Time Travel Omnibus, page 793
And anyway, what will happen with this mad expedition to the past? I’ll find myself kilometres from the church, with no means of transportation to get there. Or else, if I get there, I won’t be able to intervene. How would I stop that girl? If I was writing a story, I know exactly how it would end: the heroine would succeed in going back in time. After all kinds of adventures, she would reach the church just in time to throw herself on the suicidal girl before she could leap into space. There would be a struggle between them. And it would be my heroine who fell over the parapet to fall, either on the head of her alter ego, or on Vero’s.
I’m sick of it. Vanier wants emotions? Well here’s one: I’m fed up with waiting. I’ve had it up to here with eating my heart out imagining all sorts of ways, each more horrible than the next, of terminating this expedition. The power plant blows up. There’s a defect in the structure containing the forcefield—it ruptures and the bunker collapses on us. Sorry, I won’t be in the bunker.
Phew. Just a second to let the adrenaline level fall.
It’s crazy, it’s exactly what made me decide to embark on this. I’m fed up with pessimism, with the turn of mind that always made me imagine the worst. I can’t walk along the sidewalk without convincing myself that a car is going to jump the curb and run me down. When I take the subway, I wonder which end will collide with the next train, the front or the back? When you have an accident happen “that only happens to other people,” when you experience what you have one chance in a million of experiencing, no one can convince you that it won’t happen again.
I shouldn’t have gone that evening. A journalist grabbed me and for an hour he followed me around like a puppy. He wanted to know my reasons for being in Paris, if it could be expected I would set a story there, and on and on. The security service had to ask him to leave me alone if he didn’t want to be thrown out. Now the bastard will likely be in a hurry to trash my next book. If I’m still a writer after . . .
That’s an outstanding debt. The journalists. At the beginning of my career, I would have given anything for good press, an interview. And then, when things went well, I realized that I couldn’t do it. Whatever guy approached me, I would always think back to that night, alone in Paris in my hotel room, when the Quebec journalists telephoned me. I would see the cameras flashing at the funeral. The screaming match with the guys for Photo-Police. The girl who killed Vero even poisoned my success. Maybe that’s what I find the hardest to forgive.
Thursday, June 15, 2024
We had the first session. Vanier was furious with me and I’m dead tired. I almost smashed my fist on his nose just now. The fool blames me for the failure of his attempts at hypnosis. He says I refuse to let go. During the tests, though, it worked all right, didn’t it? I think he’s the fly in the ointment. He went so far as to claim I was cheating with my emotions, that I was only a petty bourgeois who wants to stop feeling guilty, and that I would do better to treat myself to sessions with a psychiatrist. I replied that the shrink would have cost less. I think I also answered that he was mad at me because I didn’t mortgage my house to pay the full cost (it was true, in fact, that he took me at a discount, but it was he who offered it). In short, a huge row. He told me that I was trying to hurt myself, that I was punishing myself for my success. Success! I would really like to be able to shove my last royalty cheque under his nose! They’re not mobbing the book fairs to see me, as far as I know. I manage to live from my pen because I have always been able to publish steadily, in all sorts of fields. I have no titles that have been sold on the international market. Punish myself! And what else? “You’re cheating,” he repeated. Then I understood. After all, it’s not hard for him to get access to my files on the TRI network. Maybe he’s even reading me, the voyeur. Are you happy, Vanier? I’m furious! I’d like to break your nose. Who do you think you are, you charlatan? Because you play with other people’s money, you’re not too worried about piling up failures, when it’s the guinea pig who coughs up the money. You wanted me, you’ve got me! Start by hiring a real hypnotist, and then we’ll talk about my underlying motivations.
Friday, June 16, 2024
It’s better now. We’ll do another test tomorrow. I’m too beat to elaborate. Bedtime.
Addendum to the journal of F.P.
I did it. I’m scared.
I know I succeeded, because I went to the newsstand just now, and I saw. Sunday, August 7, 1983. From the position of the sun, it’s still not noon. I didn’t keep my watch. It wouldn’t have been any use to me. The only objects you’re permitted to take with you are this single sheet of paper and this antique pen. A little money too, old coins Vanier bought from a coin dealer.
I wasn’t entitled to anything else, because they’re afraid I’ll be called back, of course. But as much as I think with all my strength about my reality, my brain refuses to trigger the return process. Because of the hypnotic conditioning no doubt. Vanier warned me about it. He’s a better hypnotist than I said he was.
It’s better now. Writing always calms me down. I still feel nauseated, but I don’t think I’m going to vomit anymore, or dirty my pants. I arrived at just the right moment, at the right place (I’m in the park behind the church). I felt a moment of panic, just now, because I can’t remember any more which of the two spires I have to climb, but I found the information buried in the back of my mind. Vanier has thought of everything. If I had come a day too early, I would have attempted to find the girl at her home, before she came here, but that maybe wouldn’t have been possible. All things considered, it’s better that it happen now. I wouldn’t have had the courage to kill her.
I have to climb. With my sixty-five-year-old legs. And if I met myself, in spite of the crowd, the strollers, the tourists, the souvenir sellers? Especially if I ran into Vero . . .
