Tangled in Time

by Pauline Baird Jones

  * * * *

  Olivia’s trans-whatever machine was even more mind-boggling on the inside. It was like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, only up a mountain. From the moment she led him inside, reality checked out, leaving him in a fictional place, a Jules Verne version of Alice Through the Looking Glass—with a weirdly sexy “Alice” as tour guide. She’d furled her umbrella with a modest flourish, wielding it like a ruffled cane. Not that she leaned. Didn’t appear to be a leaning kind of girl. Not with that posture. Even in the military he’d never seen a back that straight.

  He had no clue what her deal was, what she was doing in such an isolated area, or why she was dressed like Mary Poppins. Her jacket fit snugly to a figure that was great, well into the hot range, though the sleeves kind of exploded around the shoulders. He liked the sassy way her clothes swished when she walked and he really liked the way it accented the sway of her hips. She was a looker, no question. Long pale neck a guy had to fight not to taste and her dark hair was piled into a complicated something he hadn’t seen since his high school prom. Her manners bordered on prim, and she was buttoned from top to bottom, but with something in her eyes that made him wonder how deep the button-down went. He’d always thought less was more, where clothes were concerned. He might have been wrong about that.

  And then there was her trans—thing. The first compartment looked a bit like a crypt with metal walls. It was some longer than he was tall. On all the walls, at varying heights, there were wood and brass handles with nice knobs on the ends, like an upscale morgue. If Igor appeared in a hatchway, he was so out of here.

  “You need a lot of rods for your towels?”

  “They are handles.” She reached for one.

  If she rolled out a body, ditto on the out of here. “Let me, ma’am.”

  Her hands stayed next to his for several seconds, while her scent drifted around him and her sober gaze studied him. Lavender. His grandma used to wear it. Way different experience with Olivia. With a slight, pleased smile, she moved back, allowing him to pull the handle. From the wall there emerged a small, antique-half table, made of rich wood. Better than a coffin or a body, but still weird. When the table came down a teapot emerged behind it, like something out of a Wallace and Gromit movie. He liked that and he didn’t like tea. The handles on either side were for two wing-back chairs, with hinky, velvet cushions, and were trimmed with lace and ribbons. She activated something and a rug rolled to a stop against the side of his boot, followed by a small chandelier lowering from the ceiling. He couldn’t stop the surprised climb of his brows toward his cap.

  “Space is limited, but one needn’t lower one’s standards completely,” she said a bit defensively.

  It was so wrong, while still managing to be smoking cool. “No paintings?”

  Olivia’s chin lifted. “The Professor feels the lack and is addressing the problem.”

  Maybe she was a distant relative of the Gadi. They liked pretty, too. Or she was an escapee from the loony bin.

  He lifted the table and chairs back into place. “What are these?” He indicted the opposite wall. Olivia blushed and looked away, though she waved a hand in what he took as permission to check them out. These handles brought down two wood trimmed bunks, like stumpy four posters with this drapy stuff all around. There was even a bed stand with a Tiffany lamp fixed to it—though Carey would never admit he knew that. Two beds? Did she and the prof travel together? Hard to believe when that she couldn’t even look at the beds. And if they did travel together, where was he?

  She kept her gaze averted until he returned the beds to their cubby in the wall. She was a real blast from the past. So was the “kitchen” wall. It had a porcelain sink, “a cooking chamber” and a place for something she called an ice box that was just a box. No ice.

  “The Professor hasn’t worked out refrigeration yet.”

  He tried the faucet and water spurted, stopped and spurted again. “Or the running water?”

  A tiny line formed between her brows, but all she said was, “The privy is through there if—” She stopped and blushed again.

  Curious, Carey poked his head through the hatchway. The “privy,” turned out to be a compact and seriously awesome john. Less of the girly stuff. Brass fittings, linen towels, more bits of dark wood and another porcelain basin, none of which needed to retract into the walls. A Farmer’s Almanac from 1892—too pristine to be anything but a reprint—hung from a hook by the toilet. There was a curtain with a miniature version of a claw foot tub, but with a fancy shower head.

