Still, Nate did his circle again, trying to push through. No luck. Then, as if something had just occurred to him, he headed purposefully over to the kayaks. Ron helped him carry them to the water, but the lake we had rowed in on didn’t seem to want to accept them anymore. “Well, so much for that idea,” Nate said.
“Jacob, are you typing again?” I asked. He was speedily keying in text with his thumbs.
“I’m jotting down what it feels like to have nothing holding you up. It’s like History overruling gravity, you know? Besides, it’s not like there’s a lot to do here, Julia. No point in taking pictures for my blog—the lake is just a lake. It could belong in any century.”
Apparently deciding that our predicament could at least be used as a learning experience, Dr. B said, “Jacob, put your phone aside for the moment. Can you explain to Ruth-Ann and Ron here why we can’t jump in time without also moving in space?”
“Uh—all right, professor, I’ll take a stab at it. The short answer is that space and time are one, of course. Spacetime. Some people write it with the dash, some without. Or is it called a hyphen? Anyway, I prefer to spell it as one word—why waste a character? Plus, the whole point is that space and time are one. Anyway, the reason we can’t just stand in this spot and jump forward in time is that this spot itself will move and change as time passes. We have to keep up with it.” He started ticking off the reasons on his fingers. “One, the Earth rotates. Two, we orbit the Sun. Three, the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Four, the galaxy itself moves in space. Five, the axis of the Earth wobbles, like a top—it’s called precession. Six, the continents are drifting apart—”
Ruth-Ann put a hand on Jacob’s shoulder to stop him. “I think we get the idea, dear. Sounds like a very complicated calculation.”
“It is,” Dr. B agreed. “It can’t be done by hand. That’s why I brought my laptop.”
Nate squatted down by Dr. B. They were just about the same height. Erika had tied her long blonde hair back. She pushed her bangs out of her eyes, not because they were bothering her, but as an almost flirtatious gesture. Then I decided that the whole thing was in my mind.
“Can you do it, Dr. B?” Nate asked, as if remembering all the problems the Slingshot had given us the last time. Who could forget? “Nudge us forward in time safely? I’d rather get going than be stuck here indefinitely.”
“Like I said, there’s no reason to expect that we’ll fall into a ghost zone.”
“Can you give me the odds?”
“How can I give you the odds? I have no data on which to base any projections.”
“Ballpark, then.”
Dr. B seemed uncomfortable with the idea of ballpark figures. Many of the scientists at St. Sunniva University, whose job it was to be exact, tended to shy away from such broad approximations. I’d had plenty of experience with that. I stepped in and said, “What is your recommendation, Professor?”
“There’s no reason for us not to jump.”
“How long will the calculations take?” Nate asked.
Dr. B opened her backpack to retrieve her laptop. “It’s not the fastest computer. A good hour or so.”
“Well, time is the one thing we seem to have plenty of,” Nate said, taking a seat. Jacob pulled out his suntan lotion and started applying it.
Dr. B unzipped the waterproof cover, removed the laptop, and set it down on the log next to the Slingshot, then hooked its cable to a pouch that she unfolded into three panels.
“What is that?” I asked. “Some special battery that the Department of Engineering cooked up?”
“Nope, just a portable solar recharger.” She moved the panels so that they caught the maximum amount of sun. “You can get one at the Emporium.”
“Will we be able to jump back immediately if we do drop into a ghost zone?” Nate asked.
Dr. B shook her head without looking up from the laptop, where she was busily entering commands. “This is the old Slingshot, remember? We can’t go backward in time with it, only forward. Let me say it again—when you used the Slingshot before, the reason you fell into so many ghost zones was that Dr. Mooney had no way to calculate coordinates to guide the Slingshot. I do.”
Nate nodded. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
Remembering something Ron had said, I moved closer to where he was sitting on a log, his sketchpad on one knee. “You said there are no horses here, Ron? Where are they?”
