Chronal Engine Read online

  The “workshop,” he’d called it, but it looked more like a library. Oak paneling and built-in bookcases lined the walls. A red and gold rug covered the concrete floor. A wooden desk and a pair of workbenches were on the far side, under the front windows, next to the French doors. There weren’t any computers, but a bulky microfiche reader sat on one of the worktables.

  A three-foot-long lobe-finned fish—a coelacanth—was mounted on a pedestal in one of the bookcases. Resting on another shelf was a chicken-sized skeleton of what looked like a Compsognathus, an early theropod dinosaur from the Triassic. I assumed it was a cast.

  “That’s it?” Emma asked, drawing my attention away from the displays.

  Grandpa pulled back a velvet curtain to reveal the machine that occupied a good quarter of the room.

  “My grandfather’s greatest achievement,” he said. “Perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of mankind.” His face grew sad. “Also, his greatest tragedy.”

  The Chronal Engine. It was about the size of a compact pickup truck. Resembling the 1930s console radio in the upstairs parlor, it had a central cabinet that looked like a coppery-metallic curved rectangle with two smaller sections on either side.

  Multiple brass levers and switches, a quartet of glass dials, and a number of old-time light bulbs with visible, glowing filaments were set into its main body. A round CRT screen, now dark, was centered above the dials. On top sat a larger light, about the size of a milk jug, inside a wire cage.

  “It has its own generator,” Grandpa said, as we gathered around.

  Off to the side of the Engine stood a locked glass case, one shelf holding a brass and glass sphere about the size of a baseball.

  “This,” Grandpa announced, “is a Recall Device. The time traveler uses it to set temporal-spatial coordinates and activates it to return to the present.”

  “So it’s a remote control,” I put in.

  “Yes, but not quite,” Grandpa said. He sighed. “This is the last one.”

  I looked closer through the glass door of the case. The Device was intricately inscribed with gradations and numerals, like a precision instrument—as fine as the detailing on the antique slide rule my mom kept on her desk. Stripes along the side indicated where the pieces could move relative to one another.

  The whole thing was creeping me out. “What do we do?” I whispered to my brother.

  “Keep humoring him,” Kyle answered.

  Before I could respond, I heard a noise outside. It took me a moment to figure out what it was. “Is that a helicopter?”

  “Ah.” With a slight smile, Grandpa turned to Petra. “Your mother is an excellent woman.” Then he clutched at his chest and collapsed.

  Kyle leaped forward, catching him before his head hit the side of the machine, while Petra yelled, “Mom!”

  Grandpa tried to raise a hand and whispered something to Kyle. My brother nodded, frowning, as he helped Grandpa lie back on the floor.

  At the same time, I heard Mrs. Castillo’s footsteps clatter down the stairs.

  “Med Flight is here!” She dashed across the room and opened the French doors from the basement to the lawn where the helicopter was landing. Then she ran out and waved. “Over here!”

  Moments later the paramedics arrived with a gurney and defibrillator.

  “Kids, go upstairs,” Mrs. Castillo said. “There’s pecan pie and Blue Bell ice cream on the table. I’ll go with Mr. Pierson and call you when we get to the hospital.”

  “But—” Kyle began.

  “Do it!” Mrs. Castillo said.

  Petra led the way, with Emma following closely behind.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I grabbed Kyle by the arm. “What did he say to you?”

  Kyle shook his head, forehead wrinkled. “He said, ‘Take the bug.’ Do you know what he was talking about?”

  “No.”

  Other than the fish and the Compsognathus, there was a bunch of natural history museum-type samples lying around—a human skull, a bird skeleton—but no bugs.

  “What’s in the envelope he gave you?” Kyle asked.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Let’s check it out upstairs.”

  As we hurried up, my mind was racing. No matter how calm he and Mrs. Castillo had seemed, I couldn’t help worrying about Grandpa, even if we barely knew him. How had he predicted his own heart attack? Was he psychic? Or did he receive a message from the future?

  If so, that meant the Chronal Engine worked.

  Upstairs we found a plate with a slice of pecan pie at each of our place settings. A tub of ice cream sat in a bowl filled with ice at the center of the table.

  “That was really, really strange,” Emma said, leaning over the back of her chair. “How did the helicopter get here so quickly?”

  “Not just quickly,” I told her. “It was here before he had the heart attack. He mentioned it at dinner. He knew ahead of time that something was going to happen.”

  “How?” Emma asked.

  “It’s obvious.” I paused. “The Chronal Engine works.”

  “The time machine?” Kyle said. “What, did Santa Claus pull the switch?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “But you all heard it. Grandpa said it would be in fifteen minutes, and it was.”

  “There has to be a better explanation than a time machine,” Kyle replied.

  Emma nodded. “Maybe he just felt the heart attack coming on.”

  “Before we sat down to dinner?” I asked. “You think that’s possible?”

  Kyle shrugged. “Has to be.”

  I snorted.

  Annoyed that they were doing the “twin support in all things” thing, I sat at my place and scooped some ice cream—Mexican vanilla—onto my plate.

  “How can you eat?” Emma asked as I took a mouthful of ice cream and pie.

