Famous Men Who Never Lived Read online

  Blue light. He knew that color.

  He turned off the flashlight and followed the railing, his heavy shoes patting the stairs in a steady and deliberate rhythm, not quite a run; he didn’t want to be out of breath by the time he reached the door.

  The lock on three clicked as he swiped his card. He looked straight down the first corridor, bathed in the dim glow of the security lights. Nothing, but then, the unit in question must be on the other side of the building—the side that faced the parking lot. He moved forward. Yes, his heart was beating faster than normal. Yes, he was frightened. But he didn’t mind.

  The weight and balance of the flashlight in his hand, a cudgel.

  Around the corner now, moving as silently as he could. One of these units then, on the left, but which? No light leaked from under any of the tightly fitted security doors. It was impossible to tell. He satisfied himself by tugging on the padlocks, one after another, first the three belonging to the doors he most suspected might lead to the unit he’d noticed from outside. All locked.

  He advanced methodically down the corridor, checking every single lock. All held fast.

  How could a light turn itself on within a locked unit?

  The most sensible answer was a timer, one of those devices that could be set for a certain hour to give a home the impression of occupancy and deter thieves. Some common appliance in this world that glowed blue, something that he’d never heard of. That was all it was. Vikram felt his breathing slow a bit and he was glad that he hadn’t called the police, but he still felt himself on edge. For there was another answer, one he wasn’t allowing himself to think about. Keeping quiet, he retreated down the hall and descended the fire stairs back to ground level. He pulled the main door behind him, listened for the catch.

  The parking lot looked just as it had before, as did the half-familiar but immutable skyline—low, workaday Queens with Manhattan ranged out behind, buildings he knew from his world and buildings he didn’t, the angry sky bruised purple from light pollution.

  The old factory loomed behind him. The light that glowed the same color as the Gate he’d passed through was snuffed out. He hated to hope. And yet. What if there were more of them coming.

  Or a door. A way to return.

  In the guard shack, he settled back in the chair in front of the static monitors and pulled out the incident log. He licked the tip of his pencil. Checked the time.

  Exactly 12:13 AM. He wrote 0:13 in the log, paused.

  Back at home, where everyone used the twenty-four-hour clock, they’d called that bad luck time.

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: IMAN IBRAHIM, AGE 59, QUEENS

  I set up the lottery system, and I rigged it in my favor. I’m a statistician, after all, not a martyr, not like Dr. Mornay, a captain who insisted on going down with her ship. Mornay herself patted me on the back and sent me through the Gate with the first entry group in the fifteenth lot.

  Just hours after the meltdowns, as she and her department began to haul all that dusty equipment out of secure storage, I was in my office at Gaynor Tech, programming an ordinator to pull from military and Alternative Service records and sort out those with Extreme Crime convictions. Mornay and I knew each other from years back, when I’d done the mathematical modeling for the Gate prototype. I’d been surprised to hear she’d held on to her job, much less her machine. But I was happy to help her.

  Half the stations had gone black by midafternoon on the day of the attacks. The newsreaders on the stations that were left were wearing paper masks over their faces, as if that could do anything against radiation, talking about containment strategies for Richmond. Poughkeepsie was already a lost cause. I don’t remember what they were saying about the plant in Southern California at that point. Meanwhile, Mornay’s team trucked all the equipment down to Calvary Cemetery and set it up there without permission. That was the best open space they could think of, accessible to the most people via tramways and with three major traffic arteries right there. She had people pulling on all their connections—research colleagues, old contacts at government agencies, anything—trying to get permission to do what she was already doing. And then they sent through old Dr. Cristaudo, with a transmitter, as a test. A second test.

  The first test came years earlier, during the development of the Gate prototype. I remembered the rig, of course, that meter-and-a-half-tall unit they’d set up in the safety-shielded first-floor Applied Physics lab at Gaynor, cinder-block walls shivering in its light. I used to go down there and watch. They’d throw items in attached to strings, and reel them back home. They’d take pictures. They’d send various instruments through and run my ordinated probabilities, again and again. But none of those physicists knew what, exactly, the hole connected to. And then one night, someone left the Gate powered up, and a graduate student of Mornay’s, a woman named Ree, stepped through.

