by D. J. Gelner
“She had a family?” I asked. Tears welled in my eyes.
Sanchez nodded, “Her parents were indigent. She entered the corps precisely so that they could enjoy their later years, so that they could escape the grips of poverty.”
I wanted to scream a thousand different things, about how it was wrong that this woman sacrificed so much for people who didn’t have terribly long left in their lives, about personal responsibility and my father’s “lessons” with the bum on the Thames, but more than anything I wished to curse this damned Pandora’s Box of time travel that I had unleashed on the world. I would say “for better or ill,” but at this point, aside from soiling myself in history’s most ridiculous trophy hunt, most results appeared to be for the latter.
I fought back the tears—again, Brit and whatnot—and merely nodded instead.
“You’re free to leave whenever you wish. I regret that you had to experience these unfortunate events at a ChronoSaber facility. Please do not allow what occurred to sully your opinion of ChronoSaber or any of its employees in the future.”
I want to find that Zane Garrett and give him a proper tongue-lashing, I thought.
“On a more personal note, don’t feel guilty. This happens more often than you think. It’s not your fault. Blame those damned T-Rexes. They’re the true menaces.” Sanchez saluted smartly, and I returned the gesture half-heartedly before she exited the room, and I was left to ponder her last several words.
I got dressed (my clothes had been laundered) and slowly slinked toward the landing pad. I thought about asking Commander Sanchez whether I could appropriate one of the LR-15s for my collection, but eventually decided against doing so; I wasn’t particularly capable with the weapon, and was therefore only all the more likely to start a war in the past than provide myself with any sort of tactical advantage or other tangible benefit.
A war that will be fought no matter what you do… I thought.
I did pass the commissary, and of course I asked for several prepared dinosaur meals to go. Apparently it was a frequent enough request that they had the meals waiting for me. I carried them onto the ship and put them in the freezer in the kitchenette.
I heaved myself into the command chair with a satisfying grunt. I weighed whether or not to take a nip or two off of one of the remaining bottles of scotch in my collection, but decided against doing so; I really had no desire to stay in this time period any longer than necessary. I wondered if the beacon would make it any easier to return to “Chrono Base Alpha” should I wish to, and cursed myself for not having tried to key in the coordinates previously. Then, a glimmer of hope: perhaps there were other beacons in other time periods to allow for easy access. I frowned as I realised that even if there were, finding them would be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. More importantly, based on my previous unsuccessful attempts to key in coordinates to 2032, the year of my departure apparently didn’t possess such a beacon, now or ever.
As I had surmised, the gravity drive had recharged and was ready for liftoff. I powered on the vessel and began fiddling with the controls.
“Templeton One, this is Chrono Base Alpha control, over, please state your intended destination.”
I sighed and turned on the loudspeaker.
“Chrono Base Alpha control, this is Templeton One, I’m heading to…” I read the list, “6-9-532, Chichen Itza, Mexico. Save R—” I hit myself in the forehead; no need to alert these future dwellers that a proper madman had been amongst them!
The moments ticked by, “Roger that, Templeton One. You are cleared for take off. Have a good time, over.”
“Roger, thank you, over and out.” I felt like a proper pilot! I had always thought about becoming one, though where was the excitement in that? Crappy pay, stewardesses that grow grumpier by the year, flying puddle jumpers for years before you graduate to larger jets, and able to reap the reward of flying interminable intercontinental flights over the same stretch of nameless, indistinguishable ocean? No thank you! I was just fine becoming one of the greatest physicists this world has ever seen, known or not.
I flipped the speaker off and set about entering the coordinates into the computer. “Save R.C. and S.B.” Finally, something a bit more concrete! People needed saving, and the newly battle-hardened Phineas Templeton was going to be just the man for the job.
