The Radio Magician and Other Stories (18 page)

“How do you feel?” I asked. I had tried to maintain within myself her concentration, her ability to ignore the obvious fact, but I couldn’t do it. I worried about the crew and the water they needed. But for me? I didn’t care. Death would find Lashawnda before it took me.

She slid off the counter and tapped in a code into her work station. The recording of our landing came up again. Clouds of steam surged from the ground. She said, without meeting my eyes, “Look, Spencer. I can’t avoid it. It’s not going away. So all I can do is work and think and act like it’s not there at all. You’re behaving as if I should be paralyzed in fear or something, but I’m not going to do that. There’s still a quest or two for me in the last days, some effort of note.”

I had no answer for that. We went to bed hours later, and when she held me, her arms trembled.

A nightmare woke me. In the dream I wandered through the twisted forest, but I wasn’t scared. I was happy. I belonged. The crooked stems gave way before my ungloved hands. My chest was bare. No contamination suit or helmet or shirt. The air smelled sharp and frigid, like winter on a lake’s edge where the wind sweeps across the ice, but I wasn’t cold. I came upon a thick stand of trees, their narrow trunks forming a wall in front of me. I pushed and tugged at the unmoving branches. I’d never seen a clump of Papaver trees so large. Nothing seemed more important than penetrating that branched fortress. Finally I found a narrow gap where I could squeeze through. At first I wandered in the dark. Gradually shapes became visible: the towering stems forming a shadowy roof overhead, other branches reaching from side to side, and the room felt close.

“Spencer?” said Lashawnda.

“Yes?” I said, turning slowly in the vegetable room. Waxy-leafed plants humped from the ground, but I couldn’t see her.

“I’m here, Spencer,” she said, and one of the humps sat up.

I squinted. “It’s too dark.”

A dim light sparked to life, a pink diamond, like the last glimpse of the sunset we’d seen the day before, growing until the room became bright, revealing a skeleton-thin Lashawnda.

“I’m glad you came,” she said.

I stepped closer, all the details clear in the ruddy light. Her eyes sparkled above sharp cheekbones. She smiled at me, the skin pulled tight across her face, her shoulders boney and narrow, barely human anymore. She wore no clothes, but she didn’t need them. The plants hid her legs, and leaves covered her stomach and breasts. Like the gopher-rat, she’d been absorbed.

“The plant is old, old, old,” she said. “We think deep thoughts, all the way to Papaver’s core.”

I put my arm around her, the bone’s hardness pressing against my hand.

In the dream, I was happy. In the dream, the plants sucking every drop of water from her was right.

“And, Spencer, this way I live forever.”

I woke stifling a scream.

She wasn’t in bed.

In the decontamination unit, her suit was gone.

I don’t remember how I got my suit on or how I got outside. Running, I passed the empty water tanks, avoided the lichen-filled depressions, and plunged into the forest. The sun had barely cleared the horizon, pouring pink light through the skinny trees. I tripped. Knocked my face hard against the inside of my helmet. Staggering, I pushed on. The dream image hovered before me. Had the pain become too much for Lashawnda, and the promise of an opiate loaded bed of leaves, eager to embrace her become too tempting? I imagined her nervous system, like a gopher-rat’s, joining the plant consciousness. But who knew what the gopher-rats experienced, if they experienced anything at all? Maybe their lives were filled with nightmares of cold and immobility.

Trees slapped at my arms. Leaves slashed across my faceplate.

When I burst through the last line of trees at the clearing’s edge, she was crouched, her back to me shoulders and head down in the plants. I pictured her faceplate open, her eyes gone already, home for stabbing tendrils seeking the moist tissue behind.

“Don’t do it!” I yelled.

Startled, she fell back, holding a sensor; her faceplate was closed. For a second she looked frightened. Then she laughed. I gasped for breath while my air supply whined in my ear.

“What are you doing, Spencer?” A bag filled with the sensors we’d put on the plants sat on the ground beside her. She’d been retrieving them.

“You weren’t . . . I mean, you’re not . . . hurting yourself . . . you’re okay?” I finally blurted.

She held me until I quit shaking and my respiration settled into a parody of regularity.

The sun had risen another handful of degrees. We stayed still so long that the plants turned away to face the light. She hugged me hard, then said, “I know how to find water.”

I hugged her back.

“Can you carry the bag?” she said as she pushed herself to her feet. “It’s getting darned heavy.”

The crew stood around the one meter deep depression beside an empty water tank. Like every sheltered spot, lichens covered the rock. Lashawnda supervised the engineers as they arranged the structure she’d sketched out for them, which was two long bars crossing the hole, holding an electric torch suspended above the pit’s bottom.

First Chair stood with his arms crossed. “What do you mean, we should have figured out how to get water from the first day?”

