The Nick of Time

by Mike Parker

  “That reminds me,” the assistant continued his report. “My GPS was useless, my cell phone had no reception and, here’s where it gets really weird, it was dusk.”

  “The temperature in Webster today is 75 degrees,” Carl informed.

  “That makes no sense,” Dr. Stevens protested.

  “Believe me,” Nick chuckled incredulously. “I spent thirty minutes trying to make heads or tails of it all. The only thing that made any sense is that the B.I.R.D. sent me somewhere other than Lake Chimichanga.”

  “Then, where were you?” Ainsley asked.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Carl declared. “Someone needs to go again.”

  “No way,” his sister objected.

  “He’s right,” Nick affirmed. “And it should be me. How soon can we get more beam time?”

  “Our next scheduled slot is in ten days,” Carl answered. “We might be able to get in a day or two sooner if something opens up.”

  “Med-lab has time booked tomorrow,” the doctor informed the others. “I can call the office and have the time transferred to you.”

  “Fine. We’ll go again tomorrow,” Nick said resolutely.

  “You have to pass a physical in the morning, Nick, or it’s a no go. You understand, that right?” Stevens stated firmly.

  “He’s right, Nick.” Ainsley agreed.

  Nick looked around at the rest of his team and smiled. “Guess I’ll see all of you in the morning, but for now, could someone get me a towel?”

  – 7 –

  The Urinal on

  the Right

  “How are you feeling today?” Carl asked Nick as he entered the lab.

  “I’m fine,” Nick grinned. “Just a little tired.” After toweling off and changing into some dry clothes he had spent the rest of the day recounting every detail of his experience to the rest of the team. Then he went over it all again with Carl.

  “Physically he’s fine, all things considered,” Dr. Stevens reported following his patient into the lab.

  “Alright, then let’s do this,” Nick grinned. “When’s Ainsley getting here?”

  “She’s not,” Carl informed. “She drove out to dad’s cabin last night.” He picked up his phone off the desk and dialed. “Hey sis, are you all set?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Ainsley replied on the other end of the line. “Just sitting here on the front porch enjoying a nice cup of tea.”

  “Excellent, he should be there in about three minutes.”

  “Let’s get this show on the road,” Nick cheered stepping into the chamber.

  “Here,” Carl said, handing his friend a cell phone. “Take this.”

  “I have a,” he started to say, but then remember that his phone had gotten soaked in the lake along with the rest of him yesterday.

  “After you went home last night I modified this one a little. It now has an app that should track your GPS coordinates.”

  “Handy. Thanks.”

  “All set?”

  “Beam coming online now,” Dr. Stevens stated.

  “Safe travels,” Carl smiled warmly as he closed the iron door.

  The machine charged and the bright light flashed. When Nick opened his eyes he was right where he was supposed to be: standing out front of Mr. Ryan’s cabin. A feeling of relief swept over him. Although he was eager to make the second teleport, he would be lying to say he wasn’t more than a little anxious about where he might end up.

  “Ainsley?” Nick called out. Carl’s sister was no where to be seen. “Ains, are you here?” Perhaps she had to run inside for a minute. After all, tea did typically run through her pretty quick. Nick wandered into the cabin to search for her. “Ainsley are you in here?”

  Nick searched the house from top to bottom but found no sign of Carl’s sister. He tried to call her on his cell phone, but only got a recording saying the number was no longer in service. He walked back out to the front porch and sat on the steps. As he gazed at the forest around the cabin and the lake nearby, two thoughts came to his mind. The first was that this area seemed oddly familiar, even though his friend had never actually brought him here or shown him any pictures. The second thought was how relieved he was that this trip was only planned to last ten minutes.

  “Hi there!” a voice greeted from down the lane.

  “Hello,” Nick responded.

  A young man, perhaps thirty years old, wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt was approaching the cabin. “My name is Peter Laird.”

