The Time Traveler's Almanac (30 page)

It’s a senseless waste of ten free minutes. He tries again at a Dunkin Donuts with the same results. The next time he wises up and hits a really busy gas station. He figures the way to boost his odds is to find a place where the drawer’s going to be open a lot.

The till’s got five hundred and thirty bucks in it, counting just the big bills, twenties and up. He leaves the rest of the cash; these people have to eat too, and Ernie really isn’t a bad guy. Taking out what he paid for the luggage, he’s close to seven hundred for the day. Not bad. Not bad at all.

This time when he gets out of the john, the cashier’s losing it. She knows the cash is gone but she doesn’t know how.

Ernie practically has a heart attack when she threatens to lock the whole store and call the cops. Breathing is so hard while he’s wearing the suit that he’s already feeling like he ran the Boston Marathon. Having her freak out isn’t any help. But Ernie’s luck is still holding: there’s a pair of young black men by the magazine rack in Charlestown High football jackets. Society is what it is, and that means nobody in this town is going to suspect a middle-aged, out-of-shape white guy of robbing a gas station when they’ve got two black guys right there in Bloods colors.

Ernie gets the hell out of there ASAP. Those boys aren’t going to see jail time for this. There’s no evidence against them. That’s what Ernie tells himself, anyway, and he’s almost certainly right. And, he tells himself, there’s not much point in taking fares today, so he goes home and cracks open some James Ellroy and waits for the call from Janine.

*   *   *

She’s not happy.

She doesn’t even bother calling. She just comes over.

“Where you been?” she says. Not even a hello.

“I been working,” says Ernie, and he shows her a fat wad of bills. “I had a great day.”

He tells her a story about a couple of French businessmen he picked up at Logan, how they didn’t really get the whole tipping thing and how even though he tried to talk them out of it they left him a hundred bucks each. “Bullshit,” she says.

“Your dispatcher called me,” she says, “trying to get a hold of you. They say some kid’s been calling every ten minutes wondering if anyone’s turned in a bag he left in his cab. Silver carry-on. Sound familiar?”

“Hey, yeah,” says Ernie. “Kind of like the bag I bought you, huh?”

“Just like it,” she says. “Don’t you dare try to talk your way out of this.”

He doesn’t. He shows her the receipt from his wallet, with most of the date eaten up by a convenient Dr. Pepper stain.

“You’re up to something,” she says. “Your dispatcher said you hadn’t logged in all day. Now you got two days’ worth of tips. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he says. He’s been making the airport run all day, he says, so what’s the point of calling dispatch? Janine doesn’t buy it. He tries to talk her into dinner. She’s not buying that either.

“Come on,” he says. “You said if I had the money, you’d stay.”

“It’s not about the money,” she says. “It’s about reliability. It’s about me not having to pick up extra shifts at the last minute to make sure the bills get paid. Good night, Ernie.”

“G’night.” There’s nothing else to say.

*   *   *

It takes him an hour to realize he’s got nothing else going that night, and with all the stuff with Janine he knows he isn’t getting to sleep any time soon. He heads out to the cab and calls in to take a couple of fares. Roberta at dispatch asks him where he’s been all day. Ernie says thanks a lot and tells her to go screw herself.

One of his fares takes him within half a mile of Harvard Yard. He can’t help thinking about that kid. He rolls down Mass Ave but the Yard’s dark and empty, the way it usually is when school’s out. Then he sees a dozen people walking past Memorial Church. Most of them look Indian or Chinese, but there’s one tall skinny white guy straggling at the back. It’s the kid who forgot the suit.

He slides into a parking space half a block down and leaves her running, his eye fixed on the rear view. Soon enough he catches sight of the Indians and Chinese and the skinny kid again. They turn down Dunster and Ernie figures he knows where they’re headed. He turns off the car, feeds the meter and makes for the Brew House.

John Harvard’s Brew House is just the sort of place you go if you’re a tourist who just got done with a conference at Harvard. It’s close, it’s popular, and it’s got that ambience the tourists go for. It is not, therefore, a good place to sit by yourself and drown your sorrows. By the time Ernie gets inside, the Indians and Chinese are talking loudly in the corner, boisterous and drinking like tourists. The skinny kid’s by himself at the bar, hunched over a beer like he’s whispering secrets to it.

