Piper crept up from the basement. Her head was still wrapped in a towel but she now wore one of Uncle Seven’s rock concert t-shirts and an extremely loose pair of sweatpants under the bathrobe. The only reason the sweatpants weren’t falling to her ankles was the power cord she had found to use as a belt.

She was scared. What was going on in Uncle Seven’s brain? Could a malfunctioning nanite turn him into an axe murderer?

It was dark in the hallway. Her uncle could be waiting in the shadows, ready to jump out at any moment. Piper wouldn’t be able to run away. She didn’t even know where her feet were in these baggy sweatpants. Where was he?

Screek!

Piper jumped and half-screamed as wind blew a tree branch across a window. There was a storm brewing tonight. Piper felt ridiculous. Uncle Seven wasn’t an axe murderer…probably. Piper turned on all the lights she could from the front hallway, reasoning that her uncle wouldn’t come jumping out of any shadows if there weren’t any shadows to jump from. She grabbed the ugly elephant statue from the front hall table and held it like a club. Better safe than sorry. Slowly and quietly, she shuffled her way through the dining room and into the kitchen.

She jumped as she heard a loud “pyew” sound like a space weapon being fired. For a split-second Piper thought Of course, my uncle wouldn’t be an axe murderer, he’d be a laser-beam murderer. But then she realized the sound was from the television in the next room. Holding her elephant statue tightly, she crept into the den.

Uncle Seven was sitting on the couch, watching a TV show on one of the 24-hour kid’s channels, weeping. He turned to look at her as she entered. “Look,” he sobbed. “Look at this!”

It was an episode of “Reddy To Go,” a show Piper had watched when she was in preschool. This one was a story about outer space. The host guy Jeff and his puppet dog Reddy were dressed up in space suits, standing on what looked like a hand-drawn picture of the moon.

“Oh, Reddy! What can we do?” Jeff asked his puppet dog. “That Space Duck has taken our beach ball to Planet Z! We can’t have a beach party on the moon without our beach ball.”

Reddy barked and pulled a drawing of a rocketship out of his Wish Book. Moments later it was full-sized, and Jeff and Reddy were flying it across a cartoonish representation of the galaxy.

“Do you see that?” whispered Uncle Seven. “Isn’t it so...so...”

“Childish?” offered Piper.

“Beautiful.” Uncle Seven broke into a fit of sobs.

Piper looked at her uncle in disbelief. “Uncle Seven, you need to watch more TV. It does get better than this.”

The scientist shook his head. “Don’t listen to what they’re saying. Look at what they’re doing,” he sighed. “What a magnificent dream.”

On the screen, Jeff sang a song about the “Alphabet of Space” while the rocket flew past planets clearly labeled “M,” “N,” “O,” and ”P.”

“Space travel is nothing to them,” said Uncle Seven, smiling in wonder while weeping. “They’ve conquered interplanetary flight. Not for them the problems of how to transcend light speed, or how to store massive amounts of fuel, and they couldn’t care less about smashing into cosmic debris. Ohh, the astrodynamics of it all are in utter harmony with their needs. It’s perfect...bzzt! And I’ve destroyed it!” Uncle Seven clutched his head in his hands, narrowly missing the electronic halo.

Piper took a step closer. “Uncle Seven, it’s a man trying to act like a boy and a dog puppet. There’s not trying to be scientifically accurate, they’re just teaching the ABC’s.”

“It’s a glimpse of a false future. It’s – bzzt – IT’S WRONG! Because...I killed it!” He hung his head and cried again. “I killed spaceflight!”

“You killed what?”

“Spaceflight! Mankind will never fly through the stars.”

Piper’s mouth hung open in bewilderment. “What? What are you...” Piper stopped herself. She was about to try to comfort him, but Uncle Seven had emitted a number of small ‘bzzts’ while he sat here and he was still focused on the show. He wasn’t experiencing wild mood swings now, he just seemed kind of drunk. Maybe this was a safe way to spend time while the nanites finished recording his brain.

“I’ve murdered spaceflight in its infancy,” the scientist moaned. “It’s irrelevant now -- too many unsolved problems, too many underdeveloped technologies. I ran over it while it was learning to crawl. I won! I didn’t want to win. I wanted them to win but they couldn’t keep up and now we’ve all lost.”

