Samantha Smart (30 page)

She decided to slip out secretly, through the sewers again, which was probably a good idea, all things considered. Agent Stiles had given no indication that surveillance would ease up, despite the fact that her investigation had hit a major wall thanks to The Professor’s ingenuity. Samantha remained just as wary of the F.B.I., however; Stiles’ mention of Jordan Anderson had been disturbing, another hint that she knew a lot more than she was letting on.

Polly would not sit still this time. She followed Samantha’s every step, and eventually Agent Alpha Prime gave in to her dog’s loyalty and let her get into her familiar backpack.

“Polly,” Samantha whispered, “Not a peep out of you until we’re somewhere safe, okay?” The little terrier hunkered down and quieted her excited panting–it was almost as if she understood.

The sewer trip was easier this time–there was, at least, some light down there in the middle of the day. It was also wetter, though, for the air was warmer today and the ice on the sewer floor had thawed. Nonetheless, Samantha made a quick trip of it and was soon emerging from a different manhole she had found that opened up in a nice, safe curbside location on less-trafficked Sixth Avenue.

Deciding it was best to travel as ‘low profile’ as she could, she walked down along Twelfth Street, avoiding her local subway stop and opting to hoof it down to Fourth Avenue, where there was also a station at Ninth Street. She had worn some uncharacteristic clothes: sweat pants (her mom’s) and an old, lined leather jacket that had been Todd’s favorite until he had outgrown it. Her hair was all tucked up inside her warm winter hat with the Yankees’ logo on it and she had on a dark pair of glasses. She looked very much like any New Yorker, she hoped.

The F train was waiting as she reached the platform and she just made it through the doors before they closed and the train started rolling. She thought she had glimpsed a few men in black staking out the station about thirty feet down from her, but who knew? There were plenty of sharp dressers in this city and for all she knew they could just as easily have been Mafia as Federal agents, or even just expensive car salesmen.

The train ride was quick, as there were surprisingly few people traveling at this hour. Samantha guessed that most people were probably already at whatever place they had been going, and she was grateful for the unusually spacious subway car. In contrast, though, she was nervous after disembarking at Fourteenth Street, which was normally crawling with people and would have been a much more anonymous place had it been so today.

Even so, her walk up to the bathroom proceeded uneventfully, and she didn’t notice any suspicious-looking people on the way. She reached the bathroom quickly, without incident, and looked both ways before entering the unlikely meeting place.

It looked completely normal–no one was there that she could observe. It had to be about two o’clock by now, and she looked around for any sign that might indicate the presence of The Professor or Alpha Team. There was a slightly larger, handicapped stall at the back of the bathroom and she entered this, half-expecting to find all of her friends huddled quietly on top of the toilet seat. But there was nothing.

She looked the stall up and down, her eyes catching various bits of graffiti that ranged from phone numbers to obscene comments to pictures of kittens and band logos, rendered in fairly well-done 3-D text. She sighed and sat down on the only seat available, nervously playing with her thumbs. After a few minutes of sitting in silence, she thought she heard something; it was a voice, for sure, but where was it?

There,
she thought. It was coming from the pocket of her–of Todd’s jacket. She had brought the wrist-communicator but had opted not to put it on in an effort to draw less attention to herself from any knowledgeable party. She took it out and pressed the talk button, shushing Polly who was starting to whine from inside her backpack.

“Um... Clockmaker?” She whispered hopefully into the thing’s tiny microphone.

“Alpha Prime,” the familiar British voice responded. “Stand by.” Samantha sat, waiting.

In an instant, reality warped. The stall was enveloped in the now-familiar flashing blue lights, and a second or two later The Professor was standing in front of her, glowing chalk in hand.

“Trace your feet,” he said hurriedly, handing her the chalk. She did so as quickly as possible, looking up at him and smiling slightly.

“Merry Christmas,” she said.

“Thanks,” Smythe replied. He pressed the talk button on the wrist-communicator that he was wearing. “Now, Marvin,” he spoke into it.

Once again the light show commenced, though Samantha felt she was almost getting used to it at this point. The Mayan symbols were all now somehow familiar, almost like things she knew the meanings of, though she still couldn’t have translated them literally if anyone had asked her to. In a moment, they were somewhere else.

