Prologue

by Greg Ahlgren

  The pamphleteer! Lewis realized. Damn! Of course! The blonde woman was the pamphleteer from Maine–the girlfriend of Arthur Pomeroy.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” he said apologetically.

  She smiled shyly. “That’s good, right? My hair was brunette the last time I saw you.”

  “Dyed it blonde I see.”

  “Actually, it was dyed brunette then.”

  Ginter nodded approvingly and pursed his lips. “Nice one.”

  “She’ll go to the lab with you,” Lorrie announced matter-of-factly. “Check it out and get back to us. All she needs to tell us is yes or no. We don’t need…we don’t want…details.”

  Lewis stood up. “We need another hundred and a quarter to buy the fuel for some additional tests. After that it’ll be ready to go. And it’ll go. One way or another.”

  Lewis cast one look more look around the room at the expressionless faces before following Lorrie back up the stairs. They don’t trust us, he thought as he walked through the kitchen toward the front foyer. The television was off in the solarium as the watcher had apparently given up and gone to bed. At the front door Lewis retrieved his umbrella and looked out the doorway before stepping out onto the front landing.

  “When?” Lorrie asked.

  “Soon,” Lewis responded. “I have to make arrangements to get her in to the lab without raising suspicion. It’s all access restricted and there are guards during the day. None are university employees. Even on nights and weekends there are still cameras.

  “We really do need another hundred and a quarter,” Lewis continued. “It’ll be enough to make enough fuel to do some tests and then to operate this thing. When can we get it?”

  Lorrie shook her head. “Lewis, there’s no way. There won’t be another dime until we get a report. Shauna is real spooked by these arrests and disappearances and the connection to your deVere. Eckleburg wants to shut you guys down now. He may not say it but I can tell he wants out. He thinks the whole thing is one big money drain and that we’re buying a pig in a poke without the pig.”

  Lewis put up his umbrella without answering. As if reading his thoughts, Lorrie became adamant.

  “They’re serious, Lewis. Don’t try and stiff us on this by getting the money first and then blowing off Pamela. No tour and approval, no money.”

  “Why her?” Lewis asked, turning back.

  “Pamela knows explosives,” Lorrie continued. “She’s the one who builds the bombs for Arthur. Or she did, until…” Her voice trailed off.

  Lewis nodded and swallowed hard. “I understand. I’ll be in touch.” He stepped off the landing and walked out to Beacon Street. At the sidewalk he turned left away from his parked car and surveyed the street. No one was about and at the corner Lewis turned left again. Another left and a two-block walk brought him to his car. He started it up, checked the mirror for any activity–there was none he could see–and drove back to Beacon Street. He watched his rear view mirror, and as he pulled out onto Beacon Street saw a parked vehicle pull out behind him. He hadn’t noticed anyone sitting in it when he had driven past. He headed straight home checking his mirror every few blocks. The car stayed one block behind him.

  That made no sense. Lewis decided that this had to be either a clumsy tail or else an innocent chance vehicle heading in his direction. Since there was little reason to tail someone back to where they lived he settled on the latter explanation.

  Chapter 9

  Thursday, July 16, 2026 7:34 p.m.

  “Beer?”

  Amanda nodded. Paul opened three beers, and handed one to Lewis and one to Amanda. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” They all drank. Lewis inserted a Rolling Stones tape into the player, and “Exile On Main Street” filled the garage. Amanda smiled.

  “My favorite. Paul must’ve told you,” she said over the music.

  “Lucky guess,” Ginter said. He didn’t smile back.

  “It’s mine too,” Paul said.

  “That’s right,” Amanda said. “I’d forgotten. So, you guys need a historian to help get this muscle car back on the road?”

  “No.” Paul looked at Lewis, who palmed the metal disk and waved it in a circle above his head. He studied the readouts before nodding to Paul.

  Paul took a deep breath. “You know how I loved The Time Machine?” he asked.

  Amanda nodded. “The movie? Yeah. The Warlocks? Or Oarlocks? Or whatever they were called?”

  “Yeah, whatever. Well, you remember that I read Hawking and Sone and-”

  ”Don’t tell me.” She didn’t flinch. “You’re shitting me. Either that or you’re insane. Can you pull it off?”

  Paul was stunned at the quick turn in conversation. Amanda had always been so damn smart, but he had forgotten just how perceptive she was.

  “We already have,” he stammered. “Contrapositive wormholes. Bennett David showed us the way. All points in time and space are connected by wormholes. Hawking and Sone knew this. But they could never figure out how to do it.”

  “And you have?” Amanda asked.

  “You know the team here discovered SU44?” Paul continued. “The subatomic particle that can be accelerated to a speed faster than light?”

  Amanda shook her head.

