“Timmy’s mean.” Her little voice is high and strained. “He said Stephen Hawking said it’s impossible.” She looks back down. “Mr. Hawking knew everything.”
“Well…” Finn walks up from behind and crouches down beside Natalie. He doesn’t seem to notice or care that he’s getting his designer suit dirty. “That’s not entirely true. Hawking, like most scientists, accepted that time travel into the future was proven by the laws of physics. And while he didn’t believe it allowed for the possibility of time travel into the past, he acknowledged he couldn’t claim so with certainty.”
Natalie’s eyes brighten. He smiles and picks up a giant conch shell lying next to the sandcastle, its walls now smashed in after the boys pretended to be raiding pirates and destroyed it.
“What’s this?” He points to the pile of sand.
“That was my time machine. Timmy smashed it.”
Finn’s mouth curves as he points to the ocean. “See those waves?” Now full of crashing surf, the earlier slack is gone.
She nods.
“They’re created by wind blowing across the ocean’s surface, the air and water transferring energy. They flow in the wind’s direction until the coastline bends them toward shore. You never see them flow the other way.”
“And if you’re a surfer…” He holds up the shell. “We can’t push the waves back to ride them again. That’s how time feels tous. One direction. Every ride is different.” He stretches out his arm, moving the shell to illustrate the flow of a wave.
“But if we imagine, just for a moment, that there’s a magic tunnel beneath the surface—a shortcut that bypasses the longer surface and returns us to where the wave’s energy is still moving...” He turns the shell in his hand. “Then we could repeat the same ride.”
“That’s a wormhole,” Natalie states with pride.
He laughs. “Yes.” He hands the shell to her. “You’re very smart. Put this to your ear and tell me what you hear.”
“It’s the ocean.” She smiles, looking up, her eyes shining.
“Some believe time has an echo. That the imprint of the past never disappears. Just like this shell remembers the ocean.”
Quiet for a moment, she looks at the shell and then back to Finn. “Doyoubelieve time travel is possible?”
He considers her question. “Yes. I do.” Then he gives her a serious look, softened by his eyes. “But it will be a heavy burden for anyone who learns how.”
“Maybe someone already knows and is keeping it a secret,” she says.
He laughs. “Anything’s possible.”
She beams and gives him a hug before running off to her friends with Maddie following behind her.
I pull back the hair the wind has blown loose, wrapping it around my ear. “Thank you for that.”
“She dreams big.”
“She gets that from her father.”
He gives me a long look, then he glances upward. “I know what it’s like to want to revisit the past. To see if you can change it.” He rubs his face, squinting his eyes.
I’m sure he has his share of past regrets. Don’t we all?
“It’s too bad that science doesn’t like paradoxes. Exploring the possibility of revisiting what has already occurred…” Heshakes his head. “We all dream of it. But it’s not something we serious scientists can entertain.”
His gaze drifts to Natalie, running in the distance, laughing as she plays.
He turns back to me, his voice soft. “She’s Nathan’s?”
I catch my breath. How did he… “Yes.”
“Maybe she’ll be the one to figure it all out one day.”
CHAPTER 5
