“What just happened?” she asked. “What was that?”
Jonah opened his mouth, even though he didn’t have the slightest idea what to tell her.
“Excellent question, my dear,” a voice said from behind Jonah. “I would call that a second chance. Which also happens-not so coincidentally-to be my name.”
Katherine gaped; her eyes seemed to double in size.
“Then, you’re… Second?” she whispered.
40
Jonah whirled around.
A strange man stood behind him. If they’d been in the twenty-first century, Jonah would have described the man as a standard-issue computer nerd. He had pasty-white skin, as if he’d spent too much time indoors. His blond hair stood out in all directions, as if, like Einstein, he had other things to think about than using a comb. And he had one side of his shirt tucked into his pants and the other hanging out loose-though for all Jonah knew, maybe that was the fashion in some far-off future.
“Second Chance, at your service,” the man said, bowing slightly. He cut off the ending of the bow and jerked back up hastily, to peer straight at Jonah. “But I’m forgetting myself… given that you were ready to punch Antonio just on the suspicion that he might be working for me, perhaps you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to place myself in such a vulnerable position.” He tilted his head to the side, thinking. “Of course, I believe flabbergasted would be a more predictable emotion than furious for the two of you right now.”
“I-you-” Jonah could barely speak, let alone throw any punches.
“See?” the man said. “Just as I predicted.”
Jonah still didn’t understand what was going on, but he didn’t like proving Second right.
“So…,” Jonah tried again, struggling to gather his wits enough to ask a complete question. “This is what you were aiming for all along?” He gestured weakly toward Andrea, still bent over her grandfather back at the canoe. “This? Andrea and her grandfather-I mean, Virginia Dare and John White-finding each other?”
“Exactly,” Second said, beaming.
Jonah squinted, no less confused. He’d gotten so used to thinking of Second as someone bad, someone to fight against. To resist.
“You want Andrea to be happy?” Jonah asked.
“Don’t you?” Second replied.
“Sure, but… that’s not how things went in original time, was it?” Katherine said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Second sighed. He glanced at something in his pocket.
“It took you three minutes and forty-one seconds to reach that conclusion,” he said. “That’s about what I predicted-I was just two seconds off. Still, it’s a bit disappointing, when you’ve just witnessed the biggest scientific advance since humanity discovered time travel in the first place, and all you can say is, ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen’?”
The way he mimicked Katherine’s voice was cruel, making her sound childish and stupid.
“As your friend Andrea pointed out, original time wasn’t some priceless, perfect jewel,” Second said. “Isn’t it better to make an old man and a little girl happy?”
Jonah didn’t like Second calling Andrea little.
“But… but… if you change time, you might cause a dangerous paradox,” Jonah said. “Make it so that your own parents are never born. Or you might make other things change-so that, I don’t know, hundreds of years from now, the South wins the Civil War. Nobody ever abolishes slavery. Hitler wins World War II. Or…”
Jonah was casting about for other examples of how history could go terribly wrong. But he couldn’t think clearly because Second had begun grinning in such a mocking way-almost chortling, even.
“What if we make it so that Hitler never starts World War II?” Second asked gleefully. “Or that slavery never catches on in the United States, and there’s no Civil War because there’s no slavery to fight over? So there’s no racism, because there’s no heritage of slavery… Martin Luther King is never shot, the Trail of Tears never happens, the Bay of Pigs never happens, the Maine doesn’t sink-”
“All that’s going to happen just because of Andrea and her grandfather?” Jonah asked incredulously.
“No,” Second said. “I am 99.9998 percent certain that none of that will change because of Andrea and her grandfather. But don’t you see? We start small, almost invisibly-one girl and her grandfather, on an out-of-the-way island-and then, who knows? Maybe everything else is possible too.”
He was back to beaming again.
Jonah remembered something Katherine had said way back when they’d first learned that Jonah and his friend Chip had a connection to time traveclass="underline" If you’re going to go back in time, you save Abraham Lincoln from being assassinated. Or John F. Kennedy. Or, you keep the Titanic from sinking. Or you stop September 11. Or-I know-you assassinate Hitler before he has a chance to start World War II.
Maybe Second had heard her say that.
“So you’re trying to create alternative dimensions,” Jonah said, proud of himself for figuring this out. “Ones with all sorts of different possibilities.”
“No,” Second said. “Not alternative. You didn’t enter an alternative dimension when Andrea forced her tracer to step forward. Time itself changed. There’s only one time stream, only one history. Time travel just makes it look like more.”
“But tracers show ‘original time,’ and then there’s the way time really goes, what we see when we come back in time…,” Jonah interrupted. “So there’s two versions, right there.”
“You’re wrong,” Second said. “Tracers only live through time once, no more than anyone else. It was just that they always drew everyone and everything toward what seemed to be a preordained path. Toward their destinies, you might say. But tracers themselves could never change. Until now.” Jonah wouldn’t have said it was possible, but Second’s grin got even bigger. “You two just witnessed the first time shift in history. The first time destiny itself was derailed. The end of destiny. It’s like… you are Watson, and I am Alexander Graham Bell. You are the little boy who watched the first airplane flight, and I am Orville Wright. You are lizards in the New Mexico desert, and I am Robert Oppenheimer.”
Jonah didn’t have the slightest idea who Robert Oppenheimer was, but he thought it was a little insulting to be called a lizard.
“Hold on,” Katherine said, stamping her foot. “You want us to think this is like you just created the atomic bomb?”
Oh, Jonah thought. That must be what Robert Oppenheimer did.
“I’m not comparing the morality of it,” Second said. “I’m just saying-this is that monumental. Its repercussions will reverberate forever.”
Katherine glared at him.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “And conceited.”
“Now, now,” Second said. “Do you like the way time was supposed to go?”
Jonah opened his mouth. Then he shut it. He noticed that Katherine didn’t say anything either.
“In original time, Virginia Dare and her grandfather were never to be reunited,” Second said, a tinge of sadness entering his voice for the first time. “It was what we call a near miss. Time is rubbed so thin at the site of a near miss… Virginia Dare was standing here and her grandfather was just a few yards away, and they would never know it. They were destined to go to their graves without ever knowing the fate of the other. And, believe me, their graves were coming for both of them, very soon. Wouldn’t you call that a mistake on time’s part? Didn’t it need to be corrected?”
The question hung in the air. Jonah saw doubt flutter over his sister’s face.
“You’re manipulating us again,” Jonah accused Second. “You’ve been manipulating us all along!”
Second raised an eyebrow.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Though perhaps not as much as you think.”