Time Travel Omnibus, page 1166
Up ahead, just decades away, the world was turning to something far worse than ash. Peter Rupert would do something to bring that day closer.
But it was probably one action of his, wasn’t it? Probably the Japan scoop. One single story of the hundreds he filed.
I found myself a street corner that smelled of washed earth—not of horse, not of smoke or fuel. I stood there, snug under my umbrella, and watched the rain pour down as I formulated a plan.
“What if I got close to him?” I said to Willie that night. “The Project must know more about whatever Peter does to . . .”
“To bring on the Souring?” She sat in a rocking chair in the parlor, knitting in front of the fire, playing at being an ordinary woman.
My mouth went dry. “The—”
“Sorry—that’s what I call it. What we saw.”
I swallowed. “It’s apt.”
“It’s useful,” she said. “I use it in the journals. I’ve cultivated a conceit that losing my husband made me a bit odd.”
“Ramblings of a daft young widow?”
She nodded. “Just in case someone unauthorized gets a look.”
“Whatever Peter does to bring on your Souring,” I said, “it’s bound to be one story. They chose him because he’s key, am I right? Because he’s a simple target?”
“So?”
“The Project must tell me which story. If he sees me as a friend, an older brother, or even a father figure—his own father died in the flu epidemic—”
She flinched, for some reason.
“It’s why he’s working as a paperboy, to support his mother. In any case, I’ll keep him off that one story.”
“You’re proposing to chum around with him for years?”
“Why not? I’ll make myself useful meanwhile: keep investing money, reporting gossip, maybe help dig out the next basement . . .”
“Jules.”
“. . . I’d need someone to explain the engineering to me, obviously. How does one secretly dig a second basement in a house that already exists?”
“Jules.”
“I needn’t live here in the house if you don’t want me underfoot.”
She pulled herself upright in her chair, sitting as prim and proper as a schoolteacher. I imagined I heard her sleeve tearing, and thought about running my tongue over the freckles on her arm: how far did they go? She folded her hands, seemed to fight an urge to wring them, and waited for me to run down.
“What is it?”
She said. “The timepress uses a radiant form of energy. It’s what makes us so sick. They told you that, didn’t they?”
“I’m not going to relapse on you. I live, I know it.”
She didn’t smile. “Chances are you will die of cancer within the year.”
“Chances?”
“Rufus has survived almost fifteen months, but . . .”
She meant the sickly Negro man.
“You have no great span of time in which to befriend Peter Rupert. You can’t jolly him along for a decade and hope to break his leg before he leaves for Japan. You—”
I was across the room before I knew it, grabbing at her, tipping the rocking chair. We ended on the floor, my hand wrapped around her jaw, and again that red desire swam up. To smash, to smash, to taste of her blood on my knuckles.
“You’re. Not. Dead,” I snarled. “It’s been years and you’re not dead.”
A little flicker. Fear? I am ashamed to admit I hoped so. I needed to see something beyond pity or contempt in her.
“Go ahead, then,” she said, and I realized my other hand was resting atop—was squeezing—one of her strangely firm breasts.
Trying to buy her life? Well, she’d all but opened her legs now: I gave her blouse a swift tear as my defeated sanity—the despairing, quashed part of me that knew better—protested.
I found: a padded bodice, formed like a woman’s body.
I pushed it aside, exposing her belly . . .
. . . and found nothing but scars.
The slices had been pulled up and then stitched tight. Everything below her collarbones was purple and red, twisting lines of hashed-together tissue.
“About a week after I finished my mission.” Her words were distorted by the grip I had on her—she couldn’t really move her jaw. “I woke up with a terrible feeling. It wasn’t physical—I’d never felt so well.”
“Feeling?” I was staring at her torn-up body; I couldn’t look away.
“Panic, pure and simple. I went to a surgeon and paid him to cut away everything that made me a woman.”
I gagged, released her, and pushed myself back, back, until I was almost in the fireplace. I got entangled with her knitting bag and it came with me, my slippers trailing a half-knit Christmas stocking and strands of red and green wool.
Willie sat up. “This city is full of sweet, bright, talented boys, Jules.”
“But the future won’t have anyone, bright or otherwise, unless I fulfill my mission. Is that what you’re saying?”
She struggled to anchor her bodice over the ruin of flesh under her throat. Those empty scoops. Then she hunted on the carpet for the buttons I’d torn off her dress. She got to her feet, righted the chair, and peered out before creeping off into the house, holding her blouse shut.
I disentangled my feet from the red and green yarn, spilling Willie’s journal in the process. Snatching it up, I fled the house.
The Major had recommended a particular neighborhood speakeasy to me and it was there, with a whiskey in front of me, that I opened up the journal.
I suppose I expected to find an account, cleverly couched, of Willie’s earliest days. Or that first mission of hers.
Who did you ruin, spoil, or kill, Willie?
But that first journal was long since filled, I’m sure, filled and locked away, waiting for the project to discover its secrets. This one had only been on the go for a month or so.
It began with a brief account of the death of one of the gents upstairs, and a note to the effect that she was glad he’d got to see the Great Pyramid on ‘his recent business trip to Egypt.’
