The Time Travel Chronicles (18 page)

“Dude,” Toby said.

Asher’s eyes were bloodshot as red as little tomatoes. There was a film of snot on his upper lip that he didn’t even seem to know was there. “This is…” he muttered. “God. I can’t imagine a more catastrophic failure than this.”

Toby amended his thought to: a wimp who took himself way too seriously. “I don’t know,” he said with a groan. “You could have… like, blown the place up. Like Chernobyl or something? Killed a bunch of people and contaminated the planet? And that’s assuming that I don’t believe you’re an absolute freaking bald-faced liar. I have no evidence of anything. For all I know you gassed me somehow, loaded me into a van and drove me out here. The only evidence I have of anything unusual is that suit you’re wearing. And maybe that’s just some industrial prototype or something. Why should I believe you? Why should I take you seriously at all? You’re just some weird dude with poor emotional control.”

Asher blinked, again and again, with that snot gleaming on his upper lip.

Then he stuck his fingers into a pocket at the right hip of his coveralls and pulled out a flat, rectangular object a little thicker than Toby’s phone. Like the phone, it looked to be made of metal and plastic and glass.

“You have a phone,” Toby said dryly.

“It’s not a phone,” Asher said.

“Then what is it?”

Asher turned the thing over in his hands. He held it gently, as if he was afraid of breaking it, or dropping it. “It’s a receiver,” he said, more to his knees than to Toby. “It focuses and directs the particle stream.”

“Oooookay,” Toby said.

“You don’t believe me. Of course you don’t believe me.”

“I believe part of it. People build gadgets all the time. You put together parts from other stuff and build something new. Half the kids in my class can do that. This one kid, Lee? He built a remote that changed the channels on all the TVs on our whole block. Stuff like that is no big deal. So, how do you get from there to ‘I built a time machine’? That’s what I’ve got an issue with.” Toby stopped then, and waited for Asher to rebut any or all of that, but all the man did was continue to look at him sadly.

Then Asher said softly, “
This
is a phone.”

He pushed the cuff of his sleeve up his arm, revealing the underside of his left wrist. There was something there, a small, whitish square with a pebbled texture. To his dismay, Toby couldn’t tell if it was stuck to Asher’s skin or had been inserted underneath it. The latter idea made him more than a little queasy.

“It doesn’t work here, of course,” Asher said.

“Oh. Of course not.”

“I would have removed it before I left, but that would have tipped them off. No one removes a phone – and particularly, you don’t try to remove it yourself, for fear of permanent nerve damage.”

“Nerve damage?” Toby echoed.

“It’s connected to–”

“To what? Your
brain
?”

Toby meant that as a joke. Mockery. Because…
Jesus
. The thing was wired to Asher’s
brain
? “I need to go,” he stammered. “I don’t – this is – I really need to go home. My parents have got to be freaking out by now. Okay?” When Asher didn’t reply, he backed off a step, trying not to look anywhere near Asher’s wrist. “I need to go home now,” he said, aware that it sounded like he was begging.

He tried to back up another step, but his legs gave out on him and he ended up sitting in a heap on the ground. His tailbone sang a little because of the way he’d landed, but that seemed to be the least of his problems.

“I could try,” Asher said.

“Try what?”

For no reason Toby could figure out, Asher passed the thing that looked like a phone but wasn’t gently into Toby’s hands. “There might be enough residual energy in it to connect to the stream. It’s–” Asher shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand. The layman’s version is, if it recognizes you, it might ricochet you back to where you interfered with the ribbon.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“You could end up somewhere else. Or… nowhere.”

Toby could think of no good response to that, so instead of answering, he looked down at the gadget Asher had given him. It did look homemade, rather than mass-produced. A couple of the welds on its side were a little sloppy.

Why worry?
he thought. The thing couldn’t do anything to him. Not really. Maybe it’d give him a little bit of a shock. Lee’s remote control had done that to everyone who touched it before Lee’s dad bashed it into pieces with a hammer.

Asher looked serious about the whole thing, but for all Toby knew, he’d implanted that thing in his wrist himself. Maybe he had little implants all over his body, things that would make him look like Future Guy. That would make him seem more convincing. He might be good with building gadgets, and even with minor surgery, but that didn’t mean he was actually some big-time PhD from the
FUTURE
.

Okay, maybe he was a PhD. But the rest of it? No freaking way.

“What about you?” Toby asked him.

Asher’s face twitched. “Ah, there’s the rub,” he said mildly.

“The… what?”

Asher took the gadget back, touched his finger to several points on its face, frowned, and nodded.

“What rub?” Toby pressed.

“The fly in the ointment. The wrinkle in the fabric. I lied to you, Toby Cobb.” Before Toby could answer, Asher held up a finger, gesturing for him to hold his silence. “You probably assumed I was on some exploratory mission. Something that someone assigned me to do for the greater good. But that’s not it at all. I’m not here because I was exploring. Aiming to learn. That part of the process was finished months ago. I traveled here and there, in space and time, more than a dozen times. A few months here, a year there. Across the room, across the globe. All I really wanted to learn – at least at first – was whether my creation worked. You asked if I wanted to change history, and the answer is still no, though I’m not terribly concerned with the effect of paradox on a world that for you lies well into the future.”

Toby wrinkled an eyebrow. He would have said something, but he suspected Asher would cut him off.

“I ran,” Asher said.

Toby wrinkled the other eyebrow, creating a matched set.

