THREE CHORDS AND THE TRUTH

By Goran Skrobonja 

No one had any clue whatsoever as to why all the time travelers were arriving in Nashville. But that's what was happening. And it was happening to such an extent that one of the old buildings in this city – the "Athens of the South”, “Music City", “Time-Travel Town” – was converted into a museum of time travel.

Reuben Wilco, who worked as a curator at Nashville’s Time-Travel Museum, was a man with a secret; a secret in the form of a young woman called Julia, who had arrived from the year 2213. Thankfully, it wasn't particularly difficult for Rueben to hide Julia, as she was – like all other time travelers – only about a foot tall.

Reuben had been twelve years old in the spring of 1966, which was when a time traveler first appeared in town. This traveler from the future appeared out of nowhere, at the intersection of Lower Broadway and 21^st Avenue South, causing quite a stir among road users. The visitor readily admitted to the first police officer to approach him that he had traveled through time. The policeman in question – one officer Ambrose Heard, who made history that day – would probably have dismissed the time traveler's claims as the ramblings of a lunatic had he not been a perfectly composed human being who was only around a foot tall. That peculiarity had added some credibility to his seemingly outrageous statement, so officer Heard took the time traveler under his arm, ignoring his protests and the curious looks of passersby and eyewitnesses, and carried him to his police station, away from the prying eyes of the bewildered public. When the first journalists rushed to question the newcomer, it was already too late, with US Army personnel having already transferred him to an unknown location, possibly Area 51.

Reuben had learned about this unusual event in school, and had watched the situation unfold with interest as he grew up and prepared to go to college, which his mother could not afford. The possibility of time travel stirred his imagination and he fantasized about all the adventures he could have if he visited bygone times or unknown centuries yet to come. However, the fact was (and he actually only discovered this fact when he landed his job at the Time-Travel Museum) that, despite the excitement of the local, national and international press, in a period of a little over five years, a total of only twenty-seven visits from the future had been recorded, after which they had come to an abrupt halt.

Despite the sudden appearances of time travelers having dried up, the tabloids attempted to maintain interest by hiring analysts of dubious repute to comment on the phenomenon, offering increasingly fanciful theories as to why it had happened in Nashville specifically, why travelers from the future shrunk proportionally (apparently to approximately one-sixth of their normal height), and what had happened to them after the army had whisked them away. Finally, around the same time that Reuben had abandoned his dreams of going to college, and when his grades also began failing, the government had seen fit to address the citizenry and explain the situation once and for all. He still recalled the evening when the president, following another round of grim news from Vietnam, had appeared in front of the camera and addressed Reuben and his mother from the small screen of the black-and-white television set in the lounge of their single-story cottage near the docks on the Cumberland River.

"Good evening, my fellow Americans," said President Nixon. "I am addressing you now in response to the public's frequent questions about the phenomenon of time travel, which has been concentrated for many years in our state of Tennessee. Federal agencies have engaged all capacities to gather information from time travelers that could prove vital to national security. Following an intensive investigation, I can divulge the following.''

The president glanced down at the stack of papers in front of him, before returning his gaze to the camera.

"First of all, top scientists at our most prestigious universities agree that they are not quite sure how the physics of time travel functions, and this dilemma has not been resolved through their discussions with the time travelers themselves, for the simple reason that they haven’t been able to explain it fully. Although they hail from different years in the future, none of them were scientists in the future, rather they were volunteers in experiments and had only basic educational achievements.

“It is also unclear why all the time travelers arrived with us as miniature versions of themselves – if they are to be believed, and we have no reason to doubt them, their stature at the time of departure was such that they arrived in our world having shrunk to ratio of 1:6, which applied not only to their bodies, but also to their clothes and the objects they brought with them. There are several theories – one from Princeton, one from UCLA, and two from MIT – that seek to explain this as some kind of refraction of the information set for each individual time traveler through a crack in the space-time continuum, much in the way a ray of light refracts in water. However, none of these theories has yet been validated in the scientific community.

“Their descriptions of the world and time they come from also had very few corresponding factors, leading our scientists to conclude that they each came from a separate timeline, which ultimately made it impossible to form a cogent picture of the future that awaits us, the inhabitants of this planet, in this timeline.”

Mr. Nixon frowned a little at this, as if struggling to understand the words he’d just read. He licked his bottom lip automatically, then continued.

