Time Travel Omnibus, page 1028
The shaman rushed into my room and using sign language pointed at himself, then to his eyes. “I will see . . .”
He touched me on my shoulder with his index finger then turned his hand sideways and stretched his arm out pointing behind me. “You in the time to come.”
He was gone in a blink, and a gray cat ran out the doorway. I didn’t see the shaman after that, and I didn’t have time to think of what he’d been trying to say to me.
Some of the people had left already, going farther north. Others were still gathering possessions when, with a whoop, what could only be described as devils began pouring into the settlement.
My God, I thought. Chindi . . . devil . . . Aztec!
I could hardly believe my eyes. Where had they come from? The Aztec nation was extinct, like as the people of the Sinagua area. What had I stumbled upon?
Had I found myself back in time?
Or was I just dreaming?
The women who tried to fight back had their brains bashed out against the rocks. The children died, too. The men, whether or not they fought back, were overpowered and tied together, wrist to wrist.
I hid!
I was cowering inside my room when I remembered my ancient history studies that said that the Aztecs held in reverence a jaguar god. Quickly, I dug my leopard spotted poncho from my backpack, slipped it on, and pulled the hood over my head.
With flashlight in hand, and summoning what bit of bravery I could muster, I spread my arms out to make myself appear as large and threatening as possible, ran out into the center of the compound, and shouted, “Stop right there!”
I stomped my feet and flapped my arms and sang “Yellow Submarine” as loud as I could—all the time waving my lit flashlight.
It had some effect.
The Aztec warriors stood frozen in their tracks as they stared at me, the jaguar woman.
“Be gone, devils!” I shouted in a language none of them understood. A jaguar goddess speaking words from heaven, and whose flashlight batteries had just burned out!
I was hoping they would turn tail and run, but being from a fierce nation, once the initial fright wore off, they quickly realized I was a jaguar god impostor. The leader of the warriors came closer to me with suspicion, not wanting to make any hasty decisions. He reached out and touched my poncho and jerked back as if it had burned his hand.
Once he found he was still alive after touching the plastic, he reached out again, wrapped his big hand around the back of my neck and pushed me toward the living quarters. He wrenched the flashlight out of my hand and flung it into the scrub. As he jammed my face up against the wall and drew back his war club, my hands shot out and landed in two of the handprints. That was the last thing I remembered until I woke to a group of tourists standing around me.
“Give her some air,” someone said as they held my head and fanned me with their hand.
“Stand back, I think she must have fainted. Must be this heat.”
“She wasn’t here a second ago. Where did she come from?”
“Did you see? She just popped up out of nowhere!” The aches in my body told me I hadn’t been dreaming. Somehow I’d been in the past. Well, I was back in the present now, and with a group of concerned sunburned tourists looking down at me.
A park ranger brought water from a nearby refreshment stand and gently removed my poncho.
“Why is she wearing that hot plastic thing out here in the desert?” I heard someone whisper.
“My backpack! Where is my backpack?” I began feeling around, but to no avail. Everyone began searching, but my backpack was nowhere to be found.
Any gear I had was left in the past when the settlement was overrun by Aztecs.
“Are you sure you had a backpack?” The ranger asked. “Are you sure you are okay? Are you driving? Do you need a ride back to Sedona?”
“Sedona? Yes, I do need a ride.” A tall man helped me to my feet. After a few minutes, I was fine, no dizziness.
Some of the walls of the ruin were still standing after what certainly had been more than a thousand years, but many had crumbled into dust. The people I had come to know had disappeared, leaving no trace of having been here except for the walls . . . some of which might stand forever because they’d been built by the hands of their goddess.
I walked away from the tourists over to the farthest wall and glanced at the handprints imbedded in the hard clay. Sure enough, there was the imprint of my class ring. I looked at my hand to find that my ring had disappeared, too.
The shaman. I’d given it to him.
Through the many years it has been a mystery discussed by archaeologists as to what must have caused that unusual imprint in the walls. In the end, the historians decided that the ring must have belonged to the chief of the tribe. I knew there were no chiefs in that little band of people, and only I knew the imprint was from my ring.
There, among the pictographs, was my picture hewn out in the flat rock and outlined in faded black. Those childlike lines were a drawing of me.
