Roberto & Me

by Dan Gutman

  Startled, I looked across the room. The kid was still there!

  I bolted up from my bed.

  “Get out of—”

  The kid leaped to his feet and clapped one hand over my mouth before I could get out another word. He pushed his other hand against the back of my head and held it tight, like a clamp. He was strong, stronger than me. He didn’t smell very good. This wasn’t any dream. Now I was freaking out.

  “Is everything okay, Joey?” my mom called from down the hall.

  “Tell her everything’s okay,” the boy whispered.

  He took his hand off my mouth.

  “Everything’s okay, Mom,” I said. “I was just having a dream.”

  “Now, shhhhhh!” the boy whispered, putting his hand back over my mouth. “You’re not dreaming! I know you’re scared right now. I’m sorry I had to do it this way, but I didn’t know what else to do. You’ve got to listen to me. I know it’s hard to believe. My name is Bernard Stoshack, and I’m 13 years old, okay? You are my great-grandfather. I live in the year 2080, and I have the same power as you to travel through time with baseball cards. This is not a hoax. It’s for real. You got it?”

  I nodded my head, and he let go. I flipped on the light next to my bed to get a better look at him. He was dressed in ratty old clothes—torn, faded jeans and a striped shirt that should have been turned into a rag a long time ago. I searched his face for a family resemblance. He looked a little like me, I suppose. Dark hair. Kind of big ears. Stocky. It was hard to tell. He could have been anybody.

  “Prove you’re who you say you are,” I demanded.

  He pulled out a wallet from his pocket and produced a library card. CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, it said at the top. His picture was below it, next to the name BERNARD STOSHACK. I looked to see when the card was due to expire—February 2082.

  Maybe the kid was for real. But I wasn’t completely convinced. It could still be a hoax. It would be easy to make a fake library card. The question was, why would anyone bother?

  “I know everything about you, Grandpa,” he told me. “Your parents’ names are Terry and Bill. They got divorced when you were nine years old. Your mom is a nurse. She works at Louisville Hospital. Your dad was in a traffic accident that paralyzed him. Your favorite thing in the world is playing baseball. Your coach’s name is Flip Valentini. I could go on if you want me to.”

  I was beginning to believe that he was the real deal. Still, it was hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that my own great-grandson was sitting right next to me…and that he was the same age as me! I went to give him a hug, and he hugged me back.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “Shhhhh!” Bernard said. “You’ll wake Grandma…I mean, your mother.”

  “Did you come here just to meet me?” I whispered.

  “No,” he replied.

  Why would somebody from the year 2080 travel back to our time? I wondered. There could be lots of reasons. It would be pretty cool, for one thing. But time travel is too risky to do just for kicks. Bernard must be on a mission, I decided—just like I always give myself a mission to accomplish when I travel through time.

  “Then why are you here?” I repeated.

  “I can’t tell you right now.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Shhhhhh!” Bernard said urgently. “I need to show you something. I need you to come with me.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “To 2080,” he said. “I need to take you to the future, Grandpa.”

  18

  The Future Is Ours to See

  THE FUTURE!

  Ever since my first experience traveling through time, I dreamed of going to the future. If I could move backward in time, why not forward? Common sense says I should be able to go in either direction. But, of course, I knew why that was impossible.

  “How can I travel to the future?” I asked Bernard. “I would need a future baseball card.”

  “I know,” he replied. “I have one.”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a piece of gray cardboard that was a little bigger than a baseball card. Actually, it was two pieces of cardboard taped together on three sides. He tapped it a few times until the edge of a card popped out the side that wasn’t taped. The card fell on my bed, faceup. I wondered why Bernard didn’t just keep his baseball cards in plastic sleeves the way I do.

  I went to pick up the card, but Bernard pushed my hand away.

  “Don’t touch it, Grandpa!” he warned me. “Not yet. You know what happens when we touch it.”

  I pointed my light at the card and leaned over to examine it.

  Nina Wallace

  “Bob Feist?” I said. “I never heard of this guy.”

  “Of course not,” Bernard said. “He hasn’t been born yet. Bob Feist plays in my time. He’s one of my favorite players. This card is what I brought along to take me back home, and to take you into the future, Grandpa.”

  “Do you have to call me Grandpa?” I asked.

  “But that’s who you are,” Bernard said. “You’re my great-grandfather.”

  “It’s creepy,” I told him. “I’m 13.”

  “Well, what do you want me to call you?”

  “Stosh,” I said. “Just call me Stosh.”

  “Okay, Grandpa,” Bernard said. “I mean, Stosh.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, looking at the card again. “Chicago Cubsox? You don’t mean to tell me—”

  “Yeah, the Cubs and the White Sox merged into one team a long time ago,” said Bernard. “It was around 2050. It’s a long story.”

  “Wow,” I said, “people in Chicago must have been really upset.”

  “They’re used to dealing with adversity,” Bernard said.

  I leaned over to study the card more closely.

  “Lowstop?” I asked. “What’s a lowstop?”

