The Dinosaur Chronicles (2 page)

I nodded dumbly.

“After the experiment concludes, the scientists present, all of whom witnessed the original spigot setting at full-flow, recall the registration of the water-float occurring at the half-flow timing. Ergo, history has been changed.”

“And this experiment has actually been done?”

“Several times. It was quite unsettling for those involved. A number of the participants retired from physics to take up gardening and poetry. Two went quite insane.”

Somehow, I could believe that. When History, the foundation upon which one’s existence rests, shows its rickety underpinnings, weaker minds are apt to snap. I considered the matter some moments more before my bosom rose and fell, expelling forth a great, great sigh. It was an acquiescence of the inevitable; my mood had shifted from a dark belligerence to a sober unsteadiness.

Valik said, “Perhaps you’d care to show me the machine now?”

I rose to my feet, as did my guest, and as I guided him through the sliding glass porch doors, I found I had appended a most unscholarly wobble to my gait.

“The entrance to my workshop is outside,” I explained, fishing for the keys in my pocket.

We walked slowly round the side of the building, his lanky figure shadowing the movement of my short, stocky frame. The moon provided quite enough in the way of illumination and, in the way of conversation, I gestured to the stars and asked, “Which one is yours?”

He stopped, stared at the pinpoints for several seconds, as if to orient himself, and then lifted his arm. “It is just visible to the eye,” he said. “The dim, orange star to the right of the large, white-blue one; I do not know your Earth names for them ... there.” He pointed with more conviction.

In the moments we’d been walking, the analytical portion of my mind had not rested, and I asked him the question which now troubled me. “You say my machine, at power-up, registered on your detectors?”

The alien dropped his gaze from the heavens to look at me.

“This is so.”

“Therefore, it is quite possible that, with at least some machines, an actual time-traversal might have occurred, and your method of detection, essentially an after-the-fact mechanism, might not be sufficient to avoid all manipulation of History.”

“Theoretically, you are correct. We have no better means at hand, however, and in any case, the first powering-up of a machine will most certainly be done with its coordinates set at (0,0,0,0). The XYZ-coordinates being locally-centered, and nothing existing at Time Zero, no harm is done by the device taking a momentary journey to a point in space at which nothing exists.”

“There are problems with locally-centered XYZ coordinates,” I pointed out.

“Of course. To go back to yesterday, for example, the spatial coordinates must account for the fact that the world has moved in its orbit in the last day, the sun has moved in its orbit around the galactic center, the galaxy itself has moved, and so forth. To find the world at any given time and place, coordinates must be registered relative to a fixed point. This is why it usually takes the inventor of a time machine several tests, using the machine itself, to adjust his coordinate system from local to absolute. And long before he has the opportunity to complete the process, we will have him cooperating with us or spending his time in restraint.”

“Well,” I said, smiling because at least a portion of my work was now due some recognition for being
first
, “it wouldn’t have taken
me
several attempts.”

“And why is that, Professor?”

“Because my machine was already set up to use absolute coordinates.”

Valik blinked at me several times. “How could you have done this?”

“I used the information gathered by the COBE 7 satellite,” I said, referring to the latest incarnation of the Cosmic Background Explorer. “Its data are non-military and a matter of public record. All of its recordings are available on the Internet—you are familiar with the Net, aren’t you?”

“Yes, yes,” the Inspector sputtered with evident impatience, “another typically Terran creation—intertwined Order and Chaos. But go on with your story.”

“Well, using the newer, more accurate readings of the variations in the background radiation, it was possible to discern the
peculiar motions
of the galaxies, namely, those motions that are relative to the original location of the Big Bang. In fact, using some finer statistical methods of my own, the epicenter of the Bang can be quite closely established.”

“How closely?”

“To within several centimeters, actually. Time travel would be impossible without such accuracy. Your scientist could not have traveled into the sealed chamber to adjust the water spigot without it; he might otherwise have materialized within a wall, to mention just one possibility.” I took my arm and pointed in the direction of Hercules. “My calculations show that the Universe began some 14.58 billion years ago in that direction.”

