The Time Surgeons

Ron lounged in a darkened booth near the back of the bar, nursing a scotch on the rocks. It had been a successful couple of days, meeting lots of fans; receiving the adulation due to a leading author – some of the adulation more intimate than others.

He stretched his arms and legs in satisfaction, popping out the kinks. He had had enough of the talking, festivities and girls for now, and just wanted to settle into his own thoughts, lubricated by a bit of lone drinking. So he sat with his back to the bar, facing the wall and the empty red leather-bound bench under it, hoping nobody would recognize him. He felt – peculiar. For all his success he felt that there was something missing. That taking people along on his flights of fancy for the span of time they took to read his books wasn’t enough. That he could do more. His words gave him power over people’s minds, and the power called to him with a siren song filled with promise but empty of instruction.

He smiled at his own mood, taking another sip of the liquor, enjoying its flame, its own power to lead men to pleasure, or oblivion, or destruction. He gazed into the amber depths of his glass, as if seeking knowledge or inspiration. It stared back at him, daring him to implement the plan that had been playing in his mind for some time now. He had already essayed a probe, a preliminary skirmish to test how easily he could win the battle for men’s minds. Some were well armed and easily shrugged off the attempt, like a knight contemptuously fending off a peasant armed with a shovel. But a surprising number came naked into any battle of the mind and would believe anything. But did he dare take the next step?

So he frowned when a man slid smoothly into the seat opposite him, uninvited. He studied the man sourly. Not a drunk, and not an accidental meeting: the man was clear-eyed and intent, his peculiar dark blue eyes probing beneath straight eyebrows, a slight smile playing over his lips. He looked young, yet something about him spoke of age and experience. His face was strange: a face and nose too narrow with eyes too wide and far apart; and Ron wondered what peculiar confluence of ancestry had spawned such an otherworldly appearance. Not that he cared.

“Go ’way. Look, I appreciate all you want to tell me, but can you do it tomorrow? I need some space, you know. You people don’t own me. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love you all, I love all my fans! But this is my time, OK? We all need our own time.”

The man smiled at that, as if Ron had made a particularly witty comment. “I won’t take up any more of your time than I need to, sir.”

His accent was as strange as his appearance. He spoke fluently and well, but there was something slightly off about it; as if it was contaminated by some foreign accent Ron could not place.

“‘Sir’, is it? Well, if you want to show your respect, how about you do it in more than words and eff off? Tomorrow, as they say in the classics, is another day. Words are cheap and peace is precious.”

“I’ve come a long way to see you, sir, and cannot stay long. It will be worth your while to hear me out.”

“Yeah? An investment, is it? Buy me another drink and I might consider it.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that.”

“Why the hell not? Who are you, the Christian Temperance League?”

“Nothing like that. I just don’t have any money.”

“Well I hope you don’t think I’m giving you any.”

“No, sir. I did not come here to beg. But it is funny you mention the Christian Temperance League. I did come here to talk about religion.”

Ron groaned. Great. This is the last thing I need. “Listen, pal. You seem like a nice enough fellow. What are you, Mormon? You’ve got their clean-cut, intense look. But whatever you’re selling, I ain’t buying. Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses. Do I look like a mass to you?”

The man smiled, again as if Ron had made another witty joke. “No, I am not a Mormon, but that is as good an example as any.”

“Example of what?” asked Ron, instantly regretting it. You idiot, surely you know never to let them stick their foot in the door. Now you’ll never get rid of him.

“That some people will believe anything, even when the rest of the world can’t imagine why they do.”

Ron raised an eyebrow, intrigued despite himself that the man had voiced his own thoughts of only a minute ago. “You’re a funny evangelist.”

“Oh, I am no evangelist. Did you know ‘evangelist’ means a bringer of good news? I am afraid all my news is bad.”

“For whom? Me?”

“For you, no. Quite the reverse, in many ways. Though whether you will come to think of it as good or bad depends on how heavily the future weighs upon your soul.”

“I’m an ‘eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die’ kind of guy. The future can take care of itself.”

“You are at once prophetic and most terribly wrong.”

“What in hell do you mean by that?!”

“I mean the future will need a bit of help.” Then he proceeded to explain.

