by Jerry Ahern
“What were you trying to figure out?”
“What time it is where we came from. I mean, the date.”
“Beats me,” Ellen declared. “Late 1990s, right? Like 1996.”
“I got as far as calculating that it was October, there. Here we are,” Jack told her, “about to reelect President McKinley, and there they are about to reelect President Clinton, at least if things haven’t changed since the last time we checked the time capsule.”
“It’s kind of sad about President McKinley,” Ellen blurted out. “You’d think we could warn him or something that there’s an assassin waiting out there for him next year.”
“If we did warn President McKinley that there’s a bullet with his name on it,” Jack mused, “then Theodore Roosevelt might never succeed him as president, might never be elected in 1904, and the history of the United States, of the whole world, could be changed in ways we could never imagine. Teddy Roosevelt was/will be one of the greatest presidents in American history,” Jack added superfluously.
“This isn’t fun, Jack. Knowing the future isn’t fun at all.”
Ellen’s camera bag was heavy as Jack Naile slung it to his left shoulder. With his right hand, he slipped the Marlin from its saddle scabbard.
Ellen repeated, “Not fun at all,” as she drew the Winchester from her saddle.
***
Ellen Naile was reminded of standing once near a very large, open field, the night very dark and still. She was a little girl at the time, visiting with one set out of several pairs of aunts and uncles. This particular aunt and uncle lived in Wisconsin and had a neat house that was well away from town. Fireflies were everywhere in the field, moving in seemingly random patterns, like beautiful shimmering stars in some crazy race through the heavens. Another uncle’s car started; time to go. The car’s headlights switched on, the flickering lights from the fireflies instantly vanishing. This night, the moon was so bright that it was almost painful to look at, the sky perfect and clear, and the stars that would have been visible close to the moon, like the fireflies in that long ago field, were lost in the glare.
The night would have been romantic, with Jack lying beside her beneath that moon and the hidden stars, but the guns, the camera and the time transfer base about a city block or so distant from the broad, flat rocks in which they hid negated all happy thoughts.
Jack had insisted. “We can’t get too close. We’re lucky we haven’t tripped perimeter alarms already.”
“The characters in our books can always neutralize stuff like that.”
“Knowing how to do it and being able to do it are two different things. I could write an article on how to swim. But can I swim?”
“You swim like a rock.”
“Pumice is rock. It floats. I swim worse than a rock.”
There was something visible in the spot below them that reminded Ellen of something she had researched for one of their novels. She saw it there within the time base behind the chain link fence, saw the picture from a research book in her mind’s eye. The connection eluded her. “What do you call that thing?”
“What thing?”
“That thing! There!” Her mother had always told her that it was impolite to point, but if she’d heeded her mother’s advice, she never would have married Jack. “That!”
That at which she pointed was a large object about three times the size of a passenger elevator, sheathed in gray metal. It hadn’t been at the time-transfer base when she had observed the site fewer than twenty-four hours earlier.
“That? It looks like it’s an industrial-sized generator, but it can’t be, because there wouldn’t be any purpose for it. You wouldn’t need something that large for lights, computers, like that.”
“What if this is designed to be a revolving door, Jack?”
“A revolving door? Like in a department store? What— oh, shit.”
“To generate enough electrical power to really do some serious time-traveling back and forth, but in this period in history . . .”
Ellen let the words hang.
Jack finished the sentence for her. “You’d go nuclear. You’re not powering a couple of states or even a city, so you wouldn’t need a large reactor. You’d need plenty of shielding for the safety of the personnel.”
“What did Three Mile Island look like that time you were in Harrisburg?” Ellen asked.
“A lot bigger,” he advised. “What you’d probably need—we’ll have to ask Peggy—but it would be something maybe the size of the reactor package that would go into a nuclear powered surface vessel.”