  At that point, their knowledge of what the device did was only theoretical. They had no idea the effect it would have on a living human being, or how much matter the aperture could accept at once. They’d tried a paper clip, an apple. Never a person. Now, they had proof it was possible for a living being to pass through—and a citation before the Human Subjects Board, to boot.

  There was no way to call Ree back. She’d planned exactly what she was doing, though. Just before she ducked into the field, she looked up at the security camera and gave a little wave.

  My escape was just as neat. By the time Homeland Defense set up their ad hoc Evacuation Commission, I was helping the army developers integrate the codes my lottery picks generated into an identity card scanning protocol. Once we were sure everything was working properly, I gave myself my promised reward. I fed my own code into the system.

  The only person on this side who’s ever appreciated what I accomplished was the agent. He found me at the coffeehouse here, in Astoria, where I do my contract work from my laptop a few mornings a week. They sent a Somali American in a skinny tie and expensive-looking shoes to sweet-talk me, as if our parents’ distant shared ancestry could possibly make him feel like kin. In my own world, where the terrorists were America Unida and the Afghans drove out the Russian communists and the Jews never settled Cisjordan, I did not experience anti-Muslim prejudice. That only set me father apart from the midwestern-accented young agent, who must have suffered it all his life. A miscalculation. He was handsome. Maybe his handlers hoped I would find him sexually attractive. Or that I’d see him as a son. He sidled up to me, tried to buy me a bubble tea, and for a moment, I thought he must be from yet another government department. Another line of Debrief, a secret loyalty test. But no, it was much more sordid than that. He worked for a power delivery infrastructure company. His employers didn’t care about refugees; they were looking for ways to incorporate Gate technology, specifically its amorphous metal power transformers, into the smart electrical grid.

  “I’m not an engineer,” I said. “I’m a statistician. What do you think I know?”

  And his eyes went round in a gratifying way and he said, “More than we do.”

  That would have been enough for some UDPs. The interest. We so resent being resented.

  What do I remember, from Calvary? I stood between the graves and saw the Gate swallow up the one-hundredth and final entry group in Lot Fourteen. This was the first time I’d witnessed the full-sized model, the imposing physical architecture of the Gate itself, the hasty welding of its base, its rattling generators and galvanic compressors and the snaking cords that powered them all. Not to mention the cough-syrup-blue light it threw up. I saw the machine power down. Then, the soldiers began to let the next group of strangers file in through the checkpoint near the generators. I joined them at the staging area, looking up at the lingering spread of the plasma dispersal, as awed and frightened as anyone else.

  Mornay was still there, supervising the emergency patch of some tube in the coolant system—even the prototype had always run incredibly hot—and I remember seeing a new looseness to the very skin o
f her face and wondering about how many hours she’d been up. Somewhere else, fires at the three power plants still raged, and workers risked their lives to operate the heavy machinery that would bury the smoking hulks, though the tons of earth could not muffle or contain the radiation. Somewhere else, army ministers met in various chambers and halls and bunkers, trading dares and threats, counting their weapons. And here I was, abandoning it all.

  I didn’t want to distract her, but I felt the need to say something, to say I was sorry. I must have said something like that. Her response, I recall perfectly: “You did your part, Dr. Ibrahim.” Then, she put her hand on my shoulder blade. “From each, according to her ability.”

  Insultingly self-congratulatory, really.

  Still, I wish the agent from the power delivery infrastructure company had been as plainspoken, as realistic about my limits. He thought my brain was an ordinator, that I had blueprints stored in my synapses. All I could tell him was my own system. How I’d picked out who would go and who would stay.

  “You were fair,” he said. “You made it as fair as you possibly could.”

  “You’re just trying to flatter me,” I said.

