Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  By the time he fell asleep, he’d managed to convince himself things weren’t so bad. He didn’t steal the suit from that kid. Right from the beginning he meant to give it back. He just forgot. And things with Janine weren’t as bad as they could’ve been. She was pissed, sure, but she still had her ring on. She never did get pissed off the way Ernie does. She stores everything up, lets it build, and it takes just as long for her to bleed the pressure off. Ernie, he’s more the firecracker type. Short fuse, short burst, then back to peace and quiet.

  But he figures she meant it when she said she’d stay for dinner. Too bad that’s not going to happen anymore. It’s too late to get a full day’s worth of fares and be home by dinnertime. He missed the morning rush and the Sox are on the road. But before he nodded off he got himself an idea about the suit. He told himself he wasn’t going to go through with it, but that was before he slept through the morning rush. Now the more he thinks about it, the more he figures there isn’t another way. Before he tries it, though, he’s got to try an experiment.

  He sets up the suit exactly the same way he did the night before—two minutes on the timer, the clock set five minutes fast—only this time he doesn’t put the suit on. He holds the suit up over his head and gives it a little upward toss as he hits Start on the timer.

  The suit’s on the ground without falling there. He’s looking at it overhead and then it’s on his feet. He never sees it fall. He’d have said this is pretty weird, but the weirdest part is this is exactly what he thought would happen.

  He’s got five minutes to wait before the next part of the experiment, and during that time he learns five minutes is way too long to think about whether being near this suit is going to give him cancer or something. For all he knows, the suit’s radioactive. For all he knows, he ought to be wearing a lead jockstrap.

  At the end of the five minutes, he pokes and prods at the suit with a big stubby toe. He can’t move it. He kicks it. Can’t even ruffle the neoprene. A harder kick and all he does is hurt his foot.

  Just for grins he pours a glass of water on the suit. The water looks like it slides off the suit without ever touching it. Not like rain on a waxed car, where it beads up on the wax; it’s as if the suit’s not wet because the water can’t touch it at all. There’s a dark spot in Ernie’s orange shag carpeting and not a drop on the neoprene. For two minutes nothing he can do affects the suit.

  By this time he figures he’s got a pretty good idea of what this suit is and what it does. He can’t even begin to imagine how it’s possible, but at this point he can’t afford to care. This little jewel is the end of all his worries. Never mind a full day’s pay; what he needs is for Janine to take him back, and with this thing he can get her back for good.

  He stuffs the suit in an old duffel bag and heads downtown. He doesn’t turn his lights on, doesn’t roll by the hospital or the Huntington Avenue hotels to see if there’s a fare, doesn’t even bother calling in to dispatch. Whatever he’d make from fares isn’t squat compared to what the suit can do for him.

  Ernie parks at the first 7-Eleven he sees, grabs the duffel bag, and asks the old guy behind the counter if he can use the john. In the bathroom he changes into the suit, sets the clock one hour fast, and sets the timer for ten minutes. Then he punches Start.

  It’s hard to breathe again and opening the door feels like he’s pulling it through water. He finally manages to get it open, though, and outside the whole store’s frozen. The second hand on the clock isn’t moving. The little hot dog rollers don’t roll. The hot dogs don’t even blister under the heat lamps.

  It feels like wading as he makes his way to the cash register. There’s a little portable radio on behind the counter; he can’t tell what it’s playing because there’s just the one note coming from it, like someone leaning on a car horn. The old guy is staring at the chest of a busty eighteen-year-old buying Cosmo and cigarettes. Her eyes are fixed in mid-blink, her teeth at half-chew on her gum. Their hands are stone still above the counter, her change in mid-slide from his hand to hers. The till is open.

  It’s hard to pull up the black plastic drawer, and not just because it’s stuck there like glue: Ernie doesn’t know if bumping into the old guy will be like nudging the smoke, freeing him, so he’s got to be careful not to touch him. It takes him about a minute to lift the drawer. One minute to make a solid day’s worth of fares. It wouldn’t be too hard to pick up the hundred dollar bills if he could use his fingernails, but they’re gloved under an eighth of an inch of blue neoprene and so he needs to use the edge of a quarter to pry them up. He takes all three, and the fifty too, and leaves the checks.

