Troy crept through the side yard to the back of the house. The front door was always locked and bolted, but in summer, they left the back door open with a screen across the opening to keep out the flies. He shoved his way inside.
A young couple was sitting at the dining room table, their baby in a highchair between them. They looked up as he stepped into the room, their eyes widening. The man started to push back his chair, until Troy pulled a gun from his pocket. “Stay there,” he said. “Don’t move.”
“D-do you want money?” the man stammered. “I don’t have much. I’m a teacher. You can… you can have my wedding ring.” He grabbed his left hand and tried to pull off the ring, but it wouldn’t budge.
Troy shook his head, a strand of silver hair falling in his eyes. He had been traveling for months without a break, and his hair and beard had become long and disheveled. “That’s not what I’m here for.” He was tempted to lecture the man on his taste in women, but it was better to get in and out quickly.
The woman laughed. “He’s here for the baby, Harold.”
The man gasped. “What the hell’s gotten into you? Why is this funny?”
“I thought this might happen,” she said. She stood and pulled the baby from the highchair. Smirking, she walked over to Troy and handed him the infant, who immediately began to wail.
“Don’t worry,” Troy said. “You’re going to have the life you deserve.” He turned and left the way he came in, the baby in his arms.
The woman went to the back door and called after them, “I’ll see you again! You know I will! Just you wait!”
Troy ignored her. He put away his gun and pulled a remote control from his pocket. “Ready to start your new life, little man?”
Rosa dropped a plastic binder on the director’s desk. “I have a new proposal for you, Jim.”
He put on his reading glasses and peered at the cover page. “More research on the forties?”
She forced a laugh. “Oh, you know, World War Two is such a rich period. Still a lot we don’t know much about, like the UFO flap of 1947.”
“Interesting…” He plucked a pen from his shirt pocket. “Give me an hour to look this over and make some notes.”
“Do you think you’re likely to approve the funding? I know the budget is a bit tight, what with all the austerity measures this year.”
“That’s only for social programs. The Bureau is like the military. If we want something, Congress just turns on the printing presses.” He laughed. “I’m sure I’ll approve your project. I know I can trust you.”
He started reading, apparently done with the conversation. She turned to go and saw his coat hanging on the office door. As she passed by, her hand dipped into the pocket and grabbed his keycard, hiding it in her blouse’s loose bell sleeve.
Once she was in the elevator, her shoulders began to relax. No one was following her. She touched her sleeve. The keycard was still there. “Looks like nobody noticed,” she muttered. “Not yet.”
Troy gazed at the hole in the sand. “The trunk is still down there,” he thought. “Won’t have to dig it up. Rosa did the hard work for me.” He climbed down and gave the trunk a shove. It didn’t budge. It was stainless steel, and packed full. It had been hard to move even with Rosa’s help. Dragging it out by himself would be a pain, but at least he wouldn’t have to share the treasures inside. Not anymore.
He turned the trunk on its end, leaning it against the side of the hole. Grunting, he pushed it up to the surface. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he climbed back up. He took out a pocket knife and cut the black tape sealing the trunk lid and pulled it open. “Good, everything is here. I beat her to it this time.”
A woman’s voice came from behind him. “Thanks for doing the heavy lifting.”
He turned around to find an older woman aiming a shotgun at his chest. “…Mom?”
Rosa went downstairs to the security desk in the lobby. No one was there. The usual guard, Randy, must have been on a break. She used the director’s keycard to unlock the computer station. It only took a moment to scan the data on the card and make a duplicate. Deleting the file and the security camera footage took several minutes. She managed to finish just as Randy returned.
He frowned, confused. “What are you doing at my desk, Miss Rosa? You’re not supposed to be there.”
She stood up and smiled, tilting her head as she twisted a strand of hair around her finger. “Hey there. I’ve noticed the way you look at me. I thought maybe you’d want to come back to my office for a bit and… talk?”
His eyes widened. “There must have been some misunderstanding. I’m happily married. And I’ve just been through training with HR about this stuff. Third time they made me take it.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. Maybe I’ll go do some yoga instead. I’m as bendy as a licorice whip, and twice as tasty. But I guess you’ll never know.”
