Time Travel Omnibus, page 876
“Huh?”
“You remember your mission schedule?”
“Of course I do.”
“Well, then. If we assume that you landed four days ago, and have been here ever since, then what’s today’s date?”
Aaron thought for a moment. “If I returned on October tenth, as scheduled, then today’s October fourteenth.”
Gabe sighed. “It’s not.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s May eleventh.”
Aaron narrowed his eyes. “Are you telling me I was in space for over a year? Impossible. I didn’t have enough supplies to last for that long.”
“You misunderstood me. Today’s May eleventh, a week before your launch.”
That evening, still locked in his cell and eating bland food off one of the government-issued trays, Aaron went over the conversation from that afternoon. At first, he had refused to accept his old friend’s statement.
“What are you talking about?” he had asked.
Gabe sighed, and slid down with his back against the wall next to the door. He crouched on the floor, looking ready to jump up if Aaron made any sudden moves. “What I mean is,” he said, drawing each word out, “you haven’t left yet.”
“Bullshit! I’ve gone and returned.” He stood up from the bunk and pointed at himself. “See? Here I am.”
Gabe appeared to tense up. “Oh, I can’t argue with the fact that you’ve returned, Aaron,” he said, waving a hand. “I mean, I’m talking to you right now.”
Aaron settled onto the bunk again. “Well, then?”
“Well, then.” Gabe sighed. “The thing of it is, I also talked to you this morning.”
“This morning? No way. I would have remembered.” Even though, Aaron thought, he had no way of knowing the time, since no clock hung in the cell.
Gabe chuckled. “I’m sure you do remember the conversation. I spoke with the real—I mean, the one of you who hasn’t left yet.”
“And what did we discuss?”
“We talked about the wafer with all the names on it.” Gabe stared at his face. “You said—”
“I said that it was a waste of my weight allowance.”
“Yes.”
Aaron snorted. “I remember that conversation. From over six months ago.”
Gabe shook his head. “It happened this morning.”
Aaron leaned forward. “Prove it to me.”
Gabe stood up again and held out his arms in a gesture of helplessness. “I wish I could.”
“Not good enough. If this is for real, then tell me—how did I travel back in time?”
“We believe your ship followed a Gott closed timelike curve, if you know what that means.”
Aaron shook his head. “I don’t.”
“Do you want me to try to explain it to you?”
Aaron smiled. “I wouldn’t consider it proof.”
Gabe put his fingers together and stared at the wall over Aaron’s head. “Think about my dilemma for a moment, even if you consider it just a theoretical exercise. How could I prove to you that you’re in the past? You’ve lived through it already. There’s nothing I can show you that you haven’t already seen.” He paused. “I suppose you could ask me questions to try to trip me up, but I don’t see how that would work.”
A sudden realization hit Aaron. “But I could prove to you I’m from the future, is that it? Tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow?”
The color drained from Gabe’s face. “No,” he said, “do not do that, under any circumstances.”
“Why not?” Aaron looked around at the walls. “Isn’t that why you locked me in here?”
“No. We locked you in here to avoid any paradoxes.”
“Paradoxes?”
Gabe sighed. “Aaron, what would you do if you managed to build a time machine? What would you use it for?”
Aaron’s nose itched; he scratched it. “You tell me.”
“You might use it to give yourself information about the future, so as to change it. But if you change it, then where did the information come from in the first place?”
Aaron thought for a moment. “I’ve heard of this. The Grandfather Paradox, right? I go back in time and kill my grandfather, and then I was never born. But then how did I go back in time if I never existed?”
Gabe nodded, a small smile on his face. “Good. You do understand.”
Exasperated, Aaron asked, “Whatdo I understand? Tell me.”
“You understand why we had to lock you up.”
Aaron glared at Gabe and clenched his fists. He suppressed the rage he felt. “I do not understand that at all,” he said in measured tones.
“We had to keep you away from everyone else to avoid contaminating the present with information from the future.”
Aaron grunted. “I suppose,” he said, “I could grant that necessity.”
Gabe sighed. “I’m glad you can see it my way. My own presence here is a risk. If you told me something about the future, it could destroy the Universe.”
Aaron stared at his friend for a moment, then laughed. The hollow laughter rippled and cascaded, and wouldn’t stop. After a moment, Aaron began coughing.
“Are you okay, Aaron?”
Aaron waved his friend’s concern away as the last of his coughs spasmed out. “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just that you sounded so melodramatic.” He mimick-ed Gabe’s serious tone. “ ‘It could destroy the Universe,’ ” he repeated, and he started laughing again.
“It could.”
Aaron stopped laughing. “Literally?”
“Yes.”
Aaron thought for a moment. If Gabe was telling the truth . . . “Then coming in here to see me must be some risk.”
Gabe shrugged. “You weren’t doing too well, Aaron. Somebody had to explain.”
Aaron looked into Gabe’s eyes and realized that Gabe himself must have fought for the right to tell Aaron why they had locked him away. For a moment, Aaron felt affection for his friend. But it quickly faded. After all, Gabe might have fought to talk to him, but what Aaron really wanted, really needed—
“Let me go, Gabe.”
