Universe Between

by Dean Wesley Smith

  They’d handed her the telegram, flanking her in case she fainted.

  But she didn’t faint. She read the news twice, glad they’d handed her a document. She wouldn’t have believed them otherwise.

  Jack had been found, in the plane that had gone down in a remote area in the Pacific, his dog tags still beside him. They were bringing him to her.

  They asked her if she wanted to wait until after the holidays.

  “No,” she said. “He told me he’d be home for Christmas. He wanted to promise, but I wouldn’t let him. Maybe I should have.”

  And then she smiled at the men, despite the tears glinting in her eyes.

  Introduction to “The Atlantis Fifty”

  When I finished revising the first novel featuring my favorite character, Poker Boy, I realized I’d left a few tales untold. Poker Boy crosses many universes. He lives in ours (sort of), but interacts with a variety of gods, including the God of Poker and Lady Luck herself. Poker Boy slips between those universes easily now, but in the beginning he had as much trouble understanding what he faced as I did when I first dreamed him up.

  Poker Boy comes from my own experiences as a professional poker player, and from my love of casinos. Sometimes I think I’m more at home in a casino than I am in my own writing office. Fortunately, I get to meld casinos and writing in these stories, which always makes them fun to write.

  The Atlantis Fifty

  Dean Wesley Smith

  1

  I got stuck in an instant of time on Saturday afternoon at 12:37 and seven seconds, exactly.

  Actually, I woke up stuck.

  I knew something was very wrong the instant I woke up. Not only was my warning voice telling me something was wrong, but the sounds were gone from the Las Vegas Strip that normally filled the background of Patty’s apartment like a faint sound of the ocean when you stay near the beach.

  I could hear nothing.

  Either I had gone deaf while sleeping, or something else was going on.

  I tapped the bed stand with my alarm clock and heard the sound of my knuckle on the fine oak just fine.

  Nope. Not deaf.

  Patty wasn’t in bed beside me, but I figured she hadn’t been up long. We had both been up until after four in the morning last night, her working until three at the MGM Grand and me playing in a tournament in the poker room there.

  And then we had enjoyed a wonderful half hour before sleeping.

  That memory made me smile.

  I strained to hear anything, at that point not thinking I was between moments in time. That usually takes me some focus to do and focus while I am sleeping is not one of my superpowers.

  No sound.

  My warning sense that something was very wrong was dinging in the back of my head like an annoying microwave timer that wouldn’t shut off.

  I rolled out of the big bed, shoving the thick tan comforter aside, and padded to the window across the soft brown carpet in my boxer shorts.

  I pulled the blinds aside slightly and the night shade and after my eyes adjusted to the bright light, I knew instantly what the problem was.

  There over Las Vegas, at about two thousand feet, was an airliner turning to make a final approach into the airport. Only it wasn’t moving. It was just stuck there, as if someone had glued a decal to a phony blue-sky ceiling in a bedroom.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I love my ability to step into a moment of time, out of the normal time flow. It’s my second favorite superpower right behind being able to teleport. But unless I do the stepping between moments purposefully, or have another superhero or god put me in a time bubble, I didn’t much like being out of whack with the real ticking of time.

  I took a deep breath and imagined myself back in the normal flow of time. That’s what I always did to drop a time bubble that I made.

  Nothing.

  Intense silence.

  Not even the deep breath helped.

  No wonder my alarm dinger was going off in the back of my head. Something was very wrong.

  I headed for the bathroom. Patty Ledgerwood, aka Front Desk girl and my girlfriend, was in the shower, her head thrown back as water ran down her long brown hair.

  Only the water wasn’t actually running, more like glistening in sparkling droplets all over her as if someone had taken a still picture of her.

  I can say without any chance of argument that she had a perfect body. And every detail, from her smooth skin to her deep brown eyes fit together.

  Now I was no different than any other young man growing up. What stood frozen in front of me was any teenage boy’s fantasy. A beautiful woman with a perfect body, naked in a shower, caught in a moment of sheer beauty, every perfect detail magnified by the wetness.

  Even as a superhero, I wasn’t immune to that, so for an instant after I opened the shower door, I stopped and stared.

  Sometimes even emergencies can take a back seat to an opportunity of a lifetime.

  So I stood there for a moment, just a moment, staring. Honest, it was only a moment.

  And all I could do was ask myself how I had gotten so lucky as to have that woman in my life?

  Finally I eased forward, feeling almost guilty, and touched her shoulder, bringing her into the time bubble with me.

  The water around her ran off, but no more water came out of the faucet.

  “Up for a rematch from last night?” she asked, turning to face me and giving me that smile that often made me forget everything around me.

  And her being nude and wet like that was just damn near impossible for me to resist.

  “In a little bit,” I said, leaning forward and kissing her. “We have a problem I can’t seem to get a handle on.”

  Her expression turned serious, and she turned to shut off the water. Then she realized it was no longer running, even though the faucet was turned on.

