Samantha Smart (3 page)

Polly had jumped out of Samantha’s backpack and trotted down the few stairs left above the water line, and now stood at the water’s edge sniffing, looking around and occasionally gazing back at Samantha with a look of utter confusion. Samantha walked down to her and stooped to pet her. “It’s okay, Polly,” she tried to reassure her canine friend, “I know this is pretty weird. But it’s kind of cool,
too, isn’t it?” She smiled and looked at her little terrier, who did not seem to agree at all. Polly was not an exceptional swimmer and appeared to be in fact quite distressed that most of the world around her had suddenly been filled with water. She had always hated baths and did not even really like to get wet, unless it involved some nice warm mud. She tried her hardest to express these feelings through whimpers, pitiful looks and a general lack of tail-wagging, and it seemed as if Samantha understood.

“Okay,” Samantha said to Polly, “I guess all we can do is go back downstairs and try to help Professor Smythe figure out what went wrong–and how we might be able to fix it. Come on, Polly... ”

Polly jumped back into Samantha’s backpack and they slipped back into the museum, heading for the familiar door to the basement stairs. Samantha kept going over possibilities in her head as to what could have happened to flood all of Manhattan, her mind trying to picture some huge dam bursting or a rainstorm of biblical proportions. Her mind was so completely preoccupied with these thoughts that she almost walked right into a security guard who was now standing in front of the basement door. She stopped suddenly and gazed up at six and a half feet of uniformed muscle. A quizzical, African-American face looked back at her from atop the mountain of person.

“Can I help you?” the security guard asked, blocking the door.

“Oh,” Samantha peeped, “I–I–uh, my mom works here.”

“Really?” the guard replied. “And you are... looking for your mother?”

“Well, not–uh–not exactly. I’m looking for Professor Smythe–I know where his office is, if I could just–” Samantha tried to slip by him to the door.

“Hold on a minute,” said the guard. He clicked on the radio attached to his belt and spoke into it. “Cal–hey, it’s Art up front. I’ve got a young girl who’s trying to get downstairs–says she wants to see Professor Smythe.”

“Smythe?” the radio crackled. “What for? Who is she?”

“Well, she says her mother works here–what did you say your name was again, Miss?”

“Samantha. Samantha Smart,” Samantha replied nervously. “My mom’s name is Cindy–Cindy Smart. She works at the–the ticket counter.”

“Did you copy that Cal?” Apparently ‘Art’ had been holding on to the ‘talk’ button on his radio.

“Copy that, Art. No one here seems to know a Cindy Smart at tickets–does she sound familiar to you?”

“Negative,” Art replied, staring down at Samantha. “What do you want me to do?” The radio was silent for a moment, then chirped on again.

“Why don’t you bring her up here, Art. We can watch her while you go ask The Professor.”

“Affirmative, Cal,” Art replied, “sounds good.” Art gestured in front of him for Samantha to make her way to the ticket counter. Samantha sighed and reluctantly obeyed, praying to herself that Polly would not be noticed. They walked over to the counter and Art left her there, going back towards the door to the basement. His radio crackled again.

“Hey, Art, we’re just gonna try to ring him on the phone in his office. He might pick up.”

“Roger that,” Art responded, resuming his standing position at the door and awaiting further instructions.

Samantha was in luck. The Professor had obviously picked up the phone and the security guard at the ticket counter was talking to him, nodding. Presently, he hung up and motioned her over to his post.

“Professor Smythe says to wait here,” he said when she was close to him, “he’s coming to meet you.”

“Okay,” Samantha shrugged. She walked over and sat down in a nearby lobby chair that she remembered having played on as a little girl.
Of course,
she thought to herself,
in this reality I probably never played on this chair–it doesn’t even seem as if my mom works here.
Samantha frowned a worried frown. Would she even ever see her mother again? Sure, Cindy Smart was a shallow, materialistic, man-devouring dating machine, but Samantha had to admit she loved her anyway. Who knows, maybe in this reality her mom was a famous poet, a very deep, sensitive thinker who spent exhausting hours upon hours championing noble causes and creating priceless contributions to the cultural commonwealth. But then, perhaps in this reality, this ‘alternate course of history,’ Samantha had never been born. The world had been spinning off in a different direction since 1931. That was a long time. Thinking like this started to make Samantha’s head feel dizzy, and she was glad when she looked up and saw The Professor walking toward her, a sort of bookbag over his shoulder.

