Red, White, and the Blues

by Walker, Rysa

  “Yeah, that was my thought,” he says. “But it was actually a bad choice, because it got Katherine to wondering why Max was in 1966 if she was a modernist. I said maybe she’s a subject specialist like me.”

  “She is, actually. Madi’s working on a thesis in literary history.”

  “Really? How the hell did she end up developing time travel?”

  “No clue,” I say, chugging back the rest of my coffee, which has gone cold. “But I need to talk to Angelo about going back to at least give her a heads-up. I don’t think we can just assume that they sent their invitation to Madi in 2136, given that they called her by the false name she gave Katherine. They don’t seem to know that she’s Madison Grace.”

  “Which doesn’t make sense. They hitchhiked on her signal, right? Yours and hers.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe they’re just . . . sticking out their thumbs to anyone passing by? I mean, if you’re concerned with getting to a particular destination, maybe you’re not tracking the origin of the traveler. Either way, that’s probably information that we don’t want them to have. Madi’s identity, I mean. Otherwise, their next gambit might be to just undo time travel in this sector of the multiverse by taking her and her partners out of the equation.”

  “That would leave them with a wide-open game board. Good point.”

  We take the lift down to the lower level. Katherine and Angelo are supposed to meet us in the courtyard. It’s a Saturday, so the first floor is teeming with tourists, including a line in front of Tate Poulsen, our Viking specialist, who must be the unlucky guy stuck with Q&A duty today.

  Rich pulls me toward a corridor that leads to a side exit, rather than the door directly in front of us.

  “What?” I ask.

  “That’s supposed to be my Q&A shift. Angelo said he’d get someone to cover for me, since we were working on the scenarios. Tate’s probably already pissed enough without seeing me strolling across the lobby.”

  “But you did Q&A last night . . .”

  “I did,” Richard says. “So there’s a decent chance it’s you he’s pissed at, not me, because this was one of your sessions I promised to cover—”

  “When you lost the bet with me in Memphis.”

  “Exactly. And I have no clue whether it’s my name or yours on the list.”

  I groan and pick up the pace. Poulsen is fairly easygoing, but I have no desire to get on the bad side of the guy whose genetic-design team used Thor from Marvel Comics as a template when they set out to craft a Viking historian.

  A clear floor-to-ceiling barrier in both the lobby and the corridor provides an unobstructed view of the small courtyard that sits at the center of CHRONOS HQ. The courtyard was once the front lawn of a library and the historical center for the city of Washington, DC. A holostatue of Andrew Carnegie, the donor for the original building, stands at the center, along with two curved benches retained from the original construction that span most of the courtyard. A University is carved into the stone of the left bench and For the People is carved on the right. Pictures from the late 2000s show a wide staircase between the benches, leading up to the building that was eventually replaced by the current complex. The training wing is on the other side of the courtyard, so this is where students always congregated to get a bit of fresh air and sunlight at lunchtime back when we were in classroom training. It still tends to be occupied mostly by students and teaching staff, even on the weekends, and there’s a small cluster of third- or fourth-year students currently playing hoverball in one corner of the yard.

  Katherine and Angelo are seated on the right bench. She’s clearly trying to convince him of something, although we’re still too far away to hear what she’s saying.

  “Damn,” Rich mutters. “I knew we should have gotten here earlier.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s trying to talk him into having Saul work with us on this.”

  “Did she tell you—”

  “No,” he says. “She didn’t have to.”

  I don’t question him. He’s known Katherine far longer than I have, and probably knows her better than anyone, even Saul, who seems far too focused on himself to really bother understanding anyone else, even the woman he’s engaged to. There’s a decent chance that all of CHRONOS will eventually be focused on reversing this time shift, but Angelo isn’t going to rush to pull Saul into the fold. He doesn’t trust the guy any more than I do.

