THE DNA COULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT IN A DIFFERENT DIMENSION TOO, the Elucidator flashed. AND DNA TESTS WOULD HAVE SHOWED THAT JONAH IS DISTANTLY RELATED TO THE ACTUAL CHARLES LINDBERGH.
“I am?” Jonah said, surprised.
EVERY HUMAN IS RELATED TO EVERY OTHER HUMAN IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, the Elucidator replied.
“You might as well say, ‘Tricked you! Psych!’ ” Jonah complained. “I thought maybe you were going to tell me that Gary and Hodge lied about me dying in an orphanage in original time.”
SORRY. THAT PART IS TRUE, the Elucidator flashed back.
Angela tilted her head, looking back and forth from her Elucidator to Jonah’s.
“Wait,” she said. “You just told us who Jonah really is, and you told me back at the Lindberghs’ house. But no Elucidator ever let JB or any of the other time agents know the truth for sure? Why not?”
THE TIME STREAM WAS STILL MUDDIED, Jonah saw on his own Elucidator’s screen. TOO MUCH WAS STILL IN FLUX.
“But it’s not now?” Jonah asked excitedly.
NOT ABOUT YOUR IDENTITY, the Elucidator replied.
Strangely, this did make Jonah feel good. He remembered how, way back at the beginning of the whole time-travel mess, Katherine had told him off for asking questions about his past and upsetting their parents. She’d said every middle-school kid wondered who they were supposed to be. Jonah imagined teasing Katherine: Even an Elucidator admits that nothing about my identity is still in flux! I am who I am! And you’re still wondering about yourself, right? What does that make you?
Would Jonah ever see Katherine again to tease her? Or even just to talk to her?
He shook his head, trying to clear his brain.
“What else did Gary and Hodge mess up, connected to me?” Jonah asked.
THIS IS INDIRECTLY CONNECTED TO YOU, BECAUSE OF WHO THEY CLAIMED YOU WERE, the Elucidator began.
And then it showed a series of scenes of Gary and Hodge trying to kidnap the actual Lindbergh baby. This would have been like watching funny outtakes from a movie if every scene hadn’t ended with a baby dead on the ground. Once Hodge dropped the baby from the ladder himself. Once Gary wavered in and out of the scene—there, not there, there, not there—as he tried to lift the baby from the crib. Each time he picked the baby up, he immediately dropped him.
PORTIONS OF THIS TIME PERIOD WERE CLOSED OFF TO TIME TRAVELERS, the Elucidator explained. THAT’S WHY HE DISAPPEARS.
“Is it because time travelers had made that Damaged Time?” Angela asked. “Because so many people had gone there, curious about what happened to the baby?”
NO, BECAUSE JAPAN HAD JUST INVADED CHINA IN THE RUN-UP TO WORLD WAR II, AND LOTS OF TIME TRAVELERS WERE WATCHING THAT, the Elucidator flashed back.
Jonah decided not to admit that he’d never known Japan invaded China.
FINALLY GARY AND HODGE JUST GAVE UP AND KIDNAPPED YOU INSTEAD, SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, the Elucidator told him and Angela.
“Because nobody cared about me disappearing,” Jonah said, and the words came out sounding more bitter than he would have expected.
Oops. Maybe some things about his identity still were “in flux,” as the Elucidator put it.
But something new struck him.
“But if nobody cared, then how was there anything connected to my kidnapping that needed to be fixed in time?” Jonah asked.
THERE WASN’T, the Elucidator flashed back. THE ONLY ISSUE THE TIME AGENCY HAD WITH YOU WAS THAT THEY WORRIED ABOUT YOU BEING FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION. WHICH YOU’RE NOT.
Jonah felt as if the Elucidator had just lifted some huge burden from his back. He wouldn’t have to go back in time to live out some dangerous life as some other kid. He was free.
Well, except for needing to stay in this time cave thinking and thinking and thinking until we figure out everything about the time split, he thought. And except for worrying about rescuing Katherine and the other kids and curing JB and making everyone the right age again. And having the Elucidator say that everything depends on me and Angela.
He’d left someone out. The Elucidator hadn’t just said that everything depended on Angela and Jonah. They’d said it depended on Charles Lindbergh, too.
Why? Jonah wondered.
Jonah remembered that he’d never actually seen what Gary and Hodge had told Charles Lindbergh to do.
“Even if you can’t tell us what happens with Charles Lindbergh next, can you at least tell us how Gary and Hodge want things to go?” Jonah asked his Elucidator.
