Paradox (8 page)

Bryce finally turned to Zac. “We can’t
break the rules. We can’t change anything.”

“But what can possibly be so bad about
trying to stop this? What could possibly go wrong if we intervene?”

“We don’t know,” Bryce said. “Causality is
a tricky thing, and since we don’t know, we don’t act.” His calm demeanor was
completely the opposite of the chaos in the streets.

People were screaming, crying. Zac heard
someone yell.
“Oh, God!
They’re jumping! Those people
are jumping!” He closed his eyes and tried to hold his emotions in check.

“I want to go back,” Zac said. “I want to
return to the present.”

“Soon,” Bryce said. “But do you see why
we’re here? There is always something we want to change. Everyone has
something, even I do. But we can’t change every bad thing. It’s impossible.”

“But this is so big,” Zac said, eyes full
of tears. He tried to block out the sounds surrounding him.

“Yes, but it’s filled with so many variables
that we don’t know what would happen if all those people survived.”

“Those are
people
, not variables!”

“I know,” Bryce said. “I agree. But there
will come a point where every single one of us will want to use this ability of
time travel to correct something.
To stop something bad from
happening.
But we can’t.” He sighed. “We have to resist that temptation
when it comes to us.”

He held out his Wand. “But I agree with
you. It’s time to go. Ready?”

“Never more ready,” Zac said, holding out
the device and grasping it firmly in his fist like Bryce had shown him.

He placed his thumb on the top of the
device and pushed down. As the world around him faded, he could hear the sirens
and the screams of people.

The world swirled back into focus. Zac
could feel the platform below his feet, and the sensation of dizziness came and
went much quicker than it had last time. He took a deep breath, steadied
himself, and then opened his eyes.

Outside the wormhole chamber, the members
of the TEMPUS Project waited. Emilee stood close to Rock’s side, her hand
touching his right arm. Chen stood off to the side, ear buds in his ears. Zac
could see his dad coming down the concrete ramp, a concerned look on his face.

The chamber door opened, and everyone
seemed to be waiting in expectation for Zac to say something. He stepped
forward and handed his Wand to Bryce, who took it and put it in a case mounted
to the wall. Each Wand belonged to a different user, and the spaces were
labeled below them. Since they were all identical, it would be easy to grab the
wrong one.

Bryce locked the case and handed the keys
over to Dr. Ryger.

“How’d it go?” Rock asked.

“Same as always,” Bryce said. “Same
reaction, same questions everyone else had.”

Dr. Ryger approached Zac and put a
comforting hand on his shoulder. “
You doing
okay?” His
eyes held a genuine look of concern.

Zac hesitated a moment, then recoiled.
“How can you just let people watch that?” he asked. “You just throw me into a
helpless situation like that? What’s the point?”

“The point,” his dad said, “is that we
can’t change things for reasons we won’t always know or understand.”

“Why not?”
Zac
asked with anger. “Why can’t we change the fact that those buildings fell? Why
can’t we stop those people from jumping to their deaths?”

“He’s right, man,” Rock said. “I mean, I
hated watching it, too. I wish I could still go back and do something. But
listen to what your dad has to say.”

“
This
ought to be good,” Zac
mumbled.

Dr. Ryger sat down on a nearby chair.
“Zac, you time-traveled.
Those people were already dead
before you went there. Think of it this way. Yes, that day was tragic.
Horrible.
Devastating.
But consider
this.” He paused, taking a breath. It was like he was preparing a monologue he
had used several times before. “Because of those attacks, airport security and,
well, security everywhere was heightened. More protocols were established, and
government agencies began to collaborate for the first time to combine their
intelligence information. With that, they caught a lot of other terrorists and
prevented some other big attacks.” Zac tried to interrupt, but he held up a
finger. “Now, think about it: if we stopped those attacks, it would be good
because all of those people would be alive.
But then what?”

“What do you mean?” Zac asked. “Then
they’d be alive, I guess.”

“Here’s what I mean,” Dr. Ryger said. He
shifted in his chair. “We don’t really
know
what would be next. We
think
things would be fine. But maybe, because security was never heightened as a
result of the attacks, something far worse got through. A terrorist cell got
ahold of a dirty bomb, or a biological or chemical weapon. They unleash it on a
city and it spreads, killing hundreds of thousands of people or more.”

