by Turner, Ivan
The party began to disperse a bit as people lined up for tours. That left me without Carolyn so I shrank into a corner and was finally left alone with my thoughts for a few moments. Those moments ended when I was approached by a woman. She was an older woman. I would have placed her in her fifties which meant she was probably closer to eighty. She walked with a confident stride that seemed familiar.
“I’ve been waiting to get you alone,” she said to me. That was when I put it all together.
“Natalie?”
She smiled an easy smile that I would never have believed could have crossed her face. Now that I knew who she was I could see it in her features. The young girl was long gone, the fiery aggressiveness long since dissolved into a sure confidence. That she smiled at me showed that she had given up all of her animosity towards me. Although I already knew that. After all it had been Natalie who had saved me from the soldiers during the invasion.
I was wrong about you, she had said. You know how to help us. Maybe in two hundred years, you’ll be able to pick up the pieces of Rogers’ war and finally save us.
Is that what I had been doing these past few weeks? Had I really become the savior they all thought I was?
“I knew it,” she said to me. “I wish I had seen it sooner, but at least I saw it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said back. “What are you doing here?”
“I came for the opening. After all, it was my information and a good chunk of my money that made this happen.”
“You’re a member of FLASH?”
She shook her head. “Of course not. But I knew where the headquarters was and after FLASH found it and started looking for financing for the Foundation, I started channeling them money.”
Of course. The information that had led to my rescue had come from an anonymous source. A lot of the financing, too. Jefferny had discussed it with me but we had simply concluded that it was coming from someone who was interested but didn’t necessarily want to be connected. It never occurred to us that a leaper, and a prestigious one at that, was behind it all. Clearly Natalie had been grounded for some time. She had obviously built herself a successful life here in the twenty fourth century.
“I almost died,” I said.
She nodded. “I heard. It took me a long time to settle into this time period. After that, it took even longer to find someone who was at all interested in opening up the old headquarters. I was careful to maintain my anonymity.”
Something about her story didn’t feel right. I didn’t detect a lie so to speak, but something was missing. I thought back to our first brief meeting. Sitting in Dr. Philip Kung’s lab she had berated me for not doing my part to see an end to Forty Leaping. Sitting around a table in a conference room dozens of feet below where we now stood, she had once again shown animosity. But that had changed when I’d attacked Rogers. It was as if she had been seeing him for the first time. Then she had found me during the invasion and locked me in a hole so that I would survive. While the others had perished in battle or leaped only to find themselves buried alive, I had been scrunched up in a cubby.
“How did you get out?” I asked. “During the fight, how did you get out?”
She seemed to be taken unawares by the question, as if it hadn’t even occurred to her that I might ask it. Natalie had lost a step. “What do you mean?”
I shook my head. “No one got out. All of the exits were blocked and they forced us inward. How did you get past them?”
“I got lucky.”
I looked her dead in the eye, buoyed by a sudden conviction. “You didn’t get lucky.”
My thoughts had taken me down a dangerous path. I had no proof of my theory yet I was certain of its accuracy.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You were their informant,” I said. “We wondered how they had found the headquarters. It was you. You were his right hand and you turned him over to them.”
“It’s not like that.” Her voice had lowered to a whisper, but also taken on an edge.
“What is it like?”
“You were right. The whole time, you were right. Rogers perpetuated that war to feed his ego. When you said it I felt like such a fool. I had followed him like some mesmerized child. It had to end.”
“Turning us in was the way you ended it?”
“I saved your life,” she said.
“They pulled forty bodies out of that hole!”
It happened in an instant. The anger burst through my defenses. How dare she claim to have saved my life when the danger had been her fault in the first place? All at once I knew that the power of my body had broken past the protection of the adrenal blockers. I could feel the rush in my head and in my muscles. I wanted to reach out and shake her.
The room went virtually silent. I can’t even say how loud I had yelled. Maybe they heard me in Australia.
“People were dying every day,” she said to me.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was she really trying to justify her method of ending the war. Never once had I suggested that the slaughter of all of the Forty Leapers was the solution.
“What was the deal? How much did you tell them?” But I already knew the answer to that. Natalie knew just about everything there was to know. She knew the location of not only Rogers Clinton’s headquarters but the locations of installations all over the world. She knew where people were assigned. There wasn’t a leaper involved with the movement that she couldn’t lead them to.
I think she tried to explain it again. I think she tried to tell me that her actions had led to this good. Without her there would be no Foundation. And I realized that Natalie had not grown up as she had grown old. She had just redirected her misguided convictions. Still a fighter, she was convinced of the rightness and righteousness of her actions. There was no telling her that she had done the wrong thing because the events had led to this right thing. But although she was no different, I had changed considerably. I shouted at her. It was not a dignified reprimand. I screamed bloody murder. I was so outraged at her refusal to accept responsibility for murdering all of those people. It wasn’t only those that had died buried inside the complex. It was about the ones who had been killed during the invasion. I thought of the man I had seen leap out and then leap back in moments later. He had never stood a chance.
