The Time Hackers

by Gary Paulsen

  “Well, when you put it that way …”

  “And you call me irrational?”

  Dorso studied his sister on the lawn for a moment. The cat was sitting quietly in the doll dress at a little table, looking across the table at Darling as if waiting for a cup of tea and a scone. I wonder, Dorso thought, if a cat would eat a scone, and what is a scone? “Still, there's something weird going on.”

  “I think what's weird is you. You're imagining things and making them real in your mind.”

  “I'm not imagining the body in my locker or all the dead frogs, and I'm not imagining Custer looking at me either. He looked right into my eyes.”

  Frank shook his head. “And through you, out the other side. He was looking through you at all the Indians coming down on him, and that's all it was. You've got to relax. I tell you what—this weekend let's have a history marathon. We'll go back and see all the battles of the Civil War—not the whole battles, just the high spots; all the charges.…”

  But Dorso wasn't listening. It didn't matter what Frank thought or said; there was definitely something very strange happening, and he couldn't help thinking that it wasn't over yet.

  His name was Ludwig van Beethoven. In his own opinion, he was the greatest composer who had ever lived and indeed might be the greatest who ever would live.

  And he was angry.

  Of course, if you spoke to anybody who knew him, knew of him, had ever met him or had even been in the same room with him, you would find that he was always angry.

  Indeed, he sometimes thought anger was the force that drove him.

  And right now he was furious. He made his way through the streets of Vienna on foot—on his feet and not in a coach, by all that was holy!—to tutor an addlebrained young girl who didn't know the first thing about music, simply because he was almost penniless again and her father was rich enough to pay handsomely for her to hammer away at a pianoforte while Ludwig pretended to teach her.

  Stupid! Not the girl, all of it. Well, he thought, the girl too.

  And for nothing. Time wasted, life wasted, thought wasted and all for nothing except a few coins when he should be in the middle of his own music.

  He turned a corner to take a shortcut, trying not to break into a run, and stopped dead.

  Ahead of him the alley turned into a long, dark tunnel, stretching away to nothing, to a point of darkness. My mind, he thought, my mind is going.

  Worse, in front of the tunnel, staring at Beethoven with his mouth open, was a young boy dressed in outlandish clothes and strange shoes, carrying a small tablet of some kind.

  It did not last long. The boy jumped back, then stretched out a hand as if to touch him, but Ludwig lashed out at the hand with his arm and swore and turned away just as the tunnel changed into a white light and the boy disappeared.

  All madness, Ludwig thought; all is madness. Is this the way art treats us? Drives us mad? To see such things in the daylight?

  He was shaken, so upset that he decided not to use the shortcut but to avoid the boy and the tunnel and go a longer way. He hadn't taken five steps when he came upon an old man stumbling down the side of the road.

  “Out of the way!” Beethoven cried, but the old man did not hear, and when Beethoven moved to brush past him he saw that the man had a sign hanging about his neck and was holdingacup.

  I AM DEAF, the sign proclaimed. But it was nothing to Beethoven, because many were deaf then. First they suffered from an affliction so painful that it caused them to pull at their ears. Eventually, they went deaf. It was nothing. Only people of the street were affected; so far no one in the upper classes had become ill. The disease only took the very poor and uneducated.

  But as Beethoven brushed past him the old man coughed and sneezed and filled the air with hundreds of millions of viruses that nobody knew existed, would not know about for decades. Several thousand of them floated into the air in front of Ludwig and into his open eyes, where they found a ready home in the moisture, and from there traveled to his bloodstream, where they stayed until they could move to his ears and cause the infection that, in three years, would lead to Beethoven's complete deafness. Beethoven, who called himself the greatest composer in history.

  Frank shook his head. “I still think you're missing a chip or two.”

