“I may have a magnifying glass in that roll top,” Mr. Cameron suggests. Blake looks over the desk and finds a large magnifying glass sticking out of a cup of pens. He hands it to Carson.
“It definitely starts with an S. Maybe Sierra? What does GMC make?” Carson asks.
“Can I see?” Blake takes the paper and the magnifying glass. “I think it might say Savannah. Does that sound right?”
“I think that’s a real van though, right?” I say.
“Why are we trying to find this out?” Francesca asks. “I’m a little lost. Why does it matter what it says?”
“It could be nothing,” Mr. Cameron explains. “I just found it odd that it stated that bit about the van not being a model currently in production. In light of our conversation last night, and all of you present here today, it made me wonder if you all were the only ones who were affected during that power line incident. I could be jumping at shadows now that I’ve had a taste of the bizarre, but I thought it was unusual.”
“That is interesting,” I agree. “If someone else came back, too, they may have some idea about what happened.”
“They might know how to get back,” Blake adds.
“They also could be a freaking murderer! Did you guys miss that part?” Francesca exclaims.
“Yeah. That part doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I say. “I don’t know how we go about finding out more about it, but it might be worth the effort. Maybe we can ask around a bit and see what else they’ve figured out.”
“Does anyone know where the impound lot is?” Robbie asks.
“We know where the police station is. I suppose we could find out there,” Blake suggests.
“At least we have something to check out,” I say.
“Maybe we should split up,” Carson offers. “A couple of us can check out the station and ask around about the van thing, and the others can see if we can find the time place.”
“I’m not going anywhere near the murder van,” Francesca says.
“Okay. How about you and Blake and I can go look for the Time Studies Society,” I say. “Carson and Robbie can check out the police station and see what’s up. Carson can probably charm some girl cops out of some information.”
Carson smiles. “I’m not the handcuffs type, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Can we shower first? I feel disgusting right now,” Francesca asks.
“I’ll get you all some towels and see if I can find you some clothes that might fit,” Mr. Cameron says. “I know my son has left more than a few things here in the past, or if not, there is my closet. And I can probably find something of Abby’s for you, Francesca.”
“That would be awesome,” I reply.
Francesca looks skeptical but hides it quickly with a smile as Mr. Cameron passes her and heads up the stairs. “I’m going to need a job at a clothing store, like right now,” she says after he’s out of earshot. “Sorry Robbie. No offense, but it’s going to be a little weird wearing your deceased grandmother’s clothes.”
“I know what you mean,” Robbie replies. “At least we’ll be in the same boat. We get my grandpa’s stuff to wear.”
Upstairs we find Mr. Cameron laying out an armful of clothes in the room with the twin beds. The guys take turns showering in the hall bathroom and we are finished at the same time that Francesca emerges from the bathroom in Mr. Cameron’s room. She is wearing a floral skirt and a white blouse that she’s rolled the sleeves up on, and she’s carrying a knit sweater over her arm.
“Your Grandma had long arms Robbie,” she comments. “And there are some benefits to elastic waist bands. She was pretty classy though. I actually really liked some of her outfits.”
The guys have varied success with Mr. Cameron’s clothes. Robbie and Carson find some corduroy pants to wear with some polo shirts. Blake and I are too tall for any of the pants and opt to stay in our athletic shorts, but help ourselves to some of Mr. Cameron’s long-sleeved T-shirts.
We regroup downstairs near the kitchen and Mr. Cameron provides us with a phone book to search for the St. Petersburg Temporal Studies Society. Blake finds the number and dials it into Mr. Cameron’s phone.
“Hello. Yes, good afternoon. I was wondering what your address is?” He scribbles hastily on a pad next to the phone. “Okay, wonderful, and do you have any tours, or interviews for students interested in your work? . . . Uh-huh, would that be available today? . . . Okay, thank you very much.” He turns back to us. “Good news. They have a designated intern for giving information on the organization and he’s available till four-thirty. I got the address. That should at least get us in the door.”
“Awesome. How far is it?” I ask.
“It’s actually really close to the softball field. It’s over on Twelfth Ave.”
“Good. Robbie and Carson can hit up the Police Station on Central and see if they can find out anything about the van thing.”
“I can give you two a ride down there if you like,” Mr. Cameron suggests. “Central is a bit far to walk. I can’t fit everyone in my car, otherwise I would take you all.”
“Thanks, that would be great,” Robbie replies.
“What’s the phone number here?” I ask. “We can call back here if we get in trouble.”
“I’ll write it down for you.” Mr. Cameron scribbles the number on two slips of paper and hands them to Robbie and me. “If we make it back prior to you three, give a call and perhaps I can pick you up.”
“Do you have your phone on you, Francesca?” I ask.
“It doesn’t work here, remember?” she replies.
“Yeah, but bring it anyway. It may be of interest at the Temporal Studies Society if we need to tell someone our story. You should bring your I.D. too.”
We split up, and Spartacus is left to tend the house. It’s a familiar walk back toward the softball field. Blake and I walk quickly, only slowing when Francesca is in danger of lagging behind.
