The Time Traveler's Almanac (72 page)

And we fell silent then, and sat almost together in our thicket, fearful and attentive, she listening to the distant incessant clatter of firearms, and I for any sound that might be the stranger returning. I took no comfort from his assurance that he preferred not to have our corpses discovered in his slaughterhouse. Sociopaths changed their minds, too. When, at length, we did hear the unmistakable crack of wood snapping underfoot, both of us uttered hoarse little cries of fright and spun around – just as John stepped out from behind a tree. He beamed at us and said, in his infuriatingly cheerful way, “Not too much the worse for wear, I trust.”

He was dressed as I had last seen him, in a striped cloth suit and a beaver hat. His hair was immaculately waved and curled, and there didn’t seem to be a speck of dirt anywhere on his person.

Elizabeth squawled at him in the voice cats use when their tails get caught in doors:
“Where the hell have you been?”

He looked at her amusedly. “Oh, around. Before that, at the exposition, of course. I think everybody in England must’ve been there.” He fingered his silk cravat, stroked his moustache, looked past her to give me a man-to-man kind of smirk. “Don’t ever let anybody tell you that nineteenth-century gals weren’t lookers, or that they didn’t know how to have a good time.”

“John,” said Elizabeth, “I am riven with nausea at the mere thought.”

He laughed. “I just didn’t know you two’d gotten lost. Not at first, anyway. When we arrived in London,” and he looked very pointedly at me, “you weren’t around,” and he looked as pointedly at Elizabeth, “and she wasn’t around, and I just sort of figured both of you’d run off into the crowd or, ah, somewhere.”

Beside me, Elizabeth groaned in disgust. “Give me a break!”

I took my cue from that and said to him, “We didn’t even know each other before we wound up here. We don’t seem to like each other now that we have gotten acquainted.”

“Pity. She’s really not bad-looking underneath all that dirt, you know.”

Elizabeth went straight at him, spewing curses. Though he would have made two and a half of her, he retreated, stepping surprisingly daintily through the plant debris as she reached for his lapels with her two very dirty hands. She was half-unshod, however, and there were thorns in the mat of plant stuff underfoot, and it was no time at all before her lavish description of his mating habits was cut short by a yelp of pain. She grabbed her foot and hopped backward a couple of steps to sit on a fallen bole.

I asked myself, bitterly and not for the first time in all the long while I had known John, why he had to be the one with the special affinity for my favorite place and period of history. I stepped over to Elizabeth and knelt before her. “Let me see your foot.”

“Oh God, what
is
this? Sight of blood turn you on or – ow! Damn it!”

I showed her the thorn, then tossed it aside. “John,” I said, “give me your handkerchief.”

I noted with a certain sense of satisfaction that he looked distressed as he drew the handkerchief from his pocket. “This is real silk, Lew.
Silk.
”

“So it is, John, so it is.”

“Ah, jeeze.”

“God,” Elizabeth murmured as I bound her foot, “for a guy who can’t find his own ass in the woods, you’re such a damn Boy Scout.”

She said it almost tenderly. Very surprised, I looked up at her face. She smiled fleetingly. After a moment’s hesitation, I smiled back. Removing a thorn from someone’s foot is vastly underrated as a bonding experience. I felt like Androcles.

Then her attention swung from me and her foot back to John, and she immediately took on the aspect of Mount Pelée about to blow.

“Hey,” he told her, “give
me
a break, okay? I did have other people to look after on this little excursion. I
am
sorry about losing you. But you know how it is. These little slippages happen.”

Mount Pelée exploded. “
This
little slippage nearly got us killed!”

“But it didn’t actually get you killed. And I
did
come looking for you as soon as I realized that you really
weren’t
around. And now I have found you, haven’t I? Well? Haven’t I?”

Elizabeth sullenly yeah-yeahed. I didn’t respond. I was dead tired. All I wanted to do was go home, and he grated on the little I had left that could be grated on. There is no one more smug than somebody who has your signed waiver stashed someplace safe.

