by Anthology
He was right. There might be new cures in the future. Then again, there might not be. All I could promise them was a gamble.
Slowly, the calls and emails came. People had heard about the opportunity through the SCA. I told them it might be a dangerous, one-way trip, but the journey would be the adventure of a lifetime. I never heard back from the majority again; but to my surprise, some were serious about joining the crew.
Though he disapproved of my plans, Will helped weed the jokesters and the dangerous from the list of volunteers. “It’s not cheap to fly to Newfoundland. Only the serious ones will come,” Will said. We whittled the list to twelve, ten men and two women. Four had sailing experience, and one was a Welshman who offered to expedite translations with Madoc.
The crew arrived a week before St. Patrick’s Day. They were a diverse crowd: fisherman, physicist, historian, ex-marine, writer, student, trucker, doctor, and more. They all had their own reasons to come with us.
We prepared provisions, avoiding ferromagnetic materials altogether. The SCA rallied and made period clothing appropriate to Madoc’s time. We chose the four lions of Gwynedd for our symbol, stitched onto white and green cloth.
Madoc and I continued teaching each other our languages. “It’s not too late, Lady Kate. You can stay with good Will. I promise to see them safely into the future.”
I shook my head. “It’s what I want.”
Alas, St. Patrick’s Day came all too soon. Tomorrow, we would set sail.
I spent that night with Will, cradled in his arms.
I asked him one last time. “Come with me.”
He held me tighter. “I need certainty.” He reached for his coat by the bed, and took out a small black box from his pocket. My heart pounded. A ring?
No. Inside the box was a golden necklace, its pendant adorned with the salt water rock I had so admired at Avalon. He put it around my neck and fastened it. “It’s not iron, so it’s safe. Something to remember me by. I love you, Kate.”
I couldn’t hold back the tears anymore. “And I you. Remember me, Will.”
The next morning, the harbourfront was packed with students, strangers and friends who came to see us off. Most of them expected the whole thing to be a publicity stunt. I saw Rebecca, Philip, and Harry Connon, but there was no sign of Will. Was it too hard for him to see me off?
It had been Will who convinced the Coast Guard to return the Gwennan Gorn to us temporarily. High-prowed, she creaked as we set foot aboard her. The sound was strangely reassuring. This ship had survived many journeys and the test of countless years. She would serve us well.
What would the world be like, seventy-five years from now? Would Newfoundland be exactly the same as now, as though no time had passed? I didn’t know. All I knew was that the Will I loved would not be there, waiting for me.
I distracted myself from that thought, focusing on our preparations. We loaded food and other supplies onto the ship, within the roofed enclosure built into the center. We checked and double-checked the manifest, and we swept the ship and crew with a metal detector, looking for forgotten iron. The last crew might have been lost because of a nail. I didn’t want to make the same mistake.
When we were fit to launch, I stood at the head of the boat with a hand on Madoc’s shoulder. “Fellow travelers!” I shouted. “I trust you’ve said your goodbyes. We might go into the storm and go no further than today. We might meet with disaster. Worst of all, we sail into uncertainty. But throughout history, haven’t there always been men and women with adventurous souls, who have left behind loved ones to find new horizons? In the future, men will build ships to the stars. They will choose to do as we do today, to leave behind everything we love to explore the unknown.”
I paused and met the eyes of my shipmates. “It’s a frightening prospect, I know. But I know if I never took this chance, I will regret it for the rest of my life. I hope you all feel the same. Let’s make history!”
My crew cheered.
The snow began to fall, and the wind picked up. Sheila’s Brush was on its way.
Upon Madoc’s signal, the crew began to row. The Gwennan Gorn glided through the harbour waters past the ice floes. I looked for Will and spied him pushing through the cheering crowd, an old man following behind. It was the gentleman Will and I had met on the beach at Avalon.
Will waved from the docks, wearing civilian clothes. “Kate! Wait!” He leapt onto the ice floes, the pans, between the docks and the ship.
“Stop rowing!” I cried.
Will leapt from pan to pan, ignoring the danger. He clambered into the boat, took off his watch, and dropped it in the water. “My last piece of iron.”
I embraced him. “What made you change your mind?” I asked.
“Madoc convinced me,” Will said.
