Focusing again on the portal, he envisioned the desk and the paperclips, and his trips through space and time. He had accepted the portal's use as a tool, but hadn't explored the realms of physics that had been proven. Limiting knowledge of the portal hadn't protected Fritz and Linda, his priority. A soft tap interrupted his thoughts. Doesn't it always.
Ms. Crispin stuck her head in, and held a cell out. “Mr. President, the general.”
He thanked her and walked out to the garden. “Sorry to disturb your vacation, Jim. I hope you'll come back now. We have our own Caballero.”
When he disconnected, he surveyed his view of the South Lawn. No matter what happens, I'll never have an office with a view that matches this.
Chapter 24
Linda
I'D BEEN ENJOYING watching the snow falling through the family room window when a car door closed. A young man headed up our walkway. Not recognizing either the car or the young man, I opened the door as he took the four steps two at a time. I hadn't had a visitor in a while, and certainly not someone I didn't know. I opened the storm door and asked him what he wanted.
“Ms. Russell, I'm Eric Silver. Mr. R was my history teacher. I'm home on break and I want to talk with him about a project I'm working on.”
I told him that my husband wasn't at home.
“Will he be home soon? I can come back later. It's about time travel, Ms. Russell. I've found a way to create a new portal.”
I remember those words clearly because my knees buckled and I grabbed the door frame to keep from falling. Eric pulled the door open and reached in to steady me.
“Are you okay? You do know about the portal, don't you?”
I told him I did, too well, and after regaining my balance, I invited him in. When I opened the door, snowflakes beat him inside. As I had so many times with Fritz, we continued our conversation at the kitchen table. I offered him a drink and he said he'd have one if I did. He didn't want to bother me, he said. He couldn't have known how little a bother that would be.
“Is diet okay?”
“Sure. Anything.”
While I poured, I looked him over. He was as tall as Ashley, with a comfortably short length of blondish hair. His golden-glow tan spoke of time spent outdoors. I handed him the soda and sat down across from him. I asked him to tell me what he'd found.
“Well, Ms. Russell, I'm not sure where to start. I'm in my freshman year at MIT, and just getting a general sense of what school is like. Boston's a great area to go to college.”
“It is, Eric, but I meant about the portal.”
“Do you think Mr. R will be okay with me telling you? The president made me take an oath not to talk to anyone but Mr. R about it.”
“If you feel uncomfortable talking about it, just tell me in general terms.”
“Well, it all started in September. Walking back to the dorm, my lab partner and I witnessed a spectacular meteor shower. We sat down and watched it, and began talking about what it must have been like before TV and telescopes. And all the bright lights that interfere with a clear view of the stars. We talked about the imagination those primitive people must have had. “Orion, that's my favorite constellation, glimmered low in the sky. For me, it's a welcoming of winter. All the summer stars are hidden and Orion's Belt dominates. Sorry, I'm getting sidetracked.”
I understood. Fritz and I had talked about the artists who could look up at scattered stars and draw pictures and create stories that have survived through history.
“Mr. R told us something like that too. We were studying the Civil War period, just before the storm when the lightning hit him. He told us about the Underground Railroad, and he played a recording of…”
“Follow the Drinking Gourd,” I interrupted. “The first time he gave that lesson, he played it for me too. And talked about the story he had prepared for his classes.” I could feel my eyes well up.
“Are you sure you're okay, Ms. Russell?”
I wiped my eyes and told him to keep going. He said that he spotted the Big Dipper that night and he understood that he'd continue along that road, until he discovered how time travel worked. “If I succeed,” he said, “I'll be one more in a line of people who have followed the stars through history.”
“So what happened that brings you here now?”
“A few days later, a storm flooded a lot of the campus. A large puddle blocked our way into the lab building, so we waited. My shoes were new and I didn't want to wreck them. I would have to step through it eventually, but not at that moment. My lab partner picked up a stone and tossed it in the middle, and we watched the waves scatter. That gave me an idea. So…”
“Eric, I don't mean to interrupt, but you said you found another portal. Did you get inside?”
“Not exactly. I had seen Mr. R open the portal and how the paperclips worked. I watched Mr. Almeida hook up the doorknob to the generator, so I did the same thing. I used a picture of my room in my parents' house. I opened the door and the room materialized. So did a younger me, as a kid. I just shut the door. Ms. Russell, really, I don't want to be rude, but I promised I wouldn't say anything. My lab partner thinks we discovered something new. I didn't even tell her.”
I asked if he had the president's permission, would he tell me the whole story? When he said sure, and asked me not to be angry. I told him not to worry, that I might have a quick solution. At this point, I called Jane and told her she should come over now. I told her that Eric said that he'd found a way into the portal.
Chapter 25
Jane
“HELLO, ERIC,” I said. “We haven't actually met but I know about you. MIT, last year's valedictorian. Linda, Eric is the student who put together the play last spring.” Linda said she understood the play had been successful, but she hadn't seen it.
“Linda was finishing up with her MBA, Eric. Otherwise she'd have been there.”
