Time Travel Omnibus, page 1164
“I know what a paradox is, mom. If I step out of the faire, we all blink out of existence.” I snap my fingers and hear the sound. I’ll remember it, and all the other sounds I’m collecting. My mother’s voice. My father’s voice. They can’t undo my memories.
“What are the risks?” my father asks. He doesn’t seem convinced to let them take me, but I think he’s beginning to understand—I screwed up.
The mean man turns to the doctor hovering over his right shoulder who says, “Well, we don’t have the technology to remove someone’s hearing. I . . . I’ll have to improvise.”
“You are not taking him,” my mother says.
I turn and look into her eyes for a change, instead of staring into the words on my glasses. “Say something nice. I just want to remember.”
Tears pool in my mother’s eyes and she speaks very slowly. “I love you, Tyler.”
I smile through the pain in my chest. I’ll be strong—for them. My mother holds me until strong hands grip my shoulders and pull me away.
In an isolated, well-lit room, they plop me on a padded recliner. A sea of device-like pens litter a metal tray to my left.
My parents hover just outside. They aren’t allowed in.
“I’m sorry about this, kid. I really am.” The mean man shakes his head in resignation. “I thought we’d planned for every possibility.” He backs away and the doc who gave me hearing grabs one of the pens.
He looks at it with uncertainty then leans over me, blocking out the overhead light. “I’m going to try curing you again. Perhaps a second cure will overload your auditory canals.” He shrugs, and there’s nothing scarier than a doctor shrugging.
I close my eyes and hum the tune I heard earlier. I’d like to think it’s a song that plays at weddings. A grand, sweeping song of love and passion and joy.
It’s the only song I’ll ever know and it’s the most beautiful song in the world. Played just for me.
The End
DRINK IN A SMALL TOWN
Peter Wood
Wallace picked a hell of a place to watch the first Mars expedition land. The small Georgia town probably hadn’t changed in a hundred years.
He parked in front of Scooter’s Tavern, the place the interstate gas station attendant had suggested. He wondered how dives like Scooter’s survived. Except for the bar he saw nothing but boarded-up buildings. The dark street had only one other car.
He thought twice about leaving the interstellar drive’s blueprints in the trunk. But he didn’t feel like lugging them around. After the frustrating week trying to get money to manufacture the drive, he half hoped somebody would steal the damned plans.
Inside, the wheezing window air conditioner fought August’s heat and humidity. A teetering stack of water-stained boxes leaned against a dented video poker machine. Wallace hoped he hadn’t made a mistake coming in here. “Do y’all serve food?” he asked the bartender, a greasy-haired man in a NASCAR T-shirt.
The bartender’s eyes opened wide. He grabbed a half-filled beer off the counter and gulped it down. “Evening, sir. I’m Ray. We got burgers and chips. Want a drink?”
Wallace sat down on a duct-taped stool. He needed a drink. After trudging through South Carolina and Georgia, he still hadn’t found a single investor. The real world was even less interested in his ideas about string theory and exceeding light speed than the Ph.D. physics program. Days like this he almost wished he hadn’t dropped out. “Burger and chips. And whatever you have on draft.”
Ray slapped a patty on the grill and poured Wallace a tall Stroh’s. He turned on the flat screen TV with a remote. “Those boys are about to land.”
“I wouldn’t want to be the first man out of the lander. Too much pressure. Hard to top Neil Armstrong.”
“One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind,” Ray said.
“You know your history,” Wallace said.
Ray smiled. “It’s my specialty.” Wallace sipped his beer. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was. “How old’s this place?”
Ray shrugged. “Who knows? Ninety years? I was here when the Supreme Court ended segregation. The Vietnam War. The Moon landing.” His voice was slurred.
“You were here?”
“Of course not.” Ray coughed. “I meant the bar’s been here that long.”
“This must be a slow night with the landing and all,” Wallace said.
“Nope. Normal crowd.” Grease spattered as Ray flipped the burger. The rich smell of sautéing onions filled the air. “It’s our last night.” He poured himself another beer.
“So, I’m celebrating.”
Wallace studied the unswept concrete floor, and the cracked plastic chairs and Formica tables. He wondered if the dusty pinball machine worked. “Hard to make money downtown with the interstate, I guess. Everybody goes to Red Lobster or Applebee’s.”
Ray leaned against the counter. “Our work’s done is all. I’ll miss it. A good spot to watch the world. Nobody bothers you.”
Wallace doubted anyone could see much of the world from a street that probably had less traffic than a suburban cul-de-sac. The countdown clock on TV said thirty minutes to landing.
Ray placed a steaming hamburger before Wallace. He unclipped a bag of barbecue chips from the wall. “Sorry, we’re out of plain and sour cream. Not much point in restocking.”
Wallace slathered the burger with mustard and Texas Pete hot sauce. He took a bite and remembered why he had left the generic chains near the highway. “This is great.”
“You’re a long way from home, ain’t you?” Ray asked.
“I’m from Florida.” Ray took another sip of beer. “Good day’s drive to Miami.”
“How’d you know I was from Miami?”
