The Time Travel Megapack: 26 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Stories Page 7

  His fist swept past me and into the power distribution frame. From momentum or drunkenness, the rest of him followed.

  The world flashed white. I flew through the air, thrown by an explosion, or electrical discharge, or colliding with Jonas, and crashed into the fence.

  When I could see again, Jonas lay heaped on the concrete floor. His body twitched; his hair was aflame; steam curled from his clothing. A stench like acid and charred meat enveloped him.

  Knowing there would be none, I checked for a pulse.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dazed, overwhelmed, I fled the enclosure. In the nearest dark corner I settled to the floor, elbows on knees, head in my hands. I think I rocked myself.

  At some impossible remove, the unconnected end of the power cable leapt and writhed, sparked and crackled. It hadn’t done that before. With that wild punch, Jonas must have struck the circuit breaker and activated the circuit.

  Jonas was dead—as if by my own hand—without having ever jumped to the future. Having never gone forward, he would never come back. Having never quite finished his person-sized machine, no one else would come back through it.

  It was over.

  But if it were over, would I remember the events of an aborted future? Nor was it only my memories. Expensive equipment across the lab testified that some Future Jonas still sent back stock tips.

  Branches? Loops? Those were Jonas’s terms. Time—or, at least, messing with time—must not be anything so simple. To me time had come to seem more of a spiral, or perhaps a rollercoaster.

  And also sinister.

  Was the line from Twelfth Night? I wasn’t certain about the play, but I remembered Shakespeare’s text.

  And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

  I’d seen Jonas jump into the future. That I still had that memory…did it mean he could yet return?

  While I struggled with paradox and whirligigs, the end of the writhing high-voltage line flapped into the booth’s open access panel.

  More sparks. The stench of burnt electrical insulation.

  And Jonas—some Jonas—appeared inside the booth.

  * * * *

  I jumped to my feet, lunging for the booth. Jonas, facing the controls he had just used, must have seen, through the rear panel—himself. Lying in an unnatural heap, his arms out-flung, his hair and clothes still smoldering. Motionless.

  A glass vial slipped from Jonas’s hand and shattered on the booth floor.

  Why did Jonas drop it? In shock at what he had seen? From the impact as I hit the booth door? Either. Both. It doesn’t matter.

  I jammed my screwdriver through the door’s outer handle, hoping that would keep the inner handle from operating the latch.

  Jonas turned and stared at me. And back at his corpse. And back at me.

  “An accident,” I said. “You electrocuted yourself.”

  I held up the copy of future me’s note. I don’t know how much of it Jonas read. The picture was probably enough.

  “That was a vaccine sample I dropped,” he finally got out.

  “Should you go back for another?” I asked. “Or will another trip make things worse?”

  Jonas shook his head. “At best the vaccine prevents catching the disease. It never cures. And I…”—he shrank inward on himself—“I’m patient zero. If I leave this booth.”

  Patient Zero: the person who sets off an epidemic.

  Even from a sample, how long would it take to synthesize, mass produce, and distribute the vaccine? By then, how far and wide would the doomsday plague have spread?

  “Burn it,” Jonas said. His voice firmed. “Burn down the damned lab. All of it. Everything. My notes. My prototypes. While no one but me understands or knows how to construct them.”

  “But the virus,” I said. “The heat. If the glass of the booth cracks…”

  “That won’t be a problem.” Turning his back on me, he tapped on the control panel.

  He—and any viruses he’d brought with him—vanished from the booth.

  In a coruscation of sparks, the compartment at the foot of the booth burst into flame.

  * * * *

  Where is Jonas? When is Jonas? Jonases? Dead, I believe. Any and all of them. Some, maybe, trapped in timeline limbo. The paradoxes are far beyond me.

  I set myself to a task I might achieve: Jonas’s final request.

  I closed the main water valve of the sprinkler system and disabled the fire alarms. Beginning with Jonas’s lab notebook, found face down on a nearby workbench, I fed paper to the small blaze. Glowing cinders swirled in the updrafts.

  The old warehouse was a tinderbox. Decades-dry wood burst into flame at the touch of a spark. Fire raced up the walls, into the rafters, across the ceiling. When the main lighting circuit shorted out, I had plenty of firelight to see by.

