The Return

by Joseph Helmreich

  Grace, his soon-to-be-retired secretary, buzzed him.

  “Dr. J, there’s a young man here to see you.”

  He leaned into the speakerphone. “If it’s another student asking about a grade change, tell him I’ve blown my brains out; he should take it up with my next of kin.”

  “He’s here about the ad.”

  “Send him on in.”

  Seconds later, a young man appeared in the office, medium height, thin, scruffy facial hair that wasn’t quite a beard. He introduced himself as Mike Williams, and Professor Jordan instructed him to take a seat across from him.

  “So, Mike, you have a résumé?”

  “Not with me,” the young man replied. “I was passing through and saw the sign and thought I’d stop in just to hear about the position. I can get it for you later, though.”

  “Sure, sure, that’s no problem. Have you ever been a departmental secretary before?”

  “Nope. This would be the first time.”

  “Ah, okay. And what makes you interested in the job?”

  “Well, I’ve always really loved physics and figured that working all day inside a physics department would be a pretty great environment.”

  “Mm-hmm. You have any kind of formal background in physics?”

  “Well, I almost majored in it in college. Took lots of courses, but didn’t end up going for the degree.”

  “What areas of physics did you study?”

  “Special relativity. Quantum field theory, string theory. Bunch of other stuff.”

  Professor Jordan looked at the young man as though suddenly seeing him for the first time.

  “Where did you study?”

  “Roxbury Community College.”

  “Must confess I haven’t heard of it. What areas of quantum field theory did you study?”

  “Gauge theory and supersymmetry, mostly. Also some of the stuff Hugh Watkins has been saying about superstring theory.”

  “Huh! Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have thought undergrads would be getting exposure to those sorts of things. What do you think of Watkins’s superstring theory work?”

  “I think the whole thing is nonsense, to be honest.”

  Jordan laughed. “It’s complete bullshit, isn’t it? Five, ten years from now, everyone else will realize it, too. Meantime, the fad will just have to run its course. Why didn’t you finish the degree, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Uh, you know. Fate, circumstances.”

  “Mm-hmm. Well, I’ll be honest with you, Mike. We’re not exactly a hub of scientific innovation here. The environment at this department will be not unlike the environment of any other department at this school, which is to say, not unlike the environment of an old-age home. That said, you get in your paperwork and everything checks out with administrative services, you’ve definitely got the gig.”

  “Thank you so much, sir!” the young man replied. “Is it okay if I take a few days to think about it?”

  “By all means!”

  * * *

  Outside, the maple and holly trees were in full bloom, and the summer sky was a beautiful creamy blue. As he got ready to leave the campus, “Mike Williams” turned around and took one last look at the physics building. He had asked for a few days to think about it, but in truth, there was no decision to be made. Shawn couldn’t take the job, not this one or any other. Employment, friendship, romance, all things indicative of a consistent, stable existence were simply not in the cards for him anymore.

  But he could still dream.

  As he got into his Toyota Corolla, which he’d stolen after discarding the old SUV in New Mexico as a precautionary measure, he took off his T-shirt and exchanged it for another. He changed his clothes at least three times a day and never drove wearing the same outfit he’d worn while walking around. Sometimes he wasn’t sure whether he was being rational or whether life on the run had simply made him completely obsessive-compulsive. Either way, he now judged himself to be more paranoid than even Leland had been, and that scared the shit out of him.

  He still wondered about Leland sometimes. It was over two months since the last time he’d seen him, when he’d vanished so mysteriously from that clinic in Annabella. That sudden flight had been strange, but in the thousands of hours he’d spent with Leland on the road, he’d never been able to get any real handle on the man, so why waste time trying to understand him now? In physics, you might spend decades researching and experimenting in the hopes of finally solving some great mystery. With other people, you weren’t so naïve.

  He hoped Leland was still alive, though, and figured that if he, himself, hadn’t yet been caught, even though he’d stolen the lotus flower and didn’t have any special abilities to protect himself with, then Leland was no doubt doing just fine, outrunning Ambius and probably more than a little happy to be on his own again.

  Shawn didn’t think about Leland too much, though, and he thought about Rachel even less, a fact that surprised him. He wasn’t sure if it was because he’d hardened himself against her or, as he suspected might be more likely, he’d built a wall around the whole subject, another “impenetrable shield,” this one to protect him from himself.

  One image that occasionally came back to him, though, was that strange, sad look that had crossed her face in the last moments before he left her. Of all the expressions he would have expected to see on her—rage, fear, desperation—sadness seemed strange, out of place, especially for someone as cold and calculating as she was. Yes, after all the hope she’d pinned on that flower, she surely must have been horrified to watch him steal it from her. But sad?

  He wondered, could it be that what he had seen had been a hint of regret? Remorse, even, for everything she’d done to him, everything she’d done in general? A small trace of humanity?

  It was possible, he supposed, but not likely. Either way, he certainly wasn’t going to dwell on the matter.

