Found (11 page)

“
Physics?
” Katherine repeated. Clearly, that wasn’t what she’d expected.

“Well, yeah…” Angela looked down at her hands. Jonah noticed she had her fingers knotted together, like she was suddenly very tense. “Look, you’re not going to believe me anyhow, so maybe I shouldn’t even tell you this part. I’ve been working on this for thirteen years, and it’s gotten me nothing but scorn and mockery. And I’ve gotten no confirmation—no sign that what I believe is true. At least, not since that first day. So maybe I should just pat your heads, and tell you to run off and be good little children for your parents, and don’t worry about where you came from. Don’t be like me, obsessed and paranoid and—”

“We already are,” Chip said firmly. “It’s too late.”

Speak for yourself!
Jonah thought. But he was dying to hear Angela’s theory too. He couldn’t walk away now either.

Angela took a deep breath.

“Okay, then,” she said. “One thing I saw that nobody else did—though I did report it when I was debriefed, before they began talking about confidentiality statements—was an insignia on the plane. By the time everyone else saw the plane, it looked like any other Sky Trails regional jet. But when I first saw it, the plane’s door said,
TACHYON TRAVEL
.
Tachyon—T-A-C-H-Y-O-N
. You’re all too young, probably, to have studied much physics—and anyway, this is very theoretical physics—”

“So what’s a tachyon?” Katherine asked. She always hated being talked down to or told that she was too young for something.

“Tachyons are particles that travel faster than the speed of light,” Angela said.

The speed of light?
Jonah thought.
What’s that got to do with anything?

“I thought nothing could travel faster than light,” Katherine said, acting proud that she knew that.

“Nobody knows really,” Angela said. She was speaking very carefully now, watching for their reactions. “At least, nobody knows
yet
. The theories are that if anything could go faster than light, all sorts of weird things would happen. Time and space would have a different relationship. Aging would be different. And, if a plane could travel that fast, it’d become…a time machine.”

Everyone stared at her.

Chip was already shaking his head.

“Who’d send a bunch of babies in a time machine?” he asked scornfully. “What would be the point?”

“I don’t think anyone sent a bunch of babies in a time machine,” Angela said, speaking very precisely. “I think a bunch of adults got into a time machine. I think it was an experiment, one of the first attempts at time travel. They didn’t understand all the effects. So they didn’t realize what would happen when they arrived in our time.” She paused, letting that sink in.

“You mean—” Katherine asked.

Jonah couldn’t tell if she really understood or if she was just prompting Angela.

“I mean that Chip and Jonah used to be much older than they are now,” Angela said. “I think they were changed by traveling through time. I think they—and all the other babies—came from the future.”

Silence. Dead silence.

Jonah wasn’t really even thinking about what Angela had said, because it was too bizarre and incredible to consider. It was like his brain shut down, rejecting her theory so completely. After a few moments, he thought to look at Chip and Katherine to see how they were reacting—mostly he was concerned that they’d be all rude and mocking and mean to Angela, when clearly she was just a nutcase. Oh, sure, she’d seemed fairly reasonable at first, except for being scared to talk on the telephone. But believing in time travel? And babies aging backward? Insanity.

Chip and Katherine both had their mouths open already, though Chip’s might have just been hanging open in shock.

“Well, thanks for meeting with us,” Jonah said quickly, hoping he could get everyone away from Angela before Katherine had a chance to speak. “Your ideas are, um, very interesting.” He was struggling for words, trying to think of a polite excuse to leave. Could he carry off,
Oh, my, look at the time!?

Suddenly something slammed into the glass door next to Jonah.

Instinctively, Jonah grabbed for the door handle, but it was too late. A man was wedging his heavily booted foot between the door and the glass wall. The rest of the man’s body was sprawled out on the ground, because another man appeared to have tackled him.

“You can’t do this!” the tackler was screaming. No, not exactly screaming. He was keeping his voice down, barely above a whisper, but his words still echoed with fury. “Not here. Not now. You’ll make a scene. Do you want to ruin time completely?”

Jonah shoved against the man’s boot; he drove his shoulder against the door, trying to shut it against the man’s ankle. He couldn’t see the man’s face, because the tackler blocked his view. Then the tackler turned, and Jonah could at least see him clearly. A jolt of recognition flowed through his body; he was so stunned he almost let go of the door.

The tackler was the “janitor” from the FBI, the one who’d told Jonah to look at the file on Mr. Reardon’s desk.

“Jonah! Chip! Run!” the tackler called urgently, struggling with the man in the boots.

