The nurse dodged the hand I’d put out, just for a last friendly pat, you know. She covered me, toes to chin, with a lead blanket.
“When do you tell me my mission?”
“Willie will send word when you’ve gotten there safe and sound.” The Major’s words came from a speaker in the ceiling. “Good luck, son.”
“Eyes wide, now.” The nurse slid a hand into the seven tons of steel bolted to the ceiling above me, drawing out a pair of rubber cups on a long, noodle-pallid cord. I complied, distorting my view of the chalk timeline on the wall across from me; she popped the cups on my eyes, like contact lenses except they were so thick they braced my eyelids open.
“Bit of discomfort coming,” she said, patting the lead blanket.
Blinded, I felt the vibration of the machine as it lowered from the ceiling, Dr. Frankenstein’s version of an optician’s examining rig. It settled on my body like an automobile laid atop the blanket. I heard clips. The flesh of my rump pressed the rawhide grid below.
“It’s wrong on my nose,” I protested: cold steel was pressing down on my face with bruising force.
“Try to breathe.”
“My nose,” I said again.
All their warnings ran through my mind: If you lied about ever being to Seattle you will die. If there is any metal in your body, you will die.
Who would lie about visiting Seattle?
This is a one-way mission.
Knowing I would survive the press was hardly a comfort.
Seven tons of steel were clamped around me and my nose was going to break, and after telling me to breathe, just breathe, that nurse—she smelled of rosewater, I’ll never forget it—was sliding some kind of leather bit into my mouth. It was enough to make me wish I was at the front, face-to-barrel with one of the new Russo-German repeating rifles.
I heard her retreat to the staircase, locking the lead door. I counted to thirty. What felt like a year passed.
Then I saw the death of the world.
It was hot, but there was no fire. My crushed nose picked up a smell straight out of Dante’s Inferno: charnel and brimstone. I rose above the great American city, above Lake Washington and Puget Sound. Higher, higher.
But something was wrong with the color of the future, seven weeks out. Seattle, below, the sky above, even the air around me … it was all splashed with color I’d never seen before. Everything was off the accepted painter’s wheel of red, blue, yellow.
The cries of thousands of living things, dying in agony, merged with my own.
My mind, confronted with the impossible, revolted. Pinned, gagged, and clamped in place, unable to look away, I screamed as the timepress thrust me against the end of everything, as I bounced off that imminent stained future and ricocheted into the past.
A sproing, a sense of strings beneath me popping. I dropped—but struck something soft before I realized I was falling.
It was dark, everything hurt, and I was still screaming.
I fought the howls, eventually compressing them to whimpers, then a voiceless suctioning of air. The cups over my eyes were gone, but I seriously doubted whether I would ever open my eyes again.
… color that color that sound that smell …
When I did, I saw a square of light above, the doorway at the top of the staircase.
Was I still in the project basement? All the equipment was gone. I lay on a mattress in the middle of the floor, placed where the gurney had been. A bare light bulb hung overhead; the staircase that led up and out was wood, rather than steel, and my chalk timeline, naturally, was gone.
Just within reach was a milk jug full of water. A bucket waited in the corner.
A woman—not the nurse from before—waited at the top of the staircase. She had a blanket in one hand and a pistol in the other.
“How do you feel?” She sounded wary.
I covered my groin with one hand and felt for the bit in my mouth. The handful of leather was almost too much to lift; I was that weak.
I prodded my nose: not quite broken.
She waited.
What I managed was a thready: “Skinned. I feel skinned.”
She nodded, pocketed the weapon, and brought the sheet, restoring my modesty with a brisk snap of linen. Everything it touched ached, as if bruised.
Vanishing upstairs, she returned with a pillow, a proper blanket, and a tray containing broth, aspirin, and a tiny soda biscuit.
“Keep your hands under the bedclothes,” she ordered, feeding me extremely small sips of the soup.
“Who are you?”
“Constance Wills. Willie.”
“You’re Agent Sixteen?”
“Thought I was a chap?” she said. “The Major loves his little joke.”
The Major had told me they’d pressed Willie in 1937, seven weeks before the first time the world ended. Somehow she’d made it back to 1916 and pushed the devastation off nine years. If not for her, I’d have died at age nine.
She was the first of us to survive the timepress.
“Do whatever Willie says,” they told me. “You’ll be fine.”
It was a bit of a dirty trick to be expecting some war-ragged captain and to find, instead, a girl with cornflower eyes, hair the color of a strawberry roan, and delicate, freckled hands. Her face was stronger than I liked, her gaze more direct. No lipstick, either. Pity. I like a girl who tries.
“I’m—” I began, and she dumped lukewarm soup in my mouth.
“I don’t want to know your name unless you make it.”
With the spoon caught between my teeth, I could hardly tell her how I knew I would survive.
* * *
It was days before my body agreed, and conceded to feeling as though I might not, as Willie expected, simply die.
I took what she gave me—pills, pale suggestions of food—and shivered on the mattress. The thing I’d seen raked at my dreams, even though I couldn’t properly recall that awful color, or the exact timbre of that chorus of screams.
