Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Page 2
***
The lightpulse lab looked a bit like the pictures she’d seen on television of NASA control rooms. One entire wall was filled with monitors and graphs and satellite photos. A low white platform about six feet across rose from the center of the room, flanked on two sides by white-coated technicians seated at several workstations. The air conditioning chilled the white room uncomfortably. Someone had hung a child’s spaceship in front of the air vent, and the toy twirled gently in the draft. If there was ever a place less like the arboretum, this must surely be it.
She could not understand the lack of fear in Sofu’s face. She had never seen him so excited.
As soon as the navigation engineer arrived, everything seemed to happen at once. A nurse checked Ojiisan’s vital signs, while a doctor peered into his eyes and ears, and double-checked his reflexes. There were waivers to sign and coordinates to triangulate and calculate. But soon, too soon, it was time to say goodbye.
Her concern had been building from the moment they’d arrived, but now, more than anything, Keiko didn’t want him to go. She held her hand to her mouth to keep herself from saying anything. This was what he wanted, and how could she be so selfish as to deny him his peace of mind? But the pain in her heart was nothing compared to the twinkle of joy she beheld in her Sofu’s eyes.
The navigator, Dr. Orlov, explained what would happen.
“We’ve set the coordinates so that he will materialize on the street in front of his home one hundred years from today. We know from current satellite photos that the rubble has been cleared, so we can be fairly certain that he’s not going to end up inside a wall somewhere.”
Two technicians helped her grandfather into the powder blue travel vest. It was made of a lightweight, netted material with large zippered pockets; some obviously empty, others bulging with equipment. It hung long on Sofu; halfway past his knees. When they handed him the control device, Keiko translated Dr. Orlov’s explanation of how it worked.
“The green button will initiate the lightpulse jump into the future; the blue button will return you back to this time and place. The vest automatically records all the environmental measurements of that place and time. One hundred years in the future, there will be radiation but it won’t be strong enough to bother you.”
The old man clutched the controller to his chest and nodded fiercely. “Hai!”
“And one more thing. For legal reasons, no one can push the green button for you. If you wish to go to the future, you will have to push the green button yourself. If you decide to stay, remove the vest, press the red button, then zip the controller into the right front pocket. In 60 seconds, the vest will return without you. Do you understand, Ojiisan?”
They assisted him to the platform, and made sure he had a good grip on his walker cane.
“Are you ready,” asked the navigator.
“Yes!” Grandfather’s beatific smile lit up the laboratory.
Dr. Orlov began the countdown. “Three, two, one, go.”
Nothing happened.
The technicians all cheered and raced forward to remove the blue travel vest.
“Ask him how it was!” Dr. Orlov was grinning ear to ear.
Keiko shook her head. “But nothing happened. It didn’t work.”
“Oh yes it did. Like I said, he returned to this time. Just ask him.”
The despairing look on her grandfather’s face told her all she needed to know. The Sacred Lily leaf she had pinned to his lapel was gone. She wanted to go to him, but they were too busy checking his medical signs. His hands were dirty; his shoes scuffed and coarse with dust and bits of dried mud. A tang of ozone filled the air of the lab. When he spoke, her heart squeezed in her chest.
“Tell me what he’s saying,” Orlov demanded.
Keiko couldn’t stop the tears of both relief and sadness. “He says he wants to go back. He wants me to tell you there is a shrine at the top of a hill overlooking the village. He wants you to send him there instead of back to his house.” She stifled a sob.
“What? What else did he say?”
She could barely choke out the answer. “He says next time, he wants to go 200 years.”
***
The technicians at Time Horizons had taken all of Sofu’s fine new clothes when he returned from his lightpulse jump, so when they went back to the Time Horizons headquarters the following week, he was forced to wear one of his older suits and a pair of black Nikes. She had not been able to find any more Japanese Sacred Lily leaves, so they’d clipped a sprig from a huge cedar tree at the Arboretum. When they reached the reception lobby, Dr. Orlov was waiting for them. He looked like a man who’d just won the lottery. Or maybe a Nobel Prize.
“Mrs. Erikson, please extend our grateful thanks to your grandfather for his bravery. We’ve only just begun to analyze the data gathered from his trip. The value and importance of this information to mankind supersedes even what scientists have been able to extrapolate from Chernobyl.”
Keiko had spent all week trying to talk Sofu out of returning, but in the end, she’d had to obey his wishes. Now, her only hope lay with the navigator.
“Dr. Orlov, I would like you to tell him that there has been a mistake. Please, tell him the machine is broken. Or that you’ve found someone else. I don’t care what you say, but I don’t want him to go.”
He gave her a puzzled look. “Why would I do that? Have you any idea the significance of your grandfather’s contributions to science? The dust on his shoes alone—.”
“I don’t care,” Keiko’s mouth trembled with the weight of her emotions. “He’s been having nightmares. He’s so upset by what he saw. He says the town is filled with angry ghosts.”
Sofu put his heavy hand on her shoulder for silence. “Two hundred years, Orlov-san,” he said. “I am ready.”
