Rhys-Michael Silverlocke


The Stupidity Factor

In his last moments of life, Doctor Arvin Claypool understood
it all. It all made perfect sense. Such an obvious flaw, and
everyone had missed it. How had that happened? Claypool was a
self-confessed man of brilliance and considered by most an expert
in his field. Yet the simple truth had eluded him until this
moment.
He thought briefly on his arrogance, and that of the scientists
at The Center; and the elitist members of the Kichtlinger
Foundation; the self-assured researchers assembled from all the
best universities. All of them had failed; most of them would
never know it.
Even the thousands of complex yarns spun by fiction writers
which had been analyzed for possible factual data had fallen
short of the mark and failed to understand fundamental reality.
No one had grasped the fatal flaw in the experiment.
But Doctor Arvin Claypool could hardly feel superior to them at
this point, even though he now understood it all, down to the
smallest detail. Even though the answer had been obvious all
along. This sudden onset of modesty in a man well-known for his
smugness could no doubt be attributed to the surety of his
immanent death.
He felt the air leave his body, his eyes seemed to freeze in
their sockets and his vision dimmed, then faded entirely.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
He saw them nearly at once; they weren't very good at following
people. Unless they wanted to be seen... Which only served to
lead to assorted other questions.
Who follows a professor of quantum mechanics across the entire
campus of a major university dressed in black suits, with dark
glasses and thin black ties around their thick necks? Harry
chuckled to himself; they had to be government.
He remembered an absurd Monty Python show seen longs years ago
where some characters in dark glasses, false mustaches and
trenchcoats followed people about and when asked about their
identity would only reply, "Well... we aren't secret police,
anyhow. You can be sure of that."
He wondered which government branch had allowed its standards
to drop so sharply that the pair so blatantly trailing after him
would now qualify for recruitment. Couldn't be the F.B.I. They
had actually followed him once (a student of his had been
suspected of terrorist anti-american activities, and by that
association, Harry also fallen under suspicion briefly) but he
never knew about it until later.
At least the F.B.I. had a touch of class and some discretion
about them; the two following him (Frick and Frack, Harry had
mentally christened them) had no such finesse.
On a whim, Harry Gardener quickened his pace. He lengthened
his steps and strode quickly and deliberately across the quad,
headed to his office at a pace which belied his age and
contrasted his more normal shuffling absent-minded gait.
Let's see how they enjoy the Arizona sun in those black suits.
Probably sweating like pigs already, he thought maliciously. In
truth, he had broken sweat by the time he reached the elevator
inside the Metaphysics Building. October may dance in with a
chill in most places, but in Arizona it more regularly ends up as
just another month of indian summer. High eighty-degrees today,
and enough to make someone feel flushed-- especially if they
happened to be wearing thick layers of dark heat-absorbent cloth.
Harry smiled all the way up in the elevator. He had seen them
enter the building just as the door closed-- mopping their brows
and looking dismally uncomfortable. He anticipated they would
not take the stairs after their exertion but would instead wait
until he got out of the elevator and ring for it themselves.
As the doors opened, Harry stepped out into the hall quickly,
and grabbed a free-standing ashtray with a weight of sand in it
and slid it into the path of the closing elevator door. It
failed to close, but instead rebounded off the object and opened
fully. Then it attempted to close again, and rebounded off the
ashtray... and so on.
As Harry made his way down the long hall to his office he heard
the frustrated doors every few seconds, determined to close.
This time he laughed out loud, not caring if anyone around heard
it or thought it odd.
Frick and Frack would be taking the stairs.
He had time to make coffee and pour himself a cup before the
two identically dressed government minions had occasion to
actually knock on his door.
"Come in gentlemen," he called happily the very instant one of
them contacted the door.
They stepped in slowly, their body movements almost a precise
mirror of each other. Frick and Frack indeed.
"And what can I do for our government on this fine sunny day?"
he asked with a nasty and suspicious glint in his eye.
As if prompted by his mention of the weather, the larger of the
two men removed his sunglasses, and with a handkerchief wiped
them of sweat and his eyes as well. Harry did not ask either of
them to sit, nor did he offer them water.
