Four Hours Early
In my mind I pictured the scene. In this mental image, I was standing on a beautiful beach with tall, dull, off-white chalk cliffs to my back facing the sea as they had for untold centuries. There were several small white birds flying about in the breeze, heading back to their roosts after a hard day of catching delicate insects to eat. The mid-afternoon sun was bright, reflecting off the gentle, rolling waves. The sand under my feet was a beautiful deep shade of red, bordering on maroon. The two moons already visible in the sky at this early hour shimmered in the heat waves coming off the hot sand.
The instant I visualized this scene, I knew I was there, in my mental image, before I even opened my eyes. The smell of salt hung heavy in the air. I could feel the gentle breeze on my face. The sight that I was treated to when I did open them was exactly as I had envisioned it to be.
“Steve’s really got something here,” I mumbled under my breath. I immediately felt a blush of embarrassment, not being in the habit of talking to myself.
I started to wander aimlessly along the strange beach. The shock of my surroundings threatened to overtake me. I kicked the sand, testing the reality of the small red particles. Everything certainly seemed real. Why shouldn’t it, I thought?
Suddenly, a small, two-headed crustacean scuttled busily out of nowhere, pausing momentarily before me, as if my presence bothered the poor thing. I stood motionless, watching the bright blue “crab.” It suddenly turned its back on me and went about its business, bringing my thoughts crashing back to reality.
“If this is real, wow... the implications -- exploration, thousands of worlds, maybe even colonization...” I mumbled to no one in particular, not feeling the least bit guilty for talking to myself this time. I desperately had to sit down to think things over. It is not normal to be on a beach like this, especially wearing a business suit.
I was a political science professor at an Ivy-League school, dealing primarily in foreign policy. My friend, Steve, known as Dr. Harrison to the world because of the doctorates in physics and physiology he holds in addition to his Masters in biology, had asked me to advise him in regard to a rather touchy problem he had uncovered in regard to Fed. U.D.S. Foreign Relations.
Steve had developed a machine, or process, rather, of making the theory of matter transmission possible. As far as the general public knew, myself included, matter transmission was still decades in the future, if it was feasible at all.
Matter transmission is a rather simple concept to grasp, but infinitely difficult to actually do. It is simply the breaking up of a person or thing into it’s component atoms and reassembling them in another place, as it is routinely done on Star Trek, the old science fiction series.
To top this, Steve had somehow incorporated brain waves into the picture. One had only to think of the place he wants to be, hold that vision for a few seconds, and he is there. A very scary concept in many ways. Too close to Buck Rogers for my comfort.
I remember when Steve first told me of the project.
“Steve, this is impossible! It has to be!” I shouted at the tall blonde man sitting behind the oak desk.
“Not only is it possible, it works,” he replied with a smug smile, tugging on his wispy blonde mustache.
“Hold it, you mean I just have to think of a place, and I’ll be there? Boom, just like that?”
“Yep,” he said, with that smug little smile still plastered obscenely on his face.
“Instantly?”
“Yep.”
“How? How does the machine know what I’m thinking, and how does it match it with reality? I asked, hoping the carpet was as thick as it looked, just in case I collapsed.
“What do you mean?”
“If I’m thinking of a restaurant, how does the machine or computer or whatever know exactly which restaurant I’m thinking of? How does it match it up? Does it have pictures of every location on Earth?” I had a mental picture of an old IBM computer spewing out thousands of punch cards in a frantic search for Tahiti.
“Well, it’s all very technical...”
“No kidding! Give me the fairy-tale version.”
“I can’t. I can try, but you’ll never really understand it. I don’t even understand it. It isn’t really a machine. Well, its a machine, but it isn’t.”
“Can you repeat that, please?” I asked.
“No,” he said with a confused look on his face, which was much better than the smug little smile that he had there before. “Anyway, the machine is more of a warp creator than a matter transmitter. It creates a warp, placing you actually, physically there, wherever you want to be, by bending space.”
“Huh?”
“Take a piece of paper, for example. That piece of paper is the plane, the distance. If you were an inch tall standing on one edge of the paper, and I was an inch high standing on the other edge, we could meet without taking a step if someone were to bend the paper in the middle. The machine does this with the space-time continuum.”
“Then why bother with matter transmission?”
“It’s needed to get you the one stop over the threshold that you can’t go. If I’m standing on one edge of the paper, and you are on the other, I can’t go where you are, because you are already there. Got that? I don’t.”
