“But it doesn’t go back to the past,” Stan said, staring at the dancers. “We know that because Nicky disappears.”
“In this timeline,” I said.
Stan started to open his mouth and shut it, suddenly lost in his thoughts.
“Have I ever said that time travel gives me a headache?” I asked.
Patty smiled at me as I turned and kneeled down beside Nicky.
“How is this time bubble around the building set to recall?”
“One day exactly from the moment it left,” he said. “Automatically. It will return within thirty minutes of leaving.”
“And it takes everyone who is inside it at that moment with it?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “I would assume so. This is the first time I’ve ever tried it. I figured if the bubble took along anyone who didn’t belong, I would just send the hitchhikers back where they belonged before they noticed.”
Now my stomach was really twisting. We had an untested machine that could take us all at any moment.
I stood and looked at Patty. “Any idea how many people live in this building?”
“Oh, my,” she said, her face white. “Maybe around 500 people at any given time.”
It was the middle of the afternoon on a Saturday, so not all of them would be in the building, but a large number of them would be.
Stan and Ben and Screamer had been listening and all three of them were just shaking their heads slowly, Stan staring at the dancers.
All my team looked like I was feeling.
Shocked.
Around us, all of Nicky’s friends from Atlantis remained frozen in different positions of dance, their brightly-colored robes spread out or twisted around them, smiles covering their faces.
If we were inside this building when it shifted back, we would end up in a timeline where Nicky returned to Atlantis with his friends. And everyone from Las Vegas time in this building would go with him and suddenly find themselves thousands of years in the past. And all of them would be lost to this world and all their families.
That would be a missing person’s case for the ages.
And if we stopped this, Nicky and his friends would be stuck here, lost to all their families.
And since it was a new invention, who knew if the timer was right or would even work.
Or if it went off, where or when it would send any of us.
Wonderful. Just wonderful.
We were so screwed.
I had to admit, Nicky here had really invented something to cause problems.
“I’m open to ideas,” I said, glancing around at my team.
I didn’t even have one of my normally stupid ideas or random thoughts.
Patty, Screamer, Ben, and Stan all just stood there looking blankly. We all seemed to understand this was a disaster where no matter what we did, no one won.
“So what’s going on?” Laverne demanded as she walked into the room. Lady Luck had on her normal power suit and her hair was pulled back. She also had on tennis shoes instead of her normal dress shoes. More than likely she knew she was going to have to climb twenty flights of stairs when she came into the time bubble.
She looked at the crowd of frozen dancers with a puzzled frown, then looked at Ben. “Why are those kids dressed like they are from an Atlantis college party?”
“Because they are,” Ben said.
That made the frown on Lady Luck’s face just get deeper.
Behind me, Nicky was climbing to his feet. “Hi, Aunt Laverne,” he said, stepping up beside me, his voice soft and his eyes not meeting hers, but instead staying focused firmly on the carpet in front of him.
“Oh, shit,” Lady Luck said, seeing him. She clearly understood the situation, or at least part of it, instantly.
She stepped forward and seemed to tower over the cowering Nicky.
“So you are responsible for the greatest mystery in all of Atlantis, the Lost Fifty,” she said.
She glanced at Stan, then focused back on Nicky.
Ben was nodding slowly, his gaze also aimed directly at the carpet.
Nicky wisely said nothing.
Lady Luck shook her head, clearly disgusted and saying nothing. Having Lady Luck disgusted at me was my worst nightmare. And I had some horrid nightmares at times, but having her disgusted at me was the worst one.
Finally, Lady Luck turned to look at the frozen dancers, then at Stan, touching his arm slightly for a moment, and then finally she looked at me. “We can’t let these kids go back. They did not return in this timeline. They were lost to their families a very long time ago.”
I nodded.
“We know that,” I said. “But we have another problem as well. Nicky thinks his machine will just take everyone in the building when it automatically jumps.”
Beside me Nicky nodded.
“Even the people from this time period who are in time stasis in the building?” Laverne asked, her voice as cold and as angry as I could ever imagine it getting. The windows seemed to vibrate from the tension in her words.
I know I did.
“I think so,” Nicky said. “I don’t know for sure. It might. I don’t know.”
I thought the poor kid was going to break into tears, but somehow he just kept staring at the carpet and managed to hold it together.
“Can you just shut it off?” I asked Nicky. I hoped my voice was a little less angry and powerful as Laverne’s, but I was so mad at this point, I wasn’t sure.
Nicky did exactly as I feared he would do. He shook his head.
“It will return the moment I shut it off,” he said.
“Perfect, just perfect,” I said to myself. “Where is it exactly?”
“Ground floor, very center of the building,” Nicky said.
“Does it have a visible timer on it?”
Again he shook his head.
