The Didymus Contingency

THREE
Teetering
2005

Arizona

Tom and David gleefully spent the next eleven hours sorting through piles of documentation, equipment and tools that had been sent back in time from their future selves. The idea that this could work originated from David’s brilliant mind, but was quickly supported by Tom when they first met. David grew skeptical of Tom’s motivation after learning about Megan’s untimely and violent death. But Tom had assured David endlessly that if success came within their lifetimes, he would not try to alter his tragic past. Tom knew that doing so would mean he and David would never meet. Having never met, any success they would experience in the realm of time travel would cease to exist, meaning Tom couldn’t go back in time in the first place. This was only one of the many theoretical paradoxes of time travel, which they now faced in the futuristic items laid out around the room.

David rubbed his weary eyes and continued on, driving his thoughts into a particular schematic that diagramed how one might navigate through the time stream without creating a cosmic wake. David’s mind wrapped itself within the blanket of the schematic’s quantum calculations. His eyes twitched back and forth, as he sucked up the information like a computerized leech. Then, an epiphany, “Look! Look!” he yelled, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of this sooner?”

Tom looked up from fiddling with a silver watch. “How do you know you thought of it at all?” Tom asked and went back to exploring the contours of the watch.

David crinkled his forehead. He began, “Well, I started working on-”

But Tom cut him off with a question of his own “Why did we send back watches?” Ten watches were lined up on the table next to Tom, but before the issue could be further addressed, Tom asked another question, “Whose handwriting?”

David grew confused, “What?”

Tom answered, not looking up from the watch, “Whose handwriting is on the schematic?”

“What are you talking about? I don’t know,” David replied, with a tinge of impatience.

“Well, look,” Tom said.

David begrudgingly held up the schematic and inspected the handwriting. As David continued his detective work, Tom puzzled over the watches, “There are ten of these watches. All the same.”

David placed the schematic on a table and moved it nonchalantly aside. Tom never looked up. Thinking he got away with his sleight of hand, David relaxed and attempted to steer the conversation further in the direction it was already headed. “Here, let me have a look,” David said as he reached for the watch in Tom’s hand.

Tom pulled the watch out of David’s range and asked, “Whose handwriting? Yours or mine?”

“Ugh, just give me the watch,” David pleaded.

“Tell me.”

An agonizing moment passed. Agonizing for David at least. It was sheer pleasure on Tom’s part.

“Yours,” David conceded.

Tom smiled smugly and handed the watch over. David snatched it away quickly, eager to move on to more productive topics.

The watch face was silver, lined with what David thought must be gold. Could these be gifts celebrating their success? Not likely, David surmised as he looked at the lines of small buttons, tracing each side of the watch with his index finger. In all, he found eight buttons. The diamond quartz display showed the time, which was wrong, but left plenty of room for several other sets of information-numbers, codes, percentages-to be viewed. What are these watches for?

David found the chance to recover from the schematic fiasco. “It’s digital,” David said, “So you’ll be able to read it.”

Tom feigned a laugh as David continued, “I don’t know what it’s for, but the time is wrong.”

“I’ll fix it,” Tom said as he snatched the watch from David’s hands.

“Hey!” David blurted, as he attempted to recover the watch from Tom, who made a hasty retreat.

Tom stopped and pushed several buttons. “Okay, here we go,” Tom said with confidence, as he sat in a smooth, metal chair.

As Tom worked the buttons, both men leaned in close to see what was happening to the watch face. The screen displayed several sets of numbers, the meaning of which Tom and David could not fully grasp. Losing patience, Tom pushed the buttons at an ever-increasing rate until one finger landed on a button that had yet to be depressed.

Nanoseconds later, a crackling noise filled the air around them. With no visible source for the audible emanations, both men looked around in confusion. The noise grew louder and then, both men recognized it. Their eyes met.

Between their faces, a small light began to pulsate. It started again…

Whum… Whum… Whum… WhumWhumWhumWhum.

The pair’s eyes widened and they dove apart in separate directions. David ducked behind a trash barrel while Tom overturned a table, sending stacks of diagrams to the floor, and dove behind it.

“What’s happening?” David shouted.

“How should I know?”

“Look!”

“You look!”

David peeked up over the barrel. The intense flashing light sent him back down. His mind scrambled for answers.

“We triggered another time event,” whispered David to himself.

A thought struck David and he yelled over the increasing noise, “The watches… They’re the time devices. We triggered the event with the watch!”

David was sure Tom couldn’t hear him over the noise and didn’t bother repeating himself. His eyebrows raised as a new realization reeled into his mind. Not only had they created a time travel device in the future, they had created several and they were portable!

