Joe Haldeman - The Accidental Time Machine

Then it started to accelerate, quickly sorting through the years of his childhood, picking out the most painful memories and replaying them in mercifully compressed time, or unmercifully concentrated time.

Then into middle school and high school, with all the fumbling experiments and excruciating embarrassments. College was almost a relief except when it was unbearable. Then graduate school and the wringer he’d been through since the time machine invented itself.

When he opened his eyes it was just a room again, and somehow he was dressed, but his mind was still spinning. He eased his head up and turned so his feet swung to the floor.

His mouth was dry, gummy, as if he’d been sitting with it open. “Water?”

The valet appeared with a tinkling glass of ice water. Matt drank half of it in three gulps, then sat panting. “How is … Martha?”

The image gestured and he saw a new door in the wall, an oak door with a bronze knocker. Matt crossed, limping a little, and knocked, and then knocked again. No answer.

He pushed on the door and it eased open silently. The room looked identical to his. She was on her knees at the end of the lounge, her palms together in prayer.

He cleared his throat slightly and she looked up at the sound and smiled. “Where did that come from? The door?” She rose to her feet gracefully and danced across the room to embrace him.

“Oh, Matthew! Wasn’t it wonderful?”

“The, uh, the interview?”

“It was so cleansing—it was like I was confessing to God Himself, and was forgiven.” She hugged him tightly. “The dream last night, and now this. I never will be able to repay you for bringing me here.”

Well, if you run out of things to confess, he thought, I’ll be glad to help you come up with something new.

“I’m happy for you,” he murmured. “For me, it was not so pleasant.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe I’m not used to confession.” He laughed. “Maybe because I’ve never had one, and I had a lot of sin stored up.”

“That’s probably it,” she said. “You’ve done a lot more than I have, anyhow, and you’re pretty old.”

“Only twenty-seven,” he protested, but yeah, there was a certain amount of fornication, prevarication, and masturbation in those years. Was there anything in the Bible about dope? “And I can’t even remember the last time I murdered somebody.”

“Don’t joke about sin,” she said, but she was still smiling.

La appeared next to them. “We have some things to talk about before we leave. What to expect. But I suppose you want to eat first, perhaps rest.”

“I’m starving,” Martha said.

“Go back to where we had breakfast. If you tell me what you would like, it may be ready when you get there.”

“Bread and cheese and fruit,” she said. “Mild cheese.”

“I want a hamburger,” Matt said. “Two hamburgers. With everything.”

“Give me one, too, please.” To Matthew: “They’re horrible at school, like leather fried in grease. People were always saying how good they were somewhere else.”

“Well, that’s sure where we are now, somewhere else. Let’s go.”

The burgers weren’t ready when they got upstairs, but the breads and cheeses and fruit were laid out artistically. They did considerable damage to the display in the two minutes it took for the valet to show up bearing two plates.

They probably weren’t the best hamburgers he’d ever had, but they were the most welcome. Comfort food. But the meaning of “with everything” had changed over the ages: his burgers were topped with a fried egg, bacon, avocado, and a slice of pickled beet as well as the expected lettuce, tomato, and onion.

After the interrogation and heavy repast, they slept for several hours. Matt woke up to an empty bed. He dressed and went into the sitting room.

Martha was looking at the porn notebook, turning it this way and that. “When I picked this up, it had the strangest picture. But then it disappeared.”

“You have to hold it a certain way for several seconds. That’s to keep children from accidentally turning it on.”

“Hm. It looked like something children would be interested in.” She grasped it various ways, but didn’t get the right combination.

“There. You keep your left thumb there, and slide the right one halfway down.”

The picture flashed on, somewhat dim because the ambient light was low. It was vivid enough, though, with unconvincing passionate sound. “What’s she doing with his thing ?”

“Um … it’s something people sometimes do if they’re in love.”

She nodded and studied it. “She doesn’t sound like she’s in love. She sounds hungry.”

In that context, something was about to happen that would be hard to explain. “Here.” He took the display and turned it off by placing thumbs in opposite corners. “They teach you about things like this in your Passage, I think.”

“That’s how they make babies?”

“Well, not exactly. But it’s related.”

She waved a hand in front of her face. “I don’t want to know, yet. If I’m not home in a week or two, maybe we can talk about it.”

“Sure. Be a good thing.” That set up an interesting array of conflicts. He could just leave her with the book and hope that the images would free her repressed sexuality. But she might find it so scary or revolting that she would completely retreat. He could step her through it as if she were a child, the birds and the bees—but the last thing he wanted to be was a father figure. Even an uncle figure.

Avoiding it would not be a good strategy, but being too direct could be a disaster. What if she drew a parallel from some Bible story like Bathsheba’s, and saw him as a seducer?

Of course, he did want to be a seducer, technically. He just didn’t want to be a bastard about it. Have her take the first step.

La rescued him by knocking on the door. Of course she would have been watching the exchange with the porn machine, and wisely didn’t simply appear next to them.

They sat on the couch, with La facing them. Matt poured two glasses from the still-cold bottle.

“If you went backward through time as far as we’re going forward, you would be back in the Paleolithic Era, in the middle of the last great ice age. People were huntergatherers, thousands of years before agriculture. Language would be very primitive, and even if we became fluent, it might be impossible to explain our situation to them.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Matt said. “About going into a future that’s literally incomprehensible to us.”

She nodded. “Where they would have to study us and invent a way to communicate. I’ve developed a few approaches to that situation.”

“Or there might be the opposite of progress,” Matt said. “Civilization might be a temporary state. We could wind up in the Stone Age again—after all, my last jump was only a couple of centuries, and the last thing I would have expected would be a return to medieval theocracy.”

“That’s not really fair,” Martha said. “We know about things like television and airplanes, but choose to live simply, without them.”

“I stand corrected. But we’re going a hundred times as far into the future, this jump.”

“But suppose you hadn’t detoured into that theocracy,” La said. “Suppose you had pushed the button twice and come straight here. Two thousand years later, but isn’t it less strange to you than Martha’s time and place?”

“It is. Most of the people I knew could make the transition easily, even enjoy it. My mother would go crazy here; shop till you drop.”

“Which is something we ought to be prepared for. The main reason I want to leave this place is that it’s so stable. One century is much like the next. We may step out of the time machine and find that nothing’s changed. The culture here is not just comfortable and stable; it’s addicted to comfort and stability. And there aren’t any barbarians at the gates; the whole world, outside of the isolated Christers, enjoys a similar style of life.”