“That was smart,” Jonah said grudgingly.
On the screen Lindbergh showed up in the Skidmores’ living room in the same brown suit and fedora he was wearing right this minute. Jonah was hit with such an ache of homesickness that it took him a moment to put everything together.
“But—I saw you then!” he exclaimed. “That was just a moment before you kidnapped Katherine! I knew you were there!”
Jonah just hadn’t realized that the first time he’d seen Lindbergh in the twenty-first century had occurred, for Lindbergh, after his disappearance with Katherine.
“Sometimes you do need to pay more attention to the little details around you,” Lindbergh said, with a bit of sternness. He held the razor Elucidator up admiringly. “This little device saved me again and again from taking some subtle action that would end up having terrible repercussions.”
“It didn’t drive you crazy demanding that you ask it precise questions?” Jonah asked.
“Uh, no,” Lindbergh said, looking slightly puzzled. “I always did ask it precise questions. Didn’t you?”
Jonah decided not to answer that.
Lindbergh dropped the razor Elucidator in Jonah’s hand.
“So that’s everything, I guess,” he said. “You can take it from here?”
Jonah gaped at Lindbergh.
“You’re willing to just walk away from time travel?” Jonah asked, so stunned that he almost dropped the razor Elucidator down to the ground. “Or were you thinking that I get the Elucidator and you get that plane? That’s not going to work. Because, see, even though they’re not here now, there are time agents who enforce—”
“Of course not,” Lindbergh interrupted. “Perhaps it was cheating a bit, but I saw the life that’s ahead of me without time travel. My wife and I are going to have five more children. I’m going to travel the world, even more than I already have. I’m going to be a bestselling author and an ace pilot during—what is it that they’ll end up calling it? World War Two? There will be things I say and do publicly and privately that others will judge me for, but since when have I concerned myself with the judgment of others?”
Jonah stared down at the Elucidator in his hand—and at baby Gary and baby Hodge on the ground.
“What am I supposed to do with a razor Elucidator, two babies who used to be my worst enemies, and an airplane that—well, I guess it really is sort of an Elucidator too?” he asked.
“You forgot about the other thirty-five babies I brought you,” Lindbergh said. He pointed back toward the plane. “All the original babies are still on the plane.”
Except for me, Jonah thought dazedly.
“But—” he began to protest.
Lindbergh clapped him on the shoulder.
“You seem like a smart fellow,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Now if you’ll excuse me . . . I did see that my wife is due to go into labor with our second son, Jon, in just a matter of hours.”
He turned to go.
“Are you going to talk to the reporters at the front gate?” Jonah asked. “Are you going to tell them anything about—”
“Don’t worry,” Lindbergh said, chuckling as he looked back. “I’ve gotten very good at answering their questions without telling them anything at all. And it’s not as if they’d believe me anyhow. They’d claim I lost my sanity in my grief.”
And then he was truly walking away, leaving Jonah behind with the Elucidator and the plane and the babies.
“Wait,” Jonah said.
Lindbergh turned around once more.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Jonah said. “Your first one. I’m sorry you couldn’t get him back.”
For a moment even decisive Charles Lindbergh seemed lost.
“I have now learned,” he began, “that even with time travel, some things just are. They can’t be changed or undone or fixed. But people—people can heal. Even from events they believe are unendurable.”
And then Lindbergh walked away, toward the reporters and the future he already knew lay ahead of him.
Jonah turned back around to face the plane and the babies. On the ground the baby versions of Gary and Hodge were starting to squirm and whine. Baby Katherine was doing the same thing in his arms.
Jonah looked around quickly to make sure no one was close enough to see him.
“Um, Elucidator, any chance you could fix me up with three baby bottles, with the right kind of milk for four-month-olds?” Jonah asked. He wasn’t actually sure how old Gary and Hodge were now, but he cared more about getting the right food for Katherine. “Maybe bottles that could be propped up without someone having to hold them?”
