Katherine opened her mouth, and Jonah could tell she was about to say something snarky and mean, like, “Wow—did you get fired after one day? Or were you just too lazy to go back for day two?”
Jonah glared at his sister; he pressed his thumb and forefinger together and drew them across his lips, the universal sign forShut up! He hoped the full force of his glare plus the gesture would let her know,If you say one more nasty thing, I will throw you out. And Chip and I won’t tell you a single word that Angela says, so you won’t know a thing….
Katherine coughed.
“Um—Sky Trails?” she said weakly.
“It’s an old airline—probably none of you have heard of it, because it went out of business about ten years ago,” Angela said. “It went bankrupt, didn’t pay any of its creditors. But I still get a disability check from Sky Trails, every single month.”
Disability? Jonah thought. That was for people who couldn’t work anymore because they were too sick or, well, disabled. Angela looked as if she could run a marathon—even in those funky high heels she was wearing. And, anyhow, Jonah had had some vague notion that disability checks came from the government, not private businesses.
Angela was looking around—from Katherine to Jonah to Chip—as if she expected one of them to ask another question. No one said anything. Angela sighed.
“That one day at Sky Trails changed my life,” she said. “What I saw—well, you won’t believe me, and nobody else will back up my story. But I know what I saw. I’m not crazy!”
Oh, Jonah thought.Can people maybe get disability checks for being crazy, too?
Angela shrugged.
“I can tell by your eyes you’re already starting to doubt me,” she said in a voice that was strangely choked. Jonah wondered: why would it matter to Angela whether three kids believed her?
“But,” Angela continued, “I’m going to tell you this anyway. I think I have to.”
“Okay,” Chip said.
Angela clasped her hands together on the table, seeming to steel herself for the story ahead.
“During my one day as a gate agent at Sky Trails, an unidentified plane arrived at the airport,” Angela said. “It was an unscheduled landing, completely unexpected. Depending on who you believe, either the radar was out of order briefly while it was landing—or it just appeared. Out of nowhere.”
Jonah saw Katherine stiffen.
“I was evidently the only person who saw it appear,” Angela said. “The only person who was looking.”
“Did it disappear, too?” Katherine asked in a small voice.
Angela shot her a surprised look.
“I wasn’t planning to get to that part until later,” Angela said. “But…yes.”
“I saw something like that happen once too,” Katherine admitted. “Not a whole plane appearing and disappearing, but a person. A man.”
“So you know what it’s like,” Angela said slowly. “Knowing exactly what you saw, but thinking that it couldn’t possibly have happened like that. Second-guessing yourself. Having other people make fun of you because you won’t say, ‘Oh, I must have made a mistake.’”
“Exactly,” Katherine said, nodding eagerly.
Any second now, they’d be throwing themselves into hugs, sobbing onto each other’s shoulders, proclaiming, “Nobody understands me but you!”
“Can we get back to the story?” Chip interrupted. “That plane—was I on it? Was Jonah? Did it crash—is that why we’re listed as survivors? I’ll want to look at the records and find out where it came from, maybe talk to the pilot….”
Angela snorted.
“It didn’t crash,” she said. “But good luck finding any records. Or the pilot.”
“But—but—” Chip sputtered.
Angela’s look was sympathetic again.
“I’m willing to bet that you two were on that plane,” she said. “There were lots of babies. And if I was listed as a witness and you were listed as survivors—that’s the only thing I’ve ever witnessed where government agents got involved like that.”
“But—whywere government agents involved?” Jonah asked. “A plane landed, it didn’t crash—big deal.”
Somehow, he could gloss over the whole appearing/ disappearing part of the story, just as he’d glossed over it when Katherine was telling about the vanishing man in Mr. Reardon’s office. He believed in ignoring unpleasant facts, in hopes that they’d go away.
“Anunauthorized plane landed,” Angela corrected him. “That’s supposed to set off an alert for the entire airport. There’s a whole protocol to be followed in those situations that I, being new, forgot about. But when I heard the first baby crying…”
Me?Jonah thought.Was I crying?
“Wasn’t the baby with its parents?” Chip asked. “Or some adult?”
Angela looked him straight in the eye.
“The plane was full of babies. Thirty-six of them,” she said. “But there wasn’t a single adult aboard.”
Chip laughed, a bitter sound in the sudden silence.
“What—babies were flying the plane? You expect me to believe that? ‘Goo-goo, gaa-gaa, air traffic control, this is baby plane one, over,’” he mocked. “It sounds like something out of a diaper commercial.”
Angela fixed him with a steely look.
“The FBI’s theory was that therehad been a pilot, a co-pilot, a whole flight crew, but they escaped somehow. Even though there were security cameras at the gate, and none of them showed anyone leaving the plane before I stepped on.”
“So maybe there was a secret door somewhere, out of the camera’s view,” Jonah said. “Or maybe it was an experimental high-tech plane that worked on autopilot.” He was still looking for realistic explanations. But if “experimental high-tech…autopilot” was the best he could do, he was really getting desperate.
“Youthink the pilot and flight crew just vanished into thin air,” Katherine said, her voice ringing with confidence.
