Authors: Cam Rogers
“This was residential back in the day,” Beth said. A three-legged dog skipped across the busted curb in front of them, glancing self-consciously at them before disappearing in the weeds. “Way, way back in the day.”
Jack sat upright. Beth’s hand—still thimble-clipped into her rig—slipped from his shoulder.
“Will didn’t buy this place for the view.” Jack looked at her hands, traced a finger along the rubberized thimble covering her thumb to the first joint, then the insulated wiring that led to a wrist clip of the same color and material.
“Zero State Mobility Rig,” she said. “The exo carries its own chronon charge, maintaining my personal M-J field, even in a complete causality vacuum. It means I can walk around in a stutter, as long as the charge lasts.”
The bridge was ahead. The address put the swimming hall directly beneath it.
“Before we do this,” Jack said, “I need a few answers. That morning on Bannerman’s Overlook. That show with Aberfoyle—the chop shop, the yachts, what happened to Aberfoyle and his men, the
timing.
The way nobody came to ask us questions. How…?”
“Do you like Douglas Adams?” she said.
“The writer?”
“He wrote that the knack to flying lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground, and miss.”
“And?”
“Same thing.”
Jack thought about that. “No it isn’t.”
“Here we are!” Beth was pointing at a decrepit building shoved snug beneath the bridge. It was completely unremarkable. The faded signage, half-lost to gravity and vegetation, read
BR
BURY
SWI MING HALL
. Beth was out of the cab, making a line for the place.
Jack followed. Colonies of seagulls and pigeons populated the underside ribbing of that third-rate bridge. Thin-stalked greenery reached up against stanchions supported by crumbling brickwork. Even the graffiti hadn’t been updated since the nineties. The hall was as broad as the bridge itself, and built from the same brickwork. Two levels, all of the windows barred and boarded-over. Double doors of steel-banded wood sat square in the middle of the construction, falling-apart sign overhead. Steps led up to the door, a concrete wheelchair ramp swerving up from the side. Grass and vegetation had spent a decade or two undermining the concrete and brickwork, splitting it, green explosions reaching for the bridged-over sky.
Beth turned back to the cab. “Nick, you got a crowbar, tire iron, something…?”
Nick, out of the car, clicked his tongue and gave her pistol-fingers in the affirmative before jogging around to the trunk.
“So,” Jack said, trying to be casual. “Did you … see … anyone while you were away? A guy?”
“Not really.”
“Oh?”
“I had a lot to get done in that time. Well, there was one guy, I guess.”
“One guy who?”
Nick jogged over. “Here ya go!”
Beth took the tire iron, tested the heft, moved for the door.
Jack sidled over, dropped his voice to a whisper. “Was it serious?”
Beth was busy trying to wedge the iron between the two doors.
“Are you … in touch?”
Beth stopped what she was doing, looked him in the eye, and said his name in the most well-meaning tone she could manage. “Jack.” He got the hint.
She got the tire iron in there, started sawing the other end of it to and fro.
Jack found it oddly uncomfortable to watch, looked away.
Metal and wood complained, splintered, finally popped. “I think I got it.”
Jack grabbed the handle on one of the doors; she got the other. Sure enough the lock had fallen apart as it separated from the housing. The doors shrieked across the concrete.
Beth surveyed what this revealed. “Oh, get bent.” A proper, actual security door. Thick, metal, heavy, with a code lock.
Nick whistled. “He wasn’t screwing around.”
Beth gestured at it. “Where’d your brother get that? NORAD?”
“Wait a sec.” Jack stepped up to it. The code lock looked like it still had power. He punched in six digits. Waited.
From deep within the door’s body came a weighty triple-
thunk
and, just like that, the half-ton iron door popped loose—opening an inch.
Beth examined it, looked at Jack.
“My birth date,” he said.
“Huh.” Beth pushed the door open easily. “After you.”
“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.”
The video ended. Jack closed the laptop. “Countermeasure?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“I don’t!”
Nick was watching from the far end of the hall, wondering why Mom and Dad were fighting.
Jack let it go. “I say we get this thing fired up.”
Beth wasn’t convinced. “Safe cracking I can wing my way through, but kick-starting a time machine is one of the few things not covered on the Internet.”
“Paul walked me through it. I think I can do it again. How different can it be?”
“That’s not my concern. My concern is that this is a
time machine,
Jack. As a student of popular culture, I have no desire to go the full Bradbury.”
“Think about it: we fire this up, we go back to
before
the university incident. We get in there, we
stop it,
and then this never happens.”
Beth shook her head. “I know you know that’s not possible.”
“Of course it’s possible! We have a—”
Her hands came up, T for time-out.
“
Stop. It isn’t about going back earlier. It’s about causality. We are here having this conversation
because
the university happened. If we could go back and prevent the university event from happening—and we can’t—then causality would fall apart.”
Jack’s expression was stage-one grief. She felt like she’d kicked a dog. “We go back, Jack. Of that I’m certain. But it doesn’t play out the way you’d like.”
“You want to explain that?”
“We’re in your brother’s hidden lab. He left a message for someone he’s collaborated with about something called a ‘Countermeasure’—a measure that counters. The only time-machine-related thing that needs countering right now is the Fracture. He just said that the Countermeasure was taken on July 4, 2010. It sounds to me like there’s a chance that we’re the ones who took it. Maybe that’s what we do. Take it, bring it back to our time, and fix the Fracture.”