Tears rolled down my dirty face as I remembered what had happened to my little group of friends. Their abrupt disappearance was due to the Aztecs trekking long miles up from Mexico hunting slave labor to help build their magnificent city or to be offered in a blood-bath. My friends who had escaped to the north were lost to time; even I could not say where they had gone or if they had survived.
I had to make my own arrangements to get back home.
Back in Columbus I went straightaway to the travel agency. I wanted to get a few things straight with that strange little man who obviously sent me to the past instead of taking my photograph. As best I could remember, the little old agent looked a lot like the shaman of the Sinagua.
An accidental tourist?
I walked past the door three times before I realized the storefront had changed. There was no sign waving in the breeze. There were no glass beads hanging across the doorway; they had been replaced with a modern glass and chrome door. The floor beyond was clean and devoid of sand.
I pushed through to the office.
There were two desks cluttered with telephones and computers, with a woman seated behind each desk.
“Can I help you take a trip?” one of them asked.
I shook my head. “Where is the little old man? I saw him here . . .” When exactly had I seen him? Days ago? Centuries? “A little man with weathered skin.”
“Little old man?” She smirked and looked at the other agent, who smiled behind her hand.
“Yes,” I insisted. “There was a little old man here who sent me to Sedona, oh, maybe two weeks ago. Wasn’t there a little old man? No!”
I just answered my own question.
There was no little old wrinkled man working there, never had been, never would be. He’d found himself forward in time, and then just as likely had found his way back home . . . or somewhere, somewhen else.
I walked back to my apartment. Upon searching through the pockets of the clothes I’d worn when I was transported to ancient Arizona, I jerked my hand as I came across something raspy. I turned the pocket inside out, and to my amazement onto the floor fell a necklace made of tiny turquoise beads cut into odd little shapes.
SPOILERS
Linda P. Parker
I did it for the mysteries.
—S.J. Cameroon
“I can get you what you need.”
The leader of the Angels of Time, the Reverend John J. Something-or-other, had a shiny slick look that made me want to pick up the handful of change that lay on one of Rick’s crates and stuff it deep into my pocket.
He stood in the middle of Rick’s squat, in what had once been an upscale apartment building with cavernous lofts, but now was just junk space that nobody wanted. He was beautifully dressed in a dark gray suit and a blinding white shirt, and he pretended a jolly friendliness. But he looked around out of the corners of his eyes, and his nostrils flared as if he smelled something rotten.
Not that I could blame him. Rick’s squat wasn’t nice and it wasn’t clean. It had a tattered old sofa and a couple of wooden crates for furniture. And a sleeping bag for a bed and a chair with only three legs for a nightstand. Propping it up was a stack of old books, probably scavenged from the library where Rick had worked. There wasn’t much call for history books anymore, not since Timeshares.
Rick’s space wasn’t even the nicest the building had to offer. That’s why it annoyed me for some jerk to be so obvious with his disdain.
Rick always let others have the best of what was available. He’d done it when he had his dream job, assistant librarian at the university, and he did it now that he had no job and no place of his own. The way he had cared for the books, he now looked after the homeless kids and the crazy old ladies and the men like him, anachronisms in a world without mystery.
But still, there must have been something to the way Rick lived. Even with the library gone, he was once the happiest person I knew. Or he had been, until he won the Time Lotto.
And that’s why we were now standing in Rick’s room with Reverend John, who reached into the inside pocket of his shiny suit and pulled out the tiniest e-phone I’d ever seen. He thumbed it on, punched a couple of buttons, and then handed it to Rick.
Duane, who had been lurking in the shadows of the far corner, shuffled forward to look over Rick’s shoulder. Duane was the one who’d set up the meeting. He had once been an Angel of Time, before he’d decided he liked things, like drugs and sex, that just weren’t all that angelic.
On the screen was a document with a long list of explosives and components. The writing was so tiny I had to squint to see it. Ballistite, guncotton, mercury fulminate, Trinitrotoluene TNT, RDX. The names meant nothing to me.
“Old style C4?” Rick handed the phone back without looking at the list. “Can you get C4 without heavy metals in it?”
The reverend straightened his shoulders as if he was proud of what he was doing. “Yes.”
That bothered me. None of us were proud of our plans. We just couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“It has to be metal free,” Rick insisted.
“Yes,” the reverend repeated. “I can get it. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“We’ll decide what we need to worry about,” I snapped.