“That’s just a giant ‘what if?’ that can
never be proven or disproven.”

“True,” his dad replied. “But the point is
we don’t know what effect our changes would have. They could be better, or they
could be worse. We just need to accept the fact that some things are meant to
be.”

Zac shook his head and looked around the
room. Chen was awkwardly shuffling his feet. Clearly, he’d been fed this line
too. Emilee wasn’t making eye contact with anyone. If what Bryce said was
right, her bitterness was probably growing each time his dad said some things
were “meant to be” a certain way.

He still couldn’t accept it. Maybe on a
grand scale, saving three thousand lives would have too many repercussions.
But one life?
One small change?
Doubtful.

Bryce came forward. “You know, Zac, I felt
the same way before. But at TEMPUS, we
can
actually stop bad things from
happening, and there are no repercussions. We observe, we report, and we
prevent worse things from happening.” He put a hand on Zac’s shoulder. “We
could use your help. I know you’re the kind of guy who wants to do what is
right; I’ve seen it in you. And while we might not be able to use time travel
for the reasons we’d really like to, we can do a lot of good with the way we
do
use it.”

“What do you say, Zac?” Emilee said. “Can
you really go back to normal life after this?”

Zac was silent, letting the thoughts swirl
through his head. So much was at stake. On the one hand, it would let him help
people. In a sense, he would be participating in a form of law enforcement, a
new form. But on the other hand, he’d have to observe a lot of tragedies.
Tragedies he would want to prevent but wasn’t allowed to interfere with. Could
he do it?

“I’m not sure,” Zac said. He tossed the
idea back and forth in his head. The image of his mom dying flashed through his
mind. What if this technology had been around back when his mom was killed?
What if the killer had already committed another crime beforehand? A group like
TEMPUS could have gotten information and had the killer arrested before he had
a chance to shoot her. That would have definitely changed things for Zac. Could
he do the same for others?

Dr. Ryger stood and started up the hallway
toward the main office. “Well, you have a chance to think about it and let us
know,” he said.

“No,” Zac said. His dad turned. “I don’t
need to think about it. I’ll do it. I’m in.”

Everyone around him smiled.

“Awesome,” said Chen. “It’ll be great to
have someone else on the team.”

Rock shook Zac’s hand hard. He clasped the
other arm around Zac, pulling him in and giving him a bear hug. “You made the
right choice,” he said. “I don’t regret joining for a second.”

Emilee stood off to the side, but she gave
Zac a quick glance and half a smile. She was more distant than the others, but
Zac didn’t want to press her.

“So what’s next?” Zac said.

“The next thing,” Bryce said, “is for you
to go home and get some rest. Tomorrow after school, you can come here and we
can see if there’s something you can do.”

Zac found it difficult to sleep. His mind
was filled with recurring images of the planes slamming into the buildings, the
glass and flames radiating from the impact. The fact that he did nothing to
stop it haunted him.

Yet he knew that was the purpose of the
time leap. He was supposed to feel helpless. He was supposed to witness
something so big he had no choice but to let it happen, to let its effects
bleed through time and take shape. This way, when he was faced with smaller
things he’d want to change, he would remember that it was impossible. It was
against the rules of time travel.

He laughed to himself. A week ago, would
he have foreseen himself lying in bed, pondering the rules of traveling through
the space-time continuum?

His cell phone vibrated on the nightstand
next to him. He read the caller ID and answered. “Hey, Bryce,” he said. “What’s
up?”

“I was just calling to check in on you,”
Bryce said. “I remember having trouble sleeping after the first time, too. Let
me guess: you can’t sleep, either.”

“Not at all,” Zac said. He sat up and
reached over, turning on the lamp next to his bed. “I just keep feeling… I
don’t know how to describe it.”

“Guilty?” Bryce said.

“Yeah.
I think
that’s exactly it.”

“I know how you feel. But I think that’s
the other point of seeing what you saw.”

“How?”
Zac asked.

“Well,” Bryce continued, “I think that
now, because you feel so guilty and helpless, you’ll have a desire to do what’s
right. You know you can’t use the technology to affect the past.”

