The man stopped, tipped his hat, revealing dark hair slicked to his skull and parted in the middle. “Bonjour. You are scientists?” the man said in a French Jake barely understood. Some kind of creole? The woman stood beside him, and the children hid behind, but they peeked around her skirt.
“We are visitors,” Jake said, confused. Why would the man call them scientists? It would only be more startling if he’d called them time travelers. “Yes, scientists, I suppose. Why do you ask?”
“Your clothes, monsieur. The fashion on the continent, I suppose. We don’t get important visitors on the island often.”
“We are safe?” said the woman. Her voice was surprisingly deep. “There is noise at night, and the dust. The children worry.” She waved her hand at the air.
One of the children shook his head. Jake put his hand to his mouth to hide a smile.
“Of course we’re safe,” said the man. “The governor’s family, after all. Would they be within a hundred miles of here if we were not? Come, we will be late. Au voir.”
The man set off at a brisk pace. The woman gathered a child’s hand in each hand, and followed.
“What did you find out?” said Martin. “Did you get a date?”
“No. We’re on an island, though. Not France. And he said something about the continent. A French colony then. And they’re worried about something. He thought we were scientists.”
Martin looked at the road. “There’s no room for an automobile here. No radio or television antennas. Sailing ships in the harbor. We could be in the 1800s.” He laughed. “It worked again, Jake. We’ve slipped time’s surly bonds.”
Unease kept Jake from joining Martin’s joy. The memory lingered too strongly of the growing roar, the flames reaching around the zeppelin’s side. How could they have arrived then and there? A change in the light caught Jake’s attention. Where the sun cut a sharp shadow on the buildings now all was a uniform shade, as if dusk was falling. Rolling like a slow ocean at storm, the clouds squirmed overhead. The two-story buildings standing so close together under a ceiling of black clouds suddenly seemed imprisoning. Jake ran ahead. What hid on the other side? Why were the clouds so strange? He passed an old man in his Sunday best, walking with a heavy limp. A young girl, leading a dog on leash, watched wide-eyed as Jake dashed by.
“What are you doing?” yelled Martin.
Jake reached a junction. Across the street, a small park held cast-iron benches with brightly painted red seats. In a small white gazebo, surrounded by yellow flower beds, a man in military uniform leaned on the railing, smoking a pipe. He tipped his hat at Jake, but Jake’s attention was beyond the gazebo, up and up. Martin joined him. “We should stay together. This is an unfamiliar time, and…”
Beyond the park, beyond and above the rows of houses that made the rest of the city, a mountain rose against the sky, pouring black clouds from its peak. No gentle oozing of clouds either. They catapulted from the shrouded mountain, ascended, caught in a high wind that didn’t reach the ground, and flattened over the town.
Jake strode across the street, into the park, his gaze trapped by the silent display. The mountain was close, no more than five miles. Houses in rows lapped against the sloping flank of it. How quiet the town was. None of the seabirds called out. Water in the bay made no sound under the docks. Only his muffled footfalls in the dusty grass. His own breathing.
On the gazebo, the soldier watched Jake’s approach.
“Where are we?” Jake demanded. He gripped the gazebo’s railing as if to vault himself beside the soldier, a teenager, by his unlined face, so new to his uniform that he looked uncomfortable in it.
“Martinique,” said the man with a rise in his voice, like he had asked a question.
Nervelessly, Jake’s hand fell away from the painted wood. All the horizon held was the mountain and its billowing performance. “What town is this?” he nearly whispered. Martin walked to the gazebo’s side, staring at the volcano.
Puzzled, the young man said, “It is St. Pierre. My company is here to proctor the election.”
“Oh, no,” said Jake. “We’ve done it again.”
Martin turned back to him. “What?”
“I know the mountain.”
From somewhere in the town behind them, a church bell rang out, breaking the silence with its somber tolling.
The soldier laughed nervously. “The Angelus bells. I must be going, monsieur.”
“That’s Mount Pelee, isn’t it?” said Jake in English. “C’est Mont Pelee?” He grabbed the soldier’s arm as he went down the steps. Under the heavy flannel uniform, the man’s arm felt slender. He’s just a boy, thought Jake.
