The Accidental Time Machine

11

Matt tumbled into the front seat and groped for the steering wheel, in case he wound up in traffic again. But when the world reappeared, it was all forest.

He still had the plastic dome in his hand. He pressed it into place over the RESET button, and it locked in with a loud click.

The engine was humming. He turned it off and got out of the driver’s side door and looked around. A deer bounded away, white tail flashing.

Something smelled funny. After a moment he realized it was a lack of pollution. He was just smelling the planet.

Where was everybody? They supposedly could predict within tens of meters where he was going to appear—and predict when, within minutes or even seconds. Where was the welcoming committee?

That didn’t bode well.

The cab still had tires, after a fashion. The rubber had disappeared, or rather stayed behind, and left four wheels of steel-mesh foam, squashed slightly out of round.

He switched it on and put it in gear and carefully maneuvered around the trees and brush. He was supposed to be a couple of hundred meters east of Highway 95. Well, it felt like afternoon, so he steered eastward, away from the sun.

The road appeared with no warning, bumpy, broken asphalt with grass and even small trees growing through it. That was not a good sign, either.

Maybe it didn’t mean the end of civilization. Maybe America had finally outgrown the car.

But still. Where was everybody?

Maybe the calculations had been off, and he was where he looked like he was, the middle of nowhere. He started driving south, in the breakdown lane. It had less brush, for some reason.

Hungry, he popped open the glove compartment and found a Baby Ruth, half a bag of red-hot peanuts, a bottle of water, and an old-fashioned snub-nosed revolver. There was also a half-empty box of .357 Magnum cartridges.

He put the gun back and ate the Baby Ruth, saving the peanuts for dinner. Maybe the next time he saw a deer he should shoot it. Then skin it and dress it out with his Swiss Army knife, sure.

It gave him a cold chill when he realized he might have to do just that, or whatever inelegant approximation of butchering he might be capable of. He stopped and did a more thorough search of the glove box. No matches or lighter.

Deer sushi, how appetizing.

The taxi had a quarter charge; the gauge said its fuel cells were good for another seventy-seven miles. It shouldn’t be more than fifty miles back to Cambridge. If their calculations had been right.

What if it was more than fifty miles? More than 177 years?

A few miles down the road, he came upon an abandoned car. He stopped and, obscurely frightened, took the pistol with him when he got out.

There was no sign of violence, but the car had been totally stripped, no tires or seats. The hood was open, and the fuel cells were gone.

The plastic body was a dull pink. He had a feeling that it had started out red but had been out in the sun and rain and snow for decades.

Was it possible that the world had ended? Some ultimate weapon had given the Earth back to nature?

Not all at once. Somebody survived to steal. Or salvage.

The trunk of the car had been forced open, and was empty, not even a spare. That reminded him to check the taxi’s trunk.

It did have a spare, and a small toolbox, which might prove handy. A shoulder bag that had the driver’s wallet with about $800, reading glasses, pills, and a small notebook, dark at first. He held it up to the sun, and after a few seconds it showed an index full of moving porn.

He flipped through it for a minute and was becoming aroused, but then there was a girl who looked just like Kara, as a twenty-one-year-old, and a sudden access of sadness wilted his desire.

What was he thinking? He could have just said no to her invitation. Or he could have said yes. He was crazy to leave everything behind and leap into the unknown.

He threw the bag into the backseat and drove on.

The abandoned cars came more frequently; soon he was never out of sight of one or two. They all seemed to be in about the same shape.

Didn’t this used to be mostly pasture and farmland? How long would it take for such land to return to forest? He remembered as a child being taken to a forest outside of Paris, which had been the site of a vicious battle in World War I. The gunfire and artillery had been so intense that no tree had been left standing, except for one battered sapling. A hundred and fifty years later, it had become a huge oak darkly looming in a forest of lesser but uniformly large trees.

That there were no large trees interrupting the highway and shoulders indicated that somebody used it. Or maybe the ground under the road had been treated to discourage growth.

He went around a long, slow bend and saw, a couple of hundred meters away, a man on a horse, riding with a child on his lap. They saw Matt and bolted into the woods.

Matt leaned out the window. “Wait!” he shouted. “I won’t harm you!” He stopped at the place where they had left and listened. Nothing. “I won’t hurt you,” he shouted again. “I just want to talk. I need information.”

He listened for fifteen minutes or so. Then he drove on, until he fell asleep at the wheel and crunched into some brush.

Time to call it quits for the night. He didn’t want to drive with lights on: too conspicuous and a waste of power. He ate the peanuts with a few small sips of water.

He got a greasy blanket out of the trunk and wrapped up in it and tried to find a comfortable position for sleeping. When it got dark, a skylight appeared in the cab’s roof. The stars were unnaturally bright, crowding the sky. There were noises in the woods that probably were animals. He locked the doors and kept the revolver by his side.

He woke at dawn, suddenly, to loud birdsong. There were six deer, four of them fawns, grazing nearby. When he opened the door, the two adults looked at him for a moment, then they all bounced into the woods.