“Samantha!” he shouted, waving as he approached. “Come on, then, we’re going out. Got some research to do, I’m afraid, that is, if we want to get things back to normal.”

Samantha nodded vigorously at this idea and got up, following The Professor toward the main doors. They walked out and down the stairs to where the waterline was, then looked at each other. Polly stuck her head out of Samantha’s backpack and sniffed the outside air again.

“We’ll have to hail a taxi-boat,” The Professor said. “I’ve been out a few times already, Samantha–in this
reality. One doesn’t have to be quite as careful about changing things–at least, assuming our goal is to change the past back to normal and eliminate this ‘incorrect present’ altogether.”

“I see,” Samantha responded. They stood in silence for a minute, waving for a taxi-boat, which it seemed was no easier to flag down than its wheeled counterpart, the familiar New York taxi cab.

“Some things haven’t changed,” The Professor smiled, shrugging.

“Professor,” Samantha thought out loud as they continued waving, “Is it still October?”

“That,” he replied, “is a good question, Samantha. I’ve always assumed that my calendar was still correct, but I can’t say for sure. We shall have to ask someone.”

“If it is
still October, don’t you think it’s, well, quite warm?”

“Hmmmph. Indeed. It feels more like May than October, doesn’t it? Strange... ”

The Professor seemed to drift off into a haze of thought, but his reverie was quickly interrupted by a taxi-boat which had finally buzzed over to them.

“Where to, Mac?” the driver asked, edging the open-roofed boat close enough for them to climb in.

“The nearest newsstand, I think,” The Professor offered.

The taxi-boat sped off along what used to be Central Park West, cut right down the former Seventy-fifth Street and then left onto the old Columbus Avenue. There were, in fact, new street signs that had been attached to corner buildings, apparently to replace the street-level ones which were all now entirely submerged. Samantha marveled at the eerily familiar yet vastly changed blocks of upper Manhattan. All the storefronts had been moved to the second floors of the buildings, and all of them had these plastic or Styrofoam docks floating at their doors. There were long stretches where one could even walk along on sidewalks made from the same strange material. Samantha thought they were all terribly ugly, and that they would’ve looked much better had they been done in wood.

The roofs of the buildings all seemed to have sprouted thousands of antennae as well, large steel things with disc-shaped tops packed eight or ten to a rooftop. Samantha wondered if everyone broadcast their own radio station in this alternate reality, but the receiver dial in the taxi-boat seemed to have no more numbers on it than familiar radios.

“How’s this?” the cabbie shouted over his rather noisy outboard motor. They had pulled up at a plastic dock next to Manny’s Newsroom, on the corner of Seventy-first and Columbus.

“Superb,” said The Professor in his royal-sounding British accent.

They disembarked onto the plastic sidewalk and Professor Smythe paid the driver, noting thankfully that money hadn’t changed too drastically either. The taxi-boat sped off downtown and Samantha decided to let Polly out of the backpack. Shaking off a bit of a nap, she walked around a little, unsure of the stability of the floating sidewalk, though it did seem to be anchored quite well into the sides of the buildings. She was, however, unhappy about having to sit outside the newsstand’s door as the humans went in to look for clues to why the world had changed so much.

They entered Manny’s Newsroom, finding it to look quite like a normal, familiar newsstand, and went to one of the racks that held newspapers. There were a variety of headlines, it (presumably) still being Saturday, though few of them made much sense to them. Still, Samantha read them all and filed them away in her mind for future reference.

“WAVES TAKE FIFTH STRAIGHT TITLE”

“PARK FIRE KILLS TWENTY, LEAVES EIGHTY HOMELESS”

“JAPAN MOVES THOUSANDS OF MORE REFUGEES TO CHINESE COAST”

“CALVIN VETOES BOATER LEGISLATION”

and finally,

“TRICK-OR-TREATERS WAX UP THEIR BOARDS”

“This ain’t the public library, ya know,” a grating, raspy voice called from behind the store’s counter. “Ya think the rent’s cheap on this little chunk of commercial real estate? You wanna
read a paper, you buy
a paper, capiche?”

