The Hope Chest

by Jacquie D'Alessandro

  “Yes. And our medical scientists say the chromosomal effect is no virus. In my era, machines aren’t advanced enough to change the continuum. And in your time…the science is more primitive, but it is sufficient to determine that the moment you activated the time machine, something happened to the electromagnetic spectrum to distort time.”

  “You keep saying I activated the time machine but I’ve been asleep for weeks.”

  “Then the chromosomal effect has already begun.” Kendar leaned forward and gently touched her cheek. “While we were never certain if the machinery still worked, my coming back in time proves that it’s a fact.”

  “And you aren’t listening. How could I activate the machine while I was asleep?”

  “Maybe your presence, your breathing, your scent or a stray thought or an emotion during your dreams triggered the device. Or perhaps it was your pod itself. We may never know for certain, since we have no idea how the time machine works. But it does or I wouldn’t be here.” He placed a warm hand on her shoulder, his eyes full of sympathy for what she would undoubtedly be feeling if she believed him—which she still didn’t. His story was fantastic, but she slid her gaze to the alien machine, then back to him as he continued, “Somehow you triggered the machine’s operation, and if we don’t shut it down—every woman on Mars will die, including you.”

  “Wait. Wait. You’re going too fast. Why assume I did something? How do you know you didn’t activate the machine?”

  “Because Mars began to blink in and out of time immediately after your arrival.”

  “What does that mean? Blink in and out of time?”

  “Time passes differently on Mars than on Earth—or anywhere else in the galaxy. Think of a light that goes on and off. When it’s on, everything is fine, but when it’s off, it’s as if the rest of the universe is passing us by.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s been happening for three hundred years. And if we don’t work to counteract the effect, history will repeat itself.”

  “And the women will all die?”

  He nodded. “To ensure we didn’t do any more damage we used force fields to prevent human contact with the artifact in 2705. But apparently you triggered the device from your side of the time line.”

  She tried to push aside her doubts for a moment to wrap her mind around his theory. “You think if we find a way to deactivate the machine…we can stabilize time and change the future?”

  He nodded, his eyes intense. “We must restore the balance.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SARA DIDN’T KNOW whether to laugh or cry. “Let me get this straight. You need me to decipher an alien language and figure out how the time machine works to keep Mars in balance, so the time distortion ends and all the women on Mars in 2705 will live.”

  Kendar nodded, his expression grim. “I believe you now understand.”

  She shook her head, confused, full of doubts and wishing that their relationship didn’t need to end. However, as much as she would have liked to explore the sexual side of his nature, she found his bizarre delusion too strange. “You’re insane.”

  At her insult, she expected him to bristle. To argue. To curse. He didn’t react as anticipated, surprising her once again.

  “Do you have a communicator?” Kendar stared at her as if his request made perfect sense, his emotions locked down tight. Sometimes he seemed to have more control over himself than she did, as if he understood how impossible she found his story and was not going to let her doubts upset him. How could the man stay so calm when his delusion was so disturbing?

  He was accusing her of ruining the future of women on Mars. He claimed she was responsible for thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of deaths. No. She shook her head appalled and horrified. She should send him away, but when her gaze caught his, she saw empathy there, as if he understood how much his words were hurting her.

  “Sure. I have a communicator.” She lifted her wrist.

  “Locate a news channel.”

  Sara tuned to the desired frequency and an announcer’s voice echoed through the chamber. “Please stay calm. Stay home. The doctors at our finest hospitals in the capital are working round the clock to find the cause of this unknown ailment affecting women. So far only those over sixty and those younger than five have shown symptoms.”

  Kendar commented, “The weak die first.”

  Sara clicked off the communicator, her stomach tightening with apprehension. No matter how farfetched Kendar’s story, she could no longer ignore the possibility he told the truth. With a combination of genetics and bioengineering marvels, mankind had wiped out the last known illnesses over a century ago. Hospitals were no longer filled with sick patients but by those who required bodily repair due to natural aging or accidents. For Kendar to arrive at a time when people were once again struck by an unknown ailment lent credibility to his statements and was too much of a coincidence to ignore. Besides, from what she could comprehend, Kendar had nothing to gain from lying. And he wasn’t asking anything more from her than to study the machine—which was what she’d come here to do anyway. She accepted his story. She’d activated the alien time machine and brought him back in time. That’s why all those women were sick. Nothing else made sense. At the implications, she began to shake and her gut clenched tight. “How long do I have?”

  “A few days to live, but at the end…” He hesitated to speak the unspeakable.

  “At the end, I’ll be too sick to work?” Sara concluded, her tone grim.

  “I’m sorry.”

  No pity entered his tone and for that she was grateful. To think of her own death saddened her, shook her, upset her, of course, but to think that she might be the cause of the death of thousands… It was a burden so horrible, that for the moment, she didn’t want to ask any more questions. She shoved aside her food, too sickened to eat, and she couldn’t help thinking that if Kendar came from a future where she’d failed, that she was bound to fail again. Ice seeped into her bones.

