Chronal Engine

by Greg Leitich Smith

  Emma and I plunged through the ferny undergrowth, and a shot rang out behind us. We ran a few minutes, toward the river, I thought, and then stopped next to a redwood to see if we were being followed. “Where’s Samuel?”

  He burst out of the shrubbery. “Here! Come on!” Without waiting for us, he raced on, past a magnolia and into a sunnier, more open area. We followed and soon were right behind. Which was why we plowed into him when he suddenly stopped. He pitched forward over a mound of dead leaves and branches.

  “What is it?” Emma asked. I looked back and could hear Campbell making his way through the plants, following.

  “Nest!” Samuel said, as he scrambled to his feet.

  He was right. It was a nest. A big nest. “And there’s mama bear!”

  The tyrannosaur stood about twenty-five yards to our right.

  “Flank speed!” I shouted, and led the way off to our left. I ran as fast as I could, praying that adult tyrannosaurs really were as slow as some paleontologists thought.

  I glanced back to see the creature standing there, maybe a step or two closer to the nest. Happy to drive us away from its young.

  And then I ran into a barrier of cycads. More than six feet tall, the plants’ sharp leaves sliced into my face and arms, and I tumbled to the ground.

  Samuel and Emma pulled me to my feet, and, breathing heavily, we stared back at the tyrannosaur.

  “We have to go around,” I said. The cycads were too thick to plow through.

  We were just heading around the grove when Campbell burst out of the woods on the other side to the clearing. He jumped atop the nest and fired his gun at us.

  We froze.

  “Idiot!” Samuel muttered.

  “Look out!” I shouted, and pointed.

  But he had already sensed or heard or saw or maybe smelled the danger. He whirled and, in a panic, began shooting at it.

  It didn’t faze the dinosaur at all. The tyrannosaur took two steps toward him and lunged. Then it grabbed Campbell in its mouth and lifted its head.

  Emma screamed.

  Campbell’s legs, still visible, kicked out as he did what he should’ve done in the first place: activate the Recall Device.

  The other side of the clearing was suddenly engulfed in a blinding flash and a cloud of smoke.

  A moment later we caught the smell of cooked meat.

  When the smoke cleared, Campbell was gone. So was a portion of the nest. Part of a ginkgo tree. And the front half of the tyrannosaur. The rest, from about the waist back, lay crumpled on the ground, charred and smoking.

  Chapter XVIII

  Launched

  “IMAGINE THAT APPEARING SUDDENLY IN YOUR PARLOR,” Samuel said.

  At this Emma snickered, and we all burst into laughter.

  “Seriously, though, what happened?” she asked. “Where’s Campbell?”

  “We think there are size limits,” I said, remembering the diagram back at the Pierson ranch house, “on what the Recall Device can transport. It’s why we couldn’t bring the Hummer.”

  “There are,” Samuel told us. “Mass limits, technically.”

  Emma took a swig of water from the canteen. “Great. Let’s get home.” She pointed. “Kyle and Petra are up this way?”

  “Yes,” Samuel answered, “but . . . Max, how far is the cave?”

  “From here?” I shrugged. “Four, maybe five hours.”

  “And back to the cottage?”

  “About an hour and a half.”

  “Then let’s go there,” Samuel said.

  “How will that help?” We’d lose the time it would take to backtrack, and the boat wasn’t that much faster than walking.

  “Oh, didn’t I mention it?” Samuel said with a thin smile. “There’s one built into the steamboat. It’s how my father transported the materials for the cottage.”

  I stared a moment, angry again that he’d been holding out. Then it occurred to me. “Wait. Isn’t the boat as big as a tyrannosaur? How did it not go up in smoke?”

  “There are two versions of the Recall Device,” Samuel answered. “The personal and the industrial.” He grinned. “And, even fully loaded, the steamboat still has significantly less mass than a full-grown T. rex. But you should know that.”

  With another brief, self-satisfied grin, he headed back upriver.

