Revealed (31 page)

What Jonah didn't know was: Where could he hide to get out of Hodge's way?

Jonah's first thought was to scramble into the space between the rows of seats.

This is a plane full of babies—it's not like they have long legs dangling down and taking up all the room between the seats
, Jonah told himself.

But there was barely any room between the seats to begin with. And with only two seats on the right side of the aisle and one seat on the other side, Jonah could tell at a glance that some part of his body was bound to stick out into the aisle.

So . . . if not under the seats, then where?
Jonah thought, frantically peering around.

He saw a door at the back end of the aisle, just beyond row 12, and was already crawling toward it before his brain asked him,
Maybe the bathroom?

Jonah opened the door the smallest amount possible, as silently as possible, and squeezed in. Then he inched the door mostly closed behind him.

Hodge won't notice, will he?
Jonah thought.
Surely this will be one of those times when he's lazy and reckless and he won't look up and down the aisles to make sure nothing's changed since the last time he was on this plane?

Jonah had to stand up, because there wasn't room to stay crouched down in the narrow airplane bathroom—and anyway, it wasn't as if he really wanted to crouch down with his face smashed against the side of the toilet. Even though Jonah knew that this wasn't exactly a regular airplane, the bathroom had a too-realistic smell to it. Jonah almost wished he hadn't gotten his sense of smell back so quickly.

And maybe I should have been a bit more specific about exactly where and when I told the Elucidator to put me on this plane?
Jonah scolded himself.

He turned away from the toilet and peeked out the crack at the side of the door.

Hodge and Lindbergh were both on the plane now, directly in Jonah's line of vision. Hodge was bent over a seat in the second row. Lindbergh, in his blue pilot's uniform, was standing stiffly in the doorway that led to the cockpit.

Hodge straightened up, his arms empty.

“There,” he said. “Now I'll be off.”

Wait—shouldn't he be carrying the baby version of me?
Jonah wondered.
Did I somehow end up on the wrong version of this plane?

He was still timesick enough that it took him a moment to realize: The fact that Hodge wasn't carrying baby Jonah off the plane was actually proof that Jonah was on the
right
version of the plane. He needed to be on the plane that Gary and Hodge had sent off from its last stop—in 1932, probably—without any baby at all in seat 2C.

It's just the other two versions of time where I was ever on this plane
, Jonah reminded himself.

Trying to figure out time and time splits and different versions of time made Jonah's head ache. And he needed to focus on a more immediate problem: Hodge was looking toward the back of the plane. Had he seen Jonah?

No
, Jonah told himself, holding his breath and silently backing away from the door.
He's admiring all the rows of babies that are going to make him rich.

Hodge turned back around toward Lindbergh.

“Remember,” he said. “You must follow our instructions exactly, or you will never see your son again. See you in the future!”

Lindbergh nodded once, curtly, and turned toward the cockpit.

Hodge began walking toward the door back to the Jetway.

He's leaving
, Jonah told himself.
He's leaving . . . he's left!

Jonah heard the door click into place. Almost immediately, the plane pulled back from the Jetway.

Jonah shoved the bathroom door all the way open and took the first step back into the aisle. He had a clear view now of all the babies at the back of the plane—he couldn't have said who any of them were, because they all just looked like sleeping babies.

I guess they aren't really anybody at all yet
, Jonah told himself.

They weren't the children they'd been in the past or in the twenty-first century. If Gary and Hodge had their way, these babies' entire identities lay in the future.

Gary and Hodge aren't going to get their way
, Jonah told himself.

The airplane turned and zoomed suddenly forward, and Jonah realized he didn't have much time to stand around thinking about these babies. He took three quick steps—and stopped again beside row 2.

There was the only baby on the plane Jonah could recognize instantly: Katherine.

Like all the other babies, she was sleeping soundly. She had her thumb in her mouth, which made her look even
more recognizable: Jonah could remember her sucking her thumb a lot when she was little. Sometimes, way back in their childhoods, she used to suck her thumb and hold on to Jonah when she saw something scary on TV.

