Footprints of Thunder

by James F. David

  Nick pushed his concerns about the President to the back of his mind and opened the folder. The top photo was from Landsat of the North American continent, zoomed in on the United States. The continent looked like a quilt. Contrasting topological colors were sprinkled from the East Coast to the West Coast, and the sprinkling continued into the sections of both Canada and Mexico that were visible on the photo. Other photos showed similar effects in both eastern and western Europe. There were no photos of the Southern Hemisphere, but Nick had no doubt the effect was worldwide.

  Deeper into the pile of photos and analysis reports, he found a photo taken off the Florida coast. An attached report noted that a tidal wave had washed over part of Florida’s gulf coast. The photo of the ocean showed massive amounts of debris in the water. The water itself looked more like mud, and there were whole evergreen trees mixed in the muck, their roots and crowns jumbled together. Wherever this land had been displaced from, it had the bad luck of being displaced into the ocean. Whatever animal or human life it had held was lost now.

  There were three sealed envelopes at the bottom of the pile marked SECRET and stamped with a red top-secret seal. One envelope was labeled New York City, the second Atlanta, and the third Montreal. Each envelope carried a label with the obligatory warning against unauthorized access to the information inside and the requisite listing of penalties. The first envelope included an aerial photo of New York City—a picture worth a thousand words, snowing what Nick had only read about. At first glance it looked normal, but scribed across one edge of the city was a neat line. On one side was a dense urban setting, on the other side, nothing. Nick had heard the devastation described as “prairie” in some reports, but from an aerial photo it looked like a void. A second photo showed more of the city and the surrounding urban area. The shape of the void approximated an oval. Pulling the Landsat photo out of the stack again, Nick held it close to his eyes. Most of the quilt pieces seemed to be oval.

  The third photo confused him. It was the same photo of New York, but in this photo the section of missing city was there. He looked closely at it, noticing that part of the photo—where the quilt section had been—was fuzzy. There were time notations in the bottom corner of the photos, indicating that the third was taken after the photo with the void. Nick examined the photos again. The third photo showed the city in the center of the quilt section that became fuzzy toward the edges. Was the city coming back? Nick turned to the accompanying report and began to read. When he finished he immediately began composing a message for the PresNet, the top secret classification quickly forgotten. While he typed, a message appeared at the bottom of the screen. As it scrolled up Nick realized it was essentially the message he was about to send. It was from Dr. Gogh.

  44. Ocean Ride

  People of all ages will become prisoners of the unseen. Good times will become times of misfortune; bitterness will replace sweetness: The wealth of nations will float in the wind,

  —Zorastrus, Prophet of Babylon

  Off Naples, Florida

  PostQuilt: Tuesday, 12:00 noon EST

  Ron woke at midday to find everyone else asleep on the back of the beast. He was thirsty, but the water had to be rationed. Even with a deep tan, the sun burned his back. He tried rolling over, but the sun was too bright. Sleep eluded him, and he found himself studying the baby.

  It was a magnificent animal. It had a long neck like an elephant’s trunk. A triangular head was covered with slick gray-green skin, and it had large black eyes, with eyelids that blinked occasionally, clearing away the salt spray.

  Ron was staring into the water looking for the legs when he realized the baby was moving toward him. It swam closer and fell a little behind the mother and then swung its head to look at Ron square on. His heart started to pound, but not from fear, from excitement. There was curiosity in those huge round eyes, maybe even intelligence. Ron slowly raised his head and smiled at the face, almost ready to talk to the baby, when the mother turned her head in a slow pendulous motion and made a bleating sound. The baby immediately returned to its position in the mother’s peripheral vision. Ron felt sad when it left.

  They passed out water in the early afternoon, each taking a little. It couldn’t be more than eighty degrees, yet with so little to drink it seemed like a hundred. Ron hoped his estimate of distance was correct because if it took more than a couple of days, they would be dead of thirst.

  As Ron took his turn at drinking he noticed the baby had dropped back again and was watching him. The baby’s face was nothing but taught gray-green skin, but Ron imagined he saw sadness in its eyes. Then he realized the baby and its mother had been churning through the ocean with nothing to drink. Was it as thirsty as he was? he wondered. Surely it had to be. Ron and his family had been riding while the dinosaurs worked, and they were very thirsty. Ron knew some animals could go long periods without water but doubted a dinosaur was like a camel.

  Later that afternoon Ron was awakened from a light doze by Rosa talking to Chris, saying something about the dinosaurs eating. Ron sat up in time to see the mother’s head dip down into the ocean and up. Her back rolled gently when she did. A few seconds later the baby’s head dipped into the ocean and came up with seaweed hanging from its jaws. The baby chewed the seaweed slowly, working the drooping strands into its mouth. Ron worried about the salt content. He suspected they would last longer if they didn’t ingest the salt. Still, he found his concern about the dinosaurs ironic. They were all hungry, thirsty, and exhausted, but they also felt secure on the great animal’s back. In a few short hours the dinosaur had been transformed from a mere vehicle to their friend and savior.

