CHAPTER TWO
Jack picked up the phone and tapped out the number from memory.
“This is Arthur Beach.”
“Yeah, Arthur, this is Jack Naile—the one in the present,” Jack added lamely.
“Did you get my envelope yet?”
“That’s the reason I called. Yeah. We got it. And thanks for being so helpful. Listen. Do you have any way of finding any more photographs of the Naile family? And getting them copied? Within reason, I’ll pay whatever it costs. I could use a better copy of the photo you sent us, too.”
“Before I forget, I uncovered some more information on the Naile family, Jack. And, even though Jack Naile was a businessman, he seems to have gotten himself a reputation for being handy with a gun. It kind of reads like some kind of a western movie,” Beach added, laughing. “But, yeah, I think I can get some copies made of the photos. See any family resemblances?”
“Yeah—a little bit, at least.” Jack lit a cigarette, his gaze fixing on the photograph of Richard Boone, long-barreled single action drawn and pointing at him.
Ellen sat beside Jack at the table. Unlike some of the higher-profile writers attending the science fiction/fantasy convention, she and her husband had no scheduled mass autographing, but their readers caught them at the beginnings or endings of panel discussions or merely stopped them in the lobby.
Ellen saw Elizabeth signaling from the back of the room that she’d wait for them outside, and Ellen shot her a wave. David hadn’t come, having to work instead. But in a way, he was with them in spirit; they’d borrowed his Bondo-mobile Saab because the hotel’s underground garage was too low for the Suburban.
Jack passed a copy of their latest novel over to her. He was still talking with the reader who’d brought it. Ellen signed and dated the frontispiece under Jack’s signature. She closed the book, handed it back to Jack, and they exchanged a few more words with the man and his wife. Jack returned the book. The man and his wife smiled and walked away.
“You all set, Ellen?” Jack asked, starting to get up.
Jack pulled her chair for her. As Ellen got up, a good-looking young man in his late twenties or early thirties, a little boy of about four in tow, approached the table. An interesting thing about cons was that one got to recognize a lot of the faces of the attendees. And Ellen Naile recognized this man—yet she had no idea from where or what.
Somehow, the beard that the man wore didn’t look usual for him, nor did the glasses.
“I was wondering if you guys would mind autographing your book for my son here. I’m a big fan, and I’m sure he’ll love your stuff, too—soon as he’s old enough to read, anyway.”
Jack laughed. Ellen smiled as Jack accepted the book and started writing in it. Even the voice sounded familiar, somehow. Ellen signed the book as well. Jack was joking with the little boy. He was very cute, with curly red hair and an almost pugnacious smile.
The young man offered his hand, and he and Jack shook. He offered his hand to Ellen, and she took it. “Your little boy reminds me of our son, David, when he was that age.” And Ellen extended her hand to the little boy. Like a little man, he shook hands. Ellen laughed.
“Do I get a handshake, too, pal?” Jack inquired. The little boy seemed a bit reluctant, but shook hands.
“It was really great meeting you guys. My little boy will cherish this book and so will I. God bless.” The young man swept his son up into his arms, smiled and walked away.
“What was his name, Jack?”
“He wanted the book autographed to his son. James was the name.”
“Didn’t that little boy remind you of David?”
“His father reminded me of David. Come on, I’ll buy you and Elizabeth a drink.”
They linked up with Elizabeth in the corridor, Elizabeth immediately told them, “That little boy and his father? Wasn’t that little boy cute?”
Ellen smiled.
Almost ten days after Jack’s conversation with Arthur Beach, Ellen Naile found herself being reminded of the Norsemen, their belief that at the moment of birth the skein of one’s life was woven by their equivalent of the Fates. The warp and woof seemed to be quite apparent.
Elizabeth, not seriously dating yet, was to go out with three of her friends, but one of them—the one old enough to drive—had to work instead.
David was to have been out with a few of his buddies from school, guys with whom he’d been on the wrestling team and the tennis team, most of them friends since kindergarten. But their plans fell apart; Ellen didn’t know why.
Clarence had called and accepted their standing offer to come up from Atlanta and spend the night.
At the post-office box that morning, there had been another package from Arthur Beach, this one quite a bit thicker.
Ellen and Jack had opened it together in the car. Considering the age of the originals from which the copies had been made, the photos were remarkably clear. The likenesses of the Naile family of nearly a century ago to the Naile family of the present were not just uncanny, but unmistakably identical.
She could have lied to herself that the queasy feeling she had was because her period had just started, but she didn’t; the reason was in an envelope on her lap.
The day had passed quickly—too much so—and, almost before she knew it, the entire family, such togetherness an increasing rarity, was seated around the kitchen table.
Perhaps to keep her mind off the photographs and their scary implications, Ellen Naile had done something that she rarely did—she made dessert. Lars Benson had called during the day, telling them that he had the advance check for Angel Street and that he’d have the disbursement check in their hands by the following day, Friday. Because of that, Ellen went to the grocery store and bought T-bone steaks, one of Jack’s favorites.
The check was to arrive by Federal Express, meaning that it would be there in time for deposit. Because of that, Ellen was not surprised when she caught a weather report predicting severe thunderstorms throughout the Southeast. The storms would obviously be so severe that flights incoming to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport would be delayed just enough that their check would not arrive until after two p.m., meaning that the deposit wouldn’t be credited until the following Monday.
But she bought the steaks anyway.
The steaks consumed, she suggested, “Why don’t we wait a few minutes before dessert, guys?”
Elizabeth stood up from the table, came over and felt her mother’s forehead and cheeks. “Doesn’t have a fever or anything.”
“Mom must be sick, though,” David cracked.
“So, fine, I made a dessert. It’s got broccoli in it—don’t worry.”
“Did you check the ingredients?” Clarence asked.
Her nephew obviously knew that she’d checked the ingredients. Although the rest of them kidded Clarence about it, his allergy to peanut oil was no joke. “Yes. It’s cherry cream-cheese pie. I made the crust from graham crackers, and I checked the box for ingredients. Liz double-checked it.”
“Well, you know I’ve gotta be careful.”
Jack cleared his throat, got up, said, “Be back in a second,” and walked into the hallway.
“What’s up with Daddy?”
“Yeah. Dad seems awfully quiet,” David declared, agreeing with his sister.
“It’s not some more of that stuff about that other Naile family,” Clarence began. “When I was up here the last time, I went home and didn’t get to sleep for a couple of hours, and I had some really yucko dreams.”
“Well, saddle up for some more of them, Clarence,” Jack said. He stood in the kitchen doorway, both of Arthur Beach’s envelopes in his left hand, a cigarette in his right. “Exhibit A.” Jack placed the earlier package at the center of the table.
David picked it up and opened it. “Like I told you before, Dad, this is some kind of a sick joke.” But David didn’t take his eyes from the Xerox of the Naile family of the past.
Jack leaned against the kitchen counter, next to his ashtray. He passed the second envelope over to David, then returned to his ashtray. “Check out what’s inside, son. Pass things around.”
“No. I was just going to stare at the envelope, Dad.”
“There’s no reason to get pissed off,” Jack told him. “Well, maybe there is, but wait until you’ve looked at all the new stuff, and then get pissed off. No sense doing it twice.”
