John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

When my nausea had passed I continued downstairs without caring who saw me. I was reaching for the front door when an elegant white hand closed around my wrist.

“One moment, Mr. Tolliver.”

I turned to face her, prepared for the worst, and saw to my surprise that she looked frightened. She smelled — faintly but unmistakably — of hairspray and coffee and sweat. So much for the “synthetic human” theory.

“Let go of me, Miss Greer. I’m not my father.”

“Let’s suppose, Mr. Tolliver, that there’s a tiny grain of truth to your idea. Not an enormous grain, mind you, but just enough. There would likely be people — individuals, or even entire groups — who’d have an interest in keeping that truth to themselves.” Her voice dropped so low that I could barely hear her. “Don’t go to the General Lee. It’s being watched.”

“What do you mean?” I said, feeling queasy again. “Who’s watching it?”

“You don’t need to go to Harlem, Waldy. Use your head a little. You’re a history major. You ought to know where to go next.”

“I’m trying to come up with a reason to trust you, Miss Greer.”

“Do you think you’re the only one — you and the rest of your family — with an interest in turning back time?”

She glanced quickly over her shoulder, then unlocked the door and pulled it smoothly open. I stepped out onto the stoop, feeling as though anything in the world might happen next. It ought to have been a good feeling, Mrs. Haven, but it wasn’t.

“Can I ask you why you’re telling me all this?”

She gave a clipped laugh. “I’m in love with your father. Is that so hard to imagine?”

“It is, actually. What’s in it for you?”

“I had no choice in the matter — I thought you’d been informed. I’m an autobot, created for his pleasure and relief.”

She gave another, harsher laugh and shut the door.

Monday, 09:05 EST

I was on my way back from the bathroom, Mrs. Haven, when I saw him. He lay spread-eagled in the Archive, around a slight crook in the tunnel, and only the heels of his wingtips were visible. His eyes came open when I reached him, identified me, then fell closed again. His face was not a face I recognized. If not for his shoes and his tattered green satchel I might not have known him at all.

“There you are, Nefflein ,” he managed to rasp. “I’ve been eavesdropping again, as you can see.”

He gestured at his lap, wincing from even that small effort, and I saw my latest pages scattered there. The top few were coated with a fine, slate-gray dust, as though they’d traveled with him a great distance. Some of them were dog-eared at the corners: passages, presumably, that he took issue with. He asked if he might have a drink of water.

When I returned with the water he was sitting upright, or as near as he could manage, and my manuscript lay neatly stacked beside him. He took the glass from me and drained it, then let out a sigh — long and damp and contented — and sucked in enough air to speak.

“Judging by the look on your face, Nefflein , you’re asking yourself why I make these visits.”

“You come because of me. I understand that now.”

He nodded. “And because of the book.”

I took the manuscript and leafed through it, fingering the occasional dog-eared corner. “It looks as though you’ve found some more errata.”

“Not at all,” he said, smiling a little. “Those are places where you’ve gotten something right.”

It was the first joke we’d shared, and it seemed to ease his pain, or at least to distract him a little. I refilled his glass and let him drink, in no hurry to ask my next question. I had very few left.

“Tell me what happened at Äschenwald.”

His smile was gone before I’d finished speaking. “No use talking about that . I set everything down, clear as day, in my protocols.” His voice cracked. “If you care to consult—”

“Your protocols describe how you did what you did. That doesn’t interest me, Uncle. I want to know why.”

“I’ve told you already.”

“Tell me again.”

He seemed to pull back into the wall of trash behind him. “Why do you persist in the delusion that my crimes are your concern? If our positions were reversed, Nefflein , I’d feel no such responsibility — I can assure you of that.”

“That’s the difference between us,” I heard myself say, and I felt the Archive tremble as I spoke. “That’s the difference between us,” I told him again. “That’s why you and I are not the same.”

I had my answer at last, Mrs. Haven, and the Timekeeper knew it.

“Are you satisfied?” he wheezed, his voice heavy with defeat. “Will you leave me in peace?”

“Not just yet. Tell me what happened when the Red Army came. Tell me how you escaped.”

His face grew distant and set, and for a moment it seemed as if he might refuse. But he was only remembering — or attempting to remember. Eventually he coughed and sat upright.

* * *

“It was the crowning act of my duration, of course, but it was done in the blink of an eye. I’d always conceived of time travel as a matter of addition , if you understand me: of creating a machine, or an approach, or a propensity. In fact, as I discovered quite by accident, it proved a simple matter of subtraction. It happened naturally, effortlessly, as a function — in perfect accordance with my theory — of environmental stress. The Red Army had just overrun the compound. My intention was simply to excise myself from the timestream; I never thought of it as an escape. I’d calculated that the event would be immediate — that the extrachronological ether would reject me as an alien object, like a body attacking a virus — and that I’d return to the instant I’d left. At that point the Russians would find me, and I’d attempt to negotiate terms; or the partisans would find me, and beat me to death with their rifles. I was reconciled, by necessity, to either of these outcomes. It would have been irrational to hope for any other.

“Instead I found myself cut free absolutely, expending my duration in haphazard snatches of time, with no control over the direction of each ‘translation.’ Eventually, in the course of my wanderings, two constants became evident. The span of each chrononavigatory leap was a factor of seven solar years — not unlike the life cycle of a cicada, fittingly enough — and my spatial coordinates were never affected. No matter when I found myself, in other words, I found myself exactly where I’d been.

“The first of these translations — which seemed instantaneous, just as I’d predicted — deposited me in the depths of a forest, among a landscape of overgrown, box-shaped depressions which I recognized, with no small amazement, as the ruins of the Äschenwald camp. I had no guess as to the year — it might have been seven years into the future, or forty-nine, or seven hundred — but I began walking toward the sun, which was setting, as soon as I’d recovered from my shock. I felt surprisingly little sorrow as I stumbled through that dense, unpeopled forest, and even less regret: there can be no greater joy, for a scientist, than the thrill of complete vindication. My crimes seemed trifling to me, the actions of some vague acquaintance, some half-forgotten relative. My biography had been reduced to a single entry. I’d made a guess — the greatest guess since Galileo’s marble — and I’d been proven right.

“The next translation happened just before the sun went down. It dropped me without warning onto a field of steaming tarmac: the parking area for a Soviet-administered sovkhoz the forest had been flattened to make room for. The year, I would soon learn, was 1959. I got my bearings quickly: fifties Poland, in certain respects, was not so different from the German Reich. I made my way to Warszawa in the guise of a Czech day laborer, hitching rides and doing odd jobs for my fare. The skills I’d learned in Budapest came back to me readily, and I made my living in the capital — once I finally arrived there — as a thief. My plan was to bribe my way over the border, and I was saving my złoty to that end when the next breach in the chronosphere occurred: forty-nine years backward, to June sixteenth, 1910. This was a considerable frustration, I have to confess. Crossing the border was no longer a problem — there wasn’t any border to speak of — but the money I’d saved was now worthless. I was thrown back, yet again, onto the kindness of strangers.