Then she saw what he was standing in front of. And the names over the other alcoves. “Any idea what this is all about?”
“Not a clue,” Zane said. “I figured I would press that button when we were both here.” He pointed at the green blinking light near a white button on a counter top fitted into the alcove.
“Go for it,” Belle said.
Zane pushed it and then they both stepped back a half step as holographic images of Bonnie and Duster appeared. The images were about a foot tall and it looked like the two of them were standing on the counter beside the wooden box.
“Welcome back,” Duster said.
“Yes, welcome,” Bonnie said.
Zane was stunned. He didn’t know what to do or say, so he simply took Belle’s hand and they stood there, listening.
“Much has happened since you left,” Duster said, “but now in the fight against the dictator who has terrorized the entire 23rd century using time travel, we need your help even more than before.”
Bonnie nodded and Duster continued.
“We built this new hidden cavern eighty years after you vanished,” Duster said, “In the year twenty-one hundred.”
“It took us that long to finally figure out the math and what exactly happened to you,” Bonnie said. “A full explanation of all that and what has happened, the entire lines of history since you vanished, is in the library area. Goldie can direct you to the right place.”
“Of course, since we had traveled to the Step Three and Step Four at 2320,” Duster said, “we knew you never returned, at least in the way we hoped you would return on the day you left. But we knew you would return here at some point in time first. We didn’t know when, but this is why we built this cavern and have maintained it. And now we all continue to use it at times.”
“So have we continued the fight,” Bonnie said, “stopping the dictator in many millions of timelines, but he still exists in millions and millions more as we record this in 2364. We have been unable to find his original source of the crystals and close it. And we have been unable to find or stop the mathematicians that used our published work to help the dictator develop time travel with the crystals.”
“We are continuing to look,” Duster said, the small holographic image almost as intense as Duster in real life. “As we find more data, we update what we call our war room, which is through the library and behind a shelf of books there on mathematics. Pull the third book on the second shelf from the floor on the left to open it.”
“So when you return,” Duster said, “we need you to continue the fight to stop the dictator from whatever time you return in. Update the war room as you can in the last part of the 22nd century, at any point. All of us are doing that, pooling information as we find it.”
“You will be a secret weapon,” Bonnie said. “You will be attacking the sources of the dictator’s power from the future.”
Belle squeezed his hand at that and Zane nodded.
“We were forced to destroy the mine tunnel in 2364,” Duster said. “The crystal in this box, this time you find yourself, is now your base time from the future. Once you have done what you can in the timeline in this crystal, return it to the main cavern outside the mine tunnel and remove another crystal from the wall from another area of the large cavern there and go back in that timeline.”
“Do not contact us or return to the Warm Springs institute at any point in history,” Bonnie said. “Live and exist under assumed names, different from timeline to timeline. Be cautious. Remember, our enemy, the enemy of all mankind, has time travel as well.”
“Our goal is simple,” Duster said. “Somehow get to the dictator’s entrance into the crystal cavern before he is able to get to it and shut it off, so in that timeline and millions of others, he never finds the entrance.”
“Your knowledge of the caverns should help with that now,” Bonnie said.
“We hope it will,” Duster said.
Zane wasn’t so sure, but given enough time, he might be able to track the massive main caverns.
“In over three hundred timelines, we have killed the dictator when he was young in various accidents as he grew up,” Bonnie said. “That saved billions of timelines from his reign as well.”
Belle gasped at that, but Zane understood completely.
“And we are quickly working to scrub all our articles on time travel and the nexus of time and matter,” Duster said. “Zane, since you are the only founder born after Bonnie and my first lifetimes, you should be able to stop numbers of articles as we publish them. Do what you can in any way you can to keep those articles from being printed without revealing yourself to us. We have left an entire list of the articles and their publication location and dates. We do not know which of our articles triggered the research by the dictator’s people.”
“But Belle will not be able to join you on those trips,” Bonnie said. “It will vary the timeline too much to make the effort of value.”
“So all this information and how to use the crystal in this box in front of you is in the library,” Duster said. “Take your time, go slowly, plan your trips into the past.”
“And be careful,” Bonnie said.
“And when we have eliminated the dictator from all timelines,” Duster said, we will update the war room in the year 2299, and then I hope we can all meet once again at the institute for a Christmas party in the year 2020.”
“Until then,” Bonnie said. “Take care and be careful.”
Duster nodded and the two small holographic images vanished.
The button was no longer blinking and the silence in the cavern seemed suddenly very heavy.
Belle squeezed his hand and looked at him. “Seems we have things to do and an ongoing mission.”
“It does,” Zane said, nodding. “And it seems we have a way out of here after all.”
