Wasting Time by Grey Rollins
* * * *
There are things we'd all like to be able to do, even if it required finding a loophole in the laws of nature. But you can't do just one thing....
* * * *
hristopher Arken quietly closed his office door behind Tammy. Although he would never say it out loud, it was clear that Ms. Odom wasn't going to do well in his introductory physics class. The semester was only six weeks old and she was already hopelessly lost. He had to give her credit, though, she was still trying. Most students in her position adopted a defeatist attitude and began skipping class rather than face the seemingly impossible task of catching up.
As he slid back into the chair behind his desk, he caught sight of the spider plant on the windowsill. It looked pretty bad. Sighing, he leaned towards the plant and probed the soil with his fingertip. Dry. He pushed himself to his feet, reaching for the plastic pitcher he kept on top of a filing cabinet. Not much water in it, but he went ahead and poured what remained onto the parched soil, watching it pool on the surface before soaking in.
Arken didn't really like the plant, but it was a gift from the departmental secretary, intended to cheer him up after the sudden death of his wife five months previously. Why women always wanted to give plants was a mystery to him. From his point of view, the damned thing was a burden to care for and a continual reminder of what he had lost. Still, he couldn't bring himself to let it die through neglect. He went to refill the pitcher in the bathroom down the hall.
It was the chartreuse sheet of paper taped to the door of the bathroom that reminded him that he had refilled the pitcher just that morning. He distinctly remembered seeing the flyer advertising a band he'd never heard of playing at a local bar. The band's name, Five O'clock Shadow, had struck him as incongruous at seven thirty in the morning and ... oh, never mind, the pitcher was empty and that was that.
Stuck in traffic on the way home an hour later, it came to him that the pitcher held a quart and he knew for a fact that he'd used less than a fourth of it after filling it that morning, leaving ... what, twenty-four, twenty-five ounces or so? Round that down to twenty, just to be on the safe side. Yet that same afternoon there had been only two or three ounces remaining.
He frowned. Call it eighteen ounces of water evaporating in one day--less than a day--six hours, tops. Must be some pretty dry air in his office to empty the pitcher that rapidly. No wonder the poor spider plant looked so bad.
* * * *
The next morning, he was hailed as he was unlocking the door to his office. "Hey, Chris!"
Arken pushed the door open and reached inside to toss his briefcase on the visitor's chair before turning. "'Morning, Bob. How're you doing?"
"Great, man, great! We've finally managed to get that phase change to work." Bob Tindall had spent the past eighteen months trying to improve the efficiency and color temperature of LEDs.
"Then that means--"
"Exactly! We'll be able to get a true paper-white LED."
Arken stuck out his hand. "Well, congratulations! I'll buy you a beer to celebrate."
Tindall grinned widely. "Better you should buy one for Nigel. I'm telling you, that kid's going places. Best grad student I've ever had."
"One for each of you, then," Arken promised. "Tonight?"
Tindall squinted, staring at nothing. "Uh, yeah, that'll work for me--I'm free this evening. I'll track down Nigel and see if he's got any plans."
"Let me know if it's okay," Arken said. "I'm always open."
A brief look of sympathy passed over his friend's face. "Yeah, I know. But, hey, we'll get you out for some fresh air tonight." Tindall hurried off down the hall, leaving behind an intangible air of busy energy.
Arken entered his office. The first thing he did was to check the spider plant. Nicely moist soil and the plant itself had perked up. The pitcher was about as full as he remembered it being from the previous afternoon. The morning had dawned overcast and a light rain had begun as he'd driven into town. If the plant hadn't improved, he'd planned on setting it outside for a good soaking, but now he wouldn't have to.
He shrugged, picked up his notes, and left for his eight o'clock lecture.
* * * *
Kenny Burton was waiting for Arken after class. "Professor, I know it's not office hours, but I wanted to ask you a quick question."
Arken reached in his pocket for his key and unlocked his office door. "As long as it doesn't take too long, Kenny."
He was speaking over his shoulder as he said this, but something in the student's expression made him turn. He blinked. Then blinked again. The glass in his office window had shattered, allowing rain to spatter in. Plaster had spalled off the outside wall in irregular patterns, leaving only bare lath. Part of the ceiling near the wall had collapsed. The room was a mess, with plaster dust everywhere, all over his desk, his papers, his ... spider plant? It was dead. Absolutely, irrevocably dead. Brown, desiccated leaves had fallen to the floor from shriveled stems. How the hell could the thing be dead? It had been doing fine before he left to teach class.
