Time Travel Omnibus, page 989
In the weeks that followed, Ali gave himself no time to brood on his fate. Stage Two had English classes, and though Fahim and the others had long outgrown them, Ali joined in. He finally learned the names for the European letters and numbers that he’d seen on weapons and machinery all his life, and the teacher encouraged him to give up translating individual words from Persian, and reshape whole sentences, whole thoughts, into the alien tongue.
Every evening, Ali joined Fahim in the common room to watch the news on TV. There was no doubt that the place they had come to was peaceful and prosperous; when war was mentioned, it was always in some distant land. The rulers here did not govern by force, they were chosen by the people, and even now this competition was in progress. The men who had sent the soldiers to block the bridge were asking the people to choose them again.
When the guard woke Ali at eight in the morning, he didn’t complain, though he’d had only three hours’ sleep. He showered quickly, then went to the compound’s south gate. It no longer seemed strange to him to move from place to place this way: to wait for guards to come and unlock a succession of doors and escort him through the fenced-off maze that separated the compound from the government offices.
James and Reza were waiting in the office. Ali greeted them, his mouth dry. James said, “Reza will read the decision for you. It’s about ten pages, so be patient. Then if you have any questions, let me know.”
Reza read from the papers without meeting Ali’s eyes. Fernandez, the man who’d interviewed Ali, had written that there were discrepancies between things Ali had said at different times, and gaps in his knowledge of the place and time he claimed to have come from. What’s more, an expert in the era of the Scholars had listened to the tape of Ali talking, and declared that his speech was not of that time. “Perhaps this man’s great-grandfather fled Khurosan in the time of the Scholars, and some sketchy information has been passed down the generations. The applicant himself, however, employs a number of words that were not in use until decades later.”
Ali waited for the litany of condemnation to come to an end, but it seemed to go on forever. “I have tried to give the applicant the benefit of the doubt,” Fernandez had written, “but the overwhelming weight of evidence supports the conclusion that he has lied about his origins, his background, and all of his claims.”
Ali sat with his head in his hands.
James said, “Do you understand what this means? You have seven days to lodge an appeal. If you don’t lodge an appeal, you will have to return to your country.”
Reza added, “You should call your lawyer. Have you got money for a phone card?”
Ali nodded. He’d taken a job cleaning the mess, he had thirty points in his account already.
Every time Ali called, his lawyer was busy. Fahim helped Ali fill out the appeal form, and they handed it to James two hours before the deadline. “Lucky Colonel Kurtz is gone,” Fahim told Ali. “Or that form would have sat in the fax tray for at least a week.”
Wild rumors swept the camp: the government was about to change, and everyone would be set free. Ali had seen the government’s rivals giving their blessing to the use of soldiers to block the bridge; he doubted that they’d show the prisoners in the desert much mercy if they won.
When the day of the election came, the government was returned, more powerful than ever.
That night, as they were preparing to sleep, Fahim saw Ali staring at the long white scars that criss-crossed his upper arms and chest. “I use a razor blade,” Fahim admitted. “It makes me feel better. The one power I’ve got left: to choose my own pain.”
“I’ll never do that,” Ali swore.
Fahim gave a hollow laugh. “It’s cheaper than cigarettes.”
Ali closed his eyes and tried to picture freedom, but all he saw was blackness. The past was gone, the future was gone, and the world had shrunk to this prison.
4.
“Ali, wake up, come see!”
Daniel was shaking him. Ali swatted his hands away angrily. The African was one of his closest friends, and there’d been a time when he could still drag Ali along to English classes or the gym, but since the appeal tribunal had rejected him, Ali had no taste for anything. “Let me sleep.”
“There are people. Outside the fence.”
“Escaped?”
“No, no. From the city!”
Ali clambered off the bunk. He splashed water on his face, then followed his friend.
Dozens of prisoners had gathered at the south-west corner of the fence, blocking the view, but Ali could hear people on the outside, shouting and banging drums. Daniel tried to clear a path, but it was impossible. “Get on my shoulders.” He ducked down and motioned to Ali.
Ali laughed. “It’s not that important.”
Daniel raised a hand angrily, as if to slap him. “Get up, you have to see.” He was serious. Ali obeyed.
From his vantage, he could see that the mass of prisoners pressed against the inner fence was mirrored by another crowd struggling to reach the outer one. Police, some on horses, were trying to stop them. Ali peered into the scrum, amazed. Dozens of young people, men and women, were pushing against the cordon of policemen, and every now and then someone was slipping through and running forward. Some distance away across the desert stood a brightly colored bus. The word “freedom” was painted across it, in English, Persian, Arabic, and probably ten or twelve languages that Ali couldn’t read. The people were chanting, “Set them free! Set them free!” One young woman reached the fence and clung to it, shouting defiantly. Four policemen descended on her and tore her away.
A cloud of dust was moving along the desert road. More police cars were coming, reinforcements. A knife twisted in Ali’s heart. This gesture of friendship astonished him, but it would lead nowhere. In five or ten minutes, the protesters would all be rounded up and carried away.