The only problem was, clearly I wasn’t. I hadn’t been up to saving Alyson, nor had I played any great role in ensuring Jayden’s survival. I was weak, impotent, a great mind, to be sure, but trapped inside a frail, cowardly body. Though I had helped to kill (murder?) a T-Rex, I needed a high-powered, futuristic laser rifle to do so. It instantly became clear to me that were it not for that asteroid, mankind very well could have never existed at all.
I brooded as the computer went through its calculations and flashed up a solution:
“99.9%”
Big surprise, I thought. I shook my head. Though the shock of Alyson’s death had largely passed, I still felt that stone lodged in the middle of my chest, a gaping wound not unlike the one her torso had suffered from the pike-like jaws of the T-Rex.
“Computer, play us some uplifting takeoff music, please?” I asked.
The speakers blared the first line of Aerosmith’s “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”
“No, no! I said uplifting, damn you!”
The staccato beat of “Lee Harvey Super Model” by the Inklings started up. Fair enough. Not my favorite, but it would do.
I then asked the computer for proper clothing for the next stop.
“Request denied—current clothing is suitable,” the console read.
I shrugged, and realised that the computer was probably right; what did it matter what exactly I wore? Unless the populace believed me a warlock of some sort (and given the time period, that was a distinct possibility) and thought it best to kill me or sacrifice me or make me a part of some other appalling practice, then I supposed I would be okay, after all.
I sighed. My fingers floated over the red button. Though I wanted nothing more than to leave this place at that very moment, I hesitated. With the horrors that this jump had dredged up, what kind of fresh hell awaited me at the next turn? For once, I yearned to be back in my relatively safe, quiet lab, even if it entailed getting yelled at by Avi for butchering some ridiculous pronunciation of some ancient Aramaic word, which, by the way, wasn’t even how they spoke in Ancient Judea!
My hand quaked. I felt like the rat that I had tormented in my early career by placing a button in its cage. Whenever it hit the button, it was rewarded with a pellet of food, and punished with a shock. The rat knew it needed the nourishment, but invariably after several weeks of mixed stimuli, it would refuse to push the button any longer. And it would die.
My curiosity was similarly crucial to who I was, who I am, yet here I was, hesitating like one of those horrible rats in a cage all those many years ago.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to give up? I thought. To be honest, this was the first time the thought ever crossed my mind. I could just stay at the base, perhaps hitch a ride to the future and tell them about my legacy.
Or ‘headquarters’ could change their minds and throw you out into the wild, I thought. No, far better to be making progress toward my own time on my Benefactor’s terms than to be at the whim of someone else’s, though I was beginning to think that my Benefactor might have a few more hands in the workings of ChronoSaber than I had initially imagined.
I sighed again and my tremulous pointer finger landed squarely on the red indicator on the screen before it slid off to the side (did I mention I was sweating a bit?).
The familiar hum of the gravity drive kicked in, and before I knew it, I was off once more. I thought it was a nice touch that Sanchez herself came out to the launchpad to give me a proper send-off. Then her form flickered: a hologram. My smile turned to a scowl in the blink of an eye.
The ship made its way through several families of pterosaurs as I once again admired the odd
ly eroded surface of the Earth. Obviously, the dinosaurs hadn’t a clue that some advanced creatures were coming back to hunt them any more than they realised that a gigantic asteroid collision would begin a chain of events that would exterminate their ilk in the coming years. I wondered if the same could be said for Isaac Newton, or the innocent folks of Nazareth whom Trent continued to bilk. Did they appreciate the many influences exerted on their lives by advanced beings, whom you could even venture were an entirely different species? Or were they similarly blissfully unaware of the external factors that had preordained the outcomes of their lives?
I shook my head as the ship exited the atmosphere. Though the planet could differ from period to period, complete with a gaggle of different sights, sounds, and smells, the one thing that stayed constant was the cold, unforgiving, blissfully empty nature of space. Though, the more I thought about it, even that assessment wasn’t true; in a few short years, this space would be filled with an asteroid about to obliterate the creatures below. Even the moon could make a surprise appearance, as my near-miss with it had shown. Even in space, everything was guided by the invisible hand, though that hand wasn’t so much human as…something else. I was beginning to see what Sanchez meant by “the universe has a funny way of ensuring that what should happen, happens.”
