Whoops! A Cautionary Tale By Jeff Marmaro SMASHWORDS EDITION * * * * * PUBLISHED BY: Jeffrey M. Marmaro on Smashwords Whoops! A Cautionary Tale Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey M. Marmaro Smashwords Edition License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold but can be given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please do so but please do not alter it in any way or remove this paragraph. This short story is intended to provide a moment or two of enjoyment. If you wish to publish this work in any other form or in any collection, please contact the Author for permissions. Thank you for respecting the author's work. * * * * * ‘Whoops!’ was the first thought to come into my head. The next one was: ‘How could we be so smart, yet be so dumb?’ I suppose it is partially due to my fondness for science fiction. Reading all of those stories gave me some ideas that I had never thought to question. But now I am in a real fix because of this foolishness! I suppose this all began some years ago after George and I became interested in cold fusion. Yeah, that dud of a technology that disappointed so many. The thought now brings a tang of bitter irony to mind: Cold Fusion. Indeed! Sounds like an oxymoron, sort of like ‘Freezer Burn’. Yeah, freezer and burn; an oxymoron alright; which makes kind of a fitting epitaph for me and my brother now that I think of it. In our case, however, we’re the morons. We are, or shall I say, were, physics professors at a small university. We dismissed Cold Fusion like everyone else, but over time and lots of beers, we began to have some odd ideas. Like a proper pair of fools, we thought that we were much cleverer than those other two, those impetuous Cold Fusion guys, and began to think that we might just succeed where they had failed. When our father passed away and left us as lonely but well-off orphans, we invested our inheritance in our private science project. We comforted ourselves with the thoughts of the untold riches awaiting the inventors of a real and reliable cold fusion. Over time, we began to notice some interesting and unexpected results of some of our experiments. During certain of our tests, we noticed that our watches began to behave strangely. With other tests, things around our workbench began to seem either much too heavy or much too light. Even the light in the room sometimes looked odd. We noticed such things much too often for us to ignore them. We ceased our experiments for a while to consider matters. Over several nights and many more beers we began to see some very intriguing patterns in our data. If I had not been such a devotee of science fiction, we may never have come to the right conclusions. As it was, we began to suspect something quite surprising; we were not making progress towards cold fusion, rather we were warping the fabric of space-time in our very own laboratory. Further experiments and even more beers later, we began to get very excited. The possibility of understanding and even attaining actual time-travel seemed to be within our grasp. I recalled quite fondly a story that I had read as a young boy; Robert Heinlein’s “The Door into Summer” about a character who succeeded in accomplishing time travel. Then there was that most wonderful movie, “The Time Machine” which I had watched many, many times. Inspired by these recollections, I urged my brother on to greater efforts in my excitement. Well, to make a long story just a tad less tedious, George and I succeeded. We succeeded where the conventional wisdom had decreed it was impossible to go. We made Time Machine. Yes, a Time Machine. Since we did not know what to expect in terms of collisions with objects as we were to travel in Time, we made a pair of vehicles sort of like small space-capsules to travel in. Yes, a PAIR of Capsules. Heinlein was right about one thing, to travel in Time, there had to be a certain conservation of temporal momentum. The amount of mass sent in one direction through Time had to be matched by an equal mass going in the opposite direction in Time. Ambitious, but a bit scared as well, we decided our first trip would be a short one, attempting to travel only one day in Time. One of us was to go forward and the other back. Also, like the Heinlein story, we could not know in advance which one was which. One of us was to go back a day and the other forward a day. On the fateful evening of our maiden voyage, we had a great dinner and then toasted ourselves with a few pints of Guinness Stout and shook hands. We had forgone the business of testing our Time Machine with animals first as we were single, orphans and like I have mentioned before; morons. I remember the scared yet excited grin on my brother’s face as we stepped into our little capsules. We communicated by radio as we each set our controls so that we would launch ourselves into the unknown at precisely the same moment. Then we each pushed the button. *** I did not expect it to be so cold. But that is what happens when one is floating in a small capsule drifting in empty Space watching the Earth go spinning away. For all of our cleverness, we never considered one thing. Traveling in time does not mean that we would travel in Space. We moved in Time, that much is sure, but we did not move an inch in Space. You may wonder why this is such a big deal. But consider; in all the stories, Time Travelers move in Time, but are more or less planted to the same spot on Earth. However, there is one small detail which is always overlooked; the Earth is moving very, very rapidly in Space as it spins around the Sun. The entire Solar System is spinning rapidly in the outer arms of our galaxy. This makes for quite a lot of movement. Even though I stayed in one spot, the Earth did not. I am now exactly one day away from where I started, but I am precisely where the Earth was when I left. Needless to say, the Earth is no longer there, and I am floating around in empty Space. None of the stories I had read about Time Travel even got close to getting this part right. This was the one eventuality that had never occurred to us. I wish it had. Darn it’s cold! As I think about it, I realize that I must be the one who went forward in Time as the Earth is receding and getting farther away from me by the second. It would appear that I am doomed to perish from heat, cold or lack of air. George must have gone backwards in Time, so that means…Uh, Oh. Whoops!, I wonder what he is thinking about at this moment or shall I say spot? *** At the EXACT same location in Space, only two days EARLIER: Whoops! thought George. Fred and I did not anticipate this! It does make sense, however, now that I think about it. What morons! It seems quite cold now, but if I am right, it won’t stay that way for long. The Earth sure is pretty from here, small and distant, but it is getting larger by the moment. However, I should heat up quite nicely when the Earth’s Atmosphere hits me at that speed. Poor Fred, he must be freezing. How blind could we get? Why didn’t we think of this? I suppose it all comes from reading too much science fiction in which nothing like this ever happened. Who would have thought it worked this way? Hmmm, perhaps we shouldn’t have had all those beers while we worked out the equations. *** Rocking alone on her porch in the twilight’s last gloaming the old woman stared into the deepening sky. Glancing up, she made a silent wish on the swiftly fading diamond of light.