A story in the round written by members of SFNovelist.com
Edited by Victory Crayne, Terry Perrine, and Keith Howington
Copyright 2009
Stim practiced another quick draw of his ion blaster and fired at the manikin target, blowing a hole in its chest at 20 yards in one second. His blaster would work in any gravity.
Carol adjusted her Time Travel suit. She was disguised as a man this time, and her chest compressor was uncomfortable. She would be Doctor Chance, working out of a traveling medicine show wagon.
General Barnes said, “Listen up. You will have four days to find the rogue time travelers and dispatch them. Each of your suits has enough charge for a maximum of four temporal OR space jumps before you need to signal us to pull you back here to 2088.”
He pointed to the temporal map on the wall. “Carol, Standard History seemed to have been altered first in 1849 at this train junction just outside of Chicago. Look for anything that does not belong in that time. Stim, things really went haywire at the United Nations Lunar Base in 2049. See if you can find who started that war and put a stop to it early.
“If you fail, you may not get to come home.” He hit the activator and they disappeared.
Carol sat on her wagon scanning the nearby junction of three railroads and a major highway. A diesel locomotive rolled by and diesel trucks traversed the highway. Nothing fit with 1849 and her disguise didn’t fit the time. Her Jensen detector beeped showing a particle emission four clicks to the southwest. Trouble! She was in the wrong time near an unknown nuclear event.
“Don’t panic. One minute at a time.”
She jumped from the wagon in time to see it incinerated by an ion blaster. The rogues were on to her. She fired her blaster wildly as she rolled into a ravine for cover.
“Damn! Missed!”
Down the ravine southwest along the railroad and under the highway bridge she ran. A sign, Fermi National Laboratories, stood by the road. Now she knew exactly where she was and why her Jensen had gone off, but how? As she emerged from under the bridge, a car pulled onto the shoulder. The Jensen announced an OR suit in the direction of the car. By the second beep, Carol had blasted the car and dived back under the bridge.
“Scratch at least one rogue,” she muttered as she viewed the incinerated vehicle. “That should give the locals some problems.”
Stim awoke clutching the back of his head, just in time to duck and avoid a flying trashcan. At lunar gravity, it described a graceful arc that telegraphed its destination, but it still probably massed 20 kilos. As he rolled out of the way, he caught a glimpse of the culprit. The man who had thrown it was an Oriental, possibly Chinese or Korean. He was dressed in a light blue jumpsuit bearing a dark blue chevron. A uniform, but Stim didn't recognize it.
"Stop!" he shouted, instinctively.
The man paused, then ran toward a door opening directly onto an airhall, a shared airlock for non-connected lunar communities. Stim recognized the community across the airhall as the German base. The man didn't have a surface suit on, so Stim figured the Oriental was going to hold his breath and make a jump across to the German base. It wasn't a great way to get around, but for the last several decades, Loonies had mastered the art of moving short distances unsuited.
Then the unthinkable happened. The Oriental turned right, blasted the door to the Outside, and ran out at full speed onto the lunar surface.
His choices were limited: slam the door to preserve the atmosphere and allow the rogue to escape, or give chase, leaving the inhabitants to fend for themselves.
The answer was simple: Luna habitats all have airtight emergency doors for just such a situation, and a loose rogue time agent could cause untold mischief if not stopped. Stim dived for the open door with a combat roll that ended in the shattered airlock.
"Stop, you son of a Barundi dog," Stim ordered, his own ion blaster coming up as he completed the roll. The sight picture had barely settled when he squeezed the firing stud.
The rogue answered with a returning ion blaster bolt, incinerating the blast lock wall where his head should have been.
Stim scrambled to his feet to pursue, his blasters second supersonic CRACK-sizzle discharge reverberating in the blast lock’s confines.
Without a suit or rebreather air supply, Stim would have only a few precious seconds, a minute at most, to get the rogue. He drew a quick breath from the air escaping through the open door behind him, then charged the shattered opening where the rogue escaped, hoping to catch a glimpse of the fleeing rogue agent.
