More than anything, NE resembled a very clean farm with lots of barns and research areas. All in all, very lovely and quiet, despite the nearly three thousand people working in the complex.
I saw the panda nursery, and even got to hold one. The small male had been injured when only a few days old and could never be released into the wild. They would keep him here, in the complex, for breeding. They even had his mate picked out. The original pandas had been a breeding couple; it was hoped the clones would be as well.
In my first two hours on the job, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about rare bovines, goats, and deer. NE had a regular farm here as well, with the requisite pigs, cows, and sheep. These “normal” farming activities were highlighted during the average “show and tell” for visitors, since NE also grew much of the food consumed every day by its employees. Ky continued talking about the company’s cloning efforts over lunch. I ate my salad and listened as we watched a lazy group of pigeons fly over the valley. The flock landed as one near several researchers. I pointed to the birds.
“Are the pigeons someone’s hobby? Or dinner?”
Ky laughed. “We don’t eat pigeons here. We have a flock of domestic birds because we got some viable cells from two different passenger pigeons.”
“Male-female?”
“No, both male, but we have been able to replace one Y chromosome with an X. They’re going to start implanting fertilized eggs into surrogate pigeons this week. By this time next fall we may have a new flock.”
“At most you’ll have multiple copies of only four breeding individuals. Too small of a subset to get a viable population.”
“It’s a start until we can pull individuals out of the past. We have to try.” Ky waved to the scene before us as the pigeons took wing again and filled the valley’s sky with their graceful dance. “If your father is right and we can’t travel back in time, much of this will fall apart. Not right away, but it will eventually because of the lack of new genetic material.”
“My father’s wrong,” I said softly. Ky looked at me, waiting for an explanation but I didn’t say any more.
Ky stood. “I promised you a tour of the mammoth lab. Researchers unearthed another frozen mammoth two years ago. This one is in much better shape than the one they found in ’99. They expect to find good DNA, though we don’t expect we’ll need elephant hosts for another year yet.”
I couldn’t help but smile as we walked out of the building. “This is all very exciting. A mammoth would be even better than pandas, but this all costs so much money. Who cares enough to support this?”
“Oh, you would be surprised how much people care about this work. Of course, not all is positive. Many have tried to buy us out and shut us down. It won’t happen. There are too many on the other side. Some are hunters who want to see rare animals, especially mammoths, come back.”
“To kill them?” I had to ask.
“Some may hope for that, but there will never be enough I for hunting. Actually most hunters are naturalists, you know. They like animals.”
“Ah, that’s why they shoot gorillas and elephants and make ashtrays out of the body parts.” The gentle summer wind blew across the valley and stirred the trees; still, I felt cold.
“Connor, NE never takes money with any strings attached. Certainly not that one. No matter how much money they gave, no one would be allowed to hunt our animals, here or in the wild.” We kept walking and passed several techs returning from their lunch. One woman was obviously very pregnant. I waited till they were out of hearing.
“Ky, I’ve been hearing rumors that the pandemic left us nearly sterile, as a people. Any truth to that?”
“How would I know? I’m a physicist.”
“Who’s very into preserving endangered species. Did that pandemic leave humans endangered?”
“We still have a population of nearly five billion left.”
“Five? I heard—How many people did we really lose in ’04?”
Ky ran his hands through his hair. “You really want to know?”
“Of course.”
“One point seven billion, give or take a few.”
“How? Where?”
“Entire villages were wiped out all over the third world, but especially in Africa and Eurasia. Only twelve percent of the population had any resistance to that strain of virus. Those with AIDS or TB never had a chance.”
“And some who survived couldn’t take care of themselves, and starved. I had heard some stories, but I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“We were lucky and had stockpiles of drugs to help against the pneumonia.”
“And now we’re sterile.”
Connor sighed heavily. “They don’t know for sure. Those individuals who were sick have decreased fertility rates. Are their children the same? Worse? Or normal?”
“And those who never got sick?” I asked.
“Some test normal.”
“Some, and if our children are worse or sterile, too?”
“We’ll need that time machine.”
“But we can’t change the past,” I said.
“No, but can we change the future by carefully stealing from the past?”
“I don’t know yet.” I itched to tell him more about my own research.
“By the way, we never had this conversation.”
NE had goals I could believe in—and they had money. Lots of money. In fact the physics portion of NE’s budget was rather small. Still there was no lack of funding my wants, as Ky had promised. And physics projects were seldom cheap these days. Had they ever been?
And they left me alone to work at my own speed. No official progress reports.
Even better than the government!
But then my work wasn’t that expensive. I had seen some of the other labs and their setups. Big bucks were spent on portable power plants to fuel time machines. Or at least what those researchers thought would someday be time machines. None of the machines looked even as nice as H.G. Wells’ famous machine from the movies. And these new toys would work about as well, too.