“How the hell do you dream this stuff up?” I asked.
“It isn’t easy. I need a team of psychologists and theologians on hand to keep me from going crazy trying to keep it straight in my head or thinking I’ve sinned somehow.”
“I can imagine.”
“I doubt it,” he replied with a tired sigh.
“Hold it. When I get ‘beamed or ‘warped’ or whatever you call it, I have to be in some machine, don’t I?”
“Yes, the TPC, the thought processing cubicle, why?” he asked.
“When I get to wherever it is I’ve gone, how do I get back?”
“Just think of the original TPC,” he answered with a smile that told me that he was starting to anticipate my questions. “When you ‘think’ out, the computer locks onto your last thought patterns, to put it simply, and can return you at your leisure form anywhere withing five meters form the point you materialized at in the first place. At the present, we can only track five people at a time, but that should increase when we get our new grants for the bio-computer links.”
“I have one more question.”
“Only one?”
“Well, only one right now. I happen to know of several scenes that look very similar. Every cliched greasy-spoon cafe in New York looks the same. How does the bio-computer, or whatever, know which one I want? For that matter, here’s question number two -- how does the computer know what everything looks like? Explain this to me.”
“You’re not going to like my explanation.”
“So? Give it to me anyway.”
“The machine simply takes your thought patterns, turns them into the digital code it understands, takes all possible images, compares them, and shoots you to the closest comparison. Mickey Mouse, but it works.”
“Where does it get the possible images?” I asked, that pesky vision of the IBM machine in my head again.
“From the astral plane. Don’t ask me where the astral plane is, because I don’t know. That’s why there are philosophers and theoretical physicists. All I know is that it works. Not perfectly, but it works. You may not get to the right place, but you will go somewhere and you can come back.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic about it. Want a cigarette?” I asked absently.
“Enthusiastic, but scared. Put that damn thing away. It stinks.”
“You’re saying that I could attend a meeting in Moscow in the morning, hit Paris of lunch, and spend the afternoon in the Bahamas?” I said slowly, starting to see the possibilities of such a machine. “Great, I’ve always wanted to go to Monaco. Send me to Monaco!” I said, flicking my cigarette in a potted plant by my chair to annoy Steve.
“Yep. That’s why I need a foreign relations expert. But, I can do better than Monaco,” he said with an evil grin that made me miss the smug smirk.
He went on to explain to me that philosophers and scientists had theorized that the universe was nearly infinite. Ever since the Big Bang the universe has been spreading out at a steady rate, continuing to this day, and is therefore as close to infinite as the human mind can conceive.
There has also been speculation that in an infinite universe, everything exists. For example, if you have an infinite number of marbles, almost certainly one of them must be blue, and another pink with red dots. Following that line of thought, in a nearly infinite universe, playing with infinite worlds instead of marbles, almost anything should be possible as long as it follows the known laws of nature. That was Steve’s belief when he and his team created his machine. He deduced that any image the mind can conceive, following the laws of nature, may exist, and can be visited.
After this lengthy explanation, complete with psycho-babble that I can’t remember, Steve offered to let me try the process. “Just don’t don’t go anywhere stupid,” he said as he led me to the TPC. “Go to a nice beach or visit your parents or something. Leave Jupiter and girls’ locker rooms out of it. Stay close.”
As I stood in the small metal room that served as a nexus for the machine’s energy, I had a sudden thought. The thought had red sand in it. I don’t know where it came from, but I thought it anyway.
A small animal, possibly a relative of the blue crab, scuttled across my feet, bringing me out of my reverie rather suddenly. I had been on my beach thinking for some time now, and it had gotten rather hot.
I leapt to my feet, startled anew at the strange surroundings. As I glanced to my right, I noticed a man walking along the beach, perhaps two hundred yards from me. I waved at him, not thinking that it might not be wise to wave at unknown humanoids on a strange planet. The thin humanoid stopped walking when it saw me. The angle of the sun created a halo effect above the creature’s head and made it impossible for me to see any details about the being.
As I stood there, quietly watching the man, trying to figure out who he/she/it was, I got the feeling that I didn’t belong there. It was one of those strange things that are unexplainable, like deja vu. I just knew that I was not supposed to be intruding on this being’s life.
