For the second time this week, Max walked down the ghostly dim hallways of Cedarbluff in the early morning hours. Tall windows cast odd shadows, which drifted along the high walls of the corridors as if they were dark angels watching silently from their perches. Not a soul was present, not even a custodian, as Max could hear the rubber soles of his own shoes compressing against the polished tiled floor, before the shuffle of students’ feet and the sound of voices would drown out everything else.
The door to Professor Stoner’s classroom was open. Max walked inside and followed the path to his office, which was also open. Walking in, he noticed the professor scribbling on a notepad and, upon noticing Max’s presence, he abruptly looked up and motioned to him.
“Hey. Come in. Come in.” The professor jumped out of his seat and came around the desk, looked out his office door, then guided Max to his seat. “Let me go close the door.”
Max watched as the professor walked back over to the classroom door, looked outside both ways, and then closed it. His demeanor, Max thought, was that of a secret informant, worried that the bad guys were closing in. It made Max a little uncomfortable.
“Okay. Okay,” the professor said as he walked back into the office. “Uh, let’s close this door too.”
As he closed the office door, Max really began to get anxious.
The professor took his seat and started to speak but instead got back up. “You know what; let’s keep this door open so you can watch the front door.” He got up and opened the office door again and sat back down.
“You’re starting to freak me out,” Max said, being completely honest. “What’s going on?”
Professor Stoner finally settled down and looked directly at Max. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
The words caught Max off-guard. They scared him.
“Look,” the professor continued, “forget about invisibility. That’s not what’s happening here. Okay, look here.” He grabbed his notepad but stopped and looked out through the office door. “Okay, come here.”
The professor walked out to the chalkboard and Max followed, still feeling uneasy about this whole meeting. The professor began by drawing a line on the chalkboard.
“If you have a one-dimensional line, right? If one spot on that line becomes too dense…” The professor began to take the chalk and vigorously rub on one spot of the line. “…that the properties of the first dimension can no longer support it, it falls out of the first dimension and into the second.” He took the chalk and drew a line from his spot perpendicular to the line, creating a T-shape, and then turned to look at Max for confirmation that he was following.
Max nodded. “Okay, I’m with you.”
“Good,” the professor said as he scanned the classroom door again to make sure no one had entered. Next, he drew what looked like a flat diamond shape. “Now if you have a two-dimensional plane and one point becomes too dense for the properties of the second dimension to support it—“
“It falls out of the second dimension into the third.” Max finished the sentence as the professor drew another perpendicular line starting at his point on the plane.
The professor erased the line and plane examples without even looking at Max and drew a 3-D box on the board. Placing his next dot inside the box, he turned to look at Max.
Max was staring in amazement.
The professor nodded. “If a point in the third dimension becomes too heavy to be supported by the properties of the third dimension, it falls…” He took the chalk and drew a dotted line from the dot inside the box straight across until it was outside the box.
At least ten seconds of silence passed as the professor allowed what he was saying to sink in. “That’s right, Max. Your little ball is not turning invisible. It’s completely visible wherever it’s at. Or I should say whenever it’s at.”
“Is it possible?” was all Max could mutter.
“It all makes sense,” the professor reasoned. “The ball gets many times heavier each time you increase the power even a little. As you increase the power a lot, it becomes so heavy that it literally falls out of the third dimension into the fourth―time. That would also explain why the emitters were drawn toward it and why my pen was sucked into the void left by the ball. It’s Einstein’s theory of wormholes.”
“You’re talking about a black hole,” Max said. “It can’t be. Black holes are strong enough to suck in entire galaxies, let alone felt-tip pens.”
The professor smiled as if he had already considered that. “But black holes in space begin as supernovas, which are a thousand times larger than our sun. Compared to our little lead ball, they’re a hundred billion times greater in mass to begin with. They get denser as they collapse and all that mass gets compressed into a relatively small area. But you have found a way to make the molecules of lead heavier without changing its physical size. So, our little ball cannot suck in an entire galaxy.”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Max began to accept the professor’s explanation. “Do you think it’s going forward or backward in time?”
“I don’t know,” said Professor Stoner honestly. “But there’s a chance that someone is walking along, past or future, and your ball appears on the ground.”
Max suddenly became concerned at that possibility. “Could it shock them or electrocute them if they tried to pick it up?”
“I don’t think so. The connections all stay in our time. It looks as if only the lead ball itself travels, so that’s all that should show up in another time.”
The professor’s words were a little comforting, but not entirely. “What if they pick it up and break the connection?” Max asked.
“Good luck picking it up,” the professor laughed. “It would weigh so much they couldn’t lift it.”
