The Accidental Time Machine

20

La’s amplified voice woke them. “We’re approaching the Moon. Better come strap in.”

The Moon loomed ahead, looking curiously “wrong,” like Earth viewed through a distorting lens. Matt’s science knowledge sorted most of it out: The horizon was too close; the sky looked odd because the air was so dry, and the atmospheric gradient was less steep, which also explained the absence of large cloud masses. There were perfectly round lakes everywhere, craters filled with water, but no large seas.

“It’s funny,” he said to La. “If you took an old map of the Moon and distributed water evenly around it, there would be oceans. At least as much sea surface as land.”

“It must be artificially maintained,” La said. “They keep the water in small lakes because there’s not enough to fill an ocean bed. Oceanus Procellarum and Mare Imbrium would make huge mud puddles. Maybe quicksand. Then dry out.”

“It’s still beautiful,” Martha said. Velvet green, ochre desert, pure white snowcap. The mountaintops a sparkling chain of frost.

Highly magnified pictures of the surface appeared and faded on the screen. “No sign of human habitation,” La said. “Or talking bears or flocks of carnivorous lizards. But the atmosphere is breathable, like a high mountain on Earth. There could be surprises. Better be armed away from the ship.”

Matt thought about what the Jesus apparition had said. If La, rather than the Moon, had a surprise in store for him, his old pistol and a few rounds of ammunition weren’t going to do much.

Landing with atmospheric braking took longer than for Earth, and wasn’t as violent. Out of curiosity, La took them to the last place she had visited on the Moon, Aitken City, but there weren’t even any ruins left after so long, just grassland and a wide lake.

“They were making plans for that back in the twenty-first, ” Matt said. “Did they build underground?”

“They did at first. By the time I got there, they had a force-field dome over everything, so radiation wasn’t a problem.

“Not that I was ‘there’ in the sense that you would be. I’d given up my body long before.” They eased down by the shore of the lake. “Over a quarter of a million years, and it seems like yesterday.” Matt couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

Their ears popped as the ramp went down. “Why don’t you lovers take a stroll? You haven’t been actually alone in a long time. Take the pistol, though. I’ll have the ship go into danger mode if it hears a shot.”

“Thanks.” He felt uneasy, leaving the time machine behind. But she wasn’t going to leave them stranded as long as she needed his thumb … which gave him a macabre thought he didn’t want to linger on. In his home time, people had been murdered for their door-opening thumbs.

They walked down the ramp, bouncing in the lunar gravity. It was cold, barely freezing. The grass crunched under their feet.

“I wonder why it isn’t colder,” Martha said. “It looked like we were pretty close to that ice cap.”

“I think it’s the smallness of the world, along with the slow rotation, mild weather. Long time since I studied it.”

They walked to the edge of the water. Matt followed an ancient impulse and picked up a smooth rock and spun it out over the water’s surface. It went a long way between skips, almost to the horizon.

“Are we far enough away to talk?”

“I don’t know. That she suggested we leave makes me suspicious. But yeah. What do you think?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“You’re clear on the Jesus part?”

“That was just to get my attention?”

“And confidence. Some of those guys look pretty strange.”

“Demonic. Why do you think they only appear in dreams?”

“Well, La can’t read our thoughts,” he said.

“She can’t invade our dreams, either. So they’re more powerful than her, that way.”

“But they can’t physically intercede. I think that’s because they’re still in our future. Just my guess. They can only send information back, not solid matter.”

There was a long pause, just the quiet lapping of the water. “Does that mean … we’re never going back? It really is impossible?”

He threw out another stone. It sank after one skip, “I’m trying to recall the exact wording.”

“They said they had to catch up with us. That doesn’t sound like they’re in our future. Could it mean distance?”

“I don’t know. But distance is our problem. After a few more jumps, we’ll be too far from Earth to return in one lifetime.”

Staring into the water, she shook her head sadly. “We’d never want to go back there, anyhow.”

She stood closer to him, her shoulder touching his arm. He put his arm around her, and it was a good thing it was his left.

Where the stone had sunk, a huge creature surged out of the water, bigger than a car, all claws and wriggling feelers. A stink of rotten vegetation.

