“Call him back,” Sean told the phone.
“The line is busy.”
“Break in on him, then.”
“The line is under privacy seal,” said the telephone.
Sean swore and shook his head. “Tell him it’s a family emergency.”
“The line is under privacy seal,” the phone repeated.
“I know that. Doesn’t family emergency take priority?”
“The line is under privacy seal,” said the phone once more.
“All right,” Sean grunted. “Forget it.”
For a moment he considered grabbing a cab and going out to his place near the beach to confront himself face to face. But he decided against it. If Sean, was so twitchy and strung out that he couldn’t figure out who had been calling him, he deserved to go on sweating a little while longer about who was going to get the nod for Project Pendulum. Sure, Sean thought. The hell with him. Let him keep on worrying another few weeks. The dummy. Let him just keep right on worrying.
13. Eric -5×106minutes
He could see the house, halfway down the block on the other side of the street. It looked smaller than he recalled, and the pink stucco badly needed repainting. The big palm tree in front was leaning way over, with its roots pulled halfway out of the ground. The earthquake had done that, he remembered. He could see the earthquake crack along the front wall of the house, too. A raw gully like an open trench ran for a hundred yards down the middle of the street. The quake must have come just a couple of days before. They hadn’t had a chance to do much cleaning up yet.
The quake, the big Santa Monica earthquake, had happened right at the beginning of October, 2006, his freshman year in high school. So once again the shunt had brought him in smack on target, carrying him back exactly 9.51 years. From April of 2016 to October of 2006—yes, just right. Here he was. Nine and a half years in the past. And actually in his own teenage neighborhood.
That part of it was hard to believe. The shunt had dumped him down in the middle of Santa Monica, at the corner of Wilshire and Eighteenth. His old territory. No more than a five-minute walk from the house where he and Sean had lived from the time they were ten until they went to college. So of course he had to go over to have a look at it. And maybe to catch a glimpse of his own younger self. Of course.
Now, standing across the street from the pink stucco house, Eric found himself wondering if it was such a hot idea to be poking around in his own past like this. Suddenly it didn’t feel really good.
Not just stirring up the earthquake memories—the jolt in the middle of the night, dogs barking, the sound of dishes breaking, frightened people running out into the streets. He would have expected that bringing it all vividly back to mind would be disturbing, and it was.
But what was even more troublesome was simply revisiting the ordinary memories, the routine day-by-day stuff. The world of 2006 looked a lot less glamorous than Eric remembered, earthquake damage aside. Everything seemed shabbier and more seedy than he expected. The shops out on Wilshire, the cars in the streets, the advertising billboards—it all was run-down, everything had a dreary, old-fashioned look.
Would things really be so much sleeker and shinier nine and a half years down the line? Maybe so. Or maybe over the years he had simply polished up his memories until the past had a much brighter gloss in his mind than it ever had had in reality.
And then there was all the other stuff to think about again, the adolescent stuff, the business of crossing the line from boyhood into manhood. The changes happening in his body. The conflicts with Sean—he and Sean were always battling like fiends in those days, the good old sibling rivalry, five times as fierce because they were identical twins. Sean was fifteen minutes older and he liked to make a big deal about that. And then too the unfocused ambitions, wanting to do something great when he grew up but not having any idea what it would be. The shy, hesitant encounters with girls. Eric had filed all those things away deep within himself. Now, at twenty-three, he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to come face-to-face with them again. It might be better, he thought, to turn around right now and walk quickly the other way.
But he stayed where he was, watching the little pink house across the street and hoping that nobody was watching him.
The upstairs room on the left: that one was his. A poster was taped in the window, probably the dinosaur poster from the County Museum. There was a big plaster-of-paris triceratops on the front lawn too, a pretty crude job but not really awful. The summer he was twelve he had spent a messy few days making that. As far back as he could remember, he had been absolutely nuts about dinosaurs. His ambition was to go out to Wyoming and dig up the biggest one ever found. Sean had laughed at that. “Sure,” he said. “They’ll call it Ericosaurus supergigantus.”
Everybody said it was a phase he was bound to grow out of when he was a little older, but he didn’t. Instead he got deeper into it, paleontology and geology, too. He studied the folds and strata of the rocks in which fossils were found, though it was always the fossils themselves that fascinated him the most. He could remember feverishly packing his little collection of trilobites and ammonites into a suitcase in the first terrifying minutes after the earthquake, back here when he was thirteen, so that he wouldn’t lose them in case a second shock struck and destroyed the house. And then—
Who’s that?
A boy had come out of the house and was standing on the little porch, looking around in wonder and dismay at the earthquake debris in the street. Eric stepped back into the shadows. The boy was short and thin, with straight sandy hair going off wildly in all directions. He had to be thirteen and a half, but to Eric he seemed much younger. His face was smooth and bland-looking and had a strange unfinished look about it.
That must be Sean, Eric thought.
No—wait—
He wasn’t sure. Of all the strange things that had happened to him since the pendulum had begun to swing, this was the strangest, that he should be staring at this boy and not know whether he was seeing his brother or himself. It was absolutely impossible to tell. Time had not yet carved the adult face of this boy out of the raw material of early adolescence. His nose was just a snub and his mouth and lower jaw had that unfinished look. And at this age he and Sean must have looked much more alike than they would later. Perhaps if both twins were standing side by side on the porch, he might be able to guess which one was Eric and which Sean. But as it was he was baffled.
It was almost frightening to have time swallow his identity-like that. Simply being a twin is complicated enough. But when you start losing track of which twin you are—
Then the boy came down the three cracked steps to the lawn. Pausing by the plaster-of-paris triceratops, he grinned and stroked its long crooked horns for a moment in an unmistakably affectionate way. Eric, watching from a distance, grinned also.
No doubt of it now. That boy had to be his own younger self. He felt a shiver go sliding down his spine.
Go on, he told himself. Walk across the street. Introduce yourself to him.
He imagined half a dozen impossible things that he could say.
“Hi, there. You’re not going to believe this, but I’m you of the year 2016, taking part in the first time-travel experiment ever.”
Or: “I’m here to tell you not to worry about a thing. I know you’re uneasy about all sorts of stuff that you know lies ahead of you, but I can guarantee that everything’s going to turn out just fine for you when you grow up.”