by Will Hubbell
It was dark when Con woke him a kiss. The fire was burn-ing brightly, and Rick was warm. He stared about groggily.
"It's time to say good-bye to Joe," said Con.
Rick still felt exhausted. "How long has it been dark?"
"Not long. I see you got everything ready. Thanks."
Rick rose and, after stretching his stiff muscles, took a flaming brand from the bonfire. "This tribute was your idea," he said. "You should light the pyre."
"We should do it together."
Each holding the brand, they advanced to the kindling and wood Rick had placed at the base of the mound on the wind-ward side. Flames danced and spread, fanned by the wind. They rose ever higher into the black sky and illuminated the landscape with reds and oranges. The fire grew so hot, it drove Con and Rick back. They sat on the ground, which now seemed pleasantly cool, and watched the spectacle of light. Somewhere within it, Joe was ascending to the sky.
Rick felt an anxious excitement as he scanned the night sky where he thought the island lay. Any moment he hoped to see the lights of a plane.
Con did not share his optimism. "It's as if my cabin's burning," she said sadly.
"Your cabin?"
"The cabin I dreamed of while I was alone. The place where I was going to make you and Joe honey cakes. I guess I don't need it anymore."
"You won't need it because we're going to be rescued."
Con nodded, but otherwise seemed lost in her own thoughts. "Will you make me a promise?" she asked.
"Anything."
"Will you make me a pyre, too? It doesn't have to be as big as Joe's, just something bright and warm."
"Con, we don't need to talk about that..."
"Yes we do." Con lifted her jacket to reveal a rib cage where every bone was sharply denned. Beneath it; her ab-domen formed a deep cavity. "I don't want to leave you, but I'm souped." She smiled ruefully.
"My parents wanted me to have every advantage."
Time passed, and the sky above the sea remained dark. Rick's hopes faded. As the future lost its promise, the present became paramount. It seemed-to him that, as Con's body dwindled, her spirit was more apparent. It wants to break
free, he thought, and leave her body behind. He craved for that spirit to linger as long as possible. Rick held Con in his arms and tried to savor each heartbeat.
Intent on one another, Rick and Con did not see the pin-point of light that rose from the sea. Blue-white, it mingled with the swirling red sparks ascending into the black sky, but unlike the sparks, it moved purposefully and grew ever brighter. Even when the light became an airplane, Rick and Con remained unaware of it. The plane descended and dis-appeared behind the pyre.
The two figures that approached from the beach were still far away when Rick spotted them. They appeared to be chil-dren. Their clothing shimmered, reflecting the flames. He squeezed his eyes shut to clear them of tears, then stared to make sure they weren't an illusion.
"Con!" he cried joyously. "We're saved!"
Con rose to her feet, her expression one of disbelief and wonder. Rick rose with her. He wrapped one arm around Con and waved the other, calling out. "Over here! We're over here!" One of the figures reacted to Rick's shouts by pointing an object in his direction. The end of it briefly glowed blue. Con gave a startled cry, jerked violently, and fell to the ground. Rick turned to call her name, but a jolt of pain froze the word in his mouth, as the world dissolved into blackness. 36
RICK BECAME AWARE THAT HIS EYES WERE OPEN. HE HAD
no idea how long they had been that way. When he blinked, they felt dry and scratchy. He tried to move and found that he could not. For a terrified instant, he thought he was par-alyzed. Then he realized this could not be the case, for he was still aware of every sensation in his body. There was a presence in his mind that blocked his efforts to control that body. What it was, he had no idea, but he thought he knew its source. That thing that glowed blue did this to me.
Rick stared into a flat surface that shone softly. It looked vaguely familiar. He was laying on something flat and soft, yet gritty. The air was warm. He was naked.
There was the noise of people entering the room. He heard voices. The sounds they made were utterly alien. He had never heard a language, if it was a language, that remotely resembled it. It seemed to be a string of vowels that were sung as tones, interrupted by lip noises that vaguely sounded like the letter "B." The effect was that of a recording played too fast and backward.
A childlike face appeared over his. She had a metallic-colored dot in the middle of her forehead. Rick wished he could say something, even make some small movement to communicate, but he lay powerless. My eyes are playing tricks, or that child's gigantic, he thought. The face disap-peared, and hands touched his body. The touch was not like that of a physician. There was rough indifference in the way he was prodded and examined. It was as if he were a corpse or a specimen, something that could not feel pain or indig-nity.
The hands left him, but the voices were still nearby. Rick found that, through an act of intense concentration, he could regain some control over his body. Slowly, he turned his head in the direction of the voices. He was lying on a sandy bed. Next to him lay Con, emaciated and naked. What seemed to be three huge children, two boys and the girl, were standing near her. The boys had the same metallic dot on their heads as the girl. Their clothing was of a strange pattern, with surfaces that were sculpted into elaborate organic de-signs. It was made from a material that shimmered and changed shade as they moved.
