Timescoop

by John Brunner

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

A Pandora's box of evil Freitas had commanded the engineers of his vast, world-wide empire to build him a device that could ransack the past. Now all the riches of the ages were his for the taking. But mere wealth was not what Freitas was after. Supreme power was what he sought, and from the past he picked the men and women who could help him gain absolute mastery over his rivals. But one thing he had not reckoned on - the power these creatures fro the past would have over him, the reign of terror about to begin...

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 148

Sample

“That’ll do nicely, Chester,” said Harold Freitas III as the statue drew abreast of the long lounge on which his wife, Sarah, was reclining. The calm-faced, rather good-looking young Negro who had volunteered to push it on its hissing air-pallet from the door of the elevator cut the power and it sank to the floor with a solid-marble thunk.

“There!” Harold added to Sarah. “What do you think of that?”

Lithe and exquisite as usual, Sarah swung her bare golden legs to the floor and shook back her shoulder-long fair hair. There was a long pause. During it, Harold realized that, if only the big breakthrough had happened on a Friday, he would have been able to tell her the news at their country place in Arizona, and in some indefinable sense that would have been infinitely more appropriate.

But it was Wednesday, so they were in the Los Angeles penthouse, a place so completely of the twenty-first century its very walls seemed to exclude even thoughts of the dead past. He felt the first twinge of apprehension lest his carefully planned surprise should go to waste through such a silly accident.

I ought to have waited to Friday evening after all.

But there were two good reasons why he couldn’t have. For one thing, ever since their marriage he had felt a trifle uncomfortable in Sarah’s presence. He felt, in some way he could never pin down, inferior to her—not that anyone could have accused her of acting as though that were her view of him, not that any outsider could have detected friction between them. He simply seemed to lack the ability to impress her, and surely after five years a man ought to have done at least one thing to impress his wife!

And for another thing, he was purely bursting with need to share the news with somebody.

At least, he noted, she was taking the trouble to get up and walk around the statue to inspect it from all sides, to touch it here and there with a probing ringer, to stand back with folded arms and give a nod.

“The Hermes of Praxiteles,” she said. “And rather a good copy, if I’m any judge.”

“No!” Harold said in triumph. “Not a copy—that’s exactly the point.

She gazed at him blankly for a moment. Then she gave her high tinkling laugh. “Oh, Harold! You’re not going to tell me somebody conned you into buying this as the original? The original is in the museum at Olympia—I’ve seen it there. It couldn’t be for sale by any stretch of the imagination, and I don’t suppose it could possibly be stolen, either. Besides, it shows more than a few signs of old age. I mean it’s chipped!”

“That,” said Harold doggedly,” is the Hermes of Praxiteles. Not a copy but the original. We finally got the bugs out of the Timescoop project, and this is the first object larger than a clay pot that we’ve brought forward with it. The power alone cost us about half a million.”

At least, he reflected with grim satisfaction, if he hadn’t impressed her he’d bewildered her, and that was a new sensation. She glanced in astonishment from him to the statue, then to Chester, and back to him.

“I don’t think I quite understand,” she said.

He was tempted to say that, if she took more interest in her husband’s work, she’d have known about the project from the beginning and would understand perfectly. Conscience held back the words; he himself understood only a fraction of what the Freitas billions had rendered possible. It was hard to have been made, at the age of twenty-nine, what a commentator over K3V-Fortune had termed “the rider on the wild horse”—in other words, to have been dropped into the saddle of Freitas Interplanetary at a time when the sheer financial inertia of the corporation implied that no single man, president or humble clerk, could hope to do more than divert the dozens of individual research projects and public-service enterprises within the empire by a degree or two of arc from their preplanned courses.

He turned away grumpily to serve himself a drink from the liquor console. “You’d better ask Chester for the details,” he threw over his shoulder. “He’s the man who takes the credit for all this.”

“Well now, that’s a bit of an exaggeration,” Chester Waley said in a mild tone. “It certainly could never have succeeded without the twenty or thirty people on our team, and above all, it couldn’t have come off without the help of Sparky.”

