The Space Sieve

by David Smith

OVER THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, David used the Machine to travel into the past as well as the future, many times.

  David would set the Machine to take him into the past or future and then, after a specified time there, return him to his bedroom in the present once again. So for instance, he would set the Machine to take him 20 years into the past or the future in your world, to leave him there for exactly one hour, and then return him to his bedroom in the present at the same time as when he left, no matter what.

  Each time however, he found himself simply sitting in front of the Machine. It would indicate that it had performed the requested function – that indeed it had sent him backward or forward in time. And yet, to David, it always seemed like nothing had happened.

  Smart as he was, David never did figure out what had been happening. I on the other hand not only understand what happened, I will illustrate it with one example. In this particular instance, it was Leland who traveled back in time.

  One day in the summertime, David set the Device to take him roughly 23 years back in time. He wanted to see what the world was like when his own father was a boy, and indeed, what his own father had been like then.

  But just as he was getting ready to go, his mother called for him to come down for lunch, which he did. Being distracted as humans often are, he left the Machine “live” so to speak. As it sat there, it was ready to take David back in time 23 years whenever David told it to. It was also set so that one hour after arriving, it would return David to the present.

  What happened next was this: Leland had come home from work to take care of some matters, and he had also planned to have lunch there, but as he passed David’s room he saw the Machine sitting there at the foot of David’s bed.

  “That’s strange,” said Leland under his breath, and the hair on his neck stood up as he first noticed a stool attached to the front of the Device, and then a single, small red button on the keyboard. The stool looked to be of solid construction – much better than what one would have expected that his son could have constructed. After running his hand along the stool and then testing it for strength, Leland sat down on it, and faced the Machine. A cold feeling came over him as his gaze fell upon the strange, red button. Then he reached over and touched it.

  Leland was standing in the high school classroom, and he smelled the wetness in the air as the cool breeze from the evaporative cooler blew across him. Sitting down at his desk he took out his algebra book and his pencil and placed them in front of him. He glanced around the room. Yes, Jane was there. He had always greatly admired her, and the memory flashed through his mind of how once, when he and she had been alone in the school hallway, she had walked by and had started wiggling her hips noticeably as she went. But at the time, he had not greeted her or acknowledged her at all. Now, here in the classroom he dreamed that he would perhaps ask her out, or perhaps even take her to the Prom.

  As the soft chalk clicked against the hard green surface of the blackboard, Leland’s teacher was at the front of the class, drawing figures. He told the class that today they would be moving from pre-college algebra to something different. It was called “permutations” and “combinations” and was part of the subject of “probability.”

  “So you mean we finally get to learn something we can actually use?” Jim asked. “Will this stuff help me in Vegas?” Jim was the class clown, but the truth was, he was also one of the smartest kids in the High School.

  Leland smiled as Mr. Day replied: “Maybe, who knows? But be sure before you go searching for the big time Jim, that you ask your parents.” And the class laughed.

  As Mr. Day described the subject matter on the blackboard, Leland wasn’t listening. He dreamed first about taking Jane to the Prom, then thought about how he saw another girl he liked, Polly, kissing a boy he didn’t like. He saw her outside the school, and she was kissing him for a very long time. And then, he was thinking about how he and his friend in years past used to play with Hot Wheels after school. They’d take the orange plastic track and string it down the stairs in his friend’s basement, then back up against the far wall. They would let a car go down the track, and up the other side, and then as it came back, they would roll marbles down the track, bashing the car off. They did the same thing using other cars instead of marbles to bash the cars on the track. They would also take his friend’s large slot cars, build cities on the slot car tracks, and then crash the cars into the cities directly, or using ramps so the cars would fly before crashing. Suffice it to say they were not too kind with the toys of Leland’s friend.

  Suddenly, Leland realized he wasn’t paying attention in the algebra class. “Why is Mr. Day writing numbers with exclamation points behind them?” he thought. It didn’t make sense, and he realized that he’d better start paying attention.

  Leland had always been smart. He mused over the fact that all through elementary school and junior high, he had always been the smartest one in the class. But working his way up into harder and harder classes in high school left him realizing he was no longer the smartest kid in class – he found that now he actually had to work to get good grades. Now that he was a senior in high school, he determined that he would have to start buckling down.

  But soon, he was daydreaming again.

