Samantha Smart

by Maxwell Puggle

  “How can I correct your mistake if I don’t know what it is until it happens?” Samantha asked.

  “Hmmmm.” The Professor thought out loud, his brow furrowing. “I suppose you’ll have to anticipate it, to some degree. Remember, it probably has something to do with a letter, and I know there was a postman nearby in that time. Whatever happened–aaah, this is frustrating! I would say to look for a postman, and to pay attention to whatever I’m doing around the time you might see him.”

  “All right.” Samantha’s mind processed the information.

  They had been walking in a semi-circle around Belvedere Castle, and now ascended some stone steps to a sort of terrace that stretched out like a grand, outside dance floor. They were still walking and talking when Samantha noticed that Polly had frozen in place.

  “Polly, come on, girl,” Samantha intoned, pulling gently on her leash. She still would not budge, and seemed to be staring into the distance at a person who was leaning on a stone wall about fifty yards away. Her ears were straight up in the air and she seemed to be extremely on edge.

  “Polly, what is it, girl?” The Professor prompted her. She turned for a half-second at the sound of her name, then immediately snapped back to looking at the distant figure, who was now walking toward them. It appeared to be a young man in a dark red leather jacket, with an average build and a gait of calm confidence. As he grew closer, Samantha began to recognize him. It was Jordan Anderson. Her heart began to thump as she remembered the feel of his hand on her arm–half a feeling of danger and half one of excitement. She gulped hard as he approached them and The Professor took note of her reaction. Polly began to growl.

  “Samantha, right?” Jordan asked, stopping in front of them and flashing his blinding white smile like a mirror in the intense sunlight.

  “Hi, Jordan,” Samantha gushed. “I–I forgot I told you about this place–Polly, stop it!” She slapped her dog lightly on the head to cease her growling.

  “Well, it certainly is a nice place,” Jordan replied, his eyes darting from Samantha to The Professor to Polly.

  “Oh–I’m sorry,” Samantha continued, trying to assume an air of womanliness. “This is my friend Professor Smythe. And this is my dog, Polly. Polly, stop.” She grabbed the canine’s face to quiet her continued noises.

  “Good to meet you,” Jordan said, shaking The Professor’s hand.

  “Likewise,” The Professor said somewhat suspiciously.

  “I–uh, I met Samantha downtown yesterday. She said she was a fan of my band. Oh–here, I brought that poster in case I ran into you,” he said, turning to Samantha and pulling a small poster from an inner pocket of his jacket. “Signed by the whole band.”

  “Oh, thanks! Thanks for remembering,” Samantha peeped, taking the poster and unrolling it. It was truly the same Heatwavvve she remembered, with all the members’ signatures signed in what appeared to be fresh black marker underneath each of their faces. She was tickled pink, but then remembered her strange experience at the Times Square music store.

  “Jordan, I tried to find your discs at the store the other day and–”

  “They didn’t know who we were?” Jordan interrupted.

  “Well, yeah,” Samantha said, blushing a little.

  “Yeah, well... we’re not that big–yet. I was actually surprised you knew who we were, Samantha. It’s nice to have a fan. We’ve been trying to get our albums in the bigger chain stores, but, well, it’s tough, you know?”

  “Oh, sure,” she responded, once again taking on an air of maturity and nodding as if she knew all the ins and outs of the music business. Inside she breathed a sigh of relief; that explained a lot and dispelled most of the uneasy feelings she had had before.

  “Where can one purchase one of your recordings?” The Professor piped in, still eyeing the young man warily.

  “Oh - um, well, you can get them at Al’s music, down on Fifty-seventh and–oh, I think it’s Third or Fourth Ave.”

  “Third or Fourth?” The Professor raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah. That’s–I think that’s one of the closer places, though I’m not sure. They’re at other stores, too, just not that many, and you kind of have to dig a little. You can download them for iTunes too.”

  “Cool.” Samantha smiled.

  “So–how did your appointment go? Yesterday.” Jordan asked her.