He was willing to feed the baby versions of Gary and Hodge, but he wasn’t going to cuddle them in his arms.
The bottles instantly appeared in the mouths of Gary, Hodge, and Katherine. All three babies started drinking greedily.
Angela was right, Jonah thought. An Elucidator really does make getting food in a foreign time period much, much easier.
He wondered if the babies on the plane also needed food, but when he peeked in through one of the windows, all those babies still seemed to be asleep.
“Elucidator, can you put me in contact with Angela now?” he asked. “Or JB, if he’s sane again, or Hadley—or, really, just about anybody else in the time agency?”
NO, the Elucidator in his hand flashed back at him. NOT YET.
“When will I be able to talk to them?” Jonah asked.
IT DEPENDS, the Elucidator said.
“On what?” Jonah asked.
ON WHAT YOU DO NEXT.
Oh, no pressure! Jonah thought.
He looked down again at baby Katherine and baby Gary and baby Hodge, and at the airplane.
“You mean, it depends on what I do with the plane and the babies,” Jonah said.
EXACTLY, the Elucidator agreed.
Jonah sank down to the ground, cradling baby Katherine on his lap. She clumsily slapped her hands against the bottle, but it wasn’t like she could actually hold it well on her own.
Jonah tilted the bottle up so the milk flowed a little faster.
Babies are so helpless, he thought. Dependent. Totally at the mercy of the people around them.
He glanced over at baby Gary and baby Hodge. Babies were defenseless, too. Jonah could punch and kick and even torture his enemies now, and there was nothing they could do about it.
But that seemed so horribly wrong that Jonah was disgusted with himself for thinking of it. Gary and Hodge were babies now. They’d been awful as adults; they’d been downright gleeful trying to ruin Jonah’s life. But as babies they were innocent. When they grew up again—if they grew up again—they might be terrible people once more or they might be good this time around.
Or they might be totally disabled because of the strain of un-aging from adults back to babies again, Jonah remembered.
Was that Lindbergh’s fault? Or Jonah’s? Or . . . nobody’s? Jonah couldn’t feel too guilty about what had already happened to Gary and Hodge. But what if Jonah did something with all the babies on the plane that also messed them up, just because he didn’t know all the possible consequences?
Andrea, he thought with a pang. Chip, Gavin, Daniella, Alex, Emily, Brendan, Antonio . . .
He could picture each one of his friends. And he pictured each one of them with a crowd behind them of friends and relatives—everyone their lives had touched or could potentially touch, everyone whose lives could be ruined or repaired by Jonah’s decisions.
What if what happened to the babies and the plane could ruin or fix time itself?
“I’m thirteen years old!” he said aloud. “I shouldn’t have this much power! I don’t know anything!”
In his arms baby Katherine startled. She stopped sucking on the bottle for a moment and stared up at him with large, worried eyes.
Then she giggled.
She’d laugh at me if she were here as her right age too, Jonah thought. She’d say, “Haven�
�t you learned something from time travel?”
He had, actually. On his trips through time he’d seen again and again how often little, seemingly insignificant actions saved the day. He’d seen how tiny moments of helping one person had saved everyone.
Whatever I decide to do with an entire planeload of babies is never going to be tiny, he thought.
But he did know tiny bits and pieces about time and life and the other big topics he’d discussed so many times with JB: fate and God, philosophy and religion . . . and what was the purpose of life, anyway?
God? Jonah thought searchingly. What should I do with this plane?
It wasn’t like he expected to hear a booming voice from above, giving him directions. But he felt a little less paralyzed. He could hear other voices in his head, especially JB saying again and again, We have to fix history. We have to repair the mistakes that Gary and Hodge made, kidnapping those kids from time. . . .
History had already been fixed for every single one of the thirty-five babies on the plane. Jonah didn’t exactly know his own situation, but he’d seen how everyone else’s past lives had worked out when he’d watched the monitors back in the time cave.
