Ancient Fire

by Mark London Williams

  My dad still wasn’t anywhere around. Mr. Howe said he would take me to meet him.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “We can’t tell you. But you need to come with us.”

  “Why? Are you taking me to him?”

  “It’s only an hour’s drive,” he said. But that didn’t answer my question.

  He tried to give me what he thought was a reassuring smile, but it didn’t sit right on his face. Instead, he looked like someone waking up from surgery, when the knockout gas hasn’t quite worn off. Like the smile came from outside him and wasn’t an expression he could make on his own.

  Now we seem to be going down, driving on a long ramp, or in an echoey tunnel. The windows may be blacked out, but you can still feel slopes. And hear sound.

  We stop and the sliding door is flung open. More uniformed guys are standing around. I step out, and the air feels damp. It’s some kind of giant underground garage with rows of lights way overhead. Lots of cement. Pipes running along the walls. We’re walking toward what seems like a complex of offices behind a large Plexiglas window. Why put in a window? What’s so great about a view of a dark, damp cement garage?

  I see some more guys in DARPA jumpsuits running around. “Where are we?”

  “We can’t really tell you,” Mr. Howe tells me, and I’m starting to wonder why I bother asking any questions at all.

  “It’s an old BART tunnel,” a voice says. “But since the train doesn’t come through here anymore, it’s like our own private station.”

  It’s a woman’s voice. I turn, and she’s stepping out of a private train that whooshed in silently from one of the dark tubes. She’s in a blue business suit, and her hair is blond, streaked with gray. She wears it loose. When she smiles, at least, it seems more real than when Mr. Howe tries it. “They had to build several different subway tunnels after the last earthquake. This was one of the old ones they left behind. A real fixer-upper. But office space is so expensive aboveground. This was a steal.” I stare at her a moment. She seems so different from Mr. Howe that I’m beginning to think it was less strange running into a dinosaur. “Who are you?”

  She shrugs. “Number Thirty.” She gives me the smile again, like she has warm cookies for me, but of course she doesn’t.

  “That’s your name?”

  She points to my baseball cards. “That was Griffey’s number. It’ll be my name for today.” Two men in dark blue suits step out of the train car, and the shadows, to stand next to her. “And we’ll call these two Twenty-Five.”

  I look back at the cards: Both Bonds and McGwire wore number twenty-five. I consider asking Mr. Howe something, and decide it’d be useless. Instead, I say to Number Thirty, “Don’t tell me you people brought me this far for some kind of Barnstormer game.”

  “Me and the two Twenty-Fives, here. We’re the Referees.”

  “Baseball has umpires.”

  “Well, we’re known here as Referees. We kind of do what the Supreme Court does. Except they make public decisions.”

  She lets that hang there.

  “And you make secret ones?”

  “Private ones. For DARPA, and other agencies. When things happen that there aren’t any rules for yet. We help make up those rules.”

  “But then who gets to know what they are?”

  She doesn’t answer, turning to Mr. Howe instead. “You’re right. He is a smart boy.” Then she leans in close to me. “Come on, Eli Sands. Let’s find out what we should do with you. And whether there’s any chance of getting your mother back.”

  She turns and walks toward the Plexiglas office, with the Twenty-Fives in tow. She’s whistling a little song—from a Disney movie, I think, but I’ve been too old for those since at least 2015. It’s an ancient one, about being happy while you work. I wonder how much she really cares about my mom.

  Soon, I’m in a soft, fancy chair—like the kind you might find on an airplane—looking up at a blank white wall. The wall brightens and shimmers into life with a series of 3-D images.

  There’s a picture of Andrew Jackson Williams, standing in front of the CABIN CREEK sign — except there’s no motel on that corner now. The sign says CABIN CREEK CLEANERS. But Dad and I were just there in June.

  And how did they find out, anyway? Were they following us?

  “This is from the Daily Oklahoman site. Headlines from a few days ago. A town named Vinita. You’ve heard of it?”

