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

by Edward M. Lerner

  Talking to himself, he’d said.

  I paused outside his bedroom. Through the closed door I heard the familiar raspy snoring: he hadn’t taken off yet for the future.

  Or had he gone and returned? My head hurt, and not just from a hangover.

  I went downstairs. This time I counted the rice bags he had stacked by the booth: ten. Two hundred fifty pounds. For confirming the booth’s ability to transport his weight. Jonas weighed, in my best guess, two-ten or two-twenty.

  The night before, he had poked at something after noticing me. I checked the workbench where I’d found him sitting. On its bottom shelf sat my old boom box. Through the smoky plastic of the access panel I could see something in the cassette drive.

  I popped out the cassette. The label was hand-lettered, in a spidery style I knew well. Jonas’s handwriting.

  Talking with himself, Jonas had said. Arguing was more like it. I carried the boom box and cassette into the kitchen. With the door closed, the volume turned low, and a sense of foreboding, I pushed PLAY.

  “Hello, Jonas,” a familiar voice said. It was Jonas, and yet somehow it wasn’t. Too sad. Too world-weary. Staticky, too, and in some strange way distorted. “I know what you want to do.” There was a nervous chuckle. “I am you. Was.

  “Here’s all you need to know: don’t. We made things worse. You’ll want an explanation, and that’s what I don’t dare to offer. What’s future must stay future. Anything sent back can’t fail to impact the timeline.

  “Why send you this? Because I’m one stubborn son of a bitch. I know you’ll keep at it. I’m you, and I did.

  “I’m giving you something I didn’t have. A gift. A choice. I’m giving you stock tips, winning horses, and championship teams. You never need work again. You never need obsess again. So: Retire. Frolic on a beach. Spare yourself from the misery I’ve endured—and the mess that with the best of intentions I’ve caused.”

  “All right, you know.” Jonas said from behind me. “Shut it off.”

  I pushed STOP and turned toward the door. My thoughts churned. “When?”

  “The cassette came with the first smoke detector and the pages of investment tips.” He reclaimed his cassette. “If you’re wondering why he used tape”—and I was—“not even that first, crude prototype could garble a magnetic recording to the point I wouldn’t recognize my own voice. Future me wanted to contact me as early as he could.”

  I started to make coffee, for something to do with my hands. They were trembling. “Why didn’t you listen to him?”

  “Jonas five years from now knows things I don’t, but he’s forgotten things, too. He’s forgotten who he was. He’s forgotten what’s important. If he supposes I have any interest in frolicking, that I can be bought off, he’s become someone undeserving of my trust.

  “But I can redeem the long years that so wore him down. I can—no, I will—make a difference.”

  * * * *

  Jonas spent hours downloading web pages onto his smart phone: megabytes each for every looming threat and ominous trend that had a presence on his corkboards. “For reference,” he said, whether speaking to himself or to me. “It’s easier to find information while it’s fresh. There are lots of current events whose evolutions I’ll want to study.”

  “Stay put,” I pleaded. “Listen to yourself.”

  Jonas brandished his phone at me. “I am listening to myself. It’s future me whose opinion I’m discounting. He has no separation from events. He doesn’t know what advice to offer our time. But I know”—and once more he waggled his phone—“the world is running amok. It’s within my power to change things for the better.

  “Look, Peter, you needn’t worry. I’ll go forward and scope out what’s changed. I’ll come back with a fresh perspective. Imagine a specific warning to the FBI before 9/11. Three thousand lives saved in a day and the Afghan war averted. Imagine if I could have warned that A.Q. Khan was about to start peddling—”

  “Who?”

  “Father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program. Imagine a tip to the CIA before Khan started peddling his uranium-enrichment technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya. As Khan did do. How much safer would everyone be today for that warning?

  “Let me put it in your terms. Suppose I’d been able to show a few years in advance that the housing bubble was about to burst. How much misery could I have prevented?”

