Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  By the time she had stretched away the pain, the thought of driving back to Kalispell was gone. She turned on the power tank light with the red lens already in place over the 800,000 candlepower halogen light, turned off her headlamp and started setting up.

  After returning to her cabin early in the afternoon, she had spent the remainder of the day reading the instruction manual and the books, setting up the tripod and telescope, hooking up her computer, installing software, and doing as much as she could without actually having a night sky to look at. Now, without opening the manual, she went through the setup. Her only hitch was when she had to pick out the three bright objects. She hadn’t looked at the stars since trudging away from her cabin, intent on getting set up. She raised her head to the stars.

  “Oh . . . my . . . God!” It was just as awesome as two nights before when she was lying on Brad’s rock. There was no moon—she hadn’t thought to go onto the web to check the lunar schedule—and the infinite number of stars was overwhelming. For two long minutes she only stared up until, suddenly, it all seemed to start moving. She turned her head to follow, stumbled and caught herself on the telescope and tripod. She had to force her eyes down or she certainly would have fallen over from the dizzying immensity of the huge night sky.

  When she had her equilibrium under control she sat down on the log and put her eye to the telescope. After another, “Oh . . . my . . . God!” and after getting lost for a time in the vastness in this one little piece of the universe, she picked out three bright stars and started the telescope calibrating and aligning. When that was completed she took a look at one of the stars she had picked out. It was Capella. She looked it up in her book and discovered it to be not one star, but two. It was a binary consisting to two giant stars in the constellation Auriga, and it was the eleventh brightest star visible to Earth. In Latin Capella meant ‘little she goat’. In Roman mythology it represented the goat Amalthea that suckled Jupiter. It was Amalthea’s horn, which, after being broken off by Jupiter, was transformed into the ‘horn of plenty’, the Cornucopia. She examined Capella through the telescope and thought she could make out the two different giant stars.

  Next she opened her book randomly and found Alpha Centauri, a name she recognized, but when she input that to the telescope she discovered that it was too far south to be observed from her current location.

  “Fine! Maybe Grandfather can see it from Mexico.”

  She picked out another one and discovered that it, too, was in the southern hemisphere. “Well, hell’s bells, this is frustrating!” So she started looking through her book for something in the northern hemisphere and found Ursa Major. She scanned the northern sky without the telescope until she spotted it and the nearby Ursa Minor, the two shapes any school kid was familiar with and could find with their naked eye. She had never bothered to learn the stories and facts beyond the basics of these two constellations, never having interest in outer space. She spent her years instead with her eyes glued to electron microscopes and associated textbooks, studying space at the atomic and subatomic levels. She considered why only briefly and then instead of inputting one of the constellations, Ursa Major or Minor, she input Polaris, and watched as the telescope swung, silent as a whisper, on its vertical and horizontal axis. When it stopped she had to change positions to view it, connected to the log only by one butt cheek.

  “So that’s the North Star,” she said as though a companion was sharing the night sky with her. From Polaris she followed the curve of the four stars making up the handle of Ursa Minor, famously known as the Little Dipper or Little Bear, to its bowl. Then she swung over to Ursa Major’s Bowl, the more famous Big Dipper or Great Bear. She followed the two outer stars of the bowl to where they pointed back to the North Star. She thought about how when Hera discovered Zeus was having an affair with Callisto, Zeus put Hera and her son, Arcas, into the sky where they became Great Bear and Little Bear. In one of the many Greek Myths, Arcturus, the “Bearkeeper” or North Star, was sent as their guardian to keep the bears from straying from their paths.

  She paged through and found Orion, and then Scorpio, Pegasus, Cancer and Lyra. She read all the Greek myths and the footnotes about Roman myths, Hindu myths, as well as a few of those of Ireland, Finland, France, Britain, China, and various American Indians. After a time, concerned about using up the power tank, she turned off the red light and just went from constellation to constellation with the aid of the telescope. She wondered why people made up stories about the stars and why those stories carried through the centuries. They are, after all, myths, not facts upon which one can build something tangible to better their lives. And who were Callisto, Zeus, Arcturus, and all the rest? Just fictional characters?

  Zeus was a god, she remembered. Were they all gods to the Greeks? In other cultures they were just made up stories. Why did it take so long to figure out what those bright pinpoints of light in the sky really were? And now that we do know what they really are, why do all the stories still persist? What was the point of it all?

  She looked down at the book lying closed in her lap and realized she was one of the reasons the stories still existed. She bought a book of such stories, which meant that it was profitable to keep the stories going. If people stopped caring about the myths, the myths would go away and they’d start spending more time improving their real lives. She wondered why she bought the book to begin with. She never bought fiction, didn’t like reading fiction, didn’t even like watching it on television. She used to; she really got into science fiction movies until one day, a little over a year after learning of her and her mother’s travel through time, she attended a Star Trek convention with her father. He’d gone against his will because he could never seem to say no to her.