  “My–oh! Oh, it was great; I went to this literary agent’s office to–” The Professor subtly pinched her, rather hard, an action obviously meant to tell her she was perhaps talking a bit too much. “To–uh, do an interview. For my school paper.”

  “Really! Whom did you interview?”

  “Oh, uh, it was this... children’s book author. A man named Mark Farmer. Have you heard of him?”

  “’Fraid not.” Jordan shrugged. “What did he write?”

  “Ah–The Frog Prince,” she struggled out, wincing to herself for coming up with such a stupid answer.

  “The Frog Prince? I thought that was a really old story.”

  “Right. I mean, it is. He just, oh, modernized it.”

  “I see. Good story. One of my favorites,” Jordan responded. There was something of a dire gleam in his eye when he said this, and he had the slightest hint of a mischievous smile on his face. Polly began to growl again.

  “Well,” he said, breaking his stance. “ I suppose I should get going. We’ve got a photo shoot later this afternoon. It was good to see you again, Samantha.” He took her hand and kissed it, making her shiver with pre-teen crush feelings. Polly growled loudly and he let her hand go, shaking The Professor’s again. “Nice to meet you, Professor,” he said. The Professor just nodded and stared as he walked away.

  “Thanks for the poster!” Samantha blurted out belatedly, waving to the cutest boy she had ever seen, who had just kissed her hand. He turned around and shot her a gun-shaped finger as if to say “You got it, kid.” What a smooth operator, she thought.

  The Professor turned to her with a look of concern.

  “Heatwavvve?” he asked. Samantha nodded. “Seems like a bit of a loose cannon, that bloke. I get a funny feeling about that lad. You watch out for him, Samantha.”

  “Oh, Professor!” she shot back. “It’s just an act. He’s supposed to come off as the ‘bad boy.’ I’m sure what we just saw isn’t at all the real Jordan Anderson. There are probably very few people that really know him, you know? I mean, really know him well.” She drifted off into fantasy-land, wondering if she could be the one to really get to know Jordan.

  “Hmmph,” The Professor snorted, looking at her as if she were suddenly just another, average pre-teen girl.

  “I think your judgement is a bit... clouded, shall we say. Anyway–it’s not that I thought he was, well, your typical, roguish young man, it’s just–well, I didn’t trust him. He’s lying about something.”

  “What!?” she chirped defensively.

  “I don’t know,” The Professor scratched his chin. “But it’s more than just the popularity–or lack thereof–of his band. Mark my words.”

  The two walked in silence for a little while longer until Polly had had her fill of the great outdoors, then hailed a taxi-boat at the shore and returned to the museum, where they sat down in The Professor’s office and went over the last-minute details of their plan, working out various contingencies and worst-case scenarios that could in fact occur in the unpredictable world of time travel. The Professor explained that to get back to the present, she would have to return to the museum and the sub-basement room that contained the massive Mayan time-machine and stand in exactly the same spot that she had arrived in.

  “Trace your feet with this,” he said, handing her a piece of odd-looking chalk. This, he further explained, was part of the machine, this chalk, and it was not to be lost at all costs. “One must place one’s feet exactly within the markings to return properly,” he stressed. That was how he had gotten back to the present from his journey into the past, though now it was this presen
t, a present altered by his actions back in 1931.

  “If you get confused,” he reassured her, “remember, we’ll be in constant communication.”

  Everything was ready. Samantha had checked her wrist-communicator, had her backpack on which contained ten tuna-fish sandwiches, sixty-four ounces of water and some pepper spray (in case of emergencies), and was wearing a heavy wool coat as they did not expect 1931’s October to be as balmy as this one in the altered, globally-warmed timeline. She stood on the stone platform in the middle of the time machine’s ring of monolithic outer stones while The Professor fiddled with what looked like primitive black glass beads on the panel directly in front of her. She held Polly in her arms, who looked a bit frightened though she did not squirm. In her left hand she clutched the “magic” chalk.

  “All right, Samantha, brace yourself. As I recall, this feels a little strange.”

