By Bob Jamieson

Tachyon

Coffee

We were in Pompeii in 79 A.D. for the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. We were also present in 1883 for the eruption of Mt. Krakatoa in the South Pacific island chain of Indonesia. And, for the trifecta, we were present in 1980 for the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State. In all three cases, we escaped just in the nick of time.

You may wonder how that could be possible, given our ages. I am currently 75 years old and my two grandsons are just 11 and 8. When I say "currently" I mean in the year 2022. I believe that is the current year, but who knows for sure? You see, I am beginning to have a bit of trouble with the whole concept of time. That is one of the hazards of bouncing around on the spacetime continuum. And that's what this book is all about. I should warn you, though, that it could get a bit bumpy out there, so you might want to fasten your seat belt.  

At this point, I suspect that you are beginning to wonder what I am blathering on about. And who can blame you? The tale that I am about to tell you is admittedly going to be a bit difficult to believe. Maybe more than just a bit. And the craziest part of it is that it all began with a simple cup of coffee.

I was, as usual, about half awake on that fateful morning about - oh, what was it - three or four years ago? It's hard to say now. Anyway, I walked over to the Keurig machine, that wonderful invention that allows a person to brew a perfect cup of coffee from a little plastic pod filled with coffee grounds. I filled the reservoir with water, reached into the box where we kept the pods, and withdrew the last one, placing it precisely where it belongs in the Keurig machine. Then I brought the hammer down and pushed the button to start the brewing process. Soon that wonderful elixir began to flow slowly into my cup. The sounds and the aroma were delightful!

I like to clean as I go, so before retrieving my cup I removed the pod from the machine. I was about to discard it in the trash when I noticed that it had a strange label on it. Though it had come from a Maxwell House coffee box, the label on the pod read "Tachyon Coffee - Travel at Your Own Risk!" It seemed odd, but I didn't give it too much thought at the time. I just tossed it and prepared to enjoy my cup of coffee. 

My mind began to wander and I remembered where I had heard the term "tachyon" before. A tachyon, if I remembered correctly, was a hypothetical subatomic particle with a rather remarkable characteristic, one that even the great Albert Einstein had thought to be impossible. A tachyon, at least theoretically, was always in motion and was always moving faster than the speed of light. It could not, for reasons that I admittedly do not understand, ever slow down to sub-light speed. Or so the theory went.

Such a particle would violate the so-called "speed limit of the universe" established by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, so I didn't give it much credence. Nothing, declared the great man, can ever travel faster than the speed of light (186,284 miles per second), which leads to some pretty wacky notions, at least from the point of view of the layman. 

Here is one of my personal favorites. If two trains racing toward each other on the same track at 60 miles per hour were to collide, they would do so at their combined speed of 120 miles per hour. However, if two beams of light, both travelling at the speed of light, were to collide head on they would do so at the speed of light, not twice the speed of light. Mind-boggling, right? 

And how about this one, Einstein's famous equation:  

It sounds simple enough on the surface, but the consequences of his insight were profound. One of the implications of this equation, apparently, is that it is impossible for anything to exceed the speed of light. It also means that as velocity increases, time itself must slow down. Einstein assured us that all of this (and a great deal more) was undeniably true.  

Well, you might be thinking, time can't actually slow down, can it? Maybe Einstein was wrong! Nope. Two atomic clocks, one kept stationary on the ground and the other flown at great speed aboard a jet plane, proved that Einstein was right. 

Still, I had to admit that Tachyon Coffee was a great marketing name. The word "tachyon" is derived from the Greek word "takhus" meaning "swift." What a great name for a drink that helps to get a person moving in the morning!

All of those thoughts raced through my mind in just a matter of seconds and then something odd began to happen. I began to experience a sense of deja vu - but in reverse. I glanced at the clock on the wall and noticed that the hands were racing around counterclockwise at an astonishing rate. The room began to spin around me. Alarmed by these observations,  I stood up and - to steady myself - put one hand on a shoulder of each of my two grandsons, Roman and Donovan. Suddenly I felt something bump into me from behind and then found myself in a whirling vortex, along with my two grandsons and another person, a rough-looking man who was a dead ringer for the movie character Indiana Jones.

As the whirling began to subside, we found ourselves standing in a place that I did not recognize. It appeared to be a tropical forest of some kind. Standing before us was the Indiana Jones guy, staring back at us with a very annoyed look on his face.