  The crowd was peppered with crazy people dressed in crazy costumes and pretending to do very crazy things. One booth displayed out of this world information about time travel, turning it into a joke. Annie, though only fifteen at the time, wanted to grab the guy with orange spiky hair by his green sequined collar, rip off his pointed ears, paint his eyebrows back on, and tell him how it really was. Instead she led her father out of the convention hall, very disappointed, not so much in what she saw—though the time travel booth irked her for days—but in the fact that whatever enchantment and entertainment science fiction had provided her was completely gone. It was the same with fantasy, which she enjoyed for a while. She stopped paying attention to Harry Potter and anything fiction and turned all her mental and physical energy into the real universe of the atomic structure.

  When the power level showed 15% she shut everything down, turned on her headlamp and packed it all back up. After she was finished she turned off the headlamp and sat for a while just looking at the stars. She thought about that convention again, remembering the booth with the banner across the top that read, “Beam Me Up Scotty!” and the two nerd-looking guys, one big and one little, in white shirts and black ties. That might have been the one thing that did intrigue her because they didn’t try to insult her intelligence with a lot of silly fiction. They attempted to use real science to convince the onlooker of the real possibilities. They presented some interesting facts, though even at that age, even before she started poking into the science of time travel and quantum teleportation, she understood more than they seemed to. She and her father looked at each other with that secret smile, like when someone is trying to tell a joke and can’t get the punch line right. If only they could provide the punch line. The booth was so close, but still so far away.

  It was after that that they came to spiked orange hair and walked out.

  Suddenly Annie’s memory jumped back to the Beam Me Up Scotty booth and she launched to her feet. “Holy molly, the big guy was Charles ‘The Dweeb’ Walshe. I thought he looked familiar.” She remembered back to the first day of the semester when he walked into Professor Grae’s lecture hall. She had seen him around the previous semester but never thought much about him, now a totally different shape than that day
almost five years previous. Back then he was five or six inches shorter and at least double that wider. He had to have been only seventeen, though his considerable bulk made him seem much older. He had apparently lost a lot of weight somewhere in the last five years. Granted, he was still huge, but his proportions weren’t as far off as that day she saw him in the booth. Back then he was a head on a giant pear.

  She sat back down and wondered why she was remembering that now?

  Chapter 33

  June 13, 2007

  The knocking woke her, but the door was open with Mary’s head poking in before Annie could recover enough to respond.

  “Sorry, luv; your light was on so figured you were up.”

  Annie stretched and stood. “I was. Made coffee, showered, dressed, and then sat down. Last thing I remember.”

  “Out late last night?”

  “Star gazing.”

  “Oh!” Mary’s eyebrows went up.

  “By myself.”

  “Oh.”

  Annie sleepily pulled on her jacket and picked up the travel mug of coffee. “I can wake up as we walk.”

  The three of them sat on the log—“Our log,” Mary had claimed one time—and watched the sun come up.

  “Annie was out staring gazing last night,” Mary said.

  “Star gazing,” Richard said. “You have a telescope?”

  “Bought one yesterday.”

  “Good for you. This is a great place. What kind of scope is it?”

  “A Celestron NexStar.”

  “Hmm. Never heard of it, but then I’ve never seriously studied the stars. How big?”

  “Eight inch.”

  “Hmm. That sounds big.”

  “It’s the largest they had that was still portable, though it didn’t feel very portable when I carried it out to our log.”

  “You’ll have to have a star gazing party one of these nights.”

  “That sounds like a great idea,” Mary said. “What do you think?”

  Annie looked at them both. “Sure. I guess that would be fun.”

  A family of five including three boys between seven and twelve appeared. The parents said their good mornings and followed the boys to the edge of the river. Their noise and excitement prompted Richard to say, “Let’s go for a walk.”

  And so they did. They walked north along the river, never straying farther than twenty feet from the water’s edge, stopping often to study an abandoned bird’s nest, get chastised by a squirrel or simply to comment on a flower or the flow of the river. Once they spotted a white tail doe observing them from the point of the next bend. When they got there she was gone. When Richard stopped to examine something in the water Annie turned to look the other way, into the forest, only to be surprised by a house, white and rectangular with a platform for a porch under one visible door. The sun had found a hole in the trees and was illuminating a sign over the door. She started to turn away when she realized the sign was similar to the one she saw on the side of the tractor-trailer the morning before. Curious, she drew closer until she could read it.

  She noted that the truck that had been towing it was not around and that the Yukon and RV that were with it were parked in such a way as to make a courtyard like affair in the middle of which was a family-size tent, its entryway facing the river. A satellite dish sat on top of the RV. A couple of what appeared to be fire hoses lay side-by-side next to what she assumed was a water pump. There was nothing else; no fire ring, no camping chairs, no fishing gear.

  “Have time, will travel,” Mary whispered close to Annie’s ear. “Retirees, I’ll bet. Let’s go before we wake them.”

