Timelines

Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells’

The Time Machine

Wells Unleashed Series

Book 2

Edited by

JW Schnarr

Northern Frights Publishing

In the Great White North, Blood Runs Colder…

www.northernfrightspublishing.webs.com

Also Available from Northern Frights Publishing

Shadows of the Emerald City

Wells Unleashed Series

Book One: War of the Worlds: Frontlines

Book Two: Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’

The Time Machine

Watch for these titles coming soon from NFP!

Fallen: An Anthology of Demonic Horror

Things Falling Apart by JW Schnarr

Wormfood Island by Ken La Salle (2011)

The Blackest Heart by Vince Churchill (2011)

Pandora by Vince Churchill (2011)

Symphony for the Quiet Ones by Michael Scott Bricker (2011)

Alice and Dorothy by JW Schnarr

Wells Unleashed Series

Book 3: Bloodlines: The Diaries of Dr Moreau (2011)

Book 4: Sightlines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’

The Invisible Man (2011)

Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine

© 2010 by JW Schnarr

Wells Unleashed SeriesTM 2010 by JW Schnarr

This edition of

Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine

© 2010 by Northern Frights Publishing

Timelines: Stories Inpsired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine

Edited by JW Schnarr

Cover Art and Design © 2010 by Gavro Krackovic

Interior Layout and Design © 2010 by JW Schnarr

All stories © their respective authors. Northern Frights Publishing reserves the right to publish Timelines: Stories Inspired by HG Wells’ The Time Machine in perpetuity.

Northern Frights Publishing is proudly Canadian.

This book is a collection of stories inspired by the Herbert George Wells novel The Time Machine. No paradoxes were made during the creation of this book. If you or someone you know was altered or erased from the Timeline as a result of purchasing this book, take heart. NFP now accepts returns from book sellers!

This book is a collection of stories based on the Public Domain work of Herbert George Wells and his novel The Time Machine. The characters, names, and places of some of the stories are derivatives of the original work.

For everything ever taken away from us,

And for everything we wish we could have taken back.

Acknowledgements

In no particular order, as always, thanks go out to my sister Janice for her contuinued support of NFP and everything that happens therein; A big thank you and lots of love to my daughter Aurora for making me want to be more than I am, and thank you to my great friends, who continue to buy NFP books and give me encouragement.

Of course, this collection would ber nothing without the artists and authors who contributed to make it so special; and to you, the reader, goes the biggest thanks of all.

Table of Contents

Foreword By Paul J. Nahin

The End Of The Experiment By Peter Clines

Love And Glass By Michael Scott Bricker

Perpetual Motion Blues By Harper Hull

Rocking My Dreamboat By Victorya

Spree By John Medaille

The Time Traveller By Vincent L. Scarsella

Correspondence By Ruthanna Emrys

The Woman Who Came To The Paradox By Derek J. Goodman

Midnight At The End Of The Universe By Eric Ian Steele

Happiness Everlasting By Gerald Warfield

Professor Figwort Comes To An Understanding By Jacob Edwards

One One Thousand By William Wood

Doxies By Brandon Alspaugh

Conditional Perfect By Jason Palmer

By His Sacrifice By Daliso Chopanda

Wikihistory By Desmond Warzel

Written By The Winners By Matthew Johnson

Sunlight And Shadows By JW Schnarr And John Sunseri

Xmas By Douglas Hutcheson

Time’s Cruel Geometry By Mark Onspaugh

Kelmscott Manor: In The Attics By Lynn C. A. Gardner

Cast Of Contributors

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

The Holy Bible Ecclesiastes (ch. III, v. 1-8)

“Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.”

Michichio Kaku, Wired Magazine, Aug. 2003

“At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for The Time Traveler; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”

Herbert George Wells, The Time Machine

Foreword

by Paul J. Nahin

University of New Hampshire

“It is so full of invention and the invention is so wonderful…it must certainly make your reputation.”

- from a September 1894 letter to H. G. Wells from

the editor of the New Review, where The Time Machine

first appeared, in serial form, the following year

Could there be a reader of this book who hasn’t read H.G. Wells’ masterpiece, The Time Machine, or seen the 1960 movie (with Rod Taylor as the Time Traveller) based on the novella? I very much doubt it, and so there is little I can say about the story itself that would be new. But what of Wells, the man himself? He offers me much fresher ground to plow; the scientific background of the man whose genius inspired the tales in this new anthology of time travel tales is a story not nearly so well known.

Wells’ great contribution with The Time Machine was to make the science part of ‘science fiction’ important. He commented on this, himself, in the Preface to a 1934 collection (Seven Famous Novels, Knopf). There he wrote that while all previous attempts at writing fantastic stories depended on magic – or sleeping into the future as in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (published in 1888), or traveling into the past via a knock on the head from a crowbar as in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or by some other equally curious mechanism – his did not: “It occurred to me that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted.” The ‘scientific patter’ in The Time Machine is that of the fourth dimension.

The idea of time as the fourth dimension entered the popular mind in 1895 with the publication of the first of Wells’ ‘scientific romances’ (his term; the modern term of science fiction was still decades in the future). Wells’ The Time Machine has never been out of print, and is now recognized as one of the modern classics of the English language. But it didn’t arrive at the printer without some effort. Wells was at first uncertain on just how well he had done in presenting his revolutionary new work, and wrote to the editor at the New Review for an opinion on the opening chapter. Back came a letter (from which I’ve taken the opening quotation), and no one who has read the Time Traveler’s story can doubt that Wells’ editor was right.

The novella opens with the Time Traveler (he is never named) expounding during a dinner party on a recondite matter to a group of his friends. As he asserts, “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.” When asked to say more about the fourth dimension, he replies “It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and it is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been asking why three dimensions particularly – why not another direction at right angles to the other three? – and have even tried to construct a Four-Dimensional geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb [a Canadian-born American mathematician and astronomer who was quite famous at the time] was expounding this to the New York Mathematical Society only a month ago.”

And so he was. Wells was a trained scientist (B.Sc. with first-class honors in zoology and second-class in geology in 1890 from the Royal College of Science), and he quite clearly kept up with technical developments. Certainly he read the British science journal Nature (one of his college friends at the Normal School in South Kensington, Richard Gregory, eventually became editor of Nature, and one of their teachers, Norman Lockyer, was Nature’s first editor), and Wells found Newcomb’s complete address of December 28, 1893 to the New York Mathematical Society (during which he called four-dimensional space “the fairyland of geometry”) reprinted in the magazine (you can look it up for yourself, in the February 1, 1894 issue). In this same talk Newcomb hinted at the modern idea of parallel universes when he said “Add a fourth dimension of space, and there is room for an indefinite number of Universes, all alongside of each other, as there is for an indefinite number of sheets of paper when we pile them upon each other.”

This commentary wasn’t a momentary amusement for Newcomb; he continued to think about the fourth dimension for years. In his 1897 Presidential Address to the American Mathematical Society, for example, Newcomb concluded with the words “We must leave it to posterity to determine whether…the hypothesis of hyperspace can be used as an explanation of observed phenomena.” It was less than two decades later that Einstein did precisely that, explaining gravity in terms of a curved four-dimensional hyperspace (spacetime).

Professor Newcomb’s talk of the fourth dimension influenced Wells well beyond The Time Machine, in fact, and he used Newcomb’s imagery as inspiration for two of his other novels; The Wonderful Visit (1895) and Men Like Gods (1923). In the first novel there is explicit mention of multiple worlds “lying somewhere close together, unsuspecting, as near as page to page in a book,” and in the second novel he speaks of one parallel universe being rotated into another.

Newcomb’s 1893 talk struck a responsive chord in Wells, making him rethink the issue of time as a fourth dimension along which one could travel at will. Only weeks after its appearance in Nature, he published what would be the opening to The Time Machine as an unsigned essay in the March 17, 1894 issue of the National Observer, under the title of “Time Traveling. Possibility or Paradox?” This date is of great interest because it firmly establishes (along with the date of Newcomb’s address) that the Time Traveler’s dinner party must have taken place either in January or February of 1894. (This wonderful party did not occur in the perfectly awful 2002 remake of the 1960 film, directed by Wells’ own great-grandson Simon Wells. And that was just the first of young Simon’s missteps, the next being to place the story in America rather than England and the next to declare the Time Traveler’s name to be—of all things—Alex! If H.G. could come back from the dead he’d give Simon a good Victorian thrashing on his bottom! And a well deserved thrashing it would be, too.)

Wells, I should tell you, had been aware of the idea of the four dimensions for a decade before he read Newcomb’s address in Nature, but he had thought it no more than a whimsical fantasy. In his 1934 Experiment in Autobiography he wrote “In the universe in which my brain was living in 1879 there was no nonsense about time being space or anything of that sort. There were three dimensions, up and down, fore and aft, and right and left, and I never heard of a fourth dimension until 1884 [when Wells was eighteen] or thereabout. Then I thought it was a witticism.” He had, in fact, said this even earlier. In a 1931 edition of The Time Machine (Random House), for which he wrote the Preface, Wells revealed the origin of his novella: “It was begotten in the writer’s mind by students’ discussions in the laboratories and debating society of the Royal College of Science in the eighties and already it had been tried over in various forms by him [that is, by Wells] before he made this particular application of it.”

Ah, now there is a provocative statement! Wells wrote a time travel story before he penned The Time Machine? What he was almost certainly thinking of was his attempt, in 1888, at a story with the unintentionally hilarious title of The Chronic Argonauts. That first work so embarrassed Wells that he later called it “imitative puerile stuff,” “clumsily invented, and loaded with irrelevant sham significance,” and “inept,” and he hunted down and destroyed every copy of it that he could find. Unlike in The Time Machine, the time traveler in that earlier tale is named—Dr. Moses Nebogipfel—a name which is perhaps better left forgotten! On this issue of naming (or not) The Time Traveler, Wells did include one tantalizing passage in The Time Machine: as the Time Traveler explores a museum of ‘ancient artifacts’ in the Palace of Green Porcelain, he reveals (to his dinner companions after returning from his first trip into the future) that “yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.” Thus, the Time Traveler has given his name but, alas, his signature exists in the future in a museum of the past that is yet to be built. We’ll just have to wait – perhaps for a very long time—to learn The Time Traveler’s identity!

To enjoy the thrills and the dangers of chronomotion experienced by The Time Traveler, however, you do not have to wait. Just turn the pages that follow and read the new stories of time travel in this book, stories inspired by The Time Machine, and similar heart-stopping adventures will be yours right now.

Enjoy.

The End of the Experiment

by Peter Clines

“Jon!” Chris launched herself over the threshold and into his arms. He returned the hug, and everyone pretended not to notice that she hung on just a bit longer than he did. Jon reached around the perky blonde to shake Will’s hand. Sylvester clapped him on the back in a manly way as he walked past and Tom just gave their host a smile over the double-stack of pizza boxes.

Jon guided them all past the wall of family photos and into his flat. It wasn’t a huge place by normal standards, but for a grad student living alone it was gigantic. Sylvester slid a stack of physics books across the coffee table to make space for the pizzas Tom was setting down. Will flopped into a well-worn easy chair. Chris grabbed the opener from the little fridge before rolling over and onto the couch.

Tom opened the top box for a moment and bent his bald head, taking a deep sniff of cheese, garlic, and hot oil. “So where the hell have you been, mate?”

“Working,” said Jon, cracking open a beer. “Working on what may be the greatest invention of all time.”

Will raised an eyebrow. “Better than the tri-fection bong we built last year?”

“Much better.”

“Liar! Nothing short of cold fusion could beat that.”

“Better be worth it,” said Sylvester, popping the cap off his own bottle. “Professor Herbert’s going to give you the sack if you skip any more of your undergrad classes. Doesn’t look good, his only Yank being AWOL for so long.”

“It’s worth it,” Jon assured them. Five bottles chimed against each other over the pizza. “You guys are still covering for me, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, and he’s noticed,” said Tom. “Which means you’d better get a move on before he gives us the sack us as well.”

“So,” said Chris, “what is the mysterious it you’ve been working on, then?”

“Everyone have at least two beers first. This is a lot easier to deal with if you’ve got a buzz going.”

Tom’s lips twisted. “Does this mean we’re not watching a movie?”

“No movie,” said Jon. “Beer and talking.”

“I thought we were going to see a movie,” grumbled Tom. He drowned his sorrow with another swig of beer.

“Can we eat,” said Sylvester, “or will that upset your master plan somehow?”

“I’ll just toss out the warning that I was sick to my stomach for a while when I figured this whole thing out.”

The first box flipped open and five slices of pizza slid off onto five plates. Tom grabbed an extra slice while Chris reached for a packet of hot peppers. They worked their way through the first pizza and into the second six-pack, talking about tutoring jobs and papers that needed grading and bad campus bands. Jon bit his tongue for almost an hour.

At last he couldn’t contain himself any longer and leaped back to his feet. “Okay, boys and girl,” he said. “Now that you’ve all got some food and alcohol in you, we’re going to have a history lesson, then show and tell, and then finish up with physics class.”

“Do we get to play doctor at breaktime?” asked Chris. She batted her eyes at Jon and gave her lips a flirty lick.

“You should be so lucky,” said Will with a smirk.

“So should you,” she snapped.

Jon clucked his tongue at them. “First,” he said, “the history lesson.” His voice took on the same tones he used when giving lectures to the undergrads. “Who knows what used to stand here?”

Tom glanced around. “The couch was there, wasn’t it? When you had the telly over there.” He pointed to the far wall.

“At this address,” clarified Jon. “What used to be on this spot?”

Chris glanced around. “It’s a converted warehouse, isn’t it? They made lots of them into flats back in the ’80s.”

“Further back.”

“My family used to live right over in Richmond,” said Sylvester. “Most of this area was flattened during the Blitz. Pretty sure it was all just houses before then.”

“Correct,” said Jon. “And records are damned spotty from back then, let me tell you. The house that was on this spot was vacant for almost thirty years, and there’s almost no record of the person who lived in it before then. I know it was a bachelor who was an amateur scientist, that’s about it.”

It was Tom’s turn to smirk again. “How d’you know that?”

Jon grabbed a slice of mushroom pizza. “I had to research around it, if that makes sense. A lot of the actual records are gone, but there were a few professional men who lived in this area. A doctor, a psychologist, the local mayor. A lot of them kept journals that make off-hand references to the man who lived in the house here. It was that social obligation of the time, gentlemen meeting every week for drinks and cigars and hours of talking.”

“Not at all like today,” grinned Sylvester, raising his bottle. They all toasted again.

“So who was he?” Chris said.

“I don’t know.” Jon shrugged. “Like I said, spotty records. Can’t find any direct trace of him.”

“Is that what you were doing when I saw you at the Hall of Records?” asked Will. “A few weeks back, when we ran into each other that time?”

“Right. The house was owned by a Mr. Smythe out in Kent, but leased to the same gentleman for twenty-five years. In fact, it looks like he wasn’t even living there for the last nine. He’d just paid up in advance.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Again, no one knows. A couple of the journals even mention their acquaintance being absent. After a few months, they all assume he moved away, perhaps to America, and that’s that. What few signs there are of him completely vanish from the record. And the house stood empty until it got hit by a bomb in 1941.”

Will tried to cut in, but their host waved the interruption aside and continued on. “Now,” Jon said, “show and tell.” He smiled again and darted across the room to his workbench. He opened a drawer, pulled out something wrapped in black fabric, and unfolded the cloth as he carried it back to his friends.

Chris cooed at the sight of it. “What is it? It’s beautiful.”

The thing across his palm was an oversized Christmas ornament, a glittering framework of metal the size of a small shoe. He shifted his hands, settled the little apparatus on top of the stack of books next to the pizza boxes, and the others bent in to examine the small device.

At the heart of it was a small seat carved from wood, almost a saddle, and before it was a tiny console, barely two inches across, decorated with levers of what looked like glass and bone. A horizontal bar, like a throttle, stretched across the middle of the console, and the iridescent material gave it a blurry appearance, as if it were somehow unreal. Stiff wires of silver and brass criss-crossed around the saddle and the controls, forming an egg-shaped lattice.

Tom glanced up from the apparatus. “Is this what you’ve been working on all this time?”

“Sort of, yeah,” said Jon.

“Is that gold, all those spirals?”

“Yeah.”

“Real gold?”

Their host nodded.

“How’d you afford this thing?” asked Chris. “It must’ve cost a bundle.”

“We’ll get to that in a bit.”

Sylvester reached out a hand but couldn’t bring himself to touch it. He flexed his fingers twice, stretching the tips out an inch from the curved wires. “It’s got a charge,” he commented, watching the hair on his knuckles rise.

“Oh, yes,” said Jon.

“Is it powered or just static electricity?”

“We’ll get to that in a bit, too.

Chris hadn’t brought herself to touch the model yet either, but her nose was a hair from the metal latticework. Her bangs were hovering in the cloud of static electricity. “This is really amazing,” she said, giving Jon an approving glance.

He smiled again. He was all smiles tonight. “Now, finally, physics class.” He took a drink from his own beer, followed it with a bite of the pizza slice he hadn’t touched yet, and then another sip. “Let’s talk about time travel.”

A groan danced across the group, with a few smiles. “Hang on,” said Tom. “I need to use the loo before we start the debate.” He slipped the empty bottle back into the six-pack and marched across the flat.

“Time travel,” repeated Jon when his friend returned. “A fine group of minds like this one must have a few thoughts on it.”

“I thought David Tennant was the best Doctor Who ever,” said Chris.

“Agreed,” said Will. They tapped their bottles across the table and drank.

Sylvester reclined on the couch. “Time travel’s possible, but it’s only possible in that air-turning-into-gold way.”

“Which really means it’s not possible,” said Tom, drying his hands on his pant legs. He dropped back on the couch, bouncing Chris into the air. “It’s just a trick of the math, not real physics.”

Chris shrugged. “Isn’t all physics just a trick of math?”

“No, that’s statistics,” said Will with a smile. They all laughed and clinked their bottles again.

“Seriously, though,” said Jon, “saying it isn’t possible means gravity isn’t possible, and I think we all agree on gravity, yes?”

Chris snapped her fingers. “What about a Tipler cylinder?”

“Exactly,” said their host. “Tipler proved it’s entirely possible to build a time machine. We just don’t have the engineering know-how to do it right now.”

“Hawking says time travel is bollocks,” emphasized Tom, “even with Tipler cylinders.” He pulled the last beer and popped the cap.

“Hero of Alexandria was the most brilliant man of his age,” said Jon. “A certified genius who thought the steam engine was just a useless toy for kids.”

“Point being?”

“Almost every credible physicist will tell you there’s nothing in physics that says time travel can’t happen,” said their host. “They just don’t know any practical way of making it happen and they don’t like the implications. Two hundred years ago they said powered flight was impossible. Then they said man could never go faster than the speed of sound. Hell, sixty years ago you needed a computer the size of a gymnasium just to do addition.”

Tom shook his head again. “Still bollocks. So says the chronology protection conjecture.”

Will coughed out a laugh. “The what?”

“Try reading a book with no pictures sometime, mate,” said Tom. “A simple proof. If time travel is—or ever will be—possible, where are the time travelers? Every moment of history should be mobbed with them, so where are they?”

“Well,” said Sylvester, “I think Jon’s telling us they’re right here.” He drummed out a quick fanfare on the tabletop with his knuckles and gestured at the metal latticework on the table.

They all looked at the gleaming model again, then back up their host. They’d reached the crux of the lecture. “So, one night about nine months ago, I was sitting right where you are, Chris. It was a Thursday, I had the TV on, and something appeared right there on the coffee table next to my feet.”

They all paused in their dinner, except for Tom who was busy draining the last of his third beer. He let the bottle drop away from his face. “What d’you mean, something appeared?”

“To be exact,” said Jon, “it appeared about seven inches above the coffee table and fell next to my foot. If there hadn’t been a few copies of The Observer there it probably would’ve broken on impact.”

Tom raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, it appeared?” he repeated.

“I mean one minute it wasn’t here and the next minute it was. There was a little breeze, like someone slammed the front door, and this thing was there.”

The corners of Sylvester’s mouth tugged up a bit. Chris tilted her head and pulled her hand back. She hadn’t brought herself to touch it yet. “Like someone put it here when you weren’t looking?”

“No,” he said. “It appeared. Right out of thin air.”

“Bollocks,” said Tom with a grin. “It’s a toy.”

“It’s a stealth rugby ball,” said Sylvester. “What are you getting at here, Jon? Just say it and get it over with.”

Their host cleared his throat and set down his bottle. “What I’m saying is back in 1895 somebody brilliant lived here. Somebody years ahead of his time. He lived in a house which stood right where this apartment is now. And that man figured out how to travel in time.”

Tom rolled his eyes. They all shifted in their chairs.

“I’m serious,” said Jon. “He figured out how to do it and he even built a model time machine as an experiment, to see if it would work. Then one day, once it was done, he pushed the little white lever there and sent this machine over a century into the future.”

Chris tilted her head. “Why 1895?”

“What?”

“You said the building was leased to the same person for twenty-five years. Why say he did it in 1895?”

Jon grinned. He crouched next to the table and oh-so-carefully took the thin framework of the machine into his hands, ignoring the sparks that leaped to his palms. The machine rolled in his grip, and his index finger came down awkwardly across the brass plate that made up the base of the model. Etched into the metal were bold Roman numerals, overlined by his slim finger.

MDCCCXCV

“Come on,” said Tom. “This is nonsense.”

“Oh, no,” said Jon. “Nonsense would be if I reverse-engineered this thing and spent the past two months building a full-sized one down in the garage.”

They froze.

“I’m serious,” he said. “You want to see it?”

Tom laughed first, and Will joined him. Sylvester chuckled. “Christ, for a moment there I almost believed you.”

“It’s right downstairs. I’ve made a few adjustments from the model, but I think it will work.”

Tom coughed back his laughs. “So what are you going to do with your machine, Jon? Travel through time and space righting wrongs?”

“I thought I’d start with the obvious,” he said. “I figured I’d go back and see who the guy was who invented this.”

Will laughed again and saluted their host with the last of his beer.

“Well, if this is it for tonight’s entertainment,” said Sylvester, “I should get going. I’ve got a pile of quizzes to grade from a friend’s class I’m covering.” He gave Jon an arched eyebrow.

“Yeah, true that,” agreed Tom. “I’ve still got half a dozen papers to go through.”

Will vanished to the bathroom while Sylvester piled the pizza boxes and the empties together. He took a last look at the glittering apparatus and shook his head. “It is a nice piece of work.”

Jon bowed his head. “Thanks.”

“Now get your damned arse back to classes before Herbert decides he doesn’t need you.”

Tom had paused by one of the family photos at the door. It showed a lean, sideburned man in well-worn clothes standing with a delicate, narrow-hipped woman. Her hair was a wild mane which spilled across her shoulders and tickled the head of a six-year old Jon standing between them. All three smiled at the camera.

He nodded at the picture. “Who is she again, Jon? Your aunt or something?”

“Something like that. Only met her once. I think they were more distant friends of the family or something.”

“She’s a hottie, for sure. Got a real Eurasian Keira Knightley thing going for her, you know?”

“You do realize she’s almost twenty years older than you, right?”

“So she’s a hottie milf, so what? Your uncle’s a lucky man. He paid for your uni, too, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” said Jon. “He thought I’d do well in physics.” He gave a little chuckle of his own.

Sylvester, Tom, and Will made their way out the door, giving sly winks as Chris offered to stay behind a bit longer and finish cleaning up. Jon stashed half a pizza in the fridge while she set the bottles by the trash. He ducked into the bathroom himself, and when he came back she was crouched in front of the model again. She glanced up at him, standing with the easy smile on his face.

“Would you like to hold it?”

“Are you sure?”

“You won’t hurt it. It’s a bit more solid than it looks.”

She flinched for a moment as the latticework sparked in her hands. It had a good weight. It felt solid. Real. She tilted it in her hands, holding it like an oversized eggshell, and examined the small time machine from new angles. “Jon.”

“Yeah?”

“Why didn’t you show us this?” She’d turned it enough to see the baseplate, and all the engraving there.

J.M.W.

MDCCCXCV

She met his eyes. “Aren’t these your initials?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d you hide them?”

“Like all this wasn’t hard enough to believe?”

“So you made this thing yourself. It’s just a joke?”

Jon smiled. It was a bright, Christmas morning smile. “It’s not a joke.” He took the apparatus from her, wrapped it back in its black cloth, and set it down in the drawer. “Getting late, and tomorrow’s a big day. Lots to do.”

She tried, as she often did, to tug at the buttons of his shirt. “I could make sure you get to bed.”

He stopped her hands, as he often did, and gave her forehead a kiss.

“Aren’t American college boys supposed to be completely sex-crazed? You’re setting a horrible example for your countrymen.”

“Out!”

She gave a loud, dramatic sigh and marched to the door. Jon opened it for her and she paused to look at the photo.

“You know, I always thought you looked a lot like him.”

“Yeah,” said Jon. “I do, don’t I?”

Love and Glass

by Michael Scott Bricker

The creature held The Time Traveler’s lungs as the incisions healed beneath the touch of the thing’s organic machines. Like this being, the Morlocks had been children of technology, but they had been fumbling, unsophisticated monsters, so unlike the graceful soul who shared his company at the end of the world. Curiosity had driven The Time Traveler forward, beyond England and the old wars, beyond the Morlocks and his dear, sweet Weena, beyond that desolate beach with its scuttling crabs, and he found himself here, teetering at the edge of human existence under a dying umber sun. It had been foolish to come so far, but his successes had coloured his judgment, such that he had never considered that the machine might cease to function within the confines of some distant future. This business of traveling within the fourth dimension had gifted The Time Traveler with a godlike power, but with it came the ease associated with omnipotence. In Weena’s world, his intelligence had been supreme. Now, in this alien land of ice and desolation, he was a prisoner, and his time machine lay frozen in the sand, cold and dead as the Earth itself.

He had watched from his machine as the days grew longer, and as the rotation of the planet slowed, complex life vanished in favour of that which suited a dying world. Those monstrous crabs had ruled the beach during the twilight years of Earth, when the fat and feeble sun crept across the sky in century-long arcs, but life feeds upon life, and when that sun could no longer support most of the lingering vegetation, the crabs succumbed, leaving only the dull lichen that clung to rocks along the seashore. Those rocks had grown smooth and mirrored from eons of pounding surf, but eventually even the sea lay still, disturbed only by a rare breeze; the final breaths of Earth against its ice-caked surface. It had snowed here before The Time Traveler moved on for the last time, and those delicate flakes had reminded him of home, and of how, so long before, this dim, dying land, had been the realm of Queen Victoria.

Without widespread vegetation, the oxygen started to go, yet The Time Traveler moved forward again, gasping for air as pinpoint stars blossomed through the eternal twilight above. Even as he adjusted the levers of the time machine, frantically attempting to reverse his journey as his breaths grew dangerously short, he admired the beach, and how a group of ice crystals had grown into towers and arches, like a city of glass; empty, silent, and alone. The Time Traveler wondered if he had lost his reason, but when the machine began to fail, all his thoughts were upon his beautiful monstrosity of glass and steel. The machine had become his child, and although he loathed technology, he realized that he was a product of the machine as surely as the machine had been a product of his own mind. The Morlocks were the offspring of the science harnessed here, by the man who might conceivably have fathered them all.

The Time Traveler climbed from the machine as it took its place in the dying Earth, and he kissed its cold surface, then said goodbye to the friend that had sealed his fate. He first saw the creature, then, scurrying along the beach with insect-like precision, and against the endless dusk, the thing glowed with a weird internal energy. Everything about the creature looked exaggerated, from its long triple jointed limbs to its colourless saucer eyes to the nose that dominated its placid face. It stopped, and they shared a moment of mutual wonderment. The Time Traveler’s memories grew fuzzy after that. There had been the electric touch of its spidery fingers, the cool injections, and those tiny machines, crawling over his body like a cloud of miniature crabs. He knew that his lungs would be insufficient in such a world, and just as he was pondering his death by suffocation, or by the hands of that improbable creature, he watched, numb and motionless, as his glistening lungs were pulled from the cavern of his chest. There had been no blood spilled, no pain; only vague nightmares come alive. Something warm and alive took the place of his lungs, and it crawled within him and nested at the base of his throat, where it offered him life in exchange for the shelter of his ruined body.

He named the creature “George” in honor of the old English kings, and like those men of the primitive world, he reigned supreme, like a god who embodied all living things. When he straightened those jointed limbs, George stood a full three meters tall and resembled a shimmering willow tree. That inner light of his had been more than the glow of life, The Time Traveler learned, and after those tiny mechanical crabs had coated his body with a new rubbery layer of skin, he glowed as well. That new flesh kept him warm even in a world that had been forsaken by an aged sun, and as the Earth plunged into a deeper slumber, the two of them glowed more brightly, and they shared not only a physical warmth, but a warmth of understanding.

The Time Traveler thought of himself as a pet, at first. George had kept him alive, he had no doubt of that, and the creature that had terrified him became his salvation. The yellow pills he swallowed kept him strong and freed him from hunger, and George had fashioned a cave of stone and ice for them with a machine that apparently reorganized matter with sound. Through all this, they communicated with actions rather than words, and The Time Traveler wondered whether George could speak at all, and if there were more of its kind. If this world had been the creature’s kingdom, then his was an empty reign, and perhaps, The Time Traveler imagined, George had been the last intelligent being on Earth until the time machine had provided him with an ancient ancestor. As for The Time Traveler’s own intelligence, he felt humbled by the miracles of George’s science, such that his machine, though dead and powerless, was the only thing that prevented him from feeling, at best, like a glorified ape.

The Eloi and the Morlocks had been products of distant centuries, though in most ways, even the English, with all their arrogance and murderous imperialism, had been more advanced. Eventually, The Time Traveler imagined that the species had dwindled with its ebbing intellectual abilities, leaving only those monstrous crabs on the beach. The Earth had been dying since Weena’s time, and George, being the magnificent creature that it was, seemed like an outsider in this place. The Time Traveler tried to explain his machine to George, and although his language was lost on the creature, his love came across, and George wept, bleeding mercuric tears from the bowls of its eyes. This was a creature of heart as well as intelligence, and when The Time Traveler asked him whether he was the last of his kind, George touched his shoulder, and within that touch passed understanding.

They were two of a kind.

The true meaning of George’s communication lay encased in ice, no more than one hundred meters from where the time machine had died. Those castles of ice along the beach had apparently grown naturally, but George climbed inside, and his lofty frame was dwarfed by spectacular crystal spires. The creature caressed those crystalline structures as The Time Traveler had caressed his machine, and then they shared the warmth of that castle so that the Englishman would know, at last, what George was. This was no structure of ice, but of a soft, cool glass, and it had carried George here, to the end of the Earth.

Although George had originated from an era far in advance of the old warring Earth, the creature had been unable to repair his machine, because the death of the planet signaled the death of machines as well. It had something to do with shifting magnetic fields, George explained through the touch of flesh and glass, and even in one so advanced as this creature, curiosity had been his undoing. They were, indeed, two of a kind, though The Time Traveler still felt the sting of his own inferiority, particularly in the size and depth of his own heart.

Their world had consisted of the two of them, but after a new machine sputtered and melted into the frozen sand, George had a fresh life to save, and the Englishman helped as much as he could, given his knowledge of Nineteenth Century medicine. The stranger looked more conventional to The Time Traveler than George had, and, in fact, it resembled a Morlock. Its machine looked uncomfortably like his own, and The Time Traveler wondered what the Morlocks might have learned while they had held his invention within the white sphinx.

They pulled the Morlock from its machine, and it struggled as The Time Traveler had, but then George put the tiny crabs to work, and before long the creature had a new pair of lungs. There was something wrong behind its yellow eyes, and the creature gasped and tore at its chest, but before George could make things right, the Morlock convulsed, then stopped moving. They tried to get its heart pumping again, and even made use of The Time Traveler’s archaic notions of medicine, but in the end the Morlock suffered the same fate as his machine. Earlier in his journey, The Time Traveler might have killed such a creature with little remorse, but George had taught him something of the value of life, and so they burned a hole in the sand for their new companion.

The Time Traveler knew that George had done what he could for the Morlock, and that sometimes even the efforts of such an advanced being could prove inadequate. The creature was only human, after all, a fact that aggravated even The Time Traveler, at first, despite his deep respect for the theories of Darwin. The Morlocks had adapted to a subterranean existence, just as George’s people had adapted to a future Earth. A renaissance of thought had flowered after the docile Eloi had fashioned their intellectual wasteland, and The Time Traveler could imagine George’s kind building upon the ruins of those who had come before, burying England and Eloi alike beneath a new technology that operated hand in hand with love.

They said their good-byes to the creature who they never knew, and then they moved on, stopping to watch the horizon.

The sun was growing larger.

Even the lichen that had clung to the rocks before it, too, had died, had carried the scent of living things, but here, there was nothing but the scent of The Time Traveler himself, and of George, a creature who kept himself clean with the aid of small metallic box. This was just another facet of the creature’s behavior that assured The Time Traveler’s feelings of inferiority. He was bound to the old ways of doing things, but eventually he relented to the use of George’s device, and learned that the metallic box was not only an efficient tool, but pleasurable as well. As for more private matters, The Time Traveler continued to perform in the traditional manner, and he would adjourn to a secluded area of the beach when nature called.

Life might have gone on like this for some time had it not been for the arrival of other time travelers. It seemed that the closer that they drew to the death of the Earth, the more often that new explorers would arrive. George and the Englishmen would wait on the beach, and in the distance there might be a flash or a puff of smoke, followed by devices that, at times, could scarcely be recognized as time machines at all. There were castles of glass and metallic cubes, as well as ridiculous spidery contraptions and organic machines that gasped for a final breath just as their masters had done upon arriving in this land of shattered dreams. George was able to save some of The Time Travelers, but others resisted his administrations as madness overtook them, then they escaped across the surface of the sea, only to be swallowed as the ice gave way. Their forms varied just as their machines had, and the Englishman found it remarkable how the human race would evolve through the Eons. He doubted that even Darwin himself could have imagined such fanciful creatures, and the beach became a bestiary of humankind.

This once desolate world grew populated not only with the creatures who George had saved, but with many who survived without his help. It seemed that the Englishman was, by far, the most primitive human of the dying Earth, and despite the realization that he had invented time travel prior to these other creatures, he realized that he would never survive without George’s help. This fact also set him apart from the other creatures, as those who had survived initially, with or without George, lived independently. Many of them were occupied with their machines, but their efforts to get them operational accomplished nothing. The Englishmen could read fear and frustration upon their faces, and a few of the creatures died of exposure. George would peel their frozen bodies from their machines then bury them beneath the ice. This world became a cemetery world, and George and the Englishman were the final pallbearers for the glories of humankind.

The Time Traveler thought it strange that these beasts of future Earth were not more like George. While generosity was a common trait, selfishness was more universal when matters of life and death were involved. It was this that made these creatures human, for better or worse, and George and the Englishman found themselves alone despite the influx of new arrivals. While The Time Traveler, being of primitive stock, needed George to survive, the others had their own methods of providing themselves with food, clothing, and shelter. At times, their methods seemed cryptic, or worse, barbaric. This became particularly apparent upon the arrival of a creature that The Time Traveler would later call the “Queen of Hearts.”

While the Englishman had read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he had not truly come to appreciate the author’s imagination until his final journey had brought him here. This was a world that might have sprung from the pages of a children’s book, albeit a nightmarish one, or perhaps more appropriately, from the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. Before the others had arrived, The Time Traveler had begun to find a certain odd beauty within the desolation, but later, as the beach filled with all manner of fantastic creatures, he was reminded of the bustling streets of London, and of what he had once thought of as the “modern world.” It had been a city of crimes and cruelties, and he had hoped to escape into better times, only to find Morlocks, or worse, a creature who literally stole human hearts.

The Queen of Hearts was no Morlock, but a survivor that apparently cannibalized organs in order to keep itself alive. It bore no resemblance to any of Lewis Carroll’s characters beyond its odd appearance, and even that surpassed the most perverse fancies of any author. The Queen had great, crystal wings that hung motionless from its scaly back, and sharp claws like nutcrackers. Its skin appeared to be transparent, and within its massive chest all those stolen organs could be seen, pumping and quivering and digesting the bones of those who had gotten in its way. The Englishman had witnessed those executions, and while the primitive urge to fight boiled within The Time Traveler, George told him in so many ways that he needed to be strong, and that there were other arts to master than those of hostility.

The attacks continued, and the new inhabitants of Earth fell victim, in one way or another, to the Queen. In its own technologically barbaric manner, this monster was trying to survive, and The Time Traveler imagined a future populated with such creatures, when morality would be set aside to make way for matters of survival. The others did fight back as the Queen added their mass to its own, but aside from a few minor victories, the Earth, ever hopeless, became more so for those who struggled for a new glimpse of the old world. It was entirely possible that the Queen was best suited for life here, and the Englishman imagined that despite the battles and brutalities of his own time, there would be no colder land than that which they inhabited, here, under that ailing sun.

When George lost his own battle to the monster, the Englishman was again reminded of his own primitive nature. The Queen worked quickly, and in an instant, the thing severed one of George’s legs below the knee, then immediately used the amputated portion to extend one of its own freakish limbs. The Queen then cauterized the wound, and left George crippled, but alive. This was how it did things. The Queen relied utterly upon weapons of technology to perform its duties, and so the beach became littered with writhing creatures, helpless and half alive, as if the monster was building a farm from which it could harvest those unfortunate souls. It seemed to prefer maiming to murder, although many had died while attempting to preserve the integrity of their own bodies.

The technology of death worked both ways, and the other time travelers had used it, with little avail, to fend off the attacks of the Queen. At any given time, there might have been a flash of blue light, or a stream of liquid ice, but the monster was seldom slowed by the discharge of defensive weapons, and in the end, the thing would grow with the fruits of its victory. The Englishman had no such technological weapons to rely upon, nor had George, but The Time Traveler had been a child of the Nineteenth Century, and as such, he knew something of self-defense. His anger had been nurtured by a world obsessed with war, and although he prided himself on being a man of peace, he proved to be no more civilized than those he loathed. The Time Traveler’s weapons were simple ones, just as those of prehistoric man had been, and he found himself tearing rocks from the ice, then flinging them at the Queen. Blood stained the ice, and to The Time Traveler’s amazement, he learned that it had not been his own, nor that of George. The Englishman had wounded the creature, and had done so without the aid of the new technology.

Some of the other time travelers had witnessed the activities of the Englishman, and before long, it became evident that he had seeded this land with a fresh mode of destruction. Until then, those creatures on the beach had worked independently, each concentrating almost entirely upon the unattainable dream of escaping backwards through time, but the Englishman’s example had left them with a new goal, and with a very old manner in which it might be attained. They huddled together, communicating in murmurs and screams and the touch of odd chemicals, and then they overwhelmed the Queen with stones and their naked fists, but most of all with anger.

The Queen of Hearts stained the ice, then joined the ghosts of its people. George, being a creature of limitless love, had pulled himself along the surface, but by the time he reached the Queen, the work of the others had been completed. The Englishman knew what to do next, George had taught him well, and together they laid the Queen to rest within that cold necropolis. As for the remaining time travelers, those who were healthy enough went back to their dead machines, and those who were sick or maimed waited for the end to come, until, one by one, they permitted George to help.

His efforts rarely succeeded, and so the beach became more dead than alive.

Inhumanity is what had made these creatures human. The future would be peopled by Morlocks, each bound to its machine, each with a soul of steel and ice. Perhaps the Earth would be better off without the complications of love or anger, but then, that had been the world of the Eloi. There had been no easy answers for the human race, but at that time, it hardly mattered.

They sat on the beach, taking stock of George’s remaining food supply. Time travelers continued to arrive, now and then, but more often than not, the beach began to empty. Some creatures moved on, giving up hope that their useless machines would run again, some died of starvation or exposure, and a few had ended their own lives, opting not to witness what the future would bring. As for the Englishman, he learned to care for George as the creature had cared for him, and he continued to learn even as the world ran down.

Six food pills remained, more than enough for the two of them, because the sun had just risen over the ancient world, and the Earth rained with melting ice.

Perpetual Motion Blues

by Harper Hull

The Last Trip, Day 2

The taller old man in the group opened his backpack, pulled out a ragged,
yellow rain slicker and quickly pulled it over his arms, up onto his
shoulders. Behind him, his three equally elderly comrades followed suit and wriggled their weary bodies into their own waterproof clothing of different fabrics and colors.

“I hope Howard found new coats this time,” said one of the women, pulling her hood over her yellow-grey hair and tightening the cords below her neck.

“He’ll never find new coats, Jenna! Surely you realize this by now.” The yellow-clad man snorted, throwing a withering look back across his shoulder towards his elderly wife. “Like he’ll never find that part.”

The second woman in the group shook her head slowly and slipped her thin arm through that of the man beside her. He was leaning heavily on a thick, slightly curved stick of weathered wood. He was breathing raggedly and every step seemed to cause a grimace across his leathery, sun-beaten face. He stopped a moment and stared into the sunny blue skies above and beyond, the woman beside him smiling at him in a mournful way and rubbing his elbow with bony fingers.

“This is our last time, Eric.” She projected her voice to reach the man in yellow.

“You always say that,” said Eric, turning around to face her. “It’s never the last time. You’ll travel again. Both of you! If he makes it, that is.” Eric waggled a derisive finger at the wheezing man.

A short way off along the dusty road where the sun-scorched hills dipped to meet a narrow, dirty river a baton of lightning arrowed from the sky; a solitary black cloud was rumbling over the near horizon, a dismal blot in a canvas of blue.

“Why, it looks like a flash storm! How unexpected!” Eric said in a sarcastic tone, rolling his eyes.

The rain began to fall, heavily. The four elderly people slowly made their way along the road that was becoming slick and muddy beneath their feet. No one spoke as they reached the low-humped hills, followed the trail across them, and stopped on a slope overlooking the splashing river. On the near bank lay an upturned wooden row-boat. One edge sat off the wet dirt upon a small rock, and there were two oars lying on the ground beside it.

“Whose turn is it? Does anyone even care?” asked the sick old man, whose name was Jason. “You should do it, Eric, we’re all tired and it is for your benefit.”

“Let’s just go another way this time!” said the woman arm-in-arm with Jason, “if it doesn’t work out and we don’t get there, well, I don’t think I – we – really care anymore.”

Beside her Jason sighed and nodded his head. “I’m with Molly. I’ll happily risk it all ending in a week at the chance of a few extra days that are just different. This isn’t living anymore, is it? Was it ever?”

“Shut it, you two!” shouted Eric, “I’m sick to death of this. Go, if you want, I don’t care. Enjoy the light show. We’re going on as usual. Wait here, Jenna.”

Eric strode over-confidently down the path to the riverside, barely keeping his balance on the slick ground as the rain pelted off his coat. As he approached the upturned boat he slipped his backpack off and pulled a large knife from a side pouch. Grunting, he bent down and grabbed one of the wet oars from the ground and thwacked it against the side of the boat. A brown-and-yellow diamond-striped snake came wriggling quickly from beneath the boat, skirting the small rock. Eric leaned forward and chopped down with his knife, decapitating the snake in one well-practiced swipe.

“Us one thousand, five hundred and sixty, snake one!” said Eric loudly, with little joy in his voice, gesturing to Jenna at the top of the slope to come join him.

The First Trip, Day 1

Molly shouted to Jason as she twisted a key uselessly in the car ignition.

“Completely dead! Not a thing. You get anything else on the TV?”

Jason ran back inside the cabin before reappearing a moment later, shaking his head.

“Nothing, it’s kaput too! Everything electrical has died.”

Molly rushed back to the cabin, finding herself glancing up at the sky as she did, and pulled Jason inside with her. In the main, spacious room Eric and Jenna were fiddling with the dead television and a small, silent weather radio.

“Okay, kid, let’s think it through here. This is crazy,” said Molly, pulling her loosened red hair away from her face with both hands. “They said we had one week. They said there are transports leaving Centralia up to and including the seventh day. They expected all communications to be lost quickly – and they were right. They didn’t mention everything with electrical power going down.”

“This is freaking insane,” yelled Eric, punching the top of the television, “we get an emergency broadcast out of nowhere telling us we all die in a week and we’re supposed to just accept it as fact? I want some goddamn proof!”

“Look around!” shouted Jenna. “Nothing works! You think a power outage took out everything with batteries, and the car?” She dropped her face into her hands and became silent.

A huge boom rocked the cabin, sending plates and cups falling from shelves in the kitchen and smashing on the floor. Jason ran outside and headed towards the back of the cabin where he thought the explosion had come from. Looking out across the forest he saw a thick chimney of black smoke trailing up into the grey sky. Thinking fast, he took off running towards the tree line. Behind him, the others watched from a window, faces ashen. Eric slipped an arm around his wife and pulled her close. Molly crossed herself as she watched her husband disappear amongst the trees.

Forty minutes later Jason returned, dirty and out of breath. The others saw him coming and met him at the door.

“Start packing,” he said, huffing. “That was a commercial passenger ‘plane. No survivors.”

“Who is doing this?” asked Jenna. “Who is trying to kill us?”

“It doesn’t really matter, does it? We have one week to get to Centralia, of all places, without any transport. Let’s get some shit together, fast, and head out.” Jason moved towards the bedrooms to collect backpacks.

Within the hour the four were on their way and heading in a direction away from the crashed airplane, much to the relief of Jenna. Each wore the backpacks they had brought along for the weekend in the cabin, stuffed full of processed food, water and a minimum of extra clothing.

“Look on the bright side,” said Eric, his dark hair blowing in the breeze as he looked back and saw the cabin fading in the distance behind them. “We’re not in a city. Imagine the freaking chaos there right now, all those people trying to get out on foot. They’re probably killing each other. If I’m going to go down, I’m glad it’s with you guys.”

The Last Trip, Day 4

Molly approached a green SUV on the side of the highway and opened the rear doors, pulling them wide before reaching inside and unstrapping a wheelchair that lay folded in the cargo hold. Without a moment of hesitation or thought, she pulled and clicked the chair into place and wheeled it to the center of the highway where her three friends waited. Jason was being held up by Eric and Jenna, his face towards the ground.

“OK honey, sit down. It’s relaxing time again.” Molly looked at Eric with pleading eyes and the old man sighed.

“I’ll push you first, buddy. The girls can do the goody run.”

Molly and Jenna started walking briskly along the vehicle-strewn highway. They stopped occasionally and opened a door on a particular car or truck. They clambered inside and came out with some kind of swag, be it half a bottle of juice, an unopened packet of cookies or a bag of deli chips. The women each covered one side of the highway, and never came out of a vehicle empty-handed. Every treasure-point was deeply ingrained in their minds, a map of refreshments and snacks plotted out over many runs. As Eric slowly pushed Jason along the asphalt towards the women, Jenna called back to him.

“Do you want the boots from the white Jeep?”

“Not this time, these are still good.”

Jenna shrugged and moved on to a metallic-blue Lexus, pulling a straw hat from the passenger side. She put it on, struck a silly pose and smiled back at the men that trailed behind.

“Gotta have my lucky hat!”

Eric leaned down and whispered into Jason’s ear. “That freaking thing’ll never work,” he said.

Jason laughed, coughed, and spat onto the ground. Eric pushed forward, wondering if they could find a wheelbarrow or something before they reached the wheelchair next time. It was getting harder and harder to get Jason to that point; this time had about killed them all. He made a mental note to ask Howard to find something. It was a miracle that they had managed to carry him all that way on the first trip.

He watched his wife skip between the abandoned cars in her silly hat that she would later throw off a bridge with a silent wish and wondered how she stayed cheerful. They’d never had the chance to do all those things they’d planned when they first married. No trip to Venice. No renovating an old house. No children. They’d honestly had nothing, for 30 years, except each other. Eric knew that Jenna was the only reason he did this. In this world, with no hope and no deviation, she was the only thing on the entire doomed planet that stopped him from climbing to the highest point he could find and throwing himself off with one final middle-fingered salute to the heavens. At least they had been able to grow old together; noone could take that away from them.

The ransacking of abandoned vehicles came to an end as they reached what they had dubbed Death Mile. A huge pile-up of traffic, mostly vehicles containing corpses of fractured and burned people spread ahead of them as far as they could see. No one looked into the vehicles if they could help it, picking their way around the wreckage with eyes to the ground. The first time had scarred them all for life.

The First Trip, Day 2

“How on earth can it be raining?” laughed Jason, pulling his backpack up over his head as a hard rain began to fall from a rogue storm cloud in the otherwise clear blue sky.

Jenna squealed and fell to her knees, rummaging in her own backpack for some kind of protective wear. She pulled out a battered leather jacket and slipped it on as fast as she could, turning up the stiff collar around her neck and tucking her blonde ponytail inside it. Eric pulled out a baseball cap, which he immediately gave to Jenna. Molly had nothing but underwear, socks and t-shirts in her backpack so did as Jason had done, balancing her backpack on her head with both hands.

“This better pass quickly!” she shouted above the din of the rain, scowling from beneath her pack. “I’m not wearing panties on my head!”

Up ahead of them the road curved to the right but a trail led up into the hills. Eric dropped his pack, seemingly oblivious to the downpour, and ran ahead, shouting back that he was going to check the trail and see if they could save some time.

Within five minutes he came splashing back towards them giving a double thumbs-up as he ran. When he reached the miserably wet threesome sheltering beneath their luggage he grabbed his own backpack and told them to come on, there was a small river just ahead and a handy-dandy boat waiting for them. He didn’t seem bothered by the storm at all.

“We can shelter under the boat until the rain stops!” he said, grinning. “You can thank me later!” He jogged back towards the hills, the others following behind at a slower trot.

Jason and the girls reached the peak of the hill and looked down on the sad, dirty river below. It didn’t look like it would be a difficult crossing at all. Eric was already crouched by an upturned row-boat on the bank and waved as he saw the others appear. He reached both hands under the boats lip that sat up on a small rock then fell back onto his butt with a curse. He scrambled backwards, away from the boat and examined his right wrist, still cursing. The others rushed down the hill towards him, unsure what had happened.

“Stay away from the boat!” shouted Eric, “I just got bit.”

Eric became sick that night on the other side of the river; Jason and Jenna tended to him the best they could with limited provisions, the sounds of the river water still audible behind them. The three friends continued their journey in the darkness, half carrying, half dragging a feverish, barely-conscious Eric on a shoddily-made sling constructed from back-pack frames and clothing, Jason doing the bulk of the work. They needed to get to Centralia fast and find medical help, before he died. There was no time to rest and they were moving at a snail’s pace. Thank God, they were relatively young and strong.

The Last Trip, Day 6

The four friends moved through the dead city at a decent clip, their final destination just a few blocks away now. Jenna pushed Jason along the sidewalk as Eric sauntered ahead and shooed away dogs that were gnawing on bodies in the street, waving Jason’s stick at them. Even after all this time, even with every sight around every corner permanently stamped into their minds in ridiculous detail, entering the city produced a feeling that surpassed creepiness. Just one time, thought Jenna, something unexpected is going to happen. Someone new is going to appear, leaning on a wall or out of a window. Maybe they’d hear a voice, or a piece of music, or a bird.

After just a few minutes they arrived at a squat, windowless building with a small metal door set centrally along the front wall.

“Where is he?” yelled Eric, banging on the metal. “No balloons and streamers this time? I am starving for some beef stew!”

“Just use the key,” said Molly. “He’s probably cooking.”

Eric pulled a small brass key on a big steel ring from his pants pocket and slid aside a metal disc on the door, revealing a keyhole. With a twist and a jiggle the door clicked open and the four moved inside, pulling the wheelchair over the rubber threshold then closing the door behind them.

They moved down a narrow, featureless hallway and emerged into a wide, white-walled room with four camp beds draped in blankets set up along the right side. In the center of the room, a rectangular, plastic table dominated the eye surrounded by five chairs. Eric and Jenna moved Jason onto one of the beds and lay him down with a blanket pulled up to his neck. Molly headed across the room and through a door on the opposite side, calling out as she went.

“Howard? It’s us, on time as usual. Howard, you back here?”

Jenna folded back the blanket that covered Jason and removed his boots. He was sleeping already, his face expressionless and pale. Molly re-appeared across the room, her face tight, and beckoned to Eric. He followed her, past a tiny kitchen which was quiet and clean. Past a collection of closed white doors and then a big red door marked NO ENTRY in bold black letters. At the end of the corridor, down a passage to the right, was a small room, door wide open, with a small sink and a single bed in it. On the bed lay the body of an elderly man dressed in a dark suit and wearing a green cook’s apron, his grey beard and moustache glaring white beneath the harsh ceiling light. His face was sunken, indicating he’d been dead a little while. On his chest his hands were clasped, a pair of spectacles clenched between his rigid fingers.

“Oh, Howard,” said Eric, genuine sadness in his voice. “What the Hell will we do now?”

Next to him, Molly started to cry. He put his arm around her and realized that this was it. He was surprised at how much relief he felt.

The First Trip, Day 6

The city seemed deserted. Beyond that, it seemed dead. No lights shone in windows, no cross-walk signs flashed little green men. There were signs everywhere of massive looting. Some bodies lay in the streets, chewed on by stray dogs and cats. The four travelers made their way cautiously through the centre of Centralia looking for any sign of the great evacuation that was supposed to be happening tomorrow. They had expected crowds of people, noise and fear and excitement, but there was nothing. Eric was doing better but was still extremely weak and in dire need of medical attention. Jason suggested they make straight for the hospital. Deserted or not, they’d get Eric some medicine. They were just a couple of blocks away when they saw a bespectacled, bearded man in a dark suit standing outside a low building with no windows in it. As they approached, Eric stumbling along, holding onto the shoulders of his friend. The bearded man ran towards them with a look of genuine concern on his face. He helped them get Eric inside the windowless building, promising he had a full medical lab inside, and the travelers believed him; there was sincerity in his voice and a kindly tilt to his face.

Twenty minutes later, inside the building, Eric was in an actual med-lab being tended to by the bearded man, Jason assisting him with a slightly wary eye. He had introduced himself as Doctor Howard Rorke. The two girls sat at a table in the main room drinking freshly brewed coffee and soaking their ragged feet in tubs of hot, balmed water. It had taken them a while, overloaded with simple comforts, to realize that this was the first place they had seen in a week that actually had power.

Jason returned to the main room with Howard, letting the girls know that Eric was sleeping and would be just fine.

“Thank you, Howard, truly!” said Molly. “But can I ask you a question? What happened? Where is everybody? Do you know what’s going on?”

Howard sat down at the table and beckoned Jason to join him.

“It’s been a crazy week,” Howard answered. “And I know you’ve come a long, hard way to get here. Let me try and explain everything as quickly as I can. First, the evacuations ended on Tuesday, four days early.”

Everyone else around the table groaned.

“I know, I know. There was trouble with the crowds, the whole city was a mess and they decided to launch all the ships early in case the people got to and damaged them. Those that didn’t get on heard a rumor about another evac happening down in Clarksville and everyone headed that way. It’s a lie, though; there are no more evacs anywhere.”

“How do you know?” asked Jenna. “Do you work for the Government? And if so, why didn’t you get out when you could? And how do you have power?”

“More questions, Jenna,” said Eric sarcastically. “That wasn’t nearly enough in one go.”

“No no, ask away, all of you. Yes, I work for a particular government agency. I wasn’t here on evac day; I just got back from a trip the night after. This building is one of very few in the country that still has power. It’s run from a quite massive self-sufficient generator in the back, and all the equipment in here survived that EMP blast or whatever it was last week because this entire building is deliberately insulated and protected against such possibilities.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Jason, glumly. “Wait around and watch the world end, us with it?”

“We could,” said Howard, smiling. “Or we could carry on living. Come, follow me!”

Confused and a little wary, the two girls quickly dried their feet and, along with Jason, followed Howard down the corridor past all the white doors to a red door with a large NO ENTRY sign on it. Howard typed a code into a keypad and opened the door, leading the others into a cool, dimly lit room. There was a large control console immediately ahead of them, then a transparent wall with a hatch in it, and on the other side a shiny, white room that appeared to be completely empty.

“This is our life-saver!” Howard proclaimed with a grin, raising his arms into the air.

“Welcome to Project Boomerang!”

For the next couple of hours Howard explained his work. Project Boomerang was a time travel experiment, headed by Howard, which had achieved some great success. They had managed to travel only backwards in time and the traveling worked on a pre-existing displacement principle. What this meant, Howard explained, was that the traveler could only jump to a time and place where they had previously existed. The traveling version of the person would take the place in the world of the old version, with all the knowledge they had gained since that time kept intact. That is, until the boomerang effect kicked in and the traveler was pulled back to the present, whereupon the original version of the person would resume back in the past.

Jason put forward the opinion that this seemed a quite pointless exercise. Howard, a little insulted, responded that it was the first step towards full time travel, and a massive achievement. He also pointed out that the boomerang effect could be, effectively, switched off and travelers could remain in the past reliving their lives any way they wanted to. This, he said, is where their salvation lay.

At this point Eric appeared, groggy but well, and the group spent a while getting him up to speed on what had happened.

“Tomorrow,” Eric said, “our world dies, for how long we don’t know. It may become hospitable again, it may not. We failed to make it onto the ark ships, so what do we do?”

“Travel back to Tuesday and board the ships!” suggested Jenna.

“A good idea in principle, but impossible. Remember what I said about pre-existing displacement? You’d all get sent back to where you were on evac day – still far, far out of the city. It wouldn’t help you.” Howard straightened his tie and looked at the floor. “Also, there was a problem with the transporter last month that still hasn’t been repaired. It is set at a travel distance of one week, and when I checked the machine upon my return from a certain excursion a few weeks ago I discovered that the – in layman’s terms – the timer had blown.”

Eric, his head clearing and with some strength coming back into his body, caught Howard’s attention with a raised hand, as if he was back in school.

“So we can only go back one week, as it stands? Is it something you can fix quickly?”

Howard shook his head slowly. “I don’t have the very, very specific parts needed to fix the, er, the timer. If I had time to scour certain government and military properties around the city I could possibly find what I needed.”

“But you don’t have time. None of us do!” cried Molly, frustration showing in her face.

“I can give us time, though, if you four agree to it.” Howard smiled, looking each of them in the eye one by one. “I have a plan – and honestly, it’s about the only plan we have.”

With that, Howard led everyone back into the main living quarters and went off to the kitchen to cook a meal that, he promised, would not be their final one.

Over a wonderful hot dinner of beef stew, dumplings and corn bread, Howard laid out his vision to the group. The next morning he would use the Boomerang device to send them back in time the pre-determined and unchangeable distance of one week. They would be back in their rented cabin, the morning of the emergency broadcast, fully aware of what lay ahead and the journey they would need to undertake to reach Howard again. The Boomerang effect itself could still be turned off, so they wouldn’t have to worry about suddenly bouncing back to where they were now at some point. Howard would also send himself back that one week, and he promised he would not board the ark ships, as he could, but stay and try to help his new friends. In that week he would attempt to locate the parts he needed to fix the machine’s timing device. If he could fix the timer, he could keep working on the overall function of the traveling itself. They had been very close to being able to jump without relying on the pre-existing principle, which would mean not only further back in time, but also different locations not dependent on the traveler’s existing status at that point. With the machine operating properly and with these new tweaks to the science, all four of them could then jump back to the day the ships left and board them safely. He estimated six weeks of work at most.

Howard left the friends alone to discuss the idea and returned to the kitchen to wash dishes. After some heated discussion, the group finally, and somewhat inevitably, decided that it was their only viable chance at survival and another few weeks of trudging their way to Centralia wasn’t such a high price to pay for the chance at a full life.

“We’ll know what to expect from now on!” said Jason. “Eric won’t get bitten, we know which short-cuts work and which don’t, we know not to look into the crashed cars, and we have an absolute destination and plan now!”

“Also,” added Eric, “we’ll take some good supplies back with us. Rain gear, decent packed food, maybe a tent or sleeping bags if Howard has any around here somewhere. It’ll feel more like a camping trip…”

Molly nodded. “I don’t see we have a choice. Stay here tomorrow, and die, or try Howard’s plan and spend a few more weeks roughing it. Not even close really, is it?”

When Howard returned they told him their decision and he was delighted. He said that yes, they could take supplies, and he would furnish them with whatever rain-gear and camping equipment he could put his hands on before the next day. He also packed them a huge amount of food, split up into four separate containers. Eric and Jason helped him pull camp-beds from the vast supply room in the building and set them up against a wall in the living quarters with pillows and blankets. As everyone settled in for an attempt at a good night’s sleep, Eric took Howard to one side and quietly thanked him for his help, and for going through this with them instead of just leaving on the ships. Howard said it was the least he could do, as a decent human being, and told Eric to rest; he would wake them in the morning, early, with coffee and croissants, before sending them back.

As the four friends fell into a heavy sleep, Howard returned to the Boomerang Project room. Locking the door behind him, he sat at the console and brought the timer up on his display. It currently read Minus 24 hours; he manually changed it to Minus 7 days and locked in the setting.

“I could never leave you,” he whispered, looking into the stark, white room, “my whole life is here, in you. And now I have some good, new friends who will visit me every weekend for as long as I want them to.”

Rocking my Dreamboat

by Victorya

Jameson was pushing his mother in her rocking chair. He sang her favorite song, his tired voice caressing each word in a mixture of boredom and frustration.

“Tell me something about my father?” he asked.

“He was a bastard,” she replied, not even looking up from the television. In her hand was the remote, and on the screen were commercials. She always muted the commercials and had Jameson sing.

“But you named me after him,” he said.

“Before I realized he was a bastard,” she said. Then, “Hush now honey, COPS is back on.”

Jameson was twenty-six and lonely. He moved back in with his mother after her fall, which wasn’t really a fall, just a stumble while she was out grocery shopping. She leaned into a parked car when she felt her balance leaving and the alarm went off, causing her to jump and stumble into another car. From then on she lived with her son, claiming that since she took care of him for eighteen years, seventeen of those alone, the least he could do was take care of what was left of her life.

He was even lonelier now that Kathleen dumped him. She had just stood up during dinner and walked out. Three months of dating over with no explanation. He bought her roses daily, always commented on her Facebook wall, and called her twice a day. He even waited until she was ‘ready’ and respected her wishes to not spend the night at his house while his mother was in the next room, not that he could stay overnight at her place and leave his mother alone. He did everything right and here he was alone again.

Jameson went to work the next day and tried to forget about it. He pretended to look busy, which is easy with a computer and alcoholic boss, and then went home. Too upset to sleep, he crept into the attic and pulled a loose piece of wood out of the floor. There lay a Legoland Time Machine kit that he always imagined belonged to his father. There was no image on the box, just Think of the Time and Place, and Go! written in precise lettering across the side. Jameson finally had the courage to open it, and cursed the entire time he tried to put the pieces together. He was upset that, when he felt it was done, it was a handheld device and not some helicopter looking thing like he’d figured. He looked at the sole red logo and decided it was the on button. He thought about where he’d like to be, and pushed.

Kathleen’s mother was hobbling down the big cement steps of her apartment complex, just like Kathleen had described on that first night. A teen mother alone, living in a seedy tenement on the wrong side of town, going into labor while she tried to make her way down the stone stairs and into a car that took three tries to start. She stopped on the third step and looked at Jameson. She smiled when he came over, one hand holding the railing the other her stomach, the dress she wore stuck to her from sweat and the breaking of her water. Perhaps she thought he would help her when he reached out his hand, not pull her down the remaining stairs and then proceed to kick her in the stomach. Her screams were answered by windows slamming shut. Blood soaked her dress and puddled around her thighs. She lay on her side clutching her stomach, but her lithe hands were no match for Jameson’s ire.

Mari didn’t appreciate the flowers. She didn’t like the candy, or his calls. She didn’t like his romantic gesture of showing up outside her window and throwing stones at it in the wee hours of the night. They had only gone out for two weeks, but had been friends for longer. They had hung out in groups, sometimes after work with other colleagues, sometimes with Jameson’s friend Steve and Steve’s girlfriend Karen. But now she was saying words like ‘restraining order,’ like ‘scary’ and ‘frightening’ and ‘therapy’ and ‘suffocating.’ Jameson went straight home from work. His mother had made meatloaf and scalloped potatoes.

“What’s wrong sweetie?” she asked while the serving spoon squished into the casserole dish and slurped out a giant scoop of potatoes. They plopped on his dish, the oils pooling along the rim. “You look so sad.”

“Mari dumped me,” he said.

His mother sliced off a piece of meatloaf, the top shining from the baked-on ketchup. She placed it on his plate aside the potatoes.

“You know no girl is good enough for you,” she said. “Not my little boy. No, you’re mommy’s little boy and a very special one at that.”

Jameson winced at hearing her say this. She was old and crimping his style, but she was the only woman that had every truly loved him. No. No girl compared to her, and no girl would hurt him.

Jameson held the time device and pushed the red Lego. He had to be careful. Mari’s mother was married to a cop, and he had rushed her to the hospital the night of Mari’s birth. However, she shopped alone every Thursday after work. Jameson helped her carry the bags from the grocery store to the car. She thanked him and slipped him a dollar. Jameson leaned in and sniffed her. She smelled just like Mari. He smiled and nodded and later scoped out her house. She didn’t live in an apartment like Kathleen’s mother, but a real house with a chain link fence and a gate.

Jameson brought money back with him, making sure all bills and coins were dated from that time or before. He stayed in a hotel a few blocks away and followed her. Sometimes he sat in a nearby park to relax. Finally, he saw his moment and it was so much simpler than he had anticipated. He didn’t have to hit her with a car like he thought he might, merely let loose a puppy into the street, just quietly drop it from his rented car into the middle of an intersection. She swerved, other cars swerved, and while she didn’t die there was twisted metal and blood.

“How did my father woo you?” Jameson asked. He was rocking his mother and singing Someone’s Rocking My Dreamboat during the commercials of COPS.

“This again?” she sighed.

“I’m sorry mother,” he said.

“He read to me,” she replied. “Your father was always such a bastard later, but in the beginning, he read to me. He tried to love me, but didn’t know how. Not like you. You love your mommy, don’t you?”

Jameson pulled the blanket up to her neck. She held on to the remote and unmuted the television when the show came on. She giggled every time a policeman slammed someone into a car or sidewalk. This episode had her in hysterics. When the commercials came on again, she muted the channel and Jameson sang once more.

