by Ken Doggett
(Originally published in Amazing Stories, July 1981)
"Eureka!" the Professor cried. "It's done!"
"What's done?" asked his beautiful female assistant. She tossed her head so that her flaxen hair settled in a whirl to her shoulders.
"My machine!" The Professor calmed himself long enough to emit a sigh. "Haven't you been paying attention? I've created a machine that will stop time. And it must work! It has to! The equations are correct!"
The assistant nodded blankly. Then she busied herself unwrapping a fresh stick of gum to add to the huge wad that already kept her perfect mouth in busy rhythm. "You've made a time machine," she said.
"No, no, no!" the Professor cried, tearing at his wild, uncombed hair. "Not a time machine, you stupid little ninny! A machine that stops time!"
"Oh," said the assistant, her pretty face still a blank. "What's the difference?"
"When I throw this lever," the Professor explained as he grasped the protruding instrument and ignored her question, "all time will come to a complete halt. But---" he raised a finger "---only I will know it, because only I control the machine. To everyone else, time will seem to move normally, while I move around unfettered by its restrictions. But from my viewpoint they will seem frozen, imprisoned motionless by the universe's headlong dash toward increasing entropy."
The assistant had produced a hairbrush, and was running it through her silken locks. "What?": she said.
"Never mind, " said the Professor with an impatient wave of his hand. "I will demonstate." With that he pulled the lever and disappeared.
The assistant waited a long, long time, perhaps as much as fifteen or twenty seconds, but the Professor failed to reappear. She wriggled over to the machine and stood, hands on curvaceous hips, and scowled at its control panel.
"Golly," she cursed, hurling the foul invective at the impassive machine with all the venom of an unhatched Indian Cobra. "Surely the Professor would not have made such a bad mistake. Surely he would know that as he stopped time, he would also stop the very photons in their tracks; and that it would be ever so dark, and if he got turned around, he might never find his way back to the machine.
"And surely he would not have forgoten that the only breatheable air he carried was what was in his lungs at the time (all used up), and that all the air outside his body would for him be composed of inactive atoms and molecules which would not only give him no sustenance if he tried to inhale them (probably proving toxic also), but would provide little or no atmospheric pressure to balance that which was inside his body. And he might even explode!"
She ran the brush absently through her hair once more as a frown troubled her lovely countenance. "Surely he would have considered all that." And she hopped up on a nearby counter and prepared to wait for him until doomsday if necessary, or at least another minute or two, her faith in the Professor unshakeable. But still he failed to return.
Another frown crept onto her face, and she held her hairbrush motionless for an instant, forgetting even to chew her gum. Then she shrugged as both brush and gum went into motion at once.
"And he called me stupid."
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copyright 1981, 1982, 2006, 2008 by Ken Doggett
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