“So,” Madison asked, getting the discussion going as he dried his hair with a big brown towel. “Is what just happened unexpected?”
Duster shrugged. “No, the math kept pointing us in that direction. But since we never really saw evidence of it happening, we kept trying to find other mathematical reasons why it wouldn’t happen.”
Bonnie nodded. “What’s he’s saying clearly is that yes, we expected it, but never saw it until now. It’s why we always touch the machine when traveling.”
“Touching the machine,” Duster said, “allows a traveler to remember both the old timeline and the shifted timeline. We designed it for this kind of thing to happen.”
“So that shimmer,” Ryan said, “was unusual?”
“I think the shimmer,” Bonnie said, finishing the salad and wiping off her hands, “was the entire room shifting in some form or another.”
April flat didn’t understand that, so she kept her focus on finishing getting the potatoes ready.
Duster nodded, but said nothing.
“So we can go back and live in the lodge?” Madison asked.
“Oh, sure,” Duster said, “in the same timeline we just left. I sure don’t see why not.”
“I agree,” Bonnie said, putting the salad in the middle of the table.
April smiled at Ryan who was smiling at her. So their plans to go back were still on.
“So,” Janice asked, “what happens now when we hook up to a new crystal and go back?”
“Nothing different,” Duster said. “The lodge won’t be there until we build it.”
“Even though it’s now here?” Steven asked.
“You can’t exist in a timeline where you are already there building the lodge,” Bonnie said. “So the rules of conservation of mass and energy and time will just shift you to a timeline where the lodge was not yet built.”
“So you didn’t feel a shimmer when you came back from the trip where Madison died?”
“Nope,” Duster said. “We didn’t change anything major.”
“But I still think we need to take a trip into Boise,” Bonnie said, “and see if anything else has changed.”
“What about our offices?” April asked as she finished cutting the last of the potatoes. “Since in this timeline we weren’t hired to build the lodge, will the offices be there? And our apartments?”
“Good question,” Duster said. “They should be. You remember them, don’t you?”
Ryan nodded with her.
“Then they are there,” Bonnie said. “But after dinner, let’s go find out. This was a pretty major timeline shift in a lot of areas.”
“And anyone not touching the machine won’t remember the shift?” Madison asked.
“Nope,” Duster said. “The people who occupied that building in the other timeline will not even realize they were shifted to another place.”
“So my old boss won’t even realize I kept working for him for two more months before everything shifted?” April asked, trying to grasp that.
“He won’t,” Bonnie said. “This timeline is now the one and the crystals that were the other timelines merged into the timelines we now are in.”
“Thus the heat-wave shift?” Dawn asked.
“That or a dimensional shift,” Duster said.
April looked at Ryan and he looked as lost on that comment as she felt. So she just turned and worked to put the potatoes into boiling water as Dawn started work on mixing white gravy for the chicken.
Everyone in the kitchen area of the big cave just remained silent, lost in thought and confused memories.
What was important now to her was that she and Ryan could go back to their beautiful home and live for years to come.
But even if they could never travel in time again, they were still together here and that really was all that mattered.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
July 20, 2015
THE DINNER LASTED TWO HOURS, mostly full of talk that Ryan only understood parts of. He knew that given enough time, like Madison and Dawn, he and April would understand more and more of the time travel complications. But right now he was just trying to grasp that the ten years had only taken two minutes.
And he was trying to sort out which memories were of this new timeline and which were left over.
After dinner Duster drove them back to Boise, with one bathroom stop along the way.
Ryan and April just sat in the back, holding hands. Madison and Dawn and Duster and Bonnie talked about different aspects of time travel, but mostly Ryan only listened and April said little.
What he liked about listening was that they kept coming back to the conclusion that nothing bad had happened and they all could just keep moving forward as before.
But they also decided that no member of a couple should ever go back without the other. That way they could never do anything to cause a shift in the couple being together.
Ryan and April both agreed to that as well.
Janice and Steven were headed back as well in their own car. They had all decided to spend the day tomorrow in Boise making sure that not much had changed. Tomorrow, Bonnie and Duster were going to make a drive to the lodge.
Dawn and Madison had wanted to go along, but Duster overruled them. “We look first.”
They would all meet at April and Ryan’s office the following day at eight in the morning to decide what to do next. But more than likely, unless they discovered something very strange, they would all head back up to the mine and back into the same timeline as planned.
The idea of that had Ryan very excited.
