Blurb: Science is people poking their noses in God's business. Religion is God poking His Nose in people's business. But who's to say that the Big G doesn't blur the boundaries on occasion, especially when one of His People need a second chance. Warning: a time-travel story that calls upon Jewish traditions.

Behind this story: Strictly speaking, this story has seen print, but strictly speaking, the Jewish Spectator didn't pay us anything, even though they extended their reputation by publishing their first science-fiction story. My wife and I wrote this story with our good friend, Rabbi David J. Zucker. He supplied the Jewish expertise; he also included a reference to it in his book (more about him). I supplied the SFnal expertise.

Here and Now

Sarah Pollock hunted for the Schwartz apartment through pleasant halls lined with pastel wallpaper and spotted with tasteful landscapes. The apartment's number, neatly written in her notebook, didn't reflect the excitement building in her nor the longing about to find relief in action.

The words of the Aytz Hayyim came to her lips, as they did every Saturday-morning service. The image of the chapel's venerable, Old-World Ark rose before her eyes. Her arms remembered the weight of the temple's new Torah. She winced once again as the modern crowns and rimmonim clashed with the dark and heavy cabinet so filled with old-country tradition.

Sarah stopped before a stubby off-shoot from the main hall. Almost as real to her was the burnished plaque of dedication that she read anew every week:

"Ark of the Rokynik Shul in Czechoslovakia: Confiscated 1940 — Recovered 1972. Recovery made possible by Herschel Schwartz and the generosity of Congregation B'nai Emunah"

Plates on doors to two apartments read "Eli Jay" and "Herschel Schwartz." The young rabbi rang the appropriate bell. At last, she would learn the Ark's story for herself! And maybe, just maybe, start down a trail that would re-unite it with the Torah that belonged inside it.

The door opened with a sucking noise, then she heard something similar, fainter, behind her. She was tempted to check out the second sound, but she wanted to give her full attention to the man standing before her.

"And who might you be?" the man, stocky, shorter than her, demanded. His intense-white hair contrasted with the darker play of colors on his forehead.

"Rabbi Sarah Pollock. We spoke last week. You invited me to come by this evening."

Sarah noticed the little things — eyes that skittered away and jumped back to stare a little, a head twitch that was a denial cut short — reactions she expected whenever she identified herself as a rabbi to older people.

But Hersh recovered well. "Forgive an old man," he said and stood aside. "Come in, come in." Then he added, "Shavuah tov! A good week."

"Shavuah tov ... You are Herschel Schwartz?"

"Right again." The voice was full, resonating, but age had robbed it of volume.

"And I'm Eli Jay."

A reedy voice spoke these words from beside Sarah's shoulder. Startled, the young rabbi jumped and turned. She saw a slovenly shock of wiry gray hair that tilted over a pair of piercing blue eyes. At close range, they were stunning.

"Neighbor," the other old man confided. "People call me 'Eli Jay.'" He rolled his eyes and acknowledged the other resident without a word.

"Come in," Hersh said. "Both of you," he added through a grudging smile.

Sarah stepped into the apartment, feeling Eli right behind her. At Hersh's direction, she passed a small kitchen, then walked into a well-lit living room. Outside a large picture window, a wintry moon gave Portland the best it could offer, but the city had little to give in return.

"Mr. Schwartz," the rabbi began.

Hersh threw himself into one corner of a low-slung sofa. Eli perched in an easy chair. Sarah took the other easy chair.

"As I said the other day on the phone," Sarah went on. "The synagogue would like to put together a Memorial Service around the Ark you enabled us to acquire."

"And a fine piece of memorabilia it is, too."

"How did you happen to recover it?"

"A bit of luck." Hersh lowered his gaze modestly. "I was doing business in Switzerland when it came on the market." The old man sat forward. "You see, the Nazis collected artifacts as they dealt with —" His voice hardened. "— the 'Jewish problem.' They were going to open a museum when we were all gone." He was silent for five heartbeats, his eyes distant. "Some of the pieces made their way to neutral territory, were forgotten, then rediscovered in '72. The Ark caught my eye — it is an outstanding piece — and the rest of the congregation supported me with their pocketbooks."

"How did you know where it was from?"

Hersh blinked slowly three times. "Whoever found it did the research. I just took their word for it."