What good was that? There was nowhere to run
to
, except out the door where the men were fighting. The booted man reared up, almost breaking the tackler’s grip.

Katherine shrieked.

“The window!” Angela said.

She rushed over to the outer wall and began tugging on the window handle. Chip jumped up and helped her. The window opened inward, making a narrow V with the wall. Chip dived out through the small space, barely missing landing in a holly bush.

Katherine followed him quickly, executing a gymnastic-like move at the end, when she flipped over onto her feet.

“Jonah, come on!” she yelled in through the open window.

Jonah looked back at the men struggling on the ground. What would happen if he stopped holding the door?

“Go!” the tackler called over his shoulder.

Jonah ran for the window, skirting the table. He looked back once and saw that the men had rolled into the conference room. He still couldn’t see the booted man’s face, but he had a general impression of bulk, of muscles. He wasn’t sure the tackler could hold him.

“You go first, Angela,” Jonah said.

The name seemed to trigger a reaction in the tackler. He jerked his head back, looking over the top of the conference table.

“Angela DuPre,” he called. “We have wronged you in time. We owe you—”

The tackler’s head suddenly disappeared beneath the table. The booted man must have pulled him down. There was a sound like someone’s head clunking against the floor, and the table lurched sideways.

“Angela?” Jonah urged.

He held out his hand to help her out of the window. She was wearing a skirt; she probably wouldn’t want to go headfirst.

Angela drew back.

“You go on,” she said. “I’ve been waiting thirteen years for something like this. I’m going to stick around and get some answers.”

“But they’re dangerous!” Jonah protested. He couldn’t see the men at all now, but he could hear them, grunting and punching and slamming into the chairs and the table.

“Probably. That’s why
you
need to get out of here,” Angela said. She pushed him toward the window. He grabbed on to the frame, spreading his fingers against the glass to brace himself as he slid his feet out.

“Go, Jonah!” the tackler called from beneath the table. “Hurry! And Jonah—I saw your note! You have to be careful! Careful where you leave anything that could be seen later…anything that could be monitored—”

That was all Jonah heard, because he was out the window now, and the tackler was still using that low voice of hushed urgency. Jonah looked back, and he could see the tackler clearly now, under the table. He had one hand pressed into the other man’s hair, holding his head down. With his other hand, the tackler was frantically waving Jonah away. His mouth formed the words, “Go! Go! Now!” But Jonah couldn’t really hear him.

Jonah spun around and ran. He quickly caught up with Chip and Katherine. Without even speaking, all three of them ran for the bike rack, scooped up their bikes, and took off, pedaling furiously.

They were halfway down the bike path before Jonah’s mind kicked into gear, letting him think again instead of just acting on reflex.

He immediately slammed on his brakes.

Katherine was the first to notice that Jonah wasn’t keeping up, that he wasn’t pedaling hysterically toward home alongside her and Chip.

“Jonah!” she called over her shoulder from several bike-lengths ahead. “What are you doing?”

“I have to go back!” he yelled. “We can’t just leave Angela like that!”

“But—she’s a grown-up! She told us to go!” This was Chip arguing now.

“She—”

Jonah decided he didn’t have time to stand there and argue. He whirled around and began pedaling back toward the library just as desperately as he’d been pedaling away from it.

Grown-ups can get kidnapped too
, he thought.
And she’s a little nutty, she’d probably trust anyone who pretended to believe her crazy theories…. Her theories
are
just craziness, aren’t they?

Jonah couldn’t think about that right now. He focused on trying to pedal faster. By the time he reached the library, his legs were aching and he was gasping for air. He dropped his bike on the sidewalk and slipped in the door just ahead of a mother pushing a baby stroller and holding a toddler’s hand and taking infuriatingly slow steps, with a play-by-play commentary: “That’s right, you push the button for the automatic door opener and then the door will open, and…”

Jonah dashed through the lobby, past the check-out desk.

“Young man! No running in the library!”

It was a librarian, one of the women his mom always said hello to when she stopped in. Jonah thought maybe this librarian had been in charge of story hour when he and Katherine were preschoolers.

“I just—the conference room—men fighting—danger—”

That was all Jonah could manage, with his lungs threatening to burst.

To her credit, the librarian stopped yelling and sprang into action.

“Show me,” she said.

She rushed along behind Jonah, practically running herself.

They dashed through the stacks, past the magazine section where Katherine had hidden before, past the nonfiction shelves with all the thick books about taxes. Then, finally, Jonah could see into the conference room and—

It was empty.

“Angela?” Jonah called.

