In Times Like These (25 page)

“I’m Harry. Though you seem to know that.”

“Yes. Well
 . . . I’ve met you before, or later I guess. I’m not sure how phrasing that works.”

“Ah. Future me. Please say no more. Still not sure how much I should know about my own future, though I have run into myself a couple of times now and seem not to have hurt anything. It’s not an exact science yet, this time traveling, by any means.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Just passing through, currently,” he says, smiling.
“I use these jump rooms to come and go. It’s a relatively secure location the way I’ve got things worked out. Has the future me explained the use of these rooms to you?”

“W
e made some short blinks in here.”

“Blinks?” h
e says.

“Oh, yeah, time jumps? Blinks is just the name your
 . . . um . . .one of your associates made up.”
Does he know he has a daughter yet?

“Ah. I see.”

“But we only stayed in the rooms. We didn’t really come and go.”

“Oh, well the color-
coded doors are my system of knowing which door to leave from and know how not to run into myself. I usually set up the anchors and leave out the blue door. When I arrive after using an anchor, I leave out the green door so I don’t run into the other version of me. There are tunnel exits that lead to different areas around town.”

“That
makes sense,” I say. “I saw the ladders on the way in. Does that mean the other version of you is close by somewhere? Maybe in the tunnel? Because I was actually hoping to talk to him.”

“Oh. I don’t know. This was one of the anchors I set up a while back. Would have been a younger
version of me that set that up. I’m afraid I have no idea where this older me has wandered off to.”

“Y
ou might want to be careful. Something bad is going to happen here soon,” I say.

“Oh, you probably shouldn’t tell me,” he says
, and puts his hands in his pockets. I can tell he is thinking about the possibilities. He gazes past me a moment before his eyes come back to mine. “How bad are we talking?”

“The building is going to catch on fire in a few hours,” I say.

He looks at the four backpacks in my hands. His eyes grow suddenly serious. “It’s not you burning it down, is it?”

“No! I would never want to hurt this place. I just know that it’s going to happen soon. I’m trying to get our stuff out before it happens. My friends and I are trying to get back to 2009. You were helping us, but I’m not
sure where you are now.”

Quickly takes off his hat and runs a hand through his hair. “This is getting complicated again
, as always. I’m headed toward the past, so I should be safe for now, though I suppose I ought to adjust my jump plan for heading forward again, if this place is going to be on fire, like you say. What time does this happen?”

“Before seven. Not exactly sure,” I say.

He consults his wrist and I notice he has a regular watch strapped next to his chronometer. He draws a leather bound notebook out of his back pocket and makes a couple of notes in it. Quickly looks at my wrist next. “What are you working with there?” I hold out my arm so he can have a look. “Oh, that looks like a later model than mine. Manembo must be working on some modifications. I will have to check in with him soon. Want to trade?” He smiles.

“Um, I kind of need this one,” I say.

“Ha, I’m just kidding. I will get my own at some point it seems. No use rushing things.”

“Yeah. Yours is much more advanced than this later on
, I think. These are just our training models,” I say.

“I
t certainly looks like it will do. I wouldn’t have minded having that as my first device. You should have seen all the clutter I had to lug around in the beginning. I must have looked like a hobo. I even had a shopping cart involved for a bit.”

“That must have been tough,” I say.

“Ah well, there’s a lot of trial and error in science, no matter how far in time you go. Luckily I’m still here to tell about it. It sounds like we ought to be moving along if we would like to stay that way.” He extends his hand. “It was a pleasure meeting you Benjamin Travers. Till we meet again.”

“Good to meet you too
, sir.”

Quickly gives a nod and walks back down the hall. He’s about to walk into the next jump room when I call out to him.
“Oh hey, Doctor Quickly?”

“Yes?”

“Can you point me to the stairs by chance?”

“Indeed.”
He points to the hall behind me and crooks his finger to the left. “East down that hall, second door on the right.”

“Thank you.”

Then he is gone.

I walk to the corner he was pointing to, pull out my pen, and
reaching up under the trim, draw an arrow with the word “East.”

That should help if I get lost again
 . . . at least till the place burns down.

