Paycheck (2003) (37 page)

Addison Doug stared at him. ‘We want what?’

Uneasily, the security agent said, ‘To take further trips into time. As you have done. Unfortunately, you yourself cannot ever do so again, because of the tragic implosion and death of the three of you. But other tempunauts—’

‘We want what? Is that what we want?’ Addison’s voice rose; people at nearby tables were watching now. Nervously.

‘Certainly,’ the agent said. ‘And keep your voice down.’

‘I don’t want that,’ Addison said. ‘I want to stop. To stop forever. To just lie in the ground, in the dust, with everyone else. To see no more summers - the
same
summer.’

‘Seen one, you’ve seen them all,’ Merry Lou said hysterically. ‘I think he’s right, Addi; we should get out of here. You’ve had too many drinks, and it’s late, and this news about the—’

Addison broke in, ‘What was brought back? How much extra mass?’

The security agent said, ‘Preliminary analysis shows that machinery weighing about one hundred pounds was lugged back into the time-field of the module and picked up along with you. This much mass—’ The agent gestured. ‘That blew up the pad right on the spot. It couldn’t begin to compensate for that much more than had occupied its open area at launch time.’

‘Wow!’ Merry Lou said, eyes wide. ‘Maybe somebody sold one of you a quadraphonic phono for a dollar ninetyeight including fifteen-inch air-suspension speakers and a lifetime supply ofNeilDiamond records.’ She tried to laugh, but failed; her eyes dimmed over. ‘Addi,’ she whispered, ‘I’m sorry. But it’s sort of - weird. I mean, it’s absurd; you all were briefed, weren’t you, about your return weight? You weren’t even to add so much as a piece of paper to what you took. I even saw Dr Fein demonstrating the reasons on TV. And one of you hoisted a hundred pounds of machinery into that field? You must have been trying to self-destruct, to do that!’ Tears slid from her eyes; one tear rolled out onto her nose and hung there. He reached reflexively to wipe it away, as if helping a little girl rather than a grown one.

‘I’ll fly you to the analysis site,’ the security agent said, standing up. He and Addison helped Merry Lou to her feet; she trembled as she stood a moment, finishing her Bloody Mary. Addison felt acute sorrow for her, but then, almost at once, it passed. He wondered why. One can weary even of that, he conjectured. Of caring for someone. If it goes on too long - on and on. Forever. And, at last, even after that, into something no one before, not God Himself, maybe, had ever had to suffer and in the end, for all His great heart, succumb to.

As they walked through the crowded bar toward the street, Addison Doug said to the security agent, ‘Which one of us—’

‘They know which one,’ the agent said as he held the door to the street open for Merry Lou. The agent stood, now, behind Addison, signaling for a gray Federal car to land at the red parking area. Two other security agents, in uniform, hurried toward them.

‘Was it me?’ Addison Doug asked.

‘You better believe it,’ the security agent said.

The funeral procession moved with aching solemnity down Pennsylvania Avenue, three flag-draped caskets and dozens of black limousines passing between rows of heavily coated, shivering mourners. A low haze hung over the day, gray outlines of buildings faded into the rain-drenched murk of the Washington March day.

Scrutinizing the lead Cadillac through prismatic binoculars, TV’s top news and public-events commentator, Henry Cassidy, droned on at his vast unseen audience, ‘… sad recollections of that earlier train among the wheatfields carrying the coffin of Abraham Lincoln back to burial and the nation’s capital. And what a sad day this is, and what appropriate weather, with its dour overcast and sprinkles!’ In his monitor he saw the zoomar lens pan up on the fourth Cadillac, as it followed those with the caskets of the dead tempunauts.

His engineer tapped him on the arm.

‘We appear to be focusing on three unfamiliar figures so far not identified, riding together,’ Henry Cassidy said into his neck mike, nodding agreement. ‘So far I’m unable to quite make them out. Are your location and vision any better from where you’re placed, Everett?’ he inquired of his colleague and pressed the button that notified Everett Branton to replace him on the air.

‘Why, Henry,’ Branton said in a voice of growing excitement, ‘I believe we’re actually eyewitness to the three American tempunauts as they remanifest themselves on their historic journey into the future!’