For those of you not familiar with Indiana Jones, take a gander at this movie poster. The character, played by Hollywood actor Harrison Ford, is a fictional archeology professor with a highly unconventional approach to the discipline. That approach, however, does serve him well in a series of exciting cinematic adventures set in the late 1930s. This is pretty much what the guy in the vortex looked like.

"Where are we?" I mumbled, unable to make any sense out of our predicament. "And how did we get here?" 

"Amateurs!" exclaimed the Indiana Jones look-alike, sounding thoroughly disgusted with whatever had just happened. "The question is not 'where are we' but rather 'wherewhen are we'."

Noticing the look of puzzlement on my face, he sighed and dialed back his frustration. "My apologies," he began. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Nicholas T. Knox, but my friends call me Opportunity Knox." After a momentary pause, he added pointedly, "You three can call me Mr. Knox." 

We introduced ourselves and then asked again where - or wherewhen - we were.

"You probably won't believe me when I tell you this," said Knox, "but I am a time traveler, an entrepreneur from a spot on the spacetime continuum that is far in your future. You appear to have consumed a bit of tachyon coffee, a somewhat primitive but still very effective spacetime transfer methodology, just as I was passing through. I bumped into you and you must have also touched both of your grandsons at precisely that moment, which caused us all to enter a state of quantum entanglement. Do you know what that means?"

"Well, vaguely," I answered. "It has something to do subatomic particles. When they are entangled, whatever happens to one happens to the other, no matter how far apart they are."

"Close enough," said Knox. "As it pertains to time travel, it means that the four of us   

are now entangled. We are entangled because we all touched during a tachyon transfer. In practical terms, what that means is that wherewhen I go, you go. And vice versa. Get it?"

"Well," sort of, I answered, wondering what kind of hallucinogen I had consumed with my morning coffee. "Is this for real?" I asked, chuckling at the absurdity of it all.

"Yes," said Knox, "unfortunately it is all too real. Now I am stuck with you three and I'm sorry to inform you that you are also stuck with me, at least for the duration of this assignment."

"What assignment is that?" I asked, still enjoying what I now regarded as an amusing and hopefully harmless fantasy.  

"I am on a mission to restore an extinct species to the world. My world, that is. From your point of view, the world of the future. On this trip, I have been asked to bring back a pair of T-Rexes, so we have traveled back millions of years into the past."

"Uh-huh," I responded, smiling. "Did you happen to see the movie 'Jurassic Park'? It didn't end well." I found this amusing, still imagining that I was hallucinating.

"You don't believe me, do you?" said Knox. "That's OK, my skeptical friend. You will soon enough. And if you want to survive, you had better start taking this seriously."

Roman and Donovan looked at each other and grinned. "A pair of T-Rexes!" they shouted in unison. Apparently they had no difficulty accepting this new reality at all. And they were enthusiastically on board with the mission.  

I was a bit more hesitant, but since it all seemed so unreal, I figured why not?

We had to spend the night under the stars, sleeping on the hard ground while being eaten alive by mosquitos and other strange bugs that seemed very real indeed. Frightening howls and screeches punctuated the darkness all night long. I didn't get much sleep and neither did anyone else. In the morning, Knox shared some of his food with us. He carried it in the form of tiny packets that expanded rapidly in hot water and I must admit that they tasted pretty good. 

He cautioned us, though, that he had only packed for one and now had four mouths to feed, so we would have to conclude the mission quickly or learn to live off the land. By this time the reality of our predicament was beginning to sink in. No fantasy could possibly last this long and seem so real, could it?

"So this is what you do for a living?" I asked. "You bring extinct species back to your world?"

"This is one of the things that I do. I am a freelance spacetime entrepreneur, an adventurer and a businessman. I have been involved in a lot of spacetime tourism, taking people back to famous disaster sites and then exiting just at the last minute. Very exciting stuff, and very lucrative, too. Universities hire me for historical tours, families for genealogy explorations and for visits with loved ones who have passed on. For some of these, I have to use virtual live technology so that we can be present but neither seen nor heard. We are like ghosts on those trips and people often walk right through us without realizing that we are there. I've done plenty of other things, too."

"Do you ever try to correct errors that were made in the past?" asked Roman.   

