by Alan Seeger
It took a few moments for the young truck driver to grasp what he was being told. Then his eyes grew round. “I knew it. I knew it! You guys are from the future, like that movie I went and seen the other night —”
“The Time Machine,” said Sarah.
“Yeah!”
Nigel and Terry stared at Sarah as if she had two heads. “How did you know that?” asked Terry.
“The film version of H.G. Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’ came out in August of 1960,” she said, as if this should be common knowledge.
“I had no idea that your wife was such a fount of cinematic trivia,” said Nigel.
“Neither did I,” said Terry, shaking his head.
CHAPTER 69
2802
Having no way to communicate directly with Time Team members that were in other timelines, Sam and Callie had no real option but to sit tight and wait for Team Delta to return. They left Wilkerson restrained, despite the fact that they would have to listen to his mouth run. “If he gets too loud,” said Samuel, “We can always gag him.” They went into the conference room and settled down for the wait.
They had been at Headquarters for a little over two hours when they heard a familiar crackle and a burst of thunder.
“Sounds like they’re back,” said Calliope.
They rose and went back into the transit chamber to greet the others. They were shocked to see that Wilkerson had somehow managed to free himself from his restraints and had retrieved his sidearm from the shelf where Samuel had left it. They weren’t used to dealing with captives, especially armed ones, and Sam hadn’t given a second thought to leaving the weapon on an open shelf, reasoning that as long as it was out of Wilkerson’s reach, it was safe. Worse, the soldier was holding the members of Team Delta at gunpoint; Nigel, Terry and Sarah (now single copies again), Geoff and Janelle were standing on the transit platform, hands raised.
At least I locked up his damn rifle, thought Samuel.
“I see we have company,” Wilkerson drawled. “Please, do join us.” He motioned with the pistol for Samuel and Calliope to move to where the others were standing.
When they didn’t immediately follow suit, he pointed the weapon directly at Sarah’s head and repeated pointedly, “Come over here and stand with the others, now, or I will shoot this pretty li’l girl in the face.”
They both moved quickly to join the rest of the group.
“Any more of you?”
The seven members of the Time Team glanced at each other.
“You’d best not lie to me. I’ll know if you do,” Wilkerson said.
“There are others, but they are away on assignment, and we have no way to communicate with them, so we don’t know when — or if — they’ll be coming back,” said Nigel.
“Ah, a Brit!” Wilkerson said. “Fancy a cuppa tea, Guv’nor?” His affected English accent was horrible, but none of them dared to ridicule him.
“So,” Wilkerson continued, “it seems that we have a bit of a quandary here. You have my M4 rifle. On the other hand,” he grinned, “I have all of you. Now, one of you is going to retrieve my weapon and restore it to its rightful owner — which would be me, of course — and you’re gonna do it now.”
The Time Team members glanced at each other. Then Geoff spoke up. “I’d get it for you, but my hands are bound.” He looked at Samuel and Calliope, knowing that they were the ones at HQ.
“Geoff, don’t,” said Callie.
“Tell him now, or he’s liable to start shooting us all one by one,” said Geoff.
Samuel frowned for a moment. Wilkerson swung his arm and pointed his sidearm at Calliope’s head. “The man’s right, you know,” he said.
“All right!” Samuel exclaimed. “You don’t need to hurt anyone. Your rifle’s in storage locker number four.”
“That’s more like it,” Wilkerson said. “You done made the right decision.”
Something clicked in Samuel’s mind. He had thought the soldier seemed familiar. Now he knew.
“Wilkerson.”
“What?” Wilkerson hesitated for a moment. This was something he didn’t expect.
“You were attached to Project STAMINA when I was there. I’d been gone from there for several years before I got recruited to be part of the Time Teams, but I remember you, and the way you would tell enlisted men that they ‘done made the right decision’ when they gave you the right answer to something you asked them. It was you that went through the STAMINA gate to try to kill President Lincoln. Why’d you do it, Wilkerson?”
