The Wells Bequest

by Polly Shulman

  I was halfway there when Jaya yelled, “Turn on the lights, Mr. Clemens!” When they came on again, Jaya was standing by Mr. Smith’s table, pointing another model death ray at his head. She must have grabbed it out of a crate when the lights were out. Hers was bigger than his—she needed two hands to hold it. “Drop it or I’ll shoot!” she said.

  “You? You’re not going to shoot,” he said.

  Instead of answering, she pointed the death ray over his shoulder and pulled the trigger. With a horrible hiss, a stream of hot, blinding silver shot out of the muzzle and racketed into the wall behind him. The impact shook the lab.

  Jaya pointed the model death ray back at Mr. Smith. “I said, put it down.” Her voice was shaking a little.

  He put his ray gun down.

  “Come here, Smith,” said Tesla. “Right now!”

  Mr. Smith took a step toward the door.

  Suddenly there was another earsplitting sound like a zillion fingernails tearing a chalkboard apart. The air next to Mr. Smith split open, and Simon stepped through.

  We all stared at him with our mouths open. The gap in the air was still open. The edges pulsed with ribbons of blue and purple light. I could see through it, but I couldn’t really make sense of what I was seeing. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope, but not just the flat kind—like a kaleidoscope with five or six dimensions. I saw tiny bits of trees and chairs and people and galaxies and daylight and night sky, all oozing and swirling. For a second I saw something sickeningly pink, like the inside of somebody’s intestines. For a second I saw what looked like fire.

  While we were all staring into the horrifying portal, Simon picked up the model death ray that Mr. Smith had been holding.

  Simon pointed it at Jaya. That snapped us out of it.

  “Put the gun down, Jaya, and take me to the Wells time machine,” he said.

  “Seriously?” Jaya said. “Seriously, Simon? You’re going to shoot me?”

  “If I have to.”

  “But you kept saying you loved me.”

  Mark Twain had recovered his voice. “Who is that?” he said. “How did he get here?”

  “It’s Simon! Mr. Smith’s great-great-grandson, the one Jaya told you about! We have to stop him!”

  Simon was saying, “I do love you, Jaya. I don’t want to hurt you. So put the gun down.”

  “No, you put your gun down. Or I’ll shoot your ancestor, and you’ll never be born!” said Jaya.

  Mr. Smith stared at Simon. “Who are you? Where did you come from?” he gasped.

  “I’m on your side. I’m your great-great-grandson, from the future,” said Simon.

  Mr. Smith looked shocked. “My great-great—but where—but how—?”

  “How did you even know we were here, Simon?” asked Jaya, still pointing her weapon at Mr. Smith.

  “I used the people finder at the Burton. It has a time setting,” said Simon. “It showed you in 1895, so I knew you’d used the Wells time machine. I knew you were trying to stop my ancestor. I came back to stop you and get the time machine. Where is it?”

  I still had the copper rod in my hand. I was edging around toward Simon. I wasn’t sure what I was planning to do, but I had to do something. Maybe I could knock the death ray out of his hand.

  “Stop right there, Leo! Nobody moves or I’ll shoot,” said Simon.

  Tesla had picked up a big metal object and was bearing down on Simon. “Get out of my lab! All you, get out!” he roared. He moved like a giant skinny gorilla.

  Simon yelled, “Everybody stand still! Or I’ll shoot her, I swear I will!”

  Another tremendous noise—this time a deep boom that made my bones itch—and another copy of Simon materialized in the lab. He was riding on what must have been the Burton’s other time machine. It had rounded lines—it looked like something out of a 1950s space comic. He had the beginning of a black eye, his shirt was ripped, and his nose was bleeding.

  He leapt at the first copy of himself, screaming, “Stop! Stop! You’ll hurt Jaya!”

  Then everything got very confusing.

  The new Simon knocked the death-ray pistol out of the first Simon’s hand. Then the two Simons were fighting like demons, punching and kicking and yelling. They were perfectly matched. Simon One was fresher and unhurt, but Simon Two knew every move he was going to make seconds before he made it.