By the time they got back into Boise, it was a little after nine in the evening and the sun was going down. Bonnie and Duster again dropped them off at the office, which Ryan was very happy to see was there.
And that his key worked just fine.
They had only been gone since that morning, but it seemed like a lifetime.
Actually two lifetimes with the weird shift.
They went inside and turned on lights.
Nothing at all had changed.
They both went to their separate offices and Ryan found the plans for the big lodge on his computer. It didn’t matter that it now sat up there on the summit. He had designed it here in this office over the last two months.
April showed up in his doorway a few moments later, shaking her head. “Nothing changed. Now I’m wondering what everyone else on the staff thinks we were doing.”
Suddenly the memory of that was back for him. “Just as with the original design, we considered our clients eccentric and didn’t allow anyone to talk about it.”
April nodded. “I remember that now. That’s why nothing has changed here.”
“Exactly,” Ryan said, feeling very relieved. Designing a lodge for the past or one that already existed. Either way the client was eccentric and not to be talked about. Standard for both architecture and interior design.
They headed out, walking slowly in the warm evening summer air. Ten minutes later they found themselves in their favorite booth with the same waitress as the night before.
Less than twenty-four hours before they had sat here, not knowing what was going to happen the next day. And they had made love for the first time after going to her apartment.
Yet that was ten wonderful years ago.
Ryan was having a horrid time wrapping his mind around all this. It would have been bad enough sitting here after living ten years, but having the other memories mixed in were just making everything damned hard to accept.
And on top of that, he was just tired. And so was April. They had gotten up at sunrise in Boise in 1910, spent an entire day getting things closed up and ready to go in their big home. At sundown, they had been pulled to the cave, which was in the middle of the day again.
So they had been up for going on twenty-one hours their time.
They talked about almost nothing while eating, but to Ryan that felt comfortable. As long as she was beside him, he didn’t care
.
After eating, they walked slowly to her apartment.
As she unlocked the door, she said, “Wow, you were right, this feels like it was an eternity ago that I locked this, even though it was this morning.”
“Just ten wonderful years,” he said, smiling at her and kissing her.
They crawled into bed together and unlike the last time in this bed, they fell asleep in each other’s arms as they had done for ten years.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
July 21, 2015
APRIL WOKE UP the next morning in her own bed, in her apartment, alone.
For a moment she thought it all had been a dream. She hadn’t really lived in the past for ten years in a wonderful mansion with Ryan.
But then she knew she had. She was in Boise, after all, not Denver or a hotel room in Kansas City where she would have been if Bonnie and Duster hadn’t hired her. She had that memory as well, but it was fading.
She crawled out and headed for the bathroom, then naked she walked out into her living room.
“Wow, anyone ever tell you that you’re looking good,” Ryan said, smiling at her from behind her computer.
“Lost ten years in age overnight,” she said, stretching and enjoying the feel of her younger body as the man she loved watched her show off. She hadn’t minded growing older, but being in her early thirties again didn’t suck.
“What are you doing?” she finally asked.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, clicking off her computer. “Not snooping, just wanted to look up a couple of things.”
“And what did you find?” she asked.
He got up from her computer and she realized he didn’t have anything on either. And he was clearly happy to see her.
“I’ll show you later,” he said, sweeping her off her feet and carrying her back into the bedroom where they could once again explore their much younger bodies.
An idea she very, very much agreed with.
She was starting to realize that coming back to the present and being young again did have some benefits.
An hour later, both showered and with Pop Tarts in their hands, they left her apartment and headed back toward their office. The morning was a perfect summer day in Boise. The air wasn’t hot yet, and there was a cool breeze blowing along the river.
The trees were all full and most of the sidewalk they walked was in shade.
The one thing she did really notice was the noise. She had gotten used to the silence of living in the country in the past. Even going to San Francisco and Denver and Chicago on shopping trips didn’t compare to the noise that was normal for a modern city.
That surprised her.
They walked hand-in-hand and never in all her life could she have imagined being so in love with a man. Yet she had just spent ten years with Ryan in the past and loved him more than yesterday here in the present.
More than likely it was the sudden memory of how she might have gone on and never met him.
Or it was just that living together made her love him more. Either way, she didn’t want to think about not being with him for as long as possible into the future.
“How about we take a longer walk first?” he asked, smiling at her.
Suddenly her stomach twisted and she got excited. “Our house? If the lodge is here, our house is here. Right?”
“Lets go take a look.”
