Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Mileva died.

  Albert died.

  The wall went blank.

  The real Mileva sat staring at the emptiness, breathing hard.

  “And Lieserl?” she finally said in a broken voice. “What of Lieserl, if . . . ”

  Jonah wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but evidently the Elucidator could follow her line of reasoning.

  The scene on the wall came to life again, but it didn’t look like history anymore. Or, rather—it looked like history that even Jonah remembered.

  A phone was ringing.

  Yeah, we had a cordless phone just like that when Katherine and I were little too, he thought.

  Now an ordinary-looking couple clutched the telephone together. The woman had the same kind of haircut Jonah’s mom had had, years ago. The father wore a T-shirt bragging that he’d volunteered at the Columbus Marathon in 1995.

  “Tonight?” the woman was saying. “We get the baby tonight?”

  The next scene showed the woman holding a baby in her arms.

  Jonah realized he was watching Emily’s childhood. She blew seeds off dandelion stems. She played an angel in a Christmas pageant. She received an A+ on a math test. She opened a birthday present that turned out to be a miniature microscope.

  Mileva, watching, had tears in her eyes once more.

  Now Emily-on-the-wall looked exactly the same age as Emily sitting frozen beside Mileva. She seemed to be wearing the same blue jeans, the same maroon shirt. And Jonah recognized her surroundings as well: a time hollow, possibly this very same one.

  On the wall she was talking to a version of JB that wasn’t frozen yet.

  “I’ll do it,” she was telling him with quiet resolve. “I want to help.”

  What? Wait! Jonah thought. Did I just miss something? What did she just agree to? Mileva—can’t you back things up and show me that again?

  It was maddening not to be able to ask out loud.

  Mileva let the scene keep playing, but it transitioned to a moment Jonah had actually witnessed: Emily showing up in the toddler Lieserl’s room, Jonah convincing her to join with her tracer, Mileva sweeping into the room and finding her there . . .

  “Oooh,” Mileva said, letting out a sigh of understanding. “So that’s how it worked.” She started punching in commands on the Elucidator. “No, no, I want to see more of her life in the twenty-first century. I want to see what’s possible for my daughter that wasn’t possible for me . . .”

  The scene on the wall only froze. Evidently some sort of explanation showed up on the Elucidator, because Mileva started complaining.

  “Why not?” she muttered. “Why can’t I see everything?” She paused. “It depends on what?”

  Mileva looked up, squinting in distress. Jonah would have expected her to look toward the real Emily again—maybe pat her daughter’s face or stroke her daughter’s hair. Instead Mileva stood up and walked unsteadily toward Jonah. She lifted her arm, pointing the Elucidator at him.

  “Restore him,” she said. “Please.”

  A split second later, Jonah felt his right foot touch the ground. He stumbled, his ankle twisting.

  Mileva grabbed his arm, holding him up.

  “Will you help me?” she asked.

  FORTY

  “What?” Jonah said, his first word in an eon. “You unfroze me first? Before your own daughter? Why?”

  Mileva opened her mouth to answer, but Jonah was so relieved to be able to talk again that he decided to keep asking questions.

  “Is it because you thought the unfreezing might be dangerous, and you wouldn’t really be that upset if it killed me?”

  Mileva laughed. And then, strangely, she hugged him.

  “I forgot how funny you were,” she murmured. She held him by the shoulders, looking directly into his face. Her eyes gleamed. “I forgot how wonderful it could be just talking to another human being, and having them answer. After more than sixty years . . .”

  “Sixty years!” Jonah exclaimed.

  “Well, yes,” Mileva said. “I watched the entire rest of my life, and the rest of Albert’s life, and the first thirteen years of my daughter’s life in the future . . . I taught myself everything I could about time travel too, and that probably took sixty years as well, just by itself. Though that’s impossible to measure, since time really doesn’t pass in here, and I never got hungry and I never got thirsty and”—she patted her stomach—“I never got any more pregnant . . . Oh, how Albert would love this place! He could get so fixated on his ideas, and he would forget to eat or drink or, you know, even comb his hair . . . If he were in this time hollow, he’d stay a million years!”

