The Human Element.

1842.

With an audible thud and a flash of light, he appeared, kneeling in the sand. He removed his blindfolds and opened his eyes and couldn’t see a thing. Was he blind? Did the machine malfunction? He held his hand up in front of his face, and could not see it until it was inches from his nose. His eyes were fine. No moon, no cities, no such thing as streetlights. They didn’t warn him that it would be this dark, yet they claimed they had thought of everything. Jim looked up—and saw the stars. There were so many. Billions. It was a breathtaking sight for someone who had never seen more than a few at one time. As beautiful as it was, his doubts about the mission grew. There was simply not enough light—until the moon peaked over the horizon. In the span of five minutes the entire orb loomed low but large over the landscape, bigger than he’d ever seen it before.

He scanned the terrain. Rocks and boulders. As the moon rose higher, he was able to locate the first cache, a cardboard knapsack with a sextant, a compass, some charts, tables, candles, matches and a flint striker. He shrugged it over his shoulder and began the trek to the next cache, and ultimately, the top of the treeless ridge.

2514.

Mission manager Adrian Moss cleared his throat and began. “Five years ago, two brilliant mathematicians were having lunch with two ignorant astronomers—” He waited until the laughter died down. “… and discovered, much to the astronomer’s amazement, that one of the asteroids they’d been studying, unique for its size and heft…” the room turned silent, “…was on a collision course with earth. An asteroid so large, it qualified as a ‘planet killer.”

Planet killers are inherently catastrophic. Whatever remains of the planet is completely uninhabitable. While the astronomers ‘studied’ it, the two mathematicians established the exact point, in space and time, that the two planetary bodies, the earth and the asteroid, would meet their mutual cosmic fate. Their proofs were irrefutable.

“When does this happen? 3700 years in the future, but the fact remains, we live on a planet scheduled for destruction by an errant ball of dirt.”

Solutions were sought, only one was deemed feasible.

A short, mirthful man in a white shirt stood up and explained, “It’s simple, really. We don’t have the technology to move the asteroid in any conventional way from its degrading orbit about the sun. You know, tractor beams, photon torpedoes? But we do have the time-machine.”

“We can send someone into the past, with a small, pre-charged, solar powered, laser pulse generator. While the force of a light beam is infinitesimal, using a second portal and Local Group 473’s gravity lens, we can refocus the pulse to jump even further into the past, multiplying its intensity and duration at the same time. Most of this can be automated.” The room seemed suddenly buoyed by his unabashed confidence. “The pulses will strike the asteroid 12 million years in the past, give or take a few millenia, and that gentle impact will alter the asteroid’s trajectory just enough to turn a hit, into a miss.”

He sat down. Pleased with himself. People clapped.

2518.

Jim Fixx was a wiry guy, with a long face and a reluctant smile. He was hand-picked for the mission but rarely summoned to the Directors office.

Burton Welles, The Program Director and de facto head of the ‘trans-temporal adjustment team’ (T-TAT) sat at his desk, rubbing his temples. He said, “You ready, Jim?”

Jim nodded. “Yup.”

“The team asked me to give you the bad news, Jim, we still can’t send food back in time, and very little water, since the water could accidentally arrive inside of you.”

“In the desert? I’ll take that risk.”

“Sorry Jim, no can do. We can’t take that risk. The point is, since the emitter has to fire on three consecutive nights, you’ll either have to find food for three days or go hungry. You’ll need to find some water too, for certain. You won’t survive three days in that environment without water.”

“I’ll figure something out,” Jim said, chewing on his toothpick.

1842.

Abner came running into the cabin leaving the door open, raced to the pantry and helped himself to a chunk of bread, took a small bite and shoved the rest into his pocket. He was breathless as he told the old man he’d seen lights in the sky again.

“Is that right?” His pa said. “Storm comin’?”

“No, Pa. It’s not a storm. It was like a shooting star, but on the ground. Like it had landed.”

“That’s nonsense. Where was this star, boy?”

Abner opened the door and pointed. “That way. Up on the ridge.”

The old man set back in his chair, as if too tired to move. “Maybe we’ll check on it tomorrow, once our chores is done, boy. Now go fetch us more wood and keep the blasted door closed, or so help me God…” The boy was already out the door.

Old Tom Oglesby knew that that boy would never wait until tomorrow.

Jim Fixx staggered up the last scree of boulders, and slid to the ground with his back against a granite slab, exhausted. “Joseph and Mary,” he muttered. It was hot as hell and muggy, even in the middle of the night and the dust was everywhere. He suffered scrapes and bruises on every limb, along with a few puncture wounds from more than one species of cactus. He plucked at the most painful barbs while catching his breath, then reached into the duffle bag to extract the two main pieces of the laser assembly to… something bit his finger. A lighted match revealed, but didn’t intimidate a large and aggressive spider in the bag. He wanted to smash it flat as a pancake, but the equipment was fragile. It was just a big old tarantula.

