Chapter Eleven — A Matter of Metal
The third-of-a-mile walk took less than eight minutes, and they arrived just in time for the next tour to begin. About fifteen minutes into the 45-minute tour, the tour guide took the group to a pyramid tomb bearing the words Omnia Ab Uno. There she explained how the structure had been built by actor Nicolas Cage in 2010. Thereafter, when the tour guide moved to their next stop, the couple stayed behind.
Once the tour group was out of sight, the elderly woman spun her scooter around to face Frankie and Finn. “Mind if we old coots come with you to the Ocademy?”
Frankie grinned. “Not at all! We’d love it!”
“Be prepared for things to be a bit different from when you were there last,” she warned them.
“After seeing two-thousand-twenty New Orleans, I think we can handle anything,” Frankie said.
“Okay kids, it’s super easy,” Finn explained. “Just walk through wherever they tell us, all right?”
Maggie gulped down her fear. “Yes, Mr. Finn. Will you hold my hand?”
“Of course.”
“What about me?” Chuck whimpered.
“Let’s all hold hands,” Frankie suggested.
The woman drove her scooter up to the back of the pyramid and steered to the right so as to be perpendicular to the structure. When she pushed on the side of the pyramid, a door popped open with a slight click. She then backed up to allow the door to open fully. On the inside of the triangle-shaped door was a pull handle. The space behind the door consisted of what looked like a force field of swirling colors. The woman straightened out her scooter to face the portal and zoomed right through, disappearing into the vortex of color.
The man revved his scooter then took off after his wife. “See you on the other side, kids!”
“Ready everyone?” Finn asked.
Maggie tightened her grip on his hand and stepped along with the others into the unknown as Finn used his free hand to pull the triangle door closed behind them.
They emerged into an enormous round space that had a domed ceiling that looked like the late night sky.
Maggie, Chuck, and Betsy oooooohed in unison.
Finn grinned and relaxed his shoulders in relief. “Welcome to Omni, Robinsons.”
“Where you’re always in your element,” the woman added. She then zoomed over to a structure that resembled an old hay wagon. A bald man in his late fifties greeted them warmly. “Kids,” she called back to the group, “meet Clybe Paladio. He runs the Welcome Wagon. And he’s going to contact someone who can see about getting you home!”
Maggie bobbed on her heels. Chuck folded his arms and sulked.
A grizzled and stubby man hobbled over to the Welcome Wagon, groaning with each step and using a cane for support. He got into a very animated discussion with Clybe and the older couple, occasioned by a good deal of head shaking and finger wagging. After a few minutes, the man shuffled over to speak to the kids. “I’m Bardlbus, Aetherean second class. What’s this I hear about you kids accessing the space-time continuum through a wormhole and loophole simultaneously?”
The 1950s gang looked at each other blankly.
“No matter,” the man wheezed. “I won’t get into the technicalities, but the long and the short of it is, you have to get back to your point of arrival in twenty-twenty before the loophole closes in forty minutes.”
“Forty minutes!” Finn exclaimed. “We’ll never make it back in time.”
“Back in time is precisely where you’re going!”
“I mean it will take us more than forty minutes!”
“Not if an Aetherean transports you,” Bardlbus replied. “In order for the reversal to work, you’ll need something metal from the site of origin, something from the ship you were on.”
“We have our showgirl costumes in our bags,” Frankie said.
At the mention of showgirl costumes, Bardlbus did a double take at Frankie. “I see. Any of it metal, say costume jewelry?”
“Yes! I have a brooch. Will this work?” Frankie asked, plunging his hand into his satchel to pull the decorative pin off his headdress.
“For one of you, yes,” Bardlbus said. “You all need something metal.”
Finn furiously dug through his bag. “I don’t see anything metal from the ship.”
“Does it have to be metal?” Frankie asked, now digging through his own bag.
“Yes, absolutely.”
Frankie and Finn looked at each other in dismay.
“Will a spoon work?” Chuck asked as he produced from his pocket a stainless steel soup spoon.
“You took a spoon from the ship?” Maggie asked with a disapproving tisk.
Chuck shrugged. “Never know when you might find yourself face to face with a hot fudge sundae.”
Frankie let out an enormous belly laugh. “Kid, you’re all right!”
