Текст книги "The Accidental Time Machine"

Автор книги: Joe William Haldeman

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But this might not be so bad. Marsh noted that Matt had been given a doctorate by MIT, and a professorship in the chronophysics department.

Maybe he’d get the girl, too. He scanned the bleachers for Kara—but of course she’d be over forty now, and might look quite different. There was a front row of seats occupied by people who must have been of some importance, but that might not include ex-girlfriends who had betrayed the guest of honor.

His throat suddenly tightened when he realized that his mother wasn’t there.

People were applauding. Marsh had asked him up to say a few words.

He stood up and fainted.

9

The doctor said it was a combination of extremefatigue and the succession of shocks. They kept him under observation for twenty-four hours anyhow. Candled his head and didn’t find anything surprising.

He had a large single room on the top floor of MIT Medical. He could see the Green Building from his window. Way too many flowers; he had a sneezing fit and asked a nurse to take them out.

He was facing the corner of the Green Building from which students had conducted the Great Piano Drop his first year of graduate school. Three in the morning, they had pushed an ancient, out-of-tune player piano off the top, thirty floors up, along with a speaker system. It played a few distressing seconds of a complex Mozart tune on the way down.

Matt was out of bed and dressed when Marsh came to visit the next morning. Tweeds suited him better than a blue tuxedo. “Sorry about all that brouhaha,” he said. “They’ve been anticipating your return for some time.” He sat down heavily.

“Are you all right, sir?” His normally ruddy face was pale.

“Up too late. A man my age should know when to stop celebrating.” He smiled broadly, teeth too perfect to be real. “But that was quite a day. You should have seen the car materialize, right then and right there.”

“I’m surprised you could predict the time and place so accurately.”

“I’ll go over the math with you. Or have Dr. Lewis do it; he knows it better.”

“That would be StromLewis?”

“Yes, of course. He was a student of yours when you were a TA, wasn’t he?” And took his job and stole his girl, incidentally.

“Sure. How’s he doing?”

“All right. Assistant professorship, tenure. Has a family, I believe.”

“Oh. How nice.”

Marsh paused. He was not completely clueless. “You outrank him, of course. Honorary full professor, and tenure is, um . . .” He waved it away with one hand. “You’re the safest person in the department. After me, perhaps.”

“So I’ll be teaching . . . not chronophysics.”

“No, no, not yet. You have some catching up to do. We have you penciled in for 8.225.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“It’s an introduction to old modern physics—‘Physics of the Twentieth Century’—you know, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman.”

“Twentieth century?” Marsh nodded. “Jesus!”

“A lot has happened in physics since you disappeared,” he said. “ Becauseyou disappeared. There are even aspects of Newtonian mechanics that have to be reconsidered. String theory’s completely rewritten, and with it, quantum mechanics and relativity—moving toward a Grand Unified Theory, finally.

“These past fifteen years have seen a total revolution. People compare it to the 1920s, after Einstein’s bombshell.”

“So I have some studying to do.”

“Quite a lot, I think.” He reached into his bag and brought out two books, one at a time: Aspects of Time Traveland Intermediate Chronophysics, both by himself. “You might want to look through this one first.” Aspects.“You’ll want to bone up on rings and algebras and topology for Intermediate.”

Rings and algebras? “What does set theory have to do with it? Topology?”

“I think you’ll find it an interesting approach. But do read the general treatment first.” He levered himself up out of the chair, wincing. “If you feel up to contributing, we’ll be having a press conference at noon. The big conference room on the fourth floor of the Green Building.”

“No harm in it. Not much to tell them.”

“See you there about 11:30, then. Think I’ll go have a little rest first.” He shook hands and shuffled away.

Matt was halfway through the book’s introduction when there was a tap on the door. “Mattie?” It was Kara, a little heavier, poised on the brink of middle age, still attractive in a short skirt and SPAMIT tee shirt—Stupid People at MIT, a select fraternity. Strom Lewis followed her in, not quite a young Turk anymore, salt-and-pepper in a short beard.

She giggled, hand in front of her mouth, then shrugged off her backpack and kissed him on the cheek. “You look so young!”

He couldn’t immediately come up with a tactful reply– “You look so old” wouldn’t be kind—so he just nodded.

“By God,” Strom said. “Was it like . . . I mean, did no time pass at all?”

