If Lionel wants to hoard his treasure like a fairy-tale creature, that’s up to him. I just want Penny to trust me again.
Anxiety lurches up sticky in my throat because everything rests on this ninety-three-year-old man nattering on next to me, and I’m sorry if that sounds cruel but as he gloats about how he finally deigned to grant the world the technology that enabled cellular networks and global positioning and the Internet itself decades after he first invented them, all I can think is: What if he’s crazy too? Maybe this is some communal delusion, like religious zealots who writhe on the floor and speak in tongues. Maybe Lionel and I share a unique psychological disorder where we think we rightfully belong to an alternate techno-utopian reality and we’re crucial to the true destiny of humankind. What if meeting him doesn’t prove I’m right—it just proves we’re both wrong?
110
We pull up at the Chai Wan warehouse and Wen locks us in the car while he does a perimeter sweep. Lionel fidgets with a button on his shirt. The thread that binds it has started to come loose.
“I’m sorry,” says Lionel, “but something puzzles me. Why do you keep calling it an engine?”
“What do you mean?” I say. “That’s what it’s called.”
“But it makes no sense,” he says. “Engines turn energy into force. Generators turn force into energy. It should be called the Goettreider Generator.”
I actually remember a cranky science teacher in high school griping that Lionel Goettreider would be aghast that his legacy had been tarnished with this fundamental inaccuracy. When President Johnson announced the invention to the world in a televised address on August 22, 1965, his science advisers were still arguing over a list of names. Two of President Johnson’s special assistants, Jack Valenti and Richard N. Goodwin, both took credit for calling the device “Dr. Goettreider’s Engine of the Future”—the cheery appellation that Johnson used in his speech—which was soon informally shortened to: Goettreider Engine. The name stuck.
Of course, the reason the invention could be named by a presidential speechwriter instead of its inventor is that Lionel didn’t live long enough to see his device change the world. He didn’t even live long enough to give it a name. I know I should tell him this, that every moment I don’t will only make it more awkward when I do, but it’s hard to explain to someone that they should’ve died in hideous, molten pain five decades ago.
Before I can make a decision one way or the other, Wen gives the all clear and Lionel does his stiff-but-fluid walk to the one door in the otherwise impenetrable box. He makes this conductor-like gesture in front of it and the door opens with the clunk of heavy bolts retracting.
Inside, the warehouse is as unadorned as the outside, blank cement walls, soundproofing insulation, exposed joists and beams. Lionel’s home felt like the last refuge of the world I left behind, but his warehouse is just a warehouse. The air in here is cold and astringent, like anything organic has been thoroughly purged.
There are some neat tricks, though. Like no electrical cords anywhere. The overhead lights are spheres of a billowing, iridescent gas. What looks like a solid cement floor turns out to be thinly layered wedges on rotating hinges that move like a conveyer belt, propelling forward at a speed Lionel can modulate with a swipe of his finger in the air. He wears what appears to be an antique spring-and-gear wristwatch that’s dense with motion-detecting analytics, which control everything around us.
We pass door after door, segmented metal with elaborate locking mechanisms and sensor panels. They’re all unmarked but illuminate invitingly as we approach, like lonely puppies wagging their tails at footsteps on the front porch. Lionel, so chatty in the car, is now all terse. Maybe he’s trying to build up suspense for the big reveal, but my mind feels blank, overloaded, so the theatrics are lost on me.
Lionel points to an unmarked door at the end of a hallway and the floor halts in front of it. He makes another gesture and a radiant indigo circle is beamed onto me from an overhead emitter. Every follicle on my body tingles as I’m scanned. He looks at his watch and I see a glint refract off his eyes—he wears some sort of contact lenses that interact with his watch to project a three-dimensional image into his field of vision. The segmented door folds in on itself, revealing a dark room of indeterminate size. Lionel walks in, expecting me to follow. And I do.
He waits for the door to unfold closed behind us, sealing us into blackness.
And then the lights come on. It’s a very big room, round, with a domed ceiling seven or eight stories up, lined with thousands of pinpoint lights that cast a diffuse, shadowless glow across the vast, sloping space.
In the center of the room is a small blocky device, brushed steel with ultra-black paneling that must have light-absorbing qualities, because the room’s ambient glare kind of bends around it. A few flexible pipes lead out of a bulbous chamber in the back, snake off across the floor, and feed into a massive rotating vent at the far end of the room.
In a ten-foot radius, the floor around the device is shinier than it is in the rest of the room, like the concrete has been alchemically polished into mirror.
There’s an odd, staticky, salty odor to the air. Not quite sulfuric. Like . . . oceanic.
“What is it?” I say.
“Well,” Lionel says, “it’s a time machine, of course.”
111
Lionel Goettreider built a time machine.
All the technology he spent five decades developing, this was why—to make time travel possible. He didn’t care about any of his groundbreaking inventions on their own merits. They only mattered to the extent that they brought him closer to his goal. Some he tossed out his door for the world to gnaw on like a hungry dog with a meaty bone. Some he never bothered to release because he didn’t think that anyone who wasn’t trying to create a time machine required or deserved them.
Like teleportation. Lionel simply felt that humanity had no need to atomically decompose and reconstitute themselves between locations. But he needed to invent teleportation for his time machine to work, so he did. That’s what’s off-putting about spending time with Lionel—not the noble genius-martyr of my world, the weird old recluse of this world. He’s even more brilliant than he was fifty years ago, but he doesn’t have the clean-lined personality of a mythic historical figure. He’s needy and a bit glum and also vain and abrasive and smug. He regards this retrograde world with amusement and contempt but derives deep validation from his secret role in shaping it, while also resenting everyone for not recognizing his importance, even though he’s the one who chose to conceal himself. It’s unsettling.
Lionel did have a few things going for him that my father didn’t when he invented his version of time travel. Namely, he knew it was possible, or at least had a pretty good working theory that it was possible. The readings that my presence in 1965 fed into his detection equipment gave him the key insight that he could use the energy signature of the Goettreider Engine itself as a radiation trail through space and time.
“Does it work?” I say.
“Yes,” Lionel says, “it works.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” he says, “I’ve used it.”
112