“The replication project,” she said, reminding him that she’d been paying attention at their first meeting.
“Yep.”
“After our meeting, I read your whole paper. It’s public domain since you’re using federal funding. How come your presentation doesn’t mention the time travel, though?”
“My government sponsors don’t exactly know about it. I have two tracks of research going.”
“One where you try to make hamburgers out of bricks and one where you go back in time and rob people?”
He clearly didn’t like her poke at him, but he laughed in spite of himself. “Yes, I guess you could put it that way. I wouldn’t, personally, but I can see your perspective.” Random groups of people were starting to pass them on the street as it became lined with homes, buildings and shops. “Since you’ve read my paper, how much detail do you need?”
They actually didn’t have all the time in the world to chat, so she said, “Jump ahead to the part where it turns into time travel.”
“Alright. In my experiments, as you may have read and I think I told you at lunch, I am attempting to speed up the individual atoms within a piece of matter – which could be a sugar cube, a brick, or even an SUV – to the speed of light, to then slow them back down to a mathematical specificity that actually changes their make-up. You’re familiar with the phrase ‘matter can be changed, but not destroyed’? Well, that’s what I’m doing. As I was experimenting with the speed I could reach with individual atoms, something crazy happened. By that time I’d already been successful in converting an atom of hydrogen to an atom of nitrogen, so I was pushing a larger item – a diamond. Very basic carbon-based construction, so it would give me a good picture of what was possible. I was successful in speeding the diamond up, but as I slowed it back down, it disappeared. No idea where it went. Until about 90 seconds later, out of nowhere it showed up. I tried it again, changing the speed of the atoms by a microscopic amount. As I was programming the computer, another diamond appeared.”
“Just out of the blue?”
“Yep. Just appeared on the platform, bumping the other diamond out of the way.”
“So you sent that one back in time?”
“I did, yes.”
“But you had to complete the chain of events by still sending it, right?”
“Yes, which I did.”
She thought about that for a moment. “What would’ve happened if you hadn’t?”
He smiled again at her. It was a warm smile for the topic. “Well, my theory is that it wouldn’t have come through. Time is smarter than all of us. Or more logical, at least.”
“C’mon – you could’ve chosen not to send it after you knew the result. You know, screw around with time?”
“But not really,” he said. “It is what it is. It’s a concept I’m currently calling ‘fulfillment.’ It means that if there is an effect that happens in the present, by hook or by crook there has to be a cause. And if the cause doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, it’s in our best interest to make sure it does.”
“Fulfillment,” she repeated, determining she’d have to give that some more thought at a better time. It didn’t seem accurate. In fact, what they were trying to accomplish here in 1770 kind of flew in the face of it. But she had to admit there was a bit of logic to it. She’d ponder it later. “That’s a helluva way to produce diamonds.”
“Oh,” he said, “who’s the entrepreneur now? It’s pretty easy to let your mind wander to how to profit from this, isn’t it?”
She ignored him. Probably because he was right. “So you experimented like any scientist would, using larger and larger subjects until... What? How did you decide you could use a human?”
“The key to everything was creating a device that could do the same thing that I was doing in a confined chamber. I won’t go into detail now on how I did that because we’d be here for a couple days, but once I was successful, it was natural that I should be the first experiment. So I painstakingly did the mathematics behind it – this was before Abby came into the picture – and sent myself back to 1951.”
“Why 1951?”
“I wanted to see how precisely I could get it to work, so I attempted to go back to see Bobby Thompson’s famous home run for the New York Giants against the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
“The ‘shot heard around the world,’” she said. That would impress him.
“Baseball fan?” he asked.
“No. Historian,” she said, smiling. “We’re pretty well-rounded.”
“I guess so... Anyway, I wanted to push the experiment to see how reliable the process would be, so I studied the film of the home run to see exactly where Thompson hit the ball.”
“You were going to try to get it?”
“I was hoping to. I bought a general bleacher seat to the Polo Grounds – which, by the way, to a baseball fan from the 21st century, was amazing in and of itself – but since the television coverage then wasn’t of the quality of today, I ended up missing the ball by three rows and four seats. Very exciting game, though, even though I knew exactly what was going to happen.”
“Then you just left the stadium and came back to the present?”
“Essentially.”
“So, if I watch the footage of that game and look into the left field stands, you’ll be sitting there?”
He shook his head. “I’ve checked. There isn’t a good enough shot of it. I can make out someone who’s probably me, but nobody else would be able to tell.”
“That’s incredible, Jeff.”
“Isn’t it? Anyway, with a successful experiment under my belt, I began to build my team.” He pointed a block ahead. “That’s the park that Dexter and I waited in before we went to Garvey’s house, which is around that corner.”
She looked up and saw a treed area, the thoughts of time travel science dissipating into what they now had to accomplish. She stopped walking, looking forward, and he stopped with her. “How’s your right hook feeling?” she asked, without looking at him.
“It feels like it’s going to try its best.”
