FIRST SUCCESS
Wilson retreated back to the only place he felt safe and secure on campus, Dr. Morrison's darkened and deserted lab. Letting himself into the locked lab -- only he, Daphne and Dr. Morrison had keys -- he sat on his favorite stool and did something he hadn't done since he was a very small boy -- he cried.
When he's gotten it out of his system, he stared for what seemed like hours at the blackboard. At some point his brain, unused to activity, began scanning the jumble of symbols and formulas on the board. His eye caught something.
"That's not right," he thought. "And if that's not right, then this part is wrong, and if this part's wrong, that means this equation is off as well."
With a fever, Wilson began checking and rechecking the computations. After several hours of work, he stopped and stared at the results.
"Of course it didn't work," he thought. "It couldn't have with the computers programmed the way we had them." In the midst of his reverie, the door open and Daphne came in. "What are you doing?" she asked.
"Look Daphne, look," Wilson cried, pulling her to the blackboard. "We had it wrong here, here and here, but we didn't notice."
"I did those figures myself," Daphne huffed. "I know they were right."
"Of course they were right," Wilson agreed. "But the problem was the information that you started with was wrong."
After reviewing his data, she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "It'll work," she said, breaking into a smile.
"Of course, it will," Wilson beamed. "We could make the modifications in a few hours. Test it and then break the news to Dr. Morrison. I know that the knowledge his theory was right will help him recover."
Suiting action to words, the two let themselves into locked and secure room holding the TTDA proto-type. It took close to eleven hours for even these two geniuses to program, reprogram, test, and debug their system. Finally, after more than 24 hours of straight work, the two sat at the console and looked at each other.
"Well, Daphne, that's the 20th test and the results are once again positive, I think we ve got it."
"So do I Wilson, but there's only one way to find out."
"I agree, and I volunteer."
"No Wilson, I think I should go. You have more knowledge of the operating system and the hardware than I do. We know the math is right, if there's a problem, it will be with the hardware, and that's your department."
Wilson reluctantly agreed.
"Before we go zapping each other off to the Roman Empire, we d better run a few smaller, less ambitious tests," Wilson said.
"Agreed," she replied.
"So how far back do you want to go for the first try?" Wilson asked.
"I don't know, how about a year?"
Daphne stepped to the front of the TTDA and activated the opening mechanism. A door silently opened and she entered the chamber. On the voice monitor, he heard her call out that she was ready.
"I'm going to take this slow, Daphne. I don't want it to be a shock to your system."
"Okay." Wilson initiated the program sequence and a flat computer voice sounded out a countdown. Three, two, one ....... Wilson saw a blue sphere of light form and coalesce around Daphne. The TTDA power built in intensity. Then shut down. Nothing.
Wilson called through the monitor, "Daphne, are you there? Are you okay?"
"Yes, on both counts, Wilson. What happened."
"Well the machine shows that a temporal time bubble formed around you, just as we predicted, but you didn't go into the past."
"Well let's not give up yet, Let's try going further back."
"How far?"
"Set it for 20 years. If I don't disappear into the past this time, then we'll know something is wrong with what we re doing."
"Okay, but I'm going to use the lowest setting on the machine, just in case. Ready?" Daphne gave the thumbs up and Wilson once again initiated the program sequence. Again the computer voiced the countdown and again a sphere of blue light formed around Daphne, This time the TTDA stayed on-line even longer, but the results were once again the same.
"Daphne, something's wrong, It's not working, you'd better come out," he said into the monitor, sounded dejected.
"It should have worked," Daphne said upon exiting. "What went wrong?"
I don't know? But I'm too tired to think anymore tonight, and we haven t been to see Dr. Morrison." Daphne nodded in agreement and by mutual consent, they shut the system down and left for the hospital. Dr. Morrison's condition had not changed, but they were allowed to visit for 15 minutes.
Depressed from the failure of the TTDA and their visit to their mentor, the two rode home in silence in Daphne's 1980 Honda Civic. They stopped for a burger and ate in silence. Wilson kept going over the equations over and over in his mind. He looked over at Daphne, suspecting she was doing the same. Daphne looked different somehow, but couldn't put his finger on it.
"Did you change your hair?"
"No, why?"
"Nothing I guess."
DAPHNE S SURPRISE
Daphne dropped Wilson off at his landlady's -- the first time he'd been home in over a week. On a spur of the moment, Daphne returned to the lab. Sitting in a desk chair before the board, Daphne began running all the equations from the beginning. Over the next hour, her thoughts were constantly interrupted by a shivering sensation that rippled across her body.
