Chapter 5: The Backstory

Baker had been awake for about 20 minutes and was just beginning his daily rituals. He was a slow mover in the morning, slow but methodical, and had barely got around to brushing his teeth when his vid-wall switched from the morning news to communication mode, with the usual flashing and beeping. He moved over to the wall and responded. “Yeah, this is Baker. What do you want?”

It was Jerry. “I need to talk to you. Come right over. We can have breakfast here.”

Baker nearly fainted in shock. Hearing Jerry speak before lunchtime was rare, let alone before breakfast. Usually, Jerry slept until the last possible minute and kept silent for his first few hours of consciousness, waiting for the hangover to die a natural death. It was typically everything he could do to get vertical at all in time for work. To hear Jerry’s voice two hours before morning work call was not just unusual. It was unheard of.

“Since when do you eat breakfast? Come to think of it, since when do you get up more than 10 minutes before morning call?”

“I’m serious, Baker, I need to see you now.”

“And I’m in the midst of my...private time. Can’t it wait?”

“Baker, just shut up and get your ass over here”

“Alright, alright. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Baker was a particular person, and the particular nature of his morning rituals were central to making his existence tolerable. He needed fully two hours to patiently wake up, groom, meditate, exercise, eat, and generally prepare himself for the day in privacy. When allowed to perform these rituals, he was a reasonably strong person who could well withstand the tedium of the workday, and following that, the nightly bombardments of Jerry’s outbursts when the tuber-rye got the better of him. On the rare occasion that something interfered with his morning, however, the tedium of the day drove him mad, and turned him into a mean, angry, and generally unhappy person with about as much patience as an angry drunk looking for a fight. The only thing that could save him at that point would be some kind of brain work, something requiring scientific rigor or creative problem solving, something to distract him from his loss, which Baker knew a day in the mines would never offer. His sometime evening hobby of working quietly on his inventions would help, but he would be so far gone at that point that he would have difficulty focusing, give up, and go over to Jerry’s early, where the night would undoubtedly end in argument and physical violence.

Jerry’s morning ritual, on the other hand, was a little less complicated. About 10 minutes before the morning work call his homemade alarm would roust him by dumping him off the couch. He would grab the cup of coffee the kitchen unit had made for him in advance, light up a cigarette, and drag himself to work.

Baker walked through the door with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking like hell.

“Baker, you look like hell.”

“Don’t start with me, Jerry. I need a good two hours in the morning to find peace and come to terms with the day and my miserable existence on this so called planet. I have not had those two hours my old friend, and I warn you, I am most definitely not at peace.” Baker sat down at the kitchen table and blew into his coffee, watching the steam rise. “So what is it Jerry? What is it that not only makes you vertical at this unprecedented hour, but requires that you disturb me during the one time of day I want to be left alone?”

“Baker. Two hours ago I got a vid from Pete Elbert.”

Baker stared in silence. Then he let himself laugh.

“The twitch?”

Where Jerry had been Elbert’s mentor, Baker had been more of an amused observer. Jerry had worked hard to make Elbert comfortable and build his confidence. Baker had not. Instead, he sat back and watched this overaged kid struggle, and reveled in the fact that he had grown out of his own confidence issues decades before, putting them well behind him with the rest of his adolescence. Elbert sensed Baker’s attitude, and became extremely nervous around him if Jerry wasn’t nearby for support. When Jerry wasn’t around, Elbert acquired a nervous tick that Baker came to know very well.

Jerry had been protective of Elbert, and never liked hearing him referred to as “the twitch”. But a lot had happened since those days, and Jerry felt a lot less generous toward his former student now than he had then.

Baker continued, “He still at RTI?”

“Yeah.”

“And he called you from, what, the lab? I suppose two hours ago it was just after lunch on Earth.”

He breathed a heavy sigh, and thought about the old days. “Lunch on Earth. Even a light lunch. Maybe a BLT. Remember bacon, Jerry? God what I wouldn’t give for a slice of real bacon.” He sipped his coffee.

Jerry, too, had his moments of nostalgia, but had little use for it this early in the morning. He attempted to diffuse Baker’s daydreaming. “I used to have a hard-boiled egg for lunch. Cold. No salt.”

“Even a hard-boiled egg, Jerry. The real thing.” He gave another long sigh. “But I preferred hot corned beef on rye. Fresh rye with a little crunch on the crust. Or the patty melt at George’s. Remember that, Jerry? With the cheese dripping all over the grilled onions, and…” Baker broke off. “We’ve been on this hell hole too long, Jerry. Too long.”

Jerry and Baker stared at each other, a stare of still being half in the coma of sleep, or in Jerry’s case, of having been up most of the night. In this state, they were extremely susceptible to these bouts of nostalgia, and Jerry knew from experience that they could easily go on for hours. There was no end of the things they missed about living on earth in relative freedom. When they got on the nostalgia track, especially if they were talking about food, they would spiral themselves into a frenzy that would only make the longings worse. During the workday, it wasn’t so bad, because at least it took their minds off their work. At night it was painful because it would completely take them over, and they would have no recourse but to sit and stare at the kitchen unit wishing for what could never be. Just now, however, they did not have the time.

“Get a hold of yourself, Baker,” he snapped.