  They were walking near the library on a bright, warm Saturday morning. Neither of Dorso's parents was at work that weekend, so he didn't have to watch his little sister. He wanted to use the mainframe computer at the library to download some history data for a paper he was doing on early American train wrecks. He could get the data from the Internet, but sometimes the lines were so busy he couldn't get through. The library kept several infrared entry ports open all the time for visitors, and they were almost always available. The best part of working at the library directly with the mainframe was that it was so fast. And it got him away from Darling for a bit. She was studying ambush techniques used in jungle warfare—or so it seemed to both Dorso and the cat—and had almost caught Dorso in a punji pit filled with tigers earlier that morning, if you could imagine the cat as a bunch of tigers in a pit. Dorso had to admit that the job she had done on the cat with poster paint did make him look like a tiger, albeit a small one.

  “My laptop is fine. I ran a diagnostic and—”

  “I mean in your head. You said Beethoven saw you and ran off.”

  “He took a swing at me, Frank! He took a swing at me and then he ran off down this alley. He saw me and got this scared look in his eyes and then he said something in a foreign language—I think he was swearing at me—and then he took a cut at me and then he ran off.”

  “Then the UFO came down and beamed you up out of there and they got you on the spacecraft and took a long copper wire, which they inserted in your—”

  “Frank! Be serious about this. I'm telling you this is really happening.”

  “Or you think it is.”

  “What does that mean? You think I'm crazy? That I'm hallucinating all this?”

  “Well.…” Frank shrugged. “I had thought about that, but I think there's a more logical explanation. Look, what have you got so far? Some yack is playing practical jokes on you in some way we don't quite understand, and you saw Custer right when he saw all the angry Native Americans in the world and he seemed to look at you and then you saw Beethoven and he seemed to look at you….”

  “No.” Dorso shook his head. “He did look at me.”

  “But what if he didn't? What if he was looking past you or through where you were standing at somebody who was getting ready to mug him? You said it was in an alley, right? Maybe he was about to get attacked and you and I both know Custer had plenty to look at right then. Think about it. What I said before still holds. Would somebody who has somehow managed to defeat the time paradox use it to play jokes on a kid?”

  Dorso sighed. “I guess maybe you're right. Still, I wish this whole thing would stop.”

  “Let's do like I said before. We'll find some potato chips and pop and other junk food and have a historic battle marathon. Speaking of that, isn't it strange that they put the sliding chip blocks on naked women, which you would only study for art, of course, and yet they'll let you watch battles where guys are getting hacked and blown to pieces? Not that I want them to block out the battles, that would be just wrong, but what could it hurt to see Marie Antoinette taking a bath? Just for anatomical study purposes, you understand. Of course, my research tells me that apparently she never bathed.…” He stopped and nodded, thinking. “Hmmm. Maybe if we searched in the mainframe for the history of bathing, just looked for famous baths …”

  He was going to say more, although Dorso wasn't listening because he'd heard it all before. Frank stopped and stared ahead of him and upward. He was looking directly into the rear end of a woolly mammoth. It had just pulled up a bunch of grass with its stubby trunk and was bringing it up to its mouth.

  “What?” Frank stopped dead. Dorso, who'd been looking behind him because he'd h
eard a car backfire, took one more step and actually bumped into one of the mammoth's legs.

  The skin felt coarse and was covered with thick hairs so bristly they almost scraped him. For half a second Dorso, struck by curiosity, stretched out a hand to touch the skin again and then he, Frank and the mammoth all came to the same conclusion at the same time.

  Dorso shouldn't be able to feel the mammoth. Not if it was a hologram. He should be able to walk right through it. The mammoth felt much the same, that Dorso shouldn't be touching it, and it turned to its left and saw Frank standing there, openmouthed.

  Just the day before, a somewhat similar biped, covered with animal skins and filthy hair, had tried to poke the mammoth with a sharpened stick. Now the creature dropped its grass and with some irritation reached back with its trunk, took Frank by the ankle and flipped him onto the library lawn in a spiraling throw that brought Frank skidding into a perfect three-point landing—nose, elbows and knees— directly in front of a KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign.

