Screaming Science Fiction (10 page)

After that…thankfully the nightmare’s incidence in this its most recent, more grotesque form was only sporadic, and by chance or sheer good fortune I was seventeen before it once again came to the notice of my parents. By then, however—having scared the wits out of my mother one night with my gibbering and shrieking—I had decided it was time to reveal the extent of my problem and perhaps seek help.

By then, too, I had submitted four extremely well-received scientific papers and had been assured a position in one of the country’s finest experimental labs when my formal education was complete, and I knew the last thing that any future colleagues of mine would want to discover—or that I would be prepared to reveal—was that since my childhood through young manhood I had been suffering from…well, how best to put it? A deep-seated persecution complex? Mental depression? Some rare psy-chological disorder? Any or all of these things? Possibly.

I saw several shrinks (please excuse my use of this term, and try to understand: I’ve never had much faith in psychiatry, so this was somewhat of an ordeal for me), one of whom went so far as to attempt regression. Perhaps my cynicism was to blame for his total failure; or perhaps it was simply that there was nothing in my past, my childhood, that he could focus in on or pinpoint as the source of any emotional problem whatsoever.

And so, not knowing when it would strike next, I was left to suffer the nightmare, all through my final term of education and well into my nineteenth year, when mercifully its fortnightly, then monthly, then quarterly incidence seemed to indicate a gradual remission. So that by the time I took up my position at “the facility” (whose location I may not reveal for reasons of national security) I had again begun to believe that perhaps this time my troubles were truly behind me—

—When in fact they were ahead….

The facility.

While I may not reveal its location—for fear of making it a prime target in any future conflict—its purpose isn’t any longer a matter of national security. Indeed, and for the last decade, a majority of the world’s technologically advanced countries have been engaged in just such research.

As for the research in question:

Wasn’t it Einstein himself who declared the concept of a past, a present, and a future—the concept of time, in fact—an illusion, albeit a persistent one? That at least was the substance of it if not in so many words. Temporal physics, yes, dizzying even by quantum standards. But as to why anyone would
want
to travel through time, to speed up their passage through it, or indeed reverse it….

Well, I shall risk my status as a citizen and a hero and propose one of my own theories. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to slide a century or so back down the space-time cone and adjust history somewhat, just a tweak here and there? No of course it wouldn’t! And I know that any reasonable, reasoning mind would recoil in sheer terror at the notion. Ah, but tell that to the government, and to those military men who believe that a world without Hitler—a world which had never known men such as Mao or Osama, or a hundred others of that ilk—would be a better world. Perhaps they are right, but what if they are wrong? At least the world we know is stable, the status quo maintained.

But of course I’m only guessing (despite the presence of the CIA and certain uniformed types in an allegedly “advisory” capacity.)

And so at just twenty-one years of age—and because we all have to earn our keep—that is where I had been working for two years and some months when my nightmare manifested yet again in its final, most monstrous form and at the worst possible, indeed the
only
possible, time….

The facility’s Powers That Be had eventually decided, despite what I’ve said above, that the past was forbidden and nothing physical could be made to materialize there. They had reasoned that if it were at all possible it would have already happened; surely we would have sent something into the past, and, knowing in advance what we were
going
to do would have been witness to its arrival—which is an indication of how far ahead we were with the project—which in turn is to say that we were ready. Or ready for the future, at least.

Only then—if we could get that far and send some object a few minutes into the future—would we reconsider the past. As to the time-traveler in question: since earlier experiments had indicated that a non-metallic element would have the first best chance, the subject of our experiment was to be a simple glass paperweight.

I was to be the last one out of the vault, the one making the final minute, feathery adjustments to the equipment. But of course I can’t describe the equipment, not if I’m interested in preserving my heroic image and citizenship.

And there I was alone of humanity in that vast underground lab, me and the machine. And I must say I felt oppressed by the sheer weight of protective lead surrounding me on all sides—protecting those on the
outside
, that is—yet at the same time excited by the knowledge that much of this, not only the theory but also in large part the actual design of the experiment, was the product of my own imagination and creativity.

Oppressed yet excited…but was it only the lead shielding I felt weighing upon me? And might not my excitement in fact be fear? But fear of what: the possible consequences of what I was about to do? Suddenly I felt oddly perverse: I sensed a danger, yet welcomed it! But there again, was Einstein perverse when he formulated his most famous equation, E=mc2? No, neither man nor equation…not even in the searing light of Hiroshima. Science is science, after all. And as for me: I was no Frankenstein….

But finally we were ready; my monitors and meters were displaying optimum readings, and outside the vault my colleagues—in fact
my
team—were reading their own monitors, conversing excitedly, and beckoning me to join them beyond the reinforced carbon-crystal portholes.

Which was when I felt the darkness swirling and knew that it was happening again; not a nightmare this time but a
waking
horror, a daymare! Again it had come to plague me. I was awake, yes, yet must have seemed half-asleep to those who watched me; asleep and staggering in the grip of invisible forces, swaying like a zombie, mesmerized by this thing which only I could see:

That tortured, fire-blasted face forming out of a darkness conjured in my mind. But more than a face this time, this last time…a face, a neck, and the upper half of a torso, all of it ravaged and worse than ravaged. The left arm had been torn free of a shoulder that spurted blood, spattering the apparit-ion’s laboratory smock. But…a laboratory smock?

And finally I understood, knew what it was all about, what it had always been about. Which was perhaps the most staggering revelation of all. So that even as the thing gibbered its first and last warnings at me—
”Don’t do it! You mustn’t do it!”
—I was passing out, my mind refusing to take it in, shriveling in upon itself like an abruptly deflating balloon.

I remember stumbling against a laboratory table, trying to grasp it and steady myself, and the experiment’s remote control device falling from my suddenly spastic fingers…then of its landing face-down, of course, on the button, and so triggering the experiment.

With me inside the cone zone.

Then the blast like a great bomb going off in my face, the wash of alien heat lifting me up and taking me with it, and the pain that I felt without really feeling it. No, for I must have been half out of it before…well, before I was out of it.

But it’s possible that I remember one other thing: wondering whose arm it was, spraying blood as it went spinning across the laboratory floor…?

As for the glass paperweight:

I’m told it disappeared, only to reappear a minute or so later as a scattering of perfectly formed clear glass marbles of various sizes, which blinked out of sight before they could roll off the smoking laboratory table…materializing a week later as a clump of silicon crystals before disappearing again…and reappearing after four months as a small heap of glass dust, then at once vanishing…to return in a three-month as an acidic vapor that blinded the technician who had been left in charge of the obviously ongoing experiment.

Since when there has been nothing.

So while time travel is possible, we still have a long way to go before we’ll have even a short
time
to go! But I believe we’ll succeed in the end. And while I’m no longer able to give of myself physically, my mind is still keen…indeed, only a very small part of it has escaped me…

So then, what had happened?

Well as anyone with even a basic schooling in science will know, every action has a reaction. I had sent something of the paperweight into the future, its elements if not its structure. But since time is kept in balance by space, the spacetime universe had reacted, compensated. And I was the one in the cone zone.

My mind, or something of my mind (certain of its elements at least) had been blasted down the time-cone into the past, aware that it had an urgent warning to impart if not what the warning was about. And for thirteen years or thereabouts that dazed
thought
had been visiting its former habitation, trying now and then to warn me of my deadly future, but ever fading and losing coherency—

Until the time when I first dreamed the thing, when I was just eight or nine years old; dreamed of the face—
my future face
—before the fragment sped off into an even earlier time, when there had been no me to warn….