The Reality Master and Missions Through Time

THE REALITY MASTER AND MISSIONS THROUGH TIME A NOVEL BY PM PILLON VOLUME FOUR OF THE REALITY MASTER SERIES Volume One: The Reality Master Volume Two: The Reality Master And A Threat To The World Volume Three: The Reality Master And Travel Beyond The Reality Master And Missions Through Time the continuing adventures of joey, kurt & natalie This is a work of fiction and any resemblance between the characters and persons living or dead is purely coincidental. The Reality Master And Missions Through Time Copyright © 2011 by PM Pillon Website: pmpillon.com Gmail: pmpillon All rights are reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No parts of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the Copyright holder.

CONTENTS PART I A Trip To The Past 1: CRIME PREVENTION 2: STILL IN EUROPE 3: UNPLANNED TRAVEL 4: DEMONSTRATING LUCKY’S POWER PART II An Interstellar Journey 5: LEAVING THE SOLAR SYSTEM 6: RADDER TRAVELS TO AMERICA 7: A CALL TO THE FUTURE 8: TRAPPED 9: THE HERO WHO VANISHED 10: A VOYAGE TO THE STARS 11: STRANDED FAR FROM HOME 12: A SUBJECTIVE LASER

1: CRIME PREVENTION When fifth grader Joey Blake arrived at Mason Elementary School in Palo Alto, California on the morning of April 21, 2014, local police were on the grounds and yellow tape blocked a side door of the administration building; several of their black and white cars were double parked in front of the school. Joey’s best friend Kurt McCarty was standing in a group of students who were watching policemen going in and out of the building; the actions of the police evinced no sense of crisis and in fact appeared to be calm and routine, but the students near Kurt were palpably distressed, most of them with their hands covering their faces as though in shock or extreme dismay.

Joey asked, “What’s up Kurt, was there a crime?”

“There sure was! They’re saying Mr. Blandon stabbed Ms. Milford!”

“The counselor Mr. Blandon? With a knife? Are you serious?”

“That’s what they’re saying. I don’t know if he used a knife or what. Bert said it was a bayonet,

but you know him, he’s in la-la land. It’s unbelievable that counselors are stabbing teachers now like they’re gang members or something. I gotta go, it’s almost time for class.”

“Is she gonna be all right?”

“I don’t know, I saw her walk to the ambulance and she looked okay and somebody said the police took Mr. Blandon away in handcuffs right before I got here. I’ll talk to you about it later, it’s almost time for class. I’ll tell you everything I know about what happened at lunch, but I might not see you after school cuz I got important stuff to take care of.”

They headed to class, which for Kurt was Music and for Joey was English, a course that was officially titled Writing. Normally, most of Mr. Sheridan’s students were enthusiastic about starting out the day with one of his pedantic monologues that were chock-full of practical context and interesting rather than just dry and rote and soporific intonement like some teachers were prone to, but today they were restless and murmuring about the violence; though not including Joey’s best buddy in the class who sat next to him, Frank Shapiro, the twin brother of the boy genius Freddie who wasn’t attending Mason because he was already in college. Frank was enrolled in the class but was home with the flu. As a result of the violent crime, Mr. Sheridan’s students were as noisy as they were during their boring classes. After informing the class that he had just received a call assuring him that Ms. Milford was expected to be released from the hospital later today and giving them her contact information so they could wish her a speedy recovery. Mr. Sheridan informed them that grief counselors would be arriving in the school gym within half an hour, and that any student who wanted to speak to one could leave any class at any time during the entire school day by simply excusing themselves to go there without a need to ask for any teacher's permission throughout the rest of the school day. After explaining all this he began his daily lecture, and decided it might be best to distract his students by launching into a more expansive and intellectual subject than usual for his morning class.

“In order to give you something weighty to contemplate today, I want to return to a topic I raised shortly before class ended recently when I spoke of the crucial significance of referents. For instance, the chalkboard, desks, a teacher and other students are perceptual referents which inform you that you’re in a classroom. All of our perception derives from the interaction between our minds and reality, and it is through this interaction that each of us generates referents that guide us through our everyday life. Immediately after we come into this world we scarcely have referents to make us aware that we that we have arms and legs, with even our vision largely limited to somewhat vaguely observing the presence of something to suck on to assuage an uncomfortable feeling in the stomach arising from our newborn need of liquid nourishment. Now, a decade after your birth, when you write an assignment about – for instance – our nation’s founding father George Washington, many referents come to mind – hopefully” adding that caveat with a smile, “such as revolution and first President and even long white hair. Your homework for tonight should be fairly easy: You will simply write list of as many referents as you can think of for words that I will pass out to you in a few minutes. And yes, you can Google the words for this particular assignment if you want to.”

Mr. Sheridan concluded his lecture about referents, passed out his handout of the word list, and then moved on to another topic, but Joey was having an aha moment after hearing about this, wondering if Lucky worked his miracles by changing time referents; so he continued to mull it over while the rest of Mr. Sheridan’s hour went over his head unimpeded by his attention. He would have to ask Freddie the physics and mathematics expert about this because it seemed to be about time and relativity, making him the only person Joey knew who might know something about the subject. Joey was aware that because his parents were liberal arts professors with scant background in the hard sciences after they finished high school, he couldn't turn to them and expect much enlightenment

about a matter concerning math or physics. Near the end of the class hour, he glanced at Jane Fárah sitting directly to his left, a Somalian immigrant whose father was like Joey’s parents a Stanford professor, and saw that she was red-eyed. He thought he may have seen a tear or two on her face when he glanced at her, but he couldn’t confirm this without staring at her outright; although he was normally very comfortable with her, unlike when he was around most other girls. He considered her his closest female friend in the school, so when the class ended and she spoke to him as they exited the classroom he was receptive to conversing with her.

“Joey, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’m worried sick about Ms. Milford. Can you come to the hospital with me after school? I have to see how she’s doing. I called my dad and he doesn’t know anything yet. He said he was on his way to the hospital when I called him right before class. I’m going to call him again now.”

“Sure, but I have to go there on my bike cuz if I leave it at school for too long somebody will swipe it. You come to school on a bus, don’t you? What about the grief counselors, maybe you should see one.”

“Today I came on my bike, so we can ride there together, is that okay? I’m going to go see a counselor now, but after school I want to go to the hospital.”

"Frank would come with us but he’s home with the flu, I think he’s going to die.”

“Silly, a flu won’t kill him. A hundred years ago there was a flu that killed mostly young people, but that was a special case."

"You’re a smart girl, maybe after college you'll be an e-pi-deem ... ologist.” said Joey haltingly as he struggled with his incorrect pronunciation. “I’ll meet you in front after school. And I’m sure Kurt will come along too, if he can, but he said he might get hung up in school for a while.”

“You and Kurt are inseparable. I wish I had somebody I could be inseparable with.”

“I’ve invited you to come and join our club I don’t know how many times, but you never even come there to visit. You’re my only girl friend in this school – I don’t mean girl friend, I mean a girl who’s my friend.”

Joey’s face quickly flushed red with embarrassment caused by having called her his girl friend, so he continued quickly to try to distract here from what he just said, “I’ll never forget the first time we met and you sang Rock Around the Clock.”

“I love to sing, but I normally don’t sing around people. I want to come over to your clubhouse but I only feel like I can trust you, I don’t know most of those boys, just you and Kurt. I’ve never even said much more than hello to Phil or Freddie or even Frank even though he's in our first class with us. I’m shy around everybody but you, even around other girls.”

“Don’t be so shy, my clubmates are all cool, otherwise I wouldn’t hang out with them. Every one of them already said it’s fine with them if you join our club.”

“Okay, I’ll do it! But not today cuz we have to go see how Ms. Milford is doing.” She smiled and added, “See you after school.” as she turned away and walked towards her next class.

Joey smiled back and tritely replied, “Be there or be square.”

He didn’t know much about girls, but he had always liked Jane since the very first time he saw her because she was so innocent and her smile seemed radiant to him; and last but not least, because she had sung for him when they happened to meet for the first time as the only two students in the classroom on the first day of the current school semester; remarkably, she finished singing the threeminute song immediately before Mr. Sheridan walked in. Joey always wondered how Mr. Sheridan or other students would have reacted if they had walked in halfway through while Jane was singing. Mr. Sheridan would undoubtedly have stood quietly in appreciation, but other students might have mocked her derisively. Joey asked himself if he had a crush on this splendorous girl with the radiant

smile, then remembered a minute earlier inadvertently calling her his girl friend and felt his cheeks warm up again, flushing with embarrassment. He wondered what she had thought when she heard this, but then he realized she probably understood what he really meant and considered his explanation unnecessary. In sum, he may have actually brought more embarrassment on himself by anxiously explaining his statement than if he hadn’t explained it at all. He reckoned this was an example of what Frank the wordmeister had told him was the law of unintended consequences; and regardless of whether that law applied to this case, the experience was yet another example of how life had become more complicated for him recently than it had ever been before.

The principal came into the room during the second period and announced that crisis counselors were available for students and that they could leave any class and go to the gym to talk to one at any time and that they could also choose to go home if their parents picked them up. On the way to speak to a counselor Jane called her father and learned he was at the hospital seeing about Ms. Milford and had been told she appeared to have a non-life threatening injury, so Jane didn’t bother him by asking him to pick her up; instead, she told him she would come there right after school. At lunch, Kurt told Joey and Jane that he had heard the crime was committed with a small knife, which was what they had also heard; and that he wanted to accompany them to the hospital but he might have to stay after school for a half hour or more to help make some decorations for a display that his teacher needed the next day; so if he didn’t show up right away they should proceed without him and he would probably arrive there soon after they did. In the interim, Joey couldn’t call them or them him because he had forgotten his cell phone at home. After school while waiting for Joey and Kurt Jane called her father repeatedly, but his phone was continuously busy; she couldn’t get messages from him because she only had a feature phone for calls in and out. After a few minutes they rode off together without Kurt towards the hospital, but within a block they ran into students who were standing around talking and learned that Ms. Milford had already been released from the hospital and gone home.

“Let’s go to my place.” said Joey. “Would your dad mind?”

“No, I don’t see why he would. I'm sure he went with Ms. Milford to her house up in San Mateo, so he won't be home for a few hours. He normally doesn’t get home until late and I’m always bored all alone at home until then. And he’s friends with your father – they teach in the same department.

I'll call him from your place when we get there and go home if he wants me to or he could pick me up at your house. I’d love to see your house, I’ve never been to anybody’s home except Ms. Milford since we moved here.”

“Really? I’ve been to like, half the houses around here, but then I was born and raised here and you’ve only been here a year. Don’t worry, I don’t take drugs or sniff glue or drink booze or any of that weird stuff. The only weird thing I do is play video games.”

“You don’t even have to tell me your don't get drunk, silly, I know it already. You’re the goodest boy I’ve ever met.”

Joey smiled and said, “You better not use the word goodest in any of Mr. Sheridan’s homework assignments, he’s a great guy but he’s liable to give you an D for it. Anyway, I thought I should tell you I’m not a boozer or anything cuz my dad says there’s a lotsa people who seem cool but they have secrets and stuff that you can’t tell they have when you see them every day – like Mr. Blandon, for instance.”

“Ten-year-olds aren’t boozers!”

“You’d be surprised. Bert is one already.”

"Really? How do you know?"

“I saw him staggering around once and I heard he got busted for drinking a couple of times. His

brother Davey isn't like him though, he's totally cool – he’s one of my best friends since Kurt beat him in the yo-yo contest in spite of all the dust-up about which one of them really won and Bert accusing me of helping Kurt cheat. We didn’t really cheat, but I’ll tell you about that some other time ... it’s a long story."

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Joey, but I’m not really into yo-yos cuz I’m a girl.” “Ha! Kurt got beat by a girl two weeks ago, so not all girls feel like you do about it.”

“I’m not against it or anything, it’s just that I’m really clumsy, I don’t have any watchacallit ... dexterity?”

“I bet you have a lot more dexterity than you think you do, you just haven’t discovered it. Some guys get put in prison and it’s only because they have so much time on their hands that they discover that they’re great artists.”

Jane smiled and said, “Okay, I’ll play with yo-yos when I get put in prison.”

“They don’t put saints in prison these days, Jane, at least not in America.”

“I thought Martin Luther King was put in prison a buncha times. And how do you know I’m a saint?”

“I don’t know much about MLK, so you got me there, Saint Jane.” and they both laughed as they began their ride a short distance to Joey’s house, which they completed without discussing anything else on the way. When they arrived they sat down on the sofa in the living room and Joey turned on the Internet display as an option to either watch or use as audio-visual background for their conversation. Jane called her father from Joey’s landline phone and he finally answered, explaining that he drove Ms. Milford home and that she and was determined to show up for work the next day with her arm in a sling, but she wasn’t feeling well, so he wouldn't be home until after 8 pm. He told Jane that she should cook up something for herself but not for him because he would prepare dinner for him and Ms. Milford in her kitchen. He also told her the counselor Mr. Blandon turned out to have a serious criminal record under a different name, but she didn’t ask the name, nor did he offer it: he obviously had matters of greater concern to attend to. Then their conversation concluded and after Jane hung up Joey chimed in.

“That’s great news that she’s okay. So your dad knows Ms. Milford personally.”

“Yes, my dad and I have had dinner and picnics with her a buncha times, in fact just last week.

She’s a wonderful lady!” and as she said this, tears appeared on her face, so Joey ran and got her a fresh hand towel out of a linen closet, assuring her, “Here, this is freshly washed, sorry we don’t have tissues around – at least I don't know where there are any.”

“I’m sorry Joey, I messed up coming over here and crying like a baby. I always mess up everything!”

“You didn’t mess up anything, Jane. Ms. Milford is your friend, so you would mess up if you didn’t cry about what happened to her. Thank God she’s going to be okay. I can’t believe that counselor guy could do something like that. And he turns out to be a convicted criminal! What a weird world we live in.”

“You haven’t been to Somalia, it was way worse over there, I lost my mom ...” and mention of her mother set her off on another and more copious stream of tears. “I’m sorry to bother you ...”

“Stop it, Jane, you’re not messing up and you’re not bothering me. You have a right to feel the way you do so go ahead and cry all you want. I’m your friend – that’s what friends are for. I'm on your side, don't ever forget it.”

They changed the subject for relief from the heart-rending developments and chatted for a while about school matters until Jane’s phone rang. Her dad told her but he had to rush Ms. Milford back to the hospital where she was in critical condition, and that they should both pray for her. Then he said

he just spotted the surgeon who diagnosed her and needed to talk to him, so he hung up. Jane told Joey, “I can tell he’s crying, Joey. I think he was closer to Ms. Milford than I really knew about, but I had an idea about it. He can’t take this after losing our mom and then raising me by himself for the last five years. I’m scared, Joey. I’m sorry to ask you this, but can you hug me?”

Joey hugged her and heard her face sobbing next to his while his shoulder moistened from her tears, of which she seemed to him to have a never-ending supply. He had never been closer than half an arm’s length to any girl other than his thirteen-year-old sister Natalie, and now here he was hugging one who was falling apart at the seams. His mind raced as he desperately tried to think of a solution to this tragedy, when suddenly Mr. Sheridan’s lecture about referents that morning popped into his mind. It again occurred to Joey as it had in class, that Lucky may have reversed his loss of the swim race and other events by reinstating prior referents. At any rate, regardless of how he did it, maybe Lucky would help Joey and Jane fix the crisis caused by the violent counselor. Joey grabbed her shoulders, looked her in the eyes, and said “Referents. Maybe that’s what Lucky’s about: Referents.”

Jane didn’t respond, consumed as she was by her throes of weeping and clearly flummoxed by what he had just said.

“Listen Jane, I can’t promise you anything, but maybe I can do something that will help Ms. Milford. It’s just a maybe. Do you want me to try?”

Jane still didn’t speak, but she nodded her head up and down ever so slightly, helplessly assenting to his proposal to perform a seeming impossibility – by a ten-year-old who seemed to think he might be able to prevent an adult from succumbing in ER to a severe injury.

“Jane, you just keep sitting right here on this sofa and I’m going to sit down over there at the dining table with my back to you. I’m going to try to do something you that couldn’t possibly understand, but I have just a little bit of hope that it might help Ms. Milford. Okay? Can you do that?

This may not work, but either way it will just take a minute.”

Jane hadn’t spoken for half a minute and continued to maintain silence, just vaguely nodding her head again affirmatively; so Joey walked to the dining room table, sat down and pulled Lucky out of his pocket while she patiently remained on the sofa and continued to wipe her face with the hand towel. Lucky was the same blank stone he normally was – when he wasn’t displaying a tiny tv screen on his face and performing miracles.

Joey said, “Lucky, can you help Ms. Milford? Can you help her for me? Please?” Lucky’s face immediately lit up and showed the double screen Joey had seen several times before, and then a large screen appeared, hovering over the table. Joey turned and looked at Jane to see if she had a surprised look on her face as she gazed his way indicating she was seeing the screen, but she returned his look with an expression of mere curiosity on her face. It was obvious to him that she didn’t see it, which was par for the course in Joey’s previous Lucky experiences; usually nobody but him saw any Lucky screen anywhere, whether on Lucky's face or in the air.

The left side of Lucky’s two screens showed a still image of the counselor sitting in an office that had the words Morton Real Estate painted on its window through which he was plainly visible; and the right side showed one of him stabbing Ms. Milford in the lower part of her left shoulder, a sight that made Joey wince. The words, Go there? appeared on the left screen near the bottom of the image.

As cryptic as this was, Joey nevertheless understood what it meant, which was that he would need to appear where this stabber worked before his job at the school in order to stop him – but as a little boy, Joey stood little or no chance of overpowering an adult male, so he inferred that Lucky intended for him to do something like detective work to stop the stabber, not a physical assault. Even though Lucky had never provided Joey with time travel, Joey was getting good at figuring out Lucky's intent even when he supplied only the slightest bit of information. Joey was fully confident that Lucky had

been protecting him for thousands of years and was confident that he could now virtually read Lucky like a book. He also knew that he needed Jane to join him because she could subsequently get through to her father who obviously was very fond of Ms. Milford with information that others including Joey’s own father would probably dismiss – coming as it would be, from children who were deeply affected by the awful event and arguably fantasizing as a result of their trauma.

Joey stood up, walked back to the sofa, sat down and showed Lucky to her.

“What’s that?”

“You don’t see anything, do you? Just a stone, right?”

“Yes.” “Lucky, show her please. I need her help. Show her.” and Lucky showed her a single screen displaying the counselor sitting at a desk in the real estate office.

“That’s Mr. Blandon! Where did you get that picture?”

“You can see it? Wow, most kids can’t see anything even when it’s as plain as day.”

“Why shouldn’t I be able to see it? Why do say kids can’t see it, can adults see it?”

“I haven’t showed it to any kids, that’s a long explanation we may not have time for right now.

Jane, this isn’t really just a stone, it’s not even an it, he’s a person. He might even be a she, but I call him he. He has fantastic power, and his name is Lucky. I gave him that name, but it’s his real name.

Don’t ask me how I know this, I just know. He’s showing us Mr. Blandon in that office because that’s how Lucky wants to help us save Ms. Milford. Lucky wants to take us to where this counselor was in the past, but I don’t think Lucky will let him hurt us. If you want Lucky to help us, you have to say yes and he will do the rest, but it will be the weirdest ride you’ve ever been on. Lucky may send us to some other place or some other time, but somehow he will help us. Obviously, this isn’t anything normal that you ever heard of before, this is like magic – just so you’ll know how wonderful it is. Do you want to do it?”

“It sounds scary, not wonderful, and I don’t really understand what you’re talking about. How do you know it will help Ms. Milford? What do you mean he can send us somewhere? It’s not a car, it’s just a little rock, so that's not possible.”

“I know he will help Ms. Milford because that’s what I asked him to do when I sat down at the table. Jane, I need you to go into the past with me if we’re going to save Ms. Milford, I don’t think I can do it without your help.”

As he said, this, Joey printed a flash news story about the stabbing by a James Blandon that had just appeared on a news site and told Jane to stuff it in her purse, which she kept in her book bag. She did so, but she didn’t return the purse to her bag, hanging it on her shoulder while her book bag remained on the sofa next to her.

Jane said, “She’s like my mom, I would die for her. Yes Joey, I’ll do it, but you haven’t told me what you want me to do.”

“You don’t have to even wiggle your nose like that Bewitched lady in the tv show, Lucky will do take care of everything. Are you sure you want to do this, Jane? This is the biggest decision of your life – probably even for the rest of your life.”

“Yes I’m sure, Joey. I’m ready, so go ahead and do whatever you need to do.” “Okay, let’s go, Lucky, we’re ready!”

Suddenly, Joey and Jane were standing on the sidewalk in front of a shop on a commercial street in broad daylight in noticeably warmer weather than they were in at Joey's house. Jane looked around in bewilderment, but Joey, having already had a few previous Lucky experiences, immediately started looking around for the counselor. When he turned completely around he saw that right behind them was a shop window with Morton Real Property painted on it and they could see two people seated

inside it, one of whom was sitting sideways at a desk and looked like Mr. Blandon, or whatever his real name was.

“That’s him, Jane. Isn’t it? What do you think?”

Jane excitedly replied with a veritable tsunami of questions, “Yes, that’s definitely him, but why is he out of jail? Did he bail out already for such a horrible crime? Where are we? What happened? Why aren’t we in your living room?”

“I don’t know exactly where we are, but Lucky set us down in front of the place where the counselor used to work before he was hired by the school district. It’s a real estate office, and he won’t recognize us because he hasn’t seen either of us yet. I spoke to him once at Mason, but we're in a time when he haven't met me yet, and he hasn't met you either. Did you ever speak to him?”

“No, I never spoke to him, but he said hi to me a few times and smiled when he saw me. I thought he was a nice man.”

“That’s why I warned you about how people are totally different from how they seem when you see them in everyday life. Like I said, I could have been a drug addict for all you knew when you came to my house thinking I'm as pure as the driven snow. He probably smiled at you like that because he's a perv and has a thing for young girls. Anyway, we’re in the past, so at this point he’s never seen you or smiled at you or said hi to you or anything. We need to find out if he’s using the name James Blandon and notify our school or parents in Palo Alto that he’s a convicted criminal. Don’t you see? If they find out he has a record, they won’t hire him and he won’t stab Ms. Milford.”

“Why didn't we just go back a shorter time while he was starting to work at Mason and warn everybody? We’re really in the past? How do we get back? Could we get stuck here forever? I’m getting really scared, Joey.”

“No, don’t worry about that. Lucky will send us back to my living room as soon as we’re done here. And if we didn't go back this far we might warn people and they might not do anything about it because we wouldn't have any evidence that he used a phoney name. How about we go in the shop and tell the counselor that our parents want to buy a house, so they need a real estate office's business card, and we can also see if he has a name plate in front of him on his desk?”

“I’m scared, what if he recognizes one of us?”

“He won’t. Trust me, he won’t.”

“Okay, but can you do all the talking? I don’t know anything about real estate. I don’t even know why it’s called real or estate. If I say anything I’ll mess everything up again.”

“Okay, you keep mum and let me do all the talking.”

Joey and Jane went into the shop and he spoke to the future counselor, telling him his parents sent him to search for real estate agents, and half a minute later they exited with three business cards.

