Time Travel Omnibus, page 1160
“You wouldn’t believe the places I’ve had to escape from in the middle of the night,” Jerboa said. “The people who tried to fix my, my . . . irregularities. You wouldn’t believe the methods that have been tried. People can justify almost anything, if their perspective is limited enough.”
Malik wrapped his hand on Jerboa’s back, so it was like all three of them were embracing. “We’ve all had our hearts broken, I guess,” he said. “I was a teacher, in one of those Teach For America-style programs. I thought we were all in this together, that we had a shared code. I thought we were altruists. Until they threw me under a bus.”
And it was then that Malik said the thing about wanting to stand outside history and see the gears grinding from a distance, all of the cruelty and all of the edifices that had been built on human remains. The true power wouldn’t be changing history, or even seeing how it turned out, but just seeing the shape of the wheel.
They sat for a good long time in silence again. The engine ticked a little. They stayed leaning into each other, as the faceplates watched.
Lydia started to say something like, “I just want to hold on to this moment. Here, now, with the two of you. I don’t care about whatever else, I just want this to last.” But just as she started to speak, Madame Alberta tapped on the passenger-side window, right next to Lydia’s head, and gestured at her car, which was parked in front of theirs. It was time to suit up, and go get some nuclear waste.
Lydia didn’t see Malik or Jerboa for a month or so, after Madame Alberta told her weird story about Europe getting nuked. MJL Aerospace shuttered its offices, and Lydia saw the rocket picture in a dumpster as she drove to the Lucky Doubloon. She redoubled her commitment to going to a twelve-step meeting every goddamn day. She finally called her mom back, and went to a few bluegrass concerts.
Lydia got the occasional panicked call from Normando, or even one of the other semi-regulars, wondering what happened to the club, but she just ignored it.
Until one day Lydia was driving to work, on the day shift again, and she saw Jerboa walking on the side of the road. Jerboa kicked the shoulder of the road over and over, kicking dirt and rocks, not looking ahead. Hips and knees jerking almost out of their sockets. Inaudible curses spitting at the gravel.
Lydia pulled over next to Jerboa and honked her horn a couple times, then rolled down the window. “Come on, get in.” She turned down the bluegrass on her stereo.
Jerboa gave a gesture between a wave and a “go away.”
“Listen, I screwed up,” Lydia said. “That aerospace thing was a really bad idea. It wasn’t about the money, though, you have to believe me about that. I just wanted to give us a new project, so we wouldn’t drift apart.”
“It’s not your fault.” Jerboa did not get in the truck. “I don’t blame you.”
“Well, I blame myself. I was being selfish. I just didn’t want you guys to run away. I was scared. But we need to figure out a way to turn the space travel back into time travel. We can’t do that unless we work together.”
“It’s just not possible,” Jerboa said. “For any amount of time displacement beyond a few hours, the variables get harder and harder to calculate. The other day, I did some calculations and figured out that if you traveled one hundred years into the future, you’d wind up around one-tenth of a light year away. That’s just a back-of-the-envelope thing, based on our orbit around the sun.”
“Okay, so one problem at a time.” Lydia stopped her engine, gambling that it would restart. The bluegrass stopped mid-phrase. “We need to get some accurate measurements of exactly where stuff ends up, when we send it forwards and backwards in time. But to do that, first we need to be able to send stuff out, and get it back again.”
“There’s no way,” Jerboa said. “It’s strictly a one-way trip.”
“We’ll figure out a way,” Lydia said. “Trial and error. We just need to open a second rift close enough to the first rift to bring our stuff back. Yeah? Once we’re good enough, we send people. And eventually, we send people, along with enough equipment to build a telescope in deep space, so we can spy on Earth in the distant past or the far future.”
“There are so many steps in there, it’s ridiculous,” Jerboa said. “Every one of those steps might turn out to be just as impossible as the satellite thing turned out to be. We can’t do this with just the four of us, we don’t have enough pairs of hands. Or enough expertise.”
“That’s why we recruit,” said Lydia. “We need to find a ton more people who can help us make this happen.”
