In Times Like These (13 page)

Dr. Quickly walks to the wall and rolls a green chalkboard in a frame over to our table. He picks up a piece of chalk and draws a pair of parallel, squiggly lines across the board. He makes an X in between the lines at one end.

“Imagine this as a river. This is all of you
in 2009.” He points to the X. “You are flowing along in time along with everything else around you. The Temporal Studies Society suffered an explosion that released the gravitites into the environment around you by way of electricity. That is crucial to the events, because electricity acted in this case as not only the medium in which you were exposed to these particles, but also the catalyst for the reaction that ensued.”

“You’re not going to say something with ‘one point twenty-one
jigawatts’ in it now are you?” Carson says, “Because that would kind of make me laugh if that turned out to be true.”

“Hmm. No. As much as I enjoyed the
Back to the Future
films myself, I’m afraid I can’t just put you in a car and zap you with lightning to get you home. The electricity played a key part to be sure, but it’s a little more complex than that. These particles act as disruptors to the way individual cells stay anchored in time. The cells of your body and in all the things around you, have a gravity of sorts that keeps you in sync with the flow of time, stuck in the river with everything else that’s floating with you. All of it is flowing at the same speed.” He draws some movement lines in the river.

“Like going tubing down a river with your friends,” Francesca says.

“Exactly. Relative to each other, it’s not as noticeable that we’re moving, because we’re all traveling in the same direction and at the same rate. Cells that have been exposed to these gravitites are essentially released from the ‘gravity’ of time. You and most of the biological or organic matter around you would’ve been affected. It’s like you took your tube to shore and hiked back along the edge of the river while the rest of your life floated on.

“The electrical current that flowed through you can react various ways with those particles. In your case, the event that ensued was an enormous leap through time.” He looks at his drawing on the board. “You would have to hike for a long time in this analogy.” He draws an arc back to a spot between the lines and writes 1986 above it. “It’s one of the longest jumps I’ve heard of actually. Much more would have required an exposure that would most certainly have killed you. That was the first instance where you all were extremely lucky.”

“What would have killed us?” Francesca asks.

“Oh, any of a long list of very unpleasant things,” Dr. Quickly replies. “Electrocution for one, but the most likely would have been that you would have been left floating in outer space. You see, one thing that many people fail to realize when talking about time travel
theory, is that one cannot effectively travel through time without also traveling through space. If we were to travel backward in time, one day, to this exact location in the universe, we would find ourselves out in the cold dark of space, waiting for the earth to get to us as it orbits around the sun.” He scribbles a quick depiction of the sun and a planet and a line to show an orbit around it. I straighten up on my stool.

I feel like I should be taking notes.

“Even if we were to jump 365 days ahead so that the earth might be in the same relative position in its rotation around the sun, we would still miss, because the sun is moving too.” He draws an arrow coming out of the sun.

“The whole galaxy is in fact hurtling through space at speeds that make trying to calculate for it laughable. The universe itself could be moving for all we know. We highly suspect it is. Trying to hit a mark like that would be like hitting a
bullseye on a dartboard attached to a speeding train, while throwing from an airplane . . . with your eyes closed. It’s a useless endeavor.”

“How did we end up alive then?” I ask.

“You were fortunate enough to be in contact with something that was not traveling through time, that happened to exist in more or less the same condition in the time you jumped to. In your case, it was the bench in the dugout on the softball field. It exists in relatively the same condition here in 1986 as in 2009. It was still anchored to the same slab of concrete, so when you were shocked in contact with it, you stayed fixed to it during your jump. The bench itself underwent a sort of matter fusion event, but that isn’t really relevant to you at the moment. Essentially you five just went along for the ride.”

“How do you know all this about us?” Carson asks. “How did you know we were at the softball field?”

“You told me. Later. Well, it’s later for you. It’s in the past for me.”

“We tell you in the future?” Francesca asks.

“Yes. Possibly. You did tell me in the future. Whether you will again remains to be determined.”

“Oh. Right. This is really confusing,” Francesca says.

“Welcome to my life. If there is one thing I can promise you about time travel theory, it is that it is a complex science and there are plenty of things that I don’t understand either. A lot can go wrong, but I’m going to do my best to give you the basics of what I know, and hopefully keep you safe. To that end, I have some things I want to give you.”

“It’
s possible though, right?” Blake asks. “You can get us back?”

Dr. Quickly looks him in the eye as he replies. “You are going to get yourselves back. But I’m going to help you.”

Dr. Quickly reaches down and pulls a cardboard box from under the table. From it he extracts five smaller wooden boxes that are hinged with lids. He slides one to each of us across the table. I lift the lid on mine and peer inside at the objects it contains.

This looks exciting
.

Dr. Quickly pulls out a sixth box and sets it in front of
himself. “These are some basic safety items. One of the main dangers you face is that since you’ve been exposed to the gravitites, you are susceptible to any amount of electricity triggering another jump. Even certain amounts of static electricity could possibly result in you traveling, and if you’re not planning for it, it can yield some very nasty results. You don’t want to end up inside a wall somewhere, or melted into the center of the earth or anything like that.”

“You’re really freaking me out,” Robbie says.

“It’s better that you know what you’re dealing with. These dangers will lessen over time, the longer you stay in one place. For the first week or so after a jump of the magnitude you experienced, your cells are still very unstable temporally speaking. You’ll find in your boxes an item that’s going to help diffuse any unwanted electrical impulses, and keep you from jumping.

