Part of Winston’s mind flashed on a series of questions about how this might be. Unfortunately, no sooner had he started to ponder the possibility of Homo sapiens having been seeded on Earth than the chamber’s door opened to reveal two soldiers. At first, they were oblivious to Winston’s presence. Each looked at the other. One of them waved a hand dramatically and said, “…when she told me to get stuffed!”
Both men started to laugh. As soon as their heads swiveled back into the room, they would spot Winston and the lowered cage.
Bernie began.
No sooner had his fingers withdrawn from Winston’s hand than Winston felt a sudden burst of pressure in the back of his brain, and the world exploded into a field of electric white.
17
Push for a Plan
As the sparks fell away, Winston confirmed that he was in the same room. The winch control console for Bernie’s cage looked unchanged. Thankfully, the guards had vanished, and the cage now stood at its original position well above Winston’s head. A quick check of the time controls in his peripheral vision confirmed that Winston had jumped back about five and a half hours. The problem was that he had meant to go back only three and a half hours. Once again, Bernie must have given him a little nudge beyond his own control.
He wobbled on his feet, feeling slightly dizzy and a bit nauseous. The sensation passed quickly, though, and he stood straight and steady as he studied the room for any immediate threats. So far, nothing seemed to have changed except the cage’s position.
Winston felt tinnitus flare in his left ear. An instant later, Bernie’s voice appeared in his mind.
Winston opened his mouth to reply, then he realized the truth of his situation. The Bernie above him didn’t know about Winston’s arrival. The Omega Mesh would be updating him any second now, but Winston had a few seconds during which he could stop to think through his own plans free from Bernie’s interference.
Bernie wanted Winston to avoid his parents, but everything in Winston wanted the exact opposite. If he had really been through this situation many times before, could it be that he had always had this impulse and that Bernie was right. Did involving his parents always doom his mission? Or did Winston normally listen to Bernie, which yielded the dismal results?
There was no way to know. And there was no way he was going to ask.
Winston remembered the time in sixth grade that he had gotten into trouble for cheating on his math test. He had watched his teacher, Mrs. Roberts, log in to her classroom computer so many times that picking up her password had been no problem. With that in hand, even a kindergartner could log in to her account and figure out how to browse through her files.
Low lag time, indeed. Someday, he was going to have to learn how aliens got around network latency.
“Says who?” he asked quietly. “You? The Omega Mesh? I thought you weren’t going to keep getting in my head.”
Winston’s mind felt like a beehive. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t make the pieces of what was happening line up in any kind of sensible order. The existence of this Omega Mesh threw everything into a new light, but he had no idea what to make of it.
The chrono pieces still spun within Little e at his side. Not knowing what else to do yet, Winston started searching backward in time for another jump point.
A click sounded within the winch control console. Above Winston, Bernie’s cage gave a sudden lurch. Its ground cables bent inward, and its floor started to descend.
Winston didn’t want to listen. He wanted to talk with his parents, his mom most of all. She could guide him. But she, or at least the version of her that knew him, was dead.
No. Not all of her.
Winston closed his eyes and did what she had raised him to do in times of uncertainty. He listened for his little voice.
And there it was. Not with words, but more with feelings and half-images flitting through his mind, the voice spoke up from somewhere inside him with an answer. He understood. He didn’t have time to question whether the idea was sound. It simply felt right, and he acted.
Focusing on the chrono controls in his vision, Winston recalled arriving at the Area X gate with younger Devlin Bledsoe and Theo. He didn’t immediately know the time from that moment to his first jump backward in time, but twenty-four hours should be safe. There would be fewer people in the complex.
As he concentrated on his experience at the gate, Winston saw a dot form above the timeline to the right of his present position — a “bookmark” for the gate moment, he realized. He pushed the time slider until it landed in the marked position, then instructed the Alpha Machine pieces to seek exactly twenty-four hours beyond that point, a time Winston had never visited and so would not cause a duality conflict. The Alpha Machine system complied and showed green controls. All set.
This time, when Bernie drew even with Winston and the cage thudded into the stone floor, Winston was not wide-eyed and lost. He met Bernie’s dazzling gaze with determination.
“No, let me,” interrupted Winston. “I’m going forward to twenty-four hours after I arrived at the Area X gate. Remember when you reached out to me? Twenty-four after that.”
Bernie stepped to the bars between them. His eyes seemed to grow slightly larger. Was that an expression of surprise? Maybe worry? Winston took one step back to make sure he stayed out of reach.
“I want you here. I want my parents here. And I want them here with a bunch of QV serums. Got it?”
Bernie slowly shook his head.
Winston smiled. “Yeah, but it feels so right.” He raised Little e. “And if there are guards or whatever, and I get captured, then the Omega Mesh will just have to deal with it.”
He started to squeeze Little e’s crossbar, when Bernie all but yelled in his mind,
“What?”
That caught Winston off guard.
