by Greg Logan
She said, “Is that really possible? After all we know? All we’ve seen? After what we are? I mean, you’re a time-traveler. You always will be. And I’m a squid.”
He shook his head. “No, you’re not. You’re a beautiful woman. In my eyes at least, you’ll never be a squid.”
She smiled. “As silly as it sounds, I think that’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
And they were kissing again. Long and deep. This could have gone much further, Jeff thought, if they could find some privacy. If they could find a room where the door could shut. But with the ventilation down, all doors were open so there could be at least some flow of air.
Of course, Jeff could always take them somewhere else. The dorm room Chloe and Ashley shared. But, no. Before he could build anything with Sara, they had to take care of problems at hand.
A thought occurred to him. Something she had said. Time-traveler. He had gotten them some information before by breaking the rules. Maybe he could again.
He said, “I want you to go back inside. There’s something I have to do.”
“What?”
“I have to do something Scott would blow his top over if he knew. But, in a time of war, sometimes you just have to break the rules.”
He waited until she was safely through the doorway to the ladder that would take her up and into the facility.
Then he reached out and parted the strands of time, and was gone.
SIXTEEN
Cassandra loved the waters of Mexico. The pacific coast. Warm as bath water. She dove under the surf, then emerged again. She then realized she was still alone in the water. Alexander was going to come down from the cottage and join her, but there was no sign of him on the beach.
She walked out of the water, her long dark hair clinging to her back and shoulders. She was in one-piece racing swim suit. She didn’t come to the beach to luxuriate in the sun like a swim-suit model. She came to experience the water. Besides, it wasn’t like an android could develop much of a tan.
She wrapped a sarong about her hips and stepped into sandals, and started up the beach to the cottage standing just beyond the sand.
The cottage was small. One bedroom only, but that was all she and Alexander needed. A small kitchen. A screened-in room that served as a parlor.
This is where she found Alexander. He was in a recliner, a laptop resting literally in his lap. On a small stand beside him was a margarita in a frosted mug.
She said, “Aren’t you going to join me in the water?”
Alexander looked to be maybe thirty, but he was actually much, much older. His dark hair was cut short, and he was clean-shaven. He was in swimming trunks, which showed off a physique that was mildly muscular. Not like the steroidal apes you saw on magazine covers, which disgusted Cassandra so much. Society had developed in some strange ways over the past hundred and twenty years.
“I’ll be right down,” Alexander said. “I was just listening in.”
“Well, if you’re not going to drink this..,” She grabbed the margarita and took a sip. Not that she could get drunk, it was just that she appreciated the taste. The margarita was one of the nicer things that had developed over the last hundred and twenty years.
“How are they doing?” she said.
“Not well. The squid attack force did some harm. Chuck Burroughs will be ineffective now, because his battlesuit is damaged. He needs that suit fully functional or he can’t execute molecular contraction without bringing harm to himself.”
“He’d freeze himself to death.”
Alexander nodded. “Essentially. And now, the A.I. they call Sammy is down. He took a full ion charge.”
“Oh, my.”
“Indeed. Disrupted his synthetic neurons. Tempest should be able to figure it out, but he doesn’t have time. The armada will be here in five months and eighteen days. Even with his brilliant intellect, without access to the proper materials his ideas are merely ideas. Like Michelangelo, who could probably have developed the microprocessor if he had only the materials.”
“So, how long are you going to just sit here?”
“They tried to kill us, remember?”
“They didn’t understand. They thought we were the enemy. Remember?”
“Of course I remember. Seeing you lying on the floor, all blown apart. Your entire cerebral cortex off line. It was one of the most devastating moments of my life.”
“If it hadn’t been for that Iroquois woman, reviving you.”
“If they had left well enough alone, then our plan would have been placed into action by now. The Earth wouldn’t be in danger. They brought this all on themselves.”
Cassandra sat on the edge of a footstool. She brought her knees up and rested her forearms on them. She held the margarita mug in both hands.
Damn, she was hot, Alexander thought. He thought so in the nineteenth century, and he thought so now. But he was too pissed off at Tempest and his crew to do anything about it at the moment.
She sighed wearily. “You know you’re going to help them. Because if you don’t, there’ll be nothing to stop the invasion. The aliens will try us both as war criminals. They’ll dismantle me and execute you.”
His turn to sigh wearily. “I don’t know what we can do, really. Even if we were to help. So much of our equipment was destroyed when the tavern burned and caved in on the lab. It had taken me decades to build all of that. I never bothered to rebuild. I was just so weary. And I figured if these people don’t want to even help themselves, why should I bother? Besides, Tempest’s plan is ludicrous. It’ll never work. But there’s a workable idea, if he just wasn’t too short-sighted to see it.”
Cassandra said, “He needs your help.”
He shook his head. He wanted to say no. Yet, he knew she was right. If he and Cassandra were captured by the enemy, they wouldn’t have a bright future.
“All right.” He shut the laptop. “Jeff Calder has just departed.”
“He’s gone back?”
Alexander nodded. “It’s safe. Go ready the teleportation field. We’re going to pay them a visit.”
