“Okay,” the time travelers say, indicating at long last their good-to-go-ness. “Sorry for the wait. Come to think of it, I guess we could have been setting up while you were in the lobby. That one’s on us,” they say, expecting that the students will, in turn, apologize for playing too long. But this would require a common decency the students don’t appear to have at their disposal. Clearly, a lesson in more than just time travel is in order. But why must the time travelers be the ones to deliver it? Why must they be the ones to insist upon the proper respect and astonishment to which they are so obviously entitled? The thought boggles their not inconsiderable minds.
“Anyway, we’re ready now,” they tell the students. “Can we stop all that spinning there in the back and start talking about the reason you’re here today? Who knows what we do here?” they ask, and the front-of-the-room students are ready.
“You do time travel,” they say.
“Yesssss!” the time travelers say. “Time travel! We travel through time! Excellent. Now, who can tell us why time travel is important?”
The students do not answer. The back-of-the-room students keep spinning. The front-of-the-roomers are quiet, fidgety, unsure.
The time travelers do not have enough experience to know that such silences can be common when dealing with third graders. It isn’t always ignorance. Sometimes it’s apathy. Or sugar. It could also be the artifacts. The eighteenth-century captain’s sextant resting in the corner, for example, with its sleek nautical curves and precarious balance, is distraction incarnate. Its intricate golden quarters twinkle wildly, begging to be handled. Objects like these can easily sidetrack a third-grade class riding high on the glazed rush of a donut hole binge.
The question still hangs in the air: Why is time travel important? The answer seems simple enough to the time travelers: Time travel is important because it is the most objective way to study the unfolding of past events as they actually happened, to cut out history’s middleman, with his incomplete record and his limited and often hopelessly biased perspective, and go straight to the source—history in its rawest, purest form.
This, and the answers to many other questions the time travelers are planning to ask, was outlined in a primer packet sent ahead to the school to prepare the students to participate in this part of the presentation. Had their teacher failed to cover this material? Where was this person? Why the woeful dereliction of duty? The time travelers’ gray jumpsuits sag even more. In the interest of time, they answer their own question.
“Time travel is important,” they say, “because it is the most objective way to study the unfolding of past events as they actually happened, to cut out history’s middleman, with his incomplete record and his—” But the answer is cut short by the appearance of orange puke on the conference table.
The students are suddenly unwell. They feel queasy and light-headed. It might be from the spinning, or the fact that many of them have just consumed their weight in donut holes and juice, but probably not. These third graders are the tough, hardy sort. They’ve stared down Tilt-A-Whirls with truckloads of ice cream under their belts and barely loosed a hiccup, let alone painted their shirts with the full contents of their stomachs, which many of them are doing now, as their classmates yuck, and eww, and pee-yew.
“We’re sick,” the sick students moan.
“Yes,” the time travelers sigh, “we were worried this might happen.” A few more time travelers rush into the conference room with plastic buckets and wet towels, some just in time to catch blackish volleys of repeating grape juice splattering onto the carpet. Meanwhile, a few of the still-healthy back-of-the-room students are using the chaos of the moment to make a move for the sextant.
“It’s the juice!” some of the students shout, only half serious. “The juice is poisoned! Don’t drink the juice!”
“It’s not the juice,” the time travelers hush. “It’s the time travel device. It’s in the lab down the hall. You’re just not used to being so close to it, and it’s upsetting your systems.”
The students are puzzled and woozy. They require a metaphor.
“It’s like being on a boat,” the time travelers say. “How many of you have been on a boat?”
Some of the students raise their hands proudly. Some weakly. Some barf into their laps.
“Sometimes people get sick on boats,” the time travelers explain. “While walking on the deck of a ship, their eyes tell their brains that the ground beneath them is level and stable, while their inner ears tell them that it isn’t. For a while, the brains can’t make sense of this. The brains know that things are not behaving as they should, which makes the brains uneasy, which makes the bodies uneasy. In time, a compromise is reached between the two senses, which allows for stable movement and surer footing. Sailors call this getting your sea legs.”
The more the time travelers talk about the ocean, the greener the green students get. One spews anew at the word “legs.” The time travelers with the buckets miss the burst, but catch the runoff.
“Something similar happens when you get too close to the time travel device, except the conflicting reports are coming at you in four dimensions instead of three. Everything should sort itself out after a few minutes. We call this getting your time legs.” The time travelers’ hopeful smiles are met with pinched noses, bloodshot eyes, and the spittle-laden breathing of the miserably ill.
“Does this still happen to you?” the sick students want to know.
“Occasionally,” the time travelers say, replacing full buckets with empty ones. “Less than when we started.”
There is a chime of tinkling sounds from the back of the conference room, as what was once an eighteenth-century captain’s sextant falls to the floor in a drizzle of geometrically perfect golden pieces.
“Oops,” the back-of-the-room students say.
“Oh God,” say the time travelers.
