Machine. Unexpectedly, I'd invented a time

- Alan Moore

The time machine was working perfectly today, so Mr Tuniak took me on a short trip again. Of course, he didn't tell me where we were going.

Therefore, when the doors of the time machine opened, I had no idea where we had landed. It was warm, but not uncomfortably so. I saw some familiar looking trees and bushes which meant that we couldn't have travelled very far into the past. I didn't see any animals, but I heard the sound of huge amounts of rushing water.

We left the time machine and went in the direction of the sound. What was in front of me can only be described as a blend of a big river and enormous cascades. It was clear that the water was flowing downhill, steeper than any mountain river I've ever seen, but not steep enough to actually be called a fall. On both ends were enormous seas, so big that I couldn't see the opposite shore.

Right in front of us was a grey machine, three metres high at least and a cable was running from this machine into the rushing river.

“Did you build this?”, I asked Mr Tuniak.

“No”, he answered. “My mothers did. I'll tell you about it later.” He pointed to a bench standing next to machine and we both sat down. “If you got a packet from an unknown person, how would yo go about to find this person?”

I knew immediately that we were going to talk about the search for the mysterious woman who had invented the formula for time travel. “The package your professor got, had been delivered by the postal service?”, I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I'd first go to a post office”, I said. “There I'd try to find out where the package had been sent from.”

Mr Tuniak nodded in agreement. “That's what my mothers and I did as well. We found out where the package had been posted very quickly and went to that post office. But nobody there could remember who had been the addresser. They only knew that it had been none of their regular customers.”

“A dead end then”, I said.

“Yes”, Mr Tuniak agreed. “So, what would be your next step?”

I couldn't think of any right away. “Maybe ask other customers if they could remember something and hope to get lucky?”, I said, not because I thought that was a good idea, but mostly to say anything. “Or read through all her notes. Maybe there's something useful there.”

“Precisely”, Mr Tuniak said. “And we did find something. We found several sheets of paper with a date and the letterhead of a university in Paris. The date was several years in the past. You know: I was living in the 70ies then, but the notes came from the 60ies.”

“I can't imagine that that would have caused any problems for you.”

Chaos reigned in the streets. The student demonstration had gone bad and there were several confrontations with the police. Violent confrontations.

Alexander had gone underground. He was walking in the sewers of Paris. He had a 2-way radio set, no bigger than a small button, in his ear. This way he could keep contact with his mothers who were right now in another part of the city. It had been easy to go to the university at the date written in the notes but it had taken them another three days to narrow it down to two students who could have been responsible for the notes. Unfortunately the confrontation between the students and the police forces had escalated at the same time, which made their search not only more difficult but also potentially dangerous. But they had to stay, because this was the only time when they knew for sure where the writer of the notes had been.

“Where am I?”, Alexander asked. Shortly after entering the sewers he had completely been lost.

“Just go straight ahead”, Miriam answered. She was sitting in the time machine, where she could pinpoint the location of his radio.

Alexander followed her directions. From time to time he could hear the sound of battle from above.

“Ah!”, he cried out suddenly.

“What is it?”, Miriam asked worriedly.

“Just a rat”, Alexander answered. “Or maybe ten rats whose tails have melted together, I don't know.”

He continued walking but after another few metres he was startled again.

“What is it now?”, Miriam asked immediately.

“Just... me”, Alexander said. He was standing right in front of himself. The other Alexander didn't seem a lot older than himself and he was hiding something behind his back.

“Where did the rat king go?”, Future-Alexander asked.

“Down that way”, Alexander answered.

“Thanks”, Future-Alexander said. “You're nearly there. Just continue going this way and turn right at your next opportunity. You'll be right below her apartment building then.” And then he left.

“We had gotten two names from the university and visited both women”, Mr Tuniak said. “Once we had met them, I became clear very quickly who the woman was we were looking for.”

“Can you tell me her name?”

“Of course. Juliette Belloq.”

“And did she really develop parts of a theory of everything?”, I asked. “Why does nobody know her name?”