Baker came to.

“Sure. Ok. Yeah.” Baker looked at Jerry for clues. “So what was Elbert doing calling you from the Old Man’s place? Either things are getting pretty lax around there, or he was taking a big risk. Frankly, I have trouble believing either one.”

“I think the latter. He cut out quick when he saw someone coming. And I think before he’d finished telling me what he really wanted to say.”

“Which was?”

“Fisher’s paradox.”

The air quality control system hummed quietly as Jerry and Baker let this idea sink into the empty space between them.

“He found proof?”

“It’s happened, Baker. Is happening. Right now in…wait for it…” Jerry flipped through several pieces of scrap paper covered in notes, “…sector 47b.”

“Holy cow.”

“You said it, friend.”

The implications of the situation rapidly filled Baker’s head. It had been years since he had talked about this problem, but it had never really left him. It even haunted his nightmares from time to time.

Cautiously, he asked, “How fast is it growing?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out.” Jerry put out his cigarette and stood up. He paced a bit and said, “After I got over the shock of waking up, seeing Pete, and, well, the whole situation, I tried to get down to work. I started staring at the log he was holding up, but couldn’t wrap my head around what I was looking at. They’ve completely changed the layout of the things, Baker. It’s better, but it takes some getting used to. It took me a little time to understand what I was looking it, but I think I picked it up pretty fast. I had just located the time codes and was trying to analyze them when Pete cut out.”

“Well that won’t make this any easier. Did you see much before he cut out?”

“I wrote down everything I could remember and have been going over it for the last two hours. I think the growth is relatively slow, but…” Jerry was still unsure of himself, of what he thought he had seen. It was so absurd that he hardly believed it himself. Would Baker?

“But what, Jerry?”

“But either the Trash-bots in the field are completely incompetent in making their logs…”

“You can count that theory out right away.”

“My thoughts exactly. So since we know a T-bot could never make that kind of mistake, the log must be correct. But I’m telling you, Baker, it doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t make sense?”

Jerry hesitated.

“The time codes. Nothing adds up. None of the basic formulas come out right. I tried the Miranda sequence in my head while Pete was still on the line, and a dozen times since them. It comes out completely upside down.” Jerry flipped through his notes again. “After he cut out I tried every sequence and formula I could think of, and it’s like everything I ever learned was gibberish.”

“Wait a minute, Jerry, “ Baker interrupted, “maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way. What if we invert the anti-polaric fusion constant and reintegrate the Gerhsom function to…”

“So what you’re saying, Baker, is that time is slowing down in the vicinity of this expanding rip?”

“Yeah. I think that’s it, Jerry. And the bigger the rip gets, the slower time moves in that area. But I don’t think that’s all. I think the time anomaly is spreading. It’s pretty weird, I admit, but I think the farther away you get from the rip, the faster time moves, until you’re far enough away that it gets back up to normal.”

“Like a ripple.”

“A what?”

“Like a ripple in the water. You throw a stone in the water and you get this big wave, right? But as it moves outward, it gets smaller and smaller until it is completely gone.”

“Sure. I think that’s pretty dead on, Jerry. The energy of the ripple slowly gets absorbed by friction as it moves outward, and eventually dies. To follow your analogy, yes, I think what we’re seeing is a sort of time ripple. I’m not sure what’s absorbing it, but it is definitely getting less intense as it moves outward.” Baker felt pretty pleased with himself and was starting to think this day might not turn out so badly after all. There was nothing like a working on a puzzle to make him feel right with the world, especially if it was difficult, which this one was turning out to be.

“Unfortunately, the analogy doesn’t quite fit the situation.”

“How so?”

“Alright, Jerry. In the case of the water ripple, you throw one big rock in the water, and it makes a big ripple that slowly dies out, right?”

“Right.”

“Instead, imagine you make the ripple by pointing a jet of water into the pond. And then imagine that the jet slowly gets more intense. That’s more like what you have here. The ripples still die out, but at the same time, they keep getting more and more intense at the source, which means they will eventually spread further and further before they die out. In other words, the ripples have a limited distance, but that distance is growing.” Baker allowed his words to sink in before he continued.

“Jerry, I think the expansion of the rip is letting something in that is not only causing this time ripple, but is getting more intense all the time. Does the Fisher paradox predict this?”

Jerry didn’t even stop to consider, and he fired right back. “No. Not at all. I had it all wrong”

“All wrong?”

“I can’t figure it, Baker, but it must be completely wrong”

Baker and Jerry stared at each other, this time with energy, excitement, and no small amount of fear. They were thinking the same thing, but were afraid to say it: Maybe they were both wrong. Maybe they had been all along.

Jerry walked down to the Old Man’s office and entered, unannounced. He had walked right past the secretary with a little wink, and she let him cross into the office without incident. He knew this would anger the Old Man, but he didn’t really care.