He put down the pencil and tugged at the beads in his beard. “It’s quite a story. A long time ago—more than a million years, if we could go back that far in time with your STEWie—”
“It’s never been tried,” Dr. B offered, briefly glancing back over her shoulder as she worked.
“If we did, we would have seen them, horses, dog-size ones, munching on leaves in the woods. This is where evolution bred them. Then, some ten thousand years ago, they went extinct. No one’s quite sure why.”
Jacob put away his phone and devoted his full attention to Ron’s tale.
“Luckily for rodeos and chariots and racing tracks, some of the animals crossed the Bering Strait land bridge before they died off here, heading in the opposite direction the ancestors of the Psinomani took. Then the land bridge disappeared under rising ocean levels…Meanwhile, the horse thrived in Asia and Europe. But here in the Americas—today, at this very moment in time—there are no horses. None. Not one. Was it climate change? Being hunted to extinction by man? Drought? Disease? Like I said, no one knows.”
It was daytime and our fire was out, but his story could not have been more effective if he had been telling it at night around a campfire.
He went on. “When the animal did return, it happened not over land, but over water.”
For a second I had a vision of a herd of horses ambitiously swimming across the Atlantic or the Pacific, but Ron continued: “The ships of Columbus and other Europeans carried pigs, cattle…and horses. Nature did what it does best when a door is opened—she jumped at the chance. Some of the horses escaped and soon spread throughout the Great Plains. There weren’t any big herds immediately, not of horses, and not of buffalo either. That happened later, when the balance between man and nature was lost after smallpox, which also came in on the ships, took its toll on the Indian population.
“Imagine a modern city left with few caretakers—vegetation and wildlife would soon overrun the place. Nature always wins. And so it will be in this case. The orchards and woods and animal populations that had been shaped by the hand of man—”
An image of the well-tended grove of black walnut trees back on Runestone Island flashed into my head.
“—would slowly lose the mark of civilization and the newcomers would assume that it had always been so. Without any check on their populations, animals multiplied. Great herds of horses and bison may have been what the Europeans saw, but that’s not how it was before their arrival. The massive flocks of passenger pigeons reported by John James Audubon, the painter, were not the mark of a pristine continent untouched by the hand of man; they were a sign of unchecked animal population growth. Audubon described the flocks as darkening the skies for hours on end, obscuring the sun like a bird eclipse.”
“I’m hoping to snap a photo of a passenger pigeon,” Ruth-Ann said. “They are completely gone in our own time. Be on the lookout for a blue-gray head above a breast the hue of red wine,” she added poetically.
The mid-day breeze stirred the budding leaves on the trees around us and I thought of the palisaded village again and of its small group of inhabitants. Listening to Ron and Ruth-Ann, and talking to Nate’s grandmother the other day, had made it clear to me how little I knew of history. I felt ashamed that I knew so little about the past of my own country. I had heard of Vinland and Columbus but not about the horses, the passenger pigeons, or some of the things Dr. Payne had mentioned, such as that no one was sure how long ago
the ancestral Indians had arrived or along which route.
Ruth-Ann took over the tale. “The Psinomani have the land in hand—they hunt deer and other small game, occasionally buffalo and bear, and they also fish, gather plants, farm wild rice, encourage the growth of trees they find useful. Wild rice, incidentally, isn’t rice at all but a water grass harvested by two people in a canoe.”
“Is anyone having trouble breathing?” Dr. B suddenly asked.
If we weren’t before she said that, we certainly were as soon as she did.
Nate scrambled to his feet. He turned to check for the invisible wall again and didn’t have to take a single step. The wall had moved. Closer.
“Dammit,” Dr. B said. “We’re not time-stuck. Someone is coming.”
Unnoticed by us, History’s walls had been inching in on us minute by short minute, putting pressure on us to leave.
I felt myself start to breathe heavily, as if I had been running, and willed myself to inhale and exhale normally. It was clear History wanted us gone, but how?
