After and Again

by McLellan, Michael

  While washing up in the shallow stream Zack saw a large crayfish crawl under a rock beneath the water. He turned the rock over and grabbed the crayfish between its body and its tail to avoid the pincers and tossed it up on the bank. Wading out and turning more rocks he was easily able to find enough for his dinner.

  His dinner cooked and eaten he laid back against the saddle that Toby Martin had loaned him and opened his pack. He took out the two books that he had packed and examined them. The first one was called The Winter of our Discontent by someone named Steinbeck. Zack read the back and thought that it was a made-up story like The Wizard Oz. He set this aside and picked up the next one; it was called Mysteries of the Deep and it indicated that it was a book about the ocean. Zack had heard about the ocean from travelers and from other books that he had read, but didn’t think that he would ever go there. He set this book aside as well, marveling over how new they both looked. Next he took out the tube shaped object that he was sure was some kind of light. It may be worn out like the one on the wall in the cave he thought to himself turning it over in his hand. There was a small plastic piece on the side, which he slid back and forth. He then fumbled with the end that had the glass on it and found that it would unscrew and could be removed. As he took this piece off the tiny bulb inside fell onto his lap. He gingerly picked the bulb up and put it back into the hole that it fell out of, and then screwed the piece with the glass lens in it back on. The opposite end had a metal arm set into it that would flip out on a small hinge. Once the arm was out it had another smaller arm set into it that also flipped out on a small hinge. When both arms were out it was obvious to Zack that you were supposed to turn it like a crank, which he did; on the first turn there was a weak light from the end with the glass. Smiling now, Zack turned the handle faster and the light brightened to a brilliant white. He stopped turning the handle and the light stayed on. Completely fascinated now he slid the plastic protrusion on the side and the light went out. A switch, of course.

  With the sun fully set Zack set the light down beside him and continued going through his pack. He took out the chewing gum package, which actually had six smaller packages inside and opened it. He opened one of the smaller packages and could smell mint like his mother grew in the rear yard and used in tea. There were twelve more packages inside that turned out to be individually wrapped pieces of some sort of candy. It said “chewing gum” so he opened one and chewed it. It tasted wonderful, but no matter how much he chewed, it never got any smaller or broke down. “Ha, chewing gum,” he said aloud to no one.

  Finally Zack took the pistol box out of the backpack, setting it on the bedroll that he had laid out to sit on and opened the box. He removed the pistol and held it up, looking closely at the plain black finish. He thought of killing the men who murdered most of his townsfolk and kidnapped his mother and Emily. Probably kidnapped them, Toby Martins voice spoke in his head. He believed that they were both still alive. He had to believe it. Setting the pistol in his lap, he took the small book out of the box and began to read it. The cover said: “Instructions for the use and care of your Remington automatic pistol.” Zack spent the next hour reading the manual. Once, the light started going dim and he had to crank the handle until it was bright again. He then spent another hour putting into practice what he had read. He did everything outside of firing the pistol, occasionally referring to the book. He dismantled the pistol as if he was going to clean it, he removed the magazine and loaded it with cartridges from one of the boxes that he had brought. He tested the safety mechanism. Feeling comfortable with the weapon but wishing that he could test fire it (he didn’t in fear that it would be heard across the plains) he re-packed everything back in the pistol box except for the pistol itself and stowed the box back in the pack. The pistol he kept out, wishing that he had a holster like the Wild West Cowboy had that performed in Payne’s Station that time when he was younger.

  Zack, beginning to grow tired now, pushed the pack up by the saddle, laid the pistol on the blanket from his bedroll and got up and kicked apart the already dying campfire. He walked a ways away from his camp to do his necessary, burying it when he was finished like his father had taught him. “Vermin leave their scat laying about, Zackary, not men. Remember that.” His father had said that to him on their first hunting trip together. He walked back toward the camp in the darkness using the fading campfire embers as a reference point. Grace chuffed and he saw her silhouetted near the camp, foraging done for the night. He walked to her and stroked her neck for a few moments and talked to her softly before moving back to his bedroll. He sat down, removed his boots, and leaned over to set them next to the saddle when he noticed a green glow coming from his backpack. It was the small plastic/metal box that he had hooked to the pack. He had forgotten about it with everything that had happened and somehow had missed it hanging there when he had gone through the pack earlier. There was a tiny green light glowing brightly on the metal side of the object. He touched the light and jumped up suddenly, his heart beating wildly in his chest: A voice was coming from the box.

  “Greetings my new friend, how exciting it is not knowing whether someone picked up this device an hour from now, a year from now, or a hundred years from now. Who knows, maybe a thousand years from now. Of course recently I have discovered, sadly at the expense of most of the human race, that time is, well… A little more flexible than I once imagined. There is also the possibility that no one has found it at all and I am leaving this message for naught, but the law of probabilities dictates that someone will find it eventually provided that there is someone left to find it. There is also another scenario; there is a chance that this recording and all of the other things that I am leaving here won’t be here at all, because I never even left them! But we will get to that shortly. Now if it hasn’t been very long then you probably know how to work the device that I am currently speaking into and that you are, sometime in the future of course, listening to. If however it has been say, a hundred years then I guess that you inadvertently charged the device by putting it in the sun. Going under that assumption I will give a brief tutorial. To listen to what is on the recorder just push the button with the green light on it, which obviously you have already done. To stop the playback simply push the same button again. To go back push the button with the left facing arrows and to go forward push the button with the right facing arrows. As I have already alluded to, putting the device in the sun… umm, black side up, will charge the powercell so the device can be used. It actually does a great many other things but you would need a mother comp and I am sure that you probably don’t have one handy whatever year you may be living in….”