Kenny gazed in wonder at the faint haze of dust hanging in the air. "Uh, Professor, if this isn't a good time, I can come back later." He paused, then finished hesitantly, "I mean, I know it isn't office hours ... and ... well, I'll come back later." He left hurriedly.
Arken stared at the remains of the spider plant. Truth be known, he'd come to the conclusion that the ugly thing was unkillable. To have it expire so quickly and completely was a boon from his point of view, but he had the sneaking suspicion that there was a price yet to be paid.
As fate would have it, that reckoning was to be sooner rather than later. "Chris?" came a feminine voice from behind him. "I've got your mail. Something came in that looked important, so I thought I'd bring it--"
He turned to see Marsha, the departmental secretary. Her eyes widened as she looked past him into his office. "Ohmigod! What happened?"
Arken shrugged. "I don't know. I just finished my eight o'clock and came back to find this." He gestured vaguely at the mess. "It must have happened within the last few minutes or the dust would have settled."
Her eyes locked on something and he knew with dreadful certainty what was coming next. "Oh, and the spider plant!" She turned hurt eyes on him. "Didn't you water it?" She pushed past him, leaving smudged footprints in the dust on the floor. She tested the soil with her finger and said in an accusing tone, "Why, it's dry as a bone! Men! Can't even take care of a simple plant." She flounced out, insulted.
"Maybe the plaster dust poisoned it," he said to her retreating back. The words sounded lame, even to him.
But then his eyes stole to the pitcher. It was empty. Nothing but a faint brown haze towards the bottom showed that it had ever contained water at all. And it had been over half full just before class.
Really dry air.
* * * *
Maintenance showed up while he was still trying to dust off the papers on top of his desk. He knew the man vaguely, having spoken to him once about a flickering light in the corridor. Tom, Bill, Jack, some common name, but for the life of him he couldn't remember which one.
"Whoa! Good one, Prof."
As though it was something Arken had done on purpose. He caught himself on the verge of saying something rude to the man. "How long to fix it?"
From the way the maintenance man flinched, his tone must have been sharper than he'd intended. "Don't know, man. Never seen a wall let loose like that." He spent a minute prodding at the wall, causing more bits of loose plaster to fall, then turned to face Arken. "You'd better get your things together. We're going to have to see about moving you somewhere while we fix this. It's going to get messy."
Arken threw down a book in disgust. It raised a cloud of fine, choking dust, setting him to coughing. Clearly, the room was a health hazard. "Get messy?" he complained. "Looks like we've already achieved messy status."
The maintenance man nodded sympathetically. "Yeah, it'll be a pain, no matter how you look at it. We'll have to call someone in who does walls. All I can do is grab some plastic sheeting and put it over the window to keep any more rain from coming in."
Arken sighed. "Okay. Let me start packing things up."
* * * *
Christopher Arken actually preferred that people use his full first name, but he could never bring himself to correct those who shortened it to Chris. It was a small matter in the great scheme of things, but all the same it annoyed him. His wife, Mindy, had called him Christopher from the first day he'd met her. In some mysterious manner, she had intuited his desire and had never once called him Chris. When she'd died, he'd found their home too choked with memories. He'd sold it and moved into an apartment, telling himself that it would be easier to clean.
The ease of cleaning aspect was going to factor heavily into his evening's work. He had a row of paper bags sitting on the floor. Plaster dust had settled over absolutely everything in his office and he'd brought home an assortment of cardboard boxes and bags containing all the books and papers and oddments that he had accumulated over his career. Every piece he pulled out of the bags sent more dust drifting through the air in his apartment. He had the vacuum going and was using the little round fuzzy brush attachment to go over everything. He'd already had to change the filter once and was on the verge of needing to do so again. It was amazing how fine the dust was.
Arken's back was stiff from hunching over for so long. The clock said it was after nine, which made it almost three hours that he'd been vacuuming things. It seemed like forever. Time for a break. After dropping a stack of cleaned paperwork on the kitchen table, he stepped across to the kitchenette and filled a glass with water. On his way back past the table, he happened to notice that the papers he'd cleaned were yellow in comparison to the pages of a novel he'd left open on the table the night before.
He frowned. Surely he'd done a better job of cleaning off the dust than that. Rubbing a finger on the yellowed sheets, however, did not produce much in the way of dust. Nor did it whiten the page.
Curiouser and curiouser. Arken pulled up a chair and sat. He took the top sheet off the pile and examined it closely. An ordinary piece of paper. It just happened to be slightly yellowed. Not enough to be obvious until it was seen against something white as a reference. Of course, the paper used in novels wasn't all that white--more of a light grayish-cream color. So if something appeared yellow compared to that standard, it must be really yellow.
