The End of the Experiment
by Peter Clines
“J |
on!” Chris launched herself over the threshold and into his arms. He returned the hug, and everyone pretended not to notice that she hung on just a bit longer than he did. Jon reached around the perky blonde to shake Will’s hand. Sylvester clapped him on the back in a manly way as he walked past and Tom just gave their host a smile over the double-stack of pizza boxes.
Jon guided them all past the wall of family photos and into his flat. It wasn’t a huge place by normal standards, but for a grad student living alone it was gigantic. Sylvester slid a stack of physics books across the coffee table to make space for the pizzas Tom was setting down. Will flopped into a well-worn easy chair. Chris grabbed the opener from the little fridge before rolling over and onto the couch.
Tom opened the top box for a moment and bent his bald head, taking a deep sniff of cheese, garlic, and hot oil. “So where the hell have you been, mate?”
“Working,” said Jon, cracking open a beer. “Working on what may be the greatest invention of all time.”
Will raised an eyebrow. “Better than the tri-fection bong we built last year?”
“Much better.”
“Liar! Nothing short of cold fusion could beat that.”
“Better be worth it,” said Sylvester, popping the cap off his own bottle. “Professor Herbert’s going to give you the sack if you skip any more of your undergrad classes. Doesn’t look good, his only Yank being AWOL for so long.”
“It’s worth it,” Jon assured them. Five bottles chimed against each other over the pizza. “You guys are still covering for me, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, and he’s noticed,” said Tom. “Which means you’d better get a move on before he gives us the sack us as well.”
“So,” said Chris, “what is the mysterious it you’ve been working on, then?”
“Everyone have at least two beers first. This is a lot easier to deal with if you’ve got a buzz going.”
Tom’s lips twisted. “Does this mean we’re not watching a movie?”
“No movie,” said Jon. “Beer and talking.”
“I thought we were going to see a movie,” grumbled Tom. He drowned his sorrow with another swig of beer.
“Can we eat,” said Sylvester, “or will that upset your master plan somehow?”
“I’ll just toss out the warning that I was sick to my stomach for a while when I figured this whole thing out.”
The first box flipped open and five slices of pizza slid off onto five plates. Tom grabbed an extra slice while Chris reached for a packet of hot peppers. They worked their way through the first pizza and into the second six-pack, talking about tutoring jobs and papers that needed grading and bad campus bands. Jon bit his tongue for almost an hour.
At last he couldn’t contain himself any longer and leaped back to his feet. “Okay, boys and girl,” he said. “Now that you’ve all got some food and alcohol in you, we’re going to have a history lesson, then show and tell, and then finish up with physics class.”
“Do we get to play doctor at breaktime?” asked Chris. She batted her eyes at Jon and gave her lips a flirty lick.
“You should be so lucky,” said Will with a smirk.
“So should you,” she snapped.
Jon clucked his tongue at them. “First,” he said, “the history lesson.” His voice took on the same tones he used when giving lectures to the undergrads. “Who knows what used to stand here?”
Tom glanced around. “The couch was there, wasn’t it? When you had the telly over there.” He pointed to the far wall.
“At this address,” clarified Jon. “What used to be on this spot?”
Chris glanced around. “It’s a converted warehouse, isn’t it? They made lots of them into flats back in the ’80s.”
“Further back.”
“My family used to live right over in Richmond,” said Sylvester. “Most of this area was flattened during the Blitz. Pretty sure it was all just houses before then.”
“Correct,” said Jon. “And records are damned spotty from back then, let me tell you. The house that was on this spot was vacant for almost thirty years, and there’s almost no record of the person who lived in it before then. I know it was a bachelor who was an amateur scientist, that’s about it.”
It was Tom’s turn to smirk again. “How d’you know that?”
Jon grabbed a slice of mushroom pizza. “I had to research around it, if that makes sense. A lot of the actual records are gone, but there were a few professional men who lived in this area. A doctor, a psychologist, the local mayor. A lot of them kept journals that make off-hand references to the man who lived in the house here. It was that social obligation of the time, gentlemen meeting every week for drinks and cigars and hours of talking.”
“Not at all like today,” grinned Sylvester, raising his bottle. They all toasted again.
“So who was he?” Chris said.
“I don’t know.” Jon shrugged. “Like I said, spotty records. Can’t find any direct trace of him.”
“Is that what you were doing when I saw you at the Hall of Records?” asked Will. “A few weeks back, when we ran into each other that time?”
“Right. The house was owned by a Mr. Smythe out in Kent, but leased to the same gentleman for twenty-five years. In fact, it looks like he wasn’t even living there for the last nine. He’d just paid up in advance.”
“Where’d he go?”
“Again, no one knows. A couple of the journals even mention their acquaintance being absent. After a few months, they all assume he moved away, perhaps to America, and that’s that. What few signs there are of him completely vanish from the record. And the house stood empty until it got hit by a bomb in 1941.”
Will tried to cut in, but their host waved the interruption aside and continued on. “Now,” Jon said, “show and tell.” He smiled again and darted across the room to his workbench. He opened a drawer, pulled out something wrapped in black fabric, and unfolded the cloth as he carried it back to his friends.
Chris cooed at the sight of it. “What is it? It’s beautiful.”
The thing across his palm was an oversized Christmas ornament, a glittering framework of metal the size of a small shoe. He shifted his hands, settled the little apparatus on top of the stack of books next to the pizza boxes, and the others bent in to examine the small device.
At the heart of it was a small seat carved from wood, almost a saddle, and before it was a tiny console, barely two inches across, decorated with levers of what looked like glass and bone. A horizontal bar, like a throttle, stretched across the middle of the console, and the iridescent material gave it a blurry appearance, as if it were somehow unreal. Stiff wires of silver and brass criss-crossed around the saddle and the controls, forming an egg-shaped lattice.