“Less than a minute each time, each transition,” Matt said. “I was in Somerville yesterday, at the police department’s stolen automobile pound.”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Strom said. “That must have been pretty unpleasant.”

Did people know about the mysterious stranger with the million bucks’ bail? It had to be a matter of record. “What about when I came back for a few seconds on the express-way? Fifteen years ago. Was anybody hurt?”

They looked at each other. “There was a big pileup,” Kara said. “I don’t remember whether anyone was hurt or killed.”

“Well, yeah,” Strom said. “I’ve seen the cubes a hundred times. A pickup truck rolled, but I think the driver stayed inside—that’s right; you can see an air bag. Other cars banging around. One was a police ghost car, fortunately, so we had your appearance time down to the thousandth of a second, and with five or six different GPS readings, we could position you within a fraction of a millimeter.”

“So if I pushed the button now? Would I wind up in Arizona, or what?”

“Up by the New Hampshire border, I think, 177 years from now. Of course, no one’s going to push the button until we have a duplicate made.”

“Okay by me. Fifteen years is disorienting enough.”

“Oh, I brought you some stuff,” Kara said, and rummaged through her backpack. She brought out a stack of magazines and a thing like an old-fashioned iPod stick, but without wires. “Here.” She pulled a little red dot off the machine and pressed it onto his cheekbone. “I put some old music on it, too, but it’s mainly what young people are listening to. Your students’ ages.”

“Pure crap,” Strom said.

“No, it’s just different.” She did a shrug and a moue that hadn’t changed. “They look different, too.”

“Brands,” Matt said. “I’ve seen a few here.”

“And other kinds of scars. Not so much at MIT. It can be pretty extreme on the street.” She put the magazines on the rolling table by the bed. “You’ll want to look through these.”

Strom stood up. “Once you get settled, come on up to the office. Spend a few hours getting you up to speed on the math.”

“Yeah . . . I’ll Google around for a few days first, get my bearings.” Have to ask. “Um . . . does anybody know who bailed me out?”

“Bailed you out?”

“The first time I came back, after forty days?”

“Of course,” Strom said. “That’s when you sent the preliminary results to Dr. Marsh.”

“That’s right. I was in jail for causing a pileup on Mass Ave. A lawyer showed up with my bail, which he got from some anonymous stranger.”

Strom shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that. Could it have been Marsh?”

“No way. He was . . . sort of angry with me.”

“I remember,” Kara said. “He got my number somehow and called me. He thought you’d stolen the machine and disappeared. Of course you’d just—”

“But I left him a duplicate! Slogged down here in the snow to put it together. It didn’t travel through time, but it did supply one photon per chronon, which is what it was designed to do.”

“He must not have found it.”

“But I put it right where . . . I’ll take it up with him later today.” Could somebody have broken in and stolen it? Nobody would know of its importance.

Except perhaps a time traveler.

“Well, we’ll see you over at the press conference,” Strom said. “Come early. I heard Marsh talk to Maggie about the catering. It’s going to be a real blowout.”

“Sounds good. I’ll see about checking out of here.” He watched them go with mixed, not to say confused, feelings. Just a few days ago, they had destroyed his life. Now they were strangers and allies.

The suitcase in the closet was his, but most of the clothes hanging there were unfamiliar. Once they’d realized what had happened, the department had rented his old place, partly to keep it against his return and partly to see if there was any clue there to the machine’s anomalous behavior.

Most of the clothes he’d left behind had been ten years old already, and not too clean. Another fifteen years wouldn’t have helped.

It looked pretty warm out. He put on an unfamiliar tie and tweed jacket. Stroll through campus and check out the current crop of undergraduate girls. Brands and all.

The dispatcher at the main desk said that everything had been taken care of; he was free to go. An hour and a half before the press conference. Walk up to the Student Center and back, and get there just as the canapйs come out.

He was headed for the revolving door when the emergency doors next to it whooshed open. Two men and a woman rushed in guiding a gurney.

It was Professor Marsh, mouth open and eyes closed. They pushed him into a waiting elevator.

Matt went back to the dispatcher. “Is that Professor Marsh?”

“Was, I think.” He squinted at his computer screen. “Somebody found him in the Green Building, in his office. We had this team there for a big press conference; they got right to him. Too late, though.”

“Damn.”

“I saw him on TV last night,” the dispatcher said. “Too much excitement, I guess. You knew him?”

“A long time ago, yeah.”

