Someone New - Parts I - VI
by Steve Anderson
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Note 72.0 Someone New--I: The Watch 27 replies
HC::SANDERSO "Futon torpedo" 81 lines 3-NOV-1992 01:25
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Someone New--I: The Watch
"One man's junk is another man's fortune."
Somewhere, somewhen, a man and a boy stood together and looked at a
watch. Perhaps they stood on a battlefield, where the "right" side had
just won a decisive battle. Perhaps they stood at the Mason-Dixon Line,
where they had just helped an important slave-narrative writer to safety.
Perhaps they stood outside the Globe Theatre, where an as-yet little-known
playwright had just had his first play produced. Or perhaps they stood in
any of a hundred other places and other times; anywhere, so long as there
was an important historical turning-point at hand. It could have been just
about anywhere and anywhen; the particulars are lost to history.
One way or another, however, they found themselves, for the thousandth
time, looking at the mysterious pocket-watch and noting that the red light
which had, until now, been lit, had now switched itself off and that its
accompanying green light had come on. Perhaps the man uttered his favorite
refrain--"Green light, kid!"--and perhaps he didn't. Perhaps the boy
addressed a reply to his companion, calling him by the name "Phineas," and
perhaps he did not. At any rate, they consulted the watch, and fiddled
with the dial--except that closer investigation would show it was not a
dial but a miniature globe--and moments later vanished from wherever, and
whenever, they had been.
Suddenly, they were flying through the black void of the Vortex,
red-streaked planes rushing by above, below, to the right, and to the left.
It was still a terrifying experience, but they were slowly getting used to
it.
----------
Somewhere, in the early- to mid-1980's, a television writer slammed
down his phone. //Damn,// he seethed in frustration. //I thought I
really had something there.//
But the studio's word was final, and so he took his remaining notes,
and scored 2 big points in the wastepaper basket next to his desk. He
leaned back in his chair, propped his feet on his now-empty desk, and
awaited inspiration. "Voyagers" was dead.
----------
Phineas Bog and Jeffrey simply vanished. One moment, they were in
the Vortex, on their way to yet another historical crisis, and the next they
were simply gone, scattered to the four winds and the vagaries of Hollywood
casting.
The "pocket-watch," however, was a specialized prop, useless
elsewhere, and so it was left where it was. It showed considerable
damage--its case was cracked and its lights blinked drunkenly--but it
continued to float through the Vortex, slowly drifting towards one side
and thus towards an eventual contact with a physical realm.
Moments, minutes, hours, days, years, eons, all are the same in
Vortex. Some time later, anyway, the "watch" finally succumbed to the
inevitable. It struck one of the passing planes, and, with a small lurch
of clashing continuities, it incorporated itself into an
as-yet-unidentified alternate. Finding itself in midair, as was its
wont, it fell to the ground and landed with the gritty crunch of a breaking
piece of delicate clockwork machinery.
----------
Deep in the bowels of the urban think-tank, a greying man sat, wishing
for his eyesight, and noted the departure of his friend, colleague, and
underling. He smiled as he remembered some of the good times they'd had,
and cursed the disease that had torn from him forever the chance of seeing
his friend with his own eyes, even one more time.
His friend shared the wish; nothing brought him more wonderful joy
than seeing the older man happy, and anything--which now meant the
blindness--which disturbed the older man bothered this younger one almost
as much.
Shaking his head, the young man walked out to his jeep--he had
recently sold his truck, as well as the motorcycle, and re-purchased the
jeep--and prepared to go home. As he was buckling his seat belt before
starting the engine, a glimmer in the grass beside his parking space caught
his attention. He climbed out and took a closer look. Seeing the
watchworks-that-weren't-watchworks, the mechanisms of unknown design and
function, and the wonderful, overwhelming complexity of the thing, and also
clearly noting the impossibility that it would again function properly, he
was overcome with a desire to investigate it, at least far enough to
determine what it had once been, if not to repair it.
But repairs were, of course, what he did best, and so he would
obviously try as hard as he could to retore the exotic time-piece to
working order. But first, he should find out whether whoever had dropped
it wanted it back. He registered the piece with Phoenix Security, and waited
the suggested two weeks. At last, they concluded that its owner was not
going to claim it, and signed control over to him. The very night of his
authorization, the "trouble-shooter" began work.
Hardly any piece of machinery had ever been too much for him to
understand, and he would solve this mystery, as well, or his name wasn't
Angus Macgyver.
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Note 73.0 Someone New--II: Repairs 6 replies
HC::SANDERSO "Futon torpedo" 89 lines 3-NOV-1992 17:27
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Someone New--II: Repairs
"The impossible we do yesterday, the incomprehensible we do _every_ day"
Evening gave way to night, and the hours rolled slowly by. Still, at
3:00 AM, a light from his house-boat window shone out across the water as
Macgyver continued to work. Spread out over the kitchen counter at which
he stood was an amazing array of cogs, gears, and miniature parts of every
possible description. Anyone else would have been hopelessly baffled by
the array, and even he had to admit that he had only a precious few vague
theories. Still, there was hope that this device would eventually yield
its secrets; at any rate, that was the thought with which he disciplined
himself as he carefully prodded at yet another tiny piece with the
white-tipped tweezers from his ever-present Swiss Army knife.