  With a fire axe I hacked pallets into kindling. I doused the wood scraps with kerosene we kept for the space heaters; a tossed kitchen match set the pyre ablaze. Into the bonfire went Jonas’s laptop, iPad, and camcorder—anything that might contain a digital record. Electronic gear might not burn to ash, but with enough warping and melting—I had to believe—nothing could be recovered.

  Fire roared. The heat was intense. Smoke and acrid fumes stung my eyes. Jonas’s corkboards were ablaze, sending up tongues of flame to lick the stairs.

  But my job wasn’t complete until every transceiver, from the earliest prototype, was wrecked beyond recognition. And starting with that earliest prototype, I was stymied. Jonas had built it in a freaking heavy strongbox. I couldn’t begin to move it to my bonfire.

  Instead, I carried shovelfuls of flaming embers to one prototype after another. Around the transceiver that held future me’s message I piled the coals twice as high, praying that the heat would incinerate any plague virus within.

  Behind the glass door, Jonas’s mottled image burst into flame. I stood, transfixed. Only after a tap on the glass crumbled the blackened page into ash and soot could I tear myself away.

  A squeal caught my ear. The guinea pigs! They were frantic, clawing at the bars of their cage. I dragged the cage to the closest door, flung it open, and released my pets.

  Wind rushing through the opening was like the pumping of an enormous bellows.

  With a whoosh, fire exploded. I ran inside, nearly squashed as flaming rafters rained into the doorway. The glass wall of the first-floor offices shattered. Across the floor, the wooden stairs had erupted in a fierce hot blaze.

  And from upstairs came a cry for help.

  CHAPTER 12

  I was upstairs. The Peter who belonged in this hour. I had been so focused on when Jonas might appear that I’d never even considered another me.

  Upstairs, I, he, was drunk. Confused. And trapped by an inferno.

  The heat was palpable. I couldn’t get within twenty feet of the stairs. I ran for the elevator, and stopped halfway there. It didn’t work. I ran back.

  In the upstairs hall, through black, greasy smoke and the roaring fire, I glimpsed a frightened face. My own.

  Did he recognize me? I don’t know. “The hall windows!” I screamed.

  “Too small!” he shouted back. He glanced over his shoulder. “And the outer wall is burning.”

  I heard sirens, louder by the second. “Fire trucks are on their way. Hold on!”

  And with my heart in my mouth, I left him. There was equipment left to ruin.

  “Help me!” upstairs me screamed.

  But I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t help myself. Walls of flame barred the doors and the loading dock.

  Something within me whispered, “But you can help yourself.” I had not yet attended to the cabinet-sized transceiver. Funny how I had left its destruction for last. I could once more wedge myself inside, jump back a day…

  More of me, thankfully, recoiled. Upstairs, one Peter was roasting to death. Peter of some unknowable future had sacrificed himself, his long-suffering world, to send me a warning. For me to sneak away wo
uld mean leaving this transceiver operational. It might escape complete destruction in the flames. If, to play safe, I destroyed this unit yesterday, would I still have it when I needed it tomorrow?

  I hadn’t forgotten how “random” flailing of the high-voltage line had flipped the cable end into the booth’s open access panel. Not to short out and fry the electronics. Not to make a cascade of sparks, then writhe itself back out.

  No: to spot-weld connections, in just the right places, precisely enough to furnish power for several minutes. Long enough for Jonas to return, speak with me, and then take his contagious self…somewhen.

  Accident? Coincidence? The odds of that circuit forming must be beyond astronomical.

  Call it fate or the whirligig of time…if human frailty allowed it, something would have its revenges.

  Choking on smoke and bile, disgusted with my momentary weakness, I flipped open the electronics compartment of this one remaining transceiver. I ripped out its entrails and buried them in red-hot coals.

  My work was done.

  All around, close now, sirens wailed.

  Flames had penetrated the caged area, and I gagged on the sickening sweet smell of burning meat. Of Jonas. When a four-foot spool of power cable, too, caught fire, the acrid stench of burning insulation was a mercy.

  With an earsplitting crack, something behind the fence, a transformer, perhaps, exploded.