The St. Petersburg Temporal Studies Society is located in a fenced in warehouse on a corner of an otherwise residential block. A small parking lot along the building is full, and a number of people in lab coats and I.D. badges are loitering around a back door, smoking. We enter through the main door and are greeted by a red-haired receptionist at the desk.
“Hello, we called about getting some information on your program,” Blake says as we walk up to the desk.
“Are you students?”
“Er, yes,” he replies. “We’re doing a research paper on theories of time travel for our physics class.”
“Okay, our intern, Elliot, will be able to answer your questions. I’ll need you to sign in and I’ll get you some visitors’ badges.”
We sign the form and pin on the badges. A few moments later a tall, lanky blonde man about our age, walks through a set of double doors and greets us.
“Hello, I’m Elliot. I understand that you’re interested in getting the tour.”
“Yes.” Francesca smiles. “We want to learn about time travel.”
“Well, we study a lot of things here at the Temporal Studies Society, everything from quantum theory, to the affects of aging. It’s true that some of the scientists here have been studying theories of time travel, but that’s not all we do.”
“Which scientists have been working on it?” Blake asks.
“Dr. Simons is head of the department on temporal physics but a lot of the work is being done by Dr. Quickly, who came out with a published theory on the subject a few years ago, and has been considered a leader in the area. Let me show you around. There are some areas that I won’t be able to show you due to safety concerns, but I can show you a few of our projects.”
Elliot leads us down a hallway to an expansive open laboratory. There are bulky machines that I can’t begin to identify, as well as volumes of manuals and charts laid out on tables around them. A few men in coveralls are working on one of the machines in the center of the room.
“Our creation department is devoted entirely t
o the construction of the equipment we need for various tests. In our field, many of the tools we need don’t exist anywhere else, so we’re required to custom build them to our purposes. That’s one of the costs and challenges of being on the cutting edge of scientific technology.”
“So what are the current chances of someone time traveling?” I ask.
“Ha, for a person, zero,” Elliot responds. “Unless you live in Hollywood. We’ve been getting that question a lot, ever since this summer, when Back to the Future came out. We don’t have a Delorean in any of these labs, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“But the theory is there, right?” Blake asks.
“Yes and no. There are still a lot of things we don’t know about space and time and how they interact. We’ve been studying a lot of possible scenarios.”
Elliot leads us through another set of doors into a smaller room that has a few large computers and a number of chalkboards and drafting tables. A dark-skinned man of about thirty is working on a drawing on one of them. “This is Malcolm. He’s one of our draftsmen and also does some of the tours. He was an intern here before me and they liked him so much they gave him a permanent position.” Malcolm nods from behind the table and gives a small wave before he goes back to his drawing.
“So how does Dr. Quickly propose to develop the theory of time travel further?” I ask, hoping to get the conversation back to items that can help us. “What are his methods?”
“There’s been a lot of talk over the years about speed being a key to time travel,” Elliot says. “Some of Einstein’s theories suggest that traveling at speeds close to that of light could make one capable of time travel. The fact that you cannot make matter go that fast without first converting it to energy, obviously makes it a challenge to discuss ever sending a person through time. There have been experiments done trying to send individual particles that fast. So far there has been limited success. Most recently the science has moved into the study of wormholes, or passages through the fabric of space and time. That has of course presented the problem of finding the energy to keep such a wormhole open.”
“Like electricity?” I suggest. “I thought I read something about this sort of blue electricity . . .”
Malcolm’s head lifts at this and I catch his eye momentarily before he drops his gaze again.
“I don’t know that I’ve heard of color ever having anything to do with it, but there have been some theories in the works there also. I believe Dr. Quickly has been developing some recently. But I’m not the one to talk to on that subject. You would probably have to get that information from the source.”
“Can we do that?” Francesca asks. “Can we talk to Dr. Quickly?”
“He has a pretty busy schedule. He doesn’t take appointments very frequently.”
We move into the next room. It has a number of steel tables in it. Some of them hold flowerpots under glass domes. The flowers are in various states of growth, from budding leaves, to pathetic withered twigs. There’s also a row of cages with lab rats in them.
“Hey, it’s Pinky and the Brain.” Francesca nudges Blake with her elbow. I notice that Malcolm has followed us into the room and is fiddling with a pencil sharpener on the wall.
“This room has a number of our aging tests. I’m sorry about the heat. We keep it at a pretty warm temperature for the plants. They’ve been doing various longevity tests here for years. Not all that exciting if you ask me.”
Francesca starts taking off her sweater. “Isn’t it a little hot for these rats? I’m burning up.”
As Elliot explains the nature of the tests on the rats to Francesca, she folds her sweater over her arm. Her cell phone falls out of the pocket and bounces off of her foot, then skids across the floor. Francesca mutters to herself, then notices Malcolm frozen in place staring at the phone with a pencil in his hand. He looks from the phone to the three of us with wide eyes for a moment, then quickly composes himself, and walks out of the room through the doors we entered by.
