Time Travel Omnibus, page 1171
We worked day in and day out moving through the complications in between. One night when clock showed 3:00 A.M I heard my grandpa screaming “Eureka! Eureka!”. I jumped out of my bed and saw my grandfather with the silvery grey machine with a narrow door and enclosed roof. Soon my doubts vanished, When he told me that it was the “TIME MACHINE” whose concept was brought out by Albert Einstein. I examined its interior and saw two round meters one stating the speed and other Number of year along with the big green button in midst of meters.
My grandpa was inside machine and I in excitement jumped on him to hug him but unexpectedly his hand touched the green button. He forcibly pushed me out of the machine and all of a sudden the door closed, machine began vibrating at immense pace and harsh sound made me close my ears. I tried to get up but machine disappeared.
After that my grandpa never came back and everybody chided my answers. Now I have something to repent for my actions and whenever I miss him, I remember his lines spoken in deep mellow voice for me:
“Hey Champ you are created by God to work for Science. You will do something that will surprise everyone and I know you will definitely make me proud.”
Someday I will definitely find my grandfather and solve the mystery of time travel.
But this time I know that time travel is dangerous.
END
THE VISIT
Christopher Jon Heuer
“Dad, do you think time travel is possible?” Billy asked. “Like on Space Cadet Jake?”
“Probably not the same way it happens on television.” Father tousled his son’s hair and adjusted the telescope. The sky was darkening rapidly. Venus and Jupiter blazed overhead. Even Mars was visible now. Father pulled the small plastic kitchen stool from the trunk of the car so Billy could stand on it and see through the eyepiece. Billy always liked Jupiter the best. Through Father’s telescope you could see the bands, the four stars that were really Galilean moons, and sometimes even the Great Red Spot. Though it was only red in the pictures. Through the telescope the entire planet was yellow.
“Why not?”
Father thought about it. By way of reply he swiveled the telescope on its tripod and pointed it instead at the face of the full moon. He didn’t really need to use the laser diode to home in on it but he used it anyway so Billy could watch and learn. “Okay son,” he said. “Look through the eyepiece. What do you see?”
Billy stood on his tiptoes on the stool. “Nothing.”
“Just wait,” Father said.
A few moments passed. “The moon!” Billy squealed, excited. “I see the edge!”
“Keep watching,” Father said.
More seconds passed. “I see more of it now,” Billy said. It’s moving across the circle!”
“The view field,” Father said. “Yes. Keep watching.”
After a minute, Billy said, “It’s almost gone.”
“Right. Why is it gone?”
Billy thought about it. “Is the telescope moving?”
Father laughed. “Good guess! But no. It’s locked into place on the tripod.”
“Then the moon is moving!”
“Yep. It’s orbiting the Earth.”
“But what does that have to do with time travel?”
“The Earth is doing the same thing. It’s orbiting the sun. Even now at this very second, it’s orbiting the sun. And it’s spinning around on top of that. That’s why it’s nighttime.” Father made little motions with his hand, curling it as if around an invisible ball. “This is the sun,” he said, holding up his other fist. “This is the Earth.” He first turned this, and said, “Night.” Then made this same hand circle the other. “Summer. Fall. Winter, spring,” he said.
“I still don’t understand,” Billy said. “I mean I understand about the seasons and stuff but not time travel.”
Father realigned the telescope with Venus. “When Jake goes back in time he’s always in the same spot. If he’s sitting at a table and presses the time-shift button on his wrist and jumps back five minutes in time he’s still sitting at the table, right?”
“That was just on!” Billy cried. “And then he put down some glue on the seat because he knew Soran the Sauronian would come in and sit down and start being all stupid!”
“Exactly,” Father said. “But think about it. Why would the table still be there? In the exact same spot. With Jake seated there in the same place?”
“I don’t understand.”
Father held up his fist. “Jake is here. At the table.” He pointed at the knuckle of this forefinger. “Exactly right here in the present, okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay the Earth turns, right? So if he goes back five minutes,” Father paused, making his hand turn just a little bit counter-clockwise. “The table would be back where it was five minutes ago. Just like the moon would be back where it was when you first saw it in the view field five minutes ago. By now it’s way over there.” He pointed to where the moon was now. “You can probably barely see it, but look. Right now it’s above that branch there, see? The one that looks like a ‘V’ ? In another minute it’ll move again. Watch.”
Billy watched, and saw. “Oh!” he cried.
Father held up his fist again. “Okay,” he said, “this is the sun.” He held up his other fist. “This is Earth. And let’s say it’s summer. And Jake goes back in time six months. Where’s the Earth?”
Billy thought about it. “On the other side of the sun!” he yelled. “Oh I get it!”
Father tested. “So if Jake went back six months in time but stayed in the same place, where would he appear?”
“In space!”
“Yep. Good thing he has a spacesuit.”
“Wow, I never even thought about that!”
