The bridge reappeared on the screen, truncated as before, except that a few more cars and people had gathered to stare at this concrete evidence for the unbelievable.
Blackmore was puzzled. “What am I looking at?”
“The bridge, man, the bridge to the mainland!” said O’Reilly, his voice rising.
“Oh my god!” said Blackmore, turning white as a sheet. “Where’s the rest of the bridge? Where’s the mainland...”
“Exactly!” said O’Reilly. “Darwin, you take over for me here.”
“Where are you going?” asked Blackmore sharply.
“First I’m going to drive out and inspect the bridge myself, and then I’m going to the hospital to talk to Hoffstetter. I’ll have to be able to give our people answers!”
With that he strode out of the room, beckoning Dave to follow. Using the same stairwell as before, they went up one floor to the first basement, and then to the underground garage.
Not given to ostentation, O’Reilly drove a small, well-used Toyota. The car emerged from the underground parking lot into bright sunlight, where smoke from the explosion, driven by the wind, formed a long, slanted column to the west. They drove slowly past the patrol cars of the campus police, who were already beginning to clear the streets, and headed for Causeway Point. There, more cars choked the approach to the bridge, and curious onlookers were gathered into groups, as if talking would shield them from the terrifying evidence of their senses.
Parking at the side of the road, O’Reilly and Dave got out of the car and walked past the groups of students to the bridge. The concrete structure, resting on large pillars buried in the ocean floor, seemed undamaged, extending ahead of them into the strait like the bowsprit of a ship. Fear gripped Dave’s stomach as he walked out onto the bridge and saw the ocean, hundreds of feet below him. He tried not to think of the height but concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. After a couple of minutes, they approached the end of the pavement. O’Reilly, about ten feet ahead, continued to the very end of the bridge, where he crouched down on his hands and knees to examine the severed edge.
“Cut as cleanly as if with a sharp knife!” he muttered. “Not so much as an impact fragment.”
Dave kept his eyes on his feet, determined not to betray his fear to his uncle. Suddenly the end of the bridge yawned before him, and he looked down into the foam flecked sea, churning against the last remaining bridge pillar at his feet. Dizziness and nausea washed over him. He would have toppled forward, but for the firm hand that pulled him back.
“Dave, don’t stand so close. I don’t want to have to explain to your mother...” O’Reilly didn’t finish the sentence, but pulled Dave away from the edge. “Maybe you should sit down.” Dave obeyed. O’Reilly looked at his nephew him for a moment with concern, and then returned to examining the bridge.
Uncle Charlie, we’re both wondering when we’re going to speak to my mother again. Where are we? How do we get back?
O’Reilly stood up. “Let’s go back,” he said in a subdued tone as he extended his hand and pulled Dave to his feet. They walked back to the car in silence, ignored by the clusters of people whose frightened, animated discussions buzzed in the background. Grateful his uncle didn’t ask for an explanation of his behavior on the bridge, Dave left O’Reilly to his thoughts.
Chapter 2 A New Beginning
From the bridge O’Reilly drove straight to the university hospital, now alive with frenzied activity in the aftermath of the explosion. Dave followed his uncle as he strode into the main foyer. The woman at the reception area was speaking frantically into the telephone. Her eyes widened when she recognized O’Reilly.
“I’ve really got to go!” she said to her caller, and hung up.
“Chancellor O’Reilly.” The receptionist straightened her blouse and returned a recalcitrant wisp of hair to its rightful place.
“I need to see Professor Bertrand Hoffstetter right away. I understand he has been admitted.”
The receptionist quickly tapped the name on her keyboard, hesitated a few seconds, then, “He’s in room E¬241. Down that hall to the end. Turn left to the elevator.”
Thanking her, the two men hurried to follow her directions. The nurse at the station on the second floor of the E-wing showed them to Hoffstetter’s room.
The door was slightly ajar. They could hear a muffled, repetitious sound coming from inside. They paused to listen. The indistinct sounds rose and fell in pitch like a chant.
