by Anthology
Before she could say, “Paley,” he was sitting on a stone-tuff church six hundred years in the past.
Perhaps tomorrow he’d go to shul. Today he’d sit and watch monks.
TIME TRAVELERS NEVER DIE
Jack McDevitt
1
Thursday, November 24, Shortly before noon.
We buried him on a cold, gray morning, threatening snow. The mourners were few, easily constraining their grief for a man who had traditionally kept his acquaintances at a distance. I watched the preacher, white-haired, feeble, himself near the end, and I wondered what he was thinking as the wind rattled the pages of his prayer book.
Ashes to ashes—
I stood with hands thrust into my coat pockets, near tears. Look: I’m not ashamed to admit it. Shel was odd, vindictive, unpredictable, selfish. He didn’t have a lot of friends. Didn’t deserve a lot of friends. But I loved him. I’ve never known anyone like him.
—In sure and certain hope—
I wasn’t all that confident about the Resurrection, but I knew that Adrian Shelborne would indeed walk the earth again. Even if only briefly. I knew, for example, that he and I would stand on an Arizona hilltop on a fresh spring morning late in the twenty-first century, and watch silver vehicles rise into the sky on the first leg of the voyage to Centaurus. And we would be present at the assassination of Elaine Culpepper, a name unknown now, but which would in time be inextricably linked with the collapse of the North American Republic. Time travelers never really die, he was fond of saying. We’ve been too far downstream. You and I will live for a very long time.
The preacher finished, closed his book, and raised his hand to bless the polished orchid-colored coffin. The wind blew, and the air was heavy with the approaching storm. The mourners, anxious to be away, bent their heads and walked past, laying lilies on the coffin. When it was done, they lingered briefly, murmuring to each other. Helen Suchenko stood off to one side, looking lost. Lover with no formal standing. Known to the family but not particularly liked, mostly because they disapproved of Shel himself. She dabbed jerkily at her eyes and kept her gaze riveted on the gray stone which carried his name and dates.
She was fair-haired, with eyes the color of sea water, and a quiet, introspective manner that might easily have misled those who did not know her well.
“I can’t believe it,” she said.
I had introduced him to Helen, fool that I am. She and I had been members of the Devil’s Disciples, a group of George Bernard Shaw devotees. She was an MD, just out of medical school when she first showed up for a field trip to see Arms and the Man. It was love at first sight, but I was slow to show my feelings. And while I was debating how best to make my approach, Shel walked off with her. He even asked whether I was interested, and I, sensing I had already lost, salvaged my pride and told him of course not. After that it was over.
He never knew. He used to talk about her a lot when we were upstream. How he was going to share the great secret with her, and take her to Victorian London. Or St. Petersburg before the first war. But it never happened. It was always something he was going to do later.
She was trembling. He really was gone. And I now had a clear field with her. That indecent thought kept surfacing. I was reasonably sure she had always been drawn to me, too, just as she was to Shel, and I suspected that I might have carried the day with her had I pressed my case. But honor was mixed up in it somewhere, and I’d kept my distance.
Her cheeks were wet.
“I’ll miss him too,” I said.
“I loved him, Dave.”
“I know.”
He had died when his townhouse burned down almost two weeks before. He’d been asleep upstairs and had never got out of bed. The explanation seemed to be that the fire had sucked the oxygen out of the house and suffocated him before he ever realized what was happening. Okay, I didn’t believe it either, but that was what we were hearing.
“It’ll be all right,” I said.
She tried to laugh, but the sound had an edge to it. “Our last conversation was so goofy. I wish I’d known—” Tears leaked out of her eyes. She stopped, tried to catch her breath. “I would have liked,” she said, when she’d regained a degree of control, “to have been able to say goodbye.”
“I know.” I began to guide her toward my Porsche. “Why don’t you let me take you home?”
“Thank you,” she said, backing off. “I’ll be okay.” Her car was parked near a stone angel.
Edmond Halverson, head of the art department at the university, drew abreast of us, nodded to me, tipped his hat to her, and whispered his regrets. We mumbled something and he walked on.
She swallowed, and smiled. “When you get a chance, Dave, give me a call.”
I watched her get into her car and drive away. She had known so much about Adrian Shelborne. And so little.
He had traveled in time, and of all persons now alive, only I knew. He had brought me in, he’d said, because he needed my language skills. But I believe it was more than that. He wanted someone to share the victory with, someone to help him celebrate. Over the years, he’d mastered classical Greek, and Castilian, and Renaissance Italian. And he’d gone on, acquiring enough Latin, Russian, French, and German to get by on his own. But we continued to travel together. And it became the hardest thing in my life to refrain from telling people I had once talked aerodynamics with Leonardo.
I watched his brother Jerry duck his head to get into his limo. Interested only in sports and women, Shel had said of him. And making money. If I’d told him about the Watch, he’d said, and offered to take him along„ he’d have asked to see a Super Bowl.
Shel had discovered the principles of time travel while looking into quantum gravity. He’d explained any number of times how the Watches worked, but I never understood any of it. Not then, and not now. “But why all the secrecy?” I’d asked him. “Why not take credit? It’s the discovery of the ages.” We’d laughed at the new shade of meaning to the old phrase.
