He stood, savoring the moment in his imagination for a few seconds longer, and then proceeded through a door and along a corridor to his inner, private office at the rear of the lab area. This was where he conducted his more secretive business. Inside, he locked the door, cast a wary eye around instinctively, even though it was obvious there could be no one else there—and at once spotted the missing appointments diary on a corner of the desk. Tut-tutting to himself, he went over to the wall cabinet and released the catch that allowed it to slide aside, revealing his hidden safe. Armor plate, sunk into the brickwork of the original walls. No electronic security for him, whatever the administrators tried to say about how solid it was these days. How could anyone believe it, when half the people in the world seemed to spend their lives trying to make computers do what they were supposed to do instead of contributing to anything useful?
He dialed in the combination sequence and swung the door open to disclose his trove of files, papers, and notes from the time when he first met Eli Zaltzer and the dream began the course that would one day make it reality. He took out the file box reserved for test results, added the hard copy that he had brought from downstairs, and was just replacing the box, when he heard footsteps in the corridor outside. They sounded furtive, as if someone were creeping past warily. Normally, Abercrombie always locked the door when he opened his safe, but on this occasion, after the momentary distraction of seeing the appointments diary on the desk when he walked in, he was unable to recall whether or not he had. “Who’s there?” he called out, fearful of being found with the cabinet open. There was no reply. The footsteps hastened away.
Hurrying to the door, Abercrombie found that he had locked it after all and had to fumble for his keys before he could get out, by which time the corridor was empty. He followed it to the back stairs and the freight elevator but found no sign of anyone there. As he began retracing his steps toward his rear office, a peculiar, low-pitched whine emanated from the other side of the door to the workshop area ahead of him. He increased his pace, heading past his office door. “Who is that in there?” he yelled ahead, but the noise ceased just before he burst in, and he found the place empty. With rising agitation he carried on through to Mrs. Crawford’s post, but she had seen no one go that way. Then Abercrombie realized that he had committed the cardinal sin of leaving his private office door unlocked with the safe open.
Abandoning Mrs. Crawford in mid sentence, he raced back through the workshop area, slammed the office door behind him, and rushed across the room to check the contents of the safe. Moments later, he emitted a horrified groan. The master notebook, in which he had brought together and summarized the essential design information for the time machine—the distilled essence of his past eight years of intensive labor—was gone.
He had to inform Eli Zaltzer and the university governors that the project had run into unexpected difficulties, forcing him to put the schedule on hold. Zaltzer remained as trusting and optimistic as ever, but the faculty members who were privy to Abercrombie’s crazy scheme chortled behind raised hands and told each other it had only been a matter of time—deriving added glee from the intended pun. Abercrombie became convinced he was the victim of a conspiracy to either sabotage or steal his project. Several times, he thought he heard prowlers about in the labs, but he never managed to catch anyone. On one occasion, late in the evening when the lights were turned down, he did actually accost and pursue an intruder; but on rounding a corner was met full-force by the discharge from a fire extinguisher, and by the time he had cleaned the froth from his eyes and recovered, the trespasser had vanished.
And then, a week or so after the loss of the notebook, he heard the strange noise again. He was on the phone in his public office at the front near the main elevators, wearing a dress suit in anticipation of an honorary dinner he was due to attend that night, when the same low-pitched whine as before reached him through the wall from the direction of the lab and workshop area. He excused himself, saying he would call back later, and hung up. Then, giving no advance warning this time, he rose and went over to the door, checked the corridor beyond, and crept stealthily to the double doors leading through to the workshop. The noise had by now ceased. Turning one of the handles gently, he eased the door open far enough to peer around it and inside . . . and almost fell over from shock and disbelief. The time machine was there, standing in the middle of the floor, exactly as he had envisioned it! But there was nobody with it.
He stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him, and walked past it warily—almost as if fearing that a sudden movement might cause it to vanish—and secured the doors leading to the rear before coming back to study the machine more carefully. It stood over seven feet high from the bottom of the cylindrical base frame, crammed with circuit boxes, generator manifolds, and coil housings, to the top of the field delimiter capping the cage. The ticking and clicking of hot parts cooling came from beneath, as from the hood of a car after a long run. Abercrombie reached out and touched part of the structure gingerly, as if unsure if it might be an illusion. It was solid and real.
And as he thought through what it meant, his indignation rose in a hot flush climbing slowly from his collar. Evidently, at some eventual future time, somebody would build the machine. So was he now supposed to go through the protracted effort of redoing all the work he had lost, in order for someone to steal it and go careening around through time and having who-knew-what kinds of adventures? Dammit, he had been though all that once. And here he was, seeing the fruits of his own labors for the first time. It was his!