He stood and went to his computer. Pulling a fresh sheet of paper from a ream sitting next to his laser printer, he returned. Seen against a new, white sheet of paper, the yellowing was even more obvious, trending towards the color of parchment.
Okay, so what yellows paper? Well, exposure to chemicals could do it. Nitric acid, perhaps hydrochloric ... but there had been no smell in his office, and either would have left a pungent calling card. Rephrase the question: What is odorless that would yellow paper? That took a moment's thought, but ultraviolet light seemed like a good candidate. So where would the ultraviolet light come from? The fluorescent lights in the ceiling? True, fluorescent lights put out some UV, but not enough to yellow paper in a matter of days. And short of applying the entire output of the lights as heat, there was absolutely no way they could evaporate a nearly full pitcher of water in a mere ninety minutes.
Which left him with a yellowed piece of paper, a failed hypothesis, and a large pile of dusty things that still needed vacuuming. He shrugged and went back to work.
* * * *
As fate would have it, word of his mishap had spread among his students and in consequence Christopher Arken acquired a great deal of perverse interest. A greater than usual number of students--including several he was certain needed no help with physics--came to office hours in his new "office" which was, in fact, a hastily cleaned out storage room on the third floor. Most of them were content with one visit, but each had to be seen, regardless of whether they were there with serious questions or not. Fortunately, the novelty wore off quickly.
What didn't wear off so quickly was the discomfort and inconvenience of being shoehorned into a narrow space that barely provided enough room for him to push back from his desk. Arken was getting quite a collection of bruises on his shins from maneuvering around the desk on the way in and out. His books had been haphazardly stored in a motley collection of cardboard boxes that now lined one wall of the storeroom. His student visitors invariably chose to perch on the cardboard boxes rather than sit in the awkwardly positioned visitor's chair, leading to a certain amount of wear and tear on the boxes. Arken could only hope that the books inside the boxes were taking the punishment gracefully.
He'd been in too much of a hurry on the way in to work that morning to stop by his old office and check on progress, so when lunch finally rolled around he walked down the nearest flight of stairs. Luck was with him and the red-headed leader of the workmen was just leaving, pulling the door to behind him.
Arken explained who he was and asked for an update. The red-headed man pushed the door open and showed him the naked lath. "We finished getting the plaster off the wall this morning. Normally, we'd leave anything that was sound, but in this case, we're going to put up wallboard, so we wanted the lath completely clear."
"So what happened?" Arken asked.
"Well, when the brick let loose, it--"
"Wait a minute ... what brick?"
The workman raised an eyebrow. "You didn't know the brick fell off the outside of this wall, here?"
Arken shook his head. "No, this is the first I've heard of it. I wasn't in here when it happened and I don't normally walk around that side of the building."
"And no one told you? Huh! Okay, the brick on the wall outside your office broke apart and fell. Not entire bricks, just the outer half-inch or so. Split away from the wall and fell to the ground. An area about fifteen feet in diameter. It is, bar none, the single weirdest thing I've ever seen. One brick--okay, you might could see how one brick might have had a crack in it or something, but for a whole round section of the wall to let go..." He shook his head in wonder. "Anyway, the vibration from that must have been what knocked your plaster down. Broke the window, too, but that's already fixed. Had a glazier come by and put new glass in."
"Wow, I'm glad I wasn't in here when it happened. Probably would have scared me to death," Arken said.
The man nodded in agreement. "I imagine so. Anyway ... got some masons coming to tear out what's left of the old brick and put in new. "˜Course, it won't look the same, being as how it's impossible to match old brick like you've got here, but at least it'll keep the weather out. They're worried that the cement will have let go--the rest of the brick might just up and fall out entirely one of these days."
"So how long will it take to get all this back together?"
The workman scratched his head. "Lemme see. Take another day to get the wallboard up and tape the joints. In a house, we'd take longer, but an office like this we just slap-and-go."
Arken grimaced. "Sounds encouraging."
"Hey, man, we offered to do the full do-rah, but they just wanted to get your room back together as soon as possible."
"And paint?" Arken prompted.
"Oh, yeah. That'll be another couple days." He patted the doorjamb. "We should have you fixed up by next Tuesday or so. Wednesday at the latest. I'm not sure when the brick guys are getting here, but other than some noise and people outside your window, there's no reason you can't move back into your office as soon as the paint's done. It's not like you're running around naked in here or anything, so as long as you aren't worried about privacy I'd say that you can plan on being back in here the middle of next week."
