Written in Time

by Jerry Ahern

  Atlas’ single newspaper from shortly after the town’s birth as a mining camp in 1861 until the last issue came off the presses in 1933 was the Atlas View, and copies of the weekly’s every issue from 1877 until 1933 were on file. Jack had majored in English in college—which, in part, accounted for his phenomenal (lack of) economic success—but had been a course or so short of a major in History. And, it took little historical insight to discern that the Atlas View was staunchly Republican, as Nevada had always been in those days, some even suggesting that Nevada’s comparatively quick and easy shot at statehood had been because of that.

  With more and more sucking up in the general media about the Democrats and the wonders of their presidential candidate, Jack Naile found the old newspaper’s politics remarkably refreshing.

  After thanking Mrs. Lincoln—no relation to the Lincoln, she told them when Clarence asked—Jack Naile climbed behind the wheel of the rental car. Clarence settled into the passenger seat beside him, and remained stonily silent for the duration of the drive back to Reno.

  The aircraft an hour outside of Atlanta, Clarence started talking. “It pisses me off that you guys are going to disappear on me. You’re about ninety percent of the only family I’ve got.” Jack didn’t bother to correct the math, just let Clarence talk. “I don’t know if I can hack it, Jack.”

  Jack Naile took Clarence’s hand for a moment; if the other passengers thought they were gay or something, he didn’t care. “Look, Ellen and the kids and I love you, too, Clarence. You’ve always been like another son to us. You know that. But, if this crazy thing happens, I can’t change it, alter it so that you can come along. Anyway, I understand they cooked with peanut oil a whole lot in—”

  “Knock it off about my allergy.”

  “Look,” Jack continued. “From everything that’s stacking up, I don’t think Ellen and I can stop this from happening.” Sometimes, however awkward, there was no time like the present. Jack cleared his throat and told Clarence, “When we first made out wills—”

  “For God’s sake—”

  “Let me finish, son. When Ellen and I first made out wills, when the kids were little, we named you as our contingent beneficiary.”

  “I get all the bills, huh?”

  Jack forced himself to laugh, and so did Clarence. “No. No bills, but the house is worth a good chunk of dough. We have other assets, like royalties off books, and there might be more money off this movie deal.”

  “I don’t wanna talk about that now.”

  “Fine. Later.” If there would be enough later left.

  Jack had barely walked into the house when the phone rang. “Take it, Jack; whoever it is will want to talk to you anyway,” Ellen told him as she kissed him on the cheek.

  “Right,” and Jack took the receiver from Elizabeth’s hand. It was their “agent.” “Yeah, Lars. What’s up?”

  Lars’ voice betrayed his excitement. “They’re starting principal photography on Angel Street in six weeks, Jack! Six weeks and they write a check for pickin’ up the option! Hey! And, they want you guys out there—all expenses paid—the day they start shooting! Some publicity thing or something. Wonderful, huh!?”

  Jack shook his head, incredulous at the news. “Hold on a second, Lars.” He pushed the hold button and told Ellen, the kids and Clarence, “Nothing wrong or anything; just the opposite. They’re starting principal photography in six weeks, we get the money in two weeks and they want us out wherever the hell they’re shooting it. All expenses paid.”

  “I can’t leave my job,” David said flatly.

  “Summer-school session one will be over the end of next week, David,” Elizabeth interjected. “You can work your days off to give you a four day weekend.”

  “David’ll need more time than four days. We’re going to have to drive out there with our stuff. Can’t risk being separated from each other or what we hope to bring.” Jack punched back on with Lars, Ellen automatically handing Jack his cigarettes and lighter and pushing the ashtray nearer to the phone.

  “Lars, how can they have a script? It hasn’t been more than a couple of weeks.”

  “This is the sweet part, Jack. This screenwriter I never heard of liked your book, wrote the script and then took the script to his agent and the script was the reason they optioned your book. The only reason it’s taken this long— imagine!—is because they had to nail down the male lead. Some guy I never heard of, but he’s big with kids. Got some TV show that’s really up there.”

  “You remember his name?”

  “Naw. I’ll get it. Hey! Did Lars deliver or what, man! I’m gonna get you guys more deals like this! Wait! Just wait! Look, Jack, I’ll get back to you with more details.

  Gotta fly!”

  “Yeah, Lars. Have a nice flight. Thanks.” Jack Naile hung up the telephone, wondering why—knowing why— he was depressed even though he was about to see more money in one chunk than he’d ever seen in his life.

  “He’s flying somewhere?” David asked.

  “No, just trying to sound cool, that’s all,” Ellen said as if reading Jack’s mind. “At least there’s the money you were anticipating we’d have, Jack.”

  Jack nodded to his wife as he said to David, “You’re the best businessman in the family. Do it tomorrow. Get on the horn and find out about diamond prices.”

  “Diamonds?” Lizzie asked.

  “Why diamonds, Dad?”