Suddenly frightened, realizing that this was an alien life form that could quite possibly kill me, I ran the fifteen yards to the point where I had materialized and started to concentrate, which, under the circumstances, was quite difficult. I pictured the bare room of the thought processing cubicle, with its naked gray walls seeming to physically push in from three sides. I visualized the thick plexiglass door in front of me, and knew in my mind that I could reach out and touch the walls to my sides without moving. I could even smell the sterility of the room, the same antiseptic small present in hospitals. I was there.
I opened my eyes and instinctively pushed on the door, only to find it locked. Steve was on the other side, frantically pushing intercom buttons.
“What the hell were you thinking of? You idiot! I can’t believe it,” I heard Steve shout when he finally hit the right button.
“Huh?” I mumbled at him, still a bit preoccupied with my experience on the beach.
“I told you not to do anything stupid, numbskull!”
“Yeah, so?”
“Where did you go?” he shouted, visually quite upset.
“I just thought of all the boring beaches I’d been on. I altered the scene a little, that’s all, threw in an extra moon and some red sand. And cliffs, I added some cliffs, too.”
“WHERE DID YOU GO?”
“I DON’T KNOW! I just thought of the most peaceful scene I could come up with. If I knew where it was, don’t you think I would tell you so we could go there on vacation?”
“Well, it obviously wasn’t in this world. We could tell that when you left. The computer tracks things to an extent. You weren’t on Earth. Or Luna. Don’t you know that you could bring back some disease from some far-out planet that could kill us all or turn us into carrots or something? Damn, now we’ll have to keep you in there until we can find some way of knowing your not contaminated or something. We could have had a lab set up right here if we had known you were going to adventure, not to mention oxygen and temperature suit. What would you have done if there hadn’t been any breathable air wherever you were? What if it had been 900 degrees or something? Christ!”
“Well, damn,” I muttered, not quite knowing what to say. I hadn’t thought of diseases. It was bad enough to have to be quarantined, but to have made Steve mad like this really upset me for some reason, like I had betrayed his trust. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me this would happen? You could at least tell a guy.”
“I’m sorry. I should have known your warped sense of humor could pop in. Look, just don’t move, and for God’s sake don’t touch anything. Don’t even think anything until I get back.” He started for the lab door, leaving me. “I’ll have to talk to the F.D.A., or maybe the...”
“Hold it! Didn’t you shut this booby-trap off? I don’t want to go anywhere by accident!”
“Yeah, I did, but still, don’t think. It’s safer that way,” he said on his way out the door, leaving me locked in the dismal cubicle. I suddenly noticed the various technicians that were standing around the room on the other side of the sealed plexiglass door.
“Damn,” I exclaimed loudly, kicking the gray steel wall to my right. I sat down in the far corner of the chamber. I can’t just sit here, I have things to do. The report on the third Luna colony, the speech on Federation of United Democratic States foreign relations with the equally young Consolidated Communist Countries of Africa and many other projects have to be done.
“How long do I have to stay here?” I yelled to whoever was in the outer chamber.
“At least two or three days, Mr. Robinson,” replied a tech. His ID tag was pinned on his lapel, with the word “Anders” typed on it in big letters. This, I assumed brilliantly, must be his name.
“Anders, tell me something.”
“Yes, Mr. Robinson?”
“What are they going to do to me? How can they decontaminate a person who may be carrying unknown diseases?”
“Um, I don’t really know, sir.”
“Hasn’t this happened before?”
“No, sir.”
“Damn.”
The reality of the situation continued to hit me as I turned my head towards the wall. I hadn’t realized until now that I could actually die. My brain could turn to dust or something. This wasn’t theoretical anymore. The thought of death kept me occupied for a while. My wife and kids probably won’t be too thrilled about this, I though. So much left...
I was still trying to reconstruct my last will and testament in my head when Steve returned. Nervously following him were several important-looking people trotting to keep up with Steve’s long strides. They all but had “VIP” tattooed on their foreheads. I put on my best VIP look, which was pretty good, and glared back through the door at them as they stopped in front of me.
“Hello, Mr. Robinson,” said a very formal looking man wearing the standard gray three-piece of a diplomat or official. He was about average eight, a little overweight, balding, a fairly typical bureaucrat.
“Hello. What seems to be the problem here, Mr...?”
“I’m Rogers. Craig Rogers. The problem is that nobody has ever actually gone extra-terrestrial with this device.”
“WHAT? Steve said that it was possible; I assumed that it had been done. What are the procedures from here on out?”
“We don’t know, Mr. Robinson,” said a man to Rogers’ left. “We weren’t expecting to have this happen for several months. We were hoping for a totally controlled experimentational period before actual use.”
