What Was I Thinking? (21 page)

I frowned. Ouch. Moving my forehead in the
frown had made me notice the headache that had been lurking. I ignored it. “I
hadn’t thought about that, in all the excitement and newness, but you’re right.
We’ll have to decide how to handle it.”

“I cannot say I understand,” said Augusta. “Why
should telling me tales of Addie’s world lead to trouble? I’m hardly likely to
use the information for dastardly activities, after all.”

“No, of course you wouldn’t intentionally, but
there are so many risks …” Bert trailed off and looked at me. “I don’t know how
to explain. What little time travel mythology has been developed now has not
addressed that. There was nothing about the intellectual cross-pollination
brought about by time travel in Mr. Wells’ book, or Mr. Twain’s. Now I
consider, all of the thoughts I have on the subject are from future mythology,
like that story of the gun dropped by a traveler to the past, or the crew of
Star Trek giving the secrets of transparent aluminum to a twentieth century
engineer.”

Now Augusta looked truly puzzled. “Bert, I
think of myself as an intelligent and well-read lady, but I do not understand
what you just said at all. What in the world is ‘cross-pollination’? And what
is transparent aluminum? I cannot remember all of the things you said in that
short speech that I did not understand.”

We all looked at each other. This was hard. It
was important that we all understand the risks we had created, and agreed on a
plan for handling them, but we had no common language for it. And, as much fun
as my telephone/cell phone conversation with Augusta had been that morning, if
we tried to explain all of the terms and stories encapsulated in Bert’s last
comments, we would be up all night, and we still wouldn’t get to the point.

I took another bite of the strawberry pie. It
was wonderful, but it didn’t help the headache or the problem. Bert and Augusta
poked at their food too, but nobody had much appetite. Finally, Bert turned to
me again.

“Addie, can you try to explain? I know I’m the
one with the most actual experience of the travel—we need a term for it, I
think, that we can use in front of others—but I don’t think I know how to
explain what I mean. Maybe you’ve seen enough movies positing time travel that
you have more words for the dangers.”

“Movies?”
Augusta asked Bert.

“The future of Mr. Edison’s moving pictures,”
Bert answered. “They catch on.”

“Okay,” I said, with decision.

“Mother does not know that term,” Bert
objected.

“I figured it out just fine before lunch,”
Augusta retorted. “Be quiet and let Addie speak.”

“Yes, do shut up, Bert,” I agreed. “If we stop
to define every term, we won’t get anything said.”

Bert looked affronted. He straightened, and
pulled back a little. I patted his hand and apologized. “I don’t mean to hurt
your feelings, but I do need you to let me talk if you want me to be the one to
explain.”

“Very well.”
If possible, he got even
straighter in his chair.
Later for him.

“Okay then. Before we start, Bert, do you know
about Chaos Theory? It is popularly known in my time, but I don’t know how old
it is, or whether you would have run across it.”

“I’ve heard the term, but I never studied it.
And Mother wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“Okay. That’s a good place to start, I think.”
I looked around, considering. It was a beautiful dining room, but there were
doors on two sides, either one of which could, and probably did, hide a servant
listening. And the long, graceful table meant we were sitting too far apart for
a whispered conversation.

“Is there somewhere else we could go for this
chat?
A smaller room, where we wouldn’t be likely to be
overheard?”

“My apartment would suit, I think,” said Bert.
“It’s where my lab was on your last visit to the house—” he broke off to smile
at me and the memory. I smiled back. We were going to be okay. “And just like
then, the servants are forbidden from entering.”

“But surely that would not be proper, Bert!”

“You will chaperone us, Mother. It will be
fine.”

So we adjourned to the third floor, which
looked more or less as it had the last time I saw it, though the window wall
had many small panes instead of the larger modern ones, and the lack of a
computer didn’t jar as it had.

We settled in the comfortable easy chairs with
cups of coffee—yuck—and I gave a précis of Chaos Theory, and the import it gave
time travel. “There’s a famous short story,” I finished up, “in which time
travel has become a tourist activity, but the characters are all terribly
conscious of the dangers they pose to history. They try to protect against
causing danger by bringing nothing with them and touching nothing. But a
tourist stumbles one day, and steps on a butterfly just as he is leaving the
past. When his group of tourists returns to their own time, they find it
dreadfully altered. The death of the butterfly has, as in Chaos Theory, caused
many small changes that, together, over time, destroyed the world they knew.”

“So you see,” Bert began eagerly. “I’m sorry,
Addie. Were you finished? I do not intend to interrupt again.”

“No, no, you’re fine. I’m talked out anyway.”

He nodded. “So you see, Mother, we have to
contend with the possibility that even by traveling, we are causing
far-reaching changes to the history of the world. And if we bring foreknowledge
of history and inventions with us, who knows what could be altered?”

She pursed her lips, looked at each of us,
sighed, and then took a slow sip of coffee. “I do see. And I can hardly put my
own entertainment before the good of the entire world and the future of
mankind, but I do feel most childishly disappointed at the thought of no
further stories of your adventures and Addie’s world.”

We all thought about that, and drank more
coffee.
Bleah.
On the other hand, the caffeine seemed
to be easing my headache a bit. Oh. Duh! I hadn’t had Diet Coke in over
what—thirty-six hours?
Forty-eight?
I couldn’t
remember the last time it had been so long. I usually had withdrawal symptoms
and migraine headaches within eighteen hours. Better learn to like coffee,
because there wasn’t going to be any Diet Coke, or any Advil to help with this.
I took another drink. Double-bleah, but I would stick with it.