Bernie gripped his cell bars, leaning forward until his forehead touched the steel.
Winston knew Bernie was playing for time, trying to delay him for some unknown reason. But outright lying? That seemed out of character given the little Winston knew about the alien.
“I’m going,” he said. “Twenty-four hours from the gate. Just please make it happen.”
And as Winston pushed his mental energy into Little e and out to the Alpha Machine pieces, he felt one last thought from Bernie force its way into his brain.
18
An Offer for Authority
The chimpanzee stared at Bledsoe from its small cage bolted into the far wall, sullen and clutching an unpeeled banana. A gray woolen blanket lay crumpled under its feet to protect them from the wire mesh. Every once in a while, Bledsoe could swear that the monkey was trying to think at him. Of course, that was absurd. The primate might have human-like brown eyes, but that didn’t mean there was intelligence behind them.
“Shh,” Bledsoe muttered to the beast from his desk. “I can’t get a word in edgewise with you hogging the conversation.”
He rubbed at his forehead, trying to push away
a slowly mounting headache and a creeping sense of mental fogginess.
“What’s that, sir?”
The new kid from Columbia University peeked over the stack of books atop his own desk. He sat in the row opposite Bledsoe, three stations down. Four of them remained in Animal Research, even though 5:00 had chimed almost half an hour before. The other two walked before the long line of cages, checking food and water levels and murmuring to the various creatures. Bledsoe would have already missed the tram back to the west elevator. No point in rushing now. It didn’t matter, anyway. He and Theo weren’t due to drive into town — if one could call that sad outpost of sweat and grime a town — until 7:00.
“Nothing,” Bledsoe said, mostly to himself. “Nothing at all.”
The chimpanzee was one of two females in that cage. The other rested on her own blanket, face to the wall, perhaps sleeping, although Bledsoe suspected she was ill. He could tell them apart by the pattern of spots in the brown skin around their mouths, but otherwise he had no sense of their individuality. He used their proper names of SC14 and SC15, not Ellory and Queen, as some of the others called them. They were just test subjects, like the scattering of rats, guinea pigs, and cats arrayed in their own cage sections within the research center. The builders had not planned for chimps to be here, and so the female pair were taken out for thirty minutes each day to roam about, leashed, in the adjacent room, where they could climb on abandoned filing cabinets and swing on the rope that staff had attached to the ceiling.
Ridiculous, Bledsoe thought. These were experiment subjects, not pets. He loathed being here, among the stench of fur and excrement, with animals chittering and howling all day and night. He was a physicist, not a biologist. How had he gone from the Manhattan Project to scribbling notes about monkeys?
Because the monkeys in question had been injected with QVs fourteen hours before, and he had to know the daily behavior of these animals as if they were his best friends to better observe any differences once they started getting dosed with radiation. He had objected to being assigned to animals. The brass had asked if he wanted to be pulled off QVs completely, and that was the end of that discussion.
However, observing monkeys was never going to tell him everything he needed to know. Bledsoe knew that these experiments were ultimately going to culminate in human trials. They had to if the military ever wanted to see its force of radiation-proof super soldiers become a reality. The government had time on its side, now that the war was over and the Soviets remained clueless about how to harness nuclear technology. Hence, they wanted to go slowly. That didn’t change the fact that someone was going to emerge as the hero of Project Majestic, the one researcher who took a leap and changed history. Bledsoe had every intention of being that hero.
Which was why he had snuck into the bio lockers last night and injected himself with 30 cc’s of QV serum.
SC15 appears quiet, possibly lethargic, he wrote in his logbook. She is holding her afternoon banana but makes no attempt to eat it. SC14 remains curled in the fetal position in the cage’s corner, possibly suffering from early effects of QV sickness. She has not moved in over one hour, although she makes no audible sign—
The room’s only phone rang where it hung near the research room’s main door, setting some of the animals to squeaking with its obnoxiously loud chrome bells. Fortunately, one of the other researchers sat in a desk closer to the entrance. He gave Bledsoe a questioning glance, but when Bledsoe turned his attention back to his logbook, the man sighed, scooted back from his desk, and moved to lift the handset. He listened for a moment, then faced Bledsoe and raised his eyebrows with a told you so expression. Bledsoe had the urge to pull rank and put the younger man in his place, then realized that they were both here doing the same thing: staring at animals. He didn’t have much claim to greatness down here.
The handset cord only reached five feet, and the man held it out to Bledsoe expectantly. SC15’s eyes followed Bledsoe as he crossed to the researcher and took the black handset from him.
“Hello?”
“Mister Bledsoe?”
The voice on the line was male, but it sounded distant, thin, and metallic, which wasn’t necessarily unusual for these long copper lines, but something about this caller sounded odd.
“It’s Doctor Bledsoe, but whatever floats your boat.”
“Mister Bledsoe, you need to report back to your office.”