“This is a chronometer.” He holds up an item that looks like a complex wristwatch. I
remove mine from my box also. “These chronometers have had the time jumping portion disabled, but they have a component inside that acts as a sort of capacitor that can either diffuse or store electricity from your body. They act as regulators for jumping as well, but we haven’t gotten to that yet.”

I look at the chronometer in my hand. It has the basic shape of a large watch, only in place of a face with
hands, it has a series of concentric rings that appear to be capable of movement. There are dials on the sides. Each is marked with different symbols and some numbers. It’s beautiful, even though I have no understanding of how it works.

“Put them on your wrists,” he says, and we all comply, making minor adjustments as needed. “On th
e full versions such as mine,”—At this he pushes up his sleeve and shows us an ornate looking chronometer that’s around his wrist—“there is a pin on the side that can be pushed as a key to activate other options for you, but for the moment, yours are set to maintain the present flow of time.”

“Are we going to be able to use these to get home?” Blake asks.

“In time.” Quickly smiles. “Pun intended. There is much to learn before we can accomplish that feat however. I’m going to need to have all of your free time as much as possible for the next few weeks. Getting all of you to 2009 is likely to take a number of smaller jumps, as I’m doubtful about the safety of sending you back as violently as you arrived here. The odds of you surviving that again are slim. We’ll need to take precautions, and there’s a lot of theory and some precise calculating that needs to happen for it to work. Even so, I’m optimistic that if we all work at it, we can get you traveling home. It may take a few weeks, it could take a few months, but it should be possible.”

“Well w
e’re here to learn,” I reply, happy that we’re making progress. Blake has cheered up considerably and there is an air of general excitement among the others as well.

“What’s this?” Francesca reaches into her box and pulls out
a long wire with a plug at the end.

“Wall charger.” Quickly smiles. “No fun running out of power halfway to your destination.”

Dr. Quickly invites us to tour the laboratory. Behind the walls of shelves are other rooms with a few things I recognize like generators and gyroscopes, and even more things I can’t recognize at all. I see a kitchen and a couple of different stairwells but the purposes of most of the rooms he’s showing us go over my head. He leads us through various hallways full of lab spaces and classrooms but I rapidly lose comprehension of where we are.

“You sure have a lot of space in here,” Robbie comments.

“And this is just the first level.” Dr. Quickly winks.

“What’s down below you?” Francesca says. “I noticed we’re not actually at ground level. Was there something between this level and the tunnel?”

“Coffee shop,” Quickly replies. “The ground floor has a number of retail spaces. I find it helps mask the fact that my lab is up here.”

“Hmm. Coffee. Good to know.” Francesca smiles.

After showing us around, Quickly tells us that we will reconvene again tomorrow as it’s getting late. We agree to meet him in the morning, and he shows us out. Instead of taking the tunnel back to the house the way we came, he leads us out another exit and we descend a set of stairs and emerge from a nondescript door in a side alley of the building.

As we walk across the street, I get my first real look at the outside of the lab. It’s a large, glass-paned, rectangular office building with mirrored glass. The width of the building is such that I have no concept of which windows belong to the lab. I begin to understand how Quickly has been able to hide it in plain sight between the other occupants. I doubt that the other tenants of the building have any idea what neighbors them. We walk a block to another large American car parked along the street. This one is a battered Chevy Impala. Like the Galaxie, it has a front bench seat and we can all manage to pile in. We’re dropped off in front of Mr. Cameron’s house.

“Thank you so much for helping us,” Francesca says.

Dr. Quickly smiles. “Don’t mention it. I know a thing or two about what it’s like to be displaced and need help. I’m happy I get to return the favor to someone.” And with a cheery wave, our new acquaintance is gone.

We file into the house and find Mr. Cameron still awake. Tybalt and Mercutio, the two parrots, are still up as well and walking around on the back of his chair as we tell him our story. Mr. Cameron listens intently and looks at our chronometers.

“How soon does he say you may be able to return home?” He asks.

“He says we have a lot to learn. Probably a couple of weeks at least.”

Mr. Cameron looks a little relieved when I say this.

I don’t think he is very ready to see us go.

Everyone has gone to bed as I settle onto the couch. Spartacus comes to nuzzle me briefly and attempts to lick my face in greeting, but then wanders up the stairs, leaving me to my thoughts. My mind is racing with all that has happened. I look at the chronometer on my wrist and the weight of it on my arm makes the situation seem more real. Until now I’ve not let my thoughts go to what we are trying accomplish, beyond getting Blake back to Mallory and the rest of us home to our normal lives. The whole experience has felt more like an odd vacation. The reality of Dr. Quickly and his accomplishments has changed that. What before see
med a massive traumatic problem now begins to look like an opportunity. We’re now friends with a scientist who has successfully traveled through time and who is going to teach us how to do it.

The little boy in me that has always dreamed of
super human abilities has awakened again. I think about the possibilities of what time travel might enable. I could visit moments in history I‘ve always wanted to see. I could go to a Beatles concert, see the first person walk on the moon on the day it happened, figure out who shot Kennedy. I could go farther back, see the Wright brothers make the first flight at Kittyhawk.
What if I could witness the Gettysburg Address?

I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
How far back could I go? Could I talk to Alexander the Great? Aristotle? Jesus? What if I went back and captured some animals that are now extinct and saved them? What if I could shed light on blunders the human race has made before they ever happened? Would I ruin time in the process? What about the future? Space travel? New technologies? What if we make alien contact in the future? I could meet one.
My mind reels and I fall asleep with thoughts of medieval jousts and futuristic space ships swimming through my head.