Or as Trent might say, “What happened happened, bro.”
Again, the ship sailed what felt like half-way to Mars, even though I knew that we were just outside of the Earth’s gravity well. I pressed the flashing green button, the gravity drive ramped up, and the tunneling lasers did their job. Before I knew it, I was in the same, extraordinarily long wormhole as before. This time, thoughts of creating a black hole and finally receiving my sweet release coursed through my mind.
Alas, ’twas not to be. Though the cabin vibrated for quite a while, eventually the craft emerged on the other end of the wormhole, unscathed. Instead of marveling at the blue marble in front of me, I took the omniyoke and, in a trance, pushed it forward to maximum speed. Maybe this time period would finally provide some answers. Or, at least, a safe respite from the horrors of the last one.
As the machine approached the Earth and the autopilot took over the controls, I was caught off-guard a bit by the familiar shapes of continents and the ice caps below. As I got closer still, everything seemed to be in miniature. The trees weren’t as tall, nor the wildlife as gargantuan as sixty-five million years before; a simple fact, I know, but one in which I took great solace at that moment.
Just good old, ordinary devilish people here, I thought.
My pulse quickened as the time machine flew over the same area that had served as my hunting grounds those millions of years before, but which had been in reality only a short day ago. I wondered if those individuals shepherding time travellers to-and-fro ever got a sense of temporal vertigo, and found it difficult to keep track of exactly how old they were. Even I couldn’t remember what “day of the week” it technically would have been had I stayed in the “normal” course of time in Baltimore, and never embarked on this most foolish of fool’s errands in the first place.
Several clearings dotted the thick jungle, but one was of particular interest. It was a smoldering crater carved into the otherwise lush, full canopy. While several stone buildings dotted the fringes, a number of metallic beams were strewn about the surface of the crater. More curiously, the time machine approached the crater instead of the clearing, and set down on the far edge, furthest away from the burning debris.
A couple of figures trotted out from the underbrush. Both wore camouflage body armor and pants with plain green undershirts. One of the forms waved at the ship; I quickly engaged the cloaking device. The figures yelled something at the ship, but I couldn’t make it out. I engaged the external mikes.
“Over here!” One of the voices yelled in a heavy, southern drawl.
“Thank God!” The other sighed with a nasally whine.
“You’re a soldier—act like it!” the first voice hissed.
I patted the Baretta holstered snugly against my chest as I made my way toward the ostensible gangway. I pressed the panel next to the ship’s entrance, and the door opened with a “WHOOSH!” The figures ran toward me.
“Finally! You the rescue party?” The first man asked, surprisingly not out of breath after his sprint. He was handsome, if not dapper, with a well-chiseled jaw coated by a thin layer of stubble. An unkempt, overgrown sandy blonde crew cut framed his recruiting poster face.
“Are you ‘R.C.’ and ‘S.B.’?” I asked, more than a little thrown.
The second man stuck out his hand. He was more than a bit out of shape with curly black hair, and a smooth, boyish face betrayed by a thin whisp of a mustache.
“Specialist Steve Bloomington, United States Army, Sir,” the portly fellow said.
The handsome man extended a gloved hand and caught mine in an iron grip.
“Commander Richard Corcoran, United States Navy. Happy as hell to meet you.” A sly smile crept over his face.
“You can call me Ricky.”
Chapter Eleven
Part of me wanted to see exactly how much punishment that well-crafted jaw could take. Another part wanted to ask a thousand questions of the man who would some day, somehow, appropriate my accolades for his own.
“Commander Corcoran? Commander Corcoran!” I could barely contain my rage.
“Like I said, you can call me Ricky,” he flashed that smile again.
“Indeed I can, Richard.”
“Ricky,” he said one more time as the smile perked and faded.
