“No, it’s some kind of… some kind of trick,” he says, though he sounds far from convinced that he is right.
“All right. What else can we do to prove it to you?”
He frowns skeptically. “Right. You’ll take me anywhere.”
“We can.”
“Okay. Let’s go see, um, the signing of the Declaration of Independence.” He crosses his arms as if he’s thrown down a challenge he knows we can’t deliver on.
In a way, he’s correct. There are so many things wrong with this request — from the clothes we are wearing to the type of money we don’t have, not to mention that RJ’s African American ancestry could create its own set of dangerous problems — but it’s the proximity of the signing to the point in history where I already changed the time line on multiple occasions that concerns me the most. “We’re not prepared for a jump that far,” I say. “Plus it would use up too much of what is left in the battery. Which is what we’re trying to get your help with, after all.”
Looking at me for approval, Iffy says, “How about something a little more recent? Say within fifty years of 2015?”
“That we can do,” I say with a nod.
RJ is silent for several seconds before saying, “1977?”
It is near the far end of the time frame, but doable. “Okay,” I say. “Do you have an exact date and location?”
A mischievous smile grows on his face. “I do.”
The total time of our journey into the past was several hours longer than I had anticipated, but I don’t adjust for this when we jump home, and instead return us to my apartment only ten minutes after we left.
Being in the opening-night audience for a movie called Star Wars has turned RJ into an enthusiastic supporter of the — as he calls it—“Juice the Time Machine” project. While he and Iffy take detailed measurements of the chaser and the power slot, I check on my sister, and am surprised to find her sitting up, a book in her hand.
“When did you wake?” I ask.
“A few minutes ago.”
I sit on the bed beside her and touch her forehead, happy to find it cool. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay.”
“Tired?”
“I’ve been sleeping all day.”
“I’ll bet you’re hungry.”
Her eyes light up. “Yes. Very. How about a hamburger?”
I made the mistake of letting Iffy pick up a hamburger for Ellie one night, and now my sister can’t get enough of them.
“I’m thinking soup tonight.”
She grimaces. “I don’t want soup.”
Knowing even if I win this argument, I’ll lose, I say, “I’ll see what we have.”
I tilt my head and read the title off the spine of her book. Oliver Twist. Charles Dickens. He was a writer in our time line, too, though his canon of work is different than it is in Iffy’s world. Ellie likes reading this version of him better, she’s told me. Even though his stories are more than 150 years old, she says there are things about them that remind her of home and the friends she will never see again. These are the same friends who stopped visiting her as she grew more and more sick, but Ellie doesn’t know this. That occurred to the version of her I watched die when I was still a boy. I grabbed this Ellie before her friends turned their backs on her.
“Where did you go?” she asks as I stand up again.
“Go?”
“Someone was knocking on the door. I went to check, and you and Iffy and her friend were gone.”
“Did you open it?” I ask, instantly concerned. When she is here alone she is, under no circumstances, supposed to talk to anyone.
She shakes her head. “Just peeked out the window.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. By the time I looked, no one was there.”
With the exception of Iffy, who has a key, and this evening, RJ, the only visitors we usually get are either our landlord, Mr. Castor, or people trying to sell us something. I assume it must have been one or the other, though my sense of unease does not completely disappear.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she says.
“We took a quick trip.”
“Back?”
“A few years.”
Ellie still struggles with the idea that I jump through time. The only trips she has taken with me were the jumps we made when I brought her here, and she was basically unconscious through all of them. But she realizes that the world here is completely different than the one we were born into, and she can’t ignore that the brother who had once been two years younger than she is now five years older. It’s actually surprising that she hasn’t had a mental breakdown. Thankfully, she’s only fourteen and still has a bit of wonder about the world.
“Let me go see what I can whip up for dinner.”
“No soup,” she says.
“No soup,” I agree.
When I return to the other room, RJ is looking over several pages of notes.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
He looks up, surprised. “Great. You wouldn’t consider letting me open it up, would you? I’ll be very careful.”
“No way.”
While I’ve opened one of the smaller interior cavities to disconnect my chaser’s companion function, I’ve never opened the main area. And with the very real possibility that this is the last chaser in existence, I wouldn’t want anyone else to do it either, unless there was absolutely no other choice.
“Figured as much,” he said. “It’s okay. I have a couple ideas that might do the trick. We’ll have to do a little testing, though.”
I frown. This is treading into the same waters as opening the box.
Before I can respond, though, he says, “Don’t worry. Nothing invasive. I just need to check power levels and make sure we’re sending the right type of electricity in so that we don’t fry any circuits. I assume it uses DC, but who knows? Don’t suppose you’d be open to bringing it by the lab at school? They’ve got everything I need there.”
“I’d rather we do what needs to be done here.” I can’t chance others getting curious about what RJ is working on.
“You’re not making this easy, are you?” He thinks for a moment. “Give me a couple days to see what I can come up with.”
“Sure,” Iffy says. “Call me when you’re ready, and we’ll set up a time to meet again.”
For months, the weight of the chaser’s diminishing power problem has been sitting squarely on my shoulders, but now, at least for the moment, it’s almost gone. So it’s with relief that I offer him my hand. “Thank you.”
“Thank you,” he says, smiling broadly. “‘May you live in interesting times.’ Sure fits, doesn’t it?”
I cock my head. “What?”
“It’s something a friend told me once. Said it’s some kind of Korean or Chinese curse. I can’t remember what. It doesn’t sound like a curse to me.” He nods at the chaser. “And with that, man, you get to live in multiple interesting times.”
His words are truer than he even realizes.
He starts to turn for the door, but then stops. “Oh, I’ll, um, probably need to get some parts. They might not be cheap. And, well…” He points a thumb at himself. “Student.”
“Of course. How much do you think you need?”
He considers the question for a moment and then says, “A few hundred?”
“Wait here.”
I go into my room and open the safe I keep in my closet. It’s where I put the chaser when I’m not using it. It’s also where I keep some of the cash I’ve collected on hand. Usually there’s between $5,000 and $10,000, but I’ve recently had another bill from Ellie’s doctors, and at the moment there’s only $1,800.