Stolen Time Page 9

  Dorothy propped a foot on the windowsill and hoisted herself up, balancing on the edge. The world spun below her.

  She hesitated, imagining her arms and legs going numb as she plummeted down and down, her neck snapping on impact with the hard surface of the water, losing consciousness as the icy liquid flooded her throat and lungs. Her fingers curled around the windowsill. It would be a painful death, drowning. Much more painful than a bullet in the back of the head.

  Make a choice. Should be easy. Die jumping or die staying.

  Roman shouted something from the other room. A door slammed.

  Dorothy closed her eyes.

  Make a choice.

  LOG ENTRY—JANUARY 13, 2074

  08:23 HOURS

  WEST COAST ACADEMY OF ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY

  It’s been a little over a month since my first hire, and Roman is doing brilliantly. The kid is a genius (and I don’t use that word lightly). He’s already sorted through the résumés to weed out the most impressive applicants, upgraded my computer software, and helped me and Zora figure out what was causing the Second Star’s internal nav to go all wonky.

  I’m satisfied that he’ll be a great assistant, so it’s time to start hiring the rest of my team. I’ve been given clearance for another three hires: a medic, in case of emergency; security detail; and a pilot.

  (My own flight capabilities were deemed “subpar” after a particularly humiliating test with a NASA pilot, but that is neither here nor there.)

  Natasha has pointed out that the brilliant minds at NASA didn’t even consider that they might need an actual historian to research these “little jaunts through history,” as she likes to refer to them.

  Luckily, I told her, I had the good sense to marry a historian. Do you know what she said to that?

  You can’t afford me.

  Ah, to have my beautiful, brilliant wife by my side while I make history! We’re destined to be the Marie and Pierre Curie of time travel.

  In any case, Natasha had an interesting idea for my dilemma. One evening, I was complaining that I couldn’t find the qualities I was hoping for in the applicants the school provided, and Natasha said that it would make more sense to go back in time and find the most brilliant applicants in all of history.

  I think she was joking.

  But picture it: The strongest man in all of history. The world’s most brilliant medical mind. The most talented pilot . . .

  I’m going to have to ruminate.

  Roman came to me with a curious question the other day. He asked whether it would be possible to go back in time and help some of the people in Tent City.

  We can’t go back in time and stop that 6.9 earthquake from happening, of course, but Seattle wasn’t even set up with an EEW (earthquake early warning) like they have in California and Tokyo. If we’d had that in place, thousands of people wouldn’t have died.

  I desperately wanted to tell him yes. But I don’t see how we can avoid a paradox.

  Generally speaking, there are three types of time-travel paradoxes. I’m referring here to the first, a “causal loop,” which exists when a future event is the cause of a past event.

  For instance, if mass casualties from an earthquake convinced me to go back in time to set up an EEW, which then prevented the mass casualties from occurring, I’d have no reason to go back in time.

  If there’s no cause, there can’t be an effect.

  Of course, paradoxes are all purely theoretical. We can’t really understand how the future will respond to changes in the past until we test them.

  I’m not technically supposed to go back in time until I’ve chosen my team, but what could a really small trip hurt?

  Causal loops are tricky, so I’ll leave those for another day. Today, I want to tackle the big one: the grandfather paradox.

  The grandfather paradox is a consistency paradox. It occurs when the past is changed in a way that creates a contradiction. For example, if I go back in time and kill my grandfather before he creates my father, my father won’t be alive to create me, which would make it impossible for me to go back in time and kill my grandfather in the first place.

  Disproving it’ll be easy. All I’ll need is an apple.

  Let’s call this mission Hera 1, after the Greek myth of Paris and the golden apple.

  My objective, as stated, will be to disprove the grandfather paradox. I’ll do this by taking an apple from the kitchen table and placing it in the bathroom. Then, I’ll go back in time one hour, take that same apple from our kitchen, and eat it, thus making it impossible for me to place the apple in my bathroom an hour later. Brilliant in its simplicity, right? And absolutely no grandfathers will be harmed!

