TIME OUT, by Edward M. Lerner

I’m coughing, choking. Every breath sears my throat and rasps like sandpaper at my lungs. Fire licks hungrily at walls, furniture, equipment. Smoke is everywhere: thick, black, and toxic. The flames hiss, crackle, and roar.

But nothing masks the screams.

I fear I’ve been reliving it aloud, because the cop seated across the table glances at the wall with the one-way glass. Following his eyes, I catch my own reflection. That slump-shouldered, expressionless figure seems at least twice my thirty years.

The cop’s look asks, “Do we let him keep talking or read him his rights?”

My rights. I try to care. Only the flames and smoke—and the screaming—are real to me.

Maybe I overlooked some signal. Maybe the cop made up his own mind. He begins reciting, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can…”

No matter my rights, I must remain silent. I dare not let anyone even suspect, or it will all have been for naught.

The horror once more washes over me, untouched by conviction I could not have done anything else. Again memories obliterate the present.

I’m in the warehouse. I feel the scorching heat, and I hear the screams, and I smell—

Convulsively, I throw up.

CHAPTER 1

The tale began and ended—if it has ended—with Jonas.

I would have liked to see myself as Watson to Jonas’s Holmes: a colleague, though not an equal. I knew better. I was more clueless even than Watson.

Better to call me Ishmael to Jonas’s Ahab, Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Igor to his Victor Frankenstein. There were no happy endings to those pairings.

So, Jonas…

* * * *

Mornings spent in the Home Depot parking lot had cured my pallor. Flab, alas, did not yield so easily. The owlish glasses probably didn’t recommend me, either. Whatever the reason, the weathered-looking men in their battered, mud-spattered trucks had yet to acknowledge me, much less to offer me work.

A Mutt and Jeff pair, grinning, had ridden off on the flatbed of a pickup, twenty or so minutes earlier. Likely they were the last who’d get work today. The main thing that I’d learned about day labor was that construction jobs began early. That, and that soon the store manager would tell us rejects and laggards to shove off, before the parking area and the store got busy. The understanding was we’d be elsewhere by ten.

I’d barely set off for home, such as it was, the June day already warm and humid, when the Hyundai station wagon pulled up. Dirt lay as thick on it as on any truck that had come trawling for cheap laborers, but still it didn’t fit. The back seat was folded down, and the cargo deck was filled with—I had no idea what. Like a tornado had hit a Radio Shack, and deposited the debris there. The driver’s shirt, seen through the grimy windshield, might have been white. The faint music sounded orchestral and baroque.

A window slid down. (The music swelled; Vivaldi, I decided.) This was where the would-be employer would shout out for carpenters, or painters, or just strong backs.

This guy was at a loss what to ask, but managed to come up with, “Who speaks English?” He himself had a trace of an accent. Slavic, I thought.

Most everyone answered yes (or sí, or twice da). Three of us stepped up to the Hyundai.

The driver had a square face, clean-shaven, with epic frown lines. His gray hair was as snarled and unruly as a Brillo pad. Sixty-ish, I guessed. His eyes, small and close set, darted about.

Beneath the edginess, I sensed something else. Determination. As for the hiring of day labor, he didn’t know what he was doing.

That was okay. I didn’t know what I was doing, either.

I said, “A priest, a minister, and the Dalai Lama walk into a bar. Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

The man in the station wagon smiled uncertainly, displaying large, uneven teeth. He said, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

“How can I help you?” I asked.

“Odd jobs in my workshop. Cleaning. Furniture moving. Sort and inventory a bunch of stuff. Run errands. Just so you know, I have some high-voltage equipment. It’s all labeled. You’ll need to stay away from it.”

“I can do odd jobs,” I assured him, “and not electrocute myself, either. I’m Peter Bitner, by the way.”

“Jonas,” he answered reflexively. “Have any technical aptitude? Electronics, computers, ham radio, that kind of thing?”

“None whatsoever,” I told him.

He nodded. Ignorance, apparently, was a good thing.

The men who had stepped forward with me sidled back. Too many had been stiffed at the end of a day’s work. When, in the charitable expression, you’re an undocumented worker, as many here were, or working off-book for cash, as did everyone here, to whom would you complain? People learned to avoid anyone who felt off.

Jonas felt off to me, too. So what? I was divorced, disgraced, and destitute. Disowned by my parents and deserted by my so-called friends. (Except, when I was honest with myself, the few who had tried to stay in touch. Them I was too ashamed to see.) Days away from homelessness. Rejecting a job—if Jonas offered me one—was a bigger risk than getting cheated.

I asked, “What do you say?”

We haggled a bit and came to terms. I got in the car beside Jonas.

“So,” Jonas finally said, “a priest, a minister, and the Dalai Lama.”

“Sorry about that. I was improvising. Here’s a joke I do know. What do you call a thousand lawyers, buried up to their necks, at the bottom of the ocean?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“A good start,” I told him.

From his bitter laugh, I guessed that Jonas, too, had had a run-in with lawyers.

* * * *

We rode in silence, apart from tinkly harpsichord music, to a seedy, light-industrial neighborhood. Jonas parked outside a wooden warehouse, its paint cracked and peeling, the name of a defunct moving-and-storage company faded almost to illegibility. I began my first chore: toting in the boxes and bags that filled the station wagon. Wherever Jonas shopped, it wasn’t the mall. As for his so-called workshop, it dwarfed my house.

The four-bedroom colonial I had once owned, not the dingy, little more than a closet that I rented in a transient hotel.

Grime coated the warehouse floor, and slogging along we added to the already innumerable shoeprints. Oscillating fans stirred the dust. More dust danced and sparkled in the sunbeams slicing down from windows beneath the eaves.

The ceiling was at least twenty feet over my head. Along one edge of the cavernous space, above a glass-walled row of mostly vacant offices, was a partial second story accessible from one end by a cargo elevator and from the other end by a narrow flight of well-worn wooden stairs. Paint lay so thickly on the treads as to almost mask the gaps between planks. Beneath the stairway, strata upon strata of paper sheets, flapping to the back-and-forth cycling of the fans, covered a long corkboard.

Jonas had not been kidding about high-voltage stuff. Opposite the offices, within a padlocked, chain-link enclosure, was what looked like a Dominion Power substation. Something inside the fence put out a tooth-rattling bass hum. Fat insulated cables snaking along the concrete floor supplied power from within the cage to—I had no idea what.

Gray cabinets, many with their doors hanging open, lined the remaining two walls. In a corner, amid heaps of scavenged electronics, were two freestanding metal strongboxes each the size of a file drawer. I couldn’t imagine what Jonas imagined anyone might want to steal from here.

Computers, instruments, and tools covered the tops and lower shelves of a dozen wooden workbenches; more gear overflowed into the aisles aboard wheeled carts. Colored wire, as abundant as tinsel on a Christmas tree, hung everywhere.

Needles leapt and twitched, digital readouts blinked, and weird shapes morphed and spun on large displays. Of the instruments near enough to read, about half showed the current time. I thought nothing of it: half the gadgets in my former home doubled as clocks, too.

This was some workshop.

“So are you a mad scientist?” I asked him.

“Not yet. Just peevish.”

Taking the hint, I finished unloading the station wagon without asking anything more personal than, “Where do you want this?” (I staggered under a couple of the boxes, but didn’t ask for help. If my new boss hadn’t noticed that I was a runt, I saw no reason to bring it to his attention.) When I encountered a chicken-wire pen with four guinea pigs, I told myself these were pets, not, well, guinea pigs.

Chore two, long overdue, was mopping. Wash water turned black within minutes; I rolled my bucket to and from the single utility sink as much as I swabbed. I hadn’t finished half the floor—what showed of it—when Jonas was ready to drop me off. Apart from muttering as he tinkered, his words incomprehensible when they weren’t inaudible, he had had nothing to say about what he did.

The good news was, he paid everything to which we had agreed and tossed in a couple extra bucks for my dinner. The better news was, he wanted me back the next day.

* * * *

As I scraped and scrubbed the biology experiment that had once been a refrigerator, Jonas stopped mumbling to himself long enough to comment, “You do good work.” He retreated into a cluster of bench equipment faster than I, in my surprise, could summon a thank-you.

It was our third day together, and I still had no idea what he did, or why his “workshop” brimmed with clocks and computers, or why he had enough smoke detectors, their boxes sealed, to fill a cabinet. Though he muttered as he worked, I wasn’t often close enough to make it out. When I could hear, I still made no sense of it. I’d never heard of entropy, tachyons, isotope separation, or recombinant DNA.

When he took a break from his work it was to surf the web; he still muttered, only louder. From time to time he’d print off an item, highlight or underline or circle all over it, and pin it with the collection already on the corkboard. The printouts, at least, I sometimes understood: ways in which the world was going to hell.

If Jonas wasn’t a mad scientist, he had advanced beyond peeved.

The next day, as I shuttled old gadgets from his scrap heap to shelves I’d improvised from concrete blocks and boards, Jonas looked my way to ask, “What did you do before?”

I didn’t care to share, but neither could I afford, however metaphorically, to bite the hand that fed me. And Jonas was decent enough, in his mad-scientist way. That morning he’d sent me with a twenty to buy pizza for our lunch. When I offered him his change, he’d waved it off.

Before was nonspecific enough to leave some wiggle room without, quite, lying.

“I was in banking,” I told him. That answer satisfied most people. Between the housing bubble going pop and the Great Recession, banks had done plenty of downsizing.

“Where you worked as?” Jonas asked.

“A clerical,” I equivocated.

Because mortgage workers didn’t get much sympathy. Notaries who certified robo-signed eviction notices got none.

Never mind that I either approved everything as I was told or got fired. Never mind that the homeowners involved were invariably months behind in their payments. Never mind that the lawyer who managed the delinquent-accounts department, who demanded we dispose of thousands of bad loans every month, got off with a tsk and a fat severance package.

Britney had been shocked—shocked!—to find out what her trusted assistant had done.

There wasn’t as much as a tweet to show what she had ordered me to do. She’d always given orders verbally.

“Clerical,” Jonas repeated. “I can see that. You’re organized. Very systematic.”

Doubtless why I’d made such a good prison librarian. Notary fraud is a felony.

“Thank you,” I said, wishing he’d drop the subject.

And then Jonas surprised me. He said, “I don’t keep records very well.”

Big surprise.

He seemed on the verge of adding something, and then thought better of it. “When you’ve finished clearing that pile of old gear, we’ll call it a day. Tomorrow, you can organize the storerooms upstairs.”

* * * *

On the eighth day, Jonas reached a decision.

“Look, Peter, I need a regular assistant. You can see as much. You’re hardworking and surely capable of more than I’ve asked of you so far.

“The thing is, my funds are limited. Suppose we stop the day-at-a-time arrangement and I set you up rent-free in a room upstairs. Same pay, still off the books, and I’ll furnish all your meals.”

Saving me the daily rent I’d been paying on the rathole where I was living, not to mention that any of the second-story rooms I’d emptied out would be larger. Jonas, I’d found, already lived in a room upstairs. I was tempted. But—

“I’ll need to know a few things before making this permanent,” I said. “Respectfully, how do you pay for this?” And for how long could he afford to keep paying? It wasn’t like I’d seen a customer, or that we were in a high-rent district. These might be hard times for mad scientists, too.

And I’d learned a hard lesson on the limits to trust.

“I’m not rich,” Jonas admitted. “I’m not without resources, either. The lease here is prepaid for another fourteen months by an NSF grant I used to have. Most of this equipment is castoffs, from my colleagues at the university. For day to day expenses, I have some savings.”

“You’re affiliated with the university? Which one?”

“Smithson-Briarwood,” he said, not meeting my eye. “To be more precise, my former colleagues.”