When the strange man had finished speaking, Ron burst out laughing.

“That, my friend,” he chortled with a grin, “is the best story pitch I’ve ever heard. If I wasn’t such an honest guy, I’d be tempted to steal it for myself.”

He laughed into his drink then shook his head. “Oh, boy! So let me guess. You’re a budding science fiction writer, looking for a leg-up? An end run around the gatekeepers of the publishing world? Well, I have to hand it to you, after that performance, you deserve it. So sure, I’ll help you, if that’s what you’re after.”

“I do not want my story published. Ever. Just for you to do your part. Most of which you intend doing anyway.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Salidor told him.

Ron just stared at him, wondering what his game was. He certainly knew too much about Ron’s plans for padding out his resume. Yet all he seemed to know were hints, not the full story. And there had been no intimation of exposure or blackmail in the man’s story, just a dry recital of facts. But Ron hadn’t been born yesterday.

“You tell an interesting story, friend,” he drawled at length. “With the emphasis on ‘story’. You have to admit, it is another great plot and you spin a good yarn, but it isn’t very plausible.”

“Neither is the religion you will found.”

“The religion you say I will found. I dunno what you’re talking about. Anyway, if you know that, I guess you know whether I carry out your wishes or not. And if you want my help, maybe you shouldn’t insult what you tell me is going to be my life’s work.”

Not that he’s wrong. The whole idea was just to win that bet with Heinlein that I can go one up on the Mormons. Not that I’m ever going to admit that to anyone.

“I apologize for my poor mastery of the nuances of your language,” replied Salidor. “I assure you I meant no insult, merely that you are a man of great imagination to whom mere implausibility is not a fatal barrier. But I expected you to need more. My words were merely to prepare the ground. To prepare your mind. Now I will show you.”

Ron tensed as the man reached into a pouch hanging at his waist, but relaxed as he pulled out a set of some kind of goggles with a strap.

“I cannot prove what I say, but I can show you something even your imagination will find hard to explain away. Here. Examine it.”

Ron took it hesitantly, turning it over, studying it. It looked like a set of wrap-around sunglasses with a strap to hold them snugly on your head. He held it up to his eyes but could not see through the lens.

“So what the hell is this?”

“Put it on so it comfortably covers your eyes.”

Ron obeyed. “Great, I’m blindfolded. Now what? You going to hustle me into a car and take me somewhere to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”

“Tap the right lens with your finger.”

Ron reached up and felt the smooth glass or whatever it was; he tapped it and jerked back. The device had come alive, filling his field of vision with a detailed geometric design. “Whoa! What is this thing? Some kind of picture show? Some kind of tiny TV?”

“It is that, and also what you would call a computer.”

“A computer? You need a truck to move one of those. You can’t just slip one over your head.”

“Quite so. Yet this is a computer. It is what they are… in my time. Now watch. See what my time is like. Tap the lens again. You can also tap the left lens to pause or push down longer on it to go back.”

Ron gave the button another nervous tap and the image was replaced by a photo. It looked just like a color photo: there was no flicker like on a television, no static, not even any visible dots, and he wondered what magic could have produced it. No magic I know of, at any rate.

The photo showed the man before him, dressed in strange garb and standing before an even stranger machine. A crowd of people stood near him, equally queerly dressed. But the strangest thing was that the man’s face, which earlier he had considered odd, was not odd at all among these people.

He whispered, shocked, “Is this… is this… real?”

“Yes. Now touch the right lens with your finger for a second.”

Ron did so, and nearly fell from his chair in surprise when the image began to move. And not only move, but move as a three-dimensional full color scene: he could not tell the difference from actually being there. He watched, enthralled. I can imagine – just – that someone might have mocked up that picture. But this? How is it possible?

He wondered what would happen if he moved his head. He grabbed the edge of the table reflexively as the scene moved smoothly, as if it were real and he was standing there in the middle of it.

Nor was it just vision: sound accompanied the strange movie, projected into his ears by the band of the glasses. The man was speaking, and others were responding. But the language was like none he had ever heard.

He ripped the device from his head; stared at it; stared at the man in amazement.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Watch more.”

