The Wells Bequest

by Polly Shulman

  He wouldn’t really do it, would he? He couldn’t be that evil—could he? But when I remembered the look on his face when Francis teased him about his family, I wasn’t so sure.

  I got to work at my computer hunting up maps and reading about how people used to get around New York before the subways opened in 1904. I packed up batteries and an adapter. What could I put them in? My backpack would look really out of place in 1895, and they wouldn’t invent plastic bags for another few decades.

  Maybe my laundry bag?

  Emptying it made me realize what a gigantic mess my room was. Dad says a messy desk is a sign of a fertile mind, and Mom doesn’t care what I do to my room as long as she doesn’t have to look at it.

  I kicked things under the bed, shoveled things into the closet, bundled the trash out of the room, threw a sweater over the more delicate projects on my workbench, and straightened the blankets on the bed.

  I was engineering a tower of books when the buzzer rang.

  “Come on up. It’s the sixth floor,” I told Jaya through the intercom.

  I stood in the hallway waiting for her elevator and trying to look calm. No big deal, right? Just a coworker I was goopy about, coming over to travel back in time a century or so and stop a supervillain from destroying the city. Not a supervillain, exactly. A dweebervillain. Just the most amazing girl in the city, coming to my own apartment to bend the laws of physics with me and defeat a boy without a conscience. Just the girl—

  “Hi, Leo!” called Jaya, stepping off the elevator. She was carrying an old-fashioned leather traveling bag. I led the way to my room.

  “I plotted our route downtown,” I said. “Let me show you. We’d better take the Sixth Avenue elevated train, which actually runs on the same track as the Eighth Avenue line up here, and we can catch it at—”

  Jaya cut me off. “That’s fine. Do you think we could move those books? I need at least five square feet of floor space to work in and a wall outlet.” She took a little gadget out of her traveling bag. It looked like a cross between a pencil sharpener and a vacuum cleaner.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The shrink ray from the Wells Bequest.”

  “That’s a shrink ray? But it’s so . . . small,” I said.

  “That’s because I shrank it. It’s way too big to carry. Come on, help me move these books.”

  We pushed the books under my desk. Jaya plugged in the gadget.

  “I need to turn it on, but now the switch is too small for my finger. You don’t have a needle or a pin, do you?” asked Jaya.

  “I have a microprobe. Will that do?”

  “What’s a microprobe?”

  I rifled through the mess on my workbench, found the probe, and handed it to her.

  “This is just a needle stuck through a cork,” Jaya pointed out.

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “A needle makes a pretty good microprobe, and the cork makes a good handle.”

  “Whatever,” said Jaya. She set the shrink ray down in the middle of the cleared space, kneeled beside it, and poked at it with the microprobe.

  I peered down at it.

  “Get out of the way, Leo! Move back from the shrink ray,” said Jaya impatiently.

  “I’m nowhere near it,” I said.

  “You will be soon. Get back!”

  I retreated to the wall. The little machine suddenly began to swell, pushing a stray book along the floor beside it. It blew up so fast I was afraid it would burst. I leapt out of the way as the machine’s side zoomed toward me.

  Just when I was sure it was going to hit the wall and bring it crashing down, Jaya threw herself on it and hit a switch.

  The thing stopped growing. It was about the size of a motorcycle. It took up all the spare space in my room.

  “Wow,” I said. “I wasn’t sure you’d stop it before it knocked over the building.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” said Jaya. “I guess I went a little too fast. I had to leave my patience as a deposit when I borrowed the shrink ray.”

  “Your patience?”

  “Yes, remember? Dr. Rust collects functional deposits when we borrow objects from the Special Collections. I generally leave my patience—I don’t have all that much of it anyway, so I don’t really miss it. Now, what did you do with that time machine?”

  “What a thing to leave! Couldn’t you leave—I don’t know, your impatience?” I went to open the closet door. “Close your eyes—it’s a mess in here.”

  “I’m not afraid of a few dirty socks!”

