The Dinosaur Chronicles

by Erhardt, Joseph

  “How closely?”

  “To within several centimeters, actually. Time travel would be impossible without such accuracy. Your scientist could not have traveled into the sealed chamber to adjust the water spigot without it; he might otherwise have materialized within a wall, to mention just one possibility.” I took my arm and pointed in the direction of Hercules. “My calculations show that the Universe began some 14.58 billion years ago in that direction.”

  Valik followed my arm and nodded thoughtfully. Then, in the dim light of the quarter moon, he asked softly, “Do you have a telescope, Professor?”

  I nodded. “A ten-inch reflector with good optics. You wish to take a look?”

  “If you please. I’ll wait here.”

  I did not know what my unexpected guest had in mind, but within the course of three minutes I had retrieved the reflector from my house and had set up the scope for viewing.

  Valik adjusted the equatorial mount, placed his eye to the eyepiece and, I thought, shuddered just a little. He said, “I take it your time machine has a stasis-based sampling chamber?”

  “Certainly. Samples taken from any moment in time are in effect ‘frozen’ within the sampler. I’d hoped that as a side-invention, the stasis chamber could be used to hold seriously-ill patients in limbo until better treatments for their afflictions could be developed.”

  Valik stood back from the scope. “Take a look,” he said.

  I looked. At first, I saw nothing amiss. Several of the closer stars blazed brightly in the image produced by the telescope, and a number of nearby galaxies patterned the background. After a moment, however, I became puzzled, and I temporarily shifted the scope to another region of the sky.

  The background of that view was not nearly as dark.

  I pointed the reflector back to Hercules, then to the adjacent sky coordinates. The area of dark background was circular in shape and—were my eyes tricking me?—expanding.

  Valik spoke, and this time I knew his voice was forced. For any being, alien or human, his words came as a croak. “One thing I did not mention,” he said. “When History is changed, the change does not propagate to the present instantly. A certain lag has been measured. The effect propagates at roughly a billion years per hour. I recognized one of the galaxies still visible in the view; it is about 500 million light-years away. It vanished as I watched.”

  I stood up from the scope. I too had just seen a galaxy dissolve to nothingness. Our eyes met, but nothing needed to be said.

  For when I’d powered up my machine this morning, with absolute coordinates (0,0,0,0), I had unwittingly sampled and trapped the Creation Event.

  The Universe would no longer exist and, when the propagation wave reached us, neither would we.

  I said, “The Event must still be in the stasis chamber.”

  He said, “You must fire the machine again, evacuate the chamber, and relocate the machine before returning it here. We have perhaps half an hour before Nothingness overtakes us.”

  Adrenalin shook the shake from my steps, and Valik followed as I led the way to my workshop. Inside, a frantic ten minutes were spent readying the three-meters-on-a-side white cube that rested in the center of the old garage. Then, another two were invested in a double-check of all instruments. Finally I told Valik, “I’m ready to try it.”

  “Do it!”

  I toggled the security latch and pressed the power button. For the blink of an eye, the great machine vanished, then solidified once more. I took several readings of the stasis chamber before I said, “The chamber is empty. The Event has been restored.”

  Still, Valik did not appear happy.

  “Come on,” I said and grabbed his arm. “Let’s look through the scope and see what’s happening.”

  “But—”

  I dragged the alien back to the side of the house and was the first to press my eye to the telescope.

  “The void is still there!” I cried. “But the restoration worked!”

  “It may well have worked,” Valik said dryly, “but you have forgotten the propagation speed. The change of History that restores the Universe is some thirteen hours behind the propagation wave that destroys it.”

  Cold sweat sprang from my pores. Wind arose from God Knows Where and I could not have shivered more had I been dropped naked to an ice floe. I stuttered, “W-We’ll be dissolved!”

  “Yes. And there’s nothing to be done about it. At least the Universe will be restored.”

  “With us in that Universe?”

  “I do not know.”

