“That’s what I thought. Be a miracle if they can bring him back. Sorry.”

“Me, too.” Matt nodded. “Me, too.” He turned and headed for the other exit, toward the Green Building. Might as well see what was happening.

10

It was Marsh’s ascension into scientific sainthood and Matthew’s fifteen minutes of fame. The cover of Timehad Marsh brooding in a hyperrealistic painting by Fiona Wyeth—probably on file for years—against a ghostly background of clocks, where a wraithlike figure of Matt is stepping out of the mists of time.

The press had it all figured out. Matt wasn’t much more than an experimental animal, even though it was his clumsiness that had started it all. It was Marsh’s genius that had explained Matt’s accidental time machine.

But Matt could see that the Marsh Effect didn’t explain what happened in a definitive way. It really just described what the machine did. Then Marsh and others had tried, and were still trying, to twist physics around so that it allowed the machine to exist.

But it was as if physics had been a careful, elegant house of cards, then Marsh—or rather his earthly avatar, Matthew—had been a playful child who blundered into it and brought it down, not out of malice, but just by accident.

Now Matt, true to the analogy, sat in the middle of the mess, picking up one card and then another, trying to make sense out of it.

He came to the office every morning at nine and spent part of the day working on time travel and the rest trying to put together his course on antique physics. He had more than three months before classes started; if he’d been assigned the course back in his TA days, and there were no time machines to complicate things, he could’ve assembled the course in a few weeks. But ignoring the Marsh Effect would be like trying to conduct a class around an elephant sitting in the front row.

Marsh had been right in his warning that Matt would have to bone up on topology and the manipulations of algebras and rings—mathematical tools he’d never needed before. So he was attempting a mental juggling act, trying to learn the old new math while preparing to teach the new old physics. It made his brain hurt.

And it wasn’t as if he’d be allowed to sit uninterrupted and work. There were more than a thousand copies of his time machine in the world, and science demanded that he push the RESET button on all of them, in case the Marsh Effect was really the Matthew Effect. They couldn’t just FedEx a machine from China, have him push the button, then mail it back after having failed to make it disappear. He had to hike down to a lab and sit in the middle of a circle of cameras and other instruments and push the button.

A few times, he agreed to duplicate the original physiological circumstances—stay up for thirty hours high on coffee and speed. He argued that the whole thing was more like superstition than science, and the response was basically: Okay, do you have a better idea?

Meanwhile, it wasn’t only science that had changed drastically in the past sixteen years. Movies were either dumb static domestic comedies (during which the audience laughed insanely at things that didn’t seem to be funny) or brutal bloodbaths from Japan and India. Popular music set his teeth on edge, harmonic discord and machine-gun percussion or syrupy, inane love ballads. Popular books seemed to be written for either slow children or English Ph.D.s.

Women his age had been children when he left. Of course theyliked the music and books and movies and thought the height of fashion was symmetrical cheek brands—not only on the cheeks of the face, he was given to understand. The women who were his contemporaries were either like Kara, middle-aged and married, or middle-aged and not interested in men.

His mother was in a rest home, lost to Alzheimer’s Disease. He visited her several times, but she didn’t recognize him.

He did have a little notoriety by virtue of being an artifact from the past, but sixteen years didn’t exactly make him a caveman. More like an old-fashioned geek who hadn’t kept up with stuff.

He went to his twenty-fifth high-school reunion and left early, deeply rattled.

About that time he started to fantasize about pushing the RESET button again. The world would be truly alien, 177.5 years in the future, but he wouldn’t be trying to fit in. He would be a genuine curiosity, like a nineteenth-century scientist appearing today. Who wouldn’t be expected to do any real physics. And the big questions would presumably be answered. He might even be able to understand the answers.

The time machine was very much under lock and key, with a twenty-four-hour armed guard. But if anybody could get to it, Matt should be able to.

That stayed in the back of his mind, the ultimate escape fantasy, while he did his damnedest to adjust to this not-so-brave, not-so-new world.

Ironically, Kara and Strom, whose betrayal had pushed him into pushing the button, became his best friends and mentors. He often went to their place for dinner, to hang around and play with their son, Peter. At nine years old, he was close to being Matt’s equal in social sophistication.

He tried to date. It wasn’t hard to find women his age who were interested in him, either as famous semiscientist or social freak from the past. But neither characterization was a good starting point for a relationship. His foolish aversion to facial brands didn’t help, either, eliminating half the pool of young women a priori.

Male friends were even harder to make. He wasn’t interested in sports, the one cultural fixation that hadn’t changed at all, as far as he could see, and that was the one place where men assumed they could make an easy connection. When somebody said, “How about them Sox?” he would mumble something and look at his feet.

Under normal circumstances, his natural pool of friends would be the graduate students and young professors in his own department. But he didn’t know enough about post-time-machine physics to chat about their work, and his unearned full professorship was an obvious obstacle.

A couple of times he resorted to “dates” from escort services, but that was so disastrous that not even the sex was very much fun. It was like taking a department-store manikin to dinner and a show, and then home to a perfect body with nothing inside but lubricant.

Then one night after dinner, Peter put to bed and Strom off in the study, Kara led him out to the front porch, where they sat together on a swing with glasses of wine. She was just close enough that they barely touched.

“I’m sorry about what I did,” she said quietly. “I should’ve stayed with you.”

Matt didn’t know what to say. “Water over the bridge,” he tried. “I mean under.”

“I don’t know. Does it have to be?”

“Kara . . .”

“I’m desperately unhappy,” she said without inflection. “Strom bores me to tears.”

He patted her hand. “You wouldn’t’ve been any better off with me. One chronophysicist is about as boring as the next one.”

She smiled up at him. “See? Strom would never say that. And you’re anything but boring.”

This couldn’t be happening. The full moon hanging over the horizon romantically, crickets chirping. Her wonderful smell. Her husky voice: “But I’m too old for you now.”

“No! Kara . . . you’re beautiful. You’re still the most beautiful—”

“We should talk. Strom’s taking Peter up to Maine on Friday, to his parents’ country place. He knows I can’t go because I’m allergic to horses. Let’s spend the weekend together . . . and talk.” She moved her hand, with his, to between her thighs.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Just one weekend.”

“If we were caught . . .”

“We won’t be.” She squeezed his hand. “Please, Matt.”

That was awkward. A couple of months before, he’d been madly in love with her, or with someone who could have been her younger sister. Just shy of forty, she was still sexy as hell, and still the same person he had fallen in love with.