“Too damn much work,” Jonas said when I suggested moving. To relocate the lab, he meant. “And I’ll thank you not to spend my money. That’s not what it’s for.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I’d been apologizing a lot. Other than that Jonas was cranky, I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t think he was angry with me.
That left only him.
His progress appeared to have stalled. Calculators and cell phones and anything else that relied upon precision microelectronics never functioned after a time shift. And the objects he chose to shift had stopped getting heavier. I gathered that had something to do with power requirements.
“I don’t want them inside,” Jonas often muttered. The power company, I decided he meant. They might steal his work.
As his experiments progressed, an electrical overload was probably inevitable. Still, when one happened, Jonas wasn’t quite sure why. A typo, perhaps: Maybe he’d accidentally scheduled two arrivals for the same moment. Or maybe he’d miscalibrated one of his devices.
Maybe, I opined, future Jonas had had something more to say.
My theory he dismissed with a scowl.
Whatever the reason, two transceivers beeped in unison. Once.
With a blinding fountain of sparks, the warehouse substation blew. Cascading effects plunged the neighborhood into darkness for several blocks in every direction. And in neither transceiver did any object come through.
The temporary blackout was a small thing, surely.
But so is the proverbial Amazonian butterfly, whose flapping wings give rise—weeks later, and far away—to a raging hurricane.
* * * *
A beautiful spring day: mild with a gentle breeze, and all the cherry trees in bloom. Birds chirping, dogs yipping, and toddlers gleefully shrieking. A picnic lunch in the park. Stretched out on the grass, the sun warm on my face. Victoria singing softly to herself.
I was—the realization took me by surprise—happy.
When I summoned the energy to open my eyes, Victoria’s hair—wind-stirred, glinting in the sun—was more pixieish than usual. She was smiling down at me.
“Spinach in my teeth?” I asked. “See, this is why I don’t believe in vegetables.”
“You can tell yourself that.” She patted my arm.
We’d had sandwiches and deli salads she’d brought from the 7-Eleven, listened through shared earbuds to the newest download on her iPod, kicked around our dinner options, and debated braving the downtown crowds over the weekend to take in the Cherry Blossom Festival. She’d told a charming anecdote about her two-year-old niece. I’d told lawyer jokes.
“So…” she said.
“Back to the salt mines?” I guessed.
“We have a few more minutes.” She brushed the hair off my forehead. “When do I get to see where you work?”
A recurring theme. I said, “It’s not as interesting as where you work.”
“Right. Seriously, Peter, what’s the big mystery?”
“The boss likes his privacy.”
Jonas had finally ordered a second high-voltage line for his lab. About now he’d be watching a Dominion Power service crew like a hawk. Even though we’d covered his work area with canvas tarps. And draped a second layer of cloths over the first, lest any of the first batch should slip.
But as uneasy as Jonas had been about admitting the power-line techs, he’d also been eager: a calculator transmitted forward the evening before had arrived still able to calculate. The improvement had to do, somehow, with “more precise real-time modulation of the transfer stream, at more noise-resistant carrier-wave levels.” Whatever that meant.
I tried not to imagine what experiments he might undertake with that extra power.
“I Googled him last night,” Victoria said.
“Any cookies or brownies in the bag of plenty?” I asked.
“He’s not an ordinary guy.” She wasn’t one to be deflected.
“Is that a ‘no’ on dessert?”
“He worked on esoteric stuff,” she persisted, “before he left the university. Relativity. Tachyons. Whatever those are. If they even exist.”
“Jonas’s work is way over my head,” I said.
“Why did he leave the university to work alone in a warehouse?”
I’d also looked up my boss. His difference of opinion with the NSF hadn’t made it into Wikipedia. I shrugged, the gesture feeling just a scooch less like lying than saying that I didn’t know.
“Reading between the lines, Peter, there’s something fishy about him. I worry that you can’t trust him.”
I sat up. “He pays me regularly. He treats me fairly. He gives to charity.”
That last item was both true and misleading. Jonas had sent me to the local precinct with a check made out to the local branch of the Fraternal Order of Police. Thereafter, cop cars came cruising around the warehouse a lot more often.
I tried not to think of that transaction as wealth from the future influencing my present.
“That’s something,” Victoria allowed. She started gathering the wrappings and remains of lunch. “Whatever it is your Dr. Gorski does, it seems to be far off the beaten path. At least that’s how I interpret that his papers are seldom cited.”
So far off the path that I doubted Jonas could still see the path. But unless someone else knew how to build working time machines, the fault lay with the path. Pioneers like Jonas opened new paths.
I said, “It is what it is. The boss doesn’t want anyone brought inside. He pays the rent; he’s entitled.”
“It’s your home, too.”
I’d tried that tack. Jonas told me I was free to live elsewhere. I shrugged again.
Victoria stood. “Now I do have to get back. Have time to walk with me?”
Jonas would be too preoccupied with watching the Dominion Power crew to notice, or care, if I took a few extra minutes.
“Lead on,” I said.
We’d arrived separately: my warehouse, her 7-Eleven, and the little park were at the corners of an almost equilateral triangle. I’d walked here through a light-industrial complex and past a strip mall.
Her route took us into a quiet residential area of mostly brick bungalows from the Fifties. Huge old trees dwarfed everything that hadn’t been bulldozed to make way for McMansions. Every block had for-sale signs. Grass gone shaggy and towering weeds marked long-vacant houses.
How many were foreclosures? I wondered. Which of them had I rubberstamped?
My eyes must have lingered, because Victoria said, “You’re not that guy any more.” She gently squeezed my hand.
Fat lot of good remorse did the people I’d denied their due process. But “due process” was so namby-pamby. People whom I’d cheated. Hurt.
“You’re not,” she insisted.
Perhaps. But if I wasn’t that guy, then who had I become?
CHAPTER 7
The day came when the guinea pigs chowed down on time-shifted lettuce leaves. Jonas spent an hour afterward just staring into their cage. Waiting to see if anyone would get sick, I knew. I arranged my morning chores to keep looking in on the gals.
“They’re fine,” Jonas assured me on my fifth pass-by. “You see what this means.”
I didn’t till he explained: The time transfers were finally preserving fine details, even microscopic details, down to the molecular level.
Maybe Jonas got bored; he moved on to doing something else. The day before he’d assembled his largest transceiver yet, and now he fussed with its controls. Calibration of some kind, it looked like. The new transceiver used a metal utility cabinet about the size of a four-drawer file cabinet; he’d said it should shift up to about one hundred fifty pounds. To confirm his predictions, he sent me out for three hundred pounds of dense ballast, shaking his head when I counter-proposed that he use weights from his barbell.
Returning from the grocery, lugging in the first of many twenty-five-pound bags of rice, I detoured past the cage again. Caramel was ramming ar
ound the enclosure, or chasing poltergeists. Feeling no pain. Sugar and Spice were playfully tussling. And Cinnamon—
Was gone.
Dropping my burden—breaking the plastic sack, sending rice grains flying everywhere—I dashed into Jonas’s main workspace. He stood by a workbench, his attention cycling between an empty transceiver and a clock.
“Where is she?” I shouted.
“Who?” Jonas asked.
“Cinnamon, damn it.”
Jonas frowned. “The guinea pig, you must mean. Peter, I told you not see them as pets.”
“Where is she?” My stomach sank. “When is she?”
“She should return to us in”—he glanced again at the clock—“fifteen minutes.”
After a very long fifteen minutes, the transceiver beeped. Behind the glass, Cinnamon sniffed about curiously, acting none the worse for her experience.
“May I?” I asked.
“If you keep an eye on her.”