Expired grant. Former colleagues. Old enough, no doubt, for tenure, and yet…

Jonas sighed. “You’re right to be skeptical. My research is…unorthodox. I admit it. But I’m close, Peter. I’m close. And when I succeed”—he gestured grandly at the clutter all around—“everything will become so much better.”

“What is your research?” I asked. It was politer than either question I wanted to ask: How much in savings? What happened to your grant?

“It’s quite abstruse physics. Look, I can promise you this. If my savings run out, you can continue living here rent-free while the lease lasts.”

“And you’ll put that in writing?”

He nodded.

Somehow, I had to ask. “Abstruse physics. How will that make everything better?”

His face reddened, and I feared that I’d gone too far.

“I was just curious,” I backpedaled. “It doesn’t matter.” As the silence stretched, I sweated.

“My peers didn’t understand.” I sensed Jonas answered himself, not me. “So much rides on this, and yet they mocked my theories as foolish. Mocked me. Conspired to usurp my grant.”

“So I think we have an agreement,” I told him.

“No one’s books are perfect,” he droned on to himself. “Of course they found an irregularity or two. The excuse they were searching for to reclaim my funding.”

“Auditors?” I guessed.

His eyes snapped back into focus and he noticed me again. “Yes, the damn auditors. I appealed their ruling, for all the good it did me. When they denied my appeal I tried taking them to court, only to be told the matter was between me and the NSF.”

I recalled how bitterly Jonas had laughed that first day at my lawyer joke. It seemed we had more in common that I would have guessed.

I told my boss, “I’ll move in tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 2

My first few days living in the warehouse, I spoke more to the guinea pigs than with Jonas. I got to know the manager at the local bodega and the counter staff at the nearby eateries from which I picked up our takeout. I started flirting with the cute blond cashier, she of the most striking green eyes, at the 7-Eleven.

Whereas Jonas, after I moved in, hardly ever left the building.

Perhaps that was why, at long last, Jonas ceased his muttering and emerged from among his clustered workbenches to ask, “Do you ever wonder?”

Amid the monotony of my duties, I did little but wonder: about the shambles my life had become. About the choices I’d made, and that Amy, my ex, had made. About what Amy was doing now, and with whom. About the dreary and lonesome existence stretching ahead of me. I wondered if my scuzzball former boss was lolling on a beach, sipping mai tais.

None of which I was about to share.

“Sure,” I told Jonas.

“Maybe the world doesn’t need to be this messed up.”

If the world would leave me alone, I would gladly return the favor. I said, “Maybe some things are meant to be.”

“Fate?” Jonas looked disappointed. “God’s will? Karma? Here I thought you were an educated man.”

Did I believe in fate? Or did I only wish I did? How liberating it would be to blame forces bigger than myself for my failings. Because then they wouldn’t be my failings, would they?

None of which I was about to share.

“Not all education is the same,” I said. “You scientists learn to ask why things work. Engineers learn to ask how things work. Accountants learn to ask how much things cost.”

“And English majors? What do you learn?”

“To ask, ‘Do you want fries with that?’”

Jonas chuckled, but I hadn’t diverted him. He tried again. “But maybe the world doesn’t need to be this messed up.”

Forget fate, I thought. Just look at human nature. Evenings, if I took the time to surf the news, now that I again had access to the net, the world seemed pretty determined to go to hell.

What was on Jonas’s mind today? Economies in freefall? Climate change? Nuclear proliferation? Terrorism? Narco-states? On his wall of woes, all had a prominent place.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Jonas followed my glance to his corkboard. “Suppose someone knew what was coming. Would we listen?”

Had I believed anyone ever listened, I would have been a whistleblower instead of a patsy. Or maybe my character flaw was the lack of guts, not a lack of belief. Either way, I had held my tongue and held onto my paycheck for a few more months, while Britney’s orders outvoted my conscience.

Still, talking about most anything would beat the customary grim silence and nonstop introspection.

“The problem is, no one knows.” I gestured, vaguely, toward his corkboard. “The world is full of so-called experts who claim to know best, and who don’t agree on the time of day.”

A sad smile flickered over Jonas’s face. “No, they don’t.” When I didn’t comment, he turned back toward the workbenches and his whatever-it-was.

Suddenly I was loath to let our first real, however vapid, conversation end. To Jonas, but really talking to myself, I said, “We don’t need more experts. We need a do-over.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Suppose you could warn the world about Hitler in 1938. Not that he was an evil, ambitious man, or that he meant to start a terrible war—but that he had started a war. That millions died. That the whole political order of Europe was shattered, and that as a result, the communists occupied half the continent to enslave millions more. Would you?”

I’d been giving fresh food and water to the guinea pigs when all this started. Much to Jonas’s amusement, I had given them names. I finished, latched the cage door, and stood.

“That’s tricky,” I said. “Stop Hitler and what else do you alter? Millions of lives saved, sure, but billions of lives changed.”

“Not so tricky,” Jonas said, glowering. “Not for everyone. If you came from Poland, it would be easy. Between the Nazis and the Russians, one out of six Poles died during World War II. For decades after, the communists oppressed and impoverished those who had survived.”

Anger brought out the accent I had almost ceased to notice. From the short letter that passed for a contract between us, entitling me to live upstairs for the next fourteen months, I had learned Jonas’s full name. His family name was Gorski. I wondered when, and under what circumstances, he had moved to this country.

“Or I could go back to my youth,” I said, changing the subject without too overtly changing the subject. If Jonas had the locks changed while I was out running an errand, what could I do? Hire a lawyer? “I’d teach my younger self everything I’ve learned about women. It wouldn’t take long.”

I laughed at myself. After a second Jonas joined in.

But I kept picturing my younger self meeting the near-indigent I had become. I couldn’t imagine that overconfident, snot-nosed teen listening. Or me of a year—and a lifetime—earlier, either.

Did Jonas wish he could tell his earlier self to take better care of his grant’s finances? Or to choose a research topic more respectable than whatever it was he did do? Or to seek friends beyond his circle of fickle colleagues?

As Jonas went back to his enigmatic task, I couldn’t help feeling there was something more that he had wanted to discuss.

* * * *

For all its awkwardness, the stop-Hitler-early conversation had knocked down the wall between us. That afternoon as we worked, we talked baseball. That evening, in the former break room become our improvised kitchen, we discussed music over pizza and beer. But when Jonas began frothing about a financial crisis, this latest one, apparently, embroiling Europe, I nodded along and concentrated on my beer. Whatever had gone wrong with Greece’s debt, no one could fault me.

The next day, as I cleared breakfast dishes from the workbench that served as our dinette table, Jonas talked about entropy. Whatever that was. Something to do with his abstruse physics, I guessed. He’d mumbled to himself about entropy often enough.

This once he noticed my blank expression. “Disorder, if you will.”

“If I will what?”

Jonas shook his head, smiling. “Think of entropy as measuring the homogeneity of a system.”

“That doesn’t help,” I said.

A coffee mug sat on a workbench beside him. He pointed. “There’s milk in my coffee. It’s well mixed, making the color within the mug uniform.”

“Uh-huh.”

He persisted. “The coffee is hot. At a molecular level the coffee and milk are rushing about. Despite that random motion, you never see milk gathering itself and the rest of the cup’s contents turning black. Entropy is why not.”

I frowned, trying to puzzle that out. “It’s some kind of force that operates on milk?”

“Only metaphorically,” Jonas said. “The force of numbers. There are countless ways for the milk and coffee to arrange themselves in which the fluids remain blended. The arrangements in which milk and coffee have separated are vastly fewer.”

“But it could happen,” I challenged.

“It could.” He stroked his chin pensively. Deciding whether to go on or cut his losses? “You’re familiar with the physicist Murray Gell-Mann?”

I’d heard of Einstein and Newton and an Italian. It took me a moment to retrieve that name, Galileo. I had my doubts I knew any other physicists. “I don’t think so.”

“No matter.” Perhaps not, but Jonas looked thwarted. “Gell-Mann once said, ‘That which is not forbidden is mandatory.’”

“So we should be seeing milk separate?”

“Yes, but not in our lifetimes,” Jonas said. “Gell-Mann’s domain was particle physics. I don’t know that he ever thought about milk dispersing. The thing is…”

“Yes?”

“The laws of physics, all of them, work the same forward and back.”

“Forward and backward,” I repeated.

“In time,” he added. “Suppose a car maintains a constant velocity due north at sixty miles per hour, and I know where that car is at this moment. By elementary physics I can as easily tell you where the vehicle was ten minutes ago as where it will be ten minutes from now.”

My mug was empty. Pouring a refill, I wondered about Jonas’s day-earlier wondering. I took a great intuitive leap. “You’re interested in time travel.”

“I am.”

“So that someone could stop Hitler.”

“Merely as an example.”

I’d been right from the first. I worked for a mad scientist. Outside of a Terminator movie, who talked about time machines?

But dusting in Jonas’s room, I’d seen framed doctoral degrees in physics and electrical engineering from Harvard and MIT. On the wooden crate that served him as an end table, a beer stein emblazoned with a Smithson-Briarwood crest congratulated him on making associate professor. It wasn’t hard to believe he had once won an NSF grant.

So: scientist, crackpot, or both? My thoughts spun around and around, like the wheels in a slot machine.

There was no jackpot.

As I hid behind my coffee mug, Jonas stood. “I have a list of groceries for you to pick up. After that, and taking care of the guinea pigs, I’ll have you start with—”

“What does time travel have to do with coffee and milk?” I blurted out. “I mean entropy?”

Blinking at the interruption, Jonas still managed to look pleased. He must miss discussing science with colleagues. As sorry a substitute as I must be, I had shown interest.

He said, “What isn’t forbidden is mandatory. Time travel, as far as anyone can tell, is not forbidden.”

Even I could complete the syllogism: Ergo, time travel is mandatory. But I could not bring myself to voice the obvious implication.

Jonas spoke for me. “So where are the time travelers?”

* * * *

Where are the time travelers?

I take my coffee black, but I couldn’t not reach for the milk pitcher. I kept pouring, my coffee turning paler and paler. I didn’t stop till liquid lapped at the brim.

“The future is a long time,” I said, “If ever time travel is invented, wouldn’t someone come back to our time?”

“You would think,” Jonas said, watching me intently.

In my confusion, I managed to bump the table. Coffee sloshed, ran off the bench top, and splattered my shoes. I hardly noticed.

The more time goes by, the more thoroughly milk and black coffee must mix. As the future inevitably stretched out after the inevitable invention of time travel, must not the pre-discovery and post-discovery eras eventually mix, too?

So where were the time travelers?

Perhaps they lived among us in secrecy. Or maybe recorded history, all of it, was somehow a vanishingly improbable era, our “coffee” and their “milk” staying separate despite the odds. Or…

Suppose the metaphorical coffee of our era remained black because there was no metaphorical milk of time travelers from the future. Suppose the future—at least for humanity—came to an end before the invention of time travel.

Jonas’s sneering at fate notwithstanding, the litany of the world’s ills on his corkboard assumed a sickening new inevitability.

“I hope you’re a raving loon,” I said.

“I hope so, too,” Jonas answered.

CHAPTER 3

Eventually I stopped counting my days in the warehouse. I had a job, however menial. Instead, as Jonas’s mood grew ever darker, I wondered how many days’ work remained.

Because whatever he attempted to build here, it wasn’t working for him.

He cursed out his equipment, slammed doors, growled at me, punted innocent wastebaskets. Twice he flung things against a wall. Whatever an oscilloscope was, it shattered impressively.

It was a dreary Thursday, the thunder all but constant, rain in sheets cascading down the few, high windows. Inside the warehouse, the atmosphere was grimmer. With gauges and meters I could not begin to name, Jonas checked and double-checked his latest setup. Muttering became snarling—and swearing, when I asked what I should work on next. I made myself scarce, but slams and thumps pursued me.