  “I’m Nick Jones. Nice to meet you.”

  “What brings you up here?” Peter inquired in a neighborly manner.

  “Umm … you know … I’m just a friend of Carl’s.” Nick answered awkwardly.

  “Right, I’ve seen ol’ Carl up here a bunch of times over the years,” the young man smiled. “I live just down the road. Nice guy, but I can’t ever get him to go fishing with me.”

  “No, fishing’s not really his thing,” Nick chuckled. Just then the little BIRD began to beep. “Um, will you excuse me? I, um, have some blueberry muffins in the oven. Very nice to meet you.”

  Nick stood up, shook Peter’s hand and moved quickly inside. No sooner had the door closed behind him than Nick was momentarily blinded by a bright light. When the light faded he was standing once again inside the B.I.R.D.’s nest.

  “Welcome back,” Dr. Stevens greeted, looking visibly relieved that opening the chamber door would be the extent of services needed this time around.

  “I don’t know what happened!” Carl explained tensely into his phone. “Listen, he’s back now safe and sound. We can talk about it when you get back to Boston.” Carl hung up the phone and then turned his attention to Nick. “Where on earth have you been?”

  “What do you mean, where have I been?” Nick asked sounding thoroughly confused. “I was at your dad’s cabin. Where was Ainsley?”

  “Sitting on the front porch and waiting for you, just like she said.” The scientist answered still sounding quite flustered.

  “That’s not possible,” his friend explained. “I was at the cabin. I sat on the porch. I looked around inside. I didn’t see her there. I didn’t see anyone there except some guy in his thirties named Peter Laird.”

  “Guy in his thirties?” Carl questioned sounding more confused than ever. “You mean Allan Laird? Peter is Allan’s kid and he can’t be more than ten.”

  “No, I’m sure he said Peter. Said he lived down the road and he knew who you were.” Nick could tell that Carl was having difficulty believing his story. “Check the GPS data from my phone. It should tell you precisely where I was, right?”

  “Good idea, the app is set to relay all data to my computer any time it enters the lab,” the scientist explained rushing over to his desk and opening a program on his computer. A list of coordinates popped up on the screen. “Okay,” he said, scrolling through the list. “This is you in the lab, then you teleport here and back in the lab here.” Carl pulled out his phone again and dialed frantically.

  “Hello?” Ainsley greeted.

  “Hey sis, are you still at the cabin?”

  “Yeah, I was just about to pull away. Why?’

  “Hang up and text me your GSP coordinates.”

  “Um, okay. Bye.”

  A moment later, Carl’s phone buzzed as a new text arrived. “Nick, check out the GPS coordinates of where you teleported to.”

  Nick gazed at the computer screen and said, “Okay, go ahead.”

  “42.033,” Carl called out. “And, negative 71.841” He paused a moment waiting for a reply. “Nick, did you hear the coordinates?”

  “Yeah, I heard them,” Nick said in a dazed voice.

  “Carl,” Dr. Stevens, who was looking over Nick’s shoulder and viewing the monitor, said. “I think you better come look at this.”

  Carl stepped closer to the computer and gazed at the screen. He double checked the text message he had received. Then he examined the numbers on the screen again. “That can’t be possi
ble,” he muttered, totally mystified.

  By the time Ainsley caught up with the guys, they had left the lab and found a booth at the local Red Robin. They had been discussing their teleporting quandary all day long and still seemed no closer to a solution.

  “Can someone tell me what’s going on?” Ainsley inquired as she sat down next to Nick.

  “What took you so long?” her brother asked.

  “I do have another job, you know, right? Now what’s going on?”

  “We don’t know anything,” Nick said flatly.

  “That’s not true,” Carl objected. “We know several things, we just have no clue how they all fit together.”

  “Hello, Ms. Ryan,” Dr. Stevens greeted, returning to the table.

  “Hi, Doc,” she replied. “I just don’t understand how we could be in the exact same place, but not see each other.”