"Professor Gardener..." one of then (the drier of the two)
began.
"Doctor," he interrupted quickly.
"Doctor Gardener, then," the man amended, and tried to go on.
"Though I am a Professor too. So it's difficult to say which
is correct."
The two men in black looked at each other and grimaced. Why
could nothing ever be easy?
"Though, Professor-Doctor Gardener seems a mouthful to me,"
Harry continued, ignoring their consternation, "and a bit awkward
to say. Professor-Doctor, Professor-Doctor. Doesn't quite roll
trippingly off the tongue.
"Not like 'Field Agents Frick and Frack' would sound any
better, but at least there is concision in both cases.
Ultimately..." he trailed off, seemingly just recalling the other
two men stood in the room.
"Doctor Gardener?" the sweatier man (Frack) tried to interrupt
and take over the conversation again.
"Yes? Oh, I'm sorry. You wanted something. How rude of me...
please go on."
And before they could go on he added, "I wouldn't dream of
slowing your obviously crucial mission in any way shape or
form..."
"Doctor Gardener?"
"Present and accounted for! Was there anything else, or can I
finish my coffee now?" he reached for the mug before him.
"I think we should just shoot him," Frick said to Frack.
Frack smiled. "I think you're right."
Harry laughed deep and hard. "Okay, okay. You aren't
assassins-- you two have been recorded traipsing behind me like a
pair of sooty puppies on far too many monitors to be
inconspicuous or dangerous. So what DO you want?"
Wordlessly, the two agents communicated which would do the
talking, and Frack said, "We need your help Professor-Doctor..."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Within a week Harry Gardener had quit his job at the University
and moved to Washington, D.C. to take up residence in one of the
many homes lavishly appointed and outfitted for those who worked
for the Kichtlinger Foundation.
In the private office of the Foundation's chief administrator,
those who held the purse-strings had debated for long hours about
the enlistment of this rogue "free thinker". Many did not want
him based on his mercurial reputation. Others were hesitant to
involve anyone at all-- considering that the last three project
leaders working on the "Claypool Emitter" had vanished without
trace, never to return. All parties agreed on one thing only;
best not to tell the man too much if he did come in on the
project.
The device Claypool had originally constructed had been
replicated several times so far, at great cost and with much
secrecy. So far as the best scientists could tell, it should
have worked flawlessly; though others less acquainted with the
mathematics and the underlying theory might well imagine the
whole purpose of the device to be ridiculous and totally
improbable.
No one told the new team what the complex machinery did, nor
any other detail about the previous projects and project leaders.
The recently recruited personnel (including Gardener) received a
packet with schematics (though some pages considered classified
had been deleted or obscured) and some pages of mathematical
shorthand, as well as access to the main Kichtlinger computer
database.
Gardener received an addendum; he would have to address the
administrators of the Foundation in two weeks and give them a
"Progress Report". So he spent the first of those two weeks
essentially going back to school. He slept little; he read
constantly. He had the new recruits draft lengthy explanations
for each of the simple mathematical statements he found on his
"outline".
Some of these seemed contradictory, some merely absurd. But
one researcher in particular started him thinking in a markedly
unusual direction.
The comment, "This doesn't appear to hold true in four-
dimensional Einsteinian relativity.." had been an ordinary thing
to say, given the circumstance, but it had sparked a thought
within Gardener's brain... what else is there?
What else, beyond Einstein's theories, might exist?
Within six days Gardener suddenly realized what some of the
data indicated. On the seventh he decided he had gone insane.
By the ninth day he had become a flurry from office to office,
from lab to lab, with an endless series of questions for everyone
he met.
But no one made much any comment when he advanced his ideas.
No stunned reactions, no praise, no snickering or doubting
whispers or sighs. Just... nothing. More dry facts to review.
The frustration of it all nearly overwhelmed him. Yet he knew,
knew down to his bowels that the answer lay before them all if
only they would bother themselves to look.
