That stayed in the back of his mind, the ultimate escape fantasy, while he did his damnedest to adjust to this not-so-brave, not-so-new world.
Ironically, Kara and Strom, whose betrayal had pushed him into pushing the button, became his best friends and mentors. He often went to their place for dinner, to hang around and play with their son, Peter. At nine years old, he was close to being Matt’s equal in social sophistication.
He tried to date. It wasn’t hard to find women his age who were interested in him, either as famous semiscientist or social freak from the past. But neither characterization was a good starting point for a relationship. His foolish aversion to facial brands didn’t help, either, eliminating half the pool of young women a priori.
Male friends were even harder to make. He wasn’t interested in sports, the one cultural fixation that hadn’t changed at all, as far as he could see, and that was the one place where men assumed they could make an easy connection. When somebody said, “How about them Sox?” he would mumble something and look at his feet.
Under normal circumstances, his natural pool of friends would be the graduate students and young professors in his own department. But he didn’t know enough about post-time-machine physics to chat about their work, and his unearned full professorship was an obvious obstacle.
A couple of times he resorted to “dates” from escort services, but that was so disastrous that not even the sex was very much fun. It was like taking a department-store manikin to dinner and a show, and then home to a perfect body with nothing inside but lubricant.
Then one night after dinner, Peter put to bed and Strom off in the study, Kara led him out to the front porch, where they sat together on a swing with glasses of wine. She was just close enough that they barely touched.
“I’m sorry about what I did,” she said quietly. “I should’ve stayed with you.”
Matt didn’t know what to say. “Water over the bridge,” he tried. “I mean under.”
“I don’t know. Does it have to be?”
“Kara …”
“I’m desperately unhappy,” she said without inflection. “Strom bores me to tears.”
He patted her hand. “You wouldn’t’ve been any better off with me. One chronophysicist is about as boring as the next one.”
She smiled up at him. “See? Strom would never say that. And you’re anything but boring.”
This couldn’t be happening. The full moon hanging over the horizon romantically, crickets chirping. Her wonderful smell. Her husky voice: “But I’m too old for you now.”
“No! Kara … you’re beautiful. You’re still the most beautiful—”
“We should talk. Strom’s taking Peter up to Maine on Friday, to his parents’ country place. He knows I can’t go because I’m allergic to horses. Let’s spend the weekend together … and talk.” She moved her hand, with his, to between her thighs.
“I shouldn’t.”
“Just one weekend.”
“If we were caught …”
“We won’t be.” She squeezed his hand. “Please, Matt.”
That was awkward. A couple of months before, he’d been madly in love with her, or with someone who could have been her younger sister. Just shy of forty, she was still sexy as hell, and still the same person he had fallen in love with.
It wouldn’t hurt his wounded masculinity to get back at Strom. But Peter was in the equation, too, and it could be devastating to the kid.
And make Matt look like a fool, as well as a home-wrecker.
She kissed him softly, and then deeply. “Please? Your place at 6:00 on Friday?” She moved his hand to her breast, and then her own hand somewhat lower.
Of course he said yes and, before the subway was halfway home, regretted having said it. He never watched soap operas on the cube, but he was pretty sure he’d just signed up for chapter n-minus-1. And they never had a happy ending. If they had a happy ending, they’d have to go off the air.
A mature man would have called Kara the next day and said he got carried away, sorry, there’s no way that it could work. Let’s admit we made a mistake and stay good friends.
Instead, Matt figured he had just two days to get to the machine and escape into the future.
His first plan was direct passionate action: buy a gun at one of the Southie pawnshops, go disarm the guard, and take the machine. It wouldn’t be stealing, really; it was his machine. Stealing would be when he crawled into a Dumpster and pushed the button, using it as a getaway car, and showing up in the future with tons of exotic garbage.
A less dramatic opportunity presented itself. The chronophysics department wanted to run the machine through a positron scanner three times—alone, and then with a person touching it, and then with Matt touching it. Careful not to push the RESET button, of course.
Once he was inside the claustrophobic tube, he’d just find a piece of metal, clip it with the alligator clip, and push the button. Off to the twenty-third century.
It would look like an accident. Poor Matt, sacrificed to science.
This time he wouldn’t need any protective gear. Marsh had calculated where he would wind up next, to within a few dozen meters. It was up by where Route 95 crosses into New Hampshire, pretty far from the ocean. Pretty near to the tax-free liquor warehouse. Have to take a credit card.
What, really, ought he to take up into the future? His first thought was old coins. But they’d probably have him take all of the metal out of his pockets for the positron scan.
Rare documents, small ones. He went down to Charles Street and maxed out two credit cards buying a note Lincoln had scrawled to Grant and a letter from Gabriel García Márquez, in the last year of his life, to Pablo “El Ced” Marino when he was an unknown poet, forty years before his Nobel Prize.
Of course he might wind up in a future that cared nothing for history or literature. That would be trouble, no matter what.
There was also the small matter of 177.5 years’ interest on those two credit cards. Maybe they’d go out of business.
It was bound to work one way or another. In some future he was going to come back to that law firm sixteen years ago and leave a million-dollar check to bail himself out.
He spent a day worrying. How could you plan for a trip like this? There was no Baedecker for the future. Science fiction had a really bad record, world peace and personal dirigibles. For lack of anything else positive to do, he bought a really good Swiss Army knife with twenty-one functions, in case they didn’t make him empty his pockets.
Of course, he might be vaulting into a radioactive hell. Or a wasteland rendered sterile by nanotechnology or biological warfare.
He couldn’t un-push the button.
But he could press it again, and again. Two thousand years. Then 24,709 and three hundred thousand. The fifth push would be 3,440,509 years, long enough for anything to quiet down.
It would also be a kind of suicide. If there were still people that far in the future, he would be more distant to them than a Cro-Magnon man would be to the here and now.
Did you make your computer chips out of flint back then?
He went to the old-time theater on Brattle Street and watched three twentieth-century movies in a row. A soft-porn romance, a Western, and a once-daring epic about a war in Southeast Asia. It kept his mind off everything, though he emerged with a seriously sore butt and didn’t care if he never saw popcorn again.
He might not.
He got a few hours of imperfect sleep and went down to the Green Building early.
The first time traveler, Herman, inhabited a deluxe terrarium in the lobby. He had grown to helmet size, and slept through Matt’s tapping on the glass to say good-bye.