Erica noticed he was looking past Jeff at the lawn. The gardeners must’ve missed something.
Jeff swung around to see where he was looking. “What is it?”
“I will admit to you that those Greeks are new.”
“I thought they were weird,” Erica said. “You’re an American history guy.”
Behind Dexter, the front door opened and a young woman bounded out of the house and down the walkway toward them.
“Uh, this is something new, too,” Dexter said after turning toward the noise. He said it without moving his lips.
The woman’s pretty, yet pale, face showed worry, and her long black hair flowed behind her as she sped toward Dexter, throwing her arms around his neck. “Honey, where have you been? I’ve been so worried about you,” she said, holding his neck and kissing his face. “Are you okay?”
Erica watched with great interest, then caught Jeff looking at her. He shook his head, telling her he had no idea about this. Dexter uncomfortably hugged the woman, then awkwardly patted her on the back and told her he was fine. She leaned back and looked at him, still holding his arms, then embraced him again.
Standing there, Erica didn’t want to seem callous, but a playground-quality “I told you so” was welling up inside her. Even if she didn’t spring it on them there, she’d be delivering it to Jeff during the car ride back to New York. She wanted to feel compassionate, but the recklessness of their experiments had put them squarely into this position. Bluntly, they deserved what they got. Well, Dexter, at least. Jeff seemed to be coming through everything unscathed other than for the fact that his best friend now lived in Philadelphia instead of around the corner.
“I was so worried,” the woman said again as Erica searched for and spotted a wedding ring on her left hand. “I tried calling. Where’s your phone?”
“My phone,” Dexter said, weary. “Battery.”
Erica craned her neck to see if somehow a similar ring had appeared on Dexter’s hand, but there was nothing. Perhaps he’d removed it for the mission.
The woman finally let go of Dexter and looked past him at Jeff. “If I didn’t know he was with you, I would’ve been in really bad shape,” she said, catching Jeff off-guard.
After stuttering for a moment, Jeff caught himself. “Don’t worry, he was in good hands. Thanks for letting me borrow him.”
Erica tried to catch the look on Dexter’s face, but suddenly the attention was on her. Jeff looked at Dexter and must have realized he wasn’t going to say anything, so he jumped in. “Oh, I’m sorry. This is Dr. Erica Danforth. She’s been working with me – with us – on our research team.”
The woman extended her hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Elizabeth, Dexter’s wife. These guys call me Liz, though, so you can too.”
Erica hesitantly shook it. “Nice to meet you, too.” Strangely, the woman looked vaguely familiar.
Liz returned to Dexter, grasping his arm tightly. “You guys look tired. Can I get you something? Will you stay for a bit?”
To Erica’s surprise, this time Jeff spoke up. She thought he’d want to be there for his friend as he met his wife for the first time. Not so, though. “No, we’ve had a long night and we have a good ride back to the city. We should get on the road.”
She looked at him and his face was stone. No expression at all. She wanted to punch him in the arm and tell him that he needed to stick around at least for a little while, but couldn’t bring herself to be so obvious. Instead, they all said a quick goodbye and a moment later they were sitting in the car watching Dexter walk up the sidewalk like he was headed to the gas chamber.
“What the hell was that?” she asked him once Dexter and Mrs. Dexter had closed the front door behind them.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.” Jeff put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway. “I literally had nothing to say. Apparently we’re old friends, but I have no idea who she is. That was so surreal.” He took off down the tree-lined street, a fair bit faster than the town’s recommended speed limit.
“Well, what are you going to do now? He’s your best friend. You can’t just leave him to fend for himself – especially since this new twist is entirely your fault.”
He held up his hands to calm her down, a gesture that Erica definitely had never liked – no self-confident woman wanted to be calmed down, particularly when she was right. “We will,” he said, though. “We will address it somehow. If there’s one thing you should know about me, if you haven’t figured it out already, it’s that I don’t – I can’t – act on the fly. I’m a meticulous planner, and when I’m presented something like what I was just presented with, I freeze. I can’t react, I can’t do anything. But give me some time to process it, and we’ll come up with something.”
At least he had a point for shushing her. “I don’t know if there’s anything to come up with,” she said as he turned onto Highway 30 into the center of the town which would lead them to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “Like I’ve told you a hundred times, you’ve dramatically changed things. This new reality is the reality.”
“I’ll accept the blame for the lantern thing, but I have no idea what we could’ve changed that got him married.” He paused, thinking. “He loathed relationships. Vowed never to get married. I don’t know, maybe we go back and fix things.”
“But what are you fixing? This, right now, where your friend Dexter is married, is what you’d be fixing. There is no telling what would happen if you changed something else.”
