by Anthology
“Look,” I said. “I’m not sure what’s going on. The President’s been dead for an hour, and now you three abduct me. This is weird, you know?”
“Honey,” said Emma, her eyes very serious, “I’ve seen weird. This is nothing.”
And left it there.
“This ain’t an abduction, mate,” Paul said. “It’s more of a . . . detainment. You’re safe, don’t worry. We just need some help. Like Emma said, we’re lost. We need to get our bearings.”
“Lost?” I asked. “You work here.”
“Will you sit down?”
Paul’s voice didn’t change much, but there was a tightness to it that scared me a little. And for the first time, I saw the bulge under the sweater he had on. Christ, I thought, he’s got a gun.
I sat down.
“Thanks,” Emma said. “Just a few minutes, and we’re out of your hair. Promise. What do you do for a living, Jeff?”
“I work over at Davis High. I’m a history teacher.”
The guy by the door, Tom, broke out laughing. Paul cracked a smile too. I think I even saw a flicker in Emma’s eye. “That’s . . . convenient,” she said.
“You get the day off because the President was in town?” asked Paul. “This president with the same name as me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was going to be a big thing for the students. Most of them came into town with their families. A lot of them were probably there when . . . oh, man.” I hung my head. It was really starting to sink in.
“It’s rough, I know,” Paul said. “You wish you could go back and change things. Make it like it never happened.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly it.”
Emma scowled. “That’s a bad wish, Jeff. You don’t know how bad.”
I looked at her, hard. “That’s about the fifteenth really weird thing you’ve said since I met you, Emma.”
“It won’t be the last. What are you doing?”
I’d pulled out a cigarette, had the match out. “Smoke?”
“They still do that in this fork, Emma,” said Paul, and waved a hand at me. “Good on you, mate. Go ahead.”
I lit up. The smoke calmed my nerves a little. “You keep mentioning forks,” I said. “What’s that about?”
They looked at each other. Emma shrugged. “Don’t see the harm in telling you,” she said. “But we go first, all right?”
I was pretty sure she had a gun too, so I nodded.
“Okay,” said Paul. He pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. “Quick quiz, mate. About history, so this should be easy. First question—is America at war right now?”
“Of course,” I said. “In Korea. We’ve been over there since 1951.”
“Korea,” said Paul. “Hm. Good, that’s a start. Against the communists?”
I blinked. “Are you kidding me?”
Paul stopped writing. He didn’t look happy. “Maybe . . .”
“Jeff,” Emma asked, leaning in. “Who are we fighting in Korea?”
“The Japs,” I said. “Who else?”
“Ah, shit,” said Tom from the door. “It’s one of those.”
“I thought we’d dealt with that tangle,” said Emma.
“We did,” Paul said. “Wang’s crew, a while back. Something must have re-tangled it.”
I sighed, taking another drag. “I suppose I’ll figure out what a ‘tangle’ is later, too.”
“Probably,” said Paul. “What happened at the end of World War Two, Jeff? Who won?”
Seriously. He asked that.
“Nobody won,” I said. “Hitler took most of Europe, but we kept him out of England, and Trotsky’s Reds pushed him back before he could storm Moscow. It was the same with the Japs. They kept some parts of Asia, we took back others. Then they dropped a nuke on Kauai.”
“Nuke . . . on . . . Kauai,” said Paul, writing fast, his eyebrows rising.
“America had nuclear weapons too, though, right?” asked Emma.
“Yes,” I said. “Enough to hit Okinawa, then threaten to drop more on Tokyo and Berlin. But the Nazis had them too, and so did the Reds. Hence the truce.”
“Four-way cold war,” said Paul, impressed. “That’s a new one.”
