The walkway led fifty feet to where the rank of coils ended at the rear wall of the big room. Vapor bled off the framework. They were rimed with some kind of ice or condensation. The whole coil array and walkway sat on a framework atop a poured concrete slab. The big room was a deep freeze after the desert heat. There was a chemical tang in the air.
“I walk through those Freon tubes, and I could meet Cleopatra?” Dwayne said.
“Conceivably,” the doc replied. He was pleased that Dwayne was getting it.
“I rode all the way out here with you,” Dwayne turned to him and spoke without inflection. “I may as well hear the rest.”
“Without going into the physics or resorting to equations, the Tube creates a field that halts and then reverses the flow of time,” Tauber said. “This requires a tremendous amount of power which we get by amping up the tower with a surge. That creates a mega-joule response from the tower, which increases the power of the initial jolt exponentially. There are limitations, of course. We can only crank up the necessary wattage once in a forty-eight hour period and then for only a thirty-minute window.”
“You must get a hell of a bill from Nevada Electric,” Dwayne said. He noticed his breath came out as vapor.
“Oh, we’re off the grid completely,” the doc said. “We can’t have anyone asking questions. That’s why we have a nuclear reactor.”
“Where?”
“Inside one of the Q-huts. A generation four reactor. No waste. Totally shielded, very little spike in the background radiation. Just a small unit, really. Smaller than the one on a submarine.”
“Run by your Iranian pals who are on a terror watch list,” said Dwayne. He knew the first phone call he’d be making when he got back to Vegas.
“Yes. Parviz and Quebat are very proficient. Tehran’s loss is our gain. The Tauber Tube would be impossible without their contribution.”
“And you named this mother of all refrigerators after yourself?”
“Oh no,” the doc said. “It’s named for my sister Caroline. She made the calculations and developed the science that made time travel a possibility. My area is engineering, mainly.”
“So, where’s your sister, Doc?”
“She’s somewhere out there,” said Tauber. He gestured down the walkway into the coils.
“About one hundred thousand years ago.”
Dwayne was seated in one of the Q-huts now with a Dos Equis tallboy in his fist. He hated Dos Equis. But it was ice cold and wet and the only brand in the house. The hut was drywalled inside with a carpeted floor and furnished with stuff from Walmart. Futon sofa, particleboard kitchen table, and lawn chairs. It reminded him of the dorm he lived in during his one semester at State before joining the army. All but the poster of a teenage Leonardo DiCaprio on the wall. That was a touch from the two Iranians who were in the next room. Sounds of Wii tennis came from within punctuated by laughter and curses in Persian.
Doc Tauber sat across the table from Dwayne and fidgeted.
“I know this is hard to grasp at first,” Tauber began.
After a mouthful of beer, Dwayne raised a hand for silence. He swallowed.
“Your sister and two other guys—”
“—Dr. Miles Kemp and a grad student from UC Davis named Phillip,” the doc said.
“They went into this coil for a trial run about a week ago, and they didn’t come back,” Dwayne said.
“We can open the field for thirty minutes once every forty-eight hours. We’ve done that three times since they went through and none of them have returned back through the Tube. Something has to have gone wrong on the other end.”
“What’s on the other end, Doc?”
“Nevada, as it was one hundred millennia ago. Where we are now would be on the shore of a shallow sea almost a thousand miles across. The geologic record for this period gives us a reasonable amount of certainty on that, for this exact location. You see, though the Tube allows travel through time it doesn’t—”
“—take you through space,” Dwayne said. “I saw the movie, Doc. And you want me to go through the Tube and rescue your sister.”
“And Dr. Kemp and Phillip.”
“Rescue them from what, Doc?”
“Well, the time period is teeming with dangerous lifeforms. Basically, giant versions of animals familiar to us today. Giant bear. Giant beaver. Giant moose. Even elephants at that period. There could also be violent storms or floods. It’s impossible to know what conditions are on the other side without going through the Tube.”
“People?”
“No indigenous people,” Tauber said. “The oldest known human habitation is 60,000 years ago at the outside. And that’s the Topper site on the Savannah River in South Carolina. We chose our target destination because of the total lack of Paleo-Indian habitation. You’d be outside that window.”
“So.” Dwayne set down the empty and popped another open. “I go back there and find out your sister and her pals were eaten by a giant squirrel. Or they went through and wound up at the bottom of the sea. Or inside a mountain. Or that they were just vaporized by your machine as soon as they stepped inside. And that could happen to me if I go on this snipe hunt.”
“No!” said Tauber and stood up. “I had momentary contact with them on the other side. A signal, using the Tauber Wave Generator Transmitter. Some clear transmissions ending in a garbled one. They arrived in prehistoric Nevada alive and intact.”
“Tauber wave generator? Your sister’s a busy gal,” Dwayne said and took a long pull of the tallboy.
“The transmitter is my invention,” the doc said.
Dwayne set the beer down and stood up. “Okay, take me back to my motel. Drive me back or I’ll take the Rover myself in exchange for the time you wasted.”
“You’re walking away from three people in danger? You’ll just let them die?”
“I’m supposed to believe this bullshit?”
“So, you’re leaving?” Tauber said. His eyes were
