Category: photog’s Corner

“I said, That’s impossible.  That world has been dead forever.  You must be mistaken.”  Bertram McKenzie shook his head and I could see there were tears in his eyes, “No the stars don’t lie.  We are one thousand years in the future and that is Earth or what’s left of it.  And the rest of the solar system has also been impacted.  Mercury is completely gone.  Venus is worse than Earth and even Mars has lost its atmosphere completely.  The only thing I can think of is that a massive disruption of the Sun’s fusion process occurred in the last thousand years; something like a nova.  And the Earth as we knew it was destroyed utterly.”  I asked him exactly when did it happen and he said, “Without searching for the event it’s impossible to know.  It could have happened just a few years after our present day in the twenty first century or it could have been almost a thousand years in the future, right before when we are now.”

And then I asked him the question I had been thinking about most, “Bertram did we cause this?”  And he shook his head violently, “No!  No, no, no.  I didn’t do this.  This is just a coincidence.  How could the tiny energy I used to transport us cause this stellar event.  It’s not possible!”  But I was pretty sure there was fear in his voice and panic.

I was as frightened and panicked as McKenzie but I could see we had to get back to our time as quickly as possible and try to get ourselves re-grounded with reality.  I told him, “Alright none of this is anything we can act on here and now.  Let’s go home.”

The boys did some calculations and set up the drive within a few minutes and we made another run.  This time it was our Earth.  Alive and blue and beautiful.  I think there must have been tears in everyone’s eyes.  We were back about the time we left the LHS 1140 system to come back to Earth.  We had decided that two sets of “us” in the same time period even fifty light years apart might be asking for trouble.  We brought the craft in for a landing and I sent everyone home for the day.  And I went home that night and got pretty thoroughly drunk.

The next morning, I tried to think of who I should tell this awful thing to.  In a 1950s science fiction movie there would be a convenient convention of physicists with someone resembling Albert Einstein to break the news to.  All we had was tech billionaires and all they would be interested in was how to short the market at the perfect moment.

So instead, I decided to tell the President of the United States and let him figure out how to let the world know they were doomed.  Or maybe not let them know.  After all, maybe we should have some smart men think about this for a few days and then break the news in a way that won’t stampede civilization off a cliff any sooner than it already was.

I got on the phone to the White House and I set up an appointment with the President and his science advisor.  And I got a few of the wise men from the voyage to put together a dog and pony show to give some proof to my story.  It wasn’t a normal experience.  I don’t think either man actually believed me.  But the President told me not to breath a word of this to the press or anyone else until the NSA had a chance to think up a way to break it to the public.

On the flight back to Texas I got a text from McKenzie.  He said he needed to talk to me so I told him to meet me at my home at midnight.  He was there when I arrived and he looked like hell.  He said, “I think we did spark the nova.  When we caused the surge in the field that threw us back into the distant past it must have disrupted the time-space environment of the solar system and triggered the solar activity that destroyed Earth.”  I said, “Well, it’s too late to do anything about that now.  What we have to do is figure out how to save humanity from this disaster.  And I don’t think it’s a good idea to be taking the blame for all of this.  That’s probably the fastest way to commit suicide I can think of.”

But he shook his head and said, “But there is a way to fix this.  We take the ship and travel through both time and space and meet up with our ship while it’s in the LHS 1140 system and tell them how to adjust their program to avoid the surge.  Then the disruption will be prevented and everything will be back to normal.”

I think I looked at him as if he had three heads and said, “Do you know how insane that sounds?  How can we change the past?”  But he just shook his head and said, “It’s the only way!”

I told him to take the week off and we’d talk about this crazy idea when we’d both had a chance to get some rest.  I went to bed and when I got up in the morning there was a message from the field saying that McKenzie had refueled the ship and taken off.  At about the same time there was a message from Bertram it read, “Devon, I performed the mission.  Meeting myself was a frightening but interesting experience.  I convinced them to change the program and afterward I took a time trip, about fifty million years into the future and the big beautiful blue earth was still there.  So, all’s right with the world.

But I realized that this technology is much too dangerous for humans to fool around with.  So, I’m not coming back and I’ve taken all the key documents you would need to duplicate my invention.  I’m going home.  Goodbye.

Bertram McKenzie”

And that’s almost the end of the story.  He never came back.  But he said he was going home.  So, I had a contractor do a metal detector search of the area where the McKenzie family has lived in Maine for the last two hundred years and sure enough, they found a lot of those precious metals buried out in a field in Maine.  There was a rock with an inscription carved into it, “HEY DEVON.  THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.””

At that point Devon stopped talking and just stared out at the wall behind me.  I said, “Well, it sounds like it all worked out for the best.”  His eyes snapped back on my face and he said, “Sure, sure.  You’re right, everything’s great.  I guess I’m just tired.”

But as I sat there, I thought of something, “Devon, if McKenzie met up with his earlier self and yours in the LHS-1140 system and they came back on time where are they now?”  He looked at me and nodded his head, “That’s what I’ve been thinking about.  I think the program fix he gave them destroyed their ship inside that system.  We’ll probably never know but I kind of think in some sense I may be a ghost.”

He was preoccupied so I said my farewells and left.  I’m not sure I believe the story, but I think he does.  I think I feel sorry for the richest man in the world.

