by Paul Siluch
Out
of
Time
♦♦♦
Five Tales
of
Time Travel
♦♦♦
Janet Guy ∞ K.P.Hornsby ∞ Teresa Robeson ∞ Paul Siluch
Russell James
∞Edited by Russell James ∞
Out of Time
Copyright 2013 Janet Guy
Discover other writings by these authors:
www.russellrjames.com
www.kapehorn.com
www.teresarobeson.com
www.janetguy.com
www.paulsiluch.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
All proceeds from the sale of this ebook will be donated to Doctors Without Borders.
Advance Praise for Out of Time:
“These stories are so good, you’ll wish you could go back in time and read them again!”
–A real person
Table of Contents
The Paths We Choose by Paul Siluch
Widow in the Woods by K.P. Hornsby
A Thousand Different Copies by Janet Guy
Unfillable Void by Teresa Robeson
Boomerang by Russell James
The Paths We Choose
by Paul Siluch
“It’s like a dungeon down here. Haven’t they given you an office upstairs yet?”
Two men walked into a university lab, talking as they opened the door. The lights were low in the large, dim room. Workstations lined the walls, their countertops filled with meters, servers, and electrical components. The taller man turned the lights up, flooding the place in brightness.
A janitor standing in the dim room was startled. Albert swept the building every night in the same meticulously ordered way and he did not expect Dr. Blackman back at this hour. He held his hand up against the light over glasses large and thick, tilted slightly from one ear down to the other. Uncombed brown hair hung down to the stained collar of his uniform. One of his legs was short, causing a hitch in his walk when he pushed his broom along the linoleum.
“Hi Albert. It’s Dr. Blackman. Don’t be afraid.” The man in front took off his winter coat and waved to the janitor cowering far across the lab.
Albert knew Dr. Blackman. He worked harder than all the other professors.
“Albert prefers to clean when there’s no one around. He’s not very good with people,” said Dr. Blackman to his colleague in a low voice. Most people thought he was deaf because he was slow.
“This is Dr. Spencer,” said Dr. Blackman more loudly. “He’s my friend.”
“He works for the university through the Special Challenge program. Some injury when he was a kid,” said Dr. Blackman in a hushed voice again. “He’s harmless.”
Albert winced, reminded of dark memories he tried every day to forget.
“He has this amazing thing, his sense of time,” continued Dr. Blackman. “Watch this.” He walked toward Albert, past a desk where personal pictures of the professor and his assistants were pinned to the wall beside the monitor. Albert looked down at the floor, rubbing the handle of the broom.
“What time is it, Albert?”
“St. Andrew’s,” blurted Albert. “Quarter to eight.” Exactly as he finished, the peal of a distant church bell could be heard through the high window of the lab, where it just reached above the ground floor. Snow fell down the glass in white flutters, muffling the sound. Dr. Spencer looked at Dr. Blackman and raised his eyebrows, the way people often did when Albert behaved oddly. Albert hung his head. It was not something he could stop.
“What day was April 17, 1772?” said Dr. Blackman.
“Friday,” mumbled Albert.
“How old is Dr. Spencer?”
“Forty-two.”
Dr. Blackman turned and walked back to his colleague, who was standing with his mouth open. His coat dripped slush onto the floor Albert where had already swept. He did not like being put on display, and he did not like that he would have to clean the floor again.
“Don’t bother checking. He’s never missed once,” whispered Dr. Blackman.
Albert was not proud that he was right. He always knew what time bells rang, when the sun rose each morning, how old things were…it was the only skill he had that others did not. He would have gladly traded it for something more normal.
Dr. Blackman began to check the wires, filaments and strange lights surrounding his metal enclosure. Dr. Spencer stepped beside him. Ignored, Albert listened to them as he pushed his broom quietly along in symmetrical lines. He did not understand much, but more than most people thought he was capable of.
“Why’d you have to make it so large? It looks like a jail.” Dr. Spencer craned his neck inside the open door and looked around the inside of the metal bars. “It looks like a faraday cage. What are you trying to keep out?”
Albert did not know what a faraday cage was, but he liked the way the words felt on his lips as he mouthed them.
“That’s what it is, sort of,” answered Dr. Blackman. “Except a faraday cage is a passive shield. This is more active.”
“Active?”
“I need to push something out rather than just shut the door on it. The force I am trying to measure is pervasive, like gravity. I can’t get a zero reference unless I can negate it.”
“You said you were making progress when you asked for my help. Please tell me it has nothing to do with that crazy time theory of yours again. People are beginning to talk.”
Dr. Blackman’s shoulders slumped like he was tired of being treated like an idiot. Albert knew how that felt. “Time is accelerating, Kevin. I won’t stop until I’ve proven it.”