  She sounded so merry, Jonah wondered if he’d just been hallucinating about all the sad details of her life.

  “Um,” he said. “When you were watching what was going to happen to you and Albert—er, I guess, what could happen—I saw it too. I’m sorry.”

  He wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for watching her life—like such a stalker—or if he was apologizing for what happened in her life: Albert betraying her, and her being so sick and sad and poor, and the tragedies and failures piling up around her even as the fame and honor and glory piled up for Albert.

  Something in Mileva’s expression softened.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I do appreciate that. But I knew you were watching all along. You and my daughter and Katherine, and those strange men I’ve never even met . . . It’s a strange quirk of stopped time in a time hollow, that even people frozen in time aren’t completely frozen. Time can’t ever quite stop here, since it doesn’t really exist in this place to begin with.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Jonah objected.

  Mileva shrugged, the merriness back.

  “Oh, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, for the contradictions of time travel!” she joked. “But it’s such a relief, that stopped time doesn’t work that way in general. I was so happy to find out that Albert frozen in 1903 isn’t aware of anything, and when you and I unfreeze him, it will seem to him that nothing happened. For him, one second of his ordinary time will just flow right into the next.”

  Jonah felt relieved by that detail about stopped time, too. It meant that if he ever got back to the twenty-first century, his science teacher would never know that Jonah had sneaked out of class.

  Assuming Jonah was ever able to return to the twenty-first century and sneak back in to class.

  Jonah realized he was getting ahead of himself.

  “Hold on,” he said to Mileva. “Did you just say that you and I are going to unfreeze Albert in 1903? Aren’t you going to unfreeze Katherine and Emily and JB and Hadley first? Can’t you just let the experts take care of dealing with 1903?”

  Mileva bit her lip.

  “No,” she said. She winced a little.

  “Why not?” Jonah challenged.

  Mileva sighed. She patted the puff of hair around her face, still preserved in the topknot style of 1903.

  “Time is very fragile right now,” she explained. “I think it’s possible that outside of this room, all of time is frozen. In every time period.”

  Jonah gaped at her.

  She was watching him very carefully. Almost sympathetically.

  “You should think of it like . . . I know,” she said. “In the twenty-first century I saw Emily—my Lieserl—reading an article about medically induced comas. Sometimes when patients are horribly sick or have been in horrible accidents, the doctors will give them medicine to keep them comatose, so their bodies can use all their energy for healing. That’s almost exactly what’s happened now. Time itself is in a coma, and as far as I can tell, you and I are the only ones who can heal it. Anybody else unfrozen would be an unnecessary complication.” She gulped, and shot a tense glance at Emily. “A . . . potentially fatal complication.”

  Jonah stared at her. Maybe another sixty years passed before he could figure out an adequate response.

  “You’re not supposed to know about things fr
om the twenty-first century,” he finally said. “That’s dangerous.”

  Mileva’s lips curled up into a rueful smile.

  “And . . . that’s why it had to be you that I unfroze,” she said, shaking her head. “Because you will keep telling me things like that. And . . . I will need to hear them.”

  Jonah squinted at Mileva.

  “Why should I trust you?” he asked. “Why should you trust me?”

  Mileva glanced quickly at Emily, who still sat frozen in the exact spot where she’d huddled protectively against Mileva—when? Sixty years ago? A hundred and twenty?

  Then Mileva took Jonah by the shoulders, gently turning him so he faced Katherine, still frozen mid-stride, and JB and Hadley, frozen so grimly in their chairs.

  “We have to trust each other,” Mileva said. “Because that is the only way to save the people we love.”