Furious now, he opened the access gate, stepped up into the cage, and stared at the control panel atop its plinth. He wasn’t really sure what he intended to do. And as he looked over the keys, lights, and the command lines displayed on the screen, it slowly came to him that he wouldn’t have had a clue how to go about doing it. The machine was based on his original design, yes; but a lot of detail that he was not familiar with had been worked out in the final stages. But it was rightfully his, wasn’t it? Maybe he could turn things around and be the one to benefit from his interloping future self’s labors instead. That would require studying the construction and wiring and trying some tests, which could take a while. It couldn’t be done here; his other self who had arrived in it for whatever reason could return at any moment. He needed a safe place to hide the machine, where he could investigate it at leisure.
But could such a plan work? He frowned, bemused by the bizarre logic. Surely, whatever he decided to do, his future self would remember having decided, and be able to pursue him accordingly. Unless the time line somehow reset itself to accommodate changes. Or maybe some multiple-universe explanation applied, in which the possibly similar past that a person returned to was still different from the past that was remembered. He had long speculated about such alternatives, but a working machine was the prerequisite to being able to test them. And now he had one! Forget all the questions for now, he told himself. Worry about getting the machine to a place where he could devote himself to the only prospect in sight—without having to repeat eight years of work—for finding some answers.
It would need to be reasonably close but unfrequented by people. Anywhere in the City Annexe itself would be out of the question because of the comings and goings of staff, students, visitors, and a host of others. But a short distance away along the waterfront there was a disused dock building, a former customs warehouse still owned by the Port Authority, earmarked for development into an indoor market and restaurant mall one day, but derelict for years. The cellars beneath would provide a suitable place—not perfect, maybe, but they would do until he found something better. And with the limited time at his disposal, that was good enough. He stepped back down out of the machine and went through to the rear part of the building to find a means of moving it.
By the freight elevator he found a hand dolly that was used for moving equipment cabinets, machinery, and other heavy items around the labs. A utility room ne
arby, where maintenance and decorating materials were stored, yielded a painter’s floor tarp that would serve as a cover. He hurried the dolly back to the workshop, eased the lifting platform under the time machine’s base, elevated it, draped the machine with the tarp, and trundled it back through to the rear. The freight elevator took him down to the goods-receiving bay at the back of the Annexe building, where he signed for use of the departmental pickup truck. He brought the truck around to the loading bay, and minutes later was driving his purloined creation out through the rear gates of the premises, onto the waterfront boulevard.
He had gone no more than a few hundred yards, when he heard the wail of a police siren behind and saw red and blue lights flashing in his mirror. For a sickening moment his heart felt as if it were about to fall into a void that opened up in his stomach. Then he realized it had nothing to do with him; a car a short distance back was being pulled over. Exhaling loudly with relief, Abercrombie entered the weed-choked lot surrounding the derelict dockside building, drove around to the side, where he would be less conspicuous, and parked in front of a once-boarded-up entrance, its planks long ago stripped and broken up for firewood by vagrants. He climbed out of the truck and went in to reconnoiter the interior for a suitable hiding place for the machine.
The figure who had observed Abercrombie’s arrival retreated to a hideaway in the cellars below the front part of the building, screened by fallen debris but commanding a view of the ramp down from the ground-floor level. His name was Brady. He was long-haired and bearded, dressed in a military-style camouflage parka with paratrooper combat boots. As Abercrombie came out of the room into which he had wheeled the strange contraption, and disappeared back up the ramp to the side entrance, the watcher murmured into a cell phone to a person that he referred to as “Yellow One.”
“I dunno. It looked like a machine.”
“What kind of machine?”
“I never saw anything like it before. A man-size birdcage. Maybe some kinda surveillance thing. I don’t like the look of it.
“What does the guy look like?”
“Tall, about sixty, maybe. Thin. Could be kinda mean. Hair white and gray. Wearing a black suit.”
“A suit? There’s only one kind of people that wears suits. They’re onto us, man. Get—”
“Wait!” Brady interrupted as the sound came of tires squealing to a halt outside the front of the building, close to where he was concealed. Moments later, footsteps pounded in on the floor above, followed by crashing sounds and metallic clanging. “There’s more of ’em breaking in upstairs!” Brady said, sounding alarmed.
“It’s a bust,” Yellow One told him. “Get yourself out!”
Professor Abercrombie came back out onto the waterside boulevard and drove the truck back to the university Annexe. Just as he was turning in through the rear gate, a dull boom and a whoosh sounded from a short distance away as the building he had just left exploded and collapsed in flames.
Police and fire-department vehicles arrived by the dozen, and the ensuing spectacle meant that little work was done anywhere in the nearby university buildings for the rest of the day. Curious officials from the Annexe went to find out what they could from the officers in charge, and the gossip in the staff coffee room by the end of the afternoon was that an extremist group of survivalists, who trained in the hills with guns and believed in preparing for catastrophe or nuclear holocaust, had been using the place to store weapons and explosives. The police had been waiting for a special shipment, due within the next few days, before moving in, but evidently there had been some kind of accident in there first. Rumor had it that the charred remains of one of them had been found in there. Nobody else had been caught.