YES, the Elucidator said.
It began showing another scene, though this one held the words “NOT ACTUAL EVENTS—DEMONSTRATION PURPOSES ONLY” stamped across the screen.
Behind those words Charles Lindbergh took off from the airport back home in the airplane with thirty-six babies in the passenger seats—baby Katherine, plus all the original babies on the plane except Jonah. Lindbergh landed the plane a split second later in a place so brightly lit that Jonah could make out only one detail in the glare: Gary and Hodge were standing on the runway waiting for him. Lindbergh stepped out and greeted them. Jonah was stunned to see that it was still the adult Lindbergh, tall and slightly stooped.
“Didn’t you just say that Lindbergh was going to be un-aged to a baby on his trip through time?” Jonah interrupted.
THIS IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP OF THE PLAN, the Elucidator replied. JUST WAIT.
Jonah didn’t understand this, but he kept watching.
There was a sped-up sequence where Gary and Hodge had employees pull each and every baby off the plane. Then Lindbergh got back into the plane.
“Where’s he going now?” Jonah asked.
“My Elucidator says it’s to a time hollow nearby,” Angela said, holding hers sideways so Jonah could see it too.
PERSONALLY, I THOUGHT YOU COULD FIGURE THAT OUT FOR YOURSELF, ONCE YOU SAW IT, Jonah’s Elucidator flashed.
In the background Lindbergh was landing the plane again, though Jonah wasn’t sure it could be called “landing” when the plane suddenly just appeared in an enclosed space. A crowd seemed to be waiting on the ground beside the plane. In the cockpit Lindbergh took a deep breath, as if steeling himself for what came next. A voice came out of the speaker in the cockpit: “Remember, these are enemy combatants. They want to destroy time forever, and make it so that you never see your son again. They will be hostile. You must knock each and every one of them out, and then load them onto the plane to be taken to time prison.”
Lindbergh unbuckled his seat belt and picked up a small object from the seat beside him. Jonah guessed that it could be anything from a Taser to a ray gun. Lindbergh took another deep breath, then stood up, walked out of the cockpit, and opened the door of the plane.
Lindbergh started shooting his weapon even before the door was fully open.
Beside Jonah, Angela gasped.
“He’s just tranquilizing them or something,” Jonah muttered, without lifting his gaze from the screen. “The voice said he was just supposed to knock them out. Not kill them.”
“L-l-look,” Angela stammered. “Look who he’s shooting.”
Jonah squinted, watching bodies fall. And then he recognized the bodies. Everyone looked to be thirteen years old; everybody was a person Jonah knew: Chip. Emily. Ming. Brendan. Antonio . . .
Andrea.
Charles Lindbergh was shooting all the other missing children of history.
FORTY-FIVE
“Stop!” Jonah screamed at the Elucidator screen. “Stop shooting!”
“He can’t hear you!” Angela screamed back at him.
On the screen all the bodies had fallen. Lindbergh began methodically carrying each and every body onto the plane. He strapped them into the futuristic seats, and double-checked dials on the sides of each seat that said UN-AGE TO FOUR TO SIX MONTHS OLD.
“He’s taking them to the future as babies too?” Jonah asked incredulously. “A different future, I guess, since Gary and Hodge already got a first set of them all as b
abies?”
“They’re not dead,” Angela whispered beside him. “They’re not. I can see them still breathing. There’s still time to save them . . .”
Jonah watched Lindbergh finish strapping in the last teenager, Dalton, whom Jonah himself had saved from having to live through the end of his life as Henry Hudson’s son. There was still one seat left empty.
Oh, Jonah thought. The seat I would have been in originally. And then Katherine sat in it the second time around. . . .
Lindbergh went back into the cockpit and took off. The camera’s view stayed trained on his face, which seemed to be smoothing out, growing younger. . . . At what point would he realize he himself was turning back into a baby?
Jonah was pretty sure it would be too late for Lindbergh to do anything about it.
“So, both times, Gary and Hodge get thirty-six babies to sell,” Jonah muttered.
“What’s that going to do to time?” Angela asked in a horrified voice. “Especially if this set of babies goes to the same place Lindbergh took the other group?”
Jonah was too shocked to answer her. He guessed both Elucidators were ignoring her question too, since his Elucidator just kept showing Lindbergh in the cockpit, getting younger and younger and younger.
Then Angela clutched Jonah’s arm.
“The Elucidator changed my drawing,” she whispered, sounding stunned. “To show what will happen if everything goes the way Gary and Hodge want.”
