Winston didn’t feel up to running yet, despite the need to work away this bone-chilling cold, but he managed a quick walk. For psychological comfort as much as physical need, Winston fished a crushed, soggy juice box and granola bar from the bottom of his bag. He would need to stash the packages to prevent anyone from asking awkward questions.
A chain-link fence ran along the property line, further marked with a brown, clumpy grass strip where the mower missed. Amazingly, there were occasional gaps in the boundary, apparently to let people in and out as they pleased. Airport security must be very different in 1969 than 2013, Winston mused.
The shivers came on more strongly as the cold air leeched through his damp clothes. Even the new jacket didn’t prevent an icy chill from creeping up his legs and down his neck. He forced himself into a jog, nervous that rushing might draw attention, and left the road to cut straight across the field, wanting the shortest possible path to warmth. Fortunately, he only saw a few people at the airport. No one called to him. He trotted all the way across the airfield to the closest hangar.
When he crossed through the enormous main hangar door, Winston was relieved to find the place marginally warmer thanks to the sporadic placement of electric space heaters around the interior. At least forty aircraft, most of them smaller with only one or two propellers, stood arranged into two rows down the hangar’s left and right sides. A scattering of mechanics or perhaps pilots moved among the planes. Some checked their machines from below, others leaned into engines from tall ladders. No one paid Winston the slightest attention.
Except one man.
For an instant, Winston didn’t recognize him. He wore blue coveralls and had grease smudges all over his hands. His dark hair lightened to gray at the temples, and crow’s feet appeared in an otherwise smooth, narrow face when he smiled. He had been working on a white, single-propeller plane bearing a very familiar, banana-shaped pontoon jutting from its front.
He straightened from whatever he had been doing with the wing and stared for a long moment at Winston. Similarly, Winston could only stare back. He didn’t know what to do or say. He had never knowingly met his father before, and that was ignoring the fact that he wouldn’t be born for another thirty years.
At last, Claude started into motion, walking toward Winston while wiping his hands on his pants. The smile never left his face. “Well,” the man said slowly. “Words fail.”
Winston took a couple of halting steps, then fell still again. He had fantasized about a moment like this for all of his life. Despite the strangeness of the time and place and everything that had led to this moment, Winston could finally say that he had met his father — his real father, as he might have been in a happier, better world. Winston had the urge to find someone, anyone, and say, “This is my dad. My dad. I finally found him.”
Winston couldn’t stop the tears. As his father approached, Claude looked like he was about to extend his arm to shake hands, but he must have spotted the expression on Winston’s face. He stepped in closer, wrapped his arms around Winston, and something deep within Winston snapped.
“Dad!” he gasped. It was the only word he could form, and he repeated it over and over as he sobbed and rested his cheek on Claude’s shoulder.
His father pressed a hand against Winston’s neck and patted him gently. “My boy,” whispered Claude. “My son.”
They stood like that for a while, oblivious to anything around them.
“Darrel?” called a much younger man who had appeared near the plane. “You want me to finish her up?”
“If you don’t mind,” said Claude as he released Winston and gave his associate a little wave. Claude also had tear streaks on his cheeks.
He guided them deeper into the hangar and through the side doors. What became a museum lobby in the future was a visitor’s lounge in 1969, only in Tillamook their idea of a lounge was a refrigerator, a few tables, and a sink set into a long counter.
“Darrell?” asked Winston when he saw that they were alone.
Claude shrugged. “It works. Are you hungry or thirsty?”
Winston was about to say no when his father opened the refrigerator and revealed a top shelf filled with Coca-Cola bottles — tall ones with bottle caps, and not an aluminum can in sight. In Winston’s time, these glass jewels had to be imported from Mexico.
Claude followed his stare. “Ha! I see kids are still the same in the future.”
He grabbed one of the bottles, pulled a Snickers bar from a counter drawer, and put a couple of quarters into a jar on the counter beside the fridge. He set the snacks before Winston and popped off the cap with a bottle opener on his key ring.
“Should I call you Dad?” Winston asked. “I’m pretty much a stranger to you. Or…am I?”
“Nothing you would remember,” said Claude. He indicated Winston’s height. “And definitely not since you’ve gotten so big. Yes. It’s strange for both of us.”
“My friend is waiting for me,” Winston said around a mouthful of candy bar. “The FBI is after both of us. So is Bledsoe. I’m not sure if those two things are the same.”
Claude stiffened at Bledsoe’s name, but he took a deep breath and let it out. Again, his deep eyes crinkled with humor and affection. “We have time. Sort of.”
“Right.” Winston gently knocked himself in the forehead with a knuckle. “Time machine.”
The silence between them grew until Claude splayed his hands on the tabletop. “So. What shall we talk about? Is it too late for the birds and the bees?”
“Dad! Ew! We covered that in sixth grade.”
“Really?”
They both laughed, and Winston felt relieved that the tension was starting to fade.
“Should I tell you about 2013?” he finally asked.
