Mission: Tomorrow

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “So, magic and tricks,” I said. “I’m not complaining, exactly. They gave us a grant. We can use it, but—” I sighed. “But I’d like to have a chance at the big time.” Big time, real relationships . . . something. Something beyond talking a lot and playing with circuit boards, and setting coins on edge. “Is that a trick coin?”

  He shook his head. “No. There is a way of throwing it. A flick of the thumb that makes it more likely than not to land on edge.”

  I didn’t say anything. It would be easy to say something, and get this conversation going. We’d done this before. They would speak through the night, happily spinning nebulous theories.

  Apparently, the fact that I was silent wouldn’t stop them. “See,” Xavier said, putting down the soldering iron and reaching for a piece of bread. “In some ways, distance doesn’t exist. Or time. Well, they exist, but in a mathematical way. Time is an abstraction of the human mind, and every piece of matter in existence touches every other piece. Some people have theorized that the universe is a hologram. And if you work from that hypothesis, then it should be possible to move one piece of matter from one place and time to another, without passing the space intervening. Other people have worked on this theory, for instance—”

  “And your magic bullet is?” I said.

  “Beg your pardon?” Kenyon said.

  “If other people have worked on it, your magic bullet to get it to work for you is . . . ?”

  “Oh.” He grinned at me. “That is where Xavier comes in. We’re building a computer that will perceive time/space in its intrinsic togetherness, so that to it the universe will be just one hologram, a flat set of coordinates, where matter can be transposed from one side to the other.”

  “Really,” I said, aware my voice sounded sarcastic. I’d heard all this before, as they added chips and circuits and soldered and talked. “Just a trick of the thumb for the computer.”

  “Uh, what?” Xavier said.

  “I think Cass is tired,” Kenyon said, his eyes shining with something like amusement. “Maybe we should show her the test?”

  “Not tonight,” Xavier said. “I need to iron out the bits of code, unless we want to send a package to last Wednesday again.”

  “Last Wednesday?” I said.

  “Next Wednesday, actually,” Xavier said. “We tried to send something across the living room, yesterday, but what we did was send it to next Wednesday. At least from the energy or whatever, Kenyon calculated that it went some distance in the future, no further than next Wednesday.”

  “I see,” I said. “That will not solve the problem of instant package delivery.”

  “Probably not,” Kenyon said, and looked away from me, “Hey, Xav, have you considered that perhaps a person needs to go through with the package?”

  “What?” Xavier dropped bread crumbs perilously close to the soldering iron he’d taken up again, as he bit into a chunk of bread.

  “Perhaps a person needs to go with the package. Oh, sure, I mean, the computer can move things because it doesn’t have the perception of time and space we have, but maybe some perception of time and space is needed, or—”

  “Or we’ll end up anywhere at all. Yah. But building a transporter portal the right size is going to take forever, and I don’t think—”

  “We don’t need a portal. Just an area of conductivity we can attach the computer to.”

  “Uh.”

  They’d quite forgotten I was there. I should tell them that there were laws against human experimentation—and animal experimentation, should it come to that—but I didn’t think they’d hear. They’d just nod, then go back to arguing over something that made no sense at all.

  I left and climbed the stairs in the dark to my room. Downstairs, I heard the click of the keyboard that meant one of them had dragged his laptop in. Mostly Kenyon talked, a bright stream of words, and Xavier interrupted with monosyllables, often in a questioning tone.

  Up in my room it was very quiet, save for the hum of the mosquitoes and the song of the crickets. I pulled back the sheers and stood at the window, looking down at the lights of the cityscape, and wondering, precisely, where all this was leading.

  I didn’t even know if I had any interest in either of them. I wasn’t raised to expect a man to support me, or necessarily even to get married. But there is a madness that comes to women in their mid-twenties. Or perhaps it was just that I suffered from an unwarranted attraction for very smart men who most of the time didn’t seem to notice I was around. My mother had accused me of collecting geniuses as far back as kindergarten. I thought it would have been much easier if I’d collected them like my brother used to collect butterflies, with a pin through the heart.