Hearing sirens, Carol hunkered down beneath the concrete bridge, nearly overcome by the stench of stale wine and urine. Hmm, she mused. When am I? Fermi Lab? Opened in late 1960s, I think—missed by over a century.
If accidental, how did she happen to materialize right in the rogues’ line of fire? She didn’t believe in coincidence. Recall could wait.
“Hardly nothin’ left,” she heard a male voice say. “How’d it burn so fast, and where’s the body? Nine-one-one caller said it was like instant fireball and nobody got out.”
Startled by the crunch of gravel under boots, Carol stared up at a husky man wearing a wide-brim hat.
“What the hell you supposed to be?” the man asked, drawing his sidearm. “Get up. Keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”
“What’s the problem, officer?” Carol asked in her best male voice.
“Problem is you’re right by a possible crime scene dressed like Daniel Boone. You’re coming downtown.”
“Afraid I can’t do that, officer,” Carol replied. Without waiting for his reaction, she reached inside her jacket and initiated OR jump one, only imagining the cop’s expression as his bullet ricocheted off the concrete behind where she once stood.
"Whoah!"
Carol halted her stolen cracky wagon.
"Gee! Get up! Whoah!"
The two reluctant horses steered behind a huge boulder alongside the trail. It was three days hard travel since the jump to 1849, on a rail line with no right to exist. Taking a swig of water, Carol skittered down scree on the leftward slope, surveying the desolate, sagebrush-dotted landscape of northwestern Nebraska.
No Pawnee.
Chinese laborers worked a mine blocking the rail spur in the distance. Her Jensen was concealed inside a bottle labeled “Kickapoo Sagwa Indian Blood—Liver and Stomach Renovator.” The scope showed men wearing strange uniforms with blue chevrons, supervising the laborers.
These weren’t rogues.
Carol scooped some of the scattered tailings into the Jensen’s analyzer, expecting uranium, and cursed.
Moon dust! She quickly brought her neckerchief over her nose to protect her lungs from the hazardous dust, but she also lost her purchase and slipped…into three cold cadavers, forms half blasted into fundamental particles.
These were rogues.
A backwards step tripped her over another body, and Carol sagged, limp, frightened, and gasping with horror.
No training ever prepared her to look into the cold, empty eyes of her own lifeless body.
Stim swore when he saw he was facing the wrong direction. Twisting his body, he fired his blaster toward the Asian. His trajectory was off and the blast hit meters away from the rogue.
While Stim was reaching the top of his slow arc, the rogue was keeping close to the surface, propelling himself toward safety with his legs. The man reached a utility hatch and was working on it. He would be inside within moments. Stim fired again, and watched with satisfaction as the Asian man's left shoulder and part of his head vaporized. Scratch one rogue.
Using his legs to absorb the extra energy as he landed, Stim tumbled into the lunar dust. His lungs were burning from the lack of air. He'd never make it back inside in time.
He OR jumped.
A blaster charged immediately behind him. "Turn around." He recognized Carol's masculine voice and swore. How did his jump land him back on Earth in 1849?
She frowned when he turned around. "What are you doing here?"
"OR jump." He brushed moon dust off his uniform. "For some reason, it brought me here."
"I also landed here when I jumped. Must be some sort of temporal crossroads."
Stim glanced over Carol's shoulder and gasped. "Is that…"
"Yeah, it's me. Or some version of me," she said. "I checked her gear. She only made one jump. It took me two to get here."
"But how's that possible. I could understand three or more jumps. That'd make her a future you who jumped back here before the current you arrived." He paused and shook his head at the convoluted logic of it.
"I think she may be from another timeline," said Carol. "One that diverged from here just like ours did. That would explain why we all seemed to end up in this time and place." She crawled upslope until she could peek over the top at the strange mine entrance. She pointed. "It may have something to do with those guys over there."
"Who are they?"
"Not rogues," Carol said. "Some sort of military by the uniforms."
"I don't recognize the insignia," said Stim. "Looks like they're packing ion pulse rifles. Not 1849 weaponry." He glanced back at the bodies behind them. "Maybe they're from another timeline, too."
