Marlene Dotterer - Shipbuilder

January 25, 2006

In 2006, Sam Altair broke a lifetime of following the rules when he stole equipment from his employer and set up an experiment they’d forbidden him to do. Then he sent himself back in time to the year 1906.

That last part was an accident.

When the Sun Consortium’s Technical Review Team cut off his funding, citing a “lack of results,” Sam heard the bong of a death knell. A lifetime of research was about to be boxed up and filed in a records center somewhere in Waterford.

He knew he was sending objects back in time. He just couldn’t find a trace of them in the past. The Technical Review Team expressed concern that he was starting alternate timelines whenever he ran an experiment. They said an object sent back in time could cause the universe to split at that point, creating a new universe with an identical history to their own, but with a separate future from that moment forward. Sam was doubtful, but it scared the powers-that-be. He was certain this was the real reason they pulled the plug on his research.

But he would never have another chance.

Sam didn’t have time to plan this clandestine experiment, and yes, he had to shrug off the irony of that. He’d slipped the small time machine into his bag, but it wouldn’t take long for someone to notice it was missing. Anyway, the moment he accessed the satellite feeds, using the Consortium’s dedicated lines, they would know without doubt what he was doing.

But if he was successful—if he could send a young tree back one hundred years, and if the full-grown tree appeared in its place—they would have to let him continue. They would be delighted to do so, once he’d done the dirty work.

So as Belfast settled into its nightlife, Sam went for a walk with the time machine and his laptop stuffed into a backpack. The area around Queen’s University seldom truly slept, but the Botanic Garden was empty this late on a foggy January night. He was certain no one noticed him take the main path past the gates and over the grass, to the giant oak holding court over the herbaceous border.

He took a few pictures of the large tree with his cell phone’s camera, but it wasn’t really the big tree he cared about. He just wanted to establish the provenance of the foot-high sapling, poking up from the muddy green several feet away. The sapling that would soon be as tall as its parent.

A tickling in the back of his neck made him work quickly, using his GPS to find the coordinates of the tree, and then running the formulas to set up an isolation field around it. It wasn’t visible in the cold night air, but on his laptop screen, the field showed a blue border, 152.4 centimeters in all directions around the sapling, including the vertical. Everything within that field would go back in time.

It would leave a bloody great hole in the grass if this didn’t work. But if it didn’t work, that would be the least of his worries.

He’d set his equipment on some large rocks behind the nearby bushes, and now he knelt beside them, inputting the final instructions. The location was the exact spot the sapling now occupied. The time of day was synchronized to current time: 12:02 a.m. and counting. The temporal destination was 1906.

He set the timer for one minute, and allowed himself a moment of glory as his finger poised above the ENTER key. His heart pounded with anxiety as he reviewed the steps of the experiment. All was ready.

He lowered his finger with a swift tap and the countdown started. That’s when things began to fall apart.

The low murmur of a voice reached him as he knelt by the time machine. He froze in place, breath caught. Who was that? Had someone followed him? Was he being watched? He jerked upward, looking toward the tree. For several seconds, he could not make sense of what he saw. But there, within his isolation field, was a girl, kneeling next to the sapling, patting some dirt around the tree and talking to it in that sing-song voice people used for babies and pets. She wore a dark cloak and gloves, with a cloth cap pushed over her ears. Long hair hung down her back, partially covering the backpack she wore. A student? At this time of night?

The time machine was counting down. There was no abort switch.

His mind refused to think. His actions were beyond any choice he could imagine. So he yelled. “Hey! Get out of there! Hurry!”

The girl jumped in surprise, but lost her balance, falling to sit on the ground. Sam rushed toward her, seeing in his mind how the objects in his experiments vanished from sight with a faint clap of thunder. A hundred and fifty-two centimeters. Five feet. Just a few feet from the tree, and they would both be safe.

She started to stand, arms coming up in defense at his headlong rush. And everything changed.

His senses returned one at a time, as if in slow motion. Sight first—he found himself on his hands and knees, as if he’d fallen. He stared at his fingers spread claw-like in the grass. Feeling came next—his heart beat fast and strong in his chest, the pulse points in his wrists throbbed through his hands against the ground. Then smell and taste—his first breath brought a sting of burning coal, and the invasive trace of a broken sewer. Or outhouses.

He was in the past.

Bloody hell.

He sat, staring around him at the now fogless night, noting the twin phenomena of increased darkness due to no street lights, and a sky bright with a dazzling array of stars and the full moon.

Belfast, Ireland.

January 25.

1906.

A moan off to his left told him he wasn’t alone. Memory returned with a rush of horror. The girl had come through time with him.

He twisted to look behind him. She must have fallen too. Encumbered by her backpack, the fall looked clumsy—she lay half on her back, the pack caught underneath her. A strap trapped one arm behind her and she was trying to free it.

He scrambled to her side, babbling with constrained concern, turning her so she could free the arm. “Are you hurt, Miss? I’m so sorry. My God, I’m so sorry about this. Did you hit your head?”

Free of the pack, she moved so fast he had no time to help her up. She stood, her dark cloak masking her shape. Her hat had come off, revealing a mass of hair surrounding a face so pale, it seemed to glow in the darkness.

Her voice revealed her panic. “Who are you? What just happened, here? Where are we?”

He rose to his feet, his sixty-year old knees making it a much slower process than hers. Once at his full height, he looked down about a foot to meet her eyes. She waited, her stance and eyes alert. The backpack remained on the ground. He suspected she left it there in case she needed to run.

Even amid the other-worldly oddness of what had just happened to them, he noticed her accent. She was American.

“Miss,” he said, holding out a hand to show her he wouldn’t hurt her, “I will explain everything. But it’s not going to be easy to believe.”

“Where are we?” she asked again. “How did we get here? I was by the tree and you came running out of nowhere and… and I… fell, and…” Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “Something happened. What happened?” The last words were a shout.

“I didn’t come out of nowhere,” he said. “I was behind the bushes.” He gestured to the side, staring for moment when he saw that the bushes were no longer there. When he turned back to her, he saw she had backed up a few steps, her gaze fixed on the missing bushes. He stayed silent as she looked around, his own eyes taking in a peripheral glance of Belfast’s Botanic Garden.