The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

  It was late in the day, and Rick was in the large, shielded room in which the majority of ChroNova’s equipment was kept.

  He had had a dream a couple of weeks earlier that he’d been here, working with different kinds of radiation, when he had stumbled on a certain ratio of different fields and a green portal had opened in the middle of the lab, through which Rick could see a gorgeous landscape.

  In his dream, he started to document the data, but the alarm clock went off and woke him before he could make notes.

  This morning, he felt so close. So close! Yet something in the back of his mind was telling him that this was all wasted time.

  An hour and a half left in the workday. He had planned to try one last setting, when the intercom buzzed, and Elizabeth Ryan, the office manager for ChroNova, said: “Rick, there is a visitor here to see you.”

  He decided that this was as good a time as any to wrap things up for the day.

  Making his way out to the reception area, he found a petite blonde pixie waiting there for him.

  “Hello, I’m Rick Harper,” he said, shaking the young woman’s hand.

  “My name is Calliope Sullivan,” she said pleasantly. “Is there someplace we could speak privately?”

  “Of course,” Rick said. He led her to his private office, where he offered her a chair and sat at his desk. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, actually,” Callie smiled, “It’s what I can do for you that’s important.”

  Rick listened carefully as Callie explained that she had worked with some of the world’s leading time modification researchers — which was certainly true — and that they had found the secret of stretching time to allow for twice as much work to be done in a given period of time. Sixteen hours’ worth of work could be accomplished in one eight-hour workday. A full five-day work week could be packed into two and a half days.

  Rick perked up. This sort of thing was what Randall was interested in — improving efficiency. Randall had always insisted that the idea of time travel was fanciful sci-fi stuff. He was probably right. Rick decided to give this Ms. Sullivan his full attention and see what he could learn from her.

  CHAPTER 81

  2016

  As Calliope was working out her plan concerning how she would deal with Rick, she wondered what would happen once the timestream had been changed enough that the invention of the HOT6 would never take place. Once that happened, she’d never have had the means three years ago to travel back from her own time — 2799 AD, at that time — to 2009, to help Grandpa Steve, so what would happen to her? She imagined that she would somehow phase out and disappear, like Scott Bakula’s character on that old television show, Quantum Leap, which had developed quite a following in the time-traveling culture of the 29th century. Or would she somehow be destroyed by some kind of unforeseen time paradox? She didn’t think so; 21st century Terry and Sarah had been able to coexist with 29th century Terry and Sarah when they had traveled back in an effort to save Nigel, and it didn’t seem as if there had been any horrible consequences. Still, you never knew.

  She kept talking, trying to lead Rick farther and farther away from the mindset that had caused him to stumble across the ability to open a Gate. She talked about how the thinktank she worked for had put thousands of hours of research into this theory, but that she saw that their work was taking a dark turn toward military applications of the technology, to which she was adamantly opposed. She told him that she had decided to provide what she knew to ChroNova in hopes of allowing them to achieve the ability to stretch time and patent the technology before the hawks at the Pentagon could do it.

  She also knew that it was past the particular time on this day when Rick had made his initial breakthrough.

  She felt a sort of tingle run through her body. She didn’t know if it was just the anticipation of what might happen, or —

  BOOK THREE

  CELEBRATION

  CHAPTER 82

  2009

  “Oh, I am way the hell behind,” Steven Denver thought to himself, looking at the daily calendar on his computer screen. It was the first week of November 2009, and the deadline that had been set by his publisher for initial completion of his third novel was looming less than ninety days away. He’d made a number of false starts and was juggling three or four possible story lines in his head, but the insanely busy day he’d had yesterday had completely distracted him from the project at hand.

  Steven sat at his desk in the corner of the master bedroom of the small white frame house where he lived with his wife, Lynne, and their four children. He was staring out of the window at the Bridger Mountains of Montana, fading blue into the distance. He was not quite in full panic mode, however. Not just yet. I can do this, he told himself, running his hand through his thick mane of brown hair. He noticed that it was increasingly shot through with silver these days; deadlines were just excellent for causing that.

  Steven knew that he needed to get out of the house and get some exercise, however. He’d been in front of this screen almost continuously for four days and he was feeling as though the world was starting to close in on him. He decided that a long hike would be just the thing.

  He went to his bedroom closet and changed into a pair of worn denim jeans and a chambray work shirt with his favorite tee shirt, a brilliant blue one that read Montana: Big Sky Country underneath. He traded the worn tennis shoes he wore for a pair of practically new hiking boots that he recalled having worn only once before. He hoped they wouldn’t rub a blister on his heel.

  As he started out of the house, he found a note on the table by the front door and thought that his wife Lynne had left it. Much to his surprise, he found that it was in his own handwriting. It read:

  There was also a flash drive clipped to the note, which he discovered later contained the manuscript of a science fiction novel entitled Gatespace: A New Odyssey, which bore his name and seemed oddly familiar, almost as if he’d read it or heard of it before, despite the fact that he had no memory of having written it. Puzzled, he scoured the Internet and other sources, trying to figure out where it came from, and weeks later, when he made up his mind that it hadn’t been plagiarized, he submitted it to his publisher, who was very pleased with it.

