The Time Travel Chronicles

by Peralta, Samuel

  No, with the energy contained in that thing.

  Asher’s ribbon.

  “I want to go,” he told Asher. “I can’t… I mean, if this is real – I don’t know how it could be real, but if it is, if we’re in the past, what are we supposed to do out here in the middle of nowhere? There’s no food. I guess there’s water somewhere, and we could eat berries and stuff, but… but…” He gulped in air, and it made his head swim. “You built a freaking time machine! I want to go. Please. Let me go. Let me try it.”

  “You may go home,” Asher said. “Most likely, you won’t. The ribbon is…”

  Toby jabbed a finger toward it. “Right. Fucking. THERE.”

  He could feel tears cascading down his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Asher said. “For interrupting your life. That wasn’t my intention.”

  Something pulled hard at Toby’s heart. Home, he understood. His parents. His friends. He was only fourteen; he wasn’t supposed to think about leaving home for another four years. The image of his mother and father searching for him desperately filled his mind and for a minute he wished Asher had killed him, so that he wouldn’t have to think about that kind of pain.

  No place like home, he thought.

  Gently, he knocked the heels of his Connies together, thinking of tornadoes, and Oz, and great adventures that turned out to be a dream… or maybe not.

  “We have to go somewhere,” he said to Asher. “We can’t stay here.”

  The man stood staring at him for what seemed like forever. Then, again, that odd smile crept across Asher’s face.

  “It could kill both of us,” he said.

  “Or not,” Toby said.

  It took a long time for Asher to nod. He looked down at the face of his little gadget, touched it gently with the pad of his thumb, then stretched out a hand as he stood up from the step, gesturing for Toby to follow him. “We may go to San Francisco,” he said softly as he walked toward that strange, flickering mirage. “Or we may not.”

  “Whatever,” Toby said.

  “You aren’t afraid?”

  Toby looked from him to the ribbon, then up at that huge bowl of sky. “Yeah,” he said, remembering how colossally much those first two trips had hurt. That, he couldn’t say he was anxious to repeat. “But who’s to say it won’t be epically cool? Like, who else has ever done this? Ever?”

  “Me,” Asher replied.

  “And you lived through it.”

  Asher opened his mouth as if he intended to argue the point somehow, though he didn’t actually say anything. Typical adult, Toby thought. Always about the You might hurt yourself.

  Grinning, he took a step toward the ribbon.

  “You coming?” he asked Asher.

  Asher glanced over his shoulder at the house. It might have been a trick of the light, but he seemed to look a little more pale. Scared, Toby thought; it was a wonder he’d ever worked up the nerve to test his invention out on himself in the first place. No surprise, since he was a scientist, not a test pilot. Not somebody who typically dared to do things. Not somebody who’d be very familiar with an adrenaline rush.

  But there was something in Asher’s eyes, something Toby recognized. There was a kid in there.

  A dreamer.

  An adventurer.

  “Race you,” Toby said.

  A Word from Carol Davis

  If you were a kid in the 1960s, you know about time travel. Episodes of The Twilight Zone took us into the past and the distant future. In 1966 Time Tunnel took us aboard the Titanic, to the ancient city of Troy, into the midst of the French Revolution and the Battle of Little Bighorn. The starship Enterprise used “the slingshot effect” to travel back in time to 1969… our present. Great stuff, for a kid with an active imagination and a yen to become a writer.

  Twenty years later, I discovered Quantum Leap. I’d written quite a bit by that point, much of it Trek fanfiction – but QL really drew me in. I spent the next several years writing QL fanfiction, self-publishing most of it in a popular series of fanzines, happy to be able to put my work in the hands of readers who would enjoy it. To my surprise, one of those readers was the editor of the official QL tie-in novels, and in 1995 she accepted my request to become a part of that series, which resulted in Quantum Leap: Obsessions and Quantum Leap: Mirror’s Edge. (Since Mirror’s Edge was the last book in the series, and was published several years after the show went off the air, I suppose you could say I had the last word in the world of Sam Beckett.)