“Because it’s dangerous,” he’d said, peering over the top of his glasses, not at me, but at something in the distance. “Time travel should not be possible in a rational universe.” He’d shaken his head, and his unruly black hair had fallen into his eyes. He was only thirty-eight at the time of his funeral. “I saw from the first why it was theoretically possible,” he’d said. “But I thought I was missing something, some detail that would intervene to prevent the actual construction of a device. And yet there it is.” And he’d glanced down at the watch strapped to his left wrist. He worried about Causality, the simple flow of cause and effect. “A time machine breaks it all down,” he said. “It makes me wonder what kind of universe we live in.”
I thought we should forget the philosophy and tell the world. Let other people worry about the details. When I pressed him, he’d talked about teams from the Mossad going back to drag Hitler out of 1935, or Middle Eastern terrorists hunting down Thomas Jefferson. “It leads to utter chaos,” he’d said. “Either time travel should be prohibited, like exceeding the speed of light, or the intelligence to achieve it should be prohibited.”
We used to retreat sometimes to a tower on a rocky reef somewhere downstream. No one lives there, and there is only ocean in all directions. I don’t know how he found it, or who built it, or what that world is like. Nor do I believe he did. We enjoyed the mystery of the place. The moon is bigger, and the tides are loud. We’d hauled a generator out there, and a refrigerator, and a lot of furniture. We used to sit in front of a wall-length transparent panel, sipping beer, watching the ocean, and talking about God, history, and women.
They were good days.
Eventually, he had said, I will bring Helen here.
The wind blew, the mourners dwindled and were gone, and the coffin waited on broad straps for the workmen who would lower it into the ground.
Damn. I would miss him.
Gone now. He and his Watches. And temporal logic apparently none the worse.
> Oh, I still had a working unit in my desk, but I knew I would not use it again. I did not have his passion for time travel. Leave well enough alone. That’s always been my motto.
On the way home, I turned on the radio. It was an ordinary day. Peace talks were breaking down in Africa. Another congressman was accused of diverting campaign funds. Assaults against spouses were still rising. And in Los Angeles there was a curious conclusion to an expressway pileup: two people, a man and a woman, had broken into a wrecked vehicle and kidnapped the driver, who was believed to be either dead or seriously injured. They had apparently run off with him.
Only in California.
Shel had been compulsively secretive. Not only about time travel, but about everything. The mask was always up and you never really knew what he was feeling. He used to drive Helen crazy when we went out to dinner because she had to wait until the server arrived to find out what he was going to order. When he was at the university, his department could never get a detailed syllabus out of him. And I was present when his own accountant complained that he was holding back information.
He used to be fond of saying knowledge is power, and I think that was what made him feel successful, that he knew things other people didn’t. Something must have happened to him when he was a kid to leave him so in need of artificial support. It was probably the same characteristic that had turned him into the all-time great camp follower. I don’t know what the proper use for a time machine should be. We used it to make money. But mostly we used it to argue theology with Thomas Aquinas, to talk with Isaac Newton about gravity, to watch Thomas Huxley take on Bishop Wilberforce. For us, it had been almost an entertainment medium. It seemed to me that we should have done more with it.
Don’t ask me what. Maybe track down Michelangelo’s lost statue of Hermes. Shel had shown interest in the project, and we had even stopped by his workshop to admire the piece shortly before its completion. The artist was about twenty years old at the time. And the Hermes was magnificent. I would have killed to own it.
Actually, I had all kinds of souvenirs: coins that a young Julius Caesar had lost to Shel over draughts, a program from the opening night of The Barber of Seville, a quill once used by Benjamin Franklin. And photos: We had whole albums full of Alexander and Marcus Aurelius and the sails of the Santa Maria coming over the horizon. But they all looked like scenes from old movies. Except that the actors didn’t look as good as you’d expect. When I pressed Shel for a point to all this activity, he said, what more could there be than an evening before the fire with Al Einstein? (We had got to a fairly intimate relationship with him, during the days when he was still working for the Swiss patent office.)
There were times when I knew he wanted to tell Helen what we were doing, and bring her along. But some tripwire always brought him up short, and he’d turn to me with that maddeningly innocuous smile as if to say, you and I have a secret and we had best keep it that way for now. Helen caught it, knew there was something going on. But she was too smart to try to break it open.
We went out fairly regularly, the three of us, and my true love of the month, whoever that might be. My date was seldom the same twice because she always figured out that Helen had me locked up. Helen knew that too, of course. But Shel didn’t. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that his old friend would have considered for a moment moving in on the woman he professed (although too loudly) to love. There were moments when we’d be left alone at the table, Helen and I, usually while Shel was dancing with my date. And the air would grow thick with tension. Neither of us ever said anything directly, but sometimes our gaze touched, and her eyes grew very big and she’d get a kind of forlorn look.
