Paradox (12 page)

The dinosaur was within a hundred feet of
them now. It stopped, surveying its prey. Its leathery skin was covered in
scars from forgotten battles, its legs as thick as trees. Two tiny forearms
hung in front of it as it bent lower. The teeth were the most terrifying part
of it. Each tooth had to be at least the size of Zac’s forearm. One bite from
this thing and Bryce and Rock would be crushed in half. He prayed that the
wormhole would be faster than the dinosaur’s jaws.

“Go!” Emilee yelled.

Bryce looked up at them. The tyrannosaur
gave an earth-shattering bellow and began charging. Bryce held tightly onto
Rock,
then
pressed his thumb down onto the Wand.

The tyrannosaur opened its mouth and
lunged forward, turning its head sideways to grab its meal. It slammed its head
into the base of the rock and stumbled back, dazed. The air around it shimmered
and undulated, and Bryce and Rock were gone without a trace.

“Thank God,” Emilee said. “Okay, now we
gotta get out of here.”

Zac walked away from the ledge, his eyes
still on the dinosaur below. A chill ran up his spine as it looked up at him.
Its beady eyes seemed to be following him, making him uneasy. “I never thought
about what it would look like when we go back,” he said. “I guess I always
thought a big, glowing wormhole would pop down out of the sky to vacuum us up.”

Emilee didn’t seem to hear him. “Come on,”
she said. “Wrap your arms around me.”

Zac approached her and reached out his
arms, feeling a little uncomfortable. It felt awkward to be wrapping his arms
around her, much like a slow dance at prom.

“Hold on tighter,” Emilee said. “We don’t
know if it worked for them or not. This could be it for us.”

Zac looked into her eyes as she wrapped
her arms around his waist. For a moment, she looked into his, too, and he
thought he was looking at her true self, the Emilee that didn’t hide behind a
mask of drive and determination. There was emotion in there; there was pain.
Zac could feel it.

Emilee sensed it, too, and closed her
eyes. “Here we go,” she said. “I hope to see you on the other side.”

She pressed down on the device, and the
last thing Zac heard was the roar of the ancient beast.

“What happened?” Zac heard as he arrived
back at TEMPUS. He was still holding onto Emilee, and she let go of him as soon
as she saw Rock stretched out on the ground outside the pentagon. He was
surrounded by Zac’s dad and Chen; Bryce sat off to the side in a rolling chair,
leaning forward and clutching his head. “What happened to him?” Dr. Ryger asked
again.

“The wormhole malfunctioned,” Bryce said.
“It set us down somewhere in prehistoric times.”

“What?” Chen asked. “But that’s
impossible. I entered the coordinates myself!”

Emilee moved to Rock’s side and held his
bloodied hand. Rock groaned. “Yeah, well, impossible or not, what do you think
did
this
?
Prairie dogs?”
She stroked his arm.

“I just don’t get it,” Chen said. “I
checked the parameters several times. I went through all of the precautions,
everything
.
I don’t know how it could have gone wrong, Dr. Ryger.”

“Well, we’ll have to deal with that later.
Right now, we need to get him help,” he replied.

Rock whispered something, and Emilee bent
down to listen. “We have to get him to a hospital,” she said. “He said he can’t
feel his arm where the dinosaur bit him. He said it’s numb and feels like
it’s
spreading.”

“Okay,” Dr. Ryger said. “Let’s get him to
the main level. But we need a plausible explanation. We obviously can’t tell
the hospital he time-travelled or survived a dinosaur attack.” He lifted Rock
up and together they started walking up the incline. Emilee followed.

Chen ran over to help. “I got you,” he
said, supporting Rock’s other side. “I’m so sorry, man. I have no idea how this
happened.” He continued apologizing as they walked, and his voice soon became a
murmur echoing off the walls as they ascended.

Soon, Zac was left alone in the room with
only Bryce. He pulled up another rolling chair and moved close to him. “So what
happens now?” he asked.

Bryce didn’t even look up. “I don’t want
to think about it,” he said.

“Do you think Rock’s going to be okay?”

“I have no idea. He’s in pretty bad shape
now. I don’t know about you and Emilee, but when we travelled together like
that, it drained a lot more energy from me than I expected.”

“Same here,” Zac said. He still felt a bit
dizzy and almost sick to his stomach.

“And if his arm is going numb like that…”

Zac looked at the pentagon. “He’s going to
shut it down, isn’t he?”

Bryce took a deep breath. “I don’t know.
Last time something like this happened, when Rock’s brother died, he shut it
down for a month. But Rock convinced him to keep going. I don’t see that
happening this time.”

