“Well, lad, you usually don’t, so you can forgive me for expecting you to have a man’s understanding.”
“I wish Leaky had hit you in the head with that cabbage,” said Umbo. But he was clearly backing down from his wrath, if he was making jokes, however bitter he might sound.
“It was a lettuce, you dumb privick,” said Loaf. “And if she’d been aiming at my head, she would have hit me.”
They ate a decent meal at their favorite rice-and-egg stand downtown-there was little chance of anyone recognizing them, dressed as they were now, instead of the finery they wore when they were here with Rigg. It was late in the morning as they left the city again.
They were talking about nothing much as they walked along the main road, when Loaf said, “Look at them- taking the same turning we’re going to take.”
It was a man and a boy, and they looked footsore and dirty from the road. “I hope they can afford a bath like we got.”
“Stupid boy, Umbo. They’re going to get exactly the bath we got.”
It was only then that Umbo realized that the man and boy ahead of them were Loaf and himself.
But that was impossible. How could they still be in the past, yet only a single day instead of the months that Umbo had gone back to get the jewel? “What game are you playing here?” asked Loaf.
“No game,” said Umbo. “I don’t understand it. We should have come right back to the very moment. When we go back in time, we don’t leave the present.”
“And how do you know that?” asked Loaf.
“Because whenever Rigg went back-”
“You were sitting there watching.”
“That’s right,” said Umbo.
“Well, who was sitting there watching when we went back for the jewel this morning?”
“We made sure nobody was!” said Umbo.
“We went back together, and we dug in the soil and picked up something. We weren’t just talking, we weren’t just telling stuff. We physically picked something up and took it.”
“I know that,” said Umbo. “But it didn’t make any difference when Rigg took the knife.”
“Because you weren’t with him. You were still in the present, sending him back. He returned to you.”
“Well, who am I returning to when I go back and talk to myself in the past?”
“When you just go back to talk, I think you stay in the present,” said Loaf. “But going back and doing something-I think that takes you all the way back. So when you return to the present, you’re really jumping forward in time again. And because you didn’t know that’s what you were doing, you weren’t careful. You weren’t accurate. And besides, maybe you can’t go forward to a time you haven’t lived through. You just went forward to a point fairly close to the last future time, the one you went back from.”
“I hate trying to talk about this stuff, it just makes me more confused.”
“No it doesn’t,” said Loaf. “You’re just too lazy to think.”
“I didn’t even pick a time, I just sort of let go. Just like always.”
“Well, ‘letting go’ must be identical to going into the future you came from. Within a day or so.”
“Back, forward, we go ‘back’ to the past and then ‘back’ to the place in the ‘future’ we left from in the ‘past.’ We need better words.”
“We need a place to spend the night,” said Loaf.
“But I’m ready to go on-we’ve got to get to Rigg now that we have the jewel I took. Or if we can’t get to him, at least we can get back the jewel he sold to Mr. Cooper.”
“Get it back?” said Loaf. “You mean steal it?”
“Did he get to keep the money?”
“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 “We have a plan for dividing the new world-which you still have not named-into nineteen cells,” said the expendable.
Ram looked at the holographic globe, rotated it several times, and said, “So you exclude the three smaller continents.”
“We thought those could remain as preserves for the original biota of this unnamed planet.”