It went on from there. I stopped thinking it was a joke pretty quick. These guys really didn’t seem to know much about history. I mean, they had it all wrong. They’d never heard about half the presidents, they didn’t know that Lenin named Trotsky his successor over in Russia—they asked about some guy named Stalin, whoever that is. They seemed to think there was some kind of economic depression, back in the ’20s. They thought Canada was still one country instead of three, that the Italians were Germany’s allies during the war instead of ours, and that there was this place called Vietnam, somewhere in the Greater Jap Empire. I think they even mentioned America having fifty-one states, at one point. It was by far the strangest hour of my life—and this is on the same day Clayton got killed.
Then it got stranger.
“Fine, then,” Paul said, taking a puff of his smoke and coughing a little. He’d bummed one from me; so had Tom. Emma was completely appalled. It was pretty obvious that neither of them had smoked before, and while Tom had turned green and put his out right away, Paul was enjoying his, kind of like I’d enjoyed sneaking my first beer when I was twelve. “World War One. How did it start?”
“Archduke Ferdinand got shot. A Serb did it, named Gavrilo Princip. Only two names—he was one of the rare ones.”
Paul stopped writing and gave Emma a look. She raised an eyebrow. I thought they wanted more, so I kept going.
“I think it would have happened anyway, though—most of Europe was just waiting for a reason at the time. The Russians—”
“That’s all right, Jeff,” Emma said, as Paul closed his notebook and put it away. “Was the president at the time Woodrow Wilson?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How long did he stay in power?”
“Until 1916,” I said. “Then John Gavin beat him when he was up for reelection.”
“There it is,” said Tom.
“We got our divergence,” Paul said.
Emma held up a hand, stopping them. “What happened at the end of the war?”
“Gavin got us involved right away,” I said. “That was the platform he ran on—helping friends in their time of need. Bulgaria surrendered early. We drove the Germans and Austrians back, and they capitulated in the summer of 1917. The Ottomans held out for most of another year, but that was more of a footnote, really.”
“There . . . it . . . is,” Tom said again, peering out the window. “We’ve got what we need, Em. We should go. There’s police coming—they’re probably looking for the guy shot this Clayton.”
“Yeah,” said Emma, standing up. “Paul, go down and get the pod warm. We’ll be along.”
“On it,” said Paul. He stubbed out his cigarette. “Thanks for the smoke. It was . . . interesting.” He clapped me on the arm, then headed toward the stairs that led down to the bar’s basement.
The others started getting ready to go. “Thank you for your help, Jeff,” Emma said, all business. “You got us pointed in the right direction.”
“Hold on,” I said, reaching out to grab her arm.
As I did, I heard a click, and glanced across the bar. Tom had drawn his gun. It didn’t look like any weapon I’d ever seen. It was sleeker, made of what looked like ceramic, with a red light on top. But none of that matters with guns, really. What matters is the hole in the end, and whether it’s pointed at you. Tom’s was.
“Get back from her,” he said.
“Whoa,” I said, raising my hands and stepping away from Emma.
She shook her head, her eyes locking with mine. “Put it away, Tom. You think a history teacher’s going to take me hostage? Besides, he’s unarmed. You saw the scan when he came in.”
Tom pursed his lips, giving her a look that said you never know. But he holstered his gun under his jacket anyway. She was defin
itely the one in charge. It seemed weird, watching a woman order armed men around.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Emma replied. “Besides, it’s my fault. I promised you answers.”
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Tom said, looking outside again.
Emma turned back to me. “I’m sorry, Jeff. I’ll have to make this quick.” She paused, her brow furrowing. “You ever read science fiction? Any H.G. Wells?”
“Sure,” I said. “War of the Worlds. Fellow made a radio show of it, caused a riot.”
“Yeah,” Emma said. “I’m talking about another story, though. The Time Machine.”
It all went click then. I stared at them. “You’re telling me you’re from the future?” Because they sure didn’t look like they were from the past.
Emma nodded. “A hundred and fifty years from now. Or rather, not from now. You see, time’s kind of like a tree. It’s constantly forking into different branches. In one time, the French come to the colonies’ aid during the revolution, and you get America. In another they don’t, and you get something else. In one, D-Day works out fine. In another, the Germans find out in advance, and it turns into a bloodbath.”