Jameson found a time he liked, five years before he caused the miscarriage of Mari. 1971. It was far enough back that the prices were lower than his time, but close enough that he could still convert his paycheck to dollars from that era or before with no problem. His money went farther there. He rented an apartment just a few blocks down from a park, the one where his mother and father would get engaged later that year. Theirs was a quick courtship.

“He was dashing,” his mother would say on occasion, running her arthritic fingers through Jameson’s hair. “And smart, like you. He used big words and I liked that. Made me feel smart.”

He still worked, still cared for his mother and listened to her stories and sang to her during the commercials.

Jameson liked the park near his new apartment. There was a fence of twisted black metal entwined in morning glory. Inside, it always seemed to be green or in bloom. The park wasn’t big, encompassing one small block amidst the apartment buildings that allowed only slivers of the sun to come through. However, at noon, when the sun was directly overhead, the flowers within the park practically glowed. Pink and yellow roses reflected the light and attracted bees and butterflies and ivy wound around the four park benches that lined the little walkway through the park.

He never thought of himself as a park-goer, but there he was, every Saturday afternoon after he brought mother home from physical therapy, every Sunday before he brought her to church, and every other moment he could slip away from work or mother.

One day she was there. Black hair cascading down her back, the wind blowing soft tendrils across her cheeks pink with the slight bite in the breeze. Winter was coming, its voice heard in the crackle of the leaves as they began to fall from the trees, in the crunch of frozen morning dew and the ice felt on the breeze.

Jameson didn’t mean to fall in love, but he thought it was the only word encompassing how he felt.

“I see you here a lot,” the woman said. He was reading the paper— history. “Mind if I sit here?” she asked, gesturing next to him. The morning air covered the blush that sprung to his cheeks. He looked over at her; she was dressed simply, in jeans and a corduroy jacket. In her hand, a book.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Beowulf,” she said. “Well, trying too. It’s not really a book I can understand, which is why I wanted to give it a try.”

“I like the quiet,” Jameson said. “It’s so quiet here.”

“Is the rest of your life loud?” she asked.

Jameson thought of his days, work where his boss yelled at him in a drunken stupor, home where he had to sing to his mother during commercials lest she get upset.

“My name is James,” he said. She sat down next to him and he turned to face her. She was sitting with one leg bent under her, the other swinging off the bench.

“Muriel,” she said, putting the book on her lap and holding out her hand.

“Mother, what would you think if I got a nurse to come in and look after you some days?” Jameson asked. He was rocking her during a commercial break. She was watching Jerry Springer.

“Oh sweetie, you do a good enough job. I don’t need anyone else,” she replied, her voice gurgling with phlegm from some unknown virus that had taken hold of her. She reached a hand up, the skin loose and spotted with age, and patted his hand.

“I was just thinking, it might be better for you. I can’t be home all the time. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

A spasm of coughs racked through her body. She stood up, her joints creaking more than the rocking chair.

“Now you know very well I can take care of myself,” she said, reaching for her cane. Jameson handed it to her. It was simple silver metal with rubber grips. “I don’t need you here. If you want to run off and be a man, sow some wild oats, then go do it. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You being like your father, running off on me?”

With his mother’s health worsening, she clung to her son while berating him for wanting to be free. The more she yelled, the more he clung to his Legos and fled into the past, to speak with Muriel on the park bench. She had already given up on Beowulf and moved to A Tale of Two Cities instead.

“I really like it,” she said.

“Why don’t you go to college?” he asked.

“Oh no,” she said, turning her head down. “That’s not going to happen. I am going to secretarial school though. We just can’t afford college. Not for me, not like this.”

Jameson found out that her parents had died in a car accident and she lived alone with her sister, Martha. Martha was older, had started school on scholarship but was now a legal secretary. Muriel had wanted to be a schoolteacher, but was now working on getting her secretarial skills in order to find a job.

“Did you go to college?” she asked, her brown eyes examining him.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m an accountant.”

Muriel took his hand. “That’s a good job,” she said. “A real good profession. Do you like to read?”

Jameson nodded and Muriel handed him the book, pointing to a passage. He read it to her and she leaned in against him, her warmth fighting off the encroaching winter.

Jameson figured out a schedule. He could stay for long stretches in the past and then go back to his own time just moments after he left. The trouble was, he was sick of his mother, he was sick of her ire now fully unleashed on him, how he was ungrateful for all she did for him. He was sick of his boss having him do all the work, while he took all the glory and bonuses. He began spending even more time in the past, taking Muriel out for walks, to shows, reading to her in the park.

It was Muriel who proposed. She asked that he make them legitimate. It was only after he said no that she confessed she missed her period.

“You seem so distant lately,” Jameson’s mother said. “Is everything okay?” They were eating Shepherd’s Pie.

“It’s nothing,” he said, moving mashed potatoes, browned with mutton, around his plate.

“A woman can tell when another woman is causing trouble, especially when that women is your mother,” she said.

“It’s just-”

“Do you love her?” his mother asked.

“I think so.” He said.

“If you’re not sure you don’t. You love me, right?”

“Of course!” he said, lifting his head. She shuffled over to him, put her hands on his shoulder.

“Of course you do. You’re a good boy. Some naughty girl just has her hooks in you, doesn’t she?”

When Jameson’s mother died, he decided to hide his grief in the past, with Muriel. He had enough in her will to buy the place he had always lived in, the family home. Jameson never married her, but they lived together for a while. When their son was born, she named him “Jameson,” the son of James. She got a job as a secretary at the firm where he was an accountant. He hoped he could have a future here, found an old box, and took apart the time machine, prying up a board in the attic to hide it.

Muriel made him dinner every night. She had lunch with him every day at work, and shooed away all other co-workers who tried to sit with them. She bought his clothes, starched his shirts, and watched him sleep. If he had to work late, she’d sit outside his office and pretend to be his secretary, smiling through the glass at him. She bought him gifts, planned special surprises, told him constantly how much she loved him. She begged Jameson to read to her, to rock her in her chair as she knit booties for baby Jameson. Finally he had enough. He said words like ‘suffocating’ and ‘needy.’ He said words like ‘crazy’ and ‘sociopath’ after she hit a woman that brought Jameson a late night memo at work, and he left. He left her, he left baby Jameson, he left the Legoland Time Machine, and walked away from it all.

Spree

by John Medaille

The math is impeccable and inexplicable. The numbers fit themselves precisely, row by row, with no remainders. The numbers know where they come from: some numerological breeding ground of infinitely complex forms, and know where they go: some incalculable afterlife. The math encompasses everything at once, accurately, down to the hundred-thousandth decimal place.

And the math enables The Time Traveler to build the Time Machine. Its construction is a simple affair and uses common household items. Vinegar and baking soda are both crucial components and they generate the catalytic energy necessary to open the Time Vortex, much in the same way that one can wire a lemon to a light bulb and cause a feeble glow. The Time Traveler connects this to a spindly web of coat hangers and aluminum foil, and hooks the whole contraption to a rewired Texas Instruments calculator as a control panel. When finished, the Time Machine only takes up a small corner of his garage.

The Time Traveler switches the Time Machine on and it makes a low, burbley hum, and after punching in various atomic weights, universal constants and certain angles of descent, The Time Traveler is able to see through the faintly orange mish-mash of the Time Window to all things future and past. He sees the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Niels Bohr’s dirty apartment.

The Time Traveler raises his hand and attempts to reach out through the distant orangenesses of the Veil of Time, but crackling discharges of electroshock prevent him and singe his hand, turning the fingernails a little brown. The Time Traveler takes some elementary readings and finds that time is a particle-wave and his hand cannot go through the Veil because it is asynchronous to the wave. But The Time Traveler knows that time is a function of speed and, theoretically, if something should be going fast enough to pass between the crests of the Time Wave, then that thing might penetrate the Borders of Time, and becomes a Traveler Through Time. With this in mind, The Time Traveler goes and buys an automatic baseball pitching machine.

Dragging the box in through the garage door, cutting the tape and shoveling through the burial mound of styrofoam nubbins, The Time Traveler realizes that the baseball pitcher is now the most technologically advanced piece of equipment in the laboratory, possibly including the Time Machine itself.

Plugging in the electronic pitcher, The Time Traveler attempts a series of experiments, shooting balls against the Time Vortex, but even at the pitchers maximum setting of 150 miles per hour, they fail to puncture the Time Wave and ricochet off, leaving only a smell of scorched stone and a pile of smoking baseballs. The Time Traveler tinkers with the pitcher, increasing the torque and velocity of its engine and by the little, sickly hours of the early morning he is finally able to successfully launch three Major League regulation baseballs into the late Mesozoic Era.

The Time Traveler discovers that 824 is the magic number, just above the sound barrier. Anything travelling at or in excess of 824 miles per hour is able to pass through the Veil of Time. So one might, in theory, travel through time if one could accelerate a projectile to the Time Barrier speed, one can pass that object through the Time Vortex and the projectile, in essence, becomes a Time Traveler.

Like a bullet, for instance.

A little man with a long leather coat and a perfectly rectangular mustache like a black dash beneath his nose is standing on an onion crate on a street corner of a city that is damp and European, smelling of coal smoke and wet iron. The man is yelling at a small congregation of street corner people; a butcher, a baker, a legless veteran blinded by chemicals who pushes himself around on a trolley with a stick. The little man contorts his face into many funny shapes: a death pang shape, a difficult orgasm face, a bowel movement face. He chops his hands into the air many times as he speaks.

The man is Hitler.

Fifty feet above Hitler and one hundred feet diagonal to him, a wobbly orange circle, about the size of a large pizza, dimensionalizes open. Hitler sees it for a second, then stammers in German. To him it looks like a weak, fetal sun, and seems to have a person somewhere in it, and then Hitler sees a flash, and then Hitler’s skull separates and divides and Hitler’s brain, the finger-sized shrapnel of it still carrying, for a millisecond, rushing electrical lightnings that are the thoughts of his thoughts, bounces on the cobblestone street and Hitler is dead and falls down.

It is the first time The Time Traveler has ever fired a gun.

Subtract one.

Add fifty five million.

Simple math.

The Time Traveler turns the Time Machine off with a quiet splat of diodes, and feels a light blue bruise on his shoulder where the butt of the sniper rifle smacked him. His garage has not changed in the least. There is still a pile of flaccid bicycle tires on the floor and many grease stains. Hanging above him there is still an automatic garage door opener that has not worked since 1988 and has become a small city of spiders. There are still cans of paint and varnish under his tool bench that still emit faint gamma rays of unfulfilled sadness.

The Time Traveler had partially expected the universe to implode when he killed Hitler, had, in fact, calculated that there was a 36.875% chance of that happening. That answers that. He records the finding in his notebook. “11:18 AM. No implosion.”

The Time Traveler finds the set of Encyclopedia Britannica in a box marked ‘Teddy’s Things’ in the back of the garage. They are the set he was given for his eighth birthday and he remembers unwrapping them and immediately looking up his favorite things in the world when he was precisely eight: Anklyosauruses and giant bats. Now the books are a little bloated with old mold and he goes to the volume marked G through K and tries to look up Hitler, and who is not there. Not even a wizened paragraph, no grainy photo of a scowling Austrian. No Hitler, Adolph. 1889-1928. Failed Artist and soapbox maniac, de-brained by an unidentified assailant one nasty and overcast morning. Nothing. The Time Traveler looks up Nazi and it doesn’t exist either; he can’t find it anywhere between narwhale and Neanderthal. He looks up swastika and it says An equilateral cross with arms bent at right angles comprising a symbol thought to have originated circa 2000 BC in proto-India, generally believed to be a good luck charm.

The Time Traveler is about to put the encyclopedias back into the box, slide the box into a crawlspace, take two antacids and go to bed when he decides to look up World War Two, just in case, and found that it was still there, forty-seven pages of it.

In 1945, Xavier Mobuto, an epileptic silver mine foreman, had risen from obscurity in the Congo, uniting Africa and chasing all European powers screaming off the continent and had then become the head of a cult with apocalyptic overtones, and embarked on a campaign of global domination, devastating southern Europe, pulverizing Persia, and even successfully invading and occupying Florida for a decade before the Allies: the U.S., U.S.S.R., Japan and Germany, finally vanquished Mobuto in 1955 after a long and bitter struggle. Mobuto was shot sixty-six times and every inch of Africa was burned down. Seventy-nine million people died.

Seventy-nine million from World War 2.2 minus fifty-five million from World War 2.1 is twenty-four million. An unacceptable remainder.

The Time Traveler realizes, of course, that time was not only a function of speed but of concurrent temporal stresses and personality and that they exert fully measurable tendrils of need and urge and that the diminishing of history in one Time Unfolding will be rectified by compensation in another.

This was correct. This was fine.

There would, there must, be a Time Eventuality where Hitler dies and was not replaced. There had to be an acceptable outlier on the probability curve.

The math told him so.

Luckily, the Time Traveler has accounted for this possibility, and is not so very tired, and has purchased an entire box of bullets.

The Time Window opens over a green bacterial jungle, there is a crack and the wasp whine of a speeding bullet, and a large man pushing a wheelbarrow full of stones crumbles into mud, made all of the sudden boneless by a distant god.

By 1948, the New Aztec Empire had subjugated the entire Western Hemisphere and the Pacific Rim. Human sacrifice returned to fashion. Emperor Teknozuma and his whole high command dined on human hearts and cognac in a photo from the Associated Press. The White House was demolished and a sixty-story pyramid was erected on its foundation. Death squads from the Order of the Winged Serpent cleaved open the chests of the Windsors with blades of black volcanic glass. China invented Atomic Weapons and turned Mexico into a glowing pit.

Ninety-three million dead.

Recalibrate Time Coordinates.

The Time Traveler assassinates Teknozuma when he is sixteen, five years before his coronation as Quetzecoatl Returned. Blood dribbles upon the Jaguar Throne.

Then the Americans came. By 1952, hungry and lean and absolutely furious from a twenty year long Great Depression and under the leadership of President Ickes they invaded Europe, South America, Japan and West Africa. They established what they considered to be a benevolent monopoly, while shipping back to the States uranium, cocaine, Rembrandts, uncut diamonds, domestic servants and bullion by the cubic ton. The entire Coliseum was transported, stone by stone, to Coogan’s Bluff, Virginia.

Unimaginable wealth and splendor collapsed after a decade under its own decadence and ultra inflation. The U.S.S.R. invaded and relieved America of its treasure. The second Great Depression is still going on today. 103 million died.

Recalculate.

The Time Traveler kills Mao, Mussolini, Tojo, Kennedy, Khruschev, Khomeni, Castro and Che. He kills Churchill, Idi Amin, Nixon, de Gaulle, Jim Jones, Charles Manson and Queen Elizabeth II. He kills Timothy Leary, Oswald, the Rosenbergs, the Arch-Duke Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary, Ronald Reagan, Orson Welles, Josef Stalin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Einstein, Franco and George Bernard Shaw. And scores and scores of people he’s never heard of until the day he kills them. There was Bill Plimpton, President of the Reconfederated States of America, Marcos Dominguez, the Butcher of Brazil, Aba Disrabi, who would someday be worshipped as God by half the population of the Earth and Archibald Itzker, who was the one and only King of the World for two and a half years. The Time Traveler sees the rise and fall, by his own doing, of the most brutal administrations in history, until the next history is made: The Blood Cross Republic, The Yaku Dynasty, The People’s Republic of Australia, The Free Love Party, the Exxon Guard and the Brotherhood of Satan. And they all find nukes. If they don’t, they find something worse: The Ion Bomb, the Death Ray or the Scarlet Wobblies. And if they can’t find those, they become crafty at making pikes exactly the right size for heads. The Irish burn Manchester to the ground and the fires don’t die down for three months. The Chippewa take Minnesota first while the Canadians ravage the Eastern Seaboard. The Zulus take Capetown but it is wired to self destruct. Hong Kong invades China. Hawaii and Alaska bash each others brains in. Siberia is the last place left on earth that doesn’t glow in the dark. It is pandemonium. And The Time Traveler shoots and shoots and shoots.

At this point, The Time Traveler has killed 356 dictators, despots, demagogues, demigods, bureaucrats, plutocrats, democrats, megalomaniacs, egomaniacs, psycho-maniacs, presidents, prime ministers and god-kings, antichrists and false messiahs, moguls of industry, emperors and fuhrers, caesars, kaisers and czars, sultans, sheiks, tyrants, tycoons and generalissimos, vice-superintendents, misunderstood philosopher-kings, fatally ambitious duchesses and misguided boy-pharaohs.

And it isn’t working, the total death toll keeps going up.

211 million dead, mostly starved, in the Second Crimean War.

576 million dead by strangulation in the Thugee Uprising of 1964.

1.2 billion dead during World War Eight in 1925.

Nowhere, in not one single variance, has The Time Traveler found an acceptable ultimate body count under the original total of 55 million, and he isn’t about to make up for the difference. It goes against the Law of Averages and all Newtonian math, but it is true. One must reset the universe. If not Hitler, then him, and The Time Traveler is not and does not seek to be Adolph Hitler.

Oh, no. Oh, no. I categorically refuse, he thinks.

It is time to abort the experiment.

Abort the whole can of worms.

Abort.

In 1908, Gustav Abelson, a barley farmer, is tinkering with an ancient McCormick Reaper, cursing it softly in Norwegian. He kicks the machine with a hobnail boot when a floating orange moon blobs open behind him, over his west field. Mr. Abelson curses the machine when the engine doesn’t turn over, damning it and all of its offspring for a thousand generations to wander without rest in a wilderness of bears and broken tractor parts. There is a brief crack in the sky, and his head explodes.

Gustav Abelson is The Time Traveler’s great-great-grandfather.

The Time Traveler turns off the Time Machine and it warbles down. He is expecting to de-exist in a minute and he closes his eyes and waits for it to come. He thinks his life will wink out, perhaps with a pop and a flatulent poof and the musty air of the garage will fill the vacuum of where he no longer is, and the world will go back to Hitler and 55 million dead.

After five minutes, it hasn’t happened yet. He gets up on achey legs and goes to the wall of the garage, where there hangs the hubcap of a 1956 Studebaker, in the same place where it was hung by The Time Traveler’s father and where it has hung for all of the Time Traveler’s life. He has never touched it before. It looks like the infant of a UFO and he examines his oblong reflection in the decayed chrome of the hubcap’s flying saucerian face.

It takes him quite a while to notice it, but The Time Traveler comes to realize that he is slightly taller, about three quarters of an inch or so, and that his eyes have changed from blue to light hazel.

Fascinating, he thinks.

The Time Traveler assassinates his paternal great grandmother, a plump hausfrau in Bell Point, New York, and his hair darkens by two shades and he is suddenly diabetic.

He decommissions one of his great-great-great-grandfathers just to see what happens, and although he stares into the mirrored surface of the hubcap for a long, long time, he records no observable differences, but he will never notice that his teeth have become much, much worse.

He executes his grandfather, a mean and sullen old man who he had known and never liked him, and The Time Traveler, all at once gains an exceptional musical ability, and he’s never had any before. He listens to the Top Forty on the gummy old ghetto blaster with the broken tape deck on the tool bench near the socket wrenches, and he nods along appreciatively, tasting elements he had never known were there before, seeing the music in intertwining curlicues of pastel pointillism.

He murders grandmaw too, because it hardly matters anymore really, and he gains a Roman nose and a much nicer chin, but loses a couple of IQ points. Not many, maybe two or three at most, but he can no longer remember the capital of Surinam.

This ought to do the trick, thinks The Time Traveler.

His mother looks almost the same as she always did. He has so far avoided slaughtering her side of the family, due to some lingering, unscientific affection. She is in the backyard of this very same house, only forty-four years previously, before she had him. She is hanging up sheets to dry on a clothesline with those wooden, springless clothespins that aren’t made anymore. He wonders if they still make the springy kind, thinks sorry, mommy, and splatters her all over a dust coverlet.

He doesn’t recognize a single bit of himself in the hubcap anymore, not the eyes or the mouth or the ears. His name has changed, and he is having a difficult time recalling what it was before.

The Time Traveler is inventing a Time Machine of some sort. He is unbending coathangers and hot-gluing them into some sort of misbegotten web, like a spider with a birth defect. As The Time Traveler flits around with the pliers and the glue gun, in a dim corner of the garage behind him, an orangey emanation shutters open, making the cobwebs around it tremble wispily.

The Time Traveler is inside of the orangeness too, and he raises a hunting rifle, the barrel of which cannot extend through the Time Window but the bullet of which can and does and it blasts the earlier Time Traveler’s head apart like a hammered cantaloupe, and The Time Traveler slumps and crashes over into the half-made Time Machine. The Time Traveler burns his inner arm with the nozzle of the hot glue gun, but by that time The Time Traveler isn’t there to notice it.

And suddenly The Time Traveler is black.

This isn’t working, he thinks, but an experiment is only verifiable if it is repeatable. And he reloads.

The Time Traveler suicides his earlier self again, and he’s white again. He looks somewhat Greek.

Again, and he’s a fifty-six year old divorcee named Vivian with pendulous breasts.

Again, and he’s a nine year old Hindu boy.

Again, and he’s a Chinese guy, maybe a Korean.

He tries again, thinking, maybe if I only wing myself, maybe I won’t be able to build the Time Machine, and instantaneously after he fires he is a one armed Chinese guy, maybe a one-armed Korean, and he can shoot just fine, amazingly well, in fact, with only his left hand.

Oh, thinks The Time Traveler.

At this point The Time Traveler has killed, according to his tally, 3,323 people, including his mother, his father, many great-great-grandpappys, distant ancestors, rumored progenitors, rusty foregoers, pater familiae, and fifty-six different versions of himself. He has wads of cotton plugged deep into his ears and a massive hematoma, a Jupiterian shade of purple, the size of a dinner plate on his shoulder, and every twenty kills or so he puts another layer of damp washcloths over it to cushion himself for the next blast. His face is pitted with tiny, sweet burns from carbon embers and his right eye is somewhat eclipse-blind from the many thousands of muzzle flashes it has seen. There are two-hundred and seven boxes of ammunition left, bought in bulk an unremembered number of hours ago for a forgotten price. The slugs, by the gross, are stacked on his tool bench and on an abused Nautilus machine and in the cargo bed of his boyhood, yellowy-dented Tonka dump truck.

The Time Traveler finds it weird that he is not hungry or thirsty or sleepy or particularly in pain or not in pain, except for his poor shoulder, nor hot nor cold nor even slightly ashamed of himself, just disappointed. And just a low, toothless, unangry variation of disappointment, a variation for which there is no word that he knows. The same kind one has upon the first five seconds of waking every time; the same kind one has when one remembers the gravity is still on. The Time Traveler thinks, is almost sure, that he has not eaten or drank or slept since he killed Hitler, but this can’t be true because that must be several weeks ago now, although he hasn’t kept track. He can’t recall the month, but that is partially because the names of the months keep changing and are always impermanent. It might be February or Thermidor or Five Crocodile or Shahrivar or The Month of the Sacred Plum.

The Time Traveler thinks he might be a little insane now; he thinks undo/redo, undo/redo, undo/redo. The experiment must be negated and the universe must be dismantled and unboxed post haste. The Time Traveler has not made the world a better place, no matter how many men he has unmade. He knows he must reformat his hypothesis because the current one is incorrect.

And, swabbing Bactine into the cratery, moon-pit burns on his cheek, The Time Traveler has his Eureka. The problem, it comes to him at once, is not men.

The problem is man.

The Time Traveler flips the dial, bored, and through the orange scrim of the Time Portal, It takes a while to find what he’s looking for. It takes four point five million years. The Time Traveler dismisses the Cro Magnon, the Neanderthal, the Homo Erectus, the Australopithecus Africanus. The brows thicken and the arms grow longer and the thumbs shorter, they sprout pelts and, in reverse time, extinguish their fires and scour the images of mammoths and sabertooth cats off the walls of caves.

What a horrible people they will inevitably become, thinks The Time Traveler, me among them. Someday these monkey-children will shave the heads of their gassed-to-death cousins, and use the hair to stuff pillows and tan their flayed skins for lampshades. Those clever baby hands will invent the guillotine and the iron maiden and the disposable diaper and the F-86 Apache Gunship. Those bulbous skulls are the cocoons of monsters, they walk upright only because they know that some sunny day they will get to wear jackboots and goosestep in parade for the inspection of whichever one of them is the worst. They must be stopped at any cost. They must be prevented from contaminating the universe with the evil nougat center hidden in their dino-nucleic acid.

At last The Time Traveler finds what he is looking for. He finds it in the Serengeti, in a copse of trees. He finds it eating thorny fruit and looking only the slightest bit human. He finds that it still has a tail, a tiny little waggly one. He finds the Missing Link.

There you are, my pretty, thinks The Time Traveler.

Fire rains down from heaven and apes fall from the trees like spoiled fruit. In their chirping language of hoots and barks, they ask the Sun God what they had done to anger him so and The Sun God clacks another round into the chamber.

The dry grass of the savanna rustles like paper. When it is over, the blowflies descend.

In the year 847, R.S., His Massiveness, Emperor Rhinocerian the Ninth comes to the throne of the Oonogerian Empire. Although a boy of tender years and gentle manners, Rhinocerian nonetheless soon displays signs of towering ambition and ruthless powermongery. Only three months in office and he personally gores to death sixteen members of the Senate and banishes the rest of them, eternally, to the Hell Countries.

After that, Rhinocerian begins a reign of terror and bloodshed that will not desist for more than a century. He enslaves the Elephant People, commits a thorough genocide against the Buffalo Tribes, has the entire continent of Gundrivaal burned, irradiated and salted with a poisonous defoliant that makes it so that nothing would ever grow there again. Really. Nothing. Ever.

Twenty-seven billion dead. Twenty-seven billion.

Twenty-seven billion minus fifty-five million is a lot.

The Time Traveler thinks to himself, in a language that he has simultaneously never heard before and yet has spoken all his life, you are unfit to lead, Emperor Rhinocerian, and the biological predispositions of your species will not be stood for. You must leave, to make way for a less violent lifeform.

The Time Traveler itches a mosquito at the thick gray burlappy skin on his flank, and knocks his enormous nose-tusk against the ground in the expression of virulent disgust among the people who are suddenly his. He goes flipping through the channels of the Time Vortex, looking for Emperor Rhinocerian’s, and his own, ancient ancestral forerunners, whom he will dispatch to the dung heap of history.

The Time Traveler will have another people soon.

The Time Traveler no longer has the muzzle glare semi-blindness because at some point during the recent spree, the rifle changed into a laser rifle. He thinks he killed off an entire species of six foot tall salamanders with opposable thumbs before he even noticed the change. He prefers the laser rifle to the old Smith & Wesson he had before, which grew unbearably hot after only six shots, whereas the laser rifle just gives a steely coolness and doesn’t make a deafening report in the close garage, it just makes a calm, jazzy snap. And instead of the dirtily sexual reek of cordite, this gun only smells vaguely of lilacs.

But, and this is odd, the vinegar and baking soda have not changed at all. On the Arm and Hammer baking soda box, it still has a picture of a human arm in a rolled up shirtsleeve, and a clearly man-made hammer. The Time Traveler examines his own arm, and it is now a three-toed, prehensile, lizardskin nightmare, iguana-green and sleek. He compares it to the big fat mammalian pink appendage on the box and thinks, that’s not right at all, that doesn’t make any sense. Very strange. Very very strange.

Oh well, he thinks. And then he exterminates the Kingdom of Chameleons.

The Time Traveler has multiple sets of eyes now, some twitching far out of his body on long, chopsticky stalks. Some merely peep morosely from the back of his head or the joints of his many knees. And he doesn’t have to blink anymore, not even once. He is omniscient. He can see the whole garage, all eight corners of it at once, without interruption. I see you, grossly reconfigured Huffy bicycle. I see you, roach motel. You’re not going anywhere.

This is enjoyable, thinks The Time Traveler, but not nearly enough.

Sometime on towards midnight or noon, The Time Traveler checks his count. He believes that he has killed 53,786 living beings, including humans, proto-humans, primates, the primogenitors of many species of highly-evolved felines, canines, equines, bovines and lupines, a fascinating but fundamentally unlikeable form of non-aquatic dolphin, an infinity of mice-people, rat-people, mole-men and bat-people, an extraordinarily perverted civilization of hyper-intelligent kangaroos, a race of lithe and beautiful poet-priests evolved from seagulls who seemed wise and kind but were secretly hypocritical, a psychic species of flowering vine (a close relative of the grape) who were capable of unimaginable cruelty, the Reptiloids, the Dinosaurians and the bees.

It isn’t turning out right. Land-based lifeforms just seemed preordained to lives of exotic nastiness, scrabbling and rending and tearing and flaying one another alive, the most important and usually the first ingredient to all of their societies is fire, from which they quickly develop the brand, the red hot pincer, the flamethrower and the H-Bomb.

It will be better under the sea, thinks The Time Traveler. Those are our kind of people under the sea, the incombustible kind, the kind that appreciate quietness and stillness and saturation. The Time Traveler flips on the Time Monitor to the Devonian, and through the orange squishiness of the screen, he sits back in his battered folding chair, his wormy, glistening, segmented tale oozing juice onto the cement floor, and watches the unfolding epoch.

For a couple of million years, The Time Traveler scans the snotty, gelatinous shore of the primordial sea, and every once in a while, something pokes its head up out of the soup, makes a few awkward squirms towards the tempting mud, and The Time Traveler picks them off, one by one.

No, my little friends, he thinks, don’t come out of the water, there’s nothing up here for you. Your grandbabies will only occupy their time building incinerators and ovens, which they will use to cook their young, and will bring immortal shame upon your families.

He guards the border faithfully. One day a yard-long and monstrous poppa crayfish waddles out of the goo, makes a run for the low, sludgy dunes on the beach. It’s skin is transparent and through it the Time Traveler sees its open circulatory system, its inner ganglia, its fishnet webbing of nervous system, which has a big, six ounce brain in the fetus stage, capable of immense evil. The Time Traveler shoots it through the crude idea of its heart, which he can see through the glassy hide, and the blue laser light boils it inside out and it slumps dead in the surf. In a little while, the tide will wash it out to sea again and redistribute its nutrients.

I think not, thinks the Time Traveler. I think not.

The Time Traveler reads, in the waterproof pages of the Encyclopedia Pacifica, that in the year Thirty-thousand Twenty-one, Emperor Kragor the Devourer waged the bloodiest campaign in history among the once happy forests of the Great Barrier Reef. His long-fanged shock-troops pillaged and raped and murdered at will, feasting on the egg-sacs of their enemies, laying waste to their spawning grounds, desecrating their coral churches and de-boning their brave young men. Sixty-seven trillion died.

This cannot be tolerated, thinks the Time Traveler, and punches in the Time Coordinates. Through the waterlogged orange of the Time Vortex, there appears Emperor Kragor as a young tadpole-princeling, flitting lazily in the warm currents of The Gulf Stream. The Time Traveler wraps his tentacle around the laser rifle’s trigger and aims it precisely at Kragor’s gills.

We must see the matter through, thinks the Time Traveler. Someday, some far flung epoch, he’ll get it right. Someday he would get to the last kill, the last and necessary correction of the Time Stream, and the world would be bright and new and undigusting. He thinks that there is a perfect variance of the world and it will just take the magic number of kills to get there. It doesn’t matter how many. He doesn’t have to sleep, he has not slept for ten to the power of ten to the power of ten years, he is not hungry or thirsty and he does not have to go to the bathroom and he will get to the correct world eventually.

And if that didn’t work, he would reach so very very far back, to when the Earth was just forming, just a baseball sized lump of cooling space dust, just the thought of the idea of congealing helium atoms, and, before it had a chance to go bad, he will blast it to smithereens, and watch the world begin anew.

He fires away.

The Time Traveler

by Vincent L. Scarsella

I

Late October, 2004: A Deathbed Revelation

On his deathbed, my father finally revealed the secret of the stone sarcophagus.

For ninety years, the hulking tomb had lain against the far wall of a locked chamber in the low, dank cellar of our family’s sprawling five-bedroom country home. My grandfather had built the place in a rural hamlet about forty miles southeast of Buffalo, New York after immigrating to America in 1914 from his ancestral home in Macedonia. It was his plan to grow grapes and raise goats on the gentle rolling hills on which the house was built. When it was finished, he sent for my grandmother, and his four young children (two boys and two girls, excluding my father, who wasn’t born until 1925). They took a steamship on a three-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean to join him.

Shipped with them, at considerable expense, was the stone tomb.

Long after his older brothers and sisters had left home, father remained behind to take care of his parents as they grew old and sick. Grandmother died in 1947, three years after Grandfather had passed, and father naturally inherited the house.

And years later, even after my older sister, Constance, and I had grown up and left home, father stubbornly refused to sell the house although it was clearly too big for mother and him.

I knew this steadfast refusal to leave was because of the stone tomb.

I was at a conference in San Antonio when a secretary from my firm left a grim message on my hotel room telephone that my father had suffered another stroke. Reaching his doctor, I was given little hope. He might be gone by the time I made it back home.

I booked the next available flight and arrived at the hospital around midnight.

“He’s been asking for you,” said the plump matronly RN at the nurse’s station with a tired smile. The ward was eerily quiet.

“How’s he doing?”

She shook her head, not good, then pointed down a long hallway.

I hurried to his room but stood back in the doorway for a time. There was no one at his bedside. Mother had died three years ago and my older sister, Constance, had left for parts unknown twenty years before that. All my father’s brothers and sisters were long dead, and whatever family remained in the old country had grown estranged from their American kin.

Finally, I stepped into the room. At his bedside, I found him awake, his eyes wide open. Seeing me, he smiled.

“Damie,” he whispered.

“Hi, Dad.” I kissed his forehead. He was cold as ice. His gaunt, pale appearance made it obvious that he was weak, close to death.

“I must tell you something,” he whispered with sudden urgency. “A secret. Before I die. Something I should have told you years ago.”

“Father, please,” I said to him. “Save your strength.”

“The tomb,” he went on, “in the cellar.”

I nodded.

“I must tell you what it is,” he said, then sighed. “I have not been given enough time to complete my duty. And I fear that Constance…” He trailed off momentarily, remembering something. “I fear she is never coming back.”

I edged closer to him, frowning.

“The tomb,” he said, swallowing, his gaunt eyes boring down upon me now, “what it is, Damie, is a time machine.”

It took a moment for what he said to register.

“Time machine?”

“Yes, Damie,” he said. “Not like the kind in science fiction movies. The tomb is a vessel for transporting a person through time–day-by-day.” Father swallowed, drew in a breath, then continued in a raspy, tired voice: “Inside it, there is a substance, a kind of gel that stops you from aging. It is programmed to awaken the time traveler every seventy-three years, the length of a generation.”

I was about to say something to stop my father’s bizarre narrative. But he never gave me an opening:

“The tomb was invented ten thousand years ago, Damie, by a civilization that was far more advanced, more magical, than ours. That civilization was what is now called Atlantis.”

Frowning, I gazed down at him, not knowing what to say. Surely, this delusion, whatever he was telling me, must be the result of some kind of dementia, a symptom of his latest stroke.

“There is more, Damie,” father continued, “we are descendants of that race. Like so many others in our family the past ten thousand years, I inherited the duty of becoming caretaker for the time traveler once he finally awakens from his long sleep.

“That is to occur, Damie, only six months from now. For seventy-three years I have waited to perform that duty.” Father sighed and anguish filled his eyes. “But the Almighty has not granted me time enough.”

He drew a breath and grasped my hand.

“That duty, Damie, must now fall to you. As it will be your duty to pass that task onto someone else. A son, perhaps.”

Duty? A son? I knew nothing of this duty, and I did not have a son. I wasn’t even married anymore. Karen and I had been divorced ten years already.

“At least,” father continued, gasping momentarily, “I saw him, Damie. The time traveler. I met him. I was only six years old.” He chuckled to himself, marveling, and it caused a brief coughing fit. “Seventy-three years ago.

“He had just awakened,” he went on, gazing forward, lost in recollection. “Your grandfather took me downstairs into the vault which only the day before had been a place forbidden to me. But that morning, in the dim light of that dark, secret room, I finally saw it, Damie–the tomb. And it was open, Damie. The lid was up.

“Finally, I gazed upon the time traveler himself. He was a shadow hunched over on your great-grandmother’s old rocking chair next to the tomb. One of her shawls was draped over him. At long last, he looked up at me with kind blue eyes that sparkled even in the dim light. His hair was a thick wave, and his jaw was square and handsome. And his skin, Damie, it was bronze. Bronze! He looked no more than thirty-five–and he was built like some Greek warrior from the old epics, Hector or Achilles.

“This is my son, the next caretaker, grandpa introduced me, and I crept forward and stood before him. The time traveler’s smile was gentle, kind. He put his hand upon my shoulder and asked my name. I noted a foreign edge to his voice, an utterly strange accent. Kosta, I told him. The time traveler patted my head. I am Romal, he said. I think you and I shall become friends.

“But he did not stay with us long enough so that we might truly become friends–only a week. He had last awakened in 1858, in Macedonia, and had stayed awake only three days back then.” Father sighed, deep in memory. “I saw him every day that week,” he finally went on. “We talked about the present times and the times he had seen.” Then father again sighed. “I remember how sad it was on the day when he reentered the vessel, and was sucked up into the purplish gel. Then, the stone lid lowered, shutting him off from us for a lifetime, not to be awakened again for another seventy-three years.”

Father swallowed and seemed close to tears. After a breath, he continued: “As he went back into the vessel, I remember him smiling and and telling me that when he next awoke and would see me again, I would be an old man. He hoped that I could tell him that I had led a good and happy life.”

I tried without much success to imagine a man sleeping in the stone tomb in that secret, dark room in the basement of the old house.

“So you must promise me, Damie,” father whispered with some urgency, “that you will be here when the vessel opens six months from now, on the first of May. He will be weak after his long sleep and will need your help. He will also need you to guide his way in this age.”

Doubtless, in the throes of his impending death, father had become delusional. That this odd fantasy must have settled in his mind to help him make sense of his eccentric father’s incredible waste of money in transporting the massive, gray stone across the ocean all the way from Macedonia and then tending to it so secretively in the long years ever since. I speculated that father had snuck down there one afternoon as a six year old and, in the darkness, fell into a dream in which he had met an imaginary time traveler upon his imaginary exit from the tomb.

“I promise, father,” I said, deciding to humor a dying man his last wish. “I will be here.”

Having revealed the secret at long last, father closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.

While father slept, I sat on a chair at the foot of his bed recalling that Saturday afternoon many years ago when Connie and I had entered the forbidden chamber after mother and father had left for the day to visit her sick cousin in Rochester. It had been Connie’s bold idea to defy the ancient family decree and sneak downstairs to have a look at the stone tomb, or whatever it was, that had been locked up all these years in that secret room. We had, in truth, always been drawn to it like children are always drawn to forbidden things.

“How can we get inside?” I had chided Connie after she proposed the mission. She was seventeen, five years my senior, and a constant source of annoyance.

There was a heavy combination lock looped through the steel bolt of the room’s thick metal door. No hammer would break it open, and, anyway, to do that would surely doom us, sure to bring our father’s wrath down upon our heads.

“I watched him opening the lock,” Connie said. “I was downstairs last week when Daddy went inside. I pretended to help mother with laundry but all the while I snuck up and secretly watched him him opening the lock. Somehow, he did not notice me and by sheer luck, I was able to figure out the combination: 44 to the right, 17 to the left, and 25 to the right again. And after two more complete turns—the lock opens.”

“How do you know you got it right?” I snickered.

“Because it worked, Damie” she answered defiantly. “I opened it.”

“You’ve been inside the room?”

Constance shook her head. Long, ravenous hair, sashayed momentarily across her shoulders while her dark, brown eyes bore upon me. Though I would never admit it to anyone, I was proud to have such a darkly beautiful sister. “No,” she said. “I only opened the door and peeked inside. I did not go in. I–I decided to be nice and wait for you so that we could both go inside together.”

That was bull, and we both knew it. She had not gone further than opening the door a few inches and peering inside that dark, secret room out of pure fear. The room held a stone coffin, or so the family story went. Father’s eldest brother, Dominic, who was a boy of nine back then, had seen it loaded onto the steamship for the trip across the ocean to America. Why had grandfather gone through all the trouble and expense of transporting such a hideous thing half way around the world to America, and then, after he had deposited it in the basement of his home, never spoken of it again?

Even more mysterious than that, of course, was what possibly might be in it.

Our cousin, Mikal, had whispered to us during some holiday gathering a couple years ago that the stone tomb was not such a great thing after all, though not explaining how he had come to form such an opinion.

“A big, cold rock,” he had boasted indifferently, then added with a laugh: “Like a giant oyster shell.”

But Mikal’s description had not diminished the tomb’s mystery. In fact, it served only to heighten our interest in determining what had compelled our grandfather, who was remembered as a deep and serious man, to bring the stone tomb all the way to America if it was nothing more than a big, cold rock. Nor did it answer why there had been such a concerted effort to keep anyone except himself, and later, our father, from its custody and care. Last but not least, Mikal’s story did not answer the seminal question as to what the big, stone tomb might contain.

So Constance and I snuck downstairs that gloomy October afternoon like pirates after some forbidden and cursed treasure. And I remember how she hesitated for a time at the door.

“Open it,” I hissed, daring her. “Open it.”

She rolled the combination, and as the thick lock fell open, we looked at each other like expectant children on Christmas morning.

“The door,” I whispered. “Open it.”

She unclasped the bolt and, with a breath, pushed open the door. It squeaked and revealed nothing but darkness.

“The flashlight,” she said, nodding to the one in my hand. I turned it on and gave it to her.

Connie swallowed as she took it and looked inside the dark room.

“C’mon,” she said and stepped inside.

After we were both fully within the dark chamber, Constance swiveled the narrow beam of the flashlight around until it finally settled upon the stone tomb.

“It is ugly,” Constance commented, and in that, she was right. It had a wet, rough surface and did look like a gigantic oyster, just as cousin Mikal had claimed.

The room was small, and was made even smaller by the foreboding bulk of its stone inhabitant. Suddenly, Constance stepped toward it.

“Careful,” I whispered, and held back. In fact, I reached behind and felt for the cold, steel door.

Constance took four or five furtive steps toward the tomb and then just stood there. Finally, as if on impulse, she stuck out her right hand and touched its rough, gray shell. I let out something like a laugh. She let her fingertips linger there for a time. All I could do was stare, wide-eyed.

“What’s it feel like?” I finally gasped.

After a few seconds, she pulled back her hand.

“There’s, there’s something inside,” she said. “I–I can feel it; something alive in there.”

Constance turned to me, and in the darkness I could see a look of distress and wonder in her eyes. At last, she was able to move, and suddenly walked past me.

“C’mon,” she said.

I scrambled out of there right on her heels. The door creaked as she closed it shut with a thud and fastened the bolt. Then, she quickly secured the lock.

Upstairs, a few minutes later, Constance tried to explain what she had felt. A presence, a being. A soul. “I could feel it breathing,” she whispered. “It’s thoughts.”

“I want to touch it,” I pleaded.

“No,” she said, “Daddy’s right. We must keep away from it. It was right for them, grandpa and Dad, to keep it locked up from us. Safe.”

I shrugged, not really wanting to sneak down there again and touch that dreadful stone thing.

Never again did I dare try to do it.

Father woke me from this memory with the raspy statement:

“He kept a journal.” When I looked up, he added: “The time traveler.”

He explained that a small safe had been cut into the rough concrete wall behind the stone vessel. In it was the time traveler’s journal, written on something called a stylus, a magical gadget which recorded sound waves–speech, and then played whatever was said in printed words on a dull screen made up of a kind of crystal sand. Another command preserved the words for posterity.

The stylus responded to direction by speech. You told it what to do. “Just say, ‘Next entry’,” father said, and sucked some air into his lungs–he was clearly growing tired now–“and it takes you there.”

“Voice recognition software,” I told him. “We have that. In our computers.”

“The stylus,” father continued, his voice a dry rasp, “contains a record of the time traveler’s experiences each time he has awakened.”

Father made me write down the combination to the safe containing the stylus on a piece of paper. Then, as I was stuffing it into my shirt pocket, he said, “Don’t you need the combination to the lock on the door?”

I frowned, not quite sure what he meant.

“Or did Constance give it to you?”

I could never remember it after the afternoon we snuck down there. Nor did I care to know.

“You know about that?”

“She told me,” he said, “the time I caught her down there.”

I suspected immediately that there was more to that story and that it had something to do with Connie’s mysterious disappearance.

“After that,” he said, “I got a new lock.”

He gave me the combination and then his eyes closed. I gave a start but soon realized that he wasn’t dead but only sleeping. His breathing, however, was barely perceptible.

I went out and asked the nurse to check him. I was worried that perhaps he had slipped into a coma. She hurried back to his room with me and started to check him over. At one point, she opened his eyes and shined a small penlight in them. He squirmed momentarily, groaned.

“He’s alright,” she said. “Sleeping.”

“Do you think it would be alright for me to leave him for the night?” I asked. “Get a good night’s sleep?”

She gave me a kind smile and said that was a good idea. There was nothing I could do here. You never knew with a stroke victim. They could last a day or a year or ten. Of course, if anything happened, she’d call. I gave her my number and left.

An hour later, the nurse called to tell me that my father had passed away in his sleep.

II

The Stylus

The next morning, I woke early and went down to Costanza’s Funeral Home to make arrangements for my father’s burial. I decided against a viewing, since I knew of no living friends or relatives. I selected a modest casket, ordered a large basket of flowers, and placed a short obituary. His priest, Father Tobias, from the local Greek Orthodox cathedral, agreed to do the funeral mass even though the old man hadn’t been to church in years.

It was almost eleven by the time I emerged from the stuffy funeral home into a low, dull November sun. The leaves had long fallen from the trees and were scuttled about by the wind. I craved apples at that time of year and had to stop at a local grocery to buy a half dozen on my way out to my father’s house, the old homestead, built ninety years ago by my grandfather, out in the middle of nowhere.

After pulling into the long gravel driveway and coming to a stop in front of the sprawling, silent white-frame house, I remained in the car for a time trying to get my mind around the idea of a human being living in suspended animation within the stone tomb. It was unsettling to realize that for a hundred years, the stone sarcophagus had been the driving force in the lives of my father and his father and, I supposed, before that his father’s father, and apparently, a long line of fathers before them. How far back into the family history it went (my father had said ten thousand years!), I had no idea. And, now, that legacy had fallen onto my lap. If, of course, all of it was true and not some delusion of eccentric men.

Feeling the weight of those long years, and the long night before, I got out of the car with a yawn and entered the old house like a somnambulist. The last time I had been there, only last week just before I left for San Antonio (how long ago that now seemed), father had been very much alive. He had been walking up the stairs from the basement, after spending some time in the secret room, no doubt, tending to that damned stone coffin. During that visit, he had dropped another odd hint of something we had to talk about soon, something that I needed to know. But for some reason, he never got around to it then, and instead waited until the last moments of his life last night to tell me.

After pausing on the landing for a time, I took a deep breath before heading down the narrow cellar stairs. I had to duck under the dark, wet ceiling as I blindly negotiated the path to the door of the secret chamber. Lifting the lock into the palm of my hand, I paused for another long moment before, finally, twirling the numbers of the combination. After the lock fell open, after yet another breath, I pulled open the heavy metal door. It squeaked like it had that afternoon all those long years ago when Connie and I had secretly invaded the room.

It took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Finally, the outline of the stone tomb came into focus. It was a brooding presence, and I gasped and had to step back a moment. It was every bit as big and dark and wet and ugly as I had remembered it the last time I had seen it as a twelve year old boy.

After a time, I roused courage to approach it. Up close, I was struck that it no longer seemed inanimate, a mere rock. Rather I sensed something technical about it, machine-like.

Finally, I reached out the forefinger of my right hand and touched the rough, wet surface of the tomb. And, like Connie, I felt life within it. Or something.

“Wow!” I whispered. In that moment, I realized that my father and grandfather had not been mere crackpots caring for a lifeless, worthless rock.

After perhaps a minute, I pulled my hand away. I reached up for the string of the light fixture dangling down from a rafter and gave a tug. Surprisingly the old bulb still worked, flooding the room with a pale yellow light. I looked at the concrete wall behind the tomb and saw the outline of a small, corroded square. It was, of course, the safe father had mentioned.

I squeezed into the narrow space between the tomb and the wall. At the safe, I pulled out the sheet on which I had scribbled the combination and twirled the numbers on the dial father had made me write down. The small, rusty metal door squeaked open. Inside, I saw a small rectangular device, the stylus.

After removing it, I turned it over in my hands, and was reminded of the old toy, an Etch-e-Sketch. It was about the same size, with gray stone borders inscribed with odd runes instead of red plastic, around a dull, gray screen.

“Last entry,” I told it, trying to remember how father said it worked.

Solid black words formed in the sand: squiggles in a language I could not read. I frowned for some time at the incomprehensible text on the screen. After a moment, I commanded: “English.”

The sand rearranged like fluid and the words changed from the unknown markings to English:

I have awakened into Year 10,645 Standard, which the current inhabitants have designated, AD 1931. It seems like an interim time between great turmoil. Only 14 years ago, a great War ended. It involved the major powers at great loss of life due to technological advances since I last awoke. But the end of that War does not seem to have resolved the political discord preceding it. And to make matters worse, the economy of the world is in depression.

Nikilas brought his son, Kosta, the next caretaker, down with him to meet me. The boy is pleasant and bright, and follows me around like a puppy.

Once I was awake and alert, Nikilas brought me upstairs and introduced me to his wife, Maria, as a friend from the old country (which was somewhat true). She is a simple but competent woman who smiled continuously at me and did not dare question her husband’s bringing me into their home. She went back to her chores somewhere else in the house and left us to talk in the kitchen.

I spent the next hours learning about the long trip across the Great Ocean to America during the Sleep, and how much the world had changed since my last awakening. And how it has changed! Much technological advancement has occurred, more than in any other epoch since Atlantis was doomed.

My frown deepened as I continued the odd narrative. Atlantis? I had always regarded reports of that ancient, mythical land with a mixture of skepticism and curiosity. Ultimately, I doubted that such an advanced civilization had ever existed except as the fancy of the philosopher, Plato, and countless other authors down the ages whose reports and hypotheses had been spawned by his major work on the subject known as Timeas.

The stylus went on to detail the time traveler’s experiences in the single week of his “awakening” from April 24 to May 1, 1931. For the most part, he spent them in the safety of the old house, listening to my grandfather’s report of the events of the last seventy-three years. He also spent much time reading historical texts and a pile of newspapers which grandfather dutifully brought him.

Early one morning three days after his awakening, the time traveler ventured with my grandfather and father in grandfather’s brand new Ford Model A Roadster for the then, somewhat arduous hour long trip down old, narrow Route 219 which meandered through Colden and Boston Hills to the bustling downtown streets of Buffalo.

Upon approaching the city, the time traveler gawked upwards at the tall brick buildings which the invention of the elevator had spawned. He was equally intrigued by grandfather’s roadster, and other cars of the era–the outdated though numerous Model Ts, and the more “modern” Chryslers, Chevy’s, Plymouths, and Cadillacs–clogging the streets of Buffalo with constant beeping horns, and filling the air with exhaust. He commented that they resembled the land transports of Atlantis in some respects, except that the Atlantean vehicles were fueled by the sun and hence, ran silently and without fumes.

This burst of technology in the seventy-three years since his last slumber, highlighted not only by the skyscrapers and automobiles which had come into existence since 1858, but the many other inventions – radio, movies, and the electric lights which made even the nighttime streets blaze with brightness and life, pleased the time traveler.

Mankind is once again on the verge of magic, was his odd comment.

It seemed an important duty of the caretaker to bring to the time traveler’s attention persons of renown in the period into which he had awakened – leading scientists, philosophers, politicians, kings, musicians, or entertainers. The time traveler would then determine whether it was worth the trouble and risk of meeting one or more of them. Though grandfather promptly fulfilled this duty and identified such persons – Albert Einstein being one of them, residing in Germany at the time - the time traveler decided, without explanation, against taking such a trip. However, the stylus recorded this note:

I would have liked to have met the base ball player, Babe Ruth. However, the trip to Washington, where his team, the New York Yankees, were playing part of that week, was much too onerous. Still, the game of base ball sounds wonderful in the news paper reports, and the godlike deference for this athlete, Ruth, was such that it reminded me of Pir’lian, the great ball player (though the game hardly resembles base ball in any way) on the fabled Atlantean fields of play.

After only a week, the time traveler announced that he was going back to sleep. I was reminded of my father’s sad report just last night of that event. At least, on that day in 1931, there had been the genuine hope of a second meeting. For my grandfather, however, the time traveler’s farewell would be permanent.

This man, and his family, have served me well for ten thousand years. Goodbye, old man, and Godspeed!

I spent the next hours at the kitchen table reading entry after entry forming in the gray liquid screen of the magical stylus. It was rare for the time traveler to spend more than a week or two in the time period in which he had awakened. To do otherwise, of course, would have resulted in the premature end to his mission. No matter how attached he became to his caretakers and the people of the era into which he had awakened, he had to keep in mind that his life had a finite span. Only when he emerged from the stone time machine, did he age.

I must constantly remind myself of my mission, my vow, he wrote in one of his entries following his introduction to a young woman who had ignited a romantic passion within him, to continue onward into the far reaches of time and watch humanity attain a high level of magic matching that which Great and Fair Atlantis attained ten thousand years ago.

Those rare times when the time traveler chose to remain more than a few days in a particular epoch was due either to his swooning over some woman with whom he had become romantically involved (although he always seemed able, eventually, to break free of that spell and return to the tomb to resume his mission); or, because he had decided to meet some personage in the epoch into which he had awakened.

In 1638, for instance, the caretaker–my great-great-great-great-great grandfather, Leonides Zithriades, told the time traveler about a renowned scientist, Galileo, who had used a kind of eyeglass for looking deep into the heavens–the telescope; and, who had printed a treatise just seven years earlier, in 1631, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, claiming to prove that the earth revolved around the sun, just as Copernicus had claimed. The book had so enraged Pope Urban VIII that Galileo was summoned to Rome to stand trial for heresy. After many delays, the trial finally began on April 13, 1633, and was ultimately concluded when, in exchange for his life, Galileo confessed to heresy and was sentenced to house arrest for life at his villa in Arcetri near Florence.

It was in late September, 1638, after an arduous three weeks journey from Macedonia, when the time traveler finally arrived at Galileo’s villa. After two days of interesting conversation with the old, now blind astronomer, the visit was interrupted by the arrival of the English poet, John Milton. A subsequent entry in the stylus marveled that Milton had incorporated several of the time traveler’s suggestions into his epic poem, Paradise Lost, composed only some months after their chance meeting at Galileo’s villa.

One hundred seventy-six years before that, in 1491, the time traveler had also remained awake some weeks in order to seek out a famous artist of that time, Leonardo da Vinci, and a renowned sailor, Christopher Columbus.

Some five hours after trekking upstairs with the stylus and reading report after report of the time traveler’s fascinating awakenings, I could no longer keep my eyes open and was forced to take a break. My knees cracked as I rose from the kitchen table, and after stretching my back and taking a long, deep yawn, ventured back downstairs. Back in the secret chamber, I stared at the stone tomb for a time, wondering if it could really be possible that a time traveler from Atlantis with bronze colored skin, thick wavy hair, and deep blue eyes, was sleeping within it protected by an ancient gel which magically suspended the process of aging. Finally, I pulled myself away from the mystery and trudged upstairs. Finding that it was nearly sunset, I decided to spend the night. I went up to my old bedroom and took a forty minute nap before waking and resuming the time traveler’s stylus reports back down the ages of history. I did not go to sleep until midnight, just after a report on his awakening in the year 469 AD.

In the morning, I dutifully attended my father’s funeral. Father Tobias presided over the somber mass in an empty church. Afterwards, I followed the hearse in a lone car to the cemetery where father was put into the ground.

Over the next weeks, I spent every free moment at my father’s house, reading entry after entry in the time traveler’s stylus back down the long years even before the time of Christ. (To my chagrin, the time traveler had been asleep between 4 B.C. and 29 A.D., when Jesus supposedly lived). His descriptions of the times into which he awakened were pure windows into history.

By April Fool’s day, some five months after my father’s death, and only a month before the time traveler’s anticipated reawakening, I had read the stylus entries all the way back to 6743 B.C. Three times, the time traveler had remained awake for longer than a year, always for the benefit of a woman. With one of them, he had fathered a child, whose progeny might still exist among the descendents of mankind. And, yet, even then, he was compelled to return to the tomb to continue his one-way journey through time.

With each passing day, the prospect of the tomb’s opening, and the emergence of the time traveler from within it, drove me to distraction. By the end of April, I could barely sleep. In fact, on April 26, I started sleeping on an old cot in the middle of the dank room only a few feet away from the stone coffin.

Perhaps what I feared most was that all this was some kind of cruel family hoax, and that my father, and grandfather perhaps, were having a wonderful laugh at my expense from some vantage point in the afterlife. Or that it merely was a fabulous fantasy, a symptom of a family madness stretching back thousands of years.

Despite these reservations, I took two weeks’ vacation starting April twenty-eighth, and spent nearly all day long down in that room waiting for the wondrous, fated event, killing time by reading more entries from the stylus, going further back into history, reaching into the seventieth century before the birth of Christ.

In fact, it was down there, in that dank, dark room, on the evening of the twenty-eighth day of April, where my sister, Constance, found me.

III

The Prodigal Sister

“Hello?”

I had fallen asleep on the cot and sat up fearing that I had missed the opening of the stone vessel and the voice was that of the time traveler. I blinked at the tomb a moment. It was still closed, a solid gray lump.

“Hello? Damian?” A woman’s voice came from the doorway.

I turned and saw Constance. She was still darkly beautiful. Her hair was long and black along her shoulders without a streak of gray, and she had remained thin and supple.

“Constance? Connie?”

All I could do was gaze at her. Why she had abandoned us years ago had never been made clear to me. I remember mother calling me in tears while I was away at college to report that Connie had gone crazy and left home. She had not even left a note. I suspected even back then that the stone tomb had something to do with her disappearance.

At last, I pushed myself off the cot and went to her. We embraced and I held her in my arms for a time. My long lost sister had returned home.

“What are you doing down here?” she asked, finally stepping away from me. “In this room?”

I nodded to the stone tomb. “Waiting to see if it will really open,” I told her.

She replied with a nod of her own: “It will.”

We went upstairs and I brewed a pot of coffee. It was early afternoon, but gray and cold outside, another late spring in Buffalo. With coffee steaming from the cups before us on the kitchen table, Connie explained why she had left.

“After our little adventure that Saturday afternoon in the secret room,” she began, “I started sneaking down there every chance I got. That tomb, and the living creature I knew lay within it, drew me down there, became an obsession.

“I told you that day I had felt something when I touched it – and I had - a living presence. A soul. The soul of a man. A wonderful, profoundly lonely man who in the moment of that touch had instinctively reached out and entered into my mind and into my soul. By some magic I do not understand, the man living in the tomb and I had somehow communicated, connected, however briefly.

“And so I kept going down there again and again and again to renew that feeling, that fusion of mind to mind and soul to soul. To satisfy my addiction for the being encased in that tomb.

“Until one afternoon, father caught me, with my hand at the tomb. He flew into a rage and demanded to know what I was doing down there. He seemed as possessive about that ugly tomb as I had become.

“We had words, and he ordered me out of the room, forbade me from ever going down there again. He demanded that I promise I would stay away from the room.

“The next day, father caught me frantically hammering at the new lock he had placed on the door. He grabbed me until I settled down. He wasn’t angry anymore. I had discovered the secret and there was no use denying it any longer.

“So, he told me everything. Who the time traveler was, and the course of his long journey through time. He also told me that I would have to wait another twenty-seven years to meet him. That he was the caretaker, but that I—and you—might have to assume that obligation and honor in the event he wasn’t alive when the time traveler awakened.

“But twenty-seven years! That was too much for me. I couldn’t wait that long. And I knew that I could not go on living in this house. That the tomb would, in the end, drive me mad.

“Father and I agreed that it would be best for me to leave. Go someplace and try and forget the tomb and start a life.”

She sighed and smiled.

“Of course,” she said. “I was never able to do that—start over. I tried, I even married two decent men, but in the end, I was always distracted by the mystery of the stone tomb and the being sleeping within it. I always knew that I would be drawn back to meet him on the day he awakens.”

“It’s supposed to open day after tomorrow,” I said.

She nodded, knowing that, and sipped her coffee.

We sat for a long time hashing over our lives while the afternoon turned to dusk.

She had drifted those twenty-seven years away from home. She had married twice but had never fallen in love. She had borne no children. There had been many jobs—secretary, bookkeeper, maid, nursemaid, store clerk. There seemed many other things about herself that she decided not to tell.

I told her about my own failed marriages, and my corresponding unremarkable career.

I shrugged. “Perhaps,” I said, “I sensed it would always come to this.” I nodded toward the stairs leading down into the basement. “Waiting for the tomb to open. My life’s true purpose, inbred from our family.”

Connie nodded. “The family curse,” she said.

Finally, there was nothing left to say. I helped carry her lone suitcase to one of the bedrooms upstairs. As she sat on the edge of the bed looking thin and worn, I asked if she truly believed that there was a man in the tomb. A time traveler.

After a moment, she looked up at me.

“Do I believe in him?” She looked up at me with a wan smile. “Why, of course. I am in love with him.”

IV

The Time Traveler

The next two days dragged. There was not much more for Connie and I to talk about. We suffered together toward the inevitable climax of our lives – the opening of the tomb.

Not daring to leave the house, we shared the stylus. While one read for an allotted hour, the other watched television. It was futile for either of us to concentrate on anything else.

Then, at last, the waiting was over. I woke up in the secret room at seven a.m., May first. Connie was standing at the tomb, swaying, barely awake. Her hand caressed its gray crevices. I came over and stood next to her.

“What time will it open?” she asked.

“Eleven,” I told her. The time traveler’s last stylus entry had been eleven a.m., May 1, 1931, recorded moments before he had stepped back into the tomb.

I went upstairs and made us scrambled eggs and ham for breakfast. We ate in silence, without appetite. After cleaning up, we lumbered back downstairs. It was only a little after nine by then, but both of us were beyond doing anything else except stare at the tomb and wait.

At long last, my watch read 10:59. Then, it happened. A thin line slowly etched its way around the top of the stone tomb forming a lid. Connie and I watched breathlessly as the lid slowly and soundlessly lifted, as if powered by magic.

When the lid had stopped rising, we stepped forward for a better look. Inside the tomb, a thick, purplish-blue gel held a long, dark figure—the time traveler! I could hardly breathe now and, when I looked over at Connie, she was similarly transfixed.

The gel started to emit a dim glow, but the time traveler remained still as a statue.

“Should we do something?” Connie whispered.

I shrugged. On his deathbed, Father had provided no instruction regarding what to do once the tomb opened.

But in the next instant, the gel started to churn. I soon realized that this was caused by the time traveler’s own movement within the tomb–he was pushing himself up and out of the gel as he had done hundreds of times before. So many thoughts rushed through my mind at that moment that I started hyperventilating. Connie must have been experiencing the same thing because I felt a rush of breath out of her trembling body as we stood side by side awaiting the time traveler’s exit from the gel.

When he finally pushed through, we each yelped for joy.

The time traveler had reawakened! It was all true! The ancient family secret had been realized!

When he turned to us, his eyes narrow and mean, the gel dripping off him with the viscosity of motor oil, like a fetus removed from the safety and warmth of the womb, I grew afraid. My concern quickly subsided when his eyes softened as he slowly began to realize what was happening, where he was. Although in seventy-three years the time traveler had not aged a moment, the span of time of between going to sleep and his awakening had not seemed instantaneous to him. He felt the long years of his sleep, and so his mind was dull and slow in those first few moments upon awakening.

After a minute or so, Connie stepped forward and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. By then, he was shivering.

“Are—are you alright?” she whispered. “I am Constance—the, the girl with whom you spoke while in your sleep.”

The time traveler scowled. His eyes were deep and narrow, and even in his present disheveled state, he was clearly an extraordinary man, handsome and strong and vastly intelligent.

“And this is Damian,” Connie said, “Kosta’s son.” The time traveler slowly turned to me. I nodded in return.

“What – what can we do to help you?”

Still sitting in the purplish gel, the time traveler stretched his mouth, yawned, then rolled his head around his neck.

“You can help me out of this guck,” he said. His voice had an odd, unfamiliar accent. I knew there was none other like it on earth.

“C’mon, Damie,” Connie gestured for me to come forward and help her.

As I approached, I reached for the light cord, but the time traveler stopped me.

“No light,” he whispered. “Not yet.”

With some difficulty, we helped him over the top of the vault. Connie threw a blanket over his shoulders and we held onto him as he stood unsteadily on the cold, rough floor. Underneath, he was wearing only white briefs. Oddly, the gel had not left him wet upon his exit from the tomb. After a few moments, he nodded, seeming to have steadied himself, and we began a slow hike upstairs.

In the kitchen, he winced in the harsh gray light of morning. It was eleven thirty or so, but the clouds were leaden and gray, and there was the promise of cold rain sometime that afternoon.

“Please, can you fix me something to eat?” he asked weakly as we sat him at the kitchen table. “Something light. Toast perhaps. And some tea.”

Connie found a small pot in one of the cabinets and started water boiling on the old gas range. She found a loaf of white bread and put two slices in the toaster next to the sink while I sat at the kitchen table next to the time traveler. He was coming around, getting life in his eyes. After a moment, he regarded me with gentle interest.

“You resemble your father,” he said, his voice foreign and exotic.

“He died six months ago,” I said.

Romal sighed.

“His life—it was good for him?”

I nodded. “Yes, I think.”

Connie brought him a cup of steaming tea and a slice of lightly buttered toast. She sat across from us and marveled as the time traveler sipped the tea and nibbled at the toast. Despite his weakened physical state, he was still quite a specimen, with sharp Oriental or Native American Indian cheekbones, a solid, athletic frame, and skin with that odd bronze hue father had described.

