Chapter 3

I smiled to show my new, friendly attitude. His face remained serious, but pleasant.

“Okay, I apologize,” I said. “Let’s start all over, shall we? Why don’t you just tell me your story, and I’ll listen with an open mind.”

“That’s much more the attitude I had expected from such a revered ancestor, Mr. Smith.”

“Barney. And cut the ‘revered ancestor’ crap, okay?”

“Barney. Thank you. And also let me apologize for the rather chaotic and strange manner in which this meeting has transpired up to this point. I should have been much more prepared for this conversation, much more in control of my emotions and the message I must convey to you. However, this is also the first time such a situation has ever occurred for myself as well. I must confess the enormous importance of this meeting, in addition to the somewhat traumatic events that preceded my – trip, shall we say – have left me much more, perhaps ‘flustered’ is the word I seek.”

“Okay, Solomon, so now we’re both cool and calm, right?”

“Please, call me ‘Sol.’ It somehow seems fitting that you should do so. Like a revered ... I mean, like a good friend would address me.”

“Okay. Thanks. So, what’s your story?”

“I’m a research scientist. By your terminology, you might call me a physicist. My specialty is quantum mechanics. It’s a science that is in its infancy in your Time, although the theory was actually formulated near the end of the Nineteenth Century. Approximately fifteen years ago in my life, I inherited a huge sum of money. It was more than three billion credits, which I cannot accurately convert into your monetary system. This money was left to me in a trust by my great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather. You, Barnaby Frederic Smith. This fortune allowed me to perform the research and development of a temporal displacement mechanism, which you more succinctly refer to as a ‘Time machine.’ I normally shorten it to TDM. By use of that machine, I was able to travel back into this Time/Space Continuum in order to complete the evident circuit that will make all of this transpire in my reality.”

I stared at him, waiting for the punch line. When it didn’t come, I felt a few questions might be in order.

“Okay, so let’s get a few things straight here. You’re going to give me a machine, and I’m going to give you money, right?”

“I apologize for the misunderstanding. I have come to give you a small version of the TDM, that’s correct. But you will give me no funds at this time. You will leave me this large inheritance in the form of a trust, as I mentioned.”

“I see. So you give me this gizmo right now, at no charge. Then I use it to somehow build up a huge fortune, which I leave to you in my distant future, is that it?”

“That’s exactly it, Barney. In addition to some general information which I will pass on to you regarding vastly successful businesses that will come into being, you will use the rather limited effectiveness of this mechanism to acquire great wealth.”

“‘Limited effectiveness.’ What’s that, like half of me goes back in time a month while the rest of me only makes it a week?”

“No. I again apologize that I don’t have adequate time to explain the technical reasons this small version of the prototype TDM has limited functionality. It’s primarily due to the tremendous quantities of energy required to both activate particles at rest in order to bring their external velocities to match those of their internal velocities so that both are equal to the velocity of light in free space, as well as to influence the settings of all impacted particles so they can approximate the Time/Space Continuum which is the desired locus of the quantum system which is attempting to be teleported from the origin to—”

“Sol. SOL!” I finally shouted. “What does that mean in English?”

“I have been speaking English, Barney. You see, most of the world of my time utilizes English as the base language. Naturally, certain natural linguistic evolutions have occurred from your period to mine. I have obviously not mastered the subtleties, notwithstanding my diligent efforts to study your current vernacular through the use of archived cultural records. Primarily, I seem to have a minimal mastery of all of the verbal abbreviations you use.”

“‘Verbal abbreviations?’”

“Yes. Such as ‘I’m,’ or ‘you’re,’ and so on.”

“Oh. Those’re what we call contractions, where you kind of scrunch a couple of words together to simplify the language a bit. Maybe save a little time talking.”

“Oh, of course! I understand the theory. However, they’re a bit difficult to use correctly, much like idioms, which are not only specific to the language but are often peculiar to specific geographic regions or cultural backgrounds that --”

“Sol, I’d really love to hear the rest of this lecture, you know? Maybe even the first part again, if I could get a translator to put it into my ancient vernacular. However, I gotta tell you it’s a little thick for me. Do you always speak so formally?”

“Actually, I don’t normally speak ‘formally’ at all. You must remember that, as with almost everything, language is continuously changing. Although my birthplace was the city of New York, it is no longer in the country you call the United States, and the language we speak is quite different from the English of your day. As I said, I studied archived materials from your period, both written and those with auditory and visual components. Especially movies. I really love the movies of your time. After my inheritance, I became very interested in the world of my benefactor. I tried to learn all I could of the way you might speak, dress and act, knowing that someday I would come to visit you. But I have obviously not managed to capture your speech patterns correctly,” he concluded mournfully.

