Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“I just don’t like it,” said Lydia. “I have a terrible feeling she’s going to ruin everything.” She didn’t add that she really needed this group to continue the way it was, that these people were becoming her only friends, and the only reason she felt like the future might actually really exist for her. She didn’t want to get needy or anything.

“Eh,” said Malik. “It’s a time travel club. If she becomes a problem, we’ll just go back in time and change our meeting place last year, so she won’t find us.”

“Good point.”

It was Jerboa who found the article in the Berkeley Daily Voice—a physics professor who lectured at Berkeley and also worked at Lawrence Livermore had gone missing, in highly mysterious circumstances, six months earlier. And the photo of the vanished Professor Martindale—dark hair, laughing gray eyes, narrow mouth—looked rather a lot like Madame Alberta, except without any beauty mark or giant scarf.

Jerboa emailed the link to the article to Lydia and Malik. Do you think… ? the email read.

The next meeting came around. Besides the three core members and Madame Alberta, there was Normando, who had finally tracked down that hippie chick in 1973 and was now going on the same first date with her over and over again, arriving five minutes earlier each time to pick her up. Lydia did not think that would actually work in real life.

The others waited until Normando had run out of steam describing his latest interlude with Starshine Ladyswirl and wandered out to smoke a (vaguely post-coital) cigarette, before they started interrogating Madame Alberta. How did this alleged time machine work? Why was she building it in her laundry room instead of at a proper research institution? Had she absconded from Berkeley with some government-funded research, and if so were they all going to jail if they helped her?

“Let us say, for the sake of the argument,” Madame Alberta played up her weird accent even as her true identity as a college professor from Camden was brought to light, “that I had developed some of the theory of the time travel while on the payroll of the government. Yes? In that hypothetical situation, what would be the ethical thing to do? You are my steering committee, please to tell me.”

“Well,” Malik said. “I don’t know that you want the government to have a time machine.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jerboa said. “They already have warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention. Imagine if they could go back in time and spy on you in the past. Or kill people as little children.”

“Well, but,” Lydia said. “I mean, wouldn’t it still be your responsibility to share your research?” But the others were already on Madame Alberta’s side.

“As to how it works,” Madame Alberta reached into her big black trench coat and pulled out a big rolled-up set of plans covered in equations and drawings, which meant nothing to anybody. “Shall we say that it was the accidental discovery? One was actually working on a project for the Department of Energy aimed at finding a way to eliminate the atomic waste. And instead, one stumbled on a method of using spent uranium to create an opening two Planck lengths wide, lasting a few fractions of a microsecond, with the other end a few seconds in the future.”

“Uh huh,” Lydia said. “So… you could create a wormhole too tiny to see, that only allowed you to travel a few seconds forward in time. That’s, um… useful, I guess.”

“But then! One discovers that one might be able to generate a much larger temporal rift, opting out of the fundamental forces, and it would be stable enough to move a person or a moderate-sized object either forward or backward in time, anywhere from a few minutes to a few thousand years, in the exact same physical location,” said Madame Alberta. “One begins to panic, imagining this power in the hands of the government. This is all the hypothetical situation, of course. In reality, one knows nothing of this Professor Martindale of whom you speaks.”

“But,” said Lydia. “I mean, why us? I mean, assuming you really do have the makings of a time machine in your laundry room. Why not reach out to some actual scientists?” Then she answered her own question: “Because you would be worried they would tell the government. Okay, but the world is full of smart amateurs and clever geeks. And us? I mean, I work the day shift at a… ” she tried to think of a way to say “pirate-themed sex shop” that didn’t sound quite so horrible. “And Malik is a physical therapist. Jerboa has a physics degree, sure, but that was years ago, and more recently Jerboa’s been working as a caseworker for teenagers with sexual abuse issues. Which is totally great. But I’m sure you can find bigger experts out there.”

“One has chosen with the greatest of care,” Madame Alberta fixed Lydia with an intense stare, like she could see all the way into Lydia’s damaged core. (Or maybe, like someone who was used to wearing glasses but had decided to pretend she had 20/20 vision.) “You are all good people, with the strong moral centers. You have given much thought to the time travel, and yet you speak of it without any avarice in your hearts. Not once have I heard any of you talk of using the time travel for wealth or personal advancement.”

“Well, except for Normando using it to get in Ladyswirl’s pants,” said Malik.

“Even as you say, except for Normando.” Madame Alberta did another one of her painful-to-watch bow-curtseys. “So. What is your decision? Will you join me in this great and terrible undertaking, or not?”

What could they do? They all raised their hands and said that they were in.

Ricky was the Chief Fascination Evangelist for Garbo.com, a web startup for rich paranoid people who wanted to be left alone. (They were trying to launch a premium service where you could watch yourself via satellite 24/7, to make sure nobody else was watching you.) Ricky wore denim shirts, with the sleeves square-folded to the elbows, and white silk ties with black corduroys, and his neck funneled out of the blue-jean collar and led to a round pale head, shaved except for wispy sideburns. He wore steel-rimmed glasses. He had a habit of swinging his arms back and forth and clapping his heads when he was excited, like when he talked about getting a satellite into orbit.

“Everybody else says it’ll take months to get our baby into space,” Ricky told Malik and Lydia for the fifth or sixth time. “The Kazakhs don’t even know when they can do it. But you say you can get our Garbo-naut 5000 into orbit… ”

“… next week,” Malik said yet again. “Maybe ten days from now.” He canted his palms in mid-air, like it was no big deal. Launching satellites, whatever. Just another day, putting stuff into orbit.

“Whoa.” Ricky arm-clapped in his chair. “That is just insane. Seriously. Like, nuts.”

“We are a hungry new company.” Malik gave the same bright smile that he used to announce the start of every Time Travel Club meeting. They had been lucky to find this guy. “We want to build our customer base from the ground up. All the way from the ground, into space. Because we’re a space company. Right? Of course we are. And did I mention we’re hungry?”

“Hungry is good.” Ricky seemed to be studying Malik, and the giant photo of MJL Aerospace’s non-existent rocket, a retrofitted Soyuz. “The hungry survive, the fat starve. Or something. So when do I get to see this rocket of yours?

“You can’t, sorry,” Malik said. “Our, uh, chief rocket scientist is kind of leery about letting people see our proprietary new fuel system technology up close. But here’s a picture of it.” He gestured at the massive rocket picture on the fake-mahogany wall behind his desk, which they’d spent hours creating in Photoshop and After Effects. MJL Aerospace was subletting ultra-cheap office space in an industrial park, just up the highway from the Lusty Doubloon.