In Times Like These (20 page)

“I guess we should be pretty much in the clear now. As long as Blake and I are gone by the time we walk down there, I think things will be back to normal.”

“Want to just take the car?” Robbie suggests.

“Yeah, I guess that will work too.”

We get back in the car and go around the block. As we pull up to the stop sign nearest our jumping off point, I slouch down in the back seat an
d peer around Robbie’s headrest to glimpse the rooftop of the rancher. It’s empty. I see Dr. Quickly lingering around in someone’s driveway, still jotting notes, and point him out to Mr. Cameron. He pulls the car over again and parks. I watch Dr. Quickly’s face as I get out of the car. His reaction is far less surprised than I had imagined. In fact, he doesn’t seem surprised at all.

“Messed that one up a bit,” I say, walking up to where he is on the sidewalk. He looks at his watch.

“You’re a bit early. What happened?”

“I went backward instead of forward.”

He looks a bit more concerned.

“By twelve hours.”

“Oh my. That is a mess,” he replies. “You successfully survived until now though, so that’s something. Did you log your jump?”

I nod.

“Let me see your logbook.”

I hand it over to him. “I think I may be missing some information still.”

When he flips to the page I’ve been using, his eyebrows raise in surprise. “You made five jumps?” His eyes have an avid interest now as they look into mine.

“Yes, counting the mess up, I guess it was five.”

He’s studying my entries. “A toilet railing and some monkeybars?”

“Um, yes sir.”

A broad smile breaks across his face. “There may be some hope for you yet!” He slaps me on the shoulder.

When Blake arrives on the roof of the ranch house, I’m standing in the front yard. It takes a few mom
ents for him to see me. “Hey!” he yells down. “Did you chicken out?”

“Not exactly.”

I wait for him to climb down, and when he emerges from the backyard, he’s holding a slightly battered flip-flop.

“You lose something?”

“Ha. Yes. Can I see that?” The flip-flop has some teeth marks on the heel but otherwise is not too chewed up.

“That shows what I know,” I say. Blake follows me as I walk around the corner to the alley trashcan where I deposited the other one. I lift open the lid and it’s still sitting atop a black plastic trash bag. Blake watches me pull the flip-flop out of the bin with curiosity.

“Ben, I sense you have a story to tell me.”

I smile. “It’s a good one.”

Chapter 12

“I lost track of my age some years ago. Now when people want to know, I simply ask them how old they think I am, and then congratulate them on their accuracy.”

-Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2105

The light from the star chandelier is gleaming off the table between my friends and me as I tell my story in the main study of the lab. Mr. Cameron has come with us and is browsing around the upstairs shelves. Dr. Quickly is seated a few feet back from the table in a brown leather armchair, dividing his time between staring out the window at the darkening clouds and listening as I fill my friends in on my adventure.

“So this whole time we were right about it being Stenger who killed those men in
the van,” Francesca says. She’s settled herself into an armchair while the rest of us mount stools around the table.

“W
e don’t have any specific evidence that it was him, but it sure fits,” I reply. “He’s definitely here.”

“So if we’re not the only ones who got sent back in time, does that mean there could be more of us? How many other people might have been made into time travelers?” Robbie asks from across the table.

I look to Dr. Quickly. He exhales slowly, then crosses his fingers in his lap. “I’ve been working on that issue myself. Malcolm is still watching the Temporal Studies Society for me. It’s the most likely point of contact. You five and Mr. Stenger were very fortunate to survive this jump at all. There may have been others who were less fortunate and were shot into space, or worse. I imagine that when you finally make it back to 2009, you’ll find a number of people in the area have gone missing.” He scratches under his chin briefly.

“Checking it there would most likely be the only way to find out for sure. It’s not necessary that they all arrived this far back either. If people were affected by various amounts of gravitites or voltage, they may have ended up traveling different amounts of time. They could be scattered across the next couple of decades if they were lucky enough to survive.”

“There might be more like the lady in the storage unit?” I ask.

He stares through us briefly, his eyes locked on a non-existent horizon. “Yes. Unfortunately. Also, the effects of the gravitites are relatively permanent as far as I can tell. They come with their fair share of hazards. I would imagine that even if more victims survived, the lifespan of an uninitiated, involuntary time traveler is not likely to be long. The woman in the storage unit may only be one of many fusion events. I don’t know that we’ll ever know the whole toll of that accident.”

“How much more training do you think we’re going to need to make it back to 2009?” Blake asks. “We’ve made some successful jumps now. Couldn’t we just ratchet up the intervals and do our training as we go? I mean, we could be doing this training later on just as easily right?”

Quickly’s eyes slowly focus back to us.
“I have a few reasons of my own for being in 1986 right now, but I could see about relocating soon. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to lengthen your jump intervals. You may want to see how that works for your host however.”

I watch Mr. Cameron on the second level balcony, holding a leather-bound book
at arms length so he can read the title.

“W
e wouldn’t necessarily all have to go right?” Robbie asks. “I mean, we would all end up at the same place anyway.”

“Yes, you could certainly take the normal timestream and end up in the same place.
Usually.” The last word trails off quietly, but Francesca still asks the follow up.

“What do you mean by, ‘usually?’”

But Dr. Quickly gets out of his chair and heads for the stairs up to the second balcony, seemingly unaware of the question. He joins Mr. Cameron in his appraisal of the various items stashed in the array of cubbyholes.

“Did I just get dissed?” Francesca laughs as she watches him go.

“Maybe he just didn’t hear you,” Robbie responds.

“He is a little old,” Carson suggests. “Maybe he’s hard of hearing.”

