BANTAM AND CLEVELAND continued their walk. At last the tree cover thinned and opened to clear sky, Bantam barely stifled a gasp at what he saw. There stood the massive black diamond pole, reaching like a laser-thin line of obsidian up, up, up into the forever blue above.
Cleveland smiled as he following the line of his gaze. “Ah, yes. ‘The Great Endeavor’. The bold challenge. All of the best Pencils in America came here to answer it.”
He turned to Bantam. “And you seriously don’t know about this.”
Bantam shook his head. “No. In my world —“ But then he stopped himself short of a longer explanation and said simply, “We used rockets.”
Cleveland’s eyes raised. “Rockets? You mean … projectiles?”
Bantam nodded.
“And men sit inside these projectiles?”
Bantam nodded again.
Cleveland burst out laughing. “Huzzah! Your astronauts truly are mad!”
“Okay,” Bantam said folding his arms. “So how does yours work?”
“Very simple: my Starcraft is raised up the Volzstrang Pin beyond the upper atmosphere. When it reaches —“
“Wait. What did you say?” Bantam said, eyes stabbing Cleveland. “Did you say Volzstrang?”
“Why, yes. That’s what the black diamond tower is called. It’s named for the man who invented the interwoven molecular lattices that gives it such perfect structure, enabling it to reach the edge of the sky.”
“Cleveland,” Bantam said, grabbing him by the shoulders urgently. “This is important. Is Hoermann Volzstrang actually here at MacLaren?”
“Of course he is.” Cleveland said. “Other than Hardin, he’s the top Pencil.”
“Can I talk to him?”
BANTAM WAS led into a massive building. Inside was a single corridor that led to a great cylindrical room in the middle. Strange noises filled the air: it sounded like the roaring of a river punctuated by hisses of steam.
“Hydrologic circuitry,” Cleveland yelled. “State-of-the-art Neptune aetherics. Loud as hell, I know. But it’s a lot quieter than what they had before! Not nearly as dangerous either.”
But Bantam was hardly listening. He could barely contain his excitement. Hoermann Volzstrang was actually here! It had been his equations that made time travel a reality. Maybe he could shed some light on what had happened, why he was in the strange other-1944 …
The control room proved to be much quieter and downright pleasant. It was a spacious room, punctuated with red recliners and flowers, almost like a lavish hotel lobby. A crystal skylight above let dappled sunlight play across the marble floor.
All along the circumference sat men, typing furiously on mahogany-and-ivory keypads. Above them all rose great panels that appeared to be screens.
Screens? How can they can have screens without electricity?
Inside the control room, Cleveland called out, “Doctor Volzstrang! Are you here?”
A walrus of a man turned around and pulled at his moustache. “Yes?”
“Doctor Volzstrang!” Bantam said, thrusting his hand out. But Cleveland yanked him back. “Tut! You are still a prisoner, Bantam. Have a care now! No sudden movements.”
Bantam nodded and then proceeded more slowly. “Doctor Volzstrang. Is there somewhere we can have a talk?”
MOMENTS later, they were seated around Volzstrang’s ‘screen’.
Bantam was given a stylus that attached to gears and levers to another, much, much larger stylus that moved across a series of pins on springs and depressed them as it passed.
Bantam saw to his amazement that each pixel of Volzstrang's screen was made of a very tiny crystal with a highly reflective light side and a dark side. It was like the mechanics of a watch. Whenever something was entered on the keyboard, there was the sound of a small rush of water, and the ‘pixels’ turned and formed characters, reflecting the naphtha light to cause it to ‘glow’ like an electric screen might.
Feeling very odd about it, Bantam wrote the Volzstrang equations down in front of the the very man who had invented them.
When the math was on screen, Volzstrang — a very quiet man, Bantam realized — stared with rapt appreciation, his mouth muttering a prayer of logic and numbers.
“It is ingenious, of course,” Volzstrang said finally. “Only a few minds in the world could have produced this. Is this your work, young man?”
“No,” Bantam said. “It’s yours. Even where I come from, you're one of the world's best Pencils." Hey look at me, catching onto the lingo.
At that, Volzstrang looked up like he'd just been slapped. Cleveland cringed and shook his head; apparently this was a term like nerd.
Bantam quickly proceeded to tell Volzstrang they story of his trip back through time, with Cleveland chiming in now and again to tell the story from the Army’s point of view.
When they’d finished, Volzstrang said: “Well. This is all academic. The production of the Timewave is impossible without the existence of electricity. Many of those numbers up there represent electrical qualities.”
“Doctor Volzstrang. Just — just assume for a second that there is electricity. Pretend it’s real. If we produced a Timewave — and if say, someone rode it back through time … could it theoretically push them into an alternate universe where history was different?”
“No,” Volzstrang snapped.
“No?”
“No.”
“You’re going to just totally rule that out?”
“Yes,” Volzstrang said. “That would take a different kind of wave altogether. The plasma vectors would form a differential plane that — “
Bantam waved him silent. “Okay. So not that.”
“Just how were you planning on accumulating tomorrows — thus effecting a return to your proper time?”