From deep in one of our electronics scrap heaps I recovered an old boom box. Radio reception sucked, staticky whether from Jonas’s equipment or from the storm, but a few FM signals were tolerable. I changed stations the moment any news came on. Why add to Jonas’s frustrations?

I was surveying the refrigerator when Jonas appeared. He looked…beaten.

“What do you feel like for lunch,” I asked.

He didn’t respond.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go out and leave you alone.” Living and eating for free at the warehouse, I’d retained most of my meager earnings. I could afford a Big Mac. Fries, even. “Can I bring back something for you?”

Shoulders slumped, he said, “Anything not forbidden is mandatory.”

“Outside Hollywood, maybe it is forbidden,” I said.

“You’re not alone in thinking that.” Jonas popped the cap off a beer bottle and took a long swig. “My backstabbing, unimaginative ‘peers’ insist cause must always precede effect. I don’t believe that.”

He refused to believe, his posture told me. Because if it were true, he’d wasted…years?

“Shall I leave the music on?” I asked, headed for the kitchen door.

“What?”

“Music. You know, the radio.” I gestured at the boom box on the counter. “I got this clunker out of the scrap heap. Not that the reception here is anything to write home—”

Something flashed in his eyes, stopping me. Not depression, or disappointment, or anger. Something more thoughtful.

Something—could it be?—hopeful.

A broad grin lit Jonas’s face. “Peter,” he said, “you’re a genius.”

* * * *

I returned that afternoon from the bodega to encounter Jonas in safety goggles, drilling into a strongbox. The strongbox door hung open, so I had no idea why. The squeal of the drill was piercing, and I didn’t try to ask.

The strongbox steel was tough, or the bit wasn’t, or both. Jonas snapped three bits and burnt out two drill motors before punching through. Setting down the third drill, he attacked the hole’s edges with a sturdy rasp.

By then, my sleeves rolled up, I’d begun mucking out the guinea-pig cage. My chore might have gone faster, too, if I weren’t still fixated on that recent outré breakfast conversation. Surely Jonas had been pulling my leg!

But what if he wasn’t? The lab was full of clocks and I couldn’t stop staring at them. Could any of Jonas’s gadgets have traveled through time?

No, I guessed. The clock displays all read out within seconds of one another.

“Give me a hand,” Jonas called. He’d unlocked the gate of the chain-link cage.

“What’s with the strongbox?” I asked as we rolled out a table-sized wooden reel of electrical cable.

“You’ll see.”

The cable unspooling behind us was massive. To feed power to a freaking time machine? If he wasn’t toying with me.

“Anything else I can help with?” I asked.

“Can you run a camcorder?”

“I think so.”

“Be certain,” Jonas said. He got a camcorder from a cabinet and handed it to me. “This is important.”

I roamed about the warehouse, shooting and playing back short movies—except that nothing in them moved. I tried filming the guinea pigs, but they didn’t stir till I dropped cucumber slices into their cage. I don’t know why, but they loved cucumber. By the time I’d mastered the camcorder controls, Jonas had stowed some of his gear at the bottom of the strongbox, beneath its single shelf. An end of the thick cable we’d rolled over now ran through the hole he had so painstakingly drilled.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready.” For what, exactly? I wanted to ask.

I raised the camera to my eye, pushed rec, and Jonas began to speak.

* * * *

“You see here an apparatus of my own design. In a few minutes, I will lock it inside this strongbox. Walk with me”—guidance to the cameraman, I decided, and I followed Jonas around the workbench—“and you’ll find but a single small opening in the box.”

I zoomed where he had pointed, to where he had puttied the hole. But the filler wasn’t putty, but rather a quick-setting glue of some kind. When he prodded the material with the tip of a heavy rasp, it went thunk. “As you can see, I’ve even sealed the crack around the power cord.”

Jonas spoke as a scientist—to posterity, I supposed, or to the colleagues who had doubted him—not for the likes of me. I soon lost the thread. I dutifully captured it all, zooming in when directed on his massive wristwatch. It, like the digital clock on the workbench beside the strongbox, showed 2:02 P.M. Then I shot the timepieces side by side: the steady sweep of the seconds hand on the one, the flickering digits on the other.

He slipped off the wristwatch and set it on the strongbox shelf. Beneath the shelf, the apparatus he’d built had a keypad and two displays. With a few keystrokes he set both. One display held steady at ten minutes; the second, on which he had entered sixty seconds, began to count down when he tapped ENTER.

Jonas shut the strongbox door and spun the dial of the combination lock. He said, “Now we wait, until 2:14 by this clock. You’ll observe that the strongbox door remains closed the entire time.”

That was more guidance for me. I held the camera steady on the strongbox and clock.

He fidgeted as the minutes crept by. At 2:13, he said, “This is interminable, isn’t it?”

The clock on the workbench rolled over to 2:14. With a flourish, Jonas unlocked the strongbox, swung open the door, and raised his watch to the camcorder.

The wristwatch, still sweeping out the seconds, read 2:04.

* * * *

That night we had champagne. Cheap champagne in mismatched water tumblers, but still.

Jonas raised his glass. “A toast: to understanding, at long last. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

We clinked glassware. “Understanding what?”

“Where the time travelers are.”

And I had contributed? “I’m not following. Where are they?”

“Still in the future,” Jonas said. He patted the boom box I had salvaged. “You can’t recover a radio signal without a radio receiver.” Pregnant pause. “It turns out you can’t move anything through time without a proper receiver, either.”

Anything such as a wristwatch. I was still struggling to wrap my brain around that feat. “And?”

He finished his champagne, poured a generous refill, and topped off my glass. “And so there can’t be time travel—not of a person, not of a scrap of paper—without a compatible device to receive the traveler.”

“So till someone builds a receiver…”

“As I’ve done.”

“Then should we expect scraps of paper from the future?” Or did he mean to build a much larger unit? A person-sized unit? I shivered.

“One step at a time, Peter,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to rush into any Grandfather Paradoxes, now would we?”

“Which is?”

“A riddle of cause and effect. Imagine I travel back in time and prevent my grandparents from meeting.”

If his grandparents never meet, then his parents…aren’t. Therefore he…isn’t. But if he never existed, he can hardly travel back. Then his grandparents do meet. Then…?

Jonas laughed. “You look suitably perplexed. My point is, one shouldn’t use this technology lightly.”

“How should time travel be used?”

“Carefully,” Jonas said, “and for very serious matters.”

CHAPTER 4

In the days that followed his breakthrough Jonas was manic. He puttered with his apparatus, fine-tuning it, I gathered, and tidying up what he’d built. Passing through his lab area on my chores, I often found him hunched over a tabletop, furiously scribbling in a bound, canvas-covered notebook.

Then, late one morning, the beeping started.

At first I ignored it. The tones sounded like our microwave oven. Hay fever had my ears clogged, and I had little sense of direction for any noise’s origin. But as every few minutes the beeping recurred, the microwave seemed an improbable source. How many cups of tea could Jonas drink?

Then a beep triplet came just as I passed Jonas’s workspace. I saw him look up from his lab book, set down his pen, and open the strongbox door. He took a wooden ruler from the box’s shelf, compared that ruler to a ruler on his bench, and nodded with satisfaction.

“They look the same to me,” I volunteered.

“As they should,” Jonas said. “But it’s best to confirm these things.”

“The beeps are from a timer?”

He shook his head. “I modified my rig to beep when it receives something.”

Pairs of ordinary items—mugs, tape measures, pens—surrounded him. “I gather you’ve been sending through lots of stuff,” I said. “Did everything emerge okay?”

“The pen still writes and the ruler remains a foot long.”

“And you’re sure the things in the box didn’t just sit there the entire while.”

“Of course I am,” he snapped. “The tripping of a sensor circuit triggers the alert tones. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“Sorry.” The handyman’s opinion wasn’t always welcome. “It’s after twelve. I thought I’d go out and grab some lunch. What sounds good to you?”

Jonas sat, his head cocked, his lips pressed thin, not responding. “Ah,” he finally said. He stepped off his stool and trundled over an industrial platform scale. “Weigh yourself. Tell me if this works.”

With shoes on and fully clothed, I registered scarcely one forty. “It works.”

“Now help me with the strongbox.”

We lowered the strongbox to the scale platform. The safe out-weighted me by ten pounds! Jonas had gotten it onto the workbench unaided.

“Now watch the scale,” he said.

“If you want to convince me, wouldn’t a peephole be easier?”

“The field projection must be invariant, lest temporal displacements fluctuate within the transported object. To maintain that uniformity, the integrity of the conductive enclosure is essential.”

“Huh?”

“It works better with metal all around,” he translated. “Just watch.”

He opened the strongbox and set a brass cylinder on the shelf. “A standard calibrated weight. One kilogram. Correct?”

The scale’s digital readout had bumped up a bit more than two pounds. “Agreed,” I said.

Crouched to reach into the strongbox Jonas tapped away on the controls. He stood and closed the door. “I’m sending that weight ahead five minutes. Keep an eye on the scale.”

Seconds later the readout dropped by two pounds. Five minutes after, simultaneous with the final beep of a new triplet, the two extra pounds again registered.

* * * *

A little after one-thirty I returned from Taco Bell with a bag of burritos. Jonas, his back to me, was again hunched over a workbench. Two boxed smoke detectors sat in front of him.

As though all his high-voltage stuff weren’t enough to make the old warehouse a fire hazard, there were the stacks of wooden pallets, the kerosene space heaters we’d surely need a few months hence, and cabinets filled with aerosol cans. It nonetheless remained a mystery to me—one among many—why Jonas owned so many home smoke detectors. The open rafters overhead showed plenty of sprinkler heads with their own smoke detectors.

“I have my doubts two more smoke detectors will make a big difference,” I said.

He jumped. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Are you okay?”

“A little before one o’clock, the transceiver beeped. The thing is, I had nothing due to arrive. And I’ve never sent smoke detectors.”

Then how…? Oh. “Future you sent them.”

“So it seems. Only I, he, sent just one of these detectors. The second unit I retrieved from the supply cabinet.”

I’d known Jonas happy and sad, manic and dejected. I’d never seen him awed.

“You weren’t ready to try moving something backward,” I guessed. I had hoped. Grandfather paradoxes scared me.

“Not hardly.” Jonas laughed humorlessly. “But future me was. Is.”

“How far into the future? Do you know?”

“I will,” Jonas said. “Because I, he, intends that I know. A smoke detector with the identical serial number was sitting in my cabinet.”

* * * *

Who knew that the guts of a smoke detector were radioactive?

Jonas did; that’s why he owned so many. A bit of radioactive material ionized air within the detector’s case, the ionized molecules completing an electrical circuit. Let soot particles intrude, and the level of ionization dropped. The resulting dip in the circuit’s current was what the detector actually detected.

Unlike most things radioactive, no one knew or cared how many smoke detectors someone bought. And why would they care? Even out of its case, a few centimeters of air sufficed to block the radioactive pellet’s feeble emissions.

With a sniff at my ignorance, Jonas harvested the radioactive material from both detectors. His instruments showed both still radiating, but one not quite as much as the other. One detector’s pellet had decayed.

When Jonas did the math, that pellet came from five years in the future.

* * * *

We dined out that evening, Jonas splurging on a place with waiters and white damask tablecloths. As the maitre d’ led the way to a booth, I detoured to the men’s room. I rejoined Jonas to find he’d ordered a bottle of wine. We were celebrating, he told me; as he all but swilled a glassful, the trembling of his hand said something more.

That he, too, was conflicted made me feel just a tad better.

It was a Wednesday and not yet six o’clock. We had the bistro almost to ourselves.