Sarah swallowed a sigh, then brought her eyes back to Hersh. "I didn't tell you on the phone, but personally I am very interested in the Torah that used to be kept in that Ark, back in the old country. You see, I use the Ark every Shabbat when I conduct the morning service and ... I want to know what happened —"

"They told me it was destroyed." Hersh stood suddenly and turned toward the picture window.

Sarah's mouth opened, but no words came out as she pondered Herschel's statement. A shudder broke the spell and she slumped. Then, she swallowed hard and raised her head to go on. She was ready to ask another question when she noticed Eli.

From the depths of the easy chair, the scrawny man was making a jerky motion with his index finger, bend, unbend, as though shooing something along. When it straightened, the finger pointed at Hersh.

Sarah raised her eyebrows.

Eli gave a come-hither gesture, then tossed his head at the standing man.

Sarah fumbled for words. Her sorrow from Hersh's news flooded back. "I ... I feel a lot for that Ark, and I ... dislike keeping another Torah in it, especially a modern one." She plunged on. "Are you sure there's no chance of recovering the original Torah as well?"

The question hung in the air as Hersh twisted slowly around, then gazed steadily at Sarah. As the moments passed, the young rabbi waited, not knowing what else she could do.

"I was sexton of the Rokynik Shul." A grating in Hersh's voice made the words sound rusty. "I was there when Hitler pulled our country into the Third Reich. I —"

The old man stopped and Sarah could see a paleness creeping across his cheeks, jaw, and neck. "The Nazis came," he said. "They brought us all together. They put the Ark in their truck, and they ... burned the Torah. Before our very eyes. There was nothing I could do." The words of defeat echoed his posture.

Sarah studied the old man. She thought about those times and the veil of darkness that in some ways still infected that part of the world. She saw the overwhelming might of the Nazis and compared herself to what she saw.

"What could you have done?" the rabbi asked with sympathy. "One unarmed man against a military force."

Hersh shook his head slowly, the loose skin on his neck trembling. When he brought his eyes back to Sarah, they were remote and flinty, staring across a gulf that was more than time, more than generational. "I was supposed to protect the Torah, the Ark, the whole Shul. That was my duty, my responsibility to God. All these years since — Do you know that they made me carry out the Torah and place it on the bonfire? Then with their guns herded me over to the others, to stand with the ones I had betrayed while the flames ate away at the scrolls?"

Wearily, the stocky old man turned and tried the window again, but broke off to creep back to the sofa, supporting himself along its back. He half-dropped to a sitting position, limbs draped wherever they fell.

"Mostly," he murmured. "I could hide from what I had done. I was trapped in Rokynik for the war. Somehow, I avoided the concentration camps and —"

"Leo didn't wait around for that," said Eli.

Hersh looked at the other old man, then dropped his gaze to the floor and fixed it there. "Their probabilities took the high side," he said in the manner of a rehearsed comment, but then he growled, "Mine didn't."

"Who's he talking about?" Sarah asked, glancing over at Eli.

With a dismissive flip of his hand, Hersh answered, "Leo Szilard." He begrudgingly searched the young woman's face for a sign of recognition. "Worked with Fermi." Another hesitation. "Helped convince Einstein to write that letter to FDR about building the first A-bomb." Sarah finally nodded understanding. Hersh went on quickly, "Eli tells me he worked with Szilard in Chicago, on some applications of the Special Theory of Relativity."

With a deep sigh, Hersh gathered himself. "I did look for ways to ... to recover something from that summer. I was in Switzerland when they discovered that consignment smuggled from a Nazi warehouse. They advertised that it came from the area around my home in Czechoslovakia. I went to see what they had to offer. Once there, I immediately recognized the Ark." He grinned wryly. "Here in Portland, they didn't understand why I twisted their arms so vigorously, why I squeezed them until I knew we would be the highest bidder." He shook his head. "But the Torah ..." He kept swinging his head, stare sweeping across the carpet.

Sarah felt trapped. Her own disappointment couldn't match this secret welling out of a lifetime of suppressed guilt. Her own years hadn't prepared her with enough life experience to console this painful wound that forty years of American life and relative success hadn't healed. The young woman paused and reflected on this thought. Then Eli distracted her.

Once again, the finger nudged. There's more, it seemed to say. Ask again, it urged.

