The Accidental Time Machine

4

Matt spent all of Monday writing an account of the thing he had to call a time machine. He could change the name to something less fantastic before anybody else read it. The disappearing machine? Not much better.

He wouldn’t finish the paper, of course, until he had a live turtle and video footage. Or a dead one and blankness, whatever.

There wasn’t much to say about the physics involved, the disappearing or time-traveling mechanism, especially since reproducing the machine didn’t reproduce the effect. It had to be some accidental feature of its construction.

But he was understandably reluctant to take it apart. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t find anything conclusive, and when he put it back together, it might just be a photon calibrator again.

The report was only five pages long, and even he had to admit that it wasn’t very impressive. He could have set up this iteration better. The machine was going to reappear at 8:16 Wednesday night in his shabby apartment. He could’ve taken it back to the lab and had it appear on Professor Marsh’s desk at ten in the morning. Or in the middle of the rotunda in Building One, high noon, with hundreds of students as witnesses.

Then again, there was something to be said for keeping control over the conditions of the experiment. If he had done a public demonstration now, it probably wouldn’t be him who pushed the button the next time. The machine was technically the property of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics. They had only given him a degree and a job, both begrudgingly. He wasn’t eager to turn over the science scoop of the century to them.

When he checked on his e-mail that afternoon, he found he had one less reason to be loyal to the Center and MIT. He’d been fired.

Technically, the funding for his appointment had not been renewed. So there would be no paycheck after January 1. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

The message had come from the Center’s administrative assistant, not Professor Marsh. But it was Marsh who had done it, who hadn’t renewed the funding.

Matt picked up the phone and put it back down. Go talk to him in person.

On the clattering ride down to Cambridge, he considered and rejected various strategies. He knew better than to appeal to the old man’s mercy. He couldn’t claim outstanding job performance; the job hadn’t been that demanding recently. More puttering than math. He was reasonably well caught up on the literature, though most of his energy of late had gone into time-travel theory, of course.

Could he use that as a trump card? Instinct said no: Hire me back for my penny-ante job and I promise to rewrite the laws of physics. On the other hand, when he did want to publish his results, the connection with the Center and MIT would be valuable.

But not essential. He could take his evidence to Harvard, for instance. That made him smile. The rivalry between the two schools went back to the nineteenth century. Maybe Marsh would be fired for firing him.

The sky was the color of aluminum. Snow piled up in waist-high drifts, but the sidewalks were clear. The students were so bundled up you couldn’t tell their gender.

There was no wind as he approached the Green Building, which was so unusual it seemed ominous. Usually it whipped across the quad from the frozen Charles and chilled you to the core.

He showed his card to the scanner at the entrance to the Green Building, and it let him in. So he still existed, at least until the end of the month.

He got off the elevator on the sixth floor to a pleasant shock: Kara, standing in the foyer.

“Kara? Were you looking for me?”

“Matt!” She looked surprised. “Um … this is Strom Lewis.”

Matt took his hand, dry and strong. He was younger and better-looking. “I graded your papers in 299. Marsh.”

“That’s right; I thought you looked familiar. I’ll be working for him, starting next year.” The elevator door started to close, and Kara caught it and slipped in. “Maybe I’ll see you?”

“Maybe.” Kara held up a hand in good-bye, and so did Matt.

Lose your job and your girl to the same punk kid. It just couldn’t get much better.

Marsh wasn’t in the laboratory. Matt went through to the man’s office. He had a journal and a book open in front of him, making notes in a paper notebook. Matt knocked on the open door.

Marsh put a finger down to mark his place in the journal. “Matthew. What can I do for you?”

“Well, for starters, you could give me my job back. Then you could tell me what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on.” He set his pencil down but didn’t pick up his finger. “You’ve had the same job for four years. It’s time for you to move on. For your own good.”

“Move on where?”

“You could finish your dissertation,” he said, “for starters. Then I could give you a good recommendation anywhere.”

“You think that kid Lewis can do what I do?”

“Nobody’s better than you as a technician, Matthew. But you can’t be a lab tech all your life, not with your education.”

He didn’t have a good argument against that, since it was true. He enjoyed the work, but he couldn’t deny that it was underemployment. “So I have to leave at the end of December?”

He shrugged. “You finished the calibrator. I don’t have any short-term work for you. Might as well go on home and work on your dissertation.” He picked up the pencil and turned his attention back to the journal.

Matt went back into the lab, suddenly a stranger there. He opened his drawer, but there was almost nothing of value there that didn’t belong to MIT.

Except a pair of earrings. Kara had taken them off when they went skating on Boston Common a couple of weeks ago. Her skimpy outfit, otherwise perfect, hadn’t had a pocket.

Might as well take them. Send her a note.

He went over to the campus pub, the Muddy Charles, and had a beer, and then another. That fortified him enough to walk the cold mile to the nearest liquor store. He got a bottle of cheap bourbon and a bottle of red vermouth. The road to Hell would be paved with Manhattans.

When he got home, he was slightly intimidated by the silent witness to history in the living room. He took a tray of ice and a glass into the bedroom and quietly made a big drink, and found a mystery novel he didn’t remember reading. He took both into the bathroom and slid into a tub of hot water.

By the third chapter he remembered he’d read the book before, and was pretty sure the murderer was not the beautiful ex-wife, but rather the lawyer who had hired the private eye. He grimly read on, though, rather than get out of the tub and try to find another book.

There’s more than one way to read a book, though. You can make a template out of the edge of the page, holding it in such a way that it reveals only the first letter of each line of the page underneath. In this way you can search for hidden messages from God. On the third try he found the word “sQwat.” Then the phone rang.

It was his mother. “You’re in the bathroom again.”

“Taking a bath. I should take a bath in the living room?”

“You weren’t home earlier.”

“No, I went down to school.” Might as well. “I got an e-mail that my appointment isn’t being renewed. So I went down to talk to my boss.”

“What, you’re being fired? What did you do?”

Well, my boss thinks I’m crazy because I see boxes disappear. “He said it was for my own good. Like I have too much education for the job. I should finish my dissertation and move up in the world.”

“So what have I been telling you?”

“Okay, fine. Can you loan me about twenty grand for rent and groceries while I sit around and think?”

Wrong thing to say. There was a long pause and a sniff. “You know I would if I could. It’s hard enough to make ends meet…”

“Just kidding, Mother. I’m gonna start looking tomorrow. For a job.”

“Have you been drinking? At three in the afternoon?”

He didn’t say, “Haven’t you?” He rattled the ice in the glass. “In fact, I am. It seemed like the right occasion.”

“Well, you call me when you’re sober.”

“I am sober.” Loud click. “But not for long,” he said to the dead phone.