The Door Into Summer

So we did, and talked of other things, particularly women. Chuck had a theory that women were closely related to machinery, but utterly unpredictable by logic. He drew graphs on the table top in beer to prove his thesis.

Sometime later I said suddenly, “If there were real time travel, I know what I would do.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“About my problem. Look, Chuck, I got here-got to `now’ I mean-by a sort of half-baked, horse-and-buggy time travel. But the trouble is I can’t go back. All the things that are worrying me happened thirty years ago. I’d go back and dig out the truth if there were such a thing as real time travel.” He stared at me. “But there is.”

“What?”

He suddenly sobered. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

I said, “Maybe not, but you already have said it. Now you’d better tell me what you mean before I empty this here stein over your head.”

“Forget it, Dan. I made a slip.”

“Talk!”

“That’s just what I can’t do.” He glanced around. No one was near us. “It’s classified.”

“Time travel classified? Good God, why?”

“Hell, boy, didn’t you ever work for the government? They’d classify sex if they could. There doesn’t have to be a reason; it’s just their policy. But it is classified and I’m bound by it. So lay off.”

“But-Quit fooling around about it, Chuck; this is important to me. Terribly important.” When he didn’t answer and looked stubborn I said, “You can tell me. Shucks, I used to have a ‘Q’ clearance myself. Never suspended, either. It’s just that I’m no longer with the government.”

“What’s a `Q’ clearance?”

I explained and presently he nodded. “You mean an `Alpha’ status. You must have been hot stuff, boy; I only rated a `Beta.'”

“Then why can’t you tell me?”

“Huh? You know why. Regardless of your rated status, you don’t have the necessary `Need to Know’ qualification.”

“The hell I don’t! `Need to Know’ is what I’ve got most of.”

But he wouldn’t budge, so finally I said in disgust, “I don’t think there is such a thing. I think you just had a belch back up on you.”

He stared at me solemnly for a while, then he said, “Danny.”

“Huh?”

“I’m going to tell you. Just remember your `Alpha’ status, boy. I’m going to tell you because it can’t hurt anything and I want you to realize that it couldn’t possibly be of use to you in your problem. It’s time travel, all right, but it’s not practical. You can’t use it.”

“Why not?”

“Give me a chance, will you? They never smoothed the bugs out of it and it’s not even theoretically possible that they ever will. It’s of no practical value whatsoever, even for research. It’s a mere by-product of NullGrav-that’s why they classified it.”

“But, hell, NullGrav is declassified.”

“What’s that got to do with it? If this was commercial, too, maybe they’d unwrap it. But shut up.”

I’m afraid I didn’t, but I’d rather tell this as if I had. During Chuck’s senior year at the University of Colorado-Boulder, that is-he had earned extra money as a lab assistant. They had a big cryogenics lab there and at first he had worked in that. But the school had a juicy defense contract concerned with the Edinburgh field theory and they had built a big new physics laboratory in the mountains out of town. Chuck was reassigned there to Professor Twitchell-Dr. Hubert Twitchell, the man who just missed the Nobel Prize and got nasty about it.

“Twitch got the notion that if he polarized around another axis he could reverse the gravitational field instead of leveling it off. Nothing happened. So he fed what he had done back into the computer and got wild-eyed at the results. He never showed them to me, of course. He put two silver dollars into the test cage they still used hard money around those parts then-after making me mark them. He punched the solenoid button and they disappeared.

“Now that is not much of a trick,” Chuck went on. `Properly, he should have followed up by making them reappear out of the nose of a little boy who volunteers to come up on the stage. But he seemed satisfied, so I was-I was paid by the hour.

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