Time Travelers Never Die

by Jack McDevitt

  “America,” said Dave.

  He shook his head. “It must be far away. Or very small.”

  They each posed with him and took pictures, explaining that it was a ritual that would allow them to share his courage. Sparks crackled up from the campfires, and the soldiers talked about home and the future. Later, Dave traded a gold coin to one of the Thespian archers for an arrow. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Shel said in English. “He may need the arrow before he’s done.”

  But they both knew better. One arrow more or less would make no difference. When the crunch came, the Thespians would refuse to leave their Spartan allies. They would die, too. All fifteen hundred of them.

  But history would remember only the Spartans.

  CHAPTER 39

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “ULYSSES”

  THE sensible thing to do would have been simply to leave it alone. Let Shel go. If he wants to wander through the ages, let him. But Dave knew that, if he did that, Shel would, in some manner, come back, or be carried back, to the town house on that Thursday night in mid-September. Before it burned.

  He needed Helen. If it was at all possible to find a way to bring him home and sidestep the cardiac principle, he had to have her help.

  The house had burned September 13. He pulled up the newscasts. Here was the town house, a charred ruin. And excerpts from a police statement that there’d been one fatality, a Dr. Adrian Shelborne. Then, two days later, another statement that the victim in the town-house fire had been bludgeoned to death.

  One of Shel’s cousins had posted pictures at her Web site, photos of Shel as a boy, Shel at ten in a rowboat with a fishing pole, Shel with his father feeding a camel in the shadow of the Great Pyramid. And here was Shel in a high-school cap and gown. And with his prom date, whose name Dave had once known but had long since forgotten.

  Shel at Princeton. Shel getting his doctorate. Shel sitting in a tree. Shel showing off his Toyota to a girlfriend.

  And, finally, pictures of the funeral. The preacher. The coffin, supported above the open grave. The mourners. Helen was visible. And Jerry. But not Dave.

  The drive home afterward was seared into his mind. He remembered the intersections, the people on the streets, people living as though nothing had happened. He’d kept the radio on, to put a voice in the car. Peace talks had broken down somewhere. Domestic assaults were up or down. Couldn’t remember which.

  And there’d been that strange story out of California. The pileup on one of the freeways.

  And two people stealing a body out of the wreckage.

  Incredible.

  At first, the aid workers had assumed they’d been trying to help. Panicked people doing what they could. Had to be. What other explanation was possible?

  There was one.

  DAVE called Helen at home—it was a Saturday—and left a message. An hour later, she called back.

  “Are you free this afternoon?” he asked. “I have something to show you.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Dress casually.”

  When he got to her place, instead of escorting her to his car, he suggested they go inside for a moment.

  That, plus the briefcase, got her curiosity up. “Sure,” she said.

  She lived in a sixth-floor condo above City Avenue. It was tastefully furnished, and a picture of Shel occupied a side table. They sat down opposite each other. “I’ve been doing some traveling,” said Dave.

  “Really? Where?”

  He set the briefcase down on the sofa and opened it. She looked at the converters. “What are they?”

  “An invention of Shel’s father.”

  She picked one up. “It looks like a Q-pod.”

  “It’s a time machine.”

  That provoked a broad grin. “Seriously.”

  “Helen, Shel and I have been traveling in time.”

  “Come on, Dave. You want to talk to me or not?”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  She sat back and nodded. Right. Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of it herself?

  “It’s true,” he said.

  “Dave—”

  “If you’ll allow me, I’ll do a demonstration.”

  She frowned at it. Looked at her watch.

  “All right,” Dave said. “Let me show you.” He handed her one of the converters. “Can you attach it somewhere? To a pocket or something? There’s a clip on back.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Humor me.”

  She took a long, deep breath, put it into a pocket in her slacks, and fastened it. “Okay. Now what?”

  “Stand.”

  He got up. She looked at him uncertainly, and stood.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “I suppose. We aren’t going back to play tag with dinosaurs, are we?”

  “Laugh if you like.”

  “If you haven’t noticed, Dave, I’m not laughing.”

  “Okay. There’s a large black button at the top. When you push it, the room’s going to fade. Don’t be alarmed when it does. Within a few seconds you’ll be somewhere else.” The skeptical smile was gone. Her eyes held him in a frightened gaze. She was beginning to wonder if he’d lost his mind. “Ready?”

  She nodded, mouth open. Said nothing.

  He fastened his own converter to his belt. “One. Brace yourself.” That brought the smile back. But it was less self-assured this time.

  “I’m braced.”

  “Wrong choice of words. Two. I’ll be with you.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Three.”

  She hesitated. Pressed the button, and he immediately followed suit. The living room began to grow dim. She stiffened. The walls and furniture faded to a green landscape with broad lawns and gas streetlamps. The lawns and lamps became solid, and she staggered out of the fading aura. He caught her as she started to fall.

