There was a footprint in the dirt. It was large and round, and I wanted to doubt it, but I knew immediately where I had seen ones just like it before.
Then I heard a sizzling sound behind me. I turned and saw something at the edge of the clearing, like a ripple in my vision that made the trees behind it look blurry. It was like I had something in my eye, but I blinked and nothing changed, so I flicked one of the rocks I was still holding in that direction—
The spot shimmered, and white sparks showered to the ground. There was a flash of bright light in the shape of a large, humanlike figure dressed in a long black cloak, a hood over its head, and wearing thick goggles with round eyepieces that reflected in the sparks. The figure disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared, but not before I could tell that it was coming right toward me.
Run! I spun and started toward the Jupiter hatch, but almost immediately skidded to a halt. There were more footprints between me and the steps. I flung the last rock I had toward the entrance—
Another shower of sparks, and a second figure in a heavy cloak flashed into sight right in front of the hatch, waiting to grab me.
CHAPTER
Help!” I shouted, and sprinted toward the trees. I careened down the trail, stumbling over the rocky ground. As I ran, I stabbed at my communicator, turning on my flashlight.
I reached the tree line and glanced over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see anything. I bent and grabbed a rock. Spun, threw it straight behind me—
Zap! One of the figures was right there, reaching for me.
I turned and ran as hard as I could, the light bobbing in front of me, my legs wheeling. Down the zigzagging trail to the lakeside. I grabbed another rock and twisted and threw it, but my throw went wide. Just like when Coach tried to play me at shortstop. I just knew they were still there and I kept on sprinting, my feet pounding as branches whipped against my arms and legs.
Thoughts blurred through my mind, too fast to answer: Who were they? Probably aliens. Why were they after me? Because I’d used the doorway. What did they want? To capture me or kill me or both!
I reached the grove of clapping flowers, all curled up tight in the dark. Ahead was the trail that led to the caves, but that was probably the last place I wanted to go. Maybe if I went up the hill—
Suddenly, light flashed all around me, and I felt a surge of electricity, like I’d been shocked. I tripped and crashed to the ground.
I rolled over onto my side, blinking at the brightness, trying to get my feet back under me, but something heavy pushed me down. I waved my communicator light and saw the forest blur. Clawing at the nearby ground, I found a branch and threw it straight up. It flashed in a burst of sparks. One of those figures was right there, looming over me. It was so close now that I could see that its goggles were glowing with a deep red light from inside.
“Leave me alone!” I shouted.
A heavy grip yanked me up by my shoulder, and as soon as the figure touched me, it appeared in full view.
“Let me go!” I struggled, but I couldn’t break free—
WHUMP!
The figure’s grip released and it flew backward, becoming invisible again. Ferns and flowers were crushed where it hit the ground.
I stumbled back and slammed into something solid, metal, and warm.
My Robot!
“Hey!” I shouted. “You came!”
He looked at me with his blue starlit face. I hadn’t seen him in days, but then in my other memories it had only been hours. Which one was it for him?
He pushed me firmly behind him and then swung his fist again, as if at nothing, but there was a shower of sparks and the second one of those figures went flying.
Then the Robot whirled around, lifted me onto his back, and took off up the hill with long, bounding strides.
“I’m so glad you found me,” I said to him. I looked behind us but couldn’t tell if any of those figures were back there. Another wave of dizziness washed over me, and I leaned against the Robot and stared out at the dark woods.
He ran until we reached the top of the hill, and he stopped in a clearing and bent to let me down.
“Are we safe?” I said, peering into the trees behind us. The Robot’s head panned back and forth, scanning.
I sat down hard on the dirt. Moonlight reflected on the water below. I saw the lights of the camp at Hiroki’s Jupiter across the lake. Far off in the distance, a few fires were still burning from Victor’s crash. I saw lights sweeping around out there, too: Mom and Judy and Don, maybe other colonists, searching for survivors.
“Where have you been?” I asked, my voice barely more than a croak. “Something pretty crazy has happened.”
He still didn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry I sent you away, but it wasn’t really me—well, I mean, it was me, but I didn’t want to, and there’s another reality where I don’t.”
The Robot’s head paused from his scanning. “Danger,” he said.
“Do you remember that? The other timeline I’m talking about?”
The Robot surveyed the forest one more time and then clomped over. With a hum of servos, he knelt beside me. His face lights were making the figure-eight pattern, and now a small light began to flicker on the side of his head. The light formed into a picture on the ground in front of us, a three-dimensional image like a hologram. I saw a figure sitting on the ground in the dark and realized it was me. There was someone else sitting there: Judy. We were looking at something, and I realized that it was the doorway in the cave.
“This is from…” My thoughts clicked into place. “You remember it, too! You remember being there!” And now I could picture him there, with that strange flickering light, his own version of my video recorder.
In the recording, Judy and I were talking.
Does she have any idea the kind of trouble she could cause? I heard Judy ask. Is she even thinking of how worried we are?
She probably doesn’t realize how long she’s been gone, I said.