‘Does this signify,’ Cassidy said, ‘that somehow they have managed to solve and overcome the—’

‘Afraid not, Henry,’ Branton said in his slow, regretful voice. ‘What we’re eyewitnessing to our complete surprise consists of the Western world’s first verified glimpse of what the technical people refer to as Emergence Time Activity.’

‘Ah, yes, ETA,’ Cassidy said brightly, reading it off the official script the Federal authorities had handed to him before air time.

‘Right, Henry. Contrary to what
might
seem to be the case at first sight, these are not - repeat
not
- our three brave tempunauts as such, as we would ordinarily experience them—’

‘I grasp it now, Everett,’ Cassidy broke in excitedly, since his authorized script read
CASS BREAKS IN EXCITEDLY
. ‘Our three tempunauts have momentarily suspended in their historic voyage to the future, which we believe will span across a time-continuum roughly a century from now … It would seem that the overwhelming grief and drama of this unanticipated day of mourning has caused them to—’

‘Sorry to interrupt, Henry,’ Everett Branton said, ‘but I think, since the procession has momentarily halted on its slow march forward, that we might be able to—’

‘No!’ Cassidy said, as a note was handed him in a swift scribble, reading:
Do not interview nauts. Urgent. Dis. previous inst
. ‘I don’t think we’re going to be able to …’ he continued, ‘… to speak briefly with tempunauts Benz, Crayne, and Doug, as you had hoped, Everett. As we had all briefly hoped to.’ He wildly waved the boom-mike back; it had already begun to swing out expectantly toward the stopped Cadillac. Cassidy shook his head violently at the mike technician and his engineer.

Perceiving the boom-mike swinging at them Addison Doug stood up in the back of the open Cadillac. Cassidy groaned. He wants to speak, he realized. Didn’t they reinstruct
him
? Why am I the only one they get across to? Other boom-mikes representing other networks plus radio station interviewers on foot now were rushing out to thrust up their microphones into the faces of the three tempunauts, especially Addison Doug’s. Doug was already beginning to speak, in response to a question shouted up to him by a reporter. With his boom-mike off, Cassidy couldn’t hear the question, nor Doug’s answer. With reluctance, he signaled for his own boom-mike to trigger on.

‘… before,’ Doug was saying loudly.

‘In what manner, “All this has happened before”?’ the radio reporter, standing close to the car, was saying.

‘I mean,’ US tempunaut Addison Doug declared, his face red and strained, ‘that I have stood here in this spot and said again and again, and all of you have viewed this parade and our deaths at reentry endless times, a closed cycle of trapped time which must be broken.’

‘Are you seeking,’ another reporter jabbered up at Addison Doug, ‘for a solution to the reentry implosion disaster which can be applied in retrospect so that when you do return to the past you will be able to correct the malfunction and avoid the tragedy which cost - or for you three, will cost - your lives?’

Tempunaut Benz said, ‘We are doing that, yes.’

‘Trying to ascertain the cause of the violent implosion and eliminate the cause before we return,’ tempunaut Crayne added, nodding. ‘We have learned already that, for reasons unknown, a mass of nearly one hundred pounds of miscellaneous Volkswagen motor parts, including cylinders, the head …’

This is awful, Cassidy thought. ‘This is amazing!’ he said aloud, into his neck mike. ‘The already tragically deceased US tempunauts, with a determination that could emerge only from the rigorous training and discipline to which they were subjected - and we wondered why at the time but can clearly see why now - have already analyzed the mechanical slip-up responsible, evidently, for their own deaths, and have begun the laborious process of shifting through and eliminating causes of that slip-up so that they can return to their original launch site and reenter without mishap.’

‘One wonders,’ Branton mumbled onto the air and into his feedback earphone, ‘what the consequences of this alteration of the near past will be. If in reentry they do
not
implode and are
not
killed, then they will not - well, it’s too complex for me, Henry, these time paradoxes that Dr Fein at the Time Extrusion Labs in Pasadena has so frequently and eloquently brought to our attention.’

