Chapter 12

The man looked around warily, trying to see the cat. It was very large, but virtually the same tawny color as the sand dunes that stretched for hundreds of miles around, making it almost impossible to distinguish. The man looked for some movement, or for an irregular shape against the unnatural smoothness of the sand. There were no plants in this desert, so unless he had actually lost it the cat must be hiding behind one of the dunes. It was waiting for him to grow careless, or too tired to pay careful attention. He prayed fervently that it had lost his scent.

Because he was growing tired. And very hot. And very thirsty.

He had no way of telling time, but he must have been out here for eight or nine hours. Yet there was no sign of the merciless sun dipping below the horizon. The canteen, which had been full when he started, now hung emptily at his side. His energy and strength, which had seemed boundless, had been steadily sapped by the choking heat and the fear and exertion of the chase.

Twice the cat had chased him, and twice he had used the trick they had taught him to get away. They? Who were ‘they?’ He couldn’t remember.

It was a simple trick, played with his mind. He strongly desired that time slow down in the world around him, which included the fast, powerful cat. It wasn’t quite as simple as it sounded, of course. And he couldn’t remember how he had been taught, or when, or by whom. He just knew that, when he did it right, the cat would literally move in very slow motion. Then he would run.

He didn’t have to be terribly fast himself, and he didn’t have to use evasive tactics. He just had to run, somewhere, with the cat caught in the slow-motion field he had created. The sand seemed to flow back together after his passing, although also slowly, eventually absorbing the trace of his tracks and most of the smell. If he could project a slow-motion field long enough and powerful enough, they had told him, he could get too far away for the cat to be able to track him. And then he would be safe. Had he managed to do it?

The man started moving again, carefully looking all around him, in the same direction he had been going. At least, he hoped it was the same direction. It all looked so similar, of course, and his condition made him very confused as to which way he had actually been going. As he topped a sand dune, he stopped dead.

There was the cat, sitting alertly at the bottom of the dune. It wasn’t looking at him, although its nostrils were sniffing the air and its tail was twitching in excited little jerks. He started to retrace his steps, trying no to make a sound, when the cat suddenly turned and looked right at him. The two seemed frozen for a few seconds, neither one blinking.

Then, in one graceful movement, the cat whirled and bounded in his direction. It seemed to cover a third of the ground between them in the span of his thoughts. The man also whirled, much more awkwardly, and tried to race back down the dune. He was acutely aware that the cat would flow over this sand through which he slogged so clumsily and be on him in less than ten seconds. He tried to project that field once again, but his mind was too paralyzed with fear as his body tried desperately to take over and carry him away from the cat. He knew running first was hopeless, yet he couldn’t make himself stop and concentrate on the slow-motion trick.

Then he tripped, and his body rotated as he fell. As his back hit the sand, he saw the cat bunch its hindquarters, preparing to make the pounce that would land it right on him. The man threw up his hands in horror and screamed.

“Now!” Solomon commanded.

Instantly, his assistant flipped the off switch. The flow of electronic information into the sensory deprivation tank ceased immediately.

“It’s all right now, Mohinder Abdullah Beyaz,” Solomon said softly into his microphone, knowing the man in the tank would hear him as if a god were speaking out of the emptiness around him.

Of course, having the cat land on the man would have done nothing to him. But the shock of seeing that fierce creature in a position to tear him to pieces might have caused the man great trauma, either psychologically or physically, in spite of the rigorous testing he had undergone before being selected as a research subject.

Years ago, when he had first started this series of tests, Solomon had experienced having one of his subjects suffer cardiac arrest. She was a strong Talent, so he had allowed the life-threatening simulation to go on for a few seconds. He hoped the woman would be able to project a massive mental time-distortion field at the ‘very’ last second. She had been too paralyzed with fear. Although they had administered medical attention immediately and saved her life, the woman had been so traumatized that she had required years of therapy. Solomon did not want to take such a chance again.

Solomon carefully supervised Mohinder’s extraction from the tank. When his body temperature had been brought back up to normal from the near-freezing state of the tank and he had dressed, Solomon sat down with him for a debriefing. Solomon had thought nearly all of the problems with the system had been overcome. This relative failure worried him a lot.

Mohinder was not a Talent. Still, the fact that he had not been able to adequately train the man to implement the techniques to impact the flow of Time – in this case to slow it down – bothered Solomon. No matter how little talent Mohinder had, he was nevertheless a human. Solomon’s eventual task would be to train a Comvirsent to enter into the flow of Time, not a human. There was still a lot of controversy over how trainable a Comvirsent actually was.

