by Alan Seeger
“Are you serious?” said Julia. “You’re the cute redhead. And you know how guys feel about cute redheads.”
Sarah looked at her, puzzled. “No, I guess I really don’t.”
Julia turned Sarah toward the mirror and took the glasses off her face, then pulled her shaggy red mane back in a ponytail. “Hmmmm,” she mused. “Little sis, you’ve got real potential.”
She pulled out her makeup kit and started to work. The following week, she took Sarah to see her favorite hair stylist.
Sarah’s confidence soared.
After graduating high school the following spring, Sarah attended Oberlin College, graduating in 2007 with a bachelor’s in Astrophysics and a minor in Computer Science, followed by a M.Sc. in Astronomy earned at Ohio State. She was working toward a doctorate and had set her sights on a position as an astronomer at a major observatory such as the Gran Telescopio Canarias in La Palma, Spain, the Keck observatory at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, or perhaps as a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, when Randall Orwell swooped down like a predatory bird and recruited her to become one of the ChroNova staff.
CHAPTER 58
“So, according to what you’re telling me,” Stefanie said, “it’s been, what, a couple of hours since I first went through the —” She hesitated and glanced at the rotating, emerald vortex behind them. “The Gate?”
“No more than that,” said Rick2. “Probably more like an hour.”
“Where would you have gone from here?” asked Rick1.
“The same place you went,” said Stef, “Where you went, I mean,” she added, looking at Rick2. “And where you were going to go,” she said to Rick1, “If we hadn’t bumped into you here in this dark alley. God, this is confusing.”
“You should try looking at a clone of yourself,” said Rick1.
“I would have gone to find myself — my 21-year-old self — and seen whether she’d run into you,” Stefanie said.
“Well, then, why don’t we go find her?” Rick2 said.
“It’s six in the morning. You wanna go knock on her dorm room door and wake her up?” said Rick1.
“Okay, here’s something that’ll twist your brain cells in a knot,” said Rick2, “When I came back through the Gate to find you, I had already come through to this place more than 24 hours prior in order to…” he hesitated.
“To what?” Stef asked.
“Go ahead, tell her,” said Rick1.
Rick2 drew a deep sigh. “I was going to try to figure out a way to get 2000 you and 2000 me together, so that we could have 15 more years with each other.”
There was silence for a long moment.
“Oh, honey, that’s so sweet, but —”
Rick2 interrupted her. “It’s not sweet, it’s selfish. I was worried — I’m still worried that this goddamned thing, this leukemia, is gonna take me away from you way too soon. If I could somehow work it so that you and I met years earlier than we did —”
She took his hands in hers and drew him close.
“It doesn’t matter, my sweet, sweet man. The day I met you, my life was complete. And it doesn’t matter whether we’re together one year or a hundred, no one else will ever mean as much to me as you.”
He pulled her close and kissed her hard and long.
There was a cough.
They broke the embrace and looked over at Rick1, who was standing there, a grin on his face, arms folded and toe tapping impatiently.
“Oh, all right. I love both of you,” Stefanie said. “God, this is weird.”
CHAPTER 59
It was quiet in the lab for the first time all morning. Most of the crew was out to lunch; only a few of the staff remained in various parts of the building, those who either had brown bagged it or merely had too much work to do to consider taking time away from their duties.
Two of those people were Terry Cambridge and Sarah Rhodes.
They were sitting at their stations, their chairs turned toward each other, making small talk; the weather, the Cards, the probability of Rick and Stefanie tumbling out of the gate in one piece.
Finally Terry decided the time was right to say what he’d wanted to say for well over a year. He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and said, “So, Sarah…”
“Yes?”
“I was just wondering if you might want to go to dinner sometime?”
There was a pause. She looked at him and smiled, and Terry was certain for a moment that she was going to let him down easy, beg off, say she already had a boyfriend, although he knew she didn’t.
“Terry…”
He looked at her, not knowing what to expect.
“I thought you’d never get around to asking.”
CHAPTER 60
The three time travelers, Stefanie and the two Ricks, had decided to take a cab to Berkeley, find some breakfast, and try to figure out a plan. Rick1 joked that the cab drivers in the Bay area were making a killing just from their trips back and forth.
They sat at a table in a small café, discussing different ideas for steering college Stephanie to meet 2000’s version of Rick. Finally Stef straightened her spine and said, “The simplest way to deal with this is for me to go and find her — go find myself — you know what I mean, and tell her to contact this guy, without telling her why, in so many words.”
“What about us?” asked Rick2.
“I think that you should go back to the Gate and go on back through to 2016.”
“Oh, no,” said Rick1. “No way. We’re not leaving you alone here in 2000.”
Stef looked at him sternly. “Didn’t you tell me that any little thing that we do here has the potential to change the past, and that it might have devastating consequences on the future? Look at what already happened. One of you — hell, I keep talking like you’re two different people. You did something when you were here the first time that made it so we never met at all. The longer we stay here, the more chance of something else like that happening.”