On the TV, Jeff and Reddy were standing on a planet covered in letter “Z’s” watching a hand-drawn frisbee land.

“There’s the Space Duck’s flying saucer!” exclaimed Jeff. “We did it, Reddy! Our spaceship flew faster than his spaceship, so we got here first.”

Suddenly, a huge rope net fell over them from the sky. Jeffrey and Reddy squirmed about, pretending they were tangled. A grumpy-looking duck puppet with springy antennae on its head popped up behind them and yelled, “So! Tryin’ to take my beach ball, were ya!”

“It’s the Space Duck!” said Jeffrey in amazement. “But how can you be over here when your spaceship is landing over there?”

“Easy squeezy,” laughed the duck. “The moment I landed, I put on my time belt.”

The TV camera cut to a close-up of the simple device on the ducks belly.

“Nooo,” whispered Uncle Seven.

“When I wear my time belt,” the duck said, “I can travel backward in time! I traveled into the past, before you got here, and I set this trap for you!”

Very slowly, Uncle Seven rose to his feet, staring at the TV. Every muscle in his body shook with rage.

“Uncle Seven?” Piper asked nervously.

“How dare they!” he hissed through clenched teeth.

“W-what?”

Uncle Seven glared at Piper, his hand curled into a twisted claw shaking at the television. “’Time belt?’” Uncle Seven snarled. “How dare they lie that such a thing could exist!!”

Piper mentally tried to keep up with the new mood swing -- wasn’t it a “magnificent dream” just a moment ago? She blurted, “TV show, Uncle Seven! It’s just a...”

Uncle Seven kicked the coffee table away from the couch. “Travelling back in time with a belt?” He paced back and forth. “How would he track planetary rotation? How would he compensate for galactic motion? Where’s the power source for the godforsaken thing? Time travel isn’t just about chronological progression and regression! It’s about redefining the universe...which takes a lot more than a cardboard belt with two buttons and a...and a...dial!!”

Uncle Seven reached below the front of the couch and heaved it over onto its back. Piper jumped out of the way and scrambled to grab the remote control from the floor to turn the TV off. “It’s an imaginary machine on a kid show, Uncle Seven,” she said. “Nobody is supposed to believe it. It’s not real... and it’s operated by a duck!”

Uncle Seven’s eyes drilled into Piper’s with white-hot intensity. “Time travel is real!” He twitched, again and again, his brain full of clumsy nanites and dangerous thoughts. “I’ll show you real.”

Piper saw the menace in Uncle Seven’s eyes. “Eep!” she said, and ran.

She quickly had to decide between keeping the elephant statue or holding her pants up. She turned and hurled the elephant at Uncle Seven as he pursued her through the kitchen. It was too heavy, and it fell far short of him, shattering on the kitchen floor. He didn’t even notice, his maddened eyes were on her.

Piper tripped repeatedly as she fled down the hall, fumbling to hold up the oversized pants she wore; she could have really used a time belt for multiple purposes at this point. Piper shrieked when Uncle Seven grabbed her hand and pulled her down the basement steps. Her fear turned to anger. “No! No! No!” she yelled at her uncle as she would have at a naughty pet dog. “Stop it, Uncle Seven! Stop right now!”

Uncle Seven burst through the striped barricade at the bottom of the stairs, breaking the suggestion machine. He dragged her across the laboratory towards the TimeCrab. The robots who had been milling around it snapped into full guard mode.

Unit Betsy Wetsy stretched its baby doll up as high as its laundry tubing would allow and rocked it side to side like a cobra’s head. “Command: Stay away from the TS Capsule, Doctor Lobe.”

Unit Dooley droned, “Request: Please don’t make us get tough, Doctor Lobe. We don’t do tough well.”

“All Units!” said Uncle Seven. “Naptime!”

The dolls all slumped to the ground as the code word flicked some inner switch to ‘off.’ In unison, every robot’s stubby wheeled legs retracted back into its storage tub. The speaker in each doll’s mouth emitted a quiet snoring noise.

Uncle Seven moved forward again. “Come, the future calls.”

“Stop it, Uncle Seven! You don’t need to prove anything. You’ve got a time machine! I believe you.”

