Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  And then a malicious twinkle came into his eyes as the last skein of the tangle unraveled itself. He couldn’t lose! For the machine had come to be built. He was here, installed in the Annexe, with all the resources at his disposal to build it, while the other Abercrombie was somewhere outside in the cold. Therefore, somewhere in the strange convolution of causes and effects that he didn’t pretend to grasp yet, events must have shuffled themselves out in such a way that he had obtained the information he needed—and hence the other Abercrombie, presumably, had not.

  But the other Abercrombie would just as certainly know all this, and yet was out there somewhere, unable to change it. Knowing himself, he pictured the rage of frustration that the other version of him must be experiencing at that very moment. Not a pleasant character to cross, he told himself. Better be careful not to bump into him. A frown darkened his face then. But wasn’t he destined to become that version eventually, and have to undergo the same frustration? Surely not. If knowledge had any value at all, there had to be a way to avoid it. But there was no way to be sure of any answer at present. He turned away from the window and sat down at the desk to consider his plans. One step at a time, he told himself again. Just follow where it leads.

  The police found his car abandoned less than a mile away. Late that night, wearing dark coveralls and a woolen hat, Abercrombie parked by the remains of the warehouse building, forced a gap through the fence, and followed around the outside until he found an opening under a tilted slab of concrete that gave access to what was left of the cellars. Using a flashlight, he worked his way down to a part of the center gallery that had survived, and from there found a collapsed room almost buried in rubble and mud still wet from yesterday’s hoses. On poking around, he discovered a run of pipes low on one wall, and beneath them a row of recesses between the support mountings, almost like pigeon holes. A perfect place!

  The first slot that he examined was empty, but the one next to it was blocked by a brick outlined in the congealed muck—just as would have been placed by somebody wanting to conceal something. He pried the brick loose with a jackknife he had brought, and pulled it clear to uncover a rectangular shape. It proved to be the end of a flat, plastic-wrapped metal box. His hands shaking, for surely this couldn’t mean what a rising premonition was already telling him it did, he slid the catch from the hasp and opened the lid of the box to reveal . . . a notebook and documents!

  But they weren’t his. Flipping rapidly though them, he found names and pseudonyms, addresses, contact numbers, and a section on what looked like codes and encryption procedures, but none of it was familiar. This wasn’t possible, he told himself. He couldn’t have reasoned things through and have gotten this close, only to have it all go wrong now.

  All but whimpering aloud in dismay, he turned the flashlight beam back and prodded frantically among the other recesses. And sure enough, the next one along was also closed by a mud-encased brick, which also divulged a package. And this one, indeed, turned out to contain a full set of copies of the information from his master notebook! Exultation swept over him. No other version of himself had materialized to interfere. His only thought now was to leave, before anything could go amiss. Stuffing his finds into a bag that he had brought for the purpose, he clambered back to the gallery and picked his way up through to the opening that led back outside. His car was there, untouched, and he left without incident.

  Even after his success, Abercrombie was mindful of the presence of his other self still at large somewhere, probably bordering on homicidal by now and capable of causing mischief. He approached Eli Zaltzer to say that the problems were resolved and the project could move ahead as scheduled. However, he had reason to believe there was some kind of opposition movement afoot who had gotten wind of the project and were opposed to it. In view of the precedents seen in recent times of protest groups sabotaging scientific research that they disagreed with, perhaps security around the lab should be tightened up. Zaltzer talked to the authorities, who were ever ready to appease his whims, and a private security firm was contracted to provide twenty-four-hour guards for Abercrombie’s lab and office area, and to control access. His life became a fever of activity day and night, and as weeks passed by, the machine began taking shape in the center of the workshop.

  And during that time, there were indeed several attempts by unknown persons to get into the labs. On one occasion, an alleged repairman who had come to check the air-conditioning produced credentials that didn’t pass scrutiny, and on checking turned out not to be from the company he claimed. Abercrombie himself was elsewhere that day and so wasn’t able to confront the imposter, and a slick lawyer intervened who prevented the security people from detaining him, so his identity was never established. But the description didn’t sound anything like Abercrombie, and Mrs. Crawford confirmed it. So his other self was using fronts to test the waters, Abercrombie concluded.

  Another time, somebody actually did get in under cover of what was almost certainly a contrived power failure, but one of the guards accosted him, and he got away without accomplishing anything. Inwardly, Abercrombie was impressed by what was, after all, effectively his own resourcefulness in an area where he had no prior knowledge or experience. He had never suspected that he had such talents in him.

  And eventually the day came when the machine was ready for the first live tests.

  Eli Zaltzer had to be there to see it, naturally. So was Howard Jaffey, the dean, along with Susan Peters and Mario Venasky, two other members of the faculty. Abercrombie briefed them, cautioning them to stand back, and announced that he was initiating a control program in the machine that would activate automatically ten minutes from now and send the machine back that far in time. Everyone watched the open area of floor expectantly. Moments later, an eerie whine filled the room, and a copy of the machine appeared beside the first. Even Abercrombie, though he had seen tangible evidence before that it would work, was astonished.

