THE POWER OF THREE
By
BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN
Copyright @ Billie Sue Mosiman 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form, including digital, electronic, or mechanical, to include photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the author(s), except for brief quotes used in reviews. This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents are products of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
THE FIX
WALLS OF THE DEAD
A LITTLE LIFE
THE FIX
By
Billie Sue Mosiman
Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012
“Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.”
MICHIO KAKU, Wired Magazine, Aug. 2003
“Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored.”
CLIFFORD PICKOVER, Time: A Traveler's Guide
She was a woman who had seen the face of horror and survived it. That’s what happened to people who were fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to live a long life.
Sipping a cup of Empire coffee, she relished the first taste of the day. By noon she knew she’d finish the pot. Outside the long window in the living room of her fourth floor apartment, she saw the new day rising. It was going to be another hot one. Down on the street kids were already running and screaming through the silver splatter of an open fire hydrant.
Jane looked at her wristwatch. At barely eight a.m. the city was bustling like an ant hive. Her grandson John would be over to see her around noon, taking minutes from his lunch break at the Institute to visit.
She lifted the cup to her lips and blew on the coffee to cool it. John was the only love in her life now. She had outlived two husbands, her parents and three sisters, and one of her own children. Her two surviving children neglected her, but she must be fair. They didn’t live in New York anymore, having taken off for the West Coast many years ago. Only John, the son of her deceased daughter, remained. She was grateful for him to such an extent that she knew she doted on him, but that was a grandmother’s prerogative.
He had been babbling lately on his visits about a new invention that was going to change the world. She smiled. He was always excited about something or other in his work. The think tank where he worked kept him engaged with the most splendid ideas and subjects. Once it had been a new element added to corn crops that caused the corn to carry a high percentage of proteins, insuring some third world countries wouldn’t have to starve any longer. Now that was a great invention indeed!
She had seen starvation. It was one of the horrors her old heart despaired over when she gave it thought. As a young woman she had volunteered for the Peace Corps and worked in the Sudan. There, despite regular deliveries of rice and flour from the charity organizations, people died hungry. Now her grandson had been part of a group of intellectuals who made hunger disappear.
If you lived long enough, the world changed sometimes for the better, and that was one of the best things about living.
She had seen more than that, of course. Her first husband had been…shadowy. It was three years into her young, hasty marriage before she discovered he was deeply involved in organized crime. He had insisted she learn how to shoot a gun and to carry it on her person. “If they ever come for me, you might be in the way. I want you to be able to defend yourself.”
He hadn’t lasted that long, her Stephen. He wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought, nor was he nearly as lucky as he needed to be. He was taken out in a power struggle where his loyalties lay on the wrong side of the conflict. Since her own luck ran higher, she had been nowhere near him when he was found alone on the street that night.
Cataloguing the years of a life was Jane’s pastime. What else did she have to do? Arthritis in her deformed hands and the pain it caused in her knees made her almost a cripple. She could still get around, though slowly. She could still hold her coffee cup, though not without pain, and that was a blessing.
She relaxed into the easy chair facing the widow and waited for the hours to pass until noon.
#
He came through the door, his energy high, brown eyes bright with excitement. “Me-ma, they’ve had it for twenty years!”
She straightened in her chair. She had heard him at the door, using the extra key she’d given him to unlock it. She had a smile plastered on her lips, the same one that transformed her face whenever he visited. Without him her life was a dry desert.
“Slow down, John. What have they had for twenty years? Here, sit down and tell me.” She gestured to the second easy chair pulled close to her own.
“Time travel! Oh my god, do you know what this means?” He hadn’t taken the chair. He stood between her and the window, his animated face in shadow.
She looked up at him, her mouth hanging slightly open. “Oh, they have not, not really,” she said.
“Really. Really and truly! They came to us because they need to figure out a tiny problem with it, but it’s real, Me-ma, can you believe it? You’ll be able to go back in time. You’ll be able to…”
She raised one crooked-fingered hand to stop him. “Slow down. Sit in the chair, I can’t see you hanging over me that way.”
He flopped into the chair and turned to face her. Again she smiled because his face, his presence, made her so happy. He was a young man bursting with life. He was engaged with living the way she had once been. Even when he babbled, as he was doing now, she just wanted to reach over and give him a hug to show how much she appreciated his attention. For instance, down the hall in 4D Menkel Bogdonavitch was a little younger than she, but he had no one—no family at all to visit him, to care. He spent his days alone, doing what? Living out the last days staring at the wall, she supposed, with no one to hear his voice.
“You don’t understand,” John was saying. “Even my girlfriend didn’t understand. This is the greatest thing that’s ever been discovered. I can’t believe we’ve had the knowledge for twenty years and I’m only now finding out, but it’s been a top secret project. Only recently have they got it working to the point they can, well, bring people back. They’re taking applications for people to travel. To time travel! I’ve already put your name on the list.”
