Other Earths (collection)

They round the corner and enter the classroom and are greeted by thirty children in plastic one-piece desk chairs, looking solemn, and the teacher standing in front of a beat-up battlewagon of a desk, overflowing with papers.

Behind her, posters they’d made for him, or someone had made to look as though the children made them, most showing him with the crown on his head. But also a blackboard, which amazes him. So anachronistic, and he’s always hated the sound of chalk on a blackboard. Hated the smell of glue and the sour food-sweat of unwashed kids. It’s all so squalid and tired and oddly close to the atmosphere in the underground cavern, the smell the adepts give off as they thrash in slow motion in their vats, silently screaming out images of September oblivion.

The children look up at him when he enters the room as if they’re watching something far away and half wondrous, half monstrous.

He stands there and talks to them for a while first, trying to ignore the window in the back of the classroom that wants to show him a scene that shouldn’t have been there. He says the kinds of things he’s said to kids for years while on the campaign trail, running for ever-greater office; he has said these things for so many years that it’s become a sawdust litany meant to convince him of his charm, his wit, his competence. Later, he won’t remember what he said or what they said back. It’s not important.

But he’s thought about the implications in bed at night, lying there while his wife reads, her pale, freckled shoulder like a wall above him. He could stand in a classroom and say nothing, and still they would be fascinated with him, like a talisman, like a golden statue. No one had ever told him that sometimes you don’t have to inhabit the presidency—sometimes, it inhabits you.

He’d wondered at the time of his coronation if he’d feel different. He’d wondered how the parliament members would receive him, given the split between the popular vote and the legislative vote. But nothing had happened. The parliament members had clapped, some longer than others, and he’d been sworn in, duly noting the absence of the rogue Scottish delegation. The Crown of the Americas had briefly touched his head, like an “iron kiss from the mouth of God,” as his predecessor had put it, and then it was gone again, under glass, and he was back to being the secular president, not some sort of divine king.

Then they’d taken him to the Pentagon, hurtled him half a mile underground, and he’d felt like a man who wins a prize only to find out it’s worthless. Ossuary. He’d expected clandestine spy programs, secret weapons, special powers. But he hadn’t expected the faces in the vats or the machine.

Before they built the time machine, he had insisted on meeting Peter in an interrogation room near the vats. He felt strongly about this, about looking into the eyes of the man he had almost decided to trust.

“Are you sure this will work?” he asked Peter, even as he found the question irrelevant, ridiculous. No matter what Peter said, no matter how impossible his scientists said it was, how it subverted known science, he was going to do it. The curiosity was too strong. The effort to get to this point had been too great, even if it had been his predecessor’s effort.

Peter’s eyes were bright with a kind of fever. His face was the palest white possible, and he stank of the chemicals. They’d put him in a white jumpsuit to cover his nakedness.

“It’ll work. I pulled it out of another place. It was a true-sight. A true-seeing. I don’t know how it works, but it works. It’ll work, it’ll work, and then,” he turned toward the black one-way glass at the far end of the room, hands in restraints behind his back, “I’ll be free?”

There was a blankness to Peter’s face that he refused to acknowledge. A sense of something being held back, of something not quite right. Later, he would wonder why he hadn’t trusted that instinct.

“What exactly is the machine for? Exactly. Not just …time travel. Tell me something more specific.”

The scientist accompanying them smiled. He had a withered, narrow face and a firm chin, and he wore a jumpsuit that matched Peter’s, with a black belt at the waist that held the holster for an even blacker semiautomatic pistol. He smelled strongly of a sickly sweet cologne, as if he were hiding some essential putrefaction.

“Mr. President,” he said, “Peter is not a scientist. And we cannot peer into his mind. We can only see the images his mind projects. Until we build it, we will not know exactly how it works.”

And then, when it was built, and they took him to it, he didn’t know what to make of it. He didn’t think they did, either—they were gathered around it in their protective suits like apes trying to figure out an internal combustion engine.

“Don’t look directly into it,” the scientist beside him advised. “Those who have experience a kind of …disorientation.”