She nodded then kept walking toward Garvey’s house. He kept step beside her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Into the situation again, only now with a seemingly insurmountable task on his plate, a panic came over Jeff. It strangely made him worry he might overcompensate since he was on the spot to come through. He’d seen too many movies where people got their noses broken and it sent them to the floor, so as he strategized – getting more and more nervous doing so – he determined that as soon as he saw whomever had Dexter by the arm, he was going to haul off and hit them in the nose as hard as he possibly could. He would not allow himself time to think about it.
He was just praying – something he rarely did – that there was only one soldier attached to his friend.
He estimated how long it had taken them to walk. If they were correct in their timing, he and Dexter would be entering Garvey’s home right about this moment. As they turned the corner near the park, he could see Garvey’s coach in front with two soldiers lurking – the exact scene he’d left when Abby’d hit the button on the device, saving their lives.
“We’re here,” he told Erica. “This is how we left the situation. We should be inside the house now.”
Sure enough, as they walked closer, they could hear a commotion inside and some shouting. The two Red Coats darted inside, weapons drawn. More shouts – probably his own – were coming from the rear of the house. One obstacle had been overcome: he’d pinpointed his location, which mitigated the chances of running into himself. He grabbed Erica by the hand and hustled her across the street to get into position. They had only a small window of time to make it happen.
At the top of the steps leading into Garvey’s front door, they stopped. Jeff braced himself, his heart pounding. He pulled the time device from his pocket and handed it to Erica, who held it at-the-ready in her own hand. Pushing down his overwhelming fear, he gave
her the best manly it’s going to work nod he could muster. It must’ve meant something to her, because she nodded earnestly in response. Jeff could hear voices still clamoring inside. He tried to replay the entire incident in his mind, though he couldn’t be 100% sure of what happened after they’d left. Ultimately, they’d have to come out the front door with Dexter in tow. Then he had to do his job.
After a moment, though the shouting in the back of the house continued, he heard strong footsteps coming toward the front. He peered through the limited glass on the side of the door and thought he saw two people – one a silhouette of red, one in dark blue. He looked across at Erica, who apparently had a better view because she was pointing and mouthing something to him that he couldn’t make out. Nonetheless, he clenched both his fist and teeth and prepared to pounce on the Red Coat.
A split second before he had to act, he realized what Erica was saying. He had the wrong target.
Dexter was the one wearing red.
The door opened and, as soon as he saw flesh, Jeff unloaded on the man in blue’s face – a direct blow to the right side of the nose that sent all three of them sprawling. There was a scramble on the small porch to regain footing, though it quickly became clear that the Brit was down for the count, yelling in pain with his hands to his face, now covered in bright red blood. Pain throbbed in Jeff’s hand, and he was certain he’d broken it, if not his wrist and arm as well.
Despite the pain, Jeff reached out and grabbed Dexter by the collar, pulling him roughly to the side of the porch where Erica was standing, and had actually stumbled herself from the toppling bodies. He felt her reach around his midsection and pull herself close to him, then suddenly they were in the middle of modern-day Philadelphia. All three of them, standing under the streetlights on the front porch of a brownstone owned by people they didn’t know.
Erica’s arm around Jeff mitigated the pain in his hand, and he slowly let go of Dexter, who fell to the ground. Erica relaxed her grip and Jeff sat down next to his friend, clutching his wrist.
“You got my notes,” Dexter said, smiling and out-of-breath. “I knew showing you the key was the right idea.”
“I did, yes.”
“Well, thank you for coming to get me,” he said, then looked up at Erica, who was still standing. “And thank you to you. This couldn’t have been easy for you.”
“It got easier as it went along,” she said. “Welcome home.”
Jeff looked up and down the street. “Looks like we avoided a crowd. We should probably get off of this porch. These people would freak to find a British soldier laying on their front stoop.”
They agreed and walked down the steps onto the sidewalk. Jeff had booked hotel rooms at a small place several blocks away, where they’d camp for the night. With his injured hand, though, he now planned to drop them off at the hotel before heading off to try to find the closest emergency room.
“Speaking of British soldiers,” Dexter said as they walked, a beaten trio, down the street along the row of townhouses, “do you know who you punched out?”
“No.”
Erica laughed. “That was Major Garvey. You broke his face. And you thought you couldn’t do it.”
“Can’t wait to get a history book and see the repercussions of that one,” Dexter said. “The war probably started that night.” He laughed, then half-a-block later said, “Before you came, did you guys look up to see what happened to me in 1770? Just curious.”
“Yeah – they hung you,” Jeff said quietly.
Dexter stopped walking, a look of astonishment on his face. He took in a deep breath.
“What is it?” Jeff said.
“I don’t know. In those few moments when they had me, I figured that’s what they would do, but knowing that it actually happened... Man, that’s pretty horrible. When was it?”
“Two days later.”
“Wow. I was more worried about dysentery. No such luck, though, huh?”
“Have to give Erica all the credit on finding that out. Talk about finding a needle in a haystack. We actually had to go to 1831 to get the information.”
“Interesting. Why 1831?”