“McKenzie’s face paled and his eyes were wide.  He said, “Something must have happened at the end of the program.  It got us back to Earth alright but then some kind of power surge must have caused a tachyon overload and shot us back along the time axis.  I need to review the instrument data.  I can figure out a way to send a tachyon pulse in the opposite phase and throw us forward but I need to do some calculations to calibrate the size of the pulse.  This is an enormous time change.  It may take a few oscillations forwards and backwards to calibrate it perfectly to our present day.  So, it may take us a few days to get home.”  I calmed down considerably after hearing this and told McKenzie to take his time and not to get upset.  And he did seem calmer after I said this.

The seven wise men got to work and were buzzing away at the data from the drive instruments for several hours.  And over the course of those hours, I suddenly began to see this accident as an opportunity.  I asked the photographic expert to see what he could do to capture as much data on Earth at 55 million BC.  And when I said this, it was like a switch was snapped on him and he got incredibly excited realizing what a scientific opportunity was in front of him.  And McKenzie lost one of his assistants as this fellow worked feverishly to record everything he could before we left the distant past.

And within a day they had their program worked out.  They even found out what had gone wrong.  Apparently, the drive needed a slower de-ramping at the end of the cycle to completely rule out the overload we had experienced.  McKenzie even cavalierly said it had been a lucky break because now we could add time travel to the capabilities of his drive.  And I laughed seeing him so full of bravado.

We set the time voyage for the next “morning,” whatever that meant, and when the time was upon us, we put on a brave face but I could tell everyone was keyed up.  We strapped in and the drive snapped on.  All the familiar feeling happened and then after what felt like a slightly longer period it shut down.  We cranked back the cover off the viewing port and there was Earth.  And it was awful.  The oceans were gone.  The planet was a blasted airless rock like the Moon.

We were all hit hard.  I said to McKenzie, “What is this?”  He looked even more upset than before but stammered out, “I must have overshot by a billion years.  This must be Earth after the sun runs out of hydrogen and becomes unstable.  But it doesn’t seem possible I could have been off so badly.”  He said he would use the position of the stars to get a read on how far in the future we were.  I said, “Sure, go ahead.”  And I tried to sound casual but I was scared, plenty scared.

The boys got busy figuring out the date from star locations.  After a few hours McKenzie came back to me and said he had the date.  I asked him how far in the future we were and in a flat intonation he croaked out, “A thousand years.””

“When we returned from Pluto we began the planning for the first interstellar trip.  We had about fifty stellar systems that had earthlike planets in what we measured to be the Goldilocks Zones around their stars.  We selected a red dwarf about fifty light years from earth; LHS 1140 whose second planet was believed to be a super-earth well within the habitable zone of its star.  We intended to take a lot of measurements of the planet and its neighborhood and then head straight home.

The crew would be me, McKenzie and a six-man science team that would take the measurements of the exoplanet and the surrounding system.  I also insisted that Bertram train one of his colleagues on his star drive in case any accident incapacitated him before the return.  He started laughing when I told him this, “Afraid I’ll jump ship and go native?”  I told him this was a dangerous mission and we had to have some redundancy for something as important as the astrogation.  He laughed again but he put together a manual for running his equipment and trained one of his “bosses” for the upcoming flight.

McKenzie set up the program for LHS1140 and the ship was equipped for a one-month voyage; oxygen, water, food, medicine.  I even brought some firearms, only because I realized where we were going there was no law in effect other than force.  I kept the locker those were in under lock with me the only one with a key or even knowledge of their existence.  I guess that was a little paranoid but you never know.

Came the morning of the trip everything had been inspected three times and the dashboard was all green lights.  We launched into the upper atmosphere and McKenzie set the program and a display counted down from sixty seconds.  When it reached zero, we felt the strange sensations of the drive for a few moments and then we felt normal again.  When we uncovered the viewing port there was a strange world far below us and the light of a red star was illuminating it.  The whole crew burst into spontaneous cheers.  You never saw seven nerds happier than these boys.  I thought they would never stop slapping each other on the back and jabbering about who had been most right about the planet’s appearance.  I have to admit I was pretty excited too.  That world was a mostly ocean planet with white clouds and what looked like island chains sprinkled across the equator.  There were even what looked like ice caps at the poles.  It was an amazing sight.

The boys spent the next week photographing and taking spectrograms of everything they could see.  I made a decision that for this first trip we would not enter the atmosphere of the planet.  Probably out of an exaggerated sense of caution I wanted to make sure that no microbes from this alien world found their way back to Earth.  The boys were bitterly disappointed but shrugged their shoulders and took it in stride.  After all, even a week flew by shockingly fast because of how busy all the observations and tests kept them.

Finally, I set the return hour for the morning of the eighth day.  McKenzie recalibrated his instruments by stellar observation and as the final minutes ticked off, we took our places and strapped in for the ritual.  Once again, the skin numbness and mental unease hit me but a few moments later it ceased and we cleared the viewing port to see Earth below us.  The rotation of the Earth had us facing the Eastern Hemisphere and so we could see Africa and Asia.  But something was screwed up.  India was floating off shore.  There was ocean between it and the Asian continent.  And when you looked at the whole world all of the land masses were “off.”

One of the scientists explained it to me, “That’s what Earth looked like 55 million years in the past.”  I looked at McKenzie and said, “I hope you brought your tools because we’re a long way from home.””