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

by White, Samuel Ben

  In her mind, she said a brief prayer. "Paul said that the Spirit intercedes for us even when we don't know what to pray. That's me, so bring me whatever it is I need. Thanks. Amen."

  They joined their empty hands and set off toward a path that looked like it might cut through the forest to the north. It was a dim trail, with a canopy of trees overhead and a thick layer of leaves and pecans underneath, but it was a path. It seemed to Kerrigan that there were several years worth of pecans underfoot and that made him wonder why no one ever came around to harvest them. He suddenly bent over to pick a couple of the freshest looking ones up and cracked them against each other in his hands.

  He poked around in the meat a moment before putting a small piece into his mouth. Bronwyn looked at him with apprehension but didn't try to stop him. After a moment, he shrugged and said, "Just tastes like a pecan. Wonder why nobody comes around and picks them up? I know a lot of people who'd really like the opportunity." Forcing a smile, he added, "Lotta good pies going to waste."

  Bronwyn felt herself squeezing his hand tighter as the path got darker and Kerrigan found himself not minding.

  They came after what they guessed to be about a mile to an open strip of land running east to west. It would have made a good landing strip except that it had some sort of ridge running through the middle of it. They crossed the ridge and came to the ruins they had seen.

  There was no doubt that it had at one time been a city of some prominence. Though the buildings had all crumbled to almost nothing, there was still a sense of order, as if the streets had been laid out in a grid like the streets of the towns Dalmouth and Kerrigan were used to. And here and there they could see a brick or a part of a brick. There were also bits of concrete and re-bar to be seen if one looked closely.

  "There was a level of industrialization here like I've never seen before," Kerrigan mumbled. "Not in a ruin, anyway. This is weird. It's like this place was as advanced as us but it existed a thousand years ago—or more. How come nobody's ever heard of this place?"

  "And how come no one's here now? People tend to build cities where other cities or towns used to be," Bronwyn added.

  "Yeah."

  They made their way in an easterly fashion, not straying too far from the ridge that ran east to west, though they weren't sure why. They could clearly see where streets and city blocks had once been, but the buildings were gone. Gone as if blasted away, Bronwyn thought. They were both troubled by the fact that there was no one there now.

  And nothing there now. It occurred to Bronwyn first as she said, "Have you noticed there still aren't any birds? Just crickets."

  Jason stopped dead in his tracks and, after a moment, said quietly, "You're right. And we've seen no rabbits or anything. And that whole walk through the forest, I don't remember hearing anything rustling in there other than the wind. It's like everything except the plants and the bugs are dead."

  "What is that over there?" Bronwyn suddenly asked. Before Kerrigan could even ask what she was talking about, she had let go of his hand and was crossing the ridge to the south side. With no other choice, he followed her.

  As she crossed the ridge, she stopped and stood with her hands balled into fists on her hips. He caught up with her and said, "What are you—" then he said, "What the?"

  Before them, in a clearing on the south side of the low ridge that ran east to west through what had once been a city of some size, were the ruins of a reddish-pink stone edifice. What had caught their attention was that the reddish-pink stone edifice was so incongruous with everything that they had seen so far. While all the other buildings left the impression of a modern society, this looked like the remains of a castle. An ancient castle like something out of the feudal times, or a faerie tale.

  "That's pink granite," Kerrigan muttered unnecessarily. Like all Texas schoolchildren—and especially someone with an engineer's background—he had been raised almost from birth to recognize pink granite. It was what the capitol building was made of. And the treasury building. And the war department. And the town hall of every town that could afford to have pink granite shipped in.

  Bronwyn was thinking the same thing and said, "I don't remember hearing of anything outside of Texas being made out of pink granite. Do you?"

  "No," he replied, "But surely it exists somewhere else in the world." He walked closer, to get a better look, and found himself running his hands over the granite as if the rocks themselves could tell him the story. He kicked away a few of the pebbles and some of the bigger rocks and pronounced—though he hadn't necessarily meant to say it out loud, "No rebar."

  "Hmm?" Bronwyn asked as she caught up with him.

  He stood up and repeated, "No rebar. And these stones, they aren't cut like the others we've seen. This is ancient. This is the kind of work that would precede the other stuff we've seen by a thousand years—or more. This is the kind of work that was done with hammer and chisel and took years to carve out. Like when one king would start a castle and his grandson would finish it."

  "So maybe this town grew up around these ruins."

  "Maybe," he nodded, though he sounded doubtful. "Think about this, Bronwyn. We're somewhere in the northern hemisphere where pecan trees grow and San Augustine grows naturally and pink granite is readily available and there's a giant ruined city no one's ever heard of? Doesn't that strike you as strange?"

  "Of course it does, but you're thinking something specific. What?"

  "Come here." He ran back towards the low ridge and scrambled to the top. Once there, he began kicking at the dirt as she stood by and watched him with something between curiosity and a fear that he had lost his mind. Suddenly, he dropped to his knees and began digging with his hands.

  "Jason? Are you alright?"

  He nodded and pointed to the little space he had cleared off in the dirt. She bent over and looked at what he had found. "Metal? How did you know there would be metal there?"

