The Accidental Time Machine

10

It was Marsh’s ascension into scientific sainthood and Matthew’s fifteen minutes of fame. The cover of Time had Marsh brooding in a hyperrealistic painting by Fiona Wyeth—probably on file for years—against a ghostly background of clocks, where a wraithlike figure of Matt is stepping out of the mists of time.

The press had it all figured out. Matt wasn’t much more than an experimental animal, even though it was his clumsiness that had started it all. It was Marsh’s genius that had explained Matt’s accidental time machine.

But Matt could see that the Marsh Effect didn’t explain what happened in a definitive way. It really just described what the machine did. Then Marsh and others had tried, and were still trying, to twist physics around so that it allowed the machine to exist.

But it was as if physics had been a careful, elegant house of cards, then Marsh—or rather his earthly avatar, Matthew—had been a playful child who blundered into it and brought it down, not out of malice, but just by accident.

Now Matt, true to the analogy, sat in the middle of the mess, picking up one card and then another, trying to make sense out of it.

He came to the office every morning at nine and spent part of the day working on time travel and the rest trying to put together his course on antique physics. He had more than three months before classes started; if he’d been assigned the course back in his TA days, and there were no time machines to complicate things, he could’ve assembled the course in a few weeks. But ignoring the Marsh Effect would be like trying to conduct a class around an elephant sitting in the front row.

Marsh had been right in his warning that Matt would have to bone up on topology and the manipulations of algebras and rings—mathematical tools he’d never needed before. So he was attempting a mental juggling act, trying to learn the old new math while preparing to teach the new old physics. It made his brain hurt.

And it wasn’t as if he’d be allowed to sit uninterrupted and work. There were more than a thousand copies of his time machine in the world, and science demanded that he push the RESET button on all of them, in case the Marsh Effect was really the Matthew Effect. They couldn’t just FedEx a machine from China, have him push the button, then mail it back after having failed to make it disappear. He had to hike down to a lab and sit in the middle of a circle of cameras and other instruments and push the button.

A few times, he agreed to duplicate the original physiological circumstances—stay up for thirty hours high on coffee and speed. He argued that the whole thing was more like superstition than science, and the response was basically: Okay, do you have a better idea?

Meanwhile, it wasn’t only science that had changed drastically in the past sixteen years. Movies were either dumb static domestic comedies (during which the audience laughed insanely at things that didn’t seem to be funny) or brutal bloodbaths from Japan and India. Popular music set his teeth on edge, harmonic discord and machine-gun percussion or syrupy, inane love ballads. Popular books seemed to be written for either slow children or English Ph.D.s.

Women his age had been children when he left. Of course they liked the music and books and movies and thought the height of fashion was symmetrical cheek brands—not only on the cheeks of the face, he was given to understand. The women who were his contemporaries were either like Kara, middle-aged and married, or middle-aged and not interested in men.

His mother was in a rest home, lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. He visited her several times, but she didn’t recognize him.

He did have a little notoriety by virtue of being an artifact from the past, but sixteen years didn’t exactly make him a caveman. More like an old-fashioned geek who hadn’t kept up with stuff.

He went to his twenty-fifth high-school reunion and left early, deeply rattled.

About that time he started to fantasize about pushing the RESET button again. The world would be truly alien, 177.5 years in the future, but he wouldn’t be trying to fit in. He would be a genuine curiosity, like a nineteenth-century scientist appearing today. Who wouldn’t be expected to do any real physics. And the big questions would presumably be answered. He might even be able to understand the answers.

The time machine was very much under lock and key, with a twenty-four-hour armed guard. But if anybody could get to it, Matt should be able to.

That stayed in the back of his mind, the ultimate escape fantasy, while he did his damnedest to adjust to this not-so-brave, not-so-new world.

Ironically, Kara and Strom, whose betrayal had pushed him into pushing the button, became his best friends and mentors. He often went to their place for dinner, to hang around and play with their son, Peter. At nine years old, he was close to being Matt’s equal in social sophistication.

He tried to date. It wasn’t hard to find women his age who were interested in him, either as famous semiscientist or social freak from the past. But neither characterization was a good starting point for a relationship. His foolish aversion to facial brands didn’t help, either, eliminating half the pool of young women a priori.

Male friends were even harder to make. He wasn’t interested in sports, the one cultural fixation that hadn’t changed at all, as far as he could see, and that was the one place where men assumed they could make an easy connection. When somebody said, “How about them Sox?” he would mumble something and look at his feet.

