Time Travel Omnibus, page 1012
“It’s a camera.”
“I mean, why are you taking all these pictures of the flyer?” He lowered the glasses, turning to face her.
“Because, today is the first day that they really fly. Wilbur will go up for eighteen minutes and not come down until he drains the gas tank. It’s a historic moment but they weren’t expecting it, so there’s no photographer here. Day after tomorrow, Orville will fly in front of a crowd for thirty-four minutes, but today’s the day everything changes. And later on, after they fly it, they’ll make changes and eventually dismantle the flyer. In 1947 Orville will rebuild it for an exhibit, but he’ll only have about sixty percent of this plane. There’s a historical society that wants to check the rebuilt plane against this one.”
And right then, Wilbur stepped out of the open door of the hangar. “This has gone on long enough. Madam, you should be ashamed of yourself, filling this boy’s head with nonsense in order to get him to help in your espionage.” He held out his hand to Homer. “Give me the camera, son.”
“Espionage?” Louise lifted her cane so it served as a barrier between the man and Homer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but the opera glasses are mine and I’ll thank you to leave them alone.”
“I overheard everything and though your story is designed to play upon the fancies of a boy, I could hear the elements of truth.” He reached over the cane and snatched the opera glasses from Homer’s hand.
“Hey!” Homer pushed Louise’s cane out of the way and stepped toward the man. “Give that back.”
“We’ve been at pains to keep our invention out of the wrong hands.” He brushed past both of them and hurried across the field, waving the opera glasses.
Homer ran after him and caught his coat. “Please, Mr. Wright. I was just funning with her. I didn’t think anyone would take me seriously.”
Louise hurried after them, focused more on the uneven ground than the man in front of her.
Wilbur shrugged off Homer’s hand and shook his head. “We didn’t advertise this test flight, so how do you suppose that she knew to come out here today, except through spying?
Louise laughed to hide her discomfiture. This was the sort of thing that it would have been nice for the Time Travel Society to let her know. “You can’t think that people aren’t talking about this in town, can you?”
“The people in town aren’t out here snooping around. Who looks at things up close with opera glasses?” Wilbur lifted the opera glasses and mimed snooping.
The moment he looked through the opera glasses he cursed and jerked his head away from the eyepiece. Slowly he put it back to his eyes. His face paled. Wilbur wiped his mouth, lowering the opera glasses to stare at Louise. “Who do you work for?”
“I’m just a woman that’s interested in seeing you fly.” She could barely breathe for fear of the moment. “You’re making history here.”
“History.” He snorted. “You were talking to the boy about time travel.”
Before Louise could think of a clean answer, Homer said, “She disappeared earlier. Utterly vanished. I . . . I think she’s telling the truth.”
“And if she is?” Wilbur turned the glasses over in his hands. “I look at this and all I can see are the number of inventions that stand between me and the ability to do . . . If I weren’t holding it, I should think it impossible.”
Louise could not think of a thing to say to the man. He looked as if his faith had been as profoundly shaken as a small boy discovering the truth about Santa Claus. Louise shook her head. “All I want is to watch you fly, once I’ve done that I’ll be gone and you won’t have to worry about the pictures I took.”
“This is why you were so certain the flyer will work today, isn’t it?” There was no wonder his voice, only resignation.
“Yes, sir.”
“And what you told the boy, about Orville rebuilding the plane. True? So, we’ll be enough of a success that someone builds a museum and sends a time traveler back to visit. That’s something, even if I’m not around to see it.”
Startled, Louise replayed the things she had told Homer. “Why do you think that?”
“Because everything you said was about my brother. At some point, I’ll stop registering on the pages of history.” He twisted the glasses in his hands. “Is the future fixed?”
Louise hesitated. “The Good Book promises us free will.”
“You have not answered my question.” He took his bowler off and wiped a sheen of sweat from his scalp before settling it back in place.
When he looked back at her with eyes as blue as a frozen river, she could see the boy she’d read about. Self-taught and brilliant, he had been described as having a voracious mind. Everything she said would go in and fill his mind with ideas.
“You understand that I’m a only traveler and don’t understand the science? If you think about time like a stalk of broccoli, what Mr. Barnes’s machine does is it takes a slice of the broccoli and shuffles it to a different point in the stalk. My past is one big stalk. My future is made up of florets. So the only places I can travel back to are the ones that lead to the future I live in. If I tried to go forward, they tell me that the future will be different every time. Which I believe means that you can do things different and wind up in a different stalk of the broccoli, but I’ll only ever see the pieces of broccoli that lead to my present.” She shook her head. “If that makes any sense to you, then I’ll be impressed.”
“It makes sense enough.” Wilbur lifted the glasses to his eyes again and with them masked said, “I’ll thank you not to intimate this to my brother.”
“Of course not.” Louise shuddered.