"Another big question that remains unanswered is why this phenomenon has been concentrated in Nashville, Tennessee, given the lack of any information about time travelers from the future having appeared in any other country around the world, or even in any other location within the United States, and, once again, several theories have developed that attempt to explain it as being due to the specific geographical position of this city, though even these explanations remain purely speculative for now."

The president fell silent again, took a deep breath, and scratched his left ear absentmindedly.

“Finally, it turns out that, at some point, all the time travelers that arrived in our world simply... disappeared; vanishing from the rooms where they were staying, sometimes even in front of their guards or interrogators. This tended to happen approximately three months after they appeared among us, and it is assumed that they were returned to their time and place of origin, which would mean that time travel has a limited duration, for some reason."

The president's break was a little longer this time. He turned momentarily to someone off-screen and nodded, before addressing the camera again, bringing his face a little closer as if wanting to emphasize to the audience the conclusion that should be drawn from this presentation on a subject that had so excited and intrigued the public.

"On the basis of what I’ve so far presented, I can assure the nation that our relevant agencies are monitoring the situation very closely. I ask all citizens who might have evidence of new visits from other periods to inform their nearest police station or military facility. The current break in the phenomenon is perhaps only temporary, or our descendants might have abandoned their experiments with time travel indefinitely. No one can inform us of that today. The most important thing is for nothing to threaten our national security. Thank you for your attention. Rest assured that my administration will respond promptly and inform the public as the situation develops and will do so in the interest of the public."

For a while after the president's speech, time travelers returning to their origins in the space-time continuum was a big topic in the public eye. Hundreds of novels and comic book series featuring time-traveling superheroes have been published. Six hundred TV series and movies have been made with the most fantastic premises related to temporal travel; a series of Barbie and Ken dolls appeared wearing the clothes and accessories worn by the various time-travelers that have visited our age, which prompted countless cheaper copies for poorer consumers. Even Saturday Night Live performers at the Grand Ole Opry sang about star-crossed lovers torn apart by the chasms of time. Johnny Cash and June Carter, after a break of several years, had hit singles again with the songs Until Time Tears Us Apart and Future Past Blues.

But, as the passage of time dictates, with no new time travelers having appeared, interest in the topic slowly began to fade. The political fallout from Nixon's resignation over Watergate and the disgraceful withdrawal of military and diplomatic personnel from Saigon were now on the front pages. Finally, time travel seemed to be the subject only for theoretical physicists in their dusty offices, writers of speculative fiction, and afficionados like Reuben.

Realizing he would never be able to study and graduate from college, Reuben found a place for himself: he responded to an advert for a curator's job at the Time-Travel Museum in Nashville, and was content to spend his working hours surrounded by exhibits that testified to the short-lived craze for chronomotion. He lived alone in the apartment that he’d inherited from his mother, and fantasized about meeting visitors from the future, satisfied and fulfilled.

Then Julia appeared.

The time leap left her feeling slightly nauseous and disoriented. When she regained her composure, she realized that she was laying prone on a wooden floor. She looked up to see a giant, overweight young man sitting on an equally oversized chair, holding a bowl and a spoon in his hands. His jaw dropped and he stared at her, open-mouthed.

She struggled to her feet and looked back, in a brief burst of panic. Then she realized with relief that her backpack was also there, that it had not disappeared during the journey. She breathed a sigh of relief, looked into the giant's eyes, smiled as charmingly as she could and said:

"Hello. I'm Julia. What year is this?"

The giant was still staring, dumbstruck. She realized that he might not have heard her correctly, considering that, in his reality – and his time, she, along with all the items she'd brought, had been reduced to about one-sixth of her normal size. She cleared her throat, and shouted:

"MY NAME IS JULIA! I COME FROM..."

"From the future," said the giant, breaking from his stupor. "I know. You're a time traveler.” He spoke softly, almost mumbling, but she heard him well. "My name is Reuben."

"Hello, Reuben," she shouted and smiled. "Can you tell me what year this is?"

He flinched a little, put down the bowl and spoon awkwardly, then leaned closer, answering as quietly as he could: "1975. To be precise...” They looked back at the wall with Playboy's annual calendar. "Tuesday, May 13, 1975."

Unlike the other time travelers who’d visited Nashville, this girl was not wearing a sparkly jumpsuit; she was in simple blue jeans and a white T-shirt, with Mary Janes on her feet. She was standing on his floor, about as tall as the main character of Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man, when he’d had to fight for his life with a house cat, and there was a look of relief on her face. Reuben did not have a cat – or any other pet, so the time traveler who introduced herself as Julia was safe, at least when it came to killer pets.