O’Reilly glanced at Dave, and then rapped smartly on the door. The chanting stopped.
“Just a moment!” a gruff voice called out, then, “Who is it?”
By way of an answer, O’Reilly pushed the door wide and strode into the room. Dave followed. A portly man was just leaning over the far side of the bed. Dave saw him drop an angular, foot-long black object into a bag on the floor.
Hoffstetter’s black hair was beginning to recede. In stark contrast to his hair, his beard and moustache were ash gray. His eyes were hard, trumping any joviality his corpulence might have conveyed.
O’Reilly offered a hand to Hoffstetter, who had recovered his sitting position in bed. “How are you, Bertrand?”
“Charles—I didn’t expect to see you here. I’m fine, of course. I should be back at the experimental area, but these medical cretins insist on keeping me here under observation.”
“What happened, Bertrand?”
“Who’s he?” asked Hoffstetter sharply. Dave had again tried to make himself inconspicuous by quietly taking a chair at the foot of the bed.
“My nephew. He was in my office when the explosion hit.” O’Reilly paused. “I want to keep him with me until I’ve had time to assess our situation. So what has happened, Bertrand?”
O’Reilly pulled a chair close to the bed, sat down, and leaned forward intently.
“Charles, I must tell you that I have made the most momentous discovery of my career,” said Hoffstetter in a conspiratorial tone.
“What do you mean?” asked O’Reilly.
Hoffstetter looked at O’Reilly’s face, as if trying to read his thoughts, and then continued. “I can say matter-of-factly, without prejudice or exaggeration, that I am the most brilliant physicist of my generation—arguably of all generations. But even I could not have predicted what happened today—”
“What did happen today?” interrupted O’Reilly.
Hoffstetter was annoyed at the interruption. “To put it simply, when I was powering up the Hoffstetter field generators”—he seemed to relish the sound of his own name—“the apparatus behaved erratically and eventually detonated.”
“But you had tested this before! What was different this time?” asked O’Reilly.
“As far as I can tell,” continued Hoffstetter, “in constructing the larger unit, we seem to have crossed a scale threshold of some sort. In all of the smaller experiments, the force field bubble appeared and could be controlled. This time, to put it as simply as I can, the field generators seemed to interact with the atmosphere and triggered an electrical storm, which overloaded the system. When the field collapsed...” Here he launched into unintelligible jargon.
O’Reilly put his hand up to stop the verbal deluge. “Bertrand, you’re far beyond me. I need to understand this catastrophe in plain language so that I can communicate to the students and faculty. What do I tell them?”
“Don’t you see, man? It wasn’t a catastrophe; it was a breakthrough! I’ve made physics history! I deserve a second Nobel Prize...”
“Bertrand! What is ‘it’? What has happened? Forget all this other crap.”
“Do you know how the Hoffstetter force field generator works?” asked Hoffstetter petulantly.
“No!”
“The Hoffstetter force field causes a time lag or time shift inside the bubble. Oh, it’s very small; it’s in the range of about ten to the minus thirty-second of a second behind normal time, but that’s enough to stop projectiles. Firing into the Hoffstetter forc
e field is like trying to fire into yesterday—you just can’t do it. At our time offset, air molecules and light can still tunnel through the time barrier. If I could draw 1,000 times more energy from the power plant, and if I had the equipment to increase the time offset, we could even stop the penetration of air molecules. An even larger time lag would stop radiation, such as light or even gamma rays.”
“So how does that relate to what’s happened?” asked O’Reilly.
“Charles, with due respect, you simply don’t have the understanding to comprehend what happened. How can you expect me to explain it to you?”
“You need to try,” said O’Reilly. “You can’t drive us on a lee shore like this and then tell me it’s too hard to explain.”
“All right, all right,” said Hoffstetter. “Give me a minute to decide how to explain it to you.” Hoffstetter’s eyes closed as he paused.