Max was confused again. “I assumed it would be back to normal wherever it appeared.”
“Whenever,” the professor corrected. “No. It travels through time and loses weight as it travels. The further it goes, the less it begins to weigh. Just like hitting a baseball. The original force propels the ball, but because of gravity and friction, it slowly loses that momentum as it travels and falls to the earth. If it didn’t, it would go on forever. That’s the basic law of force. Once the weight of the ball becomes low enough to be supported by the third dimension, it falls to earth, so to speak. This also means that you are not correct in that there are no changes from giving the ball enough power to disappear to giving it full power. I have no doubt that when you give it full power; you send the ball much further in time.”
“This is too unreal,” Max said as everything began to sink in. “What are we talking about here?”
The professor smiled. “We’re talking about the Nobel Prize in Physics. We’re talking about the National Academy of Science. We’re talking about the John J. Carty Award, the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal; we’re talking about every major award in science. This is the most important discovery of the twenty-first century. No, wait: this is the most important discovery in the history of mankind. You’re going to be more famous than Einstein.”
This was too much for Max as he walked over to the front row of seats and sat down.
The professor erased the board as if the crude drawing itself would give away everything then walked over and sat next to him. “What are you thinking?” he asked.
“It’s over,” Max replied. “I have to stop the experiment now.”
“What? Why?” The professor was shocked.
“It just doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t desire fame, and I don’t see how this discovery could help mankind.”
“What about disease?” the professor reasoned. “What if we could go forward in time to bring back medicine that could cure all the ills of today? What if we could go back in time and find cures for today’s illnesses, cures that might have lived in animals that have long gone extinct? The possibilities are endless.”
“Would not bringing back medicine from the future destroy the future as it exists?” Max asked.
The professor didn’t have an answer. “You have a point. It’s your decision, Max. It’s your discovery. I’m just an observer.”
“Let me think it over,” Max suggested. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m as blown away by this as you are. I just want to be sure we do the right thing. Unfortunately, I can’t recall any scripture at all that mentions time travel.”
They both laughed and Max got up. “I guess it goes without saying that we need to keep this to ourselves for the time being.”
The professor nodded as Max left him sitting in the front row of his classroom.
***
“Are you on another planet or in another time zone?” Julie asked.
“Oh, sorry,” Max replied as he realized his mind was indeed somewhere else. He began to talk with Julie again and tried hard to push back the events of the meeting in Professor Stoner’s classroom.
It had become customary for Max and Julie to sit in Max’s truck on Friday after their classes were over until the last possible minute before he had to leave to get home and change for work.
“What has you so preoccupied anyway?”
Max shrugged. Then, he decided to see if he could get another point of view without revealing anything. “Have you read The Time Machine?”
“H.G. Wells? Yeah, a long time ago. Why?” Julie asked.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that story recently. He used the time machine just to explore really. He did try to help those little people in the future, but he didn’t really seem to try to help the people of his time.”
“How do you mean?” Julie asked, now as intrigued by where this was going as she was intrigued as to where it was coming from.
Max continued. “I mean, he didn’t try to discover medicines or technology from the future and bring them back to share with the people of his own time.”
“That’s true,” Julie acknowledged. “But wouldn’t that have altered the future if he did that?”
“I guess that’s the real question. I guess if you really travel in time, you could only do it as an observer and not get involved in anything.”
Julie nodded.
Max began to stare out the front windshield, and Julie saw that she was about to lose him again.
“Hey, stay focused.”
Max smiled and continued the discussion. “It would be cool to go back in time to witness dinosaurs and stuff.”
Julie looked as if she was losing interest in this conversation. “I guess so,” she muttered.
“I’m sorry,” Max said. “Let’s change the subject.”
“No, it’s okay,” Julie replied. She really didn’t want to have this conversation, but if it was the only way to have any conversation with Max right now, she was willing to give it a try. “Yes, it would be cool to go back in time to see dinosaurs and stuff. Yes, it would be cool to go forward in time to see how advanced we have become, providing we haven’t killed ourselves off by then.”
“Do you think we have the ability to do that?” Max asked.
“I don’t know. But I know we have the destructive nature to do it.”
Max thought about what Julie was saying and knew she was right.
Julie smiled at how seriously Max was taking this conversation. “Are you planning on time-traveling anytime soon?”
Max laughed. “No. Not anytime soon.”
Julie added, “But let’s be honest. If we could travel in time, it would not be medicine or technology we would be after.”
“It wouldn’t?” Max asked. “What would it be?”
“Lottery numbers.”
