Short Story: Terminal Conversations
Time travel has been written about so many times, there can’t be anything fresh in it. I decided to play with time travel once—and only once. “Terminal Conversations” appeared in Travel a Time Historic, an anthology published in 2005.
This short story is included in the collection Regarding Dead Things on the Side of the Road.
Track One, Number Nine! All aboard!
The terminal was packed. So much for quick and easy travel. People crowded toward the entrance to Track One, their bodies pressed tightly against each other. Justin watched with detached disgust, hoping his train wasn’t so crowded.
In front of him, a fat man in a business suit was engaged in a heated argument with a ticket agent. His toupee flopped up and down in time to his mouth. The agent stoically looked past the customer, as if she wished he were either dead or she were someplace else entirely.
Justin couldn’t hear the exact words, but something was “not right” about “time” and the man wanted his “money back.”
Maybe that was “mother back.”
The line stretched past the counter and wrapped around stanchions and ropes. There were probably fifty people waiting to buy tickets and an equal number who waited for information. The air was stale; each individual exhaled breath added a distinct smell to the mix. It wasn’t right. Justin found himself secretly wishing they would all stop breathing.
A woman in her thirties, lithe and well-groomed, crossed the terminal commons. She seemed to hone in on the chair next to Justin and turned. He smelled sweet and alluring perfume before she ever sat down. Her dress shifted up past her knees as she crossed her legs and fumbled with her purse. She turned to Justin and weakly smiled. “Hi.”
“Hi.” He thought he heard his voice crack.
The woman pulled a compact out of her purse and studied whatever it was women felt they needed to study in mirrors. With flare, she snapped it shut and put it back in her purse.
“So, where are you headed?” The woman sat back in the chair and folded her arms.
“1952.” He tried to shift his eyes from her. He did not want to stare. “And you?”
“I’m going to ’59.”
“Going to see family?” Justin wondered if that question sounded too obvious, almost childish.
“Yeah. My grandmother graduated high school back then. I think she would have liked to know I was there.” The woman smiled, her eyes twinkling under the harsh terminal lights.
“Ever traveled back before?”
“Once, when I was fifteen. I took a train to 1929 with my father. He said he wanted to see his dad before he hung himself after the market fell.” The woman’s smile faded. She leaned over and put a hand on Justin’s shoulder.
“I don’t think he told me the truth,” she whispered.
Justin felt his heartbeat escalate. “What does he do for a living?”
“Plays on Wall Street with all the other stuffed shirts. Haven’t seen him in a few years, though.” She took her hand off his shoulder.
Justin put his ticket inside his coat pocket and looked up at the line at the counter. “Looks like a busy day to travel.” He turned back and noticed again just how attractive she was. “Name’s Justin.”
“Allie.”
The noise in the terminal grew louder. Words collided against words while people mindlessly walked from place to place. The high ceiling and open spaces created echoes out of every sound. Justin sat back against the chair.
“And you?” Allie turned her head slightly, revealing delicate tanned skin on her neck. “Travel much?”
“On business, mainly.” Justin sighed. “I’m a temporal systems program manager, so this is pretty much my life.”
“How many trips have you been on?”
Justin shrugged. “More than one, less than fifty. I really hate taking the train, though.”
“That’s funny.”
“What?”
“You travel all the time, and you hate taking the train. It’s like someone in the Navy who hates boats.”
Justin smiled. “Maybe. I’m just not a fan of the jump. A little too much, if you ask me.”
Allie turned. “I remember that trip I took with my father. The train was older, not like these new, sleek models. I thought it wasn’t ever going to get up to speed, but right before hitting the wall, I passed out. Never felt the jump.”
Justin peeled his eyes away again and looked over at the counter. He felt redness in his cheeks and hoped Allie hadn’t noticed. The fat man with the toupee was gone and a few people in line had moved. Not many, though. “Most people pass out. Personally, I’ve never been able to do that before the jump.”
“Really? What’s it like?”
“The jump?”
“Yeah.” Allie leaned forward, her eyes lighting up again. This time Justin wasn’t sure if was the terminal lights or something else. He fumbled with his thoughts, trying to answer her question while watching images of the two of them dancing on clouds.
“Um… well.” Look back at the line. “It’s pretty much fire and heat. It rolls through the cabin until it gets to you. It’s like falling into a fireplace but never feeling the wood or the chimney.”
Justin paused for moment. His mind swirled with images. “You float in a liquid Hell.”
“Good thing I passed out, huh?”
“Yeah, it hurts.” Justin’s mind traveled quickly from his description to his memory. So many jumps, so much pain. He pried his attention away from the line and found himself lost in Allie’s eyes. “If you pass out, you never know what hit you.”
Track Two, Number Four! All aboard!
The intercom filled the cavernous terminal. People from all over looked up as if it helped them hear better. Words spoken seemed frozen in the stagnant air, waiting for the decision to continue or drop off altogether.
People stood up from chairs and grouped together in impossibly tight messes. They pushed to the right of the terminal, each step small and cumbersome but taken together.
Justin watched the group head for Track Two. The fat man with the toupee was tangled together with a skinny kid in his mid-twenties. They pushed against each other and jockeyed for the best position to get through the gate.
“Look at them,” Justin said, pointing toward the crowd. “Each one of them thinks the first person through security will get a better seat on the train. They push and shove and get mad at each other.”
