Samantha Smart

by Maxwell Puggle

  “Shhh... ” The Professor tried to quiet her down. “Are you going to shower? I had one myself when I checked us in; it was most refreshing.”

  “Definitely,” Samantha said in a serious tone, springing from the bed into the plush, fancy bathroom.

  *

  At least an hour later, Samantha emerged, sparkling, from her first shower in nearly a week. She had used every one of the little ‘ketchup packets’ full of shampoo and conditioner, and felt cleaner and more relaxed than she had in days. She toweled her hair dry and watched The Professor, who was sitting at a table by the window, tinkering with her wrist communicator.

  “Feel better, then?” he asked without looking up.

  “A hundred times better,” Samantha gushed.

  “We should talk about what happened.”

  “Okay,” she said, sighing heavily and sitting down on the closest bed.

  “Fill in the missing minutes for me, Samantha,” The Professor requested. “Last I heard you were about to sprint past me and up Seventy-seventh Street, and then you were just screaming ‘NOW!’”

  “Yeah,” Samantha giggled. “Well, I did what you told me. I ran up Seventy-Seventh and had to barge my way into the museum through a line of very unhappy people. At some point a guard spotted me and started chasing me. I ran down the stairs, Polly was trying to jump out of the pack, I got to the room–”

  “The time machine room?” The Professor interjected.

  “Yeah. Only there–I mean then, it’s jam-packed with fake prehistoric animals.”

  “Right.”

  “So now there are three guards after me, and they have flashlights–luckily the room light was broken–but they’re still coming after me, and I’m trying to find the footprints and I’m crawling on the floor to try to dodge their light-beams, holding Polly’s collar with one hand–”

  “You were very nearly caught... ”

  “Uh–hello! You don’t even know, Professor. I had to hit the talk button on the wrist communicator with my teeth, and when I yelled ‘NOW!’ I had just stood up in the footprints and had a guard six feet from my face!”

  “Hmmmm. That’s not good. Did he see your face?”

  “I don’t know, but I think he thought I was a guy. He kept saying things like ‘we know you’re in here, fella,’ and ‘he went in here.’ Anyway, he definitely saw the light show when you hit the switch, or whatever it is that you did to bring me back.”

  The Professor pondered her last statement and hoped that the security guard wouldn’t be traumatized for life due to the experience, fail to join the army and fulfill some pivotal role in the war, causing the Nazi war machine to roll unimpeded over the allied forces. Time travel was such a sticky thing. Well, he thought to himself, hopefully he’ll just have written it off as an electrical event, a product of faulty wiring, and assumed the intruder had somehow slipped out in the excitement.

  “By the way, Professor,” Samantha mused, “how did you get back when you had no one to operate the controls for you?”

  “Ah.” The Professor snapped back to the present. “Actually, Samantha, that’s a very good question. You see, the time machine can be set to work automatically. I figured out the Mayan constructors’ measurement of time, as it relates to our concept of it, and synchronized my watch to the machine’s controls. When I returned to the museum, I stood in my footprints and simply waited for the correct moment to arrive. It’s quite intriguing–did you notice another set of footprints near to yours in the room of 1931?”

  “Well,” Samantha said, scratching her chin, “I didn’t think about it at the time–you understand I was in a bit of a rush–but you know, there may have been another set, larger, encompassing mine. Maybe we were standing in exactly the same place.”

  “Mmmmm.” The Professor nodded. “It would appear so.”

  The two were silent for several moments, each processing their thoughts and trying to make sense of them. Finally, The Professor spoke again.

  “You can’t go back, Samantha,” he said grimly.

  “What? But–don’t we have to prevent this from happening?”

  “Yes, we do. Somehow. But, for the same reason I couldn’t go back this time, you cannot go back next time. To have two of the same person in the same time, especially if they were near enough to meet, I fear would be particularly disastrous.”

  “Well... what, then?” Samantha asked hopefully.

  “We need someone else,” her mentor replied. “And, honestly, I don’t know who. Or where we’re going to find them. This is going to take some serious thought, Samantha.”

