by Jerry
“I’d watch my step if I were you, Harry,” John Christopher said. “We’ve an authentic physics professor in our midst this time.”
And indeed, young Ben Gregford was already looking a little glassy-eyed.
But Harry was undaunted; you have to admire him in situations like that. “Of course I didn’t see the accident myself. When I turned up to begin my period of tenure at the institute—”
“Tenure as what?” Bill Willis asked.
“Oh, you know, a sort of general specialist. When I began, Wells had already been able to analyse the effect, and was even ready to reproduce it under controlled conditions.
“But Wells, honest chap that he was, was rather stronger on the practicalities than the theory. A tinkerer, not a thinker; an Edison, not an Einstein. I’ve detected a pattern in what tends to become of that type, when reality overtakes their thought processes. So when he asked me to witness his experiment, I agreed with some trepidation.
“I remember how hot his lab was. It was the height of the Australian summer; and you know how the Aussies are; they regard air conditioning as an affectation of poms and other less evolved species.
“But there, at any rate, in that cluttered lab, was Wells’s pride and joy.
“ ‘This is it?” I took a swig from the beer can in my hand—this being Australia you didn’t go anywhere without a beer can in your hand—and ambled across to the object.
“It stood squat in the corner of Wells’s lab, a rough cube about three feet to a side. Rough being the operative word: it was without a doubt the ugliest machine I had ever seen. It was a Heath Robinsonish nightmare, a collection of bits of electrical junk of various types, ages and condition—there were even valves in there—apparently held together by no more than wishful thinking and a bit of sticky tape. The only components I could identify unambiguously were a couple of electromagnets.
“ ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?” Wells’s voice was charged with a paternal admiration, which came over to me even through the ghastly thatch of facial hair which reduced much of what he said to a semi-unintelligible monotone.
“I didn’t contradict him. Instead I said, approaching the thing cautiously, “What exactly is it?”
“ ‘I call it,” announced Wells nobly, his rimless glasses glinting, “a temporal flux accelerator.”
“I took that on the chin. “If that does what it sounds like, Professor Einstein might have something to say about it.”
“Wells snorted. “Dear old Einstein has had his day, Harry.” He crossed to an untidy pile of books in another corner of the room, and picked up a thin volume, little more than a pamphlet. “Have you ever read this?”
“I squinted at the title page: “The Nature of the Temporal Medium”, by Dr R Ashton. “No,” I said, “can’t say I have.”
“ ‘He knocks Einstein into a cocked hat, Harry! And his results show us the way to a whole new technology, based on the manipulation of time itself. All it took was an unfortunate accident with the magnetic containment field of Reactor C—
“ ‘Look, Harry, Einstein did point out that the rate at which time passes, as measured by instruments, can vary from observer to observer.”
“ ‘Of course; that’s elementary special relativity.”
“ ‘And everybody knows that subjectively the passage of time can crawl, or race. Why, a childhood summer day can last a month; when you’re older a year can go by in a flash—”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Gregford, the youngest of us seniors.
“He rather burbled on like this for some time,” Harry went on, “but at last we got to the point. “Look here, Wells,” I said, “what does this blasted contraption of yours actually do?”
“Ah,” he said. “Have you never read any of those stories where the hero—or the villain—could alter his own time rate with respect to the rest of the world? So that he can live, move, ten, a hundred times faster than everyone else, by stretching, say, a second of normal time into an hour of his own time? So that everyone else seems to be moving around so slowly that they’re almost motionless?—”
“Hold on a minute,” broke in Ken Slater. “This is all a bit fishy, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say,” said young Ben Gregford. He actually looked vaguely alarmed.
Ken turned to Charles Willis in the phone. “And didn’t you come up with a yarn on those lines, Charles? Art thief slows down time? What was it called—Time Enough for Love’ ?”
“That was Heinlein,” said David Kyle.
“ ‘Time Out of Joint’ ?”
“Dick!” shouted David.
