Unhappenings (30 page)

he following day I planned to see Helen after work, but she intercepted me on my way out the door.

“Hey you,” she said. “You have time to grab a coffee?”

“I do.” I stood there in a moment of indecision. Her appearance at the lab building provided me with a sudden opportunity, and I was feeling bold. “Come with me,” I said, heading back inside.

“Coffee is this way.” She pointed behind her.

“Humor me.”

She sighed. “I always do.”

Helen followed me back into the building and past the security desk. We made it to the elevator before she finally asked, “Am I allowed to be here?”

“You’re allowed to be in this part of the building, yes,” I said. “You’re not allowed in the part I’m taking you to.” Once inside the elevator, I said, “Fourth floor.”

This was followed by a routine scan, after which a polite but firm voice said, “Unauthorized personnel present.”

“Override on my authority.”

After a brief pause, the voice said, “Yes, Doctor Walden.”

Helen managed to hold her tongue for the ten seconds it took us to rise three floors. Once we were in the corridor, she whispered, “Doctor?”

“Shhh,” I told her. This seemed sufficient explanation for the time being.

When we got to my lab, I scanned my ID to get us past two sets of doors. My work space was located behind a shielded airlock, which, from the look on Helen’s face, added to her overall sense of astonishment and trepidation.

“What are you doing?” she said. “Aren’t you going to get in trouble over this?”

“Not a chance,” I said without elaborating. In truth, I was taking a terrible risk. If anyone chose to make a case about this, it would expose quite a lot of things about my situation better left unexplored. My hope was that any security concerns would be flagged directly to the project director, and that he—I—would let it slide.

As we entered my work area, I felt a sudden pang of self-consciousness about the state of the place. Every surface was cluttered with various equipment and assorted unprofessional objects. Helen didn’t appear to notice any of this, and she looked around with a wonder comparable to what she showed me at the aquarium.

“Is all of this yours?” she asked.

“It doesn’t belong to me, if that’s what you’re asking, but it is my equipment. I work alone in here.”

She looked at me with suspicion. “Why?”

“Because my assignment is of a more sensitive nature than most of the research being done here.” As I said those words, I realized the wrist modules had been left out. She had probably already seen them. Even if she identified them as important, she would not have been able to activate them, but the fact that she could see them made me nervous. She would be seeing them again, soon enough, in a very different context, if I could get them to work.

“I really shouldn’t be here, should I?”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

She grinned. “This is fantastic! Can you show me something? Is there anything here I would understand?”

I held out my hand. “Give me your tablet.”

Without hesitation, she pulled it out of an inside pocket on her jacket, and handed it to me. The case was solid polished teak. It was certainly quite a bit more expensive than the cherry one I carried. I placed it inside a small glass box. “Travel field, sixty seconds, on my mark,” I said.

“No way,” she whispered.

I smiled. “Mark.”

The tablet blinked out of existence, with a small flash of red light. Helen let out an unbridled giggle. “Oh my God! Did you just do what I think you just did?”

I laughed. Her ebullience was infectious. “If you think I just sent your tablet one minute into the future, then yes.”

“Where will it land?”

“Right back in the case,” I said. “This one only does forward travel, and it stays sealed until the jump time has elapsed. If I were sending it backward, it would be a different protocol, a different machine, and a very different outcome. Even at sixty seconds, you would probably never see it again.”

“Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod,” she said. “This is incredible!” She stared at the case with a wild glee in her eyes that made this worth any risk. Shortly, with a small blue flash, the tablet reappeared. “Ha!” she exclaimed. Exaggerated cackling followed. The chamber opened with a small hiss. Where a more cautious person might have asked if it was safe to touch it, she immediately reached in and grabbed it.

“Let me see yours!” she said. I held my tablet out to her, and we compared times. They were exactly one minute apart. This effect only lasted for a few seconds, which was as long as it took the satellite connection to correct it. Still, it made my point.

“Is this what you do all day?” she asked with giddy enthusiasm. I laughed.

“Not hardly. This is just the barest beginnings of what we are trying to accomplish here.”

“Have you ever traveled through time?” The question came at me so quickly, and so unexpectedly, that I faltered looking for a safe answer that wasn’t a lie. She saw right through that. “You have! Oh my God! Tell me! Tell me everything!”

“I…” What could I say? She wanted me to tell her everything. At that moment, I could think of nothing in the world I wanted to do more than just that. But it was too much to lay on her all at once. “I can’t,” I said.

She pouted. “Poo.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. “But I will. Someday. I promise.”

She stared at her tablet, turned it over and over in her hands, then looked me in the eyes. “This is the most wonderful thing I have ever seen.”

I took that in with a nod and a warm smile, unable to speak. At that moment, I was already looking at the most wonderful thing I had ever seen.

rom there we went out for Italian. What was supposed to be half an hour of coffee after work turned into two hours of pasta and red wine. She asked me many questions. I refused to lie to her about any of it, so much of the time I simply told her I couldn’t say. But she did learn some things that evening. I told her about the tracer pucks, and the seven year margin of error for backward travel. I told her about the mice, and the dog. I told her I had been working from Ainsley’s notes, and three glasses of wine in, I let it slip that he had been a professor of mine. I managed to cover, and she made fun of me for being tipsy.

We went for a walk after that, and talked about a lot of things. I got to hear some of Helen’s childhood anecdotes, and she got to hear some very heavily edited versions of some of mine. We talked about the day we met. She asked me if I thought at the time that she was crazy, and I told her honestly I thought she was hilarious.

There were multiple opportunities to take our friendship to a different place that night, and I managed to skirt them all. She would send a signal, I would pretend not to notice it, and then laugh at something brilliant she said. We did this dance maybe half a dozen times over the course of several hours. Between my restraint and her patience, we made it to almost midnight before we finally decided to call it a night and go our separate ways.

I went to bed feeling extremely proud of myself, and quite convinced I had managed to avoid my curse. Essentially on the technicality that we weren’t calling what we had a relationship, the universe would not be able to take her away from me.

How clever I thought I was.

The universe was not amused.