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  To Paul Bowering, for his humor

  He should have known better and opened his locker more slowly. Some sense should have warned him. There were enough strange things going on; he should be more cautious.

  But no. No, he had to come bombing down the hallway and work the last number on the combo on the door and jerk it open without thinking.

  There was an adult male hanging inside. Dead. Not only that, but it was a medical cadaver, partially cut open with long pins holding things in. And not only that, but it was an old cadaver.

  Runny.

  And the stink—Oh, my, he thought, only in different words. Much different words. Oh, my, the stink was positively alive, rolled out in a semigreen cloud, and he could hear flies coming inside from out in the schoolyard, zooming to the odor. Oh, yes, there would be flies. Of course flies. And they would stay around. Last time when he found seven hundred and twenty-one and one-half dead lab rats in his locker, packed in tightly, the flies had stayed for a month even when the rats were gone.

  It was a joke. Some joke.

  Dorso Clayman held his breath and closed the locker door, looked up and down the hallway to see if anybody was watching. Nobody seemed to be paying special attention but that didn't mean much. Someone might have a small camera on him, getting his reaction on a digit-disk to broadcast later. He decided to play it nonchalant. Cool. As if he always had bodies in his locker.

  And it would have worked except that Susan Racher walked down the hall at that moment, right past his locker, and the smell drifting, no, slithering out of the bottom grill on the locker door dropped her cold. Literally. She went down on her knees, grabbing for her inhaler. Susan was one of those who always acted sick but never actually was. But then she keeled over onto her side, one leg jerking feebly. For a second Dorso did nothing. Susan was always faking it.

  But this time it seemed real enough—her eyes had rolled back and were showing only white. So he grabbed her by the wrists and dragged her down the hallway past the smell zone. He propped her up against the wall and put her inhaler in her mouth.

  “She dead?”

  Dorso looked up to see his best friend, Frank Tate, looking down at Susan. “She's going to miss her first class if she's dead,” Frank said. “They don't like it if you miss homeroom even if you're dead.”

  Dorso shook his head. “No. She's just out for a little bit. The smell caught her wrong.”

  “What smell?” Frank sniffed. “Is there something stinking?”

  “You're kidding …,” Dorso started, then remembered that Frank had a sinus condition that kept him from smelling things. Frank had once run his bicycle over a dead skunk on the highway without noticing it, even though part of the skunk had stuck to a tire and kept flopping around and around as he rode, the stink blowing up in his face with each rotation. Bulletproof, Dorso thought, a bulletproof nose. “I had a body in my locker.”

  “Again? Man, don't they ever think of anything else to do to you? Last time they put a dead dog in there, and then there were the lab rats, and of course the time they stuck in the six or seven thousand dead frogs…”

  “This time it was human. Some medical student's job, it must have been. But old. Really old.”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah. It would have to be old. That's how it works, isn't it? You can't transport anything current and the system won't go into the future, so it has to come from the past.” As he talked he went to Dorso's locker and grabbed the handle. “How did it look?” He jerked the door open.

  “Don't—” Dorso started, but then he shrugged. It had been more than thirty seconds, and none of the … surprises … ever seemed to last longer than half a minute.

  “It's gone,” Frank said. “Too bad. I might have recognized it from when I did all those medical research scans for my anatomy study.”

  “You were just looking for naked pictures.”

  “Still. It's research, isn't it? And at first it wasn't a protected zone. If the government didn't want you to see it they would have put the blocks on the way they did with religion and later with naked pictures.”

  Dorso left Susan and moved back to his locker. The smell was still almost as strong as it had been when he'd first opened the door, but the body was gone, all traces of it, even the stains. Well, that was good, at least. He held his breath and took out his gym bag. He had gym first period, which was a stupid time to have PE, but he was stuck with it if he wanted to take computer science second period, which he had to do because Karen Bemis took computer science then and he thought if he could be around her enough she might begin to notice him. It hadn't happened in two years but he still had hopes.

  His gym bag reeked of the dead body. That meant the smell had gotten into his gym shorts and T-shirt as well.

  Great. I'll stink like a cadaver. Just great.

  He looked down the hallway where Susan was getting to her feet, her eyes dazed as she leaned against the wall, and for about the ten thousandth time that month he thought maybe it had been a bad idea when the scientists had figured out how to crack time.

  It was strange how it had happened, Dorso thought, walking slowly toward the gym, hoping the stench would dissipate before he got there.

  Some lab technician in Texas had fired one electron through a linear accelerator near the speed of light onto a receptor plate, where there were hits from two electrons, and when they were trying to figure out where the second electron came from they found a way to go back in time and bring traces of the past forward.

  Sort of.

