Chapter 25
Seeing Double
Amanda Resnick dove to the side—crashing into a scientist sitting a few feet away from her on the wispy stairs as the generator-meteor whizzed by her head so closely that it brushed her hair on the way down. She had broken out of her temporary paralysis just in the nick of time. Her husband rushed to her side and helped her to her feet.
Her heart was pounding furiously in her chest. The generator could have killed her!
“What’s this all about?” demanded Dr. Harris. “Who are you?” he asked the Ryan who had just entered the room.
Ryan ignored him. He ran to his mom and hugged her as tears cascaded down his cheeks. He wouldn’t let go. He shuddered as an image of his mom, unconscious, a huge gash in her head, popped into his head. Seeing the generator fall had given him a graphic reminder of what had happened originally—what he had almost been too late to prevent from happening again. She was safe! He was not going to lose her after all.
He had almost given up hope of finding the building. He had run as fast as he could for what seemed like forever searching for his bearings. He ignored his thirst and the searing pain in his head and the burning of his overworked lungs. His panic had grown by the second. If his mom died because he had gotten lost he would not be able to bear it.
And then he had found it. At last! The soccer-ball shaped structure.
But he would have to hurry. Far off in the distance he could just make out four tiny figures entering the building—Ryan, Regan, Carl, and Dan. He began sprinting as fast as he could. After running for so long already he now had a knifing pain in his side to match the one in his head, but he refused to let this slow him.
And he had made it. By less than a second.
The adults were too stunned to react as the stranger continued to hug Amanda Resnick, but the other Ryan wasn’t. “Get away from my mom!” he growled.
The Ryan hugging his mother turned quickly to face himself. Their eyes met. “Don’t worry, ah . . . Ryan,” said Ryan, feeling silly to be addressing himself. “I’m you.”
The room was completely silent. Everyone held their breath as they watched two mirror-image boys stare at each other. No one could take their eyes away. The boys were even dressed identically. The only difference in the two was that the newcomer was sweaty and grimy, and looked as though he had slept in his clothes.
“I accidentally went through a doorway that sent me back through time,” said Ryan to his earlier self. “So did Regan. She’s not here because she had to distract the guards while you were hanging from the tree branch. Otherwise you would have been caught by that guard coming toward you, the one with the walkie-talkie.”
Ryan and Regan gasped. This Ryan must be telling the truth! How else would he have known what had happened while Ryan was hanging from the tree. Ryan would have been caught but the guard had to run off to help chase a girl who had emerged from Prometheus Alpha. This really was another version of Ryan. He really had already lived through what they were now living. There was now no question about it.
“Impossible,” said Mr. Resnick reflexively, but even as he said it he reconsidered. How many other things that were impossible by human standards had they seen already? And what other explanation was there for the appearance of his son’s identical twin?
“If you really are my son,” said Mr. Resnick, “then you would know . . . ”
“Dad, I don’t have time for that right now,” he said, turning away from the other Ryan to face his father and the other scientists. “I don’t know how much time I have, so I can’t play games to prove what I say. You’ll have to decide later if you want to believe me or not. I’ve already changed things so I’ll never exist, and I think I’ll probably disappear any minute, so I’m going to be quick.”
The scientists looked on in fascination, hanging on his every word.
“In the past that I lived through, the generator did fall on Mom’s head, and it almost killed her. But just when you were preparing to take her to the hospital, a swarm of what we thought were killer insects came up through the floor. They’ll be here any second,” he added. “We ran and stumbled across a doorway that sent us back in time. We thought everyone else had disappeared, but it turned out that we had. We traveled back to just before you had broken into the city, so the entrance wasn’t there yet. We thought we were trapped and have been exploring the city for over a day now, searching for a way out. We finally figured out we had traveled in time just a few hours ago.”
“How in the world were you able to figure that out?” asked his mom in amazement.
“There isn’t time for that,” he said, wondering how it would feel to vanish out of existence. “I need to tell you the things we’ve been able to learn. The swarm of insects you’re about to see aren’t really insects, they’re nano-robots. This entire city was built from a single one of these in the same way humans arise from a single cell. Each of them have the programming to build this entire city. We thought they were the city’s immune system at first, but they aren’t. After they finished building the city they became its repair crew. They’re coming to repair the stairway after you cut a piece out. You’re in no danger from them.”
As if on cue, millions of the nano-robots poured from the floor, surrounding them. The scientists could not have been more astonished. This boy was telling the truth. Everything that was happening had already happened to him. He had traveled in time.
They watched in fascination as what still looked like a terrifying swarm of insects devoured rocks in seconds. Even after Ryan had told them they weren’t in danger, it was still unnerving.
“The rocks are raw material to be used in rebuilding the step,” explained Ryan.
The scientists ignored the insects and focused once again on this amazing boy. He had said he didn’t have much time and now they believed him completely. He continued to talk as the insects went about their instant repairs.
“The city was built by a people called the Qwervy as an outpost to keep tabs on promising species. They return every hundred years or so to check up on things. The city is set up like a web page on the Internet. Just as you can jump to other web pages by clicking on hypertext, you can jump to other planets just by walking through a doorway. The Qwervy don’t go web surfing, they go planet surfing. But Earth is off limits until we become more mature.”
The scientists listened in fascination. How had these kids possibly learned all of this in a day? They each had dozens of questions to ask but no one dared interrupt.
As Ryan had spoken the insects—nano-robots—had completed their work and disappeared without a trace. They had repaired the stairway just as this new Ryan had said they would.
Ryan was about to tell them about the zoo and the visit to the wooded planet when he realized that he hadn’t told them about the most important thing of all; the computerized, telepathic Teacher. If they could find the Teacher they could get answers to all of their questions. “There is a schoo—“
Ryan stopped in mid-word. The scientists had all frozen in place! Like living statues. As if time had stopped.
And Ryan had a sinking feeling that this could only mean he was vanishing from existence, and that this collection of living statues would be the last thing he would ever see.