“This is really the experiment that got the ball rolling for him, success-wise. It’s a bit obscure and underappreciated now,” William says, pointing to an unimpressive conglomeration of coils and traps inside a glass case.
“Aha,” I say, more from recognition than being awed. I’ve seen this lay in Father’s lab for years and heard him explain it proudly to me—once in exaltation after he set it up and again a few years later when I was intelligent enough to understand its significance.
“You know about this?” One of his eyebrows is cocked.
“Yes—er, I read about it, a long time ago, back home.” I chide myself for letting my thoughts show so clearly. I need to be more nonchalant if I’m going to hide from William how much I know about Father.
“The national hero back in New Zealand, I see.” He shrugs. “Anyway, it’s not much to look at, but at the time it was remarkable. Rutherford managed to measure a time interval of a hundred-thousandth of a second, which was incredible back then. It’s purely mechanical of course, though now we can’t conceive of doing this with anything less than an electrical device. It’s a far cry from an atomic clock, but it was its ancestor, you could say.”
“Right . . . time intervals . . . interesting. . . .”
“Your eyes are glazing over.” He laughs. “Moving on!”
“No, no—I was lost in thought. Please continue.” At his use of the word “time” I connect my own time travel with Father’s experiments. I hadn’t thought before of him working on anything to do with time. Was one of his apparatus capable of sending something through time? Perhaps by accident?
“Oh-kay. Though it’s weird he developed something like this when you consider how much his later experiments had to do with nuclear physics, this was his background. It seems almost juvenile, but in reality it was as impactful as anything else he conceived.”
I nod mechanically, following along after him as he leads me past the display cases with their orderly labels and logical layout. It’s all here, all the work I knew Father to have completed up until August 1906, but it looks so old. It’s dusty, faded, slightly rusty, and unmistakably tinged with age. That’s what shocks me the most as I tour the museum, not the fact that Father has an honest-to-God museum—albeit just two small rooms—devoted to his legacy. William’s only shown me half of it, but my initial impression still lingers. I’ve stepped temporarily back into the past, my past, by entering this museum, except this past looks ancient instead of holding my contemporary memories.
Suddenly the gravity of being wrenched through one hundred years of time feels very, very real, and the time very, very lost and gone.
William pauses and looks at me, but I can tell his thoughts are purely on Father’s achievements. “When you think about everything else Rutherford either worked on directly, contributed to, or oversaw—from sonar and radar to splitting the atom—”
“I beg your pardon?” I ask, startled out of my own reverie.
“Splitting the atom. It was Cockcroft and Walton who were credited, but they were directed by Rutherford, who no doubt guided them extremely closely.”
I stand open-mouthed—dumbly, I’m sure. “I-I didn’t—”
“You didn’t realize he was involved with that, eh? Yeah, no one ever credits his work, unless they’re physicists or really understand the history.”
Luckily for me, William doesn’t understand it’s really that I can’t conceive of splitting the atom itself rather than Father’s role in it. The more I’m seeing in this museum and hearing from William, the more I realize what a prolific and famous scientist my father is.
“That’s simply amazing. . . .”
“It was, yeah. And of course it wouldn’t have been conceivable if he hadn’t discovered and described the positive nucleus via the gold-foil experiments here in 1905 to 1906,” William continues.
“Oh?” This time I manage to keep my jaw from slacking right down to my pink silk top.
“Not only were they ground-breaking, but they became—as I’m sure you know—what he was most famous for.”
To think—my disappearance was around the same time Father was embarking on his most revolutionary discovery! I was there to see it!
“His legacy was already being established by the time he began those trials, first with mica sheets and then with a slice of gold foil only a few atoms thick. After his death, he was more singularly remembered for steering researchers down the right path regarding the nucleus overall. Men like Niels Bohr, who actually studied and worked under Rutherford as well, owe their success directly to Rutherford’s prior work.”
