by Paul Bishop
“Look in the backseat of the convertible.”
“I don’t think I—”
Chance stopped in midsentence.
During the conversation with Alan, he’d paced the highway and walked along the yellow line, noting the cracks, flecks of gravel, and traces of rubbish. Now, he was back at the Audi and stared at the lush gray upholstery behind the passenger seat.
It took a long moment before he realized that he looked at the key piece of evidence about to be destroyed—a key piece of DNA evidence. A baby wrapped in a lightweight blanket slept in a big plastic carrier.
Grandma had always called them pumpkin seats.
“A baby,” he said, looked up, and saw the Atkins truck bearing down. By reflex, he moved, grabbed the car’s door handle, and tugged. It was, of course, like trying to move a mountain.
Knowing it was pointless, he leaned over the side of the car anyway, got a grip on the pumpkin seat’s handle, and pulled with all his might.
Everything was fixed. There was no changing the past.
“You tried to save the kid, didn’t you?” the other man asked. “I saw the spike in your vital signs.”
“You knew about this?”
“I did. It turns out my research was more substantial than I let on.”
“Who does the baby belong to?”
“The baby had a name. Anna, and she belonged to Ms Hubbard. It was her child.”
“I don’t understand. How was DNA from the lead prosecutor’s child to be used as evidence?”
“I’m not an expert in ancient jurisprudence,” Alan said. “But apparently, Ms Hubbard came forward with a surprise and named herself as a witness in the case. She claimed intimacy with one of the defendants—an intimacy that resulted in her acquiring certain criminal knowledge as well as a child. The defendant denied ever knowing the woman outside of court.”
“So Lisa needed a paternity test.”
His partner cleared his throat. “The problem there was that Ms Hubbard didn’t have custody of Anna. The reason she’s driving so fast in your timestamp is that she’s stolen the child from a foster home. She’s rushing to get the test done even now. The whole thing must’ve seemed like some kind of grand adventure to her.”
Chance wondered again about the joy on Lisa’s face.
“One question,” he said. “Why weren’t Anna’s remains found in the wreckage?”
“She’s riding in a convertible. The conclusion was that the child was thrown clear like the dashcam on the truck but never found.”
“It seems unlikely.”
“We don’t make history, only record it.” It sounded bizarrely out of place that the man spouted one of the company’s slogans.
“Atkins still caused the accident,” said Chance. “And I don’t have to send you photos of the child.”
“You do if you want to come home. Remember, the suit remains in the past at the pleasure of whoever operates the control panel. I can leave you there until your batteries run down, normal time resumes, and a vacuum the size of Darrin Chance is instantly filled with all the various molecules rushing in to crush you into nothingness.”
He was right, unfortunately. Without Alan’s help, he couldn’t get home. Plus, he was helpless to save the child.
Anger stirred and he clenched his jaw. He might be helpless but he wasn’t powerless. He still had the suit and that had considerable battery power.
And, of course, Chance controlled the suit. He needed to buy himself time with Alan.
He scanned quickly through a menu inside the visor and touched two pads on his left arm.
Sub-atomic fans went to work in the skin of the suit to run through a cleaning cycle that would clear debris from the heating and cooling filters.
On the control panel in LA, it would show up as a blue light.
Which could mean almost anything—from a legitimate process like the filter sweep to an internal error of indefinite origin.
“Put Amy on,” he said.
“I told you—”
“Look, if you want me to send you media files of the kid, you need to put Amy on. I have an image resolution problem here—a malfunction. Can’t you see the blue light?”
He held his breath through a long pause.
“Yes, I see the blue light.”
“Put Amy on. She knows more about the image modulator than I do. I need her help.”
Another slight pause made him clench his teeth in frustration.
“Fine,” Alan said finally. “But make it quick.”
When his earbud came alive, it was with Amy’s voice. “Darrin?”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No, nothing like that. He only—”
“He only what?”
“He fired me.”
“Okay, we’ll deal with that in the future. First, I need you to trust me.”
“Trust you?” she said, clearly puzzled, but he needed her to hear him.
“No matter what. No matter how long it takes.”
“Yes?” she said. “Of course I trust you.”
“I’m going to try something new. Something I’ve been working on—a modification to the suit. If it works, it changes everything and Alan won’t have a leg to stand on in the company.”
“He still owns the patents for the time cube,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. I have the suit. If my theory proves true, it will rewrite most of his equations.”
“What is it?” she said.
“There’s no time now. But remember, I love you.”
“I love you too, Darrin. But what are you going to do? Darrin? Darrin?”
The blue light on her console stopped blinking.
We had the future we always dreamed of—flying cars, personal jet packs, and a colony on the moon.
And time travel, more or less. Despite all this, it wasn’t quite what Chance had dreamed of. What had Amy said? It was a stroll through a wax museum.
He moved a gloved hand along the porcelain rigidity of Lisa Denise Hubbard’s cheek.
We could visit the past but we couldn’t interact with it. Lisa was so beautiful but there was no way to save her.
This wasn’t the future he’d worked for.
