Black Tuesday (Area 51: Time Patrol)

by Mayer, Bob

  Ragnarok raised a hand in greeting and the two vessels met with a slight bump. Loddin threw a rope up and one of the Vikings secured the smaller vessel. The man who plied his trade in corpses scrambled up the side.

  “Ragnarok Bloodhand.” Loddin’s voice was hoarse, a man not used to speaking to others, spending most of his time alone on the ocean. Loddin put his hand out and Ragnarok grasped his forearm and they formally greeted each other.

  “Lika-Loddin, greetings,” Ragnarok replied. “One hopes you are not carrying any relative of mine.”

  “I am not.” He looked past Ragnarok and took in the crew. Then he was staring at Roland and then Tam Nok.

  “Are there any supplies you need?” Ragnarok asked.

  “Who is she?” Loddin bluntly asked.

  “A Disir,” Ragnarok replied.

  “Ah,” Loddin said. “Interesting.”

  “How so?” Ragnarok asked.

  “Strange things are afoot,” Loddin said. “Berserkers are not far away.”

  “How far?” Ragnarok asked. “What direction?”

  Loddin nodded his head from the direction he’d come and in which they were heading. “They are an hour ahead of you.”

  “Ahh,” Ragnarok said. “They will sack and pillage the monastery before us.”

  Loddin shook his head. “I do not think that is their goal.”

  “What is it then?” Tam Nok asked.

  “I think they seek the Standing Stones,” Loddin said.

  “What Standing Stones?” Tam Nok asked.

  “You will see them just past the beach,” Loddin said. “A circle of stones. Similar circles are here and there among the islands. Strange places,” he added, with a glance at Tam Nok. “It must have something to do with the darkness.”

  Roland decided to enter the conversation. “What darkness?”

  Loddin looked at him. “I do not know you. What is your family?” He smiled, revealing rotting teeth. “In case I come across you in the course of business.”

  “His family is far from here,” Tam Nok said.

  “As is yours, I am sure,” Loddin said. He nodded over his shoulder. “There was a fog bank. A most unusual one near the shore. Near the stones. A black fog. I’ve seen the like before. I always steer clear.”

  “A gate,” Roland said, before he realized he wasn’t supposed to say that.

  “Yes,” Tam Nok confirmed, which helped Roland feel better.

  “A gate,” Loddin said. “Curious. To where?”

  “No one is sure,” Tam Nok said.

  Ragnarok was a little bit behind and focused on what he did understand. “How many berserker ships?”

  “One,” Loddin replied.

  “Crew?”

  Loddin looked around. “Roughly the same as what you have.”

  “Who are these berserkers?” Roland asked.

  Ragnarok shook his head in disgust. “They are Vikings with no home. Who live for war for no cause beyond the fighting and the payment they receive. They have no honor. They wear wolf skins, if they wear anything at all. Some fight naked. Their shields are painted with blood. One will throw himself onto a shield wall, knowing he will die, to break it for the others.”

  Tam Nok cut to the key issue. “Why are they here? Going to the same place?”

  Loddin shrugged. “That is your problem. How would I know their intentions?”

  “Whose banner were they rowing under?” Ragnarok asked.

  “The black.”

  Roland could tell the Viking didn’t like the answer. “What does that mean?”

  “They are serving no one,” Ragnarok said. “They are rogue.”

  Loddin seemed bored with it all. “I would like some salt. And fresh water.”

  Ragnarok waved a hand and one of his men went to get the supplies. “Will you be returning home?”

  Loddin looked at Ragnarok as if he were crazy. “Of course not. I anticipate an increase in business very shortly.”

  Los Angeles, California, 1969. 29 October

  Scout felt comfortable because she fit right in. All the girls were slender. Everyone was slender. Food was still food in 1969 and people metabolized all of it just getting through their day. She paused and accessed the font of mostly useless information that had been downloaded into her brain and pulled out one amazing tidbit: Doritos hadn’t even been invented yet! She couldn’t imagine Edith Frobish including that in the download, so someone in that big Possibility Palace had a slightly warped sense of what was important and what wasn’t.

