Sleep Time

A story by Keith Croes

The alarm snatched the professor from a cozy fancy of twisting superstrings and he awoke with one hand on his wife's head and the other on the snooze button.

"Ten more minutes," he smiled with closed eyes.

"Oh, Howard, you better get going," his wife murmured, then quickly resumed a soft snoring.

Sun and wind washed the Ivy League campus in the dying autumn. The professor rubbed sleep from the corner of one eye and glanced out the classroom windows, thinking that each pane would soon be etched with the intricate geometry of ice, and that within a month his drive to early-morning physics would begin in darkness. Once again--how many years had it been?--youngsters with frozen hair would stumble in from an outdoors that resembled an outer planet. Already they were becoming a class, with a distinct personality and group identity, working by the light of several incandescent globes around the room to catch a glimmer of the universe he presented, a universe that was not quite so comprehensible for some as it was for Einstein.

Theodore Vanderwhitten--the boy who was talking--was this term's snotty know-it-all. There had to be at least one. The professor recognized uneasily where Vanderwhitten's argument was going.

"But the paper you published in Physics allowed for a localized anomaly in space-time in which the flow of time would be reversed," Vanderwhitten whined. "Wouldn't you call that time travel?"

"The potential does exist," the professor admitted. "Of course it exists." He scratched the equations on the blackboard with quick, irritated squeaks and a flail of chalk dust. "I also showed, however, that the reversal would require quite a bit of energy--approximately three times the estimated daily energy consumption of the earth. This is an informal classroom, Theodore. It really is not necessary for you to stand when you address me."

Laughter flitted around the room, but Vanderwhitten remained standing.

"Yes, but didn't you assume a time reversal within the anomaly of 15 minutes?" Vanderwhitten was convinced he was on to something and his voice reached a chalk-squeak pitch. His arms had developed gyrating seizures. "There's a strange geometric factor in that energy requirement. Can I come down?"

"By all means." The kid was damn sharp. When the paper was first published two years ago, Pillington at USC had written him concerning this aspect of his work, but no one had mentioned it since. The professor thought briefly of the frozen New Hampshire mornings and the drive to campus. If there was anything about his job he hated, it was awakening to those arctic mornings and relinquishing his beloved position beneath the oversize handmade quilt. One leg at a time, his mother used to tell him--let me hear your feet on the floor. And his wife, who works so hard as a volunteer at the hospital--how the two of them enjoy their morning cup of coffee together. With all the time in the world.

"Here." Vanderwhitten grabbed a new stick of yellow chalk from the tray and broke it on the first swipe. The professor stood blinking through the lightly speckled lenses of his glasses. "Let's assume a reversal of shorter duration, say, one minute," Vanderwhitten sang out. He began his own stream of equations and stopped suddenly.

"Aha," the professor pointed. "The energy requirement is even greater. This energy is a quirky curve."

"That's strange," said Vanderwhitten.

"Quirky," said the professor.

"How about five minutes?" Vanderwhitten asked.

"Closer. Let's draw the curve." With sure strokes, the professor sketched the axes and plotted several points. His wonderful, unsuspecting wife, her face clouded with concern as he bundled up each morning, her quick hands questing across his overcoat for lint even as he headed out the door into the wintry blackness--she would never know what he was giving her.

"Ten minutes," Vanderwhitten yelped. "That's a quirk and a half. The curve drops sharply at ten minutes."

"Nine minutes, fifty-two seconds and change," said the professor. "Please return to your seat, Mr. Vanderwhitten. And thank you very much."

The young man walked thoughtfully up the few steps to his seat and the professor gazed around the classroom, ineffectively brushing the chalk dust off one shoulder of his corduroy jacket. "At least Pillington had tenure," he muttered.

Vanderwhitten was scribbling madly in his notebook.

"The anomaly, of course, is theoretical," the professor intoned. "Therefore time travel within the anomaly is also only theoretically possible. No one has a clue as to the mechanism that would create it nor what would happen to anyone who was caught up inside of it. Almost any movement backward in time would require huge amounts of energy, with the curious exception of approximately ten minutes, as we have just demonstrated. Theodore was unusually perceptive in picking up that anomaly within our anomaly." The wind was rattling the windows and the professor found himself shouting.

"But there's another quirk," he huffed. "Once time is reversed within the anomaly, any further movement in time is impossible except for the normal flow of the surrounding continuum--in our case, it would be a forward flow--until equilibrium is reached. That is, until the anomaly had traveled forward in time from whence it came."

"Less than 150 volts," Vanderwhitten shrieked over the racket. "You could travel back in time on house current!"

The professor looked irked, then smiled. "Time within the theoretical anomaly could theoretically be reversed by about ten minutes by an amount of energy roughly equivalent to that available through ordinary house current, that is correct. But as for time travel, even if one developed a mechanism and could survive the trip, one would have to ask oneself what possible use could be made of the ability to travel ten minutes--and ten minutes only--backward in time."

Again there was laughter. Vanderwhitten stared in the direction of the blackboard and chewed on his pencil eraser.

His wife was sitting in bed with the quilt pulled up to her waist and a book in her lap. He sat on his side of the bed and fiddled with the alarm clock, patting it lightly when he was done. What a marvel, he thought. What a little marvel.

"Don't stay up too late, dear," he cautioned as he kicked off his slippers and stretched his way between the sheets.

"Will the reading light bother you?" she asked.

"Not at all." He pulled the quilt up over his head until his view was just a slit of light. "Bed is just the best place to be," he mumbled.

She reached over to him and rubbed his back under the covers. "It's going to be chilly tomorrow."

"Winter comes to New England." She smiled as his thoughts drifted to superstrings twisting through the depths of space to the edges of the universe.

THE END

MORE STORIES BY KEITH CROES

keith@croes.com