At the Edge of the Winner's Circle

D.E. Helbling

Copyright (c) 1991

Richard Fentz was working late in the lab again, cursing another failed attempt to repair his frequency pulsed ion beam. Without it, he had no chance of duplicating the results of his earlier efforts. He threw his hands up in despair, then ran them through his long strands of dark, loosely curled hair, tempted to pull out a lock or two.

His long hair was the only remaining badge of a bygone era, a decade of conflict between indulgence and academic excellence. Now the hair, like his patience and his credibility in the physics department here at the university, was wearing thin. He knew that few among the staff really believed he had ever successfully operated his mass reduction device.

No one was more happy about this, Richard also knew, than the Dean of Physics, Gene Royt. That the basic premise of his work held some promise, not even Gene had argued. He reviewed Richard's original paper on the subject before publication in "K-Particle Physics Review" and, as the department head, was more than willing to add his name as co-author. Now that months of work failed to produce a single repeatable demonstration, things were no longer quite so communal.

After Gene's last visit to the lab, Richard was fairly certain that the success he had reported the previous week was viewed as a last ditch effort to save face, or worse yet, a futile attempt to prolong funding for the research. And now, now Royt was coming for another "inspection". Richard could imagine his taunting, gloating smirk staring back at him over the oak desk in the next room, the desk that Eugene Morris Royt kicked his feet up on while he administered project resources and lab allocations with all the grandeur and bearing of a monarch in exile. So Richard was scrambling at this late hour, determined to somehow make it work again, just one more time.

But it was already too late.

"Any change, Fentz?" he heard from over his shoulder.

Richard spun around on his bench stool to face the inimitable Dr. Royt as he walked his pudgy, bald, and annoying frame the rest of the way through the door.

"Nothing consistent," Richard exaggerated. He knew, they both knew, that there was nothing new to report.

"Have you given any thought to your next project?" Gene asked, in some vaguely concerned way, not quite looking Richard in the eye.

"That's it, then? You're bagging it?" Richard snapped, staring right back.

"Well, you've still got a couple thousand left on your grant. You are certainly free to continue until that runs out."

"That's very generous of you, Dr. Royt." Exaggeration, again.

"Now look, there is no need to get sarcastic. You've been given every opportunity to prove your hypothesis, Rick. I think it's time you face the corner you've painted yourself into and admit that this just isn't going anywhere."

Rick, huh? That was a first, Richard thought. "Look, Gene, it's late. I'm sorry, I just guess I'm a bit short-fused right now. I'm sure that you'll find something suitable for me to work on as soon as this grant runs its course. Do you have any ideas you want me to pursue?"

No, I won't argue with you, you pompous bastard, Richard thought. Not tonight. Maybe later, after the next grant is approved and I have another obscure little space to work in for another six months, possibly at a school with a real physics wing. Meanwhile, crawl back into your office. Go back to sleep in your comfortable chair.

"Well, we'll get together next week and talk about it. I suggest you get some of that much needed rest in the meantime."

"Thank you, Doctor. Good night."

"And thank you, God," Richard muttered, under his breath, as Dr. Royt turned to leave. That was about as much mock sympathy as he could stomach without subsequent acts of violence. At least Royt hadn't found out about the broken generator. Did the senior physicist on campus resent him more because he was younger or because he was at least working on some idea of his own? Richard wasn't sure and no longer cared. That Royt took pleasure in his eventual failure was enough for him to at least contemplate with relish his private image of the violent act he knew he would never commit.

He spun back around to face his lab bench, reaching to pick up Test Ball Number One.

"Why won't it work any more?!" He tossed the ball back and forth from left to right a couple more times, then replaced it reverently on its little plastiglas pedestal atop the bench copy of his thesis.

