Chapter 18

Near one million BC.

A nudge on his good shoulder brought Mack back to awareness to find Thad and Kathy standing over him.

Thad shifted the rifle and extended a hand to help Mack up. “Time to go. I want to get everything set up before dark.”

Mack ignored the hand and struggled partway to his feet before Thad slipped his arm under Mack’s and assisted him the rest of the way up.

“I’m weak. Embarrassingly so,” he tried to apologize.

“You’re a lot closer to recovery than you were when we found you. Just keep eating those ration bars and drink all the water you can stand. With the medication the kit gave you, you won’t be down long, believe me.”

Thad and Kathy searched the area to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything. With Mack still refusing help, they started off.

Mack made it barely halfway without assistance, when, face covered with sweat, he slumped against a boulder. “I’m sorry. I have to rest for a minute.” Feeling humiliated, his breath coming in gasps, he sat on a rock.

Kathy offered him a drink from her canteen and exchanged a look with Thad as Mack’s trembling hand brought the container to his mouth. After allowing Mack to rest, Thad held his hand out again. “Ready for some help now?”

Mack looked up at the other man but didn’t see any gloating. “I guess I’m forced to lean on someone,” he said with a sick grin. “That is, if we make it today. At the rate I’m going, it will take all week.”

“We aren’t in a hurry. We’ll be there when we get there,” Thad said.

Even with their help, there were times when Mack thought he would never reach the area Thad had picked for their campsite. At last, he lay on a blanket between the boulders, his body trembling with fatigue, while Thad and Kathy laid poles across the tops of the rocks, and spread the tent material over the poles before weighting the material’s edges with rocks. The clear polymer slowly dulled until the sun could no longer be seen through it, and Mack, oblivious due to the fatigue, succumbed to a deep sleep.

This time there were no dreams. Mack slowly regained awareness of the world around him with a now familiar, driving thirst and an ache in his bladder. After forcing his tired body upright, he eased his arm to a better position in the sling and stepped out into the now moonlit darkness while mumbling, “Be back in a minute.”

That blood regeneration stuff has a drawback or two, he thought as he hurried behind a large boulder not too far off.

When he was finished, Mack vaguely remembered seeing the stream below the boulders, and he sought it out. Carefully kneeling, he washed his face and hands. After a long drink of the cold water, he returned to his new companions, completely awake at last.

Thad looked up, the ever-present rifle by his side. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah. If only we had some marshmallows,” he said while gazing at the fire.

“Marshmallows?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t have marshmallows anymore. My gosh, what will the Boy Scouts do?”

Thad looked over at Kathy, who shrugged her shoulders. “Looks like our blurp left out a few things. What’s a marshmallow?”

“For that matter,” Kathy interrupted, “what’s a Boy Scout?”

“Well,” Mack began, “A marshmallow is a sort of fluffy piece of candy that you put on the end of a stick and hold over a campfire until it catches fire. Uh, I mean the candy, not the stick,” he finished with a chuckle. “Well, you’re not really supposed to burn them, but a lot of the time, the marshmallows catch fire anyway.” Even in the firelight, Mack could see the skeptical looks on their faces. “Forget it. It’s much less complicated than it sounds. It’s just a way to pass the time, and it’s fun, especially for kids. And the marshmallows taste good, burned or not. I’m not going to try to explain what a Boy Scout is or was.” After a short pause, he added, “Oh, crap. Or will be. How do you people keep things straight?”

Thad laughed, and Kathy giggled before Thad went on to explain about his way of keeping times straight in his mind. “I know we’re talking about time, but my way works, and I’m not the only Op that uses it. Most of us do. It helps to keep our heads straight.”

“What’s an ‘Op’?”

All three looked at one another and laughed. After a moment, Kathy asked, “Would anyone like some stim?”

There was an immediate grunt from Mack, and the laughter started up again.

Kathy turned to Thad. “Can you imagine what the people in recruiting go through?”

“Yes. And that’s one of the reasons I won’t ever be in recruiting.”

Mack said, “Okay, tell me what stim is?”