Carol gasped as one of the uniformed men turned and she saw his face for the first time. It was Stim.
Blinking in surprise, she looked back at the Stim near the mine entrance to the Stim who was crouched down beside her. Then, ducking back down, she tried to assimilate this new information.
“Stim, in previous missions what were the rogue time travelers doing?” she asked.
Stim thought for a moment and said, “Well, sometimes they went back to steal artifacts, gems, and gold.”
“Right,” countered Carol, “and other times they’d do stupid things like taking tourists back in time for money. But, while they never really meant to alter the original timeline, they sometimes did and we’d go back and fix things.”
“Yeah,” said Stim. “That’s our job.”
“Well,” said Carol, “what if this time, they really intend to alter the future? I mean our present…events downstream in future timelines.”
“But that would mean they’d wipe themselves out, wouldn’t it? Why would someone intentionally do that?” he asked.
“They wouldn’t,” she said. “Unless they thought they could create a future they could control. And for that they’d need to establish a base earlier than all the changes they’d introduce.”
Stim blinked, catching her line of reasoning. “Then this must be that base,” he said.
They both smiled.
The smiles didn’t last long.
Carol’s Jensen gave off its familiar beep. “I have a bad feeling about this.” She checked the data, then turned it off. “It’s not good, Stim. I’m getting all sorts of crazy readings. Could it have been damaged in my last jump?”
“It’s possible.” Stim checked for his own Jensen, but it wasn’t in his suit. “I must have lost mine back on the Moon when I dove through the airlock.”
“What do you want to do?” Carol checked her pulse weapon. Its energy had depleted much too quickly. She should have had enough power to last a dozen missions. Instead, the reserve light was blinking weakly. “We can’t go down there without some more firepower.”
“What about them?” Stim pointed in the direction of the bodies.
“Unless I can get close enough to make those men gag from the smell of rotting flesh, nothing left on those bodies is going to help us. Whoever killed them took everything of use.”
“By whoever, I suppose you mean me?” General Barnes slid down from the top of the slope, his boots kicking up sand and mixing it with the scant bits of moon dust that Stim had shaken off.
One Who Yawns made sure the sun was behind him as he approached the ridge. Sent north by the chief of his tribe in search of allies in their war with the Mexicans, One Who Yawns was drawn to the sounds of battle. Looking down he saw three people taking cover in an attempt not to be seen by a large group coming out of a mine.
The three were so engrossed in an animated conversation that they did not see the skimmer approaching from behind. A brilliant flash of light blinded One Who Yawns before he heard the deafening explosion. When his vision returned, the three were seen running away from the mine while the larger group was running towards a smoking crater were the skimmer had been.
A large bison herd threw a cloud of dust over One Who Yawns and he backed away from the edge of the ridge under its cover. Mounting his horse, the young Chiricahua warrior rode off to his encampment. Met by his bride, the brave soon to be known as Geronimo took water from her and thought hard about what he was going to tell his chief.
Behind a boulder and still breathing hard from the run, Carol and Stim looked at their “boss.”
“Who blew it up? Who was in it?” Stim demanded. “I didn’t see an attack.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to—”
“And who is ‘we’? Are you one of us?” Carol asked, sounding not entirely male now.
“It’s more complicated.”
Stim’s hand moved toward his blaster. “Yeah, timework always is. But you know who we are, and you know the timelines. So tell us straight—are you one of us or not?”
Barnes caught the motion. He smiled. “It’s not that I’m one of you. Your old group and the rogues are parts of the problem.”
“What?” Carol said.
“The group that you trained and spent your lives with had hijacked the timeline and you’re the result. The rogues spun off and tried to make the best of it. We’ve got to put things right, and now there’s a new wrinkle.”
Barnes looked gravely at the two. “Am I one of you? Well, let’s put it this way. You two are four of us.” He glanced back the way they had come, and the bodies left behind. “Well, three of us, now.”
“That still doesn't explain anything,” Stim growled, drawing his ion blaster and pointing it at Barnes.
