Quinn's Way

by Rebecca Flanders

  “Mom?”

  Mark’s voice, small and uncertain, drew her out of her musings. He stood in the doorway, behind the screen, reluctant to come out.

  He said, “I put the leftovers away and cleaned up the kitchen.”

  Houston did not remember eating dinner. She hoped Mark had.

  “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  She extended her hand for him, and he came outside. She put her arm around him and drew him close. “Are you too big to sit on my lap?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “But I will this once if you won’t tell anybody.”

  “I promise.”

  He sat on her knee and she hugged him. “I love you, Mark.”

  “Love you, too, Mom.”

  She took comfort in her son’s embrace, in the peace of the night, in the shared moment. Then Mark asked, “Why are you mad?”

  Houston leaned back, and Mark wriggled forward on her knee so that he could see her face. Houston sighed. “I’m not mad, Mark. It’s complicated, but…I’m not mad.”

  “You acted like it. You were yelling at Quinn.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not like he can help it, you know.”

  She tried to smile. “You’re right about that.”

  Mark was thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Whatever he did to make you upset, I don’t think he meant it.”

  “Whatever he did…” Only to a ten-year-old would a man’s announcement that he had traveled back in time from a future neither of them understood be considered “whatever he did.” She patted Mark on the back. “I’m sure he didn’t. The problem is with me, not Quinn.” And she wished she could be a ten-year-old, to see and know and accept with the unquestioning faith of a child.

  Mark said, “I mean, Mom, you’ve got to see how neat this is. You know how they’re always talking in Sunday school about miracles—well, this is what I call a miracle.”

  Houston disagreed gently. “Miracles are generally considered a gift from God.”

  “A man who hasn’t even been born yet falls out of your apple tree, out of all the apple trees in the world? That’s not a gift from God?”

  A man overcame the laws of space and time to make her believe she could love again…. That wasn’t a miracle? Houston didn’t know what to say.

  “All I know is, this is better than any of the stories they tell in Sunday school,” Mark said.

  Houston started to agree, however absently, then was struck by a pang of alarm. “Mark, you know you can’t tell anyone about this, don’t you?”

  He gave her an aw, Mom look. “Of course I do. Do you think I want G-men in environmental suits crawling all over the place, trying to drag Quinn back to their lab?”

  Houston suppressed a smile. “Of course not.”

  “But,” Mark insisted, “think about it. All the things he knows, all he could tell us. Like what’s going to happen to the stock market and what I’m going to be when I grow up and if you’re ever going to get married again—”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way, Mark.”

  Quinn’s voice came quietly out of the darkness, startling them both. He was standing at the bottom of the steps, and as Mark scrambled out of his mother’s lap Quinn climbed up to them, the photograph album in his hand.

  “I thought I’d better return this,” Quinn said, handing it to Houston. “You dropped it earlier.”

  Houston took the photograph album, her heart speeding at the sight of him, at the sound of his voice. Was it from dread or anxiety, wonder or fear—or the sheer instinctual thrill of having him near? Her mind might know a dozen rational reasons to push him away, but her body had not heard the news yet.

  Mark hoisted himself onto the porch rail. “How does it work?” he asked.

  Quinn was looking at Houston, uncertain of his welcome. Houston invited in a subdued tone, “Sit down, Quinn.”

  Quinn took the rocking chair on the opposite side of the doorway, a good eight feet away from her. Houston relaxed.

  Quinn said, “Think about that, Mark. There’s no way for me to know the details of individuals’ lives. Do you know who Aristotle’s next-door neighbor was, and what he grew up to be?”

  Mark was obviously unsure who Aristotle was, and Houston did not enlighten him. It would give him something to look up in his encyclopedia later—which, knowing Mark, he would be sure to do.

  “Well, I guess not,” Mark said. “But things like who won the Superbowl and who’s going to win the election…”

  Quinn shook his head. “Those are the kinds of things I’m here to find out.”

  As hard as she tried to close herself off to this incredible conversation, as much as she wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening, Houston was intrigued. If Mark had not asked the next question, she would have.

  “What do you mean? Don’t you guys have history books?”

  Quinn shook his head. “A great deal of our history has been lost, and even greater parts have been rewritten. Don’t look so surprised—it happened in your time, too. History has always been a temporary thing, depending on who was in power—until time travel, that is. Now for the first time we’re able to find out what really happened.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t make sense. You had that tape—or whatever it was—about the Olympics. It looked just like a real news show, but it hasn’t happened yet. So you’ve got to have some kind of—I don’t know, machine or something—that records the future.”

  Quinn smiled. “Good theory, Mark. But if you think about it for a minute I think you’ll discover a much simpler explanation. What is one of the first things we learn about energy?”

  He’s good, Houston thought. And she felt a rush of affection for him that took her by surprise.

  “That it can’t be created or destroyed,” Mark said.

  “That it never goes away,” added Houston softly.

  Quinn cast her an approving glance. He said to Mark, “And what is the essence of television and radio waves?”

