Page 43 of Borrowed Time

“We’ll have to ask Jeremiah on Monday,” Seth said. “If he doesn’t know where something like this might have come from, then I doubt anyone would.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she replied, although she still looked troubled. “And even though I was supposed to go to his house on my own, I don’t think he’ll mind too much if you come along, not when we’ll have something like this to show him.”

Seth hadn’t even considered that angle to the situation, but he supposed he could see why theprimusmight be surprised — and possibly not all that happy — to have him appear when Jeremiah had only been expecting Devynn to come to his house for an exploration of her gift of time travel.

“Probably not,” he said. Something occurred to him then, and he added, “But what if it turns out this amulet can help us?”

She caught his meaning right away. “By making my time travel gift more reliable?”

He nodded. “Exactly. Lawrence said it helped him focus his powers, so maybe it will do the same for you.”

“Or maybe it’ll help me focus them so much that it sends us back to the Stone Age or something.”

True, that didn’t seem like a very desirable outcome. On the other hand, it could be that Jeremiah would be able to offer them some insights into how the thing worked and how they might be able to harness its powers to send them back to the future…either his, or Devynn’s.

Right then, it didn’t seem to matter so much, as long as they were together and not in 1884.

“What’s the future like?” he asked abruptly, and she smiled.

“That’s kind of a big topic.”

Probably true, and yet, although she’d hinted at how much Flagstaff had expanded over the years and a few other things, she’d been notably reticent about providing too many concrete details.

Out of fear that whatever she told him might change the future somehow?

He supposed that was possible, but if there was even a small chance that he might end up in her time, he thought it was probably a good idea to know something about where he was going.

“Well, start with the little things.”

She smiled, and reached out so she could take his hand in hers. “It’s probably the big things that are easier to talk about,” she said. “One thing I’ve learned from traveling to the past is that people are pretty much people no matter what the year is. They might dress differently or talk a little differently, but what’s inside doesn’t seem to change all that much.” A pause, and then she went on, “But yes, there are a lot of things that have changed quite a bit. Our cars mostly run on batteries that we charge when we park them in the garage, and mostly they’re self-driving — ”

“‘Self-driving’?” he interrupted, not sure he’d heard her correctly. “You mean a person isn’t driving them?”

“Right,” she replied, then let go of his hand. She smiled as she did so, however, signaling that she hadn’t cut off the contact because she disliked it, but only because it might have seemed odd to keep holding hands as they continued the conversation. “I mean, you can drive manually if you want to, although in certain places, like on the interstate, it’s required to let the car do it for you.”

His brain boggled at the thought of a vehicle sailing down the road with no one behind the wheel. It must feel like being driven by a ghost. “How does that even work?”

“All the cars in my time have computers installed in them,” she said, and went on, “I guess you could call it kind of an artificial brain. Anyway, they think really fast and can do millions — maybe billions — of calculations per second. So itcan see what’s going on while it’s driving and react to the world around it. We have computers do all sorts of things for us.”

“Does that mean you don’t have to work?” he asked, wondering what such a world would be like, when these machines called computers did everything for you.

She grinned. “Oh, we work. I was working at the store when I fell into the past, remember? There are a lot of jobs you would never have heard of because they involve working with computers. But we still have teachers and doctors and engineers and scientists — and miners, I suppose, although we have machinery to do a lot of that now, making it much safer than it used to be.”

Yes, that could only be a good thing. Seth was proud of the work he’d done at the mine, and he knew the United Verde was a tight operation and fairly safe as such things went, but they lost people from time to time no matter how careful they were.

To have machinery go in and do the truly dangerous tasks could only be a good thing.

“And almost everyone in the United States has central air conditioning and solar power,” she went on. “It’s a much more comfortable time to be living in.”

Since Seth didn’t even have a ceiling fan in his bungalow, he could only imagine what it must be like to have the wonder of air conditioning keeping you cool on those long, hot summer days. Even just a few years ago, he’d thought of such inventions as something out of one of the science fiction magazines and books he used to get as hand-me-downs from his cousin Freddie, but then another cousin had gone to Phoenix to conduct some business with the de la Paz clan and had come back telling stories of how one of the movie theaters there had real refrigerated air to keep its patrons cool while they were watching the latest Clara Bow film.

“Things here must feel very primitive to you,” he said, wondering if Devynn sometimes must feel like an anthropologist studying some long-forgotten tribe on an isolated Pacific island.

She waved a deprecating hand. “Oh, it’s not that bad. I’ll admit that 1926 was easier to handle, because you had a few more creature comforts by then.” Pausing, she put a hand to her waist. “Honestly, though, the worst thing about 1884 is these damn corsets. I’d be happy to get back to your time just to be able to wear something comfortable again.”

He’d also be glad to be there, for a variety of reasons. Still, what she’d told him of the future seemed tantalizing, a place where many discomforts had been dispensed with so people could focus on more important matters.

Self-driving cars? Solar power?

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