I find the second door on the right
, and sure enough, the stairwell is beyond it. As I’m about to head through the door, I look to my left and spot a door across the hall hanging open. Through the open crack I can see an oak desk with photos on it. Even from this distance, I recognize one of them as Mym.

Curious, I cross the hall and swing open the door the rest of the way. It appears to be
Dr. Quickly’s private office. Behind the desk are an oak credenza and a Van Gogh painting. I inch closer to it and see the texture of the paint.
Oh God, is that an original?
I scan the office for any clues to Quickly’s whereabouts. I stop at the desk and pick up the photo of Mym. She’s standing in a wide-open expanse of land with a hot air balloon basket in the background. For a moment, I consider stuffing the photo in my bag.
No.
Don’t be a creeper, Ben. You just met this girl
. I set the frame back down.

I slide open a couple desk drawers but just find stationary and pens.

I open the doors on the credenza and take a step back in shock. On the shelf inside the credenza, in neatly ordered rows, are stacks and stacks of hundred-dollar bills. The edge of the shelf has sticky labels fixed to it, telling the year the stacks of bills belong to. The years range from 1965 all the way to 2050.
There must be millions of dollars sitting there
. I stand in front of the credenza, debating for a moment, then start stuffing stacks of bills into the backpacks.
Now this really feels like stealing
.

After I have a couple
dozen stacks deposited in the backpacks, I stop, because I realize I still need to fit so many anchors in there too. It’s hard to leave all that cash sitting there, knowing the place is about to burn down.
We have more important things than money to worry about, Ben
. I leave the rest and walk back out of the office.

I push through the stairwell door and head downstairs. I emerge on the floor below, in the hall across from the kitchen. I know my way from here and don’t have any trouble making it back to the study.

“Took you long enough,” Carson says as I walk out from under the balconies. He has shuttled our anchors from the upper balconies and placed them on the table in the middle of the study.

“I ran into Dr. Quickly,” I say.

“Oh cool, is he going to help us with this stuff?”

“T
here was a complication there.” I fill Carson in on my encounter with the younger Quickly as we stuff items into the backpacks.

“That’s nuts,” Carson says. “So different versions of Quickly are coming and going through this place all the time?”

“I guess so. He said he was headed for the past, so this must have been a sort of pit stop.”

Carson wrestles a portion of chain link fence into an already stuffed backpack.
“I don’t think I could handle a life that complex,” he grunts, finally getting the pack to close. He grabs the next pack and notes the stacks of bills in it. He holds one up. “What’s this?”

“A little traveling money,” I say.

“Sweet.” Carson thumbs the stack and then stuffs it back into the bag.

I check the clock on the wall.
Almost six
. I scan the walls of cubbies above us. “What else do you think we should grab?”

A crash from somewhere in the back of the lab startles me
into silence. It’s followed by a couple of shouts. “What was that?” Carson says.

“I don’t know.”

We start to move toward the hallway when a pair of loud bangs stops us. “That sounded like gunshots,” Carson says. “We should get out of here.”

“What if someone is shooting at Quickly?” I say.
Or Mym.

“W
e didn’t bring a gun to this party, so I don’t know what good we can do.” Carson picks up two of the packs as I slip over to the entrance of the hallway and peek around the corner. The hallway is empty but I can still hear noises. “Ben. Come on!” Carson whispers.

I
grab the other two packs off the table. I sling one over my shoulder and carry the other. “That’s our way out anyway, if we’re going to get this stuff outside.”

I walk back to the co
rner and peek around it again. It’s still clear. We move quietly toward the adjoining hallway that runs in front of the kitchen and make a right. The exit stairwell door is just ahead of us on the right when at the far end of the hall, a figure walks backward into view from the left. He’s aiming a gun down the hallway he’s just come from. We freeze. The man still has the gun aimed down the other hallway when he turns his head and sees us. Confusion contorts the face of the last person in the world I want to encounter. Stenger.

He swings the gun toward us and scowls. In his other hand, he’s holding something colorful. I recognize it as a Rubik’s Cube.

“I’ve had enough of your tricks.”

