Nightfall

by William Woodall

  Chapter Six

  “Would you like to carry Chris today?” Annabelle asked him abruptly one morning, offering him the baby harness to put around his shoulders.

  “Uh, sure, why not?” he agreed, accepting it. He had trouble getting the straps on at first until she showed him how to work it, but once that was done it was surprisingly comfortable. Chris was used to him by then and made no objection when Annabelle put him in the carrier. He simply put his head down against Mike’s chest and promptly went back to sleep.

  She took them to the promenade around the lake that day; a fairly predictable choice. It was a favorite hangout spot for couples with young children, which Mike supposed probably had something to do with why she was so fond of the place. Mike himself had always liked it well enough, but he found that walking next to Annabelle with a baby on his chest gave him all sorts of thoughts and feelings he wasn’t used to. He felt unexpectedly domestic and family-oriented, all husband-and-fatherly, so to speak. He couldn’t quite decide yet whether he liked the taste of it or not.

  “So tell me, how’d you get involved with the tachometer in the first place?” Annabelle finally asked, breaking his reverie.

  “Well. . . I always knew about it from hanging out with Joey’s family, you know. But then I was working on my Ph.D. in astronomy, and that’s when I got interested in tachyons. What they could do, how to manipulate them, all that good stuff. Pretty technical, actually; the kind of thing only a total geek would even remotely care about,” he said, and she laughed a little.

  “You don’t seem like a geek to me,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I grew up on a farm; that hides it a little. Get to know me for a while and you’ll see,” he said, and she laughed again.

  “Maybe. So did you find out what you wanted to know?” she asked.

  “No. The tachometer was broken to start with, but I thought maybe I could figure out how it worked and maybe even fix it. One of Joey’s relatives was the one who had it; Matthieu Doucet. So I asked him to let me borrow it for a semester so I could study it and tinker with it. I guess I must have done a better job than I thought,” Mike said.

  “I’m sorry it worked out that way,” she said.

  “Oh, I’ll survive. Takes more than that to knock out Mike McGrath,” he said staunchly, and she laughed.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

  They walked ahead quietly for a while after that, enjoying the sunshine and the breeze. It was still early enough that it wasn’t too hot, and several other couples smiled and nodded when they passed.

  “Do you like it here?” Annabelle asked him presently.

  “I guess so. Still kind of homesick, though,” he admitted, and she nodded.

  “Yeah, so was I at first. It gets better after a while,” she said.

  “It’s always the little things you miss the most, I think. Like sometimes I really wish you could see the stars from here, but there’s so much light in the city that it washes them completely out,” he said.

  “You like to look at the stars?” she asked.

  “Yeah. . . I guess you could say that,” he admitted. It had been a long time since he’d done something that simple, actually, but her words reminded him of childhood days when he’d sometimes climb up to the top of Mount Nebo after supper, to pick out the constellations and remember all the stories of each one. Nebo wasn’t really a mountain, of course; just a tall hill on his parents’ place, but it had seemed enormous enough in those days, like Mount Everest itself to his childish eyes. He hadn’t thought of it at all since he went away to college, and the reminder was both sweet and painful at the same time.

  “I used to watch for falling stars sometimes when I was a kid,” she said.

  “You must have lived out in the country, then. You sure couldn’t have seen one in town,” he said.

  “Yeah, in the booming metropolis of Sugar Hill, Texas. Right outside Mount Pleasant,” she said.

  “Yeah, I think I’ve been there a couple times. To Mount Pleasant, anyway,” he agreed.

  “Not since I lived there, I don’t think,” she said wryly.

  “Why? When was that?” he asked.

  “1864,” she said, and his jaw dropped.

  “But I thought you came here with Philip,” he said.

  “I did. But that was already my second jump through time, not my first,” she said.

  “But how? There was no tachometer back then,” Mike asked.

  “Honestly I was asleep for most of it, Mike. Philip and Joan could tell you a lot more than I could. I don’t much like to think about it, myself. All that stuff was long ago and far away, and I’d rather focus on the here and now and try to make a life for myself with the cards I’ve been dealt,” she said.

  Her resolute determination made him feel a little bit ashamed of himself for spending so much time wallowing in self-pity lately, and he decided then and there to do better in the future.

  “I like your attitude,” he said.

  “It’s the only way I can be,” she said, shrugging.

  “So what are you going to school for?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “Math. Turns out I’m what they call a savant; I can do math in my head without a calculator. I got a whole year’s worth of credit by examination that way, believe it or not. So I’ll graduate in only two more years and then my advisor promised me he’d get me a job on the math faculty if I wanted it. Sounds like a good opportunity to me,” she explained.

  “You can really do any math problem in your head?” he asked.

  “Well. . . almost any,” she amended.

