Winston Chase and the Theta Factor Read online

  “It’s 1966, space man,” said another, still laughing. “What planet are you from?”

  “Beaverton,” Winston replied, which set them all to laughing even harder.

  “Senior Skip Day, 1966!” crowed the pink bikini girl as she tossed sandy blonde bangs away from her sunglasses. “Mark your calendars!”

  “How old are you?” asked the first girl.

  “Not old enough,” said Winston.

  The now drinkless blonde pushed her shades down her nose and surveyed him. “You’re kind of tall for not old enough. Get me another glass?”

  She pointed at a large green cooler resting in the gazebo’s shade.

  Winston obliged. He opened the ice-filled chest to find at least a dozen glasses nestled in the cubes, each nearly brimming with some red juice and a lime wedge balanced on the rim. Winston grabbed one and handed it off.

  “Thanks,” said the girl, still looking him over. “I suppose you need a ride somewhere.”

  “That would be great,” muttered Winston. “Where are we?”

  “My parents’ house,” said the girl in the turquoise swimsuit, the shortest of the three and adorned with sable black hair that flowed to the middle of her back. Her voice was quieter than that of her friends, but she spoke with confidence. She stood up, gracefully feline and shockingly at ease with her barely-clothed body. A white beach towel lay on the grass next to her feet, and Winston desperately wished she would wrap it around herself. He couldn’t help but turn away and look back at the river.

  “On the Columbia,” said Winston lamely. “And that’s where?”

  “About twenty miles from the coast,” she said. “You’re close to Astoria. We could give you a lift there.”

  Astoria stood at the mouth of the Columbia where it fed into the Pacific Ocean. Maybe if he could get there ahead of the freighter in 2013, he could find a way to get back on the ship and reunite with Shade.

  “That would be awesome!” said Winston.

  The girl in pink gave another little snicker. “Awesome? It’s just a few miles down Highway 30.”

  “Awesome!” said the girl in the one-piece. “Fantastic!”

  “Stupendous! Marvelous!” added her friend between drink sips.

  Winston felt himself blush as he realized they were making fun of his expression.

  He said nothing and merely looked at the ground as the other two girls stood. They examined Little e and the chronoviewer, still tucked into the crook of Winston’s arm.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” said Winston.

  The shorter girl in the one-piece joined them. He was confronted with a wall of soft, supple, perspiring girl bodies. At that moment, he would have rather gone back in the river for another frigid swim.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” commented the short girl.

  “Maybe it’s from space,” said the pink bikini girl as she elbowed her friend.

  “It’s…” Winston struggled, then decided to veer as close as he could to the truth. “They’re parts to one of my dad’s machines. If I don’t get them returned ASAP, I’m gonna be in huge trouble.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” said the short girl, running a hand back from her forehead and down her long locks as she swept the hair from her face. “I wanted to run into town anyway and catch a movie. It’s getting too hot out here.”

  The two others agreed and fanned themselves. Winston could just imagine Alyssa rolling her eyes and pretending to gag at this shameless display of lemming behavior.

  That thought brought Winston back to himself. Astoria had a locally famous bridge spanning the Columbia from Oregon to Washington. It was just over four miles long, which was a huge feat in Oregon terms, but Winston had no idea when it was built.

  “There’s a big bridge in Astoria, right?” he asked, and when they nodded cautiously, he asked, “Can I get across it? Is it open?”

  “Nuh-uh,” said the tallest girl. “My dad’s a contractor on it, and he says it won’t open until at least July.”

  That meant it was close to done. Close enough that he could drop off of it…although the fall might kill him.

  The girls went inside to get dressed, leaving Winston alone in the rose garden. He sighed with relief.

  Winston had to figure out his options and weigh them before the girls returned. He could stay here. He could go down to the water and try to jump forward in time to right before the freighter rumbled down the river. Even if he did, though, how would he climb onto it? The ship’s sides were sheer and sloped outward. There were no handholds of any kind, probably to prevent stowaways from doing exactly what he was considering. That was why they’d been lucky to get crane-lifted onto the ship while hiding inside a cargo pallet.