  “Welcome to Ambrose, Ohio,” he said. “We’ve gone upstream. Into the past. It’s 1905.” She was making odd murmuring sounds. “Teddy Roosevelt is president.”

  “Not possible,” she said. Eyes wide, she was looking at the sky, at clusters of trees, at a nearby town, at the dirt road underfoot, at a railroad station. “Can’t be happening.”

  Dave had been there once before, with Shel, when Thomas Edison was supposed to pass through, but they hadn’t done their research thoroughly, and he didn’t show up. It was a pleasant little town with tree-lined streets and white picket fences. Straw hats were in favor for men, and bright ribbons for ladies. Down at the barbershop, the talk would be mostly about the canal they were going to dig through Panama.

  Birds sang, and in the distance the clean bang of church bells started. He helped her across a set of railroad tracks, and they stopped in front of a general store.

  She leaned against him, trying to shut it out.

  “It takes a little getting used to,” Dave said.

  “This is crazy.” People were burning leaves, talking over back fences. Cabbage was cooking somewhere. A single car, an open coach, really, with its engine mounted in the rear, moved noisily past them and crossed the tracks.

  “How long?” she said.

  “How long have we had these?”

  “Yes.”

  “For almost a year. Shel’s father invented it.”

  “Okay.” She was in a state of near shock.

  “He went back to see Galileo.” Dave waited for her to laugh. She just kept looking straight ahead. A couple of people came out of a drugstore, looked their way, then turned in the opposite direction.

  “But . . . ?” She seemed unable to manage a sentence.

  “The device got wet, and he was stranded. He’s still there.”

  “Where?”

  “In the seventeenth century.”

  “Then he’s dead.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  They found
a café and went inside. Helen lowered herself into a chair near the window. “I can’t believe this is really happening.”

  He described what he and Shel had been doing. Told her about Michael’s determination to stay where he was. The waitress came, and they ordered coffee.

  “It’s hard to believe any of this,” she said. “Even with that sitting in front of me.” She indicated the street scene outside the window. A couple of guys were passing in a horse-drawn cart. Signs on the walls advertised cigarettes and Coca-Cola.

  “There’s something else you should know.”

  “Wait. If we can really travel in time, we can go back and see Shel.”

  Her eyes pleaded for the response she needed.

  He reached across the table and took her hand. “He’s not dead.”

  “What?”

  “You and I had lunch at Applebee’s Wednesday. And afterward, we went to my place.”

  “Yes?”

  “It wasn’t so I could give you a Greek medallion.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Because Shel had been there earlier that morning.”

  Her eyes slid shut.

  “I wanted you to see him. But he’d gone by the time we got there.”

  “He’s alive, and you let me go through that funeral?”

  “I didn’t know then, Helen. Not any more than you did. I assumed he was dead, and that was the end of the story. But he showed up at the house.”

  “All right,” she said at last, “where is he now?”

  “I don’t know, Helen. Lost in time, somewhere.”

  “So who’s in the cemetery?”

  “He is.”

  “But you’re saying he’s still alive.”

  In a way, he’ll always be alive. “Yes. He’s still out there. But he won’t come back.”

  She was visibly struggling to grasp the situation, and to control her anger. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t know how.”

  Her face had grown pale. When he’d finished explaining, her eyes looked empty. “You can take us back, right?”

  “Home? Yes.”

  “Where else?”

  “Anywhere. Well, there are range limits, but nothing you’d care about.”

  On the street, a couple of kids with baseball gloves hurried past. “And he thinks it’s inevitable that he’ll eventually get put in that graveyard?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand why he would.”

  “There seems to be a force that doesn’t allow paradoxes.” He told her about Ivy, and about Shel falling into the ocean.

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know whether we should do anything. With this crazy logic, he may be right. I wouldn’t go back either to get hit in the head and thrown into a fire. Would you?”

  “No,” she said. “I guess not.”

  “I have an idea how we might be able to resolve things, though,” Dave said.

  “Hold on a second. Start with this: Do we have any idea at all where to find him?”

  “I know some places to look.”

  “Will you take me to him?”

  “Yes. I think he needs you.”

  A horse-drawn carriage clopped past. She stared at the quiet little buildings. White clapboard houses. “Nineteen-five,” she said. “Shaw’s just getting started.”

  CHAPTER 40

  There was a young lady named Bright

  Whose speed was far faster than light;

  She set out one day

  In a relative way

  And returned on the previous night.

  —PUNCH

  MARK S. Hightower had been Shel’s dentist for years. He operated out of a medical building across the street from the University Hospital, where Helen had interned and still served as a consultant.

  Dave had met Dr. Hightower once. He was short, barrel-chested, flat-skulled, a man who looked more like a professional wrestler than a dentist. But he was soft-spoken and, according to Shel, a guy who was great with his patients.

  Helen and Dave, in a taxi, pulled up in front of a brownstone building. The doctors’ names—there were four of them—were posted on shingles. Hightower was on the first floor. A sign in the window read: WE CATER TO COWARDS.