Jonah looked at the Elucidator she was holding up.
The drawing still looked like a tree, but the split between the trunk and the branches started with a point labeled, AUGUST 15, 1932. DIFFERENCE IN FAKE “CHARLES LINDBERGH JR.” PUT ON PLANE THAT WILL TIME-CRASH DECADES LATER. ALSO, CHARLES LINDBERGH DISAPPEARS FROM HISTORY.
“So there’s a version of time where I’m never even on the plane?” Jonah marveled. “And that plus Lindbergh’s disappearance is enough of a disturbance that it’s possible for time to split decades later?”
It was hard to tell what happened right after 1932, since the section of the drawing for that time period was covered with heavy black lines and the words “unsettled time.” But no branch totally broke away from the trunk until a point farther up marked TIME-CRASH OF PLANELOAD OF BABIES. After that, the branches split dramatically, into not two but three new branches. Two were basically the same as the ones Angela had drawn earlier: one with the time-crashed plane flying on without making any impact on the late twentieth or early twenty-first centuries; the other with only one baby coming off the plane.
Me, Jonah thought. Only baby me. That’s the version of time I just saw. The one that was about to collapse.
Quickly he turned his attention to the third branch. This one showed time as Jonah remembered it, with all the babies—including Jonah—staying and growing up to be thirteen-year-olds in the twenty-first century.
“This is good!” Jonah cried. “There is a stream of time that works the way we want it to!”
Silently Angela pointed to words at the top of the branch: LINDBERGH TAKES KATHERINE SKIDMORE OUT OF TIME, DISTURBING TIME ENOUGH THAT GARY AND HODGE CAN ALSO REMOTELY ZAP ALL THE MISSING CHILDREN BESIDES JONAH INTO A SECRET TIME HOLLOW OF THEIR CHOOSING. THIS STREAM OF TIME COLLAPSES SOON AFTER BECAUSE OF THE EXTREME DIFFERENCE OF LOSING THIRTY-SEVEN KIDS WHO’D BEEN THERE FOR UP TO THIRTEEN YEARS.
“Thirty-seven kids?” Jonah read numbly.
“Because of you, Jonah,” Angela said. “Gary and Hodge wanted you out of this branch of time before it collapsed too.”
They were actually being nice to me? Jonah wondered.
Then he decided they must have had other reasons.
“But only because they want me in that other branch when it collapses,” Jonah muttered.
GARY AND HODGE TOOK A PARTICULAR DISLIKE TO YOU, Jonah’s own Elucidator explained, and somehow its glow seemed apologetic. THEY BLAME YOU FOR GETTING THEM SENT TO TIME PRISON.
Well—yeah! Jonah thought. I did do that!
“Did you notice this?” Angela asked, pointing to the middle branch of the time split, which showed Gary and Hodge getting their glorious, wealthy future. It was the only branch that wasn’t broken off at the end.
Instead it split again.
At that split the screen read, IMPACT OF HAVING THIRTY-FIVE DUPLICATED KIDS IN THE SAME TIME CAUSES TIME SPLIT SO EXTREME THAT IT ERASES THE POSSIBILITY OF TIME TRAVEL EVER AGAIN.
FORTY-SIX
“What’s that mean?” Jonah moaned. “All of time ends, after all?”
He looked down, not sure he actually wanted to know the answer. But that just meant that he was looking directly at his own Elucidator.
NO, it said. TIME WOULD CONTINUE WITHOUT A PROBLEM, EXACTLY AS GARY AND HODGE WANT IT. BUT IT’S LIKE ENDLESS DAMAGED TIME. THE TIME AGENCY CEASES TO EXIST, BECAUSE THERE’S NO TIME TRAVEL ANYMORE. GARY AND HODGE AREN’T IN TROUBLE, BECAUSE IN THIS VERSION OF TIME THEY NEVER ILLEGALLY CRASHED A PLANELOAD OF BABIES INTO THE WRONG TIME. ALL THEIR BABY-SMUGGLING LOOKS PERFECTLY LEGIT. AND PEOPLE WILL BE PARTICULARLY PROTECTIVE OF THESE ENDANGERED BABIES FROM HISTORY, BECAUSE THEY’RE THE LAST ONES ABLE TO ESCAPE. IN EACH OF THE TWO BRANCHES REMAINING, GARY AND HODGE HAVE THIRTY-SIX VERY, VERY VALUABLE BABIES TO SELL.
