by D. J. Gelner
Much to my amusement, the machine’s autopilot took us over our earlier landing site, where the curious, squat little bearded fellow with the camel gesticulated wildly toward several of his friends, attempting to explain his run-in with the ship the day before. One of his friends pointed at the craft, eyes wide as if I was sure to obliterate them with a death ray, and all three ducked as the ship buzzed overhead. I wonder what came of those three fellows? Everyone probably thought they had gone positively mental when they later described the scene.
Eventually, the autopilot shot us straight up, out of the atmosphere, and a comfortable range away, in the outer range of the Earth’s gravity well. I won’t bore you with the specifics of the actual time travel since I believe I adequately described it in the first chapter. I will add the addendum that I’m sure that one of the reasons that Trent enjoyed the experience of time travel so much was trying to put “the Brainenator” to use while the miraculous colours jumped out of space—it must have been quite the trip (pun most certainly intended).
Fortunately, when the ship emerged from the wormhole and came to a stop, the Earth still hung in front of me like a big, blue marble. I was transfixed for several moments by the scene; it sucked me in and hypnotised me…until the collision alarm sounded and it was all I could do to hastily activate the omni-yoke and yank the ship downward rapidly (though in hindsight the autopilot likely would have guided us safely past, I was terrified at the time). I looked up to see the moon, far more massive than I would have thought, thunder by (and yes, I fully realise that it should have swung past asonically, but I will swear until the day that I die that moon roared past with the noise of a thousand jet engines).
The satellite no longer a threat, I reengaged autopilot, and the craft cruised elegantly toward the planet. The North Sea appeared, followed by the Motherland, and, as truth is my primary endeavor in this travelogue, I must admit that the atmospheric recyclers must have been a bit overwhelmed at the moment, because I could have sworn that it got more than a little dusty in the cabin. How else could one explain the manner in which my eyes welled up, and nearly shed a tear upon seeing Jolly Old England once more? (One explanation? The bloody contacts I forced myself to wear in lieu of my spectacles. Damned things are still a menace to this day. And no, I absolutely will not allow my eyes to be butchered by a laser like a common article of cattle; test all you want, but put away your ghaastly lasers, you deranged opthalmic surgeons).
We glided in, once again unhindered by the orbits of satellites (or I should say man-made satellites) and came to rest behind a lonely haystack, away from its peers in a field otherwise dotted with the damned things. Though it was a typical April day in England, the sun peeked through the clouds every so-often to bring the normally-muted landscape to life, and honour it with its proper verdant hues.
The console flashed the words “Jump Successful,” as I unstrapped myself from the command chair and headed for the exit. Immediately before I disembarked, I remembered that I didn’t have any money, and grasped the bag which held the “blasphemous” coinage from my last stop, and attached it to my waist. As I was about to exit once more, I remembered that I had forgotten something else, and, after fumbling through the glove box for several moments, emerged with a tiny bottle of Purell, lest early English hygiene resemble that of the Nazarenes.
As the door opened, the cloaking device engaged automatically. It must have been quite a sight: this tall, gangly (if quite handsome, if I do say so myself) nobleman emerging from behind a haystack in the middle of Woolsthorpe.
A stout, pudgy-faced woman tended some plants close to a rather tall, striking stone house over a hill in the distance. She didn’t appear to notice me as I approached, though I did think the better of walking in from the fields, and quickly moved toward the road so that it would appear as if I was just another wayward traveller looking for a spot of tea.
Even as I came within five metres of the woman, she didn’t cease pruning the rose-bushes that surrounded the structure. After the “signature” smell of Nazareth, I especially enjoyed the pungent, familiar aroma that the flowers provided.
“Uh…excuse me? Madam?”
The woman looked up at me momentarily, her gaze a bit cross-eyed.
“What of ya’?” She asked curtly.
“Pardon me, madam, but I’m looking for a local resident. Perhaps you know of him? Si—err…the scientist Isaac Newton?”