"Woah." He hardly even noticed as the syllable escaped his lips; his
entire consciousness was focused on the tiniest of parts, just barely
visible inside the smallest of the casings he had examined thus far. "It
can't be," he said softly. This was impossible. The evidence was clear,
and the conclusion was becoming inescapable, but he just didn't want to
believe it. Or rather, he _couldn't_ believe it. Ending up in King
Arthur's time as a result of a hit on the head was one thing, but this was
quite another. "It can't be," he said again, and knew that it was anyway.
Minutes later, he had completed his mental picture of how this
remarkable device was meant to operate, and he was beginning to examine
each part carefully to see just what worked and what didn't. As it turned
out, only one part was permanently damaged. That was the good news; the
bad news was that the irreparable (sad to say, that word did have meaning
for him; the technology needed to build the machines to make the tool he'd
have needed was years down the road, and it was already 3:30 in the morning,
so he couldn't spare the time to invent it now) part was what might be
called, for lack of a better term, a Temporal Discrimator. That is to say,
the missing piece was the central element of the device's guidance system.
So, he could travel through time, but he couldn't control where or
when he'd end up. That had, apparently, been a design limitation of the
unit to begin with; the Discriminator had automatically picked out
historical turning-points and homed in on them. The unit, then, had been
almost completely automatic. Or maybe not. There was that port on the back;
maybe there was supposed to be another unit that could give the
pocket-watch unit more precise instructions. Some kind of helm computer. So,
even without the Discriminator, perhaps there was a chance of getting the
device up and running, if he could just supply a replacement for the
missing guidance system.
But how could he possibly design a guidance system for a time machine?
All the theories he had to work with said that time travel was impossible.
Travel to the past was inconceivable; the slightest change would undermine
the present. And travel to the future involved the same problem upon
return to the present. So the only way to time-travel was to go to a time
and then not interact with it. But then what was the point? Especially
if, as he had guessed, the red and green lights on this pocket-watch thing
were indicators for time-stream locations gone bad. Just "observing"
temporal errors wouldn't fix them, so how could one ever get a green light?
"That's it," he murmured to himself, then went on in his normal
physics-lecture voice, "if the past can go bad while this unit can maintain
its grasp of the 'original' time-line, then it must be possible for two
points in the time-stream to exist independently. Since the past shapes
the present, though, that has to be impossible, unless...." He smiled.
"Unless there are complete, independent time-streams. Whole independent,
alternative universes. So then all I really have to tell this 'watch' is
where I want to go, when I want to go there, and which version of that when
and where I want."
That, of course, involved five-dimensional calculus--a struggle even
for someone like Anakata--but five-dimensional thinking was child's-play
to Macgyver, and less than fifteen minutes later, he had invented a
coordinate system with what he took to be universal applicability, as well
as plenty of room for later refinement. Now all that remained was the
actually _build_ a computer capable of coding that kind of data quickly,
easily, and neatly. Preferably while remaining small enough to fit inside
the original hull of the pocket-watch unit. And, if possible, one that
would use the pocket-watch's original globe-and-mini-dials interface
for its data entry. That interface just had a kind of pinache you wouldn't
get with a keyboard or a mouse. But where on Earth was he going to find the
building-blocks for a miniature computer at--he looked at his watch--3:57
in the morning?
He propped his head on his hand to think, and moments later it was
lying on his cradled arms on the counter and he was slipping off to a
peaceful sleep. Just before he abandoned consciousness, however, his watch
registered the end of the minute 3:59, and its hourly chime went off.
Immediately, Macgyver was up and clambering for his knife. The
bottle-opener blade to get the back off his watch, the scissors to snip off
an unnecessary bit of circuit-board, the awl to make a hole for the
"alternates" control button on what had once been his wristwatch, and the
custom-made "soldering" blade, together with an unbent paper clip, to
reprogram the board a little. Finally, with a nudge with the outside casing
of the knife, he slipped the circuit-board into the cavity of the pocket-watch,
slid the original "watch"-face back into its appointed position, and screwed
the casing screws back into place. At last, he closed the top of the
pocket-watch, placed his newly-refurbished time-and-space machine on his
end-table, and went to bed. Basic tests were unnecessary--this was Macgyver,
after all--and more detailed examination would wait until morning.
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Note 109.0 Someone New--III: Enter The Madman 20 replies
HC::SANDERSO "Futon torpedo" 147 lines 22-NOV-1992 14:35
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Someone New--III: Enter the Madman
"Balance of power: it's the most dangerous game of them all, but it's the
only game worth playing." --J. Kirk (badly paraphrased)
Macgyver peered at the great machine from behind the darkened glass of
his space-suit's helmet and frowned. Time was certainly running
out--people were probably already dying, and whole worlds might soon pass
into oblivion--and the final clue was just beyond his grasp. It had to have
something to do with that one part he hadn't been able to identify. It was
definitely time to take a closer look at that piece. He twisted the
controls under his left hand and the jetpack floated him slowly towards it.