"Mr. Schwartz — Hersh, if I may call you that — don't you think you're being too hard on yourself? After all ..." Sarah swallowed to allow the next words out. "It was just a Torah. It's the words and what people do with them that are important. It's how we live up to our Covenant with God tha —"

The face that rose before Sarah was drawn and completely pale, skin matching the color and stiffness of the hair. The mouth was raw as it gave forth a broken voice that said, "But — you see? — God was there! God gave me a sign, but I didn't follow through!"

***

In the cul-de-sac hallway, Sarah nodded absently at Eli and turned to leave. The last moments with Hersh had been hard, talking with a man at once startled, relieved, and ashamed of his Vision. Finally, Sarah had claimed another engagement and withdrawn, Hersh's neighbor following along.

His voice rising, Eli announced, "I've always felt that two times could be connected together."

"I —" Sarah began, then faced around to explain herself. "I just wanted the Ark to be re-united with its rightful Torah. I thought, maybe, together, they could help us regain some of the community we seem to have lost."

Eli's smile grew tremulously. "Would you come in? For some coffee?"

"No, really, thanks."

"Some slivovitz?" the old man asked, raising an eyebrow. "Or, if you prefer, some Manischewitz?"

Sarah nearly rolled her eyes, but settled for shaking her head.

"Is it not permissible to offer a drink to a rabbi ... even a woman rabbi?"

Sarah chuckled. "I don't think my husband — or the Senior Rabbi — would mind. It's just that —"

"I have a fine Spanish merlot," the old man broke in, his voice an octave lower, a conspiratorial whisper. "I was planning to open it today anyway."

Sarah knew her temptation had surfaced when Eli went on with a shrug, "How could it hurt?"

The rabbi laughed aloud and nodded.

The apartment appeared to be a mirror image of Hersh's. Eli led the way into his small kitchen. Sarah appropriated one of a pair of stools and looked for something to say while Eli moved purposefully about the cabinets and drawers.

"Eli Jay, I've always felt that ancestry and heritage were a good part of my life," the rabbi began. "As a girl, I did what my parents told me I should do ... most of the time ... at least until I got old enough to make some sense out of the world. And even then, I looked to the past for clues to the way I should handle my future."

"Leo and Professor Einstein built on the successes — and mistakes — of their predecessors. 'Mining minds,' Leo called it. You may know that the Special Theory of Relativity came out when the Professor fixed the problems Lorentz had explaining the Michelson-Morley experiment regarding the speed of light."

"Rebellion is healthy, but there's stupid rebellion and smart. Every person goes through a stage where he or she rebels 'just because' — totally dismisses everything about The Establishment."

"The Professor showed that simultaneity is necessarily relative, depending on where you are. About that, Leo said that if he could just find the right place to look through, any event could appear to be simultaneous with any other event."

"What?" Sarah focused on the old man, who handed her a stemmed wine-glass two-thirds full of a dark ruby-red liquid.

"Leo came to me one morning with a sketch on the back of an envelope. The veins in his eyes told me he'd been out drinking ... musing as well, of course; they went together. The stains on the envelope told me that he'd found an idea during that late evening. He wanted me to build it." Eli sipped his wine.

Confused, the rabbi tried her drink. The many flavors and aromas tugged at different places in her brain, and as she dwelt on the sensations, the muscles in the back of her neck gradually loosened.

Eli had lapsed into a study of the wine's surface, so Sarah let her words flow. "My ancestors bequeathed to me the very cells in my body. There's nothing new here." She passed a hand around herself folded and slumped, perched on the stool. "Someone else had these eyes before, someone else had these toes, just not in this particular combination." She held out an empty glass. "As an individual, I'm unique, but parts of me have been around for generations. I'm both old and new."

Eli replenished both glasses, his eyes on his task, as he responded. "I built that device for Leo, but he never came back for it. Theoretically, it should work."

"My body was caused by my ancestors, but what are the causes for all these effects in my mind? Eh, Eli? If I could restore some of the old causes, could we get back some of the old effects?"

"Is that why you want to put the original Torah back into its Ark?"

"Yes." Sadness dragged out the word. "I'd like to give to my congregation what those other rabbis gave to theirs. I think uniting the Ark with the Torah — making it whole again — would do that. But you heard Hersh: it was destroyed."