  Since she’d indicated he could, Carey used the toilet, washed up—the water pressure was hinky here, too—and checked his ribs. Nasty bruise on his left side, but he’d live—tough luck, buzzard.

  Olivia waited for him in the crypt/living room, examining the once again blank ceiling. She seemed relieved to leave the privy behind. Carey was relieved, too.

  “The bridge is through here.”

  She’d saved the good stuff for last. The bridge was a total guy zone, nothing pretty but Olivia. She stopped to one side, near the hatch opening, in a total Mary Poppins pose, her chin up, one hand resting on the umbrella handle. Or maybe it was Hello Dolly. Not his area of expertise. Only seen the movies because he had a little sister and a mom. Whatever it was about her pose, it got him curious about the legs hiding inside that skirt. Before his imagination got too risky to his blood flow, she began the tour. It was totally whacked—and totally cool. There was a “captain’s chair” in the center of the room with lots of buttons and levers on the sides. Arms with weird stuff could be pulled down from the ceiling, which would have edged the “captain’s chair” into the dentist chair zone, except for the one that looked like a periscope. Around the room, there were more levers and gauges and valves, enough to run a Jules Verne type world. She showed him “altitudinal measurement scopes,” “telescoping magnifiers” and other goofy sounding stuff—if Olivia wasn’t totally pulling his leg. He stopped by something that looked like a compass.

  “That’s a Gyrocompass, the Professor’s own design. It overcomes the issues of torque and inertia during transmogrification.”

  How’d she say that without stuttering? Carey had been around a lot of geeks and heard a lot of geek talk, but prim geek talk was new and way sexier than normal geek talk. One panel reached from floor to ceiling and had levers and dials and a funky headset that looked like it was straight out of a Frankenstein movie. If she asked him to try it on, it was buster out of here time, no matter how cute she was. He was not switching brains with a girl dressed like Mary Poppins.

  “What’s this one do?”

  “It’s an Individual Discovery Velocipediator.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought it was.” Maybe he’d hit his head and he was having a really strange dream, but if this was a dream, he’d be kissing the girl, wouldn’t he? In his dreams, girls were for kissing, even if it didn’t work that way in real life. Before he got too distracted thinking about kissing the crazy girl, he turned to the next device in her mad scientist chamber. It looked like a joke from a really bad science fiction movie. It had a needle hovering above a big, round globe that seemed to be suspended in air inside a wooden box. “Let me guess, a GPS?” He cocked a brow at her. She blinked and arched her brows in obvious confusion. “Global Positioning System?”

  Her expression shifted to thoughtful. “The professor has been pondering different names for that one. On occasion, finding the right name is as hard as inventing it in the first place.”

  Not a problem he’d run into before. He wanted to ask where the prof was, but got distracted by the notion that her GPS might tell him where he was. The globe was huge, but clearly Earth. He could barely make out Texas under the needle. Texans wouldn’t like that. “Not a lot of detail.”

  “We can use the Mapulator Retrieval Apparatus.”

  She moved closer, setting off his internal proximity apparatus. He eased a finger around the neck of his shirt. “Really?”


  “There are numbered squares that relate to mapulator sections.” Her gloved finger pointed to something on the globe.

  He bent over again. There might have been numbers there. He couldn’t swear to it, but maybe her nearness affected his eyesight. “Kind of small, I can’t quite—”

  “You need the magnifiers.”