Rick put a hand on my arm. “Good stuff? Not something somebody cooked up in their basement last week? And without metals. We won’t make it past the first floor if it triggers the alarms.”
The reverend nodded.
Rick looked from me to Duane.
Reluctantly, I nodded. Not so reluctantly, Duane nodded. To my mind, Duane liked the idea of blowing things up a bit too much.
“Okay,” Rick said to the reverend. “What’s it going to cost?”
“There’s no charge.”
All three of us were immediately on guard. “No charge?” we said in unison.
“My price is simple. When it’s done, the Angels of Time will get credit.”
“Credit!” Duane turned very red. “We’re not going to risk our lives for—”
Rick put his hand out to stop Duane. “That’s fine,” he said, and he held out his hand to the reverend to shake.
Before they could agree, I said, “We’ll need a weapon, too. A gun with no metal parts.”
The man hesitated for just a fraction of a second, and then he gave a brisk nod and shook Rick’s hand. “I can have everything within a week or so.”
“Duane will contact you about where to drop it off,” Rick said.
I walked behind the reverend to the door and watched him. As he walked down the hallway, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He was wiping his hands when he disappeared down the stairwell.
The air seemed a bit easier to breathe with all that shine gone. “He’s gone.”
Duane whirled on Rick. “I’m not risking my—”
“Duane. Take it easy.” Rick smiled, calm and cool as could be, like always. “All I agreed to was that he could claim credit for the Angels. I didn’t say anything about who else might claim credit.”
Duane whooped and slapped Rick on the back.
I couldn’t meet Rick’s gaze. I liked him. And I knew I was going to double-cross him.
A week later we had our explosives, and I had my plastic gun. It felt like a toy in my hand.
My friend Larry came back from his scouting trip and told me who built Stonehenge. Of course, he swore me to secrecy first, because he was expecting to make a big splash on the history reality shows. I couldn’t look at him after that.
A week after that, we had our plan.
Dina, a friend who worked at the local coffee shop, took her Timeshares trip and didn’t come back. Of course, Timeshares wouldn’t have admitted that if anyone had asked.
There was failsafe on top of failsafe. Supposedly, no one could travel back and not return, the same way nobody could go back in time and change anything. The pretrip hypnotic programming prevented tampering. Supposedly it also prevented you from smashing your monitoring devices so they couldn’t activate and bring you home. I guess Dina found a way around that.
Dina had wanted to see the world before it was spoiled. She had wanted to see the earth before it was overpopulated by humans and polluted by corporate greed. Now she was living in a green world without pollution, without crowding, without war or hatred, without Timeshares.
I was envious.
The night, the night, we used a van Duane had “found” in another part of town.
As we drove past Timeshares, past the elegant, U-shaped drive with its fountains splashing water from Lourdes, I tried to look at it as a first time visitor would, but I couldn’t. The expensive, glittering elegance had turned lurid and gaudy for me. The lights were too bright, and the stained glass windows, imported directly from medieval England, were over the top. The Timeshares Travel Agency logo, supposedly painted with pigments from Lascaux, looked faded and tired.
We parked and Jo, Lu, and two others dispersed in different directions to find possible getaway cars and sit tight until they were needed.
Duane, Rick, and I headed toward Timeshares. We were dressed in silvery gray so that at first glance we looked like Timeshares employees.
As we walked, I thought about Rick. He and I were the only two of the group who’d been on a time trip.
There had been such an outcry when the company rolled out the red carpet for its zillionaire clientele, such fury that something like that was only available to the very rich, that a lottery system had been started. Every month, five were chosen out of the millions who’d signed up.
Rick had been one of the first TimeLotto winners. And one of the few people who’d chosen to go forward in time instead of someplace in the past.
It was surprising how most people wanted to go back in time. And it wasn’t just a safety issue, though I was sure that played into it. Timeshares sent people back to scout in the past, but who could ever be sure of the future? Going forward was a crap shoot. What someone scouted yesterday and found safe could be completely changed by the events of today.
Plus, Timeshares wouldn’t let anyone go just a few years forward. They claimed there was a mental health issue involved in traveling to a time in which you were still alive, though that was crap. I knew that after any important business decision had been made, one of the Timeshares execs traveled a few years forward to make sure they’d made the right decision.
