Free Written in Time by Jerry Ahern Page B

would be dead when his father was only five years old.  
    As Ellen Naile had predicted, FedEx shipments to their part of Northeast Georgia were running late because of the particularly violent thunderstorms the previous evening. Arrivals at Hartsfield were delayed.  
    Their check—a very nice big one with lots of lovely zeros on the left side of the decimal point—arrived at precisely five minutes after two, meaning that to deposit it before Monday morning would be an exercise in futility.  
    Ellen sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, the supermarket kind; she rarely bought any of the fancier variations because sometimes, when checks were late, the saving of a few pennies here and there made a difference.  
    The photo taken in 1903 was still on the kitchen table. She looked at it, realizing the irony represented by the photo and the house in which she sat while viewing it. Their house was built in 1903, perhaps under construction at the very time the photo—which hadn’t yet been taken, but had been taken—was being taken.  
    Jack was right (something which Ellen certainly would not admit to him); just thinking about the anomalies of time travel was enough to give anyone a headache.  
    “Headache,” Ellen murmured aloud, just as Jack entered the kitchen.  
    “You have a headache, kid?”  
    “No, but I was just thinking. Let’s say we do wind up moving to Nevada, but almost a hundred years ago. We’d be reduced to boiling down bark from a willow tree in order to get aspirin to knock out a headache.”  
    “On the plus side, think of all the money we’d make if we preinvented liquid Tylenol!”  
    “I’m serious, Jack.”  
    Jack sat down, lit a cigarette; he had cut down quite a bit from his usual daily consumption. “We really do have to start to plan,” Jack said.  
    “So, we’re going to figure out some way to get a washer and dryer back to the past with us?”  
    “I don’t think we can manage that,” Jack told her, smiling, running a hand back through his hair. It was mostly still brown, and no less full than when they’d been in high school. “But it appears as though we arrived in Nevada with some items we had today. Even with knowledge of the future, we would have needed money.”  
    “That would go along with the gun-on-the-hip thing?” Ellen suggested.  
    “No, silly. It meant that they brought it with them—the money. And the wagon story could have been a ruse.”  
    “A ruse?”  
    “A ruse,” Jack repeated, so that the word sounded as if it had been said by Peter Sellers in the persona of his dim bulb French police inspector. Jack persisted with the accent—not doing such a bad job, really—as he continued. “It would be, I think, trés easy to ‘ave the—‘ow you say thees word?—wag-on?, thees wag-on ‘idden away, no?”  
    “Shut up and be serious, Jack.”  
    “Je suis ‘Jaques,’ mon cher—” Ellen hit Jack on the top of the head with her open palm—not hard—and he shook his head and wiggled his lips like some sort of cartoon character struck by a falling anvil. “Thanks. I’m better now.”  
    “You’re not thinking that somehow we’d be able to take the Suburban back in time with us?”  
    “I can’t say for sure, but if we all get sucked back in time together and we all stay with the Suburban, there’s a chance, right? We take out the rear seat and leave it. I take the Suburban over to the Chevy dealer and get them to put a roof rack on it and add an auxiliary gas tank. We get four additional tires—”  
    “Those ones from Sam’s Club have held up real well.”  
    “Right. Get four new wheels—we wouldn’t be able to remount tires. If you did the research and got Lizzie to help you, we could get everything we needed to know on microfiche. Hell, we could probably get Encyclopedia Britannica that way. Medical and dental info, and the stuff we’d need for basic field surgery, dental care, like that. Learn how to