Read Online Samantha Smart by Maxwell Puggle - Free Book Online Page A

then looked over to where The Professor was tinkering with something on his desk.
    “Hi, Professor!” she said in a peppy voice.
    “Oh, Samantha!” he replied, looking up from his work. “I’ve just finished making a prototype for a wristband-communicator,” he said enthusiastically. “It runs on a closed-circuit microwave band that, if my theory is correct, should be unaffected by temporal displacement.”
    “Say what?” Samantha tried to adjust back to The Professor’s speed of thinking.
    “Time travel, Samantha. The wrist communicator is joined by a sort of a closed-circuit microwave band to this desk unit here.” He indicated a larger sort of radio thing. “They should function no matter what sort of ‘timeline’ one might be in, and of course throughout the course of any of these timelines, at any point along the way.”
    “Cool,” Samantha said earnestly, walking over to the desk and looking at his work. “Where did you get the parts to make this, Professor?”
    “Radio Shack.” The old Brit smiled a toothy smile. “Well,” he said, turning back to the desk, “we shall have to test this, then. And that means using the time machine, Samantha.”
    “Professor,” she interjected, “don’t you want to hear about my interview with Violet Edelstein?”
    “Bellowing bugbears!” he exclaimed. “I’d totally forgotten. Sometimes I just get so involved in a new project that I sort of forget what the last one was for,” he said apologetically.
    “It’s okay, Professor,” Samantha said, patting him on the top of his head. “But listen!” Her voice became as excited as his. “I got to ‘interview’ Violet Edelstein–a very neat woman, by the way - you would’ve been so proud of me, I did such a good job as field agent, impersonating a school reporter–” The Professor was nodding in anticipation. “Anyway, there’s no Elliot Bergen in this timeline, he was never born. Ms. Edelstein said that she
had
been dating a Vincent Bergen, but that he had moved, probably to North Carolina, to pursue some opportunity, and that he was supposed to have written her, that they had been considering marriage, but then her house burned down and she had to move as well and they lost touch.”
    “Oh dear.” The Professor frowned. “Do you think I did something in the past that caused her house to burn down?”
    “Well,” Samantha replied, then paused for thought. “I hadn’t thought of that. I was thinking that perhaps he
had
written a letter and that for some reason it hadn’t been delivered.”
    The Professor assumed a look of deep thought, scratching his chin and appearing to be searching his memory.
    “You know, I vaguely recall walking by a postman that time in 1931. But–I didn’t touch him or even interact with him in any way. Still, perhaps something could’ve happened... ”
    “Well, okay,” Samantha said. “What do we do with this information?”
    The Professor looked at her in a focused way, then looked back at his desk.
    “Well,” he said, “no matter what, we’re going to have to use the time machine. We need to try and get back to that short period of time I spent in 1931 and correct whatever went wrong. We now know that something I did either caused a house to burn down or a letter to not be delivered. Did Ms. Edelstein say when exactly her house burned down?”
    “No, I, um, didn’t ask her,” Samantha pouted, a little deflated.
    “It doesn’t really matter. In fact, I think the letter theory is a bit more plausible. And I seem to remember something about that postman–he... yelled or something, it made me turn around and look, but I was halfway down the block from him at that point. I hardly noticed it, but... now for some reason it sticks in my memory.
    “In any case, someone has got to go back and fix it, and as much as I would rather do it myself, I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”
    “I’ll go!” Samantha volunteered, biting her lip in