Jerry had known the Old Man for close to four years, since just before he married Ball, and in all that time, he had never really taken the Old Man seriously. It had been Ball, of course, that had introduced them to each other. The Old Man had always played the role of Ball’s father, and she had brought Jerry home to meet him and have their engagement sanctioned. Ball’s relationship with the Old Man was complicated in part by the fact that the he was more than 100 years her senior, and though she carried many of his genes, she was far from his natural daughter. Jerry had taken this all in stride, of course. Tech babies were rare but not unheard of, and he thought she deserved a family, even if it meant a self-absorbed ego-maniacal half-man half-machine with a heart of evil. Besides, he needed a job and the Old Man had been in a position to give him one. But it didn’t mean he had to take him seriously.

“Dad.”

The Old Man, sitting at his desk, was taken by surprise. “Don’t do that. Go back and get yourself announced. And don’t call me that. I’m not your father. You will call me sir like everyone else.”

“Dad, this is no time to be petty. We’ve got a big problem.”

“Petty? Petty?! Get out!” the Old Man screamed. He had a habit of holding back his anger with quiet but firm tones. He believed that shouting showed weakness, while grace under fire showed strength and class. As usual, Jerry got the better of him.

Jerry heaved a sigh of exasperation, and left the office. He had known he wouldn’t get away with it from the beginning, but he never could resist an opportunity to throw the Old Man off balance. It made the Old Man look ridiculous, and gave Jerry a sense of power and satisfaction. It was self-destructive, of course, but he supposed all the best things in life usually were.

He went back to the secretary’s office to get his official permission to enter, and because he didn’t close the door behind him, the Old Man could see Jerry in the outer office bent over the secretary’s desk. They appeared to be arguing, but the Old Man couldn’t quite make out what was going on. He pushed the button on his vid-com. “Miss Dixon, what’s going on in there?”

“I’m sorry sir. Your senior scientist is here and asking to see you.”

“Does he have a request form?”

And Jerry, his patience gone, charged back in, with the secretary screaming after him, “Sir, you can’t go in there!”

“Alright, Dad. Take it easy. I don’t have a form and I don’t have permission to see you. But I have some bad news that I think you’ll want to hear.”

The Old Man leaned back and lit a cigar. He had found his calm again and felt in control of the situation. He leaned into his vid-com and told his secretary to leave it alone, and then looked up at Jerry. “Ok, let’s have it and get it over with. I suppose you’re here to talk about the gravity drives again? Why I continue to let you work here, I’ll never know”

“I think we both know the answer to that one,” Jerry said with a smile.

“Well, I am a sucker for a pretty face.”

And at last, they both laughed. A laugh was rare from the Old Man, but the thought of his daughter always loosened him up a bit. And contrary to everything the Old Man thought about his daughter’s husband, Jerry was no fool, and regularly took advantage of this.

“The thing is, I’ve been running some number games with Dr. Baker.”

“Games?”

“Well, we call them games. Basically we’re just running scenarios and trying to find some order in the chaos. Looking for formulas that could help us control the rips.”

“The rips. Your bad news is about the rips?”

Jerry realized, for the first time since he had left his lab to come down to this office, that he was in way over his head. He knew what the bad news was, but he hadn’t actually thought through how to say it, and now that he saw the intense look in the Old Man’s eyes, he was stumbling.

“I don’t know quite how to say this, so…um… I guess I’ll just come right out with it.” Jerry took a deep breath. “Dr. Baker and I have recreated, mathematically that is, the creation and demise of the rips, and they’re…well…they’re not stable.”

The Old Man, thinking he knew where Jerry was going, settled down. He still had a few secrets even Jerry wasn’t aware of. “Oh relax. That’s impossible. I’ve seen the math myself. The energy created exactly equals the energy expended.”

“That’s true…” Jerry and the Old Man stared at each other “…for a virgin rip.”

The Old Man, sensing something new, tensed up. “A virgin rip?”

“Technically, only the very first rip ever created could really be called a virgin, but we tend to think of the first rip in any distinct area of space as virginal as well. Ever since the initial rip, minuscule amounts of energy have been escaping from the other-verse. The good news is that as long as we keep finding new and distinct dumps, the amount of energy should never add up, which is a very good thing. Now, if we didn’t, if we made repeated rips in the same area of space, enough lost energy would collect in that area that one day one of those rips would fail to close on it’s own.”

The Old Man seemed to move into an almost dreamlike state. “Not close.”

“That’s right. Just keep on opening until…”

“Until the whole universe was absorbed.”

“Well…yes.” Jerry was shocked. Could the Old Man have seen this coming? He knew the Old Man had an advanced level of understanding of the physics involved. Was Jerry wasting his time?

“But as I’m sure you know,” the Old Man came back with, “each dump we use is distinct, and there are enough distinct areas of space within our reach that it would take millions of years for us to run out of new dumping grounds.”

“Agreed.” There was something the Old Man wasn’t telling him. Something critical. Could he really be hiding something this dangerous?

“So why am I still talking to you, Dixon?”

“It’s Jerry, Dad, Jerry. J-E-double-R-Y, Jerry. And you know why you’re still talking to me.”

“I do not.” The Old Man had hardened and was ready to end the interview.

And Jerry said the one thing that could have grabbed the Old Man’s interest, the only thing that would keep him from being summarily sent back to his lab without any new information. “What’s going on in sector 47b?”

The Old Man sat up and looked Jerry dead in the eye. Then he slipped away into a dream world and molted the chitinous shell he had grown during the meeting. He leaned back again in his chair looking at his half-smoked cigar, stared at the smoke as it rose toward the ceiling, and closed his eyes.

