The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 3): Lost Time

by White, Samuel Ben

  "As far as I know," he tried to sound glib, "But what are you referring to specifically?"

  "When you said I was your best friend."

  "Bronwyn. Nobody else even comes close."

  She had stood on her tiptoes then and kissed him lightly on the cheek. She whispered, "To the end of the war."

  "'Til then," he replied softly, then let himself out. It occurred to him that he wished his quarters were farther away so the walk home would mean something. So he wound up circling the block before getting back to his side of the duplex and crawling into bed.

  They were halfway to the base before either of them spoke again. It was Bronwyn who opened the ball with, "I know I'm only joining a few million other people in thinking this, but I wish the war were over." Before he could say anything else, she opened up all the way, "I may be making a fool of myself to say this, but I wish we could go out on a date. I wish we could go to a restaurant and maybe see a show, then you'd walk me to my door and ki—hug me goodnight. And the next day we'd go to our jobs as college professors and maybe you would ask me out again another night and we wouldn't have to worry about protocol and unit morale and our ranks.

  "Maybe one date would be it. Maybe we'd discover we're good friends and nothing more and you'd date and marry someone from your church and I'd fall in love with somebody I met at my work and we'd send Christmas cards to each other and pictures of our kids. Maybe we'd fall in love and get married—don't look so scared, Major.

  "I'm just lamenting the fact that we're going to fly together today, then, tomorrow when we get back here Gustav's going to tell me I've been relocated and who knows where I'll go? There's a war on, Jason, and as good and lucky as I've been so far I may be spread across a desert next week—"

  "Don't talk like that, Bronwyn—"

  "I mean it, Jason. It's just not fair. Other people get to meet and have dates and go to balls that aren't based on a military theme. They have spats and don't worry about how it affects the morale of a unit. They kiss without being brought up on charges. They could actually hold hands in a car like this without worrying about looking guilty when they get out."

  "How would they shift gears?"

  "You know what I mean," she chuckled, as she slapped him on the arm.

  He reached over and put a tentative hand on her thigh and said, "Maybe it's not fair. If life were fair, I think we'd both have grown up with our parents and, well, Susan wouldn't have died and you would be teaching physics at A&M and I'd be building bridges and we never would have met. As much as I want Susan back, I hate the idea of never having met you. But if we both make it through this war, I will find you. Somehow, someway, I will find you."

  She put her hand on his and said, "Thank you. But that could be years. You could meet someone else. I could meet someone else."

  "If that's the case, isn't it better to be with the right person? If you meet someone you lo—want to be with more than me, then that's who you should be with. Seriously, Bronwyn, we can't rewrite the world we're given. What if it were peacetime? How would we have met? I'd be teaching engineering at Tech or some college and you'd be—doing what? Teaching at A&M? Doing research for some big Houston firm?

  "When I was a senior back at Haskell High, some reporters had us picked as the best football team in the country. Everybody had us picked at least in the top ten. Our district rivals like Stamford and Weinert were quaking in their boots. We were already predicting who we would play in the playoffs. Then, first play from scrimmage of the first game of the season our star quarterback, the one the whole offense was based on, went down with a broken leg. Fluke play, even. Just stepped back, caught his cleats in the turf, and when he went to pivot his leg snapped. Suddenly, the back-up quarterback—who had no idea what he was doing—was thrust into the role of starter and we finished the season with five wins and six losses."

  "That's interesting but what does it have to do with—"

  "I'm just saying that all plans can change. If it were peacetime and we somehow met each other, who knows if we'd even like each other? Maybe in a peacetime society you would already be married to someone you met in college. Maybe you'd even have kids. Remember? Back before the war almost everyone had kids by the time they were your age. We can wish for all kinds of things but, like my coach used to tell us, you play the hand you're dealt."

  "I guess. And I know a girl saying something like this to a guy can be, um, intimidating, but I would have liked to find out, um, if there could have been something between us." She quickly added, "Maybe you don't feel that way. Maybe I'm just a friend, but, well . . . " She let the sentence drift off and she stared off into the distance, silent.