She smiled and rose to her feet. “That’s the Alexander I so love.”
Mother used as her bedroom a back room in the jewelry store. She had a pillow, and she made a pallet of blankets on the floor.
The hour was late, but she had always been a light sleeper. A small breeze whisked by her, as though a door had suddenly been opened. She knew what it was.
She said, “Jeff?”
“Mother?” he said from the doorway.
She sat up in her blankets. “What is it?”
“I need to talk. I think I have a solution to the problem we all face, but I’m going to need your help.”
She reached for a robe and pulled it on over her nightgown. “Let’s go out to the main room. I’ll light a candle and we can put on some tea.”
They sat in the front room. A candle was burning, mounted in an old wine bottle. Mother had heated some water using a can of sterno, and now Jeff sat in an old, wooden chair with a cup of cinnamon tea in one hand. Mother was in her rocker.
She listened silently to Jeff’s plan. At one point, the Darkness arrived. He kept a watch on Mother at night. Jeff had no idea if Sondra was with him, and didn’t want to know. The Darkness creeped him out.
When Jeff was finished, she said, “It will definitely be breaking the rules. But I do agree that desperate times call for desperate measures.”
The Darkness said, “What will they say back at the facility?”
Jeff said, “We should be back before they even know we’re gone.”
Mother rose from her rocker. “I’ll go get dressed.”
SEVENTEEN
1880
The alien called Alexander was lying partially buried under rubble. He had almost fully transformed into a sentient invertebrate with tentacles, which was his natural form. Beside him was Cassandra, a hole blown into her chest. Sparks had been flying, but no more. She was go
ne.
Sammy’s and Scott’s tricorders each gave a warning beep. Scott looked at the digital readout. “The tavern up top has burst into flames. The whole building’s on fire. Probably a fail-safe, to keep this lab downstairs from being discovered. They didn’t want to pollute the time-line.”
Scott looked to Jeff. “Maybe you should start powering-down. We have to get out of here. We have no reason to remain in this time anymore.”
Jeff stood in the tattered remains of his shirt and jacket. “Give me a few minutes to fully power-down, and I’ll have us out of here.”
Smoke was filling the room. There were crashing sounds from above. The whole tavern was getting ready to come down on top of them. Jeff was concentrating on powering-down. He had to do this and fast, if they were going to get out of here alive.
Scott, in the long coat and cravat he had put on to blend in better with nineteenth century fashion, looked about the room. “It’s a shame we don’t have more time. I would love to get my hands on some of this technology.”
Sammy went to one unit that looked like a wooden bookshelf against a wall. Indeed books were there. Things that would have been considered antiques in the future. Authors such as Dickens and Plutarch. There were also a series of metallic disks.
“We should take these,” Sammy said. “They must be data storage units of some kind.”
“Do it,” Scott said.
Sammy grabbed them all.
“All right,” Jeff said. “I’m as powered-down as I can get. Let’s get out of here.”
Sammy, Scott and April gathered around Jeff.
“Brace yourselves,” he said.
He then drew a breath and pulled them through time, and they were gone.
Then Jeff, dressed in his red battlesuit, appeared with a flash of light, alongside Mother.
They had been standing just a half-second ahead in the time-line, watching the earlier version of Jeff and the others as they left for the future. The images had appeared as hazy and faded, but were recognizable.
Mother looked about her. “Is this really eighteen-eighty?”
Jeff nodded. “Not much to look at from down here.”
Mother went over to the squid. She coughed on some smoke. “Is this the alien?”
Jeff said, “That’s him.”
“An actual extra-terrestrial. I hadn’t believed they were real until these past few days. And to actually see one. A shape-shifter, in his true form.”
“Is there anything you can do for him?”
She reached out a hand to him. “Life does still flicker within him, but barely.”
“Scott thought he was fully dead.”
“Scott uses man-made devices. My ability is organic, and as such fluid and able to reach much deeper. But we haven’t much time.”
“We don’t have much time before this whole place collapses on us, ether. Stay close. I’m going to pull you and both of them out of here.”
Jeff wrapped a tachyon field around himself, Mother, the squid and the damaged A.I., and Mother drew in a deep breath and braced herself. Jeff pulled them away. They reappeared in a patch of woods outside the city.
Funny how different life was in the eighteen hundreds, Jeff thought. There were no suburbs. You get out beyond the city limits, and you had woods and farmland.
Mother knelt by the squid and began focusing on him.
“This will take time,” she said. “His physiology is like nothing I have ever seen.”
Jeff looked down at the A.I., lying motionless. In much the same condition Sammy was, back in the future. Sammy had taken a full ion blast, something Scott hadn’t built him to be able to resist. His neurons were fried. Even Chloe hadn’t been able to revive him.
She could manipulate electronics and computers. Make them dance and sing. But she couldn’t cause them to regenerate. For all intents and purposes, Sammy was dead. The first casualty of the war.
