Some people have come away from catastrophe with the feeling that God had some task for them to accomplish before they cashed in their chips. I don't know if that's good theology or not. If so, what's my task?
So here I am, and I find myself faced with an even greater conundrum (a word for which I've always wanted a use). One for which there can be no penance. No earthly penance, anyway. To have earthly penance, one must have an earth.
When I destroyed the world before (a phrase I cannot help but find oddly amusing), it was merely reshaped. The world itself still existed, but everything had changed. Memories were washed away, and some physical things also, but much had remained the same, in a physical sense—aside from the aforementioned non existence of several million people, of course. Mountain trails, basic geography, things like that remained the same, despite what I did.
I fear that the circumstances I find myself now in cannot come out as well. The forces I have set in motion will not just reshape things, I believe they will cause an end to time and all the things in it. Things are dependent on time, after all. In fact, we may have proof that the end is near. Such an end as that precludes reformation.
I have no proof of that, however. I am treading on completely new ground with no basis for many of my assumptions. I have no concrete data to point to, nor can I experiment in anything other than theory. [The problem with theory is that we—too often—theorize what we want, not what actually will be. True theory needs to be based on some observable facts, with theory conjecturing to fill in the holes. I don't really have enough facts to begin to have a theory.]
I just do not believe that the fabric of time can cope with the stress I have inadvertently placed upon it. Each day the hole seems to grow larger—or at least more frequent—and I fear there will soon be a great rending of time . . .
. . . which will destroy it.
"One thing I don't get," Mister Day said over breakfast, "Is why I've been seeing this stuff for almost five months now—and you've only been seeing if for about three. Does that mean the hole here is worse, or further advanced."
"Five months, huh?" Heather asked, just barely awake. The time difference between Colorado and Virginia was definitely playing havok with her body clock. Though the sun was up, her body was telling her she shouldn't be out of bed for a good hour or more.
"Maybe longer," Day replied. When the Fitchs looked up at him in surprise, he told them, "One day last fall—more than a year ago—I saw a man standing out in front of my gate. I thought I did, anyway. He was wearing some old fashioned clothes, so I figured he was on his way to a Halloween party or something. Right time of year for it.
"I watched as he stepped out into the street without so much as looking either way to check for cars. There was a honk and the man jumped back just in time to avoid being run over. He was OK, I thought, but then he just slumped over in a faint. I ran out of the house to see if he was all right, but he wasn't there."
"Where'd he go?" Garison asked.
"I don't know. At the time, I figured he must have just crawled away or something. Or I thought it might have been some teen ager playing a trick on me or something. They'll do stuff like that, you know. I never thought anything more about it until recently. I'm wondering now if the fellow really was from the time of his clothes—late eighteen hundreds, I'd say. Wore his hair like they do in old pictures, too."
"And this happened a year ago?" Garison confirmed.
"Yeah. But I didn't see anything else until early June, so I pretty much forgot about it. Then things started happening fairly regularly—like every two weeks or so. Here lately, they've been happening even more often. Almost daily." Day repeated, "What I still want to know, though, is why it's been happening here more than at your place."
"That is strange," Heather agreed.
Garison shook his head and said, "Not really. Think about it. Other than Sarah's encounter with that little tree, our main tip off that we were experiencing a time window has been the people we met. Their clothing and what not. But if no people come through the window, will we notice?"
It looked to Garison like they were listening but not really following, so he explained, "It was a fluke that we even noticed Sarah's time window, right? So how many more have slipped by without us knowing because we weren't watching? Our yard from four years ago looks a lot like our yard from four weeks ago—unless there's snow on it. The front yard looked pretty much like it does now even before we built the house. How much could go on out there without us knowing?"
Heather nodded but objected, "That still doesn't explain why they would start earlier here—"
"Yes, it does," Garison corrected. "Compare Mount Vernon to La Plata Canyon over the last two hundred and fifty years. Mount Vernon has been continuously occupied by people for that entire time. Townspeople, slaves, passersby. Conversely, La Plata Canyon has never been thickly populated at any point in its history. Sure, there have been a few Utes or Navajos now and then, and some miners here and there, but never very many people. Even in the gold boom days the people who were in the canyon kept to pretty specific spots. Mount Vernon has easily been occupied at any given point in history by many times more people than have ever set foot in La Plata Canyon. Therefore, it is exponentially more likely that a window in time here would contain humans than a window in time in La Plata."
"So you're saying," Heather concluded, "That the holes in time began back home at probably the same time they began here? We just didn't notice them?"
Garison nodded in confirmation, "Exactly. And, I'm thinking the holes probably opened up the moment I came back from the past. It just took more than a year for anyone to notice."
Jon seemed skeptical, "I don't know."
"You ever had anything stolen out of your yard, Mister Day?" Garison asked suddenly.
"I guess. Couple garden tools once."
