by Rysa Walker
Alex shakes his head. “One-way trip.”
“Can you track where or when this hitchhiker originates,” Jack says, “like you did with the purple jumper?”
“No,” Alex says. “I tried. Not only is there no color embedded in the signal, there’s nothing else embedded, either. It’s almost like the shell of a parasite that attached itself to a host. They’ve either got some method of cloaking their signal that I can’t detect, or else . . .” He shakes his head.
“Or else what?” I ask, not really liking his expression right this moment.
“Nothing. It has to be that they’re cloaking and somehow distorting the signal. Because the other option is that the hitchhikers aren’t simply not from this time, but from this entire timeline. This reality. I don’t even want to think about what that might mean. The simplest answer is usually the right one.”
Jack and I exchange a look. None of this sounds at all simple to me, and I’m guessing he’s feeling the same. And even though Alex is using a voice clearly designed to reassure us, and probably himself, he can’t really hide the undercurrent of panic.
Alex clears his throat and continues. “I would have just chalked all of this up to some sort of quantum-level—I don’t know, static, I guess?—if we didn’t have historical aberrations in three of the four locations. I don’t see how that could be a coincidence.”
I’m tempted to note that he said basically the same thing about my jump to Liverpool and triggering the time shift not being coincidence, but this seems far more clear-cut. It’s not just a minor interaction with John Lennon, years before any of the anomalies began. These are jumps to the actual events.
“So there’s nothing Madi can do then, right?” Jack says. “We just have to wait for them to fix it.”
“You’re assuming they find it,” Alex says.
Jack raises an eyebrow and looks around at the motley assortment of equipment in the library, some “borrowed” from Alex’s employer and the rest ancient. “No offense, but if you found it, why wouldn’t they? I know you’re the brains behind this, but if this CHRONOS place is sending a dozen or so professional time travelers out multiple times a week, I’m guessing they have better equipment. And that’s leaving aside the fact that they’re over a hundred years into our future.”
“True,” Alex says. “But watch this.”
He switches to 2-D. Flat color dots replace the bubbles. The clear bubbles vanish.
“Now you see them. Now you don’t,” Jack says.
“I’m sure their system is still picking up something,” Alex says, “because . . .” He zooms in on one of the orange dots, and you can tell that the color is ever-so-slightly faded compared to the one next to it. He shrugs. “As you can see, though, it’s just a blip when you display it any other way. So unless there’s someone there who uses my specific visualization technique, it might just seem like random fluctuations. I mean, they’ll know there was a time shift, but they may not know why. Although I guess we really don’t know why, either, but I do think we need to get what information we have to them, just in case.”
“None of the stable points go beyond 2160,” I tell them. “I’ve checked on both the Log and with the key itself. It’s true for the ones that I set locally, as well.”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing that we know where and when the other traveler will be,” Alex says. “And it’s somewhere you’re already going.”
I groan. “Which means I need to get into my new traveling clothes.”
“Maybe a little target practice, first?” Jack suggests.
“I guess. Although I’d really rather do a recon trip first. See what we’re up against. I don’t need a weapon for that, do I? Maybe I can just drop in, let the professional time travelers know what we’ve found out. And maybe let them take care of it?”
Jack shakes his head. “What if this is intentional? This purple person may know they’re carrying baggage when they travel. What if it’s some sort of sabotage, purposefully changing the timeline like that Saul guy did?”
He’s right, of course. I know he’s right. I’m just putting off dealing with the lethal aspects of this trip.
“You should have plenty of time to practice,” Alex says. “I’ve got to figure out a way to get RJ back into the house before you make the jump. Just in case. It’s possible that the first event is what triggers the other two and stopping the shootings in Montgomery will reset the timeline. I doubt it, partly because those phantom pulses are at all three locations. To be on the safe side, though, RJ needs to be inside a CHRONOS field when the shift happens.”
“Is that the only way he gets his memory back?” I ask.
“Hell if I know.” Alex throws out his hands. His eyes have a slightly manic look that suggests to me that the man needs food and at least twelve hours of sleep. “We already know that the timeline isn’t altered every time you do something different. Otherwise, we’d have had shifts each time you went back and changed something—telling yourself not to do the jumps, for example, or going back to get your shoes. What we got instead was a temporary clone of you that vanished. That tells me the timeline resists change. It will resist changing back, too. So, like I said, I think it’s unlikely that just stopping one of these events will fix things. And there’s always the chance that he’ll be the RJ we know even if he’s outside of a field when you do fix it. But since I don’t know that for certain, I think we’d be stupid not to have him here, just in case.”
“You’re right,” I tell him. “But you might want to give Lorena a heads-up on that? She may need a little time to adjust to the idea before the husband who doesn’t know her drops by.”
MADI
MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA
MARCH 23, 1965
The sneeze hits almost as soon as I land, wiping out all hope of a quiet entrance. I shouldn’t really be surprised, since the stable point sits in the middle of a bank of flowering bushes. Azaleas, I think. I also think I’m allergic to azaleas. Who knew?
