“Yes.”
“Fascinating. 1997, you said? I’d be very interested in seeing this distant time of yours.” He showed a flash of white teeth. “Now that we’ve become… comrades, I’m sure you won’t object to taking me with you when you return.”
This was just as bad as she’d thought. His deep, rough voice was honeyed with mockery. No time to lose your temper, Mac…
“But that’s the problem,” she said. “This all happened by accident—that is, I don’t know how it happened. I can’t reproduce whatever I did to… do it the first time. I can’t go back through. It doesn’t work. I tried.”
He arched a brow. “Then perhaps you can explain to me how this marvelous… passage through time functions, and how it came to be here in the middle of the jungle?”
Oh, brother. This was the tricky part. Until now she’d been as sure as any other reasonable person that time travel didn’t exist. She was by no means an expert on the theories, though Homer had known some physicists at Berkeley who’d been interested in the subject.
She sifted through memory for examples that would make sense to a man from the 1880s. H.G. Wells’s first serialization of The Time Machine wouldn’t be published for four more years—from the “now” she was in. But she remembered reading somewhere that the notion of time travel had been popular even before Wells.
“Harper’s!” she said triumphantly. “In 1856 they published an article about time travel, about a guy going into the future. I don’t remember much about it, but—”
“Is that where you came up with these ideas?”
Mac refused to be baited. “The concept isn’t beyond you, I assume?”
“Miss MacKenzie, you may try my patience, but not my intelligence.”
“That’s a start.” She chewed her lip. “Come to think of it, there are lots of examples from your time and before. Stories about people who went into the future through dreams or suspended animation or even sleeping too long. But that isn’t what happened to me. I didn’t just stay the same while the world changed. I… walked into the past.”
“Through a Maya temple.” Liam stood abruptly. “I’m returning to my camp. It’ll be dark soon, and I don’t intend to spend the night here. I haven’t got time to search for your people—whoever they are. I’ll look again in the morning, and then I’m heading for the coast.” His mouth twisted as though he’d tasted something along the lines of an underripe lemon. “As for your ‘theories’—”
Mac heaved to her feet, swaying at the weakness that clutched at her body. She batted away his offered support. “All right,” she snapped. “I get it. No more theories. You want proof.” Ignoring her dizziness, she swooped down for her pack and dug for her flashlight, which she’d dumped inside after her fruitless attempt at getting back through the tunnel. She waved the flashlight at him triumphantly. “You wanted to know about this? This is something from the future. No one’s going to invent it until the turn of the century. Or batteries this small.” She dumped the AA batteries into her palm and tossed one at him. He caught it, glancing from her to the battery.
“Let’s see what else I’ve got in here,” she muttered. She rummaged deeper into her pack. Even before the trip she hadn’t completely cleaned it out, and it was full of forgotten odds and ends. Travel toothbrush, maybe—and the first-aid kit in its plastic box. That would be good; no one was using plastic this way yet.
She smoothed out a piece of the mosquito netting and began to lay objects out on it. Old Kleenex, a piece of ancient hard candy, an empty can of Dr Pepper, the bottle of muscle relaxant she’d had prescribed when her shoulder was wrenched while moving boxes, a melted lipstick she’d tried once before giving up all notions of using makeup.
Safety pins—no, he’d know about those. Two battered ballpoint pens; maybe. Tour book; that would be a good way to prove how different things were in her time from the overgrown Tikal he’d shown her. Map, ditto. Wallet—that would have modern money, and credit cards, and her driver’s license with the renewal date printed right on it. Pocket calculator—pocket calculator! Now that was going to be way beyond his ken. And her watch as well, with its digital face and waterproof plastic wristband. She unbuckled it and laid it on the netting with the rest.