Time Travel Omnibus, page 1130
For all my agonizing, scant minutes had passed since Jonas had leapt forward.
Wait! I could go back in the booth! And destroy it in the past, before Jonas first stepped into it.
Except that Jonas, returning, could still emerge before me. And do so during the booth’s earliest operational moments, when the earlier Jonas had been right there, having just finished assembling it. Together they’d throw me out of the warehouse. Likely in pieces.
Feeling useless and stupid, I began to pace.
And jerked to a halt when my wandering brought me to something the size of a four-drawer file cabinet: the last transceiver Jonas had built while scaling up to a full-sized booth.
I stared at the cabinet. I crouched next to it, considering. In tests, it had transferred a hundred fifty pounds of rice—that was more than I weighed. If I could cram myself inside, I could travel back as much as several days before Jonas completed the person-sized booth. Back earlier than Jonas could reach. He weighed too much for this generation of his device.
And I’d be stuck inside. Great plan.
Still, fiddling with a file cabinet seemed more within the scope of my abilities than outwitting a physicist genius. I kept scheming.
Go back before the booth is done. Stop Jonas.
How?
Stacked printouts of future me’s note sat on a nearby workbench. Accusingly.
Stop Jonas. Stop him for certain.
I didn’t know how, short of killing him. Could I? I’d need a gun. As a felon just out of jail, I’d never be able to buy one legally, and I had no idea how to get a gun illegally.
But I could never kill anyone, much less a friend.
And so billions must die?
Victoria among them?
I had to go back. I had to convince Jonas. I had to have a plan, beginning with how to extricate myself from the diminutive time machine. And fast, before Jonas reappeared.
A swiveling handle secured the cabinet door. I opened the door and saw that the latching mechanism could be worked from behind. It wouldn’t be easy, wedged into the cabinet—assuming I could even squeeze myself inside. I prodded the back of the mechanism some more, this time with the flat blade of a screwdriver, and found forcing it that way was easier.
I set the cabinet controls for the wee hours of that morning. I’d arrive before Jonas ever connected power to the booth. I’d shove my future self’s message in Past Jonas’s face and demand that he stop. Until Past Jonas finished the booth, Future Jonas could not return.
And if Past Jonas instead of listening took a poke at me? As drunk as he had been, at least I’d have the quicker reflexes.
It could work.
Just like milk and coffee could separate?
On my knees—legs bent double, ankles twisted inward, bare feet pressing into my ass, in agony from hips to toes—I crammed myself inside the cabinet. I not only had to fit, I needed a free hand behind to push the enter key. I needed a free hand in front to pull the door shut and then to open the latch.
Just in time, I remembered I needed a copy of the warning. I squirmed out, put a folded copy in my shirt pocket, and wormed my way back into the cabinet. The screwdriver tucked in my waistband sliced my thigh.
I pulled the door closed. Groping behind my back, I identified the enter key by feel. I pressed—
I jerked at the first shrill beep, right in my ear.
The cabinet rocked and nearly toppled. When my heart stopped pounding, I reached for the latch, but couldn’t quite reach it. With elbows pressed into my ribs, I could scarcely breathe.
If I didn’t get out quickly, would I have any air to breathe?
Inch by inch, I worked the screwdriver from my waistband. I managed to flip the tool blade up without dropping it.
With a sigh of relief, I forced the latch. I kept enough of a grip to keep the door from crashing into anything nearby.
The lab was well lit.
Smothering a groan, I wiggled out of the cabinet. I slid the screwdriver back into my waistband to put away later.
Jonas stood across the warehouse, inside the chain-link enclosure, his back to the open gate. He’d hooked up the power cable to the distribution frame. The cable’s opposite end, I was relieved to see, remained loose on the floor near the booth. I was not quite too late.
Now to dissuade him . . .
My shoes remained hours into the future; Jonas could not have heard me approaching on bare feet. Walking through the open gate, I called, “Jonas.”
He spun around, eyes wide. “Go away,” he said.
“Jonas, it’s important.”
