Lock & Key

by Gordon Bonnet

  Freeze/Resume.

  The real Darren looked at Sherry, who stared at the screen as if transfixed, her eyes wide.

  “What does this mean?” she finally said, her voice high and thin.

  “You know the answer to that,” Lee said, still facing the motionless figures. “I’ve told you enough about my research that you should be able to figure it out. This device… it uses what is known about the present to predict the future. I’m still trying to understand completely how it does that. I started with using it to predict particle positions, which it did flawlessly. I scaled it up, and it still worked. It showed me what was going to happen. And it was always right.” He gave a humorless chuckle. “If I’m right, it throws the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger’s Cat right out of the window simultaneously.”

  “But you know that can’t be true,” Darren said. “The future is fluid. It depends on choices.”

  “Apparently not.” Lee stood, and in his hand was the pistol, as Darren knew it would be.

  Sherry gave a little cry of alarm, but did not move.

  “Lee, this doesn’t have to be the future.” He worked to keep the horror he felt from showing in his voice.

  Lee smiled, but his eyes held nothing but despair. “It has to happen this way. We fight. In the fight, the gun goes off. I’ve watched it happen a hundred times. It has to happen.”

  “Nothing has to happen.”

  Lee made an angry, dismissive noise. “How do you know that? You’re not a scientist. You’re a bookstore owner.”

  “How do I know that? I know it because I was here, standing behind you, at 2:30 this morning, when you watched this little screenplay on your magic machine, and made the decision to kill me in order to stop it. I know it because you were going to kill me at dinner tonight—right? I know it because it all happened before, and when it did, it caused a catastrophe.” He shook his head. “I still don’t understand why. But the result of all of this is that I know the future isn’t somehow fated. I’m sorry if this destroys your theory, and puts you out of the running for a Nobel for the time being, but you’re wrong. I was able to stop you tonight, and I’ll stop you again. Put away the gun. Sherry doesn’t have to die.”

  “It’s going to happen!” Lee shouted. “You can’t stop it! Don’t you think I’d stop it if I could? My device has never been wrong…”

  “It is this time.”

  Lee gestured at him angrily. “Go ahead. Try and take the gun away from me. If this is going to happen, let’s get it over with!”

  “It’s not going to happen. I will not fight with you.”

  “You will!” Lee said, through clenched teeth. “You don’t have a choice. It will happen! What this device shows always happens!”

  This is it. This is the point where the decision is made. I either talk him down, or everything spirals out of control.

  “Maybe because you always did what it took to make its predictions come true. Maybe because you didn’t know that you could decide any other way.” He shook his head. “I will not fight with you. You know what will happen if I do. We can stop it, you and I. We can change the future.”

  Lee looked from him to Sherry. The moment hung suspended.

  “How do you know all of this?” Lee said. “How did you know what I was intending to do?”

  “It would take way too long to explain that,” he said, “and I suspect I don’t have the time to tell you. Let’s say that I have it on good authority.”

  Lee didn’t answer for a moment. And for the first time, doubt entered his eyes. Finally he said, “Then why did I see these images? If they’re not true, then why?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I know someone who could probably answer that question, but he’d probably say that in the long run, it doesn’t matter. Everything that’s happened up to now is done, and has led us to this place, and led all three of us to know what we know. But what we do with that knowledge now is up to us.” He smiled, and the tension drained from his body. “It always is.”

  And in the room, something changed, like a record skipping a groove, only now the timeline spun smoothly away, spiraling into the future. The moment passed, an irrevocable instant in time that would lead to… something different. Something other than what Lee had seen, something other than Darren bouncing through history trying to fix what had gone wrong. All of that now lay in an alternate track. The cause, the divergence, had all along been due to what was going to transpire in this room. What decisions Darren and Lee made.

  What may have been fated from the beginning. Maggie would have had an opinion about that. Darren, at the moment, didn’t care.

  Lee let the arm holding the gun drop to his side. “I’m… sorry,” His voice cracked, and he collapsed back into his chair. He set the pistol down with a thump, and put both hands over his face.

  “It’s okay,” Darren said. “It’s all okay, now.”

  Sherry went to Lee, put her arm around him, and he leaned into her, his strong frame shaking with sobs.

  “Okay, guys?” Darren said, after watching them in increasing discomfort for nearly a minute. “I think I’m going to leave, now. Two’s company, and all that sort of thing. You two have a lot to talk about.”

  Lee looked up at him. “I…” he said, his voice hoarse, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’ll give you a ride back to your apartment.”

  “I don’t think you need to. I’m not going to my apartment. I’m sort of… going away, apparently.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to the Library.”

  “What Library?”

  He grinned. “The Library where I learned how to make sure that tonight would end the right way.”

  “That makes no sense at all,” Lee said, frowning.

  Darren ignored the comment. He had the feeling that the hour Fischer had given him to right everything was about to run out, and there were a few things he couldn’t leave unsaid.

  “Anyhow, I might be back. I might not. I’m not sure.” He shrugged. “It’s amazing how okay I am with that. And if I don’t come back, there’s this antique wooden box in my apartment I want you to have.” He pulled the key out from inside his shirt, and slipped the chain over his head. “This is the key that goes with it.”

