The Time Travel Chronicles (19 page)

“I have colleagues.”

They both looked at Asher’s little gadget. Light was flickering on its face, a sequence of red and amber that Toby thought might mean something. At least it meant the thing was alive, that it hadn’t been wrecked. That was good, Toby supposed – then he remembered that Asher had said it might still do whatever it was meant to do. Focus the whatevers. Move them around again.

“You could go back,” he suggested.

Asher shook his head.

“You could. You said it might have enough juice left. Maybe it didn’t get completely messed up, huh? You could go home. Work on your machine some more. Or let other people work on it, and go have a normal life. If you teach them how to run it, they’d probably leave you alone. You could tell them you want to work on other things.”

“I should never have worked on
this
thing.”

Toby had seen a lot of movies. Thousands of them, he figured. And that didn’t count all the TV shows, and the books.

“They’d use it to change the world,” he guessed.

“Yes.”

“You broke it, didn’t you? When you left. You set it to self-destruct.”

Asher’s body shifted in a bunch of different ways. For a moment, Toby thought he might cry again. It had to be terrible, Toby figured – to work so hard on something, to spend
years
putting something together, only to have it stolen away. And not for a good reason. Not to make things better. Carefully, he took the little gadget out of Asher’s hand and turned it over and over between his fingers. The lights on its face were still flickering, and he could see that it was definitely a sequence of some kind.

“I could never do something like this,” he said. “I’m not that smart. I can’t invent things. I don’t come up with new ideas.”

Asher’s expression was nearly blank for a while. Then a smile spread slowly across his face.

“I’m sure you have other value,” he said.

“I don’t know. I don’t feel like it.”

Toby got up from the step and began to pace around. It was to ease the pain in his tailbone, he told himself. Then, as he continued to move, he began to feel how enormous the world around him was. The landscape stretched on for what looked like miles in every direction, unbroken by nothing but a few scattered trees, and above him stretched an enormous bowl of sky, a bright, crisp blue onto which only a few wispy clouds had been painted.

He thought of his parents driving around in their old van, seeing as much of the country as they could manage.

Thought of them buying a house they didn’t really want.

Urgently, frantically, he told Asher, “They’ll be upset, won’t they? For a while. I know they’ll be upset.”

“Your family?”

“Can I go home? Right now? Can I?”

He was clutching the little thing that wasn’t a phone so tightly that it made his fingers ache. He thought Asher might reach for it, might try to retrieve it, but he didn’t. Maybe that meant it was pretty durable.

“It’s unlikely,” Asher said.

“Then… what, then? Where could we go?”

Asher was looking past him, he realized; was focused on something behind him. When he turned to look, he thought he saw an odd flickering in the air, something like a heat mirage rising above a road – although there was no road anywhere nearby, and it was nowhere near hot enough to generate anything like that.

“Is that it?” Toby stammered. “That right there, is that it? That’s the ribbon?”

“Yes,” Asher said.

“What will it do?”

It had hit him not once but twice before, Toby understood. Once in that hot, empty house, and again in the dark, while some woman named Iris was trying to decide whether to help him or not.

Now, here it was again.

“It’s my
density!
” Toby blurted. “Isn’t it? Maybe it didn’t happen, you know, all random and stuff? Maybe I’m not supposed to be
then
. With my parents. I just interrupted their lives. All the stuff they wanted to do. Maybe I’m supposed to be here. Do this.” He felt like that dog again, wanting to run in circles until it exhausted itself. His nerves were tingling again, alive with electricity.

No, with the energy contained in that
thing
.

Asher’s ribbon.

“I want to go,” he told Asher. “I can’t… I mean, if this is real – I don’t know how it could be real, but if it is, if we’re in the past, what are we supposed to do out here in the middle of nowhere? There’s no food. I guess there’s water somewhere, and we could eat berries and stuff, but… but…” He gulped in air, and it made his head swim. “You built a freaking time machine! I want to go. Please. Let me go. Let me try it.”

“You may go home,” Asher said. “Most likely, you won’t. The ribbon is…”

Toby jabbed a finger toward it. “Right. Fucking. THERE.”

He could feel tears cascading down his face.

“I’m sorry,” Asher said. “For interrupting your life. That wasn’t my intention.”

Something pulled hard at Toby’s heart. Home, he understood. His parents. His friends. He was only fourteen; he wasn’t supposed to think about leaving home for another four years. The image of his mother and father searching for him desperately filled his mind and for a minute he wished Asher had killed him, so that he wouldn’t have to think about that kind of pain.

No place like home
, he thought.

Gently, he knocked the heels of his Connies together, thinking of tornadoes, and Oz, and great adventures that turned out to be a dream… or maybe not.

“We have to go
somewhere
,” he said to Asher.  “We can’t stay here.”

The man stood staring at him for what seemed like forever. Then, again, that odd smile crept across Asher’s face.

“It could kill both of us,” he said.

“Or not,” Toby said.

It took a long time for Asher to nod. He looked down at the face of his little gadget, touched it gently with the pad of his thumb, then stretched out a hand as he stood up from the step, gesturing for Toby to follow him. “We may go to San Francisco,” he said softly as he walked toward that strange, flickering mirage. “Or we may not.”

“Whatever,” Toby said.

“You aren’t afraid?”

Toby looked from him to the ribbon, then up at that huge bowl of sky. “Yeah,” he said, remembering how colossally much those first two trips had hurt. That, he couldn’t say he was anxious to repeat. “But who’s to say it won’t be epically cool? Like, who else has
ever
done this? Ever?”

