In Times Like These (31 page)

“Yeah, basically. But at least he’s a time traveler.”

“This is not how I saw this night going,” Her gaze travels to Cole pouring pints behind the bar.

“We have to at least find out what he knows,” Blake says.

“Okay.” I down another swallow of my beer. “I’ll go get our tab.”

I press through the crowd to the bar and after a few moments Cole sidles over.

“I guess we’re closing out early. Just the three of our drinks and the one of his beers.”

Cole starts drying out the inside of a glass. “You going to take him off my hands for the night?”

“Yeah, looks that way.”

“Don’t worry about it then. They’re on the house.”

“Really? You don’t have to do that.”

“No problem
, man. Just bring that one around sometime again without your new friend.” He nods toward Francesca and I see her smile.

“Thanks
, man. I’ll try.”

Cole drifts off to another customer. I tuck a twenty under the edge of the container of limes and go back to my friends. I’ve just reached the booth when Guy collides with me.

“Let’s do this!”

He sways past me and works his way toward the doo
r. A girl with a kilt and thigh-high socks jumps suddenly as he walks past her, and I see her glare at him as he makes for the exit. He manages to keep his hands to himself the rest of the way outside and we catch up to him on the sidewalk. Francesca snakes her scarf around her neck again and scrounges around her bag for her hat.

“This way,” Guy says, and jolts off to the right. The cold seems to sober him up a bit and we have a hard time keeping up with him as he plunges down alleys and side streets.

He comes to a stop near the steps of a brick apartment building. He looks from the front entrance down to the next building and back.

“Pretty sure it’s this one.” He trots u
p the steps and fumbles with his keys for a few minutes before he finally gives up and pushes the button on a call box next to the door.

“Lawrence, l
et me in!”

A moment later
, the door buzzes and Guy jerks it open.

“Come on.” He waves us through. Francesca gives him a wide berth as she slides past. The interior of the ha
llway we enter is warm and stuffy. The stairs are carpeted with a shag in a variety of browns that may have once looked good before the years of foot traffic wore it down. We ascend behind our host to the third floor.

The landing holds two doors. Gu
y pounds on the door labeled 3B, and a few moments later, it swings open.

“I brought you a present,” Guy says to the face that appears behind the door.

Lawrence is dark-haired and large. He’s shorter than his brother but easily twice as wide. He scans us skeptically but his gaze lingers a moment on Francesca.

“Who are they?”

“They’re some fellow titties. Aren’t you proud of me?” Guy drawls, and pushes his way past his brother into the apartment.

Lawrence stands in the doorway appraising us for a moment, but then opens the door wider. “Well, come in I guess.”

I step cautiously into the kitchen area of what appears to be a two-bedroom apartment. Guy staggers around the right side of a kitchen island. The living room space beyond the kitchen’s linoleum is dominated by a bank of computer monitors and an L shaped couch that Guy drops himself onto. I notice the office chair in front of the largest computer screen is littered with wrappers and some crumbs that match the ones on Lawrence’s T-shirt.

“I’m Benjamin.” I extend a hand to Lawrence, and he takes it. “These are my friends
, Francesca and Blake.”

“I’m Lawrence.” He
shakes the others hands also, and gestures toward the living room where Guy is lounging on a corner of the couch with his feet up. We follow him in.

“You like my
titties, Lawrence? That’s three more than you were likely to see tonight.”

“Why is he calling us that?” Francesca says.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry,” Lawrence says, “It’s not you. He calls lots of people that.” He scratches behind one of his ears. “One of his school professors used to abbreviate, ‘Travelers in Time’ to T.I.T. He’s been calling all time travelers, ‘titties’ ever since. Although usually it’s just when he’s drunk.”

“Which is often
, I take it,” Francesca says.

“He’s not always like this,” Lawrence replies.

“What? You don’t like my charming personality?” Guy calls from the couch.

“We’re actually looking for some help,” I say, ignoring Guy. “We got your brother
’s name from Dr. Harold Quickly. We thought you might have—”

“Whoa. Wait. What did you say your names were?” Lawrence backs up a step and looks at each of our faces.

“I’m Benjamin, this is Blake and Frances—”

“Francesca Castellanas?” Lawrence asks.

“How did you know that?” Francesca replies.