"Potential for Mass Reduction Effects of Controlled Magnetic Flux Environment Ion Particle Beam Target Media, by Richard Morris Fentz", read the cover of the paper. The result of several semesters of work, it was the very sweat and blood of his brain, the most promising of the many papers he had written during his twenty five odd years of research. It had a nice ring to it, too, he thought, and a fairly sound basis in the theorems of other recently proven corollaries to some of the lesser known theories of relativity and subatomic particle physics, all of which was rather pointless now.

He reached, one more time, for his stainless steel trophy. The polished globe had started out at a very precise five pounds. It now weighed four point nine three two two five pounds, for reasons his paper explained, but no one would believe, because he could not make it happen again. He wished he could afford to have the ball analyzed, but as as the Dean of this gigantic four person department had reminded him, he only had a little money left in the grant, and he would need it to try to repair the beam generator. The thing wasn't really that sophisticated; it was little more than an X-ray machine with a frequency knob, with the exception of the emitter tube, yet it's role in the project was critical.

Looking back, he wondered if Royt's willingness to lend his name to the paper wasn't really just a reason to get the generator into the department. The few papers Royt had published in the last few years had been met with little fanfare in the scientific community. Richard had been in the field long enough by now to know that they had received little acknowledgement of any kind. Royt's own efforts to get funding, inside or outside the barriers of this rustic little liberal arts university, had all failed. If he could get just a few whiz bang gizmo's, Richard figured, Royt thought he would probably be able to attract some of that inspired endowment money. The professor had never shown any genuine respect for the devices themselves, only for their ability to generate more research revenue.

Now, thanks to Richard, Bramer Valley University could boast a pulsed frequency controlled ion beam generator among its educational assets. Had he actually used the beam in his ever so thoroughly calibrated, measured, magnetically controlled environment, to reduce the mass of this metal egg? He was starting to wonder himself.

Dr. Royt and the others were convinced that, unlike Test Ball Number Two, now in place on the digital scale at the focal point of his ion generator, this ball had NEVER weighed five pounds. He imagined the guesses they must be making behind his back. Did he specially fabricate some alloy to appear identical to Ball Two? Or did he rig the scale to somehow read constantly low only when Ball One was on it?

None of them could explain what he somehow did, because they didn't believe it had been done. Yet Richard remembered every detail of the Event like it was ten minutes ago.

He had first adjusted the large blue dial on the panel in front of him. It controlled the strength of the field inside the magnetically tuned environment that was the top of his test bench. A square frame of thin gauge angle steel formed a skeleton cube the size of a tea crate on the soapstone surface of the bench. The cube formed the perimeters of the Hemholtz cage, for all intents and purposes, a magnetic box. Then, time to continue the standard sequence: he tweaked the flux density, the red knob next to the blue one, and reached for the power switch to the particle beam generator that feed its frequency-modulated pulses into the cage.

Richard had liked the colored knobs. He added them early on in the project for a sort of Sesame Street effect. See here. Push this button. Make the little ball weigh less than before. See here. It was really a sideways insult to Royt, who really didn't have a clue as to how Richard's equations worked. Now the knobs no longer amused him. Push this button, and break the virtually irreplaceable imported particle beam generator you stayed an extra three semesters here at Backwater U to use. Perhaps he should have gone the Royt route, sought tenure and power, then at least he would now be free to continue without interference.

Some weeks earlier on in the project, the gym teacher who taught fitness in the classroom on the floor below had come into the room, ranting and panting, totally unglued because she heard there was a particle beam weapon shooting subatomic pieces around above her. She demanded that the entire project be shut down or moved to another building, preferably one in another town. He had assured her that it was not a weapon, that the radiation from these "teenee little particles" were less harmful than the glow the headsup map and gauge displays in her car, but she wouldn't buy it. If it's so harmless, she had asked, why do the building lights keep fluttering every time the damn thing gets turned on?

Doctor Royt had come through for him then, he remembered. Department heads were actually good for some things. In his mind he could see Gene talking to her, making gestures with his hands, explaining that while the generator did consume large amounts of power, it didn't actually produce much at all. Kind of a mechanical government. This she could understand.

