Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)
“Some of it—what do you think we’ve been spending?”
“And who bought it anyway? I don’t think anybody bought it, I think the Revolutionary Council pretended to buy it and then took back all the money.”
“And so you’re going to go ask for it back?”
“No,” said Umbo. “We’re going to find out where it is, go to that place, then go back into the past to the point when they’re putting it there, and snatch it away and then just vanish.”
“Vanish? You can do that now?”
“It’s how it’ll look to them!”
“But if they saw you steal it, then they’ll remember that when we show up to try to get to the spot where they’re keeping the jewel, and they’ll arrest us.”
“They won’t remember us because when we go there we won’t yet have gone back to grab it.”
Loaf pretended to pound his head into the palm of his hand. “You don’t know how this thing works. If you did, you wouldn’t have got us back here before we even arrived.”
“Why do we have to spend the night here?” asked Umbo.
“We don’t,” said Loaf. “We can just leave our stuff. It’s not much—just food and a change of clothes and my razor—something you’ll never need, I think, unless you want to slit your throat in the future and then come back and warn yourself not to do it.”
“And our blankets,” said Umbo. “I suppose we might as well wait here another day. Unless we go steal our own stuff while we’re taking a bath.”
“And then hope we don’t notice it? Is that your plan? Because if somebody had stolen our stuff last night we would have noticed.”
“But we didn’t!”
“Because we didn’t come in and steal our stuff while we were bathing. Umbo! Think!”
Umbo did try to think it through, but as far as he could tell it might go either way. It was hard to get a grasp on the rules of this time traveling thing.
They ended up sleeping in a much more expensive place closer in to the city. The room was smaller, the bed was smaller, the fleas were more numerous, and the food was worse. The next morning they returned to the boardinghouse only an hour after they left. The landlady was incredulous.
“The lines were too long,” said Loaf.
“But you came all this way! And where’s your lunch?”
“We ate it,” said Umbo.
“But you just ate a huge breakfast. Huge!”
It had been huge. And delicious.
“We have to go on to Aressa Sessamo,” said Loaf. “We don’t have a day to waste in line just to see the inside of a big building.”
Umbo smiled his sweetest smile. “Would you fix us another lunch? For us to eat for supper on the road?”
“You’ll just eat it the minute you get out of here,” she said.
“Maybe,” said Loaf, “but we’ll pay for it, too.”
She agreed, but huffed her whole way through making it, and as they left her house they could hear her muttering—because she meant them to hear—“greedy, gluttonous people eat everything and save nothing for the future.”
Don’t tell us about the future, ma’am, thought Umbo. If we’re in the future and want something we don’t have, we can just go back into the past and get it. Of course, then we can’t get all the way back to the present, so we’ll have to do everything twice.
CHAPTER 19
Aressa Sessamo