“Connor!” I turned and found Ky entering my lab. “Hey, there. What’s up?” I was seated at a workbench. I had thought it was the janitor returning to wash my soaking dishes, and I could chase him away again. I wasn’t so lucky. “Did you try getting me earlier?”
“No, why?”
“Oh, my cell rang and I ignored it.”
“Wasn’t me.” Ky’s hand swept the room. “Mostly empty. What are you playing with that’s so interesting, that you aren’t making a time machine?”
I looked at him. “What makes you say that?”
“The room is so empty.”
“Ah, you’re assuming one needs a great deal of equipment to time travel. But since we, you and I, physically do not leave our time, why would we need lots of big stuff?”
“Big stuff being a technical term?”
I smiled. “Sure. By the way, I’ve been here months and have yet to see your lab. Why is that?”
“I don’t have one. I’m management. I need to oversee everyone else’s work.”
“But you’re a good physicist.”
He shrugged. “I started out with a lab. Wasted space. Management takes up all of my time. What are you working on? Please tell me that that isn’t ordinary glass?”
“Oh, but it is.”
“Why?”
“My theories state we can’t affect history or change it in any way. But they don’t preclude us from watching it unfold—except we need a portal. Glass is very fragile and doesn’t last long even if the piece isn’t broken. In a short time it devitrifies. So I shall use this ordinary material as my spyglass—my window—to the past. It’s clear, so most people won’t notice it, even in pre-glass cultures. The smaller the piece used, the better. The less we potentially disrupt the flow of time, the more we can observe.”
“But we can’t disrupt it.”
“True, and if we try, time protects itself and won’t
let us even observe events. Be small and unobtrusive to see even more. Try to be big and flashy, and see nothing.”
“Are you saying you have already done this?” Ky’s voice was an Intense whisper.
I could lie and he would never know, maybe, but he was still my oldest friend. “Yes,” I answered quietly. “I’m just not ready to reveal it.”
“When?” He asked while looking over his shoulder as if expecting his own boss to walk in.
“Over two years ago.”
“Two years?” He rubbed his hands over his face and then looked at me. “This is really too much.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Later. How did you manage it? Where’s your device?”
“Elsewhere,” I answered.
“It’s not here at NE?”
“No, too dangerous. If someone tampered with it, it could do a great deal of damage.”
“To what? The past? Not according to your theories. The past is very safe.”
“But the future isn’t necessarily safe.”
“Can you go into the future?”
“No, that is protected from our direct travel also. At least for now, but our actions can change what does happen. I’d rather not be too rash and cause events to transpire which I can’t control.”
“What events?” He asked.
“You should get out more and see the world. It’s full of ambitious people trying to do their best to defeat us honest folks.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s leave the politics out. Tell me how your spyglass works.”
“I set up the temporal fields and move the piece of glass back through time to the event I want to see. The glass is the connection to that time-stream. The central portion is physically there, while the watcher, us, stays here. The glass can be connected to a video camera on this end, or a time-lapsed camera, or even a watchful eye.”
“Could someone in that when see us?”
“Yes, definitely, but the moment that interaction with the person on the other end changes history, the connection will break.”
“So if we were set up to watch a battle where only the dead, or rather soon to be dead, could see us, then we could perhaps interact?”
“Yes. Your thinking of going back and grabbing some dead or dying animals—”
“Or people.”
“Or people,” I added. “You could steal all the cells you wanted to use in cloning, or some sperm and ova. Anything, provided that interaction changed nothing about their time-stream. We could even pull some of the bodies forward.”
“It sounds so easy to be able to move things just a little bit, and change time.”
“It’s not a matter of what we might want or don’t want. Time cannot be changed. The past must remain constant or it wouldn’t be the past. We can’t create another version of events that is different from the original.”
“History is so—”
“Ky, it’s not history. It’s time. History is man’s take on the past. How a group of men—well, usually men—decided to record what they thought happened or what they wanted to happen. It’s seldom what really happened.”
“We’ve had this discussion before. It’s merely semantics. Can you show me the past?”
“Now?”
“Of course now! I want to see what our money has bought.”
“Wow, not your money. Not at all. I did this all on my own, while in school. All paid for out of my own pocket, thank you kindly. Which is why the apparatus isn’t even in this time zone but another.”
“Afraid someone would steal it?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Well, yes. But not here. Here you would be safe,” he said.
“Yeah, right. I’m surrounded by the leading time physicists. None of whom have gotten as far as I have. Which of them wouldn’t steal my work, even if just to play?”
“Well, maybe. I tend to think of them all as members of a family, but you could be right.”
“Could be? Still, it’s in a place where I don’t have to move it every time I move.”
“Will you at least show me the past? Show me Amora.”
“What?”
“Arnora. I bet that was the first place you visited. Her theater. You must have watched her rehearsals or some of her earl? shows.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Well, maybe, once or twice.”