I looked at Madoc. Had he learned enough English from me to talk to Will? Or had he been a fraud, all this time?
Will saw my confusion. “No, not him. The man we met at Avalon? Madoc Monteith. Our son.”
It took a while for it to sink in. “How?”
He showed me the golden pendant he wore beneath his clothes. The stone was identical to the one he gave me, striations and all, but old and worn. My hand flew to my neck. Mine was still there!
“They did find another way back. Remember I told you about Paddy’s Broom, the other storm that comes around the same time as Sheila’s Brush? Our son came back through that gate, and gave me this as proof. It’s the certainty I need. Let’s face the future together, come-what-may.”
I understood.
Madoc hollered. Ahead, a rainbow halo appeared in the whiteness of snow and fog. The gate!
There was no turning back. Into the storm and into the future.
“Come-what-may,” I said, and kissed Will.
COMING BACK
Damien Broderick
Yes, by now he admits that Jennifer is not deliberately driving him crazy. Quit laying it on her, Rostow chides himself. His Bastilled lunacy is self-evidently self-inflicted. There can be no doubt, as Tania had always insisted, that his is a personality gruesomely at risk, pumping through spasms of mania and depression, elation and reproach. As he glances up, the bulwarks of censure shear free of their hinges. The three coil techs, finishing up, share his appreciation with ogles and grins.
Descending the worn rubber treads of the catwalk, its nonmagnetic structure faintly creaking and spronging in ludicrous counterpoint, Jennifer’s legs are golden with undepilated summer hairs. Certainly he will lose his reason. It is her innocent, unconscious hauteur that propels Rostow’s intolerable aspirations.
Who would believe that less than three weeks ago, governed by hard liquor and soft drugs, his hands had crept like pussycats over those shins, pounced past her knees to her thighs and beyond, while all the while dexterous Auberon Mountbatten Singh, D.Sc., coolly worked at the far end of her torso with mysterious expertise, soothing her brow, the edges of her jaw, the latent weakness at her throat, the revealed swell of her breasts? Even at this moment Rostow can scarcely credit his role in that maniacal and tasteless contest. Was it a contest? As she steps from the catwalk to her computer terminal, Rostow groans at an ambiguity only he perceives.
If even once she took stock; fixed him with, say, a single killing glance of rebuke and rejection . . . that would put an end to it. He might flail himself definitively and be done. Instead, she moves with languid competence in his marginal survival spaces like a neutrino beam wafting through a mountain of solid lead.
“Hi,” she offers, settling herself in a molded seat. Her gaze penetrates him for an instant, moving after a beat to her keyboard. “Stan’s on his way with the entire entourage. I spied.”
“Jambo,” says Rostow. It’s all there, bolted into his larynx. Dutifully he runs the coded sequence of knobs and toggles which shunts the system from Latent to Standby. He nods to the departing technicians. There is a Parkinsonian tremor in his stupid fingers. “Pouring spirits down their throats, I guess. Softe
ning them up.”
Neat square indicators simmer vividly as the control instrumentation, swift bleats from his console to hers and back, patch into readiness. “This little number should sober them,” she observes. “ ‘Jambo’ ?”
“Swahili for ‘Hello, sailor.’ ” A thread of mush in his voice and his brain tells his ear that the inflection was wrong. I blew it. Every time I blow it. With a mental fist he clouts his forehead. There is no time for limping second guesses. Stan Donaldson’s abrasive voice precedes the man by half a second as the door swings wide for the expensive feet of the Board of Directors.
“We acquired it from Princeton, Senator,” the department head is saying. “ERDA paid out a quarter of a billion dollars for a Tokamak Fusion Test reactor that was obsoleted overnight when Sandia secured sustained fusion by inertial confinement.”
It seems to Rostow, squinting from the side of his eye and jittery with alarm, that this approach is a mistake. The senator is notorious for his loathing of costly obsolescence. Uh-huh. Buonacelli halts in midstride, pokes a finger into Donaldson’s chubby chest. “Another sonofabitch Ivy League boondoggle. By the Lord, that’s the kind of crap I won’t abide.”
Donaldson stands his ground. His own rasp is melodic after the senator’s gravel hurtling from a tip-truck.
