by Anthology
Then how . . . ? Oh. “Future you sent them.”
“So it seems. Only I, he, sent just one of these detectors. The second unit I retrieved from the supply cabinet.”
I’d known Jonas happy and sad, manic and dejected. I’d never seen him awed.
“You weren’t ready to try moving something backward,” I guessed. I had hoped. Grandfather paradoxes scared me.
“Not hardly.” Jonas laughed humorlessly. “But future me was. Is.”
“How far into the future? Do you know?”
“I will,” Jonas said. “Because I, he, intends that I know. A smoke detector with the identical serial number was sitting in my cabinet.”
Who knew that the guts of a smoke detector were radioactive?
Jonas did; that’s why he owned so many. A bit of radioactive material ionized air within the detector’s case, the ionized molecules completing an electrical circuit. Let soot particles intrude, and the level of ionization dropped. The resulting dip in the circuit’s current was what the detector actually detected.
Unlike most things radioactive, no one knew or cared how many smoke detectors someone bought. And why would they care? Even out of its case, a few centimeters of air sufficed to block the radioactive pellet’s feeble emissions.
With a sniff at my ignorance, Jonas harvested the radioactive material from both detectors. His instruments showed both still radiating, but one not quite as much as the other. One detector’s pellet had decayed.
When Jonas did the math, that pellet came from five years in the future.
We dined out that evening, Jonas splurging on a place with waiters and white damask tablecloths. As the maitre d’ led the way to a booth, I detoured to the men’s room. I rejoined Jonas to find he’d ordered a bottle of wine. We were celebrating, he told me; as he all but swilled a glassful, the trembling of his hand said something more.
That he, too, was conflicted made me feel just a tad better.
It was a Wednesday and not yet six o’clock. We had the bistro almost to ourselves.
“Future you waited five years to send that smoke detector,” I said. Or would wait. Or must wait. “Why?”
Jonas folded and unfolded his napkin. “After taking so long to decide, you mean, why communicate so far into his past?”
“Communicate?” I echoed. “Future you sent a smoke detector. He’s told you nothing.”
“Not so. To this point, I’ve only sent things forward. He’s shown me that travel to the past is possible. An effect before its cause . . . of sorts.”
And what of grandfather paradoxes? I chugged my own wine. “Maybe future you communicated something deeper, by choosing to reveal nothing about his time. Maybe it’s his way of saying this research is dangerous.”
Dropping the napkin into his lap, Jonas pressed his fingertips together contemplatively. He opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. I dared to hope he was reconsidering.
But no.
“You’re wrong,” Jonas said flatly. “Future me used the technology. I, he, had reasons important enough to risk a paradox.”
I mulled that over, still tangled in a thicket of tenses and subjunctives. “You’re thinking of the Hitler scenario?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Jonas agreed. “Of course we can’t intervene back then. There wasn’t yet a receiver. However . . .”
Our waitress had sauntered over to describe the dinner specials. I tuned her out, trying to grasp two Jonases communicating across the years, and effects that preceded their causes.
An analogy seemed simpler. If Jonas could preempt the Nazi invasion of Poland, then what? Maybe a war just as horrific between the West and Stalin’s Russia, with Poland again caught in the middle. And maybe Jonas’s father dies in that alternate war. Or war is averted, and so a Polish soldier killed in Hitler’s invasion instead lives to meet and marry Jonas’s mother. Either way there would be no Jonas to foil Hitler so . . .
The waitress prattled on about delicate sauces and exotic mushrooms while my mind ran in circles.
I asked for the special, whatever it was, as the path of least resistance. I didn’t catch what Jonas ordered. At last the woman left us.
“Where were we?” Jonas asked. “Oh, yes. I take today’s surprise as a good thing.”
“Maybe it’s time to bring in the authorities,” I said.
“And who would you trust with this technology?” he shot back. “No, we must keep this to ourselves. Trust me.”
In my mind’s ear, Britney laughed mockingly.