When he finished peeing, he heard a quiet sound of water over rocks. He took the car keys and pistol and water bottle to investigate, and just off the road found a trickle of waterfall. He filled the bottle and drank deeply, and refilled it. The water tasted wonderful, and if it was polluted, well, it wasn’t as if he had any choice.

When he returned to the taxi, he had a strong feeling that he was being watched.

“Hello? Anybody here?” No response. He got into the car and continued on.

After a few miles, the forest began to thin in a systematic way, the largest trees left standing, but ones up to about a foot in diameter were chopped down roughly at waist height. Harvested for firewood, or maybe building.

As he kept moving in the direction of Boston, the edge of thick forest moved farther and farther from the road, until finally there was no forest at all, just a rank confusion of weeds, with a few large, old trees.

When the gauge said he had twenty-two miles left, he came to a farm, or at least a ruined side road that led to a cultivated area. But the turnoff was marked with a sign that had a stylized assault rifle between the words KEEP and OUT. So he drove on.

There were a half dozen such roads, all with the same sign. That was a little encouraging—at least the neighborhood was organized enough to support the work of a sign painter.

Perhaps a gunsmith as well.

He saw the tollbooth coming for about a mile. By then eight lanes of abandoned superhighway were apparent, with only the two lanes in the middle clear. All of the toll stations but one were blocked with rubble and brush.

His watch said 7:01. Did they do Daylight Savings Time here? He stuck the pistol in his belt, but then decided to conceal it a bit and stuck it between his butt and the seat back, hidden but easily accessible.

As he approached, a man in uniform stepped out into the middle of the road. He had a weapon slung over his shoulder. As Matt drew closer, he unslung the weapon and held it across his chest, port arms. It was an ancient Kalashnikov.

He was standing by a sign painted by an amateur:

BOSTON CITIE LIMMITS / PAY TOLE ONE DOLAR. Matt dug into his pocket and found a two-dollar coin.

The man took the coin and looked at both sides. “Old. How you make that old car work?”

“Found some fuel cells. Have to recharge them.”

“Hah. You will that.” The man put the coin in his pocket. There was a purse on a string around his neck. Holding the Kalashnikov awkwardly between his elbow and side, he counted out four quarters and handed them to Matt. They were light as aluminum washers. One side was covered in small print, alternating “25” and “Boston”; the other side had IN GOD WE TRUST in one semicircle and JESUS SAVES underneath, framing a smiling Jesus wearing a crown of bloody thorns. There was no year on the shiny coin, but it couldn’t have been very old; the picture and type were just printed on, not stamped.

The guard relaxed and slung the rifle over his shoulder again, and Matt stifled a sigh of relief. “You headin’ a Boston?”

“Cambridge, actually. MIT.”

The man nodded. “They might could charge ya’ up. Sometimes they do real magic there.”

“They do. Thanks.” Matt eased the taxi forward and the man went back to his book. It was a Bible, bristling with bookmarks.

This was going to be an interesting environment for an atheistic nonpracticing Jew. He remembered when, as a third-grader, he’d begged his parents to let him go to a Methodist summer camp with all his friends. Of course it became a big family joke, our boy the Methodist. Not so funny now.

Of course the tollbooth guy was not necessarily typical. But the coins were a bad sign, too.

He made his way south down the interstate, which was bumpy but relatively free from vegetation. The monorail next to it had bird’s nests on the maglev rail. This had been a green corridor ever since they’d moved to the Boston area, the interstate and monorail high above manicured parkland, a bicycle and running path connecting Boston with Lowell through a lovingly maintained arboretum corridor. Now it was scraggly forest.

He wasn’t going to make it to Cambridge. When he got to the monorail terminal, a sign pointing down Route 3 said CAMBRIDGE 18, and his gauge said twelve.

While on the elevated highway, he’d seen a few farms, but no sign of urban civilization on the ground. Now there was thick forest on both sides of the road, which was once again overgrown with weeds.

No saplings, though, and no small trees anywhere near the road. Low limbs had been hacked off, too. Every now and then a fresh stump. For firewood, maybe for building.

He didn’t encounter any traffic until he was nearing Arlington, he estimated a little before eight. He passed a horse-drawn cart loaded with carrots and turnips, and then a dairy cart, its cargo area enclosed and dripping. The drivers both stared at him as he passed, neither answering his hello.

Ice without machines? Well, they used to cut big blocks from the lakes in winter and keep it in icehouses through summer, insulated by sawdust. Maybe they were doing that again.

Church bells chimed eight. Matt’s watch said 8:05.

In town, there were people walking along the sidewalk or maneuvering bicycles among the potholes. Most of the storefronts were boarded up or had collapsed long ago. A Bible store was opening up.

It didn’t look as if men’s clothing had changed very much. He could walk around in what he had on, jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, without anybody giving him a second look.

When the gauge hit 1.0 mile, it started chiming for his attention (a POWER LOW light had been flashing for miles). He turned right at a sign toward Spy Pond and coasted downhill. The motor whined to a stop about a block from the small lake.