They had briefed me on that mission: Smitty had interfered with the mail in the Middle East, stealing correspondence and replacing it with false letters to a number of gentlemen in Jerusalem. This had eased tensions there and thereby delayed the onset of the second Great War until 1936.
All the sick men upstairs in the bedrooms. They’re not tenants, they’re time agents. They’ve served their purpose and now . . .
“What’re you doing, Mac?” A drunk nudged me, apparently hoping I’d stand him a round.
“Reading my sister’s diary,” I said, which got a general laugh.
Ruin, spoil, or kill. The thought crept in, despite my resolve to refuse the mission. Peter Rupert, the reporter, had terrible problems with drink.
I paged ahead, past an account of some Boeing engineer and his odd friendship with Rufus. Beyond that was the account of my arrival Willie had written, just days before. I checked that last line, the one I’d believed was her tale-telling about my intransigence.
She had written: “What’s best about him, so far, is that he’s stubborn.”
There was more about the engineer, and an entry saying someone named Valois had written with an address in France and a request that she forward his mail. He was settling down with a girl in Paris, for ‘however long he had.’
She’d got back to me in her final entry: “Julie has survived his first week in America. His spirits are in turmoil. Homesickness, I expect. Nothing out of the ordinary. He’s wonderfully strong. Father expects rather a lot from him, and he is mulling over how to make the family proud.”
I had one more shot of the bathtub whiskey, then paid for a flask to take away.
On the way back, I passed a school. It was late in the day; the children were gone.
On a whim, I went in and wandered the halls, waiting for someone to challenge me. Nobody did; nobody took notice of me at all.
I stepped into a classroom and found myself contemplating a long ruler and a piece of chalk. The smell of the chalk was like the bare cement walls of the project basement: dust and bone, calm, a scent of earth and eternity.
“Are you here to fill in for our art teacher?”
I turned. The man who’d addressed me was cut from the same pattern as my father: round, pink, affable. He had green eyes, emerald chips, bright and long of lash. His wedding ring was plain and a little too tight for his finger; the valise he clutched was well-worn.
“Veteran?” he said, and I nodded.
“There aren’t enough thanks in all the world, sir, for what you’ve done.”
“I accept pound notes,” I said.
His laugh was like Dad’s, too, a boom that came from the soles of his feet. “Principal’s at the end of the hall, on the left.”
I found Willie tucking her heavy tarpaulin back into place on the mattress in the basement. There was an ugly bruise around her mouth, but when she saw me, her lips twitched. Trying not to laugh?
“Sorry.” What else could I say?
“It’s nothing.”
I lifted the edge of the mattress so she could smooth the tarpaulin under. “What are you doing?”
“Preparing for the next one.” She handed me the sheet.
That should have been my cue to tell her it wouldn’t be necessary to send another man, that I’d take on the mission. But there would be someone else, wouldn’t there?
“Have you got my book, Julie?”
I passed the journal to her. “Lots about Boeing.”
“The airfield’s one reason we’re in Washington. A hint to an engineer here, a line on a blueprint there . . . the planes make an immense difference to how it all plays out.”
“Is that what you did—help make planes?”
“Rufus is the engineer,” she said. “Who would take plane-building notes from a dotty old widow?”
“So your mission: was it ‘ruin, spoil, or kill’ too?”
“Well.” Her voice was dry. “We are siblings.”
I took that as a yes.
She said: “You’ve thought it out, haven’t you?”
I showed her the flask. “Peter Rupert has a compulsion. If I start him drinking early, especially given the poisons they’re putting in alcohol right now . . .”
Willie nodded. “Might be kinder to shoot him.”
“Kinder for him? Or me?”
“You, of course.”
If he became a drunk as a youth, he might yet pull a less illustrious life together later. “It shouldn’t be easy.”
“That’s simply masochism.”
“You’re afraid it won’t work? That I’ll die before he’s—”
She gestured at the mattress. Meaning: if I failed, someone else would come and finish the job.
I took up my ruler and walked to the wall, drawing the line I’d seen there. Working slowly, I made notches at one-inch intervals, and wrote 1900, 1914, and 1916 at the appropriate heights. They looked just as I’d remembered. There’s an odd curl to my nines I never managed, quite, to amend.
I counted forward to 1937, the year they pressed Willie, and wrote an encircled “1” beside it.
“The first Souring?” she said.
“Yes.” I counted forward through the nine years she’d bought us, to my own time, and noted the second.
“They’re learning more with every press,” she said. “Rufus has been doing quite well.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t paying attention. The scent of the chalk had caught me again, along with the odd little miracle of the bright yellow line it made, here on the rough grey wall, and the residue left on my hand. It was the same feeling I’d had when talking to the old teacher, an almost painful awareness of . . . was it beauty?
“Sorry, what?” I said.
She wore, to my shock, a smile. “One of the effects of having been—what was your word?—skinned,” she said. “Little things shine out like that. It’s never the things that are meant to be attractive, I find, but—”
I gave in to the urge to put the chalk under my nose, like a cigar, and inhale. “It’s just that it’s so different. Different from the end.”
