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THE EUREKA ALTERNATIVE


star


Brad R. Torgersen



On the four hundred-and-sixty-first day of the war to end all wars, Chief Abernathy came back from the sideways. Twice. In the exact same vehicle. Or what appeared to be the same vehicle. Constructed with the same steel frame, the same wiring, and using the same computer system and electronics. Except the woman at the controls was different. Enough for her to practically fall over with shock when she opened the vehicle door and stepped out onto the reaction chamber floor.

Four uniformed Army orderlies rushed forward and caught her before she hit the cement. Her body vibrated like a bass string that had been harshly plucked, and she clutched her arms around her midsection—retching three times—before she could finally stand on both feet. Hands shaking, she slowly reached up to the modified pilot’s helmet on her head and pushed it off. Gripping it by the chin strap, she dropped the helmet to her side where it dangled.

“Chief?” said one of the orderlies. “Chief, can you hear me? It’s Specialist Brown.”

“Specialist Brown is dead,” she said flatly.

“Ma’am?” the young orderly said, confused. He reached his hands out and gently put his fingers on her face. “It’s okay. We’ve got you. Look at me, ma’am. Look at my eyes. You’re back home.”

Her right hand reflexively popped up and caught his wrist, which she held tightly—her tendons standing out.

“Specialist Brown is dead,” she repeated.

The four orderlies exchanged worried glances among themselves, then herded the shaken warrant officer out of the reaction target zone and toward the thick steel hatchway doors—which stayed shut during reaction chamber operations, but had been wide open when the second, unexpected sideways car winked into existence.

Brown waved his hand at the array of windows protecting the control room two stories above their heads. An officer nodded and gave Brown a thumbs-up. White-smocked technicians hurriedly passed the orderlies as they crossed the chamber’s threshold and entered the tubelike corridor beyond. Chief Abernathy’s head jerked back and forth, her eyes wide to the whites—like she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

“We’re getting you to the postmission infirmary,” Brown said reassuringly.

“I know where we’re going,” she said, legs moving woodenly. “It’s just that—”

Brown motioned for the others to stop.

“What, ma’am?” he said, and waited.

“None of this should exist anymore. None of you should exist.”

Brown traded a troubled look with the other orderlies, then got his charge moving again—her boots scraping awkwardly on the textured concrete walkway.


Clara Abernathy was sitting quietly at a table in the mission briefing center when her boss, Lieutenant Colonel Garcia, walked in. The expression on his face was not happy, and Clara sat up quickly, switching off her pad computer.

“We have a problem,” the colonel said.

“Reactor signature fluctuations again?” she asked. “Gonna scrub tomorrow’s trip?”

“More complicated than that,” he said, running his hand over his shaved scalp.

“Something wrong with the sideways car?” she guessed again.

“No,” he said. “This is a personnel issue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe it’s easier if I just show you,” he said, as he motioned for her to follow him.

Clara slipped her pad into a zippered flight-suit pocket and followed her boss out of the briefing center. Home Plate—as it was colloquially known to the sideways pilots—was a warren of branching corridors leading to reinforced concrete compartments built on the bones of the Dugway Proving Ground complex destroyed earlier in the war. The US military brass had reasoned that the Chinese generals wouldn’t waste effort on an installation they presumed to have already been neutralized. Using plans and specifications delivered from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before it too had been destroyed, the US military had hastily constructed Home Plate under camouflage in less than ninety days.

When Clara reached the infirmary—all sideways pilots were required to endure a thorough checkup immediately upon return—she took one look through the mirrored glass and gasped. There she was, sitting sullenly on the edge of the medical examiner’s gurney while two orderlies and two Army doctors poked and prodded at her. Clara stepped close to the glass, her jaw hanging half-open, and stared intently for a good thirty seconds. Then the Clara on the other side—who could not see past the one-way mirror—looked up, and Chief Abernathy had to turn her head away. It was too disturbing.

“Jesus,” Clara said. “It’s me.”

“We always wondered if this could happen,” said the colonel. “After over thirty-five missions and five successive pilots—with two missing in action—we finally got a duplicate.”

“Have you talked to her?” Clara asked.

“Yes,” her boss said. “Everything checks out so far. She knows me. She knows this place. Except . . . something really bad went down. Beijing decided to have another go at Dugway, apparently. And while Home Plate’s nuke hardening absorbed most of the damage in that timeline—nice to know the effort was worth it—a lot of us still got killed. She says they launched her one more time, to try to find a branch where Home Plate was still operational.”

“The sideways cars always return to their point of origin,” Clara said. “Visits to other timelines are temporary.”

“That’s the thing,” Lieutenant Colonel Garcia said. “Her sideways car thinks this is its point of origin.”

“The branching algorithm shaved things that close, huh?” she asked.

“It would seem so. We’ve cross-checked her car’s computer, and nothing seems wrong. As far as it’s concerned, this timeline is the timeline.”

“What about—what about me . . . in there?”

“That’s what we have to figure out,” Clara’s boss said. “Even though we knew there was a statistical chance this might happen, we’ve never prepared a contingency plan. With the war going the way it is, nobody ever had the bandwidth. We’re grasping at straws at this point. Now the situation is complicated. At my request, the docs are doing a genetic test, just to be one hundred percent sure it’s, in fact, you. But I’ve got little doubt it is. And now that we have two of you, how do we handle it?”

Clara felt her skin crawl. The theorists from MIT had mentioned a doppelganger scenario, but few people involved in the Home Plate project had ever put serious thought about how to deal with it. Everyone was too busy hoping and praying one of the sideways missions might bring back something—some new piece of technology—that might make a difference in the war. She herself had witnessed six different alternative timelines, none of which had yielded positive results. Though the ice-age timeline had been interesting. Her sideways car had blinked into existence beneath a hundred feet of water. Good thing the cars had been designed with adverse environmental factors in mind, including hard vacuum and radiation proofing.

“What if this is some kind of game the Chinese are playing?” Clara asked. “We were never sure they didn’t steal MIT’s secrets before it was destroyed. Could this be some way for them to plant a ringer in our midst?”

“Doubtful,” Garcia said. “Even if they managed to obtain the plans, how would they go about kidnapping an identical you and brainwashing her into helping them? Besides, why would they bother with a Home Plate project of their own when the war is going so damned well for them in our timeline?”

Clara sighed. She didn’t need a reminder that their backs were against the wall. Hell, had been against the wall for many months. If the idiots in D.C. had not been so feckless in the run-up to the war, maybe things would have been different. As it was, many of the Army’s remaining brass—those still surviving in a world where Washington was an irradiated pile of lifeless rubble—speculated that several key senators had been on the take from Beijing. Oaths hadn’t seemed to have mattered much to twenty-first-century politicians. Perhaps they’d been bribed into complacency? Certainly the President had had her head in the sand, right up until the nukes had started to strike. And after that . . . well, it was all water under the bridge now.

Clara swallowed. “Let me talk to her.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Garcia said, holding up his hand.

“If she really is me, we’ll get a lot more information out of her a lot faster.”

“I am not sure she can help us,” Garcia said. “Like I told you, she said Beijing sent more nukes against