The girl bent over Con and began to examine her in a manner that outraged Rick. Somehow, he had to make her stop. He concentrated on forming a word. Before he could, one of the boys saw that Rick was staring at them and pointed an object in his direction. Rick felt a jolt of pain and became unconscious. FOR DAYS, CON existed in a netherworld, only dimly aware of the passage of time. Things were being done to her, but she did not know what. Something was fogging her mind, and whenever it began to clear, a jolt of pain sent her plummeting into darkness. At last, she was left alone and gradually became aware of her surroundings. The vague, confused memories of her ordeal made little sense and, once again, she wondered if she were dead. If that were true, then she was spending the afterlife in one of the stone rooms on the island.
The room was not as she remembered it. There was a thick layer of sand and beach debris on the floor. The bed she lay upon was also sandy. The most radical change in the room appeared between the stone pillars in the col-onnade. An immaterial, translucent plane bridged all the openings. It had the opalescent look of an oil slick on a puddle. Like an oil slick, its colors swirled and changed. Beyond the colored plane, the world outside was only faintly visible.
Con examined her nude body and saw it had also changed. It was no longer bony. The washboard pattern of her ribs was obscured by-soft skin. Her breasts were no longer shriveled. The muscles on her legs and arms had returned to their former sizes. Her frostbitten foot appeared normal. As she examined her restored body, she discovered a recent needle mark near a vein of her inner elbow. Strangely, none of her other ailments had been healed. Her sores and rashes remained. She was still dirty. Some of her clothing was laid next to her on the bed. It was dirty also, but had an acrid smell, as if it had been fumigated. She dressed, although the clothes felt greasy and scratchy next to her skin, and their fumes stung her eyes.
"Rick!" she called out in an uneasy voice. The eerie opalescent plane seemed to absorb her words. Con ap-proached it. The colors reacted to her presence, the hues becoming more vibrant the closer she came. As she reached out to touch them, her fingers began to tingle. When they were a few inches away, the tingling turned to pain. Con jerked her hand back, and the pain slowly disappeared. She became truly frightened. Someone had tended to her, but only minimally. This scarcely seems like a res-cue! she thought. Rather, she sensed that she had been kept alive for some purpose other than her own benefit. Looking for evidence of her keepers, Con spied foot-prints on th
e sandy floor. Most led to the empty former storage room. Little of the plaster on the far wall re-mained, and the doorway it covered was now revealed. It was sealed by a featureless silvery panel. The trail of footprints ended there. Con dreaded what might happen when the panel opened.
"Calm down," she told herself. "First things, first. I've got to take care of myself." Con checked out the bathroom, which was also choked with sand. Despite this, it still responded to her com-mands. Con craved a hot bath, and immediately began to scoop the sand from the tub. Someone had already cleared out the toilet.
The hot water helped ease Con's apprehension, but only slightly. The tub was gritty. There was no soap or shampoo, and neither were there towels, yet after what she had been through, a bath of any sort was the height of luxury. After Con had cleaned herself as best she could, she washed her filthy clothes. It took several water changes and much hand scrubbing before she had a mar-ginally clean tee shirt along with a pair of panties and trousers. The socks were beyond saving, and the shoe and sandal were unnecessary. Con decided to remove the nightstalker down from her jacket before attempting to clean it. Con was wringing out her clothes when she heard voices in the room. It sounded like people rapidly singing a tuneless song while popping their lips. Con quickly be-gan to dress in her wet clothes. She had her panties and her tee shirt on when two people entered the bathroom.
One of them pointed something at Con. The other spoke in perfect English. "Understand there is a weapon pointed at you. If you move suddenly, it will stop your mind."
Con slowly raised her hands. "I understand."
"You will come into the outer room and sit down on the bed."
Con obeyed. There was a third person waiting in the room. He held the charred remains of the gun. Con looked at him and the two other persons. Her first im-pression was that they were prepubescent children en-larged to the size of six-and-a-half-foot-tall adults. They had the bodies of young gymnasts and perfectly sym-metrical faces. Their dark hair and eyes and their olive complexions, accentuated by the metallic dot on their foreheads, gave them an East Indian look. In their im-posing presence, Con felt like a toddler among the "big kids" at elementary school. Despite their youthful ap-pearance, these people carried themselves with the grav-ity of adults. Their large, stern faces were devoid of childhood innocence.
"Who are you?" asked Con. "Where's Rick?"
"Are you referring to the male?" asked the person who looked like a gigantic fourth-grade girl.
"Yes, is he all right?"
"We will ask the questions," stated the boyish man with the weapon. "You will answer them."
"Please," begged Con. "I have to know about Rick."
"We will inform you about his status when we are sat-isfied by your responses," said the woman. "Truth is es-sential. Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Con meekly.
"Where did you get this?" asked one of the men, hold-ing out the remains of the gun.
"It was on the plane."
"Where did you get the plane?"
"It was here on the island."
"Who constructed this facility?"
"It was already here when we arrived," said Con. "I thought you built it." Her three interrogators began conversing among them-selves in their strange, rapid language. / don't think they expected that answer, Con thought. She decided their question, and the reaction her response provoked, proved Joe's assertion that history had been changed. Yet, if that's the case, why are they here? The rapid conversa-tion ceased, and the second man produced what appeared to be a small rock from the folds of his clothing. He spoke to it and a gray, rectangular plane materialized in the air a few feet in front of Con.
