Chapter One
Eli: Secrets for Trees
August 1, 2019 C.E.
“He’s not a weapon! He’s my son!”
“No, Sands, you’re wrong! In somebody else’s hands, he is a weapon! He’s dangerous!” “Is that why you gave me that stupid ‘Danger Boy’ name?”
We’re having a three-way argument, and there’s a long pause after I say that.
My name isn’t Danger Boy, but Eli Sands, and I’m a time traveler. That’s the easiest way to think of it — though, of course, being yanked around through history is never easy. I like to think of it more as being “tangled up in time,” ’cause each time you make the journey, your life gets more and more complicated.
The two men yelling are my dad, Sandusky Sands (I don’t know about that name, either. My grandparents must’ve had a weird sense of humor), and Mr. Howe.
Mr. Howe works for the government, in a department called Black Box because it has no real name. It’s a secret division of something that does have a name: DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
My dad’s a physicist — or at least he was — and Mr. Howe had been watching his experiments for a long time. After Mom’s accident, Mr. Howe practically took over our lives.
Right now, he’s staring at me. Then he stares at my dad.
“You told him the code name?”
“I showed him the whole file.”
“You showed him the Danger Boy file?”
“I don’t have any secrets from my son.”
“Every parent should keep some secrets from his children.”
“Not every parent does to his family what I’ve done to mine.” My dad’s thinking about my mom again. About the fact she’s disappeared.
I look at both men and think, Will you shut up? but I don’t say it. My dad and Mr. Howe have been going at it like this for a while now. Years, really. If I walk right out of the room, I bet neither of them will notice.
“Eli! Get back here!” That’s Mr. Howe. I guess they did notice.
But I ignore them and keep on going down the hall. Well, it’s not really a hall; it’s a limestone cave, inside an abandoned winery, which is where I live now. The winery is in the Valley of the Moon, near a town called Sonoma, in California. They make a lot of wine around here, which probably won’t surprise you, but our particular winery has been turned into a lab, which might.
At least my room is normal.
It has all the things you’d expect to see in a kid’s room: Gaming Guild stuff — like roam boxes — a lot of stray vidpads, baseball cards, old clothes, a box of cookies, and my gene map tacked up on the wall. Another wall is just for Comnet. Their version of Comnet. They’ve set it up so they can track any personal messages that come or go.
It’s been that way since I got back. And I’ve only been back about a week.
There’s also stuff in my room that’s not normal, like that little statue of the bull man with the snakes around his legs, over there on my desk. I suppose he could be an action figure, like maybe from one of the Guild games. But he’s not. He’s made of clay, and he’s supposed to be a god of some sort, called Serapis, and he was big stuff back in Alexandria.
That’s where I got him. In Alexandria, Egypt. Well, not that exact statue. The DARPA guys took the original as evidence. Proof of my travels. Two days later Mr. Howe gave me this duplicate. “A little gesture of good faith” was the way he put it.
You can still find Alexandria on a map, too, but that’s not the original, either. The city I know is mostly underwater now.
But not when I was there, more than sixteen hundred years ago. Which, like I say, for me has been about a week.
It’s been a long week.
But that’s what happens when you’re a time traveler.
I can try to tell you about it, but when you become unglued in time, tangled up in it, you lose track of where the “beginning” is.
And the idea of where it might end still scares me. I think they want to send me back there. To Alexandria.
At least, Mr. Howe does. I hear him talk to my dad: People are getting sick; strange things are happening to time itself, and people like Mr. Howe are getting worried. They think I can help make it all better.
I’m just a twelve-year-old kid who likes baseball and vidpad games. Why me?
Well, I know why. It’s because of my dad’s time spheres, and the fact that my mother disappeared into one, and the additional fact that I disappeared into one, too, except I came back.
They’ve tried to keep me around the lab since I returned — Mr. Howe and his DARPA team watching me the whole time, checking up and monitoring me. Actually, I’m amazed they’ve let me be in my room alone this long without asking —
“Eli? How are you feeling?”
It’s Mr. Howe again, with some guy in a doctor coat who I don’t recognize. There’ve been a lot of guys I don’t recognize hanging around lately.
“I’d feel better if I could get out of here. Take a walk. See a baseball game. Get some food. Anything. Even go to school.”
“We can’t let you go back to school now. You’re in a special circumstance.”
“I’d feel better if you and Dad would quit fighting.”
“Your dad, Eli, doesn’t realize how much good you can do.”
“Why are you calling me Danger Boy? That’s a corny name.”
