Needle in a Timestack (Jerry eBooks) by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

His Brother’s Weeper

The Deserializing Room at Cincinnati Spaceport was, Peter Martlett thought, a little on the bleak side. It was no more than twenty feet square, illuminated by a single hooded fluorobulb, and was bare of all ornament. In the center of the floorspace stood the awesome bulk of the Henderson Deserializer. Two white-smocked technicians flanked staring eagerly at Martlett, who had just entered. Behind him sounded the noisy hum of the waiting room he had quitted. There was a lot of deserializing going on today.

“Mr. Martlett?”

Martlett nodded tensely. He was more than a little leery of submitting himself to the Deserializer, especially after what had happened to his brother Michael. But the travel-agency people had assured him that that had been a fluke, one-in-a-million, one-in-a-billion—

“May we have your passport?” said the thinner and more efficient looking of the two technicians. Martlett surrendered it, along with his accident claim waiver, his identification ticket, his departure permit, and the pre-stamped entrance visa that would allow him to visit Marathon, where his brother had gone to a hideous death the month before.

Heads almost touching, the pair of them riffled quickly through Martlett’s papers, nodded in agreement, and gestured for him to take a seat in the Deserializer. One of the technicians produced a dark enameled square bn a foot on each side and proceeded to attach Martlett’s documents to it with stickons. Moistening his lips, Martlett watched. In a very few minutes, he knew, he himself would be inside the box.

The other deserializing technician strapped Martlett firmly into the Deserializer and lowered a metal cone over his head. In a soothing voice he said, “Of course you understand the approximate nature of the Deserializei, sir—”

“Yes, I—”

Ignoring the outburst, the technician continued what was obviously a memorized speech delivered before each departure. “The Henderson Deserializer makes possible instantaneous traffic between stars. The deserializing field induces distortion of the four coordinate axes of your worldline, removing you temporarily from contact with the temporal axis and—for convenience in storage—somewhat compressing you along the three spatial axes.”

“You mean I’ll be put in that little box?”

“Exactly, sir. You and your luggage will enter this container and you will be placed aboard a spaceship bound for the planet of your destination. Ah—Marathon, I believe. Although the journey to Marathon requires two hundred eighty-three objective years, for you it will be a matter of seconds—since, of course, on your arrival you will enter another deserializing field that will restore you to your temporal axis at a point only seconds after you had left t on Earth!”

“In short,” the other technician chimed in, “you enter a box here, are shipped to Marathon, and are unpacked there—total elapsed time, ten seconds. If you choose to return to Earth immediately on arrival, you could do that. If you felt like it, you could make nearly thirty round trips a minute, eighteen hundred an hour—”

“If I could afford it,” Martlett said dryly. The round trip fare was nine hundred units, and it was making a considerable dent in his savings.

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