"Party Guests" "Time Travelling" "Stadium"

by Mel Farr Suppastar of Project 301

PLEASE USE AFS.COM or a DEC PDP-10 TO VIEW THIS

"There is a 15% Chance that any person behaving or speaking strangely
 in a stadium is a man from another time"

     - Wolff-Ostrov's 3rd Hypothesis, 2nd Corollary


I. June 5th 1998, 11pm, Rentschler Field, East Hartford, Ct.

By any objective standard, the party was a success. Greg, the diminutive and
very bearded bartender was quick and charming. The DJ was playing strictly
disco/funk from 1974. Some guy had shown up in a very realistic Cthulhu
costume. The party guests were having quite the (stable) time. The mostly
empty stadium provided great space and accoustics. Indeed, the only person
who wasn't enjoing himself was the host, Professor Wolff-Ostrov, who paced
around nervously, because he was nervous.

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II(a) Feb 9 1996, The Alamodome, San Antoino Texas
  
   Mr. Spinsane, party guest, stepped out of the temporal aperture. The
   stadium was empty. It was still 1 week until NBA All star weekend.

II(b) October 1st, 1974, Kinshasa Zaire, 20th of May stadium.

    The DJ stepped out of the temporal aperture. The stadium was empty.
    Within a matter of days it would be the site of the famous Rumble
    in the Jungle. The DJ was early for the rumble. But he was just on
    time for the disco/funk of 1974.

II(c) 331 B.C., Greece, Panatheanic Stadium

 The man in the very realistic Cthulhu costume stepped out of the temporal
 aperture. He was early for the first olympic games. A slave caught sight of
 him and screamed in fright.

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III. October 10th, 1997

    Prof. Wolff-Ostrov was a lonely man, a condition caused by a general
    social awkwardness and exacerbated by a profession that seemed to require
    him to pace around his office, writing and erasing equations while
    muttering to himself. He was not a man who understood the subtleties of
    human interaction. This left him remarkably unprepared when Hennifer
    Marks walked into his office.

 Hennifer Marks was a grad assistant in Temporal-Spatial Physics who was
 having trouble squaring Schrodingerean Probability with Tractical Geometry.
 As they talked, Prof. Wolff-Ostrov began to experience a squishy,
 uncomfortable sensation that to him was most similar to the way bodies
 effected by gravity are forced toward each other.  Hennifer had a habit of
 slowly twirling her long flowing curls in a way that the Professor found
 profoundly distracting. Wolff-Ostrov found himself trying to estimate to the
 centimeter the amount of space between where her shorts ended and her knees
 began. Despite these distractions, the good professor managed to
 sufficiently clear up Ms. Marks' confusion and she bid him thank you and
 adieu. Then, in a moment he could scarecly believe, the good professor
 offered to review her thesis and  help her in any way she needed. Previously
 Prof. Wolff had hewed to a course of strictly avoiding assisting students
 even graduate students in their own "projects" but when Hennifer smiled and
 seemed generally interested, Prof. Wolff felt a highly unusual sense of
 anticipation.

----------------------------------------------------

IV.  December 10th, 1997, 9pm

  Prof. Wolff-Ostrov was feeling yet another utterly unfamiliar emotion. This
  one seemed the opposite of that one he had felt so long ago. He tried to
  run through some familiar equations but it was impossible. He was furious.
  How could she leave! Just when things were starting to go well! He threw
  his small model of the solar system at the blackboard. It shattered into
  3.14159 pieces. Tim Spinsane, the Dept. Secretary walked in.

"Professor, is something wrong?"
"No, uh...just an accident, Mr. Spinsane"
"You seem very upset"
"I...am."
"Well it's happy hour at the Rusty Nail @ there usually aren't any students
 there."
"Are you inviting me to get a drink with you?"
"Oh no, I'm watching the NBA tonight, but the bartender there has a knack for
 soothing the emotions."

---------------------------

V. December 10th, 1997, 10pm

 Prof. Wolff-Ostrov walked into the rusty nail. It was a small, hole-in the
 wall, distinguished only by a rather impressive bookshelf, full of pulp
 novels the Professor could not imagine perusing, let a lone reading. The
 bartender was a short bearded fellow who bore a distinct physical
 resemblance to Gimli, son of Gloin.

"What'll it be, sir?"
"Uh, something strong?"
"Whiskey?"
"Sounds great."
"Mixed with?"
"Don't people drink it straight?"
"Some."
"Well that's what I'll do."
"Sure thing."

Prof. Wolff downed the shot.

"I'll have another."
"Ok."

...

