After describing to Theo how previous photographs had led to their respective artifacts, Winston opened the zipper and spread the three photos on the counter before them. Their color was somewhat faded, and each of the three-by-five-inch prints bore rounded edges in the style that Winston recognized as having been common in the 1970s.
The first picture showed a blue sky with a handful of puffy, white cumulus clouds. Spread across these, as if superimposed on the image, was a broad, navy-blue letter V.
Winston tapped the letter thoughtfully. “V for…victory?”
“Possibly.” Theo squinted at the image thoughtfully. “That would fit with your father’s World War II theme. Also, it’s quite symbolic: victory transcending destruction.”
That sounded too much like English class for Winston’s taste. “So, victory…in the clouds,” Winston mused. “But didn’t victory come from that big army landing on the beaches?”
“Normandy.”
“Right.” Winston struggled to make the connection. “Maybe he’s telling us to succeed by taking a flight somewhere?”
“Or…” Theo’s eyebrows lifted hopefully. “What’s if it’s a Roman numeral five?”
That seemed promising. “Five…clouds. Five…air…sky… Ugh.”
After a moment, Theo admitted that he had nothing conclusive and urged Winston to move on.
The next shot showed a set of white shelves attached to a wall, such as might be found in a bedroom or living room. The camera was close to one shelf, as if the photographer had been standing only inches from it, looking down its length. The shelves were loaded with assorted odds and ends, most of which were too blurred by the narrow field of view to be identifiable. On the higher shelf, Winston could make out the shape of some paperback books, a carved duck, and a triangular object that had to be a travel clock.
On the shelf directly before the camera rested an ancient pair of headphones with speakers practically the size of coconuts, a rock the size of a walnut, and a child’s rubber ball. Under the headphones was a piece of paper — no. It was thicker, like cardboard, and square shaped, with some design on it. As Winston drew closer, he realized that the cardboard’s barely exposed corner was printed with an odd, random pattern of black dots, almost like old TV static. The upside-down letters “LED,” printed in red, poked out from under one headphone.
Winston and Theo spent at least fifteen minutes puzzling over the objects and their relative positions on the shelves before admitting defeat. Neither of them had the foggiest idea what light-emitting diodes might have to do with stereo equipment. They met similar defeat on the third photo, which looked to be a reprint of the burning-candles-set-atop-a-church-altar photo from the previous set of clues.
“Oh, Claude,” sighed Theo as he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “A letter in the clouds, hi-fi equipment, and candles. You are too sly, sir.”
Needing a break, Winston and Theo fell into chatting for a while, and every time Theo veered toward asking about the future, Winston tried to gently redirect the conversation to Area X and his parents. Understandably, two decades had left Theo’s memory a bit spotty. He had forgotten that Winston’s mom had originally been recruited to work on mass-producing penicillin, but he remembered what she looked like, how she tended to bite her lips when concentrating, and how she was always the most social one in their group. While the men tended to be head-down in a problem for hours at a time, Amanda needed to be up and moving. Insight always came to her in flashes while she was in the middle of doing something else.
“I guess I got my dad’s social skills,” Winston mused.
Theo chuckled. “Claude was the quiet one, the thinker. Sometimes, that would work against him.”
“Like how?”
Theo guided Winston over to a gallery display showing a range of warships used by the U.S. in World War II. Off to the side, a large black-and-white photo showed the infamous bombing of Pearl Harbor, with smoke and flames billowing from the wreckage of America’s Navy.
“This is what got us into the war,” Theo said. “President Roosevelt wouldn’t break our neutrality until the Japanese attacked us. America was outraged. There was cheering everywhere when FDR announced we would be going overseas into battle.”
“Like 9/11,” Winston mumbled. Then, noting Theo’s inquisitive glance, added, “Sorry. Another long story.”
Theo didn’t press for details and instead continued his own tale. “Claude was not a supporter. I remember watching him listening to the President’s radio broadcast with tears running down his face. He didn’t care about revenge. He remembered all the millions of dead from the last war and knew how many had died in this war already.”
Winston ran his fingertips over the image of the burning battleships. “World War II was worse?”
“Many times worse.” Theo winced at his recollections. “I remember, we were in my living room. It was a Sunday night. The streets were filled with people talking about it. My girlfriend was running around saying we needed to attack Tokyo the next day with every plane we had. But Claude looked up at me, one hand on top of the radio, and he said, ‘They’re going to make us fight from our labs. We scientists are going to kill innocent people with our pencils.’”
Winston struggled to fit this image of his father alongside the sassy, shriveled cribbage player he knew as Mr. A. “So why did he go along with it?”
“Oh…” Theo turned away and rubbed at the floor with his shoe. “We all had reasons, and they were never simple. It’s hard to run against a herd in the middle of a stampede. Also…in the moment, you can only take your best guess with the information you have.”
With their conversation at an awkward lull, Theo beckoned for Winston to follow him back into the basement so that he could resume packing the temporary exhibit items. Winston felt as if he’d stopped to visit a long-lost uncle, and the sense of being with family felt novel and warm.