“This was the first time,” I said to the Robot. “This is when it happened.”
The Judy in the hologram pointed at the doorway. There she is!
And then the doorway flashed, and Penny stumbled back into the cave. Even though I remembered this, it was a huge relief to see it happening outside of my own memories.
What were you thinking? Judy said, and then Penny replied, Having a genius moment, and she opened her arms and dumped a mess of candy onto the cave floor. Behold!
“You recorded this because you knew, didn’t you?” I said to the Robot. “But how did you save it? You didn’t actually go through the portal… then again, you are a super-advanced alien being who can probably detect changes in space-time like this.”
“Danger.”
“Yeah, you were right. Believe me, I see that now.”
Did you steal this? Judy was saying in the Robot’s recording.
Well, I mean, sort of? But it wasn’t even really me, right? I was still in school, so…
But it was you, Penny! Judy was shouting. If you’d been seen, if you’d gotten caught—
“She did get caught,” I said to the Robot. “You know that, too, don’t you?”
A moment later, there was a weird glitch in the video feed, like a bolt of static ripping across the picture, and when it cleared, Penny and the candy were gone.
Here, Penny, try these, the me in the recording said, holding out his hand, but his hand was empty.
And then the footage abruptly ended. The little light on the Robot’s head stopped flickering.
“That was the moment, wasn’t it?” I said. “When Penny’s shoplifting changed the past. I remember the other her, the one in the past on Earth, denying it, but of course no one believed her. And there was no way anyone ever could have imagined the truth. And Penny was so depressed after, she kept insisting she hadn’t done it.…” I remembered her sulking around the house in those months before we left. She’d even gotten kicked out of the schoo
l play because the stealing had happened during that dress rehearsal.
“And now everything’s gotten worse with the colonists,” I said. “Did you see Victor’s Jupiter crash?” I pointed toward the distant wreckage, and the Robot looked in that direction. “You and me are the only ones who know about this. We have to change it back.”
The Robot’s face lights started flowing toward the center.
Something cracked in the trees nearby. The Robot turned toward it. “Danger,” he said.
“Those aliens showed up right after I thought about using the doorway to go back and stop Penny.” I remembered something Judy had said when we first found the doorway, about how it had to be scanning our brains. “Maybe now they can hear my thoughts,” I said. “Maybe they’ve been watching us since we left the cave, and when I thought about using the doorway again, they wanted to stop me. You can see them, can’t you?”
The Robot kept scanning the edge of the clearing.
“Can you get me back to Hiroki’s ship? It’s probably a little safer there.”
The Robot turned and held out his hands. I stood, and this time he lifted me up and put me on his shoulders. He started to jog back down the hill toward the trail.
I kept my eyes peeled for blurring but didn’t see any. Maybe the aliens didn’t want to mess with the Robot again. Or maybe they were busy coming up with a way to stop him, and it would only be a matter of time before they returned.
CHAPTER
The Robot stepped to the edge of the camp and paused, just within the shadows of the trees. The chariot was still gone, which meant Mom and Judy weren’t back yet.
“What is it?” I said.
The Robot motioned toward the hatch of the Jupiter. I squinted, and a second later I saw the slightest blur. “They’re still here,” I whispered.
The Robot retreated slowly into the shadows.
“Will!” Hiroki was waving to us from down in the trees, behind a pile of boulders. We moved quietly over and saw that his daughter and granddaughter were with him.
“Your family was asking about you,” Hiroki said as we arrived. “They will be glad to know that you’re all right.” Hiroki gave me that gentle smile that he always managed to have, one that helped calm me down in almost any situation.
“Have they found any survivors?” I asked.
“So far, no luck. I have not told them yet about this.” Hiroki pointed to the blur by the hatch. “They came on board, looking around. Aiko was the first to spot them.” He rubbed his granddaughter’s shoulder. Her eyes flashed at me, but she looked quickly away, and I noticed that she was shaking.
“They didn’t seem interested in us,” Hiroki added, “but we thought it best not to stick around. I take it you know what those things are?”
“Yeah,” I said. I tapped the Robot and he let me down, and we crouched beside Hiroki. “They’re from a cave that me and Judy”—I almost said and Penny but I stopped myself—“found. Well, from a doorway inside that cave.”
“A doorway?” said Hiroki.
“It kinda lets you move through time. And space.”
“I see.…” Hiroki nodded toward the blurry being. “Their presence also suggests that you have used this doorway.”
“Kinda?” I said.
“And are you now going to tell me that this current moment has been altered from what it might have been?”
“How did you know?”
Hiroki smiled. “I didn’t. But it was the natural supposition from what you’ve already said. If such a doorway really does exist, it seems almost impossible that you would not at least test it. It’s what almost any human would have done.”
“Judy didn’t. My mom probably wouldn’t.”
“Don’t be so sure. Especially given our current predicament.”
“What we did changed things,” I began, and I told him what I knew about Penny’s trip through the door, and what had happened.
