In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Nathan Van Coops

  “Wow. What’s that like?” Francesca and I lean against the countertop of the island.

  “Spacemen and flying cars, bro,” Guy says in an affected surfer voice. “It’s gnarly.”

  “It’s not that different,” Lawrence says. “Technology is way better of course. And we’ve got the grid, but that has its downsides too.”

  “The grid?”

  “Yeah, satellite system programming for time travelers. Makes it a lot safer.”

  “Time travel is a regular thing there?” Blake asks.

  “Not exactly. It’s pretty regulated. And unauthorized usage is definitely frowned upon.”

  “Nice lethal frowns,” Guy adds. He sticks his fingers in his mouth and pulls his cheeks down in a sort of snarl, then laughs.

  “Who regulates it?” I ask.

  “Oh, there are a couple of different factions.”

  “What are you doing in 1986?” Francesca asks. “Why come all the way back here?”

  Lawrence looks away to his computer screen. “We have our reasons.”

  “It’s okay, brother. I’ll tell them.” Guy sits up straight on the couch and wags a finger back and forth at us. “I’m going to tell you the whole . . . amazing . . . story. But first, I need a beer.”

  He pushes himself off the couch and I can’t tell if it’s walking, or simply trying not to fall, that propels him into the kitchen. He makes it to the refrigerator and pulls out a can of Old Milwaukee.

  “See, the problem with the future,” he says, as he pops the top on the beer, “is that they just can’t take a joke.” He looks from me to Francesca. “Too serious.”

  “So . . . you got in trouble?” Francesca asks.

  “Trouble is a relativistic term.” Guy sips his beer. “You would know that if you ever went to the Academy. Like me.” He teeters sideways and collides with the back of the couch, but tries to play it off and just leans against it.

  “So you went to time travel academy, but you got in trouble, and they . . . kicked you out?” Blake asks.

  “I didn’t get in trouble with the Academy.”

  “Well you kind of did,” Lawrence says.

  “Hey, this is my story.” Guy points to the back of Lawrence’s head. “He wasn’t even in the Academy. He was still in Academy Prep.” Guy’s face contorts into a look of disgust. “Little prepper shits.” He swallows a burp.

  “At least I didn’t get kicked out,” Lawrence mutters under his breath.

  “A lot of good that did you, Tubster. Let’s see if they take your fat ass back now.”

  Lawrence ignores him.

  “But as I was saying, we didn’t leave because of the school. We left . . . because of the Journeymen.”

  “You mentioned them earlier,” I say. “What are Journeymen?”

  “They’re thugs,” Lawrence says. “Mob hit men.”

  “There is a mob in 2160?” Francesca asks.

  “There’s always a mob,” Lawrence replies, still fiddling with the computer. Guy weaves his way around the end of the couch and plops down into the corner again. Lawrence continues. “They were the ones that started it actually, the crackdown on the time travelers. They had the most riding on it.”

  “I don’t follow you,” I say. “Why would the mob be involved with time travelers?”

  “Because they get their panties all in a bunch when you clean out their casinos,” Guy says. He leans his head back and speaks toward the ceiling to no one in particular. “It’s only money, guys.” His head lolls back onto the cushion but he tilts it toward us. “They burnt down our mansion . . .”

  “You had a mansion?” Francesca says.

  “Yeah, baby. I’ll give you the private tour sometime.”

  “You said it burned down.”

  “Details, baby, details.” He rolls his head back and resumes his contemplation of the ceiling.

  “So you guys had your house burned down by casino hit men from the future. Am I getting that right?” Blake says.

  Lawrence nods. “Yeah, more or less.”

  “And you came to the eighties because . . .”

  “We’ve never met anyone who knew Journeymen to come this far back. They’re pretty thick in the early part of the twenty-second century. We’ve never heard of one going pre-millennium though. We figure this is as good a place to lie low as any.”

  “What happens if they catch you?” Blake asks.