  “Can you do this one?” he asked, and proceeded to give her a tough problem in astronomical engineering. She thought for a minute.

  “Eighteen point three two five. Is that right?” she asked.

  “I have no idea, honestly. I just wanted to see if you could do it,” he said, and when she laughed he joined her.

  Thus began a friendship which cheered him up very much and sometimes even managed to make him completely forget that he was a hundred years and a thousand miles away from home and could never go back there. Indeed, as time went by he found himself liking Miss Annabelle Rusk very much, and even began to wonder if perhaps the accident might have had a small silver lining after all.

  Two months after moving to Tampa, he was finally able to sell the Jeep to an antique car collector in Memphis for what seemed like an astronomical sum of money at the time. He was able to buy a secondhand car, and even more importantly, he was able to bribe an official in the Immigration Service to issue him a green card and a work permit, even though he lacked the necessary documents. It galled him to no end to have to pretend to be an illegal alien, but what other choice did he have? The bribe was a costly step, but a very necessary one if he expected to make any kind of future for himself.

  It turned out that money wasn’t worth quite as much in 2136 as he was used to, and what had seemed like a small fortune at first wasn’t really quite as fabulous as he’d originally thought. After buying the car and paying for his immigration paperwork there wasn’t all that much left, which made the need to find a job only that much more urgent.

  “I might be able to say something to my faculty advisor, explain your situation a little bit. He might be able to get you a job at the University,” Annabelle said.

  “You really think so? Considering I can’t even prove I have a degree?” he asked skeptically.

  “I didn’t say it’d be easy. Tell him you’re a war refugee from when they bombed Witwatersrand two years ago; that’s what it says on your immigration papers, after all. South Africa is a radioactive wasteland right now; nobody can prove they have any kind of degree from there,” she said.

  “He’ll never believe I’m from South Africa, Annabelle. He’ll know that’s a lie the second I open my mouth,” Mike said.

  “Well. . . nobody can help it if you sound like a Texas farm boy. Clean
up your accent a little bit and try to do the best you can. Fake it if you have to; I doubt he knows what a Boer is supposed to sound like, anyway. Or tell him your family moved there from Lufkin before you were born; I’m sure you can come up with something,” she said.

  So Mike did his homework, determined to know everything it was possible to know about the University of Witwatersrand and his supposed doctoral studies in astronomy at that now-defunct institution, not to mention a hundred years worth of advancement in science generally. That was a pretty steep learning curve.

  But he threw himself into it with a will, and in the end, things turned out to be almost disappointingly easy. The faculty committee seemed much more interested in how much he knew than in how he learned it, once they heard his cooked-up story and saw his immigration papers. And of course Mike did know his material, after all; there’d never been any question about that.

  It was pure kindness on the part of the Board of Trustees, of course, but he ended up being granted an honorary doctorate from the University of South Florida on the basis of his demonstrated knowledge and his war refugee status. Then he was offered a job as a temporary adjunct instructor of astronomy when the fall term started in August. An honorary degree wouldn’t be accepted at any other college, true, but still yet it was more than Mike had ever dared to hope for.

  “You’re amazing, you know it?” he told Annabelle after he got the news, sweeping her up in a hug. Her plan had worked wonders.

  “Thanks. You’re not so bad yourself, Doctor McGrath,” she said, and hugged him back.

  But in spite of his joy and relief, Mike soon found that teaching was a much more demanding job than he’d anticipated; one that often kept him busy till late hours. He almost always found time to eat supper with Annabelle in the cafeteria, though, and on Sundays after church they usually went to the beach for a few hours with Philip and Joan and Chris.

  He hadn’t forgotten about Joey’s strange disappearance, or the possibility that the NADF might show up one day with a bullet that had his name on it, but those worries gradually faded as time passed and nothing of the sort occurred. Even though Philip warned him more than once not to get careless, Mike reasoned that he was probably the most unthreatening person on earth at the moment. He was just a mild-mannered astronomy professor who minded his own business and never meddled in politics at all. Surely the NADF wouldn’t think he mattered, would they?

  The new job meant he was finally able to move out of Philip and Joan’s house, into a waterfront condo down by the Bay. True, it was a cheap condo, with no beach access, but it did have a marina. He bought a small sailboat to park there, and spent many a day out on the water from then on when he could take time away from his studies, sometimes with Annabelle and sometimes alone. It gradually became the accepted reality that they were unofficially dating, even though nobody explicitly said anything.