  Dave asked the driver to wait, and, carrying a converter in a laptop bag, went into the office. One patient and a guy who was probably a salesman were seated in the reception room while two people on TV discussed the latest misadventure of a prominent actress. The receptionist looked up from behind a glass panel. “Hello,” she said, opening a window and sliding the sign-in sheet toward him.

  “I’d like to make an appointment.”

  “Are you having a problem, Mr.—?”

  “McCloskey. I’m new in Philadelphia. I just wanted to get a routine checkup.”

  She nodded, gathered some papers, and pushed them in his direction. “Fill these out, please.”

  “Thank you.” He started toward one of the chairs, laid the papers on a side table, then turned and went back to the window. “Excuse me. Do you have a washroom?”

  She pointed at a double door. “Through there, and on your right.”

  The doors opened into a corridor. He could hear a drill in back somewhere, but the corridor was quiet. He took the converter out of the laptop bag and went into the washroom. It was empty. He moved himself forward ten seconds. Got a reading on the location of the washroom so he could come back to it later.

  He washed his hands and returned to the waiting room. “I’m sorry,” he said to the receptionist, “but I think I came to the wrong place. This isn’t Dr. Vester’s office, is it?”

  “No,” she said. “This is Dr. Hightower.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry for wasting your time.” He returned the papers and went outside.

  Helen looked his way. “How’d you make out?”

  “Okay.”

  CHAIN-REACTION collisions have become an increasingly dangerous occurrence on limited-access highways around the world. Hundreds die every year, thousands are injured, and property damage runs well into the millions. On the day that Shel was buried, there had been a pileup in California. It had happened a little after 8:00 A.M. on a day with perfect visibility, when a pickup rear-ended a station wagon full of kids headed for breakfast and a day at Universal Studios.

  Helen and Dave materialized well off the highway moments after the chain reaction had ended. The road and the shoulder were littered with wrecked vehicles. Some people were out of their cars trying to help; others were wandering dazed through the carnage. The morning air was filled with screams and the stench of burning oil.

  “I’m not sure I can do this,” Helen said, spotting a woman bleeding in an overturned Ford. She went over, got the door open, and motioned Dave to assist. The woman was alone in the car. She was unconscious, and her arm looked broken.

  “Helen,” Dave said, “we have a bigger rescue to make.”

  She shook her head. No. This first.

  She stopped the bleeding, and Dave got someone to stay with the victim. They helped a few other people, pulled an elderly couple out of a burning van, stopped a guy who was trying to move a man with two fractured legs. But Dave was unhappy. “We don’t have time for this,” he pleaded.

  “I don’t have time for anything else.”

  Sirens were approaching. Dave let her go, concentrating on finding what they’d come for.

  He was in a blue Toyota that had rolled over several times before crumpling into a tree. The front of the car was crushed, a door was off, and the driver looked dead. He had bled heavily from a head wound. One tire was spinning slowly. Dave could find no pulse.

  The guy was about the right size, tangled in a seat belt. When Helen got there, she confirmed that he was dead. Dave cut him free with a jackknife. EMTs were spreading out among the wrecked cars. Stretchers were appearing.

  Helen could not keep her mind on what they were doing. “Your oath doesn’t count,” David said. “Not
here. Let it go.”

  She looked at him desperately.

  They got him out of the car, wrapped him in plastic, and laid him in the road. “He does look a little like Shel,” she said in a small voice.

  “Enough to get by.”

  Dave heard footsteps behind them. Someone demanded to know what they were doing.

  A big, beefy EMT.

  “It’s okay,” Dave said. “We’re doctors.”

  Helen looked down at the body. “He’s dead,” she said by way of explanation.

  The EMT looked annoyed. “We could use your help up ahead.”

  “On our way,” said Dave.

  As soon as he was gone, they put on plastic gloves. Dave attached one of the converters to the victim’s belt and pushed the black button. They watched him fade and vanish. “So far, so good,” he said. “I was afraid it would be like the cushion.”

  “What cushion?”

  “It’s a long story,” he said. “I tried to use a converter on one, but it didn’t work. Maybe it needs to be attached to someone.”

  Dave followed the body. The highway carnage grew transparent and was replaced by the washroom in Dr. Hightower’s office. The corpse was slumped on the floor. He detached the converter from it and took it back to Helen. Moments later, they returned. Helen had a laptop.

  HIS name was Victor Randall. They found pictures of an attractive woman with cropped brown hair seated with him in a porch swing. And two kids. The kids were smiling at the camera, one boy, one girl, both around seven or eight. “Maybe,” Helen said, “when this is over, we can send them a note to explain things.”

  “We can’t do that,” Dave said.

  “They’ll never know what happened to him.”

  “That’s right. And I don’t think there’s any way around it.”

  There was also about two hundred cash. Later, he would mail that back to the family. He dragged the body out of the washroom and laid it in the corridor. “Okay, Helen,” he said, “your ball.”