So Ron did. He experienced the peculiar combination of a room so real it was like he was standing in it, in which stood a big television with grainy images of a man walking on the moon. The moon movie had an inset of a congratulatory speech by the President of the United States, who looked disturbingly like that dick Nixon. He saw cities that looked like cover art from Amazing Stories, with giant jet aircraft zooming over them. Then he saw images of ruined cities, full of dark and broken towers; lakes of fractured glass; the whole horrible history of a world gone to ruin. A world of forests, ice and death.

The scene jumped and now he saw strange vehicles, strange cities, heard strange music. He saw scenes from what looked like a museum: with some kind of preserved tablets, one summarizing the theories of Newton, the other of Einstein. He saw images of the night sky, images in which the familiar constellations were distorted by time. He saw an image of two tiny stars, then a time lapse movie of their deadly dance, and what looked like an artist’s conception turned into a 3D movie of the two meeting, then pouring a rain of deadly fire onto the Earth.

He tore the glasses off his eyes and let them dangle from his neck.

“No. No. It can’t be! This is some kind of trick!”

“I am afraid not.”

“So… what’s with… what’s with that final thing? The two stars?”

“That is why I am here. They are too close to Earth, and when they merge they become what you call a supernova. By the time we learn about it, it is too late. We have lost too much, taken too much time to recover, and have no defense. If we only had a few more hundreds or thousands of years, perhaps we would have known how to escape it. But we did not. We did what we could but the race of Man is finished. If any life remains at all on planet Earth it is microbes. By the time they evolve back into beings who can contemplate the stars, if they ever do, our Sun itself will be old and will do much the same job. This is our only hope. To buy time.

“It is extraordinarily dangerous to change the timeline. If not for those stars, humanity would have picked itself up from its ruin and gone on. Much sadder but much wiser. We would have lost thirty thousand years, but that isn’t much on an Earth already over four billion years old. But now it is risk changing time, or die forever.”

“OK, pal. So say I believe you. From what you say, our civilization is destroyed by what looks like a nuclear war. And you want me to try to preserve our knowledge to help the future. But… why that? Why not try to stop the war?”

“Nobody would believe you. You would have to give up telling people or end your quest locked away for madness. In either case your power to preserve any future at all would be negated. Frankly, I don’t know how you got away with what you did get away with. If you start raving about visitors from the future giving you a mission to save the planet, you will become a laughing stock and guarantee your failure.”

“Then why not leave me this device? As proof?”

“I am leaving it with you but it cannot help you convince others. It is my final proof to you, not the world.”

“What do you mean?”

“You will see. Then you will believe, for you will have seen with your own eyes, and understood.”

“OK… OK… say that’s true. But I don’t have to say why. I can devote my cause to world peace, or something! Maybe that will stop it from happening!”

“I have risked enough coming here. The future from this point is already uncertain. Please, please, for the sake of all you hold sacred, for the life of the human race: perform your mission in secret, as I asked. That way the futures we saw tracking back to this point will look the same. If you diverge from it, if you start trying to alter history for the better, you risk changing it for the worse. Perhaps the war will not happen but another, worse war will take its place. Perhaps the safe places we identified will be gone, and all your legacy with them. We can’t risk it.”

“But if I do anything… how much of the future will I change?”

“Consider how unlikely your own birth was: the fine tuning it took for particular men to meet particular women over the generations leading to you; not to mention the particular circumstances leading to one sperm over another fertilizing an egg at one time or another. There is a mathematics that describes this, and it basically means the future is unpredictable: tiny changes ripple forward through time until everything is changed, sooner than you might think.

“If you act in secret, if an observer from the future could tell no difference from the history of my timeline from this moment on, then you will still cause changes but they will not matter. They might not even ripple past the near singularity that strikes world history when civilization falls and nearly everyone dies anyway. Perhaps nothing will change until your legacy is rediscovered millennia hence. Or perhaps things will change but too little to matter. In any case the future of the race turns on what we do today. We dare not meddle any more than we have to, for then we risk the failure of all we seek.”

The man paused, and stared into Ron’s eyes. “I told you that meddling with history is dangerous. It is madness to attempt it, for you can easily make things worse than they were, and nothing but the death of all humanity would compel me to do it.”

“Then why put this on my shoulders?! If you’re so afraid of small changes failing, why not have more guts? Why not jump in and change the lot? Why not use your damn time machines to find out what actually caused the war, and stop it right there?!”

