Dead to Me

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Doctor Frederick’s accent seemed to be American, yet of no region that I was familiar. I would have to ask Holmes later if he knew the regional source.

  Doctor Frederick went on. “Slightly over two months ago a new White Star Liner left port from Southampton.”

  Holmes nodded. “Yes, the RMS. Titanic.”

  Doctor Frederick nodded. “I’m glad you are familiar with it.”

  “It would be hard not to be, considering the coverage it received. It seems to be one very magnificent ship. Exceptionally lucky that it did not meet a tragic fate on that first voyage. Even an unsinkable ship meeting an iceberg can sometimes lose the battle.”

  Doctor Frederick glanced nervously at his companion and then said, “I don’t think luck had anything to do with it.”

  Holmes gave him a very sharp look. “I’m afraid, Doctor, that I do not understand your comment.”

  Both of our guests seemed almost embarrassed, as if what they were about to say would seen so outrageous, so disgusting that Holmes would toss them into the street. I had seen that look a number of times when a person was about to confess something to Holmes. This time both men stared at their hands, then at the floor, then back at their hands.

  The fire crackled and what seemed like a long time passed until finally the blonde Doctor Serling took a deep breath. “Carl, we agreed.” His voice was also clearly American, but again very odd.

  Doctor Frederick nodded slowly, clearly making a decision. He looked Holmes squarely in the eyes. “The Titanic was supposed to have sunk. Slightly over fifteen hundred lives were lost when it did.”

  I thought that someone had punched me below the ribs at that moment and I suddenly knew the taste of disgust. It never occurred to me to question that the men were crazy, but their words instantly proved them so and suddenly I felt worried for the safety of Holmes and myself.

  But Holmes seemed to take the statement of the possibility of such an immense disaster as a fact. He leaned back in his chair, exhaling slowly, but never taking his gaze from Doctor Frederick. As his friend I could see the thought had him shaken, but he remained composed as always.

  The fire popped and flared for a moment as Holmes said in a very cold voice, “Go on.”

  Again Doctor Frederick glanced at his companion. Then he half shook himself and turned to face Holmes squarely. “We need your help in solving why the Titanic did not sink.”

  Holmes did not even blink at such an absurd idea and when I started to object he held up his hand and stopped me. “And who might you represent?” he asked. “I assume you are not from owners of the liner or any government agency. What is your interest?”

  Doctor Frederick almost laughed. Then he became very serious again. “Our lives. Our very future and that of this time, actually. You see, you will not believe me, but we are from the future. Actually, just over a hundred and two years in the future. But, I’m afraid we are from a future where the Titanic sank.”

  Holmes nodded. “I assumed you were not of our time from your clothes and your language the moment you stepped into this room. He nodded to Doctor Serling. You are also wearing some form of lense on your eye that I have never seen before.”

  Doctor Serling smiled and nodded. “They are called contact lenses. They take the place of glasses.”

  Both visitors seemed taken aback by Holmes calm acceptance of their bold statement that they were from the future. I, on the other hand, was not as willing to take their word. Such fancy imagination was the domain of an early evening of pleasant reading of H. G. Wells, not of the middle of the night on Baker Street.

  But Holmes waited for a response. “You have still not answered my question.”

  Both Doctor’s glanced at each other until finally Doctor Frederick seemed to understand Holmes’s question. “If you mean our employer, then I suppose that originally would have been the state of California. We were both faculty at the University of Southern California, Physics Department. Our specific research into time travel was funded mostly by the United States government.”

  Holmes nodded, as if he understood everything they had been saying, as I suppose he might have. “Why the interest in the Titanic?”

  “In our time the Titanic, and the night it sank,” Doctor Frederick hesitated with that statement, then went on, “are a thing of immense interest. It wasn’t until September of 1985 that the wreck of the great ship was found. Since then hundreds of expeditions have been launched to the site of the wreck. It seemed only logical that one of the first time travel expeditions would go back to the night the Titanic sank. Here, let me show you something.”

  He motioned for Doctor Serling to open the large case and Doctor Frederick extracted a large, colorful book. As he handed the book to Holmes I noticed the word TITANIC stamped on the front cover in red. A beautiful painting of the great liner sailing the open seas filled the cover.

  “That book was originally published in 1992. We brought it along as resource material. Little did we imagine that it would be put to this use.”

  Again the room grew quiet except for the crackling of the fire as Holmes inspected the front and back of the large and obviously heavy book and then opened it and started slowly thumbing through.

  “Flip to page 196. That section is about the discovery of the wreck. There are photographs and such.”

  Holmes did what he was told and then spent the next few minutes moving through the book, his keen eyes missing nothing. I had a great desire to stand and move to his side to look at such a book, but I held my place, as I know Holmes would have wanted me to do. But as the minutes wore on the task of remaining in my chair became very difficult, to say the least.

  Finally Holmes closed the book and placed it on the stand beside his chair. “Since it is obvious that a tragedy such as this book portrays would have a large influence on the future, can you tell me what that might be?”

