Prologue (15 page)

“We really do need another hundred and a quarter,” Lewis continued. “It’ll be enough to make enough fuel to do some tests and then to operate this thing. When can we get it?”

Lorrie shook her head. “Lewis, there’s no way. There won’t be another dime until we get a report. Shauna is real spooked by these arrests and disappearances and the connection to your deVere. Eckleburg wants to shut you guys down now. He may not say it but I can tell he wants out. He thinks the whole thing is one big money drain and that we’re buying a pig in a poke without the pig.”

Lewis put up his umbrella without answering. As if reading his thoughts, Lorrie became adamant.

“They’re serious, Lewis. Don’t try and stiff us on this by getting the money first and then blowing off Pamela. No tour and approval, no money.”

“Why her?”
Lewis asked, turning back.

“Pamela knows explosives,” Lorrie continued. “She’s the one who builds the bombs for Arthur. Or she did, until…” Her voice trailed off.

Lewis nodded and swallowed hard. “I understand. I’ll be in touch.” He stepped off the landing and walked out to
Beacon Street
. At the sidewalk he turned left away from his parked car and surveyed the street. No one was about and at the corner Lewis turned left again. Another left and a two-block walk brought him to his car. He started it up, checked the mirror for any activity–there was none he could see–and drove back to
Beacon Street
. He watched his rear view mirror, and as he pulled out onto
Beacon Street
saw a parked vehicle pull out behind him. He hadn’t noticed anyone sitting in it when he had driven past. He headed straight home checking his mirror every few blocks. The car stayed one block behind him.

That made no sense. Lewis decided that this had to be either a clumsy tail or else an innocent chance vehicle heading in his direction. Since there was little reason to tail someone back to where they lived he settled on the latter explanation.

Chapter 9

Thursday, July 16, 2026
7:34 p.m.

“Beer?”

Amanda nodded. Paul opened three beers, and handed one to Lewis and one to Amanda. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.” They all drank. Lewis inserted a Rolling Stones tape into the player, and “Exile
On
Main Street” filled the garage. Amanda smiled.

“My favorite.
Paul must’ve told you,” she said over the music.

“Lucky guess,” Ginter said. He didn’t smile back.

“It’s mine too,” Paul said.

“That’s right,” Amanda said. “I’d forgotten. So, you guys need a historian to help get this muscle car back on the road?”

“No.” Paul looked at Lewis, who palmed the metal disk and waved it in a circle above his head. He studied the readouts before nodding to Paul.

Paul took a deep breath. “You know how I loved
The Time Machine
?” he asked.

Amanda nodded.
“The movie?
Yeah.
The Warlocks?
Or Oarlocks?
Or whatever they were called?”

“Yeah, whatever.
Well, you remember that I read Hawking and Sone and-”

”Don’t tell me.” She didn’t flinch. “You’re shitting me. Either that or you’re insane. Can you pull it off?”

Paul was stunned at the quick turn in conversation. Amanda had always been so damn smart, but he had forgotten just how perceptive she was.

“We already have,” he stammered.
“Contrapositive wormholes.
Bennett David showed us the way. All points in time and space are connected by wormholes. Hawking and Sone knew this. But they could never figure out how to do it.”

“And you have?” Amanda asked.

“You know the team here discovered SU44?” Paul continued.
“The subatomic particle that can be accelerated to a speed faster than light?”

Amanda shook her head.

“Well, we did. Lewis and I were on the team. Then at about the same time Grace had to do a report on a famous scientist of the 20
^th
century. She picked Stephen Hawking, and she asked me to help her get some information about him. I started poking around with his writings again. God, I hadn’t looked at them since grad school. He had always said that time travel was impossible.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Has to do with the effects of quantum mechanics.
I won’t bore you–”

“-with the details?”
Amanda finished. “You always thought I bored extremely easily.”

“Never made it to the end of any explanation I ever tried to give on my studies,” Paul said. “If I started on it now I wouldn’t stop until I went all the way.”

“Might not be such a bad thing,” Amanda said coyly.

