A Science Fiction Story
Professor Daniels put down his glass of water and cleared his throat, the usual sign that the lecture was almost over. Ignoring the sleeping students in the back row, he continued. “And that, everyone, is how Einstein proved that we will never travel faster than the speed of light. The science fiction fans among us are disappointed, I’m sure. But don’t take it to hard! General relativity does allow for something that’s almost as interesting: time travel.”
Ben Ledbetter was suddenly alert. This was the first interesting thing he had heard all semester. He brushed his longish hair up out of his face and grabbed a pen. He might just take some notes, after all.
“General relativity,” said the professor, “shows us how matter warps space-time. Remember my example of a bowling ball on a mattress. As I said, the dent in the bed is very similar to how a planet distorts the space-time around it. Well, it’s possible to distort space-time so much that it loops back on itself, in what we call a “closed timelike curve.” You could travel such a curve and, even though you were going forward it time, you would end up back in the past!”
“That reminds me,” Ben thought, “I’m supposed to see Cathryn tonight.”
The professor picked up a piece of chalk and rolled it in his hand. “However, you would need a colossal amount of mass to do this. A black hole might do it, if it was equal in mass to the entire universe. Or, if you can find them, cosmic strings. In some cases, light will do the trick. Even though light has no mass, it also warps space-time.” The professor drew a rough diagram on the chalkboard. “A circulating laser beam will create a vortex in space-time. If you have a second laser rotating the opposite direction, you might be able to bend space-time into a loop. Unfortunately, the laser would have to be far more powerful than anything we have today. But eventually we will get there… We’ll talk more about this next time. Read chapter fifteen. There might be a quiz!”
Ignoring the rain outside, Ben walked slowly back to his car. “All this time,” he thought, “I was sure scientists had proven time travel impossible. But if relativity doesn’t rule it out, then it has to work. Now all I have to do is build the most high-powered laser in the history of the world… Yeah, right.”
Ben stepped into the house and headed down the stairs to his bedroom, the basement. The walls were covered with photos of Ben. At the top of the stairs he was three years old, sitting at the top of a slide, face beaming like the sun. A step down and he was a smiling kindergartner, excited about his first day of school. A step down and he was eight, learning how to ride a bike without training wheels. Two steps down, and a ten-year-old Ben presented his mother with a bouquet of daisies. Another step down, and a teenage Ben stood in front of his high school for the first time, holding a backpack that would be stolen later that day. Two steps down, and a sixteen-year-old Ben was sitting behind the wheel of his father’s car, which would later be vandalized after Ben parked it in a bad neighborhood. After that, the photos were farther and farther apart, and Ben stopped smiling.
Ben flopped onto his bed and closed his eyes. A voice from upstairs. “Ben!” his father bellowed. “Did you call back Mr. Forrester about that job?”
“I told you, dad,” Ben shouted, “I can’t work fifty hours a week at a factory and go to school at the same time!”
“I’m not going to support you forever, you know! You need to get a damn job!” Upstairs, Ben’s father slammed the door and stomped into the TV room.
“He never told my brother to get a job,” Ben mumbled. “He paid for him to go to college and then gave him a car. He never worked a day in his life…”
That night, Ben drove back to the college, pulling into the lot at the women’s dorms. He found a seat in the lounge and waited for Cathryn Dizen to come downstairs.
The double doors opened and a leggy woman in a black, sleeveless dress breezed in. Her black, bobbed hair framed a face hidden behind pale makeup. She practically floated across the room, dropping on the couch next to Ben. “Hey there, Snugglepup,” she said. “Do you like my dress? It’s just like one Clara Bow had…”
“It’s great, Cathryn,” Ben said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “You’re a real vamp.”
“Did you want to study here, or should we take your jalopy back to your joint?”
Ben smiled at the thought. “Well, my parents are home, so maybe we should go somewhere more private? Like the movies?”
“Sorry, Mac, bank’s closed. Now don’t get in a lather! You know I think you’re the bee’s knees, but I can’t spend the whole night at the petting pantry… I really need to study for finals, because right now I don’t know from nothing.”
Ben tried to keep his disappointment from showing. “Fine. We can just stay here, I guess.”
Hours later, Ben shoved his books back into his backpack. Cathryn looked up at her boyfriend and frowned. “Now what’s eating you?” she asked. “You’ve been acting grummy all night.”
“I’m fine,” Ben insisted. He tugged on his coat.
“I know you better than that,” she insisted. “Now spill!”