  He leaves the rest of the cash too. No point in bankrupting the place. Nor does he go after the white Coach purse hanging from the girl’s shoulder. He’s got nothing against her. Nothing against the old guy or 7-Eleven either. It’s just that he’s got to get his wife back and this is the only way he can see to do it.

  He heads to the bathroom, drags the door open, and grabs his duffel bag. The timer on his chest says he’s got four more minutes. It takes him a little over a minute to open one of the cooler doors and pry a can of Dr. Pepper off the shelf. Another minute to wade over to the front door of the store. Half a second to realize that leaving now would mean that apart from the teenage girl and the old cashier, the only person the security camera’s going to show is a chubby balding white guy who walked into the men’s room and never came out. He wades back to the john, he locks himself in, and he waits.

  When the timer hits zero, he unzips the suit and crams it back in the duffel. By the time he gets out of the bathroom, the girl’s gone and the old man still doesn’t have the slightest clue what happened. And why would he? He hasn’t opened the drawer again yet.

  The clock on the dash said it was eleven o’clock on the dot when he parked the cab in front of the store. When he starts her up again, it says eleven-oh-four. Still plenty of time.

  On the way home he stops by a J.C. Penney and buys a small silver Samsonite just like the one he gave Janine the night before. He tucks the receipt in his wallet, and when he gets home he stows the carry-on with all the rest of the crap he’s got piled up under the basement stairs. Then he waits.

  Just before noon, he makes sure to be sitting right in front of his alarm clock. He waits for it to hit. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed looking at the big red digits telling him it’s 11:59. He blinks.

  When his eyes open it’s 12:10.

  He didn’t fall asleep. He knows he didn’t. The time just passed, like a movie he didn’t buy a ticket to. He hits the streets again with the suit in his duffel.

  It turns out he got lucky at the 7-Eleven. The next men’s room he uses is at a gas station, and when he gets to the cash register the drawer’s closed and nothing he can do can make it open. He figures he’ll make the best of it, so he goes outside and tries to fill up on gas. He can pull the nozzle loose and force it into the mouth of his gas tank, but squeezing the handle doesn’t do a thing. It isn’t like the Dr. Pepper, where prying loose the can pries loose everything inside it. The gas is separate from the nozzle, and it’s all still frozen in that big reservoir under the pavement.

  It’s a senseless waste of ten free minutes. He tries again at a Dunkin Donuts with the same results. The next time he wises up and hits a really busy gas station. He figures the way to boost his odds is to find a place where the drawer’s going to be open a lot.

  The till’s got five hundred and thirty bucks in it, counting just the big bills, twenties and up. He leaves the rest of the cash; these people have to eat too, and Ernie really isn’t a bad guy. Taking out what he paid for the luggage, he’s close to seven hundred for the day. Not bad. Not bad at all.

  This time when he gets out of the john, the cashier’s losing it. She knows the cash is gone but she doesn’t know how. Ernie practically has a heart attack when she threatens to lock the whole store and call the cops. Breathing is so hard while he’s wearing the suit that he’s al
ready feeling like he ran the Boston Marathon. Having her freak out isn’t any help.

  But Ernie’s luck is still holding: there’s a pair of young black men by the magazine rack in Charlestown High football jackets. Society is what it is, and that means nobody in this town is going to suspect a middle-aged, out of shape white guy of robbing a gas station when they’ve got two black guys right there in Bloods colors.

  Ernie gets the hell out of there ASAP. Those boys aren’t going to see jail time for this. There’s no evidence against them. That’s what Ernie tells himself, anyway, and he’s almost certainly right. And, he tells himself, there’s not much point in taking fares today, so he goes home and cracks open some James Ellroy and waits for the call from Janine.

  She’s not happy.

  She doesn’t even bother calling. She just comes over. “Where you been?” she says. Not even a hello.

  “I been working,” says Ernie, and he shows her a fat wad of bills. “I had a great day.”

