The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) (22 page)

25

“So we can’t leave?” Ruth-Ann asked.

“It’s just temporary,” I explained. “We’re stuck until History’s paths rearrange themselves.”

“There’s got to be a way out,” Nate said. He headed in the opposite direction of the one we’d wanted and was forced to come to a stop again. He started feeling his way around in the air, like a mime. “Anyone care to help me?”

While the others put down their backpacks and formed a company of mimes with Nate, I stayed where I was. I had that feeling again, of being watched. But we wouldn’t be time-stuck if Quinn and Dr. Holm were near us, I reasoned. And it had to be against History’s rules for the Psinomani to keep surveillance on us, though it was possible that we were being held in place to prevent an encounter with them. As far as nature-related possibilities went, the lake hummed with wildlife, with a pair of loons gliding along its calm surface, their black heads held high in the air almost as if they were turning their noses up at our presence. The buck and the doe we had seen on the far shore hadn’t seemed particularly disturbed to see us, just curious. A squirrel had run up a tree as we lit the fire, but surely History wasn’t keeping us in place because we were scaring or fascinating the local wildlife?

On the other hand, with History and its quirks, you never did know. I shook my head.

“What is it, Julia?” Dr. B asked from where she seemed to be checking her equipment, on a log by the water’s edge. “Do you see something?”

“I just can’t shake the feeling that we’re being watched. Never mind.”

The others returned in defeat. We seemed to be trapped in a room-size sphere centered on the extinguished fire, part of it grazing the water’s edge where Dr. B had set up. “You might as well make yourselves comfortable,” the professor said. “I figured I’d prepare the Slingshot in case we’re stuck here awhile and want to adjust our position.”

“I thought we were only bringing it along for emergencies,” I said, settling down with my back against my backpack. “I’m not sure that being time-stuck—even if it turns out to be for hours—constitutes an emergency. Besides, when the Slingshot generates a new time travel basket, won’t the one on Runestone Island return home without us? Is it wise to rely on the Slingshot alone?”

Dr. B shrugged above the device, which looked like a chunkier, junkyard version of a laptop. “It will be a good opportunity to get another data point. Xavier and Steven have been running experiments to test how far the new basket has to be from the old one for both to stay.”

“What’s the distance?” Nate asked. “Have we exceeded it? We’re probably a good five, six miles from Runestone Island by now.”

“It’s not really a set distance—it’s more a combination of place and circumstance. A few blocks in a city, farther in non-urban areas.”

As our wait stretched on, Jacob, who was picking at the long-extinguished remnants of the fire with the toe of one hiking boot, said, “I think it’s me.”

“You what?” I asked.

“I think I’m the one who got us stuck here.”

“How do you figure?” Dr. B asked her student.

“We lit the fire because I needed to dry off and now we’re stuck.”

“Could be,” Nate said. “Maybe dousing the campfire with water and spreading the ash around wasn’t enough. All right, let’s completely cover it with dirt.”

We did, Nate using his pocketknife to loosen the soil. The end result was that the ash and charcoal were no longer visible but the dirt above them looked disturbed. A good dose of rain would probably have completely erased all traces of our presence, but the morning clouds had dissipated to a clear, cloudless blue.

Still, Nate did his circle again, trying to push through. No luck. Then, as if something had just occurred to him, he headed purposefully over to the kayaks. Ron helped him carry them to the water, but the lake we had rowed in on didn’t seem to want to accept them anymore. “Well, so much for that idea,” Nate said.

“Jacob, are you typing again?” I asked. He was speedily keying in text with his thumbs.

“I’m jotting down what it feels like to have nothing holding you up. It’s like History overruling gravity, you know? Besides, it’s not like there’s a lot to do here, Julia. No point in taking
pictures
for my blog—the lake is just a lake. It could belong in any century.”

Apparently deciding that our predicament could at least be used as a learning experience, Dr. B said, “Jacob, put your phone aside for the moment. Can you explain to Ruth-Ann and Ron here why we can’t jump in time without also moving in space?”

“Uh—all right, professor, I’ll take a stab at it. The short answer is that space and time are one, of course. Spacetime. Some people write it with the dash, some without. Or is it called a hyphen? Anyway, I prefer to spell it as one word—why waste a character? Plus, the whole point is that space and time are one. Anyway, the reason we can’t just stand in this spot and jump forward in time is that this spot itself will move and change as time passes. We have to keep up with it.” He started ticking off the reasons on his fingers. “One, the Earth rotates. Two, we orbit the Sun. Three, the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Four, the galaxy itself moves in space. Five, the axis of the Earth wobbles, like a top—it’s called precession. Six, the continents are drifting apart—”

Ruth-Ann put a hand on Jacob’s shoulder to stop him. “I think we get the idea, dear. Sounds like a very complicated calculation.”

“It is,” Dr. B agreed. “It can’t be done by hand. That’s why I brought my laptop.”

Nate squatted down by Dr. B. They were just about the same height. Erika had tied her long blonde hair back. She pushed her bangs out of her eyes, not because they were bothering her, but as an almost flirtatious gesture. Then I decided that the whole thing was in my mind.

“Can you do it, Dr. B?” Nate asked, as if remembering all the problems the Slingshot had given us the last time. Who could forget? “Nudge us forward in time safely? I’d rather get going than be stuck here indefinitely.”

“Like I said, there’s no reason to expect that we’ll fall into a ghost zone.”

“Can you give me the odds?”

“How can I give you the odds? I have no data on which to base any projections.”

“Ballpark, then.”

Dr. B seemed uncomfortable with the idea of ballpark
figures
. Many of the scientists at St. Sunniva University, whose job it was to be exact, tended to shy away from such broad approximations. I’d had plenty of experience with that. I stepped in and said, “What is your recommendation, Professor?”

