Time Travel Omnibus, page 1072
He didn’t turn, kept walking. I recognized his stride, smiling as I remembered how my mother described it as loose and wobbly. It was that.
I called his name again. This time he heard me and stopped to look around. I approached him—and let me tell you about the uncanny encounter of standing inches from your own younger self. The feeling goes beyond description. It was, at once, thrilling and frightening.
“What is it?” he asked. Not too politely. Who was this old guy and what did he want?
I tried to start what I meant to say, suffering an abrupt dread that I was about to face the same dumbstruck inability to speak that I had experienced in front of Adeline. I fought it off. I would not let it happen again! “I want,” I began, then faltered. “I want to help you,” I blurted.
“Is this some kind of charity?” my fifteen-year-old self asked suspiciously.
I felt a tremor of amusement. I’d always had a skeptical nature. I had to smile. My show of diversion didn’t please him. He turned away. “No, don’t,” I said abruptly.
He turned back. “Listen, sir,” he said. The sir did not sound at all polite.
“I want to speak to you about Adeline,” I said.
He stared at me. “Who?” he asked. He sounded far more aggravated than curious.
Mentally, I jumped back in my own time. Had this ever happened to me when I was fifteen? I was sure it hadn’t. This was something else. Something else entirely. I was transcending time travel.
Which strengthened my resolve to say, “The girl who lives across the street from you. The one you look at from the window of your mother’s bedroom.” There. I’d said it. Time was changed.
My fifteen-year-old-self was looking at me with deep suspicion written on his face. He didn’t speak.
“You have to speak to her,” I told him.
“What are you, a detective or something?” he replied.
I, my dubious teenage self, replied.
“No,” I said, amused again.
He didn’t react well to that amusement either.
“Listen, mister,” he began.
“No,” I interrupted him. “You listen. Adeline—”
“How do you know her name?” he demanded. He was really suspicious of me now. Was it all going wrong?
I couldn’t let it go wrong. So, mistakenly or not, I countered him. “You don’t know her name, do you? You don’t know anything about her.”
“Listen, mister,” he started again.
“No, you listen, son!” I broke in again. (Of course, he wasn’t my son, he was me.) “You have to speak to her. Stop staring out the window and go to her when she’s sitting on her porch. Get to know her. Tell her you love her. That you want to spend the rest of your life with her. Don’t make the same mistake I did! You’ve got to—”
“Mister!” he cried, cutting me off. “I don’t know what you’re talking about! All I know is you’ve lived your life! Now let me live mine!”
He was right, of course. I knew it in an instant. I had no right to mess with his life. I knew that he would never speak to Adeline. Would live his life without her. My attempted intervention was a waste of time. Would he even remember it? Doubtful.
I watched him walk away from me, my young self leaving me behind. Living his own life. As he had a perfect right to do. Unhampered by me. I’d tried in vain . . . Time travel? Bah! Humbug!
Unless . . .
Unless it taught me something. But what? Leave yesterday alone, maybe. No point in trying to change the past. It’s gone. Only in memories. Which are, face it, indelible; not subject to rewriting.
I walked back to the house. It was still there. I rang the deafening bell and the old lady opened the front door. Somehow, it was 2009 once more. I don’t have to climb back through the window. “I’ve decided against renting that room,” I told her. She didn’t seem surprised. “Thought you might,” she said, then shut the door.
I walked back to Miriam’s house. She’d returned from the market and was unloading groceries.
“Where you been, Dad?” she asked.
I kissed her on the cheek. “Went for a walk,” I told her.
THE WOMAN WHO CAME TO THE PARADOX
Derek J. Goodman
Reggie stepped out of the light and onto the streets of Braunau am Inn, Austria. It was dark and the general look of the street seemed about right, but until he found a newspaper or something he couldn’t be certain that he’d arrived on the night he intended. He looked down at himself, making sure he hadn’t lost any part of his costume in his journey. It looked intact, but he really didn’t expect to need it for long. All he needed to do was walk down to the Gasthof zum Pommer and kill the newborn baby Adolf Hitler.
He heard footsteps on the street somewhere behind him. Reggie turned, afraid that someone out late at night had seen his miraculous appearance, but it was an old woman just now coming onto the street. She was hunched over and walked very slowly, but she looked up briefly at him, nodded, and carefully sat herself down against the side of the nearest building. Reggie thought she looked vaguely familiar, but that couldn’t be possible. It wasn’t like he had time traveled before. This lady was just some anonymous footnote in history, and Reggie had no reason to pay her any more mind.
He took a deep breath and looked around to get his bearings. He wasn’t nervous, not really. He was more excited than anything else. Here he was, only twenty-five years old and inventor of the first time machine. As soon as he had invented it, however, the government had swooped down like vultures off their perch and tried to regulate his brain child. He couldn’t have that. He’d used it before they had the opportunity to stop him, and he’d come here to prove his point.
In truth, he really didn’t care about whether what he was about to do was right or wrong. Everyone always used this hypothetical scenario as a test of morals, but Reggie only cared about this point in history because it was high profile. He would be the first person to completely reshape history as he saw fit.
