“There’s got to be another way,” Lionel says.
“There will also be a woman,” I say. “Her name is Penelope Weschler. Your operatives will take her as well. But something will go wrong. She will try to escape. There will be a physical altercation and she will be terribly injured.”
“I’m a scientist,” he says. “The whole purpose of my work is to create unlimited power for the world. To make life better for everyone. I can’t hurt people.”
“And you won’t,” I say. “It will all be fake. It will look real to me, but it will be a simulation. Designed to only look authentic. Nobody will be harmed.”
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“You will safely transport the four of them to your base of operations in Hong Kong,” I say.
“Wait, why Hong Kong?” he says.
“I’m asking you to do this because it has to be done. To close the loop. It’s your responsibility to keep them safe but appear to threaten their lives.”
“If you change the past,” Lionel says, “why does it matter what happens in a future that will never occur?”
“It matters because it’s my consciousness,” I say.
Even with fifty years to think about it, I’m not sure that convincing Lionel to fake kidnapping my family and injuring Penny will work. But after decades spent weighing the options, my best chance to protect the people I love, without completely dismantling the timeline that got me to here, is this coy psychological gambit. It all has to fit together.
“Fine,” Lionel says.
“Where’s your Polaroid camera?” I say.
“What Polaroid?” he says. “I don’t have a Polaroid.”
“Yes, you do,” I say. “Go get it.”
Lionel’s about to reply when he stops, something occurring to him. He steps over a pile of rubble and reaches into the nook where the consoles meet. He pulls out that famous leather rucksack. Inside it is the birthday gift with the bow on top. He tears off the wrapping paper. The present is a brand-new Polaroid Automatic 100 Land Camera.
“It’s a gift from my aunt in Copenhagen,” he says. “My only living relative. It’s not even my birthday. Her memory is going. She mixes me up with her brother, my father. June 29 was his birthday. I’ve been carrying it around for two weeks. I thought it would be too depressing to open it.”
“Are the devices linked?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
I fire up the time machine and its detection matrix pinpoints the remaining tau radiation traces from my original trip back to July 11, 1965, mapping out a knotted, looping, fractal thread to the moment in space and time where it all went wrong.
Lionel loads the Polaroid with a cartridge of instant film and I stand next to him. He aims the lens at us and snaps a picture. I don’t bother to watch the image emerge from the photochemical glaze. I already know what it shows.
“I don’t understand how any of this works,” he says. “How am I supposed to build a time machine? And even if I somehow figure that out, I mean, how long do I have to wait for you?”
“Good-bye, Lionel,” I say.
I activate the device. And I’m gone.
Let him wait.
126
Radiation is made up of three particles—alpha particles are positively charged combinations of twin protons and neutrons, beta particles are negatively charged electrons or positrons, and electrically neutral gamma particles are high-energy photons. The initial surge of tau radiation that erupted from the Goettreider Engine when it was switched on is still circulating through the lab when I arrive there on July 13, 1965, and the time machine’s detection matrix is programmed to find the remaining traces and follow them back to their origin two days earlier, July 11, 1965.
I quickly discover that chasing a degraded cloud of energy in reverse real-time chronology is extremely disorienting—I feel like a gyroscope banging around inside a clothes dryer strapped to a roller coaster caught in a tornado. It’s hard to even think straight. I grasp moments as they skitter by. Goettreider tinkering with the prototype to fix the very radiation leak that I’m following. The dust settling, but it’s in reverse so the dust rises from a prone state into an excited fog. A tumultuous crash as the half of the ceiling that lies in rubble rises from the floor and knits itself back into place over the lab. As the ceiling uncollapses, a dozen men in 1960s-era gas masks and hazardous-material suits, rubber gloves sealed around their wrists with elastic bands, scurry backward out of the room for safety. Before that, they inspect the wreckage with yellow Geiger counters, waving the metallic sensors around, tapping the glass panels over the indicator gauges to confirm the readings are correct.
Paramedics carry off the witnesses too injured to walk. The rest limp and crawl out of the lab. Goettreider is roughly hauled to his feet. A paramedic inspects his wounds as he sits against the wall in a daze, bleeding from the tip of his burned nose, staring at the machine, flayed palms open on his lap.
Firefighters pull away wreckage to clear a path to the door. They pry Ursula from Jerome as she screams and reaches for him. Ursula sits on the floor, cradling Jerome’s head, sobbing, while he shudders and twitches, clutching his cauterized stump.
The Engine stops spinning, slows, Goettreider powers it down, he runs a safe shut-down procedure, his hands scorched and raw, he stumbles to the instrument panel, he rises from the spot slumped against the wall where I pushed him right before I switched the Engine back on and ricocheted to my own time.
By the final seconds of this rewound thread, as I sync up to the point when I first arrived at this moment in time, my mind is utterly scrambled. I see the events I already experienced, but frenetic and unlatched, like a stream of all the right words laid out with all the wrong syntax, off-kilter and half-deranged.
127
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128
If you want to remember what happened the last time I visited July 11, 1965, go reread chapters 44 to 54. I’m so disoriented I miss everything up to about chapter 52.