“A lot of people don’t. Actually it’s a lot more complicated. It’s not just the Earth going around the sun. Everything moves. The sun moves. The whole Milky Way Galaxy moves. I’m forty-five years old. Between the time I was born, and now, the Earth has moved through trillions of miles of space. If you wanted to go back to my grandfather’s time you wouldn’t have to just go back in time. You’d have to travel a long, long way to get to where the Earth actually was when he was alive.”
“Oh wow,” Billy said. They were quiet for a time. Father focused on Mars, showing him how the ice caps looked like gleaming rainbows in the view field. But after they had packed up all the equipment and were about to head home, he had to express his disappointment. “It’s too bad though, that people from the future will never visit us.”
Father patted Billy’s head. “Well maybe they can,” he said. “They just have to be really careful with their math. So that they appear on Earth. Instead of . . . you know. In front of it or something. In its orbital pa—”
“Look!” Billy pointed up at the sky. “A falling star!”
The End
TIME IS A FACE ON THE WATER
Michael Bailey
“Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it,
a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.”
—Yann Martel, Life of Pi
“I loved you then and I love you now and
I have loved you every second in between.”
—Stephen King, Lisey’s Story
ACT 1: The Past
What kind of play is this?
Günay admired the rivulets interrupting the otherwise placid pool of water in the creek out back, the place he went to think, to reflect on life, and to figure out what the fuck it all meant.
Death had taken his daughter, Airavata. He and Luci chose the name after looking through a book on names and originations. Airavata, sometimes Air for short, meant “child of water”, which they thought clever since Gün’s own name was Turkish for sun and Luci derived from the Latin lux, meaning light. From sun and light they had created a daughter they had sometimes called air and sometimes called water, and she was gone. Ten years ago she’d died. Like it was yesterday.
A tragedy?
Yes, life’s often a tragedy, but sometimes much more . . .
A comedy?
No, no one’s laughing.
A history?
Yes, there’s much history involved.
Life was beautiful play, for the most part, full of rich colors, warmth, love, and characters, so many characters, full of dialogue—sometimes internal, but more often spoken aloud whether necessary or not—and of course life was full of memorable scenes, one after another after another, like rivulets of water dancing chaotically together; and yet, sometimes life quieted down and turned placid, allowing you to reflect more clearly on the three acts of past, present, and future.
Act 1, in Gün’s case, encompassed approximately thirty years of his life, and could be summarized by the following: birth, childhood, adolescence, transition to adulthood, sexuality, self-discovery, finding and marrying the light of his life known as Luci, and then writing the first act of Airavata’s play, which, since life turns like a wheel, included her birth, childhood, adolescence . . .
Airavata had lived a one-act play.
And now I’m entering Act 2 of my own two- or, if I’m lucky, three-act play, Gün mused, staring at the water.
The creek, like the rest of state, had mostly dried up. Sparse rain the night before trickled water down the creek, which travelled the long path from the mountain and eventually through their backyard. Such a wonderful sound. Small pools of black had welled where it could as insects skimmed over the surface; green, mossy river rocks below created the dark appearance. The rain often summoned newts and less often salamanders to the uncovered rocks, and Gün noticed now an orange-bellied creature with bubbly brown skin surfacing for air.
He and Air had often carried these timid California newts around the property, and they didn’t seem to mind; they held on tight, in fact, with a strong embrace as if affectionate. The Taricha torosa, he’d later discovered, secreted a potent neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, hundreds of times more toxic than cyanide, the same toxin found in pufferfish and certain frogs.
“They’re not dangerous by any means,” Gün assured Luci on more than one occasion. “Well, they are, but only if you poke them with a stick real hard, and only if you ingest what they excrete.”
It was chain reaction of events, much like life, that made the California newt so interesting. To protect itself from birds, snakes, and other prey, the seemingly innocent creature had evolved over time to excrete the deadly toxin, arching its back and writhing to expose the bright-orange warning color of its belly if pierced, making the newt nearly untouchable as a species. Yet, as if a long-winded Darwinian joke, a few species of garter snake evolved as well, developing a genetic resistance to tetrodotoxin, putting this particular animal back in the food chain. And now they were nearly extinct.
But who fuckin’ cares about newts, Gün thought.
As if in response, the newt crawled ever so slowly onto a dry rock and studied him.
A blue-and-white sky reflected against the black-mirror surface of the small pool, as well as the autumnal-changing yellows, browns, and reds of grapevines intertwined in the branches of the trees lining the creek bed. Seafoam-green Spanish moss draped over limbs like delicate lace. Rainbow colors surrounded him as sunlight permeated the canopy in stripes.
Lux, he thought. Luci. My light.
When placed together, their names formed the compound word sunlight.
“Look, a heart,” Air had said one day, holding a large crimson grape leaf against her chest. Gün took in the memory, as well as the crisp smell of redwoods and birches and dying grapes as the wind offered all of it to him. They had sometimes floated leaves down the creek when it was running well, to see whose would reach the waterfall by the big rock the fastest.
