The Wells Bequest

by Polly Shulman

“And now,” said Doc, “go find Lucy Minnian and Rick Reyes and tell us all about this Simon who doesn’t exist.”

  • • •

  “Hang on,” said Ms. Minnian when Jaya had finished talking. “How did this Simon get back to 1895?”

  That’s what continues to amaze me about the repository librarians. Unlike every other adult ever born—well, except Mark Twain and Tesla—a kid can tell them an unbelievable story and they’ll believe it.

  “Two copies of Simon appeared in Tesla’s lab using two different time machines,” said Jaya. “One was a portal and one was a space-age-looking machine. They must have been the Kerr and the Tuck, from the Burton.”

  “But why did he use them at all if the Kerr creates alternate timelines and the Tuck can’t change the past?” asked Ms. Minnian. “Neither one would do him any good.”

  “Here’s what I think happened,” I said. I’d been puzzling it out all the way home. “Simon was tracking us with the Burton’s people finder. When he saw that we were in 1895, he knew we had a working time machine. He figured we must be trying to stop his ancestor from stealing the death ray. So he went back to stop us. Or maybe he was trying to get a death ray for himself or get the Wells time machine from us. He did tell Jaya to give him the Wells machine.”

  “But he didn’t have any effective time machines!” Jaya said.

  “True. But if he used the Kerr to get the Wells time machine, he would be in that new universe—the one in which he had the Wells time machine. And so would we since we were there with him when he took it.”

  That made Jaya scrunch up her face and think hard. “Oh. I guess you’re right.” She thought some more. “But why did he use the can’t-change-anything time machine after that? Didn’t he know that thing was useless?”

  “I guess he was desperate,” I said. “Remember? He was shouting at himself, ‘Stop! You’ll hurt Jaya!’ He must have hurt you, gone home, realized he had to stop himself from hurting you, and used the other machine to try to stop himself even though he knew it wouldn’t work. I guess he really does care about you.”

  “But why not use the alternate-universes machine again since the can’t-change-the-past one is useless?” asked Mr. Reyes.

  Doc said, “He couldn’t. The alternate-universe machine only opens a portal once per user. If I remember the originating story correctly, once the machine has encoded your quantum imprint, you can’t pass the wormhole threshold again in the same temporal direction.”

  Jaya thought about that. “Okay, but then why aren’t I hurt? If Simon hurt me and came back again to change that and if he used the can’t-change-the-past time machine to do it, then how did he succeed in stopping himself from hurting me?”

  “I thought you said Leo saved you, not Simon,” said Dr. Rust.

  “He did, but clearly he wasn’t going to until Simon showed up on the Tuck machine. I mean, Simon was sure he had hurt me—he came back on the Tuck machine to stop himself. And I’m fine now, except for a bump on my head.”

  “Maybe Simon was wrong—maybe he just thought he’d hurt you, but he really hadn’t?” suggested Ms. Minnian. “You do have a bump on your head. Maybe he thought it was worse than it is.”

  “I guess that could be it,” I said. “Things were pretty confusing with the whole fight going on.” It wasn’t a very satisfying answer, but I couldn’t think of a better one for now.

  “All right,” said Jaya. “Now, how do we bring him back?”

  “We don’t,” I said. “He was a total boson and he tried to kill you. The world is better without him.”

  “He also tried to save me, and he was my friend,” said Jaya. “And you shouldn’t make people not exist just because you don’t like them.”

  “But he brought it on himself!” I said. “If he hadn’t threatened us with the death ray, we would never have gone back to 1895 and stopped his great-great-grandparents from meeting.” This was crazy. Now Jaya was the one insisting it had been a bad idea to change the past and I was the one defending it.

  “What’s the rush?” asked Dr. Rust. “There’s no need to decide right now. Simon doesn’t exist, so he’s not going anywhere. Let’s all sleep on it for a few days.”

  We agreed to leave it at that.

  • • •

  Something else was bothering me. It nagged at the back of my brain while I walked home through Central Park and unlocked my apartment door.

  Sofia was in the kitchen making a banana smoothie and blasting Mozart to drown out the blender. A wave of relief and happiness hit me. “You exist!” I yelled. I threw my arms around her, astonishing both of us.

