Caught

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  And then everything was still. Jonah braced himself for the usual waves of timesickness. On every other substantive trip he’d ever made through time, the brief period after landing had always left him feeling brainless and senseless.

  Wouldn’t it . . . be awful . . . to be . . . brainless . . . around . . . Albert Einstein? he thought jerkily.

  He choked back a chuckle at the silliness of his own brain, but his timesick reflexes were so slow that some sound escaped: “Heh-h . . .”

  “Shh!” Katherine hissed beside him. “Got to be . . . quiet . . . I think I see . . . Einstein . . .”

  “Where? Must . . . hide . . . then . . . ,” Jonah whispered back.

  Slowly—very slowly—Jonah remembered that he’d asked the Elucidator to make them invisible. He let go of Katherine’s arm and lifted his right hand toward his face. Slowly, slowly, slowly . . . He blinked, trying to force his eyes to work. Something crystalline swung in and out of focus. Something hand-shaped and crystalline.

  Oh, yeah, he remembered. That’s how a time traveler’s body looks to his own eyes—and to any other time traveler’s eyes. But people who really belong in this time period won’t be able to see me at all.

  His request for invisibility had worked.

  Jonah barely managed to keep from letting out an audible sigh of relief.

  “Where did you see Einstein?” he whispered to Katherine.

  “Sitting . . . over . . . at that table,” she whispered back.

  Evidently she didn’t have the energy yet to lift her arm and point. But she jerked her nearly invisible chin up and to the right, and Jonah guessed that meant he should look in that direction. He turned his head and tried to blink his eyes into focus for medium-distance vision. He saw lace—a lace tablecloth, maybe? Yes, there was wood showing through the lace. A moment later Jonah figured out that he could see the bars of chair backs on three sides of the table. And beyond that? Was there a fourth chair?

  Jonah blinked again, and propped himself up on his wobbly elbows.

  A man sat in the fourth chair. A young man, with thick dark hair and a dark moustache.

  “Silly.” Jonah leaned down to whisper into Katherine’s ear. “That’s not Einstein. Einstein’s old. Don’t you remember? Bushy white hair? White moustache?”

  “Don’t you think he had to be young before he got old?” Katherine whispered back.

  It took a ridiculous amount of time for Jonah to consider this. He hoped that just meant that his brain wasn’t over the timesickness yet.

  But really, he told himself. There are just some people who don’t seem like they ever could have been young. It’s like trying to imagine my grandparents as little kids. Or—like the guy who played Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies. No way he was ever young.

  Albert Einstein was like that too. It seemed as if he must have been born old.

  Unless Katherine was right, and this really was a young Albert Einstein.

  Jonah squinted, trying to imagine the dark hair replaced by a wild white thicket, the neatly trimmed dark moustache replaced by a walruslike white thatch.

  Maybe it was still the timesickness working on him, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t see Albert Einstein in this young man’s face.

  This could be anyone.

  “Do you suppose we’re seeing him before anyone knows who he is?” Katherine hissed excitedly. “Before he’s even famous? How old was Einstein when he got famous?”

  Jonah sincerely hoped this wasn’t one of the things that Mr. Stanley had been telling them in science class when Jonah was zoning out.

  “Don’t know,” Jonah whispered back to Katherine. “I guess we can snoop around and find out.”

  Dizzily, Jonah sat all the way up, going from propping himself on his elbows to supporting himself on his knuckles, pressed against the floor. He had to tuck the Elucidator in his jeans pocket, because he didn’t trust himself not to drop it. But then, swaying slightly, he bent his knees, preparing to crouch and stand. Up, up, up . . .

  He lost his balance and fell over backward.

  He would have been able to catch himself, to keep himself from crashing onto the floor and making a horrible racket. But the floor rushed up at him quicker than he expected.

  No. His perceptions were off again. He hadn’t hit the floor. He’d hit something else.

  Or—someone.

