Myths of the Modern Man (3 page)

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What do you mean?” she answered with perfunctory timing, her back still turned to me for effect. Eleanor was cool, calm, disciplined. She was her own creation, but then so was I.

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Dissension and discord.”

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You’ll encounter dissension and discord in a few moments, Colonel Moore. Then maybe you’ll know the difference.”

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Can I count on you to bring me back, Eleanor?”

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I just hope you’re really up for this.”

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I feel swell. Give us a kiss.”

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If you’re not acting like an idiot, you’re raving like a fanatic. Like last time.”

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I brought back a profound experience last time, Eleanor, and you turned it into a white paper dissertation. I brought back tales of a saint, and you wrote about molecules and gravitational pull, and the theory of time in relation to spatial elements.”

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That’s right, Colonel Moore.” She faced me.

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I wrote about the dispassionate facts of the mission, as I was supposed to do. I analyzed its meaning and outcome. Did you want a comic book? Did you want a weekly action series?”

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What was its outcome? That was never explained to me. Did we do good? Did you find what you were looking for?”

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What do you think I’m looking for?”

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A way out.”

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It’s not that simple, Colonel….”

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Will you give up the tea party and just call me John? You are the most tight-assed….”

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I’m a scientist. I probe theory until it becomes fact, and if it doesn’t, I have to find out why. That’s all I am, John. There’s nothing mysterious or indomitable about it. There is no need for you to resent me. I’m not your keeper.”

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You took the burning banner from my hands that said Jesus Maria and put it in a plastic specimen bag. You probed my body with sterile gloves. God, Eleanor, everything about you is sterile.”

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You’re rude.”

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You’re pathetic. Do you even believe in what you’re doing? Or are you people just stringing the public and Congress along to get the funding to keep yourselves in jobs?”

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I wonder what General English would say if he could hear you, after picking you over Colonel Yorke as his choice?”

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He’d give me a straight answer. He may be an officious old fart, but he’s plain spoken and direct. You are twisted and tight.”

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I’m sorry I didn’t make a proper fuss over your souvenir from the Fifteenth Century. I look at it as scientific evidence, of some historical merit, though Dr. Ford would know more about that than me.”

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It came from the hands of a saint.”

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Who made her a saint? People sat down and decided she was a saint some five hundred years after she died. They decided she had some divine purpose.”

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And God’s hand wasn’t in it at all?” I liked baiting her, I admit it.

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I am not prepared to argue theology with you, Colonel Moore, that is not my specialty, neither is it yours.”

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Do you believe in God?”

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Do not jeopardize this mission with your emotions, Colonel Moore! I am ordering you to stop this, now. We have a new mission before us. We can begin any time you’re ready. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

Strands of her thin, blonde hair fell in front of her pale, faded eyes, and she angrily pushed them back with a ballpoint pen, because for some reason nothing better had been invented in the last one hundred years.

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I am. But, I’m afraid you’re hopeless.” I walked across the lab and lay down in the module. It was like an old CT scan of the previous century. It would send me back in time. Like my TV and my microchip player, I accepted that it would work, but I still didn’t really understand how.

Anymore than I understood the Fourth Dimension, and yet these days it was my bread and butter.

The Fourth Dimension, according to Einstein, was time. As present in our everyday lives and viable as the other three dimensions, which most of us did not “get” without those old time cardboard glasses from the movies, the Fourth Dimension was our past, and for we here in the desperate late Twenty-First Century, our future.

According to classical physics, as Eleanor liked to quote, if particles in a simple system are instantaneously reversed in their velocities, the system will proceed to retrace its entire history. Dr. Roberts’ specialty was the study of decay. It suited her. She was Dr. Doom. More properly, her specialty was Thermodynamics and the process of entropy. As heat is created, energy is spent, just as death is a natural part of life. It’s the by-product. Everything that lives must result in death. Including the death of Earth, though it hadn’t hit the newsstands yet. We all lie on the grass as children and watch the brilliant stars above us, not knowing that they are long, long gone. They are burnt out, and only their light is still traveling to us.

The Earth, and even the Universe, if there was such a thing, which I was beginning to doubt, would burn itself out. Disorder of the particles too small for us to see, reaches its creative limit, and the natural energy of sun, air, and water would give out in a tired Earth, no longer able to support life. Dr. Roberts’ doctoral dissertation was titled “The Heat Death of the Universe.” I never read it. I preferred to wait for it to come to the Cineplex. When hell froze over.

However, Eleanor, clever witch, sought a loophole with the help of Einstein’s dusty, very shaky old theory. The death of the Earth was our eventuality only if time moved forward, and his Fourth Dimension held clues to another kind of motion, another kind of energy. Reverse the electromagnetic energy and gravitational mass, and you reverse the decay. Reverse the energy by which time itself is measured, and you reverse time. And something else about wormholes in space. I have a short attention span.

So, NASA’s formerly secret Time Dimension Study was an attempt at making the figures work.

Dr. Roberts stayed where she was for a moment, on the far side of the lab, watching me, her thin, white hands gripping the steel counter until there was no blood left in them. She released her grip, and wrung her hands briefly before stuffing them back into her lab coat pockets.

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Well?” I asked.

She set the alarm on the lab door that would prevent anyone from coming in for the next few moments, much like a film sound stage is barred to visitors during a scene. She came over to the module and re-checked her specifications on her laptop, briefly glancing into my eyes as she did.

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So, listen, who was the wailing woman?” I asked.

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I beg your pardon?”

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Up in the mezzanine when Yorke and I were beating the crap out of each other. Did you like how I nearly yanked his palate out?”

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I’ll ignore your second question in favor of your first,” Eleanor replied, “That was Dr. Cheyenne L’Esperance.”

