Written in Time

by Jerry Ahern

  There was a nasty look from the two Fowler men. David gave a nasty look back, closing the door and pacing off toward the edge of town.

  After walking half again the length of the street, David finally spied his father. Jack Naile stood, leaning against the corral on the same side of the street along which David walked, essentially invisible from a distance. Maybe this was the first speed trap, David wondered absently.

  “Marshal Jack Naile,” David said under his breath.

  “The Law East of the Sierras. Shit.”

  The clothing problem had pretty much been solved via catalogue, his mother and sister having decent, albeit uncomfortable-looking, dresses. They were getting into making their own, almost as a means of self-defense. He and his father had also found a source for attire that was, at least, more acceptable than that found at the general store. But that would change. As it had been in the future and continued to be in the past, David Naile’s taste in clothes was far more sophisticated than that of his father.

  Jack Naile wore his black Stetson from the twentieth century, one of his half-dozen black on black vested suits and black cowboy boots with a medium heel. Visible above the collar of his jacket was the collar of a white shirt. He would be wearing a black tie, knotted just as it would have been a hundred years or so in the future.

  The only jewelry he would be wearing was his gold wedding ring and the gold chain he had acquired for his Rolex.

  His father had solved the wristwatch problem uniquely. The town blacksmith also repaired tack, making him the closest thing to a leather worker. Jack had removed the Rolex from its wristband and commissioned the blacksmith to cut and sew a pouch that would hold the Rolex in securely. A small brass grommet was affixed to the top of the leather case. With a gold watch chain added, the Rolex would pass for a period piece unless given more than a casual glance by someone who really knew watches.

  “I heard those boards in the sidewalk creak when you walked across them,” David Naile’s father announced, turning around quickly, his right hand not reaching for his revolver, but near it.

  It seemed as if this fall would be cooler than the last, and a brisk breeze cut along the main street out of the high ridgeline of the nearer Sierras, across the plain and toward the low mountains beyond Atlas. “I’ve gotta tell you something, Dad.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Everybody’s fine. Look at this.” David reached into his vest pocket, extracted the wall outlet and tossed it to his father. Jack Naile had always been pretty miserable when it came to catching things, and David actually felt proud of his father for catching the object he’d thrown to him, albeit a little awkwardly.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “You know what it means, Dad? That’s the wall outlet that we found in—” And David glanced around them, to make certain no passerby could hear. “It’s the one we found in 1992, in the ruins of the house. Don’t you see? That’s how we were able to find it in the house. I brought it by accident. The Suburban never gets here.”

  Jack Naile dropped the outlet in his coat pocket, taking the makings for a cigarette from his other pocket. “Shit,” David heard his father say before turning away and looking off toward the mountains again.

  Clarence had not worn a suit since leaving his job as a theater manager in suburban Atlanta a year and a half earlier. Thinking back, he could have worn a suit at the small memorial service held at the site of the helicopter wreckage, the memorial service arranged by the movie company. But he chose not to attend the service. To have done so would have been to tacitly accept the idea that his aunt, uncle and teenage cousins were dead, or at least gone from him forever.

  Always somewhat claustrophobic, even when managing a movie theater, he had never particularly enjoyed being in one, always staying toward the back of the theater so that he could egress quickly.

  It was, then, with considerable reluctance that he allowed Peggy Greer to talk him into going to see Angel Street when it hit the theaters. They sat in the very back row, Clarence sitting in the aisle seat, Peggy holding his hand. Angel Street was a bizarre western, a mixture of classic oater and occult suspense with a strong dash of mystery and romance. Professionally speaking, he thought the film was “okay” and little more than that. The male lead was a well-known supporter of liberal causes and the female lead simply didn’t turn him on. The action sequences were good enough, but not as good as those from the old John Wayne movies, which he had loved since his boyhood.