  The word “strange” did not even begin to describe what Samantha felt in the next minute. It seemed, suddenly, that she had become transparent, like a ghost. Her body felt like every cell had been connected to an open socket of cool electricity. The room around her began to flicker in and out like a TV screen that kept short-circuiting. In between were brief flashes of a world of darkness enshrouded in billowing blue mist. Sounds warped and echoed; she could hear Polly whining, though the sound of her little dog-voice seemed to come in waves, from all around her. The flickering grew more rapid and The Professor began to appear and disappear, his being becoming something more and more distant, as if it existed only in a far-off dream world outside the immediate bubble of her self. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, the electrical buzzing of her every atom intensifying, and she thought at that moment that something had gone very wrong, that the machine must have malfunctioned and that she would surely explode at any second. Weird Mayan symbols danced across the insides of her tightly-clenched eyelids and then–it was over.

  Slowly, Samantha opened her eyes. It was very dark. Luckily, she had thought to pack a flashlight in with her tuna-fish sandwiches and water and she slowly put Polly down and extracted it from her backpack, turning it on. Immediately she was startled by a gargantuan sabre-toothed tiger that could only have been three feet from her face. She stifled a scream and almost instinctively jumped straight backwards, but her intuition thankfully kept her feet glued to the floor. If she moved before she traced them with chalk, she might never get back.

  The tiger, of course, was not real. She shined the flashlight around to reveal a small jungle of apes, mammoths, cave bears and miniature horses, all posed dramatically to reflect their individual prehistoric natures. It seemed that, yes, she was in fact in the very same room she had been in a minute ago, only in another time where it was occupied by (very convincing) replicas of ancient mammals instead of a huge stone time-machine. She let out a breath she had been holding the whole time, bent down and traced around her shoes with the Mayan chalk. The outline that it made was rather amazing in itself; the lines glowed in a bright neon blue and had a pearlescent quality to them that made them appear to be moving. Samantha found herself momentarily mesmerized by their brilliant patterns and stared at them for a couple of minutes until a small, thin voice snapped her out of it.

  “Samantha? Are you there?” The Professor’s British accent crackled from her wrist-communicator. She adjusted the fine-tuning until the signal was clearer, then pressed the talk bar to respond.

  “I’m here, Professor,” she said slowly, still shining the flashlight around. “I’m in a room full of, well, artificial tigers and mammoths and stuff.”

  “Ah!” the voice said knowingly. “Sounds like the right place. Or time, rather. Did you trace your feet with the chalk yet?”

  “Yeah.” Samantha yawned. She had not slept well in anticipation of the day’s possibilities. “The marks are glowing, moving almost. They’re a beautiful blue, Professor.”

  “Indeed,” her wrist replied. “They’ll fade, though. As you move away from them, they become invisible. As you move closer to them, they will light up again. It’s a remarkable phenomenon, really. I ran a spectral analysis on that ‘chalk,’ you know. Mostly gypsum, phosphorus and gold, though there are traces of aluminium and some other compound I have yet to identify. I do hope it isn’t radioactive, though if it is, its readings are negligible.”

  Samantha shared that last hope as well and gulped at hearing of the possibility that something in the chalk might be dangerous. She decided to wrap it tightly in a handkerchief she had and stuff it in the outermost pocket of her backpack. She couldn’t help but smile a little when The Professor said “aluminum,” though, for he pronounced it al-u-min-i-um, as the English were known to. It was somehow a more ticklish-sounding word when you said it that way.

  She called for Polly, as the little terrier had already snuck off to explore their new surroundings, but came trotting back quickly from in-between some shaggy Yak-like creatures. Samantha quickly clipped the leash onto her collar, not wanting her to drastically change anything here and more than a little worried about losing her dog in a strange and unfamiliar time.

  “Okay,” Samantha said after tapping her wrist-communicator again. “Now what, Professor?”

  “You need to get out of the museum. Put Polly in the backpack and try to be sneaky. No one’s expecting a strangely-dressed young girl to pop out of the museum’s basement.”