  Emma watched him go. “I’m not sure I like him—”

  “Tell me about it,” I replied.

  We were there in a little over an hour. The boat was still tied up to the dock. The Quetzalcoatlus were gone.

  At our approach a black bird took off from one of the pilings, and a pair of alvarezsaurs fled into the rushes.

  The boat was identical to the one we’d seen wrecked, lying on the beach. Except this one was intact. I hoped that wasn’t an omen for what was going to happen next.

  The box—the industrial-strength Recall Device—we’d seen on the first boat, with the oxidized brass and copper, was 100 percent ready to go, Samuel announced.

  We cast off, and he maneuvered us into the lake, away from shore.

  He held up two fingers, set the control in the cockpit, and then we were gone, instantly reappearing downriver, at the mouth of the creek where Samuel’s cave was.

  “Over there.” I dropped anchor, and then the three of us vaulted over the side of the launch onto a sandbar. We splashed our way up the creek to stand at the bottom of the ladder.

  “Kyle! Petra!” Emma shouted. Without waiting for a reply, she began climbing.

  Petra limped out onto the cave ledge and waved. A moment later Kyle was there too, moving stiffly, but with a broad smile on his face.

  I got up to the ledge to see Emma embrace first Petra and then, more gently and with one arm, Kyle. With the other hand, she waved me in to the hug too.

  “Good job, Baby Brother,” Kyle said, holding out his fist to bump mine. “But you smell.”

  “Not as much as you,” Emma said, as I returned the gesture. And the hug.

  Long and short of it, in ten minutes and after a very hurried explanation, we were back aboard the boat with the remains of our supplies and a baby dromaeosaur.

  “This thing’s its own Recall Device, huh?” Kyle asked. At my nod he continued, “Why didn’t you guys pop back here ten seconds after you’d left?”

  “Because Campbell was in the boat on the river at the time,” I said, “and it would’ve been very bad if we’d met him coming.”

  “Very bad,” Emma said.

  Samuel cleared his throat. “I did shave off a couple hours . . . Right now, Campbell will be arriving at the cottage.”

  This seemed to satisfy my brother.

  “Everyone ready?” Samuel asked, and, without waiting for an answer, activated the Device.

  We reappeared in our time, afloat on the Colorado River, in downtown Bastrop. Right next to the dock behind St. Joseph’s Hospital, which I recognized because I needed stitches one time two years ago when we were staying at the resort just outside of town.

  We’d made it home. Alive and mostly in one piece.

  And in no time at all, really.

  Only about an hour after we’d left.

  As we tied up, Samuel suggested that he stay behind with the launch, both to protect the time machine and to ensure he didn’t see too much of the future. Or so he said.

  “No way,” I told him. I was not going to leave him alone with the only working Recall Device. I was still wrapping my mind around the fact that he was our great-grandfather. And there was still a lot he hadn’t told us.

  In the end Emma agreed to stay with the boat and with Aki, and Samuel helped me get our two injured up to the emergency room.

  When we arrived at the glass window of the check-in desk, the nurse on duty stared at us in horror.

  I knew what we must’ve looked like: damp with lake water and sweat, we hadn’t had a hot shower in days, Petra was limping and had a cut on her head, and Kyle was beat up and bruised from the Nanotyrannus attack.
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br />   And Samuel looked like he’d just come out of an Indiana Jones movie.

  “W-what happened to y’all?” the nurse stammered.

  “Mauled by a bear,” Kyle answered.

  “Fell off a cliff,” Petra said at the same time.

  The nurse didn’t look convinced, but called on an intercom, and a swarm of nurses and med techs came and wheeled Petra and Kyle away.

  It took a lot of talking, but giving them my insurance card and telling them that Kyle was Rory Pierson’s grandson and that Petra was Wilhelmina and Raul Castillo’s daughter did wonders with the paperwork. The hardest thing was getting across that Grandpa was still in critical condition at the hospital in Austin and that Mom was out of reach in Outer Mongolia.

