A Hostage in Time

David and Sylvia are the only ones remaining in the lab, performing diagnostics on the portal after having sent through it several cases of classified CIA files. In twenty-five years, the documents would reappear in the portal, ready to be unsealed, the court-mandated time period having elapsed. If the man had come in a couple of hours earlier, the place would have been swarming with agents. But he had obviously been watching the building carefully and waited until almost everyone was gone for the day.

He enters through the lab door, shoving Serge the night watchman before him. Serge stumbles and falls, and remains on the floor where he lies, face down, barely moving but breathing heavily, his bloody hand pressed to the side of his head. Bewildered, Sylvia is about to go to Serge, but freezes when she sees the gun the man is holding in his fist. Suddenly it’s all she can see. It seems so huge; it seems to loom and fill the room. It seems to stop time itself.

Her heart starts pounding in her ears; she begins saying to herself, I have to keep calm, I have to keep calm, I mustn’t miscarry. Over and over the words run in a spool in her mind: a litany, a prayer.

“All right, you two,” the man says to them grimly. He gestures with his gun to the arch that rises from the platform in the middle of the lab. “I want to use that thing. I want you to send me back in time.”

Sylvia and David look at each other, two masks of fear mirroring each other. David says, “I’m… I’m sorry. We can’t do that.”

The man yells, “Don’t give me that! That’s a time machine! I want to go back to the past. Seven years, four months, two days. Send me back now!”

David tries to make his tone reasonable. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

“Bullshit! I’ve read up on it. People go through it and they show up months, years in the future. Just put it in reverse and send me backwards!”

David licks his lips. “Please understand: I’m not refusing. We just can’t send you back in time.”

“Are you sure about that?” The man aims his gun at David’s face. Sylvia hears his sharp intake of breath.

“Wait, wait!” Sylvia screams. “He’s not lying! Please, let me try to explain.” She trembles when the man turns the gun on her and she finds herself staring into the black pit of its barrel. I have to keep calm, I have to keep calm…

She forces herself to speak. “Yes, the arch is a temporal portal. A… a time machine. It creates a field that touches every point in the time continuum. Theoretically, it allows passage to any point in the continuum, including the past. But in reality, physical objects can only move in one direction.” She pauses, suddenly struck by the horrifying absurdity of the scene. My God, am I really lecturing temporal theory to a madman?

She continues, talking hurriedly, “The future! To what we call the future. We’re already moving along the time stream in that direction. The portal allows you to jump ahead. That’s what you read about. We can send people, things forward in time. People who are sick who may find a treatment for their diseases in the future. Or… or artifacts that gain value over time, like paintings or antiques. But it doesn’t allow us to send anything to the past, it’s… it's just not possible…” Her voice trails away, faltering at the man’s cold expression.

David tries to take it on. “Look, you’ve seen time travel movies, right? Someone goes back in time, makes some kind of change in the past, and things change in the present? Well, that’s the movies. In reality, that can’t ever happen. If it were possible for an agent – a person, or any physical object – to enter the portal and go back in time, it would alter the time stream so the agent never would have entered the portal in the first place. The universe resolves the paradox by preventing even the possibility of backwards travel. When we try to set the temporal field to a point in the past, all that happens is the field disappears.”

Sylvia adds, “It’s just a universal, chronophysical principle. The past is fixed. It’s already happened. Nothing more can happen in it. But the future is undetermined, open. It hasn’t happened yet, so any number of things can still occur. An agent sent to the future simply becomes one of those many things that can still occur. It’s like –” she lights up with a sudden insight “– it’s like we’re all walking through a tunnel that’s caving in, filling up behind us. We can go forward – even leap forward – because the way forward is still free. But behind us, the tunnel has already closed itself up.”

The man glowers at them fiercely. “You think I’m dumb? I told you: I read up on it. I read in the net that that’s what all you time scientists say, but you’re really just hiding the truth. You just don’t want people to know that backwards time travel is possible. Like you said, going back and changing the past can change things, can change history. Someone might go back in time and help the Nazis invent the atom bomb or something. And you’re afraid of that happening, so you cover it up.”

David groans. “That’s not the case at all! Those are just conspiracy theory websites that –”

The man interrupts him. “Well, I don’t want to change history. I don’t want to change anything important. I just need to go back seven years, four months, two days and do just one little thing that’ll make no difference to anyone – except me.”

David asks, “Why? Why that time span? What happened seven years ago?”