  He remembered how once his friend and that friend’s two brothers had all been given new bicycles by their father. They had soon discovered that the bicycles, if they were brought up to speed and then jumped off of, would continue to travel a considerable distance all by themselves before they would crash. Soon, the three brothers had the idea of getting at opposite ends of the street and riding towards each other, jumping off, and letting the bikes crash, similarly to the way they’d played with their slot cars years before.

  Drifting from reverie to reverie as the sun streamed through the windows of the classroom, he thought about how years ago he’d hurt his foot when he had jumped off his friend’s roof, and about how as little boys they’d snuck around the side of his friend’s house late one Friday night so they could listen to his friend’s older sister and her boyfriend talking as they sat on the grass in front of the house, hoping to hear something embarrassing.

  Leland chuckled at this memory as Mr. Day’s chalk slid across the blackboard, and he had an indistinct awareness of his teacher’s voice as it reverberated throughout the classroom. He really did need to start paying attention. As he looked around, it made him feel all the worse when he saw that even Jim was paying attention. Even Jane was. They seemed to be following what Mr. Day was saying. Leland on the other hand, had no idea.

  It came as a surprise when the bell rang. Had the whole 50-minute class session already passed? He looked at the blackboard. “Thank goodness there’s no homework,” he thought.

  He placed his pre-calculus book into his backpack and got up to leave the classroom. He remembered that today was the day he had committed to himself that we would stop Jane to see if she would go to the Prom with him. As he walked toward the door, Jane was nearing the door too. Leland could see from the corner of his eye that Jane was looking at him. “This is great!” he thought, “She’s noticing me!” Then he made a distracted expression on his face like he was thinking about something important, and he hurried out of the room. As he headed down the hall, he thought about how good it had been that Jane had been looking at him, and that he would definitely ask her to the Prom tomorrow, which of course, he never did.

  Leland headed out the door at the end of the school wing. His locker was in the next wing over. He had wanted for his locker to be in the same area as the one in which his algebra class was, as this was where most of the people he knew had their lockers. But as it happened, Leland’s locker was in a wing where he didn’t know most of the kids – who to him were just a bunch of odd balls who came from some strange, cross-town school.

  As Leland walked along the sidewalk between the wings, he noticed the dry Bermuda grass. It wa
s early spring, and as such, the grass was brown. Along the edges of the sidewalk was bare dirt, where the students would step off the sidewalk and wear out the grass with their walking. Even though it was still the cooler part of the year, there was already the faint sense in the air of the intense summer heat that was to come.

  Opening the door of the wing wherein his locker was located, he felt the refreshing blast of the evaporative coolers in his face. As he walked toward his locker, Leland looked forward to the coming summer. Whether it was the swimming, the running around with little clothing on, the endless heat, or the days that seemed to go on forever, Leland really liked the summers. Turning the dial on his lock, he slid it out of his locker handle and opened the door. Lingering, he looked at the other kids walking up and down the hallway.

  Then, after trading his math book for a book of English literature (which was his next class), Leland slammed the locker door shut, returned the lock, and clicked it shut.

  Leland fell back onto the floor in front of Space Sieve, which was sitting there black and inert, as he had always seen it before. He immediately jumped up. “Wasn’t there a red switch on the front of the Device? Where’s the stool?” he wondered, and, “Why was I on the floor?”

  He got up, shook his head, walked to the bedroom door, and with a last suspicious glance at the Machine he headed out the bedroom door and down the stairs into the kitchen, where he found his son David sitting eating his lunch.

  You see, like David himself had done so many times before, Leland had gone back in time – back to his math class roughly 23 years before. Naturally, when he was there, he didn’t notice it. Nor did he remember it once he returned to his own “present.” And indeed, while Leland had spent a full hour in the past, when he returned to what you call the “present,” no time had passed there at all.

  Oddly, the purveyors of imagination in your world seem to think that people can go back in time without really doing so themselves. It usually goes like this: A man goes back in time – say, to what you call “the 15th Century.” Strangely, although everything around him at that point is as it was in the 15th Century, the person who traveled back in time is not any different himself. He is still wearing the same clothes, still thinking the same thoughts, and still in possession of the same memories, even though in the 15th century the clothes he is wearing had not been made yet, and none of the things he remembers had happened yet. Indeed, the man himself had not even been born yet! Odd, don’t you think, that the man went back to before he was even born, and yet somehow, there he is – not having changed himself at all?

  The concern is then that, “Let’s hope he doesn’t change history.” We hope, for instance, that the person who has gone back in time will not accidentally kill his own great-grandfather or something like that. If so, then the person who traveled back in time would never have been born, would he? Having not been born, how could he then have gone back in time and killed his own great-grandfather? This then, is called the “time travel paradox.”

