“Of course they would. The whole point is taking someone’s balance.”
“I don’t think you could throw me around.” Paul is around 6 feet, several inches taller than me, and probably outweighs me by forty pounds.
“Sure I could.”
“I doubt it.”
I let it drop. I didn’t really want to demonstrate on him—he could get hurt—and I’m finally getting mature enough to let go of arguments that aren’t going anywhere.
I invented an emergency dentist appointment Friday morning so I could get out of work to go to the patent office.
Gomez was a short, pudgy guy about my age. One look told me he’d been one of those guys in high school who walked around with a slide rule clipped to his waist. Now he carried a smartphone.
He was incredulous when I described Paul’s invention—incredulous that I was wasting his and my time talking about it. “Look, next to perpetual motion machines, we get more time machines here than anything. And like the perpetual motion machines, they have one thing in common: They don’t work.” He shook his head.
“Can’t I at least put in the application?”
“Do you know how much work that is? And it really helps if you get a technical advisor—not your crackpot friend—and no one’s going to do that on nonsense like this unless you pay them a lot of money. And the patent’s still going to get turned down.”
“Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“Your friend is going to have to demonstrate to someone official that this works. Given that everything going in science these days indicates that it won’t, he’s going to have a hard time convincing anyone to watch a demonstration. But that’s the best bet.” He softened a bit. “Look, Eileen, we’ve all got these kinds of friends. I get calls all the time from guys I went to college with who strayed off the regular engineering path. They think they’ve solved something that no one else can get. All you can do is pat them on the head and say ‘the world doesn’t recognize your genius.’ Don’t get sucked into doing more.”
Paul had suffered through a bad day at Goddard. After being shunted around most of the day, he’d finally ended up talking with a physics post doc who didn’t even bother with pleasantries. “He basically called me a nutcase. He didn’t even want to hear how it worked.”
He sat at my dining room table, his shoulders slumped, nursing a beer. This was the latest in a lifetime of snubs, and I could see how much it hurt.
But after my meeting with Gomez, I was wondering if Paul didn’t have more than a few screws loose. I didn’t want to say anything. Or even think it. But the world is full of people who don’t quite live in the same reality with the rest of us and I knew Paul still carried around ugly pictures in his head from the war. He could be suffering from delayed-onset post-traumatic stress syndrome.
“Look,” he said. “Let’s try it out. Once you see how it works, you can argue with that patent guy.”
Being nice to your friends puts you in some very difficult situations. I didn’t really want to try it out. I was afraid it wouldn’t work. I was even more afraid it would do something—not change time, but something awful—and we’d get hurt.
But the thing I was most afraid of was being someone else who didn’t believe in Paul. So I went along with it.
He set up the equipment, putting the two cylinders far enough apart so that both of us could lie between them. “The wave needs to pass through our brains,” he said. And then he handed me a little white pill.
“What’s this?”
“It alters your brain chemistry just enough so that your conscious mind won’t try to stop the experiment. Time travel is scary, and the human mind has to be tricked into going.”
“It looks like a hit of acid,” I said suspiciously. Now I knew he’d gone off the deep end. He was feeding me some kind of hallucinogen and then would try to drag me into a shared reality to convince me we’d traveled through time.
“It’s not,” he said shortly. “Come on, take it. Don’t you trust me?”
No, I thought but didn’t say. But that wasn’t the whole answer. I trusted him not to hurt me, or at least, to think that what he was doing wouldn’t hurt me. So I ate the pill.
“Now, where shall we go?”
“Why not back to where we lived in South Austin? No one to see us but our former selves, and they’ll just think we’re a hallucination.” Having decided to do it, I figured I’d go along with the program.
But Paul shook his head. “No, you won’t believe it if we go some place you remember. You’ll think it’s the drug. We’re going to go to Vietnam, in 1968.”
He was typing on the keyboard, and muttered something I didn’t quite catch. I thought he said, “I’ve got something to take care of back there.” It didn’t make me feel less scared.
He finished entering data, popped his pill, and lay down on the floor beside me. Our heads were aligned with the cylinders. I could feel my heart beating ridiculously fast. Paul took hold of my hand, and said, “Well, we’ve crossed the Rubicon.”
It didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. It’s what he used to say when we dropped acid.
The room started to spin around. I felt my stomach lurch, and wondered if I was going to throw up. Paul gripped my hand tighter. After several minutes the spinning slowed down. I could see the dominant color in the room had become a rich green. My walls are painted beige.
When the spinning stopped, we were lying on dirt, underneath several trees. The trees blocked the sun, but you could still tell it was very hot. And humid. I didn’t recognize the type of tree, but it looked like my idea of a tropical forest: abundant foliage in all directions.
Paul jumped up. “Come on. We’re not safe here.”
I followed him down a jungle path, getting slapped in the face by moisture-laden leaves. In a couple of minutes we came to what I guess you’d call a village: a clearing with a bunch of huts clustered around. Several of the huts were burning.
Several Asian women, wearing the loose pants and tops we called pajamas, were huddled together, guarded by American soldiers. Some of the women were crying; others looked angry and defiant.