His mouth dropped open. He just stood silently, stunned, as she walked away.
Troy groaned. This was bad. His lawyer didn’t have the security clearance to represent him in a case like this. No lawyer did. Everything was classified. The Bureau was supposed to only do research. If people knew what they could really do, there would be panic.
He watched a Bureau agent drag a large, metal trunk into the interrogation room. It was dirty and dented and nearly too heavy for her to handle. She threw back the lid and pulled out a couple of the plastic cases inside. “The trunk was under a tarp in the back of his pickup, but she had more of these plastic cases in her car. It’s clear they were both involved.”
The Bureau detective nodded, drumming her nails on the table. “I figured as much. He seemed like the type of guy to draw a younger woman into his scam.”
Troy huffed, pounding the table with his chained hands. “First, she’s not some naive college kid being led astray by an older man. She’s an adult with a PhD. Secondly, I didn’t scam anyone! We paid for everything!”
“That’s not the issue,” the detective said. “Do you think we arrested you over a handful of spare change?” She rubbed the back of her neck. “You knowingly broke the law and endangered everyone, and for what? Just to make a few dollars?”
Rosa laughed. “No, to make an absolute mountain of cash.”
The detective scowled. “This isn’t a joke. You two have made so many changes, we can’t even trace them all. The only way to fix everything is to erase both of you.”
Rosa drove out to the desert. The landscape had changed over the last century. The saguaro cactus they had used as a marker was gone. She pulled a notepad from her pocket. “Fortunately, I have a backup, thanks to Troy’s orienteering skills. Orienteering! Who knew people could still do that? It’s like finding out someone churns their own butter.”
She followed the GPS directions to the coordinates Troy had written down, to the spot where they had buried the trunk over a hundred years earlier. The burial was her idea. Troy had wanted to just take everything back with them when they returned to the present. She had to convince him that historical artifacts needed some signs of aging to be considered genuine. Anything too perfect would be considered a forgery.
They weren’t scheduled to dig it up for another two weeks, but coming a little early meant she could keep everything for herself. Troy would probably tell the boss when he found out, blaming everything on her, but by then, she would be long gone. She already had a buyer lined up willing to pay for everything in gold. You could spend gold anywhere, and any when. “Most of history wasn’t that great for women,” she thought, “but I bet I could do pretty well for myself in the California Gold Rush. Or I could go to the seventeenth century Caribbean and set myself up as a pirate queen. I always did enjoy sailing.”
She climbed out of the car and pulled her brown hair into a high ponytail. Sweat was dripping down the back of her neck already. “The only downside of coming here early,” she thought, “is I have to do all the digging myself. Wish we buried it somewhere colder.” The desert got down to 20°C at night, but there were mountain lions and coyotes in the area. It was safer to do the digging during the day, even if she was risking heat stroke.
She grabbed the shovel from the trunk and started digging. “I could have rented a backhoe,” she thought. “But that would have drawn too much attention. The Bureau would notice for sure. Maybe I should have hired a couple of big, shirtless guys. And then after they dug up the trunk, we could go back to my place and –”
Her eyes filled with stars. She collapsed, her head pounding. She remained conscious just long enough to see Troy standing over her, a shovel in his hands.
When she opened her eyes, everything was dark. She was covered in something plastic. “What is this? Did he put me in a body bag?” Struggling, she tossed it aside. An old tarp. She was in the back of Troy’s pickup, still in the desert. The sun was setting. She sat up slowly and peeked through the window into the truck cab. Empty. Troy and the trunk were gone. “Did he change vehicles? Was he afraid of someone following him? Maybe he thought the Bureau was onto us.”
She climbed down and stumbled back to her car. There was an old picnic blanket in the back seat. She tore a strip off and wrapped it around her head. It wasn’t exactly sanitary, but it was good enough to stop the bleeding.
