By the time we stopped, it was late afternoon, and everyone had worked up a sweat, even in the cool winter air.
It looked like a section of one of the temple’s walls was halfway standing again, in a kind of lopsided way. And leading from that, was a lined pathway up to the altar that A.J. had finished.
Now A.J. wants to put that altar to use. “I guess it’d only be right to make an offerin’, since it’s the New Year, and all.” A.J. looks around, then takes something out of his pocket. It’s a little scrap of cloth, I guess, but it’s old and muddy. All I can see is the word REACH on it.
He lays it on the altar.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Piece of an old baseball. Made by the A.J. Reach Company. They’re out of business now.”
“Why are you leaving it here?”
“That baseball, son, is the reason I’m back here, in Jerusalem. With you. It’s what got me started on this whole time-travel business. Since I’m not sure if any of us are gettin’ back now, especially since your cap is gone and all, well, I thought I’d try to make my peace with things.”
Neither of us says anything for a moment.
“There’s a lot you haven’t told me, isn’t there?”
“Well, for starters, that’s all that’s left of a baseball once used by Satchel Paige.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, it all starts with Green Bassett.”
“That’s not what I meant, either.”
“Actually, son, it kind of is.” He looks around — people are quiet now, at least in the sense they’ve stopped actively trying to kill us or drive us away. “Let’s take a walk and try to find Jeremiah.”
“If he’s gone, we shouldn’t try to bring him back. That’s not how history is supposed to play out.”
“I just want to say good-bye, son.”
I look around to see if Naftali or James want to come with us, but they’re gone. “I think she took ’em back down to the cave,” A.J. says, watching me turning my head. “The boys. I think Thea went back down there to wash ’em up, get ’em away from all the riotin’ folks up here.”
“I should see her.”
“You should. But you should find out some things first.”
We walk down the stone path, past the newly rebuilt wall, out toward the fields. We pass the remains of what Naftali told me used to be the palace. A.J. points to it.
“That’s where the kings lived. They’re all gone now. The very last one had to watch his own children die. After that, they blinded him.”
“Jeez. That’s horrendous.” I think of Thea, who had to go through something like that, but in reverse. “History is really awful.”
“Lotta scary things in the Bible, son, I won’t kid you. It can be a fearsome book. Did Huldah ever tell you about the king she worked for?”
“No.”
“Name of Josiah. He was a bit earlier. Called on her to interpret one of the Bible scrolls they’d found, stashed away in the temple. Make sense of the word of God, as it were.”
“Did she?”
“As much as anyone can. They added a lot of new laws to the books after that, trying to keep people on the straight and narrow. But laws only work for a while, if people don’t feel things” — and now it’s his turn to tap his chest — “in here.”
“Why is everyone tapping their hearts so much?”
“I guess we’re all havin’ lots of strong feelings, back here in the Holy Land.”
“Is that why you became a preacher, ’cause you believe everything happened just like it says in the Bible? What about all the things it doesn’t explain? Like where my mom is or whether we’re ever going to get back? Are we stuck here forever? What about that?”
A.J. picks up a stick from the ground — a long piece of wood, not a tree branch, but a piece of what used to be a wall or a pillar. “I became a preacher ’cause I think there’s something bigger than all of us out there, a Great Mystery that we all need to tend to.”
“Well, I have plenty of mysteries.”
A.J. takes a rock and throws it in the air, then swings the stick at it. He gives it a pretty good hit, and it skitters into the desert.
“Your mother, son. She disappeared in the late 1960s.”
I wish I wasn’t so used to my stomach falling all the time. “So is my mom still around, still in this world, or not?
“She’d come out to Vinita to see me.”
“She still knew you?”
“She stayed with Project Split Second, after the war. All through the ’50s and ’60s. The whole cold war. She never wanted time travel to be used as a weapon.”
He throws another rock and hits it.
“She was with the project all the way through, trying to make sure it never got out of hand, was never used to hurt people.”
