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Dave woke from his sleep in a cold sweat, his nightmare still vivid. He and his older brother Joe had been on a rock wall of the quarry near home, climbing, as they often had, without ropes. In the dream, Dave was looking up as his brother shifted his handhold and a piece of rock gave way. Joe slid down a steep incline and snagged a rocky projection only six feet away. He looked at Dave, his eyes pleading for help, as he clung desperately.
“Dave, help me! Please help me!”
Dave was too terrified to move over and grab his wrist. He saw the disappointment and despair in Joe’s eyes as his grip weakened. Then in an instant, without another cry, he plunged to the bottom of the quarry. Dave woke with the thud of the body ringing in his ears.
I couldn’t have helped him! I couldn’t have helped him!
Steady old fellow; get a hold of yourself. It’s been a year since I last had that nightmare. I guess being at the edge of the bridge with Uncle Charlie brought it back.
It was still dark outside. Glenn was gently snoring. Dave went over the funeral in his mind. Mom and Dad never said anything to him and never questioned him about what exactly had happened. Although he and Joe had strict orders not to climb there, they never blamed him. Dave made up for it by blaming himself.
When the first light of dawn crept through the window, Dave was startled by a knock on the door. “Dorm meeting in twenty minutes,” said a voice.
Dave got up. Glenn groaned, sitting up in his bed, holding his temples. “I could sure use some coffee,” he said.
The events from the day before came flooding back, and Dave realized there would be no coffee, and probably no breakfast. He got up and looked in his small fridge. There was half a carton of orange juice and two pieces of cold pizza. He offered a slice to Glenn, but when he declined Dave was more than happy to eat both slices himself.
They both threw on some clothes and rushed downstairs to the large auditorium on the main floor where dorm rock concerts were usually held. The auditorium was nearly full, with more and more people arriving every minute. The dorm president, Clive Henderson, stood on the stage, preparing to speak to the audience through the public address system.
Henderson cleared his throat loudly to get everyone’s attention. “I have a few things to say. As you heard on the TV last night, Socrates was selected to begin exploration of the mainland.” There was a murmur of opposition, and Henderson held up his hand for quiet. “Here’s how we’re going to organize ourselves. Each of our five floors will represent a separate company or unit of operation. Tomorrow, weather permitting, the Fifth Socrates will head to the mainland. We will be joined by a small company of naval personnel, who will be armed. If we make contact with North Carolina, our mission will be over—”
“What do you mean ‘if’?” said a voice from the back.
Henderson stared at the questioner and said slowly, “We’re not 100 percent sure that we will make contact.”
The murmuring grew louder. Henderson pounded on the podium with a gavel. “Silence!” he roared. The sounds stopped as if a loudspeaker had been switched off.
Henderson continued more quietly. “Because of the food situation, we don’t have a lot of time. If we don’t find—that is to say, if something unexpected happens—we plan to make camp on the mainland and make that a base for exploration. We don’t know what we’re going to find there, and we’re all rookies, so let’s keep our heads and learn fast.
“Every week, as our transportation permits, we will send one dorm floor over to the mainland and rotate one floor back to Halcyon. Your floor dons will fill you in on the details and tell you exactly when you’re scheduled to leave. Any questions?”
“I paid tuition to come to university,” said Glenn. “What if I don’t want to go exploring?”
Henderson looked Glenn squarely in the eye. “That is your choice, of course. However, if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” More murmuring. He waved some papers in the air. “These food vouchers entitle you to eat. If you sign up, then you’ll get two meal vouchers today. As long as you keep working, you keep eating.”
“When do we eat?” shouted out Dave.
“Ah, I can see we have at least one veteran among us,” said Henderson with mock gravity. “After your floor meeting, your don will pass out the signup forms and the meal vouchers. Any other questions?”
“Where do we get the equipment for this camp we’re supposed to set up?” called a voice from the back of the auditorium.
