Samantha Smart

by Maxwell Puggle

  The three walked down the plastic sidewalk, still marveling at the visual difference between what New York City was and what it had been. They found a dock with a little bench on it and sat down, deciding to see what they could learn from their pile of newspapers.

  “Apparently,” The Professor summarized, “Gary Calvin is now President of the United States, and has vetoed a bill by congress that would have required tougher restrictions on boat emissions. Poor sots–the last thing this world needs is more greenhouse gases–” The Professor cut himself off, as if something had clicked in his head. “October... ” he mused, looking at the date on the newspaper, “It is October, Samantha. And ridiculously warm. And, considering the fact that in my two other brief outings into this reality I haven’t found any evidence of dams breaking or torrential rains in the last seventy years, I’d say what we’re looking at here is the result of global warming.”

  “Global warming?” Samantha asked, looking up from her paper. “ Yeah, I’ve heard about that in science class. The earth gets too hot and the ice caps melt at the north and south poles, right?”

  “Correct,” The Professor replied, looking as if he were proud of her for having paid such good attention in school. “Global warming results from an excess of ‘greenhouse gases,’ principally carbon dioxide, building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat inside. When the heat builds to a certain level, the earth exhibits a ‘greenhouse effect’ and begins to melt the polar ice caps.”

  “Right,” said Samantha. “That’s why they say we shouldn’t pollute the air so much, or cut down all the rainforests.”

  “Precisely!” The Professor beamed. Samantha was, after all, his favorite informal student.

  “So, somehow something you did in your trip to 1931 melted the polar ice caps?”

  “Well, perhaps not directly–but yes, I think that’s the theory we should proceed with.”

  Samantha shrugged and filed away more potentially useful information. She and The Professor returned to browsing their various newspapers for any other clues they might find, sharing ideas with each other. The “Waves” were apparently some sort of water polo team that rode around on jet-skis and played in a sort of stadium that was somewhere in the huge rectangle lake that used to be Central Park. This didn’t seem like useful information, but the game looked cool in the pictures and so did the stadium. The park fire had been a terrible tragedy in a houseboat community that had sprung up downtown in Washington Square Park. There were pictures of the boats burning and people fleeing in canoes and the like, but the strangest sight to Samantha’s eyes was how short and stubby the big arch in the square looked with its first ten or fifteen feet underwater.

  The trick-or-treating headline confirmed even further that it was definitely October, with Halloween nearing, and the water-world response to this was thousands of surfboard-type things with little electric motors on them. Again, pretty cool but not much help in solving their mystery. The really good information came from the last front-page article, which talked about the Japanese refugees relocating. This went into great detail about the melting ice caps, confirming The Professor’s theory and dating the beginning of the extreme water level rise to sometime in the mid nineteen-eighties.

  “Egad!” The Professor exclaimed. “That’s extremely fast. Twenty-five years and the sea level rises by twelve feet worldwide? Something acutely disastrous must have occurred.”

  In fact, at that very moment, something acutely disastrous was occurring. Polly had wandered a little ways out onto an adjacent dock where a boat was moored with its motor running at an idle. In one of her bolder yet least intelligent moves, she had decided to jump into the boat, landing squarely on its throttle and lurching the boat forward at an alarming speed, so much so that it broke its slender tether like a string of spaghetti and roared off into the busy river-traffic of Columbus Avenue. Samantha’s jaw dropped and she and The Professor stared helplessly for a moment before springing into action.

  They ran as fast as they could, dropping all but one of their newspapers, straight to a taxi-boat that was parked nearby.

  “Please,” Samantha cried, pointing ahead of her, “We have to follow that boat!”

  “What?” the startled cabbie looked up from a magazine of questionable taste that he had been reading.

  “My Dog! Quickly, my dog jumped into that boat and must’ve hit the gas! Please!” Samantha pleaded in as hurried a voice as she could manage. The Professor nodded vigorously in agreement and they climbed into the boat.

