Joe Haldeman: The Accidental Time Machine

Well, next time.

Of course the phone rang. He peered at the caller ID. His mother. When it stopped ringing, he called her from the bathroom.

“You’re calling from the bathroom again,” she said.

“Something wrong with the cell.” Let’s not tell Mother about the disappearing machine. “Why did you call me?”

“What, you were sleeping?”

“No, I’m up and around. Why’d you call?”

“The storm, silly. Are you doing all right with the storm?”

“Sure.”

“What do you mean, ‘sure’? You got power and water?”

“Yeah, sure.” He went to the little window at the end of the room and pulled the blinds. It was solid gray, snow packed so thick that no light came through.

“Well, we don’t. The power went out right after I got up. Now they’re telling people to boil the water before you drink it.”

He just stared at the window. Snow ten feet deep?

“Matthew? Hello?”

“Just a minute, Mom.” He set the phone down on the rim of the tub and stepped to the front room. He peered through the blinds.

There was snow, all right, but only a couple of feet. The wind was fierce, though, rattling the windowpanes. That was it. The bathroom window looked out over a temporarily vacant lot. Wind blowing from the north had an unobstructed path more than a hundred yards long. So the snow had packed up against the north wall, including the bathroom window.

He picked up the phone. “So what’s the matter there?” his mother said.

“Just checking. It’s not so bad here. Anything I can do?”

“If you had a car .”

“Well.” It had been a graduation gift, and he’d sold it when he moved back to Boston.

“You couldn’t rent one.”

“No. I wouldn’t in this weather, anyhow, Boston drivers. You need something?”

“Candles, milk. A little wine wouldn’t hurt.” She lived in a dry suburb, Arlington. “Some bottled water—how’m I going to boil it? Without the electric?”

“Let me check on the T. If it’s running, I could bring you out some stuff.”

“I don’t want you should—”

“Make a list and I’ll call you back in a couple minutes.” He hung up and calculated. If his extrapolation was right, the machine would reappear just before five. Plenty of time, even with the weather.

He should eat something first. Nothing in the fridge but beer and a desiccated piece of cheddar cheese. He popped his last can of Boston Baked Beans—made in Ohio—and nuked them while he chased down a piece of paper and a pen for a list.

Candles, wine, milk, water. He called and she added bread, peanut butter, and jelly. Red currant if they had it. Some sardines and Dijon mustard—don’t worry, she’d pay. Fish? She’d better.

He poured the beans over a slice of bread that was dry but not moldy and squelched some ketchup over them. He opened another beer and watched the Weather Channel while he ate. The snow should stop by noon. But more tomorrow. A good time to take a long weekend.

He tried not to think about being bundled up with Kara while the snow drifted down. Hot chocolate, giggles. Some giddy exploration of the outer limits of love. Perhaps.

The beans had turned cold. He finished them and dressed in layers and went out to slay the wily groceries.

The combat boots he’d bought in Akron were clumsy but dry, good traction, trudging downhill. The wind had gentled somewhat, and he almost enjoyed the walk. Or maybe he enjoyed not being in the apartment alone.

No candles at the grocery store except little votive ones. He bought her a box of two dozen and a five-liter box of cheap California wine. Get one for himself on the way back. Two jugs of water. Everything but the water went into his backpack. He lumbered off toward the Red Line.

His mother was just two stops down, but more than a mile walk after that. By the time he got there, he was regretting the second gallon of water. Mom could brush her teeth with wine.

She was glad to see him in spite of the fact that he didn’t get any matches to go with the candles. He searched and found some in his father’s old workshop, where Matthew knew he’d sometimes escaped to smoke dope. They sat in the kitchen and had a glass of wine and some chocolate, and he said he had to get back to work, which was true, even though the work was not of an arduous nature.

On the way back he picked up the wine and a couple of days’ groceries, and a cheap camera phone in a blister pack. He could have gone on into Harvard Square to Radio Shack for a little button camera, since he didn’t need a new cell, but it probably would have cost at least as much. And he didn’t want to miss the reappearance.

The wind and snow had started up again when he got off the subway to make his way home. He was shivering by the time he got inside. A glance verified that the machine was still off to wherever it was, so he went straight into the kitchen and started water for coffee and to warm his hands.

A little more than an hour to go, as he sat down on the couch with his coffee. He picked up his notebook and clicked on the calculator, and made a short list:

(1.26 sec) (extrapolating back)

(15)

(176)

2073 s.

24,461 = 6h 48m

3.34 days

39.54 d.

465 d.

5493 d. = 15 y.

So he had to plan. The next time he pushed the button— if the simple linear relationship held true—the thing would be gone for over three days. Next time, over a month; then over a year. Then fifteen years, and way into the future after that.

So it was a time machine, if kind of a useless one. Unless you could find a way to reverse it—go up fifteen years and come back with the day’s stock quotations. Or a list of who had won the World Series every year in between. But simply putting yourself in the future, well, you could do that by just standing around. No profit in it unless you could come back.

He calculated two more numbers, 177.5 years and 2094. If you went that far up, if would be like visiting another planet. But you couldn’t come back, like the guy in the Wells novel, and warn everybody about the Morlocks. And it might get lonely up there, with nobody but Morlocks to grunt with.

Maybe it would be a high-tech future, though, and they’d know how to reverse the process.

No. If they could do that, we would have seen them around. Playing the stock market, betting on horses.

But they wouldn’t necessarily look any different from us. Maybe they came back all the time—made a few bucks and then went back to the future. Of course you had the Ray Bradbury Effect. Even a tiny change here could profoundly affect the future. Don’t step on a butterfly.

Through all this rumination, he kept staring at the spot. Four forty-eight came, and nothing happened. He started to panic, but then it shimmered into existence, just before 4:49. Have to adjust the equation slightly.

The two-dollar coin was where he had set it. He should have put a watch next to it. A cage with a guinea pig. And the camera.

He checked the Madhya fuel cell, and it was at 99.9998 percent, a drop of a hundredth of one percent. It might have lost that by capacitance, though; the circuit open. See what the next data point shows.

Three days and eight hours, next time. He counted on his fingers. Just after midnight Monday. He could call in sick that day. Marsh wouldn’t miss him.

He would miss the machine, though. Could he build a duplicate by Tuesday? Nothing to it, if he had all the components in front of him and a properly equipped worktable. But it would be hard to gather all that stuff over a weekend when the Institute and the city were mostly shut down. You couldn’t go to a pharmacy and pick up a gram of gallium arsenide, anyhow.