  I don’t say anything.

  Number Thirty keeps talking. “It’s a man named Andrew Jackson Williams. He wrote a book called The Time Problem. About time travel. Have you heard of that?”

  “No.”

  “No, we didn’t think so. It was published in 1969. The hippies back then really liked the book. They thought it was ‘far-out’ and ‘cosmic.’ But A.J. never really liked hippies.”

  “What’s a hippie?” I ask.

  “Never mind.” Now it’s Mr. Howe’s turn. I guess the Twenty-Fives are just going to keep quiet. “The point is, Eli, Andrew Jackson Williams died in 1969, too. Right after his book came out.”

  It’s a good thing everyone’s looking at the wall screen, and not my face. I’m feeling pretty nervous. “He died?”

  “Apparently. In the middle of a thunderstorm. According to the news stories we could find. Except that suddenly, he’s been seen again all over his hometown of Vinita.”

  More shots of him go by, posing with a vidpad — like it’s some strange object from space— and standing in front of a church, giving a lecture. You can tell all the pictures are recent.

  “Is he a ghost?”

  “He doesn’t seem to think so. He claims that during the storm, he just walked out of the motel he owned, and when the storm broke, here he is, fifty years later.” There’s another picture of him in front of the cleaners. There’s still no motel.

  “Mr. Williams says it has to do with a sudden disturbance in time. Though when local authorities asked him about it, he said they’d have to read his book.” Mr. Howe shrugged. “Except the book’s been out of print for nearly fifty years.”

  There’s a thunk as a copy lands on the table near me. Even in the dark, I can see it’s old and beat-up. The whole thing is printed on paper. “We’ve read it,” Howe added. “It didn’t answer any of our questions.”

  “Look at this.” Now it’s Thirty’s turn again. On the wall screen, a group of airline passengers stand around a busy airport terminal, looking confused and worried like they could all use a nap.

  “This just happened yesterday,” she says. “A flight from L.A. to New York. It’s supposed to take three and a half hours, nonstop.”

  “Yeah?”

  “According to everybody’s watches, and every clock we could check, and every way we could measure…it took fifteen minutes.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. They left Los Angeles, and before they had time to finish hearing about the inflatable life rafts in case of emergency, they were over Manhattan. This one we’ve kept out of the news. For now. The crew and passengers are still being debriefed in a hotel.”

  “They get a hotel? And I’m stuck in a tunnel?” No one’s laughing, and I’m not sure I meant it as a joke. “So what does ‘debriefed’ mean?”

  “It means held against their will.” That was a new voice. Dad’s.

  He’s come in the room and is standing in the back. “Daddy!”

  I haven’t called him that in about five years. Since around the time I stopped watching Disney movies.

  I can feel my cheeks get a little red, then he walks up and hugs me and I don’t care…except he’s wearing latex gloves, so it feels a little funny.

  “I’m sorry, buddy, but I came down here late last night. Mr. Howe told you this morning, right?”

  “No.”

  We both try to glare at Mr. Howe, but he just won’t feel embarrassed about anything. “I wasn’t sure you’d be finished,” he claimed. “I didn’t want to promise the boy he’d see you if you
weren’t going to be here. I didn’t want to upset him.”

  There are times when Mr. Howe makes me want to barf.

  “You should have told me you were leaving, Dad.” I let go of him so I can stand back and look him in the eyes.

  “Eli, we discovered something…and I didn’t want to get your hopes up too much. I was in a sealed room farther down the tunnel. You couldn’t have come in there, anyway.”

  I realize Dad is dressed in a special jump- suit, too, like some of the DARPA guys. He doesn’t look right in the uniform.

  “What’s going on?”

  Dad peels off the gloves and takes a small vidpad out of his pocket. “We just scanned these in. Nobody can touch it directly, of course. We had to be very careful.”

  They were pages from the old San Francisco Chronicle that popped up in his lab at the same time the baseball cap did.