  In their heart of hearts, who hadn’t known real-estate prices had become insane? That it was madness to extend loans without requiring documentation or proof of income or down payments? At the bank we had all known—as surely as we had known that till the bubble went pop, every house sold and mortgage refinanced meant profits, raises, and bonuses.

  “People believe what they choose to believe,” I said. “The rest, they rationalize.”

  “No, they’ll believe downloads of future newspapers. Perhaps not at first, but when the earliest predictions come true.”

  “Only each disclosure changes the future. You’ve seen it with first future Jonas’s stock tips. What happens to your credibility after a prediction doesn’t come true?”

  Jonas scowled.

  I dared to believe he was listening. “What if there’s no operational booth five years ahead? He can keep you away with a flip of a power switch.” And God, how I hoped Future Jonas would.

  “It’s more like three years now,” Jonas corrected. “Tempus Fugit. Look, Peter, nothing’s special about a particular arrival date. If need be, I’ll go forward a month less, or two months, or to whenever the booth remains in use. To whenever far forward future me retained his nerve.”

  I was losing the argument, and I knew it. “But what if that future you is right?”

  “Then I’ll learn that I can stop worrying.” Jonas laughed. “Then we can go frolic. Victoria, too. Because either way, I’ll come back with a fresh list of horses to bet on and stocks to buy. And I’ll share this batch.”

  Victoria and me on a tropical beach? It was tempting. So tempting. And yet…

  I’d been taught a hard lesson once about the perils of looking the other way.

  “Whatever a timeline is,” I said desperately, “we’re screwing with it. Your gains are someone else’s losses. What changed when that money isn’t in someone else’s pockets?”

  Or when the cash went into mine? I’d known damn well that secrets from the future made possible my raise, yet I’d been quick to take the money. And because of it approached a caring, funny, beautiful woman who maybe, in the universe’s grand scheme, I wasn’t meant to be with. Would I undo us if I could?

  I brushed aside my doubts to keep pressing Jonas. “Can’t you already see the ripples? A blackout happened, or at least it happened when it did, because your windfall allowed you to speed up your experiments. What, in turn, might that blackout have caused? Maybe a baby or two will come nine months later?

  “And what crimes or traffic accidents came about because the police shifted patrols to watch over this lab? I don’t claim to know how the future changed, but we do know your stock tips have gone—”

  “All trivial,” Jonas snapped. “The world is going to hell. If I don’t act when I can, I’m letting that happen.”

  Who are you to decide? I wanted to ask. I wanted to scream. “Yet two future yous told you to stop.”

  “Maybe not two of me,” Jonas said pensively. “The two-years-ahead message might preempt the five-year-ahead message. Once looping and branching of the timeline begins…well, it’s complex. The universe will maximize its entropy.”

  Loops? Branches? Jonas’s metaphors, if that’s what they were, confused me. But a butterfly flapping its wings? That metaphor, I understood. The gentle flutter of wings that tipped otherwise harmless weather conditions into a fierce hurricane…

  If I hadn’t dug my stupid boom box out of Jonas’s junk heap, if I hadn’t unwittingly provided the clue that his time transporter needed a receiver, he might have given up. Except for me, this would not be happenin
g.

  I was that damned butterfly.

  I said, “You once asked: If I could, would I warn the world about Hitler? You as much as said that you would. Here’s my question. Could the world have stopped Hitler if he had had your technology?”

  Jonas jerked as though slapped. “Say that he had. Then it would have been all the more important for the good guys also to have the tech.”

  I had run out of reasons. “Don’t,” I said wearily.

  “I already did,” he shot back. My jaw dropped, and he laughed. “A final test, last night. I jumped forward by twenty minutes, waved, jumped back two minutes, and stepped out of the booth. Two minutes later, for a few seconds, two of me waved at each other.”

  “When you jumped ahead, waving from inside the booth, did you see your other self waving back?” Because he hadn’t yet gone back those two minutes. But two minutes earlier is two minutes earlier. My head throbbed.

  Jonas grimaced. “You know? I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t,” I pleaded again.

  In answer, Jonas stepped up into the booth. He shut the door, its latch closing with a sharp click, tapped the control panel, and disappeared.

