Time Travel Omnibus, page 1040
They went down. Jeanne was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs. She wasn’t alone. The neighbor stood next to her. Curiosity had brought her over, and the sirens surprised her on the front step.
“Hurry up! Didn’t you hear the warning!”
“Yes, but it’s not for us. I bet they’re going to bomb the station.”
“We’re just next door! Come over, my cellar’s deeper underground, and my husband did a good job shoring it up.”
“We don’t have time,” Manoir cut in. “Listen—they’ve started!”
The engines’ roar had grown louder. In a few moments, the squadron would pass right over the town. Muffled explosions broke out.
“It’s the AA guns,” Jean-Jacques shouted. “Blam! Blam! Vrrr! Vrrr! Blammm!”
“Hurry, downstairs!”
Jeanne grabbed the boy. She opened the cellar door and headed down the steps. Manoir stepped aside to let the neighbor by.
Jeanne lit a small lamp. They were seated on old crates. The ground trembled without stopping. With each detonation, shockwaves shook the walls. In a corner of the cellar, empty bottles clinked.
“They’re bombing the station. We have nothing to fear.”
“If you say so!” The neighbor was missing her reinforced shelter and her sandbags. Jeanne was quiet. After a momentary brush with fear, Jean-Jacques had regained confidence before “Uncle Jean-Pierre’s” demeanor. Manoir smiled. He felt great peace within. Events once gone astray were about to resume their rightful course.
Above, a bomber had been hit. It veered, losing altitude. To lighten the load, the pilot ordered all bombs to be dropped. For a moment, the bombs rocked in the air as though uncertain, then the wind on their fins stabilized them. They were falling straight down now, with a whistling that grew ever higher in pitch. The first ripped the street open two hundred yards from the house. The second crushed a gas truck at the corner of the street. In the cellar, the neighbor, the bearer of bad news, opened her mouth to cry out. Jean-Jacques pressed himself against Jeanne, his face buried in her breast. Manoir rose, threw himself upon them, and held them.
HOW THE FUTURE GOT BETTER
Eric Schaller
The FoTax process. “Your taxes fo’ nothing,” is how Uncle Walt defined it. He stole that joke from a late-night talk show. But even though he didn’t bother to read the brochure, he had caught at least one TV special and knew that Fo stood for photon and Tax for tachyon. “Now pass me another roll,” he said, “a warm one from the bottom of the bucket.”
Mom always insisted that everyone sit down as a family for dinner, but had consented to eating a half-hour earlier than usual so we could watch when FoTax went live. Five-thirty in the pee-em, would you believe it? “Might as well be eating lunch twice,” is how Uncle Walt phrased it, but he said it soft so that Mom couldn’t hear, and out of the corner of his mouth just in case she could lip read. “Hey! What about that roll? A man could die from hunger at his own table.” Little sister Susie, Suz to the family, passed him the bucket and let him dig for his own roll. He probably fingered every one, muttering the whole time: “Cold and hard as a goddamn rock. Probably break a tooth and wouldn’t that be just my luck. There’s a sucker born every minute and, by God, this time that sucker is me.” Took him so long to find his roll and butter it that, by the time he got around to taking a bite, we were already talking about ice cream. “Hold your cotton-picking horses,” Uncle Walt said. “What’s the future got that we ain’t got now?” But he powered through his chicken, coleslaw, and dessert and long-legged it to the living room before anyone grabbed his favorite lounger.
Mom played with the settings on the new Sony receiver by the TV set, squinting at a pamphlet in her hand labeled READ THIS FIRST. “Set it five minutes ahead,” big sister Elizabeth called from her seat on the couch between Dad and Gramps. Elizabeth insisted upon being called by all four syllables of her given name but, to her credit, had memorized the instruction manual as soon as it was out of its plastic wrapper. Probably memorized the Spanish edition too, just in case. “Setting the time closer to now reduces the chance of gray spaces and ghosting,” she said. “Don’t forget to tune to channel one-hundred-and-thirty-one.”