Lashawnda sat in a chair someone had brought for her. “The plants here are cooperative. They’re not just out for themselves like we’re used to seeing. I watched the records of our landing. The ground
steamed
, but, as Spencer will tell you,” she nodded to me, “you couldn’t get an ounce of water out of a ton of the lichen no matter how hard you tried.”

First Chair looked puzzled.

Lashawnda pressed a button, and the electric torch began to glow. I could feel the heat on my face from ten meters away. Lashawnda said, “The plants were protecting each other, or, more accurately, protecting itself. They’re geniuses at moving moisture.”

In the pit, some of the yellow lichens began to turn brown, and then to smoke. Suddenly the bottom of the pit glistened, rivulets opened from cracks in the rock. Water quickly filled the bathtub-sized depression.

The crew cheered.

“The plant is trying to protect itself,” Lashawnda said. “You better pump it out now,” “because as soon as the heat’s off, it will be gone.”

First Chair barked out orders, and soon pipes led from the hole into temporary tanks in the ship.

That night I held Lashawnda close, her backbone pressed against me; my lips brushed the back of her neck.

“Did you really think that I’d kill myself by throwing myself into the plants?”

She held my wrist, her fingers so delicate and light that I half feared they’d break.

“I didn’t want to lose even a single day with you,” I said.

Lashawnda didn’t speak for a long time, but I knew she hadn’t drifted into sleep. The room was so quiet I could hear her eyelashes flutter as she blinked. “I don’t want to lose a day with you either.” She pulled my arm around her tighter. “Four hundred years is a good, long time to live. I don’t suppose when I do go that you could arrange for me to be buried in that clearing at the gully’s end?”

I remembered how the plants had grasped her hand and arm, how attentive they were when she passed.

“Sure,” I said.

It occurred to me that I wanted to be buried there too, where the beings work together to save each other and share what they have to help the least of them.

“But we’re not there yet,” I said.

WHERE AND WHEN

T
he two scientists surveyed the cabin’s interior from their positions behind the crowd at the windows. Jake flicked the command that turned his recorders on, his eyes and ears sending the signal to the computer buried in his jawbone, while Martin stepped to a table and retrieved what turned out to be a menu. He held the pages like they were holy script.

“After all these years,” Jake exulted while turning slowly for the recorder’s sake. A silk wallpaper imprinted with a map of the world covered the wall beside him. Rich contrasting carpet. Recessed ceiling lights. The transition had been without effect. No sound or dizziness. No flash of light or sensation of falling. Just a blink. “What did we do differently?”

“The math never came out even, but it should have always worked. Maybe there are more opportune moments.” Martin carefully opened the thin document. “A thousand failed attempts. Wouldn’t Brownson be proud.”

Jake grimaced. “If he had survived.” For an instant, he thought he saw Brownson among the people at the window. Broad shoulders. One arm. Gray hair. But the light shifted, and Jake could see he was wrong. Two arms. Blonde hair. A stranger. The project had been Brownson’s from the beginning. All the theoretical work, most of the construction, only letting them help when he needed two hands. Spending long nights bouncing his ideas off them. Arguing with them about paradoxes. His faith buoyed them when they were ready to quit. His determination to succeed drove them on. His obsession. He should be here, Jake thought. This day belongs to him.

A soft thrumming filled the air, and both men compensated slightly as the floor moved beneath their feet.

Jake’s breathing came hard. It
had
been a thousand attempts. They’d poured over Brownson’s papers until their vision had blurred. Constructed and reconstructed the device dozens of times. Was it a math problem? Was there a flaw in the underlying theories? Were the old saws about paradox and the impossibilities true, the ones that worried Brownson incessantly? “We must be able to get around it,” he’d said. If only the old man had confided in them more before he’d died in the explosion, alone in the lab. “I’m going to try something,” he’d said. The investigators concluded later that a bomb destroyed the building. They found chemical traces and a melted timing mechanism. Rival government? Terrorists? Jake and Martin had labored from then on in paranoid secrecy.

“Where and when are we?” Jake said to himself. We’re here! he thought, wherever here is. And we’re now, whenever that is. He panned around the long room, across the backs of the people at the windows, and over metal-framed chairs pushed up to the tables. He lingered his focus on a yellow piano in the room’s center. A wine glass and crystal carafe poised above the keyboard tossed bright glisters from the ceiling lights. The room smelled of cologne and perfume and roast beef. His fingers glided coolly on the silk wall. Jake smiled. What style were the clothes the people wore? 1920s? 1930s? If he queried the computer, it might tell him, but it was more fun to guess. None turned to look at them.

At the window, a middle-aged woman with a cane hooked over her arm said, “Finally. The family has been waiting for hours.” Reading glasses hung from a silver cord around her neck.