“How old was he?”

“Sev—eighty-five or so. Closer to ninety.”

“That’s what I thought. Be a miracle if they can bring him back. Sorry.”

“Me, too.” Matt nodded. “Me, too.” He turned and headed for the other exit, toward the Green Building. Might as well see what was happening.

10

It was Marsh’s ascension into scientific sainthood and Matthew’s fifteen minutes of fame. The cover of Timehad Marsh brooding in a hyperrealistic painting by Fiona Wyeth—probably on file for years—against a ghostly background of clocks, where a wraithlike figure of Matt is stepping out of the mists of time.

The press had it all figured out. Matt wasn’t much more than an experimental animal, even though it was his clumsiness that had started it all. It was Marsh’s genius that had explained Matt’s accidental time machine.

But Matt could see that the Marsh Effect didn’t explain what happened in a definitive way. It really just described what the machine did. Then Marsh and others had tried, and were still trying, to twist physics around so that it allowed the machine to exist.

But it was as if physics had been a careful, elegant house of cards, then Marsh—or rather his earthly avatar, Matthew—had been a playful child who blundered into it and brought it down, not out of malice, but just by accident.

Now Matt, true to the analogy, sat in the middle of the mess, picking up one card and then another, trying to make sense out of it.

He came to the office every morning at nine and spent part of the day working on time travel and the rest trying to put together his course on antique physics. He had more than three months before classes started; if he’d been assigned the course back in his TA days, and there were no time machines to complicate things, he could’ve assembled the course in a few weeks. But ignoring the Marsh Effect would be like trying to conduct a class around an elephant sitting in the front row.

Marsh had been right in his warning that Matt would have to bone up on topology and the manipulations of algebras and rings—mathematical tools he’d never needed before. So he was attempting a mental juggling act, trying to learn the old new math while preparing to teach the new old physics. It made his brain hurt.

And it wasn’t as if he’d be allowed to sit uninterrupted and work. There were more than a thousand copies of his time machine in the world, and science demanded that he push the RESET button on all of them, in case the Marsh Effect was really the Matthew Effect. They couldn’t just FedEx a machine from China, have him push the button, then mail it back after having failed to make it disappear. He had to hike down to a lab and sit in the middle of a circle of cameras and other instruments and push the button.

A few times, he agreed to duplicate the original physiological circumstances—stay up for thirty hours high on coffee and speed. He argued that the whole thing was more like superstition than science, and the response was basically: Okay, do you have a better idea?

Meanwhile, it wasn’t only science that had changed drastically in the past sixteen years. Movies were either dumb static domestic comedies (during which the audience laughed insanely at things that didn’t seem to be funny) or brutal bloodbaths from Japan and India. Popular music set his teeth on edge, harmonic discord and machine-gun percussion or syrupy, inane love ballads. Popular books seemed to be written for either slow children or English Ph.D.s.

Women his age had been children when he left. Of course theyliked the music and books and movies and thought the height of fashion was symmetrical cheek brands—not only on the cheeks of the face, he was given to understand. The women who were his contemporaries were either like Kara, middle-aged and married, or middle-aged and not interested in men.

His mother was in a rest home, lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. He visited her several times, but she didn’t recognize him.

He did have a little notoriety by virtue of being an artifact from the past, but sixteen years didn’t exactly make him a caveman. More like an old-fashioned geek who hadn’t kept up with stuff.

He went to his twenty-fifth high-school reunion and left early, deeply rattled.

About that time he started to fantasize about pushing the RESET button again. The world would be truly alien, 177.5 years in the future, but he wouldn’t be trying to fit in. He would be a genuine curiosity, like a nineteenth-century scientist appearing today. Who wouldn’t be expected to do any real physics. And the big questions would presumably be answered. He might even be able to understand the answers.

The time machine was very much under lock and key, with a twenty-four-hour armed guard. But if anybody could get to it, Matt should be able to.

That stayed in the back of his mind, the ultimate escape fantasy, while he did his damnedest to adjust to this not-so-brave, not-so-new world.

Ironically, Kara and Strom, whose betrayal had pushed him into pushing the button, became his best friends and mentors. He often went to their place for dinner, to hang around and play with their son, Peter. At nine years old, he was close to being Matt’s equal in social sophistication.