The drive back was difficult. She was dizzy, her vision blurry. Her mind refused to focus. Once or twice, her eyes snapped open and she couldn’t remember having closed them. Thankfully, traffic was light, and the car’s sensors beeped whenever she got too close to another vehicle or the edge of the road.
By the time she made it back to Temporal Research Bureau headquarters, the building was dark. Everyone had gone home for the day. She used her keycard to unlock the door and staggered down the hallway. When security came in the morning and noticed she had opened the door after hours, someone would review the security footage. She would have a lot of explaining to do, but hopefully by then she would have enough money to start a new life.
Her vision was still blurry, but she managed to find the door to the portal generator room. She scanned her keycard again, but it didn’t work. The tiny screen in the door lock said “Revoked.”
“Damn!” Someone was watching the cameras already. They must have been suspicious enough to deactivate her card. “They’re probably sending security guards right now. Only a couple of minutes to get to the portal. Not enough time to think of a clever solution. Have to do something fast and stupid.”
She pulled a fire extinguisher from the wall and rammed it into the lock. After a couple more hits, the door frame cracked and the door slammed open. As she stepped inside, a boot kicked her in the back. She fell to the floor, landing painfully on the fire extinguisher. Rolling over, she saw Troy aiming a pistol at her head. It had only been an hour since she’d seen him in the desert, but his beard had grown. He looked exhausted. “Where did you get that pistol?” she asked. “It can’t be yours. You hate guns.”
“A previous timeline.” He pointed at the fire extinguisher. “You bashed Randy’s head in with that and stole his gun. I wrestled the gun away from you and jumped back just far enough to stop you from murdering him.”
“I would never kill anyone,” she said, keeping her voice calm. It was best not to agitate people who were pointing guns at you. “Are you sure you’re thinking clearly?”
“My brain is fine!”
She put on a concerned face. “Look at that beard. You must have taken a dozen trips back, do-over after do-over, and you still haven’t stopped me. You know that’s not good for your brain, sweetheart. I think you’ve got the chrono-skips. Do you feel like everything’s happening out of order? Maybe next you’ll be an old man on your deathbed, or a kid walking to your first day of school.”
He waved the gun. “I watched it happen! You murdered Randy. I’m afraid that knock to your head made you a little crazy. You’re a dangerous person now. Come with me and I’ll get you help before it gets worse.”
“You must think I’m so gullible.” She pulled the pin from the fire extinguisher and sprayed his face, then hurled the extinguisher at his chest.
She pushed herself up and stumbled to the control panel, setting the date and time to earlier that day. She reached in her pocket but couldn’t find the portal remote. “Damn, it must have fallen out when you hit me. It’s probably still in the desert. The one time I wear pants with pockets, and they didn’t even work…”
She set the portal duration for three seconds, and set the generator to do a full reboot as soon as it closed. “I won’t be able to get back, but I can’t have you following me.” The machine would still be down long after security arrived, and the data from the previous trip would be erased.
She threw the switch. A field of blue light appeared. The field began to spin, twisting and distorting the space around it, like a photo taken with a fisheye lens. Taking a deep breath, she ran into the light.
Rosa folded her arms. “Time travel is for research. Observation only. Changing things would get us arrested, or worse. We could end up erasing ourselves!”
“Not if we’re smart about it,” Troy said, grinning. “I’m not talking about stealing the Mona Lisa. Let’s go to the past, buy comic books that will become valuable later, and sell them in the present! Most of the old issues ended up thrown away, so the Bureau’s Anachronism Tracking System won’t notice they’re missing!”
She frowned. “Collectibles are only valuable because they’re rare. Bringing back more old comics will gradually reduce their value.”
He shrugged. “So a few people make a little less on their investment than they thought. So what? We’ll be rich! One issue can sell for a hundred grand. A trunk full of them could be worth millions!”
“Even if we sell them off gradually, it won’t be undetectable. Collectors will notice that their comics are becoming worth less and less. New old collectibles could only come from time travel! They’ll blame the Bureau!”
He shook his head. “What’s the most powerful motivator?”
“Survival needs. Food, water, shelter. Why?”