  Doctor Frederick shook his head negatively. “I’m afraid not. You see, the future we came from no longer exists. At least to us. The only way possible to move forward in time for us and our machine is to a homing beacon, for lack of a better way to describe it. I could tell you about the future where the ship did sink, but—”

  Doctor Serling broke in. “Let me try to explain what has occurred. With every event in history there are two or more possible futures leading from that event. Such as forks in a country road.” He glanced at Holmes and Holmes nodded, so he went on. “On the night the Titanic sank the logical two main futures are a future where it did and one where it did not. Of course, there are many other possible futures where only a hundred were killed, or ninety-nine. And depending on who was saved and who wasn’t, those lives lost or saved may or may not allow the futures to blend back into one. In our time we call these different worlds parallel dimensions or universes.”

  I caught myself shaking my head at the insanity of this man’s words, but Holmes clearly was giving the man his full attention, so I said and did nothing, even though my instinct was to toss them both into the street.

  “So what happened?” Holmes asked. “Did you change the past, causing the Titanic to not sink?”

  “No.” Both Doctors spoke at the same time and both were emphatic, as if Holmes had asked them if they had committed a mortal sin.

  “We arrived, “Doctor Frederick said, “on the Titanic about two minutes before it struck the iceberg, and did nothing but watch. However it quickly became obvious that history had changed. We were unable to return to our time and ended up having to hide in unoccupied cabins until the ship sailed into New York.”

  “Was it possible,” Holmes asked, “that your machine simply moved you over onto a different ‘road’ as you put it?”

  Doctor Serling seemed clearly impressed with Holmes. “We considered that, but we don’t think so. If that was the case we feel our homing device would still be functioning. But it isn’t. We clearly went back to a fork in the road of history and are now traveling down a different road. Someone or some thing a
ltered our world’s history so that the world we came from no longer exists to us.”

  Holmes nodded. “And you want me to help you find out who altered history. Who stopped this”—he tapped the book—“from happening?”

  Both doctors nodded slowly.

  Two

  “THIS IS BEYOND the imagination,” I said, no longer able to hold my tongue. “I have heard some crazy stories in my time but—”

  Holmes held up his hand for me to stop and then turned to the gentlemen. “How would you propose I do this task?”

  Doctor Frederick pointed to the large case. “In here is the machine that moves us through time. Come back with us to the night of the Titanic hitting the iceberg.”

  “What?” I said.

  But Holmes nodded. “Can you then bring us back to this point?”

  Doctor Frederick shook his head negatively. “Not exactly. We can leave a homing package here, but time will flow at the same pace as the time you spend on the ship. If we are there for an hour you will return here in an hour.”

  Holmes again nodded, then turned to me. “Watson, dampen the fire. And fetch our heaviest coats. We are going for a short trip.”

  “But you can’t really imagine—” For the third time tonight Holmes stopped me with a sharp look and a hand gesture.

  “My dear Watson. We have a case at hand.” He was clearly seeing something I was missing and willing to let these two have enough rope to prove their insanity.

  I sighed rather loudly, but then nodded and did as I was instructed. Holmes and I then donned our coats as Doctor Serling seemed to type on some sort of instrument inside the case, clicking like the sound of a dog scampering across a hardwood floor. Then he placed a small blue-green cube on the table on the top of the large book and nodded for Holmes and myself. “We are ready. Please step close.”

  Holmes did so immediately and I followed reluctantly. My mind was starting to worry at the possibility of this actually occurring. Yet the thought was so utterly preposterous that I couldn’t hold the reality of it.

  As I stopped beside Holmes, Doctor Serling tapped a small button inside the case.

  For a moment nothing registered. It was as if someone had turned off the lights and the fire and all the sounds and feelings of the world.

  Then as quickly as it left the world was back.

  In my mind we were still standing like fools bundled against the cold inside the warm Baker Street address. But then Holmes said, “Interesting” and stepped toward the wooden rail to gaze out at the black night.

  “What in the devil—” The icy cold wind sucked the words from my mouth. I could not only feel the cold, but smell and taste it. Intense, biting cold mixed with the salty smells of the open sea. I spun around to quickly look in all directions as the wind messed my hair and pulled open my coat sending shivers through my torso. We were clearly on a large ship, somewhere near the bow. The width of the ship was almost that of a city block and a towering wall of metal rose both forward and aft of our position.

  “We are on the forward well deck near the starboard side,” Doctor Frederick said to Holmes.

  Holmes only nodded as his intense gaze took in every detail. I on the other hand fought to keep my late dinner in my stomach. The very fact that we stood here on this cold wooden deck challenged every principle I believed and lived by. I must be dreaming. Holmes had not woken me and any moment this would all be a fleeting memory of a long night of troubled sleep.

  Overhead a bell started ringing insistently. I glanced up at the tall pole and could barely see the light from what seemed to be a crow’s nest. Words floated down to us through the night air. “Iceberg right ahead.”

  Doctor Franklin turned to Holmes. “That was lookout Fleet talking to Sixth Officer Moody who is on the bridge.” Franklin pointed toward the stern and up. “All right on time.”

  Holmes only nodded. He seemed to be listening intently to the sounds of the night, the water slapping against the sides of the huge ship, the low rumble of the engines. After a moment he nodded and then leaned out over the rail to watch the iceberg approach.

