Time spike

by Eric Flint

  "At first I thought it was an earthquake. I figured the New Madrid fault line had let go. Now, I don't know." The last time the New Madrid fault line had a major slip was back in the early 1800s. But everyone who lived in the area knew that the one hundred fifty mile long fault line was overdue. They also knew that when it went, it would be a national disaster that would make the New Orleans hurricane fiasco look like child's play. Over seventy-five percent of the buildings in the quake zone were older buildings made of unreinforced masonry. Buildings like that wouldn't survive an earthquake measuring a 6.3. on the Richter scale-and the last time that fault line slipped, it was a lot stronger than that. Nobody knew exactly where the New Madrid earthquake would have registered on the Richter scale, of course, since it had happened almost two centuries earlier. But the three quakes that had flattened thousands of acres of forests, changed the course of the Mississippi River, and formed new lakes. Those three quakes had been part of a series of two thousand quakes taking place over a two-year period. They were the largest earthquakes the continental U.S. had ever experienced in the historical record, and had been felt as far away as Canada. They'd even caused the church bells in Washington D.C. to ring. Andy looked around the entry area.

  The personnel closest to the metal detectors were going through the process of entering the prison. They were being patted down by nervous guards. The interiors of their lunch buckets were being visually inspected, since the X-ray machine wasn't working. Andy gave a small sigh of relief. The entry routine was helping. No one had panicked, but quite a few were close to it. "Go inside, Greg," Andy said. "Joe and I will put together a couple of teams to walk the perimeter outside the walls. You get the interior checked." He waved in the direction of the parking lot. "Divvy them up. Send them around to the backside. Make sure everything held." By the time Andy was done talking, Greg had already cut through the line and was at the first set of iron gates separating the prison from the main room. The one blindingly good piece of luck involved in the disaster was the timing-thirty minutes later, the afternoon shift would have been gone entirely. Andy would have had to deal with the situation with only forty-two people. Andy looked at Joe and shrugged. "What a way to start a shift." He looked around at the stunned faces. "Don't let anyone else in. Get them outside, walking the perimeter. That's our first priority. Then radio Lowry. I want No-Man's-Land walked."

  No-Man's-Land was what they called the killing zone: an eight-foot strip of open ground between two fifty-foot cement walls topped with razor wire that encircled the prison. A few minutes later the entry area was empty except for Kathleen who was stationed at the gates with orders to let no one enter or leave until Joe or Andy okayed it. The rest of the guards were outside. Their flashlights were on and Joe had passed out one radio to each team of three and sent them to check the walls on the east, north, and south sides of the prison. Hulbert and a half-dozen guards had already gone around to the west end of the facility. Andy was looking at the administration building. He checked the windows first; none of the glass seemed broken. The bars were all in place. And from where he stood he could see no cracks in the mortar between the brown blocks that made the walls. Everything looked good.

  There was nothing that indicated structural damage to the three-story, brown limestone building that had been built over a century before.

  "It looks solid enough. We might have gotten lucky," he said, knowing that until daylight came and men could walk the building and examine it up close, there was really no way of knowing for sure. Andy watched part of his crew as they hurried along side the building's exterior, their flashlights playing against the eighteen-foot, chain-link fence topped with razor wire that enclosed the compound. He turned east and looked at the wall and then toward town. There were no lights anywhere. Even the hospital lights couldn't be seen. The entire area was darker than he thought possible-so dark, he couldn't even make out the shape of the bluff the town sat on. He felt a tap on his shoulder.

  He couldn't remember the woman's name, but her face was familiar. She usually worked B-house. "Yeah," he said. She pointed to the sky. He looked up and his heart leapt in his chest. The clouds were gone and the sky was filled with more stars than he could remember seeing. Then he realized the temperature had changed. It was warm. Very warm.