“Future you waited five years to send that smoke detector,” I said. Or would wait. Or must wait. “Why?”

Jonas folded and unfolded his napkin. “After taking so long to decide, you mean, why communicate so far into his past?”

“Communicate?” I echoed. “Future you sent a smoke detector. He’s told you nothing.”

“Not so. To this point, I’ve only sent things forward. He’s shown me that travel to the past is possible. An effect before its cause…of sorts.”

And what of grandfather paradoxes? I chugged my own wine. “Maybe future you communicated something deeper, by choosing to reveal nothing about his time. Maybe it’s his way of saying this research is dangerous.”

Dropping the napkin into his lap, Jonas pressed his fingertips together contemplatively. He opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. I dared to hope he was reconsidering.

But no.

“You’re wrong,” Jonas said flatly. “Future me used the technology. I, he, had reasons important enough to risk a paradox.”

I mulled that over, still tangled in a thicket of tenses and subjunctives. “You’re thinking of the Hitler scenario?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Jonas agreed. “Of course we can’t intervene back then. There wasn’t yet a receiver. However…”

Our waitress had sauntered over to describe the dinner specials. I tuned her out, trying to grasp two Jonases communicating across the years, and effects that preceded their causes.

An analogy seemed simpler. If Jonas could preempt the Nazi invasion of Poland, then what? Maybe a war just as horrific between the West and Stalin’s Russia, with Poland again caught in the middle. And maybe Jonas’s father dies in that alternate war. Or war is averted, and so a Polish soldier killed in Hitler’s invasion instead lives to meet and marry Jonas’s mother. Either way there would be no Jonas to foil Hitler so…

The waitress prattled on about delicate sauces and exotic mushrooms while my mind ran in circles.

I asked for the special, whatever it was, as the path of least resistance. I didn’t catch what Jonas ordered. At last the woman left us.

“Where were we?” Jonas asked. “Oh, yes. I take today’s surprise as a good thing.”

“Maybe it’s time to bring in the authorities,” I said.

“And who would you trust with this technology?” he shot back. “No, we must keep this to ourselves. Trust me.”

In my mind’s ear, Britney laughed mockingly.

Once, I could have gone to bank examiners at the FDIC. I could have contacted the SEC. Hundreds of foreclosure orders cranked out daily, beyond any plausible claim that a human being had reviewed the paperwork. Easy to show. I’d been a notary and longtime employee of the mortgage department. I would have had some credibility.

Where did a disgraced felon handyman English major go to report reckless experiments with the fabric of reality? Who would listen?

I said, “If future you wanted you to change something, he would have told you. Told you where things went wrong. Suggested what you should do, whom you should approach. He knows all that you know, and everything he’s learned since.”

“Maybe,” Jonas said. I read into the angry tremor of his voice, “We’re done talking about this.”

Refilling my wineglass, I first noticed the label. Jonas had selected a Cheval Blanc, and a good year at that. Not cheap.

“Something came through with the smoke detector,” I guessed.

“A racing tip,” he admitted.

And by ordering a bottle of otherwise unaffordable wine, Jonas had already begun remaking the future.

We ate our expensive dinners in uncomfortable silence.

CHAPTER 5

Jonas never showed me his message to himself, but it must have offered more than the one tip on the horses. Twice I saw him online trading stocks and bonds. Once he might have been making foreign-currency trades; he shut his laptop before I got a good look at the screen.

Whatever he was doing, money ceased to be a problem for him.

He increased my pay, too, to what I surmised was a reasonable salary for a handyman—generous, considering how unhandy I was. In the same breath he announced that part of the increase was in lieu of my former meal allowance.

I took the point: no more fraternizing, let alone unsolicited advice on his project.

Weeks passed, then months. The tension eased and we started eating together again. We talked football. But unless asked, I no longer commented on his research.

In October, Jonas plunked down an Internet bet on the Super Bowl, and in February he cleaned up. Along the way I had summoned the nerve to invite Victoria, from the 7-Eleven, for coffee. It turned out we shared several interests. I began to have a life again.

Absent a few dollars in my pocket, would I have asked her out? I couldn’t know. What if things worked out between us? What if she and I married, had children—only without the windfall from Future Jonas, that wouldn’t have happened? Or what if, by keeping secrets, I poisoned the romance that was meant to be?

Gadgets no longer arrived as guilt offerings from Jonas’s former colleagues, in truckload consignments of “miscellaneous electronics” to be scavenged, or by scrounging at the dump, but in FedEx cartons—sometimes even from tech firms I’d heard of. I filled dumpster after dumpster with the junk from Jonas’s parts heaps, clearing floor space for freestanding shelves and yet more workbenches. Jonas’s research took over more and more of the warehouse.

He used the expanded work area to scale up his experiments. I would have thought that a simple task: use a larger enclosure, perhaps, or crank up the voltage. Evidently, I’d have been wrong. But bit by bit he was able to time-shift larger and heavier objects—an ancient doorstop, a toner cartridge, a stack of dinner plates.

Only some items came out…wrong. Calculators emerged spitting sparks, or unable to add and subtract properly, or inert. Shifted fruit smelled odd, and never twice in the same manner. To my unvoiced relief, the guinea pigs shied away from the scraps Jonas offered them. He mused aloud about impenetrable topics like “microscopic regions of field inhomogeneity,” then ordered yet more esoteric instrumentation. Beyond expensive and bulky, I had no idea what any of the new paraphernalia was.

After a while Jonas had six prototypes of varying features and capacities under test on as many workbenches. By then he had started keeping a schedule on a freestanding whiteboard: what he had sent forward, inside which prototype unit, due to reappear when.

I learned to ignore the incessant beeping.

One thing didn’t change: Jonas grumbling as he labored, glaring at the news that ever streamed from his laptop. Financial contagion in Greece had spread to more of Europe. Sinking house prices continued to drag down the U.S. economy. Glaciers and icecaps melted faster than predicted by climate models. The North Koreans dropped a test missile into the Sea of Japan, and the Iranians came ever closer to having nukes. I hung a second corkboard for Jonas, and he soon had it richly layered in news printouts.

As far as I knew, this Jonas had yet to send any warning back in time, and for that I was grateful. Maybe he, too, at some level, also worried about paradoxes.

He told me what he wanted me to do and I did it. We discussed little unrelated to my gophering and cleaning. Until—

* * * *

“Damn him!” Jonas shouted.

I came at a run from the break room. On Jonas’s laptop screen a wall of water loomed over little boxes. Only those boxes were buildings! The screen crawl shouted: MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI STRIKE JAPAN. THOUSANDS MISSING AND FEARED DEAD. As I watched, the tidal wave carried away—everything.

“Why didn’t he warn me?” Jonas turned toward me, ashen. “I would have contacted seismologists, geologists, someone. At the least I could have raised a few doubts, instilled some heightened awareness.”

Stunned by what I was seeing, I could only shrug.

Whole towns smashed to rubble. An entire passenger train swept out to sea. Power plants shut down across much of the country. For days, we could hardly look away. The distance that had come between us all but vanished.

Call that, while it lasted, the tissue-thin silver lining.

Then, one after another, the Fukushima reactors melted down. The icy intensity that settled upon Jonas terrified me.

* * * *

“Forget him.” Jonas shoved away his laptop. “I could warn me.”

“But you didn’t,” I said.

“But I could,” he shot back. “That’s the beauty of having a time machine.”

“Changing what else? Future you must have had a reason not to mention this.”

“That Jonas won’t tell anyone anything,” Jonas snapped. “That future went by the wayside when he gave me the means to speed up my work.”

“And if you send your earlier self a message, won’t our era”—and the experiences of everyone in it?—“go by the wayside?”

“Thousands are dead. Thousands more are missing. Thousands to whom we can restore a future. What’s happened in the last week worth saving—”

On a nearby workbench, something went beep-beep-beep.

Jonas glanced at his whiteboard and flinched. “I have nothing due.”

His latest device enclosures had windows: metal mesh embedded in glass, like in the door of a microwave oven. The mesh sufficed to maintain field homogeneity, whatever that was, in the enclosed volume. And so, within the unit that had just beeped, I saw a smoke-detector carton atop a sheet of paper.

The note, when Jonas retrieved it, exhibited the same spidery script as the whiteboard. Jonas’s handwriting.

The note said only: Don’t do it!

* * * *

The note rattled me, but not as much as what the smoke detector revealed. It, too, matched a serial number from our collection of smoke detectors. The imperious command came from little more than two years ahead of us.

An earlier Future Jonas had weighed in.

“He knows more than we know,” I said. “We should listen to him.”

Jonas began to pace, his brow furrowed. In a way, our shared confusion reassured me. And at the same time, it terrified me. If he didn’t understand the implications…

Time travel made my head hurt. Suppose Future Jonas of the earliest contact was gone, done in by his own actions. Was that suicide? A noble sacrifice? Insanity? And what of me in that future? My, or his, life would have been swept away, too.

But if Future Jonas was gone, who was it that sent, or would send, those stock tips? Expensive equipment still surrounded us, paid for somehow. I struggled to grasp a future not as much forestalled as fine-tuned.

“Thousands would be saved,” Jonas said abruptly, still pacing the aisle between two rows of workbenches. “And the nuclear plants could be shut down preemptively, the meltdowns avoided, a whole region spared from contamination. Yet I’ve told myself to do nothing. Because? Because?”

At the end of the aisle, once again facing me, Jonas stopped. “He, I, may fear a warning will make matters worse. It’s a theory, anyway.”

“Can a warning make a tsunami worse?”

“Not the tsunami,” Jonas said. “The problem would be a precise earthquake prediction, because there’s never been such a thing. People will demand explanations. My research interests aren’t secret, and none of them involve seismology.”

Transforming Jonas overnight from discredited crackpot into the man who knows the future. How long till the government seized his technology? What would be the effects of that?

“Jonas.” My voice cracked. “Keep this genie in its bottle. You only need to stop.”

“No,” he said, breaking eye contact. “I was given the resources to work faster. That happened for a purpose.”

I sensed something in his expression, but in an instant—if I hadn’t imagined it—the hesitancy vanished.

Still, to my relief, Jonas heeded his future self and sent back no warning.

CHAPTER 6

Expensive equipment kept coming. The electron microscope, I almost understood (though not why Jonas wanted one). Most names and explanations ricocheted off me. Some of the instrumentation he custom-ordered. That, I gathered, was pricey.

Nor did he limit his shopping spree to tech gear. He donated our furniture to the Salvation Army and replaced it with good stuff. He bought himself exercise gear. He donated the well-used Hyundai station wagon, too, and began driving a Lexus sport ute.

When he went out at all.

The better-equipped his lab became, the edgier Jonas got about the neighborhood. He had a security firm reactivate and monitor the warehouse’s old alarm system. He wasn’t sleeping well, either. Creeping downstairs for midnight snacks, I used to find the ground floor dark. Now, as often as not, I’d find him in the lab area. Tinkering, obsessively following current events, or standing guard? I couldn’t always tell.

“Too damn much work,” Jonas said when I suggested moving. To relocate the lab, he meant. “And I’ll thank you not to spend my money. That’s not what it’s for.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I’d been apologizing a lot. Other than that Jonas was cranky, I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t think he was angry with me.

That left only him.

His progress appeared to have stalled. Calculators and cell phones and anything else that relied upon precision microelectronics never functioned after a time shift. And the objects he chose to shift had stopped getting heavier. I gathered that had something to do with power requirements.

“I don’t want them inside,” Jonas often muttered. The power company, I decided he meant. They might steal his work.

As his experiments progressed, an electrical overload was probably inevitable. Still, when one happened, Jonas wasn’t quite sure why. A typo, perhaps: Maybe he’d accidentally scheduled two arrivals for the same moment. Or maybe he’d miscalibrated one of his devices.

