Chapter Five
Eli: WOMPERs and Wolf House
June 30, 2019 C.E.
The next day, more men arrived. Some of them belonged to a power crew, and got heavy-duty electrical lines up and running to Moonglow by midafternoon.
I asked them where all the extra power was coming from.
“It’s been arranged,” one of them said. They didn’t ask us to sign anything.
Dad and I took a walk while they worked. He didn’t want to be near them. That was the first time we discovered Wolf House. Dad read the plaque about the writer, Jack London.
My dad stood and looked at the ruins of the house. “Imagine everything you love going up in smoke like that.”
When we got back from the walk, Mr. Howe was waiting for us.
He just sat near the front door of Moonglow, smiling again, this time like some out-of- town cousin who gets to your house early and waits around for you to let him in.
Next to him, by his feet, was a green box. Made out of metal.
“Sunny California,” Mr. Howe said. “At least, when it isn’t raining. Good for you.” He stood up and held out the box. “Housewarming present.”
Dad just looked at him.
“I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to see you,” I said. Somebody had to say something. I pointed to the box. “What’s in there?”
“Top secret, son,” Mr. Howe said, winking at me. I wasn’t his son.
“I’m done with secrets,” Dad said.
“Not these secrets,” Mr. Howe replied confidently. “Wait till you hear what they are.” He leaned over and whispered in Dad’s ear.
“WOMPERs?” my dad said out loud.
“You have WOMPERs? I thought they didn’t occur on Earth,” I added, looking at Mr. Howe suspiciously. He looked at me, then back at Dad. “Do you tell him everything?”
“The fact is, I haven’t told him everything.” Dad looked at me. “We used WOMPERs back in the lab at Princeton. They did supercharge the time sphere. And that’s what caused the explosion.”
“The one Mom was in?”
“Yeah.” He was sounding far away again. Then he turned to Mr. Howe. “You already cost me my wife. I’m done with your experiments. I don’t care how many old space rocks you find.”
“These aren’t from space rocks. We have an almost limitless supply now. Thanks to nanotechnology!”
I couldn’t understand what he was saying. “Nano — what?”
“Nanotechnology.” Dad repeated the word, looking at Mr. Howe, and looking a bit scared. “It’s when you build things, Eli, molecule by molecule. A way to engineer living machines, even new life forms.”
“We have a nanotechnology project at DARPA, too. Didn’t I tell you? We don’t concentrate only on time travel.”
“But a WOMPER isn’t a molecule. It’s not even an atom.” Dad was giving Mr. Howe his don’t-lie-to-me look.
“We can make WOMPERs from other particles now. Call it… hyper-nanotechnology. It’s not easy… but we can do it. There’s nothing holding you back now.” Mr. Howe thrust the box at my dad again. “Compliments of the house.”
“Nothing holding me back, except my disgust for you.”
Dad took me by the arm, stomped into the winery, and slammed the door.
I’m not sure how long we stood there blinking at the soldiers who were already inside.
At some point, I became aware the front door was opening and Mr. Howe was letting himself in. For some reason, he started speaking to me.
“Your dad’s got to do it, Eli. Before somebody else does. Somebody who might not be working for us. Besides, it’s his experiment.”
“Don’t look at me.”
Over the next few days, Mr. Howe kept showing up with different squads of men. Not soldiers, though there always seemed to be a couple of those around to “guard” the place. And keep an eye on Dad and me.
These new guys, Mr. Howe would introduce as “fellow scientists.” When it became clear they were trying to set up a kind of WOMPER reaction in the time sphere, Dad, who’d been successfully ignoring them the whole time, finally marched into the tasting room.
“I’ll do it.”
We all looked at him.
“I’ll do it,” Dad said again. “You’ll just kill everybody.”
Mr. Howe smiled.
As Dad worked, he talked. “Don’t you worry about what the neighbors might think out here?”
“Don’t worry,” Mr. Howe said. “We bought up every house and ranch in a two-mile radius. Even took over that old park and closed it down.” Which meant Wolf House and all the trails around it.
Dad just shook his head.
“It was national security, Sandusky. National security. We have to keep everybody safe.”
“We didn’t keep Margarite safe.”
Safety was on Dad’s mind, especially as he got close to creating the WOMPER reaction, so he agreed to let one of Mr. Howe’s men take me down to San Francisco for a day while he brought the local spacetime field into a state of high excitement.
It worked. My dad didn’t blow up the neighborhood. In fact, it worked so well that when I got back, something had already happened, causing everyone to stand around and just stare at the machine. The greenish glow of the time sphere was making their faces look even more pale than they already were.
Everyone was staring at something on the floor. Some kind of bundled paper.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The time sphere,” my dad said. But it just sat there humming away, a perfectly normal time sphere from the looks of it.
“What?”
“It’s a newspaper from 1937,” Mr. Howe said. He was kneeling close to it, trying not to touch the little field of spacetime that Dad had created. “It was like it was just spit out from the past. It just appeared here.”
“Like it was tossed through a hole,” my dad added. “This time, there wasn’t any explosion.”
“Well, that’s a good thing, right? I mean, you’re still here.”
Dad shook his head slowly. “This might be worse. We might’ve done something to the time stream. Things keep popping through.”
“Like what?”
Dad was pointing. “That showed up right after the newspaper. It’s an old —”
“Cool!”
I recognized the logo. I’d just seen one in a sports museum down in the city: the San Francisco Seals. I was considering making up a new Barnstormer squad called the Seals.
My first thought was, Wow, if this was from the thirties, then maybe this was Joe DiMaggio’s actual baseball cap from when he was a Seal! Without thinking about it, I reached in to take a closer look — “Eli, no!” — violating every rule my dad had ever given me about being near the generator.
My hand went through the charged field to clutch the cap, and I could feel the jolt run up my arm. My whole body felt like Play-Doh being mashed around.
Somebody was screaming my name, and I think I screamed back, right before everything went black. And then exploded into color.
The colors stayed. But now I was sitting next to a dinosaur.