Whirlwind

by David Klass

  Houlihan gets shakily to his feet, looks down, and sees the small lake. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “It’s your choice. But I have to warn you. If you stay on board, we’re about to make like the space shuttle.”

  He squints back at me, then at Gisco, and finally peers down at the pond. “Guess I’d rather risk drowning than be part of a flying nuthouse.” He climbs up on the side of the gondola, hesitates, and then mutters an unhappy “Good riddance to you,” and leaps.

  The old balloonist’s legs churn and his arms circle as he falls with a scream. He splashes down feet first, and disappears under the blue water.

  Did he make it? Gisco asks uninterestedly.

  Yeah, he just popped up. He’s swimming for shore. What a grump.

  At least he furnished us with a last meal, Gisco says.

  Come on, things aren’t so bad, I point out. We’re flying in a hot-air balloon on a beautiful day over lovely countryside.

  As four helicopters with automatic weapons get ready to chase us down, he adds. Can you spell H-I-N-D-E-N-B-U-R-G? At least take us up and maybe we can lose ourselves in the clouds.

  I glance down at the stove. Love to, I tell him, but we’re running out of propane.

  21

  Dark Army copters roar away from fairgrounds toward us. I can see their mounted guns.

  We’re in a hot-air balloon without much heat. Not enough propane to rise. No place to go if we descend. We could dive out of the gondola into the pond like old Houlihan, but the copters would circle over us and pick us off like herrings in a barrel.

  And then I feel something on my wrist. Gisco, my father’s watch is getting warm!

  I already know what time it is. The moment of my painful departure from life, and all that is sweet and vibrant. The crickets fiddling in the fields, the robins chirruping in their nests, a pot roast swimming in gravy, all gone. Goodbye, gleaming halls of morn. Farewell …

  Gisco, it’s not just warm. It’s hot. Scorching!

  I rip the watch off my wrist. It’s so hot now that it’s burning my skin. Why now? And then I get it.

  I place Dad’s watch atop the now-flameless propane stove, directly under the balloon cavity.

  The blue watch face shimmers and glows. A sapphire luminescence kindles into flame. Air is heated, it rises into the nylon globe, and we start ascending.

  I can see the silhouettes of the Dark Army pilots as they climb cloudward after us. But we’re going up faster and faster. Already the first misty tendrils of cloud shroud us. Not just cottony white clouds, either.

  Massive, ominous, threatening black clouds.

  The sunny day has darkened. Did my dad’s watch do this, too, or did we drift into a spring storm? Thunder rumbles and it sounds like we’re in the middle of a bowling alley with balls striking pins all around us. Lightning flashes by and strikes the closest Dark Army helicopter.

  There’s an explosion audible even above the thunderclaps. The helicopter bursts into a scarlet fireball that spins sideways across the sky and takes out another copter.

  Whatever you’re doing, it’s great stuff.

  That’s not me, I tell Gisco. Or maybe it is, in some way. Because it can’t be just coincidence that this storm blew up. It can’t be just happenstance that lightning bolts are forking down toward the remaining two helicopters, which turn and flee.

  Is that a person I see, aloft in the clouds near us? No, that’s impossible. It must be just a curious twist of cumulus mist. But its lineaments are so definite, so humanlike. Arms, legs, a torso, and even a head! Flying near us, without effort. Tracking in and out of cloud.

  I remember the man from my dreamlike vision on the yellow dinghy—a face that exists outside of time and place. An Einstein. A Gandhi. Not quite a god, but no longer a man. The small figure opens his arms to us.

  I open my arms back at him.

  Who is it, Jack? Is there another helicopter? Who are you waving to?

  “Destiny,” the mysterious figure seems to say to me. “Come.”

  I can’t come, I tell him. The winds only blow west-east. If you want us to come, you’d better find a way to help get us there.

  “Come,” he repeats, and begins melting into the stormy mist. As he disappears, he moves his arms around twice in slow circles, stirring the air like a witch’s cauldron.