“Yes, Pelee. I must go to the cathedral,” said the young man. “I’m already late.”
Jake’s computer said, Mt. Pelee exploded in… A thunderous clap of sound overwhelmed the rest of the message.
On the mountain, a cloud wall boiled down the slope, its folds and wrinkles glowing like veins on fire. Trees vanished behind it. Within seconds, the upper half of the prominence became all cloud, rolling down, swallowing land, obscuring what before had been clear. Martin said, “Should we be worried about that? What is it?”
The soldier wrenched free from Jake’s grasp, glanced over his shoulder at the mountain, then ran down the street, away from the engulfing cloud. In its squeaky voice, the computer recited a litany of facts.
Jake didn’t move. Didn’t even twitch. His thoughts slowed down and felt cold to him. Emotionless. “Pyroclastic flow.” Another explosion ripped the hidden mountain top.
Martin took a step back. “Will it reach us?”
“In about two minutes.” Near the peak, the smoke radiated an incandescent orange, and a series of smaller detonations like cannon fire rattled the park. Jake’s insides had emptied. Had the family with the two little boys reached the church yet? If they were lucky, they had time for a short prayer. The computer talked to him. Twenty-nine thousand people would die in the next few minutes: the governor and his wife, in town to calm the population, the scientists who pronounced the volcano safe, the farmers who had fled fields where crops had died in the weeks of ash fall, the people who’d abandoned villages close to the mountain for the safety of St. Pierre, all of them would be gone. Only a prisoner in a basement cell would survive. Rescuers would find him days later, horribly burned, crying weakly from beneath the jail’s rubble. “Geologists call it nuee ardente, the glowing cloud. Super-heated air and volcanic ash traveling a hundred miles an hour. Strong enough to knock down buildings. So hot that breathing it boils the lungs.”
“How did we get here?” shouted Martin above the growing roar. Furious, he glared at the cloud that reached the town’s edge, hiding homes and shops and factories. “This is not random at all!” He touched the button inside his shirt, vanished.
Jake could feel the fear around him. If he turned, citizens would be on the street, drawn by the noise. The cathedral would empty. Hymn books in hand, they’d be waiting. Children, grandparents, craftsmen, soldiers, wives. Trash in the street beyond the park stirred. Now, all was dark. As if it contained a thousand freight trains rumbling headlong down their doomed tracks, the mountain bellowed.
Before the heat. Before the flesh-stripping wind. Jake pressed the button within his shirt.
Without taking his hand off the monitor input, Jake flicked from one image to the next, grainy black and white photographs of buildings without roofs, all the windows gone, bricks scattered in the street, and everywhere, bodies burned black. “They had plenty of warning, you know,” he said. “The mountain had been misbehaving for weeks. People had already died. There were mud avalanches and a tidal wave and ash falls, but they didn’t leave. How can you keep your children with you when there are… signs… portents?” He sighed and turned off the monitor. “When there are evil omens in the sky?”
“Damn it, Jake. What’s important here is the impossibility of us showing up at two disasters. History is mostly boring, repetitious,
day after day existence where people go about their ordinary lives. Historic events are rare. How could we possibly be present for two of them in a row?”
“I don’t know what the science is, here. Brownson’s math looks more like chants and incantations to me than physics anyway. We built a machine that we don’t understand. I wonder if Brownson even knew. If only we could ask him.”
Martin swore and slapped his notebook closed. “The one-armed bastard. Maybe if he hadn’t been so cryptic with us, we’d have a better chance of figuring it out.” He paced around the lab, head down. “We’ve been time travelers for all of what, ten minutes total? Both times we’ve been scared. We’re not thinking straight.” He paused, looked at Jake. “We need rationality. We were never in danger. We could come back to the lab anytime.” He paced again, circling their work table, passing behind Jake at the monitor. “Here’s the problem: we only have two points on the graph. We can’t reach a conclusion without more information. I say we try again.”
