The days bled into a week, a strange, painful rhythm of dawn-to-dusk labor that left Robert's body perpetually aching and his mind numb. The blisters on his hands broke, bled, and slowly began to callous over. The muscles in his back and shoulders, once screaming in protest, now settled into a dull, constant thrum of fatigue. He learned to handle the plane, the saw, the hammer—not with Arthur's effortless artistry, but with a passable, grinding competence. He was becoming functional. The thought was both a relief and a horror.
He was carving out a space in this past, a small, insignificant niche as Arthur's helper. He ate Eleanor's hearty meals, slept in the rustling straw bed, and worked until his mind was too tired to torment him with thoughts of home. It was a life of brutal simplicity, and part of him was starting to crave the anesthetic of its routines.
But the ghost of his old life was never far. It lived under his mattress, in the form of the dead smartphone and the impossible twenty-dollar bill. It lived in the headlines of Arthur's daily paper, each one a silent scream of a future he knew too well.
One evening, as a soft rain pattered against the windows, Arthur turned on the large, fabric-covered radio in the living room. The warm glow of the vacuum tubes illuminated the dusk, and after a moment of crackling static, the rich, sonorous voice of a news broadcaster filled the room.
*"…and in aviation news, Howard Hughes has shattered his own transcontinental speed record, landing his H-1 Racer in Newark after a flight of just under seven and a half hours from Los Angeles. A stunning achievement, proving the boundless potential of American aviation…"*
Robert, who had been listlessly darning a sock under Eleanor's patient instruction—another skill he was failing miserably at—froze. His head snapped up. Hughes. The H-1 Racer. He knew the specs, the design innovations that made it so fast. In his world, it was a historical footnote. Here, it was breaking news.
Arthur let out a low whistle. "Seven hours. Imagine that. Used to take a train near a week."
"It's marvelous," Eleanor agreed, her knitting needles clicking softly.
Robert's heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. This was a language he understood. A field where his knowledge wasn't useless. Aviation. The very thing that had been his escape, his passion in a digital world. He couldn't help himself.
"The key is the wings," he said, his voice sounding too loud in the quiet room. "The H-1. It has retractable landing gear and a flush-riveted, cantilevered wing. It reduces drag exponentially. And the Pratt & Whitney engine, it's a twin-row radial, but the real innovation is in the cowling design, the NACA cowling, it manages airflow and cooling far more efficiently than…"
He trailed off. Both Arthur and Eleanor were staring at him, their expressions a mixture of blank confusion and dawning suspicion. He had spoken too fast, used words that didn't belong in this parlor, in this year. "Flush-riveted?" "Exponentially?" "NACA?" To them, it might as well have been Martian.
"How… how would you know a thing like that, Robert?" Eleanor asked, her voice carefully neutral.
Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through him. He had broken the first rule of being a castaway: he had stood out. He had drawn attention.
"I… I read a lot," he stammered, looking down at the tangled mess of yarn in his lap. "Magazines. Popular Mechanics. I have an interest in… flying machines." It was a weak recovery, but it was all he had.
Arthur grunted, a noncommittal sound. He didn't press the issue, but the look he gave Robert was longer, more thoughtful, than before. The comfortable silence that had settled over the room was now strained, pregnant with unasked questions.
Later that night, lying in bed, Robert stared at the water-stained ceiling. The encounter had shaken him. It was a stark reminder that his knowledge was a dangerous liability. He was a walking anachronism, and the slightest misstep could expose him. He had to be more careful. He had to bury the mechatronics student, the aviation enthusiast, even deeper.
But the radio broadcast had also ignited a tiny, stubborn ember of an idea. A dangerous, foolish, intoxicating idea.
He couldn't build a time machine. The materials, the knowledge, the power source—it was all impossible here. But what if he didn't need to go back? What if he could… change things? Not on a global scale—he wasn't arrogant enough to think he could stop the coming war. But on a small scale. What if he could use his knowledge to make a difference? To save a life? To invent something early?
The thought was seductive and terrifying. It was the plot of every time-travel story he'd ever loved. But this wasn't a story. The consequences were real. The Bootstrap Paradox wasn't a theoretical puzzle; it was a potential minefield he could blunder into with a single careless word.
He thought of the planes he'd flown in his games. The Spitfires, the Mustangs, the jets. He knew their weaknesses, their strengths, the design flaws that had cost pilots their lives. What if he could scribble a note, an anonymous letter to a certain aircraft designer? A suggestion for a reinforced wing spar here, a better supercharger design there?
It was a fantasy, of course. He was a nobody. A carpenter's assistant with no credentials, no resources. Who would listen to him? They'd lock him up in an asylum faster than he could say "quantum entanglement."
The rain had stopped. A sliver of moonlight cut through the curtains, falling across the floorboards. He slipped out of bed and knelt, pulling the dead smartphone and the folded bill from their hiding place. In the pale light, his student ID photo looked like a picture of a ghost. A young man from a future that was now his impossible, irretrievable past.
He was a ghost in the machine of history. And the most terrifying question of all was beginning to form in his mind: was he here to merely observe, a powerless spectator? Or did his presence itself, this single, anomalous data point, already constitute a change? The weight of that possibility was heavier than any bag of coffee, any stack of lumber. It was the weight of a world he knew, balanced on the edge of a silence he was no longer sure he could keep.