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  “You know that’s a spin on the truth.”

  “Is it?” He knew it was, of course. He’d rehearsed the speech on the drive over.

  Dexter sat back on his love seat and put one foot up on the table. “Your logic is skewed, then. My argument to you all along has been that if we have this technology that allows us to go back in time, why wouldn’t we go back and stop 9/11? Or steer the Titanic around the iceberg? But you continue to preach about trying our best to not change history – especially in a significant way. By the reasoning you just gave, if we stopped 9/11 from happening, it wouldn’t be changing history, it would be creating a new history where no one flew airplanes into the World Trade Center.”

  “We’ve been through this,” Jeff said, feeling like he was leaning more and more forward as his friend retreated. “What makes our experiments safe and responsible is our ability – your ability – to pinpoint a precise moment and take advantage of it. There’s no specific point in time when we could stop 9/11 from happening.”

  “How do you know? Also, experiments, as in plural?”

  He skipped that second one. “You go back and start telling people that Al Qaida’s going to be flying planes into buildings on September 11th, you’re going to end up in a heap of trouble. As for Joe Wilton and his boys – as far as they knew, some bandits that were hiding up in the Sierra Nevadas in 1849 attacked them and stole their gold. No conspiracy theories, no putting people on edge with any long-term repercussions, and no dramatic changes to history. Just in-and-out new history. His gold was being stolen either way... I’m playing around with what I’m ultimately going to call this principle when I finally release a report on time travel.”

  “What principle?”

  “That only the time traveler is aware of any changes that are made while time traveling. To everyone else in the world, there is only one reality. If I were to go back in time right now and...change the channel on your television, for instance, I would know that it was on the History Channel at some point, and you would be sitting here watching the… Travel Channel… without knowing anything had changed.”

  “Well, that stands to reason, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it’s a different concept for the person doing the traveling than it is for the person not experiencing the ‘change.’ The Wilton history feels different to us because we knew something else from before. No one else on this planet knows there was any another way forward.”

  Dexter sighed. “I’m not saying you’re wrong in your logic. I’m just making sure that you know it isn’t consistent with what you’ve been saying all along.”

  “Does it make you feel better to say that?”

  He shook his head. “Not as much as I’d hoped. But let me stop you. You said experiments, plural, and then ignored me when I caught you. What else do you have planned?”

  Jeff finished his Coke and then sat back again. He paused for a moment like a husband trying to find a way to tell his wife that he was invited to a bachelor party that was going to have strippers. “I want to do the bank job.”

  Dexter laughed out loud. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “It’s the best option. It’s the safest option.”

  With Dexter’s help, Jeff had compiled a handful of moments in history where they would be able to pinpoint exactly when and where some sort of treasure would be. Which wasn’t easy, because Jeff had set rules: it couldn’t be from a time so recently that the fortunes of people who were currently alive were clearly affected; their target had to be moveable (i.e. gold doubloons from the 1500s were not an option), and at the same time not so obvious as to arouse suspicion; and it couldn’t dramatically change history – which they all knew was nearly impossible to predict, but avoided admitting was not possible. In addition, they needed to minimize danger.

  The opportunities, like the Wilton job, generally manifested themselves through some recollection of the moment left behind for them to use as a guide map. The “bank job” was one of seven on which Dexter had compiled research and was, in Jeff’s view, crafted from the moment they got on the plane back from Sacramento through until now, the most logical next choice.

  In 1931, Learned, Mississippi, a bank robber named Robert Miles walks into a bank and steals $200,000 at gunpoint. As he’s leaving the bank, a young reporter who happened to be walking along the sidewalk with his camera drawn snaps a quick picture – for which Miles, trying to make a name for himself, poses. The photo made the front page of the paper. Miles, however, disappeared down a road out of town and wasn’t heard from again for several years, until he was arrested in 1939 in California for petit larceny after walking out on a bar tab. In police custody, he confessed to the bank robbery, but during an interrogation he laughed at how he’d fooled everyone years before, with a fake gun made out of a carved baseball bat (“still would’ve hurt if I’d hit someone in the head with it – I hit 15 home runs in A ball the year before,” he’d said).

  “I didn’t realize we were looking for options,” Dexter said. “And you need to slow things down a bit here – there’s still clean-up to be done from the Wilton job. You haven’t moved the gold yet. You know the attention we’re going to get when we do it, don’t you?”

  “That’s where you come in.” He smiled to himself. Dexter’s response was not about doing another job – it was about timing. Exactly what he needed.

  Dexter sat up, pointing to his own chest to strenuously make his point. “I’m not doing it. I have a reputation to uphold. It’d raise way too many questions.”

  “No, you’re not; Emeka’s going to do it. I just need you to make that contact for us. And there’s no rush – we’re in okay shape for now. I’m not worried about physically moving it yet. I just want to get the ball rolling.”

  “How about the rest of your team? Where do they stand on this?”

  He smiled. “Like you said, we don’t need the attention right now.”

  “So, I’m supposed to just contact my guy and say...”

