The Accidental Time Machine

13

Martha walked him to Dean Eagan’s office the next morning, wearing the usual shapeless robe. His memory and imagination supplied the shape underneath it, though, and he found it hard to concentrate on the meeting with the dean.

He felt scruffy, too, having washed up with a cloth and cold water, not shaving. He was not going to try the straight razor just before an important meeting.

If he let his beard grow out, he would be the only professor on campus so adorned. “Why doesn’t anyone wear a beard?” he asked Martha.

She touched the scar on her cheek. “Nobody could tell your rank.”

“Maybe I could get away with it. Not having any real rank other than ‘professor from the past.’ ”

She reached up demurely and rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Maybe. It looks nice.”

When they stepped into the anteroom of the dean’s office, he smelled coffee for the first time since he’d left the past. He tried not to salivate.

Martha took a seat there, and the dean’s secretary, a beautiful woman with long black hair and no mark of academic rank, escorted him in.

It was a corner office, flooded with light. The walls that weren’t windows were crowded with paintings, some religious, but mostly portraits of deans, ending with Dean Eagan. Not a book in sight.

The dean was an old man, but vigorous. He came around the desk with a sure stride, helped slightly by an ebony cane, and shook Matt’s hand. When they sat down, the secretary brought over a tray with an elegant silver coffee service and delicate porcelain cups. The sugar was in irregular brown lumps, and the cream was thick and real.

She left after pouring the coffee, and the dean studied Matt for an uncomfortable moment. His eyes sparkled with intelligence.

“Matthew … Fuller. Is there a foolproof way for you to convince me that you are what you say you are?”

“A traveler from the past.”

He nodded. “From this Institute, when it was … before Theosophy.”

Matt clumsily sorted through his robe to the jeans underneath, and pulled out his wallet. His MIT ID was five years old, but it did still resemble him. And it was three-dimensional, a white-light hologram.

The dean looked at it and tried to stick his finger into the holo. He looked on the back, shook it, tapped it on his desk, then handed it back. “These were common then?”

“Every student and employee had one.” Matt had three, in fact, with different names, which he had done just to prove he could hack the system. “I was just a graduate assistant. ” The dean’s eyebrows went up. “It meant something different then, a kind of apprenticeship. I think like scholars, now.”

He took a sip of coffee and tried not to make a face. It was acrid and flat.

“All the way from Georgia,” the dean said. Matt decided to hold out for Colombian.

“So how did you do this, traveling through time?”

“There was a machine,” he said, not lying, “in the Green Building. That used to be near where the dining areas are now.”

“They did natural philosophy there?”

“Yes, physics. I used to work there, in the Center for Theoretical Physics.”

“Before Theosophy.”

“The term didn’t exist then. To the best of my knowledge. ”

“To teach here, though, you can learn Theosophy. It’s not as if you weren’t a Christian—a Methodist, I believe?—so you’re halfway there.”

“That’s right,” he said slowly. They’d talked to Moses. “I can learn quickly. My graduate assistant, Martha, said I wouldn’t be teaching until next year.”

He nodded, a faraway look in his eyes. “What was it like, traveling through time? Did you see the future going by?”

“I wish I had. It was all just a gray blur, which seemed to last only a minute or so.”

“You were in a car?”

“That seemed sensible. We didn’t know where I might end up.”

“We sent a team out to Arlington, to tow it in.” It took a moment for the meaning of “team” to sink in. Horses. “Do you think you could get it to work?”

“I don’t know. Can you generate electricity and store it in a fuel cell?”

“You’ll have to ask the people in mechanical studies. I’ve seen them make sparks with electricity that they carried in a box.”

“That would be a start.” He choked down some more coffee to be polite. “If it’s something like a chemical battery,in theory it could work.” Though it might take months to get enough charge to go a few miles, he wouldn’t mind having a getaway vehicle that was also a Faraday cage.

“Can you travel back? Go back to the … earlier MIT?”

“Some say yes, and some say no. If I were back in my own time, maybe I could build a machine that went the other direction. People were working on it when I left. But you can see the logical problem in going backward.”

The dean’s brow furrowed. “You would meet yourself? Be in two places at the same time?”

“That’s one manifestation of it. But the larger philosophical problem is that it blows apart cause and effect. You could use the time machine to go back and murder the person who invented the time machine.”

“But … that would be a sin.”

“I don’t mean you would actually do it.”

