He thought back to what he had read about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Something about the earth plunging into an ice age after the comet hit because the dust from the comet blocked out the sun. He wondered if that was what was happening now. Would he freeze to death? Would they find his frozen body someday and think he was some caveman? He couldn’t help but laugh at the idea.
No, he thought. He wouldn’t just give up like this. There was one dinosaur still left on the surface alive that he knew of. Priti. Could he find her? He decided to start looking. If he lay there, he would freeze to death.
Kyle got up and then remembered his knee. It still hurt. He looked around and found a piece of a branch that hadn’t been consumed by the firestorm. It was already covered with snow.
Not far from where he stood, he saw a glowing light in the distance. He headed in that direction hoping there would be a fire to warm up.
After walking and limping for almost two miles in the building snow, he saw the fire, a small smoldering fire. Perfect! And not a moment too soon.
Nearby there was a large pile of boulders. He touched them and they felt warm. Extremely exhausted he thought, Maybe it would be better to wait until morning to search for Priti.
One of the boulders had an outcropping and he crawled under it and bathed in the warmth. It kept the snow off. He immediately fell asleep. After a few minutes, there was a crunching sound of something approaching. Kyle didn’t hear it.
***
The following morning, Kyle awoke. It was still dark out, but enough of the sun filtered through the clouds to make it seem like the light of a full moon. It was very eerie. As he stretched his arm, something screeched next to him and he jumped clean out of the small cave and fell into the snow. He turned to see what it was that had been resting against him for the warmth and got a shock.
“Priti! Why you old doof-a-saurus you! Where…how…on earth did you find me?”
Priti snuggled up to Kyle and cooed in delight licking his face with her long black tongue.
“Wait a minute! If you’re here, we can’t be too far from the capsule,” said Kyle excitedly. Feeling refreshed, he got up and headed away from the rock still limping although not as badly.
“Come on. We can make it. Show me the way, girl!”
Priti seemed to sense where Kyle wanted to go. He had no idea how or why, but it seemed to be instinctual. They walked for quite a while leaving the warmth of the rock behind them. Occasionally, he heard the sounds of dinosaurs. He had been wrong about one thing. There were still animals alive after the firestorm.
They traveled for hours until the sun crossed the sky in its eerie trek as if it were the moon. Occasionally it snowed again but it was definitely getting colder and colder. He was shivering again.
The chances of finding the capsule were becoming more and more remote. Besides, he thought. Would they even know to launch the capsule this time? Would the future repeat as before?
No, he reasoned. It will change. The paradox is over. The future won’t be the same. He wondered how they would react this time. Would the events in the future change enough that his father wouldn’t try to strand him in the past? He just didn’t know.
“I guess it won’t matter Priti. We’re doomed.”
Then he heard it. A sound as sweet as a celestial orchestra. A hundred violins were filling the valley below with its sound.
“It’s in the valley? Something changed in the future. Come on Priti! We’re saved!”
Kyle ran up to the capsule and watched it materialize in front of his very eyes. The sound of the violins stopped. He touched the green gel and his whole body felt warmer. He was still shivering, but not from the cold. He was shivering with excitement. They were going back. Then it hit him like a sledgehammer. Priti couldn’t go with him.
He looked at her as she jumped around in that nervous way she had—cocking her head to one side and then the other. Tears filled his eyes and fell like icicles hitting the snow beneath his feet.
“I…I…can’t take you.”
Kyle reached down and stroked Priti’s head. “I know you don’t understand. But this is the way it has to be. If I don’t return, I don’t know what will happen. But I can’t stay here with you.”
Choking back the tears he said, “Goodbye.”
Just before he stepped into the capsule, he noticed that the hillside where the capsule had been the first time was gone. In its place, a small volcano had sprung up and was spewing lava from its dome.
“How could they know…?”
Kyle stepped through the gel and into the capsule. There was a camera sitting in the center.
“My god, it’s the first trip all over again,” he exclaimed as the music began and the gel started to spin.
Teresa sat on her bed and looked through a teen magazine while Sonja busily flipped through her physics book.
“It says here…” said Sonja pointing to a page near the end of the book, “that Einstein’s twin theory might explain why time went forward faster in the future when we were in the past.”
Teresa put her magazine down and immediately felt guilty for letting her mind wander off to such trivial things as the color of her shoes. She had almost lost her brother, but had no recollection of the events since she wasn’t with him this time, although she did remember the first trip. Both she and Sonja remembered that all too well.
“Twins? What on earth are you talking about?”
“The twin paradox theory. After Kyle came back and reset the present, only you and I knew about the first trip.”
“Kyle, too.”
“Yes, of course Kyle did. But only he experienced the second trip. At first, I thought he was joking with us, but…listen to this. It says it here in my textbook. Einstein said that if there were a pair of twins and, ‘one boarded a spacecraft traveling at the speed of light while the other remained on Earth, time would slow down for the one on Earth while the one of the spacecraft would speed up. Both twins would feel like time passed at a normal rate, but upon the first twin’s return to Earth from space, he may have aged only a few months while the twin on Earth might be old and gray.’”