Ellen had the old Pentax camera to her eye and was playing with the light meter and the film speed. She upped the shutter speed. The time-transfer base was well-illuminated, but surrounded by blackest night, no moonlight filtering down yet into the still-shadowy dish-shaped depression in which it was set. It was the classic case of what she could see the camera might not be able to see. She would push the film as much as possible, bracketing the shots so that—hopefully—she’d get something.
As she steadied the camera for the first shot, there was so brilliant a flash of light that it momentarily blinded her, a thunder clap so loud in the next instant that she could have sworn the ground shook with it. “Jack!”
“It’s alright! I think.”
Ellen blinked her eyes, blinked again, squeezing them tightly shut for an instant. When she looked again toward the time base, coronas of light appearing and disappearing everywhere within the facility, her eyes were drawn beyond the generator-looking thing to the flat surface at the precise center of the fenced-off area, in size and appearance looking like a helicopter landing pad. She brought the camera up and started clicking, hoping for at least one shot to come out.
Materializing out of the still wildly flickering light, shimmering as if, somehow, it weren’t fully formed, was a capsule about the size of a 1960s Volkswagen bus but shaped and metallic in appearance like an Airstream trailer without wheels.
The shimmering stopped. Jack murmured, “Holy shit.”
A side of the capsule opened, a doorway appearing in what had seemed seamless. A manshape, hooded, arms bound with heavy leather straps, tumbled from inside the capsule. As the manshape slammed hard against the flat surface of concrete, Ellen noticed that the person’s hands were cuffed from behind. Someone very dangerous, or someone in very serious trouble. She guessed the latter.
A tall man stepped out of the capsule. Six feet or better in stature, he was one of those men whose build made it appear that he was suited up for a football game beneath his street clothes; his shoulders, chest and thighs were so massive, it was as if they were not muscle and bone but heavy padding. The clothes he wore were almost nondescript, expensive looking but bland. A tweed sportcoat, a black polo shirt, faded once-black jeans.
Through the telephoto lens, she saw that he had a gun stuffed in the waistband of his trousers. As he bent over the hooded figure on the concrete apron, he adjusted the position of the weapon.
Rolling the hapless person over, the big man tore the hood away. Ellen said the word as a gasp. “David!”
She looked away, at Jack. His binoculars—to be more precise, his maternal grandfather’s French-made binoculars dating from 1886—were trained on the tableau below. “It’s not David. He looks like David, but he isn’t David.”
Ellen snapped another photo, put down the camera, and picked up the rubber-armored Bushnell binoculars from beside her camera case. As she brought them into focus, seeing the figure on the ground in greater definition, she realized that Jack was right. The prisoner of this mountain-sized brute was not David, but enough like him to be . . . “He could be David’s brother or son, they look so much—”
“Try David’s great-grandson, our great-great-grandson. That’s gotta be Alan Naile. And that brick-shithouse-sized fucker just brought him here to kill him, I bet.”
“What’ll we do? We’ve got to stop it, Jack!”
“It’s perfect, perfect, a perfect crime. Take so
mebody ninety-six years into the past and kill him. By the time the guy turns up missing, his body will have been rotted away for almost a century. The body couldn’t be identified in the past because the victim hasn’t been born yet.”
“This is creepy, Jack. We’ve got to do something.”
“I’m thinking. Let’s watch for a minute.”
That was a sensible decision, Ellen thought, tacitly agreeing with her husband, however irritated she was by his patience.
This was her great-great-grandson. At her age, that was scary enough to consider. And it appeared he was in imminent danger of losing his life, which made matters worse.
The hulking villain of the piece hauled Alan Naile to his feet, backhanded him across the face, then shoved him into the waiting arms of three men, all of whom were dressed in cowboy clothes. A fourth man walked up behind them, leading six horses and not seeming to have such an easy time of it. The big man walked over and grabbed the reins for two of the horses, keeping the animals in check while Alan was all but thrown into the saddle of an uncharacteristically small buckskin.
Alan’s hands were still manacled behind him, arms still strapped close to his sides. An ordinary rope was looped around his waist and secured to the saddle horn.