  Then the mammoth vanished.

  “All right,” Frank said, his voice muffled as he spit out dirt and grass. “All right, you've got my attention.”

  “I'm thinking …” Dorso sighed. He seemed to be doing a lot of sighing lately. Better that than the hysterical screaming he ought to be doing. A live woolly mammoth. Good lord, what if it had come when he was somewhere else, say in a bathroom? Say it had come when he was sitting on the toilet, and it had filled the whole bathroom with woolly mammoth? How would he ever have explained that to his parents?

  They were back in his room, where Frank was dabbing disinfectant on his scrapes and scratches.

  “I'm thinking there's so much wrong with all this that we ought to go to the authorities,” Dorso said.

  “All right.” Frank nodded, putting the disinfectant down and wiping his hands on a paper towel. “That's one way to approach it. The authorities would probably want to know about this, would probably want to know that somebody has found a way around the grandfather rule and has the potential to change the past and the future and could actually destroy the whole human race. Or …”

  “Or? That's not enough? There's an ‘or'?” Dorso frowned. “Although I think that might be a bit strong. Destroy the whole species? How could they do that?”

  Frank looked at Dorso with pity. “Simple. Go back to where it starts and stop it. Drop a dime on Adam, you know, whoever or whatever Adam was, and bingo, scratch the human race.”

  “But then we wouldn't be here … the grandfather rule would kick in and they couldn't do it because they wouldn't be there to— Did you say ‘Drop a dime on Adam'? Did you actually say that?”

  “And there's your ‘or.' ”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “We could tell the authorities, or …”

  “Or what?”

  “Or we could not tell them and try to figure this all out by ourselves.”

  “Are you out of your mind? You just saw a real woolly mammoth—not a hologram but a real one—that was brought forward in flesh and blood from the past. It picked you up and skipped you like a stone. This has gone way beyond our ability to figure things out…. Why are you shaking your head?”

  “Dorso, Dorso, Dorso—my poor boy. You're missing the obvious.”

  “I am?”

  “Sure. The truth is, this is the first time in the history of the human race that this thing has happened. Heck, nobody can figure it out. We can not figure it out as well as anybody can not figure it out, and we have the advantage that it's happening to you. Well, to us now, since I was the one the mammoth picked up. It's happening to us.”

  Dorso sat staring at his friend and was horrified to find himself not saying anything. This was insane. This was the time paradox. The thing that all science said was impossible, the thing that could ruin it all, destroy everything. To not tell the authorities was insane. Yet he was silent.

  “And there's the other thing,” Frank said.

  Dorso waited. Waited for the other thing.

  “Well, two other things, really.”

  Dorso waited for the two other things.

  “First, think of the opportunities to learn. We can see how time, how the core of all we are, how time works. If we can see how they do this and survive, whoever is doing it, we can bend and warp things. We can be rich. Think, we could go back and invest in Microsoft when it first started so our parents could be rich before we were born. We could be popular and good-looking …”

  “How could we be good-looking?”

  Frank shrugged. “I'm not sure, but if we know how to change time I'm sure we can work it out. The thing is, along with these other people we seem to be the only ones who know about this. What a chance. Money, power, knowledge— all of that to two twelve-year-old kids.”

  “Still…,” Dorso began, but he knew he was sunk. It was too much, too tempting. The idea of being rich, popular, maybe good-looking. Rich. “Still…” Then he shook his head.

  “You said there were two things. What was the other thing?”

  “Well, I'm thinking that if we can work this all out it will put us way outside the normal operating parameters for time viewing, give us some new angles.”

  “Sure. So?”

  “I should be able to work around the sliding blocks and get some really good studies going. Maybe Helen of Troy, Nefertiti—the really classic ones.”

  “Ah, yes.” Dorso nodded. “The naked ladies.”