Elizabeth and Clarence were studying the Xerox from the first envelope. “Dammit!” Clarence exclaimed. “This is some kind of nutball jerking you guys around.”
Ellen kept her voice calm. “When Jack and I did that book where we had this guy framed by his boss to look like a Russian spy? I did a lot of research about altering photographs. If these photographs were faked, they were done on equipment beyond state-of-the-art. And look at Jack’s holster.” Jack had obviously planned to mention the holster as well, because he disappeared into the hallway for a moment and returned with the black Hollywood rig, his pet Colt Single Action Army in the holster. “It’s empty, right?” Ellen asked perfunctorily. Jack carried a gun almost every day of his life and he never passed around a gun that was loaded.
“Yeah, but show everybody.”
Humoring her husband, Ellen removed the gun from the holster and opened the loading gate “C-o-l-t, right?” Ellen asked.
“Stop after you hear the O,” Jack said.
Ellen drew the hammer back to the second click, spun the cylinder—empty as promised—drew the hammer back the rest of the way and lowered it, closed the loading gate and returned the gun to the holster, placing the loop over the hammer. “Look at the holster in the Xerox, Clarence, and look at the holster on the table.”
“Want me to get my hat?” Jack asked.
“We get the idea, Daddy.” Elizabeth was taking the photos from the second envelope as quickly as David passed them to her.
Ellen studied her son’s face for a moment, not liking the expression that she saw. David had inherited bull-headedness from her side of the family, and David was not going to choose to believe this, no matter what he saw.
“This is a load of crap,” David announced as if on cue. “You’ve had that holster in a bunch of your gun articles, the single action, too. Somebody could have lifted the image, maybe.”
“I don’t think so, Davey,” Ellen announced.
“You didn’t really make a dessert,” David said, getting up so suddenly that his chair almost fell over. “This is just to keep us from wanting one.” He stormed out of the room. If she hadn’t known better—and maybe she didn’t know better at all—she might have thought that David was fighting to hold back tears.
“I’ll go after him,” Jack said, starting for the hallway.
“No! I’ll go after him, because maybe all David wants right now is to be left alone, not reasoned with.” Ellen pushed past her husband and ran down the hallway toward the front door. She half expected to hear the Saab starting up, or screeching out of the driveway, but as she reached the front porch, she saw the glow of a cigarette from the darkness.
Always more than a little night-blind, with great care she ventured out onto the darkened front porch. There were flashes of lightning in the clouds off to her left, and from behind the house. The storms were supposed to come in from the west and start to swing north. As yet, there was no thunder.
“It’s still far away,” David said, his voice sounding a little strained.
“You got another one of those cigarettes?”
“You quit years ago, remember?”
“Every once in a while, I take a drag on one of your father’s cigarettes.”
“It’s a Marlboro, not a Camel.”
Ellen Naile heard the first distant rumble of thunder. “Give it to me, and I’ll break the filter off.”
David shook loose a cigarette and Ellen took it, broke off the filter and asked, “Light?”
David lit her cigarette with a Bic, and then lit another one for himself. “You’re not in one of the photos.”
Ellen felt herself wanting to cry, wanted to say “Give me a hug,” but instead told him, “Probably because I was taking it, if this whole thing is real.”
“It can’t be real, Mom.”
Ellen exhaled through her nostrils. The nice thing about having given up smoking was that when she occasionally did take a puff—maybe six times a year or so—she could really enjoy it. “You ready to go back inside, Davey?”
“In a couple of minutes.”
“Smoking’s bad for you, you with your bodybuilding and everything. Don’t want to cut down on your lung capacity. You’ll be one of the top players on the tennis team next year.”
“If there is a next year. Why don’t you say that?”
“Because I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do. You know your father likes Sherlock Holmes, and there’s something Holmes says about when you’ve eliminated everything that’s probable, no matter how improbable what’s left might seem, it’s the answer. We haven’t eliminated everything yet. So who knows?” Ellen took one more drag on the cigarette and tossed it off the porch, onto the sidewalk.
The promised storm hadn’t come just yet, either literally or figuratively.
Clarence was saying, “In that one picture of the three of you guys, where’s Ellen?”
As Jack started to answer, he saw his wife in the doorway. “David’ll be in here in a couple of minutes.”
“Did you hear what I was saying?” Clarence asked her.
“Momma was probably taking the photo, like she usually does,” Elizabeth volunteered.
“Either that or I’m dead by then,” Ellen said cheerlessly.
“Oh, gee, thanks!” Jack snapped. “Don’t you ever, ever say anything like that again, Ellen!” His wife’s eyes hardened, and she’d be angry with him, but Jack Naile didn’t care. “There’s a logical explanation. Elizabeth is probably right.”
Clarence—who looked more agitated than Jack had ever seen him—said, “Logical my ass! None of this is logical at all! This is a load of bullshit! Maybe it’s that guy from Arizona who was sending you all the hate mail.”
“Nope,” Jack said. “Not him.”
Ellen added, “The typewriter used to write the note that came with the page from the magazine was a different machine. Every time I open something strange that comes in the mail, I always check. Not him, Clarence.”
“Well, all I know is that some son of a bitch is messin’ with your minds! That’s what it is! If I find out who it is, David and I’ll go beat the living shit out of him! We’ll make that bastard wish he’d never been born.”
“What are you volunteering me for?”
Jack looked toward the kitchen doorway. David stood there beside his mother. Jack’s and Ellen’s eyes met for an instant, and she didn’t smile at him.
Jack’s attention was drawn back to Clarence, who was starting another wave of vituperations. “Nobody messes with my family! No damn way! Whatever the hell nutball is doing this is—”
“What if nobody’s doing anything, Clarence?” Elizabeth began. “Y’all. Listen. I mean, this is impossible, right? But the pictures look real. The photo from the magazine looked real. Dad’s talking to the guy at their historical society—chamber of commerce, whatever—and he’s real. All I know about time travel is when we used to watch Dr. Who on Channel Eight on Saturday nights, but it looks like us in those pictures. So these are either terrific fake pictures or, or—”
Elizabeth didn’t say anything else, but started to cry.
Jack came over and dropped to one knee beside her chair. Ellen was beside them in the next instant, stroking Liz’s head and whispering, “It’ll be okay. Just calm down. Take a deep breath.”
“It’s not going to happen. Time travel isn’t real. Period,” David said, his voice emotionless, flat, almost leaden.
Clarence walked out of the room, sounding like he was starting to cry as well.
“Well, it looks like dinner has been a really big hit, Jack. Shit,” Ellen said, going over to the wall and slowly, rhythmically hitting it with her fists.
Jack Naile’s hands shook with rage or fear or exhaustion—maybe all three. He shook his head, lit a cigarette.
“That’s your answer to everything? I don’t think so, Jack! You’re just giving yourself lung cancer or something. Fine, we all go get time-transferred or zapped or whatever, and you die! What happens to the rest of us?!”
Ellen stormed out of the room, sounding as if she was starting to cry; and, after a second, Jack heard her running up the stairs, heading for the bedroom to cry or the bathroom to throw up.
Elizabeth cried even harder.
David just stared.
“Fucking wonderful,” Jack said under his breath. He turned on the kitchen faucet and put his cigarette under the spigot.
The thunderstorms were upon them. Ellen holding his hand, Jack Naile stared at the lightning. “I’ll try and cut down.”
