Still, talking about most anything would beat the customary grim silence and nonstop introspection.
“The problem is, no one knows.” I gestured, vaguely, toward his corkboard. “The world is full of so-called experts who claim to know best, and who don’t agree on the time of day.”
A sad smile flickered over Jonas’s face. “No, they don’t.” When I didn’t comment, he turned back toward the workbenches and his whatever-it-was.
Suddenly I was loath to let our first real, however vapid, conversation end. To Jonas, but really talking to myself, I said, “We don’t need more experts. We need a do-over.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Suppose you could warn the world about Hitler in 1938. Not that he was an evil, ambitious man, or that he meant to start a terrible war—but that he had started a war. That millions died. That the whole political order of Europe was shattered, and that as a result, the communists occupied half the continent to enslave millions more. Would you?”
I’d been giving fresh food and water to the guinea pigs when all this started. Much to Jonas’s amusement, I had given them names. I finished, latched the cage door, and stood.
“That’s tricky,” I said. “Stop Hitler and what else do you alter? Millions of lives saved, sure, but billions of lives changed.”
“Not so tricky,” Jonas said, glowering. “Not for everyone. If you came from Poland, it would be easy. Between the Nazis and the Russians, one out of six Poles died during World War II. For decades after, the communists oppressed and impoverished those who had survived.”
Anger brought out the accent I had almost ceased to notice. From the short letter that passed for a contract between us, entitling me to live upstairs for the next fourteen months, I had learned Jonas’s full name. His family name was Gorski. I wondered when, and under what circumstances, he had moved to this country.
“Or I could go back to my youth,” I said, changing the subject without too overtly changing the subject. If Jonas had the locks changed while I was out running an errand, what could I do? Hire a lawyer? “I’d teach my younger self everything I’ve learned about women. It wouldn’t take long.”
I laughed at myself. After a second Jonas joined in.
But I kept picturing my younger self meeting the near-indigent I had become. I couldn’t imagine that overconfident, snot-nosed teen listening. Or me of a year—and a lifetime—earlier, either.
Did Jonas wish he could tell his earlier self to take better care of his grant’s finances? Or to choose a research topic more respectable than whatever it was he did do? Or to seek friends beyond his circle of fickle colleagues?
As Jonas went back to his enigmatic task, I couldn’t help feeling there was something more that he had wanted to discuss.
* * * *
For all its awkwardness, the stop-Hitler-early conversation had knocked down the wall between us. That afternoon as we worked, we talked baseball. That evening, in the former break room become our improvised kitchen, we discussed music over pizza and beer. But when Jonas began frothing about a financial crisis, this latest one, apparently, embroiling Europe, I nodded along and concentrated on my beer. Whatever had gone wrong with Greece’s debt, no one could fault me.
The next day, as I cleared breakfast dishes from the workbench that served as our dinette table, Jonas talked about entropy. Whatever that was. Something to do with his abstruse physics, I guessed. He’d mumbled to himself about entropy often enough.
This once he noticed my blank expression. “Disorder, if you will.”
“If I will what?”
Jonas shook his head, smiling. “Think of entropy as measuring the homogeneity of a system.”
“That doesn’t help,” I said.
A coffee mug sat on a workbench beside him. He pointed. “There’s milk in my coffee. It’s well mixed, making the color within the mug uniform.”
“Uh-huh.”
He persisted. “The coffee is hot. At a molecular level the coffee and milk are rushing about. Despite that random motion, you never see milk gathering itself and the rest of the cup’s contents turning black. Entropy is why not.”
I frowned, trying to puzzle that out. “It’s some kind of force that operates on milk?”
“Only metaphorically,” Jonas said. “The force of numbers. There are countless ways for the milk and coffee to arrange themselves in which the fluids remain blended. The arrangements in which milk and coffee have separated are vastly fewer.”
“But it could happen,” I challenged.
