Samantha Smart (11 page)

“Hey you–stop!” he yelled, starting to jog after her now. She broke into a run again, bursting through the door to the stairs and down, at least one guard hot on her heels. At the bottom of the stairs she turned and made a beeline for the time machine room. By this time, Polly had become quite agitated and was poking her head out of the backpack. Samantha plunged through the familiar door and into the dark room filled with motionless mastodons and still saber-tooths. She felt her way through the forest of artificial animals, trying to get a sense of where its center was and cursing her eyes for not adjusting faster to the darkness.

“In here!” She heard the guard’s voice yell somewhere toward the doorway. She could also hear the sounds of more running footsteps coming into the room.

“Where’s he at?” asked a new voice.

“He went in here,” replied the first one.

“There ain’t no other way outta here,” a third interjected. “I’ll watch the door, you two spread out.”

Suddenly a flashlight beam cut through the dark.

“Where’s the light switch in here?” the first guard grumbled.

“It’s here,” said the voice of the second. “It’s burned out.”

“Damn! All right, fella,” said the first voice. “We know you’re down here.”

Samantha searched desperately for the chalk outlines, crawling on her hands and knees so as to avoid the beams of the flashlights and more easily navigate the herd of stationary beasts. Polly began to growl.

“Sssshhhh! Polly!” she whispered, her heart pounding like a hammer inside her chest.

“There!” the first guard’s voice shouted. “By the tiger!” His light-beam had fallen right on her. The men began shoving their way through the animals toward her and she scrambled to escape the light. Then she saw it.

Ahead of her and a little off to her left, she could see a faint blue glow on the floor. She scrambled towards it, having to use one arm now to hold her panicked terrier’s collar to keep her from jumping all the way out of the backpack. She scurried closer and the glow became stronger; it was her set of footprints, sure enough.

“Samantha?” her wrist crackled. She hit the talk button with her teeth just as she was standing up in the footprints, holding Polly firm and staring at a security guard that was no more than six feet away and closing fast.

“NOW, PROFESSOR! NOW!!!”

Mayan symbols exploded in her head once again, the world turning blue and flickering in and out. The security guard had stopped dead and was staring at her in disbelief, but he too began to flicker along with the darkness and prehistoric beasts, and images of the great stone time machine with The Professor at its controls began to replace those of the room in 1931. In a moment, it was all gone and Samantha found herself in the more familiar room, staring down at her feet on the thick slab of granite that made up the time machine’s platform. She thought she saw a light puff of smoke as she stumbled off of it, letting go of Polly and collapsing onto the floor.

*

She awoke moments later to her dog’s licking tongue and The Professor’s worried voice.

“Samantha!? Samantha, are you all right?”

“I–uuuhhh–yeah, I think so.” She sat up, looking around. “I must’ve... fainted,” she thought out loud.

“Come on now, girl, just relax. Take some deep breaths.”

Samantha did as she was told; she couldn’t, she felt, have done much else, actually. The running and the adrenalin surge had left her soaked in sweat, and she took off the heavy wool coat and shook her head. She felt very tired.

“Professor,” she said weakly, “I think I need to sleep for a little bit.”

“That’s fine, Samantha. Not a problem.” He was listening to her heartbeat with a stethoscope. “Come on over here and lay down.” He took her, standing her up slowly, over to the pile of Peruvian rugs she had come to know as her bed, and helped her lay down, stroking her forehead.

“Just for a little,” she mumbled, and then she was out.

*

When she awoke again, The Professor was sitting over her, a steaming cup of tea in his hands.

“Posthumous Postmen!” he blubbered. “Had me scared there, Agent Smart! How are you feeling?” He handed her the cup of tea.

“How long was I asleep?” she asked groggily, taking the hot beverage and sipping it.

“Hours,” The Professor replied. “But I’ve got some good news for you. After I determined you were all right, I took Polly for a walk to get some tea–I, I locked you in–I hope you don’t mind–just for about an hour. I rented us a bit of a hotel room down the road–had to pay extra for the bloody dog,” he eyed Polly disapprovingly. “We can all stay there tonight, though. It’s got proper beds and a wonderful shower in the loo. Come on, if you’re up to it we can walk there. It’s only about half-eight–er–eight-thirty to you yanks. Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” Samantha gurgled through her tea. “And I would die for a shower.”