Piper yanked and pulled, but Uncle Seven’s grip was too strong. He dragged her past the sleeping robots to the covered TimeCrab. With a dramatic swoop of his free hand he yanked away the tarp and revealed the silly red car with its strange alterations, its claws full of circuitry, its chrome armor still glistening.

“Behold! The Time/Space Capsule!” Uncle Seven yelled triumphantly.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it!” Piper said.

“Really? When did…BZZT! Oh, right! Right…BZZT! Get in.”

Uncle Seven wasn’t a strong man, but he didn’t need to be to pick Piper up bodily and toss her through the volkswagon door. Inside was the kind of cockpit you would find in a space shuttle; switches, touchpads, and computer screens covered the dashboard. Piper grabbed onto a clear plastic pillar that stood where the “navigator” seat should have been. Inside it hung the strange glowing rod Uncle Seven had begged her to drag into the house three weeks before. A very determined Uncle Seven climbed in and pushed past her, spinning her around the pillar like a swinging door.

Uncle Seven settled into the driver’s seat, which was actually an airplane pilot’s chair, and buckled his safety harness. He whispered rapidly to himself as he glanced at screens and flipped switches. “Redefinition Crystals recharged to 96%...good. Reserve power at 99%...very good. All transport appendages…” He pushed a button. “On!”

The TS Capsule began to hum and rumble. Abruptly, the whole thing rose in the air as the six mechanical crab legs straightened and lifted the strange vehicle off the ground. Piper stifled a surprised yelp.

“So when shall we go?” asked Uncle Seven, twitching.

“I’m not going anywhere--anywhen--anywhatever!!” Piper yelled. “Let me out of here! I don’t get in a car when the driver is drunk or full of robots!”

Piper was scrambling for the left side door when she saw Uncle Seven’s hand reaching for an important looking lever. “NOOO!!” she screamed.

“Here we go!” he laughed as he pulled it.

The TimeCrab got weird. The air became reflective, and dark colors flashed across the windows as the basement lab faded from view. The rod disappeared from the clear pillar tube and from the bulky engines attached to the back of the Volkswagon came what sounded like the mechanized roar of a crashing tidal wave. Piper felt her body shimmer. Then everything stopped.

Piper had fallen to the TimeCrab floor and pulled herself up against Uncle Seven’s pilot chair. Uncle Seven smiled at her and pointed at the volkswagon’s backseat. “Next time, remember: Always wear your safety belt.”

“What have you done?” whispered Piper.

Uncle Seven turned to answer her, then twitched as his confidence drained from him. “I think I’ve made a point,” he smiled, confused and apologetic. He waved his hand at the front windshield. “There’s the future.”

Piper boiled with rage. “You don’t just drag people to the future!” She turned to the window, “You--” she stopped. “Wait...”

Piper looked out the windshield at the basement lab, exactly as it had been moments before. The robot containers and dolls remained sleeping on the floor. Kittyhawk stared back from her nest.

“How far in the future did you take me?”

“Three minutes.”

Piper’s mouth opened and closed as she tried to get her mind around this. “What?!” she yelled. “All that running around and scaring me...for this?!” She gestured to everything. “Why bother?”

“To prove I could do it. That space duck with the time-belt really ticked me off.”

“How does this prove anything? It’s the same!”

“Well, no, if you look at the clocks in the lab, you’ll see that your watch is three minutes behind them...bzzt! If you were wearing a watch...bzzt! Which I see now you are not.”

Piper fumed. “Look, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to kidnap someone and show them the future...go all out! Impress a girl! Show me highways full of flying cars, or people with giant brains and six fingers.”

“I’ve never jumped that far,” Uncle Seven said quietly.

“How far have you gone?”

“A month.”

“A month?!” Piper sputtered, “That’s it? Why not a year? A century? A millenium?”

“Because I can’t come back.”

Piper stopped at this thought...and got it. “It’s a one way trip.”

Uncle Seven nodded. “Forward works pretty well. Backward, not so much. It...”

“Right!” Piper blurted. “The Theory of Relativity allows for traveling forward in time. But there are laws of physics that prove that traveling back in time is impossible. Right?”

