The Continuum, page 3
part #1 of Place in Time Series
“Could you help me carry her to the room? She needs to remain lying down in a cool and quiet place. We have reservations under the name Morley.”
“Sure.” He wipes a bead of sweat from his lip. In the process, he knocks his fake mustache askew but doesn’t seem to notice.
Marie’s eyes spring open. She stares up at the circle of faces with calm curiosity, until her eyes land on mine. Then, she gasps. “I remember!”
“You’ve had a bit of a fall,” I interrupt, “but don’t worry. You’re fine now. We’ll get you up to your room so you can rest. We have to make sure you don’t have a concussion. Do you understand?”
All the way up to the room, Marie allows herself to be supported by the two bellhops. Entering the room first, I throw a blanket on the sofa and instruct them to lay her down.
When the bellhops leave, I close the door behind them with a sigh. What else could go wrong?
The hotel is one of the most extravagant places I’ve stayed. There are gilded embellishments around the doors and windows, and soft, luxurious upholstery on the chairs and sofa. On the four-poster bed, crimson pillows with gold fringe and matching blankets are heaped, warm and inviting. My body aches just looking at them.
“Are you feeling any better?” I ask, uncertain if I’m speaking with the 1910s heiress or the 2010s pop star.
“I think so. Just confused.”
“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” I stifle a yawn and gesture to the kitchenette. “Or something to eat?”
“Just tea, please.” Marie’s tone wavers.
After starting the kettle heating, I grab two robes from the bathroom and hang my dress over a towel rack. Maggie will have modern clothes delivered to the hotel room overnight as she always does, but for right now my reflection in the full-length mirror appears regretfully unprofessional in the fuzzy bathrobe. I pull my hair into a bun and try to make the best of it. Anything beats shivering in smelly, wet clothing all night.
“Do you think you can get up?” I ask Marie as I hand her the second robe.
She groans. “I think so.”
“I’ll be right back with the tea.” I duck into the kitchenette to give her some privacy. When I’m sure she’s had enough time to pull off her wet clothes, I carry in our mugs of Earl Grey.
She accepts hers, thanking me politely, as if I’m some neighbor who’s invited her over for afternoon tea and crumpets. Maybe it’s due to the genteel upbringing she’s fabricated for herself, but I certainly won’t complain about it; I prefer demurely subdued over violently panicked any day.
Settling into an armchair, I place my own tea on the coffee table. Now… where to begin?
“My name is Elise, and I work for a company called Place in Time Travel Agency, or PITTA. Do you remember coming to PITTA?” I pause, gauging her reaction.
She closes her eyes and scrunches up her forehead.
“It’s okay,” I say. “You won’t remember everything all at once. At PITTA, we specialize in providing clients with excursions into the past. We’re very selective in our clientele. I understand you were referred by a friend who thought a break from the present might benefit you?”
This time, when Marie opens her eyes, I can see in her expression that she does remember something. “Yeah. I mean, yes.” The verbal slip throws her off, and she has to take a deep breath before continuing.
“My manager threw me out of the recording studio. He told me to pull myself together.” She stops suddenly, the realization of what she said causing her teacup to rattle in her hand.
“What else do you remember?”
“An older gentleman approached me about the agency. I needed time to clear my head, to distance myself from certain people in my life. So I signed up.” Her eyes widen, and I can tell her mind is working at full speed, grasping at the information it had suppressed. “What happened to me?”
“You’ve experienced something we refer to as confabulation.” Marie remains blank-faced, so I continue. “Time travel is a fairly recent development. About a decade ago, Dr. Wells, the head of PITTA, invented the devices we use. This isn’t something humans have experienced before, so we don’t know precisely how each individual will cope.
“For most people, their minds simply compartmentalize their vacations in the past as something slightly less than reality. For them, it’s like performing in a play, reading a book, or having a very vivid dream. They may become immersed in the world and caught up in the experience, but their subconscious labels the experience as ‘not real,’ or at least, not as real as the present.
