Nothing But Time (2 page)

“And it works?”
she asked.

“Of c
ourse it does. 
I
transported
an office chair over there today,” he answered absently
,
jerking a thumb back towards the door.

Kate
turned to see a generic swivel chair sitting near a desk.  “Are you sure that that chair wasn’t already there? 
You
have a half dozen of that same chair in
here
.”
 
ISIS purchased the generic chair in bulk;
she had several of the same in her lab as well.

“Well.
”
David
frowned then
before admitting
, “I’m not
absolutely certain
that it was the same chair
.  I don’t remember it being there before
, but the one I had
in
here definitely disappeared. 
I
sn’t that great?  I transported a solid object through space!”

“Doesn’t help if you don’t know where it went,”
Kate
told him wryly
,
crossing her arms over her chest.
 
While Kate knew that she was being rude in the face of
David
’s enthusiasm, it all felt so very wrong. 
She had a very bad feeling
gnawing in the pit of her stomach
.

“You don’t understand!”

“
Maybe not, but what I do
understand
is
that I shouldn’t be here and that you shouldn’t be telling me all this,”
Kate
insisted. 
She didn’t want to lose her job over this.  She’d worked to long and too hard for it.  Getting caught in this lab might be enough to see her sacked. 
“It’s time you t
ook
me home.”

“No!”
H
e stomped his foot.  “If you’ll just let me show you!”

“I don’t want to see it,
David
!”
she repeated.  “I don’t have the clearance for this.”

“Look!  Look!”  He pushed another chair
between the two
plates
and raced back to
the laptop, punching in one last command
. 
“I’ll send
it
over to Dr. Raney’
s office,
”
he announced as he hit the ‘Enter’ key with definitive pleasure.
 
Th
e machine did nothing.  It
emitted
no sound, no
light, no laser
s. 
However,
after a moment a black spot appeared between to the two metal plates.  It was so small that she almost hadn’t noticed it until the
area
around
the
opening
began to
re
fract in the light and then
visibly
be
nd
,
startling
Kate
.

“Well, that’s different,” she murmured under her breath
in astonishment
as the vortex expanded and
began to emit a wind-blown sound. 
A
dull, train-like roar that
,
in her experience
,
usually preceded a tornado.
  
It wasn’t loud at all.  Kate thought it was rather like being down in the cellar when the tornado hit. 
“Why is it windy?”

“That’s not wind at all,” David told her.  “Merely the gravitational pull against the room.  You see
,
it’s not blowing so much as sucking…”

A pen on the table flew through the air before snapping into the vortex.

“Geez,
David
!  We shouldn’t be in here with that thing on!  Who knows what it could do!” 
Kate
turned
intending to flee
the room
,
not wanting to be
t
here
when the storm hit.  She needed
to get out and shut the door with or without
David
but just as she reached the portal
,
David
cried out.

“Aha!  Look!”

Just as she turned
,
Kate
watched the chair
stretch and elongate
then
disappear with an audible pop.  Astonished,
Kate
’s jaw sagged.  Well, who would have really thought it would work?  She
certainly
hadn’t.

An
undeniable
suction
filled
the room. 
Kate
clung to the doorframe as
David
’s
sport
jacket began to pull
away from
him
.  He stumbled away from
the table only to struggle to return to it
.  “Okay
,
David
, turn it off!” she yelled.  “You’ve proven your point!
  Turn it OFF!
”

Looking worried for the first time,
David
caught the edge of the table and pulled himself back toward
laptop
that had
also began to buck and w
obble across the table toward the
vorte
x
that
had widened to encompass
the entire area between the panels
.

“Hurry,
David
!”
Kate
tried to pull herself the rest of the way out the door but her strength was no match for the pull created by the eddy.

“I’m
trying
,
Kate
,” he complained tightly as he typed into the machine.  “
It won’t shut down
.”

“
Damn it
,
David
,
just pull the…
David
!”
Kate
screamed as
David
stumbled away from the table. 
H
e tried to throw himself back toward the machine
but was pulled toward the siphon instead
. 
His body elongated in a surreal fashion as
the storm
pulled him inside as if he were a
cartoon character being stretched like a rubber band.  His yell of surprise echoed
her own then
,
with a pop,
David
was gone
.  Another pop sounded
right on top of the first
as the
siphon
was ripped from its cables and disappeared
.  T
he laptop
was dragged
off the table
as
its cable was swallowed by the wormhole
until it was gone was well
leaving
behind
the table which was safely bolted to the floor
.

As if satisfied by its meal, the
forceful drag
began to abate but
Kate
’s grip on the doorframe wasn’t enough to defy the lingering
pull
.  Her hands slipped and her feet slid across the floor. 

