The Cherry Street Garage

Contemporary folklore is filled with stories of international multi-billion-dollar corporations that got their start in a California garage or on a kitchen table, and some of these stories are actually true. But you have probably never heard of the Cherry Street Garage. This is not because you are ill informed or because the story is untrue. It is because nobody has heard of the Cherry Street Garage. Until now.

It is April 10^th, 1974. Maxwell Porter is working in his garage on Cherry Street in Menlo Park California. Menlo Park is about halfway between San Francisco and San Jose in the heart of what will become known as Silicon Valley. He was laid off by Hewlett-Packard because he didn’t fit the “HP Way”. There was no question that his ideas were not cutting-edge innovations, but both coworkers and managers found him “difficult to work with”.

After HP, Max went to work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. But that didn’t last either. He was considered “brilliant, but temperamental” and was terminated after a rant about the design of a hand-held computer input device, the mouse.

Now Maxwell is an adjunct lecturer in the Physics Department at Stanford University. His application for a tenure-track professorship at Stanford has twice been rejected, officially because of his doctoral dissertation. (Tenure-track documentation never includes subjective observations like personality, but that was probably a significant consideration in his case.) He has been told that his dissertation was “absurd”, that it was “interesting theory, but not practical” and that “it should be shelved between Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan in the children’s section of the library”.

Max is a single parent. His wife was killed when she was hit by a “joy-riding kid” in a stolen car. Max considers the kid’s sentence to be a slap on the wrist, because he was tried as a juvenile and not as an adult. Her life insurance paid off the house, but with little left over.  Max is now doing his best to raise their 13-year-old son, Timothy, on his own. But money is not the problem. Max doesn’t really care about money; he cares about time. To Max, time is the problem, and possibly the solution.

Max is working inside a ceramic sphere in his garage on Cherry Street.  (You ask why ceramic and not metal. For that you will need to read his dissertation.) With a slightly nervous hand, he sets the control to 60. He has successfully done one, five, fifteen and thirty seconds. Now he is doing a full minute.

He tightens his seatbelt for the third time, makes one final review of the gauges, focuses on the green lightbulb and presses the “Initiate” button.

Noises and vibrations build as the lightbulb changes from green to yellow, and then to red. If we were looking through a window (there are no windows in the sphere) we would see Max stationery as the bulb glows red for sixty seconds. But for Max, the bulb flashes red for an instant, then returns to yellow and then to green. He releases the seatbelt and checks the clocks.

Max has installed several clocks in and outside his ceramic sphere. Some are atomic, some are electronic, and some are old fashioned mechanical windup clocks. He is interested in which clocks remain in sync with each other and which don’t; but he is most interested in the difference between the clocks inside the sphere and the clocks outside the sphere.

Upon inspection, he sees that the clocks outside the sphere are 60 seconds faster than the clocks inside the sphere. Max has traveled 60 seconds back in time!

But look at the time! Max needs to pick up Timothy from school. He gets out of the sphere, locks the garage behind him, and exits the driveway with a mild chirp of the tires from his Ford Pinto.

While driving “slightly” over the speed limit to get Timothy, his mind is filled with his experiment back in the garage. Perhaps increasing the difference between the “before” frequencies and the “after” frequencies from point five to point six would cause the … .

Max slams on the breaks! Some freckle-faced kid wearing a backpack and riding a bicycle has pulled out in front of him. Max honks the Pintos’ pathetic horn. The kid glairs at him, gives him the finger, and continues across the street.

Despite the momentary delay, Max arrives early at the school. He pulls into a Seven-Eleven and buys a special treat, Popsicles for himself and for Timothy. The clerk is an attractive young woman and Max notices her name badge says Judy. He smiles and thanks Judy, and she returns it with a smile that may have been over and above the Seven-Eleven requirement. Max makes a mental note to frequent this Seven-Eleven more often. Unfortunately for Max, he will frequent this Seven-Eleven very, very often.