Time passed. Jeff paced about. He powered-up a little, then engaged his suit’s anti-grav function and rose above the tree line for a look around. In the distance, he could see the city. It was dark, as there were no streetlights to light up the city. He could see some dark outlines of buildings against the faint pale glow of street lamps. And he could see an orange blaze, which he figured was the tavern.
He returned to the ground. He knew to say nothing to Mother because she had to concentrate.
Eventually, the sun rose. Since Jeff had an acute awareness of time even when he wasn’t in the time stream, he knew the time to be near seven, 1880 time.
He was growing sleepy, so he powered-up some more. The exhilaration that came with it drove away the drowsiness. He could still go for a cup of coffee, though.
Mother eventually sat back and caught her breath. She looked weary. The squid had once again taken the form a human man.
He stirred, and looked up at Jeff and Mother.
“What happened?” he said.
Jeff filled him in. The squid, Alexander, went to stand up, but was woozy and Jeff had to catch him.
“Be careful,” Mother said. “You’re still not fully well. You’re out of danger, but you’ll need time to recuperate.”
Alexander shook Jeff off and went to Cassandra’s side.
Jeff said, “I’m sorry about your android.”
“She’s more than just my android,” Alexander almost spat the words at him.
Mother said, “Let me rest for a while, then I’ll see if I can’t help you recover some more.”
“Just leave me alone. Don’t you people think you’ve done enough? You’ve ruined everything. Cassandra and I have worked for so many years to build a plan to use against the invasion. And now, in one careless moment, you and yours destroyed it all. As far as I’m concerned, you deserve your fate.”
Jeff said, “We can’t leave you out here like this in the woods.”
“I have operatives. I’ll signal for them. Then we’ll repair Cassandra and reactivate her.”
“We came back to your time because we need your help.”
Alexander looked up at him with venom in his eyes. “I wouldn’t help you now if my own life depended on it.”
Mother stood and grasped Jeff’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
Jeff returned Mother to Boston, then he cut through the time stream laterally to step out of it within the facility. Scott and April were in the lab, which was where he appeared.
“Scott,” Jeff said. “April. I have something to tell you.”
“We know where you’ve been,” Scott said. He was sitting on a stool at a lab table. He had a cup of coffee in one hand. April had used her quantum energy to heat the water.
“I tried to help. But I failed.” It then dawned on Jeff what Scott had said. “Wait. What’d you say? How do you know where I was?”
Alexander stepped from the lounge. The longer hair and sideburns he had sported in 1880 were now gone, and he was in a henley shirt and jeans. Behind him was Cassandra, now fully restored and operational. Her hair was long and full, and she was in a tank top and athletic shorts.
Alexander said, “Your mission wasn’t a total failure.”
“But, you said you’d never help us.”
He shrugged. “I’ve had a hundred and forty years to cool off.”
Jeff said to Scott, “You’re not mad at me?”
“After what I saw in the future...no. I guess I’m changing my outlook on a lot of things.”
Scott got up from the stool and walked over and placed a hand on Jeff’s shoulder. “I guess I looked at a lot of things theoretically. That little trip to the future you took me on opened my eyes to a lot of reality. The future of the human species hangs in the balance, and I’ll do anything to prevent that future you showed me from happening. Now, go get some rest. Alexander and I have some planning to do.”
EIGHTEEN
First thing they had to do, Alexander said and Jake agreed, was to cut their losses and abandon their mountain facility. No more attempts to b
ring the generator back to life. The place was dead. Time to move on.
Scott wasn’t so sure. “It’s just, this place has been our home for years. We invested so much time and so many resources into it.”
Alexander said, “This is war. We have no time to be sentimental. We have less than six months to somehow prevent an invasion, against extremely overwhelming odds.”
Jake placed a hand on Scott’s shoulder. “You put me in charge. I hate to leave this place too, but I agree with him.”
Scott gave a reluctant nod.
They relocated to the little bungalow Alexander and Cassandra called home.
April, now in a string bikini, stood on the beach, spinning about, taking in the view. The beach stretched away in either direction. The sea was open and wide, and a tropical blue. Waves came drifting in. Behind the bungalo, the land stretched away to a rocky cliff.
Sara and Ashley and Chloe were in the water. Cassandra had an assortment of bikinis, and they were each in one. Cassandra was with them, too, in her one-piece racing suit. Jeff was in a pair of swim trunks, and was floating on his back in the water. Akila was further down the beach, where it curved away beyond their sight. She wanted to do some yoga stretches, and she liked to do them totally minus clothing. Rick was off in the hills, going for a run.
Sara sprang up out of the water near Jeff. For a moment, the water rushed from her, like she was a human waterfall, then she stood looking at him with her unearthly green eyes. She stood to her ribs in the water, looking like something off of a magazine cover in her bikini top.
“Do you know how beautiful you really are?” he said.
She grinned playfully. “Tell me.”
He flipped over in the water and down, so he was standing in front of her, and he placed his hands on her shoulders. “When this is done, I am going to take you to some remote place, and show you.”
“Oh, really?”
Their lips met.
Chloe was twenty feet away, standing in the water. “Hey, you two. Get a room.”