“We hope that each of you has some equipment of your own, since backpacking and rock climbing are popular activities. We can get some tents, bows, and arrows from the physical education center. We are currently collecting all of the fire axes from the fire safety stations, and we will send some of those along with the first group. In addition, the metallurgy department is even now converting scrap metal to useful implements.”
“How are we supposed to cross the six mile channel?” queried another voice.
“We only have a few Boston Whalers and precious little fuel. But we have about 200 dinghies. We will cross with about 60 and try to establish a beachhead.”
There were a few more questions, but Dave and Glenn went back to their room. About twenty minutes later, another knock on the door told them that Floyd Linder, their fifth floor don, had called the much awaited floor meeting.
After about 200 people had assembled in the large common room, Linder climbed onto a small platform at the end of the room, and whistled to get everyone’s attention.
“First things first,” he began. “If you sign up, you’ll receive your meal vouchers from Al Gleeson. You’ll have to come to him every day to get your food vouchers. There are only two meals per day until we get our food situation sorted out, so don’t miss your chance!
“We’ll be the first group to go to the mainland. Our job is to learn to sail well enough to get across the channel. While we’re learning, the navy guys will be exploring the coast with the few powerboats we have available. If they make contact, our training will have been a waste of time. On the other hand, if we have to go ahead, a contingent from the naval station will join us, and their responsibility will be to protect us while we do the grunt work of establishing a camp. How many have sailed before?” A few hands went up. “All of you please come and see me after the meeting. We’ll all meet at West Harbor after lunch to watch training videos, and then we’ll take up sailing in earnest tomorrow morning. Clive was overly optimistic about our crossing to the mainland tomorrow. It’s my call, and we won’t try the crossing until we’re reasonably proficient and the weather’s good.”
Dave and Glenn signed up for duty and received their food vouchers. They made their way through a sleepy crowd of students to the cafeteria for a meal of day old hamburgers and reheated fries. Nevertheless, they were so hungry, any meal would have tasted delicious. They were still quite hungry when they finished their portions, and they couldn’t help ruing the complaints they’d made in the past about cafeteria food. After brunch they walked to West Harbor and spent the rest of the day in class watching sailing videos that described more than they’d ever wanted to know about sailing.
Late that afternoon, word raced across campus that the first boats had returned from the mainland; no trace of North Carolina or any human habitation had been found.
Tired and hungry, Dave and Glenn returned to their room and turned on the TV to see if broadcasting had resumed. To their surprise Jennifer McCowan, the blonde talk show host of Halcyon Music, was on the air.
“Even without social media,” said McCowan in her gentle, lilting voice, “I know that everyone is asking ‘where are we?’ and ‘what’s happened to us?’ To answer those questions I’ve asked a friend of mine to the studio. Please welcome Vlad Sowetsky.”
Canned applause welcomed Vlad.
“So, Vlad,” said McCowan, “please tell our viewers what you do.”
Vlad, a tall, big boned youth in his mid-twenties, had a long, narrow face and close-set eyes, so that the overall impression vaguely reminded one of a horse. He had shoulder length hair and stubble on his face.
“To cut to the chase, I’m a graduate student with Professor Hoffstetter, and I was in the control room when the dislocation occurred.”
“So what actually happened during the accident yesterday?”
“Well,” said Vlad, “we were running the largest test on the force field to date. The plan was to—”
“Whoa,” said McCowan, “I think you are going much too fast. Tell the audience how the Hoffstetter force field works, but no jargon, please!”
Vlad screwed up his face as if he were being asked the impossible. “The force field appears as a bubble about the size of a soccer ball when we first generate it. The time inside the bubble is slightly behind our time. When we first make the bubble, the time delay—or offset—is very, very small so that the field is thin. That is to say, anything can cross it. We expand the bubble to the desired size and then thicken it. By ‘thicken’ I mean that we increase the time offset so the field begins to have an effect. First it stops large objects. If we increase the time offset even more, we could theoretically stop air molecules or light from crossing the force field boundary.”
“Field boundary,” said McCowan. “Now you’re lapsing into jargon again and losing me.”
