by Sarah Morell
I heard a faint knocking. I wouldn’t have even noticed, but something drew me out of the journal as I saw the shadow that looked like a person passing in front of the doorway. I stuck my head out to see who was there.
To my utter surprise, I was flabbergasted to see that it was already the full brightness of morning. I realized immediately that I was probably going to be late to work.
“Have you been in there all night?” Melody asked looking like she had already showered and prepared for the day.
I said, “Well, I haven’t really. I was only in here for like,” I looked at my watch, “38 minutes. What time do you have?”
Melody looked at her cell phone. “It is 8:15 am. You need to get hustling to make it to work on time. I already put your lunch in the car, so don’t worry about that.”
I pushed myself back into the device and grabbed the journal. I exited immediately, but Melody was now standing over by the cows gathering some feed.
“There you are. I thought you were only going to be a second.”
“I was. I just reached in for this. How long was it out here for you?” I asked.
“Not long, like a minute or two,” Melody said sounding concerned.
As I emerged from the device, time caught up with me. I immediately felt tired like I hadn’t slept for the night. And what was unnoticed hunger now became ravenous hunger. That would be something to remember for later. “Let me show you the journal I found.” My hand emerged, but instead of a journal what came out was different. It was a dusty disintegrating fragment of what I had been reading. A small breeze blew in through the open pole barn door. The disintegration was complete. Before our very eyes, everything I knew about the machine had disappeared into dust. It only occurred to me later that time must have caught up with the journal when I brought it out of the device just like it had caught up with me.
If I am calculating correctly, that means the journal was in the device for a very long time. It must have gone from past to future to past many times with the original driver. I guess it is bad to assume that there was only one driver. I really had no idea. The morning commute and even work itself went entirely too quickly. I was completely distracted and overtired from not sleeping the previous evening. That is why when I got home this evening, I relayed as much information from the journal as I could remember to the rest of the family.
Chapter 7 – Pictures
Lily had waited patiently while Ivy and her father related events from the story. She picked up the narrative from where her father had left off.
My dad went to bed right after we ate that next evening. We spent the whole time talking around the dinner table about what happened after we left him alone in the pole barn. He learned quite a bit from the journal that was left in the machine. First, this thing isn’t strictly a time machine. It can go forward or backward in time to a specific moment. We can select the moment, but we also have to provide the precise location. There are a bunch of rules built into the control system that we have absolutely no control over.
For example, we can’t ever appear near ourselves. Let me explain better. If we go into the past an hour and reappeared out in our front yard, both our past selves and our current selves would be active for the full missing minute. The very nature of our additional moment in the past negates the exact positions we would have been in an hour later to start the backwards travel. He said that it naturally prevents a time paradox, in this case meaning we can’t help ourselves in the past. It is too bad though. I sure could use that on the Algebra test I failed last week. I could have gone back in time and help myself answer the questions that I got wrong.
If the time paradox didn’t make sense to you, it didn’t to me either. My Dad said not to worry about it. Only that the machine won’t ever let us appear close enough to be able to interact with ourselves directly. Apparently, it will warn us if that happens and it won’t actually let us stay in that moment.
One of the other things he learned was that time in the machine was sometimes slower and sometimes faster than the time outside. This was an uncontrollable side effect that we had to watch for. The upshot was that anyone in the machine would catch up with time as soon as they got back. The warnings were pretty clear. We had to limit time in the machine. It wasn’t that it was dangerous to the outside world, but we couldn’t stay in it forever.
To go forward or backward in time, even a little bit, took the machine some time to complete. Even if we only went back to yesterday, it might still take the machine a few minutes to run all the calculations and drop us in the precise location. The further in either direction the machine went, the longer it took the machine to calculate. Let’s say we went back 1000 years. That might take us several days sitting in the machine before we landed. By the time we got out we could quickly age like 50 years. That wouldn’t be cool. I would be like 62 years old, yuck! It sounds like it is kind of a gamble though. Sometimes you could go back a long time and it would only age you a few years, but it was a big risk. As a precaution we could only travel within 3 years of current time.
Going forward was possible, but there were worse side effects. It took the machine even longer to calculate going forward. Add to that the trouble with calculating the variables only allowed for a short distance in the future anyway. I think Dad calculated it at like no more than 30 days and probably a lot less. Dad said there were a lot of warnings about going forward in time and the journal highly discouraged it.
Mom and Dad were concerned about the device because of what happened to the manual when he took it out. I guess I can understand. They realized that the device was way more dangerous than any of us had expected.
