Steven picked up Anne’s purse, still dangling from the test/live switch on the control panel. Jerry scowled.
“I think I left it unlocked,” Steven said.
“You THINK you left it UNLOCKED! DAMN, Steven!” Abruptly, Jerry turned away, asking someone about cage temperatures.
Again Steven stared at the cage. “Twenty-four hours,” he said to himself. He tucked the purse under his arm and then located a pen and the clipboard already loaded with control sheets.
Under time he wrote, “forward 24 hours,” and then looked at the panel. “Oh, God,” he said quietly. He closed his eyes and then opened them, turned and looked at the cage. “Oh, God!” He looked around. Everyone was busy at their stations. He turned back to the panel, scanned the settings, cycled the switch to test and back to live then rested his hand on the button that would execute the event. He considered the alternative, living without her and facing her family, her father. He pressed the button and dashed into the glass cage, instinctively putting on his hearing and eye protection when the whine started up. He waited for the light, nearly totally blinded by the dark goggles. Instead of the light, the whine stopped and hands grabbed him.
“No!” he yelled. “Let me go. It’s all my fault. let me go.”
“What the hell are you trying to do, Steven? We’ll have her back in twenty-four hours.”
“No! No! She’s gone forever. Just let me go be with her.”
“Jerry!”
Jerry turned to Thomas who at Steven’s station. “What?”
“He’s right,” Thomas said. “She’s gone. Forty-four years gone.”
“What?” Jerry went to the station and looked at the settings. “Holy shit.”
Steven was only remotely aware of being manhandled down the hall and into the conference room. “Forty-four years!” Someone said. “We’ll never get her back.” From someone else, and from some distance away, “This is going to kill the project.”
When he became conscious of his surroundings, Steven was lying on the conference room sofa. Jerry was sitting in a chair staring at him.
“1943, Jerry!” He stood, kicked a chair onto its back and fell back onto the sofa. “What in the hell have I done?”
“I don’t know, Steven. We don’t have enough information yet to know what you’ve done. I want you to go home. I want everybody to go home and get a good night’s sleep. Be back in here at 0700 and we’ll start brainstorming.”
“I can’t, Jerry. I’ve got to solve this problem. I have to go back and get her, for God’s sake, she’s pregnant.”
“Go home, Steven, you’re in no shape to be thinking anything but irrationally.” Jerry handed him a soda.
Steven looked at it for a good minute. “Yeah, you’re right.” He handed the soda back and, spotting Anne’s purse on the table, picked it up. “0700, right?”
“Right.”
“You need to go home too, Jerry.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll leave in a little while. I’m going to study the data a bit and then rough up a plan-of-action for tomorrow.”
Steven walked to the conference room door. “Sure. Plan-of-action.” He left Jerry sitting on a chair, the cold soda in his hand.
Steven paused at the lab, and then continued on by.
“Steven.” Jerry called from behind him. He turned in response.
“In your field, you’re a genius; the best. You’re the only one who can solve this. I need you tomorrow fresh and ready to charge forward. The six of us would never have gotten this far without you. This whole project would be nonexistent without you. Don’t fail us now, Steven.” He paused briefly. “Don’t do something rash and fail Anne.”
“I understand, Jerry.”
Thomas stepped out of the lab in time to watch Steven leave. How is he?”
“He still wants to go after her.”
“You know he can’t. One of us should go, if anyone. He’s the only one with the brain to figure out how to bring her back. He needs to stay here and lead us through it. Besides, without him, this project is dead.”
“This project will be dead if the company gets word of any of this. This whole group needs to stay together and stay silent.” Jerry watched out the window as Steven got into his truck. “Thomas, what would you do? Your wife, pregnant with your first child, disappears into another time and it’s your fault. Your choices are, stay and possibly never see her again, leaving her stranded alone forty-four years in the past, or follow her.”
Thomas didn’t say anything.
“What do you think is going through his head right now?”
The realization lit up Thomas’ face. “One of us should stay here tonight.”
“My thoughts exactly. Why don’t all of you get out of here. I’ll stay. I want to study the data anyway.”
Steven’s drove slowly off the base. Traffic was light going up North Rhett Boulevard through North Charleston, through Hanahan, toward the quiet little bedroom community of Goose Creek. It was still daylight, but the sun was lying low across the marsh, casting a yellow and orange glow over the distant trees. The beauty escaped him, however, determined as he was on carrying out his plan. He would go after her, and he would do it tonight.