  He tells her a story about a couple of French businessmen he picked up at Logan, how they didn’t really get the whole tipping thing and how even though he tried to talk them out of it, they left him a hundred bucks each. “Bullshit,” she says.

  “Your dispatcher called me,” she says, “trying to get a hold of you. They say some kid’s been calling every ten minutes wondering if anyone’s turned in a bag he left in his cab. Silver carry-on. Sound familiar?”

  “Hey, yeah,” says Ernie. “Kind of like the bag I bought you, huh?”

  “Just like it,” she says. “Don’t you dare try to talk your way out of this.”

  He doesn’t. He shows her the receipt from his wallet, with most of the date eaten up by a convenient Dr. Pepper stain.

  “You’re up to something,” she says. “Your dispatcher said you hadn’t logged in all day. Now you got two days’ worth of tips. What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” he says. He’s been making the airport run all day, he says, so what’s the point of calling dispatch? Janine doesn’t buy it. He tries to talk her into dinner. She’s not buying that either.

  “Come on,” he says. “You said if I had the money, you’d stay.”

  “It’s not about the money,” she says. “It’s about reliability. It’s about me not having to pick up extra shifts at the last minute to make sure the bills get paid. Good night, Ernie.”

  “G’night.” There’s nothing else to say.

  * * *

  It takes him an hour to realize he’s got nothing else going that night, and with all the stuff with Janine he knows he isn’t getting to sleep any time soon. He heads out to the cab and calls in to take a couple of fares. Roberta at dispatch asks him where he’s been all day. Ernie says thanks a lot and tells her to go screw herself.

  One of his fares takes him within half a mile of Harvard Yard. He can’t help thinking about that kid. He rolls down Mass Ave but the Yard’s dark and empty, the way it usually is when school’s out. Then he see a dozen people walking past Memorial Church. Most of them look Indian or Chinese, but there’s one tall skinny white guy straggling at the back. It’s the kid who forgot the suit.

  He slides into a parking space half a block down and leaves her running, his eye fixed on the rear view. Soon enough he catches sight of the Indians and Chinese and the skinny kid again. They turn down Dunster and Ernie figures he knows where they’re headed. He turns off the car, feeds the meter, and makes for the Brew House.

  John Harvard’s Brew House is just the sort of place you go if you’re a tourist who just got done with a conference at Harvard. It’s close, it’s popular, and it’s got that ambience the tourists go for. It is not, therefore, a good place to sit by yourself and drown your sorrows. By the time Ernie gets inside, the Indians and Chinese are talking loudly in the corner, boisterous and drinking like tourists. The skinny kid’s by himself at the bar, hunched over a beer like he’s whispering secrets to it.

  He’s the kind of skinny Ernie only ever sees in pictures of foreigners, like East African refugees, or the Jews in Auschwitz. He’s the kind of skinny that makes you stare. Ernie tries not to.

  The kid finishes his beer and orders another. Ernie sits down two stools away and orders a Summer Blonde. They sit there a few minutes, quiet. The kid looks up at Ernie and his eyes are red around the edges. They have a kind of light to them. Cruel, Ernie wants to call it. Cold. But as soon as he thinks he sees it, it’s gone, and everything in the kid’s face tells Ernie he doesn’t recognize him at all. That’s good.

  Ernie asks him how he’s doing. Fine, he says. “You don’t look it,” Ernie says. “Hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you look more stressed out than I ever been in my life, and I been held up twice. Once at gunpoint, once at knifepoint. Even then I wasn’t as stressed as you.”

  “Yeah,” the kid says, “well, the last couple of days have been pretty rough.” He knocks back the last half of his drink in one gulp.

  Ernie orders him another. “Whatsa matter?” he says. “Lose your job or something?”

  “You could say that,” he says. “My job, my fellowship, my future. Maybe my wife. I don’t know.”

  “Come on,” says Ernie. “It can’t be that bad. You’re young and full of beans. You got your whole life ahead of you.”

  He gives Ernie disdainful look. “Platitudes and beer?” he says. “That’s what I need to solve all my problems? Maybe we’ll do a cliché chaser after this.”

