Time-Travel Duo

by James Paddock

  “We’ll accept that for now, but we’ll keep a close eye on you,” Thomas said.

  “And as far as Annie goes, I’m not applying any pressure. I understand where she is. I want her to know I’m here when she’s ready and if she’s never ready I’m still her friend.”

  “Honorably said,” said Howard, “but if I had a shotgun, I wouldn’t be putting it away just yet.”

  The cool morning air hung heavy for a few seconds before Charles said, “These pancakes are getting cold so let’s get busy.”

  Charles turned back to his duties at the grill while Howard and Thomas reset their chairs and grabbed plates. “Breakfast is ready,” Thomas called toward the open door of the trailer.

  Patrick couldn’t do anything but remain rooted in place, not sure if he was invited to eat, not sure if he had the appetite if he was. He looked at the trailer.

  “Grab a plate and sit back down,” Howard said to him. “We won’t bite anymore.”

  “But the virtual shotgun is still loaded,” Thomas added and grinned.

  Patrick forced a nervous grin and then walked over and picked up a plate. He lifted several pancakes from the stack, forked a slice of ham, poured on a generous amount of syrup and returned to Annie’s chair. He stared at the hamsters and wished he hadn’t gotten involved in this craziness. Maybe he’d wake up soon and hear his dad making noises in the bathroom.

  He looked up just as Annie stepped out of the trailer and suddenly became tossed between hoping it was a nightmare and being glad it was not.

  Annie walked directly up to Patrick. “You’re in my chair.”

  He jumped up and stepped aside. As she sat down she took the plate of pancakes and ham from him. “Thank you.” She took a bite. “This is good. You should get some for yourself.” She grinned at him expecting a comeback or a battle over the plate of breakfast.

  “I’m not really hungry.” After searching unsuccessfully for dry ground on which to sit he pushed his hands into his pockets and stood to the side, next to Annie. “So is everything ready?”

  “As ready as it’s going to get for the moment. You’re not looking very well. Are you okay?”

  His eyes shifted to Thomas, who was busy on his breakfast, and then back to Annie. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just not hungry.”

  Chapter 53

  June 15, 2007

  Patrick was walking in circles, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, when he heard the high-pitched sound. He stopped and stared at the trailer, his eyes wide. It seemed to glow, even in the bright morning sun. After ten or fifteen seconds the sound faded off. The glow lasted another five seconds and then everything returned to normal, except for the lingering dead silence. After a time a bird chirped, and then another and once again Patrick became aware of the gurgle of the river. He considered going through the trees to the water’s edge and staring across it, a way of soothing his troubled and confused mind, his troubled and confused . . .

  Stop it Patrick! Don’t let your heart go there. You’re in way over your head; a simple bloke trying to stand up against a bunch of gun-toting bodyguards with IQs and doctorates to the max running science fiction experiments on the smartest, most beautiful woman you have ever known. One morning you’re a simple Wal-Mart sales associate and the next you’re in the middle of a science fiction B-grade movie.

  He stepped to the edge of the trees where he could see glimpses of the river without leaving the confines of the camp, staying within visual and audible range of the trailer door. He stared through the trees until it all fell out of focus, until the veil of deep thought dropped a haze across his eyes.

  But this isn’t a B-grade movie, Patrick. As unreal as it may seem, this is the real thing.

  The high-pitched whine started up again. He turned his head to look. The sound was shorter and the glow less intense or at least it seemed that way from his altered perspective.

  He could just walk away now and forget everything he’d seen. Could he do that? Would they let him do that? Would they come looking for him? Would Annie come looking for him or would she return to Boston and forget he existed?

  He put his back to the river and walked over to the steps leading up to the trailer door. With his hands still thrust in his pockets he stood and waited. A minute later the door opened and Annie appeared with the hamsters in their transport cage. She came down the steps and handed them to him.

  “Here,” she said. “You’ve been designated the hamster whisperer.” She placed her hand on his shoulder, kissed him on the cheek and went back into the trailer.

