by Gary Paulsen
Frank nodded. “It's all in here”—he tapped his temple softly—“just whizzing around. I think the bullet I took for you loosened up my thinking.”
“You'll have to get shot more often.”
Frank shook his head. “Another inch to the right and even Olivia wouldn't have blamed it on a locker.”
“One more question: Why? Why do this to my laptop?”
Frank smiled. “The only thing I can think of is that it's a government conspiracy and cover-up centered on all the aliens from spaceships that landed back in the fifties and launched weather balloons to cover their tracks so they could hide and abduct people and examine their navels with a long copper wire.”
“Frank.”
“Or …”
“Or what?”
“Or it was a mistake. Somehow your laptop got a change that was meant for somebody else. In either case it means the same thing for us.”
“What?”
“We have to break the code.”
But for the moment they had to set the code aside, or try to. Frank went ahead and flunked the math test, which, considering that they were allowed to use their laptops as calculators, took some serious doing. It was only by playing hard on the pity note about his head, showing the cut his locker had given him, that he avoided the dreaded e-note of concern that otherwise would have been sent directly to his parents. Instead he won the right to take the test over the following week when his head was better.
Frank's parents had but one disciplinary procedure. If they got such a note he would be grounded until the situation was fixed, even if, as his father had said several times, that meant staying in and doing schoolwork until he was thirty and had his own family with boys to ground.
Dorso had his own problems.
He passed the math test but then wound up in biology lab partnered with Karen Bemis to dissect a virtual/cybernetic frog. Usually that would have been fine. He welcomed any chance to spend time with Karen. And she smiled at him and it looked like he might actually make a little headway on the Karen Bemis front…
Except.
As he went to the storage cupboard to pick up their virtual/cybernetic frog he carried his laptop—he was afraid to leave it near any other person alone—and there was a flash of light.
He found himself in thick jungle, waist deep in swamp water and almost solid mud.
“How did you get into our game?”
Next to him, sitting on a stump sticking out of the water, was the blond man. He had sharp features, a wisp of a lip beard and eyes that were green and seemed too bright, almost a hot green. Maybe a crazy green.
“What? Who? I mean what game?”
“How did you find out? Who told you? Was it Faron? I'll bet it was. Man, when I catch up with him I'll kill him. He's going to ruin it all, bringing in another person. It's just because he got bored, you know. He wanted to pick things up. But I don't see how you got a chip. … Come on, was it Faron who told you how to jump with my line?”
Dorso studied him. A second ago he had been reaching for a virtual/cybernetic frog, thinking of Karen Bemis, and now … and now what? “Who are you and what does all this mean?”
The man cocked his head, then smiled. “Man, you don't know, do you? I mean, this is all just happening to you and you don't have a clue….” He threw back his head and laughed but there was no humor in it. A harsh laugh. “You don't know what you've gotten into at all, do you?”
“I know you're messing with the time paradox.”
“You don't know anything at all. You got one of the chips by accident, or maybe not by accident, and you don't have a single idea of what's going on, do you? Man this is rich, really rich. Wait until I tell Faron.”
A hissing growl seemed to come from the earth, low and deep and very, very close.
“What was that?” Dorso looked around at the water.
“Probably a crocodile. Of course, it's prehistoric and might be forty feet long, but they looked about the same then, or now, as they did in the future. Oh, there he is—see? He's big, but he looks just like a modern croc.”
Dorso turned to see an enormous crocodile coming at him, not twenty yards away, its mouth slightly open.
“Man,” the guy said. “Look at those teeth. Aren't they wild?”
The crocodile opened his mouth wide enough to easily swallow Dorso whole, and Dorso closed his eyes and waited for the crunch.
It never came. There was another flash and he was back in the biology lab, standing in front of the storage cabinet, hand still reaching for the frog. Except that he was soaked with mud and water from the waist down. He took the frog back to the table and put it down in front of Karen.
“What”—she looked at his pants—“happened to you?”
He looked down, then back up at her, knowing that it was over, that nothing he could ever say would make her forget how he looked at this moment. He said: “I had an accident.”
She nodded. “I see that. You know …” Her eyes were kind, and worse—far worse—full of pity. “You can get treatment for this kind of thing.”
“Thank you.” Dorso sighed. “I'm going to go to the bathroom now. To clean up.”
“Yes. That would be a good idea. I'll wait to cut the frog until you get back.”
“Thank you.”
“So it's a game.” Frank nodded. “I thought as much.”
They were back at Dorso's house so Dorso could watch Darling, who was dressing the cat as an astronaut. Dorso had told Frank about meeting the man in the prehistoric swamp. The cat, Dorso thought, looked catatonic. He smiled, wondering if that was where the word came from; somebody, somewhere, kept dressing a cat in different costumes until it simply sat there, numb. Darling was hooking the cat into a little parachute harness while she studied the upper landing of the staircase, and Dorso knew he would have to step in soon or the cat would be learning what free fall meant. “You didn't think any such thing.”
“Well, maybe not, but I had a hunch.” Frank smiled.