  I sat in a clear area on the concrete floor, one of the few spots that flaming debris had yet to claim. And waited for the fumes, the heat, or the collapsing roof to bring matters to an end.

  * * * *

  I shuddered awake, coughing. Then the dry heaves hit me; I tried, and failed, to sit up. I only managed to bat a plastic mask off my mouth and nose.

  “Peter!” I heard. “Lay still, honey.”

  Victoria. She was kneeling beside me, trembling.

  I was on a stretcher near a Rescue Squad van, its lightbar strobing. A husky man wearing scrubs nudged her aside and settled the mask back on my face. He said, “This is for oxygen, and you need it. It’s a miracle they got you out.”

  They. Flat on my back, I counted five fire trucks. Crews wielding thick hoses sprayed the blaze, and neighboring buildings to which the flames looked poised to spread.

  Victoria stroked my forehead. “I heard the sirens,” she said. “I…I had a bad feeling. I followed a fire truck.”

  Over her shoulder, there was an apparition. I saw—at a second-story hallway window, lurid by firelight—a despairing face. My face. Just for instant, then it was gone.

  Sad beyond words, I turned away from Victoria and Peter both.

  EPILOGUE

  “Drink something,” the cop says. He nudges a water bottle across the table toward me.

  I wipe vomit from my face with a sleeve. The shirt reeks of smoke. I swish out my mouth with a swig of tepid water. There’s nowhere to spit, so I swallow.

  “They recovered two bodies from what’s left of the warehouse,” the cop says. “We’re talking murder charges, not just arson.”

  Past the memory storm, I almost don’t hear him. I say nothing.

  “One was a big man, pretty clearly the renter, Dr. Gorski. You hated your boss that much, Bitner? To burn him alive?”

  I didn’t hate Jonas, not that I intended to explain. Not that I will speak at all. Any word out of my mouth would make the next word easier.

  This Jonas had died in an instant, but another Jonas was dying horribly of doomsday plague. Or would, or will, or already had. I’d seen the photo.

  A miserable, repentant Jonas.

  At the end he had seen that meddling with the timeline must stop. I was sure of it. Because Jonas could have jumped ahead, then sent a note to himself months before now. A simple note: Fire Peter. He’ll cause trouble.

  He hadn’t sent such a note, or I wouldn’t be here, now, blamed for his death.

  Or, there was no future transceiver to which he could have escaped, because I’d destroyed it. Unless curious former colleagues, inspired to reconsider Jonas’s theories, should reinvent the technology…

  I dare say nothing that might attract their attention.

  The cop studies my face. “So,” he says, “who was the second guy at the warehouse? You might as well give me that. The ME will tell us soon enough.”

  Trying to stay expressionless, I take a sip of water. And worry that the medical examiner will find useable fingerprints on my other self. That he’ll find my prints.

  If TV crime shows were to be believed, not even identical twins have identical fingerprints. And anyway, I don’t have a twin. Not even a brother.

  I hope: Let the detectives imagine clones. But Jonas was a physicist, not a biologist. Would anyone suspect that one of me came from a different time?

  I could see nothing to do about that—beyond offering no hints.

  “Answer, damn it!” the cop shouts, slamming a fist on the table.

  My water bottle jumps, falls over, spurts out glug-glug-glug into my lap. I keep my reaction to a tic.

  They can’t make me talk, I assure myself. They can only send me to jail. Or put me in an institution, if they decide I’m crazy. The universe has done its worst.

  Once again, I am wrong.

  * * * *

  “What is it?” Victoria asks, tears streaming down her face. “I know you. I know you wouldn’t hurt anyone. Why won’t you defend yourself?” And plaintively, “Why won’t you talk to me, Peter?”

  I am mute, above all, for her. I don’t make a sound, though the longing to explain consumes me. I don’t even move, though my need to hold her is overwhelming.

  Instead I focus my mind on Jonas, the flesh sliding off his face.

  How is it I can remember a future that’s been undone? And how undone, when I died in the fire without ever having come downstairs to discover an earlier Jonas’s deception and plans—

  All of which I do remember, with painful clarity.

  But there’s no use asking how, just as there is no one to ask. It must suffice to know that between us, Jonas and I had twisted and knotted, tangled and raveled the timeline. And, just possibly, we had mended it.

