I nodded.
“Then you can take a shower when you’re finished and I’ll let you be. Anything you need, please ask.”
I thanked her again. I felt very fortunate and very undeserving to be the recipient of her kindness. I think it was to be expected that she made me think of Suzy, but those thoughts were unsettling and sad and they weren’t going to help me fix everything I’d broken.
Was there a safe way to be in 1993? Could I make it even a few days without doing any damage? There was, I realized, an even bigger and potentially far more serious problem. My heinous twin had missed his target by a large margin when he had jumped back to find me in the past. Whether it was his lack of practice or the drugs still in his system, he had said he’d arrived in 1991 and had waited out the two years. That meant he was around somewhere, still alive and still plotting against me.
Everything I changed last time around all but guaranteed that Jeff Berger had not been murdered, and yet the other Daniel had survived to kill both the women I loved. Even setting things back to their normal order probably wouldn’t eliminate him, and if I fixed everything and he followed me to 2013, he would be brought into my timeline. The “real” timeline. No way.
I took Dorothy up on her offer of a shower. The hot water poured over me and before I knew it I was sitting in the bathtub, immersed in the downpour from the shower head. It felt like decades had passed since that first true travel I had made in my own shower in the home I shared with Helena. So much time and so much destroyed.
I felt myself starting to cry again, but before the tears had hit my cheeks I heard a knock at the small, slatted bathroom window. I looked up. I could see a man looking in at me. He had a full head of curly, dark hair, and a thin goatee. Though he was interrupting my shower and peeping in at me, he had a look of dismay on his face as if I had upset him.
At first I thought he was somehow floating in the air, but quickly remembered the split-level was built into a hill. I got to my feet and stepped out of the water. I grabbed a thick red towel from the nearby bar and wrapped it around my waist. The man continued to stare at me with that same disappointed, grim look.
“Who are you?” I yelled. I thought maybe he was expecting to spy on Dorothy. Maybe he was into old ladies. All I knew was I was going to protect my Suzy’s grandmother, a woman who had taken me in under the strangest of circumstances.
The man didn’t respond. I was angry. “Who the fuck are you?” I screamed over the rush of the shower.
He raised one finger to his lips in a “shush” gesture that infuriated me. I was going to say something else but he mouthed the words, “Meet me outside.”
Was he there for me? I wondered how that could possibly be. It took me five minutes to get dressed in the clothes Dorothy had left for me and make it outside. I walked up the hill that wrapped around the home. The man was as tall as me and very thin. He was dressed in a suit and long trench coat that didn’t make sense in the hot weather Pennsylvania was experiencing in May, 1993. The man still looked pissed, like I had wronged him.
“Who are you?” I asked as I approached. “What do you want?”
He shook his head disapprovingly. “Daniel, this has gone on long enough.”
“How do you know my name?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
He looked off in the distance and took a deep breath of the morning air. “It’s always this way,” he said with a sigh. “People alway ‘just want to look’ and then they get too deep.”
I wasn’t sure he was actually talking to me. It almost seemed like he was indulging in some kind of a soliloquy.
“I don’t know who you are,” I said, “But I’ve been through too much. You need to leave me alone. Now.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said.
Without thinking, I rushed at him. I was prepared to take out my anguish on this creepy stranger, but he side-stepped me with ease and slammed his fist on my back, knocking me to the ground. I rolled over and he put his foot down on my chest, holding me in place with surprising strength.
“Daniel, we’re going to have a conversation, and I’m seriously hoping you can make this go easy for both of us. We need to chat about the time stream.”
“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, though I had more than a little idea what he was talking about. What I didn’t know was how he knew me and what I had done. I squirmed and tried to push his foot off.
“Oh I think you know a fair amount, Dan. Can I call you Dan?” he didn’t wait for a response. “Here’s the thing, Dan. We have a good idea how much the timestream can handle, so we let some things slide. Freebies. For some people that’s good enough. Either they are satisfied with their exploration or they’re frightened off. Your freebie was Levi’s Confusion. Didn’t stop you though, did it?” He said that last with a tone of disgust.
“How do you know about that?” I was dumbfounded.
“It’s my job to know about that,” he said. “Look, can I let you up now? I’d like to talk like gentlemen. Can you behave yourself?”
I sighed and nodded. He removed his foot and reached out a hand to help me up. He looked around, taking in the woods around us. “The universe is suffering, but this timeline in particular is no good. Too many Daniel Wells editions popping in and out. Too many variables. Too many loose ends.” My mouth betrayed a small smile. “Something funny?” he asked.
“No, it’s just, well… I was kind of thinking the same thing.”
He nodded and sighed again. “Yeah, that’s what the others say about you. They say you’re a guy who considers all the angles.”
“What others?” I asked.
“Not now. Not here. Like I said, this timeline’s all shot to hell. It’s time to go.”
