by Stoney M. Setzer
“Have all the systems checks been completed?” Professor Morris Beckwith asked as he slipped into the officer’s jacket, completing the disguise.
“Green lights straight across,” replied his wife Charlotte as she rose to stand near him once more before he departed. “You look very dashing,” she said, brushing a little dust off of his shoulder.
“You don’t look half bad yourself,” he said as he stroked her hair. They leaned in for a final kiss—not so long or so passionate as either would have preferred, given the presence of so many technicians scurrying about, but definitely enough to cement Beckwith’s intentions of coming back alive.
“And you’re sure you want to do this yourself? You don’t want to send somebody else through?” she asked. Charlotte had that smoldering look in her eye, the one that always pressed his buttons. For the sake of the mission, it was a good thing that the others were here. If they had the room to themselves, Charlotte probably would have been pulling out all the stops right now to convince him to stay. He knew only too well he would have ultimately been powerless to resist her, and then the mission would go unfulfilled.
“I can’t. Nobody knows the mission like I do. Over fifteen hundred lives are riding on this. If this succeeds, think what else we can do, how many other people we can save.”
“You’re right, of course,” she sighed sadly. “I just wish…”
“Trust me, I know. I’m coming back, I promise.”
A couple of technicians were beginning to stare, so she cleared her throat and recomposed herself. “And you have all your supplies?”
Beckwith patted his pocket. “Fake credentials, nano-computer, and gas pellets.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Do you have your anti-gas pills? None of this is going to do any good if you’re sleeping right along with the rest of the crew.”
“Got it.”
“And your return key?”
“Naturally.”
“And if things get out of hand, what do you do?”
Beckwith shook his head; she was starting to sound too little like a wife and too much like his mother. “I press the return key and abort mission.”
“You’d better. Be careful. Love you.”
“I love you, too.”
They kissed once more, and then Beckwith made his way down to the platform. Charlotte reassumed her position at the control board. “Preparing for temporal transport in T-minus five…four…three…two…one…”
A flash of light blinded everyone for a moment, and then Professor Morris Beckwith was gone, transported two hundred years into the past.
Fortunately their calculations had been right on the money, for Beckwith materialized under the cover of night in a secluded corner of the deck. Although he was quite familiar with all of the nuances of time travel, it still boggled his mind that some two hundred years hence the Chronos was following this ship’s exact course. Since time travel always put the traveler in the exact same physical coordinates from which he had departed, such precision was absolutely necessary. Otherwise, he would have materialized in the cold waters of the Atlantic and been no better off than the people he had come to rescue.
He popped the anti-gas pill and checked his watch. It would take twenty minutes for the treatment to metabolize properly, during which time he could get his bearings. He pulled the nano-computer out of his pocket and calibrated the course he would need to follow to navigate the ship to safety once he had taken it over. Simultaneously, through the time warp, the same trajectory was being transmitted to the Chronos.
By the end of the twenty minutes, Beckwith was outside the entrance to the bridge, ready to make his move. He crouched in the shadows for an extra couple of minutes, just to be safe, and then stood and emptied the gas pellets into his hand. Then he walked onto the bridge like he owned the place. Given his officer’s uniform, no one seemed to take notice. Then again, most of the higher-ups had their backs to him.
Wasting no time, Beckwith threw the gas pellets toward the center of the room, where they broke upon impact with the floor. A green cloud filled the air, and for a moment the sounds of men coughing were all that could be heard. That was quickly followed in its turn by the sound of their bodies slumping to the floor in near-unison, and then by their snores.
“Pleasant dreams,” Beckwith said as he strode to the helm and placed the nano-computer atop it. Instantaneously, newer technology subjugated older, and the computer deftly steered the big vessel along its appointed course.
Beckwith couldn’t resist the urge to look out as the ship passed the icebergs. It still boggled his mind that such a relatively small assailant could have felled this ship, the one that supposedly God could not sink. Then again, it was no longer the case.
As the Titanic neared New York, the fallen bridge officers began to stir. None of them would ever admit to having fallen asleep on duty, not even to each other, so he had little fear of anyone reporting anything unusual. Satisfied that his mission of mercy had been accomplished, he took his nano-computer, stepped off of the bridge, and withdrew his return key.
Thoughts of grandeur began to dance in his head as he sought the exact spot for his departure. Roughly one thousand five hundred lives had just been spared; how many more could he save in the future? He thought of all of the great disasters of history—Pearl Harbor, Chernobyl, 9/11, the lunar colony on Europa—and pictured himself saving lives in every case…
He nearly leapt out of his skin when he saw the old woman crouched in the corner that was to be his departure point. She stood and pointed a withered hand at him accusingly. “You know not what you’ve done here,” she declared.
