by Paul Siluch
A few hours later, he could no longer keep his eyes open. He closed the book for the last time and returned it to its sealed container. The argon flush made the familiar soft whoosh that had signaled the end of each day for the last year. This time it was final.
“Goodbye, Maureen,” he said.
♦♦♦
Three hours later, the lights in his dorm room snapped on and roused him from a sound sleep.
“What the…” His clock read 3:10 a.m.
A tall, balding man in a gray suit with a yellow tie, the standard uniform of a senior librarian, stood at the edge of his bed. Robbie recognized him as Vincent Kane, the stern, omnipresent representative of the elusive Miss Bridenbaugh.
“Mr. Rainier, Miss Bridenbaugh wants you.”
That news brought him wide awake. Only the most senior researchers ever met with the institute’s owner.
“Now?”
“An hour ago would have been even better,” Kane said. His eyes were bloodshot, his face cast in an impatient grimace. “Get up.”
“Jeez,” Robbie said. “Let me get presentable.”
Kane looked around the tiny room, pulled a pair of sweats from the back of a desk chair and launched them at Robbie.
“Those will do. There’s no time. Hurry.”
Robbie slid on the sweats and pulled on a pair of laceless running shoes. He ran his fingers through his hair in a vain attempt to tame it into respectability as he followed the librarian down to the elevator.
Once inside, Kane placed his thumb over the lower right corner of the glass-covered state inspection card. A light rolled beneath it. A panel slid open under the row of floor selection buttons and revealed a black switch. Kane pushed it and the elevator began to descend.
“There’s a basement?” Robbie said.
Kane stared at the wall.
The elevator travelled for far longer than it would take to access a normal basement. When it stopped, the doors slid open and revealed a dozen people at computer workstations in a large concrete-walled room. At the far end, a pyramid of lit steel tubes took up about a third of the space. Those at workstations pounded keyboards and manipulated graphs on touchscreens. Several others surrounded Miss Bridenbaugh, who had the devastated look of a tornado victim.
Robbie and Kane exchanged places with two men outside the elevator. One braced the other with his arm around the man’s waist. Blood oozed from a nasty scalp wound on the supported man’s head. Kane led Robbie to Miss Bridenbaugh.
“What do you mean ‘He shifted out’?” she asked a technician.
Her voice wavered in disbelief. The gathered technicians towered over the diminutive woman. Her shoulder-length gray hair was pulled back in a bun and gave a full view of her pale, drawn face. The others tried hard not to meet her eyes as she spoke.
“He blew in here just at shift change and hit Wilson,” one man said as he held up a small black box with a cable for a tail. “He plugged this into the sequencer and shifted out.”
“How would he know how to do that?” Miss Bridenbaugh asked. “How would he even know we were down here?”
The men around her looked away. Miss Bridenbaugh glanced at Robbie.
“This is the one?”
Kane nodded. “Ranier. Early 20th Century U.S.”
Miss Bridenbaugh motioned them forward and they followed her into a room beside the control room.
“Robbie, is it?” she said.
“Yes. Sure.” His head was spinning.
“I’m Geraldine Bridenbaugh. I trust you’ve enjoyed your time at the Institute?”
“It’s been amazing.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” She tucked a few stray hairs behind her ear. “Ever wonder how we end up with such great things in our archives? Well, we go find them all over the world. And we find them because we placed them there. Or someone from our team did, actually. I’m going to have to explain a lot of things to you fast. We have been quite overcome by events.”
Robbie nodded. Kane gave the large gold ring on his finger a pensive twist.
“The Institute can send people back in time,” Miss Bridenbaugh said. “I won’t bore you with the scientific details about failed underground nuclear tests, the space-time continuum and veins of naturally occurring precious metals. My grandfather was the expert on that and now others on my staff are. What I can tell you is that it works. My grandfather’s trip back set up the endowment that funds our operations. Shifters, as we call them, travel back to their area of expertise to observe.”
Robbie’s mind reeled and his knees went weak. He touched the table for support.
“You’ve sent other researchers back?” he asked.
“Dozens,” she said. “Who do you think wrote all the diaries?”
The diaries, Robbie thought. The details. The focus on critical points in history. Of course.
“Our researchers,” she continued, “keep meticulous records, save contemporary documents and cache them in sealed metal containers. We pre-arrange safe places to bury them and retrieve them in the present.”
“And the shifters never let the cat out of the bag when they return?”
“They don’t return,” Kane cut in. “There’s no device in the past to send them back. We fake their deaths to the outside world. The few we select are more than willing to make the sacrifice to see history in real time.”
“Of course, time travel is touchy,” Miss Bridenbaugh continued. “Tinker with history and the present will unravel. There is too great a temptation for the average person to mess with it. Only a historian would respect history enough not to change it. Screw things up and you may have people you know and love erased. Or worse, the Institute disappears and all your work is for nothing. The traveler would never even know.”
“When were you people going to tell me about this?”
“You?” Kane said. “Never. You don’t fit the shifter profile. Too touchy-feely. We only trust clinical observers. On what you call Boomerang Day, we were going to send you home like 99.99% of the other Stack Rat researchers.”