  A few minutes later, they were pulling up to the gate at Kirby and being waved through.

  Wiping her eyes, she said, "Now, we better focus on the mission. I'm ready, are you?"

  As he made a loop over the town of Cisco he took a brief look at the giant swimming pool—largest in the world, some people said—that was visible even from the air. He remembered going there with his father when he had been too small to even swim. He remembered how scared he had been by the way that dam had loomed over the whole thing. He remembered the sun setting behind that dam at about four in the afternoon even in the summer and how that had just added to the creepy feeling it gave him. Even looking at it now, from so high in the air that the world's largest swimming pool looked like tea-cup, that dam scared him.

  "Coming around," he announced. "Setting the clock at fifteen minutes to jump."

  "Roger that, Susan One. You are clear."

  Kerrigan turned Bronwyn and said, "In less than twenty minutes we're going to be circling over Albuquerque. Ready?"

  "I can't wait."

  "Oh, uh, by the way, I would have liked to find out, too."

  "What?"

  Making sure the radio was on so that only she could hear it, Kerrigan told her, "I would have liked to know what it would have been like to know you without—without all this going on around us."

  On the previous jumps, the distance traveled had been determined by the amount of electric charge given to Eddie. Jumps of under one hundred miles had been necessitated by the small amount of voltage that could be generated by the dry-cell batteries they had on board.

  Before Kerrigan had even arrived at Kirby, however, Gustav had been working with one of his former (and now present) countrymen—a genius named Einstein who worked out of Building 13—on developing a much more powerful source of energy. They had begun by trying to expand on some ideas proposed by a man from the British Americas named Tesla but had found that, while his plan would be excellent for powering a city, it was not sufficient for the short bursts of power they were looking for.

  So Einstein had suggested they try to tap the power of the atom, which was what he had been working on before fleeing the land of his birth, anyway. While Gustav had been hammering away on Eddie, Einstein had tapped into the power of the hydrogen atom, conducting many of his experiments in west Texas at White Sands. He had finally developed a reactor which would fuse two atoms together and draw off enough energy to, as he put it, "Do anything we damn well want to do with it."

  With Gustav's help, Einstein and his men had created a power plant small enough to be carried on a Comal 42, but powerful enough to jump the plane anywhere in the world. It's installation had meant that Texas was one step closer to being able to bomb Tokyo and, hopefully, bring an end to the war.

  "One minute to go," Jason announced. "How's the weather in Albuquerque?"

  Tony replied giddily, "Clear and sunny. In a couple minutes, you tell me what the weather's like in Albuquerque."

  "Roger that, Kirby." Kerrigan turned to Bronwyn, who was watching the dials and gauges on Eddie with rapt attention. "How's it look, Captain?"

  "Everything's A-OK, Major. Twenty seconds."

  "Close your eyes when I hit five seconds, Captain."

  "Roger."

  Kerrigan heard a brief and very German, "Godspeed," b
efore he began his final ten seconds of countdown.

  "Three . . . two . . . one . . . go."

  As calmly as he could, Kerrigan said, "Open your eyes, Captain."

  "We made it?" she asked excitedly.

  Trying to keep the panic out of his voice, Jason told her, "I've seen Albuquerque—and this ain't it."

  Chapter Ten

  "Oh wow," was all Bronwyn could manage as she looked out the window. "Where are we?"

  "Search me," Kerrigan replied. "But it's not Albuquerque."

  "Should we try to raise someone on the radio?"

  He thought for a moment, then nodded, "Keep it in code, though. We don't know where we jumped to. Might be out of Texas."

  As she reached for the button that would activate her communications link, she pointed out, "At least we didn't go to the other side of the world." At his questioning glance, she motioned out the window, "It's still daylight."

  "And according to the compass, it's still morning."