“I can’t. It’ll create paradoxes. We need to avoid them.”
“Youcan’t avoid any paradoxes! Hasn’t my presence here already affected the timeline, if you believe your nonsense?”
Gabe smiled. “And now you understand my problem, old friend. According to Doctor—I mean, according to our physicists, I have to minimize your impact here as much as possible.”
Aaron shook his head. “The only way you could do that is by keeping me locked away in here until the time comes for me to return.”
Gabe stared at him silently for a few seconds, and Aaron suddenly felt cold.
“No,” he said. “No way. You can’t possibly—”
“What choice do I have?”
Aaron’s mind raced through the possibilities. “You’ve got a million of them! If you believe this crap, just let me out after the shuttle leaves on May eighteenth.”
“No good,” Gabe said. “We can’t explain your quick return. We’re going to have to keep you here until October, without any other human contact. But I will push for a TV for you. Think of it this way. It will let you catch up with everything you missed, in real time.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”
The door clicked open, and Gabe dashed through it. Aaron had rushed him, screaming, but by the time he got to the door, it had shut tightly in front of him.
And now, as he finished his food and left the tray on the floor, Aaron considered his options. He refused to stay locked up, without human contact, for six months. What could he do? He had to escape, somehow. But how? The door remained locked at all times, and his incessant tapping and banging on the walls had revealed no hollowness anywhere around.
Then he realized something. He had never been awake for the delivery of the food. They had to get it into and out of the room somehow . . .
Aaron smiled. Yawning loudly and deliberately, he walked over to the bunk and lay down. He closed his eyes, fought to stay awake, and waited as if he had all the time in the world. When the door finally clicked open, he was ready.
Only one guard came in to retrieve the tray while Aaron slept. Only one, probably to reduce “contamination” from the future, as Gabe had put it. A lucky break, but Aaron had managed to surprise him. The guard now lay unconscious in the cell as Aaron dashed through the corridors of the base, wondering where he could run to.
As Aaron ran, a feeling of familiarity snuck up on him. He knew the base, he knew it intimately, and this place looked very much like the way he remembered it.
He stopped. Could he really have traveled into the past? Was today really May eleventh—perhaps now May twelfth?
If it really was a week before he launched, then Aaron—his earlier self—would still be here in California, doing some last minute prep work before flying to Florida. They kept him at the base, going over the details of the mission, checking his health, and generally giving him busywork until the time came to leave.
Aaron had nowhere else to run to, and an idea had already begun forming in his mind. Quickly, he navigated his way to his old quarters, in the residential part of the base. He found his door and jimmied it open, glad to see that he still had the lock picking skills he had taught himself in college.
The door opened onto a dark room, with the ambient light of the corridor illuminating the nondescript bed, desk, computer, and chair. He snuck into the room, closed the door gently behind him, and flipped on the light switch. The man lying on the bed groaned and moved an arm to cover his eyes.
Aaron strode over to him, shook the man awake, and found himself face to face with—himself. Despite his expecting this on an intellectual level, his breath still caught in his throat.
The other Aaron’s eyes filled with fear. He opened his mouth, and Aaron quickly placed his hand over it. God, this felt weird.
“Aaron, don’t shout, don’t scream. I need to talk to you. Please relax. I’m not going to hurt you.” He paused. “Do you understand?”
The other Aaron nodded, although fear still showed in his eyes. Slowly, Aaron removed his hand.
“How are you?” he asked.
The other Aaron sat up in his bed and pulled his body back into a defensive position. “What the hell’s going on? How did you get in here?”
“Take a good look at me, Aaron. I’m you.”
Aaron waited while his younger self studied his features. Finally, the younger Aaron said, “This isn’t possible.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Gabe. Apparently, when you—when I—went on the deep space mission, we followed some sort of closed something something loop. I ended up back here, in the past.”
“How is this possible?”
Aaron shook his head. “I can only think of one thing, and I tried to tell Gabe, but he wouldn’t listen.” He sat down next to his younger self. “Halfway through the mission, at the edge of the solar system, I found something, a colorful wall of light. I didn’t discover it until I hit it, but it must have been that closed something something curve Gabe told me about. When I passed through it, I must have traveled back in time.”
The younger Aaron scrunched his eyes closed and shook his head. “I’m dreaming.”
“I wish. For a while I thought I was. But apparently, it’s all real. I must really have traveled into the past.” He looked off to the side. “Except—except that I don’t remember this conversation.”
“What?” his other self asked.
Aaron laughed as something occurred to him. “Listen, you. If I had traveled back in time, and met my past self—meaning you—shouldn’t my future self—meaning me—remember this conversation? Wouldn’t I be forming new memories for every second of this conversation?”
The other Aaron shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on.”
Aaron shrugged. “Well, I don’t know much of the science of time travel either. But it seems pretty likely to me. And that means that I’m not in the past.”
“So where—I mean when—I mean, what’s going on?”