Miss Bridenbaugh cast Kane a silencing stare. She touched Robbie’s shoulder. “But the situation has changed.”
She walked over to a terminal and turned the monitor towards Robbie. The screen showed a chart of some type, almost like a seismograph. A jagged yellow line ran between two red control limits.
“An hour ago, Akako Tamara broke in here. Do you know him?”
“I know of him,” Robbie said. He wondered why everyone naturally tied him to the bizarre little number-cruncher.
“Somehow, he got through every layer of our security and sent himself back to the past. Lord knows why, but the result isn’t good.”
She pointed to a red dot on the yellow line at the far left of the graph. It slowly advanced to the right. As it did, the jagged yellow line turned flat in its wake.
“He screwed up the timestream in a major way. That red dot is the disruption. Think of it as a wave rolling forward and washing away our existence.” She pointed to the far right of the screen. Her finger wavered. “When the line gets here, we disappear.”
Robbie’s jaw went slack. “How long will that take?”
“About fifteen minutes. Before that happens, someone needs to follow him back and stop him from destroying our present.”
The door opened a crack and one of the site’s black uniformed security guards stuck in his head.
“Mr. Kane, we need you out here for a moment.”
Miss Bridenbaugh gave Kane a permissive nod. He closed the door behind him as he left.
“Why me?” Robbie asked.
“Because Akako dialed himself back to 1932. You’re our only 1932 expert in residence.”
Robbie’s fascination with history finally had a practical application, a world-saving practical application. Plus, with her offer, he could experience what he had studied his entire adult life.
“It’s one-way, right?” he said.
“But the one wa
y to save the present,” she said. “It’s a lot to ask. Normally the shifter gets a month of prep, but you can see…”
He could teach about history at home or he could live it. And save the world.
“What do I need to do?” he said.
Miss Bridenbaugh opened the door. “Harvey! We need to dress him!”
The security guard entered with a bundle of period clothing from the archives. Minutes later, Robbie wore the slouchy fashion of a 1930’s hired hand: baggy trousers, a white button down shirt, suspenders and a beat-up cap.
Robbie and Miss Bridenbaugh reentered the control room. An unfamiliar woman stood by a terminal, about Robbie’s age, slender, blonde. She wore an ivory drop-waist mid-calf dress with a V-neck. Her hair was bobbed short with broad curls in a Roaring Twenties style. Kane stood at her side. She carried Akako’s battered notebook.
A male doctor in a white medical coat jabbed her on the arm with a pneumatic injector. She winced and looked at a big red welt on her bicep. Kane bent over and whispered in her ear. She nodded.
“This is Chloe Travis,” Kane said as the two approached the blonde. “She’s the other half of your team.”
Miss Bridenbaugh gave the doctor a double take.
“Period inoculations,” Kane said. “She never had the booster pack as a child. We checked Rainier and he’s okay.”
“You study this time period as well?” Robbie asked Chloe.
“Please,” she said with disdain. “I study time.”
“She’s going to help figure out what Akako did,” Miss Bridenbaugh said. “Try to make sense of his notes.”
“FIVE MINUTES!” someone at a computer terminal yelled.
Miss Bridenbaugh moved the two travelers into the pyramid. The framework turned bright red.
“We can only get you within two hours of Akako’s arrival and within three kilometers of his location. After that, it’s up to you.”
“Can’t we bring some current tech to help us out?” Robbie said.
Chloe sighed. “Only the organic time travels. Cotton clothes, leather shoes.” She pulled a small wad of bills from her pocket. “Paper cash. No zippers. Metals become a time sink and, well, you don’t want to see the results.”
“We are synced,” someone shouted.
“Good luck,” Miss Bridenbaugh said. “Restore the timestream and save us all.”
“Execute the shift,” Kane commanded the one of the operators.
All outside the pyramid took on a rose-colored glow. For a moment, it looked like everything reversed course. People walked backward. Robbie saw a faded image of himself and Chloe back out of the pyramid.
“Aren’t you excited?” he said.
“1932 is totally pre-Tech,” she said. “Why the hell would I want to go there?”
Robbie’s head swam. The world dissolved in a red flash and 2054 retreated into the future.
♦♦♦
The two appeared in a damp city alley. The sun shined straight overhead. The air smelled of rotten garbage and oily auto exhaust.
“This era reeks!” Chloe said. She ran her shoe along the greasy pavement, and then gave the warren of fire escapes and drying laundry around them a derisive look. “How did people live like this?” She tugged at her dress. “And these clothes? The last time I wore a dress I was six years old. First they hack off my hair, then they wrap me in this shapeless, uncomfortable sack.”
Robbie, awestruck, barely heard her. Like the student painter who finally glimpsed the Mona Lisa, he was in the unbelievable position of experiencing what he had studied for years. All the guesswork and suppositions were out the window. It was hard to believe it was all real, not some intricate historical recreation.
“Amazing,” he muttered.
Chloe slapped him on the shoulder with Akako’s notebook.
“Snap to, Stack Rat. We have work to do.”
“Right, right. I’m here.”
“I need someplace to work. I have to dissect this notebook, provided that it isn’t nonsensical gibberish. Where are we?”
