So he turned and walked shakily down the street. The cop might have said something but he couldn’t hear it. The off-key amusement park quality of the Village congealed now into a proper smarmy nightmare. Jeff staggered a bit farther, then grabbed on to a corner lamp pole. Then he leaned over and did what he had wanted to do for nearly two days: he threw up what seemed like every ounce of substance in his stomach.
He looked at the mess he had made on the street, and wondered what part of that food might have come from 2084. It would be a long, long time if ever, he knew, before he was likely to see any of that again.
A Beatles song was playing somewhere in the distance. A DJ was talking. No historical moment, no hushed build-up. Just the Beatles…
Jeff opened his eyes. He looked out of his window at the street below. Mid-April sunshine coated the sidewalk like clarified butter.
“…Traffic light in most places but still heavy on the Kosciuszko Bridge,” the radio continued. “HOA halfway through the third shift with you on WABC. Good morning!”
Jeff hoisted himself out of the easy chair. His clothes felt stale and rumpled—he had spent the night in them—and he needed a shave. He stripped, showered, shaved, and approached the pile which served as his wardrobe closet. Today would be a special day. He put on a blue button-down shirt, dark brown corduroy slacks, and pulled his navy-blue knit tie into a loose fitting double-Windsor, the only kind of knot he knew how to make. He slung a corduroy jacket over his shoulder and ambled down the three flights of stairs.
Jeff played with his scrambled eggs at the Yorkville Restaurant and considered his situation for a thousandth time. He pushed three pieces of egg to one side. His arrival twenty-three years earlier than planned, the luggage accident in Dallas, the destruction of the student lounge—were these all related, or three pieces of random, rotten luck?
He couldn’t accept his being a Robinson Crusoe in the past. He understood his predicament, his utter stranding in the 1960s, logically enough. And yet some part of him had waited these past five months, hoping that one of his team would one day miraculously appear to rescue him. He’d imagined Rena in this role, but how could she? The mouth to 1963 had been sealed with the implosion or trashing or whatever had taken out the lounge. He’d been back up there several times, when no one was around, but the lounge had been totally reconstructed, with no sign of the AWH.
The team had no way of knowing he was even here—presumably all they would know is that he hadn’t succeeded in stopping the Challenger disaster. If they sent anyone else back, it would likely be to 1985, where he was supposed to have gone, not here. And who knows if Rena or whoever would succeed any better than he. Maybe Steven Hawking was right in his chronology protection conjecture—maybe the Universe protects itself from alterations via time travel—removes unwelcome Thornes from its side—whether by misdirecting travelers, blowing up AWHs, both, more.
So he was probably stranded. But maybe not totally without options. He had to gingerly probe the contours of time travel—see just what small things it might allow, and then perhaps he’d try a few larger things. What he had in mind for today was the first modest step in this direction.
Jeff paid for his breakfast and walked out into the cool morning sunlight. His money problems were finally over—he had a job with a decent salary. Some parts of the team’s exhaustive planning had worked out after all, had survived his immersion in a time twenty-three years earlier than expected. Their massive search of historical records had uncovered fourteen Harrises who had done graduate work at universities in the mid-20th century. One, named Geoffrey, had earned a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Edinburgh in 1958. The names and academic disciplines were close enough that Jeff, with a mixture of Geoff’s credentials and his own knowledge of the field, would have been able to demonstrate a convincing identity in 1985-86—the team’s reason for coming up with this. But it turned out to also be enough for Jeff to land a job back here as an Adjunct Professor at the third school whose ad he’d answered—his act sufficiently polished, hinting just enough knowledge of new trends in the field to kindle admiration without suspicion. It was a last-minute spring teaching appointment, to fill in for a regular professor unexpectedly on leave, that required only cursory credentialing. But it was a foot in the door, and it paid real money.
He squinted at the Sun and inhaled deeply. The polluted air still bothered him, and he sometimes felt as if little pieces of black soot were burning holes in his chest. He wheezed slightly. But the day felt promising, even beautiful, and he caught the cross-town bus to the IRT subway on West 86th Street. This would take him to the “Intro to Sociology” class that he taught at City College on 137th Street in Harlem.
Farther up the subway line, near a place called Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, Mrs. Sarah Harris also made her way to work. The day was beautiful to her too, and she also wheezed a bit—from asthma—as she walked down the block to Saperman’s Bakery where she worked behind the counter. Her mind was filled today, as it was on many days, with images of the Ukrainian countryside around Kiev, and with pictures of her father. She could see him as clearly as if he were standing right in front of her, even though she had last seen him more than sixty years ago and a continent away. Her brown eyes, still keen and always wise, glistened a drop, not from soot but sentiment. Those eyes were almost identical to Jeff’s. She was his great-great-grandmother.
At City College, in a place presciently named Harris Hall, Jeff labored to make a concluding point about McLuhan. “So you see, it’s not what we watch on television that’s important, it’s the fact that we’re watching television—rather than reading a book or listening to the radio—that McLuhan says really counts. This is what he means by ‘the medium is the message.’ ”
Jeff looked at the students, most of whom were scribbling his words without the slightest comprehension. The three girls from Queens who smiled at him certainly hadn’t the vaguest idea what he was talking about. Neither did the foreign kid, his mouth continuously hanging open, who at least made no attempt to disguise his puzzlement. But a few in the class did seem to have some understanding of what Jeff was saying. The girl in the back with the soft brown eyes seemed to be in touch with him. Anyway, Jeff liked the way she looked at him.
“OK, that’s about it for today. Read the pertinent sections of Gutenberg Galaxy, and I’ll see whether I can get you some advance copies of Understanding Media.” Jeff grabbed his corduroy coat and strode out the door, smiling at the girl with the soft brown eyes.
He hurried to the subway at 137th Street. He looked at his watch—the f lector model, for Jeff no longer cared about keeping such minor aspects of his cover. In fact, he hoped future artifacts like this might attract someone’s benevolent attention, maybe someone else from the future, who could help him. He’d have gladly kept spending his 1980s money too for the same reason, had he not been afraid that sooner or later some good Samaritan would have him arrested for counterfeiting.
It was 11:56—more than enough time.
But the subway took longer than expected, and it was 12:35 when Jeff ran down the long flights of stairs at the Pelham Parkway station in the Bronx. Saperman’s was only a few minutes away by foot, so Jeff wasn’t too worried. Still, he half-walked, half-ran.
He was sweating when he reached the bakery. He realized this was more from anxiety than exertion. His great-great-grandmother had died in 1992, at the age of ninety-seven. His grandfather, whom Jeff had spent some of the most satisfying times of his childhood with, had been just six when Sarah Harris had died. But grandpa carried memories of her warmth and voice and summers they had spent together in their cottage on Cape Cod Bay, and Jeff felt he knew Sarah through this.