by Alan Seeger
Steven looked at him and said, “It tried to eat my house, so I sort of had to break it. Sorry about that.”
Michael stared at him, amazed.
Samuel broke the silence. “You said there were two losses. What was the other?”
“The Wolf Guardian was lost — I believe its destination was somewhere in the late 26 century, a hundred years or so from now. The owner was lost with it.”
Steven thought of the enormous chrome skull they’d catalogued and wondered whether the owner had been one of the other slaves or one of the Brotherhood.
“Are there any other questions I can answer for you?” Michael asked.
Samuel paused a moment, and then said, “What if you just wanted to go home again?”
A look passed between all three men. “Uhm… what exactly do you mean?” said Michael. “You can return to your home time whenever you like.”
“No,” said Samuel. “I mean that the manual refers to something it calls Rollback, which sounds like an Undo function. Can it take you back to where you came from, not only when and where, but put things back like they were before you went into Gatespace in the first place?”
Michael was silent for a beat, then nodded slowly. “It’s not recommended because we have no way to know if it’s successful. Once you initiate a rollback, it’s as though you had never been here to begin with; for example, I wouldn’t even remember that you had been here to see me. For all we know, it might simply cause you not only to cease to exist, but to cease to ever have existed.”
The three sat in silence. Steven didn’t know what to do. The risk was great, but the possibility of being able to be back with Lynne was even greater.
Finally Samuel broke the silence. “I know what we can do,” he said.
Chapter 42
By mid-morning, Wilkerson had reached the Hudson River and boarded a ferry that would take him across to Manhattan Island.
Upon arriving, he first found a place to hide the cMMU and his pack, secreting two of the extra ammunition clips for the M4A1 in the large inner pockets of his overcoat. He then located his objective: the majestic Cooper Union building at 7 Street and Third Avenue. He stood gazing at the main entrance for a time, then walked around the building, familiarizing himself with it, trudging through the muck and mud left behind by the melting winter’s snow.
Wilkerson spent most of the rest of the day exploring the area, preparing himself for what he had planned for that night. He happened across an alley where he found a man who seemed to be sleeping off a drunken binge — apparently the passage of more than 160 years hadn’t changed things all that much — and rifled through his pockets. He was rewarded with a one dollar bill, a half-dime and a couple of three cent pieces. With $1.11, he thought, I may just be one of the wealthier men in town.
It was approaching noon, so Wilkerson found a food vendor and bought two meat pies and two bottles of beer. He found an out-of-the-way park bench and sat down, watching the people passing by. He ate one of the pies and wrapped the other in a piece of cloth, placing it in his coat pocket. Then he drank one of the beers.
Wilkerson waited, watching a large clock that adorned a nearby building as people, horses and wagons passed by in the street.
At four o’clock that afternoon, he ate the other meat pie and drank the other beer. He sat quietly contemplating what was coming and did something very un-soldierly: he fell asleep.
It was slightly after seven in the evening when he awoke with a start. He glanced at the clock and realized that he was late for the appointment he’d made for himself.
He rushed back to the Cooper Union building, moving as quickly as he could without drawing undue attention to himself. A crowd of well over a thousand people had trudged through a newly arrived snowstorm to hear a relatively little-known politician speak on the topic of the Federal government’s responsibility to regulate certain aspects of social behavior. Politicians giving speeches were a dime a dozen at this time in American history, yet a number of prominent Republicans had brought in this Midwesterner to present his ideas to a New York audience.
Wilkerson went inside and found an empty seat at one end of the fifth row, as near the front as he could get without having to try to squeeze past other people.
The featured speaker was already well into his speech. He was extremely tall — a full head above any other person on the stage — and spoke in a high, reedy voice that carried to the back of the auditorium.
Wilkerson sat listening, thinking about the task he had set for himself but also fascinated by the fact that he was actually here, 169 years in the past. He continued to listen.
The speaker continued in that thin yet compelling voice:
“…under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us!” He shook his head sadly. “That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!’” He stood staring at the crowd, pausing for dramatic effect.
“To be sure, what the robber demanded of me — my money — was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle…”
Wilkerson felt a fire flare up inside him. He knew that this was his moment. He stood and cried out, “For the preservation of the South!” as he whipped his M4A1 rifle from under his overcoat and opened fire on the speaker. The weapon was set on full automatic mode, and the gunfire reverberated like thunder in the auditorium. The nattily dressed men seated around Wilkerson scattered in fear like hens before a fox. The M4A1’s shells stitched a crisscross pattern across the tall man’s chest, and he danced a macabre dance of death before crashing to the floor in a pool of blood.
Wilkerson fled up the aisle, glowing with triumph. He had just succeeded in killing Abraham Lincoln.
Chapter 43
Lynne pulled up in the driveway of Samuel’s house, the house that she and Steven had lived in for so many years. There were so many memories here for her; Steven had brought her here when they had been married just under a year, her stomach swollen with Nicolette.
