The Temporal Key

by Adam Benson

  He watched the pillar of smoke for a few more minutes. If it was a fire, then he couldn’t let it spread too far. There was no phone, or electricity in the small shack he lived in. No way to call for help. There wasn't even running water on the land. He might have no choice but to let it burn itself out, or worse, he might be forced to evacuate if the fire started burning out of control, but as he watched it, he noticed that instead of getting thicker the smoke seemed to be dissipating. Whatever it had been seemed to have blown itself out.

  Mack ran back around into the small wooden, one room ranch house to grab his hat, and a pair of binoculars that remained on a little shelf above the wood burning stove on the west wall. He started to take one last, quick bite of beans before heading back outside to jump in his old pickup truck but was stopped short as he was reminded of the spill that had occurred as a result of the explosion. He sighed grumpily over the spill and then darted back out the door to his truck.

  The rusted 1936 Chevrolet pickup was parked out in front of the house next to the barn, which was little more than a wooden shed. Mack jumped inside, looking out toward the still dissipating pillar of smoke high in the air. He tossed the binoculars on the seat next to him, started up the old truck, and drove off down the dusty dirt road. The closer he got, the faster the smoke seemed to dissipate into the atmosphere, and the origin was becoming more difficult to determine. The farm routes were nothing but old wagon paths, and most of them were pretty rough to travel on. He never got above twenty-five miles per hour going down these bumpy things. The roads had been eroded by wind and rain since they were first blazed some fifty years back.

  As he drove, he passed by several fences that appeared to have broken free in long sections and flown toward the pillar of smoke that still rose in the distance. Mack was going to have his work cut out for him repairing the long sections of torn and broken barbed wire fencing that now lay strewn along the land.

  It was more than six miles away. In fact, it was closer to eight miles away from the ranch house, and it had taken him just over twenty minutes to drive the distance. When he arrived, the smoke had mostly blown away and what remained was floating off into the distance. He passed by one last rocky outcropping before part of the crash site revealed itself and he could see broken pieces of something strewn across one of the fields.

  Mack stopped the truck and grabbed the binoculars off the seat. He saw what looked like some of the same high-tech garbage that Alamogordo had been throwing his way for the last couple of years; dummy rockets, rubber balloons and other technological rubbish. Whatever it was had clearly burned up a good section of the grass around it.

  "It's that goddamned Army base a'gin,” Mack said out loud as he got out of the truck. He grabbed a .22 rifle from behind the seat and started walking across the field toward the wreckage. As he got closer, Mack's keen eye started to notice grackles and sparrows lying dead all along his path. At first it didn't seem like anything that should concern him. It wasn't unusual to find a dead animal out here. But then there was another, and another. He came across a dead coyote, and some dead quail and then more dead animals. These creatures had clearly only been dead for a very short while, and all of them looked as though they had been thrown toward the blast sight. It made Mack suddenly aware that there didn't seem to be any birds anywhere around there. Everything was quiet. Whatever this was must have killed all of them.

  The ground itself didn't seem quite right. The burnt chemical smell he picked up back at the ranch had gotten a lot stronger, and a lot less recognizable. The static electricity in the air was raising the hairs almost straight off his body. Mack could feel little shocks coming up through the ground, pricking the bottom of his feet. Something wasn't right here. Mack stopped in his tracks. He suddenly felt trepidation about getting any closer to the thing that had crashed on his land. Whatever it was... it just wasn't quite right. He looked around and began noticing broken branches and cactus all laying arranged in what was almost a circle going around the area. He saw mesquite trees with broken limbs that were all snapped in the same direction.

  Cautiously he started inching in a little closer. It was like walking on a sizzle. Even the grass started shocking his legs through his pants as he passed through it. The breeze through the grass and the nearby trees was the only sound beside the neon buzz of static discharges taking place all around him. It was eerie. Mack's pulse quickened and his breathing got heavier. The .22 that he'd been carrying lazily with one hand was suddenly being grasped firmly with both.