The morning of the "Progress Report" Harry Gardener arrived at
the lab early in the morning and in a fit of pique (or possibly
just to verify his sanity) activated the "Claypool Emitter" and
performed a little experiment he had mulled over for days now.
Disappointingly, no great lights flashed; no huge dynamos
creaked; no loud whirring mechanical sounds of increasing stress.
A blue light came on, and the panel display showed readouts of
the working status on the four small EM generators positioned
around the main device and its console.
The system beeped and the word "Enabled" appeared on the
monitor. "Do you wish to begin?" came the next prompt. Gardener
grabbed two of the chronometers lying around the lab (now he
understood all the various timing devices scattered about the
place) and synchronized two of them. He took one and put it on
his wrist; the other he set outside the lab on a coffee table.
He sat down at the terminal and typed a single lowercase "y"
and hit enter. Options scrolled by on the screen. He set
duration to +10 and decay to constant. He then flipped the
toggle directly below the green flashing light.
More disappointment initially; nothing happened. A slight blur
in his eyes, a momentary feeling of dislocation or movement, but
nothing else at all. Hmmm. The room seemed ever so slightly off
to him, changed imperceptibly. Perhaps an after-effect of the
focussed pulse from the emitter? Could it have affected his
vision permanently?
He shut down the machine and went to the outer office and had a
look at the chronometer he had set down there. He had another
dozen looks. Then he became utterly confused, and after that
angry.
When it came time to meet with the administrators of the
Foundation he was glad to share both those emotions freely.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Seated in a leather chair in a large boardroom, Harry silently
fumed as he glanced about studying the faces of the nearly
identically-clad men arrayed around a wide u-shaped conference
table.
At the very center of the table sat a man in a slightly more
expensive suit wearing thick glasses. He began to speak but did
not get a word out before Harry interrupted him.
"Why are we here?"
Some confusion around the room. One of the administrators near
the end of the table whispered to another, asking why Gardener
had not been informed as to the purpose of the briefing. The man
in the center calmly replied, "We wanted to know how you are
settling in, Doctor."
"Crap." Harry replied simply.
More confusion. Some disdain for the scientist's perceived
attitude problem. Lots of muttering generally.
"What are we doing here???" Harry repeated. "Why aren't we
dancing in the treetops? Why aren't we on CNN sharing this
discovery with the rest of the world??? Why are we sitting in
this dingy room as if this is just another ordinary day and
nothing earth-shattering has happened?"
The man in the thick glasses silenced the many objections in
the room with sheer presence and softly told the scientist,
"Treetop dancing would, at this juncture, seem somewhat ill-
timed. Until we have refined the process and can be certain it
will work there is nothing to tell anyone really..."
"What a bunch of bullshit," Harry countered, shifting furiously
in his chair. Startled, angry reactions surrounded him. Who was
this interloper? This outsider who presumed to come in and hurl
epithets at them and tell them how to run their business?
Gardener had encountered this type time and again and had
little patience for them.
"The damn thing doesn't work..." came a particularly loud
whisper from the left side of the table.
"It works perfectly," Gardener told the man with a bleak look.
"I tried it myself this morning."
Panic. Confusion. Whispers frantically back and forth on all
sides of the table. Over it all a soft voice said, "Gentlemen,
calm down please. This was expected, by many of you, and is no
cause for concern. Professor Gardener is justifiably curious
about the device; we can hardly blame him for attempting to test
it for us.
"Very noble.." he added as an aside to Harry. The older
scientist took it for sarcasm.
"Despite his claims," a junior functionary remarked, "the
machine fails every time it is used. It is a waste of Foundation
resources and we should abandon the project. The very fact that
only these unstable-types can understand it at all would seem to
make my point for me..."
Numerous murmurs of agreement from many quarters.
"I have heard that argument advanced before," Kichtlinger told
them. "What would you say, Doctor Gardener?"
Harry thought about that. What would I say? What can I say
that they will hear? What do you say to a room of smug little
no-nothings drunk on their self-importance?