“What happened, Mohinder Abdullah Beyaz?” Solomon asked gently.

“Hey, I panicked, Master Research Scientist,” the man admitted with deep apology in his voice. “No excuses. I just totally flipped out, you know?”

Solomon noted the honorific. Although his position warranted the title, he was only twenty-three years old. He tried to deal so informally with his research subjects that they managed to speak to him more as a friend than a Level 3 government official. Mohinder must be deeply disturbed to revert to such formality.

It was his own fault; he was sure of it. He had been too confident he had mastered the phenomenon. More accurately, he thought he had learned enough about it to teach others how to use it effectively under any circumstances. Consequently, Solomon had put a non-Talent into an Alpha-state situation many Talents might have difficulty with. In other words, he had tried to make a non-Talent alter Time in a life-threatening situation while still in a Beta state. But if he couldn’t accomplish that one hundred percent of the time, what chance did he have of making a mere machine accomplish the same feat on a reliable basis?

“And did you have faith you would’ve been able to enter the Alpha state if the cat hadn’t been right on top of you?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was like I was totally in control, you know? In my gray cells I could, like, totally alter the flow of time and put the moves on that desert cat. And then – boom! It was all just so sudden. I just hadn’t expected to meet up with the cat with such little time to prepare, you know?”

Solomon felt a tiny amount of satisfaction. In some ways, this was good news. An artificial brain was so much more difficult to ‘train’ than a real human. The programming would have to be totally written into the Comvirsent. With an intelligent human, he could simply describe various situations, give that person general guidelines as to how to handle various reactions to those situations, and let them go do it. On the plus side, the Comvirsent was technically unable to panic. It might temporarily be burdened with too many unusual sensory impressions and potential reactions, which was the typical path to human panic. However, with its phenomenal computational powers, it could almost always arrive at the most logical response mechanism before overload set in. All in all, Solomon felt more confident in having a Comvirsent performing the myriad instantaneous decisions his temporal displacement mechanism might face than ninety-nine point nine percent of the people in the world.

Of course, if he could just combine the computational powers of a Comvirsent with the natural ability of a Talent to manipulate Time ... But that was a dream for the future. For now, he would have to deal with the best tool available for controlling the machine he was trying to build.

“Thank you again for your great contributions to my work, Mohinder Abdullah Beyaz. Now go and get some rest.”

“Oh, hey, thank you very much, Solomon Barnaby Smith. It was way totally cool, you know? And, may I say, I like wish you the best of luck in whatever it is you’re trying to do there. It’s really out there, totally. I mean that.”

“My thanks to you, Mohinder Beyaz. I’ll need all the luck I can get.”

Solomon entered the lounge with very mixed feelings. Having grown up in luxurious surroundings, unlike many of the other research scientists, he was oblivious to the plush comforts of the Advanced Research Scientist’s Lounge. As he morosely plunked himself down into a vibrochair, it immediately started a subtle vibration and kneading motion, massaging every part of his body in contact with its surface.

Solomon felt confident that his theories about Time travel would work, but how to program everything into a computer? The concrete stuff was easy – the geographic data, known weather conditions for nearly the past three hundred years, locations and dimensions of most fixed objects, etc. – but the intangibles were always the challenge. There was only one person in the world Solomon was aware of who was brilliant enough to write those intangibles into a program able to consistently allow a Comvirsent to make the right decisions. Unfortunately, that person was busy right now with a new transportation system for range workers in the Aussie-Kiwi Region. If only his old friend were available ... but he wasn’t, so no good wishing for that either. Then a familiar voice interrupted his glum reverie.

“Why so glum, Solomon Smith? Been re-Assigned as a repairman at a Maytag factory?”

It was an ancient joke amongst engineers, so worn no one really knew what it meant anymore. But the speaker was surprised by the galvanizing effect it had on his friend.

“Robert Winston Wood!” Solomon exclaimed, literally leaping from his seat. “I thought you would be in the Aussie-Kiwi Region for the next six months.”

“I was supposed to be. But there was a little problem – one of the sub-atomic engines suffered meltdown. They decided to shut the project down until they didn’t have to worry about giving the rider a hot seat every time he had to reach a herding station. Rather than do all the programming when we couldn’t test the hardware, they sent me back home. They figure it’s going to be eight, maybe nine months before they feel safe with the engines again. In the meanwhile, I get to braid my hair until the Director can find another project worthy of my talents.”