They walked a block and turned the corner to make sure they were out of earshot of the nefarious counselor and looked at the cards.

Joey said, “See, I told you, he acted like he never saw either one of us before in his whole life.”

“Thank God for that, I was so scared I thought I was going to faint. I can't believe he didn't recognize either one of us."

"He can't, I told you, he hasn't met us yet. Did you see the name plate that said T. Bronson?"

“Yes, but T. Bronson isn’t on any of the cards. That could be somebody else’s desk that he’s sitting at right now while Bronson is out of the office for lunch or Bronson could be on vacation or fired or something. So we have to Google that name and the ones on these cards to see what we can come up with. I have a pencil and paper in my purse, so I’ll write his name down in case we forget it.

I'm glad I was holding my purse when we did this because if I wasn't maybe I would have left it behind on your sofa with my book bag.”

“Yeah, I wish I had been wearing my book bag when we came here, but we'll have to make do with what we brought. I don't have any experience with time travel, so if I do this again next time I'll prepare better for it.”

“Do it again? You would do this again? Not with me, I hope!”

“I hope I won’t have to do it again, but like they say, never say never. Write my phone number down and write yours down and give it to me. Do you have a smart phone so you can just snap a picture of my number?”

She said, “I only have a prepaid cell phone for like, emergency calls.” and then she wrote down both of their numbers on small notepapers from a pad that she kept in her purse and gave him the one with her number on it.

Joey said, “I’ll try to email the guy’s name to myself on my phone, but if we’re in a time before there were smart phones, it won’t work.” and after looking around to make sure there were no criminal types watching them he pulled his cash out of his right pocket and asked her, “How much money do you have? I only have ten bucks, darn!”

Jane checked her purse and said, “I only have five.”

“Oh well, between us that should still be enough for what we have to do. I wish we had brought more, but I don’t think I can stretch my hand out and ask Lucky to put a thousand bucks in it, so whatever we have right now will have to be enough for the job. I don’t have an ATM card or anything with me, I stupidly left it in my book bag, what about you?”

“No, I just have the cash. Are we really in a different time, like traveling in a time machine? I still can't get used to it, I don’t know much about science fiction.”

“You keep asking me if we time-traveled, but you can figure that out by looking around you and checking a newspaper for today's date. And this isn’t science fiction, it’s science fact.” he said as he pulled out his phone.

He continued, “Did you notice the clock in the shop said it’s just after ten? My phone says the same time – check yours also. Okay, the email worked, so I’ll put the guy's name in a draft just in case we lose those tiny notepapers and can't remember his name. If you have some kind of notepad feature in your phone you should key his name in there too so we’ll have it on both of our phones.

Maybe James Blandon or Tom Bronson or whatever his name is will stay in that office for a few hours, so there’s no point of waiting for him to go home. And anyway, even if we hung around to watch him leave work for the day and we had our bikes we couldn’t keep up with his car when he goes home.”

“I don’t know if I can stay here all day anyway. I told you I’m really scared that we won’t be able to get back. What will happen to us if we’re stuck here?”

“Don’t worry about that, leave that to Lucky, he won’t fail us, he’ll get us home safe and sound.

It’s good that it’s early because we can’t hang around here late at night without getting picked up by the cops, and maybe that’s why Lucky ran the clock back from late afternoon when we were in my living room to mid-morning here. But cops might want to know why we’re running around the streets instead of being in school, so we should keep our eyes open for them and cross the street to avoid any that we see. If a cop car slows down next to us, we should go into the closest shop or restaurant or whatever and pretend we belong there or are customers who are with our parents and are rejoining them inside the place after stepping out to look at something or get something out of our car or whatever."

"Why should cops bother children?"

"Maybe in this town they arrest kids for truancy. There’s practically no truancy in Palo Alto but some places half the students are running around loose taking drugs and stuff when they’re supposed

to be in school. If they start to follow us into a restaurant we need to look for a back door, which may mean running right through the kitchen and bumping into the cooks. We can't take any chances on the cops dragging us home where we'll probably bump into ourselves, which would be disastrous.

Obviously, we were already here on this date and doing something completely different from what we're doing now. In fact I'm sure we're both in school in Palo Alto right now. So now, let’s look for a place to sit down and figure out what to do. It’s hotter’n blazes, so let’s find an ice cream place with tables so we can sit down and talk about what our next move should be.”

As they walked, they saw newspaper stands selling The Fresno Bee, dated March 12 – more than a month before the stabbing; but they would have to confirm that they were in that city later because neither of them felt inclined to bother people with what would seem a lame question to them: Excuse me ma’am, are we in Fresno? They were both aware that Fresno was often a very hot place, so being there would explain why it was only mid-morning but already felt like it was eighty degrees. They found a donut shop that also sold ice cream, and before entering it they agreed that although they both preferred cones they should each buy a scoop in a cup so they would have an excuse to put the ice cream cup in front of them on a table in the shop so they could discuss what to do.

After they sat down, Joey used his smart phone to look up T. Bronson in the local online white pages and said, “Okay, I just used GPS and it looks like we really are in Fresno, and there are a few Bronsons in the Fresno white pages. Three of them have first names that don’t start with T, but four of them have no first names at all. Let’s find the local library – according to this it’s about a dozen blocks from here. I have my ID with me, so maybe the local library will let me take out a library card and we can print maps to the four addresses of the guys who listed no first name. One time when I was with my mom in a San Francisco library they let her take out a card to borrow a book she found there even though she doesn’t live in The City, so here they might also give us cards even though we have Palo Alto addresses on our IDs. If they won't give us cards we can still pay to print at a copy shop, but we need to avoid any expenses that we can or we'll go broke and have to go back to April 21 empty-handed. I'll go to two of the Bronson addresses and you go to the other two, and if you get lost just ask a bus driver how to get back to the main Fresno library to meet me. My phone will go dead in a few hours, so I just turned it off, and you should turn yours off too. Do you have your battery charger with you?”

“No, I don’t have a charger with me, I only charge my phone at home.”

“Yeah, that's what everybody does, but I thought I should ask you just in case you happened to have it. We don’t have enough money to buy chargers, but anyway we’ll hopefully be done and outta here by the time our phones go dead. Let’s go to the library.”

They followed Joey’s phone screen instructions to get to the library, where Joey received a complimentary card, no questions asked. He logged into a library computer and looked up the URLs that he emailed to himself. He printed the maps to the four Bronson addresses along with the bus directions to get to them, and then he and Jane exchanged a big hug – without caring about adults seeing them do it – and headed out to each find two Bronsons. An hour later, Joey had just returned to the library when Jane called him to say she was on a bus to come back there, and a few minutes later she walked in with the news that she saw the name Thomas Bronson on a label affixed to an intercom that contacts tenants in an apartment building at one of the addresses. The other address she visited displayed only the name Bronson on the mailbox without a first name or initial.

Joey said, "Thomas might be the counselor, but there could be a few guys with that same combination of first initial and last name in a city this size – Fresno is pretty big. Both places I went to had only the last names, so I’m glad you found something, otherwise I don't know what the we would do next. You said you have your ID, right? I might use up my library computer time for the day

with all the research and printing we might have to do, and after that we’ll need you to get a card also.

After your time is used up we’ll have to use my iPhone for all web research, and that will make it go dead quicker.”

“Yes, I have my ID with me. Do you want me to get a card now?”

“Not yet, mine might have enough time on it for everything we'll need to do. We need to look for some kind of crime arrest story about this counselor guy as either of names, which could both be fake – I wish I had been smart enough to check James Blandon before we even came back here from my house. Let’s hope we get lucky cuz he might have a record for a low-grade crime like burglary or auto theft, so there might not be any news report about it. And even if it was a serious crime they might not include his picture because sometimes they don’t get a mug shot in time to print it or sometimes they have it but they don’t bother to print it. Even if we find a guy named Tom Bronson who got arrested for something, that doesn't guarantee he’s the same guy in the real estate office, but if we recognize his mug shot that will cinch the deal.”

Joey logged back onto a library computer and began his Tom Bronson research and Jane pushed a chair next to his so she could also look at his computer screen. He searched for an arrest without success, and after many false hits they had to get a card for Jane because his computer time ran out.

Soon after she logged in, they were surprised to find on the third search page an Oklahoma City news story that was ten years old, displaying the counselor’s picture at the top with a headline describing his arrest for murder, and when they followed up with more searching they found a smaller subsequent story reporting that he was found guilty of manslaughter; the second story showed no photo.

However, by comparing the details of the report they were able to definitively ascertain that it was about the same Tom Bronson who had been charged with murder. They didn’t find a later story about his sentencing, most likely because it wasn’t considered a newsworthy event. They printed the news reports about his arrest and conviction, logged off the computer and went outside to discuss what they had just learned. Joey said, “Okay, we know now for sure that he’s a convicted criminal, so that part is true. I pasted all this stuff into an email and sent it to myself, and maybe I did it too fast so you couldn't really see me doing it from that angle next to me. I also emailed it to you at the same time. In case it gets erased when we go back to April, we should print and each have a hard copy that we hope will go back to future with us like my phone and money and your purse did when we came to March 12. Anyway, what do we do now that we know all this?”

“We should print more copies of the stories and after we go back to April 21 we spread them around to the principal and the school district and everybody else. But why didn’t Lucky just show you that on his screen instead of putting us through all this? Maybe when we go back we’ll find out these news stories are all a fake Lucky thing and the guy was never convicted or anything. And how sure are you that we can go back to April 21?”

“I understand why you say that Jane, because you don’t know Lucky like I do. I go way back with Lucky, and I’m talking about way back – I know him practically better than I know myself, and he would never do anything fake or fool me. And I didn’t ask Lucky about this guy’s real name, obviously if I was smart I would have done that but now it’s too late for that. Lucky will take us back now that we have the information we need.”

“But how will this help, when we go back to your living room it will be back when we started and too late to help Ms. Milford because she'll be in the hospital in critical condition.” “Jane, Lucky didn’t sent us on a wild goose chase, trust me.” and as he said this he pulled Lucky out of his pocket and said, “Lucky, please send Jane back to my living room but send me back to a couple of weeks before the counselor attacked Ms. Milford.”

Suddenly, they were both back in the living room and Jane exclaimed, “It didn’t work Joey, Lucky

sent both of us back to your house!”

“No, I did stop on the way back, you just didn't notice it. Let’s check the news. Aha! Nothing about a stabbing at school today! Now let’s check Tom Bronson.”

Their news search found a local story dated four days earlier titled, Wanted Parolee Conned Way Into School Job, which described ex-con Thomas Bronson being arrested for using fake references and a phony résumé to obtain employment as a counselor at Mason Elementary School in Palo Alto.

It went on to say that he admitted to also using a bogus identity for previous employment in Fresno and Bakersfield where he had warrants outstanding for burglaries he was alleged to have committed.

His attorney said he would fight extradition to Oklahoma for violating parole by leaving the state without consent and wanted the California cases settled before the extradition process was even started. The rest of the story was about related matters such as a school district official’s reaction to the lax hiring that enabled a violent criminal to become a counselor, placing students and staff at risk.

There was no mug shot in the story, but there was no doubt in their minds that this was the same man who attacked Ms. Milford.

Jane was startled. “Does this mean Ms. Milford is okay – she was never hurt by him?”

“That’s what it means. Lucky dropped me off a few days ago and I slipped a copy of the page we printed under the door of the principal’s office and I also mailed copies to her and a copy to the school district and the police chief with notes explaining that he was working at as a Mason counselor using the name Blandon.”

“I don’t understand. I mean, how can this happen. I mean, I’m super happy that Ms. Milford is okay and all, but where did you get that Lucky thing, how can you use it to move people through time like that? I still can't believe it, it feels like it must be some kind of dream or something, it’s all just impossible ...”

“Nothing is impossible for Lucky, Jane – at least, I haven’t found anything yet that he can’t do. Of course, everything and everybody anywhere is limited.”

“You mean everything and everybody anywhere is limited except for God.” “Yeah, that’s what I mean, if there’s a God he’s the only one who isn’t limited. And I’m not saying that God sent Lucky to us, I don’t know about that and we might never find that out. But I do know that saving Ms. Milford is nothing compared to what Lucky will do in the future when he’ll save cities and planets after they’re already blown up, but that’s too long of an explanation to give you right now because we have to make sure that Ms. Milford is okay. You should call your dad and ask him about her. We have these news reports in front of us, but we don’t have personal confirmation from anybody that she’s really okay.”

Jane called her father and after her conversation with him she related to Joey that he seemed puzzled by her concerned inquiry about Ms. Milford’s health, assuring her that he had spoken to Ms. Milford not an hour earlier and she seemed perfectly okay and had mentioned nothing unusual about her health; and furthermore pointed out that Ms. Milford said she was looking forward to joining them on a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium this coming weekend. As far as Joey and Jane were concerned, this was the ultimate confirmation that Lucky had saved Ms. Milford, so Joey told her his future history with Lucky that he saw in his dreams before accompanying her on their bikes to her home, to make sure she arrived there safely. On the way there he told her he couldn’t come into her house because he had to get home and call Kurt right away to consult with him about the events.

After opening her front door, before going in Jane turned, happily beamed at Joey and gave him the V sign to close their incredible episode.

After watching her enter her house Joey sat on his bike for a minute staring at her front door, and then he finally rode all the way home, with a smile of satisfaction on his face for a job well done.

2: STILL IN EUROPE While working from his Madrid bedroom in 2091, after propagating time-thrust anomalies with a variety of features in various U. S. locations including a pair of them in San Francisco and Muir Woods north of the Golden Gate Bridge and then sending them back through time to 2014, Klaus Radder subsequently had time to examine none of them because his superaccelerant project began to dominate his schedule; this was what had happened also to his side pursuits that eventually led to fabulous scientific advancements later labeled as A-V, the Juve, APD-Wall etc., while he was working on his Senegal weapons project in 2014. His largely preliminary work on these concepts that was retrieved from his hard drive after his hideout was obliterated became the provenance for what later was known as the New Modernity that encompassed lengthened lifespans, ubiquitous flying cars and immunity from invasive diseases, among other previously only dreamed of phenomena that was garnered from his computer in Senegal.

While working on his superaccelerant he positioned a time-thrust anomaly in his Madrid bedroom in case he needed an escape hatch – not an unlikely prospect, considering the reaction to his weaponized anomalies that had resulted in a full-scale military invasion of his premises in Senegal more than seventy years earlier; he never found out how he was tracked to Senegal, but he knew that if it could happen once it could happen again; he doubted that signals to or from his satellite dish were the key because they were bounced through a thoroughly encrypted, impenetrable server system scattered around the world. As it turned out, he did indeed find himself raided again and barely made good his escape, assisted by the distraction of his attempted captors. Two uniformed Madrid policemen had brusquely and unceremoniously dragged him out of his bedroom into the hallway with his hands handcuffed behind his back to get him away from the APD-Wall that they had inferred – from very brief observation but nevertheless accurately – was displaying a schematic of his targets for destruction; they hoped to prevent further mischief by him after it appeared to them that he had just set in motion the complete evisceration of the planet Mercury.

Unknown to them, when they dragged him into the hallway it was too late to prevent him from also suicidally commanding the destruction of the terra firma they had lived on their entire lives.

Several of Radder’s other co-captors who were in plain clothes remained in the bedroom and were examining the display of targets when the woman who apparently participated in the raid and was presumably one of his antagonists came in and peremptorily summoned them to join her in the living room – not including the policemen, who stayed in the hallway to guard him – whereupon she and others including two children held hands and vanished into thin air. While the policemen stood gawking and stunned by this disappearance into thin air of a crowd of people, Radder managed to roll on his back, and after the policemen stepped into the living room to look around for a trace of the disappeared group, he sat up and as quickly as possible slid on his bottom back to the door of his bedroom – an experience that was accompanied by dizziness and by significant pain in his wrists because when he rolled on his back he had put all of his weight on his handcuffed hands.

Although under normal circumstances Radder would have been able to mentally communicate with his APD display from the hallway, he was mentally and physically weakened in extremis, doomed by the terminal effects of asbestos poisoning; because he was too groggy to invoke his APD, he scrunched himself to the bedroom door to attain closer proximity to the wall display, desperately hoping that being closer to it would remind him in his confused state of what he had to do to resolve his dire straits. When he was nearly in the doorway, he glanced back at the living room and saw one of the policemen re-entering the hallway, so he immediately thought the words Time-thrust here and a

formless shimmering appeared directly in front of him. Remembering that any part of him contacting the anomaly would suffice to remove him from the scene as it had when he escaped from Senegal seventy years earlier, he clambered onto his knees and summarily tipped himself face first into it, triggering his own disappearance not from only the room in Madrid, but also all the way back to the year 2013, missing his 2014 intended target and arriving several months prior to his last-second escape from Senegal. He had tried to calibrate the calendar for the moment right after he originally plunged into an anomaly in his Senegal lab in the month of August, but to a location in Europe that he didn’t take the time to specify exactly, since he considered all of it friendly enough territory for his prospects for continued freedom, as long as he didn’t land in a place so remote he would expire from lack of water or warmth, such as the top of a mountain. He wanted to hit the precise moment of his previous departure from 2014 to avoid creating two of himself, but his fog of a nearly moribund condition had caused him to mistakenly command a 3 instead of a 4 on his APD-Wall. Even though he previously had to anomalize himself into an escape, he thought it unlikely to occur again and had decided not to spend so much time on arranging for a second one that he would probably never need.

He had been too busy to travel around Europe much and merely and mistakenly assumed that there was no place in it where he would perish from the elements.

Immediately after plunging into his Madrid bedroom anomaly Radder woke up in a completely dark room that was populated by rattling sounds that were constant but not oppressively so, and he concluded from its familiarity that he must be in a train sleeper cabin, which if true informed him that he was in the 21st century or earlier, and probably not before the 19th century when trains were invented, if his knowledge of railway history was accurate. Because he could see nothing he wondered at first if he had gone blind or even lost his eyes altogether when he was swallowed up into the time-thrust; unlike his previous experience when he landed in a Madrid backyard, he was fully cognizant on awakening that he had traveled through time; he was fully alert and confused only by the darkness all around him and his inability to determine where he was. As he lay listening for any sound that could signal to him that humans were nearby, his eyes began to adjust to the darkness and he could see that there was what looked vaguely like a window to his right; he couldn’t make out the walls or a ceiling, but this was enough to deduce with a strong feeling of relief that he was indoors somewhere at night rather than having gone blind.

He quickly became aware of a conspicuous improvement in his condition from Madrid, specifically his breathing, which now seemed completely healthy and normal, whereas it had been terminally failing in Madrid. Also, his wrists weren’t in pain, nor did they feel constrained, so he tentatively concluded that he had left the handcuffs and their deleterious effects behind in his Madrid bedroom – which was somewhen rather than somewhere – in the past, present or future, though most likely the past. Which of these he had arrived in, he was unable to discern definitively; although it was crucial information, he had no choice but to patiently wait to find it out, thinking it unwise to sit up or even to make any major movements because although mentally he was more functional than he was when he landed in the Madrid backyard, this time around he may still be recongealing immediately after his arrival; and for all he knew, lifting an arm with a hard thrust could cause it to fall off or be otherwise significantly and perhaps permanently impaired. And there appeared to be no urgency for him to stand up and find a way out of whatever enclosure he was in, since he heard no noise indicating a human about to enter the room or caboose or whatever he was in. This was his second time being rescued by one of his time-thrusts, so now he had a bit of experience with them.

However, he knew he had to exercise caution because the result could be something altogether different than his seamless and intact reappearance the first time.

However, the previous time he could right away see in the broad daylight that he was all in one

piece, whereas in this darkness he couldn’t see much of anything. He gingerly moved his hands from behind his back to his sides and began mildly flexing muscles in them; then in his arms, shoulders and other parts of his body, trying to gauge if he was all there, and every indication thus far was that he was complete. He continued to flex muscles now that he knew his appendages seemed to be in order, starting with his neck and then down to his shoulders, arms, chest, etc. All along the way his muscles indicated that he was complete, all the way down to his toes. He was ready to sit up, but as soon as he did, a door opened, streaming light into the room, and a man entered. Radder’s eyes were adjusted enough so that he saw that it was some kind of conductor with a small flashlight and a clipboard in his grasp. After the man turned on the cabin light Radder ventured to speak first, trying to grab the initiative by saying, “Good evening, can I help you?”

The man replied in English, “Excuse me, I thought this cabin was unoccupied. Please show me your ticket.”

“I’m sorry, I know this sounds odd, but I really don’t know what’s going on here. I’ll look for my ticket but I fear I’ve lost it or it’s been stolen by somebody who got into this cabin.”

“You look like a respectable fellow,” the conductor said as he switched on a light, “not a vagabond stowaway or troublemaker, but I must see your ticket to your destination. Please be prompt as we will be entering the station shortly.”

Radder searched around in his pockets and found his APD, but when he thought the command for the wall display to appear, to his chagrin nothing happened; not that it would have availed him, as it had no power to resolve his immediate problem of lacking a train ticket and could only startle the conductor; merely wielding his non- functioning APD in front of somebody wouldn’t be likely to impress them because it just looked like a piece of cheap plastic – and in fact, if he was now in an era before its invention as he appeared to be, that’s all it was. He was confident of the infallibility of the APD-Wall technology that he had invented and subsequently studied in its more developed version during its many intervening years, so its failure to function was further confirmation for him that he had arrived in a calendar year before it was in active fruition. At least the conductor spoke English, the ascertainment of which now Radder realized was the reason he spoke to him first in that language; it was the best bet if he was in Europe rather than his native German that most Europeans didn’t speak.

In a back pocket of his pants he found and pulled out a wad of two thousand dollars, left over from his cash stash he had taken into the future and prudently had kept handy in case of an emergency; in spite of the exigency of the moment, he fleetingly considered the irony that his trips forward and back to perhaps the same year had cost him ninety percent of his savings. He had converted most of his assets into the modern A-V credits in 2089, but he had kept some of the old hard currency in case he might need it, and this was what he stuffed into his pocket when he looked out of his bedroom window in Madrid and saw police climbing up his fire escape. Unlike his escape from Senegal, this time when he had the presence of mind to leave his watch behind, he was wearing it after emerging from the time-thrust; but he had neglected to retrieve his old-fashioned wallet and identification and shove it into his pocket, irrationally planning to rely on his APD for identifying himself because the effects of his terminal illness had severely clouded his thinking. He wished he was thinking as clearly then as he was now, which in realtime was only seconds later. The good news was that he was no longer feeling any of those illness and narcotic effects, but unfortunately he had to assume that they could resume at some point; he could be in remission rather than cured, so the respite from his symptoms may prove to be temporary. Since he had no ticket to show the conductor he would have to find another way out of this tight spot, so he showed the conductor his wad of cash and said, “I have plenty of money, I can buy another ticket.”

“I’ll confer with my superior and I’ll be right back, and within five minutes, another man who was wearing similar conductor’s clothing entered the cabin and asked for Radder’s passport.

“Passport? I don’t have it, I think I lost it. I can’t find my wallet. I think somebody got in here while I was asleep and robbed me of my luggage and identification. But I have this cash and I’m quite disposed to pay for a replacement ticket, I’m sorry about the trouble.”

