Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  Annie stopped talking and tried to force the smile again, realized she was pulling on her ear, jerked her hand away. It could have happened.

  “Really,” Worley said.

  She nodded her head.

  “If that were true in the way you claim, the event would have taken place December 15th, 1976. This is only July.”

  Still grasping the free end of the handcuffs, Worley lead her out of the street without another word, through the graveyard and back to his patrol car where he stuffed her into the passenger seat. Annie felt some relief that he didn’t toss her in the back. She did wish he’d remove the handcuffs which banged into things every time she moved her arm. She took the loose end and closed it over the same wrist. When he got in behind the wheel she held it out to show him. “Chic.”

  He didn’t appear amused.

  He pulled onto the street. When Annie asked where they were going he said nothing. She considered making small talk about the weather or asking if he had plans for July 4th or pointing out that the traffic was building. Wisely, she kept her mouth shut.

  He turned right onto Park Street and then right onto Beacon. Still, she didn’t know where he was going until he slowed and turned onto Tremont Place. Just short of where the homeless person disappeared, he stopped. He removed the handcuffs, put them away and then said to her, “What the hell is going on?”

  She rubbed at her wrist. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  He hit a button somewhere and her door unlocked. He opened his door and said, “Out.”

  Annie complied and met him at the front of the car.

  “I was the third officer on the scene,” he said. “Mrs. Dexter was claiming that you struck an old man and then dragged him away, and then she said she watched this man, who you said was your grandfather, vanish in a bright light. That last statement slid her, and you, to the back burner of witnesses. I had enough to do without having to deal with a couple of crazies. By the time I got around to interviewing her she had decided that she had been hallucinating and even dropped the complaint that you had struck him. She wanted to forget the whole thing and when she mentioned that her husband was a city councilman, I was more than happy to agree with her.”

  Annie rocked back on her heel and then sat against the car.

  “Normally two people don’t have the same crazy hallucination,” he continued. “When they do it’s possible I might take a closer look. When one of them is me . . .” He rubbed his eyes. “It’s been a long night and I’m supposed to be off duty. I’d dropped off my partner where he was meeting his wife for breakfast and was heading back to the station when I picked up the accident. I’ve got a couple of officers waiting on this unit and I’ve still got to input my part of the report. As far as the report on you . . .” He crossed his arms, stared up at the sky for a few seconds. “I don’t think so.”

  He pointed at the area in front of them. “You knew whatever happened here was going to happen.”

  Whether that was a question or a statement, Annie wasn’t sure. In either case she sensed he wanted an answer. “Sort of,” she said with a near whisper.

  “Sort of? What does that mean?”

  She looked at her watch and dropped her arm.

  He picked up her arm and look at the watch. “You’re nearly three and a half hours slow. It’s only two hours to Montana. And what in the hell kind of time piece is that?”

  Annie jerked her arm away, pushed her sleeve down over the watch and crossed her arms.

  “You’re expecting something else to happen here, aren’t you?”

  Annie nodded.

  “When?”

  Annie considered the pros and cons and then said, “Fifty-two minutes.”

  “This thing that I just witnessed take place . . .” He drew his hand back and forth between the ragged quilt and the area in front of them. “That was supposed to be you, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded again.

  He considered that for a few seconds and then said, “When I wake up from this dream, this nightmare, I’m going to write it all down; hell, I’m going to write a novel. That’s what this is, isn’t it? I’m asleep and having one crazy science fiction nightmare.”

  “Yep,” Annie said. “A fine little nightmare it is, too.”

  He pushed from the car. “Get in.”

  Figuring she had little choice and suspecting he would make sure they were back here at the prescribed time, she complied.

  At police central, or whatever they called it, he handed her a visitor’s badge and recommended she place it over the date on her sweatshirt. She did and for the next 35 minutes she stayed with him while he did whatever police officers do to go off duty. Twice he introduced her as Elizabeth Chetta from Montana who he had just picked up at the bus depot. He’d told her to keep her mouth shut because she didn’t sound like she was from anywhere but upper-class Boston. That surprised her into lock-jaw silence. She found it interesting that he knowingly chose to expand on her lie. In a sense it really wasn’t a lie. She had come from Montana.

  At quarter of the hour, by her watch, he took her by the elbow and they left out a side door. He walked her over to a faded blue Ford Pinto. A bumper sticker read, “My other horse is an ARABIAN!” He noticed her looking at it. “My daughter’s car. She’s into Arabian horses.”

  “Cute,” she said and waited for him to unlock the passenger door. She almost said, “Don’t you have a remote?”

  Holding the door for her he said, “I make no excuses for the state of the interior. She’s only seventeen after all.”

  Annie paused and looked at him. “Your son is seventeen, too. They’re twins?”

  “That’s usually how it works.”

  As Worley pulled onto Tremont Place, Annie checked her watch. It was 6:51 in Montana on June 16, 2007. She had no idea what time it was locally, but downtown Boston was in full Saturday morning bustle. He parked in the same spot as before and they got out. They leaned against the front of the car.