And what a ‘somewhere else’ it was. Samantha’s jaw dropped immediately upon arrival. It was a place unlike any she had ever been in. She stood, with The Professor, on the time machine’s central stone platform. Around them was, of course, the Stonehenge-like configuration that made up the rest of the amazing Mayan apparatus–but even this was visually dwarfed by the incredible structure that surrounded it, and them.

They were on a vast, flat plane of floor that was encased in a gigantic dome, a sphere almost, made up of thousands of triangles. The whole of the thing must have stretched the length of a football field in diameter, and the structure’s ceiling was almost as far above their heads. Sunshine poured in through the translucent, triangular windows, illuminating everything with a glassy, reflective glow. Samantha’s eyes wandered the breadth of the place, then came at last to settle on what was closest to her: Marvin’s devious smile.

“What up, girl?” he grinned. “Merry Christmas.”

“Felice Navidad,” she answered in Spanish, smiling back at him. She turned to The Professor. “Is this the future?” she asked.

“Montreal. 1967,” he replied matter-of-factly. “If you knew your history, you’d recognize it.” He stepped down from the platform and walked over to a table with books and maps on it. “We’re in a geodesic dome–that is, a partial sphere composed of triangular supports, designed by R. Buckminster Fuller.
Theoretically, there’s no limit to the size of such a thing that could be built; it’s one of the near-perfect applications of this model for structural integrity. Affectionately, they’re known as ‘Bucky Balls.’”

“Bucky Balls... ”
Samantha repeated, dazed and still staring at the amazing building around her.

“Bucky Balls,” Marvin echoed, capturing her gaze and grinning again.

Polly poked her head out of the backpack at the mention of the word “ball.” She knew this word very well from playing fetch in the park, and wondered now if some game of fetch was afoot. Marvin greeted her loudly and with a friendly head-scratch; she was happy to see him. Samantha, sensing her dog’s excitement, let her out of the backpack and allowed her to run around on the spacious floor of the dome.

“It’s a few months after the World’s Fair,” Smythe went on, already deeply involved in some text on the table of what was obviously their new makeshift headquarters. “I found most of a day when no one was here and figured out how to transport the entire time machine. Marvin helped out... ”

“Yeah,
whatever!”
Marvin cut in. “I had to do almost everything!”

“Well,” Smythe shot Marvin a look, “in any case, I’ve got the thing on a sort of loop. There is a window of some five hours when no one was in this place, and I’ve set the time machine to keep transporting itself–and everything within its perimeter, of course–back to the beginning
of the five hour period, every four and a half hours. I’ve had to adjust it so as to erase what was there before, so we don’t keep piling up multiple Smythes and Marvins and Samanthas, all doing different things in different time-streams, but I think I’ve calculated everything quite properly. Do you follow?”

“Yeah... ” Samantha scratched her head, trying to understand. “So, I guess you’ve gotten pretty good at programming this thing, huh Professor?”

“You’ve no idea,” Smythe looked up, appearing exhausted.

“Professor.” A voice rang out halfway across the vast chamber. It was Suki. She and Brianna were standing over a table whose surface appeared to be a computer screen of some sort. “I think we’ve got a lock. I’m feeding the coordinates into your main computer.” Suki looked up and smiled at Samantha, as did Brianna.

“Excellent,” Smythe beamed with genuine excitement. The girls walked over to The Professor’s station. They both exchanged greetings and hugs with Samantha and Brianna bent down to scratch Polly behind the ears, as the team’s unofficial mascot had come back around to sniff everyone and make sure everything was in order. The four kids then gathered around The Professor to stare with him into the makeshift headquarters’ central computer. Onscreen was a map of what looked like a chain of islands, following a slight curve that described some deep undersea chasm. A flashing point indicated the sought-after coordinates, whatever it was that they represented. The Professor held a key on the computer keyboard and outlined the area with the mouse so that the picture zoomed in on the selected area.

“The Mariana Trench,” he said, leaning back from the screen and assuming one of his looks that meant he would probably start talking to himself. “I suppose that makes perfect sense for super-evolved sharks. Though it seems like it would be too cold for them. Can we get a depth on those coordinates, Suki?”

“Sure, Professor,” Suki responded, going back over to the other computer and punching some keys. “It looks like... wow. It says it’s approximately five thousand meters below sea level–I think that’s like, what, three miles down?”

