The system is automated and through careful observation I come to know the precise, rhythmic sequences that comprise the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. The Engine is never turned off, so the radiation thread is never severed.
I stand there. I hold the time machine. I wait.
Seconds into minutes into hours into days into weeks into months into years into a decade of standing there, of holding the time machine, of waiting.
This is probably what it was like for Lionel, wondering when I’d knock on his door and set this sequence of events in motion. Maybe he did this on purpose, to punish me, torture me, teach me what it was like to be him and why he did the things he did.
And even if that wasn’t his plan, it works. I get it. When you spend more than fifty years waiting for something to happen, everything else erodes into meaninglessness. You have one goal and whatever doesn’t help you achieve it is just in the way. Morality seems very small and wet and delicate, a bug you find in your boot.
In the early years, I think about my family a lot, frozen like me in a moment of peril, but it’s hard to maintain a state of primed anxiety for that long. Besides which, I’m already doing the best thing I can to help them, and they’re not in more peril—they’re in the exact same amount of peril, tiptoe on the point of a long, sharp knife.
And Penny. The acuteness of her, despite my determination and focus, can’t help but fade. She starts to feel, increasingly and then maybe irrevocably, like someone I knew long, long ago for a very, very brief time. I want to save her, but it’s also sort of like being asked to risk your life for someone you met once as a child. You want to be the kind of person who would sacrifice everything for the one you love, but as the years stretch on and you’re imprisoned, static, in a dark, whirring room it begins to feel like, what, her, that woman I knew for a few weeks ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago? That’s who I’m willing to die for? No, I hope she’s okay but that’s not what this is about anymore. This is bigger than that, more crucial—it has to be or no amount of counting time will keep me from going mad.
It becomes obvious that I can’t let the world continue to suffer in a technological and social wasteland just because I have emotional connections to four individual human beings. To squander global civilization and the fundamental welfare of the planet itself because I like my family better and Penny likes me better is selfishness at its most cruel and idiotic. Really, who is the greater monster, Lionel, for a few threats and manipulations in pursuit of a better world, or me, for resisting it when so much good was undone by my folly? Me. Clearly me. It only takes, like, ten or eleven years for me to let go of every last vestige of my egotism so I can genuinely accept it. By around 2004, I’ve fully committed to resetting the timeline to its original path. Rather than, you know, trying to get revenge on Lionel and rescuing Penny and my family.
Fourteen years in, Lionel finishes his time machine. It’s ready to test.
And that’s when my true education begins. I have the privilege and the curse of watching Lionel spend nearly forty years trying to build it. His workshop is in a corner of the same underground bunker where the Engine sits—a man with any imaginable resource, financial, technical, and intellectual, who deliberately chooses to work in what is essentially a prison cell. If he’s aware that I’m an inmate here as well, he never acknowledges my presence. I’m as much a ghost as I was that day in 1965.
What I witness is—failure. Entire decades spent failing. The farther back I go, the more failure there is. This is how you discover who someone is. Not the success. Not the result. The struggle. The part between the beginning and the ending that is the truth of life. Whether or not he intended it, this is Lionel’s gift to me. Respect him, despise him, judge him, absolve him, marvel at his achievements, plot his demise, I came to know Lionel Goettreider better than anyone. Hunched over his worktable, scribbling calculations with a chewed yellow pencil, tinkering with equipment, running simulations on a computer of his own design, day and night, weekends, holidays, every day, he worked. He was trying to make something no one else ever had. Just like my father.
I can’t say I forgive my father for his distance through so much of my life, but I finally understand what he was doing all those years, in his study, in his lab, around the dinner table, giving a speech to his peers, ordering around his employees, tuning out while my mother spoke to him, leaving the room when I walked into it—he was failing.
Watching Lionel, I learn something about success I never did in a lifetime as my father’s son. You keep working. You keep trying. You keep failing. Until one day in the distant future, that for me is the distant past, the failure ends. That’s all success feels like. It’s not triumphant. It’s not glorious. It’s just a relief. You finally stopped failing.
You can do a lot with fifty years of nothing but thinking.
I consider what Deisha once said to me in an abandoned town in a lost world. Do something. Be something. Make something. And what that actually means.
I come up with a plan for what I’ll do when I finally arrive at my destination. Not just one linear plan, a continuity of plans, every potential contingency unpacked, considered, fit into the lattice of eventualities.
Whatever anger I felt for Goettreider dissipates over the decades. It feels like an ancient family grudge, one I know should matter, but it was all too long ago to bother with. Besides, his is the only face I ever see and as I watch him decompress from old age, unfolding into the man I first saw back in 1965, I can’t help but feel affection for him. Seeing him walk straighter, his face smoother, his body looser, his hair thicker and darker, his eyes brighter, more keen, I empathize with him, isolated, brilliant, lost. I did this to him. That’s something that echoes through me as I watch him become the man he was: I was the toxin that unmade him. I told him to wait, that I’d come to fix what went wrong, but I didn’t understand what the waiting would do to him.
Or maybe I did. After all, I haven’t told him to wait yet. The me trapped for five decades is the one who will make that decision. Is it to punish him for doing this to me, a loop of pain that neither of us can escape until it’s run its course? Or did fifty years of nothingness inure me to the agony of an endless wait?
Eventually, there are no more plans to make. I know what to do, what to say, everything he could possibly say in reply and how I will respond, a branching nest of words and actions that can lead only to their proper resolution. So I move on from plans.
I turn inside. I figure out who I am, what parts of me are Tom, what parts of me are John, where they overlap and why they differ. We reach an understanding—John doesn’t even mind receding into the deepest folds of our shared mind as long as I give him something to think about.
Together, John and I design every building in every city on the planet. We draw a blueprint of the world and it is magnificent. All that John accomplished before now was the aimless doodling of a child. Together we build a new hull for our civilization.
I write this book, chapter by chapter, memorize the words in sequence so I can assemble it at will. I remember composing this chapter. It was some forty years into the process, the mid-1970s judging by Lionel’s appearance, although of course by then I’d long stopped caring about dates.