“What’s D-Day?” I asked.
“Never mind. What I’m telling you is, the world I grew up in lay in a different fork from yours. Or so we thought, anyway. It’s more complicated than that.”
“You can change a fork, by messing with shit in the past,” Tom put in.
I blinked at them. “You mean, if you went back, say, and stopped that bomber from killing Hitler in ’47, everything now would be different?”
Tom snickered.
“Uh, yeah,” Emma said. “Something like that. So you can see how what we do got very, very dangerous. Fortunately, people understood it was a bad idea to go back and mess with history, so the powers that be worked out an arrangement. A temporal détente.”
“Yeah, that worked,” muttered Tom.
Emma shrugged. “It did, for a while. But then something went wrong. One day the world woke up, and nothing was the same. The Soviet Union was still around, but America had broken up. Most of Europe was a radioactive wasteland. It was a mess.”
I’d been nodding up till now. Now I squinted at her, dragging on my cigarette. It had burned down, so I put it out. “How did anyone know things had changed?” I asked. “I mean, the world they knew must have been normal to them, right?”
“It was,” Emma said. “But some of us were out in the flow when it happened. When we came home, everything was different. My parents never even met, and Tom’s and Paul’s never existed. Don’t try to think about how that’s possible, it only hurts. I don’t know the answers. I just know that our world’s gone, and we don’t know why.”
“Terrorists,” Tom muttered.
Emma waggled her hand. “It could have been a lot of things. An accident. Some country broke the treaty. None of us were sure. But we didn’t like the world as it was, so we got the hell out, and came back to fix things.”
“Ah,” I said. “That’s why you wanted to know about history. You need to find out where things changed.”
“Yes. So we can change them back.”
“And you think it has something to do with President Gavin.”
She shrugged. “Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. It’s not the first thing we’ve fixed. Every time we think we’ve set things right, the divergence shifts further back. We first thought this whole thing started because someone tried to stop some buildings being blown up in 2001. Now the fork happens almost a whole century earlier. All I know is, there was no John Gavin in our election in 1916, and Wilson got re-elected. So that’s where we’re headed.”
“Sounds like someone’s one step ahead of you. Or behind, I guess.”
“No shit,” said Tom, chuckling. “I’m telling you, Em, it’s terrorists.”
“Whatever it is,” she said, rolling her eyes, “we’ve got other teams searching the flow for the cause. Paul, Tom and I, we’re strictly recon and containment. We fix time when it breaks.”
There was a hammering outside, and shouting. Men were pounding on the door of the barber shop next door. Tom looked out and sucked a breath through his teeth. “Out of time, Em. School’s out,” he said, drawing his gun once more. “We’ve gotta go.”
Emma looked at me. I looked at her. “One more question,” I asked. “When you go back to 1916—when you make sure Wilson wins—what happens to this?” I waved at everything, all around.
Really meaning, what happens to me.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. This world will probably still exist somewhere, in another fork. Maybe in a lot of them. But as for this fork, things will change. You’ll wake up one day, and everything will be different. But that could happen anyway, if whoever’s causing the trouble goes back and, say, makes sure Custer survives Little Big Horn. It’s probably inevitable, so you’d best make peace with it.”
The noise next door stopped. I could hear footsteps crunching on gravel.
“Out,” Tom said. “Now.”
Emma nodded, then leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. I remember she smelled like rain.
“Good-bye, Jeff,” she said. “And thanks.”
With that, she turned and went downstairs after Paul. Tom followed, stopping only to point at the floor, his eyes heart-attack serious. Stay here.
Part of me wanted to ask if I could go with them, but I stayed. They had guns, I didn’t. And I belong here. Or now. Both.