The Old Man looked like he had given up. Like he had been running from something so hard and for so long that he finally just gave in and let it catch him. He had held onto secrets, terrible secrets, for so long he was not sure that he could ever share them, but he was running out of the strength he needed to hold them in. Even still, he likely would have held onto them forever had something terrifying and wonderful not intervened. It was as if a presence had flown through his circuits, and forced those secrets to the surface. He had never felt anything like it before, and was powerless against it.

Jerry got scared. He thought the Old Man was about to collapse on him, or explode, or something equally terrible, and he was not sure he wanted to be in the room when it happened. Then, quietly, unexpectedly, the Old Man appeared to be at peace. He sat down, as if whatever demon had possessed him had gone, and left him only with an inner calm.

“Sit down, Jerry. I have a story to tell you.”

Jerry sat on the floor.

The Old Man took a deep breath. “Ball never told you about her mother.”

“Mother? I thought Ball was a tech baby”

“Not quite.”

Jerry nodded, as if to say, “go on…”

Jerry felt a nausea in the pit of his stomach. Something was very wrong with the Old Man, and by doing nothing, he felt as if he was exploiting him. The Old Man, in contrast, had never felt better in his life. He was suffused with something close akin to nostalgia, or perhaps even love, and was so unused to these feelings that he didn’t quite know what to do with them. They were a strange pair, the two of them. The Old Man was so consumed with these strange new feelings that he was oblivious to their appearance. He relaxed, smiled, glowed. Poor Jerry, on the other hand, felt like he was abdicating some higher responsibility by failing to call attention to them. He shrunk, cowered, winced. The Old Man’s path unfettered, he continued.

“Ballerina Justice was a scientist, like her daughter. Beautiful, too. Sometimes, I can’t even bear to look at that little girl for all the painful memories she brings up, just with her smile. I know you wouldn’t think of it to look at me now, but there was a time…oh, yes, there was a time when I was…well...human, with all of the human failings. And I was in love with Ballerina Justice.

“This was well over a seventy years ago, before the wars, and I was still…whole. I was working as a lieutenant on a medical ship out of Cassius Prime, and Ballerina was working on her thesis. It was a great time for us, seeing the galaxy, meeting new races, and saving lives into the bargain. And the best part?” Here the Old Man winked. He actually winked. “We had a cabin to ourselves.”

Jerry was soaking it in, but all the time thinking he was about to get taken, get slammed. This attitude was completely out of character for the Old Man to the point where Jerry suspected some of his circuits had gone awry, maybe even insane. Any minute, Jerry was sure, the Old Man would turn on him and attack. It was as if he was laying a trap, lulling Jerry into a false sense of security so that when he did pounce, it was at the least expected moment. Jerry knew he would be a fool to let his guard down, but yet...yet...it just wasn’t the Old Man’s style to lay a trap. It was too sneaky. The Old Man was a lot of things, but sneaky wasn’t one of them. Whatever the reason, the Old Man was telling the truth, and it scared the hell out of Jerry, who knew he would pay for it soon enough.

“She was working on a theory of multiple universes, and how to bridge the gap between them. She was obsessed. I know that now. But it made her happy, and what made her happy, made me happy. Three years I served on that ship, and I tell you they were the happiest days of my life.”

He got up and walked to the window, unshaded a small area with his finger, just enough to peek into the afternoon light outside. “Happiest days of my life.” He turned back to Jerry, dragged off of what was left of his cigar, and put it out on his desk. “It’s funny but...I almost feel her presence again. As if she were listening to me right now, as if...” He stared off into space for a few moments, lost in thought.

“After I got my own ship, things started to deteriorate a bit. I got busier than I wanted to be, and I never seemed to have enough time for Ballerina. It killed me, but I told myself I was working for her. For us. I felt sure we would soon build a family, and I wanted to be able to support us.”

Jerry watched the Old Man sink further and further into memory, as if it were consuming him, taking him over. He began to feel that perhaps the Old Man did not really want to open up to him like this at all. That, like a drunk man telling secrets out of school, he would soon come to and regret his openness. If that were true, if the Old Man felt Jerry had taken advantage of him in a weakened state, Jerry would be lucky if he lived to regret it. Yet, he couldn’t stop himself from listening.

“Ballerina finished her thesis and started to do experimental work on her own. She built and collected all kinds of stuff, a phase inverter, a neutrino gun, even a gravimetric conversion tool, and started messing around with them. She would spend days on end in the ship’s lab, not even coming up for meals. I should have been worried about her, should have seen what was coming, but I was so preoccupied with my own work, I hardly even noticed.

“Then, one day, she came to me and told me she had found it – the secret to the universes. At that time my science background was pretty minimal, just what I had learned in basic, and I could not really talk on her level. But as I said, I was feeling pretty guilty about not spending enough time with her, so I sat down with her and let her teach me all about it. I have to say I did not really understand much at the time, but when she got around to asking me to take my ship out to the edge of the system so she could run some experiments, I thought, finally, finally a way to make up for letting my work come between us. I even thought it might serve as a short vacation. A second honeymoon. Just the two of us, alone in space. If only I’d known how dangerous it would be…”

The Old Man went back to the window and gazed at the traffic outside. Jerry held his breath. Silence hung in the air. Jerry knew the Old Man was deep into his reverie, and he didn’t dare disturb it. He knew that when the reverie broke he would be in for a rude awakening, but now that he was so far into it, he was anxious to hear as much of the story as he could before all hell broke loose.