“Once or twice? Once or twice a night perhaps. That’s how you knew about those photographs. That’s why you don’t have any time to date. You spend your nights watching television. But it’s a show no one has seen for over eighty years. I’m beginning to worry about you, my dear friend.”
I merely shrugged. “Why worry about something you can’t change? But I want to finish this spying glass before I take any more ventures into other time zones, then—”
“Wait a minute,” Ky began. “When you said your equipment was in another time zone, I thought you meant at this present, but when you say time zone you mean in the past somewhere? Or perhaps the future?”
“Yes, the when and where are different from now and here. But it must be in the past because we can’t go into the future. To do so would change the now, their past, and therefore would violate the Laws of Time.”
Ky shook his head. “There are so few people who truly understand what you mean by those Laws. Sometimes I think you just made it all up and continue to make them up as you go along.”
“Never. Each Law has the math behind it to support what I’ve concluded.”
“I know, it’s just too much to grasp sometimes. When can we go back?”
“In a few days, but only if you leave me alone. Now, please.”
“All right, I’ll go.” Ky turned to leave and got as far as the lab door before returning to my bench. “There was a reason I came in here. You know those papers your father published disproving time travel?”
“Yeah, I’ve read them. He even came up with some bogus research proving beyond doubt what I’ve already achieved. Who cares?”
“The Nobel committee. They gave him another award in physics this morning. Security said you’ve been here all night, so I didn’t think you had heard.”
At first I was stunned, but it passed quickly as I sat studying my portal. “He based his new work on my research, on my math. Did they even list me or my work?”
“No. The rumor is your father stated you actually worked in his shadow.”
“I was working in his shadow? I was working in HIS shadow?” I started to stand but sat again. “He never even thought about time travel until I started my research!”
“I know that! How long would it take you to get this thing running for a demo?”
“Why?” I asked.
“To show him and the world you’re not his fool.”
“It sounds really tempting, but what would be the point? No, wait. Hear me out. We would draw attention to what we do here. We’d get more money, but according to you, we’re not hurting. What would be the chance we would get unwanted attention, from the wrong kind of people?”
“We’ve got security.”
“No, I can think of all kinds of reasons why I don’t want others to know yet.” And I could, beginning with the media and ending with the government. My father was somewhere in there, too. “Don’t say anything to anyone, even your boss. Give me some time.”
“What will you say to your father? He’ll likely call.”
I reached over and pulled the phone cord from the wall and reached into my briefcase and pulled out my cell phone and pitched it toward the lab’s sink. I heard a satisfying splash as it landed in a bucket of cold dishwater.
“I should have gone into basketball,” I said.
“That was a lucky shot.” He moved toward the door. “I’ll hold all incoming calls for you, but not forever.”
“Thanks. Give me two weeks.”
He turned as if to ask something more. I interrupted him. “I’m fine. Go away, Kyrillos. I’ll see you later.” Then I looked back to my
work, but I didn’t breathe easier until I heard the click of the door closing behind Ky. He was my dearest friend, but he was still a pest. I put my father out of my mind; it was easy to do. I had had lots of practice during high school, but I didn’t perfect the trick until in college.
It actually took me three weeks to get the glass right. The chemistry of glass changed constantly throughout history, depending on its uses as well as technical advances and of course the source material. The closer the composition of my spying glass came to the glass of a chosen time zone, the more likely I’d be able to visit that time, but still we had to be able to see through the glass clearly. And then there were many time zones, most in which glass was never used or invented. If I could just find a way to let glass revert back to basic sand within a few days of the spying glass remaining behind, it would be easier to view the past. Making it more susceptible to the sun’s UV light seemed the most promising path. Having NE’s extensive chemistry section at my disposal felt almost sinful.
Ky respected my wishes for quiet so I could work on my glass, but within two hours of my finishing, he was in my lab. It made me wonder if the place was rigged, but I guess I didn’t really want to know since I didn’t ask him about it. Instead I smiled at his boyish excitement and pointed to the other stool before my workbench where he eagerly sat.
On the middle of the bench top rested a sheet of smoky glass, forty by sixty centimeters. The bottom edge of the glass sat in a wooden frame. Wires mounted on the left edge led to the nearby computer.
“This looks so simple,” Ky commented.
“It is. Why does it have to be complex?”
Ky opened his mouth and then shut it again without comment.
I rebooted the computer to get a fresh start. Just then, Rebecca entered the lab carrying a large pizza. She set it down on one end of the bench along with two sodas and my change. I smiled at her.
“It’s still hot!” I said.
“Of course,” she answered. “I’d never let a little frigid weather get in the way of a hot pizza.” Her smile was warm and genuine until she turned and sneezed. The sneeze was as small as she was.
“How’s that cold?” I asked.
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