The woman rolled her confused eyeballs and marched over to the thick wooden door.
“Isaac! You ‘ave another visitor!” She screamed at the top of her lungs. Someone from inside replied something unintelligible, and she stood aside from the door. “‘Ee’ll see you now, but if you even think of spreadin’ that bloody black death around ‘eese parts, I’ll—”
I couldn’t help but chuckle, “Madam, I assure you, I’m most certainly not carrying the plague. Rest easy, you and your family will be safe.”
She squinted at me, “Yeah—‘at’s what ‘dis one said, too!” she motioned inside the door. Curious, I followed her hand motion to see through the (particularly well-appointed for the day, I thought) kitchen, and into a small study. One man was seated at a desk; he furiously scrawled notes on paper as the other one leisurely lounged against a chair and snorted.
“So, numbskull, does thou see how moronic thou canst be at times?” The lounging man’s accent seemed a bit off. More than that, he was taller, though much shorter than I was, and had smooth, unpocked skin, other than the bristly mustache above his lip. His hair was grey and cut in a stylish manner, even if it was somewhat obviously a comb-over, and he held a coffee mug in his hand. A pair of black-rimmed glasses framed his somewhat round, dorky face.
I couldn’t believe what I saw next: as the poor man in the chair continued to scribble, his tongue curled around his thin lips, which complimented his steadily bobbing square (if pudgy) jaw, and the prominent, English nose attached to his face.
“Isaac Newton?” I asked.
The man in the chair stopped writing momentarily and turned around.
“Who wishes to know?”
I took a step back; if the man in the chair was Newton, then who was—?
“Verily. Now, Isaac, if thou doth please, thou hast work to do!” The lounging man pushed off of the table and walked toward me. As he looked me over and saw that I towered over even him, the expression on his face changed from one of arrogance to a meek, near-cowardess. His lip trembled as he raised his right hand over his stomach and flashed the “Live Long and Prosper” sign at me.
Now that I finally knew what it meant, I returned the gesture. The man offered a weak smile.
“Very good, Isaac, now thou shallst work on the…?”
“On the…” Newton replied, without a hint of sarcasm.
“We just hath worked on the first law of motion, so verily the next one is the…?”
“The…” Newton echoed the man once more.
The other man rolled his eyes, “Second law of motion!”
“Second law of motion!” Newton tried to speak contemporaneously, but came up a bit short, and trailed the man with the mustache by a half second.
“Indeed, now I’m going to have a word with this traveller over here, so keep mulling that priceless realisation over in thy head until my return.”
“Verily, master teacher,” Newton replied.
A smug smile crept across the mustached man’s face, as he turned toward me and raised his eyebrows. He punctuated the gesture by throwing a dorky “thumbs-up” my way, which I must’ve responded to with a frown, as the timid look quickly returned to his face.
He ushered me outside the house and into the yard, opposite the side where Mrs. Newton trimmed the hedges, under a familiar-looking apple tree.
“Son of a gun! I can’t believe it—another time traveler!” The man’s accent was decidedly American, and though his voice was a bit nasally and grating, it was balanced with a gravelly, lower-pitch that made him seem a less-than-c
omplete coward.
“Um…yes…indeed, good sir. Phineas Templeton,” I extended my hand, hoping to get the hero’s welcome that Trent hadn’t given me.
Instead, all I received was a dead-fish hand in return.
“Hank Fleener, physics professor, St. Mary’s High, nice to meet you, Phineas.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle, though I wouldn’t tell this “Mr. Fleener” everything…not yet, at least, “Physics professor, eh? I know a bit about the subject myself. I’m tenured as a faculty consultant at Johns Hopkins—”
Hank did a double-take, “Wow, really? That’s great. I mean, I expected anyone from the future to know more than that dim bulb in there, just by the fact of the ChronoSaber introduction and whatnot, but to have a real, kindred spirit, it’s…just wow!”