"You're all morons," Harry began. "But typical morons. It's
'The Stupidity Factor' rearing its ugly head as it always does in
great events. You are sitting on top of the single most
important discovery in the history of... well, history! And
typically, you sit in a room somewhere bickering about the
details of something you don't even grasp, and try and control it
all for your own benefit.
"It is always like this. I don't even know why I am surprised
anymore.
"The time barrier is broken, gentlemen. We can do it!!! I
jumped ten seconds into the future, and other than a slight
visual anomaly and a headache-- which may be caused by having to
interact with all of you-- there were no harmful effects."
Numerous protests and arguments broke out around the table.
"It works? Tell that to Arvin Claypool..." came one voice.
"Be happy to," Harry replied, totally confident.
Laughter in most quarters. Some contempt and disdain for
Gardener's apparent stupidity and ignorance also seemed evident.
Once again, the quiet bespectacled man in the center took
control.
"Doctor Claypool vanished over a year ago, along with the
hardware he had designed. I organized the replacement team after
he left and had a duplicate device created from his original
design schematics."
"So I'm heading up the replacement team?"
"In a manner of speaking," Kichtlinger replied enigmatically.
Actually Gardener was heading up the third replacement team, the
previous team leaders all having shared the same fate as Arvin
Claypool, but why discourage the scientist with that unnecessary
detail?
"Then will you listen to me when I tell you the damn thing
works? I tested it myself. It works! We should be sharing this
with someone, telling the world about this!!!"
Many concerned whispers and mutters now. The world isn't
ready; there would be panic; it's too soon, too premature; there
isn't enough evidence; one man's conviction isn't enough; what
happened to the inventor of the machine?
Gardener had enough. He rose from his chair, "Gentlemen, you
can toss into the trash any papers I have signed regarding the
secrecy of events here. I will not be silenced; there is not a
force on this planet which will keep me from spreading this news
far and wide.
"There's going to be a little 'demonstration' for the rest of
the team as soon as I can arrange some technical details-- and
don't even think about trying to get in my way because you will
have to kill me. This thing is a miracle and I am damn well
going to make sure you open your eyes and see it."
An explosion of debate filled the room. Angry protests and
louder insinuations. Far from being composed administrators,
they clucked and cackled like startled hens in the presence of a
hungry fox. Over it all, calls for an immediate termination of
the project-- silly idea, ill-conceived, ill-advised, overfunded
and far too dangerous.
"I'd like to see an outline of your proposed demonstration,"
Noah Kichtlinger called to Gardener's departing back.
"I'll just bet you would," the crusty scientist told him
without turning.
After he left came the congratulations. You were beautiful; no
you were! Stop, you're embarrassing me. Did you think he would
bite so quick? Inevitable. Can't believe he volunteered! It
was in all the projections, though. And he thinks he was
bullying us! Heh heh heh, doesn't know when he's met his match.
these academic types are all alike. Just need to know how to
press the correct buttons.
Noah Kichtlinger sat back enjoying all the praise, the
congratulations, but secretly harboring the slightest moral
doubt. Perhaps it would have been better, more fair to have told
Gardener at the outset what he was getting involved in, the real
risks. Of course the machine worked for ten seconds-- it always
did. Claypool himself had tested it to 10 minutes, and reported
the same slight visual distortion or feeling of movement but
otherwise had no ill effects to note.
The problem was that everyone who tried the machine at a longer
interval had vanished without trace, taking the emitter with them
in some fashion. The first replacement team had been fully
briefed and had convinced themselves based on the evidence that
they could travel to any time with complete safety. Same with
their replacements.
In light of their recent failures, it had been decided that
perhaps overconfidence held the answer. So people were brought
in who had no knowledge of the project, left totally to their own
devices to figure out what it all meant and draw their own
conclusions. Noah had made that decision personally and now
regretted it.
He could not stop, though. None of them could. On the very
brink as they stood (looking over the abyss into something truly
marvelous) no one wished to pull back. The tone and mood of the
meeting had been carefully orchestrated to provoke the scientist
into just such a rash act. Despite the seemingly outraged
murmuring, no real intention of ceasing the project was seriously
entertained by any of them.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Friday morning Harry Gardener had his team up to speed on his
conclusions and decided to proceed with a more intensive test of
the device in the main lab. In preparation he had done a lot of
consideration as to the length of his journey-- never was there
any question that he himself would operate the controls.