The Professor helped her up and she put down the empty tea cup, which she had quickly drained.

“Right, then, we’ll get you fed and showered up. Then we can talk about what needs to happen next.” Samantha nodded, yawning.

They walked upstairs and out of the museum, pausing momentarily to look up at the main lobby’s barosauraus,
a gigantic assembly of dinosaur bones that Samantha always seemed to take for granted, having walked by it so many times. For some reason she stared at it now; it seemed somehow more alive now that she had traveled through time.

“Professor,” she asked, “could we travel as far back as this dinosaur lived?”

“Absolutely,” he replied as they exited. “Though I’d say we’d better have a bloody good reason to. I wouldn’t imagine that it would be a terribly hospitable time to fragile little creatures like you and I.” This was indeed more food for thought, and Samantha’s tired mind daydreamed of great trees and beasts as they walked out into the warm night air of the altered timeline’s balmy October.

They walked up to Eighty-first Street and then towards Columbus. The Professor explained that the hotel was up on Eighty-fourth, but that there was a falafel place on Eighty-second and Columbus he had found that was “absolutely delicious.” They traveled by over-pass as they walked, traversing the flooded Manhattan streets like nothing was amiss. They both had grown somewhat accustomed to the strange reality after having been stuck in it for nearly a week.

The falafel place was more of a to-go window than an actual restaurant, but Samantha happily inhaled one of their creations and smiled at the amused-looking Professor with tahini dribbling down her chin.

“If anyone asks at the hotel, you are my daughter, Samantha Smythe
.
”

“Samantha Smythe,” she cooed, affecting a British accent. “Yes! And I’m–I’m studying ballet
with a prominent, world class
instructor!”

“Yes, well, no need to play it up too
much, now,” The Professor chuckled. Samantha wiped off her chin with a napkin and smiled again, and they began walking toward the hotel.

Polly was out of the backpack now, on her leash, as the two arrived at The Wildman Arms. The Professor had paid for her, after all; having found a hotel that took dogs at all was a small miracle in uptown Manhattan, but it seemed as if many of the city’s hoity-toity rules had been relaxed since the whole place had flooded. The man at the desk checked them in with an air of pure boredom about him, though oddly enough he seemed engrossed in a book called
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells. Samantha exchanged a strange look with her ‘father,’ as he had obviously noticed the coincidence as well. Smythe smiled slightly and shrugged.

Their room was on the fifth floor (which was now actually more like the fourth
floor, though the elevator signs had not been modified to reflect this), and Samantha ran through the door and jumped on one of the big double beds, Polly right behind her.

“A bed,
Polly!” she shrieked in excitement. “We get to sleep in a bed
tonight!”

“Shhh... ” The Professor tried to quiet her down. “Are you going to shower? I had one myself when I checked us in; it was most refreshing.”

“Definitely,” Samantha said in a serious tone, springing from the bed into the plush, fancy bathroom.

*

At least an hour later, Samantha emerged, sparkling, from her first shower in nearly a week. She had used every one of the little ‘ketchup packets’ full of shampoo and conditioner, and felt cleaner and more relaxed than she had in days. She toweled her hair dry and watched The Professor, who was sitting at a table by the window, tinkering with her wrist communicator.

“Feel better, then?” he asked without looking up.

“A hundred
times better,” Samantha gushed.

“We should talk about what happened.”

“Okay,” she said, sighing heavily and sitting down on the closest bed.

“Fill in the missing minutes for me, Samantha,” The Professor requested. “Last I heard you were about to sprint past me and up Seventy-seventh Street, and then you were just screaming ‘NOW!’”

“Yeah,” Samantha giggled. “Well, I did what you told me. I ran up Seventy-Seventh and had to barge my way into the museum through a line of very unhappy people. At some point a guard spotted me and started chasing me. I ran down the stairs, Polly was trying to jump out of the pack, I got to the room–”

“The time machine room?” The Professor interjected.