  Silly isn’t it? Somebody comes up with some foolish idea like traveling back in time while actually not traveling back in time, and then they anguish over the fact that their foolish idea contains a paradox. In other words, you cannot travel back in time and kill your own great-grandfather, because were you to travel back in time when your great-grandfather existed, you yourself would not exist in that time!

  Take your theory of evolution. You come up with the theory then anguish over the fact that it can’t explain how something like an eye can come to be. How can something like that evolve? You see, the problem is that an eye is largely useless unless all the parts are there working perfectly, right at the start. There is no reason to have an eye unless it completely works as soon as it appears in the species. So for an eye to happen by evolution, it would have to exist fully formed at the time it was created by the very first mutation that made it. It doesn’t seem likely, does it, that a mutation would form a completely-developed, functioning useful eye? Indeed, given that even a one-celled organism cannot exist without its full, vast complexity, all operating perfectly at the very beginning, how can even a single-celled organism therefore evolve? How does a cell evolve what you call mitochondria over millions of years, if it needs the mitochondria to be able to live in the first place? Do you see that were an organism to form from the primordial ooze it would have to do so fully complete, and fully functioning, for the first one of it to be able to survive? It all has to be there in the first place, or that first cell will not live to evolve into anything. Do you know what the odds are of a single-celled organism spontaneously forming?

  Suffice it to say, it doesn’t work that way. But, having come up with the theory of evolution and finding it very much lacking, rather than just come up with a new theory, you torture your explanation of reality and of that which is so obvious to try to make it fit your theory.

  Let me explain to you how time travel really works for you, and for your reality. Remember, you live in a reality that is time-constrained. You can go back or forward in time all you want, but if you do – as happened with David’s Father – you will look, feel, act, think, etc, as you did when you did it the first time, or as you will do it in the future. Nothing will be different. In other words, if you go back in time, your body and all that you are, must regress as well. Were you to go back to when you were a baby, you would become a baby. Were you to go forward to when you were old, you would become old. Nothing would change by your having traveled in time. Of course, were you to travel to before you were born, you would never arrive there, because you would not yet exist.

  Of course, this is all providing that you as a time-constrained being traveled backward or forward in a time-constrained reality, such as the one in which you are living.

  Naturally, creatures such as I can travel back or forward in our own reality all we want. Indeed, there is no “back” and “forward” time in our reality. Past, present, and future are all the same to me. Moreover, were you to travel to a reality that was not time-constrained, you could do whatever you wanted to do as well, as far as time goes, because in those realities, time does not exist. This is what happened when David “fixed” his “thinking place.”

  And so, even though David never figured out what was happening when he would travel backward and forward in time in your world, after a while he found some worlds that were not time-constrained to which he traveled, and then he started taking Chip with him again.

  They first went to a place David called “Pathia.” Chip didn’t ask David why he called it that, and David never said.

  They arrived inside a disheveled house. One side of the house was gone, as if it had been torn away, and as they stood there in the great room they could see a valley sweeping away in the distance. “This is one of my houses,” said David.

  He stepped away from the Machine, and it went black. The stools disappeared. “Let me show it to you.”

  “What do you mean it’s your house?” asked Chip.

  “Well, I guess it’s not really my house,” David replied. “Actually, I just found this place.” He motioned to the large room around them. “Nobody’s ever here, so I just fixed up a few things. But most of it’s the way it was when I found it.”

  As they walked through the house, Chip could see it was vast, with many rooms. One room was a great, tiled hall, and there was a large, empty pool in the middle of it. One wall was entirely made of large glass blocks and the light glinted in through it.

  Another room was a large theater, complete with rows of seats. The walls were blue, and they had images of fish, shells, seaweed, and so forth, as well as castings on the walls of various ocean features – rocks, waves, etc.

  As they walked through the hallways Chip noticed that everywhere they went the house was in disrepair, as if it had been cluttered and unattended for years.

  Opening the front door of the house and stepping outside,
Chip looked down the street and was shocked to see there a forest of towering pines, and they were burning. It was totally dark, except for the light from the flames and embers which cast a ghastly orange light on the house fronts.

  “This is a forest fire,” David said. “I made this happen. I think they’re kind of neat.” The pines were huge columns 100 feet high. As the trunk of one tree exploded, another came crashing down. The two boys went back inside. While the forest fire was some distance away and appeared to pose no imminent threat to them, Chip gave David a concerned look anyway. “I don’t think you should do things like that, David.”