  Just as I’m opening my mouth to make that point, I feel an odd twinge in the pit of my stomach. The coffee. I must have chugged it too fast. Before that thought can fully form, however, everything around us shifts. The students playing hoverball vanish, along with the holostatue of Carnegie. The classroom wing behind them disappears as well, replaced by the older building I remember seeing in photographs. Arched windows and three words etched on the panel below the flat roof—Science, Poetry, History. There are a few people on the steps in front of the library, including an elderly man who is staring rather pointedly at the two of us.

  Above us, the sky is now a brownish gray. Some of the trees on the edges of the courtyard look similar, but they seem less vivid, almost anemic. The only things that look the same are the curved benches on either side of the stairs.

  And Katherine. She’s still on the bench, her eyes fixed on the spot where Angelo was only a second ago.

  Rich’s step falters for a moment, so I’m guessing he was hit by the same fleeting nausea. Then he takes off running toward Katherine. I follow at a slower pace, still conscious of the old guy watching us. He has a mask of some sort over the lower half of his face, and he peers over the top of it toward us with narrowed eyes. If everything around us seemed to blink out, it stands to reason that from his perspective, we blinked in. He appears to be the only one paying attention to us, and I’m really hoping he’ll decide he might need to get his vision checked. That will be far less likely, however, if we do anything else that attracts his attention.

  I sink onto the bench on the other side of Katherine. “We need to keep things low-key, all right? I think someone spotted us.”

  They both nod. We sit in silence for a moment, and then Rich says, “So, what the hell happened? Did the government zap CHRONOS without even seeing the evidence? I’m thinking that’s gotta be it, because the building would be here, at the very least, unless someone disabled the CHRONOS field protecting it. Or is this the end result of the other side’s opening move? Either way, if the agency is gone, then how . . .” He trails off as Katherine’s hand moves up to the pendant beneath her blouse, which is identical to the ones that Rich and I are wearing.

  “How are there still CHRONOS keys? If the agency was erased . . .” Katherine stops, steadying her voice. “I know the keys are inside a CHRONOS field . . . by definition, I guess. But if there’s no CHRONOS, then no one created the keys and we should be gone, too. Right?”

  She’s looking at Rich, expecting him to have the answer. Normally, I would be, as well, since he’s always been more adept at sorting out the various conundrums attached to time travel that make most people’s heads throb. But I’m the one with the answer this time. I just need to figure out a way to explain it that doesn’t spill the beans about Madi.

  “I’m pretty sure that as long as the CHRONOS field is active, the keys exist even if the timeline changes. They’re a constant. Even if the agency was never created in this reality, it was in the next reality over, and unless you crack open the key and destroy the field, you can’t get rid of them. And if you did try to disable them, you’d need to make damn sure none of them were left in the past because then there’s a risk that someone reverse engineers it and the whole thing starts again.”

  One skeptical eyebrow arcs above the rim of Rich’s glasses. “And you know this . . . how?”

  “Just an educated guess. That’s how it should work, right?”

  He sighs. “Hell if I know.”

  Katherine stands abruptly and starts to scan the buildings around us. “I have t
o go. I have to find Saul.”

  Richard winces. “Katherine, no. He’s not . . . I mean, we’ll find a way to fix the timeline and bring him back, but regardless of what caused this, Saul wasn’t under a key. He’s not going to be—”

  “Saul is at the OC.” She turns on Rich, eyes blazing, and points toward a building a few blocks away. “The Club is still there. See?”

  Morgen Campbell’s building is indeed there, in the same location as always, just across from Franklin Square. It looks as if it might be a few floors shorter, but it could just be that buildings nearby are taller now. A number of those buildings seem different, although I’m not sure I could pinpoint exactly how. I’m certain, however, that there was an office building across the street instead of the park that’s there currently. And there’s now a pub of some sort on the corner, Sim and Stim. I’m certain I’ve never seen that before. The top half of the building has been rented out as a billboard. First it displays an ad for some sort of exercise system, then three different campaign ads. One is for someone running for the DC-2 congressional seat, another is for an alderman, and the last one is for a judicial position. I don’t know about the second one—I’ve never even heard of an alderman—but elections for the first and third were replaced by the Solons lottery nearly a century ago.

