Time and Time Again

John Buentello and Lawrence Buentello

Rubinsky dropped the clipboard onto the director’s desk and sighed. The room was a little warmer than usual, owing to the fact that its chief occupant wasn’t human; he should have been human—that is, the previous day he had been human, a mousy little man named Stevens whose protracted overbite was no small impediment to communication. But today the director stood slightly less than ten feet tall and had a multitude of very sharp teeth in place of an overbite. He thought it might be a species of ornithomimosaur, if he recalled his dinosaur families correctly, but he couldn’t be certain. The dinosaur/director whipped his long tail in the air and brushed at a large, luminous eye with a foreclaw.

“Really, Dale,” the dinosaur said, picking at the papers on the clipboard, “you need a vacation. Coming into my office with a story like that—have you been eating bad eggs or something?”

“Dr. Stevens—”

“Stevens?” the director hissed. “My name isn’t Stevens. You know that. It’s Granoozla. By any chance, have you been drinking?”

Rubinsky pulled his white lab coat around himself, feeling a sudden chill.

“Dr. Granoozla,” he said, “I understand this may sound crazy from your perspective, but it’s absolutely real.”

Granoozla sat in an oversized chair, his tail sliding through a large hole in the spine. His long jaw clapped together thoughtfully.

“Alright, run it by me again.”

Rubinsky took a deep breath.

He said, “At exactly eight o’clock this morning I initiated the phase one sequence of the time dilation device I’ve been laboring over for the last five years. Those papers on your desk are the equations I produced for the theoretical application of time currents in historical research. The device itself was the product of experimental engineering we’ve been conducting for the last ten years.”

“Dale, we’ve been studying the influence of genetic engineering on breadfruit production for the last ten years. What’s this about time?”

“It used to be a physics lab.”

“It’s always been a bioengineering lab.”

Rubinsky sighed again.

“In any case, the theory that alternate time streams run concurrently through the space fabric is correct. In fact, their parameters are so tightly interwoven that any cross-correlations—any time splicing, for want of a better term—produces decidedly unwanted effects.”

“Such as?”

“Such as you. Sir.”

“I don’t quite understand. Are you telling me that I’m not supposed to be here?”

“Well, not here, here. If you understand my meaning. When I activated the dilator I expected to reach across time to view a history of the world. The device works by focusing the time stream through a small leptonic lens. Picking up pieces of things from time, as it were. My initial calculations indicated that the various streams themselves were widely spaced, so I used a rather liberal power stream. The streams, as I said, are not widely spaced, they’re very thinly spaced, so the dilator seems to have reached across several layers of time streams and brought them back all together.”

“Let me guess—resulting in the integration of disparate time streams, correct?”

Rubinsky raised his eyebrows. “Yes, that’s very astute.”

“Thank you. But what you’re saying is nuts. I’ve been director of this department for fifteen years, I didn’t just swim in from New Cerasopolis this morning. You, Dale, have been ingesting ill-bred mushrooms.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.

“By the way, what’s a leptonic lens?”

“A means of accessing parallel particles using leptons.”

“What’s a lepton?”

“Never mind.”

“Does it have anything to do with breadfruit?”

“At this point, I wish it did. The problem is not the effect. The problem is the after-effect, which seems to be holding constant. The streams crossed at this point in time, at this focus of time, and I can’t seem to get them unfocused.”

“Sounds like a problem.”

“Yes, Dr. Ste—yes, Dr. Granoozla.”

Granoozla swiped his long, purple tongue over his snout sympathetically.

“Even if all this is true,” the ornithomimosaur said, “what in the world do you expect me to do about it?”

“I was hoping for an insightful suggestion or two.”

“Have you tried deactivating the device?”

“Yes, but that’s not the problem. The dilator seems to have knitted the time streams together. And I don’t know how to reverse it.”

“Have you tried asking a priest to exorcise it?”

“Beg pardon?”

Granoozla shook his large head sadly.