“That's because you have many time streams lying side by side, but most of them are highly improbable, given the basic natural laws of the universe.” Barnes was smiling slightly, but continued talking rapidly. “Some events make little difference in the future state of a given time line but others can profoundly affect the future. Sometimes widely differing histories nudge a large number of otherwise differing timelines toward a common future condition called a temporal node. In the early days of temporal travel, the stated goal was historical research and the attempt was made to do nothing to alter the timeline. But even the presence of a researcher alters the timeline, sometimes in unpredictable ways.”
“Then it's impossible to fix the timelines?” Carol gasped.
“A major temporal node has been shattered by the actions of both the Temporal Police and the rogues. If we succeed here and on Luna, then the node will be restored and all the divergent lines will collapse back to a single most-probable line,” Barnes said.
Stim slowly lowered his blaster. “What do we need to do?”
Barnes reached into his tunic and produced a folded paper. "I've calculated five simple simultaneous tasks." He spread a temporal map before them. "Here and on Luna. As we suspected."
Carol stabbed a male disguised finger at a hole in the paper. "What happened there," she demanded.
"No longer relevant," snapped Barnes. "We got a pet mouse to some obscure artist named Disney. So he could tell stories to inspire a young scientist to dream of time machines."
"Five!" interrupted Stim. "We can't do five."
"Why not? They're simple enough. The details are in this digi-memo."
"I used two jumps to get here. So did Carol. That means we've only got four jumps left between us. We can't be in five places at once!"
"And what about the rogues? If you can figure this out, so can they. They'll be waiting to stop us." Carol wriggled uncomfortably inside her chest compressor.
Barnes looked stern. "This is no time for arguments or excuses," he grated. "These are your orders. Aaagh!" An arrow had suddenly sprouted from his chest. He sagged and expired.
"Geronimo," cried that warrior, stepping silently into the light, his tomahawk at the ready.
"Eek!" screamed Stim.
Geronimo yawned.
Watching Geronimo’s image quiver as he yawned, Stim realized something wasn’t right. He blasted the Indian, only to see his “body” burst into fire and then ash, not a corpse as one would expect. Barnes’s body also burned into ash.
Carol pointed at the temporal map. “Look!” The five alternate tasks morphed into two, but with a red line between the images of Stim and her. Recalling her training at the base, she announced, “I know how we can save jumps!”
She hugged Stim tightly. “Our TT suits will think of us as one person now.” She activated a jump for her suit.
Both appeared in a dimly lit bar, surrounded by alien looking creatures. As a human figure approached them, his slow gate told them they were on Luna. When he came close, they could see he was General Barnes. “Thank heavens you made it! This is the rogue’s base.” He pointed. “These creatures come from other timelines.”
A moonquake threw all three to the floor. Alien screams preceded three horned creatures bursting into flames.
Barnes exclaimed, “The space-time continuum is reacting to all the temporal changes. We’ve got to get out of here!”
At this remark, Carol realized Barnes was trying to get them to leave. When she also realized it was not in their program for him to be away from Earth base in 2088, she yanked out her blaster and reduced Barnes to a pile of ashes before he could react.
“Scratch one more rogue,” Carol said to an astonished Stim. “That means we have only one left to terminate.”
“That pile of ashes is convincing. Now, what do we do?”
“Barnes was so anxious for us to leave I’ll bet the fourth rogue is here, and that he is the other you.”
A uniformed figure walked from behind the amazed crowd of onlookers. He held a blaster aimed at them. It was the other Stim.
“So! You figured it out. A lot of good that will do you. I’ll take those OR control chips out of your suits. Now!” Stim2 remarked.
Stim dug clumsily for his chip, stalling while his mind raced.
“Hurry up before I blast you on the spot.”
In Stim’s suit was a small LK stunner with a chip just like the one in the blaster. Finally, he managed to get that chip and handed it over.
“Now outside, you two!”
As he walked out, Stim programmed his OR, grabbed Carol, and jumped.
Stim and Carol arrived, as they expected, in 1849, just outside the mine entrance.
“I can’t remember if we have one or two jumps left,” said Carol. “I hope you’re keeping count.”
“Two, I think. But I’m not sure. We’ve got only one rogue left, my other self. And I’d dearly love to know how I end up being a time rogue.”