  My mind raced. It wasn’t adrenalin this time; it was now driven by some unnamed primordial death-defying impulse that must put in its appearance only in those moments of greatest danger to the species. My voice firmed and I said, “This is most unsatisfactory.”

  Valik stared at me curiously. He even smiled, evidently resigned to his fate.

  I said, “There is another way!”

  “If there is, please tell me.”

  “I can go back to this morning, to seven o’clock, and prevent myself from powering the machine in the first place—”

  “You cannot undo an event by undoing the outer event loop!”

  “Is this proven?”

  Valik hesitated.

  I ran past the Inspector, around the corner to the shop, and locked myself in. Furiously I worked the controls of the machine’s computer panel. I could do this only once and would have no chance to try again. I set an activation timer and, with a last look around the workshop, climbed into the machine’s stasis chamber.

  —

  Pro forma, I let the doorbell ring its twenty-three times. I opened the portal, and a tall, slim man in dark tunic and slacks, with a long, bony countenance stood before me. His arrogant flair I would spike immediately, and with zest.

  “Come in, please. You must be Inspector Valik, of Interpol.”

  Certain facial gestures must be universal. I would not have believed that the alien’s jaw, still under the large rubber mask, could have dropped half the distance that it did.

  “We have met? Professor—”

  “Beloit. At your service. Please take a seat on the sofa, and I’ll get us both a drink. You do drink?”

  The tall form entered and cautiously seated itself. “I have taken a liking to your wines—that is, I like wine.”

  “There is no need to be coy, Inspector. Make yourself comfortable. Remove your mask if you wish.”

  By the time I returned from the kitchen with the two glasses of ‘15 Burgundy—a very good year, by the way—my guest had indeed availed himself of my offer. If he expected me to startle and spill the drinks at his appearance, he was disappointed.

  “The mask is rather a warm convenience,” he said slowly, taking his drink from my hand. I again dropped into the chair opposite the sofa.

  We sipped quietly for a minute. Then he said, “I take it we have met in another time period, or perhaps in another causality chain.”

  Well, I didn’t think I could lead an intelligent alien around by his pointy nose but for so long. “Yes,” I told him. “It was a most thrilling experience.”

  Valik sighed. “Please, Professor, tell me about it.”

  I told him. When I got to the point where I’d trapped the Creation Event, the good Inspector’s eyes got as big as the saucer in which he must have landed.

  “My God!” he cried. “This is something we in Time Corrections never in our wildest nightmares considered possible!”

  “It is the fault of your after-the-fact detection system,” I said plainly.

  “Yes! But what do we do for an alternative?”

  “If I help you with that, will you help me with a problem of my own?”

  Valik looked at me with suspicion. Even with alien eyes, the reaction was unmistakable. “I’d like you to finish your narrative first,” he said. “How did you fix things?”

  I told him of the restoring of the Event, and how that correction would never overtake the first erro
r. Then I told him of my second solution.

  “All right, you arrived this morning at seven o’clock. But the machine still powered up, for otherwise I wouldn’t be here!”

  I said carefully, “The machine’s coordinates were not set at (0,0,0,0), so no harm was done. Then I waited for your visit.”

  “You could simply have destroyed the machine.”

  Even more carefully, I said, “Without your presence, I would not have been able to warn you of the overlooked danger.”

  “This is so. And you were about to tell me of a way to avoid our dependence on after-the-fact detection.”

  “Will you help me with my problem?”

  “What is your problem?”

  “Answer, first. Surely the Fate of the Universe balanced against some minimal accommodation to me is a sufficient inducement.”

  Valik flushed, bringing an unsightly yellow to his even, pale-green tone. “All right,” he growled, “it is agreed!”

  I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. “The key to all of this is power, Mr. Inspector. The only radioactive isotope easily available in quantity to researchers such as myself is americium, because of its commercial use in smoke detectors. You need to place agents in the americium manufacturers, of which there are only a few, and place monitors on the Internet to detect unusual interest in temporal research or phenomena. Remember, each scientist working on a time machine will think he is the only one and will have no idea that he must avoid detection.”