  As Mack got nearer to the wreckage, it got stranger and stranger. He started passing by bits of debris. Some of it looked like metal, but it also looked like colored glass, but at the same time it didn't quite look like either. Some of what he saw he had no way to even describe, the shapes and construction were so infinitely foreign to him.

  The ground itself was more broken than he had previously noticed. There was a large, fairly burnt gouge ripped into the earth that stretched off for fifty yards or so, over a nearby rock outcropping that obscured his view from the remainder of the rocky terrain. Some of the grass and scrub brush looked charred, but much of the rest just looked dead. Not dead in the same way that the rest of the dried summer grass looked dead, but instead looked truly lifeless, as though everything that had made it grass was suddenly sucked out of it.

  Mack continued a little further until he reached a large debris cluster that had chunks of unidentifiable material scattered all around. He bent down and picked up a five or six-inch square of the strange material. It shocked him with a static discharge, and he dropped it back down onto the rocks, but without thinking he was compelled to pick it up again. It was incredibly light. In fact, it was so light that it startled him. He was expecting about ten times the amount of heft that the metallic thing had.

  He propped the gun on the ground with his hip, quickly looking all around for signs of danger, and then began fiddling with the strange object in his hand. It was very pliable but had an almost rigid feel. He could bend it easily, and yet it would spring back into the exact shape it had been in when he let go. He folded it and creased it, but again it snapped back into the exact shape it had been in. He tried wadding it like a piece of tin foil. It held there for a second, and then snapped back into place as smooth as could be.

  "Well, I'll be damned." He said quietly to himself. He pulled his pocket knife out and tried to cut the strange material, but this time it wouldn't give way, it just folded down around the knife edge and then sprung back into place when he released it. He tried to poke a hole through it with the knife, but it wouldn't relent. It was as tough as steel.

  The wreckage seemed to go on passed the rock outcropping a little over fifty yards away. He couldn't see beyond the rocks to know how much more of it there was. In any case, there was too much here for him to put in his truck. He'd need a bunch of people to clean this up. And it wasn't going to be a quick clean up either.

  If this was some new military fan-dangle it wasn't like anything Mack had ever seen. Which meant at best it was top secret, and that the military probably didn't want anybody knowing about it. The more he thought about it, the more apprehensive he became about it. Whatever it was had clearly killed everything in sight. The deathly quiet, only permeated by a raspy electrified hiss coming from the wind and the grass, made Mack feel very uneasy about being there near this thing in the desert.

  Mack looked down at the object in his hands and vacillated keeping it or throwing it back with the rest of the junk. No one will believe this, he thought, and then started heading back to the truck with the little square of material still in hand. He marched quickly, constantly looking back over his shoulder as he went. When he got back to the truck, Mack noticed his herd of sheep several hundred yards away on the other side of the farm route road. The whole flock seemed to have congregated near the top of an opposing hill, all staring the same way toward the wreckage. Mack threw the .22 back behind the seat of the truck and then grabbed the binocular
s to take a closer look at them.

  Several of the sheep lay dead on the edge of the hill. Most of the rest were standing just a short distance behind the fallen carcasses of the other sheep. They were just standing there, none of them were eating the grass, and all of them seemed to be facing the same direction. Mack glanced back at the wreckage, trying to follow the sheep's' general eye-line. Just some half a mile past the wreckage Mack could see the watering hole that the sheep usually drank from. It was almost directly in their line of sight, beyond the wreckage, but were they looking at that, or the debris field?

  The strange behavior of the sheep set Mack's heart beating a little faster. He noticed a shake in his right hand that hadn't been there before, and his breathing had become very deep. Not fast, just deep. He looked back at the wreckage one last time before hoping in the truck. He turned the truck around and drove back toward his ranch as fast as he could go down the bumpy dirt road.