As if to emphasize his personal joke, Robert rubbed his bald head. His thick. lustrous black curls had started thinning shortly after being Assigned, and had rapidly disappeared completely. There was no reason whatsoever that anyone needed to be bald, as real hair could be permanently grown within a matter of weeks by several methods. Robert was enough of a maverick to like it the way it was, however. In fact, he had had all of the follicles removed from the fringe of hair that would have grown on his round, smooth, shining black dome.

“The ghosts of Einstein and Planck are smiling upon me!”

“You mean they arranged for that engine to melt down? Well, they didn’t do me any favors. I was really enjoying the steaks and beer there. And the ladies seemed to appreciate my obvious symbol of virility much more than the locals.”

“I see. Trying to live up to your reputation as the Testosterone Terror of Seven Continents, were you?”

“C’mon, Solomon! Not you, too.”

The nickname had been handed down by some of the other engineers with whom Robert had traveled to various projects around the globe. Mostly, it was a jest about Robert’s tireless attempts to “explore the erogenous enticements of the ladies of the world,” as Robert put it. However, considering his frequent success, there seemed to be a lot of validity in the sobriquet.

Not being one to carry a joke too far, Solomon quickly turned back to the more serious subject of providing fellow engineers some technical help.

“I would’ve thought you could have solved the problem yourself inside of a month. I’m surprised they didn’t ask you to stay and supervise.”

“As a matter of fact, they did. But you know how boring I find such trivialities as sub-atomics. The Group Leader of the Transportation Division himself asked me to help them out. I told them I had a more pressing, red-hot project here, and to let the Director know when they had their own problem solved.”

“And what was that?”

“Oh, I have my own little project I’ve been toying around with, more or less on my own time, for the past couple of years. I’d rather work on that than be bored out of my shiny skull working on what amount to go-cart engines. Even if I did have to give up the steaks, beer, and fine women of Aussie-Kiwi.”

“I have something for you better than all of those things, Robert Winston Wood!”

“Now, Solomon Smith,” Robert chided. “You know I don’t like any of those new synthetic drugs.”

“Robert Wood!” Solomon exclaimed, practically scandalized, even though he knew his friend was joking. Although drugs were completely legal, they were almost exclusively used by the lower Levels. In fact, they were so cheap and easy to obtain, Solomon sometimes got the impression the Zaibatsu was actually encouraging the masses to use them. There could be no logical reason for such a thing, of course, so he wrote the thought off as a mild form of paranoia. On the other hand, the higher Levels, and especially those with technical Assignments, needed to keep their faculties intact if they wanted to keep their Assignments. “You know I don’t --”

“Save the sermon, Solomon. Of course I know! So, what’s this far, far better thing you want me to do?”

“I have a project, Robert Wood. I think it’s a very significant project.”

“Yes, yes, I know. This research thing you’ve been doing for the last, what, six or seven years? Trying to see whether or not people can slow down or speed up the flow of time. Something to that effect, yes? Frankly, I don’t see any place in it for me.”

“No, Robert,” Solomon said impatiently.

Robert raised an eyebrow at the use of his first name, but was certainly not one to be offended by some informality from an old friend. “That part’s over now. Well, almost totally over. It was all a preliminary project to my real objective.”

“Which is?”

Solomon lowered his voice and took on a conspiratorial tone, although none of the people in the lounge would have more than a professional curiosity if they bothered to listen in. With the Zaibatsu controlling everything, industrial espionage was a thing of the past. “A temporal displacement mechanism.”

“You want to displace time? I know you’re a genius and all, but I don’t think I’m following you on this one, my friend.”

“Not displace Time. Displace a person or object in Time. Move them through Time.”

“Move them through Time? You mean, like send a person to another point in the past or future?”

“Exactly! I’m sure if I asked, the Director would add you to the project.”

“Oh, so that’s been the point of all of this para-normal, psychic psycho babble you’ve been fooling around with all these years. Frankly, my friend, I couldn’t figure it out. I always thought you were much more of a widget kind of guy than all this touchy-feelie stuff you seemed to be so fascinated with. After all, you are the boy-wonder of the Advanced Technology R&D Section! But, well, you know. I sure would never have said anything.”

Solomon indeed did know. One of the biggest unwritten rules around the Advanced Technologies Institute was that no one questioned anyone else’s work, unless you were appointed to a special peer review panel. If the President of the Zaibatsu approved it and the Director of the Institute assigned it, that was all anyone else needed to know.