“You know that we’ve already sent an independent rescue team into that world. It’s just a regular techno world, like a hundred thousand others. They say your team never arrived there. They’ve never seen you.”
“Maybe we didn’t go there. I know it felt like the place I was given coordinates for. It seemed like a techno world, and then it—changed. And they got us. But I didn’t do it on purpose. I swear I didn’t!”
They asked me questions for hours, and then they left, locking the door behind them.
I couldn’t figure out why they locked the door. I could have Walked out—the InterWorld planets have potential portals everywhere. Maybe it was symbolic. Either way, there was nowhere I wanted to go.
The door was opened the next morning, and I was led out, blinking at the light that came through the dome.
They took me to the Old Man’s office. I’d been there only once before. His desk takes up most of the room, and it’s covered with stacks of paper and folders. No computers or scrying spheres that I could see, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
The Old Man looks to be in his fifties, but he’s much older than that, even in linear time. He’s seen his share of action, and more; despite cell reconstruction, he’s pretty banged up. His left eye is a technoconstruct. Lights flicker inside it, green and violet and blue. There’re all kinds of legends about what it can do: shoot laser beams and transfiguration spells, read your innermost thoughts, see through walls— you name it. Maybe it can do all those things; maybe none of them. All I know is that when he looks at you, you want to confess every wrong thing you’ve ever done and throw in a bunch you haven’t for good measure.
“Hello, Joey,” said the Old Man.
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I didn’t mean to get us lost, sir. Really I didn’t. And I tried to get back there.”
“I hope you didn’t do it on purpose,” he said quietly. He paused. “You know … some people here had doubts about taking you on as a trainee Walker after Jay’s death. I told them that you were young and untried and impetuous but that you had the potential to be one of the best. And that, on some level, as he had wished, you were replacing Jay. One for one.
“But it’s turned into one for six … and, well, the cost is too high. You took them to the wrong place. You lost them. And it looks like you ran out on them to save your neck.”
“I know what it looks like. But that didn’t happen. Look, I can find them—just let me try.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We’ll call it a day here. You won’t graduate. Instead, we’re going to take your memories of this place away. We’re going to take your memories of everything that’s happened since you left your own Earth. And we’re going to remove your ability to Walk.”
“Forever?” It couldn’t have sounded worse if he’d said they were taking my eyes.
“I’m afraid so. Look, we don’t want you to get hurt. If you start to Walk, you’ll be a beacon. You could lead them straight to your world—or back to InterWorld.
“So we’re sending you back to your Earth. We won’t even adjust the temporal differential. It’ll work in your favor—you won’t have been gone too long.”
I tried to think of something to say in my own defense, but all I could think of was “But I did take them to the coordinates I was given. I know I did. And I didn’t run out on them.” And I’d said that the day before, to too many people, too many times.
Instead I asked, “When are you going to take my memories?”
He gave me a look of great pity, then. “It’s already done,” he told me.
I looked up at the strange man with the mismatched eyes in puzzlement. “Who … ?” I said. Something like that.
“I’m sorry.” he said. And then everything went dark.
“Amnesia’s a funny thing,” said the doctor. It was my family M.D., Dr. Witherspoon. He had delivered the squid, and he treated Jenny when she had the chicken pox, and he stitched up my leg last year after I was dumb enough to go over Grand River Falls in a barrel. “I mean, in your case, you’ve lost about thirty-six hours. If you aren’t faking it.”
“I’m not,” I told him.
“I don’t believe you are. I tell you, the whole town went crazy searching for you. I don’t think that even Dimas is going to be able to keep his job after that nonsense. Sending you kids out into the city and telling you to find your own way back … well.” He peered at my eyes, shone lights into them. “I can’t find any evidence of concussion. Don’t you remember anything before you walked into the police station?”
“Last thing I remember,” I told him, “is getting lost with Rowena. And after that it all goes weird, like trying to remember a dream.”
He looked at his clipboard and pursed his lips. The bedside telephone beeped, and he answered it. “Yes,” he said. “He seems fine.… My dear woman, he’s a teenage boy. They’re practically indestructible. Don’t worry. Sure, come and pick him up in an hour or so.” He put the phone down. “That was your mother,” he told me. He made a note on my chart.
“Well,” he said then, “maybe your memory will come back. And maybe you’ll have thirty-six hours of your life lost forever. No way to tell right now.
“You’re looking leaner than I remember you,” he added. “Is there anything worrying you? Anything you need to talk about?”
“I keep thinking I lost something,” I said. “But I don’t know what.”
Some people thought I was faking. I heard one story in school about how I’d hitchhiked all the way to Chicago, which was kind of disturbing—I mean, for all I know I might have hitchhiked to Chicago. Or gone even farther.
They did a segment on the local eleven o’clock news, with interviews with Mayor Haenkle, and the chief of police and with an old guy who demonstrated with models that I’d been taken off in a flying saucer.
Dimas didn’t lose his job. It turned out that each of the cards he’d given us before we set off had had a tracker chip built into it. So he knew where each of us had been all the time.
Except for me, of course. My little red blip had gone from the screen on his laptop (he was cruising around in his Jeep, making sure none of us got on buses or called home for rides). And it never turned up again. That was one of the things that the saucer guy pointed to as evidence that I had been taken into space.
Ted Russell thought it was hilarious. He started calling me “saucer boy” and “space captain” and “Obi-Wan Harker” and things like that whenever he saw me. I did my best to ignore him.
I grew kind of popular, but it was the way a bear in a cage would have been popular. Some kids wanted to be my new best friends, and some stared and pointed from across the lunchroom.
Rowena Danvers came up to me after math, later that first week. “So, where did you go that day?” she asked. “Was it a flying saucer? Or did you go to Chicago? Or what?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“You can tell me. I was the one who waited for you on that stupid street corner for half an hour, after all. I won’t tell anyone.”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I wish I did.”
Her eyes flashed angrily. “Fine, if that’s how you feel. I thought we were friends. You don’t have to trust me if you don’t want to. I don’t care about you anyway.” And she stomped away, and all I could think was I know what you’d look like with your hair cut really, really short. And then I wondered why I’d thought that.
One