  “Leo, get off! What’s the matter with you?” she said, licking smoothie off her thumb.

  “I don’t know—isn’t it your job to tell me that?”

  When Jake came over that evening, I managed not to hug him, but I lost five games of Gravity Force III.

  “I can’t believe you let me pulverize your sub with my death ray,” said Jake. “That’s like the easiest shot to dodge! What’s wrong with you?”

  I couldn’t believe it either. Shouldn’t riding around in real submarines and fighting with real death rays make it easier to handle the fake ones in a video game?

  I had a lot on my mind. For one thing, I felt bad about Simon too. I mean, I didn’t think causing someone to never have existed was really the same thing as killing him, and there could be lots of theoretical universes where he still existed, and I certainly didn’t want to ever see him again as long as I lived. But still, he had existed, and now he didn’t, and to some extent it was my fault.

  I also felt bad about not telling Jake—my best friend—about all my amazing adventures. And the thought of Jaya was distracting me too, of course. Did that kiss mean anything?

  That night I dreamed I was riding the Fifth Avenue Stage with Jaya, too nervous to put my arm around her, while Simon whipped the horses and laughed at me and a voice in the background—my own voice—shouted, “Kiss her, Leo! Kiss her!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jaya’s Brilliant Idea

  When I got to the repository on Tuesday, Ms. Callender sent me and Jaya down to Stack 5. It was a quiet day. I wished I had lots of call slips to run. I didn’t know what to say to Jaya. Why did I feel so awkward? Shouldn’t capturing a time machine and traveling back to 1895 with a girl make you feel more comfortable with her, not less?

  A call slip arrived. I took as long as I could to run it. As I was wrapping up a jigsaw to send to the Main Exam Room, the stack door opened and a boy ran in. He looked about seven or eight years old.

  “Sister Jaya!” he yelled.

  “Brother Dre!” Jaya yelled back. “What are you doing here? Did you come with Marc?”

  “Yeah, he’s upstairs with Doc. Read me a story?” He handed her a book.

  “I thought you had a sister, not a brother,” I said, puzzled. The kid looked African American, not Indian.

  “I don’t have a brother yet, but I will. This is Andre, Anjali’s boyfriend’s baby brother.”

  “Baby yourself!” said Andre indignantly. To me, he said, “Hi. Who are you?”

  “That’s Leo,” said Jaya. “He’s a new page.”

  Andre grinned at me. “Hi, Leo. Can you get Jaya to read to me?”

  “Can’t you read to yourself? Or is the book too hard?” asked Jaya.

  “Of course I can!” He sounded outraged. “But it’s way more fun when you read it. You make all the stories more exciting.”

  I knew what the kid meant.

  Jaya looked at the book. “What is this, Poe again? Boy, Andre, you love the scary stuff, don’t you!”

  He nodded gleefully. “Read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart.’”

  “I’m sick of that one,” said Jaya. “How about ‘The Purloined Letter’?”

  A pneum thumped into the basket. I pulled out a sheaf of call slips. “A snarling iron, a cow’s tongue, a beak iron, a riffler, a bastard file, and a burnisher,” I read. “What the quark is all
this stuff?”

  Jaya laughed. “Those are all silversmiths’ tools. They should all be close together.”

  I went off down the stack to look for them. When I got back, Jaya jumped up, calling out, “I’m brilliant! I’m a genius!” She handed me the book. “Here, Leo, finish reading Andre the story. I have to go check something.”

  The story was about a detective looking for a missing letter. The villain had hidden it in plain sight—in a rack of other letters. Andre wasn’t impressed. “That wasn’t scary at all. I like ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ way better. Read that one next,” he told me.

  “The Pit and the Pendulum” was much more exciting. I’d just gotten to the part where the red-hot walls of the torture chamber were threatening to crush the hero and throw him into the pit when Jaya burst back into the room holding a transparent rod. It looked very familiar.

  “Look, Leo! I think this is it!”

  “It what?”

  “The missing quartz rod! From the full-size Wells time machine!”

  “But where did you find it?”