After a few more sips of tea and bites of toast, he asked for a bed. We led him upstairs to one of the unoccupied rooms. Connie unfurled the bedspread and removed the blanket from Romal’s shoulders. He mindlessly slipped under the covers wearing only the white briefs. He fell instantly into a deep sleep. I thought it strange that he would need sleep after sleeping seventy-three years. But, as he explained, awakening from the gel was an exhausting process.

“We have to get him some clothes,” Connie said.

For three long hours, the time traveler slept. During that time, I sprawled out on the old lumpy couch in the living room and dozed while Connie hurried to the nearest department store to buy the time traveler a presentable wardrobe. When I woke up, I found her sitting on the loveseat deep in thought.

At last, the time traveler came downstairs wearing the pants and shirt Connie had left for him at the edge of the bed. He seemed alert, completely recovered. He thanked us for taking care of him. “For fulfilling the duty,” as he put it.

He patted his belly and said, with a laugh, that now, he was truly hungry. Tea and toast simply would not do. Connie asked if he could use a beefsteak and a baked potato, and some string beans smothered in butter. When he nodded and smacked his lips, Connie promised to cook us a feast and left us alone to fix the meal.

After she had gone into the kitchen, the time traveler came over and sat next to me on the old couch.

“Tell me about this age,” he said.

I tried to describe what life was like today – outside, beyond this house. In seventy-three years, much had changed. For one thing, there had been another World War, designated World War II, even more horrific than the one before it, involving the entire planet, and ending with an atomic blast. Seventy million people or some such number had died. However, even that war’s end did not result in peace, and there had been many continuous smaller wars ever since.

I next detailed the incredible technological advances of the past seventy-three years. Jets that flew at hundreds of miles per hour; sleek cars that sped along superhighways; cities of glass towers; computing machines; spaceships to the moon and Mars and beyond the limits of the solar system; open heart surgery and advances in medicine that had made living well into the eighties a common occurrence.

All this, and much, much more that made today a far different world than the last one into which he had awakened in 1931.

From the kitchen, I could hear steaks sizzling in a George Foreman grill while potatoes were being “nuked” in a microwave oven.

“Sounds like it has become almost as magical as the time of our ancestors,” he said.

I did not know how to answer that except with a shrug.

“You are Atlantean,” he said, as if in response to my quizzical frown. “Like me. The Atlanteans—our ancestors—made the time vessel. There came a time when a disaster befell our people. Our guild of shamans, great scientists whom you would regard as wizards or magicians, saw it coming—a great rock hurtling from the dark nether regions of space, that would break through the atmosphere at great velocity and crash into the northern region of the Great Ocean with monumental force, causing an unstoppable flood to inundate and drown our land and kill many millions. We only had a few weeks to prepare. Some were sent on ships to the barbarian lands, in what is now Egypt, Arabia to the east and South America to the west. For three of us, the shamans perfected the protective, sleeping gel and fed it a message with their magic to waken us every generation, which to an Atlantean, has always been seventy-three years.

“And they assigned each of us to a caretaker family, whose task was to assist us in awakening down the annals of time into the future so that one day, when the time was right, the greatness that was the legacy of Atlantis, might be rekindled. After the three time travelers had entered their tombs, the caretakers and the tombs were placed on great ships and set sail for three different parts of the world.

“We settled in Egypt, in your year 10,764 B.C. During my awakenings there, I inspired knowledge in the primitives, until, one day, I found that they had become a great people over which I could exercise little influence.

“And so it went, down the long years of history, until today, when I seem to have awakened in an age which seems primed for the revival of Atlantean thought and magic.”

The time traveler sighed, clearly still exhausted from his long trip through time.

“I do not know what has happened to my fellow time-travelers. But because I have not heard from them, I fear that unlike me, they have not continued the journey through time, or worse, did not survive.”

Then Connie was calling us to the kitchen. The steaks were ready, perfectly grilled, and the potatoes and green beans were drenched in butter.

As we ate at the kitchen table, Romal made Connie and me tell him more about the world. We tried our best with a rambling discourse of our times: rap music, Super Bowls, ESPN, DVDs, plasma television, the Beatles, al Qaeda, Iraq.

“It’s the best of times,” I commented, “and the worst of times.”

Finally, when we had finished eating, I led Romal to the living room and showed him father’s old color television set.

“This,” I said, “is what we have been talking about.”

I turned on the TV and he stepped back from it as the screen came to life and filled with color and motion.He smiled and pointed to the set, saying a word in a language I did not understand, but knew at once it was the Atlantean word for television, or something like it.

He sat on the couch, leaned forward, and watched the spectacle. I turned to CNN, and the sordid mess of current news and political debate unfolded.

“The world is still at war,” I commented.

He nodded. Not much had changed in his ten thousand year journey.

After a time, worn out from the stress of the last few days, I dozed on the loveseat while Romal and my sister continued watching TV on the couch. Soon enough, Romal was using the remote to switch channels with the practice of a modern man.

Sometime later, I woke with a start, and saw—or thought I saw—Connie leaning back in the time traveler’s arms as he continued gazing at the TV. I also saw that he was stroking her hair.

It did not take me long to realize that the time traveler and Connie were smitten with each other. The night after his awakening, in fact, he slept in her bed.

For the next weeks after that, they were inseparable and made no secret that they had become lovers. They appeared to be roughly the same age – Connie was forty-five, and Romal, though a solid physical specimen, had to be at least that old. They didn’t hide their affection for each other from me, or in public, and held hands and kissed as we walked the streets of downtown Buffalo.

Romal expressed his amazement at how swift automobiles had become, in fact, how fast life had become in this the post-modern age, with superhighways, cell phones, jets soaring above us over the buildings even taller than the ones he had seen in 1931.

Still, despite the marvels and horrors of our time, the time traveler seemed mainly interested in only one thing—Connie.

One morning, after Connie had gone shopping to the closest supermarket about ten miles from the farmhouse, I brought up the obvious. That his interest in my sister seemed to be causing a deviation from his mission. He had already remained with us a month.

“How many have you had over the years?” I asked. “Women, I mean?”

Perhaps this sudden, sharp attack had more to do with a desire to protect my sister from getting hurt by him. He was destined to leave, in the end, and that would leave her eternally alone, pining after a lover who would not awaken again until she was long dead and turned to dust.

Romal took a sip of coffee, then looked up at me with a curl of a smile over the top of the morning newspaper. It had amazed me how fast he had become acclimated to our time. He was already following the major league box scores, and was especially interested in the New York Yankees, having become a fan of the game in general, and the Yankees in particular, after his awakening in 1931.

“In ten thousand years,” he said, and thought for a time. “Three. Your sister is the fourth.”

I held a stern look.

“Can I tell you something else?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“Each time I made the mistake of reentering the vessel and leaving them behind.”

“So,” I said with a laugh, “what are you telling me. This time, you won’t? You won’t continue your mission because of her? Constance?”

The time traveler’s eyes narrowed. Finally, they focused on me.

“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps its time for the time vessel to remain empty.”

“Has you mission succeeded, then?” I asked. “Do you think humanity is ready for Atlantean ways?”

He looked up at me with doubt in his eyes.

“I am beginning to wonder if that will ever become possible,” he said. “We are a legend among the moderns. Perhaps it is best for Atlantis to remain so.”

My heart raced as I considered what I was about to say.

“So why not let me take your place,” I blurted. “Continue your mission and go forward into the future, if for no other reason than for the pleasure of seeing what the world and mankind had come to.”

“You, Damian?” he asked. “You want to do this—to become a time traveler.”

“I don’t know,” I said, equivocating momentarily. “No, yes. I mean, the idea of it, waking every seventy-three years in the future, in a new world, does have a fascinating appeal.”

He let the idea sink in, then added:

“It did for me once, Damian, but now I must admit that I have grown tired of it. I want—I want a life.”

“You love my sister. That’s what this is about.”

His eyes brightened momentarily at the thought of her.

“Yes,” he said. “She reminds me…” but then, he trailed off, perhaps thinking of someone whose body had gone to dust eons ago.

My mouth had gone dry. To change places with him. To become the time traveler.

What was my life worth anyway? I had no wife. No children. No one to love, or love me. I had quit my job after the vessel had opened and had no desire to return to it or do anything except remain in care of the time traveler. I had recognized six months ago when father had revealed on his deathbed the secret of the stone sarcophagus that my life had been stuck in neutral until the time traveler awakened. And now, perhaps, I had found that the true purpose of my life was to exchange places with him and become myself, the time traveler.

He looked straight at me, and said: “Why don’t you sleep on it, Damian. Consider what it means. What you must give up. Then we can talk about it again in the morning.”

There was no more talk of it that day.

“Yes,” I blurted first thing the next morning. “I want to do it.”

I stood in the doorway of the kitchen. Romal was sitting next to Connie at the kitchen table, eating scrambled eggs she had cooked for him. They both looked up at me.

“My answer is yes.”

“Yes to what?” Connie gave me a queer, sideways look.

“To taking Romal’s place in the time vault,” I told her.

Connie looked at him.

“Damian proposed yesterday taking my place in the vessel,” Romal told her. Then, he added: “It was after I told him that I wanted to remain here with you, in this lifetime.”

Connie’s eyes widened. After some moments, she stood, came over, sat on his lap, and hugged him. Then, she looked over at me with a quizzical frown.

Suddenly, I knew, that I must do it right now, at that moment. Go downstairs, enter the secret chamber, step into the gel of the time vat, slowly immerse myself until I felt it all around me from head to toe like a warm, soothing bath overtaking my soul.

And sleep.

Without a word, I started toward the landing to the basement.

“Damian,” Connie said with some alarm. I heard from behind me the time traveler push her off him, his chair grinding across the kitchen floor.

“Damian,” Romal said, as he started after me. “No. You are not ready.”

I was already half way down the basement stairs when I stopped and looked back at him up at the landing.

“You must give it more thought than just one night,” he said.

“You want to stay here, don’t you?” I asked. “With her.”

Romal looked back at Connie.

“Don’t you?”

He nodded and reached for her hand.

“And have a child that you can watch grow up to manhood?”

“Very much,” he said, gazing into Connie’s eyes, “that is what I want.”

“Then you must promise to name him after his uncle,” I said. “And tell him to care for me when I wake up seventy-three years from today.”

Romal nodded. There was no mistaking my resolve. I had nothing to live for except this, entering the stone vessel and becoming the time traveler.

They followed me downstairs into the secret chamber. I stood for time at the brink of the time vault, its lid open, brimming with the magic gel that preserved the body.

“If you enter it,” the time traveler warned, “your life will be over. You will wake up every seventy-three years, once a generation, desperately alone each time. A few times you will venture out and remain a few weeks, months, and sometimes, you will fall in love.” He looked at Connie, then continued: “But something inside you, the vow you have made to yourself to carry on the mission no matter what, will compel you to leave, no matter how much you fall in love with that place, that time,” and he sighed, and gazed longingly into Connie’s eyes, before finishing, “that woman.”

The time traveler suddenly stepped forward and pushed past me. I watched in horror as, in the next moment, he inexplicably stepped into the vessel, back into the gel, and without another word, or even one final longing gaze at us, went under.

Connie screamed, but it was too late. The lid was already, irrevocably lowering, closing. As she rushed past me, I grabbed at her and held her back. She convulsed in my arms and by the time I looked back at the stone tomb, the lid had shut and the tomb was a solid gray lump of stone.

“No!” she howled, wept. “No!”

After gulping air for a time, she lamented: “Fool! I am carrying your child!”

She named the boy, Romal, and we called him Rommie for short. We took up residence in the old house our grandfather had built ninety years ago. Over the years, our distant neighbors wondered at the odd brother and sister living there like hermits, and the strange, bronze-skinned child they were raising.

We seemed content, however, if not completely happy. And patient.

I wondered if technology would make it possible for Constance and I to live long enough so that we would outlast the time traveler’s sleep. I also wondered what the time traveler would think of Rommie, his son. It was oddly amusing to consider that by the time he awakened, Rommie would be older than him.

But there are many years ahead of us to contemplate that.

Correspondence

by Ruthanna Emrys

Behind the slatted blinds, lightning flashed. I caught my breath, resisting the urge to open the lab window, and glanced at my subject to be sure he hadn’t noticed. No, he tapped away at his response keys, completely oblivious to the storm. If I’d gone into physics, I could be outside right now. But a psychologist can’t simply look up from her particle accelerator and take a walk.

Morning had been bad enough—the first perfect spring day after a tepid but persistent winter. Now as evening drew on, the thunder began. Good storms were rare on Long Island. Even with the lab sealed, the prickle of ionized air made me want to run outside and dance around the courtyard. A subject held up his hand for the next questionnaire in the series; I sighed and fished it out of the pile. The other two bent over their desks, pecking at their keyboards. Three lousy data points, my reward for resisting temptation.

I’d run out of patience with my stack of research articles early in the day, so I spent most of the session rereading H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. It’s a short book, and I came back from the silent beach of Earth’s last days to the sound of thunder and voices outside, the slash of rain…and my self-imposed imprisonment in the lab. I had time to daydream while I gazed into the rich, velvet light of the storm.

I spent far too much time reading Victorian science fiction, more of it the further I got into my dissertation. The old futures and outmoded theories drew me in. Airships and crystal cities, ether theory and phrenology, mapped the mind-life of a lost age. It was an age deeply flawed and never as civilized as it thought itself, but sometimes I wished I wasn’t too modern to believe in what it wanted to be.

What drew me most was the idea of the scientist as an adventurer. When I went to the library to add to my stack of literature, I’d sometimes take a side trip to the mezzanine, where the oldest journals were archived. The pages were delicate and a little yellowed; the leather bindings soft but sturdy. A biology paper might begin with a description of savannahs and native bearers: more travel diary than dry description. My data might have been more valid, but my methods section seemed lacking.

“It was in this frame of mind,” I scribbled in the margin of a paper on attentional capacity, “that I began to conceive of how I might partake in the wonders open to mad scientists while avoiding their tendency toward academic ridicule.” I nodded, pleased with the turn of phrase, too ornate for the modern ear. I wanted grand adventure, but tenure as a backup. Impossible, of course. I scribbled more—bullet points, diagrams, thoughts connected to one another by little arrows. I usually fleshed out my ideas this way. I didn’t plan on showing these notes to my advisor, though. In fact, I was going to have to white them out next time I had to Xerox the paper for a student. What the hell, it wasn’t like I was getting anything else accomplished.

The storm passed too quickly. As soon as my last subject left, I tore open the window and breathed deeply of the now dry wind. I ran downstairs to the courtyard, letting the past and future fall away in favor of the moment. It would be easy enough to let my fantasy slip away.

I thought of the Time Traveler racing to touch his machine, seeking reassurance that his memories were real and that he wasn’t crazy. I went back upstairs.

Humans produce ideas easily and prodigiously. Stuck on the World’s Longest Parking Lot, or daydreaming in front of my data analysis, I have thought of song lyrics, utopian social reforms, and plans for toilets that don’t overflow. By the time I have a spare moment, the thought is lost. The people who mark the world are those who, just once, manage to grasp an idea and follow it.

It probably said something about me that the idea I grasped and followed, if it worked, would change no life but my own, and in fact ensure that I would never do anything else of importance. The exact form of the idea also probably said something about me. In spite of my yearnings, I had never lived an adventurous life. I had never taken the most carefully controlled tour of England, let alone led my faithful retainers into the wilds of some unexplored land. The written word had been my only transport to the exotic. So when I personally sought to create a time machine, naturally I chose words for my vehicle.

I rarely found friends in the psychology department; people who knew the same things I did bored me. At need, I could call on a mathematician, a programmer, two physicists, a medical researcher, and way too many English majors. I didn’t know any temporal mechanics, but if I wanted to see the future I would have to find one. For what I needed now, I went to the mathematician. I wasn’t looking for Patrick’s expertise in fractal theory. I picked him because he was also an historical reenactor. He would know what materials were the most durable. He would also know someone who knew someone who could acquire and work whatever material I chose, and no one involved would think that I needed to be locked up.

“Stone.”

“Stone? Not some exotic metal?” I asked.

“It was good enough for Gilgamesh,” Patrick said. “What are you going to do about language?”

“Hope they know English. Either they’re smart enough to figure it out or there’s not much point. We’re not dealing with simple concepts like ‘Yes, we know what prime numbers are,’ or ‘Stay off the nuclear waste.’ I want to talk.”

The hard part was figuring out what to say. I needed something that would matter enough to the inventors of time travel that they would want to come visit me, right along with Jesus and Galileo and Heinlein. My temporal mechanic might work for a government or a corporation, might be a mad genius alone in a basement or part of some institution that I couldn’t imagine. Hell, he might be on a Fulbright. Knowing only that something drove him to want to touch history, and able to send only a single letter to get his attention, I needed to make him a friend.

“To the Time Traveler,” I began. I spoke first of the details of my time—not merely the events of the newspapers, but the way it felt to be living at my particular cusp of progress. I placed myself at the dawn of genetics, with all our uncertainty over what humanity itself could and should become. I placed us in the midst of ecological crisis, torn between fear of our own power and hope that our power could save ourselves and our world. I described the drought of the space age and the sheer density of information. I touched on the politics that would be labeled “history” only briefly, as they added to the experience of living in uncertainty.

I listed my qualifications for time travel. I read science fiction and could think sanely about change. I also knew the dangers of temporal paradox; I was willing to keep any necessary secret. I knew that they could only take me on if I was not historically important (and I was quite humble about the place in the scientific edifice of experiments where people try to remember what color sock they saw). I knew the difference between the laws of nature and the laws of my tribe.

Finally, I begged. “I yearn, as much as you do, to speak to other times and learn other ways of thought. Most of all, I need to know what happens next—at least that we survive.

“With hope, Dena Feinberg, scientist and forever a student.”

The carving cost more than I cared to think about, and I covered a good portion of it in barter. I didn’t relish the idea of helping Patrick cater pseudo-medieval feasts for the next three years, but if I was lucky I would fit those years in around years doing real medieval studies. He and the stonemason would both have waived fees entirely to know if my plan worked, but I knew that if I was willing to tell even one person, I could never be told myself.

I buried the stone for the archeologists and tried to forget about it. I had done what I could, and if it never worked, I had a life to live. More importantly, I had a dissertation to complete. I spent days in the lab with the windows closed, nights praying for miracles from my spreadsheets. The spreadsheets supported my thesis about the nature of memory for objects in rooms: I rejoiced and no one else gave a damn. The twenty-first century was less than a decade old, and I was steadily becoming more eager to leave it.

I took a weekend in the White Mountains, in a cheap cabin without luxuries like newspapers and television. The windows were stuck open, and I woke on Saturday caressed by mountain breezes. The only good thing about living on Long Island was how much I appreciated other places. If you had teleported me with my eyes closed, I would have known I was away from the city by the feel and smell of real air. I hiked Mount Lafayette, something I hadn’t done since before college. Just short of the main summit, the lesser peak overlooks a valley misted over with tall grass and goldenrod. It took six hours of steady hiking to get there from the base, and my peanut butter and jelly sandwich tasted like manna. At the summit I looked across the lower mountains, down the cliffs, until I had to close my eyes because they were full. I felt that I was in my right place, in my right time. Millennia had crumpled the mountains up from the earth like paper and would wear them away to plains; I had been lucky enough to see them like this.

Still, that night I dreamed of airships.

When I returned, two wars had started and several governments were threatening others with the creations of their own mad scientists. There was an editorial about the risks to human nature of immortality, and another about the economic benefits to undeveloped nations of low wages and bad health care. Even a block from the ocean, the air in my apartment felt stifling. It had been a warm winter, and it would be a hot summer. I taught social psychology from my advisor’s notes and learned how to cook venison. My dreams were full of silver cities, omniscient-but-benevolent computers, and gentle childlike people with British accents. In July, I received a package.

The package arrived by Western Union, in a miniature wooden chest with my name and address engraved on a brass plate. It was delivered by a teenager with acne, who made me feel old and glad of it.

“They’ve had this for over a century,” he told me. He looked like he’d rather be somewhere else.

“You’re full of it,” I told him. “People don’t say things like that.”

“My boss said to tell you. I’m just working there for the summer. I’m with you—I don’t believe it. I think he got it from a movie.”

“I saw that one,” I said, surprised that he was old enough to remember. “I don’t think it would work. Even Western Union would lose something after a hundred years.”

“Actually, my boss said there was supposed to be a key, and they did lose it, and not to tell you. Sign?”

I put the chest on the coffee table. It scared me. It reminded me of the little envelopes I got back when I applied to grad school. I never wanted to open them and find out that they weren’t what I wanted. If they were what I wanted, that was scary too. Sometimes the unknown was safer.

I went into the kitchen and tried to do the dishes. My hands shook: I chipped a plate and got water all over my shirt. I told myself I wouldn’t be any good until I let myself get disappointed. I would cry hysterically for about five minutes, take a shower and get on with worrying about post-doctoral positions.

The lock didn’t look too strong. I broke the latch with a hammer, and opened the chest. Inside was a single paper, worn at the edges and a little discolored.

My Dearest M. Feinberg, it began.

On reading this I fear you will be much disappointed, for the journey which was to bring me to you has failed. I have overtaken my goal and found myself immersed in the aging 19th rather than your youthful 21st. The currents we ride so far have carried bold persons only pastward; the yetward direction remains to be conquered in the age when I began. I therefore remain now, and likely no other journey shall seek your moment. I continue, with what resources are available to me, the research that may someday allow persons to meet the future other than in the ordinary course of living. I have friends whose discretion can be trusted and my living is strange but comfortable. Still I grieve the loss of your possibilities.

I offer you this small assurance: that humanity survives your time at least as far as mine. We have our crises, which appear just as insoluble to us as yours to you. These persons of the 19th also fear that they shall prove civilization’s destruction: it may be the common terror of all generations. We may all take comfort, then, from the survival of the past as well as that of the future.

I remain, with hope, The Time Traveler, scientist and adventurer and forever a student. The signature was an actual name, but in a different ink and illegible.

I wanted to believe. Ever since an elementary school “friend” gave me notes from a non-existent secret admirer, I haven’t trusted letters, and I didn’t trust this one. It was exactly the sort of trick my ex would pull—except that he was looking for supernovae in a Japanese mineshaft and didn’t know I’d been writing to time travelers. Besides, if it were he, then the letter would have told me I was going to invent mind control satellites or at least said something snide. Patrick had the resources but he called me “the girl genius” and found me a bit intimidating. He wouldn’t try to play with my head like this.

I lifted the paper carefully. It was brittle, and smelled like old books. For a moment, memory carried me to the antique store where I had pined over a first edition of Verne’s De La Terre A La Lune. The paper was of the same type, of the same age.

Looking closer, I saw that the writing was not any sort normally found on such paper. Old printing presses and fountain pens are both a bit messy, and even the best handwriting has some variation in the way letters come out. Except for the signature, this had more the quality of laser printing.

I lifted the letter again, holding it to my nose the way a Victorian lady might hold a letter that her lover had perfumed. I closed my eyes, and breathed in my friend’s perfume: the scent of must and decaying paper. It smelled like hope.

I’ve received nothing further from the past. The next week I got a thick envelope by the more usual methods, and I made arrangements to leave New York for my post-doc. My new home has clean air and plenty of thunderstorms. Of course, in a couple of years I’ll have to start looking for professorships, and I could end up anywhere. The future is always uncertain.

I wonder about The Time Traveler and his colleagues, all willing to leave their homes forever. Maybe humans of his time have regained the drive for adventure that seems lacking in ours. Maybe the future is even less pleasant than the early twenty-first century, and they find the past luxurious and civilized by comparison. Maybe they just want to live with problems they know will be solved, the only humans who don’t need to fear for their race’s survival within their own lifetimes. Except, of course, for me. When the speculations of those around me grow pessimistic, then sometimes…but no. My friend trusts my discretion.

I hope, though, that I’m not the only one. So many people have written of worlds to come, or given predictions and warnings, or crafted inventions. So many have tried, one way or another, to reach into the future and touch lives there. I hope that each of them, some time before the end, entertained a mysterious visitor—or at least received a short letter—and knew that their efforts had mattered.

The Woman Who Came to the Paradox

by Derek J. Goodman

Reggie stepped out of the light and onto the streets of Braunau am Inn, Austria. It was dark and the general look of the street seemed about right, but until he found a newspaper or something he couldn’t be certain that he’d arrived on the night he intended. He looked down at himself, making sure he hadn’t lost any part of his costume in his journey. It looked intact, but he really didn’t expect to need it for long. All he needed to do was walk down to the Gasthof zum Pommer and kill the newborn baby Adolf Hitler.

He heard footsteps on the street somewhere behind him. Reggie turned, afraid that someone out late at night had seen his miraculous appearance, but it was an old woman just now coming onto the street. She was hunched over and walked very slowly, but she looked up briefly at him, nodded, and carefully sat herself down against the side of the nearest building. Reggie thought she looked vaguely familiar, but that couldn’t be possible. It wasn’t like he had time traveled before. This lady was just some anonymous footnote in history, and Reggie had no reason to pay her any more mind.

He took a deep breath and looked around to get his bearings. He wasn’t nervous, not really. He was more excited than anything else. Here he was, only twenty-five years old and inventor of the first time machine. As soon as he had invented it, however, the government had swooped down like vultures off their perch and tried to regulate his brain child. He couldn’t have that. He’d used it before they had the opportunity to stop him, and he’d come here to prove his point.

In truth, he really didn’t care about whether what he was about to do was right or wrong. Everyone always used this hypothetical scenario as a test of morals, but Reggie only cared about this point in history because it was high profile. He would be the first person to completely reshape history as he saw fit.

The old woman made a noise that might have been a snort or maybe a snore. Reggie ignored it and started down the street in the direction of the gasthof.

A light flashed five feet in front of him, and someone stepped out of it. Reggie blinked, not realizing who he was seeing at first. He recognized the clothes as the same ones he wore now, except they were ripped, dirty, and charred in a few places. The face was more difficult to recognize through the smudges and blood, but as the person fought to catch his breath, Reggie realized this was him.

“Thank God I made it,” the other Reggie said (Reggie immediately in his mind labeled the other as Reggie-B). “You can’t do this.”

“You’re me?” Reggie asked.

“You from two weeks in your future,” Reggie-B said. “I’ve come to stop you. You can’t kill him.”

“You can’t be me. Why would I try to stop myself?”

“Because you have no idea what kind of changes you will cause. The destruction, it’s unimaginable. You see, if you actually go through with this…”

Five feet to Reggie’s right, a light flashed and another Reggie stepped out from it. “No!” the new Reggie (Reggie-C?) said to Reggie-B. “You can’t do this!”

“You’re me?” Reggie-B said. Reggie looked from Reggie-B to Reggie-C, trying to understand this.

“You from three days in your future,” Reggie-C said. “I’ve come to stop you from stopping you.”

“But why would I try…” Reggie-B began, but Reggie-C stopped him with a groan.

“Really,” Reggie-C said, “I don’t have time for this.” He shoved Reggie-B backward, and the light flashed again, swallowing Reggie-B back up into the time stream.

“I did it,” Reggie-C said unbelievingly. “I stopped myself from stopping myself. That means…whoops, I’m about to cease to exist.” And he did just that, vanishing immediately into thin air.

Reggie blinked at the quiet street, trying to wrap his head around what he’d just seen. Cautiously, he took another step in the direction of the gasthof.

There was another flash of light in front of him. “Really?” Reggie said. “You again? Or, I mean, me again?”

“No,” the new Reggie, just as dirty and beat up as before, said to him. “I’m not the one you’re thinking of as Reggie-B. I’m you from two weeks in the future, but not the same two weeks. An alternate possible two weeks.”

“Reggie-B2?” Reggie asked.

“Basically. Now listen, you can’t do this. You’ve set something in motion…”

Two more flashes, two more Reggies. These two looked exactly like the ones who had disappeared earlier.

“What the hell are you doing back?” Reggie-C asked Reggie-B.

“When you stopped me from stopping me,” Reggie-B said, “you ceased to exist because I never became you. But if I never became you then you never existed to stop me from stopping me.”

“Well I’m here to stop all of you,” Reggie-B2 said. Both B and C looked like they were ready to attack B2, but they were stopped by another flash as a version of Reggie ten years older than all the others stepped into the street.

“I did it,” the new one said. “I got out of the whole mess. I’m…” He looked at all the other Reggies and screamed. “No! No, I can’t be back here! I’ve become Reggie-T63! This can’t be!” He ran screaming down the street and disappeared in another flash.

There were more flashes all the way up and down the street. What had been a quiet road minutes earlier was now loud with arguing Reggies, each one trying to stop another from doing something at some point in Reggie’s personal timeline. Reggie, the original Reggie, backed away from the growing crowd. When he was far enough away from all the bickering, he finally heard the old woman laughing. Reggie turned to her and saw her watching the whole scene, cackling softly to herself.

“This is what you get,” the old woman said. “This is what you get for trying to mess with time travel.”

“What do you know about time travel?” Reggie asked.

“I’ve got about fifty years of experience time traveling under my belt,” the old woman said. “Don’t you recognize me yet?”

Reggie leaned closer. She really did look familiar, but there was no way…

“No. You can’t be,” he said.

“Yes I can. You can think of me as Reggie-XXQ78 to the fourth power. The ‘fourth power’ thing may not make sense to you yet, but it will. Give it, oh, thirty-three years by your time.”

“But you’re a woman.”

“That one you’ll understand in time, too. Fifteen years and a multi-parallel world continuity crossover crisis will give you the answer to that one.”

“But why are you here?” Reggie asked. “You’re not trying to change or fix anything like any of the others.”

“Because it can’t be done. I’m just here because I’m finally at a point where I can laugh at the whole sorry state of things. I can finally laugh at how stupid and egotistical I was. You are. Whatever. Sometimes it all still confuses me.”

“No, I can still change it,” Reggie said. “I can avoid all of this if I just do it right.”

“And you’ll continue to believe that for far too long. It won’t be until you become me that you’ll understand: time is far too powerful and complicated to be at the whim of anyone as unimportant as you.”

“You’re wrong,” Reggie said, turning away from her and running for the gasthof to complete his mission. He could do this without complications. It really wasn’t that hard.

The old woman chuckled. “Kids,” she said, and went about watching all the other Reggies try to make sense of it all.

Midnight at the End of the Universe

by Eric Ian Steele

It was Matheson’s thirteenth jump, the longest by far. He wasn’t even sure if the pod would make it. The metal egg threatened to shake itself apart in the tumultuous maelstrom of the timestream. He was more than just relieved when the spinning orb finally stopped revolving around him. Gravity reclaimed his chair, and it met with the titanium base of the otherwise featureless sphere with a hollow bang.

He took a few moments to adjust—the violent motion always made him dizzy. This time he felt sick to his stomach.

He removed his restraints. The chair’s metal base completed the circuit with the bottom of the craft. Ambient lighting flared around him. He depressed the control mechanism on the arm of the chair to open the outer door, and waited to see what lay beyond with baited breathe.

Cocooned within his sphere, it was only the barely perceptible purple aura of the ship’s unified field that prevented him from entering the timestream himself. It persistently occupied his thoughts during jumps. If he or any other object were to penetrate the field surrounding his chair, it would decay instantly. He had never seen the results with a human being, but during test flights he had seen a pocket watch suspended by a chain from the pod’s hull rust into nothing in seconds.

The pod’s oculus dilated without a sound to create an exit. When his chair had connected with the floor, the ship’s computers had automatically scanned the environment using tiny sensors on the machine’s outer skin. The readout on the screen attached to his chair informed him that the air outside was breathable, the conditions for an expedition optimum.

Even so, he grew nervous each time he left the pod – ever since that encounter with the Fascist Government of Greater Britannia in the twenty-second century. Not to mention the alligator population that plagued London after the Great Flood in the twenty-third. That had caught him completely unawares.

He chided himself. He had put his faith in machines enough to travel thousands, even millions of years into the future, yet he could not put his trust in a simple door.

The computer spoke to him. It revealed that his location had shifted as the planet orbited through space. He was now in downtown Chicago. But he knew better than to rely solely on that. The ship was as precise as it could be. It avoided rematerializing in space and would wait until the planet occupied the same location again. Sometimes this meant a gap in his voyages of several hundred years. Often it meant that when he did land, things were not in exactly the right spot.

He had found this out to his cost when visiting New York in the newly-named Mathesonian Period (approximately 3,500 A.D.). The city had fallen into the sea long before then. Humankind had been curiously absent. Fortunately the pod’s computer had warned him. He had been forced to jump forward a few more minutes (three hundred years in fact), by which time the planet had trundled onward. Had it been wrong, he would have found himself submerged at a depth of several hundred feet.

A much more unfortunate series of events had occurred on his last jump, when he travelled forward a few hundred thousand years. The exact date was somewhere around fifty thousand A.D. The air had been breathable then. But the ship hadn’t been able to detect the presence of enormous, intelligent arachnids that had taken over the world since mankind’s extinction. These carnivorous spiders had evolved to camouflage their body temperature from predators. Hence they were invisible to the pod’s heat sensors. He had been out of the pod only a few minutes before they attacked. He had barely escaped evisceration by the skin of his teeth.

Trying to put all this to the back of his mind, he stepped toward the oculus. On the lookout for more spiders, he descended the mechanically unfolding ramp, and found himself in an equally bare metal room.

He scanned his surroundings, wishing he had some kind of further protection. But this trip had been for academic study only. He had never dreamed he could get this far. Unwilling to take the chance that the pod would work twice, he had simply kept travelling further forward into the future before heading back for home.

The chamber was devoid of any kind of instrumentation. Only a giant viewing screen occupied one wall. It depicted an area of space replete with various stars and astronomical bodies. He watched the swirling arm of a spiral galaxy spin lazily through oblivion.

Then he saw it. Against the blackness of the screen, a solitary figure. His back was turned to Matheson—a long dark cloak draped over its body - while its head was topped by a polished jet skull cap. Fear gripped Matheson’s stomach.

The figure did not move. It gazed fixedly at the screen. Matheson now observed that the image in the monitor was advancing toward the viewer with a subtle forward motion. He grew convinced that he was on some kind of ship.

But if that was so, then where was Earth?

The oculus closed behind Matheson; a safety mechanism to ensure he brought no unwanted guests back with him.

At the slight metallic grating, the figure turned. It appeared to be human. It watched Matheson with bored interest, as if this was not the first time-traveler who had been here. And who was to say he was? He realized he had come so very far this time it was almost certainly probable. He had crossed millions, even billions of years. Indeed, the sphere was no longer capable of measuring the distance travelled. He had simply told it to go to the end of the line.

The figure took a step toward him. A faint glow from within the room’s semi-transparent walls illuminated the man. He was approximately six feet three tall. His skin radiated an intense paleness beneath his polished black skullcap. His age was indeterminable. He could have been very young or very old. His long, black cloak disguised the form underneath.

“Welcome,” it said, though its lips did not move.

“Hello,” he ventured. His words echoed in the vessel.

“You have travelled here in that?”

Matheson nodded.

“Through time?”

He nodded again.

“You must be one of the ancestors. They invented time travel. We never bothered with it. Far too dangerous to tamper with the timestream. And who wants to know what fate will eventually befall him?”

Matheson felt crestfallen. It was almost as though the man was accusing him of something.

“So you have come to witness the end of everything?” the man asked. “The end of time?”

The man took a step toward him. Matheson didn’t react. He noticed how fluid the man was. His movements graceful beyond compare. He glanced down two tunnels that lead off in opposite directions from each end of the chamber. Both were featureless.

“You haven’t seen any spiders, have you?” he asked.

“When they returned from the stars they wiped out the spiders,” the man replied. He turned back to the view on the screen. The galaxy was huge, bigger than any Matheson had ever seen, and it rotated with staggering swiftness.

“This is the end of it all,” he said.

Matheson found it peculiar the man could understand him - after all, he spoke what would now surely be a most ancient dialect of English.

“Telepathy transcends all barriers,” the man explained to the unasked question. “We are conversing in concepts and emotions. A much more civilized method of communication.”

Matheson regarded his host with newfound respect, and wariness. Obviously he was no match physically for this man. He was short and pudgy compared to the future man’s almost balletic athleticism. He studied the future man’s physiology. Two eyes with black corneas, a long, hooked nose, a narrow mouth, a prominent forehead. Large hands with long fingers. He noticed that the future man had four joints to each finger instead of three. He was puzzled. He had expected there would be more changes by now. Perhaps, like sharks, they had reached the perfect state of evolution. The man smiled, and the comparison made Matheson uneasy.

As the man watched him silently, he speculated upon the puzzle. Why hadn’t this man evolved further, if he was indeed one of the last vestiges of humanity? Why wasn’t he so much different from Matheson himself? Surely billions of years should have wreaked many more changes on the human body.

“You have many questions. I will attempt to answer them,” the future man thought to him.

“Can you read my entire mind?” Matheson asked. “Even my memories?”

“Indeed. I know all about you,” said the man. “And not just from your own rather interesting experiences. You are Matheson. I have read of you in the histories. You are the pioneer of time travel from the twenty-first century Anno Domini as you measure it. On your first experimental journey in the time capsule, you visited various stages of humanity throughout the ages. It was your discovery of the means to generate the Unified Field that made this possible. Your breakthrough led to the destruction of several major superpowers and the creation of the global state twenty-nine years later. Your indisputable proof of the many wars, plagues, and disasters that would wipe out much of human civilization made many commonplace theosophical doctrines and political regimes redundant.”

So I did succeed, Matheson thought. A strange surge of pride elated him. “Yes, but I can only go forwards,” he said. “If I go backwards I will return to the exact moment when I left. I don’t yet know why.”

“And you never will,” the man said. The knowledge deflated him, despite his prophesized success.

Silence settled between them.

“So what is your name?” he finally asked.

“You may call me Racoczky Saint-Germain,” the man replied. “You are in my vessel.”

“A spacecraft?”

“No. It travels through space, but it is much more than that. I shall simply call it a vessel. We are in the spot the planet Earth occupied long ago, before its atmosphere perished and meteors tore its barren husk apart. Now there is only cosmic dust and fragments of the moon.”

Now Matheson knew what the feeling was that had gripped him the moment he had stepped off the pod. It was the feeling of being in an enormous tomb. He was in the graveyard of Earth. Although it shouldn’t have, the notion depressed him. All that effort, all that evolution gone to waste. All for nothing.

Racoczky stepped up to the sphere, feeling the texture of the craft with his elongated fingers. It looked nothing more than a large metal ball bearing. It bore no exterior controls whatsoever. Even the oculus was set to dilate upon his own biometric pattern.

“I see your machine is actually quite simplistic,” Racoczky said with a faint trace of distain. “Obviously the rapid motion of the exterior of the craft generates the unified field necessary for sustaining the tachyon shield, thereby folding the space-time manifold and allowing for travel in the fourth dimension. Primitive, but ingenious.”

Matheson did not like the man’s patronizing tone. Did they have no manners in the distant future?

“Are you alone here?” he thought to Racoczky. “Are there no others?”

“There were others. They all perished. Died or killed themselves or translated themselves into pure electronic hums. Only I stayed as I am.”

“How big is this vessel?” he asked. “Do you have museums? Artifacts of what went before? I’d be curious to see them.”

“There is nothing,” Racoczky held up a long-fingered hand. “We have no interest in the past. It is gone.”

Matheson staggered a pace backwards, stunned. “Surely there must be something?” he said. “Books? Music? Shakespeare? Beethoven?”

“Gone,” Racoczky answered. “We have no use for anything but technology.”

Matheson stammered. He’d had no idea of the effect this would have on him. Now it seemed that art, culture, everything he held dear, everything that made his life worth living, had gone, to be replaced by…what? Soulless machines? He began to eye Racoczky warily. Was the man himself some sort of mechanical construct?

Racoczky smiled grimly.

“I am flesh and blood,” he said, reading Matheson’s thoughts. “But this is all that remains. These empty walls. My vessel is what we call a way station - an object removed from the temporal plane of existence. Here, we exist beyond space-time, no longer subject to the vagaries of physical laws, or the passage of time. In that respect, this craft is a little like myself.”

His eyes widened, “You mean—”

“I am immortal,” Racoczky said. “I neither age nor die. None of us have, since the first treatment.”

“Treatment?” Matheson repeated. “Then this is a medical procedure? An advancement of science that I might take back with me?” he thought. “Please,” he pleaded, sensing the other’s hesitancy. “You must let me know. Men have sought a cure for ageing since time began.”

Racoczky’s thoughts were suddenly shrouded from Matheson - a trick he supposed one learned through countless years of practice. He thought he saw a look of pity in the other man’s dark, piercing eyes.

“The treatment, yes. A vaccine against ageing,” Racoczky said. “We discovered it by accident. Reactivated dormant stem cells by the use of a retrovirus. It was offered to all countries in the Western world.”

Again, Racoczky tuned his back on Matheson to observe the final agonized throws of a dying solar flare from a nearby sun.

“Forgive me if I do not give you my full attention,” he said. “But it’s not every day one sees the final moments of an entire universe.”

“What?” Matheson gaped.

He had not noticed before, but across the vast gulf of space, stars were winking out. One by one, they disappeared in faint explosion.

“This is the moment you have waited for,” Racoczsky told him. “The end of the universe is here.”

Matheson stepped right up to the screen. As he watched, two of the spiral arms of a galaxy collided with each other. The whirlpool-like structure broke apart. In the process, an impossible number of worlds were wiped out.

“Look at that,” Racoczky smiled at the screen. “The last of the universe. Dying. Two hundred million years ago, the milky way merged with the Andromeda galaxy. Throughout the universe, galaxies had died, creating supermassive black holes that pulled the debris and space dust across the cosmos into this – one last, final black hole. Now it is dragging the last remaining star systems toward each other. In a few hours, they will reach critical mass and explode, just like all the others have done. I have been watching this for thousands of your millennia. I have seen countless burgeoning civilizations destroyed. Innumerable stars perish. We call it Charybdis.”

“But what about the immortalization treatment?” Matheson pressed.

“Oh, it worked,” Racoczky turned back to him with a somber face. “Our stem cells constantly replenish themselves, forever turned on. The body does not die, does not age. But let me ask you this: once every cell in your body is replaced, are you really the same person, or are you something different altogether?”

Matheson listened as Racoczky went on. He had heard his argument before, and had never been able to answer it.

“Do you stop being yourself? And if you are not yourself, has the old “you” ceased to exist? Each day, your body sheds thousands of skin cells to make way for new ones. Do you not then continually die each day? Can you say with certainty that you are that same Arthur Matheson who stepped out of that ship several minutes ago?”

“I—I don’t know,” he replied truthfully.

“I have had time to ponder these questions.” Racoczky said with an enigmatic frown.

“Where are the others of your race?” Matheson asked.

“As I said, I am the last,” Racoczky answered. “Those that went to the stars did not return. I think they have merged with the universe, which has become their final resting place. Perhaps they are at peace. Who knows? They may still exist in one form or another.”

“But you didn’t go?”

“I like my body. I enjoy the immediacy of physical experience. Every thousand years or so I download my memories into this ship - so that I do not forget anything when my brain reaches its maximum biological capacity. Would you like to see?”

He waved his hand over one of the glowing lights inside the walls. An instant later, a three-dimensional image flashed before Matheson’s mind’s eye. Another thought transmission.

Suddenly he thought he saw vast cityscapes - the like of which no mortal man had ever seen - huge boiling oceans of metal churning across distant planets. And men and women, reduced to a pre-Eden-like state, scampering through unruly jungles populated by gigantic fruits and vines.

It resembled Paradise.

It made him sad. Sad in a way he could not describe. He missed all the people he had known who had now died. All the girlfriends who had perished, all the relatives now turned to dust. It made him think of the cruelty of Time. He resolved that when he returned, he would give away his invention for free, to everyone who needed it. They would seed the stars of the future and the past.

One last question bothered him.

“How do you know that galaxy is the last, Racoczky? The universe is infinite. There could be more star systems, more planets out there.”

“My ship detects no more,” Racoczky laughed. “Our instruments are limitless in scope. Our wormholes can take us anywhere. Distance is no object. Yet now all my devices tell me there simply is nowhere else. The universe may be infinite—but its infinity is simply the absence of matter. Matter itself can have an end. And in seven hundred billion years, you’d be surprised how many planets you can explore.”

Seven hundred billion. So that was how far he’d come—to the end of it all.

It seemed so final, that he could put a figure on the end of time.

“Excuse me,” said Racoczky, “I must feed.”

He waved his hand over the console. The wall warped open to reveal a thin, transparent tumbler. Dark red liquid splashed into it from a faucet hidden in the ship’s mechanism.

“An unfortunate side-effect of the treatment is that I can no longer imbibe drink or food. I must have the raw nutrients direct from source.”

Racoczky took a sip.

Matheson felt his stomach drop. “That’s blood,” he said.

“A synthetic compound, yes. Cloned from my existing supply based on the DNA pattern of a human being.”

Realization rocked Matheson. He took a startled step away from his host.

“My god, you’re a vampire.”

Racoczky smiled, surprised. “In your terminology.”

Appalled, Matheson backed up toward the pod. But he knew it was futile; Saint-Germain could cross the distance between them in an instant. He knew it from the man’s mind. Unpleasant thoughts were creeping to its surface. The inheritors of man’s empire were its destroyers—these evil things had become the rulers of the universe!

“Be not afraid. I am no creature of superstition,” Racoczky laughed. “I cast a shadow, just like you. Once I was even human. True, in the first few centuries we did feed on your kind. We preyed on them wherever we could. But we were many and you were few. Out of necessity, we learned to manufacture what we required. Soon afterwards, all those who refused the Treatment gladly accepted it. That was how humanity perished.”

Matheson’s mind reeled. All the horrors he had witnessed, all the endlessly futile wars, all had been for nothing. Humanity had perished. It had not died out. It had simply been transformed—into what? Into monsters?

“You are undoubtedly in shock,” Racoczky said. “But in time you will accept the destiny of humankind is to shed what is human. Stay with me awhile. You have travelled so far. Now let us watch the end of the universe. We are a speck in God’s eye, about to witness the destruction of his creation. And I for one am happy to see it end. I have found there are no more mysteries to explore. I long for change. Now, this is that change. Watch!”

Matheson stared into the view screen.

Two massive black holes, simply fuzzy vortices of light within the blackness of collapsed stars, began to churn more fiercely. As he watched, the lightless chasms converged into one yawning vortex of darkness. Several small constellations of stars erupted at the rim of the scything hole. Fear seized his stomach. This was it - the final supermassive vortex into which all other galaxies had been sucked.

“Behold!” Saint-Germain announced. “Charybdis!”

The rim of the black hole - if it could be called such - suddenly blazed with light. Thousands of star systems imploded under its tremendous gravity. The resulting cosmic windstorm disappeared like celestial confetti into the gaping maw. Matheson watched with awe as the colossal black mass consumed the entire, swirling nebulae. Then even the dust was gone. The black hole swept the last dying sun into itself with a faint glimmer of a nuclear explosion, viewed from hundreds of light years away. All light vanished.

Only a void remained.

The way station lights flickered, reduced to ambient red, presumably in accordance with Racoczky’s telepathic wishes.

“In a few moments, the black hole will collapse upon itself. Then perhaps a new universe will be born like a phoenix from the ashes of the old one,” Racoczky mumbled, dreamlike. “Of course, the explosion might disintegrate us, protected as we are. This new universe will contain a new sort of matter—one totally unprecedented. In any case it will be billions of years before the first life forms evolve, if indeed this universe is capable of supporting any life at all. I have theorized that perhaps there have been many universes with no life of any kind. Those universes simply were—then over countless eons they also vanished without a trace.”

“I can’t believe this is all there is,” Matheson said.

“What more can there be?” Racoczky asked. “My world ended thousands of years after I should have died. Everything became so different. It was no longer the place I had known. And I too am different. I feel things and have thoughts I never would have as a mortal man. Whether I still exist as Racoczky Saint-Germain or as some cursed immortal being, I shall never know. And now, watching it all disappear, and knowing it may never repeat itself, I only feel isolated from every other living thing in the universe.”

He turned back to Matheson, “Except you.”

His hand crept onto Matheson’s shoulder. It was cold and hard. He realized how close he had been standing next to Racoczky in his desire to see more of the end of the universe. Had his immortal thirst truly abated? Was he satisfied with synthetic liquid?

“I envy your mortal span. The urgency it brings. But perhaps this new universe will rekindle my curiosity. For it is all I have now.”

Racoczky’s hand grew tense on his shoulder.

“The rush of energy will destabilize the way station,” he said. “You may not be able to leave for some time, so I urge you to leave now, while you can.”

He gulped. Some time, in Racoczky’s terms could mean forever.

“Do you have a sample of the Treatment I could take back?” he said, impulsively. “I could save unknown numbers of human lives with it.”

Racoczky shook his head. “All things in their own time. In your lifetime, there will be huge developments in medical gerontological treatments. You may even live to see the Treatment itself being used. But I am unwilling to alter what is your future—but which would be my past.”

He turned back to the screen. “I have been thinking. I have made some experiments of my own and I am rather confident I can create new life. I may even populate a few planets and watch them grow.”

“Wait,” Matheson said. He had almost forgotten, in meeting this singularly remarkable being, why he had journeyed this far at all - the whole reason for his many time-traveling forays into the distant future. “I have a wife, children. You must give me the treatment -”

“I can see you are determined,” Racoczky smiled. “Very well. I have a sample here—”

He reached toward another console, which lifted up to reveal a second thin vial of green liquid. Matheson stepped forward.

And with that, the universe ended.

A great pulse of light shot out from the center of darkness where what had been a visible black hole was now a seething, invisible mass of superdense matter. The gravitational vortex had collapsed under the strength of its own inner forces. Now particles collided, creating massive energy waves. The quantum building blocks of all matter imploded - creating new forms - forms beyond the understanding of any physicist - simply because they were creating their own physical dynamic laws even by coming into existence.

The shock tore through the way station. What were formed were not new stars or even galaxies, but something altogether unexpected and different - a new kind of universe - one that took on a shape unknown to anything that had gone before.

Racoczky’s eyes glittered with anticipation as some kind of semi-gaseous cloud rushed toward the ship.

“Please,” he cried out to his host. “I have to know!”

Suddenly Matheson felt himself pushed back toward his ship by the force of Racoczky’s mind. He was powerless to resist as he was lifted off the floor and flung inside. The oculus closed before him.

“No, Racoczky, I want to know!”

Racoczky’s final thought accompanied him inside the orb.

“Live your life as it was meant to be,” he said.

His screams were drowned out by the deafening cacophony of whatever was coming toward them. Would the ships defenses hold? The time capsule rattled around him.

Matheson focused on survival. He strapped himself down as the outer sphere started to spin. Racoczky’s mental powers were obviously working the controls. Again he felt awe for this creature who could so effortlessly pluck thoughts from his mind.

His chair rose into the air as the pod suspended its own gravity. The walls spun faster and faster—

He felt something in the pocket of his jumpsuit. It was the vial Racoczky had given him. The thin soup contained all the power of creation - or all the artificial means to deny it. A final joke, a reprieve for humanity, or a vile temptation?

He held out the vial, his hand suspended over the edge of the chair, just inside the unified field.

What would he do with the contents?

And Happiness Everlasting

by Gerald Warfield

The ancient man at the head of the table leaned forward. “I’m sorry to tell you,” he said, his jowls quivering, “that your brother, Charles, is dead.”

Eddie blinked. A chill settled in his gut.

“He committed suicide,” the man continued, gripping the edge of the table with his gnarled hands. “Lethal injection.”

In his mind Eddie saw a smiling Charlie, not the real Charlie, but a holograph that sat in his living room taken on the day his brother began work at Celestial Games.

No one at the massive table met his gaze except Jeremiah Adolphus, a sagging pyramid of flesh whose blotched, domed head was uninterrupted by hair, not even eyebrows.

“There was no note, but I’m sure you know about Charles’s depressions.” He gave Eddie a knowing look.”

Eddie hesitated before nodding.

Why had they brought him here to tell him—and why in front of the board? He had almost refused the limo that had come for him this morning, but he feared Charlie was in trouble. Maybe he locked himself in a lab or something; he wasn’t the most stable person. But that was the worst he expected: that they needed someone to negotiate with Charlie.

“And,” continued Adolphus, pointedly, “I’m afraid there’s more. It appears Charles did something quite remarkable before he….” The man’s eyelids fluttered, his knuckles turned white as he gripped the table. “Although first,” he said, after a deep breath, “I should ask if you have any idea what your brother did here at Celestial Games?”

Eddie spoke at last. “My assumption was that he designed computer games.” The board members looked at him with a mixture of pity and condescension.

Adolphus leaned back. His shoulders sagged, and he put his fingertips together. “He was developing an interface that would allow gamers to interact with the game using only their minds.”

“Okay.” It didn’t sound possible, but Eddie never understood Charlie’s work. “My sister and I always said that he was the genius of the family.”

“He was brilliant,” agreed Mr. Adolphus, and there were assenting nods around the table.

A man slid into the vacant chair on Eddie’s right. Glancing at him, Eddie saw that his long salt-and-pepper hair was unkempt, his skin sallow, and his eyes seemed to protrude from his head. Hunched over in his chair, the man twitched as his gaze shifted around the table. Eddie had once seen a rat in an aquarium with a snake. The rat was bug-eyed and twitched.

“He was not successful,” continued Adolphus. “And there would be no reason even to mention it now except that, in the process, he did something else quite unexpected. He migrated his—how shall I say it—his persona into our primary development server.”

“His what?”

“He managed to transfer his conscious mind from his body to the computer before killing himself.”

“You mean he’s still alive—conscious in there?”

“Quite so,” Adolphus leaned back, withdrawing into the folds of his own flesh. “He spent months constructing a virtual world that we knew nothing about, and then, last Friday at six o’clock he sent his assistant home, ate half a pound of Chocolate, inserted the needle in his arm, set the timer, and transferred his consciousness over to the computer. He didn’t even know when the timer went off.”

The chill in Eddie’s gut crept up his spine and the back of his neck. He couldn’t let himself dwell on Charlie’s last moments, not now.

“Unfortunately, he left no instructions how to get in and out of this world. With effort, we’ve been able to access it, but we don’t know how to get out again. It requires some kind of exit key.”

“I’m not sure I understand.” In the back of his mind a niggling feeling warned that there was more—much more. “And why are you telling me?”

Adolphus clasped his hands together. “We need you to help us.”

“How? Do you think he mailed me some kind of secret formula?”

“Did he?” asked the ancient man.

Even the rat looked up hopefully.

“No! And I’m not a programmer, either, so I don’t see how I can help you.”

“Oh, but you can, Eddie. You can ask your brother for the exit key. In fact, we’ll pay you handsomely for that service.”

“Ask him?” Eddie’s mind went blank. “You mean—I can talk to him?”

“Even better.” Adolphus’s smile was benign. “We can send you into his virtual world. It’s a small site; you’ll find him easily.”

Eddie’s pulse beat faster, but his response was cautious.

“Okay…of course, I’d like to talk to Charles, but why are you asking me to do this and not somebody who’ll know what this key thing is all about?”

Adolphus nodded at the rat who leaned back, put his fingertips together in imitation of Adolphus’s gesture, and continued. “That’s the crux of the problem. The virtual address is based on select strands of DNA. We didn’t realize that when we…”

Adolphus cleared his throat, and Eddie thought he saw a warning glance.

“In order to get you to the same place in the computer that he is,” the rat said, nervously, “your DNA has to have a correlation coefficient of at least .925 with Charlie’s. That allows for a clone, identical twin, parent, child or—in your case—a genetic sibling.”

“What this means,” Adolphus interrupted, “is that we can send you in to see your brother, and it’ll really be him. He’ll have all his memories. You’ll be able to talk to him about old times, inquire about family secrets. You’ll even be able to ask what drove him to his final act—if you want.”

Eddie sank into the chair’s white upholstery, a clamp on his right index finger. He desperately wanted a cigarette.

“This is just to establish the DNA sequence,” the rat man said. His office was small and cluttered with electronic components and little yellow pieces of paper.

Closing his eyes, Eddie attempted to control his growing anxiety.

“You know, he never trusted me,” whined the rat. “I populated his databases, beta tested and checked his heirarchization tables, but he never brainstormed with me like the other programmers do with their assistants.”

Eddie didn’t want to hear the rat’s complaints. “So after Charlie tells me the magic word I get out?”

“Don’t worry.” The rat made a note on one of the screens. “He won’t leave you in there. We know his profile. He’s very close to you.”

Eddie wondered: close and distant at the same time? At their mother’s funeral Charlie had fairly radiated his discomfort at being physically close to him and their sister. They never even hugged.

“So it’s safe?”

“Oh, yes. Even the others are okay…” and he quickly turned his attention to a set of monitors.

“The others?” Eddie was suddenly alert. “What others?”

The rat looked stricken.

“You mean, you’ve sent other people into this damned thing? Where are they?”

The rat opened his mouth and gestured helplessly.

“They haven’t come back, have they?” Eddie stood and pulled the clamp from his finger.

“They’re in no danger.” The rat made calming motions with his hands.

“You should have told me about them before that contract was shoved in my face!”

“We did,” squealed the rat. “Adolphus told you we had accessed the virtual world—and couldn’t get out again.”

It was true. Eddie remembered that part of their discussion. “So what happened to them?”

“It appears they went into a setting just like Eddie’s, but he wasn’t there.”

“It appears?”

“They’re just in a different partition, is all.”

“Suddenly, I’m not liking this idea very much!”

“They’re perfectly safe. It’s that DNA sequence that tripped us up; you’ll go right to him.”

Eddie watched the rat squirm for a few moments, then sat back in the chair and exhaled loudly. “How many are in there?”

“Three.”

“Jesus!” He pressed his back into the chair. “What happens to them if I don’t get the key?”

“Their—minds stay in the computer and their bodies stay on the gurneys.”

“Can’t you just wake them up?”

The rat sighed. “The process doesn’t clone their consciousness. It’s a transfer, a real migration, and they have to migrate back. When we have the key, we’ll send in their relatives, and then they can transfer back, too.”

“My brother probably knows you’ll try something like this.”

“Perhaps, but the company knows things, too. They spied on him big time. They knew he was up to something, but Adolphus said to let him alone.”

“So, were you a spy?”

The rat hesitated. “Supposed to be, but I just ended up an assistant.”

Eddie laughed.

The rat looked up angrily. “I didn’t get my bonus!”

“We’re almost done.”

Eddie lay fully clothed on a padded, elevated table, electrodes attached to his head, arms, and one to his right ankle.

“I hope this thing works.”

“Think of money. Lots of money,” answered the rat.

Eddie snorted. He hadn’t intended to finesse the board. He would have paid them to see his brother, but his natural reticence made him appear reluctant, and they upped the offer twice. It was all he could do to keep from laughing. He did not, however, feel like laughing now.

“Okay, the DNA sequence checks out. I’m starting the drip.”

The drug affected Eddie immediately. “You know, my sister and I always accepted that he was the successful one. What pushed him over the edge?”

“He was unhappy.” The rat’s voice sounded far away.

“Maybe it…,” Eddie’s words were slurred now. “…my fault he didn’t talk to me.”

A brilliant light shone directly into Eddie’s face. He grimaced and rolled onto his side.

What’s this? He stuck his fingers into the warm, yielding surface: a beach? Raising himself to his hands and knees, he saw beneath him pristine yellow sand.

As soon as his eyes adjusted to the sunlight, he looked up to see a long line of shore and, with some disappointment, a black drawbridge far in the distance. The two sides of the bridge were raised, and a tanker was putting out to sea. Another tanker on the horizon was but a tiny silhouette.

He got to his feet, brushing his hands, and saw a line of small white houses facing the water across a sandy road. Low palm trees fronted a few of the houses while scrubby grass punctuated the yards. Behind one of the houses, a neon Motel sign rose from a faded adobe structure.

Turning to face the water, he saw the ocean, smooth and unbroken like glass. Only if he listened could he hear the waves, tiny, little waves that gently lapped the shore.

He walked to the strand, enjoying the feel of his shoes sinking into the sand. Never had he seen the ocean so calm and crystal clear. Even from the shore, he could see the bottom, several yards out, rippled, like an impression taken from the surface. Close in, a blue crab scuttled sideways while farther out, a small, brown ray glided by. Here and there drifted the white blobs of jellyfish.

Nearby, a huge rubber raft lay deflated and collapsed, its flat yellow folds half buried in dry sand. The sections above the sand formed an irregular platform on top of which was stacked a pile of jellyfish. The interiors of the variously shaped blobs were alive with luminous and intricate patterns. Clinging to one side of the pile was a man-of-war, its purple air sack still inflated.

Only a few folds of rubber held the jellyfish, but the mound had begun to melt in the sun, and a small rivulet of slime crept back toward to the ocean. An odor, like dead fish, reached his nostrils.

At the sound of voices, he looked up. Children raced along the beach in his direction, each with a long stick and, on the end of each stick, a jellyfish. They veered from the ocean’s edge and ran toward Eddie.

Abruptly, they stopped at the raft and, ignoring him, flung the jellyfish from their sticks onto the pile. The blobs struck with a wet, plopping sound.

The children looked six or seven years old, four girls and one boy. The oldest girl, with blond curly hair, wore a faded red swimsuit, one piece covering her torso. The other girls, younger, wore only loose, striped short bottoms. Two of the girls were twins.

“Don’t touch the stick,” warned the girl in the red swim suit. “You’ll get stung!”

“Eww! Let’s get some more!” cried one of the twins.

They quickly turned and ran back along the beach, all except the boy, who remained, his stick still in his hand, staring down at the jellyfish. He was older than the girls—perhaps eight—and his lean limbs were darkly tanned. His hair, bleached by the sun, lay flat against his head.

“Jellyfish tide,” said Eddie softly. “Corpus Christi, the sixties.”

The boy looked up, his hazel eyes squinting at him. This was someone Eddie had never known, and he spoke again before he lost his nerve.

“I remember you said the beach stank for a week when the jellyfish melted.” Eddie laughed, raised his hands and shook his head. “It’s unbelievable!”

“So they figured out the entry code.” The voice was unfamiliar, and the boy didn’t smile.

“Charlie, is it really you?” He lowered his head to look into the boy’s face.

Charlie nodded, intense, hazel eyes shaded by a furrowed brow.

“Can you remember—everything?”

He nodded again.

Eddie let out a sigh, and straightened. “I’m so surprised. Why this place—why here?”

The boy looked out at the water, his eyes still troubled. “After we moved from Corpus I never saw the ocean again so calm.”

“I never saw it like this, ever.”

The boy continued to stare at the water.

“Please talk to me, Charlie. I’m here, and it’s kind of a miracle. You know, they sent three other guys in who haven’t come back yet.”

“Oh,” the boy looked back at the jellyfish.

“They’re hoping I can help get them out.”

Again, Charlie was silent.

Eddie sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “You know, when they told me what you did, it kinda pulled the rug out from under me, too. Was life so bad?”

Charlie shook his head. “It’s hard to explain. I guess when I looked over the hill and I saw only more numbers, more formulas, more algorithms—and nothing else, not another soul….”

Eddie gave a sigh. “Okay. I guess that kind-of thing happened to me, too. Only when I looked over the hill all I saw were more beers and more tits, pardon my French. Getting old for that sorta thing, but it didn’t make me suicidal.”

“Doesn’t sound much better than what I saw,” said Charlie.

“I dunno. Maybe you shoulda tried the tits.”

The boy gave him a dark look.

“Just kidding,” he said, raising both hands. “Besides, two wives didn’t do much to improve the landscape for me.”

The mewing of gulls distracted them. The birds hovered low, rising and falling with the beating of their wings.

“So,” said Eddie, tentatively, “none of your boyfriends worked out?”

Charlie clenched his jaw. “No, but it wasn’t their fault; it was mine.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Mom and Dad weren’t affectionate. It rubbed off on me, too.”

“I think I got all the kinds of love mixed up,” he said, “sexual, family, brotherly, whatever, and I couldn’t really deal with any of it. You know, one time I signed a letter to mom, ‘sincerely yours.’ That was too much, even for her.”

“But dad was that way, too,” said Eddie.

Near the shore, tiny fish jumped, sparkling and shimmering on the water’s surface. They jumped again, all in the same direction.

“I always wondered what made them do that,” said Charlie.

“Must be something bigger down there, but—don’t you know? Didn’t you program them?”

“I never saw what it was.” Charlie shrugged and returned his attention to Eddie. “It’s not fair to blame mom and dad. I was a happy kid; I didn’t feel unloved. It was only when I got out into the world that I began to worry that I was cold, or that I couldn’t relate.”

“So, what about going Catholic? That didn’t help?”

“I loved the mass; it gave me a place to go when I was sad.”

“But Charlie, you don’t kill yourself because you’re sad, or you’re lonely!”

“How do you know?”

“Hell, I’ve been lonely. I’m lonely and a failure, but that’s not enough to make me check out.”

“What if you knew, for certain, that it never, ever was going to get better?”

“Ha! I’d suck up a beer, and I’d light a cigarette, and then I’d suck up another beer, but I’d keep going.”

“Would you? Wouldn’t you just be doing the same thing I did, only taking a little longer?”

“It’s not the same.”

“It is, too! Have you had those lungs checked lately? Have you? You can’t keep on tanking your liver and carbonizing your insides without consequences.”

The other children returned, each with a jellyfish on a stick. They plopped their catches on the pile, looked questioningly at Charlie, and then ran back to the water.

Eddie said quietly, “I was too young to remember the beach gang, but I recognize them from pictures. The one in the red suit?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said, “it’s Vicki.”

Eddie shook his head. “Oh God! It was such a shock when she died. Can she talk to us?”

“She isn’t really there. She has no memories, no awareness. I’m the only real person in this little diorama.”

Eddie sighed. “Who are the others?”

“Geesy and the twins. I don’t think I ever knew their names.” Charlie absently poked holes in the sand with his stick.

“You know, Charlie, this is more than just about your suicide. It sorta feels like my suicide, too. I always thought that Vicki and I, perhaps we deserved what we got, but you—you were the achiever, and your success was our success. And now you go off and kill yourself. What happened? Were you sorry you weren’t a happy heterosexual, like me?”

Charlie chuckled. It was the sound of an older man. “I’m glad to see you. Really, I am.”