That was the big question, followed up by the far more rarely asked question, When are we? Robbie led them to the street.
The muted cacophony of a vibrant city filled the air, peppered by the staccato sputter of automobiles. The sidewalks teemed with people buying, selling, playing, moving. A block over, a rundown nag slumped tied to a wagon of lumber. An elevated train rumbled by overhead like some antediluvian monster. The thick buttresses of the Brooklyn Bridge rose in the background.
“We’re in New York City,” Robbie said. “Adams Street in the borough of Brooklyn to be precise. If you need someplace quiet, we could find a library.”
Chloe looked at him like he’d spoken Greek.
“A public institution,” he clarified, “where people could borrow books to read.”
“Books,” Chloe said. “Quaint. Too prone to contamination.”
“Contamination?”
“You are really clueless about all this,” she snapped. “Time travel isn’t some vacation trip. We’ve dropped ourselves into the timestream. If we are a grain of sand, the timestream flows around us, statistically unchanged. Or we can crash in like a landslide, like your buddy Akako will, and the timestream alters course. We need to be invisible. Hanging around in public places increases our contact with others, deepens what we call the ‘footprint’ of your visit. We need to be secluded, where no one will look over my shoulder at Akako’s notes and start asking questions.”
“Where the hell am I supposed to find that? It’s not like I’ve got friends we can drop in on and borrow their living room.”
Then he realized that maybe he did. He pointed her to the Myrtle Avenue el line.
“We’re going uptown.”
♦♦♦
Fifteen minutes later they emerged from the subway at Manhattan’s 57th Street stop. A quick two-block walk and they stood in front of a brownstone where the bloom of spring flowers peeked from the window boxes. Chloe followed Robbie to the front door and he knocked.
A statuesque brunette in a scoop-necked black dress answered the door. Robbie was taken aback at first by the woman’s bright green eyes. He had only seen them in black and white before. Then he smiled in recognition.
“Maureen Harrison?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Robbie Rainier. This is Chloe Travis.”
Maureen looked over at Chloe and gave her hair a double take. Chloe’s eyes narrowed.
“We’ve come a long way to see you,” Robbie said. He shot a clearing glance over his shoulder. “From the Bridenbaugh Institute.”
Fear crossed Maureen’s face. “You can’t be here. There’s no contact allowed. You’ll blow my cover. The footprint−”
Chloe pushed open the door and brushed past her. “No pun intended, but we don’t have time for this. Are you alone?”
“Of course.”
Chloe plopped at a table in the sitting room and flipped the notebook open to a spot she had bookmarked.
“Well, do come in,” Maureen said, voice dripping in sarcasm.
Robbie followed in with a sheepish, apologetic look on his face. “It’s an emergency.”
He related the story of Akako’s escape into the past and the wave of time disruption that followed. The more he explained, the more grave Maureen appeared.
“They warned us this could happen,” she said. “I knew there was something off kilter the minute I opened the door. What with her hair.”
Chloe stared at her like a cat finding prey. “Watch it, Stack Rat.”
“Seriously, two years out of style, at least. And badly done.”
Chloe started to rise from her chair. Robbie moved between them.
“Hey, hey, ladies,” Robbie said. “Work to do here.”
Chloe bit her lip and returned to the table. She gave the red lump on her arm a frustrated scratch under the sleeve of her dress.
Robbie led Maureen to the kitchen.
“So how did you
know where to find me?” Maureen asked.
“This is awkward. I study you.”
“No!”
“Your diary is amazing. And the period items you’ve saved? Do you know we have the only copy of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from 1929’s Black Friday in existence?”
Maureen beamed. “I look for the rare stuff, things I’ve never heard of. You’ll be astounded at what you’ll find. Time erases so many details and you get to see them all. And wait until you try the food. The flavors are unreal. Tomatoes taste like tomatoes.”
“Can’t wait to try one,” Robbie said.
“Wait, if you are studying me, when are you from?”
Robbie considered his footprint. Maureen’s diary never mentioned their visit, so this was a change in the timestream. Or maybe she was just wise enough not to write down this violation of protocol, afraid her foreknowledge of the future might affect his present before he went into the past. His mind did a confused mental lap around that one more time. He gave up.
“I’m from 2054. You?”
“2015. Wow! What does the planet look like forty years in my future? Oh, no, don’t tell me. I already have enough trouble keeping 1932 and 2015 separated.”
“I guess we could write some pretty convincing science fiction couldn’t we?”
“Hate to break up the history geek-a-thon in there,” called Chloe. “But I’ve cracked part of this guy’s code.”
♦♦♦
Maureen and Robbie looked over Chloe’s shoulder as she flipped through pages in Akako’s notebook. Convoluted equations, hand-drawn probability graphs, dates and names filled the sheets.
“It pains me to say it, but your Stack buddy is a genius,” Chloe said.
“I told you, I barely know him.” He turned to Maureen. “Seriously.”
“He’s broken down the timestream into events and probability outcomes, the mechanics that steer the stream. Then he’s extrapolated potential future streams if events had played out differently.”
The ink-laden papers crinkled as she whipped a few pages ahead.