“Stop babbling,” Aaron said. “It makes you—me—look like an idiot.” He sighed. “Now I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe the anomaly thrust me into a parallel universe, similar to mine but a few months out of sync. Perhaps if I search around, I’ll find something different, a clue that I really have jumped universes. Or maybe—” He cut off, thinking.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know. But I know this much—I’m not in the past. And I didn’t even have to kill my grandfather to prove it.” He grinned at his other self. “Or you.”
The younger Aaron suddenly jumped out of the bed and lunged towards the desk.
Oh, shit, Aaron thought. He’s going for my gun.
Aaron lurched at his younger self, his right shoulder aiming directly at the other man’s chest. The younger Aaron went down, bent over and panting to get his breath back.
“No, I’m not going to kill you,” Aaron said. “But I’m not going to be able to convince Gabe to free me either. Unless—” He walked over to the desk, opened the top drawer, and pulled out the gun. He pointed it at Aaron and said, “When you get your breath back, take off your clothes. We’re switching places.”
Despite his conviction that he had fallen into a parallel universe rather than the past, Aaron’s life for the week before the launch followed an eerily familiar track. He couldn’t possibly remember every single detail of his life from six months ago, but nothing happened that seemed out of place. He finished his training, flew to Florida, boarded the DSS, and launched.
And, halfway into the mission, Aaron found himself back at the anomaly, the weird colorful, curving wall of light he had encountered just outside the orbit of the Pluto-Charon system, which currently sat on the other side of the solar system. He remembered planning to tell Gabe about it just before Gabe told him not to reveal any details of the mission. Well, he thought, Gabe loses out.
It suddenly occurred to him that his escape, his approach here—both felt far too easy. Why didn’t he remember this second, long trip to the outer solar system? Why couldn’t he recall launching a second time either? What in God’s name had happened to him?
He passed through the wall of light and found himself in empty darkness.
He opened his eyes and found himself back in his bunk in the cell. Two alien creatures stood in the room with him. They were tall and thin, with human-looking features that appeared stretched out, like in a funhouse mirror.
“Aaron Eliassen,” one of them said in flatly accented English. “You were only partly correct. You did not go back in time, at least not directly. But neither did you fall into a parallel universe.”
Slowly, Aaron eased himself out of the bunk. He kept his back to it and paced towards the wall. “Who are you?”
The aliens glanced at each other, and the smaller one spoke. Aaron couldn’t differentiate between the voices. “Our name would mean little to you if we gave it in our language. Your species calls itself the Wise Ones; we call ourselves the Ones Who Speak.”
Aaron looked back and forth between the two figures, and felt the urge to make a joke. “I’ll call you Jabbers.”
They looked at him without expression. “As you feel the need,” the smaller one said.
“Do you have names?”
“Again, yes, but—”
“But I wouldn’t be able to pronounce them or something. Fine.” He pointed at each in turn, first the larger and then the smaller. “You’re George and you’re Gracie.”
“As you feel—”
“—the need, yeah, I heard you the first time. So why did you tap into my mind and create that illusion for me?”
“You are quicker than we would have anticipated,” Gracie said. “You have already figured out that we had a role in the creation of the illusion of your recent experience.”
“Thank you, but I still want answers. What’s going on?”
It hesitated, then said, “Did you ever wonder about first contact, Commander Eliassen?”
Aaron thought back to all the movies and TV shows he had seen about aliens. “Sure, who hasn’t?”
“We represent an alliance of sentient beings. Whenever we discover a solar system in the process of developing intelligent life, we set up a special wormhole.”
“The anomaly,” Aaron said.
“Yes. We placed a boundary at the edge of your solar system, like a giant soap bubble. When you crossed it, it pulled you through a wormhole and transported you here.”
Aaron quelled his fears by dwelling on the mundane. “Does that mean that the Pioneer and Voyager space probes were taken off course?”
“No. The system is designed to activate only in the event it detects an actual lifeform, not an artifact.”
“Why?”
“Because only then do we know that a race has achieved the ability to colonize the galaxy.”
Aaron stifled a laugh. “Humans are a far cry from colonizing the galaxy.”
“Nevertheless, your race is at a beginning. And if we let you continue your explorations, you would soon discover wormhole travel and our alliance.”
“We just have,” Aaron said.
The aliens remained silent for a moment. Then the larger one took over the discussion. “Actually, you have that the wrong way around.We have discoveredyou . We needed to study your world. Our alliance needed to make sure that your species had developed to the point where you could accept our existence, become a part of our alliance. So we reached into your mind, let you think that you had returned to Earth, and let the scenario play out. So that we could understand your race as completely as possible.”
The smaller alien said, “Unfortunately, your will was most resistant.”
Aaron cocked his head at it. “What does that mean?”
“You were unwilling to create a present for yourself, so you replayed your experiences in the past, over and over, until finally your subconscious realized that you were trapped in a loop.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Your long-term memories have been recorded once; there was no need for them to code the same exact experiences again. So, instead, you broke out.”
