Chapter Text
“Heya, Bingo, Digger thinks you should come with me, check out this crazy thing!”
Lieutenant (j.g.) Albert Calavicci, better known as Bingo to his Navy pals, squinted one eye up at his best friend, who was hanging over the gate. He had been working on scoping out the scenery of his backyard, trying to wiggle out of Beth’s ordered chores, while burning up a pack. But if this was interesting enough… “What thing?”
“Digger’s brother-in-law works for this guy, Moe…” Chip gestured in the air with his cigar like he was trying to rope in the memory. “…Moe something. They worked on something they’re calling a ‘time machine.’ Now they’re looking for a volunteer.”
Bingo laughed as he pulled out a cigarette from his latest pack of Chesterfields. “You’re pullin’ my leg, Chip.” He lit it up and took a drag. Exhaling, he said, “Do they really think they can time travel? That’s some science fiction nonsense-“
“Digger said they think they can. They want to find someone who wants to go back in time. What a scream!” Chip threw back his head in a laugh.
Bingo squinted at his flight buddy through a fog of smoke. Thoughts he’d been repressing for the last eight years were now threatening to come to the surface. He jumped up and pulled the cigarette out of his mouth. “Yeah, let’s go! It’ll be a scream!” After scribbling a quick note for Beth, he left it on the patio table, then he slammed the gate behind him as he hopped off into Chip’s car. She was out that afternoon, so hopefully she wouldn’t be too upset.
As they left for Moe’s house, those repressed thoughts finally surfaced. He’d told almost nobody about Trudy. At Annapolis, there’d been the one doctor who inquired about family history, and there was Beth, last spring. Whenever people asked him about his family, Bingo would shrug and say, “They’re all gone.” He usually got claps of sympathy on his back and invitations to others’ family events from that, so it wasn’t all bad. The guys didn’t need to know the details, anyway. If Bingo could go back in time to 1953, he’d pretend to be a doctor and help Trudy not die. Then he’d transfer her to a better home in Maryland, where she could live while he finished his education at Annapolis. Of course, he wouldn’t be going away to Annapolis until the following year, but it was still good to plan ahead.
They arrived at a non-descript brick house. A few gadgets littered the front yard. Bingo leaned over to get a good look at one, then Chip yanked him back by the collar. “What are you doing?”
“The guy who lives here, did he make this or what?”
“I guess, but I wouldn’t touch that with a ten-foot pole if I were you. Digger said he’s here with the wifey, visiting the brother-in-law. Come on!”
They rang the doorbell, and an older man, in his sixties, answered. “Oh, are you Peter’s friends? Please, please, come in!”
Digger was inside, sitting on the couch with his wife. He raised a hand in greeting to Chip and Bingo. “Hey you two. Here to see the fabled time machine?”
“Yup,” Chip said.
Digger’s wife asked, “Oh, hey, Al. How’s Beth doing?”
“Fine, fine, she’s fine.” Bingo smiled. “So what’s all this about a time machine?”
Digger said, “Moe’s been working on a time machine for years. His assistant’s been working with him on it for the past three or four years, since he came up with some new ideas.”
“You know how it works?” The Naval pilots shook their heads, and the old man, Moe, continued, while taking a piece of string out of his own pocket. “This end of the string is when you were born, and the other end is when you die. You tie this string up in a loop, then you crumple it up like this. Then, see, you can jump around within your own lifetime! That’s how this machine works- it crumples up the string of your lifetime.” Moe clapped. “Kenny’s downstairs, making a few final tweaks.”
Digger got up. “C’mon. I’ll give you guys the tour.” He led his fellow pilots past a framed photograph of Einstein, through the house and down the basement stairs.
In the middle of the unfinished basement, there was a huge cylinder going from floor to ceiling. Digger gestured around the basement, talking about the various features. Apparently, Moe had used a different design until Kenny stepped in a few years before. The cylinder was supposed to focus the neurons and mesons, whatever the hell those were, so that the person within could more easily jump backwards or forwards in time.
“How’d he come up with the cylinder?” Bingo asked, circling the controls for the mysterious “time machine.”
Digger shrugged, and that was when Kenny came out of the cylinder, its door whooshing open. “It just came to me,” he said. “One day, about three years ago, I was down here, looking at the machine with Moe. Then some part of my brain says, out of nowhere, ‘no, no, this doesn’t look right.’ I changed it and I think it works a lot better. We just got a new generator that’s way more powerful, so Moe swears this attempt will work.”
Bingo elbowed Chip in the side. “You should go!”
“Me? No way! You should go!” Chip elbowed him back.
“Boys, boys, no fighting,” Moe chided as he came down the stairs. “Al, was it? You can go first.”
Bingo shrugged widely, then he flashed a grin over his shoulder at Chip as he followed Kenny into the cylinder. The door whooshed shut behind them.
There was a chair in the middle of the room, bristling with hardware. Bingo sat down in the chair, and Kenny belted him in with various restraints at legs, crotch and shoulders. Then Kenny put a helmet with attached goggles on Bingo’s head and secured it. “Not that different from a fighter jet,” Bingo laughed.
Kenny wasn’t laughing. “Do you have a specific time and date you want to go to? A place?”
“Try noon on February first, 1953. Brooklyn State Hospital, New York City, New York.”
There was a clock attached to a perpetual calendar that was bolted to a shelf. Kenny fiddled with it, setting the date to Bingo’s specifications. Then he consulted an atlas. “Where is this… Brooklyn State Hospital? I need coordinates.”
“Can you find Prospect Park? That should be close enough.”
Kenny paused to give him a good, long look. “You’re looking for something, aren’t you?”
Bingo looked away.
“I understand. Moe was going through the same thing for a while. That’s why he got started on this machine to begin with. Can I ask what’s there, or…?”
Bingo shook his head, his thick eyebrows so far down they nearly hid his eyes. “It means something to me and doesn’t mean anything to you.”
Kenny went back to looking through the atlas. He made some measurements with a ruler, then wrote some numbers down. Then he turned the dials on a device next to the calendar/clock combination, entering the coordinates.
"This won’t kill me, right?” Bingo blurted out.
“No. We’ve made sure whatever electricity comes out is at a non-lethal level. At most, you’ll feel some mild tingling. Are you ready?”
“Aye-aye.”
Kenny double-checked the date and the coordinates before leaving. After he left, a second door came out, sealing the cylindrical room.
This is stupid, Bingo thought. I’m going to get a little zap, Chip and Digger will get a good laugh, and we can fly as usual on Monday, I can get my usual blast of adrenaline-
Despite the darkened vision from the helmet goggles, the blue-white light filling the room was blinding. Bingo squeezed his eyes shut against it. When he opened his eyes, he expected to see the clean white halls of a psychiatric ward.