“The people you work for.” She switched hands and continued to shake the popper.
That made him smile a little, since for the past five years he had been in the position of calling his own shots and hiring his own people. “It’s more a matter of me being obsessed with the project I’ve been working on.”
“Which is?”
He waited a beat, then decided that the truth couldn’t hurt. In fact, he wanted to see her reaction. “Time travel.”
She laughed, but then she saw his face and cleared her throat. “You’re not joking.”
“No.” He glanced at the popper. “I think you’re burning it.”
“Oh.” She jerked it out of the flames and set it down on the hearth. “You really mean time travel, like H. G. Wells?”
“Not precisely.” He stretched out his legs so that the fire warmed the soles of his feet. “Time and space are relative—in simple terms. It’s a matter of finding the proper equations and implementing them.”
“Sure. E equals MC squared, but really, J.T., bopping around through time?” She shook her head, obviously amused. “Like Mr. Peabody and Sherman in the Wayback machine.”
“Who?”
“You obviously had a deprived childhood. It’s a cartoon, you know? And this dog scientist—”
He held up a hand, his eyes narrowed to green slits. “A dog was a scientist?”
“In the cartoon,” she said patiently. “And he had this boy, Sherman. Never mind,” she added when she saw his expression. “It’s just that they would set the dates on this big machine.”
“The Wayback.”
“Exactly. Then they would travel back, like to Nero’s Rome or Arthur’s Britain.”
“Fascinating.”
“Entertaining. It was a cartoon, J.T. You can’t really believe it.”
He sent her a slow, enigmatic smile. “Do you only believe what you can see?”
“No.” She frowned, using a hot pad to remove the lid from the popper. “I guess not.” Then she laughed and sampled the popcorn. “Maybe I do. I’m a realist. We really needed one in the family.”
“Even a realist has to accept certain possibilities.”
“I suppose.” She took another handful and decided to get into the spirit of things. “Okay. So, we’re in Mr. Peabody’s Wayback machine. Where would you go—or when, I suppose I should say? When would you go, if you really could?”
He looked at her, sitting in the firelight, laughter still in her eyes. “The possibilities are endless. What about you?”
“I wonder.” She held the beer loosely in her hand as she considered. “I imagine Libby would have a dozen places to go back to. The Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayans. Dad would probably want to see Tombstone or Dodge City. And my mother... well, she’d go where my father went, to keep an eye on him.”
He dipped into the popcorn. “I asked about you.”
“I’d go forward. I’d want to see what was coming.”
He didn’t speak, only stared into the fire.
“A hundred, maybe two hundred, years in the future. After all, you can read history books and get a pretty good idea of what things were like before. But after... It seems to me it would be much more exciting to see just what we’ve made out of things.” The idea made her laugh up at him. “Do they actually pay you to work on stuff like that? I mean, wouldn’t it make more sense to figure out how to travel across town in, say, Manhattan in under forty minutes during rush hour?”
“I’m free to choose my own projects.”
“Must be nice.” She was mellow now, relaxed and happy enough with his company. “It seems I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I’m a terrible employee,” she admitted with a sigh. “It’s something about rules and authority. I’m argumentative.”
“Really?”