It had, of course, long been understood that the universe operated
with clockwork precision, but it was a much more recent discovery that this
particular universe achieved that precision _through_ clockwork. In the
center of the Solar System, a small asteroid orbited the sun; it was a
completely un-noteworthy asteroid, except for the fact that it held, hidden
away on its far side, a single small door. Beyond that door was a
hyperspace corridor, at the end of that corridor was an airlock, and on the
other side of that airlock were the actual gears that held the universe
together and made it continue to operate.
Or _had_ made it continue to operate until just a few hours ago, when
the laws of physics had begun operating only sporatically. It had taken
almost an hour for the evidence to be compiled and analyzed enough for even
the great analytical minds of the Phoenix Foundation to determine that the
clockwork might be in need of an adjustment. Minutes later, Macgyver had
been helped into a space suit and driven off towards a waiting rocket,
which had, in turn, been hastily refitted for a single occupant. And so
now, with the universe hanging in the balance and flying apart at the
seams, Macgyver floated among the gears and chains, confronting the
greatest machine of all for the greatest prize of all.
And now at last it seemed he had it. The mystery part, it turned out,
controlled the Cosmic Balance, and seemed to have been thrown out of whack
when he, Macgyver, had obtained the pocket-watch and had thereby attained a
power not shared by his evil counterpart, Murdoc. Without any way of
balancing the equation, the Cosmic Balancer had overheated and melted into a
puddle of molten lead. Clearly, it could not be fixed--it was beyond all
hope of repair--and thus it would have to be replaced. Macgyver's brow
creased with frustration as he contemplated the problem.
At last, he decided that the only possible solution was to
cross-connect the universe's profundity systems--they didn't seem ever to
have gotten much use where they were, anyway--to an old-fashioned analog
balance he could jerry-rig from expendable bits of his suit. He got to work,
and minutes later, the system that had once controlled the Cosmic Balance was
replaced with a much more sophisticated and durable system which, he hoped,
would keep things intact. Crossing his fingers, he backed away from the
machinery and tripped the "restart" circuit, hoping that his jerry-rigging
would work and that the whole thing wouldn't blow up in his face...
And the tremendous buzz of a wailing siren filled the world.
Macgyver snapped awake and sat up quickly, the sweat-drenched sheets
of his bed moistly clinging to his skin, and screamed. At last, he got
conrol of himself, switched off his alarm, and went to work, pausing
briefly in the living room to pick up the Chronotron (the name had come to
him in a dream, and it was better to have a name--even a silly one--to use
for the time machine than to have to keep thinking of it in vague,
long-windedly descriptive terms). He only had to speed a little to get to
work on time, and hours later, when he finally had a chance to test the
Chronotron, he had almost completely forgotten about his dream.
----------
At 5:17 PM EST, the monitoring systems registered the achievement of a
"profoundly balanced" solution.
At 5:18 PM EST, the monitoring systems acknowledged receipt of a
message from the acquisitions computer; the message read, "CHRONOTRON
UNIQUE. SEEKING ALTERNATIVE DEVICE."
At 5:18 PM EST, the monitoring system registered a successful
conclusion to its project and returned to its earlier state of
quasi-dormancy..
----------
"Shields four, five, and six failing sir!" were Lieutenant Grayson's
last words; a moment after he finished speaking, the navigator's console
errupted in a shower of sparks and a piece of circuit-board lodged in his
brain, killing him instantly.
Captain Fenwell didn't have time to curse; instead, he began firing
out a new set of orders. "Set course 207.5 by 173.4," he shouted.
"Maximum warp, NOW!"
Willing herself not to look at her fallen comrade, Lieutenant Commander
Luellyn punched in the coordinates and, despite her innate trust of her
commander, couldn't help but say, "But sir! Those coordinates will--"
Fenwell didn't let her finish. "I know where they are, and what it
means. Now, Commander." Keying on the intercom, he continued, "Mr.
Richardson, I need every ounce of power you can give me." Finally,
swiveling to face his science officer, he went on again, "Maxwell, I
need--"
"Feeding the figures into navigation now, captain," Maxwell
interrupted, a satisfied grin lurking just behind her eyes.
Fenwell flashed her a quick smile. Haughty, yes. Arrogant, a little.
But also the best science officer, the best first officer, he'd ever had,
definitely. Nodding slightly, he turned back to the screen.
"Sir!" Luewellyn cried; a battleship was taking up position directly
in their path.
Without stopping to think, Fenwell leapt forward and, wincing a little
at the thought, pushed Grayson's body out of the way--that wet "flump"
sound would haunt him for the rest of his days if he lived through
this--and tried to re-establish weapons control with what was left of the
controls. The phasers were a complete loss, but after a bit of a struggle,
he managed to arm his last few photon torpedoes, and a moment later, as the
enemy cruiser loomed huge on the screen, his ship loosed a million megatons'
worth of destruction at the obstructor. Five of the photons hit the target,
and a split-second later, the _Peregrine_ was roaring through a cloud of
shrapnel that had once been an enemy vessel. Two photons continued on their
way unchecked.
