The Time Fetch Read Online Free PDF Page B

with mortification. He would have to be very careful to make sure they never met.
    His thoughts went back to time. Would everything just collapse if there were no time? Edward’s guess was that time was just another illusion like the illusion that things around us were solid. The past, after all, had already vanished and the future didn’t exist yet. As for the present, how could you ever get hold of that, either? By the time you had the thought, “here is the present,” that moment was already gone. Wasn’t time another one of those things people invented just to get them through the day? Something that depended completely upon your point of view? What did fruit flies feel about living only ten days, he wondered? And what about rocks? Did a million years feel like a short time to a rock? If you were a rock—
    It wasn’t until that moment that he remembered. How could he have forgotten? His stone. He started to get up out of his chair, then wondered what he thought he was doing. Really. It was only an old rock and the science room was all the way up on the third floor. Way too much physical exertion. He sat back down. He tried to put it out of his mind.
    The thought of the stone kept coming back to him.
    Somehow he didn’t like the idea of anybody else picking it up. The stone pulled at him. At last he found himself rising from his seat and heading toward the stairway.
    When he got to the science room it was empty. Someone had swept up the glass and put a large sheet of cardboard over the broken window. The air was chilly, but the wind was gone.
    He searched the floor. He searched the desks. He searched among the shelves and jars and boxes and terrariums that were Mr. Ross’s pride and joy.
    The stone was nowhere to be found.
    At lunch Edward spotted an empty seat over by a couple of guys he knew. They were playing chess and they were so totally in another dimension, they probably wouldn’t even look up.
    The cafeteria was a minefield, but Edward’s shield of invisibility was coming along well. Most people barely noticed him because they assumed that nobody was home. Which was exactly as he wanted it. He had a rich and busy interior life and he liked to keep it interruption-free.
    As he headed toward the empty seat, Edward had to pass by two girls giggling and carefully dividing up a Twinkie with a plastic knife. Happily, they ignored him.
    But then, just as he sat down, someone made a loud farting sound.
    “Oh, that Dweebo, what a bean machine.”
    The person was attempting to change her voice, but it was a low, sandpapery voice that was impossible to disguise. Edward would have recognized it anywhere.
    The two girls sawing at the Twinkie looked up and stared at him and burst into loud laughter. The two guys playing chess paused. They gazed at him curiously, then decided he was just some sort of temporary hologram projection or something. They returned to their playing.
    Edward sat down. He pulled out the cheese and pickle sandwich on rye his aunt had made him. His favorite. She made the bread herself, too. He took a large bite and considered which entertainment to choose.
    He could play the Change One Variable game. That was where you tried to imagine what would happen to the world if you changed just one small thing—like, what if people had three eyes instead of two? Or, what if there were eight days in the week, instead of seven?
    Or he could work on one of his inventions. He had a lot of invention ideas he was always tossing around in his head, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood for that amount of effort.
    No. What he settled on was the game he called Imagine Different Ways to Make Feenix Suffer.
    That was a reliable old favorite.
    The first thing he did was have her trip and fall down the stairs. The second thing he did was have her deliver an English report without knowing that she had a piece of spinach stuck between her front teeth. The third thing he did was tie her to a stake and pile up lots of wood