Tangled in Time

by Pauline Baird Jones

  “It must have fallen out when we crashed the flying machine.”

  Brae grinned at the doc. “I guess that means I get to keep her.”

  His tone was light, but there was a look in his eyes that sent a lovely shiver down Olivia’s back.

  The doctor looked about to say something, but Brae forestalled her.

  “You got to keep ET, doc.”

  Her grin was a pleasant surprise to Olivia. “I’m not the one you have to convince.” She turned, leading them toward what appeared to be a blank wall.

  FIVE

  After being disconnected from Brae, something that left Olivia feeling somewhat bereft, the doctor ushered her to a place where she could clean up. There was much to puzzle her about this place and she had many questions for the doctor. The doctor did not appear too concerned about answering those questions. Did that mean she thought Olivia would be allowed to stay or that she knew no one in 1894 would believe she’d traveled to another galaxy, so what did it matter what she was told?

  It was an island, an outpost, on a planet called Kikk in a distant galaxy. It made her aspirations to reach the moon feel small and insignificant. There were other delights, smaller in scale, like the privy. Olivia nearly jumped out of her skin when the doctor showed her how to use something called a blow dryer. It was a most acceptable replacement for hours in front of a fire or wood stove, brushing one’s hair until it dried. She could have stayed in the shower for the hours the blow dryer saved, except for her anxiety about what was going to happen to her next. Would she see Brae again? She used some of her shower time recalling the two kisses in great detail. No wonder society sought to keep men and women apart. It was lovely to be held so close to Brae and the kiss, surely that is what he’d meant about mind blowing?

  She caught sight of herself in a mirror fixed to the wall. That was not an expression she’d seen on her own face before. The smile, the softened gaze. Was this…love? Had she fallen in love with a man she could not have? A man she’d known for less than one whole day? For a few seconds she felt despair erase the lovely feelings, but then her back straightened once more. Her whole life, people around her had told her she could not have this or that and she’d found a way to get them. Had she not traveled through time, not once but twice? Flown through the air? Ridden a horseless carriage? She’d convinced Professor Twitchet to make her his assistant, had she not? She’d faced down Professor Smith. Was she going to meekly allow anyone to dismiss or shuffle her off into the past? Brae said he wanted to keep her. She wished to be kept by him. She could do no less than fight with him. She turned toward the door to the bedroom, with iron in her spine once more.

  The doctor had arranged fresh attire for Olivia, something not military, but cool and comfortable. The undergarments were much better than her old ones and still had a place for the transmogrification key—which had left a rather impressive key shaped bruise on her stomach, possibly from the combination of crash and corset. With the limited resources provided, Olivia opted to braid her hair again, though it felt a bit decadent with so many hours before it was time to retire.

  The food was something called an MRE, a meal ready to eat. Weren’t all meals ready to eat when one sat down? Why would you want a meal not ready to eat? When Olivia finished the MRE, the doctor led her through a maze of hallways to attend something called a “confab.” They arrived at a room that looked like a dining room, though one sadly lacking the softening touches. Chairs marched sternly around a large, severe table. The room had a big window that looked out on the island. Olivia would have liked to peer out that window, but a square, bluff man with a fierce expression stood in her way.

  It was a relief to find Brae already there. The doctor introduced the fierce man as General Halliwell. He was polite, but not enthusiastic. A likely blonde man was an actual alien from the galaxy named Helfron Giddioni. Olivia sensed some connection between him and the doctor, though nothing showed on their faces. It was more a vibration in the space between them. He was the only one who seemed actually pleased to meet her. His delight served only to further annoy the general.

  Brae held out a chair for her next to his, which made General Halliwell’s scowl deepen even more. Olivia dropped hurriedly into it, her chin lifted.