The soldier’s eyes narrowed. His body seemed to relax a bit, and his head tilted and an evil smile played across his face.
“Dr. Denver,” he said. “Well, I’ll be goddamned. I didn’t recognize you at first, because you’re older, but none too much wiser, I see.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Doc,” he continued, “When I learned that it was possible to go back to 1860 through that green swirly gate — and not just anywhere, but 1860 New Jersey, just a hop and a skip and a jump from New York City, where your Great Emancipator would be giving a speech on the necessity of preserving the Union, I knew that I had to do what I could to restore the dignity of the South, which had been taken away by Lincoln and his cronies. No, not restore — I would prevent that dignity from being lost in the first place by preventing that skinny bastard from ever becoming President. But you stuck your nose in where it didn’t belong, and so the only thing that remains is to —” he swung his sidearm to point it at Samuel’s head.
Suddenly, the room broke into chaos. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Nigel leapt forward toward Wilkerson, shouting “NO!” Terry reacted and tried to grab Wilkerson’s gun hand and force it toward the ceiling. Geoff and Janelle stumbled off to one side, trying to keep out of the others’ way. Calliope dove for Wilkerson’s legs, trying to knock him down. Samuel grappled with the soldier’s gun hand as well, but even between them Sam and Nigel were no match for Wilkerson’s upper body strength; it seemed that one soldier trumps two scientists in that battle. Wilkerson broke free and swung his gun hand, pistol whipping Samuel across the face. There was the sound of a gunshot. Just a moment too late, Sarah hefted a piece of office equipment and brought it down on Wilkerson’s head from behind, and the soldier collapsed in a heap.
Everything was still for a moment. The Time Team members all glanced at each other, trying to see if anyone was injured.
That was when they realized that Nigel was lying on the floor next to Wilkerson, a trickle of blood coming from his mouth. Upon checking him for wounds, they discovered a bullet wound in his chest from which blood was pouring. His face was ashen.
“This is the part where you are supposed to say, ‘Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.’” Nigel said, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. He looked up at Terry. “Go ahead, please. Humor me.”
Terry’s face was grim, but he knew there was nothing left to do for the man that had come from eight hundred years in the future to recruit him and Sarah to the Time Service and then become his friend. Even if they called for emergency services, it was clear that he had only minutes. They had saved him in one timeline only to lose him again.
“Courage, man,” Terry said in a soft voice. “The hurt cannot be much.”
“Nay, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” Nigel gave them a sad, slow smile. In a weak whisper, he said, “I always wanted to play Mercutio.”
Terry and Sarah held his hands, not knowing what else to do, until he shuddered and went still.
In the meantime, the other Time Team members had bound Wilkerson securely hand and foot. Binding tape covered his mouth.
Sam opened a passage to the Gate at the Project STAMINA site in 2025 with his handheld Gate device.
CHAPTER 70
2020
It wasn’t long before the nickname had spread, and practically everyone in the region referr
ed to Brad as “Brad the Bard.” The rest of the tour was, predictably, cancelled due to the ongoing crisis. The sporadic news reports that came in depicted a nation that was practically in ruins, whether from having been hit directly by the attacks, from fallout traveling on the prevailing winds, or from rioting and other civil unrest precipitated by everything else that had gone on.
Remarkably, one of the only places in the United States that was mostly unaffected was central and southern Oregon. Because of the lack of strategic targets in the area, none of the Chinese attacks hit the area directly; the area to the west, where fallout might have blown in from, was the Pacific Ocean, and the populace, mostly the laid back, nature-loving types that called Oregon home, did their level best to avoid getting stirred up by the events of the last few days, believing that things would work out for the best for them in the long run.