I should have just blinked in directly to the City of St. Jude. Last night, I scanned through a seventy-two-hour period at the stable point where I jumped in while testing out the key. The maintenance sheds looked quite different in the old satellite photographs that Jarvis pulled up during our research. They were called Quonset huts, and with their rounded roofs and walls, Jack said they looked a bit like a sausage split lengthwise, the halves side by side on a grill. I’m guessing they’re used mostly for storage, because there are no windows. The space between the two halves forms an oddly shaped tunnel so narrow that I could almost touch the two sides if I spread my arms out.
But no one used the location—or rather no one else. I saw myself jump in briefly and then jump out. Nor did anyone use the next closest stable point, which is nearly three miles away, near the state capitol.
At first, I was perplexed. If Alex’s information is correct, the jumper represented by the purple bubbles should have arrived. But then I realized that the local points I’ve set with this key aren’t in the Log, either. Kate’s diary said something about sharing stable points with other keys, too, so the book is most likely just a bare-bones collection for first-time travelers to an area. The purple jumper must have come in via a local point not listed in the Log.
All of this made me nervous, although I suspect that’s at least partly because I’ve never jumped into a location where I was worried about encountering another time traveler. Before now, I’d had the luxury of thinking I was a rare beast. Simply put, I’d have felt a lot better if I’d been able to see this other person jump in. To know that I was the one tracking them, and not vice versa.
Jack and I debated the pros and cons of both stable points and finally decided that it’s less likely someone will be watching the location near the capitol grounds than that they’ll be watching the stable point at St. Jude, given what we know is about to transpire there. The downside is that I’m not comfortable enough with this era to walk the roughly three miles between h
ere and there, risking interactions with God knows how many people. So I hail a cab and tell the driver, a middle-aged man puffing on a cigarette like it’s his life support, to take me to the City of St. Jude, please.
He turns back to look at me, snorting a cloud of smoke through his nostrils. “You sure about that? Not the best place for a girl your age, especially on your own. I got nothing against Cath’lics, but that place is on the wrong side of town, if you know what I mean.”
From what I can see of the man’s expression in the rearview mirror, I should probably be glad that he’s sticking to vague euphemisms like wrong side of town. Having read the background of the mission, I know exactly what he means. In 1965, Montgomery is divided into eight different wards. The vast majority of black citizens live in two of those wards, and the City of St. Jude sits near the middle of the largest.
“City of St. Jude,” I repeat, this time without the please, as I crank down the window. In retrospect, I should have walked. Even with all the auto exhaust from passing cars, the air is less toxic outside.
Thankfully, the driver decides he doesn’t want to talk to me. He turns up the radio, where some guy is wailing for the bartender to pour him sorrow on the rocks. That segues into another drinking song about grape wine and moonshine and chug-a-lug, and another about wine (type unspecified), women, and song. I’m sensing a theme here.
The musical theme actually ties in quite nicely with the cover story that we came up with to lure RJ inside the CHRONOS field. Alex claimed that he had this friend who was looking for volunteers to test a new alcohol-blocking pill. It paid $750, definitely on the low end for any research study I’ve ever seen, but Alex told RJ that he’d signed up for it and they needed one more person because somebody dropped out. Food and alcohol were being provided, so it was just a matter of hanging out, drinking, and watching vids for the weekend.
Why any sort of experiment like that would be done at a private home, rather than in a lab, I have no idea, but RJ was happy to take him up on it. I feel sorry for Lorena, since she’ll probably need to interact with him. But at least it won’t be for long. No matter how long these jumps take me, I can wrap things up in a matter of minutes from the point of view of anyone back—or I guess, forward?—in 2136.
I pay the cabdriver, magnanimously telling him to keep the change, since it will be precisely two pennies. Even in 1965, that has to be an insult. But while the driver’s comments annoyed me, I’m a little worried that he’s right. My blond self is probably going to be conspicuous in a segregated neighborhood.
As soon as I turn back to the sidewalk, however, I see that the driver was wrong. It’s not exactly a diverse area, but of the seven people in sight, two are white, including a guy around my age with a friendly smile and vivid blue eyes. I return the smile and he heads off toward the chapel. Maybe times are changing faster than the driver wanted to admit. Come to think of it, that’s probably why he was so surly.
But it’s still true that the longer I spend hanging around here, the more likely it is that I’ll have to explain my presence to someone. My first order of business is to find a safe spot, in a location that won’t be in the line of fire tomorrow night. My second task is to jump forward and pinpoint the house across the street from which the shots are coming. Once I’m certain, I’ll go back fifteen minutes, find a police or military officer who looks competent and reasonably kindhearted, and tell him I saw someone in the yard of that house when I walked past, aiming a rifle at this field. That it looked like the guy was drinking, too. That he seemed really angry.
There are several holes in this plan. Based on everything I’ve read, there will be a lot of guards patrolling the fence area once the marchers arrive tomorrow. Convincing those guards that I saw something they didn’t probably won’t be easy. Also, the occupants of the houses across the street are, almost certainly, not white. Odds are pretty good that they’re in favor of this march and Dr. King’s agenda of racial justice, so barring mental illness or other issues, they wouldn’t be inclined to open fire on the people attending this concert.