"Julia, you said?" he asked.

"Julia...Steele," the girl said, holding out a slender hand. Reuben extended his index finger, and she lightly touched his fingertip.

"Reuben Wilco," he said and smiled. "Nice to meet you."

The surname Steele was invented. Julia found it easier than reciting to her new host the sixteen-digit number that was part of her official name.

The quadrant where she lived with her father in the year 2213 was located on the territory of an area that was referred to in Reuben's time as Alaska. The rooms available to them were far enough beneath the surface to provide good protection against radiation. Theirs was one of about twenty colonies scattered across the devastated planet, arranged for the survival of the human race under the extreme conditions brought about by nuclear war. Several hundred men, women and children lived in the underground complex. They were sporadically in contact with the other shelters, and as Julia's father often said, there was no reason to think that there were more survivors in any other unknown locations.

Julia didn't remember her mother very well - she died during the collapse of the surface shaft when Julia was just four years old. She grew up with her father and in the company of other children from the colony, in a strict regime and with multiple security systems, the goal of which was to protect the children from a planet that wanted to destroy them. In addition to being the administrator of the shelter, Julia's father headed a project aimed at establishing safe protocols for time travel.

Her father was a dreamer, an idealist. He wanted to use the chance to return to the past to prevent what had happened to Earth less than fifteen years prior. But physics was inexorable. All attempts were unsuccessful: for some reason, each traveler ended up in the same period and in the same location: Nashville, in the second half of the 1960s. The appearance of each of them instantly shut off access to the existing timeline and opened a new one, thus leaving the project team with only the paradox of belonging to other streams of history, and useless information about time and space coordinates, as well as the unusual compression of the passenger’s mass to one sixth of what it had been upon departure.

As a precautionary measure, the passengers were instructed to be as vague as possible when answering questions from the authorities of the past that they would undoubtedly encounter if the jump proved successful. This also ensured that if their statements were to be compared, no one from the past would be able to be completely sure of the future that the world could expect in just a century and a half. The systems that opened the rift in the continuum were in all cases set for a duration of ninety days, after which the traveler was automatically returned to the time and place of departure. However, despite the device neatly closing the rift for the time travelers to jump back, none of them had returned.

After twenty-seven failed attempts, the project was formally suspended, but Julia's father never gave up hope. He used every free moment to calculate and conduct further work on a leap into the past that would be effective, regardless of the apparent paradoxes of the existence of a future with an altered past. He knew that his success could very likely mean the undoing of his - and Julia's - existence, but if he was to bring salvation to mankind, he would gladly make such a sacrifice.

In the meantime, Julia was growing up, playing and socializing with other children. She went through adolescence, fell in love and succumbed to rampaging hormones, discovered adult pastimes, while at the same time carrying within her, just like the other members of the colony's youth, a suppressed feeling of hopelessness and a premonition that the end of the human race was just a matter of time.

She discovered music at the age of fifteen.

Thanks to efficient replicators and codes from the General Archive, she had access to files containing all genres of music, from all periods. Julia's attachment to certain genres went through different phases, as happens with most teenagers – from death metal, through K-pop and hip-hop, the British invasion and prog-rock, all the way to a short-lived craze for avant-garde Constructo-groove. Her father lovingly observed her style wanderings through different types of music, while simultaneously listening to his own two favorites - country and western. When Julia reprimanded him for listening to Dolly Parton, Jerry Reed, Lucinda Williams or Steve Earle, he would just smile and tell her, "You're still too young to love and understand country. First you need to become a bit more mature for that kind of understanding." And once, during her jazz phase, he’d entered Julia's room and heard a Charlie Parker album, just to tell her that the great musician often used to fill jukeboxes with coins in Harlem to play country singles, especially the songs of Hank Williams. Parker’s friends teased him. “Hey, Bird, how can you listen to that redneck music?! There ain’t no bigger crap than hillbilly songs!” And Parker would answer them, “Listen to the words, man, all those lyrics; do you even listen to the words?!” Her dad had also told her that country music was most accurately defined as “three chords and the truth”. She liked that phrase and remembered it well.