  At the very beginning of the end titles appeared a dedication, naming Jack, Ellen, David and Elizabeth Naile and the pilot, Evan Soderstroum, as the victims of a terrible tragedy and stating that all five would be remembered fondly.

  That got Clarence to get up and walk out of the theater, Peggy Greer at his heels. “Didn’t you want to see the end titles, Clarence?”

  “No, baby. That just pissed me off. They’re not dead.”

  “Even if they aren’t, sweetheart, wasn’t it kind of sweet that they dedicated the movie to them?”

  “Let ‘em dedicate something that’s gonna make money to them, then. You watch and see. This thing is gonna bomb.”

  “You’re angry, Clarence.”

  “You’re right, Peggy.”

  As he later explained to Peggy, another one of the myriad things wrong with Angel Street was the music. Jack was a movie-music aficionado, had collected sound tracks. Jack would definitely not have liked the music. It needed the music of a Jerry Goldsmith or a John Williams, not some guy nobody had ever heard of. And, Clarence went on to explain, Jack would not have liked the gunfire. “Take The Magnificent Seven, for example. Jack explained it to me once, that the gunfire was too soft sounding. He didn’t know for sure, but he guessed that they actually recorded the sound of the blanks and didn’t edit in live gunfire with full-charge loads. He learned all about that stuff when he did one of those movie articles he wrote. Nowadays, they edit in the sounds of real gunfire.” They’d talked throughout the evening about the film and about the work they’d been doing out in the desert. And about what lay before them on the following day.

  For a little over six months, Clarence had assisted Peggy and Jane Rogers with their experiments, his background in electronic intelligence making the use of the equipment simple to learn. The math behind the experiments was something he only vaguely understood. He’d mastered trigonometry for his work in electronic intelligence, but it was Jack who had pumped fractions and decimals into Clarence’s short term memory before he had taken his preinduction aptitude test.

  The experiments now, almost routinely, would fire the light array for as long as a few seconds, that record achieved during a fortuitous thunderstorm with intense lightning activity. It was in the aftermath of packing up from that touch of success that Jane Rogers had announced, “Curse my age and stupidity!” She slammed shut the double doors of her Suburban. “There was something I had forgotten, that I saw just before your family’s helicopter vanished. It was ball lightning.”

  “And what the hell is that?” Clarence had demanded.

  The instant that he spoke, it began to rain, rain hard, but neither Clarence nor Peggy nor Jane made any move to get out of the rain. As calmly as a teacher in a classroom patiently explaining in simplified terms something quite complex to a group of dim students, Jane began, “Ball lightning is extraordinarily rare, so rare that no photos are known to exist which conclusively have captured it. The only time that ball lightning can be witnessed is usually in association with a conventional streak of lightning, the ball lightning found at or near its termination point. Like the conventional lightning bolt which I saw just as the aircraft carrying your family disappeared, ball lightning also moves laterally, at somewhere between five and six miles per hour, it’s estimated. That was the first time that I had ever actually seen ball lightning.

  “Those with more experience relating to the phenomenon have indicated that ball lightning has a number of extremely peculiar properties. It can ente
r a structure through a closed surface, for example, without precipitating damage to the surface through which it has passed. There is frequently sound accompanying the phenomenon, often described as like unto air slowly exiting a membrane through a tiny puncture.

  “Considering that ball lightning is almost certainly superheated plasma gas,” Jane continued, “it should, logically, rise in air, but it doesn’t. It’s of short duration, or seems to be, and as the particular manifestation of the phenomenon concludes, there is frequently the sound of an explosion accompanied by the smell of something burning in its immediate aftermath.

  “Its physical appearance seems not to be confined to one particular coloration, but several. That may relate to temperature or other variables. Size is usually seven plus inches in diameter—close to the size of a regulation basketball, I should think. The duration of the phenomenon is a matter of several seconds only.”

  “About the same amount of time that we’re able to fire up the lighting array when the experiment really works?” Clarence suggested.