For me, these facts are earth-shattering, mind-blowing, and dearly personal. This is my father he’s talking about, and in the past tense too. As William let out the words “his death,” I literally felt my chest tighten and cramp. Suddenly an anvil is crushing me into the floor, making me avail all my strength to keep upright. His death . . . Father is dead, in this reality, in this world, where I’m standing right now.
Of course he should be, in William’s lifetime, because no one could live so far into their hundreds, but the miniscule but existent kernel of hope I’d kept alive that he was somehow here in 2006—even though all rational thought told me over and over it couldn’t be true—is now as gone as my entire past life. Somehow, cruelly, I am to go on while he is unmistakably dead.
“And here in these smaller cases are just some letters and mementos and such of his. It’s boring compared to the setups, so we can go right to his later and more exciting experiments over—”
William stops short when he sees I’m not following him, but I can’t help myself from reacting to the letters.
It’s the handwriting that catches my eye—and my breath. I reach up to grasp a note, but the glass is there to protect and preserve his words. There, as if it was lifted just yesterday from his writing desk, is a letter from Father to Otto Hann. It’s yellowed and wispy—very fragile—but it’s his. My first finger strikes the glass, and it’s as close to Father as I’ve felt since I left him.
“Elie?” William is standing a few feet from me, awkwardly watching my frozen expression. “Elie? Are you okay? Is it really that interesting?”
“I—it’s—” I croak, then swallow, but my mouth is so dry, and there’s a fat lump that won’t wash down. I crane my head closer to the glass, partly to read the letter better but mostly to shade my face from him. I can’t let him see my face.
Why did I think I could keep it together when going through this place?
“Elie, what’s wrong?” William takes a few steps toward me and reaches for my arm.
I use my other hand to erase a small teardrop from the corner of my right eye, my emotion betraying my attempts to bury my reactions.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. This is all incredible.” I laugh quickly, more to fool my senses into changing their direction than anything. “It’s so old, and all right here for anyone to read. Wherever did they find all these objects?”
He shrugs, apparently relieved I’m just engrossed in the exhibit. “From his estate, I guess. His stuff from his time as Physics Chair at McGill—the apparatus not cannibalized for newer setups—sat in storage for half a century until someone decided to do something proper with it. It took until 1967 for this to actually open, if I recall.”
“My goodness. . . . This has been sitting for an awfully long time, then. I’m sure it won’t work anymore, eh?”
“Well, you’d be surprised at how hardy a lot of this old equipment can be. Things used to be built to last, unlike nowadays. I wouldn’t be surprised if we could fire up one of these bad boys and burn some radium,” William says, eyes alight with excitement only a physicist would feel at that prospect.
I laugh with honesty this time. “Yes, he did have things built with quality in mind. No use making something if it’s going to break on the way to the lab,” I joke; I could be quoting Father himself.
William chuckles as well. “That’s happened to me actually. . . . Anyway, here’s some more of his, er, personal effects, in this case here if you want to see them. This is just photos, mostly of his assistants but one or two of his family too.”
He’s turned away from me now, facing the second low case with the photos. His hand points where his body is headed, toward a photo I instantly recognize and hope he’ll turn away from.
It’s of our whole family, with some friends of my parents, on holiday in Scotland when I was about nine.
Please don’t let William recognize me, oh please God!
“Here’s one of him and Soddy, a graduate student under him who was pretty smart. And here’s one with his wife Mary and daughter Eileen and their family. . . .” He turns to me, amused. “Wow, your name is the same as his daughter’s. Humph; I’d forgotten that was her name.”
I’d laugh again, but I’m too shocked to move a single muscle of my face, so I only nod stupidly. A chill wholly opposite to the season wracks my limbs, and I swear I can hear my grey cotton skirt rustling along with it.
“Funny, you even look a little like her,” he continues, more seriously this time. “Your high cheekbones are the same, just like Rutherford’s too. And your hair parts that way from your forehead too, like the top of a heart. You could almost be related.”
“Augh—” I say, or rather groan. It’s obvious to me, and I can’t believe William to be daft enough not to realize the truth. I need to steer him away, to continue our tour of the museum, anything, but my feet are nailed to the oak planks beneath me.