A young man outside the fence met Ali’s gaze. “Hey! My name’s Ben.”
“I’m Ali.”
Ben looked around frantically. “What’s your number?”
“What?”
“We’ll write to you. Give us your number. They have to deliver the letters if we include the ID number.”
“Behind you!” Ali shouted, but the warning was too late. One policeman had him in a headlock, and another was helping wrestle him to the ground.
Ali felt Daniel stagger. The crowd on his own side was trying to fend off a wave of guards with batons and shields.
Ali dropped to his feet. “They want our ID numbers,” he told Daniel. Daniel looked around at the melee. “Got anything to write on?”
Ali checked his back pocket. The small notebook and pen it was his habit to carry were still there. He rested the notebook on Daniel’s back, and wrote “Ali 3739 Daniel 5420.” Who else? He quickly added Fahim and a few others.
He scrabbled on the ground for a stone, then wrapped the paper around it. Daniel lifted him up again.
The police were battling with the protesters, grabbing them by the hair, dragging them across the dirt. Ali couldn’t see anyone who didn’t have more pressing things to worry about than receiving his message. He lowered his arm, despondent.
Then he spotted someone standing by the bus. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He, or she, raised a hand in greeting. Ali waved back, then let the stone fly. It fell short, but the distant figure ran forward and retrieved it from the sand.
Daniel collapsed beneath him, and the guards moved in with batons and tear gas. Ali covered his eyes with his forearm, weeping, alive again with hope.
BACK
Susan Forest
Sometimes attention to detail is really important . . .
It was while Alan and Victor were touring the warehouse with the real estate agent that a slip of paper bearing the words, “It worked,” materialized on a desk in the office.
Alan stared at the note, strength draining from every muscle in his body as disbelief turned to realization, then to euphoria.
“Alan—” Victor swallowed, turning white as the paper, his eyes wide beneath unruly curls.
Alan lifted the note and fingered its crisp, white softness. It was real. Real.
“We haven’t started the experiments yet.”
Thirteen years—thirteen goddamn years of hope and faith. And now, Alan’s belief in Victor had been borne out.
Victor turned to the real estate agent. “We’ll take it.”
“This proves it.” Words poured from Alan’s mouth, out of control, as he paced the room. “It’s going to happen, Victor. The world has changed. It has.”
“Well, something’s happened,” Victor conceded. He snapped his laser measure closed and knelt on the concrete floor to record the width of the West Vancouver warehouse in his notebook.
Alan squatted in front of him, next to the wall. “And no one knows it but you and me.”
It was pushing ten o’clock, and neither of them had thought to go home. The warehouse was dusty and dark, lit by a half dozen fluorescents high above their heads and the sound of traffic and trains filtered in from beyond the aging brick and lumber walls. The real estate agent, frightened and suspicious—but ten thousand dollars richer—had left with their signed lease hours ago.
Victor pushed his stylus behind his ear. “We still have to build the time machine and send that paper back to today’s date. The experiment isn’t done until we do.”
“But we know the results. The rest is just technical.”
Victor eyed Alan. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“We can still screw up, Alan.”
Alan slapped the paper as proof. “Look at it. How can you be so skeptical?”
Victor frowned in annoyance. “Put the paper down before you wear it out. If this turns out to be what we hope, that’s a valuable archive you’ve got your biodegrading sweat on.”
Alan hurried to the office, holding the evidence gingerly by one corner and put it in his briefcase, letting his eyes linger on the handwritten scrawl for one last moment. Then he whirled back to Victor, who was on the floor, pointing the laser measure at the ceiling.
“What do you mean, ‘maybe’ ? How could this paper appear out of nowhere, unless we sent it back in time?”
“Lots of explanations. Maybe someone’s working on a molecular transporter or duplicator. Could have been someone else also working on time travel. There’s been sufficient data in the world archive since 2032 for anyone to access.” Victor collapsed the laser beam. “We have competitors, you know, Alan.”
“Competitors with a paper marked, ‘It worked,’ in my handwriting?”
Victor pulled himself to a sitting position and pushed his long curls away from his glasses. “Alan, you set your heart on things. I don’t want you to be disappointed. I don’t want you to give me credit for being a genius when so many things can still go wrong. It’s possible to want something so badly you miss the obvious, you know.”
“The paper appeared out of nowhere in front of our eyes in the very location we leased to do the experiments. I didn’t miss that.”
“Besides, we don’t know how far along other researchers are. We still have a lot of work to do.” Victor punched the measurements into his notebook. “And we have no university or grant money or big corporations behind us.”
Alan sat cross-legged on the floor. “Because we don’t want red tape to tie us up until we’re ninety.”
Victor shrugged. “Academic backing lends credibility.”
“Not always. Corporations and universities have agendas, Victor. The only way to really do this is on our own.”
“So you say. But, Alan, have you thought about how much it’ll cost before we get results we can publish? Have you really worked it out?”
“You know I have the money.”
“Enough?”
“Great-uncle Alan never made a bad investment in his life. There’s more than enough.”