One day, Julia had looked through her dad’s archives, pulled out Steve Earle's album The Mountain, played it, and that was that. She was drawn to the bluegrass arrangements of Dell McCurry, who accompanied Earle with his band on that record, unexpectedly enchanted by the sounds of the banjo and mandolin, the distinctive sounds of the violin (which her father persistently called "the fiddle") and songs about nostalgia, unrequited love, murder, Texas trains that are no longer made like they used to be. She listened wistfully to Earle singing about "the mountain where he was born," and though she had never seen a mountain in real life, she felt his longing as if it were her own.

Before long, she had downloaded several banjo and guitar models from the net, printed them in their home device, and began practicing. The first song she learned to play on the banjo and sing (at first shyly, but then more and more freely and without hesitation), was The Wabash Cannonball - firstly in the version made famous by Roy Acuff at the Grand Ole Opry, and then she accidentally came across the recording of it being performed by Ricky Skaggs with the band of traditional Irish music performers, the Chieftains. She was so captivated by the gusto and energy of their music that, for months afterward, she’d focus exclusively on country music with Irish roots.

Her father watched it all with undisguised interest and fondness, and occasionally picked up the guitar so they could play and sing their favorite songs together.

It was then she was left heartbroken, and began developing a deeper understanding and experience of numerous songs about love’s woes. The guy she liked was tragically killed when a shower of meteorites pelted their quadrant – he was in a surface prospecting crew, and the protective helmet wasn't strong enough to stop a walnut-sized piece of the meteorite that pierced his skull. Julia was inconsolable, and for weeks she would not stop listening to Tammy Wynette, George Jones and Vince Gill. The mournful, melancholic melodies and lyrics conveying feelings of real pain tore at her insides - it seemed that the tragedy had made her "mature".

Around this time, her father made a real breakthrough.

"Baby, I think I know why all previous time leap attempts ended up in the past and in the city of Nashville specifically," he declared to her one day. He didn’t show excitement or delight about this discovery, as might be expected. Instead, he had a pensive look, maybe slightly amused that such an obvious reason had eluded the other scientists and researchers who had previously worked on the intervention project.

“Why, Dad?” she asked, placing the mandolin she’d been playing on the couch next to her.

"Look," he prompted, showing her the screen of the tablet he was holding. "Do you know who that is?"

It was a black-and-white photograph of a thin, middle-aged man with a pleasant expression, wearing a suit, shirt and tie that all belonged to the fashion of the 1950s or 1960s. She shook her head.

“His name was Howard Hughes. He was a very rich and eccentric man, a billionaire. He had his own aircraft manufacturing company in Texas, but he was also involved in film and invention, constantly in the media spotlight, partly because he was considered a notorious womanizer... Look at this picture: does it look familiar to you?"

The next photo was in color and featured an unusual contraption. It looked like a sumptuous armchair in a metal frame, with what appeared to be a steering wheel and a large round plate standing behind. "No, this is the first time I've seen this," she said.

"It's a prop from the 1960 movie The Time Machine. That movie was based on a book by an English writer by the name of Wells, and the popular actor from that time, Rod Taylor, starred as the inventor of time travel. It seems that Hughes was very committed to the film, and his company even provided financial assistance in its making. But what the public learned only a few years prior to Hughes' death, in the early ‘70s, is far more interesting than mere trivial information about Hollywood cinema."

Julia's dad looked up something on the tablet, then turned the screen back to face Julia. She was now looking at a February 1975 front page of The Nashville Tennessean showing a picture of the same "time machine" from the movie, and the headline: ECCENTRIC BILLIONAIRE DONATES HIS TIME MACHINE TO NASHVILLE TIME-TRAVEL MUSEUM. She looked up in confusion at her father, who was now smiling.

“As Hughes stated at the time,” dad told Julia, “his company's R&D department was working to construct a functional time machine in a lab on the outskirts of Nashville, and he instructed the engineers and scientists involved in the work to make the prototype look like a full replica of that time machine from the movie. They seem to have done a few experiments with small animals, rabbits and dogs, but with no clear evidence of success. Those 'time travelers' of theirs were disappearing, but there was no way to know if they had actually traveled - through time and space - or if the machine had simply disintegrated them. Following President Nixon's announcement, work on that project stopped and Hughes donated the prototype to the museum, establishing a fund with the sole purpose of ensuring that the museum's existence would be financed smoothly in the future. But I think there was something in that machine of his that was crucial to all future attempts to jump through time being spatially tied to that location."

