The Curiosity Killers

by K W Taylor

  Wind whipped through the laboratory at an astonishing speed, sending papers flying from every surface. Vere pulled the lever that would turn the accelerator’s status from low to high, and then—

  Darkness.

  Silence.

  The winds died down, and the machine grew still.

  Vere sighed the sigh of a man who’d grown far too accustomed to the rise and fall of his own disappointed breath. He scratched his head, his hair rising to wild corkscrews beneath the reading glasses perched there.

  “I say, sir,” a voice said behind Vere. “Can you give me a hand? I think I’ve…”

  Vere’s heart sped up, and he whirled around, even as the speaker continued.

  “How the devil did I get out of my house?”

  In the empty space between the accelerator’s drive plates stood a man, tall and slim with a fringe of receding blond hair sweeping from a long expanse of smooth forehead. Atop a hawkish nose was a pair of goggles with smoked lenses. The man pulled the goggles off with a hand covered in a heavy leather glove. In the other hand was a blowtorch, but something about the torch seemed off, antique somehow but also a bit artificial, as if it were individually crafted rather than mass-produced.

  Vere gaped. “How the hell did you get in here?” he asked. “Who are you? Maintenance?” He shook his head. “Goddammit, I told maintenance this was a classified area.”

  “I-I…no, no, I’m not from ‘maintenance,’ whatever you mean by that,” the man said. He looked around, frowning. “Not a minute ago, I was in my cellar, and then there was a great cacophony, and then—” A slow smile spread across his face. “It worked,” he murmured. “Oh, my stars, it worked.”

  “What worked?” Vere narrowed his eyes. “What were you working on, buddy? If it was the same thing I was working on…” Vere mused, letting his voice trail off. “This’ll sound like a helluva thing to ask, but back in your cellar, as you say.” Vere leaned in. “What year was it when you were slingin’ that blowtorch, huh?”

  “Precisely the question to ask, sir,” the man said. “Precisely. Because I’d wager it is decidedly not nineteen hundred and ten here, is it?”

  ~

  Wilbur Wright stepped forward, lowered his blowtorch, and took in his surroundings.

  “I was trying to create a vacuum,” Wilbur said, staring off into space and sounding distracted. The windows of the room were caked in layers of soot. The man before him wore trousers that were far too blousy, too feminine, and too short at the ankle. Unkempt and untidy, this other man looked to be a few years younger than Wilbur, yet seemed more world-weary, more woebegone and confused.

  “A vacuum? When? Where?” The other man withdrew a pocket watch and held it out to Wilbur. “How long ago? Because that was exactly what I was trying to do here.”

  “To what end?” Wilbur asked.

  The other man drew back. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t like telling strangers my classified experiments.”

  “Because I was trying to travel in time,” Wilbur continued, “and if we were both attempting something of the sort in different eras…”

  The other man blinked. “…Then one of us could have been thrust forward or backward to the other’s accelerator,” he said. “My God. And you said it was 1910?”

  Wilbur nodded. “End of May, yes, precisely.”

  The other man stroked his chin. “End of May?”

  “The twenty-seventh, I believe.”

  A shaking hand pointed at a wall, where a page-a-day calendar hung displaying the number “27.”

  Wilbur withdrew his own pocket watch. “I’ve got a quarter to midnight. Show me your time again, sir, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course.” The minute hand of the man’s watch was pointing at a Roman numeral nine.

  “Dear me,” Wilbur said. He looked about him and realized he was still standing upon a metal plate. “Do you think…do you think if I remove myself from your apparatus that anything dire will occur?”

  “I shouldn’t think,” the man said. He held out his right hand. “By the by, I’m Doctor Vere. Eddy, if you’d like. And you are?”

  “Wilbur.” Wilbur grasped the other man’s hand and shook it. “Wilbur Wright.”

  Vere dropped Wilbur’s hand and drew back a step. “My God.” He chuckled. “Well, I wonder if this’ll make the history books, Mr. Wright. In addition to flight, you’ve just assisted in the invention of time travel.”

