by Bob Mayer
The chopper lifted up and banked over Staten Island toward Manhattan and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the Gate to take them to the Possibility Palace was hidden deep beneath the surface.
“I’ve been thinking about something you told me,” Ivar said.
“What was that?”
“That math is the quantification of reality.”
“And?” Doc was shaken, as if Ivar had picked up his earlier thoughts.
“The Rule of Seven,” Ivar said.
“What of it?”
“Why seven?” Ivar asked. “Why not six? Or eight?”
“That’s the history,” Doc said. “Atlantis was attacked by the Shadow for six straight years on the same day, and on the seventh, it was destroyed. The Shadow opens six bubbles on each day, trying to form Cascades that develop the seventh change, the tsunami. Seven has always been a significant number. Seven days in a week. On the seventh day, God rested. And so on.”
“Math,” Ivar said.
Doc didn’t miss a beat. “Seven is a prime number. It’s the only Mersenne safe prime number, actually, which is special.”
“Indeed,” Ivar said.
Doc was focused. “It’s the lowest natural number that can’t be represented as the sum of the square of three integers. And it is the most likely number to come up when rolling two dice.” As they passed over the Manhattan shoreline and headed toward the Freedom Tower, he glanced over at Ivar. “Where are you going with this?”
“In catastrophe theory,” Ivar said, “there are four possible catastrophes with one active variable and three with two variables. Seven possible types of catastrophes.”
Doc was silent for a few moments. “Do you think the Shadow is trying to create each type of catastrophe somehow? We’d have to define the seven types and—“
“Single variable: fold, cusp, swallowtail, and butterfly. Double variable: hyperbolic, elliptic, and parabolic.”
“—and then try to fit the changes the Shadow tried in each bubble to those,” Doc finished.
“Yes,” Ivar said.
Doc smiled. “If we return from this mission, it is something to explore.”
“When we get back,” Ivar corrected.
Doc wasn’t looking at the Freedom Tower. He was staring at the footprint where the World Trade Center had once stood.
Mountain Meadows, Utah
The valley was more desolate than it had been over one hundred and fifty years ago. Over-grazing. Moms remembered that from the mission briefing. Edith Frobish had said something about it. Remembering Edith made Moms smile as she though of her with Eagle. Lots of brain-power there, but something more. Something good. Eagle needed something good.
Moms shivered, the cold wind blowing across the open land biting through her jacket.
Ghosts. All around. Moms could hear them. Mothers crying for their children. Men for their wives. Boys for their fathers.
There was only one other car in the parking lot. The site was on a north-south road in southwestern Utah that pretty much went from nowhere to nowhere. Well off today’s beaten track but in 1857 it had been on one of the main westward wagon trails. The long valley had been a resting place before the final push across the Nevada deserts and then over the Sierras into the promised land of California.
For those of a certain wagon train in 1857, the promise had abruptly ended here.
A pile of stones inside an enclosure was the memorial for their deaths at the hands of Mormon militia.
“Did you have an ancestor here? When it happened?”
Moms was surprised she hadn’t heard the old man coming up behind her. Roland would have been very upset with her, but Roland was on the east coast with Neeley and for a moment, Moms felt a pang of something she quickly ignored.
She had to consider how to answer the question. There were two sides here over one hundred and fifty years ago: the victims and their killers. “No,” she lied. “Did you?”
“Yes.” He was silent for a few moments, then spoke in a low voice. “’I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner’.”
“John D. Lee.”
The old man gave a half nod. “You know the history. I’m a direct descendant. There’re many of us. He had nineteen wives and fifty-six children.” He gave a wry smile. “They don’t talk about what happened here at family gatherings. Not at all.” He pointed. “He was executed over there.” He shifted his attention back to her. “Why do you know what he said just before they shot him?”
“I’m a student of history,” Moms lied. She remembered Lee. The faces around the campfire as the awful decision was made by the Mormon militia to kill the emigrants in the wagon train. All of them, including women and children and even the babies. That was all she’d managed to avert, saving 17 very young lives, the way history recorded it
The old man seemed satisfied with that answer. “Anyone stopping here would have to be. Not many come here.”
“Do you come here often?” Moms asked.
“I live here,” he said. “Not here, here, but just a few miles away. Seems the past has drawn me with a power greater than my own. Ever feel that way?”
That truth wasn’t hard. “Yes.”
Moms phone chimed: Lawyers, guns and money.
“That’s odd,” the old man said. “There’s no cell phone coverage.”
“Special phone,” Moms said, as she checked the screen to find out where she was getting picked up. She turned for her car in the parking lot.
The old man’s voice gave her pause.
“I’ve wondered something,” he said. “Something weird.”
Moms turned. “What’s that?”
The old man touched his chest. “I, my children, my grandchildren, all exist because John D. Lee lived. He wasn’t executed until 1877, twenty years after the massacre. One of his sons was my direct ancestor and was born in those twenty years. There are probably close to a thousand people alive now because of him. So. My weird thought. If Lee had died before the massacre, or never existed, would the massacre never have happened? But I, and my family, wouldn’t exist, right? So would I wish that, if wishing could make something true? Trade my existence, and my family, and all those other who are alive, for the people who died here?”
