With so many thoughts working their way around my brain, I use the only way I know to really relax: jogging. My steady thump on the sidewalk drowns out the city’s sleepy weekend morning rumbles and quiets my inner monologue. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been instantly able to concentrate fully on running without any cranial interruption; whenever I try to use this time to mentally work through a problem, I find I stop mid-thought as my ears fill with thud-thud over and over.
Not so today.
Not only have I been ruminating about Elie’s situation, but since my VERITAS work has been speeding up, as have my classes, that’s been taking up the rest of my spare cerebral time. Already I have an intimidating High Energy Physics assignment and over a chapter and a half of the text to go over. Good thing I practically live on campus. But while the schoolwork is relatively easily solved, I’m totally lost on where to begin building a time machine to take Elie home.
Seriously, who am I, Doc Brown?
So I’ve started to work on her relatively easier problems. Signing her up for a Social Insurance Number turned out to be simple, thanks to the open online world existing today. Registering for classes was also fairly quick—and also online, of course—but applying for status as a student itself was a bit trickier. I contacted a friend working in Administration and sweet-talked my way into getting an application for Elie. It’s amazing what you can do last-minute at a university even if the semester has already started. It helps to know people, for a peon like me.
Today requires a long run, and an hour after I start out I’ve looped up the Plateau and through as many parks as I could manage. I’m depleted when I return to our apartment and dripping molten September sweat onto my sneakers.
“Will!” Evan calls from his bedroom when he hears me swing the front door shut. “Jeanne called and invited you to tea later, at seven thirty, and said not to call if you can’t come, but that you can’t refuse her, yadda, yadda, yadda. . . . Basically she yapped on for a while and said she’ll see you later.”
“Nice,” I say as I shove my head into his doorframe. “It sounds like you love talking on the phone with her.”
“She’s a peach, Will, but she rambles like both my grandmothers combined. She must really like you, dude.” He raises his eyebrows suggestively.
“Ha! She has a soft spot for good-looking American guys who drink her tea and eat her cookies.”
“Alain was saying that Aussie girl is living with her now. Must have something to do with it, eh?”
“She’s from New Zealand,” I snap back, then more lightly add, “But we’re just friends. Don’t believe everything Alain tells you. You know he’s got one thing on his mind at all times, right?”
“Two,” he corrects.
“Two?”
“Use your imagination.”
*
* *
“Will, dear, let me pour the rest of this tea into your mug. Our cups are still full.” More than the black vanilla tea itself, I particularly enjoy how Jeanne gives me mine in a manly mug while she and Elie drink theirs from porcelain cups.
“Thanks, Jeanne. I’ll take another Naniamo bar too.”
“Take two, dear. If you’re still doing those long jogs of yours, you can stand the extra calories.”
“I did run for an hour this afternoon,” I admit as she walks her pot back to the kitchen.
“An hour!” Elie exclaims. “Why so long? Where were you running to? Or what from?”
I can’t help but laugh at her astonished expression. I’ve forgotten recreational running wasn’t exactly the sport of choice in the 1900s.
“It was for exercise, Elie. I like to jog, mostly in parks, but around here I end up just going block after block.”
“Sounds exhilarating.” Her eyes betray her true thoughts, which amuses me further.
“Yeah, it’s a bit crazy, but it helps clear my mind. It’s a way of recharging, I suppose.”
“Sure. Not something I’d fancy doing, but I do enjoy a long promenade around town. I love going up to Mont Royal.” As her expression softens, I make a mental note to visit there with her.
Jeanne returns and stands with her now-empty hands on the back of her armchair, a scheming smile on her lips. “Well, kids, I suppose I ought to leave you two alone so you can chat without an old rock yammering into your free ear.”
“God, Jeanne, this is your apartment!” I laugh. “I won’t kick you out of your own living room.”
“Me neither, Jeanne. Please, sit back down. It’s a pleasure talking with you,” Elie adds.
“No, no, you two have plenty to talk about, and I’ve sat with you forty-five minutes already. I know youth needs youth.”
“Jeanne, I’d actually love some fresh air. Mind if Elie and I take our tea out to the balcony? Then you can stay in here.” I get up and replace her back pillow which had fallen off her chair when she got up.
“That’s a lovely idea, Will. It should be rather refreshing out there by now.”
Once alone and seated on Jeanne’s wicker settee next to Elie, I can finally tell her my news and give her a surprise.