When I looked at the men more closely, I could see they were barely more than children. Except for their eyes. Their eyes looked like black holes.
I shuddered. I had known—intellectually—war could do this to people, but now I could see just how much humanity they’d given up to survive.
And then I saw Paul—the Paul of thirty years ago. I recognized the set of his jaw: I’d seen that stubborn look. He looked grim. Horrible that someone so young should have seen what he’d seen. He held an M-16 in his hands, pointing it toward the women.
Something suddenly occurred to me. “Can they see us?”
“If we let them,” he said.
Oh, shit. Serious payback for ever wanting to be a soldier: to be stuck in war zone without any weapons.
Three other soldiers walked over to the group of women, took one of them by the arm, and started to drag her away. I felt Paul tense beside me, and watched the younger version of him tense as well.
“They’re supposed to stay here,” young Paul said.
“The lieutenant’s busy over there, and anyway he won’t give a fuck.” The other man stared at him, and young Paul dropped his eyes, nodded.
They dragged the woman into a hut. One of the men said, “Yell if anybody comes.”
And another said, in a taunting voice, “Unless you want to join us.”
Young Paul stood rigid. Beside me, Paul said, “You stupid bastard. Why couldn’t you stand up to them?” He stood up and started to walk toward the group.
I grabbed his arm. “What the hell are you doing?”
“They’re going to rape her, Eileen. And then they’re going to kill her. You want to stand by and watch while it happens?”
I didn’t, of course. But Paul didn’t even have a gun with him. “They’ve got guns, Paul.”
“I’ll get a gun down
there.”
I heard the woman scream, felt Paul try to shake off my grip. Something else occurred to me. “What happens if you do stop them, if she lives, if some of them die? Does history change?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you can’t do that.”
“Why not? She’ll live, then. And I won’t have to wake up every morning knowing I let her die.”
“And what else will change because of all that?”
“Who cares?”
“I care. What is happening out there already happened. Change it and things may become entirely different. Other people live, and other people die.”
“Eileen, do you have any idea what it’s like to know that your cowardice cost a woman her life? This wasn’t a situation where I was putting my life on the line; it was just the fear of standing up to other men. I could have stopped them. That boy out there, who’s trying not to hear her, he could still stop them.”
He shook off my arm, and started toward the hut again. I put my left hand on his right shoulder, dropped my weight, and made him turn back toward me, stumbling. It pissed him off. He said, “Goddamn you, this is what I came to do,” and reached up to push me back. I grabbed his wrist, stretched his arm out, walked under it, and threw him hard to the ground, then knelt on his chest while keeping his hand and elbow twisted around so he couldn’t move.
“Listen, damn it. You can’t undo the past. You don’t know what it will do to the future. Maybe the whole reason you’re a good man today is because you did something cowardly back then.”
“What if changing this makes the world a better place? Ever think of that?”
“You don’t have the right to do that.”
“Why not? Technology always changes things. Just because it’s the past I can change, not the present, why should that make things different?”
I didn’t have an answer, just a gut feeling. Changing something that already happened, no matter how horrible, struck me as terribly wrong.
“Where will you stop, Paul? You going to go back and kill Hitler? Or maybe prevent the Crucifixion?”
“I’m just undoing my sins, not everybody else’s. Goddamn, Eileen, let me up.” He’d been struggling, but he hadn’t been able to get out of my pin.
“No. Anyway, if you go after those guys, you’re going to get yourself killed. And leave me stuck in Vietnam 1968.”
“You always wanted to be a soldier,” he said nastily.
We heard the shot then. And one last scream.
“Damn you.”
I didn’t let him up, but I looked toward the hut. Young Paul was turning around, a look of horror on his face.
“You didn’t know, did you? That they were going to kill her.”
“I knew they were going to rape her. I was willing to let that happen. Does it make me a better man that I might have done something different if I’d known they’d kill her?”
“The fact that you hate yourself for it does,” I said.
Other soldiers were coming to the area now. No one seemed to care about the woman in the hut. I heard loud motors, and a couple of helicopters came into sight.
“You can let me up now. It’s too late to do anything. And we’re going back in about a minute anyway.”
I didn’t let go. I was afraid he’d run out there and die. “How do we get back?”
“Preset. The field shuts off.”
So I hadn’t been at any risk of being left there. I wondered why he’d brought me along at all.
A minute later the jungle started to spin, and a few minutes after that we were in the middle of my living room floor. I still held him in the pin. I let go abruptly.
He crawled to his knees, shook out his arm, said, “I guess you can throw people around with that Aikido stuff.”
“I guess your time machine works.”
“You going to help me patent it?”
“No. Because if you put it out there, lots of other people are going to want to change the past, just like you did. The world will end up in total chaos, people going back and changing things all the time.”
“You can’t stop people from using inventions.”
“No one else believes in this one. And I’m not going to help you put it out there to change their minds. Anyway, you didn’t make it to patent or to sell to Goddard. You made it so you could go back and change your life.”