“I was a curiosity, at first,” Asher went on. “The boy with the marvelous brain. I could imagine things no one else could. I ate up knowledge. Absorbed it so quickly and so completely that no one could keep up with me – and certainly, no one could presume to
teach
me. At an age when most boys are concerned with finding a pretty girl to attract, I was parsing out the intricacies of time.” Waving the finger again, he said, “I built a time machine. You can imagine the kind of stir it created.”

“They believed you?” Toby asked.

“Let’s say they believed that
I
believed it. They were curious. Willing to admit to the possibility that I might be right. So they had me under constant surveillance. Watched every move I made. And I do mean every move.”

“Is that legal?”

“They made it legal.”

“Wow. That… that really sucks.”

“My life…” Asher sighed softly. “You cannot imagine what my life became. What I saw it becoming if I stayed there even one day longer. So I told them I was going to run another test. I had ‘assistants’ who understood how the ribbon worked – people who read all my notes, who made sure I was doing what I said I was going to do.” With a smile growing across his face, Asher looked down at the gadget in Toby’s hands. “But there’s always a way, isn’t there? For a boy who’s determined to get out?”

“So you came here?”

“I was going to San Francisco, as I told you.”

“Because of some woman who had something you wanted?”

“A long story,” Asher said.

“That’s a movie,” Toby told him firmly. “This guy sees a picture of some beautiful woman and falls in love with her, and he goes back in time to meet her because he fell in love with her. With her picture. My mom loves it. He, like, hypnotizes himself back in time.”

“For the sake of true love?”

“In the book, it was because he was dying. Or something. That’s what my mom said. So are you in love with some woman in San Francisco? Because that gives me a headache. Although I guess I could understand it. People do really crazy shit when they think they’re in love.”

“I’m not in love. Not with a woman,” Asher amended.

“What, then?”

“With tranquility. Simplicity.”

The cold ground was beginning to leach all the heat out of Toby’s body. On top of that, his tailbone hurt like somebody was Tasering it. With a hand wrapped around Asher’s gadget, he struggled up to his feet, then sat down gingerly on the step an arm’s reach away from Asher. The step wasn’t much less cold than the ground.

“This is tranquil,” he said. “This, here.”

“I won’t argue that.”

“Maybe we’re somewhere near San Francisco.”

“Doubtful.”

“You’re sticking with Kansas, then?” That twigged Toby’s memory, and he grinned. “I could just knock my heels together and repeat ‘There’s no place like home’ three times. Supposedly that does it. Although maybe you need the ruby slippers.” He tipped his head toward his sneakered feet. “I dunno if Connies work at all.”

Asher didn’t respond to any of that. He was looking off into the distance.

“Can they bring you back? Those people who were watching everything you were doing?” Toby asked.

“No.”

“They don’t know how?”

“The system is programmed to respond only to me.”

“Sweet,” Toby said. “But… you didn’t want to go back? Ever? You were just gonna stay in San Francisco?”

“I was.”

“And they can’t follow you.”

“No,” Asher murmured.

“I bet they’re pissed. You think? If you bailed and left them with a machine that won’t do anything, after they spent – what did you say? Eighty billion dollars on it?” Toby made a low, soft whistle.

“Yes,” Asher said. “I think they’re pissed. Will be pissed,” he amended.

“In the future.”

“Yes.”

They sat there together for a while. At one point Toby saw a couple of birds fly by, but other than that, nothing moved. He could hear no sound but the rustle of the breeze and an intermittent creak he thought might be a loose shutter shifting on its rusty hinges.
Kansas?
he wondered. He’d never been to Kansas – or Colorado, either, for that matter. They’d gone down to Florida once, to Disney World, a couple of times to Philly for a ballgame, and once to New York City for the Christmas show. That was about it. Still, he thought he might be able to find his way home from Kansas. Or Colorado.

But if Asher was telling the truth…

“Would we be a long ways in the past?” he asked after a while. “Like, a lot?”

“It depends on what you consider ‘a lot’. I don’t believe the house” – Asher tipped his head backwards, gesturing – “dates before the Civil War. So we’re likely at some point later than that.”

“Okay.”

“I’m having trouble seeing what’s okay about it.”

Toby shrugged, a twitch of one shoulder. “It could be worse, right? I mean, we could have landed on the top of a mountain. Or the middle of the ocean. Or, like, we could materialize inside a mountain. Or a wall. That wouldn’t be good. Right?”

“Not very.”

“Could that have happened?”

“It might have.”

“Because I was in the way.” Asher simply nodded in reply, so Toby fell silent again, thinking. After a minute he said, “I feel like that sometimes. Like I’m in the way. I feel like there’s stuff my parents would like to do, if they didn’t have me. They used to travel a lot. They’d live somewhere for a few months, then decide to try something new. They lived in nineteen different places before I was born. And a few more after. But after I started school, they figured they should stay in one place. They say continuity is important. That I should have lasting relationships and stuff.”

“Do you?” Asher asked.

“Not so much. I mean… I have some friends and all, but it’s not like some BFF thing. We just hang out together. I think that BFF stuff is mostly for girls. They seem to get more out of it. I’d be okay if we moved.”

“Have you told them that?”

“Yeah. I guess they figure I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

There’d been that house, for instance – the one the Realtor was showing them. It looked just like all the other ones in that neighborhood, with only minor differences. Mirror layouts, Dad called it: some of them had the garage to the right of the front door, some on the left. It didn’t make them any more interesting. Interesting like this house, right here, with its crazy high ceilings and fancy woodwork. This was a house his parents could have some fun with. Painting, fixing.

“I guess you never really get what you want, do you?” he asked Asher.

“In my experience? Very seldom.”

“Do you have friends? Back there, where you’re from?”