  Lawrence shrugs. “I don’t especially want to find out.”

  “How much money did you steal?” Blake asks.

  “We didn’t steal it. We won it,” Lawrence says. “They just didn’t see it that way.”

  “Can we come back to this thing about your friend writing a paper about me in school?” Francesca asks. “What did she write about?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She probably just made up some B.S. about your life to impress our history teacher. He was an idiot.”

  “But people have heard of us in 2155?” I say.

  “Everybody knows about you because they know about Harold Quickly. You all got famous by association. Famous with time travelers anyway; I don’t know that anyone else has ever heard of you.”

  “Quickly is a big deal then, too?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah, he’s like Grandfather Time. He started it all. Of course there are some guys who claim to have gone farther into the past, so they say they’re, ‘The first time travelers.’ But that’s all horseshit. Everybody knows it was Quickly who started it all. His dissertation on the nature of temporal gravity is pretty much the first thing you read when you get into the Academy. Every major temporal physicist to come after him basically just stole his original theory and just made tweaks to try to get attention. He blew them all out of the water when he came to the Fuller Hall debates.”

  “Quickly’s been to the Academy?” I say.

  “Oh yeah. Well, he will. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Francesca says. “Aren’t you sure?”

  Lawrence holds his hands up and wiggles his fingers around. “Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.”

  “Excuse me?” Francesca asks.

  Lawrence looks from her face to mine and then to Blake’s. “Really? Nobody got that reference?”

  We stare at him mutely.

  “Dr. Who? . . . Nobody?”

  “Dr. Who?” Francesca says. “Is he another scientist?”

  “Ha. No. He’s a TV alien. You guys really are babes in the woods aren’t you? Twenty-first century time travelers and you’ve never even heard of Dr. Who? If the Journeymen hadn’t torched my digital media library, I’d make you sit and watch every episode till you were properly ready to have intelligent conversation on time travel culture.”

  I look to the couch and notice Guy has fallen asleep. His beer is leaning precariously on the couch cushion in his loose fingers. At least the conversation has gotten more intelligent there.

  “So you seem pretty knowledgeable. Will you help us out? We’re trying to get back to 2009.”

  “I might be talked into it,” Lawrence replies. “What’s in it for us?”

  “We could pay you,” Francesca says.

  “With what? Smiles?”

  “We’ve got money,” Francesca says. She reaches into her pack and holds up one of the stacks of hundreds.

  “We’re time travelers. We can always get money. What do you have to offer that we can’t already get?”

  Francesca straightens up. “Well I don’t know what you’re suggesting . . .”

  “What have you been using for anchors?” Lawrence cuts her off.

  “Oh,” Francesca says.

  “We’ve been using items from Quickly’s lab,” I say.

  Lawrence swivels his chair to face us directly. “Got anywhere good?”

  “Depends on where you want to go I guess.”

  I pull my pack up from the floor and lay it on the counter. Popping open the latch, I begin pulling out a few of our anchors. Francesca does the same. Lawrence gets out of his chair to come look.
He picks up the photo of the notched silver dollar and sets it back down. Next he picks up a photo of a toolbox in a barn and reads the description.

  “Oh, you have Montana.”

  I notice it’s one of the ones with Mym’s handwriting on the back.

  “We actually need that one,” I say, and take it out of his hands. He gives me a suspicious glance but then moves on to another packet of photos.

  He lingers over an antique hourglass and then again on a picture of a pewter mug on a bar in Germany.

  “Okay. I think I could possibly help you,” he says.

  “How would you be able to help us?” Blake says. “If we trade you some of our anchors, what would we get in return?”

  “You can use our time portal.” He nods toward one of the doors along the wall.

  “What’s a time portal?” Francesca says.