“We’re sorry,” insist the back-of-the-roomers, fingers still hanging in midair where the sextant used to be. To their credit, they do look sincerely sorry. It’s a look they produce too quickly and too easily. The time travelers formerly on vomit detail begin collecting fallen pieces of sextant.
“Can you fix it?” the students ask.
The time travelers answer: “No.”
“Not even with your time machine?”
The time travelers answer: “No.”
“Really?” ask the students.
The answer is: “Really.”
“Why not?” the students want to know. “What’s the point of having a time machine if you can’t use it to go back and fix things?”
“Because,” the time travelers explain, “time travel is expensive.”
Which is half true. The whole truth is: Time travel is extremely expensive. The dedicated reactor used to power the time travel device does not, strictly speaking, produce energy through the burning of actual money, but the joke often made at the administrative level is: It might as well. In fact, this field trip is the first step in a new PR strategy designed to keep the Time Travel Institute afloat, since, at the moment, the institute is not, strictly speaking, floating.
Still, the time travelers are men and women of principle, and even if such temporal manipulations, like, for instance, the rescuing of a priceless artifact from disassembly, or the preservation of a species from extinction, or the exploitation of the many lucrative possibilities of time travel that might keep a time travel institute financially solvent were possible—and they are—the time travelers would still never permit it. Which is exactly what they tell the students.
“And even if it wasn’t expensive,” they say, “we would still never permit it.”
The students want to know: “Why not?”
The time travelers explain: “Because we’re in the business of observing history, not changing it. Changing the past could have dire repercussions on the p
resent. Imagine if someone went into the past and—”
“We get causality,” the students interrupt. “We know H. G. Wells. We’ve seen Back to the Future.”
“You’ve read H. G. Wells?”
“We watched a film adaptation of The Time Machine in science class.”
Film adaptation or not, this pleases the time travelers. For the first time today, it feels as though the students do, in fact, have some appreciation for their work. Perhaps they should have opened with Back to the Future.
“We tend to prefer more scientifically rigorous source material,” they lie, “but that’s the general idea, yes.”
“Are there other problems with time travel?” the front-of-the-roomers want to know.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what about the observer effect?”
The time travelers are suddenly taken aback. Who has planted these ideas in the students’ heads? Their enigmatic teacher, perhaps? Where is this person? The time travelers are preparing to offer this person a piece of their minds.
“Are you referring to the idea that the simple act of observing affects what is observed?” the time travelers ask. “Do you mean to imply that by objectively recording the past, we are, against our own best efforts, altering the outcome of events and doing irreparable harm to the fabric of history? Is that it?”
“That,” say the front-of-the-roomers, “is basically what we’re getting at, yeah.” They are smiling. Their small butts twist in their chairs. Their heads bob like little balls of innocence.
“We can assure you,” say the time travelers, “that is not the case.”
“How can you be certain?” the students want to know.
“We are extremely careful.”
“But if you did alter events, there’d be no way to know, because—”
“We don’t alter events,” say the time travelers.
“But you can’t—”
“We don’t alter events.” They are adamant. “We know we don’t because we don’t. We have procedures and protocols and manuals. We’ve been doing this for a long time.”
“Are you saying that the ethical dictums of your work have kept perfect pace with the moral dilemmas inherent to your technology?” the students ask.
“Maybe you don’t want to see the time travel device after all,” the time travelers say. “Maybe you’d rather stay here and lecture us on how to do our jobs.”
“Um, hey—” say the students.
“Or maybe you’d like to go climb around in the lobby for another hour or two. Or, or, maybe you’d like the adult assigned to your care to take you home. How about that? Do you even have an adult assigned to your care? That’s what we’d like to know.”
“Hey,” the students say.
“What?” the time travelers snap.
“Some of us are older.”
“What?”
“Some of us are older.”
The time travelers ask: “What do you mean?”
The students mean: “Some of us are older than we were a few minutes ago. A handful of us look almost twenty. Is that normal?”
It’s true. Some of the students now look a little too old to be in the third grade. Many of the students’ clothes have tightened around them. Buttons have burst. The cheeks and chins of a handful of the boys have darkened. Some of the girls have begun playfully poking at their newly inflated chests. The students who have not grown stare wide-eyed at the students who have, vibrating with jealousy.
“Why aren’t we growing?” they want to know.
The time travelers do not answer right away. They crowd around the stubbled chin of a male student for a closer examination. The hair looks real enough. Their staring makes the aging students nervous, and the nonaging students even more jealous.
“Why do they get to grow?” demand the still-young students.
“Is this because we don’t have our time legs yet?” ask the young men and women who were once third graders, surprised by their own voices. They grasp at their throats. Clearing them changes nothing.
“No,” the time travelers reply, “something’s wrong. We need to check the time travel device.”
With this, most of the time travelers hurry out of the room. The children who are still children are standing on their chairs, beating their fists against the conference table, demanding to grow up.
“Everyone, calm down,” the remaining time travelers say. “No one else is going to grow up.” And for the moment, no one does.