They drove for a short while in silence. Surprisingly, her thoughts drifted to a frustration at why she was even there in the first place. How she’d gotten caught up in this twisted soap opera created by people she’d met a week before, and to whom she had no allegiance. While she didn’t understand why, she didn’t feel bad at all for Dexter. She hadn’t taken the time to process what she’d do in the same situation, which probably afforded her the ability to be cynical about it. These two guys had been playing with fire and now one of them had gotten burned. There wasn’t too much mystery to this history.
Jeff was moving along the Turnpike faster than what made her comfortable, but given the circumstances of the day, she simply tried to distract herself. She was actually starting to doze off when he finally spoke again, close to the New Jersey line.
“What’s really stopping anyone, then, from going back in time and changing things?” he asked, though she couldn’t tell if he was being rhetorical or not. “Dexter and I were just talking about this earlier. This reality could be something more orchestrated than we know.”
“Well, aside from the fact that the technology isn’t universally known-”
“But you’re not thinking about the future. What’s to say that, in the future, everyone doesn’t have one of these things, and people can just go back and change the past to suit their needs whenever they want? Or, even, the wealthy have the opportunity to go back in time?”
She took a deep breath and watched the trees on the side of the road zip past. “I think it’s a reasonable question from a purely scientific standpoint. But the reality is that your concept is a little far-fetched.”
“Alright, well I ventured into hyperbole there – but let’s take one entity... The United States government. What if they were just changing things all the time? There’d be no way any of us would know. Right?”
“You’re thinking micro versus macro,” she said, without looking at him. “On a macro level, yes, the changes that you’ve made happened around everyone. The only people who have the knowledge of what history was before you changed it are the people that made the trip. On the micro level, you, Dexter and I don’t know of any changes that were made in our own pasts. Which is why Dexter is standing in his kitchen right now trying to pretend that he knows everything about a woman he’s never seen before. But you’re right – if someone else had traveled through time and changed the course of history, we would never know it.”
“But should we know it? Is it in
our best interest to know?”
Now she finally looked at him. After what he’d pulled with her, now he asked if it was the right thing to do? “It doesn’t matter, Jeff. It’s just like your explanation about why you had to put the diamond back into the device when you had the choice not to. Because you did. Because it would not have shown up a minute earlier if you hadn’t. What’d you call it? Fulfillment? We’re in a reality right now that’s come to be because an infinite number of circumstances have led us directly to this point. Whether someone has manipulated that or not really doesn’t matter because there’s nothing for us to do about it. It is what it is.”
He was quiet for a long moment, then spoke, “You know you do a pretty good job of keeping me focused. Especially when you use my own conclusions. That helps.” Another couple miles of silence, and then he said, “Tell me about your plan to go to the future.”
“What?”
“You started to mention it when we were at breakfast, then Dexter interrupted.”
“I know what you mean, but you want to talk about it right now?”
“Yeah. It’ll help me get some perspective. I’m all scrambled right now.”
She shrugged. “Alright. There’s a way to continue your experiments without causing more catastrophe – at least to our present time. The future is yet to be written, so you can play there.”
“But everything we’ve done has taken meticulous research and planning. How could we possibly know what we’d be walking into?”
“It’s actually pretty easy. We go ten years into the future and research what we want to do five years from now. Then go back and do it.”
She saw a smile cross Jeff’s face. “You’re diabolical,” he said.
“What, you’re smiling now? You’re excited by this?” She shook her head in disbelief, both amused and horrified. “All we had to do was cross the state line, and you’ve already forgotten what happened back there?” She’d been thinking about how to push Jeff to actually do this. She didn’t think after the situation with Dexter that he’d be up for it. That he was even bringing it up was a shock to her.
Jeff took his eyes off the road for the first time and looked at her, right into her eyes. “I have to be honest with you, while I’m having trouble comprehending all of this, I’m finding myself having a hard time feeling sorry for Dexter. We’re all scientists here, whether it be social or physical science. We all know that what we were doing here was an experiment, and that there was the possibility of unintended consequences. Does it suck that he has to learn all about who he is now? Sure. But it’s not like he ended up in the slums. He’s got a beautiful house, a hot wife, and a great job that he appears to love. The alternative scenario was that he’s hanged in the town square. I don’t know – is it wrong of me to feel that way?”
“It’s probably a little cold, Jeff,” she said. “But if you’re looking at everything strictly from a scientific perspective, you can probably sleep well tonight knowing that your research has taken a tremendous leap forward. That’s if you’re able to admit that your hypothesis has changed, of course.”
“How so?”
“Your experiment is no longer whether you can travel through time. You’ve already proven you can do that. Your experiment is now to evaluate what happens when you do it.”
He looked forward at the highway without speaking. They were getting toward the northern part of New Jersey now, so the traffic was picking up again. She’d hit a chord with him. He had to have known that there wasn’t too much he could still do related to moving through time. Not only had he achieved involving people – even multiple people – but he’d been able to pinpoint the destination to the second. There wasn’t any other assessment of his experiment to be made, other than to say it had been a tremendous success. Other than the side effects, of course. She thought of all of those cholesterol medicine commercials – where the prescription will lower your bad cholesterol but might cause bleeding ulcers and leprosy. Time travel had its own issues.