“That’s the only good thing if this time-travel thing really happens. You would have had to roll your own in those days, right?”
“I guess.”
“And you’re too clumsy.”
“Right.”
“You going to fly out to Nevada?”
“Before Clarence went to bed, he told me he’d fly out there with me, at his own expense even. This is really shaking him up.”
“I think David’s going to start to plan for this, as a defense mechanism so he can keep himself from thinking about what happens if it really happens,” Ellen almost whispered.
It was nearly midnight, the rain lashing at the front porch from the northwest. Jack started walking toward the part of the porch that was getting soaked, Ellen beside him.
“You didn’t help things with that bit about maybe you were dead and that’s why you weren’t—”
“David had been thinking that, and I figured that everybody else was. Sometimes the best way to deal with something is to get it said, get it out in the open.” Ellen took her hand from his and wrapped both her arms around his left arm instead. “I bet I know what’s at the back of your mind, aside from being able to play cowboy.”
They could read each other, sometimes, it seemed. Jack Naile laughed a little. “My Dad?”
“Um-hmm. If that one photo was taken in 1903 and we didn’t look too much older than we do now—you looked like you had a little more gray—but, you could go back to Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1908 and somehow see your father.”
Jack Naile’s father had died at age sixty-three, before either of his grandchildren had been born. “Yeah. I’d like to do that, but it’d be neat to meet him when he was old enough to talk to and talk back. Maybe that time when he flipped the fence and broke his elbow when he was maybe twelve or whatever.”
“If we went back tomorrow to 1903, and—help me with the math here,” Ellen said. “How old are you? I can never remember how old I am.”
“This month you’ll be forty-four, and five days later I’ll be forty-six.”
“So, if you were forty-six in 1903, you’d be fifty-one when your Dad was born. When he was twelve, you’d only be—” And Ellen stopped talking.
“The same age he was when he died from his first and last heart attack.” Jack Naile’s initial impulse was to light a cigarette, but he decided against it.
Jack had refigured the dates as they related to his father, remembering that Arthur Beach had found out the Naile family had first arrived in Nevada in 1896. If Jack Naile waited for his father to reach age twelve, he’d be seventy years old when he met his dad. If Jack Naile died at sixty-three, as his father had, he would be dead when his father was only five years old.
As Ellen Naile had predicted, FedEx shipments to their part of Northeast Georgia were running late because of the particularly violent thunderstorms the previous evening. Arrivals at Hartsfield were delayed.
Their check—a very nice big one with lots of lovely zeros on the left side of the decimal point—arrived at precisely five minutes after two, meaning that to deposit it before Monday morning would be an exercise in futility.
Ellen sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, the supermarket kind; she rarely bought any of the fancier variations because sometimes, when checks were late, the saving of a few pennies here and there made a difference.
The photo taken in 1903 was still on the kitchen table. She looked at it, realizing the irony represented by the photo and the house in which she sat while viewing it. Their house was built in 1903, perhaps under construction at the very time the photo—which hadn’t yet been taken, but had been taken—was being taken.
Jack was right (something which Ellen certainly would not admit to him); just thinking about the anomalies of time travel was enough to give anyone a headache.
“Headache,” Ellen murmured aloud, just as Jack entered the kitchen.
“You have a headache, kid?”
“No, but I was just thinking. Let’s say we do wind up moving to Nevada, but almost a hundred years ago. We’d be reduced to boiling down bark from a willow tree in order to get aspirin to knock out a headache.”
“On the plus side, think of all the money we’d make if we preinvented liquid Tylenol!”
“I’m serious, Jack.”
Jack sat down, lit a cigarette; he had cut down quite a bit from his usual daily consumption. “We really do have to start to plan,” Jack said.
“So, we’re going to figure out some way to get a washer and dryer back to the past with us?”
“I don’t think we can manage that,” Jack told her, smiling, running a hand back through his hair. It was mostly still brown, and no less full than when they’d been in high school. “But it appears as though we arrived in Nevada with some items we had today. Even with knowledge of the future, we would have needed money.”
“That would go along with the gun-on-the-hip thing?” Ellen suggested.
“No, silly. It meant that they brought it with them—the money. And the wagon story could have been a ruse.”
“A ruse?”
“A ruse,” Jack repeated, so that the word sounded as if it had been said by Peter Sellers in the persona of his dim bulb French police inspector. Jack persisted with the accent—not doing such a bad job, really—as he continued. “It would be, I think, trés easy to ‘ave the—‘ow you say thees word?—wag-on?, thees wag-on ‘idden away, no?”
“Shut up and be serious, Jack.”
“Je suis ‘Jaques,’ mon cher—” Ellen hit Jack on the top of the head with her open palm—not hard—and he shook his head and wiggled his lips like some sort of cartoon character struck by a falling anvil. “Thanks. I’m better now.”
“You’re not thinking that somehow we’d be able to take the Suburban back in time with us?”
“I can’t say for sure, but if we all get sucked back in time together and we all stay with the Suburban, there’s a chance, right? We take out the rear seat and leave it. I take the Suburban over to the Chevy dealer and get them to put a roof rack on it and add an auxiliary gas tank. We get four additional tires—”
“Those ones from Sam’s Club have held up real well.”
“Right. Get four new wheels—we wouldn’t be able to remount tires. If you did the research and got Lizzie to help you, we could get everything we needed to know on microfiche. Hell, we could probably get Encyclopedia Britannica that way. Medical and dental info, and the stuff we’d need for basic field surgery, dental care, like that. Learn how to fabricate nutritional supplements. You’ve always had a green thumb.”
“There are lots of books we could get, and probably on microfiche—”
“Or get them put on microfiche, which could be kind of expensive, but worth it.”
“And what are you going to be doing?” Ellen asked her husband. “Learning how to brand steers and—”
“No, I’m serious. I’ll find out what we’d need so that we could keep some semblance of twentieth-century civilization going, even though we were a century in the past. Evidently, the Naile family lived there for quite some time, which means they built or bought a house, probably had one built. We could have one room that we could electrify if we brought the wire and the switches and the circuit-breaker box.”
“How will we get electricity?” Ellen said.
“We build near a stream or river, set up a sophisticated waterwheel, or windmills—solar would be too cumbersome. We couldn’t pack enough stuff to make it work. So, Lizzie could still listen to CDs, we could still have an electric clock—”
“A microwave—no, we wouldn’t need it. But a hair dryer.”
“A toaster!” Jack supplied.
“When was the last time we used a toaster? And electric can openers never work. But a small, conventional electric oven and a flat four-burner electric stove.”
“There you go!” Jack enthused. “Stuff that would make life more livable. We could have electric lights. If we did the research, we could figure out a way to step down the voltage so that we could use the bulbs that Edison had already invented by then, and we could have a couple of fluorescent fixtures and replacement tubes and starters and everything so that we could have really serious light occasionally. Hell, with the right research and the money to get the work done, we could have somebody build us new fluorescent tubes in a couple of years. We could build another house and have the whole interior just like a modern place and nobody’d be the wiser. And running water? Hey, the Romans had running water. All we need is some PVC and gravity and—”
“I get the idea, Jack. That’s all going to fit into the Suburban?”
“Yeah. I don’t see why not. If we pack carefully. It’s not like we’re going to need a lot of clothes, because modern clothes would be a dead giveaway.”