“Except,” said Jerboa, fists clenched and eyes red and pinched, “we can’t trust just any random people with this. Remember? That’s why Madame Alberta brought it to us in the first place, because the temptation to abuse this power would be too great. You could destroy a city with this machine. How on Earth do we find a few dozen people who we can trust with this?”
“The same way we found each other,” Lydia said. “The same way Madame Alberta found us. The Time Travel Club.”
Jerboa finally got into the truck and snapped the seatbelt into place. Nodding slowly, like thinking it over.
Ricky from Garbo.com showed up at a meeting of the Time Travel Club, several months later. He didn’t even realize at first that these were the same people from MJL Aerospace—maybe he’d seen the articles about the club on the various nerd blogs, or maybe he’d seen Malik’s appearance on the basic cable TV show GeekUp!. Or maybe he’d listened to one of their podcasts. They were doing lots and lots of things to expand the membership of the club, without giving the slightest hint about what went on in Madame Alberta’s laundry room.
Garbo.com had gone under by now, and Ricky was in grad school. He’d shaved off the big sideburns and wore square Elvis Costello glasses now.
“So I heard this is like a LARP, sort of,” Ricky said to Lydia as they were getting a cookie from the cookie table before the meeting started—they’d had to move the meetings from the Unitarian basement to a middle school basketball court, now that they had a few dozen members. Scores of folding chairs, in rows, facing a podium. And they had a cookie table. “You make up your time travel stories, and everybody pretends they’re true. Right?”
“Sort of,” Lydia said. “You’ll see. Once the meeting starts, you cannot say anything about these stories not being true. Okay? It’s the only real rule.”
“Sure thing,” Ricky said. “I can do that. I worked for a dotcom startup, remember? I’m good at make-believe.”
And Ricky turned out to be one of the more promising new recruits, weirdly enough. He spent a lot of time going to the eighteenth century and teaching Capability Brown about feng shui. Which everybody agreed was probably a good thing for the Enlightenment.
Just a few months after that, Lydia, Malik, and Jerboa found themselves already debating whether to show Ricky the laundry room. Lydia was snapping her third-hand spacesuit into place in Madame Alberta’s sitting room, with its caved-in sofa and big-screen TV askew. Lydia was happy to obsess over something else, to get her mind off the crazy thing she was about to do.
“I think he’s ready,” Lydia said of Ricky. “He’s committed to the club.”
“I would certainly like to see his face when he finds out how we were really going to launch that satellite into orbit,” said Malik, grinning.
“It’s too soon,” Jerboa said. “I think we ought to wait six months, as a rule, before bringing anyone here. Just to make sure someone is really in tune with the group, and isn’t going to go trying to tell the wrong people about this. This technology has an immense potential to distort your sense of ethics and your values.”
Lydia tried to nod, but it was hard now that the bulky collar was in place. This spacesuit was a half a size too big, with boots that Lydia’s feet slid around in. The crotch of the orange suit was almost M.C. Hammer wide on her, even with the adult diaper they’d insisted she should wear just in case. The puffy white gloves swallowed her fingers. And then Malik and Jerboa lowered the helmet into place, and Lydia’s entire world was compressed to a gray-tinted rectangle. Goodbye, peripheral vision.
She wondered what sort of tattoo she would get to commemorate this trip.
“Ten minutes,” Madame Alberta called from the laundry room. And indeed, it was ten to midnight.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Jerboa said. “It’s not too late to call it off.”
“I’m the only one this suit sort of fits,” Lydia said. “And I’m the most expendable. And yes. I do want to be the first person to travel through time.”
After putting so many weird objects into that cube, thousands of them before they’d managed to get a single one back, Lydia felt strange about clambering inside the cube herself. She had to hunch over a bit. Malik waved and Jerboa gave a tiny thumbs up. Betty the Cyborg from the Dawn of Time checked the instruments one last time. Steampunk Fred gave a thumbs-up on the calculations. And Madame Alberta reached for the clunky lever. Even through her helmet, Lydia heard a greedy soda-belch sound.
