A Gift of Time

by Merritt, Jerry

  “And since we’ve placed our order for another glider body, it’s obvious that someone somewhere is still working on the project.”

  “I’m afraid so. Now it’s a matter of whether Boeing delivers the body before the news from the eggs and seeds comes to the attention of forces that would like to get their hands on whoever made that glider. I doubt anyone will be able to track the delivery path back to us down in the vault, though. The feds can swarm all over that little Nevada space company and not find any link back to us. So let’s see how things work out. It may not be a problem.”

  Another major flare-up in the Middle East and a volcanic eruption in the Philippines pushed the UFO stories off the front page for several months. Even the tabloids moved on when a popular starlet tried to commit suicide after having a baby with the Devil. But I wondered what the seed-and-egg boys were doing. It was too quiet. Something was going on.

  Meanwhile the constantly evolving titanium purification equipment had matured. When Ell checked her latest stats, they listed a total of twenty-seven pounds of pure titanium on hand. It was finally enough to cast a bar with sufficient excess to allow it to be milled to the size and tolerances required by Lovely Pebble’s time glider.

  I had already established a foundry and milling company a dozen miles away in San Jose that had the equipment to do the work when the time came. Ell and I personally delivered the vacuum tank that isolated the titanium from atmospheric impurities. I met with the foundry workers who would do the highly technical vacuum casting and told them the bar would be a prototype standard weight and measure for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, therefore the need for absolute purity. Of course, they had no way to tell the titanium was pure beyond any casting ever made on earth before. Then it was home to pack for a sailing trip.

  Chapter 59

  We hit heavy smoke about a mile out from the cabin where a forestry truck blocked our way. “Wildfire up in the hills,” a flinty-eyed ranger said as he leaned on the Jeep door peering in at Ell. “Closed until the smoke eaters get it under control.” I asked if the cabin was okay, but he didn’t have any detailed info. Reluctantly, we turned around and spent the night on Lovely Pebble.

  Ell worried about Schrödinger the whole time, so we were up at dawn for a return home. The road lay open all the way to the cabin through acres of blackened manzanita and Douglas fir. Firebreaks scarred the hillside where bulldozers had cleared away the brush down to ground level. As we pulled up to the cabin, Schrödinger sat on the porch waiting for us.

  Strangely, though, Ell didn’t run to her pet. She ran several hundred yards up the hill behind the cabin instead and stood in a bulldozed firebreak scanning the burned area around her. Finally, she seemed to locate what she was looking for and darted down the firebreak toward it. When I caught up to her she held what looked like a cracked stone. Within the stone, sunlight caught stacks of cubic crystals in ordered layers. It didn’t look like any rock I’d ever seen before. She turned to me as I came up beside her.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “This?” She stared down at the rock.

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” she glanced up at me, “it was a link between me and Lovely Pebble.”

  Implication dragged its icy finger down my spine. Was this payback for leaving Lovely Pebble? Some kind of terrible revenge to remind me what could have been? In my single-minded drive to develop time travel, it had never occurred to me Ell might be something more than a helpmate. Or worse, something less.

  “You were planning to leave once you got the new control rod. I can’t believe it.”

  Ell stood speechless.

  “What were you going to do? Just call yourself down here to pick up the rod then the two of you head for home? You didn’t need to go behind my back, Ell. I would have helped you no matter what your plans.”

  Ell finally recovered her voice. “No, no. You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not leaving. I can’t leave. Lovely Pebble’s not allowed to take me with her. I’m disposable. I always have been.”

  “No, you’re not disposable, Ell.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I’m only a fragment of Ell. Fragments can’t go back to populate her virtual world. It’s a check against despots cloning themselves into a virtual army. She, the Ell on the glider, couldn’t just keep popping in down here. Her glider won’t allow repeated contact. Even in an emergency. So I had to have some way to recall the glider when the part was ready.”

  The discussion had become circular. I tried a different tack. “So what exactly was your mission, then?”

  “What I told you. Help you to make a pure titanium rod so I…, she…, Lovely Pebble, could go home. You had already decided you didn’t want to stay with her but, after she dropped you off, she discovered even the minute traces of impurities in the rod you had provided made it impossible to navigate across a galaxy, and you were the only hope she had left. So she sent me.”

  “And if I couldn’t figure out how to make a perfect rod before I died?”

  “Then I would continue with the project alone after I learned how things worked down here. I don’t age very fast. I would eventually either solve the problem or die trying.”

  “So we would prepare the rod and you, her conscious residue, would call her to come get it. Then she’d just discard you. Are you actually that inconsequential? I thought there was a real person inside of you. But you’re no more than an automaton, an artificial intelligence to keep yourself informed. Like the crow at Aunt Cealie’s. Your technology’s had me fooled for thirty-five years, Lovely Pebble. Nicely done. And cold.” I was turning to leave as she grabbed at my arm.

  “Cager? No. I’m not like that,” she said in a wounded voice.

