THE SWEET SMELL OF THE PAST [ss], Lawrence A. Perkins

"Fred dear, must you use one of our best teacups? Really, Fred?"

"Look, hon, I'm so sure that the machine will work that I want to use something important, something that means something to us. Besides, if it doesn't work" - Fred let his face sag momentarily to show her how dismal that would be - "nothing will happen. The cup will still be there. Either it works or it doesn't, and I've got to have a mass of not less than a hundred grams or more than two hundred."

Fred Finnacle firmly placed the teacup on the specimen stage of his machine and haughtily drew his rangy frame erect. "If it works, the cup reappears right there in half an hour. If' it doesn't work, the cup stays there and you can fill it with black coffee for me. I'll need it."

Finnacle threw the last switch on his panel. The house lights dimmed briefly, the cup vanished, and there was a sudden stench of ozone in the air. "Hey, it works! I've invented a time machine! Hey, pour us a couple of bourbons! I'm famous! Let's celebrate!"

"Pour yourself a drink. I'll celebrate when I see that cup again." She wrinkled her pert nose at the ozone. "That smell reminds me. When I got home from the bank this afternoon, some smog had gotten into the house. I turned up the air bath to extra high and it was all right after about an hour, but I wish you'd look at it."

"Glad to, hon." He glanced uneasily at his watch and then at the silent time machine. "I wish now I'd set that thing for five minutes, but I did want to check the calibration."

Just then the doorbell chimed. Grimacing with irritation, Finnacle hurried up the basement stairs to see who was at the door. It was Frank Gibson, gasping and wheezing. Incapable of speech, he made desperate pointing motions - he wanted to come inside.

Gibson taught Chemistry 101 at Central College, where Finnacle had a section of Physics 101. Finnacle had resigned from a much better position in New York City to escape the air pollution, he remembered bitterly as he tugged Gibson inside and slammed the door quickly to shut out the mephitic vapors. The air was supposed to be good out here. Well, compared to New York's, it was.

Gibson sat slumped on the sofa, his chest heaving, for several minutes before he tried to talk. "Whew! It looked safe enough when I left the science building. Then the wind changed and we started getting it from the paper mill and the industrial center. I noticed that I was near your place, so I ran for it."

"Do you feel better now? We have an EKG telephone attachment, of course. Shall I dial the emergency clinic?"

"Thanks, but I'll make it home from here all right now. Have an EKG on my own phone, saves a lot of red tape."

"Well, if you're sure." Finnacle nervously glanced at his wristwatch. "The wind'll probably change again soon. But look, I've finished the machine I've been telling you about, and it's running right now. The test object was a teacup, and it's due to reappear in twelve minutes. Let's have a drink and go watch. What would you like?"

"Well - ah - I'd be delighted. A small Scotch and water, please."

Finnacle poured a generous Scotch for Gibson and an even more bounteous bourbon for himself. "Here you are. Shall we go watch the experiment?" He glanced at his watch. "It should come through in about seven minutes now. The machine's in my basement." He guided Gibson down the stairs. "Sue, you know Frank. The smog drove him in off the street, and he wants to see the experiment."

"Delightful," mumbled Gibson.

Susan's pretty face was uncharacteristically expressionless. "How much longer will it be before I get the teacup back, dear?"

"Well, of course the timing could be off a little. It's pure theory so far, except that the cup did disappear, didn't it? But it'll be there." Fred turned to Frank. "Thank God there's a logarithmic aspect to it. I can set the same dial to five minutes or fifty million years. Although, of course, I can't place the specimen stage fifty million years in the past."

"Say, this looks great, Fred! How does it work?"

Finnacle suddenly realized that he had wasted hours talking to Gibson about his theory, but Gibson's real interest now kept him from exploding. "Well, you know that there's a theory that an atom is a nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons that are very small bodies about eighteen-hundredths the size of the nucleus, and there's another theory that the electron is a sort of cloud of vibrations, and there's even a theory that the whole damn atom is made up of nothing but vibrating electrical charges."

Gibson swallowed a large jolt of whiskey. "Shells. Valence electrons."

"Exactly. Look, there have been three different theories about light. One, light consists of corpuscles moving in straight rays. Two, light consists of electromagnetic vibrations in the ether. Three, light consists of photons with such oddball characteristics that we call them `wavicles' and give up. But we still define colors in terms of wavelength. And Frank, did you know that lensmakers still use theory number one - and that for their purposes, it works?"

