The button fascinated me, but I couldn’t decide what to do with it, so I sat in my chair considering the possibilities. I could make a fortune with it in a gambling casino or in the stock market. But something told me I should do more than that. I couldn’t help feeling that I was somehow being guided on how to use the button. I had the whole world—past, present, and future—right at my fingertips.
If I traveled back in time, could I change some of the events in history that had gone wrong? But I’d have to be careful not to interrupt the fabric of time. I sat in the chair, shaking my head and thinking, this is too big to rush into. I have no way of knowing what might happen if I changed the past—it might irreparably alter the present.
It had been an eventful day, and I was tired, so I decided to get some sleep and think about it tomorrow. I didn’t want to be zapped off someplace I didn’t want to be, by accidentally rubbing the button the wrong way, so I carefully wrapped it in a towel and placed it in the drawer of my nightstand, and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I should do with the button.
However, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, dust particles were flickering in the beams of sunlight streaming through the window. I showered, dressed, and went down to the coffee shop. After breakfast, I paid a shoe repairman to make a leather pouch with a strap, so I could wear the button around my neck.
I went back to my room, placed the button in the pouch, and put it on. It was a little heavy, but no one could see it under my shirt.
All morning I’d been thinking of where I wanted to go, but before I could go anywhere, I had to get my car home. If I started right away, I could be home tonight.
While driving home, I thought, Why not start using the button by doing something simple? I could go back to the family farm. . . . I was tired when I got home, so I went right to sleep.
* * * * *
Chapter 3
The next morning, I turned the utilities off and secured the house to be left empty. I was sure I would be able to return anytime I wanted to. I put the backpack on and stood by my front window watching people driving past and wondered how I could use the button to get to the family farm. There was still a lot I didn’t know about how it worked. I had enjoyed the farm when I was a boy, but I didn’t want to shock Mother by suddenly appearing in the house. I thought it would be best if I returned to the barn first, then I could walk around without frightening anyone.
I was born in 1976, so if I wanted to arrive at the farm when I was twelve, I’d have to travel back in time to 1988. I knew how to get to the farm, but how could I get there at a particular time? I had already learned that red would transport me to the place I was thinking about, and I could use green to travel back in time, but how could I travel back to a particular time? Perhaps if I wrote the date on a piece of paper, and thought of the place while concentrating on that date, the button would transport me to that place at that time.
I’ll make a trial run. I wrote December 25, 2006, on a pad and concentrated on that date while rubbing green. Suddenly, I was standing beside last year’s Christmas tree, listening to Christmas music on the radio. I rubbed white and immediately returned to the present.
Well! That worked! Now I’ll try going into the future. I wrote December 25, 2007, on the pad and rubbed the blue section. At first, since there was no Christmas tree, I thought the button hadn’t worked since I always put up a tree. Then I saw a calendar on a stand. That’s strange, I don’t keep a calendar on a stand, and that’s not even my stand. I looked closer—the calendar showed the date to be December 25, 2007, but the room was decorated differently. This was my house, all right, and the date was right.
I heard people talking in the kitchen. Then it hit me. I had moved out, and someone else had moved in. I was in someone else’s house! I didn’t want to frighten them, so I rubbed the white section of the button and returned to the present time.
I hadn’t really gone anywhere—I had just moved back and forth in time. I was wondering why I had sold the house, and who I sold it to, and for how much. It really didn’t matter; I could do it or not do it. It was my choice.
* * *
Convinced that I could do just about whatever I wanted, I wrote July 7, 1988, on a pad and, while looking at the date and thinking of a place in the family barn, I rubbed the green spot. In the blink of an eye, I was standing in the barn! I smelled the hay and old wood of the barn, and it brought back memories of my childhood. A boy was milking a cow. . . .It's me! At age twelve! Then I heard Grandfather’s voice.
“Augustus! Get that cow milked; your mother will have breakfast ready soon.” When he walked into the barn and saw me, he said, “Good morning! Where’d you come from?”