Once, I could have gone to bank examiners at the FDIC. I could have contacted the SEC. Hundreds of foreclosure orders cranked out daily, beyond any plausible claim that a human being had reviewed the paperwork. Easy to show. I’d been a notary and longtime employee of the mortgage department. I would have had some credibility.
Where did a disgraced felon handyman English major go to report reckless experiments with the fabric of reality? Who would listen?
I said, “If future you wanted you to change something, he would have told you. Told you where things went wrong. Suggested what you should do, whom you should approach. He knows all that you know, and everything he’s learned since.”
“Maybe,” Jonas said. I read into the angry tremor of his voice, “We’re done talking about this.”
Refilling my wineglass, I first noticed the label. Jonas had selected a Cheval Blanc, and a good year at that. Not cheap.
“Something came through with the smoke detector,” I guessed.
“A racing tip,” he admitted.
And by ordering a bottle of otherwise unaffordable wine, Jonas had already begun remaking the future.
We ate our expensive dinners in uncomfortable silence.
Chapter 5
Jonas never showed me his message to himself, but it must have offered more than the one tip on the horses. Twice I saw him online trading stocks and bonds. Once he might have been making foreign-currency trades; he shut his laptop before I got a good look at the screen.
Whatever he was doing, money ceased to be a problem for him.
He increased my pay, too, to what I surmised was a reasonable salary for a handyman—generous, considering how unhandy I was. In the same breath he announced that part of the increase was in lieu of my former meal allowance.
I took the point: no more fraternizing, let alone unsolicited advice on his project.
Weeks passed, then months. The tension eased and we started eating together again. We talked football. But unless asked, I no longer commented on his research.
In October, Jonas plunked down an Internet bet on the Super Bowl, and in February he cleaned up. Along the way I had summoned the nerve to invite Victoria, from the 7-Eleven, for coffee. It turned out we shared several interests. I began to have a life again.
Absent a few dollars in my pocket, would I have asked her out? I couldn’t know. What if things worked out between us? What if she and I married, had children—only without the windfall from Future Jonas, that wouldn’t have happened? Or what if, by keeping secrets, I poisoned the romance that was meant to be?
Gadgets no longer arrived as guilt offerings from Jonas’s former colleagues, in truckload consignments of “miscellaneous electronics” to be scavenged, or by scrounging at the dump, but in FedEx cartons—sometimes even from tech firms I’d heard of. I filled dumpster after dumpster with the junk from Jonas’s parts heaps, clearing floor space for freestanding shelves and yet more workbenches. Jonas’s research took over more and more of the warehouse.
He used the expanded work area to scale up his experiments. I would have thought that a simple task: use a larger enclosure, perhaps, or crank up the voltage. Evidently, I’d have been wrong. But bit by bit he was able to time-shift larger and heavier objects—an ancient doorstop, a toner cartridge, a stack of dinner plates.
Only some items came out . . . wrong. Calculators emerged spitting sparks, or unable to add and subtract properly, or inert. Shifted fruit smelled
odd, and never twice in the same manner. To my unvoiced relief, the guinea pigs shied away from the scraps Jonas offered them. He mused aloud about impenetrable topics like “microscopic regions of field inhomogeneity,” then ordered yet more esoteric instrumentation. Beyond expensive and bulky, I had no idea what any of the new paraphernalia was.
After a while Jonas had six prototypes of varying features and capacities under test on as many workbenches. By then he had started keeping a schedule on a freestanding whiteboard: what he had sent forward, inside which prototype unit, due to reappear when.
I learned to ignore the incessant beeping.
One thing didn’t change: Jonas grumbling as he labored, glaring at the news that ever streamed from his laptop. Financial contagion in Greece had spread to more of Europe. Sinking house prices continued to drag down the U.S. economy. Glaciers and icecaps melted faster than predicted by climate models. The North Koreans dropped a test missile into the Sea of Japan, and the Iranians came ever closer to having nukes. I hung a second corkboard for Jonas, and he soon had it richly layered in news printouts.