“And look!” William is pointing to a caption below another photo, one of Mother and Father. His head is close to the display case, studying the photos intently though he’d dismissed them earlier. “This one says, ‘Mary Rutherford, née Mary Newton.’ Your last name is the same as hers!”
“Mmm, yes.”
He turns to me, curiosity circling his eyes. I can see his brain—no less intelligent than my father’s students’, at least—has come to the conclusion I dread to hear. “Are you, are you—”
My head spinning, my brain reeling from one thing to another to say to him to distract him from the obvious truth. The jig is up, as Father’s beloved detective novels would say. There’s no use keeping up the charade any longer, especially to him. He’d have found out eventually anyway.
“Yes. I am.” There, it’s done. Said. Out loud.
William’s eyes widen to his ears, then narrow back in confusion. “A relative? A granddaughter? No, great-granddaughter?” He’s mentally calculating what generation from the great Ernest Rutherford my age would place me in.
But I’m the one who miscalculated. He didn’t come to the right conclusion, and now I’ve given myself away!
My face pales as my eyes crimp shut, but not before I see him turn back to the photograph from Scotland so he can study the girl’s—my—face.
“But you, you look just like his daughter. It’s uncanny, really, the more I look at her. She’s half your age, probably, but I swear this could be you in this picture.”
I lift my eyelids. Fear and resignation course through me. I see, finally, incredulity laced with a touch of fear on William’s face.
This time it’s him who can barely squeak out a word. “Are you—? Can it be? Eileen? Elie?” He turns back and forth from the photograph to me, unable to believe what his eyes tell him is true.
Almost apologetically I say, “I didn’t think a photograph of me would be here. I thought it would only have Father’s experiments. I didn’t think—”
William takes two quick steps backward and bumps into a wall cabinet, rattling a set of glass vacuum tubes and the case doors themselves. Recovering with agility, he steadies his feet below his hips while reaching outstretched arms toward my shoulders. “No, no. That’s, that’s not quite possible. It’s been a hundred years. . . .”
I half cough, half laugh. “Yes, exactly, hasn’t it.” The anvil has mercifully been removed from my person, and suddenly I realize I can speak cogently again. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but I am Eileen. That Eileen. In the flesh.”
Reaching my hands to grasp his, which are now gently covering my shoulders, apparently testing their existence, I then pull them down between us.
“Oh, my God. I’m hallucinating, aren’t I?” he asks, looking pale himself.
I shake my head, smiling with a tinge of sadness. “No, and neither am I. Why don’t we get some fresh air? It’s awfully stale in here, and I owe you an explanation.”
*
* *
Ten minutes later, we’re sitting side by side on a minimalist teak bench nestled in a primly attended garden down the hill from the Rutherford Physics Building. We could be two people discussing our day’s classes, or debating politics perhaps, but instead I’ve revealed a set of circumstances to him that would seem inconceivable if William hadn’t the photographic proof to corroborate what sounds like a Jules Verne tale come to life.
I’ve described every moment from that fateful Friday afternoon to how I’ve come to collect my new classes, job, and way of life. William has sat silently through it all, looking only at my face while listening intently. His expression tells me he believes every word I say, yet the scientist in him can’t understand how it was possible. Once I finish and fall silent myself, he opens his mouth to comment.
“Putting aside for the moment why and how you arrived here, I have to say that I can’t believe you’re holding up as well as you are. I don’t get how you’re not catatonic at the shock of a hundred years’ change. No wonder you seemed a bit . . . I don’t know, confused about some really commonplace things over the last few days. I chalked it up to you being a foreigner.”
I incline my head in appreciation. “Thanks for understanding. It’s been a big shock, yes. And then. . . .” I can’t quite put this into words. “And then going to the museum today was harder. I don’t know what I expected—to see Father’s things as I remember them from a week ago, new and crisp and clean—but everything there looked like it was pulled from an ancient archeology dig. Dirty, dusty, disused—so dead.” I scrunch my eyes, then lower my head to clear those images from my memory.