“Why did you bring your knapsack, William? You’re not planning on doing school work here tonight, are you?”
I’m not sure if she’s teasing me or not. “No way, Jose. . . . I make it a rule not to do work on a Saturday night, unless I need to study for an exam. Actually, I brought you a little surprise—a gift really.”
“What! William, no—I don’t need a thing. What is it?” Her ladylike admonishment barely masks her curiosity.
“It’s not a big deal; don’t feel bad or guilty or anything. I know you haven’t bought your course packs for your Arts classes—and I know how expensive those are—and that you’ve been borrowing your friends’ copies to do your readings,” I say as I pull four soft-bound letter-sized books from my bag. “I know you can’t afford these, but you need your own copies—”
“Oh, William!”
“—so I went to the school bookstore and picked these up for you. And here’s the physics textbook you need, the one I used for that same class five years ago. You’re lucky the edition hasn’t changed.”
“That’s too good of you, thank you! Oh, how will I ever repay you?”
“Don’t look so despaired, Elie. You don’t have to repay me, honestly. Think of me as a good Samaritan who wants to help out a destitute time traveler.”
“That I am, and these I need. I won’t pretend I’m not excited, and extremely grateful.”
“And I have some news. I was researching how to enroll you, and I went online—”
Blank stare from Elie, as expected.
“—and filled in an application for a Social Insurance Number, which you’ll get in a few weeks. Then I registered you for your classes online, once I got you a student number. That was the hardest part of the whole process, and I had to work carefully with a friend of mine in Administration. She explained how you can apply late and still be registered for class.”
By this point Elie’s eyes are as big as her teacup and her breath intake has stopped.
“It’s sort of a concurrent procedure,” I continue, “but all these things are in-process. I took the liberty of filling out your application, and here are copies of everything for you.”
“This is unbelievable, William! I’m astounded it was possible and so quickly accomplished!”
“Well, it’s not approved yet, but it’s worth a shot to apply anyway. I filled in everything to the best I could, with the birth date you gave me, your address here, and a made-up address in New Zealand. I really hope they won’t check up on that.”
“Good God, with a wave of your wand, it’s all sprung to life! It’s a complete forgery, in a way, but still lifelike.”
“Yeah, I thought that at first too, but then I realized hey, you’re actually Elie Newton—or so you say—and if you want to become a Canadian resident, you’d have to do this, so it’s legit in that respect. The only thing we’re fudging here is your past. And we have to—you can’t put your last known address of 1906 in there. Honesty like that will put you right in the ward of mental patients at Montreal General Hospital.”
Elie shudders. “Yes, let’s avoid that, please. But, gah! I could hug you. I’m awfully thankful for everything you’re doing for me!”
I laugh uncomfortably. “You can hug me when it’s approved. Anyway, you should know in a few weeks about the insurance number and in a few days about the application. They have no backlog this time of year on that, of course. As for the classes, you’re in according to the website—that’s the place where the class listing is—so you’re free to act like you belong there.”
Elie adjusts her position to sit straight forward, staring out at the city glowing its own twilight in front of us. She sighs slowly. “Goodness, William. To think where I was two weeks ago, and here I am with some solidity underneath me. I’m much more settled—though I’ll feel better when I know I’m safe from a mental institution.”
I nod, then turn to stare at the same scenery. I never tire of this view, which is slightly better than that from my apartment; I see the western side of the city, dominated by Mont Royal. And to enjoy it while sitting with her, this mysterious woman from a hundred years ago . . . it’s an understatement to call this surreal. Next to me is a time traveler who has changed my life from routine to revolutionary. Instead of concentrating on my next VERITAS task, I’m making plans to build a time machine. A time machine, for Chrissake!
A few minutes pass in silence, but it seems she, like me, doesn’t feel the need to fill it with chatter. Eventually I break the spell by broaching the topic of the time machine.
“Elie, have you thought about how we should go about building this thing?”
She knows exactly what I’m referring to. “A bit.”
“I mean, what makes passage through the space-time continuum possible? A high-energy source? A certain magnetic field? A high gravitational force?”
“I’m not sure. I’m certain I can’t explain how it can theoretically happen any better than you, and I lived through the experience.”
“Maybe you can remember what your dad was working on that day in his lab, and we’ll go from there. Perhaps once we get some puzzle pieces laid out we can arrange them and try to figure out what the magic combination was that did this.”