“Don’t you recognize me, Grandpa?”
He cocked his head to the side, squinted his eyes, “Your face does look familiar, but why do you call me Grandpa?”
Oh, oh, I knew that I had made a mistake. . . .I had traveled back in time, but me, the man traveling, had not changed to fit the time. I was still the same as I was, when I left my living room. And I learned something else about the button. No matter where, or to what time I traveled, I, the traveler, would remain the same. I had to correct my error, and quickly, or I might do some serious mental or emotional damage to my family. I sure couldn’t continue with my original plan.
“I’m sorry, sir. I heard the boy call you Grandpa, so I called you Grandpa. It was my awkward attempt at humor. I’m just a city slicker traveling through, and I wanted to see a real farm in action. . . . I’ll be going now. I parked my car down the road a ways,” I lied, and started walking away.
“No harm done, young feller. Would you like to join us for breakfast? My daughter-in-law fixes some great pancakes and eggs.”
“Thanks for the invitation, but my friends are waiting—I’d better be getting back.”
Grandfather’s invitation to breakfast made me realize that I hadn’t eaten for a while. I thought of my favorite café in Stoville—the little town nearby—and rubbed the red spot on the button, and zap, I was in the café. It hadn’t changed a bit; it was just as I remembered. I took a stool at the counter and looked around. I knew most of the people. Some of them looked at me kinda curious, but they didn’t seem to know me.
Darla Firth, the girl I had had a crush on when I was twelve, was in a booth with two of her friends. I waited until she noticed me and then smiled. She didn’t smile back; she just looked the other way. Smiling to myself I thought, Well! That sure hasn’t changed. I ordered bacon and eggs for breakfast and paid for it with a twenty-dollar bill.
Jim, the cashier, looked at the twenty and said, “This must be one of the new ones. I’ve never seen one like this before.” He looked at it more closely. “There’s something strange about this money—the date shows it was printed in 2004. This is 1988. . . . Something’s wrong.”
“Oh! I’m sorry,” I said, as I quickly retrieved the twenty. “My children have play money, and I seem to have gotten a toy twenty mixed in with my real money. I’ve handed you play money by mistake. I’ll have to get real money from my wallet in the car; I’ll be right back.”
“Wait just a minute,” Jim said. “I can’t let you leave without paying.”
“It’s okay; I’ll leave my watch as security!”
“My boss will have to approve that.” Jim hurried away saying over his shoulder, “You wait right here.”
Everyone was watching and listening. I was embarrassed and in danger of being arrested, so I removed my Rolex, laid it on the counter with the tab for my breakfast, rubbed the white portion of the button, and I was back in my living room . . . . I sat down in my easy chair and heaved a big sigh of relief.
* * *
Later, I was told that Jim returned with the owner and asked loud enough for everyone to hear, “Where’d he go?”
“Who?” Sam, a regular customer, asked into his cup of coffee from his stool at the counter.
�
��The man dressed in shirt and pants like I’ve never seen before, with a pack on his back,” Jim retorted.
“Oh, that man. . . . He disappeared.”
“You mean he walked out?” Jack, the owner, asked.
“No, I mean he just disappeared. He took his watch off, laid it on his tab, and disappeared,” Sam explained.
“Here’s his watch,” Jack said. “It looks expensive.”
Everybody stared at the gold Rolex.
The town constable, walking by the diner, noticed that something was amiss, so he stepped in and asked, “What’s going on, Jack?”
“Damned if I know. Jim told me that a man was trying to pay his check with a bogus twenty.”
“Do you have the twenty?” the constable asked.
“No,” Jim answered sheepishly.
“What did the man look like?” the constable asked.
“Just a regular guy, about thirty, six-foot tall, muscular build, blue eyes, black hair, wearing strange clothes, and he had a pack on his back.”
One of the girls chimed in, “He was handsome; he smiled at us.”