“What’s the rush?” The old woman coughed. Justin shifted his weight away from her. Since she’d sat down, she’d been nothing but annoying. Her eyes were hidden behind the folds of her skin and Justin couldn’t help but watch the hairs inside her moles wave at him. He silently wished she would just disappear.
Justin shook his head. “I don’t know, Mrs. Allie. I never could understand it. The train isn’t leaving until all ticketed passengers are accounted for and all seats filled. I always go last.”
The noise in the terminal exploded again as people continued their previous conversations either with each other or in heated bursts aimed at helpless ticket agents.
“You said you were a temp… tempo… something.”
“Temporal systems project manager.” Justin drew his attention from Mrs. Allie’s moles and back to the line in front of him.
“What exactly do you do?”
Annoying question. “Basically, I make sure people don’t mess with what’s already happened. Let’s say your father didn’t go back to see his dad before he jumped. Let’s say he tried to stop him.”
“I thought that’s what Inhibitors were for.” Mrs. Allie put out her hand to show Justin the bracelet on her spotted wrist. “I thought these were supposed to stop interference.”
Justin smiled smugly. “These aren’t permanent. There are ways to take them off.”
“Hmmm. Okay, so my father stops his dad from jumping. Then what?”
“Whatever your grandfather couldn’t have done because he was dead is now a moot point. There’s a body in the mix that isn’t supposed to be there. Whatever he changes affects something else.”
“Like a butterfly effect.”
“In simple terms, yes. But this isn’t the same thing.”
“If history changed like that, though, you wouldn’t know it. You couldn’t go back and change what is now truth.”
Justin sighed. Old people never understand.
Number Eight arriving at Track Three!
“Do you have any gum?” Allen poked Justin in the side.
“Quit poking me, kid. Isn’t your mother somewhere around here?”
“Nope. She’s dead. Got any gum?”
The crowd shifted from right to left like a herd of animals following the blinking lights above Track Three. In seconds, a few people would come through the gate. There was always less who came back. It was inevitable. Justin watched the crowd form a semi-circle of greeters.
Some of them would go home alone.
“No, I don’t have any gum.” Justin pulled his jacket away from the armrest. The snotty kid might try to go through his pockets.
“If you try to stop things from happening, Mister, how do you find out what happened?” Allen swung his legs back and forth on the chair, his baseball cap askew.
“There are temporal researchers who travel more than I do. They run back and forth collecting books and newspapers and whatever else they can find. If something they collect is dramatically different than what they know, they put together a team of people to investigate.”
“Why?”
“To fix the problem.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what we do. We clean up messes.”
“Why?”
Justin stood up. He had enough. The crowd of people still stood around the gate to Track Three and waited. He pulled his ticket out. Track Two, Number Six. Above him, glowing green monitors listed arrivals and departures. It clicked once and changed Number Eight to “Arrived”.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “Ten more minutes.”
“Hey, Mister?” Allen stood next to him, pulling on a pant leg. “If you go back and change something that’s already been changed, would that mean you didn’t need to go back and change it? Huh?”
“Yes.” Justin gritted his teeth. “It would also mean that I wouldn’t be talking to kids like you.”
“Okay. So, if you changed something back, and it didn’t need to be changed, and you then didn’t need to go back and change it, you really didn’t go back and change it, and it’s still the same way it was. Is that right?”
Justin ignored the question and looked over at Track Three. A few people filed through the gates, their eyes filled with wonder or sadness, sometimes both. People greeted them with hugs and kisses, smiling or not, laughing or not.
The fat man with the toupee stepped through the gate next. He looked through the crowd in front of him then stomped off through the masses. Apparently he didn’t get what he wanted.
Track Two, Number Five! All aboard!
Justin watched the monitors above him. They clicked and the lines moved up one. His train was next.
“So what are you going back to change?” the ape asked. It looked at Justin with wide eyes, then picked a flea off its fur.
“Something’s not right.” Justin sighed and looked around at all the apes and humans bumping into each other. He wasn’t about to tell this ape that the temporal research unit found that simians couldn’t mingle properly like humans. Nor, for that matter, could they talk. Someone had gone back too far and changed something too drastic. “I really can’t tell you what that is, but I have to fix it.”
The ape picked another flea off and looked at it crushed between its fingers. “If you’re going to change it, what happens to you?”
“Hopefully nothing.”
The ape dropped the flea and walked back to the chair. Justin followed, suddenly afraid.
It wasn’t the first time.
“What happens to me?” The ape didn’t look at Justin. It stared ahead at the ticket counter where other apes and humans were engaged in conversation.
“What do you mean?” Justin knew what it meant, though. He’d been in this situation before.
“If what you change makes me not exist…”
Justin turned to the ape and smiled as much as he could. “If what I change makes you not exist, then you wouldn’t know it.”
“I’d… die?”
“No. You wouldn’t have existed in the first place.”
The ape sighed and looked at Justin. Justin felt attraction, disgust and annoyance well up inside of him all at once. In its eyes he saw someone he wanted, someone he wished would go away, and someone who needed to find some gum. For some reason, he felt only one of those people had the right to exist.
Justin blinked, not understanding, and turned away. “Don’t worry about it. Just enjoy the ride.”
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All text copyright 2004, Benjamin X. Wretlind