  Scout knew her mother would like it here, then realized her mother had liked it here. Well not here, here. But this time. Roughly. Okay, probably a little bit later. It occurred to Scout that she couldn’t picture her mother as a college student. She’d always been her mother. Had her mother partied? Hung out? Made out? Dropped out?

  Whatever.

  People looked fit, but the clothes were awful. And some of the girls more generously endowed than Scout were going to rue giving up much needed support for their delicate breast tissue. She wondered if her mother had had sizable breasts once upon a time before she dieted and exercised herself into a stick?

  Then she wondered why she was wondering about her mother. She was sure Frasier, the Nightstalker shrink, could figure that one out, but like Nada, she sure wasn’t going to let him into her brain, and that thought stopped her in her tracks as she remembered Nada and that he was gone. Into the past and into death. Long buried in Arlington. Or yet to be buried at Arlington. Yet to die.

  Where was Nada in 1969? Scout wondered, realizing she didn’t know how old he was, or had been.

  Her head hurt and with great force of will she turned her thoughts away from the sadness of remembering her friend.

  Scout continued across the expanse of grass, noting that these college kids seemed more mature in some way than her compatriots. Of course they had a war going on, but her generation had a war going on. However, this generation also had a thing called the draft.

  Yeah, that could make a difference, Scout thought. A big one.

  Scout paused in the shade of a tree on the surprisingly warm late October day and her brain looped back to clothes and accouterments. What a sad way to protest the establishment by ruining one’s breasts. A mundane thought of no real consequence, but it was all rather overwhelming. Rifts, a zombie, Fireflies . . . whatever. Those she had faced and dealt with.

  But she was alone and she was in a different time. She wasn’t sure which was more troubling. She missed Nada more than she could acknowledge without becoming a blubbering mass of protoplasm. And to actually be in the past, before her birth . . . there was something fundamentally disturbing about it. So she was focusing back on the mundane to ground herself.

  In the here. And, more importantly, the now.

  Another observation. No backpacks. How odd. Surely there were backpacks somewhere in 1969, or was that solely the province of soldiers—The Things They Carried? Everyone was carrying stuff in their hands. Who would be the first to start putting their stuff into a pack they slung over their shoulder and carried on their back? Seemed a no-brainer, especially since the girls had long bags made of cloth or macramé hanging on one shoulder. But the concept of taking that strap and simply putting it over the head to the other side hadn’t seemed to occur to anyone.

  Or had it, but no one did it because no one did it?

  Except mailmen. Oh, Scout immediately realized. How sexist. But in this day and age it was mailmen. And stewardesses, not flight attendants—Coffee, Tea or Me? Scout knew that despite all the information downloaded into her brain, it didn’t change who she was, and it was going to be hard to keep the gender thing straight because that specific revolution was bubbling and fomenting in 1969 but not yet ascendant. Everything was still male unless specified not male.

  Scout moved out from under the shade of the tree, heading toward a street that marked the edge of campus where there were lots of students, non-students, and small storefronts.
The sort of place one could pick up information. And find a belt maker.

  But the hair thing really bothered her. Lots of lank hair and split ends.

  It surprised and depressed her to suddenly realize she was a lot more like her mother than she’d ever imagined. She had to cut the people here some slack because there were probably no shampoos to close the pores of the hair follicles.

  She passed by some long-haired guy (badly needing a washing) who stuck out a mimeographed piece of paper. She automatically took it, realizing that was wrong. Nada wouldn’t have approved. What if the Shadow had put poison on it? But damn, Nada was dead, and he had indeed been a bit paranoid, and damn she missed him so bad sometimes she thought her chest would explode and her heart would be spread out all over this beautiful lawn here in beautiful sunny California in a thousand little pieces.

  Mission.

