“To begin at the beginning, we set up the door you used this time specifically so you could come back here.”
“Why?” I blurted. “I was back where I was supposed to be. When no one came looking for me to give me an amnesia pill, I thought you must have decided to leave well enough alone.”
He grimaced. “Believe me, there was a lot of discussion about that. But after a few years, we realized that simply taking away your memories wasn’t going to fix the problem.”
“What problem?” Maire asked.
“I think I know,” said the Librarian, surprising us all. “I had wondered about it, but after twenty years I thought I must be wrong.”
Zachary Kyle regarded him for a long moment. “Interesting. An AI?”
The Librarian fixed him with a withering look. “I am a Librarian, not a Neanderthal.”
“Sorry.” Zachary Kyle flinched. “So, uh, what was your theory?”
Mollified, the Librarian transited to a more professorial pose. “Keryl—or rather, Charles—is supposed to be dead.”
I felt a bit faint, Maire make a choking noise, and Zachary Kyle’s jaw dropped.
“But—how did you figure that out?” he asked when he had regained his voice.
“Young man, my data files extend back approximately 600,000 years. Do you think you are the only civilization ever to discover time travel?”
“Well, we’ve never met anyone else…”
“Which only proves they are wiser than you, my good sir. Regardless, Charles’ being in this era the first time created a time rip, which your agency attempted to resolve by returning him, through whatever means were necessary, to the 20th century. But it did not have the desired effect; Charles was supposed to die that that day. When he returned, however, he did not land where he had left, and thus avoided the enemy troops who, in the normal course of events, would have killed him. Ergo, the last twenty years of his life have exacerbated, not mitigated, the temporal damage. Eventually, the only way to try to repair the continuum was to return him here, where his future is still fluid, and he is no further danger to earlier eras.”
I was utterly befogged, and Maire seemed lost at sea. I walked over to her chair and took her hand in mine, which she gripped with an intensity that hurt my fingers.
“That’s amazing,” Zachary Kyle breathed. “Your analysis is almost perfect.”
The Librarian frowned. “Almost, young man?”
“Almost,” he conceded. “It doesn’t cover why I’m here.”
I intervened before the Librarian could open his mouth again and take the conversation so far away I might never be able to participate.
“Wait, before you get into that, I have to know. When you sent the door, I was in a lot of trouble. And my partner had been shot. What happened to him?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Kyle responded. “We couldn’t risk your wanting to go back and save him the way you saved your friends in World War I.” World War I? There was another one? “So we dropped in a couple of agents disguised as federals. They saved your John Naylor and arrested the others. He got a promotion and the gang got life for your murder. Of course they never found your body, but with one wounded agent and a war on the way, no one raised a fuss over details.” He brightened. “You got a nice funeral, by the way. We looked up the records.”
“Thank you,” I said with a marked lack of sincerity.
“So why are you here?” Maire asked quietly. “Or do I not want to know?”
Agent Kyle sighed. “Actually, none of you wants to know. It’s bleak.”
Maire squeezed my hand, but relented enough for blood to flow into my fingers. “How bleak?”
“Here it is. Bringing Charles back solved the time rip problem as far as he was concerned. But in doing the research, we found something very frightening. A larger time rip, much, much larger, is starting to form. Someone in this era is performing time travel experiments on a massive scale, bringing in dozens, maybe hundreds of subjects. If this continues, within the next four to six months the space-time continuum is going to rip somewhere along the line and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.
“And Charles, we think you’re the only man who can stop it.”
The Cosmic City – Book 3
The Stolen Future Trilogy
Brian K. Lowe
Copyright © 2018 Brian K. Lowe
All rights reserved. 3rd Edition. July 2020
To Bret, the first one who understood.
Forward
I have a confession to make: I didn’t really write this book. I didn’t write the last one, The Secret City, either, but given the circumstances by which they came to me, I thought it would be easier if I just took credit for them. Unfortunately, it turns out I’m too damned honest for my own good, and taking credit for someone else’s work has been nagging at me for a long time. So I finally decided just to tell my readers what happened, how this all came about. If you don’t believe me, so be it. If you do believe me, well…well, you won’t, so let’s not pretend that you will.
Let me start at the beginning—at least, what counts as the beginning as far as I’m concerned. It wasn’t until I was 40 that I even knew that my great-great uncle Charles even existed. My family is not what you’d call close-knit, and when my wife took up an interest in genealogy after my parents passed away, I (or rather, she) discovered that I had a whole raft of relatives I’d never known about. Apparently, the prior generations of my family had been both quite spread out and quite close, but something must have happened before I was born, because I barely knew any of them growing up. A couple of second cousins, my great-aunts and -uncles, that was it, as far as I knew.
It was one of those great-aunts that I didn’t know about, Aunt Amelia, who indirectly led me to this confession. After the Great Family Rediscovery, as I called it, I got to know some of the cousins in my own generation and their parents. It turned out that Great-aunt Amelia didn’t have any children, and since she was getting well on in years, I took her on as sort of a project. Truthfully, she had a reputation as a bit of a handful, and the rest of the family was happy to let me have a go at her. Between us, we got along like gangbusters.