She might have said more but was interrupted by a frantic knocking at our apartment door. It was the Willard family, Pa Willard in the lead, Ma at his elbow, and all the little Willards, indistinguishable from each other with their chocolate-smeared mouths and cherubic curls, peering through the bars of their parents’ legs. “Can we join you?” Pa Willard asked. “Our receiver didn’t arrive.” Ma Willard shot him a dirty look. “You forgot to sign up,” she said. Before the argument could escalate, and the Willards were always arguing, Mom said, “Come on in. Everyone’s in the living room. Suz, would you grab some more chairs for the Willards?”
Which is why, when FoTax went live, there were fourteen of us crammed together in one small room. Our TV was seven feet on the diagonal, and the Willards might have come over even if Pa Willard had remembered to order their receiver. Last anyone knew they still had their old 42-inch model. As you might guess with both families together, and even granting that Grammy started to nod off as soon as she settled into her chair, it was kind of noisy. But everyone went quiet and stared at the TV screen when the little green numbers on the receiver flickered to six o’clock.
But nothing happened.
Nothing changed.
All you could see was the blue of an empty channel.
“What a gyp,” said Uncle Walt. “You made me rush dessert for this?”
“Maybe it’s not set to the right channel,” said Elizabeth. “One-hundred-and-thirty-one is what the manual said.”
Mom reacted like she had just been called stupid, but got up and checked the setting again anyway. “One-three-one,” she said. “See, it says one-three-one.”
Then without preamble or warning, while Mom tapped her finger on the illuminated part of the screen that, to her credit, did display the proper channel designation, an image abruptly replaced the blue background.
An image of us.
Or most of us anyway. The vantage point looked to be above and a little behind from where we were sitting. But you could see Uncle Walt’s balding head protruding above his lounger, the shoulders and hair of Dad and Elizabeth and Gramps on the couch, and, beside them, Mom sitting rigidly in one of the wooden chairs brought in from the dining table. Two of the golden-haired Willard kids shared another wooden chair beside her. In the image, they, or rather we were all watching the TV. You could see just about one-third of the TV screen, and on that image of the TV there were tinier versions of us clustered around a still tinier version of the TV. And on that miniature TV . . . well, you get the picture.
Suz, surprisingly, was the first to notice the difference between the image on TV and the positioning of those of us clustered around it. “Hey, Mom,” she said, “you’re sitting down in the TV picture. On a chair.” Which of course was true. But just as true was the fact that here, in the real world, Mom was still standing beside the TV where she had been checking the channel.
“That’s because it’s the future. And in the future Mom’s already sat down again.” Elizabeth said this using her most infuriating know-it-all voice, as if she had also seen the same thing but hadn’t bothered to say a word because it was all so self-evident.
“What if I chose not to sit down?” said Mom, suddenly inspired as she looked at the seated image of herself on the screen. “What if I continued to stand here by the TV?” Even as she said this, before she had finished speaking, her image on the TV started to turn gray and fade away like smoke.
“Hey, you’re ghosting,” said Elizabeth, genuinely excited. “I read about that. Maybe you’ll disappear altogether.”
“Oh, I don’t like that,” said Mom. She sat down in the nearest empty chair, and the image of her on TV came back clear and sharp.
“I want to ghost too,” said one of the Willard kids, already making a move like he was going to jump out of his chair and dance around the room.
“No you don’t,” said Ma Willard, and shot him a look that could freeze, and did.
Uncle Walt was the next one to make a discovery. “You know what?”
“What?” Mom said. She didn’t look at him but kept her eyes fixed on her seated TV image.
“I was wrong.”
“You wrong? Now that I find hard to believe.” Uncle Walt was Mom’s younger brother and, according to her, had been so spoiled while growing up it was a wonder he didn’t stink all the way to China. “Not that I find it hard to believe you were wrong, mind you,” Mom said. “But that you would admit it. That I find hard to believe. Please tell, and I hope to God someone is recording this.”
