God's Junk Drawer, page 5
“There was one earlier,” said Sam.
“It’s long gone. So to speak.”
“Are we dead?” asked Josh. “Ohmigod we’re dead, aren’t we?”
“We’re not dead. We’re fine.” Barnes tapped Olivia’s phone, pointed at Parker’s head. She lit up the wound while he examined it.
Logan swept his flashlight around the clearing again. “Where’s all our gear?”
“Back wherever you left it.”
“It’s not. There’s nothing anywhere on the hillside.”
“This isn’t the same hillside,” Barnes said. He gave Parker’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry about shoving you earlier. You should be fine by morning.”
“It’s okay,” she mumbled. “You’re forgiven.”
“That’s a pretty nasty gash,” said Sam. “Maybe a concussion. And head wounds bleed a lot.”
Barnes straightened up. “Trust me. She’ll be fine.”
Kyle looked up at the towering cliff. “It couldn’t’ve all gotten swept away,” he insisted.
“Nothing got swept away,” Barnes told him. “Not exactly.”
“Then where is it?” demanded Olivia. “What happened to everyone?”
Barnes took a breath. Looked at each of them in turn. “We’ve made a lot of noise,” he said. “We should head back into the trees, make the best camp we can, try to get comfortable for the night. And then I’ll explain.”
4
LOGAN
Barnes led them back down into the forest below the clearing. Logan’s knee throbbed, but it didn’t feel broken. Just a good whack that was still echoing back and forth through his nervous system.
They found his backpack propped against a jagged tree stump as if it’d slid down the slope and gotten caught. They couldn’t find any other packs or equipment anywhere. Kyle pointed out it could all be a few yards away and look like stones in the dim starlight.
They found a spot between three trees without too many lumps or rocks. Barnes unrolled his sleeping bag and had Parker sit down on it. Then he unzipped his pack and slid out a higher-end first aid kit. Logan held the light while the professor took a few gentle passes at Parker’s face with some alcohol wipes. She flinched as the wipes brushed the gouge, but she didn’t fight. It looked like a long stripe of road rash on her temple, the size of a business card and deep enough that Logan wondered if he might be looking at a bit of exposed skull.
While they cleaned her up, Josh, the questionable guide, gathered a few small stones from around the site and made a rough ring. He piled some sticks and pine needles in the center and Barnes waved a hand at him. “Don’t.”
“It’s okay,” said Josh. “It’s not my first campfire.”
“We don’t want to attract attention.”
“Actually, yes we do,” said Kyle. His perfectly messy hair had a slant to it now, and it made his head look lopsided. “We want to attract as much attention as possible because we’re lost in the woods with no phone signal and there was a fucking landslide!”
Barnes pulled an oversized Band-Aid from his kit. “Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly? What the hell is going on?”
“I’m going to tell you. I’m just not sure where to begin. I didn’t expect to have anyone with me on this trip. Sorry.”
“We know,” Olivia said. “It was last minute.”
Barnes chuckled, but he didn’t smile. “Not really.”
Logan sat down on the ground near Olivia and she shuffled a few inches to the side to give him room. She went far enough it left a gap between them. It felt like that’d been happening a lot lately. On a couple levels. He knew she’d mostly agreed to this trip to humor him, and well . . . now they were all a little distracted.
Barnes turned around, settled on the ground near Parker. He folded one leg beneath himself. Looked at each of them. A glance at Parker, sitting with her chin almost touching her chest.
“We’re in the past,” said Barnes.
Josh glanced back up the hill. “Past what?”
“The past,” said Barnes. He swung his bulging pack in front of him, unzipped a pocket, and pulled out half a dozen PowerBars. “About a hundred million years. Prehistory. Although I’m not sure that’s the best term for this place.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “The fuck are you talking about?”
“Like . . . time travel?” asked Logan.
Barnes nodded. Tossed him a PowerBar across the unused fire ring. Another one went to Olivia. Josh snatched his out of the air with one hand.