“Well, how far did they get?”
“They got as far as sending a couple of test subjects through time.”
“Really?” That doesn’t necessarily sound like she kept it from hurting anyone. “Who?”
“Me, for starters. And Rolf.”
Now it’s so weird, I have to sit down. A.J. keeps taking batting practice, stopping for a moment to stare at the wood in his hand. “This thing I’m usin’ for a bat actually came from a palace, son. A place the kings inside probably thought would last forever. Nothin’ lasts forever.”
Not even Project Split Second, apparently. He tells me that Rolf was put in charge of the program after the war, because, as part of the Drachenjungen, he was supposed to know a lot about time travel. It didn’t matter how he got the knowledge.
“It was that Operation Paperclip stuff again,” A.J. says. “Puttin’ Nazis all over our own government.”
But my mom stayed on as one of the research scientists. She was the one always saying they weren’t ready to “test on humans” yet. “But ol’ Rolfie always wondered what the point was if you didn’t test it on humans. What was it gonna be used for, anyway? So he started to look for volunteers.
“And finally, he had one. Me.” A.J. swings the wood, and hits another single.
“Why you?”
“It got me out of an Army hospital, where I’d been for a few years.” Whack! A foul tip.
“Why were you there?”
“It was the kind of place they keep people who claim to have ‘seen things.’ People who might cause a certain kind of trouble.”
Apparently, a lot of the trouble started after I’d jumped into the dimensional rift at Fort Point, where my mom was. A.J. tried to jump in after me. “I didn’t think you should go alone, son. It didn’t seem right.”
But my mom held on to him, by his heels, and pulled him back out. He’d been halfway in the time stream. In spacetime.
“Halfway in?” I ask. “What was that like?”
A.J. shakes his head. “It just confirmed the mysteries. But they kept me in Army hospitals for years after that, for ‘observation,’ as they called it. Occasionally, Rolf would come and ask me what I knew.”
And apparently, just when Rolf was ready to get A.J. his release, to do a “volunteer jump” through time, a small paper, the National Weekly Truth, published a story about Rolf’s background as a Nazi.
“Some kind of tabloid or something,” A.J. says. Whack! “But then the regular papers picked it up, and our government was so embarrassed, they had to let Rolf go.”
“So what happened then?”
“He tried to steal some WOMPERs and do his own experiments, his own time travel. Your mom thought that might be a good time to shut down the program. She leaked some more details to the press, some people in Congress were gettin’ upset…” Whack! “And she arranged to get my release from the hospital. I had to sign all these forms, swearin’ never to tell what I’d seen.”
“But you did.”
“In my book. The Time Problem. Published by the same folks that publish that Truth paper. But I thought people had the right to know. Your mom thought I
was in danger. So she came out to Oklahoma to see me. I’d gone home by then, to get out of government service, and start preachin’. But that didn’t pay well, and I had to find a way to support it. So I opened a motel.”
Whack!
“Turns out somebody else followed your mom out there, too.”
My stomach can’t really fall any further. “Rolf.”
“Your mother was bringin’ somethin’ she wanted me to have, for safekeeping.”
“What was that?”
“One of the last known captured WOMPER particles. Which the Split Second folks needed, to trigger a time-reaction.” Whack!
Even though Rolf was officially out of Project Split Second by then, he was still doing work for the government. “Unauthorized” experiments that were actually, according to A.J., completely authorized. By somebody with power.
But something went wrong when Rolf followed my mom. “Maybe there was a fight and the WOMPER got loose, but whatever it was, they triggered a time reaction right there in Vinita. I was runnin’ my motel at the time, and didn’t quite realize what had happened till later. Till right after a couple of guests in particular checked into my place, who didn’t even seem to know what time they were in.”
“Me and my dad? On that trip we were taking cross-country?”
Whack!
“Yeah.”
“And my mom was there, in Vinita? When we were? When we were so close?”