  “Right,” the driver replied, dropping his magazine and kicking in the motor. “You guys got money, right?”

  “Yes,” The Professor nodded again, and they sped off in hot pursuit of the boat that Polly had inadvertently stolen.

  The cabbie opened up the throttle and they roared into high gear, the Polly-driven boat just on the edge of sight ahead. Amazingly, it appeared to be somehow maintaining a mostly straight course, though was not stopping for any of the traffic signals and had almost caused several accidents already. The cabbie dodged crosstown traffic as he wove through the same intersections, gradually gaining.

  “Great galoshes!” The Professor exclaimed, hanging onto his hat as they barely swerved around another crossing taxi-boat, inspiring honking horns and a flurry of non-English curses. They were now only a block behind Polly but had already traversed eight or nine blocks, veered left onto Broadway and were heading straight toward the huge, busy intersection of Columbus Circle.

  With an extra burst of speed, the cabbie zoomed within a hundred or so feet of the terrified dog in her runaway boat, and Samantha could see her little head poking up over the side. It looked like she was going to jump.

  Despite Polly’s general disdain of water and her overall fear of this new water-world and everything in it, jump is exactly what she did. The boat was moving so fast that she actually skipped across the water, was almost hit by another boat and then came to a floating halt, totally dazed. She began to paddle, just trying to stay afloat, and the cabbie downshifted, slowing down to pull alongside of her.

  “Polly!” Samantha shouted, waving her arms as they approached her slowly, “Polly, over here!”

  The dazed terrier seemed to hear her and changed the direction of her paddle towards their boat. When she was within arm’s reach Samantha grabbed her by the collar and began to pull her aboard, The Professor aiding in the process.

  “Keep the seats dry!” the cabbie yelled, letting them know that he was less than excited about having a wet dog in his taxi-boat, especially after a harrowing chase. Trying to ignore him, Samantha hugged her soaked canine companion, very happy to have her back in one piece.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, almost in tears, inspecting Polly for any wounds or missing parts. Amazingly, she seemed to be intact.

  The ‘stolen’ boat, however, had not been so lucky. It had blazed right into Columbus Circle, was hit by several other boats and was now being bashed around in traffic near the circle’s central hub, where a statue of Columbus and perhaps six feet of column base were all that now divided this new, broader roundabout. The Professor and Samantha looked at each other with pale faces. A decision had to be made, fast.

  “Here,” The Professor shoved all of his money, about two hundred and thirty-four dollars, into the cabbie’s hand. “Take us to the steps of the Natural History Museum and forget you ever saw us.”

  The cabbie looked around, checked his mirrors and quickly ascertained that no police seemed to have arrived yet, and no one seemed to have noticed that their taxi-boat had been the source of all the excitement. He smiled and closed his fist on the money.

  “You got it, Mac,” he replied, pulling a sharp left onto Sixty-first street and then another onto Central Park West. At first they crept a little slowly, trying to blend in, but quickly picked up the pace. Samantha held Polly low in her lap, trying to hide the wet dog from any passing police. She was very nervous; Samantha wasn’t accustomed to breaking the law in a
ny sort of way, and she felt bad for the owner of the ‘stolen’ boat and the other boats that had been involved in crashes, and she prayed that no one had been hurt by the actions of her usually smarter dog. The Professor, though also quite nervous, seemed to sense Samantha’s unease and attempted to be a soothing adult voice to her frightened adolescent ears.

  “It’ll be all right, Samantha,” he said, whispering. “Remember, we’re trying to make sure that none of this ever happens. Though I admit this would seem to be a small setback.”

  “A small setback!!? Professor, we’re outlaws here now!”

  “Yes, well, we’re banking on the hope that no one saw us, or can really pinpoint the source of the runaway boat.” He paused, looking at the cabbie, “And so is our friend here.”

