“Yeah. It is, but is this your whole life? What happened that made you want to come live out here?”
He reaches back into the bag and pulls out a few more items. I see bacon and shredded cheese and a jar of salsa. “I needed to be here to train you when you showed up,” he says. “I needed somewhere away from the rest of the world where you wouldn’t be distracted. But I’ve been out here a while anyway.”
“What kinds of distractions?”
Benji pauses and looks at me. “You have a tendency to booger some things up once in a while if you haven’t noticed. Out here . . .” He gestures to the view out the window. “There isn’t much to mess up.”
“Wow, thanks for the vote of confidence. That makes me feel really great.”
He looks me in the eyes. “That’s not what I meant. Look, I knew what kind of state you were going to be in coming out of that fiasco in the lab. I knew if there was anytime you were likely to do something rash or emotional, then that would probably be it. I just wanted to avoid that possibility.”
“So you knew what I would go through, but you didn’t know firsthand what I’d do? So does that mean the lab never happened to you?”
“No. It didn’t. Our timestreams split before that point.”
“When?”
Benji sighs. “In 1986. But it was 2009 that really made the difference. The other 2009. Not the one you were in. Not after the changes.”
“What happened?”
Benji goes back to cracking eggs. “I made some poor choices.”
“Oh.” I consider him as he pulls strips of bacon out of the package and lays them on a pan. “So then how did you know about the lab? How did you know I would need help?”
He turns on the camp stove and adds the eggs into a pan. “You told me.”
“I did?”
“The future you,” he says. “You told me what I needed to do to get you back there.”
“Really? How did you know it was me?”
“You had the same frequency signature.” He turns and points a spatula at me. “But don’t go getting it into your head that just because I met a future version of you, that you’re somehow invincible and can’t die, or any bullshit like that. If you go do something stupid, you won’t end up being that version of you at all. You’ll end up the version of you who got himself killed doing some stupid shit.”
I nod. “Okay. I won’t.”
I turn my glass around in my hands and watch the last sip of water swirl around bottom. I look back to Benji pushing the eggs around the pan with the spatula. He’s a version of me, but he seems so different. He seems sad somehow.
“How many versions of us have you met? Are there a lot of us?”
Benji frowns. “Not as many as there should be.” He sprinkles some of the cheese over the eggs.
“Oh.” I set my glass back down. “You mind if I ask you something else?”
“Shoot.”
“Okay, well this has been bothering me since I got here. I’m not completely sure I want to know the answer, but I feel like maybe I should.” I feel my chest tighten up. I take a deep breath. “What happened to Malcolm? And Francesca and Blake? This is 1990. Does that mean they died back in ’86?”
Benji sets a plate of eggs and bacon in front of me. “No.”
I breathe a sigh of relief.
“Actually, it sort of depends . . .” he adds.
“What do you mean?”
He grabs his own plate and drags a stool to the table. “Have you ever heard of Schrodinger’s cat?”
“Who’s Schrodinger?”
“He’s a scientist. He’s dead. But he had a theory that might help you understand your situation.” He leans forward and puts his elbows on the table and begins to gesture with his hands. “The idea is that you take a cat and you put it in a box. You also put in some sort of device such as a vial containing poison that is set to break at an undetermined time. It doesn’t really matter the nature of the device in question, only that it has the potential possibility of killing the cat. Let’s say it’s fifty-fifty.”
“That’s terrible,” I say.
“Of course it is. But that’s not the point. The point is, that due to the imprecise timing or probability of this device going off, until you open the box, you don’t know if the cat is alive or dead. Inside the box, it exists in a state that can be considered both alive and dead.”
I think about this scenario. “So you’re saying that my friends right now could be dead?”
“Or they could be alive. You won’t know till you open the box.”
“What’s the box?”
“In this case, you have to figure out if you are, or aren’t, going to go back to 1986 to save them. And if you do, whether you’re actually going to succeed.”
I ponder my eggs. “So since it’s 1990, there could be a grave out there somewhere with Francesca’s name on it right now.” I point beyond the walls of the shack. “If I don’t save her, she died in 1986.”
“That’s one possibility.”
“But it might be one fact. Potentially I could walk out of here and find out the truth one way or the other. I might find that grave.”
“You might. But maybe just that knowledge that you failed would be enough to dissuade you from going back to try to save them in the first place, causing the very thing to happen that you were hoping to avoid.”
“That’s really convoluted.”
“Another reason why I brought you out to a desert with no phone and no internet and no other contact. You don’t need that kind of distraction right now. It would be too easy to go searching for answers when you need to be finding the answer firsthand.”
“So you don’t know?” I say. “You don’t know if I succeed in saving them when I go back? You met me. Future me. He didn’t tell you?”
“No. He told me what I needed to know. And he told me if I wanted to make up for some of the other things I’d done over the years, this might be a good place to start. Helping you.”
“But apparently I live,” I say.
“One version of you does at least,” Benji replies. “That’s not to say that you stay him though. Like I said. You can make different choices. Your destiny would change then, along with aspects of your timestream signature. How this plays out is up to you now.”