The entire party had gone silent now. Everyone was staring at me and I caught someone whispering to someone else and then someone run off. As I continued the verbal barrage, I could feel the quickening in my muscles. The effect of the adrenal inhibitors had been completely nullified. I knew I was going leap. Natalie had gone quiet. I think she was as mystified at my reaction as everyone else. As I was myself.
“Mathew!”
I turned to see Carolyn rushing from the direction of the elevator. I don’t try to imagine what she saw.
“Mathew!” her cry turned to one of anguish and then she was gone.
Or, more accurately, I was. So much for the temporary cure. I guess I had never truly trusted it anyway. After all, I still carried my journal everywhere. I patted my breast pocket to reassure myself that it had made the trip with me. It had.
To my surprise, I was still inside the main building of the Foundation. It didn’t look all that different. Of course, it was late at night, later I think than when I had leaped. The lights were off and only a drop of moonlight came in through the windows. I waited for a bit so that my eyes could adjust. A stage had been set up in the rear of the room. I couldn’t imagine what had gone on in that room, but on closer inspection I noted that it was in a state of disrepair. In fact, most of what I was seeing hadn’t been effectively maintained in quite a while. It saddened me to think that the Foundation had come to its end. But then again, I had no way of knowing what good it had done in my absence. I could only hope that my absence hadn’t brought about its ruin.
Leaving the banquet hall, I walked out into the main corridor. To my surprise, this seemed a bit more kept up. The paint
on the walls was not fresh, but it was not peeling. The glass doors in the front of the building were clean and I could see the courtyard through them. The yard itself was overgrown, but the paths were clear. Out in the center was an area that looked freshly excavated. There was a sapling and what looked like a tombstone next to it. Beyond, I could see the lights of Manhattan. It was a city again. I was curious about what had happened in the intervening time. I was curious about just how much intervening time there was. Unless they had changed the building too much, I would be able to find my way around. Though there was this urge to go out into the city and explore, I went first up the stairs to the second level and made my way down to my office.
The room was unused, hadn’t been used in a very long time. On the door was a nameplate that read Mathew Cristian. A plaque was mounted beside it. The father of Forty Leaping whose affliction took him from us prematurely. I went inside. It was a shrine to me. All this time and the room had remained vacant. All of my things were there. The only thing that seemed out of place from how I had left it earlier that day (how many decades before?) was a tiny folded note on the desk. I picked it up and read it.
Mathew, I miss you. Carolyn
I was touched. I supposed that she was long dead, unless she too had leaped. Maybe there was a way to find out. Certainly there was no information in here. I stepped back into the hallway. Other offices line the corridor. The next one I went to was Carolyn’s. This room had been redone. Apparently she had not garnered the same respect I had. I couldn’t imagine why. Her contribution to the Foundation had been much greater than my own. Without her, I don’t suppose the thing would have even gotten off the ground. Despite that, though, this office too was long abandoned. I didn’t recognize the name on the door.
As it turned out, none of the offices seemed to be in current use. Though the building was clean and most of it maintained to a certain degree, I wondered what its purpose was. It was deserted from top to bottom.
Or was it?
I wondered about the headquarters, still probably located an elevator trip down. For an instant I considered breaking my vow to myself and visiting it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, I marched up to the third floor, to the main conference room where we had mounted the Map. The conference room had been converted into a large office. The Map was still mounted on the wall and I could see that many additions had been made. I felt for the light switch and turned it on. There was power. Moving over to the Map, I began to study it.
I had last leaped on May 20th, 2342 at 10:10 pm. It was marked very clearly. Of course, my return had yet to be recorded. I considered doing it myself but didn’t. I had this strange aversion to the Map. In the end, I suppose I recognized its importance, but despite its artistic quality, there was something so sterile about a document that coldly tracked the lives of so many people. I spent a long time studying it. There were a lot of leapers in whose lives I was interested. Of course, those most recent in my memory were the ones I looked up first.
Carolyn was marked with a red X. My immediate reaction was sadness. What could have happened? Then I noticed that she had never leaped after arriving in the twenty fourth century. As I had originally surmised, she had probably lived a long and happy life. Somewhere, there would be records that would give me that answer. Natalie, on the other hand, did leap. Her leap was barely two hours behind mine. It was recorded to the minute so she must have stuck around after our argument. I wondered if our argument had been the cause of her leap as well as the cause of mine. She had arrived on September 22nd, 2494, a hundred and fifty years later. There was a red X after that.
So 2494 was in the past. Of course it was. I had already leaped a hundred and fifty years. Where was I now? Well I was beyond the year 2588. Rogers Clinton had leaped in on September 30th, 2588 and was marked with a red X. His leap had been four hundred years, the same as Phinneas Scot’s leap into 2342. Where was Phinneas Scot now? Well beyond 2588 I was sure. His entry was not updated.