“Not that I understand that, but it explains at least a little bit of what happened. What does it say about this string theory Kyle is so obsessed with?”
“It says something about ‘multidimensional strings’ but it is way over my head. I think I get the idea there are four dimensions: length, width, height and time. But I don’t really understand the idea there are other dimensions. I think you have to understand that, before you can understand string theory. I think Kyle understands it,” added Sonja with a distant look in her eyes.
“You really are sweet on my brother, aren’t you?”
Sonja blushed. Then a loud screeching sound pierced the air. It was so loud and horrifying, the girls covered their ears.
“What is that awful sound?” yelled Sonja.
“I think someone’s killing our cat!”
“Oh no! You must try and save it!”
The girls rushed out of the room together and stood in the hall. The sound was coming from Kyle’s room and they both looked at each other with shock etched on their faces.
***
Kyle was determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. He wanted to understand string theory in the worst way and he was willing to think way outside of normal ideas. His father called it “thinking outside the box” but Kyle was trying to think outside the known universe.
The door to his room burst open and Teresa and Sonja stood in the doorway half expecting to see Kyle killing something. They were even more shocked at what they saw.
“What are you doing?” asked Teresa.
“I’m…just learning to play the violin?” answered an embarrassed Kyle. He still couldn’t look at Sonja after his trip to the future. He couldn’t even begin to imagine being married to her.
“It sounded more like you were dragging your fingers across ten chalkboards at the same time!
”
“You want to understand string theory,” said Sonja shaking her head up and down. “He wants to understand string theory,” she repeated to Teresa confidently.
“From the sound of it, it will take you about a million years to learn to play that thing.”
Kyle set the violin down on the bed and just looked at it. “It’s quite complicated…”
“String theory?” asked Sonja.
“That, too. I mean playing this thing. Why can some people play it and make it sound like an angel singing. It’s so beautiful!”
“Are you really my brother?” asked Teresa with her hands on her hips. “How do we know you’re not an alien and you…ate him?”
“Oh, do not be so silly,” said Sonja. “If anyone can figure this out, it will be Kyle.”
What really scared Kyle at that moment wasn’t that he couldn’t figure out string theory; it was that he was starting to like Sonja. That was more terrifying than a velociraptor.
***
Kyle sat in the living room half watching the television and half playing with his hand-held Game Boy. His father was sitting in his easy chair with his feet up in the air and reading a large notebook.
“Dad?’
“Yes,” his father responded in irritated tone.
“Do you think Kaluza was right?”
“Excuse me?” his father responded in shock nearly dropping his notebook.
“Kaluza. You know. The mathematician. Was he right?”
“I know who Kaluza is. What are you talking about?”
“He said that there may be five dimensions. Einstein didn’t agree with him. But Einstein thought that the speed of light was the fastest particles moved. But there are other particles that seem to move much faster. It does seem to fit the theory of everything. It fits in with string theory, doesn’t it?”
Dr. Donavan was in such shock he could barely answer. “Uh… string theory? What do you know about…oh. I get it. Whew, for a minute there you had me going. Good one Kyle. Let me know when you get the equations worked out. Ha ha! Oh, that’s good.”
His father returned to his notebook. However, he stopped and looked at Kyle who now seemed very irritated. He wondered if he should have responded so flippantly. He was going to mention something when Kyle suddenly became very intent on watching the television and turned up the volume.
***
Something on the tube caught his attention and snapped him out of his doldrums as if he had been doused with a bucket of ice water. His hair stood up on the nape of his neck. There was a PBS special report from Ireland on the television. The camera focused on a large body of water covered with a dense fog. The moon shone down through darkened clouds overhead, but only the swirling pea-soup dense mist was visible.
It wasn’t the picture or what the announcer was saying that caught his attention so abruptly. It was the background sound that echoed across the water. It was an eerie, mystical echo—a very familiar sound.
The announcer said in his brogue accent, “…and the strange sounds we have been hearing here tonight are the latest development in the mystery of the legend here at the Loch Ness. As you can hear, it sounds almost like whistling. The odd thing is the peculiar harmonies coming from the loch. Scientists are baffled by it. No one has any idea what it could be.”
Chapter Forty-One
“Kyle. Kyle!”
“Huh?”
“Is it too much to ask you to stay awake during class?” asked Mr. White. Mr. White was Kyle’s biology teacher. He was a large black man, over six feet three with a deep, powerful, baritone voice. When he spoke, most students in his class of twenty-five snapped to attention. Kyle was one of the few exceptions.
“Sorry, Mr. White. I didn’t even know I was asleep,” Kyle responded in a daze. He yawned and the entire class broke out in laughter.
Mr. White stepped back and gestured for Kyle to go to the board.
Kyle walked up to the board bumping into his teacher’s desk in the process further setting the students to ripples of giggles. He picked up a piece of chalk and scratched his head.
Mr. White smirked. He knew the problem was far too difficult for most college seniors, let alone a high school freshman. He wanted to make a point and, it seemed, he was doing far better than he expected.