With everything on-line at the same time for the first time, Richard had chuckled to himself as he threw the switch. He watched as the lights dimmed as always. Once, twice, three times, then a fourth flicker, as each of the beam's internal power supplies kicked in. He wondered if she was down there now, watching the lights dim, worrying that she was being bombarded. He had been forced to modify the beam's power feed circuitry so it wouldn't blow the breaker every time they used it.

The so-called physics wing of the building consisted of Royt's office next door, this lab, and two classrooms. It was really wired for the language and sociology classes the founding fathers of the school had intended. The intrusion of technology studies onto the curriculum had been a concession from the start; the concession had never extended as far as the facilities. Modifying the beam generator had allowed Richard to avoid spending a big part of his grant on rewiring the lab to accommodate the special equipment.

Now it came up, one grid bank at a time, instead of all at once. He wondered again, briefly, if his modifications had somehow caused the beam to fail. This additional compromise of working on an anorexic budget, he though, would be the most laughable of all the possible gotchas. For want of a watt, and all that.

The lights steadied and he waited and watched, as the hum from the beam leveled off in its low frequency drone. Five, ten, twenty seconds later and he watched in awe as the mass reading on the steel ball dipped. An immediate drop of some fraction of an ounce was showing plainly on the six figure LED display of the digital scale supporting the steel test sphere!

But that was before, just that once, and only once.

Like some mad Faustian scholar on a frantic quest for the Lost Chord, Richard had spent the previous several days struggling to repair the beam generator: calls to the manufacturer in Germany; runs to the electronic component store for parts; a trip to the airport for components shipped via overnight carrier. His own lectures he had long since delegated to the the other two post-grad minions. He took meals in the lab room, slept briefly back in his dorm room, then returned three or four hours later for another go at it.

No luck again tonight. No last minute save before Royt's little visit. The LED's on the power panel of the beam generator still stared back at him in cold, dark defiance. He glanced over his notebook. The lines started running together.

Richard stood up from the bench for a moment and started to swoon. Too many skipped meals. He decided to take a short stroll down the hall to the vending machines for another coffee and a stretch of the legs, then return refreshed to begin again. When he got there, he asked for the usual coffee and doughnuts, but the machine responded with "Sorry, that selection is currently unavailable."

"You piece of crap," he cursed, raising his arm to swing at this other mechanical adversary of long standing, then in his fury dizzied again, reminded of just how little attention his own personal needs had received in these last few days. A sudden desire for fresh air drew him out of the building and into the night.

At this hour few students could be seen on campus. Most were in their own dorm rooms by now, mulling over tomorrow's assignments or tonight's lover. He smiled at the memory of this term's confused first-time dormers, amazed that one so old as he could still be living on campus. He never explained it, preferring to let them think that they, too, might be forty five before they finish with school.

He cast a glance over the skyline, seeing with a new eye the lights of the other campus buildings as they mingled with those of the downtown highrises blocks away. A pretty night. Though no stars seemed to penetrate the cloud cover, he imagined them above him, looking down in quiet admiration as he gazed up from below, poised to walk back indoors and finish making The Big Discovery. Pity I'll have to disappoint you, he thought.

He walked back into the building feeling refreshed and renewed. As he strolled into the lab room and up to the bench, parking himself onto the stool, he shivered, unsettled. Something was wrong.

He looked first at the beam generator, parked in its usual spot on the floor to the right of the bench, with most of its guts spread out next to it, wires and components dangling together like a mound of capsized spiders on a plate of orange and blue spaghetti. He looked at his tools and odd assortment of meters, lying there where he'd left them on the next to the generator. Then he looked at his bench top.

The damn ball, Ball Number Two, was gone!!

He jumped out of his seat and ran out the door to the lab and down the hall. Whoever had taken it mustn't be far away! But as he stood in the front of the building, where he had stood moments earlier admiring the skyline, he could see no one.

Nor had he seen anyone, he remembered, as he came back in the building mintues ago. So they must be still in the building. He ran back in, chasing up and down the halls. Locked, locked and dark, every door was locked and not a person to be found.

