After another interminable moment, he opened his eyes again. He raised his head and turned, slowly, to look back.
The glowing portal had stopped, inexplicably, ten meters short of sucking them into an early grave.
Beyond the portal lay a newly stabilized landscape, a landscape far older, darker, and more overgrown than the one in which he lay. Oh, Dorothy, he thought, we're really not in Kansas anymore. He realized suddenly that Will was nowhere in sight.
"Will?" he shouted. "Will!" The boy had been right beside him. Surely he hadn't been —
Will's head sprouted abruptly from among the leaves. "Cool…" he breathed as he looked beyond Smith, eyes shining. He scrambled to his feet and darted toward the new portal. He stopped barely short of it, peering through into the other reality. And then he crossed over into it.
"William, wait!" Smith shouted, too late.
Will waved at him from the other side, grinning. "It's just like stepping between rooms!" he called.
"I can barely contain my glee." Smith grimaced, getting painfully to his feet.
Will glanced down at his tracker again, and looked off into the distance. "Dad's signal is this way!" he cried, pointing into the stygian woods. "Come on, Doctor
Smith — " He set off into the underbrush without even a backward glance.
Smith stood staring after him. "I loathe children," he said to the air. They existed for only one purpose, in his mind: as bargaining chips. Who was it who'd said, "He who has children gives hostages to Fortune"… ? It hardly mattered. All that mattered now was catching up with the others. Once West was out of the way, Robinson would do anything he was told, to protect his son… He took a deep breath and started for the portal.
This passage deeper into time was neither as unpleasant nor as disorienting as he had feared. He entered the dank, loathsomely overgrown forest, pushing himself to catch up with the over-eager Robinson boy. He kept fit, but even in his youth he'd never had the kind of hyperactive energy this child seemed to have.
The plant life of this world was almost fungoidal; touching it was as repulsive as touching moldy bread. He stumbled over something in the underbrush beside a turbid stream; looked down, watching his steps more carefully.
As he started on, something in the undergrowth caught his eye—something manmade. A flattened scrap of metal. He stopped, pushing away the foliage until the unnatural shapes stood revealed. His frown deepened.
Will reappeared suddenly, up ahead between the trees. "What did you find?" he asked.
Smith let the foliage fall back into place and hurried forward, catching Will by the shoulders as he tried to get past for a look. "Come, come, son, no time to dawdle," he said briskly. "Let's move along." He nudged
Will, propelling him on into the forest before he could see the grave markers. Three of them. Bearing the names of Maureen, Penny, and Judy Robinson.
"Blawp? Blawp—!" Penny pushed through the amber moss forest on the other side of the portal, frantic with worry. How was she ever going to find her in all this— ?
Suddenly she heard a faint, familiar blawpmg from somewhere up ahead. She ran forward, tracking the sound through the dwinding undergrowth until a red rock cliff rose up in her path, its time-etched face a bizarre wonderland of overhangs and caverns. And there was Blawp, in an open space among the moss-draped spires, hopping up and down, chirping and blawpmg. Penny couldn't see anything for her to be blawpmg at.
Maybe she was just frightened because she was lost. "Blawp," she scolded, coming forward, "you can't run offMke that!"
Blawp began to shriek hysterically as something thudded down between them, engulfing Penny in a smokescreen of dust. Penny skidded to a halt, coughing and waving the dust out of her face. As it cleared she saw something huge begin to appear, seemingly from nowhere, within the cloud.
Her mouth fell open as she saw it clearly: It was some kind of alien, standing nearly twice her height. Its massive arms and the hump of its alligator-hided back bristled with spines; the blunt tip of its tail was studded with spikes, like a mace. It had a face like an orangutan, and bulging binocular eyes.
She stood gaping, wanting to feel afraid. But before her stunned brain could move beyond shock into fear, she saw the faded, tattered red ribbon tied around its finger…
Blawp saw the ribbon at the same moment. She launched herself at the big alien, shrieking in rage.