Not that it mattered anyway, Zac thought.
His Wand was gone, destroyed by the pack of prehistoric beasts. He couldn’t use
the machine anymore unless his dad had finished making him the other Wand. But
even if he did, he probably wouldn’t let Zac use it. His “great idea” to
observe the past had blown up in his face. And now, Rock might die because of
him.

“What do you think happened?” Zac asked.
He got up and began pacing the room. “Do you think Chen entered the information
in wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Bryce said, standing up
and walking around the corner toward the computer. “Look,” he said, pointing to
the screen, “everything’s right. I checked it earlier, too.”

Zac studied the screen. “Could someone
have sabotaged it?”

“Sabotaged?”

“Well, yeah, like another scientist or
something,” he said.

Bryce shook his head. “You’ve been
watching too many movies,” he said. “The only other person who has access to
that kind of data is Emilee. She helped create the program, and she knows it
inside and out. I don’t think she sabotaged her own work.”

They heard footsteps echo in the corridor,
and soon Zac’s dad came into the room.

“Dr. Ryger,” Bryce said, “was anyone else
down here recently?”

“No,” Dr. Ryger said, voice solemn.
“Just us.”

Bryce studied the screen, staring at it as
if it would suddenly provide him with answers.

“Dad, is Rock going to be okay?” Zac asked.

His dad shrugged. “I have no idea. The
paramedics took him to the hospital, and now I have the task of calling his
parents and explaining the situation to them. I have no idea what to say. They
don’t know about the project, either. All they know is that they’ve lost one
son who had worked with me. I don't want it to become two.”

Zac hung his head. “It’s my fault,” he
whispered.

“That doesn’t matter,” Dr. Ryger said,
sighing. “For now, though, I’m going to have to temporarily disband all use of
TEMPUS. It’s not safe.”

Zac’s heart sank. He had hoped that by
showing that he could use the machine wisely for a good purpose, he would be
able to figure out a way to use it to see his mom again. “Maybe it
did
take us to Roswell, but the year was wrong. Was the computer programmed for
1947 A.D.?”

Bryce shook his head. “There is no B.C.
and A.D. in time,” he said. “Not really. Those are manmade constructs. But I
agree with your dad. We need to sit down and go over the code, line by line,
and see if we can figure it out.”

“But it was just
one
time,” Zac
protested. “We can still use it for recent events like we did for that
kidnapping the other
day,
can’t we?”

“Zac,” Dr. Ryger said, “I’ve made up my
mind. It’s over. It’s just not safe. Something is malfunctioning inside TEMPUS.
First, the prototype Wand you found started working even though it hasn’t been
assigned to you, and now the wormhole opens up nowhere
near
where it was
supposed to. I’m sorry, but there’s no way I’m letting you or anyone else go
back in until it’s fixed.” He shoved the empty rolling chair across the room in
frustration. “If only you hadn’t come down here a week ago, we wouldn’t be in
this mess.”

“You don’t know that, Dr. Ryger,” Bryce
said. “By finding the room and accidentally activating the wormhole, Zac might
have showed us how vulnerable the system is. Without him, we might not have
found the flaws.”

“Yes, but now we don’t even have the Wand
that was malfunctioning. Maybe that was the cause of everything. But now we’ll
never know.” He exhaled heavily. Zac felt hurt; he hadn’t meant to cause any
problems. It wasn’t his fault that he found the place. If they didn’t want him
to find it, they shouldn’t have let him in the building in the first place. It
didn’t have military-level security, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t keep
people out.

“I’m sorry,” Zac said in frustration. “I
didn’t mean to cause any problems.”

“Of course not,” his dad said, “but now
we’re short two Wands that were left in a different time period. At least
they’re designed to break down over time if they’re damaged.” He shoved his
hands in his pockets and started walking out of the room. “You know, it doesn’t
matter,” he said, his voice filled with anger. “We’ll figure it out. I have
bigger problems to deal with right now.”

As he stormed off, Zac was filled with
immense guilt.

“Don’t let it bother you,” Bryce said
after Dr. Ryger was out of earshot. “He’ll calm down in the morning. He just
needs to vent a little. This project is his whole life.”

Zac rolled his eyes. Of course it was, he
thought. Work always was. And this just proved it. His dad didn’t even ask once
how
he
was after this ordeal. He could have been killed by a prehistoric
creature or left for dead in the past, but all his dad cared about was the
project.

“I guess some things never change,” Zac
said.

When Zac arrived home that evening, he
walked right past his father into the living room. Dr. Ryger sat studying
something at his desk in the other room, scribbling something into a notebook.
Zac wanted to get a closer look at what he was writing, and he inched closer to
try and look over his shoulder. He peered at the black marks that were written
with such haste that they looked like nothing but black squiggles.

