Myths of the Modern Man

by Jacqueline T Lynch

  Then Yorke stood, stepped smartly over to me and shook my hand.

  “Congratulations, Colonel Moore.” I think he would have added “happy hunting” or “happy landing” or some such lucky charm, but there was none for time travel. Not yet. After a few experiments in the lab, the only successful mission of note in time travel was last year when I was catapulted back to the Hundred Years War, rode shotgun for Joan of Arc, hung out at her immolation, and was pulled back through the tenacious, greedy fingers of gravity back here, back to the late Twenty-First Century with a smoldering banner in my hand and a case of emotional ecstasy and terror that drove me into the psych ward for a few weeks while Dr. Roberts and Dr. Ford debriefed me, Eleanor muttering her thoughts into her voice recorder. Milly, faithful transcriptionist, knew all about my supposed new-found if still tenuous religious faith after having seen a saint in action. It was all the talk of the agency commissary, but she took that in stride, as she did the whole crazy business of the time travel study. Her previous position was transcribing for an orthopedist with a lisp. It was all the same to her.

  Which is more than I can say for the rest of us. Dr. Roberts and Dr. Ford took it all too seriously, and General English, who figure-headed the mission and ran end-runs around the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was playing like a codger in his dotage. Not a man of science but a survivor of deep cuts in military spending, the General enjoyed the press junkets more than anybody, and oddly enough courted the press in a way which would have made him blanch earlier in his career, when all a military man had to do was participate in strategic exercises, mistrust and revile the press, and wait out his hitch.

  On the last point, our long peace and the absence of the old Cold War of the previous century, not to mention the era of terrorism that had finally faded away in its repeated failure to achieve anything -- all this gave way ironically to more pressing environmental problems mankind suddenly discovered we all suddenly shared. The lack of conflict made us warriors atrophy a bit. It was partly why I left Navy flying and joined the space program. I never had any idealism to speak of, which made enduring three years in a capsule alone, and a press circus when I got back a lot easier. As far as I was concerned, there was little left to care about my work or my life or this earth.

  But, these Time Dimension studies were getting to me. I had lost a great deal of my skepticism, and that scared me. Like I said, all animals have their modes of protection.

  They blasted me alone to the era of choice, to witness mankind’s previous mistakes in the flesh, like having a repeating nightmare. A sickening little game, really. I was a little afraid of going back in time again. It played hell on you in a thousand perverse ways. I couldn’t make them understand that. Maybe I didn’t try. I can be a smart-ass sometimes.

  Brian K. Yorke, poster boy for sincerity, turned at the door, saluted everybody, turned on his heel and left, probably to get a haircut. I wondered what his place in history would be. It wouldn’t be mine. Not today.

  Eleanor had not even bothered to acknowledge his stiff upper lip. Like a little boy waiting to be noticed by the teacher on whom he has a crush, I think he was waiting for that. She couldn’t even give him her notice, or say, “I’m sorry.”

  I started to feel worse for Yorke than when I beat him up.

  Dr. Roberts stood, turned around to face us again now that Yorke had gone. She dragged two fingers through her thin, blonde hair, and stuffed her thin, cold white hands into her lab coat. She looked at me without speaking for a moment, like someone deciding on the merit of a consolation prize.

  “Welcome aboard again, Colonel Moore,” she said in a soft voice, devoid of sincerity. She was no Brian K. Yorke. Everything was so tiresome to her. Sometimes, the thought I ever wanted her sickened me.

  “Sorry Eleanor. I know you wanted the boy.”

  “I wanted the best man for the mission.”

  “I guess you got stuck with me. You know, I think that’s a real shame. You two ought to go.”

  Dr. Ford smiled and Eleanor tried to interrupt, but I wouldn’t let her.