  The cabbie appeared calm, reached Seventy-seventh street, swung a quick U-turn as no oncoming boat traffic was evident and pulled alongside the museum steps, settling into a little cove that the water had created beneath the statue of a mounted Teddy Roosevelt. The fugitive trio hopped out, looked at their driver with very serious expressions and received a slight smile in return, the cabbie holding up the last of The Professor’s cash and miming zipping his mouth shut with a zipper. The Professor nodded and the driver eased back into Manhattan boat traffic, waving a last goodbye.

  “Leaping Lozenges!” The Professor blurted out after a long moment of silence, wiping his sweaty brow with a sleeve. “Have you got a leash for that monster!?”

  Samantha smiled slightly and nodded sheepishly, pulling Polly’s leash out of her backpack. Polly sat with hunched shoulders and looked as best she could like a dog who was very sorry, and certainly hadn’t meant to be bad.

  Polly sat calmly in the corner of Professor Smythe’s basement office as Samantha eyed her. It was hard not to be angry at the little Boston terrier for all the chaos she had managed to cause in this strange alternate timeline, but she was after all just a dog. Samantha made a mental note to always keep her on the leash anytime they ventured out again into this bizarre, otherworldly New York. At least it seemed like their chaotic activity had gone unnoticed; it had been a day and a half since the boat had gone charging, driverless, into Columbus Circle traffic. They had made themselves beds in the office out of fourteenth century Peruvian blankets, neither she nor The Professor being confident that their homes were still where they had left them back in the ‘correct’ timeline. Professor Smythe had assured Samantha that he was allowed to be at the museum at any time and frequently worked entire nights there. Whether or not this was true, or at least familiar to the museum guards of this timeline, security seemed to be leaving them alone in their obscure corner of the building’s basement.

  In the last thirty-six or so hours, they had read their one surviving newspaper from front to back, and had ventured out once in another taxi-boat to purchase several more. It appeared that Professor Smythe’s ATM bank card still worked in this timeline–apparently he had not been bankrupted or indeed snuffed out of existence altogether by the dramatic changes the world had gone through. “A fortuitous thing” The Professor had called it, though it had seemed quite unlikely to Samantha.

  The Professor had also expressed continued fascination with the forest of antennae that seemed to dominate the entire skyline, and they had made a plan that today they would investigate this phenomenon. It didn’t take long for The Professor to discover something about them just by re-reading the newspaper.

  “Suffering Cephalopods!” he exclaimed. “Trees! Trees, Samantha!”

  The Professor shoved the newspaper in front of her, pointing to a marginal advertisement for some sort of tree maintenance company.

  “Look at the picture,” The Professor indicated a tall, slender, antenna-like photo at one side of the ad. It was indisputably one of the things they had observed on almost every city rooftop, though it could be seen in much greater detail in the photograph. Its bottom base, which they could never see from street level, was a roughly trapezoidal shape with what looked like computer controls and a digital readout on it. The advertisement talked about regulation of CO2 intake and oxygen output, which clearly intrigued The Professor to no end.

  “Artificial trees, Samantha,” he began in a hurried voice. “Thousands upon thousands of them. Artificially processing carbon dioxide and outputting oxygen. Amazing! I must see one. But–” Samantha could almost see smoke coming out of The Professor’s ears as she watched him thinking steps ahead of her, “That would mean–could mean–” he looked again at the newspaper, then grabbed it and began marching towards his laboratory.

  “Come on, Samantha, I definitely would love to see one of these amazing devices, but first we need to run a quick test on this newspaper. If my hypothesis is correct, we may have the answer to our question of how this global warming sprang so suddenly on this alternate timeline.” Samantha shrugged and followed, closing Polly in the office behind her.

  The Professor’s lab was a pretty impressive place. Samantha had been in it many times before but still only understood what half of the hi-tech machines were for. The machine they were currently at was scanning the newspaper The Professor had placed in it, with lasers, x-rays and other invisible forms of light or energy, according to him. The results, which appeared in columns on a computer screen, were in abbreviations and percentages that made little sense to Samantha, though she had seen this spectral analysis performed once or twice before by her erstwhile mentor.