So there’d be no reason for me to send any of them back to their original lives in history, Jonah thought, and this was a huge relief.
He remembered Gary and Hodge sneering that Jonah’s other time period, the twenty-first century, was history too, from their perspective. He remembered Gary saying, It was never possible for time to survive with you or any of the other babies from that plane living in this time period. He remembered Hodge saying, Once that plane crash-landed in this time period, this time was doomed. It’s always been doomed. You lived through thirteen years of it being doomed.
What if that wasn’t a lie?
“Were Gary and Hodge telling me the truth about my time period being doomed by the time crash?” Jonah asked the Elucidator.
MAYBE, MAYBE NOT, the Elucidator flashed back. THAT DEPENDS ON YOU TOO.
Jonah resisted the urge to throw the Elucidator down to the ground and jump up and down on it, smashing it into bits. The fact that baby Katherine was still in his lap was probably the only thing that stopped him.
He took a deep breath and tried again.
“What should I do to save everyone?” he asked.
EVERYONE WHO EVER LIVED, YOU MEAN? the Elucidator asked, the words scrolling across the screen. YOU DON’T HAVE THAT KIND OF POWER.
“You know what I mean,” Jonah said. “How can I save all the people I care about? And save time?”
JONAH, I’M JUST A MACHINE, the Elucidator said. I COULD NEVER BE PROGRAMMED TO BE AWARE OF EVERY VARIABLE. I CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TO DO.
So I’m supposed to know more than an Elucidator? Jonah thought despairingly. But there was an echo to that thought, an answer: No. I’m just supposed to care more.
He couldn’t see a way clear to figuring out everything about the time streams Gary and Hodge had tangled together and split and reshaped and collapsed. But the Elucidator had said there was a possibility that the time crash hadn’t—or wouldn’t—ruin time. Without aging the babies on the plane forward—and maybe risking injuring them—he couldn’t ask any of them what they wanted. But he knew what he would have wanted, if he’d still been one of them.
Was that maybe the best way for him to decide?
He took another deep breath—not rushing into anything, not being the impulsive, careless kid who’d annoyed Katherine and Angela.
He was still certain of his decision.
“Send this plane back to the scene of the time crash,” he said aloud, and the words felt exactly right.
A second later the plane vanished.
And JB appeared in the space where it had been.
FIFTY-TWO
This was adult JB, normal-age JB, conscious JB, and—as far as Jonah could tell—sane JB.
Still clutching baby Katherine and her bottle, Jonah sprang up from the ground and launched himself toward JB. It wasn’t until Jonah and Katherine were engulfed in JB’s arms that Jonah realized: JB was also holding a baby wrapped in a blanket.
“Why does everybody think they have to bring me a baby?” Jonah joked, because there weren’t words to say everything else he wanted to. “I don’t even like babies!”
“You did it,” JB cried, reaching around both babies to pound Jonah on the back. “You saved time! And the other kids! And Katherine! And me!”
“And my parents?” Jonah began. “And Angela—”
“They’re fine too,” JB said.
“And they’re the right age again?” Jonah asked anxiously.
“I’m sure they will be,” JB said reassuringly. He shrugged. “The time agency took care of my problems first, because of my other issues. And then I left to come here as soon as I could—I couldn’t wait to congratulate you for saving everyone.”
“Well, really, Charles Lindbergh did a lot too,” Jonah said modestly. “And Angela and Hadley and . . . and you, JB. You got me to the time cave, and you got the monitor to work just about as well as it could work, and . . . It really wasn’t your fault that coming back here made you crazy.”
He pulled back a little and gazed anxiously into JB’s face. What if coming back to 1932 once more, even as an adult, created problems for JB all over again?
To cover, Jonah started to pull back the blanket hiding the baby in JB’s arms.
“Who’s this baby you’re carrying around, anyhow?”
JB pulled the baby back away from Jonah, but not before Jonah got a good look.
