The Time Hackers (2 page)

But the tech wizards soon invented the sliding chip block, so all the new Super Chips could block out anything
offensive to the viewer—or what censors and auditors might think was offensive. There were constant court battles to decide what young people should be able to see.

Then they discovered the hologram projector chip, which allowed anybody with a laptop not only to pull images from the past but also to project them anywhere they wanted, and for a short period it was impossible to drive down a road without seeing some historical image on a wall or some figure from the past standing in a yard.

Finally someone discovered how to bring smells forward with the image, and that nearly put an end to the freedom of access everyone had come to enjoy, because the scientists were worried that if the smell came, perhaps viruses would come as well, and what would happen if somebody brought a plague victim forward into a city and the plague got loose?

But only the smell came, no solid bodies, and while no one could quite understand why that was, there were no bacteria, or even viruses, introduced from the past. In the end, that was that.

But no one could see into the future for the simple reason that it hadn't happened yet, and there were apparently no other split dimensions or alternate time lines to find. Nobody had invented antigravity boots or a skateboard that flew or ray guns that blasted people to bits (unless you counted the lasers the military was using) or ships that went to the stars.

At least not yet.

There was, Dorso thought, entering the gym, just this messy time line business and the normal humdrum life that
he had going for himself, with no blips on the horizon except that somebody, somewhere, had decided to make him the recipient of a string of strange techno-practical jokes.

Bodies and dead rats and frogs had started appearing in his locker about three months earlier; then it got positively weird. There would be images mixed with other images—a carp stuck halfway through a pane of glass, alive and wiggling; a Brazilian soccer player looking normal except that his bottom half was a tricycle; and a dog riding a bicycle upside down.

None of it made sense. Dorso didn't have any real enemies unless you counted the entire football team, who seemed to think he was some kind of toy and were constantly playing catch with him, throwing him up in the air or stuffing him into containers. But they did that with most of the boys who didn't play football, except for Waymon Peers, who at thirteen was six foot four, weighed two hundred and fourteen pounds with no fat, and told them he'd pinch the head off the first player who messed with him. The team didn't seem to single Dorso out. Besides, he was sure none of them were smart enough to turn a laptop on, let alone go through the complicated process of acquiring a time line, projecting it backward to access an image, and then projecting the image forward in a hologram. It wasn't that the process was very difficult, but it was beyond most of the players, who sometimes seemed to take days to learn their locker combinations.

Dorso's life had gone on in spite of the practical jokes, which weren't really much of a bother except for the smell,
and he'd come to almost expect them. He was walking down the hallway carrying his laptop, which contained all of the material in the textbooks, when an image of George Armstrong Custer appeared next to him.

One of the byproducts of time projection was that everybody knew what all the important people in history looked like. Cleopatra really wasn't all that pretty, Shakespeare had bad teeth (of course so did everybody else back then, but Shakespeare had the surprising habit of picking at his with his pen and he always had ink on his lower lip), and John Wilkes Booth, who killed Lincoln, looked and acted like a drugged ferret.

Dorso knew instantly that it was Custer, who was dressed in the buckskins he wore the day he was killed in the big battle. Dorso had watched the battle several times, so seeing Custer wasn't that surprising. He was standing with his side to Dorso, looking away. He had a Colt revolver in his hand, and as Dorso watched—the image was only apparent for thirty seconds—Custer turned toward him.

That was when something happened that bothered Dorso. A lot. Dorso had seen many images, historical events, and famous people brought forward, and the same rule always applied. The paradox of time was called the grandfather rule. It said that you couldn't go back in time physically or affect time, because if that could happen you could go back and kill your own ancestor, and that would mean you wouldn't be able to exist to go back and kill your own ancestor, and so it couldn't be possible. The physics of time would not allow you to change time. Period. You could
not affect time; therefore, people or events from the past could be viewed but never altered. The people being viewed could never know they were being seen.

And that had always been the case for Dorso. Whatever he'd seen and done, the subjects had never been aware of him.

But now, as Custer turned, for a half a beat his eyes looked confused, as if he didn't know what was happening to him, and he looked directly at Dorso,
into
Dorso's eyes.

Dorso blinked. He had to be wrong. But no—Custer looked right at him, into his eyes, and had started to raise his hand when he was hit by a bullet and fell to one knee and then down on his side as the hologram faded.

“Custer looked at you?” Frank liked new things, different things, liked it when things out of the ordinary happened, but he was skeptical. “You mean his eyes just turned toward you. It was the battle, right? He was very busy. I've watched the battle several times, trying to get a good look at Crazy Horse. There are no pictures of him, you know. He wouldn't allow it. And the tech censors threw a block on him because they felt he would want it that way. So you can't get a good picture of him. But I know that he came up over the back of the hill and might even have been the man who shot Custer, and I thought the blocking committee might have missed him because they wouldn't know he was there but I was wrong—”

“No.” Dorso shook his head. They were sitting on his front porch. Dorso's parents both worked, and he and his six-year-old sister, Darling (yes, that was really her name, and as far as Dorso was concerned she was about as darling as a wolverine, and twice as destructive), were latchkey kids. Dorso watched her each evening until his parents came home, and it was a full-time job. Right now she was chasing the neighbors' cat across the yard, holding a doll
dress in one hand and a teacup on the other. She periodically tried to dress the cat in doll clothes and make it sit at tea parties or picnics. The cat didn't like it. At all.