“Maybe not,” Harold said, and essayed a mild witticism. “But one can hardly invite a computer to dinner, can one?”

The moment the words were out of his mouth, he felt the joke wasn’t really very funny. Sparky—SPARCI, Self-Programming Automatic Rapid Computer and Integrator—was even higher on the list of people who disturbed him and made him feel inadequate than Sarah was. Nobody ever referred to Sparky as “it,” only as “he,” and he was such an integral part of the Freitas Interplanetary setup that it was a jolt to remember where the calm friendly voice over the office intercom was coming from.

“Drinks?” Harold said to cover the flatness of his last remark. “For you, darling?”

Sarah returned to her lounge and composed her graceful limbs into a decorative posture; she was wearing a high-fashion tabard in Freitas syntholon, reaching from shoulder to crotch and designed so that it never quite revealed the intimate details of her anatomy to which it so carefully directed the eye by the curves it fell into. She said, “Not for me, thank you. If Chester is going to tell me about something technical, I shall need all my faculties to follow him. You know I haven’t got a scientific mind.”

The Negro made a disclamatory gesture. “On the other hand, Mrs Freitas, I believe you have a far greater appreciation of history than someone like myself. And art and literature, of course.”

Sarah shrugged. “Oh, the past is dead, so it just lies there and doesn’t jerk around when you try to examine it closely.”

“But that’s exactly the point!” Harold said, spinning away from the liquor console to face her again and contriving to slop over the back of his hand an ounce or two of the drink he had taken over. He kept his curses silent and went on, “The past needn’t be dead—not any more. Look, this statue is the original! Or to be exact, it’s a cross section of the original, one chronon deep, allowed to expand in the present into a facsimile of its full four-dimensional structure. You see …”

His voice trailed away as it became clear that Sarah did not see, and the sneaking suspicion arose in his mind that she was being willfully obtuse because it was he who was giving her the explanation. He knew it was the right one, because he was quoting word for word a summary issued by Sparky.

“You have a go, Chester,” he sighed, and carried his drink to an inflatable armchair on the other side of the room.

“I’ll do my best,” Chester said, and likewise sat down, leaning forward with elbows on knees. “It is a bit difficult to grasp at first, Mrs Freitas, but I think I can convey the fundamental concept. Have you ever thought that an instantaneous object could not exist?”

Sarah pondered for a moment. Then she nodded. “You mean in the perceptual sense?”

“Precisely. Therefore, as well as length, breadth and height, an object must possess duration. Just as there is a minimum spatial length—usually taken as the diameter of an electron because we still can’t observe events occurring in a smaller compass—there is also a minimum temporal length. Now suppose you were able to cut through some object with an infinitesimally fine wire, one electron’s diameter in thickness—do you think that would perceptibly affect the object?”

Sarah pondered again, and finally shook her head.

“Effectively it wouldn’t,” Chester agreed. “It might just possibly alter the total electrical potential of the object by ionizing a few of its molecules, but the odds are all against it. But cutting a one-chronon cross section of an object is a different matter. All the constituent particles of that object are sliced through by the cut; in other words, there’s a hiatus in its duration.”

“What causes it to resume when the other side of the cut is reached?” Sarah demanded, and Harold gave her a startled and irritated glare. If she could ask that acute a question after such a skimpy introduction to the subject, then she was deliberately snubbing him. She must understand very clearly.

“It doesn’t resume,” Chester said. “It exists, in a four-dimensional sense, both sides of the cut. But because the cross section is timeless, it having no time to exist in owing to the conditions established to make it possible at all, it makes no difference where the cross section is then transported.

“What we’ve done at Timescoop is to—ah—constrain such cross sections to the present. Then it does become technical; you have to derive information from a theoretically information-free environment and feed in power to permit the forward duration of the item to resume, and so on. But right here, in the shape of this statue, is proof that it can be done, and even though we saw it—uh—grow in the Timescoop lab this morning, it is in every possible respect the original which we located in Praxiteles’s own workshop and cross-sectioned just before its dispatch to the temple it was commissioned for.”

