RS01. The Reluctant Sorcerer Read Free Page B

tasseled loafers, pecked her on the cheek, and said, “I’ve just got to check this out, dear, but it may take a while. Love you. Don’t wait up.” ‘ ‘Marvin...” But he’d stormed out again, carrying the little black box under his arm, only this time forgetting to close the door behind him.
    “Oh, Marvin...” she said. With an air of resignation, she got up and closed the door. She was more or less accustomed to this sort of thing, but this time, whatever it was that had been frustrating him so, he must have gotten it licked, because he had run out in the middle of the movie, and he’d never done that before.
    “Don’t wait up,” he’d said. Like hell she wouldn’t wait up. If it took all night, she’d wait for him to return, doubtless brimming over with enthusiasm over whatever gadget it was that he’d finally managed to get working, wanting to tell her all about it. She would sit there and she’d listen and she’d share his pleasure and then, when he stopped to catch his breath (by then it would be dawn, most likely), she would put a tie and freshly laundered shirt on him, take him by the hand, and lead him down the nearest aisle she could find.
    She picked up a handful of spilled popcorn from the carpet and popped it in her mouth, then glanced at the clock atop the mantelpiece. Almost two A.M. It was late. Too late, in fact.
    Brewster rode the elevator up to his private laboratory atop the corporate headquarters building of EnGulfCo International, all the while thinking. God, it was so simple! A faulty counter in the timing switch, that was all it was. He was certain of it. He had tried everything else that he could think of in an attempt to reproduce the malfunction that had sent the first time machine off on the journey from which it had never returned and now he was certain that he had it. Everything else had checked out perfectly, with each and every one of the duplicate circuit boards for the autoreturn module he had assembled, but this one had a faulty timing switch. The moment he tripped it, instead of the counter sequentially going backward from “30” to “O,” the settings he’d selected, it went from “30” directly to “O,” without going through all the numbers in between, so no sooner had he tripped the switch than it clicked back again to its original position. That must have been what happened with the original machine. Some of the switches had been faulty and the auto-return had simply turned itself off an instant after he’d activated it. Damned English electronics, he thought, should have gone with Japanese components. No wonder the damn thing hadn’t come back. It had departed on a one-way trip! He passed the scanner and entered his laboratory, where the second time machine, the one he’d painstakingly recreated during the past two months, sat waiting in the center of the room. He stood there for a moment, staring at it and chewing on his lower lip. He had to be right this time. He’d used up the very last of the Buckyballs in putting the second one together. If it didn’t work right this time, that would be the end of it, at least until another obliging meteor containing fragments of a supernova from some other galaxy happened to smack into some unsuspecting piece of earthly real estate. And that could take a while.
    “It has to work this time,” he mumbled to himself, “it has to!” Just to make sure, he double-, triple-, and quadruple checked all the other switches for the duplicate auto-return modules he had assembled. He found two more that had the same malfunction, but all the others worked properly.
    “That’s it,” he said to himself. “That’s got to be it.” So simple. He had thought something had gone wrong in the assembly of the board, and he had done it over and over and over again, and all the time, it had just been a faulty switch.
    He rechecked all the working switches several more times, just to make certain, then. he selected one and