The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 3): Lost Time

by White, Samuel Ben

  "Huh?" the Garison in the room asked—to be quickly echoed by everyone else in the room.

  Jason held up two fingers and said, "There are two points that seem to be related to Bat's situation. One, the completely unfathomable fact that Garison—the other Garison—was able to take the memories of everything that happened in the future back with him. But just as confusing is the idea that he could remember those twenty years he spent waiting for this Garison to grow up. There's just no way he should remember any of that."

  "Yeah," Jody nodded, saying the first thing in a while other than "excuse me." She nodded as she said, "If all our thoughts about time travel were accurate—that people ceased to exist when the past changed, or their memories of that time changed—then Garison should have ceased to exist the moment he pulled George Washington from in front of that wagon."

  "The headaches," Bat pointed out.

  "Right," Jody agreed. At everyone's questioning looks, she explained, "Don't you remember—well, Bronwyn and Jason haven't read the book yet—but when Garison touched Sarah's hand he got an instantaneous headache. Same when he saved George."

  "So?" Heather asked.

  "Maybe at that moment, instead if ceasing to exist, Garison's genetic code was rewritten,” Jody offered. She and Bat ad discussed this the night before while laying in bed, Jody just praying for a comfortable position and wondering how she was going to last another two and a half months. “Maybe that's what caused the headaches. He didn't cease to exist, but he became someone else. If someone could have done before and after tests, maybe his genetic structure would have been different."

  "I threw up," Bronwyn suddenly injected, to be greeted by strange looks from around the circle. "When we first came through time, I kept getting sick and we didn't know why. Maybe the same thing was happening to me. Maybe there could only be one Bronwyn in a time zone and I wasn't the one. So with every choice I made, that made me a little different from the other Bronwyn, maybe it had some profound effect on me. Maybe it was something at a genetic level. Because it eventually went away and there was never any sign of it in our children."

  "Why go back to the 1700s though?" Heather asked of no one in particular.

  Bat looked at her oddly for a moment then replied, "That one's easy."

  As everyone turned to Bat, he told them, "I spotted that right off. Garison went back to the 1700s for the same reason he began to lose your memories" (spoken to the Garison in the room) "as soon as he gave you that tape." When it was obvious no one had any idea what he was talking about, Bat explained, "In spite of everything that happened, the problem with the holes in time wasn't his first trip trough time, it was his second."

  Another chorus of "Huh?" rang through the gathering.

  "Oh come on," Bat chided, "It's the only thing that makes sense out of this whole crazy story. Call it divine intervention or providence or whatever, but the other Garison was supposed to go back in time to 1744. That's where he belonged—not in the modern world. So that was all part of the natural order of things, I guess you'd say. What he wasn't supposed to do was come forward. That's what screwed up the natural order of things. Not only did it lead to there being holes in time, it lead to two people somehow inhabiting the same body."

  "What, like a demon possession?" Bronwyn asked.

  "No. I think it was more like the first Garison's . . . brainwaves were superimposed over the second Garison's."

  "But then how did they become two separate people unless there were two separate bodies?" someone asked.

  "Simple,” bat told them, to the amazement of everyone, but especially of Garison. “Because the Garison that went back to 1985 was not the same Garison that was growing up in Durango at that time. I know it's hard to explain, but the Garison who went back was the same Garison who was growing up, except a later model. The Garison who hid in that closet was technically the same body as the Garison he was looking at but—it's like my Dad always says about his axe. It's had three different heads and fifteen different handles but it's the—"

  "Same axe," Jason nodded. "I get you, I think. Every moment in time we're losing cells and gaining cells in our bodies, right? So the me that's sitting here right now is vastly different from the me that was walking around fifty years ago, even though we’re the same person. So we're not really the same? Is that what you're saying?"