  After what seemed a fraught pause, General Halliwell sat down as well. He and the doctor exchanged enigmatic looks that concluded with the general nodding. It reminded her of the byplay between her parents when Papa wanted Mama to handle something unpleasant for him. The doctor sat quite still and regarded Olivia for several seconds. Was she the “unpleasant something” the Doc was to handle for Brae’s general? Her throat went dry.

  “You’ve been invited to Colonel Carey’s debriefing about this incident, Miss Carstairs, because he feels you might have information that is,” a brief pause for the general to give her a another fierce look, “relevant.”

  His patent disbelief was not unfamiliar to Olivia. It did surprise her to find it in this enlightened, amazing place. She lifted her brows somewhat and gave him a steady look she had learned from her Mama. To her surprise, it worked. The general appeared discomfited. He turned to the doctor.

  “Get on with it, doc.”

  With an aplomb Olivia could only admire, the doctor directed her attention toward Brae.

  “You didn’t arrive at Area 51, Colonel Carey.”

  “No ma’am. As I explained on arrival I was—”

  “Snogging in 1944?” Doc extracted a photograph from a folder and slid it toward them.

  Snogging? Olivia leaned forward to look. It was a very good photograph of Brae holding her and—color flooded her face. Snogging. She filed the word away to examine later. They had wanted to be recorded in the historical record and they had succeeded.

  Brae picked it up, with no noticeable sign of distress. “It worked.” He grinned at Olivia. “It got your attention, doc.”

  “You planned to get photographed kissing Miss Carstairs?” the general snapped.

  “The plan, sir, was to appear in the historical record, so the doc could find us.”

  “You were supposed to lay low and wait for retrieval,” the general shot back.

  “I wasn’t sure if the impact had damaged the chip or not. Olivia figured this was a good back up plan.”

  “Olivia?” The doctor appeared to find this interested. “It was your idea?”

  Olivia nodded warily. And got a surprisingly charming smile in return.

  “Good plan.”

  Olivia had to smile back at her. “Thank you.”

  “You both put the time line at risk,” the general growled this.

  He appeared to be a most negative personality.

  Brae shifted again, offering the doctor a weak smile.

  “I was worried about our impact on the time line, which is why I buried my weapons and ID, sir.”

  The doctor pulled out another photograph of them kissing. “I can see how worried you were.” Brae grinned a bit sheepishly. The doctor dropped it on the table. “Which brings us to how you ended up in 1944.”

  “What did you do?” the general asked the question.

  Perhaps he had not heard about the collision?

  “I didn’t do anything, sir. Well, I mean, we collided, but it’s not like we could have missed each other.”

  “Is that possible, Delilah?” The alien spoke for the first time since their introduction.

  “I’d have said it was impossible, but I’d be wrong.”

  The general and the alien both gave her a look of incredulity.

  “I can be wrong,” she said, “and admit it.”

  The alien looked amused. The general less so.

  “Robert was going through the portal sensor logs, trying to figure out what went wrong. And I had facial recognition software sifting through photo archives, but we weren’t sure whether you’d gone into the future or the past. Robert was also studying data from unexplained space anomalies, hoping to find you in one of them.”

 
“UFO’s?” Brae looked unaccountably delighted by this. “What, you were worried I’d caused Marfa or Roswell?”

  “I did tell you that our impact might be visible in my time, your time and where we arrived,” Olivia felt the need to point out.

  “Did you?” The doctor might have looked impressed. It was hard to tell. “It did give you the information advantage, knowing about the collision.”

  “Will it help Robert be less chagrinned, do you think, Delilah?” the alien asked, his amusement obvious.

  Delilah. The doctor did not look at like a Delilah. The alien was, Olivia realized, an interesting character above and beyond his alien factor. Excessively good-looking, he had an air of being an observer of the situation, rather than a participant. Most of his attention seemed to be directed at the doctor. Why, Olivia wondered, did the general glare at him when he thought no one looked?

  “Possibly.” The doctor’s smile was brief. “He’ll need to know more about this transmogrification machine of yours, though.”

