part 3

While I wasn’t pleased with being kept in the dark about Adam’s project, I could sympathize to some degree with his need for privacy and was willing to wait. The physics department was not as understanding. His theoretical research was his own business, but they had provided him space in a partially used storeroom to build his mysterious device and they were understandably concerned with any potential for safety issues. By way of reassurance they began to insist on more detailed explanations than Adam was willing to provide.

His continued reticence naturally drew additional attention to his work, but even trained scientific minds are not immune to envy and insecurity, and occasionally healthy speculation grew into resentful suspicion, particularly among administrators.

Adam didn’t care.

He was perpetually cheerful, going about the business of changing the world while leaving what he saw as other people’s petty concerns in his wake.

The end of fall term came and Adam was enthusiastic about the additional time he could devote to finishing The Thing, as he called it. I needed to work on my thesis, but I was more interested in the time I was going to have off. I was looking forward to seeing my family over the holidays and talked Adam into coming for a visit. He was a little uneasy with the idea, but everyone wanted to meet him so he agreed to come for two days at Christmas, after which he would return to the apartment and I would stay on for another week or so.

Adam grew up in a small family and had been essentially alone since he was twenty one. He had become a very private person and reluctant to face the kind of team scrutiny he knew he would find in my small horde of relations, but to his credit he was willing to stand in the breach and brave the challenge.

He had asked that he be spared any gifts, but of course none of the women paid any attention to that. He accepted various useless or peculiar items with grace, and endured a number of the religious rituals he finds hollow and superstitious. His atheism was an issue, but not a topic, by prior agreement. In spite of that he won the reluctant approval of my parents and assorted elders, who are devout, the respect and endorsement of my brothers, who pretend to be, and the enthusiastic devotion of my little sister, who is not. We were all disappointed to see him go, especially my sister, who is eighteen and breathtaking and offered to accompany him. Adam denies he was in any way tempted to accept her offer, and he is honest to a fault, so it’s clear he’s also wise enough to recognize that rare juncture when the only intelligent, moral, and appropriate response to a straightforward question is a bald-faced lie.

Spring semester found us both hard at work. The only class on my schedule was the one I was teaching but I still found myself taking fewer singing jobs to concentrate on my thesis. Adam kept his old schedule but instead of working mostly at home he took one of his computers to the lab and spent much of his time there assembling The Thing.

He was under increasing pressure to disclose fully what he was up to but he felt he could finish by the end of the academic year and if he could hold the department off that long it wouldn’t matter.

The weather was often miserable and it worked to our advantage, making it easier to remain indoors and focused. We spend much of each day apart, even on the weekends, but at the end of every one was always an hour or two that was ours alone to share and we always made the best of it.

My thesis took on a dimension I hadn’t anticipated and was turning out significantly better than I had expected. Adam hit a snag but it failed to erode any of his enthusiasm. He’d expected some bumps along the road and said so, it just gave him new problems to solve and new physics to explore.

In May I graduated, and my parents came, and we had a big graduation party with lots of friends, and it was summer again, and we were more in love than ever, and I was supremely happy, and I remember thinking that life couldn’t possibly get any better, and even the the champagne couldn’t keep me from the realization of what that implied for the future.

My insight was not simply semantic or philosophical. For months I had been acutely aware that suddenly and soon everything could change dramatically. I believed everything Adam had told me. I believed his project would change the world and I believed his overnight success would lead to wealth and fame. And I believed that as the world would never be the same, neither would our life together ever be the same, and I embraced every moment as if it were our last.

On the second Saturday after graduation, Adam took me to dinner in a nice restaurant. I didn’t ask what the occasion was, we both knew what was up and I was beside myself with anticipation. I was too excited to eat much and made a meal of an appetizer, but we started late and lingered and I recovered my appetite in time for dessert. We always seemed to have things to talk about and lately the conversations tended to involve what we were going to do now that we were both without school or jobs. We seemed to be converging on a decision to reward our recent efforts with a trip somewhere during June, probably some Greek island or even Egypt, and get serious about jobhunting when we returned. I asked him where he stood with the department now that his teaching contract was over.

“Well, we’re at an impasse,” he began, and we both laughed. “I managed to fend them off the last couple months by signing a bunch of releases and agreeing not to work on it when classes were in session, and, by promising to have it off university property by the end of the month. Actually, I thought Chapman was pretty reasonable about it, Osbourne wanted them to lock me out of the lab in April.