"Blawp, no't" Penny cried, lunging forward to grab her, too late.
Blawp vaulted into the air and landed on the creature's enormous arm; she caught the frayed end of the ribbon, tugging at it with furious jealousy.
Penny stared, her amazement growing, as the giant did not shrug Blawp off like a fly, but only stood gazing down at her… tenderly?
Blawp gave up her frenzied attack as the alien did nothing to try and stop her. She settled back in the crook of the creature's arm, peering up at its face in curiosity. Then she looked at the ribbon around her wrist, at the ribbon on its finger, back and forth —realizing what Penny had already seen: that the two ribbons, except for their age, were exactly the same one.
Slowly, the alien giant came toward Penny, step by step. Penny stood where she was, paralyzed by the conflicting urges to stay and to run away, as it raised an enormous paw, reaching toward her. With amazing gentleness, it touched her cheek. "Nice girl," it said. "Pretty girl. Nice."
Penny gazed up into its face, her eyes filling with tears of wonder. This was going to make such an awesome story…
* * *
John and Don West passed through another portal, following the tracker's lead toward the still-elusive fuel source. Each new reality they entered seemed bleaker than the last, even as it took them further and further from safety, and away from the people who were depending on their success.
And yet with every passage through another time-gate, John felt his thoughts growing clearer, his mind coming more alive. "Extraordinary. I think each portal we cross moves us further in time." Only into the future. Never into the past… Why? And if it was time they were traversing, not space, they could even be walking in circles, paradoxically crossing the same stretch of terrain over and over as it aged…
Paradox was what time travel was all about—or so the theories had it. All the theory he'd ever studied suddenly seemed as simplistic as a stick-figure drawing, compared with his present reality.
"Fantastic," West muttered, hunching his shoulders and shifting from foot to foot as he gazed out at the rust-colored badlands.
John looked back at the gate shimmering in the air behind them. "Imagine an energy field that could manipulate space-time singularities to produce these kinds of localized vortex effects!" He shook his head in amazement as cascading insights went off like fireworks inside his brain. He hadn't felt a pure, ecstatic sense of wonder like this since he was a boy, working on his hyperspace theorem. "Wow! Both Einstein and Tagamishi speculated that at a quantum or even sub-quantum level…" He glanced back at West.
West was staring at him, with a look he knew all too well: the same look of incomprehension and exasperation that everyone he'd known as a boy, including his own parents, had worn, whenever he'd tried to share the amazing world inside his mind with them.
John looked down, and away, shrugging.
They began to walk again, entering an arid plain dotted with hairy, trilobed plant life. The amber hummocks reminded him of cactus.
"That would be one great climb," West said after a time, finally breaking the awkward silence they'd kept until then. He gestured toward the red, eroded rock face they were approaching. In the younger man's eyes-John saw the echo of all the risk-taking adrenaline highs West had ever known—the moments he lived for, the moments when he had proved to Death that he was fully, completely alive. Because life was not a dress rehearsal; mistakes or not, this was all the chance you ever got to make memories worth looking back on.
John suddenly remembered his father, in a way he hadn't for years: how his father had taken him rock-cl
imbing, hiking, skiing, in the wilderness preserve near their home. Not out of duty, or because the Old Man wanted to toughen up his tech-nerd son, but because it was exciting, because it was fun. Because he'd loved it there, in that dwindling refuge of Earth's beauty. They both had. "You know," he said, smiling a little, "my father would have liked you."
West looked startled; his sudden grin filled with pleasure and pride.
It was close to sundown by the time they finally reached the cliff face. John checked the tracking device again. "Damn."
"Damn?" West echoed, half frowning. "Damn is not good."
"I am a fool," John said furiously, looking up. This was the sourcepoint of the signal. But there was nothing here. Only a stone wall; a dead end. "The signal we've been tracking is the Jupiter's core material, reflecting off these rocks—" He turned, looking back the way they had come.
As he moved, a flash of unexpected light speared his eye from ground level. He looked down.
He was standing on a slab of metal covered with red dirt.