“Yes,” said Rick1, “but now that he came through and interrupted what I was planning, I haven’t done it yet. I wasn’t going to do it — I didn’t do it until 10 o’clock tonight, more than 12 hours from now, and now that you’re here and we are taking a different course, I’ll never have done it at all.”
“Jesus,” Stef muttered, putting her head in her hands. “This time travel stuff is mind-boggling.”
“Again, you should try looking at a clone of yourself,” said Rick2.
“Wait… I said that the first time around,” said Rick1.
The two Ricks looked at each other in realization. “But I have memories of having said it,” Rick2 replied. “I’m starting to have memories of saying and doing the things that you’ve said and done.”
“I wish Terry and Randall were here,” said Rick1. “They could probably help us figure this out.”
“I think,” said Rick2, “that what we are experiencing might be a side effect of having traveled through the Gate repeatedly. There’s not really two of us; we’re both the same person, separated by time, in this case, a matter of 24 hours, give or take.”
“Nature’s way of dealing with what would otherwise be a time paradox?”
“Something like that,” said Rick2.
“So don’t you think,” interjected Stef, “that it would be best if the both of you took your time traveling keesters back to 2016 before you change something else, and maybe make the universe disappear or something?”
“Oh, I doubt that anything quite so —” Rick1 began.
“Let’s GO!” Stef hissed between her teeth.
Thing One and Thing Two filed out onto the street and hailed a cab while Stefanie paid the check with her odd looking 21st century currency. Again, the cashier never blinked.
~~~~~
Stefanie hugged and kissed both Ricks, only slightly aware of the fact that a few of the other customers in the café were watching, and stood by as they piled into a cab, waving as they rode off into the
distance.
She turned to head toward the residence hall and nearly bumped into a blue-haired older woman on the sidewalk who was walking a little black Schipperke which was pulling at its leash and barking. The owner was looking Stefanie up and down; clearly, she’d seen her kiss both Ricks.
“They’re twins,” she said quickly. “Rick and… Mick. Michael, actually. I, uh…”
The woman seemed to lose interest and went on past her down the sidewalk with the Schipperke in tow.
Stefanie breathed a sigh of relief and headed for the dorm.
~~~~~
As Stefanie and Stephanie were walking toward the coffee shop in one possible timeline, suddenly they weren‘t, because Stefanie had never arrived at the residence hall to begin with.
~~~~~
The two Ricks got out of the cab in front of the alleyway. The driver gave them an odd look; they could almost read his mind. Identical twins, clearly in their 40s, still dressing alike? They both resisted the urge to laugh out loud, Rick1 feeling the urge first, then Rick2 remembering how it had felt only moments later, and realizing that something was happening to the two of them.
“I think that we’re synchronizing, somehow,” said Rick2 as they hurried down the alley. “The memories are coming more and more rapidly, closer to the actual event that I am recalling. I have no idea what might happen when we get fully synced.”
“Maybe nothing,” said Rick1.
“Maybe something catastrophic.” They were standing in front of the Gate now, the emerald glow illuminating their identical faces.
“What if the catastrophic thing doesn’t happen until after we get back to our own time?” said Rick1.
Rick2 looked grim. “That’s a risk we’re going to have to take. If it happens here, it affects history for the next sixteen years.”
“Okay, one, two, three, go!” shouted Rick1.
They both leapt into the Gate together.
~~~~~
Stefanie Padgett walked down the sidewalk toward the corner where she would cross to go onto the campus proper and head for the Unit 3 residence hall where she’d lived during her senior year at Berkeley.
She didn’t notice, as she passed by a nearby newspaper vendor, the date that was displayed on the masthead of the Oakland Tribune:
Saturday, December 16, 2000.
CHAPTER 61
Terry and Sarah were sitting, smiling, talking quietly and making plans for dinner at Lombardo’s Trattoria, so engrossed in their conversation that they nearly missed the small rippling sound that accompanied something or someone coming out of the Gate.
They looked up to discover Rick, standing alone on the entry platform, looking like he’d been asked to multiply two seventeen digit numbers in his head.
“Rick!” Terry shouted, running to assist him. His cry brought every staffer in the building running to the laboratory.
Terry and Sarah helped Rick down off the platform and into a chair. By then, Randall had arrived. He scooped Rick up in a bear hug and then held him by the shoulders.
“Did you find Stef?”
“Yes,” Rick responded, still looking a little disoriented. “We did.”
CHAPTER 62
Rick was at home, alone. Only God knew where — or perhaps more importantly, when — Stefanie was. Perhaps she was lost to him forever; lost to him sixteen years ago, lost before he had ever even met her.
She had not emerged from the Gate within the hour or two that Rick had expected, nor after two hours, nor four. Finally, at seven o’clock that evening, Randall drove a distraught Rick home; he was in no shape to drive himself. The only assurance he had that their entire scheme hadn’t simply gone plummeting into hell was that they had not all begun to forget Stefanie, as had happened when she had initially crossed over into 2000.
Earlier in the day, Rick had explained to the ChroNova staff how he had met not only Stefanie but the other Rick when he’d gone back to 2000, and how he had gradually seemed to gain memories of what the other Rick was saying and doing.