Julia nodded. "So, what now? I suppose you have some idea about what to do.”

Dad smiled again, then waved his hand widely, as if trying to encompass her entire room—the walls covered with concert posters and records of Loretta Lynn, Bill Monroe, Earl Scruggs and Little Jimmy Dickens, instruments, audio devices and albums and singles that she managed to extract from the General Archives and print at home. Then he asked her:

"How would you like to visit Nashville at a time when country music was at its peak?"

She was rendered speechless, which was a very rare occurrence indeed.

"Hughes was close to the solution," he told her, as he showed her diagrams of the billionaire's failed machine on the screen, taken from the archives. "But he lacked the technology necessary to assemble the final piece of the mosaic. The technology we now have."

"So," asked Julia, "he was ahead of his time?"

"Almost a century ahead," he replied with a nod.

He picked up a stack of sheets of hard paper - cardboard - and slammed them on the table.

“What's that?” asked Julia.

"What Hughes was missing."

“Perforated computer cards? I thought they had them at that time."

"No," he smiled. "Quantum computers are needed to create an algorithm that folds space-time and enables time travel at the point of intersection. These cards are a 'translation' to the language that the Hughes’ machine could understand."

Julia took the stack of cardboard sheets with both hands and lifted them with difficulty, then put them back on the table.

“Were they this big?” she asked. Her father shook his head.

"After Hughes stopped working on his machine in the early 1970s, he designed its computer part for the then-current 96-column punched card format introduced by IBM for its primitive Operating System 3. In fact, it was three rows with thirty-two columns, and six positions for perforations in each column: from 1 to 4, and A and B. The dimensions of these cards were 83 by 67 millimeters. These here are six times bigger.'

"I still don't understand why."

"Because feedback from all twenty-seven experiments indicates that the starting mass from our time has been reduced by a factor of six for some reason, so..."

"If I take these giant cards with me, they will be reduced to the size that fits the computer in the Hughes’ machine at their destination."

“That's right!” her dad said, beaming.

"But... won't I also be... six times smaller?"

“You will, baby. But if Hughes' time machine works thanks to this program of ours, that problem should be solved as well."

Julia told Reuben very little of this.

The young man did not show the slightest desire to report her arrival to the authorities and hand her over to government officials. Fascinated, he listened to her stories about how humanity developed over the next two and a half centuries, about technological miracles that made life easier for people and made it fascinating, about the continuation of the conquest of the solar system and, finally - about the catastrophic conflict that disturbed the biological and ecological balance of the world, and led to unprecedented destruction and the precarious survival of the miserable remnants of the human race beneath the surface of the planet.

Julia explained to him that her arrival differed from previous visits by time travelers in that she had brought with her a key that would allow her to return to her starting point, in the same timeline.

"But how come you appeared here, right in my home?" Reuben asked curiously. The diminutive girl he had seated against the arm of the sofa reached into her backpack, full of punch cards of stiff paper, and pulled out a folded printed page from The Nashville Tennessean. It was a page from the local news section, too small for him to make out what it said. Then he looked for a magnifying glass, unfolded a small piece of paper on the table, and looked under the light of the lamp.

There was his photograph, and he now recognized both the photo and the accompanying article. The headline, in bold letters, read: YOUNG MAN FROM NASHVILLE WINS LOTTERY DINNER WITH MINI PEARL AND STONEWALL JACKSON. It was about two years ago, right after the death of Reuben's mother, and that was the only time in his life that he’d won anything in a lottery. And although he was very happy about spending an evening with two of the great stars of the Grand Ole Opry at the famous Hotel Indigo, the whole event did not bring him as much joy as he expected. Minnie Pearl was actually his mother's favorite comedian and she was well into her sixties when he met her in the banquet hall; her trademark exclamation of Howdeeeee made him feel a little embarrassed and confused. And Jackson was too liberal with whiskey, so after dinner Reuben had a slightly bitter taste in his mouth, in addition to the autographed records.

But there was a sentence in the article about him and his winnings that Julia drew his attention to: "Reuben Wilco lives alone in a house at 53B Woodland Street and has recently become a curator at the Nashville Time-Travel Museum. He stated for our newspaper that his greatest wish is to one day try his hand at traveling through time."

“My father – the man who made all of this possible – found this article about you rather quickly in the General Archives, where we store almost all existing data on human history, locations, people and events.” Julia was quite honest as she told him this. "On my departure, he pinpointed the coordinates of the address listed in that article and. “voilà!”.”