“When you do important work like ours, Eli — like yours — it’s good to have a code name. Just in case.”
“Is ‘Mr. Howe’ a code name, too?”
He doesn’t answer, and instead picks up the Serapis statue. “This souvenir you brought back — we should really give it to a museum. Someday.”
“You mean the original? That one’s a fake.” Mr. Howe puts it back on my desk, gingerly. “Right.”
Serapis was supposed to be a god of healing, but I didn’t see too much healing back in Alexandria. The city felt like it was about to explode.
Now the doctor guy is shining a light in my eye. “Hey!”
Mr. Howe waves him away. “Later.”
“Where’s my dad?”
“He actually is out for a walk. Said he needed to think things over.”
“How come he gets to go?” I ask for the zillionth time that week.
“Because he’s not under medical observation. Because he didn’t just become the first person who we know can time-travel.”
Now Mr. Howe sits down on the bed only a couple feet away and turns to look at me. He’s supposed to be all sincere, but his expression gives me the creeps.
“Eli, you do know how special you are, right? Nobody wants to hurt you, but you have a chance to help a lot of people. To be a part of history yourself.”
“Starting with slow pox, huh?”
“Starting with slow pox, and helping us find a cure. We need to know if you’d be willing to go back again. This time, on purpose.”
“I want to find my dad first.” I get up and head for the door and hear the doctor guy behind me. “Sir. He’s not supposed to go outside yet. Not by himself.”
“He’ll be all right,” Howe says. Which means they’re going to have me followed. “Eli, please stay close by.”
As soon as I get outside, I see another DARPA guy, this one in a blue uniform. He looks at me kind of unhappily, but I keep walking toward the thicket of oaks nearby and hope I can disappear before he starts to follow.
When I make it into the stand of trees, I begin to run down the path. I don’t know if my dad came this way or not. I’m trying to get to a place called Wolf House, a couple miles from here.
Way back last century, some guy who wrote adventure books owned it — a big old stone house in the middle of the woods that looked like it was raised up out of the earth.
At least, that’s how it was supposed to look, but it all burned down the night before the adventure-book guy and his wife were supposed to move in. It’s a big ruin now, and they made a kind of park around it, so you c
ould have a nice picnic where someone else’s dreams were all broken up.
I like to sneak into the park without paying and go there to think.
Maybe my dad’s going there, too. If I can find him, it’ll be the first time we’ve been alone together…since Mr. Howe showed up. Maybe we can talk.
But I don’t want any of these DARPA guys hanging around. I’m running pretty hard now, but so’s the guy in the blue uniform, and when I look back, he’s yelling something into his headset, so I guess my days — or minutes — of outside walks are gonna be numbered.
This could be my only chance to get away for a while. But if I stay on the path, it’s gonna be too obvious to the DARPA guys where I’m headed.
“Dad! Dad!”
No answer. He could be anywhere.
The blue uniform is catching up. I come around a bend, then cut in fast through the brush, down toward the creek. If I can get deep enough in the bushes, he won’t be able to see me….
Aw, nuts. But they have equipment that can amplify my heartbeat. They can hear me, even if they can’t see me.
This sucks. Can’t I just be by myself for a little bit?
As I move through the trees, some low branches scratch my face. One of them drags behind my ear, over my neck.
There’s a strange tingling, almost like a sudden, intense sunburn. I reach back to feel my skin, and my fingertips tingle, too, when they touch a small rough spot the size of a quarter.
I look at my fingertips. I can feel the substance. Because it blends in so well with my skin — it looks like a slight bruise — the doctors have missed it. And since everyone here speaks English, I forgot I had it on.
My lingo-spot.
A lingo-spot is a plasmechanical device for translating languages. Plasmechanical means something that’s half biology and half technology.
How do I know all that? A dinosaur told me.
But I don’t want to explain any of this to Mr. Howe or DARPA, so I start wiping off my lingo-spot on the bark of another tree. It looks like it’s a redwood.
Then I wonder if the lingo-spot will suddenly help the tree understand human beings. Let it hear our secrets.
But that would mean, what? Translating words into sap? Into the rustle of leaves? How do you make a language out of that?
I jump at what sounds like a burp, but there’s no one around. It seemed to come from the direction of…
…the tree. Like the lingo-spot made a noise.
At least, that’s what I hope it was.
I move a little farther away. Even if the redwood could hear secrets, it wouldn’t matter. Not with mine: They’re doozies. Like the dinosaur I just talked about. I originally met him in a place called the Fifth Dimension.
Ah, forget it. The tree wouldn’t believe me, either.