Under normal circumstances, his natural pool of friends would be the graduate students and young professors in his own department. But he didn’t know enough about post-time-machine physics to chat about their work, and his unearned full professorship was an obvious obstacle.

A couple of times he resorted to “dates” from escort services, but that was so disastrous that not even the sex was very much fun. It was like taking a department-store manikin to dinner and a show, and then home to a perfect body with nothing inside but lubricant.

Then one night after dinner, Peter put to bed and Strom off in the study, Kara led him out to the front porch, where they sat together on a swing with glasses of wine. She was just close enough that they barely touched.

“I’m sorry about what I did,” she said quietly. “I should’ve stayed with you.”

Matt didn’t know what to say. “Water over the bridge,” he tried. “I mean under.”

“I don’t know. Does it have to be?”

“Kara …”

“I’m desperately unhappy,” she said without inflection. “Strom bores me to tears.”

He patted her hand. “You wouldn’t’ve been any better off with me. One chronophysicist is about as boring as the next one.”

She smiled up at him. “See? Strom would never say that. And you’re anything but boring.”

This couldn’t be happening. The full moon hanging over the horizon romantically, crickets chirping. Her wonderful smell. Her husky voice: “But I’m too old for you now.”

“No! Kara … you’re beautiful. You’re still the most beautiful—”

“We should talk. Strom’s taking Peter up to Maine on Friday, to his parents’ country place. He knows I can’t go because I’m allergic to horses. Let’s spend the weekend together … and talk.” She moved her hand, with his, to between her thighs.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Just one weekend.”

“If we were caught …”

“We won’t be.” She squeezed his hand. “Please, Matt.”

That was awkward. A couple of months before, he’d been madly in love with her, or with someone who could have been her younger sister. Just shy of forty, she was still sexy as hell, and still the same person he had fallen in love with.

It wouldn’t hurt his wounded masculinity to get back at Strom. But Peter was in the equation, too, and it could be devastating to the kid.

And make Matt look like a fool, as well as a home-wrecker.

She kissed him softly, and then deeply. “Please? Your place at 6:00 on Friday?” She moved his hand to her breast, and then her own hand somewhat lower.

Of course he said yes and, before the subway was halfway home, regretted having said it. He never watched soap operas on the cube, but he was pretty sure he’d just signed up for chapter n-minus-1. And they never had a happy ending. If they had a happy ending, they’d have to go off the air.

A mature man would have called Kara the next day and said he got carried away, sorry, there’s no way that it could work. Let’s admit we made a mistake and stay good friends.

Instead, Matt figured he had just two days to get to the machine and escape into the future.

His first plan was direct passionate action: buy a gun at one of the Southie pawnshops, go disarm the guard, and take the machine. It wouldn’t be stealing, really; it was his machine. Stealing would be when he crawled into a Dumpster and pushed the button, using it as a getaway car, and showing up in the future with tons of exotic garbage.

A less dramatic opportunity presented itself. The chronophysics department wanted to run the machine through a positron scanner three times—alone, and then with a person touching it, and then with Matt touching it. Careful not to push the RESET button, of course.

Once he was inside the claustrophobic tube, he’d just find a piece of metal, clip it with the alligator clip, and push the button. Off to the twenty-third century.

It would look like an accident. Poor Matt, sacrificed to science.

This time he wouldn’t need any protective gear. Marsh had calculated where he would wind up next, to within a few dozen meters. It was up by where Route 95 crosses into New Hampshire, pretty far from the ocean. Pretty near to the tax-free liquor warehouse. Have to take a credit card.

What, really, ought he to take up into the future? His first thought was old coins. But they’d probably have him take all of the metal out of his pockets for the positron scan.

Rare documents, small ones. He went down to Charles Street and maxed out two credit cards buying a note Lincoln had scrawled to Grant and a letter from Gabriel García Márquez, in the last year of his life, to Pablo “El Ced” Marino when he was an unknown poet, forty years before his Nobel Prize.

Of course he might wind up in a future that cared nothing for history or literature. That would be trouble, no matter what.

There was also the small matter of 177.5 years’ interest on those two credit cards. Maybe they’d go out of business.

It was bound to work one way or another. In some future he was going to come back to that law firm sixteen years ago and leave a million-dollar check to bail himself out.