“But I can use it to affect the future,”
Zac finished. It made sense. It did make him want to help others. “I just wish
there was a way to do both.”

He heard Bryce sigh. “You and
me
both, man. I think all of us have something we’d love to
change.”

Zac began to think of Emilee, her serious
demeanor and her often forlorn gaze. Something had stolen her smile from her;
she rarely seemed happy. Bryce said that if anyone had a reason to fix
something, it would be her. But what could be worse than seeing a parent get
killed?

“Can I ask you something?” Zac said.

“Shoot.”

“Earlier today, you said something about Emilee.
Something about her having a difficult life.”

“Yeah,” Bryce said, exhaling slowly. “You
could say that.”

Zac paused, unsure if he should press on.
But he had to know. “What happened?” He knew this was probably something he
shouldn’t be asking, but what if he accidentally said something to her that
would trigger bad memories? He didn’t want any awkwardness between them.

“You knew she grew up in foster care,
right?” Bryce asked.

“No.”

“Yeah.
To make a
long story short, her stepfather was abusive. Physically, verbally,
emotionally… it was horrible. He would lock her in a closet for an entire day
while he was at work. More than once, he made her sleep outside in the snow
with just a thin blanket. And there’s a lot more I don’t even want to go into.”

Zac couldn’t believe it. “How do you know
this?”

“She told me,” he said. “She and I dated
for a while, back when the project first started. But things fell apart.” He
paused. “You need to promise me you won’t say anything to her about this. But I
think you should know, since you might be in the field with her tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yeah.
She’s
going to be with you on any observations you need to do. Just remember to
listen to her. She knows what she’s doing.”

“Okay,” Zac said, looking forward to
spending some time with her. He wondered if she was just really good friends
with Rock, or if there was something more there. Maybe she’d open up a bit with
him.

“Good luck tomorrow,” Bryce said. “And
remember, as helpless as you might feel, you’re still making a change. It just
might not be the change you
want
to make.”

After school, Zac stepped into the office
building where TEMPUS was housed and nodded to the security guard. He walked
down the hallway and saw Emilee sitting at the desk, waiting.

“Hey,” he said, smiling. She looked down
at the computer screen, her eyes not leaving the monitor.

“How was your day?” she asked.

“Fine.
Nothing
major,” Zac said, shrugging. “So, what’s on the agenda?” he asked. Despite the
fact that an observation would mean something bad had happened, Zac secretly
wanted to go on one.

“Only one thing,” she said, staring at the
monitor. “A little girl was kidnapped about three hours ago. We just found out.”

“Is that a short enough time that we can
go back and stop it from happening?” Zac asked. What kind of side-effects would
that possibly have?
A happy family?

“No,” she replied. “We still can’t
interfere. But this is going to be critical to get the information as soon as
we can. In cases like these, the first few hours are the most important.” She
turned the monitor off and pushed in her chair, walking toward the bookcase.
She tugged it slightly and it rolled back, revealing the dark hallway that
descended below. She continued down toward the base of operations. Zac followed.

“So tell me what to do,” he said. He could
feel the adrenaline surging through his body, his heart beating in
anticipation. He felt like a secret spy on a mission, just like in the movies.
Only this was real. He had to succeed. A kid’s life depended on it.

“When we get down there, empty your
pockets,” she said. “We try not to take anything with us except the clothes
we’re wearing. That way, we can’t accidentally leave anything behind.” She came
to the bottom of the incline and entered the room with the platform. It was faintly
lit. She walked over to the case on the wall that housed the Wands and unlocked
the case, hanging the keys on a nearby hook, and took two of them out. “
Here’s
yours,” she said, handing him the one he had used
twice before. “Your dad’s still engineering an official one that’s designed to
use your fingerprint. We don’t want to use this one any more than we have to.”

Zac weighed the Wand in his hand turned
toward the platform, the place where a wormhole would soon open and pull him
hours into the past. It was amazing, he thought, how from that one location he
could go ten minutes or ten thousand years back in time. He walked toward the
glass enclosure.

“Chen!” Emilee yelled. “Get it ready for
us.”

A voice from down the hallway echoed in
compliance.