  He cleared off a little more dirt and said, "Not just metal, Bronwyn. It's a train rail."

  "A train track?" she mumbled, looking very confused as she knelt down to see if what he said were true.

  Jason stood up and said, "Don't you get it?" He lifted her to her feet and began to gesture around them, "A downtown area on the north side of train tracks that run east to west through the middle of town. Doesn't that sound familiar?"

  When she just looked at him, with her confusion continuing, Kerrigan practically exploded, "We're in Abilene!"

  "Abilene?"

  "Yes, Abilene. These are the train tracks that you and I both rode into town. That hill with the church on it? That's where McMurry College sat. That big building was their chapel."

  "But—"

  "The tree-lined path that brought us over here? Sayles Boulevard. The place where I found the macadam? South Fourteenth Street." Pointing, he said, "Over there to the southeast, that's where Kirby was."

  "Are you out of your mind?"

  "It all fits, Bronwyn. Remember up in the airplane when I said those hills looked familiar? It's because they were the Buffalo Gap Mountains. Those bricks we were looking at? They were probably part of the Drake Hotel, or maybe that brake shop. It all fits, Bronwyn."

  "Pink granite. The pink granite doesn't fit."

  Suddenly the wind went out of his sails and he admitted, "You're right. It doesn't. But everything else does. The pecan trees, the San Augustine, all of it. It all fits. Even the granite could have been brought in."

  Trying to remain rational, Bronwyn asked, "If this is Abilene . . . where is everybody? Why are the buildings gone?"

  "I don't know," he said as he kicked at the dirt that had until recently been covering the old train tracks. Suddenly he looked up and said, "Time."

  "What?"

  "Time. Remember, Gustav said the fourth dimension was movement. What if the fifth dimension is time like he thought? Eddie was based on removing the three primary dimensions in favor of pure movement. What if we somehow removed the first four elements i
n favor of time? Or, what if we somehow removed height, width, depth and time? Then, when we reinserted time, we're at a different point on the line. We came out of that jump exactly over where we entered it. So what if there were no height, width or depth or movement, just strictly time?"

  "So what? We like . . . jumped into . . . the future?"

  "How else would you explain all this?"

  "I can't explain all this even with that explanation. Jason, think about it. Assuming you're right. How far into the future are you saying we jumped?"

  He looked around for a moment, then said, "Who knows? Long enough for all the buildings to fall down and the pavement to crumble. How long does that take? A thousand years? Ten thousand?"

  As she turned slowly in a circle, she asked softly, "Where are all the people, Jason? And the animals? Where are the birds?"

  "I don't know. We didn't even see buildings out in the country while we were flying."

  "Or cattle. Where are all the cattle? I always figured if all the people died in Texas the cattle would take over."

  Kerrigan turned to the pink granite ruin and asked, "And where did that thing come from?"

  "Maybe they built it later." At his questioning glance, she put her hands to her head and explained, "I'm not for one minute saying I believe this cockamamy story about this being Abilene and us being shot into the future, but just for laughs, let's say it's true. In a couple thousand years, a whole new society could have sprung up and died since the one we left. Like I was saying, maybe they built the castle on top of the old society. Or maybe they tried and failed."

  "Huh?"

  "Maybe this castle didn't fall down so much as it was never completed. Maybe they just got started on it before some blight hit it or something."

  "What happened to it? What happened to our society, I mean? Where is everybody?"

  Bronwyn shrugged, "War?" Softly, as she realized what she was saying, she hypothesized, "Maybe some sort of biological weapon was used that killed off all the animals and birds, leaving only the bugs—and plants. I've heard theories of things like that. So maybe the few survivors of the war tried to rebuild things—like that castle—with whatever tools they could find. Maybe in the aftermath of a globally devastating war things returned to a sort of feudal system."

  "Then where did those people go?"

  "Maybe they got killed off before they finished the castle. Killed off by whoever they were trying to protect themselves from. Or maybe whatever the biological weapon that was used before—maybe it had laid dormant for a while then came back stronger and killed everyone that was left." Her voice as dry as sandpaper, she added, "Maybe everybody on the planet is dead."

  Trying to add some levity, she quipped, "You said you'd find me after the war was over. Looks like it's over."

  "So what do we do, Bronwyn? Even if I'm wrong—if this is just some place we never heard of that bears a superficial resemblance to Abilene—there's got to be a reason there are no animals here. Poisoned water or something is keeping the animals and birds away from here. Seems like we'd be wise to clear out as well." He pulled something out of his pocket, dropped it on the ground, and mumbled, "And stop eating the pecans."

  "And go where, Jason?"

  "That's what I'm wondering. Do we just pick a direction and fly until we run out of fuel or find someone? What if you're right and everybody in the world is dead?"

  "That may be our only choice." She took his arm and clung to it almost the way that she used to cling to her grandfather's arm when she was a scared little girl. After a moment, she asked, "If we are in the future, is there any way we could get back to the past? Back to where we came from?"

  He shrugged, his hands in the pockets of his flight suit. "Considering we don't know how we got here, I don't have any idea how to get back."

