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eight years of intensive labor was gone.
* * *
He had to inform Eli Zaltzer and the university governors that the project had
run into unexpected difficulties, forcing him to put the schedule on hold.
Zaltzer remained as trusting and optimistic as ever, but the faculty members
who were privy to Abercrombie's crazy scheme chortled behind raised hands and
told each other it had only been a matter of time deriving added glee from the
intended pun.
Abercrombie became convinced he was the victim of a conspiracy to either
sabotage or steal his project.
Several times, he thought he heard prowlers about in the labs, but he never
managed to catch anyone. On one occasion, late in the evening when the lights
were turned down, he did actually accost and pursue an intruder; but on
rounding a corner was met full-force by the discharge from a fire
extinguisher, and by the time he had cleaned the froth from his eyes and
recovered, the trespasser had vanished.
And then, a week or so after the loss of the notebook, he heard the strange
noise again. He was on the phone in his public office at the front near the
main elevators, wearing a dress suit in anticipation of an honorary dinner he
was due to attend that night, when the same low-pitched whine as before
reached him through the wall from the direction of the lab and workshop area.
He excused himself, saying he would call back later, and hung up. Then, giving
no advance warning this time, he rose and went over to the door, checked the
corridor beyond, and crept stealthily to the double doors leading through to
the workshop. The noise had by now ceased. Turning one of the handles gently,
he eased the door open far enough to peer around it and inside . . . and
almost fell over from shock and disbelief. The time machine was there,
standing in the middle of the floor, exactly as he had envisioned it! But
there was nobody with it.
He stepped inside the room, closing the door behind him, and walked past it
warily almost as if fearing that a sudden movement might cause it to
vanish and secured the doors leading to the rear before coming back to study
the machine more carefully. It stood over seven feet high from the bottom of
the cylindrical base frame, crammed with circuit boxes, generator manifolds,
and coil housings, to the top of the field delimiter capping the cage. The
ticking and clicking of hot parts cooling came from beneath, as from the hood
of a car after a long run. Abercrombie reached out and touched part of the
structure gingerly, as if unsure if it might be an illusion. It was solid and
real.
And as he thought through what it meant, his indignation rose in a hot flush
climbing slowly from his collar. Evidently, at some eventual future time,
somebody would build the machine. So was he now supposed to go through the
protracted effort of redoing all the work he had lost, in order for someone to
steal it and go careening around through time and having who-knew-what kinds
of adventures? Dammit, he had been though all that once. And here he was,
seeing the fruits of his own labors for the first time. It was his!
Furious now, he opened the access gate, stepped up into the cage, and stared
at the control panel atop its plinth. He wasn't really sure what he intended
to do. And as he looked over the keys, lights, and the command lines displayed
on the screen, it slowly came to him that he wouldn't have had a clue how to
go about doing it. The machine was based on his original design, yes; but a
lot of detail that he was not familiar with had been worked out in the final
stages. But it was rightfully his, wasn't it? Maybe he could turn things
around and be the one to benefit from his interloping future self's labors
instead. That would require studying the construction and wiring and trying
some tests, which could take a while. It couldn't be done here; his other self
who had arrived in it for whatever reason could return at any moment. He
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
needed a safe place to hide the machine, where he could investigate it at
leisure.
But could such a plan work? He frowned, bemused by the bizarre logic. Surely,
whatever he decided to do, his future self would remember having decided, and
be able to pursue him accordingly. Unless the time line somehow reset itself
to accommodate changes. Or maybe some multiple-universe explanation applied,
in which the possibly similar past that a person returned to was still
different from the past that was remembered. He had long speculated about such
alternatives, but a working machine was the prerequisite to being able to test
them. And now he had one! Forget all the questions for now, he told himself.
Worry about getting the machine to a place where he could devote himself to
the only prospect in sight without having to repeat eight years of work for
finding some answers.
It would need to be reasonably close but unfrequented by people. Anywhere in
the City Annexe itself would be out of the question because of the comings and
goings of staff, students, visitors, and a host of others. But a short
distance away along the waterfront there was a disused dock building, a former
customs warehouse still owned by the Port Authority, earmarked for development
into an indoor market and restaurant mall one day, but derelict for years. The
cellars beneath would provide a suitable place not perfect, maybe, but they
would do until he found something better. And with the limited time at his
disposal, that was good enough. He stepped back down out of the machine and
went through to the rear part of the building to find a means of moving it.
By the freight elevator he found a hand dolly that was used for moving
equipment cabinets, machinery, and other heavy items around the labs. A
utility room nearby, where maintenance and decorating materials were stored,
yielded a painter's floor tarp that would serve as a cover. He hurried the
dolly back to the workshop, eased the lifting platform under the time
machine's base, elevated it, draped the machine with the tarp, and trundled it
back through to the rear. The freight elevator took him down to the
goods-receiving bay at the back of the Annexe building, where he signed for
use of the departmental pickup truck. He brought the truck around to the
loading bay, and minutes later was driving his purloined creation out through
the rear gates of the premises, onto the waterfront boulevard.
He had gone no more than a few hundred yards, when he heard the wail of a
police siren behind and saw red and blue lights flashing in his mirror. For a
sickening moment his heart felt as if it were about to fall into a void that
opened up in his stomach. Then he realized it had nothing to do with him; a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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