The man suddenly looks to be in agony. He says, “That’s the day before my wife and kid…” He chokes up. “I tried to save a few bucks and tried to fix the gas heater myself. I wasn’t even home when it happened…”

He pulls himself together. “I’ve got to go back and get them out of the house. Or stop myself from being such a damned fool. I have to make things right!”

The mad light returns to his eyes. “So you see, if I can’t go back, then I have nothing left anyway. And nothing to lose. So start telling the truth now and help me, or I’m going to shoot you all –“ he swings his gun in a slow arc “– maybe starting with this rent-a-cop here.” The gun stops, pointing straight at Serge’s prone figure on the ground.

“Wait, wait!” Sylvia pleads. “We’ll help you! You’re right, it’s a cover-up! Time travel to the past is possible. We tell everyone it’s not because we don’t want anyone to alter the timeline. We’ll send you back like you asked.” David stares at her astonished.

The man smiles at her grimly, triumphantly. “I thought you might.”

“I’ll need to program the arch, on that console over there.”

He waves her through. She steps to the console and starts working the touch screen, trying to keep her hands from shaking. The man sidles over and peers over her shoulder, but keeps an eye on the others. She enters the command to power the portal. She looks up and he follows her gaze. A milky white field has appeared, stretching across the arch.

“Tell me what you’re doing,” the man says.

“I’ve… I’ve activated the field.” She points to the monitor on the console. “I’m about to enter the time period you said. Seven years… What – what was it again?”

“Seven years, four months, two days,” he says. She taps on the screen.

He asks, “What happens now?”

“You just walk through the arch, through that white field. You come out on the other side of the arch in the past.”

“Sounds simple enough.” He raises his gun at her. “But you’re coming with me. Just in case you’re trying to pull a fast one.”

The blood drains from Sylvia’s face. “No, please! I’m three months pregnant! My life is here, now! I didn’t even know my husband seven years ago! I’d have no way of coming back, the portals back then weren’t powerful enough!”

Her imploration barely fazes him. He scowls his impatience. “You’ll see him again… in time. It ain’t that long to wait.”

A sob breaks out of her. “Please.”

“Move.” He jabs her shoulder blade with the barrel.

“Wait.” She nods to David, her cheeks streaked with tears. “David has to monitor the field as we go through. To make sure the field is stable.”

He turns to David and says, “All right. You come here.” David moves to take her place at the console. He glances at her with surprise when he sees the screen.

The man takes her by the arm. She tries to pull away, but he is relentless. He drags her up the steps to the platform, pauses in front of the arch, then gives her a nudge to let her know she should go first. She holds her breath and walks into the white space…

…and ducks instantly, dropping to the platform as quickly but as carefully as she can. I mustn’t miscarry, I mustn’t miscarry!

A half dozen black-clad, armored figures are standing in a half circle on the other side of the arch, pointing rifles at the platform. She covers her head with her arms. Someone shouts over her in a booming voice, “LOWER YOUR WEAPON! NOW!” There is a moment’s silence, then the air shatters in a series of bone-jarring explosions. The gunfire stops, and she hears a loud thud behind her, and two of the black-clad men are lifting her up and half-carrying, half-dragging her away. She looks back over her shoulder and manages to see before she is pulled out the door that a couple of other black-clad men are approaching the platform slowly in a crouch, swirling the lingering smoke in their wake, their weapons aimed at the heap that lies bloody and twisted under the arch.

* * *

Several hours later, David enters Sylvia’s hospital room. She has been admitted overnight for observation, just to make absolutely certain she and her baby have come through the ordeal unscathed.

Sylvia smiles tiredly from her bed. “How’s Serge?”

David replies, “He’s in ICU. He has a concussion, but they say he’s going to be all right.” He sits down on the chair beside her bed. “Thank you. That was really quick thinking. You saved all our lives.”

She shakes her head. “I was so terrified, you’ll never know.” She adds, “You kept your head, too. When you saw I had programmed the portal to send us forward, you got Serge out, called the police, let them know the situation, so they were ready when we came through the arch… an hour later.”

He shrugs. “What really embarrasses me is you had me believing for a moment that everything I knew about temporal physics was wrong, and you really were about to go back in time. You were so convincing.”

“I wish traveling to the past was possible. I’d go through the portal right now and skip today.”

He puffs his cheeks and blows his breath out. “I’d join you.”

(March 2013)