Claude sobered quickly. “Absolutely not. No details. I’ve had a lot of time to bounce around. I’ve made a little money with investing. I’ve lost things, too.” A shadow of sadness crossed over his face as if from a passing cloud, then vanished. “Understand that the more you try to pin down events in time, the more slippery they get. I can tell you to find me on January 12, 1969, and that works fine so long as I stick around all day. But if I told you to divert my friend Steve out there from going home tonight and instead take him to a poker game where you play against him and other men for hundreds of dollars, that’s different. That’s using your knowledge and changing things, setting off ripples that will affect many people. The more ripples you make, the greater the odds of things not going as you expect.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just how time seems to work.”
Winston tried to puzzle it out and couldn’t. He shook his head in confusion.
Claude leaned forward, his expression earnest. “The Alpha Machine exists to help us observe. It’s meant to be a tool for learning, not for gain. Bernie warned me about this, and he was right. It’s so easy to abuse, Winston, and you won’t even know you’re abusing it until it’s too late. We like to think we can control our base nature, but we’re only fooling ourselves.”
Winston nodded and found himself unable to keep from asking about the thing he prayed was possible. “I tried to see beyond 2013, and I couldn’t. It was like I hit this wall, but…is it possible?”
Claude cleared his throat. His eyes were shadowed with concern. “I would rather not discuss it. There are things neither of us should say to the other.”
Winston stifled his indignation and said in a more hushed voice, “You don’t think that information could be important? Maybe useful?”
“You’ve made it a long way, Winston, but you have to understand. I wanted those pieces to stay hidden. I wanted you to stay hidden. I couldn’t wait to meet you today, but part of me hoped so much that you would never come. Because things can change. There was always a chance that you and your mom might have stayed safe and everything about Area X had just faded away.”
Winston snorted. “Yeah, that didn’t happen.”
“Giving someone the ability to go back is terrible enough, but to go forward? No. Never.”
Claude fell silent, lost in thought. The awkward silence between them chafed at Winston. He needed to lighten the mood.
“I hoped it would be like that H.G. Wells book. It might be cool to jump a thousand years, or even to the end of the world with Morlocks and all that.”
A smile flickered across Claude’s features. “Morlocks were in 800,000 AD or so. Wells described crab creatures at the end of the world.”
Winston’s heart fluttered with happiness. His dad was a sci-fi nerd, too.
“Unfortunately,” Claude continued, “you can’t go to the end of the world or anywhere near it. You know that sensation when you’re looking to where and when you want to jump? That stretching tension in your mind that feels anchored in the middle of your body?”
“The rubber band,” said Winston.
“Yes. The farther you go, the tighter it gets and the harder it is to pull even more.”
“But you could practice and maybe build up—”
The humorous moment vanished. Claude closed his eyes and cut him off. “There are costs. I am older than I look. The QVs help to heal my body, but I can feel…” He put one hand on his chest. “Inside, I feel older. Every jump takes a toll. It’s a weariness that no rest ever helps. And I’ve had to make many, many jumps.”
“Was it worth it?” Winston peered intently into his father’s sad gaze. “If you’ve planned all this, do you know how it’s going to end?”
Winston did his best not to contain his dismay when Claude said, “No. I don’t. There are too many variables. All I could do was try to give us — you — a fighting chance. And this…is my last action.”
Claude reached into his jumpsuit pocket and drew out a small, black torus, the counterpart to the black ring already in Winston’s bag.
“Keep in mind that there’s a direct relationship between translated distance and the duration required to appear at the destination. A line-of-sight translation will be almost instantaneous. Distant translations may take a few seconds.”
“Big jumps, more landing time,” said Winston.
Claude nodded.
“I am done,” he said as he placed the torus in Winston’s hand. “You have all four pieces, along with the energy interface.”
Winston couldn’t help but look away. He had a pretty good guess as to what the energy interface might be. “Well, um, not exactly.”
Alarm registered on his father’s face. “What do you mean?”
“It was an accident! I’d gotten the piece from Theo and had to drop off the Astoria bridge to get back on this freighter and the cops were coming and…and it fell into the river.”
“You lost the interface in the Columbia River,” Claude repeated as the meaning of the words hit him. “Please tell me Devlin doesn’t have it.”
“Does it help if he doesn’t have the energy marbles?”
Claude’s head sank into his hands. “This is what I mean! I never saw this. Every iteration I examined showed you with the energy interface.”
“I actually call it Little e. For energy.”
Claude ignored the comment and shook his head in confusion, his frustration plain. “Time is a slippery surface on which we place events, Winston. We think they stay in place because that’s how we naturally perceive them, but believing that is dangerous when the entire system is in motion.”
Winston was beginning to understand. “That’s why you think we should avoid the future. Because we’d use it to get information to bring back to the present, only it’d foul things up.”
“Yes. The past is treacherous enough.”
Winston nodded. He understood things getting fouled up. He fought back a wave of anxiety as he remembered this same man spread out on a hospital bed with his head stapled back together. And the note.
Your pops for the pieces at dawn. Say yes or he dies.