“Right.” Dorso rubbed the back of his neck. He had started to have a dull ache back there about the time he'd shown up with wet pants in front of Karen. It wasn't getting worse, but it wasn't getting better either. Just a dull, throbbing ache. “The guy looked like one of those outlaw gamesters you see in the backs of magazines; kind of wild and crazy.”
“So if it's a game, what kind of game is it?”
“A very dangerous one, if they're messing around with the time paradox. Remember last year when you went onto the Net and asked what would happen if you fundamentally changed the line of time, changed how things happened, so that you could actually go back and kill your own grandfather, which meant you wouldn't exist in the first place to go back and kill your grandfather, but if you did it then clearly you must exist even though if you didn't have a grandfather you couldn't exist to kill your own grandfather …” This, Dorso thought, isn't helping my neckache. “What did that theoretical physics professor tell you?”
“He said that time is based in some ways on the speed of light, and that if you alter time in an impossible way it's like trying to change the speed of light, which can't be done, and that in the end it can mean big trouble.”
“How big?”
“Well, if you go back in time and you meet yourself and try to occupy the same place at the same time, it's apparently like bringing matter and antimatter together. Everything ends, ceases to exist.”
“So that's their game? To make everything end? Are they that crazy?”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it's just the gamester thing, you know. One guy does something, the next one tries to undo it, or fight it, or change it. But how did it all start?”
“He said something about a chip, a game chip, how he thought there were only two of them, and that I must have a third one. And he said something about how I jumped with his line. None of it made any sense until he mentioned that bit about it being a game.”
Frank leaned back and closed his eyes, thinkin
g, and Dorso smiled. When it was all done and you took away the joking and the constant search for nude women in history, Frank had a great brain and was really good at problem solving.
“Here's what I see,” Frank said after a moment. “Somebody, somewhere, doctored a chip or a circuit in some way so as to allow it to alter the time paradox when it's put in a computer.”
“Call it a hacker,” Dorso said, walking across and taking the parachute harness off the cat when Darling was halfway up the staircase, cat hanging at her side. “A time hacker.”
“Good one.” Frank nodded. “All right. So not a scientist but a hacker stumbles onto a way to make a chip that cheats the time paradox. And then, instead of turning it over to the authorities, this hacker—let's call it hackers, more than one, because there had to be more than one to make the game concept work—so these hackers, instead of letting science know they've made this major breakthrough, wire it into their computers and set out to make it into some kind of game.”
Dorso nodded and put the parachute on top of a bookcase so Darling couldn't get it. She went off holding the cat upside down. “A game where the result, if they're not careful, is the destruction of everything.”
“The universe.”
“And we know they did it at the factory,” Dorso said. “Because somehow they put a chip in my computer by mistake when I sent it in to get it fixed. And apparently the chip was a duplicate of the one used by the blond guy because whenever he activates it, or whatever he does, it pulls my laptop and whoever is close to my laptop in with him.”
“So if we use just the simplest form of detective work we can say that whoever did this has access to computers at the factory level….”
“Might work at the factory.”
“Right.” Frank nodded. “At least one of them must work there. Maybe it was complicated enough that they couldn't do it anywhere except at the factory.”
“So all we've got to do is go to the authorities and tell them what we've learned and they can track these guys down and stop them.”
“Alll… riiight.” Frank nodded again. “That's one possible solution.”
“No.” Dorso held his hand up toward Frank, which had the added benefit of stopping Darling, who was busy trying to stuff the cat tail first into a sock. “Not this time. I know where you're going with this, and we're not doing it.”
“Where?” Frank said innocently.
“You're going to say we should jump into the game and track them down and stop them ourselves.”
Frank frowned. “I wasn't going to say that exactly. I was going to say that seeing as how we've been involved with this since inception …”
“ ‘Inception'? You use a word like ‘inception'?”
“… seeing as how we've been involved since the beginning, we might be more qualified, might be the most qualified, if you will, to pursue these maniacs through time, beat them at their own game and thereby save the universe.”
Dorso stared at him. “Have you been doing something to rattle your brain other than taking that bullet at Gettysburg?”
“Why?”
“ ‘Pursue these maniacs through time … and save the universe?' Are you listening to yourself?”
“Dorso, Dorso, Dorso…” Frank shook his head. “You're not seeing the whole picture.”
“I'm not?”
“Look at it like it really is. These guys can really destroy the whole universe, we know what they're doing, maybe we can stop them. Right?”
“Unless, you know, we make a mistake.” Dorso almost laughed. “And of course we never make mistakes.”
“Name one, just one. You know, of this size. You know, a really big mistake …”
“Last Fourth of July. You tried to make a linear accelerator out of old car batteries and some ball bearings to see if you could shift the time holograms and see Nefertiti in her bath.”
“So it didn't work. I'm not sure if it matters. When I saw Nefertiti with her clothes on she didn't look all that nice. Of course, it was hard to tell with all that makeup.”
“Your accelerator took the back wall of the Halmers' garage off and went through the rear of Jung's Pretty Pastry Bakery so fast it detonated four racks of éclairs. If that ball bearing had hit somebody it would have vaporized them.”