  “Good pie,” I said, and opened the envelope.

  “What is it?” Kyle asked.

  “A map.” I spread it out on the table.

  It was a printed map of the creek with the dinosaur footprints, from back in the days when the ranch was open to tourists and paleontologists. It looked a little like one of the maps in the book Grandpa had taken, but there was something different.

  Kyle came around to peer over my shoulder. “And X marks the spot.”

  A black X was scrawled on the map near the creek, a little removed from the main body of track beds.

  I showed Petra the paper. “What’s there?”

  “Nothing I can think of.” She bit her lip. “It’s sort of overgrown with brush and . . . I think it’s just an area that’s never been cleared out.”

  At a flash of lightning, Emma got up and looked out the window. Big droplets of rain splattered against the panes. “Tomorrow morning?”

  I nodded, still staring at the map. What could be marked there? Maybe Grandpa had discovered some kind of new dinosaur. But why would he insist on our going to the site the day after he’d had a heart attack that he’d known about in advance?

  After an hour or so of talking in circles, we cleaned up the dining room and kitchen and then got a phone call from Mrs. Castillo. Grandpa was still in critical condition, and she’d call again when there was more news.

  I wondered how much Grandpa had known. Did he know he was going to come out of it all right? Or did he know he was going to die? If so, why hadn’t he done anything to prevent the attack?

  Chapter III

  Footprints in the Stone

  MRS. CASTILLO CALLED AGAIN AT ELEVEN THIRTY THAT NIGHT TO tell us that the doctors were optimistic, but Grandpa was still “touch and go.”

  The rain still hadn’t slackened off by midnight.

  At twelve thirty Petra grabbed an umbrella and headed down the hill to the cottage she and her mother lived in, while Emma, Kyle, and I went up to bed.

  I lay awake for a while thinking about Grandpa and the Chronal Engine, and eventually decided to go down to the workshop and check things out.

  On my wa
y, I remembered the history book Grandpa had taken, so I took a detour to his room. The door was locked, though, so I went on down to the parlor.

  The book hadn’t been reshelved.

  I continued to the basement. The lights of the Chronal Engine glowed softly, and the large bulb in the cage on top flickered every now and then. The machine felt warm to the touch.

  When I put my ear to it, I could hear a low hum, though it was hard to make out over the air conditioner.

  I didn’t really know what I was looking for. Something, maybe, about how the Chronal Engine worked or even just a clue on why Mad Jack had built the thing in the first place.

  I didn’t know where to start, but I lucked out when I pulled open the top filing cabinet drawer closest to the desk. It contained what looked like lab books.

  I grabbed two volumes and set them on the desk, clicked on the green banker’s reading light, and began to leaf through the first. The pages were covered with crabbed, handwritten scribblings and equations. Other pages had scraps of paper, notes, and correspondence pasted in. Still more pages had rough diagrams of machine parts and specifications. Both the math and the accompanying text were baffling.

  Glued to the first page was a sheet of stationery with the letterhead of the Hotel Adolphus in Dallas. It read:

  Dr. Einstein’s relativity implies space-time pinholes, requiring infinite gravity.

  But this came to me during the game today: quantum tunneling of pseudogravity particles and modulation of resulting chronal wave with field-resonant material should make instantaneous temporal inversion of massive objects possible.

  Also on the sheet was a diagram of a sphere with a group of lines radiating from one point on its surface, through its interior, to other points on its surface.

  I sat back. This must’ve been when Mad Jack had first conceived of the Chronal Engine. His greatest achievement, Grandpa had said. And I didn’t understand a word of it.

  As I read on, it became clear that Professor Pierson’s experiments had been somewhat controversial. His paper had been rejected for publication six times, and his department head had called him a “dangerous quack.” An appeal to Albert Einstein by telegram went unanswered.

  So Pierson built the Chronal Engine in secrecy at a lab at the University of Texas. But his lab assistant and some of the other scientists eventually went to the engineering dean to try to shut him down.

  Pierson became convinced that his colleagues were trying to steal his work, and he tried to test the Engine before they could turn it off or take it away and destroy it or something. Unfortunately, in the process, he accidentally overloaded the power grid and blacked out the whole town.

  When the dean finally closed down the project, Pierson carted the Engine here to the ranch and, like Thomas Edison, built his own power station.

  When I finished reading the first book, I moved on to the second.

  “What language is this?” I muttered.

  “What language is what?” Emma replied from the stairwell, startling me. She came into the light at the bottom of the stairs, carrying a paper bag in one hand and a water pistol in the other, which she proceeded to shoot me with.

  It was classic Emma, but I wasn’t in the mood for it.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, holding up my hand to deflect the water from my face and protect the lab book.

  “Found this in Mom’s old room,” she said, gesturing with the water pistol. “What language is what?”

  She sat and put the pistol down on the desk.

  “This.” I slid the book toward her. “I think it’s Japanese. When did he learn Japanese?”

  “Who?”

  “Mad—” I began, then corrected myself. “Great-Great-Grandpa Pierson. This is his lab book. One of his lab books.” I turned the page and saw something even more surprising. Then I turned another. And another. And two more. “This is incredible.”

  “What?”