Maybe, I opined, future Jonas had had something more to say.

My theory he dismissed with a scowl.

Whatever the reason, two transceivers beeped in unison. Once.

With a blinding fountain of sparks, the warehouse substation blew. Cascading effects plunged the neighborhood into darkness for several blocks in every direction. And in neither transceiver did any object come through.

The temporary blackout was a small thing, surely.

But so is the proverbial Amazonian butterfly, whose flapping wings give rise—weeks later, and far away—to a raging hurricane.

* * * *

A beautiful spring day: mild with a gentle breeze, and all the cherry trees in bloom. Birds chirping, dogs yipping, and toddlers gleefully shrieking. A picnic lunch in the park. Stretched out on the grass, the sun warm on my face. Victoria singing softly to herself.

I was—the realization took me by surprise—happy.

When I summoned the energy to open my eyes, Victoria’s hair—wind-stirred, glinting in the sun—was more pixieish than usual. She was smiling down at me.

“Spinach in my teeth?” I asked. “See, this is why I don’t believe in vegetables.”

“You can tell yourself that.” She patted my arm.

We’d had sandwiches and deli salads she’d brought from the 7-Eleven, listened through shared earbuds to the newest download on her iPod, kicked around our dinner options, and debated braving the downtown crowds over the weekend to take in the Cherry Blossom Festival. She’d told a charming anecdote about her two-year-old niece. I’d told lawyer jokes.

“So…” she said.

“Back to the salt mines?” I guessed.

“We have a few more minutes.” She brushed the hair off my forehead. “When do I get to see where you work?”

A recurring theme. I said, “It’s not as interesting as where you work.”

“Right. Seriously, Peter, what’s the big mystery?”

“The boss likes his privacy.”

Jonas had finally ordered a second high-voltage line for his lab. About now he’d be watching a Dominion Power service crew like a hawk. Even though we’d covered his work area with canvas tarps. And draped a second layer of cloths over the first, lest any of the first batch should slip.

But as uneasy as Jonas had been about admitting the power-line techs, he’d also been eager: a calculator transmitted forward the evening before had arrived still able to calculate. The improvement had to do, somehow, with “more precise real-time modulation of the transfer stream, at more noise-resistant carrier-wave levels.” Whatever that meant.

I tried not to imagine what experiments he might undertake with that extra power.

“I Googled him last night,” Victoria said.

“Any cookies or brownies in the bag of plenty?” I asked.

“He’s not an ordinary guy.” She wasn’t one to be deflected.

“Is that a ‘no’ on dessert?”

“He worked on esoteric stuff,” she persisted, “before he left the university. Relativity. Tachyons. Whatever those are. If they even exist.”

“Jonas’s work is way over my head,” I said.

“Why did he leave the university to work alone in a warehouse?”

I’d also looked up my boss. His difference of opinion with the NSF hadn’t made it into Wikipedia. I shrugged, the gesture feeling just a scooch less like lying than saying that I didn’t know.

“Reading between the lines, Peter, there’s something fishy about him. I worry that you can’t trust him.”

I sat up. “He pays me regularly. He treats me fairly. He gives to charity.”

That last item was both true and misleading. Jonas had sent me to the local precinct with a check made out to the local branch of the Fraternal Order of Police. Thereafter, cop cars came cruising around the warehouse a lot more often.

I tried not to think of that transaction as wealth from the future influencing my present.

“That’s something,” Victoria allowed. She started gathering the wrappings and remains of lunch. “Whatever it is your Dr. Gorski does, it seems to be far off the beaten path. At least that’s how I interpret that his papers are seldom cited.”

So far off the path that I doubted Jonas could still see the path. But unless someone else knew how to build working time machines, the fault lay with the path. Pioneers like Jonas opened new paths.

I said, “It is what it is. The boss doesn’t want anyone brought inside. He pays the rent; he’s entitled.”

“It’s your home, too.”

I’d tried that tack. Jonas told me I was free to live elsewhere. I shrugged again.

Victoria stood. “Now I do have to get back. Have time to walk with me?”

Jonas would be too preoccupied with watching the Dominion Power crew to notice, or care, if I took a few extra minutes.

“Lead on,” I said.

We’d arrived separately: my warehouse, her 7-Eleven, and the little park were at the corners of an almost equilateral triangle. I’d walked here through a light-industrial complex and past a strip mall. Her route took us into a quiet residential area of mostly brick bungalows from the Fifties. Huge old trees dwarfed everything that hadn’t been bulldozed to make way for McMansions. Every block had for-sale signs. Grass gone shaggy and towering weeds marked long-vacant houses.

How many were foreclosures? I wondered. Which of them had I rubberstamped?

My eyes must have lingered, because Victoria said, “You’re not that guy any more.” She gently squeezed my hand.

Fat lot of good remorse did the people I’d denied their due process. But “due process” was so namby-pamby. People whom I’d cheated. Hurt.

“You’re not,” she insisted.

Perhaps. But if I wasn’t that guy, then who had I become?

CHAPTER 7

The day came when the guinea pigs chowed down on time-shifted lettuce leaves. Jonas spent an hour afterward just staring into their cage. Waiting to see if anyone would get sick, I knew. I arranged my morning chores to keep looking in on the gals.

“They’re fine,” Jonas assured me on my fifth pass-by. “You see what this means.”

I didn’t till he explained: The time transfers were finally preserving fine details, even microscopic details, down to the molecular level.

Maybe Jonas got bored; he moved on to doing something else. The day before he’d assembled his largest transceiver yet, and now he fussed with its controls. Calibration of some kind, it looked like. The new transceiver used a metal utility cabinet about the size of a four-drawer file cabinet; he’d said it should shift up to about one hundred fifty pounds. To confirm his predictions, he sent me out for three hundred pounds of dense ballast, shaking his head when I counter-proposed that he use weights from his barbell.

Returning from the grocery, lugging in the first of many twenty-five-pound bags of rice, I detoured past the cage again. Caramel was ramming around the enclosure, or chasing poltergeists. Feeling no pain. Sugar and Spice were playfully tussling. And Cinnamon—

Was gone.

Dropping my burden—breaking the plastic sack, sending rice grains flying everywhere—I dashed into Jonas’s main workspace. He stood by a workbench, his attention cycling between an empty transceiver and a clock.

“Where is she?” I shouted.

“Who?” Jonas asked.

“Cinnamon, damn it.”

Jonas frowned. “The guinea pig, you must mean. Peter, I told you not see them as pets.”

“Where is she?” My stomach sank. “When is she?”

“She should return to us in”—he glanced again at the clock—“fifteen minutes.”

After a very long fifteen minutes, the transceiver beeped. Behind the glass, Cinnamon sniffed about curiously, acting none the worse for her experience.

“May I?” I asked.

“If you keep an eye on her.”

I restored Cinnamon to the cage. Everyone touched noses and sniffed butts, and then went on about their guinea-piggy duties of eating, drinking, grooming, and meandering. I began to believe the transfer hadn’t harmed her.

Freeing me to fret about what experiment Jonas had in mind to try next.

* * * *

After dinner and streaming a movie at Victoria’s apartment, I came home to find the warehouse floor deserted. Only screen savers, clock displays, and a bit of sky glow through the under-eave windows tempered the darkness. Creeping up the stairs, I saw light under the door to Jonas’s room. Rhythmic clanking said he was hard at work with his weights. He bench-pressed about two hundred pounds; to vacuum his room I rolled the barbell from side to side.

Whether the ghostly lighting inspired me, or the six-pack Victoria and I had split that evening, I had the sudden urge to send my younger self a note. I’d observed Jonas operating his machines often enough. I turned, retreated down two steps—

And froze. What the hell was I thinking?

I could never have back my old life. If a younger me had received advice from this me on the very first day Jonas got his first prototype to work, it would still have been too late. I could only create some horrible paradox.

Even Jonas was loath to send anything back in time.

And besides, my old life had not included Victoria.

I turned around a second time and went up to bed.

* * * *

“I should demand a refund,” Jonas grumbled.

I was far across the warehouse, slipping treats to the guinea pigs. Jonas wasn’t talking to me. He wasn’t on the phone. That left talking to himself.

“What’s going on?” I called out.

He tapped one of his instruments. “You don’t want to know what this cost. It was a special order, extensively modified to my specifications from one of their standard offerings.”

I dumped the last of the fruit slivers into the cage, then walked over to where Jonas was sitting. “And?”

“And now that they’ve built one for me, I see it offered in their online catalogue. Priced at half what they charged me.”

The story of every gadget I’d ever bought. “Does it matter?”

“Well, there’s the principle of the thing.” Jonas looked around at stacks of unopened cartons, both tech gear and toys. Looking…repentant? “A funny thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m not doing as well as I was with my investments.”

“You used up the tips from Future Jonas?”

“That’s the thing,” Jonas said. “I haven’t.”

“How do you lose money when you know what’s going to happen?” And then it struck me. “At least one of the tips hasn’t panned out.”

Lips pressed thin, he nodded.

“How is that possible?” I asked.

“I want to believe it was an honest mistake transcribing the information for me.”

“And if it’s not?”

Jonas shrugged.

I imagined a butterfly, its wings fluttering.

* * * *

As my final errand one Friday, Jonas sent me to retrieve an order of specialty glass. The largest slabs were a good eight feet long and three feet wide. Each pane came swaddled in padding and braced beneath with two-by-fours, the corners protected by triangular shields of corrugated cardboard. Through a rip in the padding over one panel, I glimpsed metal mesh embedded in the glass.

They weighed a ton. Two husky guys at the factory loaded them into the truck I’d rented.

I had to honk twice before Jonas opened the loading dock. He shouted, “I imagine you need a hand unloading.”

“Yes, please,” I said.

“Be careful with these,” he chided, joining me. “I’ve waited two weeks for this order.”

One by one we carried the panels inside. Jonas was old enough to be my father, but by our second trip I was the one out of breath and sweating. Of course he had six inches and at least sixty pounds on me.

“Some fools have developed an airborne version of H5N1,” he said conversationally. “Now they published some of how they did it.”

Fools do foolish things, I thought. Also, that it would be great if Jonas would just walk a little faster. “Uh-huh.”

“Avian flu.” When I still had nothing to say, Jonas added, “Sixty percent fatality rate among humans, but until this variant the disease has spread only through contact with the feces of infected birds. But now? I’ll bet anyone with the recipe and access to a college biology lab could re-create the manmade airborne strain.”

“Sixty percent?” I said. “Jesus.”

“Chemical and bio-weapons, the poor nation’s WMDs. Only it’s not only countries anymore. Anthrax-laced letters here in America, 2001. The Aum Shinrikyo cult’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, 2007. Once biotech and genetic-engineering tools get just a little cheaper and more available, single madmen will control weapons of mass destruction.”

Biting my lip, I didn’t say: not only time machines.

Jonas went on. “And it seems Chinese hackers have twice gotten temporary control of U.S. military satellites. How often has that happened and we don’t know? Maybe we’re blind to conventional military attack, and don’t know it.”

“You’d be a lot happier if you spend less time online.” And if you had a life.

“But not as well informed.” With a tip of the head, Jonas indicated where the slab in our hands was to be set down. “Gently.”

“Why don’t you have dinner tonight with Victoria and me? You’ll like her.”

“You like her, and three’s a crowd.”

“How about four?” I asked. “She has an unattached roommate.”

“Who, unless she’s Victoria’s mother, is half my age. Go. Have fun.” Jonas started back toward the loading dock. “After we finish unloading and you return the truck.”

I strode after him. “Then take a night off with your friends.”

Stony silence.

“Look,” I said. I didn’t see how I could irritate him more. “The university treated you shabbily. Or the National Science Foundation did. You can’t hold that against all your former colleagues. They can’t all be bad guys. Some of them even jumpstarted your new lab with donated equipment.”