Helen was a frustrated actress who still enjoyed the theater. After about a year, she abandoned the Devil’s Disciples, explaining that she simply did not have time for it anymore. But Shel understood her passion and indulged it where he could. Whenever there was a revival, we all went. Inevitably, while we watched Shaw’s trapped characters careen toward their destinies, Shel would find an opportunity to tell me he was going to take her back to meet the great playwright.
I used to promise myself to stop socializing with her, to find an excuse, because it hurt so much to sit in the awful glare of her passion for him. But if I had done that, I wouldn’t have seen her at all. At night, when the evening was over and we were breaking up, she always kissed me, sometimes lightly on the cheek, sometimes a quick hit-and-run full on the lips. And once or twice, when she’d drunk a little too much and her control had slipped, she’d put some serious effort into it.
2
Thursday, November 24, Noon.
The storm picked up while I drove home reminiscing, feeling sorry for myself. I already missed his voice, his sardonic view of the world, his amused cynicism. Together, we had seen power misused and abused all through the centuries, up close, sometimes with calculation, more often out of ignorance. Our shared experiences certainly unique in the history of the planet, had forged a bond between us. The dissolution of that bond, I knew, was going to be a long painful process.
He’d done all the research in his basement laboratory, had built the first working model of his Temporal Occluding Transport System (which, in a flash back to his bureaucratic days with the National Science Foundation, he called TOTS) in a space between his furnace and a wall filled with filing cabinets. The prototype had been a big, near-room-sized chamber. But the bulk of the device had dwindled as its capabilities increased. Eventually, it had shrunk to the size of a watch. It was powered by a cell clipped to the belt or carried in a pocket. I still had one of the power packs at the house.
I would have to decide what to do with our wardrobe. It was located in a second floor bedroom that had served as an anteroom to the ages. A big walk-in closet overflowed with costumes, and shelves were jammed with books on culture and language for every period that we’d visited, or intended to visit.
But if my time-traveling days were over, I had made enough money from the enterprise that I would never have to work again—if I chose not to. The money had come from having access to next week’s newspapers. We’d debated the morality of taking personal advantage of our capabilities, but I don’t think the issue was ever in doubt. We won a small fortune at various race tracks, and continued to prosper until two gentlemen dropped by Shel’s place one afternoon and told him that they were not sure what was behind his winning streak, but that if it continued, they would break his knees. They must have known enough about us to understand it wouldn’t be necessary to repeat the message to me.
We considered switching into commodities. But neither of us understood much about them, so we took our next plunge in the stock market. “It’s got to be illegal,” said Shel. And I’d laughed. “How could it be?” I asked him. “There are no laws against time travel.”
“Insider trading,” he suggested.
Whatever. We justified our actions because gold was the commodity of choice upstream. It was research money, and we told each other it was for the good of mankind, although neither of us could quite explain how that was so. Gold was the one item that opened all doors, no matter what age you were in, no matter what road you traveled. If I learned anything during my years as Shel’s interpreter and faithful Indian companion, it was that people will do anything for gold.
While I took a vaguely smug view of human greed, I put enough aside to buy a small estate in Exeter, and retired from the classroom to a life of books and contemplation. And travel through the dimensions.
Now that it was over, I expected to find it increasingly difficult to keep the secret. I had learned too much. I wanted to tell people what I’d done. Who I’d talked to. So we were sitting over doughnuts and coffee on St. Helena, and I said to Napoleon—
There was a thin layer of snow on the ground when I got home. Ray White, a retired tennis player who lives alone on the other side of Carmichael Drive, was out walking. He waved me down to tell me how sorry he was to hear about Shel’s death. I
thanked him and pulled into the driveway. A black car that I didn’t recognize was parked in front of the house. Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting inside. They opened their doors and got out as I drifted to a stop. I turned off the engine without putting the car away.
The woman was taller, and more substantial, than the man. She held out a set of credentials. “Dr. Dryden?” she asked. “I’m Sgt. Lake, Carroll County Police.” She smiled, an expressionless mechanical gesture lacking any warmth. “This is Sgt. Howard. Could we have a few minutes of your time?”
Her voice was low key. She would have been attractive had she been a trifle less official. She was in her late thirties, with cold dark eyes and a cynical expression that looked considerably older than she was.
“Sure,” I said, wondering what it was about.
Sgt. Howard made no secret of the fact that he was bored. His eyes glided over me, and he dismissed me as a lowlife whose only conceivable interest to him might lie in my criminal past.
We stepped up onto the deck and went in through the sliding glass panels. Lake sat down on the sofa, while Howard undid a lumpy gray scarf, and took to wandering around the room, inspecting books, prints, stereo, whatever. I offered coffee.
“No, thanks,” said Lake. Howard just looked as if I hadn’t meant him. Lake crossed her legs. “I wanted first to offer my condolences on the death of Dr. Shelborne. I understand he was a close friend of yours?”
“That’s correct,” I said. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”
She nodded, produced a leather-bound notebook, opened it, and wrote something down. “Did you have a professional relationship?” she asked.
“No,” I said slowly. “We were just friends.”
“I understand.” She paused. “Dr. Dryden,” she said, “I’m sorry to tell you this: Dr. Shelborne was murdered.”
My first reaction was simply to disbelieve the statement. “You’re not serious,” I said.