The Reluctant Sorcerer Page 2

  This posed certain problems. Did this mean that there was a sort of linear factor to time, where there was now a past in which Brewster had, in fact, seen a pair of time machines sitting side by side, complete with two rabbit passengers, but he could not remember it because he only had that experience further back along the timestream? And since he had repeated the experiment, did this suggest that there were now two past segments of the timestream, one in which he had seen two time machines and two rabbits, and another, slightly further back, in which he had seen three time machines and three rabbits? The whole thing gave Brewster quite a headache. (And if you feel like putting down the book right now and taking a couple of aspirin, your narrator doesn’t mind at all. Go ahead. I’ll wait.) The only solution to this dilemma that Brewster could devise was to actually get inside the time machine himself, so that he could find out where it went after he tripped the switch. (A video camera might have been an excellent solution to this problem, but he had tried that and discovered that the temporal field caused interference.) He had actually planned to make the trip himself all along, though he would have liked having some solid data before he made the attempt. However, Bugs seemed none the worse for wear after his two journeys, so Brewster felt the risk was justified. After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  He had set everything up again, carefully following the same procedure, and he had programmed in the sequence, complete with auto-return commands. He had then set the timer, and turned around to pick up his notepad and his pen before getting into the machine... only when he turned around again, the thing had disappeared. The trouble was, this time, it did not come back. This was why Brewster had been so distracted during the past two months, while Pamela had been trying to get him to the church. She wanted him to say “I do,” only he kept repeating, “I don’t get it.” The first time he had missed the wedding, he’d been sequestered in the library, combing through the work of Albert Einstein to see if maybe there was something he’d missed. There wasn’t. The second time he blew it, when he’d made the trip to Liverpool, he had gone to pick up the special microchip component that would allow him to assemble several more circuit boards for the auto-return modules, so he could run tests to see where the thing might have malfunctioned. The third time, the occasion of Pamela’s breakdown in communications with her father, he’d been locked up in the lab, putting the circuit boards together and assembling the modules. And so far as he could tell, there were no problems in the wiring or the assembly.

  He found the whole experience extremely frustrating and he had taken to carrying at least one of the modules around with him, taking it apart and putting it back together again repeatedly, running tests and scratching his head and generally being off in the ozone somewhere, which Pamela found rather trying. However, she was a patient woman and she knew that as soon as Brewster managed to clear up whatever problem was presently occupying his attention, there would be a space of time, however short, in which he would be receptive to new ideas. Such as getting married, for instance. So Pamela didn’t press. But the moment he worked out whatever it was that he was working on, she was going to pounce.

  The commercial ended and Brewster set the little black box that he had reassembled back down on the coffee table. Almost absently, he tripped a little switch on it. And an instant after he did it, it quietly clicked back to its original position.

  “Damn!” Brewster suddenly exclaimed, leaping to his feet and sending popcorn tumbling all over the rug and Pamela’s hair. “Thafs it!” “Marvin!” Pamela protested, brushing greasy kernels of unpopped corn out of her hair, but Brewster was already rushing across the room and flinging open the front door of their apartment. “Marvin, where are you going? Marvin! Your shoes!” The door slammed shut behind him. She sighed heavily. A moment later he came barging back in his stocking feet, swept up his brown tasseled loafers, pecked her on the cheek, and said, “I’ve just got to check this out, dear, but it may take a while. Love you. Don’t wait up.” ‘ ‘Marvin...” But he’d stormed out again, carrying the little black box under his arm, only this time forgetting to close the door behind him.

  “Oh, Marvin...” she said. With an air of resignation, she got up and closed the door. She was more or less accustomed to this sort of thing, but this time, whatever it was that had been frustrating him so, he must have gotten it licked, because he had run out in the middle of the movie, and he’d never done that before.

  “Don’t wait up,” he’d said. Like hell she wouldn’t wait up. If it took all night, she’d wait for him to return, doubtless brimming over with enthusiasm over whatever gadget it was that he’d finally managed to get working, wanting to tell her all about it. She would sit there and she’d listen and she’d share his pleasure and then, when he stopped to catch his breath (by then it would be dawn, most likely), she would put a tie and freshly laundered shirt on him, take him by the hand, and lead him down the nearest aisle she could find.

  She picked up a handful of spilled popcorn from the carpet and popped it in her mouth, then glanced at the clock atop the mantelpiece. Almost two A.M. It was late. Too late, in fact.