“It’s a bargain,” he had told her, an excited smile on his face. “You know Jimmy Two Eagles that I work with at the plant, right?” She nodded. “This place was his grandma’s. She passed away a couple of months ago and it’s his now, but he and Robyn are happy where they are, down south of town. They could put this place on the market and probably get $90,000 for it, but he knows we need a place with the baby coming. He said if we’d give him $3,000 down, and then $600 a month for fifteen years, it’s ours.”
“But… we don’t have $3,000,” she said, shaking her head uncertainly.
Steven grinned. “Well, I wasn’t gonna tell you yet, but yeah, we do. My aunt Rosalie gave me three grand to put down. She doesn’t want me to pay her back, just come and do fix-it stuff for her at her house.”
Lynne’s eyes grew wide. She gazed at the little house. “Oh, god, Steve. Our own place? Our very own house?” She began to cry. Steven took her in his arms and held her.
Now, sitting in her little blue Toyota in the driveway of that same house thirty-three years later, she remembered how it felt to have her husband’s arms around her.
She had raised her four children in this house, cooked untold thousands of meals, fought with Steve, made love with him — for that matter, they had conceived three of those children in this house. Then, when he had gone into that damned green swirl fifteen years ago, the house had seemed so cold. She’d stayed until the last of the c
hildren was ready to move out, then given the house to Samuel.
But now he was gone too, and she wondered whether she’d ever see him or Steve again. Erica had packed her things and gone to her parent’s house, and the old place was standing empty.
Well, she wasn’t going to be left alone any longer. She steered the car onto the grass and drove overland toward the northeast, guiding it up the slope toward the place where her husband had disappeared fifteen years before. Within a couple of minutes she saw the familiar landscape ahead. She pulled the car to a stop and got out.
There was the cold green whirlpool, just the same as she remembered it. She didn’t have any cans of compressed air or a fire extinguisher to propel herself around in there, but somehow she still knew this was the right thing to do. She thought of Steve’s tale of the old man that had spent 800 years floating in the void, and a chill ran down her spine, but the thought to herself, If that’s what happens to me, it happens.
She stood in front of the vortex — the Gate, Steve had called it — took a deep breath, and stepped into the green maelstrom.
Chapter 44
“As mindbending as your plan is, it might just succeed,” said Michael. He and Steven stared at Samuel. Michael had a look of admiration in his eyes, while Steven glowed with a father’s love for his son. “I knew there was a reason I always called you Samwise,” Steven said.
The logic behind Samuel’s idea was impeccable. He and Steven had entered the void together; if Steven boarded the Guardian and engaged the Rollback function, and it didn’t work properly — and wiped him out of existence — according to the theories set forth by the Guardian’s designers, it wouldn’t just mean it destroyed him in the present. It would be as if he had never existed at all, in any location of the space/time continuum, in which case Samuel would never have existed either, nor the girls, and young Lynne would never have become Lynne Denver.
At any rate, Samuel would also blink out of existence as he stood in the Guardian warehouse. In that situation, the Guardian staff would still remember the Denvers and would know that the Restore function was flawed and should not be used in the future — or would they?
On the other hand, if in fact Restore did work and put Steven back where he had come from, erasing the entire history of his journeys through Gatespace, then not only would he never have visited the Guardian offices and had this discussion with Michael, but neither would Samuel. Either way, Samuel would disappear from the warehouse. However, in that case, the Guardian personnel would have no memory that they had ever been there — because it would never have happened.
It was giving all three of them a major headache.
As an attempt to remedy the confusion, Samuel got a piece of paper and wrote the following note:
Dear Michael,
My father and I would like to thank you for your outstanding assistance while we were at the Guardian service center. You made sure that our Guardian (the Bat, incidentally) was in perfect condition and helped to fill in the gaps in our understanding of how to operate it.
If you don’t remember us, it means that the Restore function on the Guardians works perfectly and that you should not hesitate to recommend its use.
On the other hand, if you remember wishing us Bon Voyage not too long ago, we’re very likely dead and it would be a good idea not to use Restore; in fact, if there’s a way to disable that function, it would probably be a good idea.
Either way, thank you so much for all your help.
Sincerely,
Sam & Steven Denver
Samuel folded the note in half and placed it on Michael’s desk. “There you go,” Sam said. “If you find that in a little while, and you still remember us, it’ll mean that the two of us will likely be interdimensional dust; if you don’t know where it came from, it’ll tell you that Restore apparently works all right. Just think of us as your guinea pigs.”
Michael looked grim. “I —”
“We’re not staying here, Michael, and we really don’t have any desire to move on to another Gate,” said Steven. “We’re doing this.” He walked out into the warehouse and stood looking at the Bat. Michael and Samuel followed.
Steven clambered up onto the Bat’s back and took his seat, staring at the buttons on the GRACE remote. “Are you ready?” he called down to Samuel.
