Paradox (7 page)

Zac made his way over to Bryce. “So where
are we?” he asked. “This isn’t our city, is it?”

“I can’t tell you that yet,” he said. “But
I can tell you that we can travel to different locations in time, too. It’s
part of the training exercise. I’ll tell you what, let’s go get something to
drink and have a seat for a while. I could use a rest.”

They walked down the sidewalk as cabs
screamed by, picking up and dropping off their fares. Massive skyscrapers
stretched into the sky, surrounding them on all sides. The morning sun
reflected off of their surfaces, and Zac had to get his bearings after looking
up at them for so long. He wasn’t used to seeing so many gigantic buildings.

“Wow,” he said. “This is so much different
than back home.”

They came to a sidewalk café and sat down
on the metal chairs.

“So you’ve done this before?” Zac asked.

“Yeah,” Bryce answered.
“A
couple of times.”

Zac was still reeling from the idea that
he was somewhere in the past. He didn’t know when, but he was sure it wasn’t a
dream.

“I’m still just in total shock,” Zac said.
“Don’t you get excited every time you do this?”

“Usually,” Bryce said. He was quieter than
normal. Zac decided to tone down his enthusiasm.

“Do you know how this all actually works?”
Zac asked.
“The science behind it?
I’d ask my dad, but
I think he would get too technical.”

Bryce nodded. “A little,” he said. “I
mean, I can’t explain it as well as a physicist like your dad can. But
basically, the Wand you have has the ability to use the energy on the platform
to transport you through the wormhole. It sort of charges the atoms in your
body, giving them the power to travel that huge distance. That’s why you feel
those vibrations. There’s so much energy passing through your body, it’s like
you’re being electrocuted.”

Zac thought back to his initial experience
and how painful it was. Whatever Rock injected him with must have helped. “But
how is this possible? How can it actually
work
?”

Bryce thought for a moment. “The best
explanation I can think of is to think of it in terms of dimensions.
Time
is the fourth dimension. If you’d told people more than a century ago that we
would be able to travel vertically from the earth, into the sky and space with
airplanes and space shuttles, they wouldn’t have believed you. But science
advanced to the point where travel in the third dimension was possible.”

“And so now we can travel in the fourth
dimension?” Zac asked.

“In short, yes. We use the Wand to
activate the wormhole, and that’s the gist of it.”

“But how can a wormhole do that? Does one
just suddenly appear?”

Bryce shook his head. “It’s not like
that,” he said. It’s more of a
bending
of space and time. Here— I have
an idea.” He picked up a straw off the sidewalk. “Okay, look at this little ant
that has found his way up the table. Let’s pretend this little guy is you.”

“I’d rather be a spider.”

Bryce smiled and grabbed a napkin from a
nearby table that was abandoned. “This napkin has a line printed on it. That
line represents the flow of time.” He traced his finger on it. The ant was
starting to crawl across the napkin, and was moving around the line. “This
line, like time, has a starting point and an ending point. Right now, where
that ant is standing is his ‘present.’ Like us, he just goes along that
timeline, from start to finish.”

“Okay,” Zac said. “I get that time is a
line, but what about the wormhole? How does that work?”

Bryce held up the straw. “Here’s the
wormhole. When we use it, it takes us from our present…” He placed it on the
napkin where the ant was, and the ant crawled inside it. He bent the straw so
that it went up in an arc over the line to a different point earlier on it. “It
takes us from our present to the past, somewhere else on the time line, like
this.” The ant crawled out, ending up at a different place on the line. “It’s
the same thing for us. And we can just use the wormhole to get back to our
start.”

Zac nodded in understanding, and the ant
crawled away.

“Let me ask you something,” Zac said.
“When I saw my dad in the past, I talked to him, and I didn’t change anything.
So what’s the big deal?”

“What did you talk about?”

“It was weird, really,” Zac continued. “I
got to see myself as a baby. My dad told me what he was naming me… well, the
baby-me.
Isaac, my full name.”

“Isaac?”

“Yeah,” Zac said, watching people pass by.
A man hailed a cab and jumped in. “He told me long ago that he named me after
Isaac Asimov because he loved the science fiction Asimov wrote.”

“That’s cool. I was named after a guy in a
donut shop.”

“Seriously?”
Zac
smiled.

“Yep,” Bryce said. “My mom got pregnant
pretty young. I never met my dad. He was a deadbeat, I guess. But anyway, one
day she walked into a donut shop and the guy who worked there was just really
nice to her and talked to her. She ended up going there every morning, and she
said they’d talk about life. It was like they were best friends.”

“Was she in love with him?”

Bryce shook his head. “No, no, it wasn’t
anything like that. It definitely wasn’t a romantic love. The way she talked
about him, it was like he was the kindest person in the world to her. She used
to say that he made her feel so worthwhile that she knew he was sent from God
to give her hope that everything was going to be okay with her new baby. He
encouraged her.” He smiled. “And so she named me after him as a way to say
thanks.”

It was interesting, Zac thought. One
person made such a huge difference in another life that it carried down through
time. Like the Time Wound theory, but the opposite. Good can bleed through,
too. So why couldn’t he go back and save his own mom? Wouldn’t good come from
that?

“My mom never got to tell him what she
named me,” Bryce said. “She got a new job and moved right around the time she
gave birth to me. Even before she died, she still talked about him.”

Zac was still fixated on his own mom. “So
do you think it’s possible to change things?”

Bryce shook his head. “No. I mean, there
are two lines of thought on this. One is what your dad already explained, that
it creates a wound in time that scabs over into something new and different.”

