On the gazebo, the soldier watched Jake’s approach.
“Where are we?” Jake demanded. He gripped the gazebo’s railing as if to vault himself beside the soldier, a teenager, by his unlined face, so new to his uniform that he looked uncomfortable in it.
“Martinique,” said the man with a rise in his voice, like he had asked a question.
Nervelessly, Jake’s hand fell away from the painted wood. All the horizon held was the mountain and its billowing performance. “What town is this?” he nearly whispered. Martin walked to the gazebo’s side, staring at the volcano.
Puzzled, the young man said, “It is St. Pierre. My company is here to proctor the election.”
“Oh, no,” said Jake. “We’ve done it again.”
Martin turned back to him. “What?”
“I know the mountain.”
From somewhere in the town behind them, a church bell rang out, breaking the silence with its somber tolling.
The soldier laughed nervously. “The Angelus bells. I must be going, monsieur.”
“That’s Mount Pelee, isn’t it?” said Jake in English. “C’est Mont Pelee?” He grabbed the soldier’s arm as he went down the steps. Under the heavy flannel uniform, the man’s arm felt slender. He’s just a boy, thought Jake.
“Yes, Pelee. I must go to the cathedral,” said the young man. “I’m already late.”
Jake’s computer said, Mt. Pelee exploded in… A thunderous clap of sound overwhelmed the rest of the message.
On the mountain, a cloud wall boiled down the slope, its folds and wrinkles glowing like veins on fire. Trees vanished behind it. Within seconds, the upper half of the prominence became all cloud, rolling down, swallowing land, obscuring what before had been clear. Martin said, “Should we be worried about that? What is it?”
The soldier wrenched free from Jake’s grasp, glanced over his shoulder at the mountain, then ran down the street, away from the engulfing cloud. In its squeaky voice, the computer recited a litany of facts.
Jake didn’t move. Didn’t even twitch. His thoughts slowed down and felt cold to him. Emotionless. “Pyroclastic flow.” Another explosion ripped the hidden mountain top.
Martin took a step back. “Will it reach us?”
“In about two minutes.” Near the peak, the smoke radiated an incandescent orange, and a series of smaller detonations like cannon fire rattled the park. Jake’s insides had emptied. Had the family with the two little boys reached the church yet? If they were lucky, they had time for a short prayer. The computer talked to him. Twenty-nine thousand people would die in the next few minutes: the governor and his wife, in town to calm the population, the scientists who pronounced the volcano safe, the farmers who had fled fields where crops had died in the weeks of ash fall, the people who’d abandoned villages close to the mountain for the safety of St. Pierre, all of them would be gone. Only a prisoner in a basement cell would survive. Rescuers would find him days later, horribly burned, crying weakly from beneath the jail’s rubble. “Geologists call it nuee ardente, the glowing cloud. Super-heated air and volcanic ash traveling a hundred miles an hour. Strong enough to knock down buildings. So hot that breathing it boils the lungs.”
“How did we get here?” shouted Martin above the growing roar. Furious, he glared at the cloud that reached the town’s edge, hiding homes and shops and factories. “This is not random at all!” He touched the button inside his shirt, vanished.
Jake could feel the fear around him. If he turned, citizens would be on the street, drawn by the noise. The cathedral would empty. Hymn books in hand, they’d be waiting. Children, grandparents, craftsmen, soldiers, wives. Trash in the street beyond the park stirred. Now, all was dark. As if it contained a thousand freight trains rumbling headlong down their doomed tracks, the mountain bellowed.
Before the heat. Before the flesh-stripping wind. Jake pressed the button within his shirt.
Without taking his hand off the monitor input, Jake flicked from one image to the next, grainy black and white photographs of buildings without roofs, all the windows gone, bricks scattered in the street, and everywhere, bodies burned black. “They had plenty of warning, you know,” he said. “The mountain had been misbehaving for weeks. People had already died. There were mud avalanches and a tidal wave and ash falls, but they didn’t leave. How can you keep your children with you when there are… signs… portents?” He sighed and turned off the monitor. “When there are evil omens in the sky?”
“Damn it, Jake. What’s important here is the impossibility of us showing up at two disasters. History is mostly boring, repetitious, day after day existence where people go about their ordinary lives. Historic events are rare. How could we possibly be present for two of them in a row?”
“I don’t know what the science is, here. Brownson’s math looks more like chants and incantations to me than physics anyway. We built a machine that we don’t understand. I wonder if Brownson even knew. If only we could ask him.”
Martin swore and slapped his notebook closed. “The one-armed bastard. Maybe if he hadn’t been so cryptic with us, we’d have a better chance of figuring it out.” He paced around the lab, head down. “We’ve been time travelers for all of what, ten minutes total? Both times we’ve been scared. We’re not thinking straight.” He paused, looked at Jake. “We need rationality. We were never in danger. We could come back to the lab anytime.” He paced again, circling their work table, passing behind Jake at the monitor. “Here’s the problem: we only have two points on the graph. We can’t reach a conclusion without more information. I say we try again.”
The blank screen looked back at Jake, but he could still picture the old images from centuries past. He’d never thought of the people who’d lived before as people, really. Those lives were abstractions. Nothing to do with him. But he could see them now, the living, beating, desperately intense faces from the past, trying to avoid their fates, staring down the rushing pyroclastic cloud burning toward them at a hundred miles an hour, or on the Hindenburg, waiting for the ground to come close enough so they could jump, not knowing if the raging hydrogen and diesel-fueled fire would reach them first.
“I don’t want to visit the dead anymore,” he said.
Martin put his hands on the back of Jake’s chair. He could see Martin’s reflection in the monitor overlaying the ghost images of a destroyed town. “I told you already, they were dead before we started. We’re dead, Jake, to someone in our future, but you’re thinking about it all wrong. They’re alive too. Everything they’ve ever done is still being done. Nothing is in the past now. It’s all redoable. Replayable.”
He checked the equipment strapped across his chest under his shirt. “We have to go again, and we need to do it now. I can’t tell from Brownson’s figures why it’s working. So much of his calculations are about the paradoxes, and they’re a waste. ‘Solve the paradox!’ he said. ‘Solve the paradox!’ There’s no paradox. We’ve traveled, but we can’t guarantee we can keep doing it. Maybe the Earth has to be in the right place in its orbit. Maybe the atmospheric conditions have to be just perfect. If we don’t go now, we might not be able to go again.”
For a moment, Jake didn’t stir. It was like the weight of Mount Pelee coming toward him and nothing mattered. He pushed away from the monitor and faced Martin. Finally, he nodded. Martin was right, he was dead any way he figured it.