“Wow,” Brianna played along. Her eye followed the cord to a jack in the wall under a counter that was strewn with powders, eyeliner pencils and even lipstick. Suddenly, she decided to act. She lunged for a lipstick even as she was saying “Does Jordan even wear lipstick?” She already had the spy device ready in one palm and intentionally knocked the lipstick off the counter so it rolled behind and under it. “Oh! I’m sorry,” she squeaked, practically diving under the counter after it.
Her training had paid off. She inserted the device into a port she’d spotted earlier in under three seconds and came back up with the lipstick in her hand. She bumped her head on the underside of the counter as an afterthought, creating some additional chaos and distraction. This caused Rita to become agitated and, along with two other stylists rushing to aid in the process, tried frantically to stop other products from rolling off the counter top.
“Oh, damn!” he/she swore. “Honey, you have to be more careful!”
“I’m really sorry,” Brianna pouted, handing the lipstick back. “I’m just sort of... klutzy sometimes.”
Rita eyed her darkly, having finally stopped the potentially disastrous motion of the other lipsticks and eye pencils. Slowly, he/she stood up and scowled at Brianna.
“I think you’ve made enough of a mess, young lady. Why don’t you go back out and watch the show?” The sentiment was reflected in the faces of the two other stylists (actual women) who had come to Rita’s aid.
“I’m sorry,” Brianna repeated, looking down at her feet and starting to shuffle away in mock dejection. Apparently that was all that ‘Rita’ had to say; Brianna stole one last glance over her shoulder and saw him/her still scowling, trying to straighten the arrangement of make-up items on the counter. She smiled a bit to herself as she walked back into the buzzing central part of the backstage area. Picking her way through the crowd, she kept her little smile as she moved toward the door she had come in. Mission Accomplished, she thought proudly. Then her smile disappeared abruptly.
She had walked right into Jordan Anderson. He was just then, it seemed, coming back from the stage for a set break, and he looked down at Brianna with an eerie, quizzical look. He was very handsome, just as much so as in photos she’d seen.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
“Huh? Oh–um–wow!” Brianna snapped back into ‘fan’ mode. “Jordan Anderson! I can’t believe it! Oh, my Gaaawwwwdd! Um, can I get your autograph?” She fumbled in her little purse, trying not to look nervous–at least, not nervous in the wrong way.
“Uh, yeah, sure,” Jordan replied, looking like he wanted to get back to his little area (this relieved Brianna). She dug out a pen and a piece of paper and then handed them to him.
“Just–on the paper?” he asked, looking up, pen in hand.
“Oh, yeah–that’d be great,” Brianna nodded. Jordan shrugged and began to sign the bit of scrap paper. As he wrote, he spoke, and something frightening and possibly sinister came out:
“That’s a pretty cool watch,” he said, eyeing Brianna’s wrist-communicator and making her almost have a heart attack. “Where’d you get it?”
“Oh, um–The Sharper Image. It does all sorts of things.” Think fast, Brianna.
“Except tell the time, apparently,” Jordan noted.
Brianna was panicking inside now. She felt like she had to do something, so she took a huge gamble.
“Oh, but it does!” she grinned, tapping the talk button. “Wristwatch: what is the time?” she asked, praying silently.
*
In the basement of the museum, the three inactive members of the team looked at each other. Suki shrugged. Marvin said “Que?” The Professor instinctively looked at the clock on his desk, then put his finger to his lips to indicate that the others should be quiet. Slowly, he pressed the talk button on the desk unit and spoke.
“The time is eight-fifty-seven Eastern Standard Time,” he said in his smoothest, most proper British accent. Then he released the button and was silent.
*
Brianna breathed a deep but discreet sigh of relief at the sound of The Professor’s voice, or, moreover, the words it had spoken. He had understood her need and fulfilled it. He was a very smart, perceptive man.
“Pretty cool, huh?” She resumed her adoring fan persona, switching the communicator off entirely.