  Almost hot. Hot and moist. And there was a combination sweet and sulfur smell in the air. He looked north, away from the prison, and had to swallow hard. The skyline glowed red. "Hey, Andy!" Joe motioned toward what should have been the administrative parking lot. "It's gone. So is the gun range and the visitor parking area. Everything's been swallowed up by the quake. " "That was like no quake I ever heard of." Andy looked at where the parking lot had been. The blacktop and the cars were gone. Not destroyed, simply… gone. In their place was nothing but bare earth and some sort of odd-looking plants. What sort of earthquake could do that? "Get inside," he said, "and get on the phone. Call the state police. Find out what's going on. Wake up the warden, and get him down here. Then call in the off-duty first responders and E-team officers." "Already tried that." Kathleen was coming through the doors. "Greg sent me out here to tell you the phone lines are down, and none of the cell phones are working. He also said the radios are on the fritz. The ones used for communication inside the prison are working better than they've worked in days, but those used for outside…" She bit her bottom lip. "They're out. Same for the TVs and the regular radio stations." James Cook's ears popped.

  The walls vibrated and hummed. The metal shelf with its two-inch foam mattress the prison staff called his bunk swayed. There was noise everywhere. Cook wanted to sit up so he could hop down from his bed, but couldn't move. He tried to turn his head, but even that was too difficult to accomplish. His eyes stayed focused on the small, iron-grated ventilation hole on the wall just a few inches below his ceiling. He watched as the six-inch bars vibrated faster and faster.

  His vision blurred. The bars faded, almost disappearing, then returned. The hum turned into a roar. The roar became a whistle. The bars returned to their original color, and then one of them fell out.

  It was lying on his bed and he could now move. He reached out to the black metal bar. It was warm, almost hot. Cook slid the bar back into the vent grill and then turned to face the door. It was tempting to try to hide it and hope the screws wouldn't notice that one of bars was missing. That piece of steel could make a big difference if he wound up having to fight one of the slabs of beef he'd seen when he arrived. But being found in possession of it could also add two years to his prison term. The bar was still loose, if he ever needed to pry it back out again. Paul Howard, his cellmate, was trying to get out of bed, and all hell had broke loose up and down the tiers. Men were screaming to be let out of their cells. They didn't want to be trapped inside during a quake or its aftershocks. Guards added to the bedlam, running up the stairs and down the walkways, slapping the metal bars with metal nightsticks and screaming for silence. He lay down, forcing himself not to look at the ventilation grill. The wall was probably as strong as ever, and they didn't build flimsy walls in maximum security prisons. Besides, what was the point of thinking about the ventilation opening? Even if he could squeeze himself through-not likely, to say the least-he'd just be looking at a three-story drop to cold, hard cement. He stared at the blue-gray steel separating his cell from the catwalk, his pulse racing and a thin sheen of sweat glistening above his upper lip. The broken bars would be found the first time the guards dumped the room. And even if they weren't, it didn't matter. He couldn't escape, and even if he could there was no life on the outside for a man on the run. James Cook was an excellent poker player. Three minutes later, when the screw played his flashlight around the room, his face was proof of that. He gave the C.O. a cold look, then closed his eyes.

  Chapter 4 "Oh, damn," Margo Glenn-Lewis snarled. "Another one!" As she slowed the rental vehicle, seeing the police roadblock across the road ahead of them, she slapped the steering wheel in frustration. "I didn't think they'd
have this dinky little county road covered also."