Kathy finished pouring water into the pot, then removed a small packet from one of the packs. “It tastes a little like your coffee, and it’s served hot as well, but it has a chemical added that reduces fatigue — at least to some degree. Much like the caffeine in coffee.”

“I’ll try some then, by all means.”

They were all sipping hot stim and staring into the fire, seemingly reluctant to break the stillness of the night, but eventually, Mack quietly said, “If you two can go back in time and change things, then I’m going back and keep Janie from dying.”

Kathy tried to catch Thad’s eye, but the firelight was too weak for him to see her expression, or else he just refused to meet her gaze. She felt like kicking him. He knows he should be the one to answer Mack. Instead, her partner just sat there staring into the fire.

“Mack, I’m not good at this. But there might be problems with that,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess there will be,” he said, refusing to hear the implication in her comment. “Without your technology, I might have some difficulty in finding just when to stop. But I don’t have anything else to do. I’ll find the right time sooner or later.”

Quietly, she said, “You can’t return to your own past. You can’t meet yourself.”

“Why not?”

Through clenched teeth, she turned to Thad and said, “If you don’t help me, I’m going to get bitchy again.”

Thad stretched his legs out and leaned back. “Oh, I don’t know. You seem to be doing just fine.”

“Thaddeus, tell him — please. Don’t let him get his hopes up for something he can’t do.”

Mack heard the exchange but didn’t comment, already expanding the idea of going back.

The heck, I can’t meet myself. That’s the simplest way to change things. I’ll just go back and tell myself what is going to happen. If we hadn’t gone to visit Bob and Julie, or we had gone on a different night, everything would have been okay.

His train of thought was broken when Thad sighed and said, “We know how you feel, Mack. Most of the people at Temporal would like to go back and change their timeline, but it can’t be done.”

“What do you mean ‘it can’t be done’? Sure, it can. All I have to do is...”

“You can’t. Not even you, Mack,” Kathy insisted. “You can’t meet yourself or change anything that would affect your past.”

Mack felt desperation take hold. What were they saying? He could change his past so Janie wouldn’t die. “Certainly, I can. Look, all I would have to do would be to tell myself what was about to happen. Or tell Janie, if I can’t meet myself.”

Thad had hoped this wouldn’t happen, at least not this soon. He had hoped to get Mack back to Temporal before he thought about changing his past. A blurp would have given Mack enough knowledge to keep him from getting his hopes up. After turning to face Mack, Thad overrode Mack’s objections. “Wait. Wait a minute. Just listen to me before you get yourself worked up over something that’s impossible.” Seeing the look on Mack’s face, he emphasized again, “Impossible, I said. And if you will listen, I’ll try to tell you why.”

Mack didn’t look pleased, but he didn’t say anything, either.

Thad tossed another limb on the fire while he gathered his thoughts. “Our blurps give enough general knowledge so that you will know you can’t go back. Trying to tell someone why, piecemeal, takes a while, and I’ll probably leave some doubt, no matter what I do. The blurps work fine since they affect the subconscious mind as well as the conscious. Once the subconscious knows you can’t, then you don’t worry away at the technical details. Just give me a few minutes, and maybe I can show you why, anyway.

“I sincerely doubt if we have discovered everything there is to know about time travel,” he said with a little chuckle, “but nevertheless, we have been in the ‘business’ for a while, and we do know some things. Suppose ... just suppose that you did as you said. You went back and told yourself what was about to happen.” As Mack started to interrupt, Thad held his hand up, and Mack stopped. “When you got back to your own timeline and met yourself (you can’t, but for the sake of argument, we’ll say you did), then there would be two Macks. Which one would then be Janie’s husband? That’s something to think about right there. What is she going to do with two of you? But forget about that aspect for the moment, and let’s call you — the Mack who can move through time — Mack 2. Now, what is going to happen to Mack 2 now that Mack 1 has been told what is going to happen to his wife? Remember now, Mack 1 now has the knowledge to change the future. Therefore, he and Janie don’t go to visit your friends, and the wreck never happened, Janie never gets killed, and you weren’t injured. If you weren’t injured, then you never were operated on and never had the changes made in your brain that made you into a time traveler that allowed you to go back with the warning, creating two Macks. Two Macks the instant you entered your own timeline and faced Mack 1. Paradox.”