“Why would you possibly want to construct such a device in the first place?”

“Scientific curiosity, of course,” Rubinsky said, surprised that he would even have to explain his motives. “Any discovery that improves our understanding of the universe is worth the effort to achieve it.”

“Hence the breadfruit.”

“But this is pure research.”

“Take the rest of the day off, Dale. Get some rest. I’d hate to see our best breadfruit man locked up in a padded room.”

Rubinsky pondered his situation as he slowly paced the hallways of the basement laboratories, his hands held behind his back, his head staring down at the shining tile floor. If Stevens was now a dinosaur, and Rubinsky was still Rubinsky, what was the reason why he maintained his own perspective of reality? Something about the timelines themselves must have been at play—perhaps when the streams overlapped through the lens the principles involved shuffled together like a deck of cards. That seemed the most logical conclusion; and yet, he couldn’t help feeling that some other factor was in play.

Abruptly he stopped pacing when a gigantic beetle crawled into his field of vision. He continued staring down on the thing, nonplussed. The beetle had the mass of a good-sized tortoise, and it flexed its wings beneath a small lab coat before twitching its mandibles.

“Rough day, Dale?” the beetle said.

Rubinsky stared at the creature a moment longer before replying.

“You could say that.”

“Is it that chitin project of yours?”

“No, actually, it’s—” He remembered his conversation with Granoozla and recalibrated his strategy. “It’s something else I’ve been working on. Times streams. Using time streams to access the past.”

“Why in the world would you want to access the past?”

“Curiosity, I guess.”

“To each his own. But the chitin project is where the grants are. I’ve always been impressed with your work. Your theories on aspiration are fascinating. The postulation that because of atmospheric changes we might evolve into tiny versions of ourselves is absorbing stuff.”

Rubinsky blinked several times at the twitching beetle.

“Yes, I’ve always found that fascinating, too,” he said. “But back to the time streams.”

“Yes?”

“Theoretically, just theoretically, mind you, if you found that you’d inadvertently joined parallel time streams together so their unique qualities were spilling over into one another, what do you think the best way would be to reverse the effect?”

The beetle batted its multifaceted eye with one of its six legs.

“Well,” it said, “the first thing I’d do is to analyze any data I collected when the streams were joined. That might give me a clue.”

Rubinsky brightened.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, there very well may be some value in that.”

“Glad to be of service, Dale.”

Rubinsky carefully stepped past the anonymous beetle—who was actually very bright for an insect—and slipped into his office.

Before accessing the reams of data sitting on his desk, he paused a moment to study the odd construction of the furniture. That morning it had all been of the sort designed for the human anatomy. Now he couldn’t tell what anatomy it was supposed to accommodate. His chair was much wider than normal, with an undulating seat that seemed far too uncomfortable for sitting; the arms were much higher, too, and twice as long. What in the world is supposed to sit in this? he thought. He moved the chair away from the desk and stood over his papers.

But after an hour of study he couldn’t quite see why the streams had become inextricably crossed, or what he could do to uncross them. The principle was simple: the leptonic lens was only supposed to scan the depth of the current time stream which Rubinsky called his own—any other theoretical time streams were thought to be entirely inaccessible. In fact, the original calculations indicated that each stream was so expansive that the only temporal reality the device could possibly detect was the time stream from which it originated.

But the post-experiment equations were clear—line after line of quantified time squeezed through the lens, leaving a trail of nearly identical quanta fields occupying the same focus in the space fabric in that small area of the universe. For wont of a few decimal places, the universe had become a very crowded place.

The device had only been activated for a minute, and now lay dormant in the basement laboratory. Surely it couldn’t have kept the effect viable after losing power.

Despite the beetle’s advice, he found himself all out of answers.

He inadvertently sat back into the oversized chair and immediately regretted his absentmindedness. Yes, it was definitely not designed for the human anatomy. He struggled to free himself, and then had an inspired thought.