I dreamed incomprehensible, awful things: men suckling the intestines of disembowelled soldiers, window glass turning to liquid and forcing itself into the ear canals of soft, white-fleeced sheep, a robed worker running a girl’s body through an industrial steam press.
The dark and quiet of the basement were soothing. The walls were close and plain, offering tight, restful concrete horizons. The crawl to the bucket in the corner was as much as I could manage physically, and as far as I wanted to go.
Willie nursed but otherwise ignored me until I finally got bored enough to ask for a newspaper. She brought me the Post-Intelligencer and there was almost more information in it than I could bear: I threw it aside after two pages of Volstead Act enforcement and reminisces of a snowstorm the previous year.
The next day she brought the paper again and the world was easier to face. That afternoon, I was allowed a little more solid food: two bites of chicken and a mash of turnips.
“The paper,” I said. “It’s current?”
She nodded.
“I’ve just had my appendix out—at home, I mean.”
“They press us down into the precise moment when our younger selves are under anesthetic. Doctor Stefoff’s theory is it’s easier to make the transition that way.”
I ran a finger over a week’s worth of beard. “I’d like to shave.”
“You’re not ready.”
“I wish to be presentable.”
“Nobody cares what you look like.”
I tried to summon a shred of charm. “You should be nicer to me, Willie. I’m here to save the world, remember?”
“You can have a mirror and a razor when you come up to your room.” With that, she vanished upstairs.
That gave me pause. The prospect of climbing that staircase filled me with dread, like a child mandated to visit to a malevolent old relative. Some dying grandfather, furious as his body failed, refusing to know his time was coming. Clawlike hands and the smell of dying …
Up in t
he house was sunshine and fresh air and the inevitability of the end.
It took me another day to muster the nerve. I was rubber-legged and sweating before I was halfway up the staircase.
“See here, old man. This isn’t physical.” To prove it to myself, I marched down to the bottom again, one two, one two, setting a slow but steady pace and swearing I wouldn’t break it. When my feet hit the concrete floor I turned on my heel—about face, good soldier!—and maintained my march to the top.
I was trembling with nausea when I reached the door, but I nevertheless forced myself through.
The door led into a closet, filled with men’s clothes. Beyond it was a plain, old-fashioned and distinctly masculine bedroom, with blue bed covers and uninspired wooden furniture. Even that, for a moment, was almost too much color.
A shaving kit taunted me. The water was fresh, steaming; Willie must have heard me dithering on the stair.
“You can do this,” I told myself.
The face in the mirror was thinner, and the bruising on the bridge of my nose was smeared, on one side, into a black eye. I’ve always been on the pale side; now I looked positively bloodless. My hair had turned a brittle white-blond, except at the roots.
I had been convinced I’d see it—the end, that horrible color—brimming from the sockets of my eyes.
I shaved, slowly, taking care not to cut myself. The sight of blood would have sent me quailing back to my sickbed. Putting on a suit from the closet that just about fit, I listened at the door.
Women’s voices and a mutter of teacups: Willie had company. No matter. She couldn’t keep me from my mission forever.
I found her in the kitchen with an older woman and a sickly looking Negro man, the three of them sharing a breakfast of eggs and bacon. The smell was so rich my stomach turned.
The older woman looked at me, eyebrows raised. “Who’s this fellow?”
“My brother.” Willie swallowed a slimy, soft-boiled egg. “Jules Wills the Third.”
The woman turned out to be a housekeeper and cook. Her name was Mrs. Farmer and she seemed a gem: motherly, warm, efficient, everything a matron should be. The old man, Rufus, was nominally a servant. This polite bit of fiction allowed him to live, despite his race, with three other gents Willie was keeping upstairs. I was given to understand she ran a boarding house for convalescent bachelors.
I endured an interminable stretch of pointless chitchat about the stock market and a recent State of the Union address and whether the carrots at market had been overpriced that day. Finally Rufus caned his way out into the hall and Mrs. Farmer took away the dishes, with their intermingling, overstrong smells.
“I could just about do a cup of tea,” I said. “Be a love, will you?”
Willie affected not to have heard, opening a small journal and paging through the opening leaves.
“Why am I appointed your brother?”
“Because you’re a flirt, and I wish to avoid trouble.”
“You said you’d be nicer to me if I survived.”
“Who says you have?”
That took the wind out of my sails. “My strength is—I am recovering.”
“You might yet run mad and cut your throat,” she said, with no apparent interest. “Or need to be shot.”
“You’re not as cold as all that, are you?”
“Would you like to test me?”
I was too irked to tell her that I’d seen proof I was going to make it. “When do I receive my orders?”
She took up a pen, turned to a blank page in her journal, and spoke as she wrote: “February 7th, 1920. My brother Jules has arrived from England and met with a mishap: he’s been robbed of his luggage and caught a fever. I have been nursing him ’round the clock—”
“Ha!” said I.
“—and it begins to look as though he may pull through. Since I saw him last, six years ago, Julie has grown into a reasonably handsome fellow—”
“Faint praise.”
