Unhappenings (43 page)

I caught my breath for a moment, pushing past the queasy feeling that I almost inadvertently cloned myself.

“But I didn’t do anything like that in 2092. There shouldn’t be any extra Nigels out there at all.”

“I know,” she said. “We’re still trying to determine exactly how this happened. The most likely explanation is that your future self somehow colluded with your past self, but we don’t know how he did that without you remembering it.” She put her hand on my knee. “The important part is that you can’t go back. There are too many ways you could injure the timeline.”

I took this in. All of it. Wrapped in this new and disturbing side effect to the technology that had become the driving force in my life was a spectacular silver lining. My parents wouldn’t need to lose me. A Nigel, a real Nigel, would continue to be their son. With any luck he would play out to be less of a disappointment. Perhaps not even be plagued by the same unhappenings. I would miss them, terribly, but they would still have a son, and that might be enough for me.

But even better, the last shackle holding me back from a life with Helen had just snapped in my mind. She was immune to my unhappenings, and now I was free to stay in her time. It was very easy to step back and take this in as the best news ever. And as I looked at my daughter, the daughter I now knew Helen and I could have without some dire peril to the universe, the other silver lining presented itself.

“I’m okay with that,” I said. “Not going back means I get to raise you.” I gave her my best happy father face. She smiled, but there was an odd hesitation to it.

“Yeah,” she said simply. Her gaze tracked back to the young father, burping his son, laughing.

“Yeah,” I said.

n a sunny weekend in June, I took Helen back to the aquarium. Our first time here had been an emergency vacation day, with me in terrible need of a distraction. This time it was simple recreation. There were no immediate or obvious crises on our doorstep, nothing had unhappened in a while, and I had recently learned that my stay in this future was to be permanent. Helen received that news with equal parts sympathy and self-interested relief. When I told her the sympathy was unnecessary, the relief overflowed.

We took our time meandering through the different sections. I got us tickets to the dolphin show, which we missed last time, and against her protests insisted that we sit well outside the splash zone. When we got to the ray tank, her eyes lit up again. The moment wasn’t entirely as magical as in our first trip here, but it still served quite nicely. After giving her a minute or so of quiet absorption with that look of wonder on her face that never got old for me, I loudly cleared my throat.

She turned to find me on my knee.

“Oh my God. Nigel, what are you doing?” She was blushing, a rarity for her, which I found entertaining in a way I would never, ever admit.

“Helena Clay,” I began, “from the moment I met you in your black biker jacket, I have known I wanted to spend my life with you. You have given me support when no one else could, even before you understood what it was for. I have learned more from you than I have from anyone or any experience in my life. No one in the world makes me laugh the way you do, and I am utterly, utterly in love with you.” I produced a small box from my pocket and opened it. “Helen, will you marry me?”

She was biting her knuckle, and it was entirely unclear whether she was holding back tears, laughter, or both. “Really?” she said finally. “The stingray tank?”

“It was this or the Ferris wheel, and the carnival isn’t in town.”

“Get up,” she said. I complied. She held her hand out. I gave her the box. She removed the ring, and looking at it, not me, she handed the box back. She held it up to her right eye, and watched the rays do their ballet through it.

Then she slipped it on her finger, and threw her arms around me. Only when the applause began did I realize how many people had gathered to watch us.

n a Wednesday morning in early July, as had been the case with the Slinky Probe discovery, my time travel breakthrough happened entirely by accident. I had been experimenting with the wrist modules, specifically seeing how they responded to being sent into the future in the chamber, rather than under their own power. I had no idea what I expected to see from this, but any measurable difference between their state after a jump on their own and an externally induced jump might give me something to work with.

The accident happened when I got the two modules confused. After this incident, I marked one with an X in felt-tip. But at that moment, they were indistinguishable.

Stage one of the experiment was to send one of the modules one minute into the future on its own. I did so, and recorded every observable measurement of the effects on both the device and the character of the jump field. Stage two was to send that module one minute into the future by strapping it to the other one. Again, lots of measurements, negligible differences. Stage three was to send the module one minute into the future in the chamber. I meant to send the same module I had used in stage one and deactivated for stage two, but, as I said, I mixed them up.

The module which was still active and already set for a one minute forward jump was placed in the chamber, which was also set for a one minute forward jump. If I had been doing this deliberately, my best guess at a result would have been a single jump two minutes forward. I would have been wrong. When I activated the chamber, the module just sat there. There was no visual evidence that anything had happened at all. The jump field meters told a fantastically different story. The strength of the field was the square of what it would have been for a single one minute jump, and it was generating a standing wave in a form I had not yet observed, nor had anyone in the literature I spent the next two days combing through. I had discovered a means of creating a powerful jump field whose net influence was absolutely zero.

Which meant, I desperately hoped, I had found a means of cancelling the unhappening effect.

hen Helen came home that day, the modules were on our dining room table.