  “Yes, about,” Jane agreed.

  The rain beat against them and the ground on which they stood with the intensity of a high-pressure car wash. Still, none of them moved toward shelter, the equipment long since packed safely away and their bodies long since soaked to the skin.

  “There is no universally accepted theory as to the exact nature of ball lightning, other than that it is composed of superheated plasma, as I believe I mentioned. Nothing, as of yet, satisfactorily explains its peculiar mobility or the source of its energy,” Jane concluded.

  “And you saw this stuff when the helicopter disappeared?”

  “Yes, circling around the aircraft. I remember now thinking that it reminded me of electrons circling a nucleus. Most peculiar motion pattern for ball lightning. And they all vanished into the black spot into which the helicopter seemed to disappear as well.”

  “Then it’s hopeless,” Peggy Greer declared, raising her voice to be heard over the drumming of the rain.

  “Why?” Clarence demanded.

  “We can’t make ball lightning, and the phenomenon occurs with such irregularity that we might have to wait indefinitely. Lightning experiments in laboratories produce pretty puny stuff by comparison to the real thing, and that’s conventional lightning,” Peggy went on. “And experiments of the type we’d need to conduct even to attempt to produce a laboratory equivalent of ball lightning, even if they were possible, would cost a fortune—a large fortune.”

  It was then that Clarence Jones had decided to find the owner of Horizon Enterprises, the company Ellen had told him, in their last conversation, owned the property in Nevada on which the ruined house stood—the company started by David Naile. One hundred percent of the stock in Horizon Enterprises was owned by a man named Alan Naile. Alan, if Clarence remembered correctly, was David’s middle name.

  Wearing one of his theater suits—he had almost a dozen of them, this one gray—Clarence waited with Peggy Greer in a side office for Alan Naile to arrive. The secretary, a pretty girl, but not as pretty as Peggy, had apologized, telling them, “Mr. Naile called on his cell phone that he was detained in traffic. He should only be a few moments. May I get you something?”

  As neither Clarence nor Peggy wanted anything but information and help, and neither of those could be provided by the secretary, she left to go back to the outer office.

  It had taken Clarence nearly a month to find the means by which to contact Alan Naile, evidently a very private person, and this only after utilizing his ex-military buddies once again for their information gathering talents.

  Yet once he got a phone number where Alan Naile could be reached, it was almost as if Clarence had been expected and the appointment was arranged within days.

  There was an ashtray. Clarence lit a Winston. Peggy didn’t smoke, but didn’t seem to mind it when he smoked.

  In the instant that Clarence pocketed the Bic lighter, the door at the side of the room opened and Clarence almost dropped the lit cigarette from his mouth. It was David’s face, David’s height and build, but this David looked to be about thirty years old, immaculately and expensively tailored, the steel gray suit he wore an obvious Armani.

  “I’m Alan Naile, Clarence. And, you must be Doctor Greer.” Clarence stood up. Alan Naile offered a firm, dry handclasp to Clarence, then held Peggy’s hand briefly, almost as if he were about to raise it to his lips. Peggy had remained seated.

  Alan Naile had David’s dark, wavy hair; but, unlike David, who habitually kept his hair short and brushed the waves as straight as possible, Alan Naile’s hair was grown out to where it was brushed back above his ears and, at the neck, it went slightly over the collar of his jacket.

  Alan Naile got right to the point. “I have debated with myself since I first learned of the time anomaly when I was twenty-one whether or not I’d interfere with it someday, especially since, for the bulk of the time I would be running Horizon, I’d have no knowledge of future history. I even brought my oldest son—my youngest was born nine months ago—to an autographing session at a science fiction convention so that he could meet Jack and Ellen. I knew I look like my great-grandfather, David, quite a bit, so I prepared by growing a beard and getting some fake glasses. It would have been awkward to explain looking almost identical to their son. What was I going to say? Your son is my great grandfather?

