Time Risk: A Time Travel Novel, page 26
CHAPTER 52
Rachel awoke in a double bed in a quiet room, hearing the soft tap of rain on the windows. The cream-colored curtains were drawn, muting the morning light. Propping herself up on her elbows, she noticed she was wearing blue cotton PJs. She looked around, taking in the surroundings that had a distinctly hotel-like feel: a desk, a chair, a beige carpet, a wide-screen TV, and a nightstand with a digital clock that read 8:23 a.m.
She eased back down, her back and neck stiff, her mind rewinding, playing back the events and conversations she’d had with Mike and Stephen. When was that? Had she dreamed it? Was it truly 2027, and over three years had passed since she’d time traveled back to 1941? How long had she been asleep?
Sitting up fully, she gently stretched her arms, yawned, and swung her legs out of bed, placing her bare feet flat on the deep, thick carpet. For a time, she just sat there, remembering, her mind circling events in the past, trying to make sense of the present.
After a shower and a hair wash, she found her purse and clothes inside the chest of drawers, and clean, casual clothes in the closet. She tried on the jeans, and they were a fit, more or less. The blue sweatshirt was large, but comfortable. Her feet slid into navy blue Crocs, and she paced the room for a time, towel-drying her hair.
A knock at the door startled her. “Yes?”
“It’s Mike Sterner, Rachel. Are you awake and decent?”
Rachel tossed the towel on the unmade bed and opened the door, finger-combing her damp hair. Mike stood there in baggy jeans, a black polo shirt, and sneakers.
“Hey, look at you,” Mike said. “You look rested. Feeling better?”
“Yes… What happened? How long have I been sleeping?”
“Two days.”
“Two days! Are you kidding me?”
“No. The doctor gave you something to help you sleep. Dr. Pam Thorston and a nurse monitored you. You were tossing, fighting and twisting—sometimes screaming.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Not unexpected, given the shock of time travel, the time change of three years, and what you said you went through back there. That’s why we had Dr. Thorston standing by.”
“I don’t remember her or the nurse.”
“They’re around. About eight hours ago, you finally settled into a peaceful, deep sleep. The room has cameras, so they observed you.”
“Where am I, Mike? Where is this?”
“An adjoining building, next to the lab.”
“This wasn’t here back in 2024.”
“It was added about a year ago.”
Mike rubbed his hands together. “Are you hungry?”
“Like a raccoon ready to dive into a dumpster.”
“Okay, let’s go to the cafeteria and get some breakfast. I’ll text Stephen and Sinclair Whitlock and tell them to meet us.”
“Sinclair Whitlock?”
“You remember we mentioned him, right? Andrew’s son.”
“Yeah… It’s foggy, but I remember.”
“Is that okay? He flew in yesterday. He’s anxious to see you. But only if you feel up to it. We can wait, if you want. It’s entirely up to you.”
“No… No, I’ll meet him. I’m ready to face this thing and end it.”
The small cafeteria was a cheerful yellow and white, with photos of the rugged Oregon coast that featured sunrises, sunsets and rocky, rustic beaches.
Rachel loaded her plate with scrambled eggs, sausage, and a toasted raisin bagel with butter. She put her plate on a tray and picked up a black mug that had TIME TEAM printed on it in white letters.
Rachel looked at Mike with a grin. “Are you selling these mugs to help support the lab?” she joked, as Mike held his mug under the coffee spout and pulled down the plastic lever.
“Not a bad idea, there, Rachel.”
Rachel filled her mug with steaming, hot coffee and placed it on her tray, along with sugar packets and creamers.
Once they were seated, Mike looked at her plate. “You probably want to go slow,” he said. “Your digestive tract might need a few days to adjust. That’s usually the case.”
Rachel took a bite of the eggs and chewed cautiously. They tasted great, so she tried a small piece of the sausage and then a chunk of the bagel.
Mike cut into his pancakes. “Stephen and Sinclair said they’d join us after we had breakfast,” he said.