  “In the geology collection, with all the other mineral samples. Call number X S&M 549.68 U556,” she said, reading from a call slip.

  “That is brilliant! How do you think it got there?”

  “Someone must have hidden it in plain sight, like the letter in the Poe story.”

  “But who?”

  “I don’t know—maybe you or me, in the past or the future. Or both. I’m going to run downstairs and see if it fits.”

  “Wait! I’ll come with you!”

  “No, somebody has to stay here in case we get call slips,” she said, and ran off. So much for her newly restored patience.

  I hadn’t even gotten to the end of the Poe story when she came back. Her hair was a mess and there were circles under her eyes.

  “Jaya! What happened to you?” I gasped.

  “Nothing—I just went back to the 1880s and had a little chat with Mark Twain about time travel.”

  “Without me? How could you do that!”

  “I’m sorry. But I was always going to go alone—he never mentioned having met you before. Did you know the ladies wore bustles back then?”

  “What are bustles?” asked Andre.

  “They’re these cage things ladies wore under their dresses, strapped to the back of their underwear, like fake rear ends. Very uncomfortable.”

  Andre laughed. “I bet you look awesome with a fake rear end stuck on your underwear, Jaya!”

  “Jaya!” I said. “You can’t go time traveling without me! It’s not safe! And who’s going to save you if Simon tries to shoot you with a death ray?”

  “Simon doesn’t exist anymore, remember?” said Jaya. “We need to talk about that. I’ve been feeling terrible about what happened to Simon. I really think we need to fix it.”

  But I was only half listening because suddenly I understood what had been nagging at the back of my brain all this time. I was the one who had changed the past and saved Jaya from Simon One. Not Simon Two—he was unable to change the past! It was me. And I knew how I’d done it—or rather, how I was going to do it!

  “Your turn to keep an eye on the stack,” I said. “There’s something I need to do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I Save the Life of the Most Awesome Girl in the Universe

  I ran upstairs to Doc’s office to save Jaya’s life back in Tesla’s lab. I had to stop in the stacks on my way to pick up a few items I needed for the job: a GPS, a microphone, and a clock.

  Balancing them in my arms, I knocked on the head repositorian’s door.

  “What is it, Leo? Come in, come in.” Dr. Rust cleared an armful of priceless objects off the spare chair and gestured for me to sit down. The other chair was occupied by a grown-up version of Andre. He looked a little older than my brother, Dmitri.

  “Oh, sorry—you’re busy. I can come back later,” I said. After all, 1895 would still be there in half an hour.

  “No, you stay. I’ve got to go anyway,” said Andre’s brother.

  “Take care, Marc. Love to Anjali,” said Doc. Marc shut the door behind him.

  Doc turned to me. “Now, Leo, what can I do for you?”

  “Do you still have that thing you gave me to use when I took the test with the clock and the radio—the conceptual coupler? Can I borrow it for a sec?”

  “Sure.” Doc opened a drawer and took it out. “Do you want to check it out on your card? If so, I’ll need a deposit.”

  “You mean like how Jaya gave you her patience?”

  “Yes, your patience would do. Patience, sense of direction, ability to dance—something like that.”

  “I only need the coupler for a few minutes. What if I just use it here—would that be okay?”

  “Help yourself.” Dr. Rust handed me the conceptual coupler.

  With my multi-utility tool, I attached the coupler to the clock, the GPS, and the mic. Doc watched me with interest.

  I tightened the connections, plugged everything in, wound the clock, switched on the power, and located Tesla’s lab in space. Then I spun time backward to the evening when Jaya and I had fought with Simon and Tesla’s lab burned down. I switched the mic to amplify, turning it into a speaker.

  The room filled with the sounds of the fight. I heard death rays hiss, lightning fizz and snap, and men curse. I heard my own grunt of pain when Mr. Smith knocked me out.

  The bangs and hisses and static seemed to go on and on. How long had I been out cold?

  “Drop it, Jaya! Drop it!” Simon’s voice came thin and crackly through the device. There! That was what he’d said just before he jumped on her.

  I pushed the button that switched the mic to speak and shouted, “Jaya, watch out!”

  Silence.