Francesca grabs the phone and sticks it back under her sweater before Elliot pays any attention. She catches my eye and jerks her head toward the door that Malcolm has departed through. I noticed the reaction too, and nod to her.
We continue to follow Elliot through a couple more rooms of the lab but are unable to gain any more information about Dr. Quickly or his current experiments. About fifteen minutes later, Elliot leads us back to the lobby at the end of the tour.
“If you need more information on The Society, The Saint Petersburg Times has written some nice articles recently. They have them on file at the library. I wish you the best of luck with your research.” He shakes all of our hands and disappears back into the lab.
We begin to walk out the front door when the receptionist calls us back, pointing to our I.D. badges. Francesca and I hand our badges to Blake and he walks them back to the desk.
The receptionist smiles and then leans past him and calls to Francesca. “Miss! I have a message here for you.”
“For me?” Francesca raises her eyebrows and walks over to the desk. The receptionist hands her a white envelope.
“Have a great day!”
Francesca smiles and takes the envelope, and the three of us exit back onto the sidewalk.
“What was that all about?” Blake asks.
Francesca tears open the envelope, and removes a small slip of paper. It contains only two lines.
“We need to talk. Meet me at the pier tonight, 8pm.”
5
“It doesn’t pay to insult another time traveler. In fact you should make it a rule of thumb to never anger anyone today, who can go back and stab you yesterday.”
-Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 2008
I’m staring out the back window of the house as Mr. Cameron pulls into the driveway. Spartacus meets everyone at the door as Mr. Cameron, Carson, and Robbie hustle through, anxious to share their news. “Dude, we ought to be detectives!” Carson declares as they enter the kitchen. “They need to make a show about us.”
“I take it you got some good info,” I say.
“Carson is an excellent sleuth,” Mr. Cameron agrees.
“What did you find out?” Francesca asks.
“The van is a GMC Savannah like Blake thought. It’s a prisoner transfer van. Only thing is, they have no idea who killed the guys in it. They’re looking into the possibility that it was the prisoner who escaped. That’s the assumption.”
“Was there more than one prisoner in the van?” Blake asks.
“They don’t know because they don’t have any info on where it came from. But guess what?”
“What?”
“The police wouldn’t give us any actual information on the case, because it’s an ongoing investigation or whatever, but I talked to this teenage kid who was on a ride-along at the station, and he told us where the van was. It turns out he had been with one of the cops who had responded to the scene yesterday. Apparently the cop had told this kid all about the experience and even drove him by the place where they were keeping the van. He was super chatty, so we got as much as he knew out of him as he was leaving the station.”
“Then Grandpa took us by the site where they were keeping it,” Robbie continues the story. “The van was locked up behind a fence but it was outside. We were able to see over the fence and could see the license plate. It had government plates registered till 2010.”
“Wow. So we aren’t the only ones,” I respond. “At least one other person is running around from the future.”
“An escaped killer,” Francesca adds.
“It looks that way,” Mr. Cameron says.
“What if it’s Stenger, the psycho bomber serial killer guy?” Francesca asks. “That guy just finally got convicted. Now he could go right back to killing people.”
“We don’t know it’s him. There could be any number of people. There are plenty of prisoners in the world,” I say.
“Yeah, but not many driving aro
und in St. Pete the day we left,” Carson argues. “His was a special case. It wasn’t even supposed to be tried here, remember? His lawyer argued something about him not getting a fair trial in Tallahassee, so they moved it to another city. They chose St. Pete, but I don’t think there are many big cases like that here usually.”
“That’s true,” Robbie agrees. “Should we warn the police here?”
“Do we want to tell them who we are?” Blake asks. “What if they take us in to question us? Who knows where we’d end up? We know the future. I don’t plan to spend my time being interrogated. We need to get back.”
“Speaking of that topic, what did you all ascertain on your adventure?” Mr. Cameron asks.
We describe our tour of the Temporal Studies Society and show the others the cryptic note we received.
“We’re thinking it’s from that Malcolm guy who was acting so sketchy, but we can’t know for sure,” Francesca explains. “But whoever it is wants to meet us.”
“Are we all going down there?” Robbie asks.
“That’s actually a good question,” I reply. “We don’t really know how much we can trust this person. Since they only saw three of us, maybe it’s a good idea for you two to keep a low profile till we know more. That way we aren’t showing all our cards at once. I’d like to know more about what we’re into before we go telling just anyone our story.”
Spartacus trots into the room and drops a toy at Robbie’s feet. Robbie picks it up and tosses it for him. “Blake brings up a good point,” I say, watching the dog dash after it. “We do know the future when it comes to a lot of things. That information would probably be valuable to a lot of people. We ought to be sure of who we can trust.”
“I want to be around in any case,” Carson says. “Robbie and I can hang out and watch from a distance. They won’t know what we look like. We can observe, and if anything goes wrong, we can jump in.”
“You can use my car if you like,” Mr. Cameron says. “And you can call here if you get separated from one another. It’s good to have a point of contact.”
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 12