Another frat prank? He wondered. Or maybe one of Royt's little mind games? He strutted towards Gene's office, ready to read him the first three chapters of Inferno, the Gaelic translation. Royt's door? Royt was sitting there in his think position, feet on the desk and arms behind his head, snoring away. No, he thought, it's not Royt.

He finally decided that whoever stole it didn't really comprise a threat to the project. Sometime during his running up and down the halls, the truth had come home. In his panic to find the missing ball, enough of his mind was freed from solving the generator problem that the answer came to him.

The emitter tube was fried.

The little hunk of glass and metal was more than just expensive and nearly impossible to replace, at least for him. It was the key to the generator's ability. The coatings of the tube, consisting of highly refined rare earth elements, its superconductive filaments, special crystalline housing, polyplast-ceramic insulators, superconductive interconnects, all combined to give the beam its special properties. Most of these properties could be summed up simply as an order of magnitude improvement in fine control over the intensity of the beam produced. Some properties were manifest in the beam's ability to rapidly respond to changes in input. In Royt-speak, it was simply Bandwidth, with a capital "B". "Gotta have that bandwidth in all your beam generators," Richard mumbled in recollection. "And response time? Hell, yes!! We can give your response time." He snapped himself out of used lab equipment salesman mode long enough to remember that these were the properties he had taken advantage of in bringing his calculations to tangible reality.

Had he zapped the tube during its first use, with his power supply workarounds? Or did it get zapped by some sort of feedback from the magnetic tomb of the Hemholtz cage? It didn't matter now. No emitter tube, no generator. No generator? Well, the rest didn't matter either, not anymore.

He returned to the lab bench and started working his way through his notes; the pages of records of the combinations of replacement components he had swapped out clearly showed that he had by this time replaced the entire unit, except for the damned emitter tube. He had simply blocked it out, he guessed, until he was distracted long enough to forget to forget.

Three hours later, he was still in his back-wrenching hunch on the bench stool, bent over the trailing end of his notes. Somewhere in these numbers, these wonderfully fascinating, unique, bizarre relationships between mass and externally applied energy, somewhere in there was the answer to why his dead emitter tube was setting on the floor next to him in his dead generator. It still seemed pretty damn pointless, he thought, reaching a last time for Ball One. He bounced it back and forth between left and right a couple more times before setting it back, no not on the pedestal, he thought, let's put it over there on the scale, where Ball Two would have been, where Ball Two would now be reading some low mass value of its own.

As he placed Ball One on the scale, his jaw dropped. What? The LED's now showed that it now weighed four point seven two nine pounds. Another stare of disbelief showed no change in the reading.

He reached out and yanked Ball One off the scale like he was avoiding some kind of electric shock, stared at it, tossed it up the air a couple of times. It felt the same. He had played with it so much the last few days he could probably detect a quarter percent change in weight just by the feel. He reached back to return it to the scale again when he noticed that it was no longer reading zero?

"Oh God", he muttered, "Maybe a flaky scale screwed me up after all. Check your measuring equipment, fool." Another lesson in elementary empirical science from the makers of cold fusion. He pressed the reset/recalibrate button on the scale and it returned to zero. But as he did so, he saw something that had escaped his scrutiny before.

The ball dip zone, that little curved receptacle area where the ball rested on top of the scale without falling off, seemed deeper than before. In fact it appeared considerably deeper. Why didn't he noticed it? Lack of sleep?

Placing Ball One back in the dip zone, he could see that it sank deeper than it had before. Time, he thought, for bed. Much too late. Powers of observation now reduced.

He stood up from the stool, then almost doubled over, as his joints protested resentfully over their lack of use. He stretched slowly, first his arms up overhead, then his legs, one at time, forward then back, forward then back, and found himself falling ...

As the room abruptly shifted from bright fluorescent to dim moonlight, he could see his hands, stretched out in front of him for balance, suspended over a glassy plane of sparkling light.

