“Hey!” Nick was waiting, twenty feet back, shifting uncertainly on his feet. “Your brother, uh, he wouldn’t… there’s not like shotguns on trip wires, or claymores… he wouldn’t have stuff like that set up, right? He wasn’t that kind of dude? That’s a serious door, is all I’m sayin’.”
Beth glanced at Jack. Jack shrugged. Beth went in first. Slowly. Jack followed, stepping into the twilight foyer of the swimming hall. Light struggled through soaped-up ceiling-level windows, revealing a cold, thickly aired time capsule to the mid-nineties lit by what light filtered through. There was signage for the 1996 Riverport Swim Meet (“Fun in the Sun!”), a wetly disintegrating corkboard that still held rainbow pushpins and handwritten ads for second-hand flippers and puppies that needed good homes. A dusty arcade cabinet stood in the corner, its colorful cartoon siding peeling away and the particleboard beneath coming out in leprous chunks.
Jack faux-retched. “Tastes like the inside of an air conditioner in here.”
The counter faced turnstiles, which led to floor-to-ceiling swinging doors-the kind that made Jack think of a hospital.
A laminated sign announced the pool would be shutting down for good on March 1, and the staff thanked everyone who had been swimming there-some of them for fifty years. A few photographs curled on the floor beneath the sign, sticky tape yellowed and withered on the corners. Jack examined one-three old guys, holding up a black-and-white of their younger selves at the same pool, not long after the end of the Second World War.
He let it go.
Nick stuck his head in. “Smells like feet.” He tentatively stepped inside. “And not the good kind.”
Whatever that meant.
Jack opened a cardboard box, dug through report cards (all grades declining over time) and shrink-wrapped comics, and came up with a framed color photograph of a white mouse in a cage next to-
“That looks like Monarch’s machine,” Beth said. “A model version of it.”
Nick wandered over. “Monarch has a machine? What kind of machine?”
The device in the photograph was small-mouse-sized-and certainly not built with aesthetics in mind: all exposed ribbing and loose wires. Written neatly in Sharpie were the words: “In Memory of Schrodinger, the world’s first time traveler.”
Beneath that was a twelve-thousand-dollar bill from a moving company
“Pickup address was from home,” Jack said. “Dated 1999. Delivery address here.”
Jack put down the bill, smoothed it thoughtfully on the two-tone boomerang-patterned Formica countertop, and then took the turnstiles at a vault. Booming through the push-doors granted a deep vista of dim light and deep shadows. The doors banged against the tiled walls, echoed off the opposite end of the hall, then back again.
He wheeled around to Beth and Nick. “Can we get power in here?”
Beth took the more civilized route through the turnstiles. “You think there’s gonna be power? After all these years?”
Jack couldn’t see much of anything. Anemic light filtered through filthy glass that lined a raised middle section of the roof, but it was still pretty murky in there. He could make out the doubly dark depression of the Olympic-sized pool, and a few things covered in canvas against the walls on either side.
Nick came in, working his phone.
“No calls,” Beth reminded him.
“Chill, sister.” He held up his glowing phone. “Just making light of the situation.” He thumbed an icon and the LED flashlight kicked in. Nick strolled around, playing the light across the walls. “You seeing all this cabling? Industrial. Well hel-lo.” Nick’s phone lit up a large yellow metal prism, about eight feet high and maybe fifteen long. Stacked next to it were four forty-four-gallon drums, one of them fitted with a worn metal hand pump.
Jack took a closer look. “What is that?”
“Generator,” Beth said, her own phone-light up and probing. “Diesel, judging by the drums.”
“This thing’s hefty,” Nick observed. “The enclosure keeps it quiet. You were saying something about your brother having a machine?”
Jack glanced at Beth. She swung her light down to the base of the generator, followed the mass of cabling across the floor to where it dropped down into the dry pool. Jack and Nick followed suit. As one, the three pools of light tracked the path of the insulated lines across mold-encrusted tiles, over workstations set up on folding tables, to the textured steel of an access ramp, to the massive circular construction that dominated the deep end.
Silence, until Nick said what nobody was thinking: “Your brother found a fuckin’ UFO?”
Beth snorted.
“No, Nick, that’s crazy.” Jack jumped into the pool. “It’s a time machine.”
“We gotta get the lights on,” Beth said. “Nick, you seem to know something about this. Can you get the generator to run?”
“Time machine?”
“Nick?”
“Uh… yeah, sure, sure.”
Jack was exploring the benighted guts of the swimming pool, scanning the contents of various workstations that Will had set up. “Computers, diagnostic equipment. A lot of this is stuff I remember from when I was a kid. He had all this set up in the barn. Except the laptops, those are new.”
Nick called out. “Hey guys?” The generator thudded to life. “I think someone’s been here.”
Beth checked the drums against the wall, near the generator housing. “Jerry cans here. Not as dusty as the forty-fours. Nick might be right.”
Nick found the breaker box, flipped it, and long racks of fluorescent overheads sputtered and snapped discordantly, laying Will’s laboratory bare.
Hunkered in the deep end of the swimming pool, taking up the whole space, was a kit-bashed-looking version of the machine he had seen in the university lab. Ring corridor, airlock, and at the center of it a geometric sphere connected to the rest of it by knots of heavy gauge cabling. Monarch’s project was neat and clean and tooled. This thing looked like it could have been powered by an old Buick. It was scrap metal and solder, with occasional touches of tungsten and titanium where it counted; around the core, for instance.
By the ramp was an old laptop on a burnished trolley. The laptop was open, a fluorescent green flash drive jutting from a side connector. Taped to the top of the screen was a note in Will’s handwriting. It read: Message for September on flash drive.
Jack pressed the laptop’s power stud. The computer pieced its thoughts together and booted the OS. “You think he wanted someone to find this?”
Beth dropped into the pool, checked the laptop. “So he and someone else used this place as a monthly drop point, a way to stay in touch off the grid. September was the last one. I wonder what year.”
Jack checked the flash drive’s directory. Just one video file. “Let’s see who he’s talking to.”
His finger hovered above the mouse button.
“Jack? You okay?”
This might be the last time Jack heard his brother’s voice say something new. The last time he would see his brother alive.
He clicked the file. The player popped open. The view seesawed as Will got the angle right.
“July fourth,” Will said. “2010.” He had recorded the message here, on this laptop. The background was the workstations, the shallow end of the dry pool, the swinging exit doors. “September, I hope you receive this.”
A chill in his chest. “September’s a-”
“-person,” Beth concluded.
The video continued. “I… I’ve come back here because I’m left no choice. It’s happened. The Countermeasure is-was-finished, completed. Ready to use. I went to my workshop by the docks. It’s a disaster. The Countermeasure, it’s gone. Taken. I’m hoping to God you have it, because… whoever took it…” Will shuddered, both hands now gripping his head. “The workshop was destroyed. Utterly destroyed. I need to know for sure. If what you said is true then someday our lives may depend on my knowing the truth about what has happened. Contact me. Find me. Please.”