One Second Per Second Page 3

  “Kasper?”

  “Hello Joad,” Kasper Asmus replies.

  “You scared the living crap out of me,” I say, fighting a full-body tremble. The room is poorly lit but enough that I begin to notice something. He’s not the same. Where yesterday there had been a shock of pale brown hair, there is now a receding hairline and a deeply creased forehead. Heavy bags hang from his eyes and the jawline that had been crisp a day before now sags. Yesterday Kasper was a decade younger than me, and now it looks like the age gap has reversed. He stares.

  “What’s happening?” I ask. “Do you know?” He blinks but doesn’t answer. “Where’s the team?” I take a step toward him and he takes a step backwards.

  “All seems a long time ago,” he says quietly, to himself more than to me. He looks around the half-lit room and I sense he’s as discomposed as me. “Should have known Joad Bevan keeps his own schedule.” He shakes his head slowly.

  “What’s a long time–?” He removes a pistol from his pocket. I gasp and back up against the closet door. He doesn’t point it at me, just holds it by his side. I want to look into his face but my eyes are frozen on the weapon. He follows my stare and looks down at the pistol. Then he apologizes. It may be an apology for terrifying me, or an apology for what he’s about to do. My heart thuds hard against my ribs and my eyes dart around the room looking for a way out.

  “Let’s talk about this Kasper. Don’t know what the hell’s happening but I think we’re the only ones left to fix it,” I say between sharp breaths. “Let’s you and me just figure this out.” He raises the gun, points it at my chest, and reaches with his other hand for the slide lock. Then his brow furrows. The slide is stuck? Without thought and the time that that would waste, I launch myself at him and he topples backwards, the battered bookshelf collapsing under our weight. I grope for the fallen lamp and grab it by its arm, then swing its base into his face. He’s pushing back on my chest, looking around himself for the pistol. I bring down the lamp base on his face again. And again. He has stopped struggling, a steady stream of red gushing from the bridge of his nose. And again. I’m panting but I seem to be as steady as a rock. No shakes. No panic. When you’re about to be finished-off, it seems a sharp sense of pragmatism descends on you. Have I killed him? No, he’s breathing, but he’s out cold. I get to my feet and see that the gun is right by his chest, too close for him to have seen. I take deep breaths, exhaling slowly through pursed lips. That needs to go with me. I pick up the gun.

  I back away from Asmus’s body, extend the handle of the roll-on bag, unzip a compartment and slip the pistol into it. The bloodied Kasper Asmus is motionless. “Block mathematical notation,” I whisper. “Asshole.”

  SEVEN

  I’m sitting just by the bar, or where I think the Thai restaurant bar would have been if it hadn’t been replaced by a park. The warm Risley sun gifts me a moment of serenity, painting a vanilla glow on my closed eyelids. The roll-on case is by my knees and I sit on the park bench feeling like I’m waiting for my flight to be called. And this will be an epic flight.

  I try to reconstruct the last hour. A middle-aged Kasper Asmus tries to kill me in my house–a version of my house, anyway. If there was ever any doubt we’re dealing with temporal acceleration then the middle-aged Kasper Asmus removed it. Right? Of course. But where does a middle-aged Kasper Asmus come from? He could have accelerated back from a time twenty or thirty years out where he is middle-aged. Or maybe he accelerated backwards from here and just aged his way back to 2021. Or maybe one of another hundred variations. And this all begs the question of why he wanted to shoot me. Sure, we never got on, but ...

  A white ball with red spots rolls up to my feet and small girl looks up for permission to take it back. Her mother smiles at me apologetically having mistaken rumination for irritation. I smile and hand the ball back. Now, my house. I’d say that what that house was, was a house with no sign of Bess. None of her clothes or other stuff was there, and the decor was what had made her weep when she first saw it. It looked to me like the house it would have been if untouched by Bess. Okay, so that’s the beginnings of an explanation. But why? How? I’m rapidly discovering that thinking is not the help I thought it’d be.