  Wilbur grinned. “I rather like the sound of that.”

  He stepped off the plate and vanished.

  ~

  Vere stared at the empty plate, keeping his eyes open so long they felt like rocks carving out the insides of their sockets. He blinked at last, delicious moisture washing away the dry remnants of his disbelief, and collapsed into his desk chair.

  It isn’t real. It’s exhaustion and too many cans of some amphetamine-yellow caffeine swill. I’m simply high on vitamin B and sleep-deprived hallucinations.

  But as Vere shook his head and let out a short, rueful chuckle, a skittering danced across the plate’s surface once more. Vere raised his head, shoved his glasses back on, and shot to his feet.

  Like a flashlight, battery low, flickering with its last gasp of power, the image of Wilbur Wright came trembling back into view. The man looked somewhat dazed, holding his arms at an angle a few inches from his body as if trying to stabilize himself on a shaky surface. At last, the picture stopped being a picture and became the man himself, stable and solid looking.

  Vere reached out a tentative hand to Wilbur. “You back, then?” he asked. He realized now that Wilbur was no longer holding his blowtorch.

  “Made some calculation readjustments,” Wilbur replied. “Did you? Here, on your end?”

  Vere shook his head. “Not a bit.”

  “Must’ve been my…” He trailed off but then looked down at his hands. “Dare I wonder if it was the iron in my lamp?”

  It took Vere a moment to understand Wilbur meant the blowtorch, and upon some consideration of the problem he nodded. “Iron, yes. I think that could very well be. This here,” he said, tapping the surface of the machine’s acceleration plate, “is made of a material you wouldn’t have seen in your time, an artificial alloy called goddardium, which when the acceleration process is activated becomes charged differently than common iron. Just as a lodestone attracts iron, goddardium is essentially a metal-infused antilodestone. If this connection is already unstable between our two time streams, even the smallest change in particle neutrality could compromise it.” He felt a flutter in his stomach. “We’re actually fortunate you weren’t destroyed, man. The instability could have done a lot worse than send you back home.”

  “I’ve accomplished so much already,” Wilbur said. “Do you know how many times my brother and I almost died?” He waved a hand through the air. “Piffle. The risk of it all, it’s why I don’t have a wife and half a dozen children running about. Too unfair to them when I’m not likely to see fifty, all the things we get up to.”

  Vere blanched. He couldn’t quite recall his history, but if he wasn’t mistaken, Wilbur wasn’t too far off and would, indeed, die decades before his famous sibling. This wasn’t the sort of thing to say, however; who knew what the information could do?

  “Paradox,” Vere muttered.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Nothing, nothing.” Vere shook his head. “Well, sir, if you’re not too concerned with your own welfare, do you want to give it another go? Carefully, of course.”

  Wilbur shrugged. “If I fly into bits, I suppose no one will know what became of me, will they? Quite the mystery, that.”

  A thought far more fantastical than Vere usually entertained entered his imagination. “I wonder. You hear of people disappearing from time to time, even in your day, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Wilbur replied. “Various folks of all stripes sometimes vanish without a trace. I wager many of them have met with misadventure. Things of that sort
occur where the remains are too-well concealed, I suspect.”

  Vere nodded. “But this, us here…doesn’t it make you wonder if perhaps some of those going missing haven’t met with not so much misadventure as—”

  “Adventure,” Wilbur cut in. “Oh, sir, now I have to do this, danger be damned.”

  Wilbur Wright stepped off the plate again, but this time his feet touched down on Vere’s floor. The percussive sound of his thin leather boots on the hard concrete was like the first strains of someone bursting into applause.

  Someone knocked at the door. Vere bristled. “Oh, hang it all, what time is it?”

  “I’m very much the wrong man to ask, my friend.”