“Go away!” He lumbered toward me.
I sidled around him. “Jonas, listen very carefully. I’m tomorrow’s me. And more than that”—I reached for my shirt pocket—“I have a message from—”
He swung wildly at me.
I skittered away.
His fist swept past me and into the power distribution frame. From momentum or drunkenness, the rest of him followed.
The world flashed white. I flew through the air, thrown by an explosion, or electrical discharge, or colliding with Jonas, and crashed into the fence.
When I could see again, Jonas lay heaped on the concrete floor. His body twitched; his hair was aflame; steam curled from his clothing. A stench like acid and charred meat enveloped him.
Knowing there would be none, I checked for a pulse.
Chapter 11
Dazed, overwhelmed, I fled the enclosure. In the nearest dark corner I settled to the floor, elbows on knees, head in my hands. I think I rocked myself.
At some impossible remove, the unconnected end of the power cable leapt and writhed, sparked and crackled. It hadn’t done that before. With that wild punch, Jonas must have struck the circuit breaker and activated the circuit.
Jonas was dead—as if by my own hand—without having ever jumped to the future. Having never gone forward, he would never come back. Having never quite finished his person-sized machine, no one else would come back through it.
It was over.
But if it were over, would I remember the events of an aborted future? Nor was it only my memories. Expensive equipment across the lab testified that some Future Jonas still sent back stock tips.
Branches? Loops? Those were Jonas’s terms. Time—or, at least, messing with time—must not be anything so simple. To me time had come to seem more of a spiral, or perhaps a rollercoaster.
And also sinister.
Was the line from Twelfth Night? I wasn’t certain about the play, but I remembered Shakespeare’s text.
And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.
I’d seen Jonas jump into the future. That I still had that memory . . . did it mean he could yet return?
While I struggled with paradox and whirligigs, the end of the writhing high-voltage line flapped into the booth’s open access panel.
More sparks. The stench of burnt electrical insulation.
And Jonas—some Jonas—appeared inside the booth.
I jumped to my feet, lunging for the booth. Jonas, facing the controls he had just used, must have seen, through the rear panel—himself. Lying in an unnatural heap, his arms out-flung, his hair and clothes still smoldering. Motionless.
A glass vial slipped from Jonas’s hand and shattered on the booth floor.
Why did Jonas drop it? In shock at what he had seen? From the impact as I hit the booth door? Either. Both. It doesn’t matter.
I jammed my screwdriver through the door’s outer handle, hoping that would keep the inner handle from operating the latch.
Jonas turned and stared at me. And back at his corpse. And back at me.
“An accident,” I said. “You electrocuted yourself.”
I held up the copy of future me’s note. I don’t know how much of it Jonas read. The picture was probably enough.
“That was a vaccine sample I dropped,” he finally got out.
“Should you go back for another?” I asked. “Or will another trip make things worse?”
Jonas shook his head. “At best the vaccine prevents catching the disease. It never cures. And I . . .”—he shrank inward on himself—“I’m patient zero. If I leave this booth.”
Patient Zero: the person who sets off an epidemic.
Even from a sample, how long would it take to synthesize, mass produce, and distribute the vaccine? By then, how far and wide would the doomsday plague have spread?
“Burn it,” Jonas said. His voice firmed. “Burn down the damned lab. All of it. Everything. My notes. My prototypes. While no one but me understands or knows how to construct them.”
“But the virus,” I said. “The heat. If the glass of the booth cracks . . .”
“That won’t be a problem.” Turning his back on me, he tapped on the control panel.
He—and any viruses he’d brought with him—vanished from the booth.
In a coruscation of sparks, the compartment at the foot of the booth burst into flame.
Where is Jonas? When is Jonas? Jonases? Dead, I believe. Any and all of them. Some, maybe, trapped in timeline limbo. The paradoxes are far beyond me.
I set myself to a task I might achieve: Jonas’s final request.
