This Is a Book - Demetri Martin [50]
Goreburg and Spatz listened, both trying not to appear too excited about the opportunity.
Dingle continued. “It’s a copy machine.”
The two men slouched with disappointment, their already muscle-less frames looking even more flaccid than usual. “A copy machine?” thought Goreburg. “What a joke.”
Spatz let out a contemptuous sigh.
Sensing their disappointment, Bill quickly explained the assignment. “I am not talking about a conventional copy machine. I’m talking about something much more advanced, a new kind of copy machine. We need to create a machine that can copy something but make the copy look like it’s a completely different idea from the original. So that way the copy appears to be the result of ‘parallel thought’ or just some sort of an innocent coincidence.”
Arthur and Ronald listened. Both men now seemed interested.
“People in Hollywood have expressed strong interest in such a device, especially the large movie studios,” Dingle explained.
Goreburg started brainstorming immediately, his beady eyes darting back and forth behind his glasses. Spatz, equally intrigued by the task, started to rock with excitement, and also because he had to pee.
Dingle explained that two major advertising agencies had already offered millions for a working model. He and his partners knew that that kind of machine would be virtually priceless to the advertising industry, an industry that had been built on stealing other people’s ideas and then changing them slightly to make shitty commercials out of them.
The two rivals left Dingle’s office. They began working together the next morning.
If Goreburg and Spatz could figure out how to make this new kind of copy machine, it would mean huge profits for Zell, and more importantly, major recognition for the two young scientists.
From the very start, Goreburg and Spatz hated working together. They were competitive and distant. Arthur was a slob, which irked the legendarily anal-retentive Spatz. And Ronald irritated Arthur with his weird tapping habit. But, the more they worked together, the more they discovered just how much they had in common. For one thing, both were allergic to legumes. Also, as children, both had been rolled down a hill inside a tire by neighborhood bullies, which was for both of them a memorable first lesson in physics. Fi, and, perhaps most importantly, both spent a lot of time alone making things in their basements.
Spatz had developed several minor inventions, most notable among them a tiny nuclear bomb that could be used to kill a frog or a very old person. He hoped to market it overseas, perhaps to some of the smaller nations who had smaller enemies. He had also done pioneering research in the field of historical biochemistry, recreating chemical models of famous historical figures’ breath based on their diets and ethnic origins.
Goreburg, in his basement, had designed several specialty vehicles, including a hovercraft ‘made from a vacuum cleaner’ and a vacuum cleaner ‘made from a hovercraft.’
After work they started to hang out and talk about their favorite movies and about the woman who worked at Zell. Their opinions about both were based firmly in science fiction. Before long, Arthur and Ronald were collaborating outside of work. One night, while they were hovering in Arthur’s vacuum cleaner, they started to talk about time travel.
They both knew that there had been various attempts to build time machines at the lab before. No one had succeeded. A few years earlier it looked like one scientist came close—he had managed to jump into the future by a couple of minutes, but later it turned out that he had just passed out in his machine. Another scientist managed to send himself backwards through time but only metabolically—he sent his body back to puberty, which had terrible repercussions on his marriage.
They knew that a time machine presented difficult questions: “If time travel were possible, wouldn’t it have always been possible?” and “Isn’t there a