Ellen leaned back in her chair. “Nothing I’m going to like better than wearing twenty pounds of ankle length clothing everyday. Want a cup of coffee?”
“Sure.”
Ellen stood up and went to the stove, pausing as she turned on one of the electric range’s burners. “You really think we could do that? Keep a modern life, kind of?”
“What? The electricity and plumbing and stuff? Yeah, if the Suburban comes back with us. And the microfiche—we’d need two readers and a really ample supply of batteries, and we never let the case with that stuff out of our sight. We sleep with it, so even if we didn’t get the Suburban back, we’d be able to reconstruct most of the stuff we’d need from things available a hundred years ago. It’s just all in knowing how.”
“What about your gun collection? The guns and the ammo will take up a lot of room.”
“I’ve already been thinking about that,” he told her.
Ellen had assumed as much. “I bring everything I’ve got in .45 Colt. There’s going to be plenty of .45 Long Colt ammo available a century ago. I’d need a serious rifle. Maybe an 1895 Marlin in .45-70 and get a Vernier tang sight installed. A couple of knives made with modern steel. Everything else we can get when we get there. We sell the rest as quickly as we can and the money from the guns and stuff goes toward the electrical and plumbing stuff and the microfiche and shit like that. What do you think?” Jack picked up a cigarette, but set it down, unlit . . .
The cheapest way to get to the small town in Nevada devolved to flying via Las Vegas and over to Reno. Clarence, despite more than six years in the Air Force, hated flying and made no secret of it. Jack rented a car in Reno; Clarence talked all the way as they drove. “Ellen was really worried.”
“Not after I reminded her that all four of us were in that one photograph and the Nailes arrived as a family of four. So, some of us aren’t going to get time-zapped and the others left behind. We’ll be fine. Relax, Clarence.” Jack Naile’s main problem was that he was too relaxed, about to fall asleep, the terrain different from Georgia’s insistent greenery, but just as repetitive. He’d had the window open earlier, but Clarence didn’t like open windows in cars, so Jack had closed it. But Jack started cranking the window down again. “I’ve gotta open a window, Clarence, or I’m gonna fall asleep.”
“Why don’t you turn on the air-conditioning? Or let me drive.”
“It’s cold with the air-conditioning. Fresh air is good for you, Clarence, keeps the lungs in shape. We’ve been breathing canned air on two airplanes. Time for some fresh.” Clarence might bitch about it some more, but Jack Naile really didn’t care and kept the window down about two inches.
“That photo with only you and the kids scares the crap out of me, Jack.”
Jack Naile lit a cigarette. “I go with the theory that Ellen took the photograph. The composition is good. It looks like her work, with a modern camera. So that’s why Ellen wasn’t in the photograph.”
“This is a pile of bullshit, right, Jack? I mean, there’s gotta be some damned logical explanation for it.”
“You think of one, let me know, Clarence.” The two lane road was well maintained, but seemed to go on forever, the terrain surrounding them a cross between high desert and low rolling hills, as inviting as lunar landscape.
“You really see yourself and Ellen and the kids living here? David would never make it!” Clarence declared.
“Why would David never make it? He’s ridiculously physically fit, smart—”
“Think about it, Jack! For God’s sake, David has to have the newest and the best of everything,” Clarence continued, chuckling. “And he doesn’t even like going to a rodeo! You really think he’s going to ride a horse? No way.”
“Well, I tell you, Clarence. He’ll either ride a horse, drive a wagon or walk until automobiles get out this way. You remind me of Cleopatra.”
“What? Are you nuts?”
“That’s beside the point, son. You remind me of Cleopatra after her barge sunk in the river—you’re in de Nile.”
“Yeah, you just go ahead and laugh! But you’re buying into a load of shit,” Clarence growled. Jack had long ago decided he’d fight the man who criticized Clarence for having a short temper, but that wouldn’t mean that Jack wouldn’t agree with the guy. “This is just fuckin’ trick photography and some elaborate scheme of some fuckin’ nutball, and you’re buying into it. Time travel doesn’t happen, Jack. We both know that.”
“Looks like it’s about to,” Jack informed his nephew. “See, I don’t particularly care to wind up in the Old West of a hundred years ago, either. Think about it, Clarence. If this movie actually gets made, it’ll open the door for a lot of our other stuff to get made into movies, maybe. And just maybe we’ll make enough money we can relax a little, do some good things for the kids, for you. Remember how Ellen and I’ve always said that the day we got a really big check in would be the day we had a nuclear war or a meteor struck the planet or something? Much as I wish it weren’t, this time-travel thing looks like it’s not only a meteor, but a fucking nuclear meteor, and aimed right at us. And there’s not a damned thing I can do about it except try to make the best of it. We’re going to miss you, Clarence, and you’re going to miss us, but I can’t change it,” Jack concluded.
“Bullshit, Jack! Fuckin’ bullshit!”
“You want me to turn around, and you can fly back to Atlanta?”
“Fuck you—no, dammit!”
“Then relax, okay? You’ll live longer. We don’t want to leave you in the present while we go into the past, but, if this happens, it doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of choice.” There was a green-and-white information sign coming up on the right. “See what that sign says, Clarence.”
Jack already knew what it said—“Moment of truth upon you in four miles.” His hands sweated on the steering wheel, and the pit of his stomach felt like somebody had just turned on a blender.
Practically the first words out of Arthur Beach’s mouth had been, “My God, you look just like the Jack Naile in those old photographs!” Because of this, Jack realized, Clarence had taken an instant dislike to Arthur Beach.
Atlas, Nevada, looked nothing like it had in the photograph that started the whole thing, Jack Naile mused. It looked modern, normal. There was a strong breeze blowing in from the desert, gradually intensifying; the occasional dust devil was the only thing that made the blacktopped street look like something out of a Western town.
“That’s where Jack Naile’s store once stood, Mr. Naile,” Arthur Beach announced, pointing a well-manicured finger across that street.
“Remember, Arthur? Call me Jack. Mr. Naile’s what they call my son.”
“Right.”
“That law office?” Clarence asked.
“Only the foundation is original, Mr. Jones. The building-commission people and the historical-society people were almost one and the same, husbands on the building commission and wives on the historical society. So when downtown was redeveloped, the wives got the husbands to save as much as they could, which is why this street looks like it’s part of another town or something by comparison to the rest of downtown.”
The “rest of downtown” wasn’t all that much, really. The old main street, where they stood, ran a distance of a long city block. The old foundations and some old facades, many of the buildings vacant, lined both sides of the street. At three of the four corners were short blocks which, Arthur Beach had told them, were part of the downtown-development project. The fourth corner was nothing more than where the highway did a right angle and went on past Atlas, across higher desert and toward the nearby mountains. A convenience store, an ordinary gas station that offered mechanical work and a diner that advertised it had slot machines and also sold ammunition were the only businesses there.
The old main street—which was called Old Main Street—was admirably wide. At eleven in the morning on Sunday, there was no traffic at all. Jack Naile stepped off the curb and started across the street.
The sun wasn’t quite overhead yet and its angle allowed Jack to see his own reflection in the plate glass window of the law office. The wind coming in off the desert blew his longish, still mostly brown hair across his forehead. He noted that the corners of his mouth were downturned under his salt-and-pepper mustache. Was he as wary as he looked, he wondered absently, or was this just a face he turned toward Clarence—who had been pissing him off—and Arthur Beach, who was so cooperative that it made him wonder if Beach had some ulterior motive?