"You mean your machine uses photons?"

"No, no, no. I just mean that maybe two theories can be true at the same time, at least for experimental purposes. Anyhow, I've - "

"Where's my teacup, dear?"

Finnacle started and looked at his watch. The teacup had been gone for thirty-one minutes and fourteen seconds. "Hon, I told you the calibration might be off a little. My God, this is the very first experiment! But I don't think it'll be off by more than five or ten percent." He frowned at his watch again.

"Anyhow, Frank, I've been observing for years what I think are electron orbits, and they are definitely elongated. Let's just say it's something magnetic that has the form of an ellipse. And you know, I don't get to use the big magnetic lab often - once or twice a year. But every damn time I run the experiment, the orbits or whatever they are check out the tiniest bit rounder. At first I thought it was observational error, but it's consistent, and at an inversely exponential rate."

"Fred, I'm going to be very annoyed if I don't get that cup back!"

"Hon, I'll be worse than annoyed if you don't get it back. But Frank, and this had gone on for five years - every single reading giving me ellipses just the least little bit rounder - the idea hit me: that's time. And then I thought, if I can round the orbits I can move an object through time. I suppose I could work the other way, too, except that I can't imagine how anybody could increase the eccentricity. The long axes head randomly in all directions, in three dimensions. But providing a force to ..."

Finnacle's voice died away. A puff of white powder had appeared at the specimen stage of the machine. Some of the powder gently swirled aloft to create an expanding cloud, but most of it dropped in a conical heap onto the square pan. At least Finnacle remembered to check the time: thirty-four minutes, six seconds.

"Fred! My teacup!"

Gibson stirred uneasily and tossed off the rest of his drink. "Thanks for everything, Sue, Fred. I'm sure the wind has shifted by now. I'll be running along. Got to get that EKG, never can tell what a bad run-in with smog like that will do to the old ticker. Don't bother, Fred, I'll find my own coat. Good night." He plumped his glass down on a workbench and fled up the stairs.

Finnacle wildly wished that he had an excuse to follow Gibson.

Susan eventually conceded that the failure of the experiment was a greater disaster than the loss of the teacup, although she refused to furnish another one to validate the chemical identity of the powder. Dolefully he bought two of the cheapest teacups he could find at a local department store. One he pulverized with a hammer; the other one he ran through his machine.

Gibson verified that the two heaps of powder were chemically identical. "But say, Fred, how did you manage to subdivide that sample 13 so finely? Stuff was like moon dust!"

"Couldn't you guess? At least I got the control calibrated right this time. I set it for half an hour and it took thirty minutes and two seconds. By the way, how did the EKG come out?"

"What EKG? Oh, the EKG. Decided not to bother."

Finnacle nervously checked the outside air and hurried home before the wind could shift. Absently kissing Susan, he glumly sank into his favorite chair. "My machine makes good moon dust. Frank says so. Sure enough, the dust was disassembled teacup."

"Dear, you mustn't let this get you down so." She managed to put a smile on her pretty face. "I got off from the bank early so we could have a nice roast for dinner, and prune whip for dessert."

"It's not so much that I've put enough money into that machine to buy a small car, or that I've spent so many hours working on it. Hon, the damn thing almost works. Hell, in a way it does work."

He let himself be led to the dining table, and the roast was indeed nice. Over prune whip and coffee Susan's blue eyes lit up suddenly. "Dear, I just thought of something. Why don't we try it on something that's supposed to be finely divided? Like grinding beef, for instance."

He very nearly spilled his coffee as he leaped to his feet. "Have you got a piece of meat in the kitchen? I know you've got accurate kitchen scales."

"Meat? Sure I have."

"Let's go. Let's see - not less than a hundred grams - a kilo is two point two pounds, so a hundred grams is zero point twenty-two pounds, let's say a quarter pound. And not more than two hundred grams, zero point forty-four pounds, say just under half a pound."

By then they were in the kitchen. "Hon, can you carve a chunk that weighs more than a quarter pound but a hair less than half a pound? If it's over I don't really think it'll matter - probably just leave some of it on the stage - but if it's under, according to my theory the machine'll probably blow up."

Susan absently brushed a strand of honey-blonde hair away from her face as she plopped a steak down on one pan of her scales and then slid the counterbalance out until the pans balanced. "Two point three. The rats! The butcher's label said two point six." She ciphered on a kitchen note pad. "A quarter's too much. Hm-m-m. A fifth is zero point forty-six. You said zero point forty-four?" Expertly eyeing the steak she carved off a piece and weighed it. "Zero point forty-one."

