How to Save the Universe Without Really Trying

by John Cusick

  Lola stepped up to the X-ray machine. She could see Momma and the girls waiting for her on the far side. The new X-ray gate, as the security guard had called it, was a bland gray archway with a few blinking lights up the side. A flashing sign on top said WAIT, then MOVE AHEAD.

  Lola did.

  “Hold still,” said the guard on the other side.

  Lola found it nearly impossible to hold still when someone told her to. She’d been standing in line for what felt like hours without any trouble, and now felt an overwhelming impulse to shimmy, jump, and do the Mashed Potato.

  And worse, she felt a sneeze coming on.

  “Hold on,” Lola said.

  “Hold still!” snapped the guard.

  Lola could see her mother checking her watch, juggling Mary in one hand and her bag in the other.

  “I think I’m going to—” she started.

  Then Lola sneezed.

  It was a heckuva sneeze.

  When it was over, she opened her eyes and straightened, blinking. Something was wrong. She blinked again. Someone must have shut off the lights. There was a power outage of some kind, a blackout (she’d been through one of those during a hurricane a few years back).

  But in movies, when the lights go out in a public place, everyone starts screaming or going oooooo.

  No one screamed, no one went ooooo. No one was making a peep.

  Lola was alone.

  “Hello?”

  Lola’s voice echoed in what sounded like a very large, unfriendly space. She cleared her throat. Something dug into her hand, making her jump; then she remembered she was holding her passport. Reassured by its presence, she spoke again. “Hello? Is anybody there? What happened? Where did the lights go?”

  As if to answer her question, a brilliant green beam of light swept through the emptiness before her. It seemed to search the dark, passing over unusual shapes that lurked in the void. Lola went cold.

  “Identification!” said the thing behind the light.

  Its voice was unlike any she’d ever heard, a cross between a bullfrog’s croak and that feeling you get just after banging your elbow but before the shooting pain makes you go half crazy. It filled Lola with a sickening dread.

  “Um . . . ,” she said.

  “Identification!” the voice said again.

  Not sure what else to do, Lola extended her passport into the darkness.

  A hand—she hoped it was a hand—snatched her passport away. It disappeared into the gloom behind the green light, which shone in Lola’s eyes and was giving her a headache.

  “Mmmm,” said the voice. “Well, Ms. . . . Passport, if that is your real name. I’m afraid you’re in an awful lot of trouble.”

  “Wh-what?” said Lola.

  The thing with the dreadful voice stepped out of the shadows. Lola’s mind split. One half wanted to scream, the other to go mute forever. Because the creature standing before her in this lifeless place was almost certainly—no, definitely—a Bog Mutant.

  Its uniform read Temporal Transit Authority.

  3

  THERE WAS AN ALIEN in Phin’s bedroom.

  In his bedroom. With his stuff. Breathing his air.

  And it was wielding a hair dryer.

  “Identify yourself, alien!” he demanded, trying to sound imposing, which was difficult to do while hiding behind your bed. “And . . . stay where you are!”

  The alien didn’t respond. Instead, it cleared its throat and adjusted its grip on the hair dryer, which it leveled at Teddy’s head.

  Phin tried a different approach. “Okay. Then how about you tell me why you’re pointing a hair dryer at my bear?”

  “This isn’t a hair dryer,” snapped the alien. “It says Vaporizer.”

  “That’s the brand name,” said Phin.

  “Oh,” said the alien, and cleared its throat again. “Well, then why did you scream?”

  “I didn’t scream,” said Phin.

  “You definitely screamed,” said the alien. “Piercingly.”

  Phin was so offended he almost stood up. But there was still a potentially dangerous hair-dryer-wielding alien in his room, and so he stayed put. “You surprised me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the alien, which struck Phin as a funny thing for a murderous alien to say. “It’s just, I heard your conversation with your parents,” it—she—went on. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, I couldn’t help it.” She lowered the hair dryer ever so slightly. “It sounded kind of . . . rough.”

  “It wasn’t,” said Phin. “I love talking to my parents. They’re awesome. They bought me all this.” Phin gestured to the impressive collection of things.

  “Okay,” said the alien. “Why did you call me an alien?”