The big man—awkwardly—mounted an overweight-looking chestnut mare with black mane and tail, an animal evidently chosen because it was docile and the man riding it would be inexperienced. The other four men clambered up into their saddles, none of them looking exactly comfortable on horseback.
Jack’s lips were suddenly beside her left ear. “Odds are, they’re taking him some distance away to kill him and ditch the body.”
“What can we do?” Ellen whispered back. “We have to do something.”
“We will. Got enough pictures?”
“For now.”
Jack merely nodded, touched at her elbow and started crawling backwards out of the escarpment.
This time, it would be easy to “head ‘em off at the pass,” the “pass” merely a place where the two trails away from the site of the time-transfer base would coincide. Not a single one of the four cowboy-looking men looked exactly at home on horseback. The big man who’d roughed up Alan seemed a downright tyro when it came to riding, however professional he might be at killing. Alan’s horse was being led.
Jack swung up easily into the saddle. “We’re going to try not killing all these guys, just scattering them. Too much shooting, and we could have an innocent casualty,” he advised his wife, already mounted. Unnecessarily, he knew, he had held her horse for her.
“There are two of us and five bad guys.”
“Exactly, and we can’t disguise those numbers. We’ll find a nice ambush spot as quickly as we can, position you above it. You open fire when you have a clear shot on whichever guy is farthest away from our great-greatgrandson. Everybody’ll look toward the point of origination for the shot. So you hunker down—”
“‘Hunker’? You’ve been living in the West too long, Jack! Hunker?”
“Well, you know, take cover, but get over to a different spot in case you have to do more shooting. I’ll take it from there. If we get separated and it’s safe for you to do so, get to Alan and start for the house. I’ll catch up.”
“What are you planning?”
Jack wheeled his horse almost one hundred eighty degrees. “It would take too long to explain. But I’d like to get one of these guys and see if he’ll talk.”
“Not the big guy, Jack.”
“I won’t have the opportunity, but I’d love to put that schmuck in a locked room with Clarence and let Clarence beat the living shit out of him. Let’s ride!”
As Jack put his heels to his horse’s sides, he thought he heard Ellen calling out from behind him, “Hey, Wild Bill, wait for me!”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The six men rode through the steep, rock flanked defile almost painfully slowly, which was better than Jack could have hoped for. What was not good was that the big man rode alongside young Alan, and because of the snail’space gait at which the horses moved, all of the riders were clustered together.
Jack knew which man would be Ellen’s target: the one at the far rear. Yet he was only about a half-dozen yards behind Alan. Recoil from the Marlin’s .45-70 chambering would have been punishing to Ellen, Ellen never more than a casual rifle shooter when she fired a rifle at all. Ellen had the Winchester in .45 Colt, by comparison very mild against the shoulder.
Jack waited, watched, hunched in a deep crouch, more or less hidden, but little protected by sun-wasted scrub brush.
Ellen fired. The dun-colored horse under the man at the rear of the group bucked. The rider tumbled from the saddle, and the animal took off as if fired out of a cannon. The other horses shied as it sped past. Jack rose to his feet. There was no clear shot at the big man, not with Alan and the little buckskin sandwiched between the muzzle of Jack’s rifle and the preferred target.
Jack swung the rifle leftward and downward, relying on the .45-70’s penetration and power as he pulled the trigger, firing through the hapless little buckskin’s neck. The animal tumbled against the big man’s black-maned old chestnut mare.
The chestnut stumbled, then dropped like Newton’s apple.
Jack levered the spent case out, chambered a fresh round.
Alan was on the ground, his dying horse almost certainly pinning his right leg under it. The chestnut, already dead, struck by the same bullet that had penetrated the buckskin’s neck, lay in a heap, legs buckled beneath it.
Jack couldn’t find the big guy. Hoping the man was, like Alan, pinned under his horse, he swung the .45-70’s muzzle right and shot one of the three remaining men out of the saddle of a good-sized pinto.