  The sudden shift in attention her direction caught Olivia off guard. She flushed, as if she’d spoken her speculations aloud.

  “It’s not my machine. It belongs to Professor Twitchet.”

  Multiple eyebrows rose on all faces except for Brae’s.

  “Professor Twitchet?”

  “Professor Emelius Twitchet. My employer.” And mentor. Surely they had not thought she acted alone?

  Doc tapped a spot on her shoulder and appeared to speak into it. “Robert, can you come to the conference room and bring that file we’ve been working on.” A pause. “That’s the one.” She smiled at Olivia but the look in her eyes made her want to shift in her seat. “We’ve only started digging into your past, Miss Carstairs, and hadn’t stumbled across the professor yet. What can you tell me about him?”

  Olivia was uncertain what the doctor wished to know, so she repeated what she’d told Brae, though warily. It was logical to investigate Olivia’s credentials. She did wonder what they’d discover about her in history. There could not be much. Would the record of her and the professor’s disappearance prove true? As she concluded her explanation a man entered the room, carrying a brown square in his hand, and sat next to Doc. He was almost as good looking as Brae. The resemblance between him and the doctor was remarkable, so it was no surprise when Doc introduced him as her brother.

  “Robert, this is Miss Olivia Carstairs. She’s from 1894.”

  Olivia expected him to show some surprise at this statement, but he didn’t even blink.

  “How she’d get here?”

  Olivia knew that look. Robert was a man of science.

  Doc held up the shackles, letting them dangle from one finger. “The colonel couldn’t resist touching.”

  Robert’s brows arched. He looked at Brae. “Kinky.”

  Olivia needed to learn their use of this word. It clearly meant something other than bent or twisted.

  “They were a joke gift from one of the bubbas and never used.” He ruffled his hair with both hands. “I was afraid we might get separated when the army showed up. I couldn’t leave her there. Not when the machine disappeared.”

  This statement engaged the attention of the doctor and her brother, but it was Robert who asked the question. “Disappeared.”

  Doctor Clementyne frowned. “I thought it was damaged.”

  “It was not functioning properly,” Olivia conceded, wondering why it mattered. “I did not know about the wormhole impact in time to understand its significance.”

  Brae looked repentant. “I didn’t realize it was need to know.”

  “And you think it was the wormhole collision, not the physical impact with the colonel that caused your malfunction?” The doctor leaned forward, her elbow resting on the table in a very casual way.

  “The gauges were behaving oddly, swinging wildly and there were interruptions in water flow throughout the transmogrification machine.” The interest in both their faces, with no hint of disbelief or condescension, prompted Olivia to relax in way she never had before. She leaned toward them, though she did not rest her elbows anywhere. One had one’s standards. “I believe the collision of his energy force and mine affected the…integrity of the machine’s systems, so that the Emergency Absquatulation Device could not get the power it needed to return the machine to the laboratory. When it didn’t do that, I assumed it had been damaged.”

  “I’m guessing it operated on some kind of repeating cycle?” Olivia nodded. “It wasn’t getting power at the right moment,” the doctor said, “so when the power supply and Emergency Absquatulation Device synched…”

  Olivia nodded again. It was lovely to converse with people who understood you.

  “…it completed its function,” Robert finished. “Interesting.”

  “I wonder why it didn’t end up at Area 51?” the doctor said. “It’s the kind of oddity that would have.”

  “What is your power source?” Robert asked, clearly following his own line of thought.

  “Water,” Brae said.

  “Steam,” Olivia amended, then added, “It powers most of the systems, except there is an additional process required for the transmogrification engine and the Emergency Absquatulation Device.”

  The general stared at her blankly. Doctor Clementyne and her brother’s expressions were more complicated, though still puzzling. It wasn’t disbelief, or at least not the insulting kind.

  “What process?” Robert rubbed the back of his neck.