He stepped back. West hauled the piece of wreckage upright, grimacing with the effort, and brushed it off with his hand.
On it, still clearly readable, was the logo of the Jupiter Two.
John swore softly. "This metal is decades old…" He ran his hand over its patinaed surface.
West let go of the metal plate as if it were burning hot; it thudded in the dust at his feet. "What kind of nightmare is this?" His eyes raked the alien landscape, came back to John's face with a kind of desperation. "Where the hell are we — ?"
"No, Major___" John shook his head. He'd been right, in his feeling that they were traveling in circles. "The question is, when the hell are we?"
The superheated air cracked open as an energy bolt caught West in the back, punching him across the open space onto his face.
John hit the ground and rolled to cover behind an outcrop of stone. He unslung his rifle and began to return fire. More explosive bursts blasted the rocks in front of him. He ducked; pushed up again to fire off another round of shots—
The lash of energy caught him from behind, just like West, and swatted him down into blackness.
The two men lay still in the dirt.
The Robot rolled out from among the rocks, its makeshift body scarred by the passage of long, hard years. It raised its arms, its pincer claws extended.
Will and Doctor Smith continued their journey through the bleak, unpromising land beyond another portal, still following the tracker's signal. They had long ago left the brooding jungle behind, for a red-rock desert where the eroded soil looked like tire treads. The two suns hung low in the crimson sky, casting long sinuous shadows with blurred edges like a double exposure.
Now they were working their way down a slope through a maze of hairy, bulbous cactuses. Some of the plants were as tall as he was; they made him feel as if he were trapped in a herd of lemmings, being carried along toward some unknown disaster.
The strangeness had stopped seeming cool to him hours ago; now it was even past scary and depressing. He wanted to be back with his family so much that he had actually begun to feel that something about this creepy landscape looked familiar…
"I feel like we got turned around," he said unhappily.
"Just follow your father's signal, young William," Smith repeated, with strained patience.
Will looked down at the tracker again, and off in the direction it was indicating. "Oh, shit," he whispered.
"A boy of your intelligence shouldn't swear," Smith said disapprovingly.
Will pointed straight ahead. "Look."
Smith looked up, following his gesture. "Oh," he said at last. "Shit, indeed."
Ahead of them in the distance, glowing like a beacon fire in the last light of the setting suns, was the Jupiter Two. It sat below the same wall of red stone, lodged up against the crater's rim… but not the way he remembered it.
This Jupiter Two had been gutted. Its lower sections were gone; the scarred hull lay open to the sky, its metal peeled back like a broken tin can. Mom. Penny. Judy— With a cry he began to run down the slope.
Chapter Nineteen
John stirred as consciousness brought him back, reluctantly, into his body. His mind replayed its final memory inside his eyelids as he tried to raise his head: Ambushed. Shot. But still alive…
He was inside a structure of some sort; one that must have survived some terrible disaster. The vast space was mostly dark, mostly in shadow; in a few isolated spots lamps burned, and the last light of day still penetrated through gaping rents in its walls. It was clearly high tech—computer consoles, control panels, screens—but most of the tech looked long dead. Here and there a few functional displays flickered, monitoring some system's failing heartbeat.
He was lying in an empty corner of the room, as if he'd been dropped there like trash. He rolled over and found West beside him, singed and battered, still unconscious. But alive, thank God … He wondered morbidly whether he looked that bad. He felt that bad.
"Well, well…" a man's voice said, echoing from broken surfaces. "All things really do come to he who waits."
John struggled to sit up, using the wall at his back for support. A lone figure was sitting across the room, his face obscured by shadow. "What is this place?" John asked.
"The shock must have scrambled your brain," the stranger said sardonically. "Look around. Don't you recognize the spot? You're home."
Home? John stared at the shadow figure. "This can't be…" Oh, God. It was. The Jupiter Two.
"What have you done to the ship?" He pushed to his feet, the pain it cost him to stand lost inside his sudden, terrible fear. "Where's my family?"