  I’ll update on my return.

  UPDATE—07:18 HOURS

  I have successfully eaten the apple. (This is kind of crazy, right? I take my journal with me when I travel through time, so I was able to write this update after the update from an hour into the future, but it looks so weird on the page!)

  UPDATE—09:32 HOURS

  Hera 1 has just hit an unforeseeable snag. Natasha has informed me that there were, in fact, two apples in our kitchen this morning. She set one aside for her breakfast. I ate that apple when I traveled back in time. Upon finding that apple missing, she found a second and placed it on the kitchen table. This was the apple that I hid in the bathroom.

  Natasha has also expressed a wish that I no longer store fruit in the bathroom. Reasonable, I suppose.

  UPDATE—16:40 HOURS

  I’ve been thinking about this experiment all day. The thing is, I looked for additional apples when I placed the first one in the bathroom. I’m a scientist, after all. I have doctoral training in controlled experimentation. I wouldn’t have left such an important aspect of the experiment up to chance.

  There was only one apple.

  But Natasha says there were two.

  We’ve long theorized that space-time travel would cause massive changes to our present—a butterfly effect, if you will.

  (A butterfly effect, of course, is the concept that small changes can eventually lead to bigger changes, e.g., a butterfly can flap its wings and cause a hurricane. Obviously it’s a lot more complicated than this, but to get any more specific I’d have to go into chaos theory, which is a lot of theory for today.)

  I wonder if this is the right question.

  Or, would it be better to ask this: Can travel through time change the past as well as the future?

  In other words, did I create a second apple when I moved the first?

  Interestingly enough, this calls to mind the third time-traveler’s paradox, the Fermi paradox, which posits, “If time travel were possible, where are all the visitors from the future?” If I changed the past by eating an apple I shouldn’t have been able to eat, it stands to reason that time travelers can change the past upon showing themselves.

  Put another way, there aren’t visitors from the future yet.

  But there will be.

  12

  Ash

  OCTOBER 14, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

  The parking garage outside the Fairmont hotel looked exactly like the photographs Ash had seen of old shopping malls in the late twentieth century. Ugly, concrete levels were stacked one on top of another. Long-rusted pipes ran along the walls, and busted light fixtures dotted the ceiling. A car stood several feet away, doors hanging open, but Ash got the feeling it was purely ornamental. Only the top few levels of the garage were still dry—the others sank deep into the murky water below.

  “Shall we?” Willis asked, cocking an eyebrow.

  Ash climbed out of their motorboat and crawled over a low concrete wall separating what remained of the garage from the water surrounding it. Several inches of water still covered the floor on the other side, making his boots squelch when he stepped down.

  “You’re sure this leads to the Fairmont?” he asked, lifting a sodden boot. “Because it looks flooded.”

  “That’s the point.” Willis hel
d a flashlight in one hand, but the dusty beam was like a match in a black room. It only made it more obvious that the dark was winning. “Let’s go.”

  They took a narrow staircase near the back of the garage. It must’ve been flooded once, but at some point the water had been cleared out and the area sealed, leaving the lower levels deceptively dry. The smell of something old and musty rose up from the ground, growing stronger the farther they descended, until it was almost like another person walking along beside them. Ash tried his best to breathe through his mouth.

  After a while they reached a metal door, which led into a wide, open garage on one of the structure’s lower levels.

  The space was squat and long: the ceiling only a few inches above their heads; the far wall nothing more than a suggestion in the distance. Huge windows covered the wall to Ash’s left, some of the panels old and clouded, others obviously new and made of thick glass. This level wasn’t underwater, but it would look like it was from outside. Ash could make out the surface of the water glimmering beyond the glass, casting the whole space in blue.

  “What is this place?” he murmured, stepping around an overturned trash can.

  “Dunno,” Willis said. He stopped beside a boxy automobile, its tires long relieved of air, cracks splintering its windshields. “Looks like they’re trying to build something, though.”