“My plan was to have it finished by now, give a private demonstration for some select potential clients, then sit back and field the offers. The good news is, I did finish it . . “

“Bravo!” I interrupted, beaming and clapping quietly.

“Hold on, there’s a but, and it’s a big one.” he cautioned.

“What are we celebrating then?” I asked, deeply disappointed.

“If you’ll give me a second, you will discover I am actually in the process of explaining that.”
“Sorry, I’ll shut up.” I pretended to pout.

“Thank you. The situation is, I have indeed completed work on the original project. I have a working model sitting on a table in the lab as we speak.”

I clapped again, but bravely withstood the impulse to interrupt.

“The problem is, it won’t do what I initially wanted it to. In fact, I can’t even really use it at all, it’s too dangerous, but I wanted to finish it anyway in order to test some components for the next model. Now, I’ve worked out the theory and some basic specs to make another version, but there’s still a ton of design and engineering to do and I can’t afford to float the whole thing on my own. It doesn’t really matter, I’m still alive for most of the original plan. When we get back from Egypt . . “

“Greece.”

“ . . or Greece, I’ll set up some demos, whatever. I’ll feed Chapman some bait and cut him in on the first meeting to get him to let me use the lab for a few more weeks. He’ll owe me, his institution will be associated with this thing forever. Since I can’t turn it on I won’t have quite the visual aid I was hoping for, but I’ve got the theoretical foundations laid out pretty clearly and plenty of schematics so I’ll be fine. We can take a break, then come back, have show and tell, and wait for people to throw money at us. This is it Crys, I’ve done it.” He paused and leaned forward, “So what do you say we go have a look at my infernal machine?”

“Yay!” I shouted, leaping out of my chair. “This is what I’ve been waiting for, let’s go, Archimedes!”

It was after ten when we got to Klein Hall, the math and science building. Even that late on a Saturday night in June there were a few people milling around. We climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, then he led me down the north wing to room 488, the last classroom on the east side, and unlocked the door. He turned on the lights and the room looked very much like other science classrooms I had seen, full of long tables with black epoxy surfaces, the walls covered with blackboards in turn covered with Greek letters and symbols and other hieroglyphics. There was a door on the north wall that led to a storage room beside the lab, part of which had been converted to work space for Adam's project. We entered and Adam locked the door behind us. Inside, surrounded by shelves of odd electronic gear, was another black topped table, and on it lay The Thing.

It wasn’t what I expected, not that I had given form to my expectations, it was just odd. It was comprised of hundreds of components, including cylinders and disks of varying sizes, all connected along a single axis to form one long object that varied in diameter from four or five inches to perhaps sixteen or eighteen. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of colored wires attached to it, some from one part of it to another, some taped into bundles that ran under the table to a rack of instruments at one end. Adam walked around the table to the corner where there was a big desk with two computers. He turned them on and tapped a few keys. “I can’t actually use it, but I can turn it on.”

“What would happen if you tried to use it?”

“Boom! Probably take the whole building with it.”

He must have sensed or reasoned my alarm.

“Don’t worry, there isn’t any way to set it off accidentally. I disconnected the only circuit that could make that happen.”

“But you did have it connected before?”

He nodded. “I needed to test all the systems, but I never had them all online at the same time.“

He tapped a few more keys, then turned and looked at The Thing. Nothing moved but I thought I could detect a faint hum.

"It lives,” he announced, “What do you think?”

"Hmm. Very interesting. Very impressive." I had no idea what to think.

"Oh please," he smiled, " it looks like a bunch of junk but you're too sweet to say so. It could be a tin can collection for all you know, right? Your attitude will change when I tell you what it does."

I walked to the middle of the table and looked at a glass cylinder near the center of the device. It was about six inches in diameter and perhaps ten inches long. There were metal cylinders above and below that were perpendicular to the axis of The Thing. The cylinder appeared to be empty but as I looked inside I saw something, so I bent down and looked more carefully. Inside the cylinder, suspended by nothing, was a small, black sphere the size of a marble, just floating in space.

"Oh, my god," I gasped. "It's anti-gravity."

"No, no," he said, smiling and shaking his head, "there are magnets holding that in place."

"Well then, what's it do?" I felt a little let down.

He stepped to the side of the table across from me, leaned over and peered at me through the glass. There, suspended between the distorted images of our faces, hung the little black ball.

"It's a time machine." he said.

