hunched over his whittling, knife gone still, and Zora staring down at one of her father’s papers without reading it. Only Chandra was gaping at him openly. She’d never been good at subtle.
“What?” He didn’t mean it to sound as harsh as it did, and he hated himself a little for it.
Zora sniffed. “You seem a little off.”
“I’m fine.”
Chandra snorted.
“We could all use a break,” Willis said, placing his whittling on a small table beside him. Now that it wasn’t hidden inside his massive hands, Ash could see a man’s head and shoulders taking shape in the wood. “Dante’s?”
Zora stretched her arms over her head, yawning. “I’d be down for a drink.”
“And a shower,” Chandra said, wrinkling her nose.
Zora shot her a look, and Chandra shrugged.
“When was the last time you washed yourself in the bathroom instead of out of that pitcher?”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Willis said quietly.
Ash was still holding the rope. He’d knotted it so tightly that individual fibers were beginning to unravel. There were rope burns on his palms.
The idea of going to Dante’s, of sitting in their regular booth and drinking hooch and forcing himself to laugh at Willis’s jokes or Chandra’s sad attempts at flirting caused a dull ache to spread through his skull. He cringed and tried to rub away the pain.
“Ash?” It was Chandra, concern threading through her voice. “Are you okay? I know that you were hoping . . .”
Ash felt his muscles go stiff and shook his head. “I need some air,” he said, zipping his jacket up to his chin.
Chandra’s face fell.
“Come drink with us, Captain,” Willis said. “It’ll be fun.”
“I’ll just go around the block.” Ash crossed to the door on the other side of the workshop. “I’ll meet you all at Dante’s or wherever. Later, though.”
Willis started to say something else, but Zora lifted a hand, interrupting him.
“Let him go.” Her voice was low, and she didn’t look Ash in the eye. So, she was pissed. Zora tended to respond to people having emotions that she didn’t approve of by getting pissed at them. It was a personality quirk that Ash wasn’t interested in dealing with just now.
He pushed the workshop door open and stepped out onto the docks. Bitterly cold air bit at his cheeks and whipped his jacket against his body.
He thought of Dorothy’s dark hair. Dorothy’s eyes.
He needed some time alone.
He needed to think.
LOG ENTRY—JUNE 14, 2074
11:47 HOURS
THE WORKSHOP
Today marks the first time that I’ve stepped foot inside my workshop all week. I used to be in and out at least once a day but, lately, ironic though it may seem, I haven’t been able to find the time.
There are daily training sessions with NASA and my new team of explorers, meetings with WCAAT, not to mention press conferences to inform the public of what we’re up to. Most of today was taken up by a photo shoot. A photo shoot, of all things.
It’s disappointing, to say the least. I’m a scientist, after all, and I’d like to be left to do my work. But the success of my past experiments has made me into a minor celebrity, of sorts, which was never my intention. I find myself longing for the days when no one knew who I was, when time travel was just a puzzle I couldn’t stop thinking about.
You know, in those early days, a time machine wasn’t even part of my plan. It’s actually rather inconvenient to have to worry about an entire ship whenever you want to blip back in time, not to mention the time tunnel itself, and the exotic matter, of which there’s a rather limited supply. I may have discovered how to travel through time much sooner, in fact, but I wasted years trying to figure out how to work around these problems, and those early attempts were all massive, messy failures.
And yet I can’t help looking through my old notes now, wondering if I missed something. Perhaps time travel without a vessel, without an anil or exotic matter is possible. . . .
All this has me thinking about Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist.
Tesla spent a lot of time and money attempting to develop the transmission of electrical power without wires—in other words, the coil.
You know the coil. It was that big copper ball that shot off sparks of electricity. Basically, it made Tesla look like some sort of crazy mad scientist, and, unfortunately, he never actually got it