  “What could they be trying to—” Ash stopped talking then, his question answered as his eyes snagged on something in the darkness. The shape shone silver in the dim light, it’s body aluminum and bullet-shaped.

  It looked awfully familiar.

  “Ash?” asked Willis, frowning.

  Ash walked past him without realizing that he’d spoken. It was dark, but he thought he could see the edge of a finned tail and the gleam of light hitting black stars.

  A nasty shiver went down his spine.

  It couldn’t be.

  Willis dropped a hand onto Ash’s shoulder. “Is that . . . ?”

  “It’s a time machine,” Ash said, his voice a rasp.

  The first time he’d seen a time machine had been on February 25, 1945, at 0400 hours. He’d been fast asleep, and when he felt the tap on his shoulder, he thought it was Captain McHugh, coming to rouse him for the preflight briefing. He groaned and rolled over, reluctantly opening his eyes.

  The man leaning over him wasn’t Captain McHugh. He had black skin and hair, and a black beard speckled with gray. He was decked out in strange clothes, too, a badly fitting suit jacket and a stiff, striped tie. Almost like he was wearing a costume.

  “It’s time to wake up, Mr. Asher,” the man said. He whispered, but his voice was so deep and rich that it boomed around them, anyway.

  That voice had knocked Ash awake. There was a man in the barracks. A man who’d somehow managed to get past the armed guards at the door. His heart jump-started, and he jerked backward, fumbling for the loaded .45 he always kept within reach.

  The man grabbed his arm, holding him with a grip like a vise’s. Ash tried to pull away, but he was strong.

  “None of that now,” the man said in that same vibrating whisper. “I’m not staying long, and you have no reason to be afraid. My name is Professor Zacharias Walker. I’m a time traveler from the year 2075.”

  Ash had stared at this professor for a long moment, still unconsciously reaching for his pistol. Then, the corner of his lips flicked upward. The boys were trying to pull one over on him, all right. Time travel. Well, that was something new, he had to give them that. He wondered where they’d found this old guy with the crazy voice and the weird clothes. He’d probably been some drunk from the pub down the street, looking to score a little free hooch.

  The “professor” frowned. “I can see that you don’t believe me. If you’ll accompany me for a moment, I can offer you proof.”

  Ash swallowed, his throat still scratchy with sleep. “Proof?”

  “I could show you my time machine.”

  Ash released a short laugh. But he sat up and threw his jacket over his long johns, trying to work his expression into something resembling seriousness. “Lead the way, old man.”

  The time machine was behind the barracks, in a secluded area just past the trees. It looked like a miniature zeppelin, small and bullet-shaped, with otherworldly blue light leaking out of its windows. Ash realized later that it was the other time machine, the Dark Star. The one the Professor built after the Second Star. The one he’d disappeared in.

  The light was what stopped Ash in his tracks. He’d lowered his hand to the side of the ship, dumbstruck. The metal was still warm.

  “Why are you showing me this?” he’d asked, when he found he could speak again.

  “Because I want you to learn to fly it,” the Professor had said.

  Now, Ash edged nearer, lowering a hand to the ship in front of him. He’d thought it was the Dark Star when he first saw it hulking in the shadows; it had the same bullet-shaped body, the same round windows.

  But this wasn’t the Professor’s ship—it was a replica. The words BLACK CROW had been scrawled over the siding where the words DARK STAR would’ve been had it been authentic.

  There were other differences, too. The Black Crow was a deep, charcoal color, quite unlike the bright aluminum of the Dark Star, and what Ash had taken for stars were actually crows, their black wings outstretched.

  A cold shiver moved through Ash. It was a feeling like déjà vu—or a funhouse-mirror sort of déjà vu. The Professor was the only man in history who’d managed to build a time machine. Others had tried, back before the mega-quake, but they’d never gotten the finned tale just right; they didn’t know what type of glass could move through an anil without cracking, or how to properly integrate the exotic matter into the structure of their designs.