“Professor, is the Slingshot ready?” Nate asked in a calm voice.
“No, I need more time.”
“Let’s hope we have it. Wait—if we’re not time-stuck, that means there has to be a way out, right? Time-travel’s fourth rule: There’s always a way back. We just need to find it.”
I hoped he was right. I could definitely feel it now. The air had become thinner and it was a chore to breathe in and out, as if there was something pressing down on my chest.
“The water.” Nate smacked his forehead. “I think we can go into the water and swim across instead of using the kayaks like we’ve been trying. We’ll have to deflate the kayaks to take them with us—”
I suddenly felt a bit woozy and stepped into the water—it was cold but I let myself slip down into it and took a few tentative strokes. I immediately felt better.
“It’s working,” I called out.
“Julia—wait, come back—” I heard Dr. B’s voice.
I made a U-turn in the water. I had forgotten my backpack.
“It’s too dangerous,” Dr. B spit out between shallow breaths. “Don’t you see? What if we all get into the water and swim out and then suddenly we aren’t allowed to swim any more?”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t think of that.”
The feeling of something pressing down on my chest was back. Next to me, Jacob was also fighting for breath. Dr. B was on her knees by the computer, as if willing it to work faster.
“Everyone, get into a huddle,” I heard her command. She sounded faint, as if either she or I were disappearing. “Holding hands is best—stand the kayaks on their ends so that they fit into the basket—”
26
“Hey, where are we?” Jacob asked. “This looks completely different.”
“It shouldn’t be.” Dr. B glanced around wildly. “I sent us just a few minutes ahead. I think—yes, there must have been a minor adjustment by History. The destination we wanted wasn’t available so we arrived as close as History would permit.”
Nate pulled out his compass and map to orient himself. “We were over there…” he said, pointing behind him. “And that’s where we want to go, north.” He pointed ahead.
“STEWie’s basket?” I asked.
Dr. B checked the instrument in her hand. “Still where we left it.”
“Good,” Nate said.
Shivering in my wet clothes, I noticed that Jacob had his cell phone out again.
“Jacob, this is no time to be jotting down thoughts for future blog posts and tweets. We’re finally free to get going. I’m just going to go change behind that tree—” If there was one motif for the week, it was water.
“Wait, Julia. I have an app for binoculars. I thought I saw—yes, look, the place where we were…there are some Indians there now—sorry, Mrs. Tuttle, is it rude to say Indians? I meant the Dakota—the Psinomani.”
“Here.” I took the phone from him, careful not to get it wet, and looked through it. Several Dakota men and boys were passing through from the woods into the more sparsely vegetated prairie to the west. Had we remained at our previous location, they would have run smack into us. I couldn’t help but notice that they were carrying spears. They were blocking our way to STEWie’s basket but luckily the other direction was where we wanted to go, farther north and deeper into the woods.
“Look, we should have anticipated this,” I heard Dr. B explain as I toweled off and changed into my backup clothing behind the tree. “The best we can expect to do is tiptoe through the woods. If anyone had any visions of mingling with the Dakota or the Norsemen, put them aside immediately. Our clothes are strange. Everything we carry—and the way we carry ourselves—stands out. The very imprints left by the soles of our hiking boots do not belong here. The same will be true for Quinn and Dr. Holm, but at least that works in our favor. They’ll be as limited as we are. If they do come, I expect that we will converge on the same spot sooner or later.”
Ruth-Ann sounded a little disappointed. “I had expected more of a front row seat than one way up in the balcony.”
“Time travel is like that,” Dr. B went on. “First-time STEWie users find that it never lives up to their expectations. It’s always—smaller, I guess. They forget that time travelers, like the locals, have only one pair of eyes. They can only see one slice of the battle or take a quick peek into the window of, say, Galileo’s villa. Answering questions is never easy. It takes multiple runs, wise choices, and a lot of luck.”