His mother’s old place would have been just across the water. There was an apartment building there now, most of its windows boarded up.

He got the taxi driver’s shoulder bag out of the backseat and put all his worldly goods in it: time machine, pistol, ammunition, water bottle, two rare documents, the driver’s wallet and porn notebook. They might be worth a lot or nothing. The Bible store probably didn’t have much porn.

The toolbox was bulky, about fifteen pounds, but it might be valuable. He rolled the blanket into a tight cylinder and tucked it under his arm. He could walk to MIT in two hours this way, maybe three.

A group that looked like a family was fishing at the end of the parking lot. They’d evidently dispatched the youngest, a boy, to go find out about the taxi driver. He ran about halfway, then slowed to a jog, a walk, a shuffle. He took off his cap to reveal an amateur haircut.

He was about ten, wearing clothes that were clean but seemed more patch than original cloth.

“Mister? You fishin’?”

“No. I was just driving to MIT and ran out of gas.”

“Gas?” That anachronism evidently hadn’t survived.

“My car’s fuel cells ran down.”

He nodded slowly at that. “My pa wondered about the car. Where you got it. If they was more.”

Matt looked up at the group, and they were all watching the transaction. The father waved in a friendly way. “Well, let me go talk to him.” Pump him for information. He waved back and followed the boy.

The man had a broad-brimmed black hat and was dressed all in black, maybe fifty years old. His wife was younger, in a shapeless black shift that fell from neck to ankles, with no ornamentation other than a silver cross. The man had a similar one, both evidently snipped out of sheet metal.

“He’s headed to MIT,” the boy said.

The father shook hands conventionally and said his name was Mose. “So that ’splains the car.” He looked up the street. “They got lots of old stuff there. That one looks ’most new.”

Matt nodded noncommittally. “How the fishing?”

“Couple a little ones.” Mose looked down at the transparent toolbox. “Got a extra rod, but the reel’s broke. You fix it, you could try your luck.”

Matt set the box and bag down. “I’ll take a look at it. No guarantees.”

“Abraham?” The boy ran off to get it.

An opportunity to find out something about the now and here. “You all live in Arlington?”

“Past few months. Prob’ly go back in the city ’fore it gets cold.” He didn’t have anything like a New England accent.

“Native Bostonian?”

“Aye. Grandfolks come up from the Carolinas. You?”

“Mostly Cambridge. And Ohio,” he added without thinking.

“Ohio the state?”

“It was some long walk,” he improvised. “My father wanted me to go to MIT.”

Abraham brought over the rod and reel. “She won’t let go a the line,” he said, and demonstrated by jerking it taut twice.

“Let me see.” Matt took the contraption and sat down on the ground. Pulled the toolbox over, as if he knew what he was doing, and found a set of small screwdrivers. The smallest Phillips head fit the recessed screws that held the reel together.

“Helps to have the right tools,” the man said ruefully. Help even more if one knew what one was doing, Matt thought, but he kept the thought to himself.

It was an elegantly compact system of wheels and pawls and a cam, controlled by a button on top. He studied it, pulling gently on the line while doing this and that. The cam seemed stuck in an odd position, so he pressed it gently. Suddenly, a click, and the line pulled loose. “Here, this is it.” He held it up to Mose and showed him the part that had come unstuck.

“The drag?”

“Whatever you call it.” He loosened it with an external dial, gave it a drop of oil, and tightened it partway.

“So you workin’ at MIT?”

“Used to.” Take a chance. “You know anything about chronophysics?”

He laughed. “Didn’t have school past readin’ and numbers. Not much in numbers—that’s what you do?”

“Used to. See whether I can get my old job back.”

Mose jerked his head in the direction of the cab. “You can get that old thing to work, they better give you a job.”

Matt screwed the housing down tight and handed it up. “Give that a try.”

Mose stirred up a jar full of dirt and pulled out a wriggling worm, and threaded it onto the hook at the end of the line. He did a couple of arcane tests, the worm dropping and stopping, then grunted okay.

Matt followed him to the water. With a practiced flip of the rod, Mose sent the bait out in a satisfyingly long arc. It splashed about twenty-five yards out, and he handed the rod to Matt.

“Uh … what do I do? I’ve only fished with cane poles.” About two hundred years ago.

Mose picked up his own rod and demonstrated. “You feel the fish bite, wait a second, an’ set the hook.” He gave it a little twitch. “Not too hard. Then reel ’er in.” He rotated the handle on the side, clockwise, and the line came back. Matt imitated him.

“So what do you do in this kronny stuff?”

“Chronophysics? Well, I’m actually kind of a handyman. I build … devices for experiments and fix them when they don’t work.”

“Plenty of that around. If MIT doesn’t take you back?” Indirectly asking, “What did you do to get fired?”

“Mose …” he looked around. “Can you keep a secret?”

He transferred the rod to his left hand and crossed his heart. “Swear to Jesus.”