  They both sat staring into space, brains aflutter, trying to think of a way to overcome this latest obstacle in their quest to restore the reality that they knew. Neither of them came up with an answer.

  “Let’s get some rest,” The Professor said at last. “Perhaps the morning will bring some fresh inspiration.”

  “Okay,” Samantha agreed, getting under the covers of her bed. At the moment, she did not have a clue as to what could possibly solve this latest problem, and as she closed her eyes she felt farther than ever from the world that she knew as home.

  Samantha and Professor Smythe sat in the basement office, she drawing circles on a piece of paper and he staring into the middle distance, chin on folded hands. They had had a wonderful night’s sleep and had each had another shower in the morning at the Wildman Arms. They’d walked Polly out to the park and fetched themselves a delicious breakfast at an uptown crepery on Broadway, and had leisurely made their way back to the museum. None of these activities, unfortunately, had jarred loose any ideas about how to solve their current predicament. They knew where they had to go and what they had to do, but the problem remained that neither of them could go and do it. They hadn’t really made any trusted friends in the altered timeline and in fact the only other person they’d hung around more than once was Jordan Anderson, who now seemed to be, if anything, some sort of enemy. They had thought about asking Violet Edelstein, who’d seemed like a wonderful and tough old woman, but had decided she was both too old and too directly entwined in the time-knot they were trying to untie.

  One entertaining distraction, at least, was the growing number of costumed people on the streets. Today was October 31, and young folks everywhere were gearing up for an evening of trick-or-treating. Even the New York Times had an especially eerie-looking front page, adorned with pumpkins, witches and black cats in its margins and with the huge headline HALLOWEEN written in bold, gothic-looking type. Even though she fancied herself a bit old for that sort of thing, Samantha thought it might be fun to go out in the watery city seeking whatever kind of candy it might offer, or at least get a hold of one of those mini-surfboard scooters that looked so cool.

  At the moment, though, they were twiddling pencils and the like, hoping some idea might hit them. Suddenly, The Professor lifted his head and opened his mouth, raising one finger in the air as if he were about to have a revelation. Samantha’s pen stopped moving in circles and she looked at him in hopeful anticipation, but then he closed his mouth into a frown and put his hands and head back down. She resumed wearing a circular hole in her piece of paper as she drew mindlessly with the pen. Finally, she plopped it down on the paper.

  “Look, I’m going to take Polly to the park. Can I have a few dollars for a taxi-boat?”

  “Mmmmpph,” The Professor acknowledged her, absently fumbling in his lab-coat pocket and handing her a crumpled up wad of bills.

  “Thanks.” She sighed, coaxing Polly into her backpack and turning to leave.

  “Oh, Samantha–” The Professor came out of his thoughts for a moment. “Try to steer clear of that Jordan fellow.”

  “I will,” she replied, departing. She was almost certain that Jordan had not spotted her in 1931, but still was, herself, quite nervous about running into him again. Though, she thought, I could perhaps try to learn more about whatever it is he’s doing, and why. Her thoughts and feelings about Jordan tumbled
around in her head and heart as the rest of her body trudged up the stairway to the main lobby, and she pushed open the door at the top of the stairs. She walked briskly by the massive barosaurus skeleton and was headed toward the main entrance when she heard a voice that made her stop dead in her tracks.

  “Samantha!” a boy’s voice yelled. “Samantha Smart!”

  She was briefly terrified. There was only one boy in this alternate timeline who knew her by name, and that was Jordan Anderson. But the voice didn’t sound like Jordan’s; it was a little deeper and sounded almost... Spanish. Slowly, she turned around, trying to pinpoint where the voice had come from, though the most likely source seemed to be a trio of costumed kids about thirty feet away. Two of them seemed too small for the voice; they were dressed as an Arabian princess and a cute kitten of some sort, while the likely shouter stood in between them wearing some bizarre, grayish animal outfit that could have been a pig or a turtle or–

  “Samantha?” The princess spoke now.

  “Brianna!?” Samantha replied hopefully, walking towards them now. “Brianna, is that you?”

  “Of course, silly,” the princess quipped back in a snooty tone, taking off her mask. The others lifted their masks as well, revealing her other two best friends Suki and–Marvin! Of course, she thought, the Spanish voice...