WhumWhumWhumCrack!

Bright light flashed through the room as time and space exposed itself again.

Boom!

The chair ceased to exist and the light faded. Tom and David gradually peeked out from behind their hiding places. Only a handful of bright blue sparkles now floated to the floor where the single watch had fallen.

Tom was the first to move, crawling out from behind the table. David followed, holding the trash barrel in front of him for protection. The two converged on the watch, where the chair once stood. Amazement was stretched across their faces as they stood over an area of the universe that had been torn apart by a device they created. A device that now lay at their feet. Both men fell to the floor, crying with laughter.

The smell of heavily buttered corn and five different kinds of barbequed meats lingered in the air. Peggy’s Porker Palace was the closest thing to a decent restaurant within one hundred square miles of the LightTech facility. That was Tom’s opinion anyway. Tom and David had become regulars at the “all you can eat” buffet. They were no longer distracted by the four hundred pound, gravy-loving, plaid-shirt wearing hicks who consumed entire tabletops worth of food in one sitting. Waitresses hustled back and forth from table to kitchen, carrying trays full of half gorged on food, repeating the cycle infinitely. Tom and David sat in a booth to the side of the action, bellies full from their celebration dinner.

While David sipped on a soda and scribbled notes on a napkin, Tom finished off his eighth bottle of Heineken. One of the time-modified watches rested on the table between them. Tom blinked his heavy eyes and focused them on the watch. He wondered how it worked, but knew he was too mentally diminished to even consider figuring it out. That’s why he let David take a whack-that, and David was better at math.

David chuckled lightly.

“Well?” asked Tom with a slurred voice, “Where’d it go?”

“Let’s just say some paleontologist is going to be very confused when he digs up a Neanderthal sitting on our chair,” David said, grinning ear to ear.

“My God, we might have changed the course of human history!” Tom blurted sarcastically, “Imagine! Chairs invented earlier, leading to the idea of having a throne, upon which a king is crowned and a monarchy is born centuries earlier then we currently know! By my calculations the time change shift hits us in three… two… one…”

Tom finished his countdown with an impressive belch that went unnoticed save for the rotund cowboy at the next table over who raised his chicken leg to Tom and nodded his head as if to say, “Nice one.”

David shook his head. Tom was a silly drunk if you stayed on his good side. “While I don’t think our chair will have any effect on the time stream, we do need to be more careful in the future,” David said.

“So puh-artna,” Tom said with a drunken smile. “Tell me how our little invention works.”

“You’re not going to remember a word of this in the morning,” David said, thoroughly amused.

“C’mon buddy, humor me…” Tom replied as he blinked his eyes, trying to clear the cobwebs.

David picked up the watch and held it up in front of Tom’s face. Tom focused on the watch as best he could. David worked the buttons with skill and spoke as he did so, “Look here. This sets the date, not today’s date mind you, the date you wish to travel to. We even included settings for B.C. and A.D. Here is the time of day, again, the exact time you wish to travel to-not our time. And look at this! Anywhere in the world you want to go to. After picking the year and time you can enter global coordinates, which are then automatically adjusted for continental shift. Just push this button and poof, you disappear…to another time…another place…another way of life, in the blink of an eye.”

“Okay,” Tom said. “So then the real question is…if the watch…which was on the chair…which belongs to the new king…created the time…warp? Wormhole? What are we calling it anyway? Forget it. Not important… Why didn’t the watch disappear too?”

“I thought about that. It’s elementary, but I think the watch might have to be attached to whatever it’s sending back in time,” David explained.

“Huh, I still can’t believe this works.”

“Believe it,” David said, “It’s about time you believed in something.”

David’s comment sank in slowly and got twisted in the process by Tom’s tanked brain. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

David spoke quickly, “I didn’t mean what you think. I-”

“You what?” Tom said, his voice growing angry, “Want me to believe in your God? Your Jonas…”

Tom squinted his eyes, attempting to free his mind of the alcohol’s effects, and said, “Your Jesus? It was my lucky day. That’s what he said, you know, my lucky day! My lucky day…”

Tom spoke through gritted teeth, “Megan dedicated her life to ‘saving people.’” Tom’s nostrils raised and his lips turned down. “Saving people… She called it that. She died for being a Christian. She died… She died because she believed in an ass of a God who could care less about those who served him.”

David looked around the room. They were beginning to get an audience.

“Here God! I want to serve you so I can die too!” Tom shouted toward the ceiling. He looked back at David. “I hold Jesus… Jesus is responsible for her death. She’s dead. It’s his fault. How could I ever believe in him? If he were who everyone says he is, why did he let Megan die?”