“I’m … well, I’m sort of an experiment, myself. I’ve been asleep for almost two hundred years.” Mose just looked at him. “What year is it now?”

“Seventy-one.”

“Seventy-one years from what?”

Mose winced. “Don’t talk like that,” he whispered.

“Look, I mean it. I don’t know anything about this world. You’re way in my future.”

“That’s why you talk so funny.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought it was maybe Ohio.”

“No, it’s the way everybody used to talk. Thanks to TV, I suppose.”

“I’ve heard of that. We don’t have it anymore, praise Jesus. Sometimes you see piles of them, all burnt, left over from the Day of Return.” He looked around. “That’s what happened seventy-one years ago. Jesus came back, just as was prophesized.”

Matt had a strong urge to set the pole down and go south as fast as possible. Find someone at MIT who would tell him what was going on.

“You shouldn’t let on you don’t know,” he continued quietly. “Some folks aren’t reasonable. And there used to be Deniers.”

“Used to be.”

He nodded and reeled in some line. “Still are, ’way west, in Gomorrah. Or so it’s said. Nothing in the Bible about that, just the old Gomorrah.”

“California?”

“I heard it called that. Or Hollywood,” he said slowly, savoring the three syllables. “Decent folks say Gomorrah.”

“No doubters out here, no Deniers?”

“Not since I was a boy.” He looked troubled, staring out to where his line met the water. “It was a bad time. Best not to talk of that either, except in family.”

“There’s a lot people don’t talk about,” Matt said.

“It wasn’t that way in your day?”

“Not so much—wait!” The end of his rod twitched twice and, before he had time to react, bent sharply.

“Got one!” Mose said. “Steady, now.” The fish swam left and right as Matt reeled it in, and a couple of times it sped straight away, overcoming the drag, but in a minute Matt had it close to shore. Abraham waded out with a hand net, and used it with both hands to lift the fish out of the water. It was as big as an adult’s forearm, and lively.

“It’s a blessed one,” the boy called excitedly. He almost tripped, splashing through the water.

“Beginner’s luck,” Matt said.

“Oh, it ain’t luck,” Mose said. “It’s fortune, for us, but it ain’t luck.”

The fish was thick and glittering black and had a precise silver cross on each gill plate. “You don’t know about these.”

“Never seen such a thing,” Matt said.

“Don’t get one ever’ day. Ruth!” He called to the woman, who was sitting at a picnic table reading the Bible. “It’s a blessed one!”

She hurried over, her eyes down. “Oh, my,” she said, and took fish and net over to a thick plank by the water’s edge. She held it down, still flopping, on the wood, and with a thick-bladed knife pressed down hard behind the gills and decapitated it. She kissed the cross on each gill plate and threw the head back into the shallows.

It wriggled away.

Abraham had brought a bucket of water. Ruth used a thin-bladed knife to slit the belly of the fish, and threw away a small mass of red-and-silver entrails. Then, with thumb and finger, she peeled the fish like a fruit.

“Almost all meat,” Mose said.

So it was. A bioengineered food machine. “You don’t catch them often?”

“This kind, maybe twice a week, praise God. This is a good sign for you.”

“Well. Good.” Matt was watching Ruth clean the fish. It didn’t seem to have any bones; basically a rectangular slab of meat. She rinsed it off and sliced it into eight thick steaks, which she arranged in a shallow bowl and covered with a red sauce from a Mason jar.

“Barbecue,” Mose said, pronouncing it “Bobby Q.” “Let’s get the fire goin’.”

“Good coals, Moses,” Ruth said. “We don’t need a big old fire.”

He rolled his eyes. “Good coals.” He led Matt to the barbecue pit, by the picnic tables. Abraham and the other two children, younger girls, had rounded up fuel—dry grass and thin sticks—and were arranging it in neat piles. From well-used plastic bags they sorted out larger sticks and a few large chunks of wood, some carbonized from earlier use.

“The girls sniff around and pick up wood in the morning, ” he said. “Gets harder to find.”

“You move into the city for heat? Later on.”

“Yeah, they got solar. Crowded, though.” He made a pile of the light grass and arranged a cone of twigs, teepee style, over it, then took a firestarting thing out of his pocket, like a fat nail file with a metal stick hanging from a chain. Striking the stick against the file made bright blue sparks. The grass started to smolder, and he blew it into flame. The twigs began to crackle, and with intense concentration he added slightly larger twigs in tripod threes, still blowing gently on the flame, with his hand cupped behind it.

Surely that action went back to the Stone Age. But the firestarter went back only to the twentieth or twenty-first century, as did the Mason jar with the “Bobby Q” sauce. To pour on the bioengineered fish.

“Where’d you get the spark maker?”

“Always had it,” Mose said, not looking up. “Took it outa my daddy’s pocket when he died.”

He built a loose house around the small blaze with twigs about as thick as his thumbs. “You did well, girls,” he told them, and they nodded gravely.

“This area must be pretty well picked over,” Matt said. “Lot of people live out here?”