  “Marvin!? Suki!?” Samantha was overjoyed. “I can’t believe you guys are here! I’ve missed you all so much!” She hugged them all in turn, almost tearing up as she embraced little Suki. “How did you guys get here!?”

  “Um, Brianna’s chauffeur,” Suki replied. “Where’s your costume? I thought we were all meeting here to go to the Heatwavvve show. You knew we were supposed to dress up, right?”

  Samantha looked at all of them and her smile faded. They had no idea what was going on, where they were.

  “Yo, your mom’s been looking for you, Samantha. She’s really freaked out, I think. Maybe you should call her.” Marvin let out.

  I wish I could, Samantha thought.

  “Yeah, she called my house, too,” Brianna said. Where’ve you been, Samantha?”

  “You guys don’t know about the flooding. You must have–Marvin, come with me for a second. Can you guys wait here for just a minute or two?”

  “Sure... I guess.” Brianna crinkled up her brow in a puzzled expression. “What do you mean, flooding?”

  “All right–everybody just–follow me for a sec, okay?” She pulled Marvin’s hand and the rest of the kids followed, out the main entrance and onto the steps, where they could see the flooded streets of Manhattan and the island of Vista Rock.

  “Damn,” Marvin said in disbelief. “When did that happen?”

  “We–we just walked in here a moment ago,” Brianna said, starting to panic.

  “This isn’t possible,” Suki contributed.

  “You all had better come with me,” Samantha said, leading them down to a taxi-boat and motioning for everyone to get in. “Belvedere Island,” she said to the driver, who sped off toward the castle.

  Her friends sat dumbfounded as they approached the shore, and everyone got out of the boat while Samantha paid the driver. She let Polly out of her backpack, and she immediately began jumping all over Marvin, who had frequently walked her with Samantha back in Brooklyn.

  “Hey, Polly! Hey, girl!” Marvin stooped to pet her affectionately. “Still sneakin’ in the museum, huh?” Polly licked his hands and made little whining noises.

  “Samantha, what is going on here!!?” Brianna demanded at last.

  “Come on,” Samantha said. “I’ll try to explain this as best I can.” She found a bench under a shady tree and sat her costumed friends down. She then proceeded to explain the whole predicament of the alternate timeline, the tree diseases, the global warming, the postman, Vincent Bergen and Violet Edelstein, the coffee, the letter and at last, the sinister true self of Jordan Anderson.

  “So that’s what’s up here,” she finished. “Somehow, you guys must have wandered into this timeline just as I did, at the museum.” There was a long silence.

  “Right,” said Suki.

  “Like, I’m sure,” Brianna offered.

  “Check, please!” Marvin shouted, getting up.

  “You don’t believe me,” Samantha sighed. “I don’t blame you. This is all extremely hard to believe. All I can say is, you will come to believe it. Look at Central Park,” she said. “Those are your own eyes you’re using; I’m not projecting a movie on the insides of your eyelids.”

  “Though that would be phat,” Marvin chuckled. He was always funny and good-natured, no matter what the situation.

  “So, you’re saying you’ve been sleeping in Professor Smythe’s office, in the basement of the museum, and that yesterday you traveled back in time, using an ancient Mayan time machine made out of... out of–big rocks, to try and change some event in the past that caused this–this reality here to happen?” Brianna summarized, still in disbelief.

  “Pretty much,” Samantha nodded, grinning hopefully.

  “Cool,” Suki smiled.

  “Well, I guess the Heatwavvve show’s off, then.” Marvin shrugged. “Fine with me. I always thought they wuz chumps. I was just goin’ ‘cause I knew da ladeez wanted to check it out.”

  “Marvin,” Samantha said, chuckling, “what exactly are you supposed to be in that costume?”

  “Yo.” He got up and began to go into one of his mediocre rhymes, “I’m an Aardvark, chillin’ hours before dark, makin’ my mark on the bleak remains of Central Park, yo, it’s all so sudden, time machines and global floodin’, Heatwavvve’s hunk is proven a villain, but Dr. Marvy’s still willin’, chillin’... ”

  “Ugh. Please make him stop,” Brianna said disgustedly. She was not taking this as well as the others. “What about my family? All our families? What about Mrs. Newberry?”

