Time Travel Omnibus, page 1163
The teller cleared his throat. I realized I had been staring at him. “And please read die message now,” I said.
He complied. “Strongly urge you to bring Chronic Argonauts”—he stumbled slightly over the last word, but pronounced it tolerably well—“into full bloom as a novel STOP Will sell well STOP Will inspire you to write other novels STOP Indeed a device just aborning called the wireless telegraph as per Tesla and Lodge will later help greatly with sales of those novels STOP You will thank me for this many years later when we speak together through this wireless for an interview STOP.”
I nodded that that was the message. I enjoyed hearing the word STOP—Ian, ever the penny pincher, would likely have instructed me to use it instead of the period in any case, since punctuation was charged for, but STOP was a Western Union freebie. But that was not the reason he had included it in this message, every word of which he had dictated to me, without even going through the motions of making sure I agreed that the content worked with what I knew of H.G. Wells. Fortunately, I thought that it did.
“Okay,” the teller said. “And you would like this signed, An American admirer with a similar name.”
“Yes.”
“That’s a little long for a signature,” the teller said.
“That’s the way I want it,” I replied. “You can charge me for it,” I added, helpfully.
“You pay for every word, Sir, except the STOP used in lieu of the period.”
Charming. But no wonder the telegram had gone the way of hieroglyphics.
I stepped out of die office into the street and the heat. The late afternoon sun was even worse than in New York. Not surprising—I was, after all, further south.
But Ian was perpetually surprising. What he hoped to accomplish with this telegraph connection to the past, and how he thought it would work, had truly floored me.
“You can’t change so much as a letter in the telegram,” he had instructed me. “No ad libbing, as you might be tempted to do in your craft of acting.”
So he’s a critic, too, I had thought. But I had permitted myself a question. “Why?”
Ian had looked at me for a few moments, as if sizing me up as to whether I could understand what he was about to tell me. He apparently concluded that I could. “It’s not the precise sense of the words that I most care about. It’s the electronic signal that their commission to the telegraph will produce.”
“I’m not sure I understand.” Though I thought I had an inkling of where he was going with this.
Ian obliged me. “The Morse Code, in addition to its translatability into these words—based, of course, on the arbitrary assignment of electronic signals to letters—will also have an effect that is not arbitrary at all. That signal, and only that specific, exact signal, will both connect into the temporal anomaly north of Wilmington, the one that made your travel here possible—”
“Right,” I said.
“—that signal, and only that specific, exact signal,” he repeated, with a glare worse than usual for my interruption, “will not only be sent across the sea to England—as any telegram could be sent today in 1970—but, because of its entwinement with the Wilmington anomaly, will trigger its sending to England in 1894.”
“Was there even transatlantic cable in 1894?” I asked.
“It was put in right after the U.S. Civil War. A major engineering feat of its day.”
“So the specific signal is the equivalent of the vest,” I had mused. “The precise Morse code signal is the equivalent of the weave.”
“Yes.”
“To move not people but information back in time,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Information back in time to H.G. Wells,” I said.
“Yes,” Ian replied, now monosyllabic.
I took it in, as best I could. “But . . . why?”
I had known the answer to that would require a lot more than one word. How much Ian chose to tell me, of course, was another matter. . . .
I stopped my reverie and looked around for a cab. Would it be air conditioned? Yes! Lucky break at last, and a hell of a lot better than this wilting Wilmington heat.
“Wilmington Station,” I told the driver.
“I have quite a lucrative business,” Ian had replied to my question, back in my hotel room, “as you no doubt have gathered. H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, though pretty far in the past, was a necessary start-up factor.”
“Because it got the world thinking about time travel?”
“That’s right,” Ian had replied. “Oh, there were a few stories before, but The Time Machine really put time travel on the intellectual map. Without any intervention from me, Wells would likely have expanded “The Chronic Argonauts” story into The Time Machine novel anyway—his biographers say he was hungry for a larger audience—but I’m thinking a little extra nudge can’t hurt, a little insurance that history does the right thing for me.”
I had looked at Ian. Behind his meticulous, scowling confidence was a bit more insecurity than I would have expected.
And he had smiled back at me, genuinely, for an instant. “Yes, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing when it comes to making sure history is on your side.”
My cab arrived at the station. I paid the cabbie and took the shaky elevator up to the northbound platform. God, it seemed as it was more than two lifetimes ago when I had been in this dingy, odiferous box. But that was, what, just two days ago?
I had had one last question of Ian, back at the Barclay in New York just yesterday.
“Why me?” I had asked Ian. “Why do you need me to send the telegram to H.G. Wells?”
“I’ve done this myself—used that office in Wilmington to send telegrams to the past—and the process worked fine. Same when I used agents unconflictingly loyal to me. But you represent the next level—someone who, consciously or unconsciously, might work against the process, might try to subvert it, because you have reason to dislike me and might want me to fail—”
I started to protest—
“No need to proclaim your reliability,” Ian interrupted. “Your lack of reliability is precisely your value here. That, and given your intersection with H.G. Wells in the early part of your career, I thought it a good idea to get you into the mix—could open up some fruitful possibilities. But if this works with people like you—if the telegram, exactly as I wrote it, arrives in H.G. Wells’ hands in Sevenoaks in 1894—then I can judge this process robust enough to add to the services of Ian’s Ions and Eons. I have people at work on codes that might even extend the transmission sites to a few cities other than Wilmington.”