“You did what?” Now her pulse elevated. She could feel it in her wrists and in the base of her neck. “I don’t want to travel in time!” Calm down, she told herself, don’t get too excited.
“Oh, Me-ma, of course you do. I’d do it myself, but they want older people, people who can travel farther into the past than I can. They have more years to travel to, you see? So far people can’t seem to go past the barrier of their own lives. You could go back and…”
“Do what? Warn Stephen to stay home and off the street the night he died? Teach your own grandfather to eat his vegetables and not clog his arteries with junk food? Just what is it I could accomplish, John? I don’t think we’re meant to meddle.” Though she knew what was coming next, she didn’t want to hear it. She could feel the doors in her mind shutting, pushing back one of those losses she tried not to think about.
“What about my mother?” His agitation stalled. He sat with slumped shoulders and a hangdog look about him.
She glanced away to the window. The sun was overhead, the temperature this July day edging one hundred degrees. Her window air conditi
oner in the nearby kitchen ran noisily trying to cool the open area of the apartment.
“Do you think I could save her? I don’t think so, honey.” Now the door to memory opened. She recalled the day Carol died. She had been in the subway late at night, just having gotten off work at a design firm in downtown Manhattan. She had been working on a new account, trying out promotional ideas, staying late, working hard. She was up for the Vice Presidential position if she could nail this one account.
The police theorized she’d been caught alone on the platform by a group of thugs. They stole her money and credit cards, beating her in the process, and had left her to die in the bright fluorescent light, her blood dribbling off the platform’s edge down into the tracks. She lay there, unable to move, no one coming to help her, until she died of blood loss from a stab wound in her chest.
“What if you could call her that night, tell her not to use the subway, insist that she take a cab home?”
Jane looked at her despondent grandson and remembered him as a child of fourteen when his mother was murdered. He had been taken out of the city by his father and raised in upstate New York. He had come back to the city for college and, being a superlative student with a high Mensa IQ score, he had found just the right place in the Institute to take him on. Now he was engaged to be married, though Jane hadn’t met the lucky woman yet.
Could she really go back in time and keep her daughter from her death?
Was this time travel thing real and if so, could one tinker with the past without creating a paradox that threatened the future?
She asked this of her grandson. He said, “The few experiments they tried didn’t change the future to any measurable degree. I know they say if a butterfly dies in the Amazon the whole world is changed, but they’re finding that’s not quite true. It may change, but not by any noticeable extent.”
“Have they gone back to save John F. Kennedy? I haven’t noticed any change in US history.” She stood carefully to fill her cup with coffee. She had to think about this. She shouldn’t let her emotions rule her.
“No, they haven’t tried anything that big,” he said. “But Me-ma,” he followed her to the kitchen and took down a cup for himself from the cupboard over the counter. “If they let you in the program and you could get to that day. That night…”
She poured him coffee. She pushed the creamer and sugar bowl toward him because that’s the way he liked his coffee. She hesitated and then her mind was made up. “If this thing is real the way you say it is, and if they want me, and if I can go back to that day, I’ll do it. Of course I will.”
#
The day John was to take her for the interview with the people who had the power to put her into the time travel program, he brought along his fiancé, Barbara. “Me-ma, this is Barb, the woman I’m going to marry.”
In an instant Jane didn’t like her. One gift of old age was an instinct honed by years of interaction with others. You could tell, even without evidence, when a person was pretty good or pretty bad. Bad, of course, was a relative term. For Jane it meant a person not quite on the up-and-up. A person with agendas, dark ones. A person of secrets, bad ones.
That person stood before her in the guise of a young, beautiful woman in her twenties. She was blonde with blue eyes, a knock-out. She was tall, svelte, and elegant. She was also as cold as a frozen fish TV dinner in Jane’s refrigerator.
Though Jane shook the young woman’s hand and tried to smile at her, she knew she was probably in some way grimacing instead. She would have to talk to John about this woman. Find out more about her in some roundabout way. Her grandson did listen to her and he respected her opinions. “Barb” was just that. A barb. A thorn that would lodge itself in her grandchild’s side.
On the way to the Institute, Barb was silent as a mongoose watching a snake. John, excited as always, didn’t notice and talked about what a great opportunity this was for his grandmother.
Jane was reminded of other women in her lifetime she’d had the unhappiness of knowing who were similar to Barb. They were social climbers, full of avarice and greed, narcissistic in the extreme. They didn’t care who suffered if they were blocked from their goals. They would do anything to get what they wanted. Barb wanted John. Rather than find out years from now what a mistake he had made in marrying her, Jane hoped before a wedding between them she could find a way to show her grandson what kind of future he was moving toward.