“Yes. Solid, somehow. Real. Food’s better too, once you can handle it.”
“Tonight, maybe,” I said, pocketing the chalk and leaving the ruler leaned up against the short stretch of the twentieth century, the scratched out record of the precious years we’d bought so far. “So, Willie, do you want to know my name yet?”
“When you’ve lived, Julie,” she said, and she meant something different by it this time. And what did it matter? I bent to help her with the sheet, smoothing out the mattress to catch the next wretched one of us, whenever he or she might land.
FUTURES MARKET
Mitchell Edgeworth
In 1980 my future self-traveled back in time to speak to me. I was twenty years old, sitting on the front porch of my parents’ house in Utica clipping my toenails. He was thirty years old, wearing a suit and tie.
“Pay attention,” he told me. “You’re going to invest in these stocks. Circuit City. Eaton Vance. II Mark IV. Gap . . .”
In 1990 he visited me again, now forty years old, while I was reading the Wall Street Journal over breakfast in my apartment on the Upper East Side. “Put that away,” he said. “You’re going to buy stocks in these companies. Biogen. Kansas City Southern. Middleby Corp . . .”
In 2000 he came to me while I was drinking a negroni at the bar at the Glen Cove Yacht Club, watching the sun go down between the masts of the sailboats. He was fifty now, but still looking good, with a little botox and maybe a nose job. “Apple,” he said. “Intuitive Surgical. Priceline . . .”
After he’d finished off his usual list of about thirty stocks, as he stood up from the bar stool to leave, he glanced at me and added, “Oh, and sell everything in the summer of 2007.”
In 2010 I was sitting in a deckchair on the back lawn of my beachfront mansion in East Hampton. My teenage son and his friends were messing around with the jet ski, and my nine-year-old daughter was building a sandcastle on the beach. I watched with slight apprehension as a hobo shuffled up the beach towards her, but he walked right past and came across the lawn towards me.
He’d aged terribly in just ten years. His eyes were bloodshot and the skin on his left cheek was mottled and red. He had a straggly grey beard and a nasty scar across his forehead. I could see his ribs through his grey t-shirt and his boots looked like they were held together with duct tape.
“Sell the stocks and the bonds and the house,” he said. “Buy some land in Montana. Learn how to shoot and hunt and ride a horse. Take a first aid course. And stock up on potassium iodide . . .”
The End
LETTING GO
Alex Shvartsman
Her expression tells you everything even before she speaks, and your world comes undone.
Then she confirms it: she tells you that her mission is a go. She is so excited, her face is radiant with possibility, and her eyes sparkle with the light of distant stars. You manage to smile, and it is the hardest thing you’ve ever had to endure.
Love requires many sacrifices, which you offer gladly and without hesitation. The most difficult among them, the one that shatters your heart into a million aching shards, is letting go.
She will be gone for sixteen years, but only two years will have passed aboard the ship. When she returns to Earth, she will be in her early thirties. Even if her love for you survives a two-year journey, how can it possibly endure the homecoming? When she returns, you will be biologically twenty years her senior.
Four months later you say goodbye. She tells you that it’s going to be all right. You try your best to believe her. You hug her fiercely and inhale her favorite perfume, trying to commit this moment to memory, from the way her long hair feels under your fingertips to the smell of lilac and jasmine. And then you let go.
The next year is a string of smaller sacrifices. You leave your job at the university because they won’t fund your research. You work eighteen hours a day, and live off your savings. In the end, it’s all worth it.
You prove that time travel is possible, but only going forward. Because it amuses you and—more importantly—because you know it would make her laugh, you design the time machine prototype to look like a blue phone booth.
It will take years to calibrate the equipment to allow for jumps to a precise date. As is, you can travel approximately fifteen years into the future. The exact date doesn’t matter. You can be together again. You imagine the two of you on the cover of Nature, the cover of Time. The first time traveler and the first interstellar astronaut: the power couple of science, and still young enough to reap the rewards of your success.
You do your best to settle all your affairs in the way only a dying person might. You make certain that the house is kept within your family; that the lab remains undisturbed until you return.
There are more sacrifices. You say goodbye to your elderly parents, knowing that it’s likely the last time you’ll see them. You will not get to watch your twelve-year-old nephew grow up. All this for a leap of faith, a ride forward in time that’s as likely to kill you as it is to work as intended. It’s a chance you take gladly, for her.
The ride is anticlimactic. You touch the screen to activate the machine, and it whirrs to life, but you feel nothing. It’s only when you open the door that you know it worked.
Everything in your basement lab looks and feels disused. The papers on your desk are yellowed with age. Your equipment has been boxed up and is stored in the corner. Some of your parents’ old furniture takes up much of the room. An old mattress is propped up against the wall by a baby crib. Your lab has become a storage room.
You hear footsteps on the floor above.
“Hello?” You call out, and a man in his thirties comes downstairs. You barely recognize your nephew.
He recognizes you, too.
“Oh my god, we thought you were dead! It’s been twenty years.” He rushes over.
Your invention overshot its target by five years, but it worked! You blurt out the only question that matters.
