THE POWER OF THREE

THE POWER OF THREE

By

BILLIE SUE MOSIMAN

Copyright @ Billie Sue
Mosiman
2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form, including digital, electronic, or mechanical, to include photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the author(s), except for brief quotes used in reviews. This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents are products of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

THE FIX

WALLS OF THE DEAD

A LITTLE LIFE

THE FIX

By

Billie Sue
Mosiman

Copyright Billie Sue
Mosiman
2012

“Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.”

MICHIO KAKU,
Wired
Magazine, Aug. 2003

“Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored.”

CLIFFORD PICKOVER,
Time: A Traveler's Guide

Sipping a cup of Empire coffee, she relished the first taste of the day. By noon she knew she’d finish the pot. Outside the long window in the living room of her fourth floor apartment, she saw the new day rising. It was going to be another hot one. Down on the street kids were already running and screaming through the silver splatter of an open fire hydrant.

Jane looked at her wristwatch. At barely eight a.m. the city was bustling like an ant hive. Her grandson John would be over to see her around noon, taking minutes from his lunch break at the Institute to visit.

She lifted the cup to her lips and blew on the coffee to cool it. John was the only love in her life now. She had outlived two husbands, her parents and three sisters, and one of her own children. Her two surviving children neglected her, but she must be fair. They didn’t live in New York anymore, having taken off for the West Coast many years ago. Only John, the son of her deceased daughter, remained. She was grateful for him to such an extent that she knew she doted on him, but that was a grandmother’s prerogative.

He had been babbling lately on his visits about a new invention that was going to change the world. She smiled. He was always excited about something or other in his work. The think tank where he worked kept him engaged with the most splendid ideas and subjects. Once it had been a new element added to corn crops that caused the corn to carry a high percentage of proteins, insuring some third world countries wouldn’t have to starve any longer. Now
that
was a great invention indeed!

She had seen starvation. It was one of the horrors her old heart despaired over when she gave it thought. As a young woman she had volunteered for the Peace Corps and worked in the Sudan. There, despite regular deliveries of rice and flour from the charity organizations, people died hungry. Now her grandson had been part of a group of intellectuals who made hunger disappear.

If you lived long enough, the world changed sometimes for the better, and that was one of the best things about living.

She had seen more than that, of course. Her first husband had been…shadowy. It was three years into her young, hasty marriage before she discovered he was deeply involved in organized crime. He had insisted she learn how to shoot a gun and to carry it on her person. “If they ever come for me, you might be in the way. I want you to be able to defend yourself.”

He hadn’t lasted that long, her Stephen. He wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought, nor was he nearly as lucky as he needed to be. He was taken out in a power struggle where his loyalties lay on the wrong side of the conflict. Since her own luck ran higher, she had been nowhere near him when he was found alone on the street that night.

Cataloguing the years of a life was Jane’s pastime. What else did she have to do? Arthritis in her deformed hands and the pain it caused in her knees made her almost a cripple. She could still get around, though slowly. She could still hold her coffee cup, though not without pain, and that was a blessing.

She relaxed into the easy chair facing the widow and waited for the hours to pass until noon.

#

He came through the door, his energy high, brown eyes bright with excitement. “Me-ma, they’ve had it for twenty years!”

She straightened in her chair. She had heard him at the door, using the extra key she’d given him to unlock it. She had a smile plastered on her lips, the same one that transformed her face whenever he visited. Without him her life was a dry desert.

“Slow down, John.
What have they had for twenty years? Here, sit down and tell me.” She gestured to the second easy chair pulled close to her own.

“Time travel!
Oh my god, do you know what this means?” He hadn’t taken the chair. He stood between her and the window, his animated face in shadow.

She looked up at him, her mouth hanging slightly open. “Oh, they have not, not really,” she said.

“Really.
Really and truly! They came to us because they need to figure out a tiny problem with it, but it’s real, Me-ma, can you believe it? You’ll be able to go back in time. You’ll be able to…”

She raised one crooked-fingered hand to stop him. “Slow down. Sit in the
chair,
I can’t see you hanging over me that way.”