He tried to date. It wasn’t hard to find women his age who were interested in him, either as famous semiscientist or social freak from the past. But neither characterization was a good starting point for a relationship. His foolish aversion to facial brands didn’t help, either, eliminating half the pool of young women a priori.

Male friends were even harder to make. He wasn’t interested in sports, the one cultural fixation that hadn’t changed at all, as far as he could see, and that was the one place where men assumed they could make an easy connection. When somebody said, “How about them Sox?” he would mumble something and look at his feet.

Under normal circumstances, his natural pool of friends would be the graduate students and young professors in his own department. But he didn’t know enough about post-time-machine physics to chat about their work, and his unearned full professorship was an obvious obstacle.

A couple of times he resorted to “dates” from escort services, but that was so disastrous that not even the sex was very much fun. It was like taking a department-store manikin to dinner and a show, and then home to a perfect body with nothing inside but lubricant.

Then one night after dinner, Peter put to bed and Strom off in the study, Kara led him out to the front porch, where they sat together on a swing with glasses of wine. She was just close enough that they barely touched.

“I’m sorry about what I did,” she said quietly. “I should’ve stayed with you.”

Matt didn’t know what to say. “Water over the bridge,” he tried. “I mean under.”

“I don’t know. Does it have to be?”

“Kara . . .”

“I’m desperately unhappy,” she said without inflection. “Strom bores me to tears.”

He patted her hand. “You wouldn’t’ve been any better off with me. One chronophysicist is about as boring as the next one.”

She smiled up at him. “See? Strom would never say that. And you’re anything but boring.”

This couldn’t be happening. The full moon hanging over the horizon romantically, crickets chirping. Her wonderful smell. Her husky voice: “But I’m too old for you now.”

“No! Kara . . . you’re beautiful. You’re still the most beautiful—”

“We should talk. Strom’s taking Peter up to Maine on Friday, to his parents’ country place. He knows I can’t go because I’m allergic to horses. Let’s spend the weekend together . . . and talk.” She moved her hand, with his, to between her thighs.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Just one weekend.”

“If we were caught . . .”

“We won’t be.” She squeezed his hand. “Please, Matt.”

That was awkward. A couple of months before, he’d been madly in love with her, or with someone who could have been her younger sister. Just shy of forty, she was still sexy as hell, and still the same person he had fallen in love with.

It wouldn’t hurt his wounded masculinity to get back at Strom. But Peter was in the equation, too, and it could be devastating to the kid.

And make Matt look like a fool, as well as a home-wrecker.

She kissed him softly, and then deeply. “Please? Your place at 6:00 on Friday?” She moved his hand to her breast, and then her own hand somewhat lower.

Of course he said yes and, before the subway was halfway home, regretted having said it. He never watched soap operas on the cube, but he was pretty sure he’d just signed up for chapter n-minus-1. And they never had a happy ending. If they had a happy ending, they’d have to go off the air.

A mature man would have called Kara the next day and said he got carried away, sorry, there’s no way that it could work. Let’s admit we made a mistake and stay good friends.

Instead, Matt figured he had just two days to get to the machine and escape into the future.

His first plan was direct passionate action: buy a gun at one of the Southie pawnshops, go disarm the guard, and take the machine. It wouldn’t be stealing, really; it was his machine. Stealingwould be when he crawled into a Dumpster and pushed the button, using it as a getaway car, and showing up in the future with tons of exotic garbage.

A less dramatic opportunity presented itself. The chronophysics department wanted to run the machine through a positron scanner three times—alone, and then with a person touching it, and then with Matt touching it. Careful not to push the RESET button, of course.

Once he was inside the claustrophobic tube, he’d just find a piece of metal, clip it with the alligator clip, and push the button. Off to the twenty-third century.

It would look like an accident. Poor Matt, sacrificed to science.

This time he wouldn’t need any protective gear. Marsh had calculated where he would wind up next, to within a few dozen meters. It was up by where Route 95 crosses into New Hampshire, pretty far from the ocean. Pretty near to the tax-free liquor warehouse. Have to take a credit card.

What, really, ought he to take up into the future? His first thought was old coins. But they’d probably have him take all of the metal out of his pockets for the positron scan.

Rare documents, small ones. He went down to Charles Street and maxed out two credit cards buying a note Lincoln had scrawled to Grant and a letter from Gabriel Garcнa Mбrquez, in the last year of his life, to Pablo “El Ced” Marino when he was an unknown poet, forty years before his Nobel Prize.