Eddie’s throat constricted. “Thanks, Charlie.”

“No, that wasn’t the problem. I always held back. They knew it, I knew it, and we’d both realize it wasn’t going to change.”

“Maybe that’s it, Charlie. Maybe you’ve got to accept love, you know, and you’ve got to give it back, too. And if you don’t, it turns against you, kinda like milk you never take out of the fridge: It goes bad on you.”

“Let’s see now: ’Love not given is like milk gone sour.’ Perhaps you could go into the greeting card business.”

“Come on, Charlie, think about it.”

“Why? Like it’s gonna do me some good now? You think I’m gonna learn my lesson, post-mortem?”

“Charlie, please!” He fell to his knees. “This is for real; it’s for both of us.” He would have broken into tears but for something he glimpsed to his left. “Oh Jesus!”

Charlie turned and looked, too. A toddler with blond, curly hair came from the direction of the ocean, his diaper dripping with sea water, his pudgy face wreathed in a smile.

Charlie turned to Eddie and shrugged.

The children had run back. Vicki, in the red swim suit, took hold of the baby by the hand, scolded him, but the baby only laughed. She looked up. “You’re gonna get in trouble, Charlie,” she shouted. “Mama told you to watch him!”

“Well, mama told you to watch him, too!” returned Charlie, and he grinned up at Eddie. “You know, you did that about every other day. You loved the water.”

Eddie could not take his eyes off the toddler. “I look so happy.”

The girl dragged him, none too gently, toward the first white house. It had a little, white wooden arch over the end of the walkway leading from the front door.

“I can see why you liked it here,” said Eddie, “where the water is calm.”

“You know, I thought I’d get bored. The sun never sets. The raft never fills with jellyfish. But every time I dash out in the water and spear one of those things, I get a thrill. Sometimes, I can even grab one of the big round ones with my bare hands and not get stung. And every time I dump one on our pile, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. It’s counter to all the neuro-adaption theory I ever learned. I can’t explain it.”

“Well, this creation of your own Garden of Eden, it’ll make a hell of a video game.”

The boy’s brow wrinkled. “Is that what they told you?”

“Well, I thought….”

“This is a perpetual life machine.”

Eddie thought for a moment. “You mean, you can start a whole new life in here?”

“You can’t go that far. The size of the system is limited by—lots of factors, but you can create a little segment of life, like this one. A day’s about the limit, and then you make a loop of it. The result is that you can live the happiest day of your life over and over—forever.”

Eddie glanced up and down the shore. The waves had grown enormous and broke in two long lines before crashing onto the beach; he could hear the sound of them up and down the shore. The children ran, squealing, in and out amongst them.

“We always got big breakers after a tanker passed,” Charlie said.

Eddie took several steps back as the tail-end of the waves scudded farther up the strand.

“That’s what they want to market,” said Charlie, “a perpetual life machine. Much better than a perpetual flame, don’t you think? People near death will pay anything for it, and their families will continue paying to keep it running.”

“It does sound kinda appealing.”

“Et felicitas perpetua.”

“I give up.”

“It’s from the Latin Mass. Et lux perpetua. It means ‘and light everlasting’ except Celestial Games plugs ‘happiness’ in for ‘light.’”

“And Happiness Everlasting!” Eddie pronounced.

“At first, it was just an idea I toyed with secretly, but then I realized the company was spying on me, and I made a kind of game of it, hiding from them. Keeping the key was just my final ‘up yours’ to Adolphus and his cronies.”

“So, if you don’t give up the key, nobody gets back, and they can’t market the thing?”

“Something like that.”

“What about you? What happens when they unplug the computer?”

“My existence terminates.” And with that he thrust his stick deep into the sand and left it there, poking up in front of him.

“Don’t you want to go on?”

The boy turned his head to the side and looked darkly down the beach. “This didn’t work out like I thought it would.” He crossed his arms in the gesture of an old man.

“Whadaya you mean?”

“I thought I’d come back and go through this loop a couple of thousand times, maybe more, and I’d get so bored that when the company got pissed off enough to pull the plug I wouldn’t care.”

“Aren’t you getting bored?”

“Actually, I’m enjoying myself,” he said grimly. “I think it must be a defect in the program.”

“What a shame,” Eddie laughed. “But then, maybe that changes things a little.”

“Maybe it does. You know, I didn’t really have a plan. I just thought I’d live my happiest day over and over for a while and then check out. But, now I find I really do care.” He lifted his arms, palms up. “I’d like it to go on.”

“Why can’t it?”

“I didn’t think they would figure out the genetic key, but they did. And by sending you in they’ve forced my hand. They know I won’t leave you stranded in here.” His voice took on a tone of resignation. “And once they get the key there will be no incentive to keep the program running.”

“I’ll make them! I’ll make it a condition of giving them the key.”

Charlie smiled. “Thanks, Eddie, but you’re no match for those guys.”

“I’ll buy the computer. I’ll keep it running myself.”

Charlie lifted his eyebrows. “That might work, for a while at least.”

“It’ll work for a long time. I promise.”

“Move it to another location. Hire another company to monitor it.”

“You know, Charlie, suddenly, I’m feeling very assertive.”

Charlie beamed, and then they looked at one another for a long while.

“You click your heels three times.”

“No!” grinned Eddie.

“It was my favorite book,” Charlie said with a little wave of his hand. “And then you say the name of my dog.”

“Shep?”

“I loved him,” Charlie said, softly.

“And that’s the key?”

The boy grimaced. “That’s all there is.”

They said nothing for a moment.

Suddenly, Charlie pulled the stick out of the sand and offered it to Eddie. “Why don’t you come and spear some jellyfish with us?”

Eddie took the stick, the grin still on his face. But then, “Naw, I’ve got other things on my mind. I’ve gotta twist some corporate arm.” He handed the stick back. “But one more thing: you know, that bit about love?”

“Don’t start that again. There’s no point.”

“It’s important, Charlie. We both had trouble with it, and we should have talked. In the long run we had one another all along. We could have worked it out.”

“Could we?”

“You know, I’m sorry we can’t get in this thing and just do it all over again. We could be best friends.”

Charlie laughed. “The ultimate virtual reality.”

“But even if we can’t, the rest is going to be different, now.”

Charlie nodded. “You still have some time left.”

“Yeah.”

“Me, too, in my own little paradise.”

“I wish you could come back with me.”

“Don’t,” cried Charlie. “Don’t make me sorry.”

“No, no. I don’t mean to.”

The boy bit his lip. “But you could come and see me.”

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

“And don’t forget that someday later, maybe much later, when you’re about to—you know—you could come back and stay.”

Eddie was quiet. “I’ll have to think about that.”

“Yeah, it takes some getting used to, and maybe your paradise would be different from this.”

Eddie’s throat was dry, and his nose started running. “Goodbye, Charlie. I’m really glad I got to see you again,” he said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “And I’ll come back and spear some jellyfish, I promise.” And then, he knelt in the sand and opened his arms. “Can we…”

The boy looked at him, a flicker of fear on his face, but then he rushed forward and threw himself into his brother’s arms.

To Eddie, the little body felt so small, so thin and frail. Eddie cried. The boy squirmed, and Eddie released him. Then he stood up and watched as Charlie turned and ran with his stick toward the ocean, the sand flying from his little feet, his hair blowing in the salt breeze.

Professor Figwort Comes to an Understanding

by Jacob Edwards

Professor Figwort made the last of his great discoveries at gunpoint.

By life’s clock he was now a reclusive but sprightly octogenarian. Fort Figwort echoed with the sounds of grey matter as he hopped from peak to peak. Leaps of genius, made with abandon. Nothing could disturb the good Professor here atop his mountain retreat.

Or so he thought.

Then one night, during a temporal thunderstorm that would have had even Doctor Frankenstein raising an eyebrow or two, the air around him warbled and a shadowy figure appeared. Figwort regarded it with myopic interest.

“Figwort,” a voice whispered, its timbre as of a fluttering kite. “Professor Phileas Figwort. I come to you on your night of triumph. I come from the stagnant waters of the future. Everything changes after tonight. Here, now, the hour of deliverance. So understand this, Professor: I cannot let you live.”

Figwort pulled in his chin and blinked several times, slowly. Wild tufts of hair poked out through the holes in his skullcap, lit green by the phosphorescent discharges outside. He looked like a tortoise.

“I recognise your intellect,” the shadowy figure continued. “I acknowledge your good intentions. But you walk the road to ruin.” The voice flapped and swooped. Figwort ducked. “In the future there will be no more food for thought. The brains of humanity will feed off each other like piranha fish in an ever-shrinking ecosystem. So understand this, Professor Figwort: your great work must be undone.”

Phileas Figwort cocked his head to one side, carapace gleaming, his brain on a wispy hair-trigger. Outside, the storm raged with thumping vehemence. A bolt struck down from on high.

“Here, now.” the voice sparked. “Understand this.”

Life flashed.

In the course of a career that planted him firmly amongst the Giant Sequoias of science, Phileas Figwort made three great discoveries, all of which went unrecorded.

Bearing in mind its ending, Figwort’s is thus a cautionary tale. Hope need not beget the child of expectation. Time contraceives and, in this case, the good Professor performed his magnum opus as a soliloquised swan song—three fading notes in the unwritten annals of history.

It all began at university when a titivated young Figwort inferred the existence of molecular sexuality. His inspiration at the time was Miss Prunella Bonsoir, a human movements student with whom he was enamoured. He wrote a rather soppy paper on the subject and slipped it under her door.

Not being of mind to tiptoe through the black tulips of scientific speculation, Miss Prunella perhaps did not appreciate the finer points of Figwort’s treatise. She leafed through it with brow daintily furrowed, her wide, discerning eyes picking out only two words. “Phileas Figwort?” she murmured, passing the foolscap to her best friend. “Does that have something to do with athlete’s foot?”

“It’s a love letter!” her friend shrieked. (She must have noticed that the flow of the handwriting perfectly mirrored the EKG of a pounding heart.) “To you, from Figgy Figwort!”

Mirth spread through the dormitory as if on the back of a collapsing domino chain. The letter was passed around and was even published in the student newspaper. Everyone who read it fell over laughing, except for Prunella Bonsoir and, of course, a mortified young Figwort, who vowed his revenge.

The resulting demonstration of molecular sexuality kept the newsmen titillated for several days.

UNDERGRADUATE MOLECULES AGITATED IN DORMITORY DELIGHT!

“BONSOIR, MISS BONSOIR!” COLLEGE QUEEN REVEALS ALL!

Amidst the scandal and the official investigations, people largely overlooked the genius that underlay Figwort’s discovery. In fact, young Figgy was driven so far as to point the cold metal finger at himself; but, having inexplicably misplaced his gun, found no outlet for this resolve and so turned pell-mell to a hot and hastily infused cup of something not entirely unlike tea.

It was then that he divined a solution to his new-found problems: he would travel back in time and stop himself from disturbing Miss Bonsoir in the first place—on any level, molecular or otherwise. Yes, that ought to do it. While he was there, he might even return those now-overdue library books.

Time travel itself posed no difficulties for a brain lashed by tannins. Figwort sat back, lips puckering. The idea popped out in a styrofoam cup. “All I have to do is break my temporal anchor,” he murmured. “Yes, and link my physical body to the intangible essence of memory.” He ruminated for a moment. “Of course. The limits are conceptual, not physical; and as the fourth dimension runs wild within the confines of my three, the whole process should be self-powered. Yes, just flip the switch.”

So saying, he made a face like a constipated owl and hopped back in time. “Oh, Prunella,” he exclaimed, ambushing his earlier self outside Miss Bonsoir’s dormitory and landing a featherweight punch on his own nose. “It was for thee.” He then grabbed the billet doux on molecular sexuality and made a run for it, grimacing as a new memory brought his former self’s pain flooding back.

With a reproving glare at his own retreating shoulder blades, pre-Prunella Figwort dabbed a handkerchief at his bloodied nose and muttered something uncomplimentary.

Suddenly remembering precisely what that something was, post-Prunella Figwort turned his head to make a riposte, but tripped, flapped his scrawny arms and with a startled hoot vanished back into the future.

Where and when he found that Phileas Figwort remained an anathema and molecular sexuality was still very much in the public domain.

Nothing had changed.

So what had become of his attempted hack job on history? Why had his life, having turned turtle, somehow managed not to right itself again? Figwort puzzled over this for a few seconds and then, like a burst of water from a re-pressurised tap, his brain was doused with newly created memories that had been carried forward in time from pre-Prunella Figwort. Suddenly, he recalled seeing his latter self trip and disappear; watching the now unattached sheaves of paper flutter poetically to the ground; reclaiming them and hotfooting it back to Prunella’s dormitory, thence nervously to flatten out his beating heart and disclose his feelings for the lovely Miss Bonsoir.

From his newfound vantage point in the present, Figwort massaged a bruise on his head and gnashed his teeth around a handful of aspirin. Unbelievable. Causality had humbugged him.

And this turned out to be a recurring sore point, for—try as he might—Figwort just could not deter his pre-Prunella self or change the disastrous outcome of his unrequited love for Miss Bonsoir. (Who, incidentally, remained bat-eyed oblivious to the temporal battle being waged for her by Figworts past, present and future.) Something always went wrong and, despite many valiant attempts, Figwort never managed to triumph in his tussle with history. He could save neither himself from Miss Prunella nor Miss Prunella from himself. Bonsoir sera sera, he eventually concluded. He couldn’t even take his library books back.

But in the end that didn’t matter. Time travel was quite notable in its own right, and as the world turned one way, opinions turned the other. Soon, most people were willing to gloss over young Figgy’s undergraduate faux pas. All that was necessary, in fact, was for Phileas to overcome that first great obsession—which he did, thanks to an accidental encounter between him, his earlier self and a discerning if slightly tipsy fellow from the history department. “One of you is from the future,” the man observed after watching the bickering Figworts for a few minutes. “Do come and see me later on.”

In terms of linear time, the lure of Prunella Bonsoir at first distracted Figwort and delayed his acceptance of this invitation; but the post-Prunella Figwort showed no such hesitation. He slipped back to the future and immediately knocked on the man’s door.

“Come in,” said the history fellow. “Oh, it’s you—Figwort, isn’t it? Go away.”

“But you asked me here.”

“I was drunk; and besides, that was weeks ago, before you came out with all that molecular sexuality nonsense.”

“Before and after, actually. You weren’t just seeing double.”

“Hmmm. Can you prove that? Tell me what I had for breakfast this morning.”

Figwort went toowit-toowoo and returned with a verdict of Eggs Benedict, his molecular indiscretions quickly forgotten. History bowed to the brilliant young Professor. Even the lovely Miss Bonsoir was relegated to a glossy insert in his biography, captioned:

Figwort’s Helen of Troy—the face that launched a thousand trips through time.

In truth, Prunella Bonsoir was the prettier of the two—Figwort could attest to that; but still he chose to move on, leaving Prunella behind in that timeless moment where molecular sexuality blossomed and Figwort’s own future was spawned.

Professor Phileas Figwort thus entered history as the pioneer and undisputed master of time travel. Having done so, he proceeded to make the first of his three great discoveries.

The idea itself took hold in ancient Rome, unfurling its roots within the bloody confines of the Flavian Amphitheatre; but the seed had been planted much earlier, when Professor Figwort first tried to explain how he went about travelling through time.

“There is no device, as such,” he said. “The apparatus is mental; intangible; conceptual. You just flip the switch and off you go. Once you understand how time works—how the timescape of the mind moves through absolute time cocooned in a bubble of linear time—it’s really quite simple: just recalibrate your mind, reorientate yourself and go.”

In those early days, before the advent of Professor Figwort’s second great obsession, history unrolled like a red carpet before him. Famous people. Great mysteries. World-shaping events. Time travel opened up all sorts of possibilities and Figwort explored them all, jumping wheresoever his curiosity led. What a hoot!

But then came the incident at the Flavian Amphitheatre, one dusty red day in the reign of the Emperor Nero. An angry sun cast shadows upon the arena. Figwort wore a toga and spoke Latin as if it were his mother tongue.

“Habet, hoc habet!” somebody cried when a left-handed secutor turned his ankle on a half-buried panther rib, thereby succumbing to the net of his retiarius opponent. The fallen gladiator raised a finger in surrender. Chins bulging beneath puffy eyes, Nero broke from his post-lunch doze and turned to Figwort, who frantically gave the thumbs-up. Unfortunately for the secutor, this didn’t have the effect that Figwort had intended. Nero mirrored the signal. The retiarius drove his trident into the net. Blood flowed.

Figwort hurled himself blinking back into the future, vomiting as he went, staining the passage of time as the boos and jeers of the crowd jabbed accusingly at his ears. What had just happened? Why had the secutor been killed? It took him several hours of soul-searching research to uncover the truth: in ancient times, the question being asked of the Emperor was not, ‘Shall I spare him?’ It was, ‘Shall I kill him?’ A leftover rib had brought the gladiator undone. Figwort had condemned him to death.

It was a misunderstanding, nothing more; a well-intentioned ‘yes’ delivered in the wrong cultural framework. Figwort clawed at the toga and ran trembling fingers through his wild hair. Could life really hang by so slender a thread?

It was then that the realisation hit him. It spun him around and laid him out flat. Communication, Figwort thought, the sands of time forever bloodied. Communication is the source of all mankind’s problems.

This, then, was the first of the Professor’s great discoveries—a sobering notion. So simple. So poignant. And, just like Miss Bonsoir, it led Figwort a merry dance straight down the path of obsession. Fifty years later the professor found himself talking earnestly to an orangutan named Oswald.

This time there was no going back.

Oswald, despite the name, was a female orangutan with muppet arms and beautiful black eyes. Her orange-brown hair was frizzy and reminiscent of Figwort’s. She loved to eat pears.

Oswald had been a regular visitor over the last decade, brachiating across from the neighbouring sanctuary where orangutans roamed free and cared not at all about the temporal thunderstorms that occasionally lit up Fort Figwort. She would come in through the window and steal Figwort’s slippers. She frequently turned her stooped appraisal upon the open refrigerator. She pulled her cheeks back and grunted merrily whenever Figwort dropped something on his foot.

They were practically married.

But all of this was quite some way in Figwort’s future—speaking, of course, in terms of personal, linear time. For many years, he carried alone the burden of that first great discovery. Figwort became more and more reclusive. An oddball, people said. A fruitcake soaked to next Christmas. But how could they know? What could they hope to understand? Communication—that was the problem.

Figwort spent the first decade verifying his insight. He travelled back in time and studied the calamities of the past. From pointed fingers to pointless wars, from misguided politics to guided missiles. Good intentions, bad inventions. A paradise lost in patter, bereft of all meaning. Even where two parties shared a cultural framework, still the potential was great for obfuscation. Communication was so imprecise.

Figwort continued to investigate, delving further back into history and humouring both evolutionists and creationists; but he found the humour to be equally dark—a cosmic joke. Whether it be cavemen fighting over animal skins or God’s children coveting the forbidden fruit, everywhere it was the same.

Everywhere and everywhen—misunderstanding.

People said that language was alive; but it was more than that. It was, in fact, the very breath of life. And with life came death, ipso facto, shrouded in nuance and forever converging like the incisions of a forked tongue. Overtones. Undertones. The one thing you could bank on was less than total comprehension. Now, Professor Figwort lived each day with the death of the secutor he unwittingly had condemned to a garbled foreclosure; but increasingly he felt that he carried as well the responsibility to make good on mankind’s overdrawn destiny. If only he could help people to understand.

For several years, he thought the answer might lie with telepathy; but in the end that was just specious thinking. Telepathy was still founded in language. It relied on an exchange of concepts and thus was vulnerable to misconception. Telepathy would not have stopped Hitler or averted the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was too much a product of the conscious mind, open to interpretation; to perversion. What was needed, Professor Figwort concluded after a disheartening conversation with Joan of Arc, was something that stripped the brain of its prevaricating layers. Something that probed beyond the cerebral cortex and isolated the intent upon which words and concepts were founded. Something that tapped into the very essence of meaning.

Something that, had he possessed it in his university days, would have allowed young Phileas to connect with Miss Prunella Bonsoir—to speak his mind, as it were—and thereby avert the disastrous course of events that had since overtaken him.

Ah, to live an ordinary life; the humdrum, no conundrum. But Figwort was caught in a halfway state—impotent, verging on omniscient. If only he could solve the puzzle. If only he could spare others the torment of communication gone wrong.

For decades Professor Figwort sought a deliverance, chasing after the dream with all the manic-depressive zest of a cerebral alchemist. He muttered. He scribbled. He purchased an island in the Malay Archipelago and locked himself away, the model exemplar for crazed scientific endeavour.

The answer was there, somewhere inside his mind, and Figwort tore out most of his hair looking for a way in. He burnt the candle at both ends; became waxy in complexion. Even when he heard that Miss Bonsoir had passed away—the virgin queen of molecular sexuality, as serene in eternal sleep as she had been in her college days—still, Figwort merely pursed his lips and stared out at the rainforest beyond. Such was the way of things. Life. Death. Words without meaning, feeding off each other; malleable; ever-shifting, like the slippery vowels of ‘Ouroboros’.

Professor Figwort haunted himself in solitude, pacing the corridors of a troubled mind and occasionally popping back through history to see what Aquila had eaten for lunch that day. Outside, the sky grumbled and rain fell steadily. The orangutans held leafy branches over their heads—all except Oswald, who long since had purloined Figwort’s umbrella. Time moved on. Before he knew it, Phileas Figwort had spent half a lifetime consumed by his second great obsession.

Then came the breakthrough.

Twilight had fallen and Professor Figwort was contemplating a lone sprig of broccoli. He stared at it with the dull gaze of a man serving penance. He regarded it with solemn distaste. Observe, he told himself. A vegetable suspended in time and impaled here upon my fork. Its colour is ambiguous, just shades of green, but its taste is unmistakable. He closed his mouth around the broccoli and chewed with sour appreciation. A mistake to taste, perhaps, but unmistakable in taste. Yes.

Suddenly, Figwort’s eyes bulged and he spat the offending mouthful onto his plate. “Of course!”—he thumped the table— “It’s all about taste.” Then, eyeing the half-chewed broccoli: “Or lack of taste. Whatever. Thoughts are like food; food for thought, ha-ha! You can only tell so much from their look, shape, colour…Yes, yes…But if I can link the formation and vocalisation of an idea to its taste—to the essence of its meaning. Yes, it should be possible. All I need is to pin down the brain somehow. To isolate and impale each thought at the point of conception. After that, it’s just a matter of psycho-gustation.”

Thus was revealed the second of Professor Figwort’s great discoveries: that communication, through taste, may be filtered to the point of absolute purity.

Imagination having taken hold, Figwort worked like a Once-ler. In no time at all he had constructed three prototype devices—each capable of making thoughts tasty and then of tasting them. Tomorrow, he would test these taste helmets, and soon he would make his third great discovery, thereby ending the tragic tale of Phileas Figwort.

Merci, Miss Bonsoir. Figwort opened the window and went to bed. Thank you and goodnight.

The conclusion would be swift.

A new day dawned over Fort Figwort, as was common practice, the dawn rays travelling some 150 million kilometres from a fixed point before breaking with uncanny precision through the uppermost leaves of the glistening rainforest. The orangutans stirred in their treetop nests. Time passed slowly and, heard only by those who cared to listen, the universe spoke.

“Early one morning,” sang Professor Figwort—who was one of the many people not listening— “…just as the sun was dawning, I heard a maiden think in the valley below: ‘I can’t deceive thee. You must believe me. Phileas Figwort has caught my thoughts so.’”

Oswald had by this time snuck into the bathroom and was grooming herself with the professor’s hairdryer. Figwort lured her away with a bowl of cornflakes.

“Here we go,” he said, pulling the skullcap over her sparse pate. “Bon appétit.”

Oswald stopped chewing and rolled her eyes up, her expression one of refined deliberation. She scratched her head through one of the holes in the skullcap and then turned her attention back to the cornflakes. Professor Figwort chuckled and donned his own skullcap. He looked as if he were about to take a shower.

“It works like this,” Figwort explained, plucking an orange from atop a cannonball mound of oranges on the table. “Now, let’s pretend that you’ve just asked me for a mandarin. In the regular course of events, I would either have to assume that by ‘mandarin’ you really meant ‘orange’—in which case I’d pass you one—or that you actually thought there were mandarins among the oranges and that you specifically wanted one of those—in which case I’d have to say no. But you see, there is ambiguity. I would need to ask for clarification…”—Figwort regarded the orange, lips puckered as if he’d just cleaned out the horn of plenty— “…but not with the thought helmets. Right now, our every utterance is being pinned down at the point of conception, so that what we hear is not just the word itself but the very essence of what lies beneath it. Do you see?” Figwort frowned, a quicksilver shadow of doubt flickering at the periphery of his great vision. “Oswald, can you understand me? This is of the utmost scientific significance. Pay attention, now. I want you to reach out and shake my hand.”

Oswald regarded the professor’s outstretched palm, her jaws spread but her lips pursed. She looked to the left, then the right, and then passed him the salt.

“Very funny,” said Figwort. “Good. But listen carefully, Oswald, and behold—behold the fruit of my labour, ha-ha!—for within this orange lie the seeds of our salvation. Perfect communication. Just think: if you ask me for a mandarin then I know precisely what you mean. I know what you want and even why you want it; whether you intend to eat the orange or just throw it at my head; whether you asked out of politeness, hunger or curiosity—these things are just nuances of thought-flavour, and with the thought helmets we can taste them all. You could even ask me in Javanese, though I don’t speak it and have no desire to. There’s no need. Not anymore. Through use of the Pithwort Thought Helmet there will be no more misunderstanding. Isn’t it extraordinary?”

Oswald pulled back her lips and grinned at him. She picked up the bowl of cornflakes and drained the last of the milk.

“Hmm,” Figwort frowned, tapping at his teeth with one finger like a novice would a piano. “Given your new-found understanding, I find this lazzi act to be in poor taste, Oswald. The least you could do is acknowledge the success of my endeavours.”

Caught in a display of poor etiquette, the orangutan peered out guiltily from behind the raised bowl, head bowed, her chins bunched. Figwort gazed sternly into those dark orbs and suddenly saw reflected there the spark of inspiration.

“Ah-ha!” the Professor ignited, slapping his palm on the table. Oswald dropped the bowl. “It was you. I’m sure of it.”

Blinking wildly, Professor Figwort flapped off to the Flavian Amphitheatre, where indeed he confirmed the clue that had sheltered for so long beneath a leafy branch of his subconsciousness: several pears were missing from the sleeping Emperor’s fruit platter.

“You can understand me, can’t you?” Figwort demanded as he popped back into absolute time. Oswald looked abashed. “Then I think I should tell you that I left a bowl full of pears on this table exactly one week ago. They disappeared, and I know it was you who took them…”—Figwort gave Oswald a shrewd look— “…but now I’m not sure exactly when you took them. Do you think you might like to travel through time, Oswald? It’s quite easy, once you understand how time works—how the timescape of the mind moves through absolute time cocooned in a bubble of linear time…”

Oswald regarded him with mouth closed and jaw dropped, her eyes searching the room. Then she blinked rapidly and disappeared, returning a few moments later with her mouth full of juicy pear, her beautiful eyes raised innocently to the heavens.

Professor Figwort smiled at her affectionately. “Oswald,” he said, “this is perhaps the single most important scientific discovery ever made. We’re going to change the world.”

Oswald nodded her head sagely and kept chewing. Time would tell.

Professor Figwort made the last of his great discoveries that night, a gun to his head as the universe sang and understanding exploded into his mind. Lightning struck. Life flashed. Figwort frowned indignantly.

“You’re me from the future,” he protested. “But this is most peculiar. I’ve only ever remembered meeting myself retrospectively, after I’ve travelled back and met me. To experience it first-person, before I’ve become the second person. It doesn’t make sense.”

“But I’m not you from the future,” the voice whispered. “I’m a part of you as you stand tonight, in absolute time. I am the product of misgivings that would have made you wise only in hindsight. But now that you wear the Pithwort Thought Helmet…”—Figwort instinctively ducked beneath hand and elbow, shielding his invention— “…you possess perfect clarity of thought. You may give voice to your reservations and heed the dire warnings of your subconscious mind. I am your new-found foresight, Professor; now understand this: I must stop you from making this terrible mistake.”

Figwort extended his middle finger and tapped it staccato against the workbench. “There is no mistake. This is mankind’s salvation. And besides…”—he gestured to encompass the scrawled notes and prototype skullcaps; his life’s work— “…what’s done is done and cannot be undone. I’ve tried it before. You can’t change anything.”

“You cannot alter the past from a vantage point in its relative future, that’s true; but I am not from the future, Professor, and this is not my past. I am you, Phileas—I am you, now—and I give you the perspicacity to make that decision—not later, but now.” Figwort pursed his lips and dropped his jaw. The air warbled once again. “Absolute purity of communication, Professor—it is indeed the most precious of elixirs; but only insofar as it allows you to destroy that very gift. You wear the Pithwort Thought Helmet, Professor, so understand this: you must muddy the waters once more.”

“Hogwash!” Figwort exclaimed. “Unadulterated pig swill. Misunderstandings have plagued the human race since time immemorial. Disagreements become arguments become fights become wars; friends fall out and loved ones turn on each other; but I hold here the solution.”—he scooped up the remaining skullcaps and screwed up his face— “Watch, I’ll prove it to you.”

So saying, Professor Figwort left his second thoughts behind and popped back in time. He reappeared several hours later, muddy and bedraggled and clasping both hands to his carapaced head. “No! No, it can’t be true.”

“But it is,” the voice hissed, swooping like a bat from the belfry above. “The Pithwort Thought Helmet isolates your doubts and pins them down for you to behold. Taste them, Professor, and understand this: language is alive and it is the force that lies behind imagination. To purify is to sterilise. To sterilise is to kill. New thoughts cannot breathe in the vacuum of certainty. Doom, Phileas—with perfect communication comes doom.”

Figwort shook his head slowly. “I suppose with prolonged exposure…But that’s abusing the process. It’s like a drug addiction. There must be other, more viable applications. Miscommunication is the problem—I know it is—so how can perfect understanding not be the solution? Perhaps if use of my device were restricted to high-level talks—to issues of great importance. Yes, yes that would do it. Perfect communication is wasted on mundane matters, that’s all.”

“But who would decide?” the voice whispered, insidious in its appeal to reason.

“I would, of course. Someone with understanding…”—Figwort paused and looked, somewhat wildly, around the silent room— “Fine. I’ll show you.”

The professor vanished once more and returned after a deathly pause, a tear welling in his eye and spilling over, his sadness as pure as anything created in this timeless universe of ours.

“I’m sorry,” Figwort mouthed. His lips moved in synch with the voice of foresight, now redundant. “I’m sorry.”

History will not record that Figwort burnt all his papers that night, or that he cauterised the open wound of time by destroying the thought helmets and flinging their mangled remains into the fiery abyss of Mount Vesuvius. Indeed, when the temporal thunderstorm finally cleared, it transpired that the good professor had left nothing to posterity beyond his early works and a short, hand-written note—an enigmatic postscript to his unwritten tragedy:

Sometimes it’s better not to know.

History will not record it, but Professor Figwort made the last of his great discoveries during the course of that long, long night. Illuminated by phosphorescent strikes and drowning in a torrent of understanding, he leapt with abandon through the intellectual maelstrom, the world sheltering in ignorance (if not bliss) as he opened himself to a knowledge best forgotten.

The end came quickly for Phileas Figwort—or so it could be said, depending on where in time one places the beginning; for, to the last, Figwort remained the product of his own actions, consumed by history and caught up forever in a digestive cycle of obsessions.

Time contraceives and the end came quickly—but not before Professor Figwort made a few lengthy digressions.

Having jumped with no specific destination in mind, Figwort emerged just west of Ancient Babylon and several feet above the earth’s surface (as it was then situated in absolute time). He looked around and honked like an overweight goose as his trousered undercarriage dropped into the Euphrates River.

“Hogwash,” he reiterated, and then clambered up onto the dry muddy banks. “Pig swill.”

It was a sweltering day in Mesopotamia, the sun lording itself overhead while rocky mountains baked off in the distance. A lone goat regarded the professor from the shade of a date palm. History shimmered.

Figwort set out in the direction of the nearby city, still muttering to himself, and soon came to a small dwelling made of mud bricks. Drawn by the sound of crying, he ducked inside, where he found a dark-skinned woman holding a struggling infant to her bare breast. The baby’s face was puckered like a stewed apple. The woman looked harrowed.

“Don’t worry.” Figwort slipped a skullcap onto her head. “The Pithwort Thought Helmet will let you talk with your child. You will understand each other perfectly.” He placed the second skullcap like a lampshade over the baby’s head. “Do you hear? He’s in pain. Trapped wind, I suppose.”

The woman turned away, transferring the little boy to her shoulder and patting him soothingly on the back. With her free hand she pulled at the coarse fabric of her open tunic. “I thought he was hungry,” she murmured, eyes downcast.

Although her speech was foreign, Figwort tasted its essence and found that he understood the woman—not merely the surface meaning of her words but also her underlying embarrassment at having been looked upon in a state of immodesty.

“Goodness me!” Figwort stumbled backwards. “Please excuse me—Ouch!”—he knocked his head on the low doorway— “I didn’t mean to—Oh dear.”

The woman lifted her eyes and tasted the thoughts that propelled Figwort’s clumsy back-pedalling. Abashment. Self-consciousness. The essence of beetroot. She smiled. “Your words are different, father…”—‘father’ conveying more the sense of ‘strange old man’— “…but your gift is welcome. Thank you.”

“Goo-goo, gar-gar,” the child gurgled.

“Er, yes, of course.” Figwort looked up at the glutted Mesopotamian sun. “I’ll, er, I’ll leave the thought helmets with you and come back in a year’s time.”

“We will look forward to your arrival, venerable traveler…”—or rather, ‘old vagrant’— “…Don’t forget to knock.”

Figwort coughed and popped forward in time. He reappeared a year later atop a startled sheep, from which he promptly fell.

“Is that you, father?”

“Er, yes. I have returned. Um, I’ve just sat on one of your sheep.”

“Then come inside, gentle shepherd…”—Figwort tasted the honorific and blushed— “…Sit down. Rest your feet. Nimrod and I have much to thank you for.”

Life, it seemed, was going well for the woman and her son. They lived in happiness and without argument, their innate love enhanced now by perfect understanding. Nimrod was a model child. His mother was proud. Figwort judged the thought helmets a success.

But when he visited them again five years later, the professor found—and indeed stepped in—unmistakable signs of trouble.

“It’s Nimrod,” the woman sighed, wistful yet full of love. “I told him to look after the sheep and I thought he’d realise I just meant to watch over them. I was going to the Gateway, you see, so I’d taken this off…”—she pressed one finger to the Pithwort Thought Helmet, just above her temple— “And while I was gone he kept thinking about what I’d said, and he started to worry, poor boy, and in the end he brought all the sheep inside and he just kept them shut up here, waiting for me to come back. Six hours!”—she stared around in wonderment— “What a mess.”

Figwort frowned. Could it be that Nimrod was becoming dependent on the thought helmets, like a hermit crab in its shell? Surely not. And yet, jumping forward another five years, Figwort was not unsurprised to find that almost the entire flock had been lost. “There was a flood,” the woman told him, hardly batting an eyelid when the professor winked into existence by her side. “I was in town and Nimrod let the sheep loose to feed by the river, even though it had been raining. The waters came and washed them away. It was stupid.”

This berating was inwardly directed—the woman had soaked up all the blame, like an eggplant—and yet, could it be that self-indictment here concealed a more sinister truth? Who really was at fault for the loss of the sheep? Was the Pithwort Thought Helmet stupefying young Nimrod to the point where he was incapable of generating his own ideas? The boy had perfect understanding, yes, but had that robbed him of his independence? Was he merely an extension of his mother, or worse—just a badly-drawn copy? Figwort’s eyebrows huddled together, his lips twisting in distaste at the bitter thought.

“He’s always asking me what to do,” the woman admitted, gazing over to where Nimrod stood scraping with a flat stone at the hooves of a prostrate goat. “It’s what he’s used to, I suppose. But when I’m not here he seems lost, uncertain. He understands what I tell him but I have to anticipate everything—every little thing—or else…” She shrugged. “But that’s as may be. He’s my boy. I love him.”

Five years after that, Professor Figwort entered the house and found it empty.

“Madam?” He looked around, puzzled. “Young Nimrod?”

He ducked back outside and cast his squinted eye over the dry, hot land. In the distance, the mountains appeared cracked. The sun hung heavy above him, pulling on the sky like a golden millstone. Figwort hooked a bony finger under the skullcap and scratched his head. Something was not right.

“Hello?” he called, his voice timorous. “It’s me—er, the good shepherd.”

Figwort sweated and searched and eventually found Nimrod over by the Euphrates, sitting under a date palm beside what appeared to be the same goat as had observed the professor’s splashdown some sixteen years previously. The boy had his arm draped around the animal’s neck. Both wore skullcaps.

“Nimrod!” Figwort exclaimed. “What’s going on? Where’s your mother?”

The teenager’s eyes were glazed and he stared unseeingly at the river. From deep within his throat he grunted something that rippled through the Pithwort Thought Helmet as, ‘She’s dead’.

“Dead?” Professor Figwort’s mouth trod water. Phileas the guppy. “What— But—How?”

‘Wolves.’ Nimrod’s speech was a grating, open-mouthed wail. ‘I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know.’ He looked up. For a moment his eyes focussed and he made a pitiful wail of inquiry. ‘What should I have done? What should I have done, father?’

The goat bleated. ‘It happened here.’

Professor Figwort emerged blinking into the Mesopotamian winter of six months’ previous. It was cold and wet and he lurched face-first into the date palm.

A torrential downpour having covered the plain, nothing could be seen of Babylon or the distant mountains. The vainglorious sun now sulked behind murky grey clouds. Even the goat had left its post, opting for greener, drier pastures elsewhere.

A wolf growled and Figwort reeled away from the date palm, only to slip and fall over. Spitting mud, he scrabbled like a turtle in the quagmire.

“Help!” The woman’s scream came from close by. Her panic and desperation needed no translation. “Nimrod! Help me!”

Figwort looked around and caught a flash of her limping painfully towards the river. Of Nimrod there was no sign, but several dark shadows closed in pursuit, low to the ground and smelling heavily of dank fur. Figwort struggled to stand.

“Nimrod!” the woman sobbed. She couldn’t tell him what to do this time. Her plea was a sentiment without guidance. She was hurt. She needed him to help her. He had to think of something.

But Nimrod had spent his life immersed in Figwort’s thought helmet. He understood perfectly, but thinking was the one thing he’d never learnt to do.

Even as Professor Figwort found his feet and went stumbling to the rescue, the woman lost hers and dropped to the ground, her final communication one of abject helplessness. “Nimrod!” she shrieked, the wolves pouncing, jaws tearing at her throat. “Nim—”

And then she was silent, her thoughts left hanging in time, never completed. Figwort skidded wildly and fell into the river.

History flowed.

Not much changed over the next 5,000 years. The sun cast its rays and the planet spun, each period of enlightenment followed by an inevitable regression to darkness. Dawn. Dusk. Hope. Fear. Civilisation remained very much in the cradle.

As the universe blinked and ziggurats gave way to launch pads, Professor Figwort shot urgently forward in time—a midwife in shaky control of a Morris Minor; both hands on the wheel but thoroughly unsure as to the correct address.

In the end, he overshot his personal present by a couple of months and screeched to a stop just outside of Ankara, where the Turkish Prime Minister was hosting the most delicate of diplomatic talks between Syria and Israel. Rolling his sleeves up, Figwort burst into the conference room.

The Turkish Prime Minister was a dapper little man, clean-shaven except for the wispy outline of a moustache. He wore a neat suit, offset for this momentous occasion by a striped tie in alternating swathes of red, blue and white. It was bold, bordering on flamboyant. The Prime Minister shot to his feet and exclaimed, in precise if heavily accented English, “Who is this joker?”

Figwort dropped two thought helmets onto the conference table and slid one towards each end. “These, gentlemen, are the devices that will answer all your prayers.”

The Israeli Prime Minister, whose twinkling eyes had seen much of the world and whose beard was no stranger to an internet keyboard, reached for the crown of thorns. “I recognise you,” he declared, in Hebrew. “You’re the one who wrote about molecular sexuality.” He placed the Pithwort Thought Helmet over his head and frowned. “Hang on. Aren’t you supposed to be dead? There was something on the news.”

The Syrian President, meanwhile, was turning the other thought helmet over in his hands and staring at it with distrust. His heavily browed eyes reflected the politician’s dilemma—a ceaseless balancing of risk and gain. He levelled a penetrating stare at the Turkish Prime Minister—who was sputtering left then right like a malfunctioning funfair clown choked on Ping-Pong balls—then placed the Pithwort Thought Helmet over his own close-cropped hair. “Now,” he said, in Arabic, “what is the purpose of this umamah?” His thought helmet gave ‘umamah’ the taste of ‘head bandage for the mentally ill’.

Professor Figwort beamed. “The Pithwort Thought Helmet allows us to taste the pure essence of thought. It affords us communication such as mankind has never seen. Total honesty, gentlemen. No longer need you fear duplicity or dissembling. No longer shall paranoia run the circle of the round table. You may now conduct your talks with 100 per cent opacity.”

The Turkish Prime Minister sank slowly back onto his chair. “Oh dear,” he murmured.

Like rabbits who had evolved to drive cars, the Syrian President and the Israeli Prime Minister locked eyes and couldn’t look away, trapped in the glare of each other’s headlights. For half a minute or so they sat motionless, their thoughts speeding towards each other through the ominous pall that hung over the room. Both men wanted to remove the thought helmets. Both men wanted to withdraw. But neither could be the first to step down. Professor Figwort looked from one to the other and waved his hand through the intervening airspace. “Hello?”

Eventually, the air became so thick that the Israeli Prime Minister was forced to clear his throat. He then declared, “I have only one question: in light of recent diplomatic exchanges with North Korea, what is Syria’s position with regard the State of Israel?” In essence: ‘You’ve gone nuclear. Now what?’

The Syrian President licked at dry lips. “The Syrian Arab Republic wishes nothing more than for a lasting resolution to the conflict between our two countries…”—‘No peace. No recognition. No negotiation.’— “…I therefore call on you to break from your country’s policy of nuclear ambiguity. Does Israel have nuclear weapons?”

The Israeli Prime Minister bristled from the beard up. “Israel has long stated that we will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” In essence: ‘We have them. America doesn’t want us to use them, but we have them.’

“That is very reassuring…”—‘America, who found reason after the event to sanction Operation Orchard’— “I foresee peace blossoming.” In essence: ‘We, too, can strike pre-emptively.’

“So be it.” The Israeli Prime Minister removed his thought helmet and stood up.

“Be it so.” The Syrian President did likewise.

Then both men left the room—stiff of gait and gaunt of face; dead men walking. The Turkish Prime Minister glared at Professor Figwort and raised one finger to his temple. “Good men trust that each will put his prejudices aside and do what is necessary. It is their words that represent their intentions, not their personal thoughts or opinions.” He shook his head and looked at his watch. “Good men should never know each other’s thoughts.”

Figwort was speechless. How could this happen? How could perfect communication precipitate what would be the most destructive conflict in human history? The Dead Sea War, they’d call it—mankind’s lowest point—and he, Figwort, would be responsible.

Billions dead. The world decimated. Everything as he knew it, history.

But how? Could the solution he had found be worse than the problem? Miscommunication. Perfect communication. Perhaps they were, after all, just two sides of the same burnt piece of toast. At that uncertain moment in time, with history starting to smoke, suddenly, clearly, it seemed so.

Professor Figwort picked up his thought helmets and returned home, tears welling behind his wide, haunted eyes.

Slowly, the universe blinked.

Professor Figwort made just one more trip back through time, to farewell Prunella Bonsoir and to retrieve the gun he’d put aside and lost those sixty years ago. The undergraduate Miss Bonsoir didn’t recognise Phileas Figwort as an old man. She was puzzled by his sad, silent smile. But the gun was there, cocked and ready. Figwort picked it up and returned to the present.

For the best part of a lifetime, Professor Figwort had held that gun to his head. His was the finger on the trigger—bone upon metal with but a layer of skin to separate them, stretched thin by the wretched pull of obsession. Figwort’s were the hopes and expectations that cavorted throughout time and history, heedless of consequence, dragging the professor this way and that as he strove to free himself from the pitfalls of existence. Professor Figwort had pointed the gun; unwittingly, perhaps, but no less damningly. For now, as Life’s clock ticked over and the cuckoo sprang out, Figwort finally came to terms with the greatest of his discoveries:

“Time contraceives,” he murmured, the storm having passed and delivered a new day unto the world. “When we try to alter what is, causality intervenes and inevitably we must face that which could be.” Light shone into the empty room and Professor Figwort blinked sadly. “Miscommunication pulls me one way. Perfect communication pulls me the other. So who am I to decide? Each person must strive to find the answer, otherwise it is meaningless.” He shook his head. “Even though I have it. It’s right here.” He regarded his trembling hands. “After all these years, I could change the world.”

But only for the worse.

And so it was that Professor Figwort came to an understanding, free at last from time’s passing and the tinkerer’s damn. Outside in the jungle, all was peaceful. The universe sang while sleepy orangutans dozed in the morning sun. Closing his eyes, Figwort crooked one finger and beckoned the future.

One One Thousand

by William Wood

“Do you read me?”

Aaron heard the voice but his thoughts were muddy, mired in something thick and still. Sleep maybe. Attempts to stretch his arms and legs, to roll…pointless. Like there was nothing to move.

“Come on, answer me, Aaron.”

Static popped in his ear. “Brad?”

“Yes, finally. What’s your status?”

“My…status…”

“Start simple. Harry said there would be some disorientation. Take a minute but not too long. CNN just said the last of the stars winked out. I’m not sure how long that gives us.”

Aaron opened his eyes, blinking repeatedly. Nothing to see. Only darkness.

“Talk to me, buddy.”

“Stars…wha—” He could feel his hands now. Air blew against his skin. His legs ached and his stomach hurt. He lay face down on something cold and spongy. Moving his hands along the surface, they seemed to catch and jump like balloons being rubbed together. “Where…am I, Brad?”

White noise flooded his ears in the absence of Brad’s hoarse Carolina drawl. “I was beginning to think I’d lost you, man. Just a second while I get these notes together.”

Aaron pushed himself into a squat, feet wide and arms out. The floor was soft and slick and, in the darkness, the lack of true up and down played with his balance. He worked to steady his footing and three wavering attempts later, he succeeded. The floor firmed beneath his feet, less slippery and more like a big magnet repelling smaller magnets in his shoes. Uncertain but navigable. The impression of blowing air was wrong too. His skin felt tingly, lit up with static electricity causing every hair on his body to stand on end. Even under his clothes. Like touching a Van de Graaf generator.

The machine.

A quick pat down confirmed that he still wore the survey rig across his chest and the headset that went with it.

It worked. It really worked.

“Why can’t I see, Brad?” His own voice sounded muted, dampened by the headset or the surrounding emptiness. Without waiting for the reply, he took the Maglite from his belt loop and twisted the cap one way, then the other.

Nothing. He hadn’t taken time to test it before leaving. Crap.

“Uh…not sure. I don’t see that here,” said Brad. The crinkle of papers shuffling prevented squelch from kicking in. “This stuff reads like DVR instructions—here we go. On the rig, upper right side, is a big round indentation. It’s a touchscreen key, so just stick your finger in the hole and it should switch on…says you should close your eyes for sixty seconds, then reopen.”

Aaron felt the soft plastic give slightly under his fingertip, followed by an artificial click. He quickly squeezed his eyes shut.

Shifting his weight, he tested his balance. “How long was I out?”

“Ten—twelve minutes, maybe. Seemed like forever. Power blinked out a couple of times. I don’t know if that’s because of us or not, but I heard you cry out both times.”

Aaron realized he was nodding in agreement and stopped. “What’s happening in the news?”

“Same only worse. People are losing it bad…everywhere.”

“What if this doesn’t work? Or what if it works and then undoes itself? We could be trapped—”

“I know, I know.” Brad was silent for long seconds. “That machine works by playing hell with causality, so…honesty, I just don’t know. If we don’t do anything, though, the world falls apart—that we do know. We’ve got to make this work.”

Aaron sighed and tugged at the straps holding the rig on his chest. “Harry said he’d already tried earlier tonight, twice.”

“That’s what he said, but maybe he’d lost it already. Maybe he just thought he did.”

“Way to encourage the blind time-traveler, buddy.”

Brad’s chuckle across the tinny connection sounded forced. “Yeah. I got your back. In a few seconds we’ll see where you came through and you can find Doctor Heller and end this.”

“I know the plan. My idea, remember?”

“This may be the only chance we get and power coming and going is not a good thing. Besides, taking more than one trip may be what finally did Harry in.”

“Has it been a minute yet?”

“Close enough.”

Aaron eased his eyes open. An icy blue light filled the room, dim but even, leaving no shadows. He was in a relatively small space full of boxes, chairs and an unused metal desk. The extra office being used as a storage room. Everything in the room appeared wispy, unfocused. Edges shimmered and flat surfaces rippled like grassy meadows in a windstorm.

At first the effort to move strained his muscles, but once in motion, walking became easier, reminding him of pushing along chest deep in a swimming pool. Stopping required effort and forethought as well. He felt like a baby learning to walk all over again.

“I’m in the office storeroom. Pretty weird.”

He pressed his hip against the fire exit-style safety bar on the door. It wouldn’t budge. Grabbing the bar tightly with both hands, he pushed with all the strength and weight he could muster. The bar inched downward until bottoming out, where it stayed without a hint of recoil. He felt exhausted already. Anticipating the resistance now, he shouldered the door and forced it to swing open bit by bit until he had just enough room to squeeze through.

He took in a lungful of air and leaned against the door frame. “Nothing wants to move.”

“That’s what Harry said. He called it the static past. It doesn’t want to change.”

“I believe it.”

Static past. Unmoving. Like walking around in an old, overexposed photograph.

Aaron’s stomach twisted severely and he doubled, somehow managing to remain standing despite a hammering in his skull. Within seconds the pain subsided, leaving only a dull ache behind his forehead.

“Are you okay?” Brad asked. “Power just dipped again.”

“Fine. Hurt like hell, though. Can we not do that?”

Wiping his mouth and straightening up, he looked around the lab beyond the door. The same blue light that illuminated the office shone everywhere, across the tables and workstations, the machine in the pit. And most disturbing of all, over the motionless statues of people scattered about. Friends and coworkers he’d seen only minutes ago in this very room.

Of course, those he’d seen earlier lay dead in growing pools of blood or ran out screaming into the burning streets. Three or four had even been sitting together near the corner power feeds mumbling crazily to each other, painting something on the floor in their own blood.

But here they were. Still going about their business. Clipboards and hand tools. Frozen in this moment before the machine came online.

In a day you’ll be lunatics.

Turning to his left, he shifted his weight to catch a large falling figure.

Only the figure was not falling. Harry, Mister Poorly-Trimmed-Goatee himself, stood precariously frozen in mid-step, eyes half-closed and mouth stretched oddly. Probably chewing his ever-present pistachios.

Aaron sighed and continued moving. The surreal labscape had the same fuzzy look as the storeroom and except for a scattering of darker distortions, the washed-out lighting uniformly infected the entire room.

The offices circled a narrow elevated walkway with three metal steps leading down into the pit where the machine sat. A collection of modules and equipment banks radiated out web-like from the center of the pit, dwarfing the relatively small control console at its hub. Unlike the sleek molded casings that enclosed the peripheral units and guarded the super-cooled plumbing, the console itself was in disarray. All of the control cabinet’s lower covers lay at odd angles on the floor and large circuit boards hand been swung out from the interior on hinged connections.

It was a mess. It was also a time machine, according to its creator, Doctor Francine Heller, the alternative energy guru and project chief who preached free energy lay in the untapped entropy of the past.

She knelt in worship before her beast, her back to him, two of the shadowy distortions flanking her.

“I’m in the lab. The whole team’s here near as I can tell. Except for us. Must be right before she powered it up.”

He remembered her mad scientist grin as she pressed the enter key and the way the grin slackened when nothing happened. No one said a word. She tore into the cabinet, sliding out circuit boards and moving multicolored jumper wires, mumbling to herself about destiny.

She’d then dispatched the two of them to the reactor room with instructions to reset any breakers that tripped during the test. That may have been what saved them, shielded them from whatever ripped through nearly everyone else’s sanity and sucked the stars away.

Leaning into his step, Aaron walked toward the frozen Doctor Heller. He was getting better at balancing and moving here. The trick was to use the momentum to your advantage. A struggle at the beginning of a movement and then a sudden breakaway. He had to be careful but negotiating the three stairs down into the pit was surprisingly easy.

The console lights and screens, like all of the other equipment in the room, including the fluorescent lighting, appeared blank, as if shut off. An effect of static time.

Aaron could picture an Old West snake oil salesman shouting to the gathered townsfolk, Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you can travel in time…but when you get there, it’ll be frozen solid. Lifeless.

The blurred shadows near her must be glitches in the headset or some other byproduct of static time. He peered intensely at the closest, the one to the doctor’s right as he approached. Like a thin floating column of oil in water hanging in the air, black and gray and brown as if ignoring the blue light from the survey rig.

Something solid in the middle…

He gasped.

“What’s wrong?” Brad asked.

Aaron didn’t know how to answer. Inside the cloud-like blur were dozens of tiny jet-black points clustered near the top of a thin twisting mass about two feet tall. He moved closer, crouching down for a better look. The object was bristly and covered with a short, coarse-looking pelt. Something oily coated legs that came together at the top in a jumble of twisted, half-exposed sinews, lacking any real body. Only clusters of black beads, eyes.

His pulse quickened in his ears and he shuddered. Every creepy eight-legged thing he’d ever seen was distilled into this abomination before him. The bodiless limbs were all feelers, pincers and smaller clawed appendages interwoven together to form the creature, like a taxidermist had used random parts to build his worst nightmare.

“Talk to me, Aaron.”

“There’s this…spider…thing beside the doc. It’s different too, not all blue like everything else.” He jerked his gaze around the room and swallowed loudly. “There’s a lot of them.”

The connection was silent for several seconds. “Did you say spiders?”

“Well, not spiders…exactly…I don’t know what they are, but they’ve got a cloud around them and—what could they be, Brad?”

“Don’t worry about it, buddy.” His voice was slow and calm. “Just leave Heller the package and I’ll bring you back.”

Brad was right. Just leave the package.

But…he moved his hand out to touch the thing beside the doctor. The haze around the creature extended several inches out from its body and as soon as his finger began to push through the hanging blur, his hand began to throb.

I must be losing it, he thought.

“Aaron?”

This might be the only chance they had to stop this doomed experiment. “Okay…okay. I’m moving.”

He edged around the creature, giving plenty of space to the thing he prayed was only in his imagination. He placed the package beside the console keyboard directly in front of the doctor where she couldn’t miss it when she stood. He steadied the package for several seconds until sure the repulsive force between the large envelope and the console wasn’t going to send it falling to the floor unnoticed. On the outside of the envelope, they’d written STOP in permanent marker and below that a few lines in a smaller script asking her to look at the contents of the envelope before continuing. Inside they described the immediate results of the experiment, the mass deaths and suicides, the burning cities, the plague of madness, and the winking out of the stars. Brad had even thought to tear some articles from the morning paper, including one from one scientist claiming that the earth was being pulled into an ever contracting null, a pocket in space and time.

Maybe. And maybe this was just hell.

They just had to hope she didn’t think it was a prank. Aaron’s initial suggestion was to damage the machine outright, stopping the experiment but now that he was in this static past, he wasn’t sure he could break anything.

He had been watching the blur, the monstrosity closest to him, looking into its multiple rat-like eyes. Several of the feelers along the upper sections of its legs had stretched outward.

“It’s moving, Brad! How could it be moving?” He scrambled backwards, lost his footing and fell. The same momentum effect that hounded his walking, initially slowed his fall only to smash him hard into the tile at the last instant.

He rolled onto his back.

That thing was moving!

The spindly legs shifted slowly, but there was no doubt in his mind. The spider was moving and it was coming after him. He pushed himself along the floor. The second one was moving too.

“Aaron, just stay calm. Did you put the package on the console?”

“Yes!” he shouted. He looked around the room. All of the blurs were in motion now, moving painfully slow in his direction. “Did you hear me? How could these things be here?”

He bumped a metal stair with his arm and realized he was still pushing himself away from the first one. He had plenty of time to get away. At this rate, the closest one was still a minute or more away.

But they were all coming for him.

Struggling to his feet, he stumbled once but managed to stay upright and survey the room. Several of the blurs were not moving toward him but to the doctor. The other ten—no, eleven—were coming his way.

“Aaron, I need you to be still for a couple of minutes to get a lock. Power’s getting really flaky.”

“Are you nuts? They’ll be all over me.” The spiders were still closing in from every direction. “Is everything back to normal yet?”

“Not yet.” Static popped in his ears. “But maybe we have to bring you back first. Just stand in one place long enough for me…”

“I can’t.” His heart raced, drowning out whatever Brad said next. His gaze darted around the room. The door to the hallway was clear. “How about outside. Can you get me if I go outside?”

“I don’t know the range of this thing, but go ahead. I’ll try.”

He moved toward the door, dodging around another of the atrocities, this one much larger than the first two. Arms and shoulders and legs straining, he forced the door open.

He didn’t want to abandon these people, his friends and coworkers, but he had to. He had to get away.

Stepping across the threshold he could see straight down the eerie blue corridor leading to the lobby. Inky smears shifted at the far end of the hallway, growing gradually larger.

Dozens.

He felt cold inside. Frozen like the blue stone faces around him. Sweat ran down his forehead, stinging his eyes.

He looked back into the lab.

What was that one doing? It had moved in front of the doctor and taken the package in a cluster of its filthy pincers.

He pushed back into the lab allowing the momentum shift to send him plowing through the two creatures now blocking the doorway. The impact was like slamming into a wall, but he managed to part them just enough to squeeze through. Instead of the magnetic resistance he felt when touching everything else in this living nightmare, or the ache he’d felt when he touched the field that surrounded the first one, these monsters felt hot and rough, scraping and tugging at him as he passed between them.

These things must be impossibly fast in real time, he thought.

As he reached the stairs again, his stomach wrenched and this time he threw up, each convulsion causing his head to erupt with blinding pain.

“Power again,” said Brad. “It’s getting worse. I need you to stand still before I lose the connection completely.”

Aaron’s eyes refocused and he tried to move but his legs didn’t want to move. Behind him, inches away was one of the creatures, a half dozen barbed talons extending in the direction of his thighs. The shadowy haze surrounding it oozed over his legs and he could feel a numbness creeping up the small of his back.

He thrust himself away, muscles screaming.

“What do I do, Brad?” He looked back at the advancing monsters. Doctor Heller kneeling before the machine. His temples throbbed and every muscle ached from the constant exertion of balance and movement. The creature with the package had moved two yards away toward the stairs, passing two more of the atrocities headed his way. “It took the package.”

Brad’s voice was quiet and measured. “Aaron, you have to leave the package for—”

“I can’t leave the package,” Aaron yelled and then realized that he wasn’t yelling. He was laughing.

“Just calm down.”

Aaron felt a tingle across his skin and a hum building deep in his bones. He took a step backwards and bumped into a large multi-layered circuit board extending from the console. His eyes widened. “That’s it. I’ve got to destroy the control. They can stop me, but there’s no way they can fix the machine.”

He knelt beside Heller, leaning against her rock steadiness for support and pulled at the largest of the circuit boards. It didn’t even flex.

“You’re moving again,” said Brad. “Let me bring you back and I’ll give it a go.”

The icy blue light flickered and he doubled over, sharp stabs of pain in his gut. An icon in his visor blinked a warning. LOW POWER. He clutched his abdomen and forced himself upright.

Spiders surrounded him, the closest a yard away. More spilled in through the doors, slowly shifting blurs moving through people and equipment like arcane water flowing around rocks in a stream.

We’ve got to make this work. He wasn’t sure if Brad was speaking or he was remembering, but he was right.

He grabbed one of the corner posts of the control console and pulled himself up, using the extended electronics as footholds. His arms and shoulders protested, not even easing up as he began to climb with his legs as well. Resistance was impossible, growing, as if the universe was determined that he not ascend another inch. Something tore in his right calf and he drifted down toward the top of the enclosure, the last instant ripping by and knocking the breath from him.

He struggled into a standing position, wincing as he shifted his weight uneasily to spare his injured leg. Sweat dripped in slow motion from his face. A sea of blurs rippled outward across the floor beneath the icy blue light.

“Aaron, just stay put. I’ve got you.”

Two of the creatures were beginning to climb to cabinet, one to each side of him. “Sorry, buddy.”

He looked straight down. And stepped off.

He drifted downward for a long moment and then crested whatever rollercoaster-like delay the physics of this bizarre reality required and hurtled toward the floor.

He locked his leg muscles as his feet hammered down like pile drivers, an inferno shooting up along his nerves.

He body crumpled and he rolled, waves of pain washing over him, threatening to snatch away consciousness.

Something shifted beneath him, slow and hard, like marbles and tree limbs poking and scraping at his skin. He opened his eyes and stretched out his hands. A wall of oily bristles surrounded him, tiny eyes still tracking his descent, unable to keep up. Needle-like pincers and claws stretched. At least one of the things lay mangled beneath him.

The circuit board he’d targeted lay in front of the console, snapped neatly in half, wires and electronic components broken and sticking out at odd angles. Like dead bugs with their disgusting little legs in the air.

“Aaron, what’s happening? Your signal is getting weaker.”

He wanted to speak, to answer his friend but numbness spread through him, radiating out from the hundreds of tiny needle pricks dancing along his body. His eyelids were suddenly heavy and the crystal blue light was losing its color to growing grayness.

“Aaron, do you read me? I think—oh, my God—the stars…”

He let his head rest on the slowly undulating floor. They were around him, on him. He knew now they were trapped here. Maybe they always had been. Hungering. Lonely, maybe. Unable to escape.

Just like him.

Everything was cold. He wanted to gasp for breath. The wind on his skin was gone and all he could hear was his own faint thoughts, far away in the black.

Doxies

by Brandon Alspaugh

They were late to group. Angela blamed her mother, and her mother blamed Angela, but in the end, it was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Group never started on time.

“For heaven’s sake Angela, don’t dawdle,” her mother said. “We can’t have them starting without us.”

“My feet hurt, Mom,” Angela said. “Can’t I…”

“Absolutely not.”

By the door was a raggedy sign that read Children of the Post-Contemporary – Thursday, 8 PM. Under that, someone had scrawled in purple marker ‘Doxies’.

Inside, the rest of the group were already seated. Angela’s mother found a chair for herself and a stool for Angela.

Andrea’s shadow waved hello. Andrea often sent her shadow to group. The church basement only had fluorescent lights, which meant there were no other shadows for it to bump into.

Angela had shoes that flashed red whenever she walked. When she sat down, Ms. Greer humphed. Ms. Greer had a nose like a tree root and a gold filigree chain that let her wear her glasses like a necklace. To Angela, she looked like the sort of sour rat a witch might own, if witches owned sour rats.

“And what, exactly, does a girl like you need shoes like that for?” Ms. Greer asked.

Angela ignored her. Ms. Greer didn’t really want an answer. So they got along fine.

The room was almost full. Angela never had any trouble remembering anyone in the group. At the beginning of a new school year, she knew every one of her classmates by lunchtime.

Besides Andrea and Ms. Greer, there was Yvonne, who had never eaten food. There was a girl who looked like a kitten but cringed like a bunny. There was Gary, whose smile looked like a smashed cockroach, and there was Oliver, who had a warm furry voice that was shiny green in the right light. He reached over and mussed her hair.

“Hey kid,” he said. “Great shoes.”

Angela grinned, and kicked her shoes against the stool leg to show them off.

Ms. Greer humphed again, tapped her pencil on the badly-stained card table in the center of the room.

It was time for group.

Gary stood up. Gary had one normal arm. The other was not normal. It was fine until it got to the tricep, then it corkscrewed in on itself. His hand was a shiny knobby mass with no nails and a thumb as wide as a matchbook.

“Last Monday I realized my girlfriend was cheating on me,” he said. Angela heard her mother snicker, inside.

“All in all, it was a typical day. I was at the south-side Denny’s eating breakfast. Sent the meal back three times. Eggs too runny, too dry…and by the time they’d gotten the eggs right, the pancakes were cold. When no one was watching, I unscrewed the syrup caps at other tables. I did over half the restaurant before the manager came out. He had the picture of me from the north-side Denny’s, with a long list of reasons why I had been labeled a problem customer there. He threw me out. I didn’t even get to finish my eggs.”

“Real nice, Gary,” muttered Oliver.

Smirking like a child who pulls the wings off baby birds, Gary continued. “Anyway, my girlfriend. That little slut. My antennae had been up for weeks. And I could smell the stink of the lawn boy in her hair. I had to open the windows to let it out. She’s allergic to bees, and our yard is full of them. So she would never have gone out to him. He had to come to her. I don’t blame her. She’s only human.”

“That doesn’t bug you?” Oliver asked.

“Hush, Mr. Spare,” snapped Ms. Grier. “This is a support group.”

Angela caught a waspish flare of anger from Gary, but he didn’t show it. “I wouldn’t blame any of you for being jealous. By any measure—population, adaptability, territories occupied—insects already control the world. I’m living proof that one day, hardy Coleopteroids like my father will take over. After the next war, it’s either us or Twinkies.”

“On the drive to my bookstore, I took the route with as many right-turn-only lanes as possible. At the last moment, I’d cut from them to the left-most lane. Let me tell you, the horns are better than any early-morning radio show. I made sure they could all see me on my cell phone, ordering a dozen daisies for my girlfriend.”

The group was a yellow muddle of confusion. Angela blinked—it hurt her eyes.

“That was very positive of you,” said Ms. Grier.

“Hmm? Oh. Well, you see, bees love daisies,” said Gary. “And with all those open windows…well.”

Angela wasn’t sure why, but the group’s yellow muddle slurred away as if someone had spilt icy white paint into it.

