"What is it that you cannot reconcile?" asked Victor.
"Dates and facts." I looked at him. "When you spoke of Wanda and Pietro, you said you knew them 'when they were children' not 'when we were children'--so you must be older than they are, to make that distinction."
"Yes. I was a teenager when the Maximoffs first brought their twins, who were then about three—to the clan gatherings. I am ten, perhaps eleven years their elder."
"Since you are thirty-seven, that means they are twenty-six-or-seven. The German forces in World War Two surrendered on May 7th, 1945. You said Mrs. Magneto was a fellow Holocaust survivor—do you mean, as most people do, that they were survivors of a concentration camp?"
"They were survivors of Auschwitz. That was where they met." he said.
"I remember reading or hearing somewhere that Mrs. Magneto was an ordinary human. She could not have been that young. They killed the young children. They only kept those who were old enough to be useful…The onset of menstruation, the beginning of a woman's fertility, began later back then—and poor nutrition and stress could have retarded it. But say she began at fifteen. The window of opportunity only stays open so long. After thirty-five, a woman's fertility begins to decrease dramatically—and by forty-five most women are infertile." I was pacing around the patch of open floor in the command center, thinking out loud. I went on:
"Even then—if a woman can get pregnant, it's only with a lot of care, sophisticated medical care, good nutrition, not having to work long hours, at home or outside it, that she can hope for a happy outcome, and not a miscarriage, or a Down's syndrome baby. Twenty-eight years ago, when she would have had to be pregnant, all of this area was behind the Iron Curtain—Malnutrition, poor medical care, and poverty were the order of the day. Add to that—she was on the run from her husband, and had been for months..."
"I see what you are getting at. They are too young. The known dates and the facts cannot be made to coincide. The likelihood of a woman of her age being delivered of healthy twins at her second live birth strains credulity beyond belief. You are grinning from ear to ear, my dear. To what do you ascribe this discrepancy?"
"Sloppiness!" I said. "Oh, there may be some simple explanation, but I would be willing to be it would turn out to be retroactive—somebody went back and patched the hole. They miss things. They drop a stitch every now and then."
"I am afraid you are becoming a trifle too abstruse for me to follow you. Who are 'they' and how have 'they' been sloppy?"
"I don't exactly know," I lied, or at any rate exaggerated. "But someone or something has been playing with both time and reality for the last forty-five years, at the very least—and on a scale that makes this latest 'end of the world as we know it' look like the work of a rank and clumsy amateur. That—and more—is what I have proof of in my grandmother's attic."
"How?" Victor asked.
"I don't know how."
"Why?" he fired back.
"I can only guess. But before you ask any other questions— do you recall what happened to Jean Grey, how she 'died'?"
"Yes. The X-men were on a borrowed space shuttle. They encountered a radiation storm, she piloted the ship while the others stayed in the shielded compartment, and the Phoenix force found her as she was dying. The Phoenix force assumed her form and identity, and returned to Earth in her stead, leaving Jean Grey in a restorative cocoon-like structure. Consequently, the Phoenix, being too powerful, became unstable, and allowed itself to be destroyed. Everyone, including the Phoenix itself, believed it to be Jean Grey, and she was reported dead. Subsequently, the cocoon returned to Earth, and Jean Grey stepped out of it, returned to life and health."
"Yes, it's the classic mythopoetic story structure. The cycle is not complete until the sacrificed hero-god returns. Now the important question: when did this happen?" I fixed him with my eyes.
"The Phoenix died about three years ago—Jean Grey returned a year ago."
"I have a copy of her obituary, printed shortly after the time of the Phoenix's death, when Jean Grey's memorial service was held."
"How is that significant?"
"It reports that she was born in 1956—and died in 1980. Nor was it the obituary of some woman with the same name. All the other details of her life were identical. I found it over three years ago—in a box of china that had been wrapped in newspapers before being packed for storage. I checked that newspaper's archives for 1980—and found nothing in the record. I looked at the exact same page that ran in 1980—every other detail on that page was the same in every way, but for the missing obituary. Instead, I found the obituary in a much newer paper."
"One that had just been printed? You said you were looking over three years before—around the true date of the Phoenix's death."
"Yes and no. I found it in a paper that was three years old then. I saved a print-out. A year and a half later, I checked again. The date of her death had changed again. It was still three years ago. Again, I printed it out and saved it. Now you remember it as having been three years ago. Ten years from now, perhaps the Phoenix's death will still have been three years ago. It isn't any use taking a time machine and going ahead ten years to find out—because what ever it is that changes reality doesn't work like that. The obituary would say she had died thirteen years ago. The changes don't extend that far ahead. You have to live through the years for the past to change, to keep up with the present.
"In one of the sequels Frank L. Baum wrote to the Wizard of Oz, there's a deadly desert that can only be crossed by a magic carpet, that rolls itself out ahead of you, and rolls itself up behind you—infinitely extensible—but the amount of carpet stays the same. The size of the roll ahead of you never gets any smaller, and the one behind never gets larger, no matter how far you walk, and there is always plenty of room for everyone to walk on it, whether it is one person, or an entire army. Someone or something is doing that to time."
"You have proof." He said. "It is vital that I see this for myself. I do not doubt you are sincere, but... Where did you gain access to a time machine?"
Oh, dear. I had gotten a little too carried away. "You do have one in the cellar in Castle Doom—in our reality, that is."
"I do not recall giving you permission to use it, nor instructing you on how to operate it. Nor did I leave an owner's manual sitting around. It is of my own devising, and no such manual exists." He was angry.
"I did not ask your specific permission to use it, but you did, when I first entered your service, extend to me a blanket order to 'research what you will and as you will' to come up with other insights." I said.
"That permission did not cover the use of potentially deadly equipment, and you knew that—even if I did not say, 'Do not attempt to operate my time machine.' What were you thinking?" He was furious.
I couldn't go caving when he glared at me. "I was thinking that it is always easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission. My theories sounded—and still sound—mad. I did not think I could explain them to you in a way that you would believe—not then. Do you believe me now? Or are you thinking this could be the onset of schizophrenia?
"Do not change the subject. How did you learn to set and operate my time machine?" Victor demanded.
"You left excellent notes. I studied them. You didn't keep them a secret, you know. You encouraged your scientists to try to understand them."
"That was more because I hoped—rather than believed—that one among them might comprehend them. I did not know anyone had succeeded." He still sounded mad.
"I still don't understand all of them—not quite." I said. "But I understood enough—and I needed to add to my proofs. It was wrong of me. I knew it was wrong—but I judged my need for knowledge to be greater than any other consideration. Have you yourself not done the same? I ask that you forgive me. I will never use it without your permission again."
"I forgive you." he said, after a long moment. "I have done…something of that kind. In return, I ask that you give your word that you will never use it—or any other equipment, machinery, developments, inventions or devices of my design—on which you have not been fully rated."
"I am not sure that I can, in good faith, make that promise. In an emergency I might have to break it."
"An emergency as defined by a threat to your life, mine, or someone dependant on us, I can allow for. Mere scientific or philosophical curiosity are not states of emergency." He stated, firmly.
"All right. Would you promise, in return, to train me in the use of anything I might conceivably need to operate?"
He thought about it for another moment. "Yes. With provisos to fit the circumstances and the equipment."
"Understood. I give my word."
"Thank you. Now. Although your theories are intriguing, they bear little on the problem at hand. I was about to point out that the aura of that creature's mother belongs to nothing human…"
TBC…