  “Aren’t you one?”

  “No,” said the alien. “Are you?”

  Phin wasn’t sure how to respond to this, so he decided to do what any respectable Fogg would do. He offered his visitor a snack.

  “Would you like some baked beans?”

  The alien, or whatever it was, sighed in what sounded like extreme relief. “That would be amazing. I’m absolutely starving.”

  “But first you have to promise not to kill me,” said Phin. “Oh, and unhand my bear.”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone.” The alien’s voice began to tremble, as if it were about to spew a poisonous venom blob—or, if it wasn’t in fact an alien, just cry. “I want to go home.”

  Feeling pretty sure he wasn’t about to be blow-dried to death, Phin came out from behind the couch.

  “I’m Phin Fogg,” he said, extending a hand to shake. The alien hesitated, then lowered the Vaporizer and stood. For an alien, she looked an awful lot like a normal human girl in an ugly T-shirt. The shirt had the words Dimension Y written on it, and a stencil of some naked security guards getting out of the bath, which was a bit weird.

  “My name is Lola Ray,” she said. “And I am seriously lost.”

  4

  LET’S REWIND A BIT.

  “I said,” said the Bog Mutant. “You’re in an awful lot of trouble, Ms. Passport.”

  The Bog Mutant pulled a notebook from his ill-fitting Temporal Transit Authority uniform. The uniform was just like any other uniform Lola had seen before—sort of blue-gray, drab, and ill fitting. But instead of being occupied by a person, it was filled with walking, talking green sludge. The seams bulged in odd places and didn’t look particularly dry. The notebook in the Bog Mutant’s gooey hand was also soaked, the pages thick and pasty. With its other gelatinous appendage, the creature extracted a pen, and though the pen was already slick with slime, it moistened the nib with its blunt green tongue.

  “Okeydokey,” said the Bog Mutant. “Let’s do the questions!”

  It cleared its throat, poised the pen just over its pad, and then, as if reciting from a memorized list (which it was), asked, “When did you come from?”

  “Sorry?” said Lola. She was still not quite used to the sickening sound of its voice, but the sound was like an old friend compared to the sickly sight of its owner.

  “No, no,” said the guard, “You’re supposed to answer the questions. You can say you’re sorry later.” The creature frowned. “I’m pretty sure that’s how it goes. Questions first. Then accusations. Then tears and apologies. Yeah, that’s right. So, Ms. Passport, When did you come from?”

  “Oh. Uh, um . . . ,” Lola replied intelligently. “I’m so sorry, Mr. . . .”

  “Jeremy.”

  “Mr. Jeremy—”

  The guard chuckled, a sound like pudding on the boil. “No, no. Mr. Jeremy’s my father. Call me Jeremy!”

  “Okay, uh . . . Jeremy,” Lola tried again. “I’m so sorry, but I don’t know where I am or how I got here.” She glanced around the space they were standing in, which, as her eyes adjusted to the light, seemed more and more like an artificial cavern. It was as if they were standing in the storage basement of a large building—which is exactly what it was.

  “I was in Newark.”<
br />
  “Are,” said Jeremy, trying to make a note on his pad. “You are in Newark. Don’t worry, tenses are hard. Especially with time travel. I had to take a whole seminar on it. Part of the training. Is. Are. Was. Would-have-been-being-en. I still have my flash cards, if you wanna see ’em.”

  “Did you say time travel?” asked Lola.

  Now, here’s the thing.

  Lola had read hundreds of science-fiction books, had seen Time Junkies and Quantum Blip: The Movie on opening night. She’d rewatched the Dimension Y: Clock-Smashers miniseries more times than she could count. In those sorts of stories, it always took the hero a really long time to put it together that, oh!, aliens really do exist, or, wow!, there’s suddenly a dinosaur in the bathtub, or, holy cow!, they’d been transported to Dimension Y. There was always lots of But . . . ? You . . . ? How . . . ? What . . . ? Lola always prided herself that if ever something truly fantastic happened to her, she’d be able to wrap her brain around it right quick. And indeed, she did.

  “Oh!” she said with a kind of giddy pride. “I time traveled! I traveled in time!”

  This, it turned out, was the absolute worst thing she could have said.

  Jeremy nodded. “A confession! Oh, well, that makes things easy. Let’s get you to prison, then. You’ll now be liquefied for easier transport to the nearest Temporal Transit Authority detention center, where you will be horribly interrogated.”

  “Liquefied?” said Lola. ““But . . . ? You . . . ? How . . . ? What . . . ?”

  “I’m under strict orders to incarcerate any known time travelers, Ms. Passport. Just because you’re the first one anyone’s ever seen, that don’t change the rules.”

  “Wait,” said Lola. “You arrest time travelers, but I’m the first one?”

  “There was bound to be one sooner or later.” Jeremy shrugged. “Me and the guys, we’ve been waiting for a time traveler to show up for, oh, a little over a hundred years now. That’s a pretty long coffee break.” Jeremy chuckled that boiled-pudding sound again. “I know it sounds great, but it gets really boring. There’s only so many games of pinochle a guy can play before he starts to feel pretty useless. It’s great to finally put all that training to use. Now, if you’ll just step up to the line and look into this light probe, you’ll be melted automatically—”

  “But wait!” said Lola. “I haven’t done anything wrong! I didn’t mean to time travel! I was just minding my own business and then I sneezed and then bam.”

  “Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” said Jeremy, as if he were reciting something he’d read. Which he was.

  Lola thought about how the responsible thing to do was to calmly explain how this was all crazy, that she was just an innocent bystander, and there had been a huge misunderstanding. Surely this Bog Mutant in a uniform would listen. Surely there was sense and logic in this world. Surely this Temporal Transit Authority was as reasonable as any other authority.

  On second thought, Lola chose to be wildly irresponsible.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Is that a zipper on your uniform?”

  “Sure is,” said Jeremy. “Buttons are tricky for me.”

  “Great. One sec?”

  Before Jeremy could react, Lola yanked at his zipper. There was a startling zzzzzzzzt! sound, and then a big gooey splash like someone had emptied a garbage bag full of yogurt onto a concrete floor.

  “Hey!” shouted Jeremy, who was now mostly a puddle.

  Lola ran. Behind her, Jeremy the puddle cursed and shouted at her to come back. She leaped over boxes and dived around crates. She slid under piping and ductwork and passed what looked to be a pyramid of stacked metallic objects—like the canned-goods promotional displays at her grocery store. She ran through the storage basement, the beam from Jeremy’s green flashlight receding behind her, growing fainter, until she lost track of it completely and was once again on her own.

  She found herself in a gloomy stairwell and climbed up and up, coming at last to a door that opened onto a long hallway so white and clean it made her eyes burn. Picking a direction at random, she followed the bright corridor, her sneakers slapping against the polished floor.

  After a while, having seen no one at all, Lola came to a large, vacant atrium. The ceiling arched beautifully overhead, gleaming and modern. The space looked as if it were meant to accommodate hundreds of visitors on a busy day. Now, though, the great peaked foyer was empty and cold. Standing in the center was a statue. It was, upon consideration, the ugliest statue Lola had ever seen.

  The bulk of the statue was a wide cylinder, about six feet high, with ridges along the side almost exactly like a tin can. Stepping closer, her breath loud in her ears, Lola saw that it was, in fact, a statue of a tin can. But why anyone would erect a statue revering a tin can—a can of baked beans, from what she could gather from the label painted on the front—was beyond her.

  This is what the lettering said:

  The Fogg-Bolus Hypergate & Baked Beans Corporation

  “Insanely Safe!”

  Est. 2399

  Because it seemed like the sort of thing people did in these situations, Lola said the date aloud in a kind of awed whisper.

  “Twenty-three ninety-nine?”

  In a daze, she turned, hoping to see something that would make her feel better. Bay windows lined the far wall. They were circular, like portholes, and daylight streamed through. Lola looked out to get a sense of where she was, to get a vantage on her situation. What she saw didn’t improve her mood.

  Newark had seen better days, and that was saying something.

  New Jersey in the future—for that’s what Lola felt certain she was in—was a vast and barren wasteland. Where once had been highways there was now rubble and dust. Twisted scaffolding reached out from the ruin like claws, and who knew what these structures had once been, or been part of. The horizon was a jagged gray line, and nothing stirred save wisps of swirling dust. It was the emptiest place Lola had ever seen, and all at once she felt so terribly alone.

  Her mother. Her sisters. Even her father. If this was the future, that meant they were all . . .

  Lola decided not to think about it. Not thinking about it helped, but not by much.

  She had only a moment to console herself before a new sound made her jump. Something squeaked and groaned back the way she came, and other sounds, strange and mechanical, echoed from deep within the building. Something big, perhaps the building itself, was powering up. Or powering down, Lola couldn’t be sure. Thinking fast, she made for a set of panels on the far wall. One of these was open, revealing a small space just large enough to hide inside. She climbed in, closing the door and blocking out the light, the statue, and the view of the ruined world.

  She held her breath. She listened. Something thumped below her. She thought she heard a door swing open somewhere. Then, so close it made her yelp, something went click and buzzzzz in the tiny compartment. Lola lurched.

  She was moving.

  The compartment was moving.

  The pressure in her stomach told her she was hurtling upward. She was in some sort of elevator, though not an elevator for people—it was too small for that; Lola had to tuck in her knees just to fit. It was some sort of dumbwaiter, hurtling up through the lonely structure, a shiny skyscraper built on the ruins of a desiccated city in a strange and frightening future.

  What Lola didn’t know was that the dumbwaiter went all the way up, to the penthouse in fact, where the building’s sole occupant, the heir to the Fogg-Bolus Hypergate and Baked Beans Corporation, resided.

  5

  “THE DUMBWAITER OPENED IN, I guess, your hallway?” Lola was explaining.

  She and the boy, Phin, were now in what she supposed was Phin’s kitchen. It looked fancy and sleek, clean yet cozy, nothing like her railroad kitchen at home—which was cozy in a different sort of way. Once the whole hair-dryer standoff was over, Phin had led her here and offered a seat at the breakfast bar. He’d promised her baked beans, but instead seemed to be
performing an elaborate and delicate science experiment.

  “Go on,” Phin urged, warming up the nuclear reactor.

  “I heard a voice, so I followed the sound down the hall until I saw you talking to your parents. I didn’t know what to do, so I hid behind the bear.” Lola glanced out the window. The wasteland stretched as far as she could see, which was now pretty far, but from this height, Lola could just make out the spires of a distant city. “Is that really New Jersey out there?”

  “What’s left of it since the Great Pork Fat Meltdown of 2415,” said Phin, and didn’t elaborate. Instead, he powered down the particle accelerator, switched off the nuclear reactor, added a dash of nutmeg, and spooned the baked beans into a happy little blue bowl.

  “Here you go,” he said, and passed Lola her lunch.

  “Thanks.” The beans smelled fabulous. Lola looked around for anything resembling a spoon. She reached out to touch the bowl, and a small blue spark arced against her finger. “Ow!” She flexed her hand. “Do beans always do that in the future?”

  “Hmm? Oh, no,” said Phin. “Probably static cling. Anyway.”

  He pulled up a stool and rested his chin on his fists, contemplating the Lola creature sitting before him. Questions raced through his mind like zero-G roadsters. Time travel was impossible. Everything he’d read on the subject said so, and he’d read extensively about pretty much every interesting thing there was to read about. And this Temporal Transit Authority—he’d never heard of it, and he’d heard of pretty much everything. The implications were staggering.

  Being a good but basically self-centered kid, there was one thing that Phin just couldn’t come to terms with, and that was how all this related to him.

  “The one thing I don’t understand—”

  “There’s just one thing?” said Lola. “Hey, you don’t by any chance have, um, spoons in the future, do you?”

  “The thing I don’t understand is why you didn’t set off the alarms. Even if you just wham-bang materialized in the basement, there’s only supposed to be one person in this building, and that’s me. We have the most sophisticated security system in the galaxy. The post office won’t even send carbon-based life-forms here anymore, just androids. And not their best ones either.” Phin furrowed his brow. “You should have been vaporized the second the system detected you. And I don’t mean blow-dried.”