  “And you’re here because you want my help, perhaps with those experiments Dr. Greer has been conducting with Dr. Rogers. You guys have come up with the same conclusion that I reached as soon as I learned that your experiments with electricity and the helicopter’s disappearance may have been related. It could be done again—maybe.”

  Clarence realized that the cigarette was burning his fingers. He stubbed it out and lit another one. “Smoking’s bad for you, Clarence. And please, don’t mind my calling you Clarence, because we are related.” Alan Naile sat on the edge of the desk for a second, and then stood. “Follow me, will you? We’ll all be more comfortable in my office.”

  Alan Naile opened the door through which he had just entered, turned into a narrow, carpeted corridor with sconced bulbs providing the illumination. The hallway looked like something out of an old movie, the frosted glass covers over the lights having what his aunt Ellen would have called an art-deco look.

  Halfway along the corridor, Alan Naile put a key into a lock and opened a mahogany-colored door. “Please,” he beckoned, letting Peggy, then Clarence, inside ahead of him.

  Alan Naile’s office was large enough to hold an intimate dance party. There was a huge, dark wooden desk at the far side of the room that fronted enormous windows with soft-looking white sheers over them; the sheers diffused the sunlight, filtering it.

  The desk itself was clearly one belonging to a wealthy and busy man. Several telephones, a computer monitor and keyboard, stacks of files and several notebooks littered the desk in patterns that seemed neither haphazard nor perfectly organized. Either his secretary knew Alan extremely well, or Alan maintained full responsibility for his own clutter.

  Alan crossed behind his desk. “Sit down, guys. Can I have Cecily get you anything? Coffee, a Coke, a beer if you want.”

  “I’m fine,” Clarence volunteered.

  “Me, too,” Peggy added.

  “See this?” Alan picked up a Lucite block from the front of his desk and crossed around his desk again, showing it to them. “This is the first money that actually came into Jack Naile’s General Merchandise. Ellen Naile saved it. Great-grandpa would have invested it.” He laughed. “It’s an 1853 half-dime. Can you imagine that? A half dime, contemporaneous, since it was still in circulation in 1897, with the nickel. Amazing. So, you want me to finance your trip back through time, Clarence, if it can be managed? Right?”

  “You get right to the point, don’t you?” Peggy Greer observed.

  “I have to, Doctor. Anyway, it would seem, since there was never a mention of you in anything Jack and Ellen left behind, or
my great-grandfather, for that matter, that you are a new element into the mix, Clarence. Perhaps your mother died during childbirth, or your father died before you were conceived.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Clarence demanded.

  “Simple. Every time Jack and Ellen Naile make the trip—and don’t ask me to explain it, because I don’t understand it myself, only that it happens. But every time they make the trip, history changes a little. In documents they left behind the last time, the most glaring example is that eight million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War Two. Yet we all know that six million were killed. Something that my great-grandfather did—likely the private-intelligence organization he put together— helped to alter history and save two million lives.

  “Anything that any of us could accomplish would pale in comparison, I’m sure you’d both agree. Who knows? Maybe one of the Jews who didn’t die did something that somehow in some way we could never figure out allowed you to be born, Clarence. Who can say?” He shrugged his Armanied shoulders, went back around his desk and plunked down into the insanely expensive-looking leather swivel chair.

  “At any event, Clarence,” Alan went on, “you’re here in the first quarter of 1994, and you want to go back to there, which, judging from what they left behind, is probably the spring of 1898. That means that your grandfather, who was also named Clarence, is just a month or two old somewhere in New York, and his older sister hasn’t taken up her profession as a madam in East St. Louis, just probably still is some cute little girl about to become an orphan.

  “We could change history in a radical way here, Clarence, maybe for the better . . . or maybe we’ll just fuck everything up. Your call.”

  “Oh, thanks a fucking lot!” Clarence exploded. “If I go back in time, I could alter history?”