“Occasionally, though, travelers become emotionally invested in the past, and their brains mislabel the present as ‘not real’ and fill in the gaps that would conflict with that conviction. They may give themselves a new identity and a new background story, even a new persona with different habits and preferences. Everything about the present time that isn’t blocked out, their mind dismisses as something fictitious they heard somewhere or read or dreamt up.”
Retrieval Specialists, of course, are the exception. We travel so frequently that our minds adjust to the reality of both places. In my line of work, the past is just my office. Jumps are just a commute.
“What do I do now?” she whispers, her face suddenly rigid and thoughtful.
“Confabulation like yours occurs very rarely, but you don’t need to worry. It’s harmless and reversible. Sometimes being back in the present is enough to trigger real memories. Others need a few hours of sleep for the brain to rewire itself, filling in the information about the present that it had previously suppressed. In your case, hitting your head may have jogged your memories.”
I watch silently as she struggles to reconcile the two stories—her true history, and the past that her mind had constructed for itself.
“But I know who I am. My name is Marie van Grete. I was born in New York. My father is a well-respected businessman. He sent me to London to stay with my aunt for the spring while he was away on business.” She stops, her mouth agape. “I’m sorry. I… I don’t know where that came from.”
“It’s okay. Your mind is still processing the information.”
“What about Allen? We were going to be married. It was all arranged. We were planning an autumn wedding. Allen… I… I love him.” Her voice cracks and tears well up in her eyes.
I close my eyes, trying not to think about Allen. He saw me Extract, and that kind of slip-up could cost me my job.
“You signed a contract with PITTA for a two-month trip,” I say, ignoring her question. “I was sent to Retrieve you when you missed your Extraction deadline, to help guide you back to the present.”
“Fine. I understand.” She pauses, straightening her robe and rising from her seat. “Now take me back.”
“I can’t. You belong here.”
“No. I belong with Allen.” Desperate tears flow freely, painting shiny pathways down her cheeks. “Send me back.”
“I can’t. You broke the Rules.”
“From one woman to another,” she says, dropping to her knees at my feet. “You still have your device; you can send me back. I’ll meet him in New York and tell him I booked passage on another liner to join him. No one else needs to know.”
“Even if I wanted to, I can’t. The Wormhole Device doesn’t have those capabilities. It’s for Extractions only, a tether from the past back to your time of origin. You need much more powerful technology to Jump to another time or place, and that technology’s only available back at the agency.”
She buries her head in her hands. A pang of sympathy jolts my conscience. I hate being the bearer of bad news, the harbinger of truth sent to shatter her beautiful illusions. Then again, I remind myself, the Rules are there for a reason. It’s obvious Marie would do everything she could to go back there and marry her fiancé, without any regard to the effect it may have on the present.
“Can you at least get a message to him?”
I open my mouth to object, to remind her that Allen more than likely perished on the Titanic, but quickly snap my jaw shut. It must be difficult to suddenly leave everything you thought was your life. She just wants closure. I’ve put her through enough today; I can give her this tiny sliver of peace, even if it is false.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I say, though frankly, after what just happened, I’m considering avoiding the Gilded Age entirely from now on. If Dr. Wells even allows me to Jump again.
“Tell him… tell him I’ll miss our days by the seaside, but that he should carry on and be happy, even if I’m not there.”
Her request sounds so melodramatic that I have to stop myself from wrinkling my nose at the unabashed sentimentality. Instead, in an impulsive gesture of sympathy, I put my hand on hers. Regardless of anything else, clearly her feelings for her fiancé were genuine, and the memories they made together won’t be easily forgotten.
CHAPTER SIX:
April 11, 2012
The warm, caramel-apple sun barely peeks over the Southampton skyline, but the room adjoining mine is already empty. Marie left me a note, two lines that assure me she remembers everything now and that she plans to spend a few days in Europe to clear her head before flying back to America.