  Feeling oddly suspicious, though she couldn’t put her finger on what she was suspicious about, Annie followed Mary back to the river’s edge where Richard was turning a stone around in his hand.

  “What did you find, Luv?” Mary said to Richard.

  “A rock.” He flipped it back into the river. “What’re you whispering about?”

  “Someone is camped right there,” she pointed. “Don’t want to wake them.”

  “Ah,” he said while nodding his understanding. “I’m getting hungry. Let’s head on back and get some breakfast.”

  Annie studied the trailer through the mix of burned out and new growth trees one last time and then fell in behind Mary. The sun had moved far enough in those few minutes that only “Will Travel” could be seen clearly; “Have Time” was in the shadows. What was clearly visible was the back of the trailer. The angle against the glare off the brilliant white surface hurt her eyes. She was certain that there was something there that she should have noticed, or something that she did notice, but which never surfaced beyond her subconscious.

  She tripped and caught herself and then turned her attention on where she was walking.

  Chapter 34

  June 13, 2007

  The late afternoon hovered at 75 degrees with not a cloud in the sky. Annie was dining on her front stoop; a hamburger sandwich and macaroni salad filled the plastic plate on her lap. She had spent the morning with Mary and Richard and then half the afternoon sitting on Brad’s rock reading about Greek mythology until she was bored to death. She had then gone out to visit the bookstore again with a stop at the grocery store to pick up the makings for hamburgers; cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, mayonnaise, ketchup, buns, and the thickest pre-made patties she could find, along with a pint of potato salad. When she got back she tried calling Beth again, but only got her voice mail. Beth always answered her phone, even if she was already on it, clicking over with call waiting. This was Annie’s fifth try since Sunday. She didn’t leave a message. It was obvious that Beth was avoiding her. So be it.

  She raised the hamburger to her mouth and had just gotten a healthy bite when a familiar rust red Chevy Blazer appeared from around the lodge. She immediately pushed down the urge to jump and hide. Facing him was inevitable; she knew that. She so badly wanted things to be different, but she wasn’t ready for a relationship yet. It wasn’t the right time.

  When would be the right time?

  She was still pondering that thought when the Blazer stopped next to her car. For the first time she noticed his personalized license plate that read, “BNTHERE”. She swallowed and took another, smaller bite. She wasn’t surprised by the visit, had wondered several times if he would show up during the week, or wait it out until the weekend. She guessed that Wednesday evening was just right.

  The door opened and Patrick stepped out into the dusty yard. Without saying a word he walked over and picked up the two books lying on the step next to her and sat down in their place.

  “Bent here?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Your license plate. It says ‘BENT HERE’.”

  He laughed. “You’re not the first person to get that wrong. It’s supposed to mean ‘BEEN THERE’.”

  “Oh.”

  Another thought about his license plate flickered in her mind until she noticed he was holding her books out in front of him, one in each hand; Steven King’s IT, and Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He turned them so that they were resting flat on his open hands. He made like he was comparing their weights.

  “This is heavy reading, literally and figuratively,” he said.

  “If they’re no good I’ll use them as paper weights. Want a hamburger?”

  “Actually I came hoping you hadn’t eaten yet, that we could go somewhere for supper.”

  “Supper? You call it supper here?”

  “Yeah. What do you call it?”

  “Dinner.”

  “Dinner is lunch.”

  “Lunch is lunch.”

  “We could compromise on evening meal,” he said.

  “Or high tea.”

  He grinned and slipped into his Irish brogue. “The lass be hanging around those Brits.”

  “Ay, she has.” She grinned back at him. “You want a hamburger or not?”

  “If it’s not imposing. Haven’t had me evening meal, or high tea.” />
  She took another bite and set her plate aside. Around the mouthful of food she said, “I’ll char the burger. You can destroy your own bun.”

  When they were again seated with their plates on their laps, Annie considered reheating what was left of her hamburger in the microwave, rejected the idea and took another bite. When she swallowed she said, “Sorry I haven’t called.”

  “It’s okay. I really didn’t expect you to.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “You’ve got issues you have to deal with first. I understand that. I didn’t come to give you a hard time or anything. Just want to let you know I’m still around.”

  “Oh.”

  “I like you.”

  Of course he liked her; goes without saying, but the fact that he said it gave her a warm feeling.

  “But that’s as far as it’s going to go until you’re ready. No pressure.”

  Just the fact that you’re here is pressure, she thought.

  “Friends,” He added. “Just good friends who like to do things together.”

  She considered that for a time, sort of liked the idea, but didn’t say anything. She loved Mary and Richard, but at times she needed someone her own age to hang out with, someone who matched her intelligence. Not that Mary and Richard weren’t intelligent. They certainly were, but what she missed was intelligence in her age bracket. Patrick wasn’t nearly the level of her MIT friends, but he had something that they didn’t have.

  She looked at him, trying to figure out what that was. He analyzed his hamburger, decided on a good attack angle, and took a bite. She looked away.