  “This is weird,” Annie said to her grandfather. “I already know I’ll have to get out to pee so why don’t I just go pee right now?”

  “Do you feel like you have to?” Her grandfather said.

  “No.”

  “Then why try to change the timing?”

  “It’s just weird.” She ducked down and crawled into the chamber. Once settled with her legs crossed she looked out through the opening at her grandfather and Professor Bradshaw. “Now what?”

  “Just sit still for a moment while your body mass is read.”

  Annie stared through the portal at the side of Thomas’ head as he watched the monitor. After a time she looked at the smooth, white surface surrounding her, feeling a little claustrophobic. She shook it off and put her focus back on the professor.

  It was another half minute before he said, “Mass index is 19.8. Weight is 50.6 kilograms.”

  “Wonderful,” she said.

  “Are you ready?”

  She looked out at him for another couple of seconds and then crawled out of the chamber. “I have to pee. You’ll have to recalculate.”

  “A couple ounces of fluid won’t make enough difference,” Robert said, “But the system will do it automatically anyway.”

  Annie looked at the monitor over Professor Bradshaw’s shoulder for a few seconds and then turned to head out the door.

  “Grab the blood pressure kit while you’re in there,” Robert said.

  Both Bradshaw and Annie looked at him.

  “It’s in the closet next to the bathroom.” He saw them staring at him. “What?”

  “We knew last night that we’d do blood pressure because you told us. Why didn’t any of us mention it until now?”

  “Very interesting,” said Charles’ bodiless voice over the intercom. Although sealed in the power plant control room, he and Professor Grae had full communications with everyone else; they were in on every conversation.

  “Yeah; interesting,” Annie said, and continued out the door.

  Patrick was sitting on the steps when Annie stepped out, the cage of hamsters in his lap. One finger was poked through the cage. A hamster was busy sniffing at it while Patrick was busy thinking about the spot on his shoulder were Annie had placed her hand and the spot on his cheek where she had placed her lips.

  He jumped to his feet holding the small caged animals as if ready to present them back to her. “You done already?”

  “Not yet. I have to pee first.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  She bent forward and looked at the hamsters. “How’re you guys doing? What did you see between here and there? What did you feel?”

  “Are you scared?” Patrick asked.

  Annie straightened up and looked out at the tall pines. “Kind of like my first airplane trip; I was apprehensive but excited; not really scared because I knew people did it all the time.”

  “People don’t time travel all the time.”

  “No, but these guys just did. So did my mother, and as a baby, me.”

  “Not one of them has ever been debriefed. You really don’t know what to expect.”

  “Actually, that’s not true. Uncle James and Aunt Abby were there when my mother arrived.”

  “When she traveled back to. . .”

  “Nineteen forty-three. Yes. Aunt Abby was a nurse at the hospital where I was born that same night. Uncle James was a police officer.”

  Patrick ju
st looked at her.

  “More of the back story. I’ll tell you about it another time. Right now I still have to pee and we still have to do my vitals.” She crossed to the RV and went inside.

  When Annie returned from the RV several minutes later she was carrying the blood pressure kit. Patrick was sitting on the step, the cage at his side. She put her hand on his shoulder again. “Just make sure the place doesn’t burn down while I’m gone.”

  He turned and watched her disappear through the door and thought about the heat of her hand and her kiss earlier. He wanted so much to feel more of her touch and wondered where this all would lead.

  He looked down at the hamsters and then lifted them back onto his lap. “Hamster whisperer!” he said to them with a snorting laugh. Four unblinking, big, brown eyes gazed back at him. “Maybe you have some advice for me, you all-wise time travelers?”

  Instead of answering, the brown eyes shifted from him to something to his left. He turned his head to follow and found that the door to the trailer was slightly ajar. “Thank you,” he whispered, set the cage aside and stood.

