Earth is the 3rd planet from the Sun at a distance of about 150 million kilometers (93.2 million miles). It takes 365.256 days for the Earth to travel around the Sun and 23.9345 hours for the Earth rotate a complete revolution. It has a diameter of 12,756 kilometers (7,973 miles), only a few hundred kilometers larger than that of Venus. Our atmosphere is composed of 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen and 1 percent other constituents. Earth is the only planet in the solar system known to harbor life. Our planet's rapid spin and molten nickel-iron core give rise to an extensive magnetic field, which, along with the atmosphere, shields us from nearly all of the harmful radiation coming from the Sun and other stars. Earth's atmosphere protects us from meteors, most of which burn up before they can strike the surface.

The Moon is 384,403 kilometers (238,857 miles) distant from the Earth. Its diameter is 3,476 kilometers (2,160 miles). Both the rotation of the Moon and its revolution around Earth takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes. This synchronous rotation is caused by an unsymmetrical distribution of mass in the Moon, which has allowed Earth's gravity to keep one lunar hemisphere permanently turned toward Earth.

The Time Goggles - Presented By: Jason Argon - Solar System News! 9.7.2374 

My faithful readers will likely recall my adventures with Nick Arrow, the missing private detective from earth.  Before he left, for somewhen, he entrusted his memoirs to me, with specific release dates for different sections.  Today is one of those days. So, in keeping with my promise, I present to you the unexpurgated adventures of the Time Traveling Detective - Part I (Part II & Part III)

* * * 

The eye of the storm, in the swirl, is Zero-Time. 

Energy exists as an harmonic constant that resonates without changing. “When you hit zero time you are in the clear.”  That’s what I tell myself now.  “When you leave zero time you pick up wherever you like, or right back where you started from.”

But I didn’t know all that in the beginning.

My name is Nick Arrow and I am a licensed detective in the state of Illinois. My story is being published as fiction only because no one would believe otherwise. It is all true, however, and if you want proof stop by my office some day and I’ll show you some things that will blow your mind.

I guess that I would say that I fit the description of your basic hero type, you know, strong chin, steely eyes, six foot two and athletic. I have taught myself how to blend into a crowd, how to tail someone without giving myself away, and I have a great ability to spot a liar or deconstruct a fallacy.

I run a successful business out of an office in my home in Lincoln Park. The two top floors are the residence.
As you enter from the front door, on the left is the front room for waiting guests. The next door on the left leads into the office. On the right side, is the kitchen, the dining room is right where it should be, and then finally the stairs up to the second floor at the end on the hall.

My story, and the ones to follow, are a paradigm shift away from the good old fashioned hard boiled days of detecting. Still hard boiled, just not old-fashioned.
I will begin this account on that windswept rainy day back on September 7th, 2372.  I was seated at my desk looking over the books for the current revenues shaking my head in disgust, when there came a knock on the front door. I rose, went to the hall, and peered through the one way glass to the stoop and saw a narrow little fellow trying to peer back.

I opened the door. “May I help you?” I asked.
He looked nervous. “ Are you Nick Arrow, the detective?”
“Yes. Please come in.” I held the door wide, took his coat hung it up, and led the way to the office. I indicated the leather chair as I swung around my desk to face him.

“What can I do for you, Mr…?” Giving him my ‘what can I do for you’ smile.  “My name is Samuel Smith.” He said, gaining confidence as he went along. “I am the assistant Director of the Clemens University Experimental Center.”

“Please to meet you. What is the nature of your problem?”
“It’s about Professor Neal Ronin. He has vanished.” His narrow eyebrows lifted in expectation. As if I could pull the professor out of a hat.

“Well, how long has the professor been missing?” I asked.
“He has been working late with another man, who he calls his brother, but it is odd that he never mentioned a brother before this gentleman arrived six weeks ago. But they look a lot alike. They sealed off a laboratory at the university, went in two nights ago, and never came out. When the door was finally forced open, the room was empty.”

“The room was empty? How do you mean?”

He squirmed. “They were not in the room. The door had been locked from the inside. Of course there is their machine.”

“What kind of machine?”"

"No one knows what it does, so we haven’t touched it. It looks extremely complex and uses huge quantities of power. He went through several small fuel cells before buying seven of the largest model.”

“I see.” I said, even though I didn’t. “Is it possible that the machine killed them without leaving a trace?”
“Anything’s possible. That is the university’s motto. But we have no reason to think that the machine killed them in the manner that you describe.”

