by Jerry Ahern
“Well, that’s certainly true, but they have your eyes, Jack.”
“I’m more interested in lips and other parts of the anatomy at the moment,” Jack whispered, kissing her.
The trouble with being married to a wordsmith, Ellen was reminded, was that he was always looking for that special way to say things. Sometimes that annoyed her. Sometimes she liked that, liked that quite a bit.
Her fingers drifted across his chest as she kissed him back.
The helicopter had been able to land just on the other side of the highway, approximately two hundred yards from their motel rooms.
Jack made a last check of the Suburban, Ellen still inside their soon-to-be-vacated room, on the telephone with Clarence for what might be the last time. It would be a little before six in the morning in Georgia, Clarence probably not at his best. But if the time transfer were to take place without a last call, Clarence would be stricken. Clarence was a good man, a very good man and Jack realized that despite Clarence’s often dour disposition, he’d miss him.
“David, you take the rifle case and that suitcase and the camera case.”
“I can take the attaché case, too, Dad.”
“Have you started carrying a gun, David? You haven’t, so I hold on to the attaché case. Lizzie?”
“Daddy?”
“Grab what you can carry out of that pile, but remember that’s what your brother and I are around for, so don’t carry too much. Leave that one. It’s very heavy.” Jack Naile called his daughter’s attention to the aircraft aluminum case with the two single actions and the derringer and a basic supply of ammunition for the three handguns.
“You’re ready. You’re really ready, aren’t you, Dad?” David asked.
“What do you mean, son?”
“You’re wearing your cowboy hat and your boots. I’ll bet the gun belt Sam Andrews made for you is in one of the suitcases we’re carrying.”
Jack Naile grinned. “You win the bet, chief. Gotta be prepared.”
Ellen’s voice came from behind them. “If we were going back to prehistoric times, your father would have had Ron Mahovsky Metalife a custom club for him, and Sam Andrews would have made your dad a holster for it.” Ellen reached for two suitcases and said, “Clarence was tired, upset, said he loves us and he won’t like it without us being around. I told him pretty much the same, except for the parts about being tired and upset. I’m only upset.”
It was a gorgeous day for flying, the sky clear, with only a few wisps of cloud to the south and east, the air cool without being cold. Of the four of them, only Jack had ever before flown in a helicopter. Although he didn’t care at all for most amusement park rides and was a nervous commercial-airline passenger, the idea of being up in a helicopter once again excited him. The thought of leaving the Suburban and its precious contents behind mildly terrified him. “Hey, guys?”
His wife, his son and his daughter, all turned to look at him.
“I just wanted you guys to know, I love you all. And remember, we’ll be together, whenever it happens.” Jack looked away before any of them could respond and caught up Ellen’s camera bag, the gun case and whatever else he could carry. There would be another trip back to the Suburban for him and David at least. Then they would be airborne.
As Jane Rogers did each time she conducted a field trial, she made final adjustments to the primary cable’s strain insulator and triple-checked the anode plate for precise alignment with the control grid.
The generators hummed from the bed of the pickup truck parked a few feet from her Suburban, one generator to produce the electricity which the laser beam, powered by the second generator, would hopefully carry to target.
This had to be it, had to be the solution.
“Jane?”
“What is it, Peggy?”
“Listen carefully, to the west. There’s a storm coming up over the mountains. I can hear thunder.”
“Damn,” Jane murmured. The front that Peggy had said was stalled on the other side of the mountains had moved. “Can we make it, Peggy?”
“We might not have conditions so close again for weeks or months, Jane. What do you want to do?”
Was she being a bad scientist? Jane Rogers shook her head, took off her battered old flat-crowned hat. She stared toward the mountains. So far, no sign of lightning, just low rumblings of thunder. The storm could be taking its sweet time just beyond the highest peaks, enough time for the experiment. “Let’s do it, girl!” Jane Rogers plunked her hat onto her head and approached the tripod-mounted refracting telescope. “I’m ready when you are!”
“On my mark,” Peggy called out. “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . Mark!” The humming of the generators seemed to increase almost exponentially.
Crackling sounds, so loud that they thrummed in her brain, then a different hum—the hum, with its unmistakable frequency. More crackling, the hum louder and louder.
As Jane Rogers peered through the telescope toward the distant light array that she prayed would fire, there was the anticipated thundering as the electrical charge was released along its carrier wave. But a microsecond— not even—after that, the array lit, and the most enormous lightning bolt Jane Rogers had ever witnessed in a life spanning nearly three quarters of a century flashed laterally across the sky. The array stayed lit, and a second, thunderous boom rent the air around her, the ground beneath her feet shaking.
“Shut down! Peggy! Shut down!”
As the lightning streaked across the sky, she had distinctly seen a helicopter, with ball lightning crackling across the sky around it like electrons circling an atom. And then the aircraft just vanished, as if it had never been there, into a patch of inexplicable blackness. Then the blackness vanished, too.