  I got up and opened the file cabinet to check out the remaining two books. They were the same. “This is incredible!”

  “You already said that,” Emma replied.

  I set the books on the table and showed Emma the pages. “This page is Japanese, this is German, this is Russian, this is French, and I don’t know what these next two are. And then back to Japanese and so on. All the books are like that.”

  I was silent a moment, awed by the effort it would’ve taken.

  “Looks like Gramps really, really didn’t want anyone else to read his notebooks,” Emma said.

  “Yeah.” I leaned back in the chair. “You don’t think Petra’s ever noticed anything weird out here before, do you?”

  Emma leafed through one of the notebooks. “She did say that tonight had been the first time she’d ever been down in the basement. You still think the Chronal Engine works?”

  I shrugged. “How else could Grandpa have known when his heart attack was going to occur, down to the minute?”

  “Maybe he’s psychic.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  She laughed.

  While she was distracted, I grabbed the water pistol and pointed it at her.

  “You don’t want to do that, Baby Brother,” Emma said.

  I hated when she called me that, although not as much as when Kyle did. (She called him Big Brother because he was older by about a minute and a half.)

  “Why?” I asked. “Only you get to—”

  “Because I have this.” She reached down into the bag and pulled out a Super Soaker water cannon.

  I froze. “Okay, you really don’t want to do that in here. Old papers, books, strange machinery . . .”

  “Maybe not.” She looked thoughtful. “This isn’t for you, anyway.”

  I raised an eyebrow, but lowered the pistol.

  “I think Big Brother needs a change of attitude, don’t you?” Emma asked. “He’s been kind of a jerk lately. He could use . . . well, a wake-up call.”

  As she brandished the soaker, I broke into a grin. Kyle had been a pain these past few weeks. Sometimes, though, Emma could be dangerously whimsical. “He’ll kill me.”

  She waved a hand. “Oh, he’ll think about it, but would never actually go through with anything terminal.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “Besides,” Emma went on, “we have this.” She reached into the bag again and pulled out a compact video camera.

  “Isn’t that Mom’s?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but she got a new one for the Mongolia trip.” Emma shrugged. “I shoot, you record, and if he gets any ideas, just threaten to upload the video.”

  I hesitated.

  “You think he’s going to want his future varsity teammates seeing him in a web video waking up and screaming like a girl?” She shook the soaker, so I could hear the clunking of . . .

  “Ice cubes?” I exclaimed.

  She nodded solemnly.

  “Remind me never to get you mad at me . . .”

  I opened the connecting door from my room and turned on the camera and the lights.

  Kyle was snoring softly, sleeping on his side, one arm over the covers.

  Emma entered through the main door, let out a piercing yell, and unleashed the full power of the Super Soaker water cannon.

  The result was spectacular, although it didn’t go exactly according to plan.

  Instead of simply shocking Kyle awake with the ice water, a good part of it apparently went up his nose.

  He didn’t scream.

  Instead, he sat up bolt upright, eyes bugging out, and coughing and gurgling like he was trying to get rid of a lung.

  Emma stopped firing as soon as he sat up, but he was still completely drenched, hair plastered to his head, water dripping down his face.

  “What the . . . what are you doing?” He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Emma! Max!” Then he coughed again and snorted, scowling.

  I lowered the camera uncertainly while Emma walked over and sat down in the cowhide wing chair. Cross
ing her legs, she laid the water cannon across her lap and began toying with the little gold cross she wore around her neck.

  “Max,” she said, “I think Big Bro and I are going to have a talk.”

  I left, for once not annoyed at being dismissed like a little kid by the two of them.

  “Good night,” I said, and left, aware of Kyle’s gaze following my every step until I closed the connecting door.

  Then I heard arguing, but couldn’t make out what was being said.

  Before I went to bed, I downloaded the video to my laptop.

  The next morning I was awake first and got into the bathroom ahead of Kyle. As I came out, I ran into him leaving his room.

  “You,” he said, “are so dead.”

  “YouTube,” I replied.

  His expression didn’t change.

  Still, down at breakfast, he seemed more relaxed, more like himself than he’d been in a while, so Emma’s plan seemed to have worked. But when I pulled her aside to ask what she’d said to him, she wouldn’t tell me.

  Petra arrived a few minutes after that, and at seven thirty we headed out to the track site. Petra led the way, with Emma beside her and carrying the video camera, while Kyle and I followed in their muddy footsteps.

  The ground and undergrowth were still soaked from the rain, so even though there was a well-defined path through the woods from the house to Little Buddy Creek, we were still pretty wet by the time we got there, our shoes caked in mud.

  We passed the tree line to emerge on a slight crest overlooking the creek. A light mist lay over the water, saturating the air. Above the burble of the water, we could hear the calls of songbirds and the chirping of insects.

  Below us, preserved for millions of years in the rock, three-toed Tyrannosaurus rex tracks paralleled the creek for about a hundred yards before crossing into it. Downstream a little were other tracks, thought to be from a herd of sauropod-type dinosaurs, maybe Alamosaurus. The water itself was too muddy from the rain to make out the ones in the creek bed itself, though I’d seen pictures in books.