I restored Cinnamon to the cage. Everyone touched noses and sniffed butts, and then went on about their guinea-piggy duties of eating, drinking, grooming, and meandering. I began to believe the transfer hadn’t harmed her.
Freeing me to fret about what experiment Jonas had in mind to try next.
* * * *
After dinner and streaming a movie at Victoria’s apartment, I came home to find the warehouse floor deserted. Only screen savers, clock displays, and a bit of sky glow through the under-eave windows tempered the darkness. Creeping up the stairs, I saw light under the door to Jonas’s room. Rhythmic clanking said he was hard at work with his weights. He bench-pressed about two hundred pounds; to vacuum his room I rolled the barbell from side to side.
Whether the ghostly lighting inspired me, or the six-pack Victoria and I had split that evening, I had the sudden urge to send my younger self a note. I’d observed Jonas operating his machines often enough. I turned, retreated down two steps—
And froze. What the hell was I thinking?
I could never have back my old life. If a younger me had received advice from this me on the very first day Jonas got his first prototype to work, it would still have been too late. I could only create some horrible paradox.
Even Jonas was loath to send anything back in time.
And besides, my old life had not included Victoria.
I turned around a second time and went up to bed.
* * * *
“I should demand a refund,” Jonas grumbled.
I was far across the warehouse, slipping treats to the guinea pigs. Jonas wasn’t talking to me. He wasn’t on the phone. That left talking to himself.
“What’s going on?” I called out.
He tapped one of his instruments. “You don’t want to know what this cost. It was a special order, extensively modified to my specifications from one of their standard offerings.”
I dumped the last of the fruit slivers into the cage, then walked over to where Jonas was sitting. “And?”
“And now that they’ve built one for me, I see it offered in their online catalogue. Priced at half what they charged me.”
The story of every gadget I’d ever bought. “Does it matter?”
“Well, there’s the principle of the thing.” Jonas looked around at stacks of unopened cartons, both tech gear and toys. Looking…repentant? “A funny thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not doing as well as I was with my investments.”
“You used up the tips from Future Jonas?”
“That’s the thing,” Jonas said. “I haven’t.”
“How do you lose money when you know what’s going to happen?” And then it struck me. “At least one of the tips hasn’t panned out.”
Lips pressed thin, he nodded.
“How is that possible?” I asked.
“I want to believe it was an honest mistake transcribing the information for me.”
“And if it’s not?”
Jonas shrugged.
I imagined a butterfly, its wings fluttering.
* * * *
As my final errand one Friday, Jonas sent me to retrieve an order of specialty glass. The largest slabs were a good eight feet long and three feet wide. Each pane came swaddled in padding and braced beneath with two-by-fours, the corners protected by triangular shields of corrugated cardboard. Through a rip in the padding over one panel, I glimpsed metal mesh embedded in the glass.
They weighed a ton. Two husky guys at the factory loaded them into the truck I’d rented.
I had to honk twice before Jonas opened the loading dock. He shouted, “I imagine you need a hand unloading.”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Be careful with these,” he chided, joining me. “I’ve waited two weeks for this order.”
One by one we carried the panels inside. Jonas was old enough to be my father, but by our second trip I was the one out of breath and sweating. Of course he had six inches and at least sixty pounds on me.
“Some fools have developed an airborne version of H5N1,” he said conversationally. “Now they published some of how they did it.”
Fools do foolish things, I thought. Also, that it would be great if Jonas would just walk a little faster. “Uh-huh.”
“Avian flu.” When I still had nothing to say, Jonas added, “Sixty percent fatality rate among humans, but until this variant the disease has spread only through contact with the feces of infected birds. But now? I’ll bet anyone with the recipe and access to a college biology lab could re-create the manmade airborne strain.”
“Sixty percent?” I said. “Jesus.”
“Chemical and bio-weapons, the poor nation’s WMDs. Only it’s not only countries anymore. Anthrax-laced letters here in America, 2001. The Aum Shinrikyo cult’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, 2007. Once biotech and genetic-engineering tools get just a little cheaper and more available, single madmen will control weapons of mass destruction.”
