COMPLETE THE CIRCLE - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

For Professor Derek Carl Pickover - or Carl to both his friends and family - the United States was the country for many strange and remarkable things to take place. It was a place that had inspired countless innovative ideas and activities over the years, and leading to some of the most inventive, intelligent, and entrepreneurial individuals on the planet. But with its pretty substantial, cosmopolitan, varied and sizeable population spread across and throughout its fifty states, in Pickover’s view the country has also produced its more than fair share of cranks, oddities, and occasionally dangerous people. He certainly did not consider himself a crank or dangerous, an oddity perhaps, although he often thought he perhaps gave that impression when he considered his scientific interests.

Physically, Pickover did not appear to look particularly different to anybody else. An Afro-American, he was 33, single, and 170 centimeters tall. He had bushy black curly hair that was slightly thinning on top, a black moustache, and he always had at least a days' chin stubble that was already beginning to show some shades of grey.

Influenced by an upbringing in mild poverty in a run-down neighborhood, he was always casually dressed in a tee-shirt and jeans, never once having the desire or incentive to appear more formal. Despite those potentially limiting circumstances, he came from a stable family, his parents actively encouraging him to be independent when it became clear their son was academically brilliant. After supporting him both financially and spiritually, they were rewarded with a son who graduated with honors in physics, and Pickover duly paid them back, helping them financially with enough cash to move into something more respectable. With little time to even consider his next move whilst teaching at the University of Connecticut, Carl Pickover was invited to take over the post of Professor of Modern Sciences. In the ensuing years there he became a highly respected individual.

It was after he arrived at Connecticut that Pickover befriended a brilliant physicist who also taught at the university, Professor Ronald Mallett. He was an individual who had received many distinctions as well as being featured in numerous television documentaries about his work, particularly in a mission inspired from childhood when Mallett’s 33 year-old father died of a massive heart attack. Carl Pickover soon became fascinated in that mission, which turned out to be a time machine project. The young Mallett had resolved to construct a device that would enable him to travel back in time to save his father, and by doing so pursuing everything in his ability to attain the knowledge and theory required.

Although the initial reasons for construction of the machine now had lesser significance, Mallett's line of research had drawn the attention of numerous academics, along with rookie professor Carl Pickover. A short-term collaboration was forged, although Pickover wanted to push the envelope beyond the professor’s original theories, theories which had been centered around a device that focused on the gravitational force of a ring laser. The external gravitational field that had been generated in Mallett’s experiments seemed to indicate that time travel – at least travelling into the past – was a distinct possibility. The drawback was that the device would only work if the machine, if it were switched on now, would still be working in the future. This meant that the only backwards time travel that was possible was for someone in the future to use that machine which, hopefully, would still be working by then, and then to be able to travel back in time. But then that person would only be able to travel back only as far as the point the machine was initially activated. As far as Mallett was concerned, actual activation of the device, let alone its actual construction, was still only an idea and a long way from any form of reality. Pickover sensed Mallett’s unease over his impatience, and graciously withdrew from the project.

Pickover remained in Connecticut until some five years later, when he moved to the University of California in San Francisco where he was free to work on a separate set of theories that would take him away from Mallett’s work. By now he was beginning to express his ideas to a much wider audience, namely his students, although he always took great care to ensure that his arguments were presented as well-thought out and reasoned arguments in his lectures. Thanks to his upbringing being a contributing factor, Carl Pickover was a thick-skinned individual and always had a ready, reasoned answer to everything, invariably ensuring that any doubtful individual who felt a need to express themselves forcefully would be leaving the lecture hall with their tails firmly between their legs. On one occasion, one individual gatecrashed such a lecture wielding a tattered bible in his hand, but before he had the chance to vent his anger directly at Pickover he was swiftly escorted out of the hall.

Pickover had no doubt in his mind that it was this particular group of people, the narrow-minded, bible-bashing, creationist-theory peddlers who were the cranks and oddities, the fundamentalists who would prevent the likes of physicists such as he and Mallett from being in the positions and influence they now found themselves in.

*

Sprawled out on a large green cushion on the bare wooden floor in the living room/bedroom of his cramped apartment on the edge of Daly City, Carl Pickover sifted through the countless pages of text and diagrams in a half-hearted attempt to try and place them in some kind of comprehensible order. Although he did possess a computer, a laptop, and a electronic tablet, he still preferred to see everything printed out. After printing out yet another sheet of freshly printed notes to the collection, he placed these with the older sheets that were filed in numerous catalogued cardboard boxes lined up against the walls. He then grabbed a can of beer in one hand, opened it, and picked away at a pizza takeaway.

            Carl Pickover once prided himself in being physically able to five kilometers every morning without pausing for breath. But now with daily sitting at a computer, and spreading himself out on a sofa or bed while relaxing at home, he no longer had any incentive to do something about his weight. He was not attached, his parents had both passed away, and there was no family in the Bay area. He always got around by car, even if it was just to buy a paper from a shop that would be only five hundred meters away. He had recently given up full-time teaching, and now solely concentrated on delivering presentations and lectures to those institutions that wanted him to do so. He was always gratified to see that there were always plenty of people in attendance, mostly students, who were willing to listen to his ideas, although the lecture halls were never full.

            This kind of touring around the halls and colleges had made him a minor celebrity in student circles. To everyone else, however, he was just another harmless and enthusiastic professor. This, and the occasional call for assistance or substitution from the local university, ensured Pickover a reasonable but unremarkable income.

In one presentation, he had put together a mock-up of a time-travel device with an equally enthusiastic student. It consisted of an unlikely collection of bits and pieces of metal, glass, circuits, spaghetti wiring, and several computers. But from this the ideas generated further bolstered Pickover’s interest in the physics of time travel. But a short time after the presentation, and without any warning, the student just simply disappeared. The machine’s main benefactors, San Francisco University, decided that the crudely put together device was technically theirs, and that it should remain with the college until some kind of use for it could be found.

The machine was then stored away, left forgotten amongst the countless spare parts, the numerous contraptions, gizmos, and other objects in a garage that was located deep within the bowels of the Mudrick Institute, a non-descript building named after the late Marvin Mudrick, a professor and essayist at the University of California. This unremarkable brick building would often act as a classroom extension and museum for the university’s projects and objects. It was an institute that very few people in the city knew or were even aware of, let alone be concerned as to whether it had a garage. Virtually forgotten by everybody else, the machine had sat there ever since, with even Pickover himself now having largely forgotten about it. But one day he happened to be in the area, and out of curiosity, he went back to the garage two years ago to be surprised to find it still there and intact.

As further theories and ideas relentlessly flowed from his imagination and onto computer and paper, and having compiled so much material based on a far more logical, scientific, and advanced mathematical approach, Pickover quickly realized that he needed help. He was certain that much of the mechanical theory of his machine was sound, but someone would be required to calculate the complex equations needed to at least make the machine do what was necessary. He also needed someone to help resolve the problem of the phenomenal amount of energy that would be involved in powering such a contraption. It would only work using a substantial power source; only government research laboratories had access to that, and he still was not sure whether even that would be enough.

Searching for inspiration and for possible collaborators, he read endless essays by noted luminaries or keen enthusiasts on similar subjects in hundreds of books, magazines, papers, and websites. He even read texts from those who claimed to have actually built working time machines. These individuals produced plenty of discourse, along with a lot of wasted paper, time and broadband, but virtually nothing in the way of actual or physical proof. No video evidence, and no independent or credible witnesses. They were all just talking a load of bull.

Pickover sincerely believed that he, himself, had cracked the problem. He just needed a couple more like-minded experts to assist.

He was certain he knew how to build a time machine.

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