He parked and rushed into the town house. Upstairs, he found the athletic bag Anne gave him several Christmases ago. He could only presume they would never be able to return and there were things they were used to that 1943 would not have, things they could not do without. He started with her dresser. Bras, underwear, nylons; he grabbed everything he could find. Her cosmetics, her favorite perfume. Jewelry. He opened her jewelry box, sorted through it. Unable to decide what to take, he threw the entire box in. He remembered her broken string of pearls in a cup downstairs and ran to it, then back upstairs to her bedside table for her treasured family bible then back downstairs for her glasses and her Casio Sports Watch, and upstairs for nothing and down and from room to room, up and down, round and round until he finally collapsed in a chair, breathing hard and heavy.
He closed his eyes and waited for the confused disarray of thoughts to cease spinning in his mind. When he opened them, Anne staring at him.
“Well, now what, Sweetheart?”
“I’ll fix it.”
“How? This isn’t a TV you can just touch with a solder iron. How are you going to fix it, Stevie?”
He glared at her then closed his eyes again.
“Come on Steven, don’t ignore me. What are you going to do? It looks like you’re planning to join me. What if I don’t want to stay here? What if I want my house back? What if I want our baby to grow up in the nineties, not the forties? What if I want my family back? What about my college? What if I want to continue going to College? What if I want my life back? What are you going to do, Stevie?”
“I don’t know!” He jumped up and grabbed her photo off the table. “I don’t know how to fix it! I can’t bring you back. And I can’t leave you there all alone. Maybe together we can make a new life.”
He walked into the kitchen then back, her framed photo still in his hand. “What on God’s green Earth were you doing there anyway? Didn’t you get the message? And why in the hell did you go sneaking into the lab? You know that area is restricted, that my work is top secret. What the hell were you thinking?”
“Maybe I was thinking that I would like to know what all the secret was about. My God, Steven, I’m not a spy. I’m your wife and you’ve never even hinted at what you’re doing every day. I’ll bet some of the other wives know what’s going on.”
“That’s no excuse.” His anger was bubbling over. “You’ve ruined everything we’ve been working for. There’s no way the project can continue now. It’s over.” He fell to his knees on the carpet, laid the photo down in front of him and began crying. “And I’ve lost you.”
Despondently he shuffled upstairs and dropped her photo into the bag. He chose some basic necessities for himself then sat on the bed and wondered what he was missing.
Money!
He pulled out his wallet and counted all he had. $15.00. He put it back and dug Anne’s wallet from her purse. $144.00. He dropped her wallet into the bag.
Not enough. Can’t start a new life on $159.00. I’ll have to go by the bank on the way back. Draw to the limit of my bankcard. He picked up the bag and went down to the area in the corner of the living room that he called his office and started opening desk drawers.
The first thing he saw was his Texas Instrument scientific calculator. He picked it up, and wondered what a person of 1943 would think if they saw it. “I can’t take it,” he said to no one. He laid it back in the drawer.
He went through the remaining drawers, and then sat back. “I can’t take anything but the clothes on my back.” He pulled the money from Anne’s wallet again and began looking at the dates. 1984 ... 1986 ... 1983 ... 1986. He threw the money and wallet into a drawer, slammed it closed and shoved himself backwards in the wheeled chair. He moved only a few inches in the thick carpet.
He caught Anne staring down at him from her other observation point next to the books on the shelf above the desk. “Now what, Steven? What are we going to start a new life with?”
“I’ll get a job.”
“Doing what, Steven?”
He dropped his eyes to another of her in her cap and gown. It sat right next to his.
“You’ve never done manual labor.”
“I could become a stock broker.”
“Humph!”
“Seriously. I know that we’ll make it.”
“And what’s to keep us from starving until this venture takes off?”
“I don’t know.” He turned in his chair and scanned the room from wall to wall as though an idea would appear between the framed stormy ocean scene and the antique portrait of Anne’s great-grandmother, painted before the turn of the century.
“What about your father’s coin collection?” His head snapped back around to her photo. “I’m sure there’s some old money there.”
“Yes!” Steven yelled and then jumped up and ran upstairs.
# # #
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About the author
A retired graphic designer, James Paddock lives in Florida with his wife, Penny, a retired teacher. Novel writing, which keeps his sanity, if there is such a thing, is his passion and gives Penny, an avid reader, something to look forward to every few years. Together they claim five children and many grandchildren, and they, of course, are all beautiful and highly intelligent.
James began his writing efforts in 1993 with the publication of his very first short story. He became hooked on the craft of storytelling and soon began longer works, completing his first novel, Elkhorn Mountain Menace, a story of terrorism in rural Montana, in August of 2001, only weeks before 9/11.
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