The silence in the concrete cell was absolute. It was a different silence from the mesa—not the quiet of focused work or mountain air, but the dead, heavy silence of confinement. There were no windows, no sounds of generators or distant voices. Only the faint, rhythmic tread of the MP outside his door and the frantic, circular noise of his own thoughts.
He had done it. He had spoken the truth. And the world, as he knew it would, had rejected that truth as insanity. He was no longer a person; he was a classified anomaly, a problem to be contained.
He expected interrogation, perhaps even "enhanced" methods to break his ridiculous story. But days passed, and nothing happened. His meals were slid through a slot in the door by an unseen hand. No one came to see him. The isolation was a weapon in itself, more effective than any physical pressure. It gave him nothing but time to replay his every decision, to wallow in the catastrophic failure of his mission.
He had not stopped the bomb. He had not found a way home. He had only succeeded in making himself a prisoner, and in the process, he had shattered the trust of the few people in this time who had shown him kindness. Arthur and Eleanor would never know what became of him. He was a missing person from a future that hadn't happened yet, a ghost in two timelines.
He held the wooden swallow until his fingers grew numb. They always find their way home. The carving felt like a taunt now, a promise from a simpler world that no longer existed. There was no home. Not in 1935, not in 2025. He was a man in between, a lost coordinate in the universe.
Weeks bled together. He lost track of time. His beard grew, his clothes hung looser on his frame. The initial peace he had felt after his confession curdled into a deep, clinical despair. He was a specimen in a jar, and his captors had simply put him on a shelf to observe.
Then, one day, the lock on his door clanked open. It wasn't the MP with his meal. It was John Albright.
He looked older, his sharp features drawn, the grey suit rumpled. He carried a single folding chair, which he set up in the center of the small cell. He didn't speak at first, just sat down and looked at Robert, who remained on his cot, back against the wall.
"The war in Europe is over," Albright said, his voice flat. "The Germans surrendered unconditionally."
Robert said nothing. He had known this was coming. The news was a historical footnote to him.
"We have a new President," Albright continued. "Truman. He has been fully briefed on this project. The decision on whether to use the device against Japan rests with him now."
Still, Robert remained silent. He had nothing left to say.
Albright leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "I have spent the last month having you investigated more thoroughly than any human being in history. We have turned your life in Oak Creek inside out. We have interviewed Arthur and Eleanor Henderson until they have nothing left to give. We have found no evidence of who you are, Robert. No family, no records before 1935. It's as if you simply… appeared."
He paused, letting the weight of that impossibility settle in the tiny room. "I have also had a team of the nation's top psychiatrists evaluate your… confession. Their consensus is that you are not insane. Delusional, perhaps. A savant with a pathological need for a grandiose personal mythology. But not clinically insane."
He looked at Robert, and for the first time, Robert saw not a hunter, not a bureaucrat, but a man grappling with something that broke his understanding of reality. "The things you knew… the things you said in the Barn… they were specific. They were accurate. Things you could not have known."
"So you believe me?" Robert asked, his voice a dry rasp from disuse.
Albright let out a short, humorless laugh. "Believe you? That you are a time traveler from the year 2025? No. I cannot allow myself to believe that. My mind, my world, does not have the… architecture for that." He stood up, pacing the short length of the cell. "But I am forced to operate on a new hypothesis. That you are a person of unknown origin, with access to intelligence of an unimaginable scope and accuracy. That for purposes I cannot fathom, you have chosen to insert yourself here, at this moment, and involve yourself in this project."
He stopped and faced Robert. "The question is no longer 'who are you?' The question is, 'what do you want?' You are now the single greatest security risk on the planet. The simplest, safest solution would be to make you disappear. Permanently."
Robert met his gaze, feeling nothing. The threat was empty because he had nothing left to lose.
"But," Albright said, his voice dropping, "you are also a potential asset of incalculable value. You claim to know the future. If that is even one percent true…" He didn't finish the sentence. The implications were too vast.
He walked to the door and knocked for the guard. Before he left, he turned back.
"The test is scheduled, Robert. Trinity. In one month. You will be transported to the site. You will observe. And you will tell me everything you see, everything you remember. You will give me every detail of this… future of yours." His eyes were hard. "Consider it your ticket out of this cell. Your only ticket."
The door clanged shut, the lock turning with a sound of finality.
Robert was left alone again, but the silence was different now. It was filled with a new, terrible purpose. He was being given a front-row seat to the birth of the atomic age. He was to be the oracle at Ground Zero, his knowledge the price of his continued existence.
He looked down at the wooden swallow in his hand. There would be no going home. But there was, perhaps, a path forward. A path of becoming the very thing he had feared: a guide to the apocalypse. The tourist was being offered a new role: the prophet. And he had no choice but to accept.