“Excuse me?” Beckwith asked, reminding himself to play the part of a ship’s officer.
“Your intentions were noble but severely misguided. You will find out soon. You should have never come here.”
“Aw, go away, you old bat!” he said. He could not understand why he suddenly felt so irritable.
“You will find out soon,” she repeated as she walked away. As soon as she was gone, Beckwith activated the return key.
Beckwith had expected a much different reception upon his return. Visions of cheering, applause, and exultation had danced through his head, to say nothing of the kiss he had expected Charlotte to lay on him before he could take two steps off of the platform. The thought that he might receive anything less than a hero’s welcome had never occurred to him.
It was occurring to him now, but as reality rather than imagination. Charlotte and the rest of his crew were there, of course, but none of them seemed particularly thrilled. Neither did any of them cheer, applaud, or take even the first step toward him. Of course, the plethora of heavily armed soldiers with weapons trained upon all of them played a significant role in their restraint.
The only one who took a step forward was a soldier who must have been wearing five pounds’ worth of decoration on his uniform. He had about him the arrogant air that bespoke a man used to having his commands followed instantaneously, and perhaps because of that Beckwith found that he already disliked him. “So, Professor Morris Beckwith, I presume?”
“Yes,” Beckwith replied guardedly.
Surprisingly, the soldier saluted. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am General Thurman Wendell VIII. Please permit me to take this opportunity to thank you on behalf of the Wendellian Empire. I understand that our illustrious empire owes its very existence to your changing of history.”
“Do what?”
“When you rescued the Titanic, you set an entirely new timeline in motion!” Charlotte cried. “One of the survivors…” Her words were cut off as the soldier nearest her jammed a metal rod into her side. Bolts of electricity surrounded her before she ultimately lost consciousness and slumped into the soldier’s arms. Blind with a sudden fury, Beckwith lunged forward, but three soldiers froze him in his tracks by aiming their weapons at him.
“I assure you, she will survive,” Wendell said. “Granted, she will feel as if her skull is aflame when she wakes, but that will pass within an hour or so.”
Far from reassured, Beckwith demanded, “Was she right? Did my rescuing the Titanic lead to…this?”
“My dear sir, that is why I thank you. The founder of our empire, Thurman Wendell I, was among the many who originally perished on that fateful night in the original timeline. Prior to your arrival, my ancestor was admittedly something of a political malcontent. Thanks to your efforts, he survived, and he was subsequently able to bring the entire globe under his rule due to his finding something that you inadvertently left behind.”
Wendell held up a small metallic object, and Beckwith suddenly felt nauseous. A quick feel of his pocket confirmed his fear. Somehow he had left his nano-computer behind in the past. In his era—or at least the one from which he had originally departed—there were enough technological checks and balances in place to limit the nano-computer to only its intended purpose. Transplanted to a less technologically advanced time, the information it supplied could give its user unimaginable power. Couple that with the machine falling into the wrong hands… Beckwith swallowed hard to force down the bile rising in his throat.
“Take them below,” Wendell commanded his men. “Don’t let them out of the lower decks. I think I have a new tool that can be used for the glory of the Wendellian Empire.”
“I can’t believe it,” Beckwith murmured under his breath for perhaps the fiftieth time.
“Must you shout?” Charlotte grumbled as she massaged her temples. The stun gun had apparently left her with a hangover to rival anything that could ever come from alcohol, with which Charlotte had little experience.
“Sorry,” he whispered as softly as he could. “Is this better?”
“It’s still a little loud, but it’ll have to do. Next time, ask Wendell’s men if they’ll just pistol-whip me instead. I think it would be less painful.”
“So what happened here? After I changed the past, I mean. How is it that you still remember what the world was supposed to be like? I thought that…”
Charlotte opened her mouth to answer, grabbed her head in a gesture of sudden pain, and motioned toward a technician named Lewis.
“Part and parcel of the Chronos being in the eye of the temporal storm,” Lewis explained. “We’re not immune to the changes, but we are somehow able to retain our memories of what the timeline was supposed to have been.”
“So when I changed the past…”
“Everything happened in the blink of an eye,” Charlotte interjected despite her pain. “One second, we see the old woman scaring you out of your skin. That’s when you dropped the nano. You chase her away and start with the return key, and all of us are yelling at the viewscreen—sort of like in the movies, when you yell at a character not to open a door because of what’s behind it, and they do anyway. We’re trying to tell you that you’re leaving the nano, but you can’t hear.”