Dave’s eyes wandered around the room. Next to Hoffstetter’s bed on the floor was an open duffle bag. A jet-black obelisk jutted out of the bag. The obelisk, square in cross section and tapering to a pyramid at one end, had curious red letters on it in a script Dave did not recognize. He was just wondering about the nature of the object, and why Hoffstetter had appeared in such a hurry to put it away earlier, when Hoffstetter resumed his discourse.
“Think of it like this, Charles: electromagnetic radiation, such as light, has both frequency and intensity, which can be controlled separately. Frequency determines the color of the light. Intensity determines the brightness. Each can be modified independently. We have the same sort of control over the force field. The intensity determines the diameter of the force field bubble, and the frequency is analogous to the time offset. When the storm hit, it overloaded our intensity control and expanded the force field far beyond the experimental field. At some point in the expansion, the frequency control was also overloaded. First the time offset increased; then the force field collapsed precipitously as the generators exploded.”
“That’s why we saw the bubble expanding past our cameras, and when it turned black, that was the increase in the time offset?” asked O’Reilly, understanding beginning to dawn.
“Exactly!” declared Hoffstetter. “I can see my explanation’s been clear.”
“So what happened when the force field collapsed?” asked O’Reilly.
“Normally when the force field collapses, we return to our normal time. This time, however, the collapse of the very large time offset—we still don’t know how large it was—did something to the matter inside the Hoffstetter field. Somehow it dislocated us; that is to say, it transported us to another place or perhaps another time. I don’t know where.”
“But that’s preposterous!” exclaimed O’Reilly.
“Use your eyes! Use your head, man!” Hoffstetter shot back, sneering. “Where’s the rest of the bridge? What happened to the mainland?”
“So where are we then?” asked O’Reilly, his eyes hardening at the contempt in Hoffstetter’s voice.
“Well,” said Hoffstetter, “let me work it out for you. The amputated bridge is incontrovertible evidence that Halcyon has moved. The alternatives are: we moved in space, we moved in time, or we moved right out of our space-time. Let me analyze these alternatives in turn. If we moved any great distance in space, Halcyon would be a small, airless, hemispherical asteroid drifting through space, the dead companion of our sun or some other distant sun. If we had been dislocated a shorter distance so that we remained on the surface of our planet, the sun would have been displaced in the sky at the time of our dislocation. I’ve run the video files. The clouds changed, but the sun remained exactly where it was in the sky. That may mean we’ve moved only a few miles, and that’s why everything looks the same. The other part of the bridge is probably only a few miles away.”
“If we had moved only a few miles,” said O’Reilly, “the airwaves would be buzzing with communication, and a Coast Guard helicopter would have already arrived from the mainland. I don’t think we’ve moved just a few miles! Remember the change in the cloud patterns? The weather doesn’t change that much when one only moves a few miles. So what about your other alternatives?”
“I suppose,” said Hoffstetter, “preposterous as it sounds, Halcyon could have moved forward or backward in time. That might explain the radio silence. If we moved to an earth in a parallel universe—”
“Backwards or forwards in time, parallel universe—are you serious?”
“Of course I’m serious!” snapped Hoffstetter. “Use your brain! Radio silence when there would be all kinds of squawking on all major frequencies—everything from short wave to radio to maritime communications. The sky changed, the shoreline has receded—how much more evidence do you need?”
Dave’s head spun. He had the sensation of trying to escape from a trap. This can’t be true! This must be some kind of a joke. There must be a reasonable, logical explanation for this. Hoffstetter is a crackpot— no, he must have been injured by the explosion. They’ll laugh about this tomorrow. But in the back of Dave’s mind there was the picture of the bridge, a phantom that wouldn’t go away, a phantom that demolished every rationalization.
O’Reilly sat in stunned silence, and the silence became uncomfortably long. “How do we find out what’s happened? How do we test these hypotheses?” asked O’Reilly at last in a weary voice.
“Well, if we’re on the earth at a different time, we’ll know when we examine the stars in the night sky. If we’re on a sister earth in a parallel space-time, who knows what that may mean.”
