"Okay, boys, I have to admit that I've been wondering what it was you wanted to talk to us about all day," their grandfather announced as they sat at the dinner table. The plates and silverware had been cleared off and Curtis had been ushered outside for the meeting so it was just the four of them.

"This isn't going to be the same level of crazy as what we told you before but it's still crazy," Zack said. "The good kind of crazy, though, I guess."

"Whenever you're ready." Their grandmother said and settled back in her chair.

Cody opened his mouth to speak but his brother beat him to it. "How much do you hate your job, Grandpa Tom?" Cody imagined his well-prepared speech spreading its wings and flying out the nearest window. He leaned back to let Zack talk and add in the relevant facts and numbers when his brother needed them like he'd done many times before.

"Well, it's not as bad as laying bricks in the middle of the summer but there's days where I wouldn't be too upset if I never set foot in there again."

"What if we told you that you didn't have to?" Zack looked to Cody and he nodded. Zack definitely had a way of cutting right to the heart of matters, he decided.

"I'd tell you that you must be smoking some of the good stuff we had in Vietnam and I want some of it unless you found a winning lottery ticket." Cody caught his grandmother's eyes narrow at the mention of drugs but she didn't say anything.

"We kind of did," Zack told him as he picked up Cody's backpack from Curtis' empty chair and set it in his lap. He pulled out Arwin's laptop and handed it to his brother and dug a little deeper until he found the folder with the majority of the the money they'd taken from Arwin's house. He set that on the table and slid it across to his grandfather. "Open it."

"What's in- oh wow!" He pulled the flap open and tapped the folder on the table until the stacks of rubber-banded bills started falling out.

"Boys," their grandmother started once she found her voice, "where did this come from?"

"Arwin," Zack replied simply.

"How much is here?" Tom asked as he picked up one of the stacks and looked at it with disbelief. His mind could do the easy math but it refused to believe his eyes.

"Just a hair under eight thousand dollars." He and Cody had argued for nearly half an hour during the afternoon over how much their share of Arwin's haul was going to be and how much they'd hand over to their grandparents. Cody had begrudgingly allowed Zack to take a larger share under the condition that they'd turn it all over if they couldn't get home.

"Eight thousand dollars?" Tom parroted.

"Yep, and that's chump change compared to what's in here," Zack smiled and patted the laptop's case. "Go ahead, Cody, you can tell them the next part."

Cody had turned the laptop on while Zack talked and had the folders pulled up on the screen. "As far as we can tell, Arwin didn't have a job here so he made most of his money here from gambling on sports," Cody said and couldn't miss his grandfather's chuckle. "Trust me on this. Even Arwin couldn't mess up too badly if he had all the scores in front of him." He turned the laptop toward his grandparents and showed them the screen. Cody leaned forward and clicked a few times and showed off what one of the folders contained. He wasn't sure if Grandpa Tom's whistle of amazement was for the scores or a computer that only weighed a few pounds but it didn't matter. "He could have organized it better but every major pro sport and college basketball and football game for the next twenty five years are in here."

"That's...unbelievable," their grandfather said.

"See why I said you you wouldn't have to go back to work ever again?" Zack asked.

"I do now. It's all in there?"

Zack nodded. "All that and maybe more. Cody hasn't really dug through the computer much so there could be other things in there as well."

"I found a list of results for the Kentucky Derby and some other horse races," Cody announced. He'd spent about an hour rooting through the laptop during the afternoon on the hunch that there were other important files hidden inside and hadn't been disappointed. "I'm not entirely sure what an exacta or the tri-something are but they were in there, too."

"Amazing," Tom said. "It's like the keys to a bank vault are sitting on our table."

"They are. The only way it could be any easier is if Arwin actually had lottery numbers," Zack told him.

"And they might still be in there," Cody added. "There's a lot I still have to sift through." Those numbers seemed like the most obvious way to get rich and he'd be surprised if they weren't in the computer somewhere.

"If they're in there, Cody'll find it," Zack said and patted his brother's shoulder.

"Hopefully I won't find anything like I found on yours," Cody mumbled and saw Zack turn nine shades of red out of the corner of his eye. "Anyway, that's part one of what we wanted to talk to you about."

"There's more?" their grandmother asked.

