Samantha Smart (19 page)

The Professor’s office was a busy headquarters once again. He had done his best to indicate an innocent, work-based relationship with Cindy Smart to the police detective, though he was now in constant fear of being under surveillance. He and Marvin had basically scrubbed his computer of any suspicious files and had transferred the massive amounts of time travel information onto flash drives, which The Professor now kept in a locked briefcase that he carried at all times. He was still very nervous, though, when Samantha returned to visit after three days at the hospital, and always locked his office doors now.

Samantha looked as exhausted as the rest of them, if not more so. None of them had slept more than a few hours a night since Cindy had collapsed, but at last Jason had had to go home for a day and had agreed to drop Samantha at the museum under the pretext that she and The Professor were researching natural toxins.

In fact, this was one of the things the group had been doing. The Professor rolled his desk chair back, turning the computer console over to a bleary-eyed Marvin, and began to detail what he could of the situation to Samantha.

“Hello, Samantha. You look tired–have you slept?”

“A little,” she replied.

“None of us have, hardly,” he went on. “I want to fill you in on what I can, though.” Samantha nodded.

“We’ve got some stuff to show you,” Marvin said, bringing up things on the computer screen.

“Of course,” The Professor began, “the first thing we tried was the most obvious–you recall I told you in one of our brief communicator talks that we tried to send Marvin back to Irving Plaza, before this happened.”

“Yeah,” Samantha nodded.

“Well, let us show you why this didn’t work. Marvin?” Marvin opened a file on the computer and a three-dimensional image popped up of a building, with bright points highlighted in several spots–floor, walls, ceiling. “Irving Plaza, that is to say, the building itself, has been, well,
time-travel-proofed, from a point in time about eighteen hours before you all arrived there. These points you see,” he indicated the bright spots, “are some kind of devices that stabilize the space-time continuum to an impenetrable degree, at least to our means of manipulating it. In other words, we can’t insert anyone into this area, at that time.”

“Can you get anyone in before
then?” Samantha asked hopefully.

“We tried that as well,” The Professor shook his head. “We sent Suki back, reluctantly, eighteen hours before and tried to have her wait until the show and get in from there, but this failed as well.” He looked over at Suki.

“I went, Samantha, I... got in. I saw all of you standing in line, but Professor Smythe told me not to let you notice me. I was on time and everything, but when I walked through the doors of the building, well... the show was over already. Everyone was mostly gone. I can’t explain it.” She looked back at The Professor.

“Nor can I,” the tired-looking man sighed. “It seems our enemies have been getting smarter–figuring out time travel faster than we are. I daresay they have resources that can far outpace ours. They have somehow found a way to completely isolate a segment of space-time, so that anyone or anything that tries to enter it just shoots instantly to its other side,
around
it, but not
through
it. It’s terribly frustrating.”

“But–what about my
mom,
Professor!? She’s still in a coma! They can’t figure out what sort of–poison is in her body, and they keep asking Jason and I if she was ever involved in espionage, if we’re sure she wasn’t a target of some ninja assassin group!” She took a deep breath. “My brother is staying at my Aunt Tina’s house in Queens, where I guess I’m going too, if I don’t go back to the hospital. Jason’s picking me up here in a couple of hours.”

“I’m sorry, Samantha. I know this is hard, and we’re doing everything we can think of. There is some good news on a couple of fronts.”

“What!?” Samantha blurted out in exasperation.

“Well,” Marvin cut in, giving The Professor a chance to breathe. “We’ve isolated the toxin.” He brought up another computer display, this time of chemical compounds laid out in 3-D molecular structures.

“We got a sample from the dart,” Brianna said. “I had to go back for that one, when your mom was being put into the ambulance on a stretcher. Almost ran into myself, but they got me out in time.”

Samantha looked around at her friends. Apparently they had all been taking greater risks with time travel than The Professor had previously allowed.

“It’s all right,” Smythe came back to the discussion. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m fairly certain we’ve avoided any major temporal catastrophes.

