Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) by Jennette Marie Powell Page B

lush appointments of the entryway. Scratches marred the table and credenza along the side wall. The desk lamp on the latter did little to illuminate the windowless room.
    He took a chair, hoping the woman would return soon. There wasn’t so much as a year-old copy of People to read. Above the credenza hung a silver relief image of the planet Saturn, flanked by three stars. Above it, a banner proclaimed Learn—Observe—Preserve.
    Across the room, an institutional wall clock broke the expanse of wall where the bricked-in windows were, and beside it hung a plain calendar turned to March of the current year. The only other decoration in the room was a trio of framed, old-fashioned photographs on the wall opposite the credenza. In one, a stolid gentleman in a derby hat handed a paper to a white-haired, black man in similar attire. The middle photo showed the exterior of the house, before the two second story windows had been bricked over. In the third, two men posed in front of a frame building with “Goodwin’s Smoke Shop - 140 Harrison Street” painted on the plate glass window. An antique car stood in front of it. Someone had scrawled a date in spidery, old-fashioned script across the bottom: 26 February, 1913. The little store must’ve been what was there before the Saturn Society house.
    “Hey Chad, it’s Taylor,” the woman said from down the hall, her voice loud enough Tony didn’t have to strain to hear. “I wanted to let you know that Tony Solomon just showed up. I’m going to go ahead and give him the test, so call me when you get this... bye.”
    She appeared a minute later with a sheaf of papers in hand, and sat in the chair across from Tony. “I couldn’t get hold of Chad, but I know he’ll want me to go over this stuff with you.” She slid the papers across the table, along with a pen.
    Tony picked up the top sheet. The heading read “Saturn Society,” with “Membership Application” below it. “What is this Saturn Society, anyway?” He flipped through the papers. “I’d never heard of it until Everly came up to me in the parking garage.”
    “Not surprising. We keep a low profile.”
    “What hap- who was that man who came in here a few minutes ago? Is he—”
    “Don’t worry about him.” She dismissed Tony’s question with a wave. “He’s... a ward of the Society. Nothing to concern yourself with.”
    Tony frowned at the door, then at Taylor. “I thought this was a research organization.” The more he thought about it, the less scientific the place looked.
    Taylor chewed her lower lip. “Well... sort of. That’s our public face, so we can do stuff like own property and have bank accounts.”
    “You don’t research time travel, then?”
    “We do it. As for research, we keep records and stuff, like what we see when we go into the past, what happens there. Ways we die, how we heal—”
    “You what?” He stared down at his hands. Could his sacrifice and death have been real? “You mean... I really died? This shit’s for real?”
    “As real as you and me sitting here.”
    “You can do this?”
    “Sure. Though the farthest back I’ve ever been is 1927. Way cool. I tell you, people back then knew how to party—”
    “How far back can you—can other people go?”
    “Depends on the individual. Some people can go back centuries, others only decades.” She crossed her legs, bumping one of his. “There’s a limit, of course. Something to do with the expansion of the universe—jump back too far, and the earth’s orbit will have been different enough that you’d warp into empty space. If your destination isn’t habitable, you don’t warp at all. Prevents us from warping inside of a wall or a mountain, stuff like that.”
    “Habitable” wasn’t a word Tony would use to describe the world of the ancient Mayans, though perhaps if one weren’t being sacrificed... “So you warp into the same physical location you are in the present?”
    “Exactly.”
    “What about the