"Yep, that's the easy part. The money on the table is like an appetizer. What's next is the main course. How much do you know about the stock market?" Cody sat back and folded his hands in front of himself as he looked between his grandparents.

He felt a little bad for excluding his father from their talk but Curtis didn't seem to mind once they stepped out into the back yard when they were finished. "You guys get everything all figured out?" he asked from one of the patio chairs once the door closed behind the twins. He'd been picking at his guitar and set it across his lap expectantly.

"A lot of things," Cody nodded.

"It was pretty boring, really," Zack added as he pulled up a chair beside Curtis. Cody had made him swear to not mention the details but he didn't see the point. Curtis already knew their biggest secret and as far as he was concerned, that was a thousand times bigger than some money. He'd agreed since it wasn't something worth arguing over. Curtis would find out eventually. "I bet you'll be going to the Derby next year, though."

"Really? We've lived here forever and never gone and the track is only like twenty minutes away."

"We've never been, either. It looks like 1987 will be a year of firsts for all of us," Zack told his young father as he took the guitar and worked through some simple chords.

"It may be," Cody said and both boys looked at him.

"Wait, does that mean you guys aren't going home?"

"It might," Cody shrugged and took one of the other empty chairs.

"Oh really?" Curtis asked softly, much more subdued than he'd been seconds ago. Even Zack was a little surprised and let the pick slip from between his fingers. He'd been joking when he made the comment about the next year.

Cody hadn't planned on having this talk with Zack quite yet, and hadn't planned on having Curtis around for it at all, but it had slipped out before he could think to stop it. "Maybe, yeah," he sighed.

"You aren't messing around are you, Cody?"

Cody shook his head at his brother. "I wish I was. I worked on the box while you two were out playing ball this morning and again after I got back from the store and again before we talked about what we talked about, Zack. I've taken the thing completely apart and put it back together five times now and I can't make it do anything. I guess I'm just too stupid to figure out what's wrong with it." He flattened his palms on the table to quell the urge to smash his fists against the glass.

"You aren't stupid, Cody. It might just be actually broken and there isn't anything you can do to fix it."

"Maybe." Cody agreed even though he was still sure he was simply overlooking some minor thing.

"You're not stupid," Zack repeated. "Trust me."

"I can't make it work, Zack."

"That doesn't make you stupid. Do you know how many people have made a working time machine? One."

"Yeah, but-" Cody stuttered before Zack cut him off.

"No buts."

"Fine..."

"Good. Now that that's settled, what do you want to do?" Zack had gazed skyward and noticed they still had a few hours before it started getting dark.

"We could walk up to the gas station and get some cokes and maybe some candy. I've still got a couple of bucks left over from my birthday money," Curtis suggested after a short moment of pondering.

Zack shrugged. "That's a better idea than anything I came up with. You in, Cody?"

Cody drew a quick mental map from the Martin house to the gas station. It wasn't that far, maybe fifteen minutes each way. "I guess. Will your mom let you go up there?"

"Probably if you two are with me. Should I go ask?" Curtis all but scrambled out of his chair once they gave him the go-ahead.

The twins took a little longer getting up and Zack could see that Cody still wasn't happy with his revelation. "Look," he said as he put a hand on his brother's shoulder and slowed him, "If we can't go home and you've tried your best, it's not your fault. You understand that, right? Arwin is an idiot genius who probably spent years trying to build the dumb thing in the first place. You've been messing with it for what? A week?"

"Somewhere around there, yeah. But-"

"I thought I said no buts a minute ago," Zack interrupted again. "We're thirteen. Thirteen. He's been inventing things longer than we've been alive."

"It's just-Ouch!" Cody yelped as Zack pinched the back of his arm.

"No buts."

Cody cupped his arm. "Okay, okay, jeez."

"Good. Now that that's settled, let's go get caffeinated."

"You do realize that bedtime isn't all that far away, right?" Cody asked as they stood in the middle of the patio.

"It's summer. We're supposed to stay up late. You're buying the drinks and the snacks, by the way."

"I'm buying? You're the one with over a grand stuffed in a rolled up sock in the back of Curtis' closet."

"You're not exactly broke yourself, pal. Dad's closet is a million times worse than mine's ever been and I don't feel like digging it out of that dump right now. I'll pay the next time we go to the pool. Deal?"

