Time Travel: Recent Trips

by Paula Guran

She held the watch up. "Two minutes."

  "He didn't want to come. Said that the doubt would be better than knowing for certain." Homer chewed his lip and handed her the opera glasses. "What happens to him, Miss Jackson?"

  Louise sighed and remembered all the things she'd read about Wilbur Wright before coming here. "He dies of typhoid when he's forty-seven. I do wish I hadn't said a thing about the future."

  Homer shook his head. "I'm glad you told me. I'll—"

  And he was gone.

  The tall grass of Hoffman Prairie was replaced by a crisply mown lawn of chemical green. Where the weathered hangar had been stood a bright, white replica. Neither the hangar nor the lawn seemed as real as the past. Louise sighed. The air burned her nostrils, smelling of carbon and rubber. The homing beacon in her handbag should bring them to her soon enough.

  She leaned back against the barn to wait. A paper rustled behind her. She pulled away, afraid that she'd see a big "wet paint" sign but it was an envelope.

  An envelope with her name on it.

  She spun around as quickly as she could but there wasn't a soul in sight. Breath fighting with her corset, Louise pulled the envelope off the wall. She opened it carefully and found a single sheet of paper. A shaky hand covered the surface.

  Dear Louise,

  You will have just returned from your first time travel mission and meeting me, so this offers the first opportunity to introduce myself to you in your present. I wish I could be there, but that would mean living for another forty years, which task I fear would require Olympian blood. You have been such a friend to me and my family and so I wanted you to know two things.

  1. Telling me the truth was the best thing you could have done for me. Thank you.

  2. We are (or will be by the time you read this) major shareholders in the Time Travel Society. It ensures that your future trips to my past are without incident, and also will let my children know precisely when your first trip takes place in your present. I hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of asking my children to purchase shares for you as well. I wish we could have presented them to you sooner.

  Be well, my friend. And happy travels.

  Sincerely yours,

  Homer Van Loon

  At the bottom of the sheet was a bank account number and then a list of addresses and phone numbers arranged in order of date.

  Her eyes misted over at the gift he'd given her—not the account, but the knowledge that she had not harmed him by telling the truth.

  In the parking lot, the Time Travel Society's minivan pulled in, barely stopping before Mr. Barnes and the rest of the team jumped out. "How was the trip?" he shouted across the field, jogging toward her.

  Louise smiled and held out the opera glasses. "I think you'll like the footage I got for you."

  "May I?" He stopped in front of her as long and lanky as she imagined Homer being when he was grown up.

  "Of course. That's why you sent me, isn't it?"

  He took the opera glasses from her and rewound. Holding it to his eyes as the rest of the team gathered around, Mr. Barnes became utterly still. "Miss Jackson . . . Miss Jackson, how did you get the camera on the plane?"

  Dr. Connelly gasped. "On the Wright Flyer?"

  "Yes, ma'am. I watched from the ground with the hatcam while Wilbur was flying. I'm quite curious to hear the audio that goes with it. We could hear him whooping from the ground."

  "But how did you . . . " Dr. Connelly shook her head.

  "I told him the truth." Louise sighed, remembering the naked look on his face at the moment when he believed her. "He took the camera because he understood the historical context."

  THE TIME TRAVEL CLUB

  Charlie Jane Anders

  Nobody could decide what should be the first object to travel through time. Malik offered his car keys. Jerboa held up an action figure. But then Lydia suggested her one-year sobriety coin, and it seemed too perfect to pass up. After all, the coin had a unit of time on it, as if it came from a realm where time really was a denomination of currency. And they were about to break the bank of time forever, if this worked.

  Lydia handed over the coin, no longer shiny due to endless thumbworrying. And then she had a small anxiety attack. "Just as long as I get it back," she said, trying to keep the edge out of her voice.

  "You will," said Madame Alberta with a smile. "This coin, we send a mere one minute into the future. It reappears in precisely the same place from which it disappears."

  Lydia would have been nervous about the first test of the time machine in Madame Alberta's musty dry laundry room in any case. After all they'd been through to make this happen, the stupid thing had to work. But now, she felt like a piece of herself—a piece she had fought for—was about to vanish, and she would need to have faith. She sucked at having faith.