“Custer looked at me. He saw me. He was bewildered and he looked into my eyes….”

“Not
into
them,” Frank said. “
At
them. Or in the general direction of them. And of course he was bewildered. He had just made the biggest mistake of his life, and every Native American in the world was about to ride over him and they were
mad
boy, were they mad. But he couldn't have looked at you. Not really— Oh, look, she caught the cat. She's dressing him. I think that might be the record. Usually the cat makes it harder. Remember last time how he took her up that elm in the backyard and across the clothesline before she caught him on top of Emerson's Buick? The cat must be getting old. Or else he's giving up….”

“Frank, quit changing the subject. I'm having a problem here and I need your help.”

Frank turned from Darling back to Dorso. “You don't have a problem, you just
think
you do. You're imagining things. Come on, you know the time paradox as well as me. You can't go back and change time because it could make you not be here.”

Dorso nodded but then shook his head. “No, wait. We just
think
we can't mess with time. But how do we know that?”

“Because they figured it out, that's why.”

“Who?”

“What do you mean, ‘who'?”

“Who told us that?”

“Scientists, math guys, people who play with numbers. The time freaks. The same goons who put in all the time blocks so we couldn't look at naked wom—so we couldn't study anatomy. That's who.”

“But what— Darling don't unscrew the cat's head that way, it'll come off. What if they're wrong?”

“The time freaks?”

“Sure. Look, all this is new. Maybe they think you can't go back and change time, but all these theories have been just that, theories. Nobody ever thought we'd be able to go back and look at Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount, but now we can.”

“Yeah. It's great. And who thought He'd turn out to be that color?”

“I'm just saying what if all those guys are wrong and somebody has figured out how to go back and mess with time?”

“Look at that! I never would have guessed you could tie a knot in a cat's tail that way to tuck it up under the dress. And look at him just sitting there. Isn't that cute?”

“It's because he's terrified. Last time she gave him a bath when he fought her. He really doesn't like the whole bath thing. The soap hurt his eyes and he smelled like bubble bath for a month and the alley cat that comes through once a month on his rounds thought he was a sissy and cleaned his clock and you're changing the subject again.”

“Because you're nuts, Dorso. Let's try to look at what you're saying in a rational way.”

“When,” Dorso asked, “have you ever been rational?”

“This isn't about me. It's about you. And what you're
trying to say is that someone, somewhere, some genius who is smarter than anybody in the whole world has ever been, someone with the giant intellect it would take to conquer the time paradox has done it, and is using it—get this now—is using it to play practical jokes on a twelve-year-old kid. Is that what you're really saying?”

“Well, when you put it that way …”

“And you call
me
irrational?”

Dorso studied his sister on the lawn for a moment. The cat was sitting quietly in the doll dress at a little table, looking across the table at Darling as if waiting for a cup of tea and a scone. I wonder, Dorso thought, if a cat would eat a scone, and what is a scone? “Still, there's something weird going on.”

“I think what's weird is you. You're imagining things and making them real in your mind.”

“I'm not imagining the body in my locker or all the dead frogs, and I'm not imagining Custer looking at me either. He looked right into my eyes.”

Frank shook his head. “And through you, out the other side. He was looking through you at all the Indians coming down on him, and that's
all
it was. You've got to relax. I tell you what—this weekend let's have a history marathon. We'll go back and see all the battles of the Civil War—not the whole battles, just the high spots; all the charges.…”

But Dorso wasn't listening. It didn't matter what Frank thought or said; there was definitely something very strange happening, and he couldn't help thinking that it wasn't over yet.

His name was Ludwig van Beethoven. In his own opinion, he was the greatest composer who had ever lived and indeed might be the greatest who ever
would
live.

And he was angry.

Of course, if you spoke to anybody who knew him, knew of him, had ever met him or had even been in the same room with him, you would find that he was
always
angry.

Indeed, he sometimes thought anger was the force that drove him.

And right now he was furious. He made his way through the streets of Vienna on foot
—
on his
feet
and not in a coach, by all that was holy!—to tutor an addlebrained young girl who didn't know the first thing about music, simply because he was almost penniless again and her father was rich enough to pay handsomely for her to hammer away at a pianoforte while Ludwig pretended to teach her.

Stupid! Not the girl, all of it. Well, he thought, the girl too.

And for nothing. Time wasted, life wasted, thought wasted and all for nothing except a few coins when he should be in the middle of his own music.