After a nerve-wracking five minutes, using an unlit candle like a battering ram against the marauding arachnid, he retrieved the critical instruments and began to assemble the platform and the device. The air was still, and it was quiet, until a dog began barking. A wolf howled, fairly close. After an hour of careful work, he had a tripod and a small frame with a suspended self-leveling plate to rest the tripod on. Checking his work by the light of a few sputtering candles, the contraption looked like a cross between a telescope, a mortar and a giant metal daisy….

Assembly had taken longer than it should have and the device came fully charged to fire on the first night. Jim stepped back, to be cautious, waited a bit, backed up a little further, and twisted his ankle on a loose stone. Wincing as he went down, he jammed his uninjured hand into a cactus plant trying to break his fall.

Even lying on the ground, writhing in pain, he was aware of footsteps in the gravel cresting the hill and coming to a sudden stop. At that moment the pulse emitter clicked, uttered a verbal warning to stand clear, then fired a single, conjoined plasma-tronic pulse-wave-particle up into space, punctuated with a distinctive plunk.

“What on earth? Are you all right, Mister?” It was a kid, Jim could tell, by the sound of his voice, as he scrambled over to kneel by his side. “What happened? Can you walk? You want me to call the Doc? Or my Dad? He’ll help ya, he’s just down the hill.”

Jim grabbed the boy by the forearm. “Don’t—get your dad—just yet.” Another set of footsteps crested the hill, bigger shoes, coming to a sudden stop. “Let go a that boy, ya creatin, or I’ll crease yer ugly noggin’ with a lead ball.”

The man reached out and snatched Abner by the collar, “You keep a clear a him, boy. Ya hear?” The sound of his flintlock rattling in the dark was menacing.

“He’s okay Pa, he’s a scientist, that’s all. Ain’t ya, mister?”

“Your boy is, ow, for Christ’s sake, jeez, ow, yeah, quite intelligent Mr…?”

“The name is Oglesby. I’m Tom, and this is my boy, Abner.”

Through the pain, with gritted teeth, laying on the ground, Jim Fixx said he was pleased to meet them.

“Looks like you had a fall,” the father observed, “Mister?” Both father and son extended an arm to help Jim to his feet. To Jim, the man’s arm felt as hard as iron. “My name’s Jim. Sir. Jim Fixx. I apologize for—skulking around near your property, sir.” He groaned audibly as he tried to put weight on his ankle. “I’d be much obliged to you for your help right now.”

The father squinted at Jim suspiciously while his son openly gazed at the contraption in wonder. “Well, we’ll see how grateful you are after we get you down this hill.” It was less than a quarter-mile distant, but a long, agonizing, journey for Jim.

Once the father had put his son to bed, he sat up late into the night with his strange guest, plied him with spirits in the dim, lantern-lit cabin and tried to wheedle the truth out of him. But Jim stuck to the story agreed on by the team. He was working for a man named Tesla, the strange device was used to measure the electricity in the air. That’s all there was to it.

In the morning, Tom Oglesby insisted that Abner go to school, but allowed as he could come home at noon. He spent the day fixing fences and resetting posts. Jim spent the day resting his foot in the shade of the back porch. By late afternoon, the entire town knew of Jim ‘the star man’ and a small crowd mingled near Tom and Abner’s house. The crowd started out silly, then got meaner as the night wore on, finally someone threw a gourd that broke a window, and the town’s Sherriff, who must have been lingering in the shadows, appeared out of nowhere on his horse and drove everyone off and back to their homes.

He dismounted and knocked on Tom’s door. When Tom answered it, the Sherriff politely asked if he could come in and speak to Tom’s guest. When he did, he said, “I don’t know your real name mister, but if I find you’s a crazy, I’ll lock you up and then run you out of town. If you’s a sellin’ snake-oil, I’ll lock you up and run you out of town. If you’s a consortin’ with demons and black witches…”

“You’ll run me out of town.”

“I will lock you up, and then run you out of town.”

The Sherriff put his hat on, adjusted it, shook Tom’s hand, “You take care now, Tom.”

“Goodnight Sherriff.”

“And say goodnight to your boy, for me.”

Abner was still awake. “Goodnight Sherriff.”

“Goodnight boy.”

The door slammed and Jim exhaled.

Even with the homemade crutch Abner had fashioned earlier that day, it took Jim more than two hours to limp to the top of the ridge, and witness the device’s second firing. Later that night, sitting alone on the front porch, nursing his swollen ankle while gazing at the stars, Jim had to hope the device remained functional and untampered with, for just another twenty-four hours.

