Joe Haldeman - The Accidental Time Machine

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

Sung had said something. “Pardon me?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sung headed for the men’s room.

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, I’ll be careful.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.