“You must have told me, sir.” Ray pointed to the TV. “There’s going to be a delay.”
Wallace glanced at the ticking countdown clock. “Everything looks on schedule.” Ray grinned. “Wait a second.”
A commentator replaced the picture of the rapidly approaching surface of Mars. “The computers are out of sync, but Mission Control promises they’ll fix the problem in ten or fifteen minutes. We—”
Ray picked up the remote and muted the sound. “The landing will be fine.”
“How do you know?”
“The same way I know your fund raising trip went well.” Had he told Ray about that? God, he was tired. “Nobody’s interested in my company.”
Ray finished the beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “That venture capitalist in Macon wants to invest. He’ll call tonight.”
“Are you watching me?”
“We’re watching this time in history. Tomorrow we return to our time.” The Georgia accent was gone. He poured another Stroh’s and pushed it to Wallace. “On the house.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m saying too much, but I don’t drink usually. And there’s something I have to tell you in a minute.” He smiled. “What do you think of the Mars landing?”
Wallace squinted. Was the man crazy? Maybe he was just drunk. “You don’t want to know.”
“Sure I do.”
Wallace rolled his eyes. “It came in billions over budget. We should have a base on Mars by now. We should have friggin’ FTL drive. And why is space travel still a national project? We need to work with India, Japan, China, Brazil. Don’t get me started.”
“Don’t worry,” Ray said. “Your little startup will fix that faster than light problem, but I got to tell you something. Helium 3 is a dead end. It’s inefficient and too expensive to mine.”
Wallace sighed. “Then what do you suggest?”
“Water. And fission. There’s plenty of water.” He scrawled something on a napkin and handed it to Wallace.
Wallace stared at figures and symbols. “That’ll really work?”
“Yes, sir. You’ll be exploring places you never imagined.”
“Where?”
“The planet hasn’t been found yet.” Ray poured another beer. . . “And you’ll discover something else when you’re tinkering with that drive.”
Wallace’s mobile phone rang. He recognized the number of the Macon investor.
“What?” he asked Ray.
Ray raised his drink in a toast. “Time travel.”
TIME WELL SPENT
George Zebrowski
As usual, I would have to leave before I arrived. Memory threw me there, exiling me from all my other times with her, no matter how much I concentrated. She was alive in all our pasts, but only these earlier presents were open to me.
“Me again?” she asked in our present, jealous and prideful.
“No one else,” I said.
I kissed her before I bridged, fighting off Maxim Gorky’s claim that “love is the failure of mind to understand nature.” If so, then love was an opposed way, an uphill fight at best.
She was asleep back there in our off-campus apartment, as I came up by train from New York City. I would have just enough time to get there and spend some time with her before the train arrived.
I always prepared by losing a pound or two, colouring my hair a bit and exercising, even using some make-up to look younger than my late 60s, so that she would not notice in the dim light of the apartment at night. Nearsighted and in bed, it helped that she would not be wearing her glasses.
I grasped my key from decades past, and summoned the vision of the pale-skinned young woman who had dyed her hair black after a silly blonde experiment, and then cut it short when I was away. I would again compliment the change.
My appearance at my old door shook the back porch for a moment. I stood before the curtained glass, but no light went on. I was fearful that this might be my last chance to regain this time, so I had to make it count. Other times with her might open to me if this one closed, but that was far from certain.
The theory of jumps was not perfect. There might not even be any real time displacement at all, but instead a reality-like recreation of significant memories that suddenly occupied a mind with a quantum flood of insistence to the point at which it made no difference to the experience; it might just as well be happening in the naive sense. Time probably did not exist outside the biology of human perception except as a timeless persistence, a stubborn duration, inexpressible endurance beyond time-like words.
I turned my key in the lock, pushed the door open and went in, closing it behind me.
“Who’s there?” asked her voice, from somewhere inside me, it seemed.
“It’s me,” I said, hoping to sound younger.
“Oh,” she said uncertainly.
I crossed the small living room to the double bed in the alcove and sat down. Her head came out from beneath the covers, hair cut short and dyed black. She looked up at me like a queen on a divan.
“Beautiful!” I said, and she giggled as I lay down beside her.
“You must be tired,” she said as I sighed. “It’s okay, we can just sleep,” she whispered. “We have all tomorrow.”
She dozed. I lay there, afraid to disappoint her.
After a while I looked at my watch and saw that I would soon arrive, and it would not matter. Were anachronisms real or only apparent? You can have all the anachronisms you want in your mind, where they happen all the time. Was I asleep up ahead? I felt a rocking sense of loss as I heard the train whistle.
“What is it?” she asked softly as my moments with her fled into some deep abyss where I could not follow.
“I’ll be right back,” I said and got up. She turned over and closed her eyes, expecting that I was only undressing. I stood there, looking at the glory of her bare back. To kiss her now might be fatal if I arrived early.
I went out the door and breathed the night air, knowing that I was coming down the street, and that I could leave it all to him.
The starry night was blue. I went across the yard and stood by the brick wall of the garage. I would come through the narrow alleyway from the street beyond, less than a block from the train station.
