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Wally pushed himsef up out of the chair and stepped to a solitary window overlooking a snow-encrusted garden deep into a winter night. “I’m from the year Two Thousand Three. My name’s Walter Alan Bayer, I was born in Oak Park, Illinois, of Hemingway fame, though I imagine he’s not Hemingway yet, probably back home right now, resting from the war, before he finds his wife and heads off to Paris to make something of himself.” Wally’s gaze remained out the window and his words gathered momentum. “I was a graduate student at Adams University in upstate New York, working on a time travel project with other physicists. We didn’t know if it really worked, since the way the Box works is that however far it sends you back, it sends you back to a universe that sprouts another universe just by the fact that you’re there. Sure, you could find a way to go forward in time, travel on a starship near the speed of light out to Alpha Centauri and back again, but you’ll never be able to return to the universe you started off in.” Wally slipped his hands in his pockets. “For all intents and purposes, you’re forever banished from your own universe, everything you took for granted. You feel so incrediby alone and disconnected, like you’ve fallen off the far end of the ocean that some people still believed in at the time of Columbus. But in all of this there’s hope. ‘Cause you know so many things, you know in advance who will have the mettle to win a war, the talent to write the Great American Novel, the hatred to kill millions of Jews—” “Get out of my room. Get out of my room and get out of this house, or we will make sure that you never leave here alive.” Wally looked back for the first time since the start of his monologue, and stared into the dark muzzle of a revolver aimed at his upper chest. “What did I say?” Heidi’s chin was firm, and she uttered through clenched teeth, “I will not be taken for a fool, especially after all that I told you. I am not a fool, and I will not be treated like one.” One of countless tears rolled past that chin. “I’m sorry, but I’m telling the truth—” |