Samantha Smart

by Maxwell Puggle

  “Polly, stop!” Samantha began laughing. “Stop! Okay! Okay! I love you, too!” It was clearly a most happy reunion. “Thanks for walking her and stuff,” Samantha said, turning to her brother. She wasn’t used to thanking him for anything or even being nice to him at all, but having gone through a week of their mother being in a coma had forced them to make a sort of peace pact. Samantha was surprised at how uncomfortable she felt–it was quite different from their normal mode of operation.

  “Yeah, no problem,” Todd blurted out with equal discomfort. “She’s pretty spunky–Polly, I mean.”

  “Yeah, she is,” Samantha giggled, still trying to control the hyperactive little dog.

  Aunt Tina had set about fixing some dinner, and Samantha was helping out, cutting onions for a quiche that was to be the main course. Her eyes stung and tears rolled down her face as she gathered up the pieces and put them into a bowl. Next, she began chopping some broccoli and her mind began to wander as she focused on the simple task. She was a little worried about Agent Stiles watching The Professor, or even interviewing him to see if their stories matched. She thought she should contact him and at least let him know to watch out for the F.B.I., to be extra-secretive in his actions, but she decided that his phone might well be tapped (this was what federal agents did in the movies, anyway). She resolved to talk to him later in the evening via wrist-communicator. Surely the F.B.I. hadn’t learned about those, and even if they had, the devices used a pretty obscure frequency.

  The quiche came out perfectly, and Samantha and Aunt Tina did a high-five in celebration of their cooperative effort. They sat at the table and ate, unhurriedly, and talked about normal family things.

  “So, I guess you guys won’t be going back to school until Tuesday?” Tina asked, pretty much knowing the answer to her question but wanting to make some light dinner conversation.

  “Yeah, well, I guess we’re going to bring Mom home tomorrow,” Todd replied, adding, “Mmmm, good quiche, guys.”

  “I’ve kind of missed school,” Samantha spoke up. “I mean, literally, I’ve missed a lot of school lately, but I also mean I’m kind of excited to go back.”

  “Mmmm,” Tina nodded, taking time to swallow a bite. “I heard all about your ‘missing person’ stint, Samantha. Your mother was worried sick. What exactly were you doing?”

  “I, um - aaaahhh,” Samantha stammered and then sighed. “I was helping Professor Smythe do some research at the museum. I couldn’t leave because, well, we were doing an experiment that required constant monitoring. I know, I know, I should’ve called home but, well, I just wasn’t able to.”

  “Well, you scared your mother half to death, you know,” her Aunt went on in a scolding tone. “God forbid you should have a child as precocious as you are.”

  ‘Precocious’ was a word Samantha had heard often enough; it was quite frequently used by many adults to describe her behavior, and though she still wasn’t sure exactly what it meant she had taken it to mean something along the lines of a person who acted more grown-up than they actually were. Perhaps the adults were right. She did sort of fancy herself more able to function independently than most kids her age. She just shrugged in response to her Aunt’s comment, though, and continued to eat quiche.

  *

  Late that night, curled up on the futon in Aunt Tina’s tiny guest room, Samantha attempted to use her wrist-communicator. She pulled the covers up over to try and create a more silent place to talk, then tapped the button that called The Professor. It seemed to take a long time, but The Professor did eventually pick up.

  “Who is it?” his voice came back, sounding nervous and hushed.

  “It’s Samantha. Where are you?”

  “Samantha! I–uh–I’m at home. Brought the desktop set here, you know–I don’t want to leave it in the office anymore.”

  “I understand, Professor. I’ll be quick. I just wanted to warn you about that Agent Stiles–she was asking a lot of questions about you at the hospital.”

  “Yes, I know,” The Professor continued in his whispery voice. “She’s been following me, I think. Shivering Shadows! I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s eating jelly rolls in a car right outside, you know!”

  “Um, it’s doughnuts here, Professor. At least, if you believe all the cop shows on TV.”