One hundred years? What would the world be like? Would there
even be a world? Hmmm... had Arvin Claypool tried to go too far
and run into some future holocaust? Sobering thought... did
humanity in fact have any future?
Fifty years? Was that safe? Or did the bombs drop years
before that and render the world uninhabitable? The past, then?
A known quality might be safer... or would it? What of paradox?
No, not the past, the future. The Undiscovered Country.
Six months. Why not six months? Long enough to make a real
test (one that could not be dismissed by a slow second-hand) and
yet not long enough that the world would have time to change too
drastically. Six months. A nice even figure.
If the machine stopped working for some reason after being used
to travel for such a duration, well he would not be too far out
of place. Just a span of months ahead of the life he had known,
and in no danger.
No more delays. While he still had the keys to everything he
would proceed. Before the Foundation took seriously his threats
to blow the whistle on their secret project to the outside world
and began cutting him off from all the systems. Yes, he would
go.
He personally notified the members of his research team and had
them standing by in the lab in the early morning; they spent the
time before he arrived familiarizing themselves with some of the
new equipment.
The lab now contained a multitude of complex monitoring
devices. The chair in which Gardener would sit had sensors which
would send the scientist's heart-rate, blood pressure and brain-
wave pattern directly to monitors which they could watch. Each
sound and sight recorded for all time-- and homing-beacons within
all the consoles should they vanish again as they had last time.
In with all the video and other apparatus installed to monitor
the test, a few more technological appurtenances went unnoticed.
Unseen monitors watched Harry as he entered the lab in relative
silence that morning. In another part of the building people
watched avidly for the results of another "time travel"
experiment.
All had been carefully prepared and orchestrated at the behest
of Noah Kichtlinger, who sat nibbling his lip, entranced by the
scene on their own surreptitious lab monitors.
The results. What would happen? Would they learn anything
new? Would it be a repeat of the last time? Would yet another
life be on his conscience? Did it make it easier because the man
on the screen deliberately chose to take this risk? No. He had
been manipulated into grandstanding. By a coward. By someone
unable or unwilling to sit in the chair and make the decision to
throw the switch himself.
What if we fail again? There are more scientists, more lives
to throw at this thing. Eventually it would be sorted out. Just
a matter of time. Always time. Noah Kichtlinger had infinite
patience... he would wait and see what happened, and then
probably start over again. Eventually, inevitably he had to
succeed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In his last seconds of life, Professor Harry Gardener Doctor
understood it all. It all made perfect sense. Such an obvious
flaw, and everyone had missed it. How had that happened?
He had seen a thousand movies and read many books on time-
travel. He had the equations of the finest minds to support the
theory involved and actually believed in his arrogance that he
had understood it all.
But he had understood nothing. Nothing at all. And all the
people who wrote those books and scripted those films had made
the same damn fatal error. Harry Gardener knew the answer now,
though, and as he looked at the blue-white planet from a distance
of miles he cursed his own stupidity.
Every movie, every book... the main character gets into the
time machine, goes forward or backwards in time and ends up in
the same place. Maybe the building he was in originally had
collapsed in the "future", or was a vacant lot in the "past", but
he remained in the same spot geographically. But that was not
reality.
Reality is dangling in space, watching the earth float lazily
by off your left shoulder. The planets move, the solar system
moves, the galaxy itself rotates. Go into the past a few hours
and you would probably find yourself rotated to the other side of
the earth.
Go back a few days and you will find the earth has continued on
without you in its inexorable journey around the sun.
Harry Gardener learned the truth of time travel in those short
seconds. He had gone into the future, and reappeared precisely
where he had left, with his chair and the Claypool emitter
floating beside him-- in the vacuum of space.
He felt the air leave his body, his eyes seemed to freeze in
their sockets and his vision dimmed, then faded entirely.