Garison told him, "Someone did that without you seeing it. How many times you think some neighborhood kid has kicked his football into your yard, hopped the fence and retrieved it, all without you noticing it? How many neighborhood cats have run through your yard or climbed your trees without you noticing? That stuff happens all the time. We notice it once in a blue moon."
"So what are you saying?" Heather asked. Get Garison talking in the abstract, she knew, and conversations could go on indefinitely—and never reach their intended destination.
"I'm saying things happen all the time that we don't notice. This hole in time seems to be recurring, right? I mean, it's not constant. We know that. What if the first month after I was back, it only appeared once during the whole month and that only for fifteen seconds? What are the chances we would see that?"
Day jumped in, "So, are you saying that—these last couple weeks when I've been seeing something strange almost daily—that there may have been five or six holes in time that I missed?"
"Sure. Think about your front yard. You've got a big front yard there with that one section that doesn't have any trees. What if a hole opened right there from—say—fifteen years ago? You'd never know. This is a big universe. The odds that every hole in time is going to contain a person or something obviously from another time are phenomenal."
Heather took Garison's hand and said, "This isn't making me feel any better about all this."
Day suddenly asked, "Why can't we just leave? Why not just build a big fence over my yard and another one over yours and seal these places off? I don't want to leave my land any more than you probably want to leave yours, but what's the alternative?"
"We thought of that, Jon," Garison answered. "But even if we could keep people out, how big do we build the fence? Remember that funeral we told you about? That hole in time may have been as much as a mile long. I don't think I could afford to buy all the land that has a potential for time shifts. Who's to say you haven't had some around here of similar length?"
Just then there was a knock on the door. Jon took a look at his watch and shrugged, not knowing who would call on him
at such an early hour. He got up and went to the door.
He opened it and there was a young man standing there with a clip board and a bag of newspapers. He was a tow headed boy of probably thirteen with permanently unkempt hair. Though his clothes were modern, he struck Garison as having just walked out of an old TV sitcom about young rascals or neighborhood menaces. He looked from his clipboard to Mister Day and asked, "Jonathan Day?"
"Yes," Day replied hesitantly.
The young man put on his best forced smile and said, "I'm your new newspaper boy and I need to collect for your subscription."
"Is it that time already?" Day asked, shaking his head. It didn't seem that long since he'd made his quarterly payment.
"Yes sir."
Day stepped out on the porch and fumbled in his pocket for his money clip. He peeled out the necessary amount of money and handed it to the boy. The boy handed him a receipt and his paper and called, "Thank you Mister Day!" as he bounded off the porch.
Jon went to put the money clip back in his pocket, but the wind caught the newspaper for a moment and distracted him. As he held tightly to the newspaper to keep it from blowing away, the money clip slipped out of his pocket and hit the porch with a resounding "ping".
"Dang it," Day muttered. He looked down, but didn't see the money clip. "Must have bounced off the porch," he muttered.
In front of the porch were some hydrangea bushes so he turned to put the paper inside. If he was going to have to go digging in the bushes, he didn't need to be still holding onto his paper, he thought. He stuck his head in the door and, tossing the paper to Garison, said, "Here's the paper if you want to look at it. I dropped my money clip in the bushes."
Jon went out and got down on his hands and knees to look for the money clip. He searched under the bushes but just couldn't find it. It was a silver money clip and should have shown up well against the dark earth. Thinking maybe it hadn't bounced that far after all, Day went back up on the porch to look. Try as he might, though, he could find no sign of his money clip.
He swore under his breath with frustration. He didn't mind the money so much—there was probably less than ten dollars in it anyway—but he liked that money clip. Had his initials on it and everything. He shook his head and went inside, thinking maybe he'd see it if he came out later with a fresh eye.
Walking inside, he told the Fitchs, "I dropped my money clip out there and it just seems to have disappeared."
Heather stood up and said, "I'll help you look." Laughing, she added, "Too bad Sarah's not up. She's always finding things we thought we'd lost."
"Cause she doesn't have to bend over as far to get close to the ground," Day laughed. "My kids were the same way when they were little. Always finding stuff we thought we'd lost. On the other hand, they were always losing their own stuff."
Heather started for the door but Garison stopped her, saying, "Wait. Jon, did you recognize that kid who delivered this paper?"
Jon shrugged and replied, "He looked kind of familiar. Seems like I've got a new delivery kid every other week. Girls, boys, they all dress alike nowadays and start to look alike after a while. Why?"
Garison held up the paper and asked, "You didn't look at this, did you?"
"No, why?"
Garison pointed to the paper and said, "According to this, the Washington Redskins just beat the Denver Broncos in the Super Bowl."
"This is November," Heather remarked. "Isn't the Super Bowl played in January?"
"That Superbowl was played in January, of 1988," Garison told her.
Day came over and took the paper from Garison. He looked at the paper and said, "This things's almost ten years old! That kids cheated me!"