It was while we were sitting in her kitchen drinking tea that she told me about her uncle, Charles Clee. She had asked me what I did for fun, and when I told her I was a writer, naturally she asked, “What kind of things do you write?” I told her, “Science fiction, mysteries, that kind of stuff,” expecting the usual, “Oh,” that you get from people who “don’t really read that kind of thing,” and don’t like it because they’ve never read it.
You can imagine my shock when she said, “My Uncle Charles used to write science fiction, back in the Thirties.”
“Really?” I asked with all the dazzling insight of which I was capable.
“Uh-huh. He wrote a book. I probably have a copy of it somewhere. I think it’s in a box in the attic.”
I’d been in the attic, and it wasn’t a place I was all that eager to visit again, even in pursuit—or more likely, particularly in the pursuit—of an old science fiction novel written by a relative I’d never heard of, so I let the subject lapse. Someday when I have to go up into the attic for some other reason, I thought, I can poke around then. If I find anything interesting, I can ask Aunt Amelia about it.
As fate would have it, I didn’t get back up to the attic until I wasn’t able to ask Aunt Amelia about anything anymore.
She passed away at the ripe old age of 96, and while I was hardly surprised that she mentioned me in her will, I was astonished at what she left me: Her entire library, including “all books, manuscripts, and copyrights bequeathed to me by my uncle, Charles Clee.”
Books, plural? Manuscripts? Copyrights?
Okay, call me mercenary, but as soon as I could make a hole in my schedule, I was climbing into that attic at Aunt Amelia’s house wearing heavy work gloves and carrying an empty cardboard box in case I found anything of interest. I had previously surve
yed her small library downstairs and found nothing of imminent importance, but the idea of old manuscripts intrigued me—not to mention, I’ll admit, the idea that an old copyright might have some value attached to it. I could ask my cousin, the executor, to see if Amelia had been reporting any income from the book(s), but I thought I’d try to see if there really was anything to see first.
Aunt Amelia had lived in the same house for 53 years. The attic reflected that. The boxes were dusty, piled haphazardly, those on top crushing those beneath. And while the space stretched most of the length of the house, it had apparently been built in an age when people were shorter, meaning I had to watch my head or I could be laid out with a concussion.
I’d started out first thing in the morning, and it was wintertime, but it didn’t take long for that cramped space to get uncomfortably warm. I had no idea what I was looking for, and no idea what might have taken up residence in these boxes, so I was starting to wonder if it was all worth it. I took a chance and concentrated on the boxes on the bottom, the ones that were being crushed by those on top of them. I mean, according to my wife’s research, Charles Clee had died in 1935, so it made sense that anything Amelia had inherited had been sitting here for a very long time.
I was right, and I was wrong. I picked the sorriest-looking box in the whole room, not worrying about an organized search pattern, and I struck gold. Buried under a layer of old postcards and a scrapbook of World War II newspaper clippings was a thick ancient manila envelope addressed to Aunt Amelia at this address, and below that, a hardcover book with The Invisible City embossed in faded gold on the spine. The author was Charles Clee. The printing date was 1923. Inside, it was inscribed: “To Ralph, To inspire your own journeys. Uncle Charles,” in the same hand as the address on the manila envelope. Ralph had been Amelia’s older brother; he died in the Pacific. I sat there staring at this message from almost a hundred years ago, before I reverently placed it in my cardboard box.
So—I had the book. But Aunt Amelia had specified “manuscripts,” too, and I didn’t see any, unless… Sure enough, when I opened the manila envelope and slowly removed the contents, I was holding an impressive pile of typewritten papers, the top sheet was which was entitled, “The Invisible City, by Charles Clee.” Once upon a time, it had been held together with rubber bands, but now only rust-colored lines remained.
How long the book had been out of print, I wondered? Might there be any interest in re-publishing it, maybe as some kind of “lost classic”? One way to find out; I’d have to read it.
I returned the manuscript to the envelope that had protected it all these years, turned to my cardboard box—and froze, staring at the envelope. I felt a chill on the back of my neck, as though someone unseen was standing behind me. I knew Charles Clee’s handwriting from the inscription in his book. And it was clearly that same handwriting on the envelope.
Except that Charles Clee had died in 1935—and the postmark on the envelope was March 3, 1964.
I shook myself. It was obvious that Charles had addressed the envelope and never sent it. Someone at the publishing house had found the envelope long after Charles died, and mailed it to Amelia. She’d had no interest in it and had stuffed it in a box along with her brother’s copy of his book. No mystery there—as long as I ignored the fact that Charles couldn’t have addressed it because Amelia hadn’t moved into this house until 1959.
There had to be a rational explanation, and since I couldn’t ask Amelia anyway, it wasn’t worth worrying about. When I got home, I opened The Invisible City and started to read. It didn’t take long to realize that other than a few passages that simply would not pass muster with today’s readers, it was quite good.