“Anyway, I did not know. I could not know. I was just not smart enough.” He turned back to Jerry and continued. “So we piled all of her equipment into my ship and headed out to the edge of the system. In those days it was a bit of a trek, and it took us almost half a day. While we flew, she explained again what she was trying to do. She believed she had discovered how to create what she called ‘an eye’ from our universe to another, and she intended to create one, then fly up close in one of the pods and take some readings. I was to stay back in the ship in case anything went wrong, and pull her back in if necessary.

“When we arrived, the plan seemed to work perfectly. We checked and calibrated all of her instruments, I watched her fly the pod a short distance from our ship, that...that crazy blue light appeared, and...and suddenly I was looking at my first rip. Ballerina’s Eye. I’m used to it now. In fact I would say that these days I barely notice it. But at the time? At the time I thought it was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen.”

He smiled at Jerry, which would have been touching if it hadn’t been so out of character. As it was, it came off more creepy than sincere, and made Jerry think once again that maybe the Old Man had gone insane.

“Have you ever seen one, Jerry?” the Old Man asked. It seemed like an ordinary question, but to Jerry, it was a large red flashing sign shouting, Warning! Warning! Danger Ahead! It was in fact the first time the Old Man had called him by name. Something was definitely wrong.

“No. Not in person,” was all Jerry could say, as he gauged the Old Man suspiciously.

“I’ve come to hate that color,” the Old Man said after a little more thought.

“About an hour later, I saw the pod start to move away from me. I called Ballerina on the radio, and she said she was going in for a closer look. I told her she was too close already, but she had become convinced that she could cross the threshold and explore the universe on the other side, and she refused to listen.”

Jerry looked up, knowingly, at the Old Man. “But surely she must have known…”

“Nobody knew anything back then. This was the first one. The virgin, as you call it. It hadn’t even closed yet. Still, I was suspicious. I told her it was crazy, begged her to come back, but there was no stopping her. No. That’s a lie. I could have stopped her.

“I had the power and I had the tools. I just didn’t have the confidence that I was right. I did not understand the science, Jerry, and I trusted her to do the right thing. And I think I knew, deep down, that if I pulled her out before she was ready, she would never forgive me.

“So she went in.” The Old Man said, as if concluding the story.

“And?”

“And nothing. She exploded and the rip closed. The same thing that always happens. It just so happened it was the first time.” The Old Man went back to his desk and lit another cigar.

But the he wasn’t done. Not yet.

“Like I said, that was before the wars. But not long before. Soon enough I found myself impressed into the Planetary Space Force, captain of another medical ship, this time on the front lines. I fought three wars in 22 years. I thought it would help me to forget. But even 22 years later, Ballerina Justice still occupied my thoughts.

“After the massacre at New Tulsa, they found me, barely alive, buried under a pile of basalt, suffocating to death. A few more minutes and I would have been dead. I remember wondering if I would finally see my Ballerina again, or if the line that divided our universe and the next would divide she and I for eternity.

“The robots kept me alive so they could torture me, and torture me they did. I will not make excuses for what I did next. I was weak. I know that now. But I say it is a rare man that would not have broken after what they put me through. When I look back, I think the only reason no one else betrayed the human race is that no one else had anything to betray the human race with. No one had knowledge the robots did not have already. No one except myself.

“They tortured me for what felt like weeks. Physical and mental tortures you cannot possibly imagine. And the drugs. The drugs.” He stared out the window again, lost in thought. Jerry waited through the silence for the rest of the story.

“And yet…and yet, after all I had been through, after all I had seen, I could still think only of Ballerina. And through the pain, through the fog, I hatched a plan. I told my captors I knew of something no one else in the universe knew. I thought, if they believed me, they would either make an experiment of me, and I would go the way she had, and we would finally be together again in that other world, or they would see the value in my information, and protect me from further harm. Either way, I knew anything would have been better than the living hell they were putting me through. I do not say I am proud of what I did, bit it was with purpose.

“I allowed the thoughts that had been festering in my mind to take focus. I became angry and bitter. Jealous. The universe next door had stolen my wife. I knew I could never get her back, but I would be revenged. I would fill that world with refuse. With dirt and muck and excrement. With rotting vegetables and molding meat. With flies and maggots and unspeakable filth. Soon my thoughts of revenge overshadowed my desire to reunite with my love, and became all consuming. The robots, as you know, can recognize anger and hate far more easily than love and kindness, and their ears pricked up at my thoughts.

“They saw this image in my mind, and for their own, far more sinister purposes, made my revenge dream come true. I got what I wanted, and they got...well...they got something in return. When they finally developed the unstoppables, the war was over within a week. Meanwhile, I was put in charge of this project as some sort of perverse reward for my treachery, and I began my new life, wading through filth, preparing vengeance on my true enemy.