  Was the future already written? Had the Sara Tolliver in Kendar’s history ever met this Kendar? She had no idea. The circular logic made her dizzy. It was like wondering which came first, the chicken or the egg, and she decided to ignore theory and concentrate on the pictographs.

  Her communicator beeped and she answered, “Yes?”

  “Sara, welcome to Station 32,” Dixon’s hearty greeting warmed her frozen core. The normalcy of his tone reminded her that while she lived, she could work, and while she could work, there was hope. Perhaps Kendar’s warning would give her a head start on the project. Dixon went on, “I’m sorry I’m not there to welcome you in person, but I was called to the capital to give input on the women’s crisis. If you need anything, contact my assistant, Terry. Sorry, I have to go.”

  What else could go wrong? Sara had been counting on Dixon’s help. Now, she had no idea when he’d return. Under normal circumstances, Sara would have studied the exposed part of the artifact for weeks, maybe months, before attempting to dig out the rest. But these were not normal circumstances. Time was of the essence. If she hoped to decipher the alien language, she needed access to as many pictographs as she could unearth, and that meant digging out the artifact as quickly as possible without causing damage. Perhaps Dixon’s assistant might be of help.

  Terry had been quite enthusiastic about Sara coming to Mars. She’d helped make all the arrangements, sending a personal note of what to bring from Earth and what she would find once she’d arrived. From the friendly notes, Sara had the impression the girl was lonely and looked forward to some female company.

  She and Kendar found Terry outside the chamber about a hundred yards away. On her stomach in the Martian dirt, she was busy taking holopics of a set of stairs that led into red sand. She looked up at their approach, her cute nose and round cheekbones smudged with dirt, a friendly smile of greeting revealing a crooked tooth that lent charm to her grin.

  Terry dusted off her hands and knees, then shook the
ir hands. A girl with leathery skin, a wide smile and intelligent eyes, she hugged Sara, but couldn’t seem to stop staring at Kendar.

  Sara didn’t blame her. Kendar was gorgeous, but still she took a possessive step closer to him. More bothered by Terry’s interest in Kendar than Sara wanted to admit, her voice came out sharper than she intended, and she skipped the small talk after making introductions. “Terry, we need an air pump, hoses and nozzles. Where does Dixon store his equipment?”

  Terry rubbed her face, making the smudges worse, but somehow her face now looked twice as cute. “Dr. Dixon didn’t plan to use that kind of equipment for several months. I’m not sure it’s arrived yet, but all our gear is over there.” She pointed to a shed and led them across the site with enthusiastic steps. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Sara appreciated Terry’s helpfulness, but after they entered the shed, she was appalled at the limited equipment that consisted of shovels, picks, brushes and buckets. Where were the thermoluminescence machines to help with dating the Martian artifacts? What about infrared, sonohistograms and geographic information systems computers on which to build holo-models?

  “This is it?” Sara turned to Terry, her heart sinking. The task before her was enormous, and if this was all the equipment she had to work with, finding, never mind reading, the pictographs would be like trying to locate an intact meteorite in the Marebrium Crater.

  “Funds are not as ample as we’d like.” Terry’s apologetic tone was tempered by a what-did-you-expect shrug that emphasized her slender body. She gestured to a bunch of mining junk, left over from the days before the atmosphere was breathable. “Dixon hoped to salvage a pump from one of the rebreathers, but he’s never gotten around to it.”

  “Perhaps, I could…” Kendar wound his way through the piles of dusty spacesuits, wire, barrels and odd pieces of scrap metal and picked up an old air hose that had once been used to tether a man so he could breathe as he mined underground. With little trouble Kendar unscrewed the fitting from a battered suit, wound the hose over his shoulder and continued searching through the junk piles.

  “What are you looking for?” Terry’s gaze followed Kendar with curiosity and she self-consciously swept a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “A working pump. A generator.” Kendar didn’t seem to notice Terry’s attractive flush, his gaze sweeping over the metal parts and settling on a tool box.

  Terry looked from Sara to Kendar and back, biting her lower lip as if trying to figure out their relationship. “There’s a broken heater and pump out back, but it lacks fuel cells.”

  Fuel cells? Sara knew exactly where to get some—if the new ones would work with such old equipment. “My pod has fuel cells. If you can modify them—”

  “I will try,” Kendar cut in.

  Terry stumbled and raised a hand to her forehead. “Whew. The dust in here must be getting to me. Anyone else feel a little light-headed?”

  Concerned by Terry’s symptoms, Sara took her arm, alarmed by her sudden pallor and her dilated pupils. “Let’s go outside.”

  “Thanks. I’m so glad you came to work here.” Terry squeezed Sara’s hand. “I hope we can be friends.”

  “Me, too.”

  Terry gave Sara a piercing look. “I hope you don’t mind me speaking frankly.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m not the kind of girl to cut in on someone else’s action. No worries there, okay?”

  Startled by Terry’s openness, then pleased, Sara helped Terry walk away from the dusty shed, unsure what to say. “Kendar and I… We aren’t… We just met.”

  Once Terry breathed the fresh air, she didn’t feel better. She trembled and sweat beaded her upper lip. “The doctors told my mother that I don’t have a strong constitution. If I’d been born a century ago, I likely wouldn’t have made it past my teens.” She breathed heavily. “Whatever that sickness is going round, I think I’ve got it.”