  There wouldn’t be any cranes on the banks of the Columbia this far into bridge construction.

  However…

  There might still be a crane on the bridge itself.

  When the girls emerged, they were in a slightly more comfortable state of dress — for Winston. The tall blonde had swapped into a red pantsuit with white sandals. Her shorter friend wore something that looked like a blue-and-white parody of a sailor’s uniform, although the color popped against the contrast of her black hair. The girl with the wireframe one-piece had inexplicably traded out for a robin’s-egg-blue bikini with a matching sleeveless blue jacket that only hid some of what Winston wanted covered.

  The short girl pointed at Winston, waggling her finger at his body. “That is not going in my new Imperial. Do you have a change of clothes?”

  “I fell off a boat,” said Winston. “Sorry, I forgot to bring a spare set.”

  “That’s too bad,” she replied, “because I don’t know where you got that get-up, but you need to return it.” She tapped one foot pensively. “I guess we can lay down some towels in the back seat. You better not get any sand in the upholstery.”

  Winston promised to do his very best.

  They drove west out Highway 30 as the sun streamed through the treetops and, despite himself, Winston put his head back, felt the wind through his hair, and reveled in the fact that he was cruising in the back of a bone-white 1966 Imperial Crown convertible with an engine that roared like a jet fighter. Dappled sunlight danced over his eyelids. He smelled mountain air so sharp and fresh it made his skin tingle. For just a moment, life was bliss, and Winston let himself relax.

  “Hey!” shouted the girl in the jacket, who had found herself stuck in the back seat. “My name’s Kelly! What’s with the white stripes?”

  Winston opened his eyes and found her pointing at the white hair above his temple.

  “It’s a condition!” he hollered, suddenly self-conscious and falling back on the standard excuse he’d adopted after a bit of web searching last year. “Poliosis!”

  Kelly put a hand to her mouth and drew back. “You have polio?”

  Winston tried to recall if the crippling, often fatal disease had been eradicated from America by 1966. If his mom had still been working on making the first mass-produced antibiotics in 1948, it seemed a stretch to think that polio would be gone by 1966, but he wasn’t sure.

  “No, not polio! Poliosis! It’s a genetic hair pigment thing!”

  It was no such thing, of course, but Winston figured this was a safer explanation than “I’m part alien and have an engineered virus running through me that turned some of my hair white and lets me travel through time with these Alpha Machine parts.” Kelly nodded slightly and peered closer at his head.

  Because he couldn’t think of anything else to fill the awkward silence between them, Winston blurted, “I’m Winston Chase!”

  “Kelly Siegle!” she said, and, apparently convinced that he wasn’t contagious, offered her hand.

  Winston gripped it cautiously, never sure how hard he should squeeze with a girl. Kelly’s grip in return was firm and confident, and she smiled at him.

  Strange, Winston thought, how trading names and shaking hands was enough to c
hange his opinion of her from snooty and empty-headed to normal and likable. Why couldn’t he do that with girls in his own time? Was that why Alyssa had never shown any interest in him?

  The short girl shouted back at Winston, “Where do you want to be dropped off?”

  Winston couldn’t begin to guess, so he went for the obvious. “The bridge, I guess!”

  “We told you, it’s not open!”

  “I like bridges! It’ll be groovy!” He winced, knowing how forced the word sounded coming out of his mouth, but maybe it would make him sound cool to them. As far as he could see, no one cringed.

  “You’ll probably get arrested if you go out on it,” hollered the driver, “but if you say so!”

  5

  Of Shakes and Shipwrecks

  To Winston’s surprise, 1966 Astoria looked much like small coast towns in the present. He and his three companions drove through many blocks of modest, single-story homes until the highway morphed into the town’s main drag. The Columbia lay only a block or two away on their right. Small restaurants dotted the highway alongside little motels, but there seemed to be a whole lot of nothing to do in Astoria.

