The Tame Truffler

By Trevor Herron

While science fiction in the form of Time Travel is integral, it is a largely a tool connecting two different cultures together. The story poses the question of how far back in time do we look to predict the cause and effect of present events on future generations.
The Tame Truffler takes its name from how a Stone Age man hears the words ‘Time Traveller’ said in a Scottish accent. He finds himself in a dilemma – integrate with the locals and inevitably affect their development, or live a solitary life. To live with humans theoretically would cause a distortion of history but no matter which way he goes, he is likely to upset the course of anthropology.
He recognized that without companionship he would be on the slippery slope to insanity. When he was shown the cave a pregnant silence descended, that electric period before something momentous happened.

... the hand lifted my palm to his lips and his palm to my lips. The pact was sealed. A man from an advanced technological age was now brother to a man of the Stone Age and proud of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CUSTOM BOOK PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: Sep 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311462497

Trevor Herron

Born in South Africa, Trevor Herron emigrated to Australia in 1998 with his wife and two sons. Besides writing being a passion, he works hard to make his stories enjoyable to his readers. He started writing at a young age but did not have the courage to submit anything for publication despite it being suggested. His other interests include painting and the building of scale models. Until recent retirement, he lectured in the electrical trade which has supplied much of the pseudo-science theory that he uses in his writings. Earlier publications include: A Variety of Vultures. 2011 Raider Publishing The Boy 2014 Strategic Book Publishing

Book preview

The Tame Truffler...

While science fiction in the form of Time Travel is integral, it is a largely a tool connecting two different cultures together. The story poses the question of how far back in time do we look to predict the cause and effect of present events on future generations.

The Tame Truffler takes its name from how a Stone Age man hears the words 'Time Traveller' said in a Scottish accent. He finds himself in a dilemma – integrate with the locals and inevitably affect their development, or live a solitary life. To live with humans theoretically would cause a distortion of history but no matter which way he goes, he is likely to upset the course of anthropology.

He recognized that without companionship he would be on the slippery slope to insanity. When he was shown the cave a pregnant silence descended, that electric period before something momentous happened.

… the hand lifted my palm to his lips and his palm to my lips. The pact was sealed. A man from an advanced technological age was now brother to a man of the Stone Age and proud of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in South Africa, Trevor Herron emigrated to Australia in 1998 with his wife and two sons. Besides writing being a passion, he works hard to make his stories enjoyable to his readers. He started writing at a young age but did not have the courage to submit anything for publication despite it being suggested. His other interests include painting and the building of scale models.

Until recent retirement, he lectured in the electrical trade which has supplied much of the pseudo-science theory that he uses in his writings.

Earlier publications include:

A Variety of Vultures. 2011 Raider Publishing

The Boy 2014 Strategic Book Publishing

Copyright © 2015 Trevor Herron

P

ublished by

The

TAME

TRUFFLER

Science Fiction

by

Trevor Herron

Money! It means little to me despite being declared the richest man in the world. My passion was the study of time; chronology and earning money was incidental. I had not even bothered to take elocution lessons to get rid of the crude slum accent of my youth.

It rasps like the sound of hard work and makes the privileged and pretentious wince. It is dirt under the fingernails and a reminder to those that seek help that I only assist those who help themselves. I had no friends. To have friends you have to be liked.

I left school at sixteen to become a bricklayer. Sixteen is three years short of completing preparatory education and would normally confine me for life to the artisan class. I was placed in the bricklaying trade and normally that is where I would have stayed for life, only advancing as far as I could in a trade level. At most I could become a foreman or a maybe a draughtsman.

People in different work categories could aspire to better or different positions provided they sat the examinations none of which were easy. Study material in any subject was available but expensive and study had to be done in your own time. Consequently few succeeded.

One was only allowed to write a test once in every four year period for a specific level in a specific category for inclusion into a different class. Very few made it from Labourer, the lowest level, to Academic Three, the highest level. Most did not even manage to get themselves promoted one or two levels upward in a lifetime. Of course if one passed they could do the next level immediately.

I made it all the way. I wrote exams almost continually for twelve years in a row and gained my Academic Three. Only the second time in fifty years that such a thing had happened – so the Psychometrists told me.

At thirty five I had a doctorate in chronology. Rich fathers could pay to have their children tutored or merely endow the right fraternity with the right amount of credits. They might not advance very far after that but at least they were spared the ignominy of manual work and having to move to a district commensurate with their classification, which believe me can be very demeaning.

To have a cultured voice in a rough background was as bad as having a rough voice in a cultured background.

There was only one class no one was allowed to aspire to and that was Politico – the ruling class. To be in this class a person had to be born into it – only rarely was anyone invited in.

It sounds almost tyrannical, but still it catered to ambition, the recognition of hard work and permanent employment from the time of being allocated your first job to the retirement age of fifty. At that age, one moved to the retirement villages where one stayed until the required termination age of sixty five. It was not a system that lacked challenge and reward. There was sufficient of both to create and cater to the most ambitious and it was the only way of ruling a population of twelve billion people.

This political structure eradicated fear of failure and as a result self-esteem was on a reasonable high. A person's status did not necessarily depend upon their own efforts.

I was different, I knew that. I advanced because of my efforts and not because my IQ, my street address and my daddy's endowments, which if possessed were multiples of assured advancement.

That was how we co-existed but how did we exist?

For my part I was proud, some said arrogant, of where I had come from. I retained my working class accent viewing it as a beacon for those who wanted more from life. I have dedicated myself to working with and financing children of promise from the poorer areas.

