Times Change Read Free

he had stayed in when he had met this Libby was situated.
    Nearly three hundred years in the future, Jacob had visited the spot and had excavated the time capsule that his brother and the woman had buried.
    Jacob had left home in the year 2255. He had traveled through time and through space to find his brother. And to take him home.
    As he walked he saw no signs of man, or of the posh resorts that would populate this area in another century or two. There was simply space, acres of it, untrampled and untouched. The sun cast blue shadows on the snow, and the trees towered, silent giants overhead.
    Despite the logic of what he had done, the months of precise calculations, the careful working of theory into fact, he found himself chilled. The enormity of what he had achieved, where he had gone, struck him. He was standing on the ground, beneath the sky, of a planet that was more foreign to him than the moon. He was filling his lungs with air. He could watch it expel in white streams. He could feel the cold on his face and his ungloved hands. He could smell the pine and taste the crisp, clear air as it blew around him.
    And he had yet to be born.
    Had it been the same for his brother? No, Jacob thought, there would have been no elation, not at first. Cal had been lost, injured, confused. He hadn’t set out to come here, but had been a victim of fate and circumstance. Then, vulnerable and alone, he had been bewitched by a woman. Expression grim, Jacob continued to hike.
    Pausing at the stream, he remembered. A little more than two years ago—and centuries in the future—he had stood here. It had been high summer, and though the stream had changed its course over time this spot had been very much the same.
    There had been grass rather than snow under his feet. But the grass would grow again, year after year, summer after summer. He had proof of that. He
was
proof of that. The stream would run fast, where now it forced its way over rock and thick islands of ice.
    A little dazed, he crouched down and took a handful of snow in his ungloved hand.
    He had been alone then, too, though there had been the steady drone of air traffic overhead and a huddle of mountain hotels only a few kilometers to the east. When he had uncovered the box his brother had buried he had sat on the grass and wondered.
    And now he stood and wondered. If he dug for it, he would come upon the same box. The box that he had left with his parents only days before. The box would exist here, beneath his feet, just as it existed in his own time. As he existed.
    If he dug it up now and carried it back to his ship, it would not be there for him to find on that high summer day in the twenty-third century. And if that was true, how could he be here, in this time, to dig it up at all?
    An interesting puzzle, Jacob mused. He left it to stew in his brain as he walked.
    He saw the cabin and was fascinated. No matter how many pictures, how many films or simulations he had seen, this was real. There were patches of snow melting slowly on the roof. The wood was still dark, aged by mere decades. On the glass of the windows, sunlight sparkled as it streamed through the high trees. Smoke—he could see it, as well as smell it—puffed from the stone chimney and into the hard blue sky.
    Amazing, he thought, and for the first time in many hours his lips curved. He felt like a child who had discovered a unique and wonderful present under the Christmas tree. It was his, for the moment, to explore, to analyze, to piece together and take apart until he understood it.
    Shifting his bag, he walked up the snow-covered path to the steps. They creaked under his weight and turned his smile into a grin.
    He didn’t bother to knock. Manners were easily lost in the haze of discovery. Pushing the door open, he stepped into the cabin.
    “Incredible. Absolutely incredible.” His quiet voice hung in the air.
    Wood, genuine and rich, gleamed around him. Stone, the kind that was chipped and dug out