“Bring Western Union—Western Un-ion—into Ian’s Ions and Eons,” I pronounced the second word as “un” and “ion” to make my point.
“That’s right,” Ian had said, “though I prefer the French pronunciation of ‘un’—meaning ‘one,’ or one with the ions.”
My train arrived. I had to remind myself again that I wouldn’t be time traveling on this one—it was 1970 now, and it would be 1970 when I reached New York.
But I had sent information back in time, to H.G. Wells, in 1894. I took a seat by the window, and looked out, as my train slid out of the station. Yeah, it had apparently worked with me—Ian had gotten what he wanted. After all, I was here on this train in 1970, I had come back here from the future, after booking my trip in Ian’s Ions and Eons, and my heart felt fine.
But the impact of this message to the past had been only to buttress what my almost namesake Herbert George Wells had already been on his way to doing, anyway. And as I looked out at the rapidly receding shrubs and rust of the Wilmington train station, I had to wonder: now that I had helped Ian validate this process, what would happen when he sold people the means of sending messages to the past intended not to support but change or undo history? Would Ian do that?
“Excuse me—are you Orson Welles?” a leggy brunette, with a high, stylish, mauve mini-skirt or some such asked me.
“Yes,” I replied, not very warmly. If I hadn’t been so engrossed in thinking about Ian, I might have invited her to sit down next to me.
She started to turn—
“Care to join me?” I asked her, in the most inviting baritone I could muster. I gestured to the empty seat next to me.
Her eyes lit up. “Yes, thank you!” She sat down. “I saw you on the Dick Cavett Show night before last—you were very clever, Mr. Welles.”
“Call me George,” I said. “It comes before the Orson.”
She smiled. “I’m Isabella.”
THE FUTURE FAIRE
Dustin Adams
The sign comes first. It hovers high in the sky, projecting green neon light, and we believe it because we don’t have technology like that.
Site of the first ever Future Faire.
Mysterious builders spend several summer weeks carving a circular clearing within the dense forest at Portland’s edge. We’re allowed to observe, at a distance of course.
When opening day arrives, we stand in an unmoving line with thousands of strangers, modest admission fee clutched tightly in our hands. I’m curious why people from the future would need cash, but my father says, “Business is business, no matter when you’re from.”
Mom and I laugh at that.
Eventually, the coolness of early morning wears off and the sun crests the distant cedars. My father shifts his weight back and forth a few times and I wait for his outburst. He smacks his palm with the back of his hand. “If only we’d been rich, we could’ve bought him the Cochlear 2—”
Through my caption glasses I see my mother stare at my father. He glances at me like he’s revealed some secret I shouldn’t know.
I know what a Cochlear Model 2 is. Hearing for the wealthy. And I know what my caption glasses are. Hearing for the poor.
A blinding light interrupts our tension. Some sort of noise causes those around me to thrust their hands over their ears. I blink, and a translucent dome appears all at once in the clearing.
People have traveled back in time.
Those in line cheer and my glasses become littered with caption bubbles full of exclamation points and graphical hands clapping.
We amble forward, and eventually, my parents and I step through the de-tech dome, and the Future Faire stretches out before us. A dozen big-top tents strategically pock a landscape brimming with carnies hawking future-games of skill.
I look down. The ground is dry earth, brown and cracked, flattened by workers’ feet.
“Tyler?” My name floats across my glasses in a bubble with an arrow pointing toward my mom. I look up. “Meet back here in an hour, okay?”
I nod vigorously. She hands me a brochure containing a map of the faire and I read the words listed in all caps on the front cover. NO TECHNOLOGY IS TO LEAVE THE FAIREGROUNDS!
“I’m going to Future Vid-Games.” I subvocalize, and my glasses’ mini-speakers verbalize my lie for my parents. They always believe me because my electronic voice was programmed to be emotionless, and my eyes are blurred behind a cloudy display.
On the map, I trace a route to the Medical Pavilion with my finger.
Unfortunately, that would take me past Future Vid-Games and Future Movies. What will video games be like? Or are there just more crane machines whose claws don’t grip cheap toys?
I run past the game tent, ignoring the excited faces of the boys lining up to enter, but I slow when the scent of barbequing sausages drifts past my nose. I’m starving, but so are dozens of others willing to brave another long line. I turn, and keep running.
Atop the Medical Pavilion is a white flag emblazoned with a red cross flapping in the breeze. My heart is pounding from my run and brimming with excitement. Soon, I might be able to hear. Really hear.
I stop at the threshold and keyword ear, hear, hearing, Cochlear, deaf, and aural so they’ll appear in a red caption on my glasses.
Then I step inside.