The following morning, he woke to an indifferent host, even the boy was somber. The boy’s father, Tom, took Jim for a walk across the field opposite their cabin, winding their way through scrub brush and cactus, they ended up at the town’s cemetery, walking slowly through the midst of the ramshackle graveyard. Perhaps it had to do with the harsh terrain, the effort required to dig a decent hole through all the stones and rocks.

Tom stopped and pointed to a single headstone. “That’s what’s left of Abner’s parents, Mister. They died in a rock-slide, I think he was four.”

He bent down and scooped up a handful of thin topsoil, rubbed it between his fingers and let some of it sprinkle to the ground. As he did so, he politely but firmly informed Jim that he knew he was a liar. All his claims from the night before were hogwash.

Jim said nothing.

“No one’s ever heard of this Tesla fellow, and no one gets paid to measure electricity in the air. I may be a bumpkin to you Mr. Fixx, but your story has no merit. It’s completely false.”

Jim assessed his situation. It was a fundamental tenet of trans-temporal doctrine, to tell the locals anything but the truth. Any lie, no matter how inept, was more likely to be believed than the truth, and this doctrine had never failed so far.

“Cat got your tongue, Mr. Fixx?”

Jim could think of nothing to say.

“I know you ain’t from around here, Mr. Fixx. The trouble is, it don’t feel like you’re from anywhere else either.”

Jim sighed, “I should’ve known better than to try and fool an old country farmer like you.”

Tom saw right through the empty flattery. “I’ve half a mind to turn you over to Sherriff Whatley right now and climb that hill straight away and make a mess of that device you hold so dear.”

“Oh please don’t do that, Tom. A lot of people are depending on me, to complete this, this…”

“Job?” Tom offered. “I’ll bet they are. I’ve seen surveyors before, with their fancy scopes, tripods and measuring sticks. You’uns are from the future all right,” he pointed to a glistening ribbon in the distance, “where a railroad runs right alongside that riverbank there. Can you see it. See how it makes sense? This hangdog little town will sprout hotels first, then liveries, hard and tack stores, and a saloon on every corner. Oh—I can see it myself without your misguided help.”

Jim said nothing.

“The future,” Tom spit on the ground, “will be here soon enough, so I’d appreciate it if you’d quit all this nonsense about the future around that boy. He has a hard enough future in store for him without some mysterious sounding riff-raff filling his head with things that airn’t real. I want him living in the real world, Mr. Fixx, this world. It ain’t much, but it’s all he’ll ever get.”

Jim looked at the blue sky, it had to be close to noon. Twelve more hours to go. “I’ll be gone by tomorrow, Mr. Oglesby, and there’ll be little or no trace of me.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear, Jim, and I’m glad of it. That’s what I expected anyway. And there’s no need to be formal with me on your last night here. But we’ll have no truck with liars.” He shook his head. “Trust is critical.” He looked around and spit on the ground again. “Especially in this Godforsaken country.”

That afternoon, on Jim’s third and final day, he asked Abner if he could read and write.

“Sure,” the boy said. “I can cipher, too.” He then reluctantly admitted that some of the other kids were planning to spy on him up on the ridge that night.

“Thanks for the warning Abner. They must not have much to do around here.”

“Are you kidding? There’s plenty to do. Slopping the hogs, feeding the chickens, milking the cows, tending the garden, pulling rocks out of that field, canning beets for the—”

“I meant for fun, Abner. What do you kids do for fun?”

“Fun? We ain’t got time for fun. Mostly.”

Jim grabbed a stick from the ground and squatted in the shade of the house. He said, “This here’s a game I used to play as a kid.” He drew a diamond in the dirt, pointed at the nearest angle and said, “That’s your home.”

“Uh-huh.”

He pointed at the other three angles and put little squares in them, “These are nearby towns.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You have your thrower stand here, right in the midst of the diamond. He’s the pitcher.”

“The what?”

“He pitches the ball and the hitter tries to hit the ball.”

“And then what?”

“If the hitter hits the ball, he has to run from town to town, see? There’s a make-believe town at each corner.”

“Why towns?” Abner said.

“Because he’s safe there. Once the pitcher fetches the ball, he can throw the hitter out anywhere between the towns.”

“And if he gets back home, he gets a point, right?”

“If he doesn’t get hit, yes.”

“Just one point?” The boy was uninterested. “Seems a bit simple to me.”

“Well,” Jim said, “you can make up more rules as you see fit.”

Three young boys sprinting down the dirt road slid to a halt when they saw Abner and Jim. “Hey Ab,” the biggest said, “we’re goin’ fishin’, down at the river. Wanna come?”

The boy seemed reluctant until the youngest boy said, “Come on Doubleday, you can dawdle with the star man later.”

“Don’t call him that,” Abner said. “I’ll see you later, Mr. Fixx,” and he was off running with his friends.

There was no sign of the boys when Jim returned to the ridge that night. The device fired as planned, then consumed itself in a flash of incandescence. Moments later, Jim Fixx vanished, from 1842.