More and more of them, however, were pressing Brad the Bard and his bandmates to sing them songs of peace, tranquility and calm that would help to keep moods in that calm state well into the future. As the guest roster at the hotel began to empty as people who lived nearby went back to their homes, the men of Gemini Genius decided to stay on at the hotel for the foreseeable future, planning to look around and find more permanent lodging ASAP. What information they had been able to glean from their now-heavily disrupted contacts in Los Angeles was that it was utter chaos: something like nine million dead, the roadways and much of the other infrastructure heavily damaged, and the Mayor and most city officials dead or missing. “Don’t even think of trying to come back here right now,” said the scratchy voice on the telephone.
So Oregon it was.
Brad and the rest of the guys spent most of their time in a suite that the hotel had insisted they take, playing acoustic instruments and singing songs that were familiar to everyone. They kept the doors open and allowed anyone who wanted to come and listen to do so. They sang songs like “Give Peace A Chance,” “Peace Train,” “Imagine,” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”
People came to listen, they came to pray, they came to chant. Day after day, people would show up that Brad didn’t even recognize. It grew and grew.
CHAPTER 71
2025
Corporal Willard Poore and PFC Franklin Watson were on duty at the STAMINA site when a group of people emerged from the vortex dragging a serviceman in improvised bonds along with them.
Terry nodded and greeted the both of them. He said, “Good morning, gentlemen. This is Sergeant Jonathan Wilkerson, who I believe you will find is stationed here at Camp STAMINA. We’ve come to turn him over to you, as we took him into custody for the attempted assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.”
Corporal Poore stared at them and stuttered, “H-he… he tried to kill President Lincoln?”
“Not exactly,” said Samuel. “He tried to kill Lincoln before he was president.”
Twenty minutes later they had the full attention of Col. Robert J. Holmes, the base commander. They provided what documentation was available and assured him that what the Army was doing here was important, and that someday it would grow into something that would be used to save the world.
Then they all saluted Col. Holmes, opened a Gate there in his office, and portaled themselves back to headquarters.
CHAPTER 72
2020
Nearly six weeks had gone by since the day of the attacks. It was mid-afternoon on December 7, and as the days had passed since October 29, the people in what some were beginning to call The Republic of Oregon had transitioned to a mentality that said that the worst was past and things would only continue to get better from this point on. Then came the reports on the local news stations that there had been another attack, this time taking the form of nuclear explosions in New York and Washington. Many immediately recognized the significance of the date: December 7. Pearl Harbor Day.
President Atwater was dead, along with the Vice President and many other members of the fledgling administration. So were about 15,000 other people in DC and 20,000 or more in New York, where a similarly sized weapon was detonated on Manhattan Island, near the World Trade Tower.
Apparently things weren’t getting better.
CHAPTER 73
2020
December 21
Two weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, a referendum was held in Eugene to discuss the future of the newly formed Republic of Oregon and the type of governance they intended to have. The people of Eugene held no fanciful ideas concerning how that future would be; they knew that less than a hundred miles up the road, in Salem, the former state capital of Oregon, things were considerably worse than it was in Eugene. Salem had been hit with a large power surge the day after the attack that caused a fire in the main power station and left a large part of the city darkened. No one knew how long it would be before things were back to a semblance of normalcy and Salem’s lights were back on.
Brad the Bard and his bandmates knew through contacts they had in the music community that 120 miles north of Eugene, in Portland, long hailed by rockers as the indie music capital of the world, things were even worse. Not only were the lights off, and with them the music — of the electric variety, at least — but the bored masses, who were now cut off not only from PDX’s live music scene but most of their recorded music as well, were starting to get restless. Fighting had broken out sporadically throughout the city, looting was taking place in some areas, and the mood of the city seemed primed for violence; worse, that mood seemed to be spreading as people in other parts of Oregon realized that they weren’t so different from those in Salem, or in PDX, for that matter.