  “Energy. Oh, man,” Mark said, understanding. “That’s right. Every time something is broadcast for television, it just goes on into outer space and floats around out there as light energy forever.”

  “That’s right,” Quinn said, and Houston felt a surge of pride in her son. “Sometimes we’re able to retrieve those light waves and reconstruct them into their original broadcasts, but it’s a difficult and time-consuming task—and not very reliable. If you know the laws of probability, you could calculate the odds of one particular light beam striking one of our retrieval satellites at just the right moment. If we had a way to control or track the transmissions, it would be a different matter. As it is, we have to just take our chances. We’ve been collecting transmissions for about a hundred years now, and we have only a handful of usable tapes.”

  Mark was silent, digesting this.

  After a moment, he said, “What I don’t understand is, how could anybody lose history? What happened?”

  Quinn hesitated, and Houston tensed. Then he said, “There are some things you don’t need to know, Mark, and it would be wrong of me to tell you. Can you accept that?”

  Mark gave it a moment’s thought. “Sure. Cool.”

  Then he said, “So what year are you from, anyway?”

  Quinn glanced at Houston, and she thought he might decline to answer out of consideration for her. The resilience of the young was a wonderful thing, and it was obvious Mark was adjusting to the new influx of information with far more ease than was Houston. She braced herself for the answer.

  “When I left,” Quinn said, “the year was 2318.”

  Houston felt a peculiar wave of light-headedness drain through her, as though she had made the trip back in time—all in the space between one breath and another.

  “Wow,” Mark said. “Captain’s log, star date.”

  Three hundred years. Her grandchildren, and her grandchildren’s grandchildren, would be long gone by then. Quinn did not belong here, and she could not even imag
ine the place he did belong. Mark had put it best: Quinn hadn’t even been born yet. Strictly speaking, he didn’t even exist.

  As far as star-crossed lovers went, one could hardly surpass that.

  “So if it’s not a time machine,” Mark asked, “how do you do it?”

  Houston said uncertainly, “Mark, I don’t think you should pester Quinn with all these questions.”

  “No.” Quinn glanced at her quickly. “I’d like to answer if you don’t mind. I feel I owe you both an explanation, or at least as much of one as I can give.”

  Houston felt like an intruder between the two of them, but she had to admit she was curious. Even though she knew she wouldn’t understand it, she wanted to hear the answer.

  Quinn chose his words carefully. “I can’t give you details, Mark, mostly because my reference words haven’t come into use in your language yet. But basically what we discovered is that by manipulating the magnetic fields that surround the human body we can alter the time-space continuum enough to actually move that body through time.”

  “So what you’re saying,” Mark interrupted eagerly, “is that time is an absolute. Static.”

  Quinn nodded. “More or less.”

  “Man! Nobody’s thinking that now! I mean, all the science-fiction guys are into the infinite-possibilities, alternate-realities hypothesis.”

  Houston stared at her son. She felt, in addition to everything else, as though she were the fifth grader and he were the teacher.

  “Don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s as simple as I make it sound,” Quinn warned. “There are volumes of exceptions and variables involved.”

  “Sure. Naturally. So in the twenty-fourth century people can just pop back and forth in time whenever they want?”

  “Wait a minute.” Houston had tried to keep herself aloof, separate from the conversation and all it implied, hoping that by doing so, she could hold on to the fragile scraps of her world as she knew it. But she couldn’t stay silent any longer. She pressed two fingers to her temple, marshaling her thoughts, and she said, “This is where I get off. I mean—some of it, sure. But if you’re telling me people from the twenty-fourth century are wandering around among us like…like vacationers at Club Med…no. That I won’t buy. I mean, we would have noticed. There would be signs—”

  “Mom,” explained Mark patiently, “there are. Batteries found in the pyramids. Three-thousand-year-old skulls with brain-surgery scars on them. Where would those things have come from if not the future?”

  “My…goodness.” The words were drawn from her slowly as another wave of altered reality hit her. This was happening. This was real.

  She turned to Quinn, questioning, almost hoping he would deny it. But he didn’t.

  “One of our most important rules is that we not interfere with the normal course of events, and leave nothing behind,” he said. “But mistakes were made before we had the rules, and sometimes accidents happen…like the one that happened to me.”

  “What?” Mark insisted. “What happened?”

  “Time travel makes use of a device called a frequency resonator,” Quinn said. “It aligns the magnetic fields around the body and converts them into readable energy, then resonates—or transfers—the signal to an amplifier, which of course is located in the twenty-fourth century. Many things can disturb the resonator field, though, particularly when you’re traveling into time periods with some technological sophistication—which is one of the things that makes the last half of the twentieth century the most dangerous, and least explored, period of history.”

  Yet he was here, Houston thought. He had chosen the most dangerous assignment, the one most desperately needed, the one no one else would take. But hadn’t she sensed that about him from the first? The reckless adventurer, intrepid explorer… She simply had never before thought of the streets of her own small town as a jungle to be mapped.

  “We use safeguards, of course,” Quinn was saying, “but they don’t always work. Some kind of system failure put me ten years and several hundred miles off course, but that wasn’t the worst problem. During the fall from your tree a lot of my equipment was broken and one very important piece was lost.”