Bert was the first to break the silence. “I do
see. And I wish most heartily to talk about all I learned, both from the
scientist’s joy of discovery, and because you were such a help in the
preliminary work that it seems quite wrong to refuse you the results.”

“Yes,” Augusta said, “and it would be most
unkind to prevent Addie from ever speaking of her own life. It is hard to be
alone in a strange land, and would be nigh unbearable, I would think, to be
forbidden even to speak of the old world.”

“So, what do we do?” I asked. “We shouldn’t
talk about it, but we want to, and quite clearly, we are not going to be able
to resist the temptation, even if we try.”

More silence, more coffee. A few more sighs,
more or less evenly distributed around the room.

“Scientifically speaking, Bert, what is truly
known about the effects of time travel on future history?” Augusta asked at
last.

“Scientifically?
Only the three of us in this
room have any idea.” He smiled.
“Unless other travelers have
been both successful and silent.
Chaos Theory is a powerful and
plausible theory, but I don’t know to what extent it has been proven.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Other theories—or myths
of time travel fiction—say that the world is what it is, and if it seems we
change it, it’s just that we don’t see the way it folds back into the plan.
That’s the idea behind Star Trek and formula for transparent aluminum,
remember?” I looked at Bert with this last, and then turned to Augusta to
explain.

“In this popular TV series—um—set of motion
picture plays, characters who travel the stars in the twenty-fifth century
visit the twentieth century. They need to buy something, but they have no
money, so an engineer from the starship barters with a twentieth century
engineer, offering him a valuable formula, the secret to making transparent
aluminum, in exchange for construction materials. As they walk away, one of his
shipmates says, ‘What are you doing? That hasn’t been invented yet!’ and the
starship engineer replies, ‘who knows? Maybe he invents it.’”

“That hinges on the notion of immutable
pre-destiny,” objected Bert.

“It does,” I agreed. “I don’t know if I believe
in it, but I have no real evidence that it’s any more or less unlikely than
Chaos Theory. It
does
fit nicely with
the Mobius strip concept of time travel.”

“So it does, so it does.” Bert stared off into
space.

Augusta put her coffee cup down. “This has gone
far beyond my understanding of science or philosophy, and it is late. I propose
we all get some rest and revisit this tomorrow, perhaps when we get back from
the fair. In the meantime, I leave it to you young people to choose a code word
for time travel, so we can speak with less fear of being overheard.”

That seemed like a reasonable proposal. It
wasn’t really very late, but my headache made me yearn to be alone and in bed.
“Good idea,” I said, and rose to go.

“Yes, yes indeed,” Bert said, rising also. “I
believe I will remain here and work a bit more, though. Good night, ladies.”

I let Augusta leave the room before me, and
turned to Bert, but he didn’t make the slightest move toward a goodnight kiss.
Drat. Maybe when we went to the Olympics by ourselves tomorrow he would act
more like a boyfriend in love.

I joined Augusta in the hall, and she asked if
I needed anything before turning in. “Have you sufficient toiletries, dear? Do
you need any creams, or tooth powder?”

“Tooth powder would be wonderful,” I said. Yay,
a version of toothpaste
had
been
invented. “Would it be possible to have a drinking glass as well? One that I
could keep in my room for brushing my teeth, and getting drinks of water at
night?”

“Certainly dear, certainly.
I’ll send Daisy along directly
with the tooth powder and a glass and she can help you out of your stays.” I
made a face behind her back. I didn’t like being helped to dress and undress.

Chapter Eleven

Meet Me in St. Louis

The Olympics were wonderful. The fair was
wonderful. It was all like a dream. I wore the green and white shirtwaist
again, and my feet got very tired in my boots, but I fit right in, and when we
rode the Skinker Trolley to the start of the marathon, I expected Judy Garland to
get on next to us and start singing “Clang, Clang, Clang Went the Trolley.”

Bert was excited, too. He had left while the
big events had been just in the planning stages and then had spent three years
studying them as history. That the biggest world’s fair in history took place
in the same year and city as the third modern Olympiad was amazing even to hear
about. Now he met them in the present and in reality.

And so did
I
. I hadn’t
lived through the anticipation and the planning, but I heard all about them
when I moved to St. Louis for college. The Wash U administration building had
been built for the fair, its original gym and natatorium had been built for the
Olympics, and beautiful Forest Park had been the site of the fair itself. The
memory of that amazing year was always in the air, even in my time.

Augusta had given us stockholder’s coupon
tickets to get in. She had bought several sets, to be sure of admission for any
guests she might have. There had been predictions that the fair would be fully
sold out, and she had no intention of risking that. I think the coupons
thrilled Bert as much as anything else. He had seen them, yellowed and frayed,
in museum displays and now he held new ones in his hand.

We did everything, and we saw everything, and
we had treats at the fair, including hamburgers for lunch and an argument over
whether they were invented during this fair. We didn’t stand out, because there
were arguments all around about whether hamburgers, ice cream cones, and
various other things had been invented here or at earlier fairs.

We got Cokes, too, and really enjoyed them.
Diet soda hadn’t been invented of course, and wouldn’t be for well over fifty
years, and Dr. Pepper was the most common soda there, but Bert bought drinks
from a vendor selling Coca Cola clandestinely. Thanks to Bert’s recent
profession as a historian of this fair, he was able to explain to me that
Coke’s application to participate had been turned down because it was a patent
medicine, with cocaine in the formulation.

“I thought that was a false rumor,” I said
mildly, not really caring. “Doesn’t the company insist that they never used
cocaine?”

“I think so. I don’t know the truth of it
myself, but the rumor was sufficient to ban the product from official
participation in the fair.”