“What’s that noise?” I ask.
“Bilge pumps,” Quickly responds. “The tunnel is fairly well waterproofed, but it still manages to find its way in. The pumps keep me from having to wear my galoshes.”
We are about fifty yards from the end of the hallway when Quickly abruptly stops. There are no doors visible, so I’m not sure why we’re stopping. It becomes evident a moment later when Dr. Quickly pulls a remote control keypad from his pocket. He aims the remote at the ceiling, punches in a series of numbers and steps back. I watch with rapt attention as the section of ceiling ahead of us slowly tilts toward the floor. The other side of the ceiling contains a set of stairs not unlike an attic access I once had in my family house in Oregon. This stairway is easily twice as wide, enough that a couple people can walk up side by side.
“You really like the secret doorways, huh?” Carson comments.
“If you are going to go through the trouble to build an underground tunnel, you may as well keep up the mystery,” Quickly replies.
Francesca considers the stairs angling into the void above us. “No secret elevator?”
“Stairs keep me young.” Quickly smiles.
We follow him into the darkness above. The stairs begin to curve once we’re past the level of the ceiling. I guess that to be ground level but I can’t be certain anymore. A push from another button on Quickly’s remote illuminates the stairwell from light blue bulbs, evenly spaced along the curving walls. The section of the stairs from the tunnel closes behind us and I feel entombed. The feeling doesn’t last long, because once we’ve climbed what I imagine to be the equivalent of a couple of stories, we emerge into the middle of a tall open room that is filled with moonlight. Glass windows make up one enormous wall that overlooks a busy street.
Our floor appears to be the second story of a very tall building. The ceiling of the room is at least fifty feet above us. To our left, facing the huge wall of windows, are tiers of beautiful wooden railed balconies that extend out to varying distances from the back wall like a theatre. The room is relatively narrow. I could stride across it in a couple dozen steps. Its impressive height is accented by the fact that every inch of the balcony walls is filled, not with theatre chairs, but with wooden cubby-holed shelves holding more unique objects than I can fathom. Quickly spreads his arms wide to encompass the breathtaking space. “Welcome to the best place in the world to travel through time.”
8
“With a name like Harry Quickly, grade school wasn’t easy. Losing hope of social acceptance early had its perks however. By the time I became president of the science club in high school, no one even paid attention. Then I mastered space and time and vanished completely. That one people noticed.”
-Excerpt from the journal of Harold Quickly, 1999
Dr. Quickly is illuminating lights around the room while I take in the various spaces. Hanging from the ceiling high above us is a chandelier, formed into the shape of the sun. It illuminates a mosaic of dark blue tiles with constellations and planets laid out in silver across the ceiling. Smaller lamps on the balconies are now shedding a warm glow on the items around them. The largest of the balconies has a collection of leather armchairs grouped loosely near a wooden table positioned by the railing.
The dark wood railings and countless shelves along the walls give the place a feeling of age, though I can get no concept of the building we’re in. It gives me the impression of a library far more than a laboratory. I’ve never known of anything like it in St. Pete.
Quickly invites us to join him in the center of the floor, where we find a circular table with cabinets built into the base. There are stools positioned around it and we take seats on these while Quickly himself remains standing.
“I know you all have many questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them, but we should get through the important stuff first. The night is finite and we have a lot to cover to make sure we keep you all safe.”
“Are we in danger?” Francesca asks.
“Well, you are in a unique situation that has natural hazards associated with it. You don’t need to be alarmed, but there are some things we need to discuss to make sure that you stay with us in the here and now.”
“We’re actually hoping to not stay here and now,” Blake says.
“Understood, but there are far worse places you could be at the moment, and in order to get you back where you want to be, we need to make sure you don’t end up someplace else. You see, the five of you are currently being affected by the results of something I ultimately bear the responsibility for.”
“It’s your fault we time traveled?” Robbie asks.
“Not directly, but yes. The event that sent you back in time was an indirect result of the research I started in the 1970’s. I worked nearly twenty years on it, and in 1996 I made a huge breakthrough. I also made a terrible mistake. I sent myself through time quite involuntarily, but by the grace of God was not killed in the process. The event was obviously traumatic and exciting at the same time. I’d made quite possibly the biggest scientific achievement in human history, and then promptly found myself out of reach of all my research materials and colleagues.”
“This was when you disappeared and everyone was searching for you.” I lean forward.
“Yes. I understand it made quite a stir about town for a while, and presented a major setback for the colleagues I left behind. I will confess I was quite guarded with my research, and not all together trusting as a young man.”
Dr. Quickly places his palms on the table. “I had a sense of what the potential dangers were to the work I was doing and felt extremely possessive of the responsibility to keep things under control. I had not shared all of my insights with my colleagues, and when they began to piece together my work after my departure, there were a few details that most likely escaped them.”
“You didn’t trust them?” I ask.