  Richard Morgan-Ash was surprised himself. It was still the middle of the night, and he wouldn't have though the local authorities in a rural area would have been able to mobilize such an extensive set of police roadblocks on such short notice. They'd been stopped twice already by roadblocks, on the first two roads they'd taken. They knew from their contact over his cell phone with their colleagues still in Minnesota that the chronoletic impact had happened right after midnight. The exact time was impossible to pin down because the impact scrambled time around itself. By the clocks in the underground facility, it had happened at exactly 12:11:08. But the time at the impact site itself might very well have read somewhat differently, to anyone in a position to observe. Whether anyonewould be in a position to observe such an impact, from "inside," so to speak, was a hotly contested issue among the scientists in The Project. A minority were inclined to believe that anyone caught by such an impact would simply be destroyed. But the main school of thought was that they'd undergo a time transfer but might come out at the other end alive. By way of evidence, adherents to the majority view would point out that-assuming the vague reports were accurate-it seemed that animals coming theother direction-so to speak-came through it fairly intact. It would help, of course, if the authorities would allow anyone except their own scientists to have access to the remains that had appeared at Grantville. But that whole area, very soon after the impact, had been declared a national security zone. The same sort of tight security had been clamped down around it that you'd expect to find at weapons test sites and top secret installations. Richard's opinion was that all the existing hypotheses were simply rampant speculation. They needed hard evidence before they could do anything more than suck theories out of their thumbs. Margo brought the car to a halt. One of the officers standing by the police car parked in such a way as to bar the road started coming their way. Richard leaned toward Margo and said softly,

  "Allow me to do the talking this time, would you?" Margo scowled.

  Morgan-Ash decided that amounted to consent, and got out of the car.

  He wanted to talk to the officer himself because Margo's notions of how to conduct a conversation with the police seemed to stem from some sort of deep-rooted adolescent resentment. He'd found that, despite appearing to be in her early fifties, Margo had a strong tendency to rebel against authority simply because it was authority. Richard had no such inclination, himself. Not because he had any greater respect for authority-qua-authority than she did. He probably had even less.

  But if there was one advantage to having been an officer in one of Britain's paratrooper regiments, as a young man, it was that he took authority for granted. "What seems to be the problem, officer?" He made no attempt to disguise his pronounced accent. First, because he couldn't anyway. Richard had the sort of upper class English accent that was so deeply ingrained he doubted if he could disguise it to save his life. Having attended Eton himself, he was skeptical that its storied playing fields had much to do with Britain's military prowess.

  For sure and certain, not one of the very tough paras he'd commanded in the field had ever attended the school or even dreamed of doing so.

  They came from a completely different class altogether. But the school was superb at drumming in the proper accent. Besides, it would probably help. Decades of movie-watching, he'd found, had ingrained most Americans with the attitude that a man who spoke English with that sort of accent was a legitimate sort of fellow. They'd suspect he would also prove to be obnoxious and overbearing, true. But Richard could defuse that easily enough. The main thing was not to be dismissed outright. And, sure enough-where Margo had gotten no explanations at all, just curt commands to turn the car around, this officer was willing to talk. "I'm sorry, sir, but you can't go any farther." He gestured over his shoulder with a thumb. "There's been some sort of major accident at Alexander, and until we know exactly what the situation is, we're keeping everyone out of the area."

  Richard shook his head. "I'm afraid I'm not from this area, officer.

  Alexander refers to…?" "Alexander Correctional Center. It's one of Illinois' maximum security prisons." The officer made a face. "It's got over two thousand of the state's most dangerous felons locked up inside. We're not sure, yet, but until we know whether or not any of the inmates have escaped, we've cordoned off the whole area." Richard abandoned his tentative plan to plead a dying relative. Given the situation described, there was no way the police would let them proceed any farther. And the mystery of how and by what means rural police agencies had been mobilized so quickly was now solved. He glanced at the logo on the police car, quite visible in the beam of the headlights coming from their rental vehicle. Illinois State Police. The cars at the two previous roadblocks had belonged to county or local law enforcement agencies, but obviously the state police were coordinating the effort. And, of course, they'd have contingency plans already in place in the event of inmates escaping from a maximum security prison in the area. "I see." He gave the officer a very friendly smile. "Well, in that case, I'm afraid our ailing cousin will have to manage on his own for a bit. Do you have any idea how soon the situation will be cleared up?" "I really couldn't tell you, sir. We still don't know ourselves exactly what's happened. The prison isn't responding to any calls, either by phone or radio." He was clearly not being reticent for the sake of reticence. The man simply didn't know anything. Richard got back into the car. "Bad luck, I'm afraid. It seems the impact happened at or near a maximum security prison."

