Paradox (13 page)

Zac was speechless. His eyes fell, and he
could feel a lump rising in his throat. His dad must have sensed it, because he
immediately began apologizing.

“I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

“No,” Zac said, “I get it.
Every word of it.
I’m just glad you finally told me what you
really think.”

“That’s not what I really think. I’m just
under a tremendous amount of stress right now, and thinking about all of these
‘what-ifs’ isn’t helping. They’re not going to fix anything. Right now, I have
a bunch of investors I need to answer to who are going to be worrying about a
lawsuit, who are going to be worrying about losing their money. I just need
some time,” he said.

Zac shook his head. “I know I messed
things up. So I’m going to fix it.”

“Zac, you can’t. The damage is already
done.”

“No,” Zac said, turning to go to his room.
“I’m going to find a way to fix it, so then you won’t be able to blame me
anymore.”

“You don’t even have the Wand anymore. You
would need to activate the one I made for you, but I’m not going to allow that.”

“Doesn’t matter.
I’ll figure something out. I’ll make things right no matter what it takes. Then
you’ll be able to keep your science project.” He smirked as he closed his
bedroom door, and then muttered under his breath, “We both know it’s what
matters to you most.”

Zac threw himself onto his bed. He didn’t
care what his dad said. He was willing to take risks even if his dad wasn’t.
And if he changed things in the process, how bad could it possibly be? No one
could really “injure”
time
. It’s not like it was a person or anything.
What was the point of having the ability to travel into the past if you
couldn’t take things that went wrong and make them right again?

Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, he
was going to TEMPUS to set things right.

Sunday morning, Zac woke up and wasted no
time getting to TEMPUS headquarters. He went down the long hallway and found
the room darker than normal. The pentagon no longer
glowed
its aqua color, though the hum of the machine still reverberated throughout the
room.

A light was on around the corner where the
computers were located. “Hello?” Zac called.

“Yeah,” Bryce said. “Come on back. Watch
your step.”

Zac maneuvered through the hallway to the
back room. It was the only room with light, cast from a small overhead lamp and
the glow of the screens. Zac took a seat next to Bryce, who was unshaven and
looked like he hadn’t slept or showered since they arrived back. He smelled
like it, too.

“What are you doing?” Zac asked.

“Trying to go through the code,” Bryce
said. “I told your dad I’d work on it, and I still haven’t figured it out.” He
swore as he scanned the lines of code on the screen.

“I wish I could help you, but I can’t
understand any of that stuff,” Zac said, scanning the code.

“I don’t think you’d be able to help
anyway,” Bryce said. “I can’t find anything wrong with it. I need Emilee to
help. She was the last one to use the program before we left.”

“Have you heard anything else about Rock?”
Zac asked.

Bryce shook his head, his eyes fixed on
the code displayed on the screen in front of him. “Not much. Emilee texted
me
to tell me that he’s still in the Intensive Care Unit
right now. Apparently whatever bit him was poisonous. Of course, the doctors
have no idea how to combat that poison since they don’t know where it’s from, so
they’re doing all they can to prevent it from spreading to his heart.” He sat
back and began rubbing his eyes. “Unless I can get Emilee to help me, I think
we’re just going to have to accept the fact that we may never know what went
wrong.”

Zac laughed.
“Yeah,
right.
Try telling that to my dad. He’s so worried about losing money
from all this that he won’t stop until everything’s perfect.”

“I don’t know,” Bryce said. “I think you
ought to give him a bit more credit than that. He’s not such a bad guy. Mine
was such a deadbeat that he never took care of my mom, never even saw me.” He
gave a sarcastic laugh. “You know, I’m glad he never came into my life. My mom
deserved better. At least the guy at the donut shop was kind to her.
Someone
treated her like she deserved. I always wished I could thank him, that I could
let him know what an impact his kindness had. Someday I want to look him up and
find him, just to say thanks.”

“I’ll help you find him,” Zac said. “But
right now, I need your help to make things right. Right now, the scales are
balanced for me.”

“What are you talking about?” Bryce asked.

“I’ve done one good thing with
TEMPUS—saving that little girl. And I’ve messed up once when we tried to go to
Roswell and Rock was injured. And now he could die. I can’t have it even out
like that. I need to do something good once more. I want the good to outweigh
the bad if this is going to be shut down.”

