The interior didn’t look like a garage. With all the cables, it resembled an H. R. Giger sculpture. In the center sat the driver’s seat, which he’d torn from their old Aerostar minivan. The captain’s chair was mounted on a black rubber box with hoses snaking out of it, and the whole thing was surrounded by plastic milk crates. A dozen thick cables radiated from the shell like a spider web connecting copper plates, breakers, and batteries mounted on the walls and ceiling. What once had been a home for two cars now resembled the interior of the CERN Hadron Collider.
Despite all the equipment, a portion of one wall was left in its original condition where two ordinary-looking items hung. The first was a 1993 Ansel Adams calendar displaying black-and-white photos of Yosemite Valley. Isley had given it to Ellis for Christmas when his son had been just fifteen. Although filled with amazing pictures of waterfalls and mountains, Ellis had stopped turning the pages at September as that one was his favorite. September was also the month that Isley had died.
The second was a poster of the Mercury Seven. He’d had it since he was a boy, when it used to adorn his bedroom along with similar ones of the Apollo crews. When he found it in the attic while looking for more cabling, he couldn’t help pinning it up. A little faded, the picture showed the original seven astronauts introduced to the world on April 9, 1959, when Ellis had been almost three years old. Two rows of determined men in tinfoil spacesuits with white enamel helmets stared back. John Glenn and Alan Shepard were his favorites, with Shepard winning out not only because he was the first American in space, but also because he’d managed the feat on Ellis’s fifth birthday.
After entering the building, Ellis locked the door. He was having trouble breathing; the crackling rustled in his chest again, only this time he wasn’t certain if the difficulty was just because of his lungs. It felt like something else had shattered.
If someone asked Ellis if he loved his wife, he would have said yes, even though he wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. Like trying to envision heaven, thoughts of love turned cheesy whenever he tried to focus on specifics. All those movies and song lyrics made it schmaltzy with overuse. Words like wind beneath wings and completing one’s self were nice one-liners, but did anyone really feel that way? He didn’t feel that way about Peggy, and he was pretty sure she didn’t feel that way about him.
He had met Peggy at a party held by Billy Raymond, a friend of Warren’s. They were six years out of high school, and Warren convinced him to go. His friend had been working at the assembly plant in Wixom, and Ellis just finished his first master’s degree. Warren never had any problem getting girls, but Ellis always had a better chance of attracting lightning. So he was floored when Peggy talked to him. She was attractive, and it was good just to be noticed. They saw each other on and off for a few months, then Peggy told him she was pregnant. She also admitted she was scared he would abandon her, the way Warren had left Marcia. Ellis didn’t. He did the right thing—at least what he had thought was the right thing.
He and Peggy had never talked much. Ellis was working at GM, improving solar cells and battery efficiency, and Peggy devoted herself to Isley. He had been their common ground, a shared interest. But after he died, they were little more than strangers in the same house. So it came as a shock that her betrayal hurt so much.
Peggy might not have been his soul mate, but she had always been there. They counted on and trusted each other. If gravity failed, the speed of light was broken, and death and taxes disappeared there would still be Peggy, telling him to be home on time because it was Tuesday and they were having salmon for dinner. The letters in his hands were notices that the sun wouldn’t be coming up anymore; the world was no longer spinning, and time had stopped.
Except it hadn’t.
Peggy would be back to talk. He didn’t want to talk to her; he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He didn’t want to see anyone. If anything, he wanted to disappear.
He looked over at the disembodied van seat surrounded by milk crates.
Time hasn’t stopped, but it could—at least for me.
Ellis stood up, moved to the fuse box, and flipped the new custom-built breakers for each line—setting them to bypass. He could pull all the power he wanted from Detroit Edison, and it would flow until the wire melted or he tripped a safety switch at the substation, which he would do pretty quickly, but not before he sucked the needed megawatts. The overhead lights dimmed noticeably as he drew power from the house’s AC current. The garage hummed with a buzz similar to the noise heard when standing under a high-tension wire.
He took off his coat and stuffed it under the wrap of bungee cords. Everything else he needed was already there; it had been packed for months. He paused, looking around the garage, at the calendar—at his world. He felt alone, as if he stood in a desert; there was nothing anymore but the time machine—a single door at the end of a one-way corridor.
Ellis sat in the chair and set the milk crates in place. Through the grates, he could still make out the Mercury Seven poster. Was this how they felt climbing in the capsule and preparing to enter the unknown? They must have known nothing would ever be the same afterward, for them or the rest of the world.
He fastened his seatbelt.
Ellis picked up the tablet, turned it on, and swiped past the lock screen. He found the custom app he’d built and double-checked his numbers.
Don’t go anywhere or do anything crazy, okay?
Why not? As Janis Joplin once sang, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
The button on the control panel was glowing red—all powered up and ready to go. His Atlas rocket was locked and loaded. His Glamorous Glennis was in the bomb bay of a B-29 Superfortress, awaiting history.
People time traveled every day without realizing it. Some moved faster, others slower, because a body at rest moved through time at one rate, while a body in motion traveled slightly slower. Einstein had discovered that time and space were related, the two connected by a sliding scale—just as the more effort a person puts into making money, the less time they have to enjoy themselves. The reason no one noticed was that the difference was infinitesimal. But send a person in a rocket to the nearest star and back, and if the trip took him twenty years, centuries would pass on earth. Of course most people lack spaceships, but there was another way to affect time—by altering its relationship to space.
Instead of traveling, all that was needed was the equivalent mass of Jupiter compressed down until it was nearly a black hole so that it would generate an enormous gravity well. This would warp space and slow time. Then the traveler simply needed to sit in a spherical mass shell, sort of like the eye of a hurricane where the winds of time didn’t blow, and wait the allotted duration. When he climbed out, he would be in a different time. There were obvious problems with this method—or there had been until Hoffmann discovered the means to generate a contained artificial gravity well that wouldn’t devour everything around it, while at the same time protect the person sitting in the middle.
To insulate the time traveler, an electromagnetic field could be used to create an electrostatic repulsion of like charges, protecting him from the critical mass. If anything went wrong, and the gravity well started consuming its surroundings, the power supply would be destroyed first and shut everything down—a perfect fail-safe. Still, this was essentially Wilbur-and-Orville-style science. A lot could go wrong and Ellis could easily be squished out of existence.