“The toxin is organic. It comes from a floating, water-lily-type plant that only ever grew on the Yucatan Peninsula–not far from where we dug up the time machine, actually, but I think this is merely coincidence. Unfortunately, its only possible antidote would have to be derived from the same sort of plant, and it’s been extinct for close to a thousand years.”

Samantha frowned, mentally following the complications.

“Of course, we shall be forced to go back and retrieve some if we hope to revive your mother from her coma.”

“So... what are we waiting for?” Samantha almost snapped. She felt instantly childish for doing so, but everyone seemed to forgive her short temper, considering the circumstances.

“Well,” The Professor sighed, leaning back in his chair, “consider this: One, we’ve never tried to travel this far through time
or
space before. Two, we don’t know for sure if the communicators will work. Three, I still don’t work the time machine like an expert, though I must say I have improved. Four, we definitely need to do a bit more botanical research to make sure we’d send someone to exactly the right area, and with enough knowledge that they could positively identify our desired plant and harvest enough of it so we could extract an antidote successfully. And
five...
”

“Yeah? Five?” Samantha was still impatient.

“Well, five, it smells like a trap, Samantha. Think about it,” The Professor folded his hands in his lap and tried to appeal to her rational side. “Our enemies have orchestrated a situation that they know we can only remedy in one way.
I assure you, they know exactly what we’re trying to do right now, and they
want
us to do it. I don’t know why;
I’m still trying to put all of our experiences together in a way that might define our enemies’ motivations more clearly, but so far it’s still fuzzy. Yes, they either want lots of plant life to disappear or the ice caps to melt, or both. But I still haven’t the foggiest idea why–Vassily Slane’s investments don’t explain it, at least not the ones we know of. And Jordan seems more and more to me like just a pawn in the game–I don’t know.

“What is obvious at the moment is that they want us in a certain place and time, perhaps to effect something that they can’t, directly, as before. I am
fairly sure that we have at least one advantage over them: I believe that whatever method of time travel they possess is somehow... incomplete, compared to ours. We can touch and directly physically interact with people and things in other times; they cannot.

“If I had to take a guess, I’d say that they’re using a somewhat poorly duplicated copy of our time machine. Perhaps they’ve built their own from some–some incomplete ancient text that they possess, some half-rotted or insufficiently translated blueprint scroll or clay tablet. One thing is certain, though: whatever their purpose, whatever their motives, plans, means or capabilities, they know full well now that we are out here, working against them. And believe me, not a day goes by that I don’t fear them finding out for sure where
our
time machine is, and coming here to take it. Pestering Paradoxes! They might even be able to just send in a spy who could somehow steal whatever secrets they’re missing, without even needing to take the thing itself!” The Professor was becoming almost crazed in a paranoid, sleep-deprived way.

“Okay,” Samantha said, taking the role of the calm one. “So we have to play along if I want to get my mom out of a coma. What do we do? I’m ready, whatever it is.”

“Right,” The Professor replied, calming. “Thank you, Samantha–I know this has been harder on you than any of us.”

“We’re all here for you, Samantha,” Suki put in with genuine concern in her eyes. Everyone in the room agreed.

“Thanks, you guys,” Samantha almost sobbed, looking around and feeling happy, for a moment, that she was lucky enough to have such good friends. “And thanks so much for taking care of Polly, Bree.” Brianna had been feeding and walking her dog for her since she’d been at the hospital.

“Well,” The Professor began again, “we need to plan a group mission. I would include myself in this but I fear the police may want to be in steady contact with me and I doubt any of you could properly work the time machine’s controls. I’m afraid I must once again resign myself to desk duty. I will, of course, maintain constant communication with you all, and will do my best as well to follow up on our other lead.”

“Our other lead?” Samantha raised an eyebrow.

“We’re getting close to finding the Slanes,” Marvin offered. “Brianna’s mission at the show did set us up with some pretty dope info... ”

“What our urban poet is trying to say,” Smythe translated, “is that we’ve traced an email that Jordan received on that laptop of his. So far we’ve followed it back through Los Angeles to the Philippines and then to Guam. We feel it originated out in The Pacific somewhere, most likely from a boat of some sort.”