Eli set down his glass and held up his hands like he was starting a fish story. "What if you could connect the present — your present —" He shook his left hand at the rabbi. "With a point in time before the Torah burned?" He waggled his right hand. "Make those events seem concurrent. Then if you could contract the time between them." He inched his hands toward each other. "Winching the two points closer and closer ... until they touched ... and came together." He intertwined his fingers.

Sarah sensed the fuzzy burn of intoxication making its way up the back of her brain. She tried for a look of open-minded contemplation, but couldn't be sure what her reaction to the old man's statement was, or should be.

Eli took Sarah's elbow and steered her down the hall and into the living room. Instead of Hersh's well-lit openness, this room was a dark cavern, filled with bulky shadows. When Eli tripped the light switch, the shadows resolved themselves into stacks of wooden crates, from floor to ceiling, that defined alleys.

The old man paused as if to take bearings. Waiting, Sarah read the label on the side of a crate at her eye level, "Neutron-intensity instruments. For atomic pile, just add graphite and uranium." Then, she followed as the old man walked down the narrow entrance-way and disappeared with a nonchalant right-turn. She found Eli tapping on a specific crate waist-high. A small label read, "Apparatus, prototype, window for simultaneity convergence, lateral-contraction, 1 of 3 pieces."

After having Eli explain what his apparatus could do for the fourth time, Sarah marched out of one apartment door to bang on its twin across the hall.

***

Ten days later, Sarah followed Hersh down his hall. Another winter afternoon was draining light from the sky over the city, but inside his living room, a troop of lamps made everything bright, though slightly yellowish. Eli stood among the lights like an actor on a flood-lit stage.

"Come on, come on," Hersh muttered impatiently as Sarah set aside her package. As the old man led the way to his dining table at one end of the living area, the rabbi barely had a chance to acknowledge Eli.

A large, flat, dull-gray box lay near the center of the crisp-white cloth Hersh had laid down. Cables snaked outward to other, smaller devices with switches and knobs. Off to one side an up-right circle held a silvery screen, like a bureau-top mirror, only there was no reflection. Sarah thought of an old Saturday-morning theater serial where they used such things to talk between Earth and Mars.

"On the phone," Sarah started, "you said you were ready. I thought we were going to put the apparatus together, not ..." She gestured with an open hand.

Hersh touched a few pieces here and there, adjusting them minutely, then addressed Sarah with a self-deprecating shrug.

"Sunday," he said, "Eli and I hauled the crates over here — he hasn't got the room — and put it together." He rubbed his hands over his face. "I haven't put in those kind of hours in years. Then, this morning, without actually turning anything on, we practiced —"

"Eli Jay said we could actually touch the other side ... the other time." Sarah was thinking of her package.

"Right." Hersh nodded and pointed at the vertical screen. "We watch through that as we probe the past. We can move through time or space. When we get where — and when — we want to be, then we throw that switch. The machine contracts the time between the two places —" He brought his hands together in an imitation of Eli. "The screen converts to an open window, and we can reach through."

Sarah bit her lip as her eyes roamed over the layout again. "Do you think this is going to work?" she asked Hersh, then turned to Eli.

"There's a good chance." Hersh pre-empted any other answer. "There must be! I have this." The old man reached beneath a straightback chair pulled up to the table. He came back up with a revolver, glimmering with oil, heavy with potential force.

Sarah stared. "What's that for?"

"To shoot Hitler, of course."

This time Sarah's appeal to Eli produced results. The blue-eyed man stepped forward with lifted palms. "Hersh, you cannot waste my machine searching for this ... evil man. The apparatus is old. It must control incredible mass-energy to warp space-time. Together, those factors severely limit your time to work. And once it ... fails, there is no fixing it. You have one, one fleeting chance." He slowly impounded the pistol.

"Then what do I do with all this?" Hersh demanded.

Together, they studied the array of mottled, jerry-rigged equipment. Sarah found she couldn't talk. She had come here expecting her ambition to be realized, but now ... her eyes welled with tears of loss.

"Hersh," Eli said, "you do know when and where ... the Rokynik Torah was burned."

The white-haired man turned to them. His face said he didn't dare hope, didn't dare try to repair that fissure in his life.

