Unhappenings (56 page)

he first thing I noticed was the lights going out. In itself, not a harbinger of doom. It took about two seconds for my brain to register the cold. My winter coats were all where they belonged, and I grabbed one, but it was just as cold as everything else, so it took a while before my accumulated and insulated body heat brought me back to a comfortable temperature.

Outside, the ground was covered in a layer of snow and ice several centimeters thick. Given that I had never, to the best of my knowledge, been shunted through time as part of an unhappening, this was a major problem. It was early September.

I explored the immediate area, and found signs of human life, although sparse ones. There were no vehicles on the road, itself covered in uncleared ice. There were, however, footprints, ski tracks and snow shoe impressions dotting the landscape, and a few chimneys were putting out smoke. Whatever natural disaster had occurred, humanity was determined to survive it.

Returning to my home, I started a fire and shut the seals on the fireplace to heat the house, something I had never used it for before. I also went back to the bedroom to double check my status with Helen. Everything she had taken was still gone. Even in these conditions I had upset her so much she couldn’t bear to stay with me.

I considered tracking back through time to find the source, or at least year, of the event that created this frozen wasteland, but recalled that the last time I did that, for even a few minutes, it had made it nearly impossible for Athena to find me. So I hunkered down to wait it out. A few minutes later she did in fact appear.

“Yellowstone,” was all she said.

“That’s insane. He can’t possibility have caused that, can he? Even a nuclear bomb—”

“Which is why he kept dropping them until he found the sweet spot,” she said. “Seven bombardments. He was halfway through the Ross Ice Shelf, too. Hedging his bets. He just happened to hit pay dirt in Wyoming first.”

“Helen left me.”

In the face of this nightmare, I probably should have held off on that announcement. Athena showed no sign of finding it inappropriate.

“I know. I’m sorry. We need to address this first.”

Considering Helen leaving me might actually result in Athena never being born, I found it extraordinary that she would soldier on so seamlessly. I knew as a traveler she could never actually be negated, but I also knew there would be some kind of consequence to this version of her if the baby Athena were never born. She knew what that was. I was in no hurry to find out.

“Of course,” I said. “Where do we start?”

arlton had spent twenty years of real time (and probably months of his own subjective time) accumulating enough fissionable material to build an arsenal of more than forty nuclear warheads. He could have used them to destroy cities, or start a global war that would leave the Earth a radioactive wasteland. Instead, he chose to use them in the most dramatic possible way, by goading the Earth into destroying herself. Had he succeeded in cutting through the Ross Ice Shelf, the subsequent rush of glaciers into the sea would bring sweeping destruction to every coastline on Earth with rising sea levels. But that was a long view plan in case his attempt to puncture the Yellowstone Caldera failed. Which it didn’t.

Stopping him turned out to be a matter of identifying his sources of materials and shutting them down before the fact, one by one. With access to time travel, we were able to provide more hot leads to counter-terrorist organizations across the world than they had ever gotten before. That ended up doing damage of its own, as terrorists adapted their tactics, and internal security rose to paranoid proportions in the wake of all these valid tips.

The entire process took three weeks, start to finish. I was left with the awful feeling that—as much as he had once again snuffed out most of the life on the planet—his heart just wasn’t in it the way it used to be.

“Does this seem too easy to you?” I asked Athena when we returned to my house, just as I left it, and just as Helen had left me.

“Yes. Either he is losing interest in the game, or it’s about to get worse,” she said.

“I don’t know if I can handle worse.”

My exhaustion was mirrored in Athena’s eyes. This was going to be our lot for as long as Carlton found it amusing, and it was breaking us. It had already broken Helen.

Athena took my hand.

“It ends now,” she said.

The world flashed.

t first I had no idea where we were. At her words of finality, I assumed this was the day we finally went to that park and murdered a baby in cold blood. I can’t say I was looking forward to it, but then it wouldn’t be me doing it. And then it would be over.

But that’s not where she took us. We appeared in an office of some sort. The only other person in the room was a man sitting behind a desk looking at a vid screen. I had not expected to see adult Carlton, and so for a moment I didn’t recognize him. I had a fraction of a second to panic before I realized he had no idea we were there. The cognitive dissonance of our arrival had rendered us temporarily invisible to him. He didn’t expect to see us, so he didn’t.

He was talking to the vid screen. Had it been facing us instead of him, the person on the other end would have seen us instantly. But it wasn’t, so she didn’t.

“I understand,” he said to the screen. “Truly. I know these last few years have been hard on you, and I am so, so sorry for that.”

“No,” said Helen. “Don’t be sorry. This can’t be easy for you either. It’s not something you did to me. It’s… just something that happened. Don’t be sorry.”

“I hope you will let me stay in touch? I would hate to part on a note of permanence. You know I care about you, no matter where our separate paths take us.”

“I care about you, too, Carlton,” said the love of my life. This conversation had happened more than two years previously, from my frame of reference. In those two years, I had never asked her what they said. I had never wanted to know. Hearing it now, hearing her tell this unspeakable beast, this genocidal maniac, that she cared about him, while in my own time she had just left me without those words, was almost more unbearable than the five years of my life I had lost to undoing this man’s carnage.

“But I need time right now,” she continued. “Maybe someday we can reconnect, but please let me have some space for now.”