  I pulled free and stalked back to the cabin. Schrödinger paced along the edge of the porch as I climbed the steps. He followed me in but sat in the far end of the kitchen observing. He knew something wasn’t right. I pulled down his box of food and rattled some into his bowl, but he didn’t make any move toward it. He was watching the front door.

  “Not as cold as you pulling away from me after all we’ve been through together.” Ell stood just inside the doorway. “I’m not a mindless automaton like you said. I’m no longer a dispassionate alien sprawled out in a tidal pool doing math, either. And I’m certainly not a lifeless simulation calculated by machines, like Lovely Pebble.” She tapped her forehead. “I’m me, Cager.” She paused, grim-faced. “But I should have told you about the communicator. It’s the only thing I’ve ever kept from you. And what difference would it have made if you had known?”

  “I don’t know what difference it would have made, Ell. Because you never told me.”

  Ell came into the kitchen with me. “I told you I loved you.”

  Her non sequitur only aggravated my new-found paranoia. She was trying to skirt the issue. “So you did.”

  Ell furrowed her brow for a time before replying. “You think I lied to you?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  She stood frozen, eyes wide, her face wreathed in disbelief. She seemed near tears.

  That had not been my intent, but the shock of her clandestine connection to Lovely Pebble continued to precipitate long-unspoken doubts from the dark undercurrents of my imagination. I sat down hard on the kitchen chair and realized the box of cat food was still in my hand.

  I tried to backtrack.

  “Maybe you never technically lied, but not telling me something as significant as your continuous connection to Lovely Pebble is troubling. It makes me wonder what else I don’t know about you after our thirty-five years. Do you understand, Ell? Suddenly it’s obvious the original you, the thing you are a copy of, is at its core, cold and heartless. On top of that, you’ve been in contact with her…, it, all this time. Not telling me is a betrayal of the trust I’ve put in you.”

  “So, you’ve never kept anything from me after all this time?”

  Her attempt to compare the enormity
of her deceit to anything I might have failed to mention infuriated me. I slammed the box of cat food on the kitchen table and stood up. “All right, there is something you don’t know.” The intensity of Ell’s response was palpable. She withdrew a half step, closing her eyes for a moment before raising her head again. It was almost the look she’d had when she spotted the T. rex at the stream.

  “What’s that, Cager?”

  “I’ve been searching for a way to get you back into the virtual world you came out of so you aren’t left abandoned here on a strange planet after I die. I know how to do that using the time glider—Lovely Pebble’s glider. I did it myself. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to it.”

  “Even if you did, the glider wouldn’t accept me. But I don’t want to go anywhere, Cager. I’ll stay here with you.”

  “Then you’ll die here.”

  “Yes. Just like you. Because I am just like you. Why can’t you understand that about me? But I appreciate your reaction now—about my not telling you of the link. I felt the same thing quite deeply when you said there was something you hadn’t told me. It scared me. I guess it’s a human trait I wasn’t aware of. Now I know.” She studied the backs of her hands for a moment. “But you don’t have the whole story yet, Cager.”

  I remained impassive. What next?

  “Do you want to know why I never told you?”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “I was afraid you would use the link to go back to the Ell you left behind on the glider. I’m just a copy made for real-world use so I have only the memory and capability a human form can have. The Ell on the glider is so much more.”

  “So you kept the comm link a secret so I wouldn’t leave you?”

  “Was that so wrong?”

  “Ell, what’s wrong is that you would even think such a thing.”

  “I’ve read your civilization’s classics, Cager. It’s a persistent theme. I’m not even born of a human and have nothing to offer but myself. And you already know what I am. A copy. And a limited one at that. I told you the first night we met. Before I knew I would become ….” She blinked hard several times taking in a timorous breath as she glanced around the kitchen seeming to search for a way to complete the thought she had left hanging. “Anyway, I know what I am, and I don’t like it very much right now. I’ve let you ….” She was struggling not to cry. “But I would never leave you, even if I could.”

  All right, so maybe that’s true, I thought. But I had always suspected she had been programmed to bond with me so had no choice in what she wanted. Then curiously, I found myself wondering what possible difference that made— even if it were true. Did anyone ever have any choice in who they loved? Had this copy of a semi-aquatic carnivore now actually become human? Or was I just witnessing an alien act? Thirty-five years we had been together, and I had never sorted it out. But I now knew in greater depth what had animated her. And she had, as she admitted, read the novels. Knew the words to say. The plots. She could easily fool me if she wanted. But she continued.

  “And I see something now I didn’t appreciate when you told me about it on our first sailing trip. It was just words then describing an event. And I wondered at the time why you seemed troubled as you told the story. Back then, though, I still thought of myself as a virtual being undergoing a human experience. But this is all I’ll ever get, Cager. I am human. I’ll never live anywhere but here. Or be anything but me. And I finally…, I finally understand what you were trying to tell me.”

  “You mean about Arlene leaving?”