  Valik thought for a moment. “What you suggest is, in hindsight, sickeningly obvious. I will see that it is done. And your problem?”

  I sipped my glass and smiled at the alien. “Think about it, Inspector. I arrived here this morning at seven o’clock. And, I will admit, I am not of fine humor in the mornings.”

  Valik blinked, squinted, gurgled and muttered an imprecation I couldn’t hear. But he wasn’t dumb. It took him only thirty-seven seconds to come up with a resounding, “Your Other Self!”

  “Yes,” I said sadly. “I’m afraid Myself wasn’t very cooperative when I faced him this morning. Myself wasn’t about to be talked out of doing things his way. I, of course, was not about to be talked out of assuring my very existence. Once Myself’s back was turned, I’m afraid I applied to the top of his head the end of a tire iron still lying about there in what used to be, after all, a garage.”

  “You killed yourself? I mean, him?”

  “My Dear Inspector!” I exclaimed. “Surely you credit me with more ethics than that!”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “What could I do? I couldn’t leave him around to spoil things, so I stuffed Myself into the stasis chamber of the machine in which I arrived and sent it back to show up, oh, right about now.”

  A minor poof filled our ears, and both of us rose to look out the sliding-glass doors. On the lawn in the back of the house, another occurrence of the time machine sat and waited. Of course, the original still rested in the workshop and had, in fact, never been powered. What Valik’s detectors had traced was the powering this morning of the machine that had just arrived.

  “The machines we can remove or destroy,” Valik said. “But what do we do with him?”

  I almost laughed, knowing that the good Inspector was in a most difficult spot indeed. His presence on the planet needed to be kept quiet, and the possibility of Time Travel could never be affirmed.

  “I am certain,” I told him after draining my glass, “that the occupant of the stasis chamber will benefit greatly from a pair of aspirin and an extended sabbatical in an interstellar conveyance.”

  Afterword

  “The Blue Smoke Test,” as by Templeton Rex, first appeared in the November 1996 issue of Keen Science Fiction!, a U.S. semiprozine that lasted 12 issues, from April 1996 to March 1997.

  Edited by the inimitable Teresa “Don’t call me editrix!” Keene, Keen SF! was a class act in small press speculative fiction. When Teresa couldn’t continue the publication because of family issues, she actually managed to refund, to every subscriber, the unused portion of their subscriptions.

  That was a rarity for small-press publications.

  The usual story with small-press subscriptions ran as follows (it may still work this way): You find a magazine that tickles your imagination, one that you really like, and one that you want to support. You scrape together a few bucks and subscribe. You receive an issue or two, and then it takes forever for that third issue to arrive. And the fourth issue never materializes. And the address for the publication becomes unusable. The publication, its editor, and its publisher (if different from the editor) disappear into the ether. Any money due you from an unfulfilled subscription is never refunded. I saw that happen so often that when I subscribed to a small-press publication, I mentally put that down as a donation. Seriously.

  “The Blue Smoke Test,” as accepted by Teresa Keene, was my 89th submission to the markets, and my very first acceptance. So this book, in a significant way, is a result of Ms. Keene’s unwitting encouragement to me.

  Indeed, it’s all her fault. If you’re reading this, Teresa Keene, thank you!

  I think.

  On Time Travel

  Time travel tales, and their ramifications, are great material for stories (it is getting hard to find new twists for the plotlines, however). In “The Blue Smoke Test,” the ability to locate the original coordinates of the Creation Event (The Singularity) is critical to the logic of the story. Because every point of the current universe was, at one time, part of that singularity, it’s a matter of some discussion as to whether the concept of that location even makes sense. Think of today’s galaxies as dots on the surface of an ever-expanding balloon. Finger-pointing from one galaxy to the next on that surface is never going to point inward, to the true origin of the balloon’s expansion.