"Did he?" Garison asked. "Look at that paper. That's not a ten year old paper. That's freshly printed." He held up his hands and said, "See, I got ink on my fingers. Most papers have changed ink so they don't do that anymore. Jon, I think you just paid your bill for the first quarter of '88."
"That explains why I didn't have to pay for the paper that quarter." Day looked down at the paper, then back towards the door. After repeating this procedure another time or two, he smirked and asked, "I wonder if anyone will notice that I paid that kid with bills that hadn't been minted yet?"
Garison replied, "Someone will notice one of these days. If you're lucky, it won't be until that money should have been in circulation anyway. Or it'll have someone else's fingerprints on it."
Day laughed as if about to say something else, then swallowed big. He cast another look at the door and mumbled, "Spring of '88."
Garison and Heather shared a shrug before Heather asked, "What? What is it, Jon?"
Still looking at the door, Jon Day told them, "Every spring I get out and work in my garden. I weed, I prune, I rake. The whole bit. In the spring of 1988 I was pruning those hydrangea bushes when I found a money clip under them. It had a few dollars in it—less than ten. But what struck me as odd was that it had 'JD' engraved on it—my initials."
He turned to them and, forcing a smile, quipped, "I guess it had my initials on it because it was my money clip—that I'd lost. I just, um, didn't know I'd lost it because I didn't know I owned it. Would own it. Whatever."
Heather turned to ask Garison what he thought of the new revelation, but her husband had disappeared. "Garison?" she asked. "Where are you?"
"In the living room," came the reply.
She followed him into the living room and promptly punched him in the arm. "What was that for?" he asked in surprise.
"I thought you had disappeared like his money clip." She hit him again (harder) and told him (forcefully), "Don't ever do that to me again. Now, what are you doing in here?"
Garison was pulling out the video camera they had brought with them (for no reason at the time) and began putting it on the tripod. He smiled and told her, "Jon's lost money clip may just be the answer to our problems."
Chapter Eighteen
Garison's Journal
November 10, 2007
Ever since H.G. Wells wrote a story about time travel, people just can't seen to get enough of the idea. I wouldn't be surprised to find that tales of the future and time travel were around long before Mister Wells. I know for a fact at least one was—two if you count my tombstone.
Stories and tales, after all, have long been a staple of mankind's psychological make up. For thousands of years, men and women have sat around campfires, around tables, or on horseback and told stories. Of course, some people were better at stories than others—but everyone told them. There wasn't a lot else to do after dark.
Then somebody got the idea to start writing these stories down. At first, writing wasn't to be wasted on stories, you used it only for important things—like laws or the Bible, or the annals of dead rich people. But someone decided the story about the shepherd's daughter really ought to be written down, even though it shouldn't be repeated in polite company.
Since then, we've been writing down all kinds of stories. Then along came television and centuries of story telling ability went right down the toilet in the span of a generation. Ah, technology.
What I was saying, though, was that people have always enjoyed stories about time travel. Mark Twain wrote a whole novel about time travel; movies have been made about it; and, not getting it very well, of course, even television has told tales of time travel. Writing, itself, is a form of time travel—taking us to a time and a place we could not otherwise go.
Time travel fascinates us. Maybe part of it is because we all have things in our life we wish we had done differently. We like the idea, even if it's a fantasy, that we could go back in time and correct things. The girl we let get away, the misspoken word that cost us a friendship, the now deceased grandparent we wish we had one more chance to talk to.
Or maybe it's the future that entices us so. Our present situation isn't what we think it ought to be, so maybe if we just skipped the next few years we would find ourselves somewhere much better. Personally, I would like to
just skip Sarah's teen age years. More accurately, I would like for Sarah to skip the teen age years. I really don't know how I'll handle being the father of a teen age daughter who looks anything like Heather. Bat Garrett has already suggested I keep a shotgun by the front door, and I'm beginning to think he may have something there.
Maybe our desire for time travel has more altruistic motives. Perhaps we dream of going back to the Ford Theater and stopping John Wilkes Booth. Or maybe we would go back to Memphis and keep Doctor King off that balcony. Maybe we would assassinate Hitler, or kidnap Rommel, or stop some serial killer before he gets started.
But how could we ever know that what we were doing was right? I saved a little boy from being run over by a wagon. My actions enabled the United States of America to become a world power. It seems like a good thing—on both accounts. But can I be so presumptuous as to say it was? After all, there were a lot of people who liked the world the way it was—even if I wasn't necessarily one of them.
What if I were to travel back and change the darkest hour in the history of the world by rescuing Jesus Christ from the cross? Would that really be a good thing? Without his death, burial, and resurrection, we are all damned. The Bible says he is "the propitiation for our sins"; but could he be if not allowed to give his life for us?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; and maybe that's the attraction of time travel. We just wish things were different. With no clue as to whether they'd really be better, we still wish they were different. This is why people run away from good homes, give up good jobs for poor ones, and vote for candidates they can't stand. Maybe different will be better.
Maybe things are best the way they are.
The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 2): Saving Time Page 15