Before the accident on July 11, 1965, Lionel and Ursula had been seeing each other for just under a year. They’d met by chance in the reception area outside Jerome’s office. Lionel had a meeting to discuss the funding opportunities that Jerome was in a position to approve and Ursula had dropped by unannounced to see if her husband was free for lunch. Jerome was tied up or claimed he was tied up and so, intrigued by each other, Lionel and Ursula had lunch together.
This is how the world changes—two strangers experience a crackle of chemistry. Circumstances allow them to explore it in the most hesitant and cautious way. But the kind of immediate, intoxicating connection that Ursula and Lionel felt is a quantum flame. Attention is its oxygen.
Lionel was forty-one. Ursula was thirty-seven. Neither had children when they met. Their work meant everything to them. Ursula and Jerome had been married for only two years but had already settled into a functional comfort that proved useful to both their careers. She miscarried twice in the first year of marriage and they agreed to stop trying for a while and focus on their work. Lionel had spent his thirties looking for a spouse who was his intellectual equal. He wanted a wife who understood everything that he understood. Who understood him. He never found her—until Ursula. She dazzled him. He couldn’t understand how a man as politically astute but imaginatively dull as Jerome had convinced her to marry him. Lionel didn’t grasp that part of what allowed Ursula to trailblaze as a woman in scientific academia was checking all the boxes as a stable, devoted wife. In the early 1960s, the fact that she didn’t get married until age thirty-five had been widely noted. To the kinds of people who granted tenure, published articles, assigned classes, and financed research, an unmarried woman in her mid-thirties implied something. The ring on her finger made all that go away. Also, and this was by no means insignificant, Ursula wanted to believe in her marriage. It mattered to her.
They didn’t sleep together right away. It took months for Ursula to trust him. And for Lionel to come to terms with what their relationship would have to be. He didn’t think of himself as the kind of man who would have sex with another man’s wife, even if he was speedily and irretrievably falling into her orbit. So he had to make some fundamental revisions to his ethical clockwork. But revise himself he did. And come to trust him she did. And so their affair began.
After the accident, they didn’t speak for almost three years. They saw each other only once, fleetingly, in the hospital where they were all quarantined until the doctors deemed them unharmed by the unknown energies that erupted during the experiment. Someone had the good sense to keep Lionel lodged away from the others, so even glimpsing each other down the hall that one time was an unexpected bit of luck. Or a cruel twist of fate. Lionel saw it as a bit of both.
In those initial lonely and demoralizing months in Hong Kong, what Lionel wanted more than anything was to simply talk to Ursula. But he knew how her mind worked—he had to wait until she was ready, however long that took.
It took two years and ten months. In May of 1968, Ursula showed up at Lionel’s lab in Hong Kong, unannounced. He didn’t even know she knew where he was.
That day, she set her terms. She couldn’t bear to never see him again. But she’d never leave Jerome, not after he lost a piece of himself saving her life. So, this was the deal—they’d see each other when they could, but never where either of them lived. When one or the other was going to an appropriate location for a legitimate professional reason, they’d get in touch and, if the timing worked, they’d meet. In the interim, however long that might be, they would not communicate. If at any time either of their feelings about the other changed, they’d both accept the decision to end it without question or argument.
Of course it was always up to Ursula.
The truth is they both figured it couldn’t last. Eventually Ursula would get over Lionel, or she’d fall back in love with Jerome, or Lionel would meet someone else, or he’d get over Ursula, or they’d simply tire of the contorted logistics and the affair would run its course. Instead, it went on for decades. Usually it was one weekend a year. Occasionally twice a year. There were stretches when they didn’t see each other for more than a year, sometimes two, once even three.
Every time they met, Ursula said this should probably be their final encounter, that it was getting to be too much for her, the stress, the anxiety, the split heart. They treated each time together as if it was the last. It was nothing like the everyday intimacy of a marriage.
It’s not that Lionel never got involved with anyone else. He did, briefly. But none of them could possibly compare to Ursula. He tried not to dwell on the fact that she was someone else’s wife. Ursula once tried to explain to Lionel that sex with Jerome was a different biological act from sex with him—that it was friction and moisture and whatever pleasure she felt came from its speed and uniformity. Sex with Jerome was math. Sex with Lionel was physics. Jerome was self-conscious about his stump and insisted on the lights being off so she couldn’t see him, but that meant he couldn’t see her either. She told Lionel if her head was cut off in a grotesque accident, she doubted her husband could identify her naked body on a coroner’s slab. While Lionel knew every part of her, surface and depth. She lived her life behind a mask that came off only when she was with him.
Lionel felt the opposite. He structured his life to be available at a moment’s notice, so when he’d get an out-of-nowhere message from Ursula to meet in Prague or Buenos Aires or Tokyo on such and such a date, he could always be there. When he was with her, knowing each encounter could be the last, he was his best self, never letting down his guard or being anything but attentive, romantic, spontaneous. But when he wasn’t with her, the mask came off and Lionel spiraled into increasingly dubious ethical terrain with his experiments.
He spent three-and-a-half decades doing two things—working on his time machine and waiting for Ursula to call. He fostered no other meaningful relationships. He let Ursula be everyone for him, but that also meant his intimate connection was limited to a few days a year. As the decades passed, this provisional arrangement turned into his whole life.
Until one day it all changed. Because his time machine was finally ready to test.
113
The greatest scientific experiment of all time happened in total obscurity.
On February 2, 2002, at 2:02 A.M., Lionel turned on his time machine and prepared to send himself sixty seconds into the past. He didn’t know what might happen if he materialized in the same physical space as himself a minute earlier—and he didn’t want to find out since it was probably nothing good—so he’d built a vacuum-sealed pod as a safe arrival point in his Shek O mansion seven miles away.
It worked. He spent one minute in the past and returned to the present, one minute after he’d left. He traveled from his lab at 2:02 A.M. to his home at 2:01 A.M. and then reappeared in his lab at 2:03 A.M. The full minute gap was intentional—to keep him aging chronologically. He was one minute older but had spent that minute in the past. There were no observers or recordings.
Afterward, he had a tinny déjà vu sensation, like trying to remember the address of a childhood home. There was a staticky, salty smell in the air, one he could never seem to wash out of his hair. But otherwise, following this culmination of his life’s work, he felt unchanged. He’d built something unbelievable, the greatest invention in human history. But now he was stuck, because Lionel’s ultimate plan required the one element he couldn’t simply invent—me. He was waiting for me to show up at his door.