  CHAPTER 10

  For what seemed like forever, I stared at the empty booth. How long would Jonas stay in the future, surveilling? A week? A month?

  I had to laugh at myself. Would I never understand time travel? It didn’t matter how long Jonas chose to be away. If he wished, he could reappear within seconds.

  Meanwhile, my head pounded and my stomach lurched. Food and aspirin might help both. I’d missed breakfast and maybe lunch, and that made me curious what the time was. Mid-afternoon? I glanced at one of the lab’s many clocks. 3:47 P.M. I started toward the kitchen.

  Behind me, something beeped.

  I whirled. The booth remained empty. A second beep sounded, and a third. They rang out from an aisle with Jonas’s earliest prototypes, seldom used.

  The beeps stopped.

  Within a transceiver the size of a microwave oven, taped to the inside of the glass of the door, was a sheet of paper.

  In bold red letters, in my own blocky printing, the note screamed: DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR!

  Tiny computer text, illegible from where I stood, filled the bottom third of the page.

  Between, occupying half the page, was the photo of a man. Blood streamed from his nose and eyes, and mottled flesh was sloughing off his face.

  It was Jonas.

  * * * *

  He had, according to the fine print, the doomsday plague.

  The virus had first appeared in 2013. Lethal. Incurable. Airborne and extremely contagious.

  The toll: four billion dead worldwide, and counting. Whole cities, even countries, depopulated. Civilization imploding, while Radical Naturists—fewer of them, too, every day—exulted. A pandemic beyond the reach of medical science, until a vaccine was developed in 2016.

  A curiously strange breakthrough, according to experts. Without the technology that had made possible the vaccine, it seemed impossible to have gengineered the plague virus.

  * * * *

  STOP JONAS, my future self concluded his note.

  Stop him, how? Jonas had invented time travel. He had created the technology by which, apparently, some madman brought bioengineered pathogens to our defenseless era.

  Did traces of the virus lurk within this transceiver? How much had seeped out the door seal while I gaped, dumbstruck, at the note? Or was this an early enough transceiver that nothing living could cross time still viable? I didn’t remember, but hopefully future me had had the records with which to chose wisely.

  Somehow I shook off my paralysis. I would send this news farther back. It had stunned me. A copy would as profoundly shock my yet earlier self! I, he, would make Jonas see reason.

  With the camcorder, through the transceiver’s glass door, I captured an image of the page. I downloaded the hi-res shot to a computer and started printing copies.

  And stopped.

  Future me might as easily have sent his warning farther back. Maybe he had. I’d taught myself to ignore the incessant beeping from Jonas’s tests.

  Had Jonas already seen this note? For all I knew he’d gotten it and ignored it, just as he had disregarded Future Jonas. Perhaps my Jonas had been so determined to go forward because he meant to fix matters in his own way.

  If. Maybe. Perhaps.

  I had dithered once before at a critical juncture—ruining my life, and Amy’s, and the lives of everyone I’d help push out of their homes.

  Squaring my shoulders, I resolved to act.

  * * * *

  Easier said than done.

  Pushing with all my strength, I couldn’t budge the booth, much less tip it over. Take a fire axe to it? That seemed workable till I remembered the high-voltage cable. I’d probably electrocute myself.

  The circuit breaker!

  I didn’t find one. At the power levels Jonas used, circuit breakers must look nothing like anything I would recognize.

  I sat, defeated. If I destroyed the booth this instant, what was to stop Jonas from coming back a second earlier?

  He might pop out at any second, even as I pitted my inadequate, nonscientific brain against his. If he spotted me trying to sabotage his equipment, he could snap me like a twig.

  * * * *

  For all my agonizing, scant minutes had passed since Jonas had leapt forward.

  Wait! I could go back in the booth! And destroy it in the past, before Jonas first stepped into it.

  Except that Jonas, returning, could still emerge before me. And do so during the booth’s earliest operational moments, when the earlier Jonas had been right there, having just finished assembling it. Together they’d throw me out of the warehouse. Likely in pieces.