Dozens of caption bubbles saturate my vision. Arrows point every which way and I try to keep up by jerking my head all around. The words inside the bubbles shrink as more words fill the tiny ovals. I can’t process and delete them fast enough.
“The Earrific repairs all functions of the inner ear.”
The sentence appears in red and the caption bubble arrow points deep in the crowd. I push my way through thick-bodied people, following the red words until I find their speaker.
A young future doctor waves what looks like a pen back and forth. Those that can hear, everyone, move swiftly past, ignoring what doesn’t concern them.
I wave to get his attention and he looks down. He balks when he sees my glasses, but then smiles and leans forward, showing me the pen. I see the word Earrific written in tiny, silver letters.
I shrug. If I speak, he’ll hear my electronic voice.
He nods like yeah, he gets that kids don’t care, but they really do. Then he holds the tip in my left ear and a moment later the world explodes.
Noises assault my head, crashing into my skull. I feel off-balance, like the sounds are dragging me down. I clench my teeth, tilt my head, and point. The doctor presses the pen into my other ear and there’s a whoosh and the volume in the room doubles.
I can hear. I can hear! My nose tingles and my throat constricts. I lift my glasses a moment to rub the back of my hand across my eyes.
“Cool, right? We programmed it to sound like a conch shell simulating the ocean. Course, I suggested it just sound like the ocean.” I read his words in my glasses fine, but what I hear is a jumble, like he’s spoken one very long word.
I take in the environment of the pavilion, connecting sights to sounds. I see/hear the shuffling of feet, the muddled mess of conversations, the whir of the ceiling fans above. How do people sort so many competing noises?
I look up at the doc and mouth, “Thank you.” My machine voice repeats the words and I hear my own voice for the first time.
He backs away. “Wait. You’re deaf?”
I shake my head. “Not anymore.”
Terror mars his features. I reach out to shake his hand but he backs into the Eariffic’s display case. It falls over and smashes into countless glass shards. The sound pierces my ears and I flinch.
My mother appears. How did she know? She pulls my hands from my ears, inspecting them. “Are you hurt?”
Her voice is sweet, softer than the doc’s, and not as rough as my surroundings, which have gone mercifully quiet.
“No.” I try to speak, but the word comes out as a cough.
My mother stands erect and stares down at me. She turns, eyes the broken display, then turns back. “What was in this case?”
The tone of her words is angry. Or perhaps I’ve simply read her stiff posture and coiled muscles like usual.
For the first time in my life I can hear, and she’s mad.
My mother shakes her hands like she’s drying them after washing, but I recognize her method of trying to relax. “I had a feeling you’d come here.” She hugs me and I feel safe. Protected. The noise in the room picks up again.
Several authoritative-looking men show up. “Is this him?” asks one. He looks mean and hard-edged. His pale-gray business suit appears glued to his body, like it was his skin instead of his clothes.
The worried-looking doc shadows them. “Yeah, I had no idea the kid was deaf. How many kids are deaf?”
I read and hear the words at the same time and I’m giddy with happiness. Someday, when the spoken words make sense, I won’t need my glasses ever again.
“These people are from the past, Doctor. Many of them were deaf or blind or had some disease.”
“You can fix this, right? Make him deaf again?” asks the doc.
I look at him in horror. My mother and I both say, “No.”
The man leans close, his eyes narrow with scrutiny. Despite being in my mother’s arms, his stare freezes me. “No technology is to leave the fairegrounds.”
“Stay away from my son,” says my mother.
“Ma’am.” He straightens. “The faire is look but don’t touch. That’s the law.” He growls a little after he’s done speaking.
I don’t like the sound of his voice. I burrow deeper into my mother’s arms.
“He doesn’t possess any technology,” says my father from nearby. He pushes an onlooker aside and I feel even safer now that he’s arrived.
“I’m afraid he does, sir. We have to . . . he has to come with us. We’ll reverse this privately.”
I hear a steady noise in the distance, pleasant and uplifting. “Is that music?” I ask. The melody diffuses some of the tension in my body and I feel connected to it somehow. Or it’s connected to me.
The mean man huffs. A caption appears with an ellipsis. Impatience? Exasperation? At last, he answers, “It’s just a generic faire tune from the public domain.”
I concentrate on the distant music the best I can. My body wants to move with it. I want to dance.
“We’re leaving.” My mother grabs my arm and we move behind my father. The music gives way to more pressing sounds. I try to focus, to hold on to it, but I don’t know how.
The room’s population has thinned. Guards block the two exits. What type of future weapons might they carry? Lasers that could level entire mountains? Machines to flatten the Earth, like they’d done to this former hillside?
The man holds out his arms, like he’d carry me—somewhere. “Please understand, Ma’am. If he leaves, a paradox could occur. Your son could kill us all.”
My father confronts the man. His posture says he’s ready to fight. “Did you not think of this before you came?”
The man’s hardened expression softens and he appears regretful. “We thought if no physical technology—”
“Wait,” I interrupt. “I’ll go.”
“No.” My mother squats and grips my arms. “We’re taking you home.”
I don’t know why I’m suddenly so brave, but hearing makes me feel invincible. Is this how everyone feels all the time?