  FORTY-ONE

  They landed in a patch of sunshine. Jonah’s head was spinning, but he couldn’t have said how much of that was from timesickness and how much of it was from the dizzying plans Mileva had shared with him. Jonah had tried to understand her explanations of what she’d learned about time travel and its underlying principles, but so much of it seemed nonsensical. For instance, she’d told him why three time travelers joining together in stopped time was no problem, but four could lead to disastrous unpredictability.

  What was the reason, again? Oh, yeah, it has something to do with time being the fourth dimension, Jonah remembered. But that’s only an issue in stopped time, right?

  He hoped it never mattered that he couldn’t remember clearly. His brain jumped to the mind-boggling array of broader topics Mileva had discussed: the speed of light, the theory of relativity, quanta, Schrödinger’s cat, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle . . .

  Uncertainty is right, Jonah thought, his stomach lurching. What if Mileva is wrong about everything? What if there’s some blatant error in her calculations, and I’m too stupid to figure it out? Or what if she knows I’m that stupid, and she’s tricking me on purpose?

  He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. Familiar objects began to swim into focus. A desk. A table with a lace tablecloth. This did look like 1903—1903 in the apartment Albert and Mileva had left behind in Switzerland, not 1903 in the bedroom in Novi Sad where Albert still stood frozen.

  Jonah blinked again.

  “Are you sure we have to come here first?” he asked Mileva, who’d landed flat on the floor beside him.

  “Yes—er—ah—” Mileva began gagging.

  “It’s just timesickness you’re feeling,” Jonah said encouragingly. “Swallow hard, and you’ll feel fine in a few minutes.”

  Mileva stumbled to her feet and weaved unsteadily toward the kitchen. Jonah could hear her retching into the sink.

  “I’m pregnant, remember?” she called back to him. “It’s like there was more than a century of morning sickness waiting for me back here. Ohh . . .”

  She leaned over the sink again.

  Jonah tried not to listen for a while after that. He struggled to his feet and went to the farthest window. Looking out, he could see the picturesque scene on the street below: the flower boxes, the trolley cars, the men in suits, the women in long dresses, everyone in a hat—and everyone frozen in place.

  Time was still stopped here.

  “I thought people were much more open about talking about pregnancy in your time,” Mileva said behind him. “In the twenty-first century.”

  Jonah turned around.

  “Well, I guess they are, but—nobody likes hearing somebody else vomit,” Jonah said. Then, just in case she wanted to talk about this a lot more, he added, “And I’m a thirteen-year-old boy. I bet there isn’t any time period where thirteen-year-old boys like hearing about pregnancy symptoms.”

  “I guess I should have thought of that, because of my brother,” Mileva said. “But I was away so much by the time he was thirteen . . .”

  She looked so haunted that Jonah mumbled, “Sorry.”

  What was it like for Mileva to know that in a decade or so, her brother would go off to war and be missing for years? That the family would give him up for dead—and that even when they found out he wasn’t dead, they’d get word that he didn’t want to come home?

  How could Mileva bear knowing that she was facing so many awful moments in her future?

  “Maybe . . . maybe you should try to forget everything that you saw back in the time hollow,” Jonah said gruffly. “You could give me the Elucidator right now, and let me freeze you in time with everyone else from 1903. Maybe that would keep you from thinking about things you shouldn’t know . . .”

  Mileva shook her head resolutely.

  “You need me to imitate Albert’s handwriting, remember?” she said.

  Jonah walked toward the table in the middle of the room. Just as before, it was covered with papers full of Albert’s scribbles.

  “A chicken could imitate this handwriting,” he joked.

  He touched the top sheet of paper and stopped.

  “What if we’re wrong?” he asked. “What if this doesn’t work?”

  “We have to try,” Mileva said. Jonah couldn’t tell if she was fighting back more pregnancy nausea—or fighting back tears.

  He nodded, and lifted the top sheet. He looked back and forth between the sheet in his hand and the ghostly version of it still remaining in place on the table.

  The ghostly version—the paper’s tracer—held completely different words, different numbers, different ideas.

  He let out a deep sigh of relief.