"This is data from an unknown probe," said the woman. "Identify what you see." An image appeared in the rectangle. It was so clear, Con felt she was peering through a window. On the other side of the window were her father and Peter Green. Green was moaning and covering his eyes. They were inside the cabin of the probe. Beyond the probe's clear walls there appeared to be fog or smoke, brightly illu-minated by the glow of flame.
"Daddy!" she cried out.
Con's father turned and seemed to look straight at her. His face was red and blistered, except for two hand-shaped areas around his eyes. "Pete!" shouted her father. "The time machine! It's starting to work!" Green replied, "Thank ..." The screen went blank. The man spoke, and it disappeared. Then the man put the rock away.
"Who were those two individuals?" asked the woman.
Con covered her face with her hands and began to weep. "That's my father, my father." When she looked up, one of the men had the weapon pointed at her. "What happened to him?" she asked between sobs.
"No questions," barked the man with the weapon.
"He was destroyed with the probe," said the woman. The woman's reply sparked an angry discussion among the interrogators. Con continued to weep as they argued.
"Cease crying," said the man with the weapon, when the argument ended. "If you persist in being uselessly emotional, I will fire."
Con stifled her sobs and told them about Peter Green and how he had acquired the time machine. Each state-ment she made elicited a rapid barrage of additional ques-tions. The interrogation continued for over an hour, and though Con answered every question directly and truth-fully, her interrogators became increasingly impatient and irritated. The men, in particular, seemed very an-noyed. The woman said something in their language, and the questioning stopped. "It is tiring to deal with an inacces-sible mind," she stated. The three moved to go. The man with the weapon raised it in Con's direction, but a rapid remark from the woman caused him to lower it. All three of them headed for the silvery panel, which opened as they approached.
"You said you'd tell me about Rick" called Con, as they departed. They did not answer her. The panel sealed itself as soon as they were gone.
Con was shaken and confused. The three individuals had told her nothing directly, except that her father and Green were dead, and she had already known that. Con was left to surmise what she could from her observations and from the nature of the questions she had been asked. Her first conjecture was that the people were from the future and their strange appearance was normal for their kind. They certainly were not children. Their somewhat androgynous bodies seemed strong and fully developed, though the woman's shape only hinted at feminine curves.
Con found their manner extremely upsetting. It went beyond condescension or even contempt. They acted like I wasn't human, she decided. The men took no more ef-fort to conceal their repugnance toward her than would a person before an animal. The woman was only margin-ally better. Her curiosity seemed stronger than her aver-sion. Only the woman had looked Con in the eye. The more Con thought about her interrogators, the more distraught she became. She was very worried about Rick. Is he alive? Why wouldn't they tell me that? A sickening thought came to her. Maybe they've disposed of him! "Disposed" seemed the appropriate word. Con felt they treated her like a stray animal, to be locked up in an empty shed. How else could they have left me here, naked and dirty? Perhaps, she reasoned, they thought I wouldn't mind. It seemed hard to believe that people had grown so insensitive. Maybe I'm being punished for stealing the time machine. The time machine was clearly their major concern. Most of their questions were either about it or its asso-ciated technology. They primarily wanted to know about the time travelers' contacts with others. It seemed to Con like they were trying to track the path of a contagion. It was also clear from the interrogation that these people had been unaware of the observatory's existence. Appar-ently, only the data from the probe tipped them off that it existed. Con guessed that the rock-like object contained the information that had been sent to the future. Did it reach our time to sit around for centuries, perhaps mil-lennia? It was the least of the mysteries that bedeviled her.
Con was too agitated to sit still. She had her former body back and, with it, her restless energy. While she appreciated her renewed vigor, she suspected the motives of the stran
gers who had restored it. I'm not rescued, she thought as she paced across the sand-covered floor, I'm captured. Captured and caged.
In need of something constructive to do, Con grabbed the jacket and began to brush the sand off the bed. Once the bed was clear, she decided to tackle the floor. She scooped a handful of sand and threw it at the shimmering barrier between the columns. The sand passed through the barrier as if it weren't there. "At least I can clean my pen," said Con. "I don't have to live like an animal, even if I'm treated like one."
Con had cleared sand from only a small portion of the floor when the silvery panel opened. The woman entered, carrying the weapon in one hand and a large grayish pink cube in the other. Con rose slowly and raised her hands above her head. The woman advanced into the room and placed the cube on the corner of the bed. All the while, she kept the weapon trained on Con.
"You may lower your hands and feed yourself," the woman said.
"You don't need to point that at me," said Con. "I'm not a savage." The woman did not lower the weapon. "A savage, I presume, is something that is dangerous?"
"You speak English so well, how can you not know what a savage is?"
"The data for your language came from this facility's verbal control system. It is incomplete and fails to define many of your words."
Con, encouraged that the woman had answered a ques-tion, pressed her for more information. "You said you would tell me about Rick."
"When we are satisfied with your responses."
"I've answered all your questions. Why won't you tell me anything?"
"We are doing what is necessary."