  At any rate, I’d helped Xavier and Kenyon win a grant, and we had money through the fall, and after that, when the first snows of Colorado flew, they’d probably admit defeat and go on to do something or other with large computers and circuits and soldering irons and I’d—

  I’d probably go back to college and study something else. And learn to stay away from dreamers who dreamed in calculations and science.

  I closed the drapes and went back to bed. It wasn’t until I was almost asleep that I thought about the package they’d sent to last—or was it next—Wednesday. Did they mean that? At least, they should have managed to make it disappear, right? Or had they just misplaced it and hoped really hard?

  I woke up with the sound of banging. One of them—or maybe both—was in the kitchen and doing something.

  We hadn’t any dishes between us, but this house had come with full cabinets of dishes and baking ware, which we’d used to warm up pizzas, mostly.

  Now, from the sound of it, the two of them were banging pans together. Perhaps they’d given up on instant teleportation and started working on a garage—or kitchen—band.

  I grabbed my robe, put it on, and went downstairs on my bare feet, because if there’s one thing you can be sure of is that two geniuses, together, in a kitchen, are as likely as not to make something explode.

  But when I got downstairs, they’d moved the noise into the dining room, the place where they’d set up their supercomputer and all its accoutrements. On one side of the dining room, connected to the computer, there was this . . . platform built of pizza pans.

  They heard me come in—a miracle, over the din they were making—as a pan fell, and grinned madly at me. “Ah, just in time for the experiment,” Xavier said. “Kenyon, here, is going to be our package delivery man, and, if everything works, he’s going to step on that platform there, and he’s going to appear on the other side of the dining room,” he said. “With the package clutched in his hands.”

  If I’d had the slightest notion that anything would happen beyond maybe Kenyon getting a very mild electrical shock, from those leads that connected the computer to the pizza pans, I’d have protested. But all I could think is that he was wearing boots, after all, so even the small amount of electrical current flowing onto the pizza pans would make no difference.

  Xavier did something at the computer, which was really just a naked bank of chips and circuits and a spaghetti confusion of wires. He nodded to Kenyon, who put safety goggles on and grabbed a carefully wrapped box, then leapt onto the pizza pans with a resounding clang and . . . vanished.

  I jumped after him.

  It wasn’t sane. It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t what any human being in the history of science should have done. It was the instinct of someone who’d just seen the impossible and wanted to unsee it. I jumped after Kenyon, because I was sure I wasn’t seeing things right and that if I just got there I would see him clearly.

  I landed on soft dirt, and heard something like a scream, and Kenyon was grabbing my arm and pulling me upright, and he threw the carefully wrapped package at something.

  It was hard to know exactly what I was seeing. Once, when I was ten, I’d had anesthesia for an operation, and as I was coming out from it, what I saw was a jumble of colors and heard a jumble of s
ounds, and nothing made sense. Someone later had explained this to me by saying you have to learn to see. Babies have to learn to use their eyes and how the shapes they see translate to three dimensional objects. Until they do that, all they see is a jumble of colors and movement.

  The colors and movement I saw were relatively familiar. I was sure the green things nearby were plants. I wasn’t sure what the huge thing in front of me was. It might have been a parrot grown to a million times the size, with claw arms.

  “T-Rex,” Kenyon said, with certainty, as he tried to shove me backwards. I stepped back, but I didn’t fall through the pizza platters into the dining room.

  “This is not the other side of the dining room,” I said indignantly, as if by saying I could make him fix it.

  “I kind of noticed.” he said, and stepped back again, retreating into the shadow of a plant.

  The alien parrot thing that he thought was a T-Rex sniffed the air and made a sound like a bull with laryngitis, and Kenyon whispered, “We must somehow have traveled back in time.”

  “This is not next Wednesday,” I said.

  “Not unless next Wednesday is really interesting.” He smiled a lopsided smile. “Right, we have to find our way back. Xavier should be calculating how to get us back right now.”