“No, of course. Theoretical possibility.” He laughed. “Sorry. I used to be a Father. So you would be using the machine to make the machine not exist in the first place.”

“Exactly.”

“But then …” He rubbed his chin and concentrated. “There doesn’t have to be a paradox. Time just starts over, and goes on as if the machine had never existed. Assuming the time traveler would have to disappear once his time machine stopped existing.”

Pretty damned good. “That’s right, sir. And the ‘loop,’ as we call it, of time and space when and where the machine existed—that loop itself ceases to exist.”

“So where does it go?”

Matt shrugged. “Limbo? Nobody can say.”

“Interesting.” He poured himself some more coffee, and Matt declined a refill. “How could one tell … how can you tell that you aren’t in one of those closed-off loops? Suppose you do invent a reverse time machine, and you go back and smash the machine that sent you here. The fact that you obviously exist—does that mean you didn’t do it? Aren’t going to do it? If you were in one of those closed-off loops, doomed to Limbo, how could you tell?”

“Well, you could jump forward again, and”—a thread of ice water down his spine—“you’d wind up in a future where your time machine had never been invented.”

Dean Eagan put his fingers together in a steeple and smiled. “Like this one.”

After the interview, Matt went for a walk to clear his head. Could he be in a Gödelian strange loop? It wouldn’t have to be he himself who went back and destroyed the time machine. Anyone capable of traveling into the past could do it, and deposit him in this odd future. A future where he was an anomaly, because the time machine had never been invented and Professor Marsh never stole the Nobel Prize from him.

But thinking about interference from the future made him wonder about the machine’s infuriating singularity. Thousands of copies had been made, and none of them worked; in essence, none of them had the vital, untraceable mistake that turned a graviton/photon calibrator into a time machine.

What if it hadn’t been anything Matt did? What if somebody from the future had come back and modified the machine, so as to make his own present possible? And then someone else from his present—or future—came back and destroyed the machine, because his own history required that it not exist? There could be an infinity of closed strange loops like this one.

Or the straightforward explanation could be true. Occam’s Razor. There was a conservative Christian revolution, and when they got into power, they systematically destroyed history in order to rewrite it. The Chinese had done that in ancient times, he remembered from an undergraduate history class—they defeated the kingdom that would become Vietnam in a war, and made the possession of historical documents a crime punishable by death.

But those were ancient times, before universal literacy and printing made books ubiquitous. Somewhere there had to be an old book stashed away, overlooked by the Angels.

He had walked over Longfellow Bridge, which used to carry the Red Line into Boston. At the end of the bridge, he carefully made his way down a rusting spiral stairway to Charles Street.

This is where he had planned to start looking for a buyer for his rare letters from García Márquez and Lincoln. It used to be a street full of antique stores, a couple of them specializing in old documents. Would that commerce have gone underground when history was abolished and rewritten? Maybe the Angels would have gone after them first. The people with actual evidence.

There were more open shops and markets here than he’d seen in the suburbs. More fresh produce, though Arlington and Somerville were closer to the farms. They must get better prices in town, or maybe the city subsidizes them.

The place where he’d bought the Lincoln note to Grant was long closed and boarded up. On the next block, the shop that had sold him the García Márquez letter was still an antique shop, but only in that everything in it was old. It was more like a Salvation Army or Goodwill store in his time—very-used stuff being sold to people who would use it some more.

There was a dusty plastic bookcase with two shelves of Bibles and hymnals and a yellowed old booklet about Boston Baked Beans. There was no date on it, but it might have been pre-S.C.

In his time such a store would have been full of old questionable appliances—the question being, “If this still works, why is it here?”—but the main motif in this one was cast-off clothing, hanging on racks or neatly folded in stacks, according to size. Most of it was pretty threadbare, but he was tempted, since he had only one change of clothes. In this warm weather, he should emulate his graduate assistant and wear the robe with nothing underneath. He was contemplating that memory when a middle-aged male clerk came up, tubby and sweating.

“May I be of service, Professor? I do have an assortment of robes in the back, though none are as fine as yours.”

He hadn’t thought anything of it, but the robe Father Hogarty had bestowed on him was new. How rare was that now?

“Actually, I’m looking for scholarly materials, old things with writing in them.”

He drew back. “Not forbidden books.”

“No, of course not. I mean things like old letters. Written before Christ appeared.”

He scratched his head. “I do have a box of old letters, but they’re probably not that old. I’ll bring them up to the light.”

