Frank Wheeler The Traveler

Frank Wheeler had lived in the same house for thirty-seven years and knew every inch of it, which is why, on a drizzly Saturday morning in October, he was absolutely certain the door at the back of the basement did not belong there. He'd gone down to fix the water heater — it had been making a sound like someone shaking a bag of marbles, which was the sound water heaters made right before they became expensive. He'd fixed water heaters before. He had a wrench and a YouTube video and a reasonably optimistic attitude. He did not have an explanation for the door. It stood against the far wall, between the shelving unit full of old paint cans and the corner where he kept the emergency generator. Solid wood. Unpainted. A brass handle worn smooth from use. He put down the wrench. He walked over to the door and stood very close to it and listened. Silence on the other side. Except — a very faint sound that was almost like traffic, but wrong. The wrong cadence, the wrong depth. Like traffic from somewhere that wasn't quite here. "This," Frank Wheeler said to his empty basement, "is going to be a whole thing." He had planned to fix the water heater, make coffee, watch football, and maybe rake some leaves. He was fifty-one years old and he had earned a Saturday that stayed inside the margins. He turned the handle. The door opened into a hallway that didn't exist — long, lit by gaslights that swayed slightly in a draft from somewhere Frank couldn't identify. Through the hallway's far window, the sky was wrong. The clouds moved too fast. The light was amber-gold, late-afternoon gold, except it had been 9am when he came downstairs. He looked behind him. His basement. His water heater, still making its marble sound. His wrench on the floor. He looked forward. The impossible hallway. Frank Wheeler had read enough science fiction in his life to understand the theoretical mechanics of what he was probably looking at. He had watched every time travel movie, formed opinions about all of them, spent considerable effort thinking through which temporal paradoxes were internally consistent and which were lazy writing. He had always known, with confident certainty, exactly what he would do if this happened. He stepped through. The door swung shut behind him with a sound like finality. The gaslit hallway stretched ahead, longer than seemed possible, the amber light giving everything the warm unreality of a photograph from before he was born. At the far end, something that might have been a person was running toward him, waving both arms, shouting something he couldn't yet hear. Frank stayed where he was. The figure was getting closer. He could make out details now — a coat, a hat, the kind of clothes that didn't belong to any decade he'd lived through. The figure reached him, out of breath, grabbed his arm with both hands. "You're Wheeler," the figure said. A young woman. Eyes sharp and urgent. "I am," Frank said. "We've been waiting." She glanced back down the hallway as if something might be following her. "There's no time to explain everything. You have to choose." "Choose what?" She looked at him directly. "Which version of 1987 you want to save."