Read The Didymus Contingency for Free Online

fallen.
    Tom was the first to move, crawling out from behind the table. David followed, holding the trash barrel in front of him for protection. The two converged on the watch, where the chair once stood. Amazement was stretched across their faces as they stood over an area of the universe that had been torn apart by a device they created. A device that now lay at their feet. Both men fell to the floor, crying with laughter.

    *   *   *   *   *

    The smell of heavily buttered corn and five different kinds of barbequed meats lingered in the air. Peggy’s Porker Palace was the closest thing to a decent restaurant within one hundred square miles of the LightTech facility. That was Tom’s opinion anyway. Tom and David had become regulars at the “all you can eat” buffet. They were no longer distracted by the four hundred pound, gravy-loving, plaid-shirt wearing hicks who consumed entire tabletops worth of food in one sitting. Waitresses hustled back and forth from table to kitchen, carrying trays full of half gorged on food, repeating the cycle infinitely. Tom and David sat in a booth to the side of the action, bellies full from their celebration dinner.
    While David sipped on a soda and scribbled notes on a napkin, Tom finished off his eighth bottle of Heineken. One of the time-modified watches rested on the table between them. Tom blinked his heavy eyes and focused them on the watch. He wondered how it worked, but knew he was too mentally diminished to even consider figuring it out. That’s why he let David take a whack—that, and David was better at math.
    David chuckled lightly.
    “Well?” asked Tom with a slurred voice, “Where’d it go?”
    “Let’s just say some paleontologist is going to be very confused when he digs up a Neanderthal sitting on our chair,” David said, grinning ear to ear.
    “My God, we might have changed the course of human history!” Tom blurted sarcastically, “Imagine! Chairs invented earlier, leading to the idea of having a throne, upon which a king is crowned and a monarchy is born centuries earlier then we currently know! By my calculations the time change shift hits us in three… two… one…”
    Tom finished his countdown with an impressive belch that went unnoticed save for the rotund cowboy at the next table over who raised his chicken leg to Tom and nodded his head as if to say, “Nice one.”
    David shook his head. Tom was a silly drunk if you stayed on his good side. “While I don’t think our chair will have any effect on the time stream, we do need to be more careful in the future,” David said.
    “So puh-artna,” Tom said with a drunken smile. “Tell me how our little invention works.”
    “You’re not going to remember a word of this in the morning,” David said, thoroughly amused.
    “C’mon buddy, humor me…” Tom replied as he blinked his eyes, trying to clear the cobwebs.
    David picked up the watch and held it up in front of Tom’s face. Tom focused on the watch as best he could. David worked the buttons with skill and spoke as he did so, “Look here. This sets the date, not today’s date mind you, the date you wish to travel to. We even included settings for B.C. and A.D. Here is the time of day, again, the exact time you wish to travel to—not our time. And look at this! Anywhere in the world you want to go to. After picking the year and time you can enter global coordinates, which are then automatically adjusted for continental shift. Just push this button and poof, you disappear…to another time…another place…another way of life, in the blink of an eye.”
    “Okay,” Tom said. “So then the real question is...if the watch...which was on the chair...which belongs to the new king...created the time...warp? Wormhole? What are we calling it anyway? Forget it. Not important... Why didn’t the watch disappear too?”
    “I thought about that. It’s elementary, but I think the watch might have to be attached to whatever it’s