  Chapter 54

  June 15, 2007

  Opening the door an inch, Patrick peered in. Bradshaw was putting aside the blood-pressure cuff. The edge of Dr. Hair’s arm was visible to the left. Beyond, Annie was on her hands and knees, crawling into what he figured was the time-travel chamber. The sight of her posterior sent a heat through his center. As she turned to settle, and before she could catch him ogling her, he stepped away. He counted to ten, scanned the tree line, and then looked back in. She was looking out of the chamber, saying something to Bradshaw, who, along with her grandfather, had his back to the door.

  Patrick eased the door open further, slipped in, and then pulled it as far closed as he could without making a noise. Placing his back against the only wall space available in the tightly packed room, he settled to the floor. Through the narrow passage between her grandfather and Professor Bradshaw, Annie was watching him. He gave her a tentative, shy wave. She didn’t wave back and she didn’t smile; she didn’t give him away.

  “Mass index is 19.8. Weight is 50.5 kilograms,” Bradshaw said. “Almost no change.”

  “Then let’s get on with it,” Annie said. “I’m impatiently waiting at the other end.”

  “Nervous?” Her grandfather said.

  “No. I already know how it’s going to turn out. Kind of anticlimactic.”

  “Speaking of that; when you arrive you’ll tell Mister Walshe to go get the blood pressure kit.”

  “Right.”

  “Last night, while Walshe was taking your blood pressure, you remembered that Patrick was about to pass out, but you were too late to stop it. This time tell him to sit down before sending Mister Walshe for the kit.”

  She nodded her head. “Good idea; see if I can change history.”

  After several seconds of silence Bradshaw said, “Standby. Systems still go in the plant?”

  “All levels are normal and stable,” Professor Grae’s bodiless voice said. “Cleared to proceed.”

  “Understand. We have a go. Engage SMMUDWAGEN.”

  Several seconds passed during which time Patrick couldn’t see anything happening, though there was a whine, like a high speed motor starting up. Within seconds it passed out of his range of hearing.

  “SMMUDWAGEN engaged,” her grandfather said.

  “Thirty seconds,” Bradshaw said. “A-okay, Annie?”

  “Peachy.” Her eyes again settled on Patrick.

  “Twenty seconds. Goggles and ear protection, Annie.”

  Annie winked at Patrick and then pulled down her goggles. From around her neck she found her ear protection and lifted them into place. Patrick could feel his heart pounding and realized he had stopped breathing. He took a deep breath and then, unknowingly, held it again. SMMUDWAGEN?

  “Ten seconds.”

  Annie pulled her knees up tight and rested her forehead on them.

  “Five seconds.”

  “Initiating sequence,” said her grandfather.

  A high-pitched scream suddenly sounded sending Patrick’s hands to his ears. A white light poured out of the chamber a few seconds later. When it became too much he closed his eyes and turned his face down until, just like Annie, his forehead was pressed against his knees. The light was so bright he could sense it through his eyelids. Unlike earlier when they were doing the hamsters, the whine and light went on and on. Seconds went to a minute and then two minutes at least. He remembered the discussion he overheard 12 hours earlier, the rough calculation of three minutes based on Annie’s mass. At what he was sure had to be way beyond three minutes he wondered if it would ever stop. And then, suddenly, the sound ceased and then shortly after so did the light.

  He dropped his hands and raised his head. When he opened his eyes the chamber was empty. He noticed that one of Robert Hair’s screens showed a black, thick spike on a light gray background overlaid with a graph. The spike—like something drawn by a child with a crayon—seemed to rise to a peak out of a baseline. It shifted and moved and then suddenly collapsed to almost nothing.

  “She stepped out of the circle,” Robert said. “Disengaging.” He did something with his mouse while watching a different screen. “Auto-reengagement activated. Nine minutes thirty seconds to initiate active reengagement. SMMUDWAGEN in hot idle.”

  “Howard?” Thomas said.

  “All’s well here. The plant is running like a charm.”

  “By the way, you have company,” said another voice over the intercom.

  “Well aware, Charles.”

  “Shall we kill him?”