“Oh–wow. So... what does that mean?”

“Well, it means we might be able to figure out where the Slanes are operating from. That would be a decided advantage for us as, despite my paranoia, I do believe that had the Slanes figured out a way to penetrate the sanctity of this building, they would have done so by now.”

“They have to know that the time machine is here,” Marvin concluded.

“Agreed.” The Professor nodded. “They know, at least, that Samantha, Marvin and myself have traveled through time, and have devised their own missions to intercept us or attempt to cause us to change history. I am certain that they are watching this place.”

“Then why haven’t they tried anything here?” Samantha asked, confused.

“I’ve been wondering that myself for a long time now,” Smythe scratched his whiskered chin. “And I’ve been studying possible answers to that question. What I’ve concluded is this: The time machine itself must have something to do with it. As you’ll recall, Samantha, the better part of a week that you and I spent in an altered timeline, the area immediately surrounding the time machine, including this office, seemed to remain somehow unaffected. You and I were aware that we were living in an... improper reality, but all of my notes were intact, as I had made them weeks before. My office phone number was the same–”

“The books,” Samantha put in.

“Eh? What’s that?”

“The books,” Samantha repeated. “Remember, we couldn’t find Elliott Bergen on the computer network, so we looked him up in your books. We found him noted in a book in your office, and he wasn’t ever born, in that timeline.”

“Precisely,” Professor Smythe replied. “We exist, here, in some sort of bubble,
some sort of neutral pocket in time. I haven’t been able to establish exactly how far it extends, but I believe that for some reason it is this bubble that our enemies cannot breech. Truly fascinating but, alas, still a mystery to me.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Suki smiled, pleased with herself to have correctly used a rural western expression.

“And we shan’t,” The Professor smiled back, looking very tired. “Nonetheless, if we can pinpoint where the Slanes are based out of, we may be able to throw a wrench into the gears of their time-traveling operations.”

“And yo, we got homie’s password, too,” Marvin grinned in his devious hacker’s way.

“His password?” Samantha asked, suddenly intensely curious.

“Yup. That little device Brianna planted did its job real good. We can check his email right now if we want.”

“Well,” The Professor spoke, “I wouldn’t count on that.”

“No, me either,” Brianna agreed. “I’m sure Jordan found that thing when he unplugged his computer. He’s probably changed all his information by now.”

Samantha frowned.
One step forward, two steps back,
she thought.

“We did get something, though,” The Professor acknowledged. “The email we intercepted detailed the plan to target your mother, Samantha. They are clearly trying to draw us into a trap, or at least into performing some other history-altering action on their behalf. Whatever mission we devise to secure the antidote for Cindy’s poisoned state, we
must
keep this in mind. I’ve already begun researching the area and time period we will need to access, i.e. the Yucatan Peninsula sometime before the tenth century A.D. I will continue to keep my mind open to other possible effects of entering this time period and try to plan around not disturbing anything too important.

“We will plan a time when everyone can go. I’ve mastered the time machine enough so that I am reasonably confident of my ability to get you there and back within an hour, so no one will become too suspicious of your absence. This will be strange, as you may spend many hours or days in the past, during which I will be in constant contact with you. However, I shall ‘re-insert’ you back into the present less than an hour after you’ve left. Hence, I will probably not remember any conversations we’ve had beyond that hour, as they won’t technically have happened yet. Though I suppose that bringing you back early will change the future, it shouldn’t matter as you will already have the required plant.”

Marvin sat scratching his head. The others looked equally perplexed by these complicated conundrums of time, and their confusion was augmented by their general lack of sleep. The Professor sensed their difficulty in understanding and attempted to simplify his explanations.

“All, right, look,” he summarized. “I’ll send you all back, and you’ll be back in the present less than an hour after you left. Just remember that upon your return, I will not remember any of the conversations we’ve had via communicator, except those that took place within one hour of your being gone. Does that make sense?” Everyone nodded.