  What had happened? Had I lost the connection? Oh, right—the mic was still on speak.

  I let the talk button go. More crashes.

  I pressed the talk button and shouted, “Help her, Leo! She’s over by the window! Quick, Leo! Go help her!”

  I switched back to amplify and we listened. More shouts and crashes. That must be the sound of me tearing Simon off Jaya. Through all the noise, I heard Jaya’s voice—she was still alive. It worked! I thought. I just saved Jaya!

  “Fascinating,” said Dr. Rust. “I wonder why you were able to access that scene? In this timeline, Simon never existed. Why should he exist in the past?”

  “He shouldn’t,” I said, “but he does. That’s the beauty of the Wells time machine. Paradoxes don’t bother it.”

  “Everybody get out! It’s going to explode!” yelled Mark Twain thinly through the microphone.

  “That can’t be Tesla yelling. Is it Mark Twain?” asked Dr. Rust.

  I nodded.

  “I always wondered what his voice sounded like,” said Doc. “You can tell he’s from Missouri.”

  More curses from the loudspeaker as Past Me grabbed the time machine and everyone scrambled for the door. I switched off the mic hastily. “Well, that’s it. If we’re still listening when the hydrogen explodes, we’ll probably blow out our eardrums. Thanks for the coupler.” I disassembled my machine and handed it back.

  Out in the corridor I heard Present Jaya calling, “Where are you, Leo? The shift’s over!”

  “My pleasure,” said Doc. “I take it your mission succeeded?”

  “Seems that way. Jaya survived.” I got up to go to her.

  “Hang on a second, Leo. I think you’ve earned this.” Dr. Rust opened a drawer and took out a folding multi-utility tool. “Keep it safe and use it carefully.”

  “Thanks! What does it do?”

  It had a zillion tools folded into its case, which was made of some silvery metal I didn’t recognize. I unfolded one. It looked like a screwdriver with a fractal end. I unfolded a teeny-tiny telescope, then a sort of curving scissors. Then a little hand the size of my thumbnail, complete with a thumbnail of its own. When I levered the hand away from the handle, it flexed and
shook itself as if being folded up had given it a cramp.

  “Careful. That one’s willful,” said Doc.

  The tiny hand snapped its fingers at us.

  “This is a fantastic tool! What is it?”

  Doc smiled. “Oh, sorry, didn’t I say? It’s a key to the Wells Bequest.”

  • • •

  “There you are! I was looking for you. What were you doing in there?” asked Jaya as I emerged from Dr. Rust’s office.

  “Oh, just saving your life and earning my Wells Bequest key.” I felt jubilant. I wanted to celebrate. I’d saved Jaya! I’d almost lost her, but I’d saved her instead! I wanted to fold her in my arms and hug her forever.

  But I still didn’t know if she liked me that way.

  “You’re kidding! Congratulations!” She punched me hard on the shoulder.

  “Thanks, and yet ouch.”

  She was standing so close. What was wrong with me? I’d driven the Terror through sea and air. I’d ridden a time machine across more than a century, battled a villain with death rays, run the wrong way in a burning lab with hydrogen tanks about to explode—but I couldn’t seem to kiss the girl I loved.

  Even though she’d already kissed me first.

  “Are you done for the day?” I asked.

  “I just have to put the time machine back in the Wells Bequest oversizes,” said Jaya. “I left it in the main room.”

  “Good. I’ll go down with you,” I said. “I want to see it.”

  • • •

  One of the devices on the silvery multi-utility tool was a little skeleton key that fit into a keyhole in the Wells Bequest door. “I didn’t notice this keyhole before,” I said. “Was it always here?”

  “Not sure. I don’t think I’ve seen it before either,” said Jaya.

  “Hey, didn’t Ms. Minnian use a remote control to open the Wells Bequest? Why is my key different?”

  “All the Special Collection keys are different. They fit the users,” said Jaya. “I like yours.”

  The time machine stood in the middle of the room. It was missing its crystal rod.

  “Here,” said Jaya, taking the rod out of her backpack and handing it to me. “Want to take her for a spin before I put her away? I got to visit Mark Twain—you should get a solo trip too.”