Lewis picked up the story again. “As you began to dematerialize in the past, Wendell and his soldiers materialized here. That part was weird. On the one hand, we all knew that none of them had been there a second ago. At the same time, we had this other memory of them having been there for quite some time. That, Professor, is where all this monkey-business with the timelines gets convoluted, and which is why you never should have done this in the first place.”
Beckwith knew the accusation to be true, but he still couldn’t help a feeling of indignation. “Insubordinate much?” he challenged.
“Irrelevant much?” Lewis countered. “I was on board before, but let’s face it. What you did wasn’t so good after all. You can’t deny it. Look at the results.”
“But all those lives!”
“…Were appointed to end on that night.”
“And what determines that?”
“Not what, Professor. Who.”
Beckwith sighed. “I presume that you refer to God.”
Lewis nodded. “Let’s face it, he didn’t mean for life on Earth to go on forever. Everybody has to die sometime, right? All those lives you saved that night, they still eventually died at some point afterwards, didn’t they?”
“Of course they did,” Beckwith agreed, rather reluctantly. “I mean, that was two hundred years ago.”
“Right. And at least in the case of this Wendell I, there was a reason that he was supposed to die on that particular night. When you saved the Titanic, you created an alternate history that led the world to this point.” Sighing, Lewis added, “All of us—myself included—were so caught up in wondering whether we could change history that we never bothered to ask whether we should change it.”
“Judging from this, the answer would be a resounding ‘no,’” Charlotte moaned.
“So do we know anything at all about this Wendellian Empire?”
“It showed up on my nano just before we got stormed,” Lewis said. “Put it this way, the original Wendell would have made Adolf Hitler look like a Sunday School teacher, and his descendants are no different.”
“Great,” Beckwith groaned. “Just great.”
“So now what?” Charlotte asked.
“There’s only one thing to do. Somehow we’ve got to make our way back to the time portal and go back one more time. I’ve got to make sure that the Titanic sinks.”
“And how do you plan to do that?” Lewis challenged. “In case you’ve missed it, we don’t exactly have the run of the place anymore.”
“You know, now that you mention it, I have felt a little confined lately,” Beckwith quipped back. Looking at Charlotte, he said, “So, you’re still not feeling so great, are you, honey?”
“My head still hurts a little, but it’s getting….”
Beckwith locked eyes with her. “No, you’re really feeling terrible, aren’t you? Like you might get seriously ill if our captors don’t give you some medical attention right away, right?”
This time Charlotte took the hint, but she furrowed her brow nervously. “Do you think that would actually work? I mean, hasn’t it been done to death in movies?”
“In our timeline, yes. But maybe if everything else in history got messed up, maybe the movie industry did also, and maybe all those movies that did it to death never got made.”
“That’s a long string of maybes.”
“I know it’s a gamble, but we already know how much good just sitting here is going to do, right?”
“Point taken,” Charlotte acquiesced. She then lay down on the floor and began to moan and groan loudly and even more convincingly than he had anticipated. For all the world she sounded as if she were at death’s door. Of course, all the world as they knew it was riding on the success of this ruse.
“Hey! We need some help in here!” Beckwith shouted through the closed door of their makeshift cell. “Something’s wrong with my wife! I think she’s dying!”
“So what?” retorted the voice of a guard. “General Wendell plans on having you all killed later anyway. If one of you dies now, it will only save us some trouble later.” From their side of the door, he and one of his comrades laughed heartily.
“Well, that worked well,” Charlotte groaned. “Any other bright ideas?”
“As a matter of fact, I might,” Beckwith said after a pause. Leaning against the door again, he called, “So, does your General Wendell know how to operate the time machine without our help?”
For a moment, no one answered. Just as it had begun to seem that no reply would ever come, the guard asked, “Do you dare to imply that it would be beyond our glorious leader’s comprehension?”
Beckwith licked his lips nervously, knowing that he would have to be cautious with his word choice. “I’m sure he could figure it out himself, but wouldn’t it take less time if we demonstrated it for him? After all, we do have experience with it.”
“One moment.” There came the sound of footsteps taking three strides away from the door, followed by the guard’s voice, apparently talking into a communication device of some sort. Beckwith strained to hear what was being said, but he couldn’t make out anything. Every muscle in his body tensed as he waited to see if this latest ruse would be any more successful than his first.
The footsteps returned, and the guard cleared his throat. “His Excellency will grant you audience for you and your staff to perform a brief demonstration of your time machine before your executions. Be advised that if you try to flee or attack when this door opens, you will be shot immediately.”
“So much for making a break for it,” Lewis whispered.
“Wasn’t going to anyway,” Beckwith countered. “Just trust me and follow my lead.”