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What a name. What’s she doing here? Is she on the Committee?”

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How should I know?”

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You mean you don’t?”

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I know she’s here to observe the mission. She has a reputation as an accomplished theorist. More than that I wouldn’t know.”

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Hmm. Stunning woman. Beautiful features.”

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I wouldn’t know. She was sobbing too much.”

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Yes,” I said, noting her irritation. The woman was evidently Somebody, if she had made Eleanor irritated.

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Rather sweet.” I smiled just short of sneer, but it was wasted because Eleanor refused to look at me, just as if she knew I was doing it. “You just don’t expect somebody in a lab coat to have a heart. The old boys were probably beside themselves over it. Certainly made her stand out, even more than those beautiful green eyes.”

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You certainly seemed to have noticed a lot about her.”

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I’m a professional observer, like Dr. Ford said.”

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Yes, you are. All right then, you’re off.”

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No countdown this time?”

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You know there’s no point to that. We’ve no press to play up to, this time, Colonel Moore. Are you set?”

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Well, no frills this time. I seem to be flying coach.”

She glared at me.

The funny thing is, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone that the past, any dot we chose on the timeline, would be a comfortable place to live, and that any contact with our past would change it, irreparably. But, we were still in the experimental stage, that comforting, “don’t worry about it” attitude we feed the press. Like Dr. Frankenstein, or Dr. Oppenheimer, we only begin to sweat when we realize we just created something really messy and we can’t take it back.

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Go ahead,” I said. The guinea pig might as well be me as Brian K. Yorke or anyone else. Immodestly speaking, I am indeed a hell of guy.

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See you at the debriefing.”

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Eleanor?”

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Yes, John?” she said, almost as if waiting for me to give her a reason not to close the lid.

I blew her a kiss. She ignored me, closed the pressure chamber, and did her thing.

Her thing was to make me go away. She did not seem satisfied in it this time. That gave me an uneasy feeling. Did she sense something was wrong, or imperfect in her calculations? Would she stop the mission if she doubted its outcome? I didn’t know. After all this time, I still didn’t know enough about Eleanor to know if she had integrity. She was brilliant. She was controlled. She was professional. I could not tell if she had a conscience. I think not.

She sent me away. I could feel it.

Instantaneous, and silent, there were no lights flashing or whirring sounds like the evil scientist labs of the movies of my childhood. Only a feeling of pressure against my face, my neck, my thighs, and the hideous unbearable company of my own thoughts accompanied me. Next, the sensation of growing cold, stroking my skin, the deep force gripping me that made me slightly nauseous and disoriented, and then the pale, fierce light that I could see through closed eyelids.

It took a moment in time. A moment, that most unmeasured of units, which could be a second, many seconds, many minutes. The intense activity of an hour could seem to us like a moment. Or, the trauma of a second could make one’s whole life flash by. It was a meaningful and meaningless form of measure.

Time, according to Einstein, was meaningful only in relation to space.

Goodbye Twenty-First Century. You took a long, bloody time to get here, and yet you vanish before me into nothing, not even a dream of the future.

I leave behind my fame, and my personal past, such as it was. I leave the reporters in the pressroom awaiting the outcome of my mission. I leave Eleanor to monitor my being in the vacuum of time, and to make any explanations that were necessary should I fail my fellow man, science, and the future of the planet by croaking or getting forever lost.

They were interested in the danger, the reporters. People liked to know about things like that. The public liked success, but they loved disaster. I know. I was never so hot as I was when coping with a bad boy image. I had done press conferences, and there were plenty that did not break out in riots. I did the talk shows, and authorized an action figure in my likeness. They did not make a doll of Eleanor, or Dr. Ford, or even General English. Just me. The golden boy. The man who travels back in time. Before that, the first man to walk on Mars. What a piece of work that was. Three years of my life for nothing. Well now I’m going to get it back in spades, aren’t I? Or maybe become the first man to die before he was ever born.

What kind of award would they give me for that? A posthumous medal? A prenatal one? God, just get me out of here. Sick to death of my hurried, harried earth with shallow minds and weak hearts, I was glad to get away. I hated it all.

Where I traveled might be no better, probably would be far worse, but it would be a different set of circumstances. Right now, I was in the mood for a different set of circumstances.

The chosen time and place for this mission was Britannia, in the year AD 60. I don’t know whose choice it was, except that it was perfectly outrageous and purposely vague. How could I prove that I’d been there? It’s not like I could bring back a newspaper.

Of course, those Celtic tribes building huts, fighting with each other, and making love in AD 60 didn’t know it was AD 60. The Roman legionnaires garrisoned in this far-flung outpost of their mighty empire didn’t know it was AD 60. They thought it was the 7th year of the reign of Emperor Nero, over 800 years since the founding of Rome, if you believe that story about Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf on the banks of the Tiber. We called it anno Domini 60, or the Common Era. The Year 60. That is what would be written on their desktop calendars, if they had them. What they did have was the sun, the moon and stars, (just as long burnt out then as in my day, but they didn’t know that), learned men to explain them or rather make up suitable answers that would not get them beheaded, and emperors to decree what was what. Time, like I always said, is what you make it. When Christianity spread across Europe in the later years of the Roman Empire, its strength was such that believers became calendar makers, and began to date the world and all time as before Christ or before the Common Era, and anno Domini.

In this year, the year 60, a terrifying and vicious rebellion against the Roman Empire would happen in Britannia. It would be led by the queen of a Celtic tribe, who was herself, another kind of she-wolf. Her name was Boudicca. I was going to watch, if I could find her, if I landed in the right place at the right time. There were never any guarantees that I might not end up in the murky mists of time in Gondwanaland, or in 1950s Paris, or last Thursday in the janitor’s closet down the hall. Maybe I would land on the seventh day when God rested.