37. Vacuum Power

“He wanted to ask you about valves in American computers.”

“Valves?” Mateo vaguely remembered a water powered computer from ... some time or other.

“You put something about them in your notes. It says here some American physicist started using them a few years ago. Incidentally, could you stop using phrasing like ‘the late ‘thirties’ in your notes? It sounds too ... historical.”

“Oops, sorry. And oh right! Vacuum tubes! Yeah! They’ll speed things up a LOT. They’ll be able to get a lot more done than you can with relays in a lot shorter time.”

Nigel licked his pencil — turned out the lousy things from back now would hardly write if they were dry — and said “I’m all ears.”

***

“Avi, I’ve found another thing to try.” Colette sounded wired.

He looked up. “What’s this one?”

It turned out once you sorted through the crackpots, there wasn’t much weird anachronism in history. They’d tried settings consistent with the date and location of the Antikythera mechanism and got no wormhole, not so much as a flicker. The worst part was knowing Mateo might have been sent there, and then whatever random tide of Dirac Sea that had kicked open a wormhole last time had receded. In that case he could precisely reproduce the settings for the rest of his life with no results.

These few months, she’d been going through accounts of mysterious strangers that came anywhere near his description, too, and now any large research teams working on projects that had led to jumps in technology, especially ones that were secretive on the front end and came to light later. It was unlikely that he’d be able to invent something by himself, but he might be able to land a job as a lab tech or something and put his future knowledge to work.

“The codebreaking machines of World War Two.”

“Oh yeah?” He didn’t look very hopeful. It was dumb to hope too much with every little possibility. He’d already tried sixty-five possibilities.

“Yes, I found some notes by Turing and Flowers. They were declassified in the mid-80s, and they mention an American consultant code-named ‘Drift’ who had a lot to say about the potential of “valves” in computing. I looked it up, that’s what the English call vacuum tubes. They were already used in a computer built by a guy named Atanasoff, but he seems to have been a one-man band.”

“I bet he had grad students,” Avi mumbled.

“I checked them. Found pictures, too. None of them were Mateo.”

“Ok. Where’s the Turing lead?”

“Sixty-two years and six thousand, four hundred kilometers. The code name fits Mateo coming from here. Maybe.” She shrugged wearily.

“Ok, I’ll try it. I should be able to get some time on the accelerator tonight.”

The lab was cold and bright, like always. His advisor was nowhere around, thank goodness. She was starting to really worry about him.

He’d developed a working theory that there was a linear relation between the readings and the distance (in space and/or time) of the other end of the wormhole. And only one setting was able to tap into negative energy and open a transversible wormhole, and keep it open long enough to pass through.

Or maybe no settings worked and this was all stupid. He huffed out a breath, squared his shoulders, and walked over to the particle accelerator.

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