  Samantha felt momentarily peeved at The Professor’s comment that she was strangely dressed, until she remembered that she was, hopefully, in 1931. Of course they would consider her strangely dressed. Luckily, the wool coat covered most of her clothes and looked like it could have been bought seventy-five years ago. She pulled it close around her and tucked Polly into the pack, then set off to sneak up to the museum’s lobby, and was doing just fine until she came to a place with a wall where a stairway should have been.

  “Um... Professor?” she whispered into the communicator. “You know the first stairway you go up from your office? Well, it’s a wall here.”

  “Oh, dear,” the tiny speaker squeaked. “Hang on a moment, Samantha... ” She could hear the sounds of papers shuffling and things being moved around. “There,” said The Professor, “I’ve got blueprints from 1928. Hopefully they haven’t had the money to change anything since then. You are in the Great Depression, remember.”

  Samantha just hoped that she was even in 1931.

  “Okay,” The Professor began, “keep going down the hallway, there should be a right turn–” she did as told, following his directions. “Follow the right turn, then take your next left. This passage should terminate at the old front stairway. It’s been bricked up for decades, here, I mean now. Do you see it?”

  “Yes,” Samantha replied, walking up the first few steps of the old stone staircase. “Should I go up this way?”

  “Yes, yes.” The Professor made more paper-shuffling noises. “When you get to the top, walk quickly to the... right, along the lobby’s back wall. Then try to blend with the people coming and going through the left main lobby entrance.”

  This is getting complicated, Samantha thought, though her feet began to move and she soon arrived in the lobby, in a little space between the large staff/information desk and central back wall, where the general public was not really supposed to be. She crept as silently as she could along that wall, trying not to be spotted, and quickly slipped into a stream of people heading out of the museum.

  It seemed to work. Shuffling out onto Central Park West with a throng of museum-goers, Samantha couldn’t help but gasp slightly at the vastly different view. There was Central Park and its corresponding avenue, not drowned in water and almost like she remembered it should be, though not quite. The park was much more wooded than she remembered it, and far fewer tall buildings crowded the midtown skyline to the southeast. If she had, briefly, entertained the thought that she was home again, in her proper time, the illusion was boldly shattered by the automobiles that passed by on the road in front of her. Th
ey were clearly old and large, each one a classic that would probably be worth a hundred thousand dollars or more to collectors of her time. They were also conspicuously few and far between; it seemed not nearly as many people drove cars at all in 1931. Of course, she thought, there weren’t nearly as many people to drive them either.

  Samantha ducked into a little cove around the north side of the museum’s steps and pressed the talk button on her communicator.

  “Okay, Professor,” she said, letting out a deep breath. “It certainly looks to be about the right year. What’s our next step?”

  “All right,” he replied. “I want you to walk down Seventy-seventh Street to Columbus Avenue. Take a left there and walk down three blocks. There should be a newsstand there that sells coffee. Stay out of sight as best you can and contact me again when you get there. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Samantha acknowledged. She began walking, pulling her coat close around her and trying to stay close to the buildings. It was, indeed, a much colder October here, and she shivered, being unaccustomed to it. It did help to keep her fairly anonymous, though, as most people were sort of bundled up and just looking straight ahead as they walked. The Upper West Side looked mostly the same, though most of the characteristic brownstones looked practically brand new, and perhaps a few more trees were in evidence. She reached Columbus Avenue without incident and swung left, walking at a brisk pace.

  Three blocks later she saw the newsstand. It was halfway between Seventy-Third and Seventy-Fourth Streets, and the pleasant smell of coffee wafted from its open front.

  “I’m here, Professor,” she tried to speak inconspicuously into her wrist.

  “Good, Samantha,” the thin, electronic voice replied. “Now I’m afraid there’s a bit of waiting involved. See if you can find an out-of-the-way stoop or basement stairway, one you can see the newsstand from.”

  “Roger,” Samantha responded. She had already spied out a set of basement steps that perfectly fit the need, and quickly made her way over to them, hunkering down on the third step from the top and keeping an eye on the newsstand through two rungs of a little iron fence that surrounded the stairway. “Okay,” she spoke into her wrist again, “What am I waiting for?”