  I dug the Fortnum’s bag out from under my laundry, then took out the time machine and handed it to her. “We should use the shrink ray to expand it,” I said. That would be way more practical than shrinking us. But I knew I was going to lose this argument—after all, I’d seen us riding the tiny machine.

  Jaya shook her head and put the time machine on my desk. “Too risky,” she said. “We don’t really understand how the time machine works. The time-travel engineering might depend on fixed distances or surface-volume proportions. Remember what Auntie Shanti said about not using Special Collection objects on each other without testing them thoroughly first? You can seriously disturb their functionality.”

  “But you just used the shrink ray to expand itself,” I said. “Why doesn’t that ‘seriously disturb its functionality’?”

  “That’s different. I used the autoexpand setting—it’s designed to do this. I’ve done it a zillion times. It’s perfectly safe as long as you manage to hit ‘off’ in time.”

  “And what if you don’t manage to hit ‘off’ in time?”

  “Oh, the shrink ray could go on growing out of control until you couldn’t reach the off switch, and then the increased mass could throw the earth out of its orbit and plummet us into the sun. Or if you were autoshrinking instead of autoexpanding, the off switch could get too small for your fingers, and then the shrink ray would shrink out of existence. But none of that’s ever happened. I’m always careful.”

  I thought about how close she’d come to knocking down my bedroom walls. “I don’t think leaving your patience as a deposit is such a great idea,” I said. “It makes you take even more risks than usual.”

  “The problem with you, Leo, is you worry too much.”

  “You sound just like my sister.”

  “Whatever. We can argue after we stop Simon,” said Jaya. “Let’s get going now. Stand over here, and I’ll shrink you.”

  “Wait a sec,” I said. “Can we talk about this some more first? Like, for one thing, are you sure we can control the time machine precisely enough? We’re on the sixth floor. The cornerstone was laid in 1894, and Tesla’s lab burned down on March 13, 1895. What if they weren’t done building this place by then? If you send us back in time to before this building was finished, we’ll go crashing through the floor because the floor won’t be there yet. We’ll die,” I said.

  While I was talking, Jaya was pushing me into position opposite the shrink ray’s pointy nozzle. “It’ll be fine,” she said. She fiddled with some knobs on the shrink ray.

  “You can’t know that. It’s too dangerous! We have to at least look up exactly when the building was finished,” I said.

  “Nah, that would take too long. If we see the walls coming unbuilt, we’ll stop and reverse the time machine. Are you doing okay there?”

  She asked that because I was screaming. I had started screaming because she turned the shrink ray on me. A green light shot out of its nozzle, and everything suddenly went really weird. The walls scampered away sideways, the ceiling shot upward, and Jaya expanded like a shapely, bright-eyed balloon. Everything I’d kicked under the bed loomed up at me like a reproachful army. My whole body itched and tickled, inside and out. It felt like someone was crumpling aluminum foil inside my bones.

  “Jaya! Jaya, stop!” I screamed.

  “What’s wrong?” She hit the off switch. The green light went out and my bones stopped squeaking. “Are you feeling okay? That’s probably
enough anyway. You look around the right size.”

  “Jaya!” I sputtered. “You didn’t warn me! I wasn’t ready!”

  She bent down, bringing her gigantic face close to me, and giggled. She actually giggled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you sound so funny! And the look on your face! It’s so—so cute.”

  “I am not cute,” I spat.

  “There’s no point saying you’re not cute when you’re six inches tall and you look like a kitten who wants to scratch me but doesn’t quite know how,” said Jaya.

  I actually gnashed my teeth. I’d read about tooth gnashing, but I had no idea people really did it. I wished I were a kitten—then at least I would have claws to scratch her with. “Can you please stop shrinking the whole world for ten seconds and tell me what the quark you think you’re doing before you do it?” I said.

  “Well, first I’m going to see if you’re the right size to ride the model time machine,” said Jaya. She reached down toward me with her vast, brown, bony fingers.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Time Passes-Backward

  I tensed every muscle in my body, prepared for a bruising squeeze. But she held me gently. She lifted me up to the desk and put me down next to the time machine.