  Meanwhile, Mr. Smith dove for Simon’s model death ray, and I dove to stop him. I grabbed what I could reach—his back and shoulder—and hung on tight. His jacket was pulling loose from him, and I was losing my grip. And he was strong! We went down together. I tried to get on top of him and pin him to the floor, but he wiggled his arms free, grabbing the model death ray.

  “Get out of the way, Leo! I can’t shoot him—I’ll hit you!” yelled Jaya.

  Mr. Smith lurched beneath me and I heard that horrible hiss as he fired his death ray. I pushed myself up with all my strength and threw my weight on him. He rolled over, throwing me off and hitting my head hard on the floor.

  For a moment I couldn’t move. I saw a flash through my closed eyelids and I heard the death ray hiss again. Something else crackled. Suddenly the air filled with crackling and hissing. It was deafening and blinding, as if everyone in the lab were shooting death rays at once. And then, to my terror, I smelled smoke.

  When I got my eyes open, some machine—a Tesla coil?—was shooting lightning all around the room and something in the far corner had caught fire.

  I looked for Tesla and Mark Twain. They were wrestling the ray gun away from Mr. Smith. One of the Simons was yelling, “Drop it, Jaya! Drop it!”

  Where was Jaya? I couldn’t see her.

  A voice was yelling, “Jaya, watch out! Help her, Leo!” The voice sounded really familiar—almost like mine. I looked around. Where was Jaya? Who was talking?

  “She’s over by the window. Quick, Leo! Go help her!” The voice was mine! How? Where was it coming from?

  No time to find out. I hauled myself to my feet and ran to the window.

  Then one of the Simons—they were both so bloody and messed up now that I couldn’t tell them apart—got away from the other one and jumped at Jaya. He pushed her over and she fell, hitting her head on the table leg with a loud crack. The ray gun went flying from her hand, and I saw it hit a metal tank. From the corner of my eye I saw what looked like lightning. Jaya was moaning and holding her head, and Simon was on top of her.

  I threw myself on Simon and tore him off her with a strength I didn’t know I had.

  “Get out now, Simon!” yelled the other Simon. “The dark energy is destabilizing the portal! Run!”

  The Simon I was fighting wrenched himself away and ran for the portal that Simon One had come out of. The whole thing was getting smaller.

  Screaming, Simon leapt in.

  The portal snapped shut behind him with a zipping wail, like a subway car crushing a zillion kittens.

  The other Simon yelled, “Run, Mr. Smith! You have to make your ship!”

  But Mr. Smith wasn’t going anywhere. Tesla and Twain had him firmly by the arms.

  The fire was spreading. Mr. Smith’s crates and papers were blazing brighter than the electric lights, and the lightning was brighter than everything.

  Tesla yelled something in Serbo-Croatian. It sounded like a curse. “The hydrogen!” he yelled.

  “Everybody get out!” shouted Mark Twain. “It’s going to explode!”

  Swearing, the remaining Simon—it must have been Simon Two—jumped onto the space-age time machine. It disappeared with another tooth-jarring boom.

  Jaya still looked stunned. I pulled her to her feet. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!” I yelled. We started for the door.

  Then I remembered. “Wait! The time machine!”

  “There’s no time! Come on!” screamed Jaya, pulling my arm.

  “You go! I’ll get it!”

  I wrenched free and ran across the room to where we’d left the traveling bag. I grabbed
the bag just as flames were licking at the handle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I Meet Myself Coming and Going

  Jaya and I stood together in the street, watching the lab burn, standing back from the wall of heat. The explosion still echoed in our ears. Mark Twain had Mr. Smith in a hammerlock, his arm behind his back. My legs felt weak, and Jaya looked grim and shaken.

  “Leo, you saved my life in there. Thank you.” She looked into my eyes.

  I looked back into hers. I didn’t know what to say.

  Tesla stared at his lab. The lightning seemed to have gone out of his eyes. “It’s all gone, Sam,” he said. “The work of half my lifetime, very nearly.” I saw tears on his cheeks, red with reflected firelight.

  “It’s a damn shame, Nik,” said Twain gently. “A damn shame.”

  Tesla turned on Mr. Smith. “How could you do this? I trusted you!”