I closed the main water valve of the sprinkler system and disabled the fire alarms. Beginning with Jonas’s lab notebook, found face down on a nearby workbench, I fed paper to the small blaze. Glowing cinders swirled in the updrafts.
The old warehouse was a tinderbox. Decades-dry wood burst into flame at the touch of a spark. Fire raced up the walls, into the rafters, across the ceiling. When the main lighting circuit shorted out, I had plenty of firelight to see by.
With a fire axe I hacked pallets into kindling. I doused the wood scraps with kerosene we kept for the space heaters; a tossed kitchen match set the pyre ablaze. Into the bonfire went Jonas’s laptop, iPad, and camcorder—anything that might contain a digital record. Electronic gear might not burn to ash, but with enough warping and melting—I had to believe—nothing could be recovered.
Fire roared. The heat was intense. Smoke and acrid fumes stung my eyes. Jonas’s corkboards were ablaze, sending up tongues of flame to lick the stairs.
But my job wasn’t complete until every transceiver, from the earliest prototype, was wrecked beyond recognition. And starting with that earliest prototype, I was stymied. Jonas had built it in a freaking heavy strongbox. I couldn’t begin to move it to my bonfire.
Instead, I carried shovelfuls of flaming embers to one prototype after another. Around the transceiver that held future me’s message I piled the coals twice as high, praying that the heat would incinerate any plague virus within.
Behind the glass door, Jonas’s mottled image burst into flame. I stood, transfixed. Only after a tap on the glass crumbled the blackened page into ash and soot could I tear myself away.
A squeal caught my ear. The guinea pigs! They were frantic, clawing at the bars of their cage. I dragged the cage to the closest door, flung it open, and released my pets.
Wind rushing through the opening was like the pumping of an enormous bellows.
With a whoosh, fire exploded. I ran inside, nearly squashed as flaming rafters rained into the doorway. The glass wall of the first-floor offices shattered. Across the floor, the wooden stairs had erupted in a fierce hot blaze.
And from upstairs came a cry for help.
Chapter 12
I was upstairs. The Peter who belonged in this hour. I had been so focused on when Jonas might appear that I’d never even considered another me.
Upstairs, I, he, was drunk. Confused. And trapped by an inferno.
The heat was palpable. I couldn’t get within twenty feet of the stairs. I ran for the elevator, and stopped halfway there. It didn’t work. I ran back.
In the upstairs hall, through black, greasy smoke and the roaring fire, I glimpsed a frightened face. My own.
Did he recognize me? I don’t know. “The hall windows!” I screamed.
“Too small!” he shouted back. He glanced over his shoulder. “And the outer wall is burning.”
I heard sirens, louder by the second. “Fire trucks are on their way. Hold on!”
And with my heart in my mouth, I left him. There was equipment left to ruin.
“Help me!” upstairs me screamed.
But I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t help myself. Walls of flame barred the doors and the loading dock.
Something within me whispered, “But you can help yourself.” I had not yet attended to the cabinet-sized transceiver. Funny how I had left its destruction for last. I could once more wedge myself inside, jump back a day . . .
More of me, thankfully, recoiled. Upstairs, one Peter was roasting to death. Peter of some unknowable future had sacrificed himself, his long-suffering world, to send me a warning. For me to sneak away would mean leaving this transceiver operational. It might escape complete destruction in the flames. If, to play safe, I destroyed this unit yesterday, would I still have it when I needed it tomorrow?
I hadn’t forgotten how “random” flailing of the high-voltage line had flipped the cable end into the booth’s open access panel. Not to short out and fry the electronics. Not to make a cascade of sparks, then writhe itself back out.
No: to spot-weld connections, in just the right places, precisely enough to furnish power for several minutes. Long enough for Jonas to return, speak with me, and then take his contagious self . . . somewhen.
Accident? Coincidence? The odds of that circuit forming must be beyond astronomical.
Call it fate or the whirligig of time . . . if human frailty allowed it, something would have its revenges.
Choking on smoke and bile, disgusted with my momentary weakness, I flipped open the electronics compartment of this one remaining transceiver. I ripped out its entrails and buried them in red-hot coals.