“I’ve just had a lot on my mind. This morning, my physics professor was talking about time travel, and it really got me obsessing about the past. But you know how that is.”
“Well, since you helped me study, I’ll help you cheer up. I’ll hop upstairs and get on my glad rags, and we’ll go to the gin mill and get ossified!”
Ben sighed and took off his coat. He knew he’d be waiting a while for Cathryn to change clothes. “Sure,” he said, “I could use a drink. Hurry up, OK?”
They decided on Cleveland Joe’s, a local bar and coffee house. Ben found them a table near the back, away from the crowd. After a few drinks, he was ready to talk. “So, general relativity allows for time travel. The professor said that an array of high-powered lasers could actually warp space-time enough to bend it back on itself… You could send anything back in time, if you had enough energy.”
“So, how much energy are we talking about?”
“Too much. With current technology, it’s just not possible.”
Cathryn smiled behind her martini. “Who cares about current technology? I might be just a dumb Dora, but I think you’re missing the obvious. If you can’t travel in time right now, why not just wait? Eventually someone will do it, and eventually they’ll end up here! Just bump ’em off and glom the time machine!” Cathryn burped. Her face red, she pushed the martini over to Ben. “I think I’m splifficated. How about you give me a fin for some java, Sugar Daddy?”
Ben handed her some money and told her to bring back a White Russian. She staggered off, unsteady in her heels. “She might just have something there,” he thought. “If I can’t build a time machine, I can always take one.”
The next morning, an extremely hung-over Ben sat in bed, watching an old home movie. “Mom was so beautiful when she was young,” he thought. “I always thought she was perfect. But then, I didn’t get enough credits to graduate my senior year. I remember coming to her, telling her I almost worked up the nerve to kill myself, and what did she say? `I always knew you would be a failure.’ God, that bitch. I had to take an extra year of high school, and the whole time I wanted to murder her. Nobody loves you like your mom. Right.” Ben turned off the television and cast the remote aside. “When you’re a kid, your parents love you so much. And then you get a little older and they get sick of you. I guess it’s much easier to love someone who’s too young to disappoint you.”
Ben rolled out of bed and took a quick shower. He toweled off and headed back down to his room. He knew Cathryn would be busy until that night, so he decided to drop in on his friend Trevor. Trevor Kale had never seen the ocean in his life, but that didn’t stop him from pretending to be a surfer. He always wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt over a white tank top. Shaggy blonde hair, a deep tan and the constant smell of incense completed the illusion.
“What’s so important, Ben?” he asked, motioning for Ben to take a seat on the sofa.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about time travel…” Ben explained his newfound fascination with time machines and Cathryn’s drunken suggestion from the night before.
“So you want to steal a time machine?” Trevor asked, looking even more confused than usual.
“Why not? Think of the benefits to humanity! I could visit two hundred years in the past, and take the newest technology and medicine back with me!”
“And you could take that girlfriend of yours back to the nineteen twenties. She could be a real flapper instead of just dressing like one.”
Ben laughed and put his feet up on the coffee table. “She would love that. Ever since she saw her first silent film, she’s been convinced she’s the reincarnation of Clara Bow.”
“She’s that actress in the posters in her dorm room, right? She does look an awful lot like her. Well, we know why she’s obsessed with days gone by. What about you?”
“I’m not obsessed with anything. I just want to travel through time. I think it’d be the most amazing experience humanly possible… Plus, like I said, think of all the good I could do!”
“Right, right,” Trevor said slowly. “So you’re going to steal a time machine. How?”
“My theory is, if time travel is possible, it will be invented eventually. So we just have to figure out where a time traveler would want to visit, and what they would look like when they did.”
“A matter like this requires some serious deep thinking,” Trevor said. He reached into a drawer in the coffee table and pulled out a small plastic bag. “And when you need to figure something out, it’s always good to have a little herbal assistance…”
After several hours of chemically-enhanced deep thought, they had filled a notebook full of clues. Ben took a nap until his head cleared and drove back home. He managed to avoid his father until that evening, when he knew Cathryn would be home. Walking up to her dorm, he saw her standing outside. She was wrapped in a fake fur coat and smoking a cigarette in a long, black holder.
“Hey there, Snugglepup,” she said. “What brings you by? I thought you’d be at home, studying for finals.”
“I need to talk to you about something… I think Trevor and I figured out how to find a time traveler.”
