Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  “Would you like a tour?”

  At first startled, Annie relaxed and then turned around. “How were you going to get me here this time, Grandfather? Another email with a set of coordinates?”

  “Doesn’t seem necessary now, does it? Like I said, would you like a tour?”

  “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”

  “About the tour?”

  She pointed at the trailer. “About this! Have you thought hard about this?”

  “Of course. Do you think we’d haul a nuclear power plant across the country if we hadn’t.”

  “What about the possible ramifications?

  “Of time travel?”

  Annie rolled her eyes. “Yes, Grandfather; of time travel. As much as I’m intrigued by the idea, I can’t go back and save Tony’s life.”

  Robert coughed and took a deep breath. “Sure you can.”

  “If Tony didn’t die I wouldn’t be here now and you’d have nothing to entice me to carry out the rest of your plans.”

  “The rest of my plans?”

  “Give me a break, Grandfather. The four of you aren’t doing all of this,” she waved her arms in the air, “so that I, as Professor Grae put it, can talk to Tony again. You’re thinking about my mother and her mother, and Professor Grae is thinking about his wife. And that’s just two of you. Why are the other two here? What lives are they trying to save?”

  “Annie.”

  She put her hand out. “Wait! It’s not what lives you all want to save; it’s what lives you want me to save. Right? I’m the one who is conveniently small enough to do the job. That means you’ll have me bouncing all over time to keep people from dying.”

  “Annie.” Robert started coughing again, and as before, he pulled it under control.

  “You not only sound awful, you look awful.” She walked up closer to him. “You’ve lost weight. What’s going on, Grandfather?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He has cancer.”

  Annie and Robert turned to find that Grae and Thomas had been listening to their exchange. Charles Walsh was looking on from the doorway of the RV.

  “Lung cancer,” Grae added. “We’ve known for some time, Robert.”

  “That’s private information,” Robert said. “How did you --?”

  Annie stepped around and put her face in front of his. “How long?”

  “They had no right?”

  “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “How long have the doctors given you?”

  He looked away from his granddaughter, seemed to focus on something in the distance and then looked down at his feet. “A few months.”

  “A few months!”

  “Maybe six.”

  She wanted to hug him; she wanted to hit him; she wanted to cry. “And you’re wasting your time with this?” she said, pointing her finger at the trailer again. And then she looked at his hair, grabbed a handful and pulled.

  “Owe!” Robert knocked her hand away. “What’re you doing?”

  “Your hair’s not falling out. You’re not getting chemo!”

  “I wouldn’t be here if I was.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because it’s hard getting treatments when you’re traveling across the country.”

  “That’s not the only reason. Why aren’t you getting treatment?”

  “It’s a waste of time.”

  Annie turned away from him and directed her glare at the three men. Grae shook his head and looked down at his feet. Thomas had turned away and was fooling with the grill. Only Charles returned Annie’s look. If she were standing close to him she’d smack him, she was sure. She swung back to her grandfather. “So what exactly is your plan? What do you think you’re going to accomplish with this thing?” She swung back to the other three. “What do you guys think you’re going to accomplish, and at the expensive of my grandfather’s death?”

  “I’m going to die anyway.”

  Annie spun around and put her finger in his face. “We’re all going to die. If you weren’t playing this game you could be getting treatment; extending your life a bit longer.”

  “What would be the point?”

  “What would be the point? Well hell, grandfather! Why don’t all five of us go jump off a cliff right now?”

  “You’re becoming irrational.”

  “You’ve become stupid! You don’t have lung cancer; you have brain cancer.”

  “Annie, don’t you think you should—?” Grae cut his sentence off when Robert held up his hand.

  “It’s all right Howard. She makes a good point, but what she forgets is that this is my life. My brain is still quite functional and as long as my heart keeps pumping it oxygen, I will continue to use it to do some good.”

  “Going back and saving Tony’s or my mother’s life is not necessarily good,” Annie said, “when you don’t know the consequences. Extending your life, maybe sending the cancer into remission, is what you should be doing.”

  “It’s way past the possibility of remission. I—” Robert launched into a coughing fit.

  Annie watched; helpless. She bit her lip but the tears came anyway. How could this be happening? Why didn’t she know? Why didn’t he tell anyone? “Does dad know?”

  Robert shook his head as the coughing eased off. “No one knows.” He looked over at Howard Grae. “Or that’s what I thought.”

  Annie wiped at her tears. “They said definitely six months?”

  “If I take it easy.”

  “You’re not taking it easy.” Her tears were now rolling non-stop. She sniffled and then suddenly there was a white terrycloth towel dangling in front of her. She followed it up to Charles the Dweeb’s sad face. “Thank you,” she said, took the towel and proceeded to try to soak up her tears. “You’re not taking it easy at all.”

  “No. There is much too much to do. I’m not just going to sit around and wait to die.”

  Annie stepped forward and put her arms around him. “I love you Grandfather. This isn’t fair. It’s not time for you.”

  “We can’t pick our time, Sweet Gums.”

