Rebel in Time

'Why, thank you, Troy. I don't think anyone has said anything as nice to me in years.' She smiled at him across her coffee cup and, with her business expression banished for a moment, she was quite lovely.

'That's not flattery — but the honest truth.'

'Which is even better. But you said that there were two things about me that impressed you. Make my day — tell me something else!'

Once again they laughed together. 'The second one is easier,' Troy said. 'You're a person who knows what they are talking about. Who operates without any, well—'

'Bullshit?'

'Right. And that's what I mean. You know what you're doing, you're in complete control of the situation here, while at the same time you're a walking ad for femlib. Which depresses me even more.'

'How?'

'It must be me. I still don't know what is going on around here.'

She shook her head. 'No, Troy, it's all my fault and I apologize. Everyone I normally talk to is up to the eyebrows in technology. I'm so used to it that I am afraid that I have forgotten how to communicate in ordinary language. I don't give interviews to the press, or have a husband to talk to about everyday matters, or any important interests outside of my work. Looking at it that way I suddenly realize that I must be a damn boring person.'

'I didn't say that!'

'Well, I did! And here is where I begin to reform. Let us leave this coffee and get back to my office and open the bar.' She frowned at him with sudden concern. 'You do drink?'

'Try me!'

'Good. I'll build a couple of swellegant gibsons and under the ameliorating effects of alcohol I will attempt to rejoin the human race.'

Fifteen minutes later Troy was sitting back in the deep armchair as he sipped gratefully from the reviving glass of frigid gin.

'That is good, really good. I can now confide in you that I am recovering from a very alcoholic week-end, and you have found the cure that I have been looking for.'

'Wonderful.' Roxanne sipped hers, then delicately picked out the tiny white sphere of the onion with her fingertips, popped it into her mouth and crunched it thoughtfully. 'All right, here we go. If I stray from the straight and narrow and you miss as much as one word, why, then shout whoa! All right?'

'Shoot.'

'All forms of energy in the universe are inescapably linked together. If you want an example you can see this clearly in a luminescent light bulb, where electrical energy is transformed to heat energy, that in turn being transformed to light energy. Sometimes the relationship is not quite as easy to make out. Take, for example, the movement of objects in a gravity field. Let us say that you lift a weight and tie it to the ceiling. It apparently just hangs there. But it still contains the muscular energy you used to lift it, only this energy is now in a different form. It is potential energy. If you cut the supporting rope it is transformed into kinetic energy and the weight drops.'

'Fine so far,' Troy said, and extended his glass so she could refill it from the shaker. 'In fact it has a familiar ring to it, something from high school.'

'Mechanics, first term physics. You knew this all the time — I'm just reminding you about it. Now let's jump over all the theory and experiments to the reality of what we are trying to do here. The thing that we are being funded for. My original theoretical calculations have been tested in a number of physical ways. The work has pretty well proven the theory to date, though there are still some holes in it that are causing trouble. But on the simple, experimental end, we are begining to get results. Using multi-dimensional parameters notionally affecting temporal displacement without physical impairment…'

'You just did it,' Troy broke in.

'What?'

'Spoke a sentence without one word in it that I could understand. Other than the first word which was using.'

'You are absolutely correct and I apologize. I'll try again. In the laboratory, with the expenditure of a great deal of electrical energy, we have managed a minimal transformation into temporal energy causing a physical displacement.'

She heard her own words and had to stop and laugh.

'Incorrigible,' Troy said. 'But a message is seeping through. Are you saying that you moved something in some way for a time?'

'Yes, I mean no. It moved, but not for a time but in time.'

Troy put his glass down most carefully onto the end table, then looked up at Roxanne.

'Please stop me if I am wrong,' he said. 'But are you trying to tell me that you have moved a hunk of something through time?'

'Roughly speaking, why yes.'

'Then you are also telling me that down there among all that stuff — that you have built a time machine?'

'Well, I think…' she smiled brightly. 'Why, yes, I suppose that we have.'

Chapter 11

'No wonder everyone's so upset about the security here,' Troy said. 'A time machine — why, just the idea of the thing, it's almost too big to take in! On television, sure, you see people jumping back and forth through time, but everyone watching knows that it's just actors in costumes and cardboard sets. But to have a real one, here, in this lab—' He ran out of words, looked to see if his glass was completely empty, then drained the remaining drops. Roxanne saw this and stood and hurried to the bar.

'Sorry. I'm being a rotten hostess. But you're right, the kind of time machines that zip into the past and future like temporal trolley cars, they happen only on television. Ours is not quite that impressive. When we turn it on we use enough electricity to light up all of Chicago to, well, do very little.'

'Like doing what?'

'I'll show you. Let's just finish these before the ice melts.'

He sipped — and was struck with sudden apprehension. 'Could your machine, could it have anything to do with McCulloch's disappearance?'

Roxanne thought for a moment, then shook her head no.

'I think that it is highly unlikely. You mean could he have sent that gold somewhere for his own nefarious purposes? That is so close to impossible that it is impossible. The biggest target object we have used so far only weighed a few grammes. But let's get down to lab nine before they lock up for the day. I'll show you just what I mean. We'll have to hurry. Bob Kleiman comes in at the crack of dawn — but he leaves just as early as well.'

Laboratory 9 was right down at the bottom of the building. They hadn't been there on their earlier tour. The heavy entrance door was locked and even the security guard could not open it. He had to telephone through to security central and identify the two visitors before the lock clicked and the door slid aside. They went in and, as the heavy portal closed behind him, Troy had the strange sensation that the hair was stirring on his head. He held his hand to it and felt it writhing under his fingers. Roxanne noticed his shocked expression and smiled.

'Nothing to worry about,' she said, rubbing at her own hair that was now standing straight out from her head. 'Static electricity. A few million volts of it, but no amps to speak of, so there is nothing to worry about. Side effect that happens when the machine is in operation. But it gives you some idea of the kind of juice we use here.'

It certainly did. The electrical fittings were most impressive. Wires thicker than his arm swung from gigantic ceramic insulators, looping down into the guts of hulking great machines. Most of the apparatus was grouped in the brightly-lit centre of the room — where the floor apparently bulged upwards. It wasn't a bulge, Troy saw when they walked closer, but a ridge of grey stone that projected up through the white concrete floor. Some of the machines were bolted to it, while others hung out over the stone on shining steel arms. A man in a laboratory smock was working at one of the machines; he turned around when Roxanne called out to him.