He opened the wooden box to see a simple dial and some wires hooked up to a crystal tucked into the back of the box against the stone.
“You would think they could make a time travel machine look a little more modern by now,” Belle said.
“As long as it works,” Zane said. “I don’t care what it looks like.”
“That I agree with,” she said, laughing as he closed the lid on the wooden box.
Then he quickly kissed her. “But before we do anything else, I need to take a shower and we need to get something to eat.”
“I’ll bring you some fresh clothes,” she said. “And I promise to behave myself.”
“What’s the fun in that?” he asked, laughing as he turned and headed for the bathroom.
And it turned out that she offered to scrub his back, and he had accepted, and as far as he was concerned, that was heaven in any century.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
December 31st, 3166
Inside the Crystal Caverns
SHE AND ZANE had spent almost a month, mostly in the library, trying to get updated on the huge battle they were involved in. The library was perfectly named. It was a large cavern with ten-foot-tall shelves jammed with books from various centuries. Most of the aisles were so close together, it was almost impossible to walk through the stacks without turning sideways.
One area near the door was filled with massive wooden tables and the stone floor in that area had been covered in a thick carpet. There were reading chairs, a couple of old brown couches that looked to be from the 20th century, and a fake fireplace that imitated flame and even put out a little heat.
It was, by far, the most comfortable place in the caverns.
She had taken over three large wooden tables for her research and he had taken over three for his. Both tables had numbers of computer-like terminals on them that also accessed large data bases stored somewhere in the rocks.
They slept every night in one of the two bedrooms off the kitchen and ate decent packaged foods that mostly tasted of nothing in particular.
But most of the time they were in the library.
The war ro
om was just a stark stone room with the walls covered in vast computer-generated images that showed timelines in representations of millions in a single line.
The timelines looked to Belle like massive trees branching out. Clearly Bonnie and Duster and their incredible math skills had been able to trace major timelines that broke off from events through history.
Over half the room had the timelines colored in green, but almost half the room showed red indicating they were timelines that the dictator still functioned.
Belle had not liked going into that war room. It was flat too depressing to realize that every thin line was thousands and thousands of world where millions suffered and eventually the world was destroyed.
After a month, they had decided to make their first trip back in time.
The crystal in their booth jumped them back into the year 2299. That was the year that Duster had said they would update the war room if the dictator had been defeated.
No one else was there. They had spent ten days studying the war room to discover more updates from the other founders. The dictator was still in control of a vast amount of the world in a vast amount of timelines. And his control extended forward for over a century until almost all of humanity was destroyed in those timelines.
Most of the red lines just ended like trees cut off in their growth.
Zane said there might be a way to really stop the dictator in a more effective way instead of working timeline cluster to timeline cluster, as the rest were doing, but he said it was so crazy, he didn’t want to talk about it.
So they decided to jump back to their future time. They both felt safer there. There the old mine was sealed up and the deep chamber very, very well hidden under the rubble of the old one.
They had left no sign or evidence they had been in 2299. Both of them, for some reason, felt that was very important.
They didn’t want the other founders to know they had yet returned in any future time.
They spent almost another six months in the research library in 3166, going over every detail of centuries of battles with the dictator through thousands and thousands of timelines.
Killing the dictator when he was young had worked in many, many timeline clusters, but he had set up guards on himself and his family, so doing that no longer worked.
So when they returned to 3166, they both first returned to focusing on what Bonnie and Duster had wanted them to focus on. She went looking for genealogical clusters of lines starting suddenly to find possible crystal cavern openings.
Zane went back to looking for more openings through research in ground structure and known cave entrances.
Both of them were experts in doing research, and they both knew how to do it. So the days went easily, and Belle enjoyed Zane’s company a great deal. She could never have imagined feeling so comfortable locked underground with another person. Yet not once during those six months did she feel she needed to get away from him.
In fact, the longer they were together, the more it felt like they just were together.
They were a team.
On the research side, Zane had spent most of his time poring over geological maps along the 42nd parallel and any historical reference to large mining operations along that line.
She had buried herself in searching for clusters of genealogical starts.
What she had found bothered her more than she wanted to admit. All of the clusters of genealogical lines like hers that just started cold had been found and already covered by the other founders.
And none of them were near any logical entrance to the crystal caverns. The clusters seemed to always come from two people as hers came from Dawn and Madison. And most could be explained away by a few dozen dictator’s loyalists who had backgrounds in the dictator’s time.
So the genealogical side was flat a dead end on tracking where a new crystal entrance might be.
In fact, Zane said to her when she told him that he could find no other possible crystal mine entrance.