  David looked back at Chip, paused, then nodded his acceptance. In a sense, David had begun to see Chip as his moral compass – as an augmentation to his own sense of right and wrong, which in the case of David, had seemed to be getting more and more out of whack lately.

  They returned to the Space Sieve, and then suddenly they traveled to another world – a huge indoor space that was very tidy. Rows and rows of room fronts – an apartment complex, dormitory, or such place – rose up all around them. They were in a huge, interior atrium. The apartment blocks and their common balconies stretched far above.

  And what struck Chip as strange and for a moment disconcerting, was that there were also other people all around. While there were the obvious works of people in many worlds to which they traveled, and while David had seen other people when he’d traveled alone, this was the first time Chip had.

  David got up from the Machine, casually as before, and walked off. Chip followed. While everyone else appeared to be about 20-25 years old, David and Chip drew some attention since they were younger, but it was not a disconcerting amount.

  It did not occur to either of them that their appearance in the middle of this atrium with the Space Sieve should have seemed far stranger to the other people, but didn’t seem as though it did so.

  As they went into a doorway of one of the rooms, they found eight of the young men and women there, lying about on the floor and sitting upon the furniture. All were dressed in bright, casual clothes. One side of the room was completely covered with windows which were open, as well as a large glass doorway that was also open, with a pleasant breeze blowing through. One of the people in the room smiled at the two boys, and pointed out the window. Just then, a formation of sleek but strange-looking aircraft streaked over.

  Through the window, Chip saw another large dormitory building with many windows in the distance, set on a grassy hill. As Chip stepped outside and looked, he could see another large building at an even greater distance – that one located in a bleak desert.

  The people all seemed so nice and friendly it never occurred to either boy that they might be in any kind of peril as they traveled within the facility. After crossing a small field they came to yet another dormitory. This one was much different. Its appearance was grim. The hallways inside were littered and unkempt, and the walls were harsh and rough – made entirely of concrete and wood – and were covered with painted symbols. The rooms were very small – little more than enough space for a bed and a tight workspace – and the people in them were rude, self-absorbed and frightening. They stared at David and Chip, and they took a disturbing amount of interest in them as they walked along the dirty hallways.

  About this time, it occurred to Chip that he had basically let David “do it” to him again. He had let David take him somewhere, and in the interest of the moment they had not taken sufficient thought about what they were doing. They had let their curiosity carry them. A cold chill swept over Chip as he realized that they had walked away from the Machine and had left it in plain sight surrounded by other people. Not only was he not sure how to re-trace his steps back to it – how could he even be sure it would still be there when they returned?

  He mentioned this to David and they both quickly returned to the large, interior space where they had left the Space Sieve. It was still there, but it had attracted a lot of attention by now. A crowd had gathered around it, and in the balconies and rows sweeping many stories above there were people looking down, talking, smiling, and pointing.

  As the boys approached the Device, Chip brushed against one of the people there who looked at him with a curious longing as he passed – as if he wished Chip would stay with them for awhile.

  As they regained the Machine and David began to operate it, the people smiled and applauded as the keys emerged and flashed. Then the hoop instantly swept over David and Chip, and they left.

  They materialized in a nondescript city, and it was nighttime there. This time, rather than leave it in the open and unattended, David made the Device move into a wall where it would be both hidden and inaccessible.

  The avenue was a dark, grimy place cluttered with storefronts in one- or two-story buildings. There was little traffic, and it was almost entirely all foot traffic and a few bicycles. As the boys went in one store after another, they found little of interest. There were also a few eating places, but the food looked greasy and unappealing. The people themselves appeared dull and idle.

  Returning again to the place David had left the Space Sieve, they were swept away, this time appearing inside a large mall. David found a locked closet which he unlocked using the Device and which he then placed inside, as he and Chip set off to explore. The mall was immaculate - the floor was tiled and the walls and storefronts all around were clean. Three appealing young women approached them.

  “We heard you talk,” one of the girls said, beginning the conversation. “Is this right?” she asked. “Am I talking after your way?”

  The girls told the boys that in this place all the people’s needs were taken care of for them. They were provided with food, clothing, entertainment and all of the other necessities and luxuries of life, by those who ran the place. When David asked what the people do in return for all these gifts, the question seemed odd to the girls. They shrugged and one of them laughed. They all shook their heads. They didn’t understand the question.