“No, apart from your ticket I need to see your passport or other identification. I’ll be back in five minutes and you’ll need to find it during that time. Sorry to say this, but your account of your circumstances isn’t verifiable, considering that you’re not listed as a passenger in this cabin. I’m going to consult and then come back and see what you have found.”

The conductor left the cabin, and Radder decided that his body was functioning fully, so he stood up for the first time and pushed his ear against the door to hear their discussion, and was pretty sure they were speaking Dutch. However, when a third voice joined them, their last several sentences were in English and sounded like bad news for him, “So why is this man with no ticket in the cabin that is listed as unoccupied in the manifest? What’s his explanation for the discrepancy?”

“He seems or claims to have no idea, but we have to be suspicious of his motives until we find out otherwise. For all we know, he’s a terrorist who sneaked into the cabin intending to blow up the train or the station, we haven’t searched the cabin yet or the area around here because we just discovered his presence and aren’t sure how to proceed. Why would he have so much cash but no passport?”

“You’re right about that, it’s highly unlikely, and there is a possibility that he could have hidden explosives somewhere on the train. I’m going to go in there and tell him he must fess up or be held for the authorities. Before talking to him I’ll call them at the station and notify them that we have a suspicious passenger.”

The new voice called the station that they were about to enter and reported the presence of the male passenger with no passport or ticket, and then he re-entered the cabin and spoke to Radder, who fortunately had just returned to his bed and sat down, in a stern tone, asking him, “Okay, Mr. ...

What did you say your name is?”

Afraid that there might be an arrest warrant in his real or adopted name, Radder lied – he knew could make up any name because he had no identification to contradict him – saying, “Uh ... Braun ... uh ... Hans Braun. I’m a native German but my passport is from the U.S.” “Mr. Braun, did you find your ticket or passport?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t, I’m sure it was stolen. Please let me buy a ticket and be on my way. I’ve been robbed, I’m felling ill, and this station we’re about to enter is my destination.” which was a risky statement because if the conductor had asked him to name the station he couldn’t have done it.

“I’m afraid we can’t do that. There are protocols we must follow, so you will be questioned when we enter the station. I’m sorry about the inconvenience, but I'll have to ask you to remain in this cabin until that interview has been conducted. Am I clear about that? We need to avoid a misunderstanding as this is a very serious matter for security reasons. Do you have any questions?”

“No, I understand.”

The conductor left the cabin and Radder decided that he was better off not talking to any of these men again. This was a regional train rather than a high-speed version with windows that didn’t open, so he was able to open the window to peek out as the train slowed down to pull into the station. He was heartened that the air outside was fairly warm, meaning he wouldn’t be confronted by freezing cold weather when he disembarked; and the darkness of night would provide some cover for him to escape the authorities, especially if he could get to a nearby wooded area. Just then, the train slowed as it approached the station, so when it was just outside it he climbed out and jumped to the

ground. He landed upright but staggered and wound up falling and rolling twice and then nimbly back on his feet. As he rushed past the near end of the station he saw a flashlight mounted on a wall, evidently by a magnet; he grabbed it in case he needed it later, anticipating that he might have to dart into dark places if he was pursued, which seemed likely to occur because of the obvious suspicions about his motives. This was theft, but he might be in a lot hotter water than boosting a flashlight.

As he walked hurriedly towards the front of the station he heard behind him shouting, men’s voices ordering him to stop, so he ran as fast as he could past a small group of people who were walking toward the platform. When he arrived at the front of the station he stopped and looked around, and saw that there was a large open space for parking to his left and a line of trees to his right, so he headed straight into the trees. Within seconds he realized that he was in a fully wooded area, most likely a park, so he plunged deeper into it. He continued to hear shouting behind him, and when he looked back he saw half a dozen flashlights at first close together and then spreading out to either side; separating from each other laterally as they came towards him. He hurried through the darkness and created a formidable space between him and his pursuers in spite of crashing into a tree, not being able to use the flashlight because it would tip his pursuers of his whereabouts. After about a minute he arrived at the far edge of the woods and saw that there was a large meadow in front of him.

He instantly recognized that his pursuers would very likely emerge behind him in time to spot him before he could traverse the meadow and enter the residential neighborhood beyond it, so he made a snap decision to try a hazardous tactic: First, he turned on the flashlight he was carrying to check its luminosity, cupping his hand over it, hoping it wouldn’t be seen by his pursuers. Being satisfied that it seemed to be approximately as strong as those of the men searching for him, he turned it off and rushed back towards them. He had another rapid-fire decision to make when he saw that they had splayed out so far there were places between them where if he hid behind a bush he might not be illuminated, but he decided against that sitting-duck gambit and opted instead to engage his previous stratagem of posing as one of the searchers. Just before he reached a place where one of the flashlights was about to shine on him, he turned around and began walking in the same direction as the other men with the flashlight he was carrying turned on, and swung the it left and right as though he were also searching for someone. When the other men had progressed past him, evidently thinking that he was one of their fellow pursuers, he jammed the flashlight shining forward into a tree and ran as fast as he could back towards the station. Arriving anew at the station side of the woods he saw nobody waiting to detain him, so he emerged from them and walked through the parking lot to the other side of the station as nonchalantly as he could manage, onto what looked like a major commercial street.

A block further he saw a bus that was traveling in the opposite direction and approaching a stop, so he crossed the street and boarded it inquiring, “I’m sorry, driver, I only have large U.S. currency.

Can I pay with a twenty-dollar bill and you can just keep the change?”

“No, that’s okay, don’t worry about the payment. Where are you headed?”

“I’m looking for the bus station out of town but I don’t know my way around here. I came in on a train and called my friend to pick me up but he didn’t answer and I lost his address so I just want to move on and call him tomorrow to find out what happened.”

“You’re on the wrong bus – in fact, you don’t want a local bus. We have no bus station, but around the corner you can catch one at a stop heading towards Tiel, is that where you want to go?

“Yes, Tiel, that’s it. I want to go to Tiel.”

“Then turn right at the first intersection behind me and look for the green sign.”

“There’s a bus every hour during the day but it’s less frequent at night and I don’t know when the

next one will come, but I’m pretty sure there’s at least one more tonight.”

“Great, thanks ... turn right and look for the green sign? Thank you very much.”

“The fare to Tiel should be less than ten dollars if I’m accurate about the exchange rate – it’s only a few kilometers. Have a nice evening,” said the driver as Radder got off, and then he closed the door and drove off. Radder followed the driver’s directions by walking around the corner and found the green sign, but now he was faced with the prospect of being tracked down by police while he waited there, besides which he also didn’t even know for sure that he could buy a ticket with his American currency, the bus driver’s belief that he could notwithstanding.

One thing Radder was confident of was that wherever he was, it was very civilized because in one that is plagued by thieves fully functioning flashlights aren’t left stuck to a wall unlocked and unattended and bus drivers don’t change a twenty for a local fare in the dead of night. Thus far, the people he had met seemed like Europeans, such as Danes or Dutch, but he had never heard of Tiel, so knowing that city’s name was no help. Remembering that the driver said this same street funneled onto the highway, he decided to see if he could get onto it and walk to Tiel. If the highway meandered through agricultural land as was likely, he could be easily spotted by police cars driving on it, but he would preferred to take that chance rather than wait at the bus stop like a sitting duck without even knowing for certain that a bus would come before morning. He briskly headed along the street, and after two blocks of residential neighborhood it became more of a warehouse district and finally ended at the beginning of a road without structures on either side, opening up into wide open land. He had walked about fifteen minutes, but he didn’t check his watch until he arrived at the road out of town because it didn’t matter to him how long it took him to get to the highway, only that he evaded capture; now he checked it because later he would need to know how long he had walked.

At least the weather was quite warm, which normally would not be the case even in summer if he was in northern Europe, though it still seemed to him likely that he was in the north – Denmark, Holland, Belgium, some such place. He hadn’t asked the bus driver the name of the town he was in because it was hardly a matter of priority; moreover, he didn’t want to make it glaringly obvious that he was a total stranger to the vicinity. Anyway, it would change nothing to know where he was, whereas finding an escape to another town or city was crucial. He wondered, If the Juve had the formulation in it that prevented exogenous diseases, would that mean it cured him of the asbestos poisoning?

He had finally swallowed the Juve liquid the day before he escaped from 2091, so he didn’t know if it took full or partial or for that matter any effect at all in such a short time, nor did he know if it would function now that he had left that time. He was aware that there may at the present time be an outstanding bench warrant for his arrest for destroying American cities, so the thought of spending hundreds of years in prison as a result of ingesting the Juve dismayed him anew; he preferred execution or suicide over that prospect. There was no guarantee that the effects of the Juve would function after he receded from its time frame, but even if it didn’t, the offenses he could be convicted of were sufficiently egregious to put him away for the several remaining normal non-Juve decades of his life – not exactly a pleasant prospect to contemplate either. He continued his ruminations about his life as he trudged along the highway in the darkness, with only stars and a half moon illuminating the sky. The diaphanous time-thrust that Radder was going to place in Muir Woods in the future had two characteristics he wanted to experiment with: One was that it could pulse, becoming active every thirty days at precisely 8 PM and once again becoming intangible and inactive ten minutes later. He sent it back to 2014 by applying to it a standard time-thrust, employing its sole and relatively rudimentary feature – compared to the new version – that had enabled him to escape military pursuers surrounding his hidden redoubt in Senegal by moving him from forward to 2089. He calibrated this new one to arrive a few months prior to his original calendar point of origin – just

before his escape from Senegal – but sent it to California rather than to the Senegalese geographical point of his hideout in Africa.

Watching the process on his advanced All-Purpose Display Wall and geolocating it with the modern version of what used to be called Google Earth, he was able to place and then form the anomaly to envelop the entrance of a tiny shop in Muir Woods north of San Francisco – a random location from a digital postcard that he had seen on his APD Wall; shortly thereafter severely and callously impacting the lives of the young Marin County couple who drove there directly from work to hike in it. After this was done he created a much larger, theoretically impenetrable anomaly and wrapped a San Francisco building with it, calibrating it to arrive soon after the one he landed in Muir Woods. Like his old ones from Senegal, Radder’s new time-thrust anomalies drew objects including organic matter into them in toto and deposited them elsewhere and/or elsewhen without damaging them, but the second time around he developed far more robust capabilities for them. In their newest permutation they were sizable and formable, unlike his previous versions; and he was able to place them precisely thousands of miles from where he was and in different sizes besides being able to move them into the past or future. After placing these anomalies Radder was confident in the success of his work, and at any rate was aware that he probably wouldn’t have time to follow through and see if they fulfilled their intended characteristics; and indeed he became too involved with his propulsion project to subsequently revisit them and examine their effect or endurance or otherwise see how well they fulfilled their paradigms. In fact, he didn’t get around to assigning any special effect for the one covering the shop door, so for all he knew it might send objects or people to the sixteenth century in Asia in the present time or the planet Pluto a thousand years later. As with all his previous work, he gave short shrift to the risk that he could be destroying lives with his toys.

He had no real difficulty dealing with his recollection of events that he knew wouldn’t happen for decades hence as though they were past experiences because this was his second trip skipping through time, so he was less confused about it this time around and in fact took it in stride. It occurred to him that the little boy Joey who somehow found him in Senegal the first time may have also found him the second time in Madrid: He had seen children when he was raided in his Madrid flat, and they must have had a special reason for their presence because anybody dealing with this issue had to consider it dangerous. The child may have remained outside of the house directing the authorities to Radder’s location rather than inside where his life and limb might be in peril, and then entered after he was handcuffed and deemed no longer a threat to individuals in his flat, perhaps to identify him. If this was the case, the question is how a little boy tracked Radder down; he figuratively and morbidly chuckled at the thought of throttling the little American brat, but he didn’t consider himself the slightest bit violently psychotic – he was fully aware that there were some Americans who were decent folk. He would love to wreak revenge on Joey by wiping out his entire home town and if possible his entire country, rather than by personally choking the life out of him: As the saying goes, all’s fair in love and war, and regardless of his age in Radder’s view, Joey had declared war on him by his trespassing and deprecatory actions.

Radder ducked into the agricultural field next to the highway whenever a car approached from either direction; he could probably catch a ride by flagging one down and giving the driver some sort of made-up sob story, but he couldn’t risk that it might turn out to be a police vehicle or someone who knew about the search for him, so he demurred and chose instead to continue his solitary stroll.

Assuming it was, say, fifteen kilometers to Tiel, he should be able to walk there in less than two hours; he was tired from dashing about near the train station, but he felt otherwise fit and able to walk all night if necessary. The luminosity of his watch was failing completely, but he was finally able to see the digits his watch with difficulty after much glaring at it in the light of the full moon, and calculated

that he may arrive at Tiel around 9 PM. Nobody used – will use – a watch in 2091, but he had occasionally worn his out of deference to his lost previous life before he traveled here (hence?) from Madrid (whence?). With sufficient time, he would have left the watch behind rather than risk having it merged into his body by the time thrust, but the Madrid raid caught him by surprise, and anyway it came through time without injuring him even as the handcuffs fell away and were back there in Madrid or perhaps had separated from him en route and had arrived nowhere – or arrived nowhen?

Eventually, he saw a town up ahead, and soon he was walking on residential streets once again.

As he walked and evaluated the English accents he had heard from everybody, he was pretty sure at this point that he was in The Netherlands or somewhere thereabouts. But now what should he do? It was a certainly possible that police would be looking for him in the Tiel train station as well, so going there might not be a good idea. He decided to look for a taxi to take him a long distance to a larger city where he might be less noticeable in his clothes and shoes that were likely both quite soiled; as well as hopefully being less easily tracked. He didn’t know yet if he was wanted for only sneaking on a train or for something far worse, such as vaporizing entire cities. Either way, he needed to exercise extreme caution to evade the authorities; he had been a hair’s breadth from capture twice before, and he was in no more mood to be corralled now than he was in the past – or was in his memory of the future. He asked a pedestrian where the center of town was and headed in that direction, but before he got there he was able to flag down a taxi driver who informed him he was in Holland and drove him two hours to Amsterdam. He explained to the driver that he didn’t even know what country he was in because he had imbibed a prodigious amount of cognac. As he rode he went through his pockets again and this time he found his passport, which he might need when he arrived in Amsterdam. He certainly didn’t feel like he was home free because he knew nobody there and would have to use his real name to check into a hotel in where he could easily be traced if there was a warrant in that name. He held out the very slimmest of hopes that if there was an Interpol arrest warrant outstanding for him it might be in his fake name Klaus Radder that he had used during the entire duration of his Senegal weapons project, rather than his real name Knut Reffner that was on his passport. He dispatched the driver near downtown and checked into the first hotel he saw.

At this point he was tiring of this physically exhausting, clandestine and peripatetic existence, having been an ace away from being put away twice for the rest of his life: It was not an appropriate life for a pure scientist who undoubtedly deserved multiple Nobel Prizes for his disparate discoveries.

He couldn’t see his face in the dark and he no longer had the flashlight or a mirror, so he couldn’t see his own face as he sat in the back seat of the taxi, but he noted that when he raised his hands to the window where city lamp lights shone on them they didn’t look any different than they did before he took the Juve, so either it didn’t work or it took time to start kicking in and may still turn him into a teenager. If this happened and he had been identified, the authorities wouldn’t anticipate him looking younger and would only release photos of him as a middle-aged man. Although he didn’t really feel like returning to age sixteen, he preferred that prospect over that of being locked up like a dog for the rest of his life, which may not happen if he went to trial in Europe but probably would if the Americans got hold of him.

He had seen newspapers for sale at several locations since his arrival at whatever time frame he was in now, but he hadn’t taken the time to check the dates on them because of his near-exhaustion and the hot pursuit nipping at his heels; his top priority wasn’t the news of the day; rather, it was to get inside and off the streets where there might be a sweep for him going on in Amsterdam; if one was in effect, he was still wearing the same distinctive clothes he wore when he jumped out of the train, so he was easily recognizable. He at least knew where he was, but now that he was far from the caboose where he began his flight he was too tired to bother with finding out when he was; the cars

looked like early 21st Century to him, but he was no car buff and they all looked alike to him after they became streamlined like race cars to avoid air resistance. This was a crucial piece of information if he was in a time before his episodes in Senegal because he was safe from prosecution, as it meant he had never committed any crimes in his entire life – yet; but since during the previous time that he was in this early 21st Century he was never anywhere near Tiel, it seemed unlikely that he would follow the same trajectory of behavior that was going to lead to his Madrid debacle. As soon as he entered his hotel room he fell dead asleep on bed fully dressed, noting that it was still dark outside but with no idea of the time of day, and unaware as yet that he had landed in 2013 – a year that legally speaking and in terms of normal human reality could exact his innocence henceforth.

Radder woke up very hungry in his hotel room the evening after his escape from the train, but he needed to shave and shower and check his clothes to see if they were presentable before venturing out onto the streets of Amsterdam for a bite to eat. Because he had been seen in the train with only a flashlight and in the town by a bus driver under nothing more than a street lamp light, he didn’t feel at risk of being recognized; and he doubted that the train authorities would do any fingerprinting, so he didn’t feel much at risk at this point and decided to proceed as though the entire episode was essentially over. Looking in the bathroom mirror for the first time since his return to 2013, he was unable to detect any age change – he still looked like early middle age as he had when he took the Juve and before it when he originally resided in the present calendar year. He used a hotel washcloth to clean his shoes, which weren’t damaged and looked okay after a bit of wiping. He was able to dust off and then wipe his pants enough with the same wash cloth to hopefully be able to go about without calling too much attention to himself. They were dark brown, and fortunately the dirt that was visible on them looked like a pattern design unless closely inspected.

He opened a window and noted that the weather was sunny and surprisingly warm, so when he went out he would be able to leave behind his dirty coat, which he fortuitously was wearing in spite of the hot Madrid afternoon of his unexpected departure from 2091, which meant he could face the public without it in his relatively clean shirt. He exited the hotel, recognized a nearby intersection and walked three blocks to the café that he favored during his previous visits to Amsterdam. He learned from a local newspaper on a table in the café that the current date was a year plus one day earlier than the cliffside showdown he had with the Americans. He thought he had targeted returning to the exact time of his escape from Senegal, but he could no longer precisely remember his future intentions and had no way to retrieve the exact time of his Senegal escape to compare it with his temporal arrival in the train, which exact time he didn’t know either. Arriving a year before he left Senegal meant that he may be a duplicate of himself – the Knut Reffner who hadn’t yet left Heidelberg to set up his lab in Senegal whose name he had changed before this date to Klaus Radder, but whom he thought of as Knut in order to minimize his confusion. His mind quickly became rife with speculation. Were there now two of him or did he replace his Knut Reffner self who was already present when he came back?

Radder had future memories that didn’t include in the future remembering this trip he made back to 2013 or to any other previous date or year. He had no way of knowing if Knut had such a recollection either and although he most likely hasn’t yet been to the future anything’s possible and Radder wasn’t inclined to call him and ask him about it; especially knowing Knut’s past propensity for suspicion and misanthropy that ironically paradoxically and ironically would encompass even himself. After he sat down to eat following so much travail he noted that this was a city that looked fully familiar to him, so he felt comfortable enough to appraise his circumstances. He had spent almost all of his life in this current time and only a brief period in the future, so maybe he could consider himself to really be from the current time even though he had arrived here after decades of absence from it.

After sating his appetite, he went for a stroll through the usual plazas and over canals while he

pondered his current future, especially what would happen now that he intended to change his future past. Obviously, he had no intention of going back to Senegal with the same weapons project to be again besieged by American troops, so he would have to find something else to do and would leave that project to Knut. And there was a thorny question: Since he now had no intention of creating the destructive anomalies, why, when he was in the future and now with that future remembrance, did he remember doing it? Because he will do it, as the Knut who became Radder? Or is it the case that after a return to a previous time an event that was consciously canceled after the return is nevertheless remembered as it was before the return trip? Or was Radder going to be inexorably forced by a law of immutable historicity or time itself provoked or was otherwise infused with a categorical imperative that was going to force him to recommit the crimes – even against his will – to recreate the weapons project in Senegal that he was at this moment due to his foreknowledge of the consequences firmly committed to avoid? He had created time-thrust and could thereby visit different years, but he had no idea whether it caused or carried ancillary effects and if they did, what they might be.

He didn’t have any sensation or consciousness of being that other self, so he preferred to think of Knut in Heidelberg as just a duplicate of himself or of himself as Knut’s duplicate; rather than Radder being an alias of Reffner or vice versa, i.e. the same person manifesting in two locations even if that was technically correct. The future had turned overnight into a dimming memory for him after just a few hours away from it, and it occurred to him that his life in the future might be exclusively based on his other self ’s actions. Perhaps Knut was going to continue to live on for many years and the self he was experiencing here and now as Radder was just a temporary phenomenon, a vestige or echo that was going to soon fade or suddenly expire. This prospect didn’t disturb him because as far as he was concerned, what is is and what was was, period end of story and anyway it all comes out in the wash. Even so, heedful and cautious deliberation combined with a certain stoicism seemed to him the most judicious path forward for him; fatalism is an exercise in futility, so there was no point in descending into it.

It seemed to him that if he is also his other self who may still be in Heidelberg, his consciousness should encompass that self as well, but he didn’t feel any such awareness. Perhaps oddly, he preferred that his other self be the one sent to prison for life for his Senegal transgressions, even though the other self was also himself. Would he need to dispose of Knut to avoid some kind of disaster arising from their simultaneous presence or conversely, will Knut become aware of Radder or remember his presence from a separate trip to the future and try to dispose of him? Maybe there are folds in this time-reality and Knut has or will soon have advance knowledge of Radder’s plot to eliminate him and will be ready for him, and he knew from personal experience that Knut was well armed. Even if he did succeed in dispatching Knut he might the same act inadvertently commit suicide. If he didn’t simultaneously perish with Knut and was apprehended for executing himself would he be prosecuted for his own murder? Even if he could prove to a court that snuffing out Knut was tantamount to suicide, that was also a crime in some places, strange as it may seem, but not one as severely punished as homicide. He decided that the safest course of action would probably be to avoid his alter ego. It was probably more advisable for Radder to avoid him and patiently wait for his double to perish in the African cliff collapse or – more likely – to be shot forward in time, as had occurred to him. If Knut was indeed going to be jettisoned forward it meant that for him, time could effectively be a Möbius Strip, curving back on itself repeatedly forever; which wasn’t irrational since there is no mathematical evidence that time is restricted to a forward-backward arrow.

After a suitable duration of considering this multifarious quandary, none of it appeared to be resolvable, so his mind began to stray away from it and eventually returned to how to deal with his adversaries. He began to wonder if ten-year-old Joey Blake would throw a monkey wrench into

whatever his next work would be as Joey was publicly credited with doing to his weapons work in Senegal; he considered the close proximity to Joey’s home of the time-thrusts he had placed while still in Madrid in 2091 – both of them less than a hundred miles north of him, but he doubted that this would make a difference in Joey’s ability to short-circuit them. He concluded that either Joey could do so no matter where they were located or he couldn’t do it at all, even though Joey had come all the way from California to Senegal to intervene in Radder’s previous project. Moreover, Radder decided not to try to determine where Joey was during the time of the placements in order to plot against him because he thought it beneath him and even an insult to plan a joust with a little boy; it was ludicrous on its face, that Joey could be a match for history’s greatest theoretical scientist.

