“Yeah … I’ll Google around for a few days first, get my bearings.” Have to ask. “Um … does anybody know who bailed me out?”
“Bailed you out?”
“The first time I came back, after forty days?”
“Of course,” Strom said. “That’s when you sent the preliminary results to Dr. Marsh.”
“That’s right. I was in jail for causing a pileup on Mass Ave. A lawyer showed up with my bail, which he got from some anonymous stranger.”
Strom shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that. Could it have been Marsh?”
“No way. He was … sort of angry with me.”
“I remember,” Kara said. “He got my number somehow and called me. He thought you’d stolen the machine and disappeared. Of course you’d just—”
“But I left him a duplicate! Slogged down here in the snow to put it together. It didn’t travel through time, but it did supply one photon per chronon, which is what it was designed to do.”
“He must not have found it.”
“But I put it right where … I’ll take it up with him later today.” Could somebody have broken in and stolen it? Nobody would know of its importance.
Except perhaps a time traveler.
“Well, we’ll see you over at the press conference,” Strom said. “Come early. I heard Marsh talk to Maggie about the catering. It’s going to be a real blowout.”
“Sounds good. I’ll see about checking out of here.” He watched them go with mixed, not to say confused, feelings. Just a few days ago, they had destroyed his life. Now they were strangers and allies.
The suitcase in the closet was his, but most of the clothes hanging there were unfamiliar. Once they’d realized what had happened, the department had rented his old place, partly to keep it against his return and partly to see if there was any clue there to the machine’s anomalous behavior.
Most of the clothes he’d left behind had been ten years old already, and not too clean. Another fifteen years wouldn’t have helped.
It looked pretty warm out. He put on an unfamiliar tie and tweed jacket. Stroll through campus and check out the current crop of undergraduate girls. Brands and all.
The dispatcher at the main desk said that everything had been taken care of; he was free to go. An hour and a half before the press conference. Walk up to the Student Center and back, and get there just as the canapés come out.
He was headed for the revolving door when the emergency doors next to it whooshed open. Two men and a woman rushed in guiding a gurney.
It was Professor Marsh, mouth open and eyes closed. They pushed him into a waiting elevator.
Matt went back to the dispatcher. “Is that Professor Marsh?”
“Was, I think.” He squinted at his computer screen. “Somebody found him in the Green Building, in his office. We had this team there for a big press conference; they got right to him. Too late, though.”
“Damn.”
“I saw him on TV last night,” the dispatcher said. “Too much excitement, I guess. You knew him?”
“A long time ago, yeah.”
“How old was he?”
“Sev—eighty-five or so. Closer to ninety.”
“That’s what I thought. Be a miracle if they can bring him back. Sorry.”
“Me, too.” Matt nodded. “Me, too.” He turned and headed for the other exit, toward the Green Building. Might as well see what was happening.
10
It was Marsh’s ascension into scientific sainthood and Matthew’s fifteen minutes of fame. The cover of Time had Marsh brooding in a hyperrealistic painting by Fiona Wyeth—probably on file for years—against a ghostly background of clocks, where a wraithlike figure of Matt is stepping out of the mists of time.
The press had it all figured out. Matt wasn’t much more than an experimental animal, even though it was his clumsiness that had started it all. It was Marsh’s genius that had explained Matt’s accidental time machine.
But Matt could see that the Marsh Effect didn’t explain what happened in a definitive way. It really just described what the machine did. Then Marsh and others had tried, and were still trying, to twist physics around so that it allowed the machine to exist.
But it was as if physics had been a careful, elegant house of cards, then Marsh—or rather his earthly avatar, Matthew—had been a playful child who blundered into it and brought it down, not out of malice, but just by accident.
Now Matt, true to the analogy, sat in the middle of the mess, picking up one card and then another, trying to make sense out of it.
He came to the office every morning at nine and spent part of the day working on time travel and the rest trying to put together his course on antique physics. He had more than three months before classes started; if he’d been assigned the course back in his TA days, and there were no time machines to complicate things, he could’ve assembled the course in a few weeks. But ignoring the Marsh Effect would be like trying to conduct a class around an elephant sitting in the front row.
Marsh had been right in his warning that Matt would have to bone up on topology and the manipulations of algebras and rings—mathematical tools he’d never needed before. So he was attempting a mental juggling act, trying to learn the old new math while preparing to teach the new old physics. It made his brain hurt.
And it wasn’t as if he’d be allowed to sit uninterrupted and work. There were more than a thousand copies of his time machine in the world, and science demanded that he push the RESET button on all of them, in case the Marsh Effect was really the Matthew Effect. They couldn’t just FedEx a machine from China, have him push the button, then mail it back after having failed to make it disappear. He had to hike down to a lab and sit in the middle of a circle of cameras and other instruments and push the button.
A few times, he agreed to duplicate the original physiological circumstances—stay up for thirty hours high on coffee and speed. He argued that the whole thing was more like superstition than science, and the response was basically: Okay, do you have a better idea?
Meanwhile, it wasn’t only science that had changed drastically in the past sixteen years. Movies were either dumb static domestic comedies (during which the audience laughed insanely at things that didn’t seem to be funny) or brutal bloodbaths from Japan and India. Popular music set his teeth on edge, harmonic discord and machine-gun percussion or syrupy, inane love ballads. Popular books seemed to be written for either slow children or English Ph.D.s.
Women his age had been children when he left. Of course they liked the music and books and movies and thought the height of fashion was symmetrical cheek brands—not only on the cheeks of the face, he was given to understand. The women who were his contemporaries were either like Kara, middle-aged and married, or middle-aged and not interested in men.
His mother was in a rest home, lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. He visited her several times, but she didn’t recognize him.
He did have a little notoriety by virtue of being an artifact from the past, but sixteen years didn’t exactly make him a caveman. More like an old-fashioned geek who hadn’t kept up with stuff.
He went to his twenty-fifth high-school reunion and left early, deeply rattled.
About that time he started to fantasize about pushing the RESET button again. The world would be truly alien, 177.5 years in the future, but he wouldn’t be trying to fit in. He would be a genuine curiosity, like a nineteenth-century scientist appearing today. Who wouldn’t be expected to do any real physics. And the big questions would presumably be answered. He might even be able to understand the answers.
The time machine was very much under lock and key, with a twenty-four-hour armed guard. But if anybody could get to it, Matt should be able to.