The Accidental Time Machine

12

Matt was half-awake, lying in a pleasant torpor, when church bells started banging next door. He dressed and went downstairs to a notice that said bath and breakfast would be available after church. On Monday? Not a good sign.

The outhouse was a little more hospitable with daylight filtering in; in the candlelight he’d been sure there were bugs everywhere, just out of sight. Instead of a roll of toilet paper, there were neat squares torn from church newsletters, which made the experience more pleasant than he’d expected. It also bespoke a certain level of civilization, he realized. In primitive cultures there were less sanitary expedients.

He went around front with the idea of going for a walk, but hesitated. There was nobody else in sight. No traffic up on Mass Ave. Maybe everyone was in church at this hour; maybe being anywhere else was illegal.

Back in the parlor, he stood still and listened. No one else up and around. An invitation to snoop.

The house was old, twentieth century or even earlier. It had electrical outlets in the walls, but nothing was plugged into them. Two Bibles, but no other books except a scrap-book of recipes in the kitchen.

The large Bible, fairly new, had a supplement tabbed “Revelations S.C.” and a pictorial section, “The Second Coming Illustrated.” It showed Jesus healing an entire intensive-care ward, Jesus standing in Times Square in front of a mountain of loaves of bread, Jesus in the Oval Office with a presidential-looking white-haired guy, Jesus hovering in midair with a glowing halo over his crown of thorns.

There were two possible explanations. One was that Jesus had returned to Earth in the brown-haired, blue-eyed visage that was familiar to Matt’s youth. The only other explanation was that it was a hoax.

Matt’s natural impulse was to go with the second one and start asking who and why and how. But first …

Was it possible that he had been completely wrong all his adult life? God and Jesus and all were real?

If that were true, then everything else fell apart. The rationalistic universe that he so completely believed in was an elaborate artifice that God maintained for His own reasons. Or some such circular assertion, neither provable nor disprovable. Literally sophomoric—he’d last heard someone seriously present such an argument back in those beery, youthful midnight bull sessions.

Actually, there had been one more recent time, the two well-dressed lads who’d knocked on his door and tried to infect him with enthusiasm for their faith. One of them had earnestly argued that Matt’s rationalism was just one belief system among others, and one that didn’t explain everything. It didn’t explain their own unshakable faith, for instance.

But it did, Matt said, as part of abnormal psychology. That was pretty much the end of the conversation. But he could have gone on to point out that rationalism doesn’t require “belief,” only observation. The real, measurable world doesn’t care what you believe.

He looked at the pictures again. A guy levitating with a halo. A pile of bread. An ICU ward full of actors and a president who was going along with the game. No actual miracles necessary.

Did the whole world believe this? He desperately needed to find someone who didn’t. Or a history book— any book that wasn’t a Bible.

The front door clicked, and he guiltily closed the book, then opened it again. The landlady walked into the parlor pulling a brush through her hair.

She nodded at him. “As good as church, I suppose. Won’t put you to sleep like the good rev.” She held the door to the kitchen open. “Bread and coffee.”

The coffee was some burned herb, but the flatbread was crumbly and good, served with butter and a dab of strawberry jam. The landlady showed him the bucket of water steaming on the stove and said there were soap and “cloths” out back.

He lugged the bucket out onto the porch. There was a bathing area, about a square meter of slatted floor with head-high modesty screens on three sides. Another bucket, rinse water, and some gray tatters of towel. A cube of harsh soap that smelled of bacon.

It was good to be somewhat clean, though the soap turned his hair into a fright wig and left him smelling like breakfast. Back in the small room he changed into his new old clothes. He rented the room for another night, and the landlady gave him a padlock so he could leave his things behind in the room’s strongbox while he explored.

What should he leave behind? She probably had another key. It would be inconvenient if she started snooping around and sent the machine into the future. He wiggled at the plastic dome over the RESET button, and it was secure enough that removing it would be an act of deliberate vandalism. The pistol and ammunition were a problem, but maybe it would be wise not to carry them into MIT.

He wound up leaving it all, except his wallet and the taxi driver’s money. The two rare documents could wait until after he’d learned more.

He’d have to learn a lot more before he decided what to do with the porn notebook. Its technology might make it extremely valuable. Its contents might put him away for the rest of his life, which could be short.