  I moved over beside him and did the same, the cold wind hitting my face and hands with a much harder intensity. Out of the shadow of the well deck, I suddenly realized just how fast the ship had been moving and that realization combined with the blast of cold wind took my breath away.

  I stood back for a moment, then again leaned out into the wind, peering into the black where the ship was headed. It took me a moment to understand that the dark shape, darker than the night, as if someone had punched a hole in the air, was a huge wall of ice, far wider and bigger than the ship. Fear twisted my stomach and for a moment I forgot the intense cold on my skin. I could see no way that a ship of this size could turn fast enough to avoid a collision.

  Yet I continued to watch with fascination as every moment seemed to stretch. It was a sick fascination, as if watching a horrible fight where someone was being badly hurt, yet unable to turn away.

  As my eyes watered and the tears seemed to freeze on my checks, I watched.

  Slowly the ship turned, just enough, and just at the last second. The bow somehow slid by the leading edge of ice.

  There was a faint rumbling lower in the ship and a distant scraping sound.

  The huge gray wall was suddenly beside us and it seemed as if I could reach out and touch the rough ice. Yet I knew that if I did the razor-sharp edges would have cut my hands.

  Holmes and I instinctively both took a step away from the rail and watched the mountain slide past the ship. When it was far beyond the stern of the ship and again fading into the black of the night Holmes turned to Doctor Frederick. “So what do you observe is different?”

  “Nothing from our three times back here since we became stuck. However, the records we have said that this part of the deck where we are standing was originally covered with ice from the berg as it scraped past.”

  Holmes nodded.

  “So we are only talking a matter of feet,” I said, “maybe even inches between saving this ship and having it sink?”

  It was Doctor Frederick’s turn to nod. “In this world, as I am sure you read in your newspapers, the ship sustained damage, but the watertight compartments held the ship afloat until it could get to New York. In my universe the damage was too extensive and the watertight compartments did very little.”

  Behind us ten or twelve hearty men emerged from a door, the yellow light casting a long bright streak across the deck. They were clearly interested in what had happened and why the engines had stopped. They talked loudly among themselves and headed toward both rails to gaze into the night. I again leaned out and looked to the stern. The iceberg was now barely visible, a gray mountain looming in the night.

  Holmes turned to Doctor Serling. “Is it possible to see these events again?”

  Doctor Serling nodded. “Actually, yes. We can move up, and back in time, to the boat deck.”

  I looked at Holmes and then at Doctor Serling who was again working in the case. “You mean that we can be up there on the boat deck at the same time we are, or were, here this time watching? I mean—” I stopped. I was totally confused and again my fear returned.

  Doctor Frederick nodded and pulled his coat tighter around himself. “Yes, but there are limits. We have never been able to get close enough to ourselves in experiments to see our earlier, or later, self. But that has not been from lack of trying.” He laughed. “Time travel is still new to us. We really can’t explain some of the paradoxes. We just know they exist and somehow the universe stops certain things from happening.”

  “So,” Holmes said, pointing up at the leading edge of the boat deck. “I will not be able to go to that position up there and look down at myself here, unless I am, or was, doing it now. Correct?”

  I glanced up, but a later version of Holmes was not standing there, much to my relief.

  “That would seem to be the rule,” Doctor Serling said. “Ready?”

 
; Holmes nodded.

  “What about the passengers?” I asked, but to Doctor Serling that question didn’t seem to matter.

  The cold, the salt-filled air, the feeling of the wooden deck under my feet all went away for a moment.

  And suddenly we were standing next to a lifeboat about halfway down the boat deck, again on the starboard side.

  Without a moment’s hesitation Holmes strode to the starboard side of the ship and looked in the direction of the coming wall of ice.

  I glanced around, relieved that no passenger was within sight to witness our arrival. “I have no desire to get used to this mode of travel,” I said, pulling my coat around me tightly in a vain attempt to hold out the wind. “How fast is this ship traveling?”

  “Over twenty-two knots,” Doctor Frederick said.

  “Far too fast,” I said.

  Doctor Frederick only grunted as the alarm bell started its insistent noise from the direction of the bow. He and I moved to join Holmes at the starboard rail leaving Dr. Serling with the heavy case.

  Again we watched as the iceberg took its collision course. I found myself unable to take my gaze from that huge, growing mountain. That same sick desire as before kept my gaze frozen into the cold wind until finally, at what seemed to be the last moment, the ship slowly turned, shifting the iceberg to the starboard side of the liner.

  With a fairly loud scraping the cold gray wall slipped past. No one said a word this time and again Holmes seemed to be listening.

  I, on the other hand, was suffering to again keep my nerves in control. I took a few quick steps back from the towering wall of ice as it slid past. There was something about this entire event that felt ghoulish, as if we were robbing graves. I shook that thought from my mind and instead thought of the warm fire at Baker Street.

  Three

  THE MOUNTAIN FADED into the distance behind the ship as Holmes stood at the railing, not watching it but instead deep in thought. I had no idea what he might be thinking. I just knew I wanted to be off this ship and back in my warm quilts, if that was not where I was still.