Despite saying he was a head-down worker, Theo clearly didn’t have a problem with thinking and talking while using his hands and muddling through the rows and piles of crates, ropes, tools, artwork, exhibit pieces, and packing supplies. As he directed Winston in the wrapping of framed photos in brown paper, he asked, “Are there any other ports on the Columbia between Portland and the Pacific in your time?”
Winston shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“Can you go back and slip away before getting loaded onto the freighter?”
“No, the Alpha Machine would block me,” said Winston. “I can’t go to a time and place the Alpha Machine has already been in. The controls show up as red and won’t execute. Plus, there would be two of me, which is probably another no-no.”
Theo bobbed his head slowly as he thought through the problem. “I see. Well, that leaves us at a momentary impasse. You obviously know how to use your first two Alpha Machine pieces. You should probably experiment a bit with the new one.”
Theo was right. While there were a thousand things he was curious to see and experience in 1966, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his mom and Shade were still back in 2013 enduring any number of terrible things. A minute here was another minute gone in his present, and thus another minute closer to Bledsoe’s deadline. The only advantage he had was the Alpha Machine, and even if it meant another accident, he needed to master the device. He needed to go all in or give up.
Winston retrieved his backpack, settled into a spot on the floor amid some boxes, and drew out Little e and the three Alpha Machine pieces. With a twinge that made him smile, he noticed the spare underwear and socks his mother had packed. At least those hadn’t been tossed aside while fleeing from Bledsoe.
Winston suddenly knew what he wanted to see in the future.
He activated Little e and directed its undulating arms to create their bowl shape around the chronoviewer ring. Slowly, Winston let go of the chronoviewer within the six arms and was delighted to find that it hovered in place within Little e’s energy field. Winston was aga
in struck by the difference between now and the first time he’d used the chronoviewer, without Little e. The text readout formed faster, and the operation felt…smoother. More natural.
This was how the two devices were supposed to interact. Winston had been doing it wrong. He could operate the choronoviewer with his bare hands, as he’d done in the motel room, but Little e made the connection easier and stronger.
Having learned his lesson from his drop into the Columbia, Winston did not add the small chronojumper piece yet.
Look before you accidentally leap…or drop, he thought.
Instead, Winston used his left hand to grab the black ring. If the silver ring let him see into time, and the silver torus let him jump to the time he viewed, then the black ring was…what? He suspected it was the piece that would allow him to see other places, the companion to the chronoviewer. That would make it the…placeviewer? No, it needed another Greek root — geoviewer. Shade would approve.
Winston brought the smaller circle within the boundary of the larger one. Not surprisingly, the geoviewer tugged out of his fingers and snapped into place, magnetically suspended in midair within the chronoviewer. It began to turn and rotate. Winston felt the familiar subtle pressures of Little e and the chronoviewer in the back of his head. The geoviewer added its own distinct sensation, a barely perceptible vibration in what felt like the center of Winston’s brain. It also appeared to add white cross hairs in the lower-left corner opposite from the chronoviewer controls. The cross hairs were surrounded by a thin white circle with a small bulge in its top, not unlike the design of the Alpha Machine rings, and a diamond shape set into its bottom.
Winston gave the chrono slider the barest nudge to the left, just enough to send the view back a few hours, erasing Theo and causing the light to stream in from a different direction. It left Winston with the odd sensation of seeing two sets of sunlight-cast shadows.
“Yes, I’d forgotten,” said Theo, who stood several feet away, watching Winston and the Alpha Machine with great interest. “What do you see? Can you describe it?”
Winston did his best to describe the experience of seeing two realities at once, with the target time-space layered under the present. He tried to convey how he could mentally grab the time scrubber in the lower-right corner of his awareness and slide it to control time movement. Theo struggled to grasp this, probably because he had no frame of reference for timeline scrubbing, which wouldn’t be invented for another twenty or thirty years.
The cross hairs intrigued Winston. As with the chrono controls, he tried mentally giving them the slightest nudge, but that had no effect. Trying to twist them also yielded nothing. When Winston pushed and released the lines, though, as if pressing an “on” button, the white lines separated, forming three closely overlapping cross hairs of red, green, and blue. Simultaneously, the second reality layer in Winston’s vision changed. Edges grew hazy. The entire view, already muted compared to the primary “here and now” layer, seemed to exist within a light fog.
There we go, thought Winston. Now, just take it easy…
Unsure how to proceed, Winston focused on the red cross hairs and tried giving them a little tug to the left. Suddenly, that second layer of reality slid into a frantic blur of motion. He felt a surge of vertigo and didn’t know that he’d fallen sideways until his shoulder collided with the box beside him.
“Whoa!” said Theo. He knelt and pulled Winston back into an upright position. “Are you all right?”
The dizziness passed as quickly as it had struck. Winston took a deep breath to steady himself and found that his second reality layer had him positioned outside the museum, staring at the back door through which he’d entered earlier. The red cross hairs slowly drifted back into their original position under the other crosses.
“Yes. Just learning.”