“That's okay. We had sell-outs for all the shows. Mr. Gilbert missed it, too. We made a video and gave it to him.”
“I've seen it. You did an awesome job. Now, what's this about the portal?”
Eric told me the same story he told Linda, and that he wanted to honor his word to the president. That didn't surprise me. The president needed men like Eric around him, the kind of person who put value to his word. I told him I thought I could arrange that permission for him.
“Mr. President, sorry to bother you, but I'm at Linda's, talking to an old friend of yours, Eric Silver. It seems he's found a way into the portal, but without your okay, he's trying to figure out how much to say. He said he made you a promise.”
The president said he had one thing to take care of, but he'd be here within the hour. I told Eric what the president said.
“Look, I didn't mean to upset everyone's schedule. I can come back another time. I'll be here for a few days.”
“Mr. President, did you hear all that.” I laughed a little at his response. “He said he'll be here in a half hour.”
While we waited, Eric told us about sitting under the stars, night after night with his lab partner. He said they talked about the universe, and the possibility of multiple universes and multiple dimensions. He told us she expected to major in physics and wanted to work for NASA.
“One night, she asked me if I thought time travel was possible. Since I knew the answer, I just said yes. Then she started to talk about how everything is connected. Even if time travel wasn't real, she said energy was.” Eric scratched his nose, gathering his next set of thoughts. “Energy can't be destroyed, we know that. And the human brain runs on electrical energy. From synapse to synapse, every thought, every idea, becomes energy. If we can't destroy it, then it takes some other form. Imagine multiple dimensions and energy flowing through all of them. That means we are all interconnected through time and space for all of time. From dimension to dimension, universe to universe, it's all floating out there.”
At the time, I thought, “wow, and he's only a freshman.”
Chapter 26
Linda
THE DOORBELL ENDED Eric's soliloquy for the moment. The president and Mel Zack walked into the kitchen. He hurried to shake Eric's hand.
“So how goes college?”
“I'm enjoying it so far, Mr. President. I want to thank you for my scholarship. I haven't seen you to tell you in person. I hope you got my letter.”
“Eric, I haven't actually seen it, but I'm sure it's in a file I'll get to eventually. I'm sure I won't be as busy not being president as I have been.” A warm smile filled his face. “So I understand you want to talk to me?”
Once again, Eric explained his dilemma. The president listened and patted Eric's arm. “I appreciate, more than you can know, that you've kept your word. So, if I give you my okay now, will you tell us the whole story?”
Jane pulled a yellow pad from her satchel while I poured sodas. Mel slid into a chair in the corner as Eric began his tale. He started with the storm and the puddle. His lab partner, Lenore Green, said that they should measure everything. “So we weighed the stones, we measured distances and we hooked up an oscilloscope to measure the waves. We tried it with two stones, then more. We dropped them in different places. She even threw a big one into the middle. We timed the waves until they reached the edge of the puddle. And we took pictures of the patterns. We recorded everything and tried to see if it had any useful meaning.”
“So what did you come up with?” the president asked.
“Our first conclusion was that the waves travel at different speeds depending on where you watch them. Time was relative.”
“Einstein,” Jane said.
“Right. Second, we concluded that if the waves were interfered with, they would change directions. Visualize this. Drop a pebble into a full sink. The waves go smoothly to the sides. Drop a second one, there's disturbance of the waves, and maybe some splashing when they collide, but at the outer edges, it's still smooth. Now add a big stone and everything gets churning like a giant pinball machine.”
“I see where you're going,” Jane said. “The larger the impact, the bigger the change. So let's talk about time travel, which you'll be getting to in a minute.” I looked around the table. Everyone was concentrating, and so far waiting patiently. “When Fritz went into the portal alone, he would create almost no impact. A small pebble. Even constant use would still be small. But as soon as the impact is more significant, like interfering with the present, the greater the danger of changing the future.”
I said, “And if you do the same in the past, you change our present.”
“That's what we think, Ms. Russell.”
“But add another piece,” Jane said. “You're talking about incidental contact with time and space. If something changes in history because you made it change, you set the ripples off in a new direction.” She directed her comments to the rest of us. “Eric's been talking about two dimensional or three dimensional movement. What if other dimensions exist that we don't know about. Scientific theory postulates more. As many as ten or twelve, that I've read about. Could that one act change time and events across dimensions?”
“You mean string theory?” Eric asked. “I just scratched through a reading about it. It's like a foreign language.”
“So you think that time waves are similar to those in the puddle?” asked the president.
“I was skeptical too, Mr. President. I don't blame you. That's when we began to design an experiment. I discussed the wave theory with Lenore and she said that made sense. Since I met you, Mr. President, and found out that we can time travel, I've kept a journal about everything weird that's happened. I've been reading books on quantum physics, and even though I don't understand most of it, Lenore is teaching me. I can't talk to my professors. They'd have me kicked out. Or committed. Ms. Russell, that's why I'm here. I thought Mr. R would have run into some of these questions and he might have some answers.”
The president looked at me. “Have you told him everything?”