“It had kind of a dual purpose,” Erica said, jumping in. “One, I wanted Jeff to prove to me that his time device actually worked, and two, I thought it was important for us to see the actual records of your hanging. Before the fire.”
“Which fire?”
“In the records office,” Jeff said. “Thomas Meeks?”
Dexter looked at Erica. “You talked to Thomas Meeks? Oh man, now I’m really jealous. He was supposed to be a wealth of knowledge. He was an adviser to John Walker and John Norvell, who started the original Philadelphia Inquirer in the late 1820s – at the same time he was managing the records office for the city. I never read anything about a fire, though. Seems like something I would know about.”
“Well, thanks to your friend here, I’ll wager that the place never burned down and the records are all intact, anyway,” Erica said.
“What did you do?” Dexter looked at Jeff.
He shook his head humbly. “I just gave Meeks a little tip about the lantern that was hanging there. She thinks it’s a big deal. I don’t know. Seemed pretty innocent to me.”
Dexter shook his head and then continued walking. “You continue to be awfully cavalier about all of this. History is not your playground.”
“That’s what I keep telling him,” Erica said.
“And even though you were successful in rescuing me, the idea of being hanged in the colonies just demonstrates even more the risks we’re taking here. These trips really have to end.”
“Guys, my hand and wrist are broken,” Jeff said, the pain now starting to throb and threaten his congeniality. “Can we save the double-teaming for the morning?”
“Yes,” Dexter said quietly. “Fair enough.”
They walked a block in silence, then Dexter said, “I don’t understand why we can’t just head to my place. I’d really like to just be at home. You’re both welcome to stay.”
Jeff shook his head. “I’m not going to drive you home now. Are you crazy? Look, we’ve been through a lot more than you have. We’re tired. It’s too far.”
“Far?” Dexter asked, then gave up.
Jeff ignored him, and they walked the remainder of the way to the hotel in silence, with just the whining of the streetlights overhead and an occasional late night driver passing by. The silence was only broken when Dexter said, “Thanks for coming to get me,” as they entered the hotel. Dexter and Erica went to their rooms, each having offered to come along to the hospital and been waved off. Thinking he’d rather be alone to consider the day’s events, Jeff instead asked the front desk clerk to call him a cab to the closest hospital.
CHAPTER THIRTY
September 30, 2015
Jeff walked along the free breakfast buffet and added a warm cinnamon roll to his plate, silently commending himself for having enough attention to detail to have checked them into rooms at a hotel that offered free breakfast. Especially since he was extremely hungry. One of the dirty tricks time travel plays on your mind – they’d gone from the present to 1831 to 1770 back to the present, arriving after room service was closed for the night. While they hadn’t spent more than an hour or two in each time, when added together they’d missed a couple of meals. It was something he’d have to take into his equations on the next trip.
So, he was going to enjoy this one. He scooped a healthy serving of scrambled eggs onto his plate, then a pile of hash browns, and finally grabbed a bottle of hot sauce and found a table where he could see the big screen TV on the wall. He watched the MSNBC news anchor rambling on about another dip in the stock market. When would things stabilize?
The lounge area was empty – it was still early. He’d just gotten back from the hospital where they’d set his wrist, which turned out to be only sprained. Though, the knuckles on his punching hand, particularly between his index and middle finger where the impact h
ad been, were bright purple and painful to the touch. But he’d amused himself when the nurses asked him who he’d gotten into a fight with by saying, “Some British asshole.” While he’d only gotten to doze intermittently, waiting for things to happen, after taking a cab back to the hotel he’d decided that, rather than try to sleep, he’d check out the buffet. So, he sat alone with a plateful of food, a cup of tea and an orange juice, enjoying the morning.
As the TV droned on, he thought about what they’d accomplished the night before. Reveled in it, actually. Dexter was safe, and to him, no sooner had they left than they were back to rescue him. They were able to erase over 200 years of history in about ten seconds. He thought of what else they might have changed along the way – the burning of the records facility, the unrest in colonial Philadelphia, the shape of Garvey’s face. He was certain that Erica’d gone to her room, powered up the internet, and started searching. He imagined Dexter would’ve gone right to sleep, but Erica would want to know exactly what mark they’d made. He understood, of course. The one that really worried him was the possible reaction to the attack on Garvey. Tensions were already high at that time in American history, and a Colonial directly assaulting a British officer was sure to be an issue.
He’d grabbed a Time magazine, ironically, to read while he ate, but it sat untouched. Partially from exhaustion and partially from his recollections of the day before, he wasn’t going to be able to concentrate on it, so he didn’t bother trying.
When his food was half-eaten, he noticed Dexter slide along the buffet bar, then scan the room. Seeing Jeff, he came and sat down across from him, setting his plate on the table. He retreated back to the buffet quickly to get coffee, then returned. “Any sign of Erica this morning?”
Jeff shook his head. “I was just thinking she’s either sleeping or neck-deep in Google searches to find out what history we changed.”
Dexter laughed. “That’s probably right.” He dug into his breakfast. “How did you get her to do this? When I wrote that, I really didn’t think there was a chance she’d agree to help.”
Fortune Page 21