Hiroki took off his glasses and cleaned them on his sleeve. “It’s strange.… I have been experiencing more than a usual amount of the feeling that I’ve been here before. I’ve often thought that was the sensation, however briefly, of another life lived. Based on what you’re saying, I may have been right.”
“I don’t know if things are a little different or a lot different,” I said, “but I do know that we’re in more danger than we used to be.”
“It is hard to say how many different variables would be changed,” said Hiroki. “Every action and condition influences countless others, spreading out across a system. A phenomenon often referred to as the butterfly effect.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that,” I said.
“It is a helpful metaphor,” said Hiroki. “No one knows quite how this would play out in terms of altering variables in time, because no one has successfully traveled through time… until you, it seems.”
“Yeah, well, I was going to try to change things back. I figured if I went and stopped Penny from stealing the candy, everything would return to the way it was.”
Hiroki nodded. “That could work, but it is still dangerous. You would need to be very careful to interact with as little of the world as possible. We have no idea what slight alteration could lead to big changes.”
“Sure, no pressure,” I said.
“Grandfather,” Aiko said quietly, looking at us with wide eyes, “why not go back and warn everyone about the attack on the Resolute? Then we might be able to avoid all this in the first place.”
“Do you think that would work?” I said.
Hiroki sighed, and a smile crossed his face. “One of the great blessings of the human mind is the ability to wonder, to think what if. There would be no problem-solving without it. And yet, it can be a curse as well, when we turn to wondering about our past and how things could have gone differently. The past is to be learned from, but the future is what we should seek to change.” Hiroki’s brow wrinkled like he was deep in thought.
He drew a dot in the dirt with his index finger and then started drawing concentric circles around it. “Imagine that you change one thing about the past. It is like dropping a stone in a pond, causing waves and ripples of effect through time. When you try to change another thing, you drop a second stone in, and not only are you adding more ripples, those ripples are interacting with the other ripples, and the patterns become increasingly complex. Things could change far beyond what you intend, and there could be many unforeseen consequences. I think, for the moment, we should focus on trying to catch that first stone before it even hits the water. Then we can think about whether or not it is worth trying to make larger changes. That is”—he turned back to the Jupiter hatch—“if our new friends will even let you near the doorway again.”
“Yeah, I don’t think they’re going to like that,” I said.
Just then, my communicator buzzed. “Will, this is Judy.”
“Hey,” I said, ducking down behind the bushes.
“Why are you whispering?”
“Just, um…” If I told her about the aliens, that might make her and Mom hurry back here, which would only put more people in danger. “It’s late and people are asleep.” I could feel Hiroki eyeing me, but he didn’t say anything. “How are you guys doing?”
“It’s not good,” said Judy. “No sign of survivors, but we’ll keep looking. I don’t think we’ll be back for a few hours, so you should probably try to get some rest.”
I glanced up at the ship, at the blurry forms by the stairs. “Yeah, okay.”
“Is there something wrong? I mean, besides, you know, everything?”
“Not really.”
“At dawn we should tell Mom about the doorway and then take her there. The more I think about it, the more I think using it is the only way to save everyone, though I have no idea how yet.”
“Yeah, um… sounds good. See you later. Be careful.”
“Thanks. You too.”
As I lowered my communicator, the Robot tapped my shoulder and motioned toward
the path.
“What?” I said. He motioned again. “You want to go back the way we came—or do you want to go back to the cave?”
His light flowed faster toward the center, and he turned like he wanted me to get on his back.
“But Judy and my mom…” But in this reality, Mom had made me send the Robot away, so on top of everything about the doorway and Penny, I was also going to have to explain what he was doing here.
“I think we’re going to go to the doorway now,” I said to Hiroki. “The Robot can fight off these guys, and the sooner we fix this, the better.”
Hiroki nodded. “I am hesitant to advise you to do something so dangerous, but in this case… good luck. We will keep watch here.”
“Thanks. Hopefully when I see you, um…”
He smiled. “We won’t even remember that we spoke.”
“Right.”
CHAPTER
I held on to the Robot’s shoulders as he loped down the hillside into the dark forest, away from camp. But we hadn’t gone ten meters when I started to worry: How were we going to avoid these aliens?
“We should probably stay off the trail,” I said, and the words were barely out of my mouth when the Robot turned sharply and started to push through the woods, away from the lakeside and toward the mountains, taking a route that I’d never been on, one that didn’t even seem to have a path.
Soon we reached a different section of the crevasse, but instead of finding a log to lay across it, the Robot leaped over it in one huge stride.
As we went, I tried to formulate a plan: If we could get back to the doorway, I was going to need to find Penny on the right day. But which day was that in my memories? The answer might be in my video journal. I was pretty sure I’d made an entry the night that she’d been caught and expelled… except, wait, this video recorder showed the other reality, where she didn’t get expelled. I closed my eyes and tried to sort the memories.… Okay, in that reality, Penny had asked me to get footage of her play on opening night, and I was pretty sure she’d said her dress rehearsal was that morning.
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