  “So,” he said.

  “Like I said before, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “It’s been a very long night. I’m ready for some entertainment. Make something up.”

  Annie looked up at the sky. “Okay. I’m not really human. I travel the galaxy looking for specimens of life similar to mine and bring them back for study. So far I’ve got a vagrant. I need a police officer. Would you mind stepping forward five paces so you can be beamed up to my spaceship?”

  “I suppose the first person I’ll see on the other end is some guy named Scotty?”

  Shocked, she looked at him. “How did you know?” That was a serious question. Was Star Trek that old?

  He laughed and shook his head. “I’d more believe this is part of a top-secret experiment going on across the Charles. You hear stories all the time about the so-called brains at MIT.”

  “Really!” Annie said, shifting, without thinking, into a defense mode. “Those so-called brains on the other side of the Charles River are my brains, and this has nothing to do with MIT.”

  “So you’re not really visiting from Montana?”

  “Bite me!”

  He made a face at her. “Bite me? What the hell does that mean?”

  Annie thought about that. “I don’t know. Just something that’s said; short for ‘bite my ass’ I would guess.”

  He nodded his head in understanding. “Language of the next century?”

  She refused to be goaded into admitting what he was suspecting. She stared straight ahead and said nothing.

  “Who’s the president?”

  Annie opened her mouth, closed it and then to stall said, “Of the United States?” Her mind was racing to come up with the answer. Given time it was no problem. As a matter-of-fact she could recite all the presidents and their vice presidents, including dates in office, but only if she could produce the visual text in her head. History and politics were never of interest to her.

  “Yes, the United States.”

  “Ronald
Reagan,” she blurted a split second before a page from a text book flashed before her. “Gerald Ford!”

  “Ronald Reagan? The actor?”

  “He was an actor?” She clamped her mouth shut, but it was too late. Way . . . too . . . late. Besides, he was going to stand here and watch and he wasn’t going to believe it was another hallucination. She extracted her wrist from under the sweatshirt sleeve and looked at her watch.

  “How long?” Worley asked.

  She sucked in and then blew out a lungful of air. “Three minutes.”

  “What will happen?”

  She shook her head and said nothing.

  “As crazy as this all appears, I’ve figured it out and you know I’ve figured it out. But who am I going to tell? I’ll go home and tell my wife I met a time traveler. Then I’ll tell my boss, maybe add it to my report. After that I’ll probably be living on the street where I can tell everyone I meet. Yep . . . I’ll run out and blab it all over Boston, maybe even write an article about it for the Boston Herald.”

  “They’d more than likely write an article about you,” she said.

  He snorted a laugh. “I can see the headline. ‘Boston’s Finest Goes Wacko!’”

  They stood in silence for awhile, watching, waiting. “When does Ronald Reagan become president?” he asked.

  She considered that for a moment and then said, “Nineteen-eighty; right after Jimmy Carter.”

  “Carter wins? He’s a nobody.”

  Annie shrugged and looked at her watch again. “Any second.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “That’s a longer story than I have time for. Right now I just want to go home.”

  “Back to 2006, right?”

  “Actually 2007. This is an old sweatshirt.”

  “You’re an MIT student?”

  “Yes, but this project is privately funded and has nothing to do with the institute.”

  “You’ll know my grandson?”

  “I’ll meet him in 2007.”

  “He’ll be a cop?”

  She nodded. “In uniform he’ll look a lot like you.”

  “What about my son?”

  “I don’t know. We weren’t exactly sharing personal information. I probably shouldn’t be telling you any of this. I could be changing history just being here.”

  “Like I mentioned before, who am I going to tell?”

  Suddenly there came a glow in front of them. They both came upright. A wind stirred up dust and a wrinkled wad of paper that lodged against Annie’s foot. She looked at it for a moment before the wind caught it again and it was gone. She stepped forward into the glow and turned around.

  “Thank you for getting me here and believing me.”

  Worley looked up and down the short street. “All looks clear. It’s going to drive me crazy that I can’t tell anyone.”

  “It is pretty amazing,” Annie said.

  “Do you end up right here 31 years from now?”

  “No. I’m headed for Montana.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She sat down with her legs crossed. “Not everything I told you was a complete lie.”

  “I’d like to talk to you again in 31 years if I’m still around.”

  Annie thought about that and decided, why not? “I’ll look you up.”

  “I’ll be expecting you. What’s your real name?”

  She looked at him, surprised.

  “You think I actually believed Elizabeth Chetta was your real name?”

  She smiled. “Annie.”

  “Annie what?”

  “Just Annie. Also, you might want to hang around for a bit. I may be sending the homeless person back.” With that she pulled her knees in tight and closed her eyes.

  Chapter 73

  June 18, 2007

  As soon as Annie was fully aware of her surroundings, and fully functional, she came scrambling out of the chamber. “Where’s grandfather?” she demanded of Bradshaw and then froze. Professor Bradshaw wasn’t sitting in his chair. He was sitting in her grandfather’s chair. In Bradshaw’s chair, in goggles and earmuffs, sat her father.