Jack stepped up onto the far side curb and stood in front of the window. He stood just a little less than six feet, and his shoulders looked broad within the A-2 bomber jacket. Since he’d stopped drinking beer and started drinking white wine, his waist was back down to a thirty-four, with not too much of a droop at the belly. Not bad for mid-forties, he reassured himself.
Jack thrust his hands into his pockets, his eyes glancing at the foundation below the plate-glass window. What did he feel? Did he know those bricks? Or would he? What he felt, really, was that he wished Ellen were with him, standing beside him. And he felt naked—because he’d flown, he’d left the Seecamp .32 in the gradually self-destructing glove compartment of Clarence’s Honda. Jack Naile was so used to the feel of the little gun in his right pants pocket that its absence was something of which he was keenly, continually aware.
He looked back into the plate-glass window. Clarence, a big guy but looking that much bigger beside the slightly built Arthur Beach, was crossing the street. Jack lit a cigarette.
“Do you want to see the ranch? I mean, what’s left of it, Jack?” Arthur Beach called out.
“Yeah, let’s see the ranch.”
As he’d lit the cigarette, Jack Naile had noticed the bronze plaque set into the foundation, assumedly by the local historical society. It read Jack Naile—General Merchandise. He noticed that his hands were trembling and thrust them into his pockets.
Clarence refused to enter the ruin of the house and stayed by the car. Jack stood within what had obviously once been a quite large home. Whether the structure had been claimed by fire—his own faulty electrical work?—or wind, there was no way to tell upon casual inspection. All that remained was a meticulously fitted stone-and-mortar chimney, most of the mortar gone, the chimney jutting defiantly upward from an extraordinarily large hearth of the same construction.
The land on which the house was built was almost a terrace, as level as if graded by modern equipment. The lot was separated from a stream by the distance of what would have been the width of an ordinary backyard, its far edge abutting the sloping bank. Fast moving, ideal for hydro-electric power, the stream’s waters emerged from deep within a forest of pines, its boundary perhaps a hundred yards distant. A double rank of the trees broke away from the woods, arced downward and across the opposite boundary of the level terrace and onward, nearly intersecting the single-lane wide dirt track that had led them up toward the house from the highway. The highway was eight or ten miles back, perhaps two hundred feet lower in elevation.
The drive from the highway had been less boring than the last leg of the drive from Reno to Atlas, the terrain rolling up through foothills and into the mountains, mountains that would have been visible from a porch here, had one still stood.
“Who owns this property now?” Jack heard Clarence asking Arthur Beach.
Beach answered, “I don’t know. I’m still trying to find out. Some corporation, it looks like.”
“Find out, Arthur,” Jack Naile called back over his shoulder without turning around. “I’d really appreciate it.”
On the drive from Atlas to what had been the Naile ranch, Arthur Beach had asked about the book that Jack had told Beach was being written. Jack had given truthful answers about the progress of their research and the general plotline, never mentioning that with each detail that was uncovered, it seemed more and more frighteningly obvious that at issue was not a book, but an inescapable trip through time.
“You know, if you and your nephew would like, I can arrange for you to get some help if you want to go to Carson City, to the State Historical Society. It’s not too far below Reno. Do you have the time?”
Jack Naile looked at Arthur Beach, then at Clarence. “What do you think, Clarence?”
“You let me drive, we’ll get there with time to spare.”
Clarence was an excellent driver, but Jack Naile didn’t like being driven by someone who seemed frequently inclined to exceed speed limits, as Clarence had exhorted him to do while they’d crossed the desolate expanse that was the final leg of their trip to Atlas. When necessary, Jack could speed with the best of them, but never otherwise. He’d developed that habit—trying to attract as little attention as possible to his driving—when he and Ellen had lived in the metropolitan Chicago area and carrying a gun was seriously illegal.
Jack started walking toward Arthur Beach’s white Jeep Cherokee, resigned to the fact that Clarence, who wore a thirty-six leg length, would get the front passenger seat again. “Let’s see what time it is when we get back to town. And then I might get you to make that call, Arthur. I can’t thank you enough already.” Getting into the Jeep’s backseat was bad enough, but getting out of it made him feel like a cork getting tugged out of a wine bottle.
R R R
“The reason we learned nothing new in Atlas was because there was nothing new to learn—it’s a pile of crap.” Variations on that theme had liberally laced Clarence’s end of the conversation for the entire length of the trip back to and past Reno, toward Carson City. There had also been several remarks about Arthur Beach being “in” on whatever “it” was. Their overnight motel reservations—they would be flying back to Atlanta the following morning—were in Reno, and, after the visit to the State Historical Society, they would be retracing part of their route.
Finding the State Historical Society using Arthur Beach’s directions was effortless in the light Sunday traffic, though finding a space in which to park the rented Ford proved somewhat challenging. Once inside, however, the first person they approached turned out to be the woman Arthur Beach had phoned and asked to assist them. Mrs. Hattie Lincoln, mid-sixties and a little plump, with a pinkish face and cheeks that indicated high blood pressure, heavy alcohol intake or too much blush, had already assembled mounds of materials for their review.
Jack told Clarence what to look for, and they split the work, Mrs. Lincoln popping in on them several times in the office she’d let them use. If Ellen had been with them, the research would have been smoother and more productive, Ellen being the best and most meticulous researcher Jack Naile had ever encountered. Yet even without her, with time running out before the facility closed for the day, Jack unearthed several documents, which Mrs. Lincoln cheerfully copied for them.
Atlas’ single newspaper from shortly after the town’s birth as a mining camp in 1861 until the last issue came off the presses in 1933 was the Atlas View, and copies of the weekly’s every issue from 1877 until 1933 were on file. Jack had majored in English in college—which, in part, accounted for his phenomenal (lack of) economic success—but had been a course or so short of a major in History. And, it took little historical insight to discern that the Atlas View was staunchly Republican, as Nevada had always been in those days, some even suggesting that Nevada’s comparatively quick and easy shot at statehood had been because of that.
With more and more sucking up in the general media about the Democrats and the wonders of their presidential candidate, Jack Naile found the old newspaper’s politics remarkably refreshing.
After thanking Mrs. Lincoln—no relation to the Lincoln, she told them when Clarence asked—Jack Naile climbed behind the wheel of the rental car. Clarence settled into the passenger seat beside him, and remained stonily silent for the duration of the drive back to Reno.
The aircraft an hour outside of Atlanta, Clarence started talking. “It pisses me off that you guys are going to disappear on me. You’re about ninety percent of the only family I’ve got.” Jack didn’t bother to correct the math, just let Clarence talk. “I don’t know if I can hack it, Jack.”
Jack Naile took Clarence’s hand for a moment; if the other passengers thought they were gay or something, he didn’t care. “Look, Ellen and the kids and I love you, too, Clarence. You’ve always been like another son to us. You know that. But, if this crazy thing happens, I can’t change it, alter it so that you can come along. Anyway, I understand they cooked with peanut oil a whole lot in—”
“Knock it off about my allergy.”
