At first Jake thought he’d gone blind until he saw the nearly full moon through thin clouds. A cold wind pushed against his face. He took a step, kicked something yielding, and a sleepy voice said, “Watch it, goll darn ya. Can’t a soldier get a decent sleep anywhere on this boat?”
Standing still, Jake listened until his eyes adapted to the pale light. Water sloshed heavily to both sides. A substantial pounding vibrated the floor beneath his feet, and before the first faint lights grew visible on the shore a couple hundred yards away, he’d already decided they were on a steamboat near the bow. He turned his back to the wind. Moonlight revealed twin gray smokestacks belching smoke and sparks above a pilot’s cabin, and dark forms that covered the deck like a lumpy landscape. He looked down. The man he’d kicked had rolled onto his side, pulling a thin blanket over him. The bundles were men sleeping on nearly every inch of exposed surface. Walking without stepping on someone would be hard.
“When and where are we?” said Martin.
“Someplace that’s going to sink soon, or catch fire, or be attacked,” Jake said.
Martin grunted. “I should have brought a coat.”
“Go back and get one.” On the shore, ghostly trees touched their branches to the water. A lone cabin, a dim light flickering in its window, peeked out from the woods. On the boat’s other side, the river reflected the moon like a long, undulating silver plate until it vanished in a low fog that hovered just off the surface. The air smelled cool, wet and muddy.
“Big river. Steamboat. English spoken here. The Mississippi.” Martin strode over a silent shape, careful not to step on it. Jake followed. Gingerly they moved toward the shore-side railing. Men sat up there, some leaning their heads on the shoulders of others. Some talked among themselves.
“He’s dead, the bastards,” said one. No one replied. “A coward’s shot, I tell ya. A yella deed, it was.”
Jake took a place at the rail. Below, the river flowed past slowly. The ship’s headway was gradual. The cabin on shore crept astern.
“You’ll feel better when we hit Cairo and head home,” said another voice.
“Vicksburg, Memphis, Cairo, Evansville. What’s it matter? Dead is dead.”
Farther down the boat, the paddle wheel churned, digging into the water with quick, ponderous movement.
“You didn’t even vote for him.”
“I would’ve.”
Dampness on the rail chilled Jake’s arms. The only warmth was Martin standing beside him, blocking the wind.
“Who is dead?” said Martin.
A log with one crooked branch sticking out like a bony, broken bone drifted by only thirty feet away. At the end opposite the branch, a pair of birds, their beaks tucked under wing, huddled side by side. “The president, ya cracker. Ain’t ya talked to anyone? Some southern dog of an actor they say done it.”
Jake leaned back, but the men were swathed in shadow. He couldn’t see who spoke.
“Lincoln?” said Martin. “Are you talking about the assassination of Lincoln?”
Someone snorted in disbelief. “Twarn’t Jefferson Davis.”
Jake’s computer squeaked to life. Before he muted the citation, it said, Abraham Lincoln died on April 14, 1865. John Wilkes Booth fired on the president during a performance….
“How long ago?” said Jake. He couldn’t remember much about the Civil War beyond the obvious. If Lincoln was already dead, then the war was over. Antietam and Gettysburg and Chancellorsville were in the past. Certainly nothing to fear, like the destruction of the Hindenburg or Mt. Pelee erupting. The shooting had ended.
“Don’t know what today is,” said the voice. “Ten days, maybe. Two weeks.”
Jake activated a search for the dates with attention on disasters. A second later, the computer said, At approximately 2:00 a.m., April 27, 1865, the massively overloaded steamboat, Sultana, exploded. At the time it carried approximately 2,100 repatriated Yankee soldiers, most from the Andersonville prison camp. Between 1,700 and 1,900 men died. The voice carried on. Facts, figures.
Jake swallowed hard. “This is the Sultana, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“Would you know what time it is?”
“Don’t know that neither.”
Jake whispered to Martin. “The boat is going to blow up.”
Martin’s head dropped to his arms. “That doesn’t make sense. The figures… the math… random times, Brownson said.”
Closer to the pilot’s cabin, another man slouched on the rail. Jake’s gaze lingered on him. The moon’s light burnished him like a bleached shadow. Was this also a soldier who would never make it home? His posture seemed familiar and out of place.
“We should leave, Jake. An explosion won’t give us time to escape. I need to get to the lab and redo the calculations. I’ve missed something.”
Jake straightened, moved toward the pilot house. A rift in the cloud cover brightened the light for a moment, showing the man’s shirt sewed shut at the shoulder. No arm. Jake thought, these are Civil War veterans; many of them have lost a limb. As he looked at the landscape of sleeping men, he saw a half dozen crutches resting across blankets. Still, Jake’s neck tingled. No empty sleeve dangled from the one-armed man. It was gone, sewn up, as if there had never been an arm for that space.
Martin sounded panicked. “I’m going.”
Jake’s back grew cold. Wind brushed against him, and the air felt empty. Without looking, Jake knew that Martin had gone. He approached the man at the rail, stepping over outstretched legs, until he stood next to him.
“You were fools to come. It’s not worth it,” said Brownson. The old man stared into the water, the side of his face a chalky reflection of moon and river air. “How much time did you give yourself?”
“I don’t know, but it can’t be long.” Jake imagined the boilers deep in the ship’s bowels, leaking steam, overpressured, fighting the current and the crowded deck, maybe seconds from ripping at the seams. He put his hand next to Brownson’s, and behind his eyes he felt a sudden pressure. His voice caught in his throat. “Your lab… they’ve bombed it. You can’t go back.”
“They?” Brownson sounded tired. His voice was flat.
“Yes. Someone. Maybe another government. They might have found out what we were doing and became scared. Maybe they thought you could solve the paradox. But there was a bomb. You sent us away that day, or we would have gone up too.”
“So, how did you get here? How did you arrange it?” said Brownson.
Jake could feel his brow wrinkling. “What do you mean? Your machine, of course. Your design worked. There’s no paradox.”
Brownson turned to face him. Moon shadows under his eyes made him look a hundred years old. “I didn’t solve the paradox—I worked around it, and so did you, or you wouldn’t be here.”
No answer worked. What did he mean? “We just activated the device. We didn’t solve anything.”
Closing his eyes, the old man sighed as if he never wanted to breathe again. “The information paradox stops time travel, as I argued. Information that would change people’s actions can’t go forward or back. The timeline is immutable.”
If it wasn’t for the beating of the paddle wheel and the soaking Mississippi breeze, Jake could almost feel back home in the lab. This was the direction of a hundred arguments. It was where the math piled up, making no sense. “But we’re here.”
“Yes, we are, and we can go anywhere the information we carry doesn’t matter. We go to time’s dead ends, like this sad ship.”
Jake’s thinking felt sluggish. So much had happened in the last hour. Too much to comprehend. “I don’t understand.”