Samantha Smart (24 page)

Thuk! Thuk! Thuk!
Several Javelin-like objects pierced the thick hide of the Vasche-creature, causing it to writhe in pain and let out a horrible screaming sound. It morphed erratically, trying to regain its pure shark form and slipping, badly wounded, back beneath the gentle waves of the gulf, trailing blood as it went. Then Samantha saw it, the agent of their rescue. It was a small speedboat, dangling from a sort of giant, square parachute, quickly descending and angling itself toward the stone platform. There were spear-guns mounted on the boat’s front, and at their triggers–Marvin, and Professor Smythe!

It would almost have been funny to Samantha if she hadn’t been purely terrified a few moments earlier. The boat-chute looked like some scene out of
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
as it touched down on the water, Marvin engaging its engine. The two rescuers zipped quickly over to the platform and Marvin got out, carrying a glass vial with him and leaving The Professor at the controls.

“Hold
very
still,” Marvin instructed as he uncorked the vial and poured what must have been some powerful acid onto the chains of Samantha’s manacles. The metal hissed and smoked, then gave way almost instantly. Some drops had fallen onto the platform and were fast eating holes through the stone, a sight that made Samantha gulp for a moment, looking down at her wrists, which held the remains of the manacles.

“Help me,” Marvin instructed, handing her another vial of the stuff and then running over to the pillar that held the unconscious Brianna. Samantha followed suit, rushing to Suki’s column and imitating what she had seen Marvin do with the acid. There was a collective roar coming from the shore and canoes were already paddling out to them, fast.

The girls jumped into the flashy speedboat, helping Marvin to carry onboard the limp Brianna. The Professor, presumably not wanting to leave any evidence of their presence in this time, had pulled the deflated parachute aboard and was packing it away inside the hull of the boat. Marvin slid behind the wheel and gunned its engine. It was very fast. The girls were thrown backward as the vessel sped along the cliff-lined shore, and it seemed for a moment as if they were heading straight for the canoes full of warriors in pursuit.

“Marvin!” The Professor yelled, but Marvin had ideas of his own. He floored the accelerator and shot right at the pursuing natives. It looked as though they were going to collide. Wide-eyed warriors threw their spears and jumped overboard from their canoes. None of the spears came close to hitting them, though one glanced off the front of the fiberglass boat. At the last moment before impact, Marvin jerked the wheel to the right and tore off north along the rocky coastline.

“That was
stupid,
Marvin!” The Professor chastised the ‘Brooklyn Bandit,’ honestly angry. “One of us could have taken a spear to the head! Cackling Quetzl-Coatls! Don’t
ever
do anything like that again!” He was holding his heart in an ‘I’m too old for this sort of thing’ way.

“Well,” Marvin sighed, smiling a little, “No one will be following us for a while.”

“That is
true,” Samantha chimed in. “But that
was
a stupid stunt, Marvin; someone could really have gotten hurt. I suppose it’s hard for me to be angry, though, when I was expecting to die moments ago and you’ve just saved all our lives–you, too, Professor.” She kissed the old, flustered Brit on the cheek, making him blush uncharacteristically.

“Well, uh, yes, well, of course!” Smythe stammered. “Aaaahhh–Marvin?”

“Ya, boss,” Dr. Marvy replied, focused on his speedboat driving. He was quite enjoying it and wishing that their real time didn’t require silly things like drivers’ licenses.

“You know where to head to, correct?”

Marvin looked down at the boat’s dashboard, which featured a bright digital display with many numbers and some sort of wavy lines on it.

“Yup, I figure about fifteen to, oh, twenty or twenty-five minutes.”

“What’s that?” Samantha’s scientific curiosity kicked in. She slid closer to Marvin and studied the dashboard’s readout, which seemed to be changing as they traveled along.

“Built-in terrain recognition,” Marvin explained. “You know, navigation stuff. They use it in fighter jets and things like that. It scans ahead of you with radar and feeds the information back to here,” he pointed at the wavy lines with his finger as he drove. “Then the computer compares it to all the radar maps in its database and lets you know exactly where you are.”

“Cool,” Samantha cooed. “Where’d you get this boat, Professor?”

