Or maybe: “There’s going to be a girl named Carla in your junior year of high school that likes you a whole lot better than she does Sean, but you’re going to convince yourself that it’s the other way around. You’ll be wrong about that. Invite her to the prom before he does.”
Or: “The winner of this year’s World Series will be—”
Or: “Your friend Charlie Graham is going to invite you to fly to Phoenix for Christmas with him and his family in his father’s plane this year. Dad won’t let you go. Be absolutely sure you don’t do anything to change his mind, because that plane’s going to get caught in a freak lightning storm, and—”
Or: “You and Sean are both going to go to Cal Tech four years from now. People are going to try to talk you into going to Harvard or Stanford instead, because they think you and Sean shouldn’t go to the same college. Don’t listen to them. Go to Cal Tech, or else you may change your entire future and miss out on the best thing that’s ever going to happen to you.”
Or—
But he didn’t say any of those things. Instead he stayed on his side of the street and hung back in the shadows, watching his younger self emerge from the yard of the little pink house, peer into the mailbox for a moment, pause to pull a huge red flower from the hibiscus bush on the frontwalk, and go running off toward Wilshire. Eric smiled. He waved at the small retreating figure. And thought:You don’t need any special tips on the future, boy. Just do whatever feels right to you. You’ll make some mistakes, but that’s no crime. And one of these days you’ll grow up and you’ll be me, and you’ll go off on the damndest wild trip that anybody in the whole history of the human race ever took.
14. Sean + 5×106minutes
He guessed he must be somewhere out to the east of Pasadena, at least twenty-five miles, maybe more— around Azusa, Glendora, Claremont, one of those towns. Definitely east: he could see big mountains off to the north, and he was pretty sure that that was Mount Baldy over there. Certainly there weren’t any mountains that size west of Pasadena. And the air had that hot, dry inland quality to it.
Sean wasn’t surprised to find himself this far from the laboratory. A time displacement of nine and a half years was bound to move him a sizable distance in space. But going east puzzled him. After all, his last jump had been a backs hunt and it had brought him out west of the laboratory. It stood to reason that shunting in the opposite direction in time ought to move him in the opposite direction spatially, too. But maybe not. Expecting anything about time travel to stand to reason was probably dumb.
For a moment he wondered whether he had actually gone backward in time, not forward, on this shunt. Which might explain the eastward displacement.
No. Impossible. Dumb dumb dumb. The one thing that did make sense in all this shunting was the mathematics of reciprocity. Everything had to balance. You swung back, then you swung forward, while your brother at the opposite end of the seesaw made an equal and opposite journey. The last place Sean had been was the minus-5×105-minutes level. Now he had to be at the plus-5×106-minutes level. There were no two ways about that. Beyond any doubt, he must have gone forward. His location in time right now, he knew, had to be late November of the year 2025.
In any case he didn’t need a computer to tell him that he had moved into the future. One quick look at his surroundings was all that it took.
This place was strange.
A lot of it looked like any Southern California town of the early twenty-first century, of course. But there were a good many new high-rise buildings too, twenty or thirty stories high. Sean didn’t remember high rises being so common out here. And they were buildings of an astonishing weirdness of design.
One had twin curving spikes on its roof, like gigantic horns. Another had a strip of mirrors a yard wide running down its front from top to bottom. A number of buildings had large eye-shaped glass ovals above their entrances, and some had additional eyes higher up on the facade.
Decorations? Or mysterious electronic devices? And the architects had apparently hated straight lines. All of the buildings had odd wriggling edges, sinuous and fluted and swirly. Sean couldn’t look for long at any one of them without feeling that he was being pulled around the corner into some other dimension.
The newer cars in the streets had the same twisting,looping lines. They were low and long and somehow sinister-looking, with single bands of grillwork across their fronts where headlights should be, and peculiar arching ornaments—or antennas?—rising in startling curves from their roofs. Some were carrying hornlike spikes similar to those on the building down the street. So a whole new kind of design would come into fashion in the years just ahead. He couldn’t say that he admired it much.
The strangest thing of all was that there was no one in the streets.
No one. No one at all. He was all alone. He might have been the only human being in the whole world. He stood in the middle of the wide street under a warm midday sun, looking this way and that. No people in sight. No cars moved, no horns honked. Not a sound anywhere.
What had happened here?
Where was everybody?
This was starting to feel creepy. Frowning, Sean began to walk toward the building with the mirrored facade.
Looking up, he saw his own image, broken and refracted a dozen times over. The entrance of the building was a wall of glass three times as tall as he was, decorated only by a jutting blue sphere that he assumed was some kind of doorknob. Hesitantly he put his hand to it.
The moment he touched it, music filled the air.
It came from everywhere at once, a hundred electronic brass bands blaring a hundred marching tunes. He whirled around, astonished, and saw lights suddenly blazing in every building, dazzling fireworks exploding overhead— fireworks in daytime!—banners unfolding from gravity rotor platforms that had come spinning out from invisible hiding places.
He stared in amazement, trying to read all the banners at once.
WELCOME, SEAN!
THE CITY OF GLENDORA GREETS THE MAN FROM TIME!
GREATER LOS ANGELES CHAMBER OF COMMERCE SAYS
HELLO, SEAN!
THE YEAR2025IS GLAD TO SEE YOU!
SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA’S GREATEST,
IS ALL YOURS!
HERE’S TO YOU—THE FIRST AND FINEST
TIME-TRAVELER!
He glanced up the wide street and saw the marchers advancing toward him now. What seemed like thousands of people, stretching off into the distance as far as he could see.
Of course. This was probably the biggest day in the history of this little town. And they had had better than nine years to prepare for it.
“Good God,” Sean murmured. “I’m famous! And here comes the parade!”
15. Eric + 5×107minutes
It was hot and steamy here, a dense, lush, tropical heat. Just drawing a breath was hard work. The humid air wrapped itself around him like a heavy cloak. The thick sweet perfume of a billion flowers lay upon the air. The sky had a curious greenish color, beautiful in its way, but strange and oddly troubling.
This time, Eric thought, the spatial displacement must have moved him clear out to Hawaii, or one of the South Pacific isles.
But something didn’t seem right. Tropical isles were always warm but never this hot. The temperature must be well over a hundred here. Well over. He had sometimes experienced heat like this, or almost like this, on field trips out in the desert. But that had been dry heat, torrid yet bearable. This stuff was something else, like being in a steam room. Or worse. Not even the desert got this hot very often.