David spoke slowly and softly. “Sometimes bad things happen to good people and we can’t see why. But the greater good-”

“Greater good? David, my wife was gunned down in front of me and died at my feet! Right at my feet. And the blood… What good could possibly come of that?!” Tom fumed as his mind raced. “You weren’t there, David. If…if you believed in Megan’s God, you died. They killed you. Fffft, that was it. If you didn’t…if you didn’t, you lived. It was that simple…that easy. Be glad you weren’t there. You’d be dead too.”

“She died for what she believed in, Tom,” was all David could say.

“Why do you think…? What… Yeah, you know, you’re right. She died for what she believed in: nothing. She died for nothing… Megan died for nothing.”

Tom wound up and punched the tabletop with all his might, getting the attention of everyone in the restaurant. Tom’s chest heaved with each passion-filled breath. He thought of Megan and how he wished he could save her-go back and save her-but he knew he couldn’t. Time would be changed forever and the time travel device he invented would cease to exist, trapping Tom in an unbreakable cycle of self-defeat. But there was something he could do. Something that wouldn’t change time, but would prove once and for all that Megan died for nothing and that David’s naive beliefs were ill founded. At least David could be saved from a life of worthless devotion to a dead god.

Tom shoved away from the table and pounded toward the door.

“Tom, wait,” David urged, not sure what was happening. He fumbled with his wallet, attempting to pay for their meal before leaving. Tom had plenty of time to make his escape.

David careened out of the restaurant unsure of Tom’s plans. Would he find Tom crying over the loss of his wife? Would he encounter a swift fist to his jaw? Would Tom pass out and wake up with a headache?

The Land Rover skidded to a dusty stop in front of David, nearly crushing his feet. Tom was behind the wheel. David approached the already rolled down window. “What are you doing?”

Tom looked at David, his eyes clear and said, “If you could go back in time…and witness any event…from beginning to end, where would you go?”

David was exasperated and didn’t want to spend time on silly questions, “Tom, I don’t know.”

“Well, I do,” Tom informed him.

“Tom…”

“I’m going to prove it to you once and for all. I’m going to prove it to the world. My wife is dead and so is your God, dead and buried,” said Tom, “Don’t worry. I won’t change anything. I won’t get involved.”

“You’re drunk!” David shouted, “You can’t drive!”

“You can’t stop me, David.”

“Give me the keys.”

“Goodbye, David.”

“Give me the keys, now.”

“See you around.”

“What are you going to do?”

Tom was finished with the conversation and slammed his foot on the gas. The SUV peeled off, leaving David to choke on a cloud of dust. David coughed as he chased after Tom, yelling, “Wait! What are you going to do?”

David stopped running in the middle of the road and caught his breath. He mentally sifted through all the possibilities Tom’s drunken mind could be considering. He thought about what Tom had said. Where would he go? What event would he witness?

David opened his palm, looked at the heavy metallic watch and found the answer. They had unlocked the door to the past and Tom was going to step through and face the man he blamed for his pain.

David’s face contorted into sheer panic and he said aloud, “No… Oh no, Tom…”

He smashed through the doors of Peggy’s Porker Palace. “Help! Somebody help me! I need a ride!” David shouted. A room full of slovenly, bibbed truckers stared at David, annoyed by the disturbance to their feast. David met their eyes and knew he was going nowhere fast.

A dark blue Chevy pickup with bull horns tied to the front stopped amid a cloud of dirt only ten feet from the inconspicuous shed in the middle of nowhere. David flung the door open and jumped out.

“Thanks,” he said to Betty, the waitress who had used her smoke break to drive the frantic David to God-knows-where for God-knows-what. Betty leaned out the window and spat, “Sure this is where you wanna be? Ain’t nothin out here.”

David smiled and nodded his head, anxious for the woman to leave, “Yes, I’m positive. Thank you again for the ride.”

“All right,” Betty said with one eyebrow perched high on her forehead, “It’s your walk back.”

David watched as Betty spun her tires, sending the truck into a quick one-eighty spin. She disappeared into the darkness, speeding through the night, country music blaring. As soon as she was out of sight, David ran into the shack like a child whose bladder was overflowing. The green laser dropped from the ceiling and scanned David’s head.

Once David reached the parking level floor, Fred greeted him. “Salutations, Dr. Goodman. What are you two doing here this late?”

“When did Dr. Greenbaum arrive?” David asked.

“He came through not twenty minutes ago. Didn’t quite seem himself though. Nearly ran me over.”