This comes as a relief to the remaining time travelers, who are a different breed than the rest. This particular group doesn’t actually do a lot of time travel per se. They’re mainly historical scholars and theorists charged with making sure that the Time Travel Institute’s reference materials and field guides are as accurate as possible, and are rarely involved in the practical applications of their research. Some aren’t even especially clear on how the time travel device actually works. They are desk jockey time travelers, masters of spreadsheets, filing codes, and the occasional odd job. At the moment, they’re on vomit duty, and none of them is eager to be promoted to the role of conference leader. Mostly they just want to dab at puke stains and guard the remaining artifacts until the other time travelers return, allowing them to get back to their paperwork, which rarely throws up or breaks priceless antiquities. In the meantime, the desk jockey time travelers do their best to ignore the sick students, who are still feeling sick, and the aged students, who are quietly slipping under the conference table, and the back-of-the-room students, who are admiring the antique cutlasses a little too closely. They keep their eyes on their work. They’re not the sort to get involved.
Under the conference table, the grown children wait for a cure to their adulthood. Their child-size clothing is comically tight around their new, long bodies, forcing sleeves and shirttails to be repeatedly tugged back into place. There isn’t enough fabric to cover all the new skin, and trying only makes matters worse, as their now-adult brains, swimming in an acid bath of new hormones and chemicals, fire off unvetted commands that cannot possibly be followed (can they?) and desires too outrageous to be taken seriously (right?). “You first” is the standing dare, but no one dares. The grown students know they shouldn’t be here, that they’ve arrived too early. And yet, here it is, the future, close enough to reach out and touch.
Then things get worse.
The desk jockey time travelers start to age. Rapidly. Their skin crinkles around their skulls like burned newspaper. Their tendons go slack as their muscles flash-atrophy. Their withering spines bow their heads closer to the floor. They’re losing their teeth, their hair, the shapes of their faces. They sputter the last syllables of air out of their lungs like empty shampoo bottles. They pull their jumpsuits tighter around them, trying to hold everything together before collapsing to the floor, cataracts clouding their vision, ears suddenly deaf to the sound of children moaning in pain, and screaming in horror, and playing at war. There is a clanging of swords too heavy for the hands that hold them, the bursting of mouth-made rifle reports, the heavy thunk of feigned death. All at once the conference room reeks of sweat, and retch, and the curdled smell of the suddenly old.
Meanwhile, the now totally unmonitored back-of-the-room students, having skirmished their way through the entirety of the low-hanging arsenal, the British cavalry sabers and German Mausers and Confederate bayonets, turn their attention now toward an enormous silver blunderbuss hanging between a pair of Kentucky dueling pistols. They salivate at its stained cherrywood stock, its poised action pin cocked tight and big as a gorilla thumb, its iron thick as a church bell. It aches to be held, and the back-of-the-roomers want nothing more than to hold it, to feel its awesome historical weight in their arms, to point it at loyal friends and shout bang. The blunderbuss smiles down at them as they stack and swivel chairs, sighing as they balance o
n teetering armrests to reach it. They bear it over their heads like a golden calf, one that will snort, and stamp, and promise to break for them in every profound and potent way a thing can.
Then more things happen: One of the dying time travelers grows suddenly young again, yanked back in time on a rip cord until he is a toddler lost in the folds of his own gray jumpsuit. The same happens to the student carrying the blunderbuss, who’s reduced to infancy so fast she’s nearly flattened under the weight of the massive weapon. Without anyone noticing, the eighteenth-century captain’s sextant is once again on its pedestal, completely restored, having returned to a time when it existed in one piece. Then, with a massive, oaken groan, the conference table is once again an ancient sequoia, strong and leafy. Its thick roots snake down into the carpet, pinning a tangle of half-naked men and women to the ground and punching through the ceiling of the conference room in a burst of untamable branches. The hail of ceiling tile is accompanied by the pitching of shouts and screams, the splintering of wooden pedestals, and an ominous, steady thump from the lobby growing louder and louder, until the wall of the room collapses, pummeled by a massive spiked tail. The roar of what is now a living stegosaurus rattles the remaining walls before a sweep of spines reduces them to rubble. Its enormous legs smithereen the room as bits of lunar rover dislodge from its dorsal spines. The only figures not cowering in pain or terror are the now fully armed back-of-the-room students, who in a few brave seconds prepare to make war with the massive beast. They raise their cutlasses and muskets, their axes and halberds. The blunderbuss suddenly grows younger in the hands of its carriers, returning to one of a thousand battles when it was loaded for bear. Its wick glows to life, its bell ready to breathe fire and belch shot, to shatter or be shattered, but all of this only for a moment, one tiny hiccup in time’s otherwise smooth digestion, and then the moment passes, and the stegosaurus is once again a pile of bones, and the tree is a conference table, and the students and time travelers are younger and older in whatever direction returns them to the way they had been before their hold on the present deserted them.
The Sea Beast Takes a Lover Page 17