The psychological quality of life didn’t seem so much different to him here in 2013 – which to reduce his confusion he decided to characterize as whence – because he hardly partook in what he regarded as licentious morality in the future anyway; the non-existent flings that he had there – which he decided to think of as hence – were as infrequent as the ones he had when he lived hence the first time around. He was now back in the era of jealousy and resentment that had existed for thousands of years along with a 24/7 epidemic of violent crime and other activities that he now regarded as retrograde, but none of it was likely to affect him personally; he was reclusive and detached from society and its values, as well as normally armed with concealed carry in case criminals tried to rob him and do him harm. He was nothing like the typical future man who indulged many times a day with multiple partners while in many cases maintaining an evidently secure lifepartnership. He doubted that any amount of time living would have changed that because he considered himself to be overarchingly cerebral and infinitesimally sensual. On the other hand he noted ironically, Were it the reverse I would have been better off suffering far lesser tribulations in relationships with women instead of being confronted by the military might of the entire world.

Anyway, now what? He could try to get his old job back; he wondered if he should give his old boss Rudolf Kaufmann a ring and see what he was up to, but Kaufmann would know that Radder was already working for him now and under the same name. On the one hand, Kaufmann would certainly be justified if he reacted to hearing from Radder by exclaiming, “Oh no, not you again!” – with multiple exclamation points, after two previous experiences of Radder bringing fire and brimstone down on the world under Kaufmann’s auspices, and on top of that discovering that there were two of him. On the other hand, based on the current date, neither event had actually happened yet and they probably weren’t going to happen – unless Radder or Knut engaged in what Einstein, who Radder always thought of as the great sage, admonished against trying to solve problems with the same kind of thinking used to create them. Meanwhile, Radder had now confirmed with own bumpy rides between the early and late 21st Century the great sage’s statement that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Radder would have to use a different kind of thinking from here forward because he wasn’t in the mood to undertake further risk of tribulation after a pair of narrow escapes from lifetime imprisonment or execution and fleeing police through trees followed by trudging for hours in the dead of night on a lonesome highway. He had an iron trap for a memory that had been dinged by his time-thrust into the future, but the damage may be abating because he had just remembered the exact date and time of the so-called Stadium Miracle and various other crucial events. While he was in the future he made a special attempt to memorize certain crucial facts for future reference; ironically, as he memorized them he didn’t realize that the future reference would turn out to be useful many decades in the past, during the now that he was experiencing at this moment.

The question occurred to him of what now really is, considering that he was being hurtled headlong forwards and backwards between different nows decades apart; but he set aside that mind-

numbing notion and decided to preserve his sanity by accepting whatever his current experience was as genuine, valid phenomenon of now regardless of whether it is occurring in the past, present or future ...

3: UNPLANNED TRAVEL Three hours after Radder’s calendar placement of a time-thrust anomaly north of San Francisco, John Harborough and his wife Juliet struck out on a hike along the Muir Woods Dipsea Trail. They out from their home after a brief stop-in at work in their tech startup and then started hiking on the trail much later than planned because of a traffic tie-up that delayed them as they crossed the Golden Gate Bridge after being excused from their jobs early. They nevertheless hoped to reach a point in the trail from which to enjoy a landmark view of an expanse of natural scenery on Mount Talmapais.

However, before they got that far they were forced to turn back by approaching dusk, arriving back at the trailhead just before darkness set in. They had enough of the day left to negotiate most of it with plenty of daylight; however, even if they completely had run out of light they were familiar enough with the trail to easily negotiate a half hour of it or more with the help of the propitious full moon and the flashlights they carried in their packs, and they could even stumble along in relative safety to the park exit in utter darkness if worst came to worst, though it would be a much slower trek.

Arriving again at the park entrance, they sat down on a bench to enjoy a few additional minutes of the park’s arboreal splendor before walking to the parking lot and driving home. As they sat discussing their view of the ocean from the trail, they heard salsa music about ten meters behind them from the direction of the gift shop, which they knew from past experience was closed this late in the day; they didn’t know the shop’s exact hours, but they agreed that they both remembered always seeing it closed in the late afternoon, and it was evening. John was about to tell Juliet that he was going to saunter over towards the shop to find out where the music was coming from, perhaps from a radio of someone who was behind it, but her cell phone sounded and she began a conversation with her sister on it. John got up from the bench and in order to avoid interrupting Julie’s call he silently pointed at the gift shop to indicate to her that he was going to investigate the music and she nodded her head up and down in acknowledgement and implicit approval; nothing about the park or anyone within it had ever inspired a feeling of menace or insecurity for them, so they had no qualms about separating for a brief period if either of them wandered off. As he approached the shop the sound of music that seemed to be blaring directly from it became louder and louder.

When he got to the door of the shop he saw movement through its glass so he came closer to it and was astonished to see inside it what appeared to be a much larger space than the gift shop should accommodate; as it was a tiny shop, barely more than a booth, like the gift shop at the entrance of the Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. There appeared to be bunk beds inside arranged as though it was a dormitory. As he peered through the door a man approached and opened it and said, “Pase, señor” while indicating with a backward sweep of his arm that John should enter the building.

Thoroughly perplexed, John hesitated but decided to go in because he realized he might come to regret leaving such a mysterious scene without at least minimally investigating it; had he been in a less favorable mood after his brief but nonetheless satisfying hike with Julie he might have felt uncertain enough to back away from the strange scene. As soon as he walked in John saw bunk beds all around the large room and he had confirmed for him that this size was impossible because as he approached the shop he had noted that it was the same tiny shed that it had always been. He felt an impulse to turn on a dime and bolt through the door, but the man who opened it and invited him in took his

arm and led him toward a set of beds a few paces away, telling him in Spanish that he would participate in a scene right away. John tentatively complied, at this point mesmerized as the man planted him standing next to a bed and walked off. John didn’t understand enough Spanish to know what the man said, and being dumfounded by what he saw around him, he remained in place looking at several other apparent Hispanics who were nearby and facing him with inscrutable expressions on their faces, some seated and some standing. He finally snapped out of his flummox and turned to head back toward the door, but a hulking male came towards him from the direction of the door, angrily pushing others aside as he approached him, so John stopped dead in his tracks.

The man came straight at John, stopped in front of him and told him in Spanish that he was going to assault him, which John understood only by inference based on his threatening gestures. Like a deus ex machina, a muscular American gringo who was noticeably smaller and shorter than either of them and whom John hadn’t previously noticed stepped forward and took the man on, warning him in English that John was his friend and was part of this film scene, though John didn’t recognize him or know anything about any film. John was strong and healthy but no pugilist and in fact was politically a pacifist, so he was frightened and unsure whether the short man might be telling the truth about being his friend or just saying so as part of his defense of a fellow gringo. At this point all bets were off and he wouldn’t surprised that his defender was one of his best friends in the world, and in fact at this moment he rather preferred that he was. His so-called friend walked straight up to the brute and very quickly they were chest-to-chest and exchanging insults, but of the two it appeared that the friend was the more aggressive and the other the more cautious. Finally, the brute reached out with his right hand and pushed the American away from him, whereupon the gringo responded with a flurry of punches that pummeled the man to the floor. The gringo stood over him, kicked him repeatedly and challenged him to get up and fight, but the brute was already vanquished and the fight had clearly gone out of him. The brute waved his hand up at John’s friend and in effect cried uncle in Spanish, shouting “Basta! Basta!” but John’s friend grabbed him by the shirt and tried to get him up, repeatedly calling him a coward – a cobarde – and continuing to insist that he get up and take some more punches. However, the brute pulled away and rolled onto his stomach, coverings his head with his hands to protect it from more punches or kicks. Then the gringo turned to John and told him it was safe for him to leave and walked away. John didn’t bother to ask his new or old friend how he knew he was in the process of leaving when he was threatened by the man who was struggling to get up, grunting out his pain. Instead, he profusely thanked his friend weakly and then heard someone yell, “Cut!” He turned to see a man standing nearby with a cameraman, which surprised him because he thought that he should have spotted the director and his gear and assistants when he looked around the building shortly after entering it. John had evidently just participated in some kind of film scene.

He looked all around him for the first time and saw that he was in an impossibly large bungalow, so there was no way it could be inside the trail head tourist shop – not that this mystery was as high a priority as extricating himself from it, whatever or wherever it was. Then he saw on the other side of the bungalow an elaborate mural design that he recognized as exactly like the one he had seen in an Amazon prison three years earlier in South America when he visited a British friend who was held there briefly on a drug charge; and that was when he realized to his further astonishment and horror that the entire place was an uncanny duplicate of the prison building in which his friend was held.

However, he saw in this room neither his British friend nor any of the other gringos, all of whom he met during that visit and the American who just rescued him not having been among them; however, he didn’t feel inclined to hang around to see if any of the gringos he met last time were still in the prison population because his only priority was to get out while the gettin’s good – assuming it was

good. If he was back in the same prison, his British friend may have been released, as there never was much of a case against him anyway. Whatever was going on, he dreaded the thought of losing his protection from the American and needed to find a way to any place where he might be safer than here. He was aware that there may be other foreigners in this prison bungalow besides the gringo who helped him because in these places foreigners were kept together and if he was there other foreigners must be there also, but he was in a crisis and had to flee the scene without consideration of anything except his own survival, so he didn’t chastise himself for not stopping to collect personal information such as the names or prisoners and the contact information of their loved ones back in their home countries – even from the one who saved him from a beating; and he didn’t in that short time span notice anybody who looked like a European or an American anyway.

His priority had become to put as much distance between him and all of the prisoners including the gringos as soon as possible. Spooked by the realization about where he was, John sharply turned away from the bunk beds and again looked at where the door should be through which he had accessed this bizarre travail. There was a door approximately where the entrance of the gift shop should be, but when he walked to it he found it was solid wood with no glass at all in it. Nevertheless, he turned the knob and pushed it open, and saw an outside of palm trees and lush, wild growth beyond it instead of the famous Muir redwoods. He stepped outside and in spite of the obvious fact that he wasn’t in Muir Woods he loudly and almost desperately called out, “Juliet! Juliet!” but she didn’t respond, nor did he see her anywhere; nor was he certain that he wanted to find her in a place like this where women would have few if any human rights; assuming he was where he appeared to be – in a South American penitentiary; and they were kept separately anyway if she was also in custody as he feared he might be. He stood in place for half a minute with his mouth open, incredulous. He asked himself, What happened? Did I die? What else could explain something so inexplicable?

Oh no, I’m in hell! There’s no way all this could be happening to me without having died!

John didn’t turn back toward the scene behind him even though he was cognizant of the danger that his defender may have gone off and lost interest in him and the brute who menaced him might note this and take advantage of a new opportunity to isolate him and attack him from behind – this time carrying out whatever he had threatened to do to him before the intervention stopped him. He realized he hadn’t even thanked the American who had rescued him, but he didn’t feel any guilt about that because of the chaotic nature of the experience thus far. At this point John feared continued further voluntary involvement with this ghost building from an Amazon past more than he did the troublemaker and had every intention of attempting to put the incomprehensible madhouse behind him without looking back if possible; he felt a dread, as if he would curse himself to stay in the bungalow forever if he didn’t put his view of it behind him permanently; he needed to try to get out of this place ASAP. The new and urgent problem now was that he was seeing all around him the tropical milieu of the prison he previously visited, so he decided to retrace the steps that he took when he previously entered it to visit his captive friend. Ahead of him and on both sides to his left and right were the same walls that looked more than five meters high, which he vaguely remembered from his prior visit; he didn’t doubt that there was one just as high behind him and that he was in fact totally confined by walls on four sides in a square or a rectangular configuration. He saw guard towers, which confirmed yet again what he already knew, that he had somehow been transported into a prison in a Spanishlanguage country. He was certain that this was the exact same scene he saw next to the prison building he previously visited even though on that occasion he only viewed it briefly on his way into the building to visit his friend. To his left was a range of small dirt hills with scruffy men standing and sitting on them, a few of them yelling down towards him, separated from him by a fence that was

about three meters high – the same scene he saw in the prison; and a taller cement wall was another twenty meters beyond the hills. If he was really in the same prison these hills were what inmates called the pampa, the area of the prison where the poor inmates lived; the wooden fence separated them from the wealthier natives and foreign inmates who lived in the bungalow.

John’s British inmate friend had told him that most of the pampa inmates carried knives and other weapons but thankfully no guns, and often several of them climbed to the top of the fence from where they shouted down at the bungalow inmates latrine next to it that the bungalow inmates had no choice but to use; shouting down threats or demanding rescate, which was Spanish for ransom. On occasion some of them bribed themselves out of their night lockup and over the fence to steal something from the far more affluent bungalow inmates where John’s friend lived. Somehow they were able to pull large objects including a thick blanket through the four square inches of space in the cyclone fence that covered the bungalow windows, and one of them in particular was notorious for being able to to this in mere seconds, almost like magic. After capturing an item such as a blanket, the pampero always demanded rescate for its return and if it was refused he might rain sticks and stones at the victim when he exited to use the latrine.

Almost all of them were addicted to cocaine paste and would do anything to get one paste cigarette rolled into carcinogenic tobacco even though it did nothing but turn them into zombies that had just one purpose in life, which was to get another paste cigarette. Since John knew he was going to leave this place and therefore could never become addicted to the paste, he had smoked a couple of these cigarettes with his British friend while visiting with him but felt no effects from it whatsoever. Once a rescate was paid, it was shared with the prison guard who had received a bribe to let the pampero climb over the fence. In terms of American dollars, these bribes and rescates ridiculously amounted to mere pennies, but they served to make life corruptly interesting for all involved. John’s British friend suffered a bloody nose from a stick thrown at him when he tried to negotiate a rescate for a German who had depressingly been caught with enough cocaine paste to put him away for a couple of years; fortunately, John’s friend had been arrested with only a few grams of coca paste that were worth the equivalent of a dollar and was released without charges after three weeks of custody after paying a fine and a bribes totaling several thousand dollars.

He resigned himself to the impossible but nevertheless undeniable reality that he was in the same South American prison that he had previously visited or – God forbid – perhaps in its hell version. It occurred to him that he could be in an unaccountably vivid dream, but he didn’t pinch himself to try to wake himself up; he had no confidence that pinching to wake up was more than an old wives tale, and he feared that this tactic, which at any rate repelled him for some reason, might actually backfire on him in some way he couldn’t anticipate. Since he had no reason to be in this prison in the first place, he felt a gnawing fear that he might actually be an inmate this time around, so determining if he was still a free man became for him the utmost exigency. He opted to roll with his circumstances by turning towards a corner of the bungalow and heading for where he remembered the exit was – hopefully he was again a visitor rather than one of the inmates and would be allowed to walk out to the free world, assuming there was one in this so-called reality. Coming around the corner of the bungalow, he recognized the gate dead ahead and without pausing he briskly and nervously walked to it.

To his unbounded relief, he was waved through and out of the prison without being questioned by the guards even though he was indistinguishable from the foreign inmates because all of the inmates wore normal street clothes rather than uniforms. He had been in this prison only once because his friend was released the day after John visited him, yet the guards acted like they knew him. He was unimaginably grateful to make good his escape from this traumatic incarceration in spite

of his uncertainty about what he was going to encounter now that he was free of it, because he knew the civilian area outside it was primarily populated at worst by petty thieves, whereas there were many homicidal maniacs within the prison. Wherever he had traveled in Latin America, although he needed to keep his eyes open for crooks, for the most part he found the general population to be perfectly honest and in many cases downright admirable and maybe in some cases of a higher integrity than he had himself.

He crossed the street directly into a community – there was no buffer zone, which he remembered was also true of a Mexican prison he once visited, and in fact that prison had many of the same features he had seen in this one that were so radically different than in the U.S., such as mixing convicted inmates serving sentences as long as life with those who had just been in custody for a few days; and all prisoners wearing normal street clothes instead of prison uniforms. The distinction about mixing two sharply different types of inmates was less prominent now he noticed, because American county jails were housing prison convicts due to budget shortfalls, which seemed to him to be lamentable. Ahead of him he saw small homes lining the street that ended in a T intersection at the entrance to the prison; it was unpaved, simply packed dirt like the walking surface inside the prison. He crossed the street to begin putting as much space between him and the lock-up as possible and remembered that if he turned right at the next block he would be just a few minutes away from the zócalo town square, where there was a market and a bus stop at which he could board a transport back towards the coast and the capital, hundreds of miles west, which he would fly to if he could rather than spend days traveling to it on a rickety bus; even if he called Juliet this very day and could assure her he was coming home and substantially abate her anxiety about what happened to him, he was anxious to get home to her as fast as he could.

He remembered that if he walked a couple of blocks past the stop of the bus that headed towards the biggest nearby city, he could also board a train in the same direction. Now it was time for him to take stock of his options and then try to get out of this country before the authorities came up with an excuse to haul him into custody. He put his hand in his right pocket and felt the dozen or so bills that were it it – around thirty or forty dollars; this was the first time he ever wished he carried a wallet. He had left his pack on the bench with Juliet, so he didn’t have his cell phone, driver’s license or credit card; his passport wasn’t in the pack, but it was sitting in a desk drawer back home where it wouldn’t do him the slightest bit of good for getting out of this predicament. Sliding his thumbs inside his pants under the belt, he felt the cash stash that he kept under his belt for emergencies, but he couldn’t take it out to see how much it he still had until he came to a safe place where nobody would see him count it. The first thing he needed to do now was find out how much money he was carrying and then try to make his way to the nearest American consulate; he recalled having at least eight hundred-dollar bills in his secret stash that he always kept in a travel belt around his waist but never used for anything – enough to fly to the capital and then pay hotel rent for a couple of weeks while he waited for the Embassy to issue him a new passport, and still leaving him with plenty for plane fare to get anywhere out of the country, even if it was to an adjacent one such as Venezuela.

Once he was in another country he felt more confident about getting Juliet to send him money to get home if he hadn’t succeeded in doing that in this one. Furthermore, he feared that here he might find himself arrested and prosecuted for God knows what bizarre crime that he didn’t commit and learn to his chagrin that he had been allowed to leave the prison by mistake; as an American, it was possible that if he entered a nearby country it would refuse to hand him over to this one unless he was charged with something dastardly such as a homicide. But he had to get to a consulate without being challenged for ID on the way – not an easy task in a country where military check points abounded and where it seemed to him tourists were often treated by authorities with a palpable

rudeness that he suspected derived from an invidious desire to figuratively turn them upside down and shake all the money out of their pockets. Bribery was a way out of most serious trouble here, but he might lack the amount needed for his offense that he might be accused of committing.

He didn’t speak Spanish well enough to explain at a check point that he lost his passport, so if he was challenged for ID he would likely be detained. All of this escape planning depended on his cash stash being sufficient, so he needed to find a thoroughly private venue right away to count his money, and then right after that he needed to get to find a way to make a phone call to Juliet, who undoubtedly was wild with worry and thought he had been kidnapped and maybe even murdered; there was no way John could imagine that she might think that he had run off deliberately. Because reality had gone mad, he knew that when he finally pulled out his stash he might find anything eight dollars instead of eight hundred, or eight Nuevo Soles, which would be such a pittance it could spell disaster. After he arrived at the next intersection he saw bustling in the distance his left that indicated the zócalo was in that direction; and to his right where he had remembered it being, the street petered out into dust and houses. This didn’t bother him at first, as he thought the discrepancy was a mere artifact of his defective memory – but then it occurred to him that he may have arrived in a different world or parallel dimension that was flipped horizontally so that everything previously to his right was now to his left. He attempted to put that vexing notion out of his head, as there was no way he could prove it and moreover he had other problems of greater primacy to resolve.

After walking half a block he saw an cul-de-sac between houses – not a full alley but enough space for him to step into it and be unseen from the rest of the street or the houses on either side that had no windows looking onto it. He walked slowly, trying to appear nonchalant and relaxed in the hot and humid weather and entered the cul-de-sac after waiting until the only person within half a block of him turned the corner and disappeared from his view. Quickly, he pulled his stash cash out from inside his waistline, saw that it was more than half a dozen hundred- dollar bills, but counted it in full because knowing the exact amount might turn out later to be crucial for him. He counted nine hundred-dollar bills, stashed them back into his waist line and pulled the smaller bills out of his pants pocket. Strangely, he found he had three twenty-dollar bills and three bills of twenty Nuevo Soles, which if he remembered correctly was a total of only about three bucks at the exchange rate when he was there before, and probably even less now.

He puzzled – but not for long – as to how the Nuevo Soles worked their way into his pants. His cash fully counted, he exited to the street and gratefully saw nobody near him or looking at him even from a distance. He resumed his march towards the zócalo, seeing a few pedestrians along the way and a lot of them on the last couple of blocks. He remembered Juliet had teasing him a couple of times about carrying nearly a thousand dollars of cash around with him, but when he was back with her again he was sure she would no longer tease him about it – assuming he would get home for the opportunity to describe this experience to her. He began to pang for her companionship and felt some fear that there wasn’t even a Juliet in this world if something bizarre like entering another world was the explanation of what happened to him. Maybe the only Juliet in this world was Juliet Of The Spirits? It was only as he arrived at the zócalo that he began to wonder why a movie was being shot in the prison bungalow and how many of the prisoners were actually actors and why the movie was being shot in such a place instead of in a studio. Certainly the ones who fought over him weren’t all play-acting, since he had seen one of them severely beat another and it was obviously a real fight. The one who defended him drew what was obviously real blood on the other’s face with his punches and kicks after his adversary was down, ouch! It was theoretically possible but unlikely that stunt men were paid enough to be willing to accept such a fisticuff trouncing.

After contemplating this momentarily, he set it aside because he was still in total crisis – still in a

Third World country where anything could happen to him and had in fact happened to other foreigners such as his British friend, so he wouldn’t be able to breathe freely until he finally set both feet in his home country. But what if the U.S. government was in on this scam? What if it was his own government set him up for this as part of an experiment and would silence him so he couldn’t expose what they did? He remembered that the U.S. Army slipped psychedelic drugs into the coffee of innocent people, causing some of them to go insane and commit suicide. But he had no alternative other than to report to the U.S. consulate. Other countries like Sweden and France would be more reliable for protecting his civil rights, but he obviously couldn’t appeal to them to help him because he wasn’t a citizen of their countries; unfortunately, his only recourse was to his own government that had long ago lost its reputation as a defender of civil liberties and was in fact known to turn the other way even when its own citizens were brutalized.

He couldn’t remember where the bus stop or train station were, for some reason – perhaps because he had misremembered the direction to the zócalo as soon as he left the prison and the discrepancy had bamboozled his points of reference. He looked around and wasn’t surprised that he saw nobody who looked European or American – this was, after all, not a tourist destination but rather prison village with a handful of foreigners locked up inside, so the only gringos that came here were a very occasional visitor to one of those unfortunate inmates. He approached a couple of senior citizens who were sitting on a bench in the zócalo; he remembered that Spanish folks were rather scrupulous about switching from saying “Buenos días” to “Buenas tardes” as soon as the sun passed the midway point, and he was pretty sure that had happened so he greeted two of them with the latter and they replied in kind. He had no idea why it wasn’t night time as it was half an hour ago in Muir Woods – it looked like mid- afternoon even though the time zone he was in was the same as California, which he remembered from timing his phone calls home when he was previously in this country; he fretted about his cell phone being in his pack sitting next to Juliet and wondered if it would say 8 or the 2 that it looked like? He approached two men sitting languidly on a bench and asked them in stumbling and broken Spanish, “Buenas tardes señores, donde está tren?”