“Oh holy shit! My friend Cassandra wrote a paper about you in like first term.”

“Someone wrote a paper about me?” Francesca asks.

“You’re the original
’86ers,” Lawrence says in awe. “Wow. That’s crazy. I didn’t expect to run into you back here. I mean I knew it was theoretically possible but—”

“What are
’86ers?” I ask. “Why do you know about us?”

“We all study you at the Academy. I mean, we study all the early time travelers, but you guys especially. It’s like required reading and shit.”

“Told you he’d wet himself,” Guy says.

“What’s the Academy?” Blake asks.

“Time Travel Academy,” Lawrence says, “Well, it’s The Academy of Temporal Sciences, or ATS if you want to be specific. Guy was class of 2157. Or . . . would have been.”

“That school blew,” Guy comments from the couch. “You could learn more about time travel from a fly on a pile of dog shit.”

“So they have a school for time traveling in the future?” I say.

This is getting wild
.

“Yeah,
they did anyway,” Lawrence says. “It’s shut down now. Or at least it will be. That’s what we heard anyway. Sometime in the 2160s.”

“So you guys are from the future?” Francesca asks.

I look around the apartment. The computer monitors definitely outclass anything that ought to exist in the eighties, but otherwise, nothing looks especially out of place.

“That’s right
, baby,” Guy says, and puckers his lips at her. “I’m your future.”

“What’s it like being you?” Francesca says, staring him down. “Do people just punch you in the face all the time?”

Guy grins and flips her off.

“Please ignore him,” Lawrence says.

“So you are from 2160?” Blake asks.

“We came back from 2155,” Lawrence replies as he plops down into his office chair. Blake and I set our packs down and Blake takes a seat on the far end of the couch from Guy.

“Wow. What’s that like?” Francesca and I lean against the countertop of the island.

“Spacemen and flying cars
, bro,” Guy says in an affected surfer voice. “It’s gnarly.”

“It’s not that different,” Lawrence says. “Technology is way better of course. And we’ve got the grid, but that has its downsides too.”

“The grid?”

“Yeah, satellite system programming for time travelers. Makes it a lot safer.”

“Time travel is a regular thing there?” Blake asks.

“N
ot exactly. It’s pretty regulated. And unauthorized usage is definitely frowned upon.”

“Nice lethal frowns,” Guy adds. He sticks his fingers in his mouth and pulls his cheeks down in a sort of snarl, then laughs.

“Who regulates it?” I ask.

“Oh, there are a couple of different factions.”

“What are you doing in 1986?” Francesca asks. “Why come all the way back here?”

Lawrence looks away to his computer screen. “We have our reasons.”

“It’s okay, brother. I’ll tell them.” Guy sits up straight on the couch and wags a finger back and forth at us. “I’m going to tell you the whole . . . amazing . . . story. But first, I need a beer.”

He pushes himself off the couch and I can’t tell if it’s walking
, or simply trying not to fall, that propels him into the kitchen. He makes it to the refrigerator and pulls out a can of Old Milwaukee.

“See, the problem with the future,” he says
, as he pops the top on the beer, “is that they just can’t take a joke.” He looks from me to Francesca. “Too serious.”

“So
 . . . you got in trouble?” Francesca asks.

“Trouble is a relativistic term.
” Guy sips his beer. “You would know that if you ever went to the Academy. Like me.” He sways sideways and collides with the back of the couch, but tries to play it off and just leans against it.

“So you went to time travel academy
, but you got in trouble, and they . . . kicked you out?” Blake asks.

“I didn’t get in trouble with the Academy.”

“Well you kind of did,” Lawrence says.

“Hey, this is my story.” Guy points to the back of Lawrence’s head. “He wasn’t even in the Academy. He was still in Academy Prep.” Guy
’s face contorts into a look of disgust. “Little prepper shits.” He swallows a burp.

“A
t least I didn’t get kicked out,” Lawrence mutters under his breath.

“A
lot of good that did you, Tubster. Let’s see if they take your fat ass back now.”

Lawrence ignores him.

“But as I was saying, we didn’t leave because of the school. We left . . . because of the Journeymen.”

“You mentioned them earlier,” I say. “What are Journeymen?”

“They’re thugs,” Lawrence says. “Mob hit men.”

“There is a mob in 2160?” Francesca asks.

