The Keepers (11 page)

Mr. Ludwig sat back and fluffed his beard, his eyes twinkling. “Explain.”

“Well, first, it's not so much that we can travel
through
time. It's that one person can experience time differently than another person.”

Another twinkle. “You mean like how time flies for somebody who's on vacation, but goes slow for somebody who's stuck at school?”

“No, no. Not like that. I mean time can
actually
go slower or faster for different people in different places. Like, clocks and everything.”

“Very good. Just testing you. But what did you mean when you said speed is the key?”

“Well, because it turns out—and this is the part I don't really understand—that our experience of time is connected to how fast we're moving. Especially if we're moving really, really fast.”

“Close to the speed of light,” Mr. Ludwig said.

“Yes. And it's sort of backward, because the faster we go, the slower time passes for us.”

“But will it feel slow?”

“No. Even if we're physically moving really, really fast, time will still seem normal to us. Clocks will seem normal. But in reality, time will be passing slowly, relative to everybody else who isn't moving as fast.”

“That's right. It's that relative part that's so important: the faster we move, the more slowly time will pass for us—
compared to someone who is not moving as fast
. So, for example, if person A is standing still, and person B is moving really, really fast—like in a spaceship, moving at speeds approaching the speed of light—each of them will think they are experiencing time normally. That is, they won't notice anything strange about themselves, or the passage of time.” Mr. Ludwig fluffed his beard again, a sure sign that he was concentrating hard. “But
relative
to each other, time will progress much more slowly for moving person B than it does for stationary person A.”

“Right. But why?”

“That I can't explain, man. I mean, I really am unable to. It's Einstein, the theory of relativity. Relative, right? Very heavy stuff—I understand the idea of the theory, but I couldn't really explain how it works. I'm no Einstein. For now, we just have to accept that the faster you move, the more slowly time will pass.”

“Okay.”

“Now the next question is, how could that concept be used to travel through time?”

Horace considered. He understood the concept, sort of, but it was hard to put into words.

Mr. Ludwig got up and turned to the chalkboard. He drew a dot and labeled it
2015
. “Let's try this. Here I am on earth, today. Now let's say thirty years go by.” He drew a high, narrow arch, up to the top of the blackboard and back down. At the top of the arch he wrote
MR
.
LUD
= 30
YEARS
. At the other end of the arch, he made a second dot. “So what year would this be?”

“It'd be 2045.”

“Right,” Mr. Ludwig said, labeling it.

“But now let's say that in 2015, you, Horace, set out on a trip through space, traveling at a really high speed. Much, much faster than me here on earth. And remember that because you're going so fast, time inside your spaceship will be moving much more slowly than it is on earth, even though you won't notice it. Let's say you plan to be gone for one year—one year according to you, and according to the clocks on your spaceship—before you return to earth. Could you draw that on here? And remember that we're just estimating the times, to make a point.” He held out the chalk.

Horace stood and took it from him. He considered the
diagram, and then bent and drew a short straight line from the 2015 dot to the 2045 dot. Beneath it he wrote
HORACE
= 1
YEAR
.

“Perfect,” Mr. Ludwig said, watching. “And why is that time travel?”

“Because I've taken a shortcut to the future. I'll feel like I've been gone only a year, like it should be 2016—but on earth it'll actually be 2045. I've traveled into the future.”

“Exactly. To me, though, it'll just seem like you were in outer space for a really long time and hardly aged at all while you were there. Pretty cool, huh?”

Horace thought hard, feeling a deep thrill at the wonder of it all. He already knew that time travel was possible—he'd
seen
it—yet he couldn't seem to apply any of this to the box. The box had nothing to do with speed. Nothing was actually traveling. Was it?

“I think I understand all this,” Horace said. “Sort of. But do you think you could build a device that did all that without traveling fast? That could send things to the future without going fast?”

“Could
I
?” Mr. Ludwig fluffed his beard again. “No, I can't. But is it possible?” He shrugged. “If you're looking for someone to tell you that it's outside the realm of possibility, you've got the wrong guy. I do think it's something the universe would allow, even if we don't yet know exactly
what all the rules are.”

All the way home, Horace thought hard. Sometimes he felt close to understanding how the box worked—at least in theory—but whenever he got close to grasping the idea whole, it slid away, evaporating. It was like the way dim stars appeared brighter in your peripheral vision, but as soon as you looked directly at them, they faded from sight.