I’m really hoping they won’t dissect my story too carefully, however. I need Plan A to work. Because if it doesn’t, I’ll have to move on to Plan B, which requires me to jump back again, break into the house where the sniper is hiding, and shoot him with what I’m sure everyone in 1965 would call my ray gun.
The ray gun isn’t so bad, actually. It took a few tries to get the aim right, but once I did, I discovered that I could hit the target with an uncanny accuracy. I’ve always been good at VR games that require hand-eye coordination. While I never really took pride in that the way I did in my swimming prowess, I’m again wondering whether I truly have any native talents. Is this an ability that some genetic designer cooked up? How many of the things that make me me were created in a lab a century and a half from now?
The other issue, of course, is that we were shooting at targets. Can I actually kill another human being? I’m not entirely sure on that point. Maybe, if I’m certain that I’m saving the lives of the people on that field and, hopefully, setting the timeline straight. But I’d really rather not put it to the test.
As soon as the cab pulls away from the curb, I walk quickly to the rear of the campus, toward the stable point. The athletic field is empty. If anyone is watching, they’re doing a good job of staying undercover.
I slip into the shadows between the two sheds and roll the time forward to 9:18 p.m. on March 24th, just in case the papers were wrong and the gunfire starts earlier than reported. Then I take a deep breath and jump in.
The music, loud and a little tinny, is the first thing that my senses pick up when I arrive, followed by the scent of mud and a faint feeling of dampness against my skin. It’s not exactly raining, but a fine mist hangs in the air, permeating each breath I take. The song that’s playing is vaguely familiar. I think I may have heard it in school as a kid. After a few more bars, I place it. “If I Had a Hammer.” It’s one of the songs that the group Mary Travers was with sang at the concert.
At the end of the tunnel between the two sheds, I now see at least a dozen vehicles—jeeps, cars, and a few trucks. Most have military markings, but some appear to be police cars. Uniformed men are gathered around, some talking, some listening to the music.
I press my back against the side of one of the huts and set the key for a return trip thirty seconds after I left, just in case I need to return home quickly. Then, I begin inching toward the edge of the tunnel, hoping to avoid catching the attention of any guards. One of the musicians tells the audience to sing along, and a huge swell of voices joins in for the chorus.
Once I’m a few yards from the edge of the building, I stop and wait, glancing down at the CHRONOS key. It’s 9:20 now, and I wish I hadn’t given myself so much time. My heart is pounding in my ears so loudly that it almost drowns out the music. I close my eyes and focus on breathing slowly as I wait.
The song wraps up and there’s applause, followed by a man’s voice. He’s introducing the next act, James Baldwin, who will read selections from his latest book, The Fire Next Time. The crowd applauds again, and then there’s a loud crack. Another one follows, and the crowd is no longer applauding. Someone screams, and other voices join in that chorus, too.
The attention of the guards is now on the crowd, so I step toward the edge of the hut-tunnel and scan the houses across the street. Eyewitness reports said there were at least ten shots—some said as many as fifteen—so I have several chances to isolate the location of the sniper.
Another crack of gunfire. I don’t see the flash of light Jack told me to look for, so I move a few steps closer. One of the guards yells at me as he runs past, telling me to find cover. He’s also scanning the tree-lined street.
Shouts of run compete with the advice to get down. Another shot rings out, and I see a man fall to the ground. I don’t know if he was wounded or if he just decided that hitting the ground was safer than running.
And then I see the fl
ash, almost hidden behind the leaves. A second flash. I’ll need to be certain, and check from another angle, but the house should be easy to spot, because it has an odd roof. There are two peaks in front, like a letter M, with a slightly higher peak, like an upturned letter V, behind them.
So I slip back into the tunnel, pull up the preset stable point, and blink out. The quiet is sudden, like the screams from the crowd were pouring from a faucet and some cosmic hand reached out and cut them off with the twist of a knob. I stand there for a moment, waiting for my pulse to return to normal so that I don’t go bolting across the field like a startled rabbit.
When I finally step out into the sunlight, I find I’m no longer alone. Off in the distance, the guy I saw when I got out of the cab is pacing around in the field. For a moment, I think he’s just getting a bit of exercise. But then he turns toward me, and as I duck back into the tunnel, I catch a flash of orange light rising up from his hand.
He’s setting stable points. Multiple stable points, every few yards along the side of the field where the shooting will occur. The locations are out in the open. I can’t imagine anyone would use them to jump in, so they must be observation points, like the ones I set in my room to watch Kate.
The bigger question is why. I can think of two very different possibilities. One is that he’s here for the same reason I am—to look for the killer who screwed up the timeline. The other is that he is the killer who screwed up the timeline, and he wants an up-close and personal view of the killing field, so that he can view the scene later, at his leisure, over and over again.
Which, to use Nora’s phrase, would make him one sick fuck.
He doesn’t look like a homicidal maniac. In fact, he seemed nice. But many of the sickest ones do.
What truly annoys me is that after all of those hours of sitting on my bed watching Kate, watching Jack and Alex in the library, and even watching my dad at Nora’s house, I didn’t think about using the stable point for surveillance the way he is. There was no need for me to be in the middle of the chaos. I didn’t have to hear their screams.