He silently accepted the gobbet and led the way to the basement, where he plumped the sample on the specimen stage and then began throwing switches. "I've set it to five minutes. That's the smallest interval I have." He threw the final switch, the light dimmed, the meat vanished, and the sharp tang of ozone filled the air. Man and wife waited intently and wordlessly.

In precisely five minutes there was a soft splat and a brownish globule of viscous consistency appeared on the stage. It stank faintly of ammonia and hydrogen sulphide, and flattened slowly as they watched.

"Oh, no! breathed Susan.

Pinnacle expelled the breath that he had been holding in a long sigh. "This thing must transmit molecule by molecule. It must have broken down the individual cells in the meat into millions of parts. I should have thought of that. I just naturally thought they would all stay together."

"Wait, don't give up yet. Let's try something else, something that's supposed to break things down into tiny particles. You clean up this - this mess and I'll measure out a quarter of a pound of rice. Let's see if the machine can make rice flour." She looked regretfully at the odorous mass. "That was good steak."

She brought the rice, he threw the switches, and they waited. This time the splat produced a gummy gray glob that smelled worse than the first experiment had. Susan looked at her husband with real alarm. "Look, dear, I'll clean up this time - it was my idea. Why don't you go pour yourself a drink? We'll think of something."

As a matter of fact, he poured himself several drinks before he finally poured himself into bed. During the next weeks Pinnacle taught indifferently, often leaving his students goggling at him. Perhaps it was the weather. Several times he had to take a taxi home, although he lived only three blocks from the campus. And his subconscious nagged him to look up the weight of a cubic meter of air at sea level, which is 1.2250 kilograms. His subconscious promptly told him that a tenth of a cubic meter of air - a cube about four inches to the side - weighed a hundred and twenty-three grams. Pinnacle gloomily wondered what difference that made.

Going over his equations one day when he was supposed to be preparing a lecture on wave propagation, he suddenly realized that he needed only provide a specimen stage at the temporal point where the specimen reappeared - in other words, "now." Anything at the physical coordinates represented by the three-dimensional location of the receiving specimen stage plus the temporal setting of the machine should vanish from the selected point in time and appear on the stage "now." The field of the machine should lock onto the matter that had just the preselected degree of atomic magnetic eccentricity and round it just enough to pop it out on the stage. Or rather, splat it out. Pinnacle shuddered.

Then he realized what his busy subconscious had been up to. The specimen stage was five inches by five inches, and the field extended upwards at least five inches. Unless he worked into a vacuum he would never have to worry about his hundred-gram minimum mass for his sample. He spent that weekend modifying the machine so that the stage would be at the receiving end rather than at the transmitting end when he threw the activating switch.

The only necessary datum missing for his next experiment was the date when his house had been built, or rather when the building had been begun. It was a good thing, he rejoiced, that the machine was already in the basement, an area that had been safely inside the earth before the house was built. It could be terribly dangerous to reach blindly into the past and grab a mass that could be as large as a four-inch cube. Just right - or just wrong - it could grab the heart right out of a man.

The house, he learned, had been built sixteen years ago. Just to be safe, he set the machine for twenty. Then he argued with Susan. "Look, hon, I'm doing this because I have to. I've put too much into this experiment to back out now. But this won't be like the first time, when all I risked was a teacup - and that didn't work out so well, remember? I could rig remote controls, I guess, but that would cost another thousand dollars and take too long. Besides, somebody should be ready to call the fire department, just in case."

"Don't be silly, dear. I'm sorry I got so wrought up over that teacup. I want to be with you, and I want to see what happens."

He finally compromised that she might peep from the foot of the basement stairs. When she was duly ensconced, he threw the switches one by one as he anxiously watched his instruments. His fingers were sweaty when he pulled the last one. The lights dimmed, he smelled ozone, and there was a pile of very fine dirt on the specimen stage. Pinnacle danced a triumphant little jig with his wife.

But by afternoon of the following day he was glum again. Would the machine really handle two hundred grams of air safely? The college was eight hundred feet above sea level; how much difference would that make? Unfortunately, there was only one way to find out. Pity that the machine was in his house and not at a lab at Central College! But the machine was his own, and his house was the only place for it. There was no garage, of course. Both of the Pinnacles walked to work. The town was small and people with private cars were unpopular.

