47

Kendra landed on something hard and unstable.  She fell to her hands and knees on the uneven surface--books on a floor--and sent more of them tumbling.  She rose to a crouch to reconnoiter her surroundings.  She hardly recognized LB’s room.  The desk was gone.  A gate-legged table stood in it’s place.  Two towering bookshelves, each packed with physics and math texts, stood where LB’s short bookshelf had been.  Stacks of notebooks, books, and papers filled the floor--she had landed on one, and knocked over several others. 

 A narrow aisle wound its way through the stacks of books from door, to closet, bureau, bed, and desk.  Kendra rose to half-standing and squinted at the note on top of the nearest intact stack of books, speed of light.  The one next to it read mass, and another effect of near-light travel on mass.  

The door swung open.  Kendra froze.  With books all around her she had nowhere to hide, and hoped with all her might that neither of her parents was about to walk in.

“Oh, it’s you,” LB said, and closed the door behind her.  “Listen, how do you get past the little problem of E equals M C squared?”

“That’s a fair estimate of the amount of energy resident within the atoms of an object or being, but it has nothing to do with travel at or above the speed of light.”

LB put her hands on her hips.  “Really?”  Doubt and sarcasm dripped from the word.  Evidently she couldn’t think of an equally scornful follow up.  She surveyed her room.  “Hey, you messed up my piles!” 

“You’ve come a long way, baby.”  Kendra knelt to stack the books around her.

“No, no,” LB objected.  “Walk past me,” she pointed to the path that led, interrupted by the small avalanche Kendra had caused, from desk to bed.  “Just sit on the bed.  I’ll clean up.”

Amused, Kendra complied.  She watched LB sort and re-stack, and felt her impatience mount.  Why did I come here?

“So did you find some vampires?” LB asked.

Oh, yeah--vampires.  “Yes.”  

“Really?”  LB put the notebook in her hand on top of a stack, then hurried to the bed, where she sat cross-legged, facing Kendra.  “Tell me what happened?  Were you scared?  Are any of them handsome?”

Kendra laughed.  Now here’s a normal fifteen-year-old.  “First tell me how school is, and when you’ll graduate.”

LB launched into a tale about having to convince the school board to let her graduate early.  She’d be two credits shy of the required total, but when graduation day arrived in two months she would have met all the other requirements for graduation, and vastly exceeded them in math and science.  “After they saw the notes from my online professors in physics and calculus, the board really couldn’t say ‘no’.”

“You’re taking the online courses from Stamford?”

“UCLA.”

Kendra nodded.  “Good job.  Have you been accepted anywhere?” 

“Best of both coasts,” LB said with pride.

“Congratulations!”  Kendra said.  She surprised both of her selves by hugging LB.  “You’ve worked really hard.”

LB beamed at her.

“I went to UCLA for undergrad.  Where are you thinking of going?”

“Don’t I have to go where you went?”

“Not necessarily.  I’m, ah, facing some challenges I hadn’t anticipated.”

“Does this have to do with the vampires?”

“Yes, and more.”

“So are they cute?” LB asked.  Her expression seemed so young and eager that Kendra wondered if she’d made a mistake by coming.

“Lighten up,” LB said with an exasperated sigh.  “I think better when I have a little fun.”

“Hmm, you sound like Alex.”

“Is Alex a vampire?  Is he your boyfriend?”

“Yes, and I don’t know.  All right, here’s what I do know,” Kendra changed the subject quickly, and then went on to explain her kidnappings and the conflict between American Missile and the vampires.

“Why does a missile company care about vampires?”

“Remember that population curve that you drew for the vampires?”

LB nodded.

“If left to follow their nature, vampires will take over the world.  I suppose that they would preserve a few humans for food--”

“Eeuw!” LB exclaimed with disgust.

Kendra nodded.  That and his being dead were the two main obstacles to her being able to think fondly of Alex.  She realized as she looked at LB’s moue of dislike that those obstacles had begun to feel smaller, or at least not strange.   Weird.

“American Missile has a lot of defense contracts,” she said.  “The government probably hired them to take of the vampire problem.”

“I get it,” LB jumped in.  “They want to jump back to that dip in the vampire population, and wipe them out for good.  Let me find that curve again.”  She hopped over a few rows of stacks to get to a stack in the corner.  It was almost behind her table/desk, and off the circuitous path through the room.  “Here it is,” LB exclaimed after some rummaging.  She hopped like a gazelle back to the bed.  “Can you jump that far back in time?”  She settled herself cross-legged and facing Kendra again.

Kendra nodded.  “I met Alex when I jumped back to 1593.  He saved me from the town watchmen, who accused me of being a witch.”

“No way!” LB gasped.  “You must have been freaked out.  So did Alex sweep you into his arms and carry you off into the night?”

“No, he walked me to his house, and showed me Cambridge.  England,” Kendra added as an afterthought.

“England?!  So you can travel that far in space and in time?  What about the future?”

“Your research must have taught you that much by now.”  Kendra gestured to the floor.  “It seems from here like your bed is a raft in a sea of books.”

“Yeah, but you know how it is.  A lot of them say the same things, or the authors pad their writing.  Do scholars have to write a certain number of pages or something?”

“You need to read the movers and shakers.  I’ll make some suggestions before I leave.  Can you clear a space for both of us at that table?  I need your help, and we’ll just have to cheat a little to make that possible.”

Kendra spent the next two hours helping LB understand time travel.  “I can’t give you the equation, and if you work on it, make sure you do it on paper, and then burn the paper.  American Missile could arrive any day.  In fact have you seen anyone who looks like Xenopoulos or Matt?”  She described the two spies in more detail for her younger self.

“No,” LB said.  “What do I do if I see them?”

“Never be alone with them.”

“Right.  How am I going to get any work done if I’m always around people?”

“You’ll figure it out.  Work here if Mom and Dad are both home.  Keep your cell phone charged and on you at all times.”

“Okay, okay.  Quit talking about it.  You’re wigging me out.  Did you want me to do something else, or just work out the time travel equation in secret?”

“Actually, I don’t want you to work out the time travel equation.  I just figured that you would want to try.  I want you to work on an auto-return module.”

“Huh?”

Kendra explained what she needed.