He blinked several times and attempted to regain his bearings. When his eyes focused, he saw with dismay that he was still in the suit, and everything in the room was the same. The heavy air inside The Machine felt like a living entity, smothering him with the weight of his disappointment. For the first time in a long time, he felt tears coming.
This was wrong, all wrong. He shouldn’t be here. He’d failed yet again, perhaps never to succeed. Thomas Edison’s comment about not being a failure despite the hundreds or thousands of times it took him to complete his invention — which had long served as an inspiration to William — now felt like an insult.
He climbed out of The Machine, his body covered in a layer of perspiration. The unexpected chill in the air stung him with surprise and he lost his breath. He began shivering and moved quickly to the footlocker to escape the sudden cold that seemed to be settling in on his bones.
Donning his pants and an extra sweater, he walked back to his chair, slumping down hard on the seat. His head hung low against his chest and he closed his eyes. He sat like that for several minutes, still absorbing the blow of his recent failure.
As he regulated his breathing back to normal, other sensations poked their way into his brain. Something smelled … strange. He tried to identify what it was, but the answer eluded him, like a forgotten name to a familiar face. He wiped his eyes and sat up straight. It would be best to put his mind at ease by focusing on his work again.
William leaned across the desk for a pencil and paper. As he jotted down the recent event and his thoughts, he noticed the pencil wasn’t working correctly. He stopped writing and looked at the tip to see if it needed sharpening. It didn’t. Then he noticed dust on the paper. He rubbed the side of his hand across the sheet and only then realized quite a bit of it had settled on his notepad.
In a daze, he put the pencil down on top of his notes with a slow, measured movement and touched his palm to the surface of the desk. Slower still, he brushed his hand across the tabletop, wiping away a thick layer of dust that had been there just seconds before.
“What in the devil?” he whispered.
William looked down at his open palm. Then his gaze jumped back to the table, which displayed a streak of wood beneath the dust. The odd smell wafted to his nose again and it took him a moment more to realize the source — his sweater? He clutched a fistful of the material and brought it to his nose. He sniffed, and made a face. It stunk, like clothing that had been kept in storage for a while.
He sat there for a heartbeat, processing this discovery, and then jerked back so suddenly that he almost toppled out of the chair. He pushed away from the desk, stumbling as he tried to regain his mental bearings and balance. Forgetting his age, William ran across the room and opened the door, racing up the stairs to the main floor of the house.
By the time he got to the top of the staircase and bustled through the upstairs door, he was out of breath. But he didn’t stop, continuing through the kitchen area, into the foyer, and then outside into the cold clip of the wind.
William stopped then, a hand to his chest as he tried to calm his heaving lungs and racing heart. The chill air cut deep and he found himself shivering again beyond control. His eyes found the familiar beacon up ahead, and he crossed the street then made his way north for the coffee and tea shop. The little bell over its entrance door sounded and Martin looked up.
“Hey Willy, long time no see!” Martin boomed over the howl of the wind that blew in as William entered. “How’s it going?”
William didn’t answer, but walked over to the counter, still shaking from the cold. He forced himself to look into Martin’s eyes and asked, with a voice that cracked and trembled, “Can — can I get a coffee — umm — black — and — and a newspaper please?”
“Comin’ up,” Martin said. His face registered concern and confusion, but he just swung around, grabbed a cup, and began serving up coffee.
William was frozen in place as he waited, his anxiety growing. Martin came back to him with a cup of coffee in one hand and a paper under his arm. He sat the coffee down and passed the paper to William, who snatched it up, bumping the cup and sloshing coffee on the counter.
He didn’t notice, digging blindly into his pants pocket for some money and thrusting it at Martin. It was more than enough for his purchased items, but he didn’t notice that either.
Martin scoffed and pulled the hand towel from his shoulder to clean the ‘liquid petrol’ — as he called it — from the counter top. He threw a cautious glance at his patron as he put the money away, but William was oblivious to this also.
William picked up his cup and crossed the room to a booth by the window, where he sat down and opened the paper. His mouth went dry and his heart stuttered then began pumping in a fury. The paper slipped from his numb fingers and fell to the tabletop.
The date on its front page read: August 16, 1948.
35
Message in a Body
Gernot Kalkolov cut a sliver of medium rare steak and stabbed it with his fork. He popped the juicy bite into his mouth and chewed slowly, savoring the taste.
Inside the cramped kitchenette, he sat at a small table rereading the notes he’d taken from the research completed in the lab. They were getting close; it was almost an art in precision.
Gernot sliced another bite of meat and flipped a page of the journal, staring at the schematics drawn out on the page. He was placing the next morsel in his mouth when there was a violent explosion of wind accompanied by a crashing noise.
He pulled back in surprise when a body form, along with bits of wood and an upside down domed slab of concrete, landed on the floor in a heap, leaving behind heavy swirls of dust in the air and a smell of smoke. He coughed and batted a hand at the debris floating in front of his face.
Gernot looked around, dazed to find he was already standing; he had no recollection of getting to his feet. He approached the body. It had listed off to the side and its face was obscured from Gernot’s view. Next to the body was a rock, or what looked like an ordinary stone.
Can it be? He walked closer to the unmoving form, holding his breath. At first glance, he saw that the body was missing its right hand and had a wound in the abdomen. He could only assume it was a fellow traveler. It had to be. Gernot reached down and pulled on the shoulder of the limp man, rolling him over for closer inspection and came face to face with … himself. The breath whooshed from his lungs, and he stumbled back a step, eyes bulging.
What to do with this news? His mind scrambled to make sense of what he was looking at and quickly settled back into analytical mode. The object by his dead body was the meteorite. It must be preserved for his countrymen.
He turned back to the journal on the table. The schematics were not complete. He still needed more time, and Amhurst would be returning soon. It was necessary to approach the doctor today and no earlier. The old man needed to know that his research was successful; otherwise, it would take more convincing.
The fact remained that whether Gernot liked it or not, it appeared a new timeline had been set. Once this happened, to change it was an exercise of extreme difficulty. He knew this even without knowing the catalyst of the event. And what was the catalyst — or who?
It did not matter. He squatted down to remove the watch from the corpse, and the dead man stirred. Gernot flinched, but didn’t move away. The man’s lips moved, and he rasped, “He’s — he’s here.” Before Gernot had a chance to ask questions, the alternate version of himself — his Other — drifted away to the next realm.