  The other odd thing I notice is an increase in air traffic, mostly delivery drones, which are supposed to use the old subway tunnels this time of day and stick to a low flight path for the last hop of their route. Dozens of them fill the air above us now, some traveling much higher than usual. Maybe that’s part of the reason the sky is thick with smog. The clothing seems different, too, and not just the face masks, which about half of the people are wearing. Their clothes seem more formal, I guess, and there’s not much skin in sight. Rich and I seem to be the only ones in short sleeves. There aren’t many women out as I look around, and Katherine seems to be the only one in pants. The others are in skirts that hang to mid knee, and it occurs to me that the old guy on the steps might have been reacting to our unusual dress rather than—or in addition to—the fact that we popped in out of nowhere.

  Katherine is already halfway down the path toward the sidewalk. Rich is clearly dreading arguing with her about this, so I take the lead. She’s not likely to listen to either of us anyway. But someone needs to at least caution her there’s not a chance in hell that her version of Saul is still around, so I head after her. To be fair, I’d have a lot more sympathy for what she’s going through if it was pretty much anyone else on the planet other than Saul.

  “Come on, Katherine. Yes, that’s Campbell’s building. And Campbell might be fine in this timeline. He might be the same asinine gox as always. But he doesn’t have the CHRONOS gene. Or . . . at least he didn’t in our timeline. Anyway, my point is, if Saul exists at all, he’s not going to be the same person. He won’t be at the OC. If by some miracle he is there, he probably won’t look the same. And he won’t recognize you.”

  “You don’t know that,” she says. “Not for certain.”

  “He wasn’t wearing a key. I saw him drop it off with the guard when he stormed out of the jump room yesterday. We wouldn’t have keys, either, if we hadn’t been jumping back and forth to oversee the simulation in the isolation tank. But you’re right,” I admit. “I don’t know for certain. There’s only one thing I’m certain about right now. Regardless of whether this is the result of our government cutting its perceived losses on the whole time-travel question, or the result of a stupid interdimensional game, the problem we have to address is in the past. We can’t do a damn thing to fix it from here.” I view the restoration of Saul as one of the unfortunate side effects of fixing the timeline, but I decide to leave that bit out.

  Katherine doesn’t slow her pace. “We don’t even know if the keys still work, Tyson. Yes, they protected us during the shift, but does that necessarily mean they’re still functional in a reality where they were never invented?”

  I don’t have an answer for that. The keys should still function, but I can’t exactly check to be sure while we’re out here in the open. My uncertainty on that point seems to have buoyed Katherine’s spirits a bit, probably because it means my view that her version of Saul isn’t around could be wrong.

  “I’ll ask at the concierge desk,” she says. “If the Objectivist Club doesn’t have Saul Rand listed as a member, then you’re right. Whatever version of him that exists here isn’t the same person.” There’s just a hint of sarcasm in those last few words. “Then I’ll know, and we can move on to whatever steps we need to take to fix this. Okay?”

  “I’ll go with her,” Richard says as we round the corner onto the sidewalk. “She’s right. We have to check. Why don’t you try to find Max? Assuming, of course, that the keys still work.”

  I expect a barrage of questions from Katherine as to why we’re assuming Madi still exists when we’re assuming the exact opposite about Saul. But she doesn’t seem to be listening anymore. In fact, she’s several paces behind us, staring at the skyline. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for her to go any paler than she did after Angelo vanished, but it’s as if all the blood has drained from her face.

  Following her gaze, I see a Cyrist symbol, tall and stark white against the sky, standing atop a massive temple. It’s at least a mile away, but still visible due to its perch on a slight hill. Something about it seems a bit off, but I can’t quite place it.

  “That’s new,” Rich says. “I thought that cult fizzled in the 2000s.”

