Voltak and the offended triplets converge on the university
Perfect Timing, Part 26, The boys find scientists willing to deal
| We serialize this novel, set in a world working right for everyone, a chapter a week for 32 weeks. © 2008 Jeffery J. Smith, all rights reserved. |
by Jeffery J. Smith, May 2008
Inside the school building, Corey and Kenny walk down a corridor on standard hard marble floor. There are no lockers lining the walls but instead mural after mural in kid art with some others a bit more sophisticated. The ceiling is higher than in the schools the boys remember, not confining thinking to inside the box but letting imagination soar to new heights.“I flushed one of the triplet’s thimbles,” Corey says. “Let that robo-cop follow its GPS signal down that toilet hole.”
Kenny nods his head. “Pretty soon this place is going to run out of thimbles for you to, uh, borrow, hombre.”
Peeking inside classrooms, they see beanbag chairs and other comfortable looking seating for small group discussions. People are seated in an irregular circle, more like the outline of an amoeba. The rooms are loaded with computer terminals but also the old-fashioned chalkboard.
They find a classroom with the correct number and the names “Dr Murky and Dr Gwode” beside the closed door.
Getting out his mask of a panther, Corey looks around then starts to put it on.
Kenny lightly slaps his buddy’s arm and regards him from under his eyebrows. “If you can’t trust a scientist, what’s this world coming to?”
They open the door and enter.
Rather than a simple classroom, it’s a laboratory with a bank of raised chairs along the walls, like in a theatre, for students and other viewers. In the center of the room is a chronoscope; an orange glow emanates from its dog-bone shape. On counters are smaller mysterious devices and tools; below the counters are cabinets. On tables are the ubiquitous computer terminals. One big screen fills much of the wall across from the windows. A nearby shelf holds one aged book, a classic, “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, by Karl Popper.
Dr Murky hangs upside down from a bar behind a desk. Dr Gwode, a tall lady with pale green skin, angular face, and limp wrists like a praying mantis, feeds piranhas in an aquarium. Corey and Kenny sniff the air then move to chairs before Murky’s desk and sit down.
Having grown accustomed to oddities popping up all over in the time and place of Geotopia, Corey cannot let this latest display delay him in his push to settle his own future. He speaks right up. “Say you could upgrade that,” he aims his chin at the chronoscope, “into a time machine. Would you send people back to die? Is that cool?”
Kenny leans forward in his chair. “Can you see any alternatives? Like, reaching back, detouring those bullets, or letting them pass by before sending anyone back? Then the situation would be a lot less risky.”
Gwode quits feeding the fish. Murky quits swinging on his perch and stares at them with his upside down eyes. The two visitors squirm in their seats.
“You two are the guys with a conscience, right?” Corey asks.
Murky swings to the floor. Bending over, he and Gwode peer at the boys. Suddenly straightening up, Murky gasps. Grabbing a magazine off his desk, he rolls it up as if to swat a fly.
Looking cross, peeved even, Corey rubs his hands. “Chill, dude, and hear our offer.” He takes in Gwode. “And dudette.”
Corey sniffs again and regards Kenny. Sniffing, too, Kenny shakes his head. Man, some of these Futurites; they should be able to deal with Pastians, since the actual time travelers have learned to deal with them.
With both index fingers, Kenny points to both of his temples. “Nothing more valuable than these.” Corey nods agreeably.
Dr Murky comes out from around his desk and gingerly taking baby steps, approaches the visitors with one finger reaching out to touch the nearest one, Kenny who rolls his eyes at Corey.
Unobtrusively, Gwode flips the switch of a machine then slips a metallic thimble on each forefinger. She holds them up before her face, close together; a spark jumps between them. She tiptoes up behind the visitors, holding her breath. Quicker than a preying mantis, she thumps the temples of Corey and Kenny simultaneously. They slump down in their chairs.
Gasping, Murky slumps down in his chair. “Dear God, criminal Pastians!” He reaches for the desk phone.
With a hand Gwode stops him. “Who you calling?” She stares at him in her beady-eyed way. “Sure you want to hand them over?” She lets him think about it. “That arrogant Ultra always gets to be first, out of sheer luck more than any superior skill. But this time, we’re the ones who caught them. We’re the ones who turned them off. So maybe we should be the ones to download them, don’t you think?”
Eyes bugging out, Dr Murky wets his lips, glancing back and forth between the Pastians and his assistant. “Not without their explicit permission. We’d have to turn them back on and ask them. They’re burglars; they can become violent.”