As the ship passed into higher and higher warps, it passed the sun,
slowed, turned, and shot back out in the dangerous maneuver called the
Slingshot Effect. Fenwell, however, had nothing so pedantic as a simple
time-traveling escape planned. Instead, he had ordered a course which,
while achieving a slingshot effect, would also trigger instabilities close
enough to the star to cause it to nova, destroying the invaders in the
blast. It was dangerous, but these bastards had killed three Federation
ships already, and this was the only way.
The _Peregrine_, of course, was traveling much faster than the
torpedoes it had launched, and so by the time the photons reached the star,
the _Peregrine_ was halfway through the maneuver and just about to pass the
star again on its way out. The torpedoes hit and exploded against the
surface of the star, causing a secondary source of powerful radiation to
form, and the radiation from the torpedo-hits interfered with the even more
powerful radiation from the warp-induced beginnings of nova to produce a
wave form with an especially large peak at, well, right about where the
_Peregrine_ was about to pass.
Maxwell had just enough time to notice it. Scrambling to reinforce
the shields against the radiation, she cried out, "CAP-"
And that was as far as she got. The radiation, while not doing all
that much to the ship itself--electro-magnetic pulse had ceased to be a
problem centuries earlier--instantly vaporized her crew, leaving the ship
empty but not exactly adrift.
Moments later, just before the radiation waves annihilated the
invasion force, the _Peregrine_ passed from spatial warp to temporal warp
and, guided by Maxwell's equations, came out near the planet Earth sometime
late in the 20th Century and, following an automatic program written by
Lluewellyn, entered a standard orbit.
----------
Astronomers gazed at the newly-arrived ship in wonder and amazement
and waited for its occupants to make contact and declare their friendly or
unfriendly intentions, but one man--one wrinkled, battle-scarred, and
thoroughly, irredeemably evil man--looked at it with a smile: a dangerous
smile, the smile of power. For just a few minutes earlier, as he had sat
plotting revenge, a program not written by any of the _Peregrine_'s crew
had beamed a set of remote controls, including transporter function,
directly onto his coffee table. Now it just remained for him to decide
what to do with it. And that was one thing that never, ever took Murdoc
very long.
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Note 113.0 Someone New--IV: Trouble 23 replies
HC::SANDERSO "Futon torpedo" 152 lines 23-NOV-1992 18:46
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Someone New--IV: Trouble
"'Step into my parlor,' said the spider to the fly."
A few short hours later, Murdoc peered into yet another Jeffries tube
and cursed. He'd known the torpedoes were gone; the computer had told him
that much. But for the phasers to be off-line, as well? That was just
unfair. And now he had finally verified, once and for all, that the
phasers were, in fact, completely beyond repair. Here he had the ultimate war
machine, and he couldn't use any of its main weaponry. It wasn't fair, and
someone would have to pay. Well, he knew the right person for _that_ job,
didn't he?
Another hour later, when he discovered holo-technology, he grinned
the special grin he reserved for his most diabolical plots.
----------
Macgyver sat in his living room, the Chronotron almost forgotten,
relaxing after an unusually hard day at the office. Of course, it was his job
to deal with crises, but coping with all the different radical
groups--seventeen in this city alone--that had decided that the spaceship
was hostile and that the only thing to do was to plant bombs in major public
buildings or take political figures hostage was just too much to deal with
in a single day, especially when there was always the possibility that the
spaceship really might be hostile, after all. So now, after defusing
twelve bombs and rescuing eight fair maidens singlehandedly, Macgyver was
more than content to collapse on his couch and watch a favorite movie of
the Old West.
He was just fading off to sleep, the beating hooves on the screen
fading into the distant, calming rumble of the waves, when his body
began to tingle strangely. He tried to snap awake, but all he could seem
to see was a strange, fuzzy cloud of white static. At last, the fogginess
cleared and he found himself laying not on his couch but on the cold
hardness of metal covered by a light carpet. Above him, he saw wide
quasi-fluorescent lights which cast a warm, even glow over a wide corridor.
He tried to shake himself awake, but failed. At last, he climbed to
his feet, reconciling himself to the dream, and found himself standing
before a large, wide, unevenly-edged set of doors. As he stood before
them, they swished open to reveal another hallway which, like this one, had
slightly curved walls and long black panels--computer interfaces, a voice
murmured in the back of his mind--and stretched off to a distant
intersection. Shrugging, Macgyver stepped forward through the door, then
stopped suddenly, surprised. His body had tingled slightly as he stepped
through the door; at least, he thought it had. He wasn't quite sure, it
had passed so fast. He stared down the corridor for a moment before
turning back, and so did not notice when the door behind him faded away to
reveal another just like it.
At last, he decided to test his observation. Turning around, he
stepped back through the door--which, once again, swished open before him
and closed behind him--and into what he took to be the corridor in which he
had begun. Nothing happened as he stepped through the door, and so he
wrote off his earlier "observation" as imagination and set off to explore.