“Shakespeare first!” said John Christopher.
“You may also be thinking,” Harry said grandly, “of a story by HG Wells. ‘The New Accelerator.’ Of course Wells did it all by drugs. Quite impossible, naturally. And you never justified your science at all, did you, Charles?”
“Now, look here—”
Ken Slater said firmly, “Yes, well, I never believed Charles’ old yarn, Harry, and I don’t believe you now. I mean why would you want such a power?”
Young Ben Gregford raised a finger. “And as to the physics—”
Harry said briskly, “Good question, Ken. “But why?” I asked Wells. “Who would wish to burn his life away like that?”
“ ‘But there’s a whole raft of applications,” Wells told me. “Think about it. You could accelerate biological or industrial processes, and achieve the end results in a fraction of the time. Clone a sheep and grow it to maturity in a day—rush through drug trials as rapidly as you like—that sort of thing. And there are intellectual applications too.”
“ ‘Intellectual?”
“ ‘Think of the Manhattan project. Think of the race to develop vaccines against new diseases. By fitting out a lab with my accelerators, you could compress years of research into a few days.”
“ ‘But your researchers would be sacrificing whole chunks of their lives—”
“ ‘ For the common good,” said Wells. “I would do it, if the cause were big enough—wouldn’t you?”
“Now, I couldn’t say if I would or not. But I recognised the nobility in the man—a humanity and intellect I hadn’t seen combined in a single individual since—”
“Sure,” said young Ben Gregford. “But look here. The successor to relativity, as you well know, Harry, is quantum gravity, of which we only have a partial understanding. Now, I’m pretty much up on the field, and I know most of the key players, I think. Smolin, Witten. And I’ve never heard of this guy—what was it, Ashton?”
“He was ahead of his time,” Harry said smoothly.
Beth looked faintly suspicious now. She got out her mobile phone, and with a few frighteningly competent key strokes logged onto the internet.
“Hmm,” said young Ben. “I don’t suppose you actually saw any of this theory, did you? You didn’t actually read this little pamphlet for yourself?”
“Wells insisted on showing it to me! Unfortunately—”
“Here we go,” murmured David Kyle.
“ ‘Look, Harry,” said Wells, “I’ll fill you in on the details later. What’s important here isn’t the equations. Harry—I have experimental proof. Or I soon will have. And that’s why I asked you here today.”
“ ‘ You say this thing can slow down time?”
“ ‘Exactly. It’s only in the early stages, of course—”
“ ‘By what factor?”
“ ‘In the ratio—approximately—of one to ten thousand.”
“My eyebrows shot up. “One to ten thousand? So one second becomes—”
“ ‘Ten thousand seconds,” said Wells, “which is about three hours.”
“ ‘But even supposing this pile does what you allege, how will I know? If it’s all going to be over in a second—”
“He picked up a battered old video camera from behind a heap of books in the corner. “Even you, Harry, I think,” said Wells, “will have to believe in a three minute film of yourself s
tanding there like a wax dummy, complete with voiceover by me.” Now Wells lugged a bulky, packed haversack from another corner of his lab to the machine.
“ ‘What’ve you got in there?”
“ ‘Food and water. Survival necessities. I can get pretty hungry and thirsty in three hours.”
“ ‘Well, you won’t starve,” I observed dryly. “But I don’t see why you need stock up like that anyway. Why can’t you just walk into the nearest restaurant and help yourself? You could even leave the money for it.”
“Wells sighed. “Are you really this obtuse, or are you showing off? Look. Every last item of food in every last restaurant, in fact everything outside the protective influence of the accelerator, is going to be completely immobile. It’ll all be frozen in position, because it’ll still be linked to the normal temporal flow, which will itself be frozen, more or less, relative to me.” (You got that much right in your yarn, Charles!—though it confused old HG a bit.)
“ ‘Ah, good point,” I said. “Um, how large is this zone of protection going to be?”