He flinched. Then he gave me a sour grin. “Don’t you want to go back and change anything about your life, Eileen?”
Christ, who doesn’t? Being with Paul had forced me to remember my youthful idealism. And while thinking about your youth at fifty often makes you blush—how could I have been so naïve, so foolish—it also tends to remind you that once you believed in something other than a retirement plan and a nice summer vacation.
Yeah, I wanted to change something. I wanted to go back and not sell out. But that seemed a little more amorphous than what haunted Paul. I couldn’t point to one choice that made all the difference. Just a sea of little compromises that had led me to a job I kept trying to believe was important.
I said, softly, “I can think of about a hundred things. That’s the temptation of that machine, you know. First you go back and change something momentous—like a time you did something cowardly or dishonest. And then maybe you go back and change your major in college. Or ask out the person you had a crush on. And before you know it, you’re going back and undoing all the stupid things you did as a teenager.
“And, in the meantime, all you’re doing with your life is obsessing over your past. How can you build a life when all you’re trying to do is make your past perfect? You want to change something, Paul? Change the present.”
He gave me the oddest look. I can’t really describe it. Some kind of combination of a light bulb going off and complete puzzlement.
I glanced up at the clock and saw the time: three a.m. Then I realized how exhausted I felt. “Come on. Let’s get some sleep.”
We both trudged upstairs. In the hallway outside the bathroom he touched my arm, and then hugged me. We stood that way a long time. A brief thought passed through my head—invite him into bed. He’d gotten divorced about three years earlier, and it had been longer than that since I’d had a man.
But Paul and I had always been friends, not lovers, and it didn’t seem like the right time to change. I kissed him good night and went off to bed alone.
And slept until noon. When I crawled out of bed, wondering if I could get the name of the truck that hit me so I could sue the bastard, I didn’t hear any noise from the other room. Paul was probably still asleep. But the bedroom door stood open, bed made, no luggage.
Downstairs I found a note on the kitchen table. “As usual, I didn’t find what I came looking for, but I think I found what I needed. You were always good at that. Maybe you should go back to doing it full time. Love, Paul.”
His things were gone, all but the time machine, packed up again in its silver suitcase. I left it in the corner of the living room.
o0o
I took a job that’s sending me to South Africa to do economic development. I’m going to run a micro-lending program, helping people start small businesses to serve their neighbors and marketing co-ops to sell crafts overseas. It doesn’t pay much, but I’ll get by okay. I know it’s incremental change, but it feels like incremental change for a purpose. Kind of like incorporating food co-ops and getting people out of jail.
Paul wrote me from Rwanda, where he’s working with children who fought in the genocidal war there. Real children: some as young as seven or eight, and most of them under fifteen.
“I thought I’d seen hell,” he wrote, “but what these children have seen, and done, completely blows my mind. I’m just trying to help them put their lives back together one step at a time. Undoing the whole thing is a nice fantasy, but so many people would have to decide to do something differently. And one thing I’ve figured out: a lot of people would go back and kill someone. So I don’t guess univers
al reinventing the past is going to work.”
I pulled the time machine out a few days before I left, when I was packing my stuff up for storage. I hooked it up, booted up the computer, and set the coordinates for South Austin 1971. I didn’t want to change anything, just to see if the past really happened the way I remember it.
The pills were in a little vial in the case, so I popped one, and lay down between the cylinders. Just waited there for the room to spin.
Nothing happened.
Maybe the pills should have been put in the refrigerator. Maybe I did something wrong when I set the coordinates. Maybe you have to be obsessed with the past to get there.
Who knows? Who cares?
It’s now I’m interested in.
Night Without Darkness
Shannon Page and Mark J. Ferrari
In which the lamentable Mr. Wendell Shrewsbury, Esq., proffers his astonishing recollections regarding the spectacular events which transpired on the evening of December 7, 1886, in the Cambridge manor laboratory of Sir Rupert Collin Frost.
o0o
…The laboratory in flames, generating ever-larger flashes of blinding light and searing heat. The terrible din of exploding bottles and jars assaulting his ears. Tinctures and potions combining as they were never meant to do, filling his lungs with noxious fumes. The high, choking screams of Lord Frost…suddenly silenced.
Shrewsbury stands, frozen as always, held within this horrifying scene by guilt and remorse—real or imagined, he no longer knows—unable to avert his eyes as Lord Frost bursts from the conflagration, a man aflame. The doctor’s nearly vanished lab coat is a shriveling, blackened wick, billowing up on gusts of heat as it is consumed. His sizzling skin sends a cloying stench into the air…”Shrewsbury!” With that anguished, accusing croak, Frost pitches forward, perishing for the thousandth time at the feet of his horrified protégé.
A dark, flitting presence begins to mock Shrewsbury from within the flames and smoke, from behind Frost’s ruined face—from inside Shrewsbury’s very mind. As it whispers sins—of commission, and omission—he is appalled to realize that it has been there all along, hiding in his thoughts, his dreams, slyly driving him…to this.
Mad Science Cafe Page 12