“Yeah... definitely,” Jordan replied, still seeming suspicious. “I feel like I’ve seen one before somewhere... ”
“Oh! Yeah, all the kids have them,” Brianna lied, flashing the princess smile. “Thanks for the autograph, Jordan! My friends won’t believe this!” She snatched the pen and paper back from him and walked quickly out the stage door.
“Sure... ” Jordan said. He still had a disturbing look on his face but was quickly distracted by two reporters who were suddenly at his side, and then some of the other members of the group came in through the stage door, further distancing him from his thoughts of a moment ago.
Brianna walked hurriedly through the lobby hallways, having (in a most unbecoming way, she felt) broken into a bit of a nervous sweat. Her vanity prevailing, she stopped at a bathroom off the side lobby to wash her face and apply a spritz of perfume, and spent a few minutes there to regain her composure. Then she made her way back through the thick intermission crowds and at last down the aisle to where their seats were, but was having a hard time finding them. There, she thought, scanning what should have been familiar rows, right next to the man with the navy officer’s hat–and the kid with the bright white Heatwavvve shirt that was way too big on him. But they weren’t there.
She dug her ticket stub out of her purse and checked the seat number, the row number. This was the right place. But no Samantha.
“Excuse me,” she said to the man in the naval hat. “Did you see my–my people leave, that were sitting here?”
“The ambulance guys took her away,” said the little boy in the big shirt. “The lady fainted or something.”
“Are you Brianna?” asked the man in the naval hat. Brianna looked at him and then at the boy. A wave of intense paranoia swept over her, and she questioned whether these people were to be trusted.
“Yes,” she said carefully after a long pause.
“They said for you to meet them near the front entrance.”
Brianna stood, stunned for a moment. She looked back and forth between the man and the boy, who was nodding, trying to detect any hint of a lie in their faces or voices. At last she turned and walked quickly back up the aisle, turning on her wrist-communicator in the process. She tapped the talk button and spoke into it as she stomped.
“Samantha?” she said, now completely on edge. “Samantha? Where are you? Professor? Can anybody hear me? What’s going on!?”
“Brianna,” Samantha’s voice came back over the device. “I’m in an ambulance. My mom is–” she sobbed. “My mom is unconscious–there’s a–a thing in her neck... ” she trailed off, still crying and unable to explain herself better. “A–like a–a dart or something. I think it came from the stage–I, I think it was Jordan! Bree, she’s not waking up!”
Brianna felt her friend’s pain, continuing toward the main entrance if for no other purpose than to put more distance between herself and Jordan. She wasn’t even sure if there would be anyone there to meet her anymore, but if there wasn’t, she decided, she would just keep walking out and hail a cab uptown to her home or maybe to the museum. She was just about to ask Samantha what to do when The Professor’s voice chirped from her wrist.
“Brianna,” he said firmly. “There is a car waiting for you outside Irving Plaza. You will get into it and meet us all at Bellevue Hospital, on First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, in the lobby. That is where they’ve taken Cindy. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Professor,” she came back, still walking briskly toward the venue’s main entrance.
“Good. We’ll all see each other very shortly. Smythe out.” He signed off, sounding like he was getting up to leave th
e office. “Oh–,” he said in an afterthought. “Did your... mission succeed? I just need to know, it’s still very important.”
“Yes, Professor, though we probably won’t get much out of it. I expect our... subject will be packed up and gone in two or three hours, if not sooner because of–well, because of what’s happened.” They both talked as if there were a possibility of someone listening in on them. Brianna guessed that in the secret agent business, this was always something that could happen, so it was prudent to communicate only as much information as was necessary to understand each other, even if they were on some crazy, time-piercing radio frequency.
“We will maintain radio silence until we see each other, all right?”
“Right,” Brianna agreed, spying a driver who was holding up a sign with her name on it and walking quickly toward him.
“Samantha?” The Professor echoed his plea for discretion on the airwaves.