  Finally, they stopped asking questions and told us to sit in the waiting area. A television playing baseball highlights hung above one corner, and a pile of magazines sat on a coffee table.

  “Now you can leave,” I told Samuel. He laughed, and we headed out of the emergency room. “But I want those extra crystals . . . and you have to tell me how to fit them into the Recall Device.”

  His grin was even broader than before. “I don’t have to. The directions are in the lab books. The ones in English, anyway. The others are just nonsense.”

  “Wait, what do you mean?”

  “My father made them out when he came to realize Campbell was trying to subvert his work,” he explained. “They don’t mean anything. The one in Japanese is just text copied from Tale of Genji, with some technical-looking pictures added. I think the French one is from Les Misérables. I don’t know about the Hebrew. Probably from Genesis.”

  “But the notebooks are probably ruined,” I said, “what with the water and dinosaurs and all.”

  Samuel shook his head. “Then just open the Device up. You’ll be able to tell where the crystal goes.”

  We stopped at the riverbank. Emma was sitting back, relaxing on a bench in the sun.

  “Don’t knock yourself out,” I said.

  We climbed back onboard, and Samuel handed over the crystals.

  I opened the box to make sure they were there. “So where does one find a chronally resonant crystal in the wild?”

  “You can find a seam of the mineral just north of Fredericksburg.” Samuel climbed into the cockpit to check the control settings. “There’s a gigantic Precambrian granite uplift that makes this mysterious sound that—”

  “You mean Enchanted Rock?” I exclaimed. “It’s what, like, four hundred feet high and covers a square mile!”

  “The same,” he said. “On the northwest side, not the whole rock.” Then he looked serious. “Listen, I have to go find my father. I reckon he’s probably back home having a drink at Sholz’s Biergarten but . . .” He gestured as if to tip his hat. “If y’all would like to come along . . .”

  Despite my misgivings about Samuel, I was tempted, but wanted to make sure Kyle and Petra and Grandpa were okay.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t . . .” My voice trailed off. I really wasn’t sorry I hadn’t trusted him. I still didn’t. Not completely, anyway.

  Not the way I trusted Kyle and Emma.

  Samuel shook his head. “You probably shouldn’t have.” He hesitated. “I did want to thank you for coming back for me in the channel. Both of you.” He held out his fist. “Is this how it goes?”

  “Yeah.” We bumped.

  We said our goodbyes and disembarked. I hoisted a pack with the lab books and Recall Device, while Aki watched the whole thing from Emma’s shoulder.

  Back ashore, while I tossed Samuel the lines, Emma stopped and called, “Wait. I still don’t understand. How did you get there in the first place? And why?”

  He gestured, looking genuinely sorry. “I’d tell you, but Max already told me it’s bad to know too much about his future.”

  And then he and the launch vanished. With a flash of light and a booming sound.

  “What did that mean?” Emma asked as we walked back up the manicured grass to the emergency room.

  “It means,” I said, “that I have to fix the Recall Device and go back. At least once.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to leave the vest and your cross for Kyle,” I answered.

  “My cross? You mean this?” She pulled the cross from underneath her blouse.

  “No, I mean this.” I stopped and grabbed the envelope with the note and the cross from a pouch in my backpack.

  “So there are two of them now?” she asked, frowning. “But don’t I have to give this one to you sometime in order for that one to be this one? What if I don’t?”

  “Then you destroy the entire space-time continuum,” I answered gravely.

  “Seriously?”

  “I have no idea.” I shrugged. “By the way, I think you also have to, er, I mean, get to go back to the 1910s and be instrumental in the development of the Chronal Engine.”

  Emma put a hand up to stop Aki from attacking her hair. “You mean be a serving girl? In Texas? Before air conditioning? I don’t think so.”

  We arrived back in the waiting room. A woman was there with a sick little girl, and they’d changed channels on the television so that it showed a purple dinosaur cavorting with a group of children.