  “You could do good work again. Imagine if power were cheaper, if we could modernize. Wars, Iman, are fought here over oil. Help me stop that. Help me use what you know.”

  There’s a lot of tech they don’t have, that the Gate could potentially unlock. I’m surprised I haven’t been asked for more. But I told him nothing.

  Because Mornay was right about me. I’d already given all I had.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hel found Dr. Carlos Oliveira waiting for her in James J. Walker Park in the West Village, deep in conversation with two little girls with hair the same shade of red, both under the age of seven or so, both dressed in immaculate playclothes. A sharp-eyed young woman who must have been their nanny sat on a nearby bench. As Hel approached, the girls dissolved into giggles—the little sister merry and daring, the older one reluctant, half-shy. Oliveira smiled benignly from under the brim of his hat.

  Hel knew what they were staring at. Oliveira’s area of study—the spread of disease—was as relevant in this world as in his own, and he’d redemonstrated his brilliance immediately upon his arrival. He’d earned an endowed chair in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His new, rewritten book, a social history of cholera outbreaks in the nineteenth century and the birth of modern epidemiology, had won last year’s Robert K. Merton Award. Now his celebrity spanned two worlds; he had the distinction of being the least-hated UDP there was. Consequently he’d become a generally recognized spokesperson for the whole community. It was crazy that he’d even responded to Hel’s email when she’d written last year to ask for his theories about the workings of the Gate, unbelievable that he’d pursued a friendship with her.

  But she doubted the girls recognized Oliveira from his recent New York Times profile. By anyone’s standards, he stuck out of a crowd. As she stepped closer, she saw him open and close his pincers rapidly—first the left set, then the right. Amazed laughter burst from the younger girl while the big sister covered her face, peering at him through the gap in her fingers.

  “There are two bones in the forearm,” Oliveira told them. “Radius and ulna. You have them too. Mine were separated by surgeons after I lost my hands. They fixed the muscles so I can use them to pick things up. Like chopsticks.” All the while he was talking he was gesturing with his maimed, modified arms. The children looked on, transfixed. Hel had been given to understand that the procedure existed in this world also, but having been invented by a German, it wasn’t common in the United States, where bilateral hand amputees were much more likely to be fitted with prosthetics.

  As she watched, he deftly picked up his high-tech phone from his lap and used one stubby digit to jab the voice-control button. “Call Helen Nash,” he intoned, then said to the girls, “See? Very useful to me.”

  “I’m right here,” she said, as her own phone buzzed from her pocket. “Sorry I’m late. These underground trains . . .”

  “Whatever time you choose to arrive is the correct time, my dear,” he told her with characteristically immoderate gallantry. “I must somehow have arrived early.”

  The nanny on the bench called to her charges. Hel glanced back at the children with dislike. No one had known exactly how the Gate would function. They’d deemed that only adults could be legally eligible to risk evac. If your name was chosen by the ordinator, you had to say yes or no immediately and then report to the site in Queens—no time for good-byes or drawn-out decisions.

  Most parents of small children had said no.

  “Let’s walk,” Oliveira said, as he always did. Silently, she handed him the bouquet of red carnations she’d picked up at a corner grocery on the way over, where she’d stopped to buy an energy drink for herself. Oliveira took the flowers. “Feeling wealthy, are you?”

  “No.” They meandered down Saint Lukes Place; without discussing it, they turned right onto Bleecker Street toward Father Demo Square. Hel squinted into the bright autumn sunlight at the people around them, slightly scruffier than the West Village denizens of her own time and place. She took a fizzy sip of her Rockstar.

  Energy drinks were possibly her favorite thing about this universe, but the store where she’d bought this one displayed a NO ALIENS sign prominently on the register. She’d considered taking her custom elsewhere. Instead, she handed the proprietor exact change for the drink, then swiped the flowers from the stand outside the door without paying. “I just feel like celebrating,” she told Oliveira now. “I’m making progress on a project.”