  Madame Alberta took the coin and placed it in the airtight glass cube— six by six by six, that they'd built where the washer/dryer were supposed to be. The balsa-walled laundry room was so crammed with equipment there was scarcely room for four people to hunch over together. Once the coin was sitting on the floor of the cube, Madame Alberta walked back towards the main piece of equipment, which looked like a million vacuum cleaner hoses attached to a giant slow-cooker.

  "I keep thinking about what you were saying before," Lydia said to Malik, trying to distract herself. "About wanting to stand outside history and see the empires rising and falling from a great height, instead of being swept along by the waves. But what if this power to send things, and people, back and forth across history makes us the masters of reality? What if we can make the waves change direction, or turn back entirely? What then?"

  "I chose your group with great care," Madame Alberta. "As I have said. You have the wisdom to use this technology properly, all of you."

  Madame Alberta pulled a big lever. A whoosh of purple neon vapor rushed into the glass cube, followed by a klorrrrrp sound like someone opening a soda can and burping at the same time—in exactly the way that might suggest they'd had enough soda already—and the coin was gone.

  "Wow," said Malik. His eyebrows went all the way up so his forehead concertina-ed, and his short dreads did a fractal scatter.

  "It just vanished," said Jerboa, bouncing with excitement, floppy hat flopping. "It just . . . It's on its way."

  Lydia wanted to hold her breath, but there was so little air in here that she was already light-headed. This whole wooden-beamed staircase-flanked basement area felt like a soup of fumes.

  Lydia really needed to pee, but she didn't want to go upstairs and risk missing the sudden reappearance of her coin, which would be newer than everything else in the world by a minute. She held it, swaying and squirming. She looked down at her phone, and there were just about thirty seconds left. She wondered if they should count down. But that was probably too tacky. She really couldn't breathe at this point, and she was starting to taste candyfloss and everything smelled white.

  "Just ten seconds left," Malik said. And then they did count down, after all. "Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five! Four! Three! Two! ONE!"

  They all stopped and stared at the cube, which remained empty. There was no "soda-gas" noise, no sign of an object breaking back into the physical world from some netherspace.

  "Um," said Jerboa. "Did we count down too soon?"

  "It is possible my calculations—" said Madame Alberta, waving her hands in distress. Her fake accent was slipping even more than usual. "But no. I mean, I quadruple-checked. They cannot be wrong."

  "Give it a minute or two longer," said Malik. "I'm sure it'll turn up." As if it was a missing sock in the dryer, instead of a coin in the cube that sat where a dryer ought to be.

  They gave it another half an hour, as the knot inside Lydia got bigger and bigger. At one point, Lydia went upstairs to pee in Madame Alberta's tiny bathroom, facing a calendar of exotic bird paintings. And eventually, Lydia went outside to stand in the front yard, facing the one-lane highway, cursing. Why
had she volunteered her coin? And now, she would never see it again.

  Lydia went home and spent an hour on the phone processing with her sponsor, Nate, who kept reassuring her, in a voice thick as pork rinds, that the coin was just a token and she could get another one and it was no big deal. These things have no innate power, they're just symbols. She didn't mention the "time machine" thing, but kept imagining her coin waiting to arrive, existing in some moment that hadn't been reached yet.

  Even after all of Nate's best talk-downs, Lydia couldn't sleep. And at three in the morning, Lydia was still thinking about her one-year coin, floating in a state of indeterminacy—and then it hit her, and she knew the answer. She turned on the light, sat up in bed and stared at the wall of ring-pull talkinganimal toys facing her bed. Thinking it through again and again, until she was sure.

  At last, Lydia couldn't help phoning Jerboa, who answered the phone still half asleep and in a bit of a panic. "What is it?" Jerboa said. "What's wrong? I can find my pants, I swear I can put on some pants and then I'll fix whatever."

  "It's fine, nothing's wrong, no need for pants," Lydia said. "Sorry to wake you. Sorry, I didn't realize how late it was." She was totally lying, but it was too late anyhow. "But I was thinking. Madame Alberta said the coin moved forward in time one minute, but it stayed in the same physical location. Right?"