Tom glanced up from the apparatus. “Is this what you’ve been working on all this time?”
“Sort of, yeah,” said Jon.
“Is that gold, all those spirals?”
“Yeah.”
“Real gold?”
Their host nodded.
“How’d you afford this thing?” asked Chris. “It must’ve cost a bundle.”
“We’ll get to that in a bit.”
Sylvester reached out a hand but couldn’t bring himself to touch it. He flexed his fingers twice, stretching the tips out an inch from the curved wires. “It’s got a charge,” he commented, watching the hair on his knuckles rise.
“Oh, yes,” said Jon.
“Is it powered or just static electricity?”
“We’ll get to that in a bit, too.
Chris hadn’t brought herself to touch the model yet either, but her nose was a hair from the metal latticework. Her bangs were hovering in the cloud of static electricity. “This is really amazing,” she said, giving Jon an approving glance.
He smiled again. He was all smiles tonight. “Now, finally, physics class.” He took a drink from his own beer, followed it with a bite of the pizza slice he hadn’t touched yet, and then another sip. “Let’s talk about time travel.”
A groan danced across the group, with a few smiles. “Hang on,” said Tom. “I need to use the loo before we start the debate.” He slipped the empty bottle back into the six-pack and marched across the flat.
“Time travel,” repeated Jon when his friend returned. “A fine group of minds like this one must have a few thoughts on it.”
“I thought David Tennant was the best Doctor Who ever,” said Chris.
“Agreed,” said Will. They tapped their bottles across the table and drank.
Sylvester reclined on the couch. “Time travel’s possible, but it’s only possible in that air-turning-into-gold way.”
“Which really means it’s not possible,” said Tom, drying his hands on his pant legs. He dropped back on the couch, bouncing Chris into the air. “It’s just a trick of the math, not real physics.”
Chris shrugged. “Isn’t all physics just a trick of math?”
“No, that’s statistics,” said Will with a smile. They all laughed and clinked their bottles again.
“Seriously, though,” said Jon, “saying it isn’t possible means gravity isn’t possible, and I think we all agree on gravity, yes?”
Chris snapped her fingers. “What about a Tipler cylinder?”
“Exactly,” said their host. “Tipler proved it’s entirely possible to build a time machine. We just don’t have the engineering know-how to do it right now.”
“Hawking says time travel is bollocks,” emphasized Tom, “even with Tipler cylinders.” He pulled the last beer and popped the cap.
“Hero of Alexandria was the most brilliant man of his age,” said Jon. “A certified genius who thought the steam engine was just a useless toy for kids.”
“Point being?”
“Almost every credible physicist will tell you there’s nothing in physics that says time travel can’t happen,” said their host. “They just don’t know any practical way of making it happen and they don’t like the implications. Two hundred years ago they said powered flight was impossible. Then they said man could never go faster than the speed of sound. Hell, sixty years ago you needed a computer the size of a gymnasium just to do addition.”
Tom shook his head again. “Still bollocks. So says the chronology protection conjecture.”
Will coughed out a laugh. “The what?”
“Try reading a book with no pictures sometime, mate,” said Tom. “A simple proof. If time travel is—or ever will be—possible, where are the time travelers? Every moment of history should be mobbed with them, so where are they?”
“Well,” said Sylvester, “I think Jon’s telling us they’re right here.” He drummed out a quick fanfare on the tabletop with his knuckles and gestured at the metal latticework on the table.
They all looked at the gleaming model again, then back up their host. They’d reached the crux of the lecture. “So, one night about nine months ago, I was sitting right where you are, Chris. It was a Thursday, I had the TV on, and something appeared right there on the coffee table next to my feet.”
They all paused in their dinner, except for Tom who was busy draining the last of his third beer. He let the bottle drop away from his face. “What d’you mean, something appeared?”
“To be exact,” said Jon, “it appeared about seven inches above the coffee table and fell next to my foot. If there hadn’t been a few copies of The Observer there it probably would’ve broken on impact.”
Tom raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, it appeared?” he repeated.
“I mean one minute it wasn’t here and the next minute it was. There was a little breeze, like someone slammed the front door, and this thing was there.”
The corners of Sylvester’s mouth tugged up a bit. Chris tilted her head and pulled her hand back. She hadn’t brought herself to touch it yet. “Like someone put it here when you weren’t looking?”
“No,” he said. “It appeared. Right out of thin air.”
“Bollocks,” said Tom with a grin. “It’s a toy.”
“It’s a stealth rugby ball,” said Sylvester. “What are you getting at here, Jon? Just say it and get it over with.”
Their host cleared his throat and set down his bottle. “What I’m saying is back in 1895 somebody brilliant lived here. Somebody years ahead of his time. He lived in a house which stood right where this apartment is now. And that man figured out how to travel in time.”
Tom rolled his eyes. They all shifted in their chairs.
“I’m serious,” said Jon. “He figured out how to do it and he even built a model time machine as an experiment, to see if it would work. Then one day, once it was done, he pushed the little white lever there and sent this machine over a century into the future.”
Chris tilted her head. “Why 1895?”
“What?”
“You said the building was leased to the same person for twenty-five years. Why say he did it in 1895?”
Jon grinned. He crouched next to the table and oh-so-carefully took the thin framework of the machine into his hands, ignoring the sparks that leaped to his palms. The machine rolled in his grip, and his index finger came down awkwardly across the brass plate that made up the base of the model. Etched into the metal were bold Roman numerals, overlined by his slim finger.
MDCCCXCV
“Come on,” said Tom. “This is nonsense.”
“Oh, no,” said Jon. “Nonsense would be if I reverse-engineered this thing and spent the past two months building a full-sized one down in the garage.”
They froze.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You want to see it?”
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