Stolen Time by Keith Hughes

Author:Keith Hughes [Hughes, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
ISBN: 9780979991820
Publisher: Penslinger Press
Published: 2019-07-14T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

John strode into Dix's lab as if he were far too busy to be bothered visiting the little scientist, but the reality was far different. He'd been having trouble concentrating on the more mundane aspects of his position. Instead, his attention bent to the task underway in the lab. When the scientist had called and asked him to come to the lab, it had taken an extreme application of John's discipline to not run pell-mell down the stairs and arrive wheezing and disheveled. In fact, he had made himself sit at his desk for an interminable, restless five minutes before leaving. Now he strived to seem busy and only moderately interested in what Dix had to say, but all the posturing was wasted on the younger man, as he stared intently at a hamster on the lab table.

“When does this one jump?” John asked, which caused Dix to look at him over his shoulder with a big grin.

“It already did, three hours ago.”

“Three hours...” John whispered, slightly confused. “So the problems you were having with the accelerated borrowed time have been resolved?”

Dix nodded enthusiastically. “These notes we have from Dr. Bertrand are from his early work on his device, and as such, they do not include the many discoveries and revisions he went through to finish his prototype.”

“Why is this significant?”

The small scientist pushed his glasses to the top of his nose and peered seriously up at John. “It means we have to rediscover solutions to problems he already overcame. Our only advantage is we know for a fact he found a solution.”

John comprehended the difficulties Dix faced but kept a serious expression. He hoped his grave demeanor would impart to Dix the importance of leaping such hurdles as expeditiously as possible. “So how much longer until the hamster's borrowed time expires? Another twenty hours or so?”

Dix's smile reappeared in full brilliance before he turned to check a computer screen. “By my calculations, Strickland has about forty-five hours left before his borrowed time expires,” the fetid man reported proudly.

“Forty-five?” John looked at the beaming scientist and considered whether the little man had finally lost it. “What happened to the twenty-four-hour limit?”

“I determined that processing power requirements were the deciding factor,” Dix lectured. “When the handheld device is computing the new frequency associated with a jump in time, there is a limit to its precision. The PDA's calculations are less accurate than the more powerful computers we have access to here, so any frequency it uses is an approximation. Because of this differential, the amount of borrowed time lessened. Since our computers here are made for scientific work, the exactness of the calculated frequency allows for a longer period of borrowed time.”

“Could it be eliminated entirely?”

Dix made a noncommittal noise. “If we had a bank of Cray supercomputers working on it for a few days, maybe.” He shrugged. “No matter how powerful a computer is used, I suspect the result will be like pi, never coming to a precise end.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.