Just as before, they helped Sofu into the heavy travel vest. For this trip, Dr. Orlov explained, they added several additional measurement devices, and a digital camera. As the technicians showed him how to operate the equipment and Keiko translated the navigator’s instructions, she saw the gleam of pride return to Sofu’s weathered face.
“Now I don’t want you to worry, Mrs. Erikson. Your grandfather’s suggestion to place him at the shrine is brilliant. Those temples were really built to last. Even if people have returned to the area, they’re not likely to have torn the place down, and he’ll be as safe there as anywhere.”
Despite the heaviness of the equipment, Sofu stood straight and tall upon the platform. She shook her head. Somehow, this whole thing had gotten changed around. Sofu was no longer at peace. The angry ghosts of his ancestors truly terrified him. It was as if he believed serving the people at Time Horizons was now more important than saving his own soul. She’d tried to convince him to die in Los Angeles, but he’d refused to listen. Most of all, she hated the thought that Dr. Orlov and the scientists were using her grandfather as an experiment. They probably thought he was just some old man.
She kept her thoughts to herself.
This time, however, when the lightpulse shimmer completed, her grandfather dropped the controller and fell to his knees. He hid his face behind puffy, mottled red hands and keened softly. His walker cane was gone.
She rushed forward, but Orlov held her back so the medical technicians could treat Sofu.
“What is it? What’s wrong with him?” She twisted away from Orlov.
“Ask him!”
But Sofu answered before she could ask. “Bees,” he said.
They gave him Benadryl, and within thirty minutes, he was resting more comfortably. Keiko counted seventeen bee stings, mostly on his hands and arms.
This time the interview took much longer. She held his hand as she translated for Dr. Orlov and his team. Sofu described the changes he observed in the immediate vicinity of the temple. The landscape had become overgrown, he said; the people had not yet returned to live in the village. The sky was yellow; thick with clouds which rained down ash. In the distance, Mo
unt Fuji had been belching noxious gouts of gas and lightning. He had been making his way around the temple when an earthquake struck, and the beehive had been knocked to the ground close to where he had fallen. Unable to get away from them, he pressed the return button when the bees began to attack.
As before, he was determined to go back.
“No, Ojiisan,” she begged tearfully. “You cannot.” His puffy, swollen face and arms bore testimony to the danger of returning. She could not bear the thought of him lying in a distant future; suffering and dying alone. He might as well be on some distant planet.
Sofu’s chin jutted forward resolutely. “One thousand years, Orlov-san,” he said. “I am ready.”
***
They waited for weeks for word, and when none came, Keiko began to relax. The bee stings seemed to take the starch out of Sofu, at least for a while. He slept a lot. Things at home with Dan and the kids went back to normal. Christmas passed, and then Valentine’s Day. Sufo accompanied her to the kids soccer games, and on the Tuesday mornings, they visited the LA County Arboretum.
By the end of April, his appetite began to fail.
Dr. Orlov’s assistant Brad called to say that if Mr. Yakashita was still interested in making a lightpulse leap of 1000 years, Time Horizons would be willing to send him.
That night, she tried again to reason with him. She pointed out that in a thousand years there might be nothing left of earth. What if something worse than bees happened to him? What if he was trapped there with the angry ghosts? When she suggested that Dr. Orlov was just using him as a guinea pig, he turned his back to her.
***
This time, she dressed in black. She brushed her long dark hair until it shone, then twisted it up into a tight chignon, holding it in place with new bobby pins. She found a little pillbox hat with a bit of veil and wore her good wool suit, even though it was May, and nobody wore mourning clothes in LA anymore. In the car on the drive over, neither one of them spoke. She’d hoped the traffic would make them late, but the universe turned against her and they arrived early.
She whipped her BMW into a spot in the visitor parking lot, stomping the brakes abruptly. He sat as a stone against her and she was ashamed. This was not the way she wanted to say good-bye.
She reached out and caressed the empty place on his lapel. “I am a stupid, stubborn woman.”
All the tension went out of him then. He took her hand and held it against his heart for a moment. “Yes.”
***
Someone had blown up one of the photographs Sofu had of the shrine taken during the trip 200 years into the future, had it framed, and hung on the wall of the laserpulse lab.
As the technicians helped the frail old man into his blue travel vest, she saw his eyes glisten and knew he would not be coming home with her. When Orlov spoke the countdown, Sofu winked at her, something she hadn’t seen him do since she was a little girl. The digital clock in the bottom right corner of each of the monitors said 9:23 a.m.
She held her breath.
This time, the lightpulse shimmered and Sofu was gone.
On the floor of the launch platform, the weathered blue vest lay in a jumbled heap. When the technicians opened the bulging zippered pockets, they were filled with hundreds of Sacred Lily blossoms.
Introduction to “This Time, I Return for Good”
Michael Robert Thomas’s second novel, a thriller titled Shock and Awe, will come out in the fall of 2013. It joins his first, Happy Lies, which he calls a tale of “scheming friends.”
“I’m a huge fan of grand adventure stories,” he writes, “but I didn’t realize I was aiming to pay tribute to that tradition until I finished ‘This Time, I Return for Good.’”
Not only is this story a grand adventure, it’s also an inventive time travel tale.