  “I do not know. The professor was most secretive about that. He said it was revolutionary and revolutions were sometimes dangerous.”

  Robert exchanged a look with the doctor. “I wonder what—or who—stopped the revolt?”

  Professor Smith had seemed to dismiss the machine. Was that a feint? A diversion? Had stopping the revolution been his purpose in traveling through time?

  “How far did the machine travel? Did it have a maximum range?”

  Olivia hesitated, but what was there to hide about a man long dead? “The professor claimed it could travel anywhere on the planet. I myself only experienced travel within our own continent.”

  “Wormhole or subspace?” Robert asked, his gaze directed at his sister.

  She shrugged, the move most elegant. Olivia wished she might have half the doctor’s innate grace. Even in her masculine clothes she was essentially feminine.

  “If she was in subspace, wouldn’t the colonel’s wormhole have passed through her?” the doctor murmured, as if to herself rather than the assemblage.

  “If the portal uses a wormhole. We don’t really know that either,” Robert said.

  The casual way they moved and talked was unfamiliar to Olivia, but she liked it. It enhanced the scientific experience in an unexplained, but pleasing way.

  “You don’t know a lot, do you?” Brae asked, as if recalling a grievance. The doc gave him a look that prompted him to add, “I had a lot of time to think about it after I woke up with a buzzard on my chest.”

  “Is it truly that remarkable to people sitting in another galaxy?” Olivia felt obliged to ask, since it appeared to have escaped their notice.

  “We have some pretty interesting power sources,” Robert said, “we’re just surprised your guy seems to have mastered something back then that didn’t make it into the historical record.”

  “Which seems to indicate he didn’t do it,” the doc—Olivia found herself adopting Brae’s name for her, at least inside her head—said. “You were testing it when the impact occurred, weren’t you?”

  Olivia kept back a frown. “The professor completed testing on the machine a year previously.”

  That created another round of surprise amongst the assemblage.

  “So you were what?” The general found his voice again. “Out for a joy ride?”

  Olivia was not sure what he meant. It was always a joy to take out the transmogrification machine, but they never took it out without a clear, scientific purpose. Her hands were pro
perly clasped in her lap and Brae covered them with one of his, sending warming comfort through her.

  “We were conducting a different experiment.” Cutting through warmth came a chilling concern for the professor. Logically, she knew he was long dead, lost somewhere in the past. Had he found his way home? Had the transmogrification machine? Olivia did not trust Professor Smith’s assertion that the professor had never reappeared. He was an unsavory character who would not baulk at lying to achieve his nefarious purpose. But what was his purpose?

  “You were testing the one with the Frankenstein head set, right?”

  Olivia did not know whether to laugh or be insulted at the implication she and the professor were mad scientists. If she had not looked at him, perhaps insulted would have triumphed, but it was impossible to look at Brae without smiling. Thinking about it, she could see why he might think that. The cranial apparatus was a bit intimidating.

  “We were testing the Individual Discovery Velocipediator.”

  This raised both the doc’s eyebrows and Robert’s.

  “The what?” This from the alien.

  “The Individual Discovery Velocipediator.” It was possible that the name was not entirely successful, but they needn’t look so incredulous.

  “What does it do?” This question also originated from the alien man.

  Olivia thought for a moment. Did they wish to know how it worked or just what it actually did? She decided on the last. “It finds people who are lost.”

  None of them appeared particularly enlightened. It was perhaps, not as world changing as the transmogrification machine, but it had much potential for good

  Doc tensed. “You were testing it. That’s why the Professor wasn’t with you.” She stopped, her expression turning complicated. “When do you think it went? 1894 or 1944?”

  Olivia had no answer for this, but felt obliged to try. “I assume 1944. I have no reason to believe it can time travel without outside intervention.”

  Brae shifted to look at her. “Why did you tell Smith you didn’t know where it was?”

  Before Olivia could answer, she felt the change in the air, felt something enter in that had not been there before.