Mass Ave was sunny and pleasant, the clop and creak of horse and mule traffic, a slight barnyard smell overlaid with sea breeze from the harbor. He took a hundred-dollar bill into a bank and got a response similar to yesterday’s— are there more where this came from?—but the clerk initially offered him $100 and wound up paying $125. It would be smart to shop around.

He walked slowly down to Building One, getting his story together. His various possible stories, depending on what he could uncover. It wouldn’t do to just walk into the dean’s office and say, “Hey, I’m Matthew Fuller, the time traveler you’ve been waiting for.” That nobody had been waiting evidenced a profound discontinuity with the past. The time and place of his projected arrival must have been widely known.

Or would they have been? Professor Marsh hadn’t been all that generous with the information Matt had given him about the time machine, back in 2058. Had Matt ever seen the actual time and place published? He couldn’t recall.

He went into Building One and walked past the administration offices, on down the Infinite Corridor toward the library, or at least the building that had once housed the science and humanities library.

The walls of the corridor were disturbingly bare. They used to be covered in a riot of posters and announcements, MIT-approved or not. Of course, it would have been bustling with students, too, Monday morning. There were only eight other people in the whole quarter-kilometer of hall.

He didn’t want to be the only person in the whole library. Kill an hour doing something else.

Halfway down the corridor, at the rotunda with the stained-glass Stations of the Cross, double doors led to the outside, what used to be the quad.

It was still a large quadrangle, not as well kept, the grass brown or bare dirt in places. A woman in head-to-ankles black was taking advantage of the morning cool to push a mechanical mowing machine. Matt had seen pictures of them. He wanted to go investigate, see whether this one was a museum piece or newly constructed, but it might not be smart to approach a single young woman that way. Or even look at her too hard. He averted his gaze and walked on toward the river.

That was different. Both banks of the Charles were solidly packed with ramshackle houseboats, most of them just moored rafts that obviously weren’t going anywhere except, eventually, straight down. Student housing in the twenty-third century, apparently; most of the people in evidence were young men, and a few women, all dressed in black. The men and women were separated.

The places weren’t drab; it was a riot of disorganized color. Walls of bright green next to orange and red, with cartoon figures stenciled or spray painted on. No obscenities, unsurprisingly; paragraphs of scripture in neat block printing. In some places, collages of scrap metal and glass clattered and tinkled in the breeze. Someone was quietly practicing intervals on a violin. That would’ve been grounds for murder, or at least musical defenestration, in the MIT dorms of Matt’s youth.

There was a faint aroma of fish frying, and people were fishing from some of the houseboats, idly watching lines or, in one case, throwing out a circular net. Matt wondered how often they caught the bioengineered Christ fishes, or whether those even swam in this river, open to the sea.

Well, he could wonder till the cows came home, though if they were bioengineered, they probably just stayed at home. He had to nail down some data. He angled across the frost-heave ruin of Memorial Drive toward the library.

The glass wall that faced Mem Drive was broken in several places, but those sections had been carefully repaired with glued stacks of clear glass bottles. The automated security system had been replaced by a guard with a wooden staff. He was sitting outside the door and looked amiable.

Matt didn’t lie. “I don’t have a card.”

“Are you carrying any books?”

“No.”

“Don’t bring any out, then.” Matt went on inside.

There were low stacks of books all around, and trays of books spine up in rows between irregular arrangements of tables and chairs. The books on shelves were behind glass, locked away, and the glass was frosted so that the titles were illegible. The trays held well-thumbed paperbacks that didn’t seem to be in any order.

There was no console for finding books. What did libraries do before there were computers? There must be a list somewhere. Look up a book and ask someone to get it for you.

Maybe he could figure it out. Meanwhile, be inconspicuous. He started sorting through the paperbacks, which seemed as limited in range and sophistication as the assortment he’d seen in the bookstore.

Then he found a slender volume simply titled American History. He sank into a soft chair by the window and opened it to the first page.

“On the first day of the first year, Jesus Christ appeared in the Oval Office of the president of the United States.”

On the facing page there was a photograph identical to the one in the Bible on Magazine Street.

The text dismissed all previous history with “Men and women had lived in the United States for centuries in a condition of sin, forgivable because of ignorance.”

Some few had refused to accept the reality of their senses and what their hearts told them about the Second Coming and so there was the One Year War, followed by the Adjustment. It didn’t say how long the Adjustment had been, or whether it was over.

It seems that President Billy Cabot, the one in the picture, had already been touched by God, which is why Jesus chose his office for His appearance. Cabot became First Bishop, and proceeded to simplify the government in ways that were part divine inspiration and part the stewardship of Jesus.