“There’s no reason for us
not
to jump.”

“How long will the calculations take?” Nate asked.

Dr. B opened her backpack to retrieve her laptop. “It’s not the fastest computer. A good hour or so.”

“Well, time is the one thing we seem to have plenty of,” Nate said, taking a seat. Jacob pulled out his suntan lotion and started applying it.

Dr. B unzipped the waterproof cover, removed the laptop, and set it down on the log next to the Slingshot, then hooked its cable to a pouch that she unfolded into three panels.

“What is that?” I asked. “Some special battery that the Department of Engineering cooked up?”

“Nope, just a portable solar recharger.” She moved the panels so that they caught the maximum amount of sun. “You can get one at the Emporium.”

“Will we be able to jump back immediately if we do drop into a ghost zone?” Nate asked.

Dr. B shook her head without looking up from the laptop, where she was busily entering commands. “This is the old Slingshot, remember? We can’t go backward in time with it, only forward. Let me say it again—when you used the Slingshot before, the reason you fell into so many ghost zones was that Dr. Mooney had no way to calculate coordinates to guide the Slingshot. I do.”

Nate nodded. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Remembering something Ron had said, I moved closer to where he was sitting on a log, his sketchpad on one knee. “You said there are no horses here, Ron? Where are they?”

He put down the pencil and tugged at the beads in his beard. “It’s quite a story. A long time ago—more than a million years, if we could go back that far in time with your STEWie—”

“It’s never been tried,” Dr. B offered, briefly glancing back over her shoulder as she worked.

“If we did, we would have seen them, horses, dog-size ones, munching on leaves in the woods. This is where evolution bred them. Then, some ten thousand years ago, they went extinct. No one’s quite sure why.”

Jacob put away his phone and devoted his full attention to Ron’s tale.

“Luckily for rodeos and chariots and racing tracks, some of the animals crossed the Bering Strait land bridge before they died off here, heading in the opposite direction the ancestors of the Psinomani took. Then the land bridge disappeared under rising ocean levels…Meanwhile, the horse thrived in Asia and Europe. But here in the Americas—today, at this very moment in time—there are no horses. None. Not one. Was it climate change? Being hunted to extinction by man? Drought? Disease? Like I said, no one knows.”

It was daytime and our fire was out, but his story could not have been more effective if he had been telling it at night around a campfire.

He went on. “When the animal did return, it happened not over land, but over water.”

For a second I had a vision of a herd of horses ambitiously swimming across the Atlantic or the Pacific, but Ron continued: “The ships of Columbus and other Europeans carried pigs, cattle…and horses. Nature did what it does best when a door is opened—she jumped at the chance. Some of the horses escaped and soon spread throughout the Great Plains. There weren’t any big herds immediately, not of horses, and not of buffalo either. That happened later, when the balance between man and nature was lost after smallpox, which also came in on the ships, took its toll on the Indian population.

“Imagine a modern city left with few caretakers—
vegetation
and wildlife would soon overrun the place. Nature always wins. And so it will be in this case. The orchards and woods and
animal
populations that had been shaped by the hand of man—”

An image of the well-tended grove of black walnut trees back on Runestone Island flashed into my head.

“—would slowly lose the mark of civilization and the newcomers would assume that it had always been so. Without any check on their populations, animals multiplied. Great herds of horses and bison may have been what the Europeans saw, but that’s not how it was before their arrival. The massive flocks of passenger pigeons reported by John James Audubon, the painter, were not the mark of a pristine continent untouched by the hand of man; they were a sign of unchecked animal population growth. Audubon described the flocks as darkening the skies for hours on end, obscuring the sun like a bird eclipse.”

“I’m hoping to snap a photo of a passenger pigeon,”
Ruth-An
n said. “They are completely gone in our own time. Be on the lookout for a blue-gray head above a breast the hue of red wine,” she added poetically.

The mid-day breeze stirred the budding leaves on the trees around us and I thought of the palisaded village again and of its small group of inhabitants. Listening to Ron and Ruth-Ann, and talking to Nate’s grandmother the other day, had made it clear to me how little I knew of history. I felt ashamed that I knew so little about the past of my own country. I had heard of Vinland and Columbus but not about the horses, the passenger pigeons, or some of the things Dr. Payne had mentioned, such as that no one was sure how long ago the ancestral Indians had arrived or along which route.

Ruth-Ann took over the tale. “The Psinomani have the land in hand—they hunt deer and other small game, occasionally buffalo and bear, and they also fish, gather plants, farm wild rice, encourage the growth of trees they find useful. Wild rice, incidentally, isn’t rice at all but a water grass harvested by two people in a canoe.”

“Is anyone having trouble breathing?” Dr. B suddenly asked.

If we weren’t before she said that, we certainly were as soon as she did.

Nate scrambled to his feet. He turned to check for the invisible wall again and didn’t have to take a single step. The wall had
moved
. Closer.

“Dammit,” Dr. B said. “We’re not time-stuck. Someone is coming.”

Unnoticed by us, History’s walls had been inching in on us minute by short minute, putting pressure on us to leave.

I felt myself start to breathe heavily, as if I had been running, and willed myself to inhale and exhale normally. It was clear History wanted us gone, but how?

“Professor, is the Slingshot ready?” Nate asked in a calm voice.

“No, I need more time.”

“Let’s hope we have it. Wait—if we’re not time-stuck, that means there has to be a way out, right? Time-travel’s fourth rule:
There’s always a way back
. We just need to find it.”

I hoped he was right. I could definitely feel it now. The air had become thinner and it was a chore to breathe in and out, as if there was something pressing down on my chest.

“The water.” Nate smacked his forehead. “I think we can go into the water and
swim
across instead of using the kayaks like we’ve been trying. We’ll have to deflate the kayaks to take them with us—”