“Christ, not that again. Look, I know it seems like time was slower when we were kids, and summers lasted forever, but, come on. You have to let this thing go before it ruins your career.”
Albert’s head snapped up at Dr. Spencer’s mention of slower time. He was slow in thought, it was true, but it was more than that. He knew he was actually moving slightly slower than everyone else, thanks to the awareness of his special gift. He was slow enough to watch butterflies flap their silk-thin wings, swaying leaves in their wake as if an angel had passed. In the summer, he even liked to watch grass grow. Crazy Albert, the students said as they walked past him each day.
He knew Dr. Blackman was right. He had always known it. As the world progressed, people seemed to…speed up. But like a hummingbird increasing the beat of its wings, it was impossible for anyone to notice. Except for a person with an uncanny sense of time.
Albert stared at the men as they continued to argue. The idea of time moving faster was of great interest to him.
“I’m close! I know you’ve heard this before, but it explains everything! The singularity, for example…”
“You know how close you are to being a running joke, don’t you? They call it Blackwell’s ‘Need for Speed’ theory.” There was tense silence for a moment.
“Don’t mock me,” Dr. Blackman said in a low voice. “I just need your help with the math. I’m already getting data that suggests time might be different inside the cage than outside it.” He reached
up and tightened a wire connection. “We’re racing towards the singularity as our collective intelligence multiplies exponentially by the day. Even you know this. What I intend to show is that time is speeding up as this…force…of intelligence grows.” He looked down as if he were embarrassed by his own beliefs.
“Force of intelligence?” Dr. Spencer’s lip curled slightly.
“I was hoping you would help me, Dr. Spencer. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
Albert had been cleaning offices at the university long enough to understand that academic friendships were over when professors switched from first names to formal titles. After Dr. Spencer put his coat back on and left, Dr. Blackman flipped a row of switches. The cage hummed softly. He put his own coat on slowly, as if it weighed a hundred pounds more than it had when he took it off.
“I have a final test running, Albert. Please make sure to lock the door when you leave. I have everything I own tied up in this,” he said quietly, addressing Albert as an adult instead of in the simple voice he normally used. “Although someone would need to believe this is worth something to want to steal it.”
He left the room, closing the door with a soft click behind him after he had dimmed the lights. The snow continued to fall silently outside the window.
Albert drew his broom back and forth slowly. He did not have to try to believe Dr. Blackman, for he knew the truth in his bones. Time was accelerating for humanity, a stream that was moving faster and faster. It was something Albert perceived even without the complicated wires and machines wrapped around Dr. Blackman’s metal box. It was a force he understood better than anyone because it was leaving him behind, millisecond by millisecond, day after day, month after month.
To know this was not a gift at all. His ability was as much of a cage as Dr. Blackman’s box of bars and metal.
Albert did not understand much of what the two professors had said, but he understood what Dr. Blackman was trying to do with his machine. His mother had told him he was once a very smart little boy. Until the day…she could never say it.
...until the day my father beat me even harder than he beat you.
The device held his interest more readily now. If time slowed for someone inside it, what would happen to someone who had already stopped time?
He leaned his broom precisely in the corner of the room then walked up to the cage. His lips mouthed the word faraday as he opened the door and stepped inside. He knew it was 7:58 p.m.
Sitting cross-legged, he reached down and touched an old carpet laid over the metal floor. Dr. Blackman had sat in here, too, he realized. He wondered if the professor had noticed anything different when he was inside.
Intuitively, Albert knew how speed affected time. How the faster you moved, the slower you aged. His brain sensed Einstein’s equations without comprehending any of their logic. He squeezed his eyes shut. His mother said he had started reading at age one, way ahead of the other children. That was before the night Albert was sent to the hospital the first time. He concentrated on what made him different from everyone else.
An insight crystallized in his mind like a mist lifting from a morning field.
Time moves faster because people are getting smarter, he remembered from the conversation.
But not for me. I am slow because I am like this cage. I block time out.
Intelligence was a wind blowing humanity faster and faster. But a man can hide from the wind, he thought. Even change its direction for a moment.
Albert pushed through the molasses of his damaged brain. His understanding of time took a different turn, and he smiled as understanding popped into his head. If time could speed up, it could slow down, as well.
But could it slow down enough to go backwards?
He took a deep breath and concentrated on the flow of time surrounding the outside of the cage, the machine’s counterforce enabling him to feel it. Time coiled and swirled, stirred faster by the wind of human knowledge.
To stop time, he suddenly realized, he must stop knowledge. I must become even slower than I am. I must push it away, just as Dr. Blackman’s machine does.
His father’s face, surly and angry, formed as a catalyst in his mind. He was a man of pure ignorance who hated anyone who studied to be better.
Time slowed around Albert as the memory of his father strengthened his strange sense of time.
