Back to the Present:
Report from the 42nd Century
Urgent Dispatch
from W.A.D.S.H.O.T.
| Note to the Reader: If you have not yet read the initial findings referred to below, we urge you to do so before you assess this document. Please go to the first page of the original report.
|
| From: Waxahachie Asynchronous Diachronic Superheterodyne Hydrogerontic-Ontology Team. To: Magellan's Log Dear Magellan, We find it fitting that first publication of our extraordinary circumchronic navigation should come in Magellan's Log. We thank you--and your enthusiastic readers--for the e-mail which you have forwarded to us. Generous offers of financial support have come from all over the world. One reader in Tierra Del Fuego, a recently "retired" IPO billionaire offered us the unlimited use of his Platinum American Express card to, as he put it, get us (and of course our equipment) onto a level whose margins of error are somewhat less than those displayed by your more obscure items in the fine-print pages toward the back of the Radio Shack catalog. Which is not to denigrate good old RS. We would not have got this far without grosses of plugs, patch-cords, and diodes from the handy Waxahachie outlet. But we are certain that TandyCorp will appreciate the fact that there comes a time when research requires a certain level of refinement not available to the average RS customer. We are thrilled--such an understatement--make that: THRILLED to report that, thanks to yours readers' generosity we have recently acquired new equipment enabling us to achieve bi-directional cross-chronic contact. To put that in plainer English: we have received our first direct, volitional transmission from the 42nd century. While the encyclopedia fragments were themselves astonishing, we are now poised at the point where actual direct communication will soon be possible between us and THEM, whoever they are out there? up there? over there? 2200 years in the future. "Soon"? Alas, yes. While we have received our first message from Them, it took some doing. In fact the power surge at the moment of contact and direct transmission blacked out most of North Texas and a good half of Dallas from thirty minutes. Your readers will understand that the local electric companies were less than pleased by this event. When they finally tracked us down in our mildewy, half-finished tunnel (you recall we are working in the tunnel that was started for the Supercollider), more than a few angry words were spoken in our direction. The first break came when the power company reps noticed that they--and we--were sweating profusely. They were mightily impressed by the fact that we work in our underground atelier without the least smidgen of A.C. This seemed to convince them that we were not idle crackpots but were in fact quite serious. They were then willing to read the report which you have so generously published, using up your own precious bandwidth, as well as peruse various supporting documents in our files. Unfortunately, they agreed not to prosecute only if we signed a sworn statement that we would do nothing further to draw the kind of amperage we had drawn a couple of days previously. What choice did we have. We signed. Thus we are left not tantalizingly close to direct communication with the FUTURE, but can do nothing about it, given our lack of self-generated power. We thus call on your readers for help. We will accept any donation, however modest. Do you have a 600-watt Honda generator that you bought for Y2K and never used? Please ship it to us. Whatever you have, we can integrate into our own little power grid. Yr obdnt time-traveling srvnts,
|