“And once a year, on the anniversary of her disappearance, I collected a mother-load of the most disgusting, putrid, unbearable rot I could find, and spit it into the eye of the beast that ate my wife.”

“The eye?”

“The very spot where she had been taken from me all those years ago.”

“Sector 47b.”

“Yes, Jerry. 47b.”

Jerry had been listening intently, but was only just beginning to realize the implications of the history. The Old Man, driven mad by guilt, and pushed over the edge by torture was revenging himself on the entire universe. And he actually had a chance of succeeding. The only problem was that, in order to win, he needed to destroy every man, woman and child in the universe, along with everything else. The Old Man had gone insane after all.

But there was something else. Something Jerry still couldn’t wrap his head around.

“And Ball? How was it that you were able to build her from a woman who disappeared more than 70 years ago?”

There was a thoughtful silence here while Jerry waited the Old Man out. Finally, he said, “Let’s just say the robots have been good to me.”

And that was going to have to be enough for Jerry.

Then, without warning, the Old Man changed. He crumpled up and tensed every muscle and circuit in his body. “No!” he screamed. “Don’t leave me!” And he fell to the floor and pounded his fists. “Please!”

Jerry sat stock still. He knew he should go for help, knew that would be the right thing to do, the responsible thing, but he was completely paralyzed by the bizarre situation. He had expected the Old Man to come out of the trance sooner or later, and while he had hoped it would be later, he was prepared for some sort of backlash. What he saw, however, was totally beyond anything he had imagined. He watched the Old Man squirm and tried to think through his options, but the situation was so unusual and unexpected, he didn’t know where to start. Tentatively he asked, “Are you ok?”

The Old Man rose up and smashed his head against the desk. Over and over. He stared at the desk and screamed, “Come back!” And he smashed his head again, and created a crater, slowly increasing in depth with each blow.

Whatever miracle had pushed aside the Old Man’s usual vitriol in favor of thoughtful, one might even say insightful, reminiscences had now transformed him into an extreme version of his more usual choleric self. Jerry’s worst fear of the Old Man regretting a night of drunken weakness was realized, and as expected, Jerry would now pay the price. The Old Man was crushing his artificial face against the desk, viscous substances flowing from the damage, and bloody wires coming exposed as his artificial skin tore away from his face. Then, after one particularly intense smash erased the separation between the desktop and the drawer below, he stopped. He laid with his face on the desk, in a puddle of his natural and artificial juices intermingling on the desk.

The fit subsiding, he raised his head and stared at Jerry. The semblance of human that had bubbled to the surface, and finally exploded in self-destruction was now pushed back into his inner depths, leaving only the hard shell of the half-man, half-machine Jerry had come to know so well. The miracle was over, and there would be hell to pay.

He stared long and hard at Jerry, his anger growing in direct proportion to Jerry’s fear.

“And after all I’ve been through, all I’ve sacrificed, you walk in here and try to shut me down because of a theory? You? The deadbeat? The filthy human who stole my daughter? No. I won’t have it. It’s over. Get out.” He leaned over his desk and hit the vid-com. “Miss Dixon, will you get me a towel?”

Jerry put on his game face, and pushed his fear away. With a shell of his own, he said, “It doesn’t matter, Dad. This business is crumbling down around you. I have no interest in sharing your secrets, but if you don’t stop this obsession with revenging yourself upon the universe, you’ll destroy everything. Literally everything. I can’t let you do that.”

The Old Man wiped off his face. “You’re playing hardball with me?” He laughed. this time, though, it wasn’t joy that he felt, but power. He had been wanting to do this from the day Ball had introduced them, but hadn’t for her sake. Today, at last, he would have his way. “Ok. Fine. Hardball it is. As of this moment I am calling in your debts. I would estimate you have ten hours before the debt police are knocking at your door and you find yourself on a one way trip to the colonies. Let’s see what she thinks of you when you’re unemployed, destitute, and halfway across the galaxy. Think she’ll stick by you then?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I just did.”

“You’re a monster.”

“Now there’s an insult I can live with, Dixon.” The Old Man leaned forward and engaged his vid-com. “Miss Dixon, get the rest of the science team down here.”

“Right away, sir.”

A look of panic came across Jerry’s face as he began to realize just what the Old Man was capable of. He knew he had been risking his own skin by coming down here, and figured he had some amount of protection from his family status. But his team. “What...do you want my team here for?”

“Dixon, you have shot your mouth off at me for the last time. I let my girl marry you because it made her happy. I let you work here because it made her happy. But you’ve pushed me to my limits, and there’s only so far I’m willing to go for her. What do I want your team here for? Listen. I am about to give them a chance to save themselves from you. They will take it, mark my words, and they will disavow you and your theories. You are alone, Dixon, and there is no one left to help you.”

“You may understand the ’bots, Dad, but you’ve completely lost touch with men.”

“We’ll see, Dixon. We’ll see.”

At that moment, the Old Man’s secretary announced over the vid-com, “Doctors Baker and Elbert to see you, sir.”

The Old Man told her to send them in, and greeted them as they crossed the threshold into his office. “Ah, Dixons, please come in.”

