I just remembered an old short story I wrote for some magazine... I resurrected an old storage file. Lemme see if I can find it. This is from WAY back before many of youse were even borned. This is exactly how it appeared. The editor (IIRC) added the teaser line:
Time Bomb
c Walt C. Snedeker
“Sometimes the medium is the message...”
Alexi Rostov finished stacking the heavy conducting plates on the accumulator. Even though he had been using the fork lift for the heaviest part of the labor, he was still breathing rapidly with exertion and excitement. The water- blue eyes behind his rimless glasses swept the room, coming to rest on his confederate.
“How are you coming with the lockout code, my friend? Alexi’s voice was, as usual, too high pitched and grating for the comfort of the scholarly individual bent over the computer terminal.
Swallowing his annoyance at the interruption, James Murdoch tapped three more key sequences in rapid succession, then peered at the monitor screen closely. After a moment, a wintry smile distorted his features.
“We will have a window through the control system in exactly..." he paused, “...three minutes, forty-five seconds from... NOW!” He pressed a key.
The heavily breathing smaller man came over and looked at the monitor screen.
“Outstanding! We are about to change history, James.” He wiped his glasses with an automatic motion, peering myopically at the screen. “Literally change history.”
Now Murdoch’s mood was elevating, also. The culmination of all their clandestine work over the years was about to come to fruition. He thought of the odds against what was about to take place from ever happening: they were astronomical.
James Murdoch and Alexi Rostov were born into a world that most others thought was as near to Utopia as possible for humanity. War and poverty were non-existent, and the immense energies freed up by the eradication of those blights had been redirected to focus constructively on other problems. Disease was nearly an unknown, now. Man’s only homeland was being nurtured to stay hospitable to its dominant creatures, while space exploration had seriously begun to give hope for the colonization of other worlds.
But James Murdoch and Alexi Rostov wished for a return to the legendary past, when life was short, hot, and bittersweet with the challenges of warfare and politics.
Their unique abilities in physics and computer science had been melded together as a result of a chance meeting seven years past at a history symposium that was being held in the northern wilderness section of the Moscow Crater.
The cataclysm four hundred years ago that formed the Moscow Crater was the event that directly shaped their world. No one was ever able to discover exactly how the accident had occurred, but every school child was taught how their world had been very nearly blown into fragments by the titanic explosion. Endlessly quarreling governments of the time had stockpiled enormous amounts of fissionable weaponry in an insane equation. The equation demanded that each government have more destructive power that the other in order to maintain an illusory “safety”.
Something, inevitably, had gone wrong.
The Crater walls rose to stand in a nearly perfect ring to an average height of twelve thousand feet, smooth and uniform around the Crater’s seventy mile diameter.
Only remnants of the world’s population had survived, at first. Those who survived discovered that The Event had caused a sea change in the soul of humanity. For the first time in all history,
all people agreed that cooperation and construction were the survival values that were needed. Confrontation and contention were discovered to be truly abhorrent. Cleansed, Mankind picked itself up, dusted itself off, and started onward -- looking back only to reaffirm the madness of the past.
That was not how Alexi Rostov and James Murdoch saw it. Idle conversation at the chance meeting, then piqued interest at finding similar thought patterns, were soon followed by animated suppositions. The discussions at the meeting had kindled a partnership between the two. Both wanted a return to the Old Ways.
Between them, they knew how.
Time travel is not impossible, theoretically. It just requires more energy than can be harnessed. Calculations showed that for a man to travel back in time just a little bit would require all of the energy output of a supernova.
It was James Murdoch who made the first breakthrough. It happened one evening when the pair were discussing how they knew they would have risen to the highest echelons of power if the world had stayed in the Old Ways. That such positions of power did not exist in their present world galled them both. Murdoch was in the process of placing his teacup down on the white damask cloth when he saw a spot of dust on it. A mental connection was made.
“A microdot!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A microdot! We could send a microscopic dot with instructions, warnings, information, data of all sorts!”
The other made the leap instantly. “I see... Yes. We could send the microdot to someplace where it was sure to be seen and examined.” Alexi Rostov had suddenly bent over the table, scrawling numbers thoughtlessly on the snowy surface. Murdoch could hear him mumbling, “mass... time dilation imperatives... um...” After a few moments, he’d looked up, watery eyes shining.
“It is just theoretically possible. We would have to harness the entire microwave sunpower screen energy for nearly a full second.”
“My God. That much power for just a microdot? That’s more than the entire world uses in a whole day.”
“That would be for a ten-microgram dot.” Rostov pointed to the scribbled figures. “The energy requirements go up exponentially. It would take ten times as much for an eleven-microgram dot.” Rostov’s eyes squinted thoughtfully. “But there’s something...”
“How can we make sure that it would be found?” Murdoch interrupted, “That our warning and information would be read?”
“Eh? Oh. Well, we know the exact date and time of The Event. We won’t be able to pinpoint the exact time that the microdot will appear, other than that it will definitely appear
before it.” Rostov was thinking aloud, now. “We know that before the event, there was a sort of secret service organization... KGB, I think the local government called it. And we know of transmissions by microdot between field operatives and their superiors... yes!” His fist struck his palm in satisfaction. We can place the microdot superimposed over an actual one that is to be read!” Again, Rostov’s brows knitted in perplexity. Something...
“Brilliant, Alexi!” Murdoch was jubilant. “The physical placement part is a simple three dimensional coordinate definition. And since we know we can at least ensure that the temporal coordinates will be without any doubt prior to The Event, we shall succeed! We will stop The Event from ever occurring, and change history!”
They worked together on the wording and information to place on the microdot. The first item, of course, was the warning about The Event. That terrible explosion
must be prevented. They listed the exact time that it would take place if not stopped. Then they enumerated many of the scientific advances that had been made in the ensuing four centuries, the ones that would enable the Soviet government to become supreme among all the other factions. They identified themselves minutely, making sure that the readers of the microdot information knew to whom they were indebted, with instructions that they would require their proportionate share of power when the time came.
And that power was, proportionately, to be absolute.
The last connections were made, and the clock ticked down. The clandestine computer connection to the world power grid was in place. There were just a few seconds left to go, with Alexi Rostov thinking about that tiny bit of mass requiring such enormous energy to move it, when he realized what had been escaping his notice over the months.
“Mass... energy... simultaneous...” His head ****** up so fast that his glasses fell off. “My God, Murdoch! Break the link! We mustn’t send the microdot!”
Murdoch looked up from the console, surprised and annoyed. “What the hell are you on about now, Alexi?” He scanned the readouts. No problems there. “What’s wrong?”
“The mass of the microdot! It will be made to occupy the same space, the same volume as the already existing microdot! There will be total atomic annihilation! Even the old nuclear weapons only had about a millionth part of atomic annihilation before the parts that made it up were scattered too far to contribute further! Don’t you see? The microdot will be a
perfect nuclear weapon!”
All color drained from Murdoch’s face in horrified surmise.
“The microdot
caused The Event!”
Both men leapt for the stage on the power grid that held the tiny piece of celluloid. They reached it just as the connection to the world grid activated. Power of titanic proportions surged.
With a blinding flash, both were instantly killed, their charred bodies falling by the pedestal as the microdot was wrenched backward in time to its destiny in the center of Moscow.