“Bullshit,” said Kyle, fumbling the bar thrown to him.
“It’s not,” said Barnes. “You all know physics allows for it. We just don’t know how to do it. Well, not practically.”
They stared at him. Sam checked his phone again. Josh looked back up at the dim, towering cliff. They could still see it through the trees.
“That’s a bad place to start,” said Barnes. “Okay, the whole story. I wasn’t always Noah Barnes. The name I was born with was Bill Gather.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?” asked Olivia.
He shrugged. “It did for a lot of years.”
“Wait.” Sam looked up from his phone and Logan saw his face change, almost lighting up. “Bill Gather like Billy Gather? Dino Boy?”
Barnes sighed. “Yep, that’s me.”
“No way?!”
Josh tapped a finger against his chin. “You were a fifteen-minutes-of-fame celebrity, right? No offense. Back in the early ’90s?”
“None taken.”
A memory tickled Logan’s mind. Some sort of pre-meme joke he’d seen a few times. “You were that kid forty-something years ago who had a mental break when you were kidnapped. You thought your dad was eaten by a dinosaur?”
“It was thirty-three years ago, I wasn’t kidnapped, and I didn’t have a mental break. My father was killed by a T-Rex. Right in front of me and my sister.”
“Holy crap.” Sam stared at Barnes, starstruck, slowly tilting his head, examining the man’s face. “You’re really him. It’s really you.”
“Yes it is.”
“Could someone fill me in?” asked Josh. “Pretend I’m an idiot.”
“Something tells me that doesn’t involve a lot of pretending,” said Kyle.
“Hey!”
“Kyle, seriously, give it a rest,” Logan said.
Barnes raised his palms. “Please . . . keep your voices down.”
Olivia rubbed her hands on her arms. “Why?”
“Like I said before, we don’t want to attract attention.”
Logan looked off into the dark woods. So did Olivia and Josh. They all listened quietly for a moment. There wasn’t a lot of sound. No crickets or owls or anything. Just distant echoes, too muffled to be identified.
Barnes laced his fingers together, and Logan thought it looked like he was in therapy. Ready to talk, relaxed, but still defensive on some level. Like he already knew how the session was going to go.
“A few weeks before my tenth birthday,” said Barnes, “my father took my sister and I white water rafting in Maine. It was the anniversary of our mom’s death and he didn’t want us to be sitting at home upset about it. We’d been on the water for two hours, went over a big group of rapids, and our raft . . . kept falling.”
Logan looked back into the woods. Remembered the sensation of plunging down through the darkness.
“We’d encountered a wormhole,” Barnes continued. “An actual, honest-to-God stable Ellis wormhole. And it dumped us a hundred million years in the past.”
“Bullshit,” said Olivia, rubbing her arms again. Logan could see goose pimples in the dim light. It wasn’t cold, but he wondered if she might be in shock.
He wondered if he was in shock.
Barnes shrugged. “Well, I’ve never been exactly sure how far back, to be honest. We didn’t have any way to check. But my family . . . I was lost there for two years.”
“Five years,” said Sam. “I read all the books. Dino Boy was—you were gone for five years.”
“Please don’t say ‘Dino Boy.’ And it was five years back in the present. For me, it was barely twenty-six months.”
“How?”
“Time dilation. My gut says it’s from the wormhole, but I’ve got nothing to back it up.”
Logan tried to map out a wormhole in his head. He knew the basics, but they really weren’t his specialty. “That only works when you’re going through it, though. If you made it to the other side you wouldn’t keep getting time dilation.”
“Maybe. A lot of things work differently here.”
Blue light spilled over them as Josh held up his phone, searching for a signal.
“You’re wasting your time,” Barnes told him. “And your battery. There’s not going to be any cell phone towers in range for a long time.”
Logan slid his hoodie off and draped it over Olivia’s shoulders. “I thought the whole thing was trauma,” he said. “A coping mechanism.”