“I was wrong about the future. It does look better.”
“Better than what?”
“Better than now.”
“How’s that?”
“In the future, I got a beer.” Uncle Walt gave a little nod like he had just scored a major debating point, but was too polite to rub it in. He was right. The TV version of Uncle Walt was reclined in his lounger, an extra pillow behind his head, just like the real version here in the living room. But on the TV, in the cup holder of his lounger, was a silver can of Coors Light.
Uncle Walt got up, went to the kitchen, and returned brandishing his Coors Light like it was the Holy Grail. He triumphantly popped its top and settled back into his lounger. Now there was absolutely no difference between the version of Uncle Walt on TV and the one in our living room.
We watched then in silence, waiting to see if we could pick out anything else, waiting to see what we would do next, even trying to make out what was being shown on those screens within screens within screens that should, by rights, show us the future in five-minute increments. In some ways it was like a What’s Wrong With This Picture game where you study two seemingly identical pictures and try to discover the differences. Only here they didn’t tell you how many differences there were.
And that wasn’t really fair.
Pretty soon Mom started talking about the obits with Ma Willard. Dad told Pa Willard about the funny noise our refrigerator made, sometimes squealing like there was a mouse trapped inside it, and Pa Willard responded with the obvious, “Well, maybe there is a mouse trapped inside it.” Elizabeth told the Willard kids a ghost story, with Suz adding atmospheric wailings at the appropriate moments. Gramps asked Gramma if she wanted a bedtime martini, then laughed when all he got in response was a colossal snore.
Uncle Walt wasn’t the sort to say he was getting bored with a program, at least when he was one of the stars. But after about fifteen minutes, he leaned over to me and asked, “Isn’t there a new episode of ‘Nut Jobs’ on?”
I tried to remember what day of the week ‘Nut Jobs’ ran, and if they were maybe already into repeats. I was just about to check the listings when I saw it. I spotted a difference. Me. Not Suz. Not Uncle Walt. And certainly not all four syllables of Elizabeth.
“No,” I told him. “ ‘Nut Jobs’ isn’t on. But there’s something just as good.”
“How do you know?”
I pointed at the TV.
Five minutes into the future we were already watching it.
ON THE BUS
William Grewe-Mullins
I ran into myself on the bus today. One minute he wasn’t there, the next he was. He didn’t introduce himself, as I immediately recognized me, and of course he remembered that. I turn out a bit chubbier, and wrinklier with a lot more white hair, but still a lot of red, and still in a ponytail. He had a mechanical hand.
“Still wearing the ponytail.” I said.
“Shut up.” I replied.
This is going to get confusing, so I’m going to refer to old me as he or him, even though it’s actually me.
“We only have about 5 minutes,” old me said, “So let me do most of the talking. I came here because I knew you’d be here, because of the bus schedule. An easy target, as it were. First off,have that lump on your collarbone looked at.”
As soon as I promised him that I would, in the space between seconds, his mechanical hand turned into a regular fleshy hand.
“Wasn’t it cool to have a mechanical hand?” I asked old me.
“Who had a mechanical hand?” he replied.
“Well, if you didn’t come here to fix your hand, what did you come here for?” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I came here to tell you that in about twenty-five years, we develop time travel, and that although it is fun and sometimes pretty cool, it’s also pretty much worthless. Before you ask, I could give you the lottery number that I have for next week’s lottery, but by the time I get back to my time, the number I brought you won’t be the number that’s in the historical record, the same one that I copied to give to you. My coming back here has changed everything just a little. Many have tried that, none have succeeded. Perhaps I did come to fix my hand, but now that you will keep me from losing it, I never lost it. That actually makes sense.” he rambled.
“Yes, that actually does make sense.” I replied.