  “I know you don’t want to accept the fact that this is going to happen, and no one wants it to. But if we’re going to have money when we get there, we can’t use folding money that was printed in the twentieth century. Gold— we’ll have to have some—would be too heavy. Diamonds are portable. Can you use the Internet at the library to research diamond prices, find a source for buying in quantity at the best prices, and determine what type of stone would have had the greatest value a century ago? Stuff like that, David?”

  “I suppose, but it’s a waste of time.”

  “Humor your father,” Ellen advised.

  David nodded his assent.

  They had never gotten a computer that was capable of going online, merely older machines from mixed parts that were used for nothing more than typing. Jack Naile supposed that now they never would.

  ***

  Jack’s mother had always made lists, and Jack made lists. For that reason, aside from shopping lists for the grocery store, which Ellen grudgingly composed for Thanksgiving and Christmas, she never did lists at all.

  But there was an exception to every rule. While Jack typed furiously—she reflected that wrote was a kinder word—on their latest novel, Ellen sat at the other computer and worked up a list in outline form.

  Everything from electrical and plumbing skills to animal husbandry to pattern making for clothes to passive solar hot water heating to composting toilets had to be considered. Although microfiche would comprise the bulk of their traveling library, there were certain books they would try their best not to be forced to leave behind.

  Jack believed very strongly in God. Ellen, whom Jack insisted was an agnostic and not the other a word, was the only one of the two of them who had read the Bible. Neither of them went to church, but a Bible should be brought. And, for philosophical comfort, they would want to bring Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Scrap books with family photos were a must for sanity’s sake, lest they forget who they really were and where they had come from.

  Ellen returned to the portion of the list dealing with household-related problems. Before the children were born, when she’d worked outside the home, she’d made quite a bit of her own clothes. She had always intended to show Elizabeth how, but never had the time. Soon, despite the fact that any sewing machine they would eventually acquire would be hopelessly primitive by comparison to its modern counterparts, she would have the time.

  Ellen liked to garden, rarely for flowers, mostly for vegetables. In recent years, there had been little time for that. A century away in the past, raising vegetables might not
be a necessity, but would be quite practical.

  There was a second list Ellen was making, one playing off the other. It was a listing of books she must read, despite the fact that they would be archived on microfiche. If circumstances forbade the use of the microfiche as reference material, she would still have her mind.

  Certain entries on this second list were for Jack to read, books on reloading cartridges—he seemed to be the only firearms writer there was who didn’t reload—books about caring for livestock (which she would read as well), works on electrical wiring and plumbing skills, woodworking without power tools (he’d always said he wanted to build furniture, if he ever retired), books on horseman-ship—the list seemed unending for both of them. Yet it was imperative that Jack’s list be appreciably shorter for two reasons. Most of this end of their current novel was in his hands at the present, so he would have less time. Secondly, she was the speed reader of the family.

  In her high school days, Ellen had been clocked at twenty-eight hundred and fifty words per minute, with excellent retention. Nowhere near that fast anymore, she could read five books or more in the time it took Jack— whose IQ had measured one hundred fifty six at age twelve but who was a painfully slow, maddeningly thorough reader—to get through just one.

  As David Naile had begun using the Internet to research the quality, characteristics and values of diamonds at the turn of the century, a thought occurred to him. On the off chance that this time-travel thing actually did take place—which was thoroughly stupid even to consider— there might be other data from the past that could prove useful as well.

  Despite his youth, he had been working for several years, with his parents’ help, passing himself off at times as older than he was. Although he’d worked in plumbing and landscaping, and had learned to drive a tractor before driving a car, sales had always been it for him. At seventeen he was the youngest assistant manager in his current company’s history, while still a full-time student.

  If this time transfer thing really should take place, then there was ample reason to assume that, however unlikely it seemed, they were to have a retail store, as indicated in the original photograph. According to the data his father had gleaned from this Arthur Beach jerk, the store proved quite successful and innovative in its marketing approach.

  Clearly, his father would have had little to do with that sort of achievement. His father would be packing his six-gun, wearing his cowboy hat and living some sort of Western gunslinger/gentleman rancher fantasy. His mother would groove on vegetable gardening, cooking, raising cuddly farm animals, all the things she would have normally done in the present if she hadn’t had to help his father make a living. And his sister—she was a very nice girl, but she’d probably just meet some cowboy with no interest in economics and start having babies in a few years.

  If financial success was to be theirs, it would be his responsibility. And if he could research gemstone values from the previous century via the Internet, what was to prevent him from discovering who the movers and shakers were in this hick town in Nevada? What bank would be strongest? What locals would make good credit risks? Whose financial dealings would prove disastrous?

  What products—goods and services—would become popular, with high consumer demand in the years following the supposed transition into the past? How would the overall national economy be doing? What companies, in which stock shares or ownership interests could be obtained, were destined to grow and prosper? Which would fail?

  If he could enter the past armed with information from the objective future and a thorough knowledge of financial trends in the past—granted, he was only using a computer at a high school library, and there was, perhaps, little time remaining—he could position his family to accumulate true wealth and the capability with which to manipulate businesses in such a fashion as to increase this wealth almost exponentially.

  If this time-travel thing actually did take place, he would be prepared with forward credit checks, market trends and everything else he could find.

