I don’t know if the emotional trauma of Penelope’s suicide kept me from facing the defusion sphere or if I’m just a total goddamn idiot—and the fact that the time-travel apparatus could even be activated without confirming my immateriality points to a major oversight on my father’s part, the realization of which would give me much more enjoyment if I wasn’t trying so hard not to freak out.
I look for a spot I can stand where there’s no chance I’ll touch anyone or anything. But the problem isn’t just deliberate action. My body is a maelstrom of autonomous responses, heat, hormones, gases, chemicals, radiation. I try to formulate a plan but my thoughts are a toxic fizz of regret, panic, and self-loathing, as if someone shook up a bottle of carbonated soda and uncapped it inside my brain. My mind feels weirdly doubled, trebled, quadrupled, like some sort of cognitive stutter or echo or—I guess this is what fear feels like. I’ve clearly led a sheltered life because it’s hard to muster the focus to put one foot in front of the other.
My mind was failing me, as it had so often in my life, but this time there was nobody to rescue me from myself. No grim-faced mother knocking on the door to steer home her sexed-up runaway. It was very much like the moment you realize you’re no longer dreaming, that you’re awake in your bed and it’s time to get ready for work. Except in this case my job is to get the hell out of the past.
There’s a nook to one side, created by two consoles that don’t quite meet in the back corner. Moving as silently as possible, I wedge myself in there to catch my breath before this all spins even further out of control. I step over a leather rucksack with its brass buckles left unlatched, shoved out of the way. Inside it is a gift-wrapped box with a satiny bow on top. I recognize the rucksack as Goettreider’s own bag—the association with him ensures they’ll never go out of style. But the present inside is a detail I’ve never noticed in any of the simulations. It’s good to focus on the little things instead of the big picture. Which is that I just came very close to total disaster.
47
The main problem with effectively modeling the cognitive impact of time travel on a human subject is nobody’s ever done it before.
You might wonder why my father couldn’t just do a trial run, you know, send the chrononauts back a minute, or an hour, or a day, take some readings, crunch some numbers, confirm it’s at least moderately safe? It would still be time travel—isn’t that dazzling enough?
Well, no, obviously not. A few of my father’s more prudent advisers brought up these questions from time to time. But they were curtly dismissed as lacking the boldness necessary for such a groundbreaking endeavor and encouraged to peddle their caution at someone else’s lab.
I come from a world where the impossible is commonplace. So my father’s legacy-defining experiment can’t just be successful. It has to be dramatic. A showstopper. The kind of confident, visionary statement no one will ever forget. It’s a mission to witness the most important scientific experiment in human history, because that’s the kind of direct comparison my father wants made to him. His goal is to ensure the names Barren and Goettreider are mentioned in the same sentence as often as possible.
And here I am, actually witnessing history, fulfilling my father’s self-aggrandizing dream—but my disappointing catastrophe of a brain is spoiling even this, my one big chance to make a permanent mark, getting lost in cul-de-sacs of tangent and memory and jargon. It’s hard to believe I spent months training for this, side by side with Penelope, close enough to smell the lilac and orange blossom in her hair because we sat downwind from the overcranked air-conditioning vent. My thoughts loop into themselves, adrift and hollow, a malfunctioning navigation system, like the one on the hover car that killed my mother.
I came here to do something nobody else ever has. To be first. To make history by witnessing history. Somewhere in the fractal fog of my muddled consciousness comes a loud, clear imperative drilled deep from my chrononaut training—focus. Focus on concrete information. What you see. What you hear. What you smell. What you taste. What you touch. What you feel doesn’t matter. Pain doesn’t matter. Grief, anger, humiliation, love, awe, none of it matters. Focus on what’s real.
What’s real is you’re in trouble. What’s real is you’ve made a mistake. What’s real is this is an opportunity to rise to a challenge, even if it’s a challenge caused by your own stupidity.
48
Lionel glances around, weirded out by the phantom movement. But before he can investigate any further, a woman comes in through the lab’s only door, thick steel with a heavy lock that she clunks into place. I immediately recognize her—she’s Cheeky.
Her name is Ursula Francoeur, a physics professor at Stanford University, the first tenured female physics professor they ever had, if I’m accurately recalling my high school history seminars. She’s one half of the only married couple among the Sixteen Witnesses. Her husband is Jealous, Jerome Francoeur, the bureaucrat who approved Goettreider’s funding. Why a federal science-and-technology funding administrator would be jealous of an obscure scientist, even in his moment of unexpected triumph, is one of many enduring mysteries of this endlessly fascinating moment in time.
I’m just registering it’s a bit weird that Ursula Francoeur locked the door—history asserts they barely knew each other—when Lionel Goettreider looks at her with a very odd smile. Anxious. Careful. Charged. There’s a lot going on in that smile.
And then I witness something I’ve never heard mentioned in any of the countless biographical analyses, scientific discussions, artistic flights of fancy, or virtual representations, something evidently no one has ever even considered before it happens right in front of me.
Lionel and Ursula kiss.
49
It’s not a first-time kiss. It’s a grasping, clenching, yearning kiss between two mouths that know each other well.
Holy shit. I know this doesn’t mean much to you out of context but it’s blowing my mind. Nobody, I mean nobody, knows that Lionel Goettreider and Ursula Francoeur were having, what, I guess it’s an affair? Is that why she looks Cheeky? Is that why her husband looks Jealous? What would this have meant for Goettreider if his experiment had failed, if he had lived, if any of them had survived?
Even in their final weeks, when Goettreider and most of the other witnesses had died from the radiation, neither Francoeur ever mentioned anything that might suggest Ursula was romantically involved with Lionel and Jerome knew about it.
But here they are, sharing a secret moment just minutes before the experiment is scheduled to begin. And it’s not a quick peck either. They’re making out. I feel like a bit of a pervert standing here staring at them, but it’s too crazy to look away.
If this is the only thing I see in the past, I’ve already changed Goettreider scholarship forever. The look on his face when they break the kiss, I mean, every schoolkid has seen thousands of images of Goettreider’s face, but I can say without hesitation none of them ever looked carnal.
“They’ll be here any minute,” Ursula says. “I’ll unlock the door.”
“Are you coming over tonight?” Lionel says.
“I can’t,” she says. “I think he knows something’s going on.”
“With us?”
“No,” she says. “With me. I can’t help it. I can’t go home and touch him after I’ve been with you. It’s making me distant. Mean. He doesn’t deserve that.”
“He doesn’t deserve you,” Lionel says.
“You know I hate it when you talk like that. This isn’t a soap opera. It’s my life.”
“It’s my life too,” he says.
“It’s not the same,” she says.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I know you have much more to lose. But if this experiment works . . .”
“You don’t think it’s going to work?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “My calculations, the yields I’m showing, they seem impossible. But your husband says they’ll pull my funding without some concrete results. Something I can publish. Even if it fails, at least I’ll have some real findings instead of a bunch of theories scribbled on paper.”