“I’m so sorry, Elie. I didn’t quite realize until now that you’re all you have from that time, and that everyone else is . . . gone.”
I swallow with effort, fighting the emotion that surged back in those rooms. “I don’t know how seeing those letters and that photo affected me so severely, but it’s as if the past week and a half are compressing into this one moment. I’ve put aside some of the anxiety and fear that peaked when I first arrived here while I’ve been trying to put together a substitute life in the meantime—trying to pretend, I suppose, that everything is all right—until I can figure out how to get back home. But seeing my father’s present now so clearly in the past smacks me in the face; I can’t hide behind my ersatz life forever. And now you know the truth too.”
“I guess you’re not alone now—that’s the one bonus.”
“Yes, and I thank you for not thinking I’m a crazy ranting lady claiming to be from the past.”
“Crazy? Are you kidding, Elie? This is incredible! It’s amazing and ridiculously fantastic! I’ve met someone who’s traveled in time!” William’s eyes are practically glittering emeralds now.
“Ha—a time traveler. I don’t even know how it happened.”
“No, me neither. . . . You can guess I have a million questions for you about that moment in your dad’s lab, and I want to explore the basement of the library, but for now I need to just absorb this.”
I sigh, sensing I can share this burden with him but still weighed down by the sure sense of loss of my life as I’ve always known it. I must be showing this clearly on my face because William immediately swings one leg over the bench to completely face me, takes my near hand in both of his, and says earnestly, “But you’re the one who needs help adjusting, not me. And I want to be the one to help you do that. If you don’t mind, of course. I mean, I’d like to help you with anything you need.”
His intimate gesture, his touch to my hand, is more forward than I’m accustomed to, but instead of recoiling, I let the sensation flow through me. I like it. Sharing this revelation with William has made me feel closer to him than I’ve ever felt to anyone except my parents.
Oddly, this sentiment brings up thoughts of Ralph. Why I want William to know about him, I’m not sure, but my ingrained propriety compels me to be upfront with him about more than just my immediate past.
“There’s a few more things you should know about me, William.”
He cocks one eyebrow up, then studies the daisies in front of us. “More?”
“I’m slated to marry someone. At least, that’s the impression both of my parents have given me, and the man’s hinted at it quite strongly himself.”
William looks up sharply, a look of recognition flickering in his eyes.
“Already?”
“Yes, quite. Well, I know twenty can be a bit young to get married in this day and age, but in . . . my time . . . it’s quite normal.” I hesitate to let my true feelings show through to this man whom I barely know, yet know I can pour my whole heart out to. “Not that I’m keen to marry him, but it seems already set in a way—well, that is to say it was set, until I landed myself here!”
We both chuckle at that truth, me a bit more sadly than him. William’s expression is still a bit quizzical, however.
“No, I wasn’t thinking you’re too young to get married. There are plenty of people who get married around twenty, sometimes because they have to, if you know what I mean. It’s just that. . . .” Now it’s him who hesitates, holding something back from me. He closes his mouth and twists his torso in apparent discomfort. What is bothering him?
“What is it? Please, tell me.”
“It’s just that I know a little more about your life than you do—your future, that is. This is too weird, like I’m reading tea leaves or something.”
“What?!” I demand again, dying to know what my future holds—held—in store for me.
William sputters out: “I know about Ralph Fowler. I know all about him.”
Every muscle in my body stops moving. Does my future involve Ralph more than I hoped?
“You did marry him. Or, rather, you will marry him. Or . . . you would have married him if you were still in your past,” William attempts to explain my future, clearly getting confused the more he speaks. “Okay, I’ll put it this way. According to what I’ve read about Ralph Fowler, you married him in 1909. I researched his life a bit for an undergraduate paper I wrote on a math theory a few years ago. I can’t remember all the details, but I do know that you both lived in Cambridge for a while because he published a few papers while at Trinity College.”