But the first man, the one whom Ellen had initially fired upon, who had lost his mount in the next instant, grabbed for the just-riderless pinto. He used only his left arm to reach for the horse, but wore his gun for right-handed crossdraw, which meant Ellen’s bullet had probably struck him.
Jack worked the lever of his rifle.
In obvious desperation, the apparently wounded man threw his body weight against the riderless pinto’s forelegs. The horse fell as the man clambered into the empty saddle. The horse started to its feet.
Jack’s eyes scanned the moonlit defile for the big man. The two henchmen so far unscathed, bouncing in their saddles as if they were trying to sustain spinal damage, were riding back toward the time transfer base, all caution concerning the steep, uneven surface of the defile abandoned. There was a shot from the higher rocks, Ellen giving them a send-off.
“Where are you, fucker?!” Jack said under his breath, still looking for the big guy. As his eyes followed his rifle muzzle, swinging back toward the wounded man and the still rising horse, Jack spotted his quarry. The big man was stabbing the muzzle of a large revolver—maybe an N-Frame Smith & Wesson, but by moonlight at the distance, it was only a guess—into the face of the wounded man clinging to the pinto’s saddle. There was a single shot. The wounded man fell away as the big man grasped for the saddle and clung to it as the pinto shook its mane and snorted.
Jack fired, and the big man’s body rocked with what could have been a hit or might only have been the horse shuddering under him. The pinto had its head and galloped after the two already escaping riders.
Jack levered the Marlin and fired, but the big man was so terrible a rider and the horse moving so rapidly that his shot was an obvious miss from the moment he squeezed the trigger.
Another shot from the rocks, Ellen firing, but the range was already too great for the Winchester’s .45 Colt-revolver round. There were two rounds left in the Marlin, two rounds Jack would not waste on a fast-moving target he had no hope of hitting.
Instead, he drew his revolver as he walked toward the buckskin. The little horse was still breathing. Alan, under it, moaned, but that was reassuring, affirming that Jack’s great-great grandson was still alive.
Jack, fee
ling genuine sorrow for shooting the innocent horses and wishing that he could experience sorrow— genuine or otherwise—for the vile men he had killed, put a bullet into the little buckskin’s brain, then started trying to pry, push and shove the dead animal off Alan.
Almost before it seemed possible, Ellen had joined him in the effort, and worked beside him as always.
Cleavon Little, like a black Randolph Scott, rode up out of the horizon, resplendently dressed and armed, astride a magnificent golden palomino, replete with gleaming, silver-mounted saddle. Count Basie’s orchestra, for some reason esconced in the middle of a southwestern desert, was belting out its legendary riff at the conclusion of “April In Paris.” Alan opened his eyes. The face looking down benignly upon him was definitely not the brilliant Mel Brooks, but a woman instead. An angel’s face? Was he dead and in Heaven? The last thing he remembered was a very loud gunshot and the horse that had been under him collapsing against another horse. After that blackness had engulfed him in a roaring wave of pain.
The pain was still there, and that couldn’t be right, because in Heaven, as he had learned as a boy, all earthly pain would be washed away.
An angel, however. As his vision cleared, he recognized the face, yet was more amazed than if the countenance— smiling now, with a touch of worry in the gray-green eyes—had been ethereal in the literal sense. The face was that of Ellen Naile, born in 1948—or, to be born. Objectively, he knew that since the year from which he’d been kidnapped was 1996, she was forty-eight. Except for that hint of worry in her eyes, dissipating as he forced a smile to his lips, it would have been hard to imagine this auburn-haired, delicately featured woman with almost porcelein skin to have even been thirty.
“You.” He realized that his voice was a dry, croaking thing.
“Don’t try to talk, Alan.” Her voice was a soft alto, musical to hear.
Alan shook his head: a mistake, as tremors of pain washed through him. A glass came to his lips, cool water into his mouth. He swallowed, the first sip with difficulty, the second sip more easily. The glass was taken away, and he tried again, this time successfully, more or less, to speak, the voice still not quite fully his own. “You are my great-great-grandmother.”