  "Oh… hell." Glenn-Lewis glared at the cop car, as if it were somehow responsible. "Maybe if we found a really back road…" "Not a chance, Margo. In fact, they're likely to have even heavier coverage of such roads, on the theory that an escaping prisoner is mostly likely to seek them out himself." He shook his head. "No, I'm afraid we're stymied for the moment." Margo began making a three-point turn.

  Not, probably, because she was worried about getting a ticket for making a U-turn, but simply because the road was too narrow for one in the first place. "Now what?" she asked, as they drove away from the roadblock. Richard had been considering the question himself. Not with any great hope of finding what he needed, he looked in the glove department. "Alas. No maps, as I feared. Do you know how to get to Collinsville?" "Never heard of it. And there must be a hundred Collinsvilles in the U.S." A bit defensively, she added: "Look, I'm from Manhattan. There's New York, there's Jersey, there's California way out there on the other coast, and a bunch of stuff in between."

  Richard sighed. "Collinsville, Illinois. It's near Scott Air Force Base." "There's an air force base inIllinois?" She whistled, softly.

  "Jeez, and here I thought they were all in South Dakota or Nevada or someplace like that." Richard had noticed before that most American intellectuals were astonishingly ignorant about any and all military affairs. In that respect, quite unlike British intellectuals. Or French, for that matter. He supposed it was a residue from the Vietnam War. American intellectuals tended to see that war as a manifestation of imperialist behavior, which they'd not expected from their country.

  A betrayal, as it were. They were still quietly seething about it, even these many decades later. Whereas British or French intellectuals simply took it for granted that empires were empires and did what empires did. Whether they liked it or not-and they usually didn't like it any more than their American counterparts did-they weren't shocked by the whole business. Then again, he reminded himself, that was just a theory of his-which might be as half-baked as the theories of his colleagues that he criticized so regularly. The explanation could simply be that Margo Glenn-Lewis, who'd never traveled more than fifty miles from New York City until she joined The Project, was exactly the geographical ignoramus she claimed to be. "Yes, there is. It's a very large facility, in fact. Scott is the headquarters for United States Transportation Command." "You live and learn, as they say." She glanced at him, after negotiating a sharp turn in the road. "And why do you want to kn
ow where it is?" "I have an old friend who works at the base. I haven't seen him in years, but we stay in touch now and then by e-mail. I'm thinking he might be of some assistance to us."

  "How?" "He's been there for many years. It's not that far from here, and I'm hoping he might have some contacts in the various police agencies." Richard gestured at the surrounding countryside, which could barely be seen in the light of a quarter moon. "Look at this way, Margo. We're not likely to discover anything stumbling around in the dark, now are we? I leave aside the danger of encountering escaped and dangerous felons." Margo smiled. "Hey, I ain't afraid of no convicts." She said that with the insouciance of someone who had never actually known any convicted felons. Not the sort who'd wind up in a maximum security prison, at least. Richard didn't know any, either, so far as he knew. But the paratroopers he'd commanded hadn't been all that different, in some ways. Except they were certainly tougher, if not quite as savage. "Indulge me, then," he said, smiling also. "Iam afraid of that lot. They're fearsome folk, by all accounts." Richard found a map of Illinois in the first petrol station they found that was still open in the middle of night, not far from Carbondale. It took him no more than a minute cross-checking the index with the map to figure out the directions. He looked around and saw that Margo was already out of the station and climbing into the vehicle outside. He followed, feeling mildly triumphant. "All right," he said, after he got into the car. "What we need to do-" "I know, already. We take Route 51 north to I-64, and then take I-64 toward St. Louis. We'll pass the air force base along the way." She grinned at him. "I asked the gas station attendant, what do you think?" "That'scheating. " She shook her head. "We're in the perimeter of a cosmic catastrophe, desperately searching for assistance to get us past official stonewalling, and the man is obsessed with figuring out how to get somewhere the manly way." "It's stillcheating."