  “Quite right.” Vere glanced up at the wall. Dawn was breaking, and though Alison was early it wasn’t unprecedented for her to come in before the rest of the labs. “My graduate assistant is in. Pretend you’re an old friend. Don’t tell her your surname, for God’s sake, and don’t tell her what we’ve been up to.”

  Wilbur raised an eyebrow. “Will she think me odd-looking, do you suspect? Shall I appear out of place?” He gestured down at himself.

  Vere whisked a worn lab coat from the back of an empty desk chair. “Here, toss this on.” The knocking became more insistent.

  “Doctor?” The voice on the other side of the door was gentle. There was a rattling of keys. “I can’t believe I beat you in for a change. I thought you lived here.”

  “No, I’m in, Miss Keller.” Vere jogged across the room and opened the door.

  As the young woman entered, Vere heard Wilbur’s sharp intake of breath.

  “Thanks, doctor.” Alison hung up her coat and hat. “Hi, are you helping today?” she asked Wilbur. “I’m Alison Keller, Doctor Vere’s assistant this semester.”

  “Much to my chagrin,” Vere said, though his tone was kind.

  “Sorry, sir, my scholarship is general rather than department-specific. I think it’s helpful for you to have an outsider’s perspective. You’re so insulated with your physics students all the time.”

  “Ah, so you’re not of the doctor’s discipline?” Wilbur asked. “What are you studying, then?”

  “History,” Alison replied.

  Wilbur looked pained. Behind Alison, Vere made a motion as if locking his lips and tossing away an invisible key. At this pantomime, Wilbur’s expression softened into a smile. “What sort of history?” he pressed.

  Vere flailed his arms, urging Wilbur to quiet. Wilbur ignored him.

  “I’m sorry, how rude of me,” he said, holding out his hand to Alison. “Wilbur Koerner, at your service.”

  Alison laughed. “Oh, that’s amusing. Almost my own name, isn’t it?”

  “My mother was German,” Wilbur said.

  “Your mother?” Alison asked. “Or your father?”

  Wilbur gave a non-committal shrug and sat down on a stool behind a table strewn with small pieces of metal.

  “But to answer your question,” Alison went on, “I study American…well, Empiricist and Rénartian history, I suppose, but pre-war, too, all the way back to the first Civil War.”

  Wilbur blanched. “I beg your…” He paused and cleared his throat. “Fascinating.”

  “It really is.” Alison joined him at the table. “Doctor Vere is thoroughly uninterested in the past. All he cares about is particle acceleration.”

  Wilbur glanced at Vere. “Is that so?”

  “She exaggerates,” Vere said. “And is inaccurate. I do care about the past, Miss Keller. And the future as well. But science for science’s sake, that’s far more relevant than history itself, wouldn’t you agree, Wilbur?”

  Wilbur canted his head from side to side. “One could look at it that way, I suppose,” he allowed. “But I think what’s most interesting is the intersection of history and science. Using science to make history and using history to inform science.”

  Alison beamed at Wilbur. “Precisely so,” she said. “So how do you and Doctor Vere know one another?”

  “We have shared interests,” Vere replied.

  Wilbur didn’t take his eyes from Alison. “Some, I suspect, more than others.”

  Vere frowned. This couldn’t be good, this obvious interest Wilbur was taking in the young woman. If this were allowed to continue, would history be unmade? Would there be a paradox?

  “Wilbur, I think we ought to…” Vere said. “That is, I have a lot of work for Miss Keller, and you and I need to do some work of our own.”

  “Sorry, doctor,” Alison said. “I was cataloguing your tools yesterday. Should I finish that?”

  “Please,” Vere replied. He motioned toward a smaller chamber within the lab, and Alison scurried off.

  “You’re no fun, are you? Just like my brother,” Wilbur said once Alison was out of earshot.

  “I’m quite sorry I ruined your breaking of the space-time continuum,” Vere snapped.

  Wilbur nodded. “No, you’re quite right. That…ahem. Yes.” He rose. “But what’s this about a first Civil War?”