“Are you sure this is going to work?” Charlotte inquired.
Beckwith sighed and admitted, “Not completely.”
“How reassuring,” Lewis quipped as the doors slid open.
Wendell stood in the control room, his chest puffed out with his own ego. A mere glance at his body language told Beckwith that this man would never admit to being unable to operate the time machine without benefit of the demonstration. In the dictator’s mind, he had undoubtedly already rationalized the situation until he saw himself as granting a last request rather than humbling himself to ask for help.
“Fortunately for you and your associates, I am in a most generous mood today,” Wendell said haughtily. “I shall permit you to conduct your little demonstration before having the lot of you exterminated.” No one said anything, and after a moment the general’s eyebrows jumped upwards. “Have you no expressions of gratitude for my show of mercy?” he demanded. There could be no mistaking the implication that his show of benevolence could be revoked at a moment’s notice.
Sycophancy had never been one of Beckwith’s strong suits, but he knew what was at stake. Bowing deeply at the waist, he said, “My associates and I can neither thank nor praise you enough for your kindness, Your Excellency.” Every word was a crock, but he saw no alternative.
Wendell chuckled. “I see that your etiquette is a bit rudimentary, but we shall allow it to slide under these unique circumstances.” Beckwith assumed that a rough translation would have been something along the lines of, I’d like to kill you for not groveling enough, but I don’t dare before you show me how this thing works. Clearing his throat, the dictator barked, “Quickly! On with your demonstration!”
“Everyone to your places,” Beckwith directed, turning his back on Wendell for a moment. “Just use the same date that we had used previously.” Charlotte and Lewis both gave him a pointed look, and he mouthed the words Play along at him. Both of them caught on immediately as they began to see what he had in mind, but he could see that the realization hadn’t done much to allay their fears. If anything, knowing his plan seemed to have made them more ill at ease than they had been previously.
“Very poetic, Mr. Beckwith. I must say I am impressed,” Wendell said theatrically. If the possibility of a double-cross had occurred to him, he gave no sign. “How fitting that you should set the controls to that pivotal point in history at which you made our great empire possible! I hope you men are taking careful notes.” This was directed to the soldiers flanking every member of the Chronos crew.
“I suspected that you might appreciate that selection,” Beckwith lied as he stepped toward the transport platform. “Now, if you will follow me, I will show you precisely where one must stand in order to be transported.” Positioning himself accordingly, he continued, “Anyone standing in this spot will be transported to the set moment when the people at the controls…DO IT NOW!”
To their credit, Charlotte and Lewis complied immediately. Once more the blinding light flashed, but not before he could see a few things he would have rather missed. The guards, immediately sensing what was afoot, raised their weapons and opened fire, and Beckwith could see red spots erupting onto Charlotte’s chest just as his view of the control room was obliterated. He could also see Wendell diving toward him…
A moment later he was back on the Titanic, in the same isolated spot where he had arrived before. This time, however, he was not alone. Wendell was also there—or at least the top half of him was, suspended in the air a few feet, his torso parallel to the deck, and his lower half surreally faded into nothingness. “What is the meaning of this?” he bellowed. “What have you done to me?”
“You’ve done it to yourself, I’m afraid. You jumped into the time travel beam a fraction of a second later than you should have. Half of you is here and now, while the rest of you is back aboard the Chronos in our own time.”
“Impossible! Preposterous!”
“I would have said so, too,” Beckwith admitted with a shrug, “but I can’t dispute what I see.”
“So what do you intend to do?” Wendell demanded.
“Easy. I’m going to make sure this ship sinks and takes your ancestor down with it, no matter what.”
“And what of me? Shall I hang here forever, torn between two eras? What do you propose to—”
Beckwith watched in wide-eyed amazement as Wendell’s lips continued to move, despite the fact that his voice had abruptly cut off. As he watched, the dictator began to appear less three-dimensional and more two-dimensional. Wendell’s face was just beginning to register horror as his form passed from opaque to translucent. Finally, he faded into nothingness.
Wendell’s bisection had been a phenomenon of which Beckwith would have never dreamed, but it began to make more sense in light of his disappearance. Among other things, time travel depended upon creating a brief opening in the time-space continuum. The portal had closed behind Beckwith in his earlier trip, but Wendell’s hasty lunged had propped it open—temporarily, for the opening had now worked itself shut. Wendell, who was in two times without truly being in either, had somehow fallen through a crack. If he still existed at all, he was in some sort of temporal limbo from which there could be no escape.