  Still, anisotropies in the cosmic background radiation do exist, so some overall directionality exists. Perhaps one day it might indeed be possible (even in a fourth-dimensional way) to point and say, “We began there.”

  The Men with the Power

  The guard at the outer gate watched as the small form in the tall hat and tuxedo approached. Such a form would not, in itself, have been unusual; others in similar dress had already stopped by his station to be passed. But Forrester noted the careful, measured pace of the figure and the shiny black cane the man used to steady himself. That was odd, too. Most who attended affairs like the one now going on had the money to buy the pneumatic assists—automatic devices that could be worn underneath clothing. Canes and walkers belonged to the last century.

  Other guests passed by the figure and reached the security station ahead of him, and Forrester absent-mindedly checked their names off a list and allowed them to continue. Most he knew by sight anyway. His attention remained on the man with the cane.

  At length the man arrived, and Forrester got his first good look at him.

  Old.

  In a word, the overwhelming impression Forrester got was one of age. Wrinkles ran from the brim of the man’s hat to his tight bow-tied collar; they hung under his chin in folds. Only his jet-black eyes gave the sagging flesh any dignity.

  “Name?” the guard asked automatically.

  “Zetternick,” the old man rasped.

  Forrester’s eyes dropped to the bottom of the alphabetically-sorted guest list. The man wasn’t on it. But the name—something about the name stirred his memory. He had been a small boy, and the world had almost come to war.

  “I’m sorry, sir; I don’t see your name on the list.”

  “A simple error,” the old man said, and his eyes lifted. “Do I know you?”

  Zetternick. Forrester blinked, furrowed his brow. The Russo-Persian War! Or rather, the war that wasn’t. Could this be Zetternick? He certainly looked old enough.

  “I’m afraid,” the guard replied, “I’m too young to have been one of your acquaintances.”

  “What is your name, soldier?”

  “Forrester, Jam
es C., corporal, marines.” The old man could get as much by looking at his tag and uniform, Forrester thought, pleased he was giving nothing away.

  The old man extended a bony hand. “I may not know you, my boy, but I’ve known many with your sense of duty.”

  Forrester took the hand, gently, and shook it.

  Zetternick moved on to the inner guard station without further opposition from Forrester, and if Forrester wondered why he had not stopped the man, it was in a subconscious part of his mind that would not surface for some time.

  Nor, of course, did Forrester notice the old man casually wiping his right hand against his tux.

  —

  Zetternick approached the inner guard station and the scene, with variation, was repeated. The guard let him through. As the old man entered the long, two-story Victorian edifice, he handed his card to the announcer, who goggled first at Zetternick’s cadaverous appearance and a second time at the name on the small, stiff piece of paper.

  The announcer choked, “His Excellency, the former ambassador, Walter Westcoat Zetternick!”

  The announcement killed the conversation in the chandelier-lit hall. Eyes turned in his direction; mouths flew open in surprise. Here, in this room, the people still knew his name. And although his left ear rang with unrelenting tinnitus, his right ear picked up the whispers that rose above the music that played softly in the background.

  “Zetternick? Could that be Zetternick?”

  “I thought he was dead!”

  “He’s not far from it.”

  “The old boy’s got to be a hundred! He was eighty when that Russo-Persian thing went down ...”

  Zetternick nodded his thanks to the announcer and gave up his hat to an attendant. Cautiously he worked his legs and cane down the two shallow steps into the reception hall. The walk from his car to the house had taken a toll on him, and he breathed uneasily. But he worked to hide his weakness. He hung a smile on his wrinkles and extended his hand as the first of the assembly approached.

  She was not a woman Zetternick recognized, and too young to be a major player. He shook her hand, and she introduced herself as an undersecretary in the State Department, adding, “Secretary Halstead and Chinese Premier Zhiang are still en route from Beijing. That’s why I’m here tonight, representing us. Thrust into the gap, as they say.” She grinned and added, “Or perhaps into the pit, with the lions. I suppose the Department called you here for the same reason?”