The blank screen looked back at Jake, but he could still picture the old images from centuries past. He’d never thought of the people who’d lived before as people, really. Those lives were abstractions. Nothing to do with him. But he could see them now, the living, beating, desperately intense faces from the past, trying to avoid their fates, staring down the rushing pyroclastic cloud burning toward them at a hundred miles an hour, or on the Hindenburg, waiting for the ground to come close enough so they could jump, not knowing if the raging hydrogen and diesel-fueled fire would reach them first.
“I don’t want to visit the dead anymore,” he said.
Martin put his hands on the back of Jake’s chair. He could see Martin’s reflection in the monitor overlaying the ghost images of a destroyed town. “I told you already, they were dead before we started. We’re dead, Jake, to someone in our future, but you’re thinking about it all wrong. They’re alive too. Everything they’ve ever done is still being done. Nothing is in the past now. It’s all redoable. Replayable.”
He checked the equipment strapped across his chest under his shirt. “We have to go again, and we need to do it now. I can’t tell from Brownson’s figures why it’s working. So much of his calculations are about the paradoxes, and they’re a waste. ‘Solve the paradox!’ he said. ‘Solve the paradox!’ There’s no paradox. We’ve traveled, but we can’t guarantee we can keep doing it. Maybe the Earth has to be in the right place in its orbit. Maybe the atmospheric conditions have to be just perfect. If we don’t go now, we might not be able to go again.”
For a moment, Jake didn’t stir. It was like the weight of Mount Pelee coming toward him and nothing mattered. He pushed away from the monitor and faced Martin. Finally, he nodded. Martin was right, he was dead any way he figured it.
At first Jake thought he’d gone blind until he saw the nearly full moon through thin clouds. A cold wind pushed against his face. He took a step, kicked something yielding, and a sleepy voice said, “Watch it, goll darn ya. Can’t a soldier get a decent sleep anywhere on this boat?”
Standing still, Jake listened until his eyes adapted to the pale light. Water sloshed heavily to both sides. A substantial pounding vibrated the floor beneath his feet, and before the first faint lights grew visible on the shore a couple hundred yards away, he’d already decided they were on a steamboat near the bow. He turned his back to the wind. Moonlight revealed twin gray smokestacks belching smoke and sparks above a pilot’s cabin, and dark forms that covered the deck like a lumpy landscape. He looked down. The man he’d kicked had rolled onto his side, pulling a thin blanket over him. The bundles were men sleeping on nearly every inch of exposed surface. Walking without stepping on someone would be hard.
“When and where are we?” said Martin.
“Someplace that’s going to sink soon, or catch fire, or be attacked,” Jake said.
Martin grunted. “I should have brought a coat.”
“Go back and get one.” On the shore, ghostly trees touched their branches to the water. A lone cabin, a dim light flickering in its window, peeked out from the woods. On the boat’s other side, the river reflected the moon like a long, undulating silver plate until it vanished in a low fog that hovered just off the surface. The air smelled cool, wet and muddy.
“Big river. Steamboat. English spoken here. The Mississippi.” Martin strode over a silent shape, careful not to step on it. Jake followed. Gingerly they moved toward the shore-side railing. Men sat up there, some leaning their heads on the shoulders of others. Some talked among themselves.
“He’s dead, the bastards,” said one. No one replied. “A coward’s shot, I tell ya. A yella deed, it was.”
Jake took a place at the rail. Below, the river flowed past slowly. The ship’s headway was gradual. The cabin on shore crept astern.
“You’ll feel better when we hit Cairo and head home,” said another voice.
“Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, Evansville. What’s it matter? Dead is dead.”
Farther down the boat, the paddle wheel churned, digging into the water with quick, ponderous movement.
“You didn’t even vote for him.”
“I would’ve.”
Dampness on the rail chilled Jake’s arms. The only warmth was Martin standing beside him, blocking the wind.
“Who is dead?” said Martin.
A log with one crooked branch sticking out like a bony, broken bone drifted by only thirty feet away. At the end opposite the branch, a pair of birds, their beaks tucked under wing, huddled side by side. “The president, ya cracker. Ain’t ya talked to anyone? Some southern dog of an actor they say done it.”