“Minor setbacks. As you said, nobody was hurt, and the insurance covered the reconstruction.”
“Just the same, we are not going to play this game. Not this time. We are going to go to the authorities and tell them what's happening and let them handle these crazy gamesters and that's the end of it.”
For a second Frank started to say something, but Dorso had that iron look in his eye, the look he got when there was just no changing his mind.
Oh, they went to the authorities and at first it was the same old story.
A bored time security officer sitting at a tired metal desk took down their names, or took down Dorso's name—they already had a file on Frank from his many attempts to circumvent the morality blocks—and then leaned back and sipped cold coffee and said:
“So what's the problem this time?”
Dorso took a breath. “Somebody, we think extreme gamesters, put a new kind of chip in my laptop and it allows them to cheat the time paradox and go back and affect things. You know, not just see them or bring them forward in holograms but actually go back and touch them, change them.”
The officer closed his eyes, opened them. He pushed his notebook away and put his pencil down and sighed. “Right. How did you find this out?”
“Well, I saw Custer and he saw me, and then Beethoven, and then we ran into a mammoth, and then we were sent on a pirate ship …”
The security officer closed his eyes again, then looked at Frank. “Is this some kind of trick to get around the codes again? I remember that last bit where you tried to sneak through a side entrance into Marie Antoinette's dressing room by following a carpet cleaner into the palace.”
Frank did not point out that the Marie Antoinette episode was not the last time he'd tried to cheat the codes, it was just the last time the authorities were aware of. “No. I promise.”
“Right.” The security man stood up. “We'll get right on this and call you back.”
“No, really.” Dorso held up his laptop and pushed it across the desk. “It's really happening. I swear.”
There was a grinding, slashing, blinding flash during which Dorso just had time to hear Frank say “Big mistake, pushing the laptop over,” and the three of them, the desk and a floor lamp were suddenly sitting and standing on top of a sand dune in what had to be the Sahara Desert because they were completely surrounded by bedouin tribesmen on horses brandishing gleaming swords and short curved bows, all of them screaming high attack songs, while below them on the giant dune were arrayed several hundred knights in armor. In defensive positions.
Many things happened very rapidly. Frank just had time to say, calmly and with some authority, “I'd guess one of the early Crusades and we're with a small European detachment that's about to be wiped out.”
“What? Who?” The time security officer said. “How did we get here?”
“That's how I sounded.” Dorso nodded. “In the swamp.”
“But this can't be happening!”
“Duck!” Frank yelled. “They're shooting at us!” Several hundred of the bedouins saw the desk and the men appear and let loose a cloud of arrows. “Quick, behind the desk!”
Dorso and Frank dove for cover. The officer stood for another half a second before the boys could drag him down, and one of the arrows went through the loose part of his shirt.
Half a heartbeat later, the three of them were looking at each other behind the desk. Then Dorso saw the gamester down with the knights. The guy hit two keys on his board and there was another flash and they were back in the office exactly as before except that the desk was covered with bedouin arrows.
“Your desk,” Frank remarked to the stunned security officer, who was pulling at the arr
ow in his shirt, “looks like a porcupine.”
“This could have killed me!”
“Exactly,” Dorso said. “I told you it was serious.”
“But it can't be. They can't move things around like that.”
“They can and do,” Frank said. “And we've got to stop them and save the universe.”
“The secret,” Dorso said, “is in the laptop.” He reached across the desk and took the laptop back. For that second he was more than five feet away from the officer and his desk, but standing next to Frank. Then there was another intense white flash and everything disappeared.
“Oh, great,” he had time to say, “here we go again.”
Everything was dark. Pitch-black. Gradually, Dorso's eyes became accustomed to the dark and he realized that (a) they were in a cave and (b) the light that was so faint came from a torch or torches somewhere around the corner.
Frank was standing next to him. Dorso could just make out his features as well as the fact that he was still holding one of the arrows that had been stuck in the desk.
“Where are we?” Frank asked.
“A cave.”
“Duh.”
“Let's go toward the light.”
“Oh, man,” Frank said, “that's what they always tell you not to do in scary movies. ‘Don't go toward the light,' they say, ‘Stay out of the light….' ”
But Dorso was already moving.
“Shouldn't we have a plan?” Frank whispered as he caught up. “You know, about what to do when we catch up with these guys?”
“I have one.”
“Do you want to share it?”
“We grab the guy's laptop before he can hit the button and we take it back to the authorities, if that security man is still there and not in an institution or something.”
“Oh, well, as long as it's not too difficult. You know, just grab the laptop and run. And what do you think this game freak is going to be doing while we're grabbing the laptop?”
But Dorso had gone around a corner and stopped dead.
The light was brighter now, although still flickering and soft. They had entered a kind of chamber. It had a low, rounded ceiling, and three men, three naked, indescribably dirty men covered with facial and body hair, were holding torches and painting with brushes that seemed to be made of the ends of shredded twigs or perhaps stiff animal hair.