The Time Hackers (5 page)

Except that both boys were splattered with spots of blood and wood splinters and had torn their shirts.

“Dorso?” His mother stared. “What on earth …”

“Oh,” Dorso said, thinking fast, “it's all right. Frank had a nosebleed. You know, he gets them all the time. We'll clean off with the hose.” He closed the door and dragged Frank around to the hose connection by the garage.

“Well,” Frank said, sputtering as the water from the hose hit his face. “That was fun….”

“We'll go in and get clean T-shirts for school and then we'll go to work on this.”

“What? What is it? What did you see?”

“I saw a guy back on the English ship. He looked at me.”

“Oh, great. You mean like Custer and Beethoven looked at you?”

Dorso shook his head. “No. He knew we were out of place and he looked surprised, really surprised. Then he looked down and jabbed something and we were back here.”

“What do you mean, he jabbed something?” “It was a keyboard,” Dorso said, smiling. “I saw the corner of it. He must have hit the Escape key or something and ended the scene in some way. He was carrying a laptop.”

“This is impossible.” Frank stood in front of his locker.

Dorso nodded. “He's trying to cheat the time paradox.”

“Not only that.” Frank shook his head. “The rest of it.”

“What rest of it?”

“Life. Here we are, on the edge of the greatest discovery of all time …”

“Or disaster.”

“Whatever. Here we are, on the edge of the single biggest thing that's ever happened, and life, my dull life, goes on and on. I'm going to flunk a math test this afternoon and I can't tell anybody that it's because I was whumped by a mammoth and kidnapped on a pirate ship.”

“You're going to flunk math because you didn't study, which is the same reason you
always
flunk math and have to take the tests over.”

“That's it exactly! Here I am, with maybe the most perfect excuse of my life, and I can't tell anybody.”

“Well, we
could
tell somebody else. We could tell the government. Or Mr. Cather, the science teacher. Or our parents. Which brings up something I didn't think of before.”

“Right.” Frank nodded. “If we tell somebody else we'll
lose our edge. You know. We might be able to use this to find treasure or see—”

“Naked women.”

“Aren't you even
curious
about how Helen of Troy or other famous babes looked without any clothes on? And I started thinking that I might be able to go back and maybe
be
there….”

Dorso stared at him, wondering for the thousandth time what made Frank tick. Or whirr. Or buzz. Or whatever it was he did inside that brain. “No. Not that. I was thinking how odd it is that nobody else has seen any of this.”

“It's just us,” Frank said. “It's aimed at us somehow.”

“You ran into a mammoth's butt. A whole mammoth. And he picked you up and flipped you onto the library lawn. And nobody, not a soul, saw it? And we had half a navy on my front step and my mother didn't see anything? That's just crazy. I mean, it probably is my laptop, or it seems like that's the way it works. But why
my
laptop, why us? What did
we
do? And why can't anybody else see it?”

“Well, if we go back to my logic flow charts we might find—”

Dorso shook his head. “Nope. No more of me being the subject.”

“Then all we've got left is your laptop. What did you do to it?”

“What do you mean? I haven't done anything to it.”

“You must have,” Frank said. “Why doesn't it happen to me, on my laptop? Just yours, right? So why?”

“I've never touched it. Besides, you know you can't mess
with them. It takes special tools and equipment…” Dorso trailed off, then reached into his locker and took out the laptop.

“What? What is it? You thought of something.”

“Four months ago, or five, I had that problem, remember? It kept doubling the holograms. I'd see two of everything.”

“So?”

“So I sent it back to get it fixed. I sent it to the main office and they fixed it. They had it about a week.”

Frank nodded, remembering. “But it was okay when you got it back, right? It was all repaired.”

“Yes. But it was gone a week, and that's the only time it's been out of my control. Somebody there must have done something to it.”

“Maybe that guy you saw on the ship was involved somehow. Maybe …”

Frank was going to say that maybe the guy was an engineer or something and had learned how to alter the time chips. But before he could speak there was a singular blinding flash, like a thousand camera flashes going off, but all at one point. Now they were standing on a hill overlooking a series of cornfields. Below them a group of soldiers dressed in blue uniforms rode up on horses and pointed first at the top of the hill and then at a long line of men dressed in gray uniforms marching toward them on a dusty road.

“I've seen this before in history holograms,” Frank said. “This is Gettysburg. Right before the battle. Those are Union troops pointing at us. And those others are Confederates coming to battle. We're in a bad place.” There was a
series of puffs of smoke from the men in blue, and half a second later the grass at the boys' feet was snipped by bullets zipping by. “A really bad place.”

“And we're not alone.” Dorso pointed to a small gnarled oak forty yards away. Behind the tree was the same man who had stood on the deck of the ship. He was blond and thin and Dorso could now see that he was probably in his early twenties. He was smiling a tight, thin, angry smile, and he yelled at them at the same moment that a booming sound came from below and cannons drowned out his voice.

“What? What did he say?” Dorso turned to Frank. But Frank wasn't there, he was down on his back, his eyes rolled up to show the whites, and there was a streak of blood on the side of his head. Dorso thought, He's been shot! Then there was another blinding flash and he was back by his locker. Frank was on the floor and there was still blood, real blood, on his head, and his eyelids were fluttering and then his eyes rolled back into focus. “What hap— Ow!”