They looked at each other and then back at him and discussed between themselves and then replied in too rapid a delivery for him to understand anything they said, but he gathered from their pointing and waving that if he walked to his right along the street behind him that bordered the zócalo he might find something; which hopefully would the train station but may be something else altogether, judging by past experience. This was probably not a case of someone explaining something that they knew nothing about. In Mexico he had found that it was considered rude to tell someone you don’t know where a place is that they ask you for directions to get to, so you often attempted to provide directions even when you have no idea where it is. Once when a man in Mexico started telling John to go one block down and a block to the left to find an address, the man was exposed as bogus by a woman standing nearby, who admonished him that the place certainly wasn’t where he was describing it to be. The man looked abashed at having his cover blown and John was amused, as this was the first time he saw someone exposed for his fraudulent directions. But these two men in the zócalo probably knew exactly where the train station was and were accurately directing him to it. He thanked them and began his search for the train station. Sure enough, after two blocks of walking, he saw the train station up ahead, and he noted that a clock there with hands indicating it might be an analog device said 2:11 – but was it accurate? And was it night time in Muir Woods, and was Juliet desperately calling out his name at this very moment? Now he would have to deal with the currency issue. He doubted that this would be a serious problem because during the previous occasion when he was in this country he saw currency exchangers even in small villages; and in fact such mercantilists were evident in any large village in all of the Third World countries he had

previously visited.

He approached the cashier’s window and said in an inquisitive tone the name of the larger town that he remembered being twenty miles away from where he could catch a plane to the nearest town, Iquitos; but as soon as the cashier saw his American dollars he shook his head and spoke rapidly, waving around like the old men in the zócalo, and the drift seemed to be that Harborough would have to find a money exchanger changer, but he couldn’t decipher from their waving which way he should go to find one. He pulled out his Nuevo Pesos, but he gathered from the cashier that they weren’t enough for that long a trip. Fortunately, after he showed several people some of his money and asked, “Cambio?” he was directed to a freelance currency exchanger. He took a chance of being cheated or robbed by changing a hundred-dollar bill, figuring it would provide him with enough Nuevo Pesos to get him all the way to the capital of the country, and then returned to the cashier and bought a train ticket to Iquitos. He became anxious to get there because unlike this small town it was a destination for a tsunami of tourists from all over the world; so hopefully he should be in less severe straits and uncertainty when he arrived there than he was in now.

The train left half an hour later and the ride was normal, with a conductor checking his ticket without giving him a hard time; and he arrived in Iquitos to find the station clock there showing 2:58 – so maybe it really was late afternoon. He changed more money and from the Iquitos train station he hopped a shuttle to the airport, riding there with two French ladies. He didn’t bother telling the ladies his story, which obviously they couldn’t possibly believe or begin to understand, since he couldn’t believe or understand it himself; and anyway they were absorbed in complaining about the high tourist prices in Iquitos all the way to the airport. Less than an hour later he landed in the capital. He didn’t try to call home until then because he feared that he might in some bizarre way curse his chances of going home. Juliet was overwhelmed with happiness when she heard his voice and astonished to hear his story. She told him she would immediately wire him more money so he could buy a ticket home, and late the next morning they were together again. He never tried to find out who was making the movie in the prison and instead chose to try to put the entire nightmare behind him.

The night before John landed in SFO airport and was joyfully and tearfully reunited with Juliet, tenyear-old Joey Blake, who lived fifty miles south of the airport in Palo Alto and whose stone companion Lucky had performed minor miracles by helping him and two of his friends, dreamed about a man walking into a tiny shop and being transported to a distant place.

After he woke up, Joey didn’t understand the dream and had no idea that it was going to occur later that day in real, waking life.

4: DEMONSTRATING LUCKY’S POWER Joey was in his current now that his miraculous companion Lucky shattered into three at the precise moment that he reversed the finish of a Saturday morning San Francisco Bay To Breakers foot race and changed it to one more to Joey’s liking; all three nows were simultaneously running; in two of them a Moroccan won and in a third he tied with two Kenyans. The three separate futures that were on tap to occur after these three presents also differed in other ways, such as in one of them including a massive earthquake in the Giants baseball park several hours after the race, this current one only a tremor, and no earthquake at all in the third. Due to another twist in time continuum phenomena that Lucky caused, Joey remembered mostly as dreams some of the futures of all the three nows, such as the evil scientist Klaus Radder’s unimaginable villainy that included the destruction of cities and worlds and Klaus paradoxically rescuing Chris and Jorge in a distant solar system in all three, though Joey didn’t remember the circumstances that were going to lead to the rescue. He also

didn’t remember the home invasion of Kurt’s residence or that Kurt was going to be kidnapped, or his eventual reunion with Joey that were in all three futures. This patchwork of prophetic dreams and multiple-future-memory would have driven any adult mad or close to it, but Joey was still malleable at age ten and readily accepted anything no matter how strange as par for the course without feeling disturbed or confused by it, especially because he had faith in Lucky and knew no life other than the incredible events associated with him.

Joey called Kurt’s phone for several days without success, which frustrated him no end because he wanted to tell him about how he, Jane and Lucky had saved Ms. Milford. Although he had heard that Kurt had recruited another student to cover his classes for him by taking smart phone audio notes, Joey had forgotten about this in the midst of his excitement of exposing the violent criminal and causing his arrest, pre-empting his attack on Ms. Milford; so he obtusely failed to put two and two together and conclude that Kurt was going out of town. Joey could have learned about Kurt’s trip out of town from one of his clubmates, but he didn’t want to talk to them until after he told Kurt about his Lucky-sponsored time travel with Jane and was avoiding them. Kurt lived in a neighborhood that had a reputation as being the rough part of town, and it did look run down compared to Joey’s brand-spanking-new neighborhood, but Joey always felt safe when he went to Kurt’s and had neither observed nor experienced trouble on his way there or back home, so he never hesitated about going to Kurt’s house and visited him there more often than Kurt visited Joey in his fancy neighborhood that included several monster homes.

Joey’s father never suggested driving him to Kurt’s or picking him up afterwards or admonish anything at all about safety other than advising him wear his helmet and to ride carefully. Joey had met some of Kurt’s neighbors and found them quite friendly and engaging; in fact, Joey had made other friends in Kurt’s neighborhood that he sometimes visited at their homes before or after seeing Kurt, having recognized them from school. But what he had to discuss today was strictly for his best friend Kurt’s eyes only. As he rode his bike to Kurt’s, Joey realized his perspective about the time-travel event had changed after being unable to contact Kurt and Joey now felt more primacy for talking to Kurt about a disturbing dream he had a few days earlier and another one last night. The urgency to tell Kurt about traveling through time had surprisingly waned and now he was thinking of holding off describing it to Kurt until he had discussed his dream with him before he started to forget details that may be crucial to analyzing them; and he decided that after that he should show him a practical example of what Lucky did by sending him and Jane into the past. He would invent a situation and have Lucky demonstrate his time-travel power for Kurt’s enlightenment; similarly to what he did a few days earlier when he showed him mundane changes in baseball and football games that they watched on television. In the case of the baseball game he changed an event right after it occurred as they watched in live, but in the football case it was Joey changed an event in a video recording and never went back and re- ran it to see if the change had taken hold permanently in a historical sense or if it was just fleeting and only affecting what he and Kurt were watching at the moment that he changed it but wasn’t forever etched into the objective human history.

Joey wasn’t concerned about whether these incidents would retain permanent historical persistence because they were strictly experimental and therefore didn’t necessarily mean anything either way; nor was he worried about finding out that some time in the future he would learn that Ms. Milford had been wounded after all, and that what Lucky changed hadn’t persisted historically, because Joey knew that Lucky wouldn’t do that to him. Kurt had reacted with disbelief and denial when Joey changed a sports event in his presence, rushing out of his house without explanation, so it might be best to actually demonstrate the time travel to Kurt before describing the exposure of the criminal and explaining why no report of Ms. Milford being assaulted was in the news if Kurt looked

for one; and neither did it exist in anyone’s mind except for those of Joey and Jane, whom Joey called before leaving for Kurt’s to make sure she was at home and ready to take a call from Kurt to confirm what Joey was planning to him about the criminal counselor stabbing her.

He pedaled his bike to Kurt’s house and wheeled around to the back as he always did and entered the unlocked back door without knocking, heading straight to Kurt’s bedroom. His door was open and he was lying on his back across his single bed holding a balsa wood airplane in both hands above him in which the glue he applied to it had just finished drying; he was twirling it around to see if there were any imperfections in how he fit the pieces together. Next to him on his bed was a flute that he had been practicing playing earlier. Joey sat down at Kurt’s old IBM computer, which was on and apparently was just used because he saw an Internet browser on the desktop rather than Kurt’s usual screen saver of fighter airplanes. Lucky’s reversal of multiple events including the Senegal destructions of American cities now existed only in dreams that Joey’s siblings and Kurt were having on a regular basis; they were aware of the events but they thought of them as potential rather than as actual based on several of the dreams that were clearly fantasy rather than any kind of reality, and only Joey knew that some of them were real. As if on cue, as soon as Joey walked into Kurt’s room he encountered a healthy dose of Kurt’s tendency to deny the event reversals. Kurt began right away explaining his doubts about what Joey thought his stone Lucky had accomplished. In spite of all that Kurt had seen, experienced and heard about from multiple sources, he seemed unable to divest himself of a fundamental skepticism about what Lucky had done.

“I been thinking, Joey, that maybe I really did win that yo-yo contest and the same thing with your swim race and what you showed me. Maybe we all just thought weird things were happening and they really didn’t, and maybe they’re just psychological effect of those dreams we’re having.”

“No way, other guys saw Frank’s knee all banged up with a compound fracture, even though he has no firm memory of it – he told me he remembers his knee being hurt but he doesn’t know why it was totally all right afterwards. I don’t even know how he managed to get himself hurt so bad just falling off a skateboard, but I saw it with my own eyes and he was hurt really bad. Anyway, I’ve gotta explain to him that Lucky cured him pretty soon cuz it’s not fair to leave any of our clubmates in the dark about all this, especially Frank after what happened to him.”

“I’m glad you asked him about that. I really wanted to know his side of the story but I wasn’t there when it happened, so it didn’t feel right for me to bother him about it. But how come he only has this vague memory, how come he doesn’t know he was cured?”

“That’s just the way Lucky works, he doesn’t let everybody in on everything he’s doing sometimes, you oughta know that by now. Anyway, check this out, and afterwards I’ll tell you about what Jane and I did that way weirder than this. I’m going to show you some time travel if Lucky will let me.”

Joey decided to extemporaneously demonstrate Lucky’s time-travel ability with an example right there in Kurt’s bedroom with a maneuver he improvised on the spot. He handed Kurt a standard sheet of computer paper after folding it in half nd explained, “You’re not gonna believe this, it’s so cool it’s actually spooky but harmless. Turn your back to me, write a word on this paper and hold it with the word facing the wall so I can’t see it. Make sure it’s a word I can’t guess. I’m gonna turn around also to make sure I won’t be able to see what you’ll write. tell me when you’re ready for me to tell you what word you wrote down.”

He then turned around and after about twenty seconds he asked, “Ready?” Kurt replied, “Okay, I’m ready.” Joey turned around and said, “Fantasia.” Kurt was surprised and asked, “How did you do that?”

“I cheated, but you can’t guess how.”

“No, you’re right, I don’t have a clue. Tell me all about it, I’m all ears.”

“Lucky was able go into the past to change the result of the yo-yo contest and all that other stuff that you already know about, and now I found out something else he can do. He can send me back to an earlier time and I can mosey around and see and do whatever I want to and then come back to this time. After you turned around I pulled Lucky out and stared at him and he showed me two choices as he always does, and this time on the left side you had just turned around and on the right side I saw myself facing you with my back to the wall looking at the word you wrote, but the word wasn’t visible on Lucky’s screen. So I mentally told him to take me to the right side where I was looking at the word and right after that I was still standing in the same place but you weren’t moving at all, you were totally stiff like a statue, so I walked around and looked at the word, and then I told Lucky to put me back at the scene on the left side, and here I am. I didn’t even have to speak out loud, I just thought about what I wanted for the first time and Lucky took care of it.”

“I don’t get it, you gotta explain that to me. What are you saying? Nobody can travel through time, I thought that was impossible.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying, that I can go back in time. And it makes sense in a way because that’s what Lucky does – after something bad happens, he goes back and changes it. You had already lost the yo- yo contest and I had lost the swim race when I asked Lucky to change the result, and he went back through time and changed it. He did the same thing to cure Frank’s knee. I still don’t know the mechanics of it, but maybe I’ll never know that. When you think about it, that’s what happened long ago in that valley when we were warriors in the same dream that we both had. We were both badly hurt and about to die but Lucky not only changed the attack on us, he sent us back to the time before the attack. Now he showed me that not only can he go back through time to change something, he can send me back to change stuff too.”

“Jeez, that’s really weird. It looked like Lucky could go back a few seconds to change the yo-yo and swim race and Frank things and even what he did in our dreams during that war in a valley, but I didn’t know he could actually send a person back in time. I dunno, Joey, it sounds dangerous. I don’t think you should do this again until you discuss it with some folks, maybe including your parents. It’s already strange that you have something like this but only a couple of kids like you know about it and not responsible adults like your folks. How come you haven’t told them about Lucky?”

“If my mom or dad had been there when Lucky did any of those things I would have told them, but so far it’s only been fifth-graders like you and Jane, so I’m keeping it that way. We don’t know that adults would know anything different than we know about this anyway.”

“Okay, that’s up to you, but don’t make me freeze again because I might stick that way and turn into a real stiff. And what if you go back in time and then you can’t get back? When you went back were there two of you, the one who was already there and the new one who went back, or only one?

Did you replace yourself when you went back there?”

“I think there were two when I went back, but it’s different than what Lucky did in other events.

For instance, you and I never left the the time we were in when those warriors in that dream attacked us and Lucky rescued us and all our people by crashing a mountain on them. Lucky just froze everybody, but he didn’t move anybody through time backwards or forwards, and he didn’t do that with the yo-yo contest, the swim race, Frank’s injury and all that. You know the warrior scene really happened because we both had the same dream and we had never even talked about anything like that or saw a movie about it together or anything. And Natalie and Paul and Karen all had the same dream also.”

“I dunno, I still say this is too creepy, and a dream isn’t necessarily what they call prophetic, or in this case describe what really happened. If you do go into the past again you should make sure you

don’t touch or change anything that you don’t have to, you don’t know what might happen.”

“I’ve thought about that but I’m not really worried.”

“No, really, Joey. This could be really dangerous, you could be playing with fire – or worse. I heard about a science fiction story where somebody went into the past and while he was there he stepped on a bug without even noticing it and it changed all of history, so when he got back to the present the entire world around him was completely different than it was when he was there before he went into the past. And I already warned you before about doing unimportant stuff with Lucky and here you are at it again about a word I wrote.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t have any reason to do demos a buncha times, it was an experiment just to show you, it’s not something I do all the time for fun. And it might come in handy some time. It’s only the second time I tried to ask him to do something for me instead of waiting for him to offer it, and also I never did it mentally, without speaking, before, so that’s a first too.”

“So much for my theory that Lucky really didn’t do all that stuff that I was trying to convince you about when you came in. I totally believe you now, so forget about doing it again to prove it to me, don’t do this time thing on me again, okay?”

“Okay, now that I showed you an example of Lucky sending me into the past I’m gonna tell you what Jane and I did – it’s really cool. We both went into the past and prevented a violent crime from happening. And we changed a whole buncha stuff while we were back there, not just step on a bug, and when we got back to the present the only difference we noticed was that the crime had been erased from reality. In other words, you don’t need to believe everything you read in a science fiction story. By the way, where were you the last several days?”

“My dad got some unexpected time off from work and made a snap decision for us to go drive in Yosemite and hike the trails there, so I was absent from school and the weekend. Janet Simmons covered my classes and was supposed to tell you where I went.”

“I knew about her doing that but I didn’t ask where you went cuz I got involved with this really big deal with me and Jane and Lucky. You won’t believe it even after I tell you every single detail about it.”

“So you told Jane about Lucky. That’s a surprise.”

“You’ll understand that when I tell you all about it. And I had another one of those far-out dream last night.”

“I hope it wasn’t about cities and planets being wiped out, you’re starting to spook me with that end-of- the-world stuff.”

“Not exactly ... but you know my dreams have turned out to be accurate about a lotta stuff and Lucky was always behind it. He showed me the past that also had you and Natalie in it and the spelling bee and the yo-yo contest and the swim race and Frank’s blown-out knee on his screen and all of it came true ... well, the spelling bee didn’t, but that’s because I was surprised and turned down what Lucky wanted to do. I had a new dream last night that I want to run by you.”

“I gotta start on my homework, you and Lucky are always distracting me, so spill your guts real quick about your dream last night and what you and Jane figured out, young fella, I ain’t got all day and besides that I’m a young man in a hurry.”

“Who you calling a man, I’m almost eleven so I’m older than you are. I shouldn’t even be in the same grade as a little kid like you.”

“Okay grandpa, just get it over with before I lose patience and throw a baby tantrum on you. I can’t spend the whole morning lollygagging. You and Lucky keep me from doing my homework all the time. And both of us are ahead of most other kids our age, so quit bragging.”

“Yeah, Lucky does the same thing to me, if my dad didn’t force me I wouldn’t get any homework

done at all ...” said Joey as he looked down at the floor, pondering whether he should really reveal all of his dreams, even to his best friend, but he decided to go ahead and do it, saying “Let’s start with my dream a few days ago and get to the one last night. It’s way less important than what Jane and me did, but I’m afraid I’ll start forgetting parts of it if I don’t tell you about it right away.”

“You probably forgot about half of it already cuz dreams fade fast.”

“I already talked to Jane about it so I should remember most of what I told her, but she doesn’t have any ideas about what it meant. In the dream I saw a man sitting at a computer and on the screen there was a wobbly shimmering cellophane thingy wrapping around the entrance of the little shop. It looked just like the little one at Muir Woods – you remember that shop right near the parking lot entrance and the trail head, right?”

Kurt replied, “Was that a shop? I didn’t notice cuz I didn’t really go near it when I was there with my mom and dad. I thought it was just a rest room.”

“I guess it’s for tourists like they always have in places where tourists go. I asked my dad about it and he said he thinks it sell s trail maps and souvenirs like plaques and stuff. I got a close look at it and in fact I went in it, so I’m pretty sure it’s the same one that was in my dream.”

“So what about it? What was the cellophane film, did you find that out in the dream?”

Joey explained, “It was evening and it looked like it was almost dark, and the thingy showed up covering the door of the shop and then it disappeared. There was salsa music coming from around there and a guy opened the door of the shop and walked into it and later a woman went to the door and looked in through the glass and after that she looked around and started calling out the name John, so it was pretty obvious she didn’t find him in that tiny little building even though it’s smaller than a step van. She walked around the shop calling out the name John over and over and finally after awhile she made a phone call and some kind of green car parked in the lot and a guy in a uniform walked over to her and talked to her. I don’t remember what forest ranger uniforms look like except that I think they’re green, but I suppose that’s what he was wearing ... and that’s when I woke up. And get this, some guy came back from South America, and he says he walked into that shop after dark when it was supposed to be closed and suddenly found himself in South America.”

“Yeah, I saw something about that in Weird News. But I only read like, the first paragraph, I thought it was a hoax like balloon boy or something. Are you saying Lucky sent the guy to South America? Now you’re starting to pique my interest, maybe I’ll postpone my homework for this.”

Befuddled, Joey asked, “What kind of peak? Like Mount Everest?”

“No, I mean pique, with a q, not with a k, it’s spelled p-i-q-u-e-d. You can look it up with Google right now on my computer if you don’t know the word – I learned it from Frank, you know how he is about vocabulary. I’m not like you, I listen to his vocab rants and try to learn from them.”

“Okay, I see it here on your computer screen. But it sorta means the same thing, so they shouldn’t have two words for the same meaning.”

“That’s normal, there’s a million cases of two words meaning the same thing. You need to take some lessons from Frank. And anyway, the word piqued doesn’t at all mean the word peaked, as in he peaked too early, so you’re even wrong about that, dummy!”

Joey resumed, “Did you know the guy’s wife was with him in Muir?”

“I don’t really remember much about it. But a couple in your dream doesn’t mean it’s the same couple in the Weird News story, there’s billions of couples in the world in in dreams.”

“She had to go home alone that night because she couldn’t find him anywhere, but my dream ended before she left Muir. A lotta folks are saying it’s a publicity stunt, but he has a buncha corroborators.”

“I thought cars didn’t have carburetors any more.”

“Corroborators, not carburetors! Jeez, here you were making fun of how I use the word peak.

Anyway, people saw the guy in The City the same day he turned up in a small village in South America that’s supposedly too far from any airport to have gotten there that fast even in a jet fighter – and I don’t think jet fighters can fly that far without mid-air refueling. Anyway, where he works they say he was there until mid- afternoon and the U.S. embassy in South America confirmed that he walked into their office the next morning to ask them to help him get home. South Americans also confirmed they saw him down there the same day he was supposedly in Muir Woods. I don’t know why reporters were able to find South Americans who confirmed they saw him so quickly – and maybe they just saw a guy who looked like a photo of him but was somebody else. It seems like nobody would even bother to send somebody to check some village in the middle of the Amazon and also check plane ticket records and all that, and do it so quickly. I don’t know how journalists could piece all that together so fast and claim they confirmed the guy’s story when they never could figure out who shot JFK whether the Iraq war was based on lies or bad intelligence. Or maybe the guy paid people to say that as part of the hoax.”

“They do know that the Iraq war was based on lies, you need to bone up on your history.

Anyway, we’re really getting way off the topic. Did your dream really tell you it was going to happen?

That’s pretty weird, getting moved like, five thousand of miles in a couple of hours and maybe even in one second. This looks like something only Lucky could do, that is, if you’re right about his powers.”

“The dream didn’t exactly tell me it was going to happen, but the thingy did close right onto the shop door, and that’s where the guy who said he was transported to South America said he ran into trouble. And here’s the clincher: When I saw the news photo of the guy who came back it was the same guy I saw in the dream – either the same guy or his twin brother.”

“Yeah, but maybe hearing about it on the news is what caused you to have the dream and recognize him rather than the other way around.”

“I know these are all Lucky dreams, they’re not just ordinary dreams like any Joe Blow has every night. And I had the dream before it was on the news. And besides, I know that my dreams haven’t been like that, they’re all turned out to be as real as what Lucky showed me on his screen.”

“Not really, you haven’t had a coat hanger monster attack you with a switch blade knife, and that seems unlikely to ever happen – at least I hope for your sake it doesn’t.”