“Well, it’s not bad, I guess,” I tried to let him down gently. “And you really seem to be getting better the more we talk. It’s more – well...”

“Please tell me.”

“It’s the clothes, Sol. I mean, they kind of make you look like someone out of an old movie. They make you look – uh, older than I’m sure you really are.”

“I did not do well?” he lamented, clearly disappointed in not having copied the speech and clothing exactly in spite of all his efforts. These eggheads. Such damned perfectionists!

“No, you did great, Sol,” I said unconvincingly. “After all, you sound like anyone speaking a foreign language would, I suppose. I’ll bet my Spanish and German sound just as off to a native speaker. Probably worse.”

“I suppose I should have utilized a translation machine,” he sighed regretfully. “It would have allowed for more perfect idiomatic communication. I simply assumed that my many years of close study of your culture would have better prepared me for this meeting. It was of some arrogance on my part, I must confess.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean to bring you down. You’re doing great, really. I’ll bet I’d have a hell of a time trying to get by in your society.”

“You have no idea,” he said, with a grim tone that surprised me.

I figured it was time to get back to the main topic.

“Hey, I thought you were about out of time and had to get back to the future.”

“Of course! Thank you for reminding me, Barney. There’s quite a bit of information I must pass on to you before my energy source no longer has sufficient power to reverse this current transference. First,” he said, digging into a pocket, “here is a list of companies that will earn tremendous profits throughout their existence. As to short-term investments, I didn’t have a sufficient period to study actual business or sporting activities of your era. However, the limited capabilities of this TDM will prove quite sufficient for that purpose.”

“Which reminds me, you haven’t explained what you meant by the ‘limited’ effectiveness of this gizmo.”

“Very true. In brief, due to the limited storage capacity of the energy capacitors, this mechanism can only duplicate physical settings up to a duration of approximately thirty days into the past. It has ‘visual’ settings – that is, previewing your destination before you go there – of approximately double that. Because of the geometric increase in the uncertainty of probabilities as the TDM attempts to emulate settings of the Time/Space Continuum of the future, the accuracy of the machine is much less. You might achieve two days in actual physical teleportation, and perhaps three or four for ‘visual’ capacity. Both TDMs are only very primitive prototypes of what I hope to eventually develop. As I haven’t had sufficient opportunity to experiment with this smaller version, I am understandably not totally in command of the exact capabilities of the mechanism.”

There was a slight pause. That was me trying to think of something intelligent to say.

I felt my eyes rolling. I’m no dummy, okay. For example, I earned my doctorate in economics in the usual number of years, meaning I understood my subject pretty well. But this was worse than Greek to me – it was gobbledygook. Not so much the words (although some of them sounded pretty damn pretentious) as much as the premises. He was obviously referring to scientific concepts and technologies that had taken him quite a few years to develop, and had never been part of my interests or studies. Still, I had to wonder – damn! Can’t these eggheads ever speak English, even if it’s the English of seven or eight generations in their past?

But the old geezer (or was he an incredibly young geezer?) was theoretically offering to make me filthy rich. Assuming, of course, this wasn’t all the ravings of a seriously deranged mind. Or else the most elaborate sting ever devised. Which, considering both the bizarre details of the story and my financial condition, might have been the same thing. But, I figured old Sol wasn’t asking for any money up front (or at least said he wasn’t), so what did I have to lose? Except for either my sanity or my life savings. But, since right now neither of those were worth an autumn leaf at the top of the pile, what the hey? I figured the best thing was to try to get him to explain all of this to me once again.

“Could you please explain all of that to me once again?” I asked politely.

“Which part?”

“From where you said, “In brief.” Forget the part where you talked about energies and velocities and all of that – stuff.”

“Very well, I shall attempt to do so in simplistic terms. Are you familiar with quantum mechanics?”

“Those are the guys who take all those years of specialized training and get lots of certificates so the car dealership can brag about having them on their staff, right?”

“No, Barney. As I previously mentioned, quantum mechanics is a science, a branch of physics that --”

“Sol, I was just kidding again. Humor. You’ve heard of it, right?”

“Humor. Of course I’m aware of humor. It is often used in our various forms of entertainment.”

“Yeah, well ... Okay, never mind.”

“So how much do you know about quantum mechanics?”

“I think a ‘quantum’ is a measurement of energy on some sort of microscopic level. That’s about it.”