  Brewster rode the elevator up to his private laboratory atop the corporate headquarters building of EnGulfCo International, all the while thinking. God, it was so simple! A faulty counter in the timing switch, that was all it was. He was certain of it. He had tried everything else that he could think of in an attempt to reproduce the malfunction that had sent the first time machine off on the journey from which it had never returned and now he was certain that he had it. Everything else had checked out perfectly, with each and every one of the duplicate circuit boards for the autoreturn module he had assembled, but this one had a faulty timing switch. The moment he tripped it, instead of the counter sequentially going backward from “30” to “O,” the settings he’d selected, it went from “30” directly to “O,” without going through all the numbers in between, so no sooner had he tripped the switch than it clicked back again to its original position. That must have been what happened with the original machine. Some of the switches had been faulty and the auto-return had simply turned itself off an instant after he’d activated it. Damned English electronics, he thought, should have gone with Japanese components. No wonder the damn thing hadn’t come back. It had departed on a one-way trip! He passed the scanner and entered his laboratory, where the second time machine, the one he’d painstakingly recreated during the past two months, sat waiting in the center of the room. He stood there for a moment, staring at it and chewing on his lower lip. He had to be right this time. He’d used up the very last of the Buckyballs in putting the second one together. If it didn’t work right this time, that would be the end of it, at least until another obliging meteor containing fragments of a supernova from some other galaxy happened to smack into some unsuspecting piece of earthly real estate. And that could take a while.

  “It has to work this time,” he mumbled to himself, “it has to!” Just to make sure, he double-, triple-, and quadruple checked all the other switches for the duplicate auto-return modules he had assembled. He found two more that had the same malfunction, but all the others worked properly.

  “That’s it,” he said to himself. “That’s got to be it.” So simple. He had thought something had gone wrong in the assembly of the board, and he had done it over and over and over again, and all the time, it had just been a faulty switch.

  He rechecked all the working switches several more times, just to make certain, then. he selected one and snapped the module into the control panel. That’s all there was to it.

  ‘Wow,” he said. He turned to look at Bugs, sitting in his wire cage, looking fat and healthy and munching contentedly on a piece of lettuce. “Now we find out where you’ve been off to. Bugs, old buddy. And we go back and get the first machine... wherever the hell it is.” That thought brought him up short for a moment. Certainly, that first machine had to be somewhere. Only where? It should have merely traveled back into the past ten minute
s, from the time he’d sent it off, right in that very selfsame lab, and only been gone for ten seconds. Only, of course, since the auto-return module had switched itself off, it hadn’t returned ten seconds later and was undoubtedly still there. Which meant he had to work out the precise settings so that he would go back into the past exactly ten minutes from the time he had originally sent the first machine back. Or did he? If it was still in the lab, and time was sort of linear, and the new past he had altered by sending back the machine was running about ten minutes behind him, then it was probably still there, only ten minutes ago.

  Unless I’ve moved it, he thought. Only why would I do that? If I sent it back and the past me saw it appear, and not return, then obviously the past me in that new, altered linear past would have figured out that something had gone wrong and would undoubtedly be waiting for the future me to figure it all out.

  “Is that what I’d do?” he asked himself aloud. “Well, yes, of course, since I thought of it, then that’s exactly what I’d do, since I’m me and I know how I think, whether I’m the present me or the past me. Right?” He glanced at Bugs and nodded. “Right. Of course. That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Bugs merely continued munching on his lettuce leaf.

  “The past me must be getting very impatient with the present me, or from the past me’s viewpoint, the future me, to figure it all out and fix it. And all this time, it was so obvious. When I get back there, I’ll have to give myself a good talking to.” The thing to do, he decided, was duplicate the original settings exactly, without attempting to compensate for the time lag from the date of the original experiment. Just repeat everything exactly the same way and travel back into the past ten minutes earlier from the present. That way, the first time machine would undoubtedly still be there, and he would be too, since he’d arrived at the lab considerably more than ten minutes ago.

  He frowned and scratched his head. He hadn’t seen himself when he came in, so clearly, that seemed to support his new theory that time ran in a sort of linear fashion, rather like the current of a river. He tried to visualize it.

  If he were sitting on a riverbank and he marked a certain place on that bank with a stone, then took a flower petal, for instance, and dropped it in the river some distance upstream of the stone, then he could watch the flower petal as it drifted downstream, past the stone- That was the normal flow of time. A few seconds in the past, the flower petal had been upstream of the stone, now it was downstream of it. If he now fished that flower petal out of the water, carried it back to the spot where he’d originally dropped it in, and went back a moment or so in the past and dropped it in again, there would now be two flower petals floating downstream, side by side, toward the stone. However, since there had to be a space of time in which there had only been one flower petal floating down the river, that space of time was now represented by the volume of water from which he had fished out the flower petal before taking it back upstream and traveling back into the past with it.

  Consequently, the two flower petals now floating downstream side by side would be aware of each other (assuming awareness on the part of flower petals), but the flower petal in the original, unaltered space of time represented by the volume of water between the place where he had originally tossed it in the river and the place where he had fished it out would have no awareness of a second flower petal, because in that particular time frame, its past had not been changed. The past had been changed behind it.

  Brewster figured this was why he was unaware of having seen himself when he walked into the laboratory a short while ago. Because he was still existing in that space of time where the past had not yet been changed. The moment he went back, he’d see himself entering the lab, but he couldn’t remember that now because it hadn’t happened yet. It had happened-or would happen-about ten minutes earlier.