Perhaps the answer lay in the streams themselves; if he studied the streams he might be able to detect where they crossed, and then possibly find a way to uncross them. He winced, rubbed his tailbone and left the office.

When he entered his laboratory he found all the working materials resized to fit insectoid dimensions. With the help of a shed carapace left in one corner of the lab, though, he was able to decipher which tools were made for what purpose and fashioned a handset (or mandible set, he wasn’t entirely certain) that displayed the time streams measured by the dilator. The glowing streams on the viewer, however, appeared for all purposes like the inside of a lava lamp.

All he had to do was find a spot where the streams crossed.

The focus of the various time streams was surely in the basement where his device lay, but there was so much radiation being given off by the equipment that the screen merely registered unreadable static. Perhaps if he moved a little further away from the dilator he’d find a point where the streams began to intersect and discern a coherent pattern.

Rubinsky cautiously left the building and wandered out into the world.

It was a much-changed landscape. There were few vehicles on the streets, and those present seemed oddly proportioned. Most of the population crawled, skittered, slithered or slid toward their destinations. He looked up at one point to see a sky filled with buzzing wings and shiny, suspended carapaces. Fortunately the streets themselves were relatively unchanged, and the buildings, although their dimensions were altered to fit the girth of giant insects, were almost identical to the ones he knew.

He found it odd that there were no dinosaurs present. Surely the time streams that crossed in the lab would have some played-out effect this close to it. He was about to ask a huge Stiretrus anchorago—or stink bug—if it had seen any dinosaurs about when the static on his handset suddenly focused into a knot of green light.

“Cool player you got there,” the stink bug said. Only it wasn’t a stink bug anymore. It had changed instantaneously into a huge chunk of muscovite.

He glanced down at the glowing knot of the time streams, if indeed that was what he was looking at, and back to the huge chunk of yellow-green mineral. Certainly the evolutionary tract that the stink bug had followed couldn’t have ended in this mass of hexagonal crystal. While he was mourning this waste of evolutionary time, he noticed that one of the crystal faces of the muscovite, about a foot and a half in length, shined with a pearly luster. Rubinsky, a closet geologist since he was five years old, reached up to try to wrench the crystal free from its base.

“Hey!” The six-foot slab of translucent silicate teetered away from Rubinsky’s grasp. “Why’d you go and poke my eye?”

Rubinsky glanced at the knot on the screen. This was quite impossible. Forgetting for the moment that crossing time streams was itself improbable, how in the world of Albert Einstein could a particular stream have played itself out to the point where the evolutionary path of earthly creatures concluded in a rocky monolith?

As he surveyed the once-again altered landscape he observed slabs of limestone, sheets of mica, spars of gypsum, cubes of platinum, and conglomerates of quartz rolling, tumbling, falling, and avalanching around him, on their way to wherever sentient rocks and minerals ambled off to. He watched as sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic forms of life filled a volatile landscape.

“If I stepped on your space, I apologize,” the muscovite mass said. “But the strata is for everyone, you know.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Rubinsky said, tapping the glowing screen. “Rocks can’t be sentient. Certainly I’ve heard all the scientific babble about mineral-based forms of life, but come on!”

He kicked absently at a pebble near his foot. It yipped and skipped away.

“Come to think of it,” he said to himself, “how did insects become an acceptable route of evolution?”

“Maybe you’re not peering through the right crystal,” the mineral monolith replied, shedding flakes of itself. “Take this eye of mine. It’s real opaque, see—”

Rubinsky rushed past his stony acquaintance, passing by a light-hearted group of pumice frothily discussing the latest eruption and a stunning gold nugget trying to convince its silver companions that it was not, in fact, a lump of iron pyrite. He kept his eyes on the energy knot on the screen.

Strangely then, the light on the screen wavered and coalesced into a massive lump of pulsing light. The knot seemed Gordian in its complexity, and he was about to try to fathom its meaning when a voice lightly touched the base of his skull and whispered, “Don’t bother.”

