A Gift of Time

by Merritt, Jerry

  I ordered a half-dozen controllers with a follow-on contract to integrate the controllers to actual fighter aircraft joysticks modified with the thumbwheel altitude control and twist-motion yaw control.

  Back at the vault Ell and I began designing a manned glider—a four-seater.

  “It should operate outside the atmosphere in case you end up there by accident,” Ell said. “Underwater too. And it should have a homing switch to return you to your starting point in an emergency. Also, the machine will take everything in its radius of influence with it on a time hop. If you don’t want to carry a chunk of the floor here along with you, you need to modify the radius to encompass only the glider.”

  “How on earth do I do that?”

  “I don’t know. Lovely Pebble didn’t give me detailed technical knowledge on time travel. I’m not even sure a human brain could hold it all.”

  “But her glider didn’t have a problem carrying away extra mass did it?”

  “No. The active volume stopped at the outer surface of the glider. I do know that much.”

  “But you don’t know how that was done?”

  “No. Our gliders had thousands of improvements made over the years, just as your automobiles and aircraft have. I do know the simplest volume to generate is a sphere. The next simplest is a hemisphere. So if we can figure out how to do a hemisphere we could put the flat side down and align it with the glider’s landing struts so only the machine and the surrounding air would be involved in the hop.”

  “Maybe we could just leave the machine hovering all the time and avoid having it touch down.”

  “You don’t even want to think about entering or leaving your glider while it’s hopping. In a hover it would be in a continuous hop. Any piece of you sticking out would be left behind.”

  “Ah. Forgot about that. A thousand slices a second.”

  “So you’ll want the doors automatically locked when the glider is hopping.”

  But these final niggling, little problems fell to persistence, and the following year Ell and I rolled a large crate from the freight elevator into the lab. An hour later we had unpacked a sleek, silvery vehicle shaped something like an elongated egg flattened underneath. The five-foot-high shell sat on three short struts. Overall length was twelve feet with a width of six feet. Solar cells covered the top. The vehicle had been tested for a day in NASA’s space simulator in a hard vacuum under artificial sunlight on pretext of being a prototype for a future on-orbit transfer craft for a private space company. It was certified airtight and could, for a brief time, maintain a livable, though hot, interior temperature through thermoelectric cooling powered by the solar cells.

  After securing the vault, I activated the glider’s gullwing doors. They swung up with a quiet sigh. The inside smelled of leather from the four comfortable seats. Visibility out the side and forward windows was excellent. A low console held the simple array of selector switches plus screens with camera views straight beneath and behind the craft. And, of course, keypads to manually input settings to take us to a specific place and time on the initial hop. The oxygen generators, heat radiators, and deep-cycle batteries took up the last few feet in the rear. It had everything Ell had suggested except the emergency homing switch to return us to our starting point in an emergency. I hadn’t gotten around to designing a foolproof system for that.

  An empty compartment to hold the control boxes that drove the craft occupied the middle of the console. The wiring harnesses were already installed so all we had to do was plug in the amplitude selector, control box, and joystick. That took about a minute including snapping the compartment’s cover in place. The craft had cost more than a Lamborghini. Way more. We looked at each other.

  “Where to first?” Ell asked.

  “How about a few centimeters up and forward in present time just to be sure everything works.” I flipped the toggle that closed the doors. They hissed shut with a final, reassuring whine of latches reaching out to pull them tightly closed sealing us into the hushed interior. I powered up the console, selected the centimeter setting, and rolled the thumbwheel upwards one click. The craft lifted smoothly then hovered when I rolled the wheel back a click. I pushed the stick forward a half-inch and we glided forward as well and kept moving until I returned the stick to neutral. When I twisted the stick, the craft yawed slowly in the direction I wanted.

  “So far so good,” I said. “Now watch the clock on the wall.”

  I selected the seconds increment for a time jump then pulled the trigger to engage the time drive before pushing the stick forward slightly. The clock jumped seven seconds ahead.

  By then I was feeling overwhelmed. I powered the machine down without thinking and it dropped several centimeters to the floor with an unnerving bounce. “Guess I should have built some sort of interlock into the power switch so it won’t shut off while we’re in midair.”

  “Yeah, there aren’t a lot of safety overrides built into this thing,” Ell noted with wide, apprehensive eyes. “We need to be careful.”

  We continued playing with the glider in centimeter-and-seconds-mode for a while. That bit of practice made a big difference in our ability to maneuver, and we were soon anxious to take it “on the road,” as Ell put it. She had recently read some Jack Kerouac.

  “How about straight up to three thousand meters in present time,” I suggested. “That should be high enough we won’t be visible from the ground then we can figure out what to do from there.”

  “Doesn’t sound too well thought out, Cager. You’re usually a lot more cautious than that.”

  “Yeah, I know. But this is such a great little toy. And we’re going to have to leave the vault someday. I’m about as ready as I’m going to get.”

  Ell grabbed onto the sides of her seat. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  I punched in a three-thousand-meter altitude for the initial hop and selected a space interval of kilometers and a time interval of years for the joystick. Inputs loaded, I glanced at Ell and engaged the actuator. The vault vanished.

