The Wells Bequest (19 page)

I Meet Myself Coming and Going

J
aya and I stood together in the street, watching the lab burn, standing back from the wall of heat. The explosion still echoed in our ears. Mark Twain had Mr. Smith in a hammerlock, his arm behind his back. My legs felt weak, and Jaya looked grim and shaken.

“Leo, you saved my life in there. Thank you.” She looked into my eyes.

I looked back into hers. I didn't know what to say.

Tesla stared at his lab. The lightning seemed to have gone out of his eyes. “It's all gone, Sam,” he said. “The work of half my lifetime, very nearly.” I saw tears on his cheeks, red with reflected firelight.

“It's a damn shame, Nik,” said Twain gently. “A damn shame.”

Tesla turned on Mr. Smith. “How could you do this? I trusted you!”

Mr. Smith shrugged, or tried to—he couldn't move his shoulders much. “It's your own fault. You should have let me take the things and go. Then you wouldn't have lost everything.”

Tesla roared. I thought he was going to tear his assistant apart. Twain spun Mr. Smith around, putting himself between the two men.

“It's not true, Mr. Tesla,” Jaya said quickly. “It's not your fault. Your lab would have burned down tonight anyway. In the future where we come from, the fire starts in the basement. I think Mr. Smith was always going to start it.”

“You knew that? Then why didn't you warn me?” This time I thought Tesla was going to tear
Jaya
apart.

“Well, Leo wouldn't—I mean, we didn't want to risk—” She stopped. “I'm sorry, Mr. Tesla, I really am. But don't worry, you'll build a new lab right away. I promise.”

We heard fire engine bells. The sound seemed to remind Jaya of her impatience. “Come on, Leo. We have to go,” she said.

“I'm really sorry about your lab, Mr. Tesla,” I said.

Jaya said, “I'll see you very soon, Mr. Clemens. But—” She hesitated.

“But I won't see you, is that it?” said Mark Twain.

Jaya nodded. “You've already seen me back then.”

The clanging was getting louder and closer. “Come on, Leo,” Jaya said.

Mr. Smith said something unrepeatable. Twain wrenched his arm. We walked away quickly to the train, not looking back.

• • •

When we got uptown to my building, it was quiet and empty in the starlight. We slipped in through the back door and climbed the stairs to the top floor. Once we were all packed and shrunk, Jaya hopped on the saddle. “My turn to drive,” she said. “Get on behind me.”

I started to argue, but then I remembered that I had been sitting behind her when the time machine had appeared in my bedroom. “All right,” I said, “but we have to make a stop on the way home.”

“When you saw us in your bedroom, you mean? Okay,” said Jaya.

I braced myself for that horrible feeling of wrongness, and Jaya pushed the lever marked
FUTURE.

• • •

We poured through time again with the same headlong, motionless hurtling, but this time it was different—maybe because we were going in the right direction. I felt like I was winning a game, acing a test. An upside-down waterfall of hope cascaded through me, starting in the soles of my feet and babbling out through my head.

“We did it!” I cried, leaning against Jaya and hugging her tight. “We stopped Simon! His ancestor didn't get the death ray! The city's safe!”

She laughed and leaned back against me, her hands on the controls.

The years flew by. I lost count, but I didn't care. Out the window, buildings rose and fell. Trees sprouted and writhed their branches taller and taller.

Suddenly a building leapt jerkily into existence on the corner lot near my building. I recognized it: the new annex of the Brindley School. They'd just finished building it the year before. “Slow down, Jaya! We're almost there.”

She pulled back on the lever. The days flicked past one by one. Vast shadowy shapes filled the room; I saw my own furniture. My chair jerked around from desk to window and back. My bed flung its sheets into wild heaps, occasionally making itself neatly for a few moments. My
self
flickered around too, transparent and ghostly, shimmering on the chair or making the bed lumpy.

What day was it now? I looked around for the pencil line I'd drawn on the wall back when I was seven and first getting excited about astronomy. That's where the sunlight falls at noon every summer solstice, the third week in June.

There!
The sun hit the line, and I started counting days. “Get ready to stop,” I told Jaya.

One more night. One more sunrise.

“Now!”

She pulled the lever to the stop position. We stopped with a bang, knocking over my lamp.

• • •

I don't love looking in the mirror. I mean, I'm a reasonably okay-looking guy, I guess, but it always feels so strange to see myself from the outside. Photos are even worse—I'm used to Mirror Me, so Photo Me looks backwards, distorted, with my ears all crooked and that bosonic curl on the wrong side of my forehead. But the worst of all was real-life 3-D Me. He was backwards and distorted and a zillion feet tall, with his mouth hanging open in surprise.

