Still hand-in-hand, Walter and Michael emerged from the brightness of the singularity into the world of March 24, 2167 CE, latitude fifty-nine degrees, fifty-five minutes north, longitude ten degrees, forty-five minutes east. Aside from the expected disorientation of physically traveling 130 years in an instant, Walter's reaction to twenty-second century Oslo, Norway, was utter incomprehension. He had always been a man ahead of his time, impatient with technology's slow progress when he could see the possibilities decades ahead of everyone else. Moving more than a century ahead, though, was beyond his usual range.
Now he saw a world that looked, at first, like a sea of bright colors, rising into crested waves that often reached far up into the dry blue sky. He soon realized that these were buildings, irregularly shaped, with seemingly overlapping foundations, and made of some kind of translucent, colored building materials that reminded Walter of cherry, orange and watermelon-flavored hard candy. His mouth watered.
When he shook himself out of his reverie, Walter became aware that he and Michael were standing on a small platform at the nexus of a complex system of what his mind could only compare to conveyor belts that ran like streets between the fruit-colored buildings. Many people flowed in opposite directions on each side of these conveyors. It was a warm day, and Walter took off his gloves, but immediately took Michael's hand again. The bullet-shaped object that held the wormhole open stood before them on the platform. They walked around it.
Walter squeezed Michael's hand to make sure the boy knew that he was there and that they were safe. As he did this, however, he felt that Michael only squeezed back to prevent Walter from crushing his hand. Walter realized that he was really the one in need of reassurance. He looked down at the boy and saw the same impassive, dark, wide eyes as always. Michael was bringing to this new environment the same equanimity he brought to every encounter with whatever the universe threw at him.
Walter noted that most of the people were attired in familiar-seeming fabrics that looked like nylon, cotton, and wool, though Walter suspected the latter materials were synthetic imitations. Men seemed to be enjoying a fashion of shaving their heads while raising short but full beards. Few of them were clean shaven. The women all seemed to have short hair plastered close to their skulls—perhaps involving some sort of mousse—with elaborate sideburns looking as if they had been painted onto their temples and even the cheeks. It was not a style that instantly appealed to Walter, but he knew that fashions change, are always changing, and if you don't like this year's, well then, just wait until the next.
Suddenly, looking toward the twelve o'clock position, Walter saw three individuals in bright blue—his first thought was to describe them as wearing frogman suits—who seemed to be approaching Walter and Michael faster than the other people heading toward them on the same conveyor. Walter noticed, in fact, that the three blue people were in the middle lane of the people conveyor while the regular people on the right side of the conveyor were flowing toward the time-travelers at what seemed to be a much slower pace, and those traveling away from Walter and Michael, on the left side of the conveyor, seemed to be moving away at a much faster rate. It reminded Walter of Einstein's thought experiments that led him to the discovery of relativity. The three Blue Meanies—as Walter apprehensively thought them—seemed to be bearing down faster and faster, the closer they came.
On closer inspection, the Blue Meanies' uniforms still looked like bright blue frogman suits with caps that closely covered head and neck, leaving only their faces exposed, and making them look, in Walter's mind, more suitable for deep-sea work than patrolling the center of downtown on a cloudless spring day. From the sun's position, he judged that it was early afternoon. Walter wondered whether those suits might be air-conditioned as he could feel the perspiration seeping into his own collar, and his hand in Michael's was starting to become clammy.
He could now see that the three Blue Meanies, though equally erect in posture, were different from each other in height and build, and that two were unfashionably clean-shaven men while the third was a woman, unmistakably distinguished, in her tight-fitting uniform, by her ample breast size, though the three of them had a unisex-look from the neck up, and it was the woman who had the toughest, sternest expression. The level of intimidation Walter was feeling did not decrease.
One of the men spoke first. It sounded to Walter as if he were saying, "Hodere, you two." Walter wondered if this might mean, "Hold there, you two."
The woman immediately added what sounded like, "Iditify yosef." Walter's brain resisted the interpretation that the female officer thought she was addressing someone named "Josef," but he still was not entirely certain that she was saying "Identify yourself."
"Do any of you speak English?" Walter asked. The three officers exchanged puzzled looks.
"We're speakin Engelsk," said the taller male officer indignantly.
"I am Dr. Walter Bishop, from the year, well, originally from 2016, by way of 2036 …."
"Hooboy?" asked the woman sharply. Walter interpreted her meaning more from her body language than her speech. She seemed to be gesturing with her arms and eyes toward Michael.
"This is Michael," said Walter.
"Yatok so funny, 'ster," said the shorter of the men. "It a firs' it you say, I get."
Beginning to adjust to the surprisingly radical changes in English in less than two hundred years—or was it just the way Norwegians spoke it—Walter replied, "The feeling is mutual."
"Huh?" the three said in unison.
The officers formed a triangle around the two time-travelers and led them onto the middle lane of a people conveyor to Walter's left, which he judged from the sun's position to be leading them toward the west. They not only had the middle lane all to themselves, but, as the woman took the point position, they began speeding past the other people who seemed surprisingly oblivious to what was transpiring. Walter wondered whether time-travelers popping up in the middle of Oslo had become a common occurrence. He also wondered whether they were under arrest. The officers did not communicate further with him and would not tell Walter where they were going. They also did not seem to be communicating with anyone to alert them that they were en route.