~~~~~
Brad had felt this sort of vibe before, in Los Angeles, in 2019. He’d been walking through a part of the city that he didn’t normally frequent when a man stopped him and quietly warned him that something bad was being stirred up. He wondered for a minute if the guy was going to try to roll him, but he saw nothing but concern in the man’s eyes, so he retreated a dozen yards in the direction the man was indicating, and they stood and watched the scene play out.
Before his eyes, over a period of about twenty minutes, a group of angry men began to gather. He realized later that they must have planned ahead to meet there, at that particular intersection, at that particular time of day. One of them produced a bullhorn and began making loud, stern pronunciations about how the government of the City of Los Angeles had failed them. By that time, there were forty or fifty of them gathered — all races, all colors, and all in the uniforms of L.A. city workmen. The spokesman became increasingly strident in his delivery as he told of the injustices that had been done to them, how they had been ‘downsized,’ marginalized or just plain fired for any of a dozen reasons. Didn’t their higher-ups know they had families to feed? Bills to pay? They had tried all the normal channels: union stewards, arbitration, even legal action, all to no avail. Now they were taking matters into their own hands.
“OUR JOBS WERE TAKEN FROM US UNFAIRLY!” the man shouted, reading from a scrap of paper in his hand, the bullhorn magnifying his voice many times over. “THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES, WITHOUT REGARD FOR OUR FAMILIES OR OUR WELL-BEING, TERMINATED OUR EMPLOYMENT —”
Just then, Brad saw that a group of riot police in helmets and carrying shields were approaching from the south. Oh, Jesus, he thought, This is gonna get real bad, real quick.
And it did. The protestors faced down the cops, and soon there was violence from both sides. Brad retreated to a safe distance but watched with a curiosity usually reserved for situations where one encounters a fatal motorcycle accident or obnoxious drunk in a bar. When they started firing off tear gas rounds, Brad figured he’d better move along and head home. He was nearly tagged as being part of the protestors but managed to separate himself from the group and found a bus stop, and from there he made his way back to the cheap apartment that he was sharing with Gerry Lorefield.
~~~~~
Now Brad felt the same sort of
tension in the air, the type of desperation that led people who see their hope dwindling away to do irrational and occasionally stupid things.
The crowd was scared, there was no other word for it. They’d heard how things were in the other parts of the country, even in some of the other cities right here in Oregon, and it frightened them. Brad couldn’t blame them, really; it was scary to think that things might go bad so quickly, so easily.
CHAPTER 74
2020
The angry, frightened crowd milled around within the confines of the North Eugene High School gymnasium, uncertain of what the future held, unsure of their safety and unconvinced that what had happened in other parts of the county and world — twice now — would not finally come to the Emerald Valley that they called home.
Brad Lawrence and the other members of Gemini Genius filed in and took seats at the back of one of the two large rectangles of folding chairs that had been set up facing the makeshift stage. The Mayor and City Manager, along with the eight members of the City Council, sat ready to run the meeting, but there was a considerable amount of trepidation concerning the mood of the people at large. There was a low rumble of voices as the disgruntled crowd talked quietly among themselves about what had been done — or moreover, what hadn’t been done — to increase security in town. Despite the fact that the people of Eugene were, by and large, the peaceful and law-abiding sort, there were always a few in any town that would take advantage of opportunities, and a few businesses reported having had their windows broken out and items stolen, including a pawnbroker on Franklin and a car stereo dealer on 7th Street.
The meeting began with the Mayor greeting the crowd, but things quickly turned sour. A woman stood up while the City Manager was speaking and interrupted him, shouting that everyone in the city was in danger because no one knew what the real conditions were in other parts of the country. A man joined in, saying that he had talked to his brother up near Salem and things were chaotic there; he wanted to know what was being done to prevent that sort of trouble from spreading to the Eugene area. Naturally, since no rioting, no widespread looting, and no influx of troublemakers had been seen, the government officials were a little taken aback by this. Their reaction caused many more in the crowd to begin shouting epithets and howling about how every one of them were doomed.