  By late afternoon they began to talk again, their fear of the animals forgotten. They named the big apatosaurus Patty and the little one, Pat. They all agreed Patty was a good mother. Somehow she had managed to save Pat from the sinking island and get him to sea. Ron speculated with Carmen and the kids about what it must have been like on the island. There had been a noise like a sonic boom, and then the island had just started sinking—relatively slowly, fortunately, because anything faster would have created a much bigger wave.

  Patty and Pat must have found themselves in a landscape quickly flooding with water. The trees would have been pushed around or toppled by the rising sea. The animal life would have panicked, fighting for higher ground, ground that would become crowded with terrified animals, and then, in turn, flooded. Big animals like Patty could have kept their heads above water longer, but eventually they would have had to swim for their lives to solid ground that was miles away. Patty would have had a better chance of saving herself without Pat, but she stayed with him, like a good mother would.

  “Dad,” Chris asked. “Do you think there were people on that island?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ron said to reassure Chris, but there was no way to know. That island shouldn’t have been there at all. It just appeared; with animals like nothing Ron had ever seen on PBS or a National Geographic Special. If people knew about that island, it certainly would have made the news.

  When Ron next passed water to the family, he noticed Carmen only wet her lips, so he did the same. When Ron had the water bottle back in its net bag he noticed Rosa staring at Pat.

  “Hey,” Rosa said. “I think Pat is having trouble.”

  Ron watched the baby for a while, but it seemed to be moving steadily, even after more than a day of swimming. Ron shrugged his shoulders at Rosa.

  “Listen to it,” Rosa ordered.

  Ron listened and realized he could hear its labored breathing. It was in trouble, and he wished there was something they could do to help it, but there wasn’t. No one talked after that, instead they spent the time watching Pat and listening to his breathing grow deeper and more ragged. Patty regularly swung her head around to look at Pat with one eye. At first that unnerved them, but Patty paid no attention to them, only to Pat. Patty also slowed her pace, but it didn’t seem to help.

  “I hope you make it, little
one,” Ron whispered. “I really hope you make it.”

  45. Contribution

  The Bible, and other authorities, record that God made the sun stand still in the sky, so that Joshua could defeat his enemies. Astronomically this is impossible. It is no more difficult to believe Joshua and his men were somehow sent back a day in time.

  —William Renfro, Space, Time, and History

  Honolulu, Hawaii

  PostQuilt: Tuesday, 11:07 P.M. AHT

  Assistant Professor Emmett Puglisi was sitting in Professor Wang’s executive chair brooding. Since he and Carrollee encountered the plesiosaur, he hadn’t seen the botanist again. She had been busy organizing people to protect the buried plesiosaur eggs and with other activities she wouldn’t tell him about. Emmett had been just as busy. At first he spent his time answering the many questions about the plesiosaur on the PresNet. He’d gotten his fifteen minutes of fame, but then other reports of dinosaurs began to appear on the network. Emmett wanted the attention back, but he wasn’t a biologist, and he had little to offer. He felt like a bystander once more.

  Emmett found himself both frightened by and drawn to the network, especially to models proposed to explain what had happened. Hour by hour, day by day, he sat there, downloading the complex data and models, spreading them across Dr. Wang’s desk and struggling to understand them. Slowly the equations came into focus, and Emmett began to see how the models evolved. Still, he remained a spectator. He longed to play in the big leagues but could see nothing original to add. His frustration only grew as other scientists proposed new models, richer, more detailed, or unique in structure, models just out of the reach of his comprehension.

  Creativity came only when he stopped struggling toward it.

  Emmett reconstructed the latest variation of what was being called the Gomez model using the equations provided on the PresNet. He was looking for some variation that hadn’t occurred to others, working diligently until he realized he had extended the model too far, projecting it into the space/time future. He was about to quit when he noticed something about his solutions. The time displacement varied with the distance from the mass. Near the mass of the earth the time distortion was clearly affected in a proportional way, but, at least mathematically, the temporal displacement decreased with distance from the earth.

  It was at that point Emmett had his insight. He knew the effect was hypothesized to weaken with distance from the source, but he wondered what a significant mass besides the earth would do to the effect? Specifically, what effect would the moon have on the space/time disruption?

  Although only a sixth of the earth, he calculated that the moon was of sufficient mass to influence the time distortions. What he hadn’t anticipated was the inversion of the effect. He knew his model was speculative, and none of the respected names was theorizing in this direction. So he hesitated at sharing them on PresNet.

  He hadn’t originated the theory, or the model he had used. He merely extended it. He wasn’t sure it was a contribution sufficient enough to put on the PresNet with his name on it. Besides, the problem was here on earth, now; what happened to the moon paled in comparison.

  In the end, the insignificance of his speculation overcame his fears of charges of plagiarism. He believed those on the network would pay scant attention to his model, so he sent it. Emmett was soon shocked to find that not only someone had noticed it, but someone at the top.

  46. Operation Mend

  It happened as we were boarding the coach. Benjamin went to check the horses and never came back. The coachman says he never saw my husband, and we have not seen him since. Ifs as if God lifted him off the face of the earth.

  —Lucy Bathurst, November 29, 1809

  Washington, D.C.