“By field boundary I mean the edge of the force field bubble. Shooting a missile through this barrier is, as Hoffstetter would say, ‘like trying to shoot into last week.’” Vlad was beginning to get exasperated.
“Okay,” said McCowan, “please go on. Even if I don’t understand all of the physics, I’m sure there are many listeners who will.”
“Well, we had intended to expand the force field so that it enclosed the central building in the experimental area. However, while we were expanding the bubble, the first lightning strike overloaded the equipment and the expansion continued unabated.”
This was followed by a momentary pause and a baffled look on McCowan’s face. “How big did the bubble get?” she finally asked.
“I think it expanded to a sphere about four miles in diameter,” said Vlad.
“Then what?”
“Then a second series of lightning strikes overloaded the offset controls, and the time offset increased enormously,” said Vlad. Beads of perspiration had appeared on his forehead.
McCowan uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. “Tell the audience what you think happened next,” she prompted.
Vlad took a deep breath. “I only have a half-baked theory. Do you know about quantization of energy?”
“Vaguely,” said McCowan, a blank look on her face.
“Let me see if I can make it as simple as possible. Macroscopically, that is, in the world of meter lengths and kilogram masses, energy seems to be continuous. It flows like a stream or a river. So if I ask how much energy it takes to lift this book,” he lifted a book from the table, “you can calculate the energy in joules to as many decimal places as you like. I can lift the book to any height and calculate the lift energy for each height. But when you go down in size, ten orders of magnitude to angstroms, the world changes. When lifting electrons away from the atomic nucleus, all the rules change, and one can only ‘lift’ the electron to discrete ‘heights,’ or energy levels. It’s like being able to lift this book in little jumps.” He demonstrated by rapidly lifting and stopping the book at various heights.
“Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. You’re bringing back unpleasant memories of first year chemistry. But what has that got to do with the Hoffstetter field generators and the accident?”
“Everything!” said Vlad. “I think time is also quantized.”
“You’ve lost me again. How can time be quantized?” asked McCowan. “And if it is, what difference does it make?”
“Well, think about it in relation to the quantization of energy that you learned about in first year chemistry. We think of time flowing past us like a stream moving at a constant rate. That may appear true in our macroscopic world, but what happens if, at very short time intervals, one reaches a minimum time (I call it a mintival for minimum time interval)? What if our existence at the time interval of a mintival consists of little jumps, like a jump second hand rather than a sweep second hand? Or putting it another way, what if instead of a flowing stream, time consisted of a series of pools,” and here he paused to let his words sink in, “and our existence is a discontinuous series of jumps from one pool to the next?”
“Your theory is fascinating, Vlad, but what has that got to do with the Hoffstetter field generators?”
“I just told you that the Hoffstetter field generators cause the matter inside the field to lag normal time by a very small amount, say ten to the minus thirty-second of a second—that’s a decimal point with thirty-one zeros after and then a one. Now let’s suppose...” Sowetsky turned and kneeled on the sofa and drew three contiguous rectangles on a white board behind his seat “...that these three rectangles represent three sequential mintivals in our world, or universe, if you like. Another world can coexist with ours, as long as the mintivals of that world are offset from those of our time.” He drew three more rectangles adjacent but offset to the first three, like bricks on the side of a building. “It would be like a single reel of film containing two movies, with the odd numbered frames representing our world and the even numbered frames representing another world. If two protectors played this interlaced film with one displaying the odd numbered frames and the other the even numbered frames, one film could give rise to two motion pictures. Similarly, although two solid objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time, they can occupy that space at different times, so to speak.”
“Keep going,” ventured McCowan doubtfully. “I hope our viewers are following you through all this.”
“Well, normally, when the Hoffstetter field generators shut down, they collapse back to the nearest quantized mintival. When the field generators overloaded, I believe we kicked over into the trailing mintival—hence the new world!”
“Well, I’ll be!” said McCowan, genuinely shocked. “Can we get back?”
“I don’t know,” said Sowetsky, frowning. “We only know how to make the Hoffstetter field lag time, not precede time. If we tried it again, we might jump into yet another world that lags this one!”