Enough humming and hawing! I know what I have to do. There’s no turning back. Come what may.
Saturday, June 17, 2024
I couldn’t go up. It was an immense shaft of shadows. I guessed it to be high, so high, endlessly high, a well to draw night from the very sky. My legs felt like lead and refused to move. I didn’t know what I had come there to do.
I turned back, went out into the light, the sun, the heat, the crowd, the movement. Then I remembered: I was supposed to climb the spire, prevent the girl from committing suicide. There was nothing to attempt now. I had hesitated too long. Hurry, climb those infinite steps, put one foot in front of the other, all the way up, I could at least give a warning when the girl tried to throw herself down. I was sure to recognize her: I remember so well her black shoes, her black skirt and her black blouse, her hair fanned out in a dark mass to hide her bloodied face, there, below, when I turned towards the cries of the crowd to discover who was dying at my feet, while beside her lay Vero’s corpse.
I felt as weak as a baby. Everything I dreamed about, all those years, the ruse to get into the hospital, where the girl would be if she survived, the room where I would break her spine, or else the cutting words I would throw at her as she rotted in her wheelchair, or else the pitiless gesture by which I would kill her, that morning, before she left home to so commit suicide . . .
All that, all that. Ridiculous. I wasn’t even able to climb that staircase. Not able to face reality.
I plunged into the crowd, jostling strollers, tourists, the stuck-up twits. Wildeyed like an old madwoman. That’s what the two gendarmes I ran into must have thought. Quick, quick, I heard a girl talking about climbing up there to jump . . .
Sceptical, they promised to keep an eye out. The idiots, they won’t do anything, they were men of stone that I couldn’t budge.
I ran to the gate of Notre Dame behind which I would be, we would be, soon when the girl . . . I knew that I would meet myself. What would happen then? Would one of us vanish in a puff of smoke? Oh well.
Once again my legs were too heavy. They refused to move forward. Feet of stone, like the gargoyles that watched me from up there laughing.
And then, there was shouting, in the crowd, I think I screamed myself too. I saw myself, I wasn’t looking my way. Where was Vero? I didn’t see her. A movement in the crowd hid the group of tourists from my view. I saw the girl fall, a mass of gesticulating black, she was falling, she fell for hours, centuries. Then, that sickening sound like a pumpkin smashing on the paving stones.
The crowd rushed in that direction, I wasn’t able to see anything for a long time, I had to cut through, push through, elbow my way through to reach the gate, where the gendarmes were pushing back the frightened spectators.
The girl was laying on the ground, broken in the same position as in my memory. But she was alone. The tourists who were in the area of her fall had surged back towards the entrance of the church when the screams were heard. I had succeeded. Vero was alive.
It is the most marvellous dream I have ever had in my life.
Saturday, June 17, 2024
I’m coming back from a last row with Vanier (a last row! I hope that’s the case!). I don’t know what he did to me, what he ordered me to do, under hypnosis, but I feel all shrivelled up, my veins stand out on my hands, the hands of an old woman. Vanier claims that it’s fatigue, of course. The voyage can’t be done without exhaustion. What idiocy! There was no voyage, he lied to me, I dreamed it all. He held a scribbled sheet of paper under my nose, but obviously he could have made me write it while I was under his control.
Right after my “return,” Vanier contacted a newspaper to check the archives. I could only speak to him via television, since he didn’t want to leave the protected bunker as long as he didn’t have proof of a supposed variation in the temporal matrix. I haven’t changed at all myself, yet I have never been under the protection of the forcefield. That’s why I yelled at Vanier at first. Nothing has changed. His answer: he shoved under my nose, using the monitor, the front page for Monday, August 8, 1983. No tourists killed during a spectacular suicide. I’d actually succeeded.
He made me call somebody in my family. I started with my brother, because he wasn’t talkative. I was sure I could get off the line quickly. He thought I was funny. I didn’t dare ask him if Vero was alive. I imagined Vanier (who was listening in), cursing. Then, Jacques told me my agent had called, that he was trying to reach me. My agent! I’ve never had an agent. And yet . . . Yes. I have an agent. I even knew his name, his number, before my brother read the message.
Then it was my turn to yell at Vanier. Not only had nothing really changed, but it was worse.
I just don’t know anymore.
I called my agent. He answered with hesitation, accustomed as he was to my manias, my eccentricities (accustomed to?). He didn’t balk when I asked him to describe my family. Three children alive. Vero, dead in a car accident, Sunday, September 11, 1983.
I always hated driving. I was always afraid in a car.
When Vanier’s face replaced my agent’s on the monitor, I smashed in the screen with my fist.
Sunday, June 18, 2024
The metal chair is hard and icy under my buttocks. I can’t get to sleep. I should have gone back to the hotel, but they want to run some more tests, tomorrow. Today. I don’t care.
Vanier won’t want to. First I have to go home, work a little, in order to replenish my bank account. My agent was trying to reach me because he had a proposal for me, from a producer. Just as well. If I have money, Vanier will have to listen to me. Because he’s wrong. I didn’t succeed. The weak variations they observed in the temporal matrix are not due to a change in the past. The matrix remained stable because the past did not really undergo a change. Vero’s death was moved, not prevented. I will succeed the day I open my eyes in a world in which my sister lives—where I will be nothing, an unknown author, a failure?