“Yeah, but I took that dream as a message from Lucky that he’ll always protect me, not as a prediction of something that will really happen. And by the way, I had another really strange dream last night.” Joey absent-mindedly clicked Google News as he said this and exclaimed, “Hey look at this, there’s a buncha people trapped inside a building South of Market up in The City. It says here they’ve tried various measures to extricate the workers. That was what my dream was about last night!"

“Trapped? By a fire?”

“No, there’s no fire.”

“Is it the U. S. Mint building with no windows to climb out of or what?”

“No silly boy, the U. S. Mint buildings were shut down a long time ago.”

“Don’t call me a boy, I’ll beat you up. I’m a young man.”

“Ha! You couldn’t beat up your one-year-old sister! Anyway, it’s one of those normal buildings you see near the Giants stadium. They can’t get out, it says there’s some kind of invisible barrier that nothing can penetrate. Let’s see ... they tried sledgehammers and jackhammers and a bulldozer and next they’re going to try to blow a hole in the wall with explosives.”

“Explosives? Just to get into an ordinary building? That makes no sense.”

“I dreamed about something like this, but I can’t tell if it’s the same place from the photos – oh

my God! There’s a photo of one of the guys who are trapped inside! And that woman, she was in it too! It’s the same place, the same people and it was exactly what I saw on the computer screen of the guy who was sitting and looking at it in my dream!”

“When did this happen, are you sure the people are trapped now? Check the time of the news story. And could you have heard about it before your dream?”

“Let me see ... It started yesterday when they were on their way out after work, it says around 5 PM, but I stayed off the Net all evening and didn’t listen to any radio or anything and called you this morning before I checked any news. I don’t really like to keep up with news anyway because it’s almost always bad. Dad usually doesn’t let me go on the Net after 5 PM until I finish my homework even if it’s a Friday night so I don’t have to turn it in ‘til the following Monday.”

“I wish my dad was like that, I waste too much time surfing around all over the place. Sometimes I wish we didn’t even have Internet in our house, but at least we can only afford dial-up, which is so slow we can’t do much with it beyond checking our emails. Anyway, maybe all this stuff seeped into your brain yesterday through microwaves headed for smart phones or something.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. It sounds impossible, but it wasn’t long ago I would have thought Lucky was impossible. Anyway, I doubt that it would transmit pictures of trapped people into my head. Here’s a Youtube video, maybe it will show the people in the building.”

“Looks like another job for Lucky to fix, but this is way beyond yo-yo contests and swim races, so he may not be up to it. What about those other dreams you had that later showed up again with the red crossing lines across them? Have you figured those out yet?”

“No, I haven’t. I dreamed the circle with the red line about a huge earthquake and also a line through that guy looking at a screen that was targeting cities and he was destroying them and another time when he was destroying entire planets and seeing it all on his wall – it’s exactly like the red lines that ban smoking. There was also a dream I didn’t tell you about where some guy threw something into your house and then ran off just before a bunch of cop cars showed up. I didn’t tell you about it because I didn’t want to scare you and your dad might get mad at me if he hears about it and tell you I’m nuts or something. Paul says he thinks the red line means those events were supposed to happen but they got canceled or toned down some way or other. So that means the guy throwing something into your house that starts a fire will be canceled too, at least I hope so.”

“Wow, thanks a whole bunch for finally getting around to telling me about guys attacking my house. What if it happened and I never knew that it would because you didn’t tell me? We’ve always left the back door unlocked, but now I’m scared. And why do you think my dad would react like that, I think he likes you better than me.”

“Well, it’s not like you would have set up a machine gun nest in your living room, there’s really not much you could do to prepare for it besides locking the door. You can’t ask the cops to guard your house because of a dream one of your friends had.”

“Still, I should know, you shouldn’t keep me in the dark about it, and maybe my dad could get a gun or something. I can start locking the back door, that’s not hard to do, but now I have to figure out how to convince my parents to do it without telling them about your dream – they’ll think that’s plain silly. So what other bad news have you got for me?”

“Okay, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it, I’ve just been really confused about all these dreams.

I’ve been getting them almost every night and they’re all weird, but these are the main two that I was able to remember afterwards. There’s other dreams I haven’t told you about either, I don’t like to go around talking about every last thing that happens to me.”

“Anyway, what’s this that Paul is saying that stuff is supposed to happen and isn’t going to because it was canceled?”

“Paul said maybe Lucky will cancel some events like he did already, so we will never experience them or they’ll have a small impact. That’s why after I had a dream about you winning the yo-yo contest and me winning the swim race I didn’t get one later with a red line, so it wasn’t canceled and actually happened.”

“So, do you think one guy could really destroy cities and planets – but that sounds like a real fantasy dream, not a future reality! Wow, maybe cities and planets will actually be destroyed in the future and Lucky will reverse it! Cities and planets! Wow, that’s heavy! And I had no idea Lucky could do something in what Frank would call that order of magnitude.”

“Here I am always poking fun at about Frank for his vocabulary obsession and you’re actually learning from him. You’re right, I should start paying more attention to him instead of making fun of him. Anyway, Paul is really cool, he’s showing up every day for work and he’s not hanging around with those hoods in pool halls any more. He’s not brooding or scheming any more like he used to 24/7 and he’s turned into the great brother he used to be before he quit high school. In fact, he’s working on his GED and talking about going to college. Natalie especially is tickled pink – she really missed him the way he was before changed so much – and so did I. Paul didn’t bat an eye lash when I told him about Lucky, he’s been right there for me trying to figure out what Lucky is about without doubting anything I say about him.”

“Yeah, everybody is noticing the difference, I’m really happy for you because you have a great family, you have a great bother and sister but I’m an only-child loser. So being patient with Paul like you and your parents did really paid off. If your folks had been hard on him or even kicked him out when he was so obnoxious and was getting in trouble, like some people were saying they should do, he might have spiraled down into some kind of awful delinquency or something. Or maybe Lucky did – or maybe I should say will – change something in the future that also changed Paul?”

“You’re losing me now, it’s getting too complicated.”

“Anyway, there’s no way to find out what these dreams really mean or what the red lines mean.

There’s no Lucky expert we can turn to at Stanford or UC Berkeley or anywhere in the entire world.

They don’t even know anything like Lucky ever existed any time in human history. But maybe something like Lucky happened a buncha times but there’s no record of it because it was somebody’s private experience that never reached the public. You always gotta consider that you may not have the only Lucky even right at this moment, as we speak. But maybe you interfering in my yo-yo contest or the swim race is what caused the attacks on the cities and planets. You gotta be careful with Lucky, Joey – you don’t know, you could be playing with fire. If I were you I wouldn’t use him for minor stuff like silly swim races. Save him for disasters like those earthquakes and planet destructions we saw in our dreams.”

Joey took Lucky out of his pocket while expecting to see just a shiny stone, which is what he in fact saw, and he replied, “You got a point. But he offered to help and I was really mad when you and I both got cheated, so I went for it both times. Next time if he offers to fix something dorky like that I’ll tell him not to do it like I did the first time, when he tried to fix my spelling bee. I’ll wait for something big like an earthquake or saving cities or planets.”

“I think that’s best, but even if you stop a stadium earthquake, stopping it might be the cause of the cities and planets getting wiped out.”

“Okay, enough already, you’re turning me into a mental pretzel, and anyway I already told you that Jane and I went back and changed lotsa stuff and nothing looked different when we came back.”

Even though Kurt was Joe’s best friend and had the same dream about the warriors long ago, he clung to a stubborn refusal to totally believe in Lucky, but Joey nevertheless described to Kurt how he and Jane solved the vicious violent attack on Ms. Milford, and as Joey expected, Kurt listened

attentively but seemed to accept the account with a grain of salt, confirming Joey’s impression the previous day that there was no rush to fill Kurt in on the story, as amazing as it was. Joey had Kurt speak to Jane by phone and she confirmed every detail of Joey’s account about exposing the violent criminal who was working at Mason under a false name and having him arrested to prevent what would have been his violent attack on Ms. Milford. The next day the news was good about the trapped people; all of them had all been evacuated by firefighters who tunneled under and broke through to the lobby. However, the building remained invisibly enveloped and unusable for weeks until one day the barrier suddenly disappeared. After that, the building was condemned and demolished and the open space was fenced off securely in case the unexplained barrier returned.

Apart from this fenced-off blight the surrounding neighborhood returned to normal.

The stadium earthquake dreams they both had came up again and Joey asked, “Speaking of stadiums, how about we go see the Bay to Breakers tomorrow morning and then the Giants game?

We can take Caltrain up to The City or one of our dads might take us.”

“I don’t think my dad can do it, but maybe yours can. If he can’t, I’ll come over to your place early so we can try to get there before the race is over. Or maybe you should stay away from stadiums cuz of that dream.”

“I love the Giants. I’m going to play for them when I grow up. There’s no way I’m going to stay away from their games, and anyway Lucky showed me yesterday that he knocked down that big quake in the stadium to something we’ll barely notice. So I’m going, and I’m pretty sure my dad will take us.”

On the way home from Jane’s house after they solved the school stabbing Joey had concluded that he needed to describe his and Jane’s trip to the past to Kurt very soon, but he knew he had plenty of time to do it, and he had to be strategic; namely, he had get home and finish his homework so he could receive permission from his father to go to San Francisco and also have hope that he might drive him and Kurt to see the Bay to Breakers. Otherwise they would have to take the slower route by train plus public transportation. Joey’s dad drove the kids up to San Francisco the next morning, and on the way Joey grumbled about Kenyans winning it every year. On their way up to The City. Joey complained about Kenyans always winning and his dad said, “Yeah, it would be nice if someone from another would win it every now and then, just to break the monotony. They say a Moroccan has a chance to win it this time, but we’ll have to put up with it if another Kenyan wins again because there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Oh yeah?” asked Joey loudly as he considered his planned and arguably frivolous use of Lucky’s invaluable power by changing a foot race result.

His father glanced over at him out of curiosity, sensing the tone of mysterious and emphatic braggadocio in Joey’s voice, but he didn’t challenge or otherwise question what he said, being distracted by the traffic ahead of him that suddenly cleared up, allowing him to accelerate and giving them a better chance to be standing near the finish line when the winner crossed it. Even when they arrived in The City they would still have to find parking and then walk or catch municipal transportation to get to the finish line, which at that point was scheduled to be crossed by the runners in only about 45 minutes. They attended the foot race and Joey evoked Lucky’s power to change the result; then they headed to the Giants exhibition game. As they entered the stadium, Joey and Kurt slyly discussed the Lucky earthquake dream they both had, disregarding the puzzlement they knew this had to cause Joey’s dad. Joe repeated to Kurt that the dreams didn’t matter because “Lucky fixed it”.

Joey’s dad wondered who Lucky was and shook his head when he heard this exchange, wondering what went on in the heads of kids who had such and enigmatic mental lives, but then he remembered

he was somewhat like that too at their age and decided to let them preserve the exclusiveness of their private conversation; and therefore posed them no inquiry about it. His wife several times had intoned that “boys will be boys” but he felt less sanguine about boys than she was because he remembered his own rapscallion and profligate ways when he was Joey’s age, and it seemed to him that so far his son was largely a chip off the old block. He couldn't remember if he sometimes made statements that caused his own father to want to scratch his head in befuddlement, but if he did his father said nothing about it – perhaps just as he likewise was saying nothing now that he heard Joey’s conversation with Kurt that sounded so mysterious to him.

The trio arrived back in Palo Alto early in the evening. Joey’s and Kurt’s fathers weren’t work associates but they had become good friends through their sons and through the school board meetings that they both diligently attended when they could get to them, but on this night he could only drop Kurt off and hurry up and get home.

PART II An Interstellar Journey 5: LEAVING THE SOLAR SYSTEM On August 12, 2091, Interstellar Mission Captain Jack Anderson, also a British Navy Lieutenant Commander, was in charge of the mile-long and oddly shaped and appropriately named ship Centaur as it sped towards Sol's closest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. Klaus Radder’s propulsion invention was so potent it provided sufficient fuel for multiple round trips to any of the nearest four stars, so if Centauri didn’t pan out, Anderson and his crew were pre- authorized to proceed to the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system; or to other even more far-flung stars if his crew had the moxie to do so while still retaining the ability to return to Mars in one piece and sane. However, to do this the captain would require the unanimous consent of the crew at all stages of decisions about further exploration in order to proceed to another star, as it would require a total trip of an entire century; he would need to record video testimony declaiming the assent by all of the crew, some of whom may by that time be reluctant or even dead set against venturing further; and for all he knew, he might himself be irresistibly anxious to return to his home planet Earth.

His lifepartner had decided to forego his studies and his career at this crucial juncture of his life on Earth and joined him on this trip as an agriculturist, so at least the captain wouldn’t be pining for his lost love life while engaged on this voyage. The norm of life expectancy easily allowed for more than four decades of round trip travel from Mars to the Alpha Centauri planetary systems while still being in the prime of life after completing them and returning home, but there was little doubt that a crew would feel extremely homesick long before the completion of even the more than ten years of voyage that would constitute half of the total trip. But there would be no shock when returning to and gazing upon their loved ones after nearly half a century because the Juve that extended modern lifespans also reverted them to a perpetual appearance and condition of a teenager. They could be gone half a century and still after returning spend hundreds of years happily lifepartnered or married to a husband or wife.

Though mining was also a priority, the overarching goal of the Centauri crew’s mission was to settle humans permanently in at least one extrasolar planet in case an unexpected and sudden conflagration destroyed all human life in the Solar System. A good prospect for permanent human

habitation had been discerned by Mars analysts among the Alpha Centauri planets, so the much closer proximity and therefore far shorter voyage to get to it made it a destination that was distinctly preferable to the century-long round trip that visiting Gliese 581 would require. Based on the fastdeveloping Juve technology, by the time they returned from Alpha Centauri, human life expectancy was expected to be extended to more than a thousand of years. Founding a set of homes on new planets would also help ameliorate the crowding that was anticipated to occur on the current ones hosted by Sol. An expanding human population throughout the intrasolar habitats and its lengthening lifespan was expected to put a strain sooner or later on resources that would outstrip the advances in mining technology.

With these factors in mind, they built their ship with a capacity to bring back enough rare earth elements to last nearly a century, with subsequent trips and larger cargoes expected in the future if this first one was successful. And it was possible that substances might be discovered that would be brought back to employ in even newer technology. With this in mind, a dozen geologists were included among the crew to balance the dozen anthropologists who would look for signs of life and methods for establishing a human settlement, hopefully on multiple planets. The crew also included astronomers, nutritionists, and even a pair of physicists. About half of them had previously traveled on experimental excursions as far as the extrasolar heliosheath, and the rest had only traveled within the Solar System. Captain Anderson’s ship was composed of two hundred and twenty-two large cargo ships – routine Mars and moon ball-shaped travelers that were retrofitted for this well-nigh illimitably more challenging journey than their normal sauntering between Solar System planets and moons.

They were welded together on Mars shortly before launch, and although such ships were effectively secured to each other via A-V self- welding, a standard substance welding was applied to them for extra measure; this way, all bases were deemed to be covered. The Centauri crew hoped to obtain a new source of rare earth and other elements that were gradually being depleted in the five planetary bodies of their home system from which they were currently retrievable. Captain Anderson was unaware that his voyage scheduled for a minimum of twenty-four years round trip was about to be called back only an hour after its launch, returning to base on the same Earth calendar day of its launch rather than the anticipated estimate of 2214.

Anderson felt a combination of elation and trepidation as he prepared to inform the crew that they would henceforth have to rely exclusively on the ship’s brain and his expertise as a a space navigator because the Mars controllers would be too far from them to remain in touch with with the ship’s electronic decision center. The Mars base engineers who were at this point still in charge of his ship had been hired by German industrialist Rudolf Kaufmann to handle the painfully complicated navigation instructions and send Centaur on its way, using a superaccelerant propulsion system invented by someone that neither they nor anyone else was as at that time aware was an infamous evil scientist, Klaus Radder. Like every pilot, Anderson preferred to be in full control of his ship, but he also felt uncertainty about how well the ship’s brain would deliver for the rest of the decade or more that it would take to get to the target planetary system, plus an equal amount of time to return.

After that point they were going to literally be on their own, without a capacity to call Pluto for rescue of their superaccelerant failed them; they would still have their A-V propulsion, but it would take them many years to travel to a re-communication point, and even when they did there would likely be no other superaccelerant ship in existence to send to their rescue; the only other one that had been constructed was destroyed by the military by being flung into the sun after it was recognized by Earth authorities to be an apocalyptic weapon. Although Earth authorities were aware that it may be possible to garner Radder’s theories from his APD-Wall and construct another superaccelerant vehicle, the initial consensus was that because it could be also weaponized if it fell into the hands of a

nefarious individual such as Radder himself or another such maniac, building another one would be too dangerous; so if they learned that Anderson and his crew were adrift in outer space they may have to be left to fend for themselves. Anderson felt daunted by the fact that all communications with humans outside his ship was about to end, and after that there would be no way to send out an SOS to any human being if their ship was disabled including A-V or they otherwise found themselves in a mission-aborting scenario.

Although Centaur had maxi-redundant navigation and life support systems, Anderson knew something could go wrong with them also in spite of the unblemished record of Fail-Safe during its billions of utilizations over a period of decades after it was rebranded True Fail-Safe and quasioxymoronically deemed relatively perfected by the scientific community. Anything, in Anderson’s opinion, was possible during decades of travel for an unprecedented amount of time and distance.

Unlike the Earth authorities that included Chris and Jorge Dorman, Anderson was ignorant of the fact that Radder had only two hours earlier destroyed Mercury and Earth or that ten-year-old Joey Blake’s sun-based sidekick on whom he had endowed the sobriquet Lucky had retroactively and fully restored both planets to their previous condition by reversing the apocalyptic events.

Anderson probably couldn’t be aware of these events for two reasons: In the first place, he was far away, already outside of the Solar System speeding towards Proxima Centauri when these calamities occurred, and in the second place, even if he were still within the Solar System he might never learn about these planet eviscerations because after they were reversed by Joey and Lucky, in terms of normal human reality they had never occurred at all; and even if their occurrence were publicly divulged with great fanfare, he would be appropriately skeptical about the fantastic reports.

Between Lucky’s ability to reverse events and Radder’s invention of time-thrust anomalies that sent both him and Joey into both the past and the future, human reality had taken twists that were unprecedented and perhaps impossible to comprehend. As a mid-ranking British Royal Navy officer, Anderson had encountered skepticism from some of his peers about his qualifications to command this mission, the running joke being that he’ll know what to do if he come across space pirates, but he had won the job due to his high technical training and his years of experience piloting space explorations as a civilian before joining the Navy; experience as far from Earth as Pluto, handling with aplomb two perilous situations and receiving nothing but stellar ratings for his leadership.

After returning to Earth for a three-year stint on ocean-faring airborne vessels during which he rose quickly through the ranks, he took to hankering after space life anew and moved to Mars where he resumed space exploration. Following several months of this, he applied to captain the Centaur probe after luckily spotting a blurb about it on his APD-Wall. He immediately applied for a waiver from the Navy so that he could retain his rank and status in it while participating in the Centaur venture even though it was privately financed and operated, and it was granted, and in fact, both the British and German governments offered their latest technology to the effort, unaware of its darker implications. Anderson was living in the age of new modernity when people who lived in advanced nations were remarkably stable and cooperative and had a lifespan of hundreds of years; so on paper he shouldn’t have difficulties with crew discord. However, traveling in one direction for more than two years hadn’t ever been done before, so all bets were off on the effects on a crew during a multidecade journey. They may soldier through the entire experience with aplomb or they may go totally mad and mutiny even though they had democratic rule over all onboard decisions.

The huge travel balls would surely be perceived by the crew as smaller and smaller as time went by until they conceivably could begin to feel like little more than prison cells – not like early 21st century cells but rather like modern ones, which weren’t even called cells but rather apartment rooms and were in fact the size of early 21st century apartments and functioned like them: Prison cells in the

modern age had all the amenities of free living other than the securing of prisoners in the apartments with APD barriers, for which there was no provision in an age in which affluence and the ability to successfully cope with even extreme episodes of stress was virtually universal in fully developed nations. A substantial and historic amelioration of what was now historically viewed as an insanity epoch lasting thousands of years had been accomplished with mind scans to discover defects that impelled anti-social behavior, followed by brain treatments to cure them during childhood; so there was very little criminal behavior in this modern era. Consequently, there were less than five hundred prisoners in the entire U.S. and on any given day and less than two hundred in the UK and Europe combined; however, the ratio of prisoners to free citizens was significantly higher in non-modern nations.

Part of the study of the effects of containment inside of a relatively small traveling ship hurtling through the emptiness of space for multiple decades had been done by examining the life of West Berliners who were walled in for as long as the Centaur was expected to travel. Some buildings in West Berlin were designed with huge empty spaces in them to compensate for the lack of space available to its citizens immediately outside of its city limits.One mitigation of cramping that Centaur’s crew could avail themselves of was their option of using the new EAPDS. Enhanced APD Sensation wasn’t just for creating the tangible holography that was already ubiquitous in modern life – its users could totally immerse themselves in it; enabling them, for instance, to walk on a holography beach that wasn’t real and dive into a similar body of water. They could surf with the same physical sensations they would have if they were actually doing it on Earth in a real ocean. The original technology of APD, the acronym for All-Purpose Display, was now extended beyond mere display to the wholesale production of fully convincing artificial environments.

Faux EAPD surfing was nearly as enjoyable and superior to the real experience in the sense that if someone was thrown by a powerful wave straight down, resulting in bouncing violently off the sea floor followed by desperately struggling to get to the surface – a fiasco that had killed even the most expert of surfers, such a person who realized he or she was about to drown in the holography could instantly cancel the swim with a mentally issued command and return to reality, safe and sound and essentially none the worse for wear. Extensive and accelerated testing with thousands of subjects had found that these simulated realities had provided long-lasting satisfaction similar to that of the real experience without the inherent dangers, but never before had they been undertaken in a setting that excluded the option of the unsimulated, real ones; so the effect on crew members of that missing element during such a far-flung voyage as this one to Centauri was an unknown factor.

Enhanced APD Sensation was a technology that had barely gotten off the drawing board and tested prior to the launch and was barely approved for the mission the day before their departure, so they felt very fortunate to have it. Because of it, even their amorous experiences with boy or girl friends back home umpteen billions of miles away felt real on both ends of the transaction while they were within contact, though after they were out of range it would seem real only for the extrasolar traveler, not for their lover at home who could no longer reciprocate until they also obtained the as yet unapproved Enhanced EAPD that had been specially approved for only the Centaur crew. In sum, for this crew there would be no need for pleasuring themselves because they would be able continue their mutual pleasuring with their loved ones thanks to the simulation via EAPDS. The crew members had been pre-screened to assure that fundamentally monogamous applicants were the only ones accepted for the project in order to avoid excessive competition between them for love partners among the crew; this screening was necessary because the percentage of monogamy was gradually diminishing during the modern age, although evolutionary sociologists expected it to survive in the long run as a double-digit percentage of the population regardless of further changes in human

culture. One problem was that there wasn’t yet a method to induce monogamy or any other type of partner preference in anyone, though one was in the works.