“Their blunder was our good fortune, sir,” he says. “They were going to haul off the toroidal coils for recycling, but I managed to have them diverted to this laboratory. Everything is surplus or off-the-shelf. It made for a considerable saving.”
Somewhat mollified, Buonacelli pushes forward to loom over Jennifer Barton’s supervisor terminal, his minnows in attendance. “I’m still god-damned if I know what your magnets are for. Come straight out with it, man. The trustees won’t be slow to scrap any project that smacks of self-indulgent tinkering.” The set of his agribiz frame shows approval of Jennifer at least. “Convince us, and fast. This is the third department we’ve been dragged through today, and my feet are killing me.”
“Miss Barton, could you fetch the senator a chair?”
Incredulous on her behalf, Rostow burns. Buonacelli holds the woman’s biceps as she rises. “That’s fine, honey, I’ll stand.” An arm goes around her shoulders in a friendly squeeze nobody in his right mind could construe as avuncular. Eddie Rostow damages his tooth enamel. “Don’t bother buttering me up, Dr Donaldson. Let’s get straight to the meat. What does this pile of junk do? Why do you deserve more megabucks?”
Rostow’s chagrin buckles to delight as Stan’s moist, unhealthy jowls darken. No doubt this will be the third or fourth time Donaldson has tried to explain the advanced-wave mirror to the accountants. Probably, Eddie decides, Buonacelli is just baiting him. The old bastard might know zilch about high-energy physics, but he’s nobody’s fool.
There again, it would serve Donaldson right if they haven’t followed a word he’s been saying. The man revels in pretentious jargon. Rostow hears a scurry of furry feet in the cardboard box near his own, cranes his neck, breaks up in silent mirth. The white bunny rabbit in the box is making its own critical observations. Cottontail high, it’s dropping a stream of dry pellets into the shredded lettuce that litters the box.
Florid, Stan has decided to simplify his spiel. He’s saying: “A totally new branch of technology, gentlemen. Perhaps my previous remarks were overly technical.”
“New like Princeton?”
“New like Sandia,” the professor says, grasping thankfully at the straight line. “Yet thoroughly rooted in classical theory. What we have here, gentlemen, is the answer to a puzzle provoked by James Clerk Maxwell more than a century ago. Maxwell,” he glosses, “was the genius who first showed that electricity and magnetism were one and the same. His equations are the basis of all electronic technology.”
“For history we fund historians,” one of the committee says coldly, currying favor, and recoils slightly when Buonacelli growls.
Irritated and emboldened, the great physicist states loftily: “Physics is precisely the accumulated history of great physicists. My point, Senator, is that Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetic wave motion have two sets of solutions. One set describes what we term retarded waves, where fluctuations are broadcast outward due to the acceleration of a charged particle. Radio waves from a transmitter are retarded waves, akin to the ripples from a stone dropped in a pond.”
Rostow monitors surges of power in the system, holding it in equilibrium. He seeks Jennifer Barton’s eye, hoping for a shared long-suffering grimace, but her attention is directed to the listening senator.
Donaldson is creeping into pomposity again. “The other solutions, equally valid in theoretical terms, we call advanced waves. Until now they have never been detected, let alone utilized.”
“Radio waves get drawn back into a transmitter?” Buonacelli poses acutely, puzzled.
“Exactly.” Donaldson rewards him with a satisfied pout. “Advanced waves converge to a point. Another way of looking at it is to say that they travel backwards in time. They put time into reverse. Normally, for complex reasons, the two sets of waves interfere, yielding no more than the retarded component. What I’ve done here with this equipment—”
Unnoticed, Eddie Rostow sits bolt upright and his face distorts in a throttled shriek. What you’ve done, you thieving sonofabitch?
But Buonacelli’s scandalized roar has filled the lab. Suddenly it is obvious that indeed he had not grasped the earlier explanations. “Who in hell do you think you are, Professor—H.G. Wells? Don’t you ever learn? How dare you stand there and shamelessly tell us you’ve been spending the university’s endowment on a time machine? Credit me with the sense I was born with.”
As Rostow spins in his chair, the dignitaries are stomping toward the door. Before Donaldson finds words, Jennifer Barton has magically slipped into Buonacelli’s path. “Surely you’re not leaving yet, Senator. Won’t you at least wait for the demonstrations we’ve prepared for you?” She blinks as if something is in her eye.