  Zack pushed the green button and stood there in the dark staring at the device with flat out awe. He had heard that the people from the old days had many amazing things, he had even seen some things for himself, like the lamps in the Martin house that were supposed to work by electricity that the people used to capture from lightning. He had seen the light bulb in the cave actually light up for a moment. Then there was the tube light that he had found in the cave that still worked. There were automobiles that were like wagons that didn’t need horses….but this, this was a real person from back then; from the old days. He sat down again and pushed the lighted button on the device.

  “… It is currently the year 2046, nine years after some very stupid people did some very stupid things and destroyed most of the planet. When I was a teenager- I am forty eight now, the world was run by governments. Governments in case you don’t know, for the most part were regular citizens who had the desire to be in charge of things and had formed bodies with other people who liked to be in charge of things to make laws and such. Later on, after most of the governments proved themselves too corrupt or too inept to run things, the corporations started taking over. Corporations are businesses, very large businesses run by people whose interest is in making money. Which by the way there isn’t any of anymore, money that is…. er, corporations either for that matter
. Paah, anyway, what I am trying to say is that governments at least mostly tried to do the right thing, corporations on the other hand just wanted more. More money, more power, more everything. Anyway, by 2030 or so the corporations were pretty much running the show, even though in most places it still looked like the governments were still doing their jobs. The insatiable greed and thirst for power of these corporations eventually caused a war, or an accident, who can be sure which? The outcome was the same regardless: Weapons of unspeakable power that could never even have been tested were unleashed upon the world.

  Eighteen of them we think, but really it could have been quite a few more. We will use that number as there is no one at hand to argue our estimate. Eighteen of these bombs were sent racing to earth from satellites in space… from the sky, for you future-ites that have no idea what a satellite is, which is why I have saved books, but I will get to that later. These eighteen bombs were so powerful that they annihilated entire countries and ripped holes in the very fabric of the universe. The planet has been thrown into chaos, possibly the earth has been skewed on its axis. We endured earthquakes almost daily for months afterward. From satellite pictures—while we could still receive them—we saw places that were completely swallowed by the ocean and super-cell hurricanes by the dozens. Our estimates were eighty five percent, give or take a few million, of all living things on the planet were vaporized instantly, and many many millions more I would venture to say, have died since.

  I have spent my life since the cataclysm collecting things that can be saved and used, most particularly books, of which I have over one thousand stashed away in this cave, along with hundreds of other items and foodstuffs. The books and the other items should stay preserved for hundreds if not thousands of years, due to the handy vacuum tubs that I have liberated from my previous place of employment. I was an engineer and a physicist you see, for a space exploration corporation and I was working underground when the rather short thirty-minute or so event began. Our location was at the very farthest edge of the blast radius of one of the bombs and it still managed to completely destroy every single above-ground structure. Myself and seventeen others of which I am now the sole survivor, crawled out after a few days, started picking up what pieces we could, and proceeded with our new, radically different lives.

  We found the space/time rip, what some may call a wormhole, completely by mistake. As a group of scientists we had decided to study the closest blast areas—kind of a life still having a purpose thing. We used the underground portion of our research compound as sort of a base of operations at first because it had a generator, computers, a gasoline and diesel supply, three very nice Land Rovers, and other miscellaneous research equipment. We were lucky in many ways, food was the biggest problem after the supplies in the cafeteria and vending machines were exhausted. We found that we had to travel farther and farther to find enough to sustain us. Three of our number were killed by other survivors on one such foraging trip. When the huge machine that was modern agriculture and industrialized food processing came to a grinding halt, it was amazing how fast the stores that were not destroyed by the blasts ran dry. Water, for us at least was not an issue. The newer propulsion technology used a great deal of it and we had two underground tanks that held thirty thousand gallons each. We even took to bringing jugs of water on our foraging runs and trading it to others for food.

  We took turns, divided ourselves into groups, with some staying behind and foraging and some leaving for several days to several weeks to study the blast areas. The new bombs were a marvel of science as they were some sort of pure-energy device and a single one was more powerful than a hundred nuclear bombs….”

  Zack noticed that the man, in his reverie, was no longer trying to explain things with language that he could understand. “.…but left no radioactivity; no, this was something new that had somehow been kept a secret from the public. In a world of information leaks, this in and of itself was amazing.