“You can’t be serious!” said McCowan.
“I’m deadly serious,” said Sowetsky evenly.
“We’re never going to get back, are we?” asked McCowan, her voice fading to a whisper as tears began to fill her eyes. She turned away from the camera for a moment. “I have one final question, Vlad,” she said, regaining her composure with obvious effort. “Did you tell Professor Hoffstetter about this possibility?”
“Of course! I told him not once but several times!” said Sowetsky. “That’s what burns me up so much.”
“What did he say when you told him?”
“At first he told me ‘science requires us to take risks,’ and finally he told me to stop raising the matter.”
Back in the dorm room there was brooding silence as the interview on the television drew to a close. Glenn suddenly got up and threw a magazine as hard as he could against the wall, cursed, and stomped out of the room. Within minutes, Dave heard the sound of an ominous rumble, like the growl of a giant beast being roused from a troubled slumber. He went out into the hall to investigate. Students were everywhere. Approaching the common room, he felt the air electric with tension. The fear and anger that had been building over the last two days was growing, and students were gathered in groups. Most had seen the television show, and they were loudly blaming Hoffstetter for their predicament.
The discussion grew increasingly heated. Some of the students began yelling and cursing Hoffstetter. Finally their anger reached a crescendo when someone shouted that they ought to storm the experimental area control building and make Hoffstetter pay for what he had done to them; the crowd surged downstairs.
Dave thought about saying something, but he knew he wouldn’t be heard. He went back to his room. Whatever these angry students did would add to Uncle Charlie’s heavy load of care. The loneliness of Dave’s position washed over him like the tide coming in. What if they couldn’t get back? He would never see his parents or siblings again. He began to think of his home and of times they had shared together. He tried to tear his thoughts away, but they kept going back to the home he might never see again. He remembered reading Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. How he’d loved the thrill of imagining himself one of the Americans learning how to survive with only his wits. Now he lived that dream. That cheered him up a little bit, but the dark thoughts that he might never see his parents and siblings again kept assailing him. Convincing himself that Sowetsky could be wrong provided the only relief.
What does Sowetsky know? He’s only a graduate student. Uncle Charlie would tell us if this were really true, he thought. With that, he dozed off for a couple of hours.
__________
It was almost midnight when Dave was awakened by his roommate’s return. Glenn lurched against the doorway. His unruly black hair was matted, and there was an ugly purple bruise on his forehead. He was drunk. Torn and muddy as he was, Glenn flung himself into his chair by his desk.
“Ohh, my head!” he groaned as he gingerly felt the bruise. “I’m going to be sick.”
Dave helped him across the hall to the bathroom where Glenn vomited, then removed his soiled clothes and staggered into the shower. Dave returned to their room. When Glenn came in, looking somewhat revived, he appeared to want to talk.
“So what happened?” Dave asked.
“Those bloody physicists,” slurred Glenn. “Always trying things without thinking about anybody else. Look what they’ve done now. Stranded here and no way to get home.”
“So what did you do?” repeated Dave.
Glenn looked at him from under the bruise, which had now grown to cover a good part of his face. “We tried to get at Hoffstetter. Everyone was saying he was over at the experimental control center, so we went over there. The campus police and the navy guys were waiting for us. We tried to break through, but we couldn’t. They had stunners, and several of us got hit. They’ve converted the new zoology building into a temporary jail and dragged several of us back there. We regrouped and tried again. Reinforcements kept arriving. Finally, old O’Reilly, the chancellor, arrived and tried to talk to us. Somebody clipped him with a bottle and knocked him down. I’ll say this for him; he has a lot of guts. He got back up and told us we had to pull together and we ought to go home. After we saw him knocked down and get back up, we quieted down and decided to listen to him and give up our assault.
“I happened to be with a bunch of guys from Locke. They all went back to a keg party over in their residence. Apparently they had planned it before the dislocation and had quite a lot of beer. I had a good time!”
“Yeah, I can see that,” said Dave. “Let’s get some sleep.”