  “I’ll show you.” He leads us around the couch to the wooden door and cracks it open. He meets some resistance in the form of some clothes on the floor but once he has it open, he flips on the light and steps back so we can have a look. I lean in to see. The bedroom is a mess for the first few feet of space. There’s a small twin bed jammed against the wall in the corner that’s littered with clothes and random magazines. Taking up the majority of the rest of the room, is a floor-to-ceiling cell made of cinderblocks, with a steel door.

  He elbows past me with a set of keys and unlocks the three deadbolts on the steel door. The hinges complain slightly as the door swings open. Francesca peers cautiously past me to see inside. We inch closer.

  Lawrence illuminates the cell with a switch that turns on a set of fluorescent overhead lights. Inside are two metal chairs and a table with some straps and diodes on it. A tangle of wires on the table leads onto the floor and over to a pile of car batteries that have been linked up in series with each other. A single computer monitor sits on the table with the wiring.

  “What do you think? I built it myself.”

  I try to think of something complimentary to say. It looks like an interrogation room.

  “Looks . . . efficient.”

  “The batteries are just back-up power in case the electric were to fail. The room is totally impenetrable once you’re inside. Makes for a super-safe travel environment.”

  It smells like feet.

  “How far can we get in this?” Blake says.

  “Guy only likes to go from weekend to weekend in it, but it’ll do ten years at a pop, easy.”

  “You only go to weekends?” Francesca says.

  “Yeah, Guy doesn’t really like weekdays much.”

  “Mondays are for suckers.” Guy’s voice reaches me from the bedroom doorway. He has found his feet again and is leaning on the doorpost with half-lidded eyes.

  “It has fringe benefits, too,” Lawrence says. “You only age like a hundred days per year that way. Keeps you young.”

  “You have enough room for all of us in here?” I say.

  “Yeah, I’ll rig up some more straps,” Lawrence says. He flips off the light. “I’ll do it in the morning.” He passes through us and leads us back to the living room. “You guys are welcome to crash here tonight. The couch is pretty comfortable.”

  “My bed is really comfortable,” Guy says to Francesca.

  “Ugh.” Francesca turns to me and whispers, “We aren’t really going to stay here are we?”

  Blake leans in. “I’d do about anything if it gets us ten years.”

  Francesca stews for a moment. “Well, you’re not leaving me alone with either of these guys.”

  “Don’t worry. We aren’t going anywhere,” I say.

  I turn to Lawrence. “We actually need to charge our chronometers. Do you have a wall outlet we can use?”

  “Yeah, sure. Not that you’ll be needing those antiques anymore, but I don’t mind.” He points me to the wall past the couch. “I can grab you guys a couple of blankets if you want.”

  “Thanks.”

  Lawrence and Guy disappear into the other bedroom and don’t immediately return.

  “You trust that thing?” Francesca gestures toward the jump room.

  “It looks a little sketchy, but these two obviously use it okay. Neither of them are missing arms or anything,” I say.

  “It will only take three jumps to get home if it can really do ten years at a time,” Blake says. “We could be home in our own beds tomorrow night. If the chronometers were charged, I’d just skip to tomorrow morning and say strap me in.”

  “I just don’t know how much I trust these guys,” Francesca says. “Dr. Quickly at least evoked confidence, and it was bad enough doing jumps with him. The idea of traveling with these guys . . . it actually makes me nauseated just thinking about it.”

  “It’s just three jumps,” Blake says.

  I plug two of our chargers into the wall and Blake hands me his chronometer to plug in. I slip mine off my wrist and hook it up as well. I leave them near the baseboard and lay my pack down next to them. I look around for another outlet for Francesca’s and have to settle for one in the kitchen. Lawrence emerges from the bedroom with an armload of blankets as I’m plugging it in.

  “These should help.”

  “Thanks.” I take the blankets and set them on the couch.

  Lawrence begins shutting down his different computer monitors. One large flat-screen, mounted higher up than the others, shows a dense web of diverging lines. Each thread seems to have a thousand little threads branching off it. In the center of the web on the screen is a flashing blue blip.

  “What is that one showing?”

  “That? That’s us. It’s showing our location in time.”