Winston still had no idea how to solve the problem immediately before him, and he desperately needed advice, even if it meant bending the rules.
“He has you, Dad,” said Winston. “Bledsoe. It’s—”
Claude held up his hand at arm’s length to block whatever Winston might say. “No. Winston, you must not tell me anything.”
“You’re in this hangar, right over there.” He pointed to the main area beyond the lobby. “And Bledsoe has—”
“No!” Claude stood up so quickly that his chair skidded backward and fell over, clattering loudly.
“Did you know he also has Mom now?” Winston pleaded.
Claude swallowed thickly and bowed his head. “Yes. But I did not know that he had me.” He looked up sharply. “Despite all my planning, all it takes is one little random element to send events spinning off into another direction.”
“Butterfly wings,” Winston muttered.
Claude cocked his head, not understanding.
“It’s chaos theory,” explained Winston. “The idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in one place could eventually lead to a hurricane thousands of miles away.”
Claude nodded slowly and set his chair upright at the table. His movements as he sat down again were tentative and cautious, like those of a much older man. He suddenly seemed as exhausted as Winston felt.
“Then…you should go soon,” said Claude. “Your mother needs you.”
Winston knew his father meant well, but he felt like the man might be pushing him away, and that stung. It brought up all those old feelings of having been abandoned as a baby. Perhaps that was why Winston found it easy to push back against his father’s earlier words.
“Are you telling me everything?” he asked.
Claude stiffened and eyed him warily. “What do you mean?”
“You said this was the fourth piece, the last piece.” Winston hefted the silver device in his hand. “But Mom said there were five, and the last one is crescent-shaped. What’s up with that?”
Claude stared fixedly at the table between them, his mouth pursed with tension. At last, he said, “I can’t discuss that.”
“You wanna know my theory?” Winston asked. “I know I can’t see into the future with the pieces I have. It’s locked or something. But you managed to jump from 1948 decades into the future…and you had five pieces.” He paused until Claude glanced up and met his eyes with a mix of what appeared to be irritation and fear. “I think the fifth piece is a future unlocker. How am I doing?”
“You should not be asking about this,” Claude said quietly.
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t give it to you.”
“Are you serious right now?” Winston pushed away from the table, anger bubbling up within him. “I’m in the middle of trying to save your life! It would be kinda handy to see what helps and what doesn’t!”
Claude shook his head vehemently. “It doesn’t work that way! I—!” He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly. When Claude’s calm returned, he said, “Winston, I have already committed to giving my life for you, for your mom, for the purpose that all of this serves. You have to trust me. I cannot give it to you.”
“Even if it means Bledsoe wins?”
His answer emerged in a whisper. “Yes.”
Silence fell between them again. Winston supposed he had what he needed, but despite his frustration he couldn’t bring himself to think about disappearing so soon.
“Does it matter when I leave?” Winston asked. The geojumper felt almost feather-light in his hand but weighed heavily on his mind.
Sensing the change in their discussion, Claude’s mood lifted somewhat. “On a practical level, no. You can choose whatever time you want for your return, although the Alpha Machine may merge your true present if you try to land close enough to it. Remember, though: An hour passing here is an hour passing in your true home timeline, your relative present. Also, I will caution you that the longer you stay, the more you will lose your sense of urgency.”
&n
bsp; Shade had said he needed some time to do his work in the forest, whatever that was going to be.
“How soon?” Winston asked.
Claude checked his watch. “It’s quarter past four. Do you have any plans for dinner? I have a couple of T-bones in the fridge for just such an occasion.”
Despite himself, Winston grinned from ear to ear.
26
A Piece and a Pop
Winston didn’t realize that he’d fallen asleep until he awoke to the smell of French fries. He lay nestled deep in couch cushions, their fabric redolent with the scents of home cooking and long use. After driving to his father’s small house on the northern edge of Tillamook, they’d seasoned the steaks and sliced up a batch of home-cut fries together. Seeing that Winston couldn’t stop yawning, Claude had put Winston in charge of keeping the fireplace fed while he continued to dry out and warm up on the couch. Winston remembered feeling a pang of guilt, knowing that Shade must still be out in that dripping, dark forest, right before closing his eyes for a second.
That second had apparently lasted fifteen or twenty minutes, because the smell of fries immediately gave way to his father standing over him, steaming dinner plate and utensils in hand.
“I have a little table in the kitchen,” he said, “but I figured we could eat here where it’s warm and comfortable. If you’re hungry, I made enough for four or five people.”
Winston pushed off the red flannel blanket his father had laid over him and tore into his dinner like a velociraptor. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tasted food this good.
“Best…dinner…ever,” he said around a mouthful of ketchup-laden fries.
Claude smiled as he sat in a simple rocking chair across from Winston. They chatted about Winston’s mom, his life in school, his love of science and robotics, his not-so-secret-anymore affection for Alyssa, and everything else that didn’t give away big-picture details about the future. Claude drank it all in, constantly plying Winston with more questions, trying to capture thirteen missing years in one evening.
Winston Chase and the Theta Factor Page 20