Looking at a map, it was easy to read between the lines. The One Year War had produced an entity that still called itself the United States of America, but it comprised only the Eastern Seaboard states south of Maine and Vermont, with obvious lacunae. The eastern third of New York was blacked out, as was a large part of Maryland and Virginia, bordering Washington. Metropolitan Atlanta and Miami. What had happened to them? The book had no index and little organization; it rambled along like a disjointed conversation. Well, the author was Bishop Billy Cabot, as told to Halleluja Cabot, presumably his daughter.

As a military history, the book was of questionable value. The Army of the Lord chose its battles well, evidently, and never lost. It apparently didn’t bother to fight for 80 percent of the fifty-one states, though.

What kind of battles were they? He couldn’t imagine tanks rumbling down Broadway, but New York City was in the blacked-out portion. Was it destroyed?

Maybe it was all metaphor. The “war” was not military at all, but some kind of propaganda war for this new version of Christianity. Which could be almost as scary as a fighting war.

He could walk up to Maine, which would only take a few days, a week, and ask his questions there. If he was allowed to cross the border into that heathen state. If there was anyone left there to talk to. What if Christ had nukes?

There was a thing about the all-seeing Spirit and His Avenging Angels that sounded a lot like satellite surveillance and low-orbit killer satellites. But how could he reconcile that with the horse-and-buggy technology around him?

He got up and searched through all the rest of the paperbacks. No politics, economics, world history. There were three other copies of Cabot’s American History, but no rivals.

“What is it you are seeking?” An older man had come up behind him, quiet on bare feet. He had on the black robe, white hair to his shoulders, and a pair of vertical scars on each cheek.

“Just … something to read. I’m not sure.” The man nodded slowly, not blinking or changing expression.

Silently waiting for input. It was a robot, like the McWaiters in Matt’s world. Ask it for a burger and fries.

“Is there a world history text?”

“Only for scholars. What level of scholarship are you?”

“Full professor,” he said firmly.

“At what institution? I don’t recognize you.”

“I … I’m freelance. I don’t have an institution right now.”

It stared at Matt, perhaps trying to process that idea. “You were at the Admissions Office yesterday, though it was Sunday.”

What to say? “That’s right.”

It didn’t move. “But no one could be in the office. It would be a sin.”

“I wasn’t looking for anybody,” he extemporized. “I was just checking the course changes on the wall.”

It nodded gravely. “I understand.” It turned and walked away silently.

A world where they put scars on robots and give them a large database but low intelligence. Where there wasn’t enough electricity to put lights in a library.

Matt sat down and looked at the history book without reading it. What was the deal here? There was electricity and artificial intelligence for robots. There was an industrial base adequate for mass-producing Bibles and history books with color pictures. But most of the world was living in the nineteenth century, if that.

Worse than that. It was a modern world overlaid with a nineteenth-century costume—this building still had elevators, but no way to make them go up and down. The McRobot was evidence of generally available computing power, but there were no data stations in the MIT library.

Another robot approached, robes and scars but bald. A short female behind it.

Not robots. They moved like people. The man smelled like old sweat. He introduced himself as Father Hogarty.

“You’re a visiting scholar,” he said, and offered Matt a black robe.

“Thank you.” Not knowing what else to do, Matt put it on over his clothes.

“This is your graduate assistant, Martha.” She was nervous and pretty, a blonde in her early twenties. One almost invisible scar on her cheek. “Hello, Dr. Fuller.”

Matt shook her hand. “Hello, Martha.” What the hell was going on? “Are you in physics?”

She looked confused. “I’m a graduate assistant.”

“She’s born again,” the man said. That explained everything.

“You know my name,” Matt said.

The old man nodded. “The library searched you and sent a messenger. He told me that you were the full professor we were waiting for. Even though you have no marks of scholarship.” He touched the scars on his cheeks. He had four prominent ones. “You are in the Data Base.” Matt could hear the capitals. “But your office number is wrong. It says you are in Building 54.”

Matt nodded. “The Green Building.”

“A green building? Where would that be?”

“There’s a bluish green one behind Building 17,” Martha said. “I had Prayer Variations there.”

“It’s not the color. It was named after a guy named Green.” The tallest building on campus, hard to miss. “Maybe it’s gone?”

They looked at each other. “Where would a building go?” Martha said.

“Not like it moved,” Matt said. “It maybe got old and was taken down.”