  “My God!” Venasky breathed, staring pop-eyed. “It’s real. I mean, really real.”

  Susan Peters was staring at Abercrombie with a mixture of awe and mortification. “Aylmer . . . you were right all along. The things some of us said behind your back for all that time . . . I’ll never know how to make it right now.”

  “Quite understandable,” Abercrombie condescended in a paternal tone.

  “There, you see!” Zaltzer pronounced triumphantly. “I am not the nutball that you think I don’t know you think. Next we talk about changing the name to Zaltzer University. Okay?”

  Howard Jaffey just stood gaping, without, just for the moment, being able to say anything.

  In the stupefied words and semicoherent comments that followed, nothing really meaningful was said through the next few minutes, at which point Abercrombie, enjoying his role as master of the show, called one of the security guards in from outside and said they needed help to move the machines. Looking puzzled but asking no questions (up till then there had been only one machine), the guard draped his jacket over a nearby chair. Then, following Abercrombie’s directions, Jaffey and Venasky shifted the duplicate machine a few feet farther from the original, while Abercrombie and the guard moved the original into the space where the duplicate had stood. The guard turned to leave at that point, but Abercrombie’s intoxication made him crave a greater audience. “No, stay,” he commanded. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Twenty-four hours from now, the whole world will be talking about this.”

  The guard waited obediently. Moments later, the original machine suddenly emitted a series of warning beeps followed by its characteristic whine, and then popped out of existence. At the same instant, a new voice from somewhere shouted “Get down!” in such an imperative tone that everyone automatically obeyed—just as the gun holstered in the guard’s jacket still hanging over the chair exploded, sending bullets ricocheting around the room.

  “Calm down, all of you. It was just an oversight,” the voice continued, while they were picking themselves up and
looking about dazedly. Another machine had materialized, this time with a copy of Abercrombie inside. He made no effort to contain a look of smug amusement at the expressions on the others’ faces. Even Abercrombie-One was stunned. “The varichron radiation induced by the process evidently triggers unstable materials like cartridge caps,” Abercrombie-Two went on. “Now that we are aware of the fact, we will know to avoid such instances in future.”

  Abercrombie-One was about to ask how far in the future his other self had come from, when A-Two looked at him loftily and supplied, “Thirty minutes.”

  A-One collected his wits raggedly. But it made sense. “Which you knew I was about to ask, because you were me,” he said.

  “Exactly,” A-Two confirmed.

  “So in the next thirty minutes I’ll figure out it was the radiation that did it, and decide it’s something we can work around?”

  “No, you won’t have to. I’ve already told you.”

  “In the same way you were told?”

  “Yes.”

  A-One still couldn’t make sense of it. His other self had the advantage of having had more time to think it through, which irked him—and which, from the expression on the other self’s face, the other self was also well aware of. “So I presume too that you also know how irritatingly supercilious you appear just at this moment?” A-One said.

  “Of course,” A-Two agreed. “But then I don’t care, because I can assure you that you’ll enjoy it every bit as much as I am right now, when you come to be me.”

  Harold Jaffey was finally managing to find his voice. “This is crazy,” he croaked. “How can he tell you what you’ll do, like some kind of robot executing a program? You’re a human being with free will, for heaven’s sake. What happens if you plumb decide you’re not going to do it?”

  Susan Peters was frowning, trying to reason it through. “No machine or copy of you came back from, let’s say, an hour ahead of now. But what’s to stop us setting the machine to do that, just like you did before? Let’s go ahead and do it. So why isn’t it here?” She directed her words at Abercrombie-One. He didn’t know either, and looked appealingly at Abercrombie Two, as if the extra thirty minutes might have conferred some superior insight.

  “Those are the kinds of things we’ll be testing in the weeks ahead,” A-Two told them. “But for now, enough of the mundane and methodical. I’ve been shut up in this lab, working virtually nonstop for three months.” He went over to Zaltzer and draped an arm around his shoulder. “This is the man who believed in me, and he’ll share in the glory. Tonight, Eli, we’ll go out and celebrate, and talk about how this will be the sensation of the century. Tomorrow we’ll be the talk of the world.”

  This was becoming infuriating. “You seem to be taking over,” Abercrombie-One told his other self peevishly. “Might I remind you that I had some little part in bringing this about too?”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t really come into things, because in a little under thirty minutes from now, you won’t be here, will you?” A-Two replied.

  That did it. “And suppose I refuse to go back?” A-One challenged. He folded his arms and sent Jaffey a look that said, Good point .Let’s try it right now. “What are you going to do—hit me over the head and throw me into the machine?” he asked A-Two. “Even that wouldn’t work. You came out of it in good shape.”

  A-Two grinned back as if he had been expecting it—which of course he had. “Later, is when we test the paradoxes,” he said. “You know as well as I know how full of uncertainties this whole business is. We pursue it methodically and systematically, isn’t that what we’ve always said? And now you want to jeopardize years of work by giving in to a fit of pique. Is that what you want?”

