Time Enough For Bombs ===================== Pat Spacek I didn't mean to be a mad scientist, no matter how briefly I held the job. Who does? It's not like there are a lot of role-models out there, nor are there many paragons of mad science which budding young mad scientists can look up to. I mean, who can truly be called a 'mad scientist,' anyway? The people who invented the atomic bomb? The 'doctors' at Auschwitz? Third world terrorists trying to synthesize anthrax? Those people are all scientists, true, but mad scientists? The closest you could get would to call them 'evil'... or maybe 'misguided'. Or how about 'vile'? 'Amoral'? Evil scientists perform experiments which are unethical. They hurt people. For real. Mad scientists, on the other hand, twirl their moustaches and commit acts which are described as 'diabolical'. I'm not sure there are any mad scientists, actually. Or were. Until me, of course. Until I became a mad scientist, albeit not a very good one. As I said, I really didn't mean to become a mad scientist. In fact, I wasn't even a 'scientist' at all (which, now that I think about it, may actually be a prerequisite to attaining *mad* science). I was just a man living in a regular house, with too much time on his hands. Far too much time. You see, my wife had left me six months before, taking the children and moving to her Sister's house somewhere in frigid wasteland that is Saskatchewan. It was hardly a surprise move, and it would be stretching things to say that I missed her or wanted her back. I didn't. I didn't even really want my kids back, though I would like to see them again sometime in the future, if only to see them when they're older and more tolerable. Still, their departure left less of a void in my life than in my schedule. It was amazing to me to discover just how much time I had been spending doing family-related things, and with the removal of those things left me with a great deal of truly empty time. It didn't take me long to realize that I was watching way too much TV, downloading far too much porn, and re-reading bad novels I'd bought, read and forgotten about years before. I wasn't living so much as wasting time, time that I decided to fill instead of squander. How did I end up filling that time? The way that most people would. I picked up my old hobbies. It's amazing how little time you have for your old interests as soon as you have children. One of my hobbies had been science. Engineering. Physics. Things I had been interested in before marriage and fatherhood had swept me off that path and onto another. Spending nights reading technical and scientific manuals and puttering about in my basement was almost like becoming young again, minus the drugs and the endless attempts at getting laid. Being an adult afforded me much more focus than I have ever achieved in my youth. My hobbies began to grow larger and more time-consuming, and I even started calling in sick to get back to my precious books and machines. How did I stumble onto the principle of time transportation? I really have no idea. It just kind of happened. At first, my research and tinkering snaked off into opposite, random directions. I'd spend some nights huddled over my tools and machine parts, experimenting with mechanics and engineering principles, creating lumpy metal objects which did very little and did it poorly. Other nights, I'd sit in my armchair until dawn, reading up on quantum mechanics or particle physics or any other book or paper I could get my hands on. I was completely omnivorous, but somehow, my reading and my experimentation narrowed and narrowed and narrowed until suddenly I found myself with a little metal box than vibrated slightly to the touch and opened on a pair of steel hinges. I called in my 'infinity box' in a moment of silliness. I suppose that's how mad science starts: one day, you're making potentially dangerous contraptions and giving them ridiculous, comic-booky names, and the next, you're laughing maniacally while threatening to destroy the world. At any rate, without quite realizing what I'd done or how I'd done it, I had, sitting on my workbench at home, the infinity box. I had created an object of pure mad science. I had, somehow, inadvertently, become a true mad scientist. The properties of the infinity box at first a total mystery to me. As I've already told you, touching the thing was odd. It vibrated. The skin of my hand itched and tingled for minutes afterward. Actually opening the thing was weirder still. The inside of the box was rippled by this weird, shimmering haze, almost like an oasis, and, for some reason, even though the interior dimensions of the box were the same as the exterior dimensions, looking in it gave me a feeling a lot like vertigo. It looked deep and endless, even though it didn't really look that way at all, if you can understand that. Staring into the thing for too long gave me a headache. I had no idea what I'd created, so I did the obvious thing. I started playing around with my invention. Whatever else the infinity box may have been, it was, ultimately, a box. What do you do with a box? You put things in it, so that's what I did. Sticking my hand into the box was out of the question, since moving any part of my body close to the opening caused an unpleasant pins-and-needles sensation to shoot up my arm and into my whole body. Clearly, I would have to use some kind of test subject. First, I threw a rat into it, the poor bastard being one of the several white laboratory mice I'd bought for such a contingency. The rat, twisting and shrieking as I lowered it, by the tail, into the gaping maw