  “The word ‘shortstop’ was considered offensive by midgets and dwarves,” Bernard told me. “So it was changed to ‘lowstop.’ There have been a lot of changes in the last 70 years.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  I thought about Sunrise. She could barely picture all the things we have in the twenty-first century: DVDs, IMAX, iPods, the Internet. In 1969, the PC hadn’t even been invented yet. And that was only a few decades ago. I couldn’t imagine how much the world would change and technology would advance 70 years from now. In Bernard’s world, it was probably like Star Wars every day.

  Bernard got up and started looking curiously at the stuff on my desk, picking things up and putting them down. It occurred to me that my room must look like an antique shop to him. Or maybe one of those living-history museums.

  “Do you have a flying car?” I asked him.

  “Hmmm?” Bernard had picked up a calculator from my desk and was engrossed in punching the buttons.

  “A flying car,” I repeated. “They say that in the future, every family will have a car that flies. Do you have one of those?”

  “Uh, no,” he replied.

  “Too bad,” I said. “It would be cool to ride in one. But I bet you have lots of other great stuff, huh? Like robot servants and microwave freezers. How about light sabers and laser guns? Do you have them?”

  “You’ll find out when we get there,” Bernard said absentmindedly. He was looking at my cell phone charger.

  “What about a jet pack?” I asked. “I bet you have your own jet pack, right?”

  “A what?” Bernard asked.

  “A jet pack,” I said. “You know, one of those things you strap to your back so you can go flying around? Do you jet pack to school every day?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t have a jet pack.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Too bad. Hey, can we go now? I can’t wait to see what the future will be like.”

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and took a clean T-shirt from my drawer.

  “Give me just one minute, Grandpa,” Bernard said.

  “Don’t call me Grandpa!” I said.
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  “Shhhhhhhhhhh!”

  Bernard seemed fascinated by the ordinary stuff in my room. He found the switch on my desk lamp and turned it on. Then he turned it off again. Then he turned it back on and looked at the bulb.

  “You probably don’t even need light switches in the future, huh?” I asked. “You probably turn your lights on and off through mind control or something, right? You just think ‘On’ and the light goes on. Man, future stuff is cool.”

  “Um-hmm,” he mumbled.

  Bernard didn’t seem interested in talking about what the world is like in 2080. He looked at my electric pencil sharpener, my laptop, my iPod.

  “This stuff must look like a lot of old junk to you, huh?” I asked. “I bet you have much cooler stuff in 2080. Futuristic stuff.”

  “Okay,” Bernard said with a sigh, “I’ve seen enough. We need to go.”

  I was curious why he always used the word “need.” It was never “We should go” or “I would like to take you to the future.” It was always “We need to go” and “I need to take you to the future.”

  We both knew what to do. Bernard turned off the desk lamp and sat on my bed next to me. I grabbed his hand and closed my eyes.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Some baseball cards?” he said.

  “Oh, yeah. Of course.”

  I went to my desk and got a pack of new baseball cards out of the drawer. My ticket back home. I put them in my pocket and sat down on the bed again.

  “Do you want to hold the Bob Feist card?” he asked me. “We both have the power. I suppose it doesn’t really matter which one of us holds the card.”

  Usually I’m the one who is taking somebody with me through time. I had never been a “passenger” before.

  “You hold it,” I said. “I want to see what it’s like to go along for the ride.”

  Bernard took my hand with his right hand and picked up the card with his left. My hand was sweaty, and I realized I was nervous. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  “This will take a few minutes,” Bernard said.

  “I know,” I said. “Hey, I just remembered. I have a game tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll get you back in time,” Bernard told me.

  While I waited for the tingling sensation to come, I concentrated on the future. If Bernard read a diary that I kept as an old man, he must know a lot about me. He knew things that I didn’t even know about myself. There was so much I wanted to ask him. What did I grow up to do for a living? Was I successful at it? I must have gotten married. Who was my wife? How many children did we have? And, of course, when did I die?

  Bernard probably had a lot of questions he wanted to ask me too. But there would be time for that once we got to 2080.

  “It’s starting to happen,” Bernard suddenly said.

  “You feel the tingling sensation?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied, “in my fingertips.”

  “It won’t be long now,” I said.

  “It’s moving up my arm,” he whispered.

  I knew exactly what he was experiencing. After a minute or so, my left hand—the one he was holding—started to tingle. The sensation quickly moved across my body and down my legs. We were approaching the point of no return.

  “In the future,” I whispered, “is everything, like, in 3-D and stuff?”

  “You’ll see very soon, Grandpa,” Bernard replied.

  “Don’t call me Grandpa!”

  And then we disappeared.

  19

  So Much for Science Fiction

  BERNARD AND I LANDED IN A FIELD. IT WAS A BASEBALL field, but it took me a moment or two to figure that out. It wasn’t a nicely mowed and groomed field like the ones I play on. There was no backstop, no fences, and no bleachers. It was more like a vacant lot.

  There was a piece of cardboard where first base would be. Somebody’s shirt was second base. An old shoe was third. And home plate was a garbage can cover.

  “Are you okay?” Bernard asked, brushing the dirt off his pants.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said.

  A bunch of boys were throwing high pops to one another in the outfield. They seemed to be about my age. I looked around. There was a house in the distance, a barn, a silo, and some trees—but not much else. We were out in the country somewhere.