Arken thanked him and left.
Part of him was glad that the workmen would be done sooner rather than later. The other part was miffed that the department didn't consider him worth however much extra money it would cost to get the "full do-rah," whatever that might mean.
The bright side was that he'd secretly been wishing they would paint his office for several years now. Willy-nilly, he was going to get new paint. He just hoped that they chose a tasteful color.
* * * *
Knowing that his office would be back in service soon made the cramped storage space easier to tolerate. His exile to the third floor became more like a camping trip--a temporary privation to be proud of, rather than something to complain about. Arken was already practicing lines in his mind, simple throwaways like, "Oh yes, back when my office wall exploded..." After all, it wasn't a tale that his colleagues could easily match. Their lives were unutterably boring and mundane, unlike his. After all, who among them could brag that their office wall had collapsed? Put in those terms, it all seemed rather silly, but it brought a smile to his face nonetheless.
With that, his mood improved and he started finding humor in the situation. He welcomed the students who dropped by during office hours with an airy, "Enjoy the view," even though the storeroom had no window. He got some strange looks, but a few went along with the gag, pretending that they could see through the wall all the way over to the center of town, nearly two miles away.
He had never spent much time on the third floor. Nothing against the place, it was just that he wasn't in the habit of climbing the extra flight of stairs unless there was a need. Now that he found himself on third with a few extra minutes to kill before his Thursday 11:00 lecture, he thought it might be interesting to take the long way around and tour the floor.
Phillips Hall, the physics building, had originally been two separate, parallel buildings back in the early twentieth century. The long axis of the buildings was east-west. In 1957, the two buildings had been joined across their eastern ends with a new, third wing. At the time, the building had been a marvel of modernity, but now it was a worn-out shoe that no longer fit twenty-first century science. Any research that required more than a modest amount of electricity was restricted to either the dank basement or the first floor. The ceiling had been almost completely removed from the basement, allowing orderly ranks of electrical conduits to run along the joists, either to the basement laboratories, or to the floor directly underneath the first floor labs.
Christopher Arken had been assigned a second floor office in the south arm of Phillips Hall for exactly that reason. He was a theoretician, not an experimentalist, and was content with a functioning computer terminal. It worked to his advantage, in that he was graced with a view of the outside world, even if it was bounded by the north arm of the building. He was not one to complain that the walk running between the two wings and through the east wing was a favored route for the coeds living in the dorm just to the west.
Other than the purely practical division between theoretical and experimental work, there was neither rhyme nor reason to the assignment of offices, either by floor or by wing. Eigen was here on third, helping to raise the temperature of effective superconductors. Sanchez was on first, but in the other wing, doing much the same thing, though from an experimental point of view. Wellington was tucked down in the basement, diddling with time. First floor had Marchall-Wingert and his elaborate vacuum chamber, playing with vapor deposition of alloys on ceramic substrates in an attempt to create new semiconductors. When he'd first arrived, Arken had wondered why people weren't arranged in a more logical manner. As time went on, he saw that it was part random availability as offices came open and part inspired cross-fertilization to keep researchers from growing stale.
Arken walked along the hallway, noting that it was almost a carbon copy of the second floor. No surprise there. The east connecting wing was sufficiently different in design that it stood out from the south and north wings, both on the outside and inside. Although somewhat newer, the rooms were smaller and newer members of the faculty were assigned offices here, side-by-side with display cases full of dusty old cloud chambers and poorly labeled X-ray diffraction prints.
The north wing was mirror-imaged from his. Looking through an open office door and out the window, he saw the ivy-covered wall of the south wing. Sure enough, there was a raw scar where the brick had come apart. The newly exposed inner surface of the brick was clean and notably lighter.
Glancing at his watch, he found that he'd taken longer to tour the third floor than he'd intended, and would have to hurry to get down to the first floor lecture hall on time. Something bothered him as he trotted down the stairs, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He chalked it up to the trouble with his office and forgot about it.
* * * *
Christopher Arken heard the siren midway through his lecture. It came from afar and got quite close before it cut off--close enough that his students began glancing at one another and the doors leading out into the hall, as though expecting emergency personnel to come bursting in at any moment. No one interrupted them, however, and they went back to the Lorentz contraction equations without further interruption.
When class ended Arken left for his office, but ran into Bob Tindall before he'd made it ten paces down the hall. "What a week, Chris! First your office falls apart, and now this."
"Now what, Bob?"
Tindall's eyes opened wide. "Oh, wow, you haven't heard? Guy died in your office, not half an hour ago."