"Do you promise you won't conveniently forget you wallet?"

"Cody, I am offended!" Zack said as he threw a forearm across his eyes like a starlet from one of those old black and white movies his mother liked to watch on Saturday afternoons. He quickly lowered it to cover the grin he couldn't stop from forming. "Why would you ever think I'd do something like that?"

Cody rolled his eyes. "Because I've lived with you for more than three days? Now come on. Curtis is waiting for us." He pointed to the patio door. Their father was standing just inside with his hands on his narrow hips and an expectant look on his face.

"Give him another foot and a half and about a hundred and twenty pounds and that's the exact same look he always gives us when he's waiting on us back home."

"You, Zack. That's the look he gives you when he's waiting for you," Cody laughed. "It's pretty close to the one I give you when we're supposed to be leaving for school and you're still messing around."

"You aren't allowed to mention school during summer vacation, Cody, but I'll let it slide this time since you're buying the drinks. C'mon."

"So how are we going to do this?" Martha asked once the boys were all squared away for the night. It was a few minutes after midnight and they were sitting in the living room with Johnny Carson playing quietly on the television. He'd been nursing a beer since midway through the late news and she sat down beside him with a new one for him and one of her own.

"Very, very carefully," Tom answered.

"Tom..."

"I know, I know. First things first, one of my old army buddies is a lawyer now and he does quite a bit of family law stuff. If it turns out that Cody and Zack can't go home, I'll go to him and tell him that I had a drunken one night stand with some girl when I first got back to the States and she just dropped a set of twins off on our doorstep all these years later. Their age is close enough to make it work and he'll help us get them in the system."

"It can't be that easy."

"Oh, I'm sure it's not but I'll talk to him and we'll see what happens from there. It's all we can do."

"How long should we wait?"

"That's one of the things I've been thinking about all day. We can't wait toolong but I don't think we should act too fast, either. It wouldn't look good if the kids we were trying to get into the system suddenly disappeared, right? Maybe a month. The first of August at the absolute most."

"That's about where I'm at as well. That'll still give us a little over a month to get them enrolled in school."

"Middle school, right? I don't think I'm ready to have kids in high school yet," Tom said with a grin.

"Cody said they were a few months into the seventh grade back home when we were shopping today so I assume they'd go into seventh here as well. Of course that means we'll have three boys in high school at the same time eventually."

Tom groaned and finished his old beer before popping the new one. "I know how much I ate when I was that age. With three bottomless pits we might as well just move into the back room at Kroger."

"That would solve the problem of all three of them sleeping in Curtis' room."

"I've been thinking about that, too. His room is barely big enough for just him now and it'll be a smelly sardine tin with them all in it."

"We're going to need a bigger house," she told him.

"I know, dear. I was going to see Walt tomorrow about starting to work some overtime out on the factory floor again like I used to but I might not have to with everything Cody and Zack told us tonight."

"That all just sounds too good to be true."

"Well, like Cody said, some things may change since they're here or were never meant to be in the first place but we won't know unless we try. And we'd be damn fools if we didn't try."

"So what do we do first on that end?"

"I guess that depends on exactly how risky do you want to be. We could go out to Vegas and drop some serious money betting on whoever wins the next Superbowl or we could talk to someone about putting the money in the stocks Cody mentioned."

"Whatever we do, we can't just throw it away, Tom."

"We won't. I really think we should take a chunk of it and put it in the bank just in case the future does turn out to be completely different here. Of course if Cody does happen to find the Powerball numbers in that computer and they're right it won't matter at all."

"What would we do with millions of dollars?" Martha asked as she scratched a mosquito bite on her ankle.

"Anything we wanted. Buy a nice, big house. Send the kids to any school they want. Travel. Maybe find a way to throw some money around to get some of the stuff the boys talk about from the future to happen sooner."

Martha grinned. "It's funny you should say that because I overheard Zack earlier tonight talking about how he's determined to bring the longer shorts they wear in their time into style here now one way or the other."

"Well, I'd prefer that innernet thing they were talking about but I guess I could settle for having shorts that don't wedge themselves in my crack if I squat down."

"I'd settle for that, too," she smirked and playfully tugged at the hem of his shorts.