  The little blip seems almost buried by all the threads around it. Lawrence merely gestures with his fingers and the screen zooms in. As the blip grows larger, information begins to appear alongside it. It lists the date in 1986 and shows a frequency oscillation. The frequency is labeled LVR17. Each thread branching off our thread shows a different frequency.

  “So it’s like a map?” I say.

  Lawrence looks from the screen to my face. “Did Dr. Quickly explain the fractal universe to you yet?”

  “Um. I don’t think so. We talked a bit about the timestream and paradoxes and such, but I don’t really recall anything about fractals.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting.” He flips off the monitor and the map disappears.

  “Why? What’s interesting?”

  “Just thought that would probably have come up. No problem though. Plenty of time to fill you guys in tomorrow morning.”

  Lawrence walks to the room with the time cell in it and begins to shut the door behind him. “Oh, bathroom’s over there if you need it.” He gestures toward the door next to the computer monitors and closes his door.

  Blake checks his chronometer’s status near the baseboard, and then grabs one of the couch cushions and throws it on the floor next to the wall.

  “You guys want me try to squeeze down to one end of the couch, so we could have two on here?” Francesca says.

  “No. Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I don’t think we’d fit.” I sit down near the chronometers and rearrange the clothing in my pack to be soft enough to use as a pillow. I lie down and try to get comfortable. Francesca picks up one of the blankets gingerly with two fingers and gives it a sniff. Her nose wrinkles and she sets it back down. She lays her pea coat over herself instead as she gets comfortable on the couch. After a few seconds on the couch cushion, she pops back up and grabs a T-shirt out of her pack. She lays that over the cushion and then rests her head back down.

  “I’ll be really happy to be out of this place.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry this night didn’t go like you planned,” I say. “I’m sure you would much rather have been hanging out with nicer company.”

  “Maybe you can look up your bartender friend when we get back,” Blake says. “He might be a little old, though.”

  “That’s okay,” Francesca says. “Let’s face it. In tw
enty-five years, that man is still going to be gorgeous.” She smiles at me, then rolls over toward the couch cushions. I contemplate the ceiling. Another night in 1986 after all. I reach my hand over to where my chronometer is charging. I can feel a slight hum inside as I rest my palm on it. It’s not long before I drift off.

  There is the faintest hint of predawn light shining over the top of the blinds as my eyes pop open, but the rest of the room is dark.

  “I’m telling you, it’s not there.” Francesca’s voice is coming from the far end of the bank of computer screens. As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I make out Blake’s silhouette near her.

  “Did you feel along that inside wall?” he whispers.

  “Yeah, of course I did. You try if you like.”

  “Hey. What are you guys doing?” I ask.

  “Looking for the bathroom light switch,” Blake replies.

  “I can’t find my backpack,” Francesca says.

  I rise up to an elbow and peer into the darkness near the couch. “Didn’t you have it right by you?”

  “Got it,” Blake says, as light from the bathroom streams in over the couch. “It was a pull cord.”

  The pack isn’t near the couch. I sit up and realize I’m still holding my chronometer, so I set it down.

  “See. Told you,” Francesca says to Blake. “I had it right there. I was going to get another shirt because I was cold, but it wasn’t there.”

  Climbing off the floor, I walk over to the couch and look behind it. Nothing. But why would it be . . . I look to the corner of the kitchen counter where I left Francesca’s chronometer charging.

  “Oh shit.”

  “What?” Francesca says.

  I rush around the island and grope at the area near the refrigerator in the half-light. “It’s gone. Your chronometer is gone.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Blake says. He strides to the kitchen and then immediately walks over to Guy’s bedroom door. The door swings open easily as he turns the knob. Tangled sheets and a pile of dirty clothes are all we see when he flips on the light. I move to the other door. This one doesn’t move.

  “You’re kidding,” Francesca says. “They’re gone?”

  I pound on the door. “Lawrence!”

  Nothing.