"Died? Who died?"
"One of the workmen doing the wall stuff."
Arken was shocked. "What happened? Did he fall off a ladder or something?"
"They don't know. It's complicated. The room's a mess and the guy, well, they say he looks pretty bad."
"Of course the room is messy, it's a construction zone."
"Chris, the wall exploded."
Arken shrugged. "I don't know that I'd go so far as to say that the wall actually exploded--all that happened was that the plaster fell off. That's why they're putting up new walls."
Tindall said very slowly and carefully, "Man, your wall exploded. Today. Just a little while ago. I'm not making this up. Go see for yourself."
When Arken got to his office, there were campus police, city police, and paramedics all crowded into the room. There wasn't room for him to enter.
A female officer looked up and saw Arken standing in the door. "I'm sorry, sir, but you can't come in here. Move along, please." She was already moving to eject him from the scene.
"This is my office," he said simply. "Or at least it was until the walls needed repairing."
Her eyes narrowed. "Did you know this man?" she asked, pointing at the floor.
Arken craned his neck to look between some of the people standing around the body. He was shocked by the body's condition, but forced himself to concentrate on the face. "It looks like--maybe--the man I talked to yesterday, but I can't be certain. He wasn't ... uh ... well, he didn't look like that."
"According to the driver's license in his wallet, his name was Patrick MacGillivray. Does that name mean anything to you?"
Arken shook his head. "No. I never got around to asking his name."
"You said this is your office?"
He nodded.
"Did you keep anything explosive in here?"
"Explosive? No ... why would I?"
The officer looked up from the notes she was taking. She waved her pen vaguely in the air. "You're a physicist. You might be doing an experiment."
Arken had run into this before--the blind assumption that scientists routinely blew things up just to put some excitement into an otherwise boring day. "Uh, no. All the labs are down in the basement or first floor. If there's anything explosive in the building, it would be downstairs. Nobody keeps anything rough in their office."
"Care to explain how this could happen?" she asked, using her pen to point at the nearest wall. Her tone was just shy of accusatory.
The body on the floor had consumed all of Arken's attention so far. Now he saw that large, gray sheets of what he assumed were wallboard had been put up, but the seams between adjacent panels were ragged and torn, as though they had indeed exploded. There were rows of circular divots out of the interiors of each of the panels as well, each with a black screw head exposed in the center of a ripped area.
He squeezed past a paramedic to closer examine the wall, then turned back to her and said, "I have no idea. As I understand the process, they hold up the sheets of wallboard, use screws to fasten them into place, then use some kind of glop to smooth over the heads of the screws and the edges of the boards. Looks as though some sort of chemical reaction took place and it exploded, although I have no idea how that could happen. I don't know what's in the stuff."
"If you ask me, it looks like pudding, but the tub says it's called joint compound. The label on the side of the container says it's mostly crushed limestone and gypsum," she volunteered. "That help any?"
He thought for a moment. "Those are both pretty stable compounds. I can't see any reason why either one would explode."
She questioned him for a few minutes longer, but it was perfunctory by that point. She'd already ruled him out as a suspect in whatever crime she thought had taken place. Her last question, however, took him by surprise. "Can you think of anyone who might want to kill you, Mr. Arken?"
He turned from examining the frayed edges of the wallboard and gave her his complete attention. "Are you suggesting this was murder?"
"It's a possibility, sir. This is your office. Under normal circumstances, you might have been in here this time of day. That," she paused to point at the body on the floor with her pen, "could have been you."
And that put an entirely different slant on things.
* * * *
Christopher Arken walked slowly towards his temporary office, numb to the external world. The police officer's suspicion that someone might be trying to murder him was worrisome, but with a man lying dead on the floor in his office, it was difficult to ignore the possibility. It would be one thing if it was just ugly graffiti scrawled on his door, as had happened to a colleague of his, but death ... that was a another matter entirely.
He decided that he was in no condition to teach a class, taped a note to the door of the classroom to notify his students that it was canceled, and went for a walk. Without any particular destination in mind, he simply went out the nearest door and wandered aimlessly around campus. The idea was bizarre. Murder was something that happened to other people. He hadn't had an affair with anyone's wife. He didn't owe anybody money. He hadn't shafted anyone on a drug deal. He didn't know anything about top secret government research projects. He kept circling back to the unbelievability of it, then would realize yet again that a man had died in his office, wonder how it had happened, come to the point in the conversation where the officer had suggested the possibility of murder--her facial expression was stuck in his mind--only to return to the impossibility of it all. Round and round in circles. If he managed to get off the endless treadmill, his mind went to the mysterious manner in which the workman had died. Arken was also beginning to feel a latent sense of guilt that an innocent man might have died in his place. Not that he wanted to die, but if some innocent third party had been killed in an attempt to murder him, it was going to be hard to live with.
