Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Ernie would have said the kid was full of crap if he hadn’t been doing that very experiment all afternoon. “So what’s the point?” he says. “Give a hammer and chisel and I figure I could make your lump smaller for you. I wouldn’t need two hours and a college degree, neither.”

  “What’s the point?” asks the kid, and he squints at Ernie like Ernie just asked him which one’s worth more, a nickel or a hundred dollar bill. “We didn’t limit the experiments to lumps of cesium,” he says. “We built a bodysuit,” he says, and he tells Ernie all about it.

  Ernie gets it. He gets it just fine. The suit is free money. It’s the ultimate blank check. According to the kid, the college types invented it to see if something that borrowed time from its own future could pull other things into its time-stream, but Ernie’s got bigger fish to fry. And he’s got bigger questions too, but he can’t ask them flat out without tipping the kid off that he has the suit. So he sits. And he listens. And he waits.

  When the kid’s done, Ernie says, “Sounds like you’re living the dream, sport. You and your prof went and invented the ring of Gyges.”

  “What do you mean?” says the kid.

  Ernie rolls his eyes, wondering what they’re teaching kids in college these days. He says, “In the suit you can do whatever you want, right? And nobody can do anything about it, right? ’Cause you’re the only time traveler? My friend, what you got is action without consequences. You got the ultimate get out of jail free card.”

  “It’s not free,” the kid says. “And the consequences are far too high.”

  Ernie’s finally got him where he wants him. “What’re the consequences?” he says. “What’s the downside to this time traveling of yours?”

  “It isn’t time travel,” says the kid. “And it isn’t free. This is borrowing time. Take it from me: if you do it enough, you’ll destroy your life.”

  Ernie’s balls shrink up into his gut. He knew it. He just knew it. There had to be a downside. Cancer. Something. But he can’t let any of that show on his face. Instead he says, “What do you mean? You don’t look dead to me.”

  “Not yet,” the kid says, “but I’m living on borrowed time.” He laughs at himself and drains his beer. They’ve had four together so far. Ernie orders another round.

  “My life isn’t my own anymore,” the kid tells him. “My daughter was born the day after I defended my second proposal. Seeta Marie. My wife’s family’s Indian. Beautiful, beautiful girl.” He stops to take another drink. “I had a brand new baby,” he says, “two dissertations to write, and only a year before my grant money ran out. Do you know what kind of pressure that is? No. Of course you don’t. A year wasn’t enough. I needed more time.”

  That look comes back in his eyes. “I put on the device,” he says. “Every night, as soon as Lakshmi and Seeta were asleep, I set it for eight hours. At first I was planning to use the time to write, but my computer wouldn’t work. I could dislodge the keys into my time-stream but not the electrons in the wires. So I wrote during the day and used my extra eight hours a night to read. I finished my thesis on Poincaré’s special relativity in ten months flat. I’m halfway through the second one now.”

  “Let me get this straight,” says Ernie. “You been doing this every night?”

  “I’ve been living thirty-two hour days for over a year,” the kid tells him.

  “Jesus,” says Ernie. “No wonder you look tired. How much you borrowed so far?”

  “Eight hours a night for a year is just short of a hundred and twenty-two days,” says the kid. He chuckles into his mug. “I’d be in the hundred and fifty range by now if it weren’t for the interest.”

  Ernie doesn’t get it, and says so.

  “It was a recent discovery,” the kid says. “Six weeks ago we tried stopwatches instead of cesium samples, to make the results of the experiments more easily understandable to lay people. For funding, you see. It never even occurred to us that radioactivity would have anything to do with the time lending process.”

  Ernie gulps. Cancer. The suit’s radioactive after all. Then he figures out the kid’s talking about the cesium. Even with that realization, he still wants to grab his nuts to make sure they’re still there.

  “Borrow a minute from a stopwatch’s future,” the kid says, “and you get it back just over a minute fast. We haven’t yet figured out why. My advisor thinks it has something to do with the mass—the cesium was always lighter when it paid back its time—but I think it’s more to do with the radioactivity itself. At any rate, the discrepancy magnifies exponentially as you increase the time borrowed. Borrow an hour and it comes back almost sixty-six minutes fast.”