“Ready for possible annihilation? Hell, yeah,” Samuel laughed. “Dad —”
Steven’s mouth tightened. “Yeah, Samwise?”
“See you at home.”
Steven smiled grimly and thumbed the Restore button.
Chapter 45
Wilkerson raced out of Cooper Union, bent on reaching the vortex in New Jersey and escaping this place and time. He headed west, crisscrossing from one street to the other, detouring up side streets and retracing his route in an effort to avoid the authorities. The people in attendance at Cooper Union were frozen in shock and fear, but they would not stay that way for long.
He stopped in the alley where he’d hidden his equipment and shed his overcoat, frock coat and hat. He put the cMMU back on as well as his pack, and strapped his helmet on his head. Soon he reached the Hudson and ran onto the deck of the ferryboat that would take him to the Jersey shore. His strange attire drew looks from the ferrymen, but Wilkerson was beyond caring about that. He stood gathering his strength; he had been on the run for nearly an hour.
Soon the ferry pulled away from its dock and Wilkerson knew that he would make it to his goal. As he stood watching the waves, however, he heard hoofbeats and turned to see a group of armed men on horseback approaching on the shore.
“Stop!” cried the man in the lead. “I order you to stop!”
Wilkerson turned and made for the bow of the ferry in an attempt to put as much distance as possible between him and his pursuers. One of the men leveled a rifle at him and fired. He felt the bullet impact, but realized he was uninjured; evidently the cMMU had shielded him from harm.
He raced through the night, running until he was weary, and finally located the vortex. Triumphant in his success, he leapt into the void and immediately discovered that he had a serious problem. The cMMU failed to respond when he squeezed its control triggers. The policeman’s bullet must have damaged it somehow.
He was trapped in the void, with no way to maneuver.
Chapter 46
The void is cold, thought Lynne. It’s cold and green and it goes on forever.
She’d been floating in Gatespace for a couple of weeks, she thought. I wonder how many hundreds of years have passed by back home? Thousands, maybe. She’d watched for the orange glow that Steven had described, the backside of a vortex, but she hadn’t encountered a single one yet.
She’d had plenty of time to contemplate her decision to enter the void since she’d stepped through the Gate. She had come to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done. In fact, on her Top Ten List of stupid things she’d done in her life, stepping through the Gate had to be up there near the top. Maybe not #1 — there was, after all, that time she’d gotten into a catfight with Maureen Dellasandro at the block plant’s 4 of July picnic because she’d told Steve that he could “put his hot dog in her bun anytime.” Maureen had been drunk and was shooting her mouth off, so maybe jumping on her back and screaming, “You fucking little bitch!” wasn’t the best way to handle things, but she was a new mom at the time. Chalk it up to the post-partum emotional roller coaster.
Steve’s face floated before her eyes most of the time. She saw his 40-year old face as she remembered it from the day before she’d entered the Gate, his 22-year old face in his wedding tux, his 30-year old face topped by a ball cap, coaching girl’s little league softball… his face, and the idea that she might never see it again, haunted her. She thought that if she floated in this green hell much longer she’d go completely insane.
She thought of her children; Samuel was gone, too, of course, but she’d left behind Annieleigh and Dakota and Nicolette… This is lik
e someone committing suicide, she thought, except in this case the suicide has the ability to regret what she’s done… maybe forever. I guess maybe people who actually do kill themselves get the chance to regret it, too, depending on what you believe.
Lynne knew from what Steven had told her that time seemed not to actually exist in here, which she confirmed by managing to get a glimpse of the face of her watch, frozen at 1:17 pm, the time she’d entered the Gate. Either that, or the Gate had broken her watch; she didn’t know. Despite this, she was aware of how long she seemed to have been floating here, and she watched the various other inhabitants — if you could call them that — of Gatespace float by, wondering in many cases just how long they had been lost in here.
There was a mountain lion, some sort of satellite bristling with antennae, and a flight of seventeen or eighteen Canadian geese. There were two pieces of sheet metal, each three or four feet square, which were scorched and bent. She wasn’t sure, but she thought they might have once been part of some spacecraft that met with disaster. Apollo 13, or perhaps one of the Space Shuttles that had been lost, or maybe a piece of an airliner? If she could have shrugged, she would have.
She wondered where Steve was, whether he still thought of her, or whether he was still alive.
Chapter 47
Lianne Denver drove her Dodge Caravan down the main street of Three Forks, having just picked up a shipment of craft goods at the local UPS outlet. The back of the van was stacked with cardboard cartons containing a rainbow of Quiviut yarns; her regular clientele, which included craftspeople from more than 200 miles away, eschewed acrylic yarns and she found that “the good stuff,” as they called it, was very much in demand. “If I wanted acrylic,” said one 76-year old knitter from Bozeman, her fingers still nimble, “I’d go to Wal-Mart.”