Gün found a yellow grape leaf and placed it in the water. It floated alone, not moving anywhere, but spinning in slow circles because there was not enough current to move it along.
Luci took Airavata’s death the hardest. She rarely spoke, burying herself in cleaning and other such chores, whether necessary or not, and she refused to touch Air’s room, as if waiting for her to return one day. It took her and Gün three days to talk about what happened, and even after they talked about it, neither had anything much to say. This lack of communication nearly wrecked their marriage, but they’d somehow stuck together and survived the roughest of times. It wasn’t Luci’s fault, but both their faults. Communication’s a collaborative enterprise.
Will she stay? Gün asked the water, meaning Luci, meaning would she stay alongside him to see how their play would ultimately end, to see what kind of a play they had lived.
He looked at his reflection and his reflection looked back.
Ten years, he thought. Will she stay for ten more years?
Water rippled from the wind, from the bugs, from floating hearts and other debris, from the deadly newt crawling back under the surface. Ravens fluttered and cawed from the treetops, as if laughing from above at his internal dialogue. The scent of leaves decomposing on the wet ground at the edge of the creek was aromatic, along with the mushrooms and lichen growing on fallen branches and the snapped fir tree dangling over the water.
And then the face changed, much quicker than the season.
His once brown hair was a little less brown, with perhaps some peppered gray, perhaps thinner; his facial hair appeared lighter as well, his cheeks more gaunt, his eyes a shade darker and baggier. He was older.
Ten years. This is what I will look like in ten years.
A hazy version of Luci’s face peered over his reflection’s shoulder, like a heat wave over hot asphalt. She, too, appeared ten years older. Crow’s feet had begun at the corners of her eyes, her face thinner, her expression as sad as his.
This is what she will look like in ten years.
She was a stunning woman, always. Add another ten years, and another ten years, and, hell, even another, and she’d still be as beautiful as the day he fell in love with her all those years ago. But that was more of the past. Love’s a hard thing to find after tragedy.
Gün turned and was surprised to find Luci standing there. This was his daydream, after all, his glimpse into the looking glass.
She didn’t say anything at first, only put a hand on his shoulder.
He put his hand over hers and together they looked at the creek.
The high afternoon sun had dropped closer to the horizon to become a setting sun, the colors changing once more before their final fade to colorless night; the yellows more orange, the oranges more red, and the reds becoming various shades of purple like the mountain range to the east. The colors seemed warmer, almost glowing, although it was much colder than when he had first come out to the creek to think.
“I found something new,” she said, meaning something of Airavata’s.
Ten years had passed and they were still finding pieces of her past scattered around them.
A week after her funeral, which was also a week after Air’s tenth birthday, Gün found a shriveled balloon left over from her birthday party. He found it in the laundry hamper, of all places, and at first thought it was a bunched-up sock mixed in with the rest of her dirty clothes. Air had often worn bright socks, not necessarily matching. And he remembered knowing then that Luci would wash these clothes, even though she’d never be able to wear them again. It was a red oxidized balloon that he found, like a blotch of memory, with some of Air’s breath trapped inside.
He’d held the balloon close to his chest, sobbing tearlessly, his chest caving painfully with each uncontrollable spasm. “Sometimes it hurts to cry,” his mother once told him, and it was then he finally understood her meaning. The tears eventually came, and they did hurt, and by that time, Luci had come looking for him because he’d been gone for so long.
“I said I found something new,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Where were you just now?”
“I was just remembering the balloon.”
She squeezed his hand tighter and he squeezed back, three times.
I love you, it meant, one squeeze for each word.
Some words were harder to say after losing a daughter, but some words could be said without talking at all.
She squeezed back, two times, ever so softly.
I know.
Airavata had created the secret language, perhaps a dozen or so phrases through various hand squeezes. It was one of the few things of hers that didn’t hurt to keep.
They held on to the balloon a few more days after finding it, and it sometimes joined them at the dinner table, or on the dash of the car when they went out for a drive, and every day the balloon shrank, and what was left of Air inside slowly dwindled and dwindled . . .
“Yeah?” she said.
“I remember the smell,” he said. “We were so afraid of losing her, you know? Her breath was in there, that small part of her we could keep, but holding on to the balloon and not releasing her breath meant we could lose her forever, even though by cutting open the balloon we’d get her for that brief moment, and still lose her forever.”
She squeezed his hand, once, for a long time. It didn’t mean anything specific, but somehow meant something that couldn’t be expressed in words, and they both understood.
Luci had squeezed his hand like that the moment before they cut open the balloon to let the last of Air go.
“It smelled like huckleberry lip gloss,” she said.
“It did.”
Gün smiled, and although he couldn’t see Luci’s smile, he knew it was there.
Luci pointed over his shoulder to another dry rock.
The orange-bellied newt had returned, or maybe one of his friends.
“She used to love carrying those around,” she said. “Remember the second year we lived here, she found five of them, or six, and she came running to the back patio holding all of them at once?”
“And the next day she found ten.”
