Joe Haldeman - The Accidental Time Machine

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.

Matt was half-awake, lying in a pleasant torpor, when church bells started banging next door. He dressed and went downstairs to a notice that said bath and breakfast would be available after church. On Monday? Not a good sign.

The outhouse was a little more hospitable with daylight filtering in; in the candlelight he’d been sure there were bugs everywhere, just out of sight. Instead of a roll of toilet paper, there were neat squares torn from church newsletters, which made the experience more pleasant than he’d expected. It also bespoke a certain level of civilization, he realized. In primitive cultures there were less sanitary expedients.

He went around front with the idea of going for a walk, but hesitated. There was nobody else in sight. No traffic up on Mass Ave. Maybe everyone was in church at this hour; maybe being anywhere else was illegal.

Back in the parlor, he stood still and listened. No one else up and around. An invitation to snoop.

The house was old, twentieth century or even earlier. It had electrical outlets in the walls, but nothing was plugged into them. Two Bibles, but no other books except a scrap-book of recipes in the kitchen.

The large Bible, fairly new, had a supplement tabbed “Revelations S.C.” and a pictorial section, “The Second Coming Illustrated.” It showed Jesus healing an entire intensive-care ward, Jesus standing in Times Square in front of a mountain of loaves of bread, Jesus in the Oval Office with a presidential-looking white-haired guy, Jesus hovering in midair with a glowing halo over his crown of thorns.

There were two possible explanations. One was that Jesus had returned to Earth in the brown-haired, blue-eyed visage that was familiar to Matt’s youth. The only other explanation was that it was a hoax.

Matt’s natural impulse was to go with the second one and start asking who and why and how. But first …

Was it possible that he had been completely wrong all his adult life? God and Jesus and all were real?

If that were true, then everything else fell apart. The rationalistic universe that he so completely believed in was an elaborate artifice that God maintained for His own reasons. Or some such circular assertion, neither provable nor disprovable. Literally sophomoric—he’d last heard someone seriously present such an argument back in those beery, youthful midnight bull sessions.

Actually, there had been one more recent time, the two well-dressed lads who’d knocked on his door and tried to infect him with enthusiasm for their faith. One of them had earnestly argued that Matt’s rationalism was just one belief system among others, and one that didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain their own unshakable faith, for instance.

But it did, Matt said, as part of abnormal psychology. That was pretty much the end of the conversation. But he could have gone on to point out that rationalism doesn’t require “belief,” only observation. The real, measurable world doesn’t care what you believe.

He looked at the pictures again. A guy levitating with a halo. A pile of bread. An ICU ward full of actors and a president who was going along with the game. No actual miracles necessary.

Did the whole world believe this? He desperately needed to find someone who didn’t. Or a history book— any book that wasn’t a Bible.

The front door clicked, and he guiltily closed the book, then opened it again. The landlady walked into the parlor pulling a brush through her hair.

She nodded at him. “As good as church, I suppose. Won’t put you to sleep like the good rev.” She held the door to the kitchen open. “Bread and coffee.”

The coffee was some burned herb, but the flatbread was crumbly and good, served with butter and a dab of strawberry jam. The landlady showed him the bucket of water steaming on the stove and said there were soap and “cloths” out back.

He lugged the bucket out onto the porch. There was a bathing area, about a square meter of slatted floor with head-high modesty screens on three sides. Another bucket, rinse water, and some gray tatters of towel. A cube of harsh soap that smelled of bacon.

It was good to be somewhat clean, though the soap turned his hair into a fright wig and left him smelling like breakfast. Back in the small room he changed into his new old clothes. He rented the room for another night, and the landlady gave him a padlock so he could leave his things behind in the room’s strongbox while he explored.

What should he leave behind? She probably had another key. It would be inconvenient if she started snooping around and sent the machine into the future. He wiggled at the plastic dome over the RESET button, and it was secure enough that removing it would be an act of deliberate vandalism. The pistol and ammunition were a problem, but maybe it would be wise not to carry them into MIT.

He wound up leaving it all, except his wallet and the taxi driver’s money. The two rare documents could wait until after he’d learned more.

He’d have to learn a lot more before he decided what to do with the porn notebook. Its technology might make it extremely valuable. Its contents might put him away for the rest of his life, which could be short.