“Look,” Jack continued. “From everything that’s stacking up, I don’t think Ellen and I can stop this from happening.” Sometimes, however awkward, there was no time like the present. Jack cleared his throat and told Clarence, “When we first made out wills—”
“For God’s sake—”
“Let me finish, son. When Ellen and I first made out wills, when the kids were little, we named you as our contingent beneficiary.”
“I get all the bills, huh?”
Jack forced himself to laugh, and so did Clarence. “No. No bills, but the house is worth a good chunk of dough. We have other assets, like royalties off books, and there might be more money off this movie deal.”
“I don’t wanna talk about that now.”
“Fine. Later.” If there would be enough later left.
Jack had barely walked into the house when the phone rang. “Take it, Jack; whoever it is will want to talk to you anyway,” Ellen told him as she kissed him on the cheek.
“Right,” and Jack took the receiver from Elizabeth’s hand. It was their “agent.” “Yeah, Lars. What’s up?”
Lars’ voice betrayed his excitement. “They’re starting principal photography on Angel Street in six weeks, Jack! Six weeks and they write a check for pickin’ up the option! Hey! And, they want you guys out there—all expenses paid—the day they start shooting! Some publicity thing or something. Wonderful, huh!?”
Jack shook his head, incredulous at the news. “Hold on a second, Lars.” He pushed the hold button and told Ellen, the kids and Clarence, “Nothing wrong or anything; just the opposite. They’re starting principal photography in six weeks, we get the money in two weeks and they want us out wherever the hell they’re shooting it. All expenses paid.”
“I can’t leave my job,” David said flatly.
“Summer-school session one will be over the end of next week, David,” Elizabeth interjected. “You can work your days off to give you a four day weekend.”
“David’ll need more time than four days. We’re going to have to drive out there with our stuff. Can’t risk being separated from each other or what we hope to bring.” Jack punched back on with Lars, Ellen automatically handing Jack his cigarettes and lighter and pushing the ashtray nearer to the phone.
“Lars, how can they have a script? It hasn’t been more than a couple of weeks.”
“This is the sweet part, Jack. This screenwriter I never heard of liked your book, wrote the script and then took the script to his agent and the script was the reason they optioned your book. The only reason it’s taken this long—imagine!—is because they had to nail down the male lead. Some guy I never heard of, but he’s big with kids. Got some TV show that’s really up there.”
“You remember his name?”
“Naw. I’ll get it. Hey! Did Lars deliver or what, man! I’m gonna get you guys more deals like this! Wait! Just wait! Look, Jack, I’ll get back to you with more details. Gotta fly!”
“Yeah, Lars. Have a nice flight. Thanks.” Jack Naile hung up the telephone, wondering why—knowing why—he was depressed even though he was about to see more money in one chunk than he’d ever seen in his life.
“He’s flying somewhere?” David asked.
“No, just trying to sound cool, that’s all,” Ellen said as if reading Jack’s mind. “At least there’s the money you were anticipating we’d have, Jack.”
Jack nodded to his wife as he said to David, “You’re the best businessman in the family. Do it tomorrow. Get on the horn and find out about diamond prices.”
“Diamonds?” Lizzie asked.
“Why diamonds, Dad?”
“I know you don’t want to accept the fact that this is going to happen, and no one wants it to. But if we’re going to have money when we get there, we can’t use folding money that was printed in the twentieth century. Gold—we’ll have to have some—would be too heavy. Diamonds are portable. Can you use the Internet at the library to research diamond prices, find a source for buying in quantity at the best prices, and determine what type of stone would have had the greatest value a century ago? Stuff like that, David?”
“I suppose, but it’s a waste of time.”
“Humor your father,” Ellen advised.
David nodded his assent.
They had never gotten a computer that was capable of going online, merely older machines from mixed parts that were used for nothing more than typing. Jack Naile supposed that now they never would.
R R R
Jack’s mother had always made lists, and Jack made lists. For that reason, aside from shopping lists for the grocery store, which Ellen grudgingly composed for Thanksgiving and Christmas, she never did lists at all.
But there was an exception to every rule. While Jack typed furiously—she reflected that wrote was a kinder word—on their latest novel, Ellen sat at the other computer and worked up a list in outline form.
Everything from electrical and plumbing skills to animal husbandry to pattern making for clothes to passive solar hot water heating to composting toilets had to be considered. Although microfiche would comprise the bulk of their traveling library, there were certain books they would try their best not to be forced to leave behind.
Jack believed very strongly in God. Ellen, whom Jack insisted was an agnostic and not the other a word, was the only one of the two of them who had read the Bible. Neither of them went to church, but a Bible should be brought. And, for philosophical comfort, they would want to bring Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Scrap books with family photos were a must for sanity’s sake, lest they forget who they really were and where they had come from.
Ellen returned to the portion of the list dealing with household-related problems. Before the children were born, when she’d worked outside the home, she’d made quite a bit of her own clothes. She had always intended to show Elizabeth how, but never had the time. Soon, despite the fact that any sewing machine they would eventually acquire would be hopelessly primitive by comparison to its modern counterparts, she would have the time.
Ellen liked to garden, rarely for flowers, mostly for vegetables. In recent years, there had been little time for that. A century away in the past, raising vegetables might not be a necessity, but would be quite practical.
There was a second list Ellen was making, one playing off the other. It was a listing of books she must read, despite the fact that they would be archived on microfiche. If circumstances forbade the use of the microfiche as reference material, she would still have her mind.
Certain entries on this second list were for Jack to read, books on reloading cartridges—he seemed to be the only firearms writer there was who didn’t reload—books about caring for livestock (which she would read as well), works on electrical wiring and plumbing skills, woodworking without power tools (he’d always said he wanted to build furniture, if he ever retired), books on horsemanship—the list seemed unending for both of them. Yet it was imperative that Jack’s list be appreciably shorter for two reasons. Most of this end of their current novel was in his hands at the present, so he would have less time. Secondly, she was the speed reader of the family.
In her high school days, Ellen had been clocked at twenty-eight hundred and fifty words per minute, with excellent retention. Nowhere near that fast anymore, she could read five books or more in the time it took Jack—whose IQ had measured one hundred fifty six at age twelve but who was a painfully slow, maddeningly thorough reader—to get through just one.
As David Naile had begun using the Internet to research the quality, characteristics and values of diamonds at the turn of the century, a thought occurred to him. On the off chance that this time-travel thing actually did take place—which was thoroughly stupid even to consider—there might be other data from the past that could prove useful as well.
Despite his youth, he had been working for several years, with his parents’ help, passing himself off at times as older than he was. Although he’d worked in plumbing and landscaping, and had learned to drive a tractor before driving a car, sales had always been it for him. At seventeen he was the youngest assistant manager in his current company’s history, while still a full-time student.
If this time transfer thing really should take place, then there was ample reason to assume that, however unlikely it seemed, they were to have a retail store, as indicated in the original photograph. According to the data his father had gleaned from this Arthur Beach jerk, the store proved quite successful and innovative in its marketing approach.
Clearly, his father would have had little to do with that sort of achievement. His father would be packing his six-gun, wearing his cowboy hat and living some sort of Western gunslinger/gentleman rancher fantasy. His mother would groove on vegetable gardening, cooking, raising cuddly farm animals, all the things she would have normally done in the present if she hadn’t had to help his father make a living. And his sister—she was a very nice girl, but she’d probably just meet some cowboy with no interest in economics and start having babies in a few years.