Unfortunately, it turned out there wasn’t a lot of interest in reprinting a forgotten book from 1923, so I ended up re-publishing it myself. In the narrow zone of interest that it found, its antiquity was actually a plus. On that basis, I finally did some research of my own on my mysterious uncle, belatedly discovering that he’d been an actual war hero (decorated by General Pershing himself), and that later he became a federal agent who’d died in the line of duty…facts that, when added to the book jacket, benefited my sales significantly.
The Invisible City ended with a cliffhanger which cried out for a sequel, and since I had no other projects in the works, I decided to write one. I would have liked to publish The Invisible City under my own name so as to cross-promote my other works, but since it was already out there, I couldn’t. But I could publish an “authorized sequel” using my own name. After all, Uncle Charles didn’t need the money, and I owned the copyright, so legally I was entitled. If I had any moral reservations, I swept them under the rug.
I had begun outlining what I was going to call Return to The Invisible City when I received a manila envelope in the mail.
The envelope was postmarked January, 2013, and the handwriting was Charles Clee’s. Inside were a letter and a thick manuscript entitled The Secret City. The story they told was, if anything, more astounding than the book that Charles had written in 1923. For reasons crass and commercial, I divided the manuscript into two volumes: The Secret City and the novel you are about to read, The Cosmic City. Along with the latter, I thought it only proper to include the accompanying letter as a preface, which sheds some light on this incredible story. I have not changed a single word.
Not even the byline on the manuscript—which was in my name.
Preface
Mr. Brian K. Lowe
California, USA
My dear nephew,
If it feels odd to you to be addressed so familiarly by a man you have never met—and who by all accounts died decades before you were born—you may trust me when I say that it feels no less odd to me, and I have experienced what might call some very odd adventures in my time(s). In any event, please forgive me, since we are family.
I must admit that I was pleased to learn (through avenues which I regret must remain mysterious) that someone had at last re-discovered my poor attempt at literary immortality—and re-published it! I suspect that the copyright on The Invisible City had lapsed, but whatever you are able to glean from its publication, I grant you wholeheartedly. In point of fact, I owe you my gratitude for rescuing it from the doubtless well-deserved obscurity in which I am sure it languished for many years. Still, tastes change, and if you were successful in returning it to the light of day, then you deserve to reap the fruits of your labors. Certainly I have no use for them.
You hold in your hand the second volume of my escapades—a weighty tome to be sure—which I fear you will find even more outlandish than the last, although I assure you it is all true. I have been forced to deviate in the latter portion of this account from my practice of speaking strictly of my own personal experiences, because there are elements of this tale that occurred outside my presence (far outside my presence, as you will see) whose bearing on the ultimate outcome was so critical that I could not omit them. I have set these facts down as they were told to me by those who were there, and they have assured me that I did not make any grave errors in transcription.
I fully expect that this will be the final installment. What comes next remains even for me to see.
This, then, is goodbye…an ironic term for two who have never met, but apt. I wish you long life—and that no one accuses you of having too vivid an imagination for your own good.
Sincerely,
Your affectionate (if absent) uncle,
Charles Clee
Chapter 1
I am Handed the Universe
It is not every day that someone tells you it is your job to save the entire space-time continuum. What do you say? “Thank you”? “Sorry, you must have the wrong number”? Or do you simply mutter, as I did without realizing that I had spoken aloud, “Oh no, not again.”
Zachary Kyle was most apologetic. It was odd, not being able to read his mind, or even glimpse his emotions, but I felt he was sincere. After all, he had risked a great deal to come here
and warn me, not only the danger of capture and imprisonment hundreds of thousands of years from his own time, but (unless his era had refined time travel significantly from the last I knew) the very real possibility that he would miss his target and never find me at all. In fact, from what he had just told me, had he overshot his mark by so much as half a year, he would have emerged in a timeless void from which there would be no escape.
“Believe me, Charles, there are a lot people back in my time who wish things were different. They’d rather we could use our own agents to handle this problem. I was one of the ones who argued that you were the right man for the job.”
“Forgive me if my gratitude for your faith in me is limited,” I said. Although I kept my tone wry, I was already struggling with the parameters of the problem. We were talking about finding a needle in a haystack, with a haystack the size of the entire Earth! And once we found it, we had to stop whoever was behind it by convincing him that his experiments were far too dangerous to continue—all without telling him how we knew this in the first place.
“You have no idea,” said Kyle, leaning forward in his chair. He was evidently immune to my brand of sarcasm. “You’re a legend in my time. Not only were you the first person ever to escape execution for illegal time travel, you’re the only civilian we’ve ever sent through time who wasn’t on some kind of research expedition. And even those are rare these days.” He shook his head. “Nobody’s been executed for time trespassing for years, but the law’s still on the books, and they’re talking about using it again. Everybody’s scared of time rips now—if they hadn’t absolutely needed you, they wouldn’t have sent you through again at all. You were supposed to have been brought to my time first so we could brief you, but something to do with the whole time rip phenomenon that’s going on now interfered with what we were doing then and drew you straight here.”
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