“Yeah. Only there–I mean then,
it’s jam-packed with fake prehistoric animals.”

“Right.”

“So now there are three guards after me, and they have flashlights–luckily the room light was broken–but they’re still coming after me, and I’m trying to find the footprints and I’m crawling on the floor to try to dodge their light-beams, holding Polly’s collar with one hand–”

“You were very nearly caught... ”

“Uh–hello!
You don’t even know, Professor. I had to hit the talk button on the wrist communicator with my teeth, and when I yelled ‘NOW!’ I had just stood up in the footprints and had a guard six feet from my face!”

“Hmmmm. That’s not good. Did he see your face?”

“I don’t know, but I think he thought I was a guy. He kept saying things like ‘we know you’re in here, fella,’ and ‘he went in here.’ Anyway, he definitely saw the light show when you hit the switch, or whatever it is that you did to bring me back.”

The Professor pondered her last statement and hoped that the security guard wouldn’t be traumatized for life due to the experience, fail to join the army and fulfill some pivotal role in the war, causing the Nazi war machine to roll unimpeded over the allied forces. Time travel was such a sticky thing.
Well,
he thought to himself,
hopefully he’ll just have written it off as an electrical event, a product of faulty wiring, and assumed the intruder had somehow slipped out in the excitement.

“By the way, Professor,” Samantha mused, “how did you get back when you had no one to operate the controls for you?”

“Ah.” The Professor snapped back to the present. “Actually, Samantha, that’s a very good question. You see, the time machine can be set to work automatically. I figured out the Mayan constructors’ measurement of time, as it relates to our concept of it, and synchronized my watch to the machine’s controls. When I returned to the museum, I stood in my
footprints and simply waited for the correct moment to arrive. It’s quite intriguing–did you notice another set of footprints near to yours in the room of 1931?”

“Well,” Samantha said, scratching her chin, “I didn’t think about it at the time–you understand I was in a bit of a rush–but you know, there may have been another set, larger, encompassing mine. Maybe we were standing in exactly the same place.”

“Mmmmm.” The Professor nodded. “It would appear so.”

The two were silent for several moments, each processing their thoughts and trying to make sense of them. Finally, The Professor spoke again.

“You can’t go back, Samantha,” he said grimly.

“What? But–don’t we have to prevent this from happening?”

“Yes, we do. Somehow. But, for the same reason I couldn’t go back this time, you cannot go back next time. To have two of the same person in the same time, especially
if they were near enough to meet, I fear would be particularly disastrous.”

“Well... what, then?” Samantha asked hopefully.

“We need someone else,” her mentor replied. “And, honestly, I don’t know who. Or where we’re going to find them. This is going to take some serious thought, Samantha.”

They both sat staring into space, brains aflutter, trying to think of a way to overcome this latest obstacle in their quest to restore the reality that they knew. Neither of them came up with an answer.

“Let’s get some rest,” The Professor said at last. “Perhaps the morning will bring some fresh inspiration.”

“Okay,” Samantha agreed, getting under the covers of her bed. At the moment, she did not have a clue as to what could possibly solve this latest problem, and as she closed her eyes she felt farther than ever from the world that she knew as home.

Samantha and Professor Smythe sat in the basement office, she drawing circles on a piece of paper and he staring into the middle distance, chin on folded hands. They had had a wonderful night’s sleep and had each had another shower in the morning at the Wildman Arms.
They’d walked Polly out to the park and fetched themselves a delicious breakfast at an uptown crepery on Broadway, and had leisurely made their way back to the museum. None of these activities, unfortunately, had jarred loose any ideas about how to solve their current predicament. They knew where they had to go and what they had to do, but the problem remained that neither of them could go and do it. They hadn’t really made any trusted friends in the altered timeline and in fact the only other person they’d hung around more than once was Jordan Anderson, who now seemed to be, if anything, some sort of enemy. They had thought about asking Violet Edelstein, who’d seemed like a wonderful and tough old woman, but had decided she was both too old and too directly entwined in the time-knot they were trying to untie.