  “Anatomical studies,” Frank said. “Anatomical studies.”

  “Of course.”

  Six days passed.

  Six long days in which nothing at all happened. That is to say nothing new.

  The weekend roared through, Dorso's parents went back to work, school resumed, class fed into class. There was a moment of excitement when the history teacher said that no matter what they saw in time holograms, kids wouldn't understand history unless a teacher guided them through the controversy. Frank asked what controversy the teacher meant and the teacher said that all history was open to interpretation and Frank said there wouldn't be any problem at all if they would remove the blocks so that kids could see it all and not a watered-down version.

  Life went on. The cat found a new hiding place by crawling through a small hole under the stairs and working his claws up into a floor joist to hang inverted like a sleeping bat. But Darling found that the vacuum-cleaner hose would just fit through the hole. She put the control dial on super-tornado-dust-atomizer-seventy-four and the cat came out nearly voluntarily and not totally bald.

  So life went on, but it wasn't that Dorso and Frank weren't working on the problem. Frank used his personal computer to do what he called logic flowcharts.

  “Look, this is how I see it.” Frank propped the flex-screen up against the wall. Their personal portable computers were little more than a flexible screen less than an eighth of an inch thick that could be folded or rolled up for storage. With built-in solar charging, there was no need for plug-in power, and with all data taken and sent through infrared data ports, there was no need for wires or hookups for modems. The computers had touch-sensitive keyboards implanted in the screen in such a way that they could be stored electronically in the data chips when not needed. Of course, with voice-controlled systems coded to operate only with the owner's voice, there was little need for a keyboard.

  Standing in front of the screen as though he was making a presentation, Frank said, “Tell me if this is roughly correct. This has been going on for about three months, right?”

  Dorso nodded, looking at the screen. Frank had made graphs and bar and pie charts.

  “Okay, we'll call each event an incident. This line here is the incident-appearance line, coupled with this bar, which represents the height or depth or maybe the best word would be seriousness of the incident.”

  Oh, good, Dorso thought. An incident-appearance line coupled with an incident-seriousness bar. My life in graphs. If we could just work in a geekness-quantity pie chart my w
orld would be complete.

  “So they started kind of light, just weird images and holograms, little jokes—”

  “If,” Dorso interrupted, “you can call four cubic feet of dead and rotten earthworms jammed in your locker a little joke.”

  “Right. I know that at the time the subject considered these things serious, but we must have a logic base to start from. Initially, they were almost harmless pranks—”

  “If,” Dorso said, interrupting again, “you consider four hundred and thirty-one pounds of rhino excrement jammed in my locker a harmless prank—and did you just call me the subject?”

  Frank nodded. “We have to keep it neutral to keep it accurate.”

  “I don't want to be neutral. I don't want to be a subject.”

  “We're getting off track here.”

  “Well, it's my track and I'll get off it if I want to and I don't want to be called the subject.”

  “How about calling you Subject Number One.”

  “No.”

  “What do you want to be called?”

  “Dorso.”

  Frank seemed about to argue and then nodded. “Dorso. But let's get back to the charts. It started slowly, with silly prank holograms in your locker, isn't that right?”

  “If you can call cadavers and dead frogs and lab rats silly pranks…”

  “All right! So they weren't pranks. Still, they started at this lower level and then they got worse, isn't that right?”

  Dorso frowned, remembering. He nodded. “Yes.”

  “So describe how they got worse.”

  “Well, initially they were just like you said—warped, weird little things, sometimes all mixed up, like they had two and sometimes three holograms combined by mistake. Or maybe on purpose. There was the ancient Greek athlete who had a headlight for a face, and Michelangelo's statue of David, only it was made out of green Jell-O with those small marshmallows and bits of fruit in it. Joke stuff. Then it went to disgusting things—dead bodies and squashed frogs and different loads of animal dung and then, finally, the scenes with Custer and Beethoven, where I know they saw me.”