Rick said I was the only one he’d told about what he’d seen of the future. What he’d seen was the reason he was walking beside me wearing a backpack with enough C4 in it to blow up a city block. It was the reason I was walking beside him.
As we approached the city block that housed Timeshares, Duane gave us a grinning thumbs-up and angled off toward one of the visitor parking lots.
Rick checked his watch. It was an old-fashioned one with hands that swept around and around, pointing to the minutes and hours.
I turned aside to look at mine, shielding it from him. My watch was a Timeshares Digital that showed time, date, temperature, and could be programmed to show the same information for five different continents. Or five different centuries.
Rick took a deep breath and blew it out. He gave a tiny nod and walked away toward the back of Timeshares.
I watched to make sure he turned the corner before I started off toward the front of the building. We were supposed to reconnoiter, then rendezvous on the opposite side of the block, near the delivery and service entrance. That’s where Rick and Duane thought we were going to break in, after Duane’s diversion had everybody’s attention, after we’d called in a bomb threat for the building.
My plan was simpler.
At the employee entrance, halfway down the block, I stopped and took out the things I’d stuffed into my pockets—my Timeshares Security badge and my ID.
I held my badge up to the reader, then typed in my PIN.
The wrought iron gate, built by a famous gunslinger/ blacksmith during the period called the Old West, slid open.
I went through to a door that let me into a brightly lit hallway lined with walls of one-way glass. I could see the grounds outside, and the glittering lights from the fountain. The air was dry and overprocessed. The guard post was empty.
The door at the other end of the hall opened, and a guard came trudging toward me. Then he recognized me, and he straightened and quickstepped the rest of the distance.
“You need to send some guards along the fence,” I snapped. “I saw a couple of people dressed in black walking toward the delivery gate.”
He thumbed the headset in his ear and relayed my message.
A half dozen guards, all straightening their uniforms, came hustling down the hall. They breezed past me and jogged along the fence.
My guard made an officious pretense of scrutinizing the photo on my ID, then me, then the ID again.
When the explosion came, I started even though I was expecting it. The loud boom rattled the glass walls.
The guard jumped like the C4 had been set off in his pants.
Behind me, some time traveler’s car went up in flames. The night sky lit up like sunrise. The reflection of red flames danced in the windows.
He touched me on my shoulder with his index finger then turned his hand sideways and stretched his arm out pointing behind me. “You in the time to come.”
He was gone in a blink, and a gray cat ran out the doorway. I didn’t see the shaman after that, and I didn’t have time to think of what he’d been trying to say to me.
Some of the people had left already, going farther north. Others were still gathering possessions when, with a whoop, what could only be described as devils began pouring into the settlement.
My God, I thought. Chindi . . . devil . . . Aztec!
I could hardly believe my eyes. Where had they come from? The Aztec nation was extinct, like as the people of the Sinagua area. What had I stumbled upon?
Had I found myself back in time?
Or was I just dreaming?
The women who tried to fight back had their brains bashed out against the rocks. The children died, too. The men, whether or not they fought back, were overpowered and tied together, wrist to wrist.
I hid!
I was cowering inside my room when I remembered my ancient history studies that said that the Aztecs held in reverence a jaguar god. Quickly, I dug my leopard spotted poncho from my backpack, slipped it on, and pulled the hood over my head.
With flashlight in hand, and summoning what bit of bravery I could muster, I spread my arms out to make myself appear as large and threatening as possible, ran out into the center of the compound, and shouted, “Stop right there!”
I stomped my feet and flapped my arms and sang “Yellow Submarine” as loud as I could—all the time waving my lit flashlight.
It had some effect.
The Aztec warriors stood frozen in their tracks as they stared at me, the jaguar woman.
“Be gone, devils!” I shouted in a language none of them understood. A jaguar goddess speaking words from heaven, and whose flashlight batteries had just burned out!
I was hoping they would turn tail and run, but being from a fierce nation, once the initial fright wore off, they quickly realized I was a jaguar god impostor. The leader of the warriors came closer to me with suspicion, not wanting to make any hasty decisions. He reached out and touched my poncho and jerked back as if it had burned his hand.
Once he found he was still alive after touching the plastic, he reached out again, wrapped his big hand around the back of my neck and pushed me toward the living quarters. He wrenched the flashlight out of my hand and flung it into the scrub. As he jammed my face up against the wall and drew back his war club, my hands shot out and landed in two of the handprints. That was the last thing I remembered until I woke to a group of tourists standing around me.
