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boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

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Barrier 175<br />

“First tell me year.”<br />

Alex laughed, and the girl smiled. “And how long have you beed on a bonder?”<br />

Alex asked.<br />

A bonder, Brent guessed, would be a bond bender. ‘This bees my first drink,” he<br />

said, “since 1942. Or perhaps since 2473, according as how you reckon.”<br />

Brent was not disappointed in the audience reaction this time.<br />

It’s easy to see what must have happened, Brent wrote that night in the first entry <strong>of</strong><br />

the journal Derringer had asked him to keep. He wrote longhand, an action that he<br />

loathed. The typewriter which Stephen had kindly <strong>of</strong>fered him was equipped with<br />

a huge keyboard bearing the forty-odd characters <strong>of</strong> the Farthing phonetic alphabet,<br />

and Brent declined the loan.<br />

We’re at the first Barrier—the one that failed. It was dedicated to Cosmos and launched<br />

this afternoon. My friends were among the few inhabitants not ecstatically present at the<br />

ceremony. Since then they’ve collected reports for me. The damned contrivance had to be<br />

so terrifically overloaded that it blew up. Dyce-Farnsworth was killed and will be a holy<br />

martyr to Cosmos forever.<br />

But in an infinitesimal fraction <strong>of</strong> a second between the launching and the explosion,<br />

the Barrier existed. That was enough.<br />

If you, my dear Dr. Derringer, were ever going to see this journal, the whole truth<br />

would doubtless flash instantaneously through your mind like the lightning in the laboratory<br />

<strong>of</strong> the Mad Scientist. (And why couldn’t I have met up with a Mad Scientist instead<br />

<strong>of</strong> one who was perfectly sane and accurate … up to a point? Why, Dr. Derringer, you<br />

fraud, you didn’t even have a daughter!)<br />

But since this journal, faithfully kept as per your instructions, is presumably from<br />

now on for my eyes alone, I’ll have to try to make clear to my own uninspired mind just<br />

what gives with this Barrier, which broke down, so that it can’t protect the Stasis, but<br />

still irrevocably stops me from going back.<br />

Any instant in which the Barrier exists is impassable: a sort <strong>of</strong> roadblock in time.<br />

Now to achieve Dyce-Farnsworth’s dream <strong>of</strong> preventing all time travel, the Barrier would<br />

have to go on existing forever, or at least into the remote future. Then as the Stasis goes<br />

on year by year, there’d always be a Barrier-instant ahead <strong>of</strong> it in time, protecting it. Not<br />

merely one roadblock, but a complete abolition <strong>of</strong> traffic on the road.<br />

Now D-F has failed. The future’s wide open. But there in the recent past, at the<br />

instant <strong>of</strong> destruction, is the roadblock that keeps me, my dear Dr. Derringer, from ever<br />

beaming on your spade beard again.<br />

Why does it block me? I’ve been trying to find out. Stephen is good on history, but<br />

lousy on science. The blond young Alex reverses the combination. From him I’ve tried to<br />

learn the theory back <strong>of</strong> the Barrier.<br />

The Barrier established, in that fractional second, a powerful magnetic field in the<br />

temporal dimension. As a result, any object moving along the time line is cutting the<br />

magnetic field. Hysteresis sets up strong eddy currents which bring the object, in this case<br />

me, to an abrupt halt. Cf. that feeling <strong>of</strong> twisting shock that I had when my eyes were<br />

closed.<br />

I pointed out to Alex that I must somehow have crossed this devilish Barrier in going<br />

from 1942 to 2473. He accounts for that apparent inconsistency by saying that I was

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