“Close enough, I suppose. It’s more like the smallest quantity of some physical property, which can also be energy itself, that a system can possess. Hmm. Alright, do you know what Newtonian mechanics are?”

“Actually, I think I do know something about that from my physics classes. At least, the ones I managed to remain awake in. That has to do with an object remaining at rest or in some steady motion until influenced by some outside force, something about the rate of change of momentum being proportional to the force that causes the change, and this outside force causes an equal and opposite reaction to the object. Is that right?”

“Very good. Simply put, those are the three basic laws. Early in your own century, quantum mechanics was developed in an attempt to explain the behavior of elementary particles and atoms that do not obey Newtonian mechanics.”

“So that was the origin of obedience training?”

“I beg your pardon?”

I sighed. “Never mind. I give up on the attempts at humor, okay? It’s just that old habits die hard. Look, maybe you can give me some kind of analogy of how this thing works that even a simpleton like me can understand.”

“An analogy. Hmm,” he mused. He put his left elbow on the arm of his chair and turned his head so he could put his forehead on the fingers of his left hand. Then he started rubbing his brow in a great imitation of an absent-minded professor trying to remember where he had left the Clift Notes to his last classroom dissertation. Very effective, I thought. So what? I was still very skeptical.

“There is in this century a mechanism known as a facsimile machine. Are you familiar with this device?”

“A fax? Of course! What kind of idiot do you think I am?”

“Let’s put that aside for the moment.”

Knowing he didn’t have a sense of humor, I was about to give him a sharp retort to that remark. Like a typical professor, however, he didn’t give me a chance. He pushed right ahead with his lecture. Since I had asked for it, I shut up and listened.

“In essence, that machine assimilates information from the document which it is scanning, whether that is text or graphics. We will assume that information corresponds to any given quantum or macro system. The first phase of this process consists of a rough absorption of all information of the target document and converting this information into an electronic set of data, essentially ready to be replicated in a format which can be easily manipulated and then very faithfully reproduced. This relates to my temporal displacement mechanism assimilating the general parameters of both the object and surrounding Time/Space Continuum that is to be replicated and the macro spectrum of the Time/Space Continuum to which the subject object is to be teleported. In this analogy, one then denotes the exact portion of the document that one desires to scan, which would equate to the object that one wishes to teleport, which may be animal, a human being, or so on.

“Simultaneously, the mechanism utilizes the exact geographic coordinates and point in Time it has been fed to ‘visualize’ the conditions of that locus, or the relatively exact ‘position’ in the Time/Space Continuum one wishes to emulate. The settings for both the desired object of transport and the desired arrival point are then approximated to the highest degree possible, and the simulation occurs. If a high enough degree of faithfulness to the original was produced in the facsimile machine, the object could be electronically transmitted to another locus. It would then be received with sufficient accuracy that the original could essentially be ‘reproduced’ in that distant locus. In the case of my TDM, the initial ‘visual’ portion of the scan corresponds to the destination, which allows the user to ‘see’ what may or may not occur at a certain point in the past or future. However, approximating enough detail to physically teleport to that point in the Time/Space Continuum requires a much higher degree of exact acquisition of reproducible data and expenditure of energy, and consequently allows for a much lower actualization of results. Additionally, the size and energy capacity of the TDM also determines how much ‘cargo’ the TDM can transport, which is another reason yours is limited.”

This time I’m positive my chin was resting on my lap and my eyes had rolled to the back of my head. I had lockjaw of the brain, and was sure it was frozen for life.

“Barney?”

“Uh.”

“Barnaby! Are you there?”

“Uh.”

I blinked my eyes a few times until they straightened out. Then I picked my chin up and put it back into place. Finally, I shook my head until I heard a clunking and whirring again, and managed to refocus on his face.

“Barney, did you understand what I was talking about?”

“Uh.”

“Oh, good. Do you have any questions?”

Only the obvious, like: “What the hell are you talking about?” But I didn’t want to seem totally stupid, so I again tried to think of something more intelligent to ask. Without sounding like an idiot, of course. Which is what I felt like, but who wants to admit to that?

“Oh. Uh. Well, you mean the finer you want to pinpoint the final result, the greater your accuracy has to be and the more energy you have to use, right?”

Sol looked like the proud parent of a formerly stupid child who had just been placed in pre-algebra while still in the sixth grade. “Exactly.”

“So first you kind of roughly ‘scan’ whatever is going to be transported. That gives you a kind of ‘ghost’ image of the target electronic document, which is the equivalent of the place in the future or past you want to transfer it to. Yes?”