“With castoffs and relics.” Jonas jumped into the truck and took hold of the back end of another glass panel. “Guilt offerings. Token penances for having bad-mouthed me to the school and the NSF. Now lift.”

I lifted.

Jonas said, “Oh, not everyone betrayed me. But neither did they defend me. Whatever their motives, my ‘friends’ poached my grants, my grad students, and my lab space at the university.

“Suppose I did socialize with them. They’d want to know what I’ve been doing. If they learned I’d made a breakthrough, they’d try to steal my latest work, too.”

I knew Jonas was brilliant. The man had invented time travel! So how had he alienated his colleagues? Maybe he’d always been suspicious and secretive. Maybe his incessant doom-saying got to be too much.

In the months I’d know Jonas, those tendencies had only gotten worse.

“Simple solution,” I said. “Don’t talk about work.”

“Then they’d gloat, certain—as they all are—that my theories are flawed.”

“So make new friends,” I said. Or quit pushing away the one friend you seem to have. “I know a great pub nearby. Nice folks who don’t pry.” Had the people there been nosy, I would never have gone back. “Let’s you and me go out tomorrow night.”

“We’ll see.” Which meant no.

Jonas had cleared an expanse of the main floor while I’d been fetching his glass order. I began to see the pattern in where we placed the individual panels. As jigsaw puzzles went, this wasn’t much of a challenge. The pieces would fit together to form a booth.

A person-sized booth.

Thinking two weeks, I dropped my end of the latest panel.

“It slipped,” I said.

CHAPTER 8

Why didn’t Jonas show me the door?

Because once before I had held my tongue to keep my paycheck? Quite likely, and the memory made me feel about an inch tall.

Because ex-con that I was, no one would take me seriously if I did talk? Some of that, too, I felt sure.

Because he had to have human contact with someone, and I was too ignorant to reveal his methods? Almost certainly.

But maybe there was more to him keeping me on.

I like to think Jonas also found in me a voice of common sense. That though he never admitted to finding merit in my comments, he did hear me out. He had not, to my knowledge, risked paradoxes by sending anything to the past.

Oh, I knew that he would. That Future Jonas had. But the onus for that was on Future Jonas. Meanwhile, this Jonas worried about the implications of the stock tip gone bad.

An anomaly that terrified me.

Whatever his reasons, Jonas did keep me around. He tolerated my questions and my doubts. He shrugged off my “accident” with the glass panel.

But as he put in an expedited order for a replacement, my fears only grew.

* * * *

“It’s okay,” I told Victoria.

Her head against my chest, her tears soaking my shirt, shivering in my arms, she said, “But it mi-might not have…have been.”

“But it is,” I insisted.

With a long, shuddering breath, she pulled herself together. “Thanks for coming.”

How could I not have come? I gave her a squeeze.

The lightbar flashed on the police cruiser in front of the 7-Eleven. The cop, having finished talking with Victoria and the manager, was scanning footage from the store’s security cameras.

“So do you get off the rest of your shift?” I meant it as a joke, to lighten the mood.

From Victoria’s cringe, she didn’t see the humor. She wriggled loose. “You know, you got here almost before the cops.”

I’d been at the pub just two blocks away when she’d rung my cell. Once again, Jonas had declined to join me. “You’re okay, hon.”

“I wish.”

“But you are okay.”

“Quit telling me that,” she said. “You weren’t here. You didn’t have a gun in your face.”

Her nose had started to bubble. I handed her a tissue from the box on the counter. “I’m sorry.”

Victoria blew her nose with a loud honk. I gave her another tissue and she wiped her face.

She said, “You didn’t rob the store. There’s no reason for you to be sorry.”

“I know.” But neither did I feel exonerated.

A police cruiser had sped past me, its lights strobing, coming from the direction of the warehouse. Had Jonas’s donations lured patrols away from the 7-Eleven? The bribes I hand-delivered each month to the precinct?

What if the gunman in the ski mask had robbed the nearby 7-Eleven, not some other place, because of Jonas and me? What if others would have been terrorized tonight and the experience would have changed their lives? What if in some alternate holdup, somebody would have gotten shot? What if—

I made myself stop. That way lay madness.

“Maybe I should spend the night,” I said.

She shook her head, and reached for another tissue.

“You sure?” I pressed.

“I want a new job. A safe job. And I want you to have another job. Something not mysterious.” She brightened. “Or apply here at the store. We have openings all the time.”

Absent Jonas and me, would the police have come sooner, maybe even been visible enough to have deterred the gunman? There was no way to know. But stocks not behaving as Future Jonas knew they had? That was a certainty.

God help the universe, in Jonas’s cloistered life I was the sole voice of reason.

“I like my job,” I lied.

“Well, I don’t.” In a small voice she added, “Will you walk me home?”

* * * *

I stayed for a while with Victoria in her apartment. The roommate was out somewhere, her liquor stash unguarded. I mostly drank and Victoria mostly vented, and neither treatment helped either of us to feel better. Just before midnight, after she dozed off on the sofa, I covered her with an afghan and let myself out.

I got to the warehouse to find Jonas working late. He sat at a workbench with his back to me. Rice sacks stacked like sandbags made a neat low partition by his feet. He’d been busy with more than the rice: the glass booth was assembled. And he’d done it without me. The man was freakishly strong.

Not only had the panels been put together; the enclosure looked wired. Through the glass, I saw a control panel mounted in the main compartment and a mass of gear in the floor-level compartment. The fattest power cable yet stretched across the floor, not connected at either end. An access panel hung open at the foot of the booth.

Jonas was shouting, his speech slurred. The line of beer bottles in front of him might explain both. I didn’t see anyone else, and guessed he was on his cell.

“Screw your advice,” he yelled. “I’m done. And I’ll get my own tips.”

I stumbled into a lab stool, knocking it over, and Jonas jerked around at the clatter. His eyes darted about. He poked at something in shadow on the shelf beneath the work surface. “Oh, Peter. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I’m sorry if I startled you. Who were you talking to?”

“Myself,” he said belligerently.

“Well, I’ll leave you two alone then.” I beat a hasty retreat. My speech was muddled, too. “Good night.”

“G’night,” he answered.

The flight of stairs seemed even steeper and more rickety than usual. The vodka, I supposed. I looked with longing toward the elevator, but it had been inoperable—its heavy copper cables stripped by vandals—before Jonas first moved in. He had taken a free month on the lease instead of insisting on an expensive repair.

I dragged myself up to the second story. The moon was an ebbing crescent and the sky overcast; the hallway’s tiny, high windows only daubed the corridor with gloom.

Maybe that impression was the vodka, too.

Kicking off my shoes, I fell into bed without bothering to undress.

CHAPTER 9

I woke with a hangover, the vague intuition of a butterfly dream—and an epiphany.

I’ll get my own tips. The person-sized time machine was complete, and Jonas meant to jump forward!

I tried to remember everything about our brief late-night interaction. Jonas talking to himself. His speech had been loud and slurred. But maybe not all of it. When I’d first come in, before he knew I was there, hadn’t some words been clear and distinct?

Talking to himself, he’d said.

I paused outside his bedroom. Through the closed door I heard the familiar raspy snoring: he hadn’t taken off yet for the future.

Or had he gone and returned? My head hurt, and not just from a hangover.

I went downstairs. This time I counted the rice bags he had stacked by the booth: ten. Two hundred fifty pounds. For confirming the booth’s ability to transport his weight. Jonas weighed, in my best guess, two-ten or two-twenty.

The night before, he had poked at something after noticing me. I checked the workbench where I’d found him sitting. On its bottom shelf sat my old boom box. Through the smoky plastic of the access panel I could see something in the cassette drive.

I popped out the cassette. The label was hand-lettered, in a spidery style I knew well. Jonas’s handwriting.

Talking with himself, Jonas had said. Arguing was more like it. I carried the boom box and cassette into the kitchen. With the door closed, the volume turned low, and a sense of foreboding, I pushed play.

“Hello, Jonas,” a familiar voice said. It was Jonas, and yet somehow it wasn’t. Too sad. Too world-weary. Staticky, too, and in some strange way distorted. “I know what you want to do.” There was a nervous chuckle. “I am you. Was.

“Here’s all you need to know: don’t. We made things worse. You’ll want an explanation, and that’s what I don’t dare to offer. What’s future must stay future. Anything sent back can’t fail to impact the timeline.

“Why send you this? Because I’m one stubborn son of a bitch. I know you’ll keep at it. I’m you, and I did.

“I’m giving you something I didn’t have. A gift. A choice. I’m giving you stock tips, winning horses, and championship teams. You never need work again. You never need obsess again. So: Retire. Frolic on a beach. Spare yourself from the misery I’ve endured—and the mess that with the best of intentions I’ve caused.”

“All right, you know.” Jonas said from behind me. “Shut it off.”

I pushed stop and turned toward the door. My thoughts churned. “When?”

“The cassette came with the first smoke detector and the pages of investment tips.” He reclaimed his cassette. “If you’re wondering why he used tape”—and I was—“not even that first, crude prototype could garble a magnetic recording to the point I wouldn’t recognize my own voice. Future me wanted to contact me as early as he could.”

I started to make coffee, for something to do with my hands. They were trembling. “Why didn’t you listen to him?”

“Jonas five years from now knows things I don’t, but he’s forgotten things, too. He’s forgotten who he was. He’s forgotten what’s important. If he supposes I have any interest in frolicking, that I can be bought off, he’s become someone undeserving of my trust.

“But I can redeem the long years that so wore him down. I can—no, I will—make a difference.”

* * * *

Jonas spent hours downloading web pages onto his smart phone: megabytes each for every looming threat and ominous trend that had a presence on his corkboards. “For reference,” he said, whether speaking to himself or to me. “It’s easier to find information while it’s fresh. There are lots of current events whose evolutions I’ll want to study.”

“Stay put,” I pleaded. “Listen to yourself.”

Jonas brandished his phone at me. “I am listening to myself. It’s future me whose opinion I’m discounting. He has no separation from events. He doesn’t know what advice to offer our time. But I know”—and once more he waggled his phone—“the world is running amok. It’s within my power to change things for the better.

“Look, Peter, you needn’t worry. I’ll go forward and scope out what’s changed. I’ll come back with a fresh perspective. Imagine a specific warning to the FBI before 9/11. Three thousand lives saved in a day and the Afghan war averted. Imagine if I could have warned that A.Q. Khan was about to start peddling—”

“Who?”

“Father of the Pakistani nuclear weapons program. Imagine a tip to the CIA before Khan started peddling his uranium-enrichment technology to North Korea, Iran, and Libya. As Khan did do. How much safer would everyone be today for that warning?

“Let me put it in your terms. Suppose I’d been able to show a few years in advance that the housing bubble was about to burst. How much misery could I have prevented?”

In their heart of hearts, who hadn’t known real-estate prices had become insane? That it was madness to extend loans without requiring documentation or proof of income or down payments? At the bank we had all known—as surely as we had known that till the bubble went pop, every house sold and mortgage refinanced meant profits, raises, and bonuses.

“People believe what they choose to believe,” I said. “The rest, they rationalize.”

“No, they’ll believe downloads of future newspapers. Perhaps not at first, but when the earliest predictions come true.”

“Only each disclosure changes the future. You’ve seen it with first future Jonas’s stock tips. What happens to your credibility after a prediction doesn’t come true?”

Jonas scowled.

I dared to believe he was listening. “What if there’s no operational booth five years ahead? He can keep you away with a flip of a power switch.” And God, how I hoped Future Jonas would.