  She let go of his arm and got the look on her face that she always had when intently exploring an idea. "Let's think about it for a moment. What was different about today's flight over all the others?"

  "The nuclear power plant. You think that effected the flight somehow?"

  "Not the plant itself—because it's incredibly well-sealed. I'm thinking more of the power output from the plant." She snapped her fingers and said, "E=MC squared."

  "Hmm?"

  "That formula doesn't really apply to us, but . . . I'm trying to remember the name of the guy that came up with it. Einstein! That's it! I was talking to that man Einstein one day. Most of it didn't make any sense because it was so far over my head, but one thing he said was a theory he had that if a person were to travel fast enough—like traveling through space to another star or something—that time itself might work backwards."

  "What do you mean?"

  "He said that if a person were to travel at the speed of light for one year—say to some star and back. By the time they got back, everyone they had left behind would be twenty-one years older. What if when we added the power boost, we didn't make a pure movement jump like we expected. Maybe we didn't separate movement from time like we thought. Maybe we didn't technically travel in time but we were going so fast that it seemed that way to everyone we left behind."

  "I see what you're getting at, but that doesn't give me any hope that we can make it back."

  "Maybe it does." She began walking, dragging him with her, as she said, "I want to get back to the ship and make some calculations. If we really are in the future, then there just might be a way to take us into the past."

  As he followed her he objected, "But if we're not in the future and you send us back in time, then you might be sending us to a point in time where the only two people we'd have to talk to are Adam and Eve."

  "Cain got his wife from somewhere, didn't he? Maybe he married our daughter. Come on."

  "What do you mean 'our daughter?"

  Chapter Eleven

  "You're kidding," Kerrigan replied. "You think we can just reverse the process and go back where we were—when we were?"

  "I'm saying it's worth a shot."

  "What if it just—sends us nowhere? Obliterates us?"

  Bronwyn shrugged. "That's a possibility, I guess, though I don't see why it would do that when it's never done it before."

  "It never sent us here before, either," he pointed out.

  She stood up and put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his eyes. "I had an idea while we were walking over here, Jason. You know how I feel about you and it occurred to me that it wouldn't bother me to play Adam and Eve here with you."

  At the look of surprise in his eyes, she quickly continued, "But you said it yourself: we can't stay here. There's something wrong with this place. At the very least we'd die from lack of meat. Not to mention fruits andvegetables. All we’ve seen that’s edible are those pecans—and they might kill us."

  "You're right," he said, while shaking his head. "I mean, the idea of playing Adam and Eve isn't entirely unattractive to me, either. But we can't stay and, well, I guess I'm afraid to go."

  "I thought the only thing you were afraid of was living," she quipped. As soon as she had said it, she regretted the statement. She had meant it as a joke, but the look in his eyes told her it hadn't been received that way.

  "You're right again," he said as he turned and walked to the northern edge of the meadow where he had landed the airplane. A creek bed bordered the edge of the meadow on that side, though it had no water in it at the time. He sat down on the bank and threw rocks into the bottom, imagining what the splash might have been like.

  Bronwyn banged her head against the side of the plane, then followed him. She sat down beside him and said, "I'm really sorry. I didn't mean that like it sounded."

  Jason just shrugged. After a while, he said, "You're right, you know. I didn't want to live for a long time after my mother died. I don't think I ever really thought about committing suicide, but I did take risks. Whenever the guys got started seeing who could ride a bicycle fastest or drive a car the fastest or jump off a barn—I always won.

&
nbsp; "I wanted to be a combat pilot for the same reasons, maybe even though I probably would have made a better engineer. Maybe that's why I liked this job so much. I don't know that I have ever wished to die, but I'm not sure I wanted to live. I've been like this for a long time—since Mom, maybe.

  "Then I met Susan. I was a senior in high school when her family moved to Haskell. Took her to the junior-senior prom two months after she came to town. Asked her to marry me that next winter when I was home for Christmas. She never even hesitated. Said yes like the words were popped out of a cork-gun. We got married and, you know, I stopped taking the risks. I never really thought about it until just now, but I did. I guess I finally had someone to live for—something to live for. After she died, I went back to my own ways—except maybe worse. Didn't the Apostle Paul say something like, 'to live is Christ and to die is gain'? I've—uh—tried to live for him, but I agreed most of all for the second half of the statement because to die meant to be with Susan."

  "How did she die?" Bronwyn asked softly, after a long time of silence in which the sun began to go down on them.

  "Ovarian cancer," Jason replied. "I had never even heard of it before then. I mean, I knew women had ovaries but I had never heard of anyone getting cancer there. But she did. Found out just before her nineteenth birthday and she was dead shortly after her twentieth. Never got to be a teacher like she wanted. Never got to see me fly. She would have liked flying. Died right here, you know."

  "In Abilene?"

  "Right here in good ol' Abilene," he nodded. He chuckled grimly, like a spectre, "Man I hate this place. It'll be my luck that when we get to heaven Jesus is going to decide that instead of building a new Jerusalem he'll build a new Abilene and I'll have to spend eternity here." After a moment, he continued, "Anyway, when she died I guess I got tired of living again.