In the Institute, where she had never been before, John left Barb in his office, and took Jane to a room down the hall where two men sat behind a table. “Thank you,” one of the men said to John, dismissing him from the room.
Jane sat down gratefully, her knees killing her. She placed her white patent leather purse in her lap and crossed her hands where they lay on the shiny metal table. “My grandson tells me you’d like to ask some questions.”
For the next hour she answered everything honestly. Where she was born, what year, would she be willing to go to a past year and come back to tell them of the experience? Would she be careful not to disturb the past if she could help it?
She lied on answering the last question for she meant to alter the past if she could. She most certainly would break that one oath she was asked to sign. They didn’t have to know everything.
#
The day of the experiment, Jane was asked to pick a date in her past to re-visit. She pretended to pick a date out of the air, nonchalantly waving her old, crippled hand and saying with a slight stutter, “Oh, I…heck…I guess May 16, 1989 will do.”
It had been reiterated over and over to her that she should just pick a random day where nothing of great import happened in her life.
Did she worry about coming back? Did the large machine kept in a climate-controlled room in a large military complex on Long Island frighten her? Was her heart tripping and stuttering and was her blood pressure rising despite her blood pressure medicine?
Yes, all of that. If she did not come back to the present, she couldn’t help prevent John’s marriage to Barbara. If the large, alien, humming machine crunched her bones to dust and sent her into oblivion, it might hurt, and it might be her last moments alive. And her heart was a mess though she tried to meditate and accept these risks without such terrible fear.
She was placed in a capsule inside the cold, steel, towering machine that rose two stories high. She sat comfortably in a reclining chair, her feet lifted, her eyes closed. If this was the end then at least it was more exciting than a heart attack, and much less painful.
She heard nothing. No whirrs or hisses, no high-pitched sounds, no grinding of motors or clanking of parts. She thought she’d dozed.
She woke in 1989 in her bed. Her second husband, Charles, had already left for work. She sat up in her younger body, amazed at how well she felt. She flexed her fingers, startled at how straight and beautiful they were. She slid her legs to the floor and noticed not one iota of pain in her knees. She was a woman in her fifties, fifteen pounds lighter, and this was a new day.
Then she remembered why she was here. She had been here before, had lived this day like any other. She had washed and ironed clothes. She had mopped the floors and made dinner. And around ten p.m. the phone had rung with the news her daughter was dead.
She leaped from the bed and rushed to the living room. She had Carol on the phone within minutes. Her daughter’s voice was like hearing a ghost. She said breathlessly, “Carol! Don’t take the subway tonight! You’ll work late and there won’t be anyone on your platform at the station. You’ll be mugged and stabbed. You’ll die!”
Silence came from the receiver. Jane licked her lips nervously. She almost spoke again.
Then Carol said, “Mother, have you been drinking or something?”
“Baby, I know this sounds nuts, but you have to listen to me. If you were ever in your entire life going to listen and follow your mother’s advice, this is the day to do it. You CANNOT take the subway tonight. I will come and ride with you in a cab mys
elf if I have to. Do you understand?”
“Sure, Mama, I got it, okay? You’re having some kind of premonition. I’ll take a cab, I promise.”
All day Jane paced the apartment, electrified with her racing thoughts. She didn’t wash or iron or mop or cook. She paced, wondering if she should make the trip downtown to her daughter’s place of work to make sure she didn’t take the subway. When ten p.m. came and went without a phone call, she collapsed into a chair. She called Carol and spoke to her, finding for herself that her daughter was safe. Her husband gave Jane a troubled look and announced, “Hell, I’m going to bed. You’ve worn me out with your pacing.”
The time travel lasted just twenty-four hours. They had not been able to make it last any longer, despite years of development. She woke in the reclining chair, people standing over her smiling. Behind them she saw John. There were tears in his eyes.
She was taken to a private room and questioned. She filled out some papers detailing her day. She left out the warning she’d given her daughter to save her life.
In the hallway John waited to take her arm. He walked beside her to the elevator, hailed a cab to take them back to the city. Once inside the cab he turned to her.
“Well?” she asked, waiting to hear how he had lived his life with his mother.
“She’s not here. You went back in time to the wrong day. She was killed on May seventeenth, in the same way, on the same platform.”
Jane gasped. “But it didn’t happen on the seventeenth! It was the sixteenth. I went back to that day and I got her to take a cab.”
John shook his head. “No, Me-ma, you made a mistake. It was the seventeenth.”
#
Jane became a permanent time travel candidate. She was sent back in time once a week for months on end, coming back all in one piece, her memories intact. She kept changing the date, as if picking something off the top of her mind. She always picked the day John told her his mother died, no matter what day that was. May seventeeth. June twentieth. September thirty-first. Every time she called Carol and told her to take a cab. Every night after ten she called to be sure she was alive and she was.
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