Dorso sank down in relief. “Frank, Frank,” he said. He was shaking. “You were shot at Gettysburg.” He helped Frank sit up straight. “That guy yelled at us and when I turned you were down. You have blood on your head. Here.” Dorso reached into his locker and took out a box of tissue. “It's a small cut. A bullet grazed you, I guess. But I thought… you were dead.” His face felt clammy.

“Wait.” Frank held up his hand. “You have tissue in your locker? What kind of guy has tissue in his locker?”

“The kind who finds dead bodies there.” Dorso sighed. “I'd keep a garden hose if there was a place to attach it.”

“What happened to you?” They turned to see Olivia Whelms holding her books and looking at Frank's head. Olivia never really listened to what anybody said and always spoke so that at least one word in every sentence was emphasized, but she almost never stressed the right word. “You
have
blood all over your head.”

“I was shot,” Frank said. “At Gettysburg. Right in the head. It was a grazing wound.”

“Which
will
teach you not to open your locker so fast without moving your head
away.”

She moved off down the hall and Frank watched her go, shrugging. “If a truck hit her she wouldn't know it.”

“He yelled something,” Dorso said. “The guy was there, by that tree, just before you got hit, and he yelled something at us. I couldn't make it out.”

“Oh, yeah.” Frank nodded, then winced. “It was something about a combination. Like a snotty question or something. Like ‘So you have the combination,' or ‘How do you have it' or ‘So you think you know the combination' or ‘code' or ‘sequence'…”

“Combination? Code?”

“I think so. Then I lost it. I got shot in the head, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“At Gettysburg.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Because of your laptop. So in a way I guess you could say I took a bullet for you.”

Dorso ignored him. “Combination,” he mused. “What did he mean by that?”

Frank dabbed at his head and saw that the bleeding had stopped. “I wonder if I should go to the school nurse. No. All those reports and things. How could I explain getting shot in the head at Gettysburg? And if I lied and said I'd hit my head on the locker like Olivia thinks, they'd want to come and inspect the locker…. I'll just let it go. I think he meant code.”

“What? What did you say?”

“Code. Maybe there's some kind of combination or entry code that lets you into the time line or something.”

Dorso stared at him. “That's it! A code. Let's say they did something to my computer when I sent it in to the factory and then put in a code to access the time line thing. You thought of that?”

Frank nodded. “It's all in here”—he tapped his temple softly—“just whizzing around. I think the bullet I took for you loosened up my thinking.”

“You'll have to get shot more often.”

Frank shook his head. “Another inch to the right and even Olivia wouldn't have blamed it on a locker.”

“One more question: Why? Why do this to my laptop?”

Frank smiled. “The only thing I can think of is that it's a government conspiracy and cover-up centered on all the aliens from spaceships that landed back in the fifties and launched weather balloons to cover their tracks so they could hide and abduct people and examine their navels with a long copper wire.”

“Frank.”

“Or …”

“Or what?”

“Or it was a mistake. Somehow your laptop got a change that was meant for somebody else. In either case it means the same thing for us.”

“What?”

“We have to break the code.”

But for the moment they had to set the code aside, or try to. Frank went ahead and flunked the math test, which, considering that they were allowed to use their laptops as calculators, took some serious doing. It was only by playing hard on the pity note about his head, showing the cut his locker had given him, that he avoided the dreaded e-note of concern that otherwise would have been sent directly to his parents. Instead he won the right to take the test over the following week when his head was better.

Frank's parents had but one disciplinary procedure. If they got such a note he would be grounded until the situation was fixed, even if, as his father had said several times, that meant staying in and doing schoolwork until he was thirty and had his own family with boys to ground.

Dorso had his own problems.

He passed the math test but then wound up in biology lab partnered with Karen Bemis to dissect a virtual/cybernetic frog. Usually that would have been fine. He welcomed any chance to spend time with Karen. And she smiled at him and it looked like he might actually make a little headway on the Karen Bemis front…

Except.

As he went to the storage cupboard to pick up their virtual/cybernetic frog he carried his laptop—he was afraid to leave it near any other person alone—and there was a flash of light.

He found himself in thick jungle, waist deep in swamp water and almost solid mud.

“How did you get into our game?”

Next to him, sitting on a stump sticking out of the water, was the blond man. He had sharp features, a wisp of a lip beard and eyes that were green and seemed too bright, almost a hot green. Maybe a crazy green.

“What? Who? I mean what game?”

“How did you find out? Who told you? Was it Faron? I'll bet it was. Man, when I catch up with him I'll kill him. He's going to ruin it all, bringing in another person. It's just because he got bored, you know. He wanted to pick things up. But I don't see how you got a chip. … Come on, was it Faron who told you how to jump with my line?”

Dorso studied him. A second ago he had been reaching for a virtual/cybernetic frog, thinking of Karen Bemis, and now … and now what? “Who are you and what does all this mean?”

The man cocked his head, then smiled. “Man, you
don't
know, do you? I mean, this is all just happening to you and you don't have a clue….” He threw back his head and laughed but there was no humor in it. A harsh laugh. “You don't know what you've gotten into at all, do you?”