A resounding crash of gunfire from downstream made us look around. John’s expression was mildly reproachful. “Boy,” he said, “everybody seems to have got up on the wrong side of bed this morning. But, as I was saying. Sorry it took so long to locate you. You’ve really got no idea how many time-travelers are wandering around this area right now, right at this very minute. Their trails are everywhere. I mean,
everywhere.
New trails and old ones, too. Who’d think so many people’d want to come watch two armed mobs chase each other around the countryside? Give me the good times, thank you.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said wearily. “The battle’s starting up again.”

He nodded, but he also said, “Where’s your spirit of adventure, Lew?”

“Same place as my sense of humor. Gone.”

“Boy, I guess so. Well, come on, the twenty-first-century express is now boarding.” He stepped closer, gave his spotless gloves a sorrowful look, held out his hands to us. I took one. Elizabeth started to take the other, then held back.

“My hands are dirty,” she told him. “Mustn’t mess up your nice clean gloves.”

She reached out and deliberately wiped her black fingers against the front of his coat.

“Much better,” she declared, and entwined her still-nasty fingers with his.

He sighed. “Lady, you are no lady.”

“Cut the crap,” she said, “and just take us home.”

There was a moment’s lightheadedness, a sensation of blacking out, and then the three of us were floating together through the treetops, unmindful of gravity and spiky branches alike. Now, as we emerged into the open sky, I saw the vast extent of the forest and caught a glimpse of a road below and ahead, and a long swarm of men.

It was only a glimpse, though. Among the trees were many opaque puffs of grayish-white smoke. Rising here and there were columns of darker stuff, some of it shot with red and orange flames. As far as the eye could see, the world lay obscured by a translucent, pungent haze.

Beside me, John said, “I even ran into some visitors from our own future. First time for me. It was some historian with a pack of grad students in tow. Fun bunch
they
were, too, let me tell you. They got all sniffy when I asked ’em about things up the way. Said it was against the rules. Rules? I said, and the old guy just grinned at me and cackled, There’ll be
laws
one day, and cops, too. Can you imagine? Cops!”

I remembered the stranger’s smile as he talked of Yankees cooked just right, and I nodded, more to myself than to John. I could imagine cops.

Then, suddenly, we were
going.

TIME GYPSY

Ellen Klages

Ellen Klages is an American writer who has published two acclaimed young-adult novels.
The Green Glass Sea,
which won the Scott O’Dell Award, the New Mexico Book Award, and the Judy Lopez Memorial Award, and
White Sands, Red Menace,
which won the California and New Mexico Book awards. Her short stories have been nominated for the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, World Fantasy Award, and Campbell Award. Her story, “Basement Magic,” won a Nebula in 2005. She lives in San Francisco, in a small house full of strange and wondrous things. “Time Gypsy” was first published in 1998, in
Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction,
edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel.

Friday, February 10, 1995. 5:00 p.m.

As soon as I walk in the door, my officemate Ted starts in on me.

Again. “What do you know about radiation equilibrium?” he asks.

“Nothing. Why?”

“That figures.” He holds up a faded green volume. “I just found this insanely great article by Chandrasekhar in the ’45
Astrophysical Journal.
And get this – when I go to check it out, the librarian tells me I’m the first person to take it off the shelf since 1955. Can you believe that? Nobody reads anymore.” He opens the book again. “Oh, by the way, Chambers was here looking for you.”

I drop my armload of books on my desk with a thud. Dr. Raymond Chambers is the chairman of the Physics department, and a Nobel Prize winner, which even at Berkeley is a very, very big deal. Rumor has it he’s working on some top secret government project that’s a shoe-in for a second trip to Sweden.

“Yeah, he wants to see you in his office, pronto. He said something about Sara Baxter Clarke. She’s that crackpot from the 50s, right? The one who died mysteriously?”

I wince. “That’s her. I did my dissertation on her and her work.” I wish I’d brought another sweater. This one has holes in both elbows. I’d planned a day in the library, not a visit with the head of the department.

Ted looks at me with his mouth open. “Not many chick scientists to choose from, huh? And you got a post-doc here doing that? Crazy world.” He puts his book down and stretches. “Gotta run. I’m a week behind in my lab work. Real science, you know?”