If financial success was to be theirs, it would be his responsibility. And if he could research gemstone values from the previous century via the Internet, what was to prevent him from discovering who the movers and shakers were in this hick town in Nevada? What bank would be strongest? What locals would make good credit risks? Whose financial dealings would prove disastrous?
What products—goods and services—would become popular, with high consumer demand in the years following the supposed transition into the past? How would the overall national economy be doing? What companies, in which stock shares or ownership interests could be obtained, were destined to grow and prosper? Which would fail?
If he could enter the past armed with information from the objective future and a thorough knowledge of financial trends in the past—granted, he was only using a computer at a high school library, and there was, perhaps, little time remaining—he could position his family to accumulate true wealth and the capability with which to manipulate businesses in such a fashion as to increase this wealth almost exponentially.
If this time-travel thing actually did take place, he would be prepared with forward credit checks, market trends and everything else he could find.
Elizabeth slid open the mirrored doors of her closet. If the time-transfer really happened, everything in her closet would be useless to her.
In the summertime, instead of shorts and a T-shirt, she would be in long dresses. In the fall, as opposed to pants and nice tops, she would be in long dresses. In the wintertime, long dresses again. In the spring, long dresses. There would be no need for softball uniforms, tennis skirts, bathing suits—just long dresses and, perhaps for variety, scratchy, high-necked blouses and long skirts. Not to mention the world’s supply of useless underwear and tightly laced corsets, which helped to induce fainting.
She was to enter her sophomore year, would be old enough to drive in just a little over six months—drive a wagon. “Shit,” Elizabeth said under her breath.
A final adjustment to the strain insulator for the primary cable, and Jane Rogers was ready to tweak the anode plate’s alignment with the control grid.
At seventy-three years old, prudence had cautioned her to be slightly more cautious in movement and diet, but these were her only concessions to age. Her mind, as she herself was able to judge, and—unless they were incredibly polite—everyone with whom she interacted seemed to concur, was as sharp as when she’d been the first woman in her alma mater’s history to take a PhD in physics. Her judgment, Jane Rogers flattered herself, was appreciably better.
And her eyes—despite a lifelong and insatiable appetite for the written word—were just as keen, if a little less brighter blue. Ever so slightly, Jane Rogers re-aligned the anode plate once again.
The hardware was ready.
She had been born in the wrong era, that conviction and the death of her husband twenty years, two months and twenty-seven days before the only things which marred her contentment—if one discounted the tantalizing yet incomplete degree of success of her experiments in plasma electricity.
As a graduate student, and later as a degreed physicist, because of her sex she had always been someone’s assistant rather than a project leader in her own right. Some things, admittedly, were determined by sex. When she was introduced to Albert Einstein, Jane Rogers found herself speechless and very nearly collapsed into a faint—and she was not a fainter, never had been. When she met and married the man of her dreams, she had aided him in his work in particle physics, abandoning her passion for electricity, no matter how much the work and its potential intrigued her and her own calculations confounded her.
Dr. Einstein had almost certainly thought her to be a ninny with an empty head. But her Frank had never thought that, she knew. All of the time before meeting Frank, she had worked with men who didn’t do science nearly as well as she; Frank did it better, and she found this as irresistible as the curly hair he tried to beat into straightness with his military brushes, as the shy gray eyes he shielded behind rimless glasses he didn’t really need to wear for anything but the most exacting detail work.
To have remarried—she was only fifty-two when Frank, ten years her senior, died—would have been unthinkable, was something she never once considered. But with Frank’s death, Jane Rogers’ attitude toward herself changed quite radically.
She concluded the series of experiments at which Frank had been laboring for the past eighteen months, perhaps more rapidly than Frank himself could have achieved the same results. Then she donated his notes and equipment to the graduate school of the university with which Frank had been affiliated since his own grad school days.
When Jane Rogers returned to the study of plasma and how it could be used to achieve the dreamer’s dream, the transmission of electricity through thin air, her decades of work with Frank in particle physics had proven to be of greater help to her than she had ever realized they would.
At the time of Frank’s death, they were far from his beloved university, plying their background in particle physics for the United States government as part of what well over a decade later would become the Strategic Defense Initiative. Then, as in the present, her notion reinforced by the continuation of SDI after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she had believed that there was more to particle physics weapons research than just the means by which to get a leg up on the Russians. But if so, she was out of that line of work and no one would have volunteered information to her in any event.
Jane Rogers had come to be known as “strange” because of the common wisdom that anyone who labored in her particular corner of physics research had to be a poor scientist or have her bubble more than a little bit off plumb. No one had ever accused Jane Rogers of being a poor scientist.
After Frank’s death, Jane made the decision—one she had never regretted—to remain in Nevada, but quite a bit more to the north, in order to escape the heat. Remaining in Nevada enabled her to be within relatively easy driving distance of the smallish cemetery where she had placed her husband’s physical remains.
Jane Rogers supposed that she did honestly have one more regret. Frank, like the main character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, injured during the war—but a different war than the one whose horrors were supposed to end all war.
The experiments she had been conducting for the last eight years—begun at age sixty-five when anyone with sense might think of retiring—had the sole purpose of generating a stable electrical field that could be precisely aimed across great distances on a laser carrier beam. When it reached its target, the electrical field would be as strong as it had been at point of origin. She would be able to broadcast electrical power to anywhere in the world with an appropriate receiver, transmit the modern age to the most remote corners of the globe.
“Jane?”
Jane Rogers realized she had been standing still, just staring at her apparatus. Hearing Peggy Greer call her name brought her back from her thoughts. “Just thinking about Frank and everything else, and what we’re doing here. Are we ready, darling?”
“I’ve run everything on the computer so often I’ve almost got it memorized, Jane. The video monitoring equipment has been checked and rechecked. If everything holds up, we’re more ready than we’ve ever been.”
“Good. Good, darling. Now, Peggy dear, we may as well get started.”
Jane Rogers walked toward the open rear doors of the GMC Suburban, where Peggy Greer was inspecting the screens of various pieces of monitoring equipment. She seemed to be paying particularly intense attention to the oscilloscope which they had modified for their purposes.
Peggy announced, “Screen’s smudged. Got a tissue, Jane?”
Jane knew that she did not and said so. “Sorry.”
Peggy merely shrugged her little shoulders and whisked the green scarf from her head, attended to the smudge on the screen and began retying the bandanna over her hair. Her hair was just past shoulder length, so bright a strawberry blond that it was nearly red. Despite the almost constant sunshine and Peggy’s thorough dislike for any sort of hat that might shield her face, Peggy’s mid-twenties complexion was pale, very pretty, a perfect setting for her sparkling green eyes.
Jane had taken to wearing a flat-crowned cowboy hat, new when Frank had bought it for her but long since battered and faded. Sun brutalized her face, given half the chance, always had. Even when she was Peggy’s age, sitting poolside or at the beach, she’d always worn a hat, admittedly something more feminine in design. More than once, someone had likened her weathered Stetson to those worn by John Wayne in his myriad westerns. She hoped any physical resemblance ended there.
The wind was picking up, whistling down from the mountains and toward the desert. Jane hoped that—this time—her carrier wave would reach back into the mountains, where she and Peggy had positioned the receiver.