“No,” Darla spoke up. “He didn’t smile at you; he smiled at me. . . . He looked a lot like Augustus Wilder.”
“Ah, come on, Darla! Augustus is only a boy. Did anybody see him walk in?” the constable asked.
“He didn’t walk in, he just suddenly appeared over there,” Jim responded, pointing at a stool. “He sat right there at the counter, didn’t talk to anyone, but he sure looked the place over. He seemed to know me. And, as Darla said, he looked a little like Augustus Wilder.”
“Well, he was sure no thief,” the constable noted. “This watch is worth a lot more than his breakfast.”
Shaking his head in confusion, Jack asked the constable, “Don’t you think you ought to look for him?”
The constable’s face mirrored Jack’s confusion as he said, “Now, let’s see if I’ve got this right. Nobody saw this man come in, nobody knows him, and nobody saw him leave. He left a watch worth many times the price of his breakfast, and you want me to look for him? Where do you suggest I look, and for whom?” Smiling as he walked out the door, he asked, “You’re not selling whiskey in here are you, Jack?”
* * * * *
Chapter 4
My first attempt at time travel hadn’t worked out well, but I’d learned a lot about how to use the time-travel button. Now I’ve got to decide what to do with it. I sat in my living room pondering the possibilities.
I could travel back in time and have a conversation with Plato, or I could travel even farther back and discover the origin of man, then travel into the distant future and know the human destiny. Maybe that’s asking a little too much of a button that’s bound to have limitations. I hope I don’t find out what those limitations are by accident.
Going back in time would be interesting, but what has happened, has happened. I could observe the historical events as they occur and perhaps correct the mistakes historians made in recording it, but I couldn’t change anything. It would probably be a mistake to change anything even if I could, so I’ll go into the future. Maybe I can learn something that will be helpful. There’s no reason to take time off from work, since I can return to the present time anytime I want to, and no one will ever know that I’ve been gone.
I was excited about what I might find by traveling into the future. Things were really screwed up in the world right now, and I wanted to know if reason would prevail, and humanity would progresses into a bright new future—or will ignorance, bigotry, and greed prevail, and we find ourselves engaged in a major war? If I knew the answers to those questions, I might be able to make a difference.
On the chance that I might not return, I wrote a message on a pad of paper explaining where I had gone, and placed the pad next to the telephone. No one would believe the message even if they read it, but I’d leave it anyway. I’ll destroy it when I get back. I’ll get some sleep now, and tomorrow I’ll decide what to take with me into the future.
Next morning, I woke up excited and eager to go. I had no way of knowing what I might find in the future or what I might need. I didn’t want to overload myself, so I took only the essentials. I’d be traveling at the speed of thought, and since there’s no lapse of time while traveling, the only way I would know, to what time I had traveled, was to predetermine the time.
I knew that traveling into the future was risky, and I wanted to travel far enough to find out which way humanity was going. Theologians were saying that we are in the “end times,” and that the world is in for a thousand years of strife. If they’re right, I could find myself in a very uncomfortable situation. I hoped that if I zapped myself into a place I didn’t like, I could zap out again.
* * *
I put my backpack on, visualized downtown Los Angeles one hundred years into the future, and rubbed the button. Suddenly, a new environment appeared. I looked around but saw nothing that even resembled what Los Angeles had been at the time I left.
A great city lay in shambles. Piles of broken concrete with rusting reinforcing bars extended into the air. The rank odor of decay escaped from the rubble. To confirm that I was really in Los Angeles, I took readings with my navigational equipment. I was indeed at the location that had once been Los Angeles. My Geiger counter was clicking away. It was obvious that atomic bombs had fallen, perhaps many years in the past. Radiation levels were so high that I wouldn’t be able to endure them for long.
What appeared to be second generation humans—their bodies distorted as the result of radiation—were living in the rubble and scavenging for food. When they saw me, they ran toward me, brandishing crude weapons made of concrete reinforcing bars. They had shaped the iron bars in ways that enabled them to impale their victims.
