Seize the Night

first time in my life, I started feeling time running out,” he said, referring not solely to his own mortality but to the fact that time was running out for all of us, for the entire world as we knew it. “Watches, man, I hate them, hate everything they stand for. Evil mechanisms. But lately I start wondering what time it is, though I never used to care, and if I can't find a clock, I get way itchy. So now I wear a watch, and I'm like the rest of the world, and doesn't that suck?”
    “It sucketh.”
    “Like a tornado.”
    I said, “Time was screwed up in the egg room.”
    “The room was a time machine.”
    “We can't make that assumption.”
    “I can,” he said. “I'm an assumption-making fool.”
    “Time travel is impossible.”
    “Medieval attitude, bro. Impossible is what they once said about airplanes, going to the moon, nuclear bombs, television, and cholesterol free egg substitutes.”
    “For the sake of argument, let's suppose it's possible.”
    “It is possible.”
    “If it's just time travel, why the pressurized suit? Wouldn't time travelers want to be discreet? They'd be super-conspicuous unless they traveled back to a Star Trek convention in 1980.”
    “Protection against unknown disease,” Bobby said. “Maybe an atmosphere with less oxygen or full of poisonous pollutants.”
    “At a Star Trek convention in 1980?”
    “You know they were going to the future.”
    “I don't know, and neither do you.”
    “The future,” Bobby insisted, the beer having given him absolute confidence in his powers of deduction. “They figured they needed the protection of the spacesuits because … the future might be radically different. Which it evidently is.” Even without the kiss of the moon, a faint silvery blush lent visibility to the riverbed silt. Nevertheless, the April night was deep.
    Way back in the seventeenth century, Thomas Fuller said that it is always darkest just before the dawn. More than three hundred years later, he was still right, though still dead.
    “How far in the future?” I wondered, almost able to smell the hot, rancid air that had blown through the egg room.
    “Ten years, a century, a millennium. Who cares? No matter how far they went, something totally quashed them.” I recalled the ghostly, radio-relayed voices in the egg room, the panic, the cries for help, the screams.
    I shuddered. After another pull at my beer, I said, “The thing … or things in Hodgson's suit.”
    “That's part of our future.”
    “Nothing like that exists on this world.”
    “Not yet.”
    “But those things were so strange … The entire ecological system would have to change. Change drastically.”
    “If you can find one, ask a dinosaur whether it's possible.”
    I had lost my taste for the beer. I held the bottle out of the Jeep, turned it upside down, and let it drain.
    “Even if it was a time machine,” I argued, “it was dismantled. So Hodgson showing up the way he did, out of nowhere, and the vault door reappearing … everything that happened to us … How could it have happened?”
    “There's a residual effect.”
    “Residual effect.”
    “Full-on, totally macking residual effect.”
    “You take the engine out of a Ford, tear apart the drive train, throw away the battery—no residual effect can cause the damn car to just drive itself off to Vegas one day.”
    Gazing at the dwindling, vaguely luminous riverbed as if it were the course of time winding into our infinitely strange future, Bobby said, “They tore a hole in reality. Maybe a hole like that doesn't mend itself.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “What it means,” he said.
    “Cryptic.”
    “Styptic.”
    Perhaps his point was that his explanation might be cryptic, yes, but at least it was a concept we could grasp and to which we could cling, a familiar idea that kept our sanity from draining away, just as the alum in a styptic pencil could stop the blood flowing from a shaving cut.
    Or perhaps he was mocking my tendency—acquired from the poetry in which my father had steeped me—to assume that everyone spoke in metaphor and that the world was always more complex than it appeared to be, in which case he had chosen the word solely for the rhyme.
    I didn't give him the satisfaction of asking him to elucidate styptic . “They didn't know about this residual effect?”
    “You mean the big-brain wizards running the project?”
    “Yeah. The people who built it, then tore it down. If there was a residual effect,