  I feel it instantly, on my back and neck. The winds shift. Blow stronger. Pull us as if they have a will of their own.

  Hey, check this out. Gisco was rooting around in the corner of the gondola where old Houlihan stored his possessions. No doubt the dog was looking for the bag of chips. Instead, he’s found a compass. It shows that we’re going due south. Beacon of Hope, we’re headed to the Amazon!

  22

  Moment of truth. At least that’s what I’m hoping I’ll hear. I’m aloft with Gisco, spinning and soaring through dark clouds. But this isn’t like the twister that whisked Dorothy willy-nilly to Oz. These whistling winds are pushing our balloon one way—south. This is a very special storm with a purpose, an agenda. Who stirred up this targeted tempest, and for what reason? It’s time to find out. Okay, dog. Let’s have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you Great Dog God. What the heck is going on?

  I can certainly appreciate your curiosity, Gisco replies, sitting back on his haunches.

  Then let’s have some answers. Why did some warlord from a thousand years in the future kidnap my girlfriend? I thought when we used Firestorm to save the oceans, we created conditions that would end the threat of the Dark Army. Who sent you back to help me? And why are we being FedExed to the Amazon by special delivery balloon?

  Excellent, thoughtful, probing questions, Jack. I would love to try to answer them for you, but the truth is you don’t have the necessary sophistication in the physical sciences even to begin to understand what has transpired.

  Perhaps not. But I do have enough sophistication to know that if I kick your doggone butt out of this gondola, gravity will yank your hairy mass back to earth with enough acceleration to smash you like furry scrambled eggs.

  There’s really no need to threaten an old friend. I’m completely on your side.

  I take a step toward him, furious. What side is that? I demand angrily. The war in the future is over and the Dark Army is vanquished, right?

  Not exactly, Gisco replies. Things are a bit more complicated than that. I really don’t know where to begin.

  Why don’t you start by explaining what happened after our Firestorm quest. You promised me you would never leave and then you betrayed me by disappearing without even saying goodbye.

  I was called back. It’s not something I can control. It’s like being yanked by a rope around your neck. I think they called Eko back, too. She didn’t betray you either, by the way. In fact, I think she was starting to fall in love with you.

  Gisco’s revelation rocks me. I remember holding Eko tightly as we flew away from Dargon’s island. She was dying. I felt her slipping away, and then she literally slipped through my fingers and vanished into thin air.

  So she may still be alive? I ask the dog. You’re saying Eko may have been transported away from me by people who could save her life?

  It’s possible. I haven’t seen her since. But she may not have been any more in control of her disappearance than I was of mine.

  I have trouble believing we’re all at the mercy of future puppeteers who can pull our strings and make us appear and disappear.

  Yes, it is very disconcerting. One minute you’re pondering an island vacation with dear friends, after the successful completion of a mission. The next instant, poof, you’re gone. Or rather; yank, you’re being jerked away to a very different place and time.

  His vivid description makes me recall my own out-of-body experience on the dinghy when I dreamed that I was being transported over a great distance to a mighty river. I had the painful sensation of being ripped out of my skin and dragged along by an irresistible leash. Okay, I tell G
isco, I believe you. Who called you back?

  The people who sent me.

  My mother? My father? The Caretakers?

  What was left of them. Gisco looks sad. You see, Jack, things had gotten very, very bad.

  How is that possible? We did exactly what we were supposed to do. We found Firestorm and used it to destroy the trawlers and preserve the oceans. That’s why I was sent back to the Turning Point as a baby. You came back to help me. Together we turned the future in a better direction, right? Did we save the future or not, dog? It’s a simple yes or no.

  It’s a “not quite,” and there’s nothing simple about it, Gisco responds. You see, Jack, by sending you back in time to the Turning Point to change things, we inadvertently opened a very dangerous door, a sort of cosmic Pandora’s box.

