RS01. The Reluctant Sorcerer Read Free

poverty and squalor ever since. One of their legends had it that someday their wealth would fall from the skies. It did. Now the survivors of this windfall were all living in luxury apartments and driving Mercedes-Benz convertibles. This had, needless to say, cost EnGulfCo quite a bundle, but they figured that if Brewster needed this stuff, chances were that he was onto something that was liable to be very profitable in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, they had obtained exclusive offshore drilling rights.
    What made this substance special was that if it was started spinning on the inside of the tube, with magnetic coils preventing it from contacting the sides, somewhat like in a cyclotron, theory had it that if the Buckyballs went fast enough, at the speed approaching that of light, it would create a warp in space/time. And whatever was inside the field would drop through.
    To where? Good question. This was what Brewster intended to find out. You see, he had done this before. A couple of times, in fact. The first time traveler in history was a lop-eared rabbit Brewster had purchased in a pet shop and named Bugs. (What else?) The experiment that Brewster had set up went something like this: (Actually, it went exactly like this, but it’s complicated, so pay close attention.) He placed Bugs inside a cage and then he placed the cage inside the time machine, which he then programmed to travel back in time ten minutes for ten seconds. Before he did this, he used a forklift (which he’d needed for the Buckyballs, remember?) to move the time machine about fifteen feet to one side, so that when it appeared ten minutes in the past, it would not appear on the exact same spot where it had been sitting earlier. (Confusing? Wait. It gets worse.) Theoretically (that is, assuming it all worked), Brewster should have wound up with two time machines sitting side by side, about fifteen feet apart. Now, this might seem like something of a paradox, since if he sent the machine back ten minutes into the past, then it should have made the journey and appeared ten minutes before it had ever left. Which meant that there would be two time machines and two lop-eared rabbits named Bugs sitting on the floor of Brewster’s laboratory ten minutes before he’d ever sent the first one back.
    But... wait a minute. That doesn’t make sense. (At least, not logically, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with temporal physics, but let’s not get into that right now, because you’re probably confused enough.) Before Brewster sent the machine back into the past, there had to be a past in which he hadn’t sent it back at all. The moment that he sent it back, he would, in effect, have altered history. At least his history, which meant that the moment he programmed the machine and tripped the switch to send it back ten minutes for ten seconds, at the very instant that it disappeared, he should have suddenly acquired a memory of standing in the lab and seeing two time machines, standing side by side. At least, that’s how he thought it would work. He was not exactly sure. But then, in scientific experiments, one never is, is one? The problem was, that wasn’t how it worked in practice. What happened was that Brewster had programmed the machine, entered the auto-return sequence, and tripped the timer switch to send it back. And it had disappeared. Only Brewster did not suddenly acquire a memory of having seen two time machines sitting side by side, ten minutes earlier. The machine had simply disappeared, complete with Bugs, and reappeared on the exact same spot ten seconds later. Where had it been? Brewster had no way of knowing. He had repeated the experiment with more or less the same results.
    This posed certain problems. Did this mean that there was a sort of linear factor to time, where there was now a past in which Brewster had, in fact, seen a pair of time machines sitting side by side, complete with two rabbit passengers, but he