Caught (Missing) (3 page)

It was true that she had to go straight from driving on the sidewalk to driving in the lane on the opposite side of the street, going the wrong way. But the problem was that all of the other cars around her were stopped, not that they were darting around her.

This isn’t like a car-chase movie,
Jonah thought.
It’s like one of those prehistoric video games my dad has from when he was a kid, where everything moves too slow.

Finally they arrived at Chip’s. Katherine immediately shoved open her door and began rushing up the front walk.

“No—wait! Maybe I should go first—,” Angela called after her.

When Katherine didn’t stop, Angela scrambled out and ran to catch up.

“Shouldn’t we keep the Elucidator with us?” Jonah asked. Neither Angela nor Katherine answered him, but Jonah leaned over the front seat and yanked the connecting cable away from the Elucidator.

As soon as the link to the car was broken, the Elucidator began to make a crackling noise.

“JB? Hadley?” Jonah asked.

Through the crackling static Jonah thought he heard a voice. Was the Elucidator working as a communications device again, now that it wasn’t powering a car?

Jonah lifted the Elucidator closer to his ear.

“Angela, Kath—,” he started to call out to the others. But then he got scared that the Elucidator might work only briefly, and he didn’t want to waste any time.

“Hello?” he said into the Elucidator. “JB? Is that you?”

“Angela? Jonah? Katherine? Are you there?” JB’s voice floated weakly from amidst the static. “Are you there? Angela?”

Jonah realized that even though he could hear JB, JB couldn’t hear him. He began fumbling with the controls on the side of the Elucidator.

“JB?” he said.

“Jonah? Is that you?” The relief in JB’s voice practically drowned out the static. “Are you okay?”

“Uh, sure,” Jonah said.

“Oh, thank you! Thank you, Angela! Thank God!” JB might have gone on with his listing of thanks, but the Elucidator blanked out for a moment. When the sound came back on, he was saying, “. . . was so worried . . .”

“JB, I can’t hear you very well,” Jonah said. “Are
you
okay? Where are you?”

“. . . in a time hollow . . . watching . . . early nineteen- . . . he’s not thinking about the right things. He . . . I thought . . .”

It was so frustrating, trying to make sense of the few bits and pieces of JB’s explanation that came through. Maybe Jonah should have Angela and Katherine listen to this too. Quickly he slipped out of the car and began walking toward them. They’d reached the doorstep of Chip’s house, and Katherine had just started pounding her hand against the door.

“Chip! Chip!” Katherine was yelling.

“Shh,” Jonah hissed. “JB’s talking on the Elucidator!”

Angela whirled around.

“. . . was afraid that . . . ,” crackled out of the Elucidator. “But you haven’t seen anything strange . . . ?”

“Strange?” Jonah repeated. “JB, time’s stopped.”

For a moment the Elucidator was completely silent.

Then JB wailed, “Stopped? No! It can’t be! Your time is stopped? The twenty-first century?”

Jonah reached the front step of Chip’s house and climbed up the stairs behind Katherine and Angela. Angela reached out and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, we’re still okay,” Jonah said. “Angela came and got me and Katherine, and now we’re at Chip’s house, and—”

“Chip’s house? No! Stay away from Chip! Run!” JB’s
voice screamed from the Elucidator. “Run away!”

Several things happened almost at once. Chip’s door scraped back, revealing Chip looking pale and clammy-skinned. Katherine reached out and brushed Chip’s hand with her fingers just as Jonah grabbed her arm to pull her back. Angela reached up to feel Chip’s forehead with the back of her wrist. In that one second they were all linked, each of them touching the person on either side.

In the next second everything went black.

For a long moment Jonah couldn’t think. His mind remained as blank as the scenery around him.

Then he heard Katherine’s voice.

“Is it just the two of us?” she asked weakly. “Just the two of us, floating through time?”

Through time,
Jonah thought.

He was relieved that Katherine had put a name to what they were doing. This did indeed feel like all the other times they’d traveled to the past. Just as before, there was nothing but a dark void around them, an emptiness that seemed infinite. But neither he nor Katherine had shouted out a command to travel to another time; he didn’t think Angela or JB or Hadley had preprogrammed secret coding into the Elucidator to . . .