Rachel nodded and turned her attention back to the food. They didn’t speak. They ate.
It was Rachel who finally broke the silence. “Mike… I still feel a little weird, like I’m hovering in a dream or something. So, am I really three years older?”
Mike held up a finger. “Technically, yes, but biologically, I don’t know. Dr. Thorston will do a complete physical and psychological exam when you’re ready. But look at you. You actually look younger than when you left.”
“Don’t bullshit me. Talk to me. Give me information.”
Mike blotted his mouth with his paper napkin, wadded it up, and tossed it onto his empty plate. He leaned back, laced his fingers across his belly, and nodded in sympathy. “Yes, Rachel. You deserve that, of course. But are you ready?”
“Hell, yes, I’m ready. If not now, then when?”
CHAPTER 53
Mike drained the last of his coffee, cleared his throat, and began. “Okay, Rachel. Stephen and I and the rest of the team have been pouring over your debriefing for two days. We’ve run countless simulations and put all our A.I. systems on it. We’ve diced it, chopped it, parsed it and flambeed it, and this is what we’ve come up with, even though our analysis will be ongoing for months, even years. Your case—your successful time travel journey—will be in the history books someday.”
“Oh, God, I hope not.”
“If it will make you feel any better, you’ll probably be dead before the general public is ready to hear about it.”
Rachel leaned forward, waiting. “So, tell me what happened.”
Mike continued. “We used advanced temporal tracking and analysis technology to detect any anomalies or disruptions in the timeline between 1941 and 1944. We found evidence of a temporal intervention around the time of Pearl Harbor, suggesting that your successful actions of saving David Whitlock’s life did indeed alter history. And, of course, we were visibly shaken at first when we saw that David Whitlock was killed in 1944, not 1941. Once we comprehended what had truly happened—that you were successful—we celebrated for two days.”
Rachel lifted a hand, shaking her head. “Wait a minute. I’m guessing that temporal intervention means there was a time diversion or something? In other words, time was altered, and it went off in another direction? When I saved David, I changed time and, thus, I changed the course of world events?”
“Yes. The timeline was altered, in a minor way, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t significant. We concluded, based on all the evidence, that the time anomaly we detected was the result of your successful mission in 1941.”
Rachel nibbled on her lower lip, digesting the information. “Is that it?”
“Rachel, we have a lot of data that we never had before, and we’ve only just begun to analyze it. It will take time, pardon the pun. We have to acknowledge the fluid nature of time travel and the importance of analyzing temporal anomalies so we can piece together changes in history. We’re now more aware of the immediate synchronization effects, and we’re already updating our protocols to better improve future time travel projects.”
Rachel stood up, turned in a circle, and then sat back down. She reached for her mug of coffee, but when she went to take a drink, she realized it was empty. In a kind of trance, she replaced it on the table.
“Are you with me, Rachel?” Mike asked.
“Yeah… I’m getting there. Part of my brain is still flying around out there somewhere.”
Mike sat up. “Okay, let’s make this simple. You traveled back to 1941 and saved David Whitlock’s life. By doing that, you changed the world—and yourself. In the future, which you didn’t know had changed, the world readjusted itself because of your success. David survived until July 5, 1944. As a result, his wife, Lorraine, did not die, but continued to live with her son, Andrew. She remarried and had two more children. We’ll never know the thousands of ways people’s lives have been altered by your saving David’s life in 1941. But here’s the bottom line: the world changed, Rachel, and the world you left from in August 2024 is gone. You’re now living in a new world—a world you helped to change.”
Rachel stared down at her empty plate, trying to wrap her head around it. “Yes, I get that, I think… but it seems… well, now that I’m back, it seems impossible.”
“Alright, maybe this will help. In video game terms, a ‘Checkpoint Restart’ refers to restarting from a saved point in the game. So, after an avatar has failed or died, the player doesn’t have to start over from the very beginning. Right?”