“He has blue eyes, like mine, and hair so dark it might be taken for black.”
“It’s not dark now.”
“It’ll grow in.” Willie continued to narrate: “He has had his appendix removed in childhood and—” She paused. “Other scars?”
“If you’d nursed me as attentively as you claim, you’d know.”
“The project must know which one you are if they’re to send proper identification.”
Which one you are. It raised the hairs on my arms.
“Shall I be forced to describe your personality?” Withering tone there: whatever she said would be unflattering.
“It’s the bottom of my foot. I stepped on a fishing lure.”
She finished the sentence in silence and then added, “Though dear Julie isn’t out of danger yet—”
“I’m not wild about this pet name you’ve given me.”
“—he is restless and eager to be of use.” She looked across the table. “They’ll send something along presently.”
“Just like that?”
We could press things back, never forward. Willie would complete her girlish diary and shelve it somewhere safe: her notes would wait until they reached the project, twenty-six years on, for the Major to read about my arrival.
“What is it?” Willie said.
“I won’t see 1946 again until I’m in my forties.” The thought was staggering.
She frowned. “Your package will arrive downstairs. When you go, bring up the sheets.”
“Would you have me dust while I’m at it? Arrange some flowers?”
“I’m sure, Julie, that I don’t care what you do.” She jotted one last sentence, snapped the journal shut when I tried to see it, and left me tealess and suddenly chilled in the kitchen.
She told them I was insubordinate. My stomach cramped and I was, all at once, brimming with fury. I had an urge to chase her out of the room, to smash her head against the banister until her blood ran between my knuckles. To lick, drink … I touched my tongue to the notch between my clenched index and middle fingers, imagining salt, and saw a flash of color …
It passed, leaving me dry-mouthed and appalled at myself.
You may yet run mad.
“Maybe Julie isn’t out of the woods yet,” I conceded, and escaped downstairs.
The basement had a sour smell I associated with an animal’s den—my smell, I realized, from days of sickness—overlaid by lubricated machinery. I gathered the bedding, wadding everything into the top sheet, and walked it up to the room with the wardrobe. The stairs were easier the second time.
Between the sheets and the mattress was a stiff black tarpaulin. I folded that, too, finding the mattress beneath pristine, and carried it up.
Returning once more, I strained to tilt the mattress off the floor. There was no drain there yet. The message scratched into the floor, “16—Hungry,” seemed fainter than it had been, a week ago in the future, when I was climbing aboard the gurney.
I let the mattress fall back into position and paced the room. There was nothing down here but cool air, bare walls, soothing quiet. By my time, there would be a trapdoor under the staircase, access to a lower basement. For now, though, the floor was intact: this was the bottom of the hole.
I had never been monstrous. The flash of bloodlust was tied to what I’d seen, seven weeks into my future, at the end of the world. I’d been infected. Some rot was blooming within my mind or soul.
What could I do but fight it?
I should go out, take in a little air, feel the rain on my face. Or eat—Mrs. Farmer would fix me tea, I’d wager, even if Willie had no idea of proper female behavior. I could go upstairs and meet the convalescents.
Instead I sat on the steps in the blessed dim and quiet, trying to still my thoughts.
After about an hour a satchel appeared in mid-air, at waist-height—the height of the gurney. It was scorched. A scrap of strung hide was burning into its bottom.
It flopped onto the mattress, just as I had, and lay ther
e, smoking. I thought of horse droppings, suddenly, steaming on frosty lawns.
Inside the satchel I found bundles of letters and a paper-wrapped package, tied in string and all neatly labelled, like an odd Christmas parcel. Names: mine, hers, someone named Robert Chambers and Kenneth Smith.
I opened a package with “Jules Wills III” on it, and found a wallet containing thirty dollars in American bills. A small fortune.
The brown paper the wallet came in had been inked with facts and figures I was meant to memorize: my birthday in 1898, Willie’s in 1895, our parents’ names. There were notes outlining a sketchy little cover story about growing up on an estate in the West Dorset countryside, and the circumstances that had brought us to America.
The tale was Willie had married a man who’d brought her here. He’d died in the Great War and so she’d set up the convalescent home. Our parents had sent me out to check on her.
“Is the post in?” Her voice at the top of the stair made me jump. “I smell smoke.”
I coughed, stood, passed it up. Her eyes travelled over the basement—she saw the soot-mark from the bag on her virginal mattress and I realized I wasn’t meant to have brought up the tarpaulin.
“You put the mattress there?” I asked suddenly. “You’d have fallen onto—”
I gestured at the floor and wondered if she’d broken anything when she hit the concrete.
She extracted the bundle with her name on it and passed me a bunch of letters. “From Father,” she said. I could sense she was debating her answer.
“Please, Willie. I don’t mean to be beastly. None of this is what I expected.”
She shook her head. “There was no mattress. How could there be?”
“It’s only a yard, I suppose. Were you hurt?”
“Grady and Biggs broke my fall.”
“Who?”
“Agents fourteen and fifteen. What remained of them, anyway.”
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