Mr. Ludwig hadn't done much to clear up the mysteries of the box, but he did have Horace asking a new question: What was a trip through the box like? If an object placed inside the box was taking a shortcut to the future, Horace wanted to know just how short that shortcut seemed for the object itself. But how could he find out?

That night, he came up with an experiment that would have made Mr. Ludwig proud. He got out his father's old stopwatch, one that actually had a moving hand. At 8:02, he clicked the stopwatch's green button, starting it up, and then placed it inside the box. He listened to the watch tick as the red hand swept around. As soon as the hand hit the ten-second mark, he snapped the box closed.

At 8:01 the next evening, Horace sat on his bed, his eyes trained on the spot where the watch would arrive. When the stopwatch finally materialized, loud and startling, it dropped gently onto the covers, the red hand still moving. It was just ticking forward to eleven seconds. Apparently, the trip from one day to the next took almost no time at all—less than a second. Horace scooped up the watch, letting it continue to run,
marveling. He considered the implications while the watch ticked forward. As the second hand approached the half-minute mark, he put the watch back into the box. “Keep going,” he said, and at thirty seconds exactly he snapped the box closed, sending the watch forward yet another day.

Horace was comforted by his discovery that the trip through the box was a short one. Between the time an object disappeared one day and when it reappeared the next, it had to be
somewhere
, didn't it? It was easy to imagine dark voids, airless alien dimensions, spinning vortexes, frozen abysses. The idea that sent objects weren't spending much time at all in . . . wherever they were . . . relieved Horace greatly.

And with that relief, he knew what his next experiment would be.

Horace crept down the stairs and eased the back door open, slipping into the cool, wet night. Ghostly yellow lights blinked and floated across in the lawn, dozens upon dozens. “Perfect,” he said. He went out into the dusk, and on his first gentle swipe, caught a lightning bug in his cupped palm.

He brought the firefly back up to his room. He opened the box and gradually maneuvered the bug inside.

“Come on, little bug. This is for science.”

The firefly began to motor uselessly around the inside of the box like a car with its blinker on. Horace watched it—a living thing. He had no idea what would happen to it once the lid was closed.

“I'm sorry. In advance. If things go bad.”

He closed the box. His hands lit up with the familiar tingle—perhaps a little stronger this time. Horace opened the box again. The lightning bug was gone.

It would be another full day before Horace found out if the bug had survived. Horace felt a little guilty, but he told himself that wherever the bug was now, no time at all was passing.

And then he saw a very faint flash of light inside the box. But no, not inside—farther away. Deeper in, somehow. A blinking light. He held the box high and looked closer. There it was again.
Flash. Flash. Flash
. The lightning bug—was it caught in the glass? Horace brought the box close to his face, so close that instead of looking at the glass, he was looking through it, and through the glass he saw:
nothing but the ceiling of his room, glow-in-the-dark stars, and then—flash
. But it wasn't in the glass or the box; it was out there, in the room. Flying around.

Horace lowered the box, expecting to see the firefly buzzing around the room. It must have escaped somehow. But when he looked, he could see nothing. No lightning bug. He looked again through the box, and his skin began to prickle with excitement—
a flash, over to the left, and then the silhouette of the dark circling bug itself, wings whirring; a few seconds later, another flash
. He turned, following the flight of the bug as it flew around the room, looking through the box as though he were looking through a pair of binoculars. His room, this room. And yet the bug was not here—it was only there, through the box.

“Oh, please,” Horace said. “Oh, please please please.” He
turned with the box—
the door, closed; the desk, messy; the bed . . . lying there, a small shape, perfectly round
. Chilled, Horace bent in for a closer look. The stopwatch. The stopwatch he'd just sent. It wasn't here, not now, but he could see it through the box.

Horace straightened, eyes fixed through the glass. He slid his free hand around the back side of the box, where he ought to be able to see it through the glass. He felt a queasy lurch in his stomach as his hand passed in front of his face but through the box he saw nothing, as though his hand didn't exist. And it didn't. Not where he was looking. Horace spun farther, and when he got to the bed, he nearly dropped the box, even though he was half looking for what he saw there—
someone sitting on the bed, watching; not just someone, no . . . Horace himself, looking large and serious and staring hard but not quite straight ahead, a piece of paper in his hands, propped upright on his belly, meant to be read—five thick-lettered words
.

“Oh, holy creeping cow,” breathed Horace—this Horace, himself, here now.

The sign the other Horace held read:

YES HORACE,
THIS IS TOMORROW