“No. It wasn’t really that. I think I was a bit selfish then. I should have trusted them with more, but I justified keeping it to myself by saying I was protecting them. That was half true. Their research did come together in a workable form, but the errors they made, combined with the unpredictability of Florida weather, conspired to prove catastrophic to the results.” Quickly gestures to clouds in the night sky beyond the wall of windows. “The electrical disturbance at The Temporal Studies Society yielded unexpected results, that being you five coming here. The lightning caused an overload of their machinery and allowed the escape of unique particles, called gravitites, into the environment around the lab, by way of the electrical power lines. When that power line broke free of the pole and hit your bench, it transferred not just the electricity, but the gravitites as well. My colleagues had far too many of the particles in use during their experiment, and the result was a very large area being affected. The error was theirs, but the ultimate responsibility lies with me.”
“Did you realize we were coming?” I ask.
“Yes. As a matter of fact, tonight is not the first time I have met you, even though it is the first time you have met me.”
“You just lost me,” Robbie says.
This is getting crazy.
“It’s a long story,” Quickly says, walking around the table and looking out the window. “I promise I’ll explain it another time.” He turns back to us. “For now, let me tell you a few of the things it is imperative that you learn.”
Dr. Quickly walks to the wall and rolls a green chalkboard in a frame over to our table. He picks up a piece of chalk and draws a pair of parallel, squiggly lines across the board. He makes an X in between the lines at one end.
“Imagine this as a river. This is all of you in 2009.” He points to the X. “You are flowing along in time along with everything else around you. The Temporal Studies Society suffered an explosion that released the gravitites into the environment around you by way of electricity. That is crucial to the events, because electricity acted in this case as not only the medium in which you were exposed t
o these particles, but also the catalyst for the reaction that ensued.”
“You’re not going to say something with ‘one point twenty-one jigawatts’ in it are you?” Carson says, “Because that would make me laugh if that turned out to be true.”
“Hmm. No. As much as I enjoyed the Back to the Future films myself, I’m afraid I can’t just put you in a car and zap you with lightning to get you home. The electricity played a key part to be sure, but it’s a little more complex than that. These particles act as disruptors to the way individual cells stay anchored in time. The cells of your body and in all the things around you, have a gravity of sorts that keeps you in sync with the flow of time, stuck in the river with everything else that’s floating with you. All of it is flowing at the same speed.” He draws some movement lines in the river.
“Like going tubing down the river with your friends,” Francesca says.
“Exactly. Relative to each other, it’s not as noticeable that we’re moving, because we’re all traveling in the same direction and at the same rate. Cells that have been exposed to these gravitites are essentially released from the ‘gravity’ of time. You and most of the biological or organic matter around you would’ve been affected. It’s like you took your tube to shore and hiked back along the edge of the river while the rest of your life floated on.
“The electrical current that flowed through you can react various ways with those particles. In your case, the event that ensued was an enormous leap through time.” He looks at his drawing on the board. “You would have to hike for a long time in this analogy.” He draws an arc back to a spot between the lines and writes 1986 above it. “It’s one of the longest jumps I’ve heard of actually. Much more would have required an exposure that would most certainly have killed you. That was the first instance where you all were extremely lucky.”
“What would have killed us?” Francesca asks.
“Oh, any of a long list of very unpleasant things,” Dr. Quickly replies. “Electrocution for one, but the most likely would have been that you would have been left floating in outer space. You see, one thing that many people fail to realize when talking about time travel theory, is that one cannot effectively travel through time without also traveling through space. If we were to travel backward in time, one day, to this exact location in the universe, we would find ourselves out in the cold dark of space, waiting for the earth to get to us as it orbits around the sun.” He scribbles a quick depiction of the sun and a planet and a line to show an orbit around it. I straighten up on my stool.
I feel like I should be taking notes.
“Even if we were to jump 365 days ahead so that the earth might be in the same relative position in its rotation around the sun, we would still miss, because the sun is moving, too.” He draws an arrow coming out of the sun.
“The whole galaxy is in fact hurtling through space at speeds that make trying to calculate for it laughable. The universe itself could be moving for all we know. We highly suspect it is. Trying to hit a mark like that would be like hitting a bullseye on a dartboard attached to a speeding train, while throwing from an airplane . . . with your eyes closed. It’s a useless endeavor.”
“How did we end up alive then?” I ask.
“You were fortunate enough to be in contact with something that was not traveling through time, that happened to exist in more or less the same condition in the time you jumped to. In your case, it was the bench in the dugout on the softball field. It exists in relatively the same condition here in 1986 as in 2009. It was still anchored to the same slab of concrete, so when you were shocked in contact with it, you stayed fixed to it during your jump. The bench itself underwent a sort of matter fusion event, but that isn’t really relevant to you at the moment. Essentially you five just went along for the ride.”
“How do you know all this about us?” Carson asks. “How did you know we were at the softball field?”
“You told me. Later. Well, it’s later for you. It’s in the past for me.”
“We tell you in the future?” Francesca asks.
“Yes. Possibly. You did tell me in the future. Whether you will again remains to be determined.”
