There was a long silence, then the woman, Torrie, said, “Uh oh.”
“It’s leakage,” Vrank said. He was the talkative one, the narrator for the “dock.” He explained what Torrie and Shil, his camera and sound ops, were doing as they spread the guts of their time machines out on the kitchen table. Rick and Marsha had finally decided to let them go once they’d promised not to snark anything up.
The time machines looked like fanny packs until Shil unzipped their flaps and unfolded them into flat, floppy panels of circuitry. Vrank said, “There’s supposed to be suppressors in there to keep down the ripple effect when we chrono, but evidently one of ’em’s tranged. Sorry about that.”
“Sorry?” Marsha said. ‘You’ve put Rick through the wringer.”
“It’s worse than that,” Vrank said. “We’ve evidently twonked his whole life. You honestly weren’t even thinking about Fermat’s last theorem until last night?”
“Nope,” Rick said.
“What about the journal?” Torrie asked. “You wrote in your journal that you got a flash of inspiration at the reception, and again on the drive home, and you described how you worked on it for days after you met Marsha here, ’cause you wanted to impress her.”
“What journal?” Rick asked.
“Twonky,” Shil said, poking at a couple of bumps and a squiggle in the dark fabric. “The journal’s a—yada, sure enough, here’s the prob. It was yours, Vrank.”
“Skrot. Now what?”
“Can’t you go back and undo it?” Rick said, leaning over the table to look at the offending circuit. It looked like someone had doodled with a laundry marker on a piece of gray nylon. “Can’t you tell yourself to fix your time machine before you leave?”
Vrank shook his head. “For one thing, looping like that’s a good way to trang your brain, but even if I tried it, that’d just dox it up even worse. We came back here to dock your discovery, which means you do figure it out.”
“Or at least he gets the credit for it,” Torrie said.
Shil looked up from the time machine. He and Vrank and Torrie exchanged knowing glances. “It’d work,” Shil said.
“It would, wouldn’t it?” said Vrank.
“What?” Rick asked, backing warily away and getting ready with his broom handle. “What would work?”
“Going with it. Docking your discovery the way we originally intended to.”
“It’s not my discovery,” Rick said. “You guys planted it.”
“Yada? Then where did it come from?” Vrank asked. “We got it from you.”
There was a long, pregnant silence, then Rick pulled out a chair and sat down. “My head hurts,” he said.
“It’s not a proof,” he said the next morning. Torrie and Vrank and Shil and Marsha were gathered around Marsha’s computer, where Rick had displayed a graph of his brainstorm, but on the screen where the two curves were supposed to diverge and thus prove that no integer solutions existed, they crossed.
“That’s not right,” Vrank said. “You’re missing something.”
“Obviously.”
“Cheer up,” Torrie said. “You’ll get it soon. Your journal said it took you just a few days.”
“No pressure,” Marsha said, giggling.
“Yeah.” Rick stared at the screen for a few minutes, then said, “So Vrank, why don’t you jump forward and back again, give me another hint.”
Vrank laughed. “Sorry. Shil fixed the chrono, so it wouldn’t do any good.”
“Besides,” Torrie said, “we need to get some good shots of you thinking. It wouldn’t do to have you spring it right off, or people downtime would know for sure what happened.”
“Couldn’t have that,” Rick said sourly. He tapped at the keyboard.
changing the display from fourth to fifth power integers, but the parabolas still crossed.
“Actually,” Marsha said, “isn’t their intersection a counterexample? Maybe you can prove the theorem wrong. That would be just as big a deal.”
Rick thought about that, then said, “The intersection points aren’t necessarily rational numbers. Besides, Wiles proved the theorem true already. I’m just looking for a more elegant one. And trying to impress you, of course.” He put his arm around Marsha. She was the one good thing to come of all this.
A week later, he was getting used to having people from the future popping in and out of his office, his living room, even his bedroom. He drew the line at his bathroom, demanding at least one safe refuge, but that didn’t help him either. The theorem and his flawed proof of it haunted him no matter where he went, and that was what was driving him nearly crazy.
He called a halt to it the next time Vrank and his crew showed up in his office. “Look,” he told them, “it’s not going to work. The whole concept is bogus.”
“No, no,” Vrank assured him. “You’re close. I can tell.”
“Yeah, why don’t you?”
“What?”
“Why don’t you tell? Just give me the solution, I’ll write it down, you can finish your documentary, and I can get back to my life.”
Torrie frowned. “That wouldn’t make for good drama.”
“You want me to climb in a bathtub and shout ‘Eureka’? Fine. Write me a script. But I’m tired of trying to validate your mistake. I never wanted to work on this stupid theorem anyway.”
Shil looked up at the clock and grinned. Rick said, “What’s so funny?”
“Twenty minutes from now you won’t be saying that.”
“Oh?” Rick looked from Shil to Vrank to Torrie. All three had big grins on their faces. “What, this is the big moment?”
“Yada,” Torrie said. The telltales around her glasses winked red and yellow.
Rick looked back to the mess of papers on his desk. He’d given up on the graphical route, and was trying to come up with a completely new paradigm. “No way,” he said. “I’m completely at sea here. I couldn’t prove the Pythagorean theorem in twenty minutes.”
“Come on,” Torrie said, “try.”
Rick turned back to his desk, conscious of her glasses recording his every move, and tried to concentrate on the problem. What was he missing? He shuffled through the pages of graphs and the tables of logarithms, tapping his pencil on the tiny comer of bare desktop. Out of perversity, he picked his nose. If he concentrated, he could hear the clock humming, the second hand sweeping around and around.
When twenty minutes had come and gone, he looked up again and said, “I think it’s time for plan B.”
The proof from the future was no better than his own. Rick had called Marsha into his office to see it, but the two of them read the article in the futuristic plastic unibook with growing confusion. “It’s not a proof,” Rick said, using the recessed toggle on the side to flip back to the abstract on the first page. “It says it is, but it’s got the same problem I have with mine. Doesn’t anybody do peer review in the future?”
“That’s your article,” Vrank said, his voice worried. “I downloaded it straight out of the archive.”
“It may have my name on it,” Rick said, “but I’d never try to publish something with this basic a mistake in it.”
“Then it’s twonked,” Shil said. “Our little snark-up here must have rippled down the connie and changed it.”
“Oh, skrot,” Vrank said, grabbing the door frame for support. “Rick, you’ve got to solve it. If you don’t, we’re doxed bad.”
“Sorry,” Rick said. “I’ve given it my best shot.”
There was a moment of silence while everybody scratched their heads, then Marsha said, “Why don’t we go to the source?”
“We’re at the source,” Vrank said.