I knew those guys with the cameras couldn't be trusted.
Granther
“Sir! We have a request for permission to land from a shuttle.”
“Yes?”
“We don’t have anything due to return for another two days.”
“Ah! Interesting. Any other information?”
“Their call sign indicates Shuttle 106. Our records show that one as having been decommissioned and dismantled two years ago. It no longer exists.”
“Most curious, then.”
“Yes, Sir!”
“Well, invite them in. We don’t get much company out here.”
“Yes, Sir!”
Mr. W was standing at the portal when the guests came aboard. First to enter was an attractive woman who appeared to be in her mid-thirties. She was immediately flanked by two young men scarcely out of their teens. From their stance, he concluded they were wearing some kind of recording devices. If so, the devices were incredibly small and unobtrusive. A journalism interview?
“Welcome aboard the Flying Castle! I’m called Mister Weatherman.” He greeted her warmly.
“Thank you! I’m Sarah Nesbitt.” She shook his hand with a firm grip. She indicated the two young men with a nod. “This is Zark, and Flin.” Neither spoke, and she ignored them from that point forward.
“I appreciate your greeting us personally. You are exactly the person I wanted to meet, and to ask you to keep our visit under a security protocol.”
“Really? Why?”
She glanced at Zark. He nodded almost imperceptibly. “Because we’re from the future, and it is vital that no one else know it.”
“Ah, yes. That would be an important thing to keep secret. Why?”
She smiled. “Because we have to limit our exposure to your timeline for fear of contaminating it in some manner. A careless word could cause untold and irreparable havoc.”
“Understandable. From how far in the future are you?”
“About a century and a half.”
“Okay. May I ask the purpose of your journey?”
“We are here on an official record-producing mission. We want to document some of the faces and figures that have populated our history books.”
“Well, that is very flattering. I suppose we can accommodate you for that purpose. I had considered that you were some kind of news crew, and I suppose that is an apt description of what you say you’re doing here.”
“We were trying to get close to the anniversary of your arriving at Mars, but we had to settle for arriving in the same part of the orbit. Something about conservation of directional momentum, they said.”
“It’s astonishing that you were able to travel through time at all, much less find us in a particular part of our orbit! Now, you want to explain who you are again, and why there’s such a need for secrecy about it?”
“Sure! I’m Sarah Nesbitt, a great-granddaughter of the current “weatherman” on the Flying Castle, my Granther Vlad. He’s celebrating his one hundred and fiftieth birthday, and he asked us to come back and make a documentary for our records and posterity. The need for secrecy is to make sure that information only goes one way. Let’s say we learned the hard way that time paradoxes can cause trouble.”
“So you won’t reveal your identity to your Great-Great-Grandmother, but you are willing to let me know?”
“Granther said you would be able to resist the temptation to violate our secrecy. Besides, we need your cooperation to gain trust and access to where we want to go.”
“Where is that? Other than every square inch of the Habitats?”
“Earth and Mars, of course. There is a lot to document.”
“I see. In the meantime, would I be able to examine your ship?”
“Of course! We made it look externally like one of your shuttles. Internally, it houses the temporal helix compression equipment and our fusion power plants.”
“Temporal helix compression equipment?”
“Our time machine. Did you ever wonder what keeps you in the same place?”
“Not particularly, no.”
“I suppose a good analogy would be the groove of a record on a record player. No, wait! That was before your time, wasn’t it?”
“Not entirely. I get the picture.”
“Oh, good, I’ve been studying your centuries. Anyway, everything is stuck in its own groove, as the Universe unwinds through its destiny. To get from one groove to another, you have to build a bi-stable temporal field, and then collapse your end of it. It’s easier if you can match velocities, and that’s why really long trips are usually out of the question. There normally isn’t anywhere to land.”
“I would assume it wasn’t easy. What’s a bi-stable temporal field?”
“Wotcher. It’s similar to a gravitational gradient field. You know that mass warps space, of course. Well, a temporal field is like the electrical field around a magnetic field; it’s at right angles to the gravitational gradient field. A bi-stable temporal field is a three-dimensional saddle-shape in the ten-dimensional coordinate system.”
“Of course. I should have remembered that.”
She looked at him intently. “You’re familiar, of course, with gravitational libration points. In a two-body problem, there are five libration points. If the bodies are of equal mass, the diagram of their relationship is symmetrical. We build synthetic temporal libration points in temporo-gravitic space, and then reverse the temporal polarity. The interchange is instantaneous, but the energy draw is enormous.”
“Maybe you should just show me your ship.”
She smiled. “Agreed. Are you ready?”
“Of course. After you!”
Turning, and visibly choreographing her motions with the two young men, she led the way back to the ship. Externally, it resembled a standard shuttle. The Flying Castle had more than six hundred of them, but many were out on maneuvers and scouting missions. Much of the asteroid field could be assayed by laser spectroscopy, but collecting samples, and salvaging volatiles, had to be done at the scene.
The spherical elevator car opened onto a scene of smoothly shaped wonder. As if the ship had been designed completely inside a computer program, and then manufactured, the visible surfaces flowed from one purpose to another. The need for shuttles to occasionally reverse their gravitational orientation, or dispose of it altogether, was apparent in the artistic manner in which floor could become wall, or ceiling.
At the moment, even though much of the interior was taken up by gargantuan machinery of unimaginable complexity and power, the ship seemed strangely spacious. Could this shuttle, if like the others intended to house as many as a hundred passengers in an emergency, really have a crew of only three?
“You are the only crew?”
“Forgive me, please! The only ones you will be meeting.”
“Ah. Of course.”
That's the problem when you have time on your hands. You always are in need of more reading material.
Of course they had to take pictures when I’m pregnant again. Why don’t news crews ever turn up when I’m thin?
“Let’s say we learned the hard way that time paradoxes can cause trouble.”
Ouch, and a book, copyrighted 2045 titled “Abnormal radiation, teleportation, and you: A primer on quantum tunnel baryonic matter transmission and your future mutant offspring.”
Well, so long as there isn’t any connection between quantum baryonic matter transmission and time travel, they’re okay.
No strange cthulhu bunnies running amok in the habs or bizarre levitating humns with psi abilities..