“When it’s warm, yeah, gettin’ out of the city. Churches here expect almost two thousand today, plus some people go into town for the day. Maybe twenty-two hundred in Arlington, till October, November.”

“You know how many people live in Boston, the Boston area?”

“Huh-uh. Feels like a million in the winter.”

“No heat out here?”

“Only what you make.” He arranged the rest of the wood around the blaze and sat back. “How did it used to be?”

Matt pointed at the apartment building. “My mother used to live right here, on the lake, year-round. In the wintertime her place was usually so hot I couldn’t stand it.”

“She had electricity?”

“And a fireplace, too, for special occasions. That was in the 2050s.”

He shook his head. “No good with numbers.”

Matt added and subtracted in his head. “That would have been about 130 years before Jesus came back.”

“Long time.” His face pinched in concentration. “My gran’ther was born about twenty years before, B.S.C. So his grandfather …” He tried to do it on his fingers but shook his head again and let his breath out in a puff.

“Well, if you count twenty-five years per generation, that would be his grandfather’s father.”

Mose looked up, his eyes shining. “And you were around back then.”

“Yeah.” Something suddenly drained out of Matt. Energy, hope.

Mose saw it. “Will you get back?”

He cleared his throat. “I … I don’t know. I think so.” Someone had to make his bail 293 years ago.

Ruth came over carrying the fish and two metal grates, which looked like refrigerator shelves. She peered at the fire. “Ready in about ten minutes, Moses?”

“Ready when it’s ready, woman.” She shrugged and set the fish down on the table.

He placed a few small sticks in with the larger ones and blew gently until they were blazing. “If you don’t get back, stuck here, you want to join a church. I mean you have to. What were you back then?”

“You mean religion?” Mose nodded, not looking at him. Ex-Reform Jew atheist would probably be a bad answer. “Guess I’m sort of a Methodist. Church wasn’t so … central to our lives.”

“As it was written,” he said. “And so you were laid down low. We were, humanity.” Matt couldn’t think of a safe response to that. “Meth-o-dist,” Mose said softly. “That was like the old Catholics?”

“They split off from the Catholics long before I was born.” They were something else in between, he vaguely knew from his childhood friends. Lutherans or something.

“Hope they don’t give you trouble about that at MIT. They shouldn’t, since you were born before the Second Coming and then sort of hop-frogged over it. But those religious people are unreasonable sometimes, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“I should be careful what I say around them.”

“Say and do. Really careful.”

“I will, Mose. Thank you.”

“They’re scientific, so they might give you some room. Like any reasonable person would. But they’re all priests, too, or most of them.”

The fire was going well now, hot enough that both men moved a little away from it. “Let it burn down a bit.”

“So … there aren’t any Methodists anymore?”

“Not around here. Down south they still have Church-o’-Christs and Baptists and what all. Here we’re just Christians.”

“Everyone?”

“Oh yes.” He said that a little too quickly. “You would be about twenty-two?”

“I’m older than I look. Twenty-seven—or two hundred-some, if you count from date of birth.”

“They might make you spend some time in service.”

“In the military?”

“Military? No, just in service to the Lord. I was in service from eighteen to twenty, which is usual. But if you’re in school a grown-up, they wait till you’re out.”

“What do you do in service?”

“Whatever you’re best at. You’d probably be a mechanic or some scientist’s assistant.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Might just make you a scientist and give you an assistant. You probably have enough school to be a scientist.”

“Old-fashioned stuff, though. Science goes out of date.”

“Maybe so. I never heard of your chronochemistry. Maybe they don’t do it anymore.”

“Chronophysics, but you’re right. That would be a … a shame.” Not to say a goddamn kick in the balls.

Matt was wondering what would be the best way to approach MIT. Probably best not to walk in and say, “Hi! I’m the chrononaut you’ve all been waiting for.” The fact that there had been nobody waiting for him up at the New Hampshire border spoke volumes. He should try to sneak in and get the lay of the land before he identified himself. It might save him from being ridiculed, or burnt at the stake.

Abraham had come to whisper something to his father. “Ask him,” Mose said.

He came over. “Father said I could ask you could we look in the car.”

“Sure. I’ll go over with you, unlock it.” Matt stood up and fished in his pocket for the thick bunch of keys on the taxi driver’s ring. Mostly plastic electronic keys, with a few old metal ones. One of the plastic ones said MIT-SUBISHI. He clicked on it as they approached the car and the key blinked red twice. Of course, out of power. The doors unlocked one last time, with a slow thunk.

The two girls had tagged along, and now they all piled into the cab and bounced around. The musty old thing was probably the newest car in the state, or the East Coast. Let them play, though; there was no way they could do any harm.

“What’s this, mister?” Abraham had found a .357 Magnum cartridge on the floor.

“Here, I’ll take it.” Matt reached for it.

“Is that a bullet?” Mose said, behind him.

Matt paused. A cartridge, actually. “Looks like.” He passed it to Mose.