  Hoping Terry would recover soon, Sara helped her to her quarters, leaving Kendar to collect what he could. “It’s probably just the dust still in your lungs.” Or perhaps the power of suggestion.

  Sara wished she could believe that but she didn’t. Between Kendar’s appearance in the chamber where he’d seemed to come through a solid wall and the strange sickness on Mars, she’d lost any remaining doubts about Kendar’s story. Women on Mars had less than a week to live—unless she succeeded in turning off the alien machine. So she hadn’t a moment to waste.

  SARA RETURNED to the chamber, picked up a holocamera and photographed the pictographs that were already visible. She tried not to draw conclusions but noted facts. The aliens used no straight lines within the pictographs, nor did they align the pictographs in rows. Instead, the symbols appeared random and didn’t remind her of anything recognizable. She suspected that while directions might be inscribed on the ancient machinery, the makers had assumed the viewer would already know how to read.

  Earth’s first satellite to leave the solar system had been fashioned to draw on basic mathematical principles to help build a common vocabulary. But this artifact wasn’t designed that way. Nor was it like the Rosetta Stone where several languages told the exact same message. What she had before her was the equivalent to one page from a computer manual. Not only did she have to decipher the language, she had to figure out enough to balance the time continuum—whatever the hell that meant.

  She might be alone, but her computer could analyze the symbols against every hypothesis known to man. However, the aliens might have based their language on, for example, a five-hundred-day calendar, or on how often their home world suffered an earthquake—random cycles that would mean nothing to the computer. Sara tried not to think about the next-to-impossible task before her, or about how scientists over the next three hundred years had failed to read the alien markings.

  Instead, she sketched on her pad of paper, an antiquated habit she’d acquired during her schoolgirl days when she’d thought using ancient equipment had been cool. Later, she’d scan the data into the computer and decide where to dig next. Usually, several different types of machines processed the information to determine what was rock and what was an object. Other machines drew three-dimensional maps. Without them, any digging would be going in cold and could damage a critical piece of machinery. She wished Dixon was here and wondered if he’d return if she told him Kendar’s story. Yeah, he’d probably come back all right, to kick her off the site and get her mental help for believing that a machine millions of years old could transport a man through time.

  Lost in her thoughts, she jumped at the sound of footsteps and carefully put down her notes before turning around. Kendar entered the chamber carrying an assortment of hoses, fittings and a modified heat pump. After depositing his finds on the floor, he strode to the pod, removed the fuel cell and placed it into a slot. When the motor purred to life, he grinned a satisfied smile. And despite everything she’d learned today, her pulse raced.

  It figured that the one time she’d finally found a man that interested her, she didn’t have time to pursue him. Still, she could enjoy the sight of him as he welded the equipment with ease. At thirty percent of Earth’s pull, the low gravity made it possible for her to lift much more, but that old pump must weigh a ton and he hefted it with one arm. Brawn and brains. A nice combination. Kendar’s cleverness and intelligence combined with his positive attitude were exactly what she needed right now and she took a moment to appreciate him. With his bulging muscles, the man exuded masculinity, but as he went about his task with a matter-of-factness, he impressed her even more.

  “Now, I can uncover the rest of the pictographs for you.” Picking up the nozzle he headed toward a section of wall that appeared to be dirt.

  “Wait a second.” She was the archeologist. She should be making the decisions, not ogling his muscles. Perhaps the residual traces of the drugs weren’t totally out of her system as she’d assumed. “It would make sense to start near the pictographs we can already see.”r />
  Kendar kept striding toward solid dirt and rock, his confidence radiating from him like the sun’s corona. “You’re forgetting that I have the advantage of having already seen the machine. This area is what you want.”

  Sheesh. Right. How could she have forgotten he was from a future where the site had already been fully excavated? Probably because although she’d decided to believe him, her reservations remained huge. Either that or her poor brain couldn’t quite take in all the ramifications of time travel. Especially going forward.

  Sara was accustomed to ruins, relics, studying the past. As a child, she’d immersed herself in her most precious possession, the journal of her ancestor Lady Amanda Pratt. At the memory, her fingers itched to hold the journal that had always comforted her during times of trouble, but watching Kendar airbrush the machinery, removing eons of rock and sand until patches of the machine shone through, mesmerized her.

  She’d thought that Dixon had meticulously wiped the machine clean, but the newly revealed ancient metal gleamed as brightly as new. Kendar had obviously known the exact location to dig and she realized that squashed the last of her doubts about whether he’d really traveled from the future. The place he’d chosen to uncover hadn’t been logical, and yet, he’d unerringly found the right spot.

  Despite her fascination with the relic, she couldn’t help admiring Kendar. After his initial astonishment that he’d traveled back in time, he’d taken the news with a surprisingly optimistic and practical attitude. He’d plainly said what needed to be done and then hadn’t once complained about the primitive conditions or the lack of help or equipment, or about her asking him for proof. Nor had he expressed dismay at having been ripped from his place in time.