They looked uncomfortably at Jerry, and then at each other. The Old Man, either out of shrewdness, or because he was actually oblivious to such subtle human behaviors, ignored this, and said, “It appears you have a rogue element among you. This human claims that our scientifically based work of goodwill is causing irreparable harm to the galaxy. He claims, in fact, that we hold in our humble hands the power to destroy the universe, and are doing so with every step.”

The Old Man allowed the tone to sink in. “As I cannot tolerate rogue elements in my organization, this human has been relieved of his responsibilities, and been left to fend off his debt collectors without his former protection. Do either of you have anything to say?”

Baker had always been a stand up guy. It didn’t matter that he questioned parts of Jerry’s theory, or that he thought Jerry was too rash in coming down here. He was a stand up guy, and that’s all there was to it. “You can fire whom you want,” he challenged, “you can deny what you want, but you cannot change the facts. Our work is destroying the tentative hold we have on the wall between our universe and the next, and that wall will crumble if we don’t stop ripping.”

The Old Man nodded. “I see.” He turned to Elbert. “Dixon, do you agree?”

Although Elbert was not particularly a stand up guy, he did have a loyalty for Jerry some would call extreme. Jerry had been the first person that had really taken him under his wing, and trusted him, and Elbert had never been shy in his appreciation. So it was a surprise to everyone when he said, “No sir, I do not.”

Jerry and Baker turned to stare at Elbert, who was speaking to his feet. “I believe there are discrepancies in the expressions and because of this, cannot fully support the theory. I have said this to both of them, but they are convinced that my concerns are insignificant. They may be right. But the discrepancies are there, significant or not, and I cannot stand behind their assertions.”

Jerry and Baker were floored. Elbert had spoken up for the first time in his life, and in one stroke, given both of them a life sentence. The Old Man, of course, was pleased.

“Well spoken, Dixon. You are instructed to form a new team without these men. I am sure our department of science will thrive under your new leadership. Dixons, you are dismissed.”

And with that, Jerry’s and Baker’s lives changed forever.

“Jerry, do you still have your notes with the original functions?”

“I have them right here in my hand. I’ve been staring at them for the last hour.”

“Let me have a look.”

Jerry handed a pile of dog-eared papers covered in notes to Baker. The papers were covered on both sides, with notes in various colors filling in every available space. He had been working on them for two hours already this morning, and had significantly added to the already crowded margins. “Maybe you’ll see something I don’t, Baker. When I look at it, it still adds up. I just can’t see where it could be wrong.”

Baker took a few moments to study Jerry’s notes. They had always been a bit messy for Baker’s taste, but there was no denying his genius. Jerry had a way of jumping from one idea to the next almost intuitively, sure that he could fill in the gaps later with scientific rigor, and it always took Baker a few moments to make the same leaps without the missing clues. As he acclimated himself, his mind went back to the days when they had last worked on the problem, and he went after the proverbial elephant in the room.

“What if Elbert was right, Jerry? What if the noise in the system was significant enough to diminish the effects of the paradox?” The question had never left either of their minds for over a decade. Elbert had said that the minuscule amounts of energy loss, spread throughout the system would ultimately have a significant impact. Jerry and Baker had both dismissed them as pedantic thoughts from a small minded man – a stickler for detail that could not see the forest for the trees.

“It doesn’t matter. I still say it can’t make a difference. There’s no way the kind of noise the good Dr. Elbert was so obsessed with could possibly have such an impact on a system that large. Stare at it all you want. Nothing has changed.”

“Except the data.”

“Yes, well, except the data.” Jerry was exhausted. “How’s your coffee?”

“Could use a warm-up,” Baker said, as he handed Jerry his cup.

Jerry got up and went to the kitchen, which was really no more than a nook on the other side of the room. He typed in a few numbers and a cup of coffee appeared, made specifically to Baker’s taste. This was true not because the kitchen somehow intuited Baker’s desires, but because Baker had been coming around enough over the last 12 years that Jerry had finally gotten around to programming Baker’s coffee into it.

Moments later, he returned with the cup.

“Jerry, I agree with you that random noise would not result in the sort of time shifts we are seeing in the data, but what if the time shifts themselves are the …” Baker took a sip of coffee, and immediately spit it out, halfway across the room. “What the hell is this? It tastes like cold carbon water.”

Jerry went back to the kitchen. “Kitchen’s on the fritz, and I haven’t had the cash for a repair-bot. I thought I could fix it myself, but…let me try again.” He tried a few buttons and got another cup. This time he tasted it himself. “Well, it’s not your mix, but it’s not bad for Galactic Standard.” He handed the coffee to Baker.

Baker took a tentative sip. “Better. Thanks.”

Jerry prompted him to pick back up. “Now what were you saying about the time shifts themselves being the problem?”

“I mean your omega function assumes that the passage of time is constant. There is no room in the expression for that not to be true. But if it is not true…”

“Baker, the expression itself proves that time is constant.”

“Yes...” Baker got quiet and considered. Then, slowly, “Jerry, do you remember the story Professor Kingston told us about the dog in the decompression chamber?”

“Dog in a decompression chamber? Remind me.”

