Samantha Smart

by Maxwell Puggle

  Samantha made her way to the elevator in the lobby’s far right-hand corner, located the agent’s office on the directory board and walked through the doors when they opened, pressing the button on the inside for the fifth floor. The doors closed and she began to move slowly upward, watching the numbers light up as she passed floors two, three and four. As ‘five’ lit up, the elevator stopped, opening its doors and ringing a little bell that sounded like it belonged in a Japanese economy car.

  Apparently the whole floor was occupied by Alan Horrowitz And Associates, as there was a sort of lobby here, too, with a receptionist’s desk straight in front of her. She walked up to it, noticing that the receptionist was on the phone, and stood waiting patiently.

  “No, Mr. Horrowitz doesn’t represent children’s authors,” she was saying to someone. “I– know that adolescents aren’t exactly children, but as I said–” more silence as the persistent author continued in a minuscule voice Samantha could almost make out. “Yes, well, again, I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid your book just isn’t our kind of material. Thank you!” The receptionist hung up, looking peeved at the caller, then noticed Samantha and instantly painted a somewhat patronizing smile back onto her face.

  “You must be Ms. Smart,” she said in a voice that dripped with feigned honey. “We’ve been expecting you.” Samantha smiled and nodded.

  “Come on, then,” she said, getting up from the desk and motioning for Samantha to follow her down a long hallway. “Ms. Edelstein doesn’t usually give interviews, but I think she was a bit charmed by the notion of a young girl from a high school paper. Right this way... ” She opened a door to a large, sunny office with Alan Horrowitz’s name on it. Samantha was led in and seated in a comfortable chair in front of an impressively large desk, and the receptionist pressed a button on the desk intercom and spoke into it.

  “Mr. Horrowitz, Samantha Smart is here from the school paper.”

  “Right! We’ll be in in a minute,” a man’s voice replied from the plastic box. The receptionist smiled at her and started towards the door.

  “They’ll just be a moment. Can I get you anything while you’re waiting?”

  “No, thank you,” Samantha replied politely as the spokesmodel-esque woman exited.

  Think fast, she said to herself. She pulled out a little notepad on which she had scribbled some ‘cover’ questions on the taxi-boat ride down, in addition to Professor Smythe’s ‘essential’ questions. She had to play this like she was actually interested in Violet Edelstein’s poetry and short stories, though she had read none of them. She realized, in fact, that she had never really interviewed anyone before, except maybe her brother Todd, for some dumb school assignment. She hoped she could pull off the charade.

  After five minutes or so, a side door into the office opened and a well-dressed man in his forties appeared, helping a very old woman walk to the chair opposite Samantha’s. She gave Samantha a smile as he helped her sit down, then the man walked over and shook her hand.

  “Hello, Ms. Smart. This is the elusive Violet Edelstein.” He indicated the old woman.

  “Hello,” Samantha replied, looking at both of them.

  “I’m Alan Horrowitz, Ms. Edelstein’s agent. Ah, if you don’t mind, I’ve got some business to attend to, so I’ll leave you two alone.” He smiled and exited back through the door they had come in through.

  “So,” Violet Edelstein said after a brief but somewhat uncomfortable silence. “You write for your school paper?”

  “Yes,” Samantha blurted out. “But I’d like to write other things someday... like you.”

  “I wrote for my high school newspaper,” the aged author began dreamily, “The Pelham High Gazette. My, that was a long time ago.”

  “Um–did you like writing for the paper?” Samantha asked, pretending to take notes.

  “Well... I suppose as much as you seem to,” she replied, staring at her with knowing eyes. “I always wanted to write fiction, though. And of course poetry, though,” she chuckled, “I certainly never expected to make money off of that. Fiction and poetry, they’re much more... imaginative. More fun to envision, you know?”

  “Absolutely,” replied Samantha. “What would you say is the key to any successful story?”

  The old woman thought for a moment, then lifted her finger and pointed at Samantha.

  “Research. A story, a person, a place–all of these things are always more believable, more tangible if they are thoroughly and earnestly researched. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” Samantha chewed her pen. “I would indeed. Do you, ah, do you remember when your first story was published?”