My memory moved within him. I was waiting here only to see him walk by in the dark. The unreality of time seized me, and seemed about to inflict a wretched pain, but relented.
Time could show mercy if you remembered well enough, a collective delusion, the setting of human psychology, biologically based, to conceal the fact that everything was in one place and happened all at once.
I would return, inexactly, to this very time and place as often as my force of memory struck out against loss. I looked around the dark yard. I was present here in these shadows more than once, similarly aware, only moments apart.
He came through the dark alleyway, and I felt the flow of love for his waiting beloved; love then, not my love now. His step was sure, the past his own, his youth holding back the incoming future. The same key I still held was in his pocket.
He would not disappoint the dark-haired goddess in her bed.
I was gone before I got to the door.
THE COLOR OF PARADOX
A.M. Dellamonica
The last thing they did, before sending me into the past, was shove me to the end of the world.
The Project Mayfly nurse waited as I raised myself onto a wicker table with a surface made of tightly-strung hide, a grid that put me in mind of a tennis racket. The squares of string pressed against the thin fabric of my hospital gown.
As I climbed on, I couldn’t help noticing the drain in the floor. It was a hand’s width away from the letters scratched into the concrete: “16—Hungry.”
There were marks on the wall, too, across from the metal staircase. A timeline, in yellow chalk, running from floor to ceiling, hashed at one-inch intervals. The year 1900 was scrawled at the bottom, the numbers mashed short by the floor. A foot and change upward from that, 1914 and 1916. The nines had a familiar, slightly twisted look to them. They were at once readable and yet not quite perfectly formed. So were the nines in the other chalk digits that followed: 1937 and the current year, 1946.
The nurse dodged the hand I’d put out, just for a last friendly pat, you know. She covered me, toes to chin, with a lead blanket.
“When do you tell me my mission?”
“Willie will send word when you’ve gotten there safe and sound.” The Major’s words came from a speaker in the ceiling. “Good luck, son.”
“Eyes wide, now.” The nurse slid a hand into the seven tons of steel bolted to the ceiling above me, drawing out a pair of rubber cups on a long, noodle-pallid cord. I complied, distorting my view of the chalk timeline on the wall across from me; she popped the cups on my eyes, like contact lenses except they were so thick they braced my eyelids open.
“Bit of discomfort coming,” she said, patting the lead blanket.
Blinded, I felt the vibration of the machine as it lowered from the ceiling, Dr. Frankenstein’s version of an optician’s examining rig. It settled on my body like an automobile laid atop the blanket. I heard clips. The flesh of my rump pressed the rawhide grid below.
“It’s wrong on my nose,” I protested: cold steel was pressing down on my face with bruising force.
“Try to breathe.”
“My nose,” I said again.
All their warnings ran through my mind: If you lied about ever being to Seattle you will die. If there is any metal in your body, you will die.
Who would lie about visiting Seattle?
This is a one-way mission.
Knowing I would survive the press was hardly a comfort.
Seven tons of steel were clamped around me and my nose was going to break, and after telling me to breathe, just breathe, that nurse—she smelled of rosewater, I’ll never forget it—was sliding some kind of leather bit into my mouth. It was enough to make me wish I was at the front, face-to-barrel with one of the new Russo-German repeating rifles.
I heard her retreat to the staircase, locking the lead door. I counted to thirty. What felt like a year passed.
Then I saw the death of the world.
It was hot, but there was no fire. My crushed nose picked up a smell straight out of Dante’s Inferno: charnel and brimstone. I rose above the great American city, above Lake Washington and Puget Sound. Higher, higher.
But something was wrong with the color of the future, seven weeks out. Seattle, below, the sky above, even the air around me . . . it was all splashed with color I’d never seen before. Everything was off the accepted painter’s wheel of red, blue, yellow.
The cries of thousands of living things, dying in agony, merged with my own.
My mind, confronted with the impossible, revolted. Pinned, gagged, and clamped in place, unable to look away, I screamed as the timepress thrust me against the end of everything, as I bounced off that imminent stained future and ricocheted into the past.
A sproing, a sense of strings beneath me popping. I dropped—but struck something soft before I realized I was falling.
It was dark, everything hurt, and I was still screaming.
I fought the howls, eventually compressing them to whimpers, then a voiceless suctioning of air. The cups over my eyes were gone, but I seriously doubted whether I would ever open my eyes again.
. . . color that color that sound that smell . . .
When I did, I saw a square of light above, the doorway at the top of the staircase.
Was I still in the project basement? All the equipment was gone. I lay on a mattress in the middle of the floor, placed where the gurney had been. A bare light bulb hung overhead; the staircase that led up and out was wood, rather than steel, and my chalk timeline, naturally, was gone.
Just within reach was a milk jug full of water. A bucket waited in the corner.
A woman—not the nurse from before—waited at the top of the staircase. She had a blanket in one hand and a pistol in the other.
“How do you feel?” She sounded wary.
I covered my groin with one hand and felt for the bit in my mouth. The handful of leather was almost too much to lift; I was that weak.
I prodded my nose: not quite broken.