  He looked at the rabbit. “I sure wish you could talk, Bugs,” he said. “It would help clear up a lot of things.” He entered the settings into the console on the panel, programming his trip, and wondered what it would feel like to meet himself. About ten minutes ago, he’d find out.

  He took a deep breath, wondering why he didn’t feel a sense of incredible elation. He was, after all, about to become the first man in history to travel back through time. Even if it was only ten minutes. The elation, he supposed, would probably come later, when he published his discovery and EnGulfCo got behind him with its massive public relations machine.

  There would be lectures at universities, interviews in magazines and newspapers, appearances on talk shows, perhaps even a film about his life, all culminating, certainly, in the awarding of the Nobel Prize. Doubtless, that would bring it all home to him and he would feel elated then. Right now, all he felt was a slight tension, an anxiety mat always came just before an important project was successfully completed.

  He thought of Pamela. She would be so proud of him. This would make up for his having missed all those wedding dates. After this, they could finally get married and then he could take her oh a wonderful honeymoon. Perhaps to Victorian London, he thought, or to Paris during the reign of the Sun King.

  “Well, Bugs, here goes,” he said, and flipped the switch.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Michael Timothy O’Fallon was, on the whole, having a very pleasant afternoon. The sun was bright, the sky was clear, his pipe was full, and he had absolutely nothing to do. He had filled all his orders, and for once, there were no annoying customers to deal with. He often wished there was some way he could conduct his business without having to deal with the public, but unfortunately, he had not yet found a way around this necessary evil. In order to sell the fruits of his labors, he required customers to buy them and Mick O’Fallon regarded customers as an irritating inconvenience. They were always pestering him, always haggling, always impatient, and always trying to look over his shoulder as he worked-which was not very difficult to do, as Mick was only three feet tall.

  He was, however, almost equally as wide, with an immensely powerful upper body and short, muscular legs, which often led people to mistake him for a dwarf, something that infuriated him no end. As far as he was concerned dwarfs were obnoxious little cretins who dressed in loud and clashing colors, had little intelligence to speak of, and were only good for relatively undemanding, menial labor. The finer aspects of any sort of real craft were utterly beyond them, though they were industrious, Mick had to give them that. Give them some simple, mindless physical task to perform and they’d happily pitch in, singing and whistling while they worked. Nevertheless, being mistaken for a dwarf was rather insulting, especially if one happened to be a leprechaun.

  Mick was not especially sanguine on this issue. Whenever some customer made this mistake, Mick would start to turn crimson, all his facial muscles would get tight, and using all his self-control in an effort to keep his temper, he would pointedly and firmly correct them in no uncertain terms. Then he would go out behind his shop, snarling and trembling with fury all the way, clamp his massive arms around the trunk of some tree, and, with one mighty heave, uproot it. In this way, he had systematically cleared a large section of the woods around his shop.

  However, on this bright and sunny day, there were no customers around to irritate him and he had fulfilled all his commissions, so he had packed his tobacco pouch and pipe and hiked up the trail to the top of Lookout Mountain, to simply bask in the sun and smoke and laze away the day while he enjoyed the view. It wasn’t an especially tall mountain, but it was an especially nice view.

  He was enjoying the peace and quiet and the solitude when the air above him suddenly became filled with static discharges and an extremely loud and high-pitched whining sound. He glanced up and saw a very strange-looking contraption suddenly appear out of nowhere in the sky about twenty feet above him, to an accompanying clap of thunder, and proceed to fall at an alarming rate directly toward the spot where he was sitting.

  With a yelp, he threw himself out of the way, just in the nick of time, as the mysterious objec
t struck the ground with a jarring crash, barely missing him, and proceeded to slide down the grassy mountain slope on what looked like sled runners, picking up speed as it went. It plowed through bushes and jounced over rocks protruding from the mountain slope, sending off sparks as it careened precariously down toward the bottom. Mick wasn’t sure, but for a moment, it seemed as if he’d heard a voice issuing from inside the peculiar-looking object, crying, “Helllllp!” “The devil!” Mick exclaimed as he dusted himself off and watched the thing go crashing down the mountainside, going faster and faster, slipping sideways and tipping from one runner to the other, miraculously without overbalancing, kept more or less right side up by some kind of large and shiny ring that encircled it diagonally.

  “Faith, and I’ve never seen the like of it!” he said, watching thunderstruck as the strange object hurtled down the mountain slope until it finally came to a crashing halt against the trunk of a huge tree. The object struck the tree with a resounding impact, shooting sparks all over the place. The tree shuddered, cracked, then splintered and, with a loud and agonizingly drawn-out creaking sound, came crashing down onto the ground, narrowly missing Robie McMurphy’s prize bull, which had been grazing peacefully at the edge of the wood.