“That sounds like an awful lot of trial and error.”
“We won’t be doing live trials, if that’s what you’re fearing.”
“Oh! I was merely thinking what a long process this is going to be.”
I chuckle and do my best not to respond with sarcasm, knowing she probably doesn’t use that type of humor much.
“They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, Elie. But it’ll be easier if we take it one step at a time.”
“You’re right. And this was my idea, after all, so I’m prepared for this to take a while.”
“Do you remember what your father was working on in the lab that day, where he was in the room, and what he was doing exactly?” As I speak, I pull a fresh, spiral-bound notebook from my bag and get ready to take notes.
“Well,” Elie begins, concentration lining the edges of her narrowing eyes, “I heard from Soddy—one of his research assistants, well, you know—that they’d been running scattering experiments earlier that day. When I walked into the lab, Father was standing at the far end of the room, bent over the opened lead box, though I assume they removed the radium sample inside.”
“Okay, good start. Where was the radium stored if it was removed?”
“Oh, Father’s pocket, probably. He usually takes it home at night and puts it on his dresser for safekeeping.”
I nearly spit out the last dregs of tea I’d been sipping.
“Are you kidding, Elie? His pocket?! Didn’t he know radioactive substances cause cancer?”
Her shocked expression tells me everything.
“Of course he didn’t know,” I continue, trying to calm her. “It was years until Marie Curie died of complications from ionizing radiation. No one really knew the dangers back then.” I pat her arm. “I’ll explain more later, but suffice it to say you need to take precautions around that stuff.”
“My goodness, I can’t fathom. . . . But that wasn’t the focus of what was in the lab that day.” Elie describes an electronic buzzing she heard from the enormous power supply, the looping wires attached to it from all ends of the lab, and how there were tables of smaller experiments lining the walls.
“I remember the buzz clearly because it stopped abruptly when I landed in the basement in 2006. It was quiet, cold, and smelled of metal.” She shudders. “The air was ionized, that I’m sure about; I’ve experienced it enough from being around after Father ran an experiment.”
I’m scribbling with a speed my right hand never knew in class lectures. Her words with my side comments—“ionized air from creating radium isotopes? Or power supply overheating and charging the air?”—have already filled half a page. “Do you remember what exactly was on the tables? If you concentrate on one section at a time, could you recall it?”
“I might be able to, if I can separate the equipment well enough in my mind. Father was never too messy, but he did have a tendency to leave anything important lying around in case he could use it again. He often did exactly that, mostly out of budgetary necessities, but also due to his natural country thrift. I never saw anything go to waste in his labs. That day, though, there were an awful lot of wires running out and about,” Elie trails off, eyes miles away. “Oh! Do you think this may have all been brought about by a series of experiments interacting, going badly maybe, or a sort of scientific garbage contaminating electrical fields?”
“I hadn’t followed that train of thought,” I reply with surprise. “I’m planning to draw out what he had at his workstation according to when it got added or discarded. Maybe then we can see what might have interacted.”
“I have an excellent visual memory, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to remember everything—only the most important bits, sod it all. I suppose it’s as a good a place as any to start, right?”
“Absolutely. Anything’s worth a shot right now. But,” I trail off. My mind is burning double time to decode something critical. “But that was a good thought a minute ago. There had to have been an interaction that caused some kind of disturbance. What if there really was too much on that table? Too much energy? Magnetic or electric fields being multiplied because things were too close or shorted together?”
“Perhaps. You’re the physicist, so I’m hoping you’ll be able to figure that out.” Elie’s hopeful, pleading look is almost too much to bear, like a homeless puppy begging to be bought from the pet store.
“I’ll do my best, Miss Rutherford! Well, go ahead and start from the table nearest your father and work your way to the door where you were standing.”
She describes setups actually like what we saw in the Rutherford museum: a detector for electromagnetic waves, glass tubes filled with ionized gases and connected to high-energy light sources, and a gold-leaf electroscope. Metal coils were supposed to be stored neatly in one area of the lab, but they had been moved around haphazardly in the weeks before. But the biggest mess was due to the wires connecting the large power supply across various setups to the alpha particle scattering experiment.
“They were draped everywhere—carelessly, really,” Elie explained. “I don’t think they could move the power supply, which was near the door, but the scattering setup was on the other side of the room. So the wires ran right . . . over . . . the-the . . . tables. . . .”
“Elie, what’s wrong?”
