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 rough edge 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.”