In case you are wondering, there really isn’t a government agency that deals with time machines; although, technically ours wasn’t really a traditional time machine from fiction books. We could go back to a specific moment, but we could only walk around and interact with that solid moment for 60 seconds. Dad explained that it would only feel like 60 seconds to us. No one else would even know we were there. We might even be able to pick up small objects, but he suspected we wouldn’t be able to bring anything back into the machine with us.
Since time didn’t really move for the other people where we landed, it might not really even be considered time travel. I don’t even know if ‘landed’ is the right word to use. It sounded more like just being able to walk through an old picture.
Days went by. We talked about nothing else at dinner every night. After doing a ton of research, Dad finally called the Army, thinking they would be the best place to start. They just laughed at us. The Air Force was a little better, but they directed us to a special agency that directed us to another agency. Dad said the final place we called was the same place that records all the UFO sightings. Apparently, they get a lot of weirdo’s because our story didn’t even faze them. I have no idea if they believed us or not, but they sure gave us the brush off. The guy said as long as it wasn’t dangerous to go ahead and have fun with it, and send pictures when we got back from our time travels.
This gave me a great idea. We could test out the device, which Ivy and I were begging Dad to do. We could take a camera with us and take pictures. Dad finally agreed, but we were going to have to wait until the weekend. He was still out of sorts from spending so much time in the machine the previous weekend.
The rest of the week went by kind of slow. We planned where to go. Ivy actually figured this one out, and we were all pretty happy that she thought of it. Instead of going somewhere exotic, we would just transport 10 minutes in the past at the far end of our street. If we got stuck then we could always just walk home. If we planned it right, we might be able to see ourselves in our yard with binoculars.
Mom even agreed to go with us. The whole family was going to squeeze into the device on Saturday morning at 10:40 a.m. and go back to 10:30 a.m. We packed extra clothes and snacks and Mom even brought a book. I know how silly it sounds now, but we had no idea what to expect. You can ne
ver have too many diapers or snacks for a 2 year old.
The time arrived, well, actually 10:30 arrived and we all held up our hands waving to an imaginary… I guess an imaginary version us from the future of 10:40. Then at 10:31 we all went back into the machine and waited for Dad to figure out how to work the controls. It was the first time the rest of us were in the shiny cramped quarters. Of course, Mom and Abacus got one seat and Dad got the other. That meant that Ivy and I had to share the third seat.
The junk we brought with us was piled on the floor pretty deep. I accidentally stepped on the snack bag and sent pretzels all over the floor. Abacus decided to help us cleanup, which only made the mess worse. Her way of cleaning up felt more like popping soap bubbles. She thought that somehow stepping on every pretzel would make them disappear. It did work in a way. Now instead of whole pretzels there were tiny pieces embedded in all the extra clothing we brought with us for the trip.
The cows were mooing when we entered the device. From inside we couldn’t even hear them. It was like they were still there, but in a fog that the noise couldn’t permeate. Dad pressed a few buttons and the door slid shut quietly. There were very dim lights that came on inside the ceiling, casting a blue hue to everything. It was like the metal itself was glowing. Then Mom stopped moving. That was it.
The door swung open almost as soon as it had closed. Dad said, “Ok, we can get out for a few seconds, but we should all get back in the machine before the minute is up.”
Ivy said, “Why don’t we just count to 30 and then come back in?”
“Good idea,” Dad said. “Lily, are you taking the pictures? If so, I want the binoculars.”
I grabbed the camera out of the junk on the floor and then handed Dad the binoculars. We all got out of the device that was now mysteriously at the end of our street. It was a little confusing to have gone so far without the feeling of movement. Dad carried Abacus since Mom was still stuck in position in the seat unable to move. It had done her no good at all to be with us. We somehow thought that maybe being inside the machine would let her stay active for the missing minute.
Dad touched my arm so that I could hear him through the time tunnel. I don’t have a better name for it, but if we got too far away from one another we couldn’t hear anything at all. So, through the time tunnel I heard him say excitedly, “I can see us waving. Well, we aren’t waving, but just standing still. Go ahead and take the pictures.”
I picked up the camera and focused it the best I could. I took as many pictures as I could in the short time we had. All the sudden I felt a tug at my back. When I turned around there was Ivy pulling hard at Dad and I. It took me several seconds to realize that we must not have been counting. Thankfully, Ivy was paying better attention than Dad or I. We got back into the machine. Without realizing it, Ivy and I sat in the opposite position than when we left.
The door closed again, but this time it just kept swinging around instead of stopping at the doorway. It was like it slid all the way from one side of the device to the other. Mom yelled. The baby started crying.
“What happened?” She asked looking fearful.
“It all went just as planned. Well, almost as planned. You sat there unmoving again,” Dad said. “I had to take Abacus with me, but we did get some good pictures.” He looked at her awkwardly. “Why were you yelling?”