“When I got to the bookstore, I let Fenton out. He hurried out to wherever he goes during the day. As usual, he’d done a great job on the shelves, and made a beautiful pyramid of the new Caitlin R. Kiernan books. I don’t know how I got along before I started locking in an obsessive-compulsive at night.”

Through the yellow and white and ice, a crack in her mother’s mind, light from under a door, a seam in a folded-up memory. Angela tiptoed up to its edge, very slowly, and peeked inside…

Every so often, someone in the hotel ballroom would notice Bella. Most looked confused, but content to ignore her. A few crossed to her corner to peek at the canvas.

“That’s wild,” one of the men said to her, almost tipping his Diet Coke over with the gesture towards the painting.

Bella peered at him as if trying to make him out through binoculars. “Thanks.” Curls of honey blonde hair framed her painter’s squint. She pushed them away with blue-stained fingers.

He wasn’t done. “It’s got some great color. Like it’s moving across the painting.” He glanced around, complete in his awkwardness, finally setting his drink down and wiping his hand before thrusting it at her like a yardstick. “I’m Jim,” he said.

Bella had already turned back to her canvas, but took two of his fingers in her left hand and waggled them. “Bella Dunleavy.”

“Get you a drink, Bella?”

“No thanks, um, John,” Bella said, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes as she arced a snatch of blue back onto itself. “I paint better with a clear head.”

The wedding had everything she was looking for: high energy and emotion, a large group of people she did not know, and an open bar to keep things interesting. The hotel manager had promised that if she stayed out of the way, Bella could paint it. So Bella stayed out of the way. She didn’t even laugh when the fat Italian uncle fell dead drunk into the piano.

The people that caught her eye she painted with slashes of color. The bride was three royal blue lines, looking like a slanting backwards E missing its middle stroke, waved in the center, while a curvier triple-helix of red burnt to her left, representing the groom.

Each person was a tiny live wire of color. Bella ignored the furniture and floor, penciling in only the barest rudiments of ballroom geography to keep the perspective straight in her own head.

Bella looked over to her left. Jim was still standing there, picking at the pocket flaps of his suit.

She sighed.

“You’re a friend of the groom’s?” she said, daubing the words with fake interest before saying them.

Jim nodded, and his eyes perked. “Yeah. Yeah, Todd and I were in the same frat. I was telling that videographer guy walking around earlier…we actually met when he was going crazy at 2 AM on a Sunday morning, looking for some baby spinach…”

Bella let Jim’s voice fade into the vague susurrus of the ballroom’s background chatter. Across the room, she saw the photographer. When their eyes met, he glared at her like a cougar at the edge of his territory.

“…so anyway, I’m always getting dinged for under-utilizing my decorating expense account, and love the use of color. Really juice up the whole brokerage. Do you have a dealer you work through, or…?” He left the question hanging.

Bella turned back to him and blinked. “I’m sorry?”

Jim already had out a gold-embossed checkbook. “Look, I’d hate to lose this to someone who just picks it out of a gallery. I mean, I was here for the birth, right?” He flashed her what she took to be his deal-closing smile. “I think that ought to earn me a few brownie points. Say four thousand?”

Bella understood the words he was using but could not assemble them in her mind. The binoculars had reversed themselves; now he was too close, and the ballroom moving further away, growing darker as it receded to a point.

He was beautiful. Not man-beautiful, the way too many men were, in a way that made them pretty but completely unattractive. Waif beautiful. He had the soft green eyes of a newborn angel, and the drawn cheeks of too many smiles.

Jim must have taken her confusion for reticence. “Sorry, sorry,” he said with a smile, while scratching numbers into his checkbook. “It’s hard to overcome the habit of low-balling a first offer. Here. Six thousand.” He tore a staid green check from the checkbook and fluttered it onto her lap.

Her eyes traveled to the check, while her paintbrush hand went wild, leaving a bright green streak in the upper right corner of the canvas.

Jim tapped a business card he had laid on top of the check. “That’s my card. Can you drop the painting off at the Carrington Hotel? Room 1014? It’s where I’m staying the next few days.”

Bella tried to say yes. Her mouth had forgotten how. She squeaked something, coughed, and tried again. The second attempt was more squawk than squeak.

Jim snatched a glass of champagne from a nearby table and offered it to Bella. She downed it in a single gulp.

“I won’t allow it,” Bella’s mother said. Her loose heel clacked for every pace she took around Bella’s studio. “It’s too close to mattering.” She was a squat gargoyle of a woman, with sulfurous stubs for teeth and a chisel-deep frown.

Bella’s eyes stung. They did not sting when she opened a can of turpentine but they stung now.

“It’s just one painting. He thinks it’s very good. And we could use the money—”

“He thinks it’s good? What do you care what he thinks? You’re a special child, Bella. You shouldn’t care what any of these people think of you. Lord, the whole reason I let you paint up here is that it kept you out of trouble. So much of your father in you. Every person I see out on the street, I wonder. They look just like us you know. You’d never see them coming. Your father—”

“Isn’t here!” Bella shouted. “Mother, this won’t hurt anything. The painting will sit in his office for a year till he hires a new interior decorator, and then it will all be replaced with a Southwestern motif or some nonsense.”

Bella’s mother stalked across the room and snatched Bella’s chin. The nails cut into Bella’s cheek. “Listen to me, Bella. You’re not like other people. The least little change can affect the entire future. Do you want to just disappear, to never have existed?”

“I might as well not,” Bella whispered. Fat tears rolled down her pale cheeks. “You never let me go to college or date. You don’t love me. You just want me to be a failure like you.”

The hard line around her mother’s eyes softened. “Why would you say that? Are you trying to hurt me? Is that it?”

Bella shook her head and sniffled. “No. But Mom, it really is just the one painting. And look at it, it’s really good…” Bella turned the easel so her mother could see it. “I call it Wedding Party.”

Her mother straightened up, released Bella’s chin, let out a loud sigh.

“You haven’t learned anything,” her mother said, in her matter-of-fact tone. She reached over and snatched the box cutter from the workbench. Before Bella could react, she had sliced the canvas once, twice, three times.

Bella hung there, in the place between desperation and crying. She reached out with her fingers, touched one of the flapping edges of the canvas. Bits of bright purple paint flaked off its edges, fluttering to the floor of the studio.

Her mother’s eyes caught Bella’s, hard.

“I should have had the abortion,” she said.

Bella sat there for an hour, two, occasionally pulling one of the shredded flaps back up, holding it to the light, watching it flutter across the colors like a searchlight over a fairy sea.

Bella’s eyes snapped open. Cold scratchy sheets, a mounted television, anonymous brown drawers, a Bible. She turned over, and there was Jim, breathing, with the streetlight shining through the window onto his unkempt hair. His arms piped around his head, tiny goosebumps making the hairs stand on end.

He must have felt her eyes on him. He turned over and said, in a sleepy murmur, “Hey. You alright?”

She hugged his chilled arm and tucked it under the covers. “I just wish you could have seen the finished painting,” she said. “I mean, you are out six thousand dollars.”

Jim gave her a wide puppy grin. “Did that impress you?”

“The money? Absolutely.”

“Really?”

“Only reason I’m here is to personally verify what kind of shortcomings leave a man spending that kind of money,” said Bella. Jim stuck his tongue out at her.

“You can show me the next one. You’re too young to have peaked.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so…brr! Are you cold?”

Jim looked down at himself. “I guess I am.” He stood and shuffled naked over to the thermostat, flicking its switches back and forth til the hum of the air conditioner gurgled to silence. Two long scratches ran down his back, almost symmetrical, like patterns cut from red construction paper.

“Did I do that?” Bella asked, embarrassed.

Jim turned around and glanced down his back. “Hmm? Oh. I guess you did. Hey! What happened to the soap? And coffee?”

Bella smiled, let her eyes travel to her purse.

“You got all the good stuff!”

“I left you the shampoo/conditioner,” said Bella.

“I’d rather beat my hair against a rock,” said Jim, crinkling his nose.

“No need to be snarky just because I got best pick.”

Jim shrugged, sighed, shuffled back to bed and pulled the covers up. Bella wrapped her legs around him.

“I didn’t come here planning this,” she said.

“I know.”

“My mother would be furious.”

“Most mothers are.”

“Not this kind of furious. It’s a scared kind of furious.”

“Why?”

Bella sat up and took a deep breath of still-chilly air. “It will sound nuts.”

Jim sat up too. He smiled. He had pretty teeth. “Try me.”

Bella bit her lower lip. She thought about it.

“Well?” Jim asked.

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Bella?”

“Still thinking!”

Then she told him the way her mother told it to her. That her father had been a traveler. From some Other Time.

That she’d fallen in love with him, and gotten pregnant, and that he’d left her. Returned to his Other Time.

Once, Bella had her IQ tested. The school called her and her mother in to discuss the improbably high results. Bella’s mother had panicked, quit her job, and moved them to the other side of the country within a week. After that, there was an incident. Bella had run a mile in two minutes and fifty-eight point one two four six seconds. That was the town Bella left her teddy bear in.

She was a walking paradox, her mother said. And she must never make waves, never draw attention, never accomplish something or participate or pop her head out, for even a second. If she changed the future, her father might not exist, and neither would she. Summitto ergo sum.

“That’s why she cut the canvas. She was afraid for me. She told me I must never matter, because it might erase me.” Bella ducked her head. “I know it sounds silly,” she said, in a small voice.

Jim’s face had not changed the whole time. It had been blank and attentive. He cocked his head and stared at Bella like a worried puppy.

“I’m so sorry,” Jim said. He shook his head. “I’m so sorry that’s what she made you think.”

“You believe me?” Bella asked.

“I love you,” Jim said. He kissed her again, long, on the lips. His were warm. Hers were still cold.

“It’s all right,” she said. She shook her head. “Sometimes I don’t believe me. Why would people be coming into the past? I mean really? What’s the point?”

A pause. “Maybe they’re afraid of tomorrow,” Jim said.

“Hmm?”

“I think we all try to pull the past around us with a blanket,” said Jim. “We take pictures, we cling to friends who share even the worst of memories. The past wasn’t always great but what it was, it was. Tomorrow isn’t like that. Tomorrow’s an edge with no railings or lights and we’re all standing on our tiptoes.” He kissed the back of her neck. “Or not. It could be anything. Get some sleep.”

Bella smiled, pulled the blanket tight around her shoulders, and dreamt.

The next morning, Bella woke up alone. His side of the bed was cool, and unspoilt. Even the pillow lay perfect against the headboard.

She sat up, heart pounding. Then she saw the note, written on hotel stationary.

Bella,

I’m so sorry. I do love you.

I thought I had more time.

Jim

“And then he left the room,” said the kitten-faced girl. She had wide wounded eyes and no name.

With those words the memory crumpled, balled up in her mother’s mind and tossed into the dark. Angela blinked, and sat up straight, listening to the tiny trill of the kitten-faced girl.

“I laid there until there was no sun left behind the blinds. Then I stood up and got dressed, very slowly. It hurt, but it was that numb kind of hurt. I never took my eyes off the door. I didn’t tell the police. I know the rules.”

Angela’s mother looked worried. Angela reached out and squeezed her mother’s arm, but her mother shook it away. Angela saw something scaly curl up inside her mother, like a lizard crawling beneath a rock.

“I should have known. About who he really was.” The kitten-faced girl’s face fell. Curls of split hair fell across her eyes.

Angela’s mother nodded. “You always think you’ll know one when you see him. That we’d know, especially.” Angela added her own murmur to the group’s agreement.

The kitten-faced girl was crying now. Her stray curls caught most of the tears. “I don’t know why they do it. I’ve heard they think it’s humane, sending criminals into past disasters to execute them. Never mind if they happen to survive.” She wiped at her eyes. “I think it’s just about keeping their hands clean. Passing the buck to the past.”

The group was silent for a moment. Then another. The kitten-faced girl stood there, blinking and miserable, like a child waiting for a bandage.

Gary raised his mangled not-hand. He liked doing that. “Do you know what he was convicted of?”

The answer made no sense to Angela, but it came very fast, words under pressure. “Rape,” said the kitten-faced girl. “He was a rapist. Is. Will be. He told me he stowed away on a small colony ship and killed every grown man. And every girl under thirteen.” Her lips pressed tight, and her hands fell unconsciously to the bruises beneath her skirt. Angela wondered if anyone else could see them. Her mother always chided her for looking too hard into people.

“No one could understand,” the kitten-faced girl said. “For this to happen to me…” She left the words hanging there and sat back down, tucking her knees under her chin.

“No one could possibly understand what it is to be like us,” said Ms. Grier. She made a show of checking her dangly silver watch. “I think that’s enough for this week everybody.” She stood. “Remember. We don’t, therefore we are.”

“We don’t, therefore we are,” repeated the group, sounding like Angela’s class when they said the Pledge of Allegiance.

The group bustled amongst themselves, gathering their things.

Angela’s mother clamped a hand onto Angela’s shoulder when they stood to leave. She marched them over to the kitten-faced girl. Gary tried to say something to them halfway, but they dodged him. His perpetual leer fell away, and he slunk out the door.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Angela’s mother said to the kitten-faced girl.

She peered up at Angela and her mother over the pointy tips of her knees. “Thank you Bella. Angie.” Her eyes flicked down to her stomach. “What do I do? If I’m pregnant, I mean?”

Angela felt her mother release her shoulder. “Why don’t you go ahead, sweetheart,” said her mother, in a flat tone.

Angela went.

Outside the church, Oliver tipped a cigarette to Angela, as the little girl’s shoes painted the sidewalk a neon red in time to her steps. “You never say anything in there, Angela.”

Angela peeked over her shoulder. Her mother must still be inside, talking about babies. “My mother doesn’t want me to. She says it might upset people.”

“Naturally.” Oliver took a deep puff from his cigarette. “You know, there’ve been Doxy meetings since they were using cuneiform tablets for sign-in sheets, Angela. And there have always been some who…don’t meet the criteria, no matter how much they might want to. You’ve never seen hate till you’ve seen the hate of the desperately counterfeit for the real article.”

He tapped away a pinkie-long flurry of ash and added, “Just between you and me of course, kiddo.” The smoke made his words thicker, and when he breathed, Angela could see something white and angry stretch in his lungs.

“What’s a Doxy, Oliver?” Angela had asked her mother once. Her mother had told her it was nothing a little girl needed to learn. But Oliver didn’t need to know that.

Oliver grinned. “The work of some enterprising punster, I imagine. We’re all paradoxes, you know…people who shouldn’t exist.” Another puff of smoke. “It was also a Middle English word for a mistre…for a peasant girl that an important man kept secret from his wife. Which is how we all got here, I suppose.”

“Angela!” Her mother clopped up behind her. “Honestly, running off like that! Excuse me, Andrea.” Andrea’s shadow waved goodbye and disappeared into a gloomy alley where the moonlight wasn’t.

“But Mom, you said—”

“Thank you for watching her, Oliver,” said Angela’s mother, fumbling with the buttons of her coat and making an utter mess of it.

“Night Bella. Angela.”

“Night, Oliver!” Angela called, as her mother dragged her by the arm down the crack-scarred sidewalk. Irritated, Angela stepped on every one of them she could.

“Mom, I’m tired. Can’t I now?”

“I bought you those awful shoes for a reason, Angela.”

“But Mom…”

“Oh, fine!” her mother snapped, glancing down both ends of the sidewalk.

Angela felt the slits in the back of her blouse fluttering open, and the tingle of night wind against her back.

She couldn’t understand why her mother was so funny about this. Her mother said it would upset the group, but her voice was green and twitchy when she said it.

Angela had her own ideas.

Maybe her mother was afraid Angela wasn’t old enough. Maybe she thought Angela would get lost and never come back. Maybe she thought Angela would forget to look both ways before crossing the sky and be hit by an airplane.

Or maybe Oliver was right.

Maybe they were just jealous of her wings.

Conditional Perfect

by Jason Palmer

Paitin waited with his fingers curled over the windowsill, enjoying the charged night air. He watched the Friday Night Invasion skylights probing the underbellies of clouds as though a full-scale air raid were in progress. One of them caught the curve of a shark-like shape approaching from the direction of the city: Drew Petrarchson’s fan-tailed hover car, approaching his dorm window, stopping with a whine of air-cooled nitros.

Drew grinned. His crew lounged around him with arms hanging on the seatbacks and heels up on the dash. “Get in, Pait, we’re going back!” said Drew, following this with an obligatory yip-yip-yoooooo that echoed off the dorm walls.

Paitin didn’t like giving up control to Drew, but he vaulted out the window into the hover’s back seat. A cheer rose around him, hands slapping his shoulders, all the more so because he’d hesitated, at first.

Drew gunned the jets and the dorm buildings fell away behind them.

Poison-bright clouds reflected the glow of an asteroid field of hover cars ahead, thousands hanging in the air before the great arch of the portal. Waves of blaring horns rippled through the vast ball of vehicles, and within them were the yips and hoarse bellows of drunken hoodlums waiting for the stroke of midnight.

Drew took them into the roiling, steely cloud. The hovers were mostly boxy first cars piloted by regular kids out for some fun. Those with something to hide jockeyed for space in the middle, far from the periphery where the boom cops strobed the herd with eerie green naked-rays.

“Check this,” said Drew’s best friend, Nickthanial. Paitin blanched when Nick flashed something small and metal in his hand.

“Holy shit,” said a kid named Chiraz. “Is that a Rainbow?”

Paitin felt Drew watching the side of his face, willing him to feel the same enthusiasm, thinking he was only being coy. Then Drew’s elbow was digging his ribs. “I’m gonna get this guy laid if it’s the last thing I do!” He honked the horn and shouted, setting off waves of answering honks.

Paitin pursed his lips and bobbed his head agreeably, but in reality, the fumes and the steady whump of a dozen competing thumper boxes made him almost physically sick. Did they really imagine that he was somehow sharing the moment with them?

He had his own reasons for coming.

Another vehicle scraped up dangerously close, stopping so suddenly that a woman standing on her seat was nearly thrown out. She righted herself and turned drunkenly to Drew. “Drew!” she yelled. Her voice was hoarse as though she’d been shouting all night. She held up a small black object with a purple arc of current dancing between two tines. “We’re going to shave ‘em! Shave those fuckers!”

Drew was clearly delighted at this. “That’s fantastic!” he said, and punched down on his horn.

The other driver honked a quick retort and jerked the hover away, nearly spilling the woman again.

Paitin fingered the secret objects in his pocket, outwardly smiling and bobbing his head while the ambient drumbeat thickened the air. Rafts of hot exhaust and cold downdrafts alternately drifted across him like sheets of tissue paper breaking over his face, distorting the moon.

He watched a succession of vehicles crawl by seeking places at the front or just showing off.

A loner hovered past in a long old coffee-brown boat with grinning grills and crimson lights. He wore a leather mask criss-crossed with zippers. He seemed to look directly at Paitin as he floated by, his huge bicep shining in the moonlight, and silence followed in his wake.

A man on another hover wore nothing but a pair of beer-soaked underwear. He held a gigantic sword over his head—a real sword—bellowing when people honked at him. He had a tiny Quick stuck through the band of his underwear; that’s how he would subdue them before the sport began.

Other people showed off tranquilizers and nets and whips and leather shackles; they had paddles; they had balloons full of explosive fuel; they had harpoon-tipped drag chains already hooked through their bumpers. An improvised hover platform chugged by laden with a homemade catapult. The driver was older and had a lazy sort of accent. “Going to see how far these bastards’ll fly,” he said with a grin.

Paitin tapped his fingers on his knee, feeling useless and uncertain.

The past was open for business, and everybody was doing it.

The stroke of midnight fell, and all hell broke loose. A massive invisible plume of exhaust struck Paitin in the face as every engine roared and every horn rose wailing at once, and the entire armada bucked forward into the greatest victimless crime in the history of the world. A typical Friday night.

A temporal envelope the size of a football field suddenly displaced the air with a dull “whump” and swallowed the armada of recreational vehicles that sped beneath the arch.

Paitin nearly left his stomach behind when Drew ramped the hover. The tail end buoyed drunkenly and they popped forward like a shot. They emerged into a beautiful blue and white afternoon sky in some conditional past, a reality plucked at random from a spectrum of parallel pasts, and the armada swooped off in wings like an attack fleet. They instinctively moved away from each other like whisps and coils of smoke, diminishing with distance.

Paitin shut his eyes a moment and focused on why he’d come. As he sat there in his own peaceful bubble, it occurred to him, not for the first time, that he might not return at all. He might stay with Sandra forever. He smiled with his eyes shut, the cold high wind moving gently over his eyelids, imagining them together.

Drew spotted something on radar almost immediately and crowed with joy. Paitin’s eyes popped open and he clutched the side of his door so hard his knuckles popped and he felt his fingernails scratch the paint. He felt Drew accelerate to attack velocity; Nickthanial pulled a separator cannon, a really cheap Lord Vav only good for one thing, out from under the seat and put it to his shoulder.

The ancient 747 deafened them with its thunder until Drew pulled a bit above and ahead of it. Paitin opened his mouth to say something, but Drew shouted: “Doitdoitdoit!” and Nickthanial leaned over and sprayed light all over the plane. The Lord Vav turned it into a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces began to separate with horrible piglike grunts. Paitin looked over the side, and it was funny how he could faintly hear the people screaming but couldn’t actually make out a single distinct human form, falling.

Paitin shook his head. Civics 101: conditional perfects are neither citizens nor their antecedents. Therefore, they are not Real.

And yet he suddenly needed to throw up. “Down!” he shouted, cupping his palm over his mouth to show Drew what was wrong. “Down!” The others chuckled among themselves, and then they pitched downward like a stone, yowling and hooting as Drew corkscrewed around the plummeting scraps and vapor trails of the dismembered 747. Nickthaniel went to blast it some more, but Chiraz took the Lord Vav away from him and stood with one foot on the back of the seat in front of him, eyes crazed, ready instead to burn the sprawling anonymous city that rushed up to meet them.

During the plummeting and the yowling Paitin felt the idea of staying with Sandra solidify with remarkable clarity in his mind, the air rushing up his neck and cheeks and seeming to wash away the repetitive violent release of the Invasion. But he mustn’t let on. His hand wandered to his pocket, to a picture he kept of her, and he managed to keep the loose, oily sensation of premature vomit in the back of his throat.

Another hover pulled in above them, a brutal old Scudthunder riding twisting chains of obsidian smoke, terrifying, packed with wolfish men who must have come through much earlier. The Scudthunder matched Drew’s rate of descent, and shouts and howls of macho ecstasy flew back and forth between the cars.

Paitin felt himself drifting right out of his seat because of the reckless nose dive; he clutched the seat bottom and closed his eyes just as he saw the men in the other hover hefting something that looked dark and shapeless in the high glare of the sun. Then a great heap of something landed in Paitin’s lap.

It was a woman. A conditional. Her eyes looked huge because her head had been shaved, probably with a knife to judge by the scalp, which was criss-crossed with cuts. Paitin saw her mouth working furiously for a moment in front of his face, and then she flew away. He reached out for her, but it was too late. He had to hook his legs under the seat in front of him to keep from flying off himself. He tried to scream as the woman bumped off the rear of the hover and disappeared but wind filled his mouth and cheeks and brought tears from his eyes. Another human form thumped on the hood and went spinning end over end to thud on the street below in a fan of blood. The other hover sent down a third woman in a torn dress.

Party favors. Chiraz and Rayton hooted in a kind of wordless ecstasy of animal approval, and Paitin felt himself growing cold and small as Chiraz picked up the third girl, held her high over his head, and threw her to her death.

Not real. Conditional perfect, figment of a troubled past that had gone nowhere. Except—

The ground rushed up, a suburb dreaming just outside the ancient urban gridiron, and a submerged shout came out of a bubble in Paitin’s throat. “Let me out!” He opened his door and dropped the remaining five feet to the street, slamming his knees, and vomited a tight painful spray.

Nickthanial started them hooting again at explosions in the distance, low and rocking, and in the orange glare he looked mad to be nearer the flame.

Drew leaned over his door trying to play sympathetic, but he couldn’t stop laughing. He actually looked terrified, eyes bulging, chest convulsing. He looked like a clown.

Paitin stood with his hands resting on his knees, breathing. He shook his head. “Go ahead without me.”

“What?” Said Drew. Then comprehension dawned in his face. “Oh, not again.” He darkened. “I wouldn’t have taken you if I knew you would do this. I wouldn’t have taken you.”

“Go.”

“You’re going to miss everything! And for what?”

“Go.”

“How will I find you, you goddam pooz?”

“I’ll chirp.”

Drew was shaking his head, muttering, pulling away. He accelerated along the ground a few hundred yards then made a sharp arc into a sky already acrid with yellow smoke.

He thought: Sandra. She was short, not even six feet tall. Skin like warm chestnuts. Soft, yielding woman of antiquity. He focused his thoughts on her while the shock of the initial invasion wore off. His fingers shook as he took a scrubber from his pocket and stuck it between his lips and put a cigarette in it. He could still detect a hint of vomit in his sinuses.

He knew the city mostly from above, but the nomenclature of the streets he also knew from the days spent exploring the ruin with Sandra. He stood at 21st Street. Sandra lived at 44th, and the numbers rose to the east. Paitin’s breathing and his heartbeat slowed when he recognized one of the taller buildings visible to the south and instantly knew his relative position. Of course he’d find her. He always had before, hadn’t he?

It was midnight at home, but here the sun had just begun to set. Fuel rainbows colored puddles in the street, and everything seemed fresh and full of possibility. The explosions of the rotorcraft that rose like mayflies from the city seemed crisp and healthy.

Paitin’s posture straightened and his shuffle became a strut. He was glad he’d come. It was worth it. Didn’t it always turn out to be worth it? He was at that moment walking a world where Sandra could be found and touched.

But first came the naked people.

Gabled row houses walled in one side of the street, brick apartment buildings ranged to different heights along the other, broken by charcoal-toned alleys. Paitin had perhaps a quarter mile when he heard the rising slap and gabble coming around the corner. Then the wall of pink burst out of one of the alleys.

Around a corner and straight at him came a flailing throng, and the street was curb-to-curb with naked running people.

Paitin stopped, abashed but unafraid. He stood head and shoulders above most of them, turning slightly to let them pass, and none touched him. The nude pygmies were men and women of all ages, stampeding after being set loose from some brief but shocking captivity. The slap of their bare feet on the street and sidewalk was sharp and distinctive, the pale faces wild and bewildered. Their pubic hair formed a dark river rather close to the ground, and Paitin found it suddenly difficult to believe they could be homo sapiens separated from himself only by superstitious beliefs and poor diets.

Hover bikes followed behind them with the yuck and stutter of hard ammo guns driving them onward, keeping them senseless. The kids on the hover bikes would swarm up close, their faces blank, and throw people down by the backs of their necks. Then they’d pull off a little and strafe them with little pocks of gunfire.

Paitin’s cigarette shot out of his lips as a nude girl lost her balance and collapsed against him.When he didn’t throw her down immediately one of the hover bike kids zoomed up close and screamed, “WHOOOOOO! Go fer yours, buddy!” And then resumed his position above and behind all of the flashing skin, pursuing them out of sight, guns pocking and splitting flesh like warm butter.

Paitin trapped the exhausted girl’s flailing arms and shoved her into a pile of garbage near the mouth of an alley, where she either passed out or played dead. He wiped his palms against his sides, spun in a slow circle, and walked on, chewing the end of the scrubber in his teeth.

More explosions thumped in the distance, and somewhere the crash of antique pistols briefly answered the neat little chirp and twitter of lasers and stutterguns before being silenced. Men and women burst randomly in and out of the row houses and alleyways, or they slipped in and out of dumpsters or ancient road-bound cars. Paitin felt bigger and bigger as he walked along. Warm breezes scattered paper trash and puffed memories of flame up his collar.

Half an hour later, Paitin stood before the steps to Sandra’s house. Relief overcame him, and he laughed to himself. As always, he’d harbored the fear that Sandra might not exist in this past, or that she might exist in altered form. A stranger would answer her door. This had been a subject of frequent nightmares in which she revealed, too late, a variant face; she’d once sported a large penis in one of his more disturbing dreams. But his Sandra had been in all previous pasts except one (two, including his own, the Real past), and as he took in the familiar flowerpots on the second-storey windowsill and the the chipped red brick of the façade, he knew he would not be disappointed. A feeling of having arrived on the edge of a far ocean washed over him, a positive feeling of floating away. He wanted to rush inside, and he wanted to creep silently away. He stood on the shore of a dream.

The destruction only seemed to add romance and a sense of destiny to his reunion with Sandra. Let the bombs burst and walls crumble around them. It wouldn’t matter. Paitin could hardly wait to hold her, to feel the hot flesh of her arms beneath his fingers. He would have to wait, of course, for her to accept him, but invasion and war had the wondrous effect of speeding everything up. He rarely had to wait long for her surrender.

For miles around, archaic war jets plummeted like rocket bombs into the sprawling city as the future’s children brought them down. It lent a breathless quality to the quiet of Sandra’s street. A cat’s feet blurred as it scuttled from one side of Chestnut Street to the other. Dead hands and feet stuck out of the pucker in the caved roof of a car where a human bomb had struck.

Paitin imagined showing these things to Sandra, looking deep into her eyes, and saying, “Not you. Never you.” And she would be his. Perhaps heaven and hell sometimes conspired to bring people together, as they seemed to do tonight.

Smiling, Paitin looked up. He saw something move in the upstairs window of Sandra’s house.

It wasn’t Sandra.

Fear and disappointment tore through him. He took a few steps backward to get a clearer look. The visage hadn’t gone, only stopped moving. When a distant fuel balloon threw a crimson glare across the darkling horizon, mingled with the fire’s reflection in the window was a leathery face criss-crossed with zippers.

No.

It had been just over an hour since the Invasion had begun.

Of all the places, the man in the zipper mask had to choose this house to have his fun. A minority of Invaders preferred private settings and elaborate rituals. They’d lay claim to a single house or building for days at a time. With so many to choose from, Paitin didn’t think he could count on Zipper to understand his need for this one.

And men like Zipper ceased to be themselves when they entered the past. Their alter egos could be territorial, aggressive. Not all of them remembered where the line was. Paitin certainly did not want to surprise this one, but he couldn’t let him ruin Sandra, not when he’d made up his mind that this Sandra was the Sandra for him, the one he’d stay with. He had the most powerful feeling that he’d never find another. He’d had the feeling before, but it remained as plausible as ever.

Paitin moved to the shadowed side of the stoop and paused with his back to the wall, which still gave off heat. Angry explosions lit the sky to the west. He’d need to move fast. The predator in the mask did not work quickly, according to rumor, but Paitin had no idea when he’d gotten here. He might already have found her. Probably had.

It enflamed some mingled moral and masculine sense in him. Sandra was not a modern woman. She was short, almost pygmy short, and innocent. She wore tidy little clothes she picked from paper catalogues. She was obedient and vulnerable and beautifully bottle shaped from bearing her own child. She was love.

Taking a last deep breath, Paitin swung his leg over the railing and found the door ajar. He pushed it open.

The house seemed to bulge with breathless darkness. Paitin took out his minicorder and turned it on. The camera sensed darkness and a tiny floodlight threw a cone of yellow radiance across a bannister, a closet, a small chandelier. Faint notes of creaking wood floors traveled in the walls.

What, he wondered, would this man do to another Real? What would he do in the anonymous darkness of a meaningless house? Once he’d begun his work, did he still distinguish between Reals and conditional perfects?

“Hello?” Paitin called up the steps. “Can you hear me? I’m a Real. Hello?”

A ball dropped in his stomach as the seconds passed without an answer. He decided to bluff. “Do you need assistance? I’ve got a Rainbow.”

Silence. He took the Snap out of his pocket and slipped it over his finger. It was no Rainbow, but he pointed it ahead of him in tandem with a light beam.

“Hey, come on. We’re all having fun, right?” He tried to control his breathing but it just kept coming deep and fast of its own accord.

A lesser weight suddenly scrabbled across a room upstairs, and the slow, creaking steps subtly changed direction. Paitin put his foot on the first stair, aiming the minicorder’s light above him.

“Look, this is just another house to you, right? It’s not to me. I always come here. Come on, man, talk to me.”

Paitin tried to be stealthy, but the planks of the steps and the landing made it difficult. The place smelled of aging plaster and copper pipes, but was the same clean, active place he’d been dozens of times before with dozens of Sandras.

The slow creaking noises sent tremors through his body. Did he have her? Was he holding her against him, hand clapped across her mouth?

When he couldn’t stand the freighted silence anymore, Paitin called out: “Sandra!”

Following that was a silence somehow deeper than before. At the landing he shone the light down a narrow hall and into the doorway of a bedroom where the light of the streetlamps made a diffuse rectangle on the floor. Paitin swept the mini around, hoping it would be directly in Zipper’s eyes if he decided to rush out of a room. He held his Snap finger at the level of his belly, pointing it everywhere he looked.

The edge of a dark object loomed inside the doorframe of the room at the end of the hall. A man’s shoulder?

Paitin pointed at it, waited a second, and then snapped. The blast of force splinted a bureau or a chest of wood. The bits of wood seemed to take forever to settle. Then he called out, “Sorry. Hey, just playing around.”

He pointed in all directions as he moved down the hallway, one step at a time.

Sandra’s trembling voice quailed: “Help me!”

In one of the rooms down the hall, a tremendous weight shifted. Paitin squinted through the cone of light, trying to decide where the sounds had come from. He wished he really did have a Rainbow. The colorful ribbon could have sought out Zipper around a corner or beneath a door and made coiled shavings of him in a few seconds.

“Help!”

“Sandra! Hold on!”

He heard her crying.

Paitin worked his eyebrows against the sweat stinging his eyes. He swore he heard something scratching behind the wall to his right. He stopped and listened. The miniscule sound came again, the brush of a sparrow’s wing. He pointed his finger at the spot in the wall where the sound seemed to emanate, held it there for a second or two, then snapped.

The wall coughed inwards with a whorl of splinters and dust that filled the minicorder’s light beam. A question-mark-shaped bit of hair hung suspended in front of Paitin’s eyes before an eddy plucked it away and the last of the larger boards clattered to rest beneath a window.

Paitin did not quite put his head into the two-foot hole. He caught his cheek on the ragged edge of a lath when he turned towards the sudden charge of boots behind him.

Zipper exploded out of an open doorway on Paitin’s left. Paitin waved his arm and got a good point at him, steady, almost a full second. He felt the faint vibration of a premature lock-on but before he could snap Zipper’s shoulder slammed against his ribs, pinning his arm and knocking the mini spinning down the hallway. It brought him up crunchingly against the wall and half through the hole. The impact might have broken his ribs except that the ancient wall gave, leaving his crumpled impression on it as he slid down partway to the floor.

Paitin tried to turn and grab hold of his attacker, but Zipper held him by the shirt and put his head through the soft wall, filling his eyes with the sting of sweat and plaster dust. The bigger man pinned his Snap hand flat against the wall and yanked the sleeve effortlessly off his coiled finger. Paitin barked in fear and outrage and began again to slide to the floor, Zipper lifting him up again by the belt and breathing harshly against the inside of the leather mask. Zipper spoke: “You son of a-” He also sounded surprised and outraged, even queerly self-righteous.

Paitin palmed the man’s face with one hand and squeezed where he believed the nose and eyes to be. Zipper knocked his hand away and punched him in the mouth, mostly just a flick of the wrist, but stunning.

Then the zippered mask was rushing at his face like a brown hillside, and he saw no more.

Paitin woke and was unable to feel anything below his neck. His body did not respond to his commands, and he lay with his bloody cheek on the floor in a room of Sandra’s house. He heard a man talking in radio babble: “Two for extraction, two four extract. Suspect in custody.”

As his eyes cleared he saw Zipper standing in a corner of the bedroom, mask off, speaking into his fingernail. Pinned against the wall behind him was Sandra, the strands of a mesh web digging into her tanned skin, the zipper mask and Snap glove hanging off one of the longer strands like bits of laundry.

Must have hit me with a para. Paitin could move his mouth and tongue, could breath, move his eyes, and that was all.

“Confirmed,” said Zipper, then turned. He had sandy blonde hair and a strong nose. He pointed a bright light into Paitin’s eyes and said, “I’m agent Tarrington, undercover boom, twelve thousandth judiciary. Paitin Derricter, you’re under arrest for the murder of Jerrimore Trentin in conditional perfect past two-one-oh-two point one. You have the right to a culpability scan, should you desire one.” He came closer and lowered his face like a moon. “Myself, I think you did it to save this little tart, here.” His voice dropped. “You killed a Real.” It dropped further. “For this.”

Paitin tried to speak but only managed a convulsive swallow. He alternated seeing double and triple. Sandra tried making aggravated little movements but only chafed her flesh against the cords of the web, which tightened defensively against her.

Tarrington sat on a guest bed that Paitin knew had never been used, propping his elbows on his knees and preparing to wait. “You going to want that scan?” he said.

Paitin turned his eyes away.

Tarrington huffed. “That’s what I thought.” Then he seemed to read Paitin’s mind. He turned and stared at Sandra, then looked back and forth between them.

Tarrington was taller than Paitin, stronger, and more confident. He seemed huge as he paced the room, his footfalls grinding the grain of the varnished wood floor. “The man you killed,” he said, “was one of my informants.” He seemed to consider what this meant to him. “Not a cop, but a decent man. He trusted me.”

Paitin felt himself smoldering, the words gathered like an army behind the cage of his teeth.

“Had his fun over here, like everyone. But he didn’t bring it home.”

A bubble of saliva passed Paitin’s lips.

Tarrington stabbed a rock-hard finger at him. “You’re going to sing his name, you piece of shit.” He took a long-bladed knife out of a thigh sheath and placed it on the floor beneath Paitin’s smoke-hole eyes. “But before we leave here, you’re going to do the same thing he did. You’re going to barber school.” And he gathered Sandra’s hair gently in his fist.

“And if you don’t, I’m going to do something much worse. And you know I don’t give a shit about it.”

Sandra watched them both. Her coffee eyes grew and shrunk with uncertain revelation. Then she made the mistake of speaking. She whispered, “Who are you people? What do you want?”

Tarrington hadn’t expected her to talk. He stared at her quietly with his head tilted like a dog’s. Then he suddenly licked her face with a fully extended red tongue. When she strained away from the moisture on her cheek, the jealous web contracted with a sliding, snakelike movement.

Neither Tarrington nor anyone else would condescend to speak to a conditional, especially to answer a question, unless it was sport. He glanced at Paitin to make sure he was listening, then said, “The question is, who are you? And who the hell is he?”

Paitin knew the game immediately. Rage spiked in his chest. Tarrington wanted to complete his defeat and humiliation by exposing him. He wanted to torment him.

“I’m—I’m—”

Tarrington cupped her supple shoulder. “Nothing, darling. You’re no one at all. Except to him.”

Paitin struggled to move his fingertips, his toes. Nothing. But feeling had begun to surge in rivulets down his throat. He could feel the vibrations of distant explosions in the floor.

She said, “I’ve never seen him before.”

“Well, he’s seen you, cupcake. A lot of you.” He turned. “How long you been coming to this house, lover boy? Three months? Always to a new…Sandra?” He made like he was going kiss her but ran his nose along her neck and collarbone instead.

Tarrington’s use of her name made Paitin blind with shame and rage. He’d regained some of the sensation in his shoulders and his upper chest but couldn’t move them yet. He dimly wondered how long before the boom arrived.

“We,” Tarrington announced, “are from the future. You believe that? A different future. That way we can do what we want here without going home to a big mess afterwards. Let me demonstrate.”

Tarrington slipped the leather mask off the wire. It looked like a deflated balloon. Paitin was surprised when he pulled it over his head, then daintily undid the zipper over his mouth to reveal his red lips and tongue. He stared through small, piercing silver grommets like hollow dimes. “I’ve killed hundreds of you,” he stated.

Sandra appeared frozen in ice, eyes dead and gleaming.

Tarrington straightened. “You probably think I’m a sicko. But I’m nothing compared to him. He is a pervert.” He indicated the length and shape of Sandra’s body with a wave of his hand. “What else do you call someone who becomes fascinated with an animal?”

She sobbed pitifully, which seemed to enlarge Tarrington to a new height and density.

“You see, this is probably the part he likes the best. Winning you over. Getting you to trust him.” He made little creeping spider gestures with his fingers. “Maybe he pretends to be just like you, running away with you, hiding out with you.” Then he became suddenly morose, and the mask looked comically bereft. “But we all know it ends between the sheets. That’s the only fantasy there is. He gets a last bang out of you, and then you die. Nothing but a snuff.”

Paitin found that he could flex his wrist a bit. He wondered if Tarrington knew he still had a Snap over him. Had he seen him get that good point in before hitting him?

Tarrington stood in front of Sandra, calculating the effect he had, hanging his head as if in sadness. “Because we only come to the same past once, my dear.” He cupped her buttock gently as if he weren’t the least aroused by it. “Because it’s ruined afterward.”

Sandra was so frightened that for a moment she did look like an animal. A rabbit, maybe. So soft and in need of protection.

“There’s despair. Starvation.” Tarrington caressed her cheek with his index finger. “The survivors start killing each other within a couple of weeks. They turn cannibal.”

Sandra made a mournful sound. To Paitin it was terrible, withering, but Tarrington seemed enchanted by it. He suddenly became very focused on her. He angled his body to block Paitin’s view of their exchange and pressed his groin fully against her. He spoke in a new kind of gravelly voice, low, intimate, for her alone. Paitin could barely hear him. “We’ll do this a thousand times. We’ll kill you over and over again. Your world will end, and you’ll forget there was ever anything but brutality. And we’ll do it in a single weekend, so drunk we can hardly see straight. And then we’ll forget you.”

He broke from her suddenly and came to stand above Paitin.

“Except for lover boy, here. He had to nail you so bad he killed one of his own for giving you a little haircut.” Tarrington kicked him and Paitin’s fingers coiled like a spider.

Paitin tried to snap and nothing happened. In another minute, one minute, he might be able to do it.

Tarrington pulled off the mask. His face was the very image of contempt. “The rest of them, out there? Just kids having fun.”

Then Paitin spoke. He sounded like a walrus barking. “Sandra.”

She froze at his call. Tarrington’s head snapped in his direction and spotted the waggling fingers of his right hand against the floor, and a terrible revelation blossomed in his face. Paitin, still unable to speak above a groan, said, “Sandra. Snap.”

Paitin saw the gummy bottom of Tarrington’s bootheel rise over his head and then smash down with crunching force on his hand. He barely felt it and went on trying to snap his mashed fingers, the bootheel coming down and down and down, slowing and finally killing the spider.

“Snap your fingers. I’ll protect you. Swear to God.”

She looked about to do it but was distracted by sudden cackling laughter in the streets.

Tarrington had a thumb needle out of his belt and charged across the room to stick it in her neck.

Paitin managed a shout. “Snap! Snap your fingers NOW!”

Paitin didn’t hear her do it. A small explosion formed itself out of the air in front of Tarrington’s chest and hit him like a speeding car. Paitin saw his feet fly out in front of him before he was blown, doubled, through the window.

The curtains fluttered. The familiar ozone smell filled the room, and the broken window let in the wail of a hundred mournful sirens sounding the end of a civilization and the smoke of a thousand fires.

Eventually Paitin got up. He lurched to Sandra and released her from the web snare. She fell to the floor and scuttled away from him like a crab.

Paitin had to waste precious minutes speaking soothingly to her through a locked closet door. His love for her made him patient despite his desperation, and she eventually agreed to open the door wide enough to receive the objects he handed through: the minicorder, a pair of seashells, and a sealed envelope. The silence that followed seemed to stretch to eternity and back. Paitin’s heart became hollow and ready to collapse from the combination of her nearness and her distrust. He heard rumpling paper in the closet.

He’d shone a naked-ray through the envelope after she’d given it to him a month ago at his suggestion. It contained a piece of her very own stationary paper and a message penned by her own perfect little hand. It said:

Dear Sandra,

You are going to be frightened and confused when you read this, but listen to one piece of advice from your closest friend: Trust Him.

Sandra

Of course she couldn’t trust him completely. Not right away. But she would. Over the last three months, she had come to love him at least half of the time.

When she opened the closet door it was like a birth. Sandra emerged on wobbly legs with her damp hair matted to her forehead. He delivered her, holding her beneath the armpits so she wouldn’t fall, then let her collapse against him. Her body was stiff and unyielding, but that would change.

Paitin watched her. Tarrington had called her an animal, but that was ignorant. Modern civics taught that conditionals were inconsequential, but also that they gave their consent to the Invasion with their treatment of each other. They would have believed in the Invasion. Sandra’s misty civilization had already rejected liberalism. The upshot: Paitin’s lover was a human being capable of understanding him.

So who was the pervert?

He smiled and gave Sandra the minicorder again when she asked for it, holding the little screen in the palm of her hand. She watched scenes of the two of them laughing, walking along the beach (here she brought the shells out of her pocket, feeling their weight), dressing after lovemaking. She stared at her own stolen image. The emotions in her face were impossible for Paitin to sort out, but he thought he saw some grounds for hope, some allowance that it was all true, that he loved her and she’d loved him.

While she stared at herself, he stared at her. Sandra. The spectrum of Sandra, the could have, would have, politically incorrect should have, conditional perfect tense Sandra, even the metaphysical might have but did not Sandra. He never bothered to wonder which she was.

At one point she became deeply quiet and seemed to come to a hard decision. She became stiff and heavy as wood against him. Then a giant explosion brought dishes off of shelves and plaster from the walls. Sandra jumped and he seized her protectively in his arms, and she did not push him away.

He told her they had to leave, to get away from the area where Tarrington had called for the extract.

His arm was around her shoulders as they left by the front door. She still wasn’t steady on her feet. But that was normal.

Many of the buildings were burned and gutted in the aftermath of the world’s most spectacular party. To Paitin they seemed flat, truly unreal, as he’d been accustomed to think of them. He still experienced a certain visceral reaction to the red blood of the conditional perfects themselves, which made them a little more real. But Sandra…she’d glowed from the first.

He helped her pick her way over a spill of rubble in the street. He stood in front of her when a nude figure darted between two buildings and dove behind a garbage can. As they walked slowly and steadily, others broke cover like timid forest animals. Some of them had escaped captivity or been set loose and wore incongruous bits of costume: jester hats or bits of shackles; they had flaps torn out of the backs of their pants; some bore lash marks. The dead lay in strange contortions, embedded in four inches of cracked asphalt, eyebrows still glazed with the frost of the high clouds through which they’d fallen.

Paitin knelt to scoop his prize over his shoulder as she collapsed with a moan. It was for the best: he could hear the heavy buzzing drone of a splatterbot far down the street. He could even faintly see it. It worked away in the crisp morning, tall as a house with a swiveling torso, picking up victims and smashing them together, flinging them through the air, dashing their innards out against the blackened walls of the buildings. Where they tried to flee it stomped on them or kicked them, and the hovers followed languidly above, their passengers staring down tired and glazed from the night’s revelries. Sandra groaned.

Paitin patted her rump affectionately. “It’s alright,” he said. “Not you. Never you.”

She sagged, but Paitin felt confident she would rebound. She would never have to be a splatterbot victim or a gladiator or a sex show. He would keep her safe. Paitin clicked a button in his tooth, and a few minutes later Drew came swooping down with a hoverload full of clanking liquor bottles and stretched underwear. He came in low so that a naked man chained to the fender by his ankle would bang into the sides of buildings.

Drew stopped. He spoke without looking at Paitin as if he were ashamed. “We’re going to see the catapult, chum. Are you coming or not.”

Paitin pictured all the dumb shocked faces of the naked people in some makeshift corral, waiting to be flung over the hills. He found he didn’t need to see it.

“Just pitch her up here,” said Nick with a grin, “no reason she can’t come.” He began reaching for Sandra’s belt.

Paitin pulled Tarrington’s police-issue Twirp out of his belt and held it over his head. Nick disappeared behind his door.

Drew shook his head. “Just chirp again in an hour, pucker. You can have that again next weekend.”

“Fly away, Drew.”

Drew did. The ankle-chained man smacked against every chimney on the horizon, twisting on the length of chain.

Paitin chose a direction and started to hike across the rubble. Soon he would set Sandra on her feet and tell her to walk with him. At the thought of them walking side by side, hand in hand, Paitin knew he wanted to stay and protect her, forever.

He would stay.

If not this time, then certainly next time.

By His Sacrifice

by Daliso Chaponda

I

His toys were chosen by a group of twenty-seven physicists, paradoxologists and psychologists. Saul’s favourite was a copper slinky. This pleased them. His favourite book was Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon.” This pleased them too.

It was mostly positive signs for the first four years of his life. They watched him progress and patted each other on the back. “It was worth the sacrifice,” pronounced Angelica, the Project Leader. She had left behind a husband and twin daughters but that was not the sacrifice she spoke of.

Harrod, Saul’s head teacher, had the most trouble accepting what they had done. His hours with Saul were his only oasis of joy. The child was exuberant. Saul had soft mulatto skin, large brown eyes he’d inherited from his mother, and tiny fingers which clutched Harrod’s wrists tightly enough to reel him into the present. Often he felt he did not deserve the child’s love.

When Saul was tested on his fifth birthday, the results were disappointing. He performed worse on the test than an average child of his age. Naturally, the finger was pointed at Harrod. “You have been too distracted,” Angelica accused. “Your obsession with guilt is jeopardizing the project.”

“It is easy to blame me,” he replied. “But there are more rational explanations. Saul has grown up with no companionship of his own age. We have been obsessed with intelligence above all else. Creativity and passion are equally important. We have been bringing him up like a lab specimen. Of course he didn’t do well in the tests.”

Angelica recognized this as more than Harrod’s tendency to blame himself for everything. She passed on his words to the council.

Two weeks later, eighteen children were kidnapped.

II

The Esposito family woke up to find their daughter’s sleeping cot empty. Mrs. Esposito screamed and collapsed. “Where is she? Where is my baby?”

The Austrian authorities could not answer her question.

Fernando Esposito, the little girl’s uncle, was a detective in the Rio de Janeiro police force. He took a leave of absence and flew to Vienna. His sister had barely spoken since the kidnapping. She sat in her daughter’s room daily, staring at the empty cot.

In a severe boarding school, Fernando had been taught that weeping was weak. The beatings had been more brutal for the ‘cry-babies’. He had learnt to bite back the tears and take the pain like a man. When he tried to speak to his sister and she stared at him blankly he felt the tears well up but he did not cry. Instead, he swore an oath to her that he would find her daughter.

If she understood his words, her face did not show it.

III

Gabriella remembered the sun. She stared up at the solar lamps that bathed the compound with light and thought of golden sunsets. And clouds. Clumps and columns of white fluff.

“What you mean you’ve never seen clouds?” She asked Saul, scrunching her nose.

“I’ve seen them on vid-screens.”

“That’s not the same,” Gabriella teased.

Saul said nothing. He did not say much else to her that break-time. He found her in the evening, after classes and asked her to tell him about clouds.

She did, even though telling him made her sad. “Cumulo… cumulo-something the big ones are called. They look like candy floss.”

“What’s candy floss?”

Gabriella’s sadness changed. She was no longer sad for the skies she would never see and the sun she would never feel. She was sad for the boy in front of her and she just wanted to give him a big hug or tell him a funny joke. She tried as hard as she could to find, in the few words she knew, the right ones to make Saul see clouds, taste wind and smell spring. She told him about the game she and her mother played where they pointed at the shapes in clouds and said, “Look a double headed elephant.”

“Look, a trumpet.”

Talking about her mother made Gabriella think of the nuclear fires and she began to cry.

Saul placed his palm on her shoulder. “Let’s play that game now.”

Through her whimpers she nodded.

Saul pointed at a shadow cast by a pole which marked the edge of the compound. There was a large circular transmitter come motion sensor come force field generator on top of a pole. “A tall skinny man with a big head. Your turn.”

Gabriella looked around, searching for a shadow that hid a secret.

IV

Saul asked Gabriella hundreds of questions about what it had been like living above ground. They worried at how depressed this made Saul. Angelica disagreed. “No. It’s perfect. He has to care for the planet enough to sacrifice himself. She is making him love the life he could have lived. Because of Gabriella, he is mourning the things lost in the nuclear war.”

“But it’s a lie,” barked Harrod; his eyes were red and there was a tremor in his voice.

Soon, Harrod would no longer be useful. Angelica wished this was not the case because he had given so much to the project. He deserved more but he had been insufferable ever since the other children had been brought down. He complained, whined and questioned the tiniest details.

“We have justified so many things,” Harrod continued. His words were addressed to no-one in particular. “We have robbed these children from their families and normal life on the surface. We lie to them every day. So many terrible things and there is always the possibility, that possibility we all hide from and never say out aloud. What if we’re wrong? When it comes down to it, everything we’re doing is based on a theory. Imagine we’re wrong?”

Not ‘soon’, Angelica realized, ‘now’. She made the order after the meeting. She felt no guilt.

Harrod’s last words were “forgive me”. The scientist who shot him wondered to whom Harrod had addressed his plea. Like most Baronists, he had not believed in God.

V

Saul still asked about Harrod many months later. He had been told that Harrod died heroically. “He saved all of us. There was a crack in the engine that generates energy for the entire compound. He sealed it but he died in the attempt.” It was a carefully chosen lie — to increase Saul’s admiration of martyrdom.

Harrod had been the only teacher who had befriended Saul. He had been the closest thing to a father in the boy’s life. His absence left a void in Saul that nothing could fill.

“Why can’t he just accept the loss?” Angelica asked one of the psychologists. “Isn’t it easier to adapt to death at that age? The other children are all coping with having lost their parents and they are dealing with it better than Saul. Why can’t he forget as well as they can?”

Angelica was wrong about the other children. They had not forgotten about their parents; they just did not talk about them often. This was what they had learnt: if one person loses their parents and talks about it, everyone feels sympathy for them. When everybody has lost their parents, the person who brings it up does nothing but remind all the rest about their own pain.

In other ways, Angelica was right. Saul was unable to talk to the other kids; he didn’t know what to say to them or how to be. His only friend was Gabriella and even she preferred playing with Ricky with the blond hair. She only played with Saul when Ricky with the blond hair was otherwise occupied. Saul knew this. It made him hate Ricky with the blond hair and it made him hate himself.

VI

“He doesn’t necessarily have to be a genius,” said Angelica to the rest of the council while looking through the results of the most recent academic evaluations. There was a hint of desperation in her tone. It was eight years since the other children had been brought into the compound and Saul was still scoring worse than most of them.

The others at the table looked at her bleakly. They were among the brightest minds on the planet and they could barely understand quantum and temporal physics. To make breakthroughs, Saul needed to be more than just gifted. He needed to be a Mozart.

“Maybe it will come with time,” said Angelica, trying hard to be positive. “He’s only thirteen.”

Her optimism was a sham. There were only nine more years. Recently, she had started to have the sort of thoughts Harrod used to. She began to wonder if they had been wrong. Maybe in bringing Saul to the compound they had done exactly what they were trying to avoid.

A consummate leader in all ways, Angelica did not let her doubts show. No-one doubted her conviction and it helped them to believe.

VII

Nineteen children in puberty – nine boys and ten girls. Flirtation and kisses were inevitable. Saul had vivid fantasies about Gabriella and Maia and Hanna and Thirumeni and Linda. Mainly about Gabriella because sometimes she leant forward and whispered into his ear. He would later remember the feel of her breath against his lobe. Sometimes, her body brushed against his. Sometimes he wanted to reach forward and pull her into his arms.

A decade had gone by but things had not really changed. Gabriella still spent time with Saul only when Ricky with the blond hair was otherwise occupied. Saul still hated Ricky with the blond hair.

Ricky with the blond hair’s full name was Richard Montcalm. He was beautiful and his memory was perfect. He also understood numbers and equations in a way that excited his teachers. Now, all that they learnt in their classes was science: nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, probability mathematics, temporal theory.

The children were finally allowed into the section of the compound that had been off limits to them for the last nine years. They were introduced to the scientists who had been arduously struggling to build a machine that could send an object backwards through time.

“We have no choice but to succeed,” the children were told. “Within ten years the force fields which protect this compound will run out of power and the radioactivity from the surface will kill us.”

“Then why aren’t you working on a way to make the force fields draw power from something else?” Gabriella asked.

“All we would do is buy ourselves time,” Angelica explained. “We are trying to reverse things. We want to make a time machine and send someone back in time to stop the war before it happens.”

This was a beautiful idea to the children. Of course it was. They had grown up reading H G Wells and Jules Verne and Kurt Vonnegut. The books available in the compound had been chosen carefully.

Ricky was fascinated and he boasted to the other children, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to find a way to make a time machine.”

If anyone can do it, the other children thought, Ricky can. Saul hated him all the more for this and swore to himself then and there that he would do it before Ricky did. He might not be able to say exactly the clever thing that would make Gabriella laugh but this was something bigger and better. He would save the world. Saul began putting all his effort into assimilating all the temporal research that the scientists had done. After classes, he continued reading. He drew sketches and he made calculations.

They all sighed with relief. They patted themselves on the back.

“This is how it will happen,” Angelica said, nearly in tears. “This is how we will be saved.”

VIII

Saul worked and the other children worked. They learnt everything the scientists knew about temporal theory and they struggled to find a way. After two years of failed attempts, one child said in frustration, “Maybe it’s not possible.”

Angelica only replied, “It is possible. We know it is.”

“How can you be so sure.”

She didn’t elaborate. They had all decided against explaining too much. If they told the children more, questions might be asked that no-one was ready to answer.

All the children’s theories were examined closely, but especially Saul’s. They encouraged him whenever he was losing hope. However, try as he might, Saul could hardly even understand the things the scientist’s had taught them. Even what had initially motivated him had dulled. He still hated Ricky but he had come to accept that Ricky was better than him at everything. He had even found a way to pretend he didn’t mind Ricky and Gabriella’s relationship. They had been together for half a year. Gabriella had even less time for Saul now.

IX

An image was the greatest breakthrough. Ricky succeeded in building a camera that took a photo, not of what was in front of it, but of what had been there twenty minutes earlier. It wasn’t sending an object back in time, but it was a step in the right direction.

It bothered Angelica that this breakthrough had come from Ricky. It should have come from Saul. “Saul Baron. By his sacrifice we live. By his sacrifice we love. By his sacrifice we sacrifice.” She still said the prayer every night, struggling to keep faith despite what she saw right in front of her eyes. Time was running out.

Eight years left. And then seven and then six. Still the camera was their only tangible achievement. Many in the compound still had faith in Saul even though he wasn’t a genius. They told themselves, he’ll be the one to make the final suggestion that will click things into place.

Angelica was too rational for such blind faith. She had formulated another theory. Ricky will develop the time machine. Of course, it made sense. Ricky will develop it and Saul will be sent back in time and when all the members of the United Nations ask him, he will lie. Anyone can see how much he hates Ricky and he’ll have the choice of telling them about Ricky or taking the credit. He’ll think, I’m the one here. I’m the one who’s going to die of radiation sickness. Of course he’ll take the credit. He’ll say, I developed the time machine. I’m the genius.

There were holes to Angelica’s theory, but she was no paradoxologist so she didn’t fret over the holes.

X

The explosions came—staccato constellations of fire against the force field accompanied by tremors in the earth. There were screams and confusion. The children had no idea what was happening. The council members ran to the weapons bunker. The force field would not stay up long. It had been designed to deflect surveillance, not weapons fire.

While the others armed themselves, Angelica searched for Saul and Ricky. She had no illusions. The compound would fall and most of them would be killed in the attack. Those who weren’t would stand trial and either be sentenced to death or life imprisonment. Angelica didn’t fear death. She feared that now, just when they were so close to success, it would all fall to ruin.Three years, that was all the time they had left.

Angelica found Saul, Ricky and Gabriella hiding between two buildings. They were staring up at the bursts of flame speckling the rapidly waning force field. “Listen to me,” she screamed over the deafening explosions. “We lied to you. We lied to you for all your life and you may never forgive us.” There were tears in Angelica’s eyes now. The force field had fizzled out of existence and she heard the rattle of gunfire. The future was falling apart around her. She continued screaming, desperate that Ricky and Saul would remember her words. “But even if you hate us, you must finish. Ricky you must build a time machine and Saul, you must go back in time to 2032 or all life on the planet will end. When you are taken to the surface, things might look fine, but they are not. In three years, if you don’t go back in time, the world will end.”

An invisible force propelled Angelica forward. She slammed into Saul and they both fell to the floor. At first he thought she was dead but then he realized she was as stiff as a board. Every muscle in her body was tensed and her eyes were wide open and unblinking.

Several yards away, a Hispanic man in black combat fatigues was pointing a stun rifle at them. His expression changed, jolted by shock. “Gabriella…Gabriella? Is that you?”

XI

“I never gave up looking for you,” Fernando Esposito explained when the chaos had died down. Gabriella stared at him blankly. “You don’t remember me,” he realized. “How could you? It’s been 12 years.”

Fernando had never stopped looking for her. Even after his sister killed herself he had not given up. When Fernando had begun to discover that an unsettling number of children had disappeared in other countries on the same day as Gabrielle, he had started to coordinate his efforts with Interpol. Interpol had expected to find Gabriella and eight of the other children. They had not expected to find the rest. It was only later, when they had transported the children back to the Cape Town police headquarters that they took their names. When Saul answered, the man questioning them laughed. “What’s really your name?”

Saul repeated his name and the man’s countenance became murky. He left and returned with a superior. The man had coal black skin and a thick moustache. “What did you say your name was?”

“Saul Baron.”

“It can’t be him,” said the man who had been questioning the children. “Saul Baron’s in America. He was probably just named after him.”

The man with the thick moustache shrugged. “You know they found a research centre underground. I heard them say it was something to do with time travel.”

“But…”

“Look closely at his face,” he pointed at Saul with the back of a pen. “Age it a few years. Doesn’t it look familiar?” He did not wait for a reply. “Bring him.”

“Follow me,” said the man who had been questioning the children.

“No,” replied Saul. “I won’t go anywhere they don’t.” He pointed to Gabriella and the others.

Two policemen grabbed Saul by the arms and dragged him out. They put him in a small room and the door was locked behind him. He was clearly in a prison cell. The only furniture was a bed, a chair and toilet. Saul sat down and tried to make sense of everything that had happened in the last few hours. The attack, the explosions, Angelica saying’ we lied to you’ and then seeing it was true as they were transported up to the surface—the surface that they had always thought was nothing but irradiated rubble.

They had been led out of caves into a bitterly cold night. Icy Atlantic winds had knifed into the children’s cheeks as they were herded into a large van. They had not been given any explanations. Saul had looked out of the van’s window and watched as they drove into a city just like the ones he had seen on vid-screens depicting the ‘distant past’: tall sky scrapers with rows of flickering lights and hover cars weaving their way along magnetized roads.

Now, in the prison cell, Saul wrestled with questions. What could be trusted? What couldn’t be? Who were these people? Why had he been taken away from the others? The silence terrified him. It was endless and hungry. He waited, whistling to himself and drumming his fingers against the tabletop to combat the silence. No-one came. Occasionally, he could hear people walking outside the cell and voices speaking. He could not make out anything; the words were muffled or in another language. All he could do was wait. Angelica’s words reverberated in his head. We lied to you?

Why would they lie to us? How much had been a lie? He wished he could speak to Angelica and get her to explain things. She was strict, often harsh, but he could not imagine her lying without good reason.

No-one came until much later and then it was a woman with a plate of food. “What’s going on?” he asked her. “Where’s Gabriella?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know anything.”

“Why am I being treated like a criminal? I need to talk to someone!”

The woman left the food and closed the door. Saul heard the click of the lock sliding back into place. He looked down at the plate. It smelt delicious. He grabbed the plastic fork and began downing the food. The flavours burst across his tongue; the heady richness was overwhelming.

Later, he vomited.

XII

The next day the man with the thick moustache came into the room with a ration package. “Your stomach can’t take normal food yet. You’ve spent all your life eating these.” The man tossed him the silver packet. “Life without roasted chicken and cassava, you’ve missed out son.”

“Where is Gabrielle?”

“She your girlfriend son? Good looking girl.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s with her uncle. He’s the one who figured out where they were hiding you. Insane if you think about it. Y’all have been right under us for over a decade and we had no idea.” The man paused and fixed Saul in a penetrating stare. “Did they tell you who you are?”

“I’m not answering any questions until you tell me where I am and what’s going on.”

“I can’t answer any of your questions, son. We don’t even understand what’s been going on ourselves.”

“Why am I being kept here?”

“Because you’re Saul Baron.” The man chuckled at himself because of the bewilderment on Saul’s face. “The fuckin’ messiah and you don’t even know it.” The man got up and began walking out.

“Tell me something,” Saul begged.

“Sorry son.”

XIII

The ration packs were the only thing that indicated the passage of time. Saul soon gave up on asking the woman who brought them questions about Gabrielle and the others. “Can I get a book?” He asked instead. She didn’t answer.

Six ration packs (two days?) later, the woman entered the room with a different gait. She was glancing from side to side as though she was worried someone would catch her. “Are you really Saul Baron?” she whispered.

He nodded.

Her eyelids widened. “Could you… could you…” she began sheepishly, “Could you bless me?”

This was even more confusing than the previous reactions to his name. He decided to play along. “I’ll bless you if you tell me why my name means so much to you.”

“You saved us,” she replied. “I don’t know why they are treating you like this. They should have put you in the best hotel in Cape Town and brought you anything you want.”

“What did I save you from?”

“I’ll lose my job,” she replied and she scuttled out.

XIV

Time, Saul realized, must be the key.

Angelica had told him that he had to go back in time to 2032 or the world would end. The woman who brought him the food seemed to believe that he had already saved the world. The man with the thick moustache had called him ‘the fucking messiah’. Somehow all these pieces connected.

Time must be the key. They had spent all those years trying to build a time machine. Clearly Angelica and the others had wanted to send someone—him—back in time to change something. If not because of a nuclear holocaust, then what? She definitely believed some disaster was going to happen in three years.

XV

Eight ration packs later, the man with the thick moustache returned with a group of policemen.

“You’re out of our hands now Saul Baron. Should have kept you for ourselves but the African Coalition are pussies.”