“ ‘It’ll be a cylinder. Seven feet high, four feet wide. I can confidently predict, Harry, that I’ll have collected all the proof I need that the accelerator works before you can bat an eyelid. Watch and learn, cobber.”
“I grinned. “I’ll drink to that,” I said, raising my beer can to my lips.
“Wells pressed down a lever—”
Harry paused, and sipped his beer.
We all sat back, rather glad of a break—all save young Ben Gregford, who scribbled equations furiously on a beer mat.
Beth was wide-eyed. She, of course, was being confronted by the full force of Harry Purvis for the first time, and looked close to burn-out. “So what happened?”
“Of course I can only surmise,” Harry said. “No record survives of Wells’s last three hours—”
“His last hours?”
“Surmise away, Harry,” growled Charles Willis from the phone. “Just make sure you don’t infringe my copyright.”
Harry set down his beer. “Very well. When Wells pressed down the lever—
“—he was plunged into silent, freezing darkness!
“The shock forced a yell from him, but he was a stout sort, like most Aussies, and soon regained control. He looked around. The darkness was absolute, a total absence of light. And it was cold too, a deep sucking cold, a huge contrast to the Australian summer day; it was like falling into a plunge pool.
“He sat down on the machine, and, shivering, tried to think things out. First the light: what had happened to it? He thought back through his understanding of Ashton’s physics—”
“Yeah, right,” murmured young Ben, still scribbling.
“He quickly saw it. Light, too, must be bound to the temporal flux. He pictured a photon striking a retina, slowed ten thousand times. Wouldn’t it seem to the retina that the photon had been stretched out to ten thousand times its original length? The shortest wavelength of visible light was that of violet, which was—Wells found difficulty in remembering—around a ten-millionth of a metre. Multiply that by ten thousand, and the result was a millimetre or so. It was no wonder he could see nothing: even violet light would be shifted far down into radio wavelengths. He could no more see sunlight than he could see the transmissions from a radio transmitter.
“That must explain why it was so cold, too. Infrared radiation would be shifted far down into the radio spectrum. Some of the electromagnetic radiations of the upper spectrum, beyond the ultra-violet, ought to be visible to him; maybe if he were outdoors he would be able to see the X-ray glow of pulsars . . .
“But on the other hand, though no light or heat could reach him, his own body heat would disperse as high-frequency radiation, relative to the outside world, as its wavelength would seem to be shortened by a factor of ten thousand. He must be a extremely bright source of X-rays: although a very transitory one, lasting only a second—and probably waning fast.”
“Even for a man weak on the theory as you say, to ignore electromagnetic effects is a pretty elementary error,” said young Ben.
“Yes,” said Harry, “one so elementary it was made by both Wells and Charles in their yarns!”
Charles Willis said, “Now look here—”
But Harry was in full flight. “I’d like to think,” he said grandly, “that Wells would have had a flicker of concern for me, who he had left standing only a few feet away from this X-ray burst. But let that pass.
“As he shivered in the gathering cold, his main concern was to leave proof of some kind that his accelerator field had worked. He had already given up hope of using his video camera; there was no light within his protective field, and it was impossible to record anything externally.
“If he rearranged the objects in the room, for example, then surely the instantaneous transformation would be convincing—but no, that wouldn’t work, with everything frozen in position.
“He could write a note, perhaps, and leave it somewhere—stuck in my pocket, for instance. That might do. He stood up, painfully aware of the cold stiffness that had settled into his joints, and stepped forward.
“And once again he cried out, as he collided with something cold, firm and solid. He stepped back, reached out and cautiously touched the surface. He found that he was completely walled in by a perfectly regular cylinder, about seven feet high and four feet wide.
“He sat down again. What could this be? He found his thinking processes becoming sluggish; the cold was reaching deep into him. It was obviously something trapped in the temporal flux, something that surrounded his zone of protection completely. What?