He spent a day worrying. How could you plan for a trip like this? There was no Baedecker for the future. Science fiction had a really bad record, world peace and personal dirigibles. For lack of anything else positive to do, he bought a really good Swiss Army knife with twenty-one functions, in case they didn’t make him empty his pockets.

Of course, he might be vaulting into a radioactive hell. Or a wasteland rendered sterile by nanotechnology or biological warfare.

He couldn’t un-push the button.

But he could press it again, and again. Two thousand years. Then 24,709 and three hundred thousand. The fifth push would be 3,440,509 years, long enough for anything to quiet down.

It would also be a kind of suicide. If there were still people that far in the future, he would be more distant to them than a Cro-Magnon man would be to the here and now.

Did you make your computer chips out of flint back then?

He went to the old-time theater on Brattle Street and watched three twentieth-century movies in a row. A soft-porn romance, a Western, and a once-daring epic about a war in Southeast Asia. It kept his mind off everything, though he emerged with a seriously sore butt and didn’t care if he never saw popcorn again.

He might not.

He got a few hours of imperfect sleep and went down to the Green Building early.

The first time traveler, Herman, inhabited a deluxe terrarium in the lobby. He had grown to helmet size, and slept through Matt’s tapping on the glass to say good-bye.

The only things alive now that might still be alive when he came back were some young Galápagos turtles in zoos here and there. He would look them up and talk to them about the old days. I knew your cousin Herman.

He’d never been to the seventh floor before. It had a slightly shabby atmosphere. Perhaps positrons were out of fashion.

“Dr. Fuller,” a young Asian man said, walking toward him with his hand out. It still startled him when people called him that, but he’d stopped protesting.

He’d never get a real doctorate now. Maybe another honorary one, for being Guy from the Past.

“Joe Sung,” he said, shaking hands. “You’re up next. Maybe ten minutes.”

“Okay.” The positron scanner was in the next room, visible through a big window.

It was all white plastic. Would there be anything metal inside to contact with the alligator clip?

He should have looked up the machine’s design. It probably did have metal all through it, and so would act as a kind of semiopen Faraday cage, and go up into the future with him.

If not, not. The time machine would disappear for about nine generations, to be recovered near the antique ruins of the liquor warehouse on the New Hampshire border. Matt would be fired, perhaps jailed. Though there probably wasn’t yet a law against sending stuff into the future.

Sung had said something. “Pardon me?”

“Just have a seat out here. I’ll come to get you.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You’ll be in the machine for more than an hour. You might want to use the washroom.”

“Thanks.” Matt went across the hall to the men’s room and sat there thinking. Reluctantly, he decided he’d better not do it. There will be other opportunities.

Or would there be? The rent-a-cop who normally stood outside the door on the ninth floor was not here. When the machine went back to its usual place, he would be. How to get by him? Flash the Swiss Army knife?

He went back to the anteroom and flipped through a copy of National Geographic backward. The clam farms of Samoa. Our Friend the Dung Beetle. Surprising Pittsburgh.

“Okay.” Sung came out with a pallid young man, the control for the experiment. He looked a little shaky.

“Don’t open your eyes in there,” he said. “It’s kind of close quarters.”

“Thanks.” Matt watched him stagger toward the elevator.

“I monitored him while he was being scanned. Nothing unusual. ’Scuse me.”

Sung headed for the men’s room.

Matt slipped into the room with the positron scanner. The machine was right there, on the end of the platform that went in and out. He snatched it and ran into the corridor and stabbed the elevator button.

The door opened immediately. The pale guy was still there. “What … what’s happening?”

“Have to, um, take it down to recalibrate it.”

“Mm,” he said. “Don’t open your eyes in there, man.”

“Yeah, I’ll be careful.”

When they got to the ground floor, Matt went for the door with unseemly haste. He had maybe a minute. There were Dumpsters behind Starbucks and Au Bon Pain.

But there was also a cab. It pulled up to the curb in front of the Green Building and the passenger got out. Then the driver got out, too, to help with the luggage.

Matt dove in. “Hey,” the driver said. “I’ve got another fare.”

Matt clipped the alligator clip to the exposed frame in the open door. But there was a plastic dome over the RESET button.

“Look, buddy, you’ve got to get out.” The cabdriver was large and menacing. “Let’s don’t have any trouble.”

Matt pulled out his Swiss Army knife and broke a thumb-nail getting the blade out.

“Man … like you’re gonna scare me with that thing.”

He popped the plastic dome off. “Don’t have to.” He pushed the button and everything went gray.