  “There’s been a second,” Vere said. “But I think the less you know about that the better.” He shook his head. “I’m really not so very interested in this thing we’ve managed to do for the sake of its research properties. Rather, I want to get down to the core of how we did it, don’t you?”

  Wilbur shrugged. “Loch…something.”

  “What was that?”

  “Eh, this fellow I correspond with, a German graduate student I met when my family and I were abroad. He and I stayed in touch and he began working on this ‘hole’ concept.” Wilbur’s brow furrowed. “What the devil did he call it? ‘Spange’ or ‘Spaniel’ or something ‘loch.’”

  Vere racked his brain for his middle school German. He tapped his tablet to life and typed a bit on the screen. “Schlangeloch?” he suggested. His blood ran cold.

  “Yes, that’s it. It’s a kind of bridge between space and time, and I’ve been working on accelerating matter in between various—”

  “Hang on.” A depressing thought nagged at Vere. “Do you mean—you discovered—no, no, that can’t be, because I had the calculations, I had the device ready to go, and if you’d done this on your own, wouldn’t we have known? Historically, wouldn’t we have known you disappeared?”

  “I know you’re living decades ahead of me, my good man,” Wilbur said, “but could you slow it down a bit for a poor fellow forced to walk while you sprint? What did I discover?”

  “A wormhole,” Vere replied. “You discovered a wormhole. A functioning one, one capable of allowing time travel.”

  “Fascinating,” Wilbur said. “Wouldn’t that be we discovered it? You were working on it, too.”

  Vere shook his head. “I wasn’t even approaching the problem that way at all,” he said. “You did it. I merely provided you a spot to land.”

  “But what you were nattering on about, there. You were right. If I really had done that, wouldn’t I have disappeared from history? I presume I had to have expired at some point. How did I?”

  “Not from disappearing, not from any experiment gone wrong, and not with a Nobel Prize in Physics under your belt, that’s for sure.” Vere cast his eyes to the ceiling. “What happened? What made this attempt different? Surely you tried this in the original history as well.”

  “Well, but that was before you were even born,” Wilbur said. He paced, growing more animated as he talked. “I believe my pen pal Mister Weyl suggested that this hole needed two ends, yes? If you were, unbeknownst to your own genius, creating one end and I created the other, yours would not have existed until this morning, would it?”

  “I suppose,” Vere allowed.

  “And yet I opened mine once before, as far as you’re concerned, but you say it didn’t make the history books.” Wilbur paced over to a white board mounted on the wall. “What on earth…where’s your chalk?”

  Vere chuckled and uncapped a pen for Wilbur, who promptly sneezed.

  “What in the blazes? The
se chemicals. How can this be healthy?” Wilbur demanded.

  “It’s not,” Vere said. “Neither are a great many things. That war for one. Probably everything we’ve done today.” He waved at the board. “Go on. Explain to the feeble minded how this works, then.”

  Wilbur gave Vere a sidelong glance. “Do you really think this,” he said, gesturing to the accelerator plate, “is unhealthy?” He wandered a step toward it. “I mean, paradoxes and physics and the like, the explosive danger, but…”

  Vere’s eyes followed Wilbur’s. He said nothing but returned to his still-open tablet, brought up the on-screen keyboard and tapped at it.

  Typhoid fever.

  That was Wilbur’s fate, a simple death in a simple time just two years from the time Wilbur left. Not some horrible, lingering brain cancer or radiation sickness, and definitely not an explosion. Still, those sorts of things weren’t as exact back then, were they?

  Vere tapped the screen again.

  Delirium, hemorrhage, coma…who was to say whether that was caused in the gut or the brain?

  He looked at Wilbur, who was now drawn and ashen.

  “It’s already got me, hasn’t it?” He threw the marker across the room. “Confound it, you told me I didn’t disappear.”

  “You didn’t!” Vere shouted. “But…”

  Soft footsteps approached. “Did Doctor Vere give you some horrible disease with his time travel experiments?”

  Both men whirled around to spy Alison.