Samantha Smart (7 page)

She felt so energetic at the moment that she decided to walk at least part of the way back to the museum. Taking taxi-boats was fast, certainly, but Samantha hadn’t done enough real walking lately, and seeing as she was in no particular rush, she availed herself of the opportunity to fit in some healthy exercise. Seventh Avenue (and apparently all the avenues) had floating plastic sidewalks lining them all the way up, and where they crossed the water-filled streets they bridged them with iron over-walks that were bolted into the buildings on either side. It was a lot of up and down walking, but it at least allowed one to walk around the city. It was also like a natural Stairmaster for the thighs, and though Samantha was not in any way fat or even flabby, she reminded herself that “cellulite is the enemy,” as she had been thoroughly informed by every major teen magazine. The workout was
nice, and Samantha worked up a sweat after only three or four blocks, she walking at a brisk pace and the day being still quite warm and sunny. When she reached Madison Square Garden and had descended from the Thirty-first Street over-walk, she was again confronted with the huddling masses of homeless people, looking hungry, half-drunk and very much beyond their years. She felt very bad for them, and wound up giving an old woman with a sort of floating shopping cart ten of her remaining twenty-or-so dollars. It was silly, she knew. In the real timeline, the woman may never have been born, or, who knew, she could be a powerful investment banker. It was probably stupid to put her resources into something she was working to eliminate (anything in this alternate timeline), but Samantha was a compassionate person and had felt the need to do something, even if it was just to make one woman more comfortable for a short period of time that might not even exist if she and The Professor accomplished their mission to right things, time-wise.

She continued walking uptown, staying on Seventh Avenue, though when she reached Forty-second Street, where Broadway cut its diagonal path across midtown, the over-walks became very jumbled, and at one point she found herself plopped down in Times Square on a large, plaza-like floating plastic triangle with benches and artificial trees on it. It was bizarre, like and yet unlike how she remembered it. There was still a large digital billboard of sorts, though it seemed to be advertising strange, unfamiliar products, among them artificial trees and motorized surfboards. Samantha wondered if they still celebrated New Year’s here, if they still dropped a ball at midnight.
Well,
she thought,
if it’s October now, I suppose we’ll find out if we don’t get this mess straightened out in a few months.

She spied a music store to one side of the plaza and, looking at her watch, decided she could duck in for a few minutes. Music was very important to her and she realized she hadn’t heard a good Heatwavvve song in a while. Even with all her new responsibilities as investigator, forensic scientist and possibly time-traveler-in-training, she maintained that it was only fair to let herself be a young girl at times.

The store was bustling with lots of people, many around Samantha’s age. It seemed compact discs had still managed to get invented, though they looked somewhat bigger and were packaged a bit differently. None of the musical artists on the wall’s posters looked even vaguely familiar, and this gave her a feeling of discomfort–it was one thing to not be “hip” because you hadn’t exposed yourself to new music; it was another thing entirely to be a girl who just
really
didn’t belong in a certain time and place. She was sort of staring at a poster of some axe-wielding heavy metal singer when a store clerk came up and jolted her out of her queasy reverie.

“Can I help you find anything, Miss?” A good-looking young man in a red vest and nametag asked her.

“Oh–uh, yeah, maybe,” she sputtered, feeling even more uncool. “Do you, um, do you have Heatwavvve,
the, uh, singing group?”

“Heatwavvve?” the clerk started walking through the aisles, beckoning Samantha to follow. “Um - I’m not sure if this is what you want, but... ” they reached a stack that the clerk thumbed through and pulled out a disc. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Samantha took the CD from him and looked at it. The cover was all red and looked like some kind of nuclear explosion, though it did say “Heatwavvve” on it. She flipped it over and read some of the song titles, “Baby Butcher,” “Chained and Hopeless,” “March of the Frost Giants”–this was definitely not the same Heatwavvve.
She confirmed this assumption by reading the names of the band in the liner notes, which were all wrong.

“Um–no,” she replied. “This isn’t them. Don’t you have Heatwavvve,
you know, the boy-band with Jordan Anderson?”