Bledsoe couldn’t wait to get out of research, but he’d procrastinated coming in this afternoon, and now he had to pay the price for another twenty-five minutes. Besides, something about this caller bothered him.
“Why?” he asked. “Who is this?”
“This is Command One.”
Bledsoe gave a chuckle. Someone must be putting him on. He probably had a prank of some sort waiting back in his office, although who would do such a thing? Only Claude, but Claude had been acting so odd and distant lately. Because of her, no doubt.
“And this is The Shadow.” He wanted to be even more flippant, but there was still an outside chance of this person being a superior. “Now, who’s really calling?”
“I know you injected a QV sample eleven hours ago.”
That brought Bledsoe’s humor to a screeching halt. He had been excruciatingly careful in stealing the vial, substituting one containing saline measured to match the QV content down to the droplet and swapping them when he had “accidentally” dropped SC15’s leash. The chimp had made a dash through the researcher’s desks, drawing everyone’s attention, and Bledsoe had traded out the vials in the two seconds he’d needed. One restroom stop later, the agent was in his bloodstream.
Bledsoe expected an incubation and sickness phase, just as many of his chimps had undergone. So far, though, he just had this low-grade headache. That suited Bledsoe just fine. Still, he remained disappointed that nothing else had happened to him. He had secretly hoped for one or two miraculous powers, like Superman. For now, he’d have to wait for the chance to try using those silver artifacts.
“Who is this?” Bledsoe repeated, all humor vanished.
“This is Command One. Go to your office now.”
Bledsoe needed more information. Could he run? There was no way to get past security if he tried. He was almost half a mile from the exit, and that was before all the security that waited beyond it. He turned his back to the research room and ran his fingertips over the phone’s rotary dial.
“Am I in trouble?” he asked quietly enough not to be overheard.
“No…” said Command One with a lingering tone that might have implied not yet.
There was a click, and the cycling ehhh-ehhh-ehhh of a disconnected line grated in Bledsoe’s ear. He slowly lowered the handset on its horseshoe-shaped cradle.
Drawing a shaky breath, Bledsoe turned from the phone and started for the door. Only as he reached for the doorknob did he realize his mistake. He went back to his desk, carefully set his pencil along the spine of his logbook, and closed it.
“Everything all right?” asked the kid from Columbia.
Bledsoe found it difficult to swallow. “Yeah. Fine. Looks like I’ve got a loose end on my other project, and they need me to look at it.”
For an instant, Bledsoe was afraid the guy would press him for details, just because he had nothing better to do. Instead, he only nodded and said, “Well, I’ll probably see you tomorrow.”
Bledsoe nodded back and felt slightly superstitious as he avoided eye contact with SC15. Strange. Why would he do that?
He made his way into the hall and took the third door on the right. He shared the little room with three other researchers, one of whom was a tenured, steel-haired professor from Stanford. She always squinted at Bledsoe in a way he found disturbing, as if she were both scrutinizing and sniffing him and found both senses unpleasant. For better or worse, though, the room was now vacant, save for Bledsoe, the four stained pine desks, and a single filing cabinet in the corner that contained months of data on each of their assigned a
nimals.
God, what he wouldn’t give for a window. Sometimes, he couldn’t remember what the sun looked like beaming through trees or soaking into his skin. He might as well be a Neanderthal living in a cave.
Bledsoe stood inside the entryway, surveying his temporary work quarters and wondering how he was going to get back into Radiation…assuming he wasn’t going directly to prison.
He heard a low tone, like the hum from a faulty vacuum tube. It seemed to come from inside his ear, but that couldn’t be right. Bledsoe stepped closer to the nearest hanging lamp, wondering if the bulb or wiring might somehow be giving off an audible frequency.
The sound quickly faded, then he heard footsteps immediately behind him. A uniformed black man entered the office. He was about the same height as Bledsoe, a bit thicker through the chest and belly, bald under his cap, and bearing a sergeant’s insignia. He closed the office door and locked it.
He faced Bledsoe with calm assurance from dark, piercing eyes. “Mr. Bledsoe,” he said in a deep voice that carried natural authority, “I am Command One.”
Bledsoe raised an eyebrow at the man’s uniform. “That’s a big name for a sergeant.”
The man offered a slight smile and a single nod. “This visit is a result of your injection of the symbiont metavirus strain.”
In the confined office, Bledsoe suddenly felt a touch of claustrophobia. His heart raced, and was acutely aware of his rapid, shallow breathing. He probably looked as guilty as he felt. Justifications for his actions started pouring through his mind, lining up to answer the questions he knew this fellow would soon ask.
“Perhaps you should sit down,” said the man.
That sounded like a grand idea. Bledsoe nearly missed the lip of his seat as he started to sit and then his knees buckled.
“I take it you’re not a sergeant?” he asked through dry lips.
“I am,” said the man. “Among other things.”
That triggered an alarm in Bledsoe’s mind. “Are you a spy? What’s your name?”
Winston Chase- The Complete Trilogy Page 75