The black man pushed it around on his palm. “Never seen one like this. Not a rifle?”

Could they have peeked into his bag? “It’s for a hand-gun. ” He didn’t look in the bag’s direction. “You have rifles but not pistols?”

“Not since my father’s time. They’re illegal.” He looked through the car window. “You be careful, Abraham.” He glanced at Matt. “No pistol in there?”

“Not that I know of. I haven’t looked all through it.”

“Children, go back to the fire.” They protested. “Abraham, see if the coals are ready.”

The kids moped away from their forbidden toy. “You weren’t surprised,” Mose said. “At this.” He handed Matt the cartridge.

“No. Plenty of guns back in my time.”

He nodded. “Be careful. They’re big trouble here.”

“Thanks. I have a lot to learn.”

Abraham was calling that the fire was ready.

Lunch was polite but strained. They gave profuse thanks to both God and Matthew for the fish, but the adults were obviously glad to see him go. Mose asked him to lock the car, but the key didn’t work; not enough power. They gave it a thorough search and didn’t find any contraband or anything useful.

A bike path still ran by the lake to the subway stop he’d last used to bring his mother wine and groceries. Mose warned him away from the subway, home to “tunnel rats,” vagabonds who lived there year-round. It was relatively cool in the summer, and survivable in the winter, but a haven for the lawless, and unsafe even for them.

Matt said good-bye and walked up the hill to Mass Ave. He’d never walked from here to MIT, but it couldn’t be more than six or seven miles. He’d biked it a couple of times.

It was pretty grim. The street was a ruin of frost heaves, unmaintained for decades. Shop fronts were decrepit, signs faded out, painted over. There were brick-and-board tables along the sidewalk where people sold food and drink or had stacks of worn clothes and junk for sale or trade. Matt got a questionable glass of homemade beer, warm and sour, for a quarter. One fourth of his contemporary money.

When he felt he wasn’t being watched, he ducked into a door and fished a single hundred from the taxi driver’s wallet. He didn’t want to flash a thick roll, but sooner or later he’d come to a bank—or whatever or whoever served as one—and wanted to find out whether the old money was worth anything more than the paper it was printed on.

He wished he’d been able to talk more with Mose. The pistol cartridge had shut that door, with the accurate implication that Matt was lying and dangerous.

Walking down the sidewalk, he drew less attention than he would have back in his own time—wrinkled, slept-in clothes of an odd style, lugging a knapsack and a toolkit. A lot of people were similarly attired and burdened, a mobile population without Laundromats.

There was an actual bank, of sorts, where Arlington became Somerville. It had once been a savings and loan establishment. Now there was a card in the cracked window that said FAMILY BANK • DEPOSITS PROTECTED • LOANS MADE TO PERMENT RESADENTS. The best spelling he’d seen so far.

The place had a big walk-in safe, standing open, flanked by young men armed with assault rifles. It probably had a worthless electronic lock.

Even with the big window and open door, it was kind of gloomy inside. There was a man wearing a shabby coat and tie sitting at a broad table in the middle of the lobby, a tall filing cabinet behind him. In front of him, bowls of coins and a sawed-off shotgun.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “I don’t know you.”

“Just passing through. I wondered what this was worth.” He took the hundred-dollar bill from his shirt pocket and unfolded it and laid it in front of the man.

The banker picked up a white plastic thing that resembled Mose’s fishing reel, but when he cranked the handle it made an intense spot of white light. He scrutinized the bill with a magnifying glass, then held the light behind it, looking at the structure of imbedded wires. He rubbed the president’s face with his thumb and it faintly said “hundred.”

“It’s well preserved,” he said. “Where’d you find it?”

“In a trunk,” he said, true enough. “What’s it worth?”

He rubbed his chin. “I could give you fifty for it.”

“Thanks,” Matt said, reaching for the bill. “I may be back.”

The banker snatched it away. “Just a second.” He cranked the light up again, and studied both sides, then sniffed it. “Twenty seventy-four … maybe I could give you seventy. Seventy-five if you have more.”

“That’s the only one I’ve got. I’ll take seventy-five for it.”

The man pretended to consider it. “All right.” He pulled out a fat wallet and extracted three faintly glowing twenties, then scooped three heavy five-dollar coins from a bowl. Matt put the coins in his pocket and held up the bills to the dim light. He couldn’t identify the portrait. They were soft and worn but looked like real currency.

“Come by if you find another one of those.”

“I might.” First see what he could get in Boston proper.

When he got to Porter Square he had to make a decision: keep going down Mass Ave where it turned, or continue straight on through what used to be a bad neighborhood. On a bike, from here it was a ten-minute cruise to campus. He’d never walked it, but it was probably half the distance of going down Mass Ave through Harvard Square.

Carrying the bag and toolbox was wearing him down, and the neighborhood didn’t look that foreboding in the afternoon light.

Besides, he did have a gun, though the idea of using it gave him a sudden thrill of dread. His total experience with firearms was a forbidden friend’s BB gun at the age of twelve, and he hadn’t even been able to hit the target.