He reached his hand out and grabbed my shoulder. Pain shot through my arm from the firmness of his grip. I opened my mouth to protest and then shut it tight. All around me, the world was moving backward at a rapid pace. The leaves on the trees shrunk and disappeared, only to be replaced by brown, dead ones that reattached themselves and gradually returned to green life.
Everything was changing in that same backward way, faster and faster. I saw the homes brighten as the paint regained its former luster and then swapped out for older, peeled paint from a previous coat. In what seemed like maybe fifteen seconds, the houses on the street collapsed into parts one by one and then vanished completely, replaced by a thick blanket of trees.
The changing images became a blur. The strange man kept his grip on my shoulder and I didn’t try to pull free. I knew what was happening. He was bringing me with him as I brought my clothes when I traveled. I watched him. He was studying the blur with intense focus. He could do what I did, but it was different. It was controlled…powerful. My traveling was like a child trying to pin the tail on the donkey while blindfolded, occasionally stealing just enough of a peak to get him close to the target. This man travelled like a scientist fiddling with a series of dials to get the settings just right.
When the blur reduced, I saw nothing but wilderness. The man released his iron grip on my shoulder. He took another huge whiff of the air and smiled. “Ah, that’s more like it. Clean and crisp.”
“When is this?” I asked.
“Oh, hard to say. Sometime long after the dinosaurs and a few ice ages, sometime before the earliest human settlers arrived. A nice quiet pocket.”
“It seemed so precise though,” I said.
“Sure,” he replied. “I could have picked a specific day if I’d wanted, but really this terrain is just like this for a period of about ten thousand years. Anyhow, you needn’t worry about all that. What you need to know is this: it’s here and now that we will have our talk.”
Chapter 23
1
The man sat on the ground against one of the enormous trees. I matched his pose against another tree nearby.
“So,” he said. “Before we get to the heart of the matter and discuss how you’ve screwed
up and what can be done about it, I assume you have a few questions?”
I had many, but I began with the most obvious one. “How do I…I mean, how do we do what we do?”
He smiled. “That’s always the first question.”
“You’ve had these conversations with other people?” I asked.
“A few. I’m only assigned certain jobs. I’ll answer your question if you want, but are you sure you want to know? It might make more sense to just accept it at face value and focus on more pressing issues.”
“I really do want to know.”
“Fine, fine, I expected as much.” He nudged the patches of moss at his feet with the heel of his brown boots. “I’m going to answer as best I can, but I’ll warn you right now a lot of my explanation comes down to, ‘that’s just the way it is, don’t ask me to explain why.’ That cool with you, Dan?”
“Yes, yes, that’s fine.”
“Good. So, you know how a lot of stories start, ‘a long, long time ago?’ Well, our story starts a long, long time from now. Way beyond this era, way beyond your home time. Twenty thousand or so years after your generation was dead and gone from the earth, some scientists finally cracked the secrets of all those complicated dimensions beyond the ones we can see… you know, height, length and depth. These geniuses discovered how to bend space and time.
“What they found was that there are all these different universes. Most of them are fundamentally very different. Different matter, different physics. Just lifeless vastness. But these guys in the future theorized that those other universes served as a lump of clay. That is, they could be molded by our universe to be an almost identical clone. How that happens is beyond even their knowledge, and it’s definitely beyond mine. It just does, or so they say. If our universe, or any universe, has a disagreement in its timeline, it spits out the offending details onto the canvas of one of those other empty universes.
“So these scientists, they learned that they could access various points on our timeline using tiny, controlled wormholes. Do you know what wormholes are?” I nodded. “Good,” he said. “Don’t want to lose you. So these machines they built could trigger wormholes and jump people or things…whole big chunks of matter, to other points on the timeline but always, always into the past. Any guesses why that might be?”
I decided to venture a guess. “Because the wormhole can only poke into something that already exists?”
He applauded. “That’s about the long and the short of it. These wormholes are like rubberbands. They pull you back to the point of origination. That’s why you always end up bouncing back to the present.”
“But I don’t go back to the present,” I said, “not exactly. It’s always later.”
“Sure, sure,” said the strange man. “The starting point of the wormhole exists in the present, so it moves with the time stream… a little slower, maybe, but time does move on. And sometimes it pops you out in an alternate timeline.”
So much of what he was saying was going miles over my head, yet I couldn’t stop listening. I was completely enthralled. This stranger was explaining things about me that I could never have figured out on my own.
“Anyway,” the man said, “the scientists developed these two objects that could generate huge wormholes. For some reason they couldn’t figure out, one of them could open controlled passages to the past. With some practice, the scientists could get the thing to spit them out whenever they wanted, just by reading their minds or impulses or some such. I don’t know. Like I said, the scientists couldn’t figure it out, and I’m no scientist.
“Now the other object did something different. No matter what they tried to do with it, it could only open wormholes sideways.”
“Sideways?” I asked.
“That’s right. Same time, different universe. It would randomly plop people into these clone universes that had been made by previous tampering with the timestream.”
“So…these objects were like partners?” I asked. “One could create these other worlds, the other visited them?”