  Of course, it didn't happen quite that fast. At first all that the scientists could bring forward were fuzzy images, almost impossible to see, and there was no way to control what they would get. They could jump into the past and project images onto a screen in the present, but they couldn't pick the time or the place, and for the first year it amounted to little more than a very interesting techno-trick. They might see a vision of a dinosaur one time and on the second try get an image of a man who might be Julius Caesar getting ready for a bath, or Anne Boleyn getting her head chopped off.

  Initially only the supercomputer labs could make it work, because it required a warping of the time line that took loads of electrical energy.

  But then they found that the new Super Chip developed by Roger Hemmesvedt in his basement in Fort Garland, Texas, made it possible for anybody with a personal computer to play with the time line. That blew everything wide open. The chip not only provided access for everybody, but when its output was coupled with a built-in clock, it let you pick the time you went to. If you used data from GPS equipment it became easier to pick the place as well.

  Soon people going to work on trains were able to access the time line and get pictures on their laptops of Shakespeare writing, or the Battle of Gettysburg, or Jesus actually giving the Sermon on the Mount.
/>   In the beginning there were amazing effects. Many of the more money-oriented evangelical ministers found themselves going broke when people listened to Jesus directly instead of needing a middleman. History teachers had to actually study history and know the facts. They couldn't just be football coaches killing time until the season started.

  Of course, there were problems. Initially there were no controls on subject access, and for a time there were naked pictures of Cleopatra in her bath and Helen of Troy standing nude in a window frame all over the place. It was an exciting time to study history.

  But the tech wizards soon invented the sliding chip block, so all the new Super Chips could block out anything offensive to the viewer—or what censors and auditors might think was offensive. There were constant court battles to decide what young people should be able to see.

  Then they discovered the hologram projector chip, which allowed anybody with a laptop not only to pull images from the past but also to project them anywhere they wanted, and for a short period it was impossible to drive down a road without seeing some historical image on a wall or some figure from the past standing in a yard.

  Finally someone discovered how to bring smells forward with the image, and that nearly put an end to the freedom of access everyone had come to enjoy, because the scientists were worried that if the smell came, perhaps viruses would come as well, and what would happen if somebody brought a plague victim forward into a city and the plague got loose?

  But only the smell came, no solid bodies, and while no one could quite understand why that was, there were no bacteria, or even viruses, introduced from the past. In the end, that was that.

  But no one could see into the future for the simple reason that it hadn't happened yet, and there were apparently no other split dimensions or alternate time lines to find. Nobody had invented antigravity boots or a skateboard that flew or ray guns that blasted people to bits (unless you counted the lasers the military was using) or ships that went to the stars.

  At least not yet.

  There was, Dorso thought, entering the gym, just this messy time line business and the normal humdrum life that he had going for himself, with no blips on the horizon except that somebody, somewhere, had decided to make him the recipient of a string of strange techno-practical jokes.

  Bodies and dead rats and frogs had started appearing in his locker about three months earlier; then it got positively weird. There would be images mixed with other images—a carp stuck halfway through a pane of glass, alive and wiggling; a Brazilian soccer player looking normal except that his bottom half was a tricycle; and a dog riding a bicycle upside down.

  None of it made sense. Dorso didn't have any real enemies unless you counted the entire football team, who seemed to think he was some kind of toy and were constantly playing catch with him, throwing him up in the air or stuffing him into containers. But they did that with most of the boys who didn't play football, except for Waymon Peers, who at thirteen was six foot four, weighed two hundred and fourteen pounds with no fat, and told them he'd pinch the head off the first player who messed with him. The team didn't seem to single Dorso out. Besides, he was sure none of them were smart enough to turn a laptop on, let alone go through the complicated process of acquiring a time line, projecting it backward to access an image, and then projecting the image forward in a hologram. It wasn't that the process was very difficult, but it was beyond most of the players, who sometimes seemed to take days to learn their locker combinations.

  Dorso's life had gone on in spite of the practical jokes, which weren't really much of a bother except for the smell, and he'd come to almost expect them. He was walking down the hallway carrying his laptop, which contained all of the material in the textbooks, when an image of George Armstrong Custer appeared next to him.

  One of the byproducts of time projection was that everybody knew what all the important people in history looked like. Cleopatra really wasn't all that pretty, Shakespeare had bad teeth (of course so did everybody else back then, but Shakespeare had the surprising habit of picking at his with his pen and he always had ink on his lower lip), and John Wilkes Booth, who killed Lincoln, looked and acted like a drugged ferret.

  Dorso knew instantly that it was Custer, who was dressed in the buckskins he wore the day he was killed in the big battle. Dorso had watched the battle several times, so seeing Custer wasn't that surprising. He was standing with his side to Dorso, looking away. He had a Colt revolver in his hand, and as Dorso watched—the image was only apparent for thirty seconds—Custer turned toward him.