It wasn't until he was halfway across campus that it occurred to him that he was a rather conspicuous target if someone actually was trying to kill him. Being out in public offered a sort of protection, but hardly enough for him to get complacent.
He turned around and started back towards the physics building, moving more rapidly, hating himself for the helpless dread that he felt. He couldn't live his life in fear. He had to know if there was actually someone trying to kill him and if so, why.
He was approaching Phillips Hall from the west. Involuntarily, his eye strayed up to the window of his office. The shattered brick on the outside wall was immediately obvious. He stopped so suddenly that a young man crashed into him from behind, muttered an apology, and went on, intent on his own problems. Arken stood and stared at the pieces of brick on the ground, some a fair distance from the wall. Broken brick, fallen plaster, exploding joint compound, and a dead man. And no obvious connection between the various facts.
Arken took a deep breath and told himself to get a grip. There had to be some connection. Things are only mysterious until they're explained. Afterwards, it's easy to see how it all fits together. The trick is to find the links that complete the chain of events.
He studied the wall outside his office carefully. It wasn't until he turned to face the north wing that the first piece of the puzzle fell into place. There was a small patch of dead ivy at the base of the north wall, almost exactly opposite his office window. Not just dead, but positively scorched. Arken approached the telltale dead spot cautiously, wary that it, too, might explode or do something unexpected. Nearly buried in the ivy was a window, just above ground level. Glancing up and down the length of the wall, he marked the spot in his mind and entered the building through the door in the end of the north wing, a suspicion growing in his mind.
He had paced the wall as he retraced his steps. Now he paced off the basement hallway until he was approximately even with the dead ivy outside. There wasn't a door there, but there was one a few paces behind him. He opened it quietly and slipped into the lab.
There were a half dozen standard 19-inch equipment racks side by side to his left, each full to capacity with electronic gear. Another five racks stood against the wall in front of him. In the center of the room was what appeared to be an optical bench pressed into service as a test bed. Bolted to the metal top of the bench was a tripod supporting a cylindrical stainless steel cylinder with cables going to it from the equipment in the racks. There were also what appeared to be cooling lines.
"Ah, Chris! How're you doing today?" boomed a voice from the corner. "What brings you to this dim and dusty corner of the dungeon?"
Even now he wasn't certain, so Arken proceeded carefully. "I wanted to see how you were getting along with your stasis games."
"Doing well. Real well. In fact, we've been at it hammer and tongs for the last three or four days now, working around the clock. I sent Chu home a little while ago. He's been up for something like thirty hours straight. So have I, for that matter, but it's hard not to be excited when you're finally getting results."
Arken spied a small pile of greasy cardboard pizza delivery boxes next to a trash can filled to the brim with stained paper coffee cups and soda cans. "Eating well, I see. And a firm believer in the caffeine diet, too."
Mark Wellington stood, stretching, as he unfolded himself from behind the rack he'd been crouched behind. "Oh, man, that feels good!" He reached up and grasped a heavy metal conduit overhead, then lifted his feet free of the floor and allowed himself to swing from his fingertips. An impressive array of pops and crackles sounded as his vertebrae settled back into place. He grinned. "Who needs a chiropractor, anyway?" He got his feet back under himself and gestured at a stool. "Sit! Sit!"
Arken warily hitched himself up on the stool, still unsure whether he wanted to be here or not. "Let's see, I talked to you about two, maybe three weeks ago. At that point you thought you were going to be able to get up to a one centimeter diameter stasis field by the end of the week."
Wellington ran his hands through his hair, causing it to stand upright for a moment before it fell over. "The best laid plans, and all that. If you'll pardon the expression, this ain't your father's concept of time we're working on, and the more we pick at it, the more we realize what a hairball the whole thing is. When you and I talked, I was still hoping for a general stasis field. I had a field a little under a millimeter in diameter, but things were acting unpredictably. Parts of the field would enter a pure, complete stasis, where time would stop. Other parts would slow down somewhat, or not at all. All very random, or so it seemed at the time. Chu and I nearly beat ourselves to death trying to figure out why the field wasn't uniform." He took a deep breath and let it out as a long sigh. "A little more work and it turned out that we weren't getting a general stasis field at all. Certain molecules were more affected than others."