This Time, I Return for Good
Michael Robert Thomas
Dearest Ned,
You are in your aunt’s study, hiding behind the leather chair near the fire, remembering the grand adventure stories we read to each other there, me to you, you to me. The hidden alcove behind the chair is an escape for you now, a refuge from the crowd in the house and their well intended, but thoroughly misplaced, expressions of sympathy.
Your unusual vantage point allows you to see an envelope, with your name on it, taped to the back of the chair.
You tear the letter open and read it with joy in your heart, for you know it is from me. Yet what you read puzzles you. Eagerness turns to suspicion. You wonder how anyone can know what is on these pages, because knowing what this letter knows is impossible. You fear the letter is a joke, a malicious prank, an attempt to mock what you so firmly believe. How dare they, you think. Part of you is tempted to hurl the letter into the fire, to watch its words, its instructions, shrivel to ash.
I know this because you tell me. You tell me this in four days.
I know this confuses you, my son. I ask for your patience, until I explain.
This is what you do. Tomorrow, when the clock in the hall strikes noon, you take this letter to your aunt. She is preparing to leave for an appointment, adjusting her hair in the mirror near the front door. You tell her she must read this letter right away. She looks at you with compassion and concern—oh, she loves you so!—but says she must meet the lawyer to review final arrangements for the estate, and will return as quickly as she can.
But she does not leave. She stays. She stays because you show her this letter.
Remember, my son, when the clock strikes noon.
With all my love,
Your father
***
My dearest Susan,
You are worried about being late for the appointment, and vexed at Mr. Lapham for insisting on meeting so soon after the funeral. You do not want to be away from Ned, for he worries you terribly. His refusal to grieve is unbalanced, you fear, and his insistence I am alive, unhealthy. You fear his stubborn denial of my passing will only cause greater pain when, as it must, the truth can no longer be ignored.
This letter concerns you deeply. You do not trust it and do not understand it. But Ned is so insistent, so firm, so very desperate for your support, that you, despite your doubts, place a call to Mr. Lapham. You tell him you will have to meet him tomorrow instead.
Much to your surprise, he is angry and alarmed, unusually so, given how thoughtfully and respectfully he’s handled his relations with you until now. But today he is demanding and short. He says the details are essential. He insists the meeting must be right away.
You tell him no, and hang up the telephone. You tremble for a moment. You usually take pains to be agreeable. Your firmness of manner seems out of character. You attribute that to your own grief, and to your fears for Ned’s state of mind.
I know this because you tell me. You tell me this in three days.
Please know that I explain everything.
This is what you do. You walk into the kitchen and tell the cook and the cleaning girl to take the night off. In the basement, you open the hidden door to the storm cellar where you and I once played. Inside the storm cellar, you move the new shelf and reveal the door to the secret safe room I built without your knowledge. You cut the cord of the telephone, turn off the lights throughout the house, and ignore the knocks at the door. Shortly before ten o’clock, you take Ned into the safe room. You do not use candles or lanterns of any kind. Instead, you guide yourselves by touch. You pull the shelf tight until it fully covers the safe room door. You hear the men break in and move through the house. You and Ned remain silent. The men search the basement, but they do not find the door behind the shelf. Shortly after midnight, angry and frustrated, the men leave.
In the morning, you go upstairs and, with Ned, restore the house to its normal state of affairs.
At the stroke of noon, you take this letter to Mr. Lapham.
With all my love,
Your adoring younger brother,
Benjamin
***
Eric,
As my sister hands you this letter, you are painfully aware of the curiosity and caution at war on my sister’s face. You understand she no longer fully trusts you.
You turn away because she must not see your anger. She must not see you calculating whether she, this woman you secretly love, can be manipulated, used, to get to me.
You do not know if you still have the will, the fortitude, to use her. You worry you have found your reason to stop flowing.
You fear what happens if you stop flowing. You know that only one person—you—has even the barest chance of finding me. You know you must find me, because what happens if, against all odds, consequences be damned, I succeed? Already I’ve betrayed you—sacrificed our partnership to plunge recklessly, dangerously, into my impossible quest. It is easy to imagine that I am capable of much worse.
I know the pity you feel, tinged with contempt, for your former comrade-in-arms, your former best friend, who stood with you, time and again, to fight the good fights, but who fell, hollowed by tragedy, into a haunted husk of his better self, consumed by visions of a time, a flow, that cannot be. I feel your sadness, my friend.
You see us that cold January morning in the American capital, quietly removing the gun from the pocket of that misguided man’s coat. You hear the young president, his wife and two young daughters at his side, lifting us with his stirring speech. We linger to hear all of it, every word, though of course we shouldn’t. You see the would-be assassin, thwarted by a pickpocket in his moment of infamy, raging to the heavens. You also see, in the days that follow, the man’s hatred melt away. You see him, much to his surprise, sobbing with relief.
You see us retrieve the piece of paper in Alan Turing’s study, after the wind blew it from his desk to the floor. You see us return it to the desk in the precise position needed for him, with his once-in-a-generation mind, to see it and make the critical leap—to create the code-breaking machine that saves England from the Germans. A single piece of paper, my friend. A piece of paper!