The Time Hackers

by Gary Paulsen

  The paintings were of animals, what looked like deer or elk and perhaps a bison. They were graceful; even in the dim light they looked incredibly beautiful.

  Prehistoric times, Dorso thought. We're in France when Cro-Magnon man was making the cave paintings.

  The first recorded art. In all their time playing with holograms and seeing living history Dorso and Frank had never come to this moment. The first example of recorded art was being made.

  It stunned him. There would be thousands of years of man's history and art to follow this moment, hundreds of centuries of art, with Michelangelo and Rembrandt and the Egyptian pyramids, and none of it was really any better than what these men were doing in the cave.

  Even Frank was silent, and it was just as well because neither of them had been seen. The three men were focused intently on their painting, speaking in monosyllables.

  The gamester was sitting on a small rock with his back to the boys not five feet away, staring up at the painters. He too seemed amazed. On his right knee lay his laptop.

  It was Frank who had the presence of mind to step quietly forward, lean over and snatch the gamester's laptop from his knee. He jumped back into the darkness.

  For an instant there was no reaction. Then the gamester turned and stood up. “What are you doing?”

  “We're stopping you!” Dorso said. “Come on, Frank, let's go!”

  “Where can you go?” The gamester didn't come after them. “There's nowhere to run and you don't know the escape codes.”

  “Wrong,” Dorso said. “I saw you hit the keys to escape in the desert. Get close, Frank, we're leaving.”

  “Don't leave me here, not with them!”

  The three painters had turned and were staring in shock at the apparition. Clothed, twenty-first century humans with sneakers and almost no body or facial hair? But their shock quickly gave way to something like anger and they came at the three time travelers.

  Dorso had lied. Oh, he had seen the gamester hit the keys and get them out of the mess in the Crusades, but he hadn't seen exactly the right keys.

  He knew the first one was F1 and he thought the second one was A, but it could have been S or Q or Z or even X or W So he took a quick breath, leaned close to Frank, held down F1 and hit them all as fast as he could.

  The effect was astonishing.

  There was the same flash of white light and then they proceeded on an encyclopedic dash through all the time periods they had entered so far. In the space of what seemed like a couple of seconds they went from the cave to the security man's office to the desert and back to the office to the swamp and back to the classroom with Karen to the pirate ship and back to the door of Dorso's home to the mammoth butt and back to the sidewalk in front of the library and the battlefield and then, finally, to what was apparently Kitty Hawk in 1903. Wilbur and Orville Wright were about to launch their flying machine for the first time.

  “I think,” Frank said, “I'm going to throw up. Everything is spinning.”

  “No.” Dorso held his shoulder. “Over there, on the side of the hill, there's another gamester. What does he have? Is that some kind of weapon?”

  The scene was below them. The flying machine was sitting on a track about twenty yards in front of and below where they were on the side of the hill. The gamester seemed to be aiming what looked like a gun but turned out to be a net-firing device used by naturalists to capture birds.

  “It's a net gun,” Frank said. “I've seen them used on the nature channels. He's going to fire that thing and knock the plane down!”

  “That's the game,” Dorso said. “I'll bet the game is one of them tries to change history, change the time line, and the other is supposed to stop him.”

  “But if they don't take off this time with the plane they'll just take off next time.”

  “Not necessarily. What if it wrecks and hurts one of the Wright brothers? Or kills one of them? Then they won't invent the airplane.”

  The gamester with the net gun was off to the side, looking away from them. He waited for the Wrights and the man the brothers had asked to assist them by taking a picture as the plane glided into the air. They were all concentrating on the flying machine and didn't see the gamester or the boys. Dorso leapt forward and used his shoulder to knock the gamester down before he could fire. The gamester had rolled his laptop up and jammed it in a back pocket of his pants. When he fell it flew clear, but neither Dorso nor Frank saw it.

  Instead, Dorso took his own laptop, and with Frank close and nearly lying on top of the gamester, he again hit F1 and all the nearby keys (he still didn't know which key did the job). He triggered the flash and the ripping ride through time again, taking the gamester and his laptop and the net gun with them.

  “This time I'm definitely going to throw up,” Frank said. “You have got to quit doing that….”

  “Get his laptop! Get his laptop!”

  The gamester was astonished to find himself with two strangers and even more astonished to find himself in a stark desert, about to be run down by a stagecoach pulled by six lathered horses being whipped to a full gallop.

  Native Americans were chasing the stagecoach. They had scruffy-looking horses and there seemed to be a dozen or so of them, apparently Apaches, all with guns, all shooting at the coach.

  “Where are we?” Frank asked.

  “His laptop! There, on the ground! Grab it!” Dorso was fairly screaming. “And the net gun. Grab everything!”

  Frank came to his senses and dove for the laptop as Dorso rolled off the gamester and fell toward him. The stagecoach thundered past and clouds of dust covered them just as the Apaches rode up. Dorso hit the keys and they screamed through time again until they were at the present. Dorso took a breath and was about to run from the gamester, who had been brought along with them, when there was a kind of whumph of light. They fell further back in the past until the three, with Frank holding the gamester's laptop and Dorso holding the net gun, came to a stop in a dark alley in a very smoky city where a woman so covered in soot she seemed to be made of dirt looked at the three of them and said in a Cockney accent:

  “Well, lookee 'ere, ducks, wot the cat's drug in….”