In awe, Reuben refolded the piece of paper and handed it back to her. He felt a little dizzy with everything that had happened, and he also felt like he was starting to fall in love with that enchanting girl from the future, no matter how small she was compared to him.

“Is it true what you said, Reuben?” asked Julia.

"What do you mean?"

"You told the journalist that your biggest wish was to try your hand at traveling through time some day?"

He nodded.

The girl from the future smiled.

"Then," she said cheerfully, "how would you like to visit the twenty-third century?"

Dust grains were lazily dancing through the rays of the early morning sun that shone through the high skylight of the lobby of the Time-Travel Museum when custodian Reuben Wilco unlocked the side entrance, entered, and locked the door behind him. It was a day like any other, and Reuben looked as he usually would, in his overalls and plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves. The only difference compared to all other working days was that he was carrying a large canvas backpack.

The display in the museum was rather modest, consisting mostly of panels with enlarged photographs of time travelers, miniature men and women who visited Nashville over a period of several years, and then inexplicably stopped coming. There were also photographs of officials and scientific teams trying to explain the phenomenon of ‘chronomotion’, with several prototypes of machines intended to manipulate time-space having been developed in laboratories and private companies, as well as a library dedicated to non-fiction and fiction on the subject of time-travel. For the younger visitors, there was a reading room with comic books, and in the small hall, from nine in the morning, when the Museum opened, until seven in the evening, when Reuben locked the doors, the 1960 movie The Time Machine was projected in a continuous loop, with Reuben changing the reels. The Museum had only one other employee, Ms. Myrtle Pikes, a middle-aged woman who sold tickets and souvenirs to visitors and always arrived ahead of opening time, an hour or an hour and a half after the custodian. But there were ever-fewer visitors, and if it hadn't been for funding from the Howard Hughes Foundation, the Museum would certainly have closed down by now.

The most interesting exhibit in the Museum, of course, was the prototype of Hughes' time machine. It stood on a podium in a small, windowless room, surrounded by thick plush cord on brass posts, discreetly lit on four sides to give the impression of mystery. Panels displayed on the walls used words and images to depict the endeavor of the billionaire's corporation in his attempt to master time.

After entering the building, Reuben locked the side entrance door and left the key in the lock. He headed straight for the room with the replica of the time machine from the movie, where he carefully removed the pack from his back. Julia emerged and looked down in admiration at the machine on its podium. The young man pulled a bundle of perforated cards and looked at them quizzically.

"Lift me to the dashboard, please," she told him.

“How's that going to work, actually?” he asked her as he got behind the wheel and sat her down in front of him.

"I'm not entirely sure – Dad tried to explain it to me, but it was too complicated and technical. The bottom line is that once we put these cards in the device, everything will work properly."

“But… it requires a large amount of energy, doesn’t it?” Reuben asked in confusion.

"Actually, no," she replied. "Only electricity is needed for the initial loading of the cards - everything else takes care of itself. When I left, Dad used the batteries, because the central power supply was temporarily interrupted. Is this machine plugged in?”

Reuben looked around, a little confused: he had never thought about it before. Under the cover in the lower part of the time machine case, he found a coiled dusty cable and unrolled it to the socket in the wall. There was a soft hum, and the dashboard lit up.

He then began carefully arranging the cards in the device, following Julia's instructions.

"It's amazing how close Hughes’ engineers were," she told him. "They only lacked these. They managed, as my father explained it to me, to scratch the fabric of space-time, and that 'scratch', or 'hole' in the continuum, brought all time travelers back to Nashville, where the engineers were working on the development of the Hughes’ machine."

“Does it mean that this…scratch…will be patched up now?” Reuben asked.

"I hope so," Julia said, looking into his eyes. "We should now be able to manipulate time and space like turning the steering wheel while driving a car."

"And as for… um…" He didn't know how to finish the question, but she could see him sizing her up from head to toe.

"You mean my size? Or whether you will arrive in the twenty-third century as you are, or in a version reduced six times?” She shrugged. "Unfortunately, even Dad doesn't know about that for sure. We'll only know it when we try it."

He nodded and swallowed. It was obvious that he was struggling internally, trying to figure out if he was ready to take this leap of faith and leave his life behind. Still, what had he even managed to achieve so far in his life? He was the owner of an inherited cottage, the custodian of a museum without visitors, and a lottery winner who had the honor of dining with two aging stars of the Grand Ole Opry. When he looked back at Julia, his eyes lit up with newfound determination.