“What’s the other theory?”

“It would be the idea that, for example,
the picture of you in that newspaper was always like that. You were there all
along; you just lived through it right now, but the
future
you always
did that. There was a funny sketch on television once,” he said, starting to
laugh. “It had Abraham Lincoln build a time machine, and he saw how John Wilkes
Booth kills him at Ford’s Theater. So Lincoln uses his time machine to go back
to when Booth was a kid, and he tries to kill him.

“He fails, but he keeps going back to kill
Booth at different stages in his life. Finally, Booth is an adult and says that
he’s had it with this man who has been trying to kill him all his
life,
and he realizes it’s been Lincoln, the president, who
has been terrorizing him all along. So he kills Lincoln to protect his own
life.”

Zac laughed. “So by trying to prevent his
own death, he
made
John Wilkes Booth want to kill him.” It was funny to
think about. “So what do you think?”

“Me?” Bryce said. “I don’t know, but I just
think we should follow the rules and not mess with time. We can’t all change
the things we don’t like. But I’d say if anyone had a reason to change their
past, it would be Emilee.”

“Emilee? Why?”

Bryce grew quiet. “It’s not for me to say.
Let’s just say she’s had it rougher than most. It’s understandable why she
gravitates to a strong guy like Rock, though.”

There was a loud, low whining sound in the
air. A large shadow passed over them, and Zac looked up to see an airplane
flying lower than he’d ever seen before.

“Here we go,” he heard Bryce whisper,
remaining motionless.

Zac’s eyes followed the plane as it
descended lower, and that was when he noticed it heading toward a tall building.

“Bryce!” he yelled. “That’s the World
Trade Center! That plane’s going to—”

There was a loud explosion that echoed
through the air, the sound waves reverberating through the buildings on the
streets. Panic ensued as people screamed, watching the plume of smoke and
flames lick the side of the building, radiating in a cloud that expanded
outward.

Bryce refused to look up.

“We have to get out of here!” Zac yelled.
“No, wait! The second plane! We still have time to tell someone about the
second one! We need to find a phone. Or something! We can—”

“No!” Bryce said firmly. “We can’t do
anything. It’s already done.”

“Don’t you get it?” Zac said, running into
the street. Smoke was rising from the tower, and people everywhere were
straining to see what had happened. Zac wanted to yell that there was a second
one on its way, but he was shocked that Bryce just sat there.

There were still people in those towers.
People who were dying of smoke inhalation and who were burning in the intense
heat. And soon, another plane was going to hit the second tower, and they would
both collapse into a pile of rubble unlike anything the world had seen.

The second tower.
If Zac could get the message to them, they could get more people out this time.
This time, less people would die. All he had to do was tell someone.
But how?

He turned to Bryce. “Aren’t you going to
do something?” he asked. “You know how this ends up. We can save lives!” He
moved in closer to Bryce, who told him to sit down. Zac refused.

Smoke filled the sky now, and Zac was
horror-stricken. He remembered all of those phone calls he had heard in school.
The ones his teacher played that were from answering machines of families who
had lost loved ones in the towers.

The messages saying “goodbye” and “tell
the kids I love them” and “I won’t make it home.” Zac stood, watching down the
street with his hands on his head. He felt helpless, like he was one of the
people he saw in all of the photos who stood and stared.

The entire time, Bryce sat, not even
bothering to look in the direction of the turmoil. It was like he was numb to
it all.
Uncaring.
Unsympathetic.

Zac stood, eyes transfixed on the tower as
if seeing it for the first time in his life. He was far enough away that he was
safe, but not so far removed that his mind didn’t recall the videos he had seen
of people who leapt to their deaths. Facing the choice of dying from what must
have been unbearable heat and flames or by having their body crash into the
pavement. He remembered the jumpers, images flowing into his mind.

He stood for what seemed like an eternity,
helpless. Time seemed to slow down, though only about fifteen minutes had
passed. And that was when the second plane hit.

The side of the tower erupted into a ball
of flame and fury as he stood, horrified. It was instant death for those
people. He thought of the children who were on board those planes, what must
have been going through their minds moments before the plane hit, clinging to
their parents in their last seconds on earth.

Bryce sat like a statue, his head propped
up and resting on his hand. Zac stormed over and tried shaking him from his
reverie.

“Dammit! We have to
do something!
”
he screamed, getting in Bryce’s face.

Bryce pulled him down into his chair. “
We
can’t!
” he said. “You don’t get it, do you? Why do you think
this
is
the training mission?”

Zac was breathing heavily now, still
unable to calm himself down.

“Your dad wants us all to see that we
can’t change things. Don’t you think I would if I could?”

“But you just sat here while it all
happened,” Zac said. “It’s like you don’t even care!”

“Don’t tell me what I care about!” Bryce
yelled. Zac was taken aback by the look of anger in his eyes, a fire he had
never seen before. “I’ve seen this scene play out more than any other person in
the program. Once is bad enough. Seeing it again and again has made nightmares
seem like a cake walk.”

Zac sat in silence. It had to be awful to
see this again and again, knowing you were powerless to help.
No wonder Bryce didn’t even bother to look.
He’d seen it
before. Once was enough, seeing videos of it. But to see it again and again… in
real life
…

“Sorry,” Zac said, calming down. “I didn’t
realize.”

“It’s fine,” Bryce said. “It’s almost time
to leave anyway. We don’t want to watch any more of this than we have to.”

“So why doesn’t anyone try to go back and
alert the authorities about this?” Zac asked, treading lightly.