“But Belle will not be able to join you on those trips,” Bonnie said. “It will vary the timeline too much to make the effort of value.”
“So all this information and how to use the crystal in this box in front of you is in the library,” Duster said. “Take your time, go slowly, plan your trips into the past.”
“And be careful,” Bonnie said.
“And when we have eliminated the dictator from all timelines,” Duster said, we will update the war room in the year 2299, and then I hope we can all meet once again at the institute for a Christmas party in the year 2020.”
“Until then,” Bonnie said. “Take care and be careful.”
Duster nodded and the two small holographic images vanished.
The button was no longer blinking and the silence in the cavern seemed suddenly very heavy.
Belle squeezed his hand and looked at him. “Seems we have things to do and an ongoing mission.”
“It does,” Zane said, nodding. “And it seems we have a way out of here after all.”
He opened the wooden box to see a simple dial and some wires hooked up to a crystal tucked into the back of the box against the stone.
“You would think they could make a time travel machine look a little more modern by now,” Belle said.
“As long as it works,” Zane said. “I don’t care what it looks like.”
“That I agree with,” she said, laughing as he closed the lid on the wooden box.
Then he quickly kissed her. “But before we do anything else, I need to take a shower and we need to get something to eat.”
“I’ll bring you some fresh clothes,” she said. “And I promise to behave myself.”
“What’s the fun in that?” he asked, laughing as he turned and headed for the bathroom.
And it turned out that she offered to scrub his back, and he had accepted, and as far as he was concerned, that was heaven in any century.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
December 31st, 3166
Inside the Crystal Caverns
SHE AND ZANE had spent almost a month, mostly in the library, trying to get updated on the huge battle they were involved in. The library was perfectly named. It was a large cavern with ten-foot-tall shelves jammed with books from various centuries. Most of the aisles were so close together, it was almost impossible to walk through the stacks without turning sideways.
One area near the door was filled with massive wooden tables and the stone floor in that area had been covered in a thick carpet. There were reading chairs, a couple of old brown couches that looked to be from the 20th century, and a fake fireplace that imitated flame and even put out a little heat.
It was, by far, the most comfortable place in the caverns.
She had taken over three large wooden tables for her research and he had taken over three for his. Both tables had numbers of computer-like terminals on them that also accessed large data bases stored somewhere in the rocks.
They slept every night in one of the two bedrooms off the kitchen and ate decent packaged foods that mostly tasted of nothing in particular.
But most of the time they were in the library.
The war room was just a stark stone room with the walls covered in vast computer-generated images that showed timelines in representations of millions in a single line.
The timelines looked to Belle like massive trees branching out. Clearly Bonnie and Duster and their incredible math skills had been able to trace major timelines that broke off from events through history.
Over half the room had the timelines colored in green, but almost half the room showed red indicating they were timelines that the dictator still functioned.
Belle had not liked going into that war room. It was flat too depressing to realize that every thin line was thousands and thousands of world where millions suffered and eventually the world was destroyed.
After a month, they had decided to make their first trip back in time.
The crystal in their booth jumped them back into the year 2299. That was the year that Duster had said they would update the war room if the dictator had been defeated.
No one else was there. They had spent ten days studying the war room to discover more updates from the other founders. The dictator was still in control of a vast amount of the world in a vast amount of timelines. And his control extended forward for over a century until almost all of humanity was destroyed in those timelines.
Most of the red lines just ended like trees cut off in their growth.
Zane said there might be a way to really stop the dictator in a more effective way instead of working timeline cluster to timeline cluster, as the rest were doing, but he said it was so crazy, he didn’t want to talk about it.
So they decided to jump back to their future time. They both felt safer there. There the old mine was sealed up and the deep chamber very, very well hidden under the rubble of the old one.
They had left no sign or evidence they had been in 2299. Both of them, for some reason, felt that was very important.
They didn’t want the other founders to know they had yet returned in any future time.
They spent almost another six months in the research library in 3166, going over every detail of centuries of battles with the dictator through thousands and thousands of timelines.
Killing the dictator when he was young had worked in many, many timeline clusters, but he had set up guards on himself and his family, so doing that no longer worked.
So when they returned to 3166, they both first returned to focusing on what Bonnie and Duster had wanted them to focus on. She went looking for genealogical clusters of lines starting suddenly to find possible crystal cavern openings.
Zane went back to looking for more openings through research in ground structure and known cave entrances.