  Scout glanced down at the paper. A protest against the war in Vietnam.

  This generation’s war. Her generation had inherited the Global War on Terrorism where the enemy was . . . well, who the hell was the enemy? And how had some people in a country most Americans had never heard become the enemy back here and now?

  Scout wanted to turn back to the long-haired, smelly guy and tell him: Hey, dude, you did stop that. Good job. Keep it up. The people we’re killing will be selling America furniture inside of a generation. And consider a bath? Not like her generation was going to stop the War on Terrorism.

  What a future to look forward to: perpetual war.

  Couldn’t we do better? Scout wondered.

  Scout stuffed the piece of paper in her own patchwork big bag hanging on one shoulder, and resisted the temptation to slip the bag over her head to the other shoulder and carry it in a more comfortable way. Frak knows how that would change history and cause a ripple to cause a shift to cause a tsunami. Because of the bag on the wrong shoulder the timeline was lost!

  Besides, it would be hard to start a trend here in 1969 without social media. 2014, sure. But not now. She imagined trends had to start now by people actually interacting with people, not with a machine in between the people.

  Wow! Scout came to an abrupt halt as she realized what was really, really different. No cell phones. No laptops. People were actually talking to each other. Looking each other in the eye. No one was head down, tuned out, checking their e-mail. No one had their hand to the side of their head, ignoring the person they were next to in order to talk to someone they weren’t next to. People were reading books, not computer screens.

  Surreal.

  She was here to save the Internet, but was the Internet really a good thing?

  Scout stepped over the grass onto the sidewalk and left UCLA proper. Across the street was a head shop, what would be called a “medicinal marijuana store” in her time and sold cookies and would even be legal in some states, but in 1969 it sold everything but the weed. She was sure it was a place she could find information.

  In a corner there was a guy hammering out leather covers for bongs.

  No weed for open sale but they sold bongs. What the frak else would someone do with a bong other than smoke weed, Scout wondered? They couldn’t do backpacks, but they had excellent bongs?

  The guy was thin, like pretty much everyone else, and had no bulky muscles. No universal gyms. Heck, Nike hadn’t even invented a shoe yet, so running really was running, like from danger or to get somewhere faster. Scout was sure there were waffle makers around. Someone would just have to connect the dots. In Oregon. Oh yeah, even that was in the download. Still a year out from borrowing the wife’s waffle iron.

  Scout checked out the guy working the leather. He had long hair that was too curly for his face. He had scruffy facial hair indicating an inadequate razor, not an attempt at style.

  So that market, along with pillows, hair color, and some others, was still wide open.

  He looked up and saw her and smiled.

  With teeth that hadn’t been whitened or perfectly straightened. Scout remembered all that time wearing braces and putting those stupid, tiny rubber bands in and being miserable. But his teeth were pretty good, the result of genes, not cosmetic dentists. It occurred to Scout that things here and now relied more on what you were born with rather than what you could buy to change what you were born with, and she wanted to think about that, but he was talking.

  “Like the belt?” Scout was still thinking about her orthodontist who probably owned black leather and whips, and had a dungeon in his house for his weekend relaxing, so he kept speaking. “Did I sell that to you? I’d have remembered a groovy chick like you.”

  Did he just say “groovy”? And “chick”? Was he Austin Powers?

  He stood up. “I’m John. I made the belt. You like it? What’s your name?”

  She finally pulled herself into the moment. “Scout.”

  “Far out, man! To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  Okay, kinda cute and he’d read a book. Or seen the movie she immediately knew, as the data dumped into her consciousness: book published 1960; movie 1962. Atticus Finch, aka Gregory Peck, standing tall in the face of racism, stupidity, and more.

  “It was a gift,” Scout said. “I’m looking for the person you made it for.”

  He cocked his head, puzzled. “You don’t know who gave it to you?”

  “It was, uh, given to me by a secret admirer, you know? Anonymously.” Oh yeah, she thought. Anonymous. Hacking stuff. She could stop them in their tracks today, eh? “Do you remember who you made it for?”