The old man nodded. “That happens. But how long ago? I would remember.”

Matt took a deep breath and plunged in. “I was born more than two hundred years before the Second Coming. I’m a time traveler who used to be a professor here. Back when it was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

They both flinched, and the woman covered her ears. “Bad word,” the other said.

“You can’t say tech—” They both shrank away. “It used to be the name of this place.”

“This place was evil once.” Hogarty stood up straight and put his hand on the young woman’s shoulder.

“What is a time traveler?” she asked. “We all move through time.”

“But I jump,” Matt said. “Day before yesterday, I was back in 2074. That was 106 years before the Second Coming.”

Hogarty laughed nervously. “If this is a joke, I don’t understand it.”

“The Nobel Prize for physics in 2072 went to the man who claimed he discovered time travel.”

“A noble prize?” the man said. “Physics?”

“It’s part of metaphysics,” the woman said.

“I know that. How do you get a prize for it, though? What does it have to do with time?”

“It’s all about time,” Matt said, “and space. And energy and mass and quantum states and the weak interaction force. You’re scholars?”

The man touched his scars again. “Of course.”

“Didn’t you ever study any of that?”

“It’s like you’re talking Chinese,” he said. “Quan tong states and interacting forces? What does that have to do with Jesus?”

Matt felt behind him, found a chair, and sat down. “Um … Jesus is part of God?”

“They’re both part of the Trinity,” he said. “They share attributes.”

Matt pressed on. “And God is everything?”

The man said, “In a way,” and the woman said, “Everything good.”

“So there are parts of everything that can be weighed and measured, rather than taken on faith. That’s what I’m a scholar of.”

Hogarty was thinking so hard you could hear the gears grinding. “But that’s for craftsmen and tradespeople. What is scholarly about things you can weigh and measure?”

“It’s because of the times he comes from,” Martha said. “The measurable world was very important to them.” She pursed her lips, then said it: “The T word. That’s what it was about.”

“Be good, Martha,” he warned.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of saying things,” she said. “Words aren’t magic.”

“You don’t know, child.” He appealed to Matthew. “Young people.”

Matt didn’t want to go there. “Why do you think measurable things aren’t scholarly, scholastic, whatever? The real world.”

Hogarty smiled, on comfortable ground. “You’re joking again. That’s the Devil’s big weapon.”

“The illusion that this world is real,” Martha supplied. “But not everybody thinks that way.”

“Martha …”

“God made this world, not the Devil. In six days? The actual world itself isn’t evil.”

“She’s an independent thinker,” the man said, not quite through clenched teeth. “An excellent graduate assistant for you.” Church bells were chiming outside. “Noontime. I have to meditate and break fast. Martha, you will see to the professor’s needs?”

“Of course, Father.”

“Professor, I’ll come by your office Wednesday morning sometime. There will be a faculty meeting in the afternoon. ”

“My office?”

“Martha will find you one. Tomorrow, then.” He left with the haste of someone really looking forward to meditation.

“So … how are you going to find me an office?”

“They gave me a list. But four of them are small. I know the one you want.”

“Okay. So who are ‘they’? How come they knew I’d need an office?”

“The administration. I had a note this morning saying I’d be assigned to you, and to expect you soon. Then Father Hogarty came by and said you were here in the library.”

“But the administration, they knew about me yesterday? ”

She nodded. “Somebody knew you’d need an office. Maybe they knew your building was gone.”

All that from the casual encounter with the guard in Building One? It occurred to Matt that it had probably been a robot, too, and he’d been scanned and identified.

So who knew what around here? He was in a database as a scholar, even though he was last employed 177 years ago.

Did that mean someone was expecting him?

He followed Martha up three flights of stairs to a dim corridor. She gave him a brass key. “This is a nice bright one.” She pushed the door open with a creak.

Well, it was bright enough. It should have been in the shadow of the Green Building, but instead he looked down on the roofs of low wooden structures. No sign of the building or its venerable Brancusi sculpture.

But just a couple of days ago, he’d snatched the time machine there and commandeered a cab and come here.

“Professor? Don’t you like it?”

“It’s fine, Martha. I was just looking at where my old office used to be. The Green Building.”

She looked out the window. “It’s not one of those?”

“No, a lot bigger. You don’t have any pictures of what it used to look like here?”

“Of course not. Nothing before Jesus.”

“Because it’s a sin?”

“No,” she explained patiently, “because it was before.”

“All the pictures from before just disappeared?”