In the next second and a half, a thousand possibilities blazed through his mind. A near death experience? A heart attack at the bench? No time for wonder. The surface of the lab floor came up to meet his chin, and he went out.

Richard awoke some undetermined moments later in unbelievable pain. His pounding head was cradled in the lap of someone with a black head, a head he saw looking down over him, busy applying some medication to his upper lip. He reached up to feel it; he must have nearly bit it off. The black-headed, perhaps hooded person pushed his hand away, mumbling something unintelligible.

As the mumble concluded, a feminine, slightly mechanical-sounding voice said, "Be still. Do not move."

He fought the urge to struggle, then yielded to the waves of relief now replacing the pain in his lip as the hooded one smeared some kind of salve slowly from one side of his lip to the other.

"Be calm. You will be fine," the voice continued.

A distinctly close splashing noise broke him away from staring into the now noticeably feminine eyes of the black hooded person stroking his forehead, while the surface beneath him gently rocked back and forth. He started struggling again, but she, yes, it was a she, he knew that much, held him firmly in place, then mumbled again.

Moments later, he heard the voice say, "It is fine. You are in a boat."

The voice, he noticed, appeared to be coming out of a little box on her shoulder. He looked past her shoulder to the same twinkling field of night stars he had seen those brief moments before conking out. Even on the clearest night, he had not remembered such a crystal-bright sprinkle of sky glitter.

He looked back into her eyes, soft, caring, concerned eyes that they appeared to be, and started to fade out again.

Later he awoke to see those same soft, caring, and yes now plainly beautiful green eyes still staring down at him between cascading locks of dark auburn hair. "Gyeslowtenden," she said. "How are you feeling?" asked the little box stuck to her shoulder.

"I feel fine," Richard said, not stopping to think before he answered. "Where am I?"

"Kmen yar shmendahike," she said, or something like it. The box said, "Save that question for a later time." She continued to speak, but he stopped listening to her for the moment; the box was a little easier to understand.

"You must take your rest at this time. Soon, you will be questioned and you will be answered." She smiled at him.

A Florence Nightingale smile? He had not looked at a woman in admiration since the last time he took a summer vacation, some two years earlier. A smile like that on a face like that with such a deliciously foreign accent? Accent?! Maybe, he shuddered, may his NDE was more D than N.

For a moment he had forgotten that matchbook-sized voice-actuated language interpreters, like the one he was apparently now conversing with, didn't exist, not outside of UFO Enquirer's Update, anyway. Yet her persisting smile dissuaded him from panic. She mumbled again and the box told him to open his mouth, then swallow. Richard opened up and she slipped a capsule between his lips. He swallowed, then slept, dreaming a relaxed, safe and warm dream of a relaxed, safe, calm boat ride with a delightful green-eyed woman with a delightful accent and long, luscious curls of the warmest brown hair, flowing on and on in a sea of warm and relaxed safety ...

When he awoke, she was still looking him over. Next to her were more faces, considerably less warm and definitely not relaxed. They were arguing amongst themselves, as near as he could tell, in the same language he had heard from her lips before.

"Enough now, he is awakening," announced one of the boxes on one of the shoulders. Each of the three, yes there were three of them, each of the three people now looking him over stopped abruptly in their discussion. The Auburn One reached out toward him and lifted him gently up into a sitting position.

"It is time now. You have a few mintues," her box said, "to ask and be asked."

Richard looked at her and her two companions. The one on her right was a square-jawed and seriously handsome blonde man of perhaps thirty, the one on her left a dark haired woman who looked remarkably like her. Maybe they were sisters. They were all wearing the same dark garb, form-fitting and shiny, like wet silk. Richard started to ask them a question, then stopped, struggling for words, as he stared past the three of them, towards the craft, the boat, as she called it, that they all must have been in together some recent moments or hours earlier.