Both of them were experts in doing research, and they both knew how to do it. So the days went easily, and Belle enjoyed Zane’s company a great deal. She could never have imagined feeling so comfortable locked underground with another person. Yet not once during those six months did she feel she needed to get away from him.
In fact, the longer they were together, the more it felt like they just were together.
They were a team.
On the research side, Zane had spent most of his time poring over geological maps along the 42nd parallel and any historical reference to large mining operations along that line.
She had buried herself in searching for clusters of genealogical starts.
What she had found bothered her more than she wanted to admit. All of the clusters of genealogical lines like hers that just started cold had been found and already covered by the other founders.
And none of them were near any logical entrance to the crystal caverns. The clusters seemed to always come from two people as hers came from Dawn and Madison. And most could be explained away by a few dozen dictator’s loyalists who had backgrounds in the dictator’s time.
So the genealogical side was flat a dead end on tracking where a new crystal entrance might be.
In fact, Zane said to her when she told him that he could find no other possible crystal mine entrance.
Period.
So on New Year’s Eve, the two of them sat at the wooden table in the kitchen munching on popcorn and drinking hot chocolate and talking about their findings.
“I’m coming to only one true result,” Zane said, shaking his head and staring into her eyes with those wonderful dark eyes of his.
“There is no other entrance to the crystal caverns.” Belle said.
Zane nodded. “There might be in some distant and extreme other timelines, but in any timeline that we would recognize, that mine shaft up there is it.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“I am,” Zane said. “Completely sure. All the other crystal caverns are far too removed in distance and time and timelines from the surface of a world we might know, even accounting for any of those side rooms getting too clos
e to the surface.”
“So how did the dictator, or someone who knows him in 2320, get into the mine?”
Zane shook his head. “I honestly don’t know, but Bonnie and Duster clearly had an inkling of that being possible when they destroyed the mine tunnel. But too late at that point.”
Belle had to agree with that. There must have been a period of time in the early 2300s that they let the security of the mine lag. Maybe for decades. Destroying the mine tunnel above could have only meant that Duster and Bonnie were worried about the caverns already being discovered as well.
“So what do we know about the dictator?” Zane asked.
Belle just shrugged. “The man and his family were nothing special. He simply gained power through the normal political process and then in the early 24th century, he became President of the United States and from 2320 forward he never let go of power. It became clear in short order to Duster and Bonnie and the rest of the original founders that the man was using time travel to control those around him by various means.”
Zane nodded, so Belle went on after munching on some popcorn first.
“The dictator basically annexed the rest of the world with threats and annihilation over the next forty years after he controlled this country and ruled the world with force and terror for over a hundred years, never seeming to age much at all when he was seen, until a major war and following plague simply destroyed most of the human population.
“So it’s this mine that is the problem,” Zane said. “And Duster and his family finding it in the first place.”
Belle nodded. “And without seeing the mine, Bonnie told me that she and Duster would have never started working on their time travel theories.”
Zane nodded and the two of them sat there in silence.
“You have an idea, don’t you?” Belle asked.
Belle had a hunch she knew what he was going to say, but she didn’t like it, so she would rather let Zane say it out loud.
Zane nodded. “I do, and because we are where we are at, we are the only two who can pull it off. We find a timeline where he was cleared out and use that as a base in the cavern above.”
Belle nodded.
“And then we jump to a timeline where he has not been cleared out. Then we jump back and destroy this mine before Bonnie and Duster can see it. We set a timer so we can get out before we also vanish in that timeline.”
Zane had been right. She hated the idea. Because without the mine, Zane would live his life a hundred years in her future and she would never meet him.
And that she could no longer imagine.
But she could also no longer imagine letting a single man destroy humanity in millions of timelines.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
December 31st, 3166
Inside the Crystal Caverns
IT HAD TAKEN Zane a few minutes to fully explain his plan to her. Since the dictator had been stopped in so many timelines, Zane had no intention of not being with Belle.
But just not in every timeline.
Not in the timelines where the dictator ruled.
Zane had finally convinced her and the two of them had spent the next four days learning how to use the explosives that Duster and Bonnie had stored in the cave. Zane had worked with explosives before and timed switches to open up some caves, so he knew enough to just be dangerous.
But they were both great at studying something, and with Belle double and triple checking him every step of the way, in a few days he felt comfortable with the idea of handling enough explosive power to completely bring down the mine tunnel so that no one would dig it out again.
And he figured if they destroyed the mine in 1778, right after Duster and Bonnie had put in all the security, there would be no reason for any of Duster’s relatives to open the played out mine again.
