Storymania - The Eleventh Commandment by Robert Remington Abbot

The Eleventh Commandment
Robert Remington Abbot

The Eleventh Commandment of the Timekeeper

“Professor Weidenboff, do you actually believe that if you send a time machine
far enough into the past you will unequivocally prove the existence of an Omnipotent
Being?”
Weidenboff took a deep breath. The Committee would never allocate enough
power to launch a Timekeeper unless he could prove there was a valid enough
incentive.
“Yes, I do, John. Without a doubt. We simply send a probe back twenty-five
billion years into the past to see what type of data it comes back with.”
John Zeissmann was not a scientist, but he was a key figure on the Senate
Finance Committee. He signed the paycheck for all major projects.
“Why twenty-five billion years, professor?”
Weidenboff sipped from a water glass. His mouth was like dry cotton.
“Most astrophysicists concur that the universe began with the biggest explosion
of all time, called the Big Bang. One moment there was just an unimaginably small and
hot ball--smaller than an atom. An instant later the universe exploded into existence,
with a bang so big that material is still hurtling away from it in all directions at
astonishing speeds.”
The Committee’s scientists refuted.
“Professor Weidenboff, that is preposterous. The universe always was. It’s
expansion is making way for new matter being created all the time. It has no beginning
and therefore has no end.”
Weidenboff shook his head. He knew that this `launch would be a difficult sell to
the Committee.
“Your theory cannot explain the microwave background radiation detected by the
ancient COBE satellite in 1992, Professor Tillman. The faint glow that’s still detectable
whenever we look into the night sky.”
Tillman knew about the Cosmic Background Explorer probe because his
great-great-great grandfather was one of the design engineers for the NASA project.
Weidenboff pressed on.
“The Wilkenson Microwave Anisotropy Probe also confirmed this. Space
everywhere is pervaded by a faint microwave glow just 2.73 degrees above Absolute
Zero. And microwaves are the remnant heat from the Big Bang.”
The Committee debated the arguments for hours. Politicians screamed at each
other and scientists screamed at the politicians, but in the end, Professor Weidenboff
won by one vote. He collapsed in the chair behind the podium, relieved. He continued
to mop the sweat from his forehead with a kerchief while the bickering continued in the
audience. Weidenboff stood up on wobbly legs. He just wanted to get back to the
sanctity of his laboratory. In exactly one week the Timekeeper would be launched and
there was so much to do.
“Professor Weidenboff,” he heard a hasty voice. He turned. Someone was
pushing their way through the crowd.
“Professor Weidenboff, a word with you, please.”
It was an attractive woman, about half his age, pushing through the wall of
politicians to get to him.
“Yes?”
She was smartly dressed in a French Hunt Jacket, midnight blue with a bronze
satin lining. It was very flattering on her, the professor thought.
“My name is Anna Winslow, professor. I attend the college here in the city.”
“Metro?”
“Why, yes,” she smiled, up in the Hamptons.”
The professor knew that Metro was an impressive institution, very difficult to be
accepted. He looked at his watch and decided she was worth a few moments of his time.
“Professor, I’m writing a master’s thesis on theology. May I ask you a few
questions?”
Her big green eyes were mesmerizing, he thought. He grabbed her hand and led
her out of the crowded conference room, down the hallway and outside the Ministry of
Science. There was a bitter chill in the air even though it was the middle of July. They
sat on a park bench under a stand of birches.
“This is nice,” she said, looking around.
“You had a question, Ms. Winslow?”
“Yes, but you must call me Anna, professor.”
He smiled at the pretty woman.
“Do you believe in a singular God?”
Professor Weidenboff rubbed his chin.
“That is a rather complex question, young lady. All too often we are inclined to
think of theology as static and cast in granite. Not so, not so. Our understanding of God
was formulated once and for all at some mysterious point in the past. Since then, all
that has been required is for that original conception, preserved and handed down
throughout generations.”
Anna looked up in the sky. The sun’s presence was dwarfed by the huge comet
that had been streaking towards the Earth . Day and night it burned in the sky, looking
like an exploding flash bulb.
“You’ve got Yahweh, a tribal god, the god of the Israelites, and only the
Israelites. He resided on Mount Sinai and indeed, a fearsome god; put a foot on his
land and one would risk his wrath. Moses met Yahweh in the form of the burning bush.