  Mrs. Newberry was Brianna’s family cat, a pure white, long-haired monstrosity that wore a collar of what looked like diamonds around her neck. The Knowles family was pretty well-off.

  “Believe me, Brianna, I miss my family too, even Todd. I haven’t seen them for days... but you have to understand - chances are, any of our parents were never even born into this alternate reality. I know it–it takes a bit of getting used to, but the only way I’ve figured out to even try to get back home is by doing what Professor Smythe says. I’m... I’m sorry.”

  Brianna pouted, and the others all looked more thoughtful now, too.

  “Listen,” Samantha sighed. “Don’t take my word for it.” She tapped the talk button on her wrist communicator.

  “What’s that!?” Marvin marveled.

  “Shhh!” Samantha shushed him. “Professor? Are you there?” She tapped the button off and a crackly voice came back at her.

  “Yes, Samantha?” Her friends looked awed.

  “Professor, I need you to meet me as soon as you can. I’m on Belvedere Island.”

  “What is it?” the voice inquired.

  “There’s been a–a new development,” she said, looking around at her friends.

  “On my way.” The Professor signed off. Samantha turned off the device to prolong the life of its battery, as she almost always did when not using it.

  “That was Professor Smythe?” Suki asked. Samantha nodded.

  “Where did you get that cool radio-thingy?” Marvin blurted out.

  “Professor Smythe built it,” Samantha responded. “It works through time, even, believe it or not. It’s really quite handy.”

  “I’ll bet.” Marvin gaped, shaking his head.

  “I want one!” Suki implored, her eyes lighting up like a small child’s on Christmas day.

  “Well,” Samantha chuckled, “you may get your wish. We’re sort of... in need of some new people just now.”

  Brianna was still sitting quietly, looking at the ground. Polly was sniffing at her leg and she reached down to scratch the dog’s neck.

  “Oh, Polly,” Brianna sighed. “If I’d known I was going
to be stranded in an alternate future, I would’ve worn something much more fashionable than this silly princess costume.”

  *

  Professor Smythe arrived on the scene in something like twenty minutes. After Samantha’s round of introductions, he sat down on the bench and tried to assess this latest change in their situation.

  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “we now have a larger pool of ‘agents’ to choose from, I suppose.” Marvin and Suki looked excited at the word “agents,” though Brianna remained obviously unenthusiastic.

  “Yeah,” Samantha piped in. “I mean, it’s kind of a lucky break, isn’t it, Professor? These guys showing up just when we needed someone else?”

  “Perhaps... ” The Professor mused, furrowing his brow. “But it also concerns me. More people from the ‘correct’ timeline accidentally being ensnared in this ‘incorrect’ one. Could there be others? What if random people, whom none of us even know, are blundering into this timeline just as you have? What if they, like us, cannot get out?”

  “No,” Samantha shook her head. “We’d know, Professor. We’d see people standing on the museum steps staring in disbelief at this flooded New York, don’t you think?”

  “Mmmmm. I suppose that’s true. Then I am forced to wonder if your friends’ arrival here is really so random at all. You kids say you were going to a Heatwavvve show for Halloween?”

  “Yes,” said Suki. “It was a big show... a dance party, kind of. I was kind of psyched for it, but I have to say this has turned out to be a lot more... interesting.”

  “Word,” Marvin echoed her sentiments, still staring around him like he was on some giant movie set. The Professor stared quizzically for a moment, translating the boy’s American slang in his head as best he could, then shook his head.

  “Well,” he concluded, “I suppose we may as well proceed according to our plan. We’ve got the extra personnel now and I can’t think of anything new to do to fix our situation.”

  The group got up and walked down to the Belvedere docks, hailed a taxi-boat and ferried back to the museum. They got some funny looks as they filed down the stairs with The Professor, costumes and all, but no one said anything to them or tried to stop them. When they reached the office, The Professor unlocked the door and let them all in.