Sean had never been alone like this before.
He had understood that the experiment was going to separate them in time, sending Eric one way, him another. But there is understanding and there is understanding. There are things you understand in your mind, and there are things you understand in your bones. Now that the contact between them had actually been severed, he was coming fully to realize what it meant to be separated from his twin by an enormous and uncrossable gulf of time. That was different. That was terrifying.
“Sean?” Dr. Ludwig said again, rumbling and strange as before. “I asked you how you were feeling.”
“Not bad, I told you.” He turned, stared, worked hard at focusing his eyes. He was getting some odd visual effects now. Streaks of colored lights, reds and blues and greens. Everything seemed too long and narrow. And there was some double vision. He was dimly aware that Dr. Ludwig was still talking to him. And Dr. White, too. Their words came to him from a million miles away. How are you feeling, how are you feeling, how are you feeling. What did that mean? Oh. It means how are you feeling, he thought. Is that any of their business? He was so terribly confused.
“Sean—”
“I’m all right!” he snapped. He didn’t want them to think he couldn’t take it.
They looked at him blankly. He tried to explain things, but he had the feeling his words were ricocheting around them like bullets. They turned to each other in bewilderment.
“What did he say?”
“What did he say?”
“What did he say?”
“Sean? Try to speak more slowly. You’re all hypered up.”
“Am I? You sound all slowed down.”
It was getting worse. He felt that his own chair was melting and flowing beneath him. And he was starting to melt with it. A sense of chill and a sense of burning at the same time. A strangeness in his stomach. A rising and a falling in his chest. That first calm moment when nothing seemed to have changed seemed like a million years ago. Everything was changing now. Everything. He wondered if Eric was feeling anything like this. Wherever Eric was right now. Whenever Eric was.
“Maybe my voice will be easier for you to make out, Sean.”
That was Dr. White. Speaking gently, softly, carefully. Her voice sounded deeper than it should have been, but not as strange as Dr. Ludwig’s.
Sean tried to force himself to relax.
He said, making an effort to be understood, “What was the span of the jump, Dr. White?”
“Five minutes precisely. Right on target.”
“And how long has it been since I got here?”
“Fifteen, twenty seconds.”
That was all? It felt like half an hour. His mind was feeding him distorted information. Was this how it was going to be, on and on through time, everything blurred and confused? Like a nightmare. Stumbling across millions of years in a dopey fog, understanding nothing.
“What have you heard from my brother?” Sean asked.
“Your brother’s fine.” Dr. Ludwig’s voice.
“You’ve heard from him?”
“We saw him. Five minutes before Time Zero.”
Sean frowned and shook his head. Everything was so hard to follow.
“Five minutes before the shunt? Well, yes, but what I meant was—” He paused. He didn’t know what he meant. “I know you saw my brother then. You saw both of us then, right here. But—”
“We saw him and we saw you.” The soft voice of Dr. White. “But we saw an extra Eric also, Eric2, the one traveling backward from Time Zero. Don’t you remember that?”
“An extra Eric.” He felt so stupid.
“Smiling at us. Winking. Happy and confident.”
“Traveling backward,” Sean murmured, struggling to cut through the fog in his brain. “An extra Eric.”
So muddled, his mind. His fine mind, his outstanding mind. He wondered if he’d ever be able to do physics again. Or even simply to think straight. He shook his head again, slowly, heavily, like a wounded bear.
They had seen Ricky traveling backward in time. Saw him arrive five minutes before Time Zero, before the start of the experiment. In this very room. Why can’t I remember seeing him? Or do I? I think I do, yes. Sean closed his eyes a moment. He tried to imagine the scene.
That ghostly figure, hovering in front of them, looking so very cheerful. Ricky always looked cheerful, even at crazy times. So there had been one Eric Gabrielson sitting in the right-hand chair on the shunt platform and another one, Eric2, floating around the middle of the room. And that had been five minutes before Time Zero—the shunt that balanced this one that had carried him five minutes beyond Time Zero. The first swing of the giant pendulum that would cut across millions of years, carrying them backward and forward, backward and forward, backward and forward—
He wasn’t sure if he could remember seeing that other Ricky or not.
Sean struggled to understand. His mind still felt doped. It was temporal shock, the effect of the shunt plus the effect of the change that had just taken place in the very recent past with Ricky’s arrival there. The past would be constantly changing with each swing of the pendulum. The robot experiments had shown that. Each swing and they’d all have an entirely new set of memories, reaching back farther and farther, five minutes, fifty minutes, five hundred minutes, five thousand minutes—
Something was glowing now on the far wall.
The temporal energy must be building up again, creating-displacement momentum for the next shunt. They had said the swings were going to be quick ones in the early stages of the journey, in and out of the past or the future in just a couple of minutes during the first few shunts, zip zip zip zip.
Dr. White said, “There’s nothing to worry about, Sean. It’s all going to work out all right.”
Sean nodded and smiled. Suddenly his mind seemed to clear a little. He was beginning to feel like himself again. “Sure it will,” he said. “I never doubted it.” He became aware of strangeness beginning to enfold him. The field was taking him onward. “Say hello to Ricky for me,” he said, and waved at them as they grew blurry around him. “I’ll see you all a little later.”
3. Eric + 50 minutes
He was falling. Like Alice going down the rabbit hole, except that when she fell it was in a slow, stately way, with plenty of time to look around. He was plummeting crazily, a wild juggernaut zooming through the center of the earth. Down through the geological strata, past the Cretaceous and the Jurassic, past the Permian, the Silurian, the Cambrian. Choking and gasping, tumbling end over end, arms and legs flailing, his hair flying in the hot breeze that came blasting up from below.
He thought he was going to fall forever.
He had never imagined it was possible to feel so sick and dizzy.
All the worst stuff comes right at the beginning, Sean had told him. And then it’s okay.
Had Sean really said that? Eric tried to remember. Yes. It was at the minus-fifty-minute level, just when he and Sean both were starting to get a little panicky about the crazy project they had committed themselves to. And then Sean2, had come whistling out of the future looking cocky and cheerful. Engaging in a whole bunch of incomprehensible babble with Dr. Ludwig about how past tense and future tense lose their meanings when you travel in time. And then, jaunty as can be, coming over to Eric and Sean1, to tell them not to worry about anything.