Samantha Smart (8 page)

“As far as you can,” The Professor said, strapping the small, watch-like device onto her wrist. “I’d actually like you to take a cab down to Battery Park, at the bottom tip of the island.”

“I’ve been there.” Samantha assumed her worldly tone and looked down at her little Boston Terrier. “Polly, do you want to come for a
walk
?”

“Walk” being a word that even most dogs of far less intelligence understand and celebrate as a key to some promised land, Polly became very excited and started sproinging around (a word Samantha had made up), panting and yipping in her little bark-voice. Samantha smiled and scratched her between the ears, then looked up at The Professor.

“Don’t worry, Professor. We can take care of each other, really. We’ve been doing it for years. Polly’s smarter than she acts sometimes, you know.”

“Hmmmph,” The Professor snorted, turning away. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” He started digging in his pocket then turned back to her. “Do you have any money left?” Samantha shook her head. “All right then, here’s twenty dollars. I want you to take a taxi-boat straight to Battery Park, we’ll test the communicator while you walk the dog, then I want you to come straight back. Here–” he handed the money to Samantha. “Shall I show you how it works?”

“Absolutely.” Samantha grinned.

The Professor flicked some switches on the desk unit then reached for Samantha’s wrist.

“This button,” he indicated controls as he spoke, “is to turn it on.
This
button is to toggle on and off whether you are in the same time as the desk unit or not–I can’t really explain how–I hope–that works, (if it even does), but it sort of modifies the bandwidth and pulse of the signal. And this big dial is your fine-tuner.
Use it to tune in if your signal gets weak or starts to break up.” Samantha nodded as she received each instruction, even though Polly was still sproinging a bit and distracting her slightly. “If you
are
in the same time as me, as you will be in Battery Park in half an hour or so, keep the right button
out.
If you are in another time, keep it pushed
in.
Got it, have you?”

“Yup,” Samantha said, already getting her backpack ready to stuff her little dog into.

“Testing... ” The Professor spoke into the communicator master unit. Samantha pressed the left or ‘on’ button on the wrist unit and made sure the right, or “time setting” button was left “out.” She could hear his voice coming out through the tiny speaker in the wrist-communicator’s face. From across the room she replied,

“Professor–is there a ‘talk’ button?”

“Oh, yes! Stupid of me, really–it’s that large bar at the bottom–it’s a button too, just shaped more like the space bar of a computer keyboard. You don’t need to hold it in the whole time you’re talking, but you need to press it at the beginning and at the end of each time you speak. Its normal state is a ‘listening’ one.” Samantha followed the directions and was able to get a message through successfully.

“Testing–testing–Professor Smythe, of the Knightsbridge Smythes, eats worms... ” she giggled into the unit.

“Thunderous thumb-suckers!” he yelled gleefully at his new invention. “It works!” He turned to Samantha, who was packing up Polly. “All right–off with you. Call me from the park, just as I showed you, then come
right back,
okay?”

“Yeah.” Samantha rolled her eyes a little. “Okay. Really, I’ll be
fine, Professor. I just want to let Polly run a little bit.”

“Just remember, Samantha, we’re a team now. Without each other, neither of us has much hope of setting things right again. Please be careful.” The Professor was most affectionate and protective, and Samantha almost blushed. Instead she nodded and headed up the stairs to the surface.

*

Battery Park was certainly a bit different, even perhaps more so than the average spot in flooded New York. Being at the foot of Manhattan Island, it had essentially become part of the bay, or the Hudson River, technically. You could still see the very tips of some of its stone walls and smaller monuments, but mostly it had become largely saltwater. In a sense, the Hudson and East Rivers had been entirely blended together into one big bay, and the water that had drowned the streets of the city was actually quite salty thanks to the ocean’s encroachment. You could still see the Statue of Liberty from the floating plastic sidewalks that lined what used to be the park, but it looked smaller now and farther away. Samantha concluded that this was probably a sort of illusion; a good portion of the statue’s base was now underwater, and essentially the global rise of the sea level had made the horizon line a bit higher. This gave the viewer the impression that Lady Liberty’s feet were down to or below the horizon line, which made the statue appear to be farther away. It was an eerie effect, and it made Samantha really soak in the apocalyptic feel of this unfortunate alternate reality.