  “Say you were contacted by someone who looked you up on-line, and that you feel it’s important they talk. He’s on to something pretty big. It has to be confidential, et cetera et cetera. Tell him to consider it a favor, and they’ll make it worth the time.”

  “And you think that’ll work?”

  “When I lay a $50K gold brick in front of him, it will.” He knew that he was much more adept at influencing people with facts and figures than anything else, so the bribery idea was more or less a brainstorm.

  Dexter looked at him blankly. “I’m pretty sure the people that I would go to with this don’t do business that way,” he said, and paused for a moment. Jeff tried to read his face. “You’re going to do this with or without me, aren’t you?”

  “I’d rather it be with you.”

  Dexter sighed. Jeff knew he could get him to stay on, even if it was just to be a chaperone. “I suppose your ‘principle’ applies here?”

  “How so?”

  “Well, you could do this without me ever knowing. So, to keep you safe, it’s probably best that I’m with you.”

  “Look,” Jeff said, smiling at Dexter’s response. “Can we talk about this in the car?”

  “In the car? I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I need you to come with me – I have to present to the government people.”

  “Are you out of your mind? That’s today?”

  “It’s every six weeks. It’s the government.” Jeff shrugged helplessly. “I know. What a pain.”

  Dexter shook his head, trying unsuccessfully not to smile. “You know, I wondered why you had a shirt and tie on. I didn’t ask because I knew your answer would be ridiculous. Why do you need me there again?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel like I do better when you’re there. I like the support.”

  “Do you ever consider the fact that other people have other things going on in their lives?” Dexter shook his head – it didn’t appear Jeff would ever change, changed history or
no.

  “Why?”

  Dexter laughed and stood. “Let me get my coat. Pain in my ass.”

  Jeff helped him get ready by turning off the television.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Jeff sat at a conference table in the Queens district office of Congresswoman Rosa Rivera. Ms. Rivera had nothing to do with why Jeff was there – her office just happened to be a good place for the representatives of the General Services Administration to meet with awardees of stimulus funding grants for project updates, since so many were concentrated in the tri-state area, of course.

  The conversation in the car had been less than productive. Jeff had been hoping that he and Dexter would discuss future endeavors, but since they really hadn’t had any time to regroup since arriving home from California and the Wilton job, they took advantage of the time in the car to compare notes.

  As Jeff had expected, Dexter had been pining over the ability to spend more time in the Old West. For a historian with his intensity and dedication, only getting a taste was too much to handle. He talked about how he longed to visit Old San Francisco, to see the growing city and join in the excitement that surrounded heading west to find fortune. From Jeff’s perspective, he knew that his friend would likely feel the same way about any place and time combination, which for him was a powerful tool to ensure that Dexter stay involved. Much as Jeff hated to admit it, the truth was that the operation didn’t exist without Dexter. Jeff was not a student of history beyond a fleeting interest in cool historical Mel Gibson movies. There was no way that any of his goals could be realized without a historian of Dexter’s caliber on the team. Time was too vast an arena for an amateur to try to play. And too dangerous.

  In the car, as Dexter was going on and on about Gold Rush figures he would’ve loved to meet, Jeff let his mind wander to the evening he’d presented his idea to the person who would become his best friend and closest confidant. He’d sought Dexter out two years earlier after compiling a roster of the top five historians he could find on the East Coast. Dexter fit the model of the type of person he was looking for – the right age, the right physical make-up, the right skin tone, the right hands-on interest in history. A lot goes into planning a raid a couple hundred years before you were born, and attention to detail was critical.

  He approached Dexter via social media, and after forcing his way through all of the “chance of a lifetime” e-mails that come in the common man’s inbox, he’d finally been able to connect with him on his own offer of a chance of a lifetime. As a researcher consistently fighting for funding, Jeff was well-schooled in persuasion, so Dexter had agreed to meet him for dinner at a hole-in-the-wall seafood restaurant in midtown Manhattan. It was on that night that Jeff outlined his plan – an opportunity for him to not only study history, but live it.

  To which, of course, Dexter, after enjoying a thick piece of Atlantic salmon, stood and bid Jeff adieu.

  Jeff had chased him for a half block down 36th Street and handed him his card with a promise of no hard feelings if they parted ways and never saw each other again. But the idea was like a puzzle for Dexter, who couldn’t help but give some thought to what the card might mean – if Jeff could indeed make his time travel trick happen, what would be a logical destination? It took very little of Dexter’s time to pinpoint one of his favorite historical tales, the crossing of Joe Wilton through the Henness Pass. He contacted Jeff and demanded to know how he could make it happen.

  Jeff showed him the time device. Dexter signed on to the project.

  It was a fluke, of course, how Jeff had actually discovered how to time travel – one that he would dance around in front of government reps every six weeks. That included today, sitting in the Congressional office awaiting their appointment. But the technology worked nonetheless, and just the promise of exploration was enough to bring Dexter on board.

  The bureaucrats entered, systematically suited, in a line, just as you’d expect federal reps to enter a room – two men and one woman. Jeff recognized the men from previous meetings; the woman he didn’t know. They exchanged handshakes and quick pleasantries, and then the three sat across from him as if he was up for parole.