  “Is it there?” Mileva asked hopefully.

  “Yep,” Jonah said. It was still so weird to him that Mileva couldn’t see the tracer page, since it was from her own time period. To further reassure her, he added, “It’s just like when Katherine and I looked before. The tracer page shows exactly what Albert would have written, if time travelers had never intervened. If he’d hadn’t gotten distracted thinking about time splitting . . .”

  Mileva was already sitting at the desk, a pencil poised over paper.

  “Start reading it to me,” she said in a brisk, businesslike voice.

  “What if I don’t know some of the symbols?” Jonah asked.

  “Describe them to me,” Mileva said. “Or—here.” She handed him a piece of paper and a pencil of his own. “If it’s something that’s too difficult, draw it as best you can, and we’ll work it out together.”

  “Okay, then,” Jonah said. “This one starts with the word ‘capillarity’. . .”

  “Capillarity?” Mileva repeated in amazement. “Albert was supposed to be thinking about that in 1903? I don’t remember him expressing the slightest shred of interest in capillarity during that time. Why would he care?”

  Jonah just looked at her.

  “This is never going to work if you don’t trust me,” he said. “And it’s going to take forever if you challenge everything.”

  Mileva gritted her teeth.

  “Right. Capillarity,” she said. “Next word?”

  It was long, slow, tedious work, reading every single word and symbol and equation from the papers spread across the Einsteins’ table, and waiting while Mileva copied them down. She was actually uncannily good at reproducing the same cramped, careless script that Albert had used on the original papers.

  They were lucky that Albert had left the papers spread across the table, only a corner here and there hiding the words written on the paper below. The only problem was that Jonah couldn’t flip over any of the tracer pages to see whatever was written on the backs. He and Mileva could only hope that they caught enough of the original idea.

  Of course, how good can our plan really be, Jonah thought, when it relies on outsmarting one of the most brilliant men in history?

  FORTY-TWO

  “Must not vomit,” Mileva said through gritted teeth. “Must not vomit.”

  They had just finished using something Mileva said was officially calle
d Ancillary Dislocation Travel in Otherwise-Originated Massive Time Stoppages—ADTOOMTS, for short. Basically, that just meant that the Elucidator had whisked them from the apartment in Bern to Mileva’s room at her parents’ house in Novi Sad while time was still stopped in September 1903.

  “Why don’t they just call it teleportation?” Jonah asked. “Or a ‘beam me up, Scotty’?”

  “Because it’s such a precise form of teleportation, and time travelers have to be precise,” Mileva said. “And—‘beam me up’? Time travelers already pay homage to that Star Trek phrase. They use it to refer to any return to their native time after being away . . . oh, crud,” Mileva moaned. She dived under the bed and pulled out a chamber pot so she could vomit.

  Jonah took the all-important papers from her sweaty hands. He sighed, and held loose strands of her hair out of the way.

  She finished throwing up and slid the chamber pot back out of sight. She sat back against the wall.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “You’ll have to forget everything you know about Star Trek,” he said.

  Mileva wiped the back of her hand across her clammy forehead. Her face was too pale.

  “I know,” she mumbled. “It’s just—Emily watched so many of those old reruns with her adopted dad in the twenty-first century. And I loved watching them too, back in the time hollow. I might have made some of my favorites repeat a time or two . . . so Emily and I could watch them together. Sort of. It felt like something I could actually share with my daughter, from the portion of her childhood she had without me. The vast portion of childhood she had without me.”

  A familiar sadness crossed Mileva’s face, and she shook her head. Jonah could tell she was trying hard to fight the sorrow.

  “Anyhow,” Mileva said, with forced cheer. “‘Beam me up, Scotty’—how can anybody not love that? It’s so much better than ADTOOMTS!”

  Jonah tried to keep looking at her sternly.

  “Really, I’ll make myself forget!” Mileva insisted. “Or, at least, I’ll never tell a single other soul about it. Not in any way that matters.”