  “Are we between moments in time?” she asked, looking at me.

  Wow, another reason I loved this woman so much. She was scary smart. I nodded.

  “How come?” she asked, quickly stepping past me and wrapping a blue bath towel around that fantastic body, making me slightly sad I had said anything.

  “I woke up out of time,” I said.

  Back before I was a superhero, those were words I never would have imagined saying unless I was late for an appointment, or the start of a poker tournament.

  “Can you clear us?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I did this one.”

  “Let’s get some clothes on and call Stan,” she said. “See if he has any idea what’s happened.”

  “That’s why I came to get you out of the shower,” I said.

  She laughed as she worked to dry off. “Sure it wasn’t just to stare?”

  “Well,” I said as I headed back into the bedroom, “I did a little of that as well.”

  “Pervert,” she shouted after me.

  “Guilty and loving it,” I shouted back.

  I could hear her laugh as I worked to get dressed.

  2

  Patty put on her comfortable clothes, which were jeans and a white blouse. She pulled her hair back and didn’t bother with any make-up. She looked fantastic and I told her so.

  I also had on jeans, but wore a tee-shirt under my black leather jacket and fedora-like hat that served as my Poker Boy uniform. The hat and coat somehow helped me focus energy. I didn’t need them inside the apartment, but in emergency situations like this, I felt better having them on.

  When we were both completely dressed and had breakfast bars half eaten, we moved into the center of Patty’s living room. I had tried a couple of times to drop back into the normal flow, without success.

  And I had Patty stand across the room from me and I made myself concentrate on releasing her.

  Nothing.

  Around us the tan furniture and tan rug seemed completely normal. Everything seemed normal except the clock on the wall near the kitchen door was stopped.

  So I was stuck
between instants of time, and from what I could tell, I had brought Patty into the mess as well. But if I hadn’t, she would have been really, really mad at me. I just never considered not including her these days in anything I did. We were so much stronger together than we were on our own.

  “Stan, a little help?” I said at the ceiling. For some reason, every time I called out to my boss, the God of Poker, I shouted upwards. I was fairly certain he could hear me if I just said his name softly, but the old habit died hard.

  Patty and I both stood there in her living room, waiting. Usually he appeared almost instantly, but after about five seconds I looked at Patty and shook my head.

  “Laverne?” I shouted at the ceiling, hoping that Lady Luck herself would hear me.

  Nothing.

  We had no access to my team this time around.

  “Let me see if I can jump us to my office and get out of this,” I said.

  Instantly I had alarm bells go off in the back of my head and Patty touched my arm and shook her head. “That feels wrong.”

  “I agree,” I said, pushing back the alarm bells.

  My little voice was telling me the problem was here and we needed to stay here and solve this. But it was really, really odd that my calling Stan or Laverne couldn’t get out of this. They never had had troubles with coming into time bubbles before.

  I went over to the window in the living room and looked at the frozen city below. The cars on The Strip were frozen in place, a couple of birds were stopped in midair a few floors below, and flags on the top of a building across the street hung at odd angles, clearly blown by a wind, but yet not moving.

  I looked back at Patty who stood there staring at me.

  “Do you have any idea how many gods or superheroes have the power to take a person between moments of time?” I asked, moving back over toward her.

  She shook her head slowly as she thought, her long brown hair flopping around on her back as she did. “It’s not many, I know that. And you are the only superhero that I know that has that power.”

  I wasn’t sure what to think of that, but at the moment I didn’t let myself dwell on it.

  “Seems we have some spare time on our hands,” I said, smiling at the worried look on her face and in her wonderful dark-brown eyes. “We might as well enjoy it.”

  The worried look turned to puzzlement.

  I shrugged.

  “We’re trapped in a moment in time,” I said. “Someone did this. It’s either a wide-spread thing or a focused event and I’m betting on focused around the person who did it, since it takes some real power to hold a time bubble for very long that’s very large. And to include us, it has to be pretty large, so I don’t expect this to last that long.”

  She nodded. “Good point. Any way to know how far this bubble extends?”

  I stopped and thought about that for a moment. In the past, when I held a time bubble, as I called them, keeping myself and others out of the flow of regular time, there was a limit. I once had a dog inside a time bubble and it couldn’t get out, the edge of the bubble held it until I released the bubble.

  I remember thinking that it would be a good and easy trap for anything wild, except that so far I hadn’t learned how to project a bubble I wasn’t inside of. And being trapped inside a time bubble with something wild hadn’t really appealed to me, so I had tossed that idea out.

  “I have a question,” I said. “Was I supposed to be part of this bubble or just an accident?”

  “If you are included only by accident, by bringing me in as well must be draining more energy,” Patty said.

  “Of whoever is doing this,” I said.

  “Let’s go exploring and see if we can find the edge,” I said, heading for the front door to her apartment.

  Patty’s apartment was on the seventeenth floor. Outside the corridor looked like a plush hotel hallway, with lamps scattered along the hallway and each door recessed into its own entryway.