The old woman made a noise that might have been a snort or maybe a snore. Reggie ignored it and started down the street in the direction of the gasthof.
A light flashed five feet in front of him, and someone stepped out of it. Reggie blinked, not realizing who he was seeing at first. He recognized the clothes as the same ones he wore now, except they were ripped, dirty, and charred in a few places. The face was more difficult to recognize through the smudges and blood, but as the person fought to catch his breath, Reggie realized this was him.
“Thank God I made it,” the other Reggie said (Reggie immediately in his mind labeled the other as Reggie-B). “You can’t do this.”
“You’re me?” Reggie asked.
“You from two weeks in your future,” Reggie-B said. “I’ve come to stop you. You can’t kill him.”
“You can’t be me. Why would I try to stop myself?”
“Because you have no idea what kind of changes you will cause. The destruction, it’s unimaginable. You see, if you actually go through with this . . .”
Five feet to Reggie’s right, a light flashed and another Reggie stepped out from it. “No!” the new Reggie (Reggie-C?) said to Reggie-B. “You can’t do this!”
“You’re me?” Reggie-B said. Reggie looked from Reggie-B to Reggie-C, trying to understand this.
“You from three days in your future,” Reggie-C said. “I’ve come to stop you from stopping you.”
“But why would I try . . .” Reggie-B began, but Reggie-C stopped him with a groan.
“Really,” Reggie-C said, “I don’t have time for this.” He shoved Reggie-B backward, and the light flashed again, swallowing Reggie-B back up into the time stream.
“I did it,” Reggie-C said unbelievingly. “I stopped myself from stopping myself. That means . . . whoops, I’m about to cease to exist.” And he did just that, vanishing immediately into thin air.
Reggie blinked at the quiet street, trying to wrap his head around what he’d just seen. Cautiously, he took another step in the direction of the gasthof.
There was another flash of light in front of him. “Really?” Reggie said. “You again? Or, I mean, me again?”
“No,” the new Reggie, just as dirty and beat up as before, said to him. “I’m not the one you’re thinking of as Reggie-B. I’m you from two weeks in the future, but not the same two weeks. An alternate possible two weeks.”
“Reggie-B2?” Reggie asked.
“Basically. Now listen, you can’t do this. You’ve set something in motion . . .”
Two more flashes, two more Reggies. These two looked exactly like the ones who had disappeared earlier.
“What the hell are you doing back?” Reggie-C asked Reggie-B.
“When you stopped me from stopping me,” Reggie-B said, “you ceased to exist because I never became you. But if I never became you then you never existed to stop me from stopping me.”
“Well I’m here to stop all of you,” Reggie-B2 said. Both B and C looked like they were ready to attack B2, but they were stopped by another flash as a version of Reggie ten years older than all the others stepped into the street.
“I did it,” the new one said. “I got out of the whole mess. I’m . . .” He looked at all the other Reggies and screamed. “No! No, I can’t be back here! I’ve become Reggie-T63! This can’t be!” He ran screaming down the street and disappeared in another flash.
There were more flashes all the way up and down the street. What had been a quiet road minutes earlier was now loud with arguing Reggies, each one trying to stop another from doing something at some point in Reggie’s personal timeline. Reggie, the original Reggie, backed away from the growing crowd. When he was far enough away from all the bickering, he finally heard the old woman laughing. Reggie turned to her and saw her watching the whole scene, cackling softly to herself.
“This is what you get,” the old woman said. “This is what you get for trying to mess with time travel.”
“What do you know about time travel?” Reggie asked.
“I’ve got about fifty years of experience time traveling under my belt,” the old woman said. “Don’t you recognize me yet?”
Reggie leaned closer. She really did look familiar, but there was no way . . .
“No. You can’t be,” he said.
“Yes I can. You can think of me as Reggie-XXQ78 to the fourth power. The ‘fourth power’ thing may not make sense to you yet, but it will. Give it, oh, thirty-three years by your time.”
“But you’re a woman.”
“That one you’ll understand in time, too. Fifteen years and a multi-parallel world continuity crossover crisis will give you the answer to that one.”
“But why are you here?” Reggie asked. “You’re not trying to change or fix anything like any of the others.”
“Because it can’t be done. I’m just here because I’m finally at a point where I can laugh at the whole sorry state of things. I can finally laugh at how stupid and egotistical I was. You are. Whatever. Sometimes it all still confuses me.”
“No, I can still change it,” Reggie said. “I can avoid all of this if I just do it right.”
“And you’ll continue to believe that for far too long. It won’t be until you become me that you’ll understand: time is far too powerful and complicated to be at the whim of anyone as unimportant as you.”
“You’re wrong,” Reggie said, turning away from her and running for the gasthof to complete his mission. He could do this without complications. It really wasn’t that hard.
The old woman chuckled. “Kids,” she said, and went about watching all the other Reggies try to make sense of it all.
WRITTEN BY THE WINNERS
Matthew Johnson
Dabe glanced over his shoulder, leaned in close so that his body blocked the screen. He had been sifting through old TV comedies for weeks now, screening every episode frame by frame for inconsistencies, but today he had made a real find—a few lines of dialogue on Family Ties that referred to Richard Nixon.