But the more they worked on his plan, the more Zane didn’t like it.
Belle even said one day over lunch that she felt the focus of the founders in this fight had been all wrong. They had assumed that the dictator had found another opening. And they had assumed the mine here was impossible to both find and get into.
And that their articles were to blame.
Zane had agreed that he too thought the founders’ focus had been wrong. Blowing up that mine tunnel was just another path.
So they both decided they would step back and look at everything again and spend a few weeks, since they had all the time they needed, to come up with a better idea.
It was a week later that Belle finally brought up a better plan.
And a more logical explanation of what had happened.
They had just finished lunch and Belle had asked him to look at something in her research in the library.
She brought up a screen on her large computer terminal among piles of books on one of her tables showing basically a family tree of the dictator.
Zane was surprised as he studied the very complex family tree illustrated on the screen. “You have all this on the man?”
Belle nodded. “The work that Bonnie and Duster had the institute do on this project is stunning in how clear and complete it is back through history.”
“The dictator himself wouldn’t even know some of this,” Zane said, staring at the screen.
“Not unless he would have been studying his own family for decades,” Belle said. “And then had the resources that Bonnie and Duster and the institute put together over a full century of work after we left.”
Zane was starting to catch on, but nodded that Belle go on.
“We need to assume the dictator has all his immediate family in history now covered,” Belle said, “but we can also assume that there is only so far he can go back in time in any crystal without ending up in the crystal cavern above and risking exposure.”
She drew a line on the family tree around 2220. “I want to assume that it was the expansion of people who knew about the institute of Step Three that caused him to discover the crystals.”
Zane nodded. “So he might have gotten the crystals he ended up using from the institute instead of the mine above.”
“Exactly,” Belle said. “Those crystal rooms for travel are huge and hold thousands of crystals and all it would take would be one person not happy with the institute in 2220 to replace a real crystal with a dummy crystal and take out the real one.”
“I tried to sneak back in time by simply using a crystal clear to the back of one room,” Zane said. “It didn’t work, but I sure thought it did.”
“Exactly,” Belle said.
“And they wouldn’t need to have a mathematics genius,” Zane said. “All they would have to do would be to smuggle out a crystal and one box from the back of one room and a few crystals.”
“Exactly,” Belle said. “Replace a real box with a fake one, then use the time travel device for some personal gain and have it eventually fall into the wrong hands. The dictator’s hands after he became president.”
“Security can always be breached,” Zane said, nodding. “That makes a ton more sense than finding and then breaching this mine above us.”
“It does,” Belle said.
“So what are you thinking?” Zane asked.
She looked away from her computer terminal and smiled at him and it was the first real smile she had given him since discovering they were actually safe in 3166.
“We don’t know who will be the thief,” Belle said, “but we can go back to almost the start of the institute and make sure that Bonnie and Duster and Director Parks are alert and can catch the person.”
“That will stop a lot of the dictator’s timelines,” Zane said, “but not all of them.”
“I know,” Belle said. “So let’s assume the dictator can’t go back any farther than one hundred years, since Bonnie and Duster designed those devices in the institute to hold at that.”
She drew a hundred year line across the dictator’s family tree.
Zane liked the look of that line. In fact, he liked it more than
he wanted to admit.
“To kill any plant or tree completely,” Belle said, “we need to kill it at its roots. If we do that, combined with making sure that Bonnie and Duster and Director Parks increase security, I think we take the dictator out of all the timelines.”
She circled on the screen one name right at the bottom of the family tree.
Zane stared at the name. Albion Jones.
“If we don’t allow Albion Jones to marry miss Edda Seavy in Moscow, Idaho, in June of 1902, this tree dies.”
Belle killed the connection between the two people on the tree showing that they got married and had seven children and the entire family tree vanished.
Zane stared at that and then kissed Belle, long and hard.
And she kissed him back.
Maybe, just maybe, they had a way out of all this.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
July 18th, 2020
Boise, Idaho
STOPPING THE MARRIAGE between Albion Jones and Edda Seavy had turned out to be very, very easy for two people with more than enough time to spend.
Albion was from the Twin Falls area of Idaho in the southern part of the state, while Edda was a local farm girl from a town called Palouse near Moscow in the northern part of the state.
With some research, Belle and Zane had discovered that Albion had sent out applications for three schools and been accepted to all three, picking the engineering department at the new University of Idaho land grant college in the farm community of Moscow, Idaho, over a similar acceptance to an engineering school in Corvallis, Oregon.
Smith's Monthly #17 Page 20