  If I can keep it intact.

  Victoria takes my hand. “If you ever felt anything for me, you’ll explain.”

  Four billion dead: an inconceivable number. An incomprehensible abstraction. Victoria struck down? That’s all too believable, and I cannot bear the idea. And so I peer into space, avoiding her gaze.

  What will my love think when the body from the warehouse—my body—is identified?

  Far more difficult than seeing myself die, I say nothing.

  At last Victoria tires of waiting. She stands to leave, shoulders quivering, eyes red and puffy. As the interrogation room door sighs closed behind her, I think about what we might have had together.

  And of grandfatherless grandsons.

  And the fluttering wings of butterflies.

  And the crazily spinning wheel of a whirligig.

  THESE STONES WILL REMEMBER, by Reginald Bretnor

  This is my confession. I have killed Ignatiev. I have killed Academician Andrei Konstantinovitch Ignatiev, the century’s foremost genius, the universal scientist, the unique mind that triumphed in half a dozen disciplines, some of them totally unrelated. That is what Pravda and other party organs always said about him, and they did not exaggerate. He was a theoretical physicist, a Nobel laureate. He was a physical chemist, again a Nobel laureate. He was the recipient of how many Lenin Prizes? How many decorations?

  It is all true. It is also true that he was a Member of the Central Committee of the Party. He was not just a creature of the men inside the Kremlin—he was one of them. He was also an egomaniac: totally self-centered, completely self-assured, utterly ruthless. Physically, he was immensely strong, with the shoulders of a bull and the huge, round, bald head of a Turkish wrestler. And he was cruel. His colleagues feared him. His women first believed they loved him, then invariably discovered that th
ey loathed and hated him.

  He was also the man whose influence freed me after I had spent eleven years in prison.

  I met him first many years ago, when we were both at the University, where we had friends in common—a professor of mathematics, his wife, and his daughter, Evgenia, a very quiet, gentle girl whom I had hoped to marry. Always he made fun of me, of my long, thin frame, my pale thin hair, and he would make crude jokes about my specialty, about the ancient languages I loved. “Our Fredichka” he’d say, “will soon announce the most important of discoveries that there are eighty-seven words in Old Minoan referring to a woman’s private parts. Imagine it! He has written a five-hundred-page dissertation of the subject.”

  I would turn red, and he would simply roar with laughter. My name is Frederic—my father, a musician, named me after Chopin, whom he loved—but no one had called me Fredichka since childhood. Ignatiev did, and the way he did it robbed me of any dignity I might have had. Much of my life then was given to my poetry, and he mocked even that, reciting unkind parodies in a falsetto imitation of my voice. For a long time, I put up with it, for Evgenia’s and her parents’ sake. Then I became aware that she and Ignatiev were lovers, and I withdrew as unobtrusively as possible, somehow sensing that the affair, for her, would end in bitterness, in her hating and despising him—and herself even more. I withdrew into my languages, into my poetry, into the company of other language scholars and other poets. Eventually I obtained a position at the Institute for Ancient Languages, teaching, doing research, writing monographs.

  It was a good life, and my career, though quiet, was not undistinguished. There were no Nobel Prizes for me, no glittering honors, but enough recognition so that I felt established, necessary. Unfortunately, too, there was enough to arouse jealousy among a few over whose heads I was promoted; and I had been indiscreet enough, and had felt secure enough, to associate too carelessly with poets who were dissidents, and to publish poems of my own crying out against political injustices. I never did learn who denounced me, but one night, after eight and a half years, they came for me.

  If you have read Solzhenitsyn, you are familiar with what followed: Lubyanka Prison, the cells, the questionings—the endless questionings, the subtle tortures of the mind and body—and then the mockery of a trial, and the cold, locked, closely guarded van to Dvershinsk Barracks. There I spent those eleven years. It was a prison for scientists and scholars, very much like the one in The First Circle. We worked interminably, given the minimum of food, of warmth, of clothing needed to keep us working. Often I wondered whose learned papers I was writing, what influential Party academic’s translations I was toiling over. But at least I was able to study, learn, and maintain my linguistic skills, and to scribble poetry too, for my fellow prisoners and sometimes even for the guards.