Robert Sawyer: End of an Era

Time travel.

I feel like an idiot typing those two words. I’m afraid anyone who reads them will start looking at me the way I look at poor Fred.

Sure, by now everyone has probably read about the mission in the papers, or seen the preparations on TV. Yeah, it really works. Ching-Mei Huang has demonstrated it enough times. And, yes, it’s incredible, absolutely incredible, that she went from a first discovery of the underlying principle in 2005 to a working time machine by 2013. Don’t ask me how she did it so fast; I don’t have a clue. In fact, sometimes I don’t think Ching-Mei has a clue, either.

But it works.

Or, at least, the first Throwback worked; the automated probe returned with air samples (a little more oxygen than today, no pollution, and, fortunately, no harmful germs), plus about four hours’ worth of pictures, showing lots of foliage and, at one point, a turtle.

But now we’re going to try it with human beings; if this test works, a bigger mission, with everyone from meteorologists to entomologists, will be sent back next year.

But for this attempt, only two people were going back, and one of them was me: Brandon Thackeray, forty-four, a little paunchy, a lot gray, a goddamned civil servant, a museum curator. Yes, I’m also a scientist. Got a Ph.D.—from an American university, to boot—and I suppose it makes sense that it would be a scientist who’d go gallivanting across time. But I’m not an adventurer. I’m just a regular guy, with quite enough to deal with, thank you very much, without something like this. An ailing father, a divorce, a mortgage that I might be able to pay off by the beginning of the next geologic era, hay fever. Regular stuff.

But this was far from regular.

We were hanging by a thread.

Okay, it was really a steel cable, about three centimeters thick, but it didn’t give me any more reassurance.

And I wished that damned swaying would stop.

Our time machine had been lifted up by a Sikorsky Sky Crane, and was now hanging a thousand meters above the stark beauty of the Badlands of Alberta. The pounding of the helicopter’s engines thundered in my ears.

I wished that noise would stop, too.

But most of all, I wished Klicks would stop.

Stop being an asshole, that is.

He wasn’t really doing anything. Just lying there in his crash couch, on the other side of the semicircular chamber. But he’s so smug, so goddamned smug. The couch is like a high-tech La-Z-Boy upholstered in black vinyl and mounted on a swivel base. Your feet are lifted up, your spine tips at an angle, and a tubular headrest supports your noggin. Well, Klicks had his legs crossed at the ankle and his arms interlaced behind his head. He looked so bloody calm. I knew he was doing it just to bug me.

I, on the other hand, was gripping the armrests of my crash couch like one of those poor souls who are afraid to fly.

It was about two minutes until the Throwback.

It should work.

But it might not.

In two minutes we could be dead.

And he had his legs crossed .

“Klicks,” I said.

He looked over at me. We were almost exactly the same age, but opposites in a lot of ways. Not that it matters, but I’m white and he’s black—he was born in Jamaica and came to Canada as a boy with his parents. (I always marveled that anyone would leave that climate for this one.) He’s clean-shaven and hasn’t started to gray yet. I’ve got a full beard, have lost about half my hair, and what’s left is about evenly split between gray and brown. He’s taller and broader-shouldered than me, plus, despite having a job that involves as much time at a desk as mine does, he’s somehow avoided middle-age spread.

But most of all, we’re opposites in temperament. He’s so cool, so laid-back, that even when he’s standing he gives the impression of being stretched out somewhere, tropical drink in hand.

Me, I think I’m getting ulcers.

Anyway, he looked in my direction, his face a question. “Yeah?”

I didn’t know what I had intended to say. After a moment, I blurted out, “You really should put on your shoulder straps.”

“What for?” he replied in that too-smooth voice of his. “If the programmed stasis delay works, it won’t matter if I’m standing on my head when they rev up the Huang Effect. And if it doesn’t work…” He shrugged. “Well, man, those straps will slice you like a hard-boiled egg.”

Typical. I sighed and pulled my straps tighter, the thick nylon bands reassuringly solid. I saw him smile, just a bit—but also just enough so that he could be sure that I would see the smile, the patronizing expression.

A crackle of static from the radio speaker fought to be heard above the sounds of the helicopter, then: “Brandy, Miles, are you ready?” It was the precise voice of Ching-Mei Huang herself, measured, monotonal, clicking over the consonants like a series of circuit breakers.

“Ready and waiting,” Klicks said, jaunty.

“Let’s get it over with,” I said.

“Brandy, are you okay?” asked Ching-Mei.

“I’m fine,” I lied, wishing I had a bucket to throw up into. The swaying back and forth was getting to me. “Just do it, will you?”

“As you say,” she replied. “Sixty seconds to Throwback. Good luck—and God protect.” I was sure that little reference to God was for the sake of the network cameras. Ching-Mei was an atheist; she only had faith in empirical data, in experimental results.

I took a deep breath and looked around the small room. His Majesty’s Canadian Timeship Charles Hazelius Sternberg . Great name, eh? We’d had a list of about a dozen paleontologists we could have honored, but old Charlie won out because, in addition to his pioneering fossil hunting in Alberta, he’d actually written a science-fiction story about time travel, published in 1917. The PR people loved that.

Ching-Mei’s voice over the radio speakers: “ Fifty-five. Fifty-four. Fifty-three .”

Anyway, nobody ever calls it His Majesty’s Canadian, Etc . Instead, our timeship is almost universally known as the Sternberger , because to most people it looks like a fat hamburger. To me, though, it looks more like a squat version of the Jupiter 2 , the spaceship from that ridiculous TV series Lost in Space . Just like the Space Family Robinson’s vehicle, the Sternberger was essentially a two-level disk. We even had a little dome on the roof like they did. Ours housed meteorological and astronomical instruments; there was room enough for one person to squeeze into it.

“ Forty-eight. Forty-seven. Forty-six .”

The Sternberger was much smaller than the Jupiter 2 , though—only five meters in diameter. Our lower deck wasn’t designed for people; it was just 150 centimeters thick and consisted mostly of our water tank and part of the garage for our Jeep.

“ Forty-one. Forty. Thirty-nine .”

Our upper deck was divided into two halves, each semicircular in shape. One half contained the habitat. Along its curving outer wall was a kidney-shaped worktable, our radio console, and a compact laboratory unit crammed with geological and biological instruments. The straight back wall, marking the ship’s diameter line, had three doors built into it. Door number one—does anybody remember Monty Hall?—led to a little ladder that angled up into the rooftop instrumentation dome and to a ramp that went down the meter and a half to the outer entrance door. Door number two led to the Jeep’s garage, which took up the height of both decks. Door number three gave access to the washroom stall.

“ Thirty-four. Thirty-three. Thirty-two .”

Mounted against the central wall in the gaps between the doorways were a small stand with an old microwave oven on it, a large food refrigerator, a bank of three equipment lockers swiped from some high school demolition sale, and a small medical refrigerator with a first-aid kit on top. Bolted to the floor were the swivel bases for our two crash couches.