THE POWER OF THREE (2 page)

In an instant Jane didn’t like her. One gift of old age was an instinct honed by years of interaction with others. You could tell, even without evidence, when a person was pretty good or pretty bad. Bad, of course, was a relative term. For Jane it meant a person not quite on the up-and-up.
A person with agendas, dark ones.
A person of secrets, bad ones.

That person stood before her in the guise of a young, beautiful woman in her twenties. She was blonde with blue eyes, a knock-out. She was tall, svelte, and elegant. She was also as cold as a frozen fish TV dinner in Jane’s refrigerator.

Though Jane shook the young woman’s hand and tried to smile at her, she knew she was probably in some way grimacing instead. She would have to talk to John about this woman. Find out more about her in some roundabout way. Her grandson did listen to her and he respected her opinions. “Barb” was just that.
A barb.
A thorn that would lodge itself in her grandchild’s side.

On the way to the Institute, Barb was silent as a mongoose watching a snake. John, excited as always, didn’t notice and talked about what a great opportunity this was for his grandmother.

Jane was reminded of other women in her lifetime she’d had the unhappiness of knowing who were similar to Barb. They were social climbers, full of avarice and greed, narcissistic in the extreme. They didn’t care who suffered if they were blocked from their goals. They would do anything to get what they wanted. Barb wanted John. Rather than find out years from now what a mistake he had made in marrying her, Jane hoped before a wedding between them she could find a way to show her grandson what kind of future he was moving toward.

In the Institute, where she had never been before, John left Barb in his office, and took Jane to a room down the hall where two men sat behind a table. “Thank you,” one of the men said to John, dismissing him from the room.

Jane sat down gratefully, her knees killing her. She placed her white patent leather purse in her lap and crossed her hands where they lay on the shiny metal table. “My grandson tells me you’d like to ask some questions.”

For the next hour she answered everything honestly. Where she was born, what year, would she be willing to go to a past year and come back to tell them of the experience? Would she be careful not to disturb the past if she could help it?

She lied on answering the last question for she meant to alter the past if she could. She most certainly would break that one oath she was asked to sign. They didn’t have to know everything.

#

The day of the experiment, Jane was asked to pick a date in her past to re-visit. She pretended to pick a date out of the air, nonchalantly waving her old, crippled hand and saying with a slight stutter, “Oh, I…heck…I guess May 16, 1989 will do.”

It had been reiterated over and over to her that she should just pick a random day where nothing of great import happened in her life.

Did she worry about coming back? Did the large machine kept in a climate-controlled room in a large military complex on Long Island frighten her? Was her heart tripping and stuttering and was her blood pressure rising despite her blood pressure medicine?

Yes, all of that. If she did not come back to the present, she couldn’t help prevent John’s marriage to Barbara. If the large, alien, humming machine crunched her bones to dust and sent her into oblivion, it might hurt, and it might be her last moments alive. And her heart was a mess though she tried to meditate and accept these risks without such terrible fear.

She was placed in a capsule inside the cold, steel, towering machine that
rose
two stories high. She sat comfortably in a reclining chair, her feet lifted, her eyes closed. If this was the end then at least it was more exciting than a heart attack, and much less painful.

She heard nothing. No whirrs or hisses, no high-pitched sounds, no grinding of motors or clanking of parts. She thought she’d dozed.

She woke in 1989 in her bed. Her second husband, Charles, had already left for work. She sat up in her younger body, amazed at how well she felt. She flexed her fingers, startled at how straight and beautiful they were. She slid her legs to the floor and noticed not one iota of pain in her knees. She was a woman in her fifties, fifteen pounds lighter, and this was a new day.

Then she remembered why she was here. She had been here before, had lived this day like any other. She had washed and ironed clothes. She had mopped the floors and made dinner. And around ten p.m. the phone had rung with the news her daughter was dead.

She leaped from the bed and rushed to the living room. She had Carol on the phone within minutes. Her daughter’s voice was like hearing a ghost. She said breathlessly, “Carol! Don’t take the subway tonight! You’ll work late and there won’t be anyone on your platform at the station. You’ll be mugged and stabbed. You’ll die!”

Silence came from the receiver. Jane licked her lips nervously. She almost spoke again.

Then Carol said, “Mother, have you been drinking or something?”

“Baby, I know this sounds nuts, but you have to listen to me. If you were ever in your entire life going to listen and follow your mother’s advice, this is the day to do it. You CANNOT take the subway tonight. I will come and ride with you in a cab myself if I have to. Do you understand?”

“Sure, Mama, I got it, okay? You’re having some kind of premonition. I’ll take a cab, I promise.”

All day Jane paced the apartment, electrified with her racing thoughts. She didn’t wash or iron or mop or cook. She paced, wondering if she should make the trip downtown to her daughter’s place of work to make sure she didn’t take the subway. When ten p.m. came and went without a phone call, she collapsed into a chair. She called Carol and spoke to her, finding for herself that her daughter was safe. Her husband gave Jane a troubled look and announced, “Hell, I’m going to bed. You’ve worn me out with your pacing.”

The time travel lasted just twenty-four hours. They had not been able to make it last any longer, despite years of development. She woke in the reclining chair, people standing over her smiling. Behind them she saw John. There were tears in his eyes.

She was taken to a private room and questioned. She filled out some papers detailing her day. She left out the warning she’d given her daughter to save her life.

