Steve woke up suddenly from sleep and shouted, “I’ve got it!” He leapt out of bed and danced around his bedroom in excitement. “Albert Einstein, you dummy! You had it all wrong this whole time.”
Even though Steve was not wearing his boots, there is no doubt that Sam must have heard all of this downstairs, and was probably not happy about any of it, especially because it was nearly six in the morning. And no doubt, also, that the mention of ‘Einstein’ did not go unnoticed.
Steve rushed over to his makeshift workroom and started making adjustments to his setup. After about ten minutes of tinkering, he grabbed four small cubes and took them over to the bathroom.
Each of the cubes had a thin wire attached to it, which connected it to the main unit in the workroom. Steve used double-sided tape to stick them to the four corners of the cabinet surrounding his sink. He ran back to his workroom to fetch a flashlight and a hammer, the latter of which he used to pry the trim panel loose from the bottom of the cabinet.
He tossed the panel behind him and peered beneath the cabinet with the aid of the flashlight. Nothing was under there but dust and spiderwebs.
Then Steve knelt down in front of the sink and began flipping the switches on the four small cubes. He took a few breaths before he flipped the final switch, as if running though a mental checklist. Finally, with some flourish, he flipped the last switch.
The front of the cabinet went black. That is to say, it completely disappeared and was replaced by an impossibly black rectangle with four small cubes at each corner.
Steve let out a loud whoop of excitement. His cat came up beside him to see what all the fuss was about, and if any food was perhaps involved in it.
Steve held a hand in front of the cat and started talking to it, “Whoa, you don’t want to go through there. If I’m right, that will send you five years back in time. And if I’m wrong, well, I doubt I‘d ever get the smell out of the bathroom.”
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The cat rubbed up against him, wondering if food was coming yet or not. Steve took a nickle from his pajama pants and showed it to the cat. “See, a nice, new nickle.”
The cat sniffed it. It wasn’t food. Steve placed it on the floor and took a picture of each side of it while explaining to the cat, “Yes, I know, this is hardly scientific proof, but I just want to see if this works or not. You see, I’m going to send this back in time five years. I trust that the person who lived here before me probably never went rummaging beneath the bathroom sink, so there is every reason to expect that it will be unmolested when I recover it five years later, which is today of course.”
The cat looked unconvinced. Steve, undeterred by his cat’s skepticism, picked up the nickle and rolled it under the sink. “Now you see, all I have to do is shut down the emitters and collect the nickle, which should be noticeably tarnished from five years of dampness.”
As Steve bent forward to turn off the cubes, his cat glanced behind him in surprise. Because right behind Steve was Sam, who was holding the trim panel in the air with a very agitated look on his face. Sam swung down sharply and cracked the trim panel over the back of Steve’s head. That stupid head. He hated it. He had wanted to smash it for so long, and now he finally could.
Steve lurched forward from the impact and fell through the black hole.
The cat meowed at Sam. Sam saw it and said, “There you are, Einstein! Did that mean old Mr. Stompy steal you? We don’t like Mr. Stompy, do we?”
The cat purred in response and rubbed against the corner of the cabinet, dislodging one of the emitters and thus closing the rift in time. Sam picked him up and took him back to his apartment, where the cat was finally given some food.
Steve was never heard from again. He simply disappeared without a trace. But we know the truth behind this inexplicable event. We know what happened to him, because we’ve read Chapter 1.
THE END
(AND THE BEGINNING)