  “Why, of course,” Violet responded. “Like it was yesterday. I was very young and naive then, but–” she smiled devilishly, “I also had the fires of love in me.

  “My first story to be published was about a man who wanted to cure cancer, a man who wanted nothing more than to, well, to help his fellow man. It was called The Mad Scientist. He wasn’t really mad, of course, just very passionate about pursuing something that, well, that thousands of young scientists are still pursuing today. Curing cancer has proved to be quite a difficult task.” She chuckled.

  “To be sure.” Samantha smiled back. “And was this man completely made up, or was he based on someone that you knew?”

  The old woman eyed her thoughtfully. “There was a man I knew,” she began, hesitating. “He was very charming–not in the way that most girls might find a man to be charming, but very... admirable. Dedicated.”

  “Dedicated,” Samantha repeated, scribbling. “And how did you come to know him?”

  “We–well, we... dated for some time. A long time ago, before all this flooding business. We... we thought about getting married, actually–but that was back when every boy a girl dated was thought of as a potential husband, you know.” She chuckled again, looking up at the ceiling as if she were remembering something distantly pleasant. “He used to write me the sweetest letters... ”

  “Well,” Samantha pressed on after a bit of silence. “What, ah, what became of this charming, dedicated fellow?”

  “We... we lost touch, I suppose. He had talked about moving, to North Carolina, I think. He said he had a big opportunity there, that he was going there to ‘check into it’ and that he would write me again when he settled into a place–he had lived in Brooklyn up until then–but I never got his letter, if he wrote one. Then there was a–a terrible fire at my house and I had to move as well. It was all rather dramatic, really. I suppose we were just–never meant to be. But that’s all ancient history.”

  Samantha’s mind was racing. A letter that wasn’t delivered, or was delivered to a pile of ashes. A wedding that never happened. A child who was never born? It was clutch time, and she decided to blurt out a blatant question.

  “Ms. Edelstein,” she said a little shakily. “That man–was his name Vincent Bergen?”

  Violet Edelstein looked shocked and seemed to become most pale, as if she had seen a ghost, and Samantha was briefly afraid she might have a heart attack or something.

  “Why, yes–yes, it was. But how... how could you know that?” she asked in awe.

  “Perhaps you were meant to be together,” Samantha replied, getting up and taking the dumbstruck author’s hand. “Thank you, Ms. Edelstein,” she said firmly but gently. “ You have been a tremendous help. I think I have enough here for the story I wanted to write.” She moved toward the door, confident that this was all the information she needed.

  “W–Wait,” the old woman squeaked out. “How do you know about... Vincent?”

  “Research,” Samantha winked, exiting the office.

  Samantha smiled as she walked in the late afternoon sun up Seventh Avenue. She had totally pulled off what she considered to be a very professional impersonation. Not only had she got the information she was sent to get, she had extracted it smoothly and cleverly, saving the blunt question for last, when she had been pretty much sure of the answer alre
ady. As much as she loved forensic science, this sort of work was very exciting, too. Perhaps she could be some sort of detective or private investigator–it was much the same as forensics, the basic gist being to gather the facts and try to make a logical conclusion. The exciting thing about this sort of work, though, was that you got to be out “in the field,” interacting with people in the real world and developing skills like impersonating school reporters. It was definitely less dull than sitting in a lab analyzing newspapers under a microscope, though her smart and logical side (of which she was very fond) told her that the latter job probably paid more, and The Professor’s bank account seemed to confirm this. She shrugged to herself; maybe she could do both. She was a young, energetic girl.

