CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A World Without Simon

Apparently Simon had never existed.

Jaya turned to me in dismay. “What happened? Simon’s great-great-grandfather didn’t die in the fire! Clemens had him—he was perfectly safe! So why wasn’t Simon born? What went wrong?”

“Nothing went wrong,” I said. “This is good! No Simon to destroy New York.”

“Yes, but why doesn’t he exist?”

I thought about it. “Didn’t Simon say his great-great-grandfather met his great-great-grandmother crossing the Atlantic? He must have missed his boat and never met her.”

Dr. Rust, who had been listening patiently, asked, “Who is this Simon who doesn’t exist?”

“There’s no time to explain! I have to go back to Tesla’s lab and stop us from killing Simon!”

“We didn’t kill him,” I said. “We just made things so that he never existed. Big difference.”

“He did so exist!”

“Not in this world.”

“Oh! Don’t be such a boson! Give me that time machine!” She was so impatient she actually stamped her foot.

“Hold your horses, Jaya.” I pulled the shrink ray out of the satchel and put it on Dr. Rust’s desk. “Before we do anything else, you’d better give Jaya back her patience,” I said.

“Clearly.” With a look of amused patience, Dr. Rust opened a dark metal box on the desk and rummaged around, pulling out something swirly and insubstantial. “Is this it?”

Jaya curled her lip at the thing. “Ugh, of course not!”

Doc squinted at it. “No, you’re right. That was just a good intention. Is this—? No . . . Ah, here it is!”

Doc pulled out a small, thin object and offered it to her.

Jaya frowned. “I thought there was more of it.”

“Your patience? Don’t be silly.”

Jaya rolled her eyes, but she took the thing, which melted into her arm. She gave a huge sigh. The difference was invisible but dramatic. I felt the air around her relax.

“And now,” said Doc, “go find Lucy Minnian and Rick Reyes and tell us all about this Simon who doesn’t exist.”

• • •

“Hang on,” said Ms. Minnian when Jaya had finished talking. “How did this Simon get back to 1895?”

That’s what continues to amaze me about the repository librarians. Unlike every other adult ever born—well, except Mark Twain and Tesla—a kid can tell them an unbelievable story and they’ll believe it.

“Two copies of Simon appeared in Tesla’s lab using two different time machines,” said Jaya. “One was a portal and one was a space-age-looking machine. They must have been the Kerr and the Tuck, from the Burton.”

“But why did he use them at all if the Kerr creates alternate timelines and the Tuck can’t change the past?” asked Ms. Minnian. “Neither one would do him any good.”

“Here’s what I think happened,” I said. I’d been puzzling it out all the way home. “Simon was tracking us with the Burton’s people finder. When he saw that we were in 1895, he knew we had a working time machine. He figured we must be trying to stop his ancestor from stealing the death ray. So he went back to stop us. Or maybe he was trying to get a death ray for himself or get the Wells time machine from us. He did tell Jaya to give him the Wells machine.”

“But he didn’t have any effective time machines!” Jaya said.

“True. But if he used the Kerr to get the Wells time machine, he would be in that new universe—the one in which he had the Wells time machine. And so would we since we were there with him when he took it.”

That made Jaya scrunch up her face and think hard. “Oh. I guess you’re right.” She thought some more. “But why did he use the can’t-change-anything time machine after that? Didn’t he know that thing was useless?”

“I guess he was desperate,” I said. “Remember? He was shouting at himself, ‘Stop! You’ll hurt Jaya!’ He must have hurt you, gone home, realized he had to stop himself from hurting you, and used the other machine to try to stop himself even though he knew it wouldn’t work. I guess he really does care about you.”

“But why not use the alternate-universes machine again since the can’t-change-the-past one is useless?” asked Mr. Reyes.

Doc said, “He couldn’t. The alternate-universe machine only opens a portal once per user. If I remember the originating story correctly, once the machine has encoded your quantum imprint, you can’t pass the wormhole threshold again in the same temporal direction.”

Jaya thought about that. “Okay, but then why aren’t I hurt? If Simon hurt me and came back again to change that and if he used the can’t-change-the-past time machine to do it, then how did he succeed in stopping himself from hurting me?”

“I thought you said Leo saved you, not Simon,” said Dr. Rust.

“He did, but clearly he wasn’t going to until Simon showed up on the Tuck machine. I mean, Simon was sure he had hurt me—he came back on the Tuck machine to stop himself. And I’m fine now, except for a bump on my head.”

“Maybe Simon was wrong—maybe he just thought he’d hurt you, but he really hadn’t?” suggested Ms. Minnian. “You do have a bump on your head. Maybe he thought it was worse than it is.”

“I guess that could be it,” I said. “Things were pretty confusing with the whole fight going on.” It wasn’t a very satisfying answer, but I couldn’t think of a better one for now.

“All right,” said Jaya. “Now, how do we bring him back?”

“We don’t,” I said. “He was a total boson and he tried to kill you. The world is better without him.”

“He also tried to save me, and he was my friend,” said Jaya. “And you shouldn’t make people not exist just because you don’t like them.”

“But he brought it on himself!” I said. “If he hadn’t threatened us with the death ray, we would never have gone back to 1895 and stopped his great-great-grandparents from meeting.” This was crazy. Now Jaya was the one insisting it had been a bad idea to change the past and I was the one defending it.

“What’s the rush?” asked Dr. Rust. “There’s no need to decide right now. Simon doesn’t exist, so he’s not going anywhere. Let’s all sleep on it for a few days.”

We agreed to leave it at that.

• • •

Something else was bothering me. It nagged at the back of my brain while I walked home through Central Park and unlocked my apartment door.

Sofia was in the kitchen making a banana smoothie and blasting Mozart to drown out the blender. A wave of relief and happiness hit me. “You exist!” I yelled. I threw my arms around her, astonishing both of us.

“Leo, get off! What’s the matter with you?” she said, licking smoothie off her thumb.

“I don’t know—isn’t it your job to tell me that?”

When Jake came over that evening, I managed not to hug him, but I lost five games of Gravity Force III.

“I can’t believe you let me pulverize your sub with my death ray,” said Jake. “That’s like the easiest shot to dodge! What’s wrong with you?”

I couldn’t believe it either. Shouldn’t riding around in real submarines and fighting with real death rays make it easier to handle the fake ones in a video game?

I had a lot on my mind. For one thing, I felt bad about Simon too. I mean, I didn’t think causing someone to never have existed was really the same thing as killing him, and there could be lots of theoretical universes where he still existed, and I certainly didn’t want to ever see him again as long as I lived. But still, he had existed, and now he didn’t, and to some extent it was my fault.

I also felt bad about not telling Jake—my best friend—about all my amazing adventures. And the thought of Jaya was distracting me too, of course. Did that kiss mean anything?

That night I dreamed I was riding the Fifth Avenue Stage with Jaya, too nervous to put my arm around her, while Simon whipped the horses and laughed at me and a voice in the background—my own voice—shouted, “Kiss her, Leo! Kiss her!”