  SIX

  Jonah felt a pair of arms steadying him. But he jerked back, scrambling away. He tripped over his own feet, and it was all he could do to regain his balance without crashing to the floor in the other direction. It was a long moment before he dared to turn his head to look back at the person he’d fallen against.

  First he saw Katherine scrambling out of the way alongside him. For a moment he felt a flare of hope: Maybe his perceptions were way off, and all he’d done was bump into her. But even as she moved, she was glaring at him, a look of horror on her see-through face. She was mouthing something, a silent scream: Get out of the way!

  Jonah turned his head as far back as he could. Behind him stood a young woman, frozen in place. She was standing so still that Jonah had a split second of wondering if time had stopped again. Then he noticed a dark lock of hair that had escaped from the bun on top of her head. That strand was swaying back and forth—proof that time kept moving, even though she had stopped.

  And it was proof that she had been moving forward a moment earlier—until Jonah had fallen against her.

  Even as Jonah watched, a look of astonishment spread across her face.

  Well, yeah, Jonah thought. Her brain’s telling her that some kid just slammed against her. But her eyes are telling her there’s no one there.

  Surprisingly, the young woman didn’t cry out, didn’t shriek—didn’t even gasp. Instead, after a long moment, she closed her eyes and took a slow step forward, gently waving her arms in front of her.

  Not the best way to try to catch someone, Jonah thought.

  But he was almost hypnotized by the grace of her movements. Her expression was different now too—was she praying? Was that what all the hope and wonder and yearning on her face meant?

  It took Katherine yanking on his arm to remind Jonah that he couldn’t just stand there watching.

  “This way!” she hissed in his ear.

  She pulled him to the side, past a stiff dark couch to a corner beside an open window. He guessed she thought they could jump out if they had to.

  But the woman had stopped moving forward. She let her arms drop. She turned her head to gaze at the young man sitting at the table. He hadn’t changed his pose in the slightest since the woman had come in. He still had his head bent over a stack of papers.

  “My Johnnie,” the woman said softly.

  “See! That isn’t Albert Einstein!” Jonah whispered to Katherine. “It’s Johnnie somebody!”

  But the man didn’t look up.

  “Albert,” the woman said, louder. “Albert, listen!”

  The man jerked to attention, reacting with such shock that he knocked a whole stack of papers to the floor.

  “Mitsa! My Dollie!” he cried. “My urchin! My little witch! I didn’t hear you come in! I—” He bent over to pick up the papers from the floor, and stopped talking. Distractedly, he gazed at the papers in his hand. He squinted. “No, wait. Did I square that? Should I?” he mumbled.

  The woman—Mitsa? Dollie?—shook her head fondly.

  “Albert, I swear, you haven’t heard anything anyone’s said to you since you started this new project,” she said. “Someone could set off a cannon right beside you and you wouldn’t notice.”

  “Or, if it’s cubed, that would mean . . . ,” Albert mumbled, completely engrossed in his papers again.

  The woman sighed and walked to the table. Her body dipped down every other step, dragging the bottom of her long skirt on the floor.

  She has a limp, Jonah thought. It was strange that he hadn’t noticed that before. Even with the limp, he still thought she moved grac
efully.

  When the woman reached the table, she eased the papers out of Albert’s hand.

  “Mileva!” Albert protested.

  He sounded so serious, Jonah guessed that had to be the woman’s real name.

  “Maybe you should try using the square root,” Mileva said, looking down at a long string of calculations.

  “Really?” Albert said eagerly. “You think that’s the answer?”

  “No,” Mileva said, holding the papers out of his reach behind her back. “I really don’t know. But I know you’ll try it if you haven’t already. And—I’ll help you. Later on. After—”

  Albert interrupted her by springing up and trying to reach around her back for the papers. She slid the papers onto the table and caught him in her arms, hugging him close.

  “This is just what I wanted for our marriage,” Mileva whispered into his shoulder. “You, me, our calculations and formulas, our grand ideas . . . But I didn’t know the devil’s bargain I’d have to make to get this. Are you sure there isn’t some other way?”