  Lee took the key from his hand. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Neither do I. We’re all floundering in the dark, trying to make things work out for the best, based on incomplete information. It’s amazing we don’t screw things up more often.”

  Lee looked at him, and for the first time since all of this started—it seemed like ages ago—his frown was replaced by a faint smile. His features smoothed out, and Darren got a glimpse of the kind, loyal face that he had known since they were children together.

  “You know, buddy, you never have made much sense. It’s a good thing I’m the one who went into science.”

  “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “Good thing. Anyhow, I guess this is goodbye for now. I hope you two have a good… future.”

  And that was when he felt a pull, as if he’d been yanked by some painless hook attached to his belly button, and the now-familiar sensation of being launched through space.

  Or time.

  Or both.

  And he opened his eyes, and found himself, clean and dry for a change, in Fischer’s office. Fischer and Maggie stood there, Fischer wearing a broad grin that made his narrow face look even more elf-like, and Maggie with only a slight upwards turn of the corners of her mouth, but an approving look in her steely eyes. As soon as he appeared, both of them applauded.

  “Bravo, Mister Ault,” Maggie said. “Well done. Really, quite masterful.”

  “Yeah, Ault, you knocked our fucking socks off,” Fischer said. “Honest to god, I didn’t think you had it in you. That’ll teach me to judge by appearances.”

  “I didn’t think I had it in me, either.”

  “Well, in any case, you fixed the divergence, and that
’s what counts.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “So, are you ready to go?” Fischer rubbed his long hands together.

  “Go? Go where?”

  Fischer looked at him, and one pale eyebrow rose. “You haven’t figured out what our surprise is, then?”

  “No.”

  “Wow. I thought that by now you would have put the pieces together.”

  “Just tell him, Fischer,” Maggie said.

  “Oh, come on. Let me have my little fun. You know why Lee tried to kill you, right?”

  “Sure,” he said, frowning. “Because he got a glimpse into the future. Or a particular future, where I was responsible for his girlfriend’s death.”

  “Right. Can you believe it? Sonofabitch accidentally hacked into the Library’s main computer, and got into the timeline projections. I’m upgrading our security program as we speak so it won’t happen again. See what happens when you people find out what could happen in the future? Fucks things up royally.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “But have you figured out why killing you obliterated the whole human race?”

  “No. That part I still don’t see.”

  Fischer gave a second-long glance at Maggie, who returned a nearly imperceptible little nod back to him.

  “Okay,” he said, drawing a deep breath, “so remember how we thought something had interfered with your ancestral line? But then we found out that one of the people you met in Kentucky was named McCaskill, and so that led us to the surmise that what had actually happened had interfered with Lee’s line, not yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, somehow there was a divergence that occurred that took out one of Lee’s ancestral lines, starting back in the tenth century. But we know Lee didn’t go back there and do it. Just killing you did it. Right?”

  “Right,” Darren said, slowly, his eyebrows drawing together.

  “And we know that the computer picked out Maíre Gillacomgain, Per Olafsson, and Jane Bell as being the focal points. We don’t really know why the last two were selected. If I were forced to guess, I’d say that it was because in each of those two places, there was an intersection with something having to do with how you’d respond when Lee confronted you in the lab tonight. You needed to know about where your grandmother’s wooden box had come from, and see Per Olafsson’s connection to you. You had to meet Josiah McCaskill, and see his connection to Lee.”

  “So?”

  “You know, you sound really hostile when you say that word,” Fischer said. “Anyhow, the important one was Maíre Gillacomgain. The reason she’s important is that she is Lee’s maternal ancestor. We knew that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, his paternal ancestor, Ault, is… you.”

  “Me?” he said, his voice rising a full octave.

  “Yup. That’s why it created a temporal paradox when Lee killed you. He was killing his own great-great-etc. grandfather.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Sorry, dude. Now that the computer has reset, tracking has been reestablished, and all it took was a simple check. You’re supposed to go back to Scotland, and do the horizontal tango with your red-haired girlfriend. Because you will father a child who will be Lee McCaskill’s direct ancestor. One of your descendants, one Ingrid Nilsdottir, will be born in Oslo, Norway in 1325. She’s Per Olafsson’s long-lost wife. One of their descendants, five-hundred-odd years later, will end up in North Carolina, and marry poor lonely Josiah McCaskill. They’ll have a son, David McCaskill, who then marries Jane Bell. The whole interlude with Murrell never happened. She and David McCaskill have three children before his death at Gettysburg. Their eldest son, one Stephen Patrick McCaskill, was Lee’s great-great grandfather.”

  “But… me?” he said. “I’m supposed to go back to Scotland and marry Maíre?”

  “Well, not necessarily,” Fischer said. “All you technically have to do is have sex with her. But by all means, marry her if you want to.”

  “Fischer, don’t be crude.” Maggie made a tsk-ing noise under her breath.

  “Well, it’s true,” Fischer said.

  “But what if she doesn’t want me?”

