The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 5

  I said, “It is what it is. The boss doesn’t want anyone brought inside. He pays the rent; he’s entitled.”

  “It’s your home, too.”

  I’d tried that tack. Jonas told me I was free to live elsewhere. I shrugged again.

  Victoria stood. “Now I do have to get back. Have time to walk with me?”

  Jonas would be too preoccupied with watching the Dominion Power crew to notice, or care, if I took a few extra minutes.

  “Lead on,” I said.

  We’d arrived separately: my warehouse, her 7-Eleven, and the little park were at the corners of an almost equilateral triangle. I’d walked here through a light-industrial complex and past a strip mall. Her route took us into a quiet residential area of mostly brick bungalows from the Fifties. Huge old trees dwarfed everything that hadn’t been bulldozed to make way for McMansions. Every block had for-sale signs. Grass gone shaggy and towering weeds marked long-vacant houses.

  How many were foreclosures? I wondered. Which of them had I rubberstamped?

  My eyes must have lingered, because Victoria said, “You’re not that guy any more.” She gently squeezed my hand.

  Fat lot of good remorse did the people I’d denied their due process. But “due process” was so namby-pamby. People whom I’d cheated. Hurt.

  “You’re not,” she insisted.

  Perhaps. But if I wasn’t that guy, then who had I become?

  CHAPTER 7

  The day came when the guinea pigs chowed down on time-shifted lettuce leaves. Jonas spent an hour afterward just staring into their cage. Waiting to see if anyone would get sick, I knew. I arranged my morning chores to keep looking in on the gals.

  “They’re fine,” Jonas assured me on my fifth pass-by. “You see what this means.”

  I didn’t till he explained: The time transfers were finally preserving fine details, even microscopic details, down to the molecular level.

  Maybe Jonas got bored; he moved on to doing something else. The day before he’d assembled his largest transceiver yet, and now he fussed with its controls. Calibration of some kind, it looked like. The new transceiver used a metal utility cabinet about the size of a four-drawer file cabinet; he’d said it should shift up to about one hundred fifty pounds. To confirm his predictions, he sent me out for three hundred pounds of dense ballast, shaking his head when I counter-proposed that he use weights from his barbell.

  Returning from the grocery, lugging in the first of many twenty-five-pound bags of rice, I detoured past the cage again. Caramel was ramming around the enclosure, or chasing poltergeists. Feeling no pain. Sugar and Spice were playfully tussling. And Cinnamon—

  Was gone.

  Dropping my burden—breaking the plastic sack, sending rice grains flying everywhere—I dashed into Jonas’s main workspace. He stood by a workbench, his attention cycling between an empty transceiver and a clock.

  “Where is she?” I shouted.

  “Who?” Jonas asked.

  “Cinnamon, damn it.”

  Jonas frowned. “The guinea pig, you must mean. Peter, I told you not see them as pets.”

  “Where is she?” My stomach sank. “When is she?”

  “She should return to us in”—he glanced again at the clock—“fifteen minutes.”

  After a very long fifteen minutes, the transceiver beeped. Behind the glass, Cinnamon sniffed about curiously, acting none the worse for her experience.

  “May I?” I asked.

  “If you keep an eye on her.”

  I restored Cinnamon to the cage. Everyone touched noses and sniffed butts, and then went on about their guinea-piggy duties of eating, drinking, grooming, and meandering. I began to believe the transfer hadn’t harmed her.

  Freeing me to fret about what experiment Jonas had in mind to try next.

  * * * *

  After dinner and streaming a movie at Victoria’s apartment, I came home to find the warehouse floor deserted. Only screen savers, clock displays, and a bit of sky glow through the under-eave windows tempered the darkness. Creeping up the stairs, I saw light under the door to Jonas’s room. Rhythmic clanking said he was hard at work with his weights. He bench-pressed about two hundred pounds; to vacuum his room I rolled the barbell from side to side.