“Possibly,” Angela said. “Or…”
She stopped. That one word hung in midair, tantalizingly.
“Or?” Jonah prompted.
Angela shook her head.
“I’ll work up to that one,” she said dryly. “Chip will just start laughing at me again.”
“I’m sorry,” Chip said, though he didn’t really sound like he meant it. “You’re making this allTwilight Zone ish, but it just seems like—well, what Mr. Reardon told Jonah and Katherine sounds about right. There was some sort of baby-smuggling ring, and they were forced to land—maybe the police were shooting them down; maybe they just ran out of gas or oil or whatever planes use. But anyhow, the people ran away and left the babies behind, because they didn’t want to get caught. So, really, as long as the FBI or INS or whoever looked at the plane, if they looked at, I don’t know, the instruction book in the cockpit, to see what language it was written in—then there should have been lots of clues about where we came from. And surely they have all that in their records and—”
“You forgot what I said,” Angela said in a steely voice. “The plane disappeared.”
“Maybe it didn’t disappear exactly,” Chip said. “Maybe they just towed it away and you thought—er…”
His voice trailed off because both Angela and Katherine were glaring at him, full force.
“I told you you wouldn’t believe me,” Angela said, and she sounded so sad that Jonah felt guilty on Chip’s behalf. Jonah wasn’t sure what to make of Angela’s story either, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
“Shall I continue?” Angela asked.
Meekly, all three kids nodded.
“Before I knew what was going on, there were FBI agents there and police and airport officials and airlines officials and all sorts of other officials I couldn’t even identify,” Angela said. “They were treating the whole airplane like a crime scene. A mystery to solve. But, you know, there were all those babies, and when one started crying, they all started crying. And you could just te
ll, it was driving those official types crazy. So they organized this baby brigade, and we had all these people carrying the babies off the plane—we were supposed to pay close attention to which seat each baby had come from, in case that was important. We didn’t have carriers or strollers or anything like that, so we just closed off the entire gate area and lined the babies up on the floor. We were just lucky none of them was old enough to be crawling yet….”
Jonah had been to the airport a couple of times: once when he was in third grade, and his Cub Scout troop had taken a field trip to learn about planes, and once when his family had gone to Disney World, and Dad hadn’t wanted to drive. Jonah could just imagine the chaos of thirty-six babies being taken off a plane at once. But surely it would have been chaos—surely lots of people would have seen.
Angela was still talking.
“The moment we had all the babies off the plane—and all the agents and officials and airline personnel were off the plane too, because they were trying to get the babies sorted out—at that moment, I looked back. And I could see the plane, just like normal, just like I could see the carpet under my feet or the rubber lining around the door or my hand in front of my own face. It was there! And then it was gone, there was nothing there except air, and I could see straight out to the runway lights and the satellite dishes and the highway….”
Even now, thirteen years later, Angela’s voice was full of wonderment. It was like she was still amazed, still stunned.
“And, once again, you were the only one to see this?” Chip asked, making no effort to keep the skepticism out of his voice.
Angela turned her head sharply.
“No,” she said. “Monique saw the plane disappear—Monique Waters, my boss. But later, when Monique saw how things were going, she denied it all.She was the one who filled out the disability papers, saying I was delusional and prone to hallucinations and unfit to work at Sky Trails.”
“How do you know she saw it disappear?” Chip asked.
“Because she screamed out, ‘Holy crap! Where’d that plane go?’” Angela said, grinning slightly.
Jonah was trying to absorb this. He sort of wanted to believe Angela—he was sure thatshe believed what she was telling them. But it was too incredible.
“What about the other people?” Katherine began. “Didn’t any of them—?”
“It was dark out,” Angela said. “We were all carrying babies—you try to take care of thirty-six infants and still manage to think clearly! I think some of the other people might have seen the plane vanish, but then this one guy, James Reardon—”
“The one we talked to,” Katherine interrupted.
Angela nodded.
“He started running around, taking charge, telling people, ‘All right, my agency has the plane towed away now; we’ll handle it from here. We’ll advise you if we discover anything that’s relevant to your department. Thanks for your help.’ And later I kind of wondered, maybe some of those people had seen weird things like that before and had decided to pretend that they didn’t exist. To be able to keep their jobs. It was close to Christmastime; they were happy to be sent home—of course none of them had seen the plane appear from nowhere and vanish into nothing, both, so they could believe the official story more easily….”
“Nobody went to the news media?” Chip asked. “Nobody put it out on the Internet? Not that the plane vanished, even, but just that there was this mysterious bunch of babies…Didn’t we make CNN?”
His voice sounded mocking, but when Jonah glanced his way, Chip’s face was deadly serious.
Angela shrugged.
“The Internet wasn’t the big deal it is today,” she said. “And we weren’t supposed to contact any newspapers or TV stations. James Reardon wanted us all to sign confidentiality statements. But I…refused.”
“Is that why you lost your job?” Jonah asked.
“Pretty much,” Angela said. “Monique told me not to come back until I was ready to sign. I was never ready. I did talk to a newspaper reporter, I did call a TV station—but when everyone else said I was crazy, what good did it do?” She held her hands out, a gesture of helplessness.