Gwode nods, unconcerned. “However, if we turn them in, we miss out on all recognition for our contribution, no?” She taps the two visitors on their heads with her metallic thimbles. “Or, we could maximize this opportunity to show the world how to do science properly, unlike Ultra’s vainglorious attempts.”
Dr Murky smoothes his hair and spins in a circle, shaking his head. “I’m going to pray now,” he says, folding his hands and peering upward. “God, chum …”
“You’re undecided,” Gwode says. She turns to face the unconscious bodies, hands on hips. “OK, so that they don’t become altered on our watch, meanwhile we’ll put them on ice.”
Without waiting for an answer, Gwode touches the phone. Its monitor displays “Tech Support”. She addresses the device. ”Urgency. Send a couple of nanoboxes right now.” She pokes the phone off.
“For now,” she tells the uncertain Murky, “we put them in the closet, out of this radiation.”
Dr Murky looks at the glowing chronoscope. “Right, of course, we shouldn’t make them more healthy than they were when they left their time. They’d return in perfect shape just to greet a waiting bullet. Utterly, utterly senseless.”
They drag the bodies along the floor, heads bouncing over thick cables. At a side wall, Gwode opens a closet door. They lay the torsos in then try to fold the legs into the closet but they fall back out. Gwode kicks Corey’s butt, trying to shove his body inside. Giving up, Murky gets a lead tarp out of the closet and tosses it over the bodies.
“Now that you’ve handled them,” Gwode says, “they don’t feel so monstrous, do they?” She pauses and places her hands on her partner’s shoulders. “You’re Dr Edsel Murky. You can deal with them awake – and with my help. Are we agreed?”
The front door light blinks and chimes.
“Tech Support,” Gwode says. “Wow. Fast for once.”
She goes over and opens the door to the last person she might have expected who looks like anything but a tech geek. Dr Bernard Saint enters, smiling at the two scheming scientists. The scientists shift from surprise to worry.
In the middle of the room, Saint turns around, sniffing the air. “Smelling lot of stress in the air today.”
Glancing at Dr Murky, Gwode slips the shiny thimbles off her forefingers, into a pocket, then replies. “Ah, yes. A new experiment. Quite challenging. Not perfected yet.” She shrugs. “You know.”
Saint nods sympathetically. “That does worry one.” He squeezes, clasps, then flexes his hands. “Care for some consoling?” He smiles benignly. “Want a massage?”
Dr Murky’s mood lightens appreciably. He speaks longingly. “A massage?”
Passing the machine she used to charge the thimbles, Gwode flips it off as she steps between the other two. “No, no. We must get back to work. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.” Clasping his elbow, Gwode urges Saint doorward.
Just before going out the door, Saint again sniffs the air then turns back, a quizzical smile on his face. “I smell, what, company?”
Gwode clutches his arm more firmly. “Just volunteers. They’re, uh, out.”
Nodding understandingly, Saint leaves. Gwode closes the door then locks it. Turning around, she stares across the room, one hand cupping an elbow, the other cupping her rounded chin. “Priests and science don’t mix.”
Leaning against the open closet door, chubby Murky slides down it to the floor where he sighs profoundly. “And it’s too bad. He might’ve given a wonderfully consoling massage.”
Gwode snaps her fingers then marches over to the chronoscope and flips off the lamp emitting yellow light. She struts over to the tarp and tugs it off the bodies. “They don’t know it, but I bet they can tell us how to upgrade our chronoscope into a time machine.”
That curious thought jerks up Dr Murky’s head.
“Listen,” Gwode continues, “if they’ve seen Ultra at work, we could download those very fresh memories.”
Dr Murky gets up. “Think they’ll let us?”
Gwode is already dragging Corey back to his chair, letting his bead bump along the floor as it crosses the covered cables. Dr Murky pulls Kenny over. Together they lift up their inert bodies and sit them in the chairs.
Exhaling, Gwode turns her machine back on and tests her thimbles. This time, they smack together, magnetized. She hands one of them to her credentialed superior.
“On three,” Gwode says. “Ready? One, two.”
Unconscious Kenny topples over onto comatose Corey. Green-skinned Gwode yanks Kenny back into place then lets go. She waits a moment to make sure the body is stable.
“Three,” Gwode says.
Gwode and Murky rub the temples of their guests. Then Murky dashes around the desk as Gwode skips back to the chronoscope. Gwode adjusts knobs while Murky, humming, fiddles with a magazine on his desk.
The two boys straighten up in the chairs. Corey massages his temples. Kenny shakes his head.