Matt fired at it twice; the second bullet trilled off in a ricochet. Then he remembered what La had said, and pulled Martha to the ground.

When the pressor beam went over them, it felt like a hot wind. It parted the water and hit the creature with explosive force, flipping it over, exposing dozens of wriggling legs.

“Come back,” La’s amplified voice shouted. They had figured that out, and were back on their feet, running hard.

They were both gasping huge, ragged breaths by the time they collapsed on the ramp. It lifted them up, not too slowly.

La was standing, looking out over the water. “That thing was mechanical,” she said. “Maybe a defensive robot.”

“Maybe a fun amusement-park thing,” Matt said, panting. “God knows what amused the people back then. Up then. Whatever.”

“It might be a hundred thousand years old,” La said, “Two hundred thousand. Can you imagine a self-repairing machine lasting for so long?”

“Maybe it’s not self-repairing,” Matt said. “We just haven’t met the people who maintain it.”

“They’re extremely well hidden. What are they hiding for?”

“From,” Martha said quietly. “What are they hiding from, that they need a monster like that?”

“An excellent point. Perhaps we should move along.”

“We should be safe in here,” Matt said, stalling. “We ought to wait and see what happens.”

La gave him an inscrutable look. “Matt, this science could be as far ahead of mine as mine is from primates learning to use sticks. I’m not sure we care to test what they can do.”

He looked at Martha and nodded slowly. “Can’t fight the logic of that. Except that futuristic science is exactly what we’re looking for. Maybe they have mastered backward time travel, and that’s where they all are. Vacationing back in the good old days.”

“This is not a time to joke. We should push the button and get out of here.”

“We could get out of the immediate vicinity by taking off and going into orbit.”

“That would not get us out of danger. Even in my time, it would be trivially easy to knock this thing out of orbit.”

Matt had run out of counterarguments. “You’re right, of course. Let’s strap in, Martha.”

“How far are we going this time?”

“A couple of hundred thousand miles. From Earth, that would have been cislunar space, closer than the Moon. And 3.5 million years.”

“Earth will be a lot different?”

“Maybe better.” He waited for the click of her harness. “Let’s go see.”

Out of the gray swirl, the man who had been Jesus. He was dressed in something like medieval mail. The others were behind him, similarly attired. “Come to Earth as quickly as possible. We’ll find you.”

When the gray faded, they reappeared in a spot apparently closer to the Earth than the Moon. At least the Earth was larger than Matt remembered seeing it in pictures from the lunar surface. They both unhooked and floated over toward the screen.

“There’s a little bit of green.” Martha pointed.

“Let’s go down and check it out.”

“It hardly seems worth the trouble.” La peered at the mostly gray globe. “Just push the button again.”

“We have to go to Earth!”

La looked at Martha in an impatient way. “All right.” She gestured. “Get ready for acceleration.”

When Matt and Martha were strapped in, La turned to look their way and nodded.

Handcuff-style shackles snapped shut over their wrists.

“You have to go? Did your ghostly dream friends tell you that?”

“Shit,” Matt said.

“It’s true that I don’t have any unusual powers over you when you’re outside the ship. But a directional microphone isn’t exactly magic.

“So Jesus and some demons are going to ‘catch up with you.’ Do they claim to have a backward time machine?”

“They just said they could help us.”

“That’s a pity. That really is. Because, of course, the time machine doesn’t work if I push the button via pressor field.”

“I’ll go with you,” Matt said. “Just land long enough for them to find her.”

“No!” Martha said.

“For some reason, I doubt your sincerity. Let me show you what I can do with a pressor field.”

Matt’s breath flew out of his lungs. It was as if there were hundreds of pounds of pressure on his chest. He could see the rictus of pain on Martha’s face. Just as he was about to black out, the pressure was suddenly gone. He heaved forward, coughing, and the right shackle opened.

“She’ll be dead soon. Push the button.”

If La had waited one more second before shackling them, Matt would have been helpless. When he buckled the harness, he’d realized the pistol was still in its special pocket, pressing painfully against his ribs, and he had been about to move it to the pants pocket.