  "Brandy Four calling the tower. Tower come in please," Bronwyn said calmly into the microphone, though her heart was beating a tattoo on the inside of her chest. After a moment, she said again, "Brandy Four calling for assistance. Please respond."

  When nothing seemed forthcoming, she tried a couple other channels. When they, too, proved futile, Kerrigan suggested, "See if you can pick up anything—anyone. Don't even try talking to them. Just listen."

  "Think maybe our radio's out?"

  "It's possible. Switch to the auxiliary unit."

  She nodded and pulled off her flight helmet to better hear the second unit. As she was flipping channels, Kerrigan was flying a wide circle, trying to see something that looked familiar. "Those hills," he muttered.

  "Huh?" Bronwyn asked. She was leaning forward, though it didn't make any difference. She still wasn't hearing anything.

  "Nothing. Those hills just look familiar for some reason. Don't know why, though. Nothing else does."

  They were flying over a terrain not terribly unlike that which they had left, though there were more trees and no sign of industrialization. There were faint trails in the underbrush that looked like they might have once been roads, but it was hard to say. Kerrigan brought the plane down lower but couldn't make out any differences. The lines he had at first mistaken for roads could have been shifts in the contour of the land or just old creek bottoms.

  It struck him as odd that there were no people. No signs of people, either. No buildings, no vehicles—and none of the land looked plowed. It looked like it might have been good land for plowing, but he wasn't much of a judge of that. As far as he could see, from horizon to horizon, there was no evidence of humanity. Not a single barn or fence or road. It occurred to him that it might have been what the land looked like when the first white man saw it, but even then surely there would have been teepees or cattle or buffalo or something.

  As he studied the terrain and flew his circle—now traveling in a roughly northeastern direction—Bronwyn announced, "Nothing. I've been around the dial twice now on both units. What are the chances that both units got knocked out in the jump?"

  "Possible, I guess. That nuclear reaction sends an awful lot of power through the system. I guess it could have shorted everything out," Kerrigan replied absently. The contours of the land were somehow familiar to him. It was like when one tries to remember a song that they know they ought to know but they just can't get the starting notes. "Never happened before, though. Never lost one radio for that matter—not even in combat."

  Kerrigan continued his circling pattern while Bronwyn continued to try and raise someone on the radio. Neither course of action seemed to be getting them anywhere. Finally, Kerrigan said, "We've got to come up with a plan. We've got enough fuel to keep flying for about another five hours, but what then? And in what direction do we fly? Want to pick a compass point?"

  "We seem to be in our same time zone—so you want to hazard a guess as to which direction would be best? Did we come out over Japan?"

  He looked around and said, "We know we're in the daytime—and by the position of the sun I'd say we're still in the northern hemisphere. The country sure doesn't look like pictures I've seen of Japan. I thought for a moment we had overshot Albuquerque and ended up near Phoenix, but I don't think so. The flora looks kind of like the stuff around Abilene, but this can't be Abilene because where are all the roads and houses and stuff?"

  "This is not making me happy," Bronwyn muttered as she returned to the radio. She had pulled the cover off the auxiliary unit in hopes that a simple, burned out fuse would prove to be the culprit. She couldn't fix it in mid air, but at least it would be a comfort to know what had gone wrong. And, she thought, providing it wasn't the same part that had been fried on both machines, maybe she could put together one working radio from the parts of the two. She was disappointed that—at least at a cursory glance—there was nothing wrong with the unit.

  "Hey, what's this?" Jason asked hopefully.

  She jerked her head up and asked quickly, "What? What do you see?"

  "One o'clock. Looks like it might be some old ruins or something."

  "Where? I don't see—wait, I follow. Be cautious. Might be someone there, using the old ruins as a hideout or something."

  Kerrigan nodded but headed for the ruins. They weren't much, just a few incongruous shapes built on and around a long low hill. As they approached, they saw no signs of people or animals, so he came in slower and lower for as good a look as possible.