When Max gets to the school, he is stopped by a cadre of first responders: city police, sheriff, highway patrol, fire fighters, and ambulances. He asks a policeman, who’s name badge says Short, what’s going on. Officer Short says there has been a shooting. The shooter is dead, but so are three students and a teacher.

Max sees activity at one of the ambulances. He gives Officer Short the Popsicles and runs to the ambulance. Two bodies are on stretches behind the ambulance. One is the shooter, the freckle-faced kid. The other is Timothy.

Max sits on the lawn in fear he will pass out. He holds his head in his hands and cries.  First his wife, and now his son. This is not fair. Life is not fucking fair!

When the human mind returns from paralyzing grief, hate can be the first stop. What if he had hit the kid on the bicycle? Even if he didn’t kill him, Timothy and the others would be alive. Hell with that! Max wants to kill that kid. He would run him down and then back over him just to be sure. Max wants to get even for the death of his wife, for Timothy, and for getting fired from HP, and from Xerox PARC, and for being denied a tenure-track position at Stanford. 

Then Max has an idea, and he looks at his watch. He rushes back to the garage, and to the sphere. With the doors shut and his seatbelt clicked, he checks his watch. It’s been 52 and a half minutes since he left to pick up Timothy. He rounds up, just to be safe, sets the control for 53 minutes and hits the button. The light flashes red.

Considering the mental trauma Max has just been through, his sense of urgency, and the hate raging in his entire body, we might forgive him for his failure to recognize that rounding up to 53 will include the current minute, causing an overlap in time. We might forgive him for his mistake, but Time is not that forgiving.

Max gets out of the sphere, locks the garage, and drive off in the Pinto. Rushing, he breaks as some freckle-faced kid on a bicycle pulls out in front of him.

Max goes to a Seven-Eleven and buys two Popsicles. He exchanges smiles with the clerk.

When Max gets to the school, Officer Short says there has been a shooting. Max runs to the ambulance only to find his dead son. Max rushed back to the garage, to the sphere. He hits the button and the light flashes red again. And again. And again.

After Max misses three classes and a department meeting at Stanford, the dean asks an associate to check on him. Max does not answer the phone, and no one appears to be home at his house on Cherry Street. The Dean notifies the police who log it as a missing persons case. The detective assigned to the case suspects that, with the death of his wife, and now his son, Max has taken his own life, and his body will turn up soon. But his body is never found, nor is the Pinto registered to Max ever found. And the garage on Cherry street is empty, but only you and I consider that significant.

Officer Jason Short recognizes the picture on the missing persons poster. He had been working crowd control at the shooting and it was getting busy as more people arrived to pick up kids, or to gawk at the carnage, then this guy shoves two popsicles at him and runs off. He had given the popsicles to a couple kids anxiously waiting for their parents. It had been especially hot that day so Max must have bought the popsicles near the school. Officer Jason Short decides to check the local stores.

At the Seven-Eleven, Judy says Max had purchased two Popsicles and seemed to be in a good mood. She gives Officer Short her famous smile and he thinks he might return, perhaps when he is off duty.

Time passes.  It is now April 10^th, 2024. The Cherry Street house was sold for unpaid taxes and the new owner converted the garage into an in-law apartment. No one drives past the garage and comments that one of the greatest inventions in human history was created there. That’s because no one, other than you and me, knows about Maxwell Porter’s invention.

Max has not been seen, but he has been very active. He has spent the last 50 years in a continuous time loop of 53 minutes, which always start and finish in the ceramic sphere and always includes a quick trip to the Seven-Eleven and Timothy's school. He always gives two popsicles to the police officer.

At Stanford University, a graduate physics student, Thomas Short, the grandson of Jason and Judy Short, discovers a dissertation from a long-forgotten lecturer. The document describes a time machine, and Thomas is interested. He needs a topic for his own dissertation, and he thinks this might lead to something interesting. He takes it home, to his workshop, in his garage.

Perhaps someday, people will drive past Thomas Shorts’ garage and point to it in awe as the birthplace of the great invention, and the giant corporation. Only time will tell.