“But are you sure?” Victor closed his notebook. “There are other things you could do with your inheritance.”
“Like what? Lie on a beach somewhere?” Alan snorted. “Would you do that with your life?”
The sound of a freight train slowing as it approached the docks almost drowned Victor’s response. “No,” he said. He lifted his head. “I wouldn’t.”
“Listen. The money’s mine. I can do with it what I want.”
“Whatever you want, sure.” Victor crawled over to the wall to inspect an electrical outlet. “But Alan, your great-uncle, or whoever he was, may not have meant investing in time travel.”
“Who knows what he meant? I never met him. But his will repeated—” Alan punched the floor with his finger. “Repeated, Victor—that I was to do anything I wanted with the money, anything at all, and none of it was to go to any other relatives. Uncle Alan might not have known me, but he had complete faith in me.”
“Weird.”
“Who cares? We’ve got the money.” Alan leaned his elbows on his knees. “Victor, I’ve wanted this since I was a kid reading Weird Tales with my flashlight in the attic. I wished I’d been the first astronaut to set foot on Mars, if that hadn’t happened before I turned ten. And even that was a privately funded mission.”
“You’re not a kid, now. You’re thirty-five.”
“Yeah. Thirty-five, and what have I done? I want to do something important. Don’t you?”
Victor grinned. “Yeah.”
“We’ll do it and we’ll be the first. We’ll go down in the history books.” He could imagine what it might be like to go back in time. “We’ll make the study of antiquity a completely new science, Victor—solve mysteries from the beginning of time. Maybe—I don’t know—cure poverty or prevent crime.” Alan slumped against the wall and the air puffed from his lungs. He shook his head. “Maybe even see the future. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“First we’ve got to finish perfecting travel into the past.” Victor picked up his instruments. “Come on. It’s late.”
“And we will perfect it. In fact—we have.”
Victor put his notebook in his pocket. “Say, did you know the real estate agent told me this warehouse has video surveillance tapes that go back to 1958? Do you know how rare that is?”
“That settles it. This was meant to be. Everything’s coming together.” Alan put a hand on his friend’s wrist. “Victor, this machine could be the number one most important invention in the history of mankind. And it’s you and me.”
Victor smiled at his friend with affection. “Once we’ve done it.”
Alan bit his nails ragged the night before the first experiment. Victor had built a small machine that took up less than a quarter of the warehouse space, and it was ready to be tested.
The day dawned overcast and threatening rain. Outside the warehouse, engines chugged up and down the yards in fine salt mist. Within, Alan hovered over the technicians, holding the note that had materialized out of thin air in a pair of tweezers, while interminable minutes dragged into interminable hours as the technicians double- and triple-checked the calculations.
Then Victor tore a page from his notebook and pulled a pen from his pocket, waving Alan over to the table in the office. The actual time-travel booth was a glass bell jar; every molecule within it—the air as well as the note—would be sent back eighteen months, to the day Victor and Alan had toured the warehouse. A valve on the top of the booth would allow a prespecified amount of air from the room to be sucked into the bell jar as its contents departed.
Alan set his note on the table, and picking up the pen, began to write. But before the ink was dry, the time-travel paper vanished, leaving only the note Alan had just written.
The technicians stared. Victor frowned. Alan felt his mouth go dry.
Then, nodding, Victor took the note from him, put it in the bell jar, and activated the time machine. There was a hum, and the note disappeared, leaving no evidence that it had ever existed. “Of course,” Victor said softly.
Alan couldn’t believe what he had just witnessed. “It’s gone,” he whispered. “Our proof . . .”
“No—” Victor shook his head. “No, the theory predicts this. The two notes can’t both exist at the same time.”
“But—but—did you know the note would vanish?”
Victor considered. “No,” he said slowly. “But it makes sense when you think about it. There can’t be an anomaly, like a time traveler meeting himself. The disappearance of the time-travel note proves it.”
“But you didn’t know that would happen.”
“That’s why we call it an experiment, Alan. We make predictions, but we don’t actually know what will happen until we try it.” Victor’s grin spread. “But really, the disappearance of the note proves that we were right.”
“It does?”
“Yes! Alan, we have just sent the first object larger than an atom back in time.” Victor grabbed his shoulders, nodding slowly at first, grinning behind his unkempt beard.
The technicians cheered.
“Really?” The other’s rare enthusiasm infected Alan, and he could do nothing but grip his old friend by the arms and pull him close in a heartfelt hug. The celebration that night at the Granville Pub went until three o’clock in the morning.
Victor published, and the race was on.
Working twelve and fourteen hour days, it took seven months to build the equipment for the next experiment. Alan withdrew his inheritance and savings and talked friends into lending money, but the publicity brought investors in droves.
The new time machine had to have a larger booth and Victor had to recalibrate the computers for more complex living biological material. Rather than using a bell jar, he emptied the entire warehouse office and converted it into the new booth. He designed it to both send and receive, because the third stage of the experiments would revolve around bringing subjects back to the present, and with the pressure of competition, Victor didn’t want to halt between the second and third stages to build a more complex booth.