This baby was painfully thin, and his eyes looked too old somehow, as if he had already seen too much in his short life.
Other than that, this baby looked like Jonah had as a . . . well, not a four-month-old. Maybe when he was a year and a half or so?
Jonah took a step back. Everything seemed frozen in the heavy August afternoon around him.
“How could you?” Jonah exploded. “Just when everything was fixed, you of all people are trying to split time again, putting two copies of me in the same time period, just like Gary and Hodge did—how is that even possible? How can I stand here looking at some replica of myself from another time stream?”
JB laid a calming hand on Jonah’s shoulder.
“Jonah, this is the same baby Gary and Hodge showed you,” JB said. “But it isn’t you.”
Jonah squinted hard at JB. He remembered how much, back at the airport, he’d wanted to believe that Gary and Hodge were lying to him. He remembered the other possibilities he’d thought of for the baby’s identity, and how quickly he’d dismissed them.
“Then they did clone me,” Jonah said.
JB shook his head.
“Why do you always go for the most outlandish, sci-fi explanation you can find?” he asked. “Isn’t it easier to believe you have an identical twin?”
“A twin?” Jonah repeated. He peered down at the baby again, thinking, Not me, not me, not me . . . It was a huge relief, since this baby looked so pathetic and desperate, like a picture from a fund-raising appeal for starving children. “But why didn’t you tell me all this from the very beginning?”
“Time is very delicate,” JB said. “And Gary and Hodge muddied so many things about this time period . . . what if we told you something that tipped the balance into letting them win? Or left a dangling paradox that made all of time collapse? There were a trillion ways all of this could have failed, and—we now see—only one possible sequence of events that could have worked. Only none of us could see the successful outcome until everything fell into place.”
Jonah glanced anxiously toward the baby versions of Gary and Hodge still lying on the ground. It was almost like he had to reassure himself that they were still there, defenseless and defeated.
“But sending that plane back to the time crash—that healed the time split, right?” Jonah asked. “The fact that you’re sane again and an adult again and could come back to rescue me—doesn’t that mea
n that everything’s going back to normal?”
“Um . . . ,” JB began. He glanced down at a watch on his wrist. “Hold on a minute. I need to put your twin back in place.”
JB disappeared for a split second, then reappeared. If Jonah had blinked, he would have missed the change. The only difference he would have noticed was that the baby JB had been holding had vanished.
Even knowing that he’d just witnessed JB sweeping in and out of time, Jonah still automatically reached out and swiped his hand through the space where the baby had been.
“Even in an overcrowded orphanage where children die of malnutrition, there was a danger that someone would have noticed that baby missing if I’d kept him much longer,” JB said apologetically.
Jonah squinted at JB in dismay. He really only heard one word JB said: Die.
“Wait—you just took that baby back to die in an orphanage?” Jonah asked, horrified. “My identical twin? You’d show him to me and then just . . . let him die?”
Without even thinking about it, Jonah tightened his grip on baby Katherine. She bit down on the bottle nipple a little harder in protest, and a tiny stream of milk flowed down her cheek.
Jonah reached down and wiped it away.
I should have at least asked the Elucidator to give that other baby a bottle too, Jonah thought. Or JB should have.
JB put a steadying hand on Jonah’s shoulder.
“Your twin brother would have died in original time, yes,” JB said with a sigh. “But that changed, remember? He was only supposed to live a little longer than you did. In just a little bit, Gary and Hodge are going to steal him out of time to put him on the alternate version of the plane to the future. And then when they leave him at the scene of the time crash, you’ll deliver him to your parents because you’ll think he’s you.”
“Oh yeah,” Jonah said. He wrinkled his nose, annoyed at having to remember that Gary and Hodge stealing the baby could be in Jonah’s past but still in his twin’s future. “But then, that stream of time with my twin in it? That’s going to collapse. Gary and Hodge said so.”
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