INTER GRAVISSIMUS
Leon Zeldis
The moment had arrived. The machine was ready and all the professors, assistants and technicians of the Timespace lab at Israel's Scientific and Technological University were assembled in the huge building specially constructed to house the first time-space distortion machine, better known as the Time Travel Capsule or TTC.
The final adjustments were being made by Professor Zeev Bildenrot, the genius physicist who had first laid the theoretical foundations for the machine. Though an Orthodox Jew, his mathematical ability had been discovered at an early age and his grandfather, Rabbi Menahem, decreed that the child should study science and go to the university. "Not every Bildenrot must be a rabbi or a doctor," he decided. "A Doctor in Physics can also make a living, and he won't have to do night shifts."
Zeev duly breezed through Yale, MIT and Princeton in record time, earning two doctorates in Mathematics and Physics, and another one in Music, graduating from Curtis as well, he being a talented violinist.
Back in Israel, the multiple grants and offers of support he received made it easy to materialize his pet project: a practical demonstration of the possibility for stitching the time-space continuum to travel back in time.
It took three years of hard work, Saturdays excluded, of course, to build the machine. Actually, it was more like a huge metal pyramid bulging with funny-looking protuberances, valves, vents and antennas in all imaginable shapes.
The work had been completed, all calculations had been made, and now Professor Bildenrot was sitting inside the structure, fine-tuning the TTC cesium chronosetter that would set the destination time.
Several dates had been proposed, May 15th 1948, of course, had been the first, but Bildenrot would have nothing to do with such kleinsthetelich, as he defined the idea.
October 12, 1492 was the best suggestion. Discovering a new world, that's what Bildenrot was going to do. Very symbolic, everybody agreed, but there was a little problem, the energy required to go back more than 500 years was just too much for the power lines feeding the laboratory and Bildenrot didn't was to delay the first trial. He was living in a daze. This was like a dream. Finally, all his years of study, the nights spent facing the computer or the blackboard, making endless calculations. Finally had resulted in this, his baby!
He played with the dials of the chronosetter, the instrument that would set the destination time: October 12, yes, but not before 1515. Perhaps 1592. exactly one hundred years after Columbus and the New World. He punched the keys, fine-tuning with the dials, the little screen finally showed the year 1582. Ten years earlier. No matter, he anxious to go ahead and didn't want to waste more time.
Hurriedly, he went out and hugged his assistants, promised to return after a few minutes, and closed himself inside the machine. Food and drink had been stocked in advance, just in case. The plan was to jump back to the target time, take a good look around, and if it was safe, go out for a few moments, and then return to the departure time with a five-minute difference. The whole trip should take no more than a quarter of an hour TTC time, and only 5 minutes origin time.
The attending personnel watched with undisguised emotion the change in color of the machine, then, with a loud blast of sound as the air rushed to occupy the empty space left by the machine, it vanished completely
Some of the young assistants started to applaud, but were rapidly hushed by older men and women. Let's wait for his return, they said. "Provided it lasts," one quoted Napoleon's mother when she heard of his coronation.
The minutes passed with agonizing sluggishness. Five minutes, six, seven…. After fifteen minutes, some of the senior staff started to fear something had gone awry.
They went back to the instrument panels, where everything done inside the machine up to its departure was recorded and displayed. Everything had worked properly. Nothing was amiss.
Dr. Angela Campoformo, the Italian expert in statistical analysis, recruited by Bildenrot, was the one who had an inspiration. Her Catholic upbringing played a part, of course. She nervously made a web search and when she read the answer broke into bitter tears.
She was crying so hard, it was impossible to get a coherent sentence from her; finally she calmed down and explained.
"The calendar instituted at the time of Julius Caesar slowly diverged from astronomical reality, so that religious festivities like Easter, did not correspond with the seasons. Finally, Pope Gregory XIII decided to make things right. He appointed a priest astronomer, Christopher Clavius, to find the way to correct the calendar, and with the assistance of Johannes Kepler, the savants brought in due time their proposal, the calendar known as Gregorian."
The assembled physicists and mathematicians listed with rapt attention, but didn't understand the connection with what had happened.
"A last problem remained," she continued, "and that was to correct the differences accumulated trough the centuries, so the Pope made a decision: he issued the bull Inter Gravissimus, decreeing that ten days would be erased from the calendar, the ten days from October 5 to October 14 of the year 1582, so that the day following October 4 was October 15."
Still they didn't get it, until she cried:
"Professor Bildenrot traveled to October 12, 1582, a day that doesn't exist!"
The vanished capsule never returned.