I had to think about this for a moment. I couldn't tell if he was teasing me or not. I’d already committed one gaff, maybe he took that as a cue to see if I would fall for something totally unbelievable and I didn’t want to make it easy for him. "No, really, what is it?"

He smiled again, but it was an earnest smile. "This whole pile of junk," he gestured along the line, "pushes that little carbon ball," he pointed inside the glass cylinder and looked at me, "into another time."

"Adam, this is not the time to be toying with me."

"I know it Crys, honestly, I'm not. I know the whole thing sounds preposterous, but I don't know how else to say it. It's a time machine, and you're the first one besides me to know that."

I stared at him. Then I stared at it. "Oh my god," I said again, watching the little ball as if it would disappear at any moment, "Oh my god . . "

“Ha!” he laughed, “Your puny god can’t help you now, even time itself is . . . “

“No, I mean you are my god!” I jumped up, danced around the table and threw my arms around him. "And I worship you!" I kissed him, then let go and stared again at the time machine. “Adam,” I continued, “A time machine! It's so . . . amazing! I mean, this is . . . amazing!" I sounded like an idiot, but I didn't care. This was big, really big, it was everything Adam had said it would be. I continued to stare at the strange contraption before me. “Can I touch it?”

“Ah, sure. Not the wires or the connections, just the big parts. On the top.”

I laid my hand gently on a big metal cylinder. It might have been vibrating, I couldn’t tell, but I could feel something. It felt . . ready . . waiting . .

A time machine. My hand lay on a device that would change the course of history. This very object would appear on television, in newspapers, in magazines, in every city, in every nation. It would become part of world lore, and a century from now schoolchildren would be shown these images and told that in this simple device the age of time travel was born. And they would be told that the father of time travel was Adam Janus, the man who was speaking to me.

“You may as well push the button.”

“There’s a button? Oh, there on the end. Geez, how could I miss it.” It was big and red. “Isn’t this the button to blow up the building?”

“If it was connected, yes. But it’s not, go for it.”

I was a little nervous, so I punched it hard and held it down. Nothing happened but it was oddly satisfying anyway so I punched it a couple more times.

“Isn’t that fun? I did the same thing a few times, I couldn’t help myself.”

“It’s our conditioning. We’re trained all our lives to push buttons.”

"Sorry it doesn’t do anything.”

In light of the circumstances, my own concerns seemed pathetically unimportant. “I don’t mind, I just wanted to know what you were working on.” I turned to look at him. “At least now I know what I’m waiting for.”

“Well, not exactly. It won’t work the way you’re thinking it will. Real time travel can’t operate like it does in science fiction.”

“How does it operate then?”

“I have to save some kind of surprise.”
“Oooh! You can be so frustrating sometimes.”

“It’ll be worth it.”

“Someday I’ll be able to travel in time?”

“Someday. I guarantee it.”

“Then I suppose I can excuse a genius an occasional eccentricity.”

He smiled broadly. “Well, you haven’t seen it work, how do you know I’m not just crazy?”

I leaned against him and he put his arms around me. “Of course you’re crazy,” I replied, “You’re crazy about me.”

“Well, there’s always that.”

“Always?”

“Of course! ‘Till the end of, uh, time . . ”

“Owww.”

“Sorry,” he admitted, “I couldn’t help myself.”

“It’s ok, it had to be done. Adam . .”

“Hmm.”

“What are you going to do with it while we’re in Egypt?”

“Well, it won't really fit in my duffle. I thought while we’re in Greece it could sit right where it’s sitting now.”

“Aren’t you worried something could happen to it?”

“Yeah, you’re right, dust could be a problem. I’ll throw some towels over it.”

“I’m serious. You told me there are other people who have keys to this room, what if somebody steals it, or vandalizes it, or just knocks the table over by accident?”

“Ok, I’ll move the table somewhere out of the way. But trust me, junk like this sits around this place for decades, it’ll be fine.”

We stood for a time while Adam rocked me gently in his arms, gazing absently at the odd artifact before us, exchanging occasional murmurs, lost in our own thoughts. Then we returned home, quietly triumphant, speaking little, radiant with victory.

He knew it wouldn’t be tampered with. He knew there wasn’t any interest in it. He knew no one would have any idea what it was until we came back from our vacation and he pried open their heads and injected the physics directly into their brains.

He was wrong.

What he did not know, could not have known, is that our trajectory had reached its highest point, the place where that which rises seems to pause, if only for a moment, as ascent yields to the forces below, and all that remains is the fall.