Joe Haldeman - The Accidental Time Machine

“Just … something to read. I’m not sure.” The man nodded slowly, not blinking or changing expression.

Silently waiting for input. It was a robot, like the McWaiters in Matt’s world. Ask it for a burger and fries.

“Is there a world history text?”

“Only for scholars. What level of scholarship are you?”

“Full professor,” he said firmly.

“At what institution? I don’t recognize you.”

“I … I’m freelance. I don’t have an institution right now.”

It stared at Matt, perhaps trying to process that idea. “You were at the Admissions Office yesterday, though it was Sunday.”

What to say? “That’s right.”

It didn’t move. “But no one could be in the office. It would be a sin.”

“I wasn’t looking for anybody,” he extemporized. “I was just checking the course changes on the wall.”

It nodded gravely. “I understand.” It turned and walked away silently.

A world where they put scars on robots and give them a large database but low intelligence. Where there wasn’t enough electricity to put lights in a library.

Matt sat down and looked at the history book without reading it. What was the deal here? There was electricity and artificial intelligence for robots. There was an industrial base adequate for mass-producing Bibles and history books with color pictures. But most of the world was living in the nineteenth century, if that.

Worse than that. It was a modern world overlaid with a nineteenth-century costume—this building still had elevators, but no way to make them go up and down. The McRobot was evidence of generally available computing power, but there were no data stations in the MIT library.

Another robot approached, robes and scars but bald. A short female behind it.

Not robots. They moved like people. The man smelled like old sweat. He introduced himself as Father Hogarty.

“You’re a visiting scholar,” he said, and offered Matt a black robe.

“Thank you.” Not knowing what else to do, Matt put it on over his clothes.

“This is your graduate assistant, Martha.” She was nervous and pretty, a blonde in her early twenties. One almost invisible scar on her cheek. “Hello, Dr. Fuller.”

Matt shook her hand. “Hello, Martha.” What the hell was going on? “Are you in physics?”

She looked confused. “I’m a graduate assistant.”

“She’s born again,” the man said. That explained everything.

“You know my name,” Matt said.

The old man nodded. “The library searched you and sent a messenger. He told me that you were the full professor we were waiting for. Even though you have no marks of scholarship.” He touched the scars on his cheeks. He had four prominent ones. “You are in the Data Base.” Matt could hear the capitals. “But your office number is wrong. It says you are in Building 54.”

Matt nodded. “The Green Building.”

“A green building? Where would that be?”

“There’s a bluish green one behind Building 17,” Martha said. “I had Prayer Variations there.”

“It’s not the color. It was named after a guy named Green.” The tallest building on campus, hard to miss. “Maybe it’s gone?”

They looked at each other. “Where would a building go?” Martha said.

“Not like it moved,” Matt said. “It maybe got old and was taken down.”

The old man nodded. “That happens. But how long ago? I would remember.”

Matt took a deep breath and plunged in. “I was born more than two hundred years before the Second Coming. I’m a time traveler who used to be a professor here. Back when it was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

They both flinched, and the woman covered her ears. “Bad word,” the other said.

“You can’t say tech—” They both shrank away. “It used to be the name of this place.”

“This place was evil once.” Hogarty stood up straight and put his hand on the young woman’s shoulder.

“What is a time traveler?” she asked. “We all move through time.”

“But I jump ,” Matt said. “Day before yesterday, I was back in 2074. That was 106 years before the Second Coming.”

Hogarty laughed nervously. “If this is a joke, I don’t understand it.”

“The Nobel Prize for physics in 2072 went to the man who claimed he discovered time travel.”

“A noble prize?” the man said. “Physics?”

“It’s part of metaphysics,” the woman said.

“I know that. How do you get a prize for it, though? What does it have to do with time?”

“It’s all about time,” Matt said, “and space. And energy and mass and quantum states and the weak interaction force. You’re scholars?”

The man touched his scars again. “Of course.”

“Didn’t you ever study any of that?”

“It’s like you’re talking Chinese,” he said. “Quan tong states and interacting forces? What does that have to do with Jesus?”

Matt felt behind him, found a chair, and sat down. “Um … Jesus is part of God?”

“They’re both part of the Trinity,” he said. “They share attributes.”

Matt pressed on. “And God is everything?”

The man said, “In a way,” and the woman said, “Everything good.”

“So there are parts of everything that can be weighed and measured, rather than taken on faith. That’s what I’m a scholar of.”

Hogarty was thinking so hard you could hear the gears grinding. “But that’s for craftsmen and tradespeople. What is scholarly about things you can weigh and measure?”

“It’s because of the times he comes from,” Martha said. “The measurable world was very important to them.” She pursed her lips, then said it: “The T word. That’s what it was about.”

“Be good, Martha,” he warned.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of saying things,” she said. “Words aren’t magic.”

“You don’t know, child.” He appealed to Matthew. “Young people.”

Matt didn’t want to go there. “Why do you think measurable things aren’t scholarly, scholastic, whatever? The real world.”

Hogarty smiled, on comfortable ground. “You’re joking again. That’s the Devil’s big weapon.”

“The illusion that this world is real,” Martha supplied. “But not everybody thinks that way.”

“Martha …”

“God made this world, not the Devil. In six days? The actual world itself isn’t evil.”

“She’s an independent thinker,” the man said, not quite through clenched teeth. “An excellent graduate assistant for you.” Church bells were chiming outside. “Noontime. I have to meditate and break fast. Martha, you will see to the professor’s needs?”

“Of course, Father.”

“Professor, I’ll come by your office Wednesday morning sometime. There will be a faculty meeting in the afternoon. ”

“My office?”

“Martha will find you one. Tomorrow, then.” He left with the haste of someone really looking forward to meditation.

“So … how are you going to find me an office?”

“They gave me a list. But four of them are small. I know the one you want.”

“Okay. So who are ‘they’? How come they knew I’d need an office?”

“The administration. I had a note this morning saying I’d be assigned to you, and to expect you soon. Then Father Hogarty came by and said you were here in the library.”

“But the administration, they knew about me yesterday? ”

She nodded. “Somebody knew you’d need an office. Maybe they knew your building was gone.”

All that from the casual encounter with the guard in Building One? It occurred to Matt that it had probably been a robot, too, and he’d been scanned and identified.

So who knew what around here? He was in a database as a scholar, even though he was last employed 177 years ago.