Winston steeled himself for another gut-wrenching shift and tried to push the red cross upward. Nothing. The red cross refused to budge. It did, however, slide easily to the right, sending Winston’s view through the museum basement and into another building across the street. Winston found himself face-to-face with a middle-aged woman in a loose-fitting bathrobe, her hair up in curlers, sitting on her bed with a magazine in her lap and a cigarette smoking between her lips.
“Oh, God!” exclaimed Winston reflexively.
His first thought was to smack the cross hairs, hoping it would operate as an “off” switch. At the last instant, he stopped himself from doing this. For all he knew, pressing the cross hairs was the execute command, and his next breath would be of her cigarette smoke and trying to explain how and why he’d magically appeared before her.
Instead, Winston dropped Little e as if it had suddenly scalded his hand. The artifacts bounced and clattered across the floor.
At first, Theo was alarmed, but after Winston explained what he’d seen, Theo doubled over with laughter.
“That—!” Theo started, but then couldn’t speak through his laughter. “That was Mrs. Bellamy,” he finally managed. “She spends her days listening to the radio and patrolling the neighborhood for anything that should be reported to the police. You would have made her month.”
14
Chronoview of Captivity
Once Winston paced off his anxiety and worked up the nerve for a second attempt, he discovered that the green cross hairs controlled forward-and-back movement while the blue controlled elevation. It all made sense: x-, y-, and z-axis controls. The higher Winston climbed, the more space his lateral shifts covered. It also resulted in decreasing amounts of detail in the world he saw. The fog seemed to grow thicker and shapes less defined as his perspective grew more distant, although he never lost sight of the ground or its features.
More experimentation revealed that the bulge on the white ring served as a compass pointer to true north. Best of all, the diamond toggled a blue text overlay indicating place names. Winston found this baffling at first. How could he possibly know place names in an area he had never visited, especially in a time from before he was born? His best guess was that the aliens who had created QV technology had spent ages studying the Earth and had cataloged all of its locations. But that would mean that all that map data was either part of the Alpha Machine or physically baked into his DNA and cells, even from the time of his birth. Maybe his brain was somehow synchronizing with external map data from 1966? That was a scary thought, because if he was fetching data from somewhere, it meant that somebody else might also be fetching data from him.
Winston shook his head. Another mystery for another day. Right now, it was time to push the envelope.
He brought his place navigation back to the basement, which was completely disorienting as his perspective was fifteen feet or so from where he sat on his boxes, and every time he turned his head to look around, his other self’s perspective changed at the same time. The effect was even worse than that first lurch outside, and Winston had to close his eyes to let his stomach settle. However, since he was in the same room, he pressed on the three cross hairs at once and found that they indeed operated as an “off” switch.
Winston settled himself back on the boxes, closed his eyes to concentrate more easily, and activated the geoviewer again. By gently gaining elevation with the blue cross hairs and shifting the red and green about, Winston found the Columbia River’s mouth and traced it east to Portland. He hit the white diamond to make place names appear. Massive Forest Park was an emerald spear thrusting into the northwestern sector of Portland’s sprawl. Just south of this spike lay Winston’s own Beaverton, and, continuing east from there, almost to the Willamette River, the folds of the Southwest Hills. Nestled in these sat the almost kidney-shaped bull’s-eye of Council Crest Park, highlighted in yellow.
Winston groaned. If Council Crest was highlighted in his internal sight, it must mean that his natural navigation system could read his mind and desired target location. There was probably a way to jump straight there from wherever he was on the globe, only he hadn’t dis
covered the command yet.
“Everything all right?” Theo asked.
“Yeah,” mumbled Winston. “Just learning.”
From this vantage, Council Crest was unmistakable: bald-crowned by grass, punctuated by a concrete circle, with a green water tower standing above one flank. This was the place Winston had promised to meet his mother for dinner a few hours after leaving her in his flight from the FBI. Had he really thought he would shake off Bledsoe’s and the government’s pursuit like playing a game of hide-and-seek?
Winston let the cross hairs settle into their neutral positions, and the perspective of his second reality almost instantly shifted to standing on the park’s concrete circle. Looking about, Winston saw downtown spread out below to the east. Along the horizon, he saw the five snow-capped Cascade mountains visible from the outlook. The park was different than he remembered, though. Some of the artwork and benches he would have recognized were missing, and an old-fashioned trolley car stood nearby, accompanied by an explanatory bronze plaque.
Of course. He was looking at Council Crest in 1966.
Winston mentally pushed the time slider to the right. Darkness blurred into daylight. Ghostly forms flitted by around him. Some winked in and out of being while others stayed. Beyond the water tower, a red-and-white radio tower snapped into existence. In his peripheral vision, passing so quickly he wondered if it had truly happened, Winston thought he saw a billowing tower of gray spewing upward from distant Mount St. Helens, the top of the cloud flattening as high winds took hold of it.
Winston could feel the tug of his true present ease as he got closer, but that wasn’t quite what he wanted. He nudged the slider until he reached October 3, 2013. He aimed for 6:00 in the evening and overshot it, nearly to 7:30, but he paused to see what was there.
Winston Chase and the Theta Factor Page 10