“Oh, no. We have Rembrandt and Leonardo and all those men. I like Vermeer best; there are two of his downtown. ”

Not very religious, a reassuring characteristic. “No photographs, though—nothing from my own time?”

“That all disappeared when Jesus came back.”

“What, it just went poof into thin air?”

“That’s as it is written. Angels took it all away. I wasn’t there, of course.”

Like Billy Cabot’s Avenging Angels? “I have a lot to learn,” Matt said, “before I can think of teaching anybody anything.”

“I can help with everyday things,” Martha said. “Father Hogarty said you won’t be teaching this semester.”

“Glad to hear it.” There was an old metal desk to the left of the window. Matt went through the drawers and found a small stack of paper, two pencils, a dip pen, and a bottle of ink. Next to it, a cylinder of cloth obviously used as a pen-wipe was rolled up around a small knife and two extra pen points.

She picked up the two points and held them up to the light. “Somebody hasn’t been too careful. I’ll bring you a potato.”

“All right. Why a potato?”

“It keeps the points from getting rusty. You stick them into a potato when you’re done for the day.” She had the amused patience of a graduate assistant telling the professor how to turn on his new computer. “You didn’t have pens like this.”

“Actually, I’ve only read about them. Ours carried their own ink around.”

“I’ve seen those. The dean has one, his pen-stick. May I show you how this works?”

“Please.”

She pulled out the old desk chair, which was on wheels that didn’t roll, and sat down carefully. She treated the ink bottle with care approaching reverence, holding it tightly while the top unscrewed with a rusty squeak. She showed him how to dip the pen partway and remove the excess ink by sliding the nib left and right along the rim of the ink bottle. Then along the top of a piece of paper, she wrote, “Jesus died to save us from our sins” in a careful hand. Matt remembered the tollbooth’s crudely lettered BOSTON CITIE LIMMITS / PAY TOLE ONE DOLAR and wondered how rare her talent was.

She stood up and handed him the pen. “Would you like to try it, Professor?”

Not really. He sat down and tried to duplicate her motions. In block letters, he printed THE QUICK BROWN FO, and ran out of ink. The letters were wavering and blobby.

“A brown fo,” she read. “Is that like an enemy?” He completed the line, dipping the pen twice. “It sounds like the start of a parable, or a fable. The fox is quick and gets away?”

“It’s just a nonsense line. It uses every letter of the alphabet. ”

“Oh, like, ‘Jesus up on high rules few vexed crazy queers today.’ ” She laughed behind her hand. “The sister who taught me that in school was reprimanded. So I memorized it.”

“As you told Hogarty. Words aren’t magic.”

“Only some of them, in the right order.” She took the pen from him and wiped it with the cloth. “Always—” Someone knocked on the door. “That would be your midday. ”

She opened the door and a male student handed her a wooden tray covered with a black cloth. “Thank you, Simon. ” She set it on a small table by the door.

“Professors don’t eat with the students. I took the liberty of giving the kitchen this room number, but you might prefer to have it sent to your quarters.”

A long way to Magazine Street, he thought. “We’ll go find your quarters this afternoon,” she said. “I’ll be out of class at three. May I meet you here?”

“Sure, that’d be fine. Thanks.” She slipped quietly out the door.

Under the black cloth, a small loaf of bread and a wedge of crumbly cheese, like an old cheddar. A plate of dried apple slices on a string. Raisins in a cup, plumped with sweet wine. Ceramic flasks of water and red wine. It wasn’t Twinkies and speed, but it would do.

In fact, he had become ravenous, and though it was fine, he could have eaten twice as much. He kept the water and wine bottles and the ceramic cup that matched them, and set the rest on the floor in the hall.

There wasn’t much else in the room. A filing cabinet that was empty except for the bottom drawer, which held a rolled-up black leather bag. He’d seen people carrying them in the corridor; it was evidently a standard item. He’d use it to move his stuff here from the rented room; less conspicuous than the taxi driver’s plastic shoulder bag.

He sat down and practiced writing with the pen for a while. One of the nibs was flexible, and his writing with it went all over the place. The blunt one Martha had used worked best.

It wouldn’t be too smart to put his speculations down, where they could be read by others. He wrote random stuff for about a half hour and then his hand began to stiffen up. He dutifully made sure all the nibs were clean, waiting for their potato, and went downstairs to have a walk and look around.