Carol gestured toward the mine entrance. “A while back, I asked you why people alter the time line, and you mentioned artifacts. That got me to thinking about artifacts that might have mattered in 1849. And it occurred to me. The telegraph. It was patented in May of 1849. If you could prevent the development of the telegraph, you’d prevent the development of two centuries of technology that came after it.”
“So the rogues were trying not so much to alter the past but to prevent a particular future.”
“Apparently.”
“But what does that have to do with the rail depot,” asked Carol, “and the uprising on Luna?”
“That,” replied Stim, “is what we are about to find out.”
"We may be looking at things too simply," Carol said. "What if Luna and the artifacts are a diversion? What if my rogue-self isn't simply going after the telegraph? What if the target is broader, and destroying the telegraph is only one result?"
"Like what else?" Stim asked skeptically.
"This entire time node. With California gaining statehood next year, slavery issues are already being debated in Congress," Carol explained.
"Sure, everyone knows that," Stim acknowledged.
"Did you know that on March 4 of 1849, had he been sworn in, David Rice Atchison, a staunch slavery advocate from Missouri, would have been the President of the U.S.?" Carol asked.
"So, if the rogues can get a sympathetic Supreme Court Justice..." Stim said.
"Justice John McKinley from Alabama might be willing," Carol interjected.
"And after swearing in Atchison, Atchison and his sympathizers could do anything they want. Including ordering martial law, disbanding Congress, and even vacating the recent Presidential elections. What kind of impact would that have?" Carol asked.
"No Lincoln, no Grant, no Sherman. The time node would be chaos," Stim concluded.
"Exactly," Carol agreed.
"But how do we find the rogue you?" Stim asked.
"In our timeline, Atchison spent the day at home. We'll start there," Carol said.
“Better hope it ends there,” Stim said. “The more I think about it, the idea of rogue you pulling off such a coup seems pretty remote.”
Carol picked up a twig and etched circles in a patch of crusted snow. “Yeah, a stretch for sure,” she said, “but given everything else we’ve encountered, can we afford to ignore the possibility?”
“Guess not. I don’t have any better plan, but we are running out of jumps.”
“Maybe we don’t have to jump,” Carol said, “if we can get to D.C. before March 4th. By the snow and cold, I’d say it’s not March yet.”
“What about the four-day deadline?” Stim asked. “We’ll never make it overland to Washington in time.”
“Time?” Carol smirked. “Four days of whose time? Which time? Turn around.”
“Huh?”
“Turn around so I can get out of this thing,” she said, letting her shoulder-length auburn hair fall free. “Don’t see any more need for this getup. I’m really hurting from squished boobs and strained vocal cords.”
Stim faced the other way. “Hurry up,” he urged. “We’ve got to find someone who knows what day it is, then get to the nearest train station—if it’s not too late.”
Carol awoke with Stim shaking her.
The time…Where…
"You OK?" Stim demanded. “I was ambushed.”
Carol sat up. The real Nebraska...
"Friggin’ harmonic shock,” she groaned. “I accidentally touched my own corpse."
"Just wonderful. A damned timestorm," muttered Stim.
"Yeah.” Carol surveyed her corpse. “This job's gonna be the death of me yet."
She considered her ‘dream’. Doppelgangers? Skimmers? Aliens? Telegraphs and intrigues? Geronimo yelling ‘Geronimo’? Lunacy, and yet...
"Stim, try sending my clone back a year.”
"No joy," Stim replied momentarily.
"Jump barricade,” nodded Carol. “Just typical. The rogues tried to block us, bought some flaky alien timetech, and mucked around. Now we’ve got a timestorm and a variant timeline usurping everything. And moondust. Mass exchange for illicit uranium, I bet. They must have a static Jensen tunnel set up at the Chicago depot, exchanging uranium for moon rocks.”
Stim grinned. “Blocking the mine would cut their power. Then we could jump back a bit and blast some rogue butt. We need a skimmer and explosives.”
Carol smiled. “You’ve three jumps.”
“Meanwhile?” asked Stim.