  He actually had gone on his hike that day, and found the mysterious green Gate. He’d made it a point to obey the instructions given in the mysterious note and stayed far away from it. He dutifully called the FBI, and soon there was a military detachment guarding it. Over the next couple of years they built an enormous complex over and around the spot; the government even bought the Denvers’ property, paying them reasonably well for it, and the family moved into a somewhat nicer house within the Three Forks city limits.

  Steven tried to put the iridescent green swirl out of his mind, but wondered about it occasionally for the rest of his very long life.

  CHAPTER 83

  2802

  Calliope Sullivan opened her eyes and looked out the window of her room. The sun was rising and the sky was tinted in delicate shades of rose and pink. It was a spring morning in March of 2802, and it seemed to Callie that she couldn’t remember ever seeing the sky so clear. The statue of the Greatfather, who she knew was her distant grandfather many generations prior, stood in the center of Granite City.

  She sat up on her bed and smiled. She dearly loved her job as an executive assistant at the largest data processing firm in Greater St. Louis. She had been there for eleven years. As far as she was concerned, she’d stay there the rest of her life.

  CHAPTER 84

  2015

  In 2015, Calvin Roberts was tried and convicted of the 2014 murder of an elderly black man who he had shot to death as he was fleeing a liquor store he’d just held up in Tupelo, Mississippi.

  He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole by Governor Gregory Allen in 2019.

  Roberts died in prison at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in 2043 and w
as buried in a cemetery on the prison grounds, having lived his life without ever having conceived of the persona of Timothy Murrah.

  CHAPTER 85

  2020

  The stage lights erupted in a blaze of color; pink, purple and blue. A bastard amber follow spot came up, illuminating a young man holding a battered Fender Stratocaster. Music blasted from the PA speakers as the band launched into their first song. The young singer poured his heart into the song. His long blond hair came nearly to his shoulders. He looked out at the audience and smiled. This was where he was at home, onstage in front of his fans.

  “HELLO EUG —” He hesitated. He had almost said Eugene, as in Eugene, Oregon, but it had been days since they’d played there. Tonight they were in Dallas. What was the matter with him? He glanced over at Wade and Ben. He chalked it up to being tired. If he had his calendar straight, it was November 3rd, 2020, and this was the thirteenth show of a twenty-two show tour. Besides, it was the band’s first national tour. Everybody said it took a bit to build up the stamina to play every night without getting worn out.

  “HELLO DALLAS!” he shouted into the mic. The crowd roared its approval. A woman in the second row, one he had seen at more than one of the band’s recent shows, screamed at him, “We love you, Brad!”

  It was gonna be a very good show.

  CHAPTER 86

  2019

  SSgt. Jonathan Wilkerson was deployed to Syria immediately after he completed boot camp in 2019. He had been there a mere three days when an ISIS militant shot him through the head with a M4A1 carbine, ironically the same sort of weapon with which, in another timeline, Wilkerson had attempted to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

  CHAPTER 87

  2021

  President Sanford Williams and First Lady Lianna Williams, along with Vice President Charles Scofield Mann, oversaw a peaceful and uneventful passing of the reins of power to President-elect Roger Winter and his wife Miriam on January 20, 2021.

  Winter’s former campaign manager, Kevin Martell, was named as his White House Chief of Staff, while his assistant area campaign manager for the Los Angeles area, Will Graves, became White House Deputy Chief of Staff.

  Senator Christopher Ferguson, who had been the Republican candidate running against Winter, continued to serve in the United States Senate until his retirement in 2028.

  The Libertarian candidate, Leroy Atwater, returned to the private sector, where he ran a number of business ventures, and contemplated another campaign for the Presidency in 2024. As it turned out, he decided not to run, citing health issues. He passed away unexpectedly in 2025 at the age of 75.

  And fastidious, bespectacled Leonard Calhoun left Washington after the end of the Williams administration and went to work on Wall Street, where he amassed a billion-dollar fortune, retired after less than five years in the private sector, and established a council of financial gurus that worked together to provide government officials with advice on how to correct the nation’s monetary woes.

  CHAPTER 88

  The Late 28th Century

  Charles Hyde-Stephens, Peter Mjembe, Benjamin Wilson, Miguel Santoros, and Franklin Carson all had positions in the governmental systems of their respective districts within the umbrella of the Human Federation; Eurasia, Afrique, Northam, Southam and Oztralia, respectively.

  Janelle Wilson grew up under the loving tutelage of her father, Benjamin, and became a teacher in one of the local elementary school systems.

  CHAPTER 89

  1960 and beyond

  Since time travel never came to be, Xue Ang-Mu was never recruited by agents of the Council of Five (which itself never came to be). He continued working in his position as a mid-level worker for the People’s Republic of China’s embassy corps.