"I hope I'm not catching something," she thought. Looking down she noticed her stockings had developed wrinkles.
"Cheap pantyhose," she thought. They must have stretched." standing she grasped the top of the hose through her dress and hiked them up. It was then she noticed her lab coat seemed to have gotten bigger on her. Her hands didn't come all the way out of the cuffs anymore. Then she noticed that all her clothes felt loose on her. Looking down her dress, which normally fell to just below her knees, she saw it now fell to almost mid shin.
"What's going on?" she thought. "Mirror, where's a mirror?" Letting herself out of the lab, she left in such a hurry that she left her keys and purse behind her. Walking swiftly down the hall, she entered the Ladies Room. Fumbling, she found a light switch and turned it on. Facing the mirrored sink, she gasped at her reflection. Her dress and lab coat hung on her, her frame had shrunk nearly six inches, Daphne in a little more than two hours had gone from a 26 year old woman to a 16 year old girl.
Daphne blinked and rubbed her eyes, but the 16 year old was still there. Suddenly she realized that the TTDA did work! It was sending her back in time but not the way they had envisioned it!
"Let's see, the first test was a year, and then twenty years. If I'm about 16 than that's a year about every 11 minutes, if the rate is constant .... "
"OOPS" She said aloud when she realized she was going to be a five-year-old in about an hour ...... but her thoughts were interrupted by another shiver and the girl in the mirror suddenly became younger again.
She actually saw her height decrease right before her eyes, loosing two inches in a moment. Her face the angularity of her jaw softened and her nose became smaller. The youthening was speeding up! She looked no more then 14 now, but strangely enough she liked it. Her face was actually pretty now. She had forgotten that she had once looked this way before she grew so lanky. She liked looking like the other girls and not some awkward oversized giant.
"Wouldn't it be nice to be a normal sized woman," she thought, but the problem was she wasn t a woman anymore. She was barely more than a child.
She looked down at her ridiculously large clothing. Her shoes looked like boats on her feet. She tried to take a step toward the door but she started tripping over the hem of her dress which was puddling on the floor around her. She felt her cheeks turn red when her panties and pantyhose piled around her feet and ankles. Being a practical woman, Daphne removed her clothes, and redressed herself only in her lab coat. It was huge, but she could maneuver in it. She rolled up the sleeves so much that they looked like large donuts around her wrists. She gathered up her clothes and headed back to the lab, only to discover it was locked and she had left everything thing in the lab.
"Great! Locked out and turning into a child." she said. She had to find Wilson.
STUCK FOR THE TIME BEING
Wilson was sitting in his room reading. He had always retreated into study when he was upset or depressed, it kept his mind from dwelling too much on his own problems. He d been reading books from Dr. and Dr. Fornel's library. He noticed that the Fornel's had clearly been ahead of their time, describing subjects such as cloning, gene slicing, genetic manipulation years before the rest of the world caught up. Evidently the couple wrote everything jointly, because he could find no materials by his landlady after the death of her husband.
The last article they published before his death was a theory of gene splicing back in late 1968 -- or as they put it sharing genetic information between human and maybe between species. Cutting and pasting of traits .....
PLINK ......
Wilson looked up from the journals to the window where the sound had just come from.
PLINK .......
Something hit the window pane again. He cautiously moved too the windows and peeked out. Some one was standing outside on the lawn. It looked like a little girl dressed in a white coat that was clearly too large for her. She saw Wilson peek and waved frantically. Wilson open the window.
"Wilson! Thank God. Let me in. We ve got to talk!"
"Who are you?"
"It's me, Daphne! Let me in. It's freezing out here. I'll explain everything."
Wilson went down and opened the door. There stood a girl wearing an oversized coat, she couldn't be any older than eleven.
"It's about time. Jeep, did you want me to catch pneumonia?" She said.
"Wait a minute, your not Daphne."
"Wrong! Thanks for being in on the show." she quipped. "The TTDA worked, but not like we thought. It was suppose project us back in time and it has -- but just our corporeal selves. In other words, It's just my physical body moving back in time. Thank God, we didn't set it a time before I existed!"
She paused as another shiver ran through her again and right in front of Wilson's eyes she became younger, slipping back to a nine year old.
"It IS you." He said in almost a whisper. "Yes!" she said smiling, her teeth now showing the normal gaps of a pre-pubescent child. "And I think It's speeding up as I get smaller. It was a year every 11 minutes before, but It's been a lot less than that since my last regression and I just felt myself slip back some more."
"We d better get back to the lab. And see if we can reverse this."