O’Reilly sat back in his chair by the bed and scowled. “Time travel seems pretty farfetched, but since we don’t know, let’s hope for the best and plan for the worst. If we are displaced in time or in a parallel world, can we get back?” he asked grimly.
“I suppose, in principle,” said Hoffstetter. “At least I could replicate the experiment and take us somewhere else if I had the equipment. But frankly I don’t have a clue how to control this dislocation. There is no assurance that initiating another dislocation will take Halcyon home. Anyway, I have to assess the damage, and the sooner I can get out of here, the sooner I can begin.”
“I see,” said O’Reilly. He rubbed the scar on his chin and watched a nurse enter the room, deposit a tray of food on Hoffstetter’s table, and leave. “I suppose our first order of business would be to figure out where we are. I’m going to talk to the staff in astronomy. What resources do you need to get us back?”
Dave saw the hint of a sly smile creep across Hoffstetter’s face. “I’ll need someone high up in the administration to help me get whatever resources I need. How about Blackmore? Can he be spared?”
“If that’s what it will take,” said O’Reilly evenly, “then you will have him to help you. Just get us home!”
Hoffstetter started to eat with appetite.
Why isn’t Hoffstetter more upset? wondered Dave.
O’Reilly looked as if he was about to get up and leave, but changed his mind.
“How are the others?” said O’Reilly.
“Oh, my team is fine,” said Hoffstetter absently, with a mouth full of food. “The control center is well protected, and the explosion didn’t damage it. They have all of us here at the hospital only as a precaution.”
“From what you said, you must have had some inkling that this experiment entailed some risk. How could you go ahead with it?” said O’Reilly, his exasperation growing.
“Of course there was some risk. We didn’t know exactly what would happen if the field collapsed suddenly—that was one of the things we were going to test—but we knew there was a very small probability that if the field were to collapse precipitously, some unusual things might happen.”
O’Reilly choked at the euphemism unusual things. “And shouldn’t this have made you more cautious?” he sputtered.
Hoffstetter bristled. “Chancellor O’Reilly, it’s easy to second-guess my decision after the fact. Without courage and a willingness to take r
isks, science cannot advance. Don’t you know your history? You’re a military man. Do you remember the Manhattan Project? Physicists had calculated that there was a low probability that the first atomic bomb explosion might set up a chain reaction in the atmosphere and destroy all life on our planet. But they conducted the test anyway because the need was great. I was faced with the same dilemma, and I didn’t flinch from my duty to advance the cause of our knowledge and science.” Hoffstetter bellowed for a nurse to adjust his pillow. No one came.
“How did you know about the bridge?” O’Reilly asked suddenly.
There was the slightest hesitation before Hoffstetter responded. “We have the same video camera links in the control room that you have in the emergency response center. The bridge happened to be up on one of the monitors, since we were keeping an eye on the weather from that quarter, so we saw the truncated bridge right away, after the field collapsed.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” O’Reilly sighed wearily. “I’d better be on my way.” He motioned for Dave to follow. Once outside the room he shook his head in disbelief. “Somehow our intelligence and cleverness always outstrip our moral judgment and our good sense!” O’Reilly said, more to himself than to Dave. “Doing his duty to knowledge and science! I wonder what he’s not telling me...”
As O’Reilly drove Dave back to his dormitory, Dave noticed his uncle’s face looked drawn and gaunt in the afternoon light. He had aged several years in the space of a few hours. Dave thought about raising the question of the black obelisk in Hoffstetter’s bag but decided now was not the time.
They arrived at a large multistory building with the name “Socrates” in bold relief above the doorway.
“Dave, I’m sorry to leave you like this. I know all this uncertainty about what’s happened makes it very hard. But I need some time to make plans for Halcyon. Since I need to speak to the people here on our university television network tonight, I have to figure out how to come to grips with our situation. I need to think about a possible course for Halcyon that will bring us back home...or one that will at least let us survive.”
The Halcyon Dislocation Page 2