«Wait. What did you say?» Bantam said, eyes stabbing Cleveland. «Did you say Volzstrang?»
«Why, yes. That’s what the black diamond tower is called. It’s named for the man who invented the interwoven molecular lattices that gives it such perfect structure, enabling it to reach the edge of the sky.»
«Cleveland,” Bantam said, grabbing him by the shoulders urgently. «This is important. Is Hoermann Volzstrang actually here at MacLaren?»
«Of course he is.» Cleveland said. «Other than Hardin, he’s the top Pencil.»
«Can I talk to him?»
BANTAM WAS led into a massive building. Inside was a single corridor that led to a great cylindrical room in the middle. Strange noises filled the air: it sounded like the roaring of a river punctuated by hisses of steam.
«Hydrologic circuitry,” Cleveland yelled. «State-of-the-art Neptune aetherics. Loud as hell, I know. But it’s a lot quieter than what they had before! Not nearly as dangerous either.»
But Bantam was hardly listening. He could barely contain his excitement. Hoermann Volzstrang was actually here! It had been his equations that made time travel a reality. Maybe he could shed some light on what had happened, why he was in the strange other-1944 …
The control room proved to be much quieter and downright pleasant. It was a spacious room, punctuated with red recliners and flowers, almost like a lavish hotel lobby. A crystal skylight above let dappled sunlight play across the marble floor.
All along the circumference sat men, typing furiously on mahogany-and-ivory keypads. Above them all rose great panels that appeared to be screens.
Screens? How can they can have screens without electricity?
Inside the control room, Cleveland called out, «Doctor Volzstrang! Are you here?»
A walrus of a man turned around and pulled at his moustache. «Yes?»
«Doctor Volzstrang!» Bantam said, thrusting his hand out. But Cleveland yanked him back. «Tut! You are still a prisoner, Bantam. Have a care now! No sudden movements.»
Bantam nodded and then proceeded more slowly. «Doctor Volzstrang. Is there somewhere we can have a talk?»
MOMENTS later, they were seated around Volzstrang’s ‘screen’.
Bantam was given a stylus that attached to gears and levers to another, much, much larger stylus that moved across a series of pins on springs and depressed them as it passed.
Bantam saw to his amazement that each pixel of Volzstrang's screen was made of a very tiny crystal with a highly reflective light side and a dark side. It was like the mechanics of a watch. Whenever something was entered on the keyboard, there was the sound of a small rush of water, and the ‘pixels’ turned and formed characters, reflecting the naphtha light to cause it to ‘glow’ like an electric screen might.
Feeling very odd about it, Bantam wrote the Volzstrang equations down in front of the the very man who had invented them.
When the math was on screen, Volzstrang — a very quiet man, Bantam realized — stared with rapt appreciation, his mouth muttering a prayer of logic and numbers.
«It is ingenious, of course,” Volzstrang said finally. «Only a few minds in the world could have produced this. Is this your work, young man?»
«No,” Bantam said. «It’s yours. Even where I come from, you're one of the world's best Pencils.» Hey look at me, catching onto the lingo.
At that, Volzstrang looked up like he'd just been slapped. Cleveland cringed and shook his head; apparently this was a term like nerd.
Bantam quickly proceeded to tell Volzstrang they story of his trip back through time, with Cleveland chiming in now and again to tell the story from the Army’s point of view.
When they’d finished, Volzstrang said: «Well. This is all academic. The production of the Timewave is impossible without the existence of electricity. Many of those numbers up there represent electrical qualities.»
«Doctor Volzstrang. Just — just assume for a second that there is electricity. Pretend it’s real. If we produced a Timewave — and if say, someone rode it back through time … could it theoretically push them into an alternate universe where history was different?»
«No,” Volzstrang snapped.
«No?»
«No.»
«You’re going to just totally rule that out?»
«Yes,” Volzstrang said. «That would take a different kind of wave altogether. The plasma vectors would form a differential plane that — “
Bantam waved him silent. «Okay. So not that.»
«Just how were you planning on accumulating tomorrows — thus effecting a return to your proper time?»
They all turned. Doctor Rachelle Archenstone stood behind them.
Bantam rose, trying not to look her up and down. He realized that Cleveland and even Volzstrang were fighting the same urge.
«The Timewave bounces forward in time once it unloads the capsule,” Bantam explained. «Therefore, it’s still here, all around us, right now, traveling forward in time. Even though you can’t see it or detect it. Unless you happen have a Volzstrang radiation detector.» Bantam glanced self-consciously at Hoermann Volzstrang.
«Anyway, I just have to get my capsule working again. Then I can surf it forward in time, the same way I surfed it back.»
Surf? Rachelle mouthed. Bantam thought about kissing that mouth.
«He’s talking about what natives in Hawaii do,” Cleveland explained, perplexed why Bantam would choose such an odd analogy. «They have these long boards made of wood and —”
«But the Timewave does not bounce forward,” Rachelle interrupted. Her eyes danced over the equations.
«But it does,” Volzstrang disagreed. «You can see that if the 28th dimension is folded into a spline curve, a rebound effect will occur when — “
«Yet it is not folded into a spline,” Rachelle said. «There is an erroneous assumption made here.» She pushed them out of the way. Her hands flew over the keyboard. «You see? It is folded, but into a hyperhexagon, not a spline.»
Volzstrang stared, pulling at his moustache, stunned. «My God. She’s right. I would have never seen that.»
«You didn’t,” Bantam said with a hint of annoyance. Then he turned to Rachelle. «And how did you know that? I thought you were a medical doctor?»
Rachelle shrugged. «I was admitted to University when I was twelve. My syllabus included a wide range of arts and sciences — including physics, of course. An education that is not well-rounded is not an education at all.»
Bantam nodded helplessly. «Yeah. I think that too.» Then he turned to Volzstrang. «Okay. It doesn’t bounce. So where does it go?»
«It continues traveling back through time,” Volzstrang shrugged. «It would simply keep going until it encountered another force to disrupt its trajectory.»
«What kind of force?»
Volzstrang rolled his eyes. «I don’t know. Something very powerful.»
«Yeah but, like what?»
«An explosion,” Volzstrang said. «There are those among us who theorize that the atom is an enormous source of — “
«Yeah. It’s called an Atomic Bomb. And trust me: it works,” Bantam said. «But since you’re still theorizing, that means you’ve never actually exploded a nuke. You don't know how to make one, so it can’t be that. What else?»
Rachelle and Volzstrang sat there deep in thought.
«A coronal mass ejection from the Sun might do it,” came a new voice. They looked up. Doctor Hardin stood nearby. «Yes. A coronal mass ejection would be just the thing.»
All of them were silent.
Hardin seemed to realize something just then. A small sigh escaped his lips. He sat his small form down and rubbed his sweating, oddly light-bulb-shaped head.
«Oh,” Volzstrang said, being the next to see it. «Oh. No. It couldn’t be.»
Rachelle looked between them, slight alarm playing across her face: she wasn’t following. «What? What is it?»
Volzstrang leaned forward, his lips again silently engaged in a litany of logarithms.
«The Day of the Red Sun,” Hardin said, pointing at the screen. «If you notice, there are strange attractors present in the underlying chaos math of these equations. On the one hand, we have the Timewave, rolling backwards through time like a wild beast unchained. But what is it, really? It’s essentially a wild flare of multiple kinds of tangled energies — light and heat only being the very surface characteristics thereof. But if you think about it in the abstract, the Timewave is very much like the negative of a coronal mass ejection.