“I’ll recruit a cavalry.” She consulted her Jensen, confirming what her subconscious mind already noticed. A native hid nearby, watching everything. He surely had friends.
Carol thought this was going to be easier. The dialect that Geronimo’s tribe spoke was different from the Apache language she’d learned in 2088. It took some interesting dead-end conversations and complicated charades before he finally seemed to understand what she was asking. He motioned for the two of them to wait while he consulted the tribal elders.
“Do you think they’ll join us?” Stim asked.
“I hope so. I wish I understood his language better. I could explain that this affects his people…”
There was an audible pop, and her Jensen immediately beeped. Carol turned, her blaster pointing at the noise. Stim stood there. Another Stim anyway. The final rogue.
Just as her Stim stood, weapon pointed at this newly materialized Stim, another pop sounded.
Another Stim. This one was armed, blaster pointing between the Stims, from one to the other and back. “Which one of you is it?” he demanded.
Two more pops in succession and there were two more Stims. Then another pop.
The newest Stim grabbed Carol, fumbled for her OR, threw it to the ground, and smashed it with the heel of his boot. All blasters wheeled on this Stim.
“This place in time is not the temporal focal point, Carol,” he panted. “You are!”
Carol spun to face the crowd of Stims behind her. She rubbed her eyes, but they weren't the problem.
The duplicate Stims shifted and blurred as she watched. They stretched away from her in a line of duplicates, like the infinite reflections in a pair of facing mirrors. They grew fainter until even their original Stims were transparent.
A roaring noise filled her ears. The last Stim was shouting something at her but she couldn't hear him. He was the only one who remained solid. He reached out and grabbed her wrist as the duplicates were blown away in a rush of wind. Dust and debris swirled around her, blotting out the sun. Stim's strong grip kept her from being blown away as well.
Then with the suddenness of throwing a switch, all was quiet. She stood in a gray emptiness with no landmarks, indeed, no land or sky. Stim stood next to her, still holding her wrist.
"You were the focus," he said. "You caused the timelines to split. Get to Chicago. Put an ad in the Herald ten days from now with your location. We'll find you." With a loud pop, he was gone too.
Carol floated in the gray void. It was difficult to discern how much time passed or whether time passed at all. She'd heard of this place. It was the terror of those who time-jumped. It had no name. It wasn't tied to a specific place or time. Indeed, it was between places and between times. Her fellow time-travelers talked and whispered of ending up here, joking bravely of a place that was nowhere and no-when, a limbo.
Sometimes time-jumpers didn't reach their destinations. Some vanished, never reappearing. While rare, it sometimes happened. Those who understood temporal mechanics said that wave equations predicted such a place must exist, but by definition, it wasn't anywhere you could go to on purpose, since it didn't exist at any point in any space-time continuum.
Fighting the vertigo that the endless, featureless, gray expanse around her caused, she flailed her arms and legs, but if she moved, she had no way to discern it or confirm it. She was trapped, uncertain how to get free?
Wait! That was it. Uncertainty and wave equations. Great Schrodinger's cat! She closed her eyes and concentrated and the world reappeared around her, but it wasn't what she'd expected, or when.
General Barnes shouted orders in a room that looked like the control center of a ritzy old-time television station. At least fifty monitors displayed scenes from various timelines either altered adversely, or in some indistinguishable way affected the multitude of versions that had shifted and distorted from the last mission he had sent Carol and Stim on. In spite of his cool, calm exterior, inside he was in turmoil. He had sent his best team out there hoping to fix a mistake. If he knew what needed to be done they'd have been back by now.
Three screens went black. "What happened? Do we have a lock on her yet?" he asked Stim, who manned a dozen of the flickering images with practiced ease.
"Every time one timeline corrects itself, another goes on the fritz," a second Stim called out.
A third Stim started to speak, then faded into nothingness, a look of surprise on his face.
A single window sat in the far corner of the room, appearing to the untrained eye to be just another monitor. Thick black clouds loomed ominously over steel gray buildings and flashes of lightening flashed in rapid succession.
"How much time do we have left?" Barnes watched as four more screens went black.