By the time they returned to the lab Daphne was a five year old, stumbling over the hem of her coat. She had such a hard time maneuvering that Wilson finally stooped over and carried her protesting in his arms. Back at the lab, Wilson powered up the TTDA and the computers. Daphne entered the chamber.
"I'm going to use more power. Based on what we ve seen, using more power should speed it up." He told her.
"I'm ready, but be careful, I don't want to wind up spread all over this lab like goo." She lisped in her child voice.
Wilson entered 21 as the displacement factor and 90% on power input and ran the sequence. The computer voice sounded "Three, two, one ......."
The blue sphere of light form and coalesce again around Daphne. The TTDA power built in intensity, until there was a loud bang the system went dark. Wilson ran to the chamber and opened the door. Daphne was a little dazed, but she seemed to be all right.
"What happened." She asked, still holding her head.
"I think I used too much power."
Daphne felt the now familiar feeling but this time it was much stronger. She moaned softly and quickly aged to eight, another wave and she aged to twelve. "Well, it looks like I'm heading back to beanpole city."
Yet another wave an she aged again to fourteen, but then, abruptly, her aging stopped. A smell of ozone and burnt wiring filled the lab as Daphne exited the machine.
"What happened?" she demanded.
"I don't know," he replied. "I'm figuring that I tried to run too much power through the capacitor relay and it burned out, initiating a cascade effect."
"In other words, I'm screwed," she concluded.
"Pretty much so," Wilson agreed. "At least until we repair the TTDA." "Well, what am I going to do?" Daphne asked, holding up the arms of her now oversized labcoat. "I can t go back to my apartment, because I'd get stopped trying to drive. I have nothing to wear, and even if I could get back to my apartment, it wouldn't help because none of my clothes fit me now." She turned and perched on top of Wilson's stool, a study in pique, with her smaller teenage chin resting on her fist.
"Well, maybe some of my stuff will fit you," Wilson offered. "We're nearly the same size now. And at least it would be better than walking around with nothing on by a labcoat."
"Wearing boys clothes!" she muttered. "Who d have thought it d come to that!
She stood and pulled the coat down and look at her chest, there was barely a rise where her breasts should have been. She unbuttoned the top button of the coat and peered down her front. "Nothing much there to cover up," she chagrined. "I never had all that much upstairs, but now I almost have less than nothing."
In her mind, she could hear the taunts of her junior high and high school classmates ..... "Flatty Patty! Flatty Patty! Any new developments, Daphne?"
"God, don't tell me I have to go through that again!"
Wilson put his arm on Daphne's shoulder and awkwardly patted it. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I guess so. You know, being an ugly grown-up is bad enough, but I just don't think I go could face being a teenager again if I had to go through what I did last time. You just don't know what It's like Wilson -- being a girl, being smart, being awkward, being tall. Getting jumped ahead in grades. Everyone looking at you like you're a freak at the same time they re looking up at you because you're so tall. You just don't know." Daphne started to cry softly.
Wilson smiled and said, "Yeah, I don't much about being tall -- and all that girl stuff, but the rest of it is the story of my life." He quietly, and with little emotion, told Daphne about his encounter with Rachel and Kirk, and what they had done to him.
"The bastards!" she said hotly. "Why didn't you call me. I've got half a mind to go over to her room right now and give her a piece of my mind."
"Why don't you wait until you're in a better position to tell her," Wilson said with a laugh, pointing at her present appearance. "Right now, I'd doubt she's take you seriously!"
Daphne smiled, held her arms akimbo and looked down at her diminished frame and laughed as well. She turned back to Wilson and realized that for the first time since she d known him that they were looking at each other nearly eye to eye. She leaned forward and gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek. Wilson broke into a blush, stammering. This made Daphne laugh even more, feeling as much like a teenage on the inside as she did in appearance. Poking him in the ribs, she leaned forward and kissed him again, this time on the forehead.
Wilson began backing up, but Daphne had grabbed his hands and was trying to kiss him again. Wilson ran out of back-up room and bumped his head into the wall. Daphne, reached up and encircled his neck with her arms.
"Don't run, Wilson, I don't bite," she said, and before she realized it, she kissed him fully on the lips. Wilson, almost shivering, held his lips tightly together. Slowly, she kissed him harder, and gradually he responded, and before she even realized it, she had opened her mouth and slipped her tongue lightly inside of his
She broke away from Wilson's lips, but her arms still held him about the neck. She head fell to one side in the classic look of puzzlement.
"You know, I never realized until know how much I liked you. I guess I knew it before but -- you know -- I'm 26 and you're a kid, no offense, but now .... you're the first guy I ever met that I ever really liked and you're too young for me!"
continued in part 3