A Gift of Time

by Jerry Merritt

  The titanium purification level was fifty feet above the time travel level and was designed to appear as the bottom level. The freight elevator only went down to the purification level unless you used an undocumented bypass procedure. The only other access to the bottom level was by a dedicated, secure elevator available only to Ell and me. By switching out construction crews and using different architectural firms to handle the elevators and tunneling, I hoped by the time construction was complete no one would notice the lower-level cavern had gone missing.

  I spared no expense. The time travel workroom lay behind a large vault door surrounded by at least a hundred yards of solid limestone. The vault door could only be opened by the combination from the outside or by a simple wall switch from the inside for easy egress.

  Both Ell and I were fully aware of the disaster a time machine would create in the hands of anyone other than ourselves. And even we weren’t sure we wouldn’t generate an apocalypse by using it incorrectly. For, while Ell’s time glider had built-in safeguards, we had no way to duplicate that technology. I would be building my machine incrementally from the bottom up as I made my way through the dense calculations leading ever farther into the heart of time travel. It was already clear it would require breakthroughs in quantum entanglement just to get started, but I was confident it could be done. The math said so. Not the way Ell’s glider did it, though. I was taking a different approach. A new path. A way that, so far as Ell knew, had never been tried. And that was the danger.

  Chapter 47

  The corporate building rose quickly once the foundation work was complete. It opened in the fall of 1993. “A citadel on a hilltop,” as one TV commentator put it. The corporation name stood out in twenty-foot-tall white letters across the top of the highest tower. CASE U.S.

  Nameless faces, Ell and I roamed the crowd during the opening ceremonies.

  “What does Case U.S. mean, Cager? It doesn’t have any particular significance I can see.”

  “I was just playing around. I found it satisfying to have Fenton as the underlying basis for the company name. It’s just a simple transposition of the letters in Fenton. I doubled each letter’s numerical position in the alphabet and added a 17 offset, modulo 26. For instance, F is the sixth letter. Moved forward to position 12 then moved another 17 positions it becomes the 29th letter. Since there are only 26 letters, I use modulo 26 to get position 3. The third letter of the alphabet is C. It would be difficult to work backwards to get Fenton if you didn’t know it was the seed. Plus it has a nice patriotic ring to it, don’t you think?”

  Ell squinted for several seconds before I saw she had broken the code. “Is that what you physicists call tomfoolery?”

  “Exactly. In fact CASE, itself, is a transposition of…”

  “Never mind, Cager.”

  During the years the corporation building had been under design and construction, we had assembled the finest team of integrated chip specialists in the world and had bought up most of the companies manufacturing the equipment that fabricated the microchips. By the time the building was finished, our superior microprocessors were already pushing competitors to the side as we flooded the market with our faster, more innovative product. With a nearly global standard microprocessor, computers and the software that ran on them leapt ahead. And the end result was more money than Ell and I together could figure out how to spend.

  One would have thought we were two of the most prominent people in the state by now, yet few had ever heard of us. We managed our assets through the CEOs of the various industries we controlled. And those CEOs had signed nondisclosure statements that were ironclad and ruinous if they ever disclosed anything about either Ell or me.

  After the grand opening, we were in and out of the headquarters building on a daily basis, but there were so many employees no one noticed us. Well, they probably noticed Ell. While my hair had grayed at the temples, she showed no sign of ageing at all. She dressed to look older but no one would have mistaken her for over twenty-five. Each day we simply entered our adjoining offices to access the concealed elevator leading directly to the time travel level. I had no particular day-to-day job in the company but Ell monitored the titanium purification program. She controlled funds, received progress reports, and made projections on when sufficient titanium would be on hand to cast and machine a new rod for the glider.

  On the bottom level there were only three of us, Otha, the janitor, being the third. But Otha, sworn to secrecy, wasn’t about to tell anyone what he saw down there. Not that it would have mattered. He had no idea what we were doing or even where in the building we were. But Otha would keep quiet because there was nowhere else he could earn what he made at CASE U.S. He kept the expanse of terrazzo floors polished and the rough limestone walls and furniture dust free. Other than the occasional cleanup in the time travel lab or bringing down deliveries of computer chips and assorted electronics, he was left to his own devices until we needed him.

  Fifty feet above us, the titanium purification level teemed with metallurgists and physicists designing equipment to collect and process titanium of absolute purity. By 1996 they had only produced a half-gram from their prototype sputter machines and wanted to know why the enormous effort and expense to produce pure titanium. They were told not to worry about it and to find ways to make it faster and cheaper. They understood that. No one wanted to lose their jobs at CASE U.S.

  About the same time, I began pushing research on quantum entanglement at the microchip laboratories. The experimentalists of the day used equipment weighing hundreds of pounds. I wanted entanglement reduced to the microcircuit level. No one in the research facility had the slightest idea how to do that, but after being told we had no need for them if they couldn’t, they grew confident they could do it ten years. I gave them three and a sheaf of papers with the quantum equations they would have to master to pull it off. Two years later they created entanglement on a chip, and a year after that they controlled it. I called for a set of chips with specific inputs and outputs programmable through a regulator microprocessor. The group delivered three weeks later and asked what we needed next. Everything was on track.

