She looked at Dane and thought she saw a ray of hope. She could tell he believed it and yet … he’d thought of something. Yes, surelyhe’d thought of something! Dane, speak up! Tell me, tellthem!
He was listening, watching, thinking.
She asked, “Does it have to happen?”
Parmenter had come across a writing pad and scribbled on it, apparently organizing his answers even as he spoke them. “Inexorable equilibrium. Theoretically, the universe must return to normal anyway. It can’t stay stretched forever. That’s the fatal flaw in all of this.”
Moss inserted, “It’s conceivable that the space-time distortion could last longer than your lifetime, meaning you would never retrace before you died naturally.”
“But the administrators and financiers of this project aren’t going to wait that long, not by any stretch of the imagination. They want the Machine back.”
“They would really do that?” Mandy asked.
“They would do that.” Parmenter prepared a moment, then said, “We told you about Dr. Kessler, and you recall meeting her in the hallway …”
“Did she take her life?” Mandy took Kessler’s note from her pocket and handed it to him.
Parmenter read it and nodded. “She did, earlier today. She knew what would become of you but she couldn’t stop it. I’m afraid Moss and I can’t stop it either. A moral argument doesn’t hold much weight against ‘matters of national security.’ But please …” He looked at Dane.
Dane laid his hand upon hers. “Before we despair, there might— might—be an alternative.”
Don’t tell me. There is a next thing?
Parmenter put down his pen and searched his mind for the right way to begin. “You recall, of course, your encounter with two thugs when you had the flat tire?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall”—he stopped, struggling for the question—“what your mental processes might have been immediately afterward?”
“My mental … I’m not sure what you’re asking.”
Dane said, “Remember running across my pasture, trying to get away from Clarence?”
She fervently wished she could. “I don’t remember anything after they gave me that shot. I just remember waking up on your couch.”
Parmenter pressed it. “You don’t remember any kind of interdimensional transference, any contact with another timeline?”
Her mind was a blank. “No.”
“No … longing, reaching, whatever it is you do to influence the Machine?”
Dane pitched in, “Right before I looked out my window and saw you running across my pasture, I saw you in my house.”
Now, this was news. She wrinkled her brow and stared at him.
He continued, “Only, you were”—now he stumbled—“you were … older, the way you were before the accident.”
“You don’t remember that?” asked Parmenter, and then he shook his head at himself. “Well, how can you? It hasn’t happened yet.”
Mandy was frustrated. “Guys, try to make sense.”
Parmenter regrouped with a little clap of his hands. “Okay. Here’s my theory on this. Before all this began, before we started adding timelines, before anyone or anything was reverted, you had your timeline and the Machine had its timeline, and at that point everything was in balance, no space-time distortion. So the point is, if we dissolve all timelines secondary to the original two—yours and the Machine’s—there would be no stress on the space-time fabric, and the two timelines would play themselves out in the natural order of things. It would be as if we never tampered with them.”
“Which would be wonderful—for the universe.”
Parmenter pointed his index finger upward, “Ahhh, but … but! Dane saw you in his home in Idaho at the age of fifty-nine afterthe accident, which suggests to me that somehow, in some way, you will exist as your chronologically correct self, intact and alive, subsequent to the accident, which suggests that somehow, in some way, you managed to circumvent the accident, and there’s only one way I know of to do that and still allow the universe to remain in balance with no additional timelines.”
Then he waited as if they might guess. They didn’t. “Trade timelines. You take the Machine’s timeline, it takes yours. It plays out your timeline and burns up, you play out its timeline and live out your life with the man you love— ifthe theory is sound, that is.”
“But … why wouldn’t it be sound?” she said to Dane, “You saw me alive in your house.”
Parmenter countered, “All of this is theoretical, entirely contingent. Dane seeing you in his house—your house, the house—is one outcome that flashed through given the conditions at the time. Anything could change, any outcome could result.”
“No promises, in other words.”
“No, but if it didhappen as Dane saw it, then it couldhappen if we can replicate it. Now, admittedly, there are problems. For one thing, the trade would mean the destruction of the Machine, which the other scientists and the government guys will never allow, which is almost moot in light of a bigger problem. The interdimensional mass of the Machine, that part of the Machine actually straddling time dimensions, is”—he scribbled it as he said it—“one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. And how much do you weigh?”
“A hundred and eight pounds.”
“You see the problem.”
“Not yet.”
“It’s like a pair of scales, like a teeter-totter. If you’re going to trade timelines, the trade has to be weight for weight, mass for mass, the same on both sides, an even trade, and you don’t weigh one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds. That’s a lot of candy bars.” He rested his head on his hand. “Oh, and there’s another problem: in order to force the trade, to make the Machine bump from its timeline to yours, yours would have to be the only other timeline available, which means we would have to dissolve your secondary timeline, the one you’re living on right now, so that you fall back into your original, but of course, should you do that, you’ll immediately retrace the original and come to your original end, the, uh, you’ll perish, uh, in a fire.”
She looked at Dane again. She could tell he was reallythinking, his fist propped under his nose, his eyes like steel.
“Oh, and there’s still the other problem,” Parmenter continued. “The mental state, the reach, the method you used to generate that momentary linger on the Machine’s timeline—that would be the moment you appeared in Dane’s home as, uh, yourself. Whatever you did, however you felt, whatever method you used, it was an incredible fluke, an accident, but it put you ahead in time.” He scurried over to the command console and came back with a three-ring binder full of notes and computer printouts. “I got the exact time and location of your appearance from Dane and extrapolated backward—well, actually, extrapolated the Machine forward in computer simulation, but at any rate, the readings show a major deflection in the Machine’s timeline at that point, meaning an incursion of another timeline into its own. Ifthe theory were sound, and ifyou’d weighed one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds at that point, and ifyou’d occupied only your original timeline, you could have bumped the Machine from its timeline to yours and taken its place. You could have done it—if you had any idea how.” He calmed, looking at his notes. “But, of course, you didn’t weigh one thousand, six hundred and thirty-two pounds, you were occupying multiple timelines at the time and had no idea how you were doing what you were doing, and so … here you sit. Which brings us to the last problem.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. It’s just the last one I can think of at the moment.”
“Go ahead.”
“Your reversion, which we still don’t understand, and all the manipulations you’ve imposed on the Machine since then have rendered it … well, it’s all messed up, okay? We can’t make any of this work until we recalibrate it, and we can’t do that until we know the exact extent of your reversion, where you went and when you got there.”