  "That's right," said Jerboa. "Same place, different time. Only moving in one dimension."

  "But," said Lydia. "What if the Earth wasn't in the same place when the coin arrived? I mean . . . Doesn't the Earth move around the sun?"

  "Yeah, sure. And the Earth rotates. And the sun moves around the galactic disk. And the galaxy is moving too, towards Andromeda and the Great Attractor," said Jerboa. "And space itself is probably moving around. There's no such thing as a fixed point in space. But Madame Alberta covered that, remember? According to Einstein, the other end of the rift in time ought to obey Newton's first law, conservation of momentum. Which means the coin would still follow the Earth's movement, and arrive at the same point. Except . . . Wait a minute!"

  Lydia waited a minute. After which, Jerboa still hadn't said anything else. Lydia had to look at her phone to make sure she hadn't gotten hung up on. "Except what?" she finally said.

  "Except that . . . the Earth's orbit and rotation are momentum, plus gravity. Like, we actually accelerate towards the sun as part of our orbit, or else our momentum would just carry us out into space. And Madame Alberta said her time machine worked by opting out of the fundamental forces, right? And gravity is one of those. Which would mean . . . Wait a minute, wait a minute." Another long, weird pause, except this time Lydia could hear Jerboa breathing heavily and muttering sotto voce.

  Then Jerboa said, "I think I know where your medallion is, Lydia."

  "Where?"

  "Right where we left it. On the roof of Madame Alberta's neighbor's house."

  Lydia had less than ninety days of sobriety under her belt, when she first met the Time Travel Club. They met in the same Unitarian basement as Lydia's twelve-step group: a grimy cellar, with a huge steam pipe running along one wall and intermittent gray carpeting that looked like a scale map of plate tectonics. Pictures of purple hands holding a green globe and dancing scribble children hung askew, by strands of peeling Scotch tape. Boiling hot in summer, drafty in winter, it was a room that seemed designed to make you feel desperate and trapped. But all the twelve steppers laughed a lot, in between crying, and afterwards everybody shared cigarettes and sometimes pie. Lydia didn't feel especially close to any of the other twelve steppers (and she didn't smoke) but she felt a desperate lifeboat solidarity with them.

  The Time Travel Club always showed up just as the last people from Lydia's twelve-step meeting were dragging their asses up out of there. Most of the time travelers wore big dark coats and furry boots that seemed designed to look equally ridiculous in any time period. Lydia wasn't even sure why she stayed behind for one of their meetings, since it was a choice between watching people pretend to be time travelers and eating pie. Nine times out of ten, pie would have won over fake time travel. But Lydia needed to sit quietly by herself and think about the mess she'd made of her life before she tried to drive, and the Time Travel Club was as good a place as any.

  Malik was a visitor from the distant past—the Kushite Kingdom of roughly twenty-seven hundred years ago. The Kushites were a pretty swell people, who made an excellent palm wine that tasted sort of like cognac. And now Malik commuted between the Kushite era, the present day, and the thirtysecond century, when there was going to be a neo-Kushite revival going on and the dark, well-cheekboned Malik would become a bit of a celebrity.

  The androgynous and pronoun-free Jerboa looked tiny and bashful inside a huge brown hat and high coat collar. Jerboa spent a lot of time in the Year One Million, a time period where the parties were excellent and people were considerably less hung up on gender roles. Jerboa also hung out in the 1920s and the early 1600s, on occasion.

  And then there was Normando, a Kenny Rogers-looking dude who was constantly warping back to this one party in 1973 where he'd met this girl, who had left with an older man just as Young Normando was going to ask her to bug out with him. And now Normando was convinced he could be that older man. If he could just find that one girl again.

  Lydia managed to shrink into the background at the first Time Travel Club meeting, without having to say anything. But a week later, she decided to stick around for another meeting, because it was better than just going home alone and nobody was going for pie this time.

  This time, the others asked Lydia about her own journeys through time, and she said she didn't have a time machine and if she did, she would just use it to make the itchy insomniac nights end sooner, so she could wander alone in the sun rather than hide alone in the dark.