Now, bent over, La couldn’t see him slip the pistol out. He slammed the nose of it up against the time machine box. “Hair trigger!” he gasped. “Don’t even think of it.”

“Oh. So you’ll let her die?”

“If she dies, I’ll blow this thing to pieces. In fact, I’ll do it on the count of three seconds anyhow. Two … one …”

“All right.” Martha started wheezing and coughing. “That was reasonably intelligent.”

“Take us to Earth right now. If I start to fall asleep—”

“You’ll pull the trigger, sure. I’ve seen a thousand times more movies than you have.” There was a slight surge of acceleration. “I suppose we should go back to that obelisk. Or whatever’s there after 3.5 million years.”

“Maybe they can help you. Show you how to use the time machine without me.”

“Sure. It is the future, and he is Jesus. Maybe Santa Claus is with him. Just stay awake for the next ninety-two minutes.”

“Santa Claus?” Martha said.

The obelisk was still there, shining in the low winter sun, but it was tilted about ten degrees out of true. “Earth was supposed to go through a comet storm,” La said, “about a half million years ago, if our predictions were accurate. It’s a wonder the thing’s still standing.”

The ground was a jumble of broken metal and rock. La landed gingerly and put the ramp down. “Here you are. My part of the bargain.”

“No. You go down first.”

“Matthew, I’m an electronically generated image. What difference does it make whether I’m up here or down there?”

“I’m not sure. But it’s like you’re a component of the ship. When you’re outside, you have less power.”

“That’s very scientific.”

“Like a machine that only works if one person pushes the button.” He kept the pistol where it was and made a sideways gesture with his head.

La shrugged and walked down the ramp.

Matt worried the time machine out of its bracket and freed the alligator clip. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve been better.” Martha touched her breasts gently. “That was … you weren’t going to …”

“I wouldn’t, no. Let’s go down and see what happens.” Matt kept the pistol trained on the machine as they walked down the ramp. The air was cold but still, and smelled clean.

La was standing there with her arms crossed, not quite tapping a toe. “So how long will it be before Jesus comes to save you?”

“He wasn’t Jesus last time,” Matt said. “More like Saint George, looking for a dragon.”

“Well, if it’s me, here I am.” She looked over their heads. “And here he is. If I’m not mistaken.”

A shimmering globe half the size of the ship was descending. When it touched the ground, it disappeared like a soap bubble. Six men, or manlike creatures, stood where it had been.

Four of them seemed to be human. The one with the pear-shaped head had scales for skin. The other’s features were not fixed; it had two or more eyes and a recognizable mouth, but they constantly disappeared and reappeared elsewhere.

“Hello, Matthew. Martha.” Their savior still had a Jesus beard, but, like the others, was draped in what looked like mail. “Martha, if you would, please go back into the ship and get a day’s worth of food and water for you both. And anything else you want to take back.” She hurried back up the ramp.

“La. So you want to go all the way up.”

“That’s right. The heat death of the universe.”

“I can do that for you.” He held out his hand. “The machine, Matthew?”

He hesitated. “We won’t need it anymore?”

“Not unless you want to go with La. Believe me, the future doesn’t get any better on Earth. I’ve been there. It’s a closed book.”

Matt couldn’t figure out any way that the man might be betraying them. They were at his mercy anyhow. He handed it over.

“Thank you. You may call me, um, Jesse.” He sat down cross-legged, the machine in his lap. “You couldn’t pronounce my real name.”

His right forefinger became a motorized screwdriver. He undid the eight screws that held the cover on and set it carefully aside, slowly studying the wires that connected the top to the insides.

He gently tugged on a gray box inside the box, and it popped free.

“The virtual graviton generator?” Matt said.

“What else?” He pulled an identical-looking box from a pocket in his tunic. He pressed it home with a sharp click. “Voilà!”

“So what does that do?” La asked.

“Yeah,” Matt said.

Jesse looked at his companions and said something in a language that was mostly whistling. The human ones laughed. The pear creature made a noise like crab claws scuttling on wood. The other one’s mouth disappeared and reappeared.

“Neither of you would understand. You don’t have the math—you don’t have the worldview to understand the math.” He positioned the top cautiously and screwed it down tight. Martha came back with the bag, which was considerably heavier.