  The gamester made a move to grab the laptop. Dorso fired the net gun at him and wrapped him up. He shoved the tangled bundle over to the side of the alley, handing the loose ends of the net ropes to the woman. “Here, this is for you.”

  Then he turned to Frank and said, “I'm guessing London, in the eighteen-fifties—I recognize it from when I did that paper on Charles Dickens. Should we run and hide here until we can figure out how to work this time-jump business or just hit all the keys again and see where we come to?”

  Frank threw up.

  “Right.” Dorso nodded. “We'll stay here a bit until we figure it out. Come on, let's get away from this geek before he gets loose.”

  And they ran off down the alley, leaving the woman holding the net and gamester as if she had a pig in a poke.

  In the darkness of the back alleys of London, where the smog from the coal fires used for heating houses was so thick that daylight never really dawned, the boys quickly found themselves an alcove back in a building and squatted against the wall.

  Dorso took a deep breath and coughed with the smog. He spit soot into the gutter. “Man, this is awful stuff.”

  Frank nodded. “You should try throwing up. The smog kind of mixes with the vomit and makes a really great taste.”

  “All right, all right. That's enough. Thank you for sharing.”

  Frank shrugged, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Just keeping you up to date.”

  “Right now I'm more interested in understanding how all this works.”

  “We have them both.”

  “What?”

  “Two laptops. Didn't you say the gamester said there were two of them? We've got three now, yours and the two others. That's it. So what do we do now?”

  Dorso shook his head. “The same thing applies as befor
e.If we can get back to where we were, we go straight to the authorities and let them handle all this. They'll believe us now, or that one guy will, with his desk full of arrows. They can work the investigation backward and see how it all started.”

  “Right,” Frank said, smiling. “That's what we'll do.”

  “You've got that tone in your voice.”

  “What tone?”

  “That kind of smart-aleck sound you make when you think you know something I don't.”

  Frank shrugged. “It's just that you said we'd turn it over to the authorities, but then you went ahead and started busting the gamesters yourself.”

  “I didn't have any control over that. We just got caught up.”

  “So what's different now? We still don't know what keys to hit to get back to the present.”

  Dorso was quiet. Frank was right.

  “I think we have to kill their laptops,” Dorso said. “Shut them down.”

  Frank shook his head. “Not so fast. We don't know how this all works. Maybe we need their laptops to make the whole time-travel thing work. If we shut them down we might get stuck here. I mean, I like England, but I figure if I have to breathe this slop for more than a day or two I'll drop dead. We're not used to breathing pure smoke. Even in the bad smog cities it's not nearly this bad….” He trailed off because Dorso was frowning, obviously thinking. “What's the matter?”

  “I just thought of something else.”

  Frank waited. “Well?”

  “Remember all those silly shows that used to be on television? About space and all the monsters and how they could go faster than light—I think they called it warp speed?”

  “Sure. Sometimes they're still fun to watch. It's all so hokey.”

  “Well, they did this thing called transporting….”

  “Sure. Where they dematerialize in one place and then materialize in another. Like I said, it's all so hokey. They tried all that years ago and found that with the trillions of cells it takes to make you human, even if they could somehow dematerialize one of us and bring us back it probably wouldn't work. I mean, if just one cell was wrong, you'd wind up with a monster. Like that old movie about the guy who tried it and there was a fly in the chamber with him and he mixed with the fly and came out all messed up. Man, he was drinking milk with this kind of hairy nose thing that slobbered all over the place—”

  “They're doing it with us.”

  “Doing what with us?”

  “We're being transported somehow. Look, when we use our laptops to just view the past, the hologram comes forward. I mean, I've never figured out quite how it works, even when they tell us in class, because it's so complicated and involves all that speed-of-light stuff. But I know we don't move. The hologram comes to us, we don't go to it.”

  “And they're moving us somehow.” Frank finished the thought for him.

  “Exactly. I think they're transporting the viewer, us, in some way because we don't just sit in one place and let it come to us. We're being sent everywhere—ancient France, Kitty Hawk, London, the Southwest deserts, northern Africa during the Crusades—we're getting dragged all over the place. And it's real, not just a hologram.”

  “They've learned how to transport people not just through time but space as well.”

  Dorso nodded. “This is big, really big. I mean, it was something when they cheated the time paradox and could affect time, but if they've really found a way to transport humans from one spot to another … oh, man—no more cars, not even the electrics we have now. No planes needed. None of it. This changes the whole world.”

  Frank held up his hand and then, realizing Dorso couldn't see it in the dark alcove, said, “Just a minute. If they could transport people, wouldn't they be doing just that? Maybe it only works when's it's used for time travel somehow.”