  “Cotton, hemp. Alfalfa! Atrophied Aztecs! There’s not one speck!”

  “One speck of what?” Samantha asked, trying to understand the numbers on the screen.

  “Look,” The Professor pointed to the abbreviations, explaining them, “Cotton, 62.5 percent. Hemp, 27.83 percent, Alfalfa, 9.64 percent–there’s no wood, Samantha. Not one iota. This newspaper is made entirely without wood pulp.”

  Samantha looked and began to understand. Artificial trees, newspapers made purely of cotton and hemp, massive global warming. It was beginning to add up to a somewhat sickening conclusion.

  “Professor,” she said quietly, “Does this mean what I think it means?”

  “It certainly seems so,” he replied, shaking his head sadly. “Samantha, I think it is quite possible, in fact likely, that in this alternate timeline there are no trees. At least not in this part of the world.”

  “The floating plastic sidewalks,” she thought out loud, “I thought they would’ve looked much better in wood. Now I understand why they made them the way the did. But Professor–no trees!? How could such a thing happen?”

  “I believe,” replied Professor Smythe, “that that is the next mystery we must unravel if we are to set things right.”

  It was quite a mystery. Fortunately, The Professor early on concluded that the answer to it might indeed lie right under their noses. They were, after all, in the basement of the Natural History Museum. While they had reasonably assumed that their little corner of basement seemed relatively immune to the effects of the time disruption, it was also true that the entire staff upstairs seemed to have changed, and it was therefore likely that the other parts of the museum had been affected.

  They wove their way upwards through the building, The Professor having decided that they should head for the section that primarily dealt with ecology and climate, if indeed it would even be in the same place that it had been before. They climbed four flights of stairs, avoiding the elevators in order to encounter as few security personnel as possible and exited into a magnificent reconstruction of an Amazon rain forest. A huge canopy of expertly-crafted vines and branches stretched out overhead, while they were flanked on either side by every kind of tropical bush, tree and moss one could imagine. Hidden speakers played the sounds of rain, shifting leaves and hundreds of different birds and animals. Samantha remembered being in a similar exhibit here before, but couldn’t remember if it had been in the same exact location or not.

  “This way,” Professor Smythe indicated. It seemed he was perhaps more familiar with
the wing; Samantha always found the massive building hard to navigate. It didn’t help that exhibits would frequently change.

  After passing through an African desert, a Himalayan mountain scene and an Arctic refuge complete with walruses, killer whales and polar bears (not live ones, of course), the pair came to a sort of nexus where the walls were lined with large, backlit displays full of writing, diagrams and illustrations. It didn’t take long for The Professor to locate something relevant; in the next moment he was reading aloud to Samantha from one of the more interesting-looking ones.

  “In 1973, a disease was discovered in trees of the lodgepole pine family by Dr. Emmond Hesparius, a researcher for the U.S. Forest Service.” The Professor pointed to a diagram of the fungoid-type organism’s molecular structure. “The disease was considered contained until the summer of 1975, by which time it had mutated to affect several other species of pine. Emergency research grants were applied for (largely at the behest of the timber industry) but did not arrive until the spring of 1976, at which point the aggressive fungoid had spread to infect all species of pine trees and several other spruce, fir and other coniferous subspecies as well. By 1977, though research funds were now pouring in from around the globe, the disease had spread to four continents and had continually mutated to infect deciduous trees as well, and by 1980 almost every tree on the planet was dead. The fungoid had mutated to also affect some bushes, shrubs, flowers and, most alarmingly, algaes that helped maintain the planet’s temperature, but by this time a neutralizing agent had been developed. The remedy proved to be too little too late, however, for without rainforests and many marine organisms, the bulk of the earth’s atmospheric processing apparatus was irrevocably crippled.

  “Dramatic increases in global temperature were recorded in every subsequent year, having been raised an average of twenty-three degrees worldwide since June 6, 1981.”

  “Yikes,” Samantha piped in, “No wonder it’s so warm.”