Of course, that was back when her idea of scary was Cookie Monster on
Sesame Street.

Before he quite thought it through, Jonah started unstrapping baby Katherine from her seat.

Because if this doesn't work and I end up getting stranded somewhere—shouldn't we at least be together?
he told himself.

The plane lurched upward—taking off? Already?—and Jonah would have tumbled over backward, all the way down the aisle, if he hadn't quickly grabbed on to the back of Katherine's seat.

That made him think of the time that he and Katherine had sat on the backs of the train seats in 1903, when they were following Albert Einstein's wife across Eastern Europe. He and Katherine had been a great team then, no matter how much they squabbled.

Stop thinking about the past
, Jonah told himself.
Just think about what you have to do now, all right?

Steadying himself as the plane leveled out, Jonah lifted baby Katherine from her seat and clutched her tightly to his chest. Then he walked on toward the cockpit.

Charles Lindbergh evidently heard Jonah's footsteps,
since he turned around. But no surprise showed on his face.

“You
are
a Lindbergh, if you figured out how to escape from them and come with me,” Lindbergh said calmly, even as he shoved one of the levels on the control panel forward.

Jonah had a sudden brainstorm.

“Uh, right,” he agreed cautiously. “And if you really believe I'm your son, don't you think we should just go back to the 1930s together? Why bother doing what Gary and Hodge want you to do?”

“Because they've already proved that they can follow you anywhere you go,” Lindbergh said, shrugging. The motion made it easier for Jonah to see the futuristic tranquilizer gun Lindbergh had strapped on his hip. Jonah remembered how he'd seen Lindbergh use that very gun in the simulation of what Gary and Hodge wanted Lindbergh to do.

Don't do anything that makes Lindbergh decide he needs to use that gun on me
, Jonah reminded himself.
No sudden moves.

“But—” Jonah began.

Lindbergh didn't wait to hear Jonah's argument.

“Mr. Gary and Mr. Hodge can still trap you; they could trap
me
—no, I want to finish this and get away, free and clear,” he said.

That was what Jonah wanted too. But his “free and clear” wouldn't be the same as Lindbergh's “free and clear.”

Jonah couldn't think of a good answer. The plane lurched slightly. To be on the safe side—and buy himself some time to think—Jonah dropped into the empty copilot's seat beside Lindbergh.

Lindbergh glanced Jonah's way.

“That baby will be safer strapped in place in the back,” Lindbergh said. “This will be my first time landing this rig.”

If the plane landed on its own back at the airport, and if it's supposed to land on its own when Lindbergh's a baby again, I don't think it's going to take a lot of piloting skill for Lindbergh to land it once in the future
, Jonah thought.

He decided that wasn't the best thing to point out to Charles Lindbergh. Instead Jonah went straight for the main point.

“I'm not actually your son,” he said, and was surprised that he managed to sound apologetic about it. “Gary and Hodge have been lying to you.”

Lindbergh took his eyes off the instrument panel in front of him just long enough to glance toward Jonah.

“I already heard—well,
saw
—you say that back at the airport,” Lindbergh said. “Mr. Gary and Mr. Hodge already explained to me that you would be confused about your
parentage. It's understandable. You were kidnapped, after all.”

“Yeah—by Gary and Hodge!” Jonah protested.

“Don't worry—you will lose your delusions once we get back to the 1930s and you're a small child once more,” Lindbergh said soothingly, as if Jonah would automatically believe him just because Lindbergh said so.

Jonah remembered the proof that he and Angela had discussed.

“Look,” he said, holding out the Elucidator in his hand. It still looked vaguely cell phone–like, which Jonah thought was good. It would look futuristic to Lindbergh. “This is a machine from the future that can do many things, and one of them is a DNA test. DNA is like—genetics. How people are related.”

