue’s embrace a few years ago. He had to admire the schoolboy charm of the dark eyes journalist with his stocky athleticism and wild black hair. Inside, Purdue knew full well that Sam’s exclamation was in fact one of subdued terror, the type unleashed from a confrontation with unbridled madness.
&nbs
p; On the wall clock the long hand reached six and the short arm pointed just short of nine. The weather was slowly growing more restless. Healy came down from the second story and reported, “Madam, there is a severe thunderstorm headed this way within the next few hours, moving over from Switzerland and due in the south of Germany by tomorrow afternoon, they say. I venture to guess it is a rather serious storm for most of Western Europe.”
“Thanks Healy. Do you hear that, gentlemen?” Lydia asked.
Purdue shook Sam’s hand and gave him a pat on the back, using his nonchalant approach to serious things to show Sam that he had no faith in the potency of this experiment. He stepped into the buzzing environment of the chamber that was now at the threshold between warming up and powering up for the actual initiation of the launch.
Light rain tapped against the windows by now and the wind bent the tree tops outside, but the people in Jenner Manor had no idea, thanks to the boarded up windows and walls keeping out all external sound. It was a dangerous ignorance that would influence their time sensitive experiment. Healy locked Purdue in the chamber as Sam filmed it.
Sam hoped that the experiment would come to nothing but a big ruckus, a jolt or two and a circuit blown on the mother board of the controlling computer before Lydia would realize it was just another failure. Then she would go back to the drawing board with her theories and allow the men to have a fee drinks while they watched the football at a local sports bar. That was Sam’s ideal outcome in the cozy safety of his mind.
Lydia looked into the lens, but she was not speaking to Sam. “Voyager III, time travel experiment number 14, 22 June 2015 in Jenner Manor, located in the city of Lyon, France. Subject: Inventor and scientist David Matthew Purdue, aged forty nine and the time is now…” she looked up, “…8.30 in the evening.”
She gestured for Sam to follow her to the control board. On the keyboard she punched in a combination code and the schematic from the map-like paper on the table came up on the screen. Color coded numbers in sequence ran upward as the heat index rose outside the chamber to facilitate the acceleration of the unseen particles inside with Purdue.