“Of course!” exclaimed Terry. “I should have stopped to consider that multiple entries into that timescape might produce multiple copies of yourself; sort of like echoes.”
“He was an echo?”
“Well,” Terry explained, drawing a diagram on a whiteboard, “one possibility is that each time you go back to a certain point on the timeline, you’re spinning off an alternate version of history. Kind of like a movie director doing multiple takes of the same scene. They’re all the same, in a way, yet there will be minor differences, and sometimes the director will make big changes and the scene will end up very different than the original.”
“I can’t even begin to tell you how little comfort this gives me,” said Rick dryly.
“I’m sorry that I can’t tell you exactly what is happening and why,” Terry said. “You realize that nobody, at least in our world, has ever done anything remotely similar to what we’re doing. We’re pioneers, in the truest sense of the word.”
“Should someone go back in and try to locate Stefanie?” asked Sarah.
“Honestly, at this point, I think it would have the potential of doing more harm than good,” said Randall. “We’ve already seen the issues that have cropped up with the first three attempts. I might add that none of this might have happened had Rick not taken it upon himself to try to change the past,” he added, looking sideways at Rick.
“I’m sorry,” Rick said, closing his eyes. “I’ve really managed to fuck things up badly. I was operating on pure emotion when I made the decision to do what I did.”
“It’s okay, buddy,” Randall said. “Given the same situation in my life, I know that I would have done the same thing.”
There was silence for a moment. The two men became aware that there were a dozen pairs of eyes staring at them. They felt the unasked question hanging in the air: What situation?
Rick took a deep breath, sat back in his chair and addressed the entire group.
“You all deserve to know.
“A few months ago, I was diagnosed with adult acute myeloid leukemia. I’ve been having chemotherapy periodically for a while now.
“The reason I originally decided to go through the Gate back to 2000 was to see whether I could arrange things — manipulate events — so that Stefanie and I would meet years earlier than we actually did, so I could have more time with her. I’m scared that I’m going to die, and it was a completely selfish move on my part.”
There was a stunned silence for a moment, and then the various members of the ChroNova staff all began to move in and envelop Rick in what seemed to him to be a wave of love and sympathy.
Now, hours later, Rick sat in his darkened living room and wondered if he’d lost Stefanie forever, the way he’d lost Holly; the way he’d lost his mother.
CHAPTER 63
It was 1996. Rick was twenty-five years old, still in the first year or so of his marriage to Holly, before things began to go south.
He was working for a company called CSSD in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when he got a call from Holly one afternoon.
“Your mom called a little bit ago,” she said. “You should call her. She didn’t sound good.”
When his afternoon break came, he placed a call to his mother’s home number.
“Hello?” Holly had been right. She didn’t sound well.
“Hi, Mom. It’s Rick.”
“Ricky! I tried to call you earlier…”
“I know, Mom. Holly told me. Are you all right?”
“Well,” she said, hesitating a little. “To tell you the truth, I’m not doing so great.”
“What’s the matter, mom?”
There was silence for a moment.
“Mom? Are you there?”
“I’ve got cancer, Rick,” she said with a note of resignation. “It’s in my lungs, and the doctor says it’s traveled all over my body. There’s tumors in my bones… they’re inoperable, he says.”
Rick was stunn
ed. His mother? Dying? No. Not possible. “How did you find out about it?”
“I hadn’t been feeling good for a few months,” his mother said. “I had a cough that wouldn’t go away. I took cough medicine off and on for weeks, but it wouldn’t ever completely quit. I was short of breath and wheezing… after a while it got to where my chest would just ache. I thought it was just from being sore from coughing so much. Then I started coughing up a little blood, and I finally decided I needed to go to the doctor.”
Again the stunned silence. Then Rick said, “I’ll be there in twenty-four hours.” She didn’t argue.
He called his boss and let him know what was going on, then called the airport and bought a ticket to Sacramento. Holly declined to accompany him, claiming that he needed time with his mom.
He rented a car at the airport and made the drive to the familiar white frame house where he had grown up, where his mother lived, where she had always lived, for his entire life. She’d gotten a job after his father had left, and worked as much as 60 hours a week under miserable conditions in order to keep the place. She’d never believed that his father was dead, refused to try to have him declared dead, and so never collected any insurance.
She’d just paid off the house the year before, when Rick had sent her some money earmarked for that purpose, a dozen years after his dad had left.
He walked in and was hit in the face with the stale smell of nearly two decades’ worth of cigarette smoke. He’d been away long enough that he’d forgotten.
His mother was sitting in the living room, on the sofa, covered with a blanket despite the fact that it was late summer. She smiled weakly when he walked through the door.
Despite being a late stage lung cancer patient, there she sat, cigarette in hand, a large pile of extinguished butts in the ashtray beside her.
He’d been there, spending every waking minute with his mother, holding her hand when she was in pain, for just twenty-two days, when she passed away quietly early one Sunday morning. She’d declined to go to the hospital; they had already told her there was nothing to be done for her. Rick honored her wishes, and kept her supplied with smokes, and Pepsi, and Vicodin.