“It’s more like three years now,” Jonas corrected. “Tempus Fugit. Look, Peter, nothing’s special about a particular arrival date. If need be, I’ll go forward a month less, or two months, or to whenever the booth remains in use. To whenever far forward future me retained his nerve.”

I was losing the argument, and I knew it. “But what if that future you is right?”

“Then I’ll learn that I can stop worrying.” Jonas laughed. “Then we can go frolic. Victoria, too. Because either way, I’ll come back with a fresh list of horses to bet on and stocks to buy. And I’ll share this batch.”

Victoria and me on a tropical beach? It was tempting. So tempting. And yet…

I’d been taught a hard lesson once about the perils of looking the other way.

“Whatever a timeline is,” I said desperately, “we’re screwing with it. Your gains are someone else’s losses. What changed when that money isn’t in someone else’s pockets?”

Or when the cash went into mine? I’d known damn well that secrets from the future made possible my raise, yet I’d been quick to take the money. And because of it approached a caring, funny, beautiful woman who maybe, in the universe’s grand scheme, I wasn’t meant to be with. Would I undo us if I could?

I brushed aside my doubts to keep pressing Jonas. “Can’t you already see the ripples? A blackout happened, or at least it happened when it did, because your windfall allowed you to speed up your experiments. What, in turn, might that blackout have caused? Maybe a baby or two will come nine months later?

“And what crimes or traffic accidents came about because the police shifted patrols to watch over this lab? I don’t claim to know how the future changed, but we do know your stock tips have gone—”

“All trivial,” Jonas snapped. “The world is going to hell. If I don’t act when I can, I’m letting that happen.”

Who are you to decide? I wanted to ask. I wanted to scream. “Yet two future yous told you to stop.”

“Maybe not two of me,” Jonas said pensively. “The two-years-ahead message might preempt the five-year-ahead message. Once looping and branching of the timeline begins…well, it’s complex. The universe will maximize its entropy.”

Loops? Branches? Jonas’s metaphors, if that’s what they were, confused me. But a butterfly flapping its wings? That metaphor, I understood. The gentle flutter of wings that tipped otherwise harmless weather conditions into a fierce hurricane…

If I hadn’t dug my stupid boom box out of Jonas’s junk heap, if I hadn’t unwittingly provided the clue that his time transporter needed a receiver, he might have given up. Except for me, this would not be happening.

I was that damned butterfly.

I said, “You once asked: If I could, would I warn the world about Hitler? You as much as said that you would. Here’s my question. Could the world have stopped Hitler if he had had your technology?”

Jonas jerked as though slapped. “Say that he had. Then it would have been all the more important for the good guys also to have the tech.”

I had run out of reasons. “Don’t,” I said wearily.

“I already did,” he shot back. My jaw dropped, and he laughed. “A final test, last night. I jumped forward by twenty minutes, waved, jumped back two minutes, and stepped out of the booth. Two minutes later, for a few seconds, two of me waved at each other.”

“When you jumped ahead, waving from inside the booth, did you see your other self waving back?” Because he hadn’t yet gone back those two minutes. But two minutes earlier is two minutes earlier. My head throbbed.

Jonas grimaced. “You know? I’m not sure.”

“Don’t,” I pleaded again.

In answer, Jonas stepped up into the booth. He shut the door, its latch closing with a sharp click, tapped the control panel, and disappeared.

CHAPTER 10

For what seemed like forever, I stared at the empty booth. How long would Jonas stay in the future, surveilling? A week? A month?

I had to laugh at myself. Would I never understand time travel? It didn’t matter how long Jonas chose to be away. If he wished, he could reappear within seconds.

Meanwhile, my head pounded and my stomach lurched. Food and aspirin might help both. I’d missed breakfast and maybe lunch, and that made me curious what the time was. Mid-afternoon? I glanced at one of the lab’s many clocks. 3:47 P.M. I started toward the kitchen.

Behind me, something beeped.

I whirled. The booth remained empty. A second beep sounded, and a third. They rang out from an aisle with Jonas’s earliest prototypes, seldom used.

The beeps stopped.

Within a transceiver the size of a microwave oven, taped to the inside of the glass of the door, was a sheet of paper.

In bold red letters, in my own blocky printing, the note screamed: Do Not Open This Door!

Tiny computer text, illegible from where I stood, filled the bottom third of the page.

Between, occupying half the page, was the photo of a man. Blood streamed from his nose and eyes, and mottled flesh was sloughing off his face.

It was Jonas.

* * * *

He had, according to the fine print, the doomsday plague.

The virus had first appeared in 2013. Lethal. Incurable. Airborne and extremely contagious.

The toll: four billion dead worldwide, and counting. Whole cities, even countries, depopulated. Civilization imploding, while Radical Naturists—fewer of them, too, every day—exulted. A pandemic beyond the reach of medical science, until a vaccine was developed in 2016.

A curiously strange breakthrough, according to experts. Without the technology that had made possible the vaccine, it seemed impossible to have gengineered the plague virus.

* * * *

Stop Jonas, my future self concluded his note.

Stop him, how? Jonas had invented time travel. He had created the technology by which, apparently, some madman brought bioengineered pathogens to our defenseless era.

Did traces of the virus lurk within this transceiver? How much had seeped out the door seal while I gaped, dumbstruck, at the note? Or was this an early enough transceiver that nothing living could cross time still viable? I didn’t remember, but hopefully future me had had the records with which to chose wisely.

Somehow I shook off my paralysis. I would send this news farther back. It had stunned me. A copy would as profoundly shock my yet earlier self! I, he, would make Jonas see reason.

With the camcorder, through the transceiver’s glass door, I captured an image of the page. I downloaded the hi-res shot to a computer and started printing copies.

And stopped.

Future me might as easily have sent his warning farther back. Maybe he had. I’d taught myself to ignore the incessant beeping from Jonas’s tests.

Had Jonas already seen this note? For all I knew he’d gotten it and ignored it, just as he had disregarded Future Jonas. Perhaps my Jonas had been so determined to go forward because he meant to fix matters in his own way.

If. Maybe. Perhaps.

I had dithered once before at a critical juncture—ruining my life, and Amy’s, and the lives of everyone I’d help push out of their homes.

Squaring my shoulders, I resolved to act.

* * * *

Easier said than done.

Pushing with all my strength, I couldn’t budge the booth, much less tip it over. Take a fire axe to it? That seemed workable till I remembered the high-voltage cable. I’d probably electrocute myself.

The circuit breaker!

I didn’t find one. At the power levels Jonas used, circuit breakers must look nothing like anything I would recognize.

I sat, defeated. If I destroyed the booth this instant, what was to stop Jonas from coming back a second earlier?

He might pop out at any second, even as I pitted my inadequate, nonscientific brain against his. If he spotted me trying to sabotage his equipment, he could snap me like a twig.

* * * *

For all my agonizing, scant minutes had passed since Jonas had leapt forward.

Wait! I could go back in the booth! And destroy it in the past, before Jonas first stepped into it.

Except that Jonas, returning, could still emerge before me. And do so during the booth’s earliest operational moments, when the earlier Jonas had been right there, having just finished assembling it. Together they’d throw me out of the warehouse. Likely in pieces.

Feeling useless and stupid, I began to pace.

And jerked to a halt when my wandering brought me to something the size of a four-drawer file cabinet: the last transceiver Jonas had built while scaling up to a full-sized booth.

I stared at the cabinet. I crouched next to it, considering. In tests, it had transferred a hundred fifty pounds of rice—that was more than I weighed. If I could cram myself inside, I could travel back as much as several days before Jonas completed the person-sized booth. Back earlier than Jonas could reach. He weighed too much for this generation of his device.

And I’d be stuck inside. Great plan.

Still, fiddling with a file cabinet seemed more within the scope of my abilities than outwitting a physicist genius. I kept scheming.

Go back before the booth is done. Stop Jonas.

How?

Stacked printouts of future me’s note sat on a nearby workbench. Accusingly.

Stop Jonas. Stop him for certain.

I didn’t know how, short of killing him. Could I? I’d need a gun. As a felon just out of jail, I’d never be able to buy one legally, and I had no idea how to get a gun illegally.

But I could never kill anyone, much less a friend.

And so billions must die?

Victoria among them?

I had to go back. I had to convince Jonas. I had to have a plan, beginning with how to extricate myself from the diminutive time machine. And fast, before Jonas reappeared.

A swiveling handle secured the cabinet door. I opened the door and saw that the latching mechanism could be worked from behind. It wouldn’t be easy, wedged into the cabinet—assuming I could even squeeze myself inside. I prodded the back of the mechanism some more, this time with the flat blade of a screwdriver, and found forcing it that way was easier.

I set the cabinet controls for the wee hours of that morning. I’d arrive before Jonas ever connected power to the booth. I’d shove my future self’s message in Past Jonas’s face and demand that he stop. Until Past Jonas finished the booth, Future Jonas could not return.

And if Past Jonas instead of listening took a poke at me? As drunk as he had been, at least I’d have the quicker reflexes.

It could work.

Just like milk and coffee could separate?

On my knees—legs bent double, ankles twisted inward, bare feet pressing into my ass, in agony from hips to toes—I crammed myself inside the cabinet. I not only had to fit, I needed a free hand behind to push the enter key. I needed a free hand in front to pull the door shut and then to open the latch.

Just in time, I remembered I needed a copy of the warning. I squirmed out, put a folded copy in my shirt pocket, and wormed my way back into the cabinet. The screwdriver tucked in my waistband sliced my thigh.

I pulled the door closed. Groping behind my back, I identified the enter key by feel. I pressed—

* * * *

I jerked at the first shrill beep, right in my ear.

The cabinet rocked and nearly toppled. When my heart stopped pounding, I reached for the latch, but couldn’t quite reach it. With elbows pressed into my ribs, I could scarcely breathe.

If I didn’t get out quickly, would I have any air to breathe?

Inch by inch, I worked the screwdriver from my waistband. I managed to flip the tool blade up without dropping it.

With a sigh of relief, I forced the latch. I kept enough of a grip to keep the door from crashing into anything nearby.

The lab was well lit.

Smothering a groan, I wiggled out of the cabinet. I slid the screwdriver back into my waistband to put away later.

Jonas stood across the warehouse, inside the chain-link enclosure, his back to the open gate. He’d hooked up the power cable to the distribution frame. The cable’s opposite end, I was relieved to see, remained loose on the floor near the booth. I was not quite too late.

Now to dissuade him…

My shoes remained hours into the future; Jonas could not have heard me approaching on bare feet. Walking through the open gate, I called, “Jonas.”

He spun around, eyes wide. “Go away,” he said.

“Jonas, it’s important.”

“Go away!” He lumbered toward me.

I sidled around him. “Jonas, listen very carefully. I’m tomorrow’s me. And more than that”—I reached for my shirt pocket—“I have a message from—”

He swung wildly at me.

I skittered away.

His fist swept past me and into the power distribution frame. From momentum or drunkenness, the rest of him followed.

The world flashed white. I flew through the air, thrown by an explosion, or electrical discharge, or colliding with Jonas, and crashed into the fence.

When I could see again, Jonas lay heaped on the concrete floor. His body twitched; his hair was aflame; steam curled from his clothing. A stench like acid and charred meat enveloped him.

Knowing there would be none, I checked for a pulse.

CHAPTER 11

Dazed, overwhelmed, I fled the enclosure. In the nearest dark corner I settled to the floor, elbows on knees, head in my hands. I think I rocked myself.

At some impossible remove, the unconnected end of the power cable leapt and writhed, sparked and crackled. It hadn’t done that before. With that wild punch, Jonas must have struck the circuit breaker and activated the circuit.

Jonas was dead—as if by my own hand—without having ever jumped to the future. Having never gone forward, he would never come back. Having never quite finished his person-sized machine, no one else would come back through it.

It was over.

