All Our Wrong Todays(87)
“Or you could do both,” he says.
He flashes me a slick little grin, like he’s over the initial shock and now kind of enjoying the lunatic charge of this historically insane situation. I appreciate his calm under pressure, even though he still turns into the devious old asshole who threatens to kill everyone I love. Which leads me to the part of my plan I’m most leery about, because it’s shaky and contrived, but I have to at least try it on the off chance it actually works.
“Are you paying attention?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
“My name is John Barren,” I say. “My father is Victor Barren. My mother is Rebecca Crittendale-Barren. My sister is Greta Barren. In the future, you will find them and you will keep track of them, but you will never interact with them in any way. Do you understand? In any way. If you do, it’ll ruin everything. But you’ll be ready. When I show up at your door, you’ll know it’s time to act. You will send operatives to take them into custody. By force. You’ll need this for leverage over me.”
“What are you talking about?” he says. “You want me to kidnap your family?”
“In the future,” I say, “I won’t be inclined to help you. I need to be compelled. But you will never harm them. It’ll be an empty threat.”
“There’s got to be another way,” Lionel says.
“There will also be a woman,” I say. “Her name is Penelope Weschler. Your operatives will take her as well. But something will go wrong. She will try to escape. There will be a physical altercation and she will be terribly injured.”
“I’m a scientist,” he says. “The whole purpose of my work is to create unlimited power for the world. To make life better for everyone. I can’t hurt people.”
“And you won’t,” I say. “It will all be fake. It will look real to me, but it will be a simulation. Designed to only look authentic. Nobody will be harmed.”
“I don’t understand,” he says.
“You will safely transport the four of them to your base of operations in Hong Kong,” I say.
“Wait, why Hong Kong?” he says.
“I’m asking you to do this because it has to be done. To close the loop. It’s your responsibility to keep them safe but appear to threaten their lives.”
“If you change the past,” Lionel says, “why does it matter what happens in a future that will never occur?”
“It matters because it’s my consciousness,” I say.
Even with fifty years to think about it, I’m not sure that convincing Lionel to fake kidnapping my family and injuring Penny will work. But after decades spent weighing the options, my best chance to protect the people I love, without completely dismantling the timeline that got me to here, is this coy psychological gambit. It all has to fit together.
“Fine,” Lionel says.
“Where’s your Polaroid camera?” I say.
“What Polaroid?” he says. “I don’t have a Polaroid.”
“Yes, you do,” I say. “Go get it.”
Lionel’s about to reply when he stops, something occurring to him. He steps over a pile of rubble and reaches into the nook where the consoles meet. He pulls out that famous leather rucksack. Inside it is the birthday gift with the bow on top. He tears off the wrapping paper. The present is a brand-new Polaroid Automatic 100 Land Camera.
“It’s a gift from my aunt in Copenhagen,” he says. “My only living relative. It’s not even my birthday. Her memory is going. She mixes me up with her brother, my father. June 29 was his birthday. I’ve been carrying it around for two weeks. I thought it would be too depressing to open it.”
“Are the devices linked?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
I fire up the time machine and its detection matrix pinpoints the remaining tau radiation traces from my original trip back to July 11, 1965, mapping out a knotted, looping, fractal thread to the moment in space and time where it all went wrong.
Lionel loads the Polaroid with a cartridge of instant film and I stand next to him. He aims the lens at us and snaps a picture. I don’t bother to watch the image emerge from the photochemical glaze. I already know what it shows.
“I don’t understand how any of this works,” he says. “How am I supposed to build a time machine? And even if I somehow figure that out, I mean, how long do I have to wait for you?”
“Good-bye, Lionel,” I say.
I activate the device. And I’m gone.
Let him wait.
126
Radiation is made up of three particles—alpha particles are positively charged combinations of twin protons and neutrons, beta particles are negatively charged electrons or positrons, and electrically neutral gamma particles are high-energy photons. The initial surge of tau radiation that erupted from the Goettreider Engine when it was switched on is still circulating through the lab when I arrive there on July 13, 1965, and the time machine’s detection matrix is programmed to find the remaining traces and follow them back to their origin two days earlier, July 11, 1965.
I quickly discover that chasing a degraded cloud of energy in reverse real-time chronology is extremely disorienting—I feel like a gyroscope banging around inside a clothes dryer strapped to a roller coaster caught in a tornado. It’s hard to even think straight. I grasp moments as they skitter by. Goettreider tinkering with the prototype to fix the very radiation leak that I’m following. The dust settling, but it’s in reverse so the dust rises from a prone state into an excited fog. A tumultuous crash as the half of the ceiling that lies in rubble rises from the floor and knits itself back into place over the lab. As the ceiling uncollapses, a dozen men in 1960s-era gas masks and hazardous-material suits, rubber gloves sealed around their wrists with elastic bands, scurry backward out of the room for safety. Before that, they inspect the wreckage with yellow Geiger counters, waving the metallic sensors around, tapping the glass panels over the indicator gauges to confirm the readings are correct.