  Olivia reached past him, her arm brushing his, messing with his breathing. More buttons pushed and a compartment opened and what looked like a whacked pair of antique glasses on a stick came to a stop in front of the GPS cabinet. The rims were narrow metal, but the lenses were big, big as goggles, and round like bug’s eyes. Clamped to them were two little magnifying glasses, like the ones in National Treasure only clear, not colors. He bent and peered through them, adjusting the small lenses and angle until the number near the needle jumped out at him. He read it out loud. Olivia turned to an old-style typewriter, partially embedded in a console next to her GPS. The keys slammed against something that might have been paper, but could have been anything in this place. When she finished typing, she cranked a lever. There was a whirring sound, a hissing like steam releasing, and a hatch slid back. A rolled up, parchment map emerged. It was curled around one metal rod, attached by clamps to another. With another whir and hiss, one of the rods retreated along a slot, unrolling the map, so he could see it.

  “That’s pretty cool.”

  Olivia blinked. “It’s parchment. It doesn’t have a temperature.”

  Carey opened his mouth to respond, but had nothing, so he closed it and squatted down to study the map. Okay, there was the Rio Grande. Mexico on that side, Texas on this one. Where—they could be in Big Bend National Park, though it wasn’t labeled on her map. Mule Ears Peak. He knew he recognized it. When he was ten, he and his dad had driven down here. Interesting mix of desert and mountains—he had to think hard for a few seconds or so—the Chisos Mountains. Even then he’d been interested in planes and stuff, so they’d explored the site of the old Johnson Ranch airfield. It had been closed down in the forties, but they’d walked along what remained of the runway while his dad told him about how they’d used it to hunt Pancho Villa. That’s why the layout of the mountains looked familiar. A kid didn’t forget a mule-eared mountain peak. Johnson’s ranch wasn’t on her map either. That was odd. If he remembered right, it had been there and that would put them…he made a virtual line on the map with his finger.

  “I think we’re about here, or at least in this area,” he said, tapping a spot along the southern rim of the Chisos. He traced a route back to the area where Johnson’s Ranch should be. There was a park road along there where he could catch a lift if the portal didn’t scoop him up first. He added, in case she didn’t know, “We’re in south Texas.”

  “It appears to be most unruly.”

  Something that continued to make Texans proud. “There’s a campground around this area, if memory serves.” He looked at the front of her machine, where space had been left for a view port or window. “Not much of a view.”

  A bit obvious, but it got a result. She pressed some buttons on a different panel and the metal sheets he’d noticed outside folded back, accompanied by more hissing sounds. In other circumstances, it would be a great view—though they weren’t high enough to see the park road. How on earth had she—or her professor—gotten permission to build or bring this thing into the Park? He frowned, as another thought hit him.

  “What’s your power source?” There sure weren’t any power lines visible above ground and no one was going to run pipes up here. He hadn’t even spotted a cell tower during his hike.

  She hesitated, though it wasn’t clear if it was uncertainty or caution that caused it. “It’s powered by steam.”

  Steam? That explained the hissing sounds—though—what was her water source? When he’d been climbing, water had been least in sight, too. And didn’t it take something else to make steam?

  He frowned. “If you’ve got water, why was it coming out of the faucets in spurts?

  A worry line dug in between her brows. “I experienced an impact, or a malfunction, during the transmogrification process.”

  She’d had an impact, too? Could he have collided with her machine—no, not possible. Well, he didn’t know if it was possible, but it couldn’t be possible with this thing. Was someone from the expedition messing with him? Didn’t seem likely on General Halliwell’s watch. If he had a sense of humor, he kept it buried deep. And the bubbas in his squadron lacked the access. The geeks who did have access were all major intense and the doc, well, she was a bit too creepy to have a sense of humor. Besides, this trip through the portal was supposed to help her team learn how to fine tune the portal controls, in hopes of making it possible to transport to Earth if there was an emergency or for tactical necessity—not give someone a chance to pull his chain. Though they needed to do more than fine tune their calculations if he’d missed Nevada by Texas and two seasons. Not to mention bent his ribs on something that wasn’t this thing.

  But he did concede it was an odd coincidence. “Impact?”

  She nodded. “Just prior to my arrival here. The Emergency Absquatulation Device should have returned the transmogrification machine to the professor’s laboratory in Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn? New York?” That’s right. New York was sometimes called Gotham in the real world, not just Bat-world. He almost asked her what absqua—whatever meant, but then thought he might know. And even if he didn’t know, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  “Of course.”