I don’t know what I want anymore.
I want to try again, that’s for sure. With or without Vanier.
Could a hypnotist, back home, create the conditions . . .?
I stopped writing, just a minute. The lamp lights me, harshly, directly. I look at my hands, my hands lying on my knees. My dark blue pyjamas.
Why do I have this feeling of déjà vu that makes me want to scream?
A HISTORY OF TEMPORAL EXPRESS
Wayne Freeze
The History of Temporal Express
by Wayne S. Freeze
Miss Goemmer’s 12th Grade History Class
Senior Research Report, 2015
THIS YEAR’S SENIOR RESEARCH REPORT WAS TO RESEARCH MODern business or government organization and write a paper that discussed the key events in its history. The report must be at least 2,000 words long and must include a minimum of four different sources of information. I selected Temporal Express for my report since many of its key events occurred during my lifetime.
It is all but impossible to discuss modern business without talking about Temporal Express. Its motto, “When it absolutely, positively must be there yesterday” has changed the face of today’s world. Although formed in the early twenty-first century, its origins actually date back to the late 1990s. Formed by a group of researchers at Maryland State University who were pushing the then known limits of high energy physics, TempEx (as it is more commonly known) has brought with it a whole new era of prosperity.
The Discovery
Temporal Express was founded in 2001 by Dr. Christopher Jameson, Dr. Samantha Ashburn, and Dr. Terry Katz. These same individuals are credited with building the first practical time transporter. The fundamental breakthrough that allowed them to build the time transporter occurred in 1998 while they were trying to build a device that would transport objects instantly from one location to another.
Their initial experiments were wholly unsuccessful. Objects placed on the transport platform disappeared as expected, but did not reappear on the receiving platform. This led to a vigorous debate as to where the objects actually went. On 1 April 1998, Dr. Jameson found one of the test objects on the receiving platform—a child’s wooden block with the letter T on the side. Thinking that either Dr. Ashburn or Dr. Katz was playing an April Fool’s joke on him, Jameson placed the block back on the shelf and forgot about it. He didn’t notice that there was an identical block sitting right next to it.
Later in the week, the researchers decided to try transporting an object from the receiving platform back to the original transporter pad. While this was supposed to work according to their theories, they hadn’t tried it before. When Dr. Katz went to get a test block, he found two blocks with the letter T on the shelf. Wondering why there were two blocks with the same letter, he grabbed the original one and placed it on the receiver pad.
When this block disappeared, Dr. Katz laughed and said that they were in luck and got the second block from the shelf. Dr. Jameson looked at it closely and instantly recognized the paint smudge that was identical to the block he had found on the receiver platform earlier in the week. Dr. Ashburn shook his head and said “Wouldn’t it be funny if the blocks were actually going backward in time?”
The more they thought about it, the more Dr. Ashburn’s explanation seemed to make sense. Further experiments proved that Dr. Ashburn was correct—the blocks actually did go back in time. They had actually built a time transporter!
The Evolution
To say that the researchers made a unique discovery was an understatement. However when Dr. Jameson, Dr. Ashburn, and Dr. Katz released their initial findings to their peers, no one believed them. They were treated as objects of ridicule. Eventually they took their case to the general public.
On the now famous episode of “Sixty Minutes,” they were able to convince Dan Rather that their machine actually worked. They were able to send Dan’s watch back in time sixty minutes while he and five different cameras recorded the event. Dan Rather actually picked up his future watch and compared it to the one on his wrist. It was identical. He then held on to the future watch and placed the one on his wrist on the time transporter’s pad, and exactly sixty minutes after the first watch was sent, he pressed the button to send his watch back into the past.
The subsequent publicity overwhelmed the researchers with requests for time travel projects. The most common requests were for pictures and artifacts from ancient history. An original copy of King Lear by Shakespeare, a scroll from Moses, and a piece of the cross from the Crucifixion of Christ were among the most popular.
Unfortunately these requests were impossible to fulfill. Early in their time transporter research, the doctors quickly identified three main limitations to their new device. The first limitation is that the time transporter can transport objects only to another version of itself. The second is the more massive the object, the more power it requires to transport it. Thus sending one two pound object requires significantly more power than sending two one pound objects. The third limitation is that sending an object back in time two days requires more than twice the power required to send an object back one day.
In addition to these three limitations, the researchers found another problem. It appeared to be possible to change the future. Dr. Ashburn received a message from herself in the future that suggested that she buy a lottery ticket with a particular set of numbers which would win a large sum of money. But on that evening’s drawing, Dr. Ashburn didn’t win anything. Subsequent experiments showed that sending the winning number back into the past worked only when someone didn’t act on that information. The Theory of Useless Information was coined by Dr. Katz to describe this phenomenon.
Once the three limitations plus the Theory of Useless Information became known to the general public, interest in the time transport device waned. It looked like the time transporter was destined to become a research oddity that would never become practical.