The helicopter was out of control, and the pilot was almost certainly dead; Jack Naile was uncertain of the order in which the two events occurred. The single flash of lightning striking horizontally across the sky out of the mountains was as bright as the corona surrounding an eclipse, gone in an instant. In the same instant, the electrical systems within the helicopter’s cockpit and all along the fuselage began to smolder, all lights and power gone. The pilot’s body had stiffened. It lurched backward, hammered into the cockpit seat, the man’s head falling at an unnatural angle to his right shoulder.
In the seconds that it took Jack Naile to shout, “Everybody hold on! We’ll get out of this!” he realized that the pilot’s body had snapped back with such force that the man’s neck had broken.
The main rotor still rotated above them, but without power. The aircraft revolved more slowly beneath it, the sound of rushing air around the machine heightening by the instant.
“Jack! What’ll we do?” Ellen’s voice was even, under control, the look in her eyes one of determination more than terror.
“Just keep in your seats, brace yourselves, heads between your knees and fingers locked behind your necks!” Jack was already half out of his seat, David starting to do the same. “No, David! Stay with the girls! Do it! I’m counting on you, son!”
The blue that had been the sky was gone. Blackness surrounded them. The aircraft’s only illumination was a pair of battery-operated emergency lights; they cast a yellow and flickering light, as if they, too, were about to fail.
The helicopter’s sharply downward-angled nose coupled with the relentless twisting motion of the fuselage beneath the powerlessly spinning main rotor caused Jack’s body to be slapped hard against the fuselage the moment he launched himself out of his seat. There were plenty of times that he had written about fictional characters flying helicopters. As he hauled himself to his knees, he recalled ruefully that there were even more times when the good guy would bring down an enemy helicopter with a disabling shot to the tail rotor, forcing the chopper to angle downward into the ground, to destruction.
There was no tail-rotor power.
The smoke from the burning insulation was thick, making the emergency lights seem even dimmer,
stranger. Jack’s eyes began to tear, and his throat began to close.
Jack half threw himself toward the cockpit. He landed hard on his knees, his head slamming against the head of the dead man with bone-jarring impact. Jack’s vision blurred for an instant and the left side of his forehead began to ache. He shook his head to clear it. The only chance without power was to let the helicopter bring itself down, but in horizontal flight. Helicopter-pilot training included powerless landings, but somewhere at the back of his mind, from something he’d read or some expert with whom he’d spoken, he recalled that the key was to keep the machine horizontal and hope for a smooth, flat spot to land.
A helicopter’s horizontal stabilizer was invariably located below the tail rotor. But finding the location of the control for the stabilizer was another matter—because his head ached so badly that he couldn’t think clearly. The pounding in Jack’s head, the roaring of the aircraft’s slipstream in his ears, the realization that he had only seconds before the machine crashed—all of this was blocking him from thinking.
“Jack! Remember? Helicopters require hand and foot coordination, don’t they?”
A smile crossed Jack Naile’s lips.
There was no time to push the dead pilot from his seat, no time for anything but to wedge himself onto the console beside the pilot and get a hand on the joystick. The hydraulics might still work just enough to level the main rotor.
Ball lightning was everywhere around them, the sky still unremittingly black, everything above and below them black, except for what seemed like something viewed drunkenly in the very center of a kaleidoscope. And that was neither above nor below them, merely present, there.
He felt a slight change in the aircraft’s attitude to the ground, but not enough. The nose was still dangerously low, and the helicopter’s fuselage was pitched to starboard. The earth—treetops, boulders—was rocketing toward them, pouring out of the spot within the kaleidoscope lens, about to engulf them. There were pedals. Jack hit the seat harness’ quick release and shoved the dead man from the pilot’s seat and into the space between the seat and fuselage, hoping against hope that his brain was working and that the pedals were, indeed, linked to the horizontal stabilizer.
Jack worked one of the pedals by feel, eyes on the nose, not knowing which pedal he’d depressed. Simultaneously, he pulled back and left on the joystick.
“The nose is coming up! Hang on!”
The dead pilot’s body was slipping forward, half covering Jack’s left side.
Seat belt. Jack need to strap himself in. If he released the joystick, changed the orientation of his foot to whichever pedal it was, he might lose what little control he had.
No time.
“This is it! I love you guys—”
The aircraft touched the ground, bounced hard, and lurched violently, the dead body of the pilot hurtling forward, smashing out the windshield glass. A rock or tree stump punched through the fuselage undercarriage— something, Jack didn’t know what—and started can opening the aircraft from the bottom.
The helicopter stopped as suddenly as if it had slammed into a wall of granite. Jack felt himself flung forward, flying, saw a blur of green and gray and blood red, then blackness.
Clarence Jones dropped the container of orange juice, spilling the yellow liquid all across his kitchen counter. A paroxysm raced across his spine, and he closed his eyes, a sadness unlike anything he had known since the death of his mother seizing his heart and mind.
“Jesus,” he whispered. Somehow, it had happened and they were gone.
He left the orange juice and called the emergency number at the movie-production site. “This is the Nailes’ nephew, Clarence Jones. Have you heard from them?”
The woman who’d answered the telephone said nothing for a long moment, and then asked if she could put him on hold. After several excruciating minutes, she finally came back to the line. When she did speak, her voice was choked with emotion.