  Radiation Poisoning

  Dayk gasped for air as he regained consciousness. His whole body was rigid and twitching, and he had no control over his limbs as they shook violently in the dirt. His skin was numb from the static discharge, and his body was cut and bruised even further by the gravitational well that had dragged him backwards across the ground. He tried to look around to see if Dr. Thalia was still alive, but his neck wouldn't do anything but shiver, and after a few chrons, he gave up and relented to his paralyzed state.

  The numbness in his skin began to tingle as he slowly regained his ability to move ever so slightly. Painfully stiff at first, he started to move his fingers, but they resisted him, breaking free from the tension bit by bit until he was finally able to curl his hand into a ball. He tried to shift his body just a little bit, but the grass and the ground beneath him snapped at him with static electric shocks. It felt like hundreds of them crawling across his skin, and the only time the shocks seemed to stop was when he stopped moving. So, he lay still for a few more hectoChrons as the tingling in his limbs and body began to wear off, and the tremors he was feeling began to subside.

  Thalia groaned in intense agony about a meter or two behind him. "Thalia!" He tried to say, but his jaw was locked, and his vocal cords were completely numb. All that came out of him was a garbled mumble.

  I'm here, she thought to him. The telepathics were functioning again without the temporal core belching radiation into the air. I can't move! She continued.

  I’m glad you're alive! Dayk thought back to her. I'm starting to get the feeling back in my limbs. He said. I think it's going to pass soon.

  I feel nauseous, Thalia thought aloud. I think it’s the radiation poisoning.

  We've got to get back to the ship and see if there's anything left of the infirmary. Dayk said. He couldn’t see the life marks on his arm while he was laying on it, but if they hadn't already suffered a fatal dose of radiation, they didn't have long to treat it.

  I can move one of my legs! Thalia thought excitedly.

  Keep trying! Dayk encouraged. With a violent shake, he rolled onto his back pulling his numb arm free from beneath him. As he went, static shocks burning into his skin repeatedly until he finally came to a rest, looking up at the sky.

  Thalia let out a painful grunt and then forced herself up onto her hands and knees. Huffing and puffing she gave it everything she had one more time and pushed herself up onto her feet. Dhregh! She thought as she gained her footing. She hobbled stiffly over to Dr. Dayk and helped him up from the ground. I’m amazed we could run as far as we did with the air this thin. Thalia thought.

  I amazed I could hurt this bad and still be conscious, Dayk replied. He stretched his arms and legs as best as he was able, still rigid from the paralysis. He looked up into the sky and saw the smoke from the wreckage dissipating and his mind turned to the locals that certainly lived in the area. Well, it looks like the blast choked most of the fires out, and it’s pushed a good part of the smoke off, but it will be a while yet before that pillar completely dissipates. Someone will have noticed this and come looking. I only hope we didn’t kill anyone when the core discharged.

  Do you think we did? Thalia asked joining him in watching the pillar of smoke slowly move away from them.

  I have no idea. We need to get back to the crash site and secure it as best we can. Dayk took one quick look around them at the destruction that the blast had caused. Everywhere he looked the world had clear signs that it had been violently sucked back toward the ship. It won’t be hard to find our way back, he said with a hint of sarcasm in his thoughts.

  They began walking stiffly back toward the ship, and after only a few hectos, they came upon the body of Captain Nocta. He was lying face down in the dirt, and his pistol lay several meters from his right hand. Dayk bent over and rolled him onto his back. Nocta was wearing a rebreather mask; a self-contained oxygen mask that converted the natural gasses around them into something more breathable. He must have found it in the wreckage. It was no wonder he was gaining on us. Dayk pulled the mask off his face and put it to his own and took a deep breath of precious, thick oxygen.

  He handed the mask over to Dr. Thalia who took it eagerly and breathed her own sigh of relief into it. Look at his arm. She thought. He is dead. Captain Nocta's arm showed all his life signs as being nothing but black patches. His heart had stopped, his lungs had stopped, and his brain had stopped.