  “Maybe, but even so, they can still do it just for moving people and not have anything to really do with time travel. Just make it a minute in the past. Let's say we're in London, which we are, but it's present day, and we want to transport ourselves to our houses in the present. All we do is transport ourselves a minute into the past—”

  “Or a second, or a half a second,” Frank cut in. “A tenth of a second.”

  “Exactly. We go a tenth of a second in the past and bang, we're home and haven't lost any time. We've been transported, essentially, within the present.”

  “They've done it. They've figured out how to transport.”

  “And all we've got to do is figure it out and we can end this whole thing. Get back to the authorities and tell them that everything in the whole world is different now.”

  “Oh, wow. I just thought of something. If we can transport—”

  Another blinding flash, even brighter in the darkness of the London smog.

  “Dorso, you didn't have to do that!”

  “It wasn't me!” Dorso just had time to yell. “It wasn't me! There's somebody else!”

  This time they were in a room.

  There was one electric light hanging from the ceiling, two wooden chairs and a wooden table. None of it looked very old or very new. The boys, and their laptops, arrived in the corner of the room furthest from the table.

  There was a solid door with no glass in it, and there were no windows in the room, but to the left of the door a small speaker was mounted in the wall.

  Frank stepped across to the door and tried the knob. “It's locked.”

  “I'm not surprised.”

  There was a rasping sound from the speaker. “Sit at the chairs by the table.” The voice was not loud but low and modulated. Not human. Or perhaps human but spoken through a filter or scrambler or amplifier.

  The boys stood for a few seconds without moving and the voice came on again.

  “Sit down! If you do not, you will be relocated into a pool of water filled with piranhas.”

  “How can they see us?” Frank said.

  “Microcameras,” Dorso answered. “A tiny dot on the wall.”

  “You're very bright,” the voice said. “Yes, we can see you, and hear you. Now sit down. It's for your comfort. We may be here for some time.”

  “We might as well.” Dorso knelt and looked beneath the furniture. “I can't see anything wrong.”

  The boys moved to the chairs and sat at the table.

  “How did you find the players?”

  It was a strange voice, but it also seemed to have feeling.

  “What do you mean?” Dorso asked.

  “Don't be cute,” the voice said. “You know what I'm talking about.”

  I'm, Dorso thought. It's a single person. Of course, he could be anywhere, or, Dorso thought, smiling, anytime, but something about the voice made him think the person was nearby; almost as if he wanted to meet the boys, to come in and talk to them.

  “I see the camera,” Frank whispered without moving his lips. “Over the doorjamb. A dark spot.”

  The voice said nothing and Dorso answered the whisper in an even lower voice. “It's not a good mike. He can't hear us if we talk this low.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I repeat, how did you find the players?”

  “It wasn't intentional,” Dorso said aloud, then whispered to Frank, “Get up and move around so you're blocking me from the camera. Do it slowly, like you're examining the room.”

  Frank spoke low. “What are you doing?”

  “I'm going to cut off all three laptops so he can't control us.” Then, in a louder tone: “It was all a mistake. Somehow …”

  Frank got up and stood to the side, looking at the table and then the wall, humming. When he was directly in front of Dorso he paused, looking up at the camera.

  “Move away, move away from the door and back to your seat!”

  Dorso had the three laptops rolled in his hand. He unrolled them, hit the pressure power pads on each, and cut them off. There, he thought, now we shall see what we shall see. “Come on,” he whispered to Frank, “sit back down.”

&nb
sp; “Somehow,” he went on loudly, “my laptop was modified to react to your signal. It was all an accident. And you're wrong, we really don't know what's happening. We just keep getting bounced around to all sorts of places without wanting to.”

  There was a pause; then, in an exasperated tone, the voice said, “You've turned off the computers.”

  “He tried,” Dorso whispered to Frank. “He tried to time-jump us and it didn't work.”

  “So now what?”

  “Now we wait,” Dorso said softly.

  “For what?”

  “For the door to open,” Dorso said. “I think he's close and he'll come in to get the laptops. Be ready to run.”

  But for a long time it seemed that Dorso was wrong.

  There was nothing. No sound from the speaker, no movement at the door. The boys got up and moved around, stretched, whispered.

  “Where do you think we are?” Frank asked.

  “I think the question might be more when do I think we are,” Dorso said. “But either way, I don't have a clue. The walls are drywall, there's electricity, the furniture is modern, so I'd guess we aren't too far in the past, but other than that, who knows? We could be anywhere in the world. I think I know one thing: for this guy to do any more damage to us he's got to get hold of these laptops, and to do that he's got to come in here.”

  He stopped. The knob on the door turned. The door began to swing open.

  “Get ready,” Dorso breathed. “Get ready to run.”

  When the door swung open it revealed Darling holding the cat.

  “Darling?!” Dorso said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Play cat,” she said, smiling, looking at Dorso and yet somehow through him. “Play cat,” and then there was a hiss and a glimmer of light. Smiling, she said, “Play cat…”

  “It's a trick, a hologram!” Frank yelled. “Jump through it. Move!” With the yell he practically climbed Dorso's back and drove him through the door …