window. They rode in silence. Adam was too busy worrying about whether he’d get thrown in jail to admire the view of the countryside as the train rolled past, but luckily no one stopped by their compartment. The skyline of Manhattan approached in the distance. A few stops later, they arrived at Grand Central Station.

Jack jumped through the exit, ducking past an approaching conductor collecting tickets and prompting an angry shout from the man. Adam used this opportunity to slip past as well, clutching the snow globe tightly under his arm.

Adam had been through the station many times in his life. Even thirty years ago, the station was a gem of a building, with enormous windows and wide marble columns. But the building was showing signs of age, and Adam allowed himself a rare smile, knowing that back in his own time, a massive restoration project had just been completed that made the station sparkle like new. Until that moment, he’d never fully considered the hundreds of thousands of people the train station had seen—not just in his own years, but in decades past.

Outside on 42nd Street, Adam saw immediately that the city had changed from when he’d visited in the 1930s, in the sense that there were more modern-looking pay phones, faster and sleeker cars, and heavy color televisions blaring in window displays. People wore slightly longer coats and larger glasses, and the women had larger hairdos that covered their foreheads. There was new technology being boasted in stores. Adam stared for a few seconds at a shiny turquoise contraption in a store window before realizing it was a toaster.

People still hurried down the streets with the familiar sense of haste common to the city, passing by notices here and there that warned the public against “the Reds.”

“Who are the Reds?” Adam asked Jack.

Jack looked at him strangely. “Do you live under a rock? The Reds are Communists. The United States is at war against them.”

Probably because he realized Adam was still confused, Jack explained as they walked. He likened the war to a game of chess in which a white team and a red team try to wipe each other out and take over the chessboard. The trouble was, each team had equal amounts of brilliant and stubborn players, and it was nearly impossible to win.

“So the red team are the bad guys?” asked Adam.

“Yes,” said Jack, and then he laughed. “Although I suppose they think we’re the bad guys.”

Adam was glad to see Jack smile. But he knew he had to warn Jack about the factory fire soon. The last time he met Jack was in 1967, the exact month and year of the fire. There might only be mere days before the fire. “Listen, Jack, I have to tell you something—”

“We’re here!” Jack interrupted excitedly. They were standing in front of a Midtown movie theater. Jack motioned for Adam to follow, and the pair went inside. Jack snuck a handful of buttery popcorn from an unattended popcorn cart nearby. On the walls were posters advertising the latest movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Adam had seen at school on an old sci-fi channel once when they had an enthusiastic substitute teacher.

Jack glanced at the poster and remarked, “I can’t wait for the future. You’ve heard about how they’re trying to fly people to the moon, haven’t you? Imagine a space mission all the way to Jupiter.” He tugged on his aviator helmet and watched Adam closely with an almost knowing look. “How neat is that? I can’t wait for the new century.”

Adam didn’t mention that he was only two years away from 2001 back home, and it wasn’t anything like the movie yet.

They managed to sneak into one of the showings and glimpse five minutes of a cowboy film set in the Wild West before the movie manager kicked them out. They ran out of the building into the daylight. Even though Adam was normally not a rule breaker and was silently panicking the entire time they were inside the theater, he found himself grinning. They laughed as they hurried down the streets. The sun had come out from behind the clouds and pleasantly warmed their faces.

Jack pointed to a newsstand. “Want some snacks?”

They went up to a seedy-looking newsstand. Rows of magazines, candy cartons, and newspapers crowded the shelves. To the side sat a small pretzel cart. Hunched inside the newsstand, manning both kiosks, was a bald man in a black leather jacket. An eye patch covered half his face, while a pink scar snaked around the other half. Adam guessed he was about thirty years old, though it was hard to tell with grown-ups. The man chewed on a cigar, absorbed in the comics section of the newspaper, chuckling in a low growl every now and then.

“Hi, Charlie,” Jack said to the man.

“Jack,” the man said gruffly.

“I’ll take two pretzels with mustard, please.” Jack held out his empty hand expectantly.

“What, you think I just give away free grub?”

The man and Jack engaged in a glaring contest. Adam took a step backward, his eyes on the vendor’s bulging muscles behind the leather sleeves. Was Jack out of his mind?

“You’re gonna run me outta business,” the man growled after a few seconds, but he retrieved two soft pretzels from the cart. Jack smiled and handed one to Adam.

“How’d you do that?” Adam asked.

The seller waved a hand and said, “Jack’s an insider.”

“I helped Charlie scare away some kids who kept vandalizing his newsstand last month,” Jack explained. “Now he owes me a lifetime supply of pretzels and candy.”

It was a good pretzel—soft and salty, with a generous line of mustard along the top. Mustard always made Adam’s lips burn, but he loved it nonetheless. He thought of Francine and how she and her friends would share mustard-laden pretzels on their birthdays. How peculiar that they could’ve done the exact same thing, in the exact same city, decades apart.

Jack finished his in four bites. “Best pretzel

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