  As I searched the horizon to orient myself, I noticed a commuter aircraft growing larger by the second out my side window. Its engines now clearly visible, it hurtled toward us on a collision course. I shoved the stick forward all the way, and everything outside went black.

  “What just happened?” Ell asked, somewhat alarmed as she floated weightless above her seat.

  I pulled the stick back and glanced down at the console screen showing the field of view behind us. A bluish half-disk glowed on the screen. Ell said, “Isn’t that Earth?”

  It occurred to me the selector switch must have been cross-wired. “I certainly hope so. We’ve got some problems in the wiring harness I think. I was just trying to get out of the way of a small commuter plane bearing down on us. It must have been coming out of L.A. headed to San Francisco. I guess I didn’t realize how much air traffic was in our area. Maybe we should go back about seventy or so years in time before we reenter the atmosphere.”

  “Well. At least we know this thing is airtight.”

  “Good thing.” I engaged the trigger to put us in time-mode and pulled the stick back. Nothing happened.

  Ell muttered, “Oh, shit.”

  Then I remembered I had to displace the glider slightly so it wouldn’t intersect itself on the reverse trip. That done, I pulled the stick back again and realized there was no readout of how much time was passing. I had planned on just looking out the window to judge that. After a while I pushed the control stick back to neutral and released the trigger putting us back in spatial mode. I yanked the stick back and the earth instantly grew in apparent size until it filled the console’s rearview screen.

  “Damn. The spatial travel interval is really messed up.” I switched power off putting us into freefall. Weightless again, I clicked the selector switch down to meters, then thought better of it. If the wiring was crossed, the meters setting might be wired to millions of kilometers. Or worse. I returned the selector switch to kilome
ters. As the glider fell, the earth slowly grew in size increasing more rapidly as we accelerated downward. Finally we entered the upper reaches of the atmosphere where the drag settled us back into our seats.

  I peered out the windows looking for a familiar land formation. After a minute or so I asked, “Do you see anything you recognize?”

  “Yeah. That’s the backbone of what you call the Rocky Mountains over there.”

  I looked where she was pointing. “The Rockies don’t have seas on both sides, Ell.”

  “They did in the Cretaceous.”

  When I glanced at Ell, my eyes must surely have been as big as hers.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, pretty sure.”

  “So something’s definitely screwed up in the selector switch wiring.”

  I applied power again to stop our descent and bumped the stick forward momentarily. In that instant, the ground below shot by in a blur of speed leaving us hovering high over a beach.

  “I think I can make a controlled landing if I leave the horizontal motion controls alone and switch the power off to let gravity continue to take us down. I’ll reapply power intermittently to stop our fall along the way. That should let us work our way onto the beach.”

  “Try it. We need to get on the ground to figure out what’s wrong. Or if nothing else, punch our home base coordinates back in and go back to the vault.”

  “Uh, that won’t work.”

  “Oh?”

  “I didn’t design this thing to take fixed coordinates. It takes distance, direction and time relative to wherever we are.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Well said. Because I have no idea what the distance, direction or time back to the vault is from here—wherever here is. But let’s get on the ground and we can work something out.”

  I flipped the power switch on and off several times. On the last drop, we stopped a few feet above the sand facing inland.

  Everything was going fine, so I should have left well enough alone, but I didn’t. Instead, I rotated the control stick to swing us around to face the sea. The craft immediately spun up to a dizzying whirl throwing both of us forward out of our seats as the massive deep-cycle batteries tore loose from their support struts and exited the rear of the craft leaving a gaping hole. The loss of power sent us spinning up the beach as we flew off in the opposite direction of the ejected batteries. We finally came to rest halfway up a large dune. I helped Ell back into her seat and hit the door release. Nothing happened. Without power, the doors remained firmly locked. Humid air carrying the loamy aroma of decaying vegetation flowed in through the hole in the rear where the batteries had flown out.

  Ell was studying me intently when I finally turned to her. “What?” I said.

  Chapter 53

  We crawled out through the breach left by the departing batteries to find ourselves in a sweltering hothouse of Cretaceous evolution. A serene, blue-green sea lay before us. Behind us, a stand of narrow palms filtered the warm air through gently swaying fronds. And beyond them, a broad swamp of dark water and strange, feathery trees barred the way to a distant forest. Then I looked up.

  A pallid moon hung in an ashen haze of water vapor against a pale-blue sky. Something was wrong. It looked the same size it always had. In the distant past it should have been closer and, therefore, larger. Maybe we weren’t in the distant past after all. I ran the orbital calculations back seventy million years. To my surprise, It would have appeared only a half-percent larger. Okay, one problem solved. Maybe we are in the Cretaceous.

  Finally Ell’s activity pulled me back to reality. She had slipped her shoes off and slogged down the dune onto the broad beach. I hoped she wasn’t headed for the swamp.

  “Where’re you going?”

  She turned and held her arms out to her side. “See if I can find the batteries.”

  As I looked beyond her, the skid marks left by the glider’s spinout extended several hundred feet down the beach. Beyond those, I thought I could make out some dark blobs in the distance. Maybe the batteries weren’t too badly damaged. I had just started down the dune when one of the blobs shifted. I stopped and squinted.