This is the concept I believe in.”
Anna nodded, and looked up toward the comet again.
“It’s frightening, isn’t it, Anna?”
She shuddered and he squeezed her hand in comfort.
“They say it is larger than Neptune,” she said, looking at him, “they say it will
wipe out all life on earth and possibly knock our planet out of orbit.”
The professor nodded. “It is inevitable.”
He could sense that Anna was scared. She had not yet made peace with herself.
Anna looked deep into the professor’s eyes.
“Professor, do you truly believe that your time machine will find God?”
He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.
“Yes, Anna, I believe I will find God at the beginning of all that we know.”
“Are you going to ask God to save our planet?”
Weidenboff looked up at the comet. He knew it was going to impact the Earth in
precisely twenty-eight days. He looked at Anna and smiled again, the kind of smile a
father gives his daughter when she wakes up screaming from a bad dream.
“God knows, Anna. What will happen, will happen. God’s Divine Will.”
She leaned forward, resting her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes.
One week later, the professor stood before a control panel of assorted digital
readouts and indicator lights. On the wall hung a large clock with bright red numbers
for everyone to see. “Everyone” consisted of Professor Leidenboff, three lab assistants,
and Anna Winslow. None of the Committee members were present. The Doomsday
comet accelerated when it slung around the planet Jupiter, and in a matter of minutes
the Earth would be obliterated. The lab shook with violent earthquakes and a fierce
storm raged outside.
There wasn’t time for a countdown now. Leidenboff waited for the gigantic
banks of Ultra Capacitors to store the equivalent of twenty-five billion watts of power
required to hurl the Timekeeper into God’s waiting hands. Anna was at the professor’s
side, working doggedly with him day and night, surviving on caffeine and energy drinks
and vitamin shots.
“Karl,” she said to him, “let me go aboard the probe.”
He continued to watch the charge indicators.
“Anna, we’ve been through this before. The Timekeeper is not designed to carry
a human being.”
“But I could fit inside it, professor, in the payload bay. I want to go.”
“You won’t survive, Anna. Twenty-five billion watts of power will probably
dissolve the probe into nothingness, anyway.”
“The comet will pulverize me if I stay here, professor, so it doesn’t matter.”
She grabbed his arm.
“But if I do survive, professor, and if I meet God--”.
Her voice trailed off. The lab rumbled with a violent shake. Steam pipes
ruptured along the walls, spewing superheated vapor into the lab. One of the lab
assistants screamed when she was caught in the deadly stream of vapor. Leidenboff
almost fell from the quake and the gauges flickered from a momentary power drop-off.
“Please, Karl,” Anna shouted over the hissing and sputtering from the broken
conduits.
He looked at her and looked at the Timekeeper.
“Let’s go,” he said, and pushed her towards the launch pad.
“Assuming you do survive the journey back, Anna, remember, there will be no
oxygen to breathe, no light, sound or darkness--”.
“I know, professor, there will be nothing at all.”
They reached the Timekeeper.
Leidenboff spun the metal wheel that secured the payload hatch. When it
opened Anna could smell the pungent ozone from the electricity pulsing through the
onboard electronics.
“Actually, Anna, there will be less than nothing, I would suspect. The energy per
unit volume or energy density could be less than zero.”
The professor reached inside the probe and began tearing out the cameras to
make more room for Anna.
“Needless to say, Anna, the implications are bizarre. According to Einstein’s
theory of gravity, the presence of matter and energy warps the geometric fabric of
space and time. What we perceive as gravity is the space-time distortion produced by
normal, positive energy or mass.”
He managed to pull one of the cameras out and away from the diamond view
plate. At least Anna would now have an observation port. There was another camera
mounted behind a sapphire window and he began to remove it.
“Now, when negative energy or mass--so-called exotic matter--bends space-time,
all sorts of amazing phenomena might become possible.”
She helped him get the second camera out.
“What are you saying, professor?”
“I’m saying, just be prepared for everything, okay?”
Anna turned towards Karl and hugged him.
“Karl, I--”.
“There isn’t time, Anna,” he said, pulling away from her grasp, “you must get
into the probe now.”
Anna stepped inside and wiggled into the payload compartment. She was small
in stature and although it was cramped inside amid the convoluted tubes and wires and
countless other devices designed to carry the probe into the past, she managed to fit.