“Of course: the air. The molecules of the air itself must be frozen in place, forming an apparently unbroken mass. There was another thing he hadn’t foreseen.”
Ben snorted again, still scribbling. “Another boner. How dumb was this guy?”
Harry adopted a tone of regal disapproval. “No dumber than Charles, and HG Wells.”
“Now, look here—”
“Of course, if the air outside the protective zone was frozen in place, then all the air he had available to breathe was contained in this cylinder. That was, what, about three by two squared by seven, about eighty-four cubic feet. Would that be enough to last him the full three hours before the effects of the accelerator ended? He was no medical man; he had no idea.
“But then there was the cold. He remembered stories about polar explorers; he thought of hypothermia, of frostbite. He had no special equipment or clothing, no way to keep warm. Already his hands and feet were so numb as to be totally without sensation. The cold made him feel tired, sluggish, sleepy. Surely his only hope was to keep moving around, to generate body heat to keep warm. But he was already starting to shiver.
“He tried to stay awake. He feared that if he fell asleep, all would be lost . . .”
We were all silent now, even young Ben Gregford, all watching Harry’s face.
“As for what I saw,” Harry said, “when Wells pulled that lever I grinned. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said, raising my beer can to my lips.
“I lowered the can. I looked again at Wells, ready to congratulate him. But the can fell from my fingers and clattered to the floor. For Wells, who an instant before had been standing beside his machine, was now sitting, huddled up, completely motionless on top of the machine.
“ ‘Wells? Are you all right?’ I touched his shoulder—and gasped, and pulled back my hand: the shoulder was icy cold to the touch. I crouched down, looked into his face. The eyelids were sealed down by a thin coating of ice at their rims, the glasses were covered with intricate frost patterns.
“And on Wells’s luxuriant beard was a thin layer of hoar-frost, fast evaporating in the heat of that Australian summer day.
“So that’s the story.” He sighed and raised his beer. “To the pioneers of science.”
We rumbled assent and raised our pints.
“Now, just hold it right there,” said young Ben Gregford
, and he spun his beer mat across the table to Harry. “Look at that. I can prove that this whole thing is just impossible. Why, the conservation of energy alone—”
“As I explained,” Harry said smoothly, “Ashton was ahead of his time.” He put down his beer, but spilled a little on young Ben’s beer mat. “Sorry!”
“Gosh darn it,” said Ben, and he took a tissue and dabbed at the mat, but his equations were smeared beyond readability.
Bill said, “I suppose the moral of the story is that you can’t control time’s passage. You can’t slow it down, you can’t reverse it—”
“And nor should you want to,” said Charles Willis. David Kyle laughed. “Oh, Harry’s stories have no morals, Bill. Any more than he does!”
Beth was looking troubled too. She showed Harry the screen of her mobile phone. “Mr Purvis, I’ve been Googling this physicist you mentioned. Ashton? I can’t find a mention of him.”
“Of course not.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Commercial confidentiality.” Harry tapped the side of his nose.
Charles Willis, always a sceptic of Purvis, piped up, “This was always the trouble with your stories, Harry. They all finished up with a mysterious accident, the death of the inventor, the knowledge lost—”
“Not in this case,” Harry protested, sounding hurt. “After all the accelerator worked; it was its misuse that did for poor old Wells. We were soon able to fix it up and put it to effective use. Of course once it was patented, and then taken into government hands, we never heard of it again. Although I did hear that one or two of the devices had gotten into criminal hands.”
Charles asked, “And what would a crook want with a device like that?”
“Oh, nothing like your museum robbers, Charles! Don’t fret about your copyright. But there are occasions when artificial ageing adds value to an object. There’s a circle working out of Melbourne who are faking antiques, ageing them centuries in a few hours—undetectable forgeries. I’m told they specialise in seventeenth-century English pewter tankards. Of course that’s just a rumour.” He held up his empty glass. “That teenage landlord’s about to call time on us. Your round, I believe, young Gregford?”