"I'm not sure I'm following you. How can you slow down time for some molecules, but not for others? I thought everything in the field was supposed to slow down at once ... all at the same time ... er, to the same degree." He gestured in frustration. "Oh hell, you know what I mean."
"That's what we thought. It does seem reasonable, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way. We began tuning the thing and found that we could actually select which molecules we wanted to put into stasis. Meanwhile the other ones just keep right on truckin', just as though nothing was happening at all. I mean, we'd already thrown out everything we thought we knew about time in order to get that far, but at that point we had to start all over yet again. It's fascinating, I tell you. What we're doing now is trying to plot some of the more obvious molecules--"
"Like water," Arken put in, as another piece of the puzzle fell into place.
Wellington nodded excitedly. "Yes, yes, water! We hunted around and found the tunings for nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and a few other things, but water is the one we've been playing with the last week or so. We've just about got that one licked. Once we get a good idea of the tunings for all the prominent molecular players, we intend to modify the system to produce a broadband noise field instead of a single, discrete frequency. Right now we don't know how much bandwidth will be required--it may be one order of magnitude, or it may be several. Anyway, once we get that question settled, we hope to achieve a true stasis for everything in the field."
Arken nodded in turn, lost in thought. "Mark, let me ask you something. Your stasis field takes time out of the sample, right?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes." He paused, staring into the distance, choosing his words as he went along. "It serves as a receptacle for time ... somewhere where time would prefer to flow, rather than through the sample in the stasis field."
"Then answer me this one, last question. Once you've removed the time from your stasis field, where do you put it? It doesn't just disappear, does it? There must be some place in your mechanism where you radiate the excess time."
"Oh, sure," Wellington said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder towards the wall behind him. "That's back here. The damned thing was getting really, really hot, so we put it next to an open window and let some of that chilly autumn air in to cool it off..."
* * * *
"We don't appreciate you trying to solve this on your own, Mr. Arken," the police officer said with obvious disapproval.
"It wasn't so much that I was trying to solve it. It's more that the answer just sort of fell into my lap," Arken protested.
It was the same female police officer he'd spoken to earlier in the day. Frankly, he didn't like her, and wished that she would simply go away. However, she seemed determined to make him sweat. She scowled at him. "And so you noticed the dead ivy and went to talk to Mr. Wellington," she prompted.
"Professor Wellington," he corrected. "I didn't know it was him, it was just a question of--"
"It was just a question of you counting paces until you located the laboratory behind the dead ivy. That sounds an awful lot like a conscious attempt to solve--"
"Look," Arken said, allowing a bit of annoyance to creep into his tone, "you were the one who jumped to conclusions and decided that someone was trying to murder me. I think it's natural that I might take an interest in the matter."
She moderated her tone somewhat. "All right. Fine. So you went into his laboratory and discovered him hiding behind some equipment."
"Look, Officer, I've known Mark Wellington for years. We're not best friends, but we're on good terms. He may be guilty of negligence, but he certainly didn't set out to murder anyone. He was just trying to get his stasis system to work."
"And this stasis thing is supposed to stop time, right?" she asked.
"Right. But it wasn't stopping time for all the molecules in the field. Only for some of them. So he was trying to modify it so that it would work equally on everything."
"I still don't see the link between that and what happened in your office."
"He discovered how to tune the stasis field for water molecules. Water is common. It's inside you and me, in the ivy, in the air. It's everywhere. Once I saw that, everything else fell into place naturally."
She couldn't bring herself to ask outright, so she prompted him instead, "And that was...?"
"Water was the key to the thing from the very beginning. The water in the pitcher in my office evaporated during the course of a single class period. Time in the stasis field had slowed down for water molecules in his lab, but for things to remain in balance, time had to speed up for water molecules elsewhere. That just happened to be my office. The destiny, so to speak, of the water in the pitcher in my office was to evaporate. The backlash from Mark's stasis field simply made it happen more quickly. Much more quickly. Due to inherent inefficiencies in the system, even more time gets expended on the back end than gets removed from the sample. It's an entropy thing."
"But what happened to the joint compound--" she began, then paused, "Wait ... you're going to tell me that it was because it was wet--that there's water in the joint compound."
Arken nodded. "The water content of the joint compound was going to evaporate, just more slowly. Under normal circumstances, it would evaporate over, say, twelve hours. There would be plenty of time for the water molecules to work their way to the surface of the joint compound and from there into the air. When the water tried to evaporate so quickly, there was no easy way for the water vapor to escape, so it expanded in place and burst the joint compound, as though it had boiled and turned to steam. Something like what happens if you try to fire pottery before it's completely dry. Some of the moisture had soaked into the wallboard, and it burst apart in the same way. That's pretty much the same thing that happened to the brick on the outside of the wall. It was raining the day the wall came apart. Enough rainwater had been absorbed into the brick--brick is more porous than you might think--that it simply blasted the brick apart."