  The carpet was light blue and the walls painted off-white with hotel-like art that depicted nothing hung on the walls. Four elevators were near the center of the building.

  No one was in the hall.

  “What’s going to happen when we find the edge of the bubble?” Patty asked.

  “My gut sense is that it will be like walking into a wall,” I said. “So walk slow and protect your face.”

  “Good to know,” she said, laughing and shaking her head.

  We slowly walked the entire length of the hallway with arms extended in front of us. We must have looked pretty silly, almost walking like movie zombies.

  No edge to be found.

  “That’s an impressive-sized bubble,” I said when we reached the other end of the hallway and stopped.

  There were two floors above hers and we headed for the stairs to the left and slowly worked our way upward.

  We made it all the way to the top floor without finding the edge to the time bubble.

  “This is someone very powerful,” I said to Patty as we stood outside the stairway door in the upper hallway, the blue carpet making me feel more like standing on water than a floor. Here there were only four doors to the four expensive penthouses that filled this floor. I had no idea who lived on this floor, but my gut sense it was someone powerful and very rich in the local area.

  The fear I was starting to feel suddenly twisted my stomach around the breakfast bar. I pushed it down and took a slow breath, getting my nerves under control.

  “This might be generated mechanically,” Patty said.

  I looked around at the building and walls and windows and the lights on the walls. Damn she was smart and had the ability to see things I just flat missed.

  “I think you might be right,” I said. “This kind of field could be generated or amplified through the electrical system. So it would cover the entire building like a skin. A mechanical field might block calling out to Stan or Laverne because natural fields have never blocked me calling them before.”

  “Good thing we didn’t try jumping out of here,” she said.

  “We’d have smashed right into the bubble wall,” I said, glad our warning senses had stopped us. “That might have been painful or worse.”

  She nodded. “We still don’t know why anyone would do this.”

  “I’m getting the sense that whoever did this is not after us,” I said. “My warning bells are not going off, except when I suggested we jump to the office.”

  “Neither are mine,” Patty said. “I bet that whoever did this didn’t realize you were here and that the time field wouldn’t get to you.”

  “I wonder why it didn’t,” I said.

  “We’ll ask Stan about that later,” Patty said, smiling at what must have been my puzzled look. “Now we need to figure out who is doing this and why.”

  However, I had no idea how to find out that simple thing.

  At that moment, the stairwell door at the other end of the hall rattled and stated to open.

  “Freeze,” I whispered to Patty and we both struck a pose we could hold that made us look like we were just two people frozen in time standing in the hallway.

  It looked like we were going to find out who was doing this sooner, rather than later.

  3

  “There you are,” Stan, the God of Poker, said as he came through the stairwell door and into the hall.

  I released the breath I think I had been holding and relaxed.

  Stan had on his normal button-down sweater and tan slacks. He could blend in anywhere and right now he seemed to almost blend in with the hallway as well, even though his colors seemed to clash with the blue carpet. It wouldn’t surprise me if I looked away and looked back, he would be wearing blue slacks.

  Right behind him was Screamer, dressed in jeans and a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Screamer was a superhero who worked for the police. He got his name because he could put images in criminal’s minds that made them scream in terror.

  He was my height at about six fo
ot and had intense dark eyes that seemed to see through things.

  Through the door behind Screamer came Ben, a god in the library area and the oldest of our team. He was panting from climbing the stairs.

  I had no idea how old Ben really was, but his old-fashioned suits and wrinkled face and hands made him look like a grandfather from a classic movie.

  I was very, very glad to see them.

  “Did you hear my call?” I asked as Patty and I stepped toward them.

  “I did,” Stan said. “But I couldn’t jump into the building, so I stopped time for me and Ben and Screamer and we managed to merge fields with this time field down in the lobby.”

  “Twenty floors. Long climb,” Ben said, still panting.

  “So ever seen anything like this before?” I asked Stan. “Ever have anyone do a time bubble this large?”

  He shook his head. “And neither has Laverne. It basically covers this entire building like a skin.”

  “More than likely run through the electrical system,” I said.

  Stan looked at me for a moment, clearly thinking, then nodded. “Possible.”

  “But why?” Patty said.

  “I’ve been wondering the same thing,” Screamer said.

  “As have I,” Ben said, still panting slightly.

  “Anyone in a personal time bubble,” Patty said, “can walk around just fine without generating something this large to take an entire building out of time. You would get the same effect with just a personal bubble.”

  That very problem had been bothering me as well. Clearly, if Stan and the rest entered down on the main floor and came up, the bubble holding this building was in the walls and covered the entire building. Patty was right, there was no reason to do that.

  None.

  Unless…

  “Maybe doing something like this,” I said, sort of sweeping my arms around me in a grand fashion, “in the walls or electrical wiring of a building, is the only way for whoever did this to generate a time bubble field.”

  “Mechanical only,” Ben said, nodding. “Not a god power. Possible.”