His dad’s hand moved in a blur, then
brought the pen down with force onto the notebook and remained still. “What?”
Dr. Ryger said without looking up.

“Nothing,” Zac said, caught off guard. “I
just wondered what you were working on.”

“Well if
I’m
working on it, then
it’s probably not intended for
you
to be looking at, is it?”

Zac backed off and walked back toward the
living room. He had hit a nerve and knew better than to keep pressing. Instead,
an awkward silence filled the room as he sat down to watch television. He
turned it on, flipping through the channels, not really watching anything, but
just doing it to be doing something.

“Do you mind turning it down?” his dad
asked. It wasn’t really a question, and Zac turned it down a little bit.

He wished his dad would just talk to
him,
yell at him for messing things up. Anything was better
than this cold and harsh silence. Hadn’t he been punished enough already? It
was his fault that no one else would be able to use TEMPUS. His fault that now,
other crimes wouldn’t be solved and lives could be lost. If it weren’t against
the rules of time travel, he’d love to be able to go back and tell himself to
just shut up, to not even suggest trying to go to Roswell.

The silent treatment grew unbearable, and
Zac stormed into the other room. “I know you’re upset, but we can’t do this. I
know we can figure out a way to keep the project from being shut down.”

“Zac, you don’t understand,” his dad said,
turning to look at him. “This project isn’t just something of mine. I’m just a
physicist who runs it and carries out the work. I’ve solicited and borrowed
money from lots of wealthy people, people whose names you’d know in an instant
if I told you. I told them of all the good we can do if given the time and
technology to develop TEMPUS. And now, they’re going to demand answers for why
the technology isn’t working properly. If they find out about this and get
nervous, they’re not going to want to invest money in it anymore. They don’t
want to be slapped with a lawsuit that could cost them everything. They’re
risk-takers, but some things are too risky.”

“Just talk to them,” Zac said. “If they
know that what you’re building is that extraordinary, I’m sure they’ll be
willing to give you more time to—”

“You don’t get it, Zac,” he said. “It’s
not just me. I didn’t build TEMPUS all by myself. Do you think I figured out
how to create the portal to the wormhole without any help? That took money and
technology, more brilliant minds than you’d believe. It’s not magic that powers
that thing!”

Zac was quiet, contemplating what to say.
He knew his dad wasn’t going to change his mind about shutting it down, but he
had to try. If only he could fix the problem that caused it. An idea came to
him.

“Wait,” he said. “What about sending
someone else back to the site where Rock was attacked by the dinosaurs? Bryce
and I can’t go, but maybe Chen could.
He
could go to that time and warn
us to leave before the attack even occurred, and then you wouldn’t have to
worry about any of this.” He smiled, proud that he had thought of it.

Dr. Ryger shook his head and put his hand
up. “Don’t you think I’ve already considered that?” He sighed. “It won’t work.”

“Why not?
We
wouldn’t be running into ourselves, would we? It would be someone different.”

“It doesn’t matter. If Chen went back and
gave you the warning, Rock wouldn’t be injured. But if Rock doesn’t come back
injured, then Chen won’t go back in time to prevent it. It wouldn’t work.”

Zac paused, considering it. Realization
hit him and he closed his eyes in resignation. “It’s a paradox, isn’t it?” His
dad nodded, crossing his arms. “But why can’t we at least
try
it? What
if all of your theories about creating paradoxes are wrong? What if we don’t
injure
time when we change something in the past? Won’t time fix itself so that things
will go back to normal? Maybe in the new timeline, Chen still goes back to warn
us, but it’s for a different reason.”

His dad stood up and began walking to the
living room. “We can’t take chances on theories,” he said. “If we do something
like that, it’s not only our lives we’re altering through the change. It could
possibly be hundreds, even thousands of others. One small change can invariably
lead to limitless smaller changes that branch off from the original.”

“So let me guess, this all fits into your
‘some things are meant to happen a certain way’ theory?” His voice was rising.
“Because I think it’s pretty crappy to think that Rock is ‘meant’ to be mauled
by dinosaurs.”

“No, I just want you to get it through
your head that some things
are permanent
! There’s nothing we can do
about them. You found the machine and talked your way into the TEMPUS Project;
that’s permanent.”

“I didn’t talk my way into anything!”

“Zac, do you think I’d want my own son
getting involved with time travel? The only reason I let you join the team was
because I knew Bryce would be able to take care of you. I was afraid that if I
didn’t let you in on it, you would mess things up worse. It looks like I was
right about something!”