A phone rings, and Dad pulls his cell out of his pocket. “Oh. It’s my mom.”
For a weird moment, I think he means Evelyn, and then I realize it’s Grandma Keller. “Tell her hello for me,” I say as he heads into the living room.
I pull up the image search from earlier and slide the tablet over to Connor. “This is what I’m talking about. There are paintings of Prudence going back several hundred years, and they’re way too close for comfort. Well, except for the pregnant ones, thank God. What’s up with all of those?”
He casts an uncomfortable look toward the living room.
“Really, Connor. I’m not asking about the mechanics. Obviously, Prudence was pregnant at some point, and I’ve already had the little talk about how that happens. Why is it central to their mythology, or whatever?”
“Well, Saul needed people on his side who could use the key. Both to tweak the timeline and, maybe, from the religious side of things, to be the ones the Cyrists view as eternal and unchanging. With Prudence, he had two options, right? She could go back and convince his former colleagues or their offspring to join the Cyrists, but I don’t think Saul had many friends among the other historians. Also, the CHRONOS gene seems to get weaker each generation, at least in my own experience, and the trait isn’t always expressed. The other option would be to use Prudence to create his own little cadre of time travelers. And that last option might be easier, since those kids could be born at pretty much any point in time.”
My omelet stirs uneasily in my stomach, both at what I’m thinking and at the realization that I’ve been a bit naive about all of this. Given the pictures, I assumed that Prudence had a child or children, but I hadn’t really thought about those pregnancies as being a conscious strategy. And that raises a whole host of other questions.
“You don’t really think Saul would . . .” I pause, not wanting to finish the sentence.
“I don’t know. He’s planning on wiping out half of humanity, so who knows where he draws the line. But I assume that he . . .” He rubs his eyes with the palm of his hand and then looks up and continues in a very matter-of-fact voice, “That he . . . bred her with one or more of the other historians or one of their children or grandchildren. But I don’t think we can exclude anything, and I’m not sure that it really matters now.”
“Of course, it matters. How can you even say that?” I look back down at one of the images, a painting of Prudence with small children gathered around her feet and one more clearly on the way. Suddenly, it’s hard for me to think of the Prudence I met at the Expo. All I can think of is the girl I saw at Norumbega the other day. She’d looked haunted. Maybe even drugged.
Connor looks a little hurt. “That’s not what I meant, Kate. Yes, it matters. She’s your aunt, Katherine’s daughter. In that sense, it definitely matters—”
I cut him off. “Prudence was fourteen when she disappeared. How old was she the first time she was—I can’t even believe we’re using this word—bred? Was it her choice? Did she have any say at all?”
“Whether or not Prudence was a willing participant in all of this doesn’t change anything for us. It doesn’t change—”
Dad comes back into the kitchen, and Connor stops when he sees Dad’s face. We both ask what’s wrong at the same time, and Dad kind of sinks down onto the bench at the breakfast nook.
“It’s my dad. He . . . he had a stroke.”
“Oh my God. Is he going to be okay?”
He shakes his head. “They don’t know. He’s in intensive care. Mom’s a wreck. Listen, Katie . . . I need to . . . I need to go, okay?”
“Of course! I’ll pack some things—”
“No,” he says. “You should stay.”
“But I want to see him!”
“Kate, he’s not conscious right now. There’s nothing you can do.”
“But Grandma is conscious. I don’t want her to think I don’t—”
“Baby, it’s okay. I told her you have school and that someone needs to stay here with Katherine. She understands. I hate leaving you right now, but—”
“No. No, Dad. You need to go.”
“It’s okay,” Connor says. “We’ll take care of her, Harry.”
Dad’s expression is hard to read. It looks for a moment like he’s going to snap at Connor, but then he takes a breath and shakes his head. “I should only be gone a few days. I still don’t like it. What god-awful timing.”
I spend the next hour repeating many of the same things I told Mom the week before she left—I’ll be fine. I’m a big girl now. I leave out the part about being really busy, because Dad knows exactly how busy I’ll be and thinking about what I’ll be doing while he’s gone won’t make either one of us feel any better about him leaving.
Maps of downtown areas don’t change much over time. After staring for about half an hour at a grainy, low-resolution 1938 map of Athens, Georgia, we found online, I compared it with Google Maps and found only a few new streets and one or two name changes. Otherwise they were identical, so I’m sticking with the digital version that doesn’t give me a headache and does give me useful stuff, like estimated walking times.
Yesterday was divided between language lessons and going over the details for the 1938 recon jump. The plan is to go in and, simply put, observe. I need to get familiar with the city, the era, and the customs. If I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll watch the three historians from a distance, but I’m not going to make contact.
I’m in the middle of counting the blocks from the stable point to my destination when there’s a tap at my door—and I promptly forget whether I counted seven or eight. I rub my eyes. “Come in?”
“I won’t ask if you’re busy,” Connor says, “because I already know the answer. But I need your CHRONOS gene for a few minutes.”
“Too bad I can’t rip it out and hand it to you. What do you need me to do?”
He sits on the arm of the couch and leans forward. “I think I’ve found Wallace Moehler. I’m not sure we want to let Katherine know this yet, but if I’m right, he didn’t go to Russia. He went to Copenhagen. And it’s 1955, not 1957.”
“Okay. That’s incredible. How did you manage to track him if she gave us the wrong year and the wrong country? Sputnik was in 1957, right?”
“Yes, but I asked Katherine a few . . . clarifying questions, shall we say . . . about Wallace when her medicines started kicking in last night. She mentioned something she hadn’t before, something about him attending the International Geophysical Year. IGY was this huge scientific conference held in 1957 and 1958, but the planning began two years earlier. So I started poking around and pulled up this article about how the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were just starting the space race and some Eisenhower administration bigwig announced we’d have a satellite in orbit as part of our participation in IGY. And that tiffs off the Soviets, whose representative at IGY calls—you guessed it—a press conference to say the Soviets will do it first. And theirs will be bigger. The international press sort of rolled its eyes, but the Soviet guy was right.”
He tosses me a printout of a photograph. Men in suits, mostly middle-aged, sit in front of a window. A slightly younger guy stands off to the left. The only odd thing about the picture is the curtain, which is white lace and looks out of place for a press conference.
“Which of these guys is Moehler?”
“Funny,” he says and then looks like he’s considering it. “Hmph. I guess he could be in the photo. Hadn’t really thought about that. Katherine’s description is average height and weight, thinning hair, glasses, kind of geeky looking.”
“So pretty much any one of them. Is there a stable point nearby?”