The Elucidator,
he thought.

He clenched his left hand—the one that wasn’t wrapped around Katherine’s arm—and was relieved to feel the smooth edge of the Elucidator against his palm and fingers. He tightened his grip. He and Katherine and Andrea had lost their Elucidator on their trip to 1600, and Jonah had no desire to repeat that experience.

“It’s you and me and the Elucidator,” Jonah told Katherine.

“Oh, goody,” Katherine said, a bit too much sarcasm in her voice. “Why didn’t Chip and Angela come, too? I was touching Chip’s hand. Angela was touching your shoulder.”

“Just touching,” Jonah said apologetically. “Not holding on. No one was holding on but me.”

“Gee, thanks,” Katherine said.

They floated on in silence for a moment, and then Katherine asked, a little plaintively, “Where do you think we’re going?”

“JB said he was in a time hollow,” Jonah told her. “Maybe we’re just going where he went. Or, he said he was watching someone in the early nineteen . . . nineteen hundreds, do you think? Or nineteenth century?”

“It could be nineteenth century BC, for all we know,” Katherine said bitterly. Jonah sensed movement beside him—it seemed that Katherine had plunged the top half
of her body forward. “Hello? Hello? JB?” she hollered into the Elucidator in Jonah’s hand.

The Elucidator remained silent.

“Great,” Katherine muttered. “Now it’s broken again.”

Jonah shrugged.

“We’ve managed before without a working Elucidator,” he said, but his voice chose that moment to squeak. He sounded like a terrified mouse.

Katherine was still hunched forward, poking at the Elucidator.

“Can we switch over to voice commands?” she asked it. “Can’t you let us hear JB again?”

“Jonah? Is that you? Are you okay?” came out of the Elucidator.

“No, it’s Katherine now,” she shouted back. “Katherine!”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you, Angela! Thank God!” JB replied, the same way he had before. And then, just as before, there was a pause before JB said, “. . . was so worried . . .”

“Katherine, I don’t think JB can hear you,” Jonah said. “The Elucidator is just playing back his conversation from before. Oh—it’s giving you what you asked for—to hear JB again.”

“You know that’s not what I meant!” Katherine wailed,
as if it would do any good to scold the Elucidator.

“Yeah, but you have to be really precise with the—,” Jonah broke off, because the repeated conversation coming from the Elucidator had reached the part where JB was describing where he was:

“. . . in a time hollow by mistake . . . trapped watching . . .”

“Did you hear that?” Jonah asked excitedly. “I can make out more of his words this time around. Elucidator, can you play that part back for us again?”

The Elucidator fell silent for a moment and then repeated JB’s words. Jonah held his breath and strained his ears, listening as hard as he could. Maybe it was because they were traveling through a near vacuum, but JB’s voice came out sounding clearer and purer now:

“I’m stuck in a time hollow by mistake. I’m trapped watching . . . in the early nineteen hundreds . . .”

“There!” Jonah exclaimed. “We’ve got a time period!”

“Shh,” Katherine shushed him. “You made me miss the rest of it!”

They had the Elucidator play JB’s lines again:

“. . . trapped watching . . . in the early nineteen hundreds. His daughter is one of the missing children of history. We had to return her. We had to. He’s not thinking about the right things. He . . . I thought . . .”

“They returned another missing child to history?”
Jonah asked. “When JB said they weren’t going to do that anymore?”

“But if they had to . . . ,” Katherine mumbled. “Elucidator, let’s hear that again.”

Jonah strained his ears harder than ever. He held his breath again. He listened so intently that he could hear his own pulse pounding in his veins. But he couldn’t make sense of whatever JB said between “trapped watching” and “in the early nineteen hundreds.”

“I got it! I got it!” Katherine shrieked. “JB’s watching Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein!”

“Albert Einstein?” Jonah repeated. “No way. You’re making that up!”

But they replayed JB’s words again, and this time Jonah heard the name too, faint but distinct.

Albert Einstein?
Jonah thought.
Albert Einstein and time travel? Albert Einstein and a missing daughter?

He relaxed through the next section of JB’s words, the part they’d already figured out. And then, maybe hearing was kind of like eyesight, where sometimes you could see things better when you weren’t looking directly at them. This time, when he wasn’t listening so hard, Jonah could make out what JB had said after “He’s not thinking about the right things.”