As far as I knew, this Jonas had yet to send any warning back in time, and for that I was grateful. Maybe he, too, at some level, also worried about paradoxes.
He told me what he wanted me to do and I did it. We discussed little unrelated to my gophering and cleaning. Until—
“Damn him!” Jonas shouted.
I came at a run from the break room. On Jonas’s laptop screen a wall of water loomed over little boxes. Only those boxes were buildings! The screen crawl shouted: MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI STRIKE JAPAN. THOUSANDS MISSING AND FEARED DEAD. As I watched, the tidal wave carried away—everything.
“Why didn’t he warn me?” Jonas turned toward me, ashen. “I would have contacted seismologists, geologists, someone. At the least I could have raised a few doubts, instilled some heightened awareness.”
Stunned by what I was seeing, I could only shrug.
Whole towns smashed to rubble. An entire passenger train swept out to sea. Power plants shut down across much of the country. For days, we could hardly look away. The distance that had come between us all but vanished.
Call that, while it lasted, the tissue-thin silver lining.
Then, one after another, the Fukushima reactors melted down. The icy intensity that settled upon Jonas terrified me.
“Forget him.” Jonas shoved away his laptop. “I could warn me.”
“But you didn’t,” I said.
“But I could,” he shot back. “That’s the beauty of having a time machine.”
“Changing what else? Future you must have had a reason not to mention this.”
“That Jonas won’t tell anyone anything,” Jonas snapped. “That future went by the wayside when he gave me the means to speed up my work.”
“And if you send your earlier self a message, won’t our era”—and the experiences of everyone in it?—“go by the wayside?”
“Thousands are dead. Thousands more are missing. Thousands to whom we can restore a future. What’s happened in the last week worth saving—”
On a nearby workbench, something went beep-beep-beep.
Jonas glanced at his whiteboard and flinched. “I have nothing due.”
His latest device enclosures had windows: metal mesh embedded in glass, like in the door of a microwave oven. The mesh sufficed to maintain field homogeneity, whatever that was, in the enclosed volume. And so, within the unit that had just beeped, I saw a smoke-detector carton atop a sheet of paper.
The note, when Jonas retrieved it, exhibited the same spidery script as the whiteboard. Jonas’s handwriting.
The note said only: Don’t do it!
The note rattled me, but not as much as what the smoke detector revealed. It, too, matched a serial number from our collection of smoke detectors. The imperious command came from little more than two years ahead of us.
An earlier Future Jonas had weighed in.
“He knows more than we know,” I said. “We should listen to him.”
Jonas began to pace, his brow furrowed. In a way, our shared confusion reassured me. And at the same time, it terrified me. If he didn’t understand the implications . . .
Time travel made my head hurt. Suppose Future Jonas of the earliest contact was gone, done in by his own actions. Was that suicide? A noble sacrifice? Insanity? And what of me in that future? My, or his, life would have been swept away, too.
But if Future Jonas was gone, who was it that sent, or would send, those stock tips? Expensive equipment still surrounded us, paid for somehow. I struggled to grasp a future not as much forestalled as fine-tuned.
“Thousands would be saved,” Jonas said abruptly, still pacing the aisle between two rows of workbenches. “And the nuclear plants could be shut down preemptively, the meltdowns avoided, a whole region spared from contamination. Yet I’ve told myself to do nothing. Because? Because?”
At the end of the aisle, once again facing me, Jonas stopped. “He, I, may fear a warning will make matters worse. It’s a theory, anyway.”
“Can a warning make a tsunami worse?”
“Not the tsunami,” Jonas said. “The problem would be a precise earthquake prediction, because there’s never been such a thing. People will demand explanations. My research interests aren’t secret, and none of them involve seismology.”
Transforming Jonas overnight from discredited crackpot into the man who knows the future. How long till the government seized his technology? What would be the effects of that?