  “Funny things have been going on with time, Eli.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Then I lower my voice so only he can hear. “Are you talking about the motel we stopped at?”

  “No. Look.” He scans through the newspaper pages, then stops, enlarging an article about an orchestra playing in San Francisco back in 1937.

  There’s a picture of one of the flute players looking toward the camera. Margarite Sands. My mom.

  Chapter Ten

  Clyne: The Rhino and the Time-Vessel

  Final Class Project: 10,271 S.E.

  3. How was this culture different from your own? Describe.

  Since I’ve already described this planet as being dominated by evolved mammals, I have, in a way, already answered the question. What could be more unusual than that? But you still may not believe me, and may even be thinking that when I get home, the school nurse should immediately prescribe a volcano cure for me to let me sweat out these bad visions. But our motto, as Saurians, has always been “Science is deep truth,” and science is on my side here.

  Even though the truth is that everything is different, and what we thought we knew about evolution has been turned into mush-fern stew.

  For example, there are nearly as many types of mammal species as there are Saurians! Not just the two-legged, mostly sentient kind like Eli the Boy, or Thea, the daughter of the scholar Hypatia (and a scholar in her own right), but many other strange creatures with equally strange names: rhinos, monkeys, tigers. They have “birds,” too. These birds even resemble our own winged Saurians.

  I met many of these firsthand, when they tried to overrun my vessel in the middle of something called a “zoo.” The human mammals evidently keep other mammals imprisoned, like the Ring of No Escape in Cacklaw. And, like Cacklaw, it’s for entertainment. But not for a few mere sun-cycles as in our own sporting events, with the gates open after the game. No, these zoos are permanent. Does this mean, for mammals, that their games don’t end? It seems more serious for the ones behind bars. I will continue to investigate.

  My introduction to the culture, of course, was when Eli the Boy wound up in my ship as a result of a poorly plotted experiment on time dynamics. Their mature beings, called “grownups” or “adults,” possess roughly the scientific knowledge of a Saurian in secondary studies. As a result of this rough science, my settings were thrown completely off.

  We know from our own studies that certain beings can potentially act as “lightning poles,” magnets if you will, for time energy—with the slightest disturbance in spacetime focused on and channeled through them. As the saying goes, “Some hatch differently.” The boy is like that. Apparently, his unique reactions are triggered by the wearing of headgear, or a “cap”.

  As a living time particle himself, Eli the Boy was drawn to another time experiment in Alexandria, a place that was “ancient” for him, since it reached the height of its glory some sixteen hundred years before he was born. Thea’s female parent, Hypatia, had retreated to a lighthouse after solving several equations about the composition of light and time, and how each measures and affects the other. She was trying to demonstrate the results for the whole city, perhaps because she thought some citizens might appreciate what would be a great forward stomp in mammalian knowledge.

  Hypatia’s experiment acted as a kind of homing beacon for us. Since I found myself back in a fairly normal, compressed atmosphere, I stuck my head out of the ship’s portal to get a better view of our surroundings, and to bring the standard time-traveler’s greeting to the crowd below: “A good time to meet!”

  But I never got that far. They began throwing projectiles and chanting at us. Apparently, they were not fond of Hypatia or her experiments.

  As the ship was still wobbly, Eli the Boy and I looked for a place to put down. When we found open space in this “zoo,” we were attacked first by the rhino, and then by other creatures, who presumably thought, as had the humans, that their territory was being invaded.

  After getting out of the ship, I just stood there transfixed, watching these amazing creatures come at us. The rhino might’ve speared me dead center in my abdo-bilious if Eli the Boy hadn’t shoved me away. A rude gesture for a kind purpose.

  In their own way, these Earth Orange animals are wondrous. Like creatures you might find in a hatchling’s tale. But they also have appetites — and tempers.

  “I think we made him mad,” Eli the Boy said as the rhino turned around to face us again.