  She laughed. “You haven’t called me that in years.” She sniffled again and swallowed. “You can’t pick your time, but you could delay it a little, spend some time with people who love you.”

  “The only person who falls into that category is you, and you’re right here. Your father tolerates me only because of you.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Yes it is. It goes both ways. I tolerate him for the same reason.”

  Annie rested her head on his shoulder, dabbed her face with the towel and thought about what he just said. He was right. She always knew it but ignored it. The two people on top of the list of people she loved didn’t much like each other for reason’s she suspected but never put much thought into.

  “I see Thomas is getting the grill ready,” Robert said. “Let’s have some breakfast and then we’ll tell you what our real mission is.”

  “Real mission?” She pushed away and looked at him. “You mean there’s something else? What?”

  “Breakfast first. We’ll present our mission statement on a full stomach.”

  Annie didn’t know how hungry she was, or how good breakfast could be. It was just eggs, bacon and hash browns, but it was like it was the first time she’d ever eaten breakfast. Was it because it was cooked on an outdoor grill? Did Charles the Dweeb put something different in it? And she also couldn’t believe that the Dweeb could cook. She also realized that they had planned for her to arrive, at some point anyway. While The Dweeb and Professor Bradshaw worked at breakfast Professor Grae fetched a fifth chair, purple and pink. She wondered whose idea that was.

  Catching and then chastising herself for actually thinking good things about Dweeb the breakfast cook, Annie turned to her grandfather. “So, what is your real mission?”

  “You’ve never been a patient person, Annie.”

  “Neither have
you.”

  He put his half finished plate aside and with the agility of an old man, stood. As Annie thought back on it she realized he had been slowing down for a while, but she had never thought anything of it. She jumped up and took his arm. He shook her off. “I’m not an invalid . . . yet.”

  “Of course you’re not. I’m just—”

  “Just trying to help an old, dying man. This is why I didn’t want anyone to know. Let’s go inside the lab so you can see what all the fuss is about, and then we’ll all talk.”

  “Under normal conditions the plant can be brought up to operational status in about six hours.” Professor Bradshaw was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.

  “What do you mean, ‘normal conditions’?”

  “No rush; well planned; very controlled.”

  Annie looked around. “You mean you could bring this nuclear power plant up faster?”

  “We could go critical in thirty minutes.”

  Annie choked on her coffee. “Thirty minutes! How is that possible? You’d fracture the entire system.”

  “We can shut it down even faster,” Professor Grae said. “We’re working with a new alloy. As a matter-of-fact I think you know of it. The metallurgical people have been playing with it for a few years.”

  “Not carbtanyttirum.”

  “Exactly. It’s a carbide-titanium-yttrium alloy.”

  “Carbide-titanium-yttrium-chromium-aluminum, to be exact,” Charles said.

  “Yes,” Professor Grae said, “but the chromium-aluminum portion is used only in the lower temperature areas, though it does withstand higher temperatures then would the aluminum by itself. Basically the ceramic portion—the carbide—provides the ability to withstand tremendous temperature changes; the titanium is not only light but gives it the necessary ductility to make it portable; the yttrium adds strength and provides a better level of workability. Overall we have an alloy that is super light, super strong and impervious to temperature differences.”

  “But has it been proven?”

  “We’ve proven it.”

  “Oh, sure!” Annie said. “One little nuclear power plant in someone’s garage is a truly proven scientific study . . . if we were still in the Middle Ages.”

  “We weren’t in a garage.”

  “Oh! Where was it? Can’t have been on Campus anywhere. Hard to keep something like this a secret, even at MIT.” She passed her question from face to face until she came to The Dweeb. She glared at him.

  “Your grandfather owns a farm up near Lowell,” he finally confessed, just after she thought she saw sweat pop out on his forehead.

  “You own a farm?” Annie said to her grandfather. “Don’t tell me you’ve had this nuclear power plant in a barn!”

  “It was quite secure,” The Dweeb added.

  “Oh, I’ll bet.” She put her mug to her lips, expecting cold coffee. The mug was empty. She set it back down and pushed it aside. “So, what have you been doing in this highly secure barn? What is your mission other than trying to figure out how to drag me into it?”

  Robert and Thomas Bradshaw looked at each other for a few seconds, and then Robert nodded. Thomas cleared his throat. “We’re intending on preventing 9/11.”

  Chapter 41

  June 14, 2007

  The only place worse to be on that black day in 2001, besides New York or the Pentagon, was Boston where the ill-fated flights originated. Images of buildings falling, smoke billowing, and people running had blasted at her from her TV screen until they were burned forever into her memory. Everything in Boston shut down and the city became like a tomb. She was fourteen with an IQ off the scale, but she couldn’t understand why anyone would hate America so much. At one point she walked outside to get away from the continuous broadcast of death and gloom only to be nearly knocked down by a military jet screaming overhead. And then there was silence, deafening silence, and she was certain the world had entered an apocalypse and would soon come to an end.