The quadrangle that used to front the Green Building was still there, sporting oversized rusted bolts that had once held down the Brancusi Flying Wing. Too secular, he supposed, or maybe it had just worn down.

The silence of the place was eerie. It had always been relatively quiet, shielded from the Mem Drive traffic noise, but when the weather was as nice as this, there ought to be lots of students playing pickup football or Frisbee circles. Not a soul in sight now.

But then a bell chimed for end of classes, evidently, and there were dozens, then hundreds, of students surging out into the sunshine. They were very quiet, but then back in his day they hadn’t exactly been a horde of rabble.

He walked along with them, trying to blend in, but he did notice an occasional furtive glance. Maybe his evident seniority and lack of scars.

They walked among the low wooden buildings, a combination of dorms and meeting halls, to a large central building that smelled of cooking. Matt turned around and passed back through the crowd, observing.

In his time, about half the students would have been Asian. In this crowd there wasn’t a single one, and few black people. Was that the result of gradual change, or had there been a sudden purge? If he could find a reliable history of MIT, he could infer a lot about the missing history of the world. Even an unreliable history would hint at things.

He saw the back of a large sign a block away and angled toward it. It was at the easternmost entrance to the old campus, and it used to be a welcome sign with a map.

It still was, though the disciplines invoked were different. Anointed Preaching, Satanic Nature, Blood Covenant. What was a blood covenant and how many courses could they offer in it? Finally he found Natural Philosophy and Metaphysics, a part of the Mechanical and Mathematical Studies wing in Building 7, not far from his office. It might be a good idea to visit it now, incognito.

The walls on the Green Building had been a kind of inspiration, displays about the history of science, mostly physics, with replicas of old experiments along with old photographs. The walls in Building 7 were inspirational, too: reproductions of dignified paintings of Jesus and various saints. No cluttered bulletin boards, no stacks of returned papers—certainly no cartoons or provocative articles taped to doors, which used to be a professor’s declaration of individuality.

Perhaps Theosophy didn’t encourage individuality. He thought of Father Hogarty’s impatience with Martha.

He went into an empty classroom—none of them were in use at this hour—and sat down in the chair behind the teacher’s desk, fighting a tide of helplessness and panic. He was not trapped here. He knew that ultimately he would find his way back, at least to the offices of Langham, Langham, and Cruise, in 2058.

He might have to go farther into the future, though, before finding that kind of rabbit hole. Maybe he should push the button now, before he got into trouble with these religious nuts. But there was no guarantee that the world 2094 years in the future would be safer or more sensible.

This place should have been comfortably familiar. He had spent most of his life in classrooms, and for many of his years had aspired to be right here, in front of a room full of young people pursuing knowledge. It smelled right; it felt almost right. But on the wall behind him there should be a clock. Not a picture of Jesus smiling benevolently.

Well, he’d spent many an hour staring at those clocks, praying for time to pass more quickly. Maybe kids were just more literal about that now.

He checked his watch. There wasn’t quite enough time to walk up to Magazine Street and back, but maybe he didn’t have to walk. He’d seen horses with carts parked across the street from Building 1, where there used to be a cab stand.

He went up to the office and retrieved the black bag, then went down and engaged the lead cart of four waiting there. The driver wanted eight dollars each way, but allowed himself to be bargained down to thirteen for a round trip.

It was stifling hot in the sun, but the cab had a leather canopy and moved just fast enough to generate a cooling breeze. It made the trip in a leisurely ten minutes, about what it would have taken in Matt’s time, crawling through traffic and waiting for lights.

The landlady wasn’t there. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed in the strongbox, so he transferred his stuff to the black bag and was back in his office by 2:30.

Waiting for Martha, he leafed through Metaphysics and the Natural World, which was full of biblical citations, but in between them did do a fair job of outlining Newtonian mechanics and basic electricity and magnetism, presupposing a knowledge of elementary calculus and trigonometry. The section on what caused the sun and stars to shine was ingenious, the heat generated by gravitational compressionand the constant infall of meteorites. It allowed for the Sun to be about six thousand years old, and close to burning out, which of course would happen on Judgment Day.

Martha knocked on the door just as bells were chiming for change of classes. “Shall we go find your quarters, Professor? ”

“Sure.” He got up and shouldered the bag.

She held out her hand. “Let me take that for you.”

“No, that’s all right.” The revolver’s heft was pretty obvious.

“But I’m your graduate assistant.” It was almost a whine.

“Look, Martha. I was a graduate assistant myself not so—”

“What? Men were graduate assistants back then?”

