by Bob Mayer
“Nada,” Moms said, half a request, half an order, both tentative.
Nada waved his hand about, letting go of the machete handle and indicating the others in the CP. “How many other people in here have memory blocks? As Doc noted, I’m sure we’re all preconditioned for them.”
“That’s not relevant right now,” Frasier said.
“I think it’s relevant,” Eagle said. “Maybe you have one,” he said to Frasier.
The team shrink twitched a smile. “Well, I wouldn’t know if that was true, would I?”
“Funny guy,” Scout muttered. “Not.”
Frasier heard her, but didn’t allow himself to be distracted. “Let’s focus on the job at hand, shall we?” He gestured at Foreman. “We need what Ms. Frobish knows, don’t we?”
Foreman nodded. “She’s worked directly with the Time Patrol for a long time and can explain it much better than I can.”
Edith looked at Foreman. “I remember you now. You visited occasionally. Met the Administrator.”
“I did,” Foreman said.
Edith took a deep breath. “All right. It’s coming back to me. Strobe-like, but settling down.”
Edith looked about, taking in everyone in the command post. As she did so, Roland and Mac came back in and silently joined the group. In the background they could hear a helicopter taking off and knew Kirk—Staff Sergeant Winthrop Carter—was en route to the morgue, and then would begin the long journey that would end in Parthenon, Arkansas.
In the back of each Nightstalker’s mind was the knowledge that they could be making a similar journey before this was over.
When Edith began speaking, her voice was level and focused. “I’m going to explain it to you the way it was explained to me as best I can remember. It’s still a little patchy but smoothing out.”
“Start at the beginning,” Moms said.
Edith shook her head. “What beginning? Okay. I’ll start where they began explaining it to me when I first joined the Patrol. I was given the explanation simply to help me do my job and understand the importance of it.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s a basic truism that if time travel is ever invented then it has always existed in our history. Which means it exists now.”
“Huh?” Roland muttered.
“Cool,” Scout said.
“Exactly,” Doc said, as if he’d thought of it himself, which he probably had, more than once.
“There are dangers to time travel, of course,” Edith continued. “The most glaring is interfering with the past. By the way, we can’t travel forward from our time for some reason.”
“Because it doesn’t exist yet,” Doc said.
Edith shrugged. “I don’t know. I also think it has something to do with math and physics, which isn’t my area of expertise.”
“Intriguing,” Doc said. “How far back can one travel?”
Edith shook her head. “I have no idea. I know I’ve researched things from the beginning of recorded history.” She shut her eyes for a moment and then opened them. “Getting beyond the clumsy paradoxes of what happens if you kill your own father, which is a non-starter because it can’t happen, because it’s a fundamental paradox loop, we have certain truths.”
“Say that again?” Roland said.
“If we wait for Roland to understand this,” Mac said, “then we’re going to be here forever.”
“Do you understand?” Roland challenged.
“Not yet,” Mac admitted. “But the pretty lady has just started.”
“Not now, Mac,” Moms said. “Continue,” she said to Edith.
“First. You have to accept that there is time travel. That’s a reality that just needs to be accepted.”
“When was it invented?” Eagle was unable to restrain himself. “By who?”
Edith shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does except maybe the techs who service the HUB or, more likely, the Administrator.”
“Who is that?” the Keep asked.
Edith seemed confused by the question. “He’s the Administrator. That’s the only name I’ve ever heard him called.”
The Keep turned to Foreman. “The Administrator?”
“He runs the Patrol,” Foreman said. “I’ve met him a few times. That’s the only name or title I know him by. I don’t meddle in the details of how he runs things or how things operate here. He’s rarely about. I’m his contact for funding and in DC.”
“So ultimately the Patrol works for you?” the Keep demanded.
“The Patrol works for mankind,” Foreman said.
Moms slapped one of the counters, rattling the phones lined up on it. “Stop it! We’re not playing a game here. We’ve been called in to this for a reason, but no one’s told us what it is. We’re not even sure what our mission is. And we’ve lost a member of our team. So, Mister Foreman, with all due respect to whatever you are and whatever position you hold, stop with the obfuscation!”
“Huh?” Roland whispered.
“She means stop with the bullshit,” Eagle said to him.
“Yeah,” Roland said in a louder voice. “Stop obfuscationing.” He stepped up right behind Moms’s shoulder, a hulking presence to punctuate her statement.
Foreman held up his hands in surrender. “The Patrol does not work for me. It exists for its mission.”
Everyone took that in for a moment.
Nada shook his head. “I’m not buying that. Someone formed the Time Patrol. Everyone works for someone.”
Foreman indicated Edith. “Let the lady speak. She knows more than I do.”
Everyone turned back to Edith.
“The HUB was in the center of the base, in the cavern.” Her forehead furrowed as she tried to remember. “I can’t remember what it looks like yet. But it drew a lot of power. There was a legend that the HUB caused the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965.”
“There were power cables in the floor of the cavern,” Doc said. “Connected to the grid.” He turned to Edith. “When was it invented?”