“Harrumph!” Buonacelli lifts her hands in his beefy paws. “I don’t know how they’ve taken you in, my dear. Never trust a scientist. If they’re not lunatics, they’re swindlers. Either way, it’s a waste of good tax revenue.”
“Why, Senator! I’m a scientist myself.”
He releases one hand, strokes his jaw. “My apologies, dear lady. To tell the truth, my eldest son is a chemist at Dow.” Gallantly he bows, retaining one of her hands. “Very well, gentlemen. To please this charming lady, let’s take a look at the professor’s so-called demonstration.”
Wincing, Rostow spins quickly back to his station. He knows he’ll be the butt of Stan’s fuming humiliation the moment the directors are on their way. Why do I put up with it?
Tersely, the professor tells Buonacelli, “You may examine this equipment thoroughly.” He leads them to the mirror chamber buried between gigantic doughnut-shaped magnets, slides open the weighty hatch. With heavy sarcasm he says, “Assure yourselves it’s quite empty. There are no hidden trapdoors or disappearing rabbits.” Rostow swallows a snigger, his eye on the white bunny munching in its box between his feet. Poor little beast, he thinks an instant later. I hate that part of it. But it’s going to rock Buonacelli on his heels and open his wallet.
“Advanced waves are generated in every molecular interaction. Within these confines they are reflected almost totally. The crystalline surface of the chamber constitutes an array of laser-like amplifiers which augment the advanced-wave component.” My idea, Eddie Rostow wants to shout. Without that, you’d have a big magnetic field going absolutely nowhere. But whose name will go on the paper? He says nothing. Donaldson puts his head inside the chamber. Dully, as he twists back and forth, his muffled voice states: “As you see, it’s perfectly safe at the moment.” An almost irresistible impulse floods Rostow. Regretfully, he pulls his finger back from the power switches.
“Okay,” growls Buonacelli, “it’s empty. So?”
Jennifer Barton leaves
her terminal and returns with a flask of boiling water in one hand and a tray of ice cubes in the other.
“This will be simple but graphic, Senator,” she says. It is Stan’s notion of theatrics to have her fetch the props. “As you can see, this water is very hot. Would you care to dip in your pinky to test it, sir?”
“Thank you, honey, but I guess I recognize hot water when I see it.”
A crony adds, unnecessarily, “You’ve been in plenty of it in your time.” Everyone laughs ingratiatingly. Jenny drops two large ice cubes into the flask, places it inside the chamber. She goes at once to her terminal, and her features blank out in the inert Zen concentration of perfect egoless programming. The assembled company stare foolishly at the sight of two ice cubes slowly dissolving. Donaldson dogs the hatch. An enhanced but rudimentary image of the interior comes to life on an adjacent TV screen. It shows two ice cubes slowly dissolving.
“Ideally,” the professor says, fists clenched at his sides, “the chamber would be absolutely shielded. We’ve sacrificed some signal purity so you can see what’s going on inside. The process will still work reasonably well. Is the system on-line, Eddie?”
“Yeah.” Rostow’s own palms are wet. The whole performance is premature. Five successful tests and two fails. Donaldson’s a yo-yo, bobbing from an obsession for publicity at any cost through close-mouthed paranoia and back. It’d almost be nice if the damned thing blew out. Bite your tongue. It’s my baby. Go, go.
“Well, don’t just sit there.”
“Right, Stan,” says Rostow through his teeth, and smashes the toggle closed.
There is no new sound, no deep shuddering hum or rising whine. Current in the magnetic coils goes to fifty thousand amps, and there is a faint creaking as monstrously thick nonmagnetic structural members crave one another’s company in the embrace of the stupendous field. Sometimes, with the lights dimmed, Rostow has seen phantom bars of pale light crossing his line of sight. Field strengths of this magnitude can screw with the visual cortex. Or maybe the magnets bend cosmic radiation through the soft tissues of his eyeballs and brain, nibbling tiny explosions of pseudolight in his synapses. It isn’t happening now. Everyone stares at the TV monitor, waiting for something apocalyptic. Caught by the mood, Rostow abandons his console and steals across to join them.