“It seems there’s this dog that has been scuba diving, and has risen to the surface too fast, resulting in a sort of dog version of the bends. His keeper takes him to a decompression chamber for the cure, but the dog only gets worse. The doctors try everything. They change the pressure, the rate of change, the duration of the treatments, but nothing helps. The dog continues to suffer, keeps whimpering all the time and eventually can barely walk. The doctors are about to give up hope, when one of them assumes the dog is about to die, and out of compassion gives him a piece of steak to chew on while they continue to the treatments. To the doctors’ collective surprise, the treatments begin to work, and soon enough the dog is cured.”

Baker waited for Jerry’s moment of epiphany.

The moment did not come.

Jerry, as deadpan as he could manage said, “No, Baker, I don’t remember that story.”

Baker dismissed Jerry’s ignorance with a wave of his hand. “Jerry, we can’t discard the notion that time may be fluid.”

“I can.”

“I think your ex-wife would disagree.”

This was a low blow on Baker’s part, and Jerry, perhaps because he had not slept, or had lost confidence in his brain, or more likely just could not stand to let her get the last word, lost control of himself.

“Aw, leave Ball out of this,” Jerry shouted. He swept his hands across the table, and sent all the notes, a full ashtray, and Baker’s coffee flying across the room.

He forced his brain to suppress his emotions and get back into the game. He took a deep breath and told himself this wasn’t about Ball. Not this time. In fact, it was almost never about Ball with Baker, yet somehow Jerry always managed to bring it around to her in his mind. Anyway, he was right. Ball would disagree. He took a deep breath and bent over to pick up his mess.

From the floor, crawling on his hands and knees and gathering back up his notes, he said, “Yes, Baker. Ball would disagree. But she belongs to the Time People. When she moves through time, which I still insist is constant, it appears fluid to her. She can’t distance herself from the experience, and uses that personal experience to define her world. She’s like a raccoon that believes there is no day because it is only ever awake at night.”

“I’m sorry, Jerry. I should not have brought her into this.” He bent over to help Jerry pick up the rest of the notes. The ashtray and spilled coffee they left alone. As they picked up, Baker continued. “But take a step back for a moment. Look at the data. Allow for the possibility that she is right. Just as an experiment.” Baker took a sip of coffee and tried to give some patience to Jerry with his presence. “What would it mean to your omega function?”

Jerry, standing up, got angry again, and stared rudely at Baker. He tore the papers out of Baker’s hand, and flipped through them testily. Once he found what he was looking for, he turned his back to Baker and moved back to the table, where a few remaining notes littered the surface along with a math machine to help with the basic calculations. He picked up a pencil, made a few more scribbles, and punched in a few numbers on the machine. While he worked, he visibly appeared to move from anger to the excitement he always had when working on a problem. As with Baker, it was the one drug that overwhelmed everything else.

“I don’t believe it.”

Baker gave a small laugh, and Jerry looked at him incredulously.

“Sorry, Jerry. But I knew you would never buy it unless you worked it out on your own.”

“You knew?”

“That the omega function was inverted? Yes, Jerry. I knew”

“How long have you known?”

“Since the day we left RTI.”

Jerry stared at Baker in shock. “And you never told me?”

“What was there to tell, Jerry? That there was a minor error in six pages of formulas? It did not make a difference, or at least I did not think it could at the time. It would have been like telling Thomas Paine there was a typo in Common Sense. Your theory was sound, and a work of genius, by the way, and inverting that function was not going to change that. Besides, I always had the shadow of a doubt that Elbert was right about the minor fluctuations and I sure did not want to bring that up again. You cannot possibly believe this changes anything?”

Jerry just stared at the papers in front of him. His whole world was changing before his eyes, and he took the time he needed to absorb it. He was leaping, and he had to study his path long enough to make sure he was not heading over a cliff. “Baker,” Jerry said at last, in a voice calm and quiet, “It changes everything. The old theory said that by continuing to disturb the same area of space, eventually we would create a rip that continues to open rather than closing upon itself. That much is still true.”

“So what has changed?”

“You remember we thought the other-verse operated by different physical laws than our own. We thought that because of this, it converted physical objects into new ones conforming to those laws, and in the process created that burst of energy strong enough to close the rip.”

“Is that not still true?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think that the physical laws of the other-verse are not so different from our own with one exception. Time. It’s not the objects we send through the rips that cause the energy bursts, Baker. It’s the contact between the two time paradigms that are incompatible.”

Baker stared at him in a rare expression of blank stupidity. “Well, now I am out of my league.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s changed. The cause is a little different than we thought, but the results are the same. If that hole keeps growing, our universe cannot possibly survive. We’ve got to stop him.”

Baker stepped forward and put his hands on the table. He leaned forward and looked Jerry dead in the eye. “What do you plan to do, walk into the Old Man’s office and show him your theory?”

Over drinks, these would have been fighting words. But Jerry wasn’t about to take the bait.

“No. I’m going to do what I should have done in the first place.”

Baker looked at him, waiting for him to continue.

“I’m going to see Ball.”

“Ball? See Ball? What do you mean?”

“I mean she’s the only one who can stop the Old Man, but she’ll never do it unless she experiences the anomaly for herself. Once she feels it, I won’t need to convince her to talk to the Old Man. She’ll do it on her own. It’s the only way.”

Baker looked unconvinced. “Well,” he said at last, “at least we’ll finally get off this rock.”