An explosion rocked the laboratory, knocking the professor down.
“Karl!”
Leidenboff’s hand appeared at the edge of the hatchway and he pulled himself
up. His head was bleeding profusely but he still managed a weak smile.
“Godspeed, Anna,” he said, and closed the heavy metal hatch.
The wheel spun, locking it in place. Anna managed to position herself so that she
could peek out of one of the diamond windows that a camera would be positioned at.
The Timekeeper’s cameras had not yet been installed; there just wasn’t time.
Anna saw that the professor made it to the control console. All around him,
flames licked up at the walls. Thick black smoke mixed with sparks came out of an
overhead control panel behind him. He began flipping switches and Anna could feel the
current surging through the Timekeeper. The ozone smell was stifling and she began to
choke, never taking her eyes off of Professor Leidenboff. He turned around and faced
the burning overhead control panel. Reaching for a huge switch, the professor
managed to throw it. The panel exploded and Anna screamed when the professor was
engulfed in flames.
In a matter of seconds, the lab disappeared. Anna felt a tremendous surge of
motion for a fraction of a second, flattening her with such a force she couldn’t even
scream.
Please, God, don’t let me die without meeting you, she prayed silently.
As if her prayer was answered, the sensation of acceleration stopped and Anna
was weightless now amid the tangle of floating wires. Dazzling splashes of color
illuminated the interior of the Timekeeper through the large diamond window and the
two smaller sapphire ones. She pulled herself nearer the window and peered outside.
“Oh, my God, it’s beautiful,” she said, watching the universe pass as radiant
streams of violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red.
It was like being trapped in an ancient kaleidoscope or a mighty rainbow river
heading towards a waterfall, she thought. There were no stars, just all the colors of the
visible light spectrum. Anna wondered if she was being exposed to deadly radiation and
then pushed the thought out of her head. Perhaps Divine guidance was navigating the
Timekeeper.
The colors outside began to thin into wispy tendrils and suddenly Anna’s skin
tingled. Her hair stood on end as if highly charged with static electricity, and she felt as
though she were passing through some sort of elastic membrane. She had a barely
perceptible feeling that the Timekeeper was slowing and then a sensation of “give” as
the probe seemed to accelerate. It wasn’t actual motion, she noticed, but rather a
cognition of motion. The Timekeeper began to shake and Anna wailed. Now she
pictured herself rolling along ancient railroad tracks, it was so bumpy to her.
Abruptly, Anna was plunged in a suffocating darkness and the shaking had
stopped. There was no heat nor cold; no sound, save for her own heartbeat and
breathing. The darkness even faded into a colorless translucence now, and she came to
the realization that her journey had ended. She looked through the diamond window,
out into Eternity, out into the translucence, wondering what was next. Am I dead, God?
Is this Purgatory?
For some reason, Anna remembered that both goodness and evil originated with
God. Perhaps the assumption that God is wholly good is not, in fact, correct. Just as
there is a dark side to each of us, there is a dark side to God--a “shadow” side to Him.
Goodness and evil reside within one Deity. Anna closed her eyes and began to say her
Act of Contrition.
The Timekeeper was nothing but a mere speck in the middle of a vastness not at
all understood by the fragile creature contained within. In much less than a
nanosecond, the Timekeeper was no more. It exploded, swelling outwards by an
astonishing hundred billion billion billion billion times. While it rapidly mushroomed out,
the infant universe began to cool, and matter and the basic forces such as electricity
and magnetism were created.
At first, the Timekeeper and Anna dissolved into quarks, but within a billionth of
a second, they began to join up in familiar combinations of protons, neutrons and
electrons. Then the neutrons and protons combined to form the simplest atoms, first
hydrogen and then helium, and the universe was filled with swirling clouds of gas.
These gradually curdled into long thin strands which eventually clumped together to
form galaxies, stars and finally planets.
The hatch wheel to the Timekeeper rotated and squealed, grinding with a thin
layer of rust. Anna peeked through the diamond window, but it was frosted over on the
outside.
The hatch creaked and groaned as it opened and Anna squinted, not use to the
brilliant light that flooded inside the payload compartment.
“Anna, Anna, are you all right?”
Her back was stiff from being confined and ached from laying against something.
Professor Leidenboff’s face appeared in the opening, and he smiled when he heard her
groaning.