They all turned. Doctor Rachelle Archenstone stood behind them.
Bantam rose, trying not to look her up and down. He realized that Cleveland and even Volzstrang were fighting the same urge.
“The Timewave bounces forward in time once it unloads the capsule,” Bantam explained. “Therefore, it’s still here, all around us, right now, traveling forward in time. Even though you can’t see it or detect it. Unless you happen have a Volzstrang radiation detector.” Bantam glanced self-consciously at Hoermann Volzstrang.
“Anyway, I just have to get my capsule working again. Then I can surf it forward in time, the same way I surfed it back.”
Surf? Rachelle mouthed. Bantam thought about kissing that mouth.
“He’s talking about what natives in Hawaii do,” Cleveland explained, perplexed why Bantam would choose such an odd analogy. “They have these long boards made of wood and —”
“But the Timewave does not bounce forward,” Rachelle interrupted. Her eyes danced over the equations.
“But it does,” Volzstrang disagreed. “You can see that if the 28th dimension is folded into a spline curve, a rebound effect will occur when —“
“Yet it is not folded into a spline,” Rachelle said. “There is an erroneous assumption made here.” She pushed them out of the way. Her hands flew over the keyboard. “You see? It is folded, but into a hyperhexagon, not a spline.”
Volzstrang stared, pulling at his moustache, stunned. “My God. She’s right. I would have never seen that.”
“You didn’t,” Bantam said with a hint of annoyance. Then he turned to Rachelle. “And how did you know that? I thought you were a medical doctor?”
Rachelle shrugged. “I was admitted to University when I was twelve. My syllabus included a wide range of arts and sciences — including physics, of course. An education that is not well-rounded is not an education at all.”
Bantam nodded helplessly. “Yeah. I think that too.” Then he turned to Volzstrang. “Okay. It doesn’t bounce. So where does it go?”
“It continues traveling back through time,” Volzstrang shrugged. “It would simply keep going until it encountered another force to disrupt its trajectory.”
“What kind of force?”
Volzstrang rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. Something very powerful.”
“Yeah but, like what?”
“An explosion,” Volzstrang said. “There are those among us who theorize that the atom is an enormous source of —“
“Yeah. It’s called an Atomic Bomb. And trust me: it works,” Bantam said. “But since you’re still theorizing, that means you’ve never actually exploded a nuke. You don't know how to make one, so it can’t be that. What else?”
Rachelle and Volzstrang sat there deep in thought.
“A coronal mass ejection from the Sun might do it,” came a new voice. They looked up. Doctor Hardin stood nearby. “Yes. A coronal mass ejection would be just the thing.”
All of them were silent.
Hardin seemed to realize something just then. A small sigh escaped his lips. He sat his small form down and rubbed his sweating, oddly light-bulb-shaped head.
“Oh,” Volzstrang said, being the next to see it. “Oh. No. It couldn’t be.”
Rachelle looked between them, slight alarm playing across her face: she wasn’t following. “What? What is it?”
Volzstrang leaned forward, his lips again silently engaged in a litany of logarithms.
“The Day of the Red Sun,” Hardin said, pointing at the screen. “If you notice, there are strange attractors present in the underlying chaos math of these equations. On the one hand, we have the Timewave, rolling backwards through time like a wild beast unchained. But what is it, really? It’s essentially a wild flare of multiple kinds of tangled energies — light and heat only being the very surface characteristics thereof. But if you think about it in the abstract, the Timewave is very much like the negative of a coronal mass ejection.
“On the other hand, we have the ejection itself. By chance alone, it is pointed at the earth. Normally, this would not be a problem — that happens all the time. Normally such phenomenon are quite harmless.
“But this time, the Timewave and the ejection feed off one another. They are mirror images, they are two colliding storms. They build and multiply and multiply …
“The ejection is pulled towards the earth, massively magnified and aimed by the Timewave. The two phenomenon are lovers, made for one another.
“And then — they collide, scalding the world.”
“But why Europe?” Volzstrang said. “That makes no sense. If the Timewave were truly generated here at MacLaren … would not this very base have been the target of this ejection?”
Hardin smiled a crooked smile. “And it would have, if not for the fact that it was nighttime here whilst it was high noon over Germany during that terrible, terrible day. The ejection was only stopped from reaching us by the mass of the very earth itself.”
Volzstrang nodded. “Ah,” was all he managed to say.
Rachelle’s eyes hit her feet. Bantam studied her. She seemed to be fighting back tears.
Hardin noticed as well. “My dear. What is it?”
“My parents,” she said. “They met because of the Day of the Red Sun. Both my grandparents relocated to the same refugee camp in South America.” She glanced up oddly at Bantam.
Hardin sat next to Bantam. “You’re still not getting it, so I will be try to be as gentle as I can.”
“What am I not getting?” Bantam said, irritated. Why was everyone tip-toeing around him now? Cleveland was confused as well.
“Your journey back through time … I believe it may have caused the Day of the Red Sun,” Hardin said.
Thunk.