“If you say so…”
“Okay, then, essentially what you did, Rachel, was to create a checkpoint by ensuring David Whitlock survived Pearl Harbor. The timeline continued from that new checkpoint with slight variations, rather than restarting the entire history of the world. The overall outcome of World War II didn’t change—Japan was still defeated, and the Allies won—but the small changes introduced by Whitlock’s survival led to subtle differences in the world at large. Those changes, while minor compared to the larger events of the war, had a ripple effect, influencing the world in small but meaningful ways over the subsequent decades.”
Rachel nodded her understanding. “If that’s so, why aren’t there two of me now living in this world? Or are there two of me? Another one out there who didn’t time travel?”
“No, you’re the only one. Think of it like editing a video. Imagine you have a scene where someone is wearing a blue shirt. If you go back and change the shirt to red, when you watch the video again, you won’t see both the blue and red shirts together—you’ll only see the red one, as if it had always been that way. The same principle applies here: when you changed the past, it altered the entire timeline, so there’s only one version of Rachel in 2027.”
“But you remember the old Rachel, don’t you?”
“Yes. The old Rachel exists in my mind, but the person I’m talking to now—the new Rachel—has a different set of memories because you lived a different version of the timeline. Got it?”
Rachel raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Alright, fine. So, you're saying I'll uncover things about myself in this world—things I don’t remember or maybe never even knew?”
Mike nodded. “Oh, yes. No doubt. In this new world, you will be surprised.”
“I don’t know if I like the sound of that.” Their eyes met. “And what happened to those three years I lost? Where did they go?”
Mike lifted his hands. “As I said, Rachel, our time travel exploration is just beginning, and just as with quantum physics, and space exploration, and underwater exploration, we don’t have all the answers, and we probably never will. We’re going to be checking and rechecking and evaluating every part of that time machine, along with the data, to see if there is a glitch somewhere. Personally, I think the glitch has more to do with the Temporal Beeper. It’s unstable. It’s always been unstable.”
Rachel closed her eyes and massaged them. “You didn’t tell me that back in 2024.”
“No, Rachel, I didn’t, but I wouldn’t have let you time travel if I believed for a second that the damn unpredictable thing wouldn’t somehow bring you back. And I monitored it every day for those three years. You were never alone. I was waiting for you.”
Rachel opened her eyes and gave him a hard squint. “Well, it’s a helluva thing to be a guinea pig, Mike. I was scared to death most of the time.”
Mike’s grin broadened in triumph as he spread his hands. “But you did it, Rachel. Do you realize how incredibly wonderful that is? You time traveled to a target, saved a man’s life and changed the trajectory of the world, and returned safely. It’s incredible!”
Rachel looked at Mike with doubt and speculation. “And what about Greg Stone?”
Mike tilted his head left and lifted an eyebrow. “That was a shock. We’re running data checks and simulations. It will take time to evaluate his impact on the past and future. Right now, you’re our first priority, Rachel.”
Rachel straightened, and she stared at him for a long time. “It’s dangerous, Mike. Time travel. The wrong kind of person could really screw the world up if they were free to travel through time. Look what Greg Stone was going to do. You know that, right? Of course, you do.”
Mike turned a hand over and looked at his veins. “It’s a risk. It’s how we grow and learn. We have to risk.”
Rachel lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Okay, so I didn’t tell you everything that occurred back there. Against your and Donald Elsden’s instructions, I did try to stop Pearl Harbor. I told Victoria Gilbert everything. She’s the reporter I told you about. Anyway, she believed me, and she contacted Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Mike’s eyebrows shot up. “No shit?”
Rachel fixed her eyes on him. “No shit. See what I mean? Going back in time and then living in that time are very different from just imagining, speculating and planning it. It was real, and I wanted to save those people and shorten the war.”
Rachel heard footsteps. She swiveled around and her chin dropped. The man standing next to Stephen Cross, smiling at her, was the spitting image of David Whitlock, the man she had saved in 1941. He was a middle-aged version of his grandfather, with the same striking features—thick black-and-gray hair and that familiar, charming smile. His dark, tailored suit complemented his tanned face, amplifying his undeniable appeal.