Jonah tried to imagine being like Angela, standing up for the truth. He didn’t think he could be so brave.
“Why did it matter so much to you?” Chip asked.
“I know what I saw,” Angela said fiercely. “I trust my own eyes. And I wasn’t going to lie because—because I thought it might be important. I thought the babies might be important. I thought we should really investigate, not just pretend nothing ever happened.”
“Soyou’ve investigated, haven’t you?” Katherine said, jumping ahead. Her eyes were glowing, like she’d found a new hero.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Angela agreed. “The more common view would be that I’ve become a total crackpot, totally obsessed. My own family thinks I’m crazy now, because I tell them that my phone is tapped, that the government’s watching me. But, you know, sometimes paranoia is justified. I get paid for doing nothing—even though I’ve called many times and said I don’t deserve disability pay. So I decided to use the money to do research, to study physics….”
“Physics?” Katherine repeated. Clearly, that wasn’t what she’d expected.
“Well, yeah…” Angela looked down at her hands. Jonah noticed she had her fingers knotted together, like she was suddenly very tense. “Look, you’re not going to believe me anyhow, so maybe I shouldn’t even tell you this part. I’ve been working on this for thirteen years, and it’s gotten me nothing but scorn and mockery. And I’ve gotten no confirmation—no sign that what I believe is true. At least, not since that first day. So maybe I should just pat your heads, and tell you to run off and be good little children for your parents, and don’t worry about where you came from. Don’t be like me, obsessed and paranoid and—”
“We already are,” Chip said firmly. “It’s too late.”
Speak for yourself!Jonah thought. But he was dying to hear Angela’s theory too. He couldn’t walk away now either.
Angela took a deep breath.
“Okay, then,” she said. “One thing I saw that nobody else did—though I did report it when I was debriefed, before they began talking about confidentiality statements—was an insignia on the plane. By the time everyone else saw the plane, it looked like any other Sky Trails regional jet. But when I first saw it, the plane’s door said,TACHYON TRAVEL .Tachyon—T-A-C-H-Y-O-N . You’re all too young, probably, to have studied much physics—and anyway, this is very theoretical physics—”
“So what’s a tachyon?” Katherine asked. She always hated being talked down to or told that she was too young for something.
“Tachyons are particles that travel faster than the speed of light,” Angela said.
The speed of light?Jonah thought.What’s that got to do with anything?
“I thought nothing could travel faster than light,” Katherine said, acting proud that she knew that.
“Nobody knows really,” Angela said. She was speaking very carefully now, watching for their reactions. “At least, nobody knowsyet . The theories are that if anything could go faster than light, all sorts of weird things would happen. Time and space would have a different relationship. Aging would be different. And, if a plane could travel that fast, it’d become…a time machine.”
Everyone stared at her.
Chip was already shaking his head.
“Who’d send a bunch of babies in a time machine?” he asked scornfully. “What would be the point?”
“I don’t think anyone sent a bunch of babies in a time machine,” Angela said, speaking very precisely. “I think a bunch of adults got into a time machine. I think it was an experiment, one of the first attempts at time travel. They didn’t understand all the effects. So they didn’t realize what would happen when they arrived in our time.” She paused, letting that sink in.
“You mean—” Katherine asked.
Jonah couldn’t tell if she
really understood or if she was just prompting Angela.
“I mean that Chip and Jonah used to be much older than they are now,” Angela said. “I think they were changed by traveling through time. I think they—and all the other babies—came from the future.”
NINETEEN
Silence. Dead silence.
Jonah wasn’t really even thinking about what Angela had said, because it was too bizarre and incredible to consider. It was like his brain shut down, rejecting her theory so completely. After a few moments, he thought to look at Chip and Katherine to see how they were reacting—mostly he was concerned that they’d be all rude and mocking and mean to Angela, when clearly she was just a nutcase. Oh, sure, she’d seemed fairly reasonable at first, except for being scared to talk on the telephone. But believing in time travel? And babies aging backward? Insanity.
Chip and Katherine both had their mouths open already, though Chip’s might have just been hanging open in shock.
“Well, thanks for meeting with us,” Jonah said quickly, hoping he could get everyone away from Angela before Katherine had a chance to speak. “Your ideas are, um, very interesting.” He was struggling for words, trying to think of a polite excuse to leave. Could he carry off,Oh, my, look at the time!?
Suddenly something slammed into the glass door next to Jonah.
Instinctively, Jonah grabbed for the door handle, but it was too late. A man was wedging his heavily booted foot between the door and the glass wall. The rest of the man’s body was sprawled out on the ground, because another man appeared to have tackled him.
“You can’t do this!” the tackler was screaming. No, not exactly screaming. He was keeping his voice down, barely above a whisper, but his words still echoed with fury. “Not here. Not now. You’ll make a scene. Do you want to ruin time completely?”
Jonah shoved against the man’s boot; he drove his shoulder against the door, trying to shut it against the man’s ankle. He couldn’t see the man’s face, because the tackler blocked his view. Then the tackler turned, and Jonah could at least see him clearly. A jolt of recognition flowed through his body; he was so stunned he almost let go of the door.
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