“Why come to me? What do the police have to say?”
“They say that not enough time has passed to consider foul play. But we know that the professor had been the target of foreign governments who wanted information based on his studies on…on…”
“On…?” I prompted
“ …On the nature of time.”
“The nature of time?”

“He had been able to create small, but powerful, energy fields that seemed to alter time in certain ways.” Professor Smith was becoming increasingly nervous as he talked about the professor’s experiments.

“Are you saying that the professor may have been kidnapped by spies because of his research?” I asked.

“Yes. Or killed. The professors experiments could allow for materials to be created outside the effects of entropy. That is all I can say.”

“Well, sir. If these mysterious experiments were so important, don’t you think that the CIA or FBI is working on the case already?”
“Perhaps, but the university wants to know what happened and it is not likely that we would be in the loop. We are prepared to pay your usual expenses plus a bonus if the professor is found in a timely manner.”

Always looking to keep the business as a going concern, I accepted.

The Assistant Director had prepared a small package of possible leads for me. It included the following: The address of the Professor and the ‘brother’, a key to the secret laboratory, another key to the professors office at the university, and a letter to be presented to any security guard that I might encounter during my inquires, instructing the officer to give me a break, and go about his or her business, and finally his home and office phone numbers.

When it comes to thinking ahead, scientists are very considerate.

Finally, he wrote out a check for five hundred, to take care of expenses, and left. I went back into the office, put my feet up on the desk, and stared at the ceiling.

I was thinking.

I do my best thinking while staring at the ceiling.

I glanced at my watch. It was two minutes after three in the afternoon. The phone rang. I pulled my legs from the desk, and grabbed the receiver, and spoke. “Hello?”
“Mr. Arrow?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar. Obviously muffled in some way.
“Who is this?” I asked slyly.
“I have information about the professor.” The voice said.
“What professor?” I asked slyly.
“Cut the crap Nick. This is for your own good. Get off your butt and go to the professors house on 8th street. The door is open.”

The voice definitely did not belong to Assistant Director Smith. I couldn’t tell who it was.
“Do you work for the university?” I asked conversationally. Stalling.
“Quit stalling.” The line went dead.

Well, I thought to myself.  A lead is a lead. Someone wants to make anonymous calls, that’s okay by me. I grabbed my camping jacket, my Uzo Laser-Pro handgun, and headed out the door.

I’ve always liked antique cars, and I owned my favorite. It is a 2357 Levitron. Built from a kit by me and some friends on weekends, it took two years of steady work, and the result is more than satisfactory. All of the equipment is state of the art. In fact, it is essentially a new car with an antique replica body. Of course, it is not the car that I use to trail suspects. For that purpose, I drive a hopped-up beater that blends into traffic, but handles great at high speeds.

I took the Levitron that day to let the bad guys know that I wasn’t afraid to let them know that I was on the job.

As I parked outside the professors residence, I saw that the front door was wide open. I pulled in the drive, parked, and approached the house.

The gun was in my hand as I eased across the threshold. The professor had a nice place. A woman had decorated it a long time ago. The foyer opened up to the second floor, a staircase made its way up and around to the left. There was a sitting room on the right. Empty.

Since I knew that I was expected, and the door directly in front of me at the end of the foyer was closed, I took the stairs to the second floor. I wasn’t sneaking around. I took the stairs two at a time, eyes focused on the doors that lined the balcony.

The first door was closed, the second one open, and the third closed. I strode to the second door and tossed in a flash-ball. My contact lenses automatically darkened as the bright light filled the room and spilled into the hall. Anyone in that room without the proper eye gear was blind for the next 45 seconds.

No one was blinded because no one was in the room at the time. I was standing in a bedroom designed by the same feminine hand as the rest of the house.

There was a large bed against the far wall beside the single window, with matching end tables, a couch and coffee table, and a desk. I retrieved the flash-ball as I looked around. There was a strange pair of goggles on the desk.

I inspected the goggles. They were lightweight. The strap was a solid expandable piece that had little tubes and wires running along its length. I turned the device around in my hands. The eyepieces each had two dials with numbers going around in a clockwise fashion.

Other than the goggles, the bedroom was pretty ordinary, so I figured that whoever wanted me to have this apparatus had succeeded in leading me to it. I decided to look around the rest of the house.