  “Well, we did. Lewis and I were on the team. Then at about the same time Grace had to do a report on a famous scientist of the 20th century. She picked Stephen Hawking, and she asked me to help her get some information about him. I started poking around with his writings again. God, I hadn’t looked at them since grad school. He had always said that time travel was impossible.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Has to do with the effects of quantum mechanics. I won’t bore you–”

  “-with the details?” Amanda finished. “You always thought I bored extremely easily.”

  “Never made it to the end of any explanation I ever tried to give on my studies,” Paul said. “If I started on it now I wouldn’t stop until I went all the way.”

  “Might not be such a bad thing,” Amanda said coyly.

  Paul ignored the retort. “Yeah, so anyway, Hawking said no, he didn’t think it was possible to construct a time machine. He was writing in the 1980s and 1990s, so it wasn’t exactly the last word on the subject. It got me thinking. I started looking around some more, and ran across another late 20th century relative theorist, Kip Sone, who had looked into the matter more deeply than Hawking did. He thought that wormholes could act as time machines, since if you–”

  “Wormholes?” Amanda asked.

  Paul waved his hand. “Later. Sone thought that by constructing a space ship capable of traveling at close to light speed, and that according to the principles of the special theory of relativity time moves slower for objects traveling at light speed, you can travel in time, and–”

  “Paul?” Amanda asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Bore me. What’s a wormhole?”

  He looked up at her face. She looked…it wasn’t her features, which he’d always found fascinating, or even her figure, which she’d kept, it was her…interest. She really wanted to know about wormholes. Nothing attracted Paul to people like seeing a spark of vitality in them, a natural curiosity, a love of learning simply for the sake of learning. Like Grace. And Peter.

  “Wormholes are basically shortcuts in space and time,” deVere said. “Look at it like this.” He looked around and picked up a parts list from one of the boxes. He removed a pen from his pocket and drew a time line across it, marking “1950” and “2026” on opposite ends.

  “We’ve come from here,” he said, putting his finger on 1950, “to here.” He rested his finger on 2026.

  “And you’re saying we can go backwards?” she asked, brushing his leg with hers as she moved closer.

  “Not backwards, exactly,” deVere said. He put his finger on 2026, almost on the right-hand edge of the list, and picked up the other end, curling it over his hand until 1950 hovered above 2026.

&nb
sp; “We take a short cut.” He bounced his finger up and down between the two ends of the paper, between 1950 and 2026. “Space is curved, remember?”

  “Einstein,” Amanda said, nodding. “You taught me that in Ithaca.”

  “Exactly. A wormhole is like a short, narrow tunnel between different parts and times of the universe. If this piece of paper is the universe, and the universe is curved, then the idea is instead of trying to go across the surface of time, we simply drop through a hole.” He laid the paper flat on Amanda’s skirt.

  “How do you know where the wormhole is?” Amanda asked.

  “That’s half the problem,” deVere said. “Wormholes aren’t static, they don’t always exist. Lewis would have to explain the math, but the real problem is that matter has to have a negative energy density relative to a light beam to pass through one of these things. It’s called exotic matter, because nobody knows of any sort of matter that can do that right now.”

  “Except…you guys?”

  “Lewis’ math showed that evaporating black holes implied the existence of this exotic matter. Our discovery of SU44 confirmed it. But if the wormhole focuses, which it does on ordinary matter, the field’s strength grows and destroys the wormhole. If it’s exotic matter, however, the wormhole won’t focus and will stay stable long enough for the matter to pass through. It’s like a tunnel that will try to crush anyone it notices trying to pass through, but if it finds it can’t crush somebody it lets that person pass through.”

  “Wow. You guys aren’t fooling around. How do you know where you’ll end up?”

  “Think of it as a garden hose. One end is fixed at the faucet. But you can turn the other end anywhere you want. On the lawn, the hedges, or the rose bushes.”

  “But the water in the hose doesn’t decide where it goes.”

  “That’s true,” he said. “But imagine if the water points the hose nozzle before the spigot’s turned on.”

  “You guys can do that?”

  DeVere smiled. “We already have.”

  “You’ve turned yourselves into exotic matter?”

  “Not quite. Lewis identified a wormhole that connected the Accelechron in our lab with a spot under the Concord Bridge a little over one year ago. We set a chronometer to zero, started it ticking, and sent it back in a canister. I drove out and recovered it. The chronometer showed it had been there over a year.”

  “So, it can be done. How do you come back? Or do you?” Amanda asked, becoming alarmed.

  “David. Dr. Bennett David,” Paul said. “The Father of Time Travel.”

  “David,” she repeated. “Didn’t he become…sort of…?”