“Maybe I’m not too late,” said David to himself.

“To late for what?” asked Fred.

Waaooh! An alarm sounded throughout the complex, so shockingly loud that David and Fred had to cover their ears. Red lights flashed on every wall. Just as quickly, the noise of the alarm disappeared, but the light remained. David knew he was too late.

David entered the control center and was met by raw chaos. Scientists were running in every direction attempting to make sense of what had happened. Armed guards lined the walls and aisles watching for anything out of the ordinary, which was everything as far as David could see. Sally was at the center of it all, giving orders to every soul in the room like a general in the trenches.

Her eyes caught David’s and he saw an expression on her face he determined that second to never forget: relief. Sally rushed to David and said, “Someone used it! Someone went back! I don’t know how this could happen. Only you, Tom and I had… Where’s Tom?”

David dodged the question, “Are the other watches still there?”

“One is missing,” Sally replied.

Spencer, a timid scientist with thick glasses and a slight hunch, approached Sally with his head down and waited for her to acknowledge his presence. “What is it?” Sally barked.

“Uh, well, closer inspection of the data sheets from the time of incursion shows two additional time-space distortions,” explained Spencer.

“Meaning?” Sally asked.

“Meaning two or three people-” David said.

“Or objects,” Spencer added.

“-traveled through time in that room at roughly the same time,” David finished.

“How is that possible?” Sally asked, “All but two of the watches are accounted for and you still have yours, right?”

David removed the watch from his pocket and held it up for Sally. “Which means someone or something transported into the room and then back out after the first watch went missing.”

“Is anything else from the room missing?” Sally asked Spencer.

“We already compiled an inventory. Absolutely nothing, other than the one watch and the unfortunate chair, is missing,” Spencer said with unusual confidence.

“What about added?” David asked. “Was anything added? Maybe our future selves sent something else back?”

“We would have found that during the inventory,” Spencer said. “Nothing inside the room has changed. But…”

David’s impatience grew. “What?”

“Perhaps the monitoring equipment is flawed?” Spencer said, looking a little uncomfortable at suggesting such a thing. “This is, after all, the first time we’ve monitored space-time distortions. What if what we’re seeing is, for lack of a better term, ripples?”

“Like aftershocks?” David asked.

Spencer smiled with relief. “Exactly! What if the second and third distortions we detected were simply aftershocks, or ripples, created by the first?”

“It’s possible,” David said. “That might make sense, but we should keep an eye out for the phenomenon in the future, just in case it repeats.”

“Good,” Sally said, the subject put to rest for the moment.

David patted Spencer on the shoulder and said, “Good work, Spence.”

“Thanks, David. See you in the past,” Spencer said as he hustled away.

See you in the past?

“David, what are your thoughts?” Sally asked.

David’s mind left his thoughts about Spencer’s odd comment and focused on their predicament “My best guess,” David said, “is that it’s either a side effect from the all the time distortions created in the last day or our future selves adding or subtracting from what they sent back. If it wasn’t from an internal source, then there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. I suggest we focus our efforts primarily on the problem at hand.”

“Agreed, but I want another inventory done, just in case something was missed,” Sally said as they entered Receiving Room Alpha, which was swarming with guards.

David scurried to the eight remaining watches, resting on a table. He picked one up and glanced over it. “Good, they’re identical. I still might be able to catch him,” he said without thinking.

“Catch who?” Sally demanded, “And how on God’s green Earth can we find were ‘he’ went?”

David put the watch down and pulled out the one from his pocket. He strapped the watch to his wrist and looked up at Sally, “Because I know where and when he went. And since the watches are identical and most likely function similarly, I’m sure he could have-”

“David, for the last time…who?”

David paused. Should he tell her? Would she still trust him after knowing the truth? David’s honesty won out, “Dr. Greenbaum… Tom went back.”

Sally cocked her head sideways, apparently confused. “What? Why would he?” she asked.

“It’s a long story,” David said, “I don’t have time to explain and I’m going to need a few things.”

David began mentally preparing for the ordeal, which he knew was his to face alone. It had been years since he held a conversation in his native Hebrew tongue, let alone his school-learned Greek and Aramaic. Thank God they were required learning throughout his years at private Israeli schools. He feared Tom would be even worse off. He began making a mental list of items he would need: Authentic clothing could be created. Money: gold and silver in moderation would probably do. Some padded sandals…and a disguise for the watch.

David decided he would take a test trip into the past. He thought it would be best if he witnessed first hand the event that drove his partner and best friend to risk changing the past to prove a point. He had to see it for himself. He had to understand. His mind was made up.

He was going to Zambia.