Well, he didn’t intend to shoot it. But it could be a powerful psychological weapon. Unless his adversary had one as well.

Mose hadn’t ever seen a pistol, yet the idea of it was obviously potent and frightening. Matt felt its considerable weight and strode on down through the slums.

Actually, once he was in the neighborhood, it didn’t seem any more run-down than what he’d just come from. No street merchants and fewer people. No pets, he suddenly realized; there ought to be dogs barking and cats lazing in the sun. An unaffordable luxury, he supposed, when you couldn’t just pop down to the grocery for pet food.

Every now and then a bicycle would rattle past, and twice mule-drawn carts. The mules had to eat; their existence implied a certain level of civilization, organization, since there were no pastures around where they could freely forage.

Of course they might not be completely natural. The anomaly of the bioengineered Christian fish was no anomaly, actually; this culture was going to be a mixture of high technology and low. He had to keep his eyes and mind open.

Inman Square was reassuring, a couple of blocks of vendors’ tables and a small crowd milling. There was a table full of books, but they were all Bibles, hymnals, and tracts. He bought a small New Testament, well thumbed and full of underlined passages, for nine dollars. Protective coloration and research. It would be smart to start learning something about Jesus.

A tea shop was open, so he sat down there to rest and watch the crowd. The teas on the menu were mostly herbal, probably homegrown or gathered locally. A cup of “Chinese tea” went for twenty bucks, the same as “real coffey.” He settled for a fifty-cent spearmint infusion.

So imports were expensive, even next to a huge port. It occurred to him that he hadn’t heard or seen a single airplane. At three in the afternoon the sky was a deep, unbroken blue. Had he ever seen a Boston sky without haze?

Nobody in the marketplace was wearing new-looking clothes. Maybe people didn’t dress up for going to the market. Maybe there weren’t any new clothes, or they were only for special occasions. Most of the women were dressed modestly, like Ruth, though some teenaged girls wore jeans or short skirts, startlingly seductive. That might be cultural; a sixteen-year-old was by definition a child, and so couldn’t be an object of desire.

Other men didn’t stare when they walked by. It would be prudent to follow that example.

He still had more than a mile to go, and he wanted to get to MIT well before offices closed. So rather than tarry for a second cup, he shouldered the bag and continued down the street. Where he saw a sign that stopped him in his tracks:

MASS. INST. OF THEOSOPHY, ONE MILE. It was over the MIT dome logo. What was theosophy? Had it existed in his time? He needed to Google.

“You need help, mister?” It was one of the gorgeous teenaged girls. He realized he was standing staring at the sign, and probably looked lost.

“What … uh, what’s theosophy?”

“It’s science,” she said with careful emphasis. “The science of God. Are you a pilgrim?”

“No, I guess not. Just a traveler.”

She opened her mouth to say something, then just nodded. “Good journey, then. God b’with you.” She bounced away, running to catch up with another girl.

The science of God. He’d better study that book.

Even more than that, he needed a history book. Something huge had happened. How long ago? Was it one thing, like a cataclysm, or was it a slow evolution?

The Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy? What did they do there? He would never fit in. Matthew Fuller, professor of atheism. You will be amused by his quaint theosophy.

Or maybe they still did do science and engineering, but had to make it appear closer to religion, for some social reason. Like this Second Coming.

Soon he was walking among tall buildings that in his day had been more or less independent research establishments associated with the Institute. People like Professor Marsh would often split their time, teaching at MIT a few days a week while maintaining lab space down the street at Biotech or Allied Chemical. MIT’s charter had forbidden some kinds of work, like weapons research, but it couldn’t control what happened slightly off campus.

Those tall, proud buildings were tenements now, with clothes flapping on lines, kids playing in the dignified court-yards. Scrawny vegetable gardens where there used to be elaborate flower beds and fantastic topiary.

But the fact that people could grow vegetables out in the open and not have their crops pilfered demonstrated a reassuring degree of social order. Along with the absence of actual starvation.

No telling where MIT’s administration would be nowadays. Building One would have enough natural light, assuming no electricity, so maybe it would still be there. He angled across campus toward the Infinite Corridor.

He wasn’t sure of the history behind it, but the oldest buildings in the Infinite Corridor dated back to 1916. By the middle of the twentieth century they comprised a linked chain of consistent design that shared a corridor about a quarter-kilometer long—not quite infinite, but a hike. It was precisely straight; twice a year students could prop the doors open and the setting sun would send a beam down 850 feet of suddenly not-dingy corridor.

Maybe they still did that, but sacrificed virgins. They used to joke that that was one thing you couldn’t do at MIT, for lack of raw material. That might have changed. Depending on the theosophical attitude toward sex.

The campus wasn’t crowded, but it wouldn’t have been in August back in his time, either. The classrooms had been individually air-conditioned, to keep bills down, and the halls and unused rooms were ovens when it got into the nineties. It was close to that now. He walked up the stairs to the Infinite Corridor door and braced for a wall of heat.