  He found out many things about her as time went by; that she was named after the beautiful Annabel Lee in Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem, that she liked seafood, and she had a rather conservative view of the world in many ways. That part didn’t really surprise him much, considering where she came from. The whole way she thought and looked at the world was so foreign to him that she was almost incomprehensible at times, but that only made her all the more intriguing, actually. In some ways she reminded him of an old woman in a young girl’s body. She thought make-up was sinful and she wouldn’t shave her legs or cut her hair, and as for wearing anything but an ankle-length dress, well, you might as well have suggested that she drink rat poison. She got up at the crack of dawn every morning to scrub the kitchen floor, and some of the words and expressions she used were so antique he almost laughed. She considered it vulgar for a girl to visit a man’s house alone, which meant he always had to be the one to go pick her up if they wanted to go out.

  He also quickly discovered that she wouldn’t hesitate to deliver a stinging slap in the face to any man who dared curse in front of her; an unfortunate habit which embroiled Mike in several fights and earned him more than a few black eyes and loose teeth from having to defend her. He soon learned to avoid taking her places where that kind of thing might happen. In vain did he suggest that she might consider overlooking those kinds of things sometimes; there were standards to be upheld, and she dadgummed well meant to uphold them. She was no shrinking violet, that was for sure.

  Mike found himself rather bemused by these things sometimes, especially when she said or did something that caught him completely off guard. But for the most part he was inclined to think her odd little habits and mannerisms were endearing. . . other than when he was nursing a black eye, of course.

  In fact, he liked her so much that after a few months he even began to contemplate the idea of getting married. He was almost certain she’d say yes, if he asked. He had a house, and a car, and a job with good prospects, and they liked so many of the same things and got along together so well, after all. He knew he was letting his thoughts be colored to some extent by the rose-tinted glasses of love, but that was all right. Things really did turn out well sometimes; aside from Philip and Joan, his own parents had just celebrated their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary a few months before the accident, still happily married as always, so he knew it was possible to make things work.

  But even though such pleasant daydreams made him smile occasionally, that didn’t necessarily mean he was in any particular hurry to follow through with them. They were just nice to think about sometimes.

  Thinking about his parents’ anniversary made him realize with a twinge of remorse that that had been the last time he’d been home to see them, even though it was less than a two hour drive. They lived on a thousand-acre ranch named Goliad, raising cows and peaches and various other things from time to time, along with his uncle Brandon and his grandma Josie and occasionally his two younger sisters when they weren’t too busy with other things.

  There’d been a time when his father had wanted Mike to take over Goliad someday, and continue the family ranching tradition. But raising cows and cotton had never been something that appealed to him; his mind and his heart had always been in the stars. So after a while, Cody McGrath had quietly stopped asking, and given his only son the freedom to do as he liked, to go away to college and follow his own dream. He’d never once tried to make Mike feel guilty for that, even though Mike knew all too well how much it cost the man. Goliad Ranch could only be passed down to a male McGrath willing to live on the property and work it; so said the terms of the land patent, and if none were available or willing, then the land reverted back to the State of Texas. Mike had only sisters, so when Cody McGrath died, then that would be that.

  Mike supposed that was exactly what had happened at some point, though he was reluctant to actually check the records and find out. Cody might not have wished to inflict any blame on him, but there were times (like now) when he felt it anyway, as if he’d been disloyal to a sacred trust, or failed in something he’d always known he was meant to do.

  But there was no use dwelling on all that. He had his private regrets, just as all people everywhere had them. But that was nothing to the purpose at the moment, and he could only look ahead and try to do the best he could from then on.

  He shook his head to clear his wooly thoughts, mildly amazed at how fast his mind could go from daydreams about Annabelle to sad memories and then right back to contemplating the future again.

  There were things he regretted as an astronomer, also, and the most jarring among them was what they’d done to the Moon. It was no longer the same silvery ball he’d always remembered, which the poets had written and sung about for ages. No, now it was blue with seas and shrouded with white clouds, just like the blue and green marble that Earth was said to look like from space. Most of the features Mike remembered had been obliterated, and even the site of the first landing was deep under water. The Lunar Terraform Project was a fascinating study in science, but the arr
ogance of the whole thing appalled him. Especially since it had all been for nothing, apparently; the place had been completely abandoned right before the Union War in 2105. For perfectly sound and legitimate reasons, to be sure, but to be left with a permanently disfigured Moon for no good reason disgusted him.

  And then he really did miss the stars, just as he’d told Annabelle. Although unlike the Moon that was really nobody’s fault but his, for choosing to live in a large city. The lights of Tampa and its myriad suburbs simply drowned out even the brightest stars in the sky, leaving it a dull purplish-black. He had access to photographs and high-powered telescopes and all kinds of modern substitutes, of course, but somehow that wasn’t quite the same as looking up at the starry host with his own naked eyes.

  But those were minor things, and for the most part Mike couldn’t complain too much about the life he found himself leading. In fact, he was even tempted at times to be thankful for the accident, and be glad that he’d landed in such a sweet spot.

  Things were about to change.