“Give her some air,” someone said as they held my head and fanned me with their hand.
“Stand back, I think she must have fainted. Must be this heat.”
“She wasn’t here a second ago. Where did she come from?”
“Did you see? She just popped up out of nowhere!” The aches in my body told me I hadn’t been dreaming. Somehow I’d been in the past. Well, I was back in the present now, and with a group of concerned sunburned tourists looking down at me.
A park ranger brought water from a nearby refreshment stand and gently removed my poncho.
“Why is she wearing that hot plastic thing out here in the desert?” I heard someone whisper.
“My backpack! Where is my backpack?” I began feeling around, but to no avail. Everyone began searching, but my backpack was nowhere to be found.
Any gear I had was left in the past when the settlement was overrun by Aztecs.
“Are you sure you had a backpack?” The ranger asked. “Are you sure you are okay? Are you driving? Do you need a ride back to Sedona?”
“Sedona? Yes, I do need a ride.” A tall man helped me to my feet. After a few minutes, I was fine, no dizziness.
Some of the walls of the ruin were still standing after what certainly had been more than a thousand years, but many had crumbled into dust. The people I had come to know had disappeared, leaving no trace of having been here except for the walls . . . some of which might stand forever because they’d been built by the hands of their goddess.
I walked away from the tourists over to the farthest wall and glanced at the handprints imbedded in the hard clay. Sure enough, there was the imprint of my class ring. I looked at my hand to find that my ring had disappeared, too.
The shaman. I’d given it to him.
Through the many years it has been a mystery discussed by archaeologists as to what must have caused that unusual imprint in the walls. In the end, the historians decided that the ring must have belonged to the chief of the tribe. I knew there were no chiefs in that little band of people, and only I knew the imprint was from my ring.
There, among the pictographs, was my picture hewn out in the flat rock and outlined in faded black. Those childlike lines were a drawing of me.
Tears rolled down my dirty face as I remembered what had happened to my little group of friends. Their abrupt disappearance was due to the Aztecs trekking long miles up from Mexico hunting slave labor to help build their magnificent city or to be offered in a blood-bath. My friends who had escaped to the north were lost to time; even I could not say where they had gone or if they had survived.
I had to make my own arrangements to get back home.
Back in Columbus I went straightaway to the travel agency. I wanted to get a few things straight with that strange little man who obviously sent me to the past instead of taking my photograph. As best I could remember, the little old agent looked a lot like the shaman of the Sinagua.
An accidental tourist?
I walked past the door three times before I realized the storefront had changed. There was no sign waving in the breeze. There were no glass beads hanging across the doorway; they had been replaced with a modern glass and chrome door. The floor beyond was clean and devoid of sand.
I pushed through to the office.
There were two desks cluttered with telephones and computers, with a woman seated behind each desk.
“Can I help you take a trip?” one of them asked.
I shook my head. “Where is the little old man? I saw him here . . .” When exactly had I seen him? Days ago? Centuries? “A little man with weathered skin.”
“Little old man?” She smirked and looked at the other agent, who smiled behind her hand.
“Yes,” I insisted. “There was a little old man here who sent me to Sedona, oh, maybe two weeks ago. Wasn’t there a little old man? No!”
I just answered my own question.
There was no little old wrinkled man working there, never had been, never would be. He’d found himself forward in time, and then just as likely had found his way back home . . . or somewhere, somewhen else.
I walked back to my apartment. Upon searching through the pockets of the clothes I’d worn when I was transported to ancient Arizona, I jerked my hand as I came across something raspy. I turned the pocket inside out, and to my amazement onto the floor fell a necklace made of tiny turquoise beads cut into odd little shapes.
SPOILERS
Linda P. Parker
I did it for the mysteries.
—S.J. Cameroon
“I can get you what you need.”
The leader of the Angels of Time, the Reverend John J. Something-or-other, had a shiny slick look that made me want to pick up the handful of change that lay on one of Rick’s crates and stuff it deep into my pocket.
He stood in the middle of Rick’s squat, in what had once been an upscale apartment building with cavernous lofts, but now was just junk space that nobody wanted. He was beautifully dressed in a dark gray suit and a blinding white shirt, and he pretended a jolly friendliness. But he looked around out of the corners of his eyes, and his nostrils flared as if he smelled something rotten.
