19. Black Swan Event

Short blinked. “All right, go on.”

Mateo looked at him with wary surprise. Not much of a reaction, but he didn’t believe him yet. Or ever. He didn’t blame him.

“I...well, uh, I’m from 2005. I came from ...2005. Minnesota. That part was true. I really am from Minnesota.” Shut up about Minnesota! That’s not important! “The stuff like the phone and the Mp3 player are just normal things for us. They’re like ... tiny little computers.”

If Short thought he was lying, he didn’t show it. “As small as that?”

“Yeah, uh, computers are really cheap now. Then. Uh. In the future. And really, uh, small. I have a big one at home, it’s about like—“ He tried to show the size by moving his hands apart, which didn’t work and hurt his wrists to try. “Uh, you know what I mean. Maybe a foot or so across.”

“How did you come to be here? To be now, I should say.”

“I ... shit, I don’t really know, sir. A buddy of mine was running some weird experiment with a particle accelerator, something about warping spacetime. But it was only supposed to make stuff go forward. And just little stuff. Like electrons or even quarks.”

“Are you a physicist?”

“No, sir, I really do repair HVAC units. I just like science stuff.”

“Where did you — for lack of a better word — drop out?”

“The town the cops found me in, sir. Or well, about two hours’ walk away. I don’t know which direction, I was just following the road.” He took a breath. “I didn’t know I was in—I thought I was in the future. Avi, my buddy, he said you could only go forward. I guess he was wrong. I ... thought I was in some really crappy future.”

“And instead you landed in what I’m frankly relieved to know you consider a crap bit of your past.”

“Yeah. They thought I was a spy, right?” Mateo said. “You think I’m a spy. Like, a nazi.”

“That was our impression when someone parachutes in without asking,” Short admitted. “I’m afraid we assumed events were clear to you.”

“The fry wrapper had a date on it.”

“Eh?”

“The newspaper the fries were in. It had the date on it. That’s how I knew I had to tell you truth. No clue if you guys’ll believe me. It’s God’s honest truth, though, I swear it.”

“Well,” Captain Short reported to Stephens an hour later. “The good news is that Smith is willing to tell us everything he knows. The bad news is he’s mad.”

“Mad?” Stephens frowned.

“He claims to be an accidental time traveler from the future.”

To Short’s surprise, Stephens looked oddly thoughtful. Then he said, apparently at random:

“Have you looked at the grocer’s receipt he was carrying?”

“Not in much detail — why do you ask?”

“The prices on it. They’re ruinously high.”

“A mistake on the part of the forgers.”

“He was carrying a correspondingly large amount of money. But all that pales next to his telephone and music player. It’s a quantum leap beyond our most advanced science, or anyone’s most advanced science. It would be akin to presenting William the Conqueror with field artillery and telling him they were merely better-made arrows.”

Short frowned. Once you took that idea on, everything began to fall into place. Even the fact that much of his music was played on instruments no one could identify. That was the attitude of a madman, though, one who saw everything through his pet theory, spiraling in on itself like a shell.

On the other hand, while old Tineye was arguably a madman, he was a clear-sighted and accurate one. He had his crank theories but he didn’t allow them to hamper his work. But this was absurd.

“It could be a hoax.”

“I frankly doubt they have any agents professional enough to carry that off. And while it’s a mad idea, I would say they aren’t that sort of mad. In any event, it’s simple enough to test without resorting to the psychiatrist. He seems educated enough for a workingman. See if he can tell us any ... history, from his vantage point.”

There was a certain logic to that, Short had to admit. If this was somehow, impossibly, true, the man was an impossibly good source of intelligence, a veritable gift from heaven.

“It’s the only logical course,” snapped Stephens in response. “And I’ll have the psychiatrist have a look at him. Will he co-operate?”

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