  These days I write not only science fiction, but supernatural mystery, horror, women’s lit, romance, humor… any type of story that crawls into my head wanting to be told. No matter which genre I’m writing in, most of my work revolves around family: the kind we’re born into, and the kind we create through marriage, friendship, and shared circumstance. I like to look at the emotional journey in all of my work – the “heart story,” as the writers of Quantum Leap always referred to it. Past or future, Earth or some distant world – for me, storytelling is about the human experience, so when Samuel Peralta proposed the idea of a time travel anthology, the first thing I thought of was, “How does this affect an ordinary person?” Unlike many time travelers we’ve met, Toby Cobb isn’t a brilliant scientist or a crew member on a starship. He’s just a kid who’s minding his own business… until he’s hit by that wall.

  If you enjoyed the story—and even if you didn’t—I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can investigate more of my work at my website and blog (www.caroldavisauthor.com) and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/caroldavisauthor). I look forward to meeting you!

  The Traveler

  by Stefan Bolz

  "Remember, as far as your travels take you, you are always at home."

  THEY TOLD ME I COULDN'T GO into his workshop. They didn't understand. They thought it would bring back too many memories. But there weren't too many memories. There weren't enough memories. Not nearly enough. I wanted to hold each one, put them in a jar and keep them with me so I could go back whenever I needed to. But instead, they began to drift away, however much I tried to hold on to them. There were painful ones, yes. But they were only from the time when he was in the hospital. Those were the ones I couldn't get back to. How his face was fallen in, how his speech was slurred, how he grasped for things that weren't there.

  No. I wanted to go back further. I wanted to remember the Saturday mornings when we worked side by side in his shop. He was always building something. Always. The smoke from the welder filled the air; the blue arc illuminated the walls each time the welding rod connected with the steel. He told me never to look directly into it, to shield my eyes from its intense burning light. For my ninth birthday, he gave me a welding mask. He fitted it perfectly to my head and I didn't take it off for the whole day. It was one of the fancier ones where you could lift the front cover up to look at the welding line and see if it was straight and contained enough filler metal to make a perfect weave bead.

  The other gifts — a karaoke machine and Just Dance 4 for the Wii — were nice but they didn't make my heart swell up. The welding mask made me an equal to him. Still an apprentice, yes, but equally capable of using some of the tools and equipment. My stepmom didn't understand why I loved it so much. She couldn't understand a lot of things.

  My sister, who was much older than me, got married right around my twelfth birthday. My dad and I made her a bouquet of flowers for her wedding. He let me attach several of the flower petals to the top of the stems. I messed up a few and burned holes into the thin metal pieces. But he cut out new ones each time, and after the fourth one, I finally was able to attach it. Once the bouquet was done, I painted the petals in yellow and white and the stem in dark green.

  My dad had a stroke three days after the wedding. He died one week later. That was two months ago. A few days before he passed away, I sat next to his bed in the hospital. My stepmom let me miss school. I think part of her knew that these were his final days. Whenever I could, I read to him. I w
as convinced that he was able to hear me. I read to him from the same book he had always read to me. I loved the Eloi. I hated the Morlocks. They scared me. Whenever he’d get to a scene in the book that had Morlocks in it, he would ask me if he should continue. I always said yes. I knew we had to go through the bad scenes, through the scary stuff, to get to the end. The time traveler had to endure it. And so should I.

  It happened right after lunch on the fourth day of his hospital stay. I had almost reached the end, the part in the book where the traveler had come back to eighteenth-century London only to disappear again a few hours later. This time for good. First I saw one of his fingers move. After a while I realized that he was pointing at me. His skin was clammy and cold when I took his hands. There was no strength left in them. The hands that had built things, had held tools for all his life, the hands that had carried me through all of mine. His mouth opened. I took an ice cube from the tray and moistened his lips with it. He might have said something, I wasn’t sure. His mouth moved as if he wanted to form a word.

  "Do you want to tell me something? Dad?"