He then just smiled at her and squeezed her hand and kept her from walking even faster.
And he wouldn’t say another word. The man was just too damn cute at times.
As they strolled down the wide sidewalk along Warm Springs Avenue, she could see the big home that Bonnie and Duster had built. It was surrounded by huge old trees and had a paved driveway going in past the building to what had been the stable behind it.
Then, through the trees, she saw their home.
She wasn’t sure if she could even breathe.
From what she could see through the big trees, it was as beautiful as it had been when they built it. Perfectly maintained.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“Wow,” he said, clearly just as stunned.
They walked a little farther in silence and were about to pass in front of the two mansions.
“Let’s go to the other side of the street so we can get a better view of it,” Ryan said.
She nodded and they made it between traffic across the busy boulevard.
From there, he was right, they could see the house they had built in 1901 much, much better.
They went to a cement bus stop bench across the street from the big mansion and sat down holding hands and staring at the beautiful home tucked among large trees that hadn’t even been planted in 1910.
She made a mental note where each tree was so that when they went back, she would plant trees there.
“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” she said, the memories of the ten years living in that wonderful house flashing through her thoughts. There were so many great memories.
“It is,” he said, “because it’s our home. Our first home.”
“And we’re going back tomorrow?” she asked.
“We’re going back,” he said. “I can promise you that.”
Something in his voice sounded odd and she looked at him. “How can you be so sure? How can you promise that?”
He had this wonderful smile on his face, a smile she had come to learn meant so much more than he was saying.
“What did you find on the computer?” April asked.
He pointed across the street as a large SUV was pulling out of the driveway of their home. There was a woman about their age with long brown hair driving. Two children were strapped into car seats in the back.
The woman pulled across the street and looked right at them.
For a moment the woman saw them and frowned.
Then she turned with traffic and was gone.
April felt like she had just looked in the mirror.
Or at a twin sister.
“Who was that?” she asked, turning to face the man she loved more than anything in the world.
He was smiling like she had never seen him smile before.
“Who was that?” April asked. “She looked just like me.”
“She did, didn’t she,” Ryan said, not breaking his smile as he stared into her eyes.
Then he finally just kissed her long and hard.
After a moment he pushed back and looked at her. “That was our great- great-granddaughter driving. Her name is Alicia. She and her husband have taken over the family home. She’s an architect. He’s an engineer.”
April just stared at Ryan and into those wonderful eyes of his. She couldn’t believe what he had just said.
Yet she knew it was true.
And she knew what that meant.
“We’re going back,” she said, breathlessly, turning to look across the street at the beautiful home they had built.
“We’re going back,” he said. “Together.”
“Every time, no matter how many years go by?”
“Together,” he said, kissing her. “Every time. For all time.”
And she kissed him back, sitting there on the bus stop bench in front of their home.
A home that they would soon make into a family home.
RELATED HOLIDAYS
Yesterday was National Bean Day.
I imagined take-beans-to-work programs
spreading all over the country,
proud employees showing off their cans.
I imagined black beans joining with red beans
to protest against the pintos while ignoring bean curds,
with coffee beans staying out of the issue,
having a union and lobbyist of their own.
I imagined beans taking over for rice
in numbers of places, including after weddings,
where guests would throw handfuls of beans at the bride,
giving the word beaned a whole new meaning.
But today is a ne
w day, a new special day, with a new focus,
the beans have been eaten, thrown, and protested over.
I must move on to National Bubblebath Day
as I sit in the tub and fondly remember National Bean Day.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
USA Today bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith published more than a hundred novels in thirty years and hundreds and hundreds of short stories across many genres.
He wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds. Writing with his wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch under the name Kathryn Wesley, they wrote the novel for the NBC miniseries The Tenth Kingdom and other books for Hallmark Hall of Fame movies.
He wrote novels under dozens of pen names in the worlds of comic books and movies, including novelizations of a dozen films, from The Final Fantasy to Steel to Rundown.
He now writes his own original fiction under just the one name, Dean Wesley Smith. In addition to his upcoming novel releases, his monthly magazine called Smith’s Monthly premiered October 1, 2013, filled entirely with his original novels and stories.
Dean also worked as an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He now plays a role as an executive editor for the original anthology series Fiction River.
For more information go to www.deanwesleysmith.com, www.smithsmonthly.com or www.fictionriver.com.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Happy New Year
The Match: A Poker Boy Story
ONE
TWO
Smith's Monthly #4 Page 28