  Ash climbed in through the Black Crow’s main cabin. It was identical to the Dark Star. The seats in the cabin were set in the same circular pattern, all facing one another. The walls were the same deep, polished bronze. For a second, Ash imagined he could smell the Professor’s peculiar mix of cologne and pipe smoke. He shook his head, and the smell faded. This wasn’t the Professor’s ship, he reminded himself. It was a copy.

  He ducked into the cockpit. Unlike the Second Star, the Dark Star had an internal control panel to store its exotic matter. The Professor had built the bigger ship a year after completing the Second Star, when he knew more about time travel and had the funding to build the ship of his dreams. If the Second Star was a zippy little fighter jet, the Dark Star was a luxury cruiser. It had been designed to take a team of people back through time as comfortably as possible. Once the Professor had completed it, he’d gifted the Second Star to Ash so he’d have something to learn on.

  The internal control panel was one of the key design elements the impostors had never gotten quite right, but the Black Crow’s was identical to the Professor’s design, down to the tiny row of lights that would flash red in an emergency. Even the Second Star wasn’t that advanced.

  Swearing under his breath, Ash dropped to his knees. The exotic matter was stored in a hidden compartment on a lower panel, back on the Dark Star. He moved his hands over levers and buttons, until a similar panel fell open, revealing—

  Nothing. Ash exhaled, rocking back on his heels. That was a small relief. Without exotic matter, Roman wouldn’t be able to take this ship back in time. Ash didn’t know how he’d managed to so perfectly re-create the Dark Star but, without any EM, the Black Crow was a glorified tin can.

  Gunshots cracked through the air, interrupting Ash’s thoughts. He jerked around, squinting through the Black Crow’s windows. The shots had come from far off, echoing through walls and water, but there was no mistaking that sudden, horrible pop.

  “Ash!” Willis shouted. “Hurry!”

  Ash leaped to his feet and stumbled out of the time machine. Willis was standing in front of the wall of windows, staring out into the gloomy water that surrounded them. Moonlight slanted through the waves, drawing ripples acr
oss the floor.

  “What’s going on?” Ash could see the watery outline of the hotel towering over him, and what seemed to be movement far above.

  “Fight, I think,” Willis grunted.

  More gunshots popped, sounding closer now. Bullets whizzed through the water outside their window, leaving trails like tiny shooting stars.

  A shape pulled away from the hotel and began moving rapidly closer.

  “Someone jumped,” Willis said. The words had barely left his mouth when a body broke through the surface. Water churned and bubbled against the window and, when it cleared, Ash saw features he recognized: Wide, green eyes. Pale skin. Brown curls.

  His entire body stiffened. “That’s Dorothy.”

  13

  Dorothy

  All Dorothy could see was white.

  Then the white began to take form: white trees, white hair, white fingers attached to white hands, floating from the window of a long-rusted car . . .

  Dead. Everything beneath the water was dead.

  She blinked. Water. She was underwater. The white she was seeing was the cloudy glass pane of a window. A figure moved behind it, and Dorothy thought she saw Quinn’s white curls and dark coat. But then she was gone.

  Something inside of her screamed: Swim.

  Physical sensations slammed back into her. The water was frigid enough to numb her skin and make her arms and legs feel stiff. It felt gritty against her eyes, clouding her vision. A deep ache stretched through her head. She kicked—hard—but her feet were too heavy.

  Something whizzed past, grazing her arm. It felt hot—a match striking skin. Another followed a second later.

  Bullets, she realized. Someone was shooting at her.

  With stiff, half-frozen feet, she dug her toes into the backs of her shoes, prying them off. She kicked again.

  The surface drew nearer. Moonlight glinted through the water. It took every last bit of energy she had to pump her arms, dragging her body up and up. Another bullet rocketed past, coming so close to her face that she could feel its heat on her cheek before it disappeared below.