The last thing they did, before sending me into the past, was shove me to the end of the world.
The Project Mayfly nurse waited as I raised myself onto a wicker table with a surface made of tightly-strung hide, a grid that put me in mind of a tennis racket. The squares of string pressed against the thin fabric of my hospital gown.
As I climbed on, I couldn’t help noticing the drain in the floor. It was a hand’s width away from the letters scratched into the concrete: “16—Hungry.”
There were marks on the wall, too, across from the metal staircase. A timeline, in yellow chalk, running from floor to ceiling, hashed at one-inch intervals. The year 1900 was scrawled at the bottom, the numbers mashed short by the floor. A foot and change upward from that, 1914 and 1916. The nines had a familiar, slightly twisted look to them. They were at once readable and yet not quite perfectly formed. So were the nines in the other chalk digits that followed: 1937 and the current year, 1946.
The nurse dodged the hand I’d put out, just for a last friendly pat, you know. She covered me, toes to chin, with a lead blanket.
“When do you tell me my mission?”
“Willie will send word when you’ve gotten there safe and sound.” The Major’s words came from a speaker in the ceiling. “Good luck, son.”
“Eyes wide, now.” The nurse slid a hand into the seven tons of steel bolted to the ceiling above me, drawing out a pair of rubber cups on a long, noodle-pallid cord. I complied, distorting my view of the chalk timeline on the wall across from me; she popped the cups on my eyes, like contact lenses except they were so thick they braced my eyelids open.
“Bit of discomfort coming,” she said, patting the lead blanket.
Blinded, I felt the vibration of the machine as it lowered from the ceiling, Dr. Frankenstein’s version of an optician’s examining rig. It settled on my body like an automobile laid atop the blanket. I heard clips. The flesh of my rump pressed the rawhide grid below.
“It’s wrong on my nose,” I protested: cold steel was pressing down on my face with bruising force.
“Try to breathe.”
“My nose,” I said again.
All their warnings ran through my mind: If you lied about ever being to Seattle you will die. If there is any metal in your body, you will die.
Who would lie about visiting Seattle?
This is a one-way mission.
Knowing I would survive the press was hardly a comfort.
Seven tons of steel were clamped around me and my nose was going to break, and after telling me to
breathe, just breathe,
that nurse—she smelled of rosewater, I’ll never forget it—was sliding some kind of leather bit into my mouth. It was enough to make me wish I was at the front, face-to-barrel with one of the new Russo-German repeating rifles.
I heard her retreat to the staircase, locking the lead door. I counted to thirty. What felt like a year passed.
Then I saw the death of the world.
It was hot, but there was no fire. My crushed nose picked up a smell straight out of Dante’s
Inferno
: charnel and brimstone. I rose above the great American city, above Lake Washington and Puget Sound. Higher, higher.
But something was wrong with the color of the future, seven weeks out. Seattle, below, the sky above, even the air around me . . . it was all splashed with color I’d never seen before. Everything was off the accepted painter’s wheel of red, blue, yellow.
The cries of thousands of living things, dying in agony, merged with my own.
My mind, confronted with the impossible, revolted. Pinned, gagged, and clamped in place, unable to look away, I screamed as the timepress thrust me against the end of everything, as I bounced off that imminent stained future and ricocheted into the past.
A sproing, a sense of strings beneath me popping. I dropped—but struck something soft before I realized I was falling.
It was dark, everything hurt, and I was still screaming.
I fought the howls, eventually compressing
The Project Mayfly nurse waited as I raised myself onto a wicker table with a surface made of tightly-strung hide, a grid that put me in mind of a tennis racket. The squares of string pressed against the thin fabric of my hospital gown.
As I climbed on, I couldn’t help noticing the drain in the floor. It was a hand’s width away from the letters scratched into the concrete: “16—Hungry.”
There were marks on the wall, too, across from the metal staircase. A timeline, in yellow chalk, running from floor to ceiling, hashed at one-inch intervals. The year 1900 was scrawled at the bottom, the numbers mashed short by the floor. A foot and change upward from that, 1914 and 1916. The nines had a familiar, slightly twisted look to them. They were at once readable and yet not quite perfectly formed. So were the nines in the other chalk digits that followed: 1937 and the current year, 1946.
The nurse dodged the hand I’d put out, just for a last friendly pat, you know. She covered me, toes to chin, with a lead blanket.
“When do you tell me my mission?”
“Willie will send word when you’ve gotten there safe and sound.” The Major’s words came from a speaker in the ceiling. “Good luck, son.”
“Eyes wide, now.” The nurse slid a hand into the seven tons of steel bolted to the ceiling above me, drawing out a pair of rubber cups on a long, noodle-pallid cord. I complied, distorting my view of the chalk timeline on the wall across from me; she popped the cups on my eyes, like contact lenses except they were so thick they braced my eyelids open.
“Bit of discomfort coming,” she said, patting the lead blanket.
Blinded, I felt the vibration of the machine as it lowered from the ceiling, Dr. Frankenstein’s version of an optician’s examining rig. It settled on my body like an automobile laid atop the blanket. I heard clips. The flesh of my rump pressed the rawhide grid below.
“It’s wrong on my nose,” I protested: cold steel was pressing down on my face with bruising force.
“Try to breathe.”
“My nose,” I said again.
All their warnings ran through my mind: If you lied about ever being to Seattle you will die. If there is any metal in your body, you will die.
Who would lie about visiting Seattle?
This is a one-way mission.
Knowing I would survive the press was hardly a comfort.
Seven tons of steel were clamped around me and my nose was going to break, and after telling me to
breathe, just breathe,
that nurse—she smelled of rosewater, I’ll never forget it—was sliding some kind of leather bit into my mouth. It was enough to make me wish I was at the front, face-to-barrel with one of the new Russo-German repeating rifles.
I heard her retreat to the staircase, locking the lead door. I counted to thirty. What felt like a year passed.
Then I saw the death of the world.
It was hot, but there was no fire. My crushed nose picked up a smell straight out of Dante’s
Inferno
: charnel and brimstone. I rose above the great American city, above Lake Washington and Puget Sound. Higher, higher.
But something was wrong with the color of the future, seven weeks out. Seattle, below, the sky above, even the air around me . . . it was all splashed with color I’d never seen before. Everything was off the accepted painter’s wheel of red, blue, yellow.
The cries of thousands of living things, dying in agony, merged with my own.
My mind, confronted with the impossible, revolted. Pinned, gagged, and clamped in place, unable to look away, I screamed as the timepress thrust me against the end of everything, as I bounced off that imminent stained future and ricocheted into the past.
A sproing, a sense of strings beneath me popping. I dropped—but struck something soft before I realized I was falling.
It was dark, everything hurt, and I was still screaming.
I fought the howls, eventually compressing
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