  “I dunno, Ault. Given that Lee exists, I’d say you’ve pretty much got a sure bet, here. That should be a confidence-booster.”

  Darren swallowed, and just stared at him.

  “Bow-chicka-bow-wow,” Fischer said. “If she’s as cute as you say, you should be pawing the ground right now.”

  “Well, sure. I’m just finding this a little hard to believe.”

  Which was an odds-on contender for Understatement of the Year.

  “No harder to believe than anything else you’ve been through, Mister Ault,” Maggie said. “When you take the long view, it really all makes sense.”

  “On the other hand, you can refuse.” Fischer gave a little shrug of his narrow shoulders. “Then the divergence happens again, and the entire human race vanishes, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in the Library with yours truly. So you can go back to Scotland, and look forward to making sweet love to your Hieland Lassie, or you can stay here and reshelve books for a living. Your call.”

  “I’ll go to Scotland.”

  “I kind of figured. So, this is goodbye, then. Probably permanently, this time.”

  “Probably?”

  “We might check in on you. You know, see how you’re doing in the fathering-offspring-to-save-humanity department. I’ve got some vacation time coming, and I’ve never been to the Hebrides before.”

  “That’d be awesome,” he said, rather unconvincingly.

  “Geez, Ault, you could at least fake some enthusiasm. You could hurt a guy’s feelings.” Without warning, Fischer pulled him into a surprisingly powerful hug, and then let him go. “You done good. Seriously. Thanks for everything.”

  Maggie, for her part, reached out her hand, and gave him a stiff little handshake. “Most impressive, Mister Ault. My most sincere gratitude.”

  “Um… you’re welcome,” he said, and for the second time in ten minutes, he was launched into darkness.

  • • •

  The wind and rain hit him in the face like a cold, wet hand. There was the glow of a campfire, and the sounds of movement and angry voices nearby. Then, without warning, the hulking shape of a man bore down on another figure standing there, small and defenseless. A well-muscled bare arm reared back, and thrust forward, and a barbed spear flew toward the smaller figure.

  It was only then that he realized that the smaller figure was… himself.

  With an audible pop—he could almost hear the air molecules recoiling to fill the gap he’d left behind—his double vanished. The spear sliced through the space his body had occupied less than a second earlier. It hit the ground with a loud chunk, and stuck, its wooden shaft quivering.

  The Viking leader gave a shout of alarm and dismay. He ran forward, retrieved his spear, and stared uncomprehendingly at the spot where, by all reason, his prey should be lying dead, skewered through the breastbone.

  Darren felt in his pocket, and found there—Thank heaven at least this part of the timeline stayed the same—his key ring with the electronic airhorn his mother had given him. He crept up behind the Viking leader, who was still frowning at the bare spot on the sand as if he couldn’t quite believe his eyes, and blasted the air horn right in the man’s left ear.

  The Viking leader gave a remarkably girly scream, dropped his spear, and ran.

  Darren picked up the spear and swung it around, and shouted, “Yeah! Take that! And don’t come back!” He gave another blast on the air horn, and heard, in the distance, another terrified yell.

  “Eeeeeevil spirits!” the Viking shouted, his voice fading into the distance. “The island is filled with eeeeevil spirits!”

  Discretion is the better part of valor. Time to get out of here.

  Still holding the spear, he ran off into the darkness, back toward the spot where Dugal’s hu
t had once stood.

  I can help them rebuild. And if Fischer was right, I’ll spend the rest of my life here. And the bookstore, and my apartment, and Seattle… I’ll never see them again.

  It was amazing how little that thought bothered him.

  Somewhere in the darkness ahead was Maíre and her family. His future lay here, in the past. He didn’t know what would happen—if his life would be long or short, if it would be happy or tragic—but at least he knew he would live long enough to tell Maíre what he’d recognized the moment he saw her.

  That he loved her, and that whatever time he had left, he wanted to spend it with her.

  He reached the top of a hill, and then turned and looked back toward the ocean. The faint light of dawn was spreading on the horizon, the undersides of the clouds stained red.

  I don’t know what more I need to know than that, he thought, and smiled a little. It’s more than most men ever get to know. And it is enough.

  He turned and ran down the hill toward the rest of his life.

  Epilogue

  Maggie set a cup of coffee down in front of Fischer. “All of the tracking is reestablished, then?” she said, standing next to his desk, her hands clasped behind her, looking a bit like a headmistress from a traditional girl’s school addressing one of her charges.

  Fischer didn’t look up from his computer screen. “Yup. We’ve run full-scale diagnostics. No other divergences found. I think we’re home and clear.”

  “Quite a near thing, that was.”

  “Oh, yeah. I thought we were done, there, a couple of times. But Ault was a trooper. A lot smarter than I thought he was, at first.”

  “Should we have told him about his own ancestry, sir?”

  Fischer shook his head. “Toward what end?”

  “There were two reasons his premature death triggered a temporal paradox. You only told him one.”

  Fischer looked up at her, and cocked an eyebrow. “He only needed to know one.”

  Maggie pursed her lips. “I suppose you’re right.”