  “How about borrowing eight hours?” asks Ernie.

  “Nine hundred and fifty-odd minutes,” the kid says. “When it comes time, I’ll pay back nearly sixteen hours for every eight I’ve borrowed.” He finishes his drink and Ernie keeps ’em coming. “My driver’s license says I’m twenty-nine,” he says. “Chronologically, my body is approaching its thirty-first birthday.”

  Ernie’s thinking, Cry me a river. Here he is, fifty-three and staring down the barrel of a divorce, and this kid’s bitching about thirty-one.

  But Ernie doesn’t say any of that. He asks him where he’s getting the time from.

  “Next summer,” says the kid, and just saying it makes him come damn close to puking.

  “What’s gonna happen to you?” says Ernie.

  “I had it all planned,” the kid says, and the words start tumbling out like they’re tripping over each other to get out of his mouth. “It was going to happen in the summer,” he says. “I was going to slip out of time. Secure a post-doc, find a little cabin in the woods, and just slip out. Now,” he says, “now . . .” and all the rest is gibberish.

  “Come on,” Ernie tells him, “hold it together. What’s gonna happen to you?”

  “I’m going to slip out of time,” says the kid. His eyes are rimmed with red; he’s halfway ready to cry. Ernie can’t stand seeing a grown man cry. “When it hits,” the kid says, “when I get to the point I’ve been borrowing from, I’m just going to freeze. However I’m sitting right then, I’ll just sit that way. From May 15th next year until the following March.”

  “What,” Ernie says, “like being in a coma?”

  The kid shakes his head. Getting him back to talking about the science seems to sober him up a bit. “I won’t feel any time pass,” he says. “For everyone else, I’ll be like a statue. My heart won’t beat. I won’t breathe. If they try to resuscitate me, they’ll fail. If my eyes are open, no one will understand why they don’t dry out.”

  “Jesus,” says Ernie. “You could wake up in a coffin.”

  The kid nods and says, “I’ve thought of that. I’ll have to make it clear I want to be cremated.”

  Ernie coughs up a mouthful of beer. “What are you, nuts?” he says. “You want to wake up burnt to a crisp?”

  “You forget,” says the kid, “burning is a kind of change. Change can only take place over time, and I’ll have spent that time by then. When you’re borrowing time, dislodging something from its own time-stream into yours is difficult but it’s possible. Once you’ve borrowed the time, though, you’ve spent it; if you were to experience change then, that would be real time travel.”

  “So nothing bad can happen to you,” says Ernie.

  The kid gives him that sullen, cold-eyed stare again. “Suppose the first one to find me is my daughter,” he says. “She’ll be almost two years old. Her father will be worse than comatose. He’ll be a zombie. A vampire.”

  “Nah,” says Ernie. “You’ll explain it to her. Your wife’ll explain it. You got a year yet, right?”

  “Then suppose I’m not at home,” he says. “What if when it happens I’m someplace where nobody knows me? Or what if I’m driving? If I’m in traffic when it hits me, I could kill someone.”

  “Nah,” Ernie says again. “You’re a smart kid. You won’t let that happen. I bet you alread
y got a backup plan.”

  “You want to hear my plan?” says the kid. He makes a face like he’s gonna puke again. He says, “The big plan was to lock up a post-doc my advisor says I’m in the running for. He says our experiments make me a shoo-in. I secure the fellowship for next year’s fall semester. I take a summer vacation ‘to write’”—he gives Ernie the air quotes—“and find myself a cabin in the woods somewhere. I slip out of time for the summer, come back mid-October, and throw something together to satisfy the post-doc people in between mailing out resumes and applying for jobs.”

  Ernie shrugs. It sounds like a good plan.

  “Don’t you get it?” says the kid. “That was when I thought I’d be out for five months. With the discrepancy, do you know how much time I’ve got to pay back?”

  “I’m guessing it’s not five months,” says Ernie.