I pick at my food for a little and then set my fork down. “I’ll tell you one thing,” Benji says. “You go through with this, you’ll know one way or the other. You don’t, and it will eat at you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that wondering ‘what if’ can be the worst of it. You go back there and you might die. That’s true. And I won’t say that’s an easy choice to make, but I’ll tell you this, dying ain’t the worst thing that can happen to a man.”
He takes our plates back to the sink and scrapes the remnants into the trashcan. He gestures me toward the door. “Come on. We got more work to do.” He opens the front door and points me to the edge of the porch. “Have a seat, while there’s still some shade. I want you to work on setting your chronometer with your eyes closed.”
“You don’t want me to look at it?”
“You shouldn’t have to. You’ve been wearing that thing on your wrist long enough now. You know where the dials are. Remember where your settings are after each jump and you should be able to set the next one without looking. You have to start using your brain to its full potential before you can get the real potential out of that gizmo.” I sit down on the edge of the porch. “And don’t cheat, or I’ll come out and blindfold you.”
He lets the screen door slam behind him. After a few moments I hear the clink and clatter of dishes again. I look down at my wrist. I feel over the face of the indicator and then touch my fingertips to the different dials. Okay. I can do this. I shut my eyes and concentrate. Let’s do five minutes. I let my fingertips find the minute dial. I give it a twist. I reopen my eyes to find it set on eight minutes. Damn it. I reset the chronometer and try again. This time I undershoot to t
he four mark. A hawk keens above me as it circles over the desert, riding waves of thermals. I go back to my chronometer.
It’s the better part of an hour before I start getting any kind of consistency. Benji comes out to check on me briefly and gives me my glass of water, but then goes back inside. I keep at it. During one of my longer periods, trying a more difficult combination, I hear a scraping noise behind me. I turn to see Cheeto pushing his way out the screen door. He clumps and scrapes himself along the rough boards behind me, before plopping off the end of the porch into some brittle tufts of grass. I hear more rustling as he burrows himself into the space under the porch.
Once the sun is directly overhead, I lose my shade and slide back against the wall of the shack to get out of the sun. Benji reappears after a little while and gestures me inside. He points me to the bed where he’s laid out a pair of khaki cargo shorts, a baseball cap, and a tube of sunscreen. “You’re gonna want those. We’re going back out.”
Once I’m out of my jeans and smelling like a coconut, I rejoin Benji outside. We refill our canteens from a barrel around back labeled, “Drinking.” We return to the dry lakebed with the drums. I run drills around the barrels again, alternating between leaps and simple taps. Benji mixes things up by throwing rocks at me, requiring me to time my blinks so as not to get pelted. Luckily, my mess-ups only result in bruises, and I manage to avoid getting anything fused into me. By the time we’re done for the afternoon, my clothes are soaked again, and despite the frequent layers of gravitized sunscreen, the skin on my neck and arms is decidedly pink. Once we’re back to the shack, Benji gets me out another change of clothes from a trunk near his bed.
“There’s a wash basin out back you can use to scrub yourself clean. You’ll find water for washing in the rain barrels back there. Should still be some left. There’s food in the cupboards, too. Nothing cold but it should be enough to tide you over till tomorrow.”
“You’re not staying?” I say.
“No. Not tonight.”
“Where are you going?”
“None of your business,” he replies. “Just get some rest. I’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll carry on from there.”
“Okay.” I nod and examine the clothes on the bed. When I turn around again, he’s gone.
I find the corrugated basin out back like he described and a clean towel hanging from a hook. A big block of soap and a washcloth are sitting on a window ledge of the shack. I strip down and pour some water into the basin out of the barrel labeled “Bathing.” It has a slight rust color but I know I’m just going to get it dirtier.
I scrub myself all over and squat down as low as I can, to get my head under the spigot of the water barrel to rinse my hair. By the time I’m done rinsing off, the bottoms of my feet are in a puddle of mud, but I feel better. A lizard watches me from the wall of the shack as I towel off, but the rest of the desert view seems vacant and lonely. I keep the towel and walk around the front of the shack, wiping my feet off and donning my clothes on the porch. Back inside, I idly browse through the books on the bookshelf near the bed for a few minutes before getting myself a glass of water and going back out to the porch. Dusk is highlighting the dunes in reds and oranges.
As I settle onto the porch, I notice the tortoise has partially reemerged from under the shack and is viewing the twilight scenery as well. I close my eyes and try to remember my last chronometer setting. I think I left it on a thirty-second interval. I look down. Twenty. At least I was close. I close my eyes again and practice for a while longer. As night descends, I admire the stars appearing in the darkening sky. Soon it grows too dim to see my chronometer settings, but I keep practicing anyway until my eyes start to droop. Cheeto has made his way over and is eyeing me from a few feet away.
“It’s just you and me tonight, buddy.” I watch the stars for a while longer. The view might not be as good as Montana, but it has to be close. I stand up and open the screen door. The tortoise watches me.
“You want to come in for the night, dude?” I walk over to him. He watches me but doesn’t retract himself back into his shell. “Okay. We’ll try this again.” I pick him up, and this time he doesn’t try to pee on me. I pry the screen door open and set the tortoise on the floor inside.