“It could.” He stroked his chin pensively. Deciding whether to go on or cut his losses? “You’re familiar with the physicist Murray Gell-Mann?”
I’d heard of Einstein and Newton and an Italian. It took me a moment to retrieve that name, Galileo. I had my doubts I knew any other physicists. “I don’t think so.”
“No matter.” Perhaps not, but Jonas looked thwarted. “Gell-Mann once said, ‘That which is not forbidden is mandatory.’”
“So we should be seeing milk separate?”
“Yes, but not in our lifetimes,” Jonas said. “Gell-Mann’s domain was particle physics. I don’t know that he ever thought about milk dispersing. The thing is…”
“Yes?”
“The laws of physics, all of them, work the same forward and back.”
“Forward and backward,” I repeated.
“In time,” he added. “Suppose a car maintains a constant velocity due north at sixty miles per hour, and I know where that car is at this moment. By elementary physics I can as easily tell you where the vehicle was ten minutes ago as where it will be ten minutes from now.”
My mug was empty. Pouring a refill, I wondered about Jonas’s day-earlier wondering. I took a great intuitive leap. “You’re interested in time travel.”
“I am.”
“So that someone could stop Hitler.”
“Merely as an example.”
I’d been right from the first. I worked for a mad scientist. Outside of a Terminator movie, who talked about time machines?
But dusting in Jonas’s room, I’d seen framed doctoral degrees in physics and electrical engineering from Harvard and MIT. On the wooden crate that served him as an end table, a beer stein emblazoned with a Smithson-Briarwood crest congratulated him on making associate professor. It wasn’t hard to believe he had once won an NSF grant.
So: scientist, crackpot, or both? My thoughts spun around and around, like the wheels in a slot machine.
There was no jackpot.
As I hid behind my coffee mug, Jonas stood. “I have a list of groceries for you to pick up. After that, and taking care of the guinea pigs, I’ll have you start with—”
“What does time travel have to do with coffee and milk?” I blurted out. “I mean entropy?”
Blinking at the interruption, Jonas still managed to look pleased. He must miss discussing science with colleagues. As sorry a substitute as I must be, I had shown interest.
He said, “What isn’t forbidden is mandatory. Time travel, as far as anyone can tell, is not forbidden.”
Even I could complete the syllogism: Ergo, time travel is mandatory. But I could not bring myself to voice the obvious implication.
Jonas spoke for me. “So where are the time travelers?”
* * * *
Where are the time travelers?
I take my coffee black, but I couldn’t not reach for the milk pitcher. I kept pouring, my coffee turning paler and paler. I didn’t stop till liquid lapped at the brim.
“The future is a long time,” I said, “If ever time travel is invented, wouldn’t someone come back to our time?”
“You would think,” Jonas said, watching me intently.
In my confusion, I managed to bump the table. Coffee sloshed, ran off the bench top, and splattered my shoes. I hardly noticed.
The more time goes by, the more thoroughly milk and black coffee must mix. As the future inevitably stretched out after the inevitable invention of time travel, mu
st not the pre-discovery and post-discovery eras eventually mix, too?
So where were the time travelers?
Perhaps they lived among us in secrecy. Or maybe recorded history, all of it, was somehow a vanishingly improbable era, our “coffee” and their “milk” staying separate despite the odds. Or…
Suppose the metaphorical coffee of our era remained black because there was no metaphorical milk of time travelers from the future. Suppose the future—at least for humanity—came to an end before the invention of time travel.
Jonas’s sneering at fate notwithstanding, the litany of the world’s ills on his corkboard assumed a sickening new inevitability.
“I hope you’re a raving loon,” I said.
“I hope so, too,” Jonas answered.
CHAPTER 3
Eventually I stopped counting my days in the warehouse. I had a job, however menial. Instead, as Jonas’s mood grew ever darker, I wondered how many days’ work remained.
Because whatever he attempted to build here, it wasn’t working for him.