"She's leaving, Barkeep."
"It's Greg, and they all do, sir."
"She's leaving, Greg."
"I wouldn't worry about that, sir"
"Why not, Greg?"
"Sir, you don't know me, but I knew you would walk in here. And I knew it
 would be about a woman."
"What else do you know, Greg?"
"Mark my words Professor. What you two have is love. And when she returns,
 the two of you will be together. Happily ever after."
"How can you know that, Greg?"
"I've seen it, sir. I'm one of the beneficiaries of your...discoveries."
"You're a time traveller?"
"Aye, sir. I've seen you and Ms. Marks in the future. You two are very happy
 together. When she returns from her sojourn abroad, you will be reunited!"

At this Prof. Wolff-Ostrovs face lit up with joy. He got up beaming, and
 walked out of the bar. But just before he left, he turned:

"Greg, if you're from the future, What are you doing here in this time
 period then?"

"The music sir, I love the music of this era: Chumbawumba, Paula Cole, Will
 Smith getting Jiggy with It - I am convinced that 1998 will go down in
 history as the greatest year in the history of popular music."

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VI. June 5th 1998, 10:45pm, Connecticut

  Greg had suggested that the Professor throw the party to celebrate the
  return of Hennifer Marks from her 7 month fellowship in South America. The
  party could coincide with the Professor's discovery of a feasible method of
  time travel. He had assured the Professor that once he
  demonstrated the secrets of time-travel she would be incurably smitten.
  Prof. Wolff-Ostrov had agreed at once. And now the moment had finally
  arrived.

  ...

  Finally, Hennifer Marks arrived, and  she was more than the Professor
  could have imagined. She had gained an enormous amount of weight. Although
  this was somewhat mitigated by the fact that she was dressed in long
  robes that made her long basically formless.

"Professor!" she shouted, eyes beaming with joy.

Prof. Wolff-Ostrov almost couldn't speak.

"I want to hug you..." she said "but the Church Fathers tell me that it is
 sinful to hug an unmarried man."

"Oh?

"I have so much to tell you!" she continued "Before the trip I had thought
 that Mormons were a cult, but now I'm a member! I can't wait to teach you
 the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints!"

"Oh."
 
"Anyhow, I have to go! I have to be up at 5:30am for Prayer. But I knew I
 had to stop by and say hello! And If any of you want to know more about
 Jesus, feel free to reach out to me!"

And with that she left.

The professor stood, shocked.

Greg walked up to him. 

"Professor, I'm sure you are very disappointed. However, you have a party
 full of guests fully expecting to time travel in this stadium. With your
 permission, hand me the transitory dialectic and I will handle the
 temporal-portation. We wouldn't want this party to be a failure."

 The professor nodded, absentmindedly.

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VII.

 And in the end, that was the tragedy of time travel: it was so damn
 inconveinent. Forget the possibility of paradoxes, the potential rupture
 of the space-time continuum. Forget the money required just to construct a
 transitory dialectic. None of that was more than a trifle compared to the
 actual inconveinence of the process.

 When Professor Wolff-Ostrov discovered the actual requirements for his
 theory to work, he nearly gave up right then and there. Most
 problematically, there was the space involved. Time travel requried the
 creation of a series of fissures and abrasions in the space-time
 continuum. These fissures and abrasions contained energies that had a
 substantially corrupting effect on the space-time continuum and more
 importantly on the surrounding physical environment. What Wolff-Ostrov
 discovered was that even a "minor" trip (say, two people, a few days
 into the past) needed to be "contained" and the only regularly occuring
 containers: stadiums. For some reason, the harmonic structures of
 stadiums tended to contain and mitigate the disturbances. The container
 had to exist at both the origin and the destination, and it had to, for
 humanitarian reasons, be basically empty. This alone put enormous
 restrictions on time travel.

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VIII. June 6th 1998,  12:10am, The Rusty Nail

"I don't get it Greg. You assured me that we would be together."

"It was a lie, Professor, a noble lie."

"But why Greg, why?"

"Because, Professor, the stadium party needed to happen, for a number of
 important events in history. Because of you, the DJ will go on to found
 disco-funk making the late 70s one of the most important party zones in
 history. Because of you, `Cthulu` will help inspire the Greek Mythology
 that will shape Western culture for Millenia. And because of you, Mr.
 Spinsane was supposed to prevent Brent Barry from winning the 1996 NBA
 Slam Dunk competition. But unfortunately Mr. Spinsane will fail. And
 Brent Barry will win."

"And what about me, Greg?"

"Well Warpus," Greg said, calling the Professor by his first name "you'll
 impregnante a prostitute and raise the child as your own. Then you'll
 carry on a longstanding affair with Grindking's wife. Eventually you two
 will get married and develop a Blender...I mean, `blended' family."




SAUCE00Wolff-Ostrov's 3rd Hypothesis      Mel Farr Suppastar  Project 301         20150411(                                   