  “Apparently not,” I say. “At least it answers the question about whether this is simply CHRONOS being erased. I mean, even without the benefit of the SimMaster’s analysis, I think we can agree there’s not much chance that erasing a time-travel agency would resuscitate a religion that died out over a hundred years before time-travel research really took off.”

  Katherine pulls her eyes away from the temple and continues toward the Club, or what she’s assuming is the Club. It could easily be something else entirely. I have no clue whether Morgen’s ancestors had the building designed specially or simply bought one that suited their needs.

  I also have no clue why the Cyrist symbol elicited such a strong reaction from her. But I’d bet this CHRONOS key that it has something to do with Saul.

  FROM THE NEW YORK DAILY INTREPID

  CONGRESS REJECTS ROOSEVELT’S CALL TO WAR

  (Washington, December 13, 1941) Late last night, the House of Representatives voted 242–185 to reject President Roosevelt’s recommendation that the United States join Great Britain and the Netherlands in declaring war on Japan, after a narrow win in the Senate. Roosevelt’s resolution was prompted by the December 7 attack by Japanese forces on two military installations in the Dutch East Indies.

  Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat, of Michigan, told his colleagues, “It could have been us! This attack could easily have been on our base at Pearl Harbor, and indeed, the next attack will be upon us if we allow this travesty to stand without defending our allies. Why are we fiddling and fuddling over legislation when all hell’s fire has broken loose around the world, first in Europe and now in the Pacific? I will never be satisfied until Adolf Hitler’s mangy, worthless hide is tanned and nailed to a barn door, and I’d be happy to add Emperor Hirohito to the wall as well, after this cowardly attack.”

  An opponent of the resolution, Representative Carl T. Curtis, Republican, of Nebraska, argued that the administration has been too ambiguous about its ultimate goal. “They cannot seem to decide whether we are going east or west. If we enter the conflict against Japan, we will inevitably be pulled into war in Europe. And no military expert can claim there is any wisdom in spreading our forces thin in a vain attempt to fight around the globe at the same time.”

  Representative Hamilton Fish, Republican, of New York, a member of the America First Committee, read from a recent speech by Mr. Charles Lindbergh, spokesperson for the isolationist group, which advocates a policy of strict neutrality in the c
urrent conflicts. “A declaration of war against Japan is merely a pretext. The true goal of this resolution, a goal driven by shortsighted Jewish groups and their allies, is to ensure that we enter the war against Germany. As I have said in the past, the greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”

  President Roosevelt anticipated the loss but stated that it was important for members of Congress to be on record, so that the American people could know where their elected officials stand on this vital issue. A Gallup poll taken in mid-November showed 68% of the American public in favor of increased aid to Allies in their struggle against the Axis powers, even at the risk of being drawn into the conflict. Roosevelt will be advocating legislation for increased aid to the Allied powers when Congress returns from break in January.

  ∞6∞

  KATHERINE

  WASHINGTON, DC

  NOVEMBER 12, 2304

  Saul isn’t at the OC. Saul isn’t anywhere. I knew this even before Tyson launched into his condescending mini lecture. I knew it as soon as I saw Angelo disappear while sitting less than a foot away from me.

  I’d just finished explaining to Angelo why we needed to pull in Saul to help formulate our strategy. He responded with a few vague excuses that really boiled down to the fact that he doesn’t like Saul, even though he’d never admit it. I saved my strongest argument for last, noting that if there were any similarities at all between the Saul we’re opposing and my Saul, that would make him ideally suited to predict his counterpart’s moves in The Game. Angelo didn’t have a rebuttal prepared for that point, and I could see him trying to think of some plausible reason to say no. Instead, he evaded the question, noting that Rich and Tyson had just come through the door.

  “Good,” I told him. “This affects them, too. Let’s get their opinion.” That was a bit risky, as strategies go, because Rich and Tyson aren’t exactly charter members of the Saul Rand Fan Club. But they’re both practical enough to recognize the truth, especially when we’re in a situation where we need all the help we can get.