“Only that Fritz isn't home yet.”
“This might be a good time, don't you think?”
So I told Eric that on Thanksgiving, Fritz went missing in the portal, and a couple of days later, Ashley had followed, trying to find him. And now, with a new president, we wouldn't have access to opening it. We needed thunderstorms, I told him, but even then, none of us could open it.
When I finished, he had a sad, sympathetic look. “So neither of you have seen them for weeks. And I'm yakking away about an experiment. Wow, I'm really sorry.”
“Eric, tell us more about what you've done,” said the president. “It could be important, even vital, in getting them back.”
“The day I met you, I noted everything you all did, especially Mr. Almeida. It's in my first journal. My lab desk is metal. We moved it to an empty room. I bought a generator and one of those blow up kiddie pools. I almost electrocuted myself the first time we tried it because I didn't hook up the generator properly, and touched the water. Believe me when I tell you that I must have sailed ten feet across the room. Water and electricity don't mix too well.”
Jane said, “No, not well at all.”
Chapter 27
Jane
“WHY A KIDDIE pool, Eric?” I asked.
“Well, you know that Ben Franklin first experimented with the kite in the thunderstorm. We considered the stream of electricity, and how water is the best conductor. In my journal, I described exactly how we set up our experiment and why I think it worked the way it did.”
“Did you bring your journals?” I asked him.
“Just one. It's in the car. Why?”
“You probably don't know that I have a doctorate in physics. But I've never had the time or inclination to do battle with the portal. Knowing it existed satisfied me enough, being able to time travel, and using it to make a better world.”
“That's just it, Ms. Barclay, or I should say, Dr. Barclay. You can't, I don't think. Using it changes the patterns of time. I don't know what changes take place, or how, but that's how I made the connection to the waves. I believe that use is cumulative, even over time.”
“Ripples,” Linda said.
“If the portal is used, even with no immediate change to the past, it sets off a chain reaction that scrambles reality as we know it.”
“What about the paperclips?” Linda asked. “Fritz thought that only those that were in his desk when lightning hit the school would work.”
Eric paused. “I don't think they matter, Ms. Russell. But they need to be exact where they're placed in order to make the connection work. I don't know for sure, but I had a box that I'd brought from home and they worked.”
I took notes and recorded his every word. So far, he had explained a theory, in abstract. Linda was fixated on his description, and the president leaned on his hand, a pose I had seen for years. He wanted the whole story. So we listened.
“I think I've discovered a wrinkle that will let me go across those dimensions, and maybe even see things that might have happened but didn't. Like what would have happened if Lincoln hadn't been assassinated, or if we hadn't dropped the atomic bomb.” Eric looked at each of us, while taking a slow drink. He gently set the glass down, as if not wanting to move its contents. “The day the lightning struck the school, track practice had been cancelled and I was about to take off my track shoes. They had metal cleats. When the lightning struck, the building shuddered. A wave, like a light beam shot across the floor. I didn't get a shock so much as a tingling feeling that ran up my whole body. Then it just went away. I had the same feeling when I opened my lab door and saw my younger self.”
I asked him if he had gone in again.
“I can go into a portal I've created. I haven't tried outside my lab. I did go in. Twice. The same place both times.” He looked me in the eye, his eyes mere slits. “With two different results.”
“Where did you go, Eric?” the president asked.
“Ford's Theater.” Eric put his hands on the table and made two fists. The p
resident patted Eric's shoulder and asked him what happened. Eric slowly shook his head, reliving the moment.
“The first time, I saw when Booth fired and then jumped. I watched from the stage wings. He ran right past me.”
Ashley had told me about one of Fritz's trips and how John Wilkes Booth ran by him. I asked Eric how he managed to have the same thing happen. He said that when Fritz had explained how the portal worked, he used the Ford's Theater book to show him about the paperclips. “I bought the same book. And I guess it carried the same energy because I had the same experience as Mr. R. I didn't know that before.”
“And the second time?” the president asked. I noted the urgency in his voice. He wanted to hear the story all the way through, but he held his impatience in check. That wasn't new to me either.
“Before we tried it, we put the generator into the kiddie pool. I'd learned the lesson already so nothing was plugged in. The generator acted like a big rock, so we adjusted it until the power level produced only small, smooth waves. When I reached for the doorknob, the shock was stronger, and I couldn't let go. I pulled the door open, but this time, President Lincoln leaned out of his box, standing next to a soldier, and Booth was lying face down on the stage. Lincoln had spotted him and grabbed the gun. Then he and the soldier threw Booth all the way to the stage. People were running up the stairs and a crowd was forming back stage, so I just left. Someone said to get a rope.”
“So the water in the pool took you to an alternate history,” Linda said. “That means that someone in that universe changed their past, or present.”
“Maybe,” said Eric. “What if our history has been altered and Lincoln was supposed to live. Like I said before, I don't know what changes take place, or how they show up, but that's what I saw. I haven't tried since then.”
Chapter 28
The Portal At The End Of The Storm (Quantum Touch Book 6) Page 17