  Now it was my turn to help. Holding the boy, I jumped to safety, hearing behind me the distressing thud of the rhino colliding with my ship. My leaping seemed to amaze the other humans scrambling for safety around us. Apparently, human legs are slow and spindly.

  I leaped across the great grounds of these Royal Quarters, over fountains, pillars, and arches, trying to keep ahead of the strange riot that was brewing between the interplay of mammals—the animals who were loose, and the various humans running from them in panic. Even in this confusion, I had time to notice that Alexandria, in all its pink, sandy tones, is very much like a Saurian city!

  But our first task was getting to safety. So I cleared the walls, still holding on to Eli the Boy, thinking we’d be safe once we were away from all the stampedes.

  Instead of tigers and lions, we found more humans. The angry mob had chased the girl up from the lighthouse and into the public market, where they had her surrounded. Then I saw Eli the Boy do an amazing thing.

  After my appearance caught them off guard once more, Eli declined to continue our escape and instead released himself from my arms.

  “Get her away from here,” he instructed me. Here I’d just arrived on their planet, and they were already getting me involved in their fights. This certainly wasn’t a typical school assignment!

  But I trusted Eli, and had a sense that the girl —for I didn’t know her as Thea yet — could use a helping claw. I took her, and, as we jumped away, caught sight of something extraordinary:

  Eli voluntarily put himself in danger, drawing the wrath of the mob, giving Thea and me a better chance to escape. Then he put his cap on and disappeared back into the Fifth Dimension.

  Meanwhile, I took the girl and returned over the wall into the Royal Quarters, since the four-legged mammals suddenly seemed less dangerous than the two-legged ones.

  I heard another distant thump as the rhino kept charging at my poor ship. The girl spoke to me, but in a tongue different from the boy. Apparently Earth Orange is so early in its development that it is still multilingual! I could see I would need the lingo-spot again to learn how to converse with her.

  I had some of the plasmechanical substance in the emergency kit in my uniform, and I quickly applied some. She was pointing frantically toward some buildings on the edge of the great lawn, and I jumped in that direction.

  After we landed, she turned to me. “Are you a lizard god? Or just a lizard man?”

  I responded, but she couldn’t understand me. I reached out to give her a lingo-spot, but she stepped back. I could understand her caution, but it would take me at least a few minutes to pick up some words in
her language.

  “Well,” the girl said, “I suppose it doesn’t matter who you are. Or what. Thank you for your help. You’re in my city, Alexandria, now. And I’m afraid you’ve come at a very dangerous time.

  “This is the library. We have all the knowledge in the known world here. My mother, Hypatia, is the head librarian, lecturer, and the city’s principal mathematician. I am Thea. I have recently discovered a new star and am also finishing a rebuttal to Pythagoras. He claimed each number has a male or female personality, but he made too many of them masculine.”

  There was a pause after that, then she grew terribly sad. “I suppose none of that matters now. I saw them take her away.” Then she did something strange: It involved water coming out of her eyes, which she eventually wiped off. After she regained her breath, she looked right at me—a look of amazing intelligence. “Whatever you are, you’re in danger, too. No, Tiberius won’t stop until everything he can’t control, or doesn’t understand, is destroyed. And he wouldn’t even try to understand you.”

  “No,” I said. It was my first word in her tongue. She looked surprised. But I still don’t know if I meant “No, he won’t understand,” or just “No,” as if I could personally stop what had already been set in motion.

  It turned out none of us could. Not even Eli the Boy, when he returned to us through time mere minutes later.

  Chapter Eleven

  Eli: DARPA — The First Tunnel

  August 2, 2019 C.E.

  I keep looking at the picture of my mom. I don’t think my dad knows what to say, either. He just looks sad, drained, and even weirdly amused, all at once. “She always wanted more time for her music,” he says.

  More time for her music? I get really impatient when grownups make bizarre jokes that only they understand. Especially in a situation where it makes more sense to be scared. “Well, is she all right?” I ask. “Does she still know who she is? Or where she really belongs?”