“Turns out, she’d disappeared, along with Rolf, in another time reaction. They must’ve been closest to whatever it was that happened, because they pretty much vanished for a while. Well, not Rolf. He popped up again in the early 2000’s, but had to keep a low profile, till he could get his hands on another WOMPER.”
“So my mom is gone again, too?”
“Last I knew, she was in the ’60s for a while. Maybe you can catch her back there.”
“And what about you?”
Whack! A.J. could’ve maybe gone into baseball to support his preaching. But then again, with so much going on, how can you concentrate on baseball? The House of David guys must have always known where their families were, in order to do it.
“As for me, son, I guess I had a little accident of my own, after that. The government guys, DARPA and some of the other agencies, tried to put me back in the hospital after your mom disappeared, so I wouldn’t talk about what I knew. But I still had something they hadn’t counted on.”
“What was that?”
“A baseball?”
“The one you left on the altar?”
“Yup.”
“The one from Satchel Paige?”
“And Green Bassett. Yup.” Whoosh!
For the first time, he misses. The rock falls straight down into the sand.
“When did you meet him?”
“When he came to Vinita, for some exhibition games.” Whack! A.J. hits the next one, and it flies over some nearby rocks, disappearing from view.
Someone says “OW!”
A.J. and I look at each other, then we scramble over to see who it is.
It’s Jeremiah, in the late-afternoon sun. He stands up when he sees us, rubbing his head. “Someone’s always throwing stones at me.”
“It was an accident,” A.J. tells him. In Hebrew. “We didn’t know anyone else was here.”
“I came out to start planting, like I said I would.” There’s a cloth bag near Jeremiah’s feet, full of seeds. “I found these in the wreckage of the granary, in the midst of all that confusion. Hopefully, there’ll be enough wheat and barley and beans by next spring.”
“We have to make it through winter first,” A.J. tells him.
“Did you try rebuilding the temple again?” Jeremiah asks.
“A little,” A.J. replies. “Everybody needs something to look forward to.”
“God doesn’t really worry about our buildings,” Jeremiah says. “That isn’t where my people need to rebuild.”
I expect him to start tapping his chest again, but he just looks at A.J.
“I know. But sometimes, you gotta take people there one step at a time.”
Jeremiah looks away from us, out over the horizon.
“I expect you’re takin’ a few steps of your own,” A.J. continues. “You’re still plannin’ on leavin’.” He doesn’t ask it as a question.
“After I finish planting, yes. Jerusalem is better off without me now. I bring up too many old memories, of pasts that can’t be changed.”
“But —” I start in English. A.J. shakes his head at me. I guess he’s right. Even if I could tell Jeremiah that maybe the past can be changed all kinds of ways after all, that might not make him feel any better. He might even want to start time-traveling!
And we don’t need another one of those.
“I believe I will head toward Egypt,” he says. A.J. nods. “Perhaps no one will know me there. And what about you?”
A.J. looks at me. “I think we’re stuck with Jerusalem for a while, and Jerusalem’s stuck with us.”
I’ve been trying not to think about this. But with my cap gone, and no one here with WOMPERs, or a lab full of experiments, I realize he’s right.
I’ll be spending the rest of my life here. With Thea. And A.J. And all those people Clyne brought. I won’t ever see my parents again.
I’ll grow up here. And then what?
Marry Thea?
That’s too weird to even think about.
And I sure won’t ever get to play ‘Barnstormers’ again.
“A good time to meet!” Clyne bounds over, apparently having hopped across the sands after us.
Jeremiah takes a few steps back, crouching a little, still not sure what to make of Clyne. He stands straight after a few moments, but keeps his distance. “And I believe it will be good if I am no longer seen in the company of a goat-demon.”
“I have been searching you out, friends!” Clyne says to us. “I believe I may have a way znnnkt! to get us home.”
Chapter Nineteen
Eli: Slaversaur
583 B.C.E.
Any day now, we should know if this works. So far, it’s been three.
