Chapter 14 #2
“A lot has happened, Dad,” he said into my shoulder. “So much has happened. Welcome back.”
He wanted me to let go. I felt it in his wiry muscles.
I stood back to look him over. He was Lyle, recognizably my son, although now a full-grown man.
His bearing was different: taller, straighter, prouder.
This man had accomplished things, difficult things, and was on his way to accomplishing more.
If I’d met him at a bar, I would have assumed him an engineer or academic.
Someone successful in life and career. More successful than I was.
He was twenty-nine. Only eight years younger than me.
Lyle’s eyes shifted sideways, and I looked over his shoulder.
A woman stood behind him. She was pretty, with high cheekbones and long brown hair.
She held a camera in one hand—tiny and sleek, the glass lens like a black eyeball.
“Oh, wow,” she breathed. Then she shook herself, and her eyes landed on mine with the intensity of searchlights. “Mr. Treder, how do you feel?”
I looked at Lyle. He shrugged and motioned with his head back toward the woman. “Dad, meet Heather.”
“Heather McGraw,” the woman said. She stepped forward to hold out her right hand, her left still holding the camera. “Of Science Daily.” She said the name of the newspaper or magazine as if I should know it.
I frowned at her outstretched hand and looked at Lyle.
“My wife,” Lyle said.
“Reporter?” I asked, my tongue thick in my mouth.
“Science and technology correspondent for the Bay area,” Heather said. She let her hand drop, doing it smoothly, like it had not been an awkward failure of manners on my side. “And this is the biggest story of my career.”
“Wait. Wife?”
“Yeah, it’s, ah … we have a lot to catch up on.” Lyle glanced at her. “Hon, let’s fill Dad in on everything before we start interrogating him, okay?”
“Interviewing,” she said, but she did it with a smile for him, and she thumbed something on the tiny camera before letting her arm drop. “I am honored to finally meet you, Mr. Treder. Your son has told me so much about you, and about what’s happened to you.”
“He has?”
“Come on,” Lyle said. He grasped my shoulder. “Let’s get some coffee and talk things through. This must be overwhelming for you.”
“For him?” Heather said, her eyes large. “We just saw him appear out of thin air, right in front of us, looking just a bit older than you.”
I let out a hard breath. The shelves in the library around me tilted, and I reached out a hand to steady myself, lowering my head.
Lyle moved to my side. He maneuvered my arm around his shoulders and put his arm around my back. He started moving me down the aisle. “Come on, Dad. We’ll get some fresh air, and we’ll talk.”
The dizziness passed as we walked. Heather was all energy and excitement. I could tell she was overflowing with questions, but she held back for Lyle’s sake. The campus was quiet this early on a September morning. Lyle didn’t say much, and I kept silent, taking in everything around me.
The vehicles had changed again. That’s what I noticed first. The campus looked much as I remembered, but the cars and the bikes were all smaller and sleeker. And the fashion had swung back around to artfully torn and faded bell-bottom jeans and skintight tank tops.
Some students held their arms up as they walked by, looking at what appeared to be thin, silvery bands on their wrists.
I caught glimpses of images in the air above their arms. Others in the coffee shop had their bracelets down on tables in front of them, where the bracelets not only displayed images in midair but also projected a keyboard on the table surface. No one gave us a second glance.
Lyle and I sat. I watched a young woman at a nearby table tap on a virtual keyboard.
“Dad. Try not to stare,” Lyle said.
“Right, sorry. Lyle?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s the date?”
“It’s September 27.” A pause. “2048.”
I sat back. I knew that. I did the math before jumping this morning. But it was one thing to calculate it out and put a number on when and where you’d arrive. It was quite another thing to be there.
Heather appeared holding a tray of mugs. “I wasn’t sure what to get, so I just got black coffees all around. Sweetener and soy milk on the side if you need any.”
“Thanks, hon,” Lyle said. He set one mug in front of me and took one for himself. “Do you need anything else, Dad?”
I looked down at the coffee, and up at Lyle and Heather. “Wife?”
Lyle’s face crinkled into a smile. “Yes.” He took Heather’s hand. She beamed back at him. “For about a year now. We were originally going to wait, but we got impatient.”