“Indeed,” Smythe scratched his beard thoughtfully. “Very deep. And probably very cold. Too cold for sharks–unless... ” He trailed off.

“Unless?” Samantha looked up at him.

“That’s it. There must be a vein of very warm water down there somewhere, probably next to an open fissure. The area is, after all, composed of active volcanoes.”

“What exactly are we looking at, Professor?” Samantha finally submitted, very much confused at this point.

“Hmm? Oh–sorry, Samantha, I suppose we should bring you up to speed here,” he said, stepping back and looking at Alpha Team once again. “We have determined that the Slanes are operating out of some sort of base in the Pacific–apparently an undersea base and not, as I originally suspected, a boat of some sort. The flashing point on the screen is a signal from a homing device that Jordan was just foolish enough to bring there with him–albeit through a little, humph, shall we say, brilliant trickery.” Smythe looked quite pleased with himself.

“How did you do it?” Samantha took the bait.

“Well, it was nothing really. Just a bit of, oh, psychological warfare,
you know. Back in Central America, when I rescued your carelessly misplaced wrist-communicators from Jordan’s hut, I replaced them with duplicates, exact copies of yours. Of course, they were somewhat altered: None could actually broadcast or receive on the unique band we use and each contained a powerful homing device that I was able to track from this computer. We gave them some frequencies, of course, useless ones really–I think all they could tap into was... what was it, Marvin?”

“Nepalese radio, I think. Short wave,” the Brooklyn Bandit grinned.

“Right,” Smythe chuckled. “Nepalese radio. Anyway, I had hoped that the lad would be curious enough to bring at least one back to his base of operations, to try to figure it out or attempt to crack our ‘Nepalese code’ or some such, and evidently that’s just what he did. Save those coordinates, Suki.”

“Done,” Suki piped from the other computer.

“Wow,” Samantha marveled, giving Marvin and The Professor an impressed look. “Clever boys,” she smiled and patted them on their backs.

“So what’s next, then?” Brianna spoke up.

“Some sort of... probe, I imagine,” Smythe replied. “We need a more concrete set of coordinates if we’re going to transport ourselves in there.” This got a shudder from Suki. “I believe I can, er, borrow such a probe from a colleague of mine. We need to get a good visual on the place as well. Marvin, if you can operate the controls, I can fetch it and be back in a minute. Are you confident enough in your abilities yet?”

“Yeah.” Marvin suddenly dropped his cockiness, as if a bit unsure. “Yeah, I can do it, Professor. Just set the initial settings for me and I can get you back.”

“Are you
sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. I got you, man.” His tone was very serious.

In a moment Professor Smythe was on the stone platform and Marvin was at the time machine’s ancient controls. The Professor winked at Alpha Team and gave the ‘thumbs up’ sign, and Marvin moved the loose pieces of obsidian around that somehow controlled the time machine’s functions. In an instant, the old Brit was gone. Polly gave a quick, yelpy bark as he disappeared from sight, and for a second everyone tried to place themselves inside her canine mind. She must, they all concluded, be very confused indeed about the whole time travel concept.

Now they were faced with their own confusion: Time travel presented many mental conundrums; it was hard to wrap one’s mind around all the possibilities of it. The Professor had been transported back to the nominal ‘present,’ presumably to spend ‘time’ conjuring up some deep-sea probe from a scientific colleague of his that worked in that field. Though this process would take him several hours or even days, he could be transported back to a mere minute after he had left, thanks to his looped time machine setting that constantly erased occurrences and so prevented more than one of each of them from existing in the same place at the same time.

The problem was, at least initially, Alpha Team had to wait for The Professor’s call in ‘real time,’ in other words, they had to wait, through approximately thirty-five hours of looping, for his call, with not much to do.

They talked about their holidays, their families and what they’d all been doing for the last month or so. Suki had apparently traveled to Tokyo for a week to spend time with her father, and had, in the process, encountered Samantha’s brother Todd. It seemed like an amazing coincidence but wasn’t really, if you thought about it. Both had left on the day after school got out, and both had been booked on a flight to Seattle, though Suki’s had left earlier than Todd’s. They had run into each other in the SEA-TAC airport, Todd being picked up by their father and Suki waiting for a connecting flight to Japan.