Rantings of an Arranged Mind

I looked at the chronometer watch on my wrist. I was about to risk travelling through time to once again save the woman I loved. After all, she’d done it for me. I worried that it would adversely affect my memory, but it couldn’t kill me. I would just have to deal with the consequences after.

I hit the “settings” button and prepared to set the time. I only had to go back about ten minutes. Ten minutes to get inside the bank before Calla and I arrived, and then I could find a safe place to take her and avoid the bank robbers. Easy.

I hesitated to “set” the time and put the machine in action, however. I really didn’t know what this might do, with the distortions from Calla’s experiments. Did I have an alternative?

“Think, man, think!” I said to myself.

I hated second-guessing myself. But I was messing with something way outside my understanding. I remembered reading about the Manhattan Project in history class. Some of the scientists had been worried that the bomb might ignite the entire atmosphere, what with the collisions of hydrogen and helium atoms set loose. They tested it anyway, and all they got was a nuclear bomb with a mushroom cloud.

That was like designing a wind generator, worrying that it might make hurricanes, and getting a tornado. It’s still dangerous. It’s still a disaster.

I remembered a saying my father had. “Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” I don’t know where he got it, maybe Shakespeare or his own father, or something like that. It sounded old. But for the first time I thought about it. Was I sowing the wind right now?

I needed to do something. Could I afford to do nothing? A sensible person might have minded their own business. Or at least gone to find the police. I was being stupid.

Or wickedly brave. Zebediah had once asked me what I wanted. I had just found out that I was going to be in charge of my father’s company, and in a confrontation with Zebediah he had asked if that was my dream, or just a burden. He’d asked if I wanted freedom. Liberty.

A free man didn’t need someone else to protect him or the woman he loved. A free man didn’t wait for someone else to perform rescues. I had fought and won against an underground boxing champion. I had survived attacks by time-travelling terrorists, and punched out a CIA agent. I’d been shot at, blasted with wind and rain, evaded lightning bolts. I was unkillable for at least the next ten months.

There was no way I wasn’t going into that bank.

But I also wasn’t stupid. Time travel was dangerous. But the chronometer wasn’t just a time machine. I turned the face and the “time” setting changed to “space.” Wires protruded from the watch and spread out over my fingers, forming a weird futuristic glove with glowing lights.

Agent Jameson of the FBI had used his chronometer to walk through walls. I knew that there had to be a way to do that, using the “space” setting. It didn’t involve time travel. Maybe it wouldn’t be affected by the tachyons.

I took a coin out of my pocket and threw it up in the air lightly. I pointed my index finger at it, and the coin floated. I pointed two fingers at it and moved them around, and the coin danced through the air. I had done all this before in Kansas, moving a blade of grass. The chronometer had some kind of telekinetic ability, moving particles through space. Kind of like magnets or gravity, I guessed. Well, to walk through a wall and leave the wall still there, wasn’t that a way of moving things? Moving through the particles, and then leaving them intact behind you?

I wasn’t going to telekinetically move an entire wall with one or two fingers. The fingers were the controls, that much seemed obvious. Using all five fingers teleported an object to FBI headquarters. But three and four fingers had to be the settings for some purpose, I just hadn’t figured out what they did yet.

I grabbed the coin and put it back in my pocket. I walked along the wall of the bank, and held up my left hand. I stuck up three fingers, and pressed that hand to the wall. It was solid and real.

“Crap.”

I took a step back and extended my fourth finger. The lights on the ends of my fingers got a little brighter, and there was a soft hum. I lifted up my hand and pressed it to the wall, biting my lip.

My hand passed through the wall like it was an illusion or a hologram. I could see my wrist, and that was it. I pushed forward and my arm went into the space beyond. I pulled back and my hand emerged.

“Ohhhhhhhhh yeah,” I grinned to myself.

I held my hand up and stared walking forward. This was a whole new way to break into a bank.