  Whether the ghostly lighting inspired me, or the six-pack Victoria and I had split that evening, I had the sudden urge to send my younger self a note. I’d observed Jonas operating his machines often enough. I turned, retreated down two steps—

  And froze. What the hell was I thinking?

  I could never have back my old life. If a younger me had received advice from this me on the very first day Jonas got his first prototype to work, it would still have been too late. I could only create some horrible paradox.

  Even Jonas was loath to send anything back in time.

  And besides, my old life had not included Victoria.

  I turned around a second time and went up to bed.

  * * * *

  “I should demand a refund,” Jonas grumbled.

  I was far across the warehouse, slipping treats to the guinea pigs. Jonas wasn’t talking to me. He wasn’t on the phone. That left talking to himself.

  “What’s going on?” I called out.

  He tapped one of his instruments. “You don’t want to know what this cost. It was a special order, extensively modified to my specifications from one of their standard offerings.”

  I dumped the last of the fruit slivers into the cage, then walked over to where Jonas was sitting. “And?”

  “And now that they’ve built one for me, I see it offered in their online catalogue. Priced at half what they charged me.”

  The story of every gadget I’d ever bought. “Does it matter?”

  “Well, there’s the principle of the thing.” Jonas looked around at stacks of unopened cartons, both tech gear and toys. Looking…repentant? “A funny thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not doing as well as I was with my investments.”

  “You used up the tips from Future Jonas?”

  “That’s the thing,” Jonas said. “I haven’t.”

  “How do you lose money when you know what’s going to happen?” And then it struck me. “At least one of the tips hasn’t panned out.”

  Lips pressed thin, he nodded.

  “How is that possible?” I asked.

  “I want to believe it was an honest mistake transcribing the information for me.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  Jonas shrugged.

  I imagined a butterfly, its wings fluttering.

  * * * *

  As my final errand one Friday, Jonas sent me to retrieve an order of specialty glass. The largest slabs were a good eight feet long and three feet wide. Each pane came swaddled in padding and braced beneath with two-by-fours, the corners protected by triangular shields of corrugated cardboard. Through a rip in the padding over one panel, I glimpsed metal mesh embedded in the glass.

  They weighed a ton. Two husky guys at the factory loaded them into the truck I’d rented.

  I had to honk twice before Jonas opened the loading dock. He shouted, “I imagine you need a hand unloading.”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  “Be careful with these,” he chided, joining me. “I’ve waited two weeks for this order.”

  One by one we carried the panels inside. Jonas was old enough to be my father, but by our second trip I was the one out of breath and sweating. Of course he had six inches and at least sixty pounds on me.

  “Some fools have developed an airborne version of H5N1,” he said conversationally. “Now they published some of how they did it.”

  Fools do foolish things, I thought. Also, that it would be great if Jonas would just walk a little faster. “Uh-huh.”

  “Avian flu.” When I still had nothing to say, Jonas added, “Sixty percent fatality rate among humans, but until this variant the disease has spread only through contact with the feces of infected bi
rds. But now? I’ll bet anyone with the recipe and access to a college biology lab could re-create the manmade airborne strain.”

  “Sixty percent?” I said. “Jesus.”

  “Chemical and bio-weapons, the poor nation’s WMDs. Only it’s not only countries anymore. Anthrax-laced letters here in America, 2001. The Aum Shinrikyo cult’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, 2007. Once biotech and genetic-engineering tools get just a little cheaper and more available, single madmen will control weapons of mass destruction.”

  Biting my lip, I didn’t say: not only time machines.

  Jonas went on. “And it seems Chinese hackers have twice gotten temporary control of U.S. military satellites. How often has that happened and we don’t know? Maybe we’re blind to conventional military attack, and don’t know it.”

  “You’d be a lot happier if you spend less time online.” And if you had a life.

  “But not as well informed.” With a tip of the head, Jonas indicated where the slab in our hands was to be set down. “Gently.”

  “Why don’t you have dinner tonight with Victoria and me? You’ll like her.”