  I leaned over, my ear close to his mouth. There was nothing. No sound. No word. I felt silly all of a sudden. But something in him wouldn't let go of me. There was a word on his lips. I tried to read it. It was like an ahhhh or maybe a duhhh. He seemed to repeat it over and over. Once I thought he said druhhh.

  That day, I left the hospital defeated. I knew there was something he had wanted to tell me but I couldn't make out the word. When he died a few days later, without ever lifting his finger again, I couldn't comprehend that he was gone. I went back to school. My sister and her husband moved into our house. They had to sell their house right after my brother-in-law lost his job.

  One evening during dinner, they started talking about my father's things. They wanted to sell the tools and the equipment. I think it was my sister's husband most of all who wanted to sell it. My sister just nodded. My stepmother was still too grief-stricken to oppose. I told them if they were going to sell his things, I would stop eating. They didn't believe me. I made it without food for three days. On the fourth day, I collapsed during gym at school and went to the hospital. I was released a few days later. They didn't sell my father's things. They even let me go into the workshop.

  The shop was in an old barn a bit further down from the house. The first few times I went there after his death, I sat at his welding station in the dark, listening to the silence, trying to feel if he was still here, if part of him was still around. The smell of his pipe tobacco and the damp coal in the forge lingered. I wasn't able to stay for long. One day, I decided that it would be a good idea to straighten up the place. I had always been responsible for cleaning after we worked together. I swept the floor planks, making sure the metal sheathing around the welding station was clear of anything combustible. I straightened out the tools and cleaned the forging hammers with oil, then swept the two workbenches. I cleaned the shelf that had all the leftover parts like copper fittings, pieces of iron, steel rods, plates, and other items. I emptied the ash container in the forge, polished the anvils, and greased the spindles of the vices.

  I had my own leather apron. It hung next to my father’s under a small shelf that had our gloves and welding masks on it. When I looked at it, I started to cry and couldn't continue that day. I didn't go back for a few days. One morning, I woke up thinking about him saying druhhh. I began to scribble the word on pieces of paper during class at school. ‘Draw’ was the closest I could come to making sense of it. Did my father, with his last word, tell me to start drawing?

  That afternoon, I went back to the shop. I turned the light on, kindled a fire in the wood stove, and sat in the corner opposite the chimney. From there, I could see the whole shop. I had a large drawing pad and a pencil and began to sketch the room. First, I tried to get the right perspective and proportions. Then I added the chimney and the large workbenches. After that came the welding station, the forging area, the large shelf with the materials, the small old dresser that had been converted to hold small boxes of nuts, bolts, washers, rags, and smaller parts. From there I went to the tool carts, the other chairs, and the larger tools like the stand-up drill and belt grinder.

  After a few hours, I was done. I hung the picture in my room where I could see it from my bed. I lay awake for most of that night. The moon rose around 11 pm and I took the drawing with me into my restless sleep. In my dream, the picture was made from charcoal from the forging oven. But it was washed out and almost unrecognizable. When I woke up again, my clock showed 1:45 am. Druhhh. Druhhh. Draw. I said the words out lout. Druwh. Drough. Drought. Dry. Draw. I looked at the drawing again. Drum. Drawl. Draw. Drawer. Drawer. Drawer.

  DRAWER!

  I sat up. Drawer. The moonlight on the wall was enough to illuminate the drawing. The old dresser. I’d never looked inside the drawers, hadn't gotten to organizing them yet. I got out of bed, put on my thermal pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a wool sweater. It had gotten cold during the last few days. The first flurries of snow had fallen yesterday. I went downstairs as quietly as I could and put on my boots. I left the house through the back door and walked along the silvery path toward the dark silhouette of the barn. My heart was pounding when I arrived. I didn't want to turn the lights on so I grabbed a flashlight from the hook next to the door. I kindled a fire in the stove and stood in front of the dresser for a while. Part of me couldn't wait to open the drawers and see what was in there. The other part wasn't so sure. What if there was nothing? What if I was chasing a ghost? What if my dad had simply told me that he wanted water?