These revelations about my life, which I have yet to live, of course, shake every fiber of my being. I married Ralph?! How did I allow that to happen? Did I have no choice, in the end? Could I no longer avoid him? Or did Mother and Father force me? I stare off into the distance beyond William, my face probably contorted into disbelief and panic. No, they wouldn’t have forced me. I must have made the decision—but how? Could I really have had no other option? Or was the pressure too great to put it off? Oh my goodness, to have been unable to escape that. . . . Suddenly I wonder what else William knows about my life.
“What else can you recall? Where did we go after Cambridge? Why did we leave here?” My mind starts spinning with more questions, and possibilities about my life sprout out into too many directions at once for me to make sense of them all.
William narrows his eyes at me in concern. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay enough to hear about this now, Elie? You look kind of pale. If I make you go into shock. . . .” He reaches out to take my hands, perhaps trying to steady my shaking nerves.
It works; I’m surprisingly comforted, and know I have the strength to hear more. “Please—I want to know—it is shocking, to hear one’s future with no doubt as to its veracity, but I can handle it.”
He takes a deep breath before speaking again. He squeezes my hands gently; it makes me even more ready to hear the rest.
“Well, your father became the chair of physics at Manchester University in 1907, and Ralph took a post in Cambridge—maybe to be in the same country as you, I don’t know. You’d lived there for a while, and Ralph fought as an officer in the First World War—”
This elicits instant confusion from me. I cock my head and open my mouth to ask a question. William holds up his hand and continues speaking.
“I’ll explain to you later; I forgot there’s so much you don’t know about the last hundred years’ history. Needless to say it was a very big and very bloody war in Europe from 1914 to 1918. Well, Ralph fought for the British and was in a battle in Gallipoli, Turkey, in early 1915. He was wounded pretty badly and sent home to you to recover. Soon after he started out of Portsmouth doing ballistics work—huge advances, actually. Anyway, a few years later, right after the war ended, Ralph moved back to Cambridge. He contributed a lot to the study of mathematics and astronomy, as it turned out. Actually, your father returned to Cambridge as well, the next year, to the Cavendish Laboratory so Ralph wouldn’t be alone.” He paused, wide-eyed, guilty, then started talking again at double speed. “Your father made an incredible run of discoveries; you wouldn’t believe it—well, you probably would, given your father’s an absolute genius. . . .”
“Yes, quite. . . .” I answer absently, my eyes staring deep in William’s. My brain zeroes into his phrase “so Ralph wouldn’t be alone.” “Father couldn’t be anything but successful. . . . Yet what did you say a moment ago, about Ralph moving back to Cambridge? And I . . .?”
William twists uncomfortably again and looks down at his hands, still clasped around mine. A moment of painful silence echoes between us while he seems to struggle to find a way to answer me. Slowly looking up to meet my gaze again, his eyes and mouth droop regretfully as he grips me almost as if trying to hold me together. Cautiously, deliberately, he finally replies.
“Ralph … returned alone to Trinity. Well, almost alone. Your four children were with him and their caretaker.”
Four children! But where was I? I can’t fathom a reason why I wouldn’t have been with my own children. Four!
“Elie, you didn’t make it. . . .” William is definitely pained when delivering those words.
“What do you mean, I ‘didn’t make it?’ Why would I abandon my own children? And my husband, little as I probably loved him,” I ask, still not comprehending a possible explanation. That last sentence, of course, I merely hope is true.
“You . . . had died at that point, Elie.” My heart stops, as do William’s words. His eyes are wide as he continues telling the past—my future—and probably the most gut-wrenching truths he’s ever had to give someone in his life. It certainly is the most gut-wrenching news I’ve ever heard, worse than the news that I’d actually had to marry Ralph—in one year.
But I’m still not sure I’d heard William correctly. “I had died?” I repeat what he had said very distinctly not ten seconds previously.
“Yes . . . all very unexpected, of course, because you were still young. I don’t think you were thirty yet.” He did half a second of mental math. “No, you were still twenty-nine. It was a complication from childbirth.”