All of which was of peripheral interest to Abercrombie, who was now left without either design data or machine, after having had the completed, working model literally in his hands. And just to make his day, when he left the office to go home, he found that his car had been stolen.
That night, in a fit of dejection, he took out the folder with the lists of media contacts, scientific notables, and others that he had prepared for the day of his great announcement, which he kept in the desk at home in his apartment, carried it downstairs to the basement, and threw it into the building’s incinerator.
The next day, Abercrombie stood at the window of his private office, staring despondently out in the direction of the old customs warehouse. What was left of the shell had been pronounced unsafe and reduced to rubble by a demolition crew, who were now fencing off the site pending a decision on eventual disposal. But the professor’s thoughts were not on how the Port Authority should best manage its piece of still-prime downtown waterfront real estate.
Why, he asked himself, was the obvious always the last thing that occurred to people? Probably for the same reason that a lost object always turns up in the last place one looks: Nobody is going to carry on looking after they’ve found it. The mysterious intruder of the day before, and no doubt those that he had suspected previously, hadn’t been from any conspiracy at all. It had been himself, coming back from a future where the machine had been built! It had taken the discovery of the machine for him to realize it. He no longer possessed the notebook containing the design information necessary to build it. Could it be that the notebook had been used, nevertheless, stolen from the past by means of a machine that will exist in the future? It sounded preposterous, but the evidence was there. However, if so, that raised another logical conundrum. For if, somewhere in the future, he had built a working machine—possibly after having to work it all out again—then what motivation would he have for going back and stealing the design? He wouldn’t need it!
No. He shook his head decisively. He wasn’t going to get embroiled in any more of those impossible tangles. He had problems enough as things were. Just take the facts one at a time and let philosophers or mystics worry about the contradictions and deeper meaning of it all, he told himself.
Yet the implication remained that at some point in the future he would find himself the owner of such a device. He stared distantly out along the waterfront and allowed himself to relish the thought. If he ever did go back to regain the notebook, he would take out some insurance to prevent anything like this from happening again, he resolved. Computer people were always impressing the importance of keeping backups. Well, maybe they did have a valid point there, he conceded grudgingly. Very well, he would follow their advice. If—or when?—such a day came, he would leave a backup copy of the notebook in some secure place, back there in the past. Then, if he ever lost the original, had it stolen, or found himself without it for any other reason, from then onward, anytime in the future, the backup would always be there, waiting to be retrieved. It was so breathtakingly simple—once again, eminently obvious now that he had thought of it. Had he done so before, he would have taken the simple precaution of maintaining an additional copy to the one that had been in the safe.
He turned his head unconsciously from the window toward the wall cabinet concealing the safe while he thought this. And his jaw dropped as the bizarre realization hit him of what the very act of his thinking it signified. The fact of having made this decision meant he would carry it with him into the future. And the decision would still be in his head when he traveled back via the machine to what was now the past. Provided, then, that he abided by that decision, it had already been done! Somewhere, right now—unless his penchant for forgetfulness were to reach impossible proportions in the future—a hidden copy of the notebook existed! That must have been how he had built the machine! He looked around the office, licking his lips in the excitement that had seized him, as if now that he had worked the implication out, the hiding place would somehow leap out and advertise itself. He cast his mind over all the places there were to choose from. Somewhere in the Annexe? His downtown apartment? Somewhere else in the city? . . . Where, out of all the possibilities, would he have picked?
And that was when the full craziness of it all finally hit hi
m; he realized that it didn’t matter! There was no need for him to try and second-guess himself at all. For all he had to do was pick a place—any place—right now, and be sure to put the backup copy in that place when he came to travel back. And that would be where he would find it today!
Surely it couldn’t be that easy. He went back in his mind through the insane logic, looking for the flaw, but couldn’t find one. Okay, then, where would he hide the copy? He looked around again. And his eyes came back to the window and the site where the demolition crew were finishing the fence around the ruin of the old warehouse. Down there in the cellars beneath, where he had taken the machine yesterday, there were bound to be corners and cubby holes left beneath the rubble. Nobody would be going in there for a long time now, probably years. With the design information available, building the machine would only take about three months. It was close by, being posted with Keep Out and hazard warnings.
Then his eyes blinked rapidly as the inevitable complication reared its head. There was another version of himself at large out there somewhere—the version who had arrived in the machine. And his disposition would not be very friendly, since by now he would have discovered that the machine had been stolen and he had no way of going back. But if this Abercrombie—the one looking out of the window, trying to make sense of it all—now chose a place to hide the backup in, then the other one of him would not only have remembered it too, but have known it all along while he (this Abercrombie) was still having to figure it out. On the other hand, knowing it wouldn’t have helped his other self to do much about acting on it, since the place had been swarming with firemen and demolition people since yesterday. So did that mean it would be a race to see which of them would get there first, probably tonight?
Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Page 27