  Albert didn’t seem to hear her. He was looking past her to the papers on the table, and still mumbling: “Square root . . . proportional distance . . . time . . . time . . . space . . . time split in half . . . But what changed in 1611?”

  Jonah felt Katherine bolt completely upright behind him, smashed into the corner. He turned and looked at his sister, and her wide, alarmed eyes told him she was thinking the same thing as he was.

  Jonah didn’t know if Albert Einstein was famous yet or not, in whatever early nineteen-hundreds year they’d arrived in. He didn’t know what “devil’s bargain” Mileva was talking about; he didn’t know why there was no sign in this room of the missing daughter that JB had supposedly returned to them. He didn’t know what “right things” Albert Einstein was supposed to be thinking about.

  But he knew what Einstein was thinking about instead, why his thoughts were capable of ruining everything.

  Einstein was thinking about them—Jonah and Katherine. Somehow he knew what they’d done on their last trip through time.

  SEVEN

  The awful thing was, Jonah couldn’t scream. He couldn’t rant or rave or pound his fist against the wall or moan, “Noooo . . .” He had to stand there, still as a rock, without making a single sound.

  “Calm down,” Katherine whispered in his ear, as if she knew how close he was to losing it.

  “But—he knows . . . he found out . . . ,” Jonah dared to whisper back.

  “Shh,” Katherine hissed. “We don’t know how much he knows. Listen. And watch. Do you see any tracers?”

  Tracers. Jonah had been so stressed and scattered since they’d arrived that he’d forgotten all about watching for tracers. He’d seen plenty of tracers on his previous trips through time—they were ghostly representations of how time would have gone if time travelers hadn’t intervened. They were invisible to people in their native time period, but could be a helpful guide to time travelers. On their trip to 1600, Jonah had grown to hate tracers, since time was so messed up there, and the tracers had seemed like taunts. Then, soon after they’d arrived in 1611, all the tracers had disappeared, and he’d realized that that was even worse.

  Please don’t let time be that far off track here, he thought. Please let there be tracers.

  Something like a whimper escaped from deep in his throat. Mileva’s head immediately shot up from Albert’s shoulder, and she peered straight in Jonah’s direction.

  A dim light glowed near her chin. Jonah shifted positions, to see it better—yes. It was a second, ghostly version of her head: its tracer. If Jonah hadn’t made that sound, Mileva would have kept her head nestled against Albert’s shoulder.

  So why didn’t I see any tracer lights before, even when I bumped into her and she started waving her arms around? Jonah wondered. Was I just not paying attention? Or would she have stood there waving her arms anyway? Why would she have done that in original time?

  Unlike Mileva, Albert didn’t move at all. He kept staring down at the papers on the table.

  After a few seconds Mileva seemed to give up on both Albert and any possibility of figuring out where the noise had come from. She took a step back from Albert, and all the tracer light disappeared, so Jonah knew she would have done that regardless.

  “Albert, I know you want to sit here all night thinking about your project. But you promised the Hallers that you’d play your violin for them this evening,” she said.

  “My violin, ah, yes, yes,” Albert said distractedly. But he kept staring down at the papers.

  Mileva tugged on his arm, pulling him away from the table. He’d just begun leaning down to scrawl something on the top page, and the sudden motion jerked the paper sideways.

  Is there a tracer left behind by any of the papers? Jonah wondered. Er—how could there be, if these aren’t the papers he would have been working on in original time?

  Jonah was confusing himself again.

  Albert only laughed at Mileva’s persistence.

  “My little urchin keeps her Johnnie boy in line,” Albert chuckled. “If the Hallers want music tonight, music they shall have! Don’t worry about the project—you know I’ve gotten some of my best ideas while playing.”

  He knelt down and picked up a violin case Jonah hadn’t noticed before. He offered Mileva his arm so they could stroll out of the room together.