  Paul nodded. “Yes, well, before all that, he was a brilliant theoretician. He reasoned that for the universe to maintain its equilibrium there had to be contrapositive wormholes. For every wormhole that linked a time and point in space with another time and point in space there had to be a wormhole that linked back that point at a future time with the original time and point. And anything that came through the first wormhole could go back through the contrapositive wormhole without needing to be accelerated again.”

  Amanda nodded slowly. “And since there are an infinite number of wormholes-”

  “Virtually infinite,” Paul corrected.

  “Virtually infinite, whatever that means, you just identify the one you want and get on.”

  ”Exactly.”

  “Why didn’t the canister come back then?”

  Lewis spoke up. “I selected a wormhole whose contrapositive had not yet occurred. Otherwise we never would have known if the canister had gone anywhere since the departure and arrival times are identical.”

  “Ah, I see. So you just have to go someplace, do whatever, and return to that same spot in time for the return trip.”

  “There is some window of allowance, but yes,” Lewis explained.

  Amanda shook her head. “So you’ll pop down the rabbit hole and boom, Alice lands in Wonderland.”

  “Boom,” Paul repeated.

  “Have you done it yet? I mean, with people?” Amanda asked.

  “No, not yet,” Paul answered. “But it’s still just a matter of time.”

  “Cute joke,” Amanda retorted.

  “Sorry,” Paul apologized.

  “I liked it,” Amanda said, studying the Roadrunner. “So, why me?”

  “Will you help us?” Paul asked.

  “Need a flesh and bones guinea pig to send back first?” Amanda asked.

  “No, Amanda, we’d never test on a person what we weren’t absolutely sure–”

  “Paul, lighten up, it was a joke. Seriously, what do you need me for? I don’t know anything about time travel. How can I help?”

  “We need you to pinpoint the time and location for us,” Lewis said.

  “What do you mean ‘pinpoint?” she asked cautiously.

  “When should we go back?” Lewis continued. “Identify a nerve point, a crucial step that we can undo. We’re not going back with an army; it’s me and Paul. We need to draw up the mission before we go back, freelancing won’t work.”

  “What mission?” she asked warily.

  Lewis looked at Paul before turning back to Amanda.

  “Your mission,” Lewis said, “should you decide to accept it, is to go back to a point in time in the old United States and change something that will prevent the demise of the U.S. of A.”

  There were several moments of silence before anyone spoke. Finally Amanda asked deliberately, “That’s it? That’s all you want to do? You’re not talking science here, you’re talking history, changing fucking history.”

  “Yeah, well, Paul and I feel that ‘fucking history’ as you call it hasn’t been so great for the good guys and if there were a different one we might all be better off. So that’s what Paul and I want to do.”

  “You and Paul? Oh, I don’t even get the fun part?” Amanda asked.

  “Well, uh, certainly if you’d like,” Paul said, cutting a glance at Lewis who shrugged and drank some beer. “I mean we didn’t assume you’d want to, it’s pretty risky–”

  “No riskier than asking me to join you.”

  Paul stopped with a slightly panicked look on his face. Amanda burst out laughing.

  “Paul, you really can’t see a joke when it hits you in the face, can you?” Amanda asked. “Of course I’ll do whatever I can to help you guys.”

  Paul let out a sigh. “I really didn’t know what you were going to say.”

  “So, you were taking a chance?” Amanda asked.

  He nodded. “Lewis and I talked about whether we should include you.”

  “I can be trusted. Even if it does mean that when I come back I will no longer be qualified to teach.”

  Lewis glanced at her face as she spoke. Amanda hadn’t looked at either of them when she had answered. He turned back to the carburetor.

  Paul studied Amanda who sat quietly on the grimy work stool.

  “Is there a problem?” Paul asked.

  “Not a problem,” she began. “I’m just not sure…”

  “About what?” Lewis interjected sharply, looking up from the carburetor.

  “When you sent that canister back. It went back a little over one year in time. So when you went to pick it up under the bridge it had been there one year, correct?”

  “Yeah,” Lewis answered warily.

  “So,” she continued. “Since it had been there one year what would have happened if you had gone to the bridge the day before you sent it back? Would the canister have been there?”

  Paul and Lewis looked at each other.

  “Go ahead,” Lewis said, nodding at Paul.

  “It’s called the Temporal Paradox,” Paul explained, turning to Amanda. “No, it would not have been there the day before. It was only there for one year previous after we sent it back–after we changed history.”

  “But then this is what I don’t get,” Amanda said. “We have a year that we all experienced with no canister under
the bridge. Had we gone there, there would have been no canister. And now you tell me there was a year in which it was there. Which year is real? The year with the canister or the year with no canister?”

  “Both,” Paul continued. “There was a reality in which there was no canister and one where there was a canister. This gets into the theory of infinite realities that David talked about.”