  “Um, Ell, something’s coming up the beach toward us.” I pointed in the direction of approach. She whirled around with her hand shading her eyes for a few seconds before sprinting back up the dune.

  “Looks like a herd of plant eaters. Predators don’t normally congregate in groups that big.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “But predators usually aren’t far from a herd of prey, either. Ready for when they get hungry again.”

  “I take it you’ve studied these things?”

  “I’ve spent some time in your Cretaceous. Not in a real-world body, though. Just observing using my glider’s imaging capability.”

  “Then you’re lucky to still have an onboard-copy of yourself up there on the moon. You might need it shortly.”

  “You know that does me no good, Cager. That’s Lovely Pebble up there. I’m here, as real as you. And just as scared.”

  “Then maybe you should put your shoes back on. We might have to run.”

  From the top of the dune, we watched the approaching herd emerge from the haze, honking and swinging their heads about in endless search of danger. I had always thought of dinosaurs as stupid lizards wandering around like mindless automatons, but this group seemed rather intelligent. Fully conscious of their surroundings. Sticking together for protection. As they passed below in a steamy fume of vegetative flatulence, I made out feathery ruffles along their backs. Their flanks glistened light brown with large, mottled blotches of olive and purple. Several of the larger ones raised and lowered feathery head crests every few seconds.

  Then the closest adult caught sight of us on the dune and veered toward the water in alarm. The unexpected motion sent a ripple through the herd as they all tried to skirt the newfound danger. Shoved too hard, several staggered out into the blue-green shallows where they flew into a panic. A moment later, I understood why. A great head rose up from a deeper blue patch, water streaming from its mandibles. The sea creature cast its head about before lunging for the nearest land beast to drag it still kicking into deeper water. As crimson and gore billowed up from the depths, a flight of outsized pteranodons glided low over our heads to circle the action before swooping down to scoop up bits of flesh.

  I stood both fascinated and terrified. I had thought earlier of swimming out into the water for safety if any carnivores showed up. That was clearly no longer an option. And the terrain around us provided no cover except the wrecked glider. And if we did use it for protection, the glider wouldn’t hold up to an attack from a large beast trying to get at us. So hiding in the glider was also out. Then it occurred to me we had no food or water.

  “I don’t see any immediate threats, Cager. Maybe we should try to find the batteries while the coast is clear. Did you notice which way they flew out?”

  “No. We were spinning so fast I was thrown out of my seat like you. But they would have come out opposite the way the glider went, so we should start looking back where those skid marks start.”

  As we searched along the sand churned up by the passing herd, Ell asked, “What if the batteries are destroyed?”

  “Those batteries were made up of multiple one-and-a-half-volt cells. The IC chips only need a volt and a half to operate. It’s just that one of those large batteries was wired to output six volts to run the cooling fans and the thermocouple cooling system at night. The other battery only ran the chips. If we can just find one or two of those individual cells, we can get out of here if the chips don’t overheat with the fans off. Or maybe we’ll find enough to power the fans too.”

  Ell looked up at me. “So this isn’t as bad as it seems.”

  “Not if a few of the cells survived.”

  After another minute of searching, Ell pointed. “There.”

  It was clear the main batteries had fragmented into cells as they tore
loose. Three cells lay embedded in the sand. But as we drew near them, we saw they had been trampled by the passing herd. I dug one out only to discover it was cracked beyond repair. I straightened up and nudged the other two with my shoe. They were crushed as well. And those were the only three in sight. From the location of the three crushed cells, it was clear everything had been hurled out to sea.

  But Ell hadn’t given up. “There’s another near the water.”

  “Wait here. I’ll get it.”

  “Don’t forget there are things out there watching, Cager.”

  “Not a chance. Be right back. Keep an eye out for anything moving through the water.”

  As I lifted the battery cell from the sand, I saw another twenty feet out in the water. Several more dark blobs lay fifty feet beyond it. I carried the battery back up to Ell.

  “I didn’t see any movement in the deeper water,” Ell said. “Maybe the poor plant-eater sated the thing for a while. How’s the battery look?”

  “Not too bad. A few gouges but the terminals aren’t pulled loose. I think it’s okay. But it would be nice to get that other one out there just beyond the beach. The cells are sealed so the salt water probably hasn’t harmed them yet.”

  “Let me go get it, Cager. You got this one.”

  “No. I’ll get it. It’s in the shallows and you said you didn’t see anything moving around out there. If I wade out quietly, it should be okay. Back in a second.”

  I leaned down to recover the battery. When Ell yelled from the beach, I looked up to see a dome of water welling up a hundred feet out. Grabbing the battery, I turned just as a coruscation of spray swept over me. A second later, a small tsunami washed past, half carrying me onto the shore. Ell was screaming. When I reached her, I turned to see a dark form undulating through the shallows back toward deeper water.

  Ell stood speechless for a moment before saying, “That’s it, Cager. No more trips into the water. Maybe the other battery parts are still on land somewhere. At least we know we’re in the right vicinity.”