  ***

  Late one afternoon in the quiet of the lab, I cobbled together the first prototype.

  As I leaned back to study the graceless, brick-sized creation lying on my granite-block workbench, an ominous foreboding settled over me. If this thing slipped from my control, civilization was done for. Yet the mechanism looked anything but impressive. I reminded myself the early crystal radios weren’t impressive either—until they pulled music and human voices out of thin air. Like so much in life, it was the internal concept that counted, not the outward appearance. At the moment, all I had was a breadboard bristling with electronics, a battery, and an activation switch. The only things cutting-edge about it were the entanglement circuits. They were the quantum demons that, like the early crystal radios, conjured the seemingly impossible from unseen forces passing through and around us every moment of our existence.

  The intercom at the vault door broke my reverie.

  I punched the opener, and the massive door swung silently outwards to reveal Ell in her creamy-white business suit and high heels. She clicked a gentle cadence across the terrazzo floor to give me a hug as she eyed the unpolished creation resting on the lab bench.

  “Wow! You’ve been busy. Is it ready?”

  “I think so.” I slid the mockup over to us. “Right here is the control stick. Push it forward and the thing should vanish into the future. Backward sends it into the past. I put the stick on there before I had thought the whole business through, though. I can’t actually use it to activate the device since it will carry away anything in the immediate vicinity when it leaves. Including my hand.”

  “Isn’t that kind of dangerous?”

  “That’s why I rigged this remote transmitter. It connects the battery before it activates the control stick. I don’t want to power up the electronics until I’m ready. I
might bump the stick accidently. Anyway, I now know better than to leave it near anything worth keeping when I test it.”

  “And you’re convinced quantum entanglements can generate hops through time?”

  “The math says it will. Entanglement operates instantaneously across any distance, so it’s the perfect trigger to force a space-time hop. I’m using three sets of entanglement microchips to regulate a spherical volume that includes the glider. The first set spoofs the basic particles, the quarks and electrons, within that volume into reacting like photons instead of fermions. Since photons experience neither time nor distance, that volume, which contains the glider, acts as a timeless, dimensionless point with all of creation meeting there at once.

  “Simultaneously, I use a second set of entanglements that would, except for one specific location in space-time, create a paradox when the glider returns to its fermion reference plane. When a third entanglement cancels the first, the glider can only return to the one unique location that avoids creating the paradox. By setting the parameters of the entanglement paradox properly, I can force a return from the photon’s point of view to any place in space-time. Instantaneously. Crossing neither space nor time.

  “So let’s see if I got it right.” I carried the little prototype across the lab and hung it on a cord dangling from a ceiling hook. Below it I had slung a catch net.

  “Stand back.”

  I set the time interval switch to one microsecond and pressed the remote. The control stick pitched forward and the contraption jumped a few inches upwards with a puff of air before falling into the net leaving the severed support cord swaying above it.

  I let out a sigh of relief. “It works.”

  “Works? All it did was fart and fall into the net.”

  I turned to look at her. “We need to work on your terminology. Where did you pick up that word, anyway?”

  “It came preloaded from your vocabulary.”

  “Oh—well, there wasn’t time to notice the device was missing before it reappeared. It only travelled a millionth of a second into the future. At that point it had already carried about six inches of its support cord with it, so it fell since it wasn’t suspended from the ceiling anymore.”

  “Then why did we have stand back?”

  “I was pretty sure it would reenter our three-dimensional world as a fourth-dimensional sphere of displaced space-time. That would be analogous to a three-dimensional sphere intersecting a plane. When the sphere first touched the plane, it would only be at a single point. But as the sphere penetrated the plane, the point would change to an expanding 2-D circle as an ever-larger cross section of the 3-D sphere entered the plane. What I figured we would see when the glider returned from its higher dimension was a point that expanded into an ever-larger sphere until the machine and its surrounding volume of space was all the way back into our 3-D world. That’s what caused that puff. It displaced some air when it reentered.”

  “So if it reentered where one of us was standing, it would just push our insides apart until we had a foot-wide ball from the past inside of us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “My glider was designed not to do that. Well, except that one time in your front yard, but that was an emergency landing.”

  “But your glider is thousands of years ahead of what I’m doing here. Anyway, that’s why we stand back on these test runs.”

  “Why didn’t you send it farther into the future?”

  “I didn’t want to lose the prototype on the first run. The Earth rotates eastward at about 800 miles per hour at our latitude while simultaneously orbiting the sun at 19 miles a second. And the Earth and Sun move through the galaxy at 130 miles a second. Then you have the expansion of the universe on top of that. I’m not sure what reference frame the little glider works in, but there’s probably a substantial shift from its starting point here on earth as it travels through time. Apparently it doesn’t move very far in a millionth of a second, though, so let’s increase the hop to ten microseconds and see what happens.”

