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showing
up with different squads of men. Not soldiers, though there always
seemed to be a couple of those around to “guard” the place. And
keep an eye on Dad and me.
    These new guys, Mr. Howe would introduce as
“fellow scientists.” When it became clear they were trying to set
up a kind of WOMPER reaction in the time sphere, Dad, who’d been
successfully ignoring them the whole time, finally marched into the
tasting room.
    “I’ll do it.”
    We all looked at him.
    “I’ll do it,” Dad said again. “You’ll just
kill everybody.”
    Mr. Howe smiled.
    As Dad worked, he talked. “Don’t you worry
about what the neighbors might think out here?”
    “Don’t worry,” Mr. Howe said. “We bought up
every house and ranch in a two-mile radius. Even took over that old
park and closed it down.” Which meant Wolf House and all the trails
around it.
    Dad just shook his head.
    “It was national security, Sandusky. National security . We have to keep
everybody safe.”
    “We didn’t keep
Margarite safe.”
    Safety was on Dad’s mind, especially as he
got close to creating the WOMPER reaction, so he agreed to let one
of Mr. Howe’s men take me down to San Francisco for a day while he
brought the local spacetime field into a state of high
excitement.
    It worked. My dad didn’t blow up the
neighborhood. In fact, it worked so well that when I got back,
something had already happened, causing everyone to stand around
and just stare at the machine. The greenish glow of the time sphere
was making their faces look even more pale than they already
were.
    Everyone was staring at something on the
floor. Some kind of bundled paper.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “The time sphere,” my dad said. But it just
sat there humming away, a perfectly normal time sphere from the
looks of it.
    “What?”
    “It’s a newspaper from 1937,” Mr. Howe said.
He was kneeling close to it, trying not to touch the little field
of spacetime that Dad had created. “It was like it was just spit
out from the past. It just appeared here.”
    “Like it was tossed through a hole,” my dad
added. “This time, there wasn’t any explosion.”
    “Well, that’s a good thing, right? I mean,
you’re still here.”
    Dad shook his head slowly. “This might be
worse. We might’ve done something to the time stream. Things keep
popping through.”
    “Like what?”
    Dad was pointing. “That showed up right after
the newspaper. It’s an old —”
    “Cool!”
    I recognized the logo. I’d just seen one in a
sports museum down in the city: the San Francisco Seals. I was
considering making up a new Barnstormer squad called the Seals.
    My first thought was, Wow,
if this was from the thirties, then maybe this was Joe DiMaggio’s
actual baseball cap from when he was a Seal! Without
thinking about it, I reached in to take a closer look — “Eli, no!”
— violating every rule my dad had ever given me about being near
the generator.
    My hand went through the charged field to
clutch the cap, and I could feel the jolt run up my arm. My whole
body felt like Play-Doh being mashed around.
    Somebody was screaming my name, and I think I
screamed back, right before everything went black. And then
exploded into color.
    The colors stayed. But now I was sitting next
to a dinosaur.
     
     
     
    Chapter Six
    Clyne: Homework
    Final Class Project: 10,271
S.E.
     
    Find an alternate Earth to visit and report
on Saurian culture there. Summarize your experience, and be sure to
answer the questions below. Remember, you will get history, social
studies, and science credits for this project, and the final score
will help determine your herd placement when you leave middle
school for the upper grades. Good luck!
    THE QUESTIONS:
    1. Where did you
go?
    2. Were the Saurians on
the other Earth helpful?
    Why or why not?
    3. How was this culture
different from your own?
    Describe.
    EXTRA CREDIT:
    4. Would you recommend
this reality to other students?
     
    1. Where did