Read Ebook: Equation for Time by Winterbotham R R Russell Robert Binder Jack Illustrator

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Ebook has 159 lines and 8081 words, and 4 pages

"If you turned down a million dollars for my sake, I think I can trust you," she said. "Supposing I was about to invent a new method of locomotion? Can you see where Keeshwar might find me obnoxious?"

"A new kind of space ship?"

Trella shook her head. "A new kind of locomotion. Animals either swim or walk. Man also uses wheels."

"He also can fly. So can birds."

"Flying is simply swimming through the air and crawling, as a worm or snake, is gliding, like swimming. Space ships swim, too, after a fashion. Boats swim through the sea and sleds swim on ice. Therefore we have only three kinds of locomotion: Legs, wheels and sleds. Another might revolutionize everything."

"But there couldn't be any other way to travel. Even the planets 'sled' through ether."

"There is another way. It will open exploration to the furthest limits of the galaxy."

"I can see why Keeshwar was so interested."

"As soon as I'm out of bed, I want you to call on me at my laboratory, Fred. I'll show you something that will make your eyes pop out of your head."

I turned to leave, when something on the window pane caught my eye. It was a small, cherry-red spot, about the size of a twenty-five cent piece.

The minute I saw it, I knew what it was. I shouted to the interne--really a detective--outside the door, and lifted Trella into my arms. I must admit that I handled her a little roughly and she groaned as I hurried her out of the room. But what I did was necessary.

As I left the room, the glass of the pane melted and a beam flashed across the room, striking the bed where Trella had been an instant before. That beam was an Oronic Ray, 5,000 degrees hot, of the type used in welding the rockets of space ships.

It was evident that Gustav Keeshwar intended to finish Trella Mayo whether I would help him or not.

A few weeks later I visited Trella in her laboratory.

"I'm anxious to see this incomprehensible conveyance," I explained.

"At least, I'm glad you are taking an interest in something besides my safety and my operation scar," she replied.

She led me through a corridor toward a heavy steel door, which she unlocked.

"You are the first person besides myself to go into this room in the past five years," Trella added.

I scarcely know what I had expected to see. What would anyone expect to see, if he was told he was going to be shown a machine that neither walked, glided nor rolled? Such a contraption is beyond human experience.

It was a long, hollow tube, large enough to hold a human body. It was made of quartz and on each side was a cylindrical, low power atomic energy machine.

"This," Trella said, "is the translator."

"The what?"

"I call it my space-time translator, which someday will make the rocket as obsolete for space travel as the horse for surface travel. It will take an object from one point in space-time to another instantly."

"Instantly?"

"There is a small lapse of time," Trella confessed. "You see the machine has two motors, one for starting the operation and the other for completing it. It takes about one second's time to switch the motive power from one motor to the other."

The machine, except for the motors, was made entirely of quartz and silver. On the right side of the machine was a long strip of silver running the full length of the tube. It was about three inches wide and it was connected with a knife-like blade of silver on the left side of the tube by a strand of silver wire. Silver was used, of course, because it was the best known conductor of electricity and other forms of energy.

"It would be wonderful if it worked," I said.

She held out a copy of the beautifully printed daily magazine. On the cover was the date, August V2, 504 .

"Unbelievable!" I said. "How does it work?"

"It operates through time," Trella explained. "It takes a short cut between two parallel instants."

She took a guinea pig from a cage in the laboratory. She put the wriggling animal inside the quartz tube and strapped it firmly in the center.

"Watch," she said.

She turned a switch on one of the boxes. A low hum arose from the atomic motor. Trella watched a dial located in the top of the quartz tube until an arrow pointed to a gold star. Then she pressed a button in the motor on the right side of the machine.

I noticed that the translator had controls that could be operated from inside the tube as well as from the outside.

There were two distinct gasps of the motor. Half of the guinea pig disappeared with the first gasp and the remaining half disappeared with the second.

Where the tube had been a second before, there was nothing now.

"He's on Proxima Centaur now," Trella said. "I managed to equip a laboratory there about two years ago. It was through that laboratory that Keeshwar learned of my experiments in translation. My men on Proxima will send back the guinea pig in a few minutes."

We sat down and waited. Trella explained the machine, although at the time the explanation was a little over my head. The actual translation was accomplished by the pushing of one motor and the pulling of another across an extra-dimensional space. Half of the object to be translated was hurled across space by the pushing of the first motor. The second motor, which operated automatically, began pulling the other half, including the first motor, after it as soon as it materialized at the end of the journey.

"But it would be parallel!" I exclaimed, beginning to see her point.

"The idea occurred to me, but it won't work," Trella replied. "There's a serious obstacle we can't overcome. In going backward or forward in time we do not travel in lines perpendicular to the parallel time lines of the earth and Rihlon--or for any other planet for that matter. But we travel like this--" Trella drew a figure on a piece of paper.

"There is nothing mathematically implausible in that," I said.

"There is nothing implausible, yet to determine the exact distance from G to F is in most cases impossible. Unless the distances involved are of the proper ratio, say, 4 and 5, the line GF becomes an irrational number, of which it is impossible to find the exact value. Supposing the distance from E to F was one light-year and the distance from G to E, one year. Then GF would be the square root of one squared plus one squared, or the square root of two. Because we are dealing with such immense distances and because even the smallest decimal point of error might lead to disastrous results, we cannot attempt time travel unless we know the exact value of the square root of two, or any other irrational number."

"Do you believe me?" she cried gleefully, waving the paper over her head.

It was quite convincing, I admitted.

"Now I am going to make a trip in the translator!"

"You!"

It was the beginning of a long argument. There was danger in the trip, I told her, and Trella had come to mean a great deal to me. She scoffed at my fears and told me that if I didn't care to witness the first translation of man to another planet in another star system she would do it when I wasn't there.

Of course, no man can win an argument with a woman.

Trella climbed into the translator.

I closed the opening. Her hand rose to the switch that operated the mechanism from inside the tube. She smiled and her lips moved in a cheerful good-by. Then she touched the switch.

The indicator on the dial crept upward toward the gold star.

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