"Absolutely not," replied Knox. "That is strictly forbidden by a law known as the Prime Directive. Any attempt to change the past could have unforeseeable consequences, consequences that could set us back a thousand years or even wipe out civilization for good. No, we got where we are as a result of a fortuitous past and we do not dare tinker with it. Those who violate the law lose their time travel license - forever."

"Just think," continued Knox, "human history can be divided into three parts. For the first million years or so, we existed as small bands of hunter/gatherers, just one rung above our animal cousins on the evolutionary ladder. Then, for about ten or fifteen thousand years, we eked out a living as subsistence farmers. It wasn't until the early 1800s that the industrial age really got underway and with it what has become known as the Great Enrichment. Even in your era, primitive by our standards, life had become much easier. The average person lived better than kings had before."   

"Now just imagine what might happen if some well-intentioned idiot came along and did something that put that advancement in peril. Let's say, for example, that he created a chain of events that prevented Johannes Gutenberg from ever being born. Movable type then might never have been invented and the dissemination of knowledge curtailed for hundreds of years. All four of us, if we existed at all, might still be trying to scratch a living out of the dirt on some primitive farm somewhere."

"Yeah, Roman," said Donovan, as if he had thought of this himself. Roman just rolled his eyes. Knox and I just smiled. Boys will be boys.

"OK," announced Knox, "it's time to get moving. The T-Rexes aren't going to just come to us, you know. We're going to have to go out there and find them." And with that, we put out the fire. Knox appeared to have a plan.

"You're probably wondering how I am going to be able to bring two gigantic T-Rexes back to the future," began Knox as he slashed his way through the foliage with a machete that he had drawn from his backpack. In fact, the thought had occurred to all of us, but before we could say so, he continued his monologue. "In my handy backpack, I have a tranquilizer gun and a small collection of tranquilizer darts to sedate the beasts. Then I will place a hand on each of the animals to entangle them for the trip back home and, as I do, I will chomp down hard on a return gummy. It should be a piece of cake."

"I think I got all of that except the part about the return gummy," I said. "What the heck is a return gummy?"   

"Don't you have gummy bears in your time?" he asked. "Or did they come later?"

"Gummy bears?" shouted Donovan. "We have gummy bears and we love 'em."

"Well," said Knox, "I happen to have a few in my backpack, but you will not want to eat them. They are infused with fast-acting tachyons that can provide instant transportation to a traveler's desired destination. A return gummy will take a traveler to the  exact point on the spacetime continuum of his previous departure. From the point of view of the people waiting for him at that destination, the traveler will suddenly disappear and then just as suddenly reappear. In this particular case, I - the traveler - will reappear with two T-Rexes and, unfortunately, with three human stowaways from several centuries in the past."

"What's our job?" asked Roman, always eager to help.

"Your job will be to stay out of my way and try not to get eaten by a T-Rex" replied 

Knox. "Think you can handle that?"

"Sure," said Roman, looking somewhat dejected.

We trudged on through the jungle in the heat of the midday sun, encountering all sorts of unusual species. Some were indisputably dinosaurs, but just  small ones that appeared to pose no risk to us. It was not until late in the afternoon that we heard a rustling in the distant trees that caused Knox to stop in his tracks. "Shhhhh!" he cautioned and we all fell silent.

Carefully parting the leaves, Knox saw just what he needed, a pair of T-Rexes suitable for breeding. Motioning for us to remain where we were, he crept slowly and carefully toward the two massive carnivores. They were devouring the remains of a kill.  

Knox drew a small dart gun from his backpack, inserted it into the gun, and then fired it at the closer of the two T-Rexes. The animal reacted sharply to the sting of the dart but otherwise seemed unaffected by it. After a couple of minutes it was obvious to Knox that there was not enough anesthetic in the dart to lay the beast out, so he fired another dart at the same animal. He got the same reaction and the T-Rex began to exhibit some signs of wooziness. However, it did not fall down and go to sleep. 

Knox appeared frustrated, but apparently decided that the T-Rex would eventually succumb to the anesthetic, so he turned his attention to the other one. Two shots later, he saw the same effect. After about ten minutes, Knox drew the last two darts from his backpack and fired one at each of the beasts. Again, they reacted to the sting but they did not fall down and go to sleep as desired. Another ten minutes went by and Knox crept back to us. "Plan B," he whispered.  