It was: “He could ruin everything.”

“But—Albert Einstein’s a good guy. Isn’t he?” Jonah asked. “How could he ruin everything?”

The words were snatched from his mouth by a sudden rush of air around his face. Jonah had been so intent on trying to figure out JB’s words on the Elucidator that he’d stopped paying attention to their journey through time. But now lights rushed up at them, and it felt as if every cell and molecule and atom of Jonah’s body were being torn apart.

They were about to land.

“Katherine!” Jonah screamed. “Shouldn’t we get the Elucidator to make us invisible? Just in case?”

His words were whipped away from him so quickly that he knew Katherine couldn’t have heard. But he tried to curl forward, bending his head toward the Elucidator
even as he struggled to bring the Elucidator up toward his mouth.

“In-vi-si-ble!” he cried out. “Make me and Katherine invisible!”

In the bone-crushing, teeth-jarring pressure of gravity and time crashing down on him, he couldn’t tell if his request had worked or not. He couldn’t see the Elucidator in his hand, but he couldn’t see anything else, either. He couldn’t hear; he couldn’t speak; he couldn’t feel.

And then everything was still. Jonah braced himself for the usual waves of timesickness. On every other substantive trip he’d ever made through time, the brief period after landing had always left him feeling brainless and senseless.

Wouldn’t it . . . be awful . . . to be . . . brainless . . . around . . . Albert Einstein?
he thought jerkily.

He choked back a chuckle at the silliness of his own brain, but his timesick reflexes were so slow that some sound escaped: “Heh-h . . .”

“Shh!” Katherine hissed beside him. “Got to be . . . quiet . . . I think I see . . . Einstein . . .”

“Where? Must . . . hide . . . then . . . ,” Jonah whispered back.

Slowly—very slowly—Jonah remembered that he’d asked the Elucidator to make them invisible. He let go of
Katherine’s arm and lifted his right hand toward his face. Slowly, slowly, slowly . . . He blinked, trying to force his eyes to work. Something crystalline swung in and out of focus. Something hand-shaped and crystalline.

Oh, yeah,
he remembered.
That’s how a time traveler’s body looks to his own eyes—and to any other time traveler’s eyes. But people who really belong in this time period won’t be able to see me at all.

His request for invisibility had worked.

Jonah barely managed to keep from letting out an audible sigh of relief.

“Where did you see Einstein?” he whispered to Katherine.

“Sitting . . . over . . . at that table,” she whispered back.

Evidently she didn’t have the energy yet to lift her arm and point. But she jerked her nearly invisible chin up and to the right, and Jonah guessed that meant he should look in that direction. He turned his head and tried to blink his eyes into focus for medium-distance vision. He saw lace—a lace tablecloth, maybe? Yes, there was wood showing through the lace. A moment later Jonah figured out that he could see the bars of chair backs on three sides of the table. And beyond that? Was there a fourth chair?

Jonah blinked again, and propped himself up on his wobbly elbows.

A man sat in the fourth chair. A young man, with thick dark hair and a dark moustache.

“Silly.” Jonah leaned down to whisper into Katherine’s ear. “That’s not Einstein. Einstein’s
old.
Don’t you remember? Bushy white hair? White moustache?”

“Don’t you think he had to be young before he got old?” Katherine whispered back.

It took a ridiculous amount of time for Jonah to consider this. He hoped that just meant that his brain wasn’t over the timesickness yet.

But really,
he told himself.
There are just some people who don’t seem like they ever could have been young. It’s like trying to imagine my grandparents as little kids. Or—like the guy who played Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies. No way he was ever young.

Albert Einstein was like that too. It seemed as if he must have been born old.

Unless Katherine was right, and this really was a young Albert Einstein.

Jonah squinted, trying to imagine the dark hair replaced by a wild white thicket, the neatly trimmed dark moustache replaced by a walruslike white thatch.

Maybe it was still the timesickness working on him, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t see Albert Einstein in this young man’s face.

This could be anyone.

“Do you suppose we’re seeing him before anyone knows who he is?” Katherine hissed excitedly. “Before he’s even famous? How old was Einstein when he got famous?”