There was no predicting where remnants like this would appear. The device that had changed time was more like a shotgun than a scalpel: it had established the present its makers wanted through hundreds of different changes to the timeline, some contradicting others. The result was a porous, makeshift new history that made little sense, but the old one had been thoroughly smashed to bits. It was those bits that remained that he and his whole department were tasked by the new history’s makers with finding and erasing.
Most of what he found was much more innocuous, references to things that had little ideological power but simply had not existed in the new history. This one, though, had meaning, a direct reference to a political event in the old history. He looked around again, drew a tape from the bottom drawer of his desk, slipped it into the second recorder and hit COPY. He could feel his heart beating more quickly as the seconds ticked by, felt the pressure of seen and unseen eyes on his back. Finally the inconsistency was over, ending as abruptly as it began, and he was able to breathe.
The danger past, he felt a rush of exhilaration. It had been more than a month since he had had anything to present to the group, but this would more than make up for the dry spell. Barely able to sit still, he decided it was no use trying to work for a while. He logged and erased the original clip, got up out of his chair and went to the kitchen.
Maura was there, biting open a bulb of milk and squeezing it into her coffee, a few strands of her long red hair loose and stuck to her mug. She looked up as he came in and smiled, and for a second he thought about reaching out and brushing her hair off the cup. Instead he simply gestured to it. She smiled again, her cheeks coloring a bit, and freed it with a toss of her head.
“Working hard?” she asked.
He shrugged. “No harder than directed,” he said.
She laughed, threw him what he thought was a conspiratorial look. Maura was one of the few people in the office he could talk to at all: most of the others were either Party members striving to be noticed or else had been ground down to gray dullness by the endless frame-by-frame searches that filled their days. “Big plans for the weekend?” she asked.
“Nothing too exciting. I might have to buy new shoes.”
“There’s a sale at Ogilvy’s, I think,” Maura said. “You should try there.” She blew on her coffee, took a sip. “I might go there this weekend myself.”
Dave nodded. Could he bring himself to suggest that they go together, maybe out for lunch or a drink afterward? Was she fishing for that? When he opened his mouth, though, his earlier confidence had left him, and he felt the moment pass in silence. “Maybe I’ll see you there,” he said at last.
“Sure,” she said, moved to step past him. “I’d better get back to work, before Chadwick sees I’m away from my station.”
“Me too.”
Maura frowned. “Shouldn’t you get your coffee first?”
“Oh—right,” Dave said, laughed. “Well, see you later.”
“Bye.”
He watched her go, trying not to be too obvious about it, then turned to the coffee machine. Stupid, he thought—but had he been wrong in seeing something there, hearing an invitation? If only he hadn’t lost his nerve . . . after tonight’s meeting, he thought, and the reception his find would get, he would have confidence to spare. Tomorrow he would try again, and this time he would push the conversation as far as it would go.
The rest of the day passed slowly, but finally it was over. After checking again to make sure no one was looking, Dave ejected the tape from the second recorder, slipped it into his briefcase and went to clock out. He put on his coat and his outdoor shoes, stepped outside. The snow had finally been cleared, three days after the storm, and already the banks were grey with dirt. A half-dozen cars, their ancient chassis recovered with plastic shells in jolly hues moved slowly down the street. Like the road, the sidewalk was slick with ice, the cold seeping right through his thin plastic shoes as he turned left, headed for downtown.
Halfway down the first block his right shoe cracked. Looks like I will be shoe shopping tomorrow after all, he thought, as he crouched down, opened his briefcase and took out some briefing papers. Separating out a single page, he folded it and then stuffed it into his shoe, hoping it would keep out the slush until he had reached his destination.
As he straightened up, Dave noticed someone behind him, half-hidden behind the high stairway leading to the Justice building. It was a tall man in a dark coat, looking nonchalant but coincidentally stopped at the same time as he was. Careful not to look too long Dave set out again, starting on a zigzag path once he was out of the government district and into downtown. Here the streets were more crowded with pedestrians, most dressed in bright colors that fought against the creeping gray mist. The new history weighed relatively lightly on its subjects: they were still free to shop, to enrich themselves as best they could, to wear or consume what they liked—and for most people that was enough.
After a dozen twists and turns he risked a glance back behind him. Confident that he had lost his shadower—if indeed the man had been following him at all—he returned to his original route and made his way to the meeting-place. This week they were gathering at Paul Beatty’s house; Paul, an electrician, was one of the few members of the group who could be sure they weren’t being watched. Paul was already there, of course—he had the freedom to make his own hours, and always quit work early when the meeting was to be at his place—and as Dave rounded the corner he saw two figures silhouetted in the light of Paul’s open door. Dave knew Gilberto Lorca by his slouch hat and ever-present umbrella, but he did not recognize the young woman with him. He waved but they didn’t see him, and he was forced to knock on the door when he got there. Dave stood still, careful to be in full view of the spy hole until the door opened.
“C’mon in,” Paul said. He was wearing jeans and a heavy sweater, as usual, and a pair of thick-framed black glasses around whose arms were twisted wires of various colors. “We’re just about to start.”