Sarah reached out to Hersh, her fingers touching his rigid arm. "Let's try." The words came out softly.

Hersh relaxed slowly as conviction overcame doubt. He flexed his fingers separately, then together. Finally, he popped his knuckles and walked toward the apparatus.

As Sarah moved to follow, she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked back.

Eli stood there, his eyes piercing, his grip resolute. "Here and now!" he whispered. "Here and now!" And then he pushed her firmly.

Hersh interrupted, "You ready?"

Sarah nodded in reply to both old men, turned toward Hersh, but as her eye left Eli, the man lifted his hand with an odd flip. The rabbi could see and hear Hersh's left thumb snap three switches to ON. She lowered herself into a chair as the screen took on sepia tones with more and more brightness and detail. With a final surge of definition, the picture froze showing a corner of Hersh's living room. Sarah had no time to ask Eli what he had meant.

"Let's go East," Hersh breathed and rotated a knob.

The screen flickered, then settled. Sarah thought she recognized Interstate 84 leading away from Portland, but Hersh was cranking the dial. The picture twisted again. In a moment, it showed metal-gray water that stretched to the horizon. Then, Hersh settled down, muttering and twitching knobs, while the image formed and shattered rapidly, like reflections in the windows of a speeding train. Sarah gave up trying to make sense of the scenery, but she couldn't tear her eyes away.

A gut-level sigh broke Hersh's under-his-breath itinerary. Sarah glanced over at the old man, then back to the screen — which showed a dilapidated town — then once again to her companion.

"I did visit Rokynik. Once, since I left in '46," Hersh explained without looking away from the screen. "After The Wall came down. It was the same ... and different. The synagogue was long gone, of course. That —" He nodded at the screen. "That is the place where the synagogue stood, where that store is now."

Hersh glanced down at his right hand. It rose as though levitated by his eyes, then fell on the next knob. "Now we go back."

The next series of images were like starting at the end of a photo album and leafing toward the front. The store changed names and colors, getting newer each time. Then it was gone, eclipsed by a sullen lot of weeds. The jumps seemed long, springing across the years. A Star of David appeared.

"Veh Iz Mir!" Hersh whispered and changed his grip on the knob.

Sarah discovered that her heart was thudding in her chest and her stomach crawled with acid nervousness.

The old man was taking his time now. "There's Rabbi Klingordlinger," Hersh confided over one glimpse of small-town life. "We're close now ... Dear God!"

A World-War-II German staff car pulled up to the synagogue. A canvas-covered troop transport kept close formation. Soldiers wearing uniforms Sarah recognized from movies leapt from the truck and crashed through the entrance, knocking aside the wooden doors. In moments, two civilians were half-dragged, half-pushed out onto the street. One was the rabbi from before.

"That's me," Hersh breathed toward the rabbi's companion.

"There's no sound," Sarah said.

Hersh clawed the air in the direction of the screen. "Not till we open the window."

An officer stepped from the car and approached with a swagger. It really did happen that way, Sarah realized with a start, just like the movies. The officer lectured, then shoved the young Hersh away.

"They sent me to round up the congregation. The officer was just a Hauptmann. He strutted like a bantam rooster ... with a German platoon to back him up."

Hersh nudged the dial. The sun was suddenly lower, sending stark shadows across the face of the synagogue. Stationary shadows of the congregation bunched together across the road, kept apart from the rabbi, quiet, eyes downcast. Dynamic shadows of soldiers carrying furniture out of the building and adding it to a pile in the street. From his post by the staff car, the officer threw out an order. A sergeant crossed from the truck, dumped liquid from a Jerry can, and dropped a match on the heap. Flames leapt free, flinging off a wraith of black smoke.

At that moment, the congregation bent their faces to their hands in horror. A gang of soldiers had appeared carrying a cabinet. Sarah's scalp crawled; she recognized the Ark.

The load was apparently heavy and awkward. The soldiers stumbled, and the Ark doors swung open and some prayerbooks, Siddurim, fell out, as did the Torah. Sarah was suddenly aware of Hersh's breathing, loud and quick in the silence of the dark living room. The Ark moved on, toward the back of the truck. The officer broke his haughty pose again to take a step, swing his other foot, and send the Torah swirling back through the darkened synagogue doorway.