  Oh, they said.

  Lydia felt guilty about harshing their shared fantasy like that, to the point where she spent the next week obsessing about what a jerk she'd been and even had to call Nate once or twice to report that she was a terrible person and she was struggling with some Dark Thoughts. She vowed not to crash the Time Travel Club meeting again, because she was not going to be a disruptive influence.

  Instead, though, when the twelve-step meeting ended and everybody else straggled out, Lydia said the same thing she'd said the previous couple weeks: "Nah, you guys go on. I'm just going to sit for a spell."

  When the time travelers arrived, and Malik's baby face lit up with his opening spiel about how this was a safe space for people to share their space/ time experiences, Lydia stood up suddenly in the middle of his intro, and blurted: "I'm a pirate. I sail a galleon in the nineteenth century, I'm the First Mate. They call me Bad Bessie, even though I'm named Lydia. Also, I do extreme solar-sail racing a couple hundred years from now. But that's only on weekends. Sorry I didn't say last week. I was embarrassed because piracy is against the law." And then she sat down, very fast. Everybody applauded and clapped her on the back and thanked her for sharing. This time around, there were a half dozen people in the group, up from the usual four or five.

  Lydia wasn't really a pirate, though she did work at a pirate-themed adult bookstore near the interstate called the Lusty Doubloon, with the O's in "Doubloon" forming the absurdly globular breasts of its tricorner-hatted mascot. Lydia got pretty tired of shooting down pick-up lines from the type of men who couldn't figure out how to find porn on the Internet. Something about Lydia's dishwater-blond hair and smattering of monster tattoos apparently did it for those guys. The shower in Lydia's studio apartment was always pretty revolting, because the smell of bleach or Lysol reminded her of the video booths at work.

  Anyway, after that, Lydia started sticking around for Time Travel Club every week, as a chaser for her twelve-step meeting. It helped get her back on an even keel so she could drive home without shivering so hard she couldn't see the road. She even started hanging out with Malik and Jerboa socially— Malik was willing to quit talking about palm
wine around her, and they all started going out for fancy tea at the place at the mall, the one that put the leaves inside a paper satchel that you had to steep for exactly five minutes or Everything Would Be Ruined. Lydia and Jerboa went to an all-ages concert together, and didn't care that they were about ten years older than everybody else there—they'd obviously mis-aligned the temporal stabilizers and arrived too late, but still just in time. "Just in time" was Jerboa's favorite catchphrase, and it was never said without a glimpse of sharp little teeth, a vigorous nod and a widening of Jerboa's brown-green eyes.

  For six months, the Time Travelers' meeting slowly became Lydia's favorite thing every week, and these weirdoes became her particular gang. Until one day, Madame Alberta showed up and brought the one thing that's guaranteed to ruin any Time Travel Club ever: an actual working time machine.

  Lydia's one-year coin was exactly where Jerboa had said it would be: on the roof of the house next door to Madame Alberta's, nestled in some dead leaves in the crook between brick gable and the upward slope of rooftop. She managed to borrow the neighbor's ladder, by sort of explaining. The journey through the space/time continuum didn't seem to have messed up Lydia's coin at all, but it had gotten a layer of grime from sitting overnight. She cleaned it with one of the sanitizing wipes at work, before returning it to its usual front pocket.

  About a week later, Lydia met up with Malik and Jerboa for bubble tea at this place in the Asian Mall, where they also served peanut honey toast and squid balls and stuff. Lydia liked the feeling of the squidgy tapioca blobs gliding up the fat straw and then falling into her teeth. Alien larvae. Never to hatch. Alien tadpoles squirming to death in her tummy.

  None of them had shown up for Time Travel Club, the previous night. Normando had called them all in a panic, wanting to know where everybody was. Somehow Malik had thought Jerboa would show up, and Jerboa had figured Lydia would stick around after her other meeting.

  "It's just . . . " Malik looked into his mug of regular old coffee, with a tragic expression accentuated by hot steam. "What's the point of sharing our silly make-believe stories about being time-travelers, when we built an actual real time machine, and it was no good?"