“But what if I...?”

“If you did succeed, a loop would be created, and you would cycle through it forever. Let’s continue with our logic just one step more, the loop notwithstanding. Suppose you could, and did, do all the things that I just mentioned. But where did Mack 2 come from? It’s you, you say, but how did he come into existence? Obviously then, Mack 1 wasn’t successful in keeping the wreck from happening with his new knowledge, because Mack 2 is here with me and is talking about going back and meeting Mack 1. One way, the first, produces a loop. You would cycle through the wreck, going back in time, meet us, talk to Mack 1, then start the whole process over again and again, forever.

“But, remember, I said it wouldn’t work before I started my little dissertation. It wouldn’t work, because it didn’t work. You’re here. Therefore, you had the accident. But circular reasoning aside, we’ve tried, and a lot of really bizarre things happened, but nothing was changed along the timeline. Nothing. And the chamber returned empty every time someone tried to change his own timeline. That’s how the originator of Temporal was lost. Temporal’s Ops (although they weren’t called that at the time) went back to try to bring back Kesslov, as well as the other people who tried to change their timelines. We can pick up our Op (that is the ones not involved in their own timelines), but they come back complaining that we didn’t drop them. To them, it’s as if we just turned the chamber on, then off, without sending them down-time at all, no matter how long we leave them in that timeline.”

Mack sat gazing into the fire for several minutes before Kathy said, “There’s another reason you can’t leave us, melodramatic as it may sound.” When Mack looked up, she continued, “We desperately need your help.”

In Mack’s case, the regulation about keeping Temporal secret seemed to have been set aside. After all, Kessler had sent them to get Mack, or whoever, or whatever had been causing the anomalies. Trying to keep something secret just didn’t seem logical, particularly with having to tell him everything at once as soon as the chamber brought them back to Temporal, particularly since he could leave of his own volition if he didn’t like what he was hearing.

Consequently, during the week following their move to the new campsite, part of their overabundance of idle time was used to brief Mack. He was too critical to their efforts against the Others to risk an outright lie, but at this point, they would tell him only as much as they had to. Even if they could not convince him to come with them, they had tagged him for the computer, and the chamber would bring him back. Nevertheless, how could someone with Mack’s abilities be forced to stay? He could leave as soon as the chamber dropped him.

Thad and Kathy debated the problem but couldn’t come up with an alternative. After a time, both agreed that they should take the gamble and tell Mack that they had tagged him. There was a risk of his leaving before the chamber picked them up (if it ever did), but then again, maybe they could convince him to go with them. If he went willingly, then they wouldn’t have to worry about him leaving when they reached Temporal, plus any animosities that might develop with the chamber snatching him back without them having asked him to go — which Kathy thought of as a high-tech version of kidnapping.

When Thad told Mack about the tag, the result was anticlimactic. “Oh, I want to go,” he said, taking a bite out of a ration bar as he stretched his legs out. “I assumed that you must have some method of making sure I went with you.” Glancing at the other two, he continued, “You told me you needed me, but neither of you ever really asked me to go. Since you didn’t have to ask, I assumed that you didn’t need to.”

Stunned at his own stupidity, Thad stumbled through an explanation while Kathy giggled. When he had the chance, he took her aside. “I feel like an idiot. Didn’t you ask him?”

Kathy stammered, “I thought you did.”

“Damn! He must think we’re rank amateurs,” Thad complained.

“Well, I am,” Kathy replied while leaving the obvious unsaid.

They had wondered if Mack could still do his thing under Temporal’s time fields. If he couldn’t, he would have to go outside the fields to be tested. But would someone who could go through the barrier at one million be bothered by Temporal’s fields? Neither thought it was likely. They discussed whether they should tell him what the results of staying under the fields would be. Ultimately, they could find no valid reason for withholding information about the longevity effect. A very long life would be an inducement for anyone, including Mack. If the secret ever got out, it would also be an incentive to build other time machines. If there was one thing they absolutely did not need, it was more time travelers stumbling around in the past changing things — inadvertently or otherwise.