“IfI come with you . . . were your words from earlier true? Would you still be interested in my . . . in my courting you?”
“As you yourself said, we have much in common . . . and I do care for you, James,” Anne admitted. “I would be honoured to know you better.”
“Iwillgo to the future,” he decided. “I am indeed a scholar at heart, and I find that the part of me that longed to explore distant lands is now equally curious about distant times.”
“Good. We should be going – you won’t need the bedroll, or anything else,” Simon added as James started to bend down. “In the morning, travellers will stumble across the campsite, and your disappearances blamed on the bandits, along with the others’ deaths. But by then, we’ll be 1,317 years into the future . . . and, once there, I think I can safely predict your lives will be reasonably long and relatively happy.”
“Good. You’ll answer to me if things turn out otherwise,” James warned him.
Simon chuckled, and Anne blushed. Holding on to her lover, she braced both of them for the trip to the future.
The Troll Bridge
Patti O’Shea
Lia glanced around the control room. It looked so ordinary, so boring – industrial grey carpeting, neutral walls, even the windows on the far side of the room were normal. She expected something more at a cutting-edge facility like the particle accelerator. The only things that separated this place from a regular office were the curved desks with two tiers of flat-screen computer monitors lined up side by side.
Even the scientists seemed mundane, dressed in slacks with Oxford or polo shirts. Couldn’t there at least be one guy running around in a white lab coat with his hair going twenty different directions like Albert Einstein?
Everyone around her was busy doing something, but she had no idea what. She’d grown accustomed to interviewing engineers as part of her job in corporate communications for Park International, but this was her first time dealing with physicists. She hoped it was her last.
The man she was supposed to talk to had listened to about three questions and answered none before he’d dumped her off on an intern. The kid knew a lot about the particle accelerator and was nervously rambling, which might have been good for her article in the monthly employee magazine except that she needed to quote someone with credentials.
It was too bad. This boy, Derrick, was going to be an asset someday. Earlier, he’d seen her blank look and had immediately started speaking in layman’s terms. That was worth its weight in gold.
Today’s experiment was supposed to rev the particles up to their highest rate of speed so far and she’d been sent to cover it. This wasa Big Deal and the order had come from the top of the food chain, but Doctor I’m-Too-Important-To-Talk-To-You didn’t care who had issued the assignment.
To her surprise, she’d found what little she’d understood about particle physics interesting, and since the kid wouldn’t ridicule her, she decided to ask a question that had intrigued her since she’d researched the atom smasher.
“Derrick,” Lia interjected when he paused, “I read something about the particle accelerator maybe creating black holes. Is this any kind of real hazard?”
“No, ma’am.” He shrugged self-consciously. “The possibility is so minute, it’s nearly inconceivable. If any do happen to actualize, they’ll wink out in a fraction of a second. They’re too small and unstable to maintain their existence long.”
That was a relief. Although she’d guessed the odds of making a black hole that could swallow the Earth were small, it was still nice to hear it from someone who knew physics – even if he was still in college.
Derrick didn’t stop, though. “It’s also unlikely that we’ll create any wormholes either, and, if we did, they’d be so small that only subatomic particles would be transported.”
Lia hadn’t read anything on that. “Wormholes?”
“Wormholes are tubes that traverse space, time, or both and if we find one and could travel through—”
“I’ve seenStar Trek,I know what wormholes are, but I didn’t realize we couldmakethem,” she told him ruefully. OK, so it was slightly embarrassing to use a television show as reference material, but the reading she’d done on particle physics had turned her brain to gelatin.
He pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “We can’t. That’s what I was explaining. The idea that we might produce a wormhole is every bit as remote as the black hole theory, although it is mathematically possible.”
“That’s kind of disappointing,” she murmured.
Derrick smiled for the first time. “Tell me about it, but it was proven that the Einstein-Rosen Bridge would shut as soon as it formed, closing—”
He stopped short when the physicist who’d ditched her called his name. The experiment was about to begin and Derrick’s helpwas needed, leaving Lia to her own devices. She glanced over a few shoulders, but no one paid attention to her, and since they all looked so intent, she didn’t ask questions. Instead, she leaned against a wall at the back of the control room and hoped something interesting would happen that she could write about.
It didn’t. Had she made a note on how long this was supposed to last? Flipping through her steno pad, she checked, but before she found the information, the tension in the room shot high. She couldn’t understand what they were saying in their geek-speak, but anything that ended the boredom had to be a good thing.
“It broke containment,” one of the scientists called.
Or maybe it wasn’t a good thing.
A man she didn’t recognize approached her. “Out,” he ordered and pointed to the exit.
