Unless Another Escapes to Tell Thee

By Stephen Saperstein Frug

At first Mona thought that Noam, her counterpart as the head of the second lab in the secret time travel research group at Cornell, was simply a creep. But over time she begins to think he knows a secret she doesn’t—a secret that will change her life forever.

"Unless Another Escapes to Tell Thee" is the sixth story in the Retcon story mosaic, each of which can be read on their own, but which, seen together, tell a larger story as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Saperstein Frug
• Release date: Aug 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781960745057

Stephen Saperstein Frug

Stephen Saperstein Frug is the author and illustrator of Happenstance: A Photographic Novel, and the author of the essay series Attempts, and of Retcon: A Mosaic Story in Three Movements. He lives with his family in Ithaca, New York, where he commits occasional acts of illeism.

Book preview

Unless Another Escape to Tell Thee

movement 1, installment 6 of

Retcon

A Mosaic Story in Three Movements

by

Stephen Saperstein Frug

Copyright © 2023 by Stephen Saperstein Frug

All rights reserved.

Published by Snark & Boojum Press

Ithaca, New York

https://stephenfrug.com/snark-and-boojum-press/

First edition

August, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-960745-05-7

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, incidents, footnotes, minerals, and mysterious physics are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Except for the Ibn Ezra comment, which really is his commentary on Deuteronomy 34:6.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. But he's an easygoing fellow, so feel free to email him and ask.

Table of Contents

Start Reading

Cover

Title Page

Contents

Epigraph

17

4

18

3

15

19

1

20

8

23

9

24

2

5

14

6

21

7

25

10

11

26

12

13

22

16

About Retcon

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Previous Stories in Retcon

Also From Snark & Boojum Press

Attempts a series of essays by the author of Retcon

Unless Another Escape to Tell Thee

Against your will were you born, against your will you live, and against your will you will die.

— Pirke Avot 4:22

17

Time travel is boring.

—Noam did not, of course, mean time visiting, time dwelling, or whatever you wish to call actually being in another time, the strangeness of all your instincts turned wrong, of colors a shade off and smells remixed, prices fallen and progress unwound. This he knew from his earlier brief excursions (yes, there had been one or two) would be as engrossing and terrifying as any spacial displacement resulting in an immersion within a strange culture. He remembered his trip to China, how bewildered he'd felt, how lost, even with Professor Wu right there at every moment to translate and explain. Of course, in the past, he'd be revisiting the lost, not traveling to a truly alien culture: he had once been fluent in that speech, practiced in those gestures; presumably it would come back to him in time. On his earlier trips he just hadn't stayed long enough, right? Or would the doubled lens sit ever before his eyes, for the rest of his already more-than-half wasted life? He did not know, not yet. He supposed it would be both familiar and strange, in some combination he could not yet conceive. But not boring: no, dwelling in the past would bring a thousand perils and humiliations and miseries, entail suffering of innumerable varieties and flavors: but not boredom.

No, what was boring was the travel.

Which is to say, time travel was like any other sort of travel, any act of not being but getting somewhere: an exhausting, uncomfortable, irritating, time-consuming, and stressful business, whose chief characteristic, sitting as the high king among the other unplesantries, was tedium: the heaps of shredded time: waiting to board the bus or to disembark the plane, watching as the agent looks for your record, the drawn-out lulls of a cross-country drive, the sitting in still vehicles, the dragging of luggage, the security lines, the over-priced waters, the fast-food, the waiting. Time travel, above and apart from everything else it was, was travel. Which is to say: dull.

H. G. Wells hadn't mentioned that part.

Most depictions of time travel he'd ever read or seen showed it as instantaneous, which (Noam decided as he twisted uncomfortably in his seat, unable to concentrate on any of the books he'd brought) made some sense as a guess, since time was precisely what was being overpassed. But it turned out it wasn't so: you moved through time within a bubble, and that bubble went only so fast, and in the meantime the traveler (stuck in timeβ) had to wait it out. This part, actually, Wells had gotten right, or almost: he'd shown his Traveler sitting and watching the world mutate before his eyes. He'd foreseen the waiting—but not the isolation. The problem was that the bounded space which traveled through time had to be wholly self-contained: nothing got in or out, not even light. Also, if you wanted to breathe, you had to bring your oxygen with you. No one was really sure what would happen if you tried to send something through time without it being hermetically sealed within saeculite: Wu seemed to think that the most likely result was that nothing would happen save a lot of energy being wasted, but since she thought that the other plausible result would be creating a massive explosion (the same explosion you'd get by transforming the to-be-translated mass into antimatter, which is to say larger than any nuke ever built), no one was ever going to try it. So isolation within a literal rock was imperative.

If tediousness is the most distinguishing feature of travel, then minor but prolonged discomfort is a close runner up. And time travel was characterized by that too. Indeed, as far as discomfort went, it was almost certainly worse than any other form of travel, save perhaps a space voyage—or being packed tight in a wooden crate and shipped steerage: to both of which it bore a rather miserable resemblance. It wasn't only oxygen that the isolation required hording: it also necessitated the recycling or storage of human wastes, and the carrying of energy sufficient to power the voyage. It would not be pushing matters too far to say that he was stuck inside a space ship: Lee, the engineer whom they'd hired for the basic design work the first time they sent a person far enough to require life support, had previously worked for NASA, and managed his task by adapting those designs to new purpose. So Noam was in a space capsule, just one which was going through dimension 4, not 1, 2 or 3. And as with any space voyage, not only did everything need to be both brought along and brought back (the ultimate carry-in/carry-out rule), mass was at a premium: it cost energy