“Jonas.” My voice cracked. “Keep this genie in its bottle. You only need to stop.”
“No,” he said, breaking eye contact. “I was given the resources to work faster. That happened for a purpose.”
I sensed something in his expression, but in an instant—if I hadn’t imagined it—the hesitancy vanished.
Still, to my relief, Jonas heeded his future self and sent back no warning.
Chapter 6
Expensive equipment kept coming. The electron microscope, I almost understood (though not why Jonas wanted one). Most names and explanations ricocheted off me. Some of the instrumentation he custom-ordered. That, I gathered, was pricey.
Nor did he limit his shopping spree to tech gear. He donated our furniture to the Salvation Army and replaced it with good stuff. He bought himself exercise gear. He donated the well-used Hyundai station wagon, too, and began driving a Lexus sport ute.
When he went out at all.
The better-equipped his lab became, the edgier Jonas got about the neighborhood. He had a security firm reactivate and monitor the warehouse’s old alarm system. He wasn’t sleeping well, either. Creeping downstairs for midnight snacks, I used to find the ground floor dark. Now, as often as not, I’d find him in the lab area. Tinkering, obsessively following current events, or standing guard? I couldn’t always tell.
“Too damn much work,” Jonas said when I suggested moving. To relocate the lab, he meant. “And I’ll thank you not to spend my money. That’s not what it’s for.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I’d been apologizing a lot. Other than that Jonas was cranky, I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t think he was angry with me.
That left only him.
His progress appeared to have stalled. Calculators and cell phones and anything else that relied upon precision microelectronics never functioned after a time shift. And the objects he chose to shift had stopped getting heavier. I gathered that had something to do with power requirements.
“I don’t want them inside,” Jonas often muttered. The power company, I decided he meant. They might steal his work.
As his experiments progressed, an electrical overload was probably inevitable. Still, when one happened, Jonas wasn’t quite sure why. A typo, perhaps: Maybe he’d accidentally scheduled two arrivals for the same moment. Or maybe he’d miscalibrated one of his devices.
Maybe, I opined, future Jonas had had something more to say.
My theory he dismissed with a scowl.
Whatever the reason, two transceivers beeped in unison. Once.
With a blinding fountain of sparks, the warehouse substation blew. Cascading effects plunged the neighborhood into darkness for several blocks in every direction. And in neither transceiver did any object come through.
The temporary blackout was a small thing, surely.
But so is the proverbial Amazonian butterfly, whose flapping wings give rise—weeks later, and far away—to a raging hurricane.
A beautiful spring day: mild with a gentle breeze, and all the cherry trees in bloom. Birds chirping, dogs yipping, and toddlers gleefully shrieking. A picnic lunch in the park. Stretched out on the grass, the sun warm on my face. Victoria singing softly to herself.
I was—the realization took me by surprise—happy.
When I summoned the energy to open my eyes, Victoria’s hair—wind-stirred, glinting in the sun—was more pixieish than usual. She was smiling down at me.
“Spinach in my teeth?” I asked. “See, this is why I don’t believe in vegetables.”
“You can tell yourself that.” She patted my arm.
We’d had sandwiches and deli salads she’d brought from the 7-Eleven, listened through shared earbuds to the newest download on her iPod, kicked around our dinner options, and debated braving the downtown crowds over the weekend to take in the Cherry Blossom Festival. She’d told a charming anecdote about her two-year-old niece. I’d told lawyer jokes.
“So . . .” she said.
“Back to the salt mines?” I guessed.
“We have a few more minutes.” She brushed the hair off my forehead. “When do I get to see where you work?”
A recurring theme. I said, “It’s not as interesting as where you work.”
“Right. Seriously, Peter, what’s the big mystery?”
“The boss likes his privacy.”
Jonas had finally ordered a second high-voltage line for his lab. About now he’d be watching a Dominion Power service crew like a hawk. Even though we’d covered his work area with canvas tarps. And draped a second layer of cloths over the first, lest any of the first batch should slip.