Of course he might wind up in a future that cared nothing for history or literature. That would be trouble, no matter what.

There was also the small matter of 177.5 years’ interest on those two credit cards. Maybe they’d go out of business.

It was bound to work one way or another. In some future he was going to come back to that law firm sixteen years ago and leave a million-dollar check to bail himself out.

He spent a day worrying. How could you plan for a trip like this? There was no Baedecker for the future. Science fiction had a really bad record, world peace and personal dirigibles. For lack of anything else positive to do, he bought a really good Swiss Army knife with twenty-one functions, in case they didn’t make him empty his pockets.

Of course, he might be vaulting into a radioactive hell. Or a wasteland rendered sterile by nanotechnology or biological warfare.

He couldn’t un-push the button.

But he couldpress it again, and again. Two thousand years. Then 24,709 and three hundred thousand. The fifth push would be 3,440,509 years, long enough for anything to quiet down.

It would also be a kind of suicide. If there were still people that far in the future, he would be more distant to them than a Cro-Magnon man would be to the here and now.

Did you make your computer chips out of flint back then?

He went to the old-time theater on Brattle Street and watched three twentieth-century movies in a row. A soft-porn romance, a Western, and a once-daring epic about a war in Southeast Asia. It kept his mind off everything, though he emerged with a seriously sore butt and didn’t care if he never saw popcorn again.

He might not.

He got a few hours of imperfect sleep and went down to the Green Building early.

The first time traveler, Herman, inhabited a deluxe terrarium in the lobby. He had grown to helmet size, and slept through Matt’s tapping on the glass to say good-bye.

The only things alive now that might still be alive when he came back were some young Galбpagos turtles in zoos here and there. He would look them up and talk to them about the old days. I knew your cousin Herman.

He’d never been to the seventh floor before. It had a slightly shabby atmosphere. Perhaps positrons were out of fashion.

“Dr. Fuller,” a young Asian man said, walking toward him with his hand out. It still startled him when people called him that, but he’d stopped protesting.

He’d never get a real doctorate now. Maybe another honorary one, for being Guy from the Past.

“Joe Sung,” he said, shaking hands. “You’re up next. Maybe ten minutes.”

“Okay.” The positron scanner was in the next room, visible through a big window.

It was all white plastic. Would there be anything metal inside to contact with the alligator clip?

He should have looked up the machine’s design. It probably did have metal all through it, and so would act as a kind of semiopen Faraday cage, and go up into the future with him.

If not, not. The time machine would disappear for about nine generations, to be recovered near the antique ruins of the liquor warehouse on the New Hampshire border. Matt would be fired, perhaps jailed. Though there probably wasn’t yet a law against sending stuff into the future.

Sung had said something. “Pardon me?”

“Just have a seat out here. I’ll come to get you.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “You’ll be in the machine for more than an hour. You might want to use the washroom.”

“Thanks.” Matt went across the hall to the men’s room and sat there thinking. Reluctantly, he decided he’d better not do it. There will be other opportunities.

Or would there be? The rent-a-cop who normally stood outside the door on the ninth floor was not here. When the machine went back to its usual place, he would be. How to get by him? Flash the Swiss Army knife?

He went back to the anteroom and flipped through a copy of National Geographicbackward. The clam farms of Samoa. Our Friend the Dung Beetle. Surprising Pittsburgh.

“Okay.” Sung came out with a pallid young man, the control for the experiment. He looked a little shaky.

“Don’t open your eyes in there,” he said. “It’s kind of close quarters.”

“Thanks.” Matt watched him stagger toward the elevator.

“I monitored him while he was being scanned. Nothing unusual. ’Scuse me.”

Sung headed for the men’s room.

Matt slipped into the room with the positron scanner. The machine was right there, on the end of the platform that went in and out. He snatched it and ran into the corridor and stabbed the elevator button.

The door opened immediately. The pale guy was still there. “What . . . what’s happening?”

“Have to, um, take it down to recalibrate it.”

“Mm,” he said. “Don’t open your eyes in there, man.”

“Yeah, I’ll be careful.”

When they got to the ground floor, Matt went for the door with unseemly haste. He had maybe a minute. There were Dumpsters behind Starbucks and Au Bon Pain.

But there was also a cab. It pulled up to the curb in front of the Green Building and the passenger got out. Then the driver got out, too, to help with the luggage.

