The Time Surgeons

If the Protectorate liked to encourage the study of science, provided it was approved science, it also liked to encourage the study of history.

The war had given mankind a savage blow, and mankind had duly retreated to a safer place to lick its wounds before poking its head outside with much greater timidity than it had before.

Many who lived in past ages would have looked at the Protectorate with great disapproval. In most ages maybe not, as it was better than many; but those who enjoyed freer times would have called it repressive and intrusive, if not outright fascist.

Perhaps such charges would have been true. But the people whose experience, actions and ideas had led to the Protectorate in its present form had lived through different times. The result was repressive and it was intrusive. But above all, its founders had sought to prevent a repeat of the War.

There had been wars before, even a world war, then another. But the final war was just known as The War, as all others paled beside its fury. Its survivors had looked at the ruination around them and never wished to see its like again. They thought about what had led to it, sketchy and contradictory as the remaining evidence might have been.

And so the Protectorate was born, with its reason for being and core directive the prevention of literally earth-shattering technologies, the encouragement of a sense of community service, and through that the shepherding of society into a future where such a War could never happen again. The founders wanted a future where it would be literally inconceivable.

Freedom is always hard won, and the disciples of freedom might have been unimpressed regardless of these lofty motives. Had they been able to stand astride history and comment on its fate, they might have opined that it carried the seeds of its own failure in its own contradictions.

Perhaps they would have had a point. Its end came not from its failures but its successes. Nobody would have named those who destroyed it as other than model citizens, deeply imbued with the values of their society. Those individuals themselves would have said the same, and said so honestly.

The residual fatigue of the hours of her long flight fell from Vickie like water from an otter when finally she stood gazing at the Machine. The gleaming metal spoke of staggering powers under the control of arcane knowledge, and the thick cables leading to it bore further witness to their magnitude.

Nuclear weapons had long been banned on planet Earth but nuclear power, at least in its safer forms, had not. If the founders of the Protectorate had feared the nuclear genie that had spat its rage onto the world, they also had the wisdom to know that survival consisted not merely of escaping death but achieving life. They had no illusions that the future lay in some idyllic, pre-technological past. An industrial society was part of their solution and industrial society needed abundant, reliable power.

The world had struggled and many had died, but it had recovered, and by this age had exceeded many accomplishments of its ancestors. The thorny problems of controlled nuclear fusion had been solved, and its hellish powers were bent to the needs of men. With that landmark achievement all fission plants were removed as a now unacceptable and unnecessary risk.

The Machine Vickie stared at had its own small but dedicated fusion reactor.

She shook herself, and looked around the room. It was a select company. She recognized many faces, all eminent personages in the sciences and government. But one eclipsed them all. She saw the stately, still handsome form of a middle-aged man across the room, and recognized Dr Ravan Harlington. The man who made it all possible. He wasn’t looking at anyone, seeming to barely acknowledge those who came up to congratulate him or shake his hand. He had eyes only for the Machine.

A large screen was set up, visible to all the company but currently dark.

There were no speeches. Dr Harlington had requested it. “If the Machine doesn’t work, then speeches are foolish,” he had opined. “If the Machine works, then speeches are superfluous.”

The screen came to life, but nothing was visible on it but its background glow. Dr Harlington stepped forward to a console, checked the settings, placed his finger on a button, then looked around the room.

He broke his own rule to the extent of quoting, “O, call back yesterday, bid time return.” Then he pressed the button.

The tiny leakage from the power going to the Machine set up a faint hum in the air, and they looked toward the large cavity inside the Machine. Faint sparkling lights danced in the cavity, like a miniature of the Northern Lights. Then they faded, and all that was visible was a tiny dot of black inside a ring of pale fire.

Vickie looked up at the screen, as Dr Harlington studied his console and made adjustments. There was a brief burst of static, and then the image cleared into something grainy but easily seen. It showed a bearded man dressed in strange garb looking at an instrument. He bent to its eyepiece, adjusted the instrument, then leapt away with a gasp, looking up towards the heavens.

Then the image winked out, and Dr Harlington stepped forward to address the room.

“That was Galileo Galilei, the first scientist, when he first looked through his telescope at another world. I could not think of a more appropriate test or tribute.”

Vickie looked at him, stunned, as did the rest of the room. Then somebody began to clap, and the room erupted in applause.

The Machine was housed in a secure facility half an hour from a city, and they all went for formal dinner in a restaurant at the top of a tall hotel tower.

There was no way even Dr Harlington could prevent speeches now, and there were speeches aplenty. But his original words still stuck in her mind. What is there to say, after seeing that? How can words express it, or hope to match it? Or stand in its memory?

Harlington had been surrounded by dignitaries far more important than her and she had not yet spoken to him. But when coffee was served she had taken her cup outside, tired of the speeches and speculations, just to stand in the cool and gaze out upon the lights of the city and the darkness of the river winding through it.

She felt a presence at her side but before she could turn, it spoke.

“Dr Gray, our historian, I believe?”

“Dr Harlington.”

She shook his hand, and when she said no more he looked at her with amusement.

“You are a woman of few words. Most people here don’t know how to shut up. Or when.”

“I confess I am quite tongue-tied.”

“You must be a hard woman to impress.”

“Quite the contrary,” she laughed. “It’s just that words seem inadequate. I can’t find any to suit. That was… incredible. Beyond incredible. Beyond words.”

“I understand completely. Thank you. For what the missing words say.”

He paused. “Well, it has been nice meeting you, but I must go. So many people want to shake my hand for the tenth time. You’d think I’ve saved the world or something, not just opened a small window into its past. Good night, Dr Gray.”

“Please wait.”

He stopped and looked at her, but again she found she couldn’t speak.

Despite her lifestyle she was not by nature promiscuous. To her, sex was too valuable for that: a union or a tool, not often a casual event like picking up strangers in a nightclub; not a fleeting pleasure lacking any other meaning. But looking at this man, her body was screaming at her that she must have him. She was shocked at her own reaction, but she knew the reason. It would be like doing it with Einstein. And Newton. Together.

“I’m flying out tomorrow,” she managed lamely, then discovered to her horror that she was blushing like a schoolgirl. Exactly like a schoolgirl, she thought, remembering the day she had first invited a boy into her bed. The memory and the comparison just made her blush the more.

He saw and smiled. This of course just made her blush even more. If that is even possible.

“You must think I’m an idiot,” she stammered. Stammering? Jesus! “I’m sorry to have taken up your time.”

“Dr Gray, I think the fact that you cannot speak, and that you react this way, is the greatest tribute I have had tonight.”

She decided to look anywhere but in his direction.

He slipped a card into her fingers. “I must mix, and bear with the adulation. But if you still feel this way in half an hour, this is my room.”

He turned to go, then turned back.

“Let me be perfectly clear and honest with you, Dr Gray. I like sex as much as the next man, and I am not above a casual dalliance. But be assured that I am not thinking of this as an easy way into the pants of some star struck fan, soon forgotten. I think that your feeling this way is as much a tribute to yourself as it is to me.”