Bryce shook his head. “I can’t let you use
it just to help you feel good about yourself,” he said. “I don’t even have
access to the Wands; your dad locked them up and he’s the only one who has
access to them. So even if I did reactivate TEMPUS, it wouldn’t do you any
good.”

“Bryce, please,” Zac pleaded. “I need your
help. You have to know some way around all the rules. If I don’t fix this,
everything just gets worse from here on out for everyone… for my dad, for
TEMPUS, for Rock… I don’t want it to end like this.”

“You know what I think?” Bryce said,
turning off the monitor and standing up. He began walking down the hallway and
out into the main room, standing in front of the glass cage surrounding the
pentagon. “I think you need to just slow down and look at what you’ve got. Go
and make amends with your dad.” His words were more urgent, more intense. “Your
problem, Zac, is that you’re so fixated on your past, on fixing or changing
what’s already happened. But right now, you’re missing a huge opportunity to
make things right in your present. Someday you might regret it, might want to
go back and make it right, but you have that chance
right now
. You don’t
need a time machine to do that. So take advantage of it while you can.”

“But I don’t care about my—”

“You know what my last words were to my
mom?” Bryce interrupted. “I told her, ‘Don’t come back.’ We’d been in an
argument and she was leaving on a business trip.” He looked down, remorse
filling his voice. “She never did come back. And every day, I wonder if those
last words were how she remembered me. I wish I could go and take those words back,
or to tell myself that some of the things I got frustrated about back then
weren’t worth it. But I can’t. What’s done is done.”

Zac was silent for a while. “I’m sorry,”
he finally said.

“I know I’m only a couple of years older
than you are, but at least hear what I have to say. Don’t make the same mistake
I did. You still have one parent around, and believe it or not, he
does
care for you. He told me to watch you and to guard your life like I was
guarding my own. I’m sure Emilee would gladly trade places with you after all
she’s been through at the hands of
her
stepfather. I don’t know what’s
worse, having no father in your life, or having one like hers.” Bryce began
walking through the corridor, up toward the exit
.
“Yeah, well,” Zac said, calling after him, “we’ll see how that goes. No matter
what I say or do, it’s never going to be good enough. His work is always more
important than I am. Sometimes I think I could erase myself from history and he
wouldn’t even try to stop me.”

The school week started out slowly as
usual. Zac couldn’t stop thinking about all that was happening. Last night, he
went straight to his room and got onto his computer, not even bothering to talk
to his dad. What did Bryce know, anyway? Bryce only saw one side, the side that
loved going to work each day, engrossed with his scientific theories. Not the
side that chose science over his own son.

Zac sat alone at lunch, going off to the
commons area to eat. He sometimes sat with people from his classes, but the
past week he’d been feeling more distant than normal. He’d had less sleep and
didn’t feel like he fit in with anyone else. He wished he was a few years older
like Bryce and Emilee so that he wouldn’t have to sit through school anymore.
But then there would be college classes to deal with.

At the beginning of one class, Mr. McClane
talked with the students about the highlights of their weekends. Zac laughed to
himself as his peers described shopping or going to the movies with such
enthusiasm that you’d have thought it was the most ground-breaking event
imaginable.

“What about you, Zac?” Mr. McClane asked,
trying to elicit conversation from him. “What did you do this weekend?”

“Nothing,” Zac had said. What was he going
to say? He watched his friend get nearly ripped to pieces by dinosaurs in a
time travel experiment? Then again, maybe if he told them that, it would get
him off the hook. Not like they would believe him anyway. Instead he just stuck
with his original answer.

“Suit
yourself
,”
Mr. McClane said, shrugging before moving on.

Sitting there in the commons at lunch, Zac
noticed students moving toward the televisions, crowding around them. Something
was going on. He got up, making his way to one of the flat screen panels
mounted above the tables.

“What’s going on?” he asked someone. No
one answered, and he could see why. They were transfixed, staring intently at
the screens. Instead of displaying the daily announcements, the television
image was one of a news anchor, text scrolling beneath her as she gave updates
on breaking news. Zac listened.

“…No one knows who is responsible for the
attack,” the anchor said, “but authorities believe this is the work of a cell
of domestic terrorists. We do not yet know the number of casualties from the
attack, but intelligence sources say that there is credible information to
suggest that this is just the beginning of a series of attacks. They have not
ruled out the use of biological or chemical weapons. There are also indications
that whoever did this may be in possession of sarin gas, a nerve agent…”

Zac stared as the screen displayed image
after image of crumbled stone and twisted iron. Investigators in HAZMAT suits
combed through the debris, dust swirling in the air. As the camera weaved
through the scene, jerky from the movement, Zac thought he could see an arm
sticking out from the crushed metal of a subway train. The news anchor
continued.