Biting my lip, I didn’t say: not only time machines.
Jonas went on. “And it seems Chinese hackers have twice gotten temporary control of U.S. military satellites. How often has that happened and we don’t know? Maybe we’re blind to conventional military attack, and don’t know it.”
“You’d be a lot happier if you spend less time online.” And if you had a life.
“But not as well informed.” With a tip of the head, Jonas indicated where the slab in our hands was to be set down. “Gently.”
“Why don’t you have dinner tonight with Victoria and me? You’ll like her.”
“You like her, and three’s a crowd.”
“How about four?” I asked. “She has an unattached roommate.”
“Who, unless she’s Victoria’s mother, is half my age. Go. Have fun.” Jonas started back toward the loading dock. “After we finish unloading and you return the truck.”
I strode after him. “Then take a night off with your friends.”
Stony silence.
“Look,” I said. I didn’t see how I could irritate him more. “The university treated you shabbily. Or the National Science Foundation did. You can’t hold that against all your former colleagues. They can’t all be bad guys. Some of them even jumpstarted your new lab with donated equipment.”
“With castoffs and relics.” Jonas jumped into the truck and took hold of the back end of another glass panel. “Guilt offerings. Token penances for having bad-mouthed me to the school and the NSF. Now lift.”
I lifted.
Jonas said, “Oh, not everyone betrayed me. But neither did they defend me. Whatever their motives, my ‘friends’ poached my grants, my grad students, and my lab space at the university.
“Suppose I did socialize with them. They’d want to know what I’ve been doing. If they learned I’d made a breakthrough, they’d try to steal my latest work, too.”
I knew Jonas was brilliant. The man had invented time travel! So how had he alienated his colleagues? Maybe he’d always been suspi
cious and secretive. Maybe his incessant doom-saying got to be too much.
In the months I’d know Jonas, those tendencies had only gotten worse.
“Simple solution,” I said. “Don’t talk about work.”
“Then they’d gloat, certain—as they all are—that my theories are flawed.”
“So make new friends,” I said. Or quit pushing away the one friend you seem to have. “I know a great pub nearby. Nice folks who don’t pry.” Had the people there been nosy, I would never have gone back. “Let’s you and me go out tomorrow night.”
“We’ll see.” Which meant no.
Jonas had cleared an expanse of the main floor while I’d been fetching his glass order. I began to see the pattern in where we placed the individual panels. As jigsaw puzzles went, this wasn’t much of a challenge. The pieces would fit together to form a booth.
A person-sized booth.
Thinking two weeks, I dropped my end of the latest panel.
“It slipped,” I said.
CHAPTER 8
Why didn’t Jonas show me the door?
Because once before I had held my tongue to keep my paycheck? Quite likely, and the memory made me feel about an inch tall.
Because ex-con that I was, no one would take me seriously if I did talk? Some of that, too, I felt sure.
Because he had to have human contact with someone, and I was too ignorant to reveal his methods? Almost certainly.
But maybe there was more to him keeping me on.
I like to think Jonas also found in me a voice of common sense. That though he never admitted to finding merit in my comments, he did hear me out. He had not, to my knowledge, risked paradoxes by sending anything to the past.
Oh, I knew that he would. That Future Jonas had. But the onus for that was on Future Jonas. Meanwhile, this Jonas worried about the implications of the stock tip gone bad.
An anomaly that terrified me.
Whatever his reasons, Jonas did keep me around. He tolerated my questions and my doubts. He shrugged off my “accident” with the glass panel.
But as he put in an expedited order for a replacement, my fears only grew.
* * * *
“It’s okay,” I told Victoria.
Her head against my chest, her tears soaking my shirt, shivering in my arms, she said, “But it mi-might not have…have been.”
Time Out Page 4