  I get to my feet. My plan is a dizzying violation of all that TMA stands for. My plan is to change history. It’s to commit the evil of going back, but to do it to undo a bigger evil. That’s my rationale. It’s a rationale that temporal logicians–TLs–have long rejected. They say, benevolent tinkering can only make things worse in unpredictable ways. Good intentions are no defense. Don’t do it. And furthermore, DON’T DO IT. One second per second is the only tick rate that’s acceptable. Period. But in reality, TLs are philosophers of the most clueless kind. Anyone who’s seen Back To The Future more than once has as much understanding of temporal logic as any TL. I’m going back, and if in future, or past, I need to face the music, then so be it.

  The privacy I need is a short walk down to the Columbia riverbank. I arrive at a clearing in the middle of a thicket of wild olives trees, unzip the main compartment of my roll-on bag and take out the ribbed metal case about a foot squared and half as high. I lay it on the ground, flip open the latches and remove its content: a temporal accelerator. It looks like a chunky, old hand-held programmable controller resting on an oval container attached along one side to three metals bulbs. It looks like this because that’s exactly what it is. Not going for the elegance a Steve Jobs might have insisted upon, TMA made a few of these years ago with the idea that human temporal acceleration might be a last resort fix for some big problem caused by dumbass nature. The least of all evils argument still held sway back then, before the TLs weighed-in. When TMA saw the error of its ways it ordered the accelerators destroyed. Problem was, they hadn’t thought ahead to carefully count how many of them had been assembled, and this one, via a lineage of TMA staff, had made its way to me and to my bedroom safe.

  Each bulb contains one of the three offending chemicals that, when combined in the correct proportions, and in the right order and at the specified addition rates, conspire to mock the very laws of physics. 6-phenyl-5H-pyrrolo[4,5-a]pyrazine-5,7(6H)-dione is one of them. I committed this to memory just to see if I could, and also to remind myself of the banal complexity of chemistry. The names of the other two chemicals were too long for me to even attempt memorization, but I know colleagues who had them down cold. Colleagues now missing. But no complaint from me about the complexity and rarity of these chemicals because that’s why we have just a few green dots a day lighting up on the wall map, and not hundreds or even thousands. Nature may be an imbecile, but not imbecilic enough to decide a mixture of vinegar and baking powder should explode like a tachyon firework. Yet all the events that lit up the green dots, at least in my experience at TMA, were innocent ones where these rare chemicals were brought together by some hapless researcher in the exact Goldilocks proportions.

  The oval container on the accelerator is the reaction chamber connected to the three chemical bulbs by micro-injectors, programmed from the controller. Programming the accelerator is, in principle, straightforward. The two parameters to set are the tachyon inner blast radius and the termination point. The inner blast radius is what sizes the sphere of matter that gets caught up in the acceleration. The termination point is where you wind up timewise. This does sound elegantly simple, the flaw being that, as far as I know, this thing has the accuracy of the first musket. There never came a chance to refine it before it became taboo.

  A week should do it, I think. Show up, work with Jenn and the other directors, get HQ involved. Track down the explosives that had been planted in the sensor array. Maybe even catch the bastards planting them. Be waiting for whoever shows up to take out the TMA team. Does that plan make sense? A week? Maybe a month is safer? Like this thing has that kind of accuracy. I’ll set it for a week back and let it decide. I then point my trembling finger at the ‘Activate’ key. Am I going to feel like I’m being dragged through a wormhole
, ripped apart by gravitational tides? Or like I’m being disassembled quark by quark, electron by electron, and crushed back together in a vice? I hear my heart thudding fast as I touch ‘Activate’.