“There’s always a mob,” Lawrence replies, still fiddling with the computer. Guy weaves his way around the end of the couch and plops down into the corner again. Lawrence continues. “They were the ones that started it actually, the crackdown on the time travelers. They had the most riding on it.”

“I don’t follow you,” I say. “Why would the mob be involved with time travelers?”

“Because they get their panties all in a bunch when you clean out their casinos,” Guy says. He leans his head back and speaks toward the ceiling to no one in particular. “It’s only money, guys.” His head lolls back onto the cushion but he tilts it toward us. “They burnt down our mansion . . .”

“You had a mansion?” Francesca says.

“Yeah, baby. I’ll give you the private tour sometime.”

“You said it burned down.”

“Details, baby, details.” He rolls his head back and resumes his contemplation of the ceiling.

“So you guys had your house burned down by casino
hit men from the future. Am I getting that right?” Blake says.

Lawrence nods. “Yeah, more or less.”

“And you came to the eighties because . . .”

“We’ve never met anyone who knew Journeymen to come this far back. They’re pretty thick in the early part of the
twenty-second century. We’ve never heard of one going pre-millennium though. We figure this is as good a place to lie low as any.”

“What happens if they catch you?” Blake asks.

Lawrence shrugs. “I don’t especially want to find out.”

“How much money did you steal?” Blake asks.

“We didn’t steal it. We won it,” Lawrence says. “They just didn’t see it that way.”

“Can we come back to this thing about your friend writing a paper about me in school?” Francesca asks. “What did she write about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She probably just made up some B.S. about your life to impress our history teacher. He was an idiot.”

“But people have heard of us in 2155?” I say.

“Everybody knows about you because they know about Harold Quickly. You all got famous by association. Famous with time travelers anyway; I don’t know that anyone else has ever heard of you.”

“Quickly is a big deal then, too?” I ask.

“Oh yeah, he’s like Grandfather Time. He started it all. Of course there are some guys who claim to have gone farther into the past, so they say they’re, ‘The first time travelers.’ But that’s all horseshit. Everybody knows it was Quickly who started it all. His dissertation on the nature of temporal gravity is pretty much the first thing you read when you get into the Academy. Every major temporal physicist to come after him basically just stole his original theory and just made tweaks to try to get attention. He blew them all out of the water when he came to the Fuller Hall debates.”

“Quickly’s been to the Academy?” I say.

“Oh yeah. Well, he will. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Francesca says. “Aren’t you sure?”

Lawrence holds his hands up and wiggles his fingers around. “Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.”

“Excuse me?” Francesca asks.

Lawrence looks from her face to mine and then to Blake’s. “Really? Nobody got that reference?”

We stare at him mutely.

“
Dr. Who
? . . . Nobody?”

“
Dr. Who
?” Francesca says. “Is he another scientist?”

“Ha. No. He’s a TV alien. You guys really are babes in the woods aren’t you? Twenty-first
century time travelers and you’ve never even heard of Dr. Who? If the Journeymen hadn’t torched my digital media library, I’d make you sit and watch every episode till you were properly ready to have intelligent conversation on time travel culture.”

I look to the couch and notice Guy has fallen asleep. His beer is leaning precariously on the couch cushion in his loose fingers.
At least the conversation has gotten more intelligent there.

“So you seem pretty knowledgeable. Will you help us out? We’re trying to get back to 2009.”

“I might be talked into it,” Lawrence replies. “What’s in it for us though?”

“We could pay you,” Francesca says.

“With what? Smiles?”

“We’ve got money,” Francesca says. She reaches down into her pack and holds up one of the stacks of hundreds.

“We’re time travelers. We can always get money. What do you have to offer that we can’t already get?”

Francesca straightens up. “
Well I don’t know what you’re suggesting . . .”

“What have you been using for anchors?” Lawrence cuts her off.

“Oh,” Francesca says.

“We’ve been using items from Quickly’s lab,” I say.

Lawrence swivels his chair to face us directly. “Got anywhere good?”

“Depends on where you want to go I guess.”

I pull my pack up from the floor and lay it on the counter. Popping open the latch, I begin pulling out a few of our anchors. Francesca does the same. Lawrence gets out of his chair to come look. He picks up the photo of the notched silver dollar and sets it back down. Next he picks up a photo of a toolbox in a barn and reads the description.