He pushed his way into the conference room. Not only was the room empty, but all the chairs were lined up perfectly around the table. And the table was exactly centered in the room, as if it had never been knocked off-kilter by struggling men. The window was closed. The only sign that anything had happened here was a smudge on the glass wall—probably Jonah’s own fingerprints, smeared against the glass when he’d scrambled out a window.

“Just what did you think was going on in here?” the librarian asked. She had her eyebrows raised doubtfully.

Just then Jonah saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head to peer out the window, and there was Angela. She was walking briskly through the far end of the parking lot.

“That’s the woman!” Jonah exclaimed. “The one who was in danger—”

While Jonah was watching, Angela stepped into the cluster of pine trees on the other side of the parking lot. She turned and lifted her hand in a way that might have been a wave at Jonah. And then she just…vanished.

Jonah hadn’t known that it would look like that. He’d heard Katherine’s description of the janitor appearing and disappearing; he’d heard Angela’s description of the plane doing the same thing. But he hadn’t understood how strange it would be, how it would set every nerve in his body on edge and make him question all sorts of basic tenets about how the world worked. Could gravity be tampered with too? Could…time?

Jonah blinked and stared and stammered, “But—but—” and then he at least had the sense to shut his mouth, because the librarian was looking at him oddly. Already his brain was trying to supply explanations for him—
She just stepped behind a tree…. You just blinked and thought you saw something odd
—the same kind of explanations he’d tried to use to account for Katherine’s story, for Angela’s. The kind of explanation anyone else, casually glancing out a window, would have accepted without a second thought. But his glance hadn’t been casual: he knew he hadn’t blinked, not while Angela was disappearing. He understood now what Angela had meant when she had said, “I know what I saw. I trust my own eyes.” The scene had been clear and distinct, and he really had seen Angela vanish into thin air.

“Where is this woman?” the librarian asked. “I don’t quite see—”

“She’s gone.”

The librarian narrowed her eyes at him and tilted her head suspiciously.

“So, what was this?” she asked. “A dare? Your audition for drama club? If so, I heartily recommend you for whatever part you’re trying out for, because you really had me convinced—you had
me
running through the library.”

“I wasn’t lying!” Jonah protested. “There really were two men in here fighting, and they seemed dangerous, and—”

The librarian tapped her chin, her eyes narrowing further.

“How did you see what was going on in this conference room
before
you ran in the front door?” she asked.

“Um, through the glass? From outside?” Jonah said, which did have a grain of truth to it. Still, his words came out sounding like a question.

“Someone did mention that they thought they heard a girl scream back here, but we thought it was just one of those computer games….” The librarian seemed to be talking mostly to herself. She reached out and grabbed Jonah’s arm. “Come with me. We’ll do a search through the library and you tell me if you see either of those men.”

Meekly, Jonah let himself be led back through the magazine section, past the row of computers, past the reference desk, through the little-kid section where the mother with the toddler was asking with exaggerated patience, “What will it be?
Curious George
or
The Cat in the Hat
?”

In the YA section, some kids from school were playing on the computers, and they pointed and giggled when they saw Jonah being paraded around, his arm trapped in the librarian’s grip.

“I don’t see either of the men now,” Jonah said, his face burning with shame. He just wanted to get out of the library, away from the librarian. He could see Chip and Katherine standing hesitantly by the front door, as if they weren’t sure if they needed to come and rescue him or not.

The librarian let go of his arm.

“I think you did see
something
,” she muttered. “You really were looking carefully for those men.”

And Jonah had been. Even when the kids from school had been laughing at him, he’d made sure that he peered down every aisle between the bookshelves, every nook of the little-kid reading area.

The men were nowhere in sight.

“Oh, well,” Jonah said, trying very hard to keep his voice from shaking. “Nothing’s wrong now. Can I just go?”

The librarian regarded him thoughtfully.

“Go on, then,” she said.

Jonah could feel her eyes on him as he went to join Chip and Katherine. Walking out the door, he felt robotic, because his body was doing something so normal—one foot stepping in front of the other, hands held out to shove against the door—while his mind was zipping and zooming and alighting on one strange thought after the other.

“What happened?” Katherine asked. “Is Angela okay?”

“Angela…” Jonah had to struggle so hard to focus his mind, to concentrate on the one precise moment of memory that his brain kept trying to transform into something normal and acceptable, something that would fit with everything else he already knew about the world. He wouldn’t let his brain do that; he wouldn’t stop trusting his own eyes.

“I saw Angela,” Jonah said. “I don’t know if she’s okay or not. I think she went into a time warp.”