  He pulled the earmuffs down around his neck. “He’s in bed. What the hell happened?”

  “Is he okay?” she asked as though she had only walked in on him drinking coffee at the kitchen counter.

  “As best as he could be. Should be in a hospital but he refused. Did you know he had cancer?”

  She shook her head. “Not until a few days ago.”

  “How long have you known about this?” he said, indicating the space around them.

  She looked at her father closely. His body language said he was angry but his tone was only an octave or so above conversational. She’d expected he’d be going through the roof. “Both tidbits of knowledge came about the same time,” she said. “You’re awfully calm.” There was something else and she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  “I’ve had a few days to cool down.”

  “A few days? You knew before you left Boston?”

  “No. I was allowed my rage after it came out Saturday morning when your boyfriend showed up and you were nowhere to be found.” Steven’s voice rose in volume to the end of his sentence, coming closer to the tone she expected.

  Annie creased her brow in confusion, turned her head to look at Bradshaw and said slowly, “This is Saturday morning.”

  “Today is Monday, Annie,” Bradshaw said. “You’ve lost two days.”

  Annie looked for a place to sit, ended up falling back against the lip of the chamber, her mind working out the puzzle. She looked up at Bradshaw. “The homeless guy. He was too big wasn’t he? Overloaded the system?”

  “You mean homeless woman. You knew about her and you didn’t stop her?”

  “I was handcuffed to the cemetery fence at the time.”

  “You what?” her father said.

  “Cemetery?” Bradshaw said.

  “Granary Burial Grounds,” Charles’ voice boomed across the intercom. “I Google Earthed the coordinates. What were you doing in handcuffs?”

  “Long story. Where is she?”

  “Outside eating pancakes with your aunt and uncle, I imagine,” Bradshaw said. “Betty was a bit excited when she arrived.”

  “Betty?”

  “That’s her name . . . Betty, and no, she wasn’t too big; less than 45 kilograms. The problem was we weren’t prepared for anyone but you, hadn’t even considered a different scenario. She came out of the chamber like a bull busting through a china shop, bottle of wine in hand and demanding to know if she was still on earth. She wasn’t happy with the answer and started flailing her arms all over the place, and I was in here by myself. The next thing I knew her wine bottle collided with my full mug of coffee. Wine and coffee flooded the SMMUDWAGEN computer and the system went down.”“Holy . . .”

  “You can say it.

  “Shit!”

  “Actually we were lucky. SMMUDWAGEN sits right next to the server. If she had flooded that you’d lost a lot more than a few days.”

  Annie tried to imagine that scenario, realizing how close they’d come to Patrick’s lab burning down theory.

  “It took us nearly 48 hours to procure another computer, load it and configure it, and we did it without your grandfather only because your father showed up.”

  Annie looked between Bradshaw and her father. “I don’t get it.”

  “SMMUDWAGEN was your grandfather’s baby, his brainchild. Your grandfather kept excellent notes and documentation, but even with that it’d have taken days, weeks, maybe forever for the three of us to deconstruct his logic and then reconstruct the SMMUDWAGEN system. Your father accomplished it in less than 36 hours.”

  Annie blew out a lungful of air, and looked at her father. He’d just taken another step up her already very tall ladder of admiration which also made her feel even smaller. “Thank you,” she said, and then, “How did you figure out where I was?”

  “Like I already said, your boyfriend. H
e showed up at your cabin Saturday morning, five minutes after Gracy and Henry. Apparently you had a plan to sneak off with them and bring them here. Were you ever intending on telling me?”

  Annie didn’t answer his question.

  “When you didn’t appear and it became evident that you hadn’t been there all night I started asking questions of Patrick. He folded rather easily, and then so did Gracy. Patrick led us here. I can’t believe you brought him in on this thing.”

  “It wasn’t planned,” Annie said.

  “It doesn’t sound like anything was planned. When I arrived here with Patrick and your aunt and uncle, it looked like a Three Stooges skit. Your elite team, Larry, Moe and Curley, was in panic mode, trying to dry out the computer while keeping your homeless friend corralled.”

  Steven removed his earmuffs, which were still hanging around his neck, threw them and the goggles onto the desk and stood. “How in the hell could you let this fiasco happen?”

  “Me!” Annie couldn’t believe her ears. “Me! I had nothing to do with it.” Now he was showing his anger and Annie suddenly realized why she didn’t see his anger a few minutes back. He was scared, and he gets calm when he’s scared. “It was Grandfather! I was trying to rescue him, and thank God I did. You have no idea what went on back there, what disaster my quick action averted.” She pointed her finger at the chamber. “If I hadn’t gone after him . . . Did he tell you what happened?”

  “He hasn’t said a word other than where and when to reach out for you,” Bradshaw said. “Other than that he’s gone silent . . . almost comatose. He won’t answer questions, won’t eat. He becomes alert only to ask about you.”