CHAPTER
FIVE
“You’d be proud of your son, Jack,” Ellen was saying.
Jack merely lay there, head cradled in his wife’s lap as she knelt on the ground, hugging him.
“I thought you just might be dead despite it all, this time-travel thing. I thought you might be, but told myself you wouldn’t be, and the time-travel thing has nothing to do with it.”
Jack’s own voice sounded odd to him. “I thought I was maybe dead, too.”
“David couldn’t get the fuselage door open and the cockpit was already in flames. Lizzie and I tried helping him. It was no good. The locking mechanism was jammed. He spotted a case bolted to the fuselage, opened it. It was some sort of survival kit. Anyway, there was an axe and a spare first-aid kit. He handed the first aid kit to Lizzie, told us to stand back, and he split the locking mechanism for the fuselage door with one swing of the axe.
“He got us out, used the axe to break into the cargo compartment and started getting out our stuff before the whole aircraft went up in flames or exploded. I told him to leave the luggage, that it wasn’t worth the risk. He ignored me, of course, ignored his sister. We couldn’t have tried to stop him physically, because we were already running toward you.”
“But David’s okay, right?”
“He’s fine, Jack. Rescued the attaché case with the gold and diamonds, got all the luggage, your gun cases, even your cowboy hat.”
Jack started to speak, but couldn’t. He felt tears welling up in his eyes and his throat tightening, but not from smoke this time.
“David got away from the helicopter about thirty seconds before it blew up. He lit a cigarette as it happened. I told him he was a hero. Lizzie told him he was a hero. All David said was, ‘Dad saved our lives. He’s the hero.’”
Jack Naile lost it and wept uncontrollably.
Miraculously, it didn’t seem as if Jack had broken anything, not even redislocated his right shoulder, something she had really expected from the position his body had been in when they reached him. Ellen had examined him to the extent of her quite limited medical training and when he seemed willing, encouraged him to try to stand up. The best way to get well was to act well, she’d always believed. And, with the afternoon waning, with no idea where they were except that their present location would have been an unpleasant one if a mountain lion or bear decided to get curious, there was little choice but to get in motion.
The weather was much colder than it had been when they’d boarded the helicopter, and the night promised to be colder still. If Jack could handle it, they had to get going somewhere, probably down and away from the mountains. At worst, they needed to find a sheltered area and water. Then David could use the helicopter’s axe to cut firewood, and, if they found water, they could find a way to boil some for drinking purposes and stay by the fire for warmth as well as to scare away any wild animals.
When Jack did stand up, aside from being wobbly and visibly quite sore, he seemed to be all right. “You sure you can handle this? We can always wait a while longer if you like.”
“I’m sore, but I’m cool,” Jack told her.
“I’m going to have such fun counting all the bruises you’ll have, especially if they’re anything like the one on the left side of your forehead. You don’t even have a bump, though. See, this wasn’t any big deal.”
“Sure. Everybody should be in a helicopter crash. Good for what ails you, huh?” Jack became more serious. “What about the pilot?”
Ellen’s face grew somber then she shook her head. She checked her husband’s vision to see if his eyes could follow a moving object, inquired about blurriness, nausea. The bruise on his head spelled the possibility of concussion, if nothing worse. But he’d displayed none of the obvious signs of which she was aware. When they reached some resting place, if either of the microfiche readers had survived without being shattered—there was an unsettling rattle from the case housing the video camera—she would probe more deeply into the symptoms of concussion.
“Th
ere’s something I’ve got to do,” Jack said. He leaned over and kissed Lizzie’s forehead, then tilted her face up toward his and kissed her lightly on the lips. Lizzie hugged her father, and then Ellen put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Slowly, a little unsteadily, Jack walked toward where David sat beside the cases and luggage.
Jack lit a cigarette. He offered one to David, who merely shook his head.
Ellen could hear David as he said, “‘Jack Naile and his family were on their way to California, but there was an accident with their wagon.’”
Ellen watched as Jack leaned over and kissed David’s forehead. David didn’t pull away, but didn’t help, either.
Ellen closed her eyes. Not a single aircraft had passed overhead. There had been not the slightest sound that could have been a truck engine or a chain saw. But the absence of such phenomena was unnecessary. As David had chosen to put into words, Ellen knew deep inside herself, no words necessary.
They weren’t in the twentieth century anymore . . .
Despite his soreness, Jack Naile announced, “We’ve got to take the most direct route that we can to get out of these mountains. The highway—or the stage road along the ridgeline—whatever or whenever it is—should be easy enough to find. If we find—when we find—the road, all we have to do is follow it away from the mountains and we’re bound to find a ranch or farm. Worst case, we’ll reach Atlas in a day or so, whatever century it is. David?”
“Dad?”
They stood about one hundred yards downslope from the gutted helicopter.
“I need you to take that axe and mark some of the trees as we go along, so we can backtrack to this spot without much difficulty. We’ve got too much stuff to carry. So, before that, take the Winchester 94 and load it up, then look around the immediate area for a safe place to stash what we can’t carry for maybe as long as a week or ten days. Use the axe to mark a path from the helicopter to where we leave the stuff. Lizzie?”