I raise my hands. “We don’t want any trouble.”

“Ha! A little late for that. Give me the watches.” Stenger takes a couple of steps toward us. We’re trapped. There’s a door to the left of Carson but it leads to a classroom. The door to the stairs is between Stenger and us on the right
. I could sprint back out to the study and try to get out the stairs to the tunnel, but in the small hallway with no room to maneuver, he’ll probably just shoot me in the back.

Carson sets his tw
o packs on the floor and puts his hand to his chronometer.

“Toss it here,” Stenger says.

Carson gives me a quick look, and I get the sense he’s trying to convey something to me but I don’t understand what. The next moment he grabs the doorknob of the room to the left, and vanishes.

Why didn’t I think of that?

Anger burns in Stenger’s eyes as he swings the gun from where Carson has disappeared and points it at me.

“You know it’s probably easier just to take it off your bod
y—”

I’ve been holding the backpack in my hands in front of me as a shield between us. I toss it at St
enger’s face. He reels backward a step but stays standing. He’s about to aim the gun at me again when Carson reappears behind him and tackles him. The gun and the Rubik’s Cube both hit the ground and skid past me as Carson and Stenger crash to the floor. I jump after the gun and go down on one knee as I grab it. I spin and aim it at Stenger’s head as he lashes backward with his elbows at Carson who is holding him down with a knee in his back.

“Stop moving!” I yell.

Stenger sees me pointing the gun and stops. He holds his hands up ahead of him, a few inches off the floor. Carson relaxes his grip on him. Pounding footsteps echo from the hall that Stenger came from. I can’t see anything but it sounds like multiple people.

Did Stenger bring friends?

“Come on, Carson. Let’s get out of here!”

Carson grabs the pack I threw at Stenger and we move hastily toward the stairwell door. I keep the gun aimed at Stenger’s head till we’re through. The moment before the door slams shut I see him sneer. We plummet down the stairs, jumping as many steps as we dare, and crash out into the lower hallway. Carson kicks open the alley door and we sprint for the street.

“Shit. I forgot the car is gone,” I pant, when we reach the other side of the street.

“What now?” Carson says.

My hands are shaking. I find the safety on the gun and set it, then stuff it into one of the packs Carson is carrying. “Let’s get out of sight.” We cut back down the same path between buildings we used earlier. Passing the smelly dumpster, I turn left and head for the cross street. We keep up a steady jog till we reach an alley to turn down, and then I slow to a walk. “God, that was scary. Thank you for tackling him.”

“No problem,” Carson pants.

“Where did you go?” I say. “Before you came back.”

“Not far. I just jumped back to about ten minutes before. I’m guessing you were still upstairs, and I would have been in the balconies. It took me a minute to figure out what to use to get behind Stenger, but finally I just used the wall. I was worried it wasn’t going to be conductive enough
, but it worked out.”

“It was brilliant.”
I walk over and give him a quick hug. “You saved my life, man.”

“No sweat
, dude.” He pats me on the back. “You would have done the same for me.”

“That
was some quick thinking.” I shoulder my second pack.

“So what’s the plan now? We still have a couple of hours till we can get the car back.”

“I vote we stash this stuff somewhere safe, blink back to eleven o’clock and retrieve it. We can go get the car then and get back to the hospital. They’re probably worried about us.”

“T
hey aren’t yet, we haven’t even left the hospital,” Carson says.

“Oh yeah. Well they ought to be worried after what we just went through. I can’t wait to tell them this one.”

We continue down the alley, keeping an eye out for good hiding spaces for our stuff. We finally settle on an old 1950s truck that we find behind someone’s garage. The fabric cover over the truck is mildewed and dirty and one look under the canvas shows us that the truck is not likely to be moving anytime soon. We make sure no one is watching, then stuff our packs into the bed of the truck, careful to replace the cover how we found it.

We find our jump location only a couple of houses down.

“Boats work great.” Carson points to a center console fishing boat on a trailer next to a garage apartment. The layer of leaves on the floor of the boat gives away that, like the pickup truck, the boat hasn’t seen much action recently.