He closed his mouth, swallowed, and blurted something. I wished Jaya didn't have to see him—me—like this.

“Hi, um, me,” I answered. “It's me, Leo. I'm you. Wow, you're big.” Smooth! But wait—didn't I have to tell him something—something about the repository? No, not the repository, the time machine.
The Time Machine.
I had to tell him to read it. That's how he would figure out about going to England and capturing the mini time machine. “Listen, this is important,” I said. “Read H. G. Wells—”

He interrupted me with questions. Then Jaya started talking, trying to warn him about Simon.

I couldn't let her do that. Suppose she told me what Simon was going to do—suppose I listened to her? Suppose she got me to stop Simon before he sabotaged Francis's Burton page application and made Jaya hate him? Then Jaya might actually make the mistake of dating that boson! And then Simon wouldn't try to hold the city hostage, so we would never visit Tesla to stop him from getting the death ray, and I would never show up in my own bedroom on a time machine, and I would never tell myself to read Wells, and I might never ask Ms. Kang for advice about my project, and I might never meet Jaya. I couldn't let that happen!

I put my hand over Jaya's mouth. I saw Past Me's enormous eyes get even more enormous, and I remembered how surprised I'd been when I saw myself treating her like that.

She bit me, of course, and started arguing, just like she had before.

I heard my sister's footsteps. I reached around Jaya and rammed the lever down. My vast, past face faded, and we poured into the future again, buoyed on hope.

• • •

We landed safely in my empty bedroom. Jaya wanted to dash out to the repository as soon as we were the right size, but I made her wash the soot off her face first and change back into her regular clothes.

“The first thing we have to do is get Simon on the telelectroscope and tell him we know he's bluffing,” she said, tugging on her ridiculous hat, the one with the pom-pom on the end.

“No, that's the second thing. The first thing we have to do is get your patience back,” I told her.

She was way too impatient for the bus. She hustled me into a cab and then kept glaring at the driver for stopping at red lights. “It was better in 1895, before they invented traffic lights,” she said.

At the repository, she was too impatient to wait for the elevator. She thumped up the stairs two at a time and burst into Doc's office.

“It's safe!” she cried. “You can call off the team! Simon's bluffing—he doesn't have the death ray!”

“Shut the door and sit down, Jaya,” said Dr. Rust. “What team? Who's Simon?”

A World Without Simon

A
pparently Simon had never existed.

Jaya turned to me in dismay. “What happened? Simon's great-great-grandfather didn't die in the fire! Clemens had him—he was perfectly safe! So why wasn't Simon born? What went wrong?”

“Nothing went wrong,” I said. “This is
good
! No Simon to destroy New York.”

“Yes, but why doesn't he
exist
?”

I thought about it. “Didn't Simon say his great-great-grandfather met his great-great-grandmother crossing the Atlantic? He must have missed his boat and never met her.”

Dr. Rust, who had been listening patiently, asked, “Who is this Simon who doesn't exist?”

“There's no time to explain! I have to go back to Tesla's lab and stop us from killing Simon!”

“We didn't kill him,” I said. “We just made things so that he never existed. Big difference.”

“He did so exist!”

“Not in
this
world.”

“Oh! Don't be such a boson! Give me that time machine!” She was so impatient she actually stamped her foot.

“Hold your horses, Jaya.” I pulled the shrink ray out of the satchel and put it on Dr. Rust's desk. “Before we do anything else, you'd better give Jaya back her patience,” I said.

“Clearly.” With a look of amused patience, Dr. Rust opened a dark metal box on the desk and rummaged around, pulling out something swirly and insubstantial. “Is this it?”

Jaya curled her lip at the thing. “Ugh, of course not!”

Doc squinted at it. “No, you're right. That was just a good intention. Is this—? No . . . Ah, here it is!”

Doc pulled out a small, thin object and offered it to her.

Jaya frowned. “I thought there was more of it.”

“
Your
patience? Don't be silly.”

Jaya rolled her eyes, but she took the thing, which melted into her arm. She gave a huge sigh. The difference was invisible but dramatic. I felt the air around her relax.

“And now,” said Doc, “go find Lucy Minnian and Rick Reyes and tell us all about this Simon who doesn't exist.”

• • •

“Hang on,” said Ms. Minnian when Jaya had finished talking. “How did this Simon get back to 1895?”

That's what continues to amaze me about the repository librarians. Unlike every other adult ever born—well, except Mark Twain and Tesla—a kid can tell them an unbelievable story and they'll believe it.

“Two copies of Simon appeared in Tesla's lab using two different time machines,” said Jaya. “One was a portal and one was a space-age-looking machine. They must have been the Kerr and the Tuck, from the Burton.”