“Frankly,” Edith said, “when it was invented doesn’t matter. As I said. If it’s ever invented then it was always invented. The Patrol used the HUB. That’s the bottom line.” She sighed. “It’s so much easier just to write things up in a report and turn it in. Even in just six pages.”
“My head hurts,” Roland said.
“This is really cool,” Scout said.
“Just tell me how to kill those things,” Nada muttered.
“Wait a second everyone,” Doc said, weighing in on his area of expertise: science. A difficult undertaking given the Nightstalkers’ propensity to shoot first and ask questions later. “We’ve got to understand this.”
“No,” the Keep interrupted. “You don’t need to understand it. Because it seems even the Patrol didn’t understand the HUB. They used it. We need to solve the immediate problem, the Time Patrol being missing, and fix it. Because the clock is ticking.”
“But they had to get the technology somehow,” Doc argued. “It had to come from somewhere and sometime. From our own future? Invented in our present? Actually that would be our past since it existed already and you insinuated it was active during the ’65 blackout.”
No one answered Doc’s questions.
Moms stepped into the silence. “The Patrol didn’t just up and decide to disappear. Someone made them disappear. Most likely that thing we killed in the cavern. And its buddies.”
“Why don’t we just listen.” The Keep wasn’t asking.
So Edith continued. “Time travel is dangerous. Both the actual mechanics of it, which, again, I am not familiar with, not being an agent or a scientist, and the possible effects a time traveler could have, or someone coming into our timeline and changing it could have. The latter was the focus of the Patrol’s mission.
“It’s not a case of stepping on a butterfly a thousand years ago and changing the course of history. The way it was explained to me is that our history, our timeline, is a powerful rive
r churning through deep banks that it has cut through the space-time continuum.” She cupped her long hands together to emphasize her point. “If a time traveler or infiltrator into our timeline changes something in the past, we call that a ripple. Like throwing a pebble into that river. Almost always it won’t have any effect. The flow of history will absorb the change and the ripple sooner or later fades away into nothing.
“But if it’s a major change—think Hannibal killing Scipio Africanus—that might have an effect.”
“Who killed who?” Roland muttered, perking up at the hint of violence, but everyone ignored him.
Edith plowed ahead, trying to explain the unexplainable. “Note I say might because generally one person or one event isn’t enough. People can be replaced by like-minded people. Very rarely is one person that important. And rarely is one event so important. But in such cases where they are, the Patrol has dealt with those attempts to change time and negated them.”
That got everyone’s attention.
“Who is making these attempts to change history?” the Keep asked.
“That’s the problem,” Edith said. “We don’t know. We assume they are from a parallel Earth timeline. One at least.”
Moms turned to Foreman. “So that’s your connection to the Patrol.”
“Yes,” Foreman said. “Our research overlapped, but we still know so very little on either side.”
“That thing down in the cavern,” Scout said. “It was from another Earth timeline?”
“It’s possible,” Edith said.
“Maybe it might be other time travelers from our own timeline,” Doc said.
“Does anyone else on the planet, our Earth,” Moms asked, “have time travel capability?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Edith said.
Moms turned to Foreman. “Do you know?”
“The same—no one else as far as I know,” Foreman said.
Roland was a bit behind. “Who is Skippy Africanus?”
Edith continued. “The Patrol has been a reactionary force, protecting our timeline. The agents, that’s what the individual members are called, each have specific eras and locations assigned that they’re responsible for.”
“How many agents?” Moms asked.
“Thousands,” Edith said. “But most are almost always gone. In the past. On patrol in their time. Only a few are here, were here, at any one time. Usually checking in. Making sure the flow is smooth. Doing research. The weird thing is, only a handful of the agents are from our time, each with a responsibility for a large era. The vast majority of operatives are from our past. Recruited for their expertise in their own specific eras, usually the duration of their lifetime, overlapping, of course with agents before and after. No current-era agent is allowed to go into the past unless they are matched up with an agent from that era. Those past agents are recruited and then trained by the Patrol to act as agents.”
“Trained where?” Nada asked.
“I don’t know,” Edith said. She shook her head. “That’s something that’s not clear in my memory. I know I know. I just can’t remember.”
Nada shot Frasier a dirty look, which was a wasted effort.
“That has to be a major operation,” Eagle said. “To adequately cover our entire past around the planet would require thousands and thousands of people. Think of the time and geography that needs to be covered.”
“The information given agents from the past,” Edith said, “is tightly controlled. They’re told only what they absolutely need to know in order to deal with any ripples in their time. The Patrol works very hard to make sure they don’t know their future.”
“Makes sense,” Doc said. “No one misses someone from the past. But someone from the present in the past could cause a problem. No matter how well trained one was, it would be impossible to completely blend in to a different era.”
“A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Eagle said.
“Exactly,” Edith agreed.
Roland was starting to twitch and Scout went and stood by him. “Ignore most of what they’re saying,” she whispered to him. “Nada will tell you who to shoot.”