She had, of course, been foolish to assume that there would be any grass remaining here, and Polly whimpered as if she had been robbed of a proper walk. There were a few little strips of sodded floating sidewalk that Samantha found and offered to Polly, who grudgingly did her business. Samantha picked up the dog-doo with a plastic bag and deposited it in a close-by trash can that had obviously been put there for just such a purpose.
Pew!
Samantha thought,
I need to start feeding her something else!

They found a little beach and Samantha sat down, looking around a little nervously as it was about six-thirty or seven in the evening and pretty much dark already, though there were plenty of lights shining out from the city that apparently still never slept. She rolled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt and turned on the wrist-communicator. Tapping the big talk bar, she spoke into its tiny condenser microphone.

“Professor? Professor, it’s me, Samantha. I’m at Battery Park now.” She tapped the ‘talk’ bar again and listened. A crackly, staticky voice came through the little speaker. She couldn’t quite make it out, so she turned the fine-tuning dial until she had a much clearer signal.

“... mantha, are you there? This is Smythe, ‘comin’ back atcha,’ I suppose. As one of your Midwestern truckers would say.”

“I hear you, Professor,” Samantha replied, tapping the talk bar on and off.

“Samantha? Wonderful! How does the park look, Samantha?”

“Like part of the bay. You should see the statue, Professor, it’s really sort of creepy. Like an end of the world sort of vibe.”

“Yes, I can imagine what it might look like. Low in the water, I should guess.”

“Yeah, it looks that way, more even than most other things.”

“A trick of perspective,” the wrist-speaker squawked. “All right. Come on home, then–I just wanted to give this a real good distance test before we try to use it through time.
Hopefully by the time you get back I’ll have fetched us some supper. Do you like Chinese food?”

“Sure!” Samantha beamed. She always wanted Chinese food, but her stupid brother was always taking all the mom-money and ordering pizza.

“All right,” the speaker continued. “Get back as soon as you can. I’ll try to meet you at the front door so you don’t have to go through all that phone-security business. And I’ll try to make us up some nicer sort of beds. My back’s been paining me lately. Smythe out.”

Samantha pushed the off button and sighed deeply. It was a nice, summer-like night, even though it was technically October. She took a moment to relax and think about things she had sort of put off thinking about, feelings she had put off feeling. She missed her mom a lot. There was this sort of gut-wrenching feeling she had that somewhere her mother was really worried about her, and she didn’t want her mom to worry. If she could only make a phone call to the world she was trying to get back to, to tell her mom she was all right, she would feel much better. But she couldn’t.

She missed her friends, too. Hanging out with The Professor and doing exciting investigative things was cool and made her feel very responsible and grown-up, but sometimes she just wanted to let loose a little and have fun. She and her friend Brianna Knowles used to spend hours in Brianna’s penthouse apartment trying on clothes and dancing around, listening to Heatwavvve
CDs. Sometimes their friend Suki Han would come over too and show them the hottest new fashions of Tokyo, Japan, where she spent half the year with her father. She even missed her friend Marvin Santiago, who was a chubby sort of Hispanic boy who lived not far from her in Brooklyn. He was weird in that he liked computers as much as he liked basketball, and wrote equal amounts of computer programs and mediocre rap songs. Samantha smiled, remembering a day she had been sitting in Marvin’s room when he had just hacked into a distribution company’s files and switched two orders, so that a wedding catering company would receive fifty stun-guns and a prison upstate would be delivered fifteen boxes of lemon mousse and chocolate-chip cookies. “Move along, move along,”
they had taught his pet parrot, Flacko to repeat as they rolled on Marvin’s floor in laughter, imitating caterers prodding guests away from the conspicuously diminished desert table at some snobby wedding. Perhaps, upon reflection, it had been a trifle cruel to ruin someone’s wedding, but Samantha thought that since a lot of prisoners were probably happy for a day, it would make up for it. Most of them were there for not much good reason, as Marvin liked to point out.

“Well,” Samantha said to her only remaining friend (other than The Professor), “thank goodness for you, Polly.” She picked up her little dog and hugged her tightly and Polly licked her face, returning the affection. “I suppose we should head on back, then.”