Chance walked around the car to the rear passenger side and stared at Anna Hubbard, an innocent pawn in a legislative game played by her mother and the state and who knew how many others.
Now, she was being used like a game piece again by Roger Alan. She deserved better.
He leaned over the side of the car and wrapped both hands around the pumpkin seat’s sturdy plastic handle. She deserved a future, he reminded himself.
“Here we go, Anna.”
With his hands occupied, he blinked three times for a new menu in the visor. Green commands scrolled in from the left and he activated the experimental module.
It wouldn’t show up on Amy’s console. Since the process was experimental, he’d never plugged it into the overall system.
The suit made an audible hum. His legs and arms began to tingle like they were falling asleep.
When he looked at the scene beyond his suit, he thought Lisa’s hair twitched.
He pulled on Anna’s basket, and it moved. Not much but enough to know his hypothesis was right. Against all odds, he’d created a time suit that moved through solid, normal space via hypertime.
Now, he slowed the phase deliberately. Not all at once, though. Not like turning the suit off, which would be suicidal.
Instead, he used a new modulator to phase him into the timestamp and literally drop him into the scene as an active participant.
When time resumed, he couldn’t be bent over the car. He needed to have Anna up and over the edge.
Chance had her off the seat by more than a foot, but his limbs were like lead and the power drain was more than he’d anticipated.
He was down thirty percent and already, things were moving outside.
The Audi scraped along the front of his suit. The car’s back
seat inched under the baby’s basket.
There was no going back now. If his experiment worked, he’d be alive but cut off from the future forever. He’d have the suit and he’d have his knowledge but he’d live his life in the past. And Anna would have a life—if they made it.
His teeth gritted, he strained against the increasing sideways momentum of the car to lift a burden that weighed hundreds of pounds. As the baby grew lighter, the inertia of the car increased and pulled him sideways.
Meanwhile, the hood of the convertible had buckled, and the scream of twisting metal was continuous. Lisa’s forehead made a dent in the glass and a foggy mist of red materialized over the dashboard.
Power was down an astonishing sixty percent.
Chance heaved Anna’s basket and saw that her eyes were half-open.
His feet slid out from under him and he realized it wasn’t going to work. He didn’t have the time or the leverage.
They were all going to die.
With arms wide open, Timestamp, Inc.’s mission room welcomed substance and style in equal measure. Hard science happened inside its blinking control panels, but lounge chairs and oversized viewscreens conveyed confidence in the company’s identity.
Amy Hamilton, her vibrant blonde hair glistening in the sunlight, spoke into a console mic.
“I love you too, Darrin. But what are you going to do? Darrin? Darrin?”
The blue light on her console stopped blinking.
She spun quickly.
“What happened?” Roger Alan demanded from his perch against a far wall. “Did you lose contact?” He took a hasty forward step. “If this is some kind of trick—”
“He severed the commlink,” she said. “No tricks.”
“Bring him back. We can’t afford to lose the suit.”
A wonderfully self-absorbed performance delivered with near Shakespearian drama, Chance thought.
He clapped lightly in applause and walked through the glass sliding door with the suit on one arm and Anna on the other.
“Well done, old man. Well done,” he said.
Alan spun on his heel. “Who are you?” he demanded.
Chance released Anna’s arm and tossed the suit onto Amy’s console.
“Darrin?” Amy asked, her hands to her mouth.
“A little older and a little wiser.” He pushed back one side of his suit coat to reveal a firearm in his belt. “The police should be here any minute.”
“But how are you here? Now?” said Alan. “Who’s this with you?”
Chance smiled and held an age-speckled hand out to the woman with the chocolate-brown hair and a smile that added three perfect lines beside her eyes.
“This is my daughter, Anna Hubbard-Chance. I’ve waited a long time to introduce you to her.”
Anna nodded. “We’ve waited a long time,” she said.
He handed her the gun. “Keep an eye on that one,” he said and pointed at Alan.
“You’re alive?” Amy looked shocked. “Then your experiment worked.”
She had been born before him. Now, he was older.
As he walked across the room to greet her, he felt the years melt away.
“Let’s talk about the future,” he said. “A future with flying cars and colonies on the moon.”
“And time travel?” she asked.
“Exactly like you always imagined it.”
Tracks
By
Jean Rabe
Tracks
Nothing.
Lokhagos Bakas had given me nothing except the clothes I wore—trousers, a tunic, and boots—basic training attire without any gear. No rations, no water flask, no guns, and not even a knife.
Survival training, the lokhagos had said as he polished the three silver stars on his jacket. All hoplites go through it.
A hold full of dung is what I called it. I sat cross-legged against the trunk of a scraggly tree and glared at my partner. Thirty-six recruits had been divided into eighteen pairs, each dropped into a different backwater section of this primitive planet.
I’d joined the Merchant Marines to serve on a star-freighter and fight ship-to-ship and on boarding parties—not to be tested in a verdant hole like this. I’d joined to use guns and grenades, to deploy ship’s weapons, to see the twelve systems, and get in my twenty and retire to a first-class colony where I might open an arms store.