Moms felt the tug of the alert. Of mission. She remembered the voices around the campfire the night before the massacre and the arguments. “It doesn’t matter. It would have happened anyway. It was inevitable given everything else. There were others responsible. He was the scapegoat. There would have been a different scapegoat, but those people would still be dead.”
The old man nodded, but didn’t look relieved in the slightest. “I imagine you’re right.”
The Possibility Palace
Where? Can’t tell you. When? Can’t tell you.
Dane looked like he was praying when Frasier, the Time Patrol psychiatrist, entered his office. Dane’s hands were clasped together under his chin and his eyes were closed. There were six folders on the table in front of him, aligned perfectly.
“What did you find out about Lara?” Dane asked, without opening his eyes.
“I got alerted,” Frasier said, indicating the folders, a wasted movement with most, but Frasier knew it wasn’t. Not with Dane, who had some of the Sight.
“We’ll get to that,” Dane said. “It will take the team a little while to assemble and the bubble is still forming. There are a couple of anomalies in it I want to know more about.”
“’Anomalies’?”
“Tell me about Lara.”
Frasier sat down across from Dane. His left eye was a solid black orb, surrounded by scar tissue.
“She disappeared out of a black site eight months ago,” Frasier said.
“Run by?”
“The CIA. They were using a mental institution as a front for experiments.”
Dane opened his eyes. “LSD. Timothy Leary. Grill Flame. The Agency has been mucking about in that since they were founded. In a way they were
more right than they knew, but in a way they were going in the wrong direction. The Sight is something that isn’t easily quantifiable. Foreman always kept tabs on the CIA’s experiments and research. How come he didn’t know about Lara?”
Frasier held up his left hand, also a prosthetic. “The black site was obliterated at the time she disappeared so it was covered deep with concrete deniability. Every staffer and guard killed. She disappeared along with all records of her. I was only able to learn this by tracing secondary computer shadows at the Agency. They still haven’t figured out what happened to the site. And they really thought she was a sixteen-year-old from Wichita who murdered her family. Father, mother, younger brother and sister.”
“And she isn’t?”
“She is,” Frasier said. “But she isn’t. There’s no doubt the family was killed. And the girl, Lara Cole was her name, disappeared. But whether that Lara Cole is our Lara? Questionable. My conjecture is: doubtful, based on what I pieced together on the Wichita Lara Cole prior to the murders. It feels like someone appropriated her identity.”
“What happened to the original Lara Cole?” Dane asked.
Frasier shrugged. “Gone.”
“Did she kill her family?”
“I don’t think so. More likely whoever took her, killed her family.”
“So we still don’t know who our Lara is,” Dane summed up.
“No.”
“Who attacked the black site?”
“Unknown.”
“How did she end up with the Russians? And getting sent to us?”
“That’s the strange thing,” Frasier said. “Her Russian story? Fake.”
“That can’t be,” Dane said. “The Russians confirmed they had her. They sent her.”
“That’s what they said and say,” Frasier said. “But I did some digging and can’t find anything to back up their story either.”
“Sin Fen believed her story,” Dane said, referring to the priestess who worked with the Time Patrol and had a large degree of the Sight.
Frasier spread his hands. “I can’t vouch for what Sin Fen ‘sees’. The only facts I can lock down are the CIA black site. And even that’s sketchy. Checking the manifest for the Russian plane, they only sent two people. Not three.”
“And yet,” Dane didn’t seem overly surprised, “three got off the plane. Where did it stop on the way over?”
Frasier shook his head. “It didn’t. Direct with inflight refueling. They weren’t taking any chances.”
“And yet she was on board,” Dane said. “And the guards didn’t act like anything was amiss. And the Russians gave us a bunch of BS to back up her story. Interesting. She wasn’t there and then she was there.” He rubbed his forehead. “She’s different. Very different. I don’t think she’s from this timeline. In fact, I very much doubt it.”
Frasier didn’t respond, because Dane wasn’t from this timeline. The Dane of this timeline had died in Vietnam decades ago. Dane didn’t speak of his timeline other than having said it didn’t exist any more. Wiped out by the Shadow.
“And Lara now?”
“I think she goes places in that fugue state,” Frasier said, choosing his words carefully. “In her mind. It looks like she’s sleeping but she’s not. She’s somewhat aware of the world around her, but more focused on some place else. Or some other time. Her heart rate is high. The temperature drop in her body and especially her brain is especially intriguing. I can find nothing in the data banks like it.”
“Any thoughts on it?”
“Perhaps a primal form of protection,” Frasier suggested. “While her mind is gone, her body is minimizing energy expenditure. Hibernation.”
“But you said her heart beat speeds up,” Dane said.
“True,” Frasier admitted. “I’m just speculating. Perhaps she went to Russia while she was in that state. A Russia in her mind? Or perhaps a Russia in a different timeline?”
“And you went into the team room again,” Dane said.
“I did.”
“I don’t think you’ll survive a third time.”
Frasier took the rebuke as the order it was intended as. With no more questions forthcoming, he broke the silence. “What day?”