“Shut up.” He said. “Historians are going to waste about five years going back into history, seeing what actually happened at controversial points, but each time they go back to, say, JFK’s assassination, where everybody goes, they don’t see the other travelers there, and every time the scene is a little different. It’s like this, Oswald is the shooter in all the scenarios we’ve explored, but in some, and only in some, there is a second shooter, sometimes a third, and in one, as many as eight, on the overpass, behind the fence on the grassy knoll, whatever, but also, the other shooters never make the shot. Miss every time. Our theory is that there is a very narrow range of possible outcomes, and that history always bends back towards the timeline of the original traveler’s reality. When you go there, carry an umbrella. That’s the rule. You won’t see anybody else with an umbrella, although you will show up on the Zapruder film. Don’t turn to the camera. Just don’t. And by the way, you can’t kill Hitler, because without Hitler, no German scientists developing electronics, without electronics, no time travel. So many have tried and failed that it’s banned, except for documentaries about how it doesn’t work. The one called “Stop Trying To Kill Hitler, It Doesn’t Work” is a good one. And you can’t go back to before Homo sapiens evolved. We still don’t know why, so no dinosaur hunts, although seeing the pyramids brand new is pretty awesome. Any questions?”
“How’s Patty?” I asked.
“She’s fine, surrounded by dogs as usual, more dogs than you can imagine. Seriously. I think that may be actually why I came. Don’t stop playing the lottery, and only when it’s over a hundred million jackpot. Just don’t. You’re going to need a lot of dog food.”
By the time I could say anything else, in the space between seconds, I was gone.”
AND HAPPINESS EVERLASTING
Gerald Warfield
The ancient man at the head of the table leaned forward. “I’m sorry to tell you,” he said, his jowls quivering, “that your brother, Charles, is dead.”
Eddie blinked. A chill settled in his gut.
“He committed suicide,” the man continued, gripping the edge of the table with his gnarled hands. “Lethal injection.”
In his mind Eddie saw a smiling Charlie, not the real Charlie, but a holograph that sat in his living room taken on the day his brother began work at Celestial Games.
No one at the massive table met his gaze except Jeremiah Adolphus, a sagging pyramid of flesh whose blotched, domed head was uninterrupted by hair, not even eyebrows.
“There was no note, but I’m sure you know about Charles’s depressions.” He gave Eddie a knowing look.”
Eddie hesitated before nodding.
Why had they brought him here to tell him—and why in front of the board? He had almost refused the limo that had come for him this morning, but he feared Charlie was in trouble. Maybe he locked himself in a lab or something; he wasn’t the most stable person. But that was the worst he expected: that they needed someone to negotiate with Charlie.
“And,” continued Adolphus, pointedly, “I’m afraid there’s more. It appears Charles did something quite remarkable before he . . .” The man’s eyelids fluttered, his knuckles turned white as he gripped the table. “Although first,” he said, after a deep breath, “I should ask if you have any idea what your brother did here at Celestial Games?”
Eddie spoke at last. “My assumption was that he designed computer games.” The board members looked at him with a mixture of pity and condescension.
Adolphus leaned back. His shoulders sagged, and he put his fingertips together. “He was developing an interface that would allow gamers to interact with the game using only their minds.”
“Okay.” It didn’t sound possible, but Eddie never understood Charlie’s work. “My sister and I always said that he was the genius of the family.”
“He was brilliant,” agreed Mr. Adolphus, and there were assenting nods around the table.
A man slid into the vacant chair on Eddie’s right. Glancing at him, Eddie saw that his long salt-and-pepper hair was unkempt, his skin sallow, and his eyes seemed to protrude from his head. Hunched over in his chair, the man twitched as his gaze shifted around the table. Eddie had once seen a rat in an aquarium with a snake. The rat was bug-eyed and twitched.
“He was not successful,” continued Adolphus. “And there would be no reason even to mention it now except that, in the process, he did something else quite unexpected. He migrated his—how shall I say it—his persona into our primary development server.”
“His what?”
“He managed to transfer his conscious mind from his body to the computer before killing himself.”
“You mean he’s still alive—conscious in there?”