  “A bit extreme.”

  “I agree,” said Howard.

  “We do need to send him another message, though.”

  “Why don’t I just sit on him while you shoot him in the foot?” said Charles.

  “Why do I need to shoot him, Charles? You sitting on him should be message enough.”

  “Quite true,” Howard said.

  “Eight minutes,” Robert said as though not privy to the conversation going on around him.

  “And shooting him would be messy,” Howard added.

  “Did you ever clean your gun after that last incident?” said Charles.

  “No, now that you mention it. I was too busy trying to dispose of the body.”

  “And cleaning up the blood,” Howard said.

  “That, too. I guess you’re just going to have to sit on him.”

  “And slash his tires,” Charles said.

  “Seven minutes.”

  “Slash his tires?” Thomas said. “What kind of message is that? I suppose you’d then want to go egg his house.”

  “It’s a thought.”

  There was a long silence. Patrick knew that they were playing with him. He thought about playing back, but decided against it. He did wonder how they knew he was there. Neither Robert nor Thomas had turned around and Charles and Howard were hidden away in the space beyond the wall at Patrick’s back, he assumed. He looked up and spotted what looked to be a camera—the size of a small cell phone—tucked up against the ceiling in the far corner. He looked over his head and found a duplicate. Between the two of them, the space was covered.

  Robert said, “Six minutes. You’ve got to realize that if you guys do any of those things it’ll piss off Annie. For some strange reason she likes him.”

  “Lord knows why,” Charles said.

  “You jealous?” Howard said.

  “Noooo! Just don’t understand her attraction to a University of Montana hick when she could have the pick of any MIT brain she wants.”

  “You don’t understand her choice of bronze over brains?” Thomas said.

  “Bronze? I don’t know if I’d go that far. I mean look at me. Bronze and brains, and she chose hick.”

  Robert laughed and then started coughing. After a time when he seemed to have it under control he said, “Five minutes,” and then started coughing again. Thomas opened a drawer
and pulled out a pair of goggles and earplugs. He turned and tossed them to Patrick. When Robert ceased coughing, silence ensued except for his announcement of the minutes remaining.

  “Thirty seconds,” Robert said. “Ready to shift from auto-reengagement to active reengagement. SMMUDWAGEN ready.”

  “Plant status?” Thomas said.

  “We’re still go.”

  “Standby.”

  “Twenty seconds,” Robert said. “Reengaging.”

  Patrick’s eyes jumped back and forth between the chamber and the screen with the flat graph, the latter of which suddenly changed from flat to a small level of black grass-like spikes.

  “Reengaged and locked.”

  “Anytime, Annie,” Thomas said.

  Several seconds later the graph surged to its previous high level.

  “She’s in,” Robert announced. “Five seconds.”

  Patrick’s heart raced a good ten beats before Robert said, “Let’s bring her home. Extract now!”

  For a minute it appeared that nothing was happening. Patrick tried to calm his unease, tried to convince himself that these men knew what they were doing, that Annie knew what she was doing. After all, it was her life on the line and she trusted them. But they sat there doing nothing, staring at their screens, the only sound being the occasional click of a mouse.

  And then he thought he could hear a high-pitched tone, but way off in the distance. He pulled out an earplug. The pitch was there and it was growing. He replaced the earplug and noticed that the chamber was starting to glow. He drew in a breath, pulled down the goggles and nervously waited.

  The dreams were strange. Not so much scary strange as weird strange, as though trapped in a kaleidoscope snowstorm, a psychedelic kaleidoscope snowstorm. It went on for minutes or hours or maybe even days, until with a sudden flash Annie found herself looking beyond her arm and pointing finger. The words, “don’t want you seeing my naked butt,” came tumbling out of her mouth. Confused, she dropped her arm and turned her head to look out the portal at Patrick’s open mouth stare from across the length of the room. The confusion and the remaining remnants of the dream faded and she instantly understood her words and what was going on. She crawled out of the chamber.