As soon as he got home he explained to his wife why another experiment was necessary.

"I understand, dear, but couldn't we have dinner first? And how will you know that it's really moving air? And won't it be awfully dangerous - not just the blowing up part, but you said that it could grab the heart right out of a man. I wouldn't like for that man to be you."

Finnacle, who had been on his way to the basement, returned to his favorite chair and sat down hard. "Unh! I hadn't thought of that. Either of those thats." He brightened. "But we're both here, aren't we? I mean, if the machine had grabbed a chunk out of me I wouldn't be here now, would I?"

"That's silly, dear. That's a logical paradox or something." Her brow wrinkled. "I wouldn't bet on that at all."

Halfway through dinner he dropped his knife and fork. "I've got it. Remember when we had termites and the exterminators put that gunk in the foundation? The basement stank so that nobody could go down there for weeks. And we'd recognize that smell, all right! It was almost as bad as the smog. Let's see, when was that?"

"Finish your dinner, dear. That machine's already had half a steak. I do believe you've lost ten pounds in the last month. Don't you like my cooking anymore? There's chocolate pudding for dessert."

After the pudding they both riffled through old checks and found out when the exterminators had been paid. They were both sure that the check had been written on the very day that the job had been done, and that neither of them had been in the basement for weeks afterwards. He had gone halfway down the stairs and then retreated gasping.

It was late, but they hurried to the basement - he to the machine and she to her post at the foot of the stairs. But just as he threw the first switch, she stepped into the room. "Dear, why didn't the machine explode after it transmitted that panful of dirt?"

"Get back, hon! Huh?"

"Why didn't the machine blow up after it transmitted that panful of dirt? After the dirt was gone it was working into a vacuum, wasn't it?"

His finger faltered on the second switch. "Why? Because the intake shuts off as soon as it has a sample. That's an important safety circuit."

"Then this won't work."

He looked at her blankly and then turned off the machine. "You're right, of course. Damn, why didn't I think of that?"

"You invented the machine, dear."

Schematics dancing in his head, he hardly heard her. "Hm-m-m. I should be able to wire in an override switch. But it will take hours, so I can't do it until Saturday."

Late Saturday afternoon Susan resumed her post at the bottom of the basement stairs for the third time as her husband began flipping switches and scanning his instruments. With the final flip came the familiar reek of ozone and waves of a heavy chemical stench, still familiar although the termites had passed into history nearly two years before.

"Shut it off! Shut it off!"

Quickly he stopped the machine, but the stench lingered thickly. He could have fled to purer air, but instead he stood and brooded. "Well, it works. I've got a machine that digs moon dust out of old basements and brings back the smell of the past. But what good is it? I hardly dare tell anybody. I'm sorry that even Frank knows about it. I'll be the laughingstock of the whole physics community. Why didn't it blow up?"

"Dear, will you do one more experiment for me, quick? Put that safety circuit back on and turn the dial all the way. You did tell me that it goes all the way to fifty million years."

"Why, hon?"

"Because who knows what the topography here was fifty million years ago? This might be deep inside a mountain. The odds are fifty-fifty that it'll be above the surface, though. It's only a few feet below the surface now."

"But why?"

"Maybe just because it's there. Will you do it for me, dear?"

Resignedly he restored the safety circuit, reset the time dial, and then went through the ritual again. The lights stayed dim several seconds longer, but nothing appeared at the specimen stage. Then, hesitantly, he killed the safety circuit. Instantly sweet fresh air began to well out of the machine - such bracingly pure air that it was almost intoxicating.

"What ... what ...?"

Susan ran to him, hugged and kissed him. "I love you, you millionaire!"

He was still speechless, pointing vaguely to the rush of fresh air.

"Dopey, fifty million years ago was the beginning of the Tertiary period. The dinosaurs had just died and the grasses and flowering plants had just appeared. There's never been any fresher air since time began." She inhaled luxuriously. "How do you think this'll grab 'em in New York?"

"But ... but ... I'm only a physics teacher, not a manufacturer. I don't even know how to apply for a patent! And ..."

"My innocent lamb, you work at a college and I work in a bank. Look, in a month you'll be famous - the man who gave the world the breath of life. We can probably find some Tertiary rivers, too, and you can give everybody fresh, pure water - at a reasonable price, of course. Leave it to me. I know a patent lawyer and a good public relations man. But now let's just enjoy it, shall we?"

"What? Enjoy what?"

She inhaled again. "The sweet smell of success."