  It was a bitter sweet victory. Until a couple of kiloChrons ago, Captain Nocta had been a team-mate and colleague. They had been living together on a small ship for the better part of the last year. He had worked for the Temporal Sciences Center for over twenty years. His sudden attack was more than just puzzling; it was out of character for the man they thought they knew.

  The pistol added more confusion than it answered. It should have been impossible for Nocta to get an unauthorized weapon on board a highly-advanced ship full of telepaths. Their telepathy was primarily technological and certain information could be barred from person to person, but their ship’s scanners were highly advanced and nearly impossible to hack. Someone should have detected something. It all suggested premeditation, but how and why?

  Why was he trying to shoot us? Thalia asked. I mean, where did that come from?

  I have no idea, Dayk replied. He checked out; clean record. Long, honorable service. This doesn’t make any sense.

  He seemed like a good guy. Good pilot, Thalia thought with confusion lacing her thoughts.

  We can't leave him in the desert. Dayk thought. We'll have to carry him back to the ship.

  It would be easier if we had another rebreather. Thalia said, handing the one they had back to Dayk.

  Dayk took a few hefty breaths from the mask. We'll have to make do. We don't have a choice. We've got to do everything we can to contain the crash before primitives show up. He handed the mask back to Thalia who put it over her mouth and nose. Dayk reached down and grabbed the gun and stuffed it as deep as he could into one of the pockets of his flight suit, then he grabbed Captain Nocta's arm and started pulling his body up. Thalia took his other arm and they stiffly dragged him back to the Chronis.

  If this was a premeditated attack, what makes you think there is a rescue coming? Thalia asked.

  They can't leave all this technology in the hands of primitive peoples. It would irreversibly change the timeline. Dayk answered. The paradox of our continued existence presupposes that the Temporal Science Center will manage to retrieve the contamination.

  But aren’t we supposed to be investigating a possible paleo-causal event? Thalia asked.

  Yes, but not an entire ship. The math doesn’t add up, Dayk replied. A small fragment of technology would constitute a contamination event, but an entire temporal ship would catastrophically alter the timeline. It’s just too much.

  As they came through the last tree line, they saw the remains of their ship, now piled around what had been the temporal core. Most of the smaller debris had fallen straight onto the ship, slamming into the hull and then collecting on the
ground below. Some of the debris remained strewn across the desert, having been captured by rocks, sturdy clumps of grass, or by hillsides and prevented from moving. The resulting collapse had turned the wreckage into one massive pile that was going to be difficult to sift through.

  They dragged Captain Nocta to the lab section and laid him on the pile of debris near where Dr. Fossor was still impaled on the ship, pinned in worse by the gravitational collapse than he had been before. Dayk looked at Fossor and saw the three blast wounds in his chest. All he could think was why? Aside from the crash, none of this made sense. Why did he kill him so mercilessly?

  Come on Doctor. We've got to find some medical supplies if any of us are going to survive, Thalia thought to Dayk, putting a shaky hand on his shoulder. I feel like I’m going to puke.

  Dayk looked at her and smiled a weak smile. She was right. They had to tend to their own wounds.

  They climbed over debris to get back into the ship, to the upper deck, where the infirmary hung, almost completely opened to the air, some three meters up. The lab section had smashed into the engineering section caving in a rear bulkhead and crushing Dr. Amikes even worse. The discharge had damaged the ship beyond what had happened in the crash. Most of the internal structures remained unchanged, but anything that was loose, or had broken free was now trashed in piles as close to the temporal core as they could possibly fall.

  All the alarms had ceased to scream. The fires had been blown out by the discharge, and the smoke had been pushed away with it. There were a few smoldering remains gently sending smoke dragons into the sky, but most of the crash had been neutralized. The consoles appeared as nothing more than flat pieces of plastic like materials, and dangling fiber conduits looked more like dangling white hairs. The chaos had become a quiet and lifeless hulk in the middle of the desert.