A man broke free from the crowd: the young Hersh. He bulled a soldier aside and disappeared through the doorway.

The old Hersh broke his stillness with a brisk movement of his right hand. "Now we go in," he grunted.

The image on the screen became a shadowy interior lit only by slanted rays of the dying sun and the impish light of the bonfire on the street ... plus the soft flickering of the Ner Tamid, the Everlasting Light, hanging near where the Ark had stood.

"The Hauptmann is shouting at me. Right now, that mumzer, the Nazi is telling me to bring the scroll outside." Hersh's hand flinched on the knob: the picture flickered and moved forward. "I'm not going to let him make me do it. This time, I won't carry my Torah out to destruction!"

"Hersh!" Sarah put out a hand. "You'll die if you do that. They'll kill you. They'll kill others, too. And the Nazis will burn the Torah anyway."

"It will be better to die than live as a traitor. I know."

"No, no, you can't. If you die there then, you won't be here now, and if you're not here ... The point is to save the Torah, not give you an easy way out."

Wearily, the old man looked over. Sarah glanced at the screen. She could barely see the young Hersh meandering around the dark and barren room.

"There's a better way to absolve your guilt," the rabbi went on and stood up. "Don't move!" She dashed away, then stumbled back, hampered by the package in her arms. Awkwardly, she shook off the wrappings to reveal two wooden spindles wound about with rough butcher paper as the old man turned to gape. Sarah explained, "I — we trade this scroll for the real Torah — through the window."

"That's not a Torah."

"The Nazis won't know that. Maybe even he —" Sarah tossed her head at the stumbling young Hersh on the screen. "— won't realize it. They'll burn the fake and we'll have the real one here and now."

With a nod, Hersh pitched himself back around to face the controls and the screen. He twitched a knob and the screen jerked, its image spinning. "I think I know where the Torah caromed off to." The picture advanced and revealed the hand-made, hand-scribed scroll, its mantle askew. "Get ready!" he ordered Sarah and reached out for the window switch. Then, "Damn!" as the back of the young Hersh obscured their view of the Torah.

"He's found it!" Sarah yelled and felt herself pushed aside.

"Get ready!" Hersh hollered. With his left hand, he turned a switch. With his right, he reached through the time window and shoved his younger self out of the way, then withdrew. His left hand clenched the displacement knob and twitched the window closer and closer to the Torah. His right hand hovered this side of the screen, then plunged again to pinch the open end of the mantle together and lug its contents awkwardly into here and now. "Your turn!" the old man shouted.

Sarah heaved her fake Torah through the window. The scroll clanked against the vertical circle, but ricocheted up the arrow of time to clatter onto the synagogue's floor. A desolate cry made its way back to them.

"Quick!" Sarah cried. "Shut it off before it blows!" As Hersh turned for his controls, the rabbi lunged toward the wall socket. A brittle, final snap caught up with her before she touched the plug, but she pulled it from the wall anyway. When she turned back, a stench of vaporized rubber drifted over to her. Silvery chunks of screen settled among charred boxes and drizzling smoke. A smoke alarm keened painfully.

Hersh caught Sarah's arm and pulled her toward the hall. Sarah resisted until she had cradled the Torah in her arms. Then she started walking toward the exit.

"I'd better call the manager," the old man said, going ahead. "Let him know we don't need the fire department." He ducked into the kitchen and turned on a light.

Sarah blinked in the sudden glare, then stared. Through the curling smoke, beyond the kitchen doorway, she thought she saw Eli, waving. The rabbi couldn't be sure if the old man were beckoning or saying good-bye. She walked forward and collided with the front door of the apartment. She jerked it back and open.

The cul-de-sac was deserted. Sarah wandered a moment with her precious burden, then turned around as Hersh joined her in the hall. The old man stood there, fanning himself, smoke dribbling out of his doorway. His red face flowed with mixed emotions, embarrassment, relief, joy.

"Rabbi," he said. "I remembered a flash of light and falling to my knees in awe. Now, I know that was our window opening and ... being pushed down."

Sarah nodded thoughtfully. Her arms welcomed the weight of the Rokynik Torah as she embraced it. "God was there, then." She nodded toward Eli's door across the hallway — and the nameplate on it. "And God's agent was here and now."

THE END