Cathryn threw back her head and laughed, an exaggerated affectation. “Oh, again with that baloney. What are you going to do? Find a time tourist and take him for a ride? Are you going to bring a chopper squad? I’m not saying you’re a piker, but you’ve never been in a rumble and you don’t wear iron. One run-in with a flattie, and you’d be behind the eight-ball. You’d go on the lamb, the coppers would nip you, and you’d end up in the cooler! Its rough being a fresh fish in the big house. And if you expect me to crush you out, you’re tooting the wrong ringer!”
“Are you done?”
“Oh, applesauce! Let’s just go get some giggle water and neck.”
Ben sighed and put his hands on her shoulders. “Look, if I take you to a bar, can you talk like a normal person for five minutes?”
“If you’ve got the mazuma, everything’s Jake! Let’s cut the static and get a wiggle on.”
Ben found a table at Cleveland Joe’s, and the waitress brought them a couple of White Russians. Ben tossed his notebook on the table and showed Cathryn what he’d written.
“Trevor and I figure a time traveler would want to avoid changing history. Any change he makes in the past would affect his life in the future in completely unpredictable ways… So, he would want to be quiet and anonymous. But there would be some subtle differences we could look for.” Ben finished his drink and signaled the waitress to bring another. “He probably wouldn’t eat or drink. He’d be too worried about disease. Language changes a lot over time, so he’d probably have a strange accent, even if he was an English-speaking American. Even his slang would make him seem out of place. But you know how that is…”
Cathryn laughed into her glass. “Ah, dry up.”
“He would either not know very much about current events, or suspiciously too much. And his answers would be memorized and recited verbatim. If he was from far enough in the future, there might even be evolutionary differences.”
“Like what?” Cathryn asked.
“Long fingers, large head and eyes, maybe no hair.” The waitress brought them fresh drinks and removed the empty glasses.
“So,” said Cathryn, “You’re really serious about this?”
“Sure. I really think it’ll work.”
“I’m sorry about razzing you earlier, Snugglepup. I thought you were just beating your gums.”
“It’s okay, Cathryn. I suppose I deserve it. I certainly tease you enough… There’s one thing I can’t figure out, though. If you were from the future, where would you want to visit? I mean, in our era.”
“If I was a time tourist, I’d definitely want to see Harrison’s Field.” Fort Harrison, a small military base in Texas, had been leveled by an explosion about three months ago. No terrorist group had claimed responsibility for the act and it was still being investigated. The area was to be turned into a park as soon as the rubble was cleared, so most people had already taken to referring to the area by the future park’s name. “You see,” she said, “if I wanted to be sure to not change the past, I would visit the area after the attack, but soon enough that I could still get a feel for what it had been like to go through it.”
“I think you’re on to something!” Ben exclaimed. “We’ll go tonight!”
“Finals start tomorrow morning.”
“We’ll go next week!”
A week later, Ben, Cathryn and Trevor stood in Odessa, Texas, watching men with bulldozers and shovels clean up what used to be a military base. “Look for anybody that doesn’t look like they belong,” said Ben.
“You mean, other than Cathryn?” Trevor asked.
“Oh, clam up,” Cathryn snapped. “Just look for somebody from the future, alright?” A bald man in a gray jacket strolled over to where they were sitting. He looked Cathryn up and down and smiled. “Is that how all the kids are dressing these days?”
“No,” she said, used to such comments. “Just me.”
“Hey,” Ben said, jabbing a finger at the man in gray. “Who’s the secretary of the Department of Transportation?”
“Norman Y. Mineta,” he said calmly.
Ben studied the man’s face and clothes, and finally said, “Yes, that’s right. Who is the Assistant Secretary for Administration at the Department of Agriculture?”
“Lou Gallegos. What is this, twenty questions?” The man turned and headed back towards the cleanup site.
“Get him!” Ben yelled. Trevor and Ben ran at the man, tackling him at the knees.
“Ben, no!” Cathryn shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Think about it!” Ben snapped, climbing on the man’s back. “He thought your vintage dress was in style. And he knows who Norman Y. Mineta is! Who the hell knows that? He obviously memorized a list of facts before he came to our time!”
“Our time?” the man said. “Get the fuck off of me, you lunatic!”
“And all the crew members are wearing an orange vest, except for this guy! If you’re not a time traveler, where’s your orange vest?” Ben demanded.
“I’m not wearing a vest,” the man growled, “because I’m the foreman! Hey, guys, come get this nut off of me!” Four men came running, carrying their shovels with them.
“Ben…” said Trevor, “Let’s get out of here!”
Ben scrambled to his feet and ran to Cathryn. He grabbed her hand and pulled her along.