I shove the note into the pocket of my new jeans, grumbling to myself that she didn’t even bother to hang up her dress. It lies abandoned in a pile on the floor—drenched, smelly and wrinkled. I guess she really was ready to move on.
I take a final look around the hotel room to make sure I haven’t left anything behind, and then I’m ready to move on as well.
“Sir, I think your wife would love touring the Barbados this time of year.” Maggie sits behind PITTA’s front desk and pushes colorful travel brochures across to a middle-aged man with a comb-over. “We have an excellent package here, though it doesn’t include meals.” She leans over the desk and points to the price with a fire engine red fingernail. Even from the doorway, I can see the man’s nostrils flare. Maggie catches me watching and winks. I just shake my head.
People who walk into the front reception often assume the Place in Time Travel Agency is just another overpriced rip-off, but our actual customers—all personal referrals—know to request a trip to Richmond, Surrey when they come in. Only then are they directed back to the real travel agency.
Since I’m eager to avoid Maggie and her inevitable questions about my botched Retrieval, I hurry past the tangerine upholstery and gaudy 80s travel posters and slip into the back.
The real travel agency, where we prepare our clients for their exclusive vacations in the past, is a million times brighter, cleaner, and easier on the eyes. And somewhere in here, I’m certain, I can find some aspirin.
Black leather sofas encircle a low coffee table, and on each of the walls is a poster-sized, full-color photograph of a great New York moment: Henry Hudson sailing the Half Moon into the harbor, George Washington’s inauguration, and the construction of the Empire State Building. Off to one side, a coffeemaker and a pastry tray sit on a counter beside the filing cabinet we affectionately refer to as “The Black Hole.” The aspirin is supposed to be kept on top of the filing cabinet but, as usual, is missing. Maybe if I’m lucky it just fell into a drawer.
As I dig elbows-deep into The Black Hole’s top drawer, the door to the adjoining room opens. I glance up and smile at the middle-aged man with the gray mop of hair who flops into the armchair. “Hey, Joe.”
“Back so soon?” He barely looks up from his paperwork. Today, his forehead seems to contain more ridges than usual, and his permanent grimace turns down at a sharper angle. Even his posture is slouched, creating unseemly wrinkles in his high-end suit.
“Sure am. What’s up with you?” I ask cautiously. My fingers close around what might be an aspirin bottle, but it turns out to be a cathode-ray tube from an old TV, so I toss it back in.
“Another 9/11 request.” He scowls, flipping through a manila folder. As PITTA’s Jump Specialist, Joe’s job is to prepare clients for their trips to the past, or—in cases like this—to explain why we won’t allow certain Jumps.
I stand on my tiptoes to reach deeper into the cabinet. The aspirin has to be in here somewhere. “Pretty early in the year to be getting September requests, isn’t it?”
“Why does no one understand the ‘annual interval’ thing?” he grumbles. “How hard is it? You leave here April 11 and you arrive there on April 11. The only thing that changes is the year. And then they all want to know why. Do I look like a physics professor?”
Aha! I pull out the aspirin bottle and slam the drawer shut. The stupid childproof cap refuses to budge. “Another hero in the making?” I ask as I fiddle with the cap.
“Aren’t they all?” Joe stirs his coffee violently, cursing when it sloshes out of the Styrofoam cup onto his pants. “Every one of ‘em insists he’s got some sort of brilliant plan that will save the day. Never mind that they’d be breaking nearly every single one of the Rules. Do they even bother to read the Rules?” He dabs at his pants with a napkin, trying to sop up the spilled beverage.
“I wonder that, too, sometimes.”
“Oh, they’ll agree with all the Rules in theory, but every one of them wants us to make an exception in their case. For the greater good, of course.”
“Have you heard from the other Retrievers lately?” I ask, popping in a few aspirin and pouring myself a cup of coffee to wash it down. Retrievers come and go so frequently that the others are practically strangers to me. There’s one guy, Mike, whom I’ve only met twice, though he’s been here as long as I have. He has the physique of a bodybuilder and specializes in the most dangerous Retrievals, when we have reasons to believe the client might put up a fight. Bob, Tom, and Sam—all pseudonyms, of course—were hired after me, and I don’t see any of them more than two or three times a year.
