CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I Meet Myself Coming and Going

Jaya and I stood together in the street, watching the lab burn, standing back from the wall of heat. The explosion still echoed in our ears. Mark Twain had Mr. Smith in a hammerlock, his arm behind his back. My legs felt weak, and Jaya looked grim and shaken.

“Leo, you saved my life in there. Thank you.” She looked into my eyes.

I looked back into hers. I didn’t know what to say.

Tesla stared at his lab. The lightning seemed to have gone out of his eyes. “It’s all gone, Sam,” he said. “The work of half my lifetime, very nearly.” I saw tears on his cheeks, red with reflected firelight.

“It’s a damn shame, Nik,” said Twain gently. “A damn shame.”

Tesla turned on Mr. Smith. “How could you do this? I trusted you!”

Mr. Smith shrugged, or tried to—he couldn’t move his shoulders much. “It’s your own fault. You should have let me take the things and go. Then you wouldn’t have lost everything.”

Tesla roared. I thought he was going to tear his assistant apart. Twain spun Mr. Smith around, putting himself between the two men.

“It’s not true, Mr. Tesla,” Jaya said quickly. “It’s not your fault. Your lab would have burned down tonight anyway. In the future where we come from, the fire starts in the basement. I think Mr. Smith was always going to start it.”

“You knew that? Then why didn’t you warn me?” This time I thought Tesla was going to tear Jaya apart.

“Well, Leo wouldn’t—I mean, we didn’t want to risk—” She stopped. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tesla, I really am. But don’t worry, you’ll build a new lab right away. I promise.”

We heard fire engine bells. The sound seemed to remind Jaya of her impatience. “Come on, Leo. We have to go,” she said.

“I’m really sorry about your lab, Mr. Tesla,” I said.

Jaya said, “I’ll see you very soon, Mr. Clemens. But—” She hesitated.

“But I won’t see you, is that it?” said Mark Twain.

Jaya nodded. “You’ve already seen me back then.”

The clanging was getting louder and closer. “Come on, Leo,” Jaya said.

Mr. Smith said something unrepeatable. Twain wrenched his arm. We walked away quickly to the train, not looking back.

• • •

When we got uptown to my building, it was quiet and empty in the starlight. We slipped in through the back door and climbed the stairs to the top floor. Once we were all packed and shrunk, Jaya hopped on the saddle. “My turn to drive,” she said. “Get on behind me.”

I started to argue, but then I remembered that I had been sitting behind her when the time machine had appeared in my bedroom. “All right,” I said, “but we have to make a stop on the way home.”

“When you saw us in your bedroom, you mean? Okay,” said Jaya.

I braced myself for that horrible feeling of wrongness, and Jaya pushed the lever marked FUTURE.

• • •

We poured through time again with the same headlong, motionless hurtling, but this time it was different—maybe because we were going in the right direction. I felt like I was winning a game, acing a test. An upside-down waterfall of hope cascaded through me, starting in the soles of my feet and babbling out through my head.

“We did it!” I cried, leaning against Jaya and hugging her tight. “We stopped Simon! His ancestor didn’t get the death ray! The city’s safe!”

She laughed and leaned back against me, her hands on the controls.

The years flew by. I lost count, but I didn’t care. Out the window, buildings rose and fell. Trees sprouted and writhed their branches taller and taller.

Suddenly a building leapt jerkily into existence on the corner lot near my building. I recognized it: the new annex of the Brindley School. They’d just finished building it the year before. “Slow down, Jaya! We’re almost there.”

She pulled back on the lever. The days flicked past one by one. Vast shadowy shapes filled the room; I saw my own furniture. My chair jerked around from desk to window and back. My bed flung its sheets into wild heaps, occasionally making itself neatly for a few moments. My self flickered around too, transparent and ghostly, shimmering on the chair or making the bed lumpy.

What day was it now? I looked around for the pencil line I’d drawn on the wall back when I was seven and first getting excited about astronomy. That’s where the sunlight falls at noon every summer solstice, the third week in June.

There! The sun hit the line, and I started counting days. “Get ready to stop,” I told Jaya.

One more night. One more sunrise.

“Now!”

She pulled the lever to the stop position. We stopped with a bang, knocking over my lamp.

• • •

I don’t love looking in the mirror. I mean, I’m a reasonably okay-looking guy, I guess, but it always feels so strange to see myself from the outside. Photos are even worse—I’m used to Mirror Me, so Photo Me looks backwards, distorted, with my ears all crooked and that bosonic curl on the wrong side of my forehead. But the worst of all was real-life 3-D Me. He was backwards and distorted and a zillion feet tall, with his mouth hanging open in surprise.

He closed his mouth, swallowed, and blurted something. I wished Jaya didn’t have to see him—me—like this.

“Hi, um, me,” I answered. “It’s me, Leo. I’m you. Wow, you’re big.” Smooth! But wait—didn’t I have to tell him something—something about the repository? No, not the repository, the time machine. The Time Machine. I had to tell him to read it. That’s how he would figure out about going to England and capturing the mini time machine. “Listen, this is important,” I said. “Read H. G. Wells—”

He interrupted me with questions. Then Jaya started talking, trying to warn him about Simon.

I couldn’t let her do that. Suppose she told me what Simon was going to do—suppose I listened to her? Suppose she got me to stop Simon before he sabotaged Francis’s Burton page application and made Jaya hate him? Then Jaya might actually make the mistake of dating that boson! And then Simon wouldn’t try to hold the city hostage, so we would never visit Tesla to stop him from getting the death ray, and I would never show up in my own bedroom on a time machine, and I would never tell myself to read Wells, and I might never ask Ms. Kang for advice about my project, and I might never meet Jaya. I couldn’t let that happen!

I put my hand over Jaya’s mouth. I saw Past Me’s enormous eyes get even more enormous, and I remembered how surprised I’d been when I saw myself treating her like that.

She bit me, of course, and started arguing, just like she had before.

I heard my sister’s footsteps. I reached around Jaya and rammed the lever down. My vast, past face faded, and we poured into the future again, buoyed on hope.

• • •

We landed safely in my empty bedroom. Jaya wanted to dash out to the repository as soon as we were the right size, but I made her wash the soot off her face first and change back into her regular clothes.

“The first thing we have to do is get Simon on the telelectroscope and tell him we know he’s bluffing,” she said, tugging on her ridiculous hat, the one with the pom-pom on the end.

“No, that’s the second thing. The first thing we have to do is get your patience back,” I told her.

She was way too impatient for the bus. She hustled me into a cab and then kept glaring at the driver for stopping at red lights. “It was better in 1895, before they invented traffic lights,” she said.

At the repository, she was too impatient to wait for the elevator. She thumped up the stairs two at a time and burst into Doc’s office.

“It’s safe!” she cried. “You can call off the team! Simon’s bluffing—he doesn’t have the death ray!”

“Shut the door and sit down, Jaya,” said Dr. Rust. “What team? Who’s Simon?”