“Sure. About half and half.”

She shook her head, openmouthed. “But what … what did you do?”

“Helped my professor out. Mostly math and electronics—that’s working with electrical machines. I gave tests and graded papers.”

“I can’t do anything like that,” she said. “I’m not supposed to. That’s for scholars.”

“So what does a graduate assistant do here?”

“I’m a graduate,” she explained. “And I’m your assistant. ”

“Oh. Okay. But humor me on this: I carry the bag.”

She shook her head. “But you’d look like a scholar, not a professor.”

“Humor me, Martha.”

Her mouth went into a tight line. “If Father Hogarty sees us, will you tell him it was your idea?”

“Absolutely.”

He followed her down the stairs and across the quadrangle, the same route he’d taken after lunch, but they kept going on past the dining hall. It was obvious when they entered professors’ territory: the residences were smaller, individual cottages, and instead of browning lawns they were fronted with carefully raked gravel and luxurious potted plants.

“Number 21.” The door was framed by two bushes covered in velvety purple flowers. She unlocked it and handed the key to Matt.

The single room smelled oddly of orange peel, some cleaning fluid, he supposed, and reflected on how far away the nearest orange tree must be. Which implied a thousand-mile chain of interstate commerce.

It looked comfortable. A large bed and bentwood rocking chair. An open rolltop desk with a padded office chair. On the desktop, an inkwell and a potato with two pen nibs stuck into it. What passed for a word processor in this place and time.

She handed him a folded-over piece of paper. “My schedule, Professor. I have Faith Enhancement twice a day, and directed reading in Alien Faiths three times a week. If you need me in those times, step outside and ring the bell in the yard. Another graduate assistant will go find me.”

He looked at the schedule, then his watch. She was due at Faith Enhancement in twenty minutes. “Well, you go on. I’ll settle in here. Then what, dinner?”

“At six. I’ll take you over there.”

She hurried off and he poked around the room. A covered chamber pot under the bed, how convenient. A small closet held stacks of sheets and blankets and a wooden box of candles, along with a red metal box that held matches, handmade and presumably dangerous. A cupboard held a loaf of bread, some hard cheese, and corked bottles of wine and water.

There was one window, with a gauze curtain, and a skylight. So he could read, after and before certain hours, without squandering candles and matches.

Next to the door a strongbox was bolted to the wall. Its padlock used the same key as the door. He unloaded the black bag into it. He held the porn notebook up to the window, but there wasn’t enough light to activate it. Having to go out into the sun would make its utility as an adjunct to masturbation questionable.

A single shelf for books had a Bible and a prayer book, along with a water carafe and glass. He poured a glass and longed for coffee, and realized that the dull ache at the base of his skull was caffeine withdrawal. He stifled a strong urge to go back to that place on Inman Square and squander $20 for a cup of “real coffey.” It would be better to invest it in aspirin and learn to do without.

He sat in the rocker and leafed through the natural science book. He could teach this stuff, second nature, but would he be able to stomach all the religion that kept cropping up?

Out of an obscure impulse, he went to the desk and took out a sheet of paper and duplicated an exercise that had been part of the final exam in undergraduate modern physics: derive the Special Theory of Relativity from first principles—there is no uniquely favored frame of reference and the speed of light is constant in any frame of reference. It took him two pages of scratching out blind alleys, but he wound up in the right place, with equations describing the distortion of measurements when one frame of reference regards another one that’s in motion relative to it.

Time dilation. Saint Albert, you should see me now!

He allowed himself a few moments of fantasy. What would happen if he worked through these equations in front of a classroom here? God does not favor any one position; everything is relative.

Martha came back just before six, to escort him to the faculty dining hall. He was nervous about it, ready for an inquisition. Could he be convincingly polite about religion? Would he have to lie outright, and pretend to believe? Would being honest lead to ostracism, loss of tenure, or burning at the stake? Polite silence was probably the best strategy, and intense observation.

The faculty dining hall was a block away from the student one, with its separate kitchen and, according to Martha, much superior food. (She had a friend who worked there, and occasionally snacked on leftovers.) She handed him over to Father Hogarty and went off to the student trough.

They sat at a table with six others, two of them addressed as “Father” and the rest professors. The Fathers were older, and all had horizontal scars on the forehead; the professors only had cheek scars.