Not that I could blame him. Rick’s squat wasn’t nice and it wasn’t clean. It had a tattered old sofa and a couple of wooden crates for furniture. And a sleeping bag for a bed and a chair with only three legs for a nightstand. Propping it up was a stack of old books, probably scavenged from the library where Rick had worked. There wasn’t much call for history books anymore, not since Timeshares.
Rick’s space wasn’t even the nicest the building had to offer. That’s why it annoyed me for some jerk to be so obvious with his disdain.
Rick always let others have the best of what was available. He’d done it when he had his dream job, assistant librarian at the university, and he did it now that he had no job and no place of his own. The way he had cared for the books, he now looked after the homeless kids and the crazy old ladies and the men like him, anachronisms in a world without mystery.
But still, there must have been something to the way Rick lived. Even with the library gone, he was once the happiest person I knew. Or he had been, until he won the Time Lotto.
And that’s why we were now standing in Rick’s room with Reverend John, who reached into the inside pocket of his shiny suit and pulled out the tiniest e-phone I’d ever seen. He thumbed it on, punched a couple of buttons, and then handed it to Rick.
Duane, who had been lurking in the shadows of the far corner, shuffled forward to look over Rick’s shoulder. Duane was the one who’d set up the meeting. He had once been an Angel of Time, before he’d decided he liked things, like drugs and sex, that just weren’t all that angelic.
On the screen was a document with a long list of explosives and components. The writing was so tiny I had to squint to see it. Ballistite, guncotton, mercury fulminate, Trinitrotoluene TNT, RDX. The names meant nothing to me.
“Old style C4?” Rick handed the phone back without looking at the list. “Can you get C4 without heavy metals in it?”
The reverend straightened his shoulders as if he was proud of what he was doing. “Yes.”
That bothered me. None of us were proud of our plans. We just couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“It has to be metal free,” Rick insisted.
“Yes,” the reverend repeated. “I can get it. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“We’ll decide what we need to worry about,” I snapped.
Rick put a hand on my arm. “Good stuff? Not something somebody cooked up in their basement last week? And without metals. We won’t make it past the first floor if it triggers the alarms.”
The reverend nodded.
Rick looked from me to Duane.
Reluctantly, I nodded. Not so reluctantly, Duane nodded. To my mind, Duane liked the idea of blowing things up a bit too much.
“Okay,” Rick said to the reverend. “What’s it going to cost?”
“There’s no charge.”
All three of us were immediately on guard. “No charge?” we said in unison.
“My price is simple. When it’s done, the Angels of Time will get credit.”
“Credit!” Duane turned very red. “We’re not going to risk our lives for—”
Rick put his hand out to stop Duane. “That’s fine,” he said, and he held out his hand to the reverend to shake.
Before they could agree, I said, “We’ll need a weapon, too. A gun with no metal parts.”
The man hesitated for just a fraction of a second, and then he gave a brisk nod and shook Rick’s hand. “I can have everything within a week or so.”
“Duane will contact you about where to drop it off,” Rick said.
I walked behind the reverend to the door and watched him. As he walked down the hallway, he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket. He was wiping his hands when he disappeared down the stairwell.
The air seemed a bit easier to breathe with all that shine gone. “He’s gone.”
Duane whirled on Rick. “I’m not risking my—”
“Duane. Take it easy.” Rick smiled, calm and cool as could be, like always. “All I agreed to was that he could claim credit for the Angels. I didn’t say anything about who else might claim credit.”
Duane whooped and slapped Rick on the back.
I couldn’t meet Rick’s gaze. I liked him. And I knew I was going to double-cross him.
A week later we had our explosives, and I had my plastic gun. It felt like a toy in my hand.
My friend Larry came back from his scouting trip and told me who built Stonehenge. Of course, he swore me to secrecy first, because he was expecting to make a big splash on the history reality shows. I couldn’t look at him after that.
A week after that, we had our plan.
Dina, a friend who worked at the local coffee shop, took her Timeshares trip and didn’t come back. Of course, Timeshares wouldn’t have admitted that if anyone had asked.