Ahh, English, thought Jake. He spoke French, German, Italian, Spanish and a smattering of Mandarin. Martin knew Portugese, Swiss and Russian. If needed, their computer implanted in his jaw could translate, but that was an awkward way to talk. Jake hoped the recorder caught what the people said. Voices from the past. Real ones. The linguists would salivate over the subtleties of vowel shifts, the nuances and shading of pronunciations from hundreds of years in the past. Not radio recordings or movie voices, but real people talking among themselves. The social historians would write treatises on the ways of the era based on his recordings. Whole new areas of study would be opened up. They’d succeeded! They’d jumped the unjumpable chasm.

“The Germans build a marvelous ship, but they can’t control the rain and wind,” an older man with dark muttonchops and a gray smoking jacket replied. “Not yet, anyway.” From the way the woman with the cane and the muttonchopped man stood together, their arms almost touching, their chins at the same angle as they looked out the window, Jake guessed they were husband and wife.

Jake moved to an unoccupied length of window. By putting his face next to the glass that leaned out from the top, he could see that three hundred feet below a grassy airfield waited. He strained to see what was to the right and left beyond the cabin: long stretches of silver-gray fabric, and above them a bulging gray fabric shelf that blocked part of the sky. No wings, he thought. We’re in a blimp.

Cars the size of matchboxes covered the ground on one side of a long wooden building. People ran beneath them. He hoped the glass wouldn’t mess up the recorder’s images.

The muttonchopped man said, “We’re tail heavy. If those folks don’t watch out below, they’ll get a good soaking.”

“How so, dear?” asked his wife. She smiled at him, a brief look, then she gazed out again.

“Water ballast.”

A nearly subsonic, mechanical thump bumped the room, then the people who’d been running scattered, their hands covering their heads as water streamed down from somewhere aft of the cabin. The muttonchopped man laughed.

Martin sidled up beside Jake. “Look at this,” Martin whispered, holding the menu he’d retrieved from the table.

Jake scanned the German text. “Nice wine list. Do you want the beef broth with marrow dumplings or the cold Rhine salmon with spiced sauce and potato salad?” He could barely keep from giggling. They had done it!

“No, not the food. Look at the name.” He stabbed a finger at the top of the page.

Trying to settle his heart, trying to keep the grin off his face, Jake read the heading.

“We’re going to Hindenburg? Is that where this airfield is?” Were the people he’d listened to American or English tourists on holiday in Germany?

Martin shook his head. “No, no. We’re
on
the
Hindenburg
. The zeppelin.
The Hindenburg
.”

Jake’s computer squeaked for attention with a bone-induction message only he could hear:
The
Hindenburg
, first commercial flights in 1936. Final flight, May 6, 1937. Gas volume of 7,062,000 cubic feet. Gross lift of 242.2 tons. Originally designed for helium, the ship . . .”
Jake flicked the voice off
.

Ahead and to the left of the ship, a solid-looking tower of crossbeams and heavy struts awaited them. The zeppelin turned ponderously toward it.

The tower slid slowly toward the front of the ship. The grass below had given way to cement and tarmac, dark with long puddles of standing water. Fragments of the ship’s reflection shown back at them.

“
When
are we on the
Hindenburg
?” said Jake. A crew member opened one of the windows so the passengers could see better. A refreshing, rain-scented breeze filled the cabin.

Martin tapped his finger against the top of the menu impatiently. “What does it matter? We’re on the
Hindenburg
. The go-down-in-flames-oh-the-humanity
Hindenburg
.”

“It
does
matter. The
Hindenburg
flew for a year before it blew up. If it’s 1936, we’re in great shape. Can you imagine? 1936! Franklin Roosevelt is president. The Berlin Olympics. The Spanish Civil War. Picasso is alive, and so is Errol Flynn and Ginger Rogers. We can go to Hollywood! What are the odds of all the places and times in the world that we’d end up on the
Hindenburg
in 1937 when it goes down?”

“Why are we in an airship at all?” Martin looked out the window at the ground. “Brownson said temporal and physical destinations were random. No guessing where we’d end up, but this seems precise. If we’d arrived ten feet that way,” he waved beyond the cabin, “our visit here would have been short.”

Long cables dropped from the front of the ship. Men on the ground ran to catch them. The hum that pervaded the background shifted, and the cabin shuddered. Jake braced a hand against the slick metal window sill to compensate for the change in speed.

Martin shook his head. He stepped around Jake. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to the man with muttonchops. “My friend here is a little confused. Would you tell him what year it is?”

Before the man could answer, Jake heard a soft pop from outside the window, like a gas burner being turned on. The woman with the cane over her arm leaned out the open window, looking up. “What is that, dear?” She reached behind her without turning her head and grabbed the muttonchopped man’s wrist. “It’s like a sunrise.”

A pink and yellow glow brightened the zeppelin’s fabric toward the tail. Jake leaned out too to record the image, but the soft glimmer turned into flames racing toward them, furiously fast.