Dr Murky smiles at the visitors. “Yes, they would be valuable.”
“Sorry?” Kenny says. “Just lost my train of thought.”
“Must be that foul fragrance,” Corey says, exhaling loudly. “I just got hit by a killer headache.”
“Oh yeah,” Kenny says. “About that extra income, your dividend for citizens.”
Murky looks up from his magazine. Quitting her dials, green Gwode regards them over her shoulder.
“Right, that,” Murky says. “Well, soon’s we all shared society’s surplus, and everyone felt secure materially, then all of us could contribute our unique talents.”
“Fascinating,” Kenny says. “Yep. But I expected as much.”
“Yeah,” Gwode says. “Remember that ex con who broke through the nano barrier? Never would’ve happened without him and everyone back then starting to get a fair share.”
“A little sharing, then progress took off like a rocket,” Murky says.
“Yes,” Gwode says. “Went ballistic. Still is.”
“Come on people,” Corey says loudly, “focus!” He whacks his pal lightly then turns back to the scientists. “Look, scratch our backs – send us back a second after the bullets pass – and we scratch yours.”
Gwode circles the boys and joins her higher ranking lab partner. “If your memories do prove useful, then I suppose we could send you back a milli-second late. Let’s have a look.”
Exchanging glances, Corey and Kenny nod toward Gwode.
Smiling her thin smile, perspiring with excitement, she gets out from a cabinet a mass of wires with electrodes at their ends.
The travelers rub their aching heads.
“This won’t hurt,” Corey asks, “will it?”
“Oh, no,” green Gwode says, “not at all.”
Chubby Murky taps into a keyboard wired up to the machine that the electrodes emanate from. Praying-mantis-like Gwode attaches electrodes to the Pastians’ scalps. Murky flips a switch on the machine at the other end of the wires.
Instantly it projects a blue light onto the room’s big screen. It shows the scene in Tepper’s mansion, the first time Voltak delivers new parts for repairing the damaged chronscope. Murcky squirms in his seat; Gwode lets out an “oouu”.
“Your new parts,” the holograph of Voltak says. “I signed them in. A solmatol Series X and an LKM 69.”
Seated at a desk, Gwode scribbles down some notes. Dr Murky taps at a keyboard. The screen shows another episode.
“More new parts,” the holograph of Voltak says. “I signed them in. Six zuminators and two KYJays.”
Again, Gwode jots down some notes, and Dr Murky taps at his keyboard. The screen shows another episode, of a pair of Pastiaan hands palming then pocketing Tepper’s cell.
“Oh,” Corey says, “it must’ve been one of those wild fantasies you get some time, you know? Just something to do with your idle hands, right?”
On the screen, Tepper returns to her dining room holding another box of new chronoscopic parts.
“Some munchies for weary travelers?” holographic Corey asks.
“Sure,” holographic Tepper says, “if you eat H80 dynamators.”
Dr Murky checks the instrument panel: empty. Gwode looks up from her notepad. Doctors Gwode and Murky exchange glances.
Gwode rubs her hands. “I’d say we’re in business.”
In the school hallway, a posse of determined triplets stake out a restroom for males. Marissa and Larissa lean against the wall on either side of the door. Karessa, the one wearing the pruners, paces in front of it.
Voltak shows up, his comatizer strapped to his belt.
Marissa looks at her watch. “Got to be finished by now.”
Larissa jerks a thumb toward the door. “They’ve been in there forever.”
“I’ll take charge now.” Voltak starts to enter.
The triplets block him. He inhales deeply.
“You?” Karessa asks.
“Are you the expert wang-tracker here?” Marissa asks.
Voltaks huffs in even more air.
“We’re the ones who trapped them.” Larissa says.
“We’re the ones who get them first,” Karessa says.
Voltaks huffs in even more air.
They move aside. Voltak exhales noisily then, staring at them sternly, enters the men’s room.
In the center of the city, high atop the government building in the Cabinet meeting room, only four of the five Dear Learneds sit around the table. Above the table, a small sector of the spherical monitor shows the time remaining, “03:23:56”, ticking away. The rest of the screen shows the image of Voltak, tongs at his side, peering into a toilet in a men’s room.
Pilard, dressed in his uniform, puffs out his cheeks. “Let’s not toy with them any longer, eh, Voltak?”
He gets up to go. “I have an appointment in my office. But we’ll be in constant communication.” A change of image on the sphere arrests his progress.