“I, er,
borrowed
it from the Chelsea Piers on Twenty-third Street. I’m, ah still working on a way to replace it; I fear we can’t get it back the way we, ah, got it here.” Smythe fretted.

“G.P.S. would’ve been easier, and easier to find a boat with,” Marvin displayed his geekiness. “That is, a global positioning system. It guides you by a very precise satellite signal.”

“I’m actually considering building G.P.S. into the next round of wrist-communicators,” The Professor took up the topic, equally zealous in his knowledge of popular electronics. “I daresay it’d be quite useful, on any mission. There is a problem, though... ”

“What’s that?” Samantha asked.

“Well, you see–it won’t work on any mission into the past beyond 1995 or so, because–”

“Because there aren’t any guidance satellites,” Samantha finished his sentence, understanding.

“Precisely. Sort of a disadvantage to traveling in the past, you know. Unless–well, I did manage to perfect a sort of wireless closed-circuit that lets us communicate through time. If I could somehow patch the satellite signal into that frequency, well, I might be able to get it to work.”

“So, we’d be able to get global positioning from satellites–in the future?”

“Yes, well, I suppose so. But, I mean, it’s just a signal like the one that carries my voice, and you’ve been getting that from ‘the future.’”

“
Anyway,
” Marvin steered the conversation back to the ‘present,’ “The terrain recognition is working fine. Luckily we’re on a coast, which makes it a lot easier, right Professor?”

“Indeed,” Smythe replied. “I programmed the map databases for this specific area, though I’m sure the coastline has changed a bit over the last thousand years.”

They zoomed along, pulling gradually back towards the shore as they went. The cliffs had blended down into the jungle they had marched through, and it stretched out like a vast, dark cloud of green that covered the land completely. The boat ride reminded Samantha of their stint in the alternate timeline, and suddenly she grew concerned.

“I hope Polly’s all right at Aunt Tina’s,” she spoke, mostly to herself. She remained troubled, staring at the jungle as it flew by on their left. She thought of their uncomfortable bug-infested time in that place and then once again felt a sense of alarm, remembering the original purpose of their mission.

“Professor, what about the plant!!? What about my mother!?”

“It’s all right, Samantha,” The Professor tried to calm her. He pulled something out from under one of the boat’s seats. It was one of their backpacks.

“How–how did you–”

“Get this?” The Professor chuckled. “You can do amazing things with time travel, you know. I simply transported myself to the coordinates of your three confiscated wrist-communicators–to you it would have been last night. I used a stun-gun on the single guard they left with your belongings–rather a tense moment for me, I should say! But I gathered up everything, the backpacks, wrist-communicators and what have you, and transported back to the lab. Actually, I dropped everything off there–this pack is full of sandwiches–delicious turkey and cranberry chutney, from the Carnegie Deli. Would you like one?” He reached into the pack and pulled out a very tasty-looking sandwich, offering it to her.

“Uh–sure,” Samantha responded, stunned. The Professor handed out sandwiches to everyone, and the group devoured them hungrily, although Brianna was still out like a light.

“I couldn’t risk leaving everything there,” Smythe continued, chewing a bite of his own sandwich. “Though I still believe that Jordan can’t physically interact with things in other times, the Slanes did
somehow manage to synthesize a poison from that very plant that I sent you after, so they have some sort of... means to achieve such things. I don’t know–perhaps they instructed one of the natives to preserve some of the plant somehow and went to collect it from a specific spot a thousand years later. They are a clever lot, too, you know–and no doubt at least as well-equipped as we are.

“In any case, I certainly didn’t want them to have the communicators, or the ‘chalk.’ It may, I believe, have something to do with their inability to time-travel as effectively as we can. And, of course, I needed the plant. I think I’ve extracted the basic essence of an antidote, Samantha–I shall get back to work on refining it as soon as we get back, I promise.”

“I, uh, um–thanks,” Samantha said earnestly, overcome with a moment of emotion at the thought of seeing her mom again, awake and well. She was still pretty stunned at The Professor’s extreme effectiveness, as well as by the tense and bizarre events of the past day or two.