“Boy-band? Jordan Anderson? I’m afraid I don’t know who you’re talking about. The only Heatwavvve
I know of is these guys,” he said, taking the disc back from her and replacing it in the stack. “And they play like thrash-metal.”

“Heatwavvve,” Samantha emphasized, frustrated. “They’re huge! Everyone knows who they are, they’ve sold millions of CDs and are in those ads on TV for soda and barbecued ribs and stuff. They’re everywhere! How could you not know them?”

The clerk scratched his head. “Are they British?” he asked, “or Australian?”

“No! They’re totally American–I just–and this was incredible–I just met one of their singers, Jordan Anderson, downtown. He was going to get me a signed poster... ” she drifted off into the memory of her moments with Jordan. The tingly feeling she’d gotten when he touched her had been amazing, and she wished she could feel it again.

“I’m sorry,” the clerk shrugged, smiling slightly at her obvious adolescent crush and causing her to blush. “Maybe you could get a CD from him, too; we don’t have one.”

Samantha thanked the clerk for his help, and after a brief and futile self-performed search of the “A” stack, hoping to find something under “Jordan Anderson,” she left the store. Her watch read 4:48, and though it surely didn’t feel like it, it was
October and hence the sun was rapidly going down. She decided to hail a taxi-boat from the huge floating triangle-plaza, figuring she didn’t want to be walking around in the dark unless absolutely necessary. She had ten dollars left and figured that would cover her ride back to the upper west side, and it didn’t take her long to find a cab.

The ride uptown was uneventful, and Samantha mostly spent it trying to figure out why Jordan Anderson existed in this timeline and yet no one at a big chain music store had ever heard of Heatwavvve.
Perhaps they weren’t quite as famous in this reality, and Jordan had just been playing himself up as a superstar simply because she had heard of his group.
That wouldn’t be so bad,
she thought to herself.
If he wasn’t so famous, maybe he’d even consider... well, dating someone like me.
She quickly dismissed this as silly girlish thinking, he was years older than her, though perhaps a definite spark of hope remained in her mind.

The taxi-boat pulled up and dropped her off at the museum steps and she gave the driver her ten dollars, tipping him two dollars and twenty-five cents as the fare had been $7.75. She did the usual rigamarole with the security desk, though by now the “new” people sort of recognized her and would generally let her find her own way down to Professor Smythe’s office once they got the telephone o.k. from him. She was almost knocked over by a Boston Terrier blow to the chest when she entered the office; Polly had obviously missed her. She gave her dog a good bit of affection and then looked over to where The Professor was tinkering with something on his desk.

“Hi, Professor!” she said in a peppy voice.

“Oh, Samantha!” he replied, looking up from his work. “I’ve just finished making a prototype for a wristband-communicator,” he said enthusiastically. “It runs on a closed-circuit microwave band that, if my theory is correct, should be unaffected by temporal displacement.”

“Say what?” Samantha tried to adjust back to The Professor’s speed of thinking.

“Time travel, Samantha. The wrist communicator is joined by a sort of a closed-circuit microwave band to this desk unit here.” He indicated a larger sort of radio thing. “They should function no matter what sort of ‘timeline’ one might be in, and of course throughout the course of any of these timelines, at any point along the way.”

“Cool,” Samantha said earnestly, walking over to the desk and looking at his work. “Where did you get the parts to make this, Professor?”

“Radio Shack.” The old Brit smiled a toothy smile. “Well,” he said, turning back to the desk, “we shall have to test this, then. And that means using the time machine, Samantha.”

“Professor,” she interjected, “don’t you want to hear about my interview with Violet Edelstein?”

“Bellowing bugbears!” he exclaimed. “I’d totally forgotten. Sometimes I just get so involved in a new project that I sort of forget what the last one was for,” he said apologetically.

“It’s okay, Professor,” Samantha said, patting him on the top of his head. “But listen!” Her voice became as excited as his. “I got to ‘interview’ Violet Edelstein–a very neat woman, by the way - you would’ve been so proud of me, I did such a good job as field agent, impersonating a school reporter–” The Professor was nodding in anticipation. “Anyway, there’s no Elliot Bergen in this timeline, he was never born. Ms. Edelstein said that she
had
been dating a Vincent Bergen, but that he had moved, probably to North Carolina, to pursue some opportunity, and that he was supposed to have written her, that they had been considering marriage, but then her house burned down and she had to move as well and they lost touch.”