He cursed out his equipment, slammed doors, growled at me, punted innocent wastebaskets. Twice he flung things against a wall. Whatever an oscilloscope was, it shattered impressively.
It was a dreary Thursday, the thunder all but constant, rain in sheets cascading down the few, high windows. Inside the warehouse, the atmosphere was grimmer. With gauges and meters I could not begin to name, Jonas checked and double-checked his latest setup. Muttering became snarling—and swearing, when I asked what I should work on next. I made myself scarce, but slams and thumps pursued me.
From deep in one of our electronics scrap heaps I recovered an old boom box. Radio reception sucked, staticky whether from Jonas’s equipment or from the storm, but a few FM signals were tolerable. I changed stations the moment any news came on. Why add to Jonas’s frustrations?
I was surveying the refrigerator when Jonas appeared. He looked…beaten.
“What do you feel like for lunch,” I asked.
He didn’t respond.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go out and leave you alone.” Living and eating for free at the warehouse, I’d retained most of my meager earnings. I could afford a Big Mac. Fries, even. “Can I bring back something for you?”
Shoulders slumped, he said, “Anything not forbidden is mandatory.”
“Outside Hollywood, maybe it is forbidden,” I said.
“You’re not alone in thinking that.” Jonas popped the cap off a beer bottle and took a long swig. “My backstabbing, unimaginative ‘peers’ insist cause must always precede effect. I don’t believe that.”
He refused to believe, his posture told me. Because if it were true, he’d wasted…years?
“Shall I leave the music on?” I asked, headed for the kitchen door.
“What?”
“Music. You know, the radio.” I gestured at the boom box on the counter. “I got this clunker out of the scrap heap. Not that the reception here is anything to write home—”
Something flashed in his eyes, stopping me. Not depression, or disappointment, or anger. Something more thoughtful.
Something—could it be?—hopeful.
A broad grin lit Jonas’s face. “Peter,” he said, “you’re a genius.”
* * * *
I returned that afternoon from the bodega to encounter Jonas in safety goggles, drilling into a strongbox. The strongbox door hung open, so I had no idea why. The squeal of the drill was piercing, and I didn’t try to ask.
The strongbox steel was tough, or the bit wasn’t, or both. Jonas snapped three bits and burnt out two drill motors before punching through. Setting down the third drill, he attacked the hole’s edges with a sturdy rasp.
By then, my sleeves rolled up, I’d begun mucking out the guinea-pig cage. My chore might have gone faster, too, if I weren’t still fixated on that recent outré breakfast conversation. Surely Jonas had been pulling my leg!
But what if he wasn’t? The lab was full of clocks and I couldn’t stop staring at them. Could any of Jonas’s gadgets have traveled through time?
No, I guessed. The clock displays all read out within seconds of one another.
“Give me a hand,” Jonas called. He’d unlocked the gate of the chain-link cage.
“What’s with the strongbox?” I asked as we rolled out a table-sized wooden reel of electrical cable.
“You’ll see.”
The cable unspooling behind us was massive. To feed power to a freaking time machine? If he wasn’t toying with me.
“Anything else I can help with?” I asked.
“Can you run a camcorder?”
“I think so.”
“Be certain,” Jonas said. He got a camcorder from a cabinet and handed it to me. “This is important.”
I roamed about the warehouse, shooting and playing back short movies—except that nothing in them moved. I tried filming the guinea pigs, but they didn’t stir till I dropped cucumber slices into their cage. I don’t know why, but they loved cucumber. By the time I’d mastered the camcorder controls, Jonas had stowed some of his gear at the bottom of the strongbox, beneath its single shelf. An end of the thick cable we’d rolled over now ran through the hole he had so painstakingly drilled.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready.” For what, exactly? I wanted to ask.
I raised the camera to my eye, pushed REC, and Jonas began to speak.
* * * *
“You see here an apparatus of my own design. In a few minutes, I will lock it inside this strongbox. Walk with me”—guidance to the cameraman, I decided, and I followed Jonas around the workbench—“and you’ll find but a single small opening in the box.”
