Read No Early Birds: A Short Story Online
Authors: Mackey Chandler
"I'll park around back if I come, okay?" That satisfied her, and she nodded.
I thumbed the little oval icon at the screen bottom that said
Target has interfering objects and observers.
Please try another location or target.
Then our lunch came.
When we were near done with lunch Edna said, "Oh dear, this is just terrible, look at this please," glancing around at all of us, but handing the paper to me. She had the front section folded and open to the third page. There was a picture of a very badly wrecked green Explorer jammed under a concrete truck. The caption said the wreck happened at 11:07 Saturday when the concrete truck ran a red light and broad-sided a rental vehicle. Wet roads were a factor. Police said no names would be released until families were notified, adding the women carried out of state ID so there might be a delay. I bet there would be a delay. More than they had any idea. I passed it across the table to Faye and Anna.
"That's ugly," Faye muttered, giving the paper back. She wasn't the sort to emote a lot on the news, but we'd just seen these people up close and even she was upset at the picture.
"We should punch in an earlier time and wait for the women to come down the street and give them the machine and a warning," Edna suggested.
"No," Faye said very thoughtfully. "Just
tell
them before not to lose the time machine at the end of the drive. If we show them we have it, and they still have it, we have two copies of the same object present at the same time and place. That might be against the rules."
"What rules?" Edna wanted to know.
"God's rules, nature's rules, hell, the Galactic Time Police for all I know," Faye protested. She read quite a bit more science fiction than the rest of us, although plenty of my romance novels had time travel themes too.
"People have to worry about paradoxes," Faye assured us, but offered no details.
"What will happen to this copy if we warn them?" I wondered, looking at it.
"I'd bet when you check your purse it just won't be there. Possibility we won't even remember any of it if we succeed," Faye suggested. "We'd loop back on ourselves and the whole loop of linked events might just,
poof
, disappear." That seemed kind of scary.
"Anybody against trying to warn them?" I asked. Nobody objected. I'm proud of my friends that way. None of them hesitated to do what was right. Not even to own a time machine.
We got back in the car, Anna still driving and went back to 156th. Ave. N.W. where we first saw the green Explorer. I knew it was later we'd seen them so I punched in 10:00 even. It seemed safer to use the thing rolling so I hit enter as soon as we turned on the street. The windshield was immediately spotted with misty drizzle and Anna turned the wipers on. The sunlight shut off like somebody flipped a switch.
Faye in the back seat was the only one who acknowledged it. She said, "Crap, it does work." It was pretty obvious with all of us watching for the change. There was no striking big change near us. No cars popping into sudden existence right beside us, but a pair of headlights did suddenly appear well down the road coming our way, and the way the clouds and rain appeared in an instant was downright spooky.
We parked at the curb, expecting to sit for awhile because we didn't have the times for everything right to the minute. We might have to wait five minutes or fifteen. The sale sign by the mailbox was familiar. We had the right place for sure. We'd just sit and wait until the green Explorer showed up.
We'd been there maybe two minutes and Anna suddenly called out and pointed. "Look, that's them!" A big green Explorer was pulling away from the curb down at another sale.
"How'd they get ahead of us?" she objected, starting the car. "They were here earlier last time."
"Wait a minute before you chase them. I can set the time back to 9:50 and we'll see them come in then."
"Okay," she agreed, putting it in park, but leaving the engine running.
I set the screen and hit enter, braced for anything to happen. The screen said:
Adjacent brane complex too dense for entry.
Change targets or move from probable area of primary event nexus.
The green vehicle reached the end of the street and turned left just like it had the first time we had followed it trying to give the machine back.
"Should I try to chase them?" Anna asked.
"No, I don't think so. We tried that before and never found them. I'm suddenly scared of the rules Faye was talking about. I don't know how hard we'd have to try to change things before the rules change us - or edit us out. Let's go home and talk about it. If we can figure something out we can go back as easily from tomorrow as from right now, Let's go home ladies, and check for concrete trucks before you go through any green lights. Things don't seem as certain as they did Friday."
* * *
We all agreed to meet at Anna's for dinner. We met like that often, going to each other's homes, but not in any rigid rotation. Edna usually made potato salad because hers was indisputably the best, and somebody would bring a big bucket of chicken from one of the little local places that beat the heck out of Kentucky Fried. I decided to make a Key Lime pie.
None of us were hurting for money. Faye always had a new minivan and Edna has a new Lexus every two years. Anna drives the same old car forever, but she probably has more money than the rest of us put together. She was the only one who kept a free standing house instead of a condo, though we teased her it was only so she could ogle the bronzed lawn workers and pool boys. We ended up there more often than not in nice weather because she has a Spanish style layout with a brick paved courtyard that was in shade by supper time with lovely plants and trees all around. It has the fake red tile roof because the real tiles aren't safe for hurricanes and wrought iron gates and grill work everywhere. All of us have stayed there a few times when a hurricane came through. We'd actually make a party of it then.