  What was going on? I looked up to the sky to see if there were any cars or people flying around with jet packs. There was nothing up there. Not even planes. Something must have gone wrong. Well, that figured. Something always goes wrong. Why is it that I never land where I want to land?

  “Didn’t you say you live in Chicago?” I asked Bernard.

  “I do,” he replied. “This is Chicago.”

  “Where’s the Sears Tower?” I asked. I remembered reading that the Sears Tower was one of the tallest buildings in the world, and that it was in Chicago.

  “It’s gone,” Bernard said. “It was gone before I was born.”

  I wanted to press him for details, but the boys in the outfield came running over. They all had on ratty old clothes like Bernard. Some of them were barefoot. I was glad I had just thrown on a pair of jeans. If I had gotten dressed up, I would have looked like I was going to a wedding compared to these guys.

  “Hey, Bernard!” one of the boys shouted. “Where were you? Let’s play ball. Who’s the kid?”

  “This is my gr—” Bernard began, but I interrupted him.

  “Cousin,” I said. “Joe Stoshack. I’m from Louisville. Call me Stosh.”

  I didn’t know if people still shook hands with each other in 2080. Bernard had told me that a lot had changed in 70 years. For all I knew, they pulled each other’s ears or had some other bizarre greeting. But they all came over to say hello and shake my hand, just like back home. They seemed like good guys.

  We divided into two teams, and I was put on Bernard’s team. There were only enough for seven players per team, so everybody agreed to having one roving outfielder. We were up first. The other team ran out to the field.

  As I watched the pitcher warm up, I realized how hot it was outside. It must have been close to a hundred degrees. Ordinarily, I try not to go out when it’s that hot. I’d rather stay inside with the air-conditioning on. But nobody else seemed to mind. It must be the middle of a summer heat wave, I figured. The sun was high in the sky.

  “The new kid gets to bat first,” one of the guys said.

  “Go get ’em, Gramps,” Bernard whispered in my ear.

  There was no bat rack, just a garbage can with six bats in it. All of the bats were made of wood. I picked up one of the smaller ones. It felt heavy.

  “No metal bats anymore?” I asked Bernard.

  “Nah, we’re baseball purists,” he replied. “This is the way the game was meant to be played.”

  I took some practice swings, choking up a few inches on the bat. With a heavier bat, I knew I would have to get it moving a little quicker to make contact.

  “Come on, Stosh, hammer it!” somebody on my team hollered.

  “Hit one into the next century!” Bernard yelled.

  For all I knew, in 70 years, pitchers might have developed some new trick pitches that would totally fool me. I decided to let the first two go by before taking a swing. That’s what I did, and the catcher called both of them strikes. The second pitch looked a little outside to me, but I didn’t argue about it. I didn’t want to look like a jerk.

  I also didn’t want them to think I couldn’t hit. So I was determined to take a rip at the next pitch if it was anywhere close to the plate.

  “Three strikes and you’re out, Stosh!” somebody yelled. “Protect the plate.”

  Well, at least the rules of baseball were the same. It would have been embarrassing if they had changed it to four strikes or something like that.

  The pitcher went into the standard windup and threw the next one right down the pipe. I hacked at it and slapped a hard grounder
to the left side of the infield.

  I didn’t look to see if the shortstop or third baseman fielded the ball. I just put my head down and dug for first. Safe by a mile! There was no throw.

  But when I crossed the first-base bag and turned around, everyone was in hysterics. I mean, they were falling all over one another with laughter. It was like the funniest thing they had ever seen. Tears were running down their faces.

  “What?” I asked. “What did I do?”

  “Is that how they play ball in Louisville?” one guy said, doubled over.

  Bernard came jogging over to me. He put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Uh, Grandpa,” he whispered. “There’s one thing I forgot to mention. They changed the rules slightly. You don’t run to first base anymore. You’re supposed to run to third. Then second. Then first. And home. Like that.”

  “What?” I asked in disbelief. “You run around the bases backward? That’s dumb! Why did they change the rules?”

  “For the novelty of it, I guess,” Bernard said. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. It happened about 40 years ago.”

  Everybody was still doubled over laughing, and my face was probably as red as a fire engine. But the guys were fair about it. They let me go back and have a do over because I didn’t know the rules.

  The count was still 0-2. I dug in at the plate—or the garbage can cover, anyway—and gripped the bat tightly. I was determined not to make a fool of myself again. The pitcher asked if I was ready; and when I nodded my head, the ball suddenly came flying out from behind his back. He didn’t even wind up. The next thing I knew, the ball had plopped into the catcher’s mitt. I never got the bat off my shoulder.

  “Strike three!” yelled the catcher. “You’re out!”

  I trudged back and sat down next to Bernard.

  “Is that pitch legal?” I asked.

  “We play by jungle rules,” he told me. “Anything goes.”

  Jungle rules? I never heard of anything like that.

  It was okay, though. The game was still fun. Baseball is baseball. I just had to get used to a few changes. For instance, one kid on each team was the “designated fielder.” That meant he would play the field but not come to bat.