Caught (Missing) Read Online Free PDF Page B

shut behind the couple.
    “Are you crazy? No!” Jonah said. “We should look at those papers!”

EIGHT
    They were in German.
    “What? No!” Katherine protested, as she and Jonah peered down at the papers scattered across the table. “Aren’t our translation vaccines still working?”
    Way back before one of their early trips through time—to 1485—JB had made it so they could understand other languages on their travels. So far Jonah and Katherine had been able to understand older versions of English in 1485 and 1611, Algonquin in 1600, and an Inuit language in 1611.
    “We could understand Albert and his wife, and I’m pretty sure they were speaking German,” Jonah said, though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d figured that out. “Maybe it only works on spoken language, not written. Here.” He picked up one of the pages at random and handed it to Katherine. “Read it out loud.”
    “Supposing ze something, something, something, weird zigzagging figure, thingy that’s kind of like an S, then—,” Katherine began.
    Jonah sighed.
    “I don’t think the problem is that we don’t understand German,” Jonah said. “I think it’s that we don’t understand enough physics. I mean, I’m barely surviving seventh-grade science. And these are Albert Einstein’s thoughts.”
    “Yeah, his wrong thoughts,” Katherine grumbled, starting to lower the paper toward the table again. “His thoughts that are going to ruin everything, because he found out—”
    She stopped suddenly, the paper frozen in her hand.
    “What’s wrong?” Jonah whispered.
    “The tracer,” Katherine whispered back in a panicky voice. “The paper left a tracer!”
    She was right. A ghostly, almost see-through page lay atop the other papers on the table.
    “Well, duh,” Jonah said. “You’re a time traveler. You changed something in time when you picked up the paper. So the tracer’s there to show where the paper belongs, where it would have been if you hadn’t disturbed it.”
    “But Albert Einstein’s thinking about the wrong things,” Katherine said. “These are the wrong papers! Time’s already disturbed!”
    Jonah looked back and forth between the paper in Katherine’s hand and the tracer version on the table.
    “It’s not the same paper,” he said slowly. “See, the tracer page has that squiggly sign at the top of it, and then a triangle—and look, all the numbers are different.”
    “Let’s look at all the papers,” Katherine suggested.
    One by one, they lifted all the pages on the table and looked at the tracer versions that remained.
    Every single paper was totally different from its tracer.
    And every single paper was totally indecipherable to Jonah and Katherine.
    “This is impossible,” Katherine complained, as they sagged down into the wooden chairs. “We know it’s all wrong, but we don’t know what any of it means. Could these different numbers”—she gestured at the piles of papers strewn across the table—“be the reason all of time froze back home? Is Albert Einstein that important?”
    “I guess,” Jonah said. “He might be.”
    “What was he supposed to be thinking about in the early nineteen hundreds?” Katherine asked.
    “I don’t know,” Jonah said. “Relativity? E equals MC squared? Quantum . . . uh, quantum physics?”
    “What does any of that mean ?” Katherine asked.
    “You got me,” Jonah said.
    Really, when he thought about Albert Einstein, hemostly thought about things that didn’t have much to do with science. A poster hung in the guidance office at school that showed the old-man Albert Einstein riding a bicycle. The caption on the poster said: “Try new things! You might discover a new talent!” And wasn’t there some famous picture of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera? Weren’t there stories about how, when he was an old man, he’d help neighborhood kids with their math homework if they brought him brownies?
    What could Jonah and