of the box, bent and distorted and, as soon as I crossed the threshold, vanished completely. It disappeared. It just wasn't there anymore. Had the thing been atomized, somehow? Was it invisible? I had no idea, so I started throwing inanimate objects into the box. I tossed in a pencil. An old floppy disk. Some coins. A little Smurf keychain I found hanging on a peg in a corner of the basement. Each item twisted and bent and then was gone, just like the rat. It was fascinating. Nothing registered on any measurement device I used, but still, the evidence was right there in front of me. Obviously, I had stumbled onto something big, but what? The breakthrough came about a week later, when I was cleaning my basement workroom for possibly the first time since moving into the house ten years before, in hopes that the mindless activity would give my brain a chance to think of some new angle to take with the box. My broom was cutting swaths through the dust and cobwebs in a corner of the room when suddenly I saw a lumpy, plastic little object buried in the grime. Kneeling down, I picked it up, blew off the dust...and saw the little smurf keychain. The smurf keychain I had thrown into the infinity box a week before. The thing was, the object looked decades older, all faded and cracked by age. It had been sitting in a pile of dust, untouched, for longer than I had lived in that house, which meant that it had been there for a decade at the very least. Could it be the same keychain? It was crazy, but something told me that it was the only logical explanation for the evidence I was seeing. There was even the long gouge along the sole of its left foot, the one made by my wife years before. Coincidence? Or something more? Among the toys I had slowly been accumulating since the departure of my family was a little palm-sized super-8 camcorder. I decided that it would do. I brought it, and a small television, down to the basement, putting the TV next to the infinity box and connecting it to the camcorder with the longest cable I could find. Then, I switched it on, made sure the picture was coming through, and dropped the camera into the box, watching it disappear the way I had watched so many things disappear. It twisted and warped and bent, and was gone...only this time, the length of cable began running into the box as well. The camera was falling. It was still hooked up to the cable. I turned to look at the TV. The signal was coming through, crystal-clear and large as life. The camera appeared to be falling, spinning in space as it tumbled through bands of light and strange, sparkly balls which were too bright for the lense and left tracers all over the screen. I glanced at the cable. The slack was feeding itself into the box with great speed. Wherever the camera was going, it would have to get there soon, or else I'd run out of cable, and then what would I do? I looked back at the screen. The camera tumbled into some kind of field of white light and then came to an abrupt stop, smashing into the earth with an impact that rattled the image on the screen. Then it was still. I squinted at the television. The camera appeared to be sitting on a hill, over a jungle. The canopy of trees below it was tense, but there was a sound... Suddenly, the massive, toothy head of a tyrannosaurus rex came into view, sniffed at the screen suspiciously, and then walked on, the earth shaking with the creatures fading footsteps. I sat there, my heart frozen. The image did not go away. Giant, leathery, featherless birds circled in the distance, their sharp, reptilian beaks opening and closing as they sang their harsh, rumbling melodies. Even farther, a volcano was erupting, turning its little corner of the sky an angry, sunset red. I watched little, bird-like reptiles run past on their hid legs. None of the creatures I was seeing looked like monsters or cinematic dinosaurs. They were animals. They looked so real and, once you got over the shock of seeing them, ordinary, that they looked kind of fake. I sat and watched it all for a while. Eventually, my wonder fading into numbness, I thought to pull the camera up. When the little silver thing was back in my hands, I touched the layer of dirt and moss that coated its base. Prehistoric mud, probably containing little life forms that had been extinct for longer than I could imagine. "Holy shit," I think I said, which I think is understandable. The evidence was clear, and, being a pragmatist, I believed it immediately. I had invented a time machine, of sorts. Over the next few weeks, I performed countless experiments, often with the camera, other times with rats or other objects tied to lengths of string with which I lowered and raised them into the void. What I discovered was that the destination at the end of the infinity box's space was random. It was always the past (as far as I could tell), but the place and time was different with each attempt. Watching the footage, I sometimes saw nothing out of the ordinary, just a generic field or desert or forest. I sometimes saw events which might be happening in the present day, like people shopping or kids just kind of hanging around. Other times, though, I saw Roman legionnaires suiting up, or Egyptian pyramids being built, or barbarians attacking the Great Wall of China. Often, I only saw the barest glimpse of all this. Other times, I was right in the middle of it, watching a historical spectacular better than any Hollywood movie. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than I about history or anthropology or archeology would kill for the chance to see what I saw. Me, I usually sat back and enjoyed the show. What else did I learn? Any animal I lowered into the box came back dead and withered, like a mummy. Inanimate objects could travel through time. Living things could not. The past was an open book to me. I'd made what was possibly the greatest scientific and technological discovery of all time, me, someone who was as far from being a genius as you are. I could have done so many different things with it. I might have patented the thing and made billions. I could have gone public with it and become the next Einstein. I could have donated it to a university and become world famous. All of those choices would have been perfectly reasonable. They would have made me a scientist...but, as I said before, I had ventured off the well-beaten path of science and into the lunatic jungle of *mad* science. I had become a mad scientist. The logical thing to do with the infinity box was use it purely for evil. You see, everything I have just told you took place over nearly six months. Six months can be a long time, especially after your family leaves you, you stop coming to work or seeing friends, stop bathing, stop doing anything but sitting in your basement conducting experiment after experiment. I didn't know if it was day or night. I didn't talk to anyone until I started talking to myself. I didn't become 'crazy,' since crazy is a euphemism for clinical mental diseases, like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder. What I became was something different. I became 'mad'. In my madness, a single thought began popping up in my head to the point where, gradually, it began to eclipse all others. It all came from that Ray Bradbury story. Have you ever read it? It's the one where some guys go back in time to hunt dinosaurs, and one of them ends up accidentally stepping on a butterfly and changing human history. That idea kept coming back into my head, louder and louder and louder each time as I began to slide down into a truly abnormal mental state. I began to wonder if I could do the same thing. Obviously, stepping into the box and, say, beating the shit out of Jesus wasn't an option. But what if I fired a bullet into the infinity box, hoping to hit something on the other side? What if I threw in a hand grenade? Then, after my transformation into what could only be called a paranoid hermit was finished, I had a new thought: what if I threw in a nuclear fucking bomb? The mad scientist I had become started laughing insanely. The was it! I would fire nukes into the past to totally eradicate the future! Insane? No, not insane. Mad. Madly... diabolical. It made perfect sense at the time. Of course, nuclear weapons proved hard to find, but construction-grade dynamite was not. I actually managed to get a crate of the stuff delivered to my house, if you can believe it, complete with fuses and enough sticks to destroy an entire city block. I hauled the crate inside, locked the door, and quickly got to work. There was mad science to perform, and I was just the mad scientist to do it! I have no idea exactly how much lit dynamite I threw into how many countless eras of history. At first, I kept expecting history to change in front of me, and I actually would sit down and wait for, I don't know, dinosaur men to rule the earth after tossing in a stick of TNT. It never happened. So I'd try again. And again. And again. Eventually, I started throwing more and more dynamite into the box, once even tying the camcorder to I could verify that the things were actually blowing up (they were). All to no effect. Finally, I took the remaining load of dynamite, lit it all, and started tossing the things into the timestream, figuring that if that didn't do it, nothing would. Then, I just stood there, clenching my fists, hoping to see the world melt away and become something different. Yet again, nothing happened. I refused to accept it. Surely, there had to be some kind of sign! I went upstairs and looked outside. It all looked as it had before. I turned on the television, hoping to see a man in an SS unform reading the news. It was the same. Over the next few days, I actually left my apartment, bearded, smelly, wearing my bathrobe and slippers, looking for alterations to the history of the world. I found non. Zero. Nada. I hadn't just crushed a butterfly, I had blown up millions with TNT! Something should have happened. I hung my head in defeat and shuffled back home. Some mad scientist I had turned out to be. I had failed not because some hero had stopped me. I had just... failed. Not knowing what else to do, I shaved, showered, went out of the house, and began looking for work. I found a good job, started dating a nice lady, and have resumed living what I suppose you could call a 'normal life'. The infinity box is still downstairs, sitting on my dusty, unused workbench. I've never told anyone about it but you, and I probably never will. That's my story, I guess. It doesn't exactly end with a bang, but I suppose that's the point. Still, I do wonder sometimes. I wonder if it's possible that I actually did change history, drastically changed history, with my sticks of dynamite. I wonder if the world we all live in so actually very different from the world that existed when I first became a mad scientist, only you don't remember it, and neither do I. Maybe I totally changed the course of history. Maybe I changed things for the better. Or the worse. Still, we never will know, will we? It's just that I sometimes like to think that it's all true, and that I wasn't quite the failure I seem to be. It's a comforting thought, somehow. A strangely comforting thought.