Perhaps, that is why when we called for a volunteer Chrononaught from among the scientific and engineering fraternity no one came forward except two of my most promising young Chronophysicists – both kids from poor backgrounds – but I was not about to let them go.

I could not help but feel that those who had lived a life of luxury should step up and be counted when the human race was on the verge of its greatest discovery. Let them claim their glory where it can be seen and not buy it and proclaim afterward how great a part they had played in the final result.

The rich and the privileged, while they financed inventions, never put themselves on the block for trialling those inventions. As I once heard a rich man say, 'That's what the poor are here for!'

I would not accept the two physicists as prospective Chrononaughts. Their scientific knowledge was not in doubt but they lacked life experience. Who knows what situations they might run into? The school of hard knocks offered the best diploma against physical and intellectual confrontation. I cannot help thinking how lucky people had been back in the twentieth century. Everybody got educated in those days and all had a chance to make something of themselves. People could stay where they wanted provided they could pay for it. Pleasure and enjoyment were the most strived for achievements.

They might have been lucky but it was a wasteful system. Hundreds, even thousands were educated yet the proportion of discoveries to discoverers was terrible. Humans have swung one hundred and eighty degrees to a mathematics and measure generation. Nowadays everything is based on intelligence factors and mental stamina. Before a child could start school they had to undergo a series of electrometry brain tests that could place with some accuracy if the child was intelligent enough to do the whole twelve years of preparation and eight years of qualification. In addition it could judge that supposing the child had the intelligence, did that child have the inner strength and determination to do so? All this could be quantified mathematically and be progressively measured.

It was my lack of dependence on the system that got me an invitation to join the Politicos when I returned from the first time journey.

I have at my beck and call the most knowledgeable scientists and engineers on time travel in the world. This was the team that was going to crack the riddle of the time barrier. Although I studied engineering at Curtin University, I obtained my Doctorate in Chronomobility at Monash and Yale. Chronomobility was a subject which had fascinated me since childhood. It was a discipline that on the face of it never advanced but it engaged many of the best minds in the world.

It was while on a short holiday in Namibia to photograph desert elephants, probably the last remaining elephants in the world, that provided the breakthrough for me. It led to my becoming the richest man in the world.

The renowned Namibian dunes are also famous for the variety of colours of unusual frequencies they reflect. However when the sand is viewed close up it looks just like common sand except that the sand of one reflection would not mix with sand of another reflection. It was a conundrum I could not leave alone.

I marked areas with three of the most striking colours in them and collected a sample of each taken many kilometres apart and each situated at a cardinal point in relation to the other. The sample that I collected from the western end I named Atlantaria being closest to the Atlantic Ocean. The one from the north was named Arctica.

'Well ye git the idea; I dinna have t' spell it oot fer ye, do I?'

For my own pleasure I intended subjecting them to various types of light – alpha, gamma and x-rays, infra-red, yellow blue and white light – and then measure the frequency of their emissions. It never happened that way. While idly mixing and trying to match various sands I had a Eureka moment. I understood exactly how a phase shift between time and space could be brought about, but of course there was still a lot of work to be done.

At Monash and Yale they were experimenting with moving objects in time, using the atomic principal of altering matter but that was only half of what was required to become chronomobile. Uranium and plutonium had proved almost useless. Our scientists were toying with alchemy principles – changing common metals to gold – only they were seeking a metal more noble than gold. They wanted a metal that combined the properties of a reflectron and an accelerated nuclear material like U443.

The race was on to be the first chronomobile state in the world federation. Some states were ruthless in their desire to win. It was the space race of the 1960's all over again, multiplied by a factor of one hundred.

We could only hope that they never found it. If the atom of such a material was ever split it would have consequences as far as the outermost planet of our solar system. Alchemy had not worked in the Middle Ages – we could only hope it would not work now.

So far they had managed to advance an object several nanoseconds into the future. They based this on the fact that the object while fading in intensity to the eye never quite disappeared and while a person's hand could reach it, it had lost all solidity. It was a sure sign that the hand and the object were in two different chronospheres.

It took some time but at last and in desperation the brains of the creeper-growing universities, Yale and Harvard approached the soapless wonders at Monash and Curtin to form a joint venture and totally integrate our efforts.

Total secrecy in this field was impossible to achieve. A significant event in Chronomobility or spatialdeflectography could be measured on the spacio-chronodifuser in much the same way as an earthquake can be measured on the Richter scale. The movement of reflectrons and nuclear materials had to show up somewhere.

It was actually a series of accidents that caused me to promulgate the Law of Forward Chronology that gave us the advantage over other universities and states.

If a combined nuclear and reflection bearing substances with a tetra frequency of radiation are made to form a junction and are then doped with an Atlantaria and an Arctica molecule respectively then the atoms within the influence of the nuclear substance will have their atomic actions accelerated to ten to the power – one hundred and fourteen times that of U443. At this speed electronic resistance is raised momentarily to five million mega ohms, considered the ultimate insulation. A depletion zone will be formed between the two materials and a controlled phase shift between time and space can be affected during that miniscule period. Time will advance by ten to the negative eight seconds while infinite space barriers will soften enough allow a solid object to pass through the polarized plasma and effect Chronomobility.

That was the theory – now it had to be put into practise. Theorems and paradigms were easy to promulgate but difficult to activate.

A man I respected very much, Dr. Uri Selvic at Moscow University came up with the theory of time paths. An item sent into the future or past could quite easily backtrack its path along the colour trail of light reflections emitted by substances it left in its wake on the forward path.

I knew where he got that from. I had come to the same conclusion and only a