“It wasn’t. It was real. Two years living with dinosaurs and Neanderthals and our robot, Ross.”
“Your robot?” echoed Olivia, sticking her arms into the hoodie. She looked up at Logan, gave him a quick, neutral smile.
“I mean, we found him stuck in the mud by the watering hole. It’s not like I built him out of coconuts or something.”
Kyle snorted. “Dinosaurs and cavemen didn’t exist at the same time.”
“Like I said, the rules are different here.” He reached out and plucked a twig from the ground. “Any of you have a junk drawer in your homes growing up? A drawer in the kitchen that collects all the little odds and ends that don’t fit anywhere else.”
“I did,” murmured Parker, raising a hand.
Logan raised a few fingers. Olivia nodded.
“I’ve got one now,” said Josh.
Barnes nodded with them. “My dad called this place God’s junk drawer. Things from all across time end up here. Things that don’t fit anywhere else in the cosmos, for one reason or another. This is where they all accumulate.” He held the twig by the end, waved it back and forth, then tossed it into the circle of stones.
“Wait,” said Kyle. “Are you saying that’s where we are now? We’re in magical dino-land or whatever?”
“It’s not magic,” Barnes replied, “but . . . yep. We’re in the valley.”
“Bullshit.”
“Sorry.”
Sam mouthed a silent whoa and stared at Barnes with fanboy awe. “You’re saying it’s all true? All the stuff in the books?” His voice hadn’t been this lively all day.
“Well, not everything,” Barnes shrugged. “A couple of them exaggerate on points, and some of them take the angle of debunking everything I said. And a few of them are pure nonsense. One reads like a Saturday morning kids show.”
Kyle coughed into his shoulder. “You’d think if there was a wormhole on a white water rafting route, somebody would’ve noticed it.”
“Exactly,” said Barnes. He pointed a finger, singling out the clever student. “For years I thought the same way, that the wormhole was in a specific location. Once I was back, I went down that river so many times. Twice a day, three times if I could manage it. I must’ve done it two hundred times, trying to cover every inch of the rapids, think of every variable. Speed, weight, materials, weather, time of day. Then I spent a year in Thailand, in the forest where I reappeared. Tried to find the exact location I got out.”
Olivia cocked her head. “Why?”
Barnes didn’t hear her. He was in lecture mode, giving the class information with a story. “Then I started investigating other disappearances. I knew other things ended up in the valley. Maybe I could find a pattern to the disappearances and where they happened. Start predicting where they were going to happen.”
“I’d guess there are a lot of unexplained disappearances,” Logan said.
“You have no idea. Especially when you start figuring the ones with accepted explanations. Plus, when random objects go missing, there’s usually less of a record.” Barnes waved a hand at the dark forest around them. “All sorts of stuff ends up here. Animals. Plants. Vehicles. Statues.”
“You found—there was an Egyptian riverboat,” Sam said. “And a giant sundial, right?”
Barnes let out a little chuckle. “You really did read all the books.”
“I really . . . it was a phase. When I was twelve. Not, like, a recent thing.”
“Anyway, spend two decades studying wormholes and eventually you get a doctorate, and then you’re an associate professor. It meant I had more resources, I just needed to teach an undergrad class now and then.”
“Plus help out with the occasional graduate project,” said Logan.
“Well, yes, but that came a little later.”
“I still say this is all bullshit,” Kyle said.
“So one day I was teaching the orbital mechanics class for the fourth or fifth time,” Barnes continued, “walking everyone through geosynchronous orbits, and I realized my problem, the wormhole, was all about location. Just not a location on Earth.”
He pointed up at the sky.
Olivia got it first. “You’re saying the wormhole’s somewhere else in the solar system?”
“It’s orbiting the sun,” added Logan, close behind her. “An orbit that sometimes intersects Earth’s orbit.”
“Almost,” said Barnes. “If my calculations are correct, and, well, current evidence seems to show they are, there’s a stable Ellis wormhole at a fixed point in Earth’s orbit.”