I don’t even react. It’s only a month into the term, and he’s been on my case about one thing or another – being a woman, being a dyke, being close to 30 – from day one. He’s a jerk, but I’ve got other things to worry about. Like Dr. Chambers, and whether I’m about to lose my job because he found out I’m an expert on a crackpot.

Sara Baxter Clarke has been my hero since I was a kid. My pop was an army technician. He worked on radar systems, and we traveled a lot – six months in Reykjavik, then the next six in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Mom always told us we were gypsies, and tried to make it seem like an adventure. But when I was eight, mom and my brother Jeff were killed in a bus accident on Guam. After that it didn’t seem like an adventure any more.

Pop was a lot better with radar than he was with little girls. He couldn’t quite figure me out. I think I had too many variables for him. When I was ten, he bought me dresses and dolls, and couldn’t understand why I wanted a stack of old physics magazines the base library was throwing out. I liked science. It was about the only thing that stayed the same wherever we moved. I told Pop I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, but he said scientists were men, and I’d just get married.

I believed him, until I discovered Sara Baxter Clarke in one of those old magazines. She was British, went to MIT, had her doctorate in theoretical physics at 22. At Berkeley, she published three brilliant articles in very, very obscure journals. In 1956, she was scheduled to deliver a controversial fourth paper at an international physics conference at Stanford. She was the only woman on the program, and she was just 28.

No one knows what was in her last paper. The night before she was supposed to speak, her car went out of control and plunged over a cliff at Devil’s Slide – a remote stretch of coast south of San Francisco. Her body was washed out to sea. The accident rated two inches on the inside of the paper the next day – right under a headline about some vice raid – but made a small uproar in the physics world. None of her papers or notes were ever found; her lab had been ransacked. The mystery was never solved.

I was fascinated by the mystery of her the way other kids were intrigued by Amelia Earhart. Except nobody’d ever heard of my hero. In my imagination, Sara Baxter Clarke and I were very much alike. I spent a lot of days pretending I was a scientist just like her, and even more lonely nights talking to her until I fell asleep.

So after a master’s in Physics, I got a Ph.D. in the History of Science – studying her. Maybe if my obsession had been a little more practical, I wouldn’t be sitting on a couch outside Dr. Chambers’s office, picking imaginary lint off my sweater, trying to pretend I’m not panicking. I taught science in a junior high for a year. If I lose this fellowship, I suppose I could do that again. It’s a depressing thought.

The great man’s secretary finally buzzes me into his office. Dr. Chambers is a balding, pouchy man in an immaculate, perfect suit. His office smells like lemon furniture polish and pipe tobacco. It’s wood-paneled, plushly carpeted, with about an acre of mahogany desk. A copy of my dissertation sits on one corner.

“Dr. McCullough.” He waves me to a chair. “You seem to be quite an expert on Sara Baxter Clarke.”

“She was a brilliant woman,” I say nervously, and hope that’s the right direction for the conversation.

“Indeed. What do you make of her last paper, the one she never presented?” He picks up my work and turns to a page marked with a pale green Post-it. “‘An Argument for a Practical Tempokinetics?’” He lights his pipe and looks at me through the smoke.

“I’d certainly love to read it,” I say, taking a gamble. I’d give anything for a copy of that paper. I wait for the inevitable lecture about wasting my academic career studying a long-dead crackpot.

“You would? Do you actually believe Clarke had discovered a method for time travel?” he asks. “Time travel, Dr. McCullough?”

I take a bigger gamble. “Yes, I do.”

Then Dr. Chambers surprises me. “So do I. I’m certain of it. I was working with her assistant, Jim Kennedy. He retired a few months after the accident. It’s taken me 40 years to rediscover what was tragically lost back then.”

I stare at him in disbelief. “You’ve perfected time travel?”

He shakes his head. “Not perfected. But I assure you, tempokinetics is a reality.”

Suddenly my knees won’t quite hold me. I sit down in the padded leather chair next to his desk and stare at him. “You’ve actually done it?”

He nods. “There’s been a great deal of research on tempokinetics in the last 40 years. Very hush-hush, of course. A lot of government money. But recently, several key discoveries in high-intensity gravitational field theory have made it possible for us to finally construct a working tempokinetic chamber.”