Jake pushed away from the window.

“It’s on fire!” someone screamed. The floor began to sink beneath their feet.

Martin faced Jake, his expression serious. “1937.”

They reached for their panic switches under their shirts at the same time. Before the world blinked away, the muttonchopped man and the woman with the cane threw themselves out the window. We’re still 300 feet above the ground, Jake thought before it all flickered and they were back in the laboratory.

Collapsed in a chair, Jake still breathed in interrupted hitches, his heart pounding in his throat. His hand fluttered as he reached for the coffee cup. Martin, though, bustled from his workbook full of figures, to the computer, and back again.

“
Nothing
in Brownson’s notes said we could end up in a zeppelin.”

Jake closed his hand on the cup. Gripped hard to stop the shaking. “Not
any
zeppelin. The
Hindenburg
.” He shut his eyes for a second, but he could see the mooring mast looming in front of him, beams and struts reflecting a hard, blazing light. In his vision, the woman, her cane still carefully tucked over her arm, tumbled out the window after her husband.

Martin ran his finger down a line of notes, turned the page, kept reading. “A hundred to four hundred years in the past, Brownson said. Location variable. But the math kept us on the ground I thought. Of course, the damn math never made any sense in the first place. Equations never balanced equally. Nothing reduced perfectly. Nothing was absolute.”

Jake shivered as he pushed away from the chair, glad for the coffee’s heat. From their lab’s single window, he could see the tar paper and gravel roof running to a low, brick border. Beyond that, a few clouds rested on the horizon. Their lab perched on the roof of the industrial park’s highest building. If he opened the door and walked to the edge, a handful of equally nondescript structures with equally bland roofs would lay out before him, like a bleak checkerboard. They were far from Brownson’s destroyed lab and whoever bombed it. He remembered the last time they’d seen Brownson, his only hand protectively over the top of the device, the place for the sleeve for his other arm sewn shut at the shoulder. No sleeve dangled. “Don’t want it catching in the equipment,” he’d said. Brownson, now, was gone, in explosion and fire, like the passengers on the
Hindenburg
.

“Those people are all dead.”

Martin looked up from the notebook. “You’re being sentimental. They’ve been dead for two hundred and fifty years. Their children are dead too, and their children. But if you’re talking about the people on the
Hindenburg
we saw, that’s not true. Only thirty-three died because of the crash. Sixty-two lived.”

The flames had come down so fast. “Only thirty-three?” Jake’s mouth was dry. Every swallow hurt.

After a moment, Martin, his voice distracted and preoccupied, said, “Yes, and two dogs. The rest got out when the ship was low enough. Didn’t your computer tell you all this?”

“I turned it off.”

Jake could still feel the radiant heat. The people screaming, all of them at once. The floor slipping away toward the ship’s tail. Glassware tumbling from the tables, and chairs falling toward the back wall. He had kept pressing the panic switch. How long would the device take to snatch them back? What if it wouldn’t?

“I behaved badly,” said Jake. “I . . .” His gaze roamed the room. Electronic equipment piled on the work table. Security video displayed on four monitors. No one would plant a bomb in their lab! The table, the monitors, the lab on a building’s roof were so far away from the collapsing ship, from old people jumping from windows. “I didn’t help anyone.”

Martin turned the computer off. He shut the notebook. “Jake, those people were dead before we got there. They’d been dead for a quarter of a millennium. You couldn’t help them. You couldn’t harm them. You couldn’t change their fate.” He sat on the table’s edge and smiled. “I know it’s a shock. I’m still quivering myself.” He held his hand out, but if it was trembling, Jake couldn’t see it. “We traveled in time, Jake, and we returned. All that nonsense about causality loops and killing your grandfather so you won’t be born, and a dead butterfly changing human history, it’s wrong. Brownson’s fears were wrong. We can travel in time. Think about how wonderful you felt when you realized what we’d done.”

Surprisingly, the coffee tasted good. Jake took another sip. “That’s true. When we arrived. Yes, it was great.” He brightened. “We’ve made history.”

Martin laughed. “That’s the spirit.” He checked the clock on the wall. “It’s early, still. You know what we need to do, don’t you?”

Jake sat up, put the coffee cup on the table, straightened his shoulders, ran a quick diagnostic on his implanted computer. “Yes, I do.”

“That’s right,” said Martin. “We have to go again.”

He pressed the button that activated their synchronized devices.

“See, we’re on the ground,” said Martin.

They stood on a narrow brick-paved road between a line of two-story shops, neatly-swept concrete stairways leading to their doors, arched stone lintels over the windows. The signs were in French.
Tobacco and Supplies. Fresh bread every morning at 10:00
. Overhead, low, dark clouds grayed the sky, but the sun on the horizon cut under them, casting shadows on the buildings across the street.