Samantha and I got here yesterday, Dan meeting us at the airport in Indianapolis, and we drove to Belton, following the same route Rich did when he made the drive that started this whole thing. Much like Rich described the weather during his trip, yesterday was beautiful. Sunny, in the 70s and only a few innocuous clouds. Samantha hadn’t been in Indiana since she was a baby, and so she had no memory of it. So different from California, though she usually laughed about the “hicks” and “hoosiers” who live in Indiana, she was clearly impressed by the fields, the beautiful green and yellow corn fields we passed as we sped along Highway 36. It was an adventure for her, made even more exciting by the thought that she’d get to see her Daddy, and not 70 years old this time, but probably looking the same as when he vanished in December.
I was excited too, if a little uneasy about what Rich was going to try and convince me to do. I hadn’t a clue what it was, but was somewhat comforted in that he was emphatic about what he wanted us to do, but not desperate. Desperation I would have interpreted to be his trying to undo something that had happened. I’m not sure it makes any sense to someone who hasn’t been through this before, but his confidence implied to me that what he wanted to happen, had happened in his timeline. And speaking of timelines, I’ve been reading a lot about time travel in the past few months, working hard to grasp the physics of the phenomenon, and fit the whole thing into what’s happening to us. I’m not at all sure that what Rich knows to have happened will happen in this timeline, but it’s possible.
We’re clear than Rich has traveled in time via two different methods, both in body and in, what I would suppose you would call consciousness or even spirit. He lived almost 15 years in his past when his consciousness traveled to 1976 immediately after the accident. Then, in December of last year, he disappeared from San Diego and, as he expected, traveled to 1933. If all goes as we think it will, Rich will travel from 1936 to now, here in Belton.
Dan was very excited to show us the house. It’s beautiful, from the rustic-looking sign at the gravel driveway gate that says “Mobius Manor,” to the elegantly simple, finished interior. Samantha and I got the grand tour, with Dan pointing out all the subtle, fine points of the house’s construction. He did a wonderful job.
Samantha though, was a little reserved, and I can tell that her intuition is saying the same thing as mine, that Rich is going to insist that we move here. Clearly, Dan built this house for us. If it’s for Rich’s return, that’s one thing, but if he’s going to ask us to live here without him because of something he has learned, found or figured out in his three years in the 1930s, that’s going to be difficult.
As he says in this post, Dan believes Rich has learned something in the future that has convinced him to shelter us all here, and that he’ll be able to control his time traveling and stay with us. Maybe.
Whatever the case, we’ll all have an answer to those questions in a couple days.