“Oh. Right. This is really confusing,” Francesca says.
“Welcome to my life. If there is one thing I can promise you about time travel theory, it is that it is a complex science and there are plenty of things that I don’t understand either. A lot can go wrong, but I’m going to do my best to give you the basics of what I know, and hopefully keep you safe. To that end, I have some things I want to give you.”
“It’s possible though, right?” Blake asks. “You can get us back?”
Dr. Quickly looks him in the eye as he replies. “You are going to get yourselves back. But I’m going to help you.”
Dr. Quickly reaches down and pulls a cardboard box from under the table. From it he extracts five smaller wooden boxes that are hinged with lids. He slides one to each of us across the table. I lift the lid on mine and peer inside at the objects it contains.
This looks exciting.
Dr. Quickly pulls out a sixth box and sets it in front of himself. “These are some basic safety items. One of the main dangers you face is that since you’ve been exposed to the gravitites, you are susceptible to any amount of electricity triggering another jump. Even certain amounts of static electricity could possibly result in you traveling, and if you’re not planning for it, it can yield some very nasty results. You don’t want to end up inside a wall somewhere, or melted into the center of the earth or anything like that.”
“You’re really freaking me out,” Robbie says.
“It’s better that you know what you’re dealing with. These dangers will lessen over time, the longer you stay in one place. For the first week or so after a jump of the magnitude you experienced, your cells are still very unstable temporally speaking. You’ll find in your boxes an item that’s going to help diffuse any unwanted electrical impulses, and keep you from jumping.
“This is a chronometer.” He holds up an item that looks like a complex wristwatch. I remove mine from my box also. “These chronometers have had the time jumping portion disabled, but they have a component inside that acts as a sort of capacitor that can either diffuse or store electricity from your body. They act as regulators for jumping as well, but we haven’t gotten to that yet.”
I look at the chronometer in my hand. It has the basic shape of a large watch, only in place of a face with hands, it has a series of concentric rings that appear to be capable of movement. There are dials on the sides. Each is marked with different symbols and some numbers. It’s beautiful, even though I have no understanding of how it works.
“Put them on your wrists,” he says, and we all comply, making minor adjustments as needed. “On the full versions such as mine,”—At this he pushes up his sleeve and shows us an ornate looking chronometer that’s around his wrist—“there is a pin on the side that can be pushed as a key to activate other options for you, but for the moment, yours are set to maintain the present flow of time.”
“Are we going to be able to use these to get home?” Blake asks.
“In time.” Quickly smiles. “Pun intended. But there is much to learn before we can accomplish that feat. I’m going to need to have all of your free time for the next few weeks. Getting all of you to 2009 is likely to take a number of smaller jumps, as I’m doubtful about the safety of sending you back as violently as you arrived here. The odds of you surviving that again are slim. We’ll need to take precautions, and there’s a lot of theory and some precise calculating that needs to happen for it to work. Even so, I’m optimistic that if we all work at it, we can get you traveling home. It may take a few weeks, it could take a few months, but it should be possible.”
“Well, we’re here to learn,” I reply, happy that we’re making progress. Blake has cheered up considerably and there is an air of general excitement among the others as well.
“What’s this?” Francesca
reaches into her box and pulls out a long wire with a plug at the end.
“Wall charger.” Quickly smiles. “No fun running out of power halfway to your destination.”
Dr. Quickly invites us to tour the laboratory. Behind the walls of shelves are other rooms with a few things I recognize like generators and gyroscopes, and even more things I can’t recognize at all. There is a kitchen and a couple of different stairwells but the purposes of most of the rooms he’s showing us go over my head. He leads us through various hallways full of lab spaces and classrooms but I rapidly lose comprehension of where we are.
“You sure have a lot of space in here,” Robbie comments.
“And this is just the first level.” Dr. Quickly winks.
“What’s down below you?” Francesca says. “I noticed we’re not actually at ground level. Was there something between this level and the tunnel?”
“Coffee shop,” Quickly replies. “The ground floor has a number of retail spaces. I find it helps mask the fact that my lab is up here.”
“Hmm. Coffee. Good to know.” Francesca smiles.
After showing us around, Quickly tells us that we will reconvene again tomorrow as it’s getting late. We agree to meet him in the morning, and he shows us out. Instead of taking the tunnel back to the house the way we came, he leads us out another exit and we descend a set of stairs and emerge from a nondescript door in a side alley of the building.
As we walk across the street, I get my first real look at the outside of the lab. It’s a large, glass-paned, rectangular office building with mirrored glass. The width of the building is such that I have no concept of which windows belong to the lab. I begin to understand how Quickly has been able to hide it in plain sight between the other occupants. I doubt that the other tenants of the building have any idea what neighbors them. We walk a block to another large American car parked along the street. This one is a battered Chevy Impala. Like the Galaxie, it has a front bench seat and we can all manage to pile in. We’re dropped off in front of Mr. Cameron’s house.
In Times Like These Boxed Set Page 16