  Mr. Smith shrugged, or tried to—he couldn’t move his shoulders much. “It’s your own fault. You should have let me take the things and go. Then you wouldn’t have lost everything.”

  Tesla roared. I thought he was going to tear his assistant apart. Twain spun Mr. Smith around, putting himself between the two men.

  “It’s not true, Mr. Tesla,” Jaya said quickly. “It’s not your fault. Your lab would have burned down tonight anyway. In the future where we come from, the fire starts in the basement. I think Mr. Smith was always going to start it.”

  “You knew that? Then why didn’t you warn me?” This time I thought Tesla was going to tear Jaya apart.

  “Well, Leo wouldn’t—I mean, we didn’t want to risk—” She stopped. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tesla, I really am. But don’t worry, you’ll build a new lab right away. I promise.”

  We heard fire engine bells. The sound seemed to remind Jaya of her impatience. “Come on, Leo. We have to go,” she said.

  “I’m really sorry about your lab, Mr. Tesla,” I said.

  Jaya said, “I’ll see you very soon, Mr. Clemens. But—” She hesitated.

  “But I won’t see you, is that it?” said Mark Twain.

  Jaya nodded. “You’ve already seen me back then.”

  The clanging was getting louder and closer. “Come on, Leo,” Jaya said.

  Mr. Smith said something unrepeatable. Twain wrenched his arm. We walked away quickly to the train, not looking back.

  • • •

  When we got uptown to my building, it was quiet and empty in the starlight. We slipped in through the back door and climbed the stairs to the top floor. Once we were all packed and shrunk, Jaya hopped on the saddle. “My turn to drive,” she said. “Get on behind me.”

  I started to argue, but then I remembered that I had been sitting behind her when the time machine had appeared in my bedroom. “All right,” I said, “but we have to make a stop on the way home.”

  “When you saw us in your bedroom, you mean? Okay,” said Jaya.

  I braced myself for that horrible feeling of wrongness, and Jaya pushed the lever marked FUTURE.

  • • •

  We poured through time again with the same headlong, motionless hurtling, but this time it was different—maybe because we were going in the right direction. I felt like I was winning a game, acing a test. An upside-down waterfall of hope cascaded through me, starting in the soles of my feet and babbling out through my head.

  “We did it!” I cried, leaning against Jaya and hugging her tight. “We stopped Simon! His ancestor didn’t get the death ray! The city’s safe!”

  She laughed and leaned back against me, her hands on the controls.

  The years flew by. I lost count, but I didn’t care. Out the window, buildings rose and fell. Trees sprouted and writhed their branches taller and taller.

  Suddenly a building leapt jerkily into existence on the corner lot near my building. I recognized it: the new annex of the Brindley School. They’d just finished building it the year before. “Slow down, Jaya! We’re almost there.”

  She pulled back on the lever. The days flicked past one by one. Vast shadowy shapes filled the room; I saw my own furniture. My chair jerked around from desk to window and back. My bed flung its sheets into wild heaps, occasionally making itself neatly for a few moments. My self flickered around too, transparent and ghostly, shimmering on the chair or making the bed lumpy.

  What day was it now? I looked around for the pencil line I’d drawn on the wall back when I was seven and first getting excited about astronomy. That’s where the sunlight falls at noon every summer solstice, the third week in June.

  There! The sun hit the line, and I started counting days. “Get ready to stop,” I told Jaya.

  One more night. One more sunrise.

  “Now!”

  She pulled the lever to the stop position. We stopped with a bang, knocking over my lamp.

  • • •

  I don’t love looking in the mirror. I mean, I’m a reasonably okay-looking guy, I guess, but it always feels so strange to see myself from the outside. Photos are even worse—I’m used to Mirror Me, so Photo Me looks backwards, distorted, with my ears all crooked and that bosonic curl on the wrong side of my forehead. But the worst of all was real-life 3-D Me. He was backwards and distorted and a zillion feet tall, with his mouth hanging open in surprise.

  He closed his mouth, swallowed, and blurted something. I wished Jaya didn’t have to see him—me—like this.