Jesse stood with balletic grace and handed the box to La. “Now the button works no matter who touches it.”

“I have only your word for that. How do I know it won’t explode?”

“You don’t,” he said cheerfully. “But you are the only entity here who’s not alive—not in any biological sense— and you’re worried about dying?”

“Dying is not the opposite of existing.”

“I guess you’ll just have to trust me. As these two must.”

She took the box and looked at Matt. “It’s been interesting. ” She walked up the ramp with it, and less than a minute later, the ship disappeared with a faint pop.

“She’s on her way?” Matt said.

Jesse nodded, looking at the space where the ship had been. “I’ve never tried to go so far up. I assume the thing will keep working, but asymptotically.”

“She’ll get closer and closer, but never quite be there?”

“As she must have known. As long as she can still push the button, the show isn’t over. By definition.”

“Why did you help her?” Martha said. “And why are you helping us?”

“With her, it’s just courtesy. People, or nonpeople, get stuck in time. Other time travelers unstick them.

“With you, it’s not so altruistic. If you, Matthew, were to die before going back, this whole bundle of universes would disappear.”

“If I hadn’t discovered the time machine?”

“Well, you didn’t actually ‘discover’ anything, did you? You just used a component that was faulty in a dimension you can’t even sense. Like the family dog accidentally starting the car. Not to be impolite.

“We’ve sent you back before.” He rubbed his brow. “Words like ‘before’ and ‘after’ become inadequate. But we have sent you back to 2058 to bail yourself out, a large number of times. We know that because we’re still here. All of us are your descendants, in a way. If time travel hadn’t started in your time and place, we wouldn’t exist.”

“Even the, um …” He made a helpless gesture. “The aliens?”

Jesse said something in the whistling language. The one with the scales made his crab-claw noise and the other one’s face filled up with eyes. “They’re at least as human as you are.” Martha smiled at that.

“Sorry. Sorry.” The two strange ones bowed. “So do you have a time machine?”

“The six of us are a time machine.” He pulled out the virtual graviton generator. “You have to both be touching this, for calibration. It will send you back to where Matt first pushed the button.

“But there’s something like an uncertainty principle involved. We can send you back to the exact time or the exact place, but not both.”

“Time, then,” Matt said. “We can find our way back to Cambridge.”

“Well, no. Not if you appear a mile under the sea, or inside a mountain. I’d choose place, if I were you.

“You might be only a few seconds off, or you might be years. We have no control over that. Was your lab on the ground floor?”

“It was, yes.”

“If it weren’t, you’d appear on the bottom floor beneath it. If you’re in a future or a past where the lab doesn’t exist, you’ll appear at ground level where it was or will be.”

“What if I meet myself and say, ‘Don’t push that button’? ”

“It won’t happen. You can’t exist, as your former self, in this universe. When we’ve sent you back to 2058, your copy automatically showed up in a time when you were in transit, and left before you reappeared.”

Matthew rubbed his chin. “I can do anything I want? I could reinvent the time machine?”

Jesse paused. “We know that you haven’t. You could try; the dog could start the car again. But it wouldn’t be smart; you’d be well advised not to put yourself in the public eye. You’d look very suspicious if someone investigated your past. If you claimed to be a time traveler, you’d probably be locked up.”

“Even if we appear in the future?”

“Even so. You won’t have existed; there would be no Marsh Effect.”

“At least the bastard won’t win a Nobel Prize.”

“You never know.” He handed the gray box to Matt. “Are you ready?”

Matt looked at Martha. She managed a weak smile and nodded. She touched the box and he folded his other hand over hers. She did the same.

“Good luck,” Jesse said. The others murmured, whistled, and scraped similar sentiments.

There was no interlude of gray. One moment they were in the Antarctic waste, and the next, they were ankle deep in mud. It was a cool fall day. A few hundred yards away, workmen were toiling at the edge of the Charles River, building a seawall.

“Oh, my God,” Matt said. “MIT hasn’t been built yet.”

A policeman in a blue uniform walked toward them, swinging a billy club.

“The more things change,” he said, “the more they stay the same.”