My work was done.
All around, close now, sirens wailed.
Flames had penetrated the caged area, and I gagged on the sickening sweet smell of burning meat. Of Jonas. When a four-foot spool of power cable, too, caught fire, the acrid stench of burning insulation was a mercy.
With an earsplitting crack, something behind the fence, a transformer, perhaps, exploded.
I sat in a clear area on the concrete floor, one of the few spots that flaming debris had yet to claim. And waited for the fumes, the heat, or the collapsing roof to bring matters to an end.
I shuddered awake, coughing. Then the dry heaves hit me; I tried, and failed, to sit up. I only managed to bat a plastic mask off my mouth and nose.
“Peter!” I heard. “Lay still, honey.”
Victoria. She was kneeling beside me, trembling.
I was on a stretcher near a Rescue Squad van, its lightbar strobing. A husky man wearing scrubs nudged her aside and settled the mask back on my face. He said, “This is for oxygen, and you need it. It’s a miracle they got you out.”
They. Flat on my back, I counted five fire trucks. Crews wielding thick hoses sprayed the blaze, and neighboring buildings to which the flames looked poised to spread.
Victoria stroked my forehead. “I heard the sirens,” she said. “I . . . I had a bad feeling. I followed a fire truck.”
Over her shoulder, there was an apparition. I saw—at a second-story hallway window, lurid by firelight—a despairing face. My face. Just for instant, then it was gone.
Sad beyond words, I turned away from Victoria and Peter both.
EPILOGUE
“Drink something,” the cop says. He nudges a water bottle across the table toward me.
I wipe vomit from my face with a sleeve. The shirt reeks of smoke. I swish out my mouth with a swig of tepid water. There’s nowhere to spit, so I swallow.
“They recovered two bodies from what’s left of the warehouse,” the cop says. “We’re talking murder charges, not just arson.”
Past the memory storm, I almost don’t hear him. I say nothing.
“One was a big man, pretty clearly the renter, Dr. Gorski. You hated your boss that much, Bitner? To burn him alive?”
I didn’t hate Jonas, not that I intended to explain. Not that I will speak at all. Any word out of my mouth would make the next word easier.
This Jonas had died in an instant, but another Jonas was dying horribly of doomsday plague. Or would, or will, or already had. I’d seen the photo.
A miserable, repentant Jonas.
At the end he had seen that meddling with the timeline must stop. I was sure of it. Because Jonas could have jumped ahead, then sent a note to himself months before now. A simple note: Fire Peter. He’ll cause trouble.
He hadn’t sent such a note, or I wouldn’t be here, now, blamed for his death.
Or, there was no future transceiver to which he could have escaped, because I’d destroyed it. Unless curious former colleagues, inspired to reconsider Jonas’s theories, should reinvent the technology . . .
I dare say nothing that might attract their attention.
The cop studies my face. “So,” he says, “who was the second guy at the warehouse? You might as well give me that. The ME will tell us soon enough.”
Trying to stay expressionless, I take a sip of water. And worry that the medical examiner will find useable fingerprints on my other self. That he’ll find my prints.
If TV crime shows were to be believed, not even identical twins have identical fingerprints. And anyway, I don’t have a twin. Not even a brother.
I hope: Let the detectives imagine clones. But Jonas was a physicist, not a biologist. Would anyone suspect that one of me came from a different time?
I could see nothing to do about that—beyond offering no hints.
“Answer, damn it!” the cop shouts, slamming a fist on the table.
My water bottle jumps, falls over, spurts out glug-glug-glug into my lap. I keep my reaction to a tic.
They can’t make me talk, I assure myself. They can only send me to jail. Or put me in an institution, if they decide I’m crazy. The universe has done its worst.
Once again, I am wrong.
“What is it?” Victoria asks, tears streaming down her face. “I know you. I know you wouldn’t hurt anyone. Why won’t you defend yourself?” And plaintively, “Why won’t you talk to me, Peter?”
