Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics

by Raymond F. Jones

  Whatever the risk it is worth it to take a chance on being together and free from interference. This is all for now. I’m repeating myself at hourly intervals through today and tomorrow. After that I shall begin sending the instructions you will need to build the alternator.

  The pen stopped abruptly.

  CHAPTER VI: The Error

  A bright shaft of sunlight had moved across him, half blinding him to his surroundings, but he remained sitting there. The image of Rena was set in the sky and his senses devoured it, the faint flush of her cheeks, the black shining hair about her face.

  He waited the next hour and wrote the things she sent. It was almost word for word as before but for him there was newness, the sense of her presence. He had lost all regard for the gap of centuries that separated their parallel time sets. For him she was writing “now.”

  It was late in the afternoon when he went into the plant. Sykes was the first to see him.

  “You had me worried, George. I called your place a half dozen times and nobody answered. You haven’t had your foot on a rail all afternoon, I hope?”

  George shook his head. “No—but the effect is about the same.”

  “Well, I put the cops on her trail. They’ll let her know who’s boss. I tell you you can’t let these things get out of hand. If she gets away with it this early you’re sunk.”

  George managed to grin. “I appreciate your understanding and advice but I wish you hadn’t notified the police. Rena is all right. She just walked out on me.”

  He returned to his desk. The pen in his pocket seemed like a hot steel bar against him. What if something happened to it? Where could he keep it safely? He dared not carry it around. It wouldn’t be practical to put it in a bank vault but he felt that if he left it in the plant lightning or fire would be sure to strike.

  In the end that was the only practical place. He’d keep it locked in his desk. It would be as safe there for the period that he would need it as any place on earth.

  He stabbed with a finger at the row of books on one corner of his desk. He picked up his lab notebook and turned to the integrator specifications. He resumed work at the point he’d been that day—was it only one day ago?—when Rena had asked for new material.

  He began transforming the equations.

  “Boy, do you look like you’ve been out all night! I’ve looked all over for you. Sykes told me you’d been on a bender.”

  George looked up into the eyes of Carl Bacon, the integrator engineer. “Just got here,” said George. “Had something of a bad time.”

  “Rena?”

  “Yeah—she walked out on me.”

  Carl nodded with supreme confidence. “She’ll be back, old man. Don’t give it a thought. Give a look to what I’ve been doing to the gadget and let your worry department have a rest.”

  He would have been more interested if Carl had jumped off a high bridge, George thought miserably, but he leaned over to give attention to Carl’s sketches and equations.

  “I took one of those tempora tubes and redesigned the suppressor with a magnetic instead of an electrostatic field and reshaped the thing to hyperbolic conformation. Then I tried souping up the current until the space in that orifice is absolutely and completely saturated with electrons like a rummage sale swarming with housewives.”

  “And what happens?”

  “What happens? Man, the things have to speed up to get through. They’re pushed from behind and squeezed from the side. They take off along that hyperbola.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know but here’s the gimmick—there’s a forty-millisecond delay between control excitation and results at the end of the hyperbola. By extending it the time can be made even greater. That’s a heck of a lot more than the simple phase differences we were getting before.

  “And here’s the best—or worst of it. By reversing the field, the lag can be made a gain. The stream actually knows what’s going to happen to it—before it happens.”

  George squinted up at him. “And you talk about me being on a bender.

  Let’s both go down to Joe’s and spend the rest of the afternoon on a high stool.”

  “That’s what I thought. I haven’t told anybody but you. Come on into the lab and I’ll show you.”

  They worked half the night. George felt some of the grief-inspired tension dropping away from him as he became absorbed in the unbelievable phenomenon that Carl had described. He insisted on rerigging the experiment from scratch. It was still there. And there was utterly no explanation.

  As midnight approached, he straightened up and stared at the equipment. “Hook two of those things in a kind of push-pull arrangement, with pulse data modulation and they could memorize all the numbers written since your great grandpa swung out of the trees and started counting on his fingers.”

  “We have an integrator, huh, pal?”

  “Let’s keep it under wraps a bit until we find out just what we can do with it. But for now let’s get some shuteye. I’m dead.”

  He made certain the pen was in the desk and locked the drawers before leaving. At his rooms he took a quick bath and fell into bed. He lay there for a time, half tormented by the fact that he had not observed all of Rena’s schedules. She had told him she would simply repeat herself—but there was still a chance, he thought, of something going wrong, of some new information he might have missed.

  And if the whole scheme should fall and contact be lost with her he’d regret every minute he’d passed up.

  * * * *

  With relief he made contact on the first schedule the next morning and there was nothing new. The aching urge to answer back, to speak to her, was almost unbearable. He felt as if the force of his longing could almost project his thoughts across the ages to her.

  He spent the day with Carl, experimenting with the tempora tube, trying to find out what it would do, trying to explain it. He stopped long enough in the afternoon to keep one schedule with Rena. Reassured, he continued the lab work.