The Elucidator seemed to be hesitating; then it added, AND THEY’RE CONSIDERED HEROES FOR SAVING THOSE KIDS.
“No!” Jonah yelled, shaking his head ferociously. “NO!”
Angela just sat there as if she was too stunned to move.
“And us?” she whispered. “What happens to us? And JB and Hadley and Jonah’s parents and—and everyone who isn’t in those time streams?”
She pointed to the branches where Gary and Hodge triumphed.
PEOPLE END WHEN THEIR TIME STREAMS END, her Elucidator flashed back. PEOPLE IN TIME HOLLOWS LIKE THIS ARE STUCK THERE FOREVER.
Jonah thought about what it would be like to stay in a time hollow forever. There’d be nothing to do, and no reason to do anything, because nothing ever changed. It was bad enough to stay in a place like this temporarily—but forever?
“You said we could get back to 1932,” Jonah wailed. “You promised!”
YOU STILL CAN, the Elucidator said, and now its glow seemed soothing. NOT EVERYTHING THAT GARY AND HODGE PLANNED HAS HAPPENED. YET.
Jonah looked around frantically.
“We’ve got to stop Charles Lindbergh,” he said. “Send us back now. Send us to—”
“Don’t!” Angela yelled, yanking the Elucidator out of Jonah’s hand. “We need a plan first, remember? How are we going to stop Charles Lindbergh?”
Jonah would have been willing to make it up as he floated through time.
“I’ll tell Charles Lindbergh I’m not really his son,” Jonah said. “Then he’ll have no reason to do what Gary and Hodge told him to do.”
“Didn’t you already try to tell him that?” Angela asked.
Jonah remembered his silent mouthing of the words in the stairwell at the airport.
“I bet he didn’t hear me,” Jonah said.
“All those early pilots were really good at lip-reading,” Angela said. “Because it was so loud in their cockpits. I bet he could tell what you were saying.”
Jonah frowned, not wanting to admit that she was probably right.
“Then we’ll prove it to him,” Jonah said. “We’ll prove I’m not his son, and I’ll prove that Gary and Hodge have no way of giving him back his real son—they couldn’t even manage to kidnap the boy. . . .”
Jonah expected Angela to object to this as well, but she didn’t.
“I think if we could prove those two things, it would stop him,” she said. “But how can we possibly prove anything? And when can we get to him without Gary and Hodge stopping us? What can we do to make him trust us?”
Jonah looked down at his Elucidator, which Angela was still holding a safe distance away from him. But Jonah could see it still showing Lindbergh in the cockpit of the plane, growing younger and younger and youn
ger.
Jonah pointed toward the Elucidator screen.
“Lindbergh’s a pilot,” Jonah said. “Don’t you think he’d trust us more if we went flying with him?”
Angela looked back and forth between her own Elucidator and Jonah’s.
“Can either of you Elucidators get us on that plane?” she asked. “Early enough that it’s still possible to fix everything?”
NO, both Elucidators flashed. NOT BOTH OF YOU.
Jonah had been talking to Elucidators enough now that he knew to ask another question: “What about just one of us?”
It seemed to take a long time for the Elucidators to consider this question. Jonah wasn’t sure how many millions of variables they were sorting through. Maybe it really was an infinity of possibilities, and he and Angela were sitting there waiting for the Elucidators to think about each and every one.
But then, in unison, the Elucidators flashed the same answer: YES. THERE IS A POSSIBILITY.
“All right!” Jonah screamed, thrusting his arm in the air.
“But with just one of us getting on that plane?” Angela asked cautiously.
YES, the Elucidators flashed again. And then there was a pause that almost seemed apologetic, because the next words showed up:
IT HAS TO BE JONAH ALONE.
FORTY-SEVEN
To Jonah’s way of thinking, it took forever for him and Angela and the Elucidators to work out all the details of his trip.
First Angela seemed to want the Elucidators to explain every single reason she couldn’t go with Jonah. It boiled down to one problem: The only safe, open time for anyone to sneak onto the plane was while it was parked at the airport, right after the time crash, right after the time split, right before Lindbergh flew it out of time again. And Angela was already present in all versions of time that resulted from the time split. Throwing another version of her into the mix would make everything too unstable, create another time stream, and, as Jonah’s Elucidator calculated, CREATE A 99.99999 PERCENT CHANCE OF DESTROYING TIME FOREVER.
Then it flashed with what had to be faked innocence, YOU DON’T WANT THAT, DO YOU?
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