Out of Time Read Free Page B

that lasted. . . how long? Perhaps only two or three minutes.
    James moved forward, directly for once, his usual wanderings cut off by the power of death. He did not touch Mr Woodforde, but stared at him closely, his face just centimetres away from the man’s. There was a kind of dullness about the skin that he intensely disliked. He looked away, along the bench. He saw the familiar notebooks, a couple of calculators, a pile of books, and there, in the middle of it all, surrounded by pens and tools and pieces of chalk, the calculator-sized piece of equipment that Mr Woodforde had been making.
    James picked it up. It looked finished. He examined it closely. He had a good understanding of what Mr Woodforde had been building and of what the scientist had believed this machine could do. It never occurred to James to doubt the concept but he did not know whether his friend had completed the task. He turned it over curiously in his hand. It looked complex, but robust. He inspected it closely. Each of the four panels contained all the numbers from 0 to 9. James set himself to remember some details. Top panel, latitude, second, longitude, third, date and fourth, time. Or was it time, then date? James carefully pressed in the coordinates that Mr Woodforde had written on the blackboard that day: 150° 50’ 51”, 34° 15’ 21”. Then he keyed in the date. He didn’t know whether to put the 19 in front of the year so he left it out. Then, with a pale sidelong glance at Mr Woodforde’s body, he keyed in3.44, not the correct time, but two minutes earlier.
    There were two more keys at the bottom, one marked ‘Enter’ and the other ‘Return’. Greatly daring, James pressed ‘Enter’. There was a pause. Then the little screen flashed up the words: INSUFFICIENT INTEGERS ENTERED .
    James was now in a quandary. He thought the message on the screen might refer to the missing prefix of 19, but he wasn’t sure what integers were. He also didn’t like being in the lab with a dead body. He had loved Mr Woodforde but he hated his body. And finally, although he had never heard of anyone but himself and occasional cleaners visiting Lab 17, he did not want to risk being caught there. He had already made up his mind to take the machine with him; if he was caught in the room the opportunity would be lost.
    He squeezed the machine into his pocket, grabbed a few pieces of paper that Mr Woodforde had been writing on, and sidled around the room to the door. Without a backward glance he left the lab and ran anticlockwise around the square. He reached his bedroom by shinnying up the oak tree and crawling precariously along the branch. At last, sitting at his desk, panting with fear and excitement and tiredness, he pulled out the papers from Mr Woodforde’s workbench.
    He was hoping to find instructions for the use of the machine on the sheets. Nervously he started reading:

    The work of Roy P Kerr (1963) on the structures of black holes, and the contributions of Martin Kruskal of Princeton on the consequences of the black hole/white hole relationship, led tothe hypothesis that Wheeler and Faynman’s single particle theory and Kruskal’s theory of a parallel universe were the key to escaping from the linear sequential model of time. It was further hypothesised that an extraordinary energy source, enabling the subject to jump through the ring singularity of the rotating black hole, would enable the subject to pass at will between the parallel universes.
    Work commenced in December, 1988 at the National Defence Forces’ Research Centre, with the first object of discovering or developing a means to facilitate travel faster than light and hence to control the transfer of matter to antimatter. I can now state that such a means has been devised, which has passed all tests and opened remarkable possibilities to physicists as well as members of other disciplines.
    There was much more of