Rachel slowly got to her feet and faced him.
He extended his broad hand. “Hello, Rachel. I’m delighted to meet you at last. I’m Sinclair Whitlock.”
CHAPTER 54
Rachel and Sinclair Whitlock strolled along a pink gravel path that meandered along the grounds of the time travel lab, where a cool breeze stirred the late autumn trees.
“Are you warm enough, Rachel? I didn’t realize it was so cool out here. I was in San Diego last week.”
“No, I’m fine. It feels good. But very different from the scented breezes of Hawaii in the 1940s.”
“I’ve been anticipating seeing you, Rachel, and hearing all about your experiences. I was sorry to hear about the Wheeler Field attack and the near-death encounter you had with that Japanese Zero. It must have been terrifying.”
“It was that, all right.”
“Do you prefer not to talk about it?”
“No, it’s fine.”
Sinclair glanced over at her with an eager smile. “It’s just that I’ve been like a kid at Christmas, waiting to speak to you about your time travel experience. I’ve carried the dream of time traveling for a long time.”
“Have you time traveled?” Rachel asked.
Sinclair glanced away. “No, I haven’t. Reason? I haven’t had the courage. It’s as simple as that. Does that surprise you?”
“No…”
“Does it make me seem like a coward?”
“I time traveled because I didn’t know what else to do. I did it because I was mad at the world, and mad at me. I didn’t care so much about what happened to me, and so I thought, what the hell? But you? You’d be risking a lot. Do you have a family? A wife? Kids?”
“Divorced, with two wonderful children. And you’re right, Rachel. I couldn’t leave my kids. I couldn’t take the chance of losing them.”
Rachel gazed up into the sky. “And look how it turned out. I saved David’s life, but he was killed anyway. So, I don’t know, was it worth it?”
Sinclar stopped, turning to her. “Yes, Rachel. Yes, it was worth it. I listened to your debriefing, and I talked to Mike and Stephen. What you did was truly remarkable and brave. You changed the course of the world, and we now have more data than we would have collected in years. And you saved my grandmother from dying so young and prevented my father from being raised in an orphanage. It had a trickle-down effect. Because of you, I had a good childhood and a wonderful life.”
Rachel slipped her hands into her jeans back pockets. “Well, I’m happy about that.”
Sinclair continued. “Am I disappointed and sad that my grandfather was killed in 1944? Yes. But I’m also proud that he died fighting for his country, as so many other men did. Yes. I’m very proud of that, and I’m very grateful to you, Rachel.”
They walked for a time in silence before Sinclair said, “Rachel… as per your contractual agreement with my father when you accepted the mission to time travel, I have transferred five million dollars into the account you provided on your application. And the taxes are paid.”
Rachel stopped again, and their eyes made contact. “I thought the deal was two million to time travel, and two more if I saved David. Five million after taxes was never mentioned.”
“You did save my grandfather’s life, and you returned. Let’s call the rest a bonus.”
They stood quietly and listened to birdsong, and to the wind rustling through the trees, and to a dog’s bark in the distance.
Sinclair said, “Rachel… Would you consider having dinner with me, say, in the next week or so? I’d love to get to know you better, and I’d love to hear all about my grandfather. What he was truly like, and anything else you want to share with me about your experiences in 1941. Will you have dinner with me? We can go anywhere you wish. Anywhere at all. My private jet will take us any place you say.”
Rachel thought about it for a moment, and then her eyes brightened with a thought. “I’d love to go back to Oahu and tour the island. I’d love to see Honolulu again. Is that too far?”
Sinclair smiled with pleasure. “No, Rachel. That sounds like fun. I’d love to.”
As they started back to the lab, Sinclair stopped short, patting his inside coat pocket, remembering something. “Oh, by the way,” he said, removing two sheets of folded paper. “This is the information you wanted for First Lieutenant Zachory Reynolds and the journalist Victoria Gilbert.”