  We sat, trying to ignore the cheerful choruses. Emma set Aki down beside her, out of sight of the check-in booth.

  “They make a cute couple, don’t you think?” she asked, all of a sudden.

  “What?”

  “Kyle and Petra,” she replied.

  I grunted.

  “Emma! Max!” The nurse spoke through the hole in her glass enclosure. “I just spoke with Mrs. Castillo. She says that Mr. Pierson is expected to recover.”

  We cheered and high-fived. And then were promptly hushed by the lady in the corner.

  Emma looked puzzled. “Did we ever figure out why Grandpa knew about the heart attack beforehand?”

  “I would guess,” I said, “that at least one of us went back before we arrived and told Grandpa about what was going to happen.” I hefted the resonant crystals in my hand. “It seems like a good test jump, don’t you think?”

  “But what if it doesn’t work?”

  “Space-time continuum.” I made an exploding motion with my hand. “Poof.”

  Author’s Note

  Fact, Fiction, and Educated Guesses

  As long as I can remember, two of the things that I’ve enjoyed reading most have been fiction and nonfiction survival stories and fiction and nonfiction about dinosaurs . . .

  Literary Antecedents

  Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, considered to be one of the earliest novels in the English language (if not the earliest), in 1719. Based in part on the true story of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, Robinson Crusoe tells the story of the title character, who is shipwrecked on a tropical island for twenty-eight years.

  Extremely popular, Robinson Crusoe spawned an entire genre of stories called “Robinsonades”—tales of lone individuals or small groups stranded in remote (undiscovered) settings without modern conveniences and who nevertheless are able to bring civilization and often technology to the savage wilderness.

  It’s no coincidence that the 1812 work about a shipwrecked clergyman and his family by Swiss author Johann Wyss would be called Swiss Family Robinson. (Both Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson are referenced by various characters in Chronal Engine, as they provide one link—among several—between Samuel, from the early twentieth century, and the rest of the group, from the early twenty-first century.)

  Robinsonades remained popular throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of Jules Verne’s most popular works is the 1874 novel The Mysterious Island, the story of five prisoners of the Confederacy who escape in a hot air balloon that subsequently is blown off course to an island in the South Pacific that they name Lincoln Island.

  Mid-twentieth-century Robinsonades include William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, an
allegorical novel published in 1954 about a group of English schoolchildren marooned by themselves on a Pacific island (which has been characterized as an anti-Robinsonade in that the children end up exhibiting brutish rather than civilized behavior); and Gilligan’s Island, a television comedy from the 1960s about six eclectic people who are lost on a desert island after leaving Hawai’i on what was supposed to be a three-hour tour.

  The 1960s also saw the publication of Scott O’Dell’s Newbery Medal-winning Island of the Blue Dolphins (1960), which depicts a girl stranded alone on an island for eighteen years; the television series Lost in Space; and the comic book series Space Family Robinson—the last two relating to a family named Robinson who are stranded on planets in outer space.

  Since the 1960s, a number of popular survival stories have been published for younger readers, including the Newbery Medal-winning Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George (1972); the Newbery Honor book Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (1987); and Far North, by Will Hobbs (1996). Although not technically Robinsonades, as they relate to survival in the Arctic as opposed to being stranded on a tropical island, they have certain common themes.

  Dinosaurs invaded the Robinsonade survival story realm not long after their discovery and popularization in the mid-nineteenth century. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot (1918) involve, among other things, intrepid explorers surviving in remote yet contemporary lands where dinosaurs still exist.

  Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and its sequel relate to modern humans being stranded on an island in the present day where genetically engineered dinosaur-like animals stalk them. While the whereabouts of the islands in the stories are generally known, these novels could be called Robinsonades (or perhaps even anti-Robinsonades) and almost certainly would be considered survival stories.

  Chronal Engine as originally conceived was, essentially, a Robinsonade or survival story with a time-travel twist and a nod or two along the way to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.