  “Isn’t it odd that I’m the only one of us who can be shot through the cannon? All I have is a few space missions under my belt, some G-force tremors left from long ago, and the ability to fight with a knife. Ford, you know more about history and the lives of everyday people back then, but you can’t blend in as easily where I’m going because you’re not white-skinned. Also you’re probably squeamish at the sight of blood. Eleanor can’t go to prove her own theories because she is a woman, a woman who is unprepared to risk rape, and I think she thinks that’s all she could possibly have waiting for her back there.”

  “Colonel Moore….”

  “You should try it and go sometime, Eleanor. I think time travel would open your eyes. I think you need to get out of this lab more and take a walk in the past. It’s not a theory. It’s a real place. It’s a fascinating, sickening, dangerous place.”

  “I’m glad to know you take some part of these missions seriously, Colonel Moore.”

  “Cut the crap and talk to me, Eleanor.”

  “If the council and General English are confident that you are the person for the assignment, I am confident as well.” She said, shooting a look to Dr. Ford, who clasped his hands over his knee. I don’t think he cared who went; astronauts were all loose cannons as far as he was concerned. He had little use for adventurers. He would have rather had a sedate and responsible historian be shot through time, somebody who knew how to analyze, ask questions, and take notes, but somebody other than him.

  “When do we meet the press?” I asked.

  Dr. Roberts smirked and gave me her disapproving expression again.

  “We do not. General English is handling the press conference alone this time. He believes the process will be carried out in a more expedient fashion than having us all put on display.”

  “Still upset about the last press conference, aren’t you?”

  “You insulted the media, broke a reporter’s finger simply because he pointed it at you, and started a riot. Let’s just say it was a tough day.”

  “I did apologize at some point. It was in the press kit.”

  Dr. Ford smiled for the first time.

  “Colonel Moore,” he said, “I’d like to offer my congratulations, too. And a hope for the best possible outcome.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Just getting you home alive.”

  “There’s a bit more to it than that, Dr. Ford.” Dr. Roberts interjected, but Ford continued.

  “Don’t worry so much about fact gathering. You’re not a detective, you’re an official observer. Just use your skills to observe….”

  “Without getting involved…” I echoed the mantra they practically embroidered across my underwear.

  “Oh you’ll be involved, whether you like it or not. These people may kill you. They’ll try.”

  “Then you can bring back my molecules and put them in a jar for study.”

  “I’m not sure what we’ll be able to do, and I don’t think Dr. Roberts is either. And when I say skills, I don’t mean as a scientist or technician, I mean as a survivor. Just survive. That’s all you have to do. We’ll take care of the analysis when you get back.”

  I shook his hand. He clapped me on the shoulder. He nodded to Eleanor with absolutely no meaning that I could discover, and then he left us alone.

  Dr. Roberts turned her back to me again and re-checked her instruments.

  “Do I sense contention in the utopian lab?” I asked, sliding off my stool.

  “What do you mean?” she answered with perfunctory timing, her back still turned to me for effect. Eleanor was cool, calm, disciplined. She was her own creation, but then so was I.

  “Dissension and discord.”

  “You’ll encounter dissension and discord in a few moments, Colonel Moore. Then maybe you’ll know the difference.”

  “Can I count on you to bring me back, Eleanor?”

  “I just
hope you’re really up for this.”

  “I feel swell. Give us a kiss.”

  “If you’re not acting like an idiot, you’re raving like a fanatic. Like last time.”

  “I brought back a profound experience last time, Eleanor, and you turned it into a white paper dissertation. I brought back tales of a saint, and you wrote about molecules and gravitational pull, and the theory of time in relation to spatial elements.”

  “That’s right, Colonel Moore.” She faced me.

  “I wrote about the dispassionate facts of the mission, as I was supposed to do. I analyzed its meaning and outcome. Did you want a comic book? Did you want a weekly action series?”

  “What was its outcome? That was never explained to me. Did we do good? Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “What do you think I’m looking for?”

  “A way out.”

  “It’s not that simple, Colonel….”

  “Will you give up the tea party and just call me John? You are the most tight-assed….”