Minutes later, as he approached a more standard door--this one, at any
rate, was rectangular--he heard, or thought he heard, a voice. He stepped
up to the door, and it, too, opened before him. Beyond it was an
industrial-looking room, a style completely unlike that of the rest of
whatever this place might be. Catwalks stretched away into darkness,
illuminated only by the red glow of a huge forge far below. Suddenly, the
voice came again, louder this time. It was still distant, but he thought he
could identify it: Penny, calling his name. "Penny?" he called, then again,
"PENNNNNNNYYYYY!!"
"macgyver?" came a cry, faint with distance and perhaps more. It
seemed to be coming from... that way. Across the catwalk. He started to
walk.
Moments later, he had reached an intersection of the catwalks. "PENNY!!"
he called again, trying to get a new bearing.
"Macgyver!" she called back, much nearer now. That way, along the
cross-catwalk. He turned and began walking again, trying to ignore the
increasing heat from the boiling metals below. Clearly, he was getting
closer to the center of the room, or at least of the forge.
Suddenly, the floor of the catwalk gave way beneath him and he was
forced to grab hold of the railing, lest he plunge to a fiery death far
below in the white-hot molten stream. For a moment or two, he just hung from
the bar, swinging slowly back and forth, too terrified to move. Then, at
last, he began to work his way, hand over hand, across the railing and
towards the next piece of flooring.
When he swung his legs up onto it, that piece gave way, as well.
Renewing his grasp of the rail, he stifled a curse as he watched the iron
gridding spin lazily, end over end, into the fires below. It had not been
an accident, of that much he was sure.
Hand over hand, hand over hand he went, relentlessly closing the
distance toward his--captive, he was sure--friend. At last, just when he
felt sure he couldn't possibly hold on any longer, he saw her. Penny was
bound and blindfolded, her hands tied firmly to a chain which in turn was
connected to the ceiling. As he hung, arms quivering with fatigue, he
watched her spin slowly and realized to his horror that she was hanging
almost ten feet off to the side of the catwalk... and there was no other
catwalk nearer to her. It would be a challenge just to get to her.
Still going hand over hand, not trusting the catwalk, he continued on
until he was even with her, then stopped and tightened his grip on the
rail. "Penny," he said, trying to breathe and speak normally, "I'm here.
I'm going to try to jump over to you. Hang on."
He forced himself to let go of the rail with one hand, and used the
other to bat away the catwalk flooring under the portion of the rail he now
held. "Macgyver!" cried Penny as she heard something large plummet away.
"I'm all right," he said. "I'll be with you in a minute."
He paused for just a moment to decide how to handle this. Obviously,
he would have to leap over to her to release her, but where would they go
from there? He thought for a few seconds, and eventually concluded that
the only answer was that they would have to try to swing on the chain in
hopes of making it back, trapeze-style, to the catwalk. Then he'd try to
hand-walk their way back to solid flooring.
With that in mind, he pulled himself up and swung on the rail in
conscious imitation of the high-bar exhibition he had seen a few weeks
earlier, around and around until he had enough momentum that he thought it
was safe to let go.
//NOW!// his mind screamed, and his hands, through long practice at
trust, obeyed. He flew through the air in a tremendous arc, trying to
maintain a reasonably graceful posture (it was good for the aerodynamics)
and, despite his best efforts, screaming in naked terror. At last he hit
something solid and grabbed on, then scrambled up and grabbed onto the
chain before he could pull Penny loose and kill them both. He hung silent
beside her, his arms partly enveloping hers as they held onto the chain
together. Once she had stopped screaming--his cry had badly frightened
her--he reached down and pulled his knife from his pocket and then, holding
her tightly with his legs, he held onto the chain with one hand and cut her
loose with the other. Finally, closing his knife and slipping it back into
his pocket, he removed her blindfold and then had to clutch at the chain with
his free hand as his other began to slip.
"Oh, Macgyver, I knew you'd come," she started to bubble, and he
looked down to give her a reassuring smile... and froze.
Her eyes were green.
Penny had always had blue eyes, and she couldn't wear contacts.
"ALL RIGHT!!" he cried. "WHAT'S GOING ON?!??"
"Too bad," came an all-too-familiar voice from off to his right. He
looked and saw Murdoc looking out of a window that had suddenly snapped
into being on the side wall of the room. "I thought I'd gotten her right.
Well, no use crying over it. Computer, discontinue Penny character."
Macgyver opened his mouth to ask what that meant, but suddenly he had
to grab onto the chain even more tightly as, without even so much as a pop,
Penny vanished from beneath him. After re-establishing his grasp, he
finally did ask, "What--?"
Murdoc didn't let him finish. "Oh, Macgyver, you disappoint me," he
said. "You, Mister Science, can't tell when you're dealing with a
hologram? Tsk, tsk. Oh, and by the way, I wouldn't try letting go; I
assure you, your death in the lead would be quite real."
And then-again without a sound--the window was gone.
Macgyver shook his head. Would Murdoc never learn? Slowly, slowly,
he began swinging the chain, closer, ever closer to the catwalk.
And suddenly, with a tremendous CCCHRRRRAANNGGGGG, the catwalk gave
way and the whole thing fell away into the abyss.
Macgyver swallowed hard. He was now hanging from a chain--with his
fingers going numb, no less--in the middle of an empty room with a raging
fire below. He couldn't go to any side, and he certainly couldn't go down.