  “You like her, and three’s a crowd.”

  “How about four?” I asked. “She has an unattached roommate.”

  “Who, unless she’s Victoria’s mother, is half my age. Go. Have fun.” Jonas started back toward the loading dock. “After we finish unloading and you return the truck.”

  I strode after him. “Then take a night off with your friends.”

  Stony silence.

  “Look,” I said. I didn’t see how I could irritate him more. “The university treated you shabbily. Or the National Science Foundation did. You can’t hold that against all your former colleagues. They can’t all be bad guys. Some of them even jumpstarted your new lab with donated equipment.”

  “With castoffs and relics.” Jonas jumped into the truck and took hold of the back end of another glass panel. “Guilt offerings. Token penances for having bad-mouthed me to the school and the NSF. Now lift.”

  I lifted.

  Jonas said, “Oh, not everyone betrayed me. But neither did they defend me. Whatever their motives, my ‘friends’ poached my grants, my grad students, and my lab space at the university.

  “Suppose I did socialize with them. They’d want to know what I’ve been doing. If they learned I’d made a breakthrough, they’d try to steal my latest work, too.”

  I knew Jonas was brilliant. The man had invented time travel! So how had he alienated his colleagues? Maybe he’d always been suspicious and secretive. Maybe his incessant doom-saying got to be too much.

  In the months I’d know Jonas, those tendencies had only gotten worse.

  “Simple solution,” I said. “Don’t talk about work.”

  “Then they’d gloat, certain—as they all are—that my theories are flawed.”

  “So make new friends,” I said. Or quit pushing away the one friend you seem to have. “I know a great pub nearby. Nice folks who don’t pry.” Had the people there been nosy, I would never have gone back. “Let’s you and me go out tomorrow night.”

  “We’ll see.” Which meant no.

  Jonas had cleared an expanse of the main floor while I’d been fetching his glass order. I began to see the pattern in where we placed the individual panels. As jigsaw puzzles went, this wasn’t much of a challenge. The pieces would fit together to form a booth.

  A person-sized booth.

  Thinking two weeks, I dropped my end of the latest panel.

  “It slipped,” I said.

  CHAPTER 8

  Why didn’t Jonas show me the door?

  Because once before I had held my tongue to keep my paycheck? Quite likely, and the memory made me feel about an inch tall.

  Because ex-con that I was, no one would take me seriously if I did talk? Some of that, too, I felt sure.

  Because he had to have human contact with someone, and I was too ignorant to reveal his methods? Almost certainly.

  But maybe there was more to him keeping me on.

  I like to think Jonas also found in me a voice of common sense. That though he never admitted to finding merit in my comments, he did hear me out. He had not, to my knowledge, risked paradoxes by sending anything to the past.

  Oh, I knew that he would. That Future Jonas had. But the onus for that was on Future Jonas. Meanwhile, this Jonas worried about the implications of the stock tip gone bad.

  An anomaly that terrified me.

  Whatever his reasons, Jonas did keep me around. He tolerated my questions and my doubts. He shrugged off my “accident” with the glass panel.

  But as he put in an expedited order for a replacement, my fears only grew.

  * * * *

  “It’s okay,” I told Victoria.

  Her head against my chest, her tears soaking my shirt, shivering in my arms, she said, “But it mi-might not have…have been.”

  “But it is,” I insisted.

  With a long, shuddering breath, she pulled herself together. “Thanks for coming.”

  How could I not have come? I gave her a squeeze.

  The lightbar flashed on the police cruiser in front of the 7-Eleven. The cop, having finished talking with Victoria and the manager, was scanning footage from the store’s security cameras.

  “So do you get off the rest of your shift?” I meant it as a joke, to lighten the mood.

  From Victoria’s cringe, she didn’t see the humor. She wriggled loose. “You know, you got here almost before the cops.”

  I’d been at the pub just two blocks away when she’d rung my cell. Once again, Jonas had declined to join me. “You’re okay, hon.”