“Dr. Harrison, who are these people?” I asked Steve, disregarding the unwritten laws of etiquette.
“This is the, um, the required team of ‘specialists’ from the government.” I could hear the quotes in his voice, making it clear that the specialists were not welcome on his end of the deal either. They certainly weren’t too welcome from my perspective. I’d worked with the government long enough to know that nothing will ever be accomplished quickly or efficiently by official representatives.
“Excuse me for asking, gentlemen, but what kind of specialists are you?” I asked the group.
“Health and planning. We try to anticipate what will come of projects like this, and the impact they ill have on he general population,” answered Rogers. “This is Andrews, Williams, and Habart,” he said, gesturing at each in order. I made the appropriate noises and gestures to each generic diplomat, and noticed that Andrews started to reach tout to shake my hand in spite of the plexiglass door separating us. That made me feel better.
“Well, where do we go from here?” I asked.
“We’ll have to give you extensive testing, and, if you are not contaminated, you will be free to go in a few days,” answered Williams, the man on the left. “However, if you do happen to carry an unknown virus or disease, you are, quite frankly, stuck here.”
“Thanks a lot. Can we please get started, then?”
“As soon as we can get the portable lab set up, we will. It’ll only take a few hours to get it over here, so until then...” Rogers said. I stood and watched them leave, not quite knowing what to feel.
I glanced at my watch, and instead of seeing the watch, I noticed that my hand was shaking rather severely. This reminder that there may be something seriously wrong made me very nervous very suddenly. Was my hand shaking from a mere case of nerves? Or was it an alien disease?
I put the the thought from my mind, preferring not to think about it for the moment. I stared bleakly out the closed door, looking for something to look at. I saw that everybody was gone, except for one guard, who was trying vainly to look like he wasn’t guarding anything. All the technicians had left, probably for supper. This reminded me that I hadn’t eaten in quite a while. Great, now I was both miserable and hungry.
With a sudden burst of anger, I turned violently to the back wall. I started to kick the wall viciously, scuffing the leather on my new shoes. I had been in this chamber for perhaps a half an hour, but it had felt like a decade. I kicked the wall, and continued to kick the wall for some time, my rage fading slightly with each kick, being replaced with an equally unbearable feeling of helplessness.
After I had let the day’s frustrations out, I felt old. It had been a long day. I ignored the protests my back made when I eased myself down to the floor and tried to make myself comfortable. Things weren’t going so good. In fact, they were startlingly bad. Of all the people in the world, why does all the really stupid stuff happen to me?
I told myself firmly that there was nothing wrong, that I was all right and would continue to be so, but I knew in my heart that I was going to die. I knew that I was going to die from something theat there was no cure for, and I was going to die in this damned bleak chamber, and then my body was going to be torn apart by more “specialists” in search of a cause. The fact that my body would be inspected, and that I would probably do the world more good dead than alive made me angry again. Strangely enough, I wasn’t angry about dying any more. I figured that we have to do it sometime, so why dread it?
It’s really strange to know that you’re dying, and yet feel no pain. I thought it would be, should be different than this. “I shouldn’t be going gently. Why am I not fighting this?”
“Dear God, I’m not religious. You know that. I won’t ask for forgiveness. I doubt I deserve it, but my family. Let ’em know that I love them,” I prayed. The first time I had prayed in years. There’s something profoundly religious about death.
I closed my eyes and waited, my pulse pounding in my ears. I don’t know how long I sat there, but it was a while. The anger never really left, it merely changed guises, keeping my book pressure up. To die with a purpose is one thing, but this? I could see no honor or purpose i dying through stupidity. My last Earthly thought was, “A heart attack? You’ve got to be kidding!” At least, in think that was my last thought on Earth. It’s hard to make the distinction between life and death from my vantage point.
Death, at least in my case, was more of a gradual process, an easing into another life than I had thought it would be. There was no pain after the first heart spasm, no great warm, loving light, no meeting with “The Maker,” just a sensation of floating.
That was many years ago. I was reminded of it rather abruptly the other day, as I was walking on the beach with the dull, off-white chalk cliffs to my back and the red sand under my feet. Two men, dressed in what looked like space suits appeared out of thin air about twenty yards in front of me. I wondered what took them so long.
I decided to keep it my secret, and willed a rather strong uncomfortable feeling towards the two men that made them head back to Earth, such as a friend had done many years ago when I tried to get to Heaven four hours early.
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