  As they flew over the crest of the hill, Kerrigan did a slight bank to give Bronwyn a better look. After a moment, she said, "Yeah, looks like there used to be a town or something down there. I could see the ruins of at least one rock building and maybe more."

  "Well, it's no good flying around up here all day. How's your paleontology?"

  "Huh?"

  "Maybe if we can't find someone who can tell us where we are, maybe we can at least find some clues. Ancient writings or something. Anything that'll give us an idea where we are so we can figure out how to get home."

  "Worth a shot. Where do you suggest we put down?"

  He pointed to a place less than half a mile to the west of the rock ruin they had seen. "There. Looks pretty level and clear."

  "Have you ever landed in a field?"

  "How much harder can it be than landing without gear?"

  "Do you have your sidearm with you?" he asked.

  "It's in my pack."

  "Better get it." At her questioning look, he shrugged, "No telling what might be down there. Like you said, there may be someone down there using the ruins for a hideout or something. At the least, we might have to kill our supper. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not eat those emergency rations unless I have to."

  When the plane was on the ground, he popped the canopy and they climbed out onto their respective wings. When Bronwyn had jumped to the ground and come around the airplane, she found Kerrigan kneeling and examining the grass. Putting a hand on his shoulder, she asked, "What did you find?"

  "San Augustine."

  "Who?"

  "San Augustine grass. Predominant to Texas. There may be other places where it grows, but I don't know of any." He stood up and walked over to the nearest trees. With her close behind, he pointed out, "Burket pecans. And look over there, paper-shell pecan trees. We've got to be in Texas."

  "You think maybe we landed on some sort of game preserve or something?"

  "If we did, it's really big. I didn't see any roads as far as I looked. Didn't see any game, either. In fact," he said, then drifted off. She looked at him and he whispered, "Listen."

  "To what?"

  "That's just it. No birds."

  Bronwyn was about to say something in response when he said, "Let's go see if we can find that big rock ruin. Maybe we can find some clue as to where we are over there."

  They found a path through the pecan tree forest, of sorts, but it was slow going. The ground was not as level as it had looked.
But soon they were on a trail that cut through the forest, running due east, directly to where they wanted to go. "Guess a lot of people went this way at one time," Bronwyn commented. "That building must have been of some importance, back then . . . whenever that was."

  Kerrigan stopped suddenly and she ran into him. She was about to ask what he was doing when he picked up a chunk of what looked at first glance like a rock. He held it up for her to see and said, "Macadam. This wasn't just a road, it was a paved road."

  She wanted to object, but he handed her the rock and, as she felt it and looked at it, it was obviously manmade. Rather than tossing it aside casually, she set it on the ground with a deep sense of foreboding. Looking into the dark forest of pecan trees, she suddenly got a chill. Grabbing onto his arm, she asked, "Mind if I walk closer?"

  "Not at all." He patted her hand. Soon they had come out on the little clearing at the top of the hill. They walked over to the ruins and Kerrigan shook his head in wonder.

  "Looks like the outline of an old church—but that's not what you're thinking, is it?"

  He nodded his head and stepped out onto the pile of cut stone. Kneeling down, he motioned her over and said, "Look at that."

  "What?"

  "Re-bar. The foundation—and maybe some of the walls—of this place was made out of reinforced concrete."

  "What does that tell us?"

  "It tells us that whoever built this place—and, presumably, the road—was pretty technologically advanced. On a level with where we are now."

  She looked around and asked, "You're saying this is like . . . an Atlantis or something?"

  "Or something," he nodded. He stood up and, looking around, said, "This is the highest point around. Look, you can see a long ways from here. We would be able to see even further if not for the forest. This was probably their place of worship or some sort of city hall or something."

  She pointed to the north and said, "It looks like there are some other ruins over that way. Maybe we can find something out about them over there—or run into somebody." As he nodded and put a hand to his pistol, growing jumpy himself, Bronwyn reached into her flight suit and put a hand to her grandfather's badge. It had a comforting feel in her hand.