“When we found her, she had already discovered everything my mothers knew”, Mr Tuniak said. “All of her writings they had found in the future, she had already written. But then she had suddenly stopped.”

“Why?”

Before confronting Juliette, there had been a short discussion between Helen, Miriam and Alexander if they should tell her about themselves and where they had come from. They had decided unanimously that they would. Juliette had a right to know what her work had accomplished.

They had left Paris and gone to the Orient of the 16^th century. Juliette had wished for that specific time and location because that's where her ancestors had come from. They were sitting close to a trading route, where traders and their camels were passing by from time to time. They were below some palm trees which offered them shadow and protected them from curious looks.

“We never found any other writings from you”, Miriam said. “Actually, we found nothing, absolutely nothing else from you. Why did you stop writing?”

“You know the world I live in”, Juliette answered. “And you know what Einstein accomplished with his formulas. Without wanting to, he had invented the atomic bomb and now the world is always living close to the edge, always close to destruction.”

“I can assure you that the world will survive mostly unchanged for the next three hundred years”, Helen said.

“And after that?”, Juliette asked.

“We've never travelled farther into the future”, Miriam admitted. Alexander was surprised. He hadn't known that.

“Or think of Oppenheimer”, Juliette continued. “I know what my theories and formulas mean. I even know how to finish this... theory of everything. But I also know the destructive power inherent in such a theory. I could not live knowing that I had given something like that to the world.”

Helen nodded sympathetically. She had had similar concerns when she had developed the time machine with Miriam and it had been one of the reasons for keeping their discovery a secret.

They spent a few more days in the Orient before returning to Paris. It was a difficult decision for Alexander and his mothers, because they knew that Juliette wouldn't leave any other traces and they were afraid of what that meant for her future.

“You never found anything about the remainder of her life?”, I asked. “Does that mean that she died during those protests?”

Mr Tuniak was smiling slightly. “You should wait with your questions until I have fini...” But then he stopped in mid-sentence, because another time machine had appeared next to his own. I had expected to see one or both of his mothers getting out of it, but instead a woman around forty with dark, curly hair opened the door and came straight at us.

“Who is...?”, I asked.

“That is Juliette Belloq”, Mr Tuniak said.

They had landed their time machine in a field outside Paris. They had said goodbye to Juliette and watched her walking towards the city. But she hadn't gone more than a hundred metres, when suddenly another time machine appeared next to her and an old man was exiting it.

“You were the old man, weren't you?”, I asked Mr Tuniak.

“I will be”, he corrected me. “When I will no longer be needing the time machine, I will give it to her.”

“And that's why she was so difficult to find”, I said. “Because once she started her travels through time she basically stopped leaving any traces.”

“Except here”, Juliette said. She had a strong French accent.

“Why?”, I asked. “What makes this places different?”

Juliette and Mr Tuniak led me to the other side of the grey machine. There five metal boxes were placed and in each box there was a red leather bound book, as well as a feather and a bottle of ink. “Here is where we write down when and where we have been”, she explained. She opened one of the books and I could see that it was full with dates and coordinates. She was adding another entry to the list.

“This is our fixed point in time”, Mr Tuniak said. “Every time traveller needs one, otherwise it would be nearly impossible to find other time travellers.”

“And why here?”

“Because no one else is here who can read our books”, Juliette said and put her book back into its box.

“And another thing: Have you never wondered where our time machine gets its energy from?”, Mr Tuniak asked. “It needs a surprisingly small amount of energy, but nevertheless it needs it.”

“A small nuclear reactor?”, I suggested. “Nuclear fusion?”

“No, simple water power”, Mr Tuniak said. “The river you see over there is no river. We are at Gibraltar and what you see here is the Atlantic Ocean pouring into a salt desert that will become the Mediterranean Sea. It will only take about two years. My mothers decided to build the Recharge Station here. The time machine only has to be here for a few hours at most, even if its batteries have been completely empty.” His time machine sounded a short gong as if in agreement. “Ah, that signals the end of its recharge cycle. Come one, we can go back again.”

NEXT WEEK:

Jeder hat in tiefstem Dank derer zu gedenken, die Flammen in ihm entzündet haben.