Chapter Four
Eli: North of Joe DiMaggio
June 19, 2019 C.E.
Thirty hours after Colorado — I had pancakes there, even though it was near lunchtime — and more of my dad’s high-speed driving (hydro-cell motors aren’t usually loud, but he could really make ours scream), we arrived at the Valley of the Moon.
Like with most of our arrivals, we got there at night.
The only unusual thing that happened in that last part of the drive was that I finally got a message from Andy. We were driving through Nevada, and I was surfing around on my vidpad when I saw I had some new mail. I’d been expecting a package — a bunch of new Barnstormer character animations that Andy had made himself or gotten on his roamer, or maybe a clip of him talking to the screen. Instead, I was surprised to see that it was just a typed sentence:
How you doing?
It wasn’t even his voice. Just the printed words.
“This whole trip has felt like the end of a game,” I said, watching the words pop up on the vidpad as I composed a reply. “Like the way Barnstormers always have to flee town.” It was on account of a low tolerance for monsters in most of the places they played. I was feeling a little bit on the run myself.
“But overall, not bad,” I added to the message.
Looking at those short sentences made me feel farther from Andy, and from home, than the actual miles did.
And anyway, the big game I was getting sucked into was really just starting. Beginning with our arrival at Moonglow.
But what do you call a game that gets way too serious?
On the way out, since we were going to live near San Francisco, I read up on local baseball history. Turns out Joe DiMaggio came from there and played for an old minor-league team called the Seals, and of course Willie Mays played for the Giants in the old days, sixty or more years ago. Baseball historians say being a Giants fan is almost as hard as being a fan of the Cubs or the Indians. But at least they won the series when I was little.
Maybe that’s a bad omen, deliberately moving fifty miles north of such a run of hard luck. Apparently the person in our family who started Moonglow wrestled a lot with his luck, too.
It was some great-uncle of mine, Solomon, I think — in any case, a brother of my granddad, Silas Sands (and boy, am I glad my dad broke the “S” chain and didn’t give me a name like Sam or Sylvester) — who tried to start the winery, with some money he made way back by investing in a company that made clunky old desktop computers that you couldn’t even fold up.
I never met Solomon or my granddad, but when Dad was a kid, he spent part of a summer working at the winery before it went bust.
That’s where the lucky streak started to wind down; a couple of plant diseases wiped out a lot of the grapes, and when the fruit recovered, my great-uncle found out nobody wanted to buy a wine called Moonglow, at least not one with a creepy picture of a glowing glass of green wine on the label.
That was my great-uncle again: He thought he was an artist, and insisted on designing the label himself.
So the winery sat there, and Solomon had some kids who grew up and eventually planned to use the land for a shopping center or something, but never got around to it. Both of them died, without kids of their own, so Moonglow wound up in my dad’s hands, and sat there until the time that he needed to escape. When that tax bill came, reminding him of the winery’s existence, I heard him laugh. It was the first time he laughed since Mom vanished.
The winery itself was kind of falling apart; the roof had holes, and water was getting inside.
Our first night there, we just took sleeping bags out of the car and found a dry spot on the wood floor in what used to be the tasting room.
On the morning of the third day, Dad drove to Sonoma in search of some basic roofing supplies. His idea was that he and I would fix up Moonglow and wait things out.
Which things?
I don’t think he was sure. Life itself, maybe, so that no more bad stuff could happen to us.
I don’t know why he thought that would work.
By the seventh day, we’d patched up several holes in the roof and polished the floors. We cleaned up a small dinette table and some chairs we’d found in an old employees’ lunch- room and made that our kitchen.
There’d never been many employees — my dad, that summer, was one of the few — but there was a lunchroom.
The building sat next to a hill, and there were caves dug out of the side, which you entered from the winery. They were made of limestone and were used to store the wine at a cool temperature.
By the ninth day, I was really beginning to think that this wasn’t just a phase my dad was going through, and maybe I could stay out of school for the whole rest of my life, since he hadn’t gotten around to even talking about where I might want to go.
On the tenth day, a package arrived.
Now, Dad hadn’t told anybody where we were going — well, nobody but A.J., but I’m not sure if that counted — but it wasn’t necessarily a huge secret. We weren’t trying to hide. I mean, I told Andy. And anyway, between stuffing a vidpad into your pocket and carrying a cell card, it’s not like anyone was hard to locate.