  “Doughnuts, then! It’s very unnerving, Samantha. I don’t think they can tap this communications band, however. Hmmmm... ” The line went momentarily silent and Samantha could tell that he was thinking hard. “Samantha, as much as I know that the Slanes are out there working against us, I’m afraid we have no choice but to completely halt all operations for at least a few weeks.”

  “Understood, Professor,” Samantha acknowledged after a brief silence. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. Try to live like a... a normal American girl. Go to school, meet with your friends–all the things you’d normally do. I suspect you should check in at the museum once a week as well, seeing as that’s normal for you, though we mustn’t speak of anything related to time travel or the Slanes in the office until I’m sure it’s not being bugged. Please relate this to the others as well, in secret, and all of you should keep your wrist-communicators switched off and in a safe hiding place until further notice. Is that all clear, Agent Smart?”

  “Clear,” Samantha promised.

  “Our next discussion of what needs to be done will take place in person, when I’m sure we are absolutely free of surveillance. Smythe out.”

  Samantha switched off her communicator and slumped down under the warm covers. It’s going to be a long, cold November, she thought to herself. She was glad, however, that it was her November, the November of her proper timeline. She pulled the covers closer and whispered to Polly, who came up onto the bed from her chosen spot on the floor and snuggled up to her much-absent-of-late owner. It was nice to sleep with Polly again, to have her warm little companion back. Tomorrow night she would have her bed back, too.

  *

  Everyone was in a cheery mood at the hospital the next day, and Samantha was no exception. It was great to see her mother up and dressed, ready to go. The family thanked the doctors and nurses on their way out, and Dr. Amesbury informed them that he and Professor Smythe had agreed to correspond about possible collaboration in future research. Jason had taken yet another day off of work and had arrived, in his own car at the front entrance to bring Cindy and the kids back home. Aunt Tina would follow in her own car (which they had all come in) and would join the family in Park Slope for a small celebration. It had been their job to procure food and drinks for the occasion, which would include doughnuts, punch, a cheese and vegetable platter and champagne for the adults. Though she really wanted to be with her mom, Samantha politely elected to ride with Aunt Tina back to the apartment so that she wouldn’t have to drive alone.

  They followed Jason’s car down First Avenue, crossing Twenty-third and then Fourteenth Street, through the East Village. Traffic was fairly heavy, it being Monday, and taxi cabs surrounded them on all sides as they squeezed by the last shades of green cast by the Houston Street traffic light. Samantha, still a little sleepy, looked at the cabs through heavy lids and tried to remember what the taxi-boats had looked like, and the streets all filled with water. It was very much fading from her memory, like a strange and distant dream, and as more time passed it became increasingly less real to her. Artificial trees, shark-men and ancient Central American warriors–all the elements of the last few weeks of her life were totally bizarre, she thought. It had been exciting, though having her mom so affected by her involvement with the time-travel bunch had been stressful and guilt-inducing.

  The cars rolled through Soho, passing chic art galleries and hip coffee shops and finally got snagged in gridlock at the southern end of Allen Street, just before they patiently merged into the flow coming from south and west and onto the Manhattan Bridge. The line of cars crawled at a snail’s pace across the East River, bottlenecked up from three str
eets worth of Manhattan traffic as well as runoff from the nearby FDR Drive. Samantha didn’t mind, really. It was a clear, sunny day, if a bit on the chilly side, and the views of both Brooklyn and Manhattan were beautiful, sunlight reflecting sharply off the glass towers of the financial district.

  The bright panorama seemed somehow strangely wrong. The huge twin towers no longer stood as the city’s biggest reflectors. It was more than a decade now since that day in September when terrorists had flown planes into them, killing thousands of innocent people. It always made her sad to think about it. She was too young to remember it–it happened right around the time she was born–and she wasn’t that in tune with global politics at all (they usually depressed her), but her personal experiences of the last two months had made her think about one thing in particular: since that day, it seemed like the world had been at war. Every day more innocent people died in foreign lands because of what had happened. And, the fact was, in the Slanes’ altered timeline, there was no war. Those towers were still standing; she remembered them vividly, oneor two stories shorter like every other building but still dominating the landscape and reflecting sunlight even more because the city’s streets were all surfaced with water. In that world, they had been a weird, almost ghostly presence that Samantha had done her best to ignore. But they had been there.