There was failsafe on top of failsafe. Supposedly, no one could travel back and not return, the same way nobody could go back in time and change anything. The pretrip hypnotic programming prevented tampering. Supposedly it also prevented you from smashing your monitoring devices so they couldn’t activate and bring you home. I guess Dina found a way around that.
Dina had wanted to see the world before it was spoiled. She had wanted to see the earth before it was overpopulated by humans and polluted by corporate greed. Now she was living in a green world without pollution, without crowding, without war or hatred, without Timeshares.
I was envious.
The night, the night, we used a van Duane had “found” in another part of town.
As we drove past Timeshares, past the elegant, U-shaped drive with its fountains splashing water from Lourdes, I tried to look at it as a first time visitor would, but I couldn’t. The expensive, glittering elegance had turned lurid and gaudy for me. The lights were too bright, and the stained glass windows, imported directly from medieval England, were over the top. The Timeshares Travel Agency logo, supposedly painted with pigments from Lascaux, looked faded and tired.
We parked and Jo, Lu, and two others dispersed in different directions to find possible getaway cars and sit tight until they were needed.
Duane, Rick, and I headed toward Timeshares. We were dressed in silvery gray so that at first glance we looked like Timeshares employees.
As we walked, I thought about Rick. He and I were the only two of the group who’d been on a time trip.
There had been such an outcry when the company rolled out the red carpet for its zillionaire clientele, such fury that something like that was only available to the very rich, that a lottery system had been started. Every month, five were chosen out of the millions who’d signed up.
Rick had been one of the first TimeLotto winners. And one of the few people who’d chosen to go forward in time instead of someplace in the past.
It was surprising how most people wanted to go back in time. And it wasn’t just a safety issue, though I was sure that played into it. Timeshares sent people back to scout in the past, but who could ever be sure of the future? Going forward was a crap shoot. What someone scouted yesterday and found safe could be completely changed by the events of today.
Plus, Timeshares wouldn’t let anyone go just a few years forward. They claimed there was a mental health issue involved in traveling to a time in which you were still alive, though that was crap. I knew that after any important business decision had been made, one of the Timeshares execs traveled a few years forward to make sure they’d made the right decision.
Rick said I was the only one he’d told about what he’d seen of the future. What he’d seen was the reason he was walking beside me wearing a backpack with enough C4 in it to blow up a city block. It was the reason I was walking beside him.
As we approached the city block that housed Timeshares, Duane gave us a grinning thumbs-up and angled off toward one of the visitor parking lots.
Rick checked his watch. It was an old-fashioned one with hands that swept around and around, pointing to the minutes and hours.
I turned aside to look at mine, shielding it from him. My watch was a Timeshares Digital that showed time, date, temperature, and could be programmed to show the same information for five different continents. Or five different centuries.
Rick took a deep breath and blew it out. He gave a tiny nod and walked away toward the back of Timeshares.
I watched to make sure he turned the corner before I started off toward the front of the building. We were supposed to reconnoiter, then rendezvous on the opposite side of the block, near the delivery and service entrance. That’s where Rick and Duane thought we were going to break in, after Duane’s diversion had everybody’s attention, after we’d called in a bomb threat for the building.
My plan was simpler.
At the employee entrance, halfway down the block, I stopped and took out the things I’d stuffed into my pockets—my Timeshares Security badge and my ID.
I held my badge up to the reader, then typed in my PIN.
The wrought iron gate, built by a famous gunslinger/ blacksmith during the period called the Old West, slid open.
I went through to a door that let me into a brightly lit hallway lined with walls of one-way glass. I could see the grounds outside, and the glittering lights from the fountain. The air was dry and overprocessed. The guard post was empty.
The door at the other end of the hall opened, and a guard came trudging toward me. Then he recognized me, and he straightened and quickstepped the rest of the distance.
“You need to send some guards along the fence,” I snapped. “I saw a couple of people dressed in black walking toward the delivery gate.”
He thumbed the headset in his ear and relayed my message.
A half dozen guards, all straightening their uniforms, came hustling down the hall. They breezed past me and jogged along the fence.
My guard made an officious pretense of scrutinizing the photo on my ID, then me, then the ID again.
When the explosion came, I started even though I was expecting it. The loud boom rattled the glass walls.
The guard jumped like the C4 had been set off in his pants.
Behind me, some time traveler’s car went up in flames. The night sky lit up like sunrise. The reflection of red flames danced in the windows.
