In fact, I feel like I could jump high enough to touch the curved ceiling seventy-five feet above me. But I don’t. I just sit up.
“All I want is for you to fix your mistake,” he says. “Every human being on the planet, including the four people you’re so concerned about, is living the wrong life. Once things are the way they should be, their lives will be moot. As well as their deaths. Because in the correct timeline they’ll have another life and another death and this life and this death won’t even exist. If they have to be sacrificed to make you do the right thing, it would hardly even be murder. You can’t murder fiction. And everyone on this planet is living a terrible fiction that has to be rewritten. By you.”
“I just expected so much more from you,” I say.
“The feeling is mutual,” Lionel says. “You seemed so much smarter before.”
“What, two hours ago,” I say, “when I thought you were the greatest human being who ever lived instead of the asshole who kidnapped everyone I love and warped the space-time continuum so he could bang another man’s wife?”
“No,” he says. “Before.”
He reaches into his pants pocket and takes out an old Polaroid photograph with a crinkled edge. He hands it to me.
It’s a photograph of me and Lionel. But not the Lionel who stands in front of me. The Lionel from 1965. And me—I look just as I do right now. I’m even wearing the same clothes.
“This picture was taken on July 13, 1965,” he says. “Two days after the accident, I turned the Engine back on for the first time. And you appeared.”
122
I stare at the photograph. Obviously it could be faked. I’m wearing exactly what I’m wearing, but he did scan me earlier. Lionel built a time machine—he could manufacture a phony Polaroid. But it doesn’t feel fake. It feels old. It feels like a photograph taken fifty-one years ago.
“You’ll go back to July 13, 1965, at 4:38 A.M.,” Lionel says, “the moment I turned the Engine back on. My earlier self will follow your instructions to help you jump the last two days back to July 11, 1965, moments before the accident. My device can manage smaller gaps in time even without the dedicated radiation trail to follow. But it also has a secondary fail-safe, a detection matrix to track any of the radiation still in the atmosphere from your initial trip back in time. You’ll make sure that my experiment succeeds and you’ll return to the present, the world restored.”
“So, I bring you the technology you need to send me back the final leg of my journey and the you in 1965 just goes along with it?”
“I’d already theorized that the person I saw in my lab that day was a time traveler,” he says, “so your appearance just confirmed my impossible hypothesis. You also seemed like you knew what you were doing and, frankly, in the wake of my life’s work collapsing around me, it turned out I could use some direction.”
“Maybe I go back and kill you with my bare hands.”
“Well,” says Lionel, “you don’t appear to be as intelligent as I’d expected, but you seem to grasp enough about causality to realize that would have unpredictable consequences. What if my death in 1965 meant Penelope were never born?”
“I feel like this is a good time to tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“If it will help us move on,” he says, “then by all means.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I say.
“Are you ready?” he says.
“Right now?”
“No time like the present,” he says.
I pick up the time machine, which is surprisingly light.
“I had to make it easy enough to carry,” he says. “And easy enough to operate. Even for someone as ignorant about time travel as the man I used to be.”
Lionel explains how it works and it really is simple. Dangerously simple. Black thoughts churn in my mind. Going back to make sure Lionel Goettreider is never born. Or stopping myself from knocking on his door just a few hours ago. Turning around and flying home and finding another way to rebuild Penny’s trust. Except of course I see now that Lionel had been waiting for me, prepared to go as far as necessary to get me to do what he wants. And there’s the photograph. I know it’s perverse but I can’t help it—the loop demands to be closed.
A section of the floor retracts and a platform rises. On it is another Goettreider Engine—or, actually, as Lionel explains, this is the original one. The device I saw at his house is his backup. This is the original prototype, the one that’s been running constantly since 1965. I can see that its components look much older than the updated one back at the house. Robotic arms connect the Engine to the time machine, and Lionel hovers next to them, checking their work like a doting kindergarten teacher.
If I appear inappropriately calm, it’s only because I’m paralyzed by the adrenal gleam of terror. I keep picturing Penny on her bedroom floor, the axe’s blunt end hitting her skull. She could already be dead. Even if I figure out a way to save her, how can she ever forgive me now? And if I don’t do what he asks, Lionel will kill them all, my mom, my dad, my sister, my love, and I’ll have no reason to live in this world anyway.
It’s too painful to think about Penny and my family, the impossible choice between letting them be killed or letting them be erased, so instead I think about the world he wants me to bring back. Flying cars and robot maids and food pills and Deisha and Xiao and Asher and teleportation and Hester and jet packs and Megan and moving sidewalks and Tabitha and ray guns and hover boards and Robin and space vacations and moon bases and my father. Am I really qualified to judge which world deserves to exist? If all goes according to Lionel’s plan, that world will be mapped over this world and all that will be left is my memory of a reality that was never supposed to be.
But I know a thing or two about flawed plans.
Lionel is so much smarter than me and he’s had so much more time to think this whole thing through. I assume he has a good reason to put his time machine in my hands and trust me to use it the way he expects. But once I’m back there—if a better solution presents itself, I’ll take it, even if I don’t fully understand the consequences. Let’s face it, I never have.
123
Lionel’s time machine is compact and unembellished. There’s a simple control panel on the lid, which opens to reveal its microscopic innards, but otherwise it’s seamless. Lionel had no financiers to impress, no customers to awe. He didn’t need his device to look cool. It just has to send a person back in time.
Lionel runs a final diagnostic and I start to undress. He looks at me, bewildered.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t I have to take off my clothes?” I say.
“No,” he says. “What kind of pervert would make you time travel naked?”
“My father,” I say. “Where I come from, he’s the one who invents time travel.”
“The professor? Interesting. So he wasn’t able to solve spatiotemporal transmission of nonorganic matter. There are implications to doing so, of course, it slows the journey considerably, but it would resolve the problem of instantaneity . . .”
Lionel touches his watch and gestures emphatically in the air, noting something. I could explain the skin suits to him, but I don’t feel particularly cooperative right now.
“My father was paranoid,” he says. “I mean clinically. Most days he was a pleasant, fussy, attentive man. But occasionally we’d come home from school to find a muttering lunatic who would sit me and my brothers down in the kitchen and debate with my frightened mother if it would be more humane to kill us all rather than let us be hunted by who knows what nefarious shadows. My mother may have been the only Jew in Europe who was relieved when the Nazis marched in. Finally my father’s paranoia was entirely justified. And yet despite a lifetime to prepare for persecution, he handled it badly. His plan was foolish and he got everyone under his protection killed.”