“You do realise that you’re speaking about one of Britain’s national heroes, a man whom you and I owe a great deal to in the pursuit of our—”
Hank waived a palm at me before he let out a guffaw, “Pffft! How amazing! I used to think the same way that you did, Phineas. Can I call you Phineas?”
“Finny is fine,” I offered a weak smile.
“Well, Finny, you know how it is, right?”
“How what is, Hank—I may call you ‘Hank,’ correct?”
He waived off the question, “Of course, of course! Not a problem at all. No, I mean, how ‘it’ is. You know…teaching.”
I decided to tell the truth; and to tell you the truth, I was just happy to be able to converse with someone else from near my time whose main hobbies didn’t previously include eating Funions and playing X-Box.
“I suppose I don’t. I generally only advise tenured faculty members, though I hear that their tantrums can rival even the most temperamental children.”
Hank rolled his eyes, “That may be true, but you haven’t dealt with anything until you’ve tried teaching physics to American kids. Talk about entitled; these kids want you to do everything for them except wipe their asses after they take a shit. Then you have the parents, who always try to annoy and cajole me to improve their kid’s grades, always threatening lawsuits and whatnot, you must at least know that, right?” He looked at me for approval and I nodded.
“And that’s of the ones whose parents care! Then you have all of the metal detectors and school shootings and all kinds of other crap, and I’m teaching a bunch of bored kids in the middle of a war zone. They might as well ship me off to the Middle East! I mean, I thought the draft might help some with getting these kids in line, but it’s still the same old shit, you know? The ones left behind still just couldn’t care less about anything other than their holomessages, you know?”
“So…instead of dealing with those spoiled high schoolers, you decided to come back in time and…berate Sir Isaac Newton?” I tried to maintain a dry tone.
Hank chuckled again, “Hardly! You think I wanted to try to teach this putz all of the most important theories in our field? I was coming off a divorce, the bitch—sorry, ex-wife—made me sell the house, and all I got was a lousy hundred grand, with almost that much in credit card debt. No wife, kids hated me, pension in the dumper, and teaching was getting more and more horrible by the year.
“Then, the government de-regulated time travel, and I knew that was the answer. I’d burn through my life’s savings to get back here, to converse with Newton and pick his brain, to get some kind of inspiration for what I should be doing with my life, you know?
“So I forked over the $100,000 to ChronoSaber, took their introduction for a week, and before I know it, here I am, at Newton’s mother’s house, finally face-to-face with the ‘master.’ Well, wouldn’t you know it, but the guy’s a dull blade! He’s dumb. He’s an I-M-B-E-C-I—”
“I think I get the point,” I said, with a curt smile.
Hank reared back like a frightened kitten poked one too many times with a stick, “Uh…yes, well, regardless, this guy didn’t know ANYTHING. And I mean the basics. Fortunately for him, I brought a copy of the Principia, in its original Latin, and—”
“And so now you’re helping him write his own books?”
Hank gave a skittish nod, “Something like that, yes. Gives me purpose, you know? I always dreamed of coming up with my own theories like his, and advancing humanity that way, but if this is how I can best serve mankind, by educating Newton and giving him the resources to become the man he will some day, then by all means, who am I to interfere?”
As I momentarily savored the irony of Hank’s comment, Newton staggered out of the house. His puffy cheeks looked more drawn in and sunken than I remembered from the various portraits I had seen, but his visage was unmistakable, especially for someone with a British public school education (Eton, if you must know). I struggled to keep my mouth from falling to the floor as he approached Hank.
“Master Fleener, I’ve looked at the second law of motion, and I can’t say I completely understand what it doth mean.”
Hank tilted his head for a moment, “Isaac, cannot thou seest that I am entertaining at the moment?”
“I do apologise, Master Fleener, but I could use some—”
Hank sighed deeply, bent over, and picked up a couple of the apples scattered on the ground before he offered Newton a terse smile.
“You—sorry—’thou’ wants something to ponder?”
“Verily,” Newton replied.