  A-One felt himself losing ground at hearing his own often-reiterated principles recited back at him. But it would need more yet to dissuade him. “A cheap debater’s ploy,” he pronounced. “You’ll have to try better than that, Aylmer.”

  “No I don’t. All that’s needed is for you to think about it. You’ve got about twenty minutes to figure out that if somebody doesn’t go back and warn them, some of these friends of yours back there might very well get killed. I don’t know the ins and outs of the logic either, yet. That’s what we have to look into. But for now, are you going to risk it—just for the sake of that stubbornness of yours?”

  A-One felt himself wilting. He knew already, with a sinking feeling, what the outcome would be, as he could read his other self knew perfectly well also. He didn’t need twenty minutes. He was trapped.

  “All right,” he said in a voice that could have cut seasoned teak. “I’ll do it.”

  But Abercrombie’s elation had subsided into gloom and wistfulness by the time he and Zaltzer sat down to what was to have been their celebration dinner at the five-star Atherton Hotel in the heart of the city. “The most staggering discovery in the history of physics, Eli,” he lamented. “When it happened, we said that the world would know. I had a list of all the names, the contacts . . .”

  Zaltzer nodded enthusiastically “Yes, I know. You showed it to me. It—” He checked himself as he saw the look on Abercrombie’s face. “Why, Aylmer? What happened?” “I never told you this before. But there was a period . . . you remember when I almost put everything on hold? Oh, it’s a long story. But it seemed everything was over.” Abercrombie looked up. “The short answer is, I destroyed it.”

  “What?”

  “The file with all the lists. I burned it.”

  For a few moments Zaltzer seemed taken aback. Then his irrepressible ebullience resurfaced as always. He waved a hand. “So . . . the announcement won’t be as widespread as you planned. I still have contacts. We’ll get the word around. It’s hardly the Dark Ages.”

  “But it won’t be the same,” Abercrombie said. “The lists I had prepared were the work of years. Not just the regular media hacks—with respect, Eli, but you know what I mean. They covered the whole scientific establishment too: Nobel laureates, directors of the national labs, national advisors . . .” This time it was Abercrombie’s turn to break off as he saw that Zaltzer wasn’t listening but staring across the table suddenly with a strange, inscrutable smile. “What is it?’ Abercrombie asked. “What do you find so funny?”

  “You’ve already forgotten this afternoon,” Zaltzer told him. “Your own machine. You don’t have to be without your file now, Aylmer. You can go back and get it!”

  The problem was, Abercrombie had no way of knowing just what days in the past, or times in the day—it was over three months ago now—he should aim for to avoid running into people and being apprehended. To compound the difficulty, the short-range tests that were all he had experimented with so far did little to help him calibrate for longer hops back, and he was unable to set an arrival time with accuracy, even if he had known which one to select. His first few attempts were cut short when he realized he had been detected—on one occasion culminating in a narrow escape when an earlier version of himself actually chased him, and he escaped only by remembering that he had used the fire extinguisher. (He never was able to work out who had thought of that.)

  But he persevered, and eventually succeeded in rematerializing in the workshop at a time when the surroundings seemed empty and quiet. He still didn’t know exactly when it was; and even if he had, he had no way of knowing what his earlier self had been doing on that particular day, and hence how much time he was likely to have. He needed to get out of the Annexe and to his apartment, which was where the folder was, make copies of the contents, conceal them in the cellars of the pre-demolition customs building nearby, and then get back to the machine with the original folder, and away. Planting the backup seemed a bit odd now, he had to admit, if by that time he was going to have the original in his possession; but he had resolved to adhere rigidly to his plan. He was taking no chances. The thing that would tell him what he had been doing that day would be his appointments diary, which was usually in his public office.

  He came out of the wor
kshop and padded toward the main-elevator end of the lab area. When he was about halfway there, the door at the far end of the corridor opened, and Mrs. Crawford came through. Abercrombie froze; but she gave him only a cursory look and disappeared into one of the offices. As he began moving again, she thrust her head back out. “The FedEx package that you were waiting for from Chicago has arrived,” she informed him.

  “It has?” He had no idea what she was talking about. “Thank you. I’ll pick it up later.” Mrs. Crawford’s head disappeared back through the doorway. Abercrombie scuttled quickly to his office, found the diary, and retreated with it to his private office at the far end of the facility.

  That had been the day when he’d gone downstairs to review Qualio and Turnel’s project assignment, the diary told him. He thought back. He had spent over an hour with them in the prototype lab, he recalled, and then lunched in the cafeteria. He had enough time. But he couldn’t afford to leave the machine standing in the workshop that long, inviting discovery. He went back and sent it away under automatic control to a quiet period in the middle of the night, programmed to return after ninety minutes. The alarm on his watch would warn him fifteen minutes before it was due to reappear.

  He left the building via the back stairs and drove home using the keys already in his pocket. The same keys let him into his apartment, where he retrieved the contacts folder and took it to a commercial copying store to make the backup.