After another pleasant but uneventful taxi-boat ride, Samantha found herself stuffing her face with Crab Rangoon–an absolute favorite of hers that The Professor had ordered in what Samantha thought was one of his especially
brilliant moments. The two sat and talked more about their predicament, the information they had and didn’t have, and tried to devise a plan for the controlled use of the mysterious Mayan time-machine. The night drifted on and they settled down to sleep on their respective piles of Peruvian blankets, listening to the slimy sound of Polly licking sweet and sour sauce from an empty food container.

“Professor?” Samantha mumbled sleepily.

“Mmmphh–yes, what? What is it, Samantha?”

“Have you ever heard of Heatwavvve?”

“Say again?” The Professor replied.

“Heatwavvve.
An American singing group. Very popular.”

“Oh, heavens no.” The Professor turned over on his side facing away from her. “Why?”

“How likely would it be, Professor, that an immensely popular group that was topping the charts in our
timeline would also exist in this one?”

“Hmmmpph. Extremely unlikely, I should think. Not impossible, but most unlikely indeed.”

“Hunh... ” Samantha began to ponder his response, but the two were asleep within minutes, and the only thing still making a sound was Polly’s tongue.

*

Morning came again without a sunrise, as it always did in The Professor’s windowless cave of a basement office. The only way they ever really knew
it was morning was by the clock on his cluttered desk. Both he and Samantha agreed that the lack of natural light was getting a bit depressing, and they decided to both take Polly for a walk over at Belvedere Castle before diving into the risky and uncertain activity of time travel. The museum lobby was bustling with school children, and they slipped out largely unnoticed, Polly stuffed neatly into Samantha’s backpack. They hailed a taxi-boat and were soon disembarking on the island formerly known as Vista Rock; Samantha let Polly out of her backpack while The Professor paid the driver.

“Sumptuous sunbathers!” The Professor exclaimed. “It’s quite nice out. I haven’t been getting out enough, what with all my time-machine researching and inventing spatio-temporal wrist communicators! Is it always this sunny, Samantha?”

“Oh, yes,” Samantha replied, clipping Polly’s leash onto her collar. “It’s been like this every day. Very nice, really, though I imagine it’s easier than we might think to get a bad sunburn.”

“To be sure,” The Professor said in a somewhat serious voice as he pulled a little folded-up cap from a pocket of his lab coat and fitted it onto his head.

Polly was quite unhappy to be on her leash, with all the rare grass to run around on, and kept tugging insistently, dragging Samantha this way and that (as much as a Boston Terrier can drag anyone). She had to sniff every square meter of ground, of course, though she found most places to be generally unremarkable. As they walked, Samantha and Professor Smythe discussed their plans for time-traveling.

“So, assuming I wind up in the right place–at the right time–what should I do, Professor?”

“Well,” The Professor answered, “I think the best thing to do would be to follow me, the ‘me’ in the past, perhaps not letting ‘me’ notice that you’re there. I know that sounds strange, but I think that the less obtrusive you can be in another time and place, the better. And I don’t imagine that The Professor Smythe of that moment would understand at all what you were doing there–and
then–
and it would take a whole lot of explaining in any event.”

“Okay. So, stay out of sight.”

“I think that would be best. And for God’s sake, don’t touch anything! Don’t talk to anyone, don’t bump into anyone, don’t even interact in any way with that world if you can possibly help it, except to correct my mistake.”

“How can I correct your mistake if I don’t know what it is until it happens?” Samantha asked.

“Hmmmm.” The Professor thought out loud, his brow furrowing. “I suppose you’ll have to anticipate it, to some degree. Remember, it probably has something to do with a letter, and I
know
there was a postman nearby in that time. Whatever happened–aaah, this is frustrating! I would say to look for a postman, and to pay attention to whatever I’m doing around the time you might see him.”

“All right.” Samantha’s mind processed the information.

They had been walking in a semi-circle around Belvedere Castle, and now ascended some stone steps to a sort of terrace that stretched out like a grand, outside dance floor. They were still walking and talking when Samantha noticed that Polly had frozen in place.