Jonah was pretty sure that that was a lousy explanation of DNA and genetics, but he kept going.

“I can take a hair from my head and a hair from your head and lay them across this Elucidator, and it can tell us whether you're my father or not,” Jonah said.

As he spoke, Jonah demonstrated, making his gestures broad and dramatic so that Lindbergh saw his every move. Then Jonah laid both hairs across the surface of the Elucidator and said aloud, “Elucidator, please determine any genetic match between these two hairs. Reply verbally, so Mr. Lindbergh can hear.”

“It's
Colonel
, not Mister,” Lindbergh corrected.

“Sorry,” Jonah muttered, feeling sorry only that he'd ruined the drama of the moment.

The Elucidator made various clicking sounds—Angela had thought to add that, because she said Lindbergh would be used to more mechanical devices.

“Here is your answer,” the Elucidator finally said. “These two hairs belong to people who are eighth cousins, twice removed.”

“See?” Jonah said. “I'm sorry, but—”

“Why should I believe you?” Lindbergh asked. “Mr. Gary and Mr. Hodge did the same test with the hairs, and
their
experiment showed that you are my son.”

They did?
Jonah thought.

He pulled his Elucidator back from where he'd been holding it out so Lindbergh could see.

“Why didn't you tell Angela and me?” Jonah demanded.

YOU DIDN'T ASK, the Elucidator flashed back.

Then, as if to prove its point, the Elucidator began showing video: Jonah with Gary, Hodge, Lindbergh, and baby Katherine in the airfield office. While Jonah was turned looking at Katherine, Gary very dramatically plucked a hair from Jonah's sweater, took a hair from Lindbergh's head, and pressed the two against his Elucidator watch. Gary's Elucidator lit up with the words FATHER-SON MATCH.

How had so much happened while Jonah was just turned around looking at Katherine?

He peered down again at baby Katherine, still asleep in his arms. Somehow that gave him the gumption to argue back against Lindbergh.

“Gary and Hodge told
me
that I'm not your son. They said I'm just an ordinary kid that got dropped off at an orphanage,” Jonah said. “They're liars.”

“How do you know they weren't lying to you and telling me the truth?” Lindbergh asked.

How had the conversation gotten so turned around?

“Because they've lied to me before,” Jonah said. “And because I saw what they wanted to do, and part of that's just tricking you. If you do what they want, you'll be stuck in the future—as a baby. Turn this plane around!”

“I don't believe you,” Lindbergh said quietly.

“Why should you believe them instead of me?” Jonah asked.

“Because they're the ones who say they'll give me my son back,” Lindbergh said, staring out through the windshield into the darkness of Outer Time.

How can I argue with that?
Jonah wondered.

He stared out the windshield too. Off in the distance he could see lights whizzing closer—always the first sign during time travel that it was almost time to land.

What is there left for me to try?
Jonah wondered.

He could think of only one thing.

Don't do it right away
, Jonah reminded himself, and it was almost like he had Angela and regular-age Katherine right there with him, telling him what to do.
Think about the consequences.

Jonah spent about three seconds thinking about the consequences, and he was still convinced he had only one choice. The lights of the future were getting closer and closer.

“Here,” Jonah said, holding out the Elucidator and the two hairs. “Take this. Make yourself invisible and travel anywhere you want to in time. If you go to my time period in the twenty-first century again, you can get a DNA test that you can pick out yourself. Test the hairs again. See for yourself who's telling the truth. Then meet me in the future, where we're supposed to land. You've got that tranquilizer gun—we can hold off Gary and Hodge together.”

Jonah had handed an Elucidator to Mileva Einstein back in 1903, and everything had turned out fine then. Ultimately.

Wasn't it possible that everything would work the same way this time around?

Lindbergh at first made no move to take the Elucidator and the hairs. Did he think Jonah was just trying to trick
him even more? Would Jonah have to grab the tranquilizer gun and use it himself on Lindbergh and Gary and Hodge?