“But why did he use them at all if the Kerr creates alternate timelines and the Tuck can't change the past?” asked Ms. Minnian. “Neither one would do him any good.”

“Here's what I think happened,” I said. I'd been puzzling it out all the way home. “Simon was tracking us with the Burton's people finder. When he saw that we were in 1895, he knew we had a working time machine. He figured we must be trying to stop his ancestor from stealing the death ray. So he went back to stop us. Or maybe he was trying to get a death ray for himself or get the Wells time machine from us. He did tell Jaya to give him the Wells machine.”

“But he didn't have any effective time machines!” Jaya said.

“True. But if he used the Kerr to get the Wells time machine, he would be
in
that new universe—the one in which he had the Wells time machine. And so would we since we were there with him when he took it.”

That made Jaya scrunch up her face and think hard. “Oh. I guess you're right.” She thought some more. “But why did he use the can't-change-anything time machine after that? Didn't he know that thing was useless?”

“I guess he was desperate,” I said. “Remember? He was shouting at himself, ‘Stop! You'll hurt Jaya!' He must have hurt you, gone home, realized he had to stop himself from hurting you, and used the other machine to try to stop himself even though he knew it wouldn't work. I guess he really does care about you.”

“But why not use the alternate-universes machine again since the can't-change-the-past one is useless?” asked Mr. Reyes.

Doc said, “He couldn't. The alternate-universe machine only opens a portal once per user. If I remember the originating story correctly, once the machine has encoded your quantum imprint, you can't pass the wormhole threshold again in the same temporal direction.”

Jaya thought about that. “Okay, but then why aren't I hurt? If Simon hurt me and came back again to change that and if he used the can't-change-the-past time machine to do it, then how did he succeed in stopping himself from hurting me?”

“I thought you said Leo saved you, not Simon,” said Dr. Rust.

“He did, but clearly he wasn't going to until Simon showed up on the Tuck machine. I mean, Simon was sure he had hurt me—he came back on the Tuck machine to stop himself. And I'm fine now, except for a bump on my head.”

“Maybe Simon was wrong—maybe he just thought he'd hurt you, but he really hadn't?” suggested Ms. Minnian. “You do have a bump on your head. Maybe he thought it was worse than it is.”

“I guess that could be it,” I said. “Things were pretty confusing with the whole fight going on.” It wasn't a very satisfying answer, but I couldn't think of a better one for now.

“All right,” said Jaya. “Now, how do we bring him back?”

“We don't,” I said. “He was a total boson and he tried to kill you. The world is better without him.”

“He also tried to save me, and he was my
friend,
” said Jaya. “And you shouldn't make people not exist just because you don't like them.”

“But he brought it on himself!” I said. “If he hadn't threatened us with the death ray, we would never have gone back to 1895 and stopped his great-great-grandparents from meeting.” This was crazy. Now
Jaya
was the one insisting it had been a bad idea to change the past and
I
was the one defending it.

“What's the rush?” asked Dr. Rust. “There's no need to decide right now. Simon doesn't exist, so he's not going anywhere. Let's all sleep on it for a few days.”

We agreed to leave it at that.

• • •

Something else was bothering me. It nagged at the back of my brain while I walked home through Central Park and unlocked my apartment door.

Sofia was in the kitchen making a banana smoothie and blasting Mozart to drown out the blender. A wave of relief and happiness hit me. “You exist!” I yelled. I threw my arms around her, astonishing both of us.

“Leo, get off! What's the matter with you?” she said, licking smoothie off her thumb.

“I don't know—isn't it
your
job to tell
me
that?”

When Jake came over that evening, I managed not to hug him, but I lost five games of Gravity Force III.

“I can't believe you let me pulverize your sub with my death ray,” said Jake. “That's like the easiest shot to dodge! What's wrong with you?”

I couldn't believe it either. Shouldn't riding around in real submarines and fighting with real death rays make it easier to handle the fake ones in a video game?

I had a lot on my mind. For one thing, I felt bad about Simon too. I mean, I didn't think causing someone to never have existed was really the same thing as killing him, and there could be lots of theoretical universes where he still existed, and I certainly didn't want to ever see him again as long as I lived. But still, he
had
existed, and now he didn't, and to some extent it was my fault.

I also felt bad about not telling Jake—my best friend—about all my amazing adventures. And the thought of Jaya was distracting me too, of course. Did that kiss mean anything?

That night I dreamed I was riding the Fifth Avenue Stage with Jaya, too nervous to put my arm around her, while Simon whipped the horses and laughed at me and a voice in the background—my own voice—shouted, “Kiss her, Leo! Kiss her!”