"I didn't push anything. That thing just sank into the cube on its own."
They both looked at it, now a perfect cube of small glass spheres. As they watched, the central
sphere rose again. "This is way beyond spooky," Susan said.
"The lights went out, the generator went on."
"Let's go outside and see if Howard felt anything."
"You go. I've got to see what's upsetting my elephants."
Susan headed for the interior door. Matt walked slowly, thoughts of cleaning up pushed aside now. Where did all those other marbles go?
His initial reaction, that they might have been folded through space-time somehow, that they were all somehow still there, packed into a seven by seven by seven volume that looked too small from our three-dimensional perspective but was plenty roomy in, say, five or six dimensions, had quickly paled. He was embarrassed that he'd even mentioned it to Susan. What must she think?
Question: Was there a way to explain the vanished spheres without resorting to extradimensional geometry?
Answer: Ask any magician. Ask any thief. Ask any prankster. Ask the gods of coincidence, chance, error, forgetfulness, and spiteful human nature.
So the box hadn't been opened. So what? The vandals got through the gate. All the data needed to build the structure now in the box was in Matt's computer; maybe he had been hacked.
Howard was pissed at him. Maybe he hired the vandals, arranged all this as a cruel hoax, maybe he liked to toy with men's minds that way. He could afford it.
Matt's mental state, though greatly improved since meeting Susan, was sometimes delicate. Maybe he'd simply replaced the alpha assembly himself while in a fugue state, and forgot.
Maybe he had been kidnapped by flying saucer men from Venus and brainwashed and this whole evening—even the whole last year—was a virtual reality experiment of surpassing cleverness.
Any of those things and many more now seemed more likely than multidimensional gymnastics. Matt felt considerable relief that he had blurted out his first theory to Susan rather than to Howard. It would be a lot easier to live down.
He reached the door, opened it, and saw that Santa Monica was gone.
SUSAN was not as frightened as Matt had feared she would be, at least not at first. The possibility had existed, they had talked about time travel in the abstract, she knew he was working on a time machine. But she had not expected to travel through time. If she did, she might have expected the journey to be more dramatic. They made a circuit of the building. They felt they had to do at least that much, even before the sun came up. In an unknown situation, Matt said, step one is to establish the parameters of your problem. For all he knew, he could turn the corner of the building and find that Santa Monica was still there... or Shangri-La, or an alien spaceship landing on Devil's Tower, or the first steps of the Yellow Brick Road.
"Is that a light over there?" Susan asked. Matt could barely see her hand, pointing toward what he figured must be the Hollywood Hills. He thought he might see the tiniest imaginable orange spark against the blackness.
"Somebody built a fire?" he wondered. "Maybe there's people around here."
Who could tell? But at that moment they got evidence that there was something sharing the night with them. It was a blood-curdling screech, very far away, but so powerfully malign that Matt felt his knees begin to shake. He turned the light back on, and they soon found themselves running around the last corner and into the pale but warm square of light, the door leading back inside the steel building.
"Can you get us back home?" Susan asked, breathing hard and afraid to look at him.
"I don't know. I think we'd better put that question aside for a few hours and figure out how long I have to solve that problem. How long we can expect to live."
"What do you mean? You think time traveling is harmful?"
"Not so far as I know. No, I mean how long we can survive."
IT quickly came down to water.
They sat together in the quiet warehouse and batted it around. The first thing that became clear was how utterly dependent people of the twenty-first century had become on the vast, interlinked network of goods and services and transportation that they called civilization. The second thing they recalled was that the Los Angeles Basin was a desert.
The taps were dry, of course. Matt assumed they were cut off abruptly, underground, just like the asphalt and concrete surrounding the building ended about five feet away from the sides.
They did an inventory. It didn't look good. Each of the five elephants had a drinking trough, and they varied from full to half empty. That wouldn't last long and there was no way to refill them. There were four rest rooms, two on each half of the warehouse, with two toilets in the ladies' rooms and one each in the men's. That was a good supply in the six tanks, but it wouldn't last long, either.
"I wish we'd put in one of those water coolers with the ten-gallon jugs," Matt said. "There's always a dozen full ones sitting around."
"Again, I haven't any idea."
The best news was the Coca-Cola machine. It was a big one, with a curved, lighted front.
Looking at it, Matt suddenly felt very thirsty. He searched his pockets and came up empty.
"You have any change?"
"My purse was in the car."
Matt looked around and found the crowbar abandoned by one of the vandals. He set the end of
it against the door of the Coke machine and started to pull. The door popped open and he took out a cold can of Coke. "You want something?"
"Is there any Mountain Dew?"
"All we have here that's clear is Sprite."
"That'll do."
They popped the tops and drank, then were silent for a moment. They had worked for several hours on the inventory, not having to talk about the central fact of their dilemma, but Matt knew it was unavoidable.
"Look...," he said, and had to stop. He took a deep breath. "I'm sorry about this. I'm so sorry about it."
"About what?"
"About... well, about getting you thrown down a temporal wormhole to what might very well be the year 13,000 B.C."
"Is that what happened? A temporal wormhole?"
"You know what I mean."
"Sure. The part I don't see is why any of this was your fault."
"I thought it was sort of... obvious."
"Not to me." She sighed. "Okay, you were trying to build a time machine."
"Trying to duplicate something that was found that might be a time machine."
"Don't get technical. You built it, some ignorant yahoos came in and did something to it—" "We scientists call that 'whacking the shit out of it.' "
"I keep elephants. I keep them in strong, secure stockades, and I keep people away from them. But what if those yahoos got in there, opened the gates and the outside doors, and threw a bunch of firecrackers into the paddocks? And the elephants stampeded down Wilshire and hurt a lot of
people? Is that my fault?"
"Well..."
"Don't think about it too long." There was a tiny edge to her voice.
"No, of course not. Not if you took reasonable precautions. But did I?"
"I don't think anybody could tell what 'reasonable' was, before this happened."
"Maybe. Maybe not. I keep thinking I could have done more."
"Howard sure could have. He could have splurged on two or three guards, around the clock. I
think we ought to take that up with him... when we get back."
He noticed it was when, not if, and was grateful for her confidence... or was she just whistling past the graveyard?
"I think I will. But there's a larger question. What was I doing fooling around with something as
dangerous as time travel in the first place?"
"Satisfying your scientific curiosity. I don't see anything wrong with that."
"That's exactly what Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi and a few dozen other physicists
were doing in the early 1940s."
"So does that make the atomic bomb their fault?"