I picked up the mug, feeling the smooth warmth of the ceramic in my palms. “I see.” I let out a breath.
“I’m sorry.” I looked at Heather. “Congratulations. I’m—I’m very happy to meet you.
Welcome—welcome to the family. Our family.
” I was struggling. I tried to keep it off my face.
My son’s wife. Someone he’d spent years with, grown to know and love.
I’d missed their wedding. Not only that.
I’d missed all the opening acts, the tentative initial moments of their relationship, the call or text from Lyle when he told me, This might be the one.
Did she and Amy have a good relationship?
I felt myself starting to spiral. Had Amy finally remarried?
Did Lyle have a stepfather, someone who supported him at his wedding?
Maybe said a few words at the reception?
Heather would know him, this theoretical man who had replaced me.
She didn’t know me beyond whatever image she had conjured in her mind from what Lyle had told her.
To her I was just a stranger who had popped out of midair in the rare-book stacks.
Heather was smiling and laughing. The sound was as perfect as her appearance. It pulled me back. Temporarily halted the spiral. She would have made an excellent news anchor. “Thank you so much, Mr. Treder.”
“Scott.”
Her smile, if anything, broadened, but she shook her head a little. “Mr. Treder. At least for a while.”
“Not ‘Dad’?” I asked. I was trying to be funny, but instead of laughter they glanced at one another and let their hands go, Heather’s winning grin dropping to a polite smile. “Sorry,” I said.
“It’s not—” Lyle said.
“No, no, it’s okay,” Heather said. They glanced at each other, communicating silently as I watched.
“So,” I said. “How did you two meet?”
“Well,” Heather said. “We met through you. In a way.”
The coffee started to burn my hands, so I set the mug down. “How’s that?”
They glanced at one another again, the look couples give each other when they’re about to relate an embarrassing story. Furtive smiles, darting eyes.
“My research,” Lyle said. “Heather wrote a story about me. On my research, I mean.”
“I was interning,” Heather said. “One of my first assignments.”
“The Daily found out about my thesis, and the…” He looked at Heather. “What would you call it?”
“Waves?”
“The waves my proposals were making in the community.”
“Community?” I asked. My eyes bounced back and forth between them, watching as they finished one another’s sentences. Amy and I had been that way, once. I pushed the memories aside and tried to listen.
“Theoretical physics,” Heather said. “They wigged.”
“Wigged?”
“It made some waves.”
“They wigged,” Heather stage-whispered to me.
“Anyway.” Lyle grinned. “She interviewed me for the story, and we hit it off. Afterward, she asked me out.”
“He’s the most interesting person I’ve ever met,” Heather said.
“Hon…”
“What? It’s true. And the work he’s done already—he’s pioneered an entirely new set of theories. Things other scientists haven’t even considered. Practically remade the entire field by himself.”
“She’s exaggerating. A lot. And besides, it’s all because of you.”
“What do you mean?”
“What’s happened to you,” Heather said, leaning forward. “The time travel.”
“The reality of it,” Lyle said. “I know it’s possible.
I’ve seen it happen, right in front of me.
Time travel forward through time for a macroscale object.
No more postulating, no more ‘ifs’ or ‘maybes’ or complicated exceptions based on the speed of light or gravitational lensing.
Just the fact. And being able to start from fact and move forward, or backward as it were, through the calculations and theories—it made certain things fall into place. ”
“Einstein’s got nothing on my hubby,” Heather said.
Lyle shook his head, but he didn’t look displeased with the comparison.
“I have decades of work ahead of me. We all do. The theory of everything, so to speak, is still a long way from becoming a mathematical reality. The formulae, the requirements to link the behavior of the quantum and the macro worlds and explain both within the same theoretical framework … it’s mind-boggling. But we’ve made progress.”
“You’ve made progress,” Heather said.
“We’ve made progress.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “Really amazing.”
Lyle and Heather turned their attention back on me. I felt the mood shift.
“There’s more you need to know,” Lyle said. “More you need to understand.”
“Lyle—” Heather said.
“No, hon, he’s my father, and he deserves to know.
I had to use the observational data I collected when I was a kid.
And the video clips from that media disaster at the UW.
I couldn’t assume the truth of time travel without scientifically verifiable data, otherwise it would’ve been just another mental exercise that’s impossible to prove.