  “The resonator?” Mark asked.

  Quinn nodded.

  “But how can you get back without it?”

  He answered, “I can’t.”

  “Wow. Then you’re stuck here? You just have to stay, and live like a twentieth-century man, forever?”

  Quinn didn’t answer right away. Perhaps it was that silence that alerted Houston, perhaps it was some kind of sixth sense, but she knew something was wrong. She strained to see his face, but he sat in the shadows and his expression was unreadable.

  “I can’t stay, Mark.” He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “Every time you travel back in time, it’s like a stopwatch is set. You have a certain number of days to complete your assignment and return. My time is almost up. I have to go back.”

  Houston did not understand the heaviness in her chest, the hollowness in her stomach. He had told her from the beginning that he would leave her. He had never pretended permanence. He wasn’t even real; she had established that in her mind already. She didn’t want him to be real. She had been furious and betrayed to learn he had deceived her in the first place. Why should she feel so hurt to learn he was leaving?

  She was so wrapped up in her own shock and misery that she didn’t even notice her son’s prolonged silence until he spoke. His tone was subdued. “So. I guess you have to find that resonator thing, huh?”

  Just when she thought her poor battered heart could not take any more, she felt a new fissure rend it for Mark’s sake. First his father, now Quinn. Every man he had ever trusted had betrayed him in the end. And Quinn was more than a friend. In the few weeks he had been here, he had been more of a father to Mark than Mike ever had.

  And more of a husband to Houston.

  “I’ve looked everywhere,” Quinn said. “It’s likely it was lost in transit. I’m going to have to try to build one.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Quinn admitted. “Not without help. I was hoping maybe you could help me.”

  “Yeah…well, maybe.”

  The forced nonchalance in Mark’s tone disguised his pride and excitement at being asked. Once again Quinn had known exactly the right thing to say, and once again mother and son responded to it. How could she hate him? How could she be sorry for what he had brought into their lives, however temporary it might have been? How could she be angry with him? He had never promised them more.

  Mark said, “Of course you’d have to tell me what you’re looking for.”

  There followed a technical discussion that seemed somehow involved with subatomic physics and that, since it included very few principles relevant to third graders, left Houston completely lost. Mark seemed to follow him, though—or if he did not, at least he gave the appearance of doing so.

  “Do you know what?” Mark said after he was finished. “This may sound crazy but…”

  He shared a shy grin with Quinn, both of them realizing that nothing Mark could say would sound as crazy as what Quinn had just asked them both to believe.

  “You remember that science-fiction forum I told you about?” Mark went on. “Well, I was thinking. It’s not just regular guys on there, but some big-name writers, too. A lot of them are scientists.”

  “And if anyone would have access to the latest technological information,” Quinn said, following his thought, “they would.”

  Mark nodded enthusiastically. “Not only that, but these guys make their living imagining things—building things like your resonator in their heads. What you don’t know, I bet they could figure out.”

  “Mark, that’s a wonderful idea.” Quinn’s voice was rich with relief.

  “Maybe if we pretended we were writing a book—”

  “Of course.”

  “No one would have to know it was for real.”


  “It’s worth a chance.”

  Mark jumped down from the rail. “I’m going to go up and start nosing around right now. You want to come?”

  Quinn said, “Let me write down what I remember about the construction. There’s no point in opening a dialogue until we have some concrete questions to ask.”

  “Right. I’ll just go and get some contacts lined up.”

  Mark dashed past Houston into the house, and she half lifted a hand as though to stop him but let it fall again. She felt as though she should say something about bedtime and school tomorrow, but such concerns seemed mundane in the extreme under the circumstances. Nothing about this situation was normal, and pretending otherwise would not make it so.

  So she let him go.

  Chapter Ten

  When Mark was gone she stole a glance at Quinn through the shadows. The silence between them felt awkward. To break it, she said, “He amazes me sometimes. Most of the time, in fact. Are you sure you can’t tell me anything about his future?”

  She hated the way that sounded. She hated the way that made her feel. Only days ago she had lain naked with him, arms and legs entwined, sharing secrets and making wishes the way lovers did. Now she was addressing him as though he were omnipotent, a seer, a god. She was embarrassed. So was he.

  “No. Sorry. Sometimes the most frustrating thing about my work is not knowing things like that—or even more important things.”

  “Of course,” she murmured uncomfortably. “I didn’t mean to imply…I mean, in the whole scheme of history the fate of one small boy doesn’t seem very important, does it?”

  He smiled across the porch at her. “It depends on the boy, I suspect. And I have a feeling Mark will make his fair contribution to history.”

  She tried to return his smile, but it faded into awkwardness. Given his vast perspective on the state of the world, given his adventures in this and other centuries, given his easy knowledge of things her twentieth-century mind could not even comprehend were they explained to her—anything Houston said sounded stupid to her own ears. She had a thousand questions she was suddenly too shy to ask, for the man she once had known and thought she could love was now a stranger.