The Vortex

by Robert R. Dozier

  “That’s rather weak, isn’t it? Surely if she were captured, her captors would have tried to use her to pressure Phillips. Besides that only answers questions about Elizabeth – what about Baca and the voices and all? And what about the second possibility?”

  “Well, first of all, the rest of the case, or cases, are not really in our bailiwick. We were supposed to discover the whereabouts of Elizabeth and if she’s dead, or presumed dead, we’ve done our job. If we try to put all the rest together, we’re way out on a limb. I think you ought to get Miss Aikens and yourself out of there. It’s just getting too weird.”

  “What’s the second possibility, Myers?”

  “All right, all right, say the guy did make a time machine. Where is he now? Three or four hours behind us? Say he went back and avoided the accident, how would he ever catch up with us in time? But the whole idea is screwy. It would mean that everything is happening at the same instant; past and I guess, even the future. It’s too far out.”

  “Yeah, I see what you mean, but I think we’re… or, I’m involved in something a little more personal than finding Elizabeth. I crossed Aikens’ trail, you know – and Sheila and I are making a concerted effort…”

  “Couldn’t you two just get the hell out of there?”

  “Maybe. I think Frank Barrows tried that right after the accident, but he came back and entered that mental hospital, remember? Maybe Baca’s trying to run right now – say – do you think the people who have disappeared were running away from this thing?”

  “You mean Elizabeth might be…”

  “Why not? She probably figured what this situation was just as we did!”

  “Why drop out of sight, though, why not just move far enough away…?”

  “I don’t know, Myers. It seems irrational now – but if we knew what they were running away from we’d have better answers.”

  “If I were you, Curt, I wouldn’t wait. Why don’t you come back to San Francisco and bring that girl with you?”

  “I might have to do that, Myers, - but ‘that girl’ has a mind of her own. I’ll keep in touch.”

  “Wait! Before you hang up let me tell you what I’ll do on this end. I’m calling this case closed, officially. I’ll contact Aikens and if he wants his money back, that’s how it will be. So you’re free to do what you want to, one way or the other. If you need help, let me know. You’ll stay on expenses until you tell me otherwise, OK?”

  Traffic was heavy on Interstate 8 as Curt left San Diego. It was not until he passed El Centro that he could sit back, relax, and let his mind wander through the new evidence he had uncovered. He had called Sheila after his long conversation with Myers, and had been quickly put off. She wanted to talk to him, but as it was nearly 11:30, she quickly told him she loved him, and was thrilled at his success at seeing Phillips, but her “visitors” were due and she didn’t want to miss a word. She said she had some new evidence also, but she had to check it out. That had been vaguely dissatisfying to Curt, but he reconciled himself with the thought that, if he drove all night and part of the day, he was only fourteen or fifteen hours away from her. What he had to do in that interval was to sort out his new information and extract meaning from it.

  He was approaching Lordsburg, New Mexico, when all the scattered bits and pieces of evidence suddenly came together. It was like a blinding flash of light that suddenly illuminated a picture so startling clear and horrible that he nearly lost control of his car, veering onto the shoulder and then back across the highway, almost going off the road. With his hands shaking and perspiring freely, he took the Lordsburg exit, drove to a quiet residential street and parked.

  He had been thinking of Myers’ conclusion about the possibility of Aikens’ discovery of a time machine. Myers had suggested off hand that if that had happened, Aikens would be three or four hours behind the present, presumably having avoided the accident that had killed Betty. Curt had thought about this, but had rejected it because the world Aikens would then be living in would be significantly different from his own. Not only would Aikens and Betty be alive – at least for awhile, but also the bombardment chamber would not then have been destroyed, all the missing and dead people, Barrows, Abrums, the hospital attendants, Baca, and even Elizabeth, would have lived lives significantly different from the ones they had. In all probability, Elizabeth would have married Phillips and would not have been missing twenty-four years later. If there had been no missing Elizabeth, then he, Curt would not have gone to New Mexico to find her. The world Aikens would now be living in would be much different from the world he had left. If so, why the nightly visits to the departed world? Obviously, there was a strong probability that Aikens either had failed in his efforts, or, wherever he was, it was not simply four hours behind the present.

  But what could be the reason for his failure? Had he simply been disintegrated, as Phillips and Abrums had concluded? If so, all the re-creations of his fatal night’s tragedies would have to be explained some other way. But, suppose, he had thought, suppose Aikens had managed to go back in time to a few moments before the accident, and had found that he could not change circumstances – that his mind might have screamed for him to stop, to slow down, to change his mode of driving – but his body could not, and that, in spite of his foreknowledge of what was going to happen, his body had to go through it all over again, -the crash, the tumbling down the cliffs, the burning car, his desperate efforts to get Betty out only to see her killed as the car exploded again.

  Even more horribly, the scenario would have to have continued. If he had been unable to change circumstances, he would have had to be taken to the hospital, to have driven again to Albuquerque, to have had the identical conversation with Barrows in Sheila’s living room, to have driven back to the laboratory and to have climbed back into the bombardment chamber beginning the whole scenario again, to repeat again and again the most terrifying moments of his life. Aikens would have been trapped in a four or five-hour cycle of existence, repeating the same actions over and over, for all eternity. What Sheila had experienced in her living room was the nightly cycle of Aiken’s living his dreadful experience.

  Even worse than that was the disruption Aikens had created in the flow of time. Because he had to crawl back into a counter that existed in real time, each location where he had lived, the emotionally-charged past of that four-hour scenario: the crash site, the hospital, Helen’s living room, and presumably, the laboratory, he had created voids, vortices which could draw people back to the pitifully few hours in 1960-61, which formed the entirety of Aikens’ existence.

  This would explain why Baca seemed to be getting younger, why Elizabeth could jog without a limp when Phillips saw her, and Curt reflected with a pang of despair, why Sheila’s bursitis had returned. They were growing younger, back to the time when the original incident happened. If circumstances didn’t change, they were all doomed either to die or to be part of four-hour existence. It was going to be a difficult task to explain this to Sheila.

  “But if what you say is true, Aunt Elizabeth has been swallowed, or drawn into… ”

  “Yes,” Curt replied, sinking even deeper into the sofa, “I’m afraid it does.”

  Sheila, who had been standing near the fireplace, walked to the sofa and sat close to Curt, resting her head on his shoulder. She did not cry, but merely held on to Curt closely. He tried to give her what comfort he could.

  “I’m terribly sorry, but we were too late. It happened even before you arrived in Albuquerque. There was nothing we could have done. What worries me now is that you and I are caught in it.”

  Sheila didn’t move, although Curt felt her shudder.

  “What should we do?” she said softly.

  “I’m not sure, but I think Barrows figured it out.”

  Sheila raised her head and looked at John hopefully.

  Curt continued: “Remember
, when Phillips said that he had visited Barrows in the rest home? Well, Phillips said that Barrows had said that he had seen Ron and he wanted Phillips to turn off the counter at Kilgore Laboratories.”

  At Sheila’s quizzical look, Curt continued.

  “It makes sense. The counter is the only physical link between the past and the present. Every night, Ron had to climb back into it before he steps into a now non-existent bombardment chamber. It’s probably the counter that brings Ron into the present, at least to the degree that he can be heard in this room and in Baca’s cave and maybe other places we haven’t found. If we can stop it, or make it different in any way from the way it is, we will probably sever the link between 1961 and today.”

  “How could we ask the government to do that?” Sheila inquired.

  “I’ve been racking my brain and I can’t see any way we could get them to do it voluntarily. It’s an expensive and delicate instrument. Phillips said it could take a year to re-set it, once the power was turned off.”

  “Maybe Uncle Charles could help us.”

  “What reason would we give him?”

  “Oh, “she said, “I see.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes.

  Finally Curt said, “It looks like we’ve got to do it ourselves. If we even raise questions to anyone, all we’ll do is let those people know that we want it turned off and put them on their guard.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know yet, but if Barrows was right, all we have to do is turn off the counter just for a second or so. What we have to do is work out a plan.”

  Curt cradled the 30.06 in his arm as he crawled slowly to the top of the hillock. Across the way, Kilgore Laboratories was lighted throughout, surrounded by a hurricane fence with a “Y” of barbed wire on top. It was really two compounds: the larger occupying an area of several acres and the smaller, the minor compound, set off against the rest with its own surrounding hurricane fence, guard shacks and patrolling guards. There were a few older wooden-framed buildings that looked like WWII “temporary” barracks, but most were modern, built of masonry with ample window spaces. Several were lighted, and Curt could see occupants working away at desks and laboratory tables. In the inner compound, only one old building remained, as all the rest had apparently been razed and new labs had been built in their place. He had a hunch that the old building housed the counter, but he couldn’t be sure and it didn’t matter that much. His target was the power lines.

  He had selected the spot, directly across the way from the power shack, as a means of insuring that all power would be cut off when he finished his task. For, coming out of the shack were six power cables, unknown amperage, which left the back at the top of a large pole into a transformer box, then emerged as a single large line into the building where Curt supposed the counter was housed. There were other lines to the rest of the compound, but Curt realized that the large line was the one to cut. If he could blow apart the large cable, all power to the entire compound would be shut off and ergo, the counter would lose its balance, ions would be free-floating, and it would no longer be the machine that Aikens built. Of course, planning the action was the easy part. The difficulty lay in doing it.

  It would be a fairly long shot – Curt estimated the distance at a good two hundred yards. The target was about one inch in diameter and he knew that it would take several shots, all hitting at slightly different points, to do the job. Moreover, he had to hit the cable near the box on the post or at its exit point from the power shack, otherwise much of the impact of the bullet would be lost by the cable’s movement. His rifle, a Remington 700BDL with a 4-power scope, was well-zeroed in, but he knew that his time would be severely limited. He could expect no more than thirty or forty seconds to fire, eject his cartridge, and aim again. Therefore he would have five or at most six shots. To be sure, Rodriguez, with no questions asked, had obtained ten rounds of armor-piercing ammunition for him, and his test firing, after shooting off forty rounds of regular ammunition to zero-in his scope, had used up only three of the precious ten, but every shot had to be a hit. Curt had been raised with high-powered rifles and he had always been considered a good shot, but he knew that with such a small target, he had to count on luck. Hunting big game had given him a knack with rifles, but his targets were always much larger.

  Curt eased himself down from the crest of the hill and looked at his watch. It was 11:28 p.m. and he was still undecided whether or not the timing of the action would have any effect upon Ronald Aikens and the rest caught up with him in the vortex. He had originally thought that all he could accomplish by shutting off the counter would be the destroying of the link between the past and the present. Sheila had asked if there was any way they could rescue the trapped people by severing the link at a particular time. It had been a point worth discussing, so they had spent some time at it.

  She had argued that, since the counter tied the past to the present, allowing the past to influence the present, could not the present influence the past? Supposing, she had said, the counter was turned off just as Ronald Aikens was in her living room, or just when Ronald was using it to measure the rate of his electron loss at the laboratory, would that not have some influence on the vortex? Would he and the others be left where they were? They had agreed it was a slim chance, but when all things were considered, the only chance they had. The hard point had been trying to decide exactly when Ronald Aikens had been using the counter.

  To determine when Aikens had entered the counter, they had to re-read the accounts and noted that Abrums and Barrows had called the police at 2:20 a.m. and informed them that Aikens had been killed fifteen minutes earlier. It did not state when the police had arrived at the laboratory, so the 2:20 call was probably logged in when it was made. This would have given Barrows and Abrums ample time to destroy the bombardment chamber, something they had probably already begun, before the police arrived. That would have made 2:05 the time of Aikens’ death or disappearance. Yet, there were readings and calculations to be made before Aikens stepped into the bombardment chamber and Curt and Sheila could only guess at how long it had taken. At that, fifteen minutes could have meant anything, so a more definite time was needed. One time they were absolutely sure about – the time Aikens and Barrows were in the living room – 11:30. They wanted, however, to go for the estimated time in the laboratory because it was the focal point of the whole vortex. This was where the past and the present met. Yet if they were even a second off, there would be no way of rescuing the trapped people in Aiken’s whirlpool of time.

  “I’ll bet,” she had said, “that both Uncle Ron and Frank Barrows already had a read-out on the rate of their electron loss. They were simply too enthusiastic not to have done that, believing they had a time machine on their hands and also calculating what they believed to be their own ageing process.”

  “Do you think Ronald would not have used the counter that night at all?” Curt asked, aghast at the implications to their plan.

  “No, because we know he did. What I’m saying is that it would not have been a first-shot try for him. He would have already have had practice. I’ll bet it only took him two or three minutes to get his readings, make his calculations, and throw the switch.”

  “Isn’t that the problem though,” Curt had answered. “We just don’t know exactly when all the preparatory work was done, or how much time it would have taken. We could use, say 2:02 a.m. as the most opportune time to shut off the counter. But if we were off a minute or two? Remember, the police had reported the accident at 9:30, and we know it was at 9:25.”

  To himself, Curt never entertained any hopes that whatever they did would release these prisoners of time. What could be the best they could imagine? That Ronald Aikens and all who had been sucked into the whirlpools would emerge, twenty-four years older, the minute the power was out? How old would that make Baca – 94? No, it had not seemed reasonable,
but Curt had tried to be as enthusiastic as Sheila. He knew she was thinking of Elizabeth, and he did not want to dash her hopes. There would be plenty of time, he thought, for disappointment later.

  “There are only two times we’re absolutely sure about,” Sheila said. “The time when Uncle Ron was calling Betty in Baca’s cave, and the times when Uncle Ron and Frank Barrows were in the living room. Oh yes! That reminds me. I think I heard Aunt Elizabeth!”

  “What!”

  “When I listened last time, I thought I heard some other voice near the stairwell – right where Aunt Elizabeth said she had burst into the living room – you remember – waving this unloaded gun around…”

  “Then that settles it, doesn’t it? If timing has anything to do with it, we’ve got to give Elizabeth as much of a chance as possible.”

  So the time Ron and Barrows were in the living room had to be it. His escape after the shooting was something else, desirable but, in the overall importance of what they were doing, something not mandatory. How long could they keep him in jail for destroying government property? Sheila had said that she would take care of the details, and, after Curt had introduced her to Doctor Hawkins, they had gone into a huddle while he had purchased the rifle and left to zero it in.

  He was, she later had informed him, to run directly away from the lab, after his concluding shot, for about 100 yards. There, in an arroyo, would be a saddled horse and a guide to help him ride away. While Curt had no hopes of getting away, he agreed to these plans to keep Sheila’s hopes up. He knew she would not let him do the job alone if she thought he was going to sacrifice his freedom. She probably would have insisted on coming along.

  Curt looked at this watch and noted that he had a minute and a half before firing. Easing himself back to the crest of the small hill, he extended the rifle and peered at his target. He decided that he would have to aim for the connection point opposite the large metal box on the wooden pole. If he missed, the round would be stopped by another hill on the opposite side of the compound. Shooting at the line near the power shack would give him the parking lot as a backdrop, and, as there were several cars parked there, he could not be sure that people would not rush to their cars when he began firing.