“And funding,” I called out from behind the tree.
Ruth-Ann and Ron chuckled at that. I had worried that they might slow us down, but they’d struck a good pace, both paddling and when the kayaks needed to be carried.
“What now?” Ruth-Ann asked when I emerged dry, with the small towel wrapped around my hair. At least it had started to warm up as the sun rose higher in the sky.
“We keep heading north,” Nate said. “Into the woods.”
After a bit of experimentation, though, we realized that History didn’t seem to want to let us go deeper into the woods. We were free to head the other way, into the open fields of the prairie with their dry, yellow growth spreading toward the western horizon. Where the Psinomani men were going.
“I guess we have to take a detour,” Nate said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to swing back into the woods sooner rather than later. Do you need any help, Dr. B?”
The professor slung the Slingshot across one shoulder, on top of her backpack. “All ready.”
“Can we stay a bit longer?” Ruth-Ann had been snapping pictures of the Psinomani men as they grew smaller in the distance, hacking at the knee-high grass as they walked.
“We’re not here to sightsee,” Nate said as the rest of us divided up the kayaks and started walking.
“Aren’t you curious about our ancestors, yours and mine?” Ruth-Ann asked, putting the camera away and hurrying to catch up with us.
“I am curious,” he said, turning around. For some reason he was looking at me and not Ruth-Ann, “but now isn’t the time. We have a job to do.”
He picked up his pace as he guided our little group forward. I hoped he wouldn’t walk smack into one of History’s invisible walls.
Soon it became clear that we were being led on an arc through the gently rolling prairie. “One thing is for sure,” Dr. B commented. “Our path seems to be tied to the coming and goings of the village.”
“Maybe we just need to put some real distance between us and the villagers and that will break this time-stickiness that we’ve been experiencing,” Jacob suggested.
“That could very well be the case,” Dr. B said. “It’s certainly happened often enough on other STEWie runs. You leave the circle of influence of a person or settlement and suddenly it’s like the gates of History have opened and you can go wherever you wan
t.”
I thought it would be wise to eat something to fend of the chill, so when we stopped to allow Ruth-Ann to snap some photos—Jacob had spotted a flock of the red-breasted passenger pigeons—I reached for a snack from my backpack.
“If we carried one or two back with us,” Jacob suggested, studying the flock of passenger pigeons gliding gracefully above our heads, with their long tails and broad wings, “they would no longer be extinct.”
Ruth-Ann caught her breath. “Can we?”
Dr. B sighed. “No. It’s a slippery slope. The photos and video will have to do. Maybe some future generation will be wiser than we are and they’ll figure out how to bring all the extinct animals back without destroying the fragile harmony of our modern-day ecosystem, but we’re far from ready.”
Munching on a cookie, I reflected again on how privileged I was to see the Psinomani village, the passenger pigeons, and all the other fourteenth-century surprises that awaited us. And I owed it all to Quinn. Not that I was happy about the situation, but if it hadn’t been for him, I would have been at my desk attending to everyday work matters. I had to admit to myself that I understood his motivations…at least partially. I just wished he had gone about things in a different way.
As we resumed walking, following the pigeons, I reached for another cookie. Nate, who had somewhat impatiently waited for the pigeon photo shoot to end, said from behind me, “You brought cookies, Julia? Haven’t you heard that it’s better to shop on the perimeter of the grocery store than in the middle? You know, where the fresh fruit and fish and milk are.”
Was he teasing me? That was very unlike him. Perhaps the sun was getting to him.
“I could hardly have brought fresh fish and milk with me. Besides, cookies are comfort food in my family. We don’t all have grandmothers who are gourmet cooks, you know.” In my family, pre-sliced white bread and peanut butter and jelly had counted as a treat for dinner. My parents had always been busy with work; chores like grocery shopping and cleaning were done on the weekends, if at all.
The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Page 21