Matt dove in. “Hey,” the driver said. “I’ve got another fare.”

Matt clipped the alligator clip to the exposed frame in the open door. But there was a plastic dome over the RESET button.

“Look, buddy, you’ve got to get out.” The cabdriver was large and menacing. “Let’s don’t have any trouble.”

Matt pulled out his Swiss Army knife and broke a thumb-nail getting the blade out.

“Man . . . like you’re gonna scare me with that thing.”

He popped the plastic dome off. “Don’t have to.” He pushed the button and everything went gray.

11

Matt tumbled into the front seat and groped forthe steering wheel, in case he wound up in traffic again. But when the world reappeared, it was all forest.

He still had the plastic dome in his hand. He pressed it into place over the RESET button, and it locked in with a loud click.

The engine was humming. He turned it off and got out of the driver’s side door and looked around. A deer bounded away, white tail flashing.

Something smelled funny. After a moment he realized it was a lack of pollution. He was just smelling the planet.

Where was everybody? They supposedly could predict within tens of meters where he was going to appear—and predict when, within minutes or even seconds. Where was the welcoming committee?

That didn’t bode well.

The cab still had tires, after a fashion. The rubber had disappeared, or rather stayed behind, and left four wheels of steel-mesh foam, squashed slightly out of round.

He switched it on and put it in gear and carefully maneuvered around the trees and brush. He was supposed to be a couple of hundred meters east of Highway 95. Well, it felt like afternoon, so he steered eastward, away from the sun.

The road appeared with no warning, bumpy, broken asphalt with grass and even small trees growing through it. That was not a good sign, either.

Maybe it didn’t mean the end of civilization. Maybe America had finally outgrown the car.

But still. Where was everybody?

Maybe the calculations had been off, and he was where he looked like he was, the middle of nowhere. He started driving south, in the breakdown lane. It had less brush, for some reason.

Hungry, he popped open the glove compartment and found a Baby Ruth, half a bag of red-hot peanuts, a bottle of water, and an old-fashioned snub-nosed revolver. There was also a half-empty box of .357 Magnum cartridges.

He put the gun back and ate the Baby Ruth, saving the peanuts for dinner. Maybe the next time he saw a deer he should shoot it. Then skin it and dress it out with his Swiss Army knife, sure.

It gave him a cold chill when he realized he might have to do just that, or whatever inelegant approximation of butchering he might be capable of. He stopped and did a more thorough search of the glove box. No matches or lighter.

Deer sushi, how appetizing.

The taxi had a quarter charge; the gauge said its fuel cells were good for another seventy-seven miles. It shouldn’t be more than fifty miles back to Cambridge. If their calculations had been right.

What if it was more than fifty miles? More than 177 years?

A few miles down the road, he came upon an abandoned car. He stopped and, obscurely frightened, took the pistol with him when he got out.

There was no sign of violence, but the car had been totally stripped, no tires or seats. The hood was open, and the fuel cells were gone.

The plastic body was a dull pink. He had a feeling that it had started out red but had been out in the sun and rain and snow for decades.

Was it possible that the world had ended? Some ultimate weapon had given the Earth back to nature?

Not all at once. Somebody survived to steal. Or salvage.

The trunk of the car had been forced open, and was empty, not even a spare. That reminded him to check the taxi’s trunk.

It did have a spare, and a small toolbox, which might prove handy. A shoulder bag that had the driver’s wallet with about $800, reading glasses, pills, and a small notebook, dark at first. He held it up to the sun, and after a few seconds it showed an index full of moving porn.

He flipped through it for a minute and was becoming aroused, but then there was a girl who looked just like Kara, as a twenty-one-year-old, and a sudden access of sadness wilted his desire.

What was he thinking? He could have just said no to her invitation. Or he could have said yes. He was crazy to leave everything behind and leap into the unknown.

He threw the bag into the backseat and drove on.

The abandoned cars came more frequently; soon he was never out of sight of one or two. They all seemed to be in about the same shape.

Didn’t this used to be mostly pasture and farmland? How long would it take for such land to return to forest? He remembered as a child being taken to a forest outside of Paris, which had been the site of a vicious battle in World War I. The gunfire and artillery had been so intense that no tree had been left standing, except for one battered sapling. A hundred and fifty years later, it had become a huge oak darkly looming in a forest of lesser but uniformly large trees.