  “You were supposed to make sure the computer got the right coordinates. What kind of coordinates did you have in mind?”

  At that moment there was a sound not quite a zap, and a kind of glowing light over a spot to the left of us. The parrot-rex turned towards it, and Kenyon pushed me upright and towards it. “There, move it.”

  His shove was so hard I fell through the glowing spot, and onto the floor of the dining room. Xavier jumped out of the way as I picked myself up, and we turned to look at the pizza pan, as a heavy weight crashed on it, and Xavier screamed and cut the connection.

  We sat there for a long time, on the dusty floor of the dining room, absolutely quiet, looking at something about the size of a French loaf, but green and ending in a claw.

  Then Xavier got up. He made a sound like a hiccup and returned to the keyboard, where his fingers moved, furiously. Again and again, he told me connection had been established, but nothing happened. The toe of the parrot-rex oozed a silvery bright liquid onto the pizza pan and nothing happened.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll look around. I can’t understand how the two of you were so crazy as to try this out when you can’t temporally control it at all.”

  “We thought”—he waved in midair—“we thought, the other side of the dining room, how dangerous can it be.”

  He punched keys on the keyboard again. “And you can’t go. It’s dangerous if you go. Clearly it’s dangerous. You shouldn’t have gone to begin with.”

  “I had to do something. He vanished.”

  “He was supposed to vanish. If you hadn’t thrown yourself in after him, when I reestablished connection, he could easily have got back. But he saved you.”

  I wanted to protest, but of course he was right. Kenyon had saved me.

  I went to the kitchen, got the barbecue tongs, and moved the toe claw aside. “Fine,” I said. “So it’s up to me to go again. Maybe the parrot creature, the . . . owner of that toe, wounded him. Maybe he’s there, bleeding, and he can’t get back in. I’ll go in and pull him into the gateway?”

  “But you can’t. I’ll go.”

  “If you go, there’s no one who can operate the computer part.”

  “Right,” he said. “Right. So . . . Try to keep very clear in your mind where you want to go.”

  “You mean, remember where I was and what we saw?”

  “No. This is not magic. The computer understands a set of coordinates.” He glared at the toe. “Okay, the computer is supposed to understand a set of coordinates. If you keep those in mind, you should get to the same place.”

  “The same coordinates that Kenyon thought of?”

  “Yes.” He frowned. “Thing is, you shouldn’t have been able to go back and forth through the gateway, and that”—he pointed at the claw—“should never have come through. You should have to be connected to the computer to get it, and Kenyon was wearing the sensors. You and the thing must have gone through on . . . residuals or something.” He made a sound like hiccupping again. “We shouldn’t be doing this. The process is clearly not worked out enough.”

  “Yes, well, you should have thought of that before sending Kenyon to the land of the T-parrots.”

  His mouth made a very thin line, but he nodded. “Right. Okay. I don’t like to do this.”

  “I’m not ecstatic, either, but we need to at least try to get him back.”

  So, Xavier had attached sensors to my forehead, little dots that were hidden by my hair, and told me a long string of letters and numbers to keep in mind at all times, which was rather like thinking of a pink rhinoceros in that all sorts of other thoughts kept intruding.

  “Ready,” he said.

  I stepped on the pizza pan. And found myself . . . somewhere. There was the moment of disorientation, while my eyes tried to process what I was seeing, and then I focused on a line of distant, coral-colored mountains. There was a dry wind blowing, and the sun in the sky looked like it was enclosed in a dark ring.

  I stepped backwards into the glow, and into the dining room.

  Xavier glared at me, “Ready,” he said again.

  I stepped through into—nothing. And fell back again, taking gasping breaths of the living room air, which still smelled of candles, wine, bread, and soldering iron.

  “Ready.”

  I tripped through and into . . . salt water. Salt water around me, above me, and something huge swimming towards me even as my lungs labored to take in a breath, and—

  Back into the living room, dripping water onto the floorboards.