  Elizabeth slid open the mirrored doors of her closet. If the time-transfer really happened, everything in her closet would be useless to her.

  In the summertime, instead of shorts and a T-shirt, she would be in long dresses. In the fall, as opposed to pants and nice tops, she would be in long dresses. In the wintertime, long dresses again. In the spring, long dresses. There would be no need for softball uniforms, tennis skirts, bathing suits—just long dresses and, perhaps for variety, scratchy, high-necked blouses and long skirts. Not to mention the world’s supply of useless underwear and tightly laced corsets, which helped to induce fainting.

  She was to enter her sophomore year, would be old enough to drive in just a little over six months—drive a wagon. “Shit,” Elizabeth said under her breath.

  A final adjustment to the strain insulator for the primary cable, and Jane Rogers was ready to tweak the anode plate’s alignment with the control grid.

  At seventy-three years old, prudence had cautioned her to be slightly more cautious in movement and diet, but these were her only concessions to age. Her mind, as she herself was able to judge, and—unless they were incredibly polite—everyone with whom she interacted seemed to concur, was as sharp as when she’d been the first woman in her alma mater’s history to take a PhD in physics. Her judgment, Jane Rogers flattered herself, was appreciably better.

  And her eyes—despite a lifelong and insatiable appetite for the written word—were just as keen, if a little less brighter blue. Ever so slightly, Jane Rogers re-aligned the anode plate once again.

  The hardware was ready.

  She had been born in the wrong era, that conviction and the death of her husband twenty years, two months and twenty-seven days before the only things which marred her contentment—if one discounted the tantalizing yet incomplete degree of success of her experiments in plasma electricity.

  As a graduate student, and later as a degreed physicist, because of her sex she had always been someone’s assistant rather than a project leader in her own right. Some things, admittedly, were determined by sex. When she was introduced to Albert Einstein, Jane Rogers found herself speechless and very nearly collapsed into a faint—and she was not a fainter, never had been. When she met and married the man of her dreams, she had aided him in his work in particle physics, abandoning her passion for electricity, no matter how much the work and its potential intrigued her and her own calculations confounded her.

  Dr. Einstein had almost certainly thought her to be a ninny with an empty head. But her Frank had never thought that, she knew. All of the time before meeting Frank, she had worked with men who didn’t do science nearly as well as she; Frank did it better, and she found this as irresistible as the curly hair he tried to beat into straightness with his military brushes, as the shy gray eyes he shielded behind rimless glasses he didn’t really need to wear for anything but the most exacting detail work.

  To have remarried—she was only fifty-two when Frank, ten years her senior, died—would have been unthinkable, was something she never once considered. But with Frank’s death, Jane Rogers’ attitude toward herself changed quite radically.

  She concluded the series of experiments at which Frank had been laboring for the past eighteen months, perhaps more rapidly than Frank himself could have achieved the same results. Then she donated his notes and equipment to the graduate school of the university with which Frank had been affiliated since his own grad school days.

  When Jane Rogers returned to the study of plasma and how it could be used to achieve the dreamer’s dream, the transmission of electricity through thin air, her decades of work with Frank in particle physics had proven to be of greater help to her than she had ever realized they would.

  At the time of Frank’s death, they were far from his beloved university, plying their background in particle physics for the United States government as part of what well over a decade later would become the Strategic Defense Initiative. Then, as in the present,
her notion reinforced by the continuation of SDI after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she had believed that there was more to particle physics weapons research than just the means by which to get a leg up on the Russians. But if so, she was out of that line of work and no one would have volunteered information to her in any event.

  Jane Rogers had come to be known as “strange” because of the common wisdom that anyone who labored in her particular corner of physics research had to be a poor scientist or have her bubble more than a little bit off plumb. No one had ever accused Jane Rogers of being a poor scientist.

  After Frank’s death, Jane made the decision—one she had never regretted—to remain in Nevada, but quite a bit more to the north, in order to escape the heat. Remaining in Nevada enabled her to be within relatively easy driving distance of the smallish cemetery where she had placed her husband’s physical remains.

  Jane Rogers supposed that she did honestly have one more regret. Frank, like the main character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, injured during the war—but a different war than the one whose horrors were supposed to end all war.

  The experiments she had been conducting for the last eight years—begun at age sixty-five when anyone with sense might think of retiring—had the sole purpose of generating a stable electrical field that could be precisely aimed across great distances on a laser carrier beam. When it reached its target, the electrical field would be as strong as it had been at point of origin. She would be able to broadcast electrical power to anywhere in the world with an appropriate receiver, transmit the modern age to the most remote corners of the globe.

  “Jane?”

  Jane Rogers realized she had been standing still, just staring at her apparatus. Hearing Peggy Greer call her name brought her back from her thoughts. “Just thinking about Frank and everything else, and what we’re doing here. Are we ready, darling?”

  “I’ve run everything on the computer so often I’ve almost got it memorized, Jane. The video monitoring equipment has been checked and rechecked. If everything holds up, we’re more ready than we’ve ever been.”