To escape from these pitiful creatures, I concentrated on a concrete structure on a mountain, then rubbed the red portion on my button and was instantly standing beside the burned-out planetarium. I could see the entire Los Angeles basin from where I stood. The ruins of the city lay before me—it had died in a moment of extreme violence.
I was shocked and stunned, but I wanted to get a closer look, so I rubbed the button and moved to a place high among the rubble of concrete that extended above the heart of what had been the city and watched dejectedly as the sun slid down the empty sky. At twilight, the branches of long-dead trees stood silent and still, their starkness silhouetted against the copper glow of a sun that had set on what seemed to be a dying world. Darkness silently moved in like a beast of prey with its claws extended. Shrouded in the deepening shadows, peering eyes watched. Danger hung in the air like a gallows blade waiting to fall.
Animals, both human and non-human, crawled from their burrows in the rubble to search for food. . . . They searched for anything that might give them comfort. Like wild animals, they fought for the tiniest morsel. They even fought for and ate crawling things. Nothing could have prepared me for such a sight. With a shiver running up my spine, I remorsefully rubbed the red area on my button and moved to another spot. The new spot was better, only because there had been fewer tall buildings and fewer people at the time of the explosions. The remains of the freeways were just ribbons of concrete extending into the distance.
I had gone too far into the future. It seemed that some world leaders had gone too far in trying to satisfy their insatiable greed, and religious fanatics had gone too far in trying to force their religion upon those who wanted no part of it. Whoever had dropped the bombs must have been insane. They had destroyed a great city and, perhaps, the whole world. I left the devastation because I could see no way to change what had happened, or do anything to rectify the deplorable conditions of the poor creatures who lived there. I rubbed white on the button and returned to my living room where I sat thinking; I’ll have to find another way.
I wanted to tell someone about what I had seen, but who could I tell, and what could I tell them? My friends were going about their lives completely oblivious to what was going
to happen. I didn’t even know who had started the war. It wouldn’t matter what I said; no one would believe me. They would think I was just another nutcase. If I were going to do anything about it, I had to know more, and I had to move cautiously to avoid being killed by the fallout. I didn’t want to die from the radiation of a bomb, without even knowing who had dropped it, but before I could do anything, I had to get cleaned up and discard my radiation contaminated clothing.
* * *
Before I could determine the extent of the damage, I had to find a way to protect myself from the radiation. My firm had built places for storing radioactive material and our workers wore radiation-shielding suits to protect themselves. I could get one of those suits and search the globe to find out if there were places that had not been destroyed, but first, I had to decontaminate myself. I placed everything I had worn, including the backpack, in the incinerator and burned it, then wrapped the ashes in lead foil, and buried it deep in the ground. I scrubbed myself until I was free of contamination, and then I put on fresh things. I replenished my equipment and put my supplies in a new backpack.
If I were going to make a difference, I had to know why this terrible thing had happened. A newspaper was laying on my door step, so I picked it up and read the headlines. . . . Five more US servicemen killed in Iraq—Stock market reaches new high as consumer confidence slumps—Major manufacturing company lays off 50,000—Wages going down while prices are going up—The middle class is under attack—Jobs being sent overseas—Medical costs soaring—Insurance costs forcing doctors to leave the profession while insurance companies fail to pay claims.
This type of headlines went on and on. Shaking my head, I laid the newspaper aside. I wasn’t sure the world was worth saving, but I still wanted to know who had dropped the first bomb. I asked myself, “Why do some people want to kill other people?” I compiled a list of the reasons. It was surprisingly short: People will kill for food, water, shelter, and clothing. They will kill to defend their life, property, country, and they will kill to remain free. The things thousands die for are: God, honor, and greed. Few men will die to fulfill their own greed, but millions die to support the greed of their leaders, and they do it in the name of patriotism. Some of our best and bravest die for their country, and at last, some are beginning to ask, why do our leaders, or our leaders’ sons, never die for their country?
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