About thirty seconds before the cops came knocking, I heard a sound from the basement: first a hum, then a noise like someone had torn a big piece of sheet-metal in two. I felt a charge in the air, like before a thunderstorm, and there was the stink of ozone. The hairs on my arms stood up. My watch stopped, and hasn’t worked since. The TV flashed white, then went dark and started to smoke.
When the police came in, I was the only person left in the place. I thought I’d have some explaining to do, but they didn’t care about a white guy alone in a colored bar. They were looking for the guy who shot Clayton. They figured out I wasn’t him, so they went on.
And I walked home, wishing the whole way that I’d told Emma I didn’t know who the hell Custer was.
Like I said, believe me or don’t. Makes no difference to me.
Jesus, even I don’t know if I buy it. But I’ve made peace, like Emma said. I’m ready for the change. One day I might wake up, and we’ll be at war with this Vietnam place, and the Nazis won’t exist any more, and the president will be some guy from Texas named Johnson. Or one day I might wake up, and I’ll be living in Confederate States of America.
Or one day, I might not wake up at all. My grandfather fought in World War One, after all. God knows what happened to him before the divergence. The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that’s the truth. It’s why they didn’t care that they told me all their secrets. Emma even said it: don’t see the harm. It’s been fifty years since John Gavin was elected. A lot will change if he isn’t.
Yeah, that’s probably it. I only exist right now because things went wrong, somewhere in the past. Any time now, I might just . . . disappear.
And so might you.
QUID PRO QUO
Ray Bradbury
You do not build a Time Machine unless you know where you are going. Destinations. Cairo after Christ? Macedonia before Methuselah? Hiroshima just before? Destinations, places, happenings.
But I built my Time Machine, all unknowingly, with no destination in mind, no happening about to arrive or, just this second, depart.
I built my Far Traveling Device with fragments of wired-together ganglion, the seat of invisible perception, of intuitive awareness.
An accessory to this inner side of the medulla oblongata and the brain shelves behind the optic nerve.
Between the hidden senses of the brain and the probing but invisible radar of the ganglion I ram-shackled t
ogether a perceptor of future beings or past behaviors far different than name-places and mind-shaking events.
My Tin Lizzie watch, my dust invention, had microwave antennae with which to touch, find, and make moral judgments beyond my own intelligence.
The Machine, in sum, would add up integers of human rise and fall and mail itself there to shape destinies, taking me along as blind baggage.
Did I know this as I pasted and screwed and welded my seemingly hapless mechanical child? I did not. I simply tossed forth notions and needs, opinions and predictions based on successes and failures, and at the end stood back to stare at my useless creation.
For there it stood in my attic, a bright object, all angles and elbows, purring, anxious for travel but going nowhere unless I begged “go” instead of “sit” or “stay.” I would not give it directions; I would simply at the right time shed my “ambiance,” my soul’s light, upon it.
Then it would rear up and gallop off in all directions. Arriving where, only God knew.
But we would know when we arrived.
So there is the start of it all.
A strange dream lurking in a dim attic, with two seats for Tourists, a bated breath and a bright hum of its spidery nerves.
Why had I built it in my attic?
After all, it wouldn’t sky-dive midair, but only hang-glide Time.
The Machine. Attic. Waiting. For what?
Santa Barbara. A small bookshop, and my signing a small novel for an even smaller group when the explosion occurred. Which hardly describes the force with which it slammed me back on my inner wall.
It began when I glanced up and saw this old, old man swaying in the doorway, dreading to enter. He was incredibly wrinkled. His eyes were broken crystal. Saliva brimmed his trembling lips. He shook as if lightning struck him when he gaped his mouth and gasped.
I went back to signing books until an intuitive cog slipped in my head. I glanced up again.
The old, old man still hung there like a scarecrow, framed against the light, his head thrust forward, eyes aching for recognition.
My body froze. I felt the blood run cold along my neck and down my arms. The pen fell from my fingers as the old, old man lurched forward, giggling, hands groping.