Rubinsky looked up, expecting to see a picayune slab of marble or chatty slice of gneiss, but instead beheld a blob of something that looked much like what his old cat Newton used to choke up on his living room carpet before making for mouse holes unknown. He detected a certain scent that was reminiscent of tarred roofs and felt his stomach roll.

“Well!” the entity that phased laterally and vertically in front of him ‘said’ inside Rubinsky’s mind. “I’ve never quite heard that description of myself before.” It turned slightly crimson in color and added, “You’re no prize yourself, you know.”

He felt a flash of shame at his thoughts. “Sorry.”

“Yes, you are,” said the cloud of light, or plasma, or jelly-like substance not unlike the phlegm Rubinsky had coughed up the time he’d caught an infectious virus that made its way into his lungs—

“Stop thinking those things!” the cloud said. “And I’m not a cloud. I’m a professor with Ph.D. degrees in applied physics, quantum physics, mathematics, and folklore of non-mitotic cultures, and all you can come up to describe my appearance is a cloud?”

“I was going to think phase shift quantum packets next,” Rubinsky replied.

“Well, you’re wrong. I’m more like a protoplasmic hyper-colloidal mass, so there.”

“My apologies,” he said. Glancing again at the screen on his handset, he inquired, “Are you yet another representation of a possible evolutionary future?”

“I am called Lint,” the voice said. “And no, I’m not the juvenile version of some vastly superior non-corporeal intellect that’s going to mess with your head, so stop thinking that. I am, however, a representative of the ultimate temporal development of what you seem to think of as amoeba, or at least the most advanced possibility of one. I am the top of the evolutionary heap, Dale. And let me tell you, your time dilemma is a nasty one.”

Rubinsky said, somewhat awed, “How do you know me and my predicament?”

“I have telepathic abilities beyond your understanding, and because I do I can perceive what you perceive to be reality. And you should be totally awed, not somewhat. I am an entity that can fathom the most complex and penetrating questions that have never been asked or will ever be asked.”

“But if they’ll never be asked, how could you possibly—”

“I just can, all right?” The super-intelligent entity glowed a hot blue. “And as for coming across representations of the future of earthly evolution, well, I would have thought you’d have ascertained that by now. The answer to your problem is as plain as the worry lines on your face.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have to think in simpler terms, Dale.”

Does every superior intelligence have to speak in riddles? Rubinsky thought peevishly.

“No, we don’t,” the mass said stiffly. “But after solving the riddles of the universe, what else is there to do to pass the time?”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“And miss out on the fun of taunting an inferior creature? I didn’t attend all those classes on Advanced Abstraction for nothing.”

“Look, I’m pretty desperate here. Through my experiments I’ve accidentally locked time streams, and now I have to find a way to unlock them. It’s a pretty straightforward dilemma.”

“Unless your basic assumption is incorrect.”

“What do you mean?”

“Again, simply telling you would be the boring methodology.”

“I like boring!” Rubinsky roared. “As far as the scientific method is concerned, boring is the preferred emotion. Just tell me, for pity’s sake!”

“Well,” Lint said quietly, “if you want to be rude about things. My wager would be that your particular evolutionary line will never make it to our level of achievement if all you’re concerned about is propriety. But despite your discourteousness, I have decided to help you anyway.”

Rubinsky tried to shield the unpleasant epithets forming in his mind.

“Thank you,” he said as calmly as possible. “Now, how do I disconnect the time streams?”

“You don’t,” Lint said, flashing an amused magenta. “It’s not the time streams that are crossed.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s a common denominator you’ve completely overlooked.”

He beetled his brow and glanced down at the handset. But when he looked up again the hyper-colloidal mass had vanished, as had the slightly undulating gelatinous landscape.