  PostQuilt: Tuesday, 5:00 P.M. EST

  Nick had to admit that Gogh had a better grasp than he did of the mathematics that physics required, Gogh had been exchanging ideas with a physicist at the Fermi particle accelerator complex in Illinois over the PresNet—but the physicist, Dr. Gomez, had almost immediately rejected Nick’s model and substituted one of her own, which involved complex equations. He could only follow the math to a point, but to Nick it seemed both to confirm and disconfirm his theory.

  He considered another factor: Maria Gomez had somewhat of a reputation in physics. She wasn’t known for her contributions to the field as much as for her ability to show the weaknesses in the contributions of others.

  Nick admitted to himself that the Oregon model, as it was now being called, was inadequate. It had good predictive validity but it lacked proper theoretical underpinnings. Like Zorastrus, Kenny Randall and his friends had observed peculiar phenomena, detected a pattern, and used the pattern to predict a future event. He would receive well-deserved recognition for his accomplishment. But also like Zorastrus, Kenny, and whoever the others were, had not really understood what caused the effect. Kenny had correctly traced it to the nuclear detonations, but that was not the same as explaining it. Nick had been influenced by Kenny’s ripples-in-a-pond idea, attracted to its predictive power and its theoretical simplicity. Gomez, however, had shredded the idea mathematically and substituted her own.

  The Oregon model assumed the time displacement occurred sequentially and was a function of time and distance from the source. It was an assumption rooted in the human experience of linear time. The Gomez model assumed that all time displacement events occurred simultaneously, in all the affected times and locations.

  Because four-dimensional thought did not come easily to Nick, he struggled with Gomez’s idea. However, when Gomez also hypothesized the existence of transient superdense matter as the root of the phenomena, Nick felt some satisfaction in having his contribution to the Oregon model supported. It was the coexistence of these dense strings of matter that created the time/space disruption, the black ripples. Apparently Gogh was hypothesizing that the effects radiate out from the source much like a field around a magnet, except, in this case, the field radiates four dimensionally. The fields are created at the moment of detonation, but Nick, and the rest of the people on the planet who must experience time sequentially, have to live through the effect. The major time displacement they had just experienced had been there since the explosions in the sixties, waiting for the human inhabitants to live through the event.

  As the exchanges between Gomez and Gogh continued, Nick became uneasy. Gomez continued to talk about the original detonations and the time displacement as concurrent events. Gomez was supplying equations to support her theory but cautioning Gogh that the theory was little more than speculation at this point. Gogh, however, ignored the cautions and pushed Gomez to speculate further. Nick did not like the direction of Gogh’s pushes, but knew that intruding would only make Gogh more protective of his convictions.

  Other physicists tried to break in on the discussion, but Gogh only responded to those who seemed supportive of the model. Nick corresponded with some of the others but lacked the expertise to follow the arguments.

  He was about to turn off the network when he noticed a new flag. The name E. Puglisi was unfamiliar to him, but what caught his attention was the description of his model variation: “Projects temporal disruption to near space, and hypothesizes a temporal inversion.” Nick called up the file and was pleased to see the sophisticated mathematics were represented with a model. Nick skipped right to it and was impressed with the graphics. The model showed a ball labeled as the earth surrounded by an ovoid made up of a tangled web of lines, labeled with a mathematical equation Nick recognized as the time waves. After another page of graphics Nick scrolled on. This following graphic showed a slice of the previous page, with the earth apparently in a cone. On top of that cone sat another cone with a smaller sphere sitting in it. The two cones were point to point. The second sphere was labeled the moon. Nick stared at the model for a minute and then scrolled back to the equations. It couldn’t be right, could it? The model projected the time disruption into the space around earth; that was the first c
one. Then Puglisi’s model showed another cone indicating a reversal of the time flow, and the moon was in the second cone. If this Puglisi was right, any time disruption on the moon would be in the opposite direction of that on the earth. On the moon the future came to the past, not the past to the future. Nick checked his list of PresNet advisors, but there was no Puglisi. He checked the access code of Puglisi’s computer, and it showed it was coming from the computer of Dr. Connie Wang, of the University of Hawaii. Whoever Puglisi was, he was not authorized to use the system. Nick realized he was beginning to judge the worth of Puglisi’s model on the unknown person’s credentials, yet Kenny Randall’s own lack of credentials had kept his warnings from being heeded in the first place. Nick vowed not to repeat that mistake. Instead, he typed in a message to Puglisi and sent it.

  Elizabeth appeared in Nick’s office again, just before he was about to leave for the Security Council meeting. She didn’t try to look casual this time but came right to the point.

  “The President’s not himself.” ,

  “In what way?”

  “When he makes a decision, he normally listens to all points of view, and even solicits dissenting opinion. Ever since I’ve known him, he has insisted on having all alternatives before him before he makes a decision. But he isn’t listening now—”

  “To you?” Nick was sure that part of Elizabeth’s concern involved her personal loss of influence with the President.

  Elizabeth looked stung by Nick’s suggestion but didn’t deny it.

  “Not to me, not to any of his advisors. Even Samuel Cannon, who’s been a friend for years, can’t get through to him. He only listens to one person, Dr. Gogh.”