Clyne’s idea was to open up a dimensional rift. He said he got the idea when he saw the scrap of the Reach baseball reflecting the rays of the setting sun “in multi-tizzyng many-vectored ways. As if the shard of cloth contained some plasmechanical material.”
“Well,” A.J. said, “that’s because I reckon it does.”
The whole thing began when he’d actually met Green Bassett, right before he disappeared. It was in Vinita, after an exhibition game against one of Satchel Paige’s traveling all-star squads from the Negro Leagues.
“I saw Bassett the mornin’ after the first game, walkin’ out of town, kinda like he was in disguise, a big overcoat on him, even on a sticky Oklahoma day, with a hat pulled low over his eyes, carryin’ somethin’ in the kinda case you might put a fishin’ pole in, or a shotgun. Though once you figured out you were lookin’ at a ballplayer, you could guess it was a baseball bat. I was on a store porch, with an Orange Crush on my lips, when I saw him. ‘Hey, Green Bassett!’ I yelled.
“He put a finger over his mouth, like I’d already spilled the beans. ‘Where you goin’?’ I asked, ’cause I knew he was s’posed to have another game against Satchel Paige that night.”
“Paige could pitch two days in a row?” I asked.
“If he had to, son. Had to make hay any way he could, since they weren’t lettin’ black men into the majors back then. ‘I need to go away a while,’ he told me, ‘’cause things ain’t exactly like I thought.’
“‘What things?’ I asked him.
“That’s when he flipped me the Reach ball. ‘Ask Paige how he learned to throw spitters like this one,’ he said. ‘I never struck out on three straight pitches before. Never. I’m going to New Orleans, to see for myself.’ And then he left town, son. He left baseball, too. No one ever saw him after that.”
“Did you ever find out what he m
eant?”
“I snuck into the ballpark the next day. Ol’ Satchel wouldn’t tell me, but he showed me after the game. Everyone else had left the park. A spitter, son, like you’ve never seen before. Took a little resin bag he had, only there wasn’t no resin in it. ‘My special sauce,’ Paige said. And he dabbed a little on the ball, looked around, then threw a pitch that gave off sparks and zigged and zagged, and almost seemed to stop before it reached the plate. Like a ball out of a cartoon.
“‘Learned that down in Louisiana,’ Paige told me. ‘Only use it when I have to. Against batters like Green Bassett. Still, I may have to give that pitch up. It unnerves even me.’”
“I knew what he meant. The whole thing seemed unnatural, even for a pitcher as great as ol’ Satchel. Well, son, in those days, I was young myself, and thought about ballplayin’.”
So he did have other options besides the motel.
“That was before preachin’ took a hold of me. So I headed off to New Orleans, armed with only the vague descriptions Paige had given me of where he had gone to get that ‘special sauce’ that made the ball fly around so crazy. I wanted to learn its secret. And I got as far as a tree.”
I knew exactly which tree he meant. The one in the bayou outside of old New Orleans, the city that used to be there before all the hurricanes struck. The place I’d visited with Thea and Clyne. The spot where the Saurian time-ship had crashed in the early 1800s, outside Lake Ponchartrain. It created a place — I guess Clyne would call it a nexus — where escaped slaves could just…“disappear.”
“The special sauce?...” I asked, beginning to put the pieces together. “From the crash site? It was still there?”
“Material from the alien ship, piloted by your goat-demon friend. I know that now.”
“Plasmechanics!” Clyne chirped. “Even a small amount on a snkkt! base-sphere could change its quantum position in spacetime! Just a znggt! fraction! Enough to make the orb seem gerk-skizzy! as if it wasn’t quite solid when it moved through air!”
In other words, when a pitch usually leaves a pitcher’s hand, the ball goes forward in space and time, arriving at the plate or against the bat. But if it had plasmechanical material on it, like Paige’s, it wouldn’t move straight through time in the normal way. It’d be off by a micro second here or there, just enough to make it a lot harder to hit. Maybe impossible.
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