I inherited my mother\u2019s little metal box of recipes.<\/p>\n
All of them were written in cursive\u2014some on index cards, some on scraps. Most stained.<\/p>\n
A smear of butter found its way onto the stroganoff recipe.<\/p>\n
I wiped it away and turned the card over.<\/p>\n
Typed on an Underwood:<\/p>\n
From the Desk of:<\/p>\n
Nathan Guillet<\/p>\n
Department of Environmental Engineering<\/p>\n
Indoor Air and Particulate Transport Lab<\/p>\n
California Polytechnic State University<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The body is always giving something off.<\/p>\n
Heat.<\/p>\n
Moisture.<\/p>\n
Trace amounts of whatever it\u2019s carrying.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t see most of it.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s there.<\/p>\n
Leaving in small, invisible bursts.<\/p>\n
It lingers.<\/p>\n
It moves.<\/p>\n
It mixes with everything else in the air.<\/p>\n
Not all of it is lost.<\/p>\n
Some of it finds its way back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What the hell?<\/p>\n
A theory?<\/p>\n
A formula?<\/p>\n
A love note to my mother?<\/p>\n
I let it sit for a while, until my wife\u2019s next craving for Beef Stroganoff.<\/p>\n
Dad didn\u2019t write things down for nothing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I went back to school the following Monday, teaching organic chemistry by rote\u2014a small Midwestern university.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t get into Cal Poly.<\/p>\n
I put the note in front of a few colleagues.<\/p>\n
\u201cParticulate transport.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAerosolized emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPlume behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTransient gas release events.\u201d<\/p>\n
Great. But what was the point?<\/p>\n
I knew the dean of Philosophical Studies pretty well. I put it to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe.<\/p>\n
The attic turned up nothing I could make sense of\u2014just notes and theorems on jet propulsion and wind studies. Pages of it. Diagrams. Arrows. Nothing that meant anything.<\/p>\n
I left it alone.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We sorted out my mother\u2019s jewelry and decided to put it in her safe deposit box. It took most of the afternoon.<\/p>\n
At the bottom of a velvet tray\u2014under a broken clasp and a pair of earrings she never wore\u2014was a tablet.<\/p>\n
Aerosol Temporal Transport Studies.<\/em><\/p>\n
Written by hand.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t recognize the handwriting at first.<\/p>\n
Then I did.<\/p>\n
I went back to the attic.<\/p>\n
Slower this time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yes\u2014he was studying time travel.<\/p>\n
But not through machines.<\/p>\n
Through moisture\u2014spray, droplets, gases.<\/p>\n
It was all there in front of me.<\/p>\n
Pages of it. Not paragraphs\u2014fragments. Repeated phrases. Arrows circling back on themselves. Words underlined twice, then crossed out, then written again in the margin.<\/p>\n
CARRIER MEDIUM<\/strong><\/p>\n
RELEASE EVENT<\/strong><\/p>\n
TRACE MATTER\u2014NOT LOST<\/strong><\/p>\n
I flipped another page.<\/p>\n
A diagram\u2014something like a lung, or a bellows. Arrows pushing outward, then pointing back in.<\/p>\n
DISPERSION
=<\/del> DISAPPEARANCE<\/strong><\/p>\nRETENTION POSSIBLE UNDER STABLE CONDITIONS<\/strong><\/p>\n
I could follow that much.<\/p>\n
Another page.<\/p>\n
Columns now. Left side labeled AMBIENT<\/strong>, right-side RETURN<\/strong>.<\/p>\n
GRADIENT REQUIRED<\/strong>
\nMATCHING CONDITIONS<\/strong>
\nRE-ENTRY NOT GUARANTEED<\/strong><\/p>\nThere were circles drawn over certain words.<\/p>\n
BACKFLOW<\/strong>
\nOVERLAP<\/strong>
\nCONTAMINATION<\/strong><\/p>\nThat one was underlined three times.<\/p>\n
I stopped there for a while.<\/p>\n
Then I went back to the first page.<\/p>\n
Through moisture\u2014spray, droplets, gases.<\/p>\n
He wasn\u2019t describing movement.<\/p>\n
He was describing something being carried.<\/p>\n
Something leaving.<\/p>\n
And, under the right conditions\u2014coming back.<\/p>\n
The setup itself was easy to induce.<\/p>\n
I ran it through an atomizer and traced it through a filter.<\/p>\n
Gone.<\/p>\n
Okay, but how will I know it worked?<\/p>\n
There was no knowing.<\/p>\n
I tried every state of moisture.<\/p>\n
But droplets are hard to trace.<\/p>\n
I needed a tracer.<\/p>\n
Gas.<\/p>\n
Easier to transport just by physics alone.<\/p>\n
But what type?<\/p>\n
Poison would leave its mark.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t want to kill anyone.<\/p>\n
My stomach gurgled.<\/p>\n
Freakin\u2019 Stroganoff.<\/p>\n
That type.<\/p>\n
Yes. That was it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I programmed the induction setup:<\/p>\n
September 12, 1938<\/p>\n
Nuremburg Nazi Rally Grounds<\/p>\n
49.4339\u00b0 N, 11.1127\u00b0 E<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
I opened the laptop.<\/p>\n
I searched Der St\u00fcrmer<\/em> for the exact date.<\/p>\n
F\u00fchrer narrowly survives suspected airborne toxic incident.<\/strong><\/p>\n
And there was Hitler, mid-retch. Goebbels and Himmler holding their noses.<\/p>\n
Adolf got the full Stroganoff treatment.<\/p>\n
An unintended benefit: there was no evidence to collect, nothing to analyze. It said so in the article.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t want to change time. I just wanted to tickle it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t take much:<\/p>\n
Pick a putridity. Pick a time. And back it goes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I have to say, the next ten years were the most fulfilling of my life:<\/p>\n
The first, a Patriots-Jets game in an enclosed dome.<\/p>\n
Political speeches, intimate proposals\u2014thank God for live TV.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And some low-hanging fruit:<\/p>\n
Stalin.<\/p>\n
Zedong.<\/p>\n
Pol Pot.<\/p>\n
Kim Il-sung.<\/p>\n
Idi Amin.<\/p>\n
I was able to line up events for all of them.<\/p>\n
Dates. Locations. Conditions.<\/p>\n
Except Leopold II.<\/p>\n
He died from bowel obstruction and related complications after surgery.<\/p>\n
A closed system.<\/p>\n
I was never able to retrieve any of the samples I sent out.<\/p>\n
Probably for the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I didn\u2019t want to change time. I just wanted to tickle it. It didn\u2019t take much: Pick a putridity. Pick a time. And back it goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":25611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-patrick-carella"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24730"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25612,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24730\/revisions\/25612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}