“Then what are we waiting for?” he asked and grinned.

Julia felt sorry for not telling Reuben the whole truth. But she couldn't risk the young man changing his mind.

When she sat in the replica of the Hughes prototype that she and her father had printed in the shelter, the tremors in the ground became so frequent that they came every ten seconds, threatening the structure of the underground rooms. Her dad stood in front of the machine and held on to the doorframe, as the walls shook and dust and clods of earth fell through cracks in the ceiling. He smiled encouragingly at her: she knew that this was her only chance to escape, to do something, change something. Twenty-seven-time travelers before her had failed to do so. But she had a plan.

The last thing she saw in her time was her father's smile filled with love, warmth and pride. Then, in a fraction of a second, it seemed to her that her whole body dissolved into tissues, cells, molecules, atoms: everything ended in a white flash, and then she came to, facing the huge Reuben. She managed to achieve at least the first part of the plan.

The time machine was a single seater. That's why she couldn't jump back in time with her father. That's why Reuben—poor, dear Reuben Wilco, the first human being to venture into the future—was himself occupying the seat of Hughes' prototype when she activated the space-time folding. But miniature Julia was right next to him, and compensation was made - just as her father had assumed.

She felt disoriented as she picked herself up from the floor by the time machine. She looked at her hands, and then surveyed the room around her: she no longer had the impression that, like Gulliver, she had wandered into the land of giants. She sighed with relief.

Reuben has disappeared. Had he now arrived—as she and her father had calculated—a split second after her departure, reduced to one-sixth his normal size, only to end up with an unknown scientist from the future trapped under tons of earth, in Mother Gaia's final, vengeful spasm?

It didn't matter anymore.

She quickly picked up the perforated cards from the device and carefully placed them in Reuben's backpack. She turned off the power supply and coiled up the cable neatly. She glanced at the clock on the wall of the room: Ms. Pikes would arrive for work in forty-five minutes. She would then notice the absence of the curator and probably call his home telephone number. Only later that morning would she even think of raising the alarm over the young man's unusual absence. And by that time, Julia would be far away.

She unlocked the side entrance, pulled out the keys and locked the door behind her. On her back she carried the pack with the cards that were the key to successful time travel. But what she carried in her head was just as important.

Months prior to leaving her father and the shelter, Julia had programmed her home computer, feeding it with records of thousands and thousands of songs, the most successful and popular country music hits from the 1930s to the 1980s. The existing big hits released after the date of her arrival in the past could have served her purpose, but she didn't think that would be fair to the artists she valued so much, who had brought her so much pleasure with their music. Instead, with the help of the computer, she composed two hundred original songs that met all the conditions to achieve platinum print run. She memorized harmonies and lyrics, so she had more than a solid supply for a meteoric, ultra-successful career.

Fame, wealth, men, luxury. She would have it all - but she would also be able to purchase the exhibits of the Time-Travel Museum and own the only functioning time machine in the universe.

And one day, she’d travel back to the future herself - to the moment before everything would be destroyed, to get Dad.

To get Reuben.

But now, the 16^th Avenue was waiting for her: Music Row.

She knew exactly where she was going, and which songs she would offer first as her original works.

A few years later, speaking in an interview with WSM Radio, the famous Roy Acuff readily answered the anchor’s questions about Julia Steele.

"As soon as she sang me a couple of songs - Raising Kids Alone and My Little Girl Calls Another Woman Mama – accompanying herself on the guitar, I knew we had to sign her up. But even before that, I had a hunch that Miss Steele was going to be one of the biggest stars in country music history."

"What do you mean, Roy? Why did you think that" asked the host of the show, which was broadcast live in fourteen states, into the homes of millions upon millions of listeners.

“Well… I think it was the way she smiled at me when my secretary ushered her into the office. She looked like she had all the time in the world at her disposal... But most of all, it was the way she answered my question. You see, I asked her the same thing I ask every young and aspiring songwriter who knocks on the door of Acuff-Rose Music: 'What do you think you're bringing to country music fans?'"

"And what did Julia Steele say to you exactly?" the show’s host enquired.

"'Three chords and the truth,'" Acuff said and nodded, smiling. "'Three chords and the truth.'"

© 2022 Goran Skrobonja