” He stared at me, waiting for my reaction.
“Okay…”
Lyle’s eyebrows pressed together, and he darted a quick glance at Heather. “What I’m saying, Dad … you’re in the papers, the theories. In my thesis. Not just an unidentified individual. You. The footage we took, the sensor readings, all of it.”
“So, I’m famous?”
“Well. Not so much famous, as much as known. At least, in hard-science circles. People know when you’re supposed to appear.
And disappear again. I never shared where you were when the jumps took place, but the rest of the data’s all there.
The dates, when it started happening, all of it.
It was integral.” He exchanged a look with Heather again, and I found myself wishing they’d stop.
“Mr. Treder,” Heather said. “There are some people, some scientists, who need to see you vanish with their own eyes, just like I saw you appear this morning. We didn’t allow them to see you appear this morning, because we didn’t want to freak you out, make you a spectacle without your consent.”
“But this is huge, Dad,” Lyle said. “When they see the reality, when we gather even more data, when they see it’s real, my theories will gain wider acceptance, and the opportunity to understand the underpinnings of the universe will be within our reach.
For theoretical physics, for science, it’s…
” He shook his head and spread his hands.
“It’s revolutionary,” Heather said. “It’s E equals MC squared. It’s Newton’s apple.”
Trying to keep up with them was like churning in thick mud. They’d been thinking about this for months, years. This opportunity. This chance to use me. And I was falling behind. All the talk of scientific revolution, of understanding the universe, and there was only one thing on my mind.
“Lyle,” I said.
“Yeah, Dad?” The way he said it made me hesitate. That subtle pause in his inflection between the two words, the way it mimicked how I used to say “yeah, bud,” to him.
“Where’s Amy? How is she? How’s your mom?”
Lyle leaned back. He and Heather looked at each other again, and I had to stop myself from shouting at them. I sucked in a long breath and let it out.
“She’s … fine,” Lyle said.
“She’s happy,” Heather said.
I looked at her. She blanched and sat back, her smile disappearing.
There was a soft rustle of movement as their hands found each other under the table.
“I just want to know if she’s okay,” I said.
“She’s fine,” Lyle said.
My breath came out in shaky puffs. “Try to see this from my perspective. To me, this all started about two weeks ago. We were married, we were in love, we had a great little boy. I won’t pretend everything was perfect, but—but we had a life.
We were building a life. A family. We were making it happen, together.
We were in love.” Heather’s expression shifted from alarm to pity.
I felt a surge of anger, so hard and sudden my hands started shaking, and I pulled them off the table.
I felt tears well up, hot and unwelcome, and I blinked them away.
The liquid skewed my vision, throwing the coffee shop into blurred rainbow patterns of light. “How am I supposed to deal with this?”
Lyle took a breath. “Mom’s, she’s good. She’s happy, like Heather said. Remarried, a long time ago. I have two stepbrothers, and they’re good people. We keep in touch. We’re not super close, but we keep in touch. She really loves Heather. They go shopping together.”
Heather smiled, her brows still furrowed.
“That’s good.” The words caught in my throat. “That’s good.” We sat there, the three of us, and the world buzzed all around us. When I spoke again, I had my voice under control, and my eyes were dry. “So, what do you need me to do?” I smiled as best I could.
They glanced at each other again, and both cracked small, cautious grins.
“Really?” Lyle asked, and for a heart-wrenching moment he was seven years old again.
“Give me an exclusive, for one thing,” Heather said.
Lyle nodded. “Other than that, speak to some colleagues of mine and let us run some tests on you before the next jump. Then, tomorrow morning—”
“Film it again. And more tests.”
“Basically, yeah. If that’s okay.”
“If it helps you.”
Lyle’s smile faltered. “Dad. This is all about you. For you. All of it. If I can understand the mechanism at work here, figure it out, I can stop it. I can make it stop happening. I have theories, I just need more. The headaches are the key, I see that now, but I don’t know what they’re the key to, if that makes any sense. But I can do this.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”
I didn’t ask the rest. I didn’t ask if he could send me back. I didn’t want to hear the answer, because I could read it on his face, and saying it out loud would make it too real, too present.
He might stop it. Might. But this was—and had always been—a one-way trip.