Bardblus rapped his cane on the floor. “Yes, yes. Now what do the rest of you have from your place of origin that is metal?”
All looked at each other for a response.
“I just had one spoon,” Chuck said.
Finn turned to Maggie. “Margaret?”
Her eyes darted in thought for a moment, and she bit her lip in concentration. “Nothing I can think of.”
The color drained from both Frankie’s and Finn’s faces.
“Time is of the essence,” Bardlbus remarked.
“Wait!” Maggie shouted and dug through her lunchbox. “This pen from the ship is metal!”
“Very well then. Three of you can travel. You just need two more items. But you must leave now.”
Finn looked at Frankie whose eyes had filled with sorrow. After taking a steady breath, Finn said, “You three kids should go. Frankie and I will be fine here.”
“But Mr. Finn,” Maggie said quietly.
Frankie attached the brooch to Betsy’s shirt. “It’s the only way, guttersnipes.”
Betsy began crying.
“I’m sorry, little Betsy. I didn’t mean to prick you.”
“It’s not that,” Maggie said. “She’s sad you won’t be coming with us.”
“I’m afraid she’ll have to be sad later, young lady,” Bardlbus said. “Your window of travel is closing.”
Maggie wiped her eyes and turned toward her brother. “Come on, Charles. We need to get a move-on. Can you carry Betsy?”
Chuck slouched, looking at the ground.
Bardlbus shooed them toward the portal. “Time to get you children back to your wormhole.”
“But I don’t wanna go,” Chuck said quietly.
Maggie slowly turned to face him. “You don’t?”
He shook his head. “There’s nothing for us there, and this place looks pretty neato.”
“But Chuck, we can’t afford tuition at a boarding school. And Mother and Father left us penniless.”
“I don’t care. I don’t wanna go back!”
Betsy cried harder. All exchanged uneasy glances.
Maggie took Betsy from the satchel on Frankie’s chest. “What do you want to do, Betsy?” The toddler extended her arms toward her brother. Maggie let out a long sigh. “Looks like she wants to stay too. Mr. Bardlbus, do you have any sort of jobs here we could get to pay for our room and board … and tuition? We know how to work in a laundry.”
Bardlbus offered her a look of condolence. “Doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid.”
The elderly couple whispered animatedly for a moment, then rolled closer to the kids. “A scholarship fund was created in honor of our grandson who attended the Ocademy,” the woman said. “We’d like it to go to you.”
Maggie put her hand over her mouth, trying not to cry. “I don’t know how to thank you, ma’am.”
“Write to us every now and then to let us know how you’re getting on. That will be thanks enough.”
Chuck handed the spoon to Frankie. “I guess you will have graduated by the time we get here in two thousand twenty.”
Frankie chuckled. “I certainly hope so! Good to know you, Chuck Robinson. You’d make an excellent pirate.”
Chuck’s face brightened. “Really?!”
Maggie removed the brooch from Betsy’s shirt and stoically handed it to Finn.
“I think you were right,” he said quietly.
She looked up at him with an expression both pleased and quizzical.
He smiled warmly. “That wildcat was a jaguar, not a leopard.”
She sucked in a sob and threw her arms around his waist, holding him tight. “I’ll never forget you, Mr. Finn.”
“I’ll never forget you either, Miss Margaret.”
“Actually, that’s not true,” said Clybe, walking from behind the Welcome Wagon counter to join the discussion. “You will not be traveling in time, per se, as much as you will be reversing the trip you took through time. When you arrive back at your point of origin, you won’t remember any of what happened after you accessed the timestream. It will be like your trip to the future, to now, never happened.”
Frankie and Finn looked at the kids again, and everyone embraced.
Bardlbus pounded his walking staff on the ground. “Out of time!”
As Finn disengaged from the group hug, a plaque on a wall caught his eye. “Hey is that my name?” When he tried to get a better look, his view was blocked by people walking past.
“Let’s go!” Frankie said, pushing Finn toward the portal.
“Too late for that,” Bardlbus said. “A pair of Aethereans will place you where you need to be in order to travel back.”
As Frankie and Finn waved goodbye, they felt as if they were being pulled forward by their shirts—the sensation that accompanied being transported telepathically by an Aetherean being.
Chuck and Maggie looked at the empty space where Frankie and Finn had stood just a millisecond before, and for the first time ever, Maggie saw her brother weep.