Our first surprise was the lack of gravity. It was just like being in a space ship, I suppose, with things floating up and out of our pockets, and us floating out of our chairs. It had never occurred to us that we’d need seat belts.
“Why didn’t we expect this?” I said, “It would have been easy enough to build an instrument that could check for gravity, and put it into a test canister.”
“Because we never thought of it,” Ian said from six feet “above” my head. “Still, it makes perfect sense. We are not on Earth any more, so we aren’t affected by Earth’s gravitational field.”
I would have been more upset, except that I saw the eight soldiers we had with us, sitting in their chairs with their hands firmly gripping the armrests, grinning at the two new kids. They and the construction workers were used to this sort of thing. I made a mental note to have someone put safety belts on all the seats, next time.
“Well, if it makes so damn much sense to you, why didn’t you predict this null gravity thing?” I asked, floating upside down to everything else.
“I said it made sense, not that I knew it was going to happen. It would also have made sense if the gravity slowly went away as we got farther and farther away from Earth in the fifth dimension.”
“Only that didn’t happen, so the fifth dimension must be impervious to gravity waves, whatever they are.”
“That, or we are moving a lot farther into the other dimensions than we thought. I mean, if we were billions of miles away from home, there wouldn’t be much of Earth’s gravitation field to feel.”
“Well, I’ve already thought of a use for the effect,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Sure. Get a weight and put it on top of a spring. The weight pushes the spring down. Take the contraption out into the fifth dimension, and the spring pushes the weight away. Attach the weight to a crank, and turn the time circuit on and off quickly. You get free power, and I bet it would be a lot cheaper to build than that emergency power machine of yours. No turbines, for one thing, and it doesn’t need a bodacious supply of air.”
“Tom, that sounds just stupid enough to work. You know, we could have powered the surfacers with something like that. We’ll put technical team on it when we get back.”
“Okay. You know, maybe you shouldn’t have pulled your sword on Hasenpfeffer.”
“It got his attention, and we were running out of time. If we’d let him delay us past the departure time, it would have given him another day to think up things to delay us further.”
“I can see your point, but while we’ve done impolite things to each other before, we’ve never used real weapons up till now.”
“All right, all right. I’ll send him a formal note of apology as soon as we get back.”
“Thank you. I just don’t want this whole thing to escalate.”
Another set of Nixie tubes said we had forty-one minutes until we arrived. We’d known that it took time to travel in time almost since the beginning. We still didn’t know why that was so, and it still bugged me.
Free fall was starting to get fun, now that I was no longer startled by it. I would have suggested some sort of free fall game, except that if the troops and workers got out of their chairs and got involved, the place would have gotten crowded in a hurry.
Besides fifteen people, we had power, food, and water aboard for a year. We had bottled oxygen, calcium oxide, and activated charcoal to last us a week. We had digging equipment to get us to the surface, tools and materials to set up a small station in 1735, and a small observatory to let us ascertain our exact geographical position. What we didn’t have was much room for a game of null-G touch football.
We were all in our seats when the Nixie tubes counted down to zero again.
Nothing happened. Gravity did not return. We weren’t on Earth in 1735, or anything like it.
I heard a nervous voice behind me say, “Boss, I think we’re in big trouble.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Big Trouble
Ian said, “Tom, you checked this program yourself, didn’t you?”
“No. I wrote it myself. Prescott checked it. I’ll go take a look at it.”
I opened the control cabinet under the Nixie tubes, and turned on the cathode ray tube display. While it warmed up, I fumbled around and found the program, a long column of nine digit numbers, all of them ones and zeros, written in my own handwriting. Ours was a stripped down system written in straight, efficient machine language, without benefit of Fortran.
What I didn’t find was my flow charts, our volumes of charts and tables of lateral drift, and everything else I needed to write a five dimensional program from scratch. They weren’t here because it had never occurred to me that I might need them anywhere else except at my desk in my office.
In hindsight, I know that this sounds incredibly stupid, but please remember that we had written more than sixty thousand of these programs before, and all of them had been for test canisters without any humans aboard. Including the volumes of tables in a small, unmanned test canister would not only be stupid, it would have been flat impossible.
After a while, you settle into habits, solid routines of how things are done. Ian and I had been so eager to make this trip that we hadn’t bothered to think everything out again from the beginning.
As it was, we were lucky that we had even the program itself with us. It was here only because the typist and her checker hadn’t bothered to take it back with them.
Working the controls with one hand while I held myself in place with the other was annoying. I put my sword inside the cabinet, took off my shoulder belt, and used it to fasten myself to the stool in front of the cabinet.
I tediously checked the screen against my written program and found the problem in about ten minutes. Two zeros in one line had somehow become ones.
“Had only one error occurred, it would have been caught in a parity check. What we’re seeing here is pretty improbable.”
“You think somebody did it on purpose?” Ian said.
“I don’t know, but we can worry about that one later. The point now is that we’ve missed our target, both in time and in space. From here, I don’t think that I can steer us back to there. Not without all the stuff I have back in my office.”
“Can you get us back home again?”
“That’s what I’m going to try, even though I don’t have any of our charts or tables with us. I think the easiest thing to do will be to simply retrace our steps. I’ll pick a time in our subjective future, and have it reverse our directions from that point.”
“Why do it in our future? Why not do it now?”
“Because it’s going to take me some time to change the program in the first place, stupid, and I don’t want to rush myself. I may not get a second try. We may not get a second try.”
It took me a half an hour to modify the program to run us backward, and load it into the buffer. I had to use some educated guesses as to estimating our drift, and that troubled me. If I was off by twenty feet sideways, we would emerge in solid rock, which would not only instantly kill all of us, but would likely take out the entire factory as well. Being off by only two inches would wreck the canister, and it just might kill us anyway, although in a less spectacular fashion.
Ian spent another forty-five minutes checking over my work before he would approve of what I’d done.
I’d allowed two hours for the job, so we had another forty-five minutes to chew our nails before we could load the modified programs into the machine proper.
The squad of infantry, all being of Killer stock, spent the first half hour of the emergency quietly talking to each other. You could see that they were worried, but on the whole, they were taking it pretty well.
After that, someone got out a deck of cards and a poker game was soon in progress, played in zero gravity. They hadn’t brought any money with them, but they had an empty Kleenex box Scotch taped to the middle of a makeshift table, and IOUs written on scraps of paper were being stuffed into it as the game progressed. The winner of each hand got to empty the box. Since their period outfits didn’t run to pockets, cards and IOUs of various denominations had to be stuffed under one’s belt. It slowed down the game, but killing time was the object of the exercise in the first place.