Samantha knew from an Italian friend of hers that “capiche” meant, “understand,” though she thought it always sounded more intimidating in Italian.

“Oh! I’m sorry,” The Professor blathered, grabbing a pile of different newspapers and putting them on the counter. The proprietor rang up the purchase, which came to six dollars and seventy-five cents. Professor Smythe paid the rather unfriendly man and they quickly exited back out to the sidewalk, where Polly was waiting nervously.

The three walked down the plastic sidewalk, still marveling at the visual difference between what New York City was and what it had been. They found a dock with a little bench on it and sat down, deciding to see what they could learn from their pile of newspapers.

“Apparently,” The Professor summarized, “Gary Calvin is now President of the United States, and has vetoed a bill by congress that would have required tougher restrictions on boat emissions. Poor sots–the last thing this world needs is more greenhouse gases–” The Professor cut himself off, as if something had clicked in his head. “October... ” he mused, looking at the date on the newspaper, “It
is
October, Samantha. And ridiculously warm.
And,
considering the fact that in my two other brief outings into this reality I haven’t found any evidence of dams breaking or torrential rains in the last seventy years, I’d say what we’re looking at here is the result of global warming.”

“Global warming?” Samantha asked, looking up from her paper. “ Yeah, I’ve heard about that in science class. The earth gets too hot and the ice caps melt at the north and south poles, right?”

“Correct,” The Professor replied, looking as if he were proud of her for having paid such good attention in school. “Global warming results from an excess of ‘greenhouse gases,’ principally carbon dioxide, building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat inside. When the heat builds to a certain level, the earth exhibits a ‘greenhouse effect’ and begins to melt the polar ice caps.”

“Right,” said Samantha. “That’s why they say we shouldn’t pollute the air so much, or cut down all the rainforests.”

“Precisely!” The Professor beamed. Samantha was, after all, his favorite informal student.

“So, somehow something you did in your trip to 1931 melted the polar ice caps?”

“Well, perhaps not directly–but yes, I think that’s the theory we should proceed with.”

Samantha shrugged and filed away more potentially useful information. She and The Professor returned to browsing their various newspapers for any other clues they might find, sharing ideas with each other. The “Waves” were apparently some sort of water polo team that rode around on jet-skis and played in a sort of stadium that was somewhere in the huge rectangle lake that used to be Central Park. This didn’t seem like useful information, but the game looked cool in the pictures and so did the stadium. The park fire had been a terrible tragedy in a houseboat community that had sprung up downtown in Washington Square Park. There were pictures of the boats burning and people fleeing in canoes and the like, but the strangest sight to Samantha’s eyes was how short and stubby the big arch in the square looked with its first ten or fifteen feet underwater.

The trick-or-treating headline confirmed even further that it was definitely October, with Halloween nearing, and the water-world response to this was thousands of surfboard-type things with little electric motors on them. Again, pretty cool but not much help in solving their mystery. The really
good information came from the last front-page article, which talked about the Japanese refugees relocating. This went into great detail about the melting ice caps, confirming The Professor’s theory and dating the beginning of the extreme water level rise to sometime in the mid nineteen-eighties.

“Egad!” The Professor exclaimed. “That’s extremely fast. Twenty-five years and the sea level rises by twelve feet worldwide? Something acutely disastrous must have occurred.”

In fact, at that very moment, something acutely disastrous
was
occurring. Polly had wandered a little ways out onto an adjacent dock where a boat was moored with its motor running at an idle. In one of her bolder yet least intelligent moves, she had decided to jump into the boat, landing squarely on its throttle and lurching the boat forward at an alarming speed, so much so that it broke its slender tether like a string of spaghetti and roared off into the busy river-traffic of Columbus Avenue. Samantha’s jaw dropped and she and The Professor stared helplessly for a moment before springing into action.

They ran as fast as they could, dropping all but one of their newspapers, straight to a taxi-boat that was parked nearby.

“Please,” Samantha cried, pointing ahead of her, “We have to follow that boat!”