  “I wish.”

  “But you are okay.”

  “Quit telling me that,” she said. “You weren’t here. You didn’t have a gun in your face.”

  Her nose had started to bubble. I handed her a tissue from the box on the counter. “I’m sorry.”

  Victoria blew her nose with a loud honk. I gave her another tissue and she wiped her face.

  She said, “You didn’t rob the store. There’s no reason for you to be sorry.”

  “I know.” But neither did I feel exonerated.

  A police cruiser had sped past me, its lights strobing, coming from the direction of the warehouse. Had Jonas’s donations lured patrols away from the 7-Eleven? The bribes I hand-delivered each month to the precinct?

  What if the gunman in the ski mask had robbed the nearby 7-Eleven, not some other place, because of Jonas and me? What if others would have been terrorized tonight and the experience would have changed their lives? What if in some alternate holdup, somebody would have gotten shot? What if—

  I made myself stop. That way lay madness.

  “Maybe I should spend the night,” I said.

  She shook her head, and reached for another tissue.

  “You sure?” I pressed.

  “I want a new job. A safe job. And I want you to have another job. Something not mysterious.” She brightened. “Or apply here at the store. We have openings all the time.”

  Absent Jonas and me, would the police have come sooner, maybe even been visible enough to have deterred the gunman? There was no way to know. But stocks not behaving as Future Jonas knew they had? That was a certainty.

  God help the universe, in Jonas’s cloistered life I was the sole voice of reason.

  “I like my job,” I lied.

  “Well, I don’t.” In a small voice she added, “Will you walk me home?”

  * * * *

  I stayed for a while with Victoria in her apartment. The roommate was out somewhere, her liquor stash unguarded. I mostly drank and Victoria mostly vented, and neither treatment helped either of us to feel better. Just before midnight, after she dozed off on the sofa, I covered her with an afghan and let myself out.

  I got to the warehouse to find Jonas working late. He sat at a workbench with his back to me. Rice sacks stacked like sandbags made a neat low partition by his feet. He’
d been busy with more than the rice: the glass booth was assembled. And he’d done it without me. The man was freakishly strong.

  Not only had the panels been put together; the enclosure looked wired. Through the glass, I saw a control panel mounted in the main compartment and a mass of gear in the floor-level compartment. The fattest power cable yet stretched across the floor, not connected at either end. An access panel hung open at the foot of the booth.

  Jonas was shouting, his speech slurred. The line of beer bottles in front of him might explain both. I didn’t see anyone else, and guessed he was on his cell.

  “Screw your advice,” he yelled. “I’m done. And I’ll get my own tips.”

  I stumbled into a lab stool, knocking it over, and Jonas jerked around at the clatter. His eyes darted about. He poked at something in shadow on the shelf beneath the work surface. “Oh, Peter. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I’m sorry if I startled you. Who were you talking to?”

  “Myself,” he said belligerently.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two alone then.” I beat a hasty retreat. My speech was muddled, too. “Good night.”

  “G’night,” he answered.

  The flight of stairs seemed even steeper and more rickety than usual. The vodka, I supposed. I looked with longing toward the elevator, but it had been inoperable—its heavy copper cables stripped by vandals—before Jonas first moved in. He had taken a free month on the lease instead of insisting on an expensive repair.

  I dragged myself up to the second story. The moon was an ebbing crescent and the sky overcast; the hallway’s tiny, high windows only daubed the corridor with gloom.

  Maybe that impression was the vodka, too.

  Kicking off my shoes, I fell into bed without bothering to undress.

  CHAPTER 9

  I woke with a hangover, the vague intuition of a butterfly dream—and an epiphany.

  I’ll get my own tips. The person-sized time machine was complete, and Jonas meant to jump forward!

  I tried to remember everything about our brief late-night interaction. Jonas talking to himself. His speech had been loud and slurred. But maybe not all of it. When I’d first come in, before he knew I was there, hadn’t some words been clear and distinct?