  “I’m a scientist. I probe theory until it becomes fact, and if it doesn’t, I have to find out why. That’s all I am, John. There’s nothing mysterious or indomitable about it. There is no need for you to resent me. I’m not your keeper.”

  “You took the burning banner from my hands that said Jesus Maria and put it in a plastic specimen bag. You probed my body with sterile gloves. God, Eleanor, everything about you is sterile.”

  “You’re rude.”

  “You’re pathetic. Do you even believe in what you’re doing? Or are you people just stringing the public and Congress along to get the funding to keep yourselves in jobs?”

  “I wonder what General English would say if he could hear you, after picking you over Colonel Yorke as his choice?”

  “He’d give me a straight answer. He may be an officious old fart, but he’s plain spoken and direct. You are twisted and tight.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t make a proper fuss over your souvenir from the Fifteenth Century. I look at it as scientific evidence, of some historical merit, though Dr. Ford would know more about that than me.”

  “It came from the hands of a saint.”

  “Who made her a saint? People sat down and decided she was a saint some five hundred years after she died. They decided she had some divine purpose.”

  “And God’s hand wasn’t in it at all?” I liked baiting her, I admit it.

  “I am not prepared to argue theology with you, Colonel Moore, that is not my specialty, neither is it yours.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Do not jeopardize this mission with your emotions, Colonel Moore! I am ordering you to stop this, now. We have a new mission before us. We can begin any time you’re ready. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  Strands of her thin, blonde hair fell in front of her pale, faded eyes, and she angrily pushed them back with a ballpoint pen, because for some reason nothing better had been invented in the last one hundred years.

  “I am. But, I’m afraid you’re hopeless.” I walked across the lab and lay down in the module. It was like an old CT scan of the previous century. It would send me back in time. Like my TV and my microchip player, I accepted that it would work, but I still didn’t really understand how.

  Anymore than I understood the Fourth Dimension, and yet these days it was my bread and butter.

  The Fourth Dimension, according to Einstein, was time. As present in our everyday lives and viable as the other three dimensions, which most of us did not “get” without those old time cardboard glasses from the movies, the Fourth Dimension was our past, and for we here in the desperate late Twenty-First Century, our future.

  According to classical physics, as Eleanor liked to quote, if particles in a simple system are instantaneously reversed in their velocities, the system will proceed to retrace its entire history. Dr. Roberts’ specialty was the study of decay. It suited her. She was Dr. Doom. More properly, her specialty was Thermodynamics and the process of entropy. As heat is created, energy is spent, just as death is a natural part of life. It’s the by-product. Everything that lives must result in death. Including the death of Earth, though it hadn’t hit the newsstands yet. We all lie on the grass as children and watch the brilliant stars above us, not knowing that they are long, long gone. They are burnt out, and only their light is still traveling to us.

  The Earth, and even the Universe, if there was such a thing, which I was beginning to doubt, would burn itself out. Disorder of the particles too small for us to see, reaches its creative limit, and the natural energy of sun, air, and water would give out in a tired Earth, no longer able to support life. Dr. Roberts’ doctoral dissertation was titled “The Heat Death of the Universe.” I never read it. I preferred to wait for it to come to the Cineplex. When hell froze over.

  However, Eleanor, clever witch, sought a loophole with the help of Einstein’s dusty, very shaky old theory. The death of the Earth was our eventuality only if time moved forward, and his Fourth Dimension held clues to another kind of motion, another kind of energy. Reverse the electromagnetic energy and gravitational mass, and you reverse the decay. Reverse the energy by which time itself is measured, and you reverse time. And something else about wormholes in space. I have a short attention span.

  So, NASA’s formerly secret Time Dimension Study was an attempt at making the figures work.

  Dr. Roberts stayed where she was for a moment, on the far side of the lab, watching me, her thin, white hands gripping the steel counter until there was no blood left in them. She released her grip, and wrung her hands briefly before stuffing them back into her lab coat pockets.