  She felt so energetic at the moment that she decided to walk at least part of the way back to the museum. Taking taxi-boats was fast, certainly, but Samantha hadn’t done enough real walking lately, and seeing as she was in no particular rush, she availed herself of the opportunity to fit in some healthy exercise. Seventh Avenue (and apparently all the avenues) had floating plastic sidewalks lining them all the way up, and where they crossed the water-filled streets they bridged them with iron over-walks that were bolted into the buildings on either side. It was a lot of up and down walking, but it at least allowed one to walk around the city. It was also like a natural Stairmaster for the thighs, and though Samantha was not in any way fat or even flabby, she reminded herself that “cellulite is the enemy,” as she had been thoroughly informed by every major teen magazine. The workout was nice, and Samantha worked up a sweat after only three or four blocks, she walking at a brisk pace and the day being still quite warm and sunny. When she reached Madison Square Garden and had descended from the Thirty-first Street over-walk, she was again confronted with the huddling masses of homeless people, looking hungry, half-drunk and very much beyond their years. She felt very bad for them, and wound up giving an old woman with a sort of floating shopping cart ten of her remaining twenty-or-so dollars. It was silly, she knew. In the real timeline, the woman may never have been born, or, who knew, she could be a powerful investment banker. It was probably stupid to put her resources into something she was working to eliminate (anything in this alternate timeline), but Samantha was a compassionate person and had felt the need to do something, even if it was just to make one woman more comfortable for a short period of time that might not even exist if she and The Professor accomplished their mission to right things, time-wise.

  She continued walking uptown, staying on Seventh Avenue, though when she reached Forty-second Street, where Broadway cut its diagonal path across midtown, the over-walks became very jumbled, and at one point she found herself plopped down in Times Square on a large, plaza-like floating plastic triangle with benches and artificial trees on it. It was bizarre, like and yet unlike how she remembered it. There was still a large digital billboard of sorts, though it seemed to be advertising strange, unfamiliar products, among them artificial trees and motorized surfboards. Samantha wondered if they still celebrated New Year’s here, if they still dropped a ball at midnight. Well, she thought, if it’s October now, I suppose we’ll find out if we don’t get this mess straightened out in a few months.

  She spied a music store to one side of the plaza and, looking at her watch, decided she could duck in for a few minutes. Music was very important to her and she realized she hadn’t heard a good Heatwavvve song in a while. Even with all her new responsibilities as investigator, forensic scientist and possibly time-traveler-in-training, she maintained that it was only fair to let herself be a young girl at times.

  The store was bustling with lots of people, many around Samantha’s age. It seemed compact discs had still managed to get invented, though they looked somewhat bigger and were packaged a bit differently. None of the musical artists on the wall’s posters looked even vaguely familiar, and this gave her a feeling of discomfort–it was one thing to not be “hip” because you hadn’t exposed yourself to new music; it was another thing entirely to be a girl who just really didn’t belong in a certain time and place. She was sort of staring at a poster of some axe-wielding heavy metal singer when a store clerk came up and jolted her out of her queasy reverie.

  “Can I help you find anything, Miss?” A good-looking young man in a red vest and nametag asked her.

  “Oh–uh, yeah, maybe,” she sputtered, feeling even more uncool. “Do you, um, do you have Heatwavvve, the, uh, singing group?”

  “Heatwavvve?” the clerk started walking through the aisles, beckoning Samantha to follow. “Um - I’m not sure if this is what you want, but... ” they reached a stack that the clerk thumbed through and pulled out a disc. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  Samantha took the CD from him and looked at it. The cover was all red and looked like some kind of nuclear explosion, though it did say “Heatwavvve” on it. She flipped it over and read some of the song titles, “Baby Butcher,” “Chained and Hopeless,” “March of the Frost Giants”–this was definitely not the same Heatwavvve. She confirmed this assumption by reading the names of the band in the liner notes, which were all wrong.

  “Um–no,” she replied. “This isn’t them. Don’t you have Heatwavvve, you know, the boy-band with Jordan Anderson?”

  “Boy-band? Jordan Anderson? I’m afraid I don’t know who you’re talking about. The only Heatwavvve I know of is these guys,” he said, taking the disc back from her and replacing it in the stack. “And they play like thrash-metal.”

  “Heatwavvve,” Samantha emphasized, frustrated. “They’re huge! Everyone knows who they are, they’ve sold millions of CDs and are in those ads on TV for soda and barbecued ribs and stuff. They’re everywhere! How could you not know them?”

