“Your dispatcher called me,” she says, “trying to get a hold of you. They say some kid’s been calling every ten minutes wondering if anyone’s turned in a bag he left in his cab. Silver carry-on. Sound familiar?”
“Hey, yeah,” says Ernie. “Kind of like the bag I bought you, huh?”
“Just like it,” she says. “Don’t you dare try to talk your way out of this.”
He doesn’t. He shows her the receipt from his wallet, with most of the date eaten up by a convenient Dr. Pepper stain.
“You’re up to something,” she says. “Your dispatcher said you hadn’t logged in all day. Now you got two days’ worth of tips. What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” he says. He’s been making the airport run all day, he says, so what’s the point of calling dispatch? Janine doesn’t buy it. He tries to talk her into dinner. She’s not buying that either.
“Come on,” he says. “You said if I had the money, you’d stay.”
“It’s not about the money,” she says. “It’s about reliability. It’s about me not having to pick up extra shifts at the last minute to make sure the bills get paid. Good night, Ernie.”
“G’night.” There’s nothing else to say.
* * *
It takes him an hour to realize he’s got nothing else going that night, and with all the stuff with Janine he knows he isn’t getting to sleep any time soon. He heads out to the cab and calls in to take a couple of fares. Roberta at dispatch asks him where he’s been all day. Ernie says thanks a lot and tells her to go screw herself.
One of his fares takes him within half a mile of Harvard Yard. He can’t help thinking about that kid. He rolls down Mass Ave but the Yard’s dark and empty, the way it usually is when school’s out. Then he sees a dozen people walking past Memorial Church. Most of them look Indian or Chinese, but there’s one tall skinny white guy straggling at the back. It’s the kid who forgot the suit.
He slides into a parking space half a block down and leaves her running, his eye fixed on the rear view. Soon enough he catches sight of the Indians and Chinese and the skinny kid again. They turn down Dunster and Ernie figures he knows where they’re headed. He turns off the car, feeds the meter and makes for the Brew House.
John Harvard’s Brew House is just the sort of place you go if you’re a tourist who just got done with a conference at Harvard. It’s close, it’s popular, and it’s got that ambience the tourists go for. It is not, therefore, a good place to sit by yourself and drown your sorrows. By the time Ernie gets inside, the Indians and Chinese are talking loudly in the corner, boisterous and drinking like tourists. The skinny kid’s by himself at the bar, hunched over a beer like he’s whispering secrets to it.
He’s the kind of skinny Ernie only ever sees in pictures of foreigners, East African refugees or the Jews in Auschwitz.
He’s the kind of skinny that makes you stare. Ernie tries not to.
The kid finishes his beer and orders another. Ernie sits down two stools away and orders a Summer Blonde. They sit there a few minutes, quiet. The kid looks up at Ernie and his eyes are red around the edges. They have a kind of light to them.
Cruel, Ernie wants to call it. Cold. But as soon as he thinks he sees it, it’s gone, and everything in the kid’s face tells Ernie he doesn’t recognize him at all. That’s good.
Ernie asks him how he’s doing. Fine, he says. “You don’t look it,” Ernie says. “Hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you look more stressed out than I ever been in my life, and I been held up twice. Once at gunpoint, once at knifepoint. Even then I wasn’t as stressed as you.”
“Yeah,” the kid says, “well, the last couple of days have been pretty rough.” He knocks back the last half of his drink in one gulp.
Ernie orders him another. “Whatsa matter?” he says. “Lose your job or something?”
“You could say that,” he says. “My job, my fellowship, my future. Maybe my wife. I don’t know.”
“Come on,” says Ernie. “It can’t be that bad. You’re young and full of beans. You got your whole life ahead of you.”
He gives Ernie a disdainful look. “Platitudes and beer?” he says. “That’s what I need to solve all my problems? Maybe we’ll do a cliché chaser after this.”
“Hey, sorry,” Ernie says. “Just trying to help. The point I was gonna make is, whatever’s wrong, you got plenty of time to fix it. You’re smart, you’re young … how old are you anyway?”
“That depends on how you look at it,” says the kid. Ernie gives him a funny look and the kid changes his answer right away. “Twenty-nine,” he says.
“There you go,” Ernie tells him. “Plenty of time.”
“Mister,” says the kid, “no offense, but I know a lot more about time than you ever will.”
That’s the hook Ernie needs. Years ago, it used to be that people talked to their cabbies. These days they’re in the back on their iPods or cell phones or whatever, but for a good twenty years a big part of Ernie’s job was making chitchat. He’s still good enough at it that he can prod the kid in the right direction. Now that he’s got him talking about time, he keeps him there.
At first Ernie’s only pretending to be interested, but actually the kid’s got some pretty neat stuff to say. Once Ernie gets him talking about his research at school, it’s hard to shut the kid up long enough to order another round. The truth is, Ernie can’t follow half of what the kid’s telling him.
He’s been meaning to put Hawking and Greene and Tyson on his reading list for years; now he’s wishing he’d gotten around to it. His favorite used book store is right across the square and Ernie’s half-wishing they were still open so he could run over there and do some digging.
But they’re not, so he can’t, and at any rate he needs to concentrate a hundred percent on what the kid’s telling him. It turns out the kid is some kind of physics genius. Ernie never went to college – to him it always seemed like too much work for too little reward – but he knows enough to know you have to be some kind of genius to be finishing a double doctorate by twenty-nine.
Even if most of what the kid says is over his head, Ernie comes to understand they didn’t start with a suit. The first experiments worked with lumps of some kind of radioactive material Ernie thinks he remembers hearing of once. Cesium, it’s called. Ernie’s pretty sure cesium’s in the periodic table but he’s not positive. The kid explained how you can use whatever these lumps give off to measure the passage of time – something about half-lifes and atomic clocks and a bunch of other stuff Ernie hasn’t thought about since high school.
But Ernie understands the long and short of it well enough.
The bottom line is, the kid and his professor at school found a way to make these lumps spend some of their own future in the present.
“No way,” Ernie tells him. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s not,” says the kid, and he buries Ernie under a lot more stuff there’s no way he’d have been able to follow if he hadn’t seen the suit do its thing. It all had to do with “four dimensional space-time” and thinking of time as cause and effect, and what is cause and effect except the transfer of energy? By the time Ernie’s ass leaves the bar stool he’ll have forgotten almost all of this, but he’ll remember that question because the kid poses it to him about a hundred times.
Over the next hour Ernie wraps his lightly liquored brain around the idea that we’ve been storing energy and converting it and moving it around for a long time, and that if causality is a kind of energy then if you understand it right you can basically move cause and effect. Ernie tries to sum it up like this: “So what you’re saying is, you’re majoring in time travel.”