On their left, (Samantha couldn’t remember if this was “port” or “starboard” in nautical terms), the jungle began to thin and gave way to what looked like the beach of a familiar desert area, most likely near to where Alpha Team had arrived in this time. Marvin eased up on the throttle and slowly began guiding the boat to shore. It grazed some rocks as they pulled into a sort of shallow cove and the jostling woke Brianna, who opened her eyes and immediately let out a blood-curdling scream. The others quickly made to comfort her, stroking her hair and quietly reassuring her that they had, in fact, been rescued, and that they were no longer about to die a grisly death. She gradually began to accept this, reluctantly allowing herself to be helped out of the boat and onto the desolate-looking shore.

It was here that The Professor informed them that they must part ways. They would have to walk a mile or two to get back to the bleak slab of rock that held their ‘magic’ footprints, apparently still their only viable means of return to their own time. The Professor would have to pilot the boat back to his point of entry, the return to which was considerably more complicated. He had transported the boat, parachute and all, to a high cliff top just outside the natives’ hidden village and had propelled it over the edge by means of a modified trailer. The motorized trailer, he had related to them, had then plummeted into the gulf below, whereupon a special polymer he had coated it with would have its chemical properties activated by contact with saltwater, causing the entire thing to dissolve within hours. This assured that no evidence of the thing from the future would be left in this primitive time, though the boat itself presented its own problem in this respect.

The Professor had, purportedly, somehow got boat and trailer into the time-machine room, which sounded impossible. He had shrugged off further questions about this feat, saying that there wasn’t time to explain it to them. He did have a plan to destroy the vessel as well, in a presumably similar manner, and acknowledged that it would not be making the trip back home with him. It was a mystery that Alpha Team could only ponder, at least for the moment.

The girls, (and even Marvin to some extent) remained concerned about how The Professor would get back to the cliff-top, but at this, too, he smiled and assured them that he would have no problem doing so, patting something in the boat that looked very much like an astronaut’s rocket-backpack. Samantha looked at Marvin and they grinned at each other. Suki and Brianna smiled too, and they all waved to their undoubtedly resourceful leader as he spun the boat around and sped out of sight.

The trek back to their footprints was hot and tiring, as expected, though it was earlier in the day than it was on the day that they had arrived, and so at least somewhat cooler. They also were mercifully free of the extra weight of their backpacks, for which they were all very grateful. Brianna in particular was in much higher spirits and hardly complained at all, which everyone was equally appreciative of.

Marvin kept checking a compass that The Professor had given him, eyeing the disturbingly homogenous horizon carefully as they went. It was only an hour or so before they came to an area that looked at least somewhat familiar to everyone in the party, and ‘Dr. Marvy’ instructed them all to split up and begin looking for the slab of rock upon which they had materialized a couple of days earlier. He passed out the wrist-communicators, which The Professor, in his wisdom, had been thoughtful enough to bring back and leave with them, and instructed each party member to signal if any of them came upon the correct spot.

It wasn’t long before the devices squawked with Suki’s voice, excited that she had been the one to find the glowing tracks they sought. The others turned around and quickly made for her location, arriving some minutes later.

There they were–four sets of footprints, glowing a bright blue in the sun of late morning, their salvation. The girls huddled around them, then hugged each other in an unspoken acknowledgment of all they had been through in the past forty-eight hours. Marvin, too, smiled and put on a look of relief that no one had seen on his face for a while. They held hands and stepped into their respective tracks, each saying a silent goodbye to the ancient world that had been their home for the past two days, and with a dazzling blue fizzle of light and temporal energy, vanished from where they had stood.

*

The feeling in Cindy Smart’s hospital room was one of nervous anticipation. Though nearly a dozen people stood around her bed, everyone maintained a sort of hush, fingers crossed. After two days of conferencing between Professor Smythe and Dr. Amesbury (The physician assigned to Cindy’s case), they had administered The Professor’s lab-synthesized antidote. At first the doctor had been very skeptical, but after a few trips to The Professor’s lab with an accompanying colleague, he had concluded that Smythe’s science was sound, that his synthesized antidote could only help and not worsen Cindy’s condition, and that it was in fact within the law to administer it with a signature from an immediate family member. Aunt Tina supplied this, reluctantly, after many assurances from Samantha, Professor Smythe and Dr. Amesbury, and so the injection had been given that morning.