So this is what it’s like to be a deer in the headlights,
she thought as it pulled her in, all her fight diminished by fasc
ination as she stared into the
whirl of colors formed against the steel wall beyond
like churning thunderclouds at dawn
.  Grays and whites and silvers all swirling together like some
mono
chromatic frappuccino.

Caught.  Fascinated. 
She couldn’t look away.

“Ahh, right on time!”
David
’s voice cut through the dizzying nausea that had
Kate
scrunch
ing her eyes tightly together as she lay
curled in a fetal position
on the ground clenching her stomach.  “Just breathe!  The nausea will abate,” he advised in a cheery voice.

Having no choice but to take his advice, Kate inhaled deeply noting that the air was cool and fresh, a balm to her whirling dizziness.  Encouraged
,
she tried it again. 
“
David
?”
Kate
moan
ed still squeezing her eyes to block out what seemed to be a very bright light.  “What was that? 
I feel as if I’ve been put on the rack!”

“That’s the effects of spaghettification, Kate,” he said cheerfully.  “Fascinating isn’t it?  You
r
body was stretched to be thin enough
to
move through a microscopic
singularity
.”

“Microscopic
singularity
?” she repeated mindlessly.  What was he talking about?  Kate clenched her fists against the pain and nausea surprised to feel grass beneath her palms.  “
This isn’t Dr. Raney’s office, is it? 
Oh, God, where did you send us?”

“Oh, we’re still right here in Didcot,” he answered referrin
g to the location of the ISIS ca
mp
us
twenty-four kilometers
south of Oxford.

Feeling the cool, dampness of earth and grass beneath her cheek,
Kate
cracked her eyes.  “Did you send us outside?”

“Well, not exactly,” he hedged a bit and even through the nausea and confusion,
Kate
could
hear
the awful hesitation in his voice.

“What do you mean
‘
not exactly
’
,
David
?
”
Dread tightened in her core as she
clenched
her
teeth.
  Whether they were clenched in irritation or to keep her dinner where it was, Kate wasn’t sure.

“There seems to have been a little mix up with the
device
.  We are exactly where we left from.  Exactly,” he reiterated.

“What do you mean ‘
exactly
’
?”
Drawing a deep breath,
Kate
rolled
onto her back before pushing herself into a sitting position.
Opening her eyes, she found, not the bright
fluorescence of office lights
that had burned at her closed lids
, but
rather dim twilight darkening the rosy horizon to the west
.
A quick glance around proved that she wasn’t in the lab or in anything
more impressive
than the middle of a
pasture
.  There were actually cows grazing nearby! 
In addition
,
a
n
old-fashioned
,
black carriage stood nearby complete with a horse to pull it. 
It looked
suspiciously like one she’d seen in Robert Downey Jr.
’s new
Sherlock Holmes
movie just a few weeks
before;
however,
it didn’t
seem to be a prop.

Dread washed over her, an ugly foreboding that she wished she were coward enough to
just close her eyes against and
deny.  Instead
,
she faced the inevitable. 
“What did you do,
David
?”

“Here’s the thing,
Kate
,” he began in a gentle tone that
Kate
equated to using with
startled horses, abused dogs and lunatics.   “You are in exactly the same place that you were five minutes ago, the problem is that you’re not in the same time.”

“Not in the same time,” she repeated dumbly as if the words had no meaning.  “
Not in the same time?”

David
squatted before her taking her hand in his and gently patting it.  “It seems that my
device
didn’t necessarily travel through space itself as it did through space-time
. 
The zero-point energy siphon drew more power than I had calculated and created a run-away quantum vacuum between the plates.  This
,
in turn
,
created a microscopic singularity spinning at near light
speed that
manifested
itself
as a wormhole – which I expected, of course – bridging two points in time and space rather than space alone.  Th
ough I had anticipated that any object set
between the plates
would
be sent through,
the
gravitational pull of the microscopic singularity grew when it wasn’t immediately shut down.  It drew me in and, I gather, even ripped the siphon from its cables.   I had hoped that the singularity would immediately evaporate after that, but since I could not be certain, I knew I had to wait for you to get here, just in case.”

Kate lay stunned on the grass trying to absorb the nonsense David had just spouted.
  “In English, please.”

“
A time machine, Kate.  I’ve created a time machine! 
I
sn’t it wonderful
? 
Can you imagine the awards I’ll get for this?  Maybe even the Nobel Prize in Physics next year!”

“What?”
Kate
questioned, locked still on the statement that came before all of his self-glorifying ramblings.  “What do you mean ‘not in the same time’,
David
?  A time machine?”