  She furrowed her brow while her mind grappled with these difficult truths. She wondered how many people would still be alive today if the Slanes’ reality was what had prevailed. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, probably, in New York, Washington, Iraq, Afghanistan. But, she thought conversely, How many people died from the global warming? Flooding, heat stroke, starvation–the elimination of all trees and many plants had wiped out primary food sources for millions of people, perhaps billions. And the future of that timeline was bleak, for humans at least. She decided to put her mind at rest on the issue, concluding that this reality was indeed, despite its troubles, the more preferable of the two to live in.

  They spilled out onto Tillary Street and turned onto Flatbush Avenue, where traffic was at least moving at a reasonable pace for once. It was mid-day, so rush hour was a long way off yet, and they cruised along comfortably, turning up Fourth Avenue before Samantha was even aware of it. Aunt Tina was a good, solid city driver and managed to make good time on the road whenever it was possible. The lights flew by now and the car slowed down to make the left turn up Ninth Street, one of the few two-way roads in Park Slope.

  Aunt Tina found a parking spot up on Eighth Avenue, a few blocks away from the familiar brownstone that Cindy Smart somehow managed to make the payments on every month. The only reason that they owned it at all was because Cindy had won it in the divorce settlement with Samantha’s father, who now lived in Seattle and worked as a computer programmer. It had been a while since Samantha had thought about him–he was so generally absent from her life. She got e-mails from him once a month or so and he would call once in a great while. She used to try to call him a lot, right after her parents’ divorce three years ago, but he was almost never home and when he was he explained to her that being a programmer meant you had to work all the time. In some ways, Samantha still resented him for leaving them; on rare occasions she would just well up with anger and feel like it wasn’t fair that her family had fallen apart when other families seemed so happy and functional. As she grew older, though, she had gradually begun to see that her mother, for all her goodness, had a hard time staying with one person, and that really, no family was perfect or without its own troubles and complications. Still, she missed her dad.

  Polly took advantage of the three-block walk and took care of a little dog business, (thankfully unwitnessed by anyone as she had absent-mindedly forgotten to bring a bag to pick it up), and everyone was happy to be back home. The brownstone had been empty for almost a week and it smelled a little stale and un-lived-in when they opened the door. Still, being surrounded by the comforts of home was a feeling of great relief to all, and Samantha flopped down on the couch with a huge sigh of satisfaction. Aunt Tina started unwrapping the food they’d brought for the celebration brunch, and Cindy was touched by the ribbons, balloons and “welcome home” letters that Jason had somehow found time to put up in the last twenty-four hours. The adults popped the cork out of a champagne bottle and the family began celebrating with smiles and optimistic conversation.

  Samantha relaxed for what seemed like the first time in ages. After a few hours of talking with the family she went into her bedroom, breathed another sigh of relief and began the task of unpacking her backpack. She and Todd had been at Aunt Tina’s for nearly a week (when they hadn’t been at the hospital), and between that and her excursions to alien timescapes, she had begun to feel less and less like she had a home, anywhere. She was glad to be back now, looking around her familiar room, and was also excited to return to school and something like a normal life. She placed her wrist-communicator in a little jewelry box that locked, turned the key and then took it, attaching it to her house key-chain. She sat down on her bed and wondered at all she and her family had been through, thanked the powers that were for her dog and her friends and then stretched out, thinking that if anyone deserved a nap, it was she. Her eyes closed and she smiled slightly, and she was briefly aware of Polly coming up to lie next to her. It would be almost seventeen hours before she would wake again.