It was quite unlike any boat he had seen before. In shape it appeared similar to the motorized inflatables he had watched down at the river in the summer, boats that pulled skiers around and swamped canoes. This boat did look much like them, except for the fishlike fins protruding from the back, fins that even now looked like they were flapping back and forth a bit.

"Do not concern yourself with the nature of your rescue craft, Richard Joseph Fentz," Auburn's box announced.

"You have me at a disadvantage," he responded. The Auburn One looked at him with a puzzled expression. "I don't know your names."

A smile of discovery dawning in her eyes, she said, "Dana"

"Dana," said her box.

"Jaaspendt," said the blonde gentleman, as did his box.

"Yantz," replied the remaining pair.

"Well, Dana," he asked, "Where am I, how did I get here, and what is it that you want to know?"

Dana looked at her two companions, then back at him, and began. "Richard Joseph Fentz, here is--"

"Please, call me Richard."

"Richard, here is Lake Fentz. You arrived here in the same manner these did. What we want to know is when the rest of your party is going to arrive."

Dana reached her hand out to him, then opened it to reveal a silver ball about the size of a pea, then with her other hand gave him another, close to the size of Ball Number Two. Of course, the "BALL NUMBER TWO" label on the side was a bit of a hint.

Richard reached out and took them from her, examining each. Then he reached up to her shoulder, touching her little translation box. He looked back over her shoulder at their boat.

"Shit," he said.

Her box made a sort of a bleeping noise and she and Yantz and Jaaspendt laughed, the first smiles he had seen on the faces of the other two.

"What can you tell me about your equations, Richard?" her box asked him. "We know you had set up a repeating series of converging parameters to validate your hypothesis regarding matter/mass displacement. We do not know which of these parameters you used in your experiments at Bramer Valley."

He tried to deny the obvious, to himself at least. He didn't answer.

"How far apart were your time intervals on the power initialization sequence of the beam generator? It is very important that we know."

"About two seconds each, I would guess," he answered without thinking.

"How long was it between when you first operated the generator and, well, when you arrived here?"

"Oh, I guess about five days."

Dana looked at him like he was truly gone. Maybe she was right, but she took that moment to reach up and touch her little box, as did her companions. Their next several minutes of conversation were not translated, save for occasional glances of suspicion or perhaps contempt that required no mechanical interpretation.

Then she shook her head, in some obvious disagreement with the other two, and reached up to switch on her translator.

"Richard, we have a problem. You came to be here by result of your work. I think we did not make that clear. I think you do not realize how far you have traveled. These balls of steel in your hands? They are portions of the test balls you were using in your 'mass reduction' experiments."

Richard nodded in acknowledgement. She continued.

"The small one? This is the inner core of the first test ball from the first time you ran the experiment. The larger one? The second ball, with some part of the equipment beneath it. The next run. You, with a spherical portion of your lab room. That is now out there, in the water." She paused, pointing out toward the center of the lake.

"So here is the future. How far into the future?"

"That is not an issue now, Richard," she replied, genuine worry resting rigid on her face.

"How do you know of my work?"

"Richard, when those parts of your lab disappeared, when you disappeared with them, people of your time began to take your work very seriously. They studied your published papers, to replicate your results, though they apparently did not understand them. In the time span of five years from you left, a new military science formed around your efforts. 'Mass Reduction', to eliminate people, war engines, cities. Without bodies, without rubble, without residual radiation. An ideal weapon, by the standards of your time."

"Eventually," she continued, "it was used for such purposes. Not until much later was the nature of your discoveries truly understood. The users of your 'Mass Reduction' technology thought they were destroying their targets, not relocating them. The amount of mass displacement the target experienced was, we know, a linear function of the energy applied, nothing in your setup would change that. The amount of temporal displacement, and how long it took for the 'send' to take effect after application of the required energy, these relationships were more complex. They were not fully explained by your published calculations."

"The small, then larger balls, " Richard observed, looking blankly into his palms.

"Then you. Exactly."