  “Hey, sorry,” Ernie says. “Just trying to help. The point I was gonna make is, whatever’s wrong, you got plenty of time to fix it. You’re smart, you’re young . . . how old are you anyway?”

  “That depends on how you look at it,” says the kid. Ernie gives him a funny look and the kid changes his answer right away. “Twenty-nine,” he says.

  “There you go,” Ernie tells him. “Plenty of time.”

  “Mister,” says the kid, “no offense, but I know a lot more about time than you ever will.”

  That’s the hook Ernie needs. Years ago, it used to be that people talked to their cabbies. These days they’re in the back on their iPods or cell phones or whatever, but for a good twenty years a big part of Ernie’s job was making chitchat. He’s still good enough at it that he can prod the kid in the right direction. Now that he’s got him talking about time, he keeps him there.

  At first Ernie’s only pretending to be interested, but actually the kid’s got some pretty neat stuff to say. Once Ernie gets him talking about his research at school, it’s hard to shut the kid up long enough to order another round. The truth is, Ernie can’t follow half of what the kid’s telling him. He’s been meaning to put Hawking and Greene and Tyson on his reading list for years; now he’s wishing he’d gotten around to it. His favorite used book store is right across the square and Ernie’s half-wishing they were still open so he could run over there and do some digging.

  But they’re not, so he can’t, and at any rate he needs to concentrate a hundred percent on what the kid’s telling him. It turns out the kid is some kind of physics genius. Ernie never went to college—to him it always seemed like too much work for too little reward—but he knows enough to know you have to be some kind of genius to be finishing a double doctorate by twenty-nine.

  Even if most of what the kid says is over his head, Ernie comes to understand they didn’t start with a suit. The first experiments worked with lumps of some kind of radioactive material Ernie thinks he remembers hearing of once. Cesium, it’s called. Ernie’s pretty sure cesium’s in the periodic table but he’s not positive. The kid explained how you can use whatever these lumps give off to measure the passage of time—something about half-lifes and atomic clocks and a bunch of other stuff Ernie hasn’t thought about since high school.

  But Ernie understands the long and short of it well enough. The bottom line is, the kid and his professor at school found a way to make these lumps spend some of their own future in the present.

  “No way,” Ernie tells him. “That’s impo
ssible.”

  “It’s not,” says the kid, and he buries Ernie under a lot more stuff there’s no way he’d have been able to follow if he hadn’t seen the suit do its thing. It all had to do with “four dimensional space-time” and thinking of time as cause and effect, and what is cause and effect except the transfer of energy? By the time Ernie’s ass leaves the bar stool he’ll have forgotten almost all of this, but he’ll remember that question because the kid poses it to him about a hundred times.

  Over the next hour Ernie wraps his lightly liquored brain around the idea that we’ve been storing energy and converting it and moving it around for a long time, and that if causality is a kind of energy then if you understand it right you can basically move cause and effect. Ernie tries to sum it up like this: “So what you’re saying is, you’re majoring in time travel.”

  “It’s not time travel,” says the kid. “It’s more like borrowing time. Think of it as taking a link from a chain and inserting it earlier in the chain.”

  He finishes his beer and Ernie signals the girl behind the bar for another round. The kid’s a lightweight drinking-wise, but Ernie has to admit he’s pretty damn smart even this many beers down. Ernie’s a couple behind him and he’s only an inch away from just plain lost.

  The kid says, “Never mind the chain,” and he goes back to the radioactive lumps. Eventually he gets Ernie to see the big picture. You take two of these lumps, the exact same size, and you pop one of them in a machine that does what the suit does. You set the machine to borrow an hour from one o’clock that afternoon. You turn the machine on and bam, lump one—the one in the machine—is smaller than lump two. Then, at one o’clock, all of a sudden lump one isn’t radioactive anymore. It stays that way for an hour, not radioactive and not shrinking. Then, by two o’clock, both lumps are radioactive again and both of ’em are back to the exact same size.

  It’s weird stuff. And Ted Williams could hit a little bit.