“Very good.” Wilbur spun on his heel. “Well, find a spot to watch.”
“But Miss Jackson’s opera glasses . . .” Homer trotted after him.
“I’ll give them back after I’ve flown.” Wilbur Wright grinned. “If your history is going to lose track of me, then perhaps the future needs to be reminded.”
On the far side of the hangar, the other men were still celebrating the flight. Eighteen minutes and forty-two seconds precisely. She’d recorded their joy but whenever Wilbur looked at her, Louise got the shivers and finally given up to wait out her remaining time out of sight. She leaned against the side of the hangar, studying her watch. Time was almost up.
At a run, Homer rounded the corner of the hangar with the opera glasses in his hands. He relaxed visibly at the sight of her. “I was scared you’d be gone already.”
She held the watch up. “Two minutes.”
“He didn’t want to come. Said that the doubt would be better than knowing for certain.” Homer chewed his lip and handed her the opera glasses. “What happens to him, Miss Jackson?”
Louise sighed and remembered all the things she’d read about Wilbur Wright before coming here. “He dies of typhoid when he’s forty-seven. I do wish I hadn’t said a thing about the future.”
Homer shook his head. “I’m glad you told me. I’ll—”
And he was gone.
The tall grass of Hoffman Prairie was replaced by a crisply mown lawn of chemical green. Where the weathered hangar had been stood a bright, white replica. Neither the hangar nor the lawn seemed as real as the past. Louise sighed. The air burned her nostrils, smelling of carbon and rubber. The homing beacon in her handbag should bring them to her soon enough.
She leaned back against the barn to wait. A paper rustled behind her. She pulled away, afraid that she’d see a big “wet paint” sign but it was an envelope.
An envelope with her name on it.
She spun around as quickly as she could but there wasn’t a soul in sight. Breath fighting with her corset, Louise pulled the envelope off the wall. She opened it carefully and found a single sheet of paper. A shaky hand covered the surface.
Dear Louise,
You will have just returned from your first time travel mission and meeting me, so this offers the first opportunity to introduce myself to you in your present. I wish I could be there, but that would mean living for another forty years, which task I fear would require Olympian blood. You have been such a friend to me and my family and so I wanted you to know two things.
1. Telling me the truth was the best thing you could have done for me. Thank you.
2. We are (or will be by the time you read this) major shareholders in the Time Travel Society. It ensures that your future trips to my past are without incident, and also will let my children know precisely when your first trip takes place in your present. I hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of asking my children to purchase shares for you as well. I wish we could have presented them to you sooner.
Be well, my friend. And happy travels.
Sincerely yours, Homer Van Loon
At the bottom of the sheet was a bank account number and then a list of addresses and phone numbers arranged in order of date.
Her eyes misted over at the gift he’d given her—not the account, but the knowledge that she had not harmed him by telling the truth.
In the parking lot, the Time Travel Society’s minivan pulled in, barely stopping before Mr. Barnes and the rest of the team jumped out. “How was the trip?” he shouted across the field, jogging toward her.
Louise smiled and held out the opera glasses. “I think you’ll like the footage I got for you.”
“May I?” He stopped in front of her as long and lanky as she imagined Homer being when he was grown up.
“Of course. That’s why you sent me, isn’t it?”
He took the opera glasses from her and rewound. Holding it to his eyes as the rest of the team gathered around, Mr. Barnes became utterly still. “Miss Jackson . . . Miss Jackson, how did you get the camera on the plane?”
Dr. Connelly gasped. “On the Wright Flyer?”
“Yes, ma’am. I watched from the ground with the hatcam while Wilbur was flying. I’m quite curious to hear the audio that goes with it. We could hear him whooping from the ground.”
“But how did you . . .” Dr. Connelly shook her head.
“I told him the truth.” Louise sighed, remembering the naked look on his face at the moment when he believed her. “He took the camera because he understood the historical context.”
INSIDE TIME
Tim Sullivan
“My name’s Mae,” said the pretty brown woman, looking down at him. A luminous, violet ceiling was just over her head. “What’s yours?”
“Herel . . .” he said, uncertain of where he was. He was fastened to a flat, inclined surface. “Herel Jablov.”
“Herel Jablov?” Mae said. “You’re famous.”
“Am I?”
“Yes,” Mae said, handing him a water packet with a sucking tube sticking out of it. “Drink this.”
“Thank you.” He accepted the packet, noticing how nice Mae smelled, not perfumed but natural. “I’m very dry.”
“Do you remember anything?” Mae gently asked.
“Yes,” he said, after taking a long sip. “I remember being carried through the dark by . . . I don’t know what it was, but it was unprotected out there. And then I saw a star.”
“A star?”
“But it wasn’t a star,” he went on. “As we came closer I saw that it was an oval of light . . . a window . . . and then I saw someone watching me through it.”
“That was me.”
