Up above, there was one burned ceiling panel. I got up on a chair and gingerly lifted it; a black cube fell out and smashed on the floor, scattering an assemblage of electronics components. “Betcha that’s the room recording system,” I said.
“No bet. I’m sure it is.” Helen crouched and looked it over. “Yep. In fact it’s more interesting than that. Charred microphone. Charred recording block. Charred everything between those two points. But nothing else even got warm.”
I climbed down off the chair and said, “This time I get to ask what’s the assumption we’re making.”
Helen sighed. “I think we’ve been assuming the universe is not out to get us. And I think all the evidence is, that it is.”
After the office cleanup crew got done, there was only about an hour left, so we sat down to try to write our report. We both noticed that whoever was typing had a tendency to space out and stare into space, and now and then to type a few meaningless words before trailing off, but by dint of dictating to each other, and occasionally giving each other a gentle shake, we got it done. I almost erased it just as we finished, but Helen knocked my hand out of the way and we managed to send it to Iphwin.
We had accomplished the whole task list for the day, such as it had been, and we were exhausted, but there wasn’t any feeling of having put in a good day’s work. “Well,” I said, “want to go for an elevator ride?”
“You hopeless romantic,” she said.
We got into the elevator, rode down to our floor, and went into our apartment. The clothing I had ordered had been delivered, and the maid service had hung it all up; the fridge was stocked with groceries, and that little company apartment was now about as much home as it could be. A note on the table said that Helen’s remaining possessions had been gotten from her apartment in Auckland and were being held in storage until we moved into a larger place, and gave her an e-mail address for requesting that anything she wanted be brought out of storage and delivered here. “Maybe some of the naughty undies,” she said, “for when I need to revive your mood.” She was checking through her bureau drawers, and then said, “Ha, nope. They put ’em in here. I guess they know more about us than I thought.”
“Well, speaking of which,” I said, “it is our second night living together, and tonight we are not dead exhausted, nor in fear of our lives.”
“If that’s a suggestion, the answer is yes. Provided that you cook dinner.”
I grabbed the apron and tied it on. I poached some fish in wine, threw some noodles and mixed vegetables on it so we could pretend we cared about nutrition, and had something edible in just a few minutes.
As we sat at the small table, eating, killing some of the white wine that hadn’t been used on the fish, and watching the sea darken as the sun set (so close to the equator, it was never more than a few minutes before or after six), Helen said, “Tell me about anything you remember, anything at all from your past.”
I shrugged. “It’s all pretty dull, as you must know. Are you curious about anything in particular?”
“Well, I’m not curious about you per se—” she began.
“Why, thank you.”
“I don’t mean that! I mean I’m curious about how many memories we don’t share, besides General Grant and the existence of the country where I grew up. For example, the history I teach in school is that after the German atomic bomb attack stopped the D-Day invasion and wrecked London, Washington, and Moscow, there was about a year and a half of disorganized fighting all over the world, and then a brief period of peace. Then Germany ordered eleven nations and regions to set up Reichs, and when they dragged their feet, the Germans went back to war in 1954 and really finished the job. They probably killed a fifth of the world population during the Lebensraum period in the sixties and seventies, and since then they’ve been relatively quiet, only occasionally threatening someone else or bullying the Japanese and Italians around. Right?”
“Right. That’s how I learned it in school.”
“Well, I told you what I grew up with. Now, can you name the American presidents?” she asked.
“If I couldn’t, my parents would have beaten the hell out of me. Washington, Hamilton, Washington again, Monroe for three terms, Perry—”
“Good enough. My list goes Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Burr, Madison, and on from there. You had Lincoln and a Civil War, didn’t you?”
“Yep. And he died, but we disagreed about when.”
She nodded. “All right, that’s just to start with. Now how about some minor details? Did your grandparents ever complain about having to learn to drive on the left when they came to Enzy?”
“Why should they? America was like all the English-speaking countries, it drove on the left.”
“When I grew up,” she said, “Americans drove on the right. So did Canadians.”
“Why would Canadians be different from people from any other state?” I asked.
“Define Canada.”
“Uh, the big state north of Lake Erie, between Michigan and Quebec.”
She nodded more emphatically. “Who made the first airplane?”
“The Wright brothers. Flew it at Kitty Hawk in 1903.”
“Who was the greatest baseball team of all time?”
“Well, I guess most people would say the 1927 Yankees— Ruth, Gehrig, those guys.”
“See, that’s the strange thing. These different histories we have tend to agree about trivia and disagree about big things, with about equal frequencies. Who was president during World War Two?”
“Franklin Roosevelt,” I said.
“Same here. You see? Drastically different patterns of what happened and all these strange details that overlap. Now what kind of assumption do we have to make, to make it possible to reconcile these?”
“I thought we weren’t working anymore today.”
“I don’t know that we get much of a choice,” Helen said, sighing. “The more I turn all this over in my head, the more I can’t leave it alone. We’re assuming something or other that won’t let us see what’s going on, I’m just sure of that.”
A thought suddenly hit me very hard, and I said, “How did we meet?”
“You don’t remember?” Helen said, looking cross.
“Humor me.”
“Well,” she said, not happily, “it was new faculty orientation at Whitman, and we were seated together because we were next to each other in the alphabet. There was a terribly dull speech by the bursar, and you started passing notes to me.”
I groaned. “We came in in different years. You had already been here a year. You joined the faculty in 2055 and I joined in 2056. We met when you posted the notice in the paper about Fluffy, just after I got hired.”
“Gee, I’d forgotten about Fluffy. Poor thing. But we were already dating when it happened, and it wasn’t that big a deal, Lyle, how would we have met about her? And why would I have run an obituary in the newspaper for my cat?”
“An obituary? I don’t mean two years ago when she died of old age.”
“She got run over just after I started dating you.”
“I met you because she got lost and turned up in my backyard. I had seen the ad in the paper so I captured her.. . .”
“I see what you mean,” Helen said. “It’s not just the big things, is it? It seems to be everything.” She stared at me. “We’re finding out something here, but I’m not sure I want to find it out.”
I had half a thought. “Let me ask something more directly relevant. Did you ever turn down an opportunity to become a really good shot with a pistol, or to learn to use that whole arsenal of weapons you had last night?”