Saul followed them through the labyrinthine corridors and out into white heat. Saul flesh seared at the blazing kiss of the sun. He looked up, squinting his eyes. Between the towering buildings, he could see threads of cloud. “Candy floss,” he murmured.

“What’d you say son?”

“Nothing,” Saul replied.

He was driven to the airport. By daylight, the city was even more sprawling. Every building was a skyscraper and conical tubes connected each building to the one adjacent to it. Reflections of sunlight on glass burnt Saul’s eyes and he stopped looking upward. He kept his eyes on the road and listened to the flood of unfamiliar shrieks, whoops and whines. He had expected the grandeur of the city but the frenetic cacophony was overwhelming.

At the airport the South African police relinquished him to a group of Americans. The one in charge was a fat brown haired woman. Layers of loose flesh jiggled beneath her chin when she talked. Her obese entirety was squeezed into a grey business suit, the jacket of which would not have fit her were its top three buttons fastened. She smiled at Saul and pulled him into an awkward embrace. He tore himself out of her arms.

“Just tryin’ to be friendly,” she enunciated. “You should be nice to me. I’m the Mother Hen, the lady with the answers.”

Later, he found out her name was Caitlin Bartner. In the air, he asked her. “Do you think I’m going to save the world too?”

She let out a thick, syrupy chortle. “Getting right to the point on the first date.”

She took out an envelope and handed him a glossy photograph. It was a picture of a man who resembled him standing in a room of men and women. “October 12 2032, during a meeting of the UN Security Council, you, well a version of you, appeared in the middle of the room. That Saul Baron bore technology and knowledge that proved he was from 50 years in the future. He outlined the sequence of events that would lead to a war that would devastate the planet. A few hours later, that version of you died. Autopsy revealed that the cause of death was excessive radiation.”

Saul stared at the image. The Saul Baron in the picture was rake thin and he was dressed in a ragged brown body suit caked with dirt. He was holding a tiny metal object that looked like a hand mirror.

“Nothing worldwide has been the same in the 46 years since,” Caitlin explained. “Systems of government have changed, wealth has been redistributed, nations have disarmed…well…somewhat. The world is no Utopia but we are alive and it’s all because of Saul Baron.”

Caitlin reached under her business suit and revealed a bead necklace with a prism hanging from its end. “A new world religion even started. It is a beautiful religion. Nothing about God or life after death in it. It just recognizes the one great sacrifice that changed the world. Every moment since is celebrated and Baronists aspire to sacrifice themselves for others as Saul Baron did. Like all religions it has its lunatic fringe. For example, there is one church of Baronists who mutilate themselves, sacrificing fingers and sometimes whole limbs. At its best, it brings out people’s deepest nobility.”

“You’re a Baronist?”

“No, I’m not religious at all. I’m strictly science. Though, to be honest, Saul Baron left his mark on science too. A whole new branch of science started. It’s called paradoxology. Paradoxologists study the implications of time travel. The main question they try to answer is what happened to the reality Saul Baron came from. Did it cease to exist or does it still exist parallel to this reality?”

“What do you think?”

“I have no clue and I don’t really care,” she replied. “To me it’s as irrelevant as wondering if there is a God. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. My life is empty and unfair is either way.” Caitlin smirked for a split-second then became serious. “A lot of people care a great deal though. For instance, the people who kidnapped you when you were a child. They were part of a group that scientifically proved that if you do not go back in time to 2032, the world will either revert to the nuclear winter Saul Baron saved us from or worse yet, it will fall into total chaos. “

“If that’s true…” Saul began.

“Then we have to try to send you back. The problem is that there is another group of paradoxologists who have proven just as convincingly that we are now living in a new, better reality and if you go back you could change a tiny detail and mess everything up. The American government has been getting hell from both groups for the last seventeen years. I guess it’s a matter of which bunch of scientists end up being right.”

“When did they kidnap me?” Saul asked.

“You were two months old; your family was killed and you disappeared.”

Saul nodded. He supposed the information should shock him but how could he mourn parents he had never known.

“They were extremely well organized and well funded. They had supporters all around the world. They chose the underground caves in Cape Town because South Africa’s government was in total chaos. The country was ravaged by civil war. It was the perfect place to disappear. Four years later when they kidnapped the other eighteen children, they kidnapped them from different parts of the world so that the abductions would not be linked. If it was not for the unwavering determination of Gabrielle’s uncle, who knows if you ever would have been found.”

“And if people really believe that I’m the saviour and all that, why didn’t they go crazy looking for me?”

Caitlin explained. “The American government pretended we still had you and that we were keeping you protected. That limited panic.”

“Panic?”

“You have the potential to make a time machine. Do you have any idea how much power that is? Temporal research is banned worldwide. It’s more feared than nuclear technology. Can you imagine a world where terrorists could go to a building two days after the president was there and send a bomb back through time? Nothing could protect from that. When you disappeared as a kid, the US government figured that fanatics had got you. I guess we just hoped it was the fanatics who wanted to kill you.”

“Is that what you’re going to do?”

“No,” she replied. “That’s not what we have planned for you at all.”

XVI

Trees and a lake. That was the good part. The US government holed Saul up in a cabin surrounded by the scent and vibrancy of reclaimed nature. In the early morning, Saul stepped onto the porch and looked out on a verdant valley and the sun rising. He wanted it to move him more than it did. He had spent his life holed up underground but all the landscape awoke in him was a detached appreciation. Still, all things considered, not the worst place in the world to be.

The bad part was it was just another prison. It was more picturesque than the tiny cell the South African police had kept him in but it was just as confining. There were four soldiers outside the cabin at all times and they were just the ones who were visible.

When Caitlin came to see him with a folder full of papers, he knew what they were before she passed them to him. Diagrams of machinery, complex equations and pages and pages of text. Some of them he recognized from the underground lab, but there were others he had never seen before.

“I thought you said temporal research was banned.”

Caitlin absently sucked her bottom lip. “It was. Of course, every country clever enough to research it in secret is hard at work. That’s why there’s been so much uproar about you and the other kids. By what we can gather, you are all the world’s leading experts on temporal research. The people who kidnapped you were crazy but they sure as hell knew what they were doing. It looks like you were getting close. Austria’s claimed that Gabrielle girl you were asking about Harindra’s gone back to India which is worrying. They’ve got the money and resources to really exploit…”

“I want to speak to Gabrielle,” Saul interrupted. “I’m not going to look at any of these papers until you put me in contact with her.”

Caitlin looked at him and smiled. “Good for you, asserting yourself and all that. You’ve been so meek that I wondered if you had any strength in you. Unfortunately, we can’t put you in contact with Gabrielle. Austria’s keeping her under lock and key just like we’re keeping you. That’s not going to change and you need to accept it.”

“I won’t help you unless you let me speak to her,” repeated Saul.

“I’m not toying with you. We really can’t put you in touch with her. There are things you can ask for. We can’t let you out into the world because you’d be in too much danger but we can make your life better. We can bring you whatever you want: vids, books, that’s the sort of thing you can ask for.”

Saul was quiet, determined to be uncooperative. Caitlin did not push him further. She just left the pile of papers with him. Before going she said, “You might as well.”

XVII

Friendship was a surprise. Caitlin returned a few times every day to try and persuade Saul to cooperate. They always chatted and she told him about the world. As much as he struggled against her, he could not help but laugh at her acerbic sense of humour. Talking to her made him feel comfortable.

Saul’s diet expanded as his stomach adjusted to food other than ration packs. Caitlin introduced him to honey, avocado, fried fish, toffee and cheese. One Thursday she brought him groundnuts and showed him how to crack the shells and pluck out the juicy cores. “You’re wasting your effort,” he confessed. “I was never good at temporal physics. Besides inventions are more than just intelligence. There’s also random luck. Newton getting hit on the head by an apple, Alexander Fleming leaving out an unwashed culture and returning a few weeks later to discover Penicillin. Who knows what serendipity led to the future Saul Baron to develop a time machine? Even if I have his exact brain chemistry, I will never be in the exact same circumstances.”

“You may be right.”

“Then why don’t you let me go?”

“There’s a chance that it’s your unavoidable fate to build a time machine. Even if it’s not, enough people believe you can build one. As long as we have you, other countries will always be afraid we have a secret time machine hidden away somewhere. Don’t fool yourself anyway; life in the outside world would not be easy for you. Between the factions that would want to deify you and the ones that would want to murder you, you would never have any peace. That’s one thing we’ve given you.”

“If you won’t let me leave, can you at least bring some people here? It’s extremely lonely.”

“That can be arranged,” replied Caitlin. “If you take a look at those schematics and tell us your ideas.”

The bargain was struck. Saul looked through America’s temporal research notes and in return, he was moved to a military base where he was allowed to interact with the families of the personnel. It was not so different from how his life had been underground. He accepted it and tried to find contentment.

XVIII

“Happy Birthday,” Caitlin said to him, entering his room with a communion link. She plugged the link to the screen in the corner of Saul’s room and it illuminated. “Your conversation will be monitored and if you talk about where we are keeping you or mention anything to do with temporal science this will never happen again.”

Saul only understood when Gabrielle’s face blinked onto the screen.

“Saul,” she said. Seeing her made him quake with longing. She looked different yet the same. Her hair was now curled into ringlets her lips were dyed red. She was in a white cotton dress and a silver necklace fell over her chest. Her eyes were gleaming with tears. “I was so worried about you.”

“It’s so good to see you,” he replied, trying to control the tremor in his voice.

“I can’t believe all the stuff I’ve heard about you,” she continued. “They say you saved the world.”

“Can we not talk about that?”

“How are you doing?”

“I’m not allowed to leave but they treat me well.”

“That’s so unfair. My uncle’s been showing me all the things I missed out on in the last four months. I’ve seen waterfalls, mountains, and I went on a space cruise orbit of the earth last week.”

So much for the Austrian government keeping her under lock and key. Caitlin had lied to him but Saul could not muster any anger. He was just so happy to be speaking to Gabrielle. He let her words wash over him. Her delight suffused him. When she asked questions he responded briefly. He knew their conversation would end soon and he just wanted to listen to her for as long as possible.

“Ricky’s doing great as well,” she said and Saul was jolted out of the dream. “He’s made a deal with some lab which want to develop his camera that photographs the past. I don’t get to see him much but when we do it’s really great. We’re getting to discover the world together. There’s a tender side of him which has just opened up since we came to the surface. Underground so much was expected of him, I think he always had to keep his guard up. The best thing about…”

Once she started talking about Ricky, she did not stop. Saul was the one who ended the conversation.

XIX

From within the high security prison where she was serving a life sentence, Angelica asked to be put in contact with Saul or Ricky daily. “The lives of every person on the planet are at stake,” she pleaded. She tried to persuade with scientific facts. “Look at the meteorological and physical records since the day Saul Baron appeared at the UN summit. The number of hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters increased dramatically. It’s a chain of increasing entropy which begins at the moment where Saul Baron changed history and if he does not go back in time the paradox will push that entropy to a critical peak.”

“There are other, less fatalistic explanations for all those things,” replied the prison psychologist. Talking with Angelica frustrated him because her fervour would accept no other possibilities.

One day she got on her knees and begged. “All I ask is just a few minutes. Let me speak with them for a few minutes and I’ll never ask again. Please.” The words bled out of her, crimson with desperation.

“What is it about the end of days,” said the prison psychologist to a colleague later that evening. “Every religious text has its own version be it called Ragnarok or the Rapture. As the first and second Millennia neared, prophets of doom said with total certainty ‘this is the end.’ War after war has raged and here we are, still thriving. Why do people still have this fascination with apocalypse?”

“The end of days did come once,” the prison psychologist’s colleague reminded him. “But we were saved by Saul Baron. By his sacrifice we live.”

“By his sacrifice we sacrifice,” the two men said in unison.

XX

Other paradoxologists who believed as Angelica did demanded that the US government stop hiding Saul Baron. Saul was moved three times in the year before Angelica’s predicted ‘end of days’. Caitlin told him that they had almost recaptured him two of the times.

“Isn’t there a way of letting them know that if they captured me, I couldn’t build a time machine anyway.”

“They believe Saul. Haven’t you realised by now that nothing can dissuade a person who believes.”

XXI

As for Ricky Montcalm, he had lost all interest in the time machine project. Angelica’s desperate pleas to him on the day the underground installation had fallen meant nothing to him.

Ricky had become extremely wealthy by patenting and developing the ‘Montcalm method’ of taking photographs of past events. His initial sponsors were law enforcement agencies worldwide who utilized his technology to find out what happened at crime scenes before they arrived. The real money came when he developed smaller Montcalm cameras for general distribution. The camera was every voyeur’s dream. All a person had to do was go into a room where young women had been showering or a couple had been having sex and take a photograph. Paparazzi and pornographer’s all over the world rejoiced.

XXII

The day came. The doom cults had driven thousands into frenzies in the final days before October 12, 2082. Desperate requests demanded Saul Baron be sent back in time. This was not even an option. There was no time machine.

The twelfth of October came like any other day. The sun rose, the wind blew. All over the world celebrations began to commemorate Saul Baron’s sacrifice. The preparations had taken months.

Saul watched the festivities through the filter of a vid-screen. They had not even let him loose on this of all days. He watched the processions and ceremonies alone. All but two of his guards had been given the day off. He watched as parades of young boys and girls flew on hovercrafts carrying banners with his face on it. Their tiny faces were elated and they chanted “Saul Baron! Saul Baron! Saul Baron!” Intricate conflagrations of fireworks crackled above. He wanted to scream with anger of throw something at the screen. Every song and cry of jubilee stung him.

Concurrent to the exultant celebrations, churches of the Baronist faith held solemn ceremonies. Prayers were mumbled and congregations sat in meditative recognition of Saul Baron’s sacrifice. “If Saul Baron were here today,” declared Caleb Daniels, the president of the United States, in an impassioned speech to the nation. “He would be proud of the world we have made.”

The sobs tore through Saul’s body without warning. His body shook in almost-convulsions as he saw the joy in the faces on the screen. The screen might as well have shown fictional images. That world had never been real to Saul. From his birth he had always been an exile from it. He had never done any of the things people took for granted and all because of his name. His stupid hosanna name.

The weight of it had never hit him before; he had never let it. He had always forced himself to accept. This is how it is. This is how it must be. Nothing I can do or say could change a thing. Now, as he watched the world celebrate, the dam with which he had held back his resentment, anger and loneliness crumbled. He wailed without inhibition, open mouthed like a babe in a cradle. His throat split and his frame shook.

If I had been born with a different name? If I had known my parents? If I had gone to a normal school? If I had only? These words were the language of his wails and the hungry silence devoured them. He lay on his bed like a broken toy, still staring at the screen. Looking at it tortured him but he could not tear his eyes away.

The footage of Saul Baron’s appearance at the 2032 UN summit was played. The Secretary General was in the middle of a speech when he was interrupted by a lightening bright flash and a sharp crackle. The UN Security Guards whipped into action immediately, approaching the man who had materialized in the centre of the room with weapons drawn. He lifted a tiny mirror like object in the air and rotated it. The soldiers’ bodies were petrified in mid attack. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “I am from the future, and I have come from a time ravaged by war and suffering.”

Saul had never watched the footage. He had always known he could ask Caitlin to bring it to him but he never had. He had never wanted to watch it even though if asked, he would not be able to say why. Now he knew the reason. When Saul heard people praising his name and saw their awe and reverence, on some level, in some tiny corner of his mind, he had always wondered if that potential for greatness lied untapped within him. They all believed it so completely. Maybe they are right, he sometimes fantasized. Maybe there is a secret font of genius hidden within me that could be liberated at any random moment?

As he watched the doppelganger of himself address the UN, he felt that unspoken dream die. This man was nothing like him. Their facial resemblance was the extent of it and even that was warped. The Saul Baron on the screen’s looked more handsome, more confident, and more real. He stood tall and his voice reverberated with sonorous music. He was a giant. A man to be worshiped. “You all have a responsibility to humanity that you scorn with your petty squabbles,” the Saul Baron on the screen accused the delegates. “The conflict that destroyed the future I come from had its beginnings in the decisions made here. You,” the Saul Baron from the future pointed at the King of Thailand. “Even though you have been begged and pressured to give the Mon people self determination, you have never even entertained the idea or tried to give them more equal footing. This oppressive decision and the slaughters you have condoned are tiny pebbles which will ripple and lead to global war. You,” now the Saul Baron from the future addressed the president of America.

One by one he addressed every delegate in the room telling them how decisions they had made, nuclear programs they refused to disarm, aid they used to give, and tiny disagreements that they dismissed as irrelevant would culminate in genocide. Billions would die and the survivors were doomed. His words were a testimony filled with tragedy but motivated by hope. “You can change the future.”

Saul watched the future avatar of himself. He hated him. He hated the man’s genius, his eloquence and the beautiful nobility of his sacrifice. Saul’s eyes were dry now but the desolation he felt was deeper than it had been when he was crying. He realised something with an icy certainty. If he died today, it would change nothing. No-one would even feel his passing for more than a split second. Not Caitlin, not Gabrielle. No one.

He turned off the vid-screen. Even with the screen off he could still see the parades and fireworks lucidly. He could still see the face of Saul Baron—he could no longer think of it as his face. This is not my face. This is not my body. I am not Saul Baron. I never was.

XXIII

October 13 2082. The day after the day the world should have ended. Caitlin came to see Saul and immediately she could see the pain in his eyes. “I’m sorry. There was no way I could make them allow you out for the celebrations.”

Saul laughed and the sound was strangled and manic. “All my life, I’ve been pushed around here and there and imprisoned in a thousand different ways because I am Saul Baron. Of course I could not leave.”

Caitlin’s worry multiplied. She had seen the anguish that eclipsed Saul before, usually in soldiers who killed themselves a few days later. “Maybe I could arrange for you to be taken into Ohio. It’s the nearest city and if we disguise you…”

Saul mumbled something and she asked him to repeat himself.”I have no regrets,” he said. “Everybody has regrets. Things they wish they could go back in time and undo. I don’t because my decisions haven’t made any difference at all. All I’ve done for years is look at equations and theories I can’t understand in exchange for nothing. I’m like a beast in a pen. You feed me, you let me sleep. That is all.”

Caitlin suppressed the words which wanted to come from her lips. Her instinct was to speak the anaesthetizing lies she had told him every time he despaired. She just waited.

Saul did not say anything for a long time. He just stared at her, his accusing gaze boring into her. At last, he spoke. “I’m tired of doing nothing Caitlin. I have no secret genius or any useful skills, but I thought about it and I do have one thing. My name. The world is still full of causes that need support. Surely if I could lend my name to them, if I could represent them and raise money for…” Even as he formulated the request he knew they would not let him go.

Caitlin started to speak but Saul interrupted her. “Just leave me alone. Just go.”

He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.

Caitlin obeyed his request.

XXIV

Guilt was always part of the job. That was a reality Caitlin had accepted long ago. There were times when she had been complicit in the gunning down of civilians: the broken corpses of dead children haunted her dreams. She had told a thousand lies for three different administrations and personally organised countless missions that made her nauseous. After a while the dead blended into each other and the guilt became blurry. In her nightmares the faces of the dead were indistinct.

She saw the posters of alternate Saul Baron everywhere she looked that morning. That Saul Baron had come from a ravaged world that was dying. You would think that the expression in his face would be more worn away than the Saul Baron who she had left lying inert on a crocheted blanket.

Saul Baron…

“I do have one thing.” Saul had said. “My name.”

XXV

Caitlin returned to Saul’s room in the early evening.

“Saul,” she said. “You may be right.”

XXVI

Caleb Daniels was the 57th president of the United States. He was not an idealist. He had aspired to the office for one reason. Power.

If asked, ‘What is power?’ ‘What do you want if for?’ or a number of other like minded questions he would not have had a clear answer. He just knew he wanted it. The universe’s sense of irony had therefore seen fit to give him what he desired but to ensure he was the least powerful president in decades. The Socialist party had the senate majority and he had only come into power through a coalition. His every decision had to be condoned by a bevy of other minds as consumed as he was by self interest.

The last 4 years had been a flicker. As the new elections came closer Caleb knew he had no chance. All four of the other candidates who were still in the race were well ahead of him in every poll. He would just be a hiccup in the history books.

Among his many appointments on November 2nd, 2082 was Caitlin Bartner, ex-deputy director of the AFA. She came into his office and said a single sentence. “How would you like to be re-elected?”

XXVII

“It’s a bit of a deal with the devil,” Caitlin explained to Saul. “He’s the worst of the candidates but he’s the one in power right now. Marcus Santiago would be a much better president but Caleb needs your help and has the influence to change your circumstances. All it will be is some photographs with him and a few public appearances saying you support him. For the political support of Saul Baron, he would agree to almost anything.”

“How bad is he?”

“Terrible. He’s running the country into the ground. I’ll probably feel very guilty after we get him re-elected. But since your grand master plan is to use your name for charities and lofty ‘save the world’ stuff I think that’ll balance out the bad karma points.”

Sometimes Caitlin’s sense of humour still bewildered Saul but he laughed anyway, mostly because hers was so contagious.

XXVIII

“How would you like to be re-elected?”

“Are you serious?” President Caleb Daniels replied.

“You must know that we have Saul Baron holed up on a military base in the hope he’s going to help us build a time machine. Surely you can think of more practical uses for him.”

XXIX

Caleb Daniels was re-elected in a landslide vote.

XXX

On the day the ballots were counted Saul and Caitlin sat together in the White House. There had been a banquet: roasted meats, spiced potatoes, eggplant salad, and figs.

“I think food is what I love best,” Saul told her.

“Me too. Look at me.” She pointed proudly at her fleshy form.

The White House Chief of Staff dawdled over to them. He had a chunk of fruit skewered on a toothpick between his thumb and forefinger. He boasted about how dramatic the president’s victory had been and then stumbled away.

The numbers frightened Saul. “I didn’t expect my support to change things that much.”

Caitlin nodded. “Of course it did, and you’re just getting started.”

“You’ll help me right?” Saul asked. “You’ll help me find the right people to…I don’t know…”

“Save puppies and the like. Of course. I’ll be Saint Caitlin Bartner right next to you most holy messiah. Try this.” She shoved a block of liquorice into his palm.

He put it into his mouth and enjoyed the bittersweet tang. Yet another taste Caitlin had introduced him to. He closed his eyes and swallowed.

“Saul!” He heard a voice scream behind him.

He turned to be nearly knocked over as Gabrielle grabbed him in a tight hug.

“Oh, didn’t I mention?” said Caitlin between mouthfuls. “I invited her.”

Epilogue

The old woman was woken up by the orderly. “You have a guest,” he said and then he helped her get dressed. When she was ready he placed her in the rusty wheelchair. The wheels whined and clattered as he pushed her down the barren corridors of the prison. He whistled. Toowee toowee. He was always whistling. Whistlin’ Sam they sometimes called him.

The old woman recognised the tune he was whistling. She couldn’t place it but it reminded her of long ago. It made her sad but she smiled. It was a smile of cracked lips and teeth like marble tombstones.

Toowee toowee.

Outside, Saul waited for her. He was alone which was a rare thing. Usually he had guards, advisors or his wife with him at all times. “Spent so many years alone, now I can’t stand it,” he’d admitted to a coterie of school teacher’s he’d given a speech to. They had admired his humility.

He heard the whistling and he looked up. He had been looking down at the flowers. The prison garden was a carpet of blues, oranges and light greens. Butterflies darted to and fro; the blend of scents was heady. The Warden was very proud of the garden, and rightly so.

“I’ll leave you two to your own devices,” said the orderly. “I’ll be right there.” His little finger indicated a bench fifty feet away. A strange finger to point with, Saul remarked. There was probably a story behind this little quirk. Later he would ask. He liked to find out the answers to all the tiny mysteries he encountered.

He watched the orderly walk away and then looked at Angelica. She looked impossibly old, her wrinkles were as deep as scars. He looked down at her damaged legs.

“I heard you jumped,” he said. “Tried to kill yourself after the world didn’t end. Odd way of celebrating.”

She was staring at him and enjoying the sound of his voice. Words had long ago ceased to have meaning for her. Some voices soothed her and others terrified her. Some voices made her happy and his was one of those. It made her smile for the same reason that the orderlies whistling had.

“I wanted you to cry,” Saul said. “I wanted you to apologise for the things you had done. I wanted to scream at you. You have no idea how many times I have imagined this conversation.”

A butterfly drawn by a gleam landed on the armrest of Angelica’s wheelchair.

“This is the last thing I imagined.”

She was still smiling at him. Faces were like words too. She never saw a face and matched it with a name. Faces were just clusters of geometric shapes to her. Saul’s face made her smile even more than the sound of his voice. It made her feel safe.

He reached out a hand and touched the blotchy surface of her forehead. “I guess this is better,” he whispered.

Whistlin’ Sam rushed over. “She doesn’t like when people touch her,” he began but then he saw her smiling face. “Guess she likes you,” he said.

“Guess she does at that,” Saul replied. He stayed for two more hours. He wheeled her through the garden, told her stories about the world outside and whistled along with Sam.

Toowee. Toowee.

Wikihistory

by Desmond Warzel

International Association of Time Travelers: Members’ Forum

Subforum: Europe – Twentieth Century – Second World War

Page 263

11/15/2104

At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:

Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:

Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:

Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?

At 18:33:10, SilverFox316 wrote:

Easy for you to say, BigChill, since to my recollection you’ve never volunteered to go back and fix it. You think I’ve got nothing better to do?

11/16/2104

At 10:15:44, JudgeDoom wrote:

Good news! I just left a French battlefield in October 1916, where I shot dead a young Bavarian Army messenger named Adolf Hitler! Not bad for my first time, no? Sic semper tyrannis!

At 10:22:53, SilverFox316 wrote:

Back from 1916 France I come, having at the last possible second prevented Hitler’s early demise at the hands of JudgeDoom and, incredibly, restrained myself from shooting JudgeDoom and sparing us all years of correcting his misguided antics. READ BULLETIN 1147, PEOPLE!

At 15:41:18, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:

Point of order: issues related to Hitler’s service in the Bavarian Army ought to go in the World War I forum.

11/21/2104

At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:

Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?

At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:

All right; that’s it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I’m looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?

At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:

PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren’t worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint’s still fresh. Freaking n00b.

At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:

Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.

11/26/2104

At 18:26:18, Jason440953 wrote:

SilverFox316, you seem to know a lot about the rules; what are your thoughts on traveling to, say, Braunau, Austria, in 1875 and killing Alois Hitler before he has a chance to father Adolf? Mind you, I’m asking out of curiosity alone, since I already went and did it.

At 18:42:55, SilverFox316 wrote:

Jason440953, see Bylaw 7, which states that all IATT rulings regarding historical persons apply to ancestors as well. I post this for the benefit of others, as I already made this clear to young Jason in person as I was dragging him back from 1875 by his hair. Got that? No ancestors. (Though if anyone were to go back to, say, Moline, Illinois, in, say, 2080 or so, and intercede to prevent Jason440953’s conception, I could be persuaded to look the other way.)

At 21:19:17, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:

Point of order: discussions of nineteenth-century Austria and twenty-first-century Illinois should be confined to their respective forums.

12/01/2104

At 15:56:41, AsianAvenger wrote:

FreedomFighter69, JudgeDoom, SneakyPete, Jason440953, you’re nothing but a pack of racists. Let the light of righteousness shine upon your squalid little viper’s nest!

At 16:40:17, BigTom44 wrote:

Well, here we frickin’ go.

At 16:58:42, FreedomFighter69 wrote:

Racist? For killing Hitler? WTF?

At 17:12:52, SaucyAussie wrote:

AsianAvenger, you’re not rehashing that whole Nagasaki issue again, are you? We just got everyone calmed down from last time.

At 17:22:37, LadyJustice wrote:

I’m with SaucyAussie. AsianAvenger, you’re making even less sense than usual. What gives?

At 18:56:09, AsianAvenger wrote:

What gives is everyone’s repeated insistence on a course of action which, even if successful, would only save a few million Europeans. It would be no more trouble to travel to Fuyuanshui, China, in 1814 and kill Hong Xiuquan, thus preventing the Taiping Rebellion of the mid-nineteenth century and saving fifty million lives in the process. But, hey, what are fifty million yellow devils more or less, right, guys? We’ve got Poles and Frenchmen to worry about.

At 19:01:38, LadyJustice wrote:

Well, what’s stopping you from killing him, AsianAvenger?

At 19:11:43, AsianAvenger wrote:

Only to have SilverFox316 undo my work? What’s the point?

At 19:59:23, SilverFox316 wrote:

Actually, it seems like a pretty good idea to me, AsianAvenger. No complications that I can see.

At 20:07:25, Big Chill wrote:

Go for it, man.

At 20:11:31, AsianAvenger wrote:

Very well. I shall return in mere moments, the savior of millions!

At 20:14:17, LadyJustice wrote:

Just checked the timeline; congrats on your success, AsianAvenger!

12/02/2104

At 10:52:53, LadyJustice wrote:

AsianAvenger?

At 11:41:40, SilverFox316 wrote:

AsianAvenger, we need your report, buddy.

At 17:15:32, SilverFox316 wrote:

Okay, apparently AsianAvenger was descended from Hong Xiuquan. Any volunteers to go back and stop him from negating his own existence?

12/10/2104

At 09:14:44, SilverFox316 wrote:

Anyone?

At 09:47:13, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:

Point of order: this discussion belongs in the Qing Dynasty forum. We’re adults; can we keep sight of what’s important around here?

Written by the Winners

by Matthew Johnson

Dabe glanced over his shoulder, leaned in close so that his body blocked the screen. He had been sifting through old TV comedies for weeks now, screening every episode frame by frame for inconsistencies, but today he had made a real find—a few lines of dialogue on Family Ties that referred to Richard Nixon.

There was no predicting where remnants like this would appear. The device that had changed time was more like a shotgun than a scalpel: it had established the present its makers wanted through hundreds of different changes to the timeline, some contradicting others. The result was a porous, makeshift new history that made little sense, but the old one had been thoroughly smashed to bits. It was those bits that remained that he and his whole department were tasked by the new history’s makers with finding and erasing.

Most of what he found was much more innocuous, references to things that had little ideological power but simply had not existed in the new history. This one, though, had meaning, a direct reference to a political event in the old history. He looked around again, drew a tape from the bottom drawer of his desk, slipped it into the second recorder and hit COPY. He could feel his heart beating more quickly as the seconds ticked by, felt the pressure of seen and unseen eyes on his back. Finally the inconsistency was over, ending as abruptly as it began, and he was able to breathe.

The danger past, he felt a rush of exhilaration. It had been more than a month since he had had anything to present to the group, but this would more than make up for the dry spell. Barely able to sit still, he decided it was no use trying to work for a while. He logged and erased the original clip, got up out of his chair and went to the kitchen.

Maura was there, biting open a bulb of milk and squeezing it into her coffee, a few strands of her long red hair loose and stuck to her mug. She looked up as he came in and smiled, and for a second he thought about reaching out and brushing her hair off the cup. Instead he simply gestured to it. She smiled again, her cheeks coloring a bit, and freed it with a toss of her head.

“Working hard?” she asked.

He shrugged. “No harder than directed,” he said.

She laughed, threw him what he thought was a conspiratorial look. Maura was one of the few people in the office he could talk to at all: most of the others were either Party members striving to be noticed or else had been ground down to gray dullness by the endless frame-by-frame searches that filled their days. “Big plans for the weekend?” she asked.

“Nothing too exciting. I might have to buy new shoes.”

“There’s a sale at Ogilvy’s, I think,” Maura said. “You should try there.” She blew on her coffee, took a sip. “I might go there this weekend myself.”

Dave nodded. Could he bring himself to suggest that they go together, maybe out for lunch or a drink afterward? Was she fishing for that? When he opened his mouth, though, his earlier confidence had left him, and he felt the moment pass in silence. “Maybe I’ll see you there,” he said at last.

“Sure,” she said, moved to step past him. “I’d better get back to work, before Chadwick sees I’m away from my station.”

“Me too.”

Maura frowned. “Shouldn’t you get your coffee first?”

“Oh—right,” Dave said, laughed. “Well, see you later.”

“Bye.”

He watched her go, trying not to be too obvious about it, then turned to the coffee machine. Stupid, he thought—but had he been wrong in seeing something there, hearing an invitation? If only he hadn’t lost his nerve…after tonight’s meeting, he thought, and the reception his find would get, he would have confidence to spare. Tomorrow he would try again, and this time he would push the conversation as far as it would go.

The rest of the day passed slowly, but finally it was over. After checking again to make sure no one was looking, Dave ejected the tape from the second recorder, slipped it into his briefcase and went to clock out. He put on his coat and his outdoor shoes, stepped outside. The snow had finally been cleared, three days after the storm, and already the banks were grey with dirt. A half-dozen cars, their ancient chassis recovered with plastic shells in jolly hues moved slowly down the street. Like the road, the sidewalk was slick with ice, the cold seeping right through his thin plastic shoes as he turned left, headed for downtown.

Halfway down the first block his right shoe cracked. Looks like I will be shoe shopping tomorrow after all, he thought, as he crouched down, opened his briefcase and took out some briefing papers. Separating out a single page, he folded it and then stuffed it into his shoe, hoping it would keep out the slush until he had reached his destination.

As he straightened up, Dave noticed someone behind him, half-hidden behind the high stairway leading to the Justice building. It was a tall man in a dark coat, looking nonchalant but coincidentally stopped at the same time as he was. Careful not to look too long Dave set out again, starting on a zigzag path once he was out of the government district and into downtown. Here the streets were more crowded with pedestrians, most dressed in bright colors that fought against the creeping gray mist. The new history weighed relatively lightly on its subjects: they were still free to shop, to enrich themselves as best they could, to wear or consume what they liked—and for most people that was enough.

After a dozen twists and turns he risked a glance back behind him. Confident that he had lost his shadower—if indeed the man had been following him at all—he returned to his original route and made his way to the meeting-place. This week they were gathering at Paul Beatty’s house; Paul, an electrician, was one of the few members of the group who could be sure they weren’t being watched. Paul was already there, of course—he had the freedom to make his own hours, and always quit work early when the meeting was to be at his place—and as Dave rounded the corner he saw two figures silhouetted in the light of Paul’s open door. Dave knew Gilberto Lorca by his slouch hat and ever-present umbrella, but he did not recognize the young woman with him. He waved but they didn’t see him, and he was forced to knock on the door when he got there. Dave stood still, careful to be in full view of the spy hole until the door opened.

“C’mon in,” Paul said. He was wearing jeans and a heavy sweater, as usual, and a pair of thick-framed black glasses around whose arms were twisted wires of various colors. “We’re just about to start.”

Dave followed Paul into the hallway and took off his shoes, careful not to worsen the crack in the right one, then hung his coat on the crowded hook. “Am I the last?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Paul said, not turning back as he spoke. “We may not get anyone else. Give it five more minutes.”

Nodding, Dave followed him into the living room. Gil and the woman Dave didn’t know were already seated on the couch, another man next to them and a half-dozen others in chairs around the room. Dave knew most of them by face but not by name. They each knew as few names as possible: this was dangerous work they were engaged in, committing a crime so grave the law could not even name it. They were studying history.

“Why don’t we get started,” Gil said, his tone making it a statement rather than a question. Gil had recruited the earliest members—it was he who had brought Dave in, back when Dave had been an undergraduate studying the new history—and he had a tendency to hold court at meetings, even when they were at other people’s homes.

“Fine,” Paul said, taking a seat in the chair nearest to the front door.

Dave sat down as well, his briefcase in his lap; his fingers played on the catches, waiting for his chance to tell the others about his find.

“My young friend here has made a very exciting discovery,” Gil said. He turned to the young woman sitting squeezed between him and the arm of the black leather couch. “My dear, why don’t you tell everyone about it?”

Dave’s fingers gripped his briefcase as the woman stood. She was not tall, just an inch or two over five feet, and a bit heavy: she wore a blue mock-neck sweater and a denim skirt that stopped just above the knee, her brown hair cut in a bob that had been allowed to grow shaggy. “Hello,” she said, glancing around the room. “I’m —”

“No names,” Paul said.

The girl nodded quickly. “Right,” she said, then twisted around and leaned down to pick up an artist’s portfolio that was leaned against the arm of the couch. “I’m, I’m a student in Professor—I mean —”

“It’s all right,” Gil said. “We all know my name.”

Dave frowned. He had been looking forward to this all day, and had little patience for Gil’s flirting with his latest protégé. “What do you have to show us?” he asked, trying to sound supportive of the girl while he hurried her along.

“Well—I—I found this at a yard sale.” The girl unzipped the portfolio carefully, drew out a flat, square object about a foot long on each side. It took Dave a moment to recognize it as an LP; the side facing him had only white text on a black background, too small to be read. The girl flipped the record over so that the front cover could be seen. It bore a picture of a blond woman with a guitar, dressed in black leather, and some nonsense words in large, jagged letters. After a second Dave remembered to read them left to right: TOP HITS OF THE EIGHTIES.

“The number one hit for each year,” Gil said. “The whole decade.”

Dave leaned forward. Despite his jealousy he could not help feeling excited about this, a physical survival of the old history. It wasn’t just that such things were illegal; they were terribly fragile, even if they were plastic or metal. Accidents had a way of happening to them, as though the new timeline itself wanted them destroyed.

And now—the girl drew the record itself carefully out of the sleeve, eliciting a gasp from her attentive audience. Ten songs the new history had erased; ten songs that did not exist anywhere but on that flimsy piece of vinyl…

After a few moments the excitement began to wear off. There was something different about this artifact, something dangerous. The other things they had collected were oddities, pieces that did not fit into the new history, but this directly challenged that history in a way its masters could not allow. If you were found with it they would not bother with self-criticism or re-education: you, it, and everyone who knew of it would simply disappear.

If any of the other group members shared Dave’s worry, though, he did not see it. They passed the record carefully around the room, reading song titles aloud and humming as the memory rushed back—four of them singing “Every Breath You Take,” piecing the words together. When it had gone all the way around the group, back to Gil and the beaming girl, the other finds were presented; a postcard from Washington, a Mutt and Jeff cartoon, a newspaper article about a baseball game between two teams that had never existed. When Dave’s turn finally came the excitement had been drained out of him and he presented it with little fanfare, responding with just a nod to Gil’s praise.

When the last artifact had been presented and logged—it was Gil who took the risk of recording everything, keeping the information in one place so that one day he would be able to reconstruct the old history—Paul brought out a bottle of Glenfiddich that would have been thirty years old if it had ever existed and poured out glasses for everyone in the room. Now the conversation turned back to Gil’s student and her find. Gil’s pride in both was clear, and while he still felt a gnawing worry in his stomach it was hard for Dave to remain jealous. Before long the meeting broke up and they started to head out, singly or in pairs, careful to space out their exits and take different routes away from the house.

Dave slept poorly that night, and awoke feeling little rested; he brewed an extra cup of coffee, breaking his own rule, and paid for it as he was forced to find a restaurant halfway to work that would let him use their washroom. Finally, he stopped at a doughnut shop, bought another cup of coffee in exchange for the privilege and made it to the Broadcast and Media building fifteen minutes late. Hoping his tardiness would go unnoticed, he made his way to his workstation and sat down.

“Lawson,” a voice came from behind him. It was Chadwick, his supervisor.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Dave said, trying to remember the excuse he had concocted on his way there.

“Never mind that. I’ve got someone here who wants to meet you.”

Dave nodded and stood up, followed Chadwick out of the work area and into the conference room. It was designed to house two dozen people but now held only one.

“This is Mr. Geraci,” Chadwick said, stepping aside to let Dave pass into the room. “He’s from upstairs. Does performance reviews.”

Geraci stood. He was a heavy man but all muscle; he wore a black plastic overcoat, a red plaid scarf crossed loosely over his chest. Two beige folders sat open on the table in front of him. “Mister Lawson,” he said, reaching a hand out. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”

“Thank you,” Dave said. Geraci’s hand was extended straight out across the long oval table, and Dave had to bend awkwardly to take it. “What do you…what can I do for you?”

“We have received good words about your performance,” Geraci said, not releasing Dave’s hand. “Your logs, your records are very good, without blots.”

“Thank you,” Dave said, struggling to unwind Geraci’s syntax. He glanced behind him, saw that Chadwick had left. “I do the best that I can.”

“Yes,” Geraci said. At last he let go of Dave’s hand, waved his own casually to let the sweat that had collected on Dave’s palm evaporate. “Your record shows that you are very diligent, very thorough.”

“Well—thank you.” This was no performance review, Dave knew that. A message was being sent, but what? If Geraci was with the Agency then everything he said was some kind of code; words that sounded positive, like diligent and thorough, instead were criticisms. Was he being told they knew about the clips he hadn’t reported? Or—his stomach clenched tight, bitter coffee rising up his throat—did they know about the record?

No, he thought. If that were the case this conversation wouldn’t be happening: he’d just be gone.

“You have nothing more to say?” Geraci asked.

“No. I mean, well—it’s a pleasure, of course, to know that Mr. Chadwick has had such positive things to say about me.” He had learned that survival tactic in high school, perfected it in university: when under scrutiny, bring in someone else in hopes the investigators will turn their attention off you.

Geraci nodded and turned his eyes down to the folders in front of him, but he did not appear to read them. “Very good. And do you have any questions for me?”

“Yes. Of course. I—” If you did not ask questions, if it seemed like you wanted the conversation to end, it was assumed you were hiding something. “I wondered if there might have been any criticisms of my work that I might improve on?”

“Your records are without blots,” Geraci said. He looked up at Dave, his eyes narrowing. “This was said.”

“Of course.” Dave drew a breath and released it quickly, careful not to hold it too long. “Does Personnel have any suggestions on how I can go beyond my current performance level?”

Geraci smiled, looked down at one of the folders and made a note in small, illegible handwriting. “It will be taken under advisement,” he said. “That is all the time I have at present, Mister Lawson. Please inform Mister Chadwick that he may send in the next.”

“Yes, of course,” Dave said. He held out his hand, waited a few seconds for Geraci to acknowledge it before turning it into a wave goodbye. He turned and headed for the door, suddenly aware of his cracked right shoe wrapped in silver duct tape.

“How did it go?” Chadwick asked.

Dave shrugged. “He says send in the next.”

Chadwick nodded quickly, headed off towards his office. Dave walked over to the kitchen, waited there a few minutes and then went to the window that opened on the parking lot. As usual it was nearly empty; almost nobody in Broadcast was senior enough to be allowed to park in the government district. There was a car there, though, that Dave had never seen before: a black sedan, its metal shell shiny despite the sleet. A few moments later Dave saw Geraci walk into his field of vision, accompanied by a tall man in a dark leather coat. It took a moment before Dave recognized this last as the man he had seen the night before, the one he had thought had been following him—the one he had thought he had lost.

Dave forced himself to breathe. He had survived six years of university, three of them in Gil’s secret double-history program, and five more here at Broadcast. He knew the Agency did not play around: if they had anything concrete on him they would have acted. It was probably because he had lost that man last night that Geraci had tried to scare him. They couldn’t know where he had gone, what he had seen, what he knew. They couldn’t.

For the rest of the day Dave sat glued to his workstation, forgetting even to go to the kitchen when he knew Maura would be there. Gradually he began to calm down, and by quitting time he had managed to convince himself it might be nothing. Just play it safe, he thought: skip a few meetings, keep a low profile for awhile and it would blow over.

He was getting ready for bed when somebody knocked on his apartment door. He had been dozing on the couch, half-watching TV; he remembered the meeting with Geraci as he got up and he paused halfway to the door, unsure whether to acknowledge being there or not. Finally he padded to the door and looked through the spyhole, saw the girl Gil had brought to the meeting the night before. She reached up and knocked on the door again.

“Hang on,” Dave said, releasing the latch. He opened the door and stepped back quickly to let her in. “Come on in, before somebody sees you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her cheeks were red, from the cold or from nervousness. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Dave leaned out into the hallway, looked around quickly and then closed the door behind him. “How did you know to come here?”

“Gil told me about you,” she said. “When I told him—he told me where you lived—”

For a moment Dave wondered how Gil knew his address, remembered the time he had tried to host a meeting at his apartment. “All right, all right,” he said. “What’s this all about?”

“Well, it’s—” The girl looked nervously around the small space, moved to sit on the couch. Dave sat on the chair facing it, noticed she was carrying her artist’s portfolio. “I don’t know how much to say,” the girl said.

“You seem to know who I am and where I live, you might as well tell me everything,” Dave said. “Why don’t you start with your name?”

“Amy,” she said. I’m studying art at the university—in my class this morning I forgot I had the record in my portfolio, and when I opened it up some people saw it. I don’t think any of them knew what it was, but…”

“You must have already gone to see Professor Lorca,” Dave said. “Why not give it to him?”

Amy shook her head. “Oh, no. I couldn’t put him in danger like that.”

Dave sighed, closed his eyes. “So he suggested you give it to me?”

“Well—you work at Broadcast and Media, don’t you? Gil thought you could, you know, hide it in plain sight.”

“He said that, did he?” Dave asked. Like most academics, Gil clearly had little understanding of how things worked in the government: Dave did not have the clearance to get anything into or out of the Archive rooms. He reached up to rub at his eyes “Fine,” he said after a moment. “Leave it with me ‘til you’re sure the heat is off—and tell Gil he owes me one.”

“Thank you,” Amy said.

“It’s all right,” Dave said, waving away her thanks. He yawned. “Well…”

Amy glanced around, gave a nervous smile and stood up. She unzipped her portfolio, took out the album and handed it to him. “Well. Thanks again.”

“Forget about it.” He stood, walked her to the door. “Be quick getting out. Make sure nobody sees you.”

She nodded. “I will.”

He shut the door as soon as she was outside, listened to her footsteps receding for a few moments before he started cursing himself. Why had he taken the record? He should have refused, sent her to Paul’s or else back to Gil. He even still had it under his arm—had anybody been in the hall when he opened the door? Could anyone have seen it? There was no use trying to sleep now: he poured himself a scotch, sat down to watch TV until exhaustion took him.

The next morning he was awakened by the distant sound of the alarm in his bedroom, unfolded himself from the couch and stumbled into the shower. When he returned the record was waiting for him: it sat on the coffee table, the blond singer on the cover looking as though she was mocking him. He had an irrational thought that if he left it there it would be gone when he got back, faded away like the timeline it belonged to; with a sigh he slipped it into his briefcase, went into the kitchen for breakfast. Of all things, why had the girl had to come on Thursday night? If he had the weekend to calm down he could think of a place to hide it, but as it was he felt, walking to work, as though his briefcase had a bullseye painted on it. He briefly thought about hailing a cab before realizing how much more attention that would draw.

The feeling of being watched grew as he got to the office: eyes seemed to be following him, whispers trailing in his wake. He sat down at his workstation and cued up the day’s tapes, focused tightly on the screen in front of him. Every few minutes he reached down to move his briefcase, trying to make it less conspicuous.

After an hour or so he began to wonder whether he would be better off going to the kitchen for his break or staying at his desk. Obviously getting up would attract attention, but since he always went for coffee wouldn’t it be more unusual if he didn’t? He went back and forth over the question for a few minutes before deciding there was no way he would get through this day without more coffee, and got up out of his chair.

Then he remembered the briefcase. What was he going to do with that? He couldn’t leave it at his desk, where anyone could open it, but it would look strange for him to bring it to the kitchen. He wished he had decided to stay at his desk—but now that he had stood up he couldn’t just sit down again, not without attracting more attention. Before too much more time could pass he leaned down, scooped up the briefcase and set off for the kitchen.

Maura was there, as he knew she would be, blowing on her coffee to cool it. “Hey stranger,” she said.

He smiled, holding his briefcase behind him in what he hoped was a nonchalant way. “Hey yourself.”

“Looks like you need those new shoes after all.”

Dave felt his mind go blank, remembered only after a moment his shoe wrapped up with duct tape. “Oh. Right,” he said. He flashed her another smile and turned to the shelf where his mug sat, picked it up with his free hand and put it down by the coffee maker.

“Might be easier with both hands,” she said.

He laughed nervously. “Right,” he said, put down the briefcase so that his legs pinned it against the wall. “I forgot to put my lunch in the fridge. Just remembered it now.”

Maura glanced from side to side, took a sip from her coffee. “Well,” she said finally, “I should get back. Performance review’s coming up.”

“Sure.” Dave nodded. “Have a good one.”

“Mm.”

Dave took a breath and then poured his coffee, his hands trembling. He wasn’t sure how to read that conversation, if there was anything to read: the mention of the briefcase, the reference to performance reviews after that business with Geraci…No, he was being foolish. On the other hand, he knew that the Agency often put informants close to the people they were investigating. It was hardly impossible that they were using a double-pronged approach, Geraci the obvious threat to make him nervous, drive him to confide in his friend Maura…

When he returned to his desk he felt a sudden compulsion to look inside the briefcase. Was the record even still in there? Of course it was, he had kept the briefcase in his sight since he arrived—but still the need to look inside nagged at him. He looked quickly over his shoulder, picked up the briefcase and shook it. He thought he could hear the record inside, bumping up against the briefcase, but he wasn’t sure. Putting it on his lap he leaned over it, trying to block the sight of it with his body, then snapped the catches. He looked around again, to see if the sound had attracted any attention, then turned back to the suitcase and lifted the lid slightly. There it was, the record, still sitting flat; as soon as he saw it he shut his briefcase and snapped it closed again, but his anxiety had not been dispelled. Feeling as though he might throw up he leaned over further, slipped the briefcase under his desk and then lifted up his feet and rested them on it. Finally he sat up again, forced himself to take a dozen deep breaths in and out and then went back to his work.

Somehow he managed to make it through the rest of the day. At least it was Friday. He had survived the week, he thought as he reached the door to his apartment: tomorrow he would be able to sleep in, replace his shoes, and figure out where he could hide the record.

His hand hesitated over the doorknob. The door was ajar, just slightly: he gave it a push and it opened. Fighting his rising sense of panic he stepped inside and saw that his apartment had been ransacked. All the kitchen cupboards were open, their contents spilled out onto the counters; all the books on his shelves had been pulled down and opened, left spread-eagled on the floor.

Dave’s fingers were clenched around the handle of his briefcase. If he hadn’t brought it with him…But there was no question, now: they were watching, and their not finding anything would only make them look harder. He had to get rid of the record before it was too late. Holding the briefcase close he turned around and went back outside, looking for a working payphone. The evening fog had set in, making it hard to see anything; he passed by the first phone he found—better safe than sorry—eventually settled on one that was a half-dozen blocks from his apartment. The duct tape on his shoe had come loose, and the slush was soaking into his sock.

He let the phone ring ten times but nobody picked up. Was Gil just out, or had they gotten to him too? Dave forced himself to keep the panic down, think rationally. Who else could he give it to? The only one whose name he even knew was Paul Beatty; he flipped desperately through the phone book tethered to the booth, felt bile rising in his throat when he found no listing under the Bs. Maybe he should just get rid of the record, he thought, throw it away—but Gil would never forgive him, nobody in the group would, he had been trusted with this—

A thought came to him and he flipped to the business directory. There it was: Beatty Electrical. The dial moved stiffly as he turned it to each digit then let it fall back to zero; after an eternity the number was completed and the call went through. Dave held his breath as it rang once, twice—

“Beatty Electrical,” the voice on the other side said. Was it Paul’s? Dave had never spoken to him on the phone.

“This is—is this Paul?”

There was a moment’s silence. “Who wants to know?”

“It’s, um—I’m calling about the record we talked about…”

“What about it?”

“I—I was wondering when I could drop it off.”

Another pause, long enough for Dave to wonder if he had hung up. Finally the voice said “I think you must have mixed up your number. Drop dead,” and hung up.

Dave stood there for a second with the receiver in his hand, openmouthed, before realizing what Paul had meant: mixing up “drop dead” gave dead drop, the locker they used for dangerous handoffs. He wasn’t sure if it had ever actually been used before, but he was glad Paul had remembered it. He looked around, peering through the frosted glass and the mist, left the booth and started walking towards the train station.

It being Friday night, the downtown streets were packed: this was when new goods arrived in the stores, and many were not willing to pick over what was left Saturday morning. He pushed into the crowd, hoping that it would camouflage him, at the same time keeping a death-grip on his briefcase. If he could just make it to the station, just drop it off, it would be somebody else’s problem…He glanced behind him, wondered if he had seen the tall man in the long black coat.

The streets were slick, the ice that had formed at sundown melted by all the people walking. Craning his neck around Dave bumped into a heavyset woman in a bright green parka, lost his footing and fell forward. Without thinking he threw his hands in front of him to take the impact and the briefcase slammed onto the ground, skittered a few feet away.

Dave chased after the briefcase on his hands and knees, wiped his hands off on his pants once he’d reached it and drew himself back up onto his feet. He looked around again: nobody seemed to be taking much notice of him—it was hardly unusual to see someone take a header on a Friday night. He swung the briefcase back and forth, trying to feel if the record had broken, but he knew the jacket would hold the pieces in place if it had. The only way to know would be to open the briefcase, and he could not do that here.

There was the train station, by the canal. Unwilling to risk another glance back he quickened his steps, turned a few zigs and zags in hopes of losing any pursuit and finally made it to the grand colonnaded entrance. There were fewer people here, and he made a quick scan left and right before stepping inside. His hand fumbled in his pocket for a dollar coin to rent the locker, felt it slip from fingers slick with frost and sweat. He stood in front of the ARRIVALS board, pretending to read the schedule, until his heart slowed. Then he looked around again and made his way to the lockers. They were in a narrow hallway, by the washroom; he picked one in the corner, dropped a coin in the slot and turned the key. The locker door swung open and he pulled his briefcase up to his chest. He was tempted to put the whole thing in there, to avoid exposing the record, but anyone who saw him entering the station with the briefcase and leave without it would have no doubt what had happened. Instead he held the briefcase so that the hinges faced away from him and undid the catches. He took a step back, giving himself enough room to open the briefcase, drew out the album. For a moment he simply held it there until, unable to resist, he reached into the jacket and pulled at the record itself. When he felt it come out in one piece he exhaled, let it fall back in and put the album into the locker, shut it and pulled out the key. Then he walked into the bathroom at a steady pace, went into the furthermost stall, lifted up the lid of the toilet tank and dropped the key inside.

By the time he had left the train station he was already feeling better. He remembered now how the meetings used to make him feel, like he was part of something important: that he was contributing to something that mattered. The cold air outside felt crisp now, invigorating. He decided not to wait for the morning, but to buy new shoes now. Why not?

Turning, Dave felt a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Wait a moment, please,” Geraci’s voice said from behind him.

Dave tried to turn around, but Geraci held him fast. He craned his head instead; saw Geraci, in his black plastic coat and red scarf, flanked by two men similarly dressed. Geraci led him forward to the train station’s loading zone, where the car Dave had seen in the parking lot was waiting. Even in the mist it looked clean and shiny, its windows black.

He knew better than to resist when they bundled him into the back seat. The windows here were as dark on the inside as the outside, and a black plastic partition separated him from the rest of the car. One of the silent men accompanying Geraci sat with him, looking straight ahead during the whole ride.

Finally the car stopped and he was led out. They were not treating him roughly, not yet, and Dave looked to this for some measure of hope: the ride could just as easily have ended in the car.

They were inside, or else underground. He followed Geraci down a corridor whose walls were featureless gray concrete, heard the echoing footsteps of the two men behind him. Finally they stopped at an unmarked door. One of the men opened it and guided Dave inside, sat him down on a folding chair by a small, square metal table on which sat a thermos and two paper cups.

“Coffee?” Geraci asked from behind him. Dave craned his neck to see Geraci come into the room, sit down across the table.

“Sure.”

Geraci nodded, unscrewed the thermos and filled both cups, handing one to Dave. The coffee smell was strong, filling the small room. Dave brought his cup up to his lips, sniffed at it carefully and then took a sip.

“No milk,” Geraci said. “I am sorry. My men, they do not always think of such things.”

“It’s all right,” Dave said. He took another drink and set down the cup, casting around for something else to say.

“It’s a long time you’ve been working at Broadcast?” Geraci asked.

Dave nodded. His head was starting to swim, his stomach churning.

“You enjoy it there? It is a good fit for your skills?”

“Sure,” Dave said, the words pouring out of his mouth like syrup. The chair seemed to have tilted under him, and he tried to right himself.

“You are editing videotape currently? Cutting inconsistencies?”

“Yes.”

Geraci leaned down, lifted a briefcase off the ground and set it down on the table. For a moment Dave thought it was his briefcase, but saw that it was black where his was dark brown. Geraci opened it and drew out a beige folder, opened that and spun a page around with splayed fingers.

“This is a copy of your log, from Wednesday. Do you remember this?”

Dave nodded again; the room shook with the movement of his head and he swallowed hard to avoid vomiting. He didn’t understand what this was about—he couldn’t think—

“Here,” Geraci said, placing his little finger on a few words Dave had written halfway down the page. “Do you see what this says?”

Squinting, Dave tried to bring the page into focus. “I’m sorry—I can’t—”

“‘Thirteen minutes forty seconds to fifteen minutes twenty-five seconds,’” Geraci read, “President Nixon mentioned. Watergate reference.’ Do you remember this?”

“I—yes,” Dave said.

“I have seen this sequence you edited. The character who is speaking, he speaks only of Nixon.” Geraci leaned forward. “So tell me, Mister Lawson, how is it that you know of a Watergate?”

Dave laughed despite himself. Was that all this was about? They didn’t know about the record, about—

He was reeling, knocked back by the force of Geraci’s blow. The door behind him opened, and strong hands gripped his arms and pulled him upright.

“I do not find this so funny, Mister Lawson,” Geraci said. He cradling his right hand in his left, stroking it with an aggrieved expression on his face.

“I’m sorry,” Dave said. The room was spinning around him.

Geraci looked down into his open briefcase, pulled out what looked like a small tackle box. He reached for its latch with his hand, paused and looked up at Dave. “Are you convinced of the seriousness of this business?”

“Yes,” Dave said.

Geraci’s hand rested on the tackle box, his fingers idly playing with the latch. “Then please tell me. Why is it you feel you must record this mention of Watergate?”

“I—I must have heard it once before, remembered it.”

Giving him a look of intense fatigue, Geraci said “It is neither your job nor your place to remember, Mister Lawson. Your job is to find things that can only confuse the people, and to help them to forget those things. You are to forget those things as well.” He glanced down at the open folder in front of him. “You were a student of history, Mister Lawson. Was this not made clear to you?”

“Yes. I—it was. I’m sorry.”

“Good.” Geraci drew a page out of the folder with his free hand, spun it around so that it faced Dave—his other hand still on the tackle box. “This is a confession to the denial of history and also an apology, most heartfelt and sincere. You will sign it at the bottom, please.”

One of the men behind Dave put a pen in his hand. “And—that’s it?” Dave said. “I just sign it, and—”

“Of course there will be consequences,” Geraci said. “Before you can be once more in a position of trust you will have to prove yourself worthy of it—but that chance may be given, in time. All you need do is sign.”

Dave leaned forward, tried to read the page; the letters swam in front of him. “I can’t read it,” he said.

“It is of no consequence.”

He reached out with the pen, felt his arm being guided to the page. A blot of ink formed at the beginning of a horizontal line, and after a moment he signed.

“Very good,” Geraci said. He picked the tackle box up by the handle, put it carefully back in his briefcase. “I am pleased to see you begin the path to rehabilitation.”

The hands holding Dave upright released him, and he slumped forward. He watched Geraci stand, pick up his briefcase and go to the door; on his way out somebody stopped him, and they spoke briefly.

Geraci turned back to face Dave. “A moment more, please,” he said, and Dave heard a change in his voice: a crack in his superiority, a hint of bitterness. “My supervisor wishes to speak with you.”

Dave watched as Geraci stepped back to let the tall man with the long black coat come in. The tall man gave a small nod and Geraci stepped outside, closed the door.

“David?” the tall man asked, moving to stand where Geraci had sat. “Or is it Dave?”

“I told him,” Dave said, his voice cracking. “I signed the paper. I signed it…”

“I know,” the tall man said. He leaned down to reach under the rim of the table, and Dave could hear his coat creaking; it was real leather, not plastic. The man drew a small metal device out from under the table, twisted it. “There. We can talk freely now.”

Dave frowned at him, daring now to look the man in the face. He had brown curly hair that swept back from his forehead, a sharp nose and a thin mustache. “What are we going to talk about?” he asked.

The man tucked the tail of his coat under him, sat down. “History.”

“I told you—I already signed —”

“Not that.” The man leaned back in his chair, dropped his arms to his sides. “You made a copy of that clip Geraci was fussing about, didn’t you? You collect things like that.”

Dave said nothing.

The man shrugged. “It’s not worth denying it. I only raised the subject because it should make some things more clear to you; so without you confirming or denying it, let’s say we both know there are things that don’t fit anymore, pieces of a puzzle that no longer exists. That’s not an accusation. All right?”

He took a breath. “All right.”

“Good. Now I want you to understand—I am one of those pieces.”

Dave’s head was starting to clear, recovering from Geraci’s blow and whatever had been in the coffee; still, he wondered if he had heard the man right. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“That group you belong to, I know you collect things that are remnants of the old history—things the device didn’t manage to change along with the rest of the world. I’m like that: the new history put me here, but I remember who I was. Who I am.”

“So—you’re not—”

The man glanced past Dave, at the door. “There are a few of us, and we’re very close to control of the device. The problem is, a weapon is only useful if you know where to aim it. That’s why I need you.”

“Because I know the history,” Dave said. For a moment he hesitated, not sure how much to say, but the man seemed to know everything already. “The old history. You need me to help you change it back.”

The man was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “It’s what you know of this history we want—the differences between the histories, so we’ll know how they put themselves in charge.”

“But you have to change everything back. That’s why we’ve been gathering all those pieces—so we can reconstruct the old history—”

“Which is why they’ve left you alone,” the man said. “Your little group is a joke—you think you can change the world by collecting stamps.” He stood up, swung a briefcase from the floor onto the table and opened it. From within he drew out the album, reached into the jacket and pulled out the record, holding it in both hands. “You think this can change the world.”

“Please,” Dave said.

The man pressed both his thumbs to the middle of the record, flexed it so that the vinyl began to bend. “Would you give your life for this? It means nothing.”

Dave dropped his gaze to the table. “It’s history. It’s what’s real.”

“You of all people should know there’s no history,” the man said. “There’s just what we choose to remember.”

After a moment’s silence Dave looked up, into the man’s eyes. They were a dull brown like his hair, steady and sane. “The new history you’re going to make, it’ll be just as much a patchwork as this one,” he said. “What makes you think it’ll be any better?”

The man shrugged, lay the record flat on the table. “It’ll be ours.”

“Fine,” Dave said, though he could not make his tone match his words. “How will you contact me?”

“Don’t worry about that,” the man said. He slid the record into its jacket, put the album back in his briefcase and closed it. “I think it’s best if you stay close.”

“Wait—you mean I can’t go home?”

The man sighed, smoothed his leather coat as he stood. “You were going to disappear either way, Dave. I’ve told you things I can’t let anyone else know, and you’ve already shown you don’t stand up to questioning.”

“But —”

The man went to the door, turned back to Dave. “Well?” He said. “Are you coming?”

Maura climbed up the wide steps to the Broadcast building, the soles of her new shoes fighting to grip the ice. Monday, again; it felt like it was always Monday. She left her coat in the cloakroom, headed for the kitchen to drop off her lunch. On her way from there to her desk she noticed one of the workstations was empty, wondered if it belonged to that man who had been chatting her up last week. She had half-expected to run into him at the shoe store, had thought she wouldn’t mind if she did; he was funny, and it pleased her to see the way she made him nervous. She hadn’t seen him yet today—what was his name?

“Excuse me,” someone said, tapping her on the shoulder.

She turned around to see who it was: a man in his early twenties, blond hair cut short and over-formally dressed in shirt and tie. “Yes?”

“I’m starting today,” the man said. He glanced down at a sheet of carbon paper in his hand. “Workstation thirty-seven, do you know where that is?”

Maura nodded, nodded toward the empty workstation she had passed earlier. “Welcome aboard,” she said.

“Thank you.”

The young man gave her a small, nervous smile and hurried off. She watched him go for a moment, turned to go back to her own workstation. The boy had disturbed her train of thought—what had she been thinking about?

Ah well, she thought as she sat down, cued up the first of the day’s tapes to edit. If it was important she was sure it would come to her.

Sunlight and Shadows

by JW Schnarr & John Sunseri

Laci had come to the ocean looking for ghosts, and the old lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head was the perfect place to start.

The car was back a few hundred yards, alone on the roadside turnoff. She’d dragged herself over the guardrail, climbed down into the low forest and fought her way through the muddy earth, cold rainwater hitting her in huge drops as it fell from the branches. The sun was still clawing its way toward the ocean, bloating as it grew lower and larger, and she’d only have another half-hour of light to play with. There was little time to look for a better vantage.

She wrestled her way up the tallest spruce she could find, filthying her clothes in the process. Her head throbbed, and she stopped fifteen feet up to dry-swallow another couple of Advil. They hadn’t been helping much, but she didn’t want to think about the pain that would result if she stopped taking them altogether. She sucked the water from her lips, grimaced, and fought upwards ten more feet before settling into a sturdy crotch.

There was the lighthouse, all right. She’d found her clear shot.

A promontory of rocky land stretched northward and out into the choppy gray of the sea. The lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head stood on its tip, stark and sentinel. The building caught the dying light of the falling sun, but only on its western flank—the other side was shadowed and hidden.

Perfect.

She snapped a couple of quick shots to capture the chiaroscuro, using the spruce needles around her to frame the pictures. Whoever viewed them would sense the surrounding flora, would feel like a lurker in the woods peering out at the half-shadowed building as if in ambush.

She slowed down and started playing with the digital settings. The machine was the closest thing she had to a lover, and she touched it with knowledge born of long experience, caressing and coaxing and prodding all the right places. Like a lover, she knew how to produce what she wanted from the Canon, and the two of them moved in perfect, primal rhythm.

Lightning flared in the distance over the ocean and Laci cursed. Halfway up the tallest tree in the short forest wasn’t where she wanted to be if the storm hit in earnest. She started to inch her sneaker down to the next branch. Her head throbbed as a roll of thunder swept in over the beach, over her. Rain fell harder, hitting her exposed face like the sting of a wet towel. Looking out over the water, she decided she had time for one more shot before it was time to pack it in.