“Survival might be the most important to animals, but humans do dangerous stuff all the time. Look at all the people who smoke or get drunk and play with fireworks. No, the most powerful human motivator is avoiding cognitive dissonance. People will do anything to hang on to their beliefs. The voters approved time travel research. They would rather trust the government than admit they made a mistake. They’ll decide that the comic shops suddenly all got greedy, everywhere all at once.”
“You’re crazy. All those new issues don’t just show up out of nowhere. People will know.”
He laughed. “It happens all the time. Someone inherits their dad’s collection, and they don’t know what it’s worth and practically give it away at a garage sale. Trust me, I grew up collecting comics.”
She smirked. “I knew you were a nerd, but I didn’t realize you were a geek, too.”
“Hey, those stories gave me hope. There’s a thing in comics called ‘retconning.’ Retroactive continuity. Writers change a character’s costume or their powers, and then say it’s always been that way. They change the character’s history, too. Comics made me believe I could find a way to do that for myself. That’s why I went into quantum physics. The discovery of time travel made it seem like it was finally possible, but then the government took over and started restricting everything.”
“What did you want to change? Was your childhood really that bad?”
“My mother had anger issues. She acted like I had done something to hurt her, like my dad and I ruined her life. I guess I wanted to be someone else, someone she would want.”
She sighed. “Women can miss out on other opportunities because they were busy raising their children, and end up feeling like their lives hit a dead end. I’m sorry she took it out on you. That’s not fair.”
“At least dad was nice. I should have gotten them coffee mugs: World’s Greatest Dad and Worst Mom in Chicago.” He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a thick, black book, The Galactic Guide to Collectibles. “Don’t worry. We just pick the top sellers in here and we’ll be set for life. Everything will go perfectly, I promise.”
Rosa fell, landing in the dirt. There was no sign of the portal room or the Temporal Research Bureau building. “The building isn’t here yet,” she thought. She touched the back of her head and winced. “My vision was so blurry, I must have set the controls for the wrong decade.That means my car isn’t here either. Looks like I’m walking to the hospital.”
She walked along the road that would one day become an eight-lane highway. The cars were different, too – larger and slower, steel dinosaurs exhaling clouds of black smoke. She put out her thumb, but no one stopped. “I must look like a crazy person,” she thought. “Covered in sand and dirt and my head wrapped in a bloody rag.” Trudging onward, she managed to make it halfway to the hospital before she passed out.
When she opened her eyes, she was in bed. For an instant, she thought she was back at home, that the whole comic book misadventure had been a dream, but this wasn’t her room. The sheets were pink and covered in cartoon characters she didn’t recognize. A chair in the corner held a large teddy bear. It was a gaudy, orange thing, probably a prize from a carnival. “Hello?” she called. “Anyone here?”
A gray-haired woman came in carrying a pill bottle. “So glad you’re awake! I’m Doris. I found you on the road and put you in my granddaughter’s room. I thought about taking you to the hospital, but I peeked at the ID cards in your pocket. That driver’s license is obviously a fake. Even the year is wrong. If you have a fake driver’s license, you’re probably running from something, right? Maybe you don’t want to see a doctor in case they call the authorities. But don’t worry about me. I wouldn’t do that. Whatever you did, I’m sure you had a good reason. Half the ladies in my murder mystery book club have thought about poisoning their husbands. If you did that, you don’t have to tell me. My husband George always says I’m a busybody. Well, he used to say that. He’s gone now… Oh, listen to me go on. How are you? I bought you some pain killers.”
She nodded. “Better, thanks.” She took the bottle and checked the expiration date. Apparently she had arrived thirty years earlier than she had aimed for. She poured a couple of pills into her hand. “I hate to ask for another favor after you’ve already done so much, but do you think you can give me a ride to the bus station? I need to get to Chicago. My friend has family out there.” Or he will, as soon as he’s born.
“Oh, that’s nice. Of course I can take you. I bet they’ll love visiting with a pretty young thing like you.”
Her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Yes, I’m sure his dad is going to love me.”
