“Ah, late together, eh?” said Mr Fukushima as the two of them walked sheepishly into the room, causing all their classmates to laugh. But when he saw how pale they both looked, he decided to stop teasing them and get back to teaching.
Goro and Kazuko quietly took their seats, but since their hearts were still racing they were in no mind to concentrate on their studies.
That’s it! thought Kazuko as she glared at the blackboard,
Kazuko discussed the idea with her friends at break time and in the hallway between classes, attracting eyebrows raised in curiosity from Mariko and some of their other classmates. Then, after the day’s classes had finished, they nervously went to knock on the door of the staff room — hoping they could catch him out of earshot of the other teachers. Luckily, they found him sitting alone in the corner, so they crowded around him for a private discussion, with Kazuko speaking first.
“Mr Fukushima?”
Their teacher looked up in surprise and put down his science magazine.
“Ah, it’s you lot,” he said, cracking his characteristic smile. “Have you come to apologize for being late this morning?”
“Well, it does have something to do with being late,” said Kazuko. “But I also want to ask your advice.”
“Is that right? Well, take a seat.” Mr Fukushima casually dragged three chairs over and invited them to sit, then he lit a cigarette. “So, what’s this all about?”
Kazuo was the best at speaking, and his friends had agreed he should speak first. “Well first of all, it’s important for us to ask you to hear us out to the end without laughing. I say that because any normal person may well think our story sounds stupid or like a dream or make-believe, and so most people might just shrug it off. We weren’t even sure if we should tell anyone at all, but in the end we decided you might understand.”
“I see,” said Mr Fukushima, the smile disappearing from his face. “Seems like a complicated situation.”
“That’s right.”
“And you’ve come to me in confidence. Right. I will listen to the end without laughing.”
“Thank you,” said Kazuo with a relieved expression. “It’s actually about Kazuko here…” And so Kazuo began telling Kazuko’s incredible story.
A LEAP IN TIME
When Kazuo finished his long monologue about what happened to Kazuko, Mr Fukushima heaved a sigh and remained lost in thought.
“Hmm. I see,” he said quietly.
Kazuko watched Mr Fukushima’s every move with pleading eyes and felt extremely impatient.
Goro couldn’t stand the silence any longer. “So Mr Fukushima, do you believe us?” he blurted out, his voice betraying his urgency.
Mr Fukushima looked at each of them slowly, then nodded slightly.
“Of course. I will believe you. I don’t think you three would go to the trouble of telling such a lie as a prank — and, besides, I can tell that something shocking has happened to Kazuko just by looking at your faces.”
Already, Kazuo and Goro began to feel a little relieved. As for Kazuko, she could hardly contain her happiness at the thought that Mr Fukushima was on their side.
“By the way, Kazuko,” Mr Fukushima said, his eyes unfocused as though he were still lost in thought. “Since this has started happening to you, or even before it started happening, how is your health?”
“Well I’m glad you asked. I actually don’t feel quite the same as before. I can’t explain it well, but I have this ‘floating’ feeling.”
“When did this start?”
“It started, I think, on that Saturday after classes, when I smelt that chemical in the science lab.”
Mr Fukushima brought his hand down on the desk.
“Ah, I remember that. That was the time you said you saw someone suspicious?”
“Yes.”
“Wait, so that makes it four days ago…”
Mr Fukushima wrote down the date in his notebook and went back to his thoughts.
“Mr Fukushima, do such mysterious things happen from time to time?” Goro asked timidly. “Even though it’s happening right in front of my eyes, I’m still having trouble believing it. Is this something that happens often?”
Mr Fukushima nodded slowly.
“It’s no surprise you’re having trouble. Anyone would. Any ordinary person — when faced with such a mysterious set of events, things that can’t be explained by science as we know it — would be so bewildered that they would rather forget about it quickly without investigating properly. Our instincts tell us to fear this kind of phenomenon. Goro, I assume you are no exception?”
Goro hesitated a little before vaguely nodding. “Yeah, well, I guess…”
“But science is a discipline that gives us the tools to analyse things that are mysterious and discover the facts that make them normal. So for us to make discoveries, we must first be faced with mysteries. No mysteries, no new discoveries!” added Mr Fukushima with a sparkle in his eye.
Kazuko had never seen Mr Fukushima like this. Kazuo and Goro were also drawn in by the passion with which he was speaking, and were listening closely.
“So, incidents like the one experienced by Kazuko could be happening more often than we think. Indeed there are similar occurrences reported from all around the world. There are people who collect these stories and are investigating them. For example, Francis Edwards is one of them, but because he’s a researcher and not really a scientist, he simply records such facts.”
“But how would you explain what’s happened to Kazuko?” Kazuo asked.
“I would say, teleportation and time leap.”
“Time leap?”
“Yup. They are not as clear as in Kazuko’s case, but there are similar phenomena happening around the world. For example on 23rd September 1880, on a farm near Gallatin in Texas, a man named David Lang vanished in front of his wife, two kids and two friends. Simply disappeared while five people were watching. Also, in a small area off the south-east coast of the US, over twenty airplanes have mysteriously vanished. In these cases, the ones who disappeared haven’t been found, and the theory is that they leapt through time and ended up far in the future or far in the past. As an example of teleportation, there was a case of a person who one day disappeared from Tokyo and reappeared around the same time in Kimberley, USA. There are many stories like this from way back.”
RETURN TO FOUR DAYS AGO
Kazuko and her friends were awestruck. They’d never heard such stories in their lives.
“So in my case both teleportation and time leap happened simultaneously,” said Kazuko.
“That’s the only plausible explanation,” nodded Mr Fukushima. “When the truck was about to hit you, in