  23

  Gisco’s words give me the chills. Come to think of it, it’s freezing up here. And the air is soupy thin. I feel dizzy, and I wrap my arms around my shivering body.

  I flash back to Dargon in the volcanic cave, warning me that if I used Firestorm to save the oceans I wouldn’t be healing the future but rather destroying it. There would be a ripple effect, he claimed, that over the course of a thousand years might alter everything, including my ancestors. So was Dargon right? I ask Gisco. You can’t repair a problem by sending someone back in time to change the past? Did I muck up the whole future when I used Firestorm? Did I kill my own parents?

  Calm down, Gisco urges. Dargon was wrong. He was playing on your unsophisticated understanding of time-space. We knew what we were doing. I can’t explain this to you, Jack. You don’t have the background to understand it. If you tried, it would just confuse and discombobulate you, to the point where you could no longer function.

  I don’t have to do much functioning in this balloon, I point out. I’ll risk discombobulation. Fire away.

  The dog still hesitates. The human mind is a frail thing. It can’t handle what it can’t wrap itself around.

  I sense that Gisco truly believes this. Just try, I urge him. What happens when someone travels back through time and changes something?

  The hesitating hound looks over at me, and takes pity. I’m a fool, Gisco mutters. But okay, I’ll try. You see, Jack, the best scientific minds of your era got this wrong. They wrestled with the same questions as you. Einstein battled with them, too. His Theory of Relativity first opened the door to the theoretical possibilities of time travel. And he didn’t like those possibilities one bit.

  I think of Einstein—the wise old face with the playful, childlike eyes. That mental picture brings another image to mind—the old mummy’s face I saw in my strange dream on the dinghy, and more recently when he seemed to be flying through the storm clouds near us. I blink it away, and refocus on the Father of Relativity. I’ve read a lot about Einstein, I tell the dog. I know he thought the cosmos should be logical and beautiful.

  Correct, Gisco agrees. And time travel is fraught with paradoxes. Einstein hated those. For example, there’s the Grandfather Paradox: If you travel back in time and kill your own grandfather before he meets your grandmother, then you would never have been born. But, at the same time, you were the one who killed him.

  I try to digest this, and find myself holding tight to the side of the gondola. It’s a mess, I agree. Is there an answer?

  The top scientists of your era agreed on one explanation. It was first suggested by the work of a grad student named Hugh Everett, in the late nineteen-fifties. As it was developed it got a fancy name—the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Our universe, the physicists theorized, was just one of an infinite number of universes continually branching out every second like new limbs from a tree, to form a multiverse. So if someone went back in time and killed his grandfather, no paradox would occur because that person would be creating a whole new universe.

  Is the gondola whirling more quickly, or are Gisco’s explanations making my head spin? I try to concentrate. So if that’s right, I ask, my parents couldn’t change their polluted, unhappy world by sending me back in time? If I did change something to try to fix their problem, I would just be creating a new branch of the multiverse tree. But their own world would remain as bad and polluted as it was.

  Correct, Gisco agrees.

  I mull it over. That seems pretty nutty, I finally tell the dog. To think that there are an infinite number of universes, with new ones being generated all the time.

  If you polled the leading cosmologists of your era, the vast majority of them were convinced it was so, Gisco says. It was a fascinating theory. Complex and completely unprovable. Of course, it turned out to be as misguided as the notion five hundred years earlier that the world was flat and explorers who sailed too far would fall off the edge.

  So if it was wrong, what was right?

  A Russian mathematician thirty years after Everett pointed in a direction that turned out to be much closer to the truth. His name was Igor Novikov, and he said that Einstein and all the other theorists who worried about time-travel paradoxes had gotten it completely wrong. According to Novikov, you couldn’t travel back in time and kill your grandfather before he met your grandmother precisely because that would create a paradox.

  I don’t get it, dog, I confess. Suppose I traveled back in time and met my grandfather and wanted to kill him. What would stop me?