  The kid’s voice gets sharp and cold. “If I stop borrowing today,” he says, “I’m looking at three hundred and one days, fourteen hours, fifty-two minutes.” The numbers roll off his tongue as easily as his Social Security number. Ernie wonders how long he’s spent dwelling on this. “By the time I come back,” the kid says, “the best jobs will be gone. My fellowship deadline will be blown and I’ll have nothing to give them. Nothing. I’ll miss Christmas with Seeta. At her age she’s not even going to remember who I am. Her dad’s going to disappear on her for almost a year with nothing to show for it. Christ, what am I going to do?”

  He’s practically crying now and it makes Ernie squirm in his seat. “Kid,” he tells him, “believe me when I tell you this: if that’s the worst this suit can do to you, you’re no different from the rest of us. Here I been thinking you’re gonna tell me the suit’ll give you a heart attack. Seriously, kid, nothing bad can happen to you while you’re slipped out of time? No cancer or nothing?”

  “I’ll answer that,” he says, “just as soon as you give it back.”

  Ernie chokes on his beer and sputters. Then he puts on the most innocent face he can and asks him what he’s talking about.

  All the kid’s emotion has drained out onto the floor. “Face it,” he says, “cab drivers don’t usually go out to bars to discuss temporal physics.”

  Wicked smart, this kid. Ernie’s looking at his shirt, his jacket, his hands, wondering what the kid saw that gave him away. He can’t figure it out so he asks, “How’d you know I was a cabbie?”

  “You drove me from the airport,” says the kid.

  Ernie says he thought the kid didn’t recognize him. “I know,” says the kid. “That’s what you were supposed to think. Now, do you have the device with you, or are we going back to your place?”

  As the kid gets in the back seat, Ernie says, “So seriously, there’s got to be risks. Doesn’t there? To using the suit?”

  “As if living on borrowed time isn’t bad enough,” says the kid. “As if lying to my wife every night for the last year isn’t bad enough.”

  They pull out into light after-bar traffic. Ernie’s feeling a touch of fuzziness on the backs of his eyes. He’s in no shape to drive and he knows it, but the kid threatened to call the cops if Ernie didn’t take him straight to the suit. “Come on,” he says. “Look at you. They invited you to bring your suit all the way to Harvard. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? If it weren’t for that suit, you and I never would’ve met because you wouldn’t have your conference to go to.”

  A guffaw from the kid cuts Ernie off. “Are you kidding?” he says. “I’m just here because my advisor’s here. He said he’d introduce me to—no, no, ‘the suit’—hell, I was never even supposed to take it out of the lab. Do you have any idea how completely fucked I am if I don’t get it back?”

  “Hey, take it easy,” Ernie says. The booze is taking over now, jumbling the kid’s words, getting him all excitable, and Ernie doesn’t want to wait and find out if he’s a violent drunk. “My point is, you’re getting away with it, aren’t you? You caught me, kid. I’m taking you back to the suit. How can you say this thing destroyed your life?”

  “You ought to know,” he says. “You’ve been wearing it.”

  Ernie thinks about lying but he can’t see the point. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s harder to move. Harder to breathe. Money feels like it’s glued down. I got to tell you, though, if that’s all there is, it isn’t much of a downside.”

  “Isn’t it?” The kid’s giving him that dead-eyed stare in the rearview. “In my book, selling out all your values isn’t such a small price to pay. Or is it your own glued-down money you’ve been stealing? You have been stealing, haven’t you?”

  Ernie feels his cheeks flush. Better than those other guys. That’s what Janine always said. I guess she was wrong, Ernie thinks. I guess we were both wrong.

  That doesn’t sit well with Ernie, so he does what he always does when it comes to stuff like this: he talks himself out of it. “So what?” he says. “You said it yourself: I took myself out of the loop of cause and effect. Even if it’s only for ten minutes, for ten minutes there’s no consequences.”

  “What else have you done?” says the kid. “Do you find yourself lying more often? Breaking the rules in general? Even when you’re not wearing the device?”

  “Hey,” Ernie says, “don’t get all high and mighty on me. You’re just a kid. What do you know?”

  “I know I never meant to lie to my wife,” he says. “I know the human body needs a little something extra to make it through thirty-two hour days. I know . . .”