He flopped into the chair and turned to face her. Again she smiled because his face, his
presence
, made her so happy. He was a young man bursting with life. He was engaged with living the way she had once been. Even when he babbled, as he was doing now, she just wanted to reach over and give him a hug to show how much she appreciated his attention. For instance, down the hall in 4D
Menkel
Bogdonavitch
was a little younger than she, but he had no one—no family at all to visit him, to care. He spent his days alone, doing what? Living out the last days staring at the wall, she supposed, with no one to hear his voice.

“You don’t understand,” John was saying. “Even my girlfriend didn’t understand. This is the greatest thing that’s ever been discovered. I can’t believe we’ve had the knowledge for twenty years and I’m only now finding out, but it’s been a top secret project. Only recently have they got it working to the point they can, well, bring people back. They’re taking applications for people to travel. To time travel! I’ve already put your name on the list.”

“You did what?” Now her pulse elevated. She could feel it in her wrists and in the base of her neck. “I don’t want to travel in time!” Calm down, she told herself, don’t get too excited.

“Oh, Me-ma, of course you do. I’d do it myself, but they want older people, people who can travel farther into the past than I can. They have more years to travel to, you see? So far people can’t seem to go past the barrier of their own lives. You could go back and…”

“Do what? Warn Stephen to stay home and off the street the night he died? Teach your own grandfather to eat his vegetables and not clog his arteries with junk food? Just what is it I could accomplish, John? I don’t think we’re meant to meddle.” Though she knew what was coming next, she didn’t want to hear it. She could feel the doors in her mind shutting, pushing back one of those losses she tried not to think about.

“What about my mother?” His agitation stalled. He sat with slumped shoulders and a hangdog look about him.

She glanced away to the window. The sun was overhead, the temperature this July day edging one hundred degrees. Her window air conditioner in the nearby kitchen ran noisily trying to cool the open area of the apartment.

“Do you think I could save her? I don’t think so, honey.” Now the door to memory opened. She recalled the day Carol died. She had been in the subway late at night, just having gotten off work at a design firm in downtown Manhattan. She had been working on a new account, trying out promotional ideas, staying late, working hard. She was up for the Vice Presidential position if she could nail this one account.

The police theorized she’d been caught alone on the platform by a group of thugs. They stole her money and credit cards, beating her in the process, and had left her to die in the bright fluorescent light, her blood dribbling off the platform’s edge down into the tracks. She lay there, unable to move, no one coming to help her, until she died of blood loss from a stab wound in her chest.

“What if you could call her that night, tell her not to use the subway, insist that she take a cab home?”

Jane looked at her despondent grandson and remembered him as a child of fourteen when his mother was murdered. He had been taken out of the city by his father and raised in upstate New York. He had come back to the city for college and, being a superlative student with a high Mensa IQ score, he had found just the right place in the Institute to take him on. Now he was engaged to be married, though Jane hadn’t met the lucky woman yet. 

Could she really go back in time and keep her daughter from her death?

Was this time travel thing real and if so, could one tinker with the past without creating a paradox that threatened the future?

She asked this of her grandson. He said, “The few experiments they tried didn’t change the future to any measurable degree. I know they say if a butterfly dies in the Amazon the whole world is changed, but they’re finding that’s not quite true. It may change, but not by any noticeable extent.”

“Have they gone back to save John F. Kennedy? I haven’t noticed any change in US history.” She stood carefully to fill her cup with coffee. She had to think about this. She shouldn’t let her emotions rule her.

“No, they haven’t tried anything that big,” he said. “But Me-ma,” he followed her to the kitchen and took down a cup for himself from the cupboard over the counter. “If they let you in the program and you could get to that day. That night…”

She poured him coffee. She pushed the creamer and sugar bowl toward him because that’s the way he liked his coffee. She hesitated and then her mind was made up. “If this thing is real the way you say it is, and if they want me, and if I can go back to that day, I’ll do it. Of course I will.”

#

The day John was to take her for the interview with the people who had the power to put her into the time travel program, he brought along his
fiancé
, Barbara. “Me-ma, this is Barb, the woman I’m going to marry.”