  There was no point in stalling. I needed to know. I opened the first drawer. On the right side, an assortment of bolts of different lengths and widths was organized into sections, separated by narrow pieces of thin, dark wood. On the other side of the drawer were nuts and washers. Over time, the sizes had gotten mixed up and now it was just a mess of bits mingling together.

  I should have taken better care of this, I thought. Instead, I’d let it get to this level of disorganization. The next drawer wasn't as deep. It held a few pieces of sandpaper for the belt grinder. Nothing else. I closed it. Then I opened it again and looked closer. It wasn't deep enough for the size of the drawer. I took out the sheets of sandpaper and placed them on top of the dresser. A false bottom. I could see it right away. There was a small gap between it and the back board of the drawer. I pulled it up. It dislodged easily.

  The beam of my flashlight illuminated what looked like a spiral notebook. It was blackened from grease and metal dust and its corners were bent upward. Large parts of the spiral were missing. I carefully lifted it up. Below it lay what looked like a piece of metal sheathing. Maybe a square foot and a quarter of an inch in thickness. I took it in my hands, expecting its weight to be much more than it actually was. It felt like lead but without the weight. I tapped at it with my fingernail. The sound was similar to that of glass when touched with a metal object. Pling! I carefully laid it on the ground.

  I went to the stove and added a few logs to the embers. The chill hadn't left the room yet. I pulled a chair close, sat down, and opened the notebook. The first page, written in perfect pencil lettering, started with Table of Contents. Below that, and perfectly aligned according to its sections, it said:

  1 — Parts

  1.1 Centrifugal Rotor

  1.1.1 Core

  1.1.2 Outer Ring

  1.1.3 Connectors

  1.2 Power Supply

  1.2.1 Battery Compartment

  1.2.2 Capacitor Board

  1.3 Controls

  1.3.1 Left Foot Pedal

  1.3.2 Right Foot Pedal

  1.3.3 Display

  1.4 External Parts

  1.4.1 Chassis

  1.4.2 Faraday Cage

  1.5 Traveler's Chair

  1.5.1 Head Rest and Neck Stabilizer

  1.5.2 Seat and Back

  2 — Construction and Assembly

  3 — Setting Dates

 
4 — Travel

  5 — Clothing and Accessories

  6 — Safety

  7 — The Traveler

  What followed were twenty pages of neatly written text intertwined with drawings, sketches, and mathematical formulas. Then several pages with lists of materials needed. This list was separated into items we had in the shop and others that needed to be bought. The list had everything in it, from metal wire fencing to pieces of copper, from steel piping to Neodymium rare earth magnets that could be ordered through the mail.

  The Construction and Assembly section described how to put it all together, piece by piece. I recognized my father's writing — how he phrased certain sentences and how he began some of the lines with "Careful there!" He had used this phrase many times throughout his teachings.

  "Careful there, don't apply too much pressure on the welding rod. Let it be pulled into the steel rather than push it into the bead."

  I could hear him as if he stood beside me, reading to me in his deep voice. I had to stop several times. During those moments, I felt both the pain over his loss and the love he had left behind.

  I still had no idea what the finished product would be. Until I got to the end of the section. The drawing took up a whole page. It was detailed and seemed to be to scale. It took me all but two seconds to see what it was. One person could comfortably sit inside. The chassis was made from galvanized pipes. The cabin holding the traveler was surrounded by metal fencing. A faradic cage. There was an engine of sorts and two pedals, one for each foot, to control the machine.

  Did he expect me to build this? He must have wanted to give it to me much later, maybe five or ten years from now. Surely he hadn't expected to die so soon. I stared at the notebook for a while, then closed it carefully and placed it back into the drawer. I was cold all of a sudden. The fire must have gone out. "I'm sorry, Dad, but what you want me to do is impossible," I said into the silence. I listened for a moment, in case there was an answer. But the shop was quiet. When I left, the grey sky loomed overhead.