Jake leaned back, but the men were swathed in shadow. He couldn’t see who spoke.
“Lincoln?” said Martin. “Are you talking about the assassination of Lincoln?”
Someone snorted in disbelief. “Twarn’t Jefferson Davis.”
Jake’s computer squeaked to life. Before he muted the citation, it said, Abraham Lincoln died on April 14, 1865. John Wilkes Booth fired on the president during a performance….
“How long ago?” said Jake. He couldn’t remember much about the Civil War beyond the obvious. If Lincoln was already dead, then the war was over. Antietam and Gettysburg and Chancellorsville were in the past. Certainly nothing to fear, like the destruction of the Hindenburg or Mt. Pelee erupting. The shooting had ended.
“Don’t know what today is,” said the voice. “Ten days, maybe. Two weeks.”
Jake activated a search for the dates with attention on disasters. A second later, the computer said, At approximately 2:00 a.m., April 27, 1865, the massively overloaded steamboat, Sultana, exploded. At the time it carried approximately 2,100 repatriated Yankee soldiers, most from the Andersonville prison camp. Between 1,700 and 1,900 men died. The voice carried on. Facts, figures.
Jake swallowed hard. “This is the Sultana, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“Would you know what time it is?”
“Don’t know that neither.”
Jake whispered to Martin. “The boat is going to blow up.”
Martin’s head dropped to his arms. “That doesn’t make sense. The figures… the math… random times, Brownson said.”
Closer to the pilot’s cabin, another man slouched on the rail. Jake’s gaze lingered on him. The moon’s light burnished him like a bleached shadow. Was this also a soldier who would never make it home? His posture seemed familiar and out of place.
“We should leave, Jake. An explosion won’t give us time to escape. I need to get to the lab and redo the calculations. I’ve missed something.”
Jake straightened, moved toward the pilot house. A rift in the cloud cover brightened the light for a moment, showing the man’s shirt sewed shut at the shoulder. No arm. Jake thought, these are Civil War veterans; many of them have lost a limb. As he looked at the landscape of sleeping men, he saw a half dozen crutches resting across blankets. Still, Jake’s neck tingled. No empty sleeve dangled from the one-armed man. I
t was gone, sewn up, as if there had never been an arm for that space.
Martin sounded panicked. “I’m going.”
Jake’s back grew cold. Wind brushed against him, and the air felt empty. Without looking, Jake knew that Martin had gone. He approached the man at the rail, stepping over outstretched legs, until he stood next to him.
“You were fools to come. It’s not worth it,” said Brownson. The old man stared into the water, the side of his face a chalky reflection of moon and river air. “How much time did you give yourself?”
“I don’t know, but it can’t be long.” Jake imagined the boilers deep in the ship’s bowels, leaking steam, overpressured, fighting the current and the crowded deck, maybe seconds from ripping at the seams. He put his hand next to Brownson’s, and behind his eyes he felt a sudden pressure. His voice caught in his throat. “Your lab… they’ve bombed it. You can’t go back.”
“They?” Brownson sounded tired. His voice was flat.
“Yes. Someone. Maybe another government. They might have found out what we were doing and became scared. Maybe they thought you could solve the paradox. But there was a bomb. You sent us away that day, or we would have gone up too.”
“So, how did you get here? How did you arrange it?” said Brownson.
Jake could feel his brow wrinkling. “What do you mean? Your machine, of course. Your design worked. There’s no paradox.”
Brownson turned to face him. Moon shadows under his eyes made him look a hundred years old. “I didn’t solve the paradox—I worked around it, and so did you, or you wouldn’t be here.”
No answer worked. What did he mean? “We just activated the device. We didn’t solve anything.”
Closing his eyes, the old man sighed as if he never wanted to breathe again. “The information paradox stops time travel, as I argued. Information that would change people’s actions can’t go forward or back. The timeline is immutable.”
If it wasn’t for the beating of the paddle wheel and the soaking Mississippi breeze, Jake could almost feel back home in the lab. This was the direction of a hundred arguments. It was where the math piled up, making no sense. “But we’re here.”
The Radio Magician and Other Stories Page 17