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just to study his molecules and atoms, but to “rearrange”
them.
    Well, either way, I could certainly use the
company.
    Sskkaa sskkaa sskkaa…
    The noise is coming from the bathroom.
    Sskaaa sskkaaa sskkaa!
    I open the door.
    “ Aaaahhhhh!”
    I yell. My visitor yells. We surprise each
other.
    It’s not a mouse.
    “Friend Eli!”
    It’s Clyne.
    Clyne!
    “Clyne! What —? How did you get in the
bathroom? It doesn’t matter — you’re way better than a mouse!”
    He’s scrunched up under the sink, like a kid
playing hide-and-seek. His eyes widen when he sees me and he
smiles, with all those dinosaur teeth.
    “A good time to meet, friend Eli!”
    Now he’s starting to sound like Thea.
    “A good time to meet!” I tell him in return.
And with that, he rolls out from under the cabinet, and I can see
he’s in some kind of handcuffs.
    “You will pardon me if I do not wave, in the
custom of your species.”
    “Clyne, how did you get here? What have they
done to—?”
    Wheenk! Wheenk! Wheenk!
    The alarms are still ringing in the distance,
but now it sounds like more of them are going off.
    “I mean, Clyne, it’s great to see you. I’ve
just been so alone here.”
    “The waters of happiness are under your eyes,
friend Eli, and I am thus snkkkt! honored!”
    “But…what’s happening?”
    “I was hoping you could illuminate for
me.”
    “How did you get in here? Especially dressed
like that?”
    “A long tale, or a short one, depending how
much empirical evidence you require.” He holds up the shackles
around his arms. “Perhaps we can unfetter me, and I can tell you
more. And then” — Clyne brightens up, as if all the world’s
problems were only small ones — “we can go find Thea and all become
outlaws together!”
     
     
     

Chapter Four
    Clyne: A Gerk -drive in
Winter
    February 2020 C.E.
     
    Now that I had allowed myself to be taken
captive, was I still considered an outlaw? And was it perhaps true
that when time travel is outlawed, only outlaws would time
travel?
    I pondered these questions whenever my
interrogators asked me what I did to “hijack history,” or what I’d
done “to the children,” by which I infer they mean my good friends
Eli and Thea.
    “What precisely are you using time travel for ?” they asked me, again and again.
    “Homework, originally.”
    They didn’t like that answer, glare-stamping
me with their eyes and immediately conferring with each other.
    “But by now,” I continued, “I expect I have
registered several ‘incompletes’ on my transcripts.”
    I was hoping this information might help them
realize I have suffered, too, from my unexpected lateral detour to
Earth Orange, but I was only met with more glare-stamps.
    “We will find out who you really are, Mr.
‘Klein’.” It was the one called Thirty speaking to me. I greeted
her with “A good time to meet!” since I had last seen her when Thea
rescued me from the holding zoo, where Thirty initially asked me
similar questions, only to be similarly disappointed with my
answers.
    But perhaps she didn’t want to be reminded of
that particular parting of company.
    As I had then, I was trying to fully grasp
the apprehension these mammals have toward Saurians. Perhaps it has
to do with the buried collective fears stemming from the “dragons”
of King Arthur and Merlin’s era, who were driven to extinction.
    It may have to do with the fact that still
being such a young species, the Homo sapiens mammals of
Eli’s earth struggle with the idea that Saurians existed for
millions of years before they did, keeping the planet, I might add,
in basic equilibrium while they did so. Except for events like the
Great Sky Hammer, a nearly mythical meteor event on Saurius Prime
that apparently actually occurred here on Earth Orange, and drove
most of those early Saurians — except for the few dragon forebears
that were to survive — into extinction, as well.
    I tried to explain some of this to my
captors, along