Kyle turned and looked at his teacher and said matter-of-factly, “You almost had me fooled there for a minute, Mr. White. Okay if I fix the equation?”
“Excuse me?” boomed Mr. White. “What do you mean, ‘fix it?’ Are you trying to be a wise guy, Mr. Donavan?”
Kyle’s face reflected his confusion. “Uh, no sir. It’s just that you have x over y here,” said Kyle pointing to a fraction in the equation. “And on the other side, y equals the number of oxygen molecules per millimeter over x which equals the amount of carbon dioxide exhaled. It doesn’t balance. You can’t figure out the rate of metabolism if that isn’t right…I don’t think. Is that what you were looking for?”
Mr. White’s mouth hung open for several seconds as he realized that he had, in fact, accidentally inverted the fraction. “Uh…yes. Why…that’s correct.”
“And so the answer…” added Kyle erasing the mistake and correcting Mr. White’s equation, “…is now 50 milliliters per second.” As Kyle solved the equation, the chalk broke in two. “Oops. Sorry.”
No one laughed. It appeared everyone, including Mr. White, ceased to breathe as they stared transfixed at the board.
Kyle casually returned to his seat and yawned.
***
Knock! Knock! Knock! Teresa banged on Kyle’s door and Toby, Kyle’s miniature pincher, began barking frantically.
“What?” yelled Kyle.
“Daaaad wants you!” yelled Teresa. “Now!” She knocked a few more times for good measure.
Kyle opened the door and Toby ran out, grabbed Teresa’s furry rabbit slipper off her foot, and ran down the hallway shaking it back and forth violently while growling viciously.
“Hey! Come back here you mangy mutt!”
“What a’ya want? I’m busy!”
“Dad wants to see you right now! What did you do this time?”
“Why? Is he mad?”
“You must be in big trouble. I heard him telling Mom, ‘I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.’ He had a letter in his hand. From Remington High. Are you failing again?”
“I…I don’t know. I don’t think I am.” Kyle thought for a moment. He wanted to have a defense ready before his dad accused him of whatever it was he did wrong.
“If you get grounded again, that’ll be the fifth time this year. You might as well bring the frig up to your room!”
“I did fall asleep in Mr. White’s class yesterday. He’s been really hard on me lately. I’ll bet he’s the one who sent the letter. Oh man…I’m gonna get it this time!”
Toby raced past Teresa with his prize still in his mouth. One of the slipper’s ears was hanging by a thread.
“Kyle!” his father yelled from the bottom of the stairs. A look of fear appeared in Kyle’s eyes.
“Coming!”
“I hope he’s not too hard on you,” said Teresa sympathetically.
“Thanks. I appreciate that. I hope your slipper is still in one piece when you catch Toby.”
Kyle walked slowly down the stairs trying desperately to brace for the lecture he was going to get.
“In the kitchen. Mom’s already there,” said his father. He couldn’t tell if his father was angry. There was no emotion in his face.
Mom, too? Maybe they found out about the trips through time somehow! I mean, sleeping in class isn’t bad enough to cause both of them to talk to me.
His dad walked into the kitchen after him. His mother’s mascara had run indicating she had been crying. Kyle swallowed hard. This is going to be bad—very bad.
“Have a seat, son,” said his father.
Kyle sat down hard, his legs too wobbly to hold him up. He didn’t remember being this frighte
ned when the velociraptors had chased him.
“Kyle. I have to say, I’m very surprised. This letter from your teacher, Mr. White…“
“But I couldn’t help myself, Dad. One minute I was paying attention…I think. And the next minute I was…”
“Whoa! Hold on there. What are you talking about?”
“Uh…well…what are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the award Mr. White says you’re getting at Assembly Day next week. He invited your mom and me to come. Says you solved one of the most difficult problems he ever gave a freshman in his twenty-some years of teaching!”
“We’re soooo proud of you, Kyle!” said his mom. She started to cry again.
“Huh? A…a…award? Me? You’re kidding…aren’t you? I’ve never won an award in my life!”
“I am well aware of that. Which is why I’m so surprised. You didn’t cheat on this, did you?”
“David! How could you say such a thing? Kyle is exceedingly bright!”
“Honey, I’m not accusing him. It’s just that…”
Kyle got up and shook his head. “It’s okay, Mom. Dad’s right. It’s probably just the effects of the harmonics on my neurotransmitters…er.”
“What did you just say?”
“Uh, nothing Dad. Just something I guess I heard you say once.”
Dr. Donavan scratched his head puzzled.
Chapter Forty-Two
“Loch Ness is located in Scotland. It is a land-locked lake some 24 miles long and up to almost a thousand feet deep in some places.” Kyle scrolled down his computer screen. He saw an image of something with a long neck moving through the water. He couldn’t tell what it was since the image was blurry. The video clip was short, only thirty seconds.
Kyle had never looked closely at this legend before, dismissing it as a hoax. Ever since returning from his most recent excursion into the past, however, he was reconsidering the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. He wondered. Could this animal be related to the dinosaurs in the lake? Kyle scrolled down a little further and read the text below the picture of a plesiosaur.
No Time For Dinosaurs Page 17