He nodded slowly. “Basically. Glad to see you’re keeping up. There’s one other thing though, and you know it already. When changes happened and one of these new worlds was formed, the wormhole would shift to the new world. No coming back to the starting universe until the changes had been erased.”
“Does every little change set off another universe?” I asked.
“No. It seems the timeline is a bit malleable and has an inherent ability to heal itself. Certain things are just absorbed. Your presence in the past, breathing the air, eating the food, all of that might make slight, technical changes to the world but the primary universe just accepts them as the new reality. Even conversations don’t matter too much. Your chat with Levi Berm was accepted, even with renaming his farm and his reputation getting a little wacky. Anything beyond that though, and the universe does its dumping thing, excising the damage and throwing it into a new world.”
“Wait,” I interrupted. “You know about my time with Levi? How do you know so much about what I was doing?”
“Because we monitor violations in the timestream, Dan. Our agents are everywhere they need to be. Trust me, you’ve passed them many times without knowing it. With Levi, we just had somebody hide behind his house. Other times one of our people would drive by you, or maybe take a tour of that camp you love so much, and you wouldn’t even know it.”
He turned away from me and stared into the wilderness. “To get back to my story, human nature being what it is, it didn’t take long before the scientists were screwing the multiverse up left and right. I’m talking about changing major moments in history just to see what would happen. Some people, part of the ruling body of which I am now a proud member, decided this had to stop. They forced the scientists to get rid of the objects. Problem was, they couldn’t be destroyed. At least not by any methods that wouldn’t destroy the rest of the planet with them.
“So, what to do? Get this— they put both objects next to each other and triggered them simultaneously. I don’t know whose idea it was but it seems to me like it was a heck of a risk.”
“What happened?” I asked. I was on the edge of my proverbial seat, waiting to hear how this all tied into my abilities.
“What happened was the sideways device broke the time travel device. I mean literally broke it. But it still had time to generate the wormhole. The sideways device slipped back to the desired destination, a time that’s so far back it’s already ancient in the era where you and I now sit. The scientists knew that based on the movement of the earth over millennia, the device would be buried deep underground.
“Now the other device…like I said, it broke. Shattered…exploded, really. Then, poof! All these shards, most of them pretty damn microscopic were gone.”
“How could they know they were gone if they were microscopic?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Dan. They have sensors for this kind of stuff.” He waved his hand to dismiss the whole point. “Moving on, these pieces of the device popped up all over the past and embedded themselves. Many of them…maybe most of them found themselves in trees, rocks, dirt, where they are harmless. They can’t be activated. A small few though…”
“They entered human beings,” I finished with a gasp.
“Mmhmm. And they bestowed a dangerous gift that the scientists didn’t expect. One that I now use to enforce the universal laws and you have now used to create serious chaos.”
This confused me. “I don’t understand. If everything I did just created parallel universes, what’s the problem? Other than my life and the lives of a few people, and trust me I’m not diminishing that, but… I mean, what does that matter to the universe?”
“I don’t know why it is,” the man said, “but mucking around pokes holes and too many holes start to unravel everything. The prime universe can’t take too much cloning. It’s like how your 21st century doctors can’t remove too much tissue while trying to cut out cancerous tumors in an org
an. It destabilizes everything on a molecular level. Not good. You saw some of the effects of your tampering when that boy almost drowned in the lake. Changes that you didn’t plan, changes that don’t connect directly to your actions. And that’s nothing compared to what will happen if you keep this up. That’s why my group monitors every time incursion from our present…your future, and we intervene when necessary to right the ship. So here I am, intervening.”
“Why didn’t you talk to me at one of the earlier points?”
“Would you have listened? Would you have stopped before seeing the horrors you had to witness?”
That shut me down quickly. I didn’t have an answer.
“So…what can I do?” I asked. “I want to fix everything. Believe me, I’ve never wanted anything more.”
He smiled. “It’s a bizarre solution, but you already know what it is. You’ve got to call yourself off. Before you get involved in that disastrous summer—and can I just say that was a mess of epic proportions— and send that version of yourself back to his original mission to stop you on your first trip to 1993. There will still be residue of your traveling but you’ll get things back to an acceptable, absorbable level of change. That will disconnect any lingering wormholes to the parallel worlds and let you go home and the whole shebang will keep on ticking.” He frowned suddenly. “Just remember the lurking variable.”
“The other version of me.” My excitement faded quickly.
“Yes. He should not have been able to escape his timeline. No clones have ever been able to travel back before the point when the timeline split, so they can never leave their clone universe. Yet he was able to use his ability to get out and through a bit of a loophole he entered the prime universe at an access point in his past. Look, I know you killed him once. I can’t even imagine what that’s like. But you’re going to probably have to do it again. Can you handle that?”
“Why can’t you eliminate him?” I asked. “Why does it have to be me?
“My orders are to have you take care of it. If I had to guess it has something to do with restoring balance to the universe. But then again, what do I know?”
The Traveler: A Time Travel Thriller Page 18