Time's Child by Rebecca Ore

Author:Rebecca Ore
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780061844782
Publisher: HarperCollins

11

Brain Berserking Molecule by Molecule

Mitt and Lizevidda gave Jonah a handheld and tiny one-time cipher chips, which they’d gotten from their smuggling connections. Jonah understood that Mitt and Lizevidda smuggled and sold something banned from now-time Philadelphia, but he hadn’t asked because he didn’t want to know details.

As much running as Jonah had done online, he’d never physically had to leave the place where he’d lived. Now, with his two accomplices from the past and a stolen time machine, he was running around Amish country full of people who’d been inbreeding since the seventeenth-century. Life was weird.

The three of them set up a lab in one of the control rooms at long-abandoned Three Mile Island and set a generator in the river. Ivar disappeared for two days and came back with a pedicab and three fairly contemporary atomic-force microscopes. Jonah suspected Mr. Wythe at the junk heap had helped with those.

Ivar didn’t explain where he’d been, just wiped the sweat off his face and dragged one of the cases into the control room that had been gutted of useful things about a hundred years earlier. “Get the other two, why don’t you,” he said to Jonah.

If they hadn’t been outlaws, the work would have been really tedious.

Jonah worried that the two past people would be eager to do something, anything, rather than work out the huge puzzle the time machine presented. But Ivar suggested that they begin by making sure the time machine’s hull was the same sort of stainless steel familiar to them and not part of the workings of the machine.

Ten feet long, four feet diameter, times pi 3.141592 equals roughly twelve feet around, which amounted to a huge number of two-by-two-centimeter areas to scan, destructively, to make maps that would help to move atoms in other stainless steel to look just like it.

Jonah said, “Let’s go time-fishing with it first.”

“We need more machines, fast,” Ivar said. “We can set up one microscope to scan and the other two to manipulate.”

Ivar had some older scripts for writing letters molecule by molecule. Jonah hoped there was a script for disassembling and reconstructing the machine hull. They had the axle; now they just had to reinvent the wheel.

The next day, Mr. Wythe showed up with a young man and a somewhat older woman. They spoke a different dialect of English, which Jonah understood easier than the one the Philadelphians spoke. “We understand the time machine is now in your hands. We’re interested in having one of our own,” the woman said. She appeared to be the young man’s minder, the agent in charge of making sure the young man came home.

“In New York?” Jonah asked.

“We admit to being not from around here,” the woman said.

According to what Jonah understood of current city-states politics, people not from around here weren’t supposed to be in the area at all.

“Do you have anything we need?” Jonah said.

The young man said, “Tool fabrication works. We’ve been in touch with Switzerland. Putting a machine together with an atomic-force microscope is probably not necessary.

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