A thousand years later, Lydia lost her hold on anything. She couldn’t get her footing. There was no footing to get. She felt ill immediately. She’d expected the microgravity, but it still made her feel revolting. She felt drunk, actually. Like she didn’t know which way was up. She spun head over ass. If she drifted too far, they would never pull her back. But the tiny maneuvering thrusters on her suit were useless, because she had no reference point. She couldn’t see a damn thing through this foggy helmet, just blackness. She couldn’t find the sun or any stars, for a moment. Then she made out stars. And more stars.
She spun. And somersaulted. No control at all. Until she tried the maneuvering thrusters, the way Jerboa had explained. She tried to turn a full three-sixty, so she could try and locate the sun. She had to remember to breathe normally. Every part of her wanted to hyperventilate.
When she’d turned halfway around on her axis, she didn’t see the sun. But she saw something else. At first, she couldn’t even make sense of it. There were lights blaring at her. And things moving. And shapes. She took a few photos with the camera Malik had given her. The whole mass was almost spherical, maybe egg-shaped. But there were jagged edges. As Lydia stared, she made out more details. Like, one of the shapes on the outer edge was the hood of a 1958 Buick, license plate and all. There were pieces of a small passenger airplane bolted on as well, along with a canopy made of some kind of shiny blue material that Lydia had never seen before. It was just a huge collection of junk welded together, protection against cosmic rays and maybe also decoration.
Some of the moving shapes were people. They were jumping up and down. And waving at Lydia. They were behind a big observation window at the center of the egg, a slice of see-through material. They gestured at something below the window. Lydia couldn’t make it out at first. Then she squinted and saw that it was a big glowy sign with blocky letters made of massive pixels.
At first, Lydia though the sign read, WELCOME TIME TRAVEL CLUB. Like they knew the Time Travel Club was coming, and they wanted to prepare a reception committee.
Then she squinted again, just as another rift started opening up to pull her back, a purple blaze all around her, and she realized she had missed a word. The sign actually read, WELCOME TO TIME TRAVEL CLUB. They were all members of the Club, too, and they were having another meeting. And they were inviting her to share her story, any way she could.
IAN, GEORGE AND GEORGE
Paul Levinson
Ian walked toward his little shop on Johnson Avenue in the Bronx, looked up at the I glowing neon sign that proclaimed its HI name, and scowled. He had programmed the neon to flicker, just a little, last week. To give it a touch of mid-twentieth-century authenticity, a time that was especially appealing to him because it was just beyond the range of his agency. But now that he looked at the cool neon script, flickering in a pattern designed to look random, he was concerned that customers might not get the historical detail, and mistake the effect for a faulty sign. That was unacceptable—the last thing Ian wanted to do was introduce any uncertainty into the minds of customers who were paying him a lot of money for a trip to the past and back. An unstable sign, after all, could also be a sign of an unstable system that provided shoddy access to a vent in the space-time continuum.
I looked at Ian shaking his head on the screen in my hand from my vantage point around the comer. I smiled. If I knew Ian, he was thinking about whom he could blame for this blunder in self-proclamation. And I knew Ian a bit about now. I’d made it my business to know everything I could about this consummate businessman, including installation of a variety of microcameras to record his moves near and in his store, which I was reasonably sure he didn’t know about. It was the least I could do, given that I was about to put a lot of money—not to mention my life—in his hands, once again.
Ian entered the building. I gave him a few minutes to get up to his “Ian’s, Ions, and Eons” on the second floor, and I walked over to conduct our business.
He was still scowling when I entered his office—presumably not about the sign, because it was no longer flickering when I reached the storefront. He looked up from behind the counter and nodded.
“All set?” I asked.
“I have your money and your signature,” Ian replied, “all that I need.” He looked at my papyrus-weave jacket. “I wouldn’t wear that tomorrow—you’ll be traveling into a brutal heat wave. Mid-nineties Fahrenheit.”
“Okay.”