  “Should we follow them?” Katherine whispered as soon as the door shut behind the couple.

  “Are you crazy? No!” Jonah said. “We should look at those papers!”

  EIGHT

  They were in German.

  “What? No!” Katherine protested, as she and Jonah peered down at the papers scattered across the table. “Aren’t our translation vaccines still working?”

  Way back before one of their early trips through time—to 1485—JB had made it so they could understand other languages on their travels. So far Jonah and Katherine had been able to understand older versions of English in 1485 and 1611, Algonquin in 1600, and an Inuit language in 1611.

  “We could understand Albert and his wife, and I’m pretty sure they were speaking German,” Jonah said, though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d figured that out. “Maybe it only works on spoken language, not written. Here.” He picked up one of the pages at random and handed it to Katherine. “Read it out loud.”

  “Supposing ze something, something, something, weird zigzagging figure, thingy that’s kind of like an S, then—,” Katherine began.

  Jonah sighed.

  “I don’t think the problem is that we don’t understand German,” Jonah said. “I think it’s that we don’t understand enough physics. I mean, I’m barely surviving seventh-grade science. And these are Albert Einstein’s thoughts.”

  “Yeah, his wrong thoughts,” Katherine grumbled, starting to lower the paper toward the table again. “His thoughts that are going to ruin everything, because he found out—”

  She stopped suddenly, the paper frozen in her hand.

  “What’s wrong?” Jonah whispered.

  “The tracer,” Katherine whispered back in a panicky voice. “The paper left a tracer!”

  She was right. A ghostly, almost see-through page lay atop the other papers on the table.

  “Well, duh,” Jonah said. “You’re a time traveler. You changed something in time when you picked up the paper. So the tracer’s there to show where the paper belongs, where it would have been if you hadn’t disturbed it.”

  “But Albert Einstein’s thinking about the wrong things,” Katherine said. “These are the wrong papers! Time’s already disturbed!”

  Jonah looked back and forth between the paper in Katherine’s hand and the tracer version on the table.

  “It’s not the same paper,” he said slowly. “See, the tracer page has that squiggly sign at the top of it, and then a triangle—and look, all the numbers are different.”

  “Let’s look at all the papers,” Katherine suggested.

>   One by one, they lifted all the pages on the table and looked at the tracer versions that remained.

  Every single paper was totally different from its tracer.

  And every single paper was totally indecipherable to Jonah and Katherine.

  “This is impossible,” Katherine complained, as they sagged down into the wooden chairs. “We know it’s all wrong, but we don’t know what any of it means. Could these different numbers”—she gestured at the piles of papers strewn across the table—“be the reason all of time froze back home? Is Albert Einstein that important?”

  “I guess,” Jonah said. “He might be.”

  “What was he supposed to be thinking about in the early nineteen hundreds?” Katherine asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jonah said. “Relativity? E equals MC squared? Quantum . . . uh, quantum physics?”

  “What does any of that mean?” Katherine asked.

  “You got me,” Jonah said.

  Really, when he thought about Albert Einstein, he mostly thought about things that didn’t have much to do with science. A poster hung in the guidance office at school that showed the old-man Albert Einstein riding a bicycle. The caption on the poster said: “Try new things! You might discover a new talent!” And wasn’t there some famous picture of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera? Weren’t there stories about how, when he was an old man, he’d help neighborhood kids with their math homework if they brought him brownies?

  What could Jonah and Katherine do to make sure the young Albert Einstein they’d seen in this room was going to turn into the bike-riding, tongue-sticking-out, homework-helping old man that everybody loved? What could they do to make sure time went right?

  And, oh, yeah—what was the deal with Einstein’s daughter? How did she fit in with all of this?

  Jonah shifted nervously in his seat, and something jabbed him from his jeans pocket.

  The Elucidator.

  “Hey, maybe we can ask JB all our questions,” he told Katherine. “We haven’t tried talking to him since we got here—maybe that will work now.”