If it did, the light array set there would, at least, flicker. That had already been established. The solitary flicker their experiments had produced lasted so briefly that, had she blinked, she would have missed it. Yet witnessing it—nine months and six trials ago—was the first sign of hope since her experiments had gone from strictly controlled laboratory conditions into the field: the solitary glimpse of practical success since her work had begun.
Jane would be pleased if she and Peggy could duplicate it, ecstatic if they could better it.
“Ready, Jane?”
“Fire her up, Peggy.”
“Right!”
A casual glance over her shoulder at the equipment was all Jane allowed herself before stepping to the tripod-mounted refracting telescope. Peggy knew her stuff, didn’t require supervision.
Jane looked into the eyepiece, focus already achieved, nothing to do but pray that the objective lens sheltered within its sunshade cap would catch a flicker of light, showing that the carrier beam had done its work.
The generators hummed from the bed of the pickup truck parked a few feet from the Suburban, one generator to produce the electricity which the laser beam, powered by the second generator, would hopefully carry to target.
“On my mark,” Peggy called out. “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . Mark!” The humming of the generators was, for a moment, like the sound of a hive of angry bees. A crackle, more crackles. A hum, louder than the others, at a different frequency. There was a popping sound, a microsecond later a sound like a clap of thunder. Would there be a second one?
Jane’s hands shook, and she dared not touch them to the telescope through which she peered toward the mountains.
But there was no second noise like thunder, there was no illumination—however brief—from the lighting array that was wired to the intended receiver.
There was nothing.
Jane looked away from the telescope. The humming from the generators was already subsiding. Peggy’s monitoring equipment had already announced their failure.
“It didn’t work. Were we any closer this time, Peggy?”
“I can’t tell, Jane, not until I run the program check. I can do it here. We don’t have to wait until we’ve traveled all the way—”
Jane cut off her young friend in mid-sentence. “That’s it!”
“What’s it?”
Jane Rogers ran toward Peggy, grabbed the girl by the shoulders and turned her around. “You have given us the answer, girl! It’s the traveling! That’s what it is! It’s the damned traveling, Peggy!” Peggy’s usually intelligent eyes stared blankly back. Jane hugged the girl, kissed her cheek. “You don’t see, do you?”
“I don’t under—”
“When we had our glimmer of light nine months ago?” Jane Rogers took the package of cigarettes from the pocket of her smock as she spoke. “Remember what happened? The cable—”
“The cable we used to connect the receiver to the lighting array had been chewed on by something and we substituted a piece of cable that was a foot shorter.”
“So?” Jane prodded.
“So if we shortened the cable still further, there’d be less distance—”
“Less distance for the electrical charge to travel. If we’re right, Peggy,” Jane said, hands trembling as she lit a cigarette with her husband’s old lighter, “when we had that flicker of light nine months ago and actually broadcast electrical energy, we had it right. If we go back to our figures from nine months ago and duplicate the experiment to the nth degree and use as short a cable as possible—”
“And better insulated than what we’ve been using,” Peggy interrupted.
“Exactly! And better insulated. Shorter and better insulated. Yes! If we do that and we duplicate all the settings—”
“And atmospheric conditions, too. Wait for a day with the right humidity—”
“Yes, weather conditions. If we duplicate that day as closely as humanly possible, with the shorter—”
“And better insulated!”
“And better insulated,” Jane agreed. “Shorter and better insulated cable and close to identical atmospherics, we should be able to get more than a damned flicker! We’ll light up the array!”
“Yes!” Peggy threw her arms around Jane and hugged her so hard that Jane thought one of them would surely break a bone.
It was at once frightening yet miraculous that time could go by so quickly. Through some artful finagling—Jack was very good at that sort of thing, Ellen readily admitted—instead of getting their movie money at the commencement of principal photography, as per contract, they had the check in their hands twelve days before the cameras would roll. Part of the deal to get the money early involved an intentional misdirection—not a lie, of course—that the entire family would be taking a much anticipated trip, perhaps within days of the film getting under way. There would be no time to put the money to work for them. In exchange for the production company’s acquiescence, Jack promised that, before the commencement of principal photography, he and Ellen would have found a way to cut eight pages from the last third of the script. Successful shortening of the script had, so far, eluded the professional writing staff assigned to the screenplay. Without it, the film would be at least one million dollars over budget, before it was ever started.
Their current novel—and, quite probably, their last, certainly written in the present—was, finally, complete. In the morning, they would set out by car for California. David, surprising both Ellen and her husband, suggested something quite bizarre. “Why don’t you guys continue writing once we’ve entered the past—I mean, if there is anything to this goofy time-travel crap. But on the off chance it does happen, you guys should think about it. You guys could be the next Jules Verne, right? What did Verne have? He imagined things like nuclear submarines and stuff like that,” David had gone on, answering his own question. “You guys wouldn’t have to imagine a damn thing! Just use your imaginations to come up with some science fiction story line and throw all the stuff from our present day into the story. Like microwave ovens, compact discs, personal computers—stuff like that. Even a trip to the Moon and satellites orbiting the Earth. You guys would still be able to do what you like and make a lot of money.”
Elizabeth had pointed out, “But they can’t do that, Davey. Because they didn’t, or else those books would already exist, just like the photograph of the store exists. It might be a terrific idea, but for some reason or another, they won’t do it, because the books you’re talking about would have been published already, see? Right, Daddy?” And Elizabeth had turned to her father, who was sitting at his computer, all the while staring at her almost worshipfully as she pelted her brother with the logic of time travel.
“You’re a hundred percent on the money, babe. The reason the photo which started this whole thing—alerted us to it in the first place—exists is because we had already built or bought the store and put up that sign: Jack Naile—General Merchandise.” Then Jack looked at David. “The reason those books will never be written—or published at least—is because they haven’t already been published, David.”
“So, Dad, you’re saying that everything we do once we get to the past—if this stupid thing happened—is predetermined, written somewhere.”
Ellen said it. “Written in time, David. It’s already written in time, and if something did change that, the consequences would be incalculable. You’ll probably start carrying a gun, for example. You were/will be in that photograph. If you had to shoot somebody and you killed a person or you didn’t kill a person, but in the past you had already not killed or killed that person—”
“I don’t follow you,” David volunteered in a moment of rare candor.
Jack chimed in. “What your Mom’s trying to say, David, is that if something any of us were to do were somehow something we hadn’t already done—from our perspective now—we could screw up the present and the future. The smallest thing that would alter the past might have enormous consequences in years to come.”
Elizabeth had offered an example, and a very good one Ellen had thought at the time. “Like if Hitler had been killed in some kind of accident when he was a little boy, then maybe World War Two might never have happened, but some guy who was killed during World War Two might have lived instead and fathered a child who blew up the world or something and none of us would be here right now. Right?”
“Exactly,” Ellen agreed.
“Okay, how do we know what to do and what not to do, then?” David asked, slipping into sarcasm. “Do we just do only the things we know the Nailes did—and we don’t know much of that—and the rest of the time sit around afraid to leave the house or whatever because we might screw up the future?”
“No, we just try to behave rationally,” Jack said, “and we hope for the best.”
“We do what this family has always done,” Ellen declared. “We fly by the seat of our pants. And at least you and your father will still be able to wear pants,” she added.