Ian reached under the counter and came up with a dark paisley vest. He rubbed the fabric between his fingers, as if he was fathoming the texture, and gave the garment to me. “I put nasal suppositories in the right pocket. You may need them, given the heat where you’re headed, and the consequent smell.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But I like to savor everything in the places I visit, including the aromas.”
“Suit yourself.”
“I only wish there was some way I could go back a few decades further,” I said. Not really, I was just saying that to gauge his reaction.
Ian’s scowl deepened. “You know the limitations.”
“I guess I’m thinking that limits are only absolute to the extent that someone has yet to figure out how to break through them.”
Now Ian smiled, with scarcely more joy than conveyed in his scowl. “I don’t care what you do or try to do about those limitations, as long as you’re back on that northbound Metroliner on July 28, 1970.”
It certainly wasn’t too hot the next morning, as I walked up to Moynihan Station, gleaming in the sunlight on 33rd Street and 8th Avenue. In fact it was beautiful, and the air was sweet with the locust and hibiscus trees planted up and down the streets and along the new overpass, too. I breathed in slowly and sighed. A parting, living postcard, to wish me well and encourage my return.
I sauntered down the stairs. Plenty of time to catch the train. I bought a cool lemon-cantaloupe juice—my favorite for this early in the morning—and looked around. I wondered if I could spot Ian’s train agent. There was a 66.66 percent chance her name started with “I,” and a 33.33 percent chance it started with “E,” but I didn’t see name tags shimmering on anyone.
I leaned against a pillar and contemplated the holographic display on the far wall. Half a dozen Tricelas were approaching Moynihan from north and south, dicing up the light as they plied their ways through the morning. They were the closest emissaries of Biden North American InterRail, which glistened in the background like a great circulatory system made of phosphor. These would be the last three-dimensional images I’d be seeing for a while. Where I was going, it would all be two-dimensional, and inside rather than outside the screens.
I found my reserved seat on the train and tried to get comfortable. She soon took the seat next to me, in a snug, thin lavender outfit of linen.
“Iris,” she said, and extended a hand.
I took it and started to tell her mine—
Ian, George, and George
“No need for pleasantries,” she said. “As you know, I’m just going to brief you here—briefly brief you,” she smiled at her own wordplay, “and leave before the train pulls out.”
“Right,” I said. No pleasantries, but I couldn’t help notice that she was aptly named, with rich earthy brown irises that warmed your soul.
“You’ve utilized Ian’s twice before, with good results, so you know how this works—you make your move between Philadelphia and Wilmington.”
“Yes,” I said.
“This trip is a little more ambitious, but the fundamentals are the same. Okay . . . any questions?”
“What happens if someone sees me in the café car, just as I’m—”
She waved a dismissive hand. “Not the problem that amateurs imagine it to be—as you know, because you’re no amateur—”
“I know,” I said, “but I still have concerns.” She waved her hand again. “Your disappearing would be chalked up as hallucination, if anyone happens to see it. You were wise to take the no-accompaniment option—you shaved some bucks off a very expensive trip, given that 1970 is so close to the terminus.” She stood and smiled again. “I better get out of here before the train starts.”
I watched her walk away down the aisle. I was known here as a generous patron of the arts, but sometimes I was too cheap for my own good. I wouldn’t have minded Iris’ company on the swift trip to Philadelphia.
The café car was crowded, which was probably, ironically, the best way to do this. Someone suddenly vanishing was a lot more likely to be noticed when one of a few, not a bustling many. I looked at my wristwatch, which I had already donned. One minute and 18 seconds until the cosmos touched my shoulder and spun me like a top back to 1970, at the exact time and day of the month as now. I stroked my paisley vest with my thumb. I hoped Ian had gotten the nano-weave right, which would pull me into the speed and angle and place of this train in the space-time fabric at the right moment, and leave me in the same place on a very different train, a Metroliner, headed to Wilmington, Delaware in 1970. For some reason, I always worried about the weave most, but it had worked as advertised twice before—actually, four times, traveling and returning, safe and sound, on two trips.