“God,” Cathryn thought, “I wish I hadn’t worn heels…”
After twenty minutes of driving, Trevor decided that the police hadn’t been called. “I think we’re OK, guys,” he said. “But we probably shouldn’t head back to the cleanup site any time soon.”
“Or ever,” Cathryn grumbled. “Look, Ben, I thought this was just going to be a fun little trip. I didn’t think you were going to attack people!”
Ben shuddered. Apparently Cathryn was too angry to use archaic slang. “I’m sorry, Honey. Look, why don’t we stop somewhere and I’ll buy us lunch.”
“I don’t care. No more of this time travel bullshit, alright?”
“Sure, sure,” Ben said, turning on the radio. “I’ll find something else to obsess over.”
Two months later, Ben called Cathryn and invited her to a concert. “I called a radio station this morning,” he said, “and I won four tickets to a Jack Bowens concert!”
“Oh, I love him!” Cathryn squealed. “He’s so amazing… Like Jim Morrison and Elvis had a baby. Hey, weren’t they giving away backstage passes, too?”
“No, unfortunately. Hey, I have to go. I’m going to invite Trevor and his new girlfriend.”
The concert was at The Coliseum, a gigantic, outdoor theater styled after the one in Rome. Jack Bowens played a two-hour acoustic set and then cleared the stage for a guest band, promising to play another set later that night. He walked off the stage to thunderous applause. The reception for the guest band was much less intense.
“Trevor, where’s Ben?” Cathryn asked. “He’s been gone for twenty minutes.”
“Probably the bathroom,” Trevor replied, quickly returning to his girlfriend’s waiting lips.
Cathryn scanned the crowd below her, looking for any signs of Ben’s return. Finally she saw him, jabbing his finger at a tall, silver-haired woman. She took off her heels and ran down to him.
“Who’s the secretary of the Department of Transportation?” Ben demanded.
“I don’t know…” the woman said, puzzled. “Will you leave me alone? I’m trying to enjoy the concert.”
“Relax,” he growled. “It’s just some one-hit-wonder band. Jim Bowens will be back on stage in an hour. Now tell me, who is the current Vice President?”
“I… I don’t know! Leave me alone!”
“Ben!” Cathryn snapped, grabbing him on the shoulder. “Not this again! Leave this poor woman alone.”
Ben pushed her away, almost knocking her down the steps. “No, Cathryn! No. She didn’t know who the VP is, and earlier she couldn’t name anyone from the top ten radio charts. She knows nothing about the current era!”
“Ben,” Cathryn said, trying to sound soothing, “What makes you think a time traveler would show up to a rock concert?”
“Because,” Ben laughed, “This is Jack Bowen’s last concert. Sadly, someone put drain cleaner in his beer. Burned out his vocal cords. He’ll never perform again.”
“Oh, god!” Cathryn moaned.
“So it was you!” The woman jumped to her feet, clutching her purse tightly against her chest. “You’re the one who destroyed his voice!”
“I was right!” Ben screamed triumphantly. “There’s been no announcement yet. They just took him to the hospital five minutes ago! I knew you were from the future, with your long fingers and high forehead. Your purse! That’s it, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s nothing,” the woman said. She shoved Ben to the side and darted down the steps. Ben pulled a gun from his jacket, firing at the woman’s back. She fell, collapsing in a heap. Ben ran down after her, ignoring his screaming girlfriend. He grabbed the woman’s purse, pulling it open. Ben was suddenly enveloped in bright, blue light. The air around him wavered like heat coming off a highway. There was a cylinder inside, covered with buttons and dials. Ben punched in a date, and disappeared.
Cathryn rushed down to the woman, feeling her neck. “She has a pulse,” she gasped. “Are you OK? Can you hear me?” The woman whispered faintly, pausing to gasp for air. Cathryn leaned down, putting her ear to the woman’s lips.
“He’s in the past,” the woman repeated. “The loop machine can only take you backward, then return you to where you left. But he won’t be returning… It only had enough power for one more trip!”
“One trip,” thought Cathryn, “I’m sure I know where he is…”
The light around him died, and he knew the machine was useless. Ben tossed the purse in the gutter and headed across the street to the park. He stood in the shade of a group of elms and stared. A couple was leading their small child to the great, silver slide. The child climbed to the top and slid down, squealing ecstatically. The boy laughed as his parents congratulated him on a job well done. He climbed to the top, pausing to let his father take a photograph. He slid down again, and then ran over to the swings. Ben watched the swinging, laughing child, trying not to cry. “Look at me!” he thought. “I’m so happy!”
