Written in Time by Jerry Ahern Page A

thought occurred to him. On the off chance that this time-travel thing actually did take place—which was thoroughly stupid even to consider— there might be other data from the past that could prove useful as well.  
    Despite his youth, he had been working for several years, with his parents’ help, passing himself off at times as older than he was. Although he’d worked in plumbing and landscaping, and had learned to drive a tractor before driving a car, sales had always been it for him. At seventeen he was the youngest assistant manager in his current company’s history, while still a full-time student.  
    If this time transfer thing really should take place, then there was ample reason to assume that, however unlikely it seemed, they were to have a retail store, as indicated in the original photograph. According to the data his father had gleaned from this Arthur Beach jerk, the store proved quite successful and innovative in its marketing approach.  
    Clearly, his father would have had little to do with that sort of achievement. His father would be packing his six-gun, wearing his cowboy hat and living some sort of Western gunslinger/gentleman rancher fantasy. His mother would groove on vegetable gardening, cooking, raising cuddly farm animals, all the things she would have normally done in the present if she hadn’t had to help his father make a living. And his sister—she was a very nice girl, but she’d probably just meet some cowboy with no interest in economics and start having babies in a few years.  
    If financial success was to be theirs, it would be his responsibility. And if he could research gemstone values from the previous century via the Internet, what was to prevent him from discovering who the movers and shakers were in this hick town in Nevada? What bank would be strongest? What locals would make good credit risks? Whose financial dealings would prove disastrous?  
    What products—goods and services—would become popular, with high consumer demand in the years following the supposed transition into the past? How would the overall national economy be doing? What companies, in which stock shares or ownership interests could be obtained, were destined to grow and prosper? Which would fail?  
    If he could enter the past armed with information from the objective future and a thorough knowledge of financial trends in the past—granted, he was only using a computer at a high school library, and there was, perhaps, little time remaining—he could position his family to accumulate true wealth and the capability with which to manipulate businesses in such a fashion as to increase this wealth almost exponentially.  
    If this time-travel thing actually did take place, he would be prepared with forward credit checks, market trends and everything else he could find.  
    Elizabeth slid open the mirrored doors of her closet. If the time-transfer really happened, everything in her closet would be useless to her.  
    In the summertime, instead of shorts and a T-shirt, she would be in long dresses. In the fall, as opposed to pants and nice tops, she would be in long dresses. In the wintertime, long dresses again. In the spring, long dresses. There would be no need for softball uniforms, tennis skirts, bathing suits—just long dresses and, perhaps for variety, scratchy, high-necked blouses and long skirts. Not to mention the world’s supply of useless underwear and tightly laced corsets, which helped to induce fainting.  
    She was to enter her sophomore year, would be old enough to drive in just a little over six months—drive a wagon. “Shit,” Elizabeth said under her breath.  
    A final adjustment to the strain insulator for the primary cable, and Jane Rogers was ready to tweak the anode plate’s alignment with the control grid.  
    At seventy-three years old, prudence had cautioned her to be slightly more cautious in movement and diet, but these were her only concessions to age. Her mind, as she