“Or has selective hearing,” Blake adds.

“Would you not want to jump ahead yet?” I ask Robbie.

“I’m not in a hurry right this moment. I feel a little responsible for getting my grandpa into all of this. I’d hate to ditch out on him, especially now, when he could go any second.”

“I didn’t necessarily mean right away,” Blake says. “I mean, it would be good to see that we’d gotten him through till your family makes it back, but we’re going to have to leave eventually. I don’t know that it necessarily does a lot of good to delay it.”

Carson wanders around the table and leans his forearms on the back of Francesca’s armchair. Francesca continues Blake’s thought. “Also, I don’t know if I’m the only one worried about this or not, but we’re not getting any younger in the past. I know this may not be a big deal to you guys, because you are guys, but I don’t really want to use up too much of my prime years in 1986. This girl has some things to get done in the present day, and I may need all my good-looking days at my disposal. Just sayin’.”

“You don’t want to date an eighties rocker?” Carson asks.

“Hey, I’m not saying I don’t love a man who can rock a perm.” Francesca laughs. “But I’m not sure I want to date a guy who has more beautiful hair than me. We might have problems. Plus, we have lives and careers there. I know we’ll be making it back around the time we left, but there are a lot of things we left hanging when this happened to us. My cat will have no problem tearing a hole through the food bag if I don’t make it home soon, but we have other people depending on us too. I don’t really want to get fired from my job. I like it there.”

Rain begins to pour outside and cascades down the glass wall of windows stretching up above us. My clouds from last night have finally decided to open up. I slide off my stool and wander over to the windows looking down on the street. I watch the cars splashing through a puddle growing from the runoff from a side street. A pair of umbrellas and a couple sets of feet pass below me on the sidewalk.

“Um, Carson?” Blake says.

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay, man? I think your arms are bleeding.”

Francesca pivots in her chair. I look and see that Carson’s arms are indeed red near his elbows.
“Oh God, what is that!” Francesca springs from the chair and spins around.

Carson looks closer at his elbows. “It does look like blood, but it’s almost like it’s congealed.”

“That’s really gross,” Francesca says.

“I
t’s not me,” Carson says. “It’s on this chair.”

Mr. Cameron and Dr. Quickly are descending the stairs together and Quickly points Mr. Cameron in the direction of the bathroom down the hall before walking our direction.

“Um, Doctor?” I say. “Your chair seems to be bleeding.”

Dr. Quickly surveys the chair briefly.
“Ah, yes. I was wondering if that might happen.”

“You were wondering if your armchairs would start bleeding?” Francesca says.

“It’s not the chair really,” he says, walking closer and leaning in to have a look. “It’s part of an experiment I have going on at the moment. I’m starting to get results back. Don’t be worried, the chair will be fine.” He grabs the back of the chair and drags it away to the corner. “I’ll just move this and we can avoid sitting in that one for a bit.”

“Does this sort of
thing happen often?” Robbie asks.

“No. Thankfully not,” Quickly replies. “The upholstery bills would get outrageous. I just happen to have a rather complex test going on at
the moment. It’s getting quite exciting.”

“Can you tell us what it is?” I say.

“No. I’m afraid I don’t want to share it yet. I’d hate for it to skew the results.” He turns his eyes from the chair back to us. “I can however share, that I’ve had pizza delivered. It’s in the kitchen for you. Though you will probably want to wash those arms off first, Carson.”

“Yeah, I don’t need some kind of chair disease,” Carson says. He wanders toward the back.

Francesca continues to eye the chair in the corner suspiciously but finally pulls her gaze away. “You wouldn’t think I’d have an appetite after seeing that, but it shows what I know. Pizza actually sounds amazing right now.”

She and Robbie head for the kitchen. I turn back to the view of the rain. After a moment
, I see Quickly’s reflection next to mine. “No lunch for you today?” he asks.

“Maybe in a bit. I had breakfast twice today.”

“Time travel can take a toll on your grocery budget,” he replies.

“Doctor, can I ask you something personal?”

“I’ve always dressed this badly out of fashion, if you must know.”

“Ha.
I think tweed will never go out of style if you ask me.”

He looks at me attentively.

“It’s really a couple of questions. One thing I was wondering was why you never went big with this technology.” I hold up the chronometer on my wrist. “
This is amazing. The work you’ve put into this and the discovery of the gravitites must have been a guaranteed Nobel Prize. Haven’t you been tempted to be rewarded for all of it? You would be famous worldwide.”

Quickly looks out
the window for a moment before responding. “I would say you’ve answered that question in part already. Fame is not for everyone. I had a partner working on this with me early on whom I know would have been thrilled to be on the cover of
Time
magazine. I think he had his interview already planned out in his head. We had very different motivations for getting into this research.

I did it partly for the achievement itself but also because I had strong motivation to succeed. There are things much more important and rewarding than fame.”

“I know what you mean,” I reply. “I don’t know how willing I would be to share this either.

“Today, when I messed up my jump, it was a scary moment. Realizing how much harm I could have done was
 . . . sobering is the best word I can think of. But then later on, when I had to make that jump from the bathroom, and it worked, it was an amazing feeling. I mean, I was running and it was hectic, and I think the adrenaline had my heart going a mile a minute, but when I made it back and things worked out, I felt elated and excited about it all. I can see how it changes all of your perspectives on things.

“What you’ve done here
, and how you’ve designed these chronometers, just blows my mind. I know we’re headed home and back to our normal lives, but I’ve got to tell you, after an experience like this, I don’t know how going back to fixing boats is going to stack up.”