They all treated Matthew with a kind of gravity that had nothing of deference in it. It took him a while to realize that most of them thought he was mad. Divine madness, perhaps, but still crazy. They were conspicuously incurious about the past he claimed to have come from.

It seemed odd that not even one wanted to quiz him about the past—as if they had time travelers drop by for dinner all the time—but then he realized the obvious. Their uniform lack of interest was prearranged; they’d been warned to keep the conversation on safe grounds.

So a lot of it was talk about students and subjects unrelated to Matt’s experience, which was a relief. He could just respond with conventional politeness and safe generalizations.

Hogarty and a younger man, Professor Mulholland, did mention Matt’s future at MIT. The new semester would start in a couple of weeks. He would monitor various natural philosophy classes with the intention of teaching next year. Mulholland would lend him copies of all the course outlines, and he could have Martha copy out the ones he was interested in teaching.

The meal was good, a thick stew of beef and vegetables with dumplings, and included wine with an MIT label, a weird scuppernong flavor that wasn’t bad. It was a 67, four years old.

Martha was waiting for him outside, totally absorbed in reading the Bible under a guttering torch. When he approached, he saw it was actually the Koran; she slapped it shut with a guilty start.

“I brought you some toilet things,” she said. “I don’t know what you have.” It was a wooden box with soap wrapped in a cloth, a handmade toothbrush, a jar of tooth powder, and a straight razor with a sharpening block. Maybe he’d grow a beard. “Do you know where the men’s necessary is?”

“No, in fact.” He’d used the one across from his office, but that had been a while ago, and “necessary” did describe it. She led him down an unmarked path to two buildings that had remarkably unambiguous pictures as to which was which. How Puritan were these people?

There were oil lamps in sconces dimly illuminating the place. A row of open toilets, two of which were occupied by men sitting with their robes pulled up, talking quietly. There was an obvious urinal, a thick pipe sunk diagonally in the ground, filled with gravel. He used it and went to a basin between two of the lights, with a mirror and a large water urn with a faucet. He brushed his teeth and put off the issue of the beard.

Martha was waiting for him, and they walked together back toward his cottage. “They told me you’re going to see the dean tomorrow.”

“Ten o’clock,” Matt said. “Do you know him?”

“Not to speak to. He’s very old and wise.”

“I guess a dean has to be,” he said lamely. “He’s the overall dean? I mean, there’s no one over him?”

“No one but Jesus. He’s the Dean of Theosophy.”

Matt thought of his own Dean of Science, Harry Kendall, dead now more than a century. A fellow Jewish atheist, how he’d roll his eyes at being under Jesus.

“I still have only a vague idea of what theosophy is.” He knew the word was adopted, or invented, by an obscure sect in the nineteenth or twentieth century, but there was no obvious connection to that, since it was dead as a doornail before he was born.

“You’ll find the way, Professor,” she said cheerfully. “Or the way will find you.”

He was getting a little annoyed at that assumption, but kept his peace for the time being. “Did you grow up here, Martha?”

“Not in Cambridge, no. Newton, south of here. My family sent me into Boston to find work, but I became a student instead.”

“Were they unhappy about that?”

“They pretended not to be. It would be sacrilegious.” That was interesting. “Where were you from, back in the past?”

“Ohio. Dayton.”

She nodded and pursed her lips. “I wonder if people still live there.”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

She looked left and right. “The Midland Plague,” she whispered. “We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

“A plague?”

“Most people younger than me don’t even know it happened. Maybe it’s just a rumor.”

“People don’t come from there anymore?”

“No. You’re the first I’ve ever met.”

They walked in silence for a block. “Ohio … was it part of the war? The One Year War?”

“Right at the end,” she said. “The infidels dropped a bomb from the sky. But it didn’t kill the faithful. So they used to say. They stopped teaching it before I was in school.”

Another isolated puzzle piece. They came to his cottage. She produced a key, opened the door, and followed him inside. She lit two candles from the one she was carrying. “What time do you want to be awakened?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be up in plenty of time for the meeting.”

“All right.” She opened the closet and took out a rolled-up pallet and a pillow, and set them up neatly in a dark corner. She knelt and put her hands together and prayed silently for a minute.

Matt didn’t know what to say or do. She was sleeping here?

She stood up and stretched and then pulled the robe up over her head. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She folded the robe up neatly into thirds, then over once, and slid it carefully under the pallet, on the pillow end. Then she slipped between the sheets.

“Good night, Professor.”

“Um … call me Matt?”

She giggled. “Don’t be silly, Professor.”