“Any other way outside this field but through the door on the ground floor?” Stan asked.
Again Nicky just shook his head.
I was stunned. Not only had this kid just destroyed the lives of fifty of his closest friends and their families, if we didn’t figure something out quickly, he was going to take all of us as well and who knew how many hundreds with him in this building.
“How long do we have before the time field returns to Atlantis?” Laverne asked directly at Nicky.
“At most ten hours,” he said. Then softly he said, “It might be a lot less. I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be when your mother hears about this,” Laverne said.
Then Lady Luck turned to me and said simply.
“I’ll talk with Chronos and the Fates and see if I can come up with a solution. In the meantime, get everyone out of this building. I’ll have the portal downstairs hooked into real time to move with your time here in the building.”
I had no idea how she was going to do that, but decided this was not the time to ask.
Then with Nicky by the arm, she turned and yanked the poor kid by the arm toward the apartment door like a mother with a misbehaving three-year-old.
7
We all watched them go. I looked at the fifty dancers and took a deep breath. “We’re going to need help and a really amazing cover story for the residents.”
“And we’re going to need counselors for these kids,” Patty said, indicating the dancers, “to help them understand what happened.”
“They aren’t even going to be speaking English,” Ben said. “Nicky could because he’s a superhero, but none of these kids will.”
“Can we give it to them in some sort of power?” I asked, trying to imagine fifty college kids trying to learn English while dealing with being centuries out of time and their entire country being destroyed and their families killed.
Ben nodded slowly. “We might. For the Atlantis Fifty, we might be able to make exceptions. I’ll go find out.
“See if you can find something that will ease their memories as well,” I said.
Ben looked at the group of frozen dancers and nodded sadly, understanding exactly what I was saying. With that, he turned and headed for the door and the stairwell for the long climb down.
I turned to Screamer. “We’re going to need Johnny’s help on this and any other police we can trust. And a bunch more we’re going to have to fool with a cover story.”
Johnny was Detective Johnny State. He was also a superhero working for the police department. I had worked with Johnny on numbers of cases, including the first case when I met Patty.
“That’s going to take a really good cover story,” Screamer said.
“Some sort of phony virus,” I said, “that everyone in the building might have been exposed to, so we take everyone to a holding area and then when the time bubble jumps, we let them return, giving them all clear.”
I was making this up as I went, but that sounded like it might work. We get the Atlantis Fifty, as Ben called the dancers frozen around us, out first and isolated, then we work on the normal residents.
“I’ll get some help from the gods of health,” Patty said, “to come up with something logical, but not too bad, but that would require this kind of action.”
“Stan,” I said, turning to my boss. “If you can hold this time bubble inside Nicky’s bubble, do you think it’s going to be possible to release a set area of residents from his mechanical bubble?”
Stan shook his head, turning his attention from the dancers. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t work that way, and since this is mechanical, I doubt I can block it.”
“How did I release Patty?” I asked.
“She’s a superhero,” Stan said.
I thought I was discouraged before, now I was really about to lose it.
“Oh, no,” Patty said, shaking her head.
I took a deep breath and came up with the only solution I could think of.
“So we move maybe up to five hundred frozen people by stretcher to the entrance, down flights of stairs. Nothing to it, right?”
Silence in a room full of dancers.
I turned to the love of my life. “We’re going to need even more help from the medical side of this than we thought,” I said. “Because everyone has to be taken by ambulance to the hospital. Only way any cover story will work when they all snap back into real time going out that doorway Laverne is setting up.”
Patty nodded.
“Our cover story could be some gas that knocked them all out,” I said. “And has no lasting problems with it.”
“Better than a virus,” Screamer said, nodding.
I turned to Screamer. “Johnny’s going to need his girlfriend from the paper to cover this as well. We’re going to need help to keep this from turning into a panic that will empty the city.”
Again everyone stood silently.
Then Patty said simply, “I don’t think we have enough time.”
“Time is the enemy no matter what we do,” I said.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Screamer said.
I kissed Patty and told her to get going.
She nodded and went with Screamer out the door almost at a run.
I looked at my boss. “Can you hold the dancers?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I’m going to go scout out where the local residents are to save a little time while we’re waiting for the cavalry to arrive.”
He nodded and dropped down onto a couch, staring at the Atlantis Fifty, saying nothing.
There just wasn’t any more to say at the moment. All I knew was that I didn’t really want to see Atlantis. At least not on a one-way ticket to a time sixty years before it was destroyed.
8
I checked out the other penthouse apartments. They were really nice, and luckily no one was home in any of them.
On the floor below there were six apartments, all the size of Patty’s apartment.
In two I found guys watching television. In two others I found only a woman home, both of them also watching television. The other two apartments were empty.