I will skip the details. I did the usual comprehensive search, always careful not to make it obvious, or leave any clues as to my identity. I didn’t find much of anything. The professor was either a fastidious cleaner, or the maid service was in twice a week. No one had been there since the last cleaning. There wasn’t a scrap in any wastebasket, and all the drawers were well kept without any unusual items stashed away.

Satisfied that I had what I’d come for, I returned home. In the office I began a closer inspection of the strange goggles. There did not seem to be a power source, even though wires wove into and out of the headband. However, when I placed the unit on my head it automatically adjusted itself to my hat size, and the lenses began to glow. I instinctively ripped the thing off as if it was a giant insect clutching my skull.

The thing had come alive as I placed it on my head. I assumed that it was activated by my brainwaves although I had never heard of anything like that, and I like to keep up on the latest gadgets.

I deduced that the goggles were not designed to injure the user, so I put them back on. I jumped. Suddenly I was standing in a field of wheat. The Sun was directly over head. I reached out and touched my desk.

Still there. That was good.

I guessed that I was viewing some kind of vidi of a field of wheat. It was a virtual reality device. This one was no toy though. It was very high quality. I took them off and it shut down. I took a closer look at the dials. Each eyepiece had two round dials that wrapped around the circumference. The outside ring on the left lens had numbers one through twelve. The number at the top read seven. The inside ring had numbers one through thirty-one. It was set to seventeen. The two rings around the right lens were also numbered. The outside ring had numbers zero through 99 and the inside ring zero one to one hundred. Each ring had a golden zero at the beginning of each of the number sequences. On the top, above the nose piece, was a digital 24 hour clock. I noticed that the current setting on the goggles was July 7^th 1865, and the time 14:30 o’clock.

Strange. Maybe there was a chip inside somewhere that played a scene from any day within a thousand year period. Seemed like a strange thing to invent. I suddenly got a bright idea. I set the rings for September 7th, 2372, at 3:02, and put them back on, thinking that no programmer would have been able to supply the machine with that time and date.

As I leaned back in my chair I saw my feet up on the table. The effect was so strong that I actually felt my knees to insure that I had both feet on the ground. I did.

I stood up and faced my desk. There I was talking on the phone, just as I had done earlier with the anonymous tipster. I was not watching some vidi in a pair of VR goggles, I was looking into the past!

How could this be? I tried to touch the image of myself that I saw before me through the goggles, but only stumbled over my empty chair. I was fascinated, mesmerized. I felt for the rings and dialed in another date at random.

A cold chill ran down my spine as I realized that I was now in possession of a device that could lead directly to extreme and extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. I decided to peer into the future to see if the men in black came and took me away.

I saw the near future of my office and although there were some strange occurrences, I did not see any men in black taking me away. I won’t go into what I saw, at least not yet, but the little I did glimpse from that first look down-the-line told me that I was just at the beginning of a very long strange trip.

My phone rang.

I reluctantly took off the goggles and answered the phone. It was my mystery caller.
“What do you think of the specs?” He asked.
“I like them, although I think that they could be a health hazard, and I was thinking of calling the Temporal Protection Agency.”
“They haven’t been invented in your time, Nick.”
“So, the professor has invented time-goggles and someone snatched him, but they left the goggles on the nightstand.”

“The desk. The goggles are toys, Nick.”
I found that I was starting to not like the way that he kept calling me Nick. “Call me Mr. Arrow.” I said. He ignored it.
“I want you to have those goggle, and a few other items. Go to the university, Nick. Go to the lab and look for the back pack. You will find more toys. Do not show them to anyone or tell anyone of their existence. You will need them in your future.”

“How do you know about my future?” I asked.
“I have goggles too. Plus, well, never mind.”
“Okay. If I hadn’t seen something that I can’t explain with my own eyes, and since you seem to be trying to help, I will comply. The potential of this and any other devices that I might acquire for the detective business makes the risk worth taking. Otherwise…”

“Good thinking, Nick. And thanks for spelling that out for me, but now is not the time for explaining, now is the time to get moving. We are on a schedule.”

The line went silent.

I put my feet up on the desk, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. I was thinking.

I decided that I didn’t like being a pawn, but that feeling didn’t over-ride the necessity of going forward.

I grabbed the goggles and drove the beater car over to the campus. It was beginning to get dark. There were not many people around. A few stray students short cutting across the quad.

To be Continued. . . . (Part II)