Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“But since you were already here—well, we thought you were, so we came upstairs to check, and couldn’t help waking you and telling you that it worked!”

But it hadn’t worked. “I left that message last night. That’s why I was sitting at the kitchen table. So I didn’t go into the past at all, I went into the future. Tonight. Last night I left the message that you got tonight.” In despair Umbo rolled over in bed and faced the wall.

“You stupid little fool,” said Loaf, not without affection. “You think that’s failure? What do we care, right now at least, whether you go into the future or the past. So you went a few hours into the future? You shifted yourself into another time at all!”

Come to think of it, once Loaf had put it that way, it was an encouraging sign. “All right,” said Umbo, rolling onto his back but keeping his eyes closed. “Because you saw me sitting at the table, and you touched my hands, I know exactly which of my tries actually worked. It was different from the others. I was numb from lack of sleep, I was so deep in my trance I felt lost, felt like I might never find my way back. I couldn’t tell when I crossed the boundary from that into sleep. But all the other times accomplished nothing.”

“Unless we’re going to keep running into ghosts of you giving us foolish messages for the rest of our lives,” said Leaky.

“I must learn how to push the messages into the past—and just the right amount of time, too.”

Loaf chuckled. “You’re not even awake. But tomorrow, let’s keep you sending messages until you start going in the right direction. Or maybe you can pick a spot to write messages in the dirt.”

“I don’t think that’ll work,” said Umbo. “You couldn’t even hear my voice, am I right? All you did was see me.”

“And hold your hands,” said Leaky. “Didn’t you feel us hold your hands?”

“Yes, I did,” admitted Umbo. “And I could smell the kitchen.”

“Of course you could,” said Loaf. “You were in the kitchen.”

“I mean I could smell the dinner as if it was fresh. I remember that now, from what I thought was a dream.”

“We know you can scratch a message in the dirt, Umbo,” said Loaf, “because you were able to dig up a certain bag that was buried in dirt, and then cover the place again so it betrayed no disturbance.”

“What bag are you talking about?” asked Leaky.

“The bag of jewels,” said Loaf. “When Rigg was arrested, we went back and got it. Only Umbo, here, had apparently come back from the future to raid my little hiding place and take the biggest jewel out of the bag.”

“Anyone could have taken it,” said Leaky.

“Anyone in their right mind would have taken the whole bag,” said Loaf.

“I can’t have done it,” said Umbo miserably. “I’m only traveling in time to reach into the future. Which is useless, since we’re all going to end up in the future anyway.”

“All those stories of ghosts,” said Leaky. “They’re probably just somebody like you. They’re walking around in a house when they’re so tired they accidentally fall into this quickening you’re talking about, and they inadvertently leave behind an image of themselves—or even the reality of themselves, since there can be touching and smelling—which pushes them into the future so that people many decades from now will see this ghost going about its business. Maybe they don’t even know they’re doing it.”

“If they do it like me,” said Umbo, “they know what they’re doing.”

“Oh, so now you know what you’re doing?” asked Loaf. “Weren’t you the one who thought he was pushing messages back into the past, but they were really getting misdelivered into the future?”

“Let me go back to sleep,” said Umbo. “I’m so tired I could die.”

“B

ut remember this when you’re going back to sleep, Umbo,” said Loaf. “You really did it. You really shifted yourself through time.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I,” said Umbo. And then he was gone and dreaming again, but this time of his brother standing at the edge of the falls.

He felt this urgent question building inside the part of him that knew it was a dream: Why can’t I also go back and save my brother’s life? If I can save Rigg’s money, doesn’t it mean I can go and speak to Kyokay and save him before he goes out to the falls?

Maybe I did, he thought as he drifted back to sleep yet again. Maybe I did, only years from now, when I’m grown. Maybe I’m the man that Rigg thought he was pushing or at least letting fall from the cliff.

Impossible.

If only.

He slept again.