Mom tried to explain, “It is a little disconcerting to be looking at my two daughters and holding my third when in the blink of an eye things changed. I no longer had Abacus, and those two girls were in different positions in their seat.” She pointed to Ivy and me as she said that.
The pictures weren’t bad, but the images weren’t very clear. It was really neat to see ourselves waving, but it would have even been better if we could have talked to ourselves. Anyway, Mom said we should get out of the machine to avoid the weird effect that Dad had experienced.
The odd part was that once we left the device, the mostly clear digital pictures became completely blurry. It was like it didn’t know how to keep the images from the past synchronized. Mom kept insisting that we must have only just stepped into the machine, but the rest of us knew that we had experienced our first intentional missing minute.
Chapter 8 – Our First Case
The science behind the machine was still a mystery to us. We even sent our pictures off to the government to have them analyzed. After another week of run-around from the government, we decided that it just wasn’t worth it to try to explain this to anyone else. Dad told us that we basically had a really expensive toy.
Ivy and I racked our brains all week looking for an excuse to use the machine. I mean, how many other people do you know that have a missing minute machine? As far as I know, we have the only one in existence. At least Mom let us take Abacus to the park down the street. It is nicer now that I am old enough to take her to the park without Mom.
We rode our bikes through town. We live in a very small town with a new stop light that they just put in. Abacus was sitting in the trailer, which isn’t as easy to pull as it looks. I called Mom with my cell phone once we got to the park to let her know we were safe. I had to check in every hour, but at least we got to go to the playground more often.
The three of us sat on the swing set, each in our own little world. Ivy was swinging really high and I was just dragging my feet. Once in a while Abacus would ask to be pushed again. I would get off my swing and give her a good underdog. Before long we were all tired of playing and decided to go back home.
On the way home we all stopped dumbfounded in front of the Fred Barns’ office. Fred Barns runs a local detective agency, although, I have never seen him with a real customer. Usually there are signs out front that say ‘missing cat, $25 reward if found’. Ok, so it is really always the same cat. Ms. Jameson loses that cat about 3 times a year. I think that she is Mr. Barns’ best customer. In fact, she might be his only customer.
Today, however, was different. Right there in front of us was the sign we had been looking for. I mean the actual sign. It said, “$100 reward for information leading to recovery of missing pocket watch.” We parked our bikes in the bike rack in the middle of town and walked two doors back to Fred Barns Private Investigations – Detective Agency.
Upon entering, it was pretty clear that Mr. Barns didn’t follow his own signs. There was a no smoking sign right there on the door, but when we entered it was more like entering a smoke stack. At first I thought it was a cigar, but instead it was a big Sherlock Holmes smoking pipe that he was extinguishing.
“Hi, Lily, Ivy, and Abacus,” Mr. Barns said. “I don’t ever remember you coming into my office. Are you lost?”
I thought to myself, how could we be lost in a one stop light town? I was much more polite in my actual response. “No, we aren’t lost. We noticed the sign out front about the missing pocket watch.”
“Oh, goodness, did you find it already?” he asked.
Ivy started to say, “No, but we have a time…”
I bumped her to get her to shut up. I knew he would never believe us anyway. “No, we don’t know anything about the pocket watch, but we were thinking of starting up our own detective agency. This might be just the kind of case we need to get us started.”
Mr. Barns laughed, but humored us anyway. “Does your agency have a name?”
“Ugh,” I looked to Ivy, but she was no help. So I blurted out the first thing that came to me. “The 4DDA. We would need your help to know what a detective does,” I said. “What can you tell us about the case of the missing pocket watch?”
Fred Barns apparently found this terribly amusing and not in the least bit threatening. He revealed that his client had come in earlier this week to explain what happened. Mr. Oswald’s gold pocket watch had gone missing sometime in the last three months. Old Mr. Oswald was finally ready to sell his belongings so that he could buy a retirement home in Florida. His pocket watch had been a gift after 35 years of service with his company. It was worth a substantial amount of
money.
He indicated that they had turned the house upside down and nothing had been found. The house had been renovated recently in preparation for sale, but none of the staff on the project recalled seeing the watch. The last time Mr. Oswald had seen it was when he opened his safe to review his fancy coin collection 3 months ago.
Before leaving, I told Mr. Barns that we were on the case. I said he would hear back from us Monday at the latest. He again, found this pleasantly entertaining. As we were leaving I saw him reach for the large pipe. I turned around to ask one last question and caught him in the act of lighting up.
“Do you have any suspects?” I asked.
“None. Everyone is accounted for. There were no signs of forced entry and very few visitors to the house.”
On the way home our brains were spinning as fast as the tires of our bikes. We had a real case. It might not make us famous, but it was a real live case.