  “Perhaps there is some kind of phasing issue,” the doctor suggested.

  “Yeah, but if that were the case, she should have been the one to see Peter Laird, not me,” Nick pointed out.

  “You mean Allen Laird?” Ainsley asked. “I did see him as I was leaving. Thirty-something, heavy set, full beard?”

  “No, Peter,” Nick corrected. “Thirtysomething, slim build, clean shaven.”

  “Of course Peter is clean shaven,” Carl interjected. “He’s 10 years old!” Suddenly a light came on in the physicist’s mind. A grin of wonder spread across his face. “Unless…"

  “Unless what?” all three others at the table asked in unison.

  “Nick,” Carl began, “You went to the restroom when we first got here, right?”

  “Ah, yeah. But…”

  “Which stall did you use?”

  “Seriously?”

  “Humor me.”

  “The urinal on the right,” Nick answered sounding really confused.

  “Okay,” Carl continued. “And doc, you went to the restroom just a minute ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which stall?”

  “As it so happens,” Dr. Stevens replied, “The urinal on the right.”

  “Same as Nick?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is weird,” Nick chuckled uncomfortably.

  “Stay with me,” Carl requested. “Doc, did you see Nick in the restroom?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But you were both standing in the exact same place.”

  “Yeah,” Nick jumped in, “But we were there at totally different times.” Carl looked around the table at his partners waiting for them to connect the dots.

  “You’re not saying…” Ainsley said tentatively.

  “What other explanation is there?” the scientist asked.

  “You’re saying,” Dr. Stevens said cautiously. “Time travel?”

  “Think about it,” Carl replied. “It makes sense. Nick and Ainsley were both at the same GPS coordinates, just not at the same time.”

  “That’s why we didn’t see each other,” Ainsley said half as a statement and half as a question.

  “And why Peter Laird was about 25 years older than he should be,” Carl added.

  “It also explains why on the first test I left on a warm fall morning and arrived at sunset in the winter.”

  “How is that possible?” the doctor asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Carl said. “But it answers a lot of our questions.”

  “You know,” Nick began thoughtfully. “I think I went to the past. That’s why there was no cabin or anything else around.”

  “How do you know you weren’t just somewhere else?” Ainsley asked, struggling to accept the time travel theory.

  “It was the same kind of trees and the lake was in the same place both times I arrived. I didn’t get a close look at it the second time, but it was definitely more or less the same size and shape as what I remember from yesterday.”

  “How is that possible?” the doctor asked again.

  “It must have something to do with the temporal bubble I used to keep the Little Bird connected to the machine in the lab. Instead of just holding Nick in stasis, it must have, somehow, sent him to a different point in the timeline.”

  The four people sat silently in their booth for a few moments trying to individually process Carl’s latest hypothesis. Finally, Nick broke the silence sounding more than a little excited, “Do you think you could control both where and when the B.I.R.D. sent me?”

  “I don’t know,” Carl began, pondering the idea. “But if we could … Check please!”

  “Aw, come on guys,” Ainsley protested. “I just got here and I’m starving!”

  “Get it to go, sis.”

  “Why don’t you and Doc head to the lab,” Nick suggested. “I’ll pay the bill and catch a ride over with Ainsley asap.”

  “Agreed,” Carl said, already on his feet and headed to the door.

  “So,” Nick smiled turning his attention back to the reporter. “It sure is nice to see you.”

  – 8 –

  It’s About Time

  Carl had spent the last two weeks working feverishly on reprogramming the B.I.R.D. Unless he could figure out how to calibrate the time jump, his teleporter was not fit to use. It was complicated and tedious work. In the end, he traded away their next beam time to the Med-lab which bought him another two weeks to come up with a solution.

  “How’s it going today,” Nick asked, entering the lab with coffee for himself and his partner. “Any progress?”