“Reports are coming in from different
sources placing the time of the blast at less than an hour ago in Dunham City.
Right now, authorities are on the scene trying to determine just
when
the
bomb was detonated, but so far, the only thing they are saying is that it
happened as the train pulled into the Bishop Street station.” The video playing
on the screen panned through the carnage, pausing long enough to show a child’s
stuffed giraffe in the rubble. “They have concluded that the bomb was on one of
the subway cars when it went off. We’ll keep bringing you more information on
this story as it develops.”

Zac felt a chill go up his spine. Whoever
did this had no regard for innocent children, and if what the news anchor said
was true, they could still be out there, possibly with chemical or biological
weapons. If they were able to detonate one of those, it would spread through
the air, maybe killing hundreds or thousands. He’d seen enough documentaries on
television to see what these weapons were capable of. If anything would
convince his dad to let him activate TEMPUS and use it, this would be it.

While everyone was gathered in a mob
around the television screens, Zac walked through the hallway and snuck out
through a side door. He knew he might face repercussions for this act later,
but they would be nothing compared to what could happen if these terrorists
struck again.

Zac swept through the door to the
conference room at TEMPUS headquarters. Everyone except Rock was already there,
staring at the television news. No one turned to look at him as he entered. His
dad spoke first.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said,
“but the answer is ‘no.’”

Zac walked next to the television hanging
on the wall. “What do you mean? Are you seeing what’s on the news?”

“Yes,” Dr. Ryger said, “and I’m as torn
about it as you are, but I’m not willing to risk using a machine that’s
malfunctioning.”

“Then don’t risk it yourself,” Zac said,
gesturing to the television. “Let me do it. Let me see if I can stop the next
attack.”

“Sit down,” his dad said.
“Just for a minute.”

Chen pushed a chair toward him, and Zac
threw himself into it and looked up at the screen. There was no possible way
they could ignore this; it had just happened. Situations like this were what
the time machine was made for.

“Zac, we’ve been discussing this since the
news started showing the first images,” Bryce said. “It’s a decision that
didn’t come easily.”

“What, you already made a decision? I
thought I was part of the team now, too!”

“You are,” his dad said. “But I think we
have more experience than you do in this and—”

“So?” Zac said. “Emilee, did you all
really agree to this, or did my dad just make you all ‘agree to agree’ about
it?” He looked at her, but she simply looked down at the table.

“I think he’s right,” she said, barely
audible. “After what happened to Rock, I’m afraid that the system might not be
ready again.”

“But did you check it with Bryce?” he
asked. She nodded. “And nothing was wrong?”

“No,” Bryce said, speaking for her. “But
even though we didn’t find anything wrong, we still don’t know what made it
malfunction like that.”

The television news showed even more
gruesome footage. Zac couldn’t believe they were airing some of the images that
they were. But that was what the news did; they used shocking things to get an
audience to tune in.

“Just send me in,” Zac said. He couldn’t
stop thinking of the stuffed giraffe, torn from the hands of a child in his or
her last seconds of life. “I’m willing to risk it. Look at
that
,” he
said, standing up again. “And now they say these same terrorists could be in
possession of sarin gas! That’s nerve gas; we all know what that stuff does.”

“It’s not that simple,” his dad said,
trying to dissuade Zac. “We deactivated part of TEMPUS when we did the check
through the computer.”

“Then reactivate it. How hard can it be?”

“Son, time travel requires a tremendous
amount of power, so much that it’s basically nuclear. That pentagon that you
stand on each time the wormhole is activated is carrying out a continual series
of small atomic reactions. It’s all safe and contained, but you can’t just
reactivate the machine and expect it to have enough energy at the start.”

Zac ignored him and turned to Bryce. “Come
on,” he said. “You agree with me. Imagine that your mom was on that train. You
said it yourself that you didn’t get to say goodbye to her the day she died.
I’m sure there are tons of other people today who will be able to relate to you
when they identify the bodies.” Bryce squirmed in his seat. “And unless we can
help get some information on who’s behind this, there are going to be a lot
more, too.” He stood silently, scanning their faces.