Paul ignored the retort. “Yeah, so anyway, Hawking said no, he didn’t think it was possible to construct a time machine. He was writing in the 1980s and 1990s, so it wasn’t exactly the last word on the subject. It got me thinking. I started looking around some more, and ran across another late 20
^th
century relative theorist, Kip Sone, who had looked into the matter more deeply than Hawking did. He thought that wormholes could act as time machines, since if you–”

“Wormholes?”
Amanda asked.

Paul waved his hand. “Later. Sone thought that by constructing a space ship capable of traveling at close to light speed, and that according to the principles of the special theory of relativity time moves slower for objects traveling at light speed, you can travel in time, and–”

“Paul?” Amanda asked.

“Yeah?”

“Bore me. What’s a wormhole?”

He looked up at her face. She looked…it wasn’t her features, which he’d always found fascinating, or even her figure, which she’d kept, it was her…interest. She really wanted to know about wormholes. Nothing attracted Paul to people like seeing a spark of vitality in them, a natural curiosity,
a
love of learning simply for the sake of learning. Like Grace.
And Peter.

“Wormholes are basically shortcuts in space and time,” deVere said. “Look at it like this.” He looked around and picked up a parts list from one of the boxes. He removed a pen from his pocket and drew a time line across it, marking “1950” and “2026” on opposite ends.

“We’ve come from here,” he said, putting his finger on 1950, “to here.” He rested his finger on 2026.

“And you’re saying we can go backwards?” she asked, brushing his leg with hers as she moved closer.

“Not backwards, exactly,” deVere said. He put his finger on 2026, almost on the right-hand edge of the list, and picked up the other end, curling it over his hand until 1950 hovered above 2026.

“We take a short cut.” He bounced his finger up and down between the two ends of the paper, between 1950 and 2026. “Space is curved, remember?”

“Einstein,” Amanda said, nodding. “You taught me that in
Ithaca
.”

“Exactly.
A wormhole is like a short, narrow tunnel between different parts and times of the universe. If this piece of paper is the universe, and the universe is curved, then the idea is instead of trying to go across the surface of time, we simply drop through a hole.” He laid the paper flat on Amanda’s skirt.

“How do you know where the wormhole is?” Amanda asked.

“That’s half the problem,” deVere said. “Wormholes aren’t static, they don’t always exist. Lewis would have to explain the math, but the real problem is that matter has to have a negative energy density relative to a light beam to pass through one of these things. It’s called exotic matter, because nobody knows of any sort of matter that can do that right now.”

“Except…you guys?”

“Lewis’ math showed that evaporating black holes implied the existence of this exotic matter. Our discovery of SU44 confirmed it. But if the wormhole focuses, which it does on ordinary matter, the field’s strength grows and destroys the wormhole. If
it’s
exotic matter, however, the wormhole won’t focus and will stay stable long enough for the matter to pass through. It’s like a tunnel that will try to crush anyone it notices trying to pass through, but if it finds it can’t crush somebody it lets that person pass through.”

“Wow. You guys aren’t fooling around. How do you know where you’ll end up?”

“Think of it as a garden hose. One end is fixed at the faucet. But you can turn the other end anywhere you want.
On the lawn, the hedges, or the rose bushes.”

“But the water in the hose doesn’t decide where it goes.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But imagine if the water points the hose nozzle before the spigot’s turned on.”

“You guys can do that?”

DeVere smiled. “We already have.”

“You’ve turned yourselves into exotic matter?”

“Not quite. Lewis identified a wormhole that connected the Accelechron in our lab with a spot under the
Concord
Bridge
a little over one year ago. We set a chronometer to zero, started it ticking, and sent it back in a canister. I drove out and recovered it. The chronometer showed it had been there over a year.”

“So, it can be done. How do you come back? Or do you?” Amanda asked, becoming alarmed.

“David. Dr. Bennett David,” Paul said.
“The Father of Time Travel.”

“David,” she repeated. “Didn’t he become…sort of…?”

Paul nodded. “Yes, well, before all that, he was a brilliant theoretician. He reasoned that for the universe to maintain its equilibrium there had to be contrapositive wormholes. For every wormhole that linked a time and point in space with another time and point in space there had to be a wormhole that linked back that point at a future time with the original time and point. And anything that came through the first wormhole could go back through the contrapositive wormhole without needing to be accelerated again.”