“It’s at one of the Lagrange points?”
Barnes shook his head. “No, it’s fixed at September twenty-second, currently at . . . well six fifty-eight Eastern Standard Time.”
“Currently?” echoed Kyle.
“Leap days. Earth’s orbit is almost six hours longer than a year, so we’re not always at the same point.”
“But this hypothetical fixed wormhole is?” Olivia asked.
Barnes gave a half smile, almost a smirk, and gestured at the forest again. “It’s not hypothetical.”
“So it’s a fixed point in the orbit,” said Logan, “but it’s not a Lagrange point?”
Josh finally lowered his phone. The screen winked out, and they were in near darkness again. “Excuse me, could someone explain what a La Range point is?”
“Lagrange,” corrected Barnes. “And it’s not important.”
“They’re points in an orbiting system where things stay put,” Kyle said, sounding annoyed he had to explain it. “The gravitational forces between the Earth and the sun balance out with the centrifugal force of the orbit, so if you get something to one of the points it stays there.”
“But the points move as the system moves,” added Logan. “For example, one of the Lagrange points is on the other side of the sun, directly across from Earth. But it’s always directly across from us. Earth moves around the sun and that point moves to keep the same relationship.”
Josh’s face lit up. “Oh! So it’s like Counter-Earth.”
“What?”
“In the comics, there’s another Earth on the opposite side of the sun, and we never see it because it’s orbiting as fast as we are. They changed it in the Marvel movies, but that’s what it was originally. They did the same thing in some old Doctor Who episodes, too, but they called it Mondas.”
“I . . . yeah, that’s actually it.”
“Really dumb,” said Kyle, “but basically it.”
“And not what we’re talking about,” Barnes said, a hint of irritation in his voice.
Olivia rolled a twig between her fingers, then flicked it into the unlit pile of leaves and sticks. “So what are we talking about?”
Barnes shrugged again. “I’ve been calling it a heliostationary point. To be honest, there isn’t a term for something that behaves like this.”
“Because nothing behaves like that.” Kyle blew air out of his nose.
Barnes stared at him. “This wormhole does. And once a year, Earth’s movement brings them together. Depending on the exact point of contact, the intersection can be extremely minor or it can be . . . larger. And whatever’s at the intersection gets transported here.”
Sam tried to throw a leaf into the stone circle, but it spun in the air and landed at his feet. “Like you, like you and your family did.”
“Like all of us did.” Olivia crossed her arms.
“Sorry.” Barnes picked up another twig. “I tried to warn you all away.”
Josh looked up at the trees. “Could’ve been a little more specific.”
“I’m pretty sure if I’d said, ‘Back up or you’ll get sucked into a wormhole,’ it would’ve led to more questions.”
“So why bring all of us out here,” asked Logan. “If there was a risk of other people getting sucked in, why not come alone? Why bring all of us?”
“And a few dozen undergrads,” Sam added.
“Really, the only one I needed was him.” Barnes pointed a finger at Josh. “Or the guy I originally hired. I just needed to get to that exact spot. But the truth is, by the time I’d gathered all the information, made all the calculations, triple-checked them . . .”
Logan remembered their discussion back on the bus. “You were broke.”
“Yep.”
Olivia shook her head. “But this is . . . it’s maybe two tanks of gas to get here from campus. And how much can this guy really cost?”
“Hey!” said Josh.
“I was really broke,” Barnes said. He patted his bulging backpack. “Associate professors aren’t rolling in money to start with, and this has been my life’s work. I’d spent my departmental budget, my savings, everything. I sold my car, went about sixty grand into debt, and I’ve been couch-surfing for the past three months. If I wanted to travel through time, I needed the department to approve me traveling a few hundred miles and hiring a guide.”
“This is all fucking bullshit,” snapped Kyle. “We’re not a million years in the past. We’re in the forest on the side of a mountain, right now, in the present, in New York, and this whole trip’s turned into a disaster so he’s trying to cover his ass.”