He’s the kind of skinny Ernie only ever sees in pictures of foreigners, East African refugees or the Jews in Auschwitz.

He’s the kind of skinny that makes you stare. Ernie tries not to.

The kid finishes his beer and orders another. Ernie sits down two stools away and orders a Summer Blonde. They sit there a few minutes, quiet. The kid looks up at Ernie and his eyes are red around the edges. They have a kind of light to them.

Cruel, Ernie wants to call it. Cold. But as soon as he thinks he sees it, it’s gone, and everything in the kid’s face tells Ernie he doesn’t recognize him at all. That’s good.

Ernie asks him how he’s doing. Fine, he says. “You don’t look it,” Ernie says. “Hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you look more stressed out than I ever been in my life, and I been held up twice. Once at gunpoint, once at knifepoint. Even then I wasn’t as stressed as you.”

“Yeah,” the kid says, “well, the last couple of days have been pretty rough.” He knocks back the last half of his drink in one gulp.

Ernie orders him another. “Whatsa matter?” he says. “Lose your job or something?”

“You could say that,” he says. “My job, my fellowship, my future. Maybe my wife. I don’t know.”

“Come on,” says Ernie. “It can’t be that bad. You’re young and full of beans. You got your whole life ahead of you.”

He gives Ernie a disdainful look. “Platitudes and beer?” he says. “That’s what I need to solve all my problems? Maybe we’ll do a cliché chaser after this.”

“Hey, sorry,” Ernie says. “Just trying to help. The point I was gonna make is, whatever’s wrong, you got plenty of time to fix it. You’re smart, you’re young … how old are you anyway?”

“That depends on how you look at it,” says the kid. Ernie gives him a funny look and the kid changes his answer right away. “Twenty-nine,” he says.

“There you go,” Ernie tells him. “Plenty of time.”

“Mister,” says the kid, “no offense, but I know a lot more about time than you ever will.”

That’s the hook Ernie needs. Years ago, it used to be that people talked to their cabbies. These days they’re in the back on their iPods or cell phones or whatever, but for a good twenty years a big part of Ernie’s job was making chitchat. He’s still good enough at it that he can prod the kid in the right direction. Now that he’s got him talking about time, he keeps him there.

At first Ernie’s only pretending to be interested, but actually the kid’s got some pretty neat stuff to say. Once Ernie gets him talking about his research at school, it’s hard to shut the kid up long enough to order another round. The truth is, Ernie can’t follow half of what the kid’s telling him.

He’s been meaning to put Hawking and Greene and Tyson on his reading list for years; now he’s wishing he’d gotten around to it. His favorite used book store is right across the square and Ernie’s half-wishing they were still open so he could run over there and do some digging.

But they’re not, so he can’t, and at any rate he needs to concentrate a hundred percent on what the kid’s telling him. It turns out the kid is some kind of physics genius. Ernie never went to college – to him it always seemed like too much work for too little reward – but he knows enough to know you have to be some kind of genius to be finishing a double doctorate by twenty-nine.

Even if most of what the kid says is over his head, Ernie comes to understand they didn’t start with a suit. The first experiments worked with lumps of some kind of radioactive material Ernie thinks he remembers hearing of once. Cesium, it’s called. Ernie’s pretty sure cesium’s in the periodic table but he’s not positive. The kid explained how you can use whatever these lumps give off to measure the passage of time – something about half-lifes and atomic clocks and a bunch of other stuff Ernie hasn’t thought about since high school.

But Ernie understands the long and short of it well enough.

The bottom line is, the kid and his professor at school found a way to make these lumps spend some of their own future in the present.

“No way,” Ernie tells him. “That’s impossible.”

“It’s not,” says the kid, and he buries Ernie under a lot more stuff there’s no way he’d have been able to follow if he hadn’t seen the suit do its thing. It all had to do with “four dimensional space-time” and thinking of time as cause and effect, and what is cause and effect except the transfer of energy? By the time Ernie’s ass leaves the bar stool he’ll have forgotten almost all of this, but he’ll remember that question because the kid poses it to him about a hundred times.

Over the next hour Ernie wraps his lightly liquored brain around the idea that we’ve been storing energy and converting it and moving it around for a long time, and that if causality is a kind of energy then if you understand it right you can basically move cause and effect. Ernie tries to sum it up like this: “So what you’re saying is, you’re majoring in time travel.”