  “Some,” Carl replied, focused intently on what he was doing. “I’ve figured out why it’s happening, I just don’t know exactly how to control it, yet.”

  “You’ll get there,” the assistant encouraged. He sat at his desk quietly for a few minutes and then asked, “When you do get this figured out, are you planning to lock it in to teleport to the present, or,” he paused to consider his words. “Or do you think you could dial it in enough to set the destination to wherever, I mean, whenever we want?”

  “I’ve wondered that myself,” Carl answered. “For now, I just have to figure out how to make it work, then we can worry about what to do with it.”

  “Fair enough.”

  While Carl continued his work on fine tuning the B.I.R.D., Nick worked on a little project of his own. He was attempting to ascertain exactly at which points in time he had ended up in on his first two teleportations. After lurking around social networks, he discovered that Allen Laird did, in fact, have a son named Peter, who would be turning eleven next month. The Peter that Nick met was well into his thirties, meaning that encounter likely took place about twenty-five years in the future.

  On the other hand, on Nick’s first trip there were no signs of civilization anywhere around the lake. According to records of the area, he would have had to have traveled several hundred years into the past to find the lake in this condition. It was also possible, although less likely in his mind, that he had leapt several hundred years in the future after some cataclysmic event had made the area uninhabitable.

  Another four days passed without much sign of progress. However, the night before the team’s next beam time was scheduled, Carl had a breakthrough.

  “I think I’ve got it!” he cheered exuberantly.

  “Got what?” Nick asked. “You mean you’ve got it it?”

  “Yup,” the physicist declared proudly. “There was one piece of the puzzle missing, and I just found it under the couch cushions!”

  “So, we’re a go for tomorrow?”

  “Definitely a go.”

  The next morning Dr. Stevens, Carl, and Nick met in the lab just before noon. The doctor gave Nick a checkup once again as they had agreed to do before and after every test run. The previous two teleportations showed no sign of detriment to his health, other than the near drowning in the lake the first time around.

  “Ready to go?” Carl asked.

  “He’s ready,” the doctor answered.

  “I’m ready,” Nick confirmed stepping into the chamber.


  “Alright,” Carl grinned. “Beam is online in two minutes. The device is set to keep you in sync with the current time. Ainsley is waiting for you at the cabin. Good luck.”

  Carl closed the chamber door and dialed his cell phone. “Hi sis,” he greeted. “He should be there in about thirty seconds.”

  “Okay,” the reporter replied. “I’ll be waiting.” She hung up and put the phone back in her pocket. Once again she was sitting on the cabin’s front porch drinking a nice cup of tea. She picked up her camera and focused in on the spot where, according to Nick’s reports, he should soon be appearing.

  The first sign that something was happening was a sort of ripple in the air. Ainsley zoomed in on the epicenter of the ripple and began snapping photos in rapid succession. A second or two later, Nick appeared directly in center frame. “Well, look who decided to show up this time,” she called out with a wide grin.

  Nick turned around to face the cabin and immediately moved towards Ainsley. The two embraced in a long hug. “Do you realize what this means?” he asked excitedly.

  “It means the B.I.R.D. actually works!” Ainsley cheered.

  “Yes, of course, but it’s more than that,” he replied barely able to contain his enthusiasm. “It means your brother not only invented a teleporter, he invented a time machine!”

  “Well, he always was a bit of an overachiever,” she chuckled. “How long do you have?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Great, let me show you around the place,” Ainsley smiled, took him by the hand and led him into the cabin.

  The following night the entire team met in Ainsley’s apartment. They agreed it would be good to get out of the lab, but at the same time thought the discussion they were about to have was one best held not in public. Dr. Stevens was married with four kids, so his place would be a little too chaotic. Both Carl and Nick lived alone, but their apartments were not far off the stereotypical bachelor pad, so it was agreed that Ainsley’s place was likely the best location. Besides, she volunteered to make a nice lasagne dinner, which none of them were inclined to pass up.