I zoomed where he had pointed, to where he had puttied the hole. But the filler wasn’t putty, but rather a quick-setting glue of some kind. When he prodded the material with the tip of a heavy rasp, it went thunk. “As you can see, I’ve even sealed the crack around the power cord.”
Jonas spoke as a scientist—to posterity, I supposed, or to the colleagues who had doubted him—not for the likes of me. I soon lost the thread. I dutifully captured it all, zooming in when directed on his massive wristwatch. It, like the digital clock on the workbench beside the strongbox, showed 2:02 P.M. Then I shot the timepieces side by side: the steady sweep of the seconds hand on the one, the flickering digits on the other.
He slipped off the wristwatch and set it on the strongbox shelf. Beneath the shelf, the apparatus he’d built had a keypad and two displays. With a few keystrokes he set both. One display held steady at ten minutes; the second, on which he had entered sixty seconds, began to count down when he tapped ENTER.
Jonas shut the strongbox door and spun the dial of the combination lock. He said, “Now we wait, until 2:14 by this clock. You’ll observe that the strongbox door remains closed the entire time.”
That was more guidance for me. I held the camera steady on the strongbox and clock.
He fidgeted as the minutes crept by. At 2:13, he said, “This is interminable, isn’t it?”
The clock on the workbench rolled over to 2:14. With a flourish, Jonas unlocked the strongbox, swung open the door, and raised his watch to the camcorder.
The wristwatch, still sweeping out the seconds, read 2:04.
* * * *
That night we had champagne. Cheap champagne in mismatched water tumblers, but still.
Jonas raised his glass. “A toast: to understanding, at long last. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
We clinked glassware. “Understanding what?”
“Where the time travelers are.”
And I had contributed? “I’m not following. Where are they?”
“Still in the future,” Jonas said. He patted the boom box I had salvaged. “You can’t recover a radio signal without a radio receiver.” Pregnant pause. “It turns out you can’t move anything through time without a proper receiver, either.”
Anything such as a wristwatch. I was s
till struggling to wrap my brain around that feat. “And?”
He finished his champagne, poured a generous refill, and topped off my glass. “And so there can’t be time travel—not of a person, not of a scrap of paper—without a compatible device to receive the traveler.”
“So till someone builds a receiver…”
“As I’ve done.”
“Then should we expect scraps of paper from the future?” Or did he mean to build a much larger unit? A person-sized unit? I shivered.
“One step at a time, Peter,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to rush into any Grandfather Paradoxes, now would we?”
“Which is?”
“A riddle of cause and effect. Imagine I travel back in time and prevent my grandparents from meeting.”
If his grandparents never meet, then his parents…aren’t. Therefore he…isn’t. But if he never existed, he can hardly travel back. Then his grandparents do meet. Then…?
Jonas laughed. “You look suitably perplexed. My point is, one shouldn’t use this technology lightly.”
“How should time travel be used?”
“Carefully,” Jonas said, “and for very serious matters.”
CHAPTER 4
In the days that followed his breakthrough Jonas was manic. He puttered with his apparatus, fine-tuning it, I gathered, and tidying up what he’d built. Passing through his lab area on my chores, I often found him hunched over a tabletop, furiously scribbling in a bound, canvas-covered notebook.
Then, late one morning, the beeping started.
At first I ignored it. The tones sounded like our microwave oven. Hay fever had my ears clogged, and I had little sense of direction for any noise’s origin. But as every few minutes the beeping recurred, the microwave seemed an improbable source. How many cups of tea could Jonas drink?
Then a beep triplet came just as I passed Jonas’s workspace. I saw him look up from his lab book, set down his pen, and open the strongbox door. He took a wooden ruler from the box’s shelf, compared that ruler to a ruler on his bench, and nodded with satisfaction.
Time Out Page 2