That soothed the big man for the moment.
“So these agents,” Moms said, having had a moment to think this through, “are probably still in place, doing their jobs.”
Edith nodded. “Most likely. But. We can’t communicate with them without the HUB. That’s the portal through which they come and go. Came and went. But there’s a good chance those in their eras, which they are experts in, are indeed still in place. The problem is, when you’re in an era, it will take time to realize a ripple has been enacted. By then, in that time, it’s most likely too late to negate the ripple. The agent can come back to the present through the HUB, research the ripple or the shift, if it gets to that, and then go back, perhaps with a current operative, to earlier in their era, and make the correction by preventing the change.
“And, more importantly, we can’t tell them if there’s been a problem in their time if we see the ripple from our perspective looking back, but they haven’t noticed it. Most ripples are noted in our present, and we go back and alert the agents of the appropriate era to take corrective action, negating even the need for them to come to our time. That’s the more usual Protocol by far.”
“I got a bad headache,” Roland said.
“Go on,” the Keep prompted.
“So a ripple is different than a shift?” Doc asked.
Edith cleared her throat. “I was told it is extraordinarily unlikely that a single ripple can cause a shift in our timeline. But a series of ripples, coordinated on a specific path, can cause what they call a shift. That’s when something begins to change in our present.”
“That’s what we’ve begun to experience,” Moms said. “The weird stuff that’s been happening to us.”
“What weird stuff?” Foreman asked, but he was ignored by the team.
“Are the changes permanent?” Doc asked. “You say the Patrol can go back and revert the timeline?”
“The Patrol can fix the shift,” Edith said. “Whether that reverts ancillary changes is something I don’t know.”
“What?” Roland said.
“The big danger,” Edith continued, “is if there are enough shifts which aren’t corrected, we could get a time tsunami.”
“That don’t sound good,” Roland muttered.
“It’s never happened,” Edith said. “But if twelve hours go by in the present and the shift isn’t corrected, then it will be a tsunami. Our timeline will change permanently.”
“Why twelve hours?” Doc asked.
Edith shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Geez,” Nada said. “We’re flying blind here.”
“That’s the countdown that started,” the Keep said.
“What countdown?” Moms asked.
“Upon the alarm being sounded,” the Keep said. She looked at her watch. “We now have seven hours and twenty-two minutes.”
“To do what exactly?” Nada demanded.
“Silence!” The Keep was surprisingly loud for such a tiny person. “I admit I’m not used to working on a team. But we need to work together. Let the woman finish. Then we’ll deal with the situation.”
“Hold on,” Doc said. “Why has the countdown started? Has there been a change in our past? Or has it started because the Time Patrol is gone?”
“I don’t know,” Edith said. “We know the HUB is gone. Here’s the key. The but, so to speak. If you follow the logic, then an agent has infinite time in the past to make a correction. But in the present, we only have the twelve hours.”
“Let me see if I follow,” Moms said. “If a shift is experienced now, as long as it’s noted, and an agent is sent to the past to alert the agent of the era the ripple or shift started in, within twelve hours, things are good to go?”
“Yes,” Edith said. “But we almost always deal with ripples. No rush on those, except we never know if they
’re adding up to a shift.”
“So the Time Patrol disappearing,” Eagle said, “is a shift.”
“Right,” Edith said.
“Hold on,” Eagle said. “So no ripples were noticed?”
“Apparently,” Edith said, “some of you have experienced ripples. But the Time Patrol disappearing; that’s unprecedented.”
Doc took a step forward. “That’s cutting it awfully thin, twelve hours. It would be easy to miss these ripples.”
Edith shook her head. “Don’t you understand? That’s why the Patrol stretches all the way back to the beginning of mankind. We have twelve hours in the present, but all of history, after the initiating event of a ripple, to notice it. So any agent past the initiating of a ripple up until the present can report it.” She pointed toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “And that’s why we’re here. We have art in there from across the world. A series of ripples make it to a shift, it will show up in the art from some time and some place.”
“Ingenious,” Eagle said. “The backup reporting system.”
Edith nodded. “Yes. The Patrol disappearing, that wipes out any agent reporting in other than through the art.”
A phone rang, cutting through all the talk. The Keep picked it up, listened for a moment, and then put it down. “Support has removed the armor from the thing you killed. And they’re afraid the body might be booby-trapped.”
The team headed out of the van toward the Met. The Keep waited until they were all gone, and then sat down in the chair facing the encrypted audio-visual channel. She turned it on. The screen flickered for a moment as it was frequency jumped and then matched to the set on the other end.
The image of the President appeared.
“I’ve considered the situation as per your reports,” the President said. “Your summation?”
“We can’t allow a breach to occur from this location,” the Keep said.
“Recommendation?”
“You authorize Furtherance for this locale. I will take personal charge. I’ve had some people run the numbers. It will be contained underground.”
The President bit her lower lip as she considered this, a habit her aides had managed to break her of—mostly. “Are you certain?”