If Beckwith succeeded in making the Titanic sink, of course, he would prevent Thurman Wendell VIII from ever existing in the first place. This time, the mission should be much simpler. All I have to do is…
His thoughts were interrupted by what appeared to be a flash of lightning just a few feet away from him. There was a moment in which he wondered what was happening, but an unpleasant realization quickly chased it away. Frantically he sprinted for cover so that he would not be detected by…
…himself. Beckwith watched in horror as he emerged from the temporal field, just as he had done on his first visit to the past. This time, however, he was an observer, watching his hours-younger counterpart prepare to sabotage the course of history in the name of good intentions.
For a fleeting second he entertained the idea of attacking himself, trying to prevent his counterpart’s mission by brute force, but fear nailed his feet in place. Countless theories existed on what might happen if a time traveler met himself in the past and engaged in any sort of physical contact. While a few speculated that only the most minor of consequences could result, many spoke of results that would be nothing short of cataclysmic. The possibility that he could make things worse than he already had was enough to stay his hand.
“Now you know, don’t you?” whispered a voice from behind Beckwith, nearly making him jump out of his skin. Spinning around, he saw the old woman who had confronted him just before he had returned from his first expedition. There was very little overt accusation in her countenance. Her expression almost reminded Beckwith of pity.
“Did you—no, there’s no way.”
“No way, what? That I could have known that you were about to change history for the worse? I promise you, I did know.”
“But how?”
The old woman held up her hand. “You wouldn’t understand if I explained it. Right now you need to focus upon making right what you have set awry.”
“Again I ask, how?”
“You wouldn’t listen to me the first time around. I’d say you might have better luck.”
Beckwith shook his head. “Do you really think that would work?”
“Do you think you could have any less luck than I did?” she countered.
Twenty minutes later, the sadder and wiser version of Beckwith stepped out of the shadows just as his younger counterpart was making his way to the bridge. “You don’t know what you’re about to do, Morris,” he said.
Morris froze in his tracks. “What in the…?!”
“That’s right, I’m you. From the future.”
“How far ahead?” Morris asked. He seemed somewhat skeptical, but not completely. Since time travel was his life’s work, he knew that such a meeting was not completely beyond the realm of possibility.
“Just a few hours after you made it back. You can’t do this, Morris.”
“And why not? If you’re me, then you know that all I’m trying to do is save lives….”
“Yeah, but you—I, whoever—will be endangering millions more in the process, if not billions. You may have to face the fact that all of these lives are appointed to end tonight.”
“Sounds like something Lewis would come up with.”
Beckwith nodded. “No argument there, but I’ve seen what happens. Trust me, it makes a whole lot more sense when you get a taste of the Wendellian Empire.” He saw the hesitation in Morris’ eyes and knew that he had to play his trump card. “They kill Charlotte in the future, Morris.”
Morris opened his mouth but stopped short. At last he said, “Really?”
“These people that you think you’re going to save tonight aren’t going to be alive two hundred years from now in your time anyway, Morris. You may just need to face the fact that we aren’t meant to change history, that maybe it all shakes out the way it does for a reason.”
Morris cast a long, forlorn stare at the bridge. “So now what?”
“You go back to our own time. That way, none of the damage we inadvertently cause ever happens.”
“Then what happens to you?”
Beckwith furrowed his brow. “I honestly don’t know. I’d be a paradox, I think. I might just cease to be.”
Morris reached into his pockets and handed him all of his equipment. “Then you’d better go back and let me be the paradox instead.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t it obvious? You know exactly why I shouldn’t do this. I don’t, save for what you’ve told me. I might be tempted to try again, but you’d have enough first-hand knowledge to keep you from trying.”
Beckwith didn’t argue; had he been in Morris’ spot, he would have thrown out exactly the same argument. “So would you die here on the Titanic? What would that accomplish?”
Morris chuckled. “If what we think about paradoxes is right, I should just fade away as soon as you go. You’ll persist, I won’t.”
Beckwith nodded solemnly. Taking stock to make sure he had everything—return key, nano, even the gas pellets that would now go unused—he gave the command to return home. As the temporal effect snatched him away, he noticed his counterpart fading, much the same way that Wendell had done…
“So you didn’t even go through with it?” Charlotte asked. The upshot that he hadn’t expected was that only he would recall the Wendellian Empire or the alternate history to which it belonged.
“I couldn’t,” Beckwith shrugged, knowing how weak it sounded but not willing to divulge the whole story. His colleagues might not have believed it anyway, and besides that there were certain details he would just as soon forget—such as Charlotte getting shot.
“So the unsinkable ship sank after all,” Lewis said. “I guess it was meant to be.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Beckwith replied.
© 2011 Stoney M. Setzer
Original fiction debuting at Residential Aliens.
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