  Momentarily distracted, Chip turned back and looked out the huge glass wall nearby. Outside the mall and immediately around it stretched a lawn, that was impeccably kept. The sky overhead was dark, almost black, but the grass was brightly lit. At the edge of the grass and light was a boundary, beyond which was bare dirt, with black and gray soot scattered upon it.

  It was apparent that the mall complex was inside a zone. Inside this zone all was beautiful; outside, beyond the light, all was dark and forbidding. Chip called David’s attention to it then Chip took one of the girls over to the window and asked her about it.

  The girl then took Chip back to the others, and one of them pointed out that their people were at war – for all she knew they were at war with David and Chip.

  David turned to Chip. “You know,” he said, “if they think we might be at war with them perhaps we should be leaving.” Agreeing, David asked, “Did you think my house was a little junky? I can show you a nice one.”

  Retrieving the Device from where they’d left it, in an instant they were hovering in the air in a reality David called “Skylia” Based on previous experience with the Kex, it didn’t come as a complete shock to Chip to be hovering several hundred feet off the ground, seemingly in mid air, with only his stool beneath him. But while no longer terrifying, it was still disconcerting.

  Below them was a wall around a vast, beautiful building. The wall was hundreds of feet high, 75 feet thick, and made of gray granite finished with impeccable workmanship, encompassing a vast, wooded area. As the wall stretched into the distance, the boys could not see the ends of it. Inside this area stood a massive building, also of gray granite, that was roughly the shape of a stepped pyramid. The bottom was a large rectangular shape, and on top of it another, smaller rectangular shape. The free space around the smaller rectangle was a balcony. The next level was a smaller rectangle, and so forth. At the fourth level, the walls rose vertically to a h
eight of two rectangles, and there was a cavernous entry, with massive pillars. As they and the Device drew closer they could see two people on one of the balconies.

  “This is a guy’s house,” David said, “one guy’s house.” He nodded. “Wait until you see the inside.”

  And then they were inside. The immense room or “hall” they were in was two thousand feet wide, and two thousand feet long. The ceiling was twelve hundred feet above the floor. The boys and the Device floated near this ceiling, looking down. The interior of the hall consisted of white marble walls with green accents. Along the top of these walls was an intricate mosaic of green and white tiles – although it appeared to be an intricate mosaic at a distance, the stones of the mosaic were actually ten feet wide. Near the four corners of this vast hall were four huge columns of white stone – two-hundred feet in diameter – also with green marbling. Comprising the top 100 feet of each column, was a cylinder of translucent, glowing jade, followed by a 100-foot-tall round capital. The last 100 feet of the column below was an ornate, round base.

  People on the floor of the hall were visible, and one could occasionally hear their voices and footsteps as they rose upward, echoing.

  “Let’s go,” said David, as though growing tired of the sightseeing.

  Appearing back in David’s bedroom now, Chip asked, “So that was the future or the past?”

  “It’s the future.” said David. “The thing is – some of the places we went – I’m not supposed to go there. They’re, I guess you’d say, prohibited.”

  “What are you talking about?” Chip asked, his suspicion rising.

  “The Machine makes it clear,” David replied, “that we’re not supposed to go into them – there are some realities I’ve been physically stopped from entering – but the places we’ve been going today are only prohibited, not blocked.

  “What do you mean we’ve been going to places that are prohibited?” Chip demanded.

  “Well,” David shrugged, “If we weren’t supposed to go there then whoever didn’t want us to should have made it so I couldn’t, instead of just posting a warning. If it’s just a warning, and I can get past it, then whose business is it?”

  As he listened to David’s, Chip began to realize how cavalier and arrogant his friend was becoming. Chip by contrast, grew concerned. For, while David was more intelligent, Chip was wiser. And yet, Chip’s wisdom fought with his human craving for the experiences David could provide him with.

  In response to all this, Chip’s next statement was illogical. “Hey, you know what might be neat - what if we took our cousin Diane and, you know, my sister, with us sometime?”

  I say his response was “illogical,” but perhaps it is understandable for one who is familiar with humans. How often it is when beings such as you – when faced with a choice between reason and stimulation, choose the latter, such as having one’s thoughts turn from logic, to desire.

  In any case, the two boys resolved that next time, they would invite Diane and Sally to go with them, which they did the following week.

  Ordinarily it could have been an innocent-enough idea. But it would prove to be the beginning of the most unfortunate event that would ever happen to Diane and Sally and to David and Chip in all their lives, as well as in the lives of numerous other innocent creatures.