A certain amount of inter-pleasure that had been misnomered as cheating occurs even among monogamous persons and was expected among the Centaur crew, but it was believed that it would be minimal and therefore would not disrupt the mission. Again, this was a mere calculation and not considered by any means guaranteed on such a long expedition. The APD display in Anderson’s control cabin provided him with a countdown to his loss of contact with a station named Heaven on Pluto, which happened to be near the farthest point of its orbit and closer by far than any other inhabited heavenly body or space vehicle to Centauri as it sped toward the stars. At the moment, Centauri’s distance from Heaven was already a million times farther than Pluto’s distance from his launch site on Mars and significantly beyond the outer limit of a ten-year round trip space exploration employing A-V propulsion before the system in his ship was invented by Klaus Radder. Anderson already felt uncomfortably far from his original home on Earth even as he raced forward to ultimately traverse at least four light years – and perhaps as many as fifteen – beyond the Sun if all went as planned. The further distances would require finding or generating copious amounts of food along the way, but modern technology enabled making food from inert substances.

Anderson’s onboard nutritionist wryly suggested that if they had to extend their travel, they could hunt for Space Cauliflower to gobble up to help them more pleasurably undertake the longer trip.

Anderson was born and spent many years living on Earth, but most of the crew members were born and raised on Mars and had only visited Earth occasionally; unlike them, he considered Earth to be his primary home rather than Mars. Although there were astronauts who were born or raised on other heavenly bodies besides Earth and Mars, no applicants from them happened to be chosen for this particular mission; this was really the luck of the draw rather than being caused by any bias. He wondered how they were feeling about their rapidly increasing distance from whichever planet they felt was their home and could only hope that routine and mitigating amenities would help ameliorate the longing for their sol home that they were sure to experience sooner or later. He had no idea what he would do if one or more of them started to come apart and appeared to need an immediate return home, because there was no option for this as this was the first such voyage so there was no precedent; he might be forced to abort the entire mission to rescue one person but he wouldn’t hesitate to do this and there was no protocol prohibiting it.

In the end, as with all crucial decisions, it would be a vote by the crew that would determine what action would be taken. In fact, there had been no time to train his crew, assuming there even existed a way to train a crew for a trip into outer space that would last more than twenty years. The crew spent the final hours of contact continuously engaged in conversations with loved ones via Pluto, talking to folks back home in anticipation of the cut-off from them that would last for decades. There had been no glitches along the way thus far, so Heaven’s commander would pop up on the display to wish him the best from there on out when the cut-off moment was imminent. As the time for the farewell approached, Anderson and his mates glanced repeatedly at the time display, anticipating the big moment that would signal a historic barrier within their journey had been traversed. And Heaven’s commander did in fact pop up with only two minutes left before total disengagement from him, but it wasn’t to say farewell.

“Commander Anderson, we have a situation and we’re ordering you to hold in place pending further instructions.”

“Wow, hold in place? That’s a surprise, and just as I’m starting to lose you. I’ll have to turn around if we’re going to retain effective contact. I’m going to sign off to focus on this, I’m not really familiar with slamming the brakes on this baby. I’ll get back to you, over and out.”

After signing off Anderson continued to hear the voice of Heaven’s commander for nearly half a minute but he couldn’t make out what he was saying, and then the voice petered out altogether. The ship hadn’t yet reached even the outer orbit of the dwarf planet Eris or as far as the heliosheath 100 AU from the sun at which point Radder had programmed the ship to take advantage of the boundary of swirling compressed and turbulent solar wind and interstellar medium to temporarily slingshot the ship forward at nearly double its normal speed. Nor had it yet dropped the first of thousands of minuscule periodic sound buoys that were intended to keep it in contact with whichever were the closest Solar System stations, albeit with an increasingly lengthening delay that would eventually become futile. Anderson’s loss of contact with Pluto occurred before calculations had indicated it would, but nobody had expected premature loss of communications to be problematic; they were all big boys and Anderson and Heaven’s commander knew each other only from a few minutes of dialogue as Anderson’s ship flew off into the stellar distance, so there was no emotional or personal attachment issue involved. Nobody involved in the mission really cared about a dramatic farewell as long-term loss of contact approached. The days of excitement etched onto video and audio tapes during the first flights to the moon more than a century earlier had been replaced by nonchalance, with ships flying all over the Solar System and beyond; and people living on the moon and Mars who had never even visited Earth and in some cases weren’t even curious about the native planet of their species.

Anderson read the table of contents of the manual for instructions about how to stop his huge hunk of superplastic – something he hadn’t expected to do for about ten years; in the end, he gave up on performing the task manually and asked the ship’s brain to do it for him. After announcing this impending maneuver to his crew and transferring the appropriate directions to the APD-Wall, he felt a dramatic loss of gravity that the thrust artificially provided, which caused him to want to kick himself for skipping over the part in the instructions that described this because he found himself floating around helplessly – he hadn’t even assumed attenuated control of the ship and already he had made a ridiculous mistake; but he had no time to excoriate himself for this lack of preparation because he needed to focus on completing the task at hand. Fortunately, his Second In Command Rajit Singh walked into the cabin appropriately wearing his APD gravity that he turned on when he heard the announcement and was able to help Anderson detach himself from the opposite wall of the cabin to which he became unaccountably attached so he could complete the ship’s about-face more conveniently.

There was never any danger of Anderson totally losing control of the ship because the APD function included voice and thought command, so ultimately he could run the ship even if he was upside down. He turned the ship around and flew back towards the Solar System for a few seconds, long enough to re-establish contact with Heaven. That’s when he learned the startling news that he was to return to Mars tout de suite, and he complied after announcing the surprising development to his crew. Soon they were back inside the solar system and approaching the ship’s base. After landing again on the same Martian site from which he had launched, Anderson was greeted by the chief engineer of the mission, Robert Klaussman, who brought him into Radder’s leased bungalow rather than taking him to the mission office next to the launch site so they could have full separation from Radder’s engineers. Due to small audio-oxygen filters they wore on their backs and oxygen containment and downward security from violently swirling dust provided by their personal APDs, they would have been able to converse if they walked on the bare surface just as conveniently as if they were on Earth, but one of the massive dust storms for which Mars was notorious was underway, so after exiting the base they had to walk inside an air-supplied transparent tube to Radder’s bungalow. The tube excluded the din of the storm, so they could hear each other easily as they

walked.

“Jack, I’m taking you to Klaus Radder’s former lodgings to bring home to you his exclusion from this mission. He apparently died in Spain today from whatever was ailing him – cancer caused by asbestos poisoning in his youth is what we’ve heard. But it’s more than that. He was reportedly a heinous individual who long ago attempted the destruction on numerous Earth cities, and one story goes that he was stymied by a little boy. Don’t ask me to explain that except that I’m told the boy had special powers. At any rate, just before he apparently died yesterday Radder reportedly created a new crisis that threatened entire planets, and the word is that the propulsion in your ship was the same technology that created a stupendous weapon that he used to destroy the Earth. Because of all this, we had to call you back. I don’t have any details, as I already said, but we have to get clearance before we can send you out again and resume the mission.”

“A weapon ... That’s not hard to imagine. Propulsion that can send someone twenty light years or more without refueling could power a might potent weapon. And it’s something that nobody before Radder even dreamed about, it’s light years beyond any other current technology, pun intended.”

“I’m glad you’re grogging the appropriate perspective. I had feared that you would be up in arms about this mission abortion.”

“Not at all. Is the danger past from Radder’s plot, or could it still be carried out? And what do you mean when you say he apparently died? You don’t know for sure that he’s dead?”

“There seems to be a lot of chaos going on about what happened to him. The U.S. agents who were present in his apartment where he was found turning blue and prone somehow failed to confirm his death and now there’s talk that he escaped rather than died, so we don’t really know what’s going on. We have to wait for subsequent reports because what we’ve heard so far doesn’t make a whole lotta sense, if you catch my drift. He was thought to have died previously during a similar raid in Africa but eventually turned up, so at this point nobody is convinced he’s dead until and unless they encounter indisputable evidence of it.”

“A fine kettle of stew you guys cooked up for me, Robert. I wasn’t supposed to be back here for many years, but instead it was hours.”

Klaussman smiled and said, “Hey, don’t blame me, I just work here and I’m telling you what I was told to tell you. Please don’t kill the messenger.”

They arrived at Radder’s bungalow, entered it and sat down on a curved couch, which like all modern furniture, employed anti-gravity to suspend it above the floor, as Klaussman continued their conversation about the disappointingly aborted mission.

“We don’t know this as yet, but the preliminary report indicates that Radder created his doomsday machine working alone, so his death ends it – if he’s dead. We’re waiting for an update, like I said, this just all happened a couple of hours ago. Assuming we get the all-clear, we deemed it preferable that you receive a full briefing on this because it could be extremely disorienting for you to learn about it twenty years from now when you get back. As it is you’re going to be plenty disoriented by finding so many other changes in human society after that much time away. As you know, this mission was funded by a retired German industrialist Rudolf Kaufmann. What we didn’t tell you is that Klaus Radder had insisted that no Americans be involved in it but he relented when he found out about your German heritage. What we’re learning now is that Kaufmann and Radder have a history connecting them that goes back half a century and Kaufmann was investigated but not prosecuted for a Radder conspiracy back before 2020. This guy Radder seemed affable enough to me, but we’re finding out that he was maybe the worst bad news humanity has ever had. Nobody seems to know where he was between the two schemes seventy years apart, but there is a rumor that he didn’t exist at all during that time and then set about to complete his insane revenge or whatever it is he had in mind

for humanity. I’ve heard of misanthropes before, but this guy is Numero Uno. If what I’ve heard so far, he makes Attila the Hun and Hitler look like school boys.”

“He didn’t exist for seventy years and then re-existed? All I can say to that is okay dokey whatever you say, dude. On the other hand, I know from flying his ship that he was unquestionably a genius, so I guess I shouldn’t doubt his ability to invent a way to do what you’re talking about, although I feel obliged to harbor a certain amount of skepticism about it. He may have been a match for Einstein, and perhaps even surpassed him, so it’s really unfortunate that he used his brains to try to destroy life.

Einstein’s work led to nuclear destruction, but he had no destructive motive for the work he did, he was a peace-loving man by all accounts – I’ve read his wonderful and eloquent humanitarian essays.

Most people are unaware that he was one of the greatest American writers ever. So what’s Rudolf Kaufmann’s status now as the funder of this project, is he implicated in any crime? Because if he is, we’re up a crick without a paddle because the UN will shut the mission down until the investigation is completed, and that could take months or even longer. I might have to bail out of it, I can’t let my career sit in limbo all that time and will have to commit to a different project. Am I restricted to the base?”

“Yes, but I’m sure it’s temporary because all signs point to this plot having been totally squelched and now it’s just a matter of mopping up. There’s a U.S. federal official named Chris Dorman on the way here. She’s due in any minute and will be coming directly to this bungalow, so you can settle in for a while and call your loved ones – if you have any – while I go fetch her. She was the lead investigator of both of the Radder plots – the new one that was foiled yesterday and the old one half a century ago, and seems to know as much or more about Radder as anybody in the Solar System. As far as him unexisting and then re-existing, that’s very likely about time travel, and with further development of his superaccelerant that already approaches half the speed of light, achieving time travel within the next couple of decades isn’t completely out of the question. In fact, if he was a good guy instead of the most dastardly rogue in history, we could encourage him to try to accomplish it in a couple of years, if he hasn’t done so already. Okay, I gotta go. Any questions before I head for the port where Dorman will land?”

“No, nothing. Even if I had one I would prefer to hold off while I chew on the mess that you laid on me already.”

Klaussman left after saying, “Okay, see you soon. Keep your clothes on while you wait even though Chris is very attractive.” and chuckled as he went out the door.

Anderson smiled, without responding that he wouldn’t mind greeting Chris unclothed. Even just a few hours after his amorous farewell to his lifepartner – who was dropped off at Pluto for a holiday before they returned to Mars – Anderson felt ready for some loving regardless of gender; but there was only one true love one for him, so Chris wouldn’t really do as a substitute. He had deliberately spent his last week before flying off on the mission with his lifepartner, knowing that he might not experience anything more than APD love for a couple of decades. There was no guarantee that he would enjoy amour with anyone on his crew, and at any rate he was a bit old fashioned and preferred true relationships rather than just physical ones, so he didn’t indulge as readily as was the norm among space navigators – or even among typical modern Earthlings, for that matter. Before that final week with his lifepartner he hadn’t been on Earth in months, constantly shuttling between Mars, the moon and points beyond Jupiter during his Navy duties. Klaussman entered the office just in time to see the ship that was transporting Chris Dorman from Earth floating in through the dust haze, barely visible through the base’s transparent dome. He stood at the landing site just five feet over from where it would touch down because her ship – like all other space vehicles other than Radder’s new invention for voyaging to Centauri – didn’t have rockets and therefore would land without expelling

anything harmful below it. All space ships prior to Radder’s special Centaur creation were propelled via anti-gravity, known by the acronym A-G, which had been refined to the point of making it a misnomer because it moved vehicles even where no gravity existed. Consequently, when ships landed they were of no danger to anyone unless they landed directly on top of them, which couldn’t happen because their guidance was automated by another of Radder’s 2020-era inventions known for obvious reasons as Fail-Safe; a name which, unlike A-G accurately described its performance. She exited the ship and they shook hands.

“Welcome to Mars, Agent Dorman. I hope you’ll enjoy your time here and find it fruitful.”

“Just call me Chris, please, we’ve had enough face-to-face APD conversations to address each other informally. I’m glad the gravity in my ship was set for Mars, but now that I’m here it seems odd.

I feel like I could leap five meters straight up.”

“I doubt you could do that, but you certainly would best your personal leaping record on Earth.

If you’re here long enough, you’ll get used to it, but I have the impression you intend to obtain basic information about the Centauri mission and leave expeditiously.”

“Yes, that’s true. Apart from one long experimental interstellar trip, this is my first time away from terra firma, I haven’t even been to the moon. Most of our friends have been on tours to both places, but my lifepartner and I have never discussed coming here, I don’t know why. It’s rather ironic to me that the first time I come here is on business rather than as a tourist – I never would have imagined anything like that happening.”

“I’m sure you’ll enjoy it even though you’re here on a crucial mission. I’ve yet to meet or hear about anybody who didn’t, regardless of why they came here. The preliminary jitters disappear very quickly. We’re only a ten-minute walk from the bungalow where the Centaur Commander is waiting to meet you as we speak. Do you have any idea about the prospects for him to set off again? You were on one of the interstellar voyages?”

“Yes, but it was straight out and straight back, so our only landing and takeoffs were on Earth.”

She looked out the window just when the dust in the air thinned enough for her to glimpse the terrain and exclaimed, “Oh my God, that mountain is unbelievably humongous! I couldn't see it through that dust storm when we were landing. I’ve heard about a huge mountain here, is that it?”

“Yes, the project’s scientific brain Klaus Radder chose to set his project near the tallest mountain on the planet. Other than that though, you probably know far more about Radder than I do. We call it Olympus Mons, but maybe if the Martian natives come out of hiding they’ll inform us that they have a different name for it ... just joking, of course.”

“I never expected to see anything as spectacular as this mountain and the area around it... Okay, let me catch my breath, and by the way it’s also amazing that I can catch it without wearing a space suit, even though I’ve watched the phenomenon on my wall many times. Anyway, as I told you on my way here, our concern is to determine if the Centaur is potentially a deadly weapon. We’ve already determined that the Centauri mission is under operational control of a very dubious character Rudolf Kaufmann who was once under suspicion of backing Radder’s previous plan to destroy cities, so we obtained a court order removing his control of it and he’s already acceded to it and says he’s prepared to write it off as a total financial loss. It seems like he wants to wash his hands of Radder in no uncertain terms but if his hands are really dirty he won’t get away with it. If Centaur takes off for the stars again, it’s going to be gone for decades, and we want to make sure it won’t come back and be used for destruction. I don’t know how to explain just how destructive it could be because you might have trouble assimilating my explanation and perhaps even conclude that I’ve taken leave of my senses. So unless you want to hear a long and bewildering story, I can shorten it by telling you it’s

capable of annihilating entire planets, such as the one we’re walking on as we speak.”

“I heard about that. How do you know it could do that? Did you manufacture a prototype and test it this quickly?”

“No, we know about this because the weapon actually destroyed planets. Someone with unimaginable powers completely restored them. We know this happened because we have videos taken from space showing the planet disintegrations prior to their restoration. The videographers weren’t ordered to keep silent because like your life here on Mars, Americans live in a free society, so we don’t suppress much of anything any more, so I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. Another aspect of this is that I don’t have the power to detain suspects or permission to carry a weapon like I had decades ago even though my job description was never officially changed. Getting permission and assistance to arrest Klaus Radder was like pulling teeth because I had to canvass both Spain and Portugal just to find half a dozen policemen to accompany me with the power to detain a Spanish citizen. There is very little crime in advanced earth societies, so there are very few policemen available.

On the moon and the U.S. rumors about the planetary destruction are running wild, but the story makes sense to almost nobody. We’ll see how people react when they see the videos – I haven’t seen them myself and frankly I hope I don’t have to.”

“I’m sure others here have heard about it, but I’ve been totally focused on my preparation for your arrival and haven’t caught the news. We have thirty thousand people on Mars and only two police officers, so I know whereof you speak when you say you lacked law enforcement manpower.

You arrested Klaus Radder? I heard he died.”

“We arrested him and he was handcuffed with his hands behind his back on a hallway floor in his Madrid bedroom when I went into the living room, but later we learned that he disappeared and we never found him, so we don’t know if he died or not.”

“You mean you walked back into the hallway and he was gone? Why wasn’t somebody keeping an eye on him is he was suspected of such horrendous crimes?”

“Actually, we indirectly traveled from that living room in Spain to a home in Minnesota, so I never saw that hallway again after Radder was handcuffed. We later learned from the Madrid police who were watching him that he disappeared. They had become distracted by what happened in the living room where I was and took their eyes off him for a few seconds. We located the weapon that he used to annihilate the planets and flung it into the sun, but as long as Centaur exists we could still be mortal danger because if did escape he could try to regain access to it, and we have no reason at this point to discount it as being convertible to a weapon like the one Radder used to destroy planets.”

“You said planets. He destroyed more than one?”

“Yes, two in fact. But both destructions were reversed. I really can’t explain it, but they’re as good as new – at least as new as your typical 4.5 billion-year-old planets can be.”

“You still haven’t told me which planets.”

“Earth and Mercury.”

“Earth! This means you will destroy Centauri? Doing that will bring extrasolar exploration to a halt before it even starts because we have nothing like it. And without Radder we probably can’t even hope to build another one like it.”

“That’s not my decision, and get used to working without Radder – in fact, he may be the first person in almost a century with a shoot-on-sight order on him from a modern country. Luckily for him, very few people have anything to shoot – for instance, where are only a couple of hundred nonmilitary weapons in the entire United States and Europe combined. I’m here to secure Centaur even though I know you are already doing that. There are a dozen U.S. Marines on the ship I used to travel

here. They have their own command and are securing the perimeter of the base as we speak, and I can assure you that they will shoot Radder if they see him – no questions asked. A team of scientists will be arriving within hours to assess the danger from Centauri. They will give you the go-ahead to send Centaur back into flight, but the fact that we don’t know what happened to Radder gives us the jitters. He might try to find a way to seize control of Centaur and wreak more mayhem that we might not be able to reverse this time. It’s a precarious set of circumstances.”

“Maybe the safest thing to do other than destroying it is to shoot it out of the Solar System on its mission so it will be out of Radder’s reach.”

“The problem with that is that we don’t know what is or isn’t within Radder’s reach. He’s a genius beyond anyone in history, so for all we know he can reach all the way across the universe. It’s definitely a conundrum for us” “That certainly poses a sticky problem. U.S. Marines, eh? I didn’t know they still existed.”

“Well, actually the ones that came with me constitute half of the entire force because the national defense we still have is almost completely automated. I guess you don’t know a lot about current events about Earth, living as you do far from it, and maybe you’re an infrequent traveler to it as well.”

“You’re right, I haven’t visited Earth in many years. I’m out of the loop about any military stuff on Earth and we have no military on Mars. I’m always busy so I don’t follow events there.”

“The U.S. Army is also two-dozen strong and we have a small Navy and an Air Force that’s barely more advanced than typical consumer equipment. After the world’s last nuclear warhead was destroyed, the only threat has been conventional, and that’s puny compared to nukes. There doesn’t appear to be much motivation to develop more and more powerful explosives, so the most people killed by a bomb in the last couple of decades is in three digits ... under six hundred, I think. We’re not really prepared for war any more, but we fortunately or unfortunately preserved the capability to get up to speed very quickly if that eventuality arose. You know the old saying, never say never.”

Dorman examined the Centaur designs for an hour, including the propulsion system, but she wasn’t a scientist so she was unable to cull any information that would help her understand what could be done next. A team of ten scientists arrived from earth right after she gave up on this study, but she repaired to Radder’s former bungalow to consult with Captain Anderson while they studied the designs in the main office on the base. They informed her that their study would take at least a few days, so she called home to Jorge Dorman – who had changed his surname from Donovan to hers when they declared themselves lifepartners – and let him know that she might remain on Mars for a week or more, based on the tentative assessment of the earth scientists. He also informed her that Joey the miracle boy hadn’t heard from his solar-based buddy Lucky and there was no sign that any new conflagration by Radder was at hand; however, his disappearance and possible escape remained cause for concern and perhaps even alarm. He had already been foiled twice but might be so hard-headed and hard-hearted that he may yet again attempt to bring disaster down on humanity.

If nothing else, he had proved himself to be maddeningly perseverant in his apocalyptic ideation, which Jorge was elaborately analyzing as part of his career expertise as a sociopsychologist. The next day Dorman was called back to earth and two days later Chris and Earth authorities that included her lifepartner Jorge Dorman engaged in a lengthy APD consultation with the scientists on Mars.

The leaders of many traditional nations also watched and listened without demanding a decisionmaking role, knowing it wouldn’t be likely to be granted in any case. In spite of the possibility that Radder had used this same propulsion system to attack the earth, multiple experts including sociopsychological specialist Jorge Dorman argued that if he was bound and determined to do humanity harm he would do it with or without the system and that even if he were unable to gain control of the one that was built to travel out of the Solar System, he may reproduce a similar one wherever he

is, though there appeared to be a low probability that Radder would be able to marshal the equipment to reproduce his weapons ...

Moreover, it was argued, if they destroyed Radder’s system there was no realistic prospect of visiting other planetary systems within the next century, which could be a crucial abeyance due to depleting elements within the currently mined Solar System that were needed for modern technology However, several experts expressed rejoinders warning of the clear danger that Radder had already twice demonstrated if the system wasn’t destroyed. At this point, the U.S. government revealed for the first time that Joey Blake had the special assistance of someone he called Lucky who had thwarted various catastrophes including planet destructions, but refused to provide any details beyond that statement. The debate went on for two hours and no vote was taken, but the developing consensus was to give Captain Jack Anderson the go-ahead and get the system as quickly and as far away from the Solar System as possible to minimize the risk that Radder might sabotage or commandeer it; even if they hurled it towards the sun as they had successfully done with his prototype, there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t be able to somehow intercept and retrieve it. They also felt a fairly substantial hope at this point that Lucky would intervene yet again to save them if he was needed.