  Carey didn’t know which to disbelieve first. He was no scientist, but he lived and worked at Area 51—when he wasn’t in outer space. He’d know, unofficially of course, if it was possible to convert water into a power source that could take this pile of interesting junk from New York to Texas. Or he’d know someone who knew, which he didn’t. She had to be whacked. Normally he avoided whacked out women, but that boat had already sailed—or trans-whatever-ified. He could distance himself though. She didn’t need him if the prof was around here somewhere. He turned to tell her he had to go and found her nose almost in contact with his nose. It put her mouth close, too. Too close…or not.

  If she was wearing makeup, it wasn’t visible without a magnifying glass. Great skin, and now he smelled the girl behind the lavender and liked it. The scent of both wrapped around him like a hug. He hadn’t hugged a girl, or been hugged by one for too long. She had long lashes and her brown eyes had little bits of green and gold. Her pink mouth was parted just enough to make it interesting.

  What if she was telling the truth? She looked like she believed what she said and not just because he wanted to kiss her. Okay, so maybe that was partly why he wanted to believe her.

  “What does trans—? What is that?”

  Her dark lashes swept down to rest against the smooth upper curve of her cheeks. Would her skin feel as silky soft as it looked? In his imagination, he started at her temple and was kissing his way past her nose when her lashes lifted again. For a long moment, they stared at each other, while color crept into her cheeks. She licked her lips. Carey’s throat dried. When she swallowed, the muscles of her long neck rippled. Vampires would line up for a chance to taste that neck.

  She cleared her throat, but her voice was still husky when she said, “Men of science agree that it means to transform, but they don’t agree on what kind of transformation. The Professor believed—and proved—that it was a process of transformation from one place to another.”

  Okay, that was pretty wacky, well, except for the fact that she was here, and they were both standing inside the professor’s crazy machine. It’s not like he wasn’t on speaking terms with crazy. He’d traveled here through a portal from another galaxy. A galaxy he’d traveled to on a top secret space ship. Now that he thought about it, it was tough to sort out what was crazy and what wasn’t. “Where’s the professor?” He looked around, like he might pop out of one of the consoles. The idea wasn’t as farfetched as it should have been
in this place.

  “The professor didn’t travel with me. He’ll be quite concerned at my failure to meet him.”

  Her voice was calm, but he knew, though he didn’t know how, that she was worried. She wasn’t worried enough though.

  “You’re out here by yourself?” His voice went up, kind of like his mom’s when she couldn’t believe something he’d done.

  “I’ve traveled twice by myself prior to this one without complication.” Her tone turned cool.

  He had a weird thought. Could his wormhole have picked her up and brought her and her thing along for the ride? If he had, then he needed to fix it. Well, he needed a geek to fix it. That meant they needed Area 51. Which brought him back to hiking down to the park road and trying to hitch a ride to a place his SAT phone would work.

  Since he was already deep in the crazy zone, he had to consider the other possibility: that her professor’s machine worked. That they had collided in the wormhole—

  …the portal traverses time and space...

  His thoughts screeched to a halt, then churned in a new direction. Time and space. That’s that the doc had said. What the doc said, he believed. She was scary and scary smart. The whole time and space thing was the reason they’d needed to play with the portal settings. Was it possible that the impact in the wormhole had changed more than his LZ—landing zone?

  Olivia’s get up, the way she talked, kind of made a guy’s gut twitch. Pretty much all he knew about women’s fashions was that the bikini had been named after an atoll they’d used to test nukes and he liked it when women’s skirts and shirts got shorter. That said, he was pretty sure the Mary Poppins get up didn’t fit his century, unless they were a costume and all this was some kind of hoax. But what if it wasn’t? What if—he almost hated thinking it—he’d been knocked into her time? What was her time? Could they really have collided?