So he climbed.
Twelve feet up, he found the force-field.
He tried pushing against it, and it held. He tried poking the smallest,
sharpest blade of his knife through it (smaller surface area meant greater
pressure per square inch, which might let him get through); it held.
So now it was a matter of how long he could hold onto the chain, was
it? Sooner or later, he'd have to let go, and then... He shuddered.
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Note 114.0 Someone New--V: Tricks Of the Trade 17 replies
HC::SANDERSO "Futon torpedo" 124 lines 24-NOV-1992 03:14
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Someone New--V: Tricks Of the Trade
"Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin."
Macgyver's hands were beginning to slip, and as he fought to renew his
grasp, he heard a fizzing sound and then Murdoc's voice erupted from only a
few feet away. Not really able to afford a slip in concentration but
helpless to stop himself, he turned to find that Murdoc was sitting on a
floating platform in midair only a few feet away, a small keyboard on his
lap. "Macgyver, old friend, I'm disappointed," he sneered. "I never
expected you to give up so soon. I thought you'd at least make it past stage
four."
"Stage four?" Macgyver somehow managed to find the breath to ask.
"Yes. Stage one was the ship, stage two was getting you inside the
holodeck, stage three was the collapsing floor-plates, and this is stage
four. I'd expected you to get at least to stage five. You're slipping."
A moment later, Murdoc continued, "Oh, I'm sorry. What an unfortunate
choice of words." He smiled a ghastly smile to let Macgyver know that
"unfortunate" was the last thing he considered it.
Had Murdoc stayed away, Macgyver just might have let it end there, but
he refused to give in with his nemesis gloating over him. And so,
gathering much of his remaining strength and channeling it into his left
hand and arm, he let go of the chain with his right and used it to unbuckle
his belt.
"Please, Macgyver!" Murdoc mock-pleaded, "not on the network!"
Ignoring him the best he could, Macgyver pulled off the belt, feeling
his slacks slip just a little lower on his hips as he did so. Then, after
"resting" for a moment with both hands holding him up, he grabbed the
buckle end of the belt in his mouth, threaded the other end of the belt
through one of the wide links of the chain, and, struggling to complete the
process one-handed, finally managed to get the buckle re-fastened. Now he
had a leather loop hanging from a link about three feet down from the
force-field. Finally, with what was almost the last of his strength, he
snaked first one arm and then the other through the loop, pulled himself up
a little, and settled the harness under his armpits. Leaning back, he
relaxed a little, keeping just enough of a grasp on the chain to keep
himself from toppling over backwards and slipping back out of the belt.
"Nice," said Murdoc. "Very nice. I won't waste your time with
shaking the chain, then. We can go right on to the next step. Computer,"
he said for emphasis, pressing buttons as he spoke, "begin stage six."
Macgyver grabbed frantically at the chain as it jerked once and began
sliding slowly, evenly upwards. Almost before he knew it, the link with
the belt through it was reaching the force-field; he slithered out of the
harness just before he would have been crushed and watched as the belt, shoved
hard against a surface impermeable to everything but the chain, was severed
neatly and fell away to its incineration. Now, of course, the problem was
to find some way of stopping the chain's rise before he ran out of anything
to hold on to. But how was he supposed to do that?
"You're probably wondering how you're supposed to stop the chain,"
Murdoc jeered. "Well, since I'm such a nice guy and we get along so well,
I'll tell you: you're not." He laughed, a loud pretentious bark.
Macgyver's brain was whirling madly. Nothing he had could cut through
the force-field. He had a problem that had to be solved right now, and he
wasn't making any headway at all. //Well, then//, some remote but
well-known part of his brain spoke up, //what you have to do is change your
approach to the problem.//
A moment later, he had it. Holding onto the chain one-handed for what
his wrist told him had better be the last time, he pulled out his knife
again, slipped it through the highest link he could reach, and held it
steady there, careful not to touch any part of its top; after all, he
didn't want his fingers pulverized between the knife and the force-field,
did he?
The chain snicked upwards, upwards, ever upwards, until at last the
knife touched the force-field and was pushed downwards. The knife,
sandwiched between the bottom of the link in which it was lodged below and
the force-field above, trembled and let out a groan as its casing was
compressed. The seemingly unstoppable force of the chain met the seemingly
unbreakable wall of the force-field through the interface of Macgyver's
pocket-knife, and both men waited to see which would win. They did not
have to wait long; almost immediately, in a harsh grinding of gears and a
sharp smell of acrid smoke, the engine driving the chain burned out and
quit. The chain fell back a half an inch, and the pocket-knife slipped out
of its place, bounced off the edge of Macgyver's grasping hand, and
disappeared below.
Murdoc shook his head. "Macgyver, Macgyver," he said almost jokingly,
"what ever will you do without your knife?"
The truth was, Macgyver didn't know. All he had been carrying to
begin with was his knife, a little spare change, and...
Before he could finish his thought, Murdoc began speaking again,
once more typing on his keyboard as he spoke. "Computer," he was saying,
"Begin stage seven, part one."