  "Exactly!" Bat snapped his fingers, "Which explains how two people could have their brains in the one body. We do that all the time. Science says that we never really forget anything, right? It's all up here in our noggin somewhere, we have just lost the knowledge of how to access it. So all my memories from this year are successfully imprinted in a brain that still contains all the memories of when I was fifteen. And those memories survive in this body even though the cells themselves have regenerated and replaced and rewritten."

  Garison finally spoke up, "So you're saying when Garison came forward, it was really only his mind that came forward! That's why when he went back to the seventeen hundreds he hadn't aged at all. His body had never come forward?"

  "Makes sense, doesn't it?" Bat asked.

  "None of this really makes sense," Jody pointed out. “And, of course, his body did come forward. At least some of it. Remember the long hair? And the clothes?”

  “Garison would probably know a lot more about this than me,” Bat said, surprising everyone, but especially Garison, “But in radio transmissions don’t they sometimes piggy-back one wave on another?”

  Garison nodded with recognition and said, surprising everyone again, “You may have something there, Bat. Not an exact explanation, but maybe a fair illustration. When radio waves are piggy-backed like that, you can only hear the one you are tuned to, but they’re both there. What if the two Garisons were—for lack of a different way of saying it—just on different wave lengths? Both were there, but only one was visible. Yet, they also shared some sort of inward connection so that, to each other, they felt like one being.”

  “But you’re saying they weren’t?” Heather asked.

  “It’s hard to say,” Garison replied with a shrug. “To a certain degree, it’s a matter of perception. If I mix red paint with yellow paint do I have orange paint or red molecules and yellow molecules so close together you can’t tell them apart. And, once mixed, they can’t be separated out again.”

  Bronwyn injected, "And maybe that's why I and the other Bronwyn could co-exist. We were the same at birth, but by the time I got to this world, we were substantially different. Different diet, for one thing. You are what you eat," she chuckled. “Twenty-plus years of choices that were different. Different shampoos and soaps to different books read. The physical shell was the mostly the same—as evidenced by the fingerprints—but there were differences. As time went by, the differences grew greater.”

  "You know," Garison nodded, "You're probably right. All of you. And maybe Bronwyn started getting sick then was because there's some immutable law in the universe about two identical . . . objects not being able to exist. Like snowflakes. Maybe, for what ever reason, the process of change sped up to make you more different from your counterpart." He sat back and, throwing up his hands in submission, added, "I don't know."

  Jason offered to Bat, "I've been sitting here and thinking about how you could remember that meeting. Here's a thought: Let's say that I travel back in time to one week ago and—save somebody from getting run over by a car. How many lives have I effected? The guy that would've gotten run over, for sure. The driver, too. Any witnesses. Maybe the people at the hospital or the coroner. A week later I have effected even more people because I've effected the lives of everyone who has come in contact with the guy I rescued. Plus, I've had little ancillary effects that are harder to quantify. All the people the doctors and nurses might have told about the accident. The cop who might have spent all night writing up the incident has been off on something else now.

  "In the old reality, for instance, Donna Lane is walking to work when she sees the ambulance
there and the paramedics attending someone but doesn't know what's going on. Maybe at work that day or the next she spends so much time talking about what she saw and trying to figure out what happened that, after the wreck, she spends too little time working on some project that's a success for the company. Company has problems and she gets fired. It's a stretch, maybe, but every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right?

  "So what I'm saying is that there's a . . . sort of cone of reaction that comes from an action. Fifteen minutes after I change the past, not much has changed and only a handful of people are affected. A week later more has been changed and more people are affected. A month later, changes have begat changes until the cone has become really big. The affect may have somewhat dissipated out toward the edges of the cone, but they are changes. Man way out on the edge somehow has a bagel for breakfast instead of a donut.

