Explanation
When they returned to the building where Agent Harris had climbed the fire escape, it was full night, and the square had resumed some semblance of normalcy, though still with the increased security. Agent Harris showed her team the fire escape she had taken and was directed to the building lobby by Agent Hessman. “We’ll take the regular stairs up to the roof,” he told them.
“Do we all have to go?” Dr. Weiss asked. “I’m probably not up to climbing all those stairs, and Robert here has his wounded arm.”
“You really need to join a gym,” the captain remarked.
“Only Sue and I need to go,” Agent Hessman replied. “The rest of you—”
“The rest of you,” Claire corrected, “are not going anywhere until I get some answers. What is it I just saw, what are those devices you have, and who are you people? Really, somehow I don’t think—” Her words ended in a short fit of coughing, accompanied by a brief shudder running through her body.
“Claire,” Ben asked, “are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just a little chill. It’s evening and I don’t have a jacket on. Now, about those answers.”
Agent Hessman caught the professor’s eye, to which Ben removed his pocket computer and began tapping the controls.
“Like that for instance,” Claire gestured. “I’ve never even heard of anything like it.”
When he found what he was looking for, he sighed and replied to Agent Hessman with a single slow shake of his head. Agent Hessman responded with a tersely worded command before he and Agent Harris turned away. “Explain it to her.”
Ben watched as the pair entered the lobby to head for the roof, then turned back to see a determined reporter glaring straight at him. He glanced over to the captain, Dr. Weiss, and the German, who all backed away, leaving him alone with Claire.
“Well?” she asked.
“Claire, what I’ve told you so far has been the absolute truth . . . just not all of it. Yes, we’re federal agents and I am a history consultant . . . but from over a century from now. My specialty is the history of the early twentieth century, what you call the Great War and the decades thereafter. These devices you’ve seen, Sue’s futuristic handgun, all of them are from the future. I was never in the war because my grandmother hasn’t even been born yet.”
She found herself once again speechless, though more for being unsure which of many questions to ask. “Why? How? I mean, I guess I believe you. I have to after seeing those bodies disappear like that. Is that how you got rid of the others? Just disintegrated them or something?”
“That’s not quite what happened. Sam could give you a better explanation, but basically the time machine we use does not project back our actual bodies but rather duplicates of them, maintained by a sort of energy conduit back through the portal to our own time. A traveler’s consciousness then hitches a ride back into such a projected body. Those devices we activated were their beacons that maintain the connection through the energy conduit. Shut them off and the connection terminates, dissolving the projection and drawing the consciousness back into the traveler’s original body in the time machine chamber.”
“But, does that mean they might still be alive?”
“We’re not quite sure on that matter,” he admitted. “This is our first trip back in time; their consciousnesses may have snapped back to their original bodies, or they may have gone to wherever they would go upon a normal death. We won’t know until we return ourselves.”
“Astounding! Then this important mission of yours—”
“We detected a TDW; that’s a temporal displacement wave. It means that someone else traveled back in time and caused a major disruption to what we know of as history. In this case, it was the Germans followed by the Japanese. We didn’t know the nature or extent of this disruption, just that it happened.”
“So that’s why you had to come back here,” she said, “to find out what happened, then prevent it from happening. You said that you didn’t know who had done what. This is why. Then this device in your hand—”
“A pocket computer. You have basic computing devices in this time. Well, this is something like that, only many orders of magnitude more advanced. This simple little device contains all we have on record of this time period. I use it to supplement my own knowledge of this time period. I could fit the contents of the Library of Congress in what you see me holding in my hand.”
The word dumbfounded would fail to adequately describe Claire’s expression, with her mouth moving but little coming out. He showed her the device and passed a finger across it to show her screens of information passing by before her. Miniature pictures of old newspaper articles, images from the World War I battlefield, photographs of New York City at the turn of the century. When he took it back to press another icon in private, she could only gasp and sputter for a second or two.
“Again, astounding. I don’t know what else to say. But aren’t you afraid I might tell someone? I’m a reporter, after all, and this is the biggest story that—well, anyone has ever come across.”
“Even if someone were to believe you—which you’ll have to admit is a far-fetched chance in itself—there is this.”
He turned the device back around for her to see what was now displayed. It was an obituary with her picture on it . . . and a date not all that far in the future. For a moment she could only gape while he continued.
“That cough of yours, and now the chill. It doesn’t look bad right now, but . . . Claire, like your hero Nellie Bly, you will die of pneumonia. Two full years before she does.”
“Pneumonia,” she gasped. “But it’s just a cough. The chill night air.”
“And the influenza outbreak of this period. Here in 1919, it’s fatal.”
“And . . . in your century?”
She looked up at him with pleading eyes, her whole demeanor thunderstruck. He felt for her, he really did, but he knew before he’d left for this mission that everyone back in this time period had already died.
“Curable if treated in time,” he answered.
He shut off his pocket computer and put it away, not sure what else he could say. He wanted to comfort her, to offer some gleam of hope, but what? Before he could say a word, however, she reached her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder.