by Rachel Ford
“Were you guys planning to go to war with the dinosaurs?” he wondered aloud.
He was, however, ignored. The vehicle came to a stop, and their driver pressed a button. The doors hissed open on either side of them. “Alright,” he said. “A pleasure meeting you folks. Sergeant Radcliff will take you from here.”
The grizzled officer was already outside their rover in wait. “This way, Ms. Abbot, Mr. Favero.” He gestured toward a hall leading out of the bay. “Mr. Garrity is waiting.”
“Waiting?” Nancy repeated. “He’s too busy, I suppose, to meet us himself?”
If Radcliff caught the sarcasm in her tones, he didn’t let it show. “Mr. Garrity believes idle hands are the devil’s work, Ms. Abbot.”
“Great. Him and my grandma would have got along just fine.”
Alfred was a little rattled by her boldness, but he couldn’t help but admire her for it. They had, after all, just been escorted at gunpoint to this tax cheat’s secret, prehistoric lair. They were practically prisoners. Anyone else might have been terrified. Hell, he was terrified. She, though, was cool as a cucumber. She was mocking their captor.
They traveled down a bare gray corridor, lit by industrial lights. It was only here, in the presence of that artificial illumination, that Alfred noted something he probably should have seen much earlier – this enclave not only had some manner of powered all-terrain vehicle, but they had electricity too.
“In here,” Radcliff said, directing them into a room off the hall. It seemed to be a reception area, with an unstaffed desk and a few sofas. He paused to knock at an interior door.
“Come,” a voice called.
The soldier opened the door and beckoned for them to go ahead. Then, once they’d stepped through, he followed. “Mr. Alfred Favero and Miss Nancy Abbot, sir. From the Internal Revenue Service.”
Behind a desk facing the door, a lean-faced man studied them with quizzical eyes. His was a face Alfred recognized at once from the files: David Garrity’s. He looked younger, somehow, than the taxman expected. There were a few lines on his brow and the start of some creasing by his eyes. But though the billionaire inventor was a few years Alfred’s senior, he had the impression that no one might have guessed it looking at the pair of them. Garrity’s blonde hair was fuller, his skin smoother, his appearance generally just more youthful.
He spoke now. His voice was good one, strong but pleasant. “The IRS? Jesus. We go missing for half a decade, and they can’t be bothered to send anyone after us until it’s tax time?”
Chapter Twelve
“I’m sorry,” Garrity was saying, “you’re telling me you didn’t come here to rescue us?”
“Rescue you?” Alfred repeated. “I didn’t even know you were trapped.”
“But you did activate the generator, didn’t you? You deliberately came here?”
The taxman flushed. “That was…a bit of an accident, actually.”
“An accident?”
“Misunderstanding, really. On the spur of the moment.”
The inventor stared at him with skeptical eyes. “You mean…you just went back in time? You didn’t think about how to get home?”
The incredulity in the other man’s tone brought heightened color to Alfred’s cheeks. “Not exactly. I didn’t know we were going to go back in time at all.”
“Well fuck,” Garrity sighed.
He cringed at the other man’s language, and Nancy asked, “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong, Miss Abbot? What’s wrong is, there were a lot of people hoping we had a way back when you two came through.”
“Oh.”
Garrity shook his head. “But I’m still a little hazy on how you even found the lab. We went to lengths to hide that place.”
“You left the doors wide open,” Alfred scoffed.
“What?”
“It’s true,” Nancy agreed. “One of your T. Rexes was chasing us, and I ran straight into a pit. Only it wasn’t a pit, it was the open hatchway.”
“To your secret lair,” Alfred elucidated. Garrity’s eyebrows rose at the description, but the taxman wasn’t finished. There was a question burning away at the back of his mind, and he was going to take the opportunity to ask it. “Which doesn’t make any sense. Why would you go through the trouble of building a secret lair – committing tax fraud by concealing it from Uncle Sam – and then leave the front door wide open?”
“I didn’t,” came the response. “At least, not directly.”
“Well, that’s clear as mud,” Nancy observed.
He frowned at her. “What I’m saying, Miss Abbot, is things did not go according to plan.”
“We gathered,” she returned dryly. “By the fact that you’re stuck here, in the Cretaceous period, with no way back. That still doesn’t answer Alfred’s question.”
“Perhaps not. But Mr. Favero will have to content himself with what I have told him. I must protect my intellectual property.” He shrugged. “I’m sure two people who chased me through sixty-five million years over some misunderstandings on a tax form can respect my rights to protect what is my own.”
“Sixty-seven,” Alfred corrected. “And a misunderstanding is signing on the wrong line. What you did, Mr. Garrity, is fraud. Tax fraud.”
The billionaire regarded him with raised eyebrows. Slowly, his lips curled up in pursuit of the eyebrows. Finally, he laughed. “Well, you’ve caught me, Senior Analyst. Go on, arrest me. Do you even have the authority to do so? No matter. Take me in. I’m ready to answer for my crimes.”
Alfred felt his cheeks flame, but he didn’t have a good retort. He was as trapped as Garrity, and, what was worse, his future depended on the other man’s charity, for he’d come to the past empty-handed.
Nancy, though, spoke, and her tones were heated. “You’re guilty of a lot more than tax fraud, Dave.”
“David,” the billionaire corrected.
She ignored him. “You developed tech that could open gateways to the past. And you used your little time-travel device to bring back dinosaurs. That’s got to break a few laws.”
“It’s a space-time manipulator, actually,” he said. “Capable of travel in any direction throughout the multiverse. It’s not a time travel device.”
She gaped. “You mean, you can jump dimensions with that thing? That’s even worse.”
“Dimensions?” Alfred was confused. “It’s…some kind of shrink ray?”
Garrity frowned at him. “Not those kind of dimensions, Mr. Favero. She’s talking about other dimensional planes in the multiverse.”
“Oh.” This clarified absolutely nothing, but the other man’s pinched tones made him feel something of a philistine in his ignorance. So he lied, “I see.”
“So you just developed an instrument that could allow someone to change the entire course of human history – hell, to change the course of history across the multiverse – on a whim, in secret? You didn’t think that the rest of humanity should have a say in that?”
“We took every precaution, Ms. Abbot.” Again, his tones were pinched.
“Not quite every precaution, Dave,” she declared, equally as dismissively. “Or else we wouldn’t be here now. And – not to put too fine a point on it – neither would you.”
Garrity sighed, then crossed his arms. “I already told you, things didn’t go according to plan. We might have been more focused on the possibilities than the outcomes. But I’m really not sure what you want from me. An apology?” He scoffed. “I don’t remember inviting you to poke around my labs.”
“The problem isn’t that there was a flaw in your plan,” Nancy said. “The problem is that you developed something like this at all. If we could find it, someone else will. That site isn’t going to sit vacant forever. Sooner or later people are going to realize you’re not coming back.”
“I planned for that,” he said. “That place is locked up tight for the next two hundred years.”
“What happens in two hundred years, then?�
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“Nothing should have survived that long.”
“Should have?” She was incredulous. “Mr. Garrity, you banked the future of our entire species on ‘should haves.’”
He shifted in his seat, and for once, Alfred saw, didn’t have a retort at the ready. The taxman, though, was still at a loss. “Our entire species?” he asked. “How?”
Nancy turned to him now. “Think of what someone can do with the power to jump through time – and realities. They could go back and kill the earliest humanoids. They could reshape history to their own whims: target humanity’s scientists and peacemakers, bring future tech to past worlds, bring viruses and pathogens across time…” She was shaking her head as the ideas rolled out. “They could do anything – anything.”
David Garrity looked positively uncomfortable now. “Yes, well, I think that’s very unlikely.”
She frowned at him. “You do? Why?”
He blinked. “Well…because…uh…”
Alfred, meanwhile, was contemplating her words. He hadn’t really thought through the implications before, but now they struck him, and hard. “Fudge muffins,” he said. “We could be the first – and only – humans. For all we know, there might not be a humanity left in our time.”
They had argued for a time after that, with David Garrity taking the position that humanity’s future, at least up until their own time, must be safe. “Otherwise, we would have ceased to be before we even entered the time shift.”
“How do you know? What if going backward in time separated us from our own timeline somehow?”
“It didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“That’s why we set up base here, in the Cretaceous period. We wanted to make sure we couldn’t screw anything up. So we gave our early ancestors a wide berth. We stayed away from anything that might impact human evolution. You may not believe it, Nancy Abbot, but we were actually very careful in our planning.”
They were engaged in this manner of debate when the door opened. A woman walked in, and David Garrity’s eyes lit up. “Angie,” he said. “You’re back.”
“Angie Becker?” Alfred asked. He recognized her from her photo, though the chestnut tones of her hair were touched now with the first flecks of gray. She’d been Garrity’s first research partner, long before there was a Futureprise. Before she vanished off the face of the Earth – or, more accurately, from twenty-first century Earth – she’d been the company’s head of R-and-D.
“Angie Garrity, actually,” the inventor said.
For a moment, they exchanged a glance of mutual affection. Alfred sighed, and she turned back to them. “I take it these are our guests?”
He nodded in turn. “Angie, this is Nancy Abbot and Alfred Favero. They’re with the IRS. Nancy, Alfred, this is Angie.”
Her brow creased. “The IRS?”
It was a reaction he was quickly tiring of, and Alfred exhaled again, loudly enough to be heard. “That’s right. The Internal Revue Service.”
“That’s…not what I expected,” she said mildly.
“No,” Garrity agreed. “Apparently, I misfiled a few things among the ten thousand documents I submitted each year, and these intrepid blood hounds tracked me down to make it right.”
She didn’t respond to the jest in his tone. “Is that all? No one else?”
The inventor’s expression grew more serious, and he shook his head. She frowned.
“Why?” Nancy asked. “Were you expecting someone else?”
Angie screwed up her eyes and turned them over Nancy. “You’re…some kind of tax investigator or something?” she asked.
“Something like that,” Nancy evaded.
Angie nodded. “I see. And – you haven’t mentioned it, David, so I’m guessing it’s a ‘no’ – but I don’t suppose you have a way back for us?”
“No,” she replied. “But you didn’t answer my question, Mrs. Garrity. Were you expecting someone else?”
“We weren’t expecting anyone, Ms. Abbot,” David Garrity said. “We gave up thinking someone was coming for us a long time ago.”
“You came through separately, though?” Angie asked. “Why?”
“We didn’t,” Alfred said. “We came through together.”
A flash of something – was it surprise? Worry? – crossed their faces. “Oh. You’re sure?”
“Of course. We were standing a few feet apart. Alfred pressed the button, and that was that.”
Chapter Thirteen
“They’re lying,” Nancy declared resolutely. “I could see it in her face. She was expecting someone else. And it wasn’t a happy expectation, either. She was afraid.”
Alfred nodded along. He was only half listening. He was studying a tablet the Garritys had given him, with information about their base. “That’s right.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
He glanced up now to see her frowning at him, and he flushed. “Yeah. They were lying.”
“About what?”
“I…uh…”
“Dammit Alfred, this is important.”
“Sorry.” He set the tablet down. Figuring out their odds of survival based on the tech Futureprise had smuggled into the past would have to wait. “What?”
“I said, I think they were expecting someone else. At least, afraid that someone else had come through.”
He considered that for a moment, trying to recall their hosts’ expressions. “You could be right. She did seem a little rattled.”
“And why would she think we made the trip separately?”
Alfred shrugged. “No idea.”
“I’m telling you, they’re hiding something. They’re lying. There’s someone they’re afraid of. And they’re afraid he’s here.”
“Well,” he sighed, “it certainly wasn’t the long arm of the law. They practically laughed at us.”
At this, Nancy did laugh. “Oh Alfred,” she said, shaking her head. Then, she sobered. “But this really is serious. If there’s someone out there, we need to know about it.”
“Whatever it is,” he said, reaching for the pad, “I don’t think we’ve got to worry about it. They’ve got enough weaponry here to stop an invading army. Did you look at these plans?”
She hadn’t, and she took the tablet he offered. Her forehead creased as she poured over it. “That’s another thing…they never did explain what all this crap is doing here.”
“Garrity said it was a research station.”
She scoffed. “I don’t think I believe that. Why all the armored vehicles, if it’s just research?”
Here, he felt he had to take Futureprise’s side. “This isn’t back home, Nance. Would you want to be out there, with T. Rexes and – whatever the heck that thing we saw yesterday was – without guns and armor between you?”
She considered for a moment. “Alright,” she conceded, “you’ve got a point there. But they were already bringing dinosaurs back with them. Why would they need a base here too?”
“We were bringing more than dinosaurs back with us, Nancy,” a voice sounded behind them. “We were bringing flora and fauna.”
The pair started, turning to see Angie Garrity. She was holding three mugs of a steaming liquid. “May I join you?”
Nancy swallowed, and Alfred flushed. “Uh…yeah,” he said. They were at a table in the mess hall, and it didn’t escape the taxman that, technically, they were visitors on her property.
She sat across from them and slid a cup over to each. “Coffee,” she said.
Alfred’s eyes lit up. “Coffee? How do you have coffee in the Cretaceous period?”
She shrugged. “We actually have a hydroponics lab where we grow it. You may laugh, but it was one of the first things we built when we put permanent security here. It was a proving grounds, that we could do it – bring food from the future and grow it here – and a way to keep morale up.”
The smell of the brew wafted up to his nostrils, and Alfred reached for it. However kind evolut
ion had been to the human species, he thought, on some level we’re no smarter than a deep sea crustacean, blindly following the lure of an angler fish to its doom. It had occurred to him that – if Nancy’s suspicions were right, and they weren’t to be trusted – this coffee could be poisoned. It could be laced with something fatal, or some drug to compel compliance or wipe their memories. If Futureprise was capable of spacetime manipulation, a little memory wipe was probably small potatoes for them.
And still, he sipped it. And sighed contentedly. “This is good coffee,” he said.
“It is,” Angie agreed.
“I thought I’d drank my last coffee,” he mused.
She smiled, then, abruptly, said, “Look, I know we got off on kind of the wrong foot. Dave told me about your conversation with him. I know you have concerns. About the company’s ethics, the things we did.”
“A few, yeah,” Nancy agreed. She, Alfred saw, still hadn’t touched her coffee.
Angie nodded. “That’s fair. I’m not going to lie. We screwed up. Big time. More than once. We did some things that – in hindsight – were stupid, obviously stupid. Things that – maybe – should been obvious to us before, too.
“And I know how that probably looks. But the fact is, we didn’t do it on purpose. We tried to be smart; we thought we were. We tried to take all the precautions, make sure we hadn’t overlooked anything.”
“Which only proves you shouldn’t have been doing it in the first place,” Nancy said.
Angie nodded again. “You’re right, Miss Abbot.”
Nancy blinked, as if she hadn’t been expecting such an easy victory.
“But the fact is, it’s too late for second guessing now. We shouldn’t have done it, but we did. And we’re stuck here. And – I’m sorry – but you are, too. I know that’s going to take some getting used to. I do want you to know, though, you’re part of our crew now. We’re going to look out for you just like we do the whole team.”