  "Yet, as big as the cone has gotten, there are still people who are essentially unaffected by it. On the other side of town on the day I save the guy, there are a whole lot of people who are unaffected by the change. As time goes on, the number of people untouched becomes smaller and smaller but there are still some unaffected people. Eventually, even if the cone does affect them, it’s not in a way that has significance to their lives. The different breakfast or something. Go back two hundred and seventy-one years to the day Garison saved George Washington and you've got a pretty big cone going there, right? At the moment it happened, only Garison's, George's and the wagon driver's lives are affected. Flash forward a couple hundred years and, because of who George became and what he did, the number of people unaffected would be extremely small—if any existed at all. Everyone in the world was probably effected somehow because of George’s affect on the world stage by being our founding father.

  "But let's go back to the idea of someone living in an area not effected by the cone. Would it be possible, then, for them to know about both outcomes? Logic would say no because when something has been changed, no one knows what the previous outcome was. But here we have someone who except for one almost fluke of an occurrence could have been outside the cone. Is it possible that the cone didn't change around him—no, that doesn't make any sense."

  "What—what were you saying?" Bronwyn asked.

  "I was just going to say that maybe the cone doesn't change for people on the edge of the cone if it doesn't need to." He looked up at everyone, "Does that make sense? Maybe Garison—the other Garison—bumped into someone on the street one day. Maybe that person doesn't remember it not because it never happened but because they have no reason to remember it."

  Garison snapped his fingers and said, "Wait a minute! Bat has to remember that to be here today!"

  "What?" everyone asked.

  "Remember what the book said? Bat was good enough to play for Sul Ross. If he had played for Sul Ross—even if he didn't turn pro—he wouldn't have been in Dallas and sent on that assignment where he met Jody. If he hadn't met Jody, he wouldn't have met Heather, either, and she wouldn't have met me. Bat had to not be at Sul Ross." Garison looked at Bat and said, "Maybe you were right about divine intervention. Maybe you were somehow allowed to remember that because it was crucial to your life—and mine."

  "Not that I mind theology," Bat, who actually taught a Sunday School class back in Flagstaff, interjected, "But is that what we're talking about? That maybe my memory of meeting you—the other Garison, I mean—and the other Garison’s photographic memories of the furture are . . . gifts from God?"

  "Um, yeah." Garison shifted uncomfortably in his seat, then continued, "It goes against my grain to say that, but yes. You three know I'm a believer. No question about that. But I also believe that God set up specific rules in this universe he created and he doesn't violate them. For God’s plan—maybe not just for my life or Bat’s but for the whole world—it’s imperative that some people be able to remember things like this."

  Bronwyn nodded and said, “Garison had to be able to remember what happened so that he could put things right once the hole started forming.” She looked at Bat and said, “And, this is more of a stretch, but maybe you were allowed to remember so that today you could explain it to us. Or, at least get us all together so we—Jason and I—can know we’re not crazy.”

  Bat looked at Bronwyn and Jason and asked suddenly, "How often do you use Eddie?"

  Bronwyn smiled at him and said, "It didn't take you long to figure that out, did it? Once or twice a week. Sometimes more around holidays and birthdays."

  Bat smiled and said, "So you can go visit the grandkids, right?"

  "How did you know?" Bronwyn asked, still with a twinkle in her eye.

  "Yeah, how?" was echoed by several voices around the room.

  "Because the only car in the driveway was that old Ford pickup and I just can't see you driving all the way to Brennam and back in that thing. But mainly it was a lucky guess."

  "Wait," Garison interrupted, "You're saying you actually use extra-dimensional travel—Eddie—on a regular basis? How?"

  "We cheat," Jason laughed. "See, the only places we ever go to with it are to our children's houses. So, years ago, we mapped out the exact coordinates, relative to the center of the earth. Ran plenty of tests, of course, and now we travel any time we want and we don't get tired doing it. We can even go to our daughter's house in Ruidoso for Christmas and spend our nights here, in our own bed. Just 'zap' ourselves there for breakfast."

  "But I thought it was the big jolts of power that sent you to the future," Heather objected.