"And the ivy?"
"That's a little more complicated. The water molecules in the ivy would normally have undergone metabolic reactions that kept the plant alive. If everything had sped up at the same rate, the plant might have survived, but only the water sped up. It would be like trying to dance the jitterbug with a partner who wants to slow dance. It simply won't work. The plant died as a result."
"The same thing that happened to the workman in your office."
"Mark and Chu were turning their system on and off as they tried different tunings and configurations. It was bad luck that he was in my office when they decided to try a full power test. Trust me, Wellington feels terrible about what's happened. He's been working day and night in his lab trying to get this going and hadn't heard about anything that's happened."
She gave him a look that clearly said, "So scientists really do blow things up." Aloud, she added, "And assuming that this was all an accident, as you say, then--"
"By all means, talk to Mark. I'm satisfied that it was nothing more than a tragic accident."
"You're not investigating Patrick MacGillivray's death, I am. I'm the one to be satisfied that it was accidental, and if I'm not, then he's going to have to try to convince a jury. What you think is immaterial."
Arken held up his hands. "You're right. Investigate away."
She gave an irritated huff. "Now, as I was saying, assuming that this was actually an accident, is there some way to make this thing safe?"
"It'll either be made safe or Mark will take his apparatus elsewhere to work on it. He's already looking at the design of the time sink, trying to figure out how to make the time that comes out of it more diffuse."
"He'd better succeed. I'll be talking to him as soon as we get done, which is to say, now." And with that, she abruptly left.
* * * *
The smell of paint was strong, but Christopher Arken's office was ready, and he did not intend to waste any time moving back in. Surprisingly, he'd found a new desk and one new bookshelf when he first let himself in. The desk was nice, but the bookshelf didn't match the others. Why they'd replaced one--and one only--he wasn't sure, but as long as it held books he wasn't in the mood to complain. He was tired of his "camping trip" on the third floor and getting resettled into his old office felt like coming home.
He had just started unpacking the fourth box when he heard a polite tapping on the doorframe. He looked up to find Marsha standing there holding a small pot with a cactus in it. "I thought that I would give you something that could stand a little inattention, since the--"
"It wasn't my fault! Honest. Mark's stasis field--"
She nodded, smiling. "I know, I know. I was just teasing you. Still, I thought that I'd get you a little something to make the place feel more like home."
"Uh, Marsha, you didn't have to do that."
"Think of it as a housewarming gift."
There was nothing to do but give in gracefully. "Thanks."
She glanced around warily. "So tell me, is it going to be weird being in here knowing that a man actually died right where your desk is? I mean, it would creep me out."
"He seemed like a decent guy, but it's not as though I actually knew him. I only talked to him the one time. I'm sure it's rough on his family, though."
She nodded. "I hear that they let Mark off the hook."
"It was an accident. It's horrible that someone died, but it wasn't something Mark did on purpose. He's got a new technology by the tail, and there's a lot to learn yet. He and Chu just didn't realize that their stasis field had the potential to kill. Now they know. It was the worst sort of way to find out, but..." He shook his head. "It's over now. Mark will be more careful, and things will be okay."
"I sure hope so," she said. "I'd hate to sit in here knowing that you're in the cross hairs of something like that. It'd scare me to death."
And that was the crux of the thing--cross hairs.
Christopher Arken stood at the window, looking thoughtfully at the dead ivy at the base of the wall of the north wing. It was a good fifty feet if it was an inch. And yet the waste time that Mark Wellington had been getting rid of had reached across the intervening space with enough force to blast a wall and kill a man.
No one had ever given it much thought before, because no one had ever managed to concentrate time; it had always been homogeneous. But now that Wellington had managed to manipulate time, it turned out to have some characteristics in common with electromagnetic waves. By all rights, the waste time from his test apparatus should have obeyed an inverse square law and dissipated to such an extent that it was harmless by the time it hit the wall outside his office. It hadn't. In one of those cosmic flukes like the discovery of vulcanized rubber or penicillin, Mark Wellington had serendipitously designed a time sink that radiated time in a tight beam. Arken doubted that it was an optimal design. That would come later ... after the government got involved.
And that was only a matter of time because, in effect, Mark Wellington had created a death ray.
(c)Copyright 2006 by Grey Rollins