“I could see my rescuer in the light cast from that window . . . It wasn’t human.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re in a time station.”
“A time station?”
“That’s what I call it,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s officially called.”
Herel looked at her. She wore a simple blue garment, a knee-length jersey. He realized that he was naked.
“I’m not dressed,” Herel said, embarrassed.
“The robot stripped you of your pressure suit and your thermal long-johns after it took you out of the Arrowhead and brought you inside,” she said. “Do you remember?”
“Yes, it examined me . . . Am I okay?”
“You’ll be fine,” she said. “The disorientation won’t last long. Your parietal lobes are adjusting.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Here,” she said, freeing him from clasps that held him to the gurney. She handed him a yellow garment similar to the one she was wearing. He got up and found that he floated. He quickly slipped the jersey over his head. Mae helped him arrange it, and he was calmed by feeling her fingers through the fabric.
“Is anything coming back to you?”
“It’s starting to.” He remembered losing contact with the other members of the team as he fell. “Did anyone else show up?”
“No, just you.”
“There were four of us,” he said, “Park Li-Joon, Hess, Ertegul . . . and me.”
“Yes, I know about the team,” she said.
“Did they make it?”
“They all came back, all but one.”
“Which one?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
What was she talking about? “But I’m here.”
“It will take a little while to explain,” she said.
Herel was confused and discomfited. It was better not to think about it right now. He gestured at the violet chamber. “Will you show me around the . . . time station?”
“So soon?”
“I’d like to see it.”
“Sure. Come with me.”
He drifted behind her through a low hatchway, propelling himself forward with handholds extruding from the walls.
“This is the kitchen,” Mae said. “Or the galley, if you prefer.”
Like the examination room they’d just left, there were no windows set in the galley’s luminous green walls. Packets of water and food floated, but otherwise it was empty.
“We’re near the station’s center,” Mae said. “There are four extensions stretching out from this point, two cells—staterooms, I call them—at the ends of three of them and the docking node at the end of the fourth.”
“So there’s plenty of room?”
“It doesn’t seem like it after you’ve been here awhile.”
“I suppose not.”
“We have everything we need to survive,” she said, handing him a food packet, “but very little else. How’s your memory now?”
“I remember falling after I lost contact with the others, but nothing else until the robot snagged me. Something must have happened in between.”
“It’ll be easier if you think farther back to your childhood, say . . . You remember that, don’t you?”
“Sure.” He sucked a mouthful of brown stuff from the tube. The grainy texture was a little off-putting, a bit sweet for Herel’s taste, but otherwise it wasn’t bad.
“High school? University? Maybe graduate school?”
“And earning my engineering degrees . . . my Arrowhead design being chosen . . . and being selected by the Institute . . . training for the project . . . and the big day . . .”
“It’s what happened recently that you don’t remember, huh?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“This is going to sound odd to you, Herel, but the reason for the blank spot in your memory is that you’ve just come from the future.”
“The future?” That did bring a lot back. “Yes, that’s what we were trying to do, go into the future.”
“You succeeded, but you can’t remember what happened uptime.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, maybe because it hasn’t happened yet, so you’ve got no memory of it.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“Maybe so, but people who come from uptime never remember what it was like.”
He cast about for something to refute what she was saying, but he could remember nothing before the robot found him.
“You were dropped into a Kerr hole,” Mae said. “You emerged in the future, but no one can stay there for long.”
“Then this isn’t the future?” Despite his faulty memory, he knew that she was telling the truth.
“No, you were pulled back, sensors picked you out of the matter flowing from the white hole out there, and you were rescued by the robot.”
He felt as if he’d awakened from a dream about an amusement park ride. He had fallen and fallen and fallen . . .
“If this isn’t the future, where are we?”
Something lashed down from the ceiling and snatched his empty food packet before Mae could answer.
“What’s that?” Herel was startled as several more of the nearly transparent fibers flailed around them.
“I call them tendrils,” Mae said. “They’re part of the station’s maintenance system. They’re just cleaning up.”
“How do they work?”
“Autonomically,” she said, taking him by the hand and drifting with him into another room. “I used to find them disturbing, but I got used to them.”
They left the busy tendrils to their task as she led him to the big oval window near the docking node. It was dark outside.
“This is where you watched them bring me in?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Other than saying we’re in a time station near a white hole, you haven’t told me where we are.”
“We’re inside.”
His own gaunt face and trim body were reflected in the window. “Inside what?”
“Inside time.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“As I understand it, we’re in a crossover loop between two branes, caused by a phase change that ties time in a knot.”
“A knot inside time?”
“Yes, the crossover stabilizes quarks into strangelets.”
“And we’re pulled back from the future into this . . . strangelet universe?”
“Yes.”
“So time travel isn’t a one-way ticket.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said, “but sometimes the return trip is misdirected.”
“How do you know all this?”