Hank threw one of the fruits in the air in a high arc. Both Newton and I marveled at the irregular-shaped red object’s flight through the sky.
Oh my God! Is this the moment? I couldn’t help but wonder.
Just as the apple began to fall back to Earth, Hank wound up and (with rather poor form, might I add) winged the other fruit not but six inches from Newton’s head before it splattered on the stonework behind him.
“There! Thinkest thou about that!” Fleener said in his most authoritarian, firmest voice possible. The now-skittish Newton cowered as he retreated back into the house; he never turned his back to Hank for the rest of the day.
As soon as Newton had disappeared, so too did the rage from Hank’s face. He even let out a good-natured chuckle as he shook his head. “Kids will be kids…”
“That was a bit harsh, don’t you think?” I asked.
Hank raised his eyebrows, “Harsh? Harsh is having your school on lockdown when some wacko kid is running around, gunning down everyone in sight. What you just witnessed—that’s respect!”
“He’s terrified of you!” I pled with Hank.
Hank laughed again, “You mistake fear for reverence. That’s what I so missed about teaching. When I started out, there was a real…respect for authority, for those older than oneself. But each passing year just got worse and worse—‘teach to the test,’ ‘you can’t berate the kids anymore,’ ‘they’ll get a complex.’ And even when we handled them with kid gloves,” he looked around and moved his head toward mine to whisper, “they still bitch and complain. Everything is owed to them; it’s not ‘what can I learn?’, but rather ‘teach me NOW.’ It wouldn’t even be so bad if, underlying all of it, the kids actually cared. They don’t. How anyone can teach in that environment is beyond me.”
Fleener raised a finger skyward, “Ah, but Isaac, he’s eager to learn. He may not yet be the greatest mind in the world, but he does have an insatiable appetite for knowledge, for information about how the world works, and he’s willing to ask the questions and put in the long hours to figure it out.”
“Even if you’re putting his own books into his head?” I asked. Though Fleener was doing his best to be endearing, I still found his prosthelytising and his abhorrent treatment of Sir Isaac Newton to be utterly annoying.
“Precisely, Finny. Pre-freaking-cisely.”
“So why not just become Newton then? Why not tie him up somewhere, or—”
Hank shook his head, “Because I wasn’t Newton. Newton exists—he’s here, right up there, actually,” he pointed at the house. “Though he may be a dolt now, he’s going to grow up
to be one of the greatest minds ever, and revolutionize the world in countless ways. I don’t share his charisma or his youthful curiosity, anymore at least. He’s more than just a scientist, you know: two stints in Parliament, Master of the Mint—”
“I’m well aware,” I offered Hank a curt smile.
Fleener nodded, “All I can do is teach him what he’s supposed to know, give him the tools, and live out my life comfortably in Jolly Ol’ England, away from my numerous creditors in the twenty-first century.” He looked whistfully into the distance for a few moments before he shook the view out of his head, “So what’s your game? Just another Newton fan, come to see the ‘master’ at work?”
“Something like that,” I said. I decided to test the waters. “What if I told you that I invented time travel?”
Hank looked at me blankly for a moment, “Commander Corcoran?” he asked.
“I’m afraid not,” I said, “that’s the second time that’s happened to me, though. I previously went to see another historical figure who ended up being a time traveller, and he asked me the same thing.”
Fleener shrugged, “Well, I can’t help you with that one, buddy. I have no way of telling if you’re right or wrong, all I know is that Commander Corcoran gets credit in the history books. Some kind of top-secret military project. Still very hush-hush. Not many details known even when they declassified little parts of the story right after they announced that time travel was no longer regulated. Very strange.”
“So nothing about Phineas Templeton then?”
He shook his head, “No, not really that I can remember. You’d have to have some kind of proof to convince anyone of that, though.”
I smiled, “Come with me.”
Chapter Six
Lacking my spectacles, I felt around the invisible ship for a few moments before I located the hand panel, and disengaged the cloaking device on the machine.