  The bridge appeared essentially complete. Drivers would have to go many blocks past the bridge itself, turn off the highway, then backtrack up a very long, sloping on-ramp to reach the main span, which passed far above the highway before heading out over the water. It certainly was no Golden Gate. The green, twin-peaked trusses seemed stubby and awkward from a distance, although the many steel-girder triangles comprising them must be quite sturdy. Several sections of the trusses stood blanketed in canvas and netting, and Winston could see a lot of reinforcement cabling along the girders still being strung into place.

  There was no sign of a crane anywhere.

  One thing Winston knew for sure was that the spans highest above the river, where all the big shipping traffic must flow, looked downright stratospheric. Now that he saw the structure up close, the idea of dropping from the bridge onto a passing freighter wasn’t simply stupid — it was suicidal.

  “What’s wrong?” asked the shortest girl, whose name was Sally.

  She stared at him, head cocked slightly.

  “It’s much bigger than I expected,” he murmured.

  “Ha!” said Kirsten, the tall girl in the red pantsuit and white-rimmed cat-eye sunglasses. “My dad says it’s five million bucks over budget. It better be big!”

  Winston searched about for some idea of what he should do next, but nothing stood out to him.

  Think, he commanded himself. What am I not seeing?

  He shook his head in frustration. He wished Shade were here. Shade would know what to do, although that usually started with…

  “Is it lunchtime yet?” he asked.

  Sally checked her watch. “It’s 11:00, so I suppose, but we already ate. What do you feel like?”

  Winston knew exactly what he wanted. All his life, he’d sat in diners — his mom’s included — that plastered ‘50s and ‘60s memorabilia across their walls and pretended to offer authentic retro American junk food. As long as he needed time to think, Winston was going to do it with a stomach full of genuine 1960s burger and shake.

  He opened his mouth to say as much just as he imagined paying for the meal…with twenty-first-century dollars. He silently cursed himself for trading out all of the 1940s money his dad had left him in that safe deposit box for current bills. The gold and silver coins he had left were in his backpack, still on the freighter. Except—

  Winston put his hand over part of his jacket and found the hard, circular outline of two coins still resting inside one zipped pocket. He breathed a sigh of relief. On impulse, he had taken two of the gold pieces and stashed them in his jacket when he and Shade had taken inventory aboard the freighter.

  “What’s the best burger place in town?” he asked.

  “The Shack,” said Kirsten.

  The other two nodded in agreement.

  “The what?” Winston asked, thinking immediately of Shade’s tech-fortified treehouse.

  “Bob’s Shake Shack,” clarified Kirsten. “Best burgers from here to Newport.”

  They turned off the highway and headed deeper into town.

  Winston leaned forward and showed Kelly the two coins.

  “I have a strange request,” he said, hoping his gut feeling about her was right. “I have no money except for these. How much would you give me for them?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What are you doing with— Are they stolen?”

  “No! Totally no. My dad gave them to me…for an emergency. I fell off a boat, so I think that qualifies. But I have no idea what they’re worth here.”

  Kelly eyed him doubtfully but finally picked up her purse and began to rummage through it. “I have six dollars — wait. No, make that five. I need a buck for the movie and lunch.”

  “You can buy a movie and lunch for a buck?”

  She didn’t answer, but Winston noticed her back away slightly.

  “I mean, sure. Of course. It’s just closer to, like, a buck fifty. In Portland.”

  What a joke. A buck fifty couldn’t even buy a side of fries back home.

  Kelly handed him four quarters, two one-dollar bills, and a single two-dollar bill. Winston turned this last over in his hands and stared at it with fascination. The picture on the gray-colored front showed Thomas Jefferson. He’d heard of two-dollar bills before but had never seen one.

  “They stopped printing them last year,” Kelly said. “But it’s good, I promise.”

  Winston handed over his two coins and pocketed the cash. With a smile, Kelly handed one of the gold coins back to him.

  “In case of another emergency,” she said. “You might want dinner.”

