I inherited my mother’s little metal box of recipes.
All of them were written in cursive—some on index cards, some on scraps. Most stained.
A smear of butter found its way onto the stroganoff recipe.
I wiped it away and turned the card over.
Typed on an Underwood:
From the Desk of:
Nathan Guillet
Department of Environmental Engineering
Indoor Air and Particulate Transport Lab
California Polytechnic State University
The body is always giving something off.
Heat.
Moisture.
Trace amounts of whatever it’s carrying.
You don’t see most of it.
But it’s there.
Leaving in small, invisible bursts.
It lingers.
It moves.
It mixes with everything else in the air.
Not all of it is lost.
Some of it finds its way back.
What the hell?
A theory?
A formula?
A love note to my mother?
I let it sit for a while, until my wife’s next craving for Beef Stroganoff.
Dad didn’t write things down for nothing.
I went back to school the following Monday, teaching organic chemistry by rote—a small Midwestern university.
I didn’t get into Cal Poly.
I put the note in front of a few colleagues.
“Particulate transport.”
“Aerosolized emissions.”
“Plume behavior.”
“Transient gas release events.”
Great. But what was the point?
I knew the dean of Philosophical Studies pretty well. I put it to him.
“Well, knowing your father as I did, he was fascinated with time travel. Always challenging his teachers. Calling Einstein a nincompoop. From what I see here, maybe he was proposing time travel by way of aerosol?”
Maybe.
The attic turned up nothing I could make sense of—just notes and theorems on jet propulsion and wind studies. Pages of it. Diagrams. Arrows. Nothing that meant anything.
I left it alone.
We sorted out my mother’s jewelry and decided to put it in her safe deposit box. It took most of the afternoon.
At the bottom of a velvet tray—under a broken clasp and a pair of earrings she never wore—was a tablet.
Aerosol Temporal Transport Studies.
Written by hand.
I didn’t recognize the handwriting at first.
Then I did.
I went back to the attic.
Slower this time.
Yes—he was studying time travel.
But not through machines.
Through moisture—spray, droplets, gases.
It was all there in front of me.
Pages of it. Not paragraphs—fragments. Repeated phrases. Arrows circling back on themselves. Words underlined twice, then crossed out, then written again in the margin.
CARRIER MEDIUM
RELEASE EVENT
TRACE MATTER—NOT LOST
I flipped another page.
A diagram—something like a lung, or a bellows. Arrows pushing outward, then pointing back in.
DISPERSION = DISAPPEARANCE
RETENTION POSSIBLE UNDER STABLE CONDITIONS
I could follow that much.
Another page.
Columns now. Left side labeled AMBIENT, right-side RETURN.
GRADIENT REQUIRED
MATCHING CONDITIONS
RE-ENTRY NOT GUARANTEED
There were circles drawn over certain words.
BACKFLOW
OVERLAP
CONTAMINATION
That one was underlined three times.
I stopped there for a while.
Then I went back to the first page.
Through moisture—spray, droplets, gases.
He wasn’t describing movement.
He was describing something being carried.
Something leaving.
And, under the right conditions—coming back.
The setup itself was easy to induce.
I ran it through an atomizer and traced it through a filter.
Gone.
Okay, but how will I know it worked?
There was no knowing.
I tried every state of moisture.
But droplets are hard to trace.
I needed a tracer.
Gas.
Easier to transport just by physics alone.
But what type?
Poison would leave its mark.
I didn’t want to kill anyone.
My stomach gurgled.
Freakin’ Stroganoff.
That type.
Yes. That was it.
I programmed the induction setup:
September 12, 1938
Nuremburg Nazi Rally Grounds
49.4339° N, 11.1127° E
I opened the laptop.
I searched Der Stürmer for the exact date.
Führer narrowly survives suspected airborne toxic incident.
And there was Hitler, mid-retch. Goebbels and Himmler holding their noses.
Adolf got the full Stroganoff treatment.
An unintended benefit: there was no evidence to collect, nothing to analyze. It said so in the article.
I didn’t want to change time. I just wanted to tickle it.
It didn’t take much:
Pick a putridity. Pick a time. And back it goes.
I have to say, the next ten years were the most fulfilling of my life:
The first, a Patriots-Jets game in an enclosed dome.
Political speeches, intimate proposals—thank God for live TV.
And some low-hanging fruit:
Stalin.
Zedong.
Pol Pot.
Kim Il-sung.
Idi Amin.
I was able to line up events for all of them.
Dates. Locations. Conditions.
Except Leopold II.
He died from bowel obstruction and related complications after surgery.
A closed system.
I was never able to retrieve any of the samples I sent out.
Probably for the better.