At first, Macgyver didn't notice anything, but then he saw that small,
slender rods, each about an eighth of an inch long, were poking themselves
out of the links in the chain, one per link. "What are those supposed to
be?" he wondered aloud.
Murdoc was quick to respond. "Why, antennas, of course, for my remote
control. Begin stage seven, part two, quarter-second intervals. Mark."
A small popping sound seemed to come from below Macgyver, and he
looked down to see the last link in the chain fall away into the distance.
Almost immediately, another tiny explosion split the next-lowest link, and
it, too, fell away. As he watched, the chain, already only seven feet
long, was growing steadily shorter. In less than two minutes, the last
link under the force-field would be gone.
But of course the solution here was obvious. Beginning with a link
half a foot below his current position and working his way steadily upward
towards the force-field, Macgyver ran his thumbs along the edge of each
link and broke off the antenna. He worked at frantic speed, and by the
time the last undamaged link fell away, he had disabled the receivers for
the remote-destructs on all the remaining links.
"You're good, I'll give you that," Murdoc said almost wistfully, and
then, in the tone of an after-thought, he added, "But I'm better. Computer,
begin stage eight." For Macgyver's benefit, he added, "the final stage.
Goodbye, Macyver."
And Murdoc, keyboard and all, vanished as near-silently as he had come.
Macgyver hung suspended in silence for a moment, waiting to see what
Murdoc had in store for him. And waited. And waited. The room was, in
fact, so dark and the rotation so slow that it was almost all over before
his inner ear told him that something was amiss. Looking up through the
force-field, he saw that the chain now seemed to be attached to a small
round plug set in the ceiling--Murdoc had, it seemed, not felt constrained
by any notions of consistency or total realism--and the plug was slowly but
surely, steadily, steadily, unscrewing itself.
This time, Macgyver knew, he really couldn't save himself. The chain was
the only thing to hold onto, the only thing to keep him from falling, and
it was about to be detached from the ceiling, and he couldn't get through
the force-field to get to the ceiling and do something. He found it somehow
tragic that, after all his adventures, he would now have to die without his
pocket-knife in hand. All he had left now was a little change, his wallet,
and...
Suddenly--unaccountably, by Murdoc's thinking--Macgyver laughed, a
noise of excitement, relief, and genuine mirth. "MURDOC!" he yelled in a
challenging tone.
Surprised, Murdoc toggled an intercom switch and replied, "Yes?"
"You haven't won, Murdoc!" Macgyver cried.
And then he let go.
<<< HC::DISK$DATA:[NOTES$LIBRARY]H-STARBUCKET.NOTE;1 >>>
-< starbucket >-
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Note 152.0 Someone New--VI: Transition 13 replies
HC::SANDERSO "Futon torpedo" 148 lines 10-DEC-1992 00:12
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Someone New--VI: Transition
"It's the end of the world as we know it..."
As Macgyver was hanging from a chain high above a pool of liquid fire,
news of the unsettled continuity in his universe was finally reaching the
highest levels of the CIA. Indeed, the Director of Celestial Intervention
(Intelligence branch) was, even now, staring at a screenful of data which,
in short order, brought him up to date. Macgyver had found the Voyagers'
timepiece, damaging his own continuity, then had repaired his univere's
Cosmic Balance, and now his nemesis was threatening his life in a holodeck.
Intervention in that universe might be dangerous to its stability right
now, but still, a man as resourceful, disciplined, and heroic as that
might be useful to the CIA, or at least to some of its agents... as he read
his investigator's report, the DCI(Intel) began to have an idea.
When he reached the end of the report, he began writing his own,
combining the information he had received with his own analysis and his
suggestion, and passed it on to his superior, a being he called "Judge,"
who, in turn, seconded his suggestion and passed the report on to the White
Guardian. Moments later, a team of near-microscopic agents assembled,
materialized inside a small piece of machinery, made a few adjustments, and
left. The DCI(Intel) read the follow-up report and smiled. It was, after all,
for the opportunity to save lives that Jack Ryan had joined the CIA in the
first place.
----------
As Macgyver fell, a spread-eagled form against an obviously
blue-screened vision of Hell, he drew the Chronotron from his pocket and,
ignoring the just-now-adjusted settings, pressed the button originally
marked "JUMP." A moment later, the heat was gone and he was seeing planes
of swirling reds and purples flash by. At first, it was frightening, but
eventually he became used to it and almost even enjoyed it. Finally, when
he had been traveling for a while, one plane loomed large, came to dominate
his whole field of vision, and suddenly took on a third dimension. True to
its form, the Chronotron placed him in this new time and place--this new
universe, in fact--several feet above the ground. Still being flesh and
blood, Macgyver fell.
----------
"WHAT?!???" screamed Murdoc as Macgyver, about to meet his bloody,
fiery end, suddenly vanished from the holodeck. "Computer, where'd he go?"
"Unknown," came the reply.
"What do you mean, 'unknown?'"
"He is no longer within scanner range."
"What does that mean?"
"He no longer occupies this immediate region of the space-time
continuum."
Hmm. As far as he knew, Macgyver always played by the rules.