  Most of the time, he just thought about his next meal or his next bed or where he could stock up on canned vegetables or soap—the usual mundane concerns of a wanted fugitive. He didn’t know why he was still alive, why he had made it as far as he had, but he was under no illusion that he was likely to survive much longer. If they had caught up with Leland in Alicante, Spain, they would catch up with Shawn in the United States.

  And when they did, he had decided, he would die grateful. All his life, he had dreamed about whatever mysteries might lie beyond the horizon of our everyday existence, about the adventure he knew awaited in the larger universe of which our own planet was only a small speck of dust. These preoccupations had gotten him into science in the first place and had taken on obsessive dimensions once he’d come face-to-face with the footage of Leland being abducted in Bernasconi Hills.

  In the end, he had actually gotten a few small and magical glimpses of that world beyond the world. Just enough to know it was really there. He had seen strange and mysterious sights, things he now felt as though he’d only imagined but knew he hadn’t. A human being facing off against a military drone on an Arizona highway at sunset. A miracle flower from light-years away dying in a Minnesota forest. These were no doubt mere windows to things far more incredible, things unimaginable, but windows were much more than most people would ever get to see.

  Except sometimes a small taste makes the hunger burn that much deeper. At night, when he closed his eyes to fall asleep, he sometimes still saw that flower, the “Illuminator” or whatever Leland had called it, burning away in the darkness of the woods. In his mind, he could still see that weird green orb, staring out at him from amid the flames, shining and expanding, abask in its unfathomable otherness. The wider existence he had longed for since childhood, that higher realm of magic and mystery where the familiar laws of physics and chemistry no longer apply, where truly anything can happen, that world of science fiction but real, he had finally gotten to experience a small piece of it. But it was a world in which he, Shawn Ferris, was not destined to live.

  CH
APTER 33

  And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  The Sonoran Desert, which covers large swaths of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, first came into being over eight million years ago during the Miocene Epoch, the same period of time in which the ancestors of humans are believed to have split from those of apes. The desert extends over an area of more than one hundred thousand square miles and is considered one of the most biologically diverse in the world, home to some sixty species of mammals and hundreds of species of birds, reptiles, and amphibians, not to mention thousands of varieties of plants. When the sun goes down, these various forms of life join forces to create a mesmerizing song, whose star performers include the screech owl, with its incessant repetition of four notes, the hooded skunk, with its rhythmic scratching and digging, and the Mearns coyote, with its mournful and melodious howl.

  Tonight, this symphony was rudely interrupted by a far less native sound, the thunderous roar of a 1980s-era Harley Davidson XLR, as the pitch blackness was likewise pierced through by the bike’s beaming headlight, streaking its way across the desert floor.

  Andrew Leland had been in Mexico for over a month now but hadn’t yet been ready to return to the desert. Instead, he’d been holed up in a tiny inn in Juárez that doubled as a whorehouse, covering the walls and floor of his room with marker ink as he attempted to work through his labyrinthine equations. Now, here he was at last, and he still wasn’t ready for what he was about to do, but he was as ready as he was going to get, which would have to suffice.

  Though it had been over three years, it didn’t take him long to find the cave he was seeking, actually an abandoned gold mine that stood adjacent to a large saguaro cactus. He parked the motorcycle outside the entrance and, with a backpack and flashlight in tow, went inside.

  Guided by the flashlight, he followed the path of the old cart tracks down through a limestone tunnel. The air was shallow and stale, and he could hear bat wings fluttering about somewhere in the deeper recesses of the mine. After about twenty minutes of walking, the tunnel he was in suddenly opened up into a wide and magnificent chamber full of shimmering stalactites and stalagmites.

  And at the far end of this chamber, blending in with the cragged rock, there it stood, untouched and exactly as he’d remembered it, tan and pentagon shaped and about the size of a large sedan. Its sloping roof was covered by a series of hard interlocking plates that were reminiscent of certain herbivorous dinosaurs and which made the whole thing look far less aerodynamic than it actually was.

  Leland almost felt wrong to be seeing it now, if only because he had never intended to see it again. He approached with slow, deliberate steps and, when he reached it, slipped his fingers onto the color-coded keyboard-like panel below its circular door and inputted a four-digit combination that, simple as it was, he was surprised he could still recall. The circular door opened, extending outward with a soft whoosh, and Leland hoisted himself inside the ship.

  Once he’d settled into the cockpit, he strapped himself into his seat and stared at the instrument panel. A maze of oddly shaped monitors, switches, and indicators, the panel, which would have been utterly foreign looking to an airline pilot or astronaut, had been designed by her specifically for him, just like the rest of the ship, and he was again surprised at how quickly it all came back. He hit the switch to activate the panel, and everything lit up like Christmas. He then removed a crumpled sheet of paper covered in scribbles from his backpack and, with his eyes flashing between the paper and a keypad on the panel, punched in the appropriate coordinates.