Nobody among them publicly or privately expressed skepticism about the accounts of Lucky’s existence or his reversal of unspeakable calamities; though neither did any of them have any idea about where Lucky came from or what or who he was, including the U.S. government of Joey himself.

Those present at the meeting had seen the destruction videos taken from the moon and that had become sufficient evidence for them of the veracity of the Lucky stories. The days of people Photoshopping and otherwise distorting video images were long gone in this world of improved sanity, and technology could almost infallibly detect any changes in a video from its original recording; besides which, there were still con men in the world, but their access to high technology had been almost universally stifled with great success over many years via brain scanning. An entire wall was occupied with the view of the gathering plus smaller views of their friend and erstwhile Vernon Preston boss, who many years earlier saw them through the first Radder crisis, and third view of the American representative who was personally present at the UN meeting. It was late at night when they finally were satisfied that issues were resolved and they could retire for the evening.

Unexpectedly, however, the next day Preston asked them to join the crew as a security precaution for a fraction of the trip.

6: RADDER TRAVELS TO AMERICA After breakfast in the Amsterdam café, Radder felt largely recovered from his physical and emotional travail the previous night – running and stumbling through woods and trudging for miles in the dark guided only by moonlight; all of this had been immediately preceded by being handcuffed while seemingly experiencing his last breaths as he succumbed to asbestos poisoning, and although all of that physical tribulation was apparently erased by his thrust nearly eighty years into the past and now he felt like he was in the prime of health, its emotional effects still lingered after he awoke the next morning. He began to wonder if he had perhaps turned down the wrong path, suffering indignities that no pure scientist should ever have to go through. As he looked around he noted that the café rented Internet computers, so he decided to try to confirm that he wasn’t a fugitive from the law, and after Googling and Binging all over the place he concluded that this was indeed the case, as there was no mention of him being an outlaw, and specifically not the greatest outlaw in world history, although he recognized that this could be because he hadn’t yet been identified. He first did a

search for Knut Reffner and found not even a mention of him – not altogether surprising, considering that in 2013 he was officially listed as an obscure accountant in Berlin or Heidelberg; no news was good news, and there was no report of Knut Reffner ever being considered a criminal suspect. He then searched for his fake name Klaus Radder and likewise came up empty, so it appeared that he needn’t have exerted himself so strenuously to escape capture when he was confronted by customs agents in the train; undoubtedly, he would have been fined or simply allowed to pay his fare but wouldn’t have been detained for what he could have sensibly argued was a mere mistake by railway officials that was perhaps combined with his simple and innocent loss of his ticket.

Even if he was free and clear, he needed more money than the couple of thousand dollars in his pocket, so what should he do now to reboot his professional life? He could maybe survive for a month with the money he brought back with him from 2091, but not much longer; it struck him as ironic that he had taken twenty thousand forward to 2089 but then lacked the foresight to bring a similar amount back with him to 2013, especially considering the fact that his second trip through that time connoted his being a more experienced time traveler. He had no bank savings under the name Radder because he had cashed his salary checks under the table and then furtively forwarded most of the funds to his American bank account in his real name, even though at the time he had no plan to revert to that name or return to that country. Considering this, he asked himself, Does anybody really understand his own motivations? Was I hedging my bets when I sent money across the pond to a bank account in the very country that was my only nemesis?

He couldn’t remember even a ballpark figure of how much money he had accumulated by this date in his U.S. bank account – it could be thousands or it could be many tens of thousands. He had always lived a frugal life; with the exception of one bad investment – he had followed a colleague’s bogus advice and lost most of his savings a few years back by pouring money into a failed venture; but he still had may have a tidy sum stashed away in the good old USA from his postgraduate work there. plus later work income in Europe as Radder. He decided he needed a change of pace from the Eurozone where he had spent so many consecutive years before his brief stint in Senegal, and considered returning to Brazil or nearby Argentina where he had visited his future financier Rudolf Kaufmann, but because the U.S. remained the prime seat of technological advancement, he chose to go there because it looked like the most probable option for him to pursue whatever would become his new scientific pursuits.

He now became irritated because he realized he would again have to jostle with finding out passwords to accounts as he did when he initially arrived in the year 2089, so he momentarily felt like he was experiencing a future déjà vu, which was a contradiction in terms but nevertheless seemed to him apropos in this most unusual case. This time, however, restoring access to his accounts turned out to be less complicated: He remembered his password to view an email draft that had all his bank account and other data including numbers and passwords and simply logged into it. He quickly learned that he had more than ninety thousand dollars in his USA bank account, so he visited a Dutch credit union, opened a new account and transferred ten per cent of his American savings into it. He figured this amount, after he converted into traveler’s checks, added to what he already had in the account statement that he would carry with him, would be enough to convince a customs agent at any U.S. airport that he was a genuine tourist visiting the country from Germany rather than someone who intended to enter and then become an undocumented immigrant.

He wasn’t certain that his American citizenship had survived the back and forth of time travel and didn’t feel inclined at that moment to reveal to a U.S. customs agent the entirety of his assets.

Although the U.S. was affluent enough to accommodate almost any number of new immigrants, it still maintained controls so that its cities wouldn’t become unaesthetically overcrowded. Someone

who was discovered to be living in the country illegally even repeatedly didn’t face prosecution for it, only deportation back to his or her country of origin. He decided to carry a relatively small amount of money with him when he boarded a plane to LaGuardia or whichever other airport he chose to land in; he was getting tired of Europe and needed a break, so he decided to go back to the U.S., but would stay clear of Chicago where he lost both of his parents in a fire as a child while they his family was visiting his uncle from Germany; nor did he have any interest in ever seeing his boring and overbearing uncle again. When he moved in with his saturnine uncle after the fire, having no known relatives to go back to in his homeland of Germany, he reacted to the loss of his parents and his depressing home life by becoming a boy who was regarded in school as an enfant terrible and more specifically, an eventual terror to his uncle who abused Knut until he became a strapping subteen and able to defend himself.

His personality didn’t improve much after he grew up enough to become first a University of Chicago undergraduate and later an MIT graduate student and researcher. He granted that he was perhaps a bit overly fastidious during his MIT stint, but he was given to understand that some of his colleagues regarded him more as outright ill-natured and petulant than merely fastidious. This didn’t bother him because he was sure it was because he was invariably right when he had disagreements with them, which from his point of view explained their nabobness of negativity toward him. He had in mind trying to re-involve himself with academics or entrepreneurs around MIT or Harvard, so the next day he caught a flight from Amsterdam to New York. He could always return to Europe or go elsewhere – Argentina? Brazil? – if the U.S. repeated its failure to appreciate his genius. For some reason, he felt himself mellowing towards Americans, perhaps because he had already wreaked his devastating vengeance on it even if it was none the worse for wear afterwards due to the miraculous boy Joey Blake. Whatever the reason, it appeared that his longstanding animosity towards Americans was gradually being expurgated from his system.

He decided he needed to get out of Europe and away from his possible other self, so he bought a laptop computer, luggage and enough clothes for a daily change for at least a week and flew to New York. On arrival there, he was tempted to look up the Chelsea Hotel, having become aware in 2089 that Leonard Cohen had stayed there, after Radder discovered that Cohen was whence arguably the most popular musician in the world and had himself become one of Cohen’s fans. Radder had been unaware of Cohen before he left Senegal and been thrust forward through time, having listened all his life only to classical music; but Cohen was a sensation in 2989 Madrid, his guitar or keyboard work and occasionally his voice being played in many shops he visited. Cohen had imbibed the Juve just in time, while he was nearly on his deathbed in 2022. Seventy years later, Cohen was just another typical new modernity teenager – albeit one who had long since become, like the also-youthful Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, a Nobel Laureate. Radder learned of these Nobels but never learned if other Beatles had been somehow resurrected, and in fact had never heard of John, George or Ringo. As a fan of Cohen’s, on arriving in The Big Apple he was curious about the hotel Cohen had made famous in the title of one of his songs. However, when he got into a taxi he set this idea aside and decided to just let the driver take him to any hotel that he deemed from his obviously considerable experience with the Big Apple to be decent and not prohibitively expensive.

He connected to a local wifi network with his laptop in his hotel room and for the first time read about the success of his anomalies in Muir Woods and San Francisco. He had no current capacity to generate any time-thrust or any of his other scientific wonders, so it occurred to him that he could consider setting up shop near the one in Muir Woods in case – God forbid – he needed yet another sudden exit. He had programmed the one in San Francisco to permanently disappear after a few weeks, but the one in Muir Woods should continue to reappear every evening in perpetuity, so if the

timing was right, he could dive into it for another escape from another humdrum invasionary raid by U.S. law enforcement. He couldn’t remember at this point if he had that at least partly in mind when he parked it there because so much had happened in the interim. He thought, wryly, that would be three last-second escapes, but who’s counting? If you’ve seen one last- second daredevil escape, you’ve seen them all. If he found himself in a South American prison in the middle of a bizarre film shoot as the young man did who stumbled into the Muir Woods anomaly, he should also be able to walk out of it, since he wasn’t an inmate there either or wanted in that country for any crime – though if he were to be invaded and escaped to South America, that alone would argue that he was some kind of fugitive.

He stayed one night in New York and rented a car the next day that he drove to Boston. In Boston he rented a hotel room and called several former academic colleagues at MIT to inquire if they knew of possibilities for him to contact researchers with grants for mathematics or physics. He drove a car that he rented at the airport to Cambridge but didn’t visit the buildings he had worked or studied in to see if anyone he knew in the old days was still around because he was fully aware that they wouldn’t necessarily be overwhelmingly pleased to see him. After a day of unfruitful calls, one of them gave him the name of a Silicone Valley venture capitalist who reportedly was trying to recruit theoretical physicists for an unnamed project, but being cognizant of Radder’s ill repute as a vexatious worker, he asked him not to mention where he heard about him. Radder had nothing else to go on, so he flew to San Francisco the next morning, figuring he could wow the VC if he could get his ear, as he had done twice, to his early 21st century Senegal and late 21st century Mars financier Rudolf Kaufmann. But a Silicone Valley VC might be more skeptical than the power-hungry Kaufmann and therefore a tougher nut to crack. Landing at SFO, he rented a car and drove to Palo Alto, the home of Stanford University and the epicenter of Silicon Valley, where he hoped to renew his career. This time he didn’t so much vow as he did hope that he wouldn’t make a complete mess of it as he was forced to admit he had done twice before.

For this to come to pass, it seemed likely that he would have to apply his rational aspect and overcome his intense animosities that led to his fiascos and his flight from police through woods in the dead of night.

7: A CALL TO THE FUTURE Joey entered Kurt’s house after school and found him in his bedroom, and then saw Chris and Jorge Dorman looking like teens on Lucky’s face and then on a larger screen on an otherwise blank wall.

Chris exclaimed, “Kurt, why do you look so young?”

Ignoring the question, Joey asked, “Is that you, Chris?”

“Of course, who else would I be? Where are you?”

“I’m in Kurt’s bedroom, but why do you look so different? You both look way young.” “I’m getting confused now, you forgot about the Juve? This could be a side effect of your movement through time. And why does Kurt look so young? I’ve never heard of the Juve setting people back before teen years.”

“I’ve never been in juvenile hall, you know I’m a good boy. What are you talking about?”

“Joey, just tell me about Kurt. I didn’t get around to telling you his house is also a heritage museum like yours to commemorate him helping reverse The Vanishing. You’re in the museum?”

“Chris, I don’t know anything that museum or any vanishing and neither does Kurt, right?” and then Joey turned to look at Kurt. “And you haven’t told me why you and Jorge are so young.”

Kurt agreed, “That’s right, I don’t know about any of that joove or whatever it is.”

Jorge said, “I don’t understand you not knowing about the Juve, you took it yourself. You and Joey must be having a sympathetic memory lapse or temporary amnesia from the time travel Joey did.

I’ve read about that happening in my research as a sociopsychologist, but I haven’t personally encountered a case of it before this.”

Chris asked, “Anyway, where are you really, in Kurt’s home in Austin?”

“Austin? We both live in Palo Alto.”

“Joey, you know there’s no Palo Alto, the entire Bay Area became part of San Francisco twenty years ago. Why do you call it Palo Alto, it sounds like you’re living in the past.”

“Chris, we’re in Palo Alto and it’s not part of San Francisco.” He turned to Kurt and asked, “Kurt, could you go to the window and yell out if anybody who hears you is in San Francisco?” but Kurt just shrugged his shoulders, assuming this was a rhetorical request.

Chris said, “This conversation isn’t getting us anywhere. You don’t know why we look so young and we don’t know why Kurt looks so young. We explained our youth but you didn’t explain Kurt’s.”

Jorge and Chris looked at each other with furrowed brows, and suddenly Jorge lit up, abruptly turned back towards the two boys and asked, “Joey, what’s the date where you are?”

“It’s April 4th.”

“April 4th? It’s of August 17th, right Chris?”

She replied, “That’s right, it’s the 17th of August.”

Joey said, “No way.” Then he turned towards Kurt and asked, “Is it August 17th, Kurt?”

Kurt said, “No, it’s not August anything, but I suppose it could be April the 3rd instead of the 4th.”

“April 4th? But what year is it, 2101?”

“2101? Are you crazy? How could it be 2101? Come on now, this is getting too weird. It’s 2014, the same year as it was yesterday and the same year it will be tomorrow.”

Chris and Jorge looked at each other in confusion and then Chris exclaimed, “Oh my God Jorge, they’re in 2014! They’re talking to us from the year 2014!”

Nonplussed, Joey replied, “Jeezis, what the ding dong are you freaking out about?”

Jorge said, “Kurt, do you have a current calendar around that you could show us? Or a recent newspaper, you had newspapers in those days, right? I don’t doubt your veracity or honesty, I just want to make sure this isn’t some kind of psychological effect you’re both going through because of confusion caused by Lucky or some other factor.”

Kurt hesitated, then looked at Joey as he shrugged his shoulders again while shaking his head; he walked to his dresser, retrieved the first section of the San Francisco Chronicle from the previous day and held it up with its front page facing the wall so that Chris and Jorge could see the date on it. At first he held it while standing next to his bed, then realized the typeface might be hard to read from that distance, so he moved the newspaper to within a couple of feet of the wall, standing as far away from the wall as possible, as if to avoid some kind of contamination; he held it with both arms fully outstretched.

“Oh my God,” Jorge said, inadvertently mimicking his lifepartner’s reaction.

He looked at Chris and exclaimed, “He’s right! It says 2014! Even after all I’ve seen, I can’t believe this is really happening!”

Joey said, “Okay, so now that you know what is happening maybe you could explain it to us. This is totally getting on my nerves.”

Chris said, “Joey, I’m glad neither of you are standing because you would fall down when you hear this. It’s not 2014 where we are here. We look like teenagers because we took a potion years ago that reversed our aging process. We’re in 1991, not 2014. We are at this very moment living in a time

nearly a century ahead of the time you’re in. You don’t know about the Juve because you’re living in an earlier time when it wasn’t invented yet.”

Joey and Kurt’s eyes opened wide with astonishment when they heard this and looked at each other with their mouths hanging open. Finally, it was Joey who spoke first after hearing this revelation and catching his breath, saying, “Lucky showed me a screen that he showed me before with you guys on it, and all of a sudden there you guys were, we had no warning that he was going to even do this and for sure not to connect to you in the future. What does this all mean? Can you show us a newspaper?”

Jorge said, “We don’t have newspapers any more, but we’ll direct our APDs to the front window so you can see what the future looks like.”

As he said this the opaque front window of their home suddenly became clear and Joey saw air vehicles zipping by, one hovering near the house others higher up flying at a quicker pace.

“What are those, aliens from Mars?”

Chris replied, “No, Joey, those are the vehicles we use to get around now. Almost all vehicles are round and fly through the air now. They’re called A-Vs because they’re powered by anti-gravity.

Remember the promises of flying cars that never seemed to arrive? They’re all like that now, the promise finally became a reality.”

Joey said, “Another strange thing is that I recognize Chris as my friend even though I never met her.”

“You never met her? Oh right, the Stadium Miracle and all that is later – after you go to the 2013 Bay To Breakers and the Giants game.”

“You mean 2015, we already went to the 2014 Bay To Breakers and a Giants game and there wasn’t any miracle unless you want to call the three home runs by pitchers a miracle. I think it set a record or something.”

Jorge looked at Chris and then asked Joey, “You already went and there was no earthquake?”

“There was a small tremor during the Giants game, nothing to write home about.”

Chris then asked Joey, “You said you don’t know me but I’m your friend? What do you mean by that?”

“I dunno, I recognize you and I know you’re my friend, but I don’t remember meeting you. What about you, Kurt?”

“Uh-uh, never, I’ve never met her either, but I know she’s our friend too. One of our best friends. They’re both our best friends even though we never met them. Too weird!”

Joey suddenly perked up with “Hey, last week I dreamed about a stadium earthquake twice, and the second time it was crossed over with a red line and my brother Paul told me he thought it meant it was an event that was supposed to happen and was canceled.”

Jorge mulled that over, and finally muttered uncertainly to Chris, “Mmmmm ... if the Stadium Miracle never happened because the big earthquake never happened ... but you were sent to San Francisco because of the earthquake Stadium Miracle. If it didn’t happen, you wouldn’t have been sent to San Francisco and you would never have met Joey and Kurt – or me. And yet here you and I are, happy lifepartners, and we have mutual friendships with Joey and Kurt. It sounds crazy, but no crazier than anything else right now – this conversation we’re having with Joey and Kurt in a different time seventy years ago is impossible and completely bat crazy. Maybe they sent you to San Francisco because of the 2013 Bay To Breakers? Joey, who won the Bay To Breakers, was it a Moroccan?”

Joey said, “Yeah, it was a Moroccan, but there was a controversy about it because the video showed two different guys winning it.” without mentioning that he had secured the victory for the Moroccan. He was confused enough already without introducing the subject of how Lucky fixed the

Moroccan’s stumble at the end, erasing his loss from history apart from the videos that showed him both winning and losing.

Chris said, “I remember meeting all of you because of the Stadium Miracle.” She looked at Jorge uncertainly and he nodded his head affirmatively. “And also, if none of that happened, I shouldn’t even know who Lucky is, but I do know. No, that doesn’t make sense to me. There must be a different explanation – or maybe there is no explanation whatsoever. Maybe what is just is.”

Joey said, “I don’t know about all that, I just know that Lucky changed two events, one a yo-yo contest and the other a swim race – oh yeah, he also fixed our friend Frank’s knee. I don’t know what else he can do, I’ve only had him a couple of weeks, but I’m glad you know who he is because explaining him to you would be just about give me a total headache.”

Suddenly, Chris and Jorge disappeared from the suspended display in Kurt’s room and Joey and Kurt both disappeared from the APD-Wall in Chris and Jorge’s living room. Joey and Kurt stared at each other and neither of them had the wherewithal to speak a single word. Joey looked at Lucky and he was his old usual self, just a blank gray stone.

After a couple of minutes of just staring at each other silently, Kurt finally offered a remark, “I don’t know what to think. Did you see what I saw? Chris and Jorge in the future? What year did they say they were in?”

“Yup, we just talked to them in 2090 or something, and they’re just about our best friends even though we never met them. Maybe we’re going totally bananas. Maybe somebody sprayed a psychedelic through your open window and we’re hallucinating and none of this is real.”

“Naaa, I don’t think anybody sprayed anything in here and I don’t feel any drug effects, do you?”

Joey said, “I’ve never taken any drug, but I don’t feel drugged up or anything, I feel totally normal.”

“Do you think they were really in the future, or is Lucky tricking us or something?”

“Don’t ever say that, Kurt. Lucky never would trick us in any way. Lucky is always on our side.

I’ve known that ever since my special dream about the coat hanger monster.”

“Beg to differ compadre, but a coat hanger monster is a trick in itself because there’s no such thing as coat hanger monsters.”

“That’s not the same as a trick, dufus! It’s like, a metaphor or something.”

“Anyway, what are we going to do?” Kurt said, “Don’t ask me, I just sleep here in this bed and that’s all I know.” and then he lay back on his bed, turned over onto his stomach and covered his head with a pillow.

Meanwhile, Chris and Jorge saw their screen revert to the international security meeting, and as they watched the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka speaking Chris said, “They’re gone, and we don’t even know if it was real. There are a lot of questions unanswered. For all we know this was Radder’s doing, he has the motive the genius and he could have researched enough to be able to artificially mimic Joey, Kurt and Lucky accurately.”

“But to what end, to rescue his propulsions system? It was too garbled a message to do that. In fact, we have nothing we can take away from this conversation. Nothing about it would cause us to recommend the preservation of Radder’s propulsion system.”

After saying this, Jorge looked at his old boss from 2013, Vernon Preston, who had watched the entire conversation and had an expression of befuddlement on his face to match theirs, but he made no comment and furthermore shook his shoulders to indicate he had no clue about what just happened.

Chris turned back towards Jorge and said, “But maybe what Radder intended didn’t pan out because the conversation didn’t go in that direction – we wound up talking about how to compare dates and trying to figure out what was going on.”

“Chris, this was already a massively confusing experience is we accepted it as genuine, but now you’re really throwing me for a loop by postulating that it was fake. Let’s just assume it was real for now and try to come to some conclusions based on that. We can get back to the fake theory later.”

“Okay, so why do both boys recognize us as friends even though we met them after 2013? And they went to the 2013 Bay to Breakers and the Giants game, but there was no Stadium Miracle, but we both remember it as having happened.”

Jorge looked at the Wall and said, “Stadium Miracle” but a search list showed nothing about an earthquake, only fantastic football catches, game-winning home runs and the like.

He said, “No Stadium Miracle – it didn’t happen at all – at least not in terms of recorded news event history. Even though I’m a psychologist, this is way beyond my training, but I’m thinking our recollection of the Stadium Miracle is some kind of vestige, like when the videos of the change of events showed both the original and the subsequent version that became some kind of permanent reality in recorded history.”

“You keep talking about recorded history. You mean that all those evil acts by Radder never happened – even beyond Lucky rendering them unhappened?”

“I’m not saying that, strictly speaking. The people on that wall are having a meeting about Radder’s recent destruction of planets that Lucky reversed, so that evil act isn’t erased from recorded history – at least not yet, and we don’t even know what yet really means at this point. But it’s not inconceivable for Lucky to allow and event to happen and then shortly after unhappen it and at some altogether different point unhappen it so thoroughly that it never happened in the first place. It would be miraculous beyond description, but frankly I don’t see Lucky being incapable of anything. After all, miracles are his stock in trade and he churns them out without any apparent effort.”

“I can’t take this, I might get my first headache in a century if we keep talking about it. But I can’t focus on the meeting, either, I’m going to lie down and listen to Pink Floyd and the Rascalmongers and you call me if they want to speak to me again. Hopefully, my part in this meeting is already culminated. I realize it’s still of uppermost importance, but I can’t think right now after talking to Joey and Kurt.”

She escalated to their bedroom, but Donovan remained in their living room to maintain their presence at the meeting; however, he likewise could hardly pay any attention and only remained sufficiently alert for questions directed at him or Chris.

After only about fifteen minutes he realized he was too discomfited to pay any attention to the meeting either and asked Vernon to let Chris and him know if they were needed, and then went upstairs to join her.

PLEASE PURCHASE BOOK FOR CHAPTERS 8-12