  Dexter, who’d been sitting in a chair against the wall behind Jeff, stood and handed him two copies of his report bound with butterfly clips. “I apologize,” Jeff said, “but I only brought two copies. There’s usually only two of you.”

  It was no problem for them, as the woman and one of the men shared a copy. Jeff instructed them to flip to the second last page, which they did.

  “As usual, I’ve prepared a summary of my progress on the project, highlighted in these seven bullet points,” he said. “If you need more details, they are included in the pages preceding.”

  He allowed the budget people to read for a moment, then continued. “Rest assured that the taxpayers’ money is being well spent, and great progress is being made. In the past six weeks, I’ve increased the size of the test matter to that of about a one-carat diamond. Though I haven’t been able to manipulate it, it feels close.” Half-truths right from the outset. The key was the word “manipulate.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman spoke. “I’ve read your last few reports, but you’ll have to bring me up to speed a little. I see what you’re trying to accomplish, but I’m having a hard time believing that it’s real.”

  Jeff smiled, as warmly as he could. “I apologize. I actually didn’t introduce myself, and I didn’t catch your name either. I’m Dr. Jeff Jacobs.”

  “Rebecca Barnum,” she said.

  “Ah, like the circus.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, Ms. Barnum,” Jeff said, “what I’m trying to achieve is the changing of energy into matter, which has in the past been considered to be, at the worst, impossible, and at best impractical, due to the amount of energy required to create only the smallest output of matter – as in a few atoms. On paper, however, the formulas are sound. There have been schools of thought since Einstein that believe that, when matter reaches the speed of light, it actually turns into light. Therefore, if we can – using a particle accelerator – speed up the atomic particles of some piece of matter, we can turn it into light. You follow?”

  She nodded.

  “The question then is, what happens when we slow down the particles? What’s to say that if I take a baseball and aggravate the particles to reach the speed of light so that the baseball becomes light itself, that when I slow it down it returns to the shape, size and make-up of a baseball? You would have to completely control the atoms to make them reform into exactly what you want them to be, whether that’s what they were previously or something new. On paper, we should be able to turn a baseball into anything of approximate size.”

  “And can you?”

  “Not yet,” Jeff said, shaking his head. “At this point the matter is too complex. We began with an atom, and then a molecule, and then a grain of sand – and were able to find some success. In our last iteration of experiments, we were able to wholly transform an object the size of a diamond into a round, soft object, resembling an overripe blueberry. I wouldn’t eat it, of course, but that’s the best description I can come up with.” He laughed at his own joke. He’d actually done this presentation enough that he felt comfortable with these people, which was helpful since he was putting on a show. He took comfort in the fact that there were elements of truth in what he was saying.

  “Is this like that thing on Star Trek where they could program any kind of food they wanted?”

  Jeff smiled. “Precisely, it is. Isn’t it fascinating that so many scientific breakthroughs are first imagined in science fiction movies? Are you a Trekkie?”

  “Closet.”

  He put his hand to his face to feign telling a secret in cheesy fashion, whispering, “Me too.”

  “And you really think this is going to work?”

  “There’s nothing that’s happened to make me feel otherwise,” he said.

  “And what are the applications?”r />
  “Well, they’re limitless. How about feeding the hungry by turning bricks and stones into food? Or ensuring our troops have the supplies they need at any given moment without the risk that comes with transporting supplies?”

  “You’re talking about feeding people – a particle accelerator costs tens of millions of dollars. It’s not like every home will have one.”

  “With all due respect, Ms. Barnum, that sounds like something they might’ve said in the sixties when talking about the first computer.”

  She grunted. “Good point. Is there a point when we can see this in action?”

  “Yes, actually – I believe I’m due for a full review in...”

  “Four months,” one of the men said. “January.” Already familiar with the project, they didn’t have the questions that Barnum had. Frankly, as long as Jeff was providing them with regular reports that showed some progress, they didn’t seem to be too concerned with how the money was being spent. Which made him a little sad for his country, and disappointed as a taxpayer, but in his case it allowed him some flexibility to pursue his own causes. Such as the bank job.

  Barnum was re-reading his summary, and then flipped through a number of the other pages. “This is incredible stuff,” she finally said. “What would make you pursue something like this?”

  “Why would any scientist pursue any seeming impossibility?” he asked. “The opportunity for discovery and the ability to make positive changes to benefit mankind.” A little lofty, he had to admit, but it seemed like the kind of answer she’d want. Jeff thought he heard Dexter let out a little laugh behind him.

  With that, and the report in hand, the three feds seemed to be content with Jeff’s answers, so they dismissed him with a promise to contact him if any more questions arose. He sensed that the woman would’ve grilled him more had the two men shown any interest in the conversation – although probably from her own curiosity as opposed to fiscal responsibility. But, since they seemed fine, she didn’t push it. Plus, he knew that they likely had a full day of interviews, and as long as they didn’t perceive that the taxpayers’ money was being wasted on any of the projects, they were amenable. The next review in January would be the important one.