  I was amazed at its workmanship. I was used to looking at things through magnifying glasses and microscopes. Usually the objects looked crude up close, with splinters and loose ends. But not the demo time machine—every edge was clean and polished. The Time Traveller who made it must have been an amazing craftsman. I wished I could make things that well.

  “Climb on the seat for a second, will you? That looks like a good fit,” said Jaya. “Don’t touch the controls! Wait for me. Okay, now I’m going to shrink the stuff I brought,” she continued. “Do you have anything you need shrunk?”

  “The maps and stuff. They’re in that laundry bag. Wait, don’t shrink the battery pack and the adapter.”

  Jaya must really have been impatient because she didn’t stop to ask why. She took out the items and put my bag next to hers.

  I climbed down from the time machine and ran over to the edge of the desk, dodging around pencils, to watch them shrink.

  “Then—let’s see—I’m going to shrink myself,” said Jaya, plopping the leather bag down on the desk beside me with her fingertips. She had chipped coral-pink polish on her gigantic fingernails. “Okay, here I go.”

  “Wait!” I said. “My desk won’t be there back in 1895. You better put the time machine on the floor.”

  “Oh, you’re right.” With her gigantic fingers, she moved the time machine, the bag, and finally me down to the floor.

  I looked up at enormous Jaya and the enormous shrink ray. “How are you going to reach the switch?” I asked. “You can’t touch it and stand in front of the nozzle at the same time. I would do it for you, but I’m too small.”

  “Watch,” she said. She took an unsharpened pencil off my desk and expanded it to the size of a spear. Then she placed the end with the lead in it against the shrink ray’s on switch, twisted a knob, and stood in front of the nozzle, where I had been standing when she shrank me. She leaned against the eraser, turning the machine on.

  “Jaya! No!” I yelled. She was writhing and shrinking. How would she be able to keep hold of the pencil and turn off the machine before she shrank out of existence?

  But somehow she managed it. When she was eye level with the desk, she writhed hard against the pencil and threw the switch. The green light went off and she stopped convulsing. She still looked enormous, but a lot less enormous.

  “Relax, Leo,” she said. “I’m good at this. Now I’m going to put the shrink ray on autoshrink and make it smaller. I need to keep it more or less the same scale as me.”

  “This would be a lot easier with a third person,” I said. “You should have asked Francis to help us.”

  “You’re right. I didn’t think of that. Well, too late now.” She reached up, switched the shrink ray to autoshrink, and pressed the on switch.

  I was impressed to see that while the machine shrank, its electric plug stayed the same size. It made sense—otherwise you couldn’t plug it in.

  Using the pencil as a switch-poker, she took turns shrinking herself and the shrink ray, back and forth, until she was just my height and the shrink ray was small enough to fit in her traveling bag.

  “Here,” she said, pulling a pair of black leather shoes and some clothes out of her bag. “Put these on.”

  I looked around for somewhere to change. There wasn’t really anywhere good. “Turn around,” I said, ducking behind my desk leg.

  “Like I was planning to peek,” said Jaya.

  I changed into the old-fashioned clothes. The shoes were too small, and I didn’t know what to do with the tie. “How do you . . . ,” I asked, coming out from behind the time machine.

  “Hang on, I’m not ready,” said Jaya. “Stupid buttons! Why couldn’t they have invented the zipper a few years earlier? Okay, you can come out now. Can you button me, please?”

  Jaya was wearing the long, dark gray dress I’d seen her in when she appeared in my room and started the whole adventure. It had puffy sleeves, a tight waist, and a flared skirt that ended just below her ankles. She turned her back and I fumbled down a long row of tiny buttons. What with her undershirt thingie and petticoat, she was covered from head to foot. But somehow I still found it embarrassing to fasten her dress.

  Embarrassing and exciting.

  “Tickles,” she said.