As they took off in their lane, leaving other travelers as if they were standing still in the left and right lanes, Walter realized that the people conveyors were far from simple belts but were similar to some experimental roads in the twenty-first century. A sophisticated computer program communicated with an automobile's GPS and guided the vehicle to its destination without any effort on the part of the driver, who in fact became a mere passenger. The difference here was that the automobile had been eliminated from the equation. Walter wondered whether the female officer in the lead set the speed and destination, or whether all three officers did, or if the whole trip was not under the control of any of them. Walter found that he had many questions, technical, legal, and political, about how this transportation system worked, but he kept silent knowing that the officers would not understand his questions, nor would he understand their answers if they did.
At a major intersection of at least eight different people conveyors, Walter noticed that they were heading directly into a junction with other conveyors that had fast-moving middle lanes, too, and he felt anxious that so much convergent traffic might lead to them colliding and flying off the conveyor at high speeds, each of them in a different direction that would do the most damage. He hoped that they had not come all this way at such a high cost in tears, sweat, and blood only to end up as statistical traffic fatalities.
Then, instead of colliding with anyone—which might have been psychologically preferable—the five of them suddenly swooped in formation down onto a lower level conveyor. Walter was not prepared. He had had no idea that there were other levels of conveyors, and he could not grasp how it might be possible for a group of people to move in unison from one level down to the next. The entire maneuver seemed an impossibility and should have ended with their bodies fatally dashed against a concrete abutment or its twenty-second-century equivalent; yet the five of them alighted on the middle lane of a conveyor without changing their positions relative to each other or being jostled in any way. This time it was Michael who initiated a quick, reassuring hand-squeeze.
Above, the light of the afternoon sun was reduced by the shade of the top layer of conveyors. Below them, against an increasingly dark matrix of space, were artificially glowing conveyors, the nearer ones revealing that the illumination was provided by runner lights on the edges of each lane.
Finally, their formation slowed down and turned a sharp right into a large, seamless, otherwise unmarked doorway, which had just opened into the side of a large, translucent, chocolate-colored building. They came to a stop in the middle of a great concourse and were quickly surrounded by phalanxes of both Blue Meanies and men and women in imitation wool suits.
Walter had wondered why their escort had not talked to anyone during their journey, alerting them to the presence of the two time-travelers. Now an answer to his question was being demonstrated in a large railed area in the middle of the concourse. There, more than a dozen technicians watched and manipulated a bank—if that was the right word—of six side-by-side holographic replays of the encounter between Walter, Michael and the three officers. Each video depicted the scene from a different angle and showed the meeting at a different moment, and the audio from each one clashed cacophonously with that of the others. This noise was not more irritating to Walter than the loud murmurings of the scores of people flowing onto the concourse, many probably there to gawk at the strangers and not having anything constructive to contribute. Walter felt a wave of sadness as he remembered that he and Michael would be anomalies from now on, living in a time that bore no relationship to the past that they hoped their presence here would change.
A gray-bearded bald man stepped forth from the growing crowd around Walter and Michael. He was naturally bald, having not shaved his head as seemed to be the fashion, and he wore a woolen suit made from rather authentic looking material. The man was more portly than Walter but about the same height. He stepped up close and met Walter eye-to-eye.
"You are Dr. Walter Bishop?" he asked in slow, accented but perfectly understandable English.
"Yes, I am," replied Walter, relieved to meet someone at last with whom he could communicate, but suddenly too overwhelmed to force out more than three words.
"I have heard of you, Doctor. You were the partner of the great scientist and entrepreneur William Bell, but each of you—I believe on separate occasions, years apart, disappeared quite mysteriously and were never heard from again—until now, apparently. By the way, I am Professor Ivar Haglund of Oslo University." The professor made an old-fashion bow as he said this. "I teach historical linguistics."
"Of course you do," muttered Walter, but he smiled.
"And who is this young man?" asked Haglund, bending down to look closely into Michael's face. Michael said nothing and looked back at Haglund without any obvious curiosity.
"This is Michael, although his formal designation is Anomaly XB-678346. I picked him up in 2036, but he actually is from your future." Walter paused, use to people being confused by such statements, but Haglund nodded as if he understood.
"That is interesting," Haglund said and he glanced briefly at a tall, trim man standing to his left and just behind him. The man was younger with only a little gray in his beard and a closely shaved head. Haglund then continued. "We have a man from the past and a boy from the future, arrived at the same time."
"What building is this?" Walter asked.
"Why it's the administration center of the University," said Haglund. "And may I ask you the purpose of your visit?"
"We are here to see Dr. Lenard Hakonsen, of the physiology and neurology department. We have something to demonstrate to him. We are actually a bit anxious to meet him, or at least I am. Michael, I think, has almost limitless patience."
"In that case," said Haglund, "you are in luck." He turned again toward the man behind him and said, "Dr. Walter Bishop—and young friend—may I present to you, Dr. Lenard Hakonsen."
Walter opened his mouth but could not immediately find the words to express his joy. Michael looked up at Hakonsen as if he had known all along that they were this close to reaching their goal.
Hakonsen said something that sounded like English, but it had to be interpreted by Professor Haglund. "Dr. Hakonsen is curious to know the gist of what you have to tell him."
"Of course," said Walter. "The reason we are here has to do with your experiment in human genetic engineering. There is something you need to learn from Michael."
"Learn what?" asked Hakonsen, evidently able to understand more than Walter had thought.
"To change your assumptions about what is desirable," Walter said, conscious that this might be the most important scientific explanation he would ever make. "To learn that Michael is the living embodiment of the best that is possible, and by learning from him, you will understand what not to do in redesigning the human species."
THE END