“Me,” Asher replied.

“And you lived through it.”

Asher opened his mouth as if he intended to argue the point somehow, though he didn’t actually say anything. Typical adult, Toby thought. Always about the
You might hurt yourself
.

Grinning, he took a step toward the ribbon.

“You coming?” he asked Asher.

Asher glanced over his shoulder at the house. It might have been a trick of the light, but he seemed to look a little more pale. Scared, Toby thought; it was a wonder he’d ever worked up the nerve to test his invention out on himself in the first place. No surprise, since he was a scientist, not a test pilot. Not somebody who typically dared to do things. Not somebody who’d be very familiar with an adrenaline rush.

But there was something in Asher’s eyes, something Toby recognized. There was a kid in there.

A dreamer.

An adventurer.

“Race you,” Toby said.

A Word from Carol Davis

If you were a kid in the 1960s, you know about time travel.  Episodes of
The Twilight Zone
took us into the past and the distant future.  In 1966
Time Tunnel
took us aboard the
Titanic
, to the ancient city of Troy, into the midst of the French Revolution and the Battle of Little Bighorn.  The starship
Enterprise
used “the slingshot effect” to travel back in time to 1969… our present.  Great stuff, for a kid with an active imagination and a yen to become a writer.

Twenty years later, I discovered
Quantum Leap
.  I’d written quite a bit by that point, much of it
Trek
fanfiction – but
QL
really drew me in.  I spent the next several years writing
QL
fanfiction, self-publishing most of it in a popular series of fanzines, happy to be able to put my work in the hands of readers who would enjoy it.  To my surprise, one of those readers was the editor of the official
QL
tie-in novels, and in 1995 she accepted my request to become a part of that series, which resulted in
Quantum Leap: Obsessions
and
Quantum Leap: Mirror’s Edge
.  (Since
Mirror’s Edge
was the last book in the series, and was published several years after the show went off the air, I suppose you could say I had the last word in the world of Sam Beckett.)

These days I write not only science fiction, but supernatural mystery, horror, women’s lit, romance, humor… any type of story that crawls into my head wanting to be told.  No matter which genre I’m writing in, most of my work revolves around family: the kind we’re born into, and the kind we create through marriage, friendship, and shared circumstance.  I like to look at the emotional journey in all of my work – the “heart story,” as the writers of
Quantum Leap
always referred to it.  Past or future, Earth or some distant world – for me, storytelling is about the human experience, so when Samuel Peralta proposed the idea of a time travel anthology, the first thing I thought of was, “How does this affect an ordinary person?”  Unlike many time travelers we’ve met, Toby Cobb isn’t a brilliant scientist or a crew member on a starship.  He’s just a kid who’s minding his own business… until he’s hit by that wall.

If you enjoyed the story—and even if you didn’t—I’d love to hear your thoughts!  You can investigate more of my work at my website and blog (
www.caroldavisauthor.com
) and on Facebook (
https://www.facebook.com/caroldavisauthor
).  I look forward to meeting you!

by Stefan Bolz

"Remember, as far as your travels take you, you are always at home."

T
HEY TOLD ME I COULDN'T GO into his workshop. They didn't understand. They thought it would bring back too many memories. But there weren't too many memories. There weren't enough memories. Not nearly enough. I wanted to hold each one, put them in a jar and keep them with me so I could go back whenever I needed to. But instead, they began to drift away, however much I tried to hold on to them. There were painful ones, yes. But they were only from the time when he was in the hospital. Those were the ones I couldn't get back to. How his face was fallen in, how his speech was slurred, how he grasped for things that weren't there.

No. I wanted to go back further. I wanted to remember the Saturday mornings when we worked side by side in his shop. He was always building something. Always. The smoke from the welder filled the air; the blue arc illuminated the walls each time the welding rod connected with the steel. He told me never to look directly into it, to shield my eyes from its intense burning light. For my ninth birthday, he gave me a welding mask. He fitted it perfectly to my head and I didn't take it off for the whole day. It was one of the fancier ones where you could lift the front cover up to look at the welding line and see if it was straight and contained enough filler metal to make a perfect weave bead.

The other gifts — a karaoke machine and Just Dance 4 for the Wii — were nice but they didn't make my heart swell up. The welding mask made me an equal to him. Still an apprentice, yes, but equally capable of using some of the tools and equipment. My stepmom didn't understand why I loved it so much. She couldn't understand a lot of things.

My sister, who was much older than me, got married right around my twelfth birthday. My dad and I made her a bouquet of flowers for her wedding. He let me attach several of the flower petals to the top of the stems. I messed up a few and burned holes into the thin metal pieces. But he cut out new ones each time, and after the fourth one, I finally was able to attach it. Once the bouquet was done, I painted the petals in yellow and white and the stem in dark green. 

My dad had a stroke three days after the wedding. He died one week later. That was two months ago. A few days before he passed away, I sat next to his bed in the hospital. My stepmom let me miss school. I think part of her knew that these were his final days. Whenever I could, I read to him. I was convinced that he was able to hear me. I read to him from the same book he had always read to me. I loved the Eloi. I hated the Morlocks. They scared me. Whenever he’d get to a scene in the book that had Morlocks in it, he would ask me if he should continue. I always said yes. I knew we had to go through the bad scenes, through the scary stuff, to get to the end. The time traveler had to endure it. And so should I.