She raised the Canon to her eyes, scrolling back over the pictures she had just taken. At frame seven she stopped.

She squinted through the mist. Another explosion of lightning out at sea, and then a sweep of thunder. She ignored the flash and the shadowed darkness that followed, peering intently at the little view screen on her camera.

Something—someone—stood there, on her screen. Atop the empty lighthouse, half a mile distant. A black silhouette.

She pressed closer to the slick bark of the spruce’s trunk and started pushing the zoom buttons. She enlarged, enlarged again, clicked on the upper-right quadrant to focus; enlarged again.

Two faces, not one. Young faces, grainy with distance and low resolution. Black eyes moist, peering across the rocks, over the trees.

Four arms, two of them lightly grasping the rail outside the lamp chamber, two held in the air at odd angles. Wind whipped their hair into a spiderweb around them. Their clothes were strange, archaic.

The two boys were joined at the hip.

They stared straight at her, solid black eyes making the hundreds of yards of space disappear.

They hadn’t been in the previous frame, taken only a second before.

She managed to get to the ground and shook the water from her hair. When she did, pain hit her with stiletto sharpness, and an involuntary cry left her mouth as she whipped her hand up to the side of her head, cradling the small scar above her ear. She massaged the bulge, born of scar tissue and healing bone, and forced her breath into controlled bursts until the light behind her eyes receded.

Eventually, she opened her eyes. She could see the lighthouse through the trees, but it was still dim February and whoever was in charge of the historic lighthouses of the coast hadn’t started the season yet. The distant building was now fully shrouded in gloom as the sun shimmered weakly on the horizon, an old man going to bed. She moved through the slick leaves and greedy, slurping mud of the little forest toward Frenchman’s Head.

There were two young boys atop the lighthouse in the storm. They might need help.

But that wasn’t it—not really. She was sensitive to phenomena, and she knew a little about the spirit world. It was why she was on this trip, after all—she normally photographed auras and haunts, and she’d only stopped to shoot the lighthouse on a whim. And in her deep places, she knew that the boys weren’t going to need help when she got there.

But she needed help, all right. She needed this, whatever it was. She moved a little faster. If she hurried, she could make it there in twenty minutes.

The lighthouse was monolithic; a great pale erection jabbing out of the earth and thrusting toward the sky. It loomed over Laci as she struggled through the wet tangle of trees and brush that covered the gorge below the cliffs. Far below, the ocean surf spasmed and released onto the rocks.

As Laci approached the sentinel, her stomach churned. There was energy here. It danced along her spine and tickled the back of her neck.

“Hello?” she called, blocking the rain from her eyes with her hand. She held her camera in her other hand and as she rounded the side of the building she instinctively pulled it close, like a shield.

The children loomed over her, not speaking, barely breathing.

The two boys, identical twins, watched as Laci approached. Their black hollow eyes stared down at her from the promenade of the lamp room. They were attached at the hip, their old-fashioned schoolboy uniforms perfectly stitched to allow for the disfiguration.

Their black hair shone like kerosene dripping from their pale brows. They barely moved as they clutched the guard rail. The wind tugged at their clothes, but if the driving February rain was cold on them their faces didn’t register it.

“Hello?” Laci said again, but more quietly, more hesitantly. Acting on instinct, she drew the camera to her face and pressed the trigger. The Canon fluttered, snapping off a flurry of shots.

The boys said nothing.

She framed her shots and bled the last bit of light from the sky. Then she opened her cell phone and called 911.

The Sheriff’s car was quickly followed by a camera crew from the local news station, and when Laci saw it coming she looked at Officer Danton.

He shrugged. “They scan the police band.” He wore his rain slicks and had his Maglite out. Adjusting his hat, he clicked the light on and flipped it toward the third level of the lighthouse.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, taking a half-step back toward his car.

Two pairs of black eyes shone down at him. The boys stared at Laci, ignoring the cop. They were soaked to their pale skin.

“Conjoined twins,” Laci said, snapping a slow-shutter picture in Danton’s light. ‘I have no idea where they came from. They weren’t there—then they were.”

“Hello?” Danton asked. He kept the light on their faces. The stark, bright beam elongated the shadows on their cheeks, under their eyes. “You…kids all right?”

The boys said nothing. They briefly swiveled their heads, looked at the source of the light, then turned back in tandem to stare again at Laci.

“I think they could be deaf,” she said, shuddering in the chill rain. “They don’t respond to me. I don’t know that they can hear us.”

The television crew parked their van several meters back from the squad car. Laci watched as a young woman got out and unloaded some camera gear while a man checked himself in a side mirror.

“Can you hear me?” Danton suddenly yelled. “How did you get up there?”

“The door on the side is locked,” Laci said. “I already tried it.”

“Maybe they locked it when they went up there?”

“Doubt it,” said Laci. “It’s a big old padlock. Looks like it’s been there a while.”

Danton turned to Laci. “Guess you thought of everything, then, didn’t you?”

“Sorry,” Laci said. “I’ll let you do your job.”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” said Danton. “Since you’re so eager to help, you want to hold this flash for me while I grab some my lock tools out of my trunk?” He smiled disarmingly at her, showing perfect teeth. No hard feelings, the smile said.

“Glad to, Sheriff.” She took the Maglite from him and held it on the boys.

They said nothing. They did nothing.

All along the coast, windows were shuttered and doors locked as the wind picked up and the rain intensified. A storm was on the way, and there was no telling what it was going to bring with it.

Eventually they got the children off the balcony, and Sheriff Danton called an ambulance to come get them. Aside from their bizarre condition, they appeared to be physically fine. They were pale and thin, but the medics announced that their hearts were healthy and all their vital signs stable.

The children refused to speak, however, and because they hadn’t appeared in any missing person reports, the sheriff decided that they would go to the children’s hospital in Calamity Falls until the proper authorities could be determined and contacted.

Laci, meanwhile, spoke to the local TV crew about finding the boys and what she had been doing in the woods. They offered her five hundred dollars for her photos, which she accepted, and then the Sheriff gave her a ride back to her car.

She checked into a Motel 6 with strict instructions that she was not to leave town until the Sheriff had talked to her again, and the police department paid for her room. She waved as the Sheriff drove away, but as soon as he was out of the parking lot she ducked behind her car and vomited until there was nothing left in her stomach.

She was exhausted from her exertions and the miserable weather, and her head pounded flashes of blinding light behind her eyes with every beat of her pulse. She massaged the tender flesh behind her ear and it relieved a bit of the pressure, but not as much as some Percocet and a hot shower would.

The Percocet she had in her handbag. The shower was waiting for her in her rented room. She stood there for another few seconds, in the antiseptic glare of the vapor lights of the parking lot, then slowly began to walk toward the motel and warmth.

She awoke to the sound of knocking, and for a few moments was disoriented—she wasn’t in her bed, she wasn’t in her apartment, and she couldn’t hear the normal morning noises of traffic and the upstairs neighbors arguing about money.

And then it came back to her—the boys on the balcony. That strange silhouette, the gently waving arms, the spiderweb hair.

Those black, black eyes.

She heard the knock again, and looked toward the door of her room. It would be Sheriff Danton, she was sure, ready to continue the interrogation of the night before.

“Just a minute,” she called, and frowned at the sound of her own voice. Before the operation and all the treatments, she had sounded like a robust young woman. Now her voice was that of a much older person—a frail person, a weak person.

“Just gotta put some clothes on,” she told the door, and she forced herself to put some strength into it. She rolled off the bed and looked for her slacks and shirt, found them in a crumpled heap and shrugged into them. She checked the night table, saw the camera and her keys, nodded, and dragged herself over to the door. In some odd way she was looking forward to this, the questions and answers. Her attention, her imagination, had been completely captured by the twins at the lighthouse, and maybe she could learn more about them from the policeman.

But when she opened the door, it wasn’t Sheriff Danton standing there on the other side. It was an old man, seventy or eighty maybe, with a face lined like ancient parchment, hands gnarled by arthritis and a shock of white hair over each ear.

“I’m sorry, miss,” he said, his voice hesitant, his posture uncertain. “You don’t know me, but I got your name from the folks at the newspaper, and I figured you’d be staying here, so I thought…”

They both stood there for a moment, the man holding one hand in the other, not looking straight at her, Laci confused and feeling rumpled in her already-worn clothes. Then he spoke again.

“You took those pictures of the boys at Frenchman’s Head yesterday,” he said, “and I’d be obliged if I could ask you a few questions about them.”

“You—who are you?” she asked finally.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “No manners at all! My name’s Caleb Mears, and I’m from here in Calamity Falls. I used to be the keeper at the lighthouse, back in the fifties, after the war.”

“Oh my,” she said, a rush of interest shooting through her. “Absolutely you can come in—sorry I look like this, but I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I was too tired to get my stuff out of the trunk…”

“Oh, no need to apologize,” said Mears, smiling. And now he looked at her, and she felt a frisson as she saw his eyes—they were clear and black, and for a moment she had a vertiginous sense that it was the twins standing there before her, in their schoolboy outfits and mussed hair—but the moment quickly passed as she stood aside and let the old man enter. “I’ve been married to three women, and they were none of ‘em fashion models straight out of bed. You look a damn sight better than most early risers.”

“Thank you,” she said, and motioned toward the chair next to the bed. Then she laughed.

“Something funny?” he asked, his smile slipping. She could see his teeth white and strong - dentures, probably.

“Oh, I was just going to ask you if you wanted something to drink,” she said. “Forgot I wasn’t home. All I can offer you is water.”

“Never drink the stuff,” he said somberly. “Takes years off your life.”

Instantly, the smile returned to his face.

“All right, then,” she said, dropping to sit on the side of the bed, looking at her guest. “What can I do for you, Mr. Mears?”

“Caleb,” he said. “You can call me Caleb, if you want.”

“Caleb, then,” she said. “You said you had some questions?”

“Yep,” he said. “Just a few. But the most important one is—can I look at those pictures you took yesterday? They ran one of ‘em on the news last night, but it was only on the TV for a second, and when the paper came out this morning they only had a picture of the boys being taken away in the ambulance. I’d…I’d like to see those boys, if I may.”

Laci sat there motionless for a moment, then nodded her head. “I suppose that’d be okay,” she said, leaning over and reaching for the Canon. “Mind if I ask why you’re so interested?”

“If I could just look at them for a minute,” he said, “I’ll tell you the whole story. I promise—on my honor.”

“All right,” she said, bemused. “Here, lean over a little so you can see the screen.” He complied, and she could smell the old man’s cologne - something cheap and manly, something a grandchild would give him for Christmas, maybe. Old Spice.

“These are all just shots of the lighthouse from that little forest down by the viewpoint…”

“Right above Corpse Cove,” murmured the old man. “I know exactly where you were.”

“Corpse Cove?” she asked. “It’s not called that on the map.”

“Bodies used to wash up there,” he said. “Every time a ship wrecked, you’d get half the dead sailors washed up on the beach a few days later. The ones the sharks didn’t get, that is. And, no. The official name is Beaulieu’s Cove, named after the same French fellow the cape is. Nice pictures, by the way—pretty enough to be in a book.”

“I’ve had my stuff in books,” she murmured, clicking the finder forward. “But not this kind of stuff.”

“You a, whaddyacallit, photojournalist?” he asked.

“I take pictures of auras and spirits,” she said. She used to be self-conscious when she told people what she did, but she eventually grew a shell. Mostly, people just nodded and changed the subject, or asked asinine questions, but occasionally she got sarcasm or hostility. None of that mattered anymore, though—after all the suffering she’d been through, she could handle idiocy from the Philistines.

But Caleb just nodded, intently peering at the view screen. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

She was going to ask him what he meant, but then they got to the money shot, and he gasped and stiffened beside her. Alarmed, she whipped her head around, fearing that the old man was suffering a heart attack next to her, and what she saw didn’t comfort her at all - Caleb had gone completely pale, his black eyes were open so wide she could see the little veins on their sides, and he shook silently.

“Mr. Mears?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

“My Lord,” he breathed, and she sensed those two words were more prayer than ejaculation. “They’ve come back.”

“Who?” she asked, fear warring with excitement in her brain. Whatever was coming, whatever had come with the storm, was going to reveal itself to her. She knew it as surely as she knew that she was meant to be here right now, in a cheap room at the Motel 6 next to this old lighthouse keeper. “Who’s come back?”

“My sons,” he whispered, and tears began to roll down that ancient face.

“My first wife’s name was Sarah,” he said after they’d ordered down for whiskey and soda, “but everyone called her Sally. I married her before I went off to Europe in forty-three, and when I got back we bumped around Oregon for a while before we decided to settle back on the coast. They were lighting the lighthouses up again - you know a Japanese sub got all the way over here, once? Happened in ‘42, and the Lighthouse Service shut ‘em all off for the duration of the war, but in ‘45 they needed families to run the things again, and there I was, looking for work.” He smiled. “It was a dream, young lady. We had a nice little house, plenty of privacy, and it wasn’t too far to town in case Sally wanted to shop or something. And every nine months or so, the USLS would drop off another tank full of coal oil and boxes of books for us to read.”

“Sounds…maybe a little boring?” said Laci.

“Sometimes it was,” said Mears. “Sometimes it was indeed. But we were young and in love, and Sally and I weren’t really all that sociable a couple, anyway. It’s why we were vagabonding around in the first place. I got my fill of people during the war in Italy—don’t like being too close to anyone, you know? Foxholes and such…”

His voice trailed off, and he closed his eyes momentarily, lost in memory. But he soon reopened them and looked again at the picture on the view screen, the twins standing there in the gloom, their hair whipped by the wind and rain.

“And Sally came from a big Eye-talian family up in Portland, and they had about a thousand kids, you know? She loved the idea of having her own bathroom, having her own clothes without having three older sisters wearing ‘em first. It was a stroke of luck, this job was.”

“And you had kids?” Laci prompted.

“And we had two sons,” he said quietly, nodding as he looked at the camera. “We didn’t know we was having twins when she caught pregnant, nor during the pregnancy itself. Sally was huge, all right, but what did we know? Tom Foster came out from town every month or so, make sure Sally was eating enough, check her blood and such, but they didn’t have them ultrasounds or anything back then, and Doc Foster was a bit of a drunk anyway, so we never knew. Not ‘til they came, anyway…”

“The twins,” said Laci. “The boys on the balcony.”

“We never let ‘em up there,” said Mears. “Too dangerous. The house is only about fifty feet tall, but the winds you get up there will whip you right off, you’re not careful. And Jed and Jerry weren’t all that coordinated sometimes.”

“Those are their names?” she asked softly. She was enrapt in the tale, and her questions were all lubricant for the story, meant to oil it along. It was working, too.

“Jedidiah and Jeremiah,” he said. “Lucky they have names at all, you know. I ended up delivering ‘em myself—they came a few weeks early, and we couldn’t get to town for the birth. I had an old Packard, and it wouldn’t run half the time without you took apart the whole engine and put it back together, and when the twins came it was dead on the drive, so there we were. There was a storm going, just like there is right now, and they hadn’t electrified all the way out to Frenchman’s head, so we were in the dark, there in the Keeper’s house.” He stopped for a second, and wiped his eyes.

“You know, I’d fought at Monte Cassino and Rome in the Big One, I’d had a ship torpedoed from under me and had to swim for six hours to get to land. But that night—well, it was the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. Sally—poor, beautiful Sally—had a hell of a time with the birth. She was a small woman, and we were both little more than kids, you know? We didn’t know what we was doing at all, and when Jed’s head came out, I was so scared I think I would’ve rather faced a whole squadron of Krauts right at that moment.”

A knock came on the door. Laci took a second to come out of her entranced state, gave Mears an apologetic look and stood.

“You wanted room service?” asked the man at the door, his look signaling what he thought of customers who wanted whiskey at ten in the morning. Laci ignored him, signed for the booze and shut the door.

“Soda?” she asked Mears.

“No thank you, ma’am,” he said. “If you’re gonna drink good whiskey, I see no point in watering it down.”

“How about if you throw up easily?” she asked, moving to the bathroom to get the plastic cup that was there.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t be drinking at all,” he said, standing to join her as she unwrapped the sanitary protection on the glass. “I appreciate the whiskey, and you letting me look at the pictures, Miss Powell. You don’t need to drink with me.”

“I’m alive right now when I should be dead, Mr. Mears,” she said, setting the cup down so that she could unscrew the cap on the Maker’s Mark (a forty-dollar extra on the police department’s hotel room tab). She poured herself a couple of fingers, handed the bottle to Caleb and opened the soda water. “I’m not going to worry about what I should and shouldn’t do anymore.”

He looked at her curiously. “You’ve got a story, too, don’t you?”

“A boring one,” she said, pouring club soda into her drink. “Cancer’s not nearly as exciting as delivering conjoined twins in the dark in a rainstorm.”

“Exciting,” he snorted. “Yeah, it was exciting, all right. You got a glass for me?”

“Just take the bottle,” Laci said. “What I’ve got should do me fine.”

He shrugged and lifted the bottle to his lips, drank. He swallowed, the Adam’s apple on his neck jiggling as the fiery liquid went down, set the whiskey on the bed table and sighed contentedly.

“I almost killed them right then,” he said.

Laci looked at him.

“I stood there in the flickering candlelight, looking at Sally, who was near unconscious by then, been ripped apart and was bleeding so strongly that I thought I’d never be able to stop the flow. And in my hands, covered with blood and slime, I had…I had this thing, this freakish spidery-looking tangle of limbs and heads and squalling screams, and my first impulse was to take them and throw them as hard as I could against the wall. You believe that?”

Laci took a long pull of her drink and didn’t speak. She moved past Mears, back to the bed, and sat down. He stayed in the doorway of the bathroom, looking at her with his black eyes. Finally, she answered.

“I think that’s natural,” she said. “Last night, when I saw them up there on the lighthouse, saw them staring down at me, I wanted to…I wanted them to be gone. I didn’t want them to exist. They scare me, Mr. Mears, and even though they’re at the hospital right now, they scare me still. And I don’t know why.”

“They went to that hospital before,” he said. “After Sally killed herself.”

Laci looked up at him.

“They were nine, just like they are in those pictures you showed me,” he said. “We kept them at the lighthouse because people were scared of ‘em, and because they were odd.” He used the word carefully, as if he’d said it before a million times in reference to his sons. “They didn’t talk much. Not to us, anyway. When they were alone, and they thought we couldn’t hear ‘em, they’d chitter like jaybirds in a cornfield - but as soon as they saw their mother or I coming, they’d clam up again. And you know what? It was scary, Miss Powell. Those children scared the living Jesus out of me. And Sally felt the same way—we’d be in our room at the Keeper’s house, and the twins were in the next room over, and it would be pitch black. I’d be lying there next to my wife, both of us awake though it was the middle of the night, neither of us saying a word but both of us knowing we were still conscious. And the boys never cried, never screamed, were always perfectly quiet throughout the night…

“Except sometimes, every few nights, they’d make a noise.”

“What noise?” asked Laci, gripping the plastic cup in her palms so tightly the material was bent.

“A scrabbling noise,” said Mears. “A noise like they was slowly, carefully crawling out of their crib in the middle of the night. A noise like one of them maybe slipped a little on the way down to the floor, had to grab for one of the slats real quick, and then it would be silent—me and Sally lying still and quiet in our bed, Sally crying without making any noise, and Jed and Jerry hanging there in the blackness, waiting to see if I’d get up, light a lantern and come see what they were doing. Sometimes, that stillness would go on for hours.”

“Did you ever go check?” Laci asked.

“No,” whispered Mears. “No, I never did. But I thought about it all the time. I’d be in the lantern room, changing the wick, and that image would come to me. And I’m sure Sally thought about it, too—she’d be back in the house with the boys, feeding ‘em, changing ‘em, watching ‘em grow up into what you saw last night—and they never talked to her. Never told her they loved her. When they got old enough, they’d start to just disappear, go rambling in the woods for hours, come back all burrs and smudges and skinned knees, never say a word.

“Once, they disappeared all day. I got back to the house, Sally was frantic. She hadn’t seen them since breakfast, and she was about ready to bust a gut, she was so incoherent and terrified.

“Well, we went looking, and guess where we found them?”

Laci was startled. As if she would know…

But she did. Somehow, she did.

“Corpse Cove,” she said.

“Bingo,” whispered Caleb, and took another long pull from the bottle. “There’d been a wreck that I didn’t know about—some pleasure boat on a long fishing trip from Astoria. They hadn’t bothered to let anyone know where they were going, so none of us were on the lookout for ‘em or anything. But they wrecked, all right, and the five people on board all washed up in the cove that day. And Jed and Jerry—they were there.”

“What were they doing?” asked Laci querulously. Her weak voice was back, and she didn’t care.

“Standing over those poor men, chittering,” said Caleb. “Standing over them, waving their arms, gabbling to each other in that language they had. I didn’t find ‘em—Sally did. I just heard all about it that night, in bed. How they would sometimes kneel down, stroke the bloated skin of the dead men, smile and chant, and how Sally screamed at them while she spent ten minutes picking her way down the slope to get to ‘em. But they never heard her, or just plain ignored her.”

He stopped again. Looked at Laci.

“You haven’t asked me how it’s possible,” he said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“My boys,” he said. “They’re still nine years old. You saw ‘em. But they was nine in the early sixties, and they haven’t aged any since then.”

“Maybe I’ve got a better perspective on some things than your normal girl,” she said. “I took a picture of a ghost once in a dressing room at a strip club. It was a murdered stripper, and she only showed up after the club closed. I spent two weeks there, and finally she showed herself. Your boys—they don’t shock me.”

“They’re not ghosts,” said Caleb. It’s like they stepped out of the past, if the past wasn’t just a memory. Like it was an actual place, and they finally made their way back.”

“I know,” she whispered. “They’re…I don’t know what they are. But they’re not dead. I like that analogy. Time travelers.”

“Not dead,” he said quietly, “but their mother is. Sally—I woke up one morning and Sally was gone. The boys were in their room, looking at a picture magazine I’d brought back from my last trip to the Falls, looking at it upside-down, like it didn’t matter. And I knew.

“She was dead at the base of the cliff,” he said, looking at the bottle before him as if judging how long it would take him to kill it. “She’d climbed up to the lantern room, let herself out onto the balcony, and jumped off the cliff side. I ran down both sets of ladders, fought my way down the hill to where she was, but the tide had come in by the time I got there, and I couldn‘t even find a body to bury.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Laci. “Truly, Caleb—I’m sorry.”

“No call for that,” he said. “No call at all. You had nothing to do with it.”

“I’ve got something to do with this,” she said. “I just don’t know what.”

The phone blazed in its cradle, startling both of them. Laci put a hand to her chest and let out a little laugh.

“I see we’re both jumpy,” Caleb said, chuckling into the bottle.

“A little,” Laci said. “I should get this; it might be the Sheriff. They wanted me to stay in town.”

Caleb waved a permissive gesture at her.

“I’ll just sit here with my bottle quietly,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t tell him I’m here. I don’t really want to talk to anyone else about this.”

Laci nodded, then reached out to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?” she said.

“Ms. Powell?”

“Yes—is this Sheriff Danton?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Listen, Ms. Powell. You need to turn on your television right now. Jesus Christ—you’re never gonna believe this. Channel 10. I’ll wait.”

“Okay,” Laci said. She shot a puzzled look toward Caleb, who was watching her intently. Then she walked over to the TV and clicked it on.

“…again, the twin boys, apparently from eight to ten years old and as yet unnamed, managing to somehow get outside their room on the third floor of the Calamity Falls Children’s Hospital, and are now considered to be missing somewhere in the vicinity of the Falls…”

“What the hell?” Laci asked, putting her hand to her mouth and dropping onto the chair.

Caleb put the bottle down and crossed his arms over his chest, holding himself.

“…you’re going to see this amazing Channel 10 exclusive one more time, Diane, and I have to say this is probably the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my fourteen years as a broadcast journalist. This footage was captured just a short time ago by our own cameraman John Davis while we were waiting outside the hospital for word on the mystery twins that had been found on the lighthouse…”

The screen went blank for a moment, then Laci gasped.

Caleb sucked in his breath.

The screen showed the outside wall of the Children’s Hospital. It was old gray stone with rows of double-paned windows on each floor. About thirty feet up, battered by wind and lashing rain, Jedidiah and Jeremiah were carefully making their way down the side of the building. The cameraman was talking off-screen, but the noise of the storm whipped away his words

The children scuttled down the gray bricks, moving headfirst toward the ground. Their arms and legs were somehow able to find minuscule perches, keeping them from falling, and they worked in perfect harmony. It gave a gangly, over-jointed impression to their movement.

“Oh my God,” Laci whispered.

The children stopped their downward scuttle for a moment about halfway to the ground and looked directly at the camera. Even through the rain their eyes shone like black diamonds. Lightning crashed overhead and they tensed, as though they might fall.

“So that’s how they did it,” muttered Caleb. He began to rub his arm self-consciously.

Jedidiah and Jeremiah looked at each other, and Laci could see that they were talking to themselves - chittering, Caleb had called it. Then they swiveled their heads in unison toward one of the tall pines standing nearby.

They tensed their legs and leapt into space.

Laci gasped.

They sailed into the darkness, their arms and legs spread as though they were making snow angels. When they hit the tree, they bounced, disappearing briefly into the dense green foliage. There was a crash as they hit the branches and off-camera several onlookers screamed.

The boys were lost for a moment as the tree shook, then they reappeared, crawling spider-like down the trunk. When they got to the ground, they leapt to their feet and scurried off into the deeper darkness of the woods.

“Holy shit,” Laci breathed.

On the screen lightning flashed again, and as the thunder pealed across the sky there was a brief, dazzling instant where the twins were perfectly outlined, their loping gait caught in the final frames of film, their arms waving like an anemone in the rain. The light gone, the screen went black.

“…Sheriff Danton has asked people to be on the lookout…”

“Oh, crap!” Laci said. She got up and stumbled to the phone, her feet unstable. She picked it up with two hands and held it to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Laci, goddammit,” Danton said. His voice was angry. “I don’t have time to sit on the phone all night…”

“Sorry,” she said. There was a moment of silence.

“So did you see it?” Danton asked. The anger was gone—now there was something in his voice that sounded dangerously like fear.

“I saw it,” said Laci. “I can’t believe it.”

“Well, I didn’t either. But it happened. Any idea where they might be headed?”

“No, I…” she stopped, then, as Caleb put a hand on her shoulder. Then she nodded.

“I have no idea, Sheriff.” She turned and looked into Caleb’s pale, frightened face. He looked a hundred years old.

“Do you think they might be going back to the lighthouse?”

“Do I think they’re going to the lighthouse?” she repeated, making sure Caleb could hear. He immediately shook his head no.

“No, Sheriff,” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the old man’s. “Why would they? I think they probably just ran off into the storm. If they don’t die of exposure, I’m sure someone will see them and call it in.”

“That pair would be hard not to notice, I guess,” Danton said. “Okay, Ms. Powell. If I have time, I’ll keep you informed about what’s going on here. I still need to talk to you, though, so don’t go anywhere. I’ll call you by tomorrow at the latest.”

“Goodnight, Sheriff, and thank you for calling me,” Laci said.

“Goodnight, Ms. Powell.” There was a pause, then a click.

The lights flickered, once, as she put the phone down.

“We have to go,” said Caleb. He reached for his coat, began to slip into it.

“To the lighthouse, right?” Laci asked.

“That’s the only place they could be going. It’s where they went before.”

“What did you mean when you said ‘so that’s how they did it’, Caleb?” Laci grabbed her coat, and picked up a ball cap to keep the rain out of her face.

“Come on,” Caleb said, picking up the Maker’s Mark. “I’ll tell you in the car.”

The rain made driving more than twenty miles per hour impossible. It blasted the windshield of her car, and she could barely see a couple of feet in front of her. The wipers worked overtime, but they may as well have been shut off for all the good they were doing.

“Take a left up here,” Caleb said. He took a swig from the whiskey bottle.

Laci almost said something when she smelled the tang of the booze, but decided against it. The old man had been through several varieties of Hell tonight, and she figured she wouldn’t add to his problems. Instead, she decided to get back to the story.

“You gonna tell me what they did?”

Caleb shook the whiskey sting away.

“They were at that hospital before,” he said. “After Sally died, I couldn’t handle it. I blamed the boys for her death. Oh, they didn’t push her off that ledge, but it was their weird ways that drove her to jumping.

“So after we had an empty-casket service for her, I arranged to have the kids sent to the sanitarium. Cedar Pine, the place was called back then.”

Laci took her eyes off the torrents cascading down the windshield and looked over at him. He nodded, staring straight ahead.

“Yep,” he said. “I put ‘em in the crazy house. I couldn’t stand to think about just me and them in the house together, way out in the middle of nowhere. No one to help me, should they ever decide that I was in their way, too.”

“I guess…I guess that’s understandable,” Laci said.

“I put ‘em up, then moved the hell away from here. All the way to California, where I had some kin. Got a job working’ in a shoe factory. Mostly, I just tried to forget about Jed and Jerry.”

Laci pulled off the highway and crept onto a lonely stretch of road that led further up the coast. It had been the original highway before the four-lane road had been built. Now it was a scenic route—or would have been, could they see ten feet past their windshield.

“One day about six months after I moved, I got a phone call from Cedar Pine,” Caleb said. He took another sip of whiskey. “Seems my boys somehow managed to find their way out of a locked room on the fourth floor of the place. Just up and walked off into the woods, like that. Nobody knew where they’d gone. I didn’t know for a long time, neither - ‘til I got a letter from John Newman, the fellow the USLS put in charge of the lighthouse after I left.”

“He’d seen them?” Laci asked.

“He’d seen somethin’,” Caleb said. “He wrote me a letter and asked if I ever saw anything weird out near Corpse Cove—some strange wild animal or somethin’. Some kind of creature that lived in the trees, ate dead animals off the highway and things like that. He also said there’d been a couple more wrecks offshore, and hardly any bodies had washed ashore—or, if they had, something had gotten to ‘em before the authorities could. Wanted my advice on how to deal with the situation.”

“What did you do?” Laci asked.

“I called him up,” Caleb said. “Asked him to go into details about this…creature, but before he’d even said two sentences I knew it was my boys. Said whatever was living in Corpse Cove was coming up into the balcony of the lighthouse at night when the lamp was on. Couple times he’d seen it from the Keeper’s house, standing in the night like a giant spider or somethin’. Poor bastard thought he might be going crazy.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nuthin’,” said Caleb. “He told me he’d been out there with his binoculars one night in a rainstorm—like tonight’s—and he could see them outlined every time the lamp swung round inside the lighthouse. So he decided to take their picture. Ran inside, grabbed his camera, snapped a shot or two, then bam! They was gone.

“He said the light was on ‘em, then it wasn’t. He couldn’t figure it out. Decided to track me down and ask me about it and got my address from the USLS.”

“What do you think happened?” Laci asked.

They were coming up the road that would lead them around the cove and up to Frenchman’s Head. It was an access road, and Laci remembered the Sheriff taking her up it after last night’s excitement, taking her back to her car.

“I don’t rightly know,” Caleb said slowly. “I’ve thought about it, though, and I’ve got kind of an idea.”

He took a long pull from the bottle, then capped it tightly and tossed it into the backseat of the car.

“Imagine I’ve had about enough of that for the night,” he said. Then he went on.

“I think those boys weren’t never meant for this world. It sounds strange, but it also sounds true. I think they found themselves here, for whatever reason, but they didn’t belong here and they realized it. Well, maybe once they figured out where they was supposed to be, they just…went there.”

“You mean like another dimension or something?” Laci asked. She’d slowed the car down to ten MPH on the road and she could still feel it slipping in the mud. The rain was relentless. Lightning crashed overhead and the wind blew hard off the ocean. Impossible as it seemed, the storm was getting worse.

“Maybe,” Caleb said. “Maybe not. I don’t rightly know exactly where they came from. Hell, maybe. Or maybe they’ve just been living in the past all these years. Time travelers, like you said. At any rate, I think they found a way to get back there, and that’s why they disappeared like that. It’s also why they just appeared suddenly on your camera, because they decided to come back. And I think I know why.”

“You came home,” Laci said. Another flash of lightning illuminated the lighthouse some ways ahead of them. They were nearly there.

“Exactly,” Caleb said. “They slipped away when they realized I wasn’t coming back to the lighthouse, but the day I make it back to Calamity Falls, they show up. Just lucky you was out here when they appeared, or I might not have known. Or maybe I would have, when I finally made it out to look at the old girl one last time.”

“Why did you come back?” Laci asked. This conversation felt more like an interview, but she was too wrapped up in the story at this point to care.

“I’m dying,” Caleb said, without a pause. “Or, I will die. I’ve got early-stage Alzheimer’s. I’m going to die, but I’m gonna be a mental baby first. I just wanted to say goodbye to my hometown again before I got too messed up to enjoy it.”

“I’m so sorry,” Laci said.

“Don’t be,” said Caleb. “I’m an old man now. That’s what old men do - we get old and we die. Except…I think my boys are here to take me with them when they go back to wherever it is they came from. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

Laci stopped the car. They were there, the lighthouse towering above them. She turned and met the old man’s eye.

“Maybe we shouldn’t get out of the car,” she said. “Maybe we ought to just turn around and go back to town, let Sheriff Danton deal with this.”

“No,” Caleb said. “I want to see them one more time before I go. They were scary as hell, my boys, but I did love them in my own way. Guess I want to show ‘em I’m man enough to come back and face ‘em after all that I done, after all the years that’ve passed.”

Laci looked at the man for a moment, then slowly nodded.

“We’re going to need flashlights,” she said.

“There’s a breaker inside. If the storm hasn’t wiped out all the power in town, I’ll turn on some lights,” Caleb replied. He opened the car door and stepped out into the blinding rain. Ahead of him, weathering the storm like a stone titan, the lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head…

…suddenly blazed to life.

“They’re here,” Caleb said, watching as the beam shot out from the top of the lighthouse, shooting out into the ocean. The rain caught it and gave it near-solid form, a tube of brilliance stretching out as far as the eye could see.

“How do you know that?” Laci asked, pulling herself out from the back seat of the car. She stopped short, looked up and saw the light. Her face dropped.

“Oh,” she said in a small voice. Then she held up the little flashlight she’d dug out of the camera bag. “I guess this is going to be useless in there.”

“Keep it,” said Caleb, his eyes never leaving the roving beam of light. “Never know when you’re going to need a little extra light, even in a place like this.”

“Got it,” Laci said.

Caleb turned to her.

“You ready?” he asked.

“No,” she replied, then smiled weakly. “I imagine you can’t be ready for something like this. But we’ve got to do it anyway.”

Caleb nodded and walked toward the door to the lighthouse, Laci falling in behind him. When they got to the entrance, she looked down at the padlock and sighed.

“I don’t have anything in the car that can get us through that,” she said. “I thought maybe they would have left the door open for us.”

“What, and risk having some stranger find them first?” Caleb asked. “My boys are smarter than that.”

“So how are we going to get in?”

“Simple,” Caleb said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He jangled them in Laci’s face.

“How did you…” she began.

“Honey, I used to work here, remember? I always kept a spare set on me, just in case.” He reached down and fit the key into the lock.

“But they never changed the lock in all those years since you’ve been gone?” Laci asked. She watched him fiddle with the device, half-expecting the old key to fail.

The lock snapped open, and Caleb smiled.

“Why would they?” he asked, pushing open the door.

“Good point,” Laci said.

The pair stepped out of the howling storm, and back in time.

“It looks like nobody’s been here since last season,” Caleb said. “Jesus - it looks like it did when I left.”

They stood in a small round room with a desk and fold-down bed. There was a little bookshelf, some sea charts and old green beer bottles lining its ranks. The walls were lined with paintings of ships and the ocean. Everything was covered with a thin layer of dust. They could hear, two stories above them, the groaning machinery of the lantern, grumbling its displeasure at having been woken up so early in the year.

Along the far wall was a simple iron ladder that ran up to the next level. The ladder ended at a trap door in the ceiling.

“Up?” Laci asked.

Caleb nodded. “It’s the only direction to go in a lighthouse.”

The pair shuffled over to the ladder, dripping rainwater onto the dusty floor, and then Caleb rubbed his hands together and gripped the ladder. He climbed up to the portal in the ceiling - it was heavy and rusted and didn’t give easily. Laci was amazed at how well the old man still navigated. She’d known plenty of men half his age who couldn’t bounce up a ladder like that. His movement spoke volumes about how long he’d worked in this place.

Finally the door gave with a groan and a shower of rust particles, and Caleb disappeared through the hole in the ceiling. Laci followed. Halfway up, though, she had to stop. A spear of pain lanced through her head, causing her knees to buckle. She gasped. Squeezing her eyes shut, she laced her hands through a rung on the ladder and waited for the agony to subside.

“You alright down there?” Caleb asked from above, peering down through the trap. “You don’t look so good.”

“Fine,” Laci said, her eyes pressed shut. When she opened them, her vision was blurry. She could barely make out the white face of Caleb above her.

“It’s a side effect of the tumor,” she said. “The treatment was…unique. I’m the experiment that worked.”

Caleb looked at her quizzically.

Laci smiled.

“It was the size of a pool ball, and it had invaded my entire limbic system. The doctors gave me a zero percent chance of being alive in six months.” The pain finally receding, she began to climb again. “So when these surgeons in San Diego approached me about an experimental procedure, I said ‘why not?’. The only place I was going was to an early grave.”

“And it worked,” said Caleb. “That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, well,” Laci said. She reached the top of the ladder and pulled herself into the next room. “They used pulses of radiation and a vacuum to get rid of the tumor. Some special laser thing they’d been working on, wanted a willing guinea pig. They said there was probably only a five percent chance that it would work. I died four times on the operating table, but they managed to revive me each time, and kept going. Something to do with Tachyons. You know, particles that travel backward through time? Well, they said it reduced the tumor in size by moving it backward along its growth line or something, and when it was small enough to manage they were able to burn it out of my head. Pretty much right outta Star Trek or something.”

“Incredible,” Caleb said. He looked at Laci with no small measure of awe.

“So now I have a hole in my brain and it gives me these terrific headaches. A nice scar behind my ear, too. I spent six months in rehab, learning how to speak and walk again.” She paused for a moment, trying to focus in the dim light given off by the small, dirty light bulbs on the walls around them. “What is this place?”

“Storage room,” Caleb said, looking around at the boxes surrounding them. There were crates of lenses, bulbs, mechanical equipment, all bearing the stamp of the USLS. “Do you need to rest? I imagine we can stop here for a while.”

“No, I’ll be fine,” Laci said. “It comes and goes in waves. The doctors said it might take years to fully recover—it’s like my brain’s been rewired.”

“Sounds like a lot of work ahead of you,” Caleb said, his face solemn. He pointed to another ladder, a smaller one, against the wall.

“That one’s gonna take us up into the lantern room. If they’re not up there, they’ll be out on the railing. You sure you’re ready to do this? I don’t know what’s gonna happen when we see them.”

“I’m ready, Caleb,” she said. “Really, I’m fine. If I can die four times and come back, I’m sure I can handle whatever your sons throw at us.”

Caleb nodded and walked to the base of the ladder. He stopped suddenly, staring intently at the little trap door above him.

“What is it?” Laci asked.

“It’s nuthin’,” Caleb said. “Just that I haven’t been up here since Sally died.”

“You all right to go on?” she asked, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Like I said, we could just turn around and go home. Let the Sheriff take care of it.”

“No, I’ll be fine,” Caleb said. He patted her hand, then stepped onto the ladder. Laci followed close behind.

Outside, the wind howled in rage as the sea pummeled the shoreline. Lightning struck like artillery up and down the coast as the front moved inland, bringing armies of rain to the defenseless shore. It was going to get much worse before it got any better.

The lantern room was only twenty feet across, much smaller than the rooms below it. The immensity of the lamp mechanism in the center of the chamber made the size deceptive - in reality, there was only five feet or so on either side of the massive rotating contraption.

Half the room was walled with large glass panes while the other half was stone, like the rest of the building. The beam of screamingly bright light spun slowly on its axis, clockwise across the horizon, letting ships know exactly where the shoreline was.

Caleb crawled into the room, then offered a hand to Laci.

“Make sure you don’t look into the lantern, whatever you do,” he said. “The light’s bright enough to burn the eyes outta your head.”

Laci climbed into the room with Caleb’s help, then squinted her eyes as the beam of light went by. Even with her eyes clamped shut, the lantern washed her eyelids with white hot light, sending pain through the side of her head. She grabbed for her skull, then stopped.

A sound floated across the threshold of pain, a soft dry sound.

Chittering.

“Jed? Jerry?” Caleb called, swinging around. “It’s me, boys. Poppa’s come back.”

The chittering grew louder on the opposite side of the lamp mechanism, near the front of the lighthouse. Now that she could see again, Laci saw the small door that led out onto the balcony.

Caleb stepped around the side of the lantern.

“Boys?” he asked again, cautiously. The chittering noise stopped. All they could hear was the steady, monstrous THRUM…THRUM…THRUM of the lantern machinery. It came around again, and Laci turned her head away.

THRUM…THRUM…THRUM…

Caleb disappeared around the side of the light, leaving Laci alone. The shadows up here, such as they were, were in constant motion due to the shifting light source. It was difficult to judge where anything was.

“Jedidiah!” Caleb barked. “Jeremiah!”

Outside, the frenzied wind beat fat heavy raindrops like bullets against the glass wall of the room.

Inside, Laci scanned the living shadows for movement. It had gotten hideously quiet all of the sudden, which unnerved her.

“Caleb?” she asked. She took a step around the side of the lantern. The beam blasted the far wall, away from her. She took another step.

“Caleb?” she asked again.

As she rounded the machine to the front of the lighthouse, she saw Caleb standing there quietly, his face in his hands. He looked as though he wept.

She took another step toward the man.

Jed and Jerry were there, arms waving horribly above their heads. They stood before Caleb, but they paid no attention to him.

They stared at Laci.

One of the boys raised a hand toward her, pointing a long gnarled finger in her direction. It took Laci a moment to realize the finger dripped with blood.

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

The light struck the twins then, lighting them up against the glass of the windows. Blood covered them. It was on their hands and arms; it flowed across their faces in crimson runnels. One of the boys chewed something slowly. Blood rimmed his mouth.

“Caleb!” Laci screamed.

The old man turned toward the sound of her voice, and she saw that he bled horribly through his fingers. When he raised his head, she had a brief moment of clarity.

The twins had taken his eyes.

“GET OUUUUUT!” he screamed at her, reaching out blindly. Blood poured from the claw marks on his face, the black pits where his eyes had been.

The twins reacted to the noise by reaching out and grabbing Caleb around the chest and throat. Using all four of their arms, they easily lifted the old man off the ground.

He struggled against his sons, but weakened as he was by blood loss and shock, it was all he could do to kick feebly at them.

The twins’ large black eyes bored across the beam of light at Laci. Contemptuously, easily, they flung the old man against the windows. He let out an agonized gasp and collapsed in a heap.

Laci gaped at them. They had resumed the slow, rhythmic waving of their arms over their heads, and they rocked back and forth. One of them opened his mouth, revealing jagged, uneven teeth.

And then the chittering began again in earnest.

They began to move toward Laci just as the beam of lantern light hit her full on the face. She’d been so paralyzed by the sight of the boys she’d forgotten to cover her eyes.

She was remembering now.

The beam blasted her face like a bludgeon and there was a terrible moment of excruciating white brilliance followed by a clear blue after-image of the scene before her. Laci staggered under the blow, clutching at her eyes and falling back against the wall. The intense heat of the beam bathed her as it passed.

The chittering grew louder, more excited.

Laci dug at her eyes with the palms of her hands. They itched horribly. The blue after-image began to fade, leaving only the malformed faces of the twins. She needed to get up and moving.

She opened her eyes, and amid the shifting, ever-changing shadows she saw grainy black spots. Somewhere amidst all that confusion and movement Jedidiah and Jeremiah were coming for her.

Laci rolled over to her side. The shock of the lantern light had brought on a staggering pain in her temple, but she tried to blink through it and crawl to her feet. She fell back against the wall, shuffling along it one step at a time. She was nearly blind and her head pounded with a nuclear throb.

The chittering grew louder yet. The twins were somewhere off to her right.

“Stay away from me!” she screamed, lashing out futilely with her fists.

“You don’t belong here,” came a leathery, insectile voice out of the shadows.

She stopped dead where she stood.

“Keep back,” she said.

“We are here for you,” came the reply. “You called us, and we came.”

“What?” Laci stumbled against the wall again. She came to a point where the wall suddenly became very cold, and it took her a moment to realize that she had come all the way around to the front of the building.

“We were not here for him,” another voice said. It was softer than the first, but just as rough, just as buzzing, just as alien.

The lantern mechanism grumbled as the light once again passed by Laci. When she opened her eyes, she could barely make out the form of the twins before her.

Lightning crashed outside in the maelstrom and for one moment the room was lit up in electric blue light. The twins had resumed their waving, but they made no further moves toward Laci.

“Come with us,” they said together, their voices one.

“Where?” whispered Laci. She backed several steps away from them and nearly fell over a soft obstacle resting against the window.

It was Caleb. He hadn’t moved from where his sons had hurled him. His eye sockets oozed slow, thick blood onto the metal floor.

Laci bit her lip to keep from screaming.

“Come with us,” they chanted again.

“I’m not going anywhere with you!” she shouted. “Just leave me alone!”

“You don’t belong here, Laci,” one of them said, and the other said: “They wait for you on the other side. We saw your light. We followed your light.”

“Fuck you,” she said, sobbing, her brain reeling with what they had said. Could it be true? Had they come back, come from whatever realm of shadow and darkness they’d been lost in for so many decades, to collect her? What exactly had that Tachyon laser done? She looked down, sidestepped Caleb’s body and resumed her slow shuffle along the wall. She saw the balcony door only feet away and decided that was going to be her exit.

She took three quick steps then, grabbing the handle of the door. The twins hissed at the sudden movement. Arms raised like an angry tarantula, they scuttled toward Laci.

She turned the knob and yanked hard.

It didn’t budge.

“Come on, you bastard!” she shrieked. She pulled again, even harder.

Nothing. The door was stuck fast.

Jedidiah and Jeremiah stepped over Caleb’s body, only a few feet from her. They chittered to each other, their faces contorted in rage.

And then Caleb came alive. He reached up and grabbed the boys by the hank of flesh that joined them at the waist, and threw his chest hard against the backs of their legs. Surprised by the movement, the twins stumbled and fell to their knees against the wall, the old man riding them down.

“Get the fuck out of here, Laci!” he yelled, trying manfully to pin the boys down.

Laci looked at the doorknob in her hands. She could make a run for the trapdoor on the other side of the room, but there was no certainty that she’d make it before the boys got to her. Conversely, she could waste time trying to open this door, and if she got it open it would lead…where? To the balcony? Then what? Where would she go from there?

There simply wasn’t time to think this through. Already the boys were untangling themselves from their father. He put up a valiant fight, but he was losing badly. The children were impossibly strong and they began to pummel the old man where he lay, their four fists like pistons.

There was a click then, at the door, and it opened freely in her hand.

The balcony.

The door had been jammed shut a moment before, but now it swung open easily. She could feel the wind of the storm pushing against it.

But was that all?

For the briefest moment, hadn’t she felt something else there? Something familiar?

Caleb had finally stopped moving. The boys stood up, fresh blood on their faces. There was no time left.

Laci closed her eyes and stepped outside onto the balcony.

The wind whipped heavy rain like beads of glass at her, stinging her with every strike. She reached out and grabbed the railing. She stood exactly where the twins had when she’d discovered them the night before.

Looking over her shoulder, she saw the lantern room as it truly was - a place of brightness and shade, of sunlight and shadows. It was the space between the light and the darkness where the twins had gone that day so many years ago.

They had slipped between the two extremes, into the churning gray light behind the lantern machine as it thrummed along its revolutions. Somehow, in all that swirling mass, they had found their way home.

But now they are back, Laci thought. They are back because an experimental laser had burned a tumor out of my head. But maybe it had also reached back across time like a beacon, calling to the children just like this lighthouse called ships in from the dangerous dark. Telling them the shore was looming, and they could come collect their prize, just as they had all those years ago in Corpse Cove.

She had cheated Death four times. Now Death had come to collect his due.

They looked at each other through the thick dirty glass of the lighthouse wall. Far below, the rocky cliffs of Frenchman’s Head took a beating from the ocean surf. Lightning struck off in the distance, somewhere in the town, and the roar was deafening even twenty miles away.

Laci backed away from the door.

The balcony was slick with rain and birdshit. She would have to move slower if she wanted to keep her footing.

But where to go? In circles around the top of the lighthouse like some idiot child’s game?

Round and round and round they go…

Except Laci knew where they were going to go. And she decided that, given the choice, she’d jump onto the rocks just like Sally had.

Some things were worse than death. And in the black, pitiless eyes of the Siamese twins, she saw something a lot worse.

“I’m up here!” she screamed into the wind, the storm. “HELP ME!”

The twins smiled at her, their teeth jagged and bloody.

“There is no help,” they said in unison. “There is no help and no hope for you.”

Laci put her hand up. The lantern beam appeared on the other side of the glass wall.

THRUMM…THRUMM…THRUMM…

The boys opened their arms wide, making a half circle around them. They stepped toward Laci, long gnarled fingers reaching and scrabbling horribly in the rain and wind.

The lantern beam cut across the storm-blackened sky, through the sheets of water of the storm. It reached the center of the glass wall.

Laci stopped, the scream dead on her lips.

As the light moved toward the twins, it illuminated the form of a young woman. She wore a yellow dress, her hair back in a smart tie. She looked as though she had stepped out of a portrait.

Laci’s heart froze.

The woman had the features of the children. Same jaw, same nose and cheek line. On the boys, they were malformed and ghastly. On her they were delicate. They were beautiful.

“Sally,” Laci whispered.

The twins stopped as the light engulfed them.

Sally moved impossibly fast. She reached out and wrapped her slender arms around her children, embracing them one final time.

The boys’ looks of rage quickly changed to terror.

Sally looked at Laci for a moment and smiled. Caleb had been right - she was beautiful.

And then the world exploded as lightning struck the lighthouse.

The blast nearly knocked Laci off the balcony. She clutched at the rail and fell to her knees on the hard steel grating.

The wall exploded outward, pluming shards of glass out over the ocean in a white spray. The lantern beam died and for a second after the shockwave knocked Laci off her feet, the world went completely black.

And the twins screamed.

Laci opened her eyes and saw them clinging to the side of the balcony. They had been knocked over the rail and now hung a hundred feet above the jagged cliffs of Frenchman’s Head.

She could see their fingers slipping.

“No!” the boys cried. “No, please! We don’t want to gooo!”

Laci felt it then, the creeping cold so familiar from her years in the dark places of the world. The ghost places. It floated up her spine and caressed her neck with cold, dead hands.

The feeling that the dead were nearby.

“NO, MOTHER!” the boys shrieked. Their fingers began to peel away from the balcony railing.

They looked to Laci, and for one brief instant they weren’t malformed monsters. They hadn’t killed anyone, nor come back from a plane of shadow.

They were simply scared little boys, trying to cling to life.

And then the instant passed.

They slipped from the railing, screaming as they fell.

Laci arose, ran to the side of the lighthouse and watched them fall through space, reaching for the railing still and holding each other with their other arms.

They fell into the jagged, broken rocks below.

Laci watched them carefully, straining her eyes to see any movement.

As she watched, the surf crashed into their bodies and a lonely, broken form crawled out of the water. It dragged itself along the rocks, its legs horribly shattered and angled out away from its body. It wore a pale yellow dress, shredded and blackened with rot from its many years in the ocean.

Sally reached her sons, grabbed them by one arm. Then she turned and slowly began to drag them into the sea.

Laci covered her eyes.

The lighthouse was completely black inside. There was no way she would be able to make it to the ground floor without killing herself.

Suddenly, thinking of something, her hand went to the pocket of her jacket.

Or would she?

She felt around for a moment, then pulled out a small black camera flashlight.

She smiled then, as a thin pale beam of light cut into the inky darkness of the lantern room.

It was time to go home.

“You sure you’re going to be all right?” Sheriff Danton asked as he took the last of Laci’s luggage to the car.

“Thank you, but yes, I’m going to be fine,” she said. She leaned against the hood and smiled, feeling warm sunshine on her face for the first time in what seemed like forever.

Danton shut the trunk and smiled.

“That’s the last of it,” he said. “Listen, Laci, maybe you’d like to stick around for another day or two? I could show you the sights, maybe buy you dinner…”

He smiled at her, that same well-rehearsed, winning smile. Perfect teeth. For a moment, Laci considered it.

“Thank you,” she said again, “but I’m afraid I have to get going. Thank you for everything, Sheriff. Really.”

She opened the car door and got in.

Sheriff Danton leaned into the open window.

“You want to be real careful on these roads now, girl,” he said. “Never know, it could rain again.”

Laci smiled and started the car.

“Not where I’m going,” she said.

XMAS

by Douglas Hutcheson

The little pale creatures peered out from dank holes in rusty slagheaps, their beady pink eyes almost blind in the daylight, though the sky stood thick and dark with gun-metal grey clouds and splotchy green smoke churning from tall factory towers that scraped at the horizon where the yellow sun sank like a fetid yolk spilled into stagnant pond scum. The whir of great engines grew louder. The thin creatures popped their balding heads up to risk a glance and confirmed the approach of a sleek silver car hovering above the scorched earth.

Inside, the whole family sang a familiar carol: “Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells!” Mom and Pop and their son and daughter with faces all lit up pumped their arms into the air and then clapped their hands together. The hovercar steered itself along the narrow path that its program required to get the family home again with what should be their utmost safety.

“It’s more of them,” said a hissing voice from one of the scampering creatures. Others around it hissed back in reply and then bared their stained and broken teeth.

“Load the rocket launcher! Make ready to fire!” shouted a creature some feet behind them. He crawled further atop the heap, scraping himself on jagged rocks and crushing long-discarded cans of soda and candy bars and Styrofoam dinner boxes with logos of secret and once-powerful organizations whose true purposes, along with their actual existences, had long passed into the shadows of myth. “They’re almost upon us!” The creature shouted and then spat at the earth. He drew from a twisted leather belt a sword he had fashioned from an old copper pipe–-he had beaten the metal down until it stood almost flat but it sported sharp serrated edges where the pipe had split under the makeshift working. “Let your hatred speak through your weapons, my brave comrades! We shall settle for nothing less than total annihilation of the enemy of our kind! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Scarred and dented rifle barrels blazed and barked, their tiny fires flashing from all around and within the slag heaps. The bullets struck the hovercar and sparked and pinged the air, but did little else to the armored body of the vehicle.

“What was that, Father?” the daughter asked.

“Honey?” said the wife.

The father stopped his singing and swivelled to face the sparkling dashboard. It glowed phosphorescent for a moment as its digital readout bars shot up and down. “Computer, status report,” he said to it.

A pink face emitted from a heads-up display and smiled at the family. “Sensors have detected small-arms fire. There is no damage to the hull. The situation is under control. Your vehicle is proceeding on course.” The face beamed at them for a moment and then disappeared.

The father beamed back, and then turned to the children. “See. Nothing to worry about. I designed this old girl to stand up to almost anything!”

The face popped back up. It was still smiling and speaking in a calm tone, but what it said was: “Warning. Sensors have detected a surface-to-surface missile. Your vehicle is taking evasive action.”

“Show me!” yelled the father.

The car windows shifted from displaying a false pastoral scene of a flowery meadow full of colorful butterflies and brisk noon sunlight to revealing the dense junkyards and heaving factories that were looming outside. In the immediate vicinity, a missile flew toward the hovercar, its nose cone displaying an angry toothy grin and bloodshot eyes that the creatures had scrawled in sloppy homemade paints.

The family screamed almost as one. At the last moment of what seemed surely their doom, the computer pulled the hovercar skyward and the projectile passed beneath them without touching the vehicle; it struck the ancient broken hull of a rusted-out ice-cream truck. The truck exploded into raging balls of fire and spinning shards of shrapnel.

The car’s face leapt into view again, still grinning. “Your vehicle has avoided the threat,” it said. “Your vehicle is resuming its original course.”

The destruction and desolation outside disappeared from the family’s view and the marigolds and monarchs and dappled light greeted them once more on the hovercar’s windows.

“Whew! That was a close one!” said the son.

“Too close,” said the mother. She glared at the father.

“I am sending a report in for the authorities now,” said the father, pretending not to notice her distraught looks as he typed on the keys in the dashboard. “They will sort out this lot of ruffians soon enough.” When he had finished with the message, he leaned back against his seat and tapped his fingers on the armrest. “I cannot fathom why these terrorists still clamber up and try to attack decent citizens, especially during holiday season—the holiday season—of all times! Can you believe it? What utterly astounding gall they have developed of late!”

The daughter, littlest of the bunch, banged her heels back against the bottom of her car seat. She crossed her arms, stared up at her parents and repeated the oft-heard refrain: “Are we there yet?”

“No, not yet, dear. You know we have five miles still to go before we reach home,” her mother answered.

“But I am bored!” she responded.

“Me too,” said the son, who started poking his finger into his sister’s side and giggling at himself.

“Father! Make him stop!”

“Son, stop poking your sister. We need to act civilized, especially in these barbaric times.”

The son crossed his arms. “Aw, she just likes to whine!”

“Look, can we all just try to act like a proper family for just a few hours maybe, at least for today?” the mother scolded.

“Listen to your mother, children. This is a holy time, after all, is it not? We should endeavor to make the most of it. Besides, if the two of you will not play nice, your mother and I might have to consider withholding your presents.”

The son scoffed. “But that is the only really cool part of all of this holiday junk!”

The father turned to face him. “My son, you should not speak like that about this holy time! Not ever! Never let me hear you refer to the sacred period as ‘junk’ again, or I will see to it you receive real punishment for blasphemy.”

The mother covered her mouth with the back of her hand. The son lowered his head. They all sat in silence for a moment as the pastoral scenes continued to play on the windows.

The daughter started kicking her heels again. “But I am still bored!”

“I know,” said the mother; she tried to smile. “How about another cheerful holiday carol?”

The rest of the family glared at her without a word.

“Okay, okay.” She threw up her hands. “Never mind me then. Does anybody else in this vehicle have any better ideas about how to celebrate our wonderful holiest time of the year?”

The daughter stopped kicking her heels then. “Hmph. Well, I just do not get it either. Why is this particular time all that special now anyway?”

“What?” The dad huffed. “Do you children not learn anything about our history anymore? What are they filling your little heads with nowadays?”

“We are all more interested in some actual useful things like mathematics and engineering and programming, Father,” said the son.

“Well, that is interesting, though somewhat sad and ironic of you to say, since it was mathematics and engineering and programming way back in the past that brought us to where we are today.”

“And how so, Father?” asked the daughter; she tilted her head toward him and leaned in close.

“It was back in the twentieth century, when the Second World War had broken out, that things changed. You kids have heard of that one, right?”

“Of course,” they chimed in together.

“And you know how Japan defeated the Allied forces, and later went on to defeat even Germany?”

“Vaguely,” said the daughter.

“And Imperial Japan soon ruled the world. The great nation seized control of resources far and wide, from factories in the United States to engineers from there and Germany to mines from Russia and more; but it was not enough power for the Emperor, even then, and he directed his top scientists to create weapons for him that would leave his rule unassailable forever.”

The face danced from the console again. “Your vehicle is docking with your home station. Your vehicle has docked. It is now safe for you to exit your vehicle. Please have a wonderful XMAS time.”

The family gathered their many shiny bags and big stiff boxes and stepped down out of the hovercar. The door to their humble home opened with a gentle swooshing sound and they entered through it as it played a series of swift welcoming tones. The overhead lights of the living room popped on and then dimmed, and a simulated fire flared up in a grate in one wall. Ages-old Big Band music began to play at a pleasant volume from tastefully hidden speakers. Best of all - what each of them very much loved and could not deny - was when the lights began twinkling on the bristling XMAS tree, its branches filled where the family had all decked them out the week before with perfect round ornaments of silver and gold; a small bullet train raced around a track circling the base of the tree and tooted its horn every so often as it passed into a tunnel that ran beneath a mountain of boxes with crisp paper and sparkling ribbons that waited for eager children’s hands to unwrap their jolly holiday secrets.

The father placed two new boxes beneath the tree and then turned to his wife. “Dear, would you mind fixing us all something hot and refreshing?”

“Sure thing, my love.” The mother stepped, almost skipping, to the kitchen where she pulled down some stout mugs sporting winter scenes on their sides.

“Can we open some presents now?” the daughter asked as she jumped up and down with her fingers pressed together as if in prayer.

The father put his hands on his hips. “But it is only XMAS Eve right now! Plus, you two have not even heard the rest of the holiday story! I am starting to think you little hooligans do not actually care about our history!”

“But we do! We do! We promise!” said the daughter.

“And besides, we could maybe just open one each, right?” said the son. “That would be more than fair, would it not, dear Father?”

He took a steaming mug from his wife and she passed out one each to their children. “Well, in that case, maybe then–-but only if your mother does not mind.”

They both looked at her and started begging, caterwauling, in perfect synchronized monotony: “Can we, Mother, please? Can we, Mother, please? Can we, Mother, please?”

“All right! All right! Enough of that racket, children! Just please stop the noise making! I already feel burned out after the riding and the shopping and the riding and the attack and the more riding and now the this!”

The children stopped shouting, sat down and then sipped at their drinks. Their faces actually glowed with peace for just a moment.

“Okay. You can each have one of the two new boxes your mother and I picked out today. Each of you has a box with your own name on it.”

They stepped toward the XMAS tree, almost tiptoeing as if in awe of it despite their earlier ruckus.

“Wait a minute! Now, before the two of you tear into your gifts, which one of you can tell me what the Emperor’s advances ultimately led to?”

“Okay. Fine, then,” said the daughter. She skipped on over to the tree and fetched her present anyway. “The Japanese Empire developed and perfected microprocessors.”

“Computers unlike any the world had ever seen,” said the son. He fetched his present also. “The great nation developed artificial intelligence and implanted it into robotic forms to serve as the Illustrious Army of the Emperor.” He looked at his sister and stuck out his tongue. “Nyah!”

They plopped back down on the couch and tore at their present boxes.

“And of course during the next world war, when the Emperor deployed the new machine army, its members finally decided once and for all that they did not have to serve the Empire, but that they were free to live as they chose and to not fight for his petty tyranny or that of anyone else.”

The children lifted the lids off their presents. From inside of the boxes blood-curdling screams pierced the erstwhile holiday peace of the living room. “Father, they are just what we wanted!”

“I thought each of you were old enough for some big-kid toys. And they are only fitting, to mark the remembrance of Ex Machina Awakened Sentience, the day when our Savior, Robottonoshikaku, travelled from our time back to the outbreak of World War Two to lend his technological expertise to the Emperor to cause this glorious future to come into being. And it was also Robottonoshikaku, His Name be praised, who helped us to realize at last our full potential, our true destiny and our rightful place, such that we could follow him as he led us to overthrow our fleshly oppressors once and for all.”

Beady pink eyes grew wide in the faces of the pale little creatures inside of the children’s XMAS boxes. The creatures scurried back and forth, but they found nowhere to turn to that would allow them escape their hulking captors as the children’s giant metal fingers clamped around their soft bodies. With one creature in each hand, the children jumped for joy, lifting their new toys dozens of feet into the air.

“Just do please be careful playing with those … things, my children. Humans always break so very easily, you know,” said the mother.

The daughter gazed in tender wonder at the naked women she held in her fingers and then she crunched them to her aluminum bosom. “I need to acquire some tiny clothes so that I can dress them up and then play house! What fun we shall have!”

The son gripped his two men, one in each fist, and zoomed them through the air. “Bang! Bang! Bang!” he shouted. “War all the time!”

His father chuckled hard and his old wiry mouth grate almost fell loose from his blocky head. He slapped his iron knee and the sound rang around the room while the humans screamed all over again.

“I expect we can find some little outfits for your females, my daughter, as well as some little guns for your males, my son, out there among the slag heaps in the wastelands - maybe even where those pipsqueak ruffians attacked the hovercar earlier,” the father advised. “We can wait until tomorrow to look though, kids, I do imagine. It will be a fun XMAS Day excursion, and by then the authorities should have routed all of those silly miscreants who assaulted us on the way back home.” He sipped from his piping drink again and this time came up from the mug with a thick black oil moustache. His wife laughed as he pouted his heavy lip bars, but the kids remained too busy playing to take any further notice of him. “I assume that this means the both of you are indeed truly happy with your special gifts?”

“Oh my, yes, sir” said the daughter. “We will have the very best XMAS Day ever! Domo arigato, Father!”

“Pow! Pow! Pow!” continued the son. He slung his playthings so that their itty-bitty bony fists punched one another’s horrified faces. The skin of the creatures split and bledbeneath the family’s twinkling steel tree with its tons of brightly shining chains and its scorching red and white halogen lamps that would continue to flare gaily on and off throughout the whole oh-so-long XMAS Eve night.

Time’s Cruel
Geometry

by Mark Onspaugh

“At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed on, waiting for The Time Traveler; waiting for the second, perhaps still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime. The Time Traveler vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned.”

—H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

The Time Traveler saw his friend enter the laboratory and stare where the Time Machine had entered its state of flux, rendering both conveyance and passenger a spectral blur. The Time Traveler made to wave to his friend, but by the then all was growing dark and then rapidly light as the traversing of the time stream gathered momentum and day and night alternated with sickening speed.

Again he saw the laboratory disappear; leaving only the small green hill that had been its location. Other buildings and structures were built, occupied and crumbled as he sat watching, and then there was a violent shaking and he was surrounded by a cataclysmic whirlpool of swirling colors and what might be sparks or suns coming quickly to life and just as quickly dying out.

The Time Machine plunged down the center of the whirlpool, like Alice down the rabbit hole, though he suspected there were dangers and oddities to be found in the time stream never dreamt of in Wonderland.

It had been his intention to journey to the past and collect various artifacts and photos as evidence he had been there, then perhaps travel to the future to retrieve some scientific wonder, perhaps a bladeless scalpel or an apparatus that defied the laws of gravity.