  In 1966, he had an opportunity to defect to the United States, and he took it, traveling to Los Angeles with his wife and small son.

  He passed away peacefully in his sleep in 2002. His son and daughter-in-law ran a popular Cantonese restaurant in Monterey Park, California for many years.

  CHAPTER 90

  2016

  In the end, all the experimentation at ChroNova came to nought. Despite the best efforts of Rick, Terry and all the rest of the team, the best they were able to achieve in terms of time stretching was a factor of about one-tenth of one percent. That basically meant adding roughly nine hours to a year — not enough of a change to make it worth all the effort.

  In the end, Randall, Rick and Terry made the ultimate decision to liquidate the company and divide the proceeds among its fourteen employees. They managed to clear enough to make it a pretty good deal for all involved.

  The major events of 2017 were the weddings of Rick and Stefanie, followed closely by that of Terry and Sarah. In both cases, Randall Orwell gave the bride away.

  CHAPTER 91

  2020

  It seemed as if there had been some sort of blink, a glitch, not just in the power on the space station, but, it seemed to Ray, in his very brain. He looked out of the cupola and what he saw on the planet below floored him.

  An unmarred, blast-free world.

  Gone were the dozens or perhaps hundreds of mushroom clouds that he and Antonov had both witnessed only moments before.

  The Earth turned serenely beneath them, as if none of the destruction they’d witnessed had ever occurred. Evidently, somehow, mysteriously, it hadn’t.

  Ray was speechless.

  Antonov, however, was not.

  “What is going on? Do you see what I am seeing?”

  Ray glanced at him. “I don’t know what the hell is happening.” He floated over to the nearest comm box and palmed the talk button. “Hey, did any of you notice something weird going on in the last five minutes or so, planetside, I mean?”

  There was a crackle of static, then a jumble of three or four voices all speaking at once; the other crew members all responding simultaneously.

  “I thought I was the only one —” That was Flight Engineer Alexandra Cole.

  “I could not believe eyes!” Mission Specialist Yuri Popovich said.

  “The whole fucking planet was explo —” said Flight Engineer Mark Manning’s voice.

  They had all begun to speak at once, then they all fell silent for a moment.

  “What is going on?” That voice, tense but controlled, belonged to Payload Specialist Yohiro Suzuki.

  “I don’t know,” said Ray. “Pavel and I are in the cupola. We saw the whole damn planet seem to light up with mushroom clouds. It lasted for a good five minutes or more… then all of a sudden it was like we blinked and none of it was happening.”

  “Same here,” said Cole.

  “Something in the air we’re breathing? Are we all hallucinating?” said Manning.

  “If we are, it isn’t affecting anything else,” said Ray.

  “Let’s do the Time Warp again,” sang Manning ironically, rather off-key.

  There was a smattering of nervous laughter.

  CHAPTER 92

  2017

  Terry and Sarah Cambridge were unwinding after a long day of work at their respective jobs. Terry was a senior engineer at Boeing’s St. Louis facility and Sarah taught at Washington University. They had taken those positions after ChroNova shut down the year before.

  “Hey, take a look at what I just ran across on Wikipedia,” said Sarah. Terry came over to where she was sitting on the bed and peered at her iPad screen.

  Jake Benson (science fiction writer)

  Born Jacob Amos Benson

  Born July 22, 1925

  Died June 24, 1990 (aged 64)

  Occupation Author

  Nationality United States

  Genres Science fiction, fantasy

  Jacob Amos Benson (July 22, 1925 – June 24, 1990), who wrote as Jake Benson, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, and formerly a long haul truck driver. He is best known for his Star Stallions series of books.

  WRITING

  Benson was an author specializing in pos
t-catastrophe and time travel novels. His first book, Rise of the Star Stallion, published in 1975, was an example of this post-apocalyptic theme, and launched his Star Stallions series. The series became his best-known work. While he never completed the series, he wrote 12 novels in the Star Stallions series before his death.

  From 1979-1989, Benson published several books as part of the Lost In Time book series. He began publishing the series in 1987, but was only able to complete three books in the planned series of seven before his death.

  Beginning in 1986, Benson published a half-dozen short story anthologies which he co-edited with his younger sister, Melba Benson Scott.

  Benson died in Moore, OK on June 24, 1990.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Star Stallions series

  Rise of the Star Stallion (1975)

  The Sound of Hooves (1976)

  A Clash of Stallions (1977)

  Star Riders (1978)

  A Red Stallion Rises (1979)

  The Distant Suns (1979)

  The Death of Ancient Stars (1980)

  Pegasi Have Wings (1981)

  The Death of a Stallion (1981)

  Stars At Twilight (1982)

  Broodmare (1983)

  The Last Battle (1989)

  Lost In Time Series

  Lost In Time (1987)

  Journey To Tomorrow (1988)

  Return To Yesterday (1989)

  Anthologies

  The Pizza Joint Just Past Jupiter (1986)

  The Evil That Men Do (Co-edited with Ronald Joseph) (1988)

  Like Skipping Rocks On A Pond (1989)