“Fourteen February.”
Frasier frowned, which wrinkled the scar tissue around his machine eye in an unnatural way. “Valentines Day? Odd.”
“Why odd?” Dane said. “One of three-hundred-and-sixty-five the Shadow has to choose from.”
“Three-sixty-six, if we include leap years,” Frasier said. “But nothing significant in history comes to mind for Fourteen February.”
Dane put his hand on the folders. “Every day of the year has significant historical events. And even the insignificant can become significant over time. We have to remember the old adage ‘for want of a nail, a shoe was lost’.”
Frasier indicated the table. “I don’t have any folders.”
“Your powers of observation are considerable.”
Frasier waited. Dane opened the top folder and began reading. He wrote something on a sheet of paper paper-clipped to the cover. Then he opened the second one. He looked up. “Still here?”
The Mission Briefing
DOC WAS THE FIRST to enter the team room. He wore a faded leather bomber jacket that had seen better days and a bedraggled World War II Army Air Force flight suit with the elbows and knees worn thin. His new ‘old’ style glasses slid down on his nose and he pushed them back into place as he took a seat at the table.
He ran a hand along the worn leather of the other sleeve, wondering if this was a real relic from the time period or something that had been made here and aged in some way.
He started coughing, hard. He bent over trying to clear his throat, putting his hand over his mouth. It took a few moments, but then the spasm passed. He straightened and grabbed a chair, slumping into it. He looked up at the wall dotted with a few mementos from previous Time Patrol missions: an original Badge of Merit from George Washington, the forerunner of the Purple Heart; a gray-green scale from Aglaeca, the mother of Grendel, both very real monsters and much worse than the epic poem made them out to be.
Eagle came in, looking not too happy, which wasn’t an unusual thing given the positions he often had to assume in order to travel into the past for his missions. He wore a white U.S. Navy uniform, from the same era as Doc’s.
That was confirmed as Eagle checked out Doc’s outfit. “Army Air Force. Before the Air Force became a separate branch. The shoulder patch is Eighth Air Force. Organized in early 1945 in Europe. So you’re going toward the end of World War Two or just after.”
“And yours?” Doc asked. “Navy, obviously.”
“Same time frame,” Eagle confirmed. “Except blacks, negroes as we were called then, on good days, weren’t integrated in the services until 1948. So I’m serving as a cook or steward or some such crap.” He sat down next to Doc. “I thought I knew history. A lot of it. But I didn’t really understand some of it. Not my people’s history in this country. What they went through.”
Doc indicated his skin. “I have some empathy with you, my friend. Not quite the same, but similar.”
Eagle nodded. “Yeah. I know. When people can tell you’re not the same as them by your skin color, the world is a very different place.”
“Would I fit in, in the Eighth Air Force?” Doc asked. “It was not easy being an obvious foreigner in 1776 in Philadelphia. I don’t think Benjamin Franklin or John Adams bought into my lie.”
“That was the least of your worries.” Eagle indicated the Order of Military Merit on the wall. “Try being a slave in 1783 in George Washington’s camp.”
“But I am not a pilot, like you,” Doc pointed out. “Will that not be a problem? Shouldn’t you be wearing this?”
Eagle pointed at a metal pin on the breast of Doc’s jacket. “Flight surgeon. That puts you in an interesting position in the unit. It was World War II. They were desperate for bodies. Eventually they even let
negroes into combat units, although they had white officers. But a doctor? Even more valuable. Especially in a bomber unit.”
“How so?”
“Ever read Catch-22?” Eagle asked. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Only one in three airmen survived the war flying missions over Europe. The losses were staggering. And you’re the man who can determine whether someone is on flight status or not. I think that’s going to matter a lot more than your ethnic background.”
Doc indicated the state of the jacket and the flight suit. “Not exactly straight from the laundry.”
“True—“ Eagle began but he paused. “You all right?”
“What do you mean?” Doc asked.
Eagle indicated a smear of blood on the arm of Doc’s chair. “That yours’?”
Doc looked at his hand. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s blood,” Eagle said. “You cut yourself?”
Doc folded his hand into a fist. “Just a scratch.”
Any further questioning was interrupted as the next member of the team came in.
Scout was dressed in an off-white robe, cinched at the waist with a rope. A step down in quality from what she’d worn on her missions to ancient Greece, a step up from being a beggar. “I just want to go to an era that has toilets,” she said. “Is that too much to ask? Hot and cold running water? Showers? People smell better when there are showers. 1969 was nice. Why can’t I go back to then?”
“Someone tried to kill you in 1969,” Eagle pointed out.
“Two someones tried to kill me in 1969,” Scout said. “Someone has tried to kill me every year I’ve gone back to. I want to die comfortable. And clean.”
“Who’s dying?” Ivar asked as he entered the Team Room.
“Looking good,” Eagle said. “Better than any of us.”
Ivar was dressed in a suit and carrying a fedora. He held aside the jacket so they could see the .45 caliber pistol in a leather shoulder holster. “At least I’m going strapped this time.”
“Don’t let Roland see it,” Scout said, “or we’ll get the history of the M1911A1 forty-five caliber pistol.”