'Tour family is dead," the man said. "Dead and in the ground."
"No—" John whispered, feeling the bottom drop out of his soul.
The man in the shadows stood, rising into the light so that John could see his face. He was nearly John's age; his clothing was dirty and worn, his blond hair and beard were long and unkempt. He looked like a hermit just emerging from a cave. And yet, they could have been brothers…
"I'll never forget that morning," the stranger said, "twenty, thirty years ago? What was it you said: 'I'll be back. I promise.' But I knew better… You never came home."
He moved slowly across the room to one of the burned-out panels. "Without you, your family never had a chance. A few spiders survived the destruction of the probe ship. They reached the planet and attacked. I can still hear the women scream…"
"Who are you?" John asked hoarsely.
The stranger came toward him then, stopped inside a circle of lamplight. His hand rose to something dangling against his chest, and he held it out. "Don't you recognize me, Dad?" Tarnished metal winked in the light: Dog tags. "I'm your son, Will."
"Penny? Penny-"
Penny looked up as her mother and Judy burst out of the brush and into the cavernous space where she sat cross-legged with the two Blawps. She grinned.
They stopped, laser pistols in hand, and stared at the enormous creature gently touching Penny's face.
"Penny?" Mom gasped. "Baby, are you all right?"
Penny nodded, getting to her feet. "It's okay, Mom," she said briskly, waving at them to put their guns away. "She's not going to hurt us. It's like she thinks I'm her princess or something…"
She wondered how they'd ever managed to find her here, until she remembered her cam/watch… they must have heard her calling Blawp. She went forward to meet them, carrying Blawp in her arms. The giant alien hung back, its strange face filled with awe and reverence.
Her mother and Judy came forward almost as shyly as the alien did, as she introduced them to each other. But the alien accepted them calmly, letting Judy examine her almost as if she remembered everything that had happened yesterday… or years ago.
"Best as I can tell," Judy murmured, turning back to face them, "this creature is pregnant. But…" She held up her hands.
"Speak, Doctor," Mom said.
/> Judy made a dubious face. "All life forms have unique biopattems. As individual as fingerprints, no two alike. Except…"
"Except the biopattems of this giant creature and our little Blawp match exactly. Don't they?" Mom finished, looking at the two aliens with a strange expression on her face.
Judy stared at her. "How did you know?"
Mom's gaze glanced off the time-eaten surface of the crater wall, and back at Blawp sitting in Penny's lap. "Because, I think Blawp and our friend here are actually one and the same."
Well, duh, Penny thought. Her family would figure things out so much faster if they'd just learn to trust their instincts. But at least they did figure things out___
She smiled, looking proudly at them all. This is going to make the awesomest story ever.
The Robot shoved John forward roughly, carrying West's unconscious body slung over its other arm as Will lead them along the empty corridors to the Jupiter's gutted engine room.
"Father, I give you… eternity." Will gestured toward what had once been the hyperdrive initiator. John stumbled to a halt in the center of the room, staring at what had become of it, and back at what had become of his son… feeling the converging courses of reality and nightmare finally merge.
A glowing energy bubble hung suspended beneath the hyperdrive initiator, hovering over its shattered basin. Within the bubble incoherent images swirled, almost but never quite coalescing into something recognizable.
Eternity… ? John realized that he was looking at eternity: that the device was some sort of permutation on the time portals that had led him here. Had Will somehow found a way to control the forces behind them?
The Robot dropped West unceremoniously in a heap. The impact jarred him awake; he rolled over, groaning. "Where are we?" he said thickly, holding his head as John helped him sit up.
John glanced away at Will. "I think we've come back to the Jupiter decades after we left," he murmured.
"Look, Father, what my 'flights of fancy' have created!" Will demanded, refusing to let John's attention leave him again. "I used your hyperengine to build my time machine!"
West's mouth opened as the grown man across the room called John "Father." After a second he swore softly, as if he had assembled all the impossible fragments, and seen what kind of picture they made.
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