  “Hi, um, me,” I answered. “It’s me, Leo. I’m you. Wow, you’re big.” Smooth! But wait—didn’t I have to tell him something—something about the repository? No, not the repository, the time machine. The Time Machine. I had to tell him to read it. That’s how he would figure out about going to England and capturing the mini time machine. “Listen, this is important,” I said. “Read H. G. Wells—”

  He interrupted me with questions. Then Jaya started talking, trying to warn him about Simon.

  I couldn’t let her do that. Suppose she told me what Simon was going to do—suppose I listened to her? Suppose she got me to stop Simon before he sabotaged Francis’s Burton page application and made Jaya hate him? Then Jaya might actually make the mistake of dating that boson! And then Simon wouldn’t try to hold the city hostage, so we would never visit Tesla to stop him from getting the death ray, and I would never show up in my own bedroom on a time machine, and I would never tell myself to read Wells, and I might never ask Ms. Kang for advice about my project, and I might never meet Jaya. I couldn’t let that happen!

  I put my hand over Jaya’s mouth. I saw Past Me’s enormous eyes get even more enormous, and I remembered how surprised I’d been when I saw myself treating her like that.

  She bit me, of course, and started arguing, just like she had before.

  I heard my sister’s footsteps. I reached around Jaya and rammed the lever down. My vast, past face faded, and we poured into the future again, buoyed on hope.

  • • •

  We landed safely in my empty bedroom. Jaya wanted to dash out to the repository as soon as we were the right size, but I made her wash the soot off her face first and change back into her regular clothes.

  “The first thing we have to do is get Simon on the telelectroscope and tell him we know he’s bluffing,” she said, tugging on her ridiculous hat, the one with the pom-pom on the end.

  “No, that’s the second thing. The first thing we have to do is get your patience back,” I told her.

  She was way too impatient for the bus. She hustled me into a cab and then kept glaring at the driver for stopping at red lights. “It was better in 1895, before they invented traffic lights,” she said.

  At the repository, she was too impatient to wait for the elevator. She thumped up the stairs two at a time and burst into Doc’s office.

  “It’s safe!” she cried. “You can call off the team! Simon’s bluffing—he doesn’t have the death ray!”

  “Shut the door and sit down, Jaya,” said Dr. Rust. “What team? Who’s Simon?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THRE
E

  A World Without Simon

  Apparently Simon had never existed.

  Jaya turned to me in dismay. “What happened? Simon’s great-great-grandfather didn’t die in the fire! Clemens had him—he was perfectly safe! So why wasn’t Simon born? What went wrong?”

  “Nothing went wrong,” I said. “This is good! No Simon to destroy New York.”

  “Yes, but why doesn’t he exist?”

  I thought about it. “Didn’t Simon say his great-great-grandfather met his great-great-grandmother crossing the Atlantic? He must have missed his boat and never met her.”

  Dr. Rust, who had been listening patiently, asked, “Who is this Simon who doesn’t exist?”

  “There’s no time to explain! I have to go back to Tesla’s lab and stop us from killing Simon!”

  “We didn’t kill him,” I said. “We just made things so that he never existed. Big difference.”

  “He did so exist!”

  “Not in this world.”

  “Oh! Don’t be such a boson! Give me that time machine!” She was so impatient she actually stamped her foot.

  “Hold your horses, Jaya.” I pulled the shrink ray out of the satchel and put it on Dr. Rust’s desk. “Before we do anything else, you’d better give Jaya back her patience,” I said.

  “Clearly.” With a look of amused patience, Dr. Rust opened a dark metal box on the desk and rummaged around, pulling out something swirly and insubstantial. “Is this it?”

  Jaya curled her lip at the thing. “Ugh, of course not!”

  Doc squinted at it. “No, you’re right. That was just a good intention. Is this—? No . . . Ah, here it is!”

  Doc pulled out a small, thin object and offered it to her.

  Jaya frowned. “I thought there was more of it.”

  “Your patience? Don’t be silly.”

  Jaya rolled her eyes, but she took the thing, which melted into her arm. She gave a huge sigh. The difference was invisible but dramatic. I felt the air around her relax.