“I see,” nodded Sarah. “In other words, so far as an outsider like me is concerned, it’s a fake.”

There followed a few seconds of tense silence. Harold broke it by jumping to his feet.

“No! Not a fake! Chester just told you—”

“Oh, Harold, really,” Sarah said in that tone of weary and almost patronizing patience which he had come to know so well since they got married. “The Hermes of Praxiteles is—I forget exactly how old, but certainly two or three thousand. If that thing there is fresh from the workshop, it’s not the original. What would an archeologist report if you asked him to check on the stone that thing’s carved from?”

Harold’s jaw dropped and stayed dropped. Even the normally imperturbable Chester blinked rapidly several times.

“Mrs Freitas has a very good point there,” he murmured.

“Thank you,” Sarah said. “Do you get what I’m driving at, Harold? In 2065 the stone is fresh-cut, not aged or weathered; it hasn’t been handled by sightseers who’ve left a deposit of—of finger grease, I suppose—on the original, and given it the patina of the ages.”

“But it is the original,” Harold insisted obstinately.

“In your sense, perhaps. Not in a collector’s sense, or an art historian’s. What were you thinking of doing with this Timescoop of yours?”

“Why—uh …” Harold stumble-tongued. Chester came sympathetically to the rescue.

“Well, it’s going to be announced to the public shortly, Mrs Freitas—so far we’ve been lucky with our security and we believe no one else has even the remotest inkling of our success. It’ll naturally take a while yet, about six or eight months according to Sparky’s projections, before we can rely on perfect operation every time. There are so many incidentals to sort out, like the fine-focusing technique we use to make sure we get what we’re after and not half or something which happened to be standing next to it. As yet, that’s dreadfully slow; it took us all of nine weeks to set up the Hermes job. We need to get it down to a matter of hours before the technique becomes economic.”

“In what sense economic? How do you price objects dragged out of the past?”

Listening, Harold felt himself trembling on the edge of a gulf of disaster. This was by far the most hopeful thing that had happened since he found himself tossed into the presidential chair of Freitas Interplanetary following the death of his father, Harold Freitas II, on the way back from Mars—the victim of a meteor strike. And here was Sarah not merely failing to be impressed but actually undermining this fantastic achievement with idiotic grumbles!

He said harshly, “It’s all been costed, of course. By Sparky. I told you, the power required to bring your—your present from the past cost about half a million. But what do you suppose the market price of that statue would be if it were to be offered for sale? Ten times that at the least! And one wouldn’t have to stick to such massive objects; that simply happened to be one whose precise location on a precise date in the past could conveniently be established. For about a hundred and twenty thousand we can bring forward the Mona Lisa—”

“I’ll bid a buck for it,” Sarah cut in.

“Oh, stop talking nonsense!”

“I’m not talking nonsense.” Sarah jumped up and went to fetch herself a drink, after all. Belatedly, when she glanced a question at Chester, Harold realized he hadn’t offered a drink to their visitor, and since the visitor nodded and smiled, he obviously wanted one. Christ, wasn’t anything going right today?

“You say Sparky costed this project’s economic viability,” Sarah continued as she attended to the controls on the console. “Well, all I can say is that he’s an ignorant idiot. Look, Harold, I’m sure you went to a lot of trouble to be able to give me that statue this evening, but you wasted the corporation’s money, you know. For a hundred thousand you could have hired the right mineralogists to match the marble, the right technicians to take measurements accurate to a few microns off the original in the museum, and a competent hack sculptor to reproduce them. You spent five times as much and all you’ve wound up with is—regardless of what you say—a duplicate.”

Chester was looking very grave. He said diffidently, “I’d be inclined to take what your wife says seriously, Mr Freitas. It’s not my field, but I do have the impression that it’s only the scarcity value which keeps up the prices of works of art—”

“Yes, of course it is!” Harold snapped. “Our plan is designed to maintain scarcity value, not destroy it. If we were to scoop the Mona Lisa, you think we’d do it a dozen times over? Not at all. We plan to make the announcement, mount a major p. . .