  I tied the cord back together and rehung the prototype glider. When I activated it, the device shifted upward a foot and to the left before falling into the net. A loud pop accompanied the jump as air rushed in to fill the vacuum left behind.

  “That’s about what I figured. Since it’s twilight outside right now, that puts us on the trailing edge of the Earth as it orbits the Sun. So when the device jumps into the future it comes out at the same spot it left but that spot is where the Earth was when the device started. From our perspective on Earth’s surface, the Earth has moved away from that point which would now be above us. If it were morning, we’d be on the leading edge and the device would come out below us. But it went as expected. It came back about twelve inches higher than when it started. Of course there are other movements that might be in play. But the largest factor does seem to be Earth’s orbital velocity.”

  I lifted the little glider out of the net and carried it back to the lab bench. “Now we have to be careful. Based on what we’ve seen so far, if I set the hop to a millisecond, the thing will return about ten stories above us. I need to figure out how to set my paradox entanglement so it doesn’t jump out of position. We already know if it returned in the same place as solid matter, there would be a real problem. Especially if that solid matter was one of us. I suspect this little toy is highly dangerous on even more levels than we’ve seen here this evening.

  “So I need to find out what happens when our little machine reappears inside a solid object.” I pulled out a plastic garbage bag. “We’ll start with liquid and work up.”

  Ell was incredulous. “You’ve got million-dollar IC chips in that thing and you’re going to waterproof them with a garbage bag?”

  “You got something better handy?”

  “Well. No.”

  “Otha brought in that steel drum and filled it with water last evening.” I slid the glider into the garbage bag along with a lead weight to hold it down and dropped it into the water. “I’ll send the glider forward a few microseconds so when it reappears it’s still below water level. Should be interesting. It will also give us some idea of its speed of return.”

  “You mean like all at once versus from an entry point expanding outwards.”

  “Exactly. The equations indicate it collapses to a point as the space-time sphere withdraws from our three-D world and it then reenters in reverse order. The loud pops prove it does it pretty fast. How much water gets splashed out should give us a rough idea of how fast. But I think I can rig another control circuit to regulate the speed of reconstitution. I also need to know whether any water gets incorporated into its structure. I suspect none, but I really don’t know for sure. You ready?”

  We crouched behind the granite lab table as I activated the glider. The lab shook from the explosion. Hot vapor swirled about us as condensed water dripped from every surface. When I peered over the table, the drum lay peeled open like a daisy. The garbage bag lay in the center.

  “I take it the thing comes back really fast,” Ell muttered as she daubed water droplets off her face with her sleeve.

  “You always have been a keen observer.” I stepped over to the door release and opened the vault to let the steam escape. Shortly after, Otha showed up peering into the mess.

  “I thought I heard somethin’. Looks like this evenin’s experiment gonna take me a while to mop up. You all weren’t hurt were you?”

  “Just my pride, Otha. I guess I need to redo a few calculations before I try that again.” I closed the vault door and splashed over to the garbage bag, extracted the glider, and hung it on the ceiling cord.

  Five seconds later it fell into the net. “At least it didn’t hurt it.”

  “I’m glad we didn’t try to recover it inside that granite table.”

  “Yeah. That might have collapsed the building. Another reminder we need to be careful of this thing.

  “It could make a military-grade weapon, too, appearing out of nowhere ca
rrying a nuclear warhead. That’s why you’re the only other person who knows what’s going on down here. If even a whiff of suspicion got out about our work, the government would seize it all and within a year enemy agents would have stolen the plans. Happened with the atomic bomb, followed by the thermonuclear bomb, all the way to submarine stealth technology. Even criminal elements would kill for it, since it can show up inside a bank vault. So we don’t dare let this technology get loose.

  Chapter 48

  A year later, with several million dollars’ worth of failed attempts behind me, I was sure I had solved the problem of the glider shifting position in space as it traveled through time. I had recalled Ell’s own time glider remaining connected to the Hadean even after it had failed and dug up my front yard. A few days of calculation confirmed that my approach to time travel also maintained a hidden entanglement with the glider’s starting point. That minor insight vastly simplified the problem of having the glider reenter time in the same spatial location it just left.

  I had also slowed the transition time into and out of the time travel mode and expanded the volume of space carried along on a hop, too. The new IC chips reflecting the design changes had just come in. I snapped them into their sockets in the sleek, little monocoque casing the fabrication shop had made for me. The new craft even had a cargo compartment. The whole thing was only four feet high and five feet long and looked like a giant, black egg sitting on three short struts.

  I clipped the chain lift to the embedded hook on the new glider, hoisted it from the lab bench, and pulled it across the room to a wooden support bench while Ell watched.

  “We’ll try a five-minute hop. With my changes, the machine shouldn’t shift position at all.”

  I pulled Ell to the far corner of the vault with me and activated the glider. It vanished without a whisper along with the upper portion of the wooden bench.