Michael Sullivan - Hollow World

He had met Peggy at a party held by Billy Raymond, a friend of Warren’s. They were six years out of high school, and Warren convinced him to go. His friend had been working at the assembly plant in Wixom, and Ellis just finished his first master’s degree. Warren never had any problem getting girls, but Ellis always had a better chance of attracting lightning. So he was floored when Peggy talked to him. She was attractive, and it was good just to be noticed. They saw each other on and off for a few months, then Peggy told him she was pregnant. She also admitted she was scared he would abandon her, the way Warren had left Marcia. Ellis didn’t. He did the right thing—at least what he had thought was the right thing.

He and Peggy had never talked much. Ellis was working at GM, improving solar cells and battery efficiency, and Peggy devoted herself to Isley. He had been their common ground, a shared interest. But after he died, they were little more than strangers in the same house. So it came as a shock that her betrayal hurt so much.

Peggy might not have been his soul mate, but she had always been there. They counted on and trusted each other. If gravity failed, the speed of light was broken, and death and taxes disappeared there would still be Peggy, telling him to be home on time because it was Tuesday and they were having salmon for dinner. The letters in his hands were notices that the sun wouldn’t be coming up anymore; the world was no longer spinning, and time had stopped.

Except it hadn’t.

Peggy would be back to talk . He didn’t want to talk to her; he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He didn’t want to see anyone. If anything, he wanted to disappear.

He looked over at the disembodied van seat surrounded by milk crates.

Time hasn’t stopped, but it could—at least for me.

Ellis stood up, moved to the fuse box, and flipped the new custom-built breakers for each line—setting them to bypass. He could pull all the power he wanted from Detroit Edison, and it would flow until the wire melted or he tripped a safety switch at the substation, which he would do pretty quickly, but not before he sucked the needed megawatts. The overhead lights dimmed noticeably as he drew power from the house’s AC current. The garage hummed with a buzz similar to the noise heard when standing under a high-tension wire.

He took off his coat and stuffed it under the wrap of bungee cords. Everything else he needed was already there; it had been packed for months. He paused, looking around the garage, at the calendar—at his world. He felt alone, as if he stood in a desert; there was nothing anymore but the time machine—a single door at the end of a one-way corridor.

Ellis sat in the chair and set the milk crates in place. Through the grates, he could still make out the Mercury Seven poster. Was this how they felt climbing in the capsule and preparing to enter the unknown? They must have known nothing would ever be the same afterward, for them or the rest of the world.

He fastened his seatbelt.

Ellis picked up the tablet, turned it on, and swiped past the lock screen. He found the custom app he’d built and double-checked his numbers.

Don’t go anywhere or do anything crazy, okay?

Why not? As Janis Joplin once sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

The button on the control panel was glowing red—all powered up and ready to go. His Atlas rocket was locked and loaded. His Glamorous Glennis was in the bomb bay of a B-29 Superfortress, awaiting history.

People time traveled every day without realizing it. Some moved faster, others slower, because a body at rest moved through time at one rate, while a body in motion traveled slightly slower. Einstein had discovered that time and space were related, the two connected by a sliding scale—just as the more effort a person puts into making money, the less time they have to enjoy themselves. The reason no one noticed was that the difference was infinitesimal. But send a person in a rocket to the nearest star and back, and if the trip took him twenty years, centuries would pass on earth. Of course most people lack spaceships, but there was another way to affect time—by altering its relationship to space.

Instead of traveling, all that was needed was the equivalent mass of Jupiter compressed down until it was nearly a black hole so that it would generate an enormous gravity well. This would warp space and slow time. Then the traveler simply needed to sit in a spherical mass shell, sort of like the eye of a hurricane where the winds of time didn’t blow, and wait the allotted duration. When he climbed out, he would be in a different time. There were obvious problems with this method—or there had been until Hoffmann discovered the means to generate a contained artificial gravity well that wouldn’t devour everything around it, while at the same time protect the person sitting in the middle.

To insulate the time traveler, an electromagnetic field could be used to create an electrostatic repulsion of like charges, protecting him from the critical mass. If anything went wrong, and the gravity well started consuming its surroundings, the power supply would be destroyed first and shut everything down—a perfect fail-safe. Still, this was essentially Wilbur-and-Orville-style science. A lot could go wrong and Ellis could easily be squished out of existence.

The really scary part would come near the end. Ellis had programmed the tablet to track his position in both time and space, so, no matter how long he remained in time’s hurricane eye, he would come out of stasis at the same physical location that he had started. Those calculations were the most difficult. Not only did he have to take in consideration the rotation of the earth, but also the movement of the planet around the sun and the universe and galaxy spinning through space. If he calculated wrong, he could materialize inside a star or, more likely, into the immense vacuum of space.

Ellis had set his destination for two hundred years and eight months. The eight months would allow him to arrive in summer rather than fall. The calculation might not be that precise. Several variables might affect the exact time lapse. The power drawn, the batteries’ storage capacity, the wiring used, even the humidity in the air could cause the arrival date to shift by a few years.

Ellis raised his finger and noticed it was shaking. He stared at the glowing ignition. Then it finally happened. His life did flash through his head. He saw his mother, saw his father, saw himself at college, then him holding an eight-pound Isley followed by teaching his son to ride a bike. He saw Peggy in the snow at Mt. Brighton, flakes on her eyelashes, cheeks red, holding on to him for dear life and laughing. They were both laughing. They hadn’t laughed together like that in…

Sadness, regret, anger, and frustration—the pain reached into his chest, squeezing his heart. Ellis took a labored breath. “Say goodnight, Gracie,” he said, and pressed the button.

The first thing Ellis noticed was that the overhead lights went out with a pop, signifying he’d just killed the breaker at the substation and possibly taken out the power to his part of the grid. Nothing else happened.

His heart sank in disappointment, but then he noticed that the light illuminating the ignition button was still on and the humming was growing louder. The Aerostar seat started vibrating like a coin-operated Magic Fingers bed, and everything was blurry. As much as he wanted to believe that the time machine would work, his rational mind knew it wouldn’t. His brain was the Chicago Daily Tribune running the banner: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN even while his senses told him something was happening.