It’s all going to be fine. Just let yourself go, and don’t try to fight it.
Sure, Sean.
Down and down and down. Did you fall like this, Sean, when you made your first jump into the future? Down, down, down through the primordial rock of the earth into the bubbling volcanic magma at the core of the planet?
Eric wondered when it was going to stop. And what it was going to feel like when he hit bottom.
Then he realized that he was floating rather than dropping. And then that he wasn’t even floating. He was still in the laboratory, not in some tunnel that passed through the bowels of the earth. That falling sensation had been just in his imagination, a side effect of the trip forward in time. In fact his feet were firmly planted on the floor of the shunt platform.
So he had arrived. He was fifty minutes in the future. Everything was a blur. Eric was so dizzy that he thought his head would spin free from his shoulders. And the nausea that he was feeling was real star-quality nausea. It was so intense that he wanted to applaud it. As soon as he felt a little better.
“Somebody grab me or I’m going to fall,” he managed to blurt.
They caught him just as he started to go over.
“Easy,” someone said. “The disorientation lasts only a couple of moments. Going into the future seems to be more traumatic than going into the past.”
“So I notice,” Eric murmured.
But they were right: you did come out of it pretty fast. He was able to stand unaided now. He could focus his eyes again. The digital elapsed-time counter on the rear wall confirmed that he was exactly fifty minutes into the experiment. Right on schedule.
Sean must already have materialized here ahead of him, making the plus-five-minutes shunt. Eric wondered whether Sean had gone through the same hellacious rabbit-hole sensation then. He wondered whether Sean—
Sean—
Suddenly Eric felt with full force the impact of his twin brother’s absence. The strangeness, the aloneness, the separateness.
It came rushing in like a roaring tsunami: the knowledge that time stood between him and his brother like a sword. He hadn’t felt it on his first time-jump, because that had been a backward one, and when he arrived he had seen Sean right there in the lab, getting ready to begin the experiment. But at this very moment Sean was a hundred minutes away, back at the minus-fifty-minute level. The balancing swing of the pendulum, the equal and opposite displacement.
From here to Time Ultimate—the end of the experiment, some 95 million years out from the starting point—they were never going to be on the same side of the time-line again. One of them would always be in the minus-time level while the other one was an equal distance up ahead in plus-time.
Eric stepped down from the platform. Took a couple of uncertain steps.
“How do you feel now?” Dr. White asked.
He managed to smile at her. “Better.” It was a lie. “Just a little wobbly. Just a little.”
“It’s a jolt, isn’t it?”
He nodded. He wanted to ask Sean how he had felt on his first forward jump. But of course Sean wasn’t here. It was weird, not having him nearby. Not feeling that odd, almost telepathic bond. The sensation that said,I am here, I am Sean, I am closer to you than anyone on this planet and always will be. Almost as if they were Siamese twins and not the ordinary kind. Eric had never talked about that with Sean. It had always seemed, well, embarrassing—telling him what he felt, asking him if he felt it, too. But he was pretty sure that Sean felt it, too.
And right now Eric was feeling the lack of it. Intensely.
“Fifty minutes from Time Zero,” he said. “I don’t suppose much can have changed in the world yet.”
Dr. White chuckled. “Not in fifty minutes. All the really interesting things are still ahead of you.”
“Ahead of me?” Eric shook his head. “No, you’ve got it upside down. The way I look at it, all the really interesting stuff’s behind me.”
She looked baffled by that.
“You don’t know what I mean?” he said.
“Well—”
“No, you don’t, do you. I’m Eric, remember?”
“Yes, of course, but—” Her voice trailed off.
“The twin who’s the paleontologist. The one who’s a lot more interested in the past than the future.” He made a broad, sweeping gesture. “I don’t mind getting a peek at the future. But what I’m really waiting for is at the other end of the pendulum. The Mesozoic, back there at the end of the whole circus. The dinosaurs!” He felt heat rising in his cheeks. Excitement coursing through him, making his heart pound. “That’s why I volunteered for this crazy ride, don’t you know? To meet the dinosaurs, face-to-face. It’s as simple as that. To walk up to a live dinosaur and say hello.”
4. Sean -50 minutes
It was different this time, the second shunt. Sean didn’t feel that initial sense of dead calmness that had tricked him before into thinking he hadn’t gone anywhere. Nor was there a rush of confusion and bewilderment and dismay right afterward. Instead he felt only a second or two of mild dizziness, and then everything seemed fine.
Maybe it’s only the first shunt that’s the bummer, he thought. Or maybe it’s easier because this time I went backward in time instead of forward.
He looked around the lab.
They were all running back and forth like a bunch of lunatics, getting all the last-minute stuff ready. The experiment would happen in less than an hour. So there they were, hooking things up, checking circuits, crunching numbers. There was Dr. Ludwig, face shiny with sweat, yelling into a pocket telephone. And Dr. White, who was usually so calm and gentle, practically tearing at her hair. Harrell, the math man, working at two computers at once. Other scientific types frenziedly doing other final-hour things. And the technicians zipping around the way people did in the ancient silent movies, going much too fast and moving in a silly jerky way.
The only people who looked calm were Ricky and Sean, those intrepid Gabrielson boys. They were standing off to one side with a numbed, zonked look on their faces, waiting to be told to mount the shunt platform and sit down on either side of the displacement torus.
It all looked terribly familiar. Sean had lived through this scene once, after all, less than an hour ago. Now here he was again. Only this time he wasn’t waiting around to be told to sit down on the platform. That was those two fellows over there; he was somebody else, Sean2, the traveler in time, the man from fifty minutes in the future.
“Hey,” he said. “Over here. Me. Anybody going to say hello to me?”
There was a sudden stunned silence in the room. They had all been so busy running through the final insane settingup procedures that they hadn’t even noticed him materialize. But they noticed him now.
“The second backswing!” someone cried. “Here he is!”
“Absolutely,” Sean said. “The big surprise. The walking, talking paradox man. You’ve never seen anything like me, right? You don’t remember seeing any of us heading backward before, is that it?”
“Not yet,” replied Dr. Ludwig. His voice sounded thick and hoarse. He looked a little dazed, as though perhaps he hadn’t been fully prepared for what was happening. Even he, who had spent years thinking about these concepts while he was planning the experiment. “You are the first, but of course not the last. Others will come before you, but we do not remember them yet. You are Sean, yes? Making your second shunt, the minus-fifty-minute swing. But soon there will be Eric at minus five hundred minutes, coming in yesterday evening.”