All Our Wrong Todays(74)
There are some neat tricks, though. Like no electrical cords anywhere. The overhead lights are spheres of a billowing, iridescent gas. What looks like a solid cement floor turns out to be thinly layered wedges on rotating hinges that move like a conveyer belt, propelling forward at a speed Lionel can modulate with a swipe of his finger in the air. He wears what appears to be an antique spring-and-gear wristwatch that’s dense with motion-detecting analytics, which control everything around us.
We pass door after door, segmented metal with elaborate locking mechanisms and sensor panels. They’re all unmarked but illuminate invitingly as we approach, like lonely puppies wagging their tails at footsteps on the front porch. Lionel, so chatty in the car, is now all terse. Maybe he’s trying to build up suspense for the big reveal, but my mind feels blank, overloaded, so the theatrics are lost on me.
Lionel points to an unmarked door at the end of a hallway and the floor halts in front of it. He makes another gesture and a radiant indigo circle is beamed onto me from an overhead emitter. Every follicle on my body tingles as I’m scanned. He looks at his watch and I see a glint refract off his eyes—he wears some sort of contact lenses that interact with his watch to project a three-dimensional image into his field of vision. The segmented door folds in on itself, revealing a dark room of indeterminate size. Lionel walks in, expecting me to follow. And I do.
He waits for the door to unfold closed behind us, sealing us into blackness.
And then the lights come on. It’s a very big room, round, with a domed ceiling seven or eight stories up, lined with thousands of pinpoint lights that cast a diffuse, shadowless glow across the vast, sloping space.
In the center of the room is a small blocky device, brushed steel with ultra-black paneling that must have light-absorbing qualities, because the room’s ambient glare kind of bends around it. A few flexible pipes lead out of a bulbous chamber in the back, snake off across the floor, and feed into a massive rotating vent at the far end of the room.
In a ten-foot radius, the floor around the device is shinier than it is in the rest of the room, like the concrete has been alchemically polished into mirror.
There’s an odd, staticky, salty odor to the air. Not quite sulfuric. Like . . . oceanic.
“What is it?” I say.
“Well,” Lionel says, “it’s a time machine, of course.”
111
Lionel Goettreider built a time machine.
All the technology he spent five decades developing, this was why—to make time travel possible. He didn’t care about any of his groundbreaking inventions on their own merits. They only mattered to the extent that they brought him closer to his goal. Some he tossed out his door for the world to gnaw on like a hungry dog with a meaty bone. Some he never bothered to release because he didn’t think that anyone who wasn’t trying to create a time machine required or deserved them.
Like teleportation. Lionel simply felt that humanity had no need to atomically decompose and reconstitute themselves between locations. But he needed to invent teleportation for his time machine to work, so he did. That’s what’s off-putting about spending time with Lionel—not the noble genius-martyr of my world, the weird old recluse of this world. He’s even more brilliant than he was fifty years ago, but he doesn’t have the clean-lined personality of a mythic historical figure. He’s needy and a bit glum and also vain and abrasive and smug. He regards this retrograde world with amusement and contempt but derives deep validation from his secret role in shaping it, while also resenting everyone for not recognizing his importance, even though he’s the one who chose to conceal himself. It’s unsettling.
Lionel did have a few things going for him that my father didn’t when he invented his version of time travel. Namely, he knew it was possible, or at least had a pretty good working theory that it was possible. The readings that my presence in 1965 fed into his detection equipment gave him the key insight that he could use the energy signature of the Goettreider Engine itself as a radiation trail through space and time.
“Does it work?” I say.
“Yes,” Lionel says, “it works.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” he says, “I’ve used it.”
112
Before the accident on July 11, 1965, Lionel and Ursula had been seeing each other for just under a year. They’d met by chance in the reception area outside Jerome’s office. Lionel had a meeting to discuss the funding opportunities that Jerome was in a position to approve and Ursula had dropped by unannounced to see if her husband was free for lunch. Jerome was tied up or claimed he was tied up and so, intrigued by each other, Lionel and Ursula had lunch together.
This is how the world changes—two strangers experience a crackle of chemistry. Circumstances allow them to explore it in the most hesitant and cautious way. But the kind of immediate, intoxicating connection that Ursula and Lionel felt is a quantum flame. Attention is its oxygen.
Lionel was forty-one. Ursula was thirty-seven. Neither had children when they met. Their work meant everything to them. Ursula and Jerome had been married for only two years but had already settled into a functional comfort that proved useful to both their careers. She miscarried twice in the first year of marriage and they agreed to stop trying for a while and focus on their work. Lionel had spent his thirties looking for a spouse who was his intellectual equal. He wanted a wife who understood everything that he understood. Who understood him. He never found her—until Ursula. She dazzled him. He couldn’t understand how a man as politically astute but imaginatively dull as Jerome had convinced her to marry him. Lionel didn’t grasp that part of what allowed Ursula to trailblaze as a woman in scientific academia was checking all the boxes as a stable, devoted wife. In the early 1960s, the fact that she didn’t get married until age thirty-five had been widely noted. To the kinds of people who granted tenure, published articles, assigned classes, and financed research, an unmarried woman in her mid-thirties implied something. The ring on her finger made all that go away. Also, and this was by no means insignificant, Ursula wanted to believe in her marriage. It mattered to her.