“Well, you just missed Bob. He was stuck here for a month,” Joe says. “Dr. Wells needed him to Retrieve someone from the 1340s and it took a while to come up with a vaccination for the Plague. The poor guy was going stir-crazy sitting in one place for so long.”
I grin as I sip my coffee. I can relate; I get antsy between assignments, too. The past is often easier to deal with than the present.
“Tom got back a few days ago, too,” Joe says, raising his eyebrows. “Messy Retrieval. The guy wanted to prevent Lincoln’s assassination. It got ugly. We got him back to the present, but from what I hear, they had quite the skirmish. Tom ended up with a shiner the size of an orange.”
“What happened to the client?”
“Same as always… blacklisted, taken care of. He won’t cause trouble for us again. When did you say you were again?” Joe asks, finishing off his coffee.
“1912. I had a Confab who forgot about the whole Titanic incident. I’m not looking forward to telling Dr. Wells about it.”
Joe raises his eyebrows. “Hadn’t ever seen the movie, huh? I don’t know how you could forget a story like that. And that song…” He starts loudly humming his own rendition of the Celine Dion tune, horribly off-key. I shake my head, knowing he’s just putting on an act for me. Nobody could be that tone-deaf.
“How do you forget something like that?” he says again. “I wouldn’t worry about it, though. You’ll be fine. Everyone knows you’re the old man’s favorite.”
It’s true, but on the other hand, Dr. Wells is a stickler for the Rules. I run my finger around the cup’s rim, wondering what I’d do if I were let go. My particular skill set isn’t one with a whole lot of uses in the ‘real’ world. I don’t even have a college degree. Ever since striking up a conversation with Dr. Wells at a sci-fi convention seven years ago, my education has been informal, hands-on, and not exactly something I could put on a résumé.
Joe leans forward to roll himself out of the deep chair and grunts to his feet. “Speaking of which, he’s been asking after you—I’m surprised he hasn’t barged in here already, actually. He’s been frantic about something the last couple of days, but he’s keeping it all hush-hush.”
As if on cue, Dr. Wells bursts through his door, sets his bespectacled eyes on me, and says, “Elise! There you are. Come in, come in.”
I shoot a desperate, help-me-out-here glance at Joe, who gives me a halfhearted salute as he measures out the ground beans for another pot of coffee.
“See you later,” he says, though, as usual, neither of us has any idea when ‘later’ might be.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
April 11, 2012
Dr. Wells exhales as though he’s been holding his breath the entire time I was gone. With his stout and rather rotund physical features, he reminds me of Santa Claus. A really brilliant, mad-scientist kind of Santa. He hurries to close the door behind me.
His office is a mystery of the universe, one of those Mary-Poppins-bag places where all the items shouldn’t logically fit in such a small space. Calling it cluttered, though, would do a disservice to the astonishing objects housed there. Aside from his scientific inventions lying in various stages of assembly, the shelves on the wall are also packed with historical treasures. Some of our regular clients like to bring back souvenirs for him: Faberge eggs, Nazi gold, a few Monets. It wouldn’t surprise me to find the Ark of the Covenant stashed in his closet.
“That’s new.” I point to an oil painting. “Is that…?”
“Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man.” Dr. Wells pushes his pudgy lower lip out into a scowl. “I guess we know now where that disappeared to. And here we’ve been blaming the Nazis for taking it.”
“You could forbid the removal of items from the past,” I suggest.
Dr. Wells shakes his head; I wonder if he even heard me. A sharp trill of his old rotary phone breaks the silence.
Dr. Wells reaches into one of his piles—a hodgepodge of ancient writing tools and Popular Mechanics magazines—and retrieves a phone receiver with a shaking hand. He glances nervously out the window. Drops of sweat pool on his forehead.