  Suppose you wanted to walk on the ceiling? What would stop you?

  Gravity.

  And according to Novikov, an invisible cosmic force would prevent you from killing your grandfather.

  What force?

  Novikov explained it this way. In the absence of time travel, the unfolding present is influenced only by the past. So if you were trying to figure out what to do at three in the afternoon, and you had made a dentist’s appointment for then, when three o‘clock came you would go to the dentist. Got it?

  So far.

  But with the presence of time travel, the unfolding present is influenced by both the past and the future. The time traveler is not just making a one-way trip—he’s making a loop. So he can’t change something that will alter the future part of his loop. Gisco looks at me sympathetically. All you need to know is that Novikov got that part right. You couldn’t go back in time and do something that would wipe out your own ancestors or parents or yourself, because you have already lived in that future.

  I’m so dizzy I have to sit down on the floor of the gondola. So you’re saying there’s no multiverse?

  None.

  Time is like a river, flowing in one direction? And if a person makes a journey upriver to change something, he can’t wipe out everything downriver because that place exists since he came from it?

  Broadly correct. The dog nods. And it is therefore possible to journey back in time and change the future in predictable ways, just as you could go upriver and change a watercourse knowing that it would have certain foreseeable effects downriver. Your father knew what he was doing when he sent you back. We could predict that using Firestorm to save the oceans would change the future world in the way we needed.

  But you were wrong? My father was mistaken?

  No, we were right. He was astonishingly correct in his calculations.

  But the world didn’t get better? You said it got worse.

  Much worse, Gisco agrees sadly. Horribly, nightmarishly worse.

  24

  Gisco’s convoluted explanations have brought us to a final conundrum. If my dad was right, and I changed what needed to be changed, why didn’t things get better? I ask.

  They did start to improve.

  What do you mean “start”? If we fixed the problem in the present, why wasn’t it long gone in the far future?

  Gisco hesitates. You look like you’ve already gone twelve rounds. Are you sure you have the stomach for more?

  I look up at him from the floor of the gondola. I am dizzy and light-headed, but I try to shake it off. Ring the bell for round thirteen, I say. I need to know why, if we fixed the problem, t
he world got worse.

  When a significant change is made in the past, it takes a while for the fabric of time and space to reshape itself in the future, the dog explains. Go back to your river analogy one more time. Let’s say the water in the stretch of river where we drink and fish is polluted. So someone is sent far upstream to remove the source of that pollution. Even if they’re successful, the water where we live doesn’t immediately become clean. It’s a gradual process. The river cleanses itself day by day and hour by hour. Got it?

  Sure, I say. But once you remove the source of the pollution, the river gets cleaner and cleaner.

  Right. And when you used Firestorm to save the oceans, a thousand years in the future things did start to get better. The oceans became cleaner. Extinct species began to reappear. Whales, wiped out for eight hundred years, started singing in the depths. Dolphins leaped from the surf after half a millennium of stillness. Coral reefs began to bloom like vast undersea gardens, and serve again as the crucial breeding grounds for millions of species. As the oceans healed, conditions on land got much better. The Dark Army began to lose its grip. The People of Dann were proven right, and were on their way to being triumphant—the caretakers of a new Eden.

  Great, I say. That’s what I imagined after you and Eko disappeared. That’s the justification I clung to when I sailed back to America on a tramp steamer. Night after night I sat on the deck alone, and I told myself that even if I had lost everything I valued in my own life, at least I had done some good. So what went wrong? What Pandora’s box did we open up?

  The dark storm clouds we’re flying through blot out the sun. Gisco’s eyes gleam for a second as lightning flashes near us.

  The Dark Army became desperate, he explains. Its leader realized that if the Turning Point could be used to tilt the future one way, it could also be used to turn it back in the other direction. He borrowed a page from the playbook of the People of Dann, and he came back to the Turning Point to attack the earth at the crucial moment and turn the future back to darkness.