  Annie stood and without looking at any of the four men or saying a word, squeezed her way out of the tight space, went out the door and retrieved her pack. She pushed her coffee mug into its side pocket, pulled the pack over her shoulder and turned to walk away. She was stopped short by her grandfather.

  “Annie…”

  She put her hand up. “No. I . . . I can’t right now.”

  “But…”

  “Give me some time. Okay? Let me digest this a little after I’ve had some sleep. It’s been a long night.” With that she stepped around him, and then turned back. “Does Atlantic Horizons, the Board, know about this?”

  When her grandfather didn’t say anything she walked away, straight to the river where she turned south and set a brisk pace for Grizzly Ranch.

  Robert stared at the opening in the trees where he watched his granddaughter walk away, where now only a piece of the river was visible. She was so much like her mother.

  He coughed a couple of times and then put his hand on his chest. He would have thought that her showing up and listening to them would have energized him, but he only felt tired, very tired. He was running out of time, but he dared not push her or she’d back off. Just like her mother. After meeting Steven Waring and being around him a number of times, he had come to the conclusion that the young physicist was not right for Annabelle. He was a very bright young man, no doubt about that, but in no way did Robert envision him as the husband of his daughter, as his son-in-law. And then, of course, he did what a father should never do. He told Annabelle what he thought. Before he knew it the two of them were engaged and there was no stopping it.

  Among his list of regrets in his life, that one was near the top. If Annabelle hadn’t married Steven Waring, she’d still be alive today.

  But then, he wouldn’t have Annie, would he?

  Annie didn’t intend on breaking her pace until she was back at her cabin. She was walking fast, her head down, watching her feet, when suddenly someone was in front of her. “Ahhh!”

  She caught her scream and came face to face with Brad. “You scared the death out of me!”

  “Contemplating your naval,” he said.

  “What?” She was startled not only by his sudden presence, but also by his odd statement. She followed his eyes to see what he was looking at over her shoulder, found nothing but Brad’s rock and the endless moving water, and then remembered that autistic people cannot look you in the eye.

  “You were walking with your head down. You weren’t watching where you were going. The idiom is, ‘contemplating your naval.’”

  “Oh.” She would normally have laughed. “I’ve got a lot of things on my mind right now, Brad. I’m not in the mood for an idiom battle.”

  “Yes.” He continued to look past her and then said, “That’s an idiom.”

  “What’s an idiom?”

  “’I’ve got a lot of things on my mind,’ is an idiom.”

  Again she almost laughed. “Yes, it is.”

  “You can’t save the world,” he added. When she didn’t respond he walked past her.

  Annie watched him climb upon his rock and then set his gaze across the water. He rocked ever so slightly, no more than an inch of head movement. She tried to remember if he did that before. If so, she hadn’t noticed.

  You can’t save the world. She wondered where that had come from. Sure it was a logical progression following her saying she had a lot of things on her mind, but after Professor Bradshaw’s announcement about stopping 9/11, it was more like he had been inside her head.

  She considered that for a time and then stepped over close to the base of Brad’s rock. “Brad. What do you remember about 9/11?”

  “Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center. Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center. Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.”

  “That’s right, Brad.”

  “Big buildings fell down. People died.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don�
��t like airplanes. I don’t like big buildings.”

  “Don’t blame you.” She thought for a minute. “Why did you say I can’t save the world?”

  “Don’t blame you. That’s an idiom.”

  Annie blew out a breath. “Yes. We often say idioms in normal conversation. That doesn’t mean we’re playing the idiom game. Why did you say, and I quote, ‘you can’t save the world’?”

  “You can’t save the world is an idiom.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “I like idioms.”

  “I guess you do.” Annie took a step back. “I’ve got to go, Brad. See you later.”

  “The ball is in your court.”

  Annie stared at his profile for several seconds and then turned around and walked away. “No shit, Sherlock,” she said under her breath. “And that, too, is an idiom.”

  Chapter 42

  June 14, 2007

  Everything was quiet at Grizzly Ranch, just the way she hoped it would be. Inside her cabin she paced for a time, picked up her cell phone and then, remembering that it was useless, put it down. She dug the satphone out of her pack. After powering it up she had to go out onto her porch to get satellite bars.

  After figuring that it was nearly noon in Florida, she dialed.

  Gracy Johnston, Former Congresswoman Gracy Keeton of New York, was cleaning up after transplanting some of her orchids into an earthen pot she purchased the day before. At 72 years old she was very active in the Ladies Orchid Society of Tallahassee. Henry Johnston, former Senator of Florida, was busy cleaning his golf clubs.

  “You spend more time cleaning those clubs, Henry, than you do playing,” Gracy said.

  “You spend more time moving your orchids from pot to pot than enjoying them in the pots they are in. One would think you were more into pots than orchids.”

  “Hush, Henry. It keeps me busy.”

  “And I with my clubs.”

  They both smiled and silently continued with their tasks until the phone rang. Gracy wiped her hands on her garden apron before picking it up, looked curiously at the caller ID, and then said, “Hello?”