The oval container on the accelerator is the reaction chamber connected to the three chemical bulbs by micro-injectors, programmed from the controller. Programming the accelerator is, in principle, straightforward. The two parameters to set are the tachyon inner blast radius and the termination point. The inner blast radius is what sizes the sphere of matter that gets caught up in the acceleration. The termination point is where you wind up timewise. This does sound elegantly simple, the flaw being that, as far as I know, this thing has the accuracy of the first musket. There never came a chance to refine it before it became taboo.
A week should do it, I think. Show up, work with Jenn and the other directors, get HQ involved. Track down the explosives that had been planted in the sensor array. Maybe even catch the bastards planting them. Be waiting for whoever shows up to take out the TMA team. Does that plan make sense? A week? Maybe a month is safer? Like this thing has that kind of accuracy. I’ll set it for a week back and let it decide. I then point my trembling finger at the ‘Activate’ key. Am I going to feel like I’m being dragged through a wormhole, ripped apart by gravitational tides? Or like I’m being disassembled quark by quark, electron by electron, and crushed back together in a vice? I hear my heart thudding fast as I touch ‘Activate’.
EIGHT
What I actually sense is a slight fall in the ambient light level. There are clouds where there had been none. Was that it? Shouldn’t I be a least slightly disoriented? I’ve been known to vomit just looking at a painting of a boat yet time acceleration does nothing to me? I check my cell to see if I’ve landed anywhere close to my target, but it’s still showing the same time and date. Yet something has definitely changed, if only the weather. I pack up the accelerator and tow my roll-on bag up the slope from the river. Nothing looks too strange so I know I haven’t shot myself back a millennium. The cars look flatter, less cockroachlike. They have the style of junkers, yet shiny and new. I reach the place where there should be a park. Or a strip mall. There is neither, just an expanse of Russian thistle weed trapped by wire fencing. I have the tingling in the pit of my stomach that I haven’t felt since I was a kid. It’s the feeling of being lost. I check my cell again for a signal. Could I be predating a cell tower? I kick my bag. “Piece of shit.” I’ve overshot the one week I was going for, and by a lot is what I’m guessing. What are my options? I could try to get back to the place I started out, but god knows where I’d actually wind up.
A thought occurs to me. TMA. Is there a TMA yet? If there is, I’d at least have someone I could talk to. But if this is earlier than 1991, I’m out of luck. TMA was the Manhattan Project of its era. As soon as the catastrophe potential of chemo-tachyonic reactions was realized, it was time for serious steps to be taken and the federal government took them. The curtain of secrecy came down and the handful of physicists who had some clue about the science of it were vetted and cordoned off. Then they kept it small. Always small. The fewer people who had a clue about what was happening, the better. A dozen people in DC and thirty-some in Washington state was how it was and how it stayed. That’s how many people knew what was going on. The question is, are some of those people right up the street from here, yet?
I see a public phone. It takes coins. Who carries coins? I see the Brookland Avenue sign. I know there are a few stores up there, maybe. Yes, the first is a dry cleaner. It looks familiar.
“Hello, can I help you?” a smiling pixie-faced woman with cropped yellow hair asks while looking at my case, eager for me to remove the laundry it should contain. The shop is brightly lit and a conveyor of plastic-bagged clothing is moving behind her.
“Hi. Uh, yes,” I stutter. “Could I ask you a big favor?” Her smile fades as if she now recognizes me as what I am. Just one in a stream of bums here to ask a favor, like using her toilet or her telephone. “I don’t have any change for the phone and really need to make a call.” She stares at me, unsympathetically. “Just a local one. Really quick.”
“We’re not allowed to let the public use the phone.”
“I know, of course not,” I turn my smile up a little but not enough to seem smarmy. “If it wasn’t an emergency ... It’d be such a help.” She surveys me for a moment then nods to the wall phone. I put together my palms to acknowledge my answered prayer, and as I pick up