“Yes. All right,” Samantha’s voice sobbed.
Brianna slid into the back seat of the waiting black car and sped away.
*
The hospital waiting room was a nervous place, as such places were likely to be. Everyone there was nervous about something–either their own health or the health of someone close to them. And all you could do was wait. It was terribly frustrating.
That was what the team of ‘adventurers’ was doing now, waiting. Brianna sat next to Samantha, who had Jason on her other side. Suki sat across from them with The Professor, mindlessly thumbing through a magazine that would have totally held her attention at any other time. They all watched the hands of the clock on the waiting room wall and thought about time.
SAMANTHA: If we could go back and prevent this from happening, my mom would be okay.
PROFESSOR SMYTHE: I should have realized something like this could happen. I need to figure a way out of this before anyone else gets hurt. And poor Cindy...
BRIANNA: I wasn’t there. Maybe I could’ve done something if I had got back just a little sooner. Oh, man, this is so scary.
JASON: It all happened so fast! It could’ve been me. Or Samantha. Why would anyone do such a thing to Cindy? I need another cup of coffee...
SUKI: Poor Samantha. I wish there was something I could do...
Their thoughts were interrupted by the attending doctor, who approached Jason and Samantha. He spoke quietly.
“Ms. Smart is in some sort of coma. The dart in her neck was coated with some sort of toxin. We–well, we don’t know what it is. We’re running a series of tests on the substance but so far it doesn’t conform to anything we know about in standard toxicology. I think it’s pretty safe to say that this was no random, childish prank. Someone planned this.”
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Jason responded in frustration. “Cindy–she sells tickets at the Natural History Museum. She’s–she’s just a regular person, you know?”
“It’s a bit disturbing,” the doctor nodded. “We’ve, ah, we’ve notified the N.Y.P.D. A detective is on his way.”
“Yeah, okay,” Jason wiped his brow nervously. He wasn’t sure what else to say.
“She’s in a stable condition, but until we find out more about what’s in her system, I’m afraid all we can do is wait.” The doctor formed a tight-lipped expression and lowered the clipboard he was holding, looking around at the gathering of concerned people. “If, ah, if you and... Samantha? If you two would like to stay, that would be great. The rest of you–well, until the detective decides whether or not to speak with you, you may as well go home.”
“Of course,” The Professor nodded. “I’ll leave my number with Jason and Samantha if the police need to reach me.” He hastily scribbled his office number onto a couple scraps of paper and handed them to Jason and Samantha, shooting a look to his primary time travel agent. “I’ll make sure these two get home,” he said, indicating Suki and Brianna.
All the adults nodded, and after Suki and Brianna had also left their phone numbers with Jason, they exited the hospital, having hugged Samantha and told her to stay strong.
Samantha sat, teary-eyed, staring into the middle distance. She was crushed, and somehow had begun to feel as if all of this was her fault. She absent-mindedly unclenched her fist, which was holding the piece of paper Professor Smythe had given her. She unfolded it and looked at it. It was more than just his office phone number. She read it to herself, wiping her nose and trying to focus.
S. - DO NOT mention anything about Jordan or T. Travel to the police. We will figure out how to fix this, I swear. Destroy this note.
For a second she was angry. Wasn’t The Professor in over his head here? Her mother was in a coma! Maybe the police should be involved... but then she began to realize things. Even if they believed her story, the police would raid The Professor’s labs, find the time machine and then... what? The F.B.I. would be called in, the government would seal off the basement of the museum and... no, Professor Smythe was right. They had to try something else. She got up and went to the bathroom, ripped his note into tiny shreds and sobbed as she flushed them down the toilet.
The Professor’s office was a busy headquarters once again. He had done his best to indicate an innocent, work-based relationship with Cindy Smart to the police detective, though he was now in constant fear of being under surveillance. He and Marvin had basically scrubbed his computer of any suspicious files and had transferred the massive amounts of time travel information onto flash drives, which The Professor now kept in a locked briefcase that he carried at all times. He was still very nervous, though, when Samantha returned to visit after three days at the hospital, and always locked his office doors now.