  EIGHT

  What I actually sense is a slight fall in the ambient light level. There are clouds where there had been none. Was that it? Shouldn’t I be a least slightly disoriented? I’ve been known to vomit just looking at a painting of a boat yet time acceleration does nothing to me? I check my cell to see if I’ve landed anywhere close to my target, but it’s still showing the same time and date. Yet something has definitely changed, if only the weather. I pack up the accelerator and tow my roll-on bag up the slope from the river. Nothing looks too strange so I know I haven’t shot myself back a millennium. The cars look flatter, less cockroachlike. They have the style of junkers, yet shiny and new. I reach the place where there should be a park. Or a strip mall. There is neither, just an expanse of Russian thistle weed trapped by wire fencing. I have the tingling in the pit of my stomach that I haven’t felt since I was a kid. It’s the feeling of being lost. I check my cell again for a signal. Could I be predating a cell tower? I kick my bag. “Piece of shit.” I’ve overshot the one week I was going for, and by a lot is what I’m guessing. What are my options? I could try to get back to the place I started out, but god knows where I’d actually wind up.

  A thought occurs to me. TMA. Is there a TMA yet? If there is, I’d at least have someone I could talk to. But if this is earlier than 1991, I’m out of luck. TMA was the Manhattan Project of its era. As soon as the catastrophe potential of chemo-tachyonic reactions was realized, it was time for serious steps to be taken and the federal government took them. The curtain of secrecy came down and the handful of physicists who had some clue about the science of it were vetted and cordoned off. Then they kept it small. Always small. The fewer people who had a clue about what was happening, the better. A dozen people in DC and thirty-some in Washington state was how it was and how it stayed. That’s how many people knew what was going on. The question is, are some of those people right up the street from here, yet?

  I see a public phone. It takes coins. Who carries coins? I see the Brookland Avenue sign. I know there are a few stores up there, maybe. Yes, the first is a dry cleaner. It looks familiar.

  “Hello, can I help you?” a smiling pixie-faced woman with cropped yellow hair asks while looking at my case, eager for me to remove the laundry it should contain. The shop is brightly lit and a conveyor of plastic-bagged clothing is moving behind her.

  “Hi. Uh, yes,” I stutter. “Could I ask you a big favor?” Her smile fades as if she now recognizes me as what I am. Just one in a stream of bums here to ask a favor, like using her toilet or her telephone. “I don’t have any change for the phone and really need to make a call.” She stares at me, unsympathetically. “Just a local one. Really quick.”

  “We’re not allowed to let the public use the phone.”

  “I know, of course not,” I turn my smile up a little but not enough to seem smarmy. “If it wasn’t an emergency ... It’d be such a help.” She surveys me for a moment then nods to the wall phone. I put together my palms to acknowledge my answered prayer, and as I pick up the handset I see the wall calendar by its side. March, 1996. I look down at my roll-on case. “Piece of shit,” I hiss then mouth not you at the pixie woman.

  Now, this better be the same number. I shield my mouth with a cupped hand and look back at the pixie who still has me in her glare. Add calling TMA on a nonsecured line to my list of charges. A woman answers. “Hello.”

  “I need to speak to the onshift director,” I say.

  After a pause, “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “I’m TMA and I need to speak to the onshift director.” Again, a pause, this time longer.

  “Hello,” a different female voice says.

  “Are you the onshift director?”

  “Who is this?”

  “My name’s Joad Bevan. I’m with TMA.” I turn to the pixie. “This is very private, sorry. I’ll be off in a minute. Really.” The pixie gives me a theatrically cynical look then walks back among the hanging clothes bags.

  “I don’t know a Joad Bevan,” the voice replies. I might as well go for broke.

  “No, you wouldn’t. I’ve accelerated back from 2021 and I have a problem.” Then the longest pause yet. If that didn’t get her attention, what would?

  “Where are you?” she asks. I read her the address stamped on the generic drycleaner’s calendar. “Are you safe?”

  Although I knew I was lost, it hadn’t occurred to me until now that I might not be safe. “I think I am.”

  “Stay there.” She hangs up.

  NINE

  Almost an hour passes before a red Chevy van pulls up outside. I step out and the passenger window opens to reveal a shiny, pink-faced man with military cut ginger hair who looks me up and down. The back door slides opens and he beckons me. The driver, a wiry older women in a leather security windbreaker walks arounds the van and puts my case in the back.