  “Oh, sure, I made that for Luke. Put his name on the inside.” He reached for her waist in a way that would get him pepper-sprayed in Scout’s time.

  “I saw the name,” she said. She twisted the belt so he could see the inside. “What’s this stuff?” She pointed at the hieroglyphics.

  John frowned. “I burned the name, but not that other stuff. What’s that, some sort of art?”

  So Luke put it there for her to see, which is what she’d figured from the start.

  “Where’s Luke at?”

  He gave her an odd look and Scout regretted dangling the preposition. People weren’t texting or using emoticons yet. They still tried to speak proper English. Or was it a stupid question?

  “So where would I find Luke?”

  Argh, Scout thought. Still a coordinate conjunction and not some strung-out interjection. How the frak did she know all this grammar stuff she wondered? She suspected Edith had added that in. She looked like the type of person that might throw some extra education into the download. Poor Roland, Scout thought. His brain was probably exploding.

  “Luke’s a brainiac,” John said. “He’ll be in the library most likely.” He smiled. “Plus he does a little dealing there. So people usually know where to find him. You know. Everyone goes to the library.”

  A library as a social hub? Made sense in this time of no laptops, cell phones, Wi-Fi, and info-dumping brain machines.

  She smiled at him. “Thanks,” she said, while thinking that if he was still alive in her time (not drafted and becoming fodder, not smashed in a car accident, whatever), that he was probably some neatly barbered, silver-haired guy checking his texts.

  “How about a bong?” he asked. “We could check one out together.”

  She saw Wall Street in his future, perfect salesman.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  He did that head-cocking thing, confused. Oh, yeah, smoking now meant cigarettes, not pot. And she realized a lot of people she’d passed coming across campus had been smoking. A totally different world despite the Surgeon General warning first issued three years earlier.

  While her mission was the computer network, still in its infancy, there was much else that would change. Cigarettes would go the way of the snuffboxes before them. Actually, why smoke when you could get coffee on every corner and pop an Adderall, Scout thought. Then she realized she’d seen no green mermaid signs on this street.

  1969 was going to be hard to negotiate, free love or not,
Scout realized.

  “What do you do?” John asked, pulling her out of her Starbucks reverie.

  I work for the Time Patrol, Scout was tempted to reply, just to see his reaction. “I’m a student.”

  “Far out.” As if almost everyone who walked in here wasn’t.

  “So where’s the library?” Scout asked, realizing that was a really poor segue.

  But John didn’t seem to pick up on a student not knowing where the library was to be the slightest bit odd. Probably too much hitting on the bong. He walked over to the front of the store and pointed. “Powell Library. They have a bunch of smaller ones on campus. But he’d be in the main one. There. That building. But why don’t you just hang out here for a while?”

  “Thank you,” Scout said. “Maybe I’ll be back,” saying the last three words in her best Arnold, which earned her a confused look from John. Ahead of his time. Literally. He probably thought she was a nut.

  But wait, Arnold was here. Not here, here. But in California, arriving a year ago and training in Venice Beach. Twenty-one years old. For some reason the thought of a twenty-one-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger gave her the creeps.

  She paused at the door, realizing she’d forgotten one key piece. “Uh, what does Luke look like?”

  Reefer dude smiled. “He’s fine as wine, or so all the chicks tell me. But just ask the desk to page him. You know.”

  “Thanks.”

  And with that, Scout left reefer madness behind. She tried to remember the last time she’d been inside a library. She walked up a broad pathway to an old building that was actually pretty neat looking while data scrolled through her brain. Most of it useless, but she knew Nada would tell her the key was hidden somewhere in the details: UCLA Library among the top ten academic research libraries in the country. A frak-load of books, in the millions. It is a United Nations Depository Library . . . which meant what? She had no idea and shut down the info that wanted to dump into her consciousness about that.