"You're kidding, right?" Stim asked, as another monitor flickered and its image was replaced by even stranger scene.
No one has ever seen a time vortex. The layperson imagines a whirlpool, a mathematician sees a collapsing of all temporal equations, a cosmologist sees the end of all things. Carol only saw…
General Barnes was near hysterics as each monitor flickered from one time line to another in complete and total chaos. He knew they were no longer going to be able to control the breakdown of the entire multiverse. He finally collapsed on the floor, sobbing.
…the beauty of it all. Infinites that swirled back on themselves in a way that would make Escher jealous. Coming to life, trillions of suns spun in varied galactic formations, worlds created and destroyed by time. Life, all life, her life.
In the center of her vision sat the very young/old man named after Saint Jerome. One Who Yawns beckoned her to join him and she sat by his side. As he smiled, the wrinkles in his weathered face seemed like undulations of the entire space-time construct. Then he whispered something into her ear that made perfect sense and was the resolution to the chaos spinning just beyond her reach.
“Life is but a dream.”
Carol stared spellbound at the swirling images for a moment as the words sank into her consciousness. She looked at her companion, who was difficult to focus on. A name came to her mind. She spoke it aloud: “Goyathlay.” After a moment, she added, “What does it mean?”
Swirling light flashed in his eyes. “Do you see?” His arms encompassed it all. “You must open wide to take all in. That was the name given me by tribal elders.” A grin raised one side of his mouth. “I did not know then. My destiny was before, and after.”
He stood, bare feet planted on deep skies below. “And now, you must follow. You must take all, and be everywhere, to find your way home.”
Carol struggled to understand. “Home? From … where? Is this an afterlife? Am I dead?”
“You are Outside. The dimensions of your time are lower than here.”
He beckoned. Tentatively she stood.
“So if I’m alive…”
“It is not magic,” he went on, not seeming to have heard her. “You call this by a different name.”
“What name?”
A hand dipped into his robe, and emerged again. She could not see what he held.
“Science.”
“Science?” Carol asked, struggling to control the quaver in her voice.
One Who Yawns yawned. “I have come from five thousand years in your future, from another destiny that wasn't destroyed. Warning of this disaster came from a new computer simulation. You and I are to go back to our respective destinies which will again bring order out of this chaos.”
“Didn't you die in the early Twentieth Century? And how did you get to a place five thousand years in my future?”
“One time the U. S. Army tried to capture me when they chased me into a cave and then waited at the entrance until thirst drove me out. Only at the back of the cave was a brane tangency that allowed me to step from there to a place five thousand years in our future. Now, I'm being sent back to that same time, but a different location, to resume my destiny.”
“What about me? Are you just going to leave me in this vestibule to hell?” Carol felt panic growing in her.
One Who Yawns handed her the object he had held, concealed in his hand. Carol recognized it at once as a jump controller.
“This one is for you,” he said.
The jump controller was pre-set. One Who Yawns pressed the activation knob as soon as Carol was within its range.
Woomph! The swirls of limbo coagulated into a muddy colored spiral before her eyes. A pungent smell, somewhere between kangaroo fart and putrid passion fruit, engulfed her. She coughed.
She was back in the control room in 2088. A quick glance around reassured her. The multiple monitors were not being operated by multiple Stims. But many were blank; some were smoking.
“Report,” commanded General Barnes.
Pop! Stim appeared beside her. “I’ve solved the problem of the time vortex,” he shouted before Carol could speak. “Carol is the temporal focal point. She’s the key to the time node. Eliminate her, and everything will return to normal.”
This time, Carol was faster. Her ion blaster flashed and Stim exploded.
General Barnes gave her a querying look.
“He was the last rogue,” she explained. “He was the last problem. Look.”
The blank screens were coming to life. Their operators peered closely at the images. A green light sprang forth from terminal number 26. Then another green beam from 13.
“We’re back to where we should be,” Carol cheered, as more green lights flooded the room. “The timeline is restored. Mission accomplished.”
General's Barne's uniform was suddenly light blue with hair cascading over the collar. “Congratulations,” she said.
The End