"So where is the controversy?" Richard asked, visibly struggling to grasp all the ramifications of what he had just heard. "If you know all this, what difference does it make how long it took for my initial test to actually work? I'm here now!"

"Because, Richard, your lab was not the last sphere to be transmitted."

Richard looked at Dana, at Yantz, then over to Jaaspendt. They were a serious looking bunch. He stood up, wobbling a bit, waved off Dana's effort to assist him, then strolled over to the boat, walking around it, kicking a pebble or two from side to side, while he clutched the two steel balls, one in each hand, until his knuckles paled around the larger ball. It, the boat, looked like an alien creature, its long, narrow, yet rigid equivalent of a gunwale sweeping back on each side to melt into a fin that swept out and down, apparently serving as propeller, rudder, and keel. Amazing! And what powered it, he could only guess.

He peered inside the boat and saw a bag of some transparent material, filled with remnants of his lab bench: the scale, pieces of the beam generator. In another bag were some of his notebooks, and there in the prow, tucked between a couple of flaps of whatever made up the boat, he could see a couple more bags filled, he suspected, with more souvenirs of the lab. In the one bag, he thought he could make out the shape to be the bench copy of his paper. The other bag was messy, filled with dripping cloth somethings.

"NO!" he gasped. "Not Royt's Florsheims?" But he knew that they were there in the bag, that Royt's feet and his blood and some portion of his pant legs were in there with them.

In a gasping breath of willpower, Richard turned away from the boat and faced the lake. His gaze stretched out from before him for a stretch before coming to rest out in the center, on what appeared to be a platform. The brightness of the stars would not have been enough to show it here in the night, but the soft blue lights floating all around it gave it a strangely luminescent appearance, like a faint spiral nebula in a field of softly twinkling darkness. It was a round, uniformly flat surface jutting up just a couple of feet above the calm of the water surrounding it. And in the center of the platform stood a roughly circular lump, looking like a crude attempt at a Buckminster Fuller version of a cutaway house. He couldn't make out the contents of this cutaway castle on the sea, but he knew what they were.

He turned away from the water and toward the others, then paused, spinning back again to face the lake.

Fentz Lake, the perfectly round lake.

Fentz Lake, he would later discover, was one of many such lakes that formed in the hemispherical cavities left by the transmission of military bases, towns, and cities over the many years since his abrupt departure from the university. It was also the first of many such lakes soon to be abruptly filled with a fast moving municipality from the past.

Richard turned back to stare at his rescuers. He wondered if they were part of a centuries long vigil monitoring the lake, waiting for the First Arrival. And the round platform under his falling lab room, where the wall that had stood between him and Royt's desk was now a crumbled piece of lath and plaster, was this platform a sort of catchers mitt for temporal relics? That notion squeezed a chuckle out of him. He started laughing a little louder, gathering return stares from the trio.

He wondered if he could really help these people to determine just when his city would arrive? They probably already assumed that the answer was no, given his last couple of admissions. But he could help them, he hoped, to cope with the cultural earthquakes to follow. The little boxes on their lapels would help.

Would he be able to help though, he wondered, if others among his papers had also been thoroughly scrutinized after his premature departure.

He looked down into his hands again, now cramped from clutching his globes of steel. His left arm was feeling long already, lugging the larger one around. He switched the two balls, putting the big one in his right, then reached back and with a wide swing, plopped it out in to the water. A cry of protest arose from the trio behind him, but he ignored it. They had other souvenirs, and more they could gather. He put the small ball in his right hand, then swung up and out, going for that forty five degree shot, and watched as the little projectile arced out of view.

Standing there next to the water, seeing the last of the waves created by his first launch fading in the glimmer of the night sky, he realized that he had finally escaped obscurity. If he could just slip back into it, like Ball One and Two, now safe on the bottom of the lake.

He began to stroll back toward the group. They would forget all about the little steel orbs, he assured himself, when he told them about the other papers. Unless, of course, they had already read them.

D.E. Helbling writes and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

dehelbling@zigsuni.rain.com