Rubinsky sat on a long, slatted bench in the center of a lush park across from the laboratory building. The bench wasn’t so much a bench as a long conical trellis on which he managed to perch. Next to him, luxuriating in the sunlight, an intricate bundle of leafy vines sat praising the lovely weather. The vines weren’t vines so much as localized sentient vegetation; as odd as it seemed to be conversing with a house plant, though, it was a fairly spirited conversationalist. He had no idea that the love life of arugula was so complex, or that melons had such loose morals.

“So the blob told me that my basic assumption was incorrect,” he said, inhaling the oxygen-rich air. “But my basic assumption is verified by observation alone. If I’m not observing varying time streams, what am I actually seeing?”

“What is ‘seeing’?” the vines said, chiefly by fluttering specialized leaves to produce coherent sounds. “Do you mean the vibration sense?”

“Sure, the vibration sense.”

“Then you should have said, ‘the vibration sense’.”

“All right, all right. The vibration sense has shown me the variations in time stream evolution alone. That much is irrefutable. How can my assumptions be incorrect?”

“That, my friend, is a fairly simple exercise in logic. You’ve drawn a conclusion from irrefutable evidence. The evidence is irrefutable, therefore your conclusion must be incorrect. Find another assumption that’s also supported by the evidence.”

Rubinsky leaned back in thought, nearly losing his balance. The proceedings of the morning were still fresh in his mind. He’d stood by the dilator, a pair of dark goggles over his eyes, watching the device’s display as the leptonic lens strobed out across the time streams and recorded the data. It was a simple matter of activating the device, monitoring the displays and making slight adjustments to the lens as the acquisition of the data fluctuated in intensity. Only one instance of variation occurred—when he reached out to lay his hand on the tubular chassis of the dilator as he leaned in for an unobstructed view of the lens—

“You don’t suppose that could have been the catalyst, do you?” he asked the vines.

“What’s this about a catalyst?”

At this fluttering exclamation, the vines relaxed against the slats, spreading out and intertwining their cordons through the empty spaces.

His eyes widened at the vines’ meditative exercise, and he finally understood. Just as the cordons of the vines were woven through the slats—

“The time streams aren’t crossed,” he said, exhilarated. “I’m crossed through the time streams!”

“Eureka!” the vines muttered, though more facetiously than in a caring manner. “Now will you please be quiet so I can absorb some rays?”

Rubinsky left the vines to their sunning as he hurried into the building and down to the laboratory.

Through some inexplicable evolutionary twist the machinery now seemed proportioned for someone half his size, but after dropping to his knees in a weird form of scientific supplication he was able to activate the monitors on the dilator to display the data of the morning’s experiment. There, in plain sight, was the slight fluctuation in intensity that accounted for his ill-placed hand. He’d seen it only as another focusing issue of the lens itself. But now he was certain that in some way he had been strung across every time stream the lens had accessed.

Relieved that he hadn’t ruined time for a multitude of universes, yet worried that the effect might not be reversible, he studied the data for any sign of reversibility. If he’d somehow become locked into multiple streams, why shouldn’t the same process unlock him? It was certainly possible. All he had to do was lay his hand across the dilator’s chassis in precisely the same location as he had originally and localize the focus of the lens to view only his originating time stream—

But as he was just about to do just that the thought occurred to him—fairly ran roughshod over his psyche—that he was in perhaps the most unique position of any scientist in the history of creation, in any universe. Dr. Dale Rubinsky was a living, breathing, organic recorder of a multiplicity of evolutionary lines of Earth. Surely no one else was ever in the same position of scientific research—and, if the effect couldn’t be replicated, perhaps no one ever would be again. Before he activated the dilator, perhaps it would be wise—perhaps it would be the purely scientific response—to spend a little more time investigating the streams accessed by the lens. After all, he seemed to be surviving just fine in every permutation of earthly evolution he’d experienced. What harm could it do to study a few more evolutionary lines?

And only a few minutes after he’d left the building, as a loquacious android shaped like a large gyroscope rolled up next to him to ask him directions to the Church of the Immaculate Processor, he knew he’d made the right decision.