  Feeling useless and stupid, I began to pace.

  And jerked to a halt when my wandering brought me to something the size of a four-drawer file cabinet: the last transceiver Jonas had built while scaling up to a full-sized booth.

  I stared at the cabinet. I crouched next to it, considering. In tests, it had transferred a hundred fifty pounds of rice—that was more than I weighed. If I could cram myself inside, I could travel back as much as several days before Jonas completed the person-sized booth. Back earlier than Jonas could reach. He weighed too much for this generation of his device.

  And I’d be stuck inside. Great plan.

  Still, fiddling with a file cabinet seemed more within the scope of my abilities than outwitting a physicist genius. I kept scheming.

  Go back before the booth is done. Stop Jonas.

  How?

  Stacked printouts of future me’s note sat on a nearby workbench. Accusingly.

  Stop Jonas. Stop him for certain.

  I didn’t know how, short of killing him. Could I? I’d need a gun. As a felon just out of jail, I’d never be able to buy one legally, and I had no idea how to get a gun illegally.

  But I could never kill anyone, much less a friend.

  And so billions must die?

  Victoria among them?

  I had to go back. I had to convince Jonas. I had to have a plan, beginning with how to extricate myself from the diminutive time machine. And fast, before Jonas reappeared.

  A swiveling handle secured the cabinet door. I opened the door and saw that the latching mechanism could be worked from behind. It wouldn’t be easy, wedged into the cabinet—assuming I could even squeeze myself inside. I prodded the back of the mechanism some more, this time with the flat blade of a screwdriver, and found forcing it that way was easier.

  I set the cabinet controls for the wee hours of that morning. I’d arrive before Jonas ever connected power to the booth. I’d shove my future self’s message in Past Jonas’s face and demand that he stop. Until Past Jonas finished the booth, Future Jonas could not return.

  And if Past Jonas instead of listening took a poke at me? As drunk as he had been, at least I’d have the quicker reflexes.

  It c
ould work.

  Just like milk and coffee could separate?

  On my knees—legs bent double, ankles twisted inward, bare feet pressing into my ass, in agony from hips to toes—I crammed myself inside the cabinet. I not only had to fit, I needed a free hand behind to push the ENTER key. I needed a free hand in front to pull the door shut and then to open the latch.

  Just in time, I remembered I needed a copy of the warning. I squirmed out, put a folded copy in my shirt pocket, and wormed my way back into the cabinet. The screwdriver tucked in my waistband sliced my thigh.

  I pulled the door closed. Groping behind my back, I identified the ENTER key by feel. I pressed—

  * * * *

  I jerked at the first shrill beep, right in my ear.

  The cabinet rocked and nearly toppled. When my heart stopped pounding, I reached for the latch, but couldn’t quite reach it. With elbows pressed into my ribs, I could scarcely breathe.

  If I didn’t get out quickly, would I have any air to breathe?

  Inch by inch, I worked the screwdriver from my waistband. I managed to flip the tool blade up without dropping it.

  With a sigh of relief, I forced the latch. I kept enough of a grip to keep the door from crashing into anything nearby.

  The lab was well lit.

  Smothering a groan, I wiggled out of the cabinet. I slid the screwdriver back into my waistband to put away later.

  Jonas stood across the warehouse, inside the chain-link enclosure, his back to the open gate. He’d hooked up the power cable to the distribution frame. The cable’s opposite end, I was relieved to see, remained loose on the floor near the booth. I was not quite too late.

  Now to dissuade him…

  My shoes remained hours into the future; Jonas could not have heard me approaching on bare feet. Walking through the open gate, I called, “Jonas.”

  He spun around, eyes wide. “Go away,” he said.

  “Jonas, it’s important.”

  “Go away!” He lumbered toward me.

  I sidled around him. “Jonas, listen very carefully. I’m tomorrow’s me. And more than that”—I reached for my shirt pocket—“I have a message from—”

  He swung wildly at me.

  I skittered away.