  “Just two more . . . okay, done.”

  She turned around. “Well? Put on your tie. A gentleman always wears a necktie.”

  “I don’t really know how,” I confessed.

  “What? You’re kidding!” She stared at me like I was some kind of alien. “I’ll do it for you.” She reached around my neck with her cool fingers, twitched my collar up, and pulled the tie around my neck.

  “Ow. Not so tight!”

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be. Haven’t you ever worn a tie? Put on your shoes now.”

  “They don’t fit. You need to expand them with the shrink ray.”

  “I’ll do it when we get there.”

  “No! I know you’re impatient, Jaya, but I’m not going back a zillion years into the past wearing shoes that pinch. What if we have to run away from someone—or something? Do it before we go.”

  Jaya sighed. “Fine. But if Simon destroys the world while I’m fussing with your shoes, you’re the one who’s explaining it to Dr. Rust.”

  • • •

  Jaya stowed her traveling bag under the time machine’s saddle. She put the battery pack and adapter in my laundry bag—they took up half the bag—and stowed it next to her traveling bag, then scrambled on board, leaning forward in the seat. “Get up behind me, Leo,” she said. “Time to go!”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I’m driving. Come on, move over.”

  She didn’t budge. “I told you, I’m good with machinery.”

  “It isn’t safe. You’re way too impatient.”

  She shook her head impatiently.

  “Also,” I added, “it isn’t fair. I’m the one who found the time machine.”

  That was a more effective argument. I could see from the way Jaya’s forehead wrinkled that her sense of justice was fighting it out with her passion for control.

  Justice won. “Go ahead, then,” she said, scooting as far back as she could without falling off the saddle.

  I climbed on. She put her arms around my waist, turning me into the tiny guy I had been jealous of way back when I first saw us, the one sharing a saddle with the beautiful girl. I savored the moment.

  No savoring for Jaya. “Well? What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”

  I took a deep breath, leaned forward, and pushed the lever marked PAST.

  • • •

  Traveling through time is the weirdest feeling. When you go very fast through space—by car or speedboat, say, or if you’ve ever ridden a motorcycl
e—it feels urgent. Everything moves. The world whips past you, trees and houses or buoys and boats, the wind in your hair, here vanishing away, there looming up to meet you, then rushing by.

  When you travel through time, you get the same headlong urgency but minus the here and there. The result is a horrible, unsettling feeling of motion in stillness. You hurtle without moving. Every second you feel you’re about to crash into the unknown.

  It’s even worse when you’re going backward, into the past instead of the future. Not only are you hurtling blindly at unnatural speed (if speed is even the word for it), but your body somehow knows that you’re going in the wrong direction. Time closes over your head. It’s like drowning.

  For me, the feeling took the form of overwhelming dread. For Jaya, apparently, it came out as amplified impatience. She hugged me so tight it pinched. “Hurry up, Leo! Can’t we go any faster?” she urged in my ear.

  “Not without losing count.” The sun was whipping across my south-facing window from west to east, over and over and over, ticking back the days. They flicked dark-light-dark-light. “We need to end up in March 1895. If we go back too far, we’ll die!”

  “That’s decades away! We’ll never get there like this! Can’t we count the years instead?”

  “It’s not as safe.”

  “Come on!”

  “All right, I’ll try. Watch the sun. When it disappears under the building across the street, that means it’s December.” I pushed the lever farther toward PAST.

  My sense of dread intensified as the flickering days smudged together into twilight. It was a brilliant dark blue. The sun blurred into a streak, an arc that rose and fell like a vicious yellow snake. Whenever it vanished behind the downtown buildings, we counted off another December.

  “1927, 1926, 1925 . . . ,” chanted Jaya in my ear.

  I pulled the lever back.

  “No, don’t slow down yet! We have thirty more years to go!”

  “We’re getting close. I’m afraid we’ll miss it. 1911, 1910, 1909 . . .”

  Jaya dug her fingernails into my ribs. “Come on, Leo!”