  “What project is this?” Every time they saw each other, the old man asked her about her recertification. The American Board of Medical Specialties had quickly established re-licensing protocols for UDP doctors, just as the American Sociological Association had helped Oliveira transfer his tenure, but she’d never looked into the details of this process—she lived perfectly fine on public assistance. Her focus was elsewhere now. “Ezra Sleight,” she said. “Do you know much about him?”

  “Ah. That’s Dr. Bhatnagar’s specialty, correct?”

  Vikram, tossing around his damn flashlight like a cowboy. “Used to be.”

  “The Pain Ray,” Oliveira said, eyes closed. “I read that one when I was a boy. How could anyone forget The Pain Ray? Yes, I know of Sleight. What about him?”

  “His house in Brooklyn. He lived there from ’35 to ’57. After. I’ve found it here. I talked to the man who owns it.”

  “But Sleight didn’t live there,” Oliveira said. “He never existed.” They had stopped in front of a green-painted bench. Oliveira handed the carnations back to Hel as, stiff-jointed, he levered himself to a seated position.

  Hel sat down next to him. “No. That’s not exactly true. He was born. He lived to age ten. 1909, Carlos. That’s when he died. It’s the oldest change I know about.”

  “Everyone says 1910, don’t they.”

  “Exactly! But Sleight died in 1909. I’m sure of it. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle has some of its archives online; there was a profile on NorthKing Baking Soda, Ezra Sleight’s father’s company, that mentioned his son’s recent drowning. It didn’t say the date of death—just the year. I need to do more digging, to find the death certificate or something.”

  “It could have been a mistake. A typographical error.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. But what if it’s not? If it was 1909, that’s months before any of the other recorded divergences. It’s got to mean something!”

  Oliveira eased off his glasses. “Are you positing a causal relationship? Do you think Sleight’s death influenced it all somehow? A ten-year-old child, son of a baking soda tycoon? That’s what changed the world?”

  “You sound like Vikram with the causal stuff. I’m not an idiot, OK? It doesn’t matter if he’s the cause. Him being first is still significant. There should be a museum. Can you imagine it? Right in that old house. A museum.”
r />   “To Sleight?”

  “To the earliest of the deviations anyone’s been able to discover. It wouldn’t just be for him; it would be about all the others. A memorial to everyone else we lost, starting with the first. By the middle of the twentieth century, many of them were never even born, you know.”

  “Yes, yes. I’ve looked into all the vanished epidemiologists in some detail myself: Pascal Toussaint’s mother died in a kitchen fire; Louise Stuart’s parents had seven other children, but somehow they were all boys; Jin Fan-Wen was born, but never went to university—that set back the discovery of the causes of cardiovascular disease by almost ten years.” Oliveira sighed. “And there’s Christian Hassel. He was born too, lived to be a teenager, but was then killed by the KomSos—by the Nazis, I mean. They called themselves Nazis here.”

  “Wow,” Hel said. “That’s awful.” To her, those born just Before whose lives had ended prematurely were the worst cases, the most frustrating. There was something especially poignant about knowing exactly what these men and women might have accomplished if only history had proceeded the way it ought to have. “All the things they should have done. They need to be memorialized.”

  The old man’s eyes were cloudy, but his gaze pierced her. “Our community is so small.”

  “But it wouldn’t just be for UDPs! This would benefit everyone! Only we know about these inventors, these discoverers, these artists. It is our duty to share that knowledge with the whole world. Don’t you think? We can make them understand us.”

  “A museum dedicated to those who never existed.” He said the words slowly, trying them out. “And what do you think you need to make that happen?”

  A fair question. Three hundred and fourteen thousand dollars—that was how much Dwayne Sealy wanted for the house, plus it would have to be cleaned out. Exhibits would have to be created, information compiled from all the other UDPs she could find and cross-checked with the historical record here. The list of tasks was overwhelming. What did she need to make it happen? Money, certainly. Help applying for a grant, perhaps. And some string-pulling. What UDP had the resources? Not even Oliveira. And what non-UDP would possibly want to take on something so unpopular?