He looked around frantically. What if the man tried again, sometime when no one was around to protect them?
Katherine shook her head, her ponytail flipping back and forth.
“Really,” she said disgustedly, “if the cute janitor wanted to warn you, he should have provided a few more details. Names, dates—something you could go to the police with.”
“The police would never believe this,” Chip groaned. “ I don’t even believe it!”
Jonah could feel the sweat rolling down his back. But it wasn’t leftover sweat from all his biking and running. It was new sweat, panicky sweat, proof that his body thought he should be completely terrified.
“Well, here’s what we need to do,” Katherine said, tossing her head emphatically, her ponytail whipping out behind her. “We need to call all the other kids on the survivors list again and see if they’ve had any experiences with some guy trying to catch them or some other guy trying to protect them. We need to gather some data—see if any of them have ever seen someone just vanish into thin air. And we need to warn them, to let them know what we know.”
“But we don’t know anything,” Chip said.
“We know about the plane,” Katherine said. “We know where Angela thinks the plane came from. We know what janitor boy looks like. We know what one of your letters means.”
Tallied up that way, Katherine’s plan almost sounded reasonable. She sounded as calm as Mom always did, dealing with a crisis. One time, when Jonah was little, he’d dropped a glass and it had shattered on the kitchen floor. And Mom had been there immediately, telling him in her most soothing voice, “Yes, Jonah, I see that there’s glass all over the floor and I see that you’re barefoot, and that is a little bit scary. But if you just stand there like a statue, I’ll pick you up and you’ll be fine and then I’ll sweep up all the glass….”
Jonah had escaped without a single cut. If Katherine could master that same voice now, he was willing to let her take control.
“All right,” he said.
Chip shrugged. “Whatever.”
All three of them retrieved their bikes and began walking them back toward the bike path. Chip and Katherine hadn’t played a soccer game or pedaled quite as frantically as Jonah had earlier, but neither of them seemed any more eager than he was to speed home. They rode slowly, each of them stopping at various points to say, “If there really is such a thing as time travel…” or “if we really are from the future…” or “if that plane was a time machine…”
None of them seemed capable of making a complete sentence, of following any of the “ifs” to a logical conclusion.
That’s because there aren’t any logical conclusions, Jonah told himself. He’d read time-travel books, he’d seen time-travel movies, and they’d always seemed wrong to him. Couldn’t the people just keep going back again and again and again, keep changing time until it turned out the way they wanted it to? And there was some paradox he remembered hearing about, something about a grandmother—oh, yeah, time travel had to be impossible because, otherwise, you could go back in time and kill your own grandmother. But if you killed your own grandmother, then you wouldn’t exist, so you couldn’t go back in time, so your grandmother would be alive again, but then you would also exist again, so you could go back and kill your grandmother, but then you would never be born….
Jonah’s head hurt just thinking about it.
They reached Chip’s house and actually parked their bikes neatly in the driveway. Even though they’d ridden slowly, Jonah was still drenched with sweat.
“Hey, I’m really rank,” he said. “Unless you want me stinking up your whole basement, I’d better take a shower before we start calling people.”
Katherine sniffed.
“Uh, me too,” she said. She didn’t have Mom’s authoritative voice anymore; she just sounded embarrassed.
“Okay,” Chip said. “But hurry back.”
He sounded like he didn’t want to be left alone, but he was too ashamed to say so.
Jonah and Katherine took their bikes back to their own garage.
“You can have the shower in Mom and Dad’s bathroom,” Katherine said, not quite looking at him. This was a gift on her part—probably a sign that she felt sorry for him—because Mom and Dad’s bathroom was bigger and nicer than the one between his and Katherine’s rooms. Usually she’d dash into the better bathroom ahead of him, slamming the door shut, jabbing the lock, and shrieking, “Ha, ha, ha! Beat you! You snooze, you lose!”
“Thanks,” Jonah mumbled.
He didn’t care about where he took his shower right now.
In the shower he stood under the pounding spray for a long time after he’d soaped and rinsed off. The hot water felt good, even though Mom and Dad were always nagging about not wasting water and energy.
“You kids should be concerned about the future,” Mom always said, “because you’re going to have to live there….”
“Oh, no,” Jonah moaned. Was that what this was about? In so many of the time-travel books and movies he’d seen, people came back from the future to warn about global warming or stuff like that. What if he and Jonah and the other kids were supposed to deliver some message about how people needed to make big changes now to save the world in the future?
“Lots of people are already talking about global warming,” he said aloud, even though he wasn’t sure whom he was talking to. “Nobody’s going to listen to me.”