Angela nodded.
“He started running around, taking charge, telling people, ‘All right, my agency has the plane towed away now; we’ll handle it from here. We’ll advise you if we discover anything that’s relevant to your department. Thanks for your help.’ And later I kind of wondered, maybe some of those people had seen weird things like that before and had decided to pretend that they didn’t exist. To be able to keep their jobs. It was close to Christmastime; they were happy to be sent home—of course none of them had seen the plane appear from nowhere and vanish into nothing, both, so they could believe the official story more easily….”
“Nobody went to the news media?” Chip asked. “Nobody put it out on the Internet? Not that the plane vanished, even, but just that there was this mysterious bunch of babies…Didn’t we make CNN?”
His voice sounded mocking, but when Jonah glanced his way, Chip’s face was deadly serious.
Angela shrugged.
“The Internet wasn’t the big deal it is today,” she said. “And we weren’t supposed to contact any newspapers or TV stations. James Reardon wanted us all to sign confidentiality statements. But I…refused.”
“Is that why you lost your job?” Jonah asked.
“Pretty much,” Angela said. “Monique told me not to come back until I was ready to sign. I was never ready. I did talk to a newspaper reporter, I did call a TV station—but when everyone else said I was crazy, what good did it do?” She held her hands out, a gesture of helplessness.
Jonah tried to imagine being like Angela, standing up for the truth. He didn’t think he could be so brave.
“Why did it matter so much to you?” Chip asked.
“I know what I saw,” Angela said fiercely. “I trust my own eyes. And I wasn’t going to lie because—because I thought it might be important. I thought the babies might be important. I thought we should really investigate, not just pretend nothing ever happened.”
“So you’ve investigated, haven’t you?” Katherine said, jumping ahead. Her eyes were glowing, like she’d found a new hero.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Angela agreed. “The more common view would be that I’ve become a total crackpot, totally obsessed. My own family thinks I’m crazy now, because I tell them that my phone is tapped, that the government’s watching me. But, you know, sometimes paranoia is justified. I get paid for doing nothing—even though I’ve called many times and said I don’t deserve disability pay. So I decided to use the money to do research, to study physics….”
“ Physics?” Katherine repeated. Clearly, that wasn’t what she’d expected.
“Well, yeah…” Angela looked down at her hands. Jonah noticed she had her fingers knotted together, like she was suddenly very tense. “Look, you’re not going to believe me anyhow, so maybe I shouldn’t even tell you this part. I’ve been working on this for thirteen years, and it’s gotten me nothing but scorn and mockery. And I’ve gotten no confirmation—no sign that what I believe is true. At least, not since that first day. So maybe I should just pat your heads, and tell you to run off and be good little children for your parents, and don’t worry about where you came from. Don’t be like me, obsessed and paranoid and—”
“We already are,” Chip said firmly. “It’s too late.”
Speak for yourself! Jonah thought. But he was dying to hear Angela’s theory too. He couldn’t walk away now either.
Angela took a deep breath.
“Okay, then,” she said. “One thing I saw that nobody else did—though I did report it when I was debriefed, before they began talking about confidentiality statements—was an insignia on the plane. By the time everyone else saw the plane, it looked like any other Sky Trails regional jet. But when I first saw it, the plane’s door said, TACHYON TRAVEL. Tachyon—T-A-C-H-Y-O-N. You’re all too young, probably, to have studied much physics—and anyway, this is very theoretical physics—”
“So what’s a tachyon?” Katherine asked. She always hated being talked down to or told that she was too young for something.
“Tachyons are particles that travel faster than the speed of light,” Angela said.
The speed of light? Jonah thought. What’s that got to do with anything?
“I thought nothing could travel faster than light,” Katherine said, acting proud that she knew that.
“Nobody knows really,” Angela said. She was speaking very carefully now, watching for their reactions. “At least, nobody knows yet. The theories are that if anything could go faster than light, all sorts of weird things would happen. Time and space would have a different relationship. Aging would be different. And, if a plane could travel that fast, it’d become…a time machine.”
Everyone stared at her.
Chip was already shaking his head.
“Who’d send a bunch of babies in a time machine?” he asked scornfully. “What would be the point?”
“I don’t think anyone sent a bunch of babies in a time machine,” Angela said, speaking very precisely. “I think a bunch of adults got into a time machine. I think it was an experiment, one of the first attempts at time travel. They didn’t understand all the effects. So they didn’t realize what would happen when they arrived in our time.” She paused, letting that sink in.
“You mean—” Katherine asked.
Jonah couldn’t tell if she really understood or if she was just prompting Angela.
“I mean that Chip and Jonah used to be much older than they are now,” Angela said. “I think they were changed by traveling through time. I think they—and all the other babies—came from the future.”
NINETEEN