The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories

by Edward M. Lerner

  “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, must 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 still 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.

  “They look the same to me,” I volunteered.

  “As they should,” Jonas said. “But it’s best to confirm these things.”

  “The beeps are from a timer?”

  He shook his head. “I modified my rig to beep when it receives something.”

  Pairs of ordinary items—mugs, tape measures, pens—surrounded him. “I gather you’ve been sending through lots of stuff,” I said. “Did everything emerge okay?”

  “The pen still writes and the ruler remains a foot long.”

  “And you’re sure the things in the box didn’t just sit there the entire while.”

  “Of course I am,” he snapped. “The tripping of a sensor circuit triggers the alert tones. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “Sorry.” The handyman’s opinion wasn’t always welcome. “It’s after twelve. I thought I’d go out and grab some lunch. What sounds good to you?”

  Jonas sat, his head cocked, his lips pressed thin, not responding. “Ah,” he finally said. He stepped off his stool and trundled over an industrial platform scale. “Weigh yourself. Tell me if this works.”

  With shoes on and fully clothed, I registered scarcely one forty. “It works.”

  “Now help me with the strongbox.”

  We lowered the strongbox to the scale platform. The safe out-weighted me by ten pounds! Jonas had gotten it onto the workbench unaided.

  “Now watch the scale,” he said.

  “If you want to convince me, wouldn’t a peephole be easier?”

  “The field projection must be invariant, lest temporal displacements fluctuate within the transported object. To maintain that uniformity, the integrity of the conductive enclosure is essential.”

  “Huh?”

  “It works better with metal all around,” he translated. “Just watch.”

  He opened the strongbox and set a brass cylinder on the shelf. “A standard calibrated weight. One kilogram. Correct?”

  The scale’s digital readout had bumped up a bit more than two pounds. “Agreed,” I said.

  Crouched to reach into the strongbox Jonas tapped away on the controls. He stood and closed the door. “I’m sending that weight ahead five minutes. Keep an eye on the scale.”

  Seconds later the readout dropped by two pounds. Five minutes after, simultaneous with the final beep of a new triplet, the two extra pounds again registered.

  * * * *

  A little after one-thirty I returned from Taco Bell with a bag of burritos. Jonas, his back to me, was again hunched over a workbench. Two boxed smoke detectors sat in front of him.

  As though all his high-voltage stuff weren’t enough to make the old warehouse a fire hazard, there were the stacks of wooden pallets, the kerosene space heaters we’d surely need a few months hence, and cabinets filled with aerosol cans. It nonetheless remained a mystery to me—one among many—why Jonas owned so many home smoke detectors. The open rafters overhead showed plenty of sprinkler heads with their own smoke detectors.

  “I have my doubts two more smoke detectors will make a big difference,” I said.

  He jumped. “I didn’t h
ear you come in.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “A little before one o’clock, the transceiver beeped. The thing is, I had nothing due to arrive. And I’ve never sent smoke detectors.”

  Then how…? Oh. “Future you sent them.”

  “So it seems. Only I, he, sent just one of these detectors. The second unit I retrieved from the supply cabinet.”

  I’d known Jonas happy and sad, manic and dejected. I’d never seen him awed.

  “You weren’t ready to try moving something backward,” I guessed. I had hoped. Grandfather paradoxes scared me.

  “Not hardly.” Jonas laughed humorlessly. “But future me was. Is.”

  “How far into the future? Do you know?”

  “I will,” Jonas said. “Because I, he, intends that I know. A smoke detector with the identical serial number was sitting in my cabinet.”

  * * * *

  Who knew that the guts of a smoke detector were radioactive?

  Jonas did; that’s why he owned so many. A bit of radioactive material ionized air within the detector’s case, the ionized molecules completing an electrical circuit. Let soot particles intrude, and the level of ionization dropped. The resulting dip in the circuit’s current was what the detector actually detected.

  Unlike most things radioactive, no one knew or cared how many smoke detectors someone bought. And why would they care? Even out of its case, a few centimeters of air sufficed to block the radioactive pellet’s feeble emissions.

  With a sniff at my ignorance, Jonas harvested the radioactive material from both detectors. His instruments showed both still radiating, but one not quite as much as the other. One detector’s pellet had decayed.

  When Jonas did the math, that pellet came from five years in the future.

  * * * *

  We dined out that evening, Jonas splurging on a place with waiters and white damask tablecloths. As the maitre d’ led the way to a booth, I detoured to the men’s room. I rejoined Jonas to find he’d ordered a bottle of wine. We were celebrating, he told me; as he all but swilled a glassful, the trembling of his hand said something more.

  That he, too, was conflicted made me feel just a tad better.

  It was a Wednesday and not yet six o’clock. We had the bistro almost to ourselves.