“Oh dear.” The Professor frowned. “Do you think I did something in the past that caused her house to burn down?”

“Well,” Samantha replied, then paused for thought. “I hadn’t thought of that. I was thinking that perhaps he
had
written a letter and that for some reason it hadn’t been delivered.”

The Professor assumed a look of deep thought, scratching his chin and appearing to be searching his memory.

“You know, I vaguely recall walking by a postman that time in 1931. But–I didn’t touch him or even interact with him in any way. Still, perhaps something could’ve happened... ”

“Well, okay,” Samantha said. “What do we do with this information?”

The Professor looked at her in a focused way, then looked back at his desk.

“Well,” he said, “no matter what, we’re going to have to use the time machine. We need to try and get back to that short period of time I spent in 1931 and correct whatever went wrong. We now know that something I did either caused a house to burn down or a letter to not be delivered. Did Ms. Edelstein say when exactly her house burned down?”

“No, I, um, didn’t ask her,” Samantha pouted, a little deflated.

“It doesn’t really matter. In fact, I think the letter theory is a bit more plausible. And I seem to remember something about that postman–he... yelled or something, it made me turn around and look, but I was halfway down the block from him at that point. I hardly noticed it, but... now for some reason it sticks in my memory.

“In any case, someone has got to go back and fix it, and as much as I would rather do it myself, I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

“I’ll go!” Samantha volunteered, biting her lip in excitement and eyeing the nifty wrist-communicator.

“Hold on a moment,” The Professor put his hand up. “I’m not so sure if that’s such a good idea either, sending a young girl alone
back in time–you could get hurt or lost–I’d feel simply horrible if anything happened to you.”

“I’ll take Polly with me!” She beamed, nodding as if this were the obvious solution. Polly wagged her little stub of a tail and looked back and forth between Samantha and The Professor.

“That dog has caused enough trouble already, don’t you think?” The Professor looked at Polly and spoke in a scolding tone so that she cowered slightly from him.

“Oh, she didn’t mean
it, Professor. And I’ll keep her on the shortest leash, the whole time!”

“Well,” The Professor grumbled, “unfortunately, I fear that I absolutely mustn’t go myself. I’m afraid having two Professor Smythes in the same time and place might produce some disastrous result, though I’m not sure what exactly would happen.” He looked at Samantha long and hard. “I suppose it has
to be you. I can’t rightly draw anyone from this timeline into our little mess. I thought about asking one of the museum security guards to do it, but then my mind got to wondering–what if they weren’t meant to exist in that timeline,
our
normal timeline. Would they be able to exist there as we are able to exist here, or might they simply blink out of existence upon reaching
our
1931? Though presumably, our timeline and this one were one and the same up until that specific point when I goofed something up.” The Professor shook his head. “There are too many ifs,
Samantha.”

“Well then that settles it,” Samantha said firmly. “If there are too many ifs,
Professor, one logically has to follow the course with the
most
certainty, even if it isn’t one hundred percent. If you’re not sure what will happen if you go yourself or send some security guard, you have
to send me. You know
that I won’t cause any ‘double-occurrence’ like you would, and it’s less
likely that I’ll blink out of existence than someone from this new timeline, and I’m the only one in this timeline besides you who even knows half of what’s going on here. Do you think some security guard is going to be easily talked into walking into some crazy Mayan time machine because you’ve just explained to him that he and his whole world weren’t meant to exist, and that we need to fix that?”

Professor Smythe frowned.

“You certainly put forth a very compelling argument, Samantha.” He sat brooding for a few moments, seemingly going over their very limited options. “All right. But I want you to take Polly–
on a short leash.
And before I let you anywhere near
that time machine we’re going to give this communicator a real test.”

“Okay! Fine–I mean, it’s a deal. I need to take Polly out anyway–how far do you want me to go with it?”