After a short while, Jeff spoke again, his eyes again locked on the highway. “So I guess that would be a natural next step?”
“What would?”
“Traveling to the future.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Your point makes sense about the next phase of the experiment. When you think about time travel and the possibilities, you’re really contemplating making changes. It’s difficult to believe that anyone interested in this technology – with the possible exception of you and Dexter – would want it so that they could simply go sightseeing. So now we know that you can travel into the past and make changes to history that will dramatically change the present, which would offer one form of control. The other form of control would be analyzing what’s upcoming and then making changes in the present to either mitigate or stimulate them. So as far as carrying the experiment to the next phase, I think you’re right on.”
“It’s amazing when you talk about it in terms of science that it completely loses the essence of danger that really surrounds it.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said, with kind of a laugh. Not a real one, though. He was too deep in thought. “I guess so.”
In his pocket, Jeff’s cell phone went off – Erica recognized the ringtone as the theme song from the alien ship in the Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Good movie. Creepy ringtone. He struggled for a minute to pull it from his pocket, then looked at the face of it. “It’s Dexter,” he said, then answered. “Hello?”
She watched as he talked, trying to ascertain what Dexter was saying from the look on Jeff’s face.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Honestly, man, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”
A laugh, maybe a little nervous. “Well, at least you know me well.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that would be the case, but I guess so.”
“No. Still about a half-hour.”
“Alright. Whatever you say. I trust your judgment.”
“No, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”
“Yeah, well anything’s better than getting your neck stretched.”
“I don’t know, man. Let’s talk first.”
“Alright. I’ll see you in a couple days.”
“Oh, sure.”
He pulled the phone from his ear and extended it to Erica. “He wants to talk to you.”
Surprised, she took it from him. “Hello?”
“Well, I still need to figure out how it happened, but you’re going to be blown away by who the little lady is,” Dexter said. He was talking very quietly. Erica interpreted it as him having snuck away for privacy.
“Yeah? Who is it?”
“About nine months ago, I apparently married Liz Darby.”
“Liz Darby,” Erica said, searching her brain for the connection. “Should I know-? Wait – Rosalynn’s daughter, Liz Darby?”
“Yep.”
“Which would make Rosalynn your-”
“Mother-in-law. Yep.” His response was short. He was not pleased.
She looked over at Jeff, hoping he was getting what was going on from her half of the conversation. The significance of the name would be lost on him, though. “She didn’t say anything on the phone this morning.”
“Why would she?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m not going to do anything. This is my life now.”
“Well, you have to figure out what happened.”
“That’s first on my to-do list.”
They said goodbye and she clicked the phone off, setting it down on the console between them.
“Very interesting,” Jeff said. “So he’s married to the daughter of that woman he can’t stand? Your friend?”
She nodded.
“He can’t be too happy about that. Wow. How do you go to your wife and ask her how you got together?”
“I bet they met while Rosalynn was doing her research at his museum. That would make sense.�
��
They drove a few minutes in silence, then Jeff shook his head. “No, that can’t be all it was. If you think about it, the Museum is there and he knows he works there. So your friend could’ve been doing her research there in Dexter’s reality. Something else changed that put Dexter and her daughter together.”
“What do you mean, in Dexter’s reality?” she asked. There were starting to be a lot of levels here.
“I’m going to say this out loud – see if it makes sense. We made a change in 1831 without Dexter there. When we caught up with him, he was already aware of the new reality. Then, we get back here and somehow there’s another reality – the one where he’s married. But he didn’t know about that one. And neither did we. So that change had to have taken place while all three of us were in 1770.”
The logic actually made her brain hurt. “Not a lot happened while we were there. Not that we could trace to the present, at least. We’ll have to think about that.”
Another pause. She knew Jeff was trying to plot the reality map. For her, there was way too much going on for her to even want to delve into it. The interpretation could wait until Dexter got some more information.
Finally, Jeff spoke. “Well, he said she corrected him in front of people and then they had a screaming match. Sounds like a mother-in-law to me.”
Erica laughed. “It’ll probably be a while before he really knows how he feels about all of this. Believe me, it takes some settling in. I know.” She wanted to get the dig in, but realized she could probably only push her own frustrations so far if they were to stay on course, so she said, “He didn’t sound upset that we left,” she said.
He shook his head. “No, he wasn’t. Actually, he didn’t seem too upset about anything.”
“You’ll see him in two days?”
“Yeah, he says after a couple days of what he called ‘orientation’ he’ll want to discuss this in person so he can make some sense of it. So he’s going to drive up to New York the day after tomorrow. Use tomorrow to get to know himself.”
Fortune Page 23