  “Yes. Until just now, I didn’t grasp the enormity of her decision. To both want to leave and not want to leave. To want to leave to free you to carry out the mission you had already left me for. And to not want to leave because she loved you—both for yourself and for being her friend. I still can’t fathom the turmoil of sorting out those conflicting forces, though, I can see now she made the right choice as painful as it must have been. But she was better than me, Cager.”

  “How so?”

  “I would have stayed with you.”

  It was finally too much for me. Lovely Pebble might have been able to put on a good act, but I felt sure only a human could understand what Ell had just expressed. Arlene’s decision was born of a being who had learned the hard way that, in a real world, life demanded constant sacrifice. Her decision was unselfish; painful; and, above all; caring, but she let her life go because of what she thought was in my best interest. And as illogical as it was, I could, from my human perspective, understand her decision. I reached for Ell and pulled her to me.

  “Arlene was better than me as well, Ell.” She remained pensive. “But Arlene got it wrong. Just as I got it wrong about you a minute ago.” I hugged her for a few moments. “So do you understand now that I would never leave you?”

  She pushed away, wiping tears with her the palms of her hands. “I think so. Yes.”

  Chapter 60

  A week later, the newly milled titanium rod arrived in a black, protective case. As we carried it down to the vault, Ell seemed uneasy. Perhaps the loss of the comm link still bothered her. Without communications, the new rod was now useless. But whatever was bothering Ell, it was quite evident.

  “Everything okay?”

  She looked up with a quick smile. “Yeah. It’s nothing.”

  As usual, I didn’t pursue it.

  The following morning at the cabin, I received word from our Nevada Space Research Corporation that Boeing had shipped the glider body to arrive the next day.

  “Well, Ell, it looks like our luck has held. The Nevada site will get the glider body tomorrow and immediately reship it to the titanium purification subdivision. We should have a new glider operational in a few days.”

  Ell set Schrödinger on the kitchen floor, then tripped over him as he crisscrossed back and forth between her feet as she made her way to the counter to get his food. She shook some dry nuggets into his bowl then leaned back against the counter looking about the cabin. “Then all of this will soon come to an end.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your mission will be over shortly after we get the glider working. Then what? You won’t be able to stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  “You said it yourself a minute ago, Cager. Our luck has held. What you didn’t say was, ‘For now.’ The first glider is still in the hands of a group of fanatical conspiracy theorists. They must have hatched those eggs by now. And surely the seeds have sprouted.”

  “But they’ll have a hard time convincing anyone the glider is some kind of alien time machine. The thing is built with everyday parts readily available here on earth. If they can’t get a federal agency interested, there’s no way it can be tracked back to us.”

  It was a good counter to Ell’s argument. But I had forgotten how Ell had that annoying habit of being right. An hour later, I opened the morning paper at the local pancake house.

  VIDEO RECOVERED FROM UFO.

  “Video?” Ell said.

  “Yeah, I don’t get it either.” I read the second paragraph to her. “’The images begin from an altitude of several miles. A geologist on the team observed that the descent was over an area that resembled the Eastern Rockies seventy million years ago. That was partially confirmed near the end of the video when what looked like a herd of hadrosaurs came into view heading along a beach toward the still-descending camera.’”

  Then it hit me. The glider had two cameras that provided views beneath and behind it. The rear camera had been carried away when the batteries tore loose. But the other was still embedded in the glider’s underbelly. It was so small and well incorporated into the design no one would notice it unless they flipped the glider upside-down. But obviously, someone had discovered the camera. Worse, it was the same type camera we had used earlier when we recorded the tractor model toppling the erasers in the lab. It recorded in a continuous loop of two minutes on an EEPROM chip—and retained the data even after losing power.

  The
re was no mention of eggs or seeds. With video, there was no need. The evidence was there. The glider had travelled back in time.

  When we got home, I called the head of the Nevada site and told him to redirect the incoming delivery from Boeing to our corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley, then heaved a sigh of relief. It didn’t matter now if anyone discovered we were the ones who ordered the glider. We could install the control boxes and have the glider tested and operational well before even the Feds could find the lower level under the titanium purification shop, much less break into the vault.

  The director called back five minutes later and told me the delivery had come in while we were talking earlier. Then he asked me to hang on a second. I heard others speaking in the background followed by shouts and gunfire. The director came back on line. “We have armed troops running through the compound.”

  A moment later a voice yelled, “Drop the phone and get on the floor.” At that point, I knew the glider body was in someone else’s custody. And, without the glider body, there was no way to operate the control boxes that moved us through space and time. They were all designed to take inputs from the wiring harnesses hardwired into the seized glider.

  I relayed the news to Ell. “Any ideas? We need to act quickly if we’re going to have any hope of recovering that glider.”

  “Well, we have all those spare parts. IC chips, and circuit boards and whatnot. Not nearly enough to cobble together a glider though.”

  “But maybe enough to pull off a recovery. I’ve breadboarded a dozen prototypes over the years. There are still a few left in the vault. They’ve all been tested, and they’re the more advanced models.”

  Chapter 61