The image of holographic Voltak yields to the homunculus dressed in green and speaking in an Irish accent. “Their being here now does alter them, so returning them altered does mean we the future do necessarily alter the past to some degree, whether negligible or not. So do feel lucky, Dear Learneds, that those bullets patiently waiting won’t miss.”
“Feel lucky!?!” one of the members of the Umbrella Committee says. “My god, what I feel is nauseous.”
Heading toward the doorway, Pilard nods gravely. Yet as he passes through the doorway, he smiles, satisfied. Going out, he puts on his general’s cap.
Not far from the door to the men’s room, Voltak, shiny tongs swinging with his every move, points at the triplets. “We’ll each visit a different professor of geonomics, so we’ll find them faster. Whoever finds them first, calls the others. Got it?”
The triplets surround Voltak.
“What we got, ‘botic boy,” Marissa says, tapping Voltak’s arm.
“Is first dibs on the wild one,” Larissa says, tilting her head, raising her eyebrows.
”Got that?” Karessa says, one hand on the pruners.
Voltak stretches himself to his full height, looking sternly at each triplet, half his size, in turn.
They fold their arms and look up at him.
Voltak inhales deeply.
The triplets cover their ears and stand their ground.
Voltak’s eyebrows bump together then back up and bump again like a pair of nearsighted caterpillars headed in opposite directions on a thin twig. At last he exhales and nods. “I could make you official deputies of the Umbrella Committee.”
The triplets regard one another, calculating.
In the classroom lab, the boys and the scientists stand in the glow of the chronoscope, staring at an empty space atop a pedestal. Suddenly a cell phone appears on top of the mini-pillar. The scientists cry and jump and hug before composing themselves.
“The test of an inanimate object was successful,” Gwode says. “Now we must try a live being. Being ethical scientists, we’ll be the guinea pigs, before you two take your turn.”
Gwode sets some dials on an instrument panel. Dr Murky grabs a remote. Together, they step up onto a podium and face the pointy part of the former chronoscope turned into a time machine. The doctor aims and clicks the remote. Gwode and Murky on tiptoes embrace, kiss deeply, then disappear.
Corey elbows Kenny. “We’re not doing that when we leave.”
The visitors approach the empty space then wave their hands through it, shaking their heads. They step onto the podium and touch the ground, finding nothing amiss. They stare at the device.
Like a squadron of militia, Voltak and the triplets prowl past the sunny windows in a school hallway, their metal tools glinting in the sunlight, and pause at every classroom door. The students in the corridor give the wide body and his posse room. While still sweeping his stern gaze back and forth, the wanna-be cop answers his phone.
A holograph of Bayer appears, wearing a grave expression. “Voltak, this assignment is overwhelming you. It’s time you called in assistance.”
Marching down the hall with the triplets flanking him and leading him, their high heels tick-tacking, Voltak nods in acquiescence. “Done and done, Madam Secretary. I got three expert wang-trackers on the job.”
The holographic head of Bayer grows larger and redder. “Listen, commandozo series c.” She calms herself. “A huge power draw just occurred, as intense as the one by Ultra when he overamped his chronoscope, in the lab of one Murky and Gwode. Can you guess what that means?”
Taken aback, Voltak salutes and turns around.
“Voltak, if our visitors managed to return with knowledge,” Bayer continues, “there’ll be hell to pay.”
The automaton guard turned law enforcer breaks into a jog, brushing people aside. The triplets follow in his wake, their heels sounding like the amplified clacking of a titanic typewriter. Their shiny, dangling tools swing and jangle.
In the lab of the absent Murky and Gwode, Corey grabs a tiny screwdriver off a counter top. Delicately, he pries open the old phone he brought with him from his own era, removes its contents, places in it the new one he stole, then closes the shell of the old one back up. Picking it up, he admires his work.
“There we go,” he says, “better than new.”
“A homecoming present to yourself?” Kenny says.
He waves his friend over to the spot the scientists left from. Together they examine it. They feel the air, peer at the floor, stare at the ceiling.
Kenny rubs his forehead. “It was just a test. Shouldn’t they be back by now?”
The phone in the lab rings four times then stops blinking and keeps a steady orange light. The recorded voice of Dr Murky says, “You’ve reached the office of Murky and Gwode. If we don’t answer, it means we have perfected time travel and have left for the weekend to the future. Your message is important to us. Pleas–“
Reaching over, Corey slams the phone off. “Those sucking … scientists. We should’ve found a lawyer; no way we would’ve trusted him. Come on.”
“Back to Plan A,” Kenny says.
“Damn right.”
They storm out into the hallway.
---------------------
Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.
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