“Commander…” I corrected myself. “And apparently, yes, I am the ‘rescue party,’ as it were.”
“And your name is…?”
“Doctor Phineas Templeton, but you can call me Doctor Templeton.”
“Pleased to meetchya, Doc,” Corcoran extended the gloved hand once more, which I grasped out of politeness. The man’s grip was firm, dare I say crushing, even.
“Before we go anywhere, though, you’re going to answer a few questions.” I said.
“Sure, no problem,” Corcoran grinned and nodded. He took several steps toward the cloaked vessel.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“I figured we could do this…you know…in your little ship over here.”
“What ever gave you that notion?” I asked.
“Look, we’ve been stranded here for a full week now. We’ve tried to respect Order One, but these natives are pretty nosy little bastards. They come at us with their spears and want to use us for all of their voodoo rituals and all of that crazy shit, so forgive me if I’m a bit on edge out in the open. Not to mention that we’ve done God-knows how much damage to the timeline—“
I shook my head without thinking, which stopped Corcoran in his tracks.
“What the hell was that?” he tilted his head toward me.
“What the hell was what?” I asked.
He looked at Bloomington, who arched an eyebrow in reply. “Wait a minute, who the hell are YOU?” Corcoran reached for his sidearm and I pulled mine. The pistol quivered in my uneven grip.
“Listen very carefully. My name is Phineas Templeton. I created time travel at the behest of my Benefactor—“
“Bullshit you did!” Corcoran yelled.
“—In the year 2032.”
Corcoran blinked. It took every ounce of my restraint to not kill the man right here, though I was certain that he would do the same to me given the chance.
“2032? Twenty years?” Bloomington asked.
Corcoran nodded, “That’s impossible.”
“Twenty years?” I looked at Bloomington, though I kept my gun firmly trained on Corcoran. “In the future?”
Bloomington eyed Corcoran sidelong and nodded.
“Twenty years…in the past.” Corcoran said. “In your past. Project Omega’s base year was 2012.”
“But that’s imp—“ I had launched into a premature attack, and Corcoran�
�s words hit me squarely on the jaw. “Did you say 2012?” I asked.
“Yeah. 2012. Not what you expected?” Corcoran snorted. Our guns still were trained on one another.
“No…no, most certainly not.” The colour drained from my face and I began to sweat cold beads. I reeled backwards, caught only by the same soil that had washed over me some sixty five million years before, one short day ago. I dropped the pistol to my side, and Corcoran cautiously holstered his own weapon.
“2012? But how—?” I asked.
Corcoran sighed, “Project Omega took off from Montauk Naval Base in Long Island in base year 2012, with a mission to conduct time travel experiments. Bloomy over here was the project’s chief scientist. I’m the mission’s commander.”
“How the devil did the Army build a time machine in 2012? I mean, compared to all of the breakthroughs that I’ve had to make—“
“Aliens,” Corcoran deadpanned. He locked eyes with me for several moments before he broke into a broad smile. “I’m just messin’ with ya’. To be honest, Bloomy here is your man in that regard; I just oversaw the program.”
“Well…it’s pretty complicated stuff…” Bloomington rubbed the back of his rather hirsute neck.
“I’m all ears,” I said.
Bloomington sighed, “Project Omega was the culmination of a number of Army Black Ops projects that have been in place since the 1947 crash of an unidentified flying object outside of Roswell, New Mexico.”
“So…you’re telling me it was aliens?” My eyes must’ve been wider than pound coins.
“No…well…we don’t know…but if they were aliens, they looked an awful lot like us. None of those shittin’ little grey things that people are fixated on,” Bloomington said, with more than a tinge of disappointment.
“After sixty years or so, we realized that it wasn’t a spaceship at all. It was a time machine,” Bloomington said. “Sure, the gravity drive could be appropriated for interstellar travel,” Corcoran rolled his eyes at the pudgy nerd, “but that would take years, decades even. Once we figured out what it was, it was much easier to reverse engineer and figure out which pieces went where.”