“The last thing I remember from 1906 was worrying that the wires were going to get tangled, so I reached to move wires off his experiment to measure time intervals. I didn’t want the wire to get wrapped around the copper coil. I touched it, and. . . .”
“Yes?” Everything up to my hair tingles with anticipation.
“And . . . then I felt a sort of energy pulse go through me. That’s when it happened. That’s when I was transported! I can’t believe I didn’t remember until now, but I must have forgotten in the confusion I felt. How could I forget something so crucial?”
“Wow! Were you electrocuted?”
“I didn’t feel hurt or singed—”
“You didn’t smell any burnt hair?” I ask with a wink and crooked smile.
“No! I arrived here in exactly the same shape as I left 1906. And all I smelled was that ionized air. You know what that smells like, right?”
I nod.
“And it was chilly. Maybe it was because I was in a basement without the added heat of any running equipment, or maybe it was cooler on that day in 2006 than in 1906. But I had a definite sense that something had happened. I just felt it, you know what I mean?”
I stare at Elie, unsure what to say. I really don’t know what she had felt. Heck, probably no one knows. “Not really, I’m sorry. I guess if you felt the energy pulse, you felt something happen, but it must have been slight enough not to have harmed you.”
“Unless . . . the energy didn’t go through me—like I was a conducting wire—but rather moved me instead.”
This girl is smarter than I thought! That never crossed my mind. But of course—Elie wasn’t a typical shock victim when she accidentally touched the wire coil. She may have somehow become part of the coil itself—maybe like just another electron conducting electricity. But instead of her doing the conducting, she was the thing being conducted. “It makes no sense, scientifically speaking, but that’s brilliant. Your father must’ve rubbed off on you.”
Elie smiles a relaxed, genuine grin. “It’s good to hear that. Thanks, William.”
“You’re welcome. I meant it. It’s almost as if you got in the way of whatever energy was flowing through that jumble of equipment. Instead of frying you, the energy moved you. But what amplified that energy? And what components were involved and which were innocent bystanders?”
Elie sighs along with me, leaning back in her chair to peer through the window at Jeanne’s mahogany grandfather clock. “Goodness, it’s late! I didn’t mean to keep you up so long working on this. You probably want to get going, eh?”
I crack up; I can’t help it. “Are you kidding, Elie? It’s only nine-thirty! The night is young—like us. Are you on Jeanne’s schedule?”
“It’s okay to be out at this time? I mean, it’s proper?” Her skeptical eyes are no doubt wondering if I’m being gentlemanly with her.
“Yes, it’s okay. In fact, why don’t you come up to my apartment for a while? Evan’s home and we can hang out,” I suggest. “In fact, we can press him for ideas about time travel.”
“Isn’t that risky? He’ll surely catch on to our project.”
“No, it’ll be hypothetical, of course—or at least we’ll couch it as such. No one’s seriously thinking about making a time machine, Elie,” I laugh. “Well, except us.”
That seems to convince her.
“Just ‘hanging out,’ Will? Just for a little bit?”
“Yes, innocently, with both of us. I’ll have you back well before midnight, I promise.”
As we’re walking through the apartment on our way to the door, Jeanne pops out of the kitchen and pulls me aside, out of Elie’s earshot.
“Will, that’s a very good thing you did out there, giving her those books.”
I shrug. “She needs them.”
“She must be poorer than I realize.”
“I think so. She won’t have a paycheck from the bookstore for a while, but she needs her books now, so. . . .”
She rubs the top of my back gently. “It’s a good thing she has you as a friend, Will, but be careful if you head down that road, okay?”
It takes me a moment to get what road she’s referring to.
“I will. Good thing she has you to protect her,” I joke.
“Well, I worry about her. She’s very . . . naïve. And maybe a bit . . . odd . . . though I don’t say that disparagingly, you understand.”
I almost choke. If Jeanne, an aging, with-it-most-of-the-time lady thinks Elie is odd, how long before everyone else sees through Elie’s charade? But I force a small grin on my face.
“Yeah, I know what you mean. But don’t worry; I’ll be good.” I mark an “x” over my heart. “See you later, Jeanne. Thanks for the tea.”
Now that I have a scientific quest—a ridiculously impossible fool’s errand, I don’t kid myself—I’m too distracted to try anything with Elie. Besides, why would I risk heartbreak for a girl who’s so desperate to leave?
So, Will . . . why are you so willing to help her then?