"That's exactly how I felt. So I looked around. The older religions, what we look down our noses at and call 'mythology,' like the Romans and Norse and Greeks, had a different worldview. Hindus today still see the universe like that. Their gods duke it out from time to time. They are willful, vain, childish, vindictive, quite willing to play dice with human lives."
"So's the Christian God, in my opinion."
"I couldn't agree with you more. But we put all those attributes into one being. Animists and others give different attributes to different gods." Matt sighed heavily. "What I'm going to tell you is that I've begun to get a... a hint of an inkling of an intuition of an enigma. Remember the old fable of the blind men and the elephant? One feels his trunk and says an elephant is like a snake. Another thinks he's like a tree, from feeling his leg. Another thinks an elephant is like a wall.
"What's happened to me is like... like I'm blind, deaf, and have no hands, and you gave me one hair off Fuzzy's back and asked me to deduce a mammoth from that."
"At last." Susan laughed. "A metaphor I can understand. How far have you gotten?"
"About as far as you'd expect. How about the railroad metaphor? I thought that one was pretty good."
"You're right. I got that one."
"Then try this. We think time is a long, straight train ride at constant speed. Actually, it can turn into a roller coaster. It's got big loops in it. It turns upside down now and then, and sometimes it goes forward and then backward. Why? I don't know. But it could be that during human history we've been riding on an abnormally straight stretch of track, that what we think of as universal laws concerning time are really only local. Maybe in the next galaxy down the block time runs backward. Maybe out there in empty space there are lots of loops, and we have no way to detect them.
"You've given me a lot of maybes."
"Best I can offer. I've got a million more. Maybe these loops in time open up more often than we let ourselves admit. What if the Loch Ness monster is an aquatic dinosaur that fell through a hole in time and swam around long enough to get spotted a few times, create a legend, and then died? What if the Sasquatch and the Yeti were time travelers? What if some—some, mind you, ninety-nine percent of them are swamp gas—some UFOs are lost astronauts from the future?"
"I've heard some of this stuff before. There are websites devoted to it."
"Sure. And until I traveled in time I dismissed them. I have no proof of any of them now, for that matter. As you say, all I've got is a lot of maybes."
Susan took another drink of her beer and thought it over.
"You're disappointed, aren't you?" Matt asked.
"A little," she admitted. "I was hoping you'd found some answers."
"I'm a long way from that. But I did learn to do a trick, and I did make a discovery. You may like the trick, but I don't think the discovery is going to be easy for either of us to accept. Watch this."
Matt reached into his pocket and took out something she immediately recognized as one of the marbles he had tinkered with five years earlier, when he was trying to duplicate the time machine. It looked like ordinary red glass, in a square cage with ridges that could be interlocked with other cages to slide over each other in any direction.
He held it between thumb and forefinger and started twisting it in the air. Left, right, right some more, forward, left again... she soon lost track of the permutations. It was like watching a safecracker twisting the dial, only he turned it through three axes. Then he stopped. Nothing happened.
"Nice trick," she said.
"It doesn't work every time. That's what's so frustrating. In science as I knew it, repeatability is everything. With this stuff... well, like my grandfather used to say, 'It don't work unless you hold your mouth right.' " He went through the motions again, and she was amused to see that he actually had screwed up one side of his mouth in an odd way, though she didn't think he was aware that he was doing it. Then he set it down on the table between them... and this time the little wire cube with the clear red glass ball in it seemed to be seized by a mysterious energy. It began to spin.
It... unfolded itself. Watching it, incredulous, Susan thought each move was as logical as unfolding a paper airplane or taking a flattened box and turning it into an assembled one... but neither of those operations hurt her eyes. This was an evolution that she felt instinctively that human eyes were not equipped to witness. Now there was a larger cube, three marbles on a side, now four, now five... and in a few eye-popping seconds there was the whole array, and the box that contained it, laid out like an opened suitcase in front of her.
She got up and hurried to the bathroom.
"FEELING better?" Matt asked when she got back.
"I didn't actually lose the beer," she said. "But for a minute there I felt sick as a dog."
"I told you it was a roller-coaster ride."
"Matt... what did you just do?"
"The only thing I've learned to do. That night, the night that began with the mammoths about to stomp us, and ended up back in Los Angeles... I watched this thing do its stuff. I ended up with that one little glass ball, and then I got hit by a city bus. I knew I had seen something and I thought I could remember it, and I knew I had to get out of there. It wasn't until later that I found the ball in my pocket. I don't remember putting it there. We were sort of busy, if you recall. Later, I figured out that the ball was still somehow attached to the rest of the machine. I did computer simulations on the model I had stored in my computer, and eventually came up with an algorithm that... that sort of pries up the lid on the place where the rest of the machine is."
"So you've had it all the time."
"That's right. All through the interrogation. But I didn't know what to do with it. I still don't."
"Why not just give it to Howard?"
Matt sighed. "I would love to do that. I don't want this thing. It's like... it's like you own a gun and you know how to fire it, but you haven't figured out how to aim it yet, and it can shoot in any direction, totally at random. How often are you going to shoot that gun? It's even worse, though, because sometimes it just goes off by itself, when it wants to, when the conditions are right, when God or Coyote wills it... I don't know."
"All the more reason to get rid of it. Give it to Howard." "Susan, Howard is a collector. That's what he wanted a time machine for in the first place. He wanted me to get him a mammoth, or the means to get one. We did, accidentally. He was fixated on mammoths at the time... but you think he'd be satisfied with that? Why not dinosaurs? He could build a real Jurassic Park."
"Believe me, if I thought it was that simple I'd go back with a big-game trapper and bring some more mammoths forward in time. But..."
"But what?"
"But I think it might be very dangerous."
Susan chewed it over for a time.
"You're talking about changing the past, right?"
"Yes. I don't know if it's possible. Maybe we could change the past and make a better world. Maybe we could make a worse one. Or maybe the way things have happened, are happening, and will happen is written in stone, and can't be changed. I lean toward that last possibility."
"Predestination."
"If you want to call it that. It could be that free choice is illusion. I don't think I have the right to test it."
"I see what you mean. But there's one question I've been meaning to ask you, ever since, ever
since you made that... that thing appear. Who made it?"