  Ernie can hear it in his voice: the kid wants to stop himself, but the booze went and loosened his tongue and now he can’t stop talking. He says, “I know the first time I fell asleep wearing the device I told myself I’d never make such a waste of it again. I’ve been taking epinephrine every night ever since, and to be honest I’m not sure I can stop. I’m on sleeping pills to counteract the epinephrine and I’m not sure I can quit on those either.”

  The kid starts crying. “And what’s the point?” he says. Ernie really cannot stand seeing a grown man cry. Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe it’s old-fashioned machismo. Whatever it is, there’s not enough beer in the world to make Ernie cry in front of a man he hardly knows. His eyes dodge the rearview like they might see his sister in it naked.

  “All that to finish in a year,” the kid says. “I’ve become a drug addict so I can look better on paper. So I can land a job where I’ll always have to wonder if the reason I got hired was because I had an unfair advantage. You had it all wrong,” he says, sobbing. “You never escape cause and effect. You just draw your cards from the deck in the wrong order.”

  Habit makes Ernie glance up at the mirror. Big mistake. “Jesus H.,” he says. “Why’re you telling me all this, kid?”

  “So you’ll give it back to me,” the kid says, his voice quivering. His whole face is red and wet; his eyes are bloodshot. “So I won’t have to call the cops,” he says. “So I can get the device back without having to admit I lost it. So I can go back to screwing up my life, I guess.”

  He starts crying again.

  “Jesus,” says Ernie.

  * * *

  They get to Ernie’s place. “That’ll be fifty-eight fifty,” he says. The kid looks up at Ernie and laughs. At least he can take a joke.

  Ernie asks him what his name is. “Ernest,” the kid says.

  “You gotta be kidding,” Ernie says with a laugh. “That’s my name! My folks named me after Hemingway.”

  “Mine too,” says Ernest. His voice is real quiet. “They wanted me to go into literature.”

  “Hell,” says Ernie, “I don’t know what they wanted for me, but it sure as hell wasn’t driving cabs. Wait here.”

  He goes inside, gets the Samsonite carry-on from the basement, and crams the suit in it. It’s not a hard decision. It might have been if they’d started their conversation on Ernie’s front porch, but they were driving all the way from Cambridge and Ernie had plenty of time to think. Plenty of places to turn off, places he coul
d’ve dropped the kid and kept driving. This time of night, the wrong neighborhood, maybe skinny little Ernest never comes back.

  Maybe. Or maybe Ernie just drives him someplace secluded, lets him out, breaks both his knees with the front bumper. Pick a dark place and turn the lights off and no one could get a good look at his plates. He could’ve made skinny little Ernest a speed bump, even backed over him to make sure, and the only description the cops would’ve had is “a taxi cab.”

  Ernie could have done it but he didn’t. He can’t exactly explain why, either. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t sure he could have gotten away with it. Maybe it’s because he got away with everything so far and he didn’t want to push his luck. Or maybe getting away with it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Ernie’s not sure. He just knows this one wasn’t the hard decision.

  Ernie gets behind the wheel, passes the case back to Ernest, and pulls a U-turn to take the kid back to the Yard. “This isn’t my suitcase,” says Ernest.

  “Yeah, well, the suit’s in it,” says Ernie. “Don’t get picky on me.”

  “No,” the kid says. “You don’t understand.” Ernie can hear him futzing with zippers. “There was a journal,” he says. “It had a log of the time I’ve borrowed. I need it back or I won’t know where to start borrowing from again.”

  Maybe you ought to lay off the borrowing, Ernie wants to say. Maybe it’ll help you quit the pills. But Ernie figures it’s not for him to get all high and mighty on this kid. “My wife’s got it,” he says.

  “I need it back,” says Ernest.

  Ernie looks at him through the mirror. “Kid,” he says, “you don’t know what you’re asking.”

  All the kid says is, “I need it back.”

  Ernie pulls up in front of Janine’s sister’s place and the living room drapes are thin enough that he can see they’ve still got the kitchen lights on. He sighs and says, “Give me the damn suitcase.”

  He rings the doorbell and her sister peeks out between the drapes. Janine comes down after a minute. Ernie takes a deep breath. “I need to tell you something,” he says, “and I’m gonna tell it to you straight.”