“Here,” he said, handing the paper back. “Thanks.”
“How does it feel?”
Eric grinned. “I always like to see Friday’s newspaper on Tuesday,” he said. “You get a good jump on things that way.”
8. Sean -5×103minutes
Four of them were waiting for him on the next swing: Dr. White and Dr. Thomas representing the psychological side of the experiment, Dr. Mukherji and Dr. Camminella representing the theoretical mathematicians.
This was his fourth shunt. It was beginning to mount up now. The swings were calibrated in logarithmically increasing intervals, each one ten times wider than the one before. So he had gone five minutes into the future, then fifty minutes into the past, five hundred minutes into the future, five thousand minutes into the past—
Five thousand minutes. Five times 103minutes. Five thousand minutes was 83 hours and 20 minutes, which was 3.46 days. Time Zero for the experiment, the point from which all the shunting began, was Tuesday, the nineteenth of April, 2016, at half past ten in the morning. And here he was, stepping down from the shunt platform three and a half days before that.
The reception committee seemed to be having a little trouble coming to terms with that. They were all trying hard to look cool and collected. Sean could see them working at it.
But they didn’t even come close to being able to hide their amazement. Their eyes were wide, their faces were flushed, their tongues kept licking back and forth over dry lips. It was the look of people who knew that they were experiencing something miraculous.
“Nice of you all to be here to greet me,” he said cheerfully. “I’m Sean, in case you weren’t quite certain. It’s last Friday night, isn’t it?”
“Friday, yes,” Dr. White said. Her voice was thick and husky, choked with emotion. “The fifteenth of April.”
“At eleven-ten P.M.,”said Sean. “On the button.”
“On the button,” Dr. White said.
Why did they seem so stunned? After all, this was his fourth shunt, two forward and now two back. They ought to be getting used to it by now.
Then he scowled at his own idiocy. He was getting used to it. But it was all new to these people. They were living three and a half days ago, back there before the start of the experiment. This was the first time they were seeing a shunter.
Maybe they had never truly believed the experiment would work. Or maybe they accepted it on a theoretical level but hadn’t properly prepared themselves for the real thing—for having him come dropping right out of next Tuesday like this. Despite all the years they had put in, working toward this moment, thinking about what it was going to be like to make time travel an actuality, his arrival must be an overpowering, almost shattering event for them.
Dr. Thomas said, “We have a few tests that we’d like you to take.”
Sean gave him a sour look. “Tests?”
Dr. Thomas was the team’s head psychologist, and he was always saying “We have a few tests we’d like you to take.” Sean had never cared much for the trim, smug little psychologist, who sometimes seemed more like a computerized simulation of a human being than an actual flesh-and-blood person.
In the planning stages of the project he had subjected Sean and Eric to multiphasic electronic devices that buzzed and flashed and screeched maddeningly as they probed the twins’ minds. The ordeal was necessary, they were told, to find out whether they were stable enough to withstand the stress of time-shunting. Apparently they were.
All right. What more did Thomas need to know now? The biggest test of all was underway this very minute: the experiment itself. Wasn’t that enough for him? Sean hadn’t been expecting another bout with those instruments of torture.
“Over here, please,” Dr. Thomas said. “Can you walk unaided?”
“Of course I can walk unaided. You think I’ve become brain-damaged?”
“Please. There isn’t much time.”
“I simply wonder why it’s necessary to inflict even more of these idiotic—”
“What we wish to determine,” Dr. Thomas said frostily, “is whether retrograde motion through time has deleterious effects on the human nervous system. Or, if you prefer me to put it in words of a single syllable—”
“You wouldn’t know how to,” Sean said. “But I assure you that my mind is still working properly. I could even spell ‘retrograde’ for you. Maybe even ‘deleterious’. How about ‘retrograde’ backward? That would be E-D-A-R-G—”
Dr. White put her hand lightly over Sean’s and said very quietly, “We don’t have any doubt that you’re taking the shunt beautifully, Sean. But we do need quantitative data.We have to know things about your pulse rate, your reaction times, your automatic reflexes, et cetera, et cetera. It really is important. And this is practically our only chance to get it. The testing machines are set up to record everything quickly and automatically. We’ve only got fifteen minutes, you know, before you go shunting off again into the future.”
Throughout the entire life of the project Dr. White had been the cool, gentle voice of reason. Whenever anyone had started yelling—and there had been plenty of that, as deadlines neared and everybody’s nerves grew taut—she had always been the one to restore peace.
Once again Sean found it impossible to resist her calm, easy manner. With a sigh he said, “All right, go ahead and test me.”
He waited grimly for the onslaught of the blinking screens and whirling patterns and screaming sirens.
Might as well humor them, he thought. Dr. White was right that they wouldn’t have many more chances to do this to him. The next time he came pastward, it would be at the minus-5×105-minutes level. That would be nearly a year ago. They probably would be expecting him then, and they’d have more tests ready. But the swing after that would bring him into the past at minus 5×107minutes. That would be the year 1921. Dr. Thomas wouldn’t even have been born yet, nor even his parents. Maybe not even Dr. Thomas’s grandparents. He wasn’t going to have to worry about Dr. Thomas or anybody else sitting him down in front of multiphasic testing machines in the year 1921.
9. Eric -5×104minutes
It was raining. Eric could hear the drumbeat of the drops hitting the roof of the single-story laboratory building. So this had to be March. The month before the experiment. It had rained practically every day in March, a torrential climax to the wettest winter Southern California had had in years, causing mudslides and other calamities all over the place. Then at the end of the month the sun had reappeared, and the weather had been dry and warm ever since, as it probably was going to be until the fall. There is hardly ever any rain in Southern California between April and November. But plenty of it was coming down right now.
The sound of the rain was beautiful in his ears. Maybe hillsides were turning to muck and goo out there and houses were floating off their foundations, but to Eric the pounding of those pelting drops was the sweetest music he could imagine. It told him that everything was still going according to plan.
He was fifty thousand minutes in the past. That was 833.3 hours. Or 34.72 days. They had drilled the arithmetic of the time journey into him until he could recite it in his sleep.