  That was when something happened that bothered Dorso. A lot. Dorso had seen many images, historical events, and famous people brought forward, and the same rule always applied. The paradox of time was called the grandfather rule. It said that you couldn't go back in time physically or affect time, because if that could happen you could go back and kill your own ancestor, and that would mean you wouldn't be able to exist to go back and kill your own ancestor, and so it couldn't be possible. The physics of time would not allow you to change time. Period. You could not affect time; therefore, people or events from the past could be viewed but never altered. The people being viewed could never know they were being seen.

  And that had always been the case for Dorso. Whatever he'd seen and done, the subjects had never been aware of him.

  But now, as Custer turned, for a half a beat his eyes looked confused, as if he didn't know what was happening to him, and he looked directly at Dorso, into Dorso's eyes.

  Dorso blinked. He had to be wrong. But no—Custer looked right at him, into his eyes, and had started to raise his hand when he was hit by a bullet and fell to one knee and then down on his side as the hologram faded.

  “Custer looked at you?” Frank liked new things, different things, liked it when things out of the ordinary happened, but he was skeptical. “You mean his eyes just turned toward you. It was the battle, right? He was very busy. I've watched the battle several times, trying to get a good look at Crazy Horse. There are no pictures of him, you know. He wouldn't allow it. And the tech censors threw a block on him because they felt he would want it that way. So you can't get a good picture of him. But I know that he came up over the back of the hill and might even have been the man who shot Custer, and I thought the blocking committee might have missed him because they wouldn't know he was there but I was wrong—”

  “No.” Dorso shook his head. They were sitting on his front porch. Dorso's parents both worked, and he and his six-year-old sister, Darling (yes, that was really her name, and as far as Dorso was concerned she was about as darling as a wolverine, and twice as destructive), were latchkey kids. Dorso watched her each evening until his parents came home, and it was a full-time job. Right now she was chasing the neighbors' cat across the yard, holding a doll dress in one hand and a teacup on the other. She periodically tried to dress the cat in doll clothes and make it sit at tea parties or picnics. The cat didn't like it. At all.

  “Custer looked at me. He saw me. He was bewildered and he looked into my eyes….”

  “Not into them,” Frank said. “At them. Or in the general direction of them. And of course he was bewildered. He had just made the biggest mistake of his life, and every Native American in the world was about to ride over him and they were mad boy, were they mad. But he couldn't have looked at you. Not really— Oh, look, she caught the cat. She's dressing him. I think that might be the record. Usually the cat makes it harder. Remember last time how he took her up that elm in the backyard and across the clothesline before she caught him on top of Emerson's Buick? The cat must be getting old. Or else he's giving up….”

  “Frank, quit changing the subject. I'm having a problem here and I need your help.”

  Frank turned from Darling back to Dorso. “You don't have a problem, you just think you do. You're imagining things. Come on, you know the time paradox as well as me. You can't go back and change time because it could make you not be here.”

  Dorso n
odded but then shook his head. “No, wait. We just think we can't mess with time. But how do we know that?”

  “Because they figured it out, that's why.”

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean, ‘who'?”

  “Who told us that?”

  “Scientists, math guys, people who play with numbers. The time freaks. The same goons who put in all the time blocks so we couldn't look at naked wom—so we couldn't study anatomy. That's who.”

  “But what— Darling don't unscrew the cat's head that way, it'll come off. What if they're wrong?”

  “The time freaks?”

  “Sure. Look, all this is new. Maybe they think you can't go back and change time, but all these theories have been just that, theories. Nobody ever thought we'd be able to go back and look at Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount, but now we can.”

  “Yeah. It's great. And who thought He'd turn out to be that color?”

  “I'm just saying what if all those guys are wrong and somebody has figured out how to go back and mess with time?”

  “Look at that! I never would have guessed you could tie a knot in a cat's tail that way to tuck it up under the dress. And look at him just sitting there. Isn't that cute?”

  “It's because he's terrified. Last time she gave him a bath when he fought her. He really doesn't like the whole bath thing. The soap hurt his eyes and he smelled like bubble bath for a month and the alley cat that comes through once a month on his rounds thought he was a sissy and cleaned his clock and you're changing the subject again.”

  “Because you're nuts, Dorso. Let's try to look at what you're saying in a rational way.”

  “When,” Dorso asked, “have you ever been rational?”

  “This isn't about me. It's about you. And what you're trying to say is that someone, somewhere, some genius who is smarter than anybody in the whole world has ever been, someone with the giant intellect it would take to conquer the time paradox has done it, and is using it—get this now—is using it to play practical jokes on a twelve-year-old kid. Is that what you're really saying?”