It was dim and stuffy at this end, offices with closed doors. Plenty of light farther down, where there were classrooms with corridor windows and the dome’s skylight. It felt odd, walking down these halls, now yellowing whitewash instead of Institute Green, the woodwork centuries older, with amateur-looking repairs. Broken windows patched with plywood squares that didn’t look new.

The few students walked slowly and quietly, which was beyond odd. With the gloom at the periphery and overhead, and a whiff of mildew rather than the persistent subliminal tang of chemicals and machines, the place had the air of a monastery. Which it might now be.

In the rotunda windows, stained-glass panels that identified the Stations of the Cross, whatever that meant. On inspection, it was obvious that the windows had been moved here from some other source, probably a church. The panels were too small for their spaces and had to be framed in plywood, painted flat black for contrast.

Matt had noticed one improvement over the world of his last materialization, 2074, in that facial scarring was no longer the height of fashion. But it wasn’t completely gone; he’d seen a few scarred people walking the corridor, mostly older men. A few of the women had faint scar lines on their cheeks.

In fact, within the Infinite Corridor you could almost generalize that the older a man looked, the more scarred his face would be, and the scars weren’t particularly artistic. Parallel gouges on the cheeks and foreheads. Perhaps it was a fad that had recently petered out, possibly one with religious significance, and possibly more than meets the eye. God knew (presumably) what was under their robes.

Room 101 was General Administration, but the door was closed and locked. Of course; it was Sunday.

Beside the door was a handwritten list of curriculum changes for the Bachelor of Divinity degree. You now had to take Signs and Wonders 101 and 102 (instead of just Signs and Wonders 10) and Advanced Christian Ethics 111 and 112 simultaneously with two iterations of Preaching Workshop. Instead of Life Transformation, freshmen who could demonstrate their qualifications could opt for Interpretive Glossolalia.

A large man with one scar straight across his forehead came up. His cassock was blue and belted and he carried a heavy staff. He didn’t need a badge or a gun.

“You have business here, sir?”

“No, sir. I was just looking around.”

“The office will open tomorrow about ten. Until then, people who are not students or faculty ought not to be here.”

Matt didn’t protest that he was faculty, a genuine fake full professor. Instead, he meekly thanked the man and went out the front way.

It was still the impressive, sweeping colonnade, with marble steps down to the street. The steps were extremely rounded, worn down from millions of feet hurrying or trudging to class.

He had to find a place to stay and something to eat. And a bath and change of clothes; he was starting to smell like someone who had worn the same thing for a couple of centuries.

At the base of the stairs, next to what used to be a bus stop, a woman was selling clothes. A table displayed neat stacks of old shirts and trousers, and there was a rack of black academic robes, some less shabby than others.

He started looking through those, protective coloration.

“You’ll need an MIT ID to buy a robe,” she warned.

“Oh. Thank you.” He had one, of course, but the date on it might raise an eyebrow. He picked out a pair of sturdy jeans and a gray tee shirt with an MIT logo. That apparently didn’t require an ID.

It came to twenty-one dollars. She made change from an open box of bills and coins. No credit-card reader.

“I’m looking for a place to stay,” he said. “Not too expensive. ”

“You’re in the wrong place for that. You might get a room for fifty or sixty dollars up in Central Square. Magazine Street. Up Mass Ave a half mile or so.”

“Thanks. I’ll go check it.” In his time that had been a kind of artsy neighborhood. High crime rate but “interesting, ” full of transients and foreigners. He was both now.

He started up Mass Ave, and the smell of cooking stopped him in the second block. At an outdoor table he got a bowl of beans and potatoes cooked with onions and garlic, washed down with cool, thin barley wine, for five bucks. While he ate, a disheveled woman with one blind eye plucked a harp and sang. The last piece was a haunting blues, a vaguely religious song about unrequited love. He put a quarter in her cup as he left.

Most of the storefronts along Mass Ave were open, people selling pills, stationery, furniture, rugs. A large bookstore had textbooks of a general nature as well as religious texts. He leafed through a few mathematics ones and, unsurprisingly, they all started out with an inspirational chapter before getting down to geometry or calculus. But it was reassuring that students of theosophy still had to put up with the basics.

There were no physics textbooks, though. The light from the skylight was growing dim before he found things like Newtonian physics covered in the metaphysics section.

Thermophysics and basic electricity and magnetism. But no obvious treatments of relativity or quantum mechanics. Let alone chronophysics.

He’d have to come back later. He bought a text, Metaphysics and the Natural World, and headed on up to Magazine Street.

Dusk was closing in when he found a place with a card saying ROOMS AND BATH in the window. An old lady who smelled rancid took $40 and gave him a wooden coin that would pay for a bath once the sun came up. For an extra dollarhe got a candle with two matches, an admonition not to burn the place down, and directions to the outhouse.

The third-floor room was small, with just a bed, table, and chair. Moonlight came through a high window. He blew out the candle and sank gratefully into the soft bed.