Uncle Seven smiled. “You’re cute when you’re enslaved to common scientific beliefs.” He mussed her hair, then grabbed her head. “No! I’ve bypassed those limitations by reinterpreting the different dimensions of existence. I got it. I got time travel--both ways.”

Piper pushed away from his grip on her head. “Well, if you’ve got it, why doesn’t it work?”

“It should work. But all of my expensive little test pods disappeared and never returned. It’s very frustrating.” He pushed a green button and a small section of the dashboard flipped over to reveal hidden controls. Little bits of tape and stickers labeled ‘DANGER’ covered every switch and dial. Uncle Seven gazed at them affectionately. “I figure someday the mystery of it all will build up in me until I just lose it and have to...do it. Just go.”

“Go where?”

“Wherever the nine test time pods and the six prototype temporal engines and that big chunk of my desk from Forbes’ house and that chicken went. I’ll go wherever anything that tries to go back in time goes...and fix it. Fix time.”

“Fix time?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t think the problem is in your machines? Time itself has to be broken?”

“Yes, definitely.”

Piper had to laugh. “You’re a little full of yourself, aren’t you?”

“Who else would I be full of?” Uncle Seven spun around in his pilot chair to directly speak to Piper. “Something doesn’t make sense in the marriage between time and the universe. Knowing myself as I do, someday, in a moment of crazed desperation, I’m going to twiddle those switches, go back to whenever the currents of the timeflow send me, and finally understand the puzzle.” Uncle Seven twitched and let out a ‘bzzt!’ “Hey! Maybe that day is today!”

He reached out his hand toward the dusty controls. Piper slapped it. As he whined “Ow!” and jerked his hand back, Piper punched the green button, flipping the dangerous array of switches back under the dashboard.

“That day is not today,” said Piper.

“...okay,” Uncle Seven muttered sheepishly.

Piper stared at Uncle Seven. “Did you say you sent a chicken back in time?”

“Her name was Rita. I was planning on augmenting her synaptic functions...but she pecked at one of my time pod prototypes and set it off.” He sighed. “She was usually a sweet chicken.”

Piper had a thought. “Hey, can you jump ahead to a point in the future where people have figured out how to travel back in time and use that technology.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because there is no future.”

“What?”

Uncle Seven looked at her sadly. “In my less enlightened days I worked for whatever company would fund my research. I made...terrible things...for terrible people. They’re out there now. I see them on the news. I don’t know what they’re going to do but I know what they can do...thanks to me...and so there is an absolute finite end to everything coming, maybe sometime soon, and with every time jump I’m hurtling towards it, flailing, blind, and stupid, racing towards the apocalypse around the corner. That’s why I’ve never jumped more than a month. Losing that month terrified me.”

Uncle Seven sat, staring at nothing, clutching the armrests of his pilot seat.

Piper wanted to unhear everything he’d just said and chalk it all up to nanites in the brain. “Still...” she said, waving at the vehicle around her. “Time machine, that’s pretty cool.”

Uncle Seven smiled. “It is, isn’t it? Chicks dig time machines.”

“I’d love to meet Jane Austen back in the 1800’s. She’s my favorite author.”

Uncle Seven chuckled sadly. “Oh, yes, I’d love to see an actual dinosaur or straighten Einstein out on a few of his theories, but those times are lost forever. What should be possible is traveling backward to the time I first activated one of these...”

He tapped on the clear tube beside him and the floating rod inside. “That is a transdimensional targeting rod. So is that one.” He pointed out the window at the other rod floating by the Christmas decorations. “These rods are how I steer the Time/Space Capsule. Once a rod is turned on, it broadcasts a unique homing frequency that the Capsule can follow to its source, wherever the rod happens to be.”

“Wait,” Piper’s mind boggled at the thought. “So as long as you’ve got one of these rods there, this thing can teleport itself to anywhere in the world?”

“The world?” Uncle Seven laughed. “Why think so locally? I said anywhere.”

Uncle Seven spun his chair around to the front and adjusted the dashboard controls.

Piper barely had time to scream “No!” before the air shimmered, the engines roared, the rod in the cylinder vanished and a slightly different one took its place.

And then...

Piper was floating in the air. She was weightless, staring out the windows at a reddish planet hanging in space.

Next Chapter: Chapter 8 - Reading, ’Riting, and Rudimentary Xenopsychology