  The clerk scratched his head. “Are they British?” he asked, “or Australian?”

  “No! They’re totally American–I just–and this was incredible–I just met one of their singers, Jordan Anderson, downtown. He was going to get me a signed poster... ” she drifted off into the memory of her moments with Jordan. The tingly feeling she’d gotten when he touched her had been amazing, and she wished she could feel it again.

  “I’m sorry,” the clerk shrugged, smiling slightly at her obvious adolescent crush and causing her to blush. “Maybe you could get a CD from him, too; we don’t have one.”

  Samantha thanked the clerk for his help, and after a brief and futile self-performed search of the “A” stack, hoping to find something under “Jordan Anderson,” she left the store. Her watch read 4:48, and though it surely didn’t feel like it, it was October and hence the sun was rapidly going down. She decided to hail a taxi-boat from the huge floating triangle-plaza, figuring she didn’t want to be walking around in the dark unless absolutely necessary. She had ten dollars left and figured that would cover her ride back to the upper west side, and it didn’t take her long to find a cab.

  The ride uptown was uneventful, and Samantha mostly spent it trying to figure out why Jordan Anderson existed in this timeline and yet no one at a big chain music store had ever heard of Heatwavvve. Perhaps they weren’t quite as famous in this reality, and Jordan had just been playing himself up as a superstar simply because she had heard of his group. That wouldn’t be so bad, she thought to herself. If he wasn’t so famous, maybe he’d even consider... well, dating someone like me. She quickly dismissed this as silly girlish thinking, he was years older than her, though perhaps a definite spark of hope remained in her mind.

  The taxi-boat pulled up and dropped her off at the museum steps and she gave the driver her ten dollars, tipping him two dollars and twenty-five cents as the fare had been $7.75. She did the usual rigamarole with the security desk, though by now the “new” people sort of recognized her and would generally let her find her own way down to Professor Smythe’s office once they got the telephone o.k. from him. She was almost knocked over by a Boston Terrier blow to the chest when she entered the office; Polly had obviously missed her. She gave her dog a good bit of affect
ion and then looked over to where The Professor was tinkering with something on his desk.

  “Hi, Professor!” she said in a peppy voice.

  “Oh, Samantha!” he replied, looking up from his work. “I’ve just finished making a prototype for a wristband-communicator,” he said enthusiastically. “It runs on a closed-circuit microwave band that, if my theory is correct, should be unaffected by temporal displacement.”

  “Say what?” Samantha tried to adjust back to The Professor’s speed of thinking.

  “Time travel, Samantha. The wrist communicator is joined by a sort of a closed-circuit microwave band to this desk unit here.” He indicated a larger sort of radio thing. “They should function no matter what sort of ‘timeline’ one might be in, and of course throughout the course of any of these timelines, at any point along the way.”

  “Cool,” Samantha said earnestly, walking over to the desk and looking at his work. “Where did you get the parts to make this, Professor?”

  “Radio Shack.” The old Brit smiled a toothy smile. “Well,” he said, turning back to the desk, “we shall have to test this, then. And that means using the time machine, Samantha.”

  “Professor,” she interjected, “don’t you want to hear about my interview with Violet Edelstein?”

  “Bellowing bugbears!” he exclaimed. “I’d totally forgotten. Sometimes I just get so involved in a new project that I sort of forget what the last one was for,” he said apologetically.

  “It’s okay, Professor,” Samantha said, patting him on the top of his head. “But listen!” Her voice became as excited as his. “I got to ‘interview’ Violet Edelstein–a very neat woman, by the way - you would’ve been so proud of me, I did such a good job as field agent, impersonating a school reporter–” The Professor was nodding in anticipation. “Anyway, there’s no Elliot Bergen in this timeline, he was never born. Ms. Edelstein said that she had been dating a Vincent Bergen, but that he had moved, probably to North Carolina, to pursue some opportunity, and that he was supposed to have written her, that they had been considering marriage, but then her house burned down and she had to move as well and they lost touch.”