  “Well?” I asked.

  She set the alarm on the lab door that would prevent anyone from coming in for the next few moments, much like a film sound stage is barred to visitors during a scene. She came over to the module and re-checked her specifications on her laptop, briefly glancing into my eyes as she did.

  “So, listen, who was the wailing woman?” I asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Up in the mezzanine when Yorke and I were beating the crap out of each other. Did you like how I nearly yanked his palate out?”

  “I’ll ignore your second question in favor of your first,” Eleanor replied, “That was Dr. Cheyenne L’Esperance.”

  “What a name. What’s she doing here? Is she on the Committee?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You mean you don’t?”

  “I know she’s here to observe the mission. She has a reputation as an accomplished theorist. More than that I wouldn’t know.”

  “Hmm. Stunning woman. Beautiful features.”

  “I wouldn’t know. She was sobbing too much.”

  “Yes,” I said, noting her irritation. The woman was evidently Somebody, if she had made Eleanor irritated.

  “Rather sweet.” I smiled just short of sneer, but it was wasted because Eleanor refused to look at me, just as if she knew I was doing it. “You just don’t expect somebody in a lab coat to have a heart. The old boys were probably beside themselves over it. Certainly made her stand out, even more than those beautiful green eyes.”

  “You certainly seemed to have noticed a lot about her.”

  “I’m a professional observer, like Dr. Ford said.”

  “Yes, you are. All right then, you’re off.”

  “No countdown this time?”

  “You know there’s no point to that. We’ve no press to play up to, this time, Colonel Moore. Are you set?”

  “Well, no frills this time. I seem to be flying coach.”

  She glared at me.

  The funny thing is, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone that the past, any dot we chose on the timeline, would be a comfortable place to live, and that any contact with our past would change it, irreparably. But, we were still in the experimental stage, that comforting, “don’t worry about it” attitude we feed the press. Like Dr. Frankenstein, or Dr. Op
penheimer, we only begin to sweat when we realize we just created something really messy and we can’t take it back.

  “Go ahead,” I said. The guinea pig might as well be me as Brian K. Yorke or anyone else. Immodestly speaking, I am indeed a hell of guy.

  “See you at the debriefing.”

  “Eleanor?”

  “Yes, John?” she said, almost as if waiting for me to give her a reason not to close the lid.

  I blew her a kiss. She ignored me, closed the pressure chamber, and did her thing.

  Her thing was to make me go away. She did not seem satisfied in it this time. That gave me an uneasy feeling. Did she sense something was wrong, or imperfect in her calculations? Would she stop the mission if she doubted its outcome? I didn’t know. After all this time, I still didn’t know enough about Eleanor to know if she had integrity. She was brilliant. She was controlled. She was professional. I could not tell if she had a conscience. I think not.

  She sent me away. I could feel it.

  Instantaneous, and silent, there were no lights flashing or whirring sounds like the evil scientist labs of the movies of my childhood. Only a feeling of pressure against my face, my neck, my thighs, and the hideous unbearable company of my own thoughts accompanied me. Next, the sensation of growing cold, stroking my skin, the deep force gripping me that made me slightly nauseous and disoriented, and then the pale, fierce light that I could see through closed eyelids.

  It took a moment in time. A moment, that most unmeasured of units, which could be a second, many seconds, many minutes. The intense activity of an hour could seem to us like a moment. Or, the trauma of a second could make one’s whole life flash by. It was a meaningful and meaningless form of measure.

  Time, according to Einstein, was meaningful only in relation to space.

  Goodbye Twenty-First Century. You took a long, bloody time to get here, and yet you vanish before me into nothing, not even a dream of the future.

  I leave behind my fame, and my personal past, such as it was. I leave the reporters in the pressroom awaiting the outcome of my mission. I leave Eleanor to monitor my being in the vacuum of time, and to make any explanations that were necessary should I fail my fellow man, science, and the future of the planet by croaking or getting forever lost.