In the hallway John waited to take her arm. He walked beside her to the elevator, hailed a cab to take them back to the city. Once inside the cab he turned to her.

“Well?” she asked, waiting to hear how he had lived his life with his mother.

“She’s not here. You went back in time to the wrong day. She was killed on May seventeenth, in the same way, on the same platform.”

Jane gasped. “But it didn’t happen on the seventeenth! It was the sixteenth. I went back to that day and I got her to take a cab.”

John shook his head. “No, Me-ma, you made a mistake. It was the seventeenth.”

#

Jane became a permanent time travel candidate. She was sent back in time once a week for months on end, coming back all in one piece, her memories intact. She kept changing the date, as if picking something off the top of her mind. She always picked the day John told her his mother died, no matter what day that was.
May
seventeeth
.
June twentieth. September thirty-first. Every time she called Carol and told her to take a cab. Every night after ten she called to be sure she was alive and she was.

But on her return to the present day time, John always shook his head and told her it had happened another day and she’d gone back to the wrong one.
Before
she went, it was a certain day.
After
her return it changed to something else. Finally she sat with her coffee in front of the long window having a serious talk with her grandson. It was noon, hot as blazes in her apartment, and sweat trickled down the back of her collar.

“We can’t save her,” she said. “I’ve tried and tried, but it’s never the right day. I don’t think we’re permitted to enter the time stream to prevent someone’s death, John. It’s just not going to happen.”

He tried to understand. To him the day his mother died hadn’t changed at all. Each time he told her it was some other
day,
he never remembered it had changed after his grandmother traveled into the past. By her changing the past with her warning, she didn’t stop the killing of her daughter, but she did change the future for her grandson enough for him to believe it had always been a certain way.

“I’m changing your past when I change Carol’s. Still, her death is pre-ordained and if I save her on one day, she dies on another the same way. She’s still gone to us in this present and nothing is really changed for any of us.”

John wept then, held in his grandmother’s arms, just a child again longing for his mother.

Jane wanted to stop the experiments. Visiting the past without the power to change it had left her even more unsettled. She really needed to talk to a learned person, a philosopher or a priest, who could explain to her the theory of pre-ordination. The people on Long Island begged her to stay in the program for just a little while longer. They wanted to try something else. Tired, her thoughts far from the discussion, she gave into their pressure. This time they didn’t ask her for a date. They told her not to trouble herself over it. They would handle everything.

#

She opened her eyes and knew immediately she was not where she had ever been before. She lifted her head from where she’d had it resting against the window of the flying vehicle. She stiffened when she looked out and saw she was a hundred feet above the streets of New York City. All around her sat passengers in seats on each side of a long aisle. One man piloted the vehicle, flying it through the canyons of buildings with expert ease.

She was in the future. That was the only explanation. There was no flying public transportation in her world.

“My God,” she breathed. She looked down at herself and she was aged, her hands crippled, her fingers swollen and bent like the hands of a crone in a fairytale. Her knees hurt, her back hurt, and she knew if she lifted her hand to her face she would find the skin of her cheeks creped and wrinkled.

What had they done?
She was told they couldn’t project subjects into the
future, that
they could only go into the past, specifically the past of those who had lived it.

Liars!

What were they expecting to get from sending her into the future?
Had that been the plan all along and the travel into the past just a ruse to lull their subjects?
What was she supposed to see or tell them when she returned? This was terrible. Not as terrible as discovering she could not change what happened to her daughter Carol, but this was definitely a betrayal of her trust.

The flying machine set down on a rooftop and Jane hurried as quickly as she could to exit it. She followed slowly behind others who went toward a gated area and then through an open door. She waited her turn to take the elevator.

On the street, she stood shakily, looking about in wonder.

Not a lot was changed, but enough to make her feel it wasn’t her city anymore. The buildings had new fronts, as if they had been plated with aluminum armor. The windows appeared not to have glass in them. She reached out to put her arm into the open space and her hand slammed into an invisible barrier. She pulled back her hand, wincing, massaging it.

She knew her own street was not far distant. She hurried that direction. It was almost noon—11:29AM according to a scrolling marquee on a building front--and John would be visiting.

#

Her apartment was the same, even shabbier if that could be truly possible. The window air conditioner hiccoughed often, the compressor stopping and starting up again by itself. The floors were worn, the rugs faded to colorless coverings. Her favorite easy chair had worn holes where she rested her hands on the arms, and the material was thin on a spot where she laid back her head. The windows were grimy and the water pipes kept up a racket to wake the dead.

She had hardly settled herself into the chair, confused by the decrepitude of her place, when she heard the key in the door.

She turned, waiting for John to enter.

The person who entered instead was Barb.

“Hello, old woman. I’ve got something for your coffee.” She carried a little evil looking brown vial. She lifted it in the air, shaking the contents. “It will make you sleep like a baby.”

Jane flinched at the woman’s cackle. “Where’s John?” she asked.

“Dead as you’re going to be in just a few minutes. If you won’t drink your coffee—where is it, by the way?” She moved toward the kitchen. “If you don’t drink your coffee, I’ll have to force this down your gullet and it won’t be nice for you.”

At hearing her grandson was
dead,
Jane thought she would die herself and save Barb the trouble. “What happened to him?”

“The bastard thought he could divorce me. He thought his high-priced lawyer could make me go away with a tiny settlement. Well, he thought wrong.
He
had coffee this morning before leaving for work. He didn’t make it to work, alas.
Oh, alas, alas.”