Period.
So on New Year’s Eve, the two of them sat at the wooden table in the kitchen munching on popcorn and drinking hot chocolate and talking about their findings.
“I’m coming to only one true result,” Zane said, shaking his head and staring into her eyes with those wonderful dark eyes of his.
“There is no other entrance to the crystal caverns.” Belle said.
Zane nodded. “There might be in some distant and extreme other timelines, but in any timeline that we would recognize, that mine shaft up there is it.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“I am,” Zane said. “Completely sure. All the other crystal caverns are far too removed in distance and time and timelines from the surface of a world we might know, even accounting for any of those side rooms getting too close to the surface.”
“So how did the dictator, or someone who knows him in 2320, get into the mine?”
Zane shook his head. “I honestly don’t know, but Bonnie and Duster clearly had an inkling of that being possible when they destroyed the mine tunnel. But too late at that point.”
Belle had to agree with that. There must have been a period of time in the early 2300s that they let the security of the mine lag. Maybe for decades. Destroying the mine tunnel above could have only meant that Duster and Bonnie were worried about the caverns already being discovered as well.
“So what do we know about the dictator?” Zane asked.
Belle just shrugged. “The man and his family were nothing special. He simply gained power through the normal political process and then in the early 24th century, he became President of the United States and from 2320 forward he never let go of power. It became clear in short order to Duster and Bonnie and the rest of the original founders that the man was using time travel to control those around him by various means.”
Zane nodded, so Belle went on after munching on some popcorn first.
“The dictator basically annexed the rest of the world with threats and annihilation over the next forty years after he controlled this country and ruled the world with force and terror for over a hundred years, never seeming to age much at all when he was seen, until a major war and following plague simply destroyed most of the human population.
“So it’s this mine that is the problem,” Zane said. “And Duster and his family finding it in the first place.”
Belle nodded. “And without seeing the mine, Bonnie told me that she and Duster would have never started working on their time travel theories.”
Zane nodded and the two of them sat there in silence.
“You have an idea, don’t you?” Belle asked.
Belle had a hunch she knew what he was going to say, but she didn’t like it, so she would rather let Zane say it out loud.
Zane nodded. “I do, and because we are where we are at, we are the only two who can pull it off. We find a timeline where he was cleared out and use that as a base in the cavern above.”
Belle nodded.
“And then we jump to a timeline where he has not been cleared out. Then we jump back and destroy this mine before Bonnie and Duster can see it. We set a timer so we can get out before we also vanish in that timeline.”
Zane had been right. She hated the idea. Because without the mine, Zane would live his life a hundred years in her future and she would never meet him.
And that she could no longer imagine.
But she could also no longer imagine letting a single man destroy humanity in millions of timelines.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
December 31st, 3166
Inside the Crystal Caverns
IT HAD TAKEN Zane a few minutes to fully explain his plan to her. Since the dictator had been stopped in so many timelines, Zane had no intention of not being with Belle.
But just not in every timeline.
Not in the timelines where the dictator ruled.
Zane had finally convinced her and the two of them had spent the next four days learning how
to use the explosives that Duster and Bonnie had stored in the cave. Zane had worked with explosives before and timed switches to open up some caves, so he knew enough to just be dangerous.
But they were both great at studying something, and with Belle double and triple checking him every step of the way, in a few days he felt comfortable with the idea of handling enough explosive power to completely bring down the mine tunnel so that no one would dig it out again.
And he figured if they destroyed the mine in 1778, right after Duster and Bonnie had put in all the security, there would be no reason for any of Duster’s relatives to open the played out mine again.
But the more they worked on his plan, the more Zane didn’t like it.
Belle even said one day over lunch that she felt the focus of the founders in this fight had been all wrong. They had assumed that the dictator had found another opening. And they had assumed the mine here was impossible to both find and get into.
And that their articles were to blame.
Zane had agreed that he too thought the founders’ focus had been wrong. Blowing up that mine tunnel was just another path.
So they both decided they would step back and look at everything again and spend a few weeks, since they had all the time they needed, to come up with a better idea.
It was a week later that Belle finally brought up a better plan.
And a more logical explanation of what had happened.
They had just finished lunch and Belle had asked him to look at something in her research in the library.
She brought up a screen on her large computer terminal among piles of books on one of her tables showing basically a family tree of the dictator.
Zane was surprised as he studied the very complex family tree illustrated on the screen. “You have all this on the man?”
Belle nodded. “The work that Bonnie and Duster had the institute do on this project is stunning in how clear and complete it is back through history.”
“The dictator himself wouldn’t even know some of this,” Zane said, staring at the screen.
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