  The plan was anything but simple. He would first need to fly this thing on his own to the mesosphere, about three hundred thousand feet from the Earth’s surface, at which point the ship’s autopilot, as determined by his coordinates, would take over. Then, at the very end of his journey, eleven and a half light-years away, he would retake manual control of the ship and bring it in for the close.

  Assuming the ship still flew, the initial ascent would likely go fairly smoothly. The next step, however, the autopilot phase, would be fraught with danger, as it depended entirely on the accuracy of his calculations, in which he had only moderate faith. The final stage of the trip, where he would resume control of the ship and fly it straight into the cosmic shield, if he’d made it that far, would be the real moment of truth.

  Shawn had claimed that to calculate everything just right so that a spacecraft could pass through the shield and wind up on the other side still in the present day, and then to successfully execute these calculations, was virtually impossible. This was correct, yet Leland had managed to pull it off when he’d escaped back to Earth the first time. Now, though, what he needed to do was an even less optimistic proposition, involving murkier math and science and requiring significantly greater aerial finesses. He would need to hit the cosmic shield at such a speed and angle so as to wind up on the other side, at their world, not in the present, nor thousands of years into the past, but just far back enough to reset the course of events and make everything right.

  Just far back enough to undo all of Shawn’s damage.

  Even if he succeeded at the time travel part, there were perilous side effects to consider, with the implications of time travel itself being chief among them. At least as far as he was aware, no living creature from Earth or anywhere else had ever actually traveled backward in time. While theoretical physicists had all kinds of strong opinions on the subject, it was impossible to truly know what sort of chain reaction doing so might unleash, what great paradoxes might result or what cosmic catastrophes they could trigger. Would the space-time continuum self-destruct, as many believed? Would the fabric of existence itself tear apart at the seams?

  Did he really care?

  This was his only chance to save her. If his actions somehow managed to destroy the entire universe instead, it was a risk worth taking.

  With all his preparations now in place, he grabbed the joystick and put his foot to the pedal. The engine revved up, five hundred thousand horsepower at six thousand revolutions per minute. At least as far as driving went, the ship seemed to be working fine, and he deftly steered it out of the chamber and into the tunnel, then along the old cart track and up and out through the large hole from which he’d entered, back into the desert.

  The bike was right where he’d left it, and he took a last look at that splendid machine, which he’d stolen from some gangster in Torreón, then hit the pedal hard and gunned the ship across the desert floor at a speed about which a Harley Davidson XLR could only dream.

  As he zoomed through the darkness, the g-forces inside the cockpit building up and pushing him farther and farther down into his seat and the dark silhouettes of dunes and rock formations zooming by through the cockpit window, he imagined that he wasn’t riding through the desert but across the Golden Gate Bridge, with the electrifying New York City and Chicago skylines on each side lighting up the night like in his dream. He could see, in his mind’s eye, her bright green eyes, her mischievous, childlike smile, all of her immense wonder and beauty.

  But of course he had always known, from the time he had first come back to Earth, that he couldn’t remember what she had really looked like, what she had really been. And that although he always remembered her as a beautiful woman, she could have just as easily been a horrifying ogre in reality or a bizarre insect or even some kind of plant.

  Some kind of flower.

  She always used to laugh when he would ask her who was more powerful, she or the Illumination. Why she had kept the truth from him, he couldn’t know now, but he did know that if he had known it back then, that she was the Illumination, that it was she Earth had been after, she whom he had built the cosmic shield to protect, he never would have left that place. Instead, he would have immediately agreed to deactivate the shield when he was asked, even though it would have meant facilitating the destruction of his own
people.

  As the ship lifted off and he felt the g-forces intensify, he thought back to the last moments from his last night with her, the night he had dreamed about earlier, the night she helped him escape. In his memories, at least, they were standing in the observatory beneath its wide silver dome. In the corner of the room was a large table covered in a tarp, beneath which, he understood, lay his original human body. She was holding in her hands a small, thumbtack-like object, which he remembered from his encounter with the avatar who had first transformed him into one of them. Though he had been told that his body had long ago been disposed of, this was obviously a lie, and now that incredible initial transformation process would be reversed, and he would return to his old self.

  “You should know,” she said, gesturing toward the tarp, “I had one of our technicians make some adjustments to it. For an experiment, I told him.”

  “What kind of adjustments?”

  “Just a few minor things. You’ll see when you return to Earth.”

  He smiled. He could only imagine what sort of “adjustments” she might be referring to.

  “All right,” she said, stepping forward with the small pin. “We’d better do this before it’s too late.”

  “Wait,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I want … I want something to remember you by.”

  She thought for a moment, then reached into an inner pocket of her silky violet robe and removed a dazzling crimson jewel and held it out to him. “A rose rock from a volcano that destroyed one of our largest cities over a million years ago. I’ve kept it with me for many years as a reminder of the impermanence of great things. It will be in your ship when you board as a man.”