We all talked about other things, avoiding talk about the morning, which would have spoiled dinner for sure. We all got along that way without making rules or discussing it. It was the sort of harmonious friendship you can't plan. We all had other friends and different combinations got tried almost at random it seems. When we four took a cruise together a couple years ago it just clicked. Nobody was weird about picking up a check or tried to calculate it to the penny. Nobody told all about their surgery while we were trying to eat. We all got along better than sisters.
When we got back from the cruise we had a bond that is hard to explain. Now we pretty much know what we are going to do each week and if one goes off to visit kids or grand kids it seems to work as a three-some just as well any way you want to juggle it. I suppose if someone died we'd try out some candidates for replacement, but when you get right down to it the reason we stay at four is simple. We fit in a car comfortably with all the junk we haul around and four works for everything from a restaurant booth to cards. Another person just wouldn't work at all.
After eating Anna started a couple citronella candles in little buckets she sets around. We cleared all the mess away and she brought out a big pitcher of peach Margaritas. We don't always do that, but considering the day we'd had she didn't bother to ask. She made them strong too.
"Anybody come up with any ideas about the machine?" Anna asked after she took a good long sip of her Margarita.
"The way the time those women stopped at the sale changed from what we remembered was spooky," Edna said. "I'm not used to the idea time can change. It's hard to even speak about it clearly with any English I'm used to using, and I was a school teacher. We need different tenses for time indefinite or time altered. I've been thinking about it a lot, and you know, I don't think they could have been aware there was any change. To them, they had to be stopping there for the first time, and I'm sure there was nothing happening to tell them something had changed and that change was reaching back in time to touch them. It's scary because the same thing could happen to us."
"Why do you say they couldn't have been aware of it?" I asked. "Not that I'm arguing. I'm just not sure I understand."
"Well why
did
things change when we tried to get the machine back to them?"
"I'd assume the fact they died. Obviously reality will stretch far enough that they could buy a novelty bank and it being absent from the world isn't enough to cause a problem." I thought on it a minute, and she didn't interrupt seeing I still had my wheels turning on the problem. "Nor all the little things that go with being here to buy the bank. The extra money the person holding the sale got, the car rental and changes because they drove around in it. They burn up gas and are on security cameras around town. All those are sort of normal things that don't really make any difference.
"But when you get run over by a concrete truck you have two dead bodies, and a wrecked car to remove and explain. It makes changes in all sorts of things that don't go away easily. It gets published in the newspaper and there are all the emergency services responding and the insurance and such. Not like the other little things that you'd be hard pressed to even prove they happened a couple days later. The bigger event extinguished the lesser. That's why we couldn't make a small change by giving them back the machine and erase the fact they were killed. Is that what you are thinking?"
"Yes, but you said it better than I could," Edna admitted. "Now the two ladies in the Explorer - I assume they used the little time machine before. Just from the way they knew what they were doing at a sale they know their way around, uh, in our time." We all nodded in agreement. "So if they saw some spooky change that didn't make sense, like we saw their arrival time shifting, I bet they'd know something big was happening. Seems to me they'd go straight home to be safe and stay put and check the papers and stuff for our date until they knew what had happened big enough to make them see events shift."
"But what if they couldn't figure it out or if it was something like their wreck that they avoided and couldn't ever know?" Faye asked.
"Then I bet they'd stay away from this area, maybe even this date. They'd go to sales in a different city, maybe even a different state, and stay away from this date too. Maybe mark the whole week off limits instead of just a day," Anna speculated.
"Maybe losing the time machine was the big change instead of the wreck," Faye suggested. "Maybe they were stuck here once that happened and the sooner they died the less stress on reality. They couldn't start altering this time bit by bit by introducing changes." That was an interesting idea too.
"We didn't forget the first time we saw them stop at the sale," Edna pointed out. She didn't really ask it as a question, but it obviously perplexed her.
"The little machine kept us anchored to that sequence of events," Faye decided. "I'd bet anything it can't make itself disappear. That would change much bigger things than a car wreck way into whenever it comes from."
"Whenever...We're changing how we talk about it already," Edna said.
"But I'm thinking about how we do things," I said. "We all have our own cell phones. And we all keep our own passports and charge cards and things even when we do things together. Wouldn't the other lady have her own time machine too?"
After some discussion we decided we didn't know enough to know if the time machine was common, or expensive where, or rather when, the ladies originated. They had to be common enough that they could use it to acquire collectables. We supposed they were doing so for a profit motive. That also suggested that other more direct ways to make money with it were either prohibited or just didn't work. Faye suggested we be very cautious trying to use it that way ourselves.
If the other lady did have one then the police likely had it and we could expect they'd be looking in it just like we did for information to try to notify the next of kin. No doubt any good detective would figure out what the machine was just like we'd done. Somebody else having one seemed to make it more likely a change could be made with it that would alter us. That idea kind of scared us, but there wasn't really anything we could do about it.
"What do you girls want to do?" I asked them directly. I looked at Edna in particular because I was concerned, worried really, that she would want to go back and visit her husband on his last day. How she thought she'd get herself out of the way or how it could have happened since she didn't remember it were things I didn't want to have to argue with her. Logic wasn't what drove her to have the idea in the first place, and there wasn't any good argument against what she felt in her heart. It just was.