But we weren’t going out of our way to let anyone know where we were headed, either. We just locked up the house and drove straight out of Jersey.
And now here we were. Between our drive out and nailing tarpaper on the roof together, Dad and I were the closest we’d been since the accident. And then the package came.
From Mr. Howe.
There was no announcement, no preparation. An unmarked delivery truck just whizzed up our road, and a man stepped out, tapping a vidpad.
“You Mr. Sandusky?”
“I’m Sandusky Sands.”
“Package. Sign here.”
Dad looked at the pad, then up at him. “Why?”
The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m supposed to deliver it anyway.” And with that, he opened the back and eased an enormous wooden crate onto his hover-dolly, then lowered it onto the ground.
“You want this somewhere?”
Dad shrugged back. He was beginning to slip back into his gray, blank sadness already.
The delivery man glided the crate over to the tasting room, where we’d spent our first night. When it still felt like camping and the start of a new adventure.
After the truck hummed away, I went up to look at the box. Dad hadn’t moved.
I could see the label:
DR. SANDUSKY SANDS
MOONGLOW REMOTE LAB
VALLEY OF THE MOON
SONOMA CO., CALIFORNIA
On the top, instead of a return address, were some familiar initials:
DARPA
Dad didn’t even open the crate. He just walked inside, sat down in a plastic chair in the old lunchroom, and started to cry.
Not for long, but just enough to scare me. Not that I think guys shouldn’t ever cry, or anything. But this was my dad.
Then suddenly he got up.
He walked to our truck and took out a crowbar and began popping slats off the box. Sure enough, there was a sphere generator inside. They wanted Dad to keep making the time spheres. And because he knew how to make them, no matter where he went, there wouldn’t be any escape from Mr. Howe.
Now, instead of crying, Dad was smiling. Grownups’ emotions are always so unpredictable.
“They’ll never be able to make me use it,” Dad said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“No WOMPERs,” he replied.
“What are ‘WOMPERs’?” They sounded like some creatures from a Barnstormer game. Like a Frankenstein monster who could swing a mean bat.
“I’ll tell you while we make dinner.”
“Making dinner” was opening a couple cans of spaghetti and uncorking some wine. Well, Dad had the wine, and I had some chocolate rice milk. Sandusky had found a few cases of unopened Moonglow wine a couple days back and, for the first time, decided to crack open a bott
le.
He was feeling pretty good again, all things considered, and told me about WOMPERs between bites of noodles and tomato sauce.
“WOMPERs stands for ‘Wide Orbital Massless ParticlE Reversers,’” Dad said, writing it out on the side of a wine label so I could see where the capital letters fell to make up its nickname. “They’ve only been recently discovered, in the farthest parts of space. The oldest parts. We theorized about them, but couldn’t prove they really existed. We thought they were only around for a little while after the big bang, then disappeared.”
“Why?”
“It takes too much concentrated energy to make a WOMPER. And the universe has been spreading itself pretty thin lately.”
“What’s a WOMPER do?”
My dad must’ve been excited by me asking all these questions. I usually left the science to him and Mom.
“If it passes through an electron or a proton, it reverses the charge. It can do this so rapidly that around any concentration — any buildup — of matter, it acts almost like an agitator in a washing machine.” He was holding up his hand and waving it back and forth. “It does even stranger things to a positron.”
“You mean the positrons you use for the time spheres?”
Those were the backward-traveling particles Dad used as the “fuel” for his, well, his time machines. Though he hates it when they’re called that.
“Right. Since a positron is already a reversed particle — a backward electron — when it’s hit by a WOMPER, the positron’s properties are speeded up, made more intense. It blasts backward through time faster, with more energy.”
“They make your time spheres stronger?”
“Exactly.”
“So if you had some WOMPERs…”
“That’s what Mr. Howe thought. Get some WOMPERs and rev these time spheres up. Make them work at warp speed.”
“Would it?”
“We don’t have to worry. WOMPERs don’t occur naturally on Earth, or anywhere near it. Mr. Howe was able to get some once, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing any more of them in our lifetime.”
He grew quiet again, then had some more spaghetti and some more red wine. Afterward, we bundled up in our sleeping bags and got the last good night’s sleep we were going to have in a very long time.
If not forever.
Ancient Fire (Danger Boy Series #1) Page 5