Extreme survival training, the lokhagos explained.
Recruits who lasted one month in this wilderness would be given a choice of assignments. If, in addition, we made it to the other side of the mountains, we would gain a promotion. Those who gave up could push the button on a transponder he provided. They would be retrieved and consigned to scutwork or released. Lokhagos Bakas smiled thinly at the last word.
I glared harder and felt the transponder in my pocket. Should I push it now?
My partner was a cephalon, roughly humanoid but with tentacles for legs and arms—and definitely no opposable thumbs. He was also dressed in trousers and a tunic, which made him seem comical, and he’d eschewed the boots, saying they did not fit properly. He returned my stare, his oddly round eyes unblinking. His face looked more simian than manlike, his skin tinted a sickly shade of green that matched the leaves on the lower hanging branches of my scraggly tree.
His name was Jake, short for something I couldn’t pronounce.
“Sshould not sit, Hoplite Sshem Mula,” Jake hissed.
“I don’t want to be here, Hoplight Jake,” I returned. “I did not sign on for this. I don’t like the outdoors, and—” I stopped myself from adding that I didn’t want to be partnered with a cephalon who hissed when he talked. “Let’s drop the hoplight.”
“Sure, Sshem Mula.”
I closed my eyes, felt a gentle breeze tease my skin, and rolled my sleeves up so I could experience it more fully. It wasn’t unpleasant—better, actually, than the recirculated atmosphere of a freighter or the disinfected stuff of my homeworld. This air was filled with scents I had no name for, something sweet and something a little musky. I pulled it deep into my lungs, held it, and might have allowed myself to enjoy it if I’d been there by choice. We were fortunate we weren’t dropped on a world that required rebreathers, which I considered noisome and uncomfortable. Again, I thought the lokhagos could have at least allowed us a knife.
“Sshould move now, Sshem Mula,” Jake said. “Look for tracks.”
“Tracks?” I opened my eyes.
“Animal tracks will lead us to water, which is crucial for survival. Could lead us to sshelter. The night could be cold. Sshelter is a priority. Jake does not like the cold.”
“Tracks might also lead to a tasty animal,” I added, “and getting food is a priority. But we’ve nothing to kill it with. Or skin it and cook it with.”
“Jake does not eat animal flesh,” he said.
I stood reluctantly. “What do you eat?” I knew very little—actually nothing—about cephalons. There were only a few of them in the service, and he was the only one on-planet today. “You have to eat something, right?”
He rattled off a long string of nonsensical-sounding words with few vowels, nothing of which translated so I could understand what he was talking about and certainly nothing that sounded appetizing.
“But Jake is not likely to find any of those things on this world,” Jake said. “Nuts, berries, and roots will suffice. Animal tracks will lead us to those things. And maybe to sshelter. I worry about cold.”
I worried about so much more than that.
To distract myself, I studied him studying the ground. I wondered how old he was. Not that it mattered, I acknowledged, as it would be relative to how long cephalons lived. I’d recently turned nineteen, and with no interest in entering advanced studies at an academy and no prospects for lucrative employment, I sought out the Merchant Marines. I thought it would be exciting and distracting, and I committed to a term without learning all the details—such as this required survival training. I was fit, a runner, we
ight-lifter, and speed swimmer, but I’d accomplished all that inside a state-of-the-art physical betterment facility. I’d not anticipated using any of those skills in the outdoors. I really didn’t like the outdoors. It was dirty, very likely bug-filled, and lacked the basic comforts of a chair and a mattress.
Simply defined, it was a month in hell—provided I could last for a month.
And with a hissing cephalon only interested in nuts, berries, and roots.
Should I push the button now?
“Found ssome tracks,” Jake announced. He extended one of his tentacle arms and brushed the ground cover aside. “Here and here and here.” He moved his arm to rustle more of the plants. The action released a burst of sweet scent.
“Flowers,” I said dreamily. They were blue-and-purple, the size of my little fingernail with teardrop-shaped petals and golden-yellow centers. I leaned forward and discovered more of them.
“Edible,” he pronounced. He’d tugged a clump of the blossoms loose and chewed on them. I noticed his teeth were blunt and his lower jaw masticated. “But not succulent.” He made a gurgling sound and spat out a mass of purple-green mush. “Not edible after all,” he corrected. “Sshem Mula sshould not eat these flowers.”
“Only Shem, please. Thanks for the heads-up.” I’d had no intention of eating them anyway.
“The tracks.” He pointed with a tentacle. With no fingers and no opposable thumbs, I wondered how useful he’d be. At least he could find tracks.
I put my face close to the ground. It took me a few moments to see the print. Flowers had been pressed down and there was a faint depression in a small spot of bare earth. I measured it with my thumb. Then I noticed I was only looking at part of the track. The whole print was the size of my hand.
Quickly, I straightened and shook my head. “We shouldn’t follow these tracks, Jake. You should find us a smaller animal to stalk. This creature? If we actually came across it, we’d be in trouble. Seriously, this one has to be as big as us, maybe bigger.”
“Sshem Mula, Jake found no other tracks to follow.”