Matt looked through the coats, thinking of the winter ahead, but of course MIT might provide. He had an appointment tomorrow with the bursar, who would evidently haggle with him over terms of compensation, which took food and shelter into account, so possibly clothing as well. I’ll trade you two Saturdays of one-on-one physics tutoring for long underwear and a winter coat.

The clerk came huffing back with a microwave oven full of loose paper. So some old appliances were still of use.

He cleared off part of a shirt table and began laying out the letters. They seemed all to be post-Second Coming, formal notes of congratulation or condolence. The handwriting was mostly childish script or block printing, not surprising if paper had been a luxury for generations. The wording of the notes was formal and unimaginative, probably copied from an Emily Post-type guide.

Matt looked at about a hundred of them, and there was nothing really interesting. His feet were getting tired, standing. He stacked the letters all back in the microwave and clicked the door shut.

The clerk came up to him with a large padded plastiglass envelope held to his chest. “I do have a curiosity you might want to look at. A holy relic.” He opened the envelope and carefully worked out what looked like an ordinary Bible, and handed it carefully to Matt. “Signed by Jesus Himself.”

“Really.” He opened it, and on the front page was a dark “X,” deeply indented, as if someone had leaned into a ballpoint pen, with JESUS HIS MARK in parentheses.

Matt didn’t know quite how to react. “How much would this be worth, do you think?” he asked the clerk.

“Oh, at least five hundred dollars. I’m not sure I would sell it, though. It makes me feel good just to have it here, and I think it brings luck.”

“Selling it might be unlucky,” Matt said, handing it back. “But couldn’t anybody do this? How do you know it’s authentic?”

“Oh, my father was there when Jesus signed it. Down in Washington.”

That was interesting. Matt’s stomach growled audibly. “Thank you for showing it to me. I’ll be back later, probably buy some winter clothes.”

“God bless.”

Matt nodded gravely. Got to find a ballpoint pen somewhere.

Aromas from the food vendors were tempting, but Martha had told him that a tray would be delivered to his office unless he asked otherwise, so he climbed up the rusty stairs and hurried back onto campus, an appetite-building half hour. This time it was bread and a sausage and a fresh cucumber, all welcome. He wrote a note asking for salt and pepper.

He put the tray and note outside the door and sat down with the natural philosophy book and a piece of paper, and started a rough outline of a physics course that stopped short of special relativity. It was frustrating, but he did map out a thirteen-week schedule. He would never be able to fake the introductory bit about how the workings of nature reflect the handiwork of God, but he could probably ask one of the Fathers to step in for that part. Split the day’s salary with you?

At 3:30 he went back to Building 1 for his appointment with the bursar, a fat little man with a scowl and a squint and the improbable name Father Gouger. He said that in addition to room and board, Matt would be given an allowance for clothing and books. Paper and ink and pen points had to be ordered in advance from Supply. Above that, he’d be paid fifty dollars for every class he taught. The price of two and a half cups of “real coffey.” A good thing he was shaking the habit, and the coffee was lousy, anyhow.

MIT offered him a hundred dollars a week stipend while he wasn’t teaching. Not unreasonable, Matt thought, since all his basic needs were taken care of, but on general principles he asked for two hundred, and eventually settled on $127.50.

To his surprise, Gouger counted out that amount and handed it to him, saying henceforth it would be delivered to his office with the noon meal every Monday.

He went out onto Mass Ave and took his newfound fortune to the nearest tavern, which had a faded sign that identified it as the Brain Drain. He got a mug of beer and a small glass of spirits and retreated to the darkest corner, away from four young men arguing over free will and destiny.

His own destiny was unsure and complex in a way the boys wouldn’t be able to understand. He knew that on 2 February 2058, someone had appeared from somewhere to set him free—free enough to go to 2059 for a second or two, then zip to 2074 to celebrate Professor Marsh’s genius.

But where was that benefactor now? Matt might be caught in a strange closed loop of space-time that contacted another strange closed loop at the moment he stole the cab—and that might be two other strange closed loops away from the one where the shadowy benefactor showed up with the million-dollar check.

There was a jar of pickled eggs on the bar. Maybe that was the model. Each egg was a closed three-dimensional solid touching other closed three-dimensional solids, unaware that it was floating in a larger universe of vinegar. Unaware of the bartender with his fork, ready to change any egg’s destiny.

The liquor had an astringent green-apple taste, not unpleasant. The beer was even somewhat cool, having come up from the basement.