“We’ve
traveled
through time,
Kate
!”
He
beamed at her.  “Isn’t that exciting?”

“
David
, if you don’t shut it and explain to me exactly what
happened right this instant
, I swear to you I will make a woman out of you!” she snarled.  “Now talk!”

“
Americans!” he muttered under his breath.  “Fine then
,” he replied
,
indignantly
crossing his arms over his chest to make sure she knew she had upset him. 
“The
siphon
cut a hole in the
fabric of time sending us backward, of course, since every
one
knows that you can’t travel forward. 
Instead of measurements of distance, the
siphon
calculated days
and years
.  We are now standing
one hundred and thirty-six
years in the past right where my lab will someday be.”

“We
traveled
back in time
one hundred and thirty-six
years,” she repeated
,
hating herself for sounding like an idiot but for some reason the concept would not take hold.  “This is
one hundred and thirty-six
years ago?”

“That’s right!”

“In England? 
One hundred and thirty-six
years ago?”

“Yes.”

“
One hundred and
thirty-six
years.”

“Yes,”
David
answered again, the corners of his mouth turning down as they tended to when he was annoyed.  “Really,
Kate
, I thought you were
cleverer
than this.”

“You’ll excuse me,
David
, if I have just a little problem digesting all of this!” she snapped at him
,
taking another look around trying to absorb what he was telling her.  Finally
, she looked back
at
David
.  “What are you wearing?”

“Do you like it?” he asked
,
standing and jerking down the bottom of his jacket before smoothing his hands down the front.  “It’s new.”

Kate
looked over his suit. 
It was d
ark brown
,
maybe
wool
with a whi
te
, high-collared
shirt
.  A
striped tie
was knotted around his neck
.  Unde
rneath the jacket, she could see
a vest of striped gold and red with a wide lapel that crossed low into a double-breasted closure.  A gold watch-fob dangled across the front.  The suit was horribly
old-fashioned
but might have fit right in
during
the 1800s. 

A lump lodged in her throat prompted
Kate
to swallow deeply taking a moment to digest everything
David
had just told her.  His wormhole device was actually a time machine.  A time machine…
really?
Her mind lingered there for several long minutes before another question nudged its way into her mind.
“Why
one hundred and thirty-six
years?”

“Well, yes,
the matrix I had developed for the destination was perhaps flawed in
a
small way.  I had thought it was measuring distance when in fact it was measuring time.  It took me quite some time to figure that out after I arrived, I can tell you.  But the whole thing is br
illiant, don’t you think?”

“No,
David
, I don’t think!”
Kate
bit out as she got to her feet.
She was light-headed and reeling now, not because of the machine’s effects but rather because of the enormity of what was happening.
 
“Are you telling me that we’re stuck in the past?  And why are you dressed like that?  You only left a
second
before me.”

“That actually took me a bit of time to
decipher
as well
. 
I mean, first of all, I had to repair the laptop. 
The screen was damaged in its fall.  Without LED technology available, I had to go back to basic CRT development to create a screen.  After that
,
I was
finally
able to calculate the delay
in arrival
which I’ve been able to determine was
d
ue to the time dilation effects near the event horizon of the singularity.
”

“English, David.”

“Goodness, Kate!  You are a scientist!”

“I’m a scientist with a colossal headache,” she returned.  “Boil it down for me.”

“Those items entering the wormhole arrived here at a time difference exponentially larger than the difference of when they fell into the wormhole,” he told her.  “Is that simple enough?
 
The
pen and
chair arrived first, I imagine several months
before I since I haven’t seen them
.  That was probably the actual computation of distance in the device.  Then I arrived
,” he explained.  “Even the
siphon
itself
,
which
entered the vortex a split second after myself
,
arrived
days
after I did
.  But never worry,
Kate
, I can get us home.”

There was no denial in
Kate
at all.  No head-shaking insistence that it wasn’t true, that it was all some prank. 
That he was just making it all up.  It
felt
true.  The ground beneath her felt very real. 
To her
,
science was filled with mysteries to be solved and scientists solved them.  Sometimes accidentally as
David
had done. 
Think penicillin. 
Science fiction of the past often became
the future’s
reality. 

Of course, this was one area of study she’d never considered a breakthrough of this sort in, but still…

No, it was all too real. 
She had seen the
siphon
at work and
still
felt the results. 
Unless David had somehow drugged her and kidnapped her to a place without any modern structures and…  No,
i
t wasn’t a joke. 
As
Sherlock Holmes had long claimed
,
once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable
, must be the truth.  God, she was such a geek if she recalled such a thing so vividly.
“Well, get us home then!”