  Without a word exchanged, we pull out. After a few minutes the pink-faced man turns back to me and asks for ID. I hand over my TMA ID.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  “TMA credential,” I reply. His stare is a potpourri of suspicion, contempt and militaristic efficiency.

  “No it isn’t,” he says.

  “Not yet.” He keeps the credential and turns away. The ride out of Risley is familiar yet alien. Someone once said that the past is a foreign country. They were never in my particular situation but they had it right. I lived here–live here–in 1996. With force, it suddenly hits me that I’m a few miles from here–a ten year-old me, that is. How can that be? You can be in the time acceleration business a long time, but you don’t experience the full bewilderment of it until the ten year-old you is a few miles away.

  Once out into the semi-arid wastelands, the landscape becomes more familiar, less changed. The driver speaks inaudibly to the site gate guard and we travel on. So here is TMA circa 1996. Same building but maybe a little newer and shinier. Other than the old model cars in the parking lot, it could be where I arrived this morning. I shiver.

  The cigarette fumes are what I notice first, then the conversations. There’s chatter within cubicles, chatter across cubicles, and a gathered group laughing. They all seem quite talkative, even friendly, very un-TMA. And it looks like plaid shirt and jeans is the uniform. I’m led to the meeting room, which now contains a battered metal-framed, Formica-surfaced table surrounded by a dozen school chairs. The pink-faced man who I now see is no older than his late twenties points me to a chair. The driver brings in the case and shuts the door to our windowless conference room. She unzips it and puts its contents on the far end of the table. An accelerator and an automatic pistol. Pink-face stares at the pistol and then at me. It seems I’m expected to answer a question he hasn’t asked. I wonder if that type of gun doesn’t yet exist. I know zip about guns. Or maybe it’s just a matter of, why the hell do you have a gun? The door opens, a woman and a man enter. The woman dismisses my escorts with a thank you. They whisper something to her, hand her my credential, then take the accelerator and the gun with them. She smiles once they leave. Her smile is a small thing but it warms me. Someone who doesn’t have contempt for me–yet.

  “We spoke on the phone,” she says in a voice that’s husky yet precise, with a touch of the South. She pours a glass of water from a jug and places it in front of me. She’s lean and outdoorsy looking–a cyclist or climber maybe. About my age, a face that relaxes to a smile, freckles, intelligent blue eyes and light brown hair tied back into a tight bun.

  “So tell me,” she says, sitting down across from me.

  “Starting where, when?” I ask. She shrugs. “It’s your story.” The man who had entered with her had no intention of going along with the patient approach.

  “What’s your name again?” he asks sharply. He also looks about my age, heavily besp
ectacled, with unkempt, black greasy hair. He has a sardonic expression that promises whatever I reply will be a setup for him.

  “Joad Bevan,” I say.

  “And where are you from?” he asks.

  “Here.” I reply to the woman. “Born and raised in Risley.” They exchange a glance.

  “Yes, we looked you up,” he says. “You’re ten years old.” She places her hand on his arm in the way that says shut up.

  “You can imagine we’re a little confused,” she says.

  “I need your help,” I say. I’m not used to being so direct when I’m not talking about matters of science, but I had breathed in and that’s what had come out. The woman leans forward, puts her palms down on the table and smiles at me. I exhale slowly.

  “So start at the beginning Joad Bevan,” she says. My mind dissolves into the fog of the day’s events: the big hangover, the big boom, the world shift, the gun in my chest, and the incompetent workings of a junk accelerator. I sip my water and feel a tremble in my hand, so put the glass down quickly, hoping it wasn’t noticed. I compose myself and belatedly return the woman’s smile. Then I tell them the epic tale of my day. Not the hangover, not the confrontation with Bess–not relevant–but from there on I share every detail I can remember. I’d told my story to the tabletop but now look up into the face of the woman. With her faint, natural smile she is looking back at me. Her greasy partner has a look that’s on the verge of a sneer or a roll of the yes, but he does neither. I sit back in my seat to say, well that’s it. The man and woman exchange a glance.