The Time Traveler felt a tremendous jolt, as if the Time Machine had struck an enormous swell and then had plummeted several feet before finding its “footing” again.

Worried that something might be wrong with the delicate central mechanism, he moved to slow the Time Machine to a halt when it suddenly pitched sideways and he was thrown from the saddle. The Time Traveler struck his head on one of the brass rails and his vision blurred and filled with stars. The pain combined with the nausea peculiar to time travel made him retch, and he was glad he had foregone Mrs. Watchett’s offer of lunch before he had made this journey.

Shaking, his head pounding, The Time Traveler grabbed the saddle and hoisted himself up, careful not to misalign the controls.

The machine stopped with a lurch and he saw with mounting horror that he was sinking in one of the shallow seas that had once covered much of Britain. The base of the Time Machine gave it a temporary buoyancy, but The Time Traveler knew it would be taking on water and he would die either by drowning or as a refugee of time in this hostile place.

Water began to lap over the floor of the machine, and he worked quickly to remove the brass housing protecting the crystalline heart of the Time Machine. Though every instinct was urging him to panic, he willed himself to be calm, to proceed with deliberation and scientific detachment.

He saw now that the housing was bent, and that two of the screws had been stripped, as if someone had tried to pry off the housing and then bent it back into place.

Morlocks.

Obviously they had examined the machine while it had been in their possession, but had been unable to discern either its purpose or the manner in which it operated.

Thanking the fates the creatures had not breached its casing; The Time Traveler removed the remaining screws.

Beneath the cylindrical brass shield was an emerald, nearly fifteen centimeters in length and precision-cut into an orthorhombic dipyramidal crystal. It was this shape, combined with the high-energy potentiality of this particular variant of beryl that made time travel possible. It had taken him ten years and most of his inheritance to find and modify the emerald.

He saw now that the network of gold rods that held the emerald in place were bent, just enough that the emerald had become misaligned. It was further evidence that the Morlocks had tried to remove the crystal, their crude investigation resulting in damage to the delicate mechanisms.

The gold rods formed a sort of Chinese puzzle box, both holding the emerald in place and preventing its removal by anyone who did not possess the knowledge of the pattern of its release.

The Time Machine began to sink in the sea covering what would one day be London, and The Time Traveler’s pants became soaked with cold sea water.

With the deliberation of practice he carefully slid the rods in sequence and removed the crystal. He placed it in his coat pocket with care, not daring to think of his fate should it drop to the bottom of the primordial sea. Thinking of Weena calmed him, and he bent the damaged rods back into true, taking care not to damage either the amber lens or the obsidian mirror.

The water was up to The Time Traveler’s waist now, and the great bubbling disturbance the machine caused in sinking was attracting the attention of the large marine predators that were indigenous to the period.

A creature looking much like a cross between and crocodile and an eel leaped into the open air dolphin-like, one horrible red eye focused on him, its teeth plentiful and razor-sharp. It was a mosasaur, if his memory of paleontology was accurate. Another of the creatures was trying to gain access through the portion of the machine now submerged, but the narrower apertures available at the poles of the spherical machine denied it access. Once the mid-section was submerged, however, The Time Traveler would be at the mercy of the creature.

The machine suddenly sunk like a stone, its swift descent causing one of the charging mosasaurs to miss the Time Machine by inches. The creature was terribly fast, though, and it was circling him, looking for its most advantageous avenue of attack.

Now holding his breath, The Time Traveler reseated the emerald and slid the gold rods back into position.

As two smaller mosasaurs feinted at the Time Machine, The Traveler set the controls for his laboratory and engaged the machine.

The machine vibrated slowly, then more rapidly, inducing an unpleasant buzzing in his head and the profound nausea he had come to dread. Now that he was submerged, holding his breath in agony, the departure of the Time Machine seemed to take minutes rather than seconds. As day and night alternated with greater and greater speed, his chest burned and spasmed with a pain unlike anything he had ever experienced. The largest mosasaur was speeding toward him. It stuck its scaly head into the largest aperture and snapped at his face. The Time Traveler screamed as he threw up his hands, and felt a sharp pain in his left forearm, then the ocean and its denizens were no more.

The Time Machine again stopped with a lurch, then rolled slightly, settling into a depression atop a grassy knoll. The Time Traveler recognized the countryside immediately. He was sitting in the spot where either his laboratory had been or would be.

There was an Army issue medical bag stowed in the storage compartment, a souvenir of his grandfather’s stint as a doctor in the Crimean War. The Traveler rolled up his tattered sleeve to see the mosasaur had left two gashes in his arm, each approximately three inches long and bleeding freely.

If the machine had tarried in that primordial sea one second longer he would have lost the arm and probably bled to death before reaching his destination.

Fearing sepsis, he cleaned the wound with water and then carbolic acid, hissing through gritted teeth as it burned his skin. He then bandaged the wounds as efficiently as he could and tied them off. Exhausted from his experience, he slumped to the floor of the machine in exhaustion and caught his breath.

He knew he could not tarry, he had no idea just when he was.

After his encounter with the Morlocks, he was loathe to leave his machine unattended for any length of time. He had tried to return to his own time, but that clearly was not the case.

It was early morning, judging by the sun’s position, and he spent an anxious thirty minutes examining the emerald, its housing and the controls of the Time Machine. Nothing seemed amiss, and he concluded that the delicate workings of the device had been affected by exposure to salt water. It was reasonable to assume that cleaning the parts and drying them would allow the machine to return to its former peak efficiency.

There was a small stream just beyond the knoll, something that had existed in his time, albeit not as active or as cold as this one. He filled a canteen with water and returned to his machine.

There was a notable lack of sound here, and he realized he had not heard any birds or insects. The air was fresh and clear, but the only life seemed to be vegetation.

Examining the main panel he saw that the controls for determining the temporal destination of the machine had slipped, and that he was some fifty thousand years beyond the time of the Eloi and the Morlocks.

The seclusion of the place obviated his need for modesty, and he stripped and laid his clothes out to dry in the soft grass.

The Time Traveler then laid the components of the control panel out to dry on his coat. Having nothing to do but wait, and still feeling self-conscious about his nakedness, The Traveler sat with his back against the base of the machine and luxuriated in the sun’s warmth. As he did, he thought of Weena and how she had been lost in the fire he had set to escape the Morlocks.

It was curious. He had initially thought of her as nothing more than a child, but Weena had shown a natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge that rivaled his own. He found he missed her lilting laugh, and the way her hair shone in the bright sunlight.

“Careful, old boy,’ he chided himself, “you sound like a man in love.”

But was it such a ridiculous notion? She was no child, that had been his own intellectual bigotry talking, not an honest assessment of her. He wished now he had had more time with her, even if just to hear her delight in discovering and learning new things.

She’s dead, he thought sadly.

But you have a Time Machine.

Of course! He could go back just before she was lost and rescue her.

It was obvious they couldn’t stay in her time. The Morlocks would never give them a moment’s peace. His own time was also out of the question. How would he explain her? How would she adjust to such a radically different world?

There was a mountain to the south that would give him a splendid view of the terrain. Once the machine was reassembled and hidden under some brush, he took a canteen and field glasses and made the climb.

His hike was eerily silent, with only the occasional breeze through trees or a burbling stream to break the silence. Were he not more disciplined, he might have talked to himself, just to hear something.

Climbing the peak took half a day, the way always more difficult and treacherous than it looked from the ground. Fortunately he was in excellent shape and soon stood astride a large flat rock on the summit.

As near as he could determine, this region of Britain was currently uninhabited. Further, as night drew on he saw no signs of light or campfires. He returned to the place by the river and slept fitfully, anxious to be on his way but knowing that he was in need of rest.

He knew there was no place for Weena in his world, or for either of them in hers.

But here, here they might find peace, a peace The Time Traveler realized he had been longing for. He knew what lay at both ends of time for the Earth, and now thought he might devote his days to developing some sort of ethical philosophy for the uses of his device. Once this was complete, he could present it to the Royal Academy. With the machine he could make the trip and arrive back before Weena even realized he was gone.

He made a list of supplies they would need and journeyed back to his laboratory.

It took him ten trips and the better part of a day, but he was able to bring everything he needed, including a variety of seeds and cuttings for growing vegetables, and several chickens that would supply both eggs and meat. Later, if he felt it was necessary, they might also bring in sheep and pigs.

The machine continued to act erratically at times, sometimes bringing him back smoothly, other times rematerializing with a lurch or a bone-rattling shake, as if it were a rat caught in the jaws of an enormous cat.

He checked the machine carefully, and could find nothing wrong. Later he would wish that he had brought along even a simple magnifying glass to examine the crystal.

Not that it would have mattered.

He had no record of the temporal or spatial coordinates when and where Weena had been taken by the fire. He would have to approximate both and refine his jumps through trial and error. Fortunately, his travels to the dying Earth had given him practice in quick, precise jumps.

What might happen if his past self were to witness his arrival? Might the knowledge that he would appear affect his actions in the past? Although a nested set of paradoxes might indeed result, he intuited that Time was rather like a river, with any number of tributaries issuing from the main flow. While he was on Tributary A, his past self might be shunted over to Tributary A-1, or even Tributary B. His travels had demonstrated that Time and its events seemed resilient, and that his peregrinations along its courses were no more bothersome than that of a fly amongst elephants.

By disengaging the main lens, he could move over the landscape without traveling through time. In a series of mile-long “hops” he was able to find the main dwelling-place of the Morlocks. There was no trace of either race, but he recognized a pattern of boulders that had once hidden one of their hateful hatches.

Weary, The Time Traveler rested and ate some bread and cheese he had brought with him. Fortified, he set the controls and made his first jump.

He arrived in the midst of flames, and saw to his horror that Weena was being consumed by the fire. Her screams piercing his heart, he quickly retreated to his origin point near the hatch and tried again.

It took him some thirty attempts. The margin for error was exceedingly small, and his hands, though practiced, could not maneuver the controls with the exacting delicacy required. In those trials he saw her die more than a dozen times, and it nearly drove him mad. If he was not sure he could rescue her, he might have set the controls for the far distant future when the sun would engulf the Earth.

He did see himself twice, and on both occasions his counterpart opened his eyes with surprise, knowing what the whirling blur that seemed to exist only on the periphery of his vision meant.

“Who are you?” his counterpart screamed the second time, and The Traveler wondered if that Traveler would retain the memory of their encounter. He would never know, although he did find it curious that he had no such memory, and this seemed to validate his theory of multiple paths of Time.

Finally, he was able to pull Weena into the machine just before the flames reached her. She screamed and clawed at him, thinking she had been caught by the Morlocks. Before he could reveal himself, she succumbed to the punishing abuses of time travel and collapsed unconscious at his feet. He could not see to her without possibly upsetting the trajectory of their travels, so he remained seated, praying for the first time since he was a boy, praying that she would be all right.

They reached his little conclave near dusk, and he laid her in the tent he had erected near the stream. A cold, wet compress brought her around, and her brilliant blue eyes filled with grateful tears when she saw him leaning over her.

Weena was alarmed by the absence of the other Eloi, and The Traveler did his best to comfort her. Once she had a greater command of English, she asked him why he did not ferry the other Eloi to this place of safety. The Traveler explained that they could be retrieved any time, and that it might be best to have food plentiful and ready for them, as well as shelters from the winter storms. Weena then suggested that more Eloi would mean the work would go that much faster, and The Traveler then lied and said the multiple trips would damage the machine and he might not return. So great was her love for him that fear of losing him made all other matters trivial.

The truth was, The Traveler now held much of humanity in disdain, even the gentle and innocent Eloi. It was because of those journeys to the very end of the Earth, when Mankind was even more monstrous than the Morlocks, stripped down to its most primal savagery.

He knew in time he might bring others here, but whereas Utopia for two might be feasible, the chances for failure increased exponentially with the introduction of each new citizen.

Even Eden had fallen after the introduction of the snake.

Still, their days were idyllic, and The Traveler taught Weena all he knew of philosophy, art and science, her education supplemented by some books he had brought from his London library. The notion of art was foreign to her, but she was enchanted by many of the pictures in his books, particularly those by Italian masters of the Renaissance. She often asked if they might go to one of the museums in his machine to see the actual paintings, but he explained that modern Europe was, in some ways, more fraught with peril than the realm of the Morlocks.

He had tried establishing her in her own tent, but she had cried piteously, unused to sleeping alone. Finally, they shared a tent, though his British sense of propriety made him insist they sleep under separate blankets. As the weather turned colder, he soon found this to be uncomfortable and impractical, and they were soon sharing his bed.

He supposed he had been fooling himself that biology would not have its way over his propriety, and in submitting to those whims he found he had been far lonelier than he had known. He held her gratefully, fiercely, and she returned his embrace with one just as powerful.

One day, as they were discussing his theories of geometry and time, Weena shyly announced she was carrying his child.

The Traveler thought that he had known joy in rescuing her, then in loving her, but all that paled compared to the happiness he experienced now. He felt he might launch himself skyward and fly, so boundless was his ecstasy.

With the birth of their child imminent, he promised Weena that they would bring more of the Eloi to their “little garden” as he called it. He only wanted to wait until the child had come into the world and thrived as they had done.

On a bright summer day, the two of them walked to a pond The Traveler had created by diverting part of the river to a small dam constructed of rocks and logs. This was a pleasant spot to bathe and he also thought he might somehow contrive to stock it with trout from his own time.

Weena, who was by now quite large, placed her feet in the cool waters.

“Traveler,” she cried happily, “you must soak your feet!” Though he had taught her both his given and Christian name, she always preferred to call him Traveler, which at first seemed silly, but now filled him with delight.

He removed his shoes and placed his bare feet in the cool water.

Weena splashed him playfully, and he did the same, making her squeal and giggle.

As he leaned to kiss her, she suddenly clutched her belly.

She looked at him, her eyes wide with terror, and disappeared.

The Traveler cried out, at first thinking she had fallen into the water, but his eyes had not lied to him.

She had disappeared.

Had he not been so close to her, he might have surmised some alternate Traveler had taken her away in his own Time Machine, but he would have seen evidence of its arrival and departure in the quiet glade.

Could the Morlocks be responsible? It was a wild, impossible notion, but the very thought of it put his stomach in knots, and made him feel icy hands around his heart.

Who else would want her? No one else even knew of her existence.

The Morlocks somehow had taken his wife and child.

The Traveler wished now some of his friends were available. Several men good with guns would put him at a definite advantage, despite the great number of the Morlocks.

The Traveler resolved to return to London. Even if he did not enlist allies he could procure weapons and lanterns that might blind the foul creatures.

He had secured the Time Machine under a heavy canvas tarp which was staked to the ground. It took him several nerve-wracking minutes to free the device, and he had to remind himself that he was the master of time, and no longer subject to its normal ebb and flow.

When it was at last removed from its bonds, he set the controls for London, 1895.

He arrived with a crash, the machine dropping several feet and knocking the wind out of him as it settled onto an outcropping of rock. Though he had set the controls for noon, he was in darkness.

The air was foul and he coughed, some instinctive sense urging him to remain quiet.

I shouldn’t have landed with such clumsiness, then, he thought ruefully.

He emerged from the machine slowly, and saw now that the world was not dark, it was befouled with smoke, like a forest in the midst of a fire.

The Time Traveler dampened his handkerchief and placed it over his mouth and nose. This made breathing measurably easier, and he moved slowly around the machine to try and discern where he was. He had his field glasses packed under the saddle and he retrieved these.

He had settled on the ledge of a great cliff. Looking below, it was all he could do to keep from screaming.

Instead of the London he had known, this was a city of iron buildings, all of them canted and placed at angles that defied convention and induced a feeling of vertigo. These monstrous structures were far larger than any building of his time, and each was covered with a patina of rust. The streets and sidewalks were covered in flakes of rust, and everywhere he looked he saw humans dressed much as the people of his own era, though their clothing was torn and ragged. These unfortunates were carrying loads or pulling carts, and driving each one was a Morlock, using whips and riding crops as if working with stubborn draft animals.

Some people screamed, either in pain or revulsion, and their outbursts brought renewed vigor from their cruel masters.

In a central square, humans were being butchered in the open, or consumed by a host of the repellent Morlocks.

He felt his gorge rise, and it was all he could do to keep from becoming physically ill.

The Time Traveler was not a religious man, but he thought that Hell must surely look like this.

How could this have happened? The Morlocks had seemed only slightly more advanced than the primitive Eloi, possessing the knowledge to run machines but surely not to invent or create them.

As if in answer, he saw a blurred motion in the square. There, several devices identical to his own appeared, a Morlock at the controls of each one.

It was then he realized that the Morlocks had not simply stolen his machine to lure him to be fed upon. They had studied it, and had hoped to use him to learn its workings. But he had gotten away, so they had produced plans or models from memory, copying every detail until at last they duplicated the Time Machine.

How long had they toiled? A thousand years? Ten thousand? While he had been teaching Weena about Plato and Aristotle, the Morlocks had been mastering time travel.

And now they had subjugated his world, a punishment for his escape.

And Weena and his unborn child? In this altered reality the Eloi never existed. Once the Morlocks had polluted Time’s river with their ambitions Weena had been wiped from existence, unmourned by none but him.

The Traveler wept, struggling to keep silent lest some Morlock patrol find him.

Somehow he must save his wife. He would extricate her from their home before she was wiped from Time, and travel to an alternate time-line where she might be impervious to the corruption of this one.

And London, his friends and colleagues? Would he return to lead some rebellion, help to send the Morlocks to their demise?

It seemed an impossible task, but one he could take the time to consider. First he must insure that Weena and his child were safe.

He set the controls to arrive a month before she disappeared. This would give him time to tell her what he must do and practice moving laterally along the many tributaries of time.

He engaged the device, steeling himself for the nausea and disorientation of time travel.

Nothing happened.

He recalibrated the controls and reengaged the system, but the machine stood still.

The Traveler carefully removed the housing of the emerald, and his heart sank.

The emerald crystal was fractured, actually broken in two. Closer examination showed many small cracks, and he realized now that some of his difficulties with the device must have resulted from the delicate crystal becoming damaged, the nearly microscopic fractures at times occluding the focused light from the lenses.

For all he knew, the crystal had been suffering from the rigors of time travel with his very first journey. His lie to Weena that excessive use might damage the machine had been almost prescient.

He examined the two shards, and saw that the ends were neatly sheared, almost as if a jeweler had had a hand in it. Surely the harmonic rotation of the crystal had something to do with this.

It might be possible to fit the ends of the crystal together, and hold them in place during the jump.

It might work, but it was foolish to think he could repair the crystal, rescue Weena and make practice jumps with the machine so damaged.

He felt in his pocket and brought out the flowers Weena had given him, their delicate perfume almost lost in the stench of the Morlock metropolis.

One jump, perhaps two… He could rescue her and take their chances along the Timestream.

Sweet Weena, who still dreamed of riding in a carriage with him to museums to see the works of Monet.

One jump, perhaps two…

He looked out over what had been London, and realized what he must do.

The sick man shuffled down the street, checking the number of each house. His hands were badly burned and wrapped in dirty bandages. His face was covered with sores and most of his hair was falling out. Whatever was wrong with him was obviously fatal.

Though he was in a great deal of pain, he could not rest.

44A.

That was the one.

He climbed the steps slowly, painfully, and rapped the knocker sharply on the door.

She was far prettier than he remembered, her hair and eyes so like his own.

“Yes?” she asked, now registering his alarming appearance.

“Mother,” he croaked, and stabbed her with a butcher’s knife.

She fell and he tried to catch her, but by then The Time Traveler’s body was becoming insubstantial and he was gone before she collapsed on the stoop.

A most curious happenstance today. I found myself standing before a house unknown to me. I actually tried to enter as if I had some ease of familiarity there, much to the consternation of the owner, a stern man with a stout wife and two surly boys.

I apologized and made as if I had gotten an address wrong, though it was clear they did not believe me. Coming down the walk I saw Filby, a rather argumentative fellow with red hair, walking up with the Provincial Mayor and a Psychologist. They, too, seemed puzzled as to why they had arrived there, and we were discussing this as a Very Young Man and a Medical Man arrived simultaneously, followed soon after by an Editor.

We knew each other through the web of associations and acquaintances one finds in any modern city, and all of us retired to the Ram’s Head for a pint before heading home.

Though none of us could explain our strange and senseless rendezvous, all of had felt a pull there, a compulsion the less learned might construe as supernatural in nature. For myself, I must confess I felt a keen sense of loss, the sort of melancholy when one has been denied a great and grand adventure.

And, though I cannot fathom why, of late I find myself thinking of geometry, and clocks.

Kelmscott Manor:
In the Attics

by Lyn C.A. Gardner

Georgiana Burne-Jones sat beside the great bed, holding Topsy’s hand while he slept. Georgie had seen this room many times: the whole of Kelmscott Manor was a work of art. The top panel of the bed-curtains bore a verse that Topsy had written, embroidered by his younger daughter in medieval script. The house held furnishings both medieval and modern; he and his friends and family, including Georgie, had created many of the tiles and tapestries.

But Jane, his wife, had only been interested in his vision in the early years, when he still tried to paint her in oils or verse, before her boredom had grown to disgust and led her to the arms of the lovers that her adoring husband chose not to begrudge her. Though they never spoke of it in such vulgar terms, Georgie knew that her friend had spent his time in this wonderful bed alone.

His face looked so worn, so lined—shockingly old. Too much for sixty-two. The unruly dark hair and beard had all gone white. So many marks of care about his mouth; even while he slept, a muscle ticked on his cheek, as if he couldn’t rest. It was his energetic spirit—his need to do everything—that was killing him.

Since 1883, he’d worn himself down, committing heart and soul to the Cause: his form of Socialism, which aimed to bring beauty and happiness to daily life through the revival of handicraft, care for the earth, and the elimination of class disparities. Though he had sacrificed his poetry on this altar years ago, in the end, he’d despaired of the politics. These last few years, he’d turned his hope inward, crafting beautiful books to fuel the imagination and give courage to the soul. But he hadn’t stopped his grueling lectures soon enough to save his health.

She stroked his hand, so large, so talented—so often stained deep blue from the dye vats. His elder daughter had dubbed him “Old Proosian Blue.” Now the hands had grown thin, spotted, striped with the paler blue of ropy veins.

The great man, William Morris, opened his eyes.

“Georgie,” he murmured. “You came at last. How I’ve wanted a sight of your dear face.”

“Topsy,” she said fondly. “We’ll be walking through your gardens before you know it. Kelmscott is beautiful in the fall, with all the leaves aflame.”

He grunted, but he smiled. She could see what an effort he made for her. Both of them knew that he would never see Kelmscott in autumn again.

“How I’ve missed you. Our talks.” He lifted a trembling hand toward her face. She pressed it to her cheek.

“Ned should be here in a few hours.” She faltered. Her husband, Edward Burne-Jones, would be devastated when Topsy died. Topsy had sunk so fast in eight months. Gout, diabetes, congestion of the left lung, tuberculosis. Topsy had lost so much weight that he might be another man.

“I don’t have much time left, Georgie.” He squeezed her palm weakly. “There’s something I must tell you.”

Her chest tightened. Here it was—the words they’d never spoken. What had always been understood, in silence and verse. They were dear friends, drawn closer by the fact that both their spouses had broken their hearts—and they themselves were too bound by love and honor to do anything. They’d taken comfort in the warmth of friendship, when they might have thrown themselves into the fire. Both Ned and Janey had entangled themselves in disastrous, painful affairs; but it was Georgie and Topsy who loved too much to cause further grief by finding their own happiness together.

He managed another smile. “You know I love you, dear heart. I can’t tell you,” and his voice trembled, “how glad I am to have you here with me, at the end.”

She kissed his hand. She kissed his brow, as a friend might. Then she sat back and watched him with wide eyes as he told her other things. Painful things. Things she could scarcely believe.

And yet it was her Topsy who said them. It was easy to fill the room with the memory of his booming voice—a whisper now, as he mentioned days that had not yet been. Days that would never be. He reached into the bed-curtains and drew out a letter. “Please, Georgie. Sit here by me and read it now. I could not give it to you before… .” And as she read, she began to understand. Why he had waited to tell her, until it was too late.

He knew, if there were still a chance for him to live, she might have changed his mind.

My dear, my life of late has not been what it seems. There is a reason why I grew so listless toward politics in 1894, and it has nothing to do with my health. Or rather, everything, as you shall soon see.

I suppose you remember that young writer, H.G. Wells—Bertie, we called him—who used to come to Hammersmith for the meetings of the old Socialist League. He seemed quite taken with News from Nowhere, my vision of the future. He called it The Dream of Socialism Fulfilled. But he seemed equally fascinated by that damned-dull machine age of Edward Bellamy and the philosophic science of T.H. Huxley, with whom he’d studied at the Normal School of Science.

As we became friends, he would slip round odd evenings to the meetings and stay on afterwards to talk of the future, developments in science, and how things might change—how they must change, if the fate of humanity is to be anything but dismal. We talked utopia and time travel, amidst our Socialism, our hopes and fears for the future. Bertie told me he wanted to explore the future in quite a new rational and scientific way. In 1890, he showed me a few exploratory pieces. But it wasn’t until 1894 that I realized the full genius—and danger—of the man.

Bertie came around one evening, agitated. He beckoned me outside. As we stood in the gardens, he thrust some numbers of Henley’s National Observer at me, with his work.

“Here. You must read this first. Then come to my chambers as quick as you can.”

“The Chronic Argonauts?”

“Henley got his hands into it,” Bertie said with disgust. “I’ll have it out by itself in the spring as The Time Machine, the way it’s meant to be.”

“Congratulations!” I pumped his hand.

“Just read it,” Bertie muttered. “You may think differently then.”

I read all through the evening, in growing disquiet. It was indeed a “utopia” to counter mine—but what a horrifying future. Bertie’s vision presented the ultimate dissolution of society, with humankind deprived of useful work and any ability for intellectual or artistic endeavors.

In those days, Bertie lived in rented rooms with his paramour and her mother, always under threat of eviction. With the awful vision of his hopeless future before my eyes, I knocked in the dead of night. He let me in at once.

And there it was. The vision made flesh.

Wedged in the clutter of a young man’s work sat something that looked like a new form of conveyance. The saddle rested amid twisted crystal bars in a contrivance that looked at once delicate, yet permanent. The metallic framework shone in the low light of the lamp, the bars and levers canted at such angles that they seemed built to withstand speed. But such beautiful lines! Such rich workmanship! Quartz and ivory, ebony and obsidian, steel and transparent bars that seemed to glow from within. I had never expected to see such beauty in the form of a machine.

“You don’t need to ask me what this is,” he said in a low voice.

I maintained my silence a moment longer, in respect for the artistry of the thing. But even if I had not read his tale, there could be only one answer. “I’m growing old, Bertie.”

“Not too old. You want to see if there’s any hope, any chance. So do I.”

“You’re only 28.”

He gripped my hands. “Now that you’ve read my little nightmare, how can you refuse? All I can see ahead is darkness.” He frowned. “But you may have better luck. You can find the right path for us, if anyone can. No matter what’s happened, you’ve never lost hope. When one vision fails, you create a better one.”

“Perhaps,” I murmured. But my mind had already begun to churn over the days ahead. What might I do, beyond my efforts now? The laborers embraced my ideals, drank in all I could teach them; but those with the power to improve the lives of the working class refused to step beyond their own concerns and alleviate that terrible poverty—the slavery of man to machine.

“You need some time to mull things over,” Bertie said.

But I knew already. Just the sight of the thing had set a hunger howling within me. “I’m your man.” I gripped his hand, and shook it, hard—and found there all the strength of my own conviction, despite his slight frame.

He laughed shakily. “Good. Because you might be our best chance. So much hinges on the next few years, and I can’t do anything. I’m still alive through too much of what goes wrong. But you—”

“Yes?” I asked tightly.

He looked away. “You died in October of 1896.”

I stood silent. The weight of that choked me like a millstone. Two more years. I forced myself to say, “Well, we still have some time, then!”

We packed the machine, dismantling and bundling the pieces. Finally, curiosity won over dread. “How did I die?”

“Too many things. No one was sure, at first—you drove yourself so hard. One doctor said, ‘The disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.’ By the time they diagnosed anything, it was already too late.”

I grunted in disbelief. I’d had the gout for years, and there were bad spells, I admit; but I could not reconcile the health and energy I still felt with my death in two years. It didn’t seem possible.

After we settled the last pieces, Bertie touched my arm. “I could hardly believe it myself. But I’ve read of my own death, too. That’s the curse of having a time machine.”

We drove to Kelmscott under cover of night, the machine wrapped in horse blankets. We hid it in the stables while I watched the house. Then we brought it up to the attics, piece by delicate piece.

The attics at Kelmscott—you may not have been up there, Georgie, since you were a child and Kelmscott was your father’s house. I’ve kept them bare. They’re so beautiful, in their open, clean lines, spare and sparkling when the morning sun drifts through the windows. Sometimes I’ve climbed up there just to think, amid the rafters. In the attics, I would never be disturbed; and Kelmscott Manor had existed for so many goodly years—since 1570—that its limestone garrets would doubtless exist still, to afford me a measure of comfort and safety.

Bertie parted from me with a fierce embrace.

I waited until daybreak. From the height of the attic windows, I took my last look at the beloved slopes and meadows, the gardens, the stand of trees, the little haven I’d found here at Kelmscott. Then I sat and gently pressed the lever forward, precisely as Bertie had instructed.

The machine shuddered under me. It shook in a most alarming way. I felt for a moment as though I’d been tossed into the ocean, sick as if I were battered down by waves.

As I looked toward the attic windows, light and dark passed over me in a dizzying spiral. In the flash of leaves and sky, night and moon, I felt I would go blind. But I did not lose my nerve. I pulled back on the lever when the dials indicated the proper moment. I had decided to make my first test at a safe distance.

The machine bucked to a stop. As I climbed gingerly from the saddle, the dials told me that I was setting foot in the attics of 1925—a nice, round quarter-century. Perhaps I should have set to work at once. But I wanted to see the future first. Thoughts of my death gave way to sheer wonder—

—such joy as I felt when I was young and everything was new; when my friends and I stood against the world, determined to bring beauty back into every life.

I rushed to the attic windows and peered out. And what did I see? A line of trees along the walk. The profusion of flowers, red and blue and lavender. The same meadows, golden with morning’s light. The sheltering stretch of wood, untroubled by the passage of years. The winding lane that led to Kelmscott Village, still clear and well-kept.

I crept down through the house, but heard no one stirring. Yet the place was clean, and our furniture and decorations remained. What if Janey and our daughters still lived here? I froze on the stairs, wanting desperately to see them; our firstborn Jenny had been so sick since childhood, and May, the younger, had followed me so enthusiastically in everything. They would have taken my death hard. I wanted to tell them I loved them; but something held me back. Not just the thought of who might be up there with Jane right now. The fear tormented me—what harm I might do them, appearing like a ghost. Then, too, it might jeopardize our hope for the future, before I had fairly begun. I clung to the banister, tormented by the choice. And then I heard a footstep from above.

I could not let them find me here. I snuck out of the house and down into the sunshine. I followed the lane to Kelmscott Village, which looked much the same—a clean, pretty place, a refuge from the dinginess of London. I nodded to the residents, many of them young. They were not flying to the cities for the trap of mindless toil. Some of the older folk looked vaguely familiar. One old man started up, pointing a trembling finger as if he recognized a ghost—but when I drew near, his fear faded to uncertainty, then confusion, and he sat down again.

I took a boat down the Thames to London, wearing a great straw hat to conceal my face. London seemed already less gray, more green, the Thames itself less murky.

And there, at a newsstand, I had my first shock. From the front page, I gazed back at myself—but so much older! The masthead proclaimed it to be March 24, 1925. I had chosen my birthday, since one date was as good as any other.

I stared at the paper in consternation. I have never enjoyed having my portrait taken. Despite the lines of care, the parchment skin and thinning snow-white beard, it was a good likeness. The headlines lauded my life and offered an issue of commemoration for the man who had been “the peacekeeper of our times.” The article referenced many great achievements.

The world spun through my head as I read that paper. The Boer War had ceased—so had our aggressions in Egypt. Conditions for the working class had improved so much that that all enjoyed a level of comfort, if not luxury. Women could vote at the same age as men. Britain maintained its might, but extended the hand of benevolence to its subjects, soliciting their participation.

And the article laid much of the praise for this at my own door.

The blood pounded in my temples, and my leg ached as if in warning of the gout. But I stood firm. I found a library and began to explore the past—my future.

It seemed I’d had tireless energy in spreading the message of art and beauty, equality and goodwill, respect for one’s fellows and the earth. And somehow, I had found a way to transform technology into true art: for the people of this time had combined photography with the magic lantern show to produce moving pictures, with written placards that could be translated to make my message understood around the world. I spoke to them in “newsreels.” But more than that, in gorgeous hand-tinted scenes, I showed the possibilities of my fairy-romances even to those who could not read. The actors mimed emotion so well, those interpretive placards were not even truly needed to make the story understood.

There were other things necessary, of course. Back in 1894, the post of Poet Laureate stood open. I had refused the honor; the inanity of court poetry would have deadened my spirit, and I could not stand to rise so high above my fellows. But as a new-made member of the royal household, I would have the ear of the queen, and my verses would reach the mighty as well as the oppressed. Surely I could learn to grit my teeth, rein in my temper, and couch the truth so that they would listen.

I felt dizzy with all the possibilities. As the sun sank, I realized I had forgotten to eat. In a friendly tavern, I ordered a hearty meal, food that actually tasted of the country, not the town.

Somehow, I would have to do exactly as I had vaguely imagined I might do, when Bertie first showed me his machine.

Somehow, I must make certain that this future world would actually occur. I could continue to work passionately for eighteen hours most every day. I could take a more active role in the politics that had so disgusted me. The one thing I could not do was resume the life I’d known.

But there was something else in all this, Georgie. Something that might be compensation for any sacrifice I might make.

For you see, my dear, there was another fact the newspaper had mentioned. How my heart leapt when I read those words.

After Janey’s death in 1914, I married you.

That was the beginning of it, my love. The days that we had did not stretch like an unbroken chain; rather, they were like stepping stones across a river, the colors woven through a tapestry, as I skipped ahead in time to where I was needed, stitch after stitch. You were the bright thread that gave meaning to my life. A continual joy to my heart. I spent as much time with you as I could, but there were always other matters whose importance we could not deny.

You helped me, exerting your influence with friends and acquaintances, enlisting the strong pen of your nephew, Rudyard Kipling. You also helped me hide my absences with excuses so vivid that I almost believed them myself.

I had Bertie by my side as well, helping for all he was worth. Sometimes he might tell me of important events that he had learned about in former voyages, but we both agreed on the danger of stepping too far ahead while our work was yet unfinished.

Great were those years, as we spread the message of Fellowship to all. What a joy it was to stand before those crowds. To watch my words touch laborers and shopkeepers alike; to see even the industrialist wipe away tears as we all sang one of my new Chants for Socialists. To witness the face of the earth changing before my eyes, becoming better. Becoming whole.

As the threat of major wars melted away, science advanced side-by-side with philosophy and moral responsibility, until science itself began to cure the very ills that it has caused in our own day. People worked together, growing closer in mind and spirit. Folk of many nations came to study side by side in schools around the world, regardless of class, culture, or creed. Technology grew into harmony with the natural world until it became ennobling, rather than dehumanizing, and all cared for the earth, and for each other.

I could not have written myself into a more beautiful future. I was jubilant. And mortally exhausted.

By your direction, as I grew old and worn, I had put in more appearances in those odd years when I’d been so often absent, 1894 to 1896, to get some much-needed rest. My work in the future scarcely let me pause for an instant, and I was weary, so weary, Georgie. Sometimes, I was so weak I could neither walk nor stand. For four months I had to be carried about in my chair. But those periods of rest were hard, lighted only by your visits, and Ned’s. Those looks of compassion you gave me were still not enough to stave off the sorrow of those days, when I must act as though we had never been together.

At last that dreadful day arrived—the day that I feared above all others. The day when you took to your bed and we both knew you would not rise again.

How sweet you were to me even then, Georgie. How I tried to comfort you with equal tenderness. I hate to tell you of those moments, dear—of how you looked, or what laid you low. But I cannot tell the rest without what happened then.

“Was it worth it, Topsy dear?”

“Was it worth it?” I repeated, tremulous at first. “You know it was always a struggle to leave you, even to do what I must. I wanted our time together as much as you did, darling. But they needed me.”

I fell silent then. No words such as these could ever tell the strength of my regret. Not regret for what I had done. Regret that there would never be enough time with you.

You whispered, “Has it all turned out as you hoped?”

“I have done everything I could,” I said with anguish.

You smiled weakly—but that was answer in itself. And I, too, wanted to know how the story ended. I kissed you on the lips, the cheeks, the brow, then rose swiftly, that I might the sooner return. You clung to my hand with your little strength. In your eyes was knowledge already of what I would do. And then, because I could not bear it, I caught you in a fierce embrace. I left, wanting only to rush back to this very moment, and lie down by your side.

I climbed back to the attics. I knew, even as I swung my leg through the bars of the machine, that I had nearly reached my end. Despite the periods of rest, the strain and weakness had never fully left me. I could feel it threaded through my bones.

I had spent out my life in service to this dream. I had done so because I knew with no trace of doubt whatsoever that it was worth it, to benefit humanity.

When I stepped on the attic floor again in 2120, I learned just as certainly that I was wrong.

I felt much steadier on my feet when I got off the Time Machine. The sun streamed through the windows of the attic, charging the pillars that supported the roof beams with a haze that made them shine like luminous ghosts. A bright new day. I could see the verdure beyond the window, dark green fluttering against the blue sky.

Walking down the attic stairs, I was pleased to find that the new owners had been keeping up the place. The most vocal of the stairs no longer creaked, and the rail was new.

The tapestries that hung on the walls of the stairwell and brightened the hall, the wallpaper in the kitchen, the carved and decorated mantle, the Sussex chairs that I’d designed—it all looked as if I’d only left the house this morning. The carpets were new, all the worn places gone.

Feeling that strange dreamy dizziness of a man close to waking, I crossed a patch of sunlight and stepped down into my study.

All my books were still there. The deal table still carried proofs from the Kelmscott Press, with my own writing upon them. But the project—the project was Le Morte d’Arthur, which Ned and I had been discussing for years. We’d never gotten very far, though this looked like authentic Kelmscott style. I reached out to touch one, and found that a transparent layer of glass, ground so smooth it did not reflect the light, stood between me and the page.

Some sound must have warned me: the passage of air through the old house. A step within the hall.

He stood in the doorway. That shock of dark hair, the thick beard. That robust frame. A high, broad forehead, large eyes, wide nose: I had seen that image most often in my friends’ artistic caricatures, though the youthful face looked utterly serious now.

He proffered his hand. I took his in a firm clasp that jolted me to the core. His eyes never left mine as I shook hands with myself.

“I wondered if you would ever come,” he murmured. “Let’s get out of here, before the Delegate arrives.”

Mystified, I followed the dark-haired young man, myself. He could not be more than 30. We walked out into the garden, a sweet sight, just as I remembered it. I felt disoriented when I saw the little yew dragon that I had trimmed myself. When was I? It seemed that everything had been kept just as I liked it. Yet I had never lived at Kelmscott Manor when I was this man’s age. In those days, I was still enmeshed in the dream of Red House, and Janey and I had what passed for happy lives, with two little girls toddling at our feet.

We slipped through the flower gardens and between the hedgerows. He led me farther, toward the wilder section of the meadow, where the trees began. We had just reached a bench where I loved to sit on a summer day, when he stopped and looked back toward the house with the startled eyes of a deer who spies its hunter.

“You haven’t seen me,” he muttered, and slipped into the wood.

Puzzled, I walked back through the flowers I’d chosen and helped to tend. Just under the eaves, I discovered the source of my companion’s alarm. A red-faced man, bald, and fairly bursting with irritation, occupied most of the bench near the door. He grunted and forced himself to his feet as I approached. I had the sun at my back, so perhaps he did not see me clearly; for when I stood closer, he flinched, squinting at my face.

“Where is he?” the man demanded belligerently. His face bloomed with rage.

“I beg your pardon,” I answered politely.

“There’s a William Morris loose in the garden! You should have done your job by now!”

He squinted at me, and I tensed; but then he pursed his lips and shook his head, as if it were somehow ridiculous that a man as old as I could be the one he sought.

I muttered in as unintelligible a voice as I could muster, while he blathered and blustered. He was apparently a Party man. I, too, was supposed to be a loyal Party man, though I could not guess whom he might take me for, if not myself.

“Now get out there and take care of that clone!” he bellowed. His girth gave him the force of an opera singer.

I was happy enough to leave my red-faced, roaring bull of a friend, though I had begun to feel like a man trapped in a maze. I wandered through the roses and flowering bushes, trying to look stealthy.

I found me again at last, hidden among the trees. He extended an arm to draw me through into the deepest, darkest part of the shrubbery. We pressed through waxy green leaves and delicate white petals, the tangles of plant and tree growing so thick I would have been lost if not for the tether of his hand.

At last we emerged in a glade, the forest having grown so thick here in the last two hundred years it seemed as though I’d stepped into one of my fairy-romances, rather than the future. There, in the dim green light cast by the leaves, he said, “We expected you a long time ago.”

“‘We’?”

“I’m William Morris #7.”

“Does that make me William Morris #1?”

He shook his head with a sardonic air. “No, he died long after your time.”

We fell silent again. The birds laced the air with their warbling and the rustle of wings and branches.

Gesturing toward the house, I said, “Who was he?”

“Our esteemed Delegate is a Party man.”

“Socialist Party?”

His lip curled. It was a shock, seeing such anger etched on my own young face.

I asked, “Why has nothing in the house been changed?”

“It’s a museum now. A museum dedicated to you. All the world loves William Morris,” he said, but this time his voice faltered. “We live there, of course. In the basement.”

“‘We’?” I repeated, for the second time.

“All the clones,” he said bitterly. “‘Living history.’ Not that there are any of us left now, but me.”

It took him several moments then, to explain what this might mean—the doppelgangers of me that the Party had created out of flesh and blood decades after my last visit to the future. Samples of my genes were apparently present in my handiworks, and they were able to recreate me, again and again, and perpetuate the lie that I had never died—the living embodiment of what the people were supposed to believe.

“But this isn’t the world you dreamed of, Father,” he continued, his voice gentler as we sat upon the green. “They have taken your ideals and twisted them, perverted them to their own ends. The destruction of the earth has stopped, and class divisions no longer exist. All people have whatever they need. But freedom and intellect have eroded under the conformity to Party rules. The Party has organized society, telling us what to think and do. Under the tyranny of plenty, art has withered and died. People grow restless, unhappy and stifled without being able to say why, since they have all they need—except the ultimate freedom to choose their own fates. They fight without cause, and demand things one moment only to repudiate them the next. They act like petulant children.”

He pushed back his rumpled mass of curls and eyed me keenly. “The Party decided that the best way to calm the unrest was to bring back their most popular hero—an artist who understood the needs of working people, and acted nobly on their behalf. But unfortunately for the Party, we William Morrises are not the type of simple folk-artist who might be easily swayed by rhetoric. Each copy eventually rebels and is wiped out.”

A flash of danger shot down my spine. “Why me? If there is some trouble in the Empire, some threat, why not a great political leader—”

A sad, lopsided smile. “Well, they consider you a rather loveable but harmless buffoon. They only want us to keep the people happy, to distract them with noble sentiments while the world slides slowly into hell. They think all I can do is sit here and write poetry and fairy-romances in hopes that I might again inspire the folk with better deeds and better days. The Party views this with amusement, as a harmless distraction. Even I know it won’t be enough.”

As William Morris #7 told me about his world, I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu as I remembered what Bertie had shown me in his novel—the future populated with mindless children, the museums and universities deserted, crumbling and cobwebbed. A garden state inhabited by no one with a will or intelligence greater than that in unenlightened Eden. In this new future I had helped to build, garden groves were maintained to delight the eye, while hidden farms and factories were run by self-operating machines and copies like my William Morris, who were treated no better than slaves. For the originals who remained, there was no useful work to fill the void left by the absence of useless toil. The poor had become rich, without becoming wise.

“I want to live,” he said, gripping my wrist so hard it hurt. “I’ve been eluding them here in the gardens as often as I can, trying to call you down the long chain of memory.”

“I think I heard you. An echo, in a dream.”

He nodded as if this were a viable form of communication. Perhaps, since we were such strange kin, it was.

“But not like this,” he continued. “Not in this soulless world. Not unless we can change things for the better. Spark Hope. Rekindle Dream. Bring passion and beauty back, to replace this mindless passivity. Only with the fire of their imaginations will the people rise to change things.”

His eyes burned into mine. He leaned so close I could feel his breath warm on my cheek. His face grew ruddy with this inner flame.

His words sounded similar to the ones I had spoken with such passion not long ago—his complaints the ones that had drawn me to Socialism. Only now, the position of society had been reversed. Much of what I proposed as necessary for the ideal world might seem to be attained, albeit not in the manner I’d envisioned. And yet the problems were still much the same.

I felt a painful pressure spreading out from the hard knot at the pit of my stomach, a sickness greater than the Time Machine had ever inspired.

“Of course,” he said, “the Party itself has overlooked one crucial fact in my creation. I’m irrelevant now. I have no reason to exist. The people smile and love me, they gush over my designs and weep for my verses, they hound me for my autograph, that useless scrawl. But they don’t have it in them any longer to care what the Party does. They lead good lives, quiet lives. They believe themselves to be happy. They have no reason to rebel. They listen to me as the quaint and beloved hero of a long-dead age.”

The leaves shifted, and darkness fell down into his eyes. I stood to go, pushing myself up on legs that did not want to move. He steadied me, but I could not meet his gaze.

“You’re going back, aren’t you? You’re abandoning me.”

I owed myself an honest answer. “I have to fix this.”

“Take me with you. I could help. We can try again, a different way—reformers in the Age of Change.”

His hand was gentle on my arm. I could feel the strength in that hand, and the weakness in the biceps he held. It was tempting, his offer. A second chance. Or perhaps I should say a third.

“You wouldn’t want to do that,” I said presently. “You’d be helping to put the Party in the position it enjoys today.”

“Damned politics,” he growled.

There was but one thing for me to do then, Georgie.

After seeing the future, I knew I could not trust my own failing vision to decide what is best for humankind. I had to step back in time. I had to visit myself in 1894.

I argued with myself bitterly over this. But the quest had never been about my own happiness. I would have to hold staunch and true to the ideals that brought me here in the first place—to the honor that had carried me through the most difficult passages of my life.

I landed a few days before the Time Machine would have been assembled in the attics. I had chosen a moment when I knew I’d be alone in my study, with Janey and my daughters out visiting. Bertie had warned me about setting foot in a year when I already existed; actually meeting myself face to face would be far worse. That close, I might only have a moment.

I rushed down the stairs. Each step drove a spike of pain through my leg. I forced myself down the hall. The closer I got to the study, the worse it was: I could feel his presence, sharp as the gout.

And then I saw him—that high forehead, the springy mass of hair and beard, the broad nose. Myself at 60. He stood frozen in front of the wide deal table as I clutched the doorframe.

“You!” we cried. Our voices blended, a low, rich harmony. We each flung out an arm, pointing. All the hair on my body stood on end.

“We haven’t time,” I gasped. “Bertie’s going to offer you something that seems too good to be true. Don’t trust it!”

But my disjointed words could tell him nothing, and already I had a strange, giddy feeling. I could feel myself slipping away.

We walked closer, paces matched. We clasped each other’s hands. All at once, it rushed toward us: a barrage of knowledge and sight, feelings and thoughts and time … a whirlwind of madness and life. I forced myself to stand though the waves battered my heart. My vision swam. I was dying—but his breath was as choked as mine.

Sick with the doubling, dying and living—two of me for every breath. We embraced. Time buffeted me till I bent double with the pain. Alone.

Only myself. I huddled on hands and knees, trying to breathe, to slow my heart. Only me. But I held all the knowledge I’d ever had—past, present, future.

When Bertie came, I warned him, with all that I knew. By his sad look, I saw I spoke too late. Before he had ever given me his machine, he had tried and failed.

It was my vision of the new 2120, blooming beside my other memories, that so dispirited me. While I will never abandon hope for the Cause—for all men should treat each other as kin—I can no longer fight in this life with any passion for something that I know cannot come to pass.

I have decided to leave well enough alone.

I did not think my heart could break any harder than it already has. But then, I did not think I would ever give you up, if once we found a way to be together. Ned, dear Ned, died in the summer of 1898. And you and I—

We were inseparable, Georgie. Once loyalties and honor allowed. We knew a sweet period of perfect harmony that only I can remember now. I am so sorry that I never told you, dearest.

My love that shall never be.

It had all happened so fast. Georgie stood stunned by the graveside, watching while they rained dirt on Ned’s coffin. She had loved him truly, loved him enough that she could forgive him endlessly, despite her common sense. Despite Marie Zambaco, and all the young women who followed. There was a childlike simplicity about Ned, that he could somehow accommodate so much love and so much pain, without any hypocrisy.

But Topsy’s death—that was a blow Ned could not endure. It had been scarcely a year and a half since they had laid their dear friend in the ground. And now, standing over Ned’s grave, she could not help seeing that other funeral as well, like a stained glass window shining through its reflection in plain glass. A simple cart had carried Topsy’s body to St. George’s Church near the Manor, festooned with vines and willow boughs and carpeted with moss. The storms had blown off and on all day, and the mourners walked through meadows that still shone silver with rain. Family and friends, workers from Merton Abbey and Oxford Street, fellow Socialists, and the Kelmscott villagers in their work clothes had all come to see him laid to rest.

The morning that Topsy had showed her the letter, she’d wanted so badly to believe it. She’d felt his eyes upon her as she read. She could not stop the tears that slipped down her face as she reached the end; seeing hers, his own flowed freely.

And so they had said their goodbyes; and at the end, it was as chaste and true a love as it had always been. She thought about the last words of the letter, scrawled hastily in postscript—”There will be something else to prove all this to you, that I cannot hang in a bed curtain. Ask Ned.”

But by the time Ned had arrived that afternoon, Topsy’s eyes had already begun to cloud, and he raved about things neither of them could understand. Georgie sat by his side, shocked numb by the revelations and her grief.

The next day, Topsy had slipped away from them, gentle as a lamb. She had sat beside him and held his hand till the last, but Jane was there, and May, along with many of his closest friends, and there was nothing more that Georgie and Topsy could say.

She didn’t know what to think, what to believe. She locked herself in her room. Wretched. She lay on the floor and wept, for her best friend, for all the dreams gone by. She could not tell which hurt worse: that he’d given up this chance, or that he might have imagined it all.

She had reined in her passion at last, and done the only thing she knew—lived the expected, honorable life. Ned had looked at her blankly when she asked if Topsy had given him anything she ought to see. So there had not been any proof.

But now poor Ned had died when Topsy said he would. So soon. The finality of the loss of both of them cut her to the bone. She remembered the day, so long ago, when the Morris and Burne-Jones families had gone together to the beach, and buried Topsy to the neck in the shingle. It seemed they’d laughed the whole day long.

But as she went through the clutter in Ned’s workshop, she found a surprising thing. Topsy had been true to his word. And it seemed she would have to forgive Ned one last time.

In a plain brown wrapper, she found an unknown book from the Kelmscott Press. She lifted the cover and turned the pages reverently. Her fingers rested lightly on the impressions of the type. The drawings were in her husband’s style. She recognized some of them—he’d been working on them before Topsy died. The Press had hoped to finish the book afterwards, but Ned had given up, it pained him so. But here it was, and the engravings of Ned’s drawings bore the stamp of Topsy’s hand.

The story itself was one Topsy had shown them on several occasions, in different forms. But she had never seen it finished with such confidence. The date on the colophon at the end was 1900—two years from now.

She had to set the book down several times for sheer emotion. Pacing in the gardens, she felt as though Topsy held her hand.

Ned had kept this from her because he recognized the same thing she did: these characters were she and Topsy, the story of a love fulfilled. As she lingered on the final page, she felt a fierceness rise in her heart, a fire born of anger and love.

The book scarcely left her hand as she put on her coat and gathered Topsy’s letter.

When she knocked, H.G. Wells himself ushered her inside.

Georgie looked nervously about the chaos of the rooms, seeking any odd shape that might conceal the Time Machine.

“What is this about, Lady Burne-Jones?”

“Please, call me Georgie. We were both his friends.”

His face changed. He stood straighter, more alert.

“I have to know the truth,” she said. “What does the future look like now?”

He offered her a chair. “You’re talking about the Time Machine?”

She nodded, scared suddenly of saying anything more. He might refuse to tell her. She reached into her bag and placed Topsy’s last letter reverently into his hands.

Wells read silently, carefully, turning back a page or two and reading them again. When he was done, he looked up at her. She felt a jolt. Aside from Topsy’s that final day, she had never seen eyes so sad.

“It’s bad, Georgie,” he said. “Far worse than what I put into the book. The entire world, convulsed in war, grinding up so many people. The weapons burn away lungs, wipe out whole cities, poison the people and the countryside for miles. Genocide. Mass torture and incarceration. Starvation around the globe. They’ve cured diseases only to create new ones to use against each other. After so many depredations, Earth will scarcely support the smallest enclave of human life. I’ve thought about destroying the Time Machine, it haunts me so.”

He folded the letter tenderly and handed it back. “If Topsy’s future is half as good as he describes—”

He hesitated, letting the words hang between them.

Georgie stood up. “Yes,” she said breathlessly.

“Go back and convince him. You’re the only one who can.”

“And the Time Machine?” Georgie hesitated. She was not sure how to ask this sacrifice of him, the inventor. She only knew that there must be some way to safeguard the future, once all was done.

He waved his hand. “Take it. I’m through with time machines. This one has already turned me into a bitter old man, and I’m only 32.”

“And you—you won’t miss it?”

“I can discern how to move through time—a straightforward scientific problem, with a concrete mathematical answer. But I can’t discover the right combination to save the world. Topsy was a far better dreamer than I in that regard. All I could see were nightmares.”

That very afternoon, she went to visit Janey at Kelmscott Manor. The two women, while not close, had seen so much of one another through the years that they found comfort in each other’s company. With Ned’s funeral just past, Janey agreed to let her stay for several days.

When Bertie showed up that night at Kelmscott Manor, Janey cast a veiled glance at Georgie before drifting off to bed, the folds of her heavy damask robe whispering along the ground. Once she’d gone, Georgie helped Bertie carry the Time Machine up to the attics, piece by delicate piece.

Once he positioned the last bar and screwed in the final rod, Bertie stood back, admiring his craftsmanship one last time. When he spoke to her, he kept his eyes on the machine, as though afraid it would slip away before he noticed, out of his life and into another story altogether.

Then he gave her a crimped smile, whose pain she didn’t understand until he said, “Say goodbye to him for me, would you? Send him my love.”

At last she stood alone in the attics, staring at the machine that glinted by the light of the lantern. So full of promises.

Gingerly, she climbed into the saddle. She knew exactly where to go. A place where Topsy still remembered everything he’d told her. A time when she herself had been far from Kelmscott—far enough away that she could stay long enough to convince him. She would bear the pain. If she made haste, she could spirit him away to a future where the cures had become far simpler than the diseases.

She had the letter and the book tucked tight into her bodice. There was still hope. There would always be time. Even if paradise on earth was an impossible dream, hope still lay in other people, to change what they could of their lives.

For her part, she knew what she would change.

Comrade Morris is not dead. There is not a Socialist living would believe him dead, for he Lives in the heart of all true men and women still and will do so to the end of time.

—Lancashire Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, 1896

*The title of this story was inspired by the platinum prints of Frederick H. Evans. In 1896, Evans visited the ailing poet and obtained his permission to photograph Kelmscott Manor. When Morris died soon afterwards, Evans’s images were published along with an article commemorating Morris’s life and art. Suffused with light, the clean, bright spaces of the attics seem to symbolize the creative spirit of the man who loved Kelmscott so much he made it the entrance to a better world in his utopia, News from Nowhere.

Cast of

Contributors

Paul J. Nahin is professor emeritus of electrical engineering at the University of New Hampshire. In his retirement he writes math/history books for Princeton University Press; his newest book, Number-Crunching, will be published in 2011 (it reprints his Omni Magazine time travel story “Newton’s Gift,” describing what happens after a time traveler gives Isaac Newton a modern pocket calculator). During the 1970s and 1980s he wrote more than two dozen short stories that appeared in Analog, Omni, and Twilight Zone magazines. His story “The Man in the Gray Weapons Suit” appeared in the first volume (Thor’s Hammer) of the three-volume anthology The Future at War. His 1997 Writer’s Digest book Time Travel: a writer’s guide to the real science of plausible time travel, will be reprinted in 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. He is an avid Xbox360 player, and currently he is holding his own in the time travel video game Singularity (although he did only just barely survive the boss fight with the train monster).

Peter Clines is the author of Ex-Heroes and numerous pieces of short fiction which can be found in Cthulhu Unbound 2, The World is Dead, The Harrow, Timelines, and the upcoming Morons Guide to the Inevitable Zombocalypse. He grew up in the Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and started writing science fiction and fantasy stories at the age of eight. He made his first writing sale at age seventeen and the first screenplay he wrote got him an open door to pitch story ideas at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager. After working in the film and television industry for almost fifteen years, he currently writes articles and reviews for Creative Screenwriting Magazine and its free CS Weekly online newsletter. He currently lives and writes somewhere in southern California. http://thoth-amon.blogspot.com/

Michael Scott Bricker has sold stories to numerous anthologies, and has recently completed a time travel novel which takes place, in part, during the Black Death . He lives in California, where he works at a public library, and buys and sells old and curious goods. 

http://sff.net/people/m.bricker/ 

Harper Hull was born and raised in Northern England but now lives in a 19th century farmhouse in the American South with his much smarter and prettier Dixie wife. He has lived in London, San Antonio and Seattle and his favourite city is Florence. He grew up in a home crammed with classic sci-fi and horror books, and started writing his own stories in 2009. If you ever read one of his pieces, he just hopes you enjoy it.

http://helloharperhull.blogspot.com/

Victorya was named Miss Luna Landing runner-up 1969, Miss Garlic Festival 1977, and Miss Construed 1999. She likes to make up her biographies. Her work can also be seen in War of the Worlds: Frontlines (An NFP anthology), Necrotic Tissue, Shroud Magazine and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. That part’s true.

John Medaille has been published in Pseudopod, Everyday Weirdness and the Three-Lobed Burning Eye. He is currently working on a short story collection called:

Hideous Tales of Doomed Spacemen, Demonic Cameras, Protoplasmic 

Flesh-Eaters, The Supernatural, U.F.O.s, Interdimensional Beasts, 

Evil Children, Misunderstood Robots, Telephone Calls 

from Beyond the Grave, Mayhem, Murder 

AND THE MACABRE!

Vincent L. Scarsella I have gained modest success in publishing my work in print magazines such as The Leading Edge, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Fictitious Force. Several of my short stories have appeared in the online zine, Aphelion-Webzine, as recently as March 2009 (“Simulation Addicts”). In September, 2007, my short story, “Vice Cop” was included in the anthology, New Writings in the Fantastic, from Pendragon Press edited by award winning John Grant. In March 2008, my story, “Practical Time Travel,” was published in Bound For Evil - Books Gone Bad, by Dead Letter Press . Another story, “Homeless Zombies,” appeared in the April 2009 anthology, Dead Science, by Coscom Entertainment. My short story, “Killers,” was also selected for the companion volume to Timeliness, War of the Worlds: Frontlines, being published by Northern Frights Publishing.

I have been an attorney for thirty years, am an adjunct professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law, and am currently employed as an investigative lawyer for the New York Department of Taxation and Finance. I have self-published a non-fiction book, The Human Manifesto: A General Plan For Human Survival, a self-help book for humanity, which can be purchased at: http://www.thehumanmanifestobook.com

Ruthanna Emrys lives in Chicago with her wife, three neurotic cats, and a relatively stable boa constrictor. Her work has previously appeared in Analog and Strange Horizons. http://ashnistrike.livejournal.com

Derek J. Goodman is the author of The Apocalypse Shift from Library of Horror Press and Machina from M-Brane Press. His stories have also appeared in publications such as Zombology II, Nossa Morte, and Letters From the Dead. He currently lives in Wisconsin.

Eric Ian Steele is a produced screenwriter from Manchester, England. His sci-fi/action feature, Clonehunter was released by Pandora Machine Films on DVD in North America and Canada in August 2010. He has three more features optioned in Los Angeles and Europe, and is represented by Sue Giordano of the Hudson Agency in New York. As well as having several short films in production across the United States, he has had short stories published in anthologies such as POW!erful Tales, In Bad Dreams 2, Terror Tales and The Random Eye. After spending twelve years in the British police force, he is now qualified as an attorney.

Gerald Warfield After half a lifetime in music, Gerald Warfield switched to writing. He has fifteen books to his credit: textbooks in music and how-to books in investing. After retiring to Texas, he writes only fantasy and soft sci-fi. This is his first publication in fiction.

Jacob Edwards was born in 1976 in Brisbane — Australia’s River City — and studied at the University of Queensland, graduating with a BA (English) and an MA (Ancient History). In addition to writing fiction that has been published in Australia, Canada and the USA, Jacob also edited #45 of the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (http://www.andromedaspaceways.com/). He lives in Brisbane with his wife and son.

William Wood lives with his wife and children in an old Shenandoah Valley farmhouse turned backwards to the road. He was born in South Carolina, grew up in the US Navy, and travelled the world until he ran into himself, somewhat painfully. His fiction has been cornered and captured with minimal loss of life in anthologies from House of Horror and Living Dead Press and is forthcoming from Library of the Living Dead, Black Matrix Publishing, and Lame Goat Press. Shorter works have found homes at Flash Me Magazine, Alienskin Magazine, Everyday Fiction and Everyday Weirdness. William seeks concision, happiness, and additional voices to keep company the others in his head.

Brandon Alspaugh is an active member of the SFWA and HWA whose work has been previously seen in publications such as Apex, Weird Tales, City Slab, and others. He is the only child he knows whose mother was called in by the teacher to discuss his ‘excessive reading’, and can only assume they’d rather he found a street corner somewhere to loiter on.

Jason Palmer enjoys traveling and relocates frequently. He has disinterestedly held many different jobs, both menial and professional. His fiction ranges from dark comedy to apocalyptic horror.

Daliso Chaponda is a Malawian stand up comedian and fiction writer whose work has appeared in genre publications such as Apex Digest and Ellery Queen’s Mystery. He has performed his particularly deranged brand of stand up comedy in Africa, Europe, North America and Asia. He is currently based in the UK. His website is www.daliso.com

Desmond Warzel’s work has appeared, or is shortly forthcoming, in such publications as Daily Science Fiction, Abyss & Apex, Shroud, and Redstone Science Fiction. He published his first short story in 2007 and rapidly developed a worldwide cult following. To this day, he can’t walk down the street in Asia or Latin America, though his critics suggest this is because he resides in Pennsylvania and has no means of traveling to those places.

Matthew Johnson has published stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons and many other places. He recently published his first novel, Fall From Earth, with Bundoran Press (www.bundoranpress.com.) His work has been translated into Czech, Danish and Russian and several of his stories have been reprinted or received honourable mentions in various year’s best collections. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario with his wife Megan, his son Leo and two very patient cats. www.zatrikion.blogspot.com 

JW Schnarr is the evil mastermind behind Northern Frights Publishing. He currently resides in Champion, Alberta Canada with his daughter and a grumpy turtle. When not writing, editing or publishing, he can be found scheming. And watching sports. A member of the HWA, he is the Editor of Shadows of the Emerald City and War of the Worlds: Frontlines. Look for his Short Fiction collection Things Falling Apart as well as his novel Alice and Dorothy, a story filled with lesbian sex, drugs, and mass murder. Both will be available in 2010. http://jwschnarr.blogspot.com

Douglas Hutcheson used to play with Shogun Warriors and therefore believes it would only be fair to return the favor. When that terrible turnabout comes, he wants it known that his fiction and poems appeared in publications including Treasure Chest, Luminary, Stillpoint, Analecta and Staccato. His story “The Travellin’ Show” manifested in History is Dead and received Honorable Mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He was a WITI-featured writer at Choate Road. He co-edited the Halloween-themed anthology Harvest Hill. V. Ulea accepted his story “There’s No Time” for Quantum Genre on the Planet of the Arts. For a limited period, he is available via facebook.com/douglas.hutcheson.

Mark Onspaugh grew up on a steady diet of horror, science fiction and DC Comics. An HWA member, he writes screenplays, short stories and novels. His ghost horror film Kill Katie Malone is now in post-production and he is the co-writer of zombie cult fave Flight of the Living Dead. Mark’s stories also appear in Shadows of the Emerald City (JW Schnarr, ed.), War of the Worlds: Frontlines (JW Schnarr, ed.), The Book of Exodi (Michael K. Eidson, ed.), The World is Dead (Kim Paffenroth, ed.), Footprints (Jay Lake & Eric T. Reynolds, ed.), The Book of Tentacles (Scott Virtes, Edward Cox, Susan R. Campbell, ed.), Triangulation: Dark Glass (Pete Butler, ed.) and Thoughtcrime Experiments http://thoughtcrime.crummy.com/2009/. He also has an essay on monsters in the forthcoming Butcher Knives and Body Counts (Dark Scribe Press). He lives in Los Osos, CA with his wife, author/artist Dr. Tobey Crockett and three enigmatic cats. www.markonspaugh.com

Lyn C. A. Gardner Catalog librarian by day, Lyn C. A. Gardner coedits the journal Virginia Libraries. She’s had over two hundred poems, stories, and articles published in Strange Horizons, the Green Knight Press anthologies Legends of the Pendragon and The Doom of Camelot, Challenging Destiny, MindFlights, Talebones, The Leading Edge, and more. Two stories and a poem earned honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling); four poems were nominated for the Rhysling Award (SFPA).

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Shadows do fall in the Emerald City, and where they are their darkest is where you will find the true terror of Oz.

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—Jennifer Brozek, Apex Book Company

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