A curious thing that I noticed was that many of the names were marked with a green circle. In fact, most of the names on the Map were marked with either the red X or this green circle. I had no idea of its significance. Neither mark appeared near my name. Samantha Radish had a green circle. So did Rupert Oderick.
When I was done looking it over, I sat at the desk of whoever occupied this office and became pensive. So much had happened to me over the course my last couple of years, over the course of history. So many of the people whose lives had touched me were not even on the Map. They were not Forty Leapers. The Kungs. My brothers. Livvie.
Jennie.
I felt fatigued and yet I did not feel sleepy. I had nowhere to go anyway. So I pulled out my journal and began to write.
The sky was still dark when I was awakened by a noise in the corridor. I must have fallen asleep while writing in the journal. I quickly closed it up and tucked it back into my jacket. I was unafraid, but my heart still pounded from being awakened so suddenly. Again, there was no chance of a leap because I had just leaped.
A man appeared in the doorway. He looked much older than I was, perhaps in his seventies or eighties. I wondered how old a man had to be to look that way in this century. Despite the lines on his face and the unruly white hair on his head, he seemed fit enough. He did not hobble, nor were his mannerisms slow or lacking in confidence. When at first he saw me, he scowled. I guess he didn’t expect visitors in the middle of the night. Maybe I was sitting in his chair. But that scowl turned to a huge grin and I recognized that grin and matched it.
It was my good friend Rupert Oderick.
I practically leaped out of my seat intending to give his hand a good hard shake. But he grabbed me up in a huge bear hug and squeezed me until I gasped.
“You leaped in?” he asked. “That’s ridiculous. Of course you did. How long have you been here?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “A couple of hours at most. I dozed off.”
He drew his arm around the room. “I saw the light on and thought we’d had another break in. Idiot kids are always trying to get in here and see the Map.”
After that he began to talk at breakneck speed. His English accent had diminished over the years. I guess living in a world where the language and accents had undoubtedly changed so much had had its effect on him. And he had obviously been here a long time. But I was too tired to ask for details. As the initial excitement of seeing him wore off, the fatigue returned. I told him I had to have a sleep and he took me across to building six. Of all of the buildings that made up the Foundation, number six was the only one still in use. Rupert lived there by himself since the arrival of a Forty Leaper had become a very rare event. I already knew my way around but he showed me to one of the suites as if it were my first time there. The bed was already made up. Rupert told me to sleep as long as I liked and he would see me later. Then we could catch up.
Chapter X
When I awoke, I had the unsettling feeling that something was out of place. The room looked different in the morning light, and a wave of panic washed over me. But I again realized that a leap was impossible at that time. I got up and washed up quickly in a small adjoining bathroom, rummaged through some old clothing until I found something that fit, and then made for the dining room. I knew when I was getting close because I could smell…lunch.
I had slept a long time.
Rupert was sitting at the table, writing on an electronic tablet. When he realized I was there, he looked up, beaming.
“Great to see you, mate.”
“It’s good to see you, too.”
There was a place already set for me and there was food on the table. Next to the setting was small phial. Through its frosted exterior, I could just make out six small pills.
“Adrenal inhibitors?” I asked.
He laughed and shook his head. “Never very good, were they? You took them straight through, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“Well those little magic beans are i
t, my friend,” he said indicating the phial.
“It?” I asked. “It what?”
“The cure!” he shouted. “I never get tired of showing it off. They pushed for it once you leaped out. There was a woman…Lynn something.”
“Carolyn Lynn.”
“That’s it!” he cried. “She left a note for you, by the way.”
“I got it.”
“Sweet girl I guess,” he said. “We missed each other by a few decades though.”
I thought that was a shame.
“Anyway, she fought for you when the others insisted you hadn’t been taking your meds. She convinced the blokes that those adrenal inhibitors weren’t worth their candy coating. They got right to work on a cure after that. And here it is.”
I picked up the phial
“It’s a ‘teaching drug’,” he said. “It teaches your body how to redirect your adrenaline flow so that it doesn’t produce the enzyme. Without that enzyme, you never leap.”
“Amazing,” I whispered.
He nodded. “One a day for six days. If you don’t finish the cycle, your body reverts back to Leaping. If you take too much, your body will destroy it. May as well get started. There’s juice in your glass.”
Looking down at the pills, I suddenly became darkly panicked. Leaping had become a vehicle to new times and new worlds. Though I had wished fervently for that which now rested in the palm of my hand, I suddenly felt as if I would be stranding myself on a deserted island. Rupert must have noticed my hesitation.
“Why wouldn’t you want to be cured?” he asked, but I guessed that he understood just the same.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m just, frightened, all of a sudden.”
“You’ve been living with it for so long, you’re afraid you won’t know how to live without it,” he said. “You’ll get used to living in one time a hell of a lot easier than you did living in multiple times.”