“We could not study the war. Our technology, great as it would seem to you, was not powerful enough to overcome the quantum disturbances caused by nuclear warfare. All we could do was hunt further away in time until we could find some other way to help the far future.”

The man paused, slowly swirling his drink, before lifting his eyes again to Ron’s.

“We believe that sometimes the great wheel of history can be changed by one man. Maybe not the war itself. Even if we had the power to learn its causes, I suspect the forces bringing your world’s doom are too wide and vast for anybody to stop them, let alone one man with less than an hour to act.

“Then we found you. A man who might change history. So here I am.”

Ron groaned and put his head in his hands. “It was all meant to be a prank, you know…”

“Perhaps your prank will save the world.”

“Or perhaps I’ll screw it up royally and be personally responsible for the annihilation of humanity!”

“You will do what you will, as did I.”

“Speaking of you: what happens to you?”

“If you do nothing, maybe the ripples of our meeting will die out and not pass through the bottleneck of the war. Then maybe I will be pulled back to my time and will know I failed. But most likely, even if you do nothing my personal future will no longer exist. I will no longer exist.”

“And yet you are here. Doesn’t that prove I failed?”

“No. Do not ask me to explain the theory. Just understand that I can come from a timeline that existed but no longer does. Or will.”

“Right… So this is a suicide mission? You left home knowing you would never return? Hoping you would never return?”

“The death of all I loved would not be delayed much longer. Better to save it, even if it never exists. If that makes any sense.”

Ron stared at him, appalled. Finally he whispered, “And I thought this was tough on me…”

The man shook himself and stared into space as if gazing at something only he could see. “Enough. My time here is ending and you should leave. I can’t be completely sure what will happen to things in my immediate vicinity when I go.”

Ron stood. The strange glasses still dangled around his neck. Then he reached out and shook the man’s hand. “Well, man from the future. How do I say goodbye to someone like you? I guess… if man has a soul, may yours find peace somewhere.”

The man nodded and gripped Ron’s forearm, leaving Ron’s hand free. After a moment’s hesitation, Ron gripped back. Strangely, this different farewell of another culture from another time made it more real to Ron than even the visions in the glasses.

“Thank you. Farewell, Ron. Do what you must, and take whatever joy life gives you in the meantime.”

Ron backed away a few steps then stood there, unable to move further, unable to take his eyes off the man who now stood looking back at him with a sad smile. As if he had dropped his child in Ron’s lap with inadequate instructions and hoped against hope that Ron would know what to do with it. And as if at the last sight he would see on Earth.

Then he was nothing but intense blackness in a faint rainbow haze, and was gone.

Ron stepped back in shock, colliding with something soft that emitted a squeak in response.

He spun around and found himself looking into the face of an attractive young woman sitting on a bar stool.

“Oh! Sorry, young lady! My clumsiness!”

“That’s all right, no harm done. Say… don’t I know you? Aren’t you…”

“Shhh!” he interrupted, “Secret mission!” he added with a smile.

She returned the smile. “So who’s your friend?”

“My friend?”

“The guy you were talking to, him over… oh! That’s strange! Where’d he go?”

Ron spun to look, though he already knew there was nothing there. Involuntarily, his hand went to his neck, but the glasses were gone. He had not even felt them go. As if… as if they had never been there.

Shaken, he turned to look at the girl. “But you saw him, right? I was talking to some guy, right?”

She looked at him, amused. “Are you ok? Sure, you were talking to some guy. Ever since I got here, about ten minutes ago.”

“I don’t suppose you noticed whether I had some funny looking glasses on? Hanging around my neck?”

She frowned. “Yeah, I think you had something like that. Why?”

‘My final proof to you,’ he said.

Not that they are there, but that they were but now are not.

Holy Mother of God.

“You know,” he said to her, “I wasn’t feeling like any more company tonight, but suddenly I think the last thing I want to do is go up to my room alone.”

The woman smiled, crossed her legs and leaned back against the bar. “Oh, really?” she replied in a voice suddenly more husky than it had been.

Ron felt a familiar fire below his stomach, reality attempting its rally against the unreality of the evening. “Really.”