But he should be thinking, not drinking. He moved the shot glass a symbolic foot away.

One thing linking this egg with the one he’d come from was the fact that the library had scanned him and identified him as a full professor. A 177-year-old personnel record? Well, he’d neither quit nor died. Maybe there was no cell on the spreadsheet for “fired because he stole a taxi and escaped into the future.”

There was a larger question about causality; about how he should act. Assume that it had been he who came back with the bail money. Since that had already happened— arguably, he couldn’t be sitting in this bar if it hadn’t happened—then it was going to happen no matter what he chose to do in the here and now.

That was A. Here was B: There was no way he was going to invent a time machine into the past with the resources of the Massachusetts Institute of Theosophy.

Therefore C: He had to be jumping into the future at least one more time, to a place and time where such a machine could be built.

Built by him? He hadn’t really built the one he was using now.

So somebody else would do the actual inventing—and maybe do the rescuing as well. Whatever, it wasn’t likely that he was going to stay here and make a career in theosophy. So it would be wise not to stray too far from the machine and keep an eye out for large metal containers. There weren’t a lot of cars and Dumpsters around.

Dean Eagan had said a team was bringing in the taxi. Better find out where it was going to be parked. Carry the time machine with him all the time? That could be awkward.

Another possibility was not exactly honest. He could follow his late, unlamented father’s motto: “Shut up and play the cards you’re dealt.” He could settle in here, teaching natural philosophy and doing research—and he could “discover” special and general relativity. Quantum mechanics.

And maybe get burned at the stake. It would be smart to tread carefully.

He sipped the applejack and followed that train of thought a little distance. To be honest, it was unlikely that he was ever going to make a significant breakthrough in the direction of his research back at the real MIT. The gravity-wave stuff looked like a dead end. Here, he had a chance to reinvent physics and perhaps give these people a chance to rediscover what they’d lost.

But the lesson of Giordano Bruno was hard to ignore. He’d tried to teach medieval Europe that their small Catholic God was inadequate in the face of the majesty of the actual universe. Matt didn’t know much about him, but remembered an image from a cube biopic he’d seen as a teenage protoscientist: Bruno dragged up from the Inquisitors’ dungeon and tied to the stake by chest and legs with rough rope, his arms free, over a pile of dry brambles and sticks. They brought the torch forward, and the priest presented him with a crucifix. He knocked it away scornfully and watched with a stony, heroic expression as they put the torch to the pile.

Matt didn’t think he was quite up to that. He moved his drinks up to the bar and bought one of the eggs and nibbled on it thoughtfully. He resisted the temptation to have another beer, and walked through the cooling afternoon sun back to his cottage.

He opened the strongbox and considered his worldly possessions. If he were to start carrying the time machine around with him, it would be in the expectation of having to use it with little or no warning. What else should he carry, planning to disappear suddenly into the future?

The gun. But no need for the whole box of ammunition; just the six cartridges that it carried fully loaded. It was just a noisemaker to him. He couldn’t imagine a scenario where he would shoot all six bullets and then have time to reload, and not be killed during the pause.

The money, of course, and the two rare documents. They might still be worthless 2094 years from now, or they might be priceless.

But the notebook with its store of pornography was questionable. In some futures it might also be a priceless asset. In others, presumably like here, it might be a serious crime to possess one.

Or maybe not like here. The attitude toward nudity was evidently relaxed, and to his knowledge there was nothing in the Bible about pornography. Thou shalt not look at graven images of professional sex workers in improbable geometries?

Besides, it would be hard to turn on the thing accidentally, especially in a culture almost innocent of modern machinery. It was childproof, which also meant “ignorant-adult-proof. ”

He put it all in the black leather bag and hefted it, less than ten pounds. Other professors didn’t carry their own bags, perhaps, but he was the man from the past, and ought to be allowed an eccentricity or two. For legitimacy, he put the New Testament Bible and the natural philosophy text in there, along with a pencil and several sheets of paper, folded over and slipped into the Bible.

Four rapid knocks on the door. “Come in?”

It was Martha, out of breath from running. “Professor! I just got word from Father Hogarty! You’re going to see Jesus! ”

“See … Jesus?”

“Right now—ten minutes from now!” She actually grabbed his arm and pulled. “Faculty chapel!”

He started to pick up the bag, but she snatched it away from him. “I’ll take that. Let’s go!”

When Jesus calls, Matt reflected, you might as well pick up the phone. “Okay. Lead on.”