State of the Union

“We have discussed this matter with our clients,” Zarelli said. “They are reluctant to offer any easing of the conditions I outlined on our previous visit. I told them that unless we could offer you something more, you would likely not agree to the arrangement. After several days of consultations among themselves, my clients have agreed to the following modification. You may be present during any use of the apparatus. If you feel that a particular action that my clients want to take would adversely affect the present by changing what happened in the past, they will stop—time permitting—to at least discuss the situation, give you time to express your concerns. They promise to give those concerns full consideration. But, in the final analysis, the decision on whether or not to proceed must remain with them.” That was not good enough. However, I had been doing a lot of thinking. I had found a way that might allow me to agree without giving up total control—a matter of what they didn’t know wasn’t likely to hurt me. Since they were willing to have me present when the machine was being used, my “out” looked secure. But I wasn’t going to agree too quickly. I didn’t even know then that I would actually succeed in building a working machine, so I couldn’t be absolutely certain that I would be able to add my gimmick to it.

“There is one other consideration that my clients have instructed me to mention,” Zarelli said when I didn’t respond immediately. “We did not discuss your fee for undertaking this project. Over and above the costs of your work, and a salary matching that which you receive from the university, you will be paid a half million dollars when you demonstrate your proof-of-concept model. When you have a full-scale apparatus working, you will be paid an additional one million dollars. And, at the successful conclusion of the tests that my clients desire to undertake, you will be paid a final five million dollars. All sums will be paid, in whatever form is acceptable to you, with all federal, state, and local taxes already paid on them, with proper evidence of those payments.” Over the weekend it had occurred to me that Zarelli and Pastor might represent organized crime—the Mafia, if you will—and the offer of six and a half million dollars convinced me of it. Neither Zarelli nor Pastor had blinked at the amounts I had quoted during our first meeting and, apart from the government, only the mob might be able to come up with that much money.

That deduction did not affect my decision. As I said before, a researcher has to be open-minded about getting funds. I wouldn’t be the first to take money from sources such as that to do research, or to turn research into something more concrete. And it wasn’t as if they were asking me to construct a machine for making drugs or anything like that.

Six and a half million dollars, with the taxes already paid. It was that last, I think, that convinced me that the immediate (if not the ultimate) sources of the money would be beyond reproach, from legitimate organizations of one sort of another, money as legally pure as that which pours into the election campaigns of honorable men and women running for public office. And, as I have already said, I had the first glimmers of, shall we say, a private sting operation—just in case.

I needed seventeen months to build my proof-of-concept model and get it working to my personal satisfaction. Satisfying my patrons took most of another month, but, finally, they gave me the go-ahead to construct a full-scale machine. The first model took seventeen months of steady work. I was due a year’s sabbatical, so I took that the following school year or I might have needed twice as long to get the first model built and operating.

Since my patrons were satisfied— delighted is a more accurate word— with my model, they made it possible for me to take a second year off from my duties at the university without pay. It was not all that much a sacrifice on my part since I had received my first bonus for my work on the time machine. I needed to be free of university responsibilities. Even working more than full time—sixteen to eighteen hours a day, six or seven days a week—it took a year to scale up from the proof-of-concept device to a full-size working apparatus. The difficulties were technical, not theoretical. A sufficient power supply was the biggest problem. It takes a lot of electrical energy to rip a few threads from the skein of time and reach through the gap.