"Plan B?" I whispered back when it did not appear that he was going to offer any details.

"It appears that the zoologists have underestimated the amount of anesthetic required to get the job done," said Knox. One dart was supposed to be enough. The extra darts were just backup in case I missed. I've used all six and we are out of darts, so we will have to improvise - and I'm going to need your help."

"Yes!" yelled Donovan, causing the two T-Rexes to quickly swivel their heads in our direction. Knox put his hand over Donovan's mouth and quietly shushed the rest of us by whispering, "Shhhh!" 

The T-Rexes turned their attention back to their meal and and then Knox continued.

"Plan A," said Knox, "was to anesthetize the two T-Rexes and have them fall down close enough to each other so that I could lay a hand on each of them to include them in our entanglement, then chomp down on a return gummy and bring us all back to the future."

"Well, that's out now so here is plan B. We will creep up on the beasts and when I shout 'Now!' one of us will put a hand on each of their tails." He obviously meant he and I. Simultaneously, Roman will chomp down on a return gummy and off we will go. Got it?"

"So we will be tumbling through the vortex with two T-Rexes?" I asked. "And what happens when we arrive? How do we know that they won't eat us?" All four of us looked at each other for a long moment before anyone said anything.

"You make a good point about our arrival back in the future," replied Knox. "We'll wait until they finish devouring their meal before we approach them. That way, their hunger will be satisfied and that should reduce the likelihood that they will eat us upon arrival."

"Reduce the likelihood?" I repeated, "By how much?"

"Hard to say," responded Knox. He did caution us to try to stay away from the T-Rexes' humongous jaws while tumbling through the vortex. "They might be a bit snappish."

Roman, Donovan and I just looked at each other and gulped. "Well," said Donovan finally, "we're always up for an adventure!" And that was it. We were committed to this crazy attempt to bring back two very dangerous creatures to a future world.

"Good!" said Knox. "There is one more thing we need to talk about. Just a few feet over to the west of us is a sharp drop off into a deep gorge. Be very careful. If these beasts move in that direction, we must be ready to pull back from this operation."

"Got it," we all said in unison. And then we waited for the T-Rexes to finish their meal, which appeared to be a medium-sized Triceratops or some similar creature. When they appeared to be finished, Knox gave us the signal to advance on them. We crept quietly behind the huge predators and then, when Knox gave the signal, we each placed a hand on the tails of the beasts. Roman was about to pop a gummy bear into his mouth as we all held our breath. And then something unexpected happened. With a flick of its tail, as casually as a cow flicks a fly away, one of the T-Rexes flipped Roman up into the air and out toward the gorge. The gummy flew out of his hand. Knox watched Roman sail overhead and then took another gummy bear from his pocket and popped it into

his mouth. I was stunned. But before I could say anything, I began to feel the effects of the impending spacetime transfer. The vortex opened before us, sucking us in and tossing us about as if we had been swept up into a tornado - a spacetime tornado.

The T-Rexes were a bit snappish, as it turned out, and there was not much we could do about it. On the other hand, they appeared to be quite distracted by the vortex and no doubt were even more frightened than we were. I personally was in despair by what had happened to Roman and the casual way that Knox had just accepted his loss. But my despair lifted a few seconds later when I noticed Roman spinning alongside us in the vortex - with a big grin on his face. I wondered how that could be and then it occurred to me that he had survived the fall because of our group entanglement. We entered the vortex before he hit the bottom of the gorge and, as Knox had explained to us - wherewhen he goes, we go, and vice versa. Interesting.

When the vortex released us, Knox asked, "Has anyone seen my bag of gummies?" Then he calmly added, "I dropped them back in the forest."

"What?!" I responded. "Does that mean that we are stranded here, wherever this is?"

"Wherewhenever this is," corrected Knox. "But to answer your question, no, we are not stranded wherewhenever this is. The bag of gummies  are entangled with this group, so wherewhenever we go, it goes. Please help me find it before one of the - uh-oh."

"What's wrong?" asked Donovan. Then, as Knox pointed toward the sky, we saw an enormous bird-like creature, perhaps a pterodactyl or some related species, flying off with the bag of gummies. Knox didn't seem nearly as concerned as we were, but he was clearly not pleased.