“There you go, my friend.” I refill his plate of grass before lying down on the bed. I try to read some more of Quickly’s journal, but in the dim light it gets too difficult to see. I watch the shape of Cheeto munching on his grass instead, and soon drift off.
When I wake in the morning, there’s no sign of Benji. The tortoise is waiting near the door, so I let him outside again. I find myself a box of strawberry pop tarts in one of the cupboards and chew on those while I wait. I walk back out to the porch and practice my no-look chronometer settings for a while longer but then find myself at a loss for what else to do. I begin running circles around the outside of the shack, blinking myself forward in twenty and thirty-second intervals as I tap each corner. I gradually move myself up to five-minute intervals. By the time I stop for breath, I look up at the sky and realize that I’ve fast-forwarded through a couple of hours.
I walk to the top of a large dune and have a look around. Still no sign of anyone. I fill up a canteen and wander out to the lakebed. I run the drills I learned the day before, jumping over barrels and pretending to dodge rocks and obstacles. I practice until I’m soaked with sweat and coated with a layer of dust. When I make it back to the shack a couple of hours later, I find Benji sitting on the front porch.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
“Where’ve you been?”
Benji stands up and gestures toward the inside with his head. “I got you something.” When I walk inside, I find a ball of brown waxed paper tied with string, sitting on the kitchen table. “Go ahead,” Benji says. “Open it.”
I untie the string and unwrap the paper. In the center of the package sits a doorknob. The metal is discolored and darkened around the edges, but it seems to be intact. “You recognize that?” Benji asks.
I pick it up and consider it. I note that it is technically only half of a doorknob, since nothing is on the other side. “It’s from the lab?”
“You got it.”
I turn the knob over in my hands. I remember Malcolm writhing in the chair with wide eyes as I walked toward him. “I never should have let that door shut,” I say.
“Well, now you can reopen it.”
“Thank you.” I tuck the knob back into its wrappings.
“Look, Ben. I know I’ve not been the easiest on you out here, but I do think you can do this. I wouldn’t have signed on for this job if I didn’t think you had it in you. I’m not saying you have it all figured out. Your skills can still use a lot more practice, everyone’s can, but you’ve certainly got enough knowledge and ability to take out a shithead like Stenger.”
“What if I don’t?” I say. “What if he wins?”
“I would never put ‘winning’ and ‘Elton Stenger’ in the same sentence together. That guy lost at life a long time ago. Surviving isn’t all there is to winning, Ben. A lot of good men have died in the act of doing something great. That doesn’t mean they lost.”
I nod.
“Come on. We’ll clean up your stuff.” Benji helps me gather my clothes from the day before and we scrub them by hand in the washbasin out back. Once they’re clean, he hangs them on a line that he strings from the shack to the outhouse. By the time we’ve finished eating some late lunch and I clean myself up in the basin again, the afternoon sun has dried my clothes enough to wear them. I walk back inside feeling clean, but still hot. I grab the loose wad of hundred dollar bills and my pen that I took out to wash my pants, and stuff them back into my pocket.
“Let me see your chronometer.” Benji has a small box of tools out on the kitchen table. I hand him my chronometer and he uses a set of micro screwdrivers to remove the back.
“What’re you doing?”
“Seeing if your unit is already wired
with a remote receiver. If it is, I can tune a remote switch to it for you.”
“Where did you learn how to do that?”
“Abe Manembo. The guy is a genius.” He sets the back of the chronometer on a clean white rag and holds the chronometer a few inches from his face. “You should look him up sometime if you get the chance . . . and yes. He put one in here already. That means I just need to see what range it’s using . . .” He uses a jeweler’s magnifying glass to read inside the chronometer. “All right. I can do that.” He pulls one of the tube-like remote switches from his toolbox and pops the end open. He uses pliers to remove a red diode, and replaces it with a blue one. Lastly, he closes up my chronometer and hands it back to me.
“Here. Try that out.” He hands me the remote switch. “You just flip over the safety just like on the DGs, and then you can push the button. This is one more thing you don’t want going off in your pocket when you aren’t paying attention.”
“Great, another exciting way to die. I’ll add it to the list.”
Benji smiles. “Go ahead. Give it a shot.”
I dial my chronometer for a two-second jump without looking at the dial, but then double check it as I place my chronometer hand on the counter near the sink. I flip open the safety on the remote with my thumb. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” I say, and push the button.
When I reappear, Benji is still smiling. “See? Child’s play.” I look down at my still existing body in relief. “I have something else for you, too.” Benji moves to the closet and removes a gas mask, a pair of welding gloves, and a large fire extinguisher. “I couldn’t get my hands on any real fire gear but this will be better than nothing.”
I nod, thinking of the heat I’ll be facing on the other side of the doorknob. “Thank you, man. This is all really fantastic.”
“You should probably take this, too.” He pulls a leather jacket out of the closet. “Not like I get to wear it much out here anyway. Are you ready to do this now or do you want to wait for the morning?”
I walk over to the bed and pick up Quickly’s journal. “I think I’m ready to go now. The longer I wait, the more time I have to worry about it.”
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 39