Samantha looked as exhausted as the rest of them, if not more so. None of them had slept more than a few hours a night since Cindy had collapsed, but at last Jason had had to go home for a day and had agreed to drop Samantha at the museum under the pretext that she and The Professor were researching natural toxins.
In fact, this was one of the things the group had been doing. The Professor rolled his desk chair back, turning the computer console over to a bleary-eyed Marvin, and began to detail what he could of the situation to Samantha.
“Hello, Samantha. You look tired–have you slept?”
“A little,” she replied.
“None of us have, hardly,” he went on. “I want to fill you in on what I can, though.” Samantha nodded.
“We’ve got some stuff to show you,” Marvin said, bringing up things on the computer screen.
“Of course,” The Professor began, “the first thing we tried was the most obvious–you recall I told you in one of our brief communicator talks that we tried to send Marvin back to Irving Plaza, before this happened.”
“Yeah,” Samantha nodded.
“Well, let us show you why this didn’t work. Marvin?” Marvin opened a file on the computer and a three-dimensional image popped up of a building, with bright points highlighted in several spots–floor, walls, ceiling. “Irving Plaza, that is to say, the building itself, has been, well, time-travel-proofed, from a point in time about eighteen hours before you all arrived there. These points you see,” he indicated the bright spots, “are some kind of devices that stabilize the space-time continuum to an impenetrable degree, at least to our means of manipulating it. In other words, we can’t insert anyone into this area, at that time.”
“Can you get anyone in before then?” Samantha asked hopefully.
“We tried that as well,” The Professor shook his head. “We sent Suki back, reluctantly, eighteen hours before and tried to have her wait until the show and get in from there, but this failed as well.” He looked over at Suki.
“I went, Samantha, I... got in. I saw all of you standing in line, but Professor Smythe told me not to let you notice me. I was on time and everything, but when I walked through the doors of the building, well... the show was over already. Everyone was mostly gone. I can’t explain it.” She looked back at The Professor.
“Nor can
I,” the tired-looking man sighed. “It seems our enemies have been getting smarter–figuring out time travel faster than we are. I daresay they have resources that can far outpace ours. They have somehow found a way to completely isolate a segment of space-time, so that anyone or anything that tries to enter it just shoots instantly to its other side, around it, but not through it. It’s terribly frustrating.”
“But–what about my mom, Professor!? She’s still in a coma! They can’t figure out what sort of–poison is in her body, and they keep asking Jason and I if she was ever involved in espionage, if we’re sure she wasn’t a target of some ninja assassin group!” She took a deep breath. “My brother is staying at my Aunt Tina’s house in Queens, where I guess I’m going too, if I don’t go back to the hospital. Jason’s picking me up here in a couple of hours.”
“I’m sorry, Samantha. I know this is hard, and we’re doing everything we can think of. There is some good news on a couple of fronts.”
“What!?” Samantha blurted out in exasperation.
“Well,” Marvin cut in, giving The Professor a chance to breathe. “We’ve isolated the toxin.” He brought up another computer display, this time of chemical compounds laid out in 3-D molecular structures.
“We got a sample from the dart,” Brianna said. “I had to go back for that one, when your mom was being put into the ambulance on a stretcher. Almost ran into myself, but they got me out in time.”
Samantha looked around at her friends. Apparently they had all been taking greater risks with time travel than The Professor had previously allowed.
“It’s all right,” Smythe came back to the discussion. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m fairly certain we’ve avoided any major temporal catastrophes.
“The toxin is organic. It comes from a floating, water-lily-type plant that only ever grew on the Yucatan Peninsula–not far from where we dug up the time machine, actually, but I think this is merely coincidence. Unfortunately, its only possible antidote would have to be derived from the same sort of plant, and it’s been extinct for close to a thousand years.”
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