“… what you’re experiencing is alternate, parallel timelines woven through space, and what’s astounding is how you’ve learned to create them at will …”
The audacity of these people was incomprehensible, enraging, tempered only by the fact that Mandy was still alive. Her anger made her bold, her questions and comebacks sharp-edged. Parmenter and Moss accepted and endured it, explaining, never defending. The meeting became a bilateral debriefing, the scientists as earnest to hear her side of it as she was to hear theirs. Mandy felt they could get along, but she wasn’t ready to be friends.
They showed her the Machine.
“We haven’t opened it, haven’t touched or tampered with anything, including the soiled sheet … yes, I guess you could call it a crime scene: we didn’t dare disturb anything until we had the uh, crime, solved.
“The bench contains the Machine’s interdimensional core; it resembles a big black domino, about six feet long, ten inches thick, accelerated to ninety-five percent of the speed of light … oh, it’s traveling that fast, all right, but in relation to an alternate dimension of time and space while maintaining a motionless foothold in ours. You could say it has its foot in the interdimensional door, holding it open so people and objects can pass through, which you’ve been doing on a regular basis. Every bouncing tennis ball, every levitation, every vanish passes through that core. Oh, and every journey through time and space, such as your encounter with Moss …”
They showed her the makeshift sleeping quarters where she surprised Moss during the night. It was just as she remembered it.
She remembered parts of the lab as well, in fragmented images of consoles, lights, shadowy faces, muffled conversations, like a continuous volley of déjà vu. She could remember and describe some of the rooms before they showed them to her.
Near midnight, they were seated around a table where the day crew took their breaks—three doughnuts left over from that day rested in a white box next to dirty coffee cups that never made it back to the kitchen. There was silence. In slow, awkward phrases and apologetic tones, Parmenter and Moss had described the final outcome, the bottom line of Mandy’s future as they saw it.
She looked across the room at the Machine, looked again at them, tried to believe but couldn’t. Hope as in, This is just a bad dream and I’ll wake up, wasn’t working so well for her anymore. She tried denial, expecting they would now tell her the next thing, the one bit of good news they hadn’t told her yet, the way out. Maybe there would be a second opinion that it didn’t have to be this way.
She looked at Dane and thought she saw a ray of hope. She could tell he believed it and yet … he’d thought of something. Yes, surelyhe’d thought of something! Dane, speak up! Tell me, tellthem!
He was listening, watching, thinking.
She asked, “Does it have to happen?”
Parmenter had come across a writing pad and scribbled on it, apparently organizing his answers even as he spoke them. “Inexorable equilibrium. Theoretically, the universe must return to normal anyway. It can’t stay stretched forever. That’s the fatal flaw in all of this.”
Moss inserted, “It’s conceivable that the space-time distortion could last longer than your lifetime, meaning you would never retrace before you died naturally.”
“But the administrators and financiers of this project aren’t going to wait that long, not by any stretch of the imagination. They want the Machine back.”
“They would really do that?” Mandy asked.
“They would do that.” Parmenter prepared a moment, then said, “We told you about Dr. Kessler, and you recall meeting her in the hallway …”
“Did she take her life?” Mandy took Kessler’s note from her pocket and handed it to him.
Parmenter read it and nodded. “She did, earlier today. She knew what would become of you but she couldn’t stop it. I’m afraid Moss and I can’t stop it either. A moral argument doesn’t hold much weight against ‘matters of national security.’ But please …” He looked at Dane.
Dane laid his hand upon hers. “Before we despair, there might— might—be an alternative.”
Don’t tell me. There is a next thing?
Parmenter put down his pen and searched his mind for the right way to begin. “You recall, of course, your encounter with two thugs when you had the flat tire?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall”—he stopped, struggling for the question—“what your mental processes might have been immediately afterward?”
“My mental … I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
Dane said, “Remember running across my pasture, trying to get away from Clarence?”
She fervently wished she could. “I don’t remember anything after they gave me that shot. I just remember waking up on your couch.”
Parmenter pressed it. “You don’t remember any kind of interdimensional transference, any contact with another timeline?”
Her mind was a blank. “No.”
“No … longing, reaching, whatever it is you do to influence the Machine?”
Dane pitched in, “Right before I looked out my window and saw you running across my pasture, I saw you in my house.”
Now, this was news. She wrinkled her brow and stared at him.
He continued, “Only, you were”—now he stumbled—“you were … older, the way you were before the accident.”
“You don’t remember that?” asked Parmenter, and then he shook his head at himself. “Well, how can you? It hasn’t happened yet.”
Mandy was frustrated. “Guys, try to make sense.”
Parmenter regrouped with a little clap of his hands. “Okay. Here’s my theory on this. Before all this began, before we started adding timelines, before anyone or anything was reverted, you had your timeline and the Machine had its timeline, and at that point everything was in balance, no space-time distortion. So the point is, if we dissolve all timelines secondary to the original two—yours and the Machine’s—there would be no stress on the space-time fabric, and the two timelines would play themselves out in the natural order of things. It would be as if we never tampered with them.”
“Which would be wonderful—for the universe.”
Parmenter pointed his index finger upward, “Ahhh, but … but! Dane saw you in his home in Idaho at the age of fifty-nine afterthe accident, which suggests to me that somehow, in some way, you will exist as your chronologically correct self, intact and alive, subsequent to the accident, which suggests that somehow, in some way, you managed to circumvent the accident, and there’s only one way I know of to do that and still allow the universe to remain in balance with no additional timelines.”
Then he waited as if they might guess. They didn’t. “Trade timelines. You take the Machine’s timeline, it takes yours. It plays out your timeline and burns up, you play out its timeline and live out your life with the man you love— ifthe theory is sound, that is.”
“But … why wouldn’t it be sound?” she said to Dane, “You saw me alive in your house.”
Parmenter countered, “All of this is theoretical, entirely contingent. Dane seeing you in his house—your house, the house—is one outcome that flashed through given the conditions at the time. Anything could change, any outcome could result.”
“No promises, in other words.”
“No, but if it didhappen as Dane saw it, then it couldhappen if we can replicate it. Now, admittedly, there are problems. For one thing, the trade would mean the destruction of the Machine, which the other scientists and the government guys will never allow, which is almost moot in light of a bigger problem. The interdimensional mass of the Machine, that part of the Machine actually straddling time dimensions, is”—he scribbled it as he said it—“one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. And how much do you weigh?”