  The following morning he arrived at seven and locked himself in a small screen room. He hung a do-not-disturb sign on the outside and put a pair of cans on his ears, just for appearance. He sat there with a pad on his knees and Rena’s pen in his hand.

  It came at eight.

  George, darling, this is it. They want me to go in just one more week.

  I can’t ask for more time without arousing suspicion. There’s no excuse I can give to hold back longer. If only I could know that you are there!

  I’ll have to give you a lot of the math involved in order for you to understand how to construct and calibrate the machine. I’m trying to remember accurately how far you can go. I’ll simplify all I can, To begin with —As the stream of abstruse equations began to pour forth faster than his mind could follow he felt sick inside. New concepts, new manipulations that he had never dreamed of appeared on the paper. A week, she said. Did she have the faintest comprehension of the magnitude of the task she was setting up for him?

  He wrote steadily through the working hours. Once Carl banged on the door and George waved him away, pointing to the cans on his ears. Carl yanked at the door but finally gave up.

  Fearful of missing an important formulation George kept the pen moving steadily. His arm and fingers began to ache. He wondered how long Rena could go on steadily without interruption. It required an effort and clarity of thought far greater than that of ordinary speech, she had told him.

  At noon, she paused.

  That’s about half of what you’ll need of the math. You must be tired writing for so long. It tires me greatly because I have to maintain the highest possible level of visualization in order to penetrate the block adequately if at all.

  Before we rest let me give you a partial material list to mull over and begin accumulating if possible, Most of the electronic equipment you can get in your labs, I’m sure. Full details of procurement will have to be up to you, of course, but I’ve simplified everything as much as possib
le.

  Swiftly an itemized list began appearing beneath the other writing. As it lengthened, George uttered an audible groan.

  There were enough components there to build a GCA. And he was supposed to do it alone—in a week.

  —a half hour, George. There is so much to do.

  He laid down the cans and leafed through the sheets he had covered since morning. He had two junior engineers working on his current project, which was about wiped up. He could put them on it, he thought, without their knowing anything of what it was for. They weren’t very bright boys anyway. He ought to have help on the more technical end—but that was out.

  He could charge some components to his project and get the rest from the junk room. With only a week to go it would take that long for the paper to go through the mill, for somebody to discover there was monkey business going on. He made a couple of separate lists and stepped out to call one of his juniors.

  “Jack! I want you to start expediting this stuff. Here’s a list for Marvin, too. Clean up our large screen room this afternoon and start gathering this stuff together in there. We’ve got a hot project.”

  Jack grinned. He had never known George when he didn’t have a “hot” project.

  The model-shop work would be the toughest. There was a large order of metal stock, sheets and bars on the list. That meant machine work. Sykes would start asking embarrassing questions before much of that came through.

  But his risks were puny beside Rena’s, he thought. He wondered what they would do to her if they ever found out.

  He glanced hastily at the clock. The time was nearly up and he’d had nothing to eat. He called to a lab boy. “Get the cafeteria to put me up a gallon of coffee, will you? I’ve got some concentrated thinking to do this afternoon.”

  Rena kept at it steadily. She made no pause for side remarks—only the steady unending flow of technical information came from the pen. Quitting time at the plant came but she gave no indication of letting up. George’s whole body ached from the strain of sitting there steadily, his only movement the guiding of the pen which he didn’t dare stop for an instant.

  She gave him fifteen minutes rest at six, then resumed and went steadily until midnight. She had completed the math, sketched the main layouts and begun assembly instructions of some of the simpler sub-units.

  She stopped abruptly with only a word that she would resume in the morning. George guessed at the deep fatigue that must have overtaken her in that long day of concentration.

  It seemed hopeless to try to absorb that mass of material and build the intricate machine in so short a time. The one ray of hope lay in the assembly instructions which she had begun. They were in a form simple enough for Jack and Marvin to handle.

  He bought a gross of caffeine pills at an all-night drug store on his way to work the next morning. It was five o’clock and he felt he’d need them to get through the day and the next and the one after that —By the time the juniors had arrived he had a day’s work laid out for them. He also managed to swipe a couple of girls from someone else who had run into a snag on his project. They could help with the wiring and soldering. He sent the shopwork down to Tom Johnson, model-shop foreman—along with a box of fifty-cent cigars.

  At eight he was locked up and ready to go. He had rigged up a crude system of levers to hold the pen so that he could guide it with only a small motion of his arm.

  The hands of the clock passed eight. The pen made nothing but a wobbly line. He grasped it and knocked the levers aside. Swiftly the point began to trace out words. And then he knew why he had been so utterly exhausted. It was more than the mere holding of the pen. Somehow, his own nervous system was serving to power it. Rena was providing the trigger impulse.

  —think somehow Harkase has found out, He asked me about the pen today and what I thought you might be doing with it. What it means I don’t know. I’m just tired and scared, darling. If I could only know that you are there for certain.