  Snow was falling on Prospect Park as Samantha shivered in her winter coat and Polly did likewise in her Gortex dog sweater. The cold of winter had come on somewhat suddenly, or else it just seemed earlier or more extreme than usual. It was only two days until Christmas, and New Yorkers were everywhere scrambling around at an even more frantic rate than they typically did. Samantha’s family was Jewish, and had done the Chanukah thing already–she was sporting a fancy new pair of boots and had also received many other clothes, books, CDs, DVDs and a fair assortment of other gifts from her mom, dad, brother, Aunt Tina and scads of other relatives that she hardly ever saw. Overall she had made out like a bandit, some would say; Chanukah wasn’t really a big holiday compared to Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah, but, this being America, consumerism was pretty much the religion of now, and so everyone got presents at every holiday opportunity. Her absolute favorite of all her presents was a new, top-of-the-line laptop computer that Jason had given her. Samantha wondered briefly if maybe he was trying a little too hard to become part of their family, but then decided she didn’t really care. She liked him a lot, anyway, and he seemed like he might stick around for longer than the average boyfriend her mother had historically had.

  The computer was totally awesome. It was cutting edge, with a lightning-fast processor, a 500 gigabyte hard drive and a Blue Ray/DVD burner. It had a superfast wireless connection that even had a 4G network option so she could connect to the net through cellular towers if no WiFi was available. She wondered if The Professor could modify it to work through time–it would surely be very handy to be able to access the modern Internet if she was stuck back in the fifteenth century or some other, more primitive place.

  Polly was tugging on her leash, suggesting that she was ready to go back to someplace warm and indoors and pulling Samantha out of her daydreams and back into the normal reality she had been living in (again) for the past few weeks. School had been fun, though she was now on vacation, and she had had to work very hard to catch up to her classmates, having missed so many days. She had enjoyed it, though, writing all those papers and even making up dozens of missed homework assignments. Her teachers had been understanding, having heard of the hard times her family had been going through, and Samantha was, after all, always at the top of her class, so the challenge actually kept the catching up interesting.

  It was nice to have a break from it again, too, though. She didn’t have to be back at school until something like the tenth of January and would have lots of time to read, explore or hang out with her dog. She hoped she would get to spend more time at the museum, both with her mom and with The Professor. Smythe h
ad been tight-lipped as promised; their once-a-week meetings focused exclusively on non-time-travel-related research and experimentation. She was happy to learn more about forensics and chemical analysis, though she wondered if he would ever again mention their still very real, very important mission. Try as she might, it was impossible to tell how much they were or weren’t being watched by F.B.I. agent Stiles or others. Both she and The Professor had become paranoid, always glancing over their shoulders, noticing ‘suspicious’ things and people that hardly would have made them think twice a month ago. Still, “better safe than sorry” was their new philosophy, for heaven only knew what chaos would be unleashed if the government were to get their hands on the time-traveling technology.

  Samantha’s mother had, in fact, received a call from Agent Stiles which Samantha had eavesdropped on. It sounded as if they had arrested someone in connection with Cindy’s ‘drugging.’ She felt weird about this; whoever it was, they had not committed the crime, which she had fairly clearly witnessed or at least confirmed her suspicions about through her conversations in the past with Jordan Slane. He was obviously the guilty party. So whom had they arrested? She fretted, hoping it was some mob-connected drug kingpin who deserved to be in jail anyway, but how could she be sure? What if it was just some kid who happened to have been at the Heatwavvve show, maybe with some small prior record for stealing a candy bar or a video game? Surely someone like that, though perhaps guilty of other, more minor crimes, didn’t deserve to go to jail for attempted murder!

  Her uneasiness was amplified when she and Polly returned home and she took off their winter coats. Agent Stiles was there, sitting on their living room couch and enjoying a cup of tea with Cindy.

  “Oh, hello Samantha,” the pretty, sharply-dressed woman got up and gently shook her hand. Polly growled under her breath.