I have only nine years to live. . . .
My father will be devastated. . . .
Four children and not living to see them grow up. . . .
I have nine years to live . . . that is, of course, if you get back to your life and let it play out like that, silly girl.
It’s too much to take in, too many painful thoughts slamming my skull from all directions like my father’s alpha particles shooting around his vacuum tubes. I can’t comprehend the truth anymore; my brain is on overload and my vision zigzags.
I must have started swaying because William is off the bench in milliseconds and reaching forward to catch me from collapsing. His arms are suddenly around my shoulders, then one hand picks my head up as another is at my waist and pushing me carefully upright again. I moan ever so softly, not out of faintness but due to the truth finally registering in my body. All at the same time I want to hear more—every detail, in fact. I didn’t envision my future being too difficult to handle, but evidently it is.
“Elie, Elie, I’m really sorry,” William pleads. “I didn’t mean to put you through this so bluntly. I should have eased you into the truth. I didn’t realize—I didn’t think—” He almost chokes on his words; his concern for me is surprising and pulls me, slightly, out of my own pain and shock. His caring touches me, and I wonder why a near stranger, if I can still consider him as such, would indeed be troubled so much for me.
“It’s . . . okay, I’m okay,” I reassure him, and I believe my own words. His holding me comforts me enough to be sure of my own vitality, even if I know what my future holds in a mere nine years. “Really, William, I’ll be all right.”
“Are you sure? I’m sure I just took years off your life telling you that.” He stops and shakes his head, aware of the irony of what he said and surely berating himself.
I laugh and nod, a smile finally returning to my face. “You sure know how to make a girl laugh.”
He offers a rueful grin of his own and reaches up to push my fallen hair out of my face. I shiver, tickled by a current of energy electrifying the air between us. “Anytime, my lady.” He chuckles, then pretends to clock the side of his head.
“But seriously, Elie, I’ve probably stressed you out more than you need right now. As if you don’t have a million other things to worry about.”
I stay silent for a few moments, not to make him feel guilty but more to gather my own thoughts. The entire situation is incredible—my transplantation, getting acclimated to a new century, and hearing my own future told to me over one hundred years after it occurred but before I lived it. But would I live it out?
“William, do you think that’s still my future?”
“What else would it be?”
“I’m not sure—I’m not an expert on fortune-telling or time-travelling—but I wonder if your research brought up any stories of me traveling back and forth in time.”
Slowly his solemn face turns into an amused grin. “Now you know how to make someone laugh, Elie! Of course I didn’t read about you time-traveling. People don’t do that.”
“Except me.”
“Well, yes, except you. And you might be the only one in the world to have done so, unless this is as big a secret as Roswell.”
I pause, trying to match that reference to some sort of physics achievement I’d heard about from Father.
“Never mind,” he says, laughing again. “It’s from the fifties. It was a supposed secret the US Government hid about an alien spacecraft, more a conspiracy theory than anything.”
My mind can’t take many more fantastical stories, so I let that sail over my head and continue my theory.
“Well, if you didn’t read anything about me disappearing for God-only-knows how long into the future and reappearing in time to marry Ralph, maybe it didn’t happen. In that history, I mean. What if I’ve now changed that history, and my life won’t happen like that?” And I won’t die so young.
“Maybe, maybe. . . . Is it possible to change the course of history?”
“How should I know, really? How could either of us know? But I do suppose there’s a way to find out.”
“Research your life again?”
“Why not? If my life happened about a hundred years ago, technically—or at least started about a hundred years ago—certainly books would reflect that change in course.” I’m hopeful as I say this; I want it to say I lived, that I returned home to my parents, that I died when I was ninety-two instead of twenty-nine, but not that I married Ralph. Certainly not that. And as I stare into the eyes of my amazingly kind acquaintance—a friend, a dear friend, a handsome, dear friend—I think I’d rather stay here a bit longer to get to know him. More than anything, my curiosity about how the history of my altered life might read has woken my senses back up and brought me back into the present.