  “Damn it,” Xavier said. It was the first time I’d heard him curse. “Damn it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was underwater.”

  “No more,” he said. “No more. Let’s call for help.”

  “Who are we going to call for help?” I said. “Nine-one-one?”

  He shook his head. The hiccup sound came again, and I realized that he was trying very hard not to cry. “Someone. Someone has to be able to help us. One of the other grant recipients, maybe. It’s said the grants went out to the best minds in the world.”

  “Like us?”

  He made a face. “Well, someone has to be able to figure it out.”

  “Why? I don’t think anyone has done this before.”

  “But now we’ve done it,” he said. “Someone should be able to figure it out.”

  “And by then Kenyon will be gone. He thought the creature that put that toe through was a T-Rex. Maybe Kenyon evaded him, but how long do you think he can survive in the Jurassic? We have to keep trying. Sooner or later we’re going to get the right time.”

  “Okay,” Xavier said. He sounded hoarse. “Okay.”

  He returned to his keyboard. He shouted, “Ready.” I stepped onto the pizza pan.

  Fire and ice, burning and freezing, underwater and what appeared to be floating out in space. Over and over again, and I thought, well, we were in Colorado. The mountains had changed height and it had been underwater through the geological ages. I thought of the coordinates, and I thought of Kenyon, and I thought of the landcape I’d seen. On and off the pizza pan, and deserts and mountains and seaside beaches.

  Dawn was a streak of light on the horizon when Xavier croaked, “Ready,” and I stepped on. And stepped back into the dining room.

  “We have to stop,” I said. “This is no use.”

  Xavier looked pale and exhausted and looked at me with that kind of look people get when they haven’t slept in a long time and there’s a good chance they’re never going to sleep well, ever again, “Why?” he said. “You’re the one who said we had to try and the next try could find him.”

  I sat down. I felt very tired and as though I’d lost all force in my muscl
es. I felt as though I couldn’t communicate what I’d seen or what was so important about it.

  “The last place I went to,” I said. “There was a city.” I paused. I could see Xavier try to shape the question of what city. Before he could, I said, “And two suns in the sky.”

  The rest of it is in the history books, of course, though some details never made it in. For instance, the toe was not a T-Rex, but no one knows what it was. The form of life might be terrestrial or simply have followed a parallel evolution.

  When we called for help, there was an investigation by the best minds of our time. It turned out that Xavier and Kenyon had managed to create a teleporter of sorts, which could take a human being and take them through what might be best described as a fold in space and time almost instantly. But what they thought could control it, couldn’t.

  It took the next several decades to perfect the process, but in the end we had ships that could reach the habitable worlds on the distant stars, with ninety-five percent accuracy. The vehicles that were created with the Kenyon-Xavier process were called Schrodingers, despite Xavier’s lobbying for them to be named Kenyons.

  We’re credited, the two of us and Kenyon, with finding the way to the stars. It turned out it was neither a great government program nor a directed private initiative that opened space to colonization, but accident and three young idiots playing with that which they did not understand.

  We got married, of course, partly, I think, so we could wait together.

  You see, that portal they created took him somewhere. We don’t know where he is. But Xavier has updated the system and made it better as new things were discovered. And we try. Over the years we’ve tried again and again, without ever finding the world where Kenyon disappeared.

  However, as we know, it’s a matter of time. Sooner or later, the coin will fall on edge.

  Sarah A. Hoyt was born in Portugal (where her birth family still lives) and English is her third language (second is French.) This possibly explains why she’s on the kill list of most copy editors. To avoid them, she lives high and dry in Colorado with her husband, two sons, and a variable clowder of cats, reading and writing, with an occasional leitmotif of pastel painting, sewing, or carpentry thrown in when someone complains she’s been at the keyboard too long. Her most recent books are A Few Good Men, Noah’s Boy, and Night Shifters from Baen books, indie Witchfinder, a regency fantasy, and upcoming Through Fire and Darkship Revenge, also from Baen Books.