  "Big jolts all at once," Bronwyn pointed out. "We discovered that if we had a continuous, low-voltage power source we could travel as far as we wanted."

  "Never went to the future again, huh?" Bat asked, though it seemed like his mind was elsewhere.

  "Not at all," Jason replied.

  Jody leaned close to Bat and whispered, "You're thinking something? What is it?"

  "Give me a little bit," Bat replied. "It may be nothing."

  "You know," Jason continued, having not noticed the Garrett's private conversation, "The future has always bothered me about this whole deal."

  "Who wouldn't be?" Heather asked. "It's not just that you went to the future, it's what you saw."

  "Yeah," Jody injected, looking at Bronwyn, "Do you think whatever it was that was making you throw up was left over from the future?"

  "I had always wondered that until today, but now I'm not so sure. Used to think that maybe I caught the last little strain of some biological agent that had been used a thousand years before. Or maybe it was just nerves. Our baby was fine—all of our babies were very healthy—and I never had any other symptoms. Kind of worried when I had morning sickness with Andrew, but not for long. It was quickly apparent that it was different. Still, I have always wondered if there were something I could do now to make that future better. But maybe it wasn't the future that caused my nausea at all.

  "Of course, there's also the question of whether the future we saw was the future of the timeline we were on, or the timeline we're on now. Maybe we don't need to change the future because it's already been changed."

  Jason, trying to get the conversation back, said, "No, what's always bothered me about the future is that I still don't see how someone could go to the future and come back to a changed past. That just doesn't make sense."

  "The fact that you came back at all would seem to be related to my whole stake in this deal," Bat offered. At several questioning glances, he explained, "If everything everyone has ever taken for granted about time travel is anywhere near true, you both should have disappeared, right? The only Bronwyn in the world should have been the one that just died of cancer and there never should have been a Jason because his parents never met—maybe never even existed. So see, we're dealing with two apparent contradictions to what we've always believed. Of course, up until about two hours ago I never believed in time travel at all."

  The first silence in quite a while seemed to settle onto the group, as t
hey all thought their own thoughts. Bronwyn looked at her watch and said, "Is anyone else getting hungry?"

  "I am," Jody quickly replied, then shrunk back, embarrassed at her exuberance.

  "There's a real good bar-b-q place here in town. What say I get them to run over some brisket and mashed potatoes and some slaw?"

  Everyone agreed that that idea sounded great and, as Bronwyn went inside to make a telephone call, the conversation drifted to more mundane topics like live oaks, pregnancies, and the Dallas Cowboys.

  As Bronwyn was getting off the telephone, Bat came inside to get another drink for Jody. Bronwyn helped him find a glass and, as he was filling it, he asked her, “Did you really meet CS Lewis?”

  “Yes, I did. One of the proudest days of my life.”

  “What was that like? What was he like?”

  “Not exactly what I expected,” she replied. “Of course, there are many books and things about him now, but at the time—1961—all I knew of him was his writings and that he was a professor. So I was scared to death, getting to meet one of the smartest men in the world. And, of course, I had this picture in my mind that he was also the strongest Christian in the world.”

  “He wasn’t?” Bat asked, with a little surprise.

  “I don’t know. He was a very strong Christian, not doubt. But he was also very . . . human. He asked me about my children and we talked about his step sons and, well, it wasn’t like I expected it to be. I was receiving an award for one of my novels—the one about the fall of England in my old world—and here I was getting to meet one of the foremost writers—in my mind, anyway—of all time. I expected we would, well,” she laughed with embarrassment, “Have some important discussion as would befit two of the most influential writers of the day.

  “But he was just this nice, old, British college professor. Very funny in a self-deprecating way. We talked a little about writing, but he really seemed more interested in my children. Even gave me autographed Narnia books for each of them.”

  “Wow!” Bat commented with heartfelt admiration. He had been a Lewis fanatic for as long as he could remember, and especially of the Chronicles of Narnia. “I wish I could have met him.”