“It’s not time travel,” says the kid. “It’s more like borrowing time. Think of it as taking a link from a chain and inserting it earlier in the chain.”

He finishes his beer and Ernie signals the girl behind the bar for another round. The kid’s a lightweight drinking-wise, but Ernie has to admit he’s pretty damn smart even this many beers down. Ernie’s a couple behind him and he’s only an inch away from just plain lost.

The kid says, “Never mind the chain,” and he goes back to the radioactive lumps. Eventually he gets Ernie to see the big picture. You take two of these lumps, the exact same size, and you pop one of them in a machine that does what the suit does.

You set the machine to borrow an hour from one o’clock that afternoon. You turn the machine on and bam, lump one – the one in the machine – is smaller than lump two. Then, at one o’clock, all of a sudden lump one isn’t radioactive anymore. It stays that way for an hour, not radioactive and not shrinking.

Then, by two o’clock, both lumps are radioactive again and both of ’em are back to the exact same size.

It’s weird stuff. And Ted Williams could hit a little bit.

Ernie would have said the kid was full of crap if he hadn’t been doing that very experiment all afternoon. “So what’s the point?” he says. “Give a hammer and chisel and I figure I could make your lump smaller for you. I wouldn’t need two hours and a college degree, neither.”

“What’s the point?” asks the kid, and he squints at Ernie like Ernie just asked him which one’s worth more, a nickel or a hundred dollar bill. “We didn’t limit the experiments to lumps of cesium,” he says. “We built a bodysuit,” he says, and he tells Ernie all about it.

Ernie gets it. He gets it just fine. The suit is free money. It’s the ultimate blank check. According to the kid the college types invented it to see if something that borrowed time from its own future could pull other things into its timestream, but Ernie’s got bigger fish to fry. And he’s got bigger questions too, but he can’t ask them flat out without tipping the kid off that he has the suit. So he sits. And he listens.

And he waits.

When the kid’s done, Ernie says, “Sounds like you’re living the dream, sport. You and your prof went and invented the ring of Gyges.”

“What do you mean?” says the kid.

Ernie rolls his eyes, wondering what they’re teaching kids in college these days. He says, “In the suit you can do whatever you want, right? And nobody can do anything about it, right? ’Cause you’re the only time traveler? My friend, what you got is action without consequences. You got the ultimate get out of jail free card.”

“It’s not free,” the kid says. “And the consequences are far too high.”

Ernie’s finally got him where he wants him. “What’re the consequences?” he says. “What’s the downside to this time traveling of yours?”

“It isn’t time travel,” says the kid. “And it isn’t free. This is borrowing time. Take it from me: if you do it enough, you’ll destroy your life.”

Ernie’s balls shrink up into his gut. He knew it. He just knew it. There had to be a downside. Cancer. Something. But he can’t let any of that show on his face. Instead he says, “What do you mean? You don’t look dead to me.”

“Not yet,” the kid says, “but I’m living on borrowed time.”

He laughs at himself and drains his beer. They’ve had four together so far. Ernie orders another round.

“My life isn’t my own anymore,” the kid tells him. “My daughter was born the day after I defended my second proposal. Seeta. My wife’s family’s Indian. Beautiful, beautiful girl.”

He stops to take another drink. “I had a brand new baby,” he says, “two dissertations to write, and only a year before my grant money ran out. Do you know what kind of pressure that is? No. Of course you don’t. A year wasn’t enough. I needed more time.”

That look comes back in his eyes. “I put on the device,” he says. “Every night, as soon as Lakshmi and Seeta were asleep, I set it for eight hours. At first I was planning to use the time to write, but my computer wouldn’t work. I could dislodge the keys into my time-stream but not the electrons in the wires. So I wrote during the day and used my extra eight hours a night to read. I finished my thesis on Poincaré’s special relativity in ten months flat. I’m halfway through the second one now.”

“Let me get this straight,” says Ernie. “You been doing this every night?”

“I’ve been living thirty-two hour days for over a year,” the kid tells him.

“Jesus,” says Ernie. “No wonder you look tired. How much you borrowed so far?”

“Eight hours a night for a year is just short of a hundred and twenty-two days,” says the kid. He chuckles into his mug.