“Professor Leidenboff?”
He reached for her hand and she felt its warmth, its strength, and its softness.
“Anna,” he said, and pulled her gently from the Timekeeper.
Anna’s legs were stiff and she leaned on the professor for support. The
laboratory was completely intact; there were no signs of devastation. Technicians
worked behind computer consoles. Voices crackled over loudspeakers.
“What happened, Karl? What happened to the comet? I thought it hit the Earth.”
Professor Leidenboff steadied her and led her to a chair. Anna felt weak and
slightly nauseous.
“Let me get a spot of tea for you, dear Anna,” Karl said.
She watched as technicians surrounded the Timekeeper, examining it with an
array of electronic instruments that searched for gamma radiation, surface temperature
readings and anything out of the ordinary.
The professor returned and handed her the tea. Anna sipped it carefully, feeling
better already.
“Shortly after I sealed the Timekeeper’s hatch, I fired the Ultra Capacitors.
Nothing seemed to happen, although I thought I’d blacked out for just a second right
after I threw the last switch.”
“Did I go back in time?”
“I don’t think so, Anna. The Timekeeper just sat on the launch pad. Doctor
Bennett thought that for an instant it did disappear, but he wasn’t sure.”
Anna nodded, sipping more tea.
“The comet, professor; what about the comet?”
Leidenboff appeared to be confused. He rested his hand tenderly on her
shoulder and smiled.
“There was a comet that barely missed Pluto about a year ago, but it never
came close to Earth, Anna.”
“When I got into the Timekeeper, professor, the laboratory all around me was
collapsing from the comet’s initial contact with the Earth’s atmosphere, and now you’re
telling me there never was a threat?”
The professor shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“Professor Leidenboff?”
He turned around. It was Drake Wakefield, one of the project engineers. He was
holding a clipboard and handed it to Leidenboff.
“We triple checked the figures, professor. The Timekeeper weighed 466.3
kilograms minus the fore and aft cameras, and now it weighs 8.2 kilograms more, sir.”
Leidenboff looked over the figures, making his own mental calculations.
“It gained additional mass in a matter of seconds, professor.”

The outer skin of the Timekeeper was made of aerospace grade aluminum alloy
reinforced with silicon Carbide Ceramic Particulate on an aluminum alloy honeycomb.
Three layers of titanium sandwiched with cobalt alloy comprised the remainder of the
structure, and its weight was precisely known.
“You do believe me, don’t you, professor?”
One of the technicians near the open hatch of the Timekeeper beckoned.
“Sir,” he said, addressing the professor, “you’d better come over and have a look
at this.”
Professor Leidenboff handed the clipboard to Wakefield. Anna followed Wakefield
and the professor to the Timekeeper.
“What is it, Mueller?”
“Look inside the probe, sir.”
Professor Leidenboff’s eyes widened.
“What in God’s name is it?”
“I don’t know, sir. I know it accounts for the additional mass of the Timekeeper.”
Anna moved closer so that she could look through the hatchway. She looked
where she had been.
Leidenboff reached inside and grabbed them, bringing them out into the brightly
lit laboratory.
“What are those?”
Leidenboff looked at Anna and the wide-eyed technicians surrounding the probe.
He swallowed hard, barely able to speak.
“Stone tablets, two of them. My God, Anna,” he said, astonished, what happened
inside the Timekeeper?”
“You’re not going to tell me that those are the Ten Commandments, written by
the finger of God, are you?”
Leidenboff looked at the tablets.
“No,” he said, reading with a perverted smile, “there are Eleven Commandments,
Anna, remember?”
“Eleven, professor? I was always taught there were ten.”
Leidenboff took his glasses off and looked closely at the polished tablets.
“Ancient Hebrew, all right. I remember from my scholastic studies.’
He looked up at the team of scientists.
“I believe these are authentic.”
Anna looked at the shiny tablets. She could not decipher ancient Hebrew, but
plainly could tell there were Eleven Commandments.
“Professor, what is the eleventh Commandment?”
Leidenboff looked at Anna and shook his head in disappointment.
“My dear Anna, I am surprised with you. And you proclaim to be a devout
Catholic? What did those priests and nuns teach you?”
Anna gritted her teeth.
“Tell me, Professor.”
“Thou shalt not commit Time Travel, of course.”
“Of course,” Anna said.