Obviously, he was an amazing intellect and had great luck, but Murdoc had
never, until now, had any evidence that Macgyver had magical abilities.
Odd.
"Computer," Murdoc said at last, "play back visual record of
Macgyver's last few seconds here. One-eighth normal speed."
On the screen before him, "Mister Science" appeared, plummeting
(slowly) towards certain death. Just before he would have hit, however, Murdoc
saw him pull something from his pocket and press a button on it. "Computer,"
he asked, "what is that?"
"Unknown."
"Compare all sensor logs of that object. Analyze."
"Working."
A few minutes later, the computer finally gave him some results. It
was a time machine, then. And not only a time machine but, it seemed, a
machine capable of traveling between alternate universes. Murdoc, half
nodding, half shaking his head, turned off the holodeck and left. His
guest had left without paying his bill, so now Murdoc had a little
research to do. "Computer," he said a few minutes later as he took a
comfortable seat in the Captain's ready-room chair, "give me everything
you've got, factual or hypothetical, on alternate universes, their
formation, and traveling to them. Also extrapolate based on sensor
readings of Macgyver's device."
Hundreds of pages of information appeared queued on the terminal, with
more evidetly on the way. He sighed quietly at the sheer bulk of it, then
whispered aloud, "You aren't rid of me yet, Macgyver." He swore to himself
that he would keep that oath and then he settled in and started to read.
----------
Brian turned from Darkstar's door, discouraged. He had offered her
enlightenment, and she had turned him away. He had approached her
amiably enough, rapping smartly on her door and then ringing her
doorbell for good measure.
When she had, at last, appeared before him, half-dressed and still
groggy, he had opened the conversation brightly: "Woman, clothe thyself. I
have come to teach you of Cheom!"
"Who?" she had mumbled.
"Cheom! The Great One."
"No. G'way."
"But..."
"Go. Away. *NOW*."
It was about when she offered to demonstrate a little-known technique
for generating great pain that he had given up on her and wandered off again.
Pacing the darkened hallways--for it was 6 AM, the best time of the day for
enlightenment--Brian soon came to Reg's door.
"I have come to tell you of Cheom!" he said brightly when the agent
answered, noting with some approval that Reg, at least, seemed to keep
reasonable hours. (In actual fact, Reg had stayed up reading and hadn't
been to bed yet.)
"Well, certainly you may, but I find it much more productive for both
parties in such a conversation to share their beliefs, not just one."
"Why? There is no need to sully the air with misconceptions and lies.
I have come to teach you the Truth, not to hear about your misguided
dreams."
"Well, however great your Truth may be, I won't listen to it unless I
can speak, too."
After a few minutes of this, Brian finally realized that only if he
consented to let Reg speak would he get a chance to make the man a convert;
reassuring himself that there was no reason why he had to _listen_, at last
he nodded and said, "Very well. You may speak. Just get it over with so I
can tell you the Truth."
"Well, then, first let me tell you the name of the great force of the
multiverse. It is called...."--he paused dramatically and dropped his
voice to a reverent near-whisper--"the Great Pumpkin."
Had Brain been listening even a little, his eyes might have popped out
of his head. As if was, he simply blurted out, "What?"
Reg's voice took on a visionary tone, and as he spoke he gazed off
into the distance and waved his arms grandly. "The Great Pumpkin. On
Halloween night, he rises from the most sincere pumpkin patch in the
multiverse and carries toys to all the little girls and boys who believe in
him. Here, let me get you a pamphlet by our founder, Dr. Linus van
Pelt," he concluded, turning aside for a moment and rooting through a box
of books and papers.
"But..."
"Yes?"
"But... but that's nonsense! The Great Pumpkin is obviously a lie, a
hoax. It is a vile concoction cooked up by capitalist crackpots to sell toys
and greeting cards! It's heresy! Blasphemy! CHEMISTRY!!! And besides,
no self-respecting deity would _ever_ be orange."
Mortally offended, Reg had slammed the door and Brian had been forced
to wander away, not quite sure whether he had truly upset the eccentric
or whether Reg had been making fun of him.
Now he knelt in the battered and damaged escape pod in which he had
arrived on the Starbucket, staring directly into the single exposed
100-watt bulb which illuminated the barren room. "Cheom," he prayed
fervently, "they are stupid and arrogant, and will not listen. Send me a
sign for them, a sign that your are the One True God. Somewhere, let me
find a disciple, a single creature to bring into the blight of your ways!"
And suddenly, through what was surely divine providence--either that,
or blind luck, or a blatant Plot Device--a long-haired human in a greasy black
tee-shirt, filthy slacks without a belt, and a pair of white (now almost
black) tennis shoes popped into being a few feet above him and fell to the
ground at Brian's knees. He groaned once, tried to raise a hand in what
might have been intended as a greeting, murmured something that sounded
like, "'ame's 'agyver," and passed out.
Brian's face lit up with joy. "Thank you, Cheom!" he cried. "I
_will_ bring this man to see your Truth! I swear it!" Still, he couldn't
quite keep himself from shaking his head and murmuring to himself, //Not
exactly what I had in mind. . . Cheom works in mysterious ways.//
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