  But I mustn’t waste time. I should be able to finish the instructions today. Then I will repeat everything once more. But even if you’ve got it all the first time there will be only five days —She plunged again into the description of the alternator, George’s sense of time seemed to go blind. He was a mere robot through which the message passed.

  She finished—at two o’clock the next morning. Her last words were barely legible, as if she were working in the last stages of exhaustion.

  George had fortified himself intermittently with caffeine pills but even so he felt as if he could not have continued another ten minutes. He glanced at his watch. An hour to get to his apartment. An hour back in the morning.

  He went into the screen room and cleared off a section of table. He could put that two hours to better use.

  He awoke again at five and made breakfast out of a couple of pills. His stomach felt as if it were slowly turning into one massive ulcer. His head seemed the volume of a number-three washtub. He could get breakfast in two or three hours when the cafeteria opened. In the meantime a lot of wiring could get soldered into place.

  It was a ghastly-looking rig growing up there, he thought, as he plugged in the iron. None of the beautifully-laced jobs that the lab girls usually turned out. This was the granddaddy of all bull models.

  But the rapidity with which it was going together was heartening. There was such utter clarity in Rena’s instructions that the lowliest ham could have put the components together..

  He tested the iron and leaned against the bench, checking over the last batch of instructions. Because of his fatigue when he wrote it most of it was wholly strange, as if written by another author and presented to him f or the first time. He thumbed through the pages, mentally weighing his own thin sliver of genius against the massive intellect that seemed necessary to absorb that mass of material.

  His eyes caught at a phrase.

  —the mounting of the velac in the fixed field is extremely critical.

  The field must be measured accurately with a flux meter and the exact plane of symmetry determined. The perpendicular axis of the velac channel —It was like a sudden small explosion in his brain, he thought afterward. That name—velac.

  Velac—it meant absolutely nothing. It resembled nothing that he had ever heard of before. In all her description Rena had used common terms for components—resistor, condenser, coil—values had been defined in familiar units. But velac—it was a word out of another language. A vague knot of fear congealed within his heart.

  She had made an error.

  In her vast experience in the ages of time she had forgotten what was available to him. Velac—a name out of the future, a device yet to be invented.

  It occupied a place of central importance in the machine. Without it there would be no functioning of the alternator, he was certain. And no way to tell her he didn’t know. No way to ask her how to build a velac.

  The enormity of that error seemed to complete the numbing effect of lack of sleep. He sagged against the bench, watching the slow curl of vapor from the heated soldering iron.

  CHAPTER VII: The Tryst

  Mechanically he took up the iron. There had to be some answer.

  Somewhere in that maze of instructional material there had to be a description of the velac. The name was just some contraction she used in reference to a common item or assembly of components. In the meantime he’d best get on with the rest of it.

  But as he worked he knew it was no good. He knew that even though he had slipped past the word while writing it there was still no explanation. A single word—a single word to keep him from Rena forever.

  Sykes surprised him at seven-thirty. The section chief walked up behind him as George bent over, half inside the temporary frame he had set up to hold the units.

  “Since when did we go into the spaghetti business?” said Sykes. He viewed the mess with distaste.

  George looked up, his face bleak and without humor. “Pretty, huh?”

  “Is there anything in pa
rticular that it does?”

  “Time machine,” said George. “You know. Send guys into the future and that sort of stuff.”

  He swayed on his feet.

  “George! What’s wrong? You look sick, man.”

  George laid down the iron and wiped his forehead. “Got up too early, I guess. I’ll be all right after I eat. Cafeteria isn’t open yet, is it?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Look, I don’t know why you’ve been knocking yourself out for the last couple or three days but you’ve got to cut it out.

  We want you to handle a new Army contract that’s coming up. Some of the technical brass will be in next week to talk over the preliminaries.

  “You’ve got to be in shape, man. There’s competition in this business now. I don’t mind your puttering around with this junk in off-periods but we’ve got to show a profit or get cut off at the pockets. We’re only a lowly development lab, not one of those prima-donna research outfits.”

  “Yeah, I know all that,” said George wearily. “I just haven’t been feeling so hot since Rena pulled out. Too much of the bottle and not enough sleep, I guess. This mess here is just a notion I got. It’ll only take a few more days to see if it’s going to pan out into something or not. Most of the stuff is from the junk room. I’m not spending the dear old stockholders’ hard earned cash on it.”

  “I think you ought to take the rest of the week off.”

  “You’d have to send the little men in white coats for me if I did. I’m off right here.”

  “Have it your way but get some breakfast into you. You look like a zombie this morning.”

  After breakfast he set Jack and Marvin to the assembly job. He went down to the model shop to try to hurry up the stuff there. Then he came back and checked to see if Rena were contacting him again.

  She was repeating the same material that he had already received.

  Though he had it he wanted to stay there, watching the pen record her thoughts. It was the closest contact with her that he would ever know—and there were so few hours of it left.