Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 Read Online Free PDF Page B

the four of us, we don't have enough pairs of hands. Or enough expertise."
    "That's why we recruit," said Lydia. "We need to find a ton more people who can help us make this happen."
    "Except," said Jerboa, fists clenched and eyes red and pinched, "we can't trust just any random people with this. Remember? That's why Madame Alberta brought it to us in the first place, because the temptation to abuse this power would be too great. You could destroy a city with this machine. How on Earth do we find a few dozen people who we can trust with this?"
    "The same way we found each other," Lydia said. "The same way Madame Alberta found us. The Time Travel Club."
    Jerboa finally got into the truck and snapped the seatbelt into place. Nodding slowly, like thinking it over.
    Ricky from Garbo.com showed up at a meeting of the Time Travel Club, several months later. He didn't even realize at first that these were the same people from MJL Aerospace—maybe he'd seen the articles about the club on the various nerd blogs, or maybe he'd seen Malik's appearance on the basic cable TV show GeekUp! Or maybe he'd listened to one of their podcasts. They were doing lots and lots of things to expand the membership of the club, without giving the slightest hint about what went on in Madame Alberta's laundry room.
    Garbo.com had gone under by now, and Ricky was in grad school. He'd shaved off the big sideburns and wore square Elvis Costello glasses now.
    "So I heard this is like a LARP, sort of," Ricky said to Lydia as they were getting a cookie from the cookie table before the meeting started—they'd had to move the meetings from the Unitarian basement to a middle school basketball court, now that they had a few dozen members. Scores of folding chairs, in rows, facing a podium. And they had a cookie table. "You make up your time travel stories, and everybody pretends they're true. Right?"
    "Sort of," Lydia said. "You'll see. Once the meeting starts, you cannot say anything about these stories not being true. Okay? It's the only real rule."
    "Sure thing," Ricky said. "I can do that. I worked for a dotcom startup, remember? I'm good at make-believe."
    And Ricky turned out to be one of the more promising new recruits, weirdly enough. He spent a lot of time going to the eighteenth century and teaching Capability Brown about feng shui. Which everybody agreed was probably a good thing for the Enlightenment.
    Just a few months after that, Lydia, Malik, and Jerboa found themselves already debating whether to show Ricky the laundry room. Lydia was snapping her third-hand spacesuit into place in Madame Alberta's sitting room, with its caved-in sofa and big-screen TV askew. Lydia was happy to obsess over something else, to get her mind off the crazy thing she was about to do.
    "I think he's ready," Lydia said of Ricky. "He's committed to the club."
    "I would certainly like to see his face when he finds out how we were really going to launch that satellite into orbit," said Malik, grinning.
    "It's too soon," Jerboa said. "I think we ought to wait six months, as a rule, before bringing anyone here. Just to make sure someone is really in tune with the group, and isn't going to go trying to tell the wrong people about this. This technology has an immense potential to distort your sense of ethics and your values."
    Lydia tried to nod, but it was hard now that the bulky collar was in place. This spacesuit was a half a size too big, with boots that Lydia's feet slid around in. The crotch of the orange suit was almost M.C. Hammer wide on her, even with the adult diaper they'd insisted she should wear just in case. The puffy white gloves swallowed her fingers. And then Malik and Jerboa lowered the helmet into place, and Lydia's entire world was compressed to a gray tinted rectangle. Goodbye, peripheral vision.
    She wondered what sort of tattoo she would get to commemorate this trip. "Ten minutes," Madame Alberta called from the laundry room. And indeed, it was ten to