“Oh, you have Montana.”

I notice it’s one of the ones with Mym’s handwriting on the back.

“We actually need that one,” I say, and take it out of his hands. He gives me a suspicious glance but then moves on to another packet of photos.

He lingers over an antique hourglass and then again on a picture of a pewter mug on a bar in Germany.

“Okay. I think I could possibly help you,” he says.

“How would you be able to help us?” Blake says. “If we trade you some of our anchors, what would we get in return?”

“You can use our time por
tal.” He nods toward one of the doors along the wall.

“What’s a time portal?” Francesca says.

“I’ll show you.” He leads us around the couch to the wooden door and cracks it open. He meets some resistance in the form of some clothes on the floor but once he has it open, he flips on the light and steps back so we can have a look. I lean in to see. The bedroom is a mess for the first few feet of space. There’s a small twin bed jammed against the wall in the corner that’s littered with clothes and random magazines. Taking up the majority of the rest of the room, is a floor-to-ceiling cell made of cinderblocks, with a steel door.

He elbows past me with a set of keys and unlocks the three deadbolts on the steel door. The hinges complain slightly as the door swings open. Francesca peers cautiously past me to see inside. We inch closer.

Lawrence illuminates the cell with a switch that turns on a set of fluorescent overhead lights. Inside are two metal chairs and a table with some straps and diodes on it. A tangle of wires on the table leads onto the floor and over to a pile of car batteries that have been linked up in series with each other. A single computer monitor sits on the table with the wiring.

“What do you think? I built it myself.”

I try to think of something complimentary to say.
It looks like an interrogation room.

“Looks
 . . . efficient.”

“The batteries are just back-up power in case the electric were to fail. The room is
totally impenetrable once you’re inside. Makes for a super safe travel environment.”

It smells like feet.

“How far can we get in this?” Blake says.

“Guy only likes to go from wee
kend to weekend in it, but it’ll do ten years at a pop, easy.”

“You only go to weekends?” Francesca says.

“Yeah, Guy doesn’t really like weekdays much.”

“Mondays are for suckers.” Guy’s voice reaches me from the bedroom doorway. He has found his feet again and is le
aning on the doorpost with half-lidded eyes.

“It has fringe benefits too,” Lawrence says. “You only age like a hundred days per year that way. Keeps you young.”

“You have enough room for all of us in here?” I say.

“Yeah, I’ll rig up some more straps,” Lawrence says. He flips off the light. “I’ll do it in the morning.” He passes through us and leads us back to the living room. “You guys are welcome to crash here tonight. The couch is pretty comfortable.”

“My bed is really comfortable,” Guy says to Francesca.

“Ugh.” Francesca turns to me and whispers, “We aren’t really going to stay here are we?”

Blake leans in. “I’d do about anything if it gets us ten years.”

Francesca stews for a moment. “Well, you’re not leaving me alone with either of these guys.”

“Don’t worry. We aren’t going anywhere,” I say.

I turn to Lawrence. “We actually need to charge our chronometers. Do you have a wall outlet we can use?”

“Yeah, sure. Not that you’ll be needing those antiques anymore, but I don’t mind.” He points me to the wall past the couch. “I can grab you guys a couple of blankets if you want.”

“Thanks.”

Lawrence and Guy disappear into the other bedroom and don’t immediately return.

“You trust that thing?
” Francesca gestures toward the jump room.

“It looks a little sketchy
, but these two obviously use it okay. Neither of them are missing arms or anything,” I say.

“It will only take three jumps to get home if it can really do ten years at a time,” Blake says. “We could be home in our own beds tomorrow night. If the chronometers were charged, I’d just skip to tomorrow morning and say ‘strap me in.’”

“I just don’t know how much I trust these guys,” Francesca says. “Dr. Quickly at least evoked confidence, and it was bad enough doing jumps with him. The idea of traveling with these guys . . . it actually makes me nauseated just thinking about it.”

“It’s just three jumps,” Blake says.

I plug two of our chargers into the wall and Blake hands me his chronometer to plug in. I slip mine off my wrist and hook it up as well. I leave them near the baseboard and lay my pack down next to them. I look around for another outlet for Francesca’s and have to settle for one in the kitchen. Lawrence emerges from the bedroom with an armload of blankets as I’m plugging it in.