  A minute later, they pulled into Bob’s Shake Shack, and it was nothing like what Winston expected. The exterior was plain brown with small windows. Inside, a single row of lime-green bench seats flanked tables down the middle of the small dining room, with smaller tables and wooden chairs arranged haphazardly along the walls. A smattering of framed photos hung on the otherwise bare white walls, but there was nothing of the glitzy, neon clutter Winston had come to associate with retro diners. Also, every one of the eight or nine men sitting in the place held a cigarette, and the air was thick and acrid with their smoke. Beyond the long opening at the back of the diner, through which Winston could view part of the kitchen, a cook checked an order slip on the sill before him as smoke curled up from the cigarette between his lips.

  “Wow,” he mumbled while trying not to cough. “Can we eat in the car? It’s…my asthma.”

  Once more, the girls looked at him like he was insane.

  “No, you’re not eating in my Imperial,” said Sally. “But we can sit on the curb.” Then she added, “You know there’s no such thing as asthma, right? It’s all in your head.”

  “You’re kidding,” he said.

  She wasn’t. Apparently, more than fashion had changed over the last four or five decades.

  Winston paid sixty-nine cents for a cheeseburger as big as his face, and his chocolate milkshake, so large that it came in both a tall glass and an equally tall, frosty steel cup for refilling, cost a quarter.

  Out on the curb, with the sun warming his back and the girls sitting in a group several feet away, Winston tried to think through his next steps. Somehow, he had to get out on that bridge. In one sense, there was no urgency to return home. He had a time machine; the date he left from would make no difference so long as he arrived at the moment when he could intercept that freighter in 2013. Still, Winston sensed that every extra hour spent in 1966 was a risk. His clothes didn’t belong, Little e and the Alpha Machine parts were bound to attract attention, and Kelly was right about him keeping that last coin if he wanted another meal.

  He needed to focus on when to make a move on the bridge. Fortunately, today was a Sunday, when there would be no construction workers. Whatever means there might be for dropping onto the passing ship wou
ld stay there throughout the day and night. Come dawn tomorrow, though, all bets would be off when workers returned. He had to act today.

  Daytime would be good because he could see what he was doing, but his odds of getting caught would be higher than at night.

  As he chewed and pondered, a billboard across the street caught Winston’s eye. It showed a giant seashell alongside the words: “ASTORIA MARITIME MUSEUM - 100 YEARS OF SEA-BORNE CURIOSITIES! Exotic animals, fascinating history, shipwreck remains, tales of war and heroism!”

  At first, his eye glossed right over the ad, drawn more by his burger’s juiciness and thick, dripping cheddar. Then the words caught him: shipwreck remains. Could there be any relation to the galley in his dad’s photo?

  “Excuse me,” he said to the girls. “Do you know anything about that museum exhibit?”

  They read the sign and collectively shrugged.

  “Boring,” said Kirsten. “Pass.”

  “Why?” asked Kelly.

  Winston didn’t see any harm in showing them the photo. Trying to shield the Ziploc bag inside his jacket, since who knew when those were invented, Winston pulled out the print and handed it to them. “Someone gave me this photo to check out but didn’t tell me anything about it.”

  Kelly took the picture and examined it. “Looks like one of those Spanish galleon ships that explored the coast,” she said. “I remember going over that stuff way back in grade school.”

  “Could there be any Spanish galleon stuff in that exhibit?” asked Winston.

  “I doubt it,” Kelly said. “If I remember right, the Spanish traders would leave from Asia and head down the California coast to Mexico. Nobody ever came this far north.”

  Sally pushed her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose to better cast a disapproving glance at her friend. The message was clear: What, so now you’re smarter than us?

  Kelly quickly, almost ashamedly, handed back the photo. Some clique habits must never change.

  Kirsten surprised Winston when she said, “That may not be true. I did a report in junior high about how some of the early settlers found fair-skinned Indians already living here. A few even had red hair.” She tilted her head back indignantly upon noticing Sally’s raised eyebrows and pursed lips. “Well, it’s true. We have the Peter Iredale wreck on our beach, but that only happened fifty years ago. The librarian helped me interview people who’d heard of a way bigger wreck off the coast of Manzanita. You can’t see the remains anymore, but some of the stuff in this exhibit is supposed to have come from that wreck. They think the white Indians might have descended from that wreck.”