  The first blast area that we visited; ours—that’s what we called it anyway because it was the one that leveled our facility—had a ground zero that was five hundred eighty miles from our home base, which in layman’s terms means that it was destructive over twelve hundred miles from end to end. The center of the blast and outward in any direction for two hundred miles had turned the earth to glass. The smoothest blackest glass that you have ever seen, without a single iota of debris. Then for another two hundred miles give or take, complete devastation with the debris getting a little more recognizable the further away that you traveled. The last of the blast area looked more like your traditional bomb damage with buildings from completely leveled to minimally damaged.

  The find however, the most amazing and wonderful thing that anyone has ever seen, born of such hideous destruction that even now, years later, I can barely fathom the depth of it, was a tear, a rip if you will, in the very fabric of existence.

  I was on the study detail along with four others. We had previously driven north from ground zero of our blast area, and discovered that after we got to the outer range of the blast that the debris field started looking more like we were getting closer to the epicenter instead of farther away. We deduced that we were entering another blast area and we simply named this second one Blast Area 2. We were in an area of gently sloping hills when Marjorie Joinner, the only female survivor of our group noticed a blacked out place on the horizon. To this day I find it the most difficult thing that I have ever tried to describe. All I can say is that if you took a standard four inch by eight inch photograph of some rolling grassy hills, then blacked out a spot about the size of your pinky nail with a felt marker, you would be close to seeing what we first witnessed that day.” Again, Zack had no idea what a felt marker was but he got the gist of it.

  We all sat in silence for the hour that it took us to get to the site. There was no road out where we were and we had to bounce along slowly with the four-wheel drive engaged. There was something….something primal, no that’s not right; something instinctual in all of us that knew that we were about to witness something of monumental proportions. We could no longer see any signs of the blasts, the rolling hills looked like they had for a millennia outside of the strange black mark ahead of us. We stopped the car a hundred feet or so from the site. We all exited the vehicle and without a word between us walked toward the floating blackness.

  It was about twelve feet tall by eight feet wide but not symmetrical, a bit wavy, and it was wider at the top than the bottom but the edges were not well defined; they seemed to fade from the deepest black imaginable to nothing. The blackness appeared almost viscous, as if you put your hand in it would come out covered in the stuff. Paul Nesbitt, the man who had been my boss in our previous life broke the silence by saying, “Back away if you want to,” and picked up a rock and tossed it into the blackness. I immediately begun to walk around to the back side giving the edge a wide berth and was momentarily stopped; when I passed a certain point it simply disappeared. If I walked back a couple of steps it would re-appear. It really boggled the senses. Once I got behind it I could see Paul, although he was standing in front of it, I asked Paul to toss another rock—which he did—and I reflexively stepped aside because it appeared that he was throwing the rock at right at me. Then nothing, the rock was simply gone.

  The next obvious test was to send something in that we could retrieve. We chose a rubber sandal that belonged to Marjorie as she had somehow lost the other one anyway. We tied the sandal to a length of nylon rope and tossed it in. After a few moments we simply pulled it back, there was no accompanying sound, no black goo stuck to it, and it was negative for radiation. The next move came pretty naturally to inquisitive minds such as ours. We drew straws….well, sticks anyway, we didn’t have any straws, and yours truly drew the short one and had to touch the black. I walked up to the thing and did not hesitate lest I lose my nerve and stuck my arm in all the way to my elbow. There was a strange sensation that made me draw back immediately but I was unharme
d. It felt like an extremely low voltage electric shock. Having survived the test, I turned briefly to my cohorts, held my breath, and walked into the black.

  There was that spilt second electric shock feeling and I was standing in a forest, my face a mere inches from a very large tree. I suddenly felt extremely faint and sat down hard on my backside. I had just passed through to another place, and I was so completely overwhelmed that for a moment my mind felt stretched to its limit. After a moment I had gotten hold of myself and took a look around with a scientist’s eye. It was a deciduous forest, and dawn, not past noon like where I had just been. Interesting but not very informative, it was time to tell the others. I stood up and turned back toward the blackness and walked through—and was sitting in the Land Rover where we had just parked upon arrival at the site! I was confused and elated and sick to my stomach all at once. I pushed my way out of the vehicle and promptly vomited on my shoes. After I had composed myself somewhat, I explained everything to my companions who immediately thought me mad. By spending roughly one minute on the other side of the blackness, I had traveled back in time one hour! Now to my cohort’s credit, they wanted to believe me, but you must understand, it was an extremely difficult idea to take on faith. So even though I explained to them the results of the initial experiments they insisted on doing them anyway.

  Meanwhile I was attempting to puzzle out what had just transpired. I had changed things by going back in time. We had performed the experiments once, and I had led them. Now, they were performing the same experiments again headed by Paul Nesbitt—and none of them remembered having already done them, because they really hadn’t done them yet! I went into the past and changed the future!” Well, naturally the ramifications began flooding my mind: I had gone through at precisely one eighteen p.m. now, if someone else went through after these repeated/not repeated experiments, at say one fifteen p.m. then we again would be back in the Land Rover, just approaching the site, and I would have no memory of everything that I just explained and I would be thinking the other person mad who was trying to convince me that they had just traveled back in time.” The man paused for a moment and breathed heavily as if catching his breath, then continued.