It was 8 p.m. He felt the wind shift. His life spooled backwards.
♦♦♦
Booming music, a high school band with an over-amped guitar, echoed through the gymnasium. Albert was fifteen again, a time before the limp. His brain had already been injured, but he still fit in with the lower rungs of high school society. He was at the school dance sitting beside a girl named Janice, a social outcast like him. He desperately liked her for exactly that reason. Turning his body to face her, Janice turned her face up slightly. He held his breath and kissed her with dry lips, letting history play out the way it had the first time. It was the awkward advance of an amateur. It ended his hopes of anything more.
He closed his eyes and visualized his father to rewind time again. Turning to face Janice, he licked his lips and kissed her harder. She instantly pulled back, surprised by his aggression. Albert forced himself forward, his father’s temper taking control. She raised her hands to push him away.
“Bitch,” he heard his father’s favourite word come out of his mouth. Before he could stop, he watched his hand strike Janice across the face, just as he had seen his father slap his mother so many times in his life. Janice screamed loud enough to be heard over the music. Teachers looked over and began to run. Albert found his hands around the girl’s throat, her face becoming his mother’s. Arms pried his fingers away as the new path of time spiraled out of control.
He squeezed his eyes and focused. He was suddenly infused with a sense of power - he could do this over and over. He could kill her a million times, if he wanted to, for she would still live a billion other lives. He drew a deep breath and let it pass. Events around him rewound like a movie in reverse, his hands drawing back from Janice until he was sitting with his arm around her again. He thought of his mother this time. He was a little boy and she was stroking his head. Both her eyes were black with bruises.
“Only kiss a girl if you love her, Albert,” she said. “Be gentle.”
Albert looked at Janice closely and smiled. He approached slowly and touched her lips very softly this time. The kiss went on forever, causing him to be late getting home. Late enough for his father to be asleep from one more can of beer. Late enough to avoid the beating that would break his leg so badly that he would limp for the rest of his life.
♦♦♦
Albert opened his eyes. He was sitting cross-legged in Dr. Blackman’s metal cage and it was still 8 p.m. He reached down and touched a thicker carpet. He ran his hand down his leg and stopped when he came to the place where the titanium plates held it together.
The bone was smooth. There was no break and he knew if he stood, he could walk without the embarrassing lurch. He smiled at the change, even as the memory of an earlier Albert faded away at the edges.
He could feel the winds of time whispering to him. He had to make a choice whether to stay here or go back. His ran his hand down his left thigh again.
Can I go further?
He focused on his father’s face again and time ticked slower. The current of the universe thickened like cooling tar. The horn of an angry driver in the street outside the lab window lowed like a foghorn, lasting minutes. The world stopped turning, a top balanced on the tip of time. Albert sank deeper, blanking his mind until it drained beyond empty.
Negative knowledge.
Time began to turn. The car outside sped in reverse, the horn’s blare sucked into the car until the driver yanked the heel of his hand from the wheel. Snow floated up. The school dance whirled past from its end to its beginning.
♦♦♦
…Albert was five years old, standing in an aisle of his fath
er’s small corner store. He clutched his mother’s hand as his parents argued. She asked when he was coming home. He said he had to work to pay the goddamned rent. When his father raised his fist, Albert let go of his mother and ran around one of the shelves. He found himself facing the candy counter, his eyes level with a tray of licorice buttons and a bowl of coloured candies. They were magical to look at. A jumbled rainbow of sweets, he was able to forget about his parents for a moment. He reached up and grabbed a red one and stuffed it into his pocket. His mother came around the corner rubbing her cheek and pulled him toward the door.
“Why, you little thief,” he heard his father’s voice growl. Albert remembered what was coming. It made his blood run cold. His father whipped his arm around.
“Stealing from your own family, that’s what you done, boy.” Albert let one blow hit him before he closed his eyes to escape the beating. He remembered his mother telling him in the hospital she had to throw a can of beans at the man to make him stop.
He lived it again. Albert was standing once more at the candy bowl. He always knew he had done wrong. His father had a twisted way of seeing the world. A rigid sense of martial honour, but honour just the same.
Before his mother could take him away, he turned and walked down the aisle toward his father, who stood watching. Albert held out a penny.
“Daddy, I want to buy this.” The sweet in his pocket seemed to weigh a ton as his father glared at him. He raised his arm. Albert drew back.
“Damn right, Bertie. Stealing’s wrong. Too many thievin’ kids around here. Don’t you become one of ‘em.” He took the penny and dropped it in the till. Albert never got the severe beating that made a brilliant little boy into a slow one.
♦♦♦
He knew it was 8 p.m. again before he even opened his eyes. The thick carpet was still there. Albert looked around at a more up-to-date lab, newer equipment flashing silently in the dim room. No longer a dungeon for outcast academics.