Into all the microphones available, of all sorts, tempunaut Addison Doug was saying, more quietly now, ‘We must not eliminate the cause of reentry implosion. The only way out of this trip is for us to die. Death is the only solution for this. For the three of us.’ He was interrupted as the procession of Cadillacs began to move forward.

Shutting off his mike momentarily, Henry Cassidy said to his engineer, ‘Is he nuts?’

‘Only time will tell,’ his engineer said in a hard-to-hear voice.

‘An extraordinary moment in the history of the United States’ involvement in time travel,’ Cassidy said, then, into his now live mike. ‘Only time will tell - if you will pardon the inadvertent pun - whether tempunaut Doug’s cryptic remarks, uttered impromptu at this moment of supreme suffering for him, as in a sense to a lesser degree it is for all of us, are the words of a man deranged by grief or an accurate insight into the macabre dilemma that in theoretical terms we knew all along might eventually confront - confront and strike down with its lethal blow - a time-travel launch, either ours or the Russians’.’

He segued, then, to a commercial.

‘You know,’ Branton’s voice muttered in his ear, not on the air but just to the control room and to him, ‘if he’s right they ought to let the poor bastards die.’

‘They ought to release them,’ Cassidy agreed. ‘My God, the way Doug looked and talked, you’d imagine he’d gone through this for a thousand years and then some! I wouldn’t be in his shoes for anything.’

‘I’ll bet you fifty bucks,’ Branton said, ‘they have gone through this before. Many times.’

‘Then we have, too,’ Cassidy said.

Rain fell now, making all the lined-up mourners shiny. Their faces, their eyes, even their clothes - everything glistened in wet reflections of broken, fractured light, bent and sparkling, as, from gathering gray formless layers above them, the day darkened.

‘Are we on the air?’ Branton asked.

Who knows? Cassidy thought. He wished the day would end.

The Soviet chrononaut N. Gauki lifted both hands impassionedly and spoke to the Americans across the table from him in a voice of extreme urgency. ‘It is the opinion of myself and my colleague R. Plenya, who for his pioneering achievements in time travel has been certified a Hero of the Soviet People, and rightly so, that based on our own experience and on theoretical material developed both in your own academic circles and in the Soviet Academy of Sciences of the USSR, we believe that tempunaut A. Doug’s fears may be justified. And his deliberate destruction of himself and his teammates at reentry, by hauling a huge mass of auto back with him from ETA, in violation of his orders, should be regarded as the act of a desperate man with no other means of escape. Of course, the decision is up to you. We have only an advisory position in this matter.’

Addison Doug played with his cigarette lighter on the table and did not look up. His ears hummed, and he wondered what that meant. It had an electronic quality. Maybe we’re within the module again, he thought. But he didn’t perceive it; he felt the reality of the people around him, the table, the blue plastic lighter between his fingers. No smoking in the module during reentry, he thought. He put the lighter carefully away in his pocket.

‘We’ve developed no concrete evidence whatsoever,’ General Toad said, ‘that a closed time loop has been set up. There’s only the subjective feelings of fatigue on the part of Mr Doug. Just his belief that he’s done all this repeatedly. As he says, it is very probably psychological in nature.’ He rooted, piglike, among the papers before him. ‘I have a report, not disclosed to the media, from four psychiatrists at Yale on his psychological makeup. Although unusually stable, there is a tendency toward cyclothymia on his part, culminating in acute depression. This naturally was taken into account long before the launch, but it was calculated that the joyful qualities of the two others in the team would offset this functionally. Anyhow, that depressive tendency in him is exceptionally high, now.’ He held the paper out, but no one at the table accepted it. ‘Isn’t it true, Dr Fein,’ he said, ‘that an acutely depressed person experiences time in a peculiar way, that is, circular time, time repeating itself, getting nowhere, around and around? The person gets so psychotic that he refuses to let go of the past. Reruns it in his head constantly.’

‘But you see,’ Dr Fein said, ‘this subjective sensation of being trapped is perhaps all we would have.’ This was the research physicist whose basic work had laid the theoretical foundation for the project. ‘If a closed loop did unfortunately lock into being.’

‘The general,’ Addison Doug said, ‘is using words he doesn’t understand.’