Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 Read Free

machine worked," Jerboa said, looking at the dirty cracked tile floor. "It's just that you can't actually use it to visit the past or the future, in person. Lydia's coin was displaced upward at an angle of about thirty-six degrees by the Earth's rotation and orbit around the sun. The further forward and backward in time you go, the more extreme the spatial displacement, because the distance traveled is the square of the time traveled. Send something an hour and a half forward in time, and you'd be over four hundred kilometers away from Earth. Or deep underground, depending on the time of day."
    "So if we wanted to travel a few years ahead," Lydia said, "we would need to send a spaceship. So it could fly back to Earth from wherever it appeared."
    "I doubt you'd be able to transport an object that size," said Jerboa. "From what Madame Alberta explained, anything more than about two hundred and sixteen cubic feet or about two hundred pounds, and the energy costs go up exponentially." Madame Alberta hadn't answered the door when Lydia went to get her coin back. None of them had heard from Madame Alberta since then, either.
    Not only that, but once you were talking about traversing years rather than days, then other factors—such as the Sun's acceleration toward the center of the galaxy and the galaxy's acceleration toward the Virgo Supercluster—came more into play. You might not ever find the Earth again.
    They all sat for a long time, listening to the Canto-Pop and their own internal monologues about failure. Lydia was thinking that an orbit is a fragile thing, after all. You take centripetal force for granted at your peril. She could see Malik, Jerboa, and herself preparing to drift away from each other once and for all. Free to follow their separate trajectories. Separate futures. She had a clawing certainty that this was the last time the three of them would ever see each other, and she was going to lose the Time Travel Club forever.
    And then it hit her, a way to turn this into something good. And keep the group together.
    "Wait a minute," said Lydia. "So we don't have a machine that lets a person visit the past or future. But don't people spend kind of a lot of money to launch objects into space? Like, satellites and stuff?"
    "Yes," said Jerboa. "It costs tons of money just to lift a pound of material out of our gravity well." And then for the first time that day, Jerboa looked up from the floor and shook off the curtain of black hair so you could actually see the makings of a grin. "Oh. Yeah. I see what you're saying. We don't have a time machine; we have a cheap simple way to launch things into space. You just send something a few hours into the future, and it's in orbit. We can probably calculate exact distances and trajectories, with a little practice. The hard part will be achieving a stable orbit."
    "So?" Malik said. "I don't see how that helps anything.... Oh. You're suggesting we turn this into a money-making opportunity."
    Lydia couldn't help thinking of the fact that her truck needed an oil change and a new headpipe and four new tires and the ability to start when she turned the key in the ignition. And she needed never to go near the Lusty Doubloon again. "It's better than nothing," she said. "Until we figure out what else this machine can do."
    "Look at it this way," Jerboa said to Malik. "If we are able to launch a payload into orbit on a regular basis, then that's a repeatable result. A repeatable result is the first step toward being able to do something else. And we can use the money to reinvest in the project."
    "Well," Malik said. And then he broke out into a smile too. Radiant. "If we can talk Madame Alberta into it, then sure."
    They phoned Madame Alberta a hundred times and she never picked up. At last, they just went to her house and kept banging on the door until she opened up.
    Madame Alberta was drunk. Not just regular drunk, but long-term drunk. Like she had gotten drunk a week ago, and never