There it was. The other shoe of Jack’s Giant, dropping on him like a house.
“The history of the entire world may have been changed from that moment forward. I know — hard to believe. I’m not sure I believe it. But these equations that you produced are clearly the work of a genius. In fact, I even recognize the handiwork of Hoermann Volzstrang himself here — or the alternate version of him from the alternate version of history in your world, in any event. Wouldn’t you agree, Hoermann?”
Volzstrang nodded like a man in a trance. “This is exactly how I would have expressed this idea, had it been mine.”
“Complex mathematical ideas may be expressed in a million ways. The chance that these equations are expressed in exactly the way Hoermann would have chosen to do so is infinitely small.”
Bantam stood as what they were saying sank in.
“But the electricity, though. Why does nothing electric work here?” Bantam nearly popped a vein.
Hardin and Volzstrang exchanged glances. But it was Rachelle that spoke up. “The … the Timewave. Plus the ejection. It could have been enough to short out the whole planet. If you assume electricity was once real.” She blushed, embarrassed suddenly. “Oh, I feel silly even even saying such a thing.”
Hardin snapped his fingers. “Yes … yes! Of course. That makes sense. If you posit that the earth once had a natural electrical charge, that would be have been burnt out. Or more than that: it may have — oh! Yes. It is actively interfering with electrical phenomenon!” He turned to Bantam. “I must confess: I have always felt that electricity should be real. I’ve felt that since I was a boy and read stories of it!
“But the experimental evidence always confirmed that it was not. And I am an empiricist: I always go where the evidence takes me.”
“So. Where is the evidence taking you now?” Bantam said.
Hardin laughed. “Well. I examined your capsule in quite excruciating detail, Mr. Bantam, I am ashamed to say. In my own defense, I don’t believe that I damaged anything. I was careful there. But several panels were opened, and I attempted to ascertain how such an apparatus might be made to function. And it was without doubt that electricity was a major assumption of its design.
“My first thought was that this was an elaborate hoax. Or a masterstroke of misdirection. You appeared on a Army base, after all. Perhaps you were an enemy, and you enlisted the help of top scientists. Could I have concocted such a hoax myself? I asked myself this question. Or Doctor Volzstrang?
“Were it put to us, truly and truly, to concoct a story such as what you have told, and build that capsule — could we have done it? And I am forced to conclude: We could not. It is too elaborate. Do you agree Doctors Archenstone and Volzstrang?”
They both nodded.
“Well. There you see. There it is.”
Bantam’s heart raced. He was nearly hyperventilating. “You mean this crazy top-hat world is all because of me?”
“It would seem so,” Hardin nearly whispered. “But I would also add, for what it’s worth, that I believe your story wholeheartedly and without reservation now, Benjamin Bantam. Given all the facts and their interlocking complexity, there is simply no other explanation that makes any sense.”
IT WAS THE NEXT MORNING that Bantam saw something in the newspapers that made every molecule in his body turn to ice.
Immediately, Bantam called for Hardin. Both he and Veerspike arrived together. “There. See that guy?” Bantam said, finger stabbing the paper. “In my timeline, he is responsible for the most horrible war ever known to mankind.”
The paper featured a large picture of a man with a curly moustache and a top hat. He was framed in an oval, like a proud portrait, and surrounded by drawings of a scroll-announcement and cherubs and eagles, as though this were a cherished annunciation or anointing. The headline in the scroll read:
ADOLPH HITLER APPOINTED SUPREME CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY
The moustache was different, as were the clothes. But there was no mistaking those eyes, those shark-eyes, filled with blood and ink. Those were the eyes of a shaman, of a legion. There was no one person in there; instead it was a well-pool of unconsciousness. Somehow, even here, he had managed to hypnotize the German people.
“You have to understand: whatever this guy does next will be bad. Very bad. In my world, he seized power earlier, in the 1930’s — so he’s a little behind schedule in yours. But you can bet he’ll make up for lost time.”
“What sorts of things?” Veerspike asked.
“He’ll attack other countries. He’ll start wars. In fact wouldn’t be surprised if it happened tomorrow. He’ll pretend to be friends. He’ll even sign treaties. Then he’ll roll in the war machines.
“Please. You’ve got to understand one thing: this man is dangerous beyond anything you’ve ever seen or could possibly imagine.”
Veerspike snorted. “Germany is our friend. Germany has always been an ally of America. They are grateful for all the aid we brought during the Day of the Red Sun.”
“Or resentful,” Bantam snapped back. “I’ve been reading your papers: their economy hasn’t been too great. And that was just the way it was in my world. Hitler took advantage of it: the fear, the resentment. Oh, the details are different, but the circumstances are the same. Bottom line? Germany’s got a little-man complex as a nation. And Hitler knows all the right buttons to push to goad it into doing what he wants.”
“You’re paranoid,” Veerspike said. “And ungentlemanly. Why ever would you try to rouse our hatred against our dear friends, the Germans? Bad form. Bad form indeed.”
Veerspike left. After a moment so did Hardin.
But Bantam noticed that Hardin took the newspaper with him.