But if it were over, would I remember the events of an aborted future? Nor was it only my memories. Expensive equipment across the lab testified that some Future Jonas still sent back stock tips.

Branches? Loops? Those were Jonas’s terms. Time—or, at least, messing with time—must not be anything so simple. To me time had come to seem more of a spiral, or perhaps a rollercoaster.

And also sinister.

Was the line from Twelfth Night? I wasn’t certain about the play, but I remembered Shakespeare’s text.

And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

I’d seen Jonas jump into the future. That I still had that memory…did it mean he could yet return?

While I struggled with paradox and whirligigs, the end of the writhing high-voltage line flapped into the booth’s open access panel.

More sparks. The stench of burnt electrical insulation.

And Jonas—some Jonas—appeared inside the booth.

* * * *

I jumped to my feet, lunging for the booth. Jonas, facing the controls he had just used, must have seen, through the rear panel—himself. Lying in an unnatural heap, his arms out-flung, his hair and clothes still smoldering. Motionless.

A glass vial slipped from Jonas’s hand and shattered on the booth floor.

Why did Jonas drop it? In shock at what he had seen? From the impact as I hit the booth door? Either. Both. It doesn’t matter.

I jammed my screwdriver through the door’s outer handle, hoping that would keep the inner handle from operating the latch.

Jonas turned and stared at me. And back at his corpse. And back at me.

“An accident,” I said. “You electrocuted yourself.”

I held up the copy of future me’s note. I don’t know how much of it Jonas read. The picture was probably enough.

“That was a vaccine sample I dropped,” he finally got out.

“Should you go back for another?” I asked. “Or will another trip make things worse?”

Jonas shook his head. “At best the vaccine prevents catching the disease. It never cures. And I…”—he shrank inward on himself—“I’m patient zero. If I leave this booth.”

Patient Zero: the person who sets off an epidemic.

Even from a sample, how long would it take to synthesize, mass produce, and distribute the vaccine? By then, how far and wide would the doomsday plague have spread?

“Burn it,” Jonas said. His voice firmed. “Burn down the damned lab. All of it. Everything. My notes. My prototypes. While no one but me understands or knows how to construct them.”

“But the virus,” I said. “The heat. If the glass of the booth cracks…”

“That won’t be a problem.” Turning his back on me, he tapped on the control panel.

He—and any viruses he’d brought with him—vanished from the booth.

In a coruscation of sparks, the compartment at the foot of the booth burst into flame.

* * * *

Where is Jonas? When is Jonas? Jonases? Dead, I believe. Any and all of them. Some, maybe, trapped in timeline limbo. The paradoxes are far beyond me.

I set myself to a task I might achieve: Jonas’s final request.

I closed the main water valve of the sprinkler system and disabled the fire alarms. Beginning with Jonas’s lab notebook, found face down on a nearby workbench, I fed paper to the small blaze. Glowing cinders swirled in the updrafts.

The old warehouse was a tinderbox. Decades-dry wood burst into flame at the touch of a spark. Fire raced up the walls, into the rafters, across the ceiling. When the main lighting circuit shorted out, I had plenty of firelight to see by.

With a fire axe I hacked pallets into kindling. I doused the wood scraps with kerosene we kept for the space heaters; a tossed kitchen match set the pyre ablaze. Into the bonfire went Jonas’s laptop, iPad, and camcorder—anything that might contain a digital record. Electronic gear might not burn to ash, but with enough warping and melting—I had to believe—nothing could be recovered.

Fire roared. The heat was intense. Smoke and acrid fumes stung my eyes. Jonas’s corkboards were ablaze, sending up tongues of flame to lick the stairs.

But my job wasn’t complete until every transceiver, from the earliest prototype, was wrecked beyond recognition. And starting with that earliest prototype, I was stymied. Jonas had built it in a freaking heavy strongbox. I couldn’t begin to move it to my bonfire.

Instead, I carried shovelfuls of flaming embers to one prototype after another. Around the transceiver that held future me’s message I piled the coals twice as high, praying that the heat would incinerate any plague virus within.

Behind the glass door, Jonas’s mottled image burst into flame. I stood, transfixed. Only after a tap on the glass crumbled the blackened page into ash and soot could I tear myself away.

A squeal caught my ear. The guinea pigs! They were frantic, clawing at the bars of their cage. I dragged the cage to the closest door, flung it open, and released my pets.

Wind rushing through the opening was like the pumping of an enormous bellows.

With a whoosh, fire exploded. I ran inside, nearly squashed as flaming rafters rained into the doorway. The glass wall of the first-floor offices shattered. Across the floor, the wooden stairs had erupted in a fierce hot blaze.

And from upstairs came a cry for help.

CHAPTER 12

I was upstairs. The Peter who belonged in this hour. I had been so focused on when Jonas might appear that I’d never even considered another me.

Upstairs, I, he, was drunk. Confused. And trapped by an inferno.

The heat was palpable. I couldn’t get within twenty feet of the stairs. I ran for the elevator, and stopped halfway there. It didn’t work. I ran back.

In the upstairs hall, through black, greasy smoke and the roaring fire, I glimpsed a frightened face. My own.

Did he recognize me? I don’t know. “The hall windows!” I screamed.

“Too small!” he shouted back. He glanced over his shoulder. “And the outer wall is burning.”

I heard sirens, louder by the second. “Fire trucks are on their way. Hold on!”

And with my heart in my mouth, I left him. There was equipment left to ruin.

“Help me!” upstairs me screamed.

But I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t help myself. Walls of flame barred the doors and the loading dock.

Something within me whispered, “But you can help yourself.” I had not yet attended to the cabinet-sized transceiver. Funny how I had left its destruction for last. I could once more wedge myself inside, jump back a day…

More of me, thankfully, recoiled. Upstairs, one Peter was roasting to death. Peter of some unknowable future had sacrificed himself, his long-suffering world, to send me a warning. For me to sneak away would mean leaving this transceiver operational. It might escape complete destruction in the flames. If, to play safe, I destroyed this unit yesterday, would I still have it when I needed it tomorrow?

I hadn’t forgotten how “random” flailing of the high-voltage line had flipped the cable end into the booth’s open access panel. Not to short out and fry the electronics. Not to make a cascade of sparks, then writhe itself back out.

No: to spot-weld connections, in just the right places, precisely enough to furnish power for several minutes. Long enough for Jonas to return, speak with me, and then take his contagious self…somewhen.

Accident? Coincidence? The odds of that circuit forming must be beyond astronomical.

Call it fate or the whirligig of time…if human frailty allowed it, something would have its revenges.

Choking on smoke and bile, disgusted with my momentary weakness, I flipped open the electronics compartment of this one remaining transceiver. I ripped out its entrails and buried them in red-hot coals.

My work was done.

All around, close now, sirens wailed.

Flames had penetrated the caged area, and I gagged on the sickening sweet smell of burning meat. Of Jonas. When a four-foot spool of power cable, too, caught fire, the acrid stench of burning insulation was a mercy.

With an earsplitting crack, something behind the fence, a transformer, perhaps, exploded.

I sat in a clear area on the concrete floor, one of the few spots that flaming debris had yet to claim. And waited for the fumes, the heat, or the collapsing roof to bring matters to an end.

* * * *

I shuddered awake, coughing. Then the dry heaves hit me; I tried, and failed, to sit up. I only managed to bat a plastic mask off my mouth and nose.

“Peter!” I heard. “Lay still, honey.”

Victoria. She was kneeling beside me, trembling.

I was on a stretcher near a Rescue Squad van, its lightbar strobing. A husky man wearing scrubs nudged her aside and settled the mask back on my face. He said, “This is for oxygen, and you need it. It’s a miracle they got you out.”

They. Flat on my back, I counted five fire trucks. Crews wielding thick hoses sprayed the blaze, and neighboring buildings to which the flames looked poised to spread.

Victoria stroked my forehead. “I heard the sirens,” she said. “I…I had a bad feeling. I followed a fire truck.”

Over her shoulder, there was an apparition. I saw—at a second-story hallway window, lurid by firelight—a despairing face. My face. Just for instant, then it was gone.

Sad beyond words, I turned away from Victoria and Peter both.

EPILOGUE

“Drink something,” the cop says. He nudges a water bottle across the table toward me.

I wipe vomit from my face with a sleeve. The shirt reeks of smoke. I swish out my mouth with a swig of tepid water. There’s nowhere to spit, so I swallow.

“They recovered two bodies from what’s left of the warehouse,” the cop says. “We’re talking murder charges, not just arson.”

Past the memory storm, I almost don’t hear him. I say nothing.

“One was a big man, pretty clearly the renter, Dr. Gorski. You hated your boss that much, Bitner? To burn him alive?”

I didn’t hate Jonas, not that I intended to explain. Not that I will speak at all. Any word out of my mouth would make the next word easier.

This Jonas had died in an instant, but another Jonas was dying horribly of doomsday plague. Or would, or will, or already had. I’d seen the photo.

A miserable, repentant Jonas.

At the end he had seen that meddling with the timeline must stop. I was sure of it. Because Jonas could have jumped ahead, then sent a note to himself months before now. A simple note: Fire Peter. He’ll cause trouble.

He hadn’t sent such a note, or I wouldn’t be here, now, blamed for his death.

Or, there was no future transceiver to which he could have escaped, because I’d destroyed it. Unless curious former colleagues, inspired to reconsider Jonas’s theories, should reinvent the technology…

I dare say nothing that might attract their attention.

The cop studies my face. “So,” he says, “who was the second guy at the warehouse? You might as well give me that. The ME will tell us soon enough.”

Trying to stay expressionless, I take a sip of water. And worry that the medical examiner will find useable fingerprints on my other self. That he’ll find my prints.

If TV crime shows were to be believed, not even identical twins have identical fingerprints. And anyway, I don’t have a twin. Not even a brother.

I hope: Let the detectives imagine clones. But Jonas was a physicist, not a biologist. Would anyone suspect that one of me came from a different time?

I could see nothing to do about that—beyond offering no hints.

“Answer, damn it!” the cop shouts, slamming a fist on the table.

My water bottle jumps, falls over, spurts out glug-glug-glug into my lap. I keep my reaction to a tic.

They can’t make me talk, I assure myself. They can only send me to jail. Or put me in an institution, if they decide I’m crazy. The universe has done its worst.

Once again, I am wrong.

* * * *

“What is it?” Victoria asks, tears streaming down her face. “I know you. I know you wouldn’t hurt anyone. Why won’t you defend yourself?” And plaintively, “Why won’t you talk to me, Peter?”

I am mute, above all, for her. I don’t make a sound, though the longing to explain consumes me. I don’t even move, though my need to hold her is overwhelming.

Instead I focus my mind on Jonas, the flesh sliding off his face.

How is it I can remember a future that’s been undone? And how undone, when I died in the fire without ever having come downstairs to discover an earlier Jonas’s deception and plans—

All of which I do remember, with painful clarity.

But there’s no use asking how, just as there is no one to ask. It must suffice to know that between us, Jonas and I had twisted and knotted, tangled and raveled the timeline. And, just possibly, we had mended it.

If I can keep it intact.

Victoria takes my hand. “If you ever felt anything for me, you’ll explain.”

Four billion dead: an inconceivable number. An incomprehensible abstraction. Victoria struck down? That’s all too believable, and I cannot bear the idea. And so I peer into space, avoiding her gaze.

What will my love think when the body from the warehouse—my body—is identified?

Far more difficult than seeing myself die, I say nothing.

At last Victoria tires of waiting. She stands to leave, shoulders quivering, eyes red and puffy. As the interrogation room door sighs closed behind her, I think about what we might have had together.

And of grandfatherless grandsons.

And the fluttering wings of butterflies.

And the crazily spinning wheel of a whirligig.