Any of the fine restaurants in Santa Monica or Westwood were happy to oblige when Matt dropped the basket off in the evening and told them, "We will be two for lunch. Surprise us."
They ate together two or three times a week while Matt gathered the courage to ask her out on a real date. They tried to visit a different park each time. Today they were on the grounds of the George C. Page Museum, overlooking the tar pit, and Matt was trying to explain the dimensions of his problem.
"Allotropes are different ways the same element can arrange itself, different crystal structures," he said.
"Right, graphite and coal and diamond. All pure carbon, different arrangements."
"Yes. Some of the metals have several allotropes. In the marbles, the zirconium and... sorry, Howard wants me to call them temporal spheres."
"Sounds like Howard," Susan laughed.
"Okay, call 'em marbles. Listen, I could explain this easier if I showed you, back at the lab."
"Suits me. I have to get back anyway." A big table had been set up in one part of the warehouse away from the glove box containing the actual gadget. On it was a very long rack of wooden cubbyholes, set at a forty-five-degree angle for easy access. They had bought the box from a Chinese language typesetter, who often had over five thousand characters to keep sorted. This one was thirty cubbies deep and one hundred wide, and all but the top few rows were full of the marbles they had assembled, marked 0001 to 2401. Each cubby held twenty identical marbles. Matt was going to make ten identical time machines and hope that one of them worked. If not, he'd try a few more things and use the ten spares of each type.
It was a problem with no easy solution. Say you have a sphere of zirconium, one-half inch in diameter. How can you be sure it's zirconium clear through? You know the surface is pure zirconium, but that might be a shell covering a layer of iron or copper.
They had probed each marble with X rays, sonic imaging equipment, and magnetic resonance and had found no obvious anomalies. The pure zirconium sphere seemed to be pure right to the center.
"There's no way we could exactly duplicate some of them," he said. "You ever look through a bag of marbles?"
"Sure. Girls can play marbles, too."
"Then you know there are no two cat's-eyes perfectly alike. We've sorted through thousands and found some that are amazingly close... but who knows? And the glass of most of them is marked up, scratched, tiny little chips. One of them, number 451, has a fairly large chunk out of it."
"You know them all by number?"
"No, but it feels like I do. And if I never saw another marble in my life I would be a happy man."
THE next evening Matt completed the first assembly and called Howard's office to see if he wanted to take a look at it. Howard did, and showed up that night in another of his vintage automobiles, an olive-green 1939 Talbot-Lago hardtop racer that had barely room for one person in its streamlined cockpit.
Matt led him inside and showed him the opened assembly. Beside it were a few numbered glass dishes containing metal marbles, or temporal spheres, of varying hues. "We wanted to reproduce the gadget exactly," Matt said. "Because we don't know just what it does, much less how it does it, assuming it does anything at all... we don't know what's important. But if we have to duplicate it at the subsubatomic level, we're screwed. No way we can analyze the neutrons and protons within the spheres for up-quarks and down-quarks, spin, strangeness, charm, all those too-cute words they use to describe properties nobody can really visualize.
"So then there's the nuclear level. Some of the spheres are ninety-nine point nine nine percent pure. But each element has isotopes—you know, different numbers of neutrons with the same number of protons—"
"Sorry, Howard, I keep forgetting..."
That I'm smarter than you are, except in the really rarefied realms of math, Howard thought. It grated on him, but he kept quiet about it because he needed Matt. Matt was a professor, after all, used to lecturing. And he'd probably been doing a lot of it lately, on his daily dates with Susan Morgan. Was there love in the air?
"Okay. Different isotopes have different weights, per atom. The ratio of isotopes found naturally is fairly standard; a lot of them decay into something else. Almost all the single-element spheres are what you'd expect, not some exotic variation. You follow?"
Howard nodded.
"But a few were a little odd. Take osmium. Atomic number, 76. Atomic weight, 190 and change. Seven stable isotopes, six radioactive ones, but with half-lives so short there'd be almost none in a normal sample. Commonest isotope, Os-192. Seventy-six protons and one hundred sixteen neutrons. A bit over forty percent of osmium ought to be Os-192. But our little ball only has thirty-five percent. To compensate, there's more Os-188 than there should be."
"Is it a radioactive decay thing?" Howard asked. "One form of osmium emits an alpha particle—"
"No, no. Osmium decays into rhenium and iridium, a little tungsten later on. Those are all there, in trace amounts, what we'd expect. No, somebody, the builder, made sure the osmium ball had a different isotopic ratio from normal. So we have to duplicate that ratio, because it's so weird it just has to be something important." He stopped, and looked at Howard for a moment. "Don't you think?"
Howard laughed. "That's what I'm paying you the big bucks for. If you think it's important, I will, too."
Matt took one of the spheres of the odd osmium, shiny as mercury, and slipped it into a little metal rack, then snapped it into place. He stood back and regarded it.
"There we are," he said. "The Howard Christian Time Machine, Mark One."
Howard looked surprised.
"You mean it's finished?"
"It's assembled. What comes next is anybody's guess."
"I'm paying you to guess." Matt sighed. "Yes, you are. But I don't have the foggiest idea what to do at this point. I can manipulate it...." He flipped the assembly of marbles onto its side and slid a row of them to the left, then pushed another row back. Several other slides, and it was back together, ten by twelve by twenty, but the marbles were in a slightly different arrangement.
Howard clapped him on the shoulder. "You'll figure it out."
"Well, I intend to spend the next year trying, anyway."
"Maybe you should just bash it. That usually works." He thumped the case with his fist. Nothing happened. He shrugged, turned, and started back to his car.
"Oh, by the way...," Matt said. Howard stopped and turned back toward him. "If you're going to take some of the marbles with you, it would be a lot easier on us if you'd let us know which ones you're taking. I mean, so we can restock."
Howard stared at him for a long moment.
"I don't know what you're talking about," he said.
"Oh, it's not a problem, I mean, not a bad one. And you can do what you want, I know that, you already own all the marbles... so to speak." Matt laughed, but it sounded a little hollow, even to him. What was the problem here?
Silence from Howard.
"Didn't you just put a couple of marbles in your pocket?" Matt asked.
Howard had learned an important lesson at the age of eight: Never admit anything. His father had sent him into a supermarket with instructions to select a good steak and put it under his winter parka. "If you get caught," his father had said, "don't say anything. Don't answer any questions, and above all, don't admit anything. Never admit anything:'
Howard did get caught, and when they found his father in another part of the store and brought his errant child to him, Christian Senior had scolded the boy, threatened to give him a good whipping when they got home, even threatened to tan his hide right there until one of the cops advised him not to. Howard had cried and cried and cried.
They laughed about it when they got back to the ramshackle trailer with no wheels that Howard's father called home. Christian Senior praised the boy for his acting. "Never saw it done so good," the old man chuckled. Howard was glad to hear what he had done was acting; he'd thought he was scared to death. Howard got better at it, until one day he was too old to pull it off, and his dad sent him back to live with his mom, who hardly noticed.