I was starting to understand how really lucky we had gotten that this happened on a Saturday afternoon.
On the floor above Patty’s, I found twelve people in the six apartments. Four were playing cards in one, two kids about twenty-something were making love and were pretty tangled up together, which was going to get interesting to say the least.
They both might need counseling after this was over, one moment going at it with their partner, the next on a stretcher going out the front door of the building.
So in three floors I had sixteen people.
I heard some commotion in the staircase outside and went out to find Patty and Screamer headed back up.
I went with them back to the top floor and back into the room full of the brightly clothed dancers.
Stan was still just sitting there, seemingly lost in his own thoughts.
“Medical equipment and ambulances are headed this way,” Patty said. “We’ve got all the gods and superheroes who could get free working this. But not everyone outside is with us, so we’ll have to be careful outside the building.”
“Are they coming up with stretchers?” I asked and Patty nodded. ‘They should arrive here in about ten minutes.”
“No one I could find on this floor,” I said. “But we’ll need to check again to make sure.”
“Police already have the building surrounded and roads blocked off and press held back,” Screamer said. “Johnny and two people he can trust are coming up in a few minutes.”
Less than thirty minutes. I was impressed.
“So now we have to get these kids moving,” Stan said.
“I think we should wait for Ben and Laverne,” I said. “We have a language problem.”
“I speak their language,” Stan said softly.
I kind of looked at my boss, who seemed very, very upset by all this. Usually he was calm and clear, but now he just sat staring at the dancers.
I glanced at Patty and she shrugged.
“You want to tell me what’s going on,” I said to my boss, going over and dropping onto the couch beside him.
“We don’t have time,” he said, shaking his head, but not moving to stand.
“I want to wait for Laverne and Ben and help from other gods to help ease these kids’ transition,” I said firmly. “They can all walk down anyhow. So taking the time is worth the gamble.”
He nodded, clearly agreeing.
“So what happened?”
My little voice sort of told me the answer, so I went ahead and asked anyway. “Did you know some of these kids?”
He nodded.
“Which ones?” I asked, my voice gentle. It never would have occurred to me that I would have to be gentle with my boss, the God of Poker.
“The two twins,” he said, pointing to two brown-haired girls dancing almost back-to-back near the center.
Patty gasped and I sort of did the same the moment I focused on them. They looked just like Stan.
“Are they superheroes?” I asked softly.
“Not yet,” he said. “They will be.”
“Your daughters?”
He nodded.
All I wanted to do was be sick.
9
All four of us remained silent after that until Ben and Laverne suddenly appeared on the edge of the room.
“Thank you,” Ben said to her.
“We can teleport inside the bubble?” I asked.
Laverne nodded.
I turned to Patty.
She was ahead of me, already turning for the door. “I’ll cancel the stretchers coming up, have them stage on the main floor. I’ll get it set up.”
Being able to teleport inside this bubble was the first good news we had gotten in this mess.
I stood and Laverne looked at Stan, a feeling of complete sadness on her face.
“Stan, you should be able to bring your daughters out before we do the rest,” she said. “Get them out of here.”
Laverne started to object, then nodded.
Then Stan moved into the dancers and touched one daughter on the shoulder, than the other, bringing them out of the time bubble he had the rest of the dancers in.
“Dad,” the one closest to the window said, glancing around at her frozen friends. “What are you doing?”
“Yeah, does mom know you are breaking up our party?” the other asked.
Stan shuddered and then with another deep breath said, “Follow me.”
I glanced at Ben and he waved that I should not ask, even though at that moment I would have never asked.
In my head I heard Laverne’s voice. His first wife killed herself when they lost their two daughters. Never ask him about it, ever.
Understood, I thought back at her.
Stan took his two daughters toward a bedroom in the back of the huge penthouse. I did not envy him at all what he was about to tell those two girls.
I couldn’t even comprehend it, to be honest. It just made my stomach twist into little knots.
Laverne looked at me, then nodded that I should go ahead with the plan.
“Let’s give Stan the time,” I said. “I will start clearing out residents, jumping them to the main floor. There should be a place down there we can store them until stretchers can take them outside.”
Laverne nodded, staring at the door where Stan and his daughters had vanished.
“Ben, you stay here to help when Stan and his daughters need the help.”
He nodded.
“Screamer,” I said. “I know where people are on the two floors below. Go down to Patty’s floor and start scouting. And work with Johnny when he gets here.”
“Got it,” Screamer said and turned and headed for the door.
“Stop a moment,” Lady Luck said to Screamer. She waved a hand at him. “I just unblocked what was holding you from learning how to teleport.”
She turned to me. “Have him jump with you on the first couple, then he can start moving people down as well. Have Johnny and his people do the scouting ahead.”
Smith's Monthly #19 Page 3