Valik followed my arm and nodded thoughtfully. Then, in the dim light of the quarter moon, he asked softly, “Do you have a telescope, Professor?”

I nodded. “A ten-inch reflector with good optics. You wish to take a look?”

“If you please. I’ll wait here.”

I did not know what my unexpected guest had in mind, but within the course of three minutes I had retrieved the reflector from my house and had set up the scope for viewing.

Valik adjusted the equatorial mount, placed his eye to the eyepiece and, I thought, shuddered just a little. He said, “I take it your time machine has a stasis-based sampling chamber?”

“Certainly. Samples taken from any moment in time are in effect ‘frozen’ within the sampler. I’d hoped that as a side-invention, the stasis chamber could be used to hold seriously-ill patients in limbo until better treatments for their afflictions could be developed.”

Valik stood back from the scope. “Take a look,” he said.

I looked. At first, I saw nothing amiss. Several of the closer stars blazed brightly in the image produced by the telescope, and a number of nearby galaxies patterned the background. After a moment, however, I became puzzled, and I temporarily shifted the scope to another region of the sky.

The background of that view was not nearly as dark.

I pointed the reflector back to Hercules, then to the adjacent sky coordinates. The area of dark background was circular in shape and—were my eyes tricking me?—expanding.

Valik spoke, and this time I knew his voice was forced. For any being, alien or human, his words came as a croak. “One thing I did not mention,” he said. “When History is changed, the change does not propagate to the present instantly. A certain lag has been measured. The effect propagates at roughly a billion years per hour. I recognized one of the galaxies still visible in the view; it is about 500 million light-years away.
It vanished as I watched
.”

I stood up from the scope. I too had just seen a galaxy dissolve to nothingness. Our eyes met, but nothing needed to be said.

For when I’d powered up my machine this morning, with absolute coordinates (0,0,0,0),
I had unwittingly sampled and trapped the Creation Event
.

The Universe would no longer exist and, when the propagation wave reached us, neither would we.

I said, “The Event must still be in the stasis chamber.”

He said, “You must fire the machine again, evacuate the chamber, and relocate the machine before returning it here. We have perhaps half an hour before Nothingness overtakes us.”

Adrenalin shook the shake from my steps, and Valik followed as I led the way to my workshop. Inside, a frantic ten minutes were spent readying the three-meters-on-a-side white cube that rested in the center of the old garage. Then, another two were invested in a double-check of all instruments. Finally I told Valik, “I’m ready to try it.”

“Do it!”

I toggled the security latch and pressed the power button. For the blink of an eye, the great machine vanished, then solidified once more. I took several readings of the stasis chamber before I said, “The chamber is empty. The Event has been restored.”

Still, Valik did not appear happy.

“Come on,” I said and grabbed his arm. “Let’s look through the scope and see what’s happening.”

“But—”

I dragged the alien back to the side of the house and was the first to press my eye to the telescope.

“The void is still there!” I cried. “But the restoration worked!”

“It may well have worked,” Valik said dryly, “but you have forgotten the propagation speed. The change of History that restores the Universe is some thirteen hours behind the propagation wave that destroys it.”

Cold sweat sprang from my pores. Wind arose from God Knows Where and I could not have shivered more had I been dropped naked to an ice floe. I stuttered, “W-We’ll be dissolved!”

“Yes. And there’s nothing to be done about it. At least the Universe will be restored.”

“With us
in
that Universe?”

“I do not know.”

My mind raced. It wasn’t adrenalin this time; it was now driven by some unnamed primordial death-defying impulse that must put in its appearance only in those moments of greatest danger to the species. My voice firmed and I said, “This is
most
unsatisfactory.”

Valik stared at me curiously. He even smiled, evidently resigned to his fate.

I said, “There
is
another way!”

“If there is, please tell me.”

“I can go back to this morning, to seven o’clock, and prevent myself from powering the machine in the first place—”

“You cannot undo an event by undoing the outer event loop!”

“Is this proven?”

Valik hesitated.

I ran past the Inspector, around the corner to the shop, and locked myself in. Furiously I worked the controls of the machine’s computer panel. I could do this only once and would have no chance to try again. I set an activation timer and, with a last look around the workshop, climbed into the machine’s stasis chamber.

—

Pro forma, I let the doorbell ring its twenty-three times. I opened the portal, and a tall, slim man in dark tunic and slacks, with a long, bony countenance stood before me. His arrogant flair I would spike immediately, and with zest.

“Come in, please. You must be Inspector Valik, of Interpol.”

Certain facial gestures must be universal. I would not have believed that the alien’s jaw, still under the large rubber mask, could have dropped
half
the distance that it did.

“We have met? Professor—”

“Beloit. At your service. Please take a seat on the sofa, and I’ll get us both a drink. You do drink?”

The tall form entered and cautiously seated itself. “I have taken a liking to your wines—that is, I like wine.”

“There is no need to be coy, Inspector. Make yourself comfortable. Remove your mask if you wish.”

By the time I returned from the kitchen with the two glasses of ‘15 Burgundy—a very good year, by the way—my guest had indeed availed himself of my offer. If he expected me to startle and spill the drinks at his appearance, he was disappointed.

“The mask is rather a warm convenience,” he said slowly, taking his drink from my hand. I again dropped into the chair opposite the sofa.

We sipped quietly for a minute. Then he said, “I take it we have met in another time period, or perhaps in another causality chain.”

Well, I didn’t think I could lead an intelligent alien around by his pointy nose but for so long. “Yes,” I told him. “It was a
most thrilling
experience.”

Valik sighed. “Please, Professor, tell me about it.”

I told him. When I got to the point where I’d trapped the Creation Event, the good Inspector’s eyes got as big as the saucer in which he must have landed.

“My God!” he cried. “This is something we in Time Corrections never in our wildest nightmares considered possible!”

“It is the fault of your after-the-fact detection system,” I said plainly.

“Yes! But what do we do for an alternative?”

“If I help you with that, will you help me with a problem of my own?”

Valik looked at me with suspicion. Even with alien eyes, the reaction was unmistakable. “I’d like you to finish your narrative first,” he said. “How did you fix things?”

I told him of the restoring of the Event, and how that correction would never overtake the first error. Then I told him of my second solution.

“All right, you arrived this morning at seven o’clock. But the machine still powered up, for otherwise I wouldn’t be here!”

I said carefully, “The machine’s coordinates were not set at (0,0,0,0), so no harm was done. Then I waited for your visit.”

“You could simply have destroyed the machine.”

Even more carefully, I said, “Without your presence, I would not have been able to warn you of the overlooked danger.”

“This is so. And you were about to tell me of a way to avoid our dependence on after-the-fact detection.”

“Will you help me with my problem?”

“What is your problem?”

“Answer, first. Surely the Fate of the Universe balanced against some minimal accommodation to me is a sufficient inducement.”

Valik flushed, bringing an unsightly yellow to his even, pale-green tone. “All right,” he growled, “it is agreed!”

I relaxed and leaned back in my chair. “The key to all of this is power, Mr. Inspector. The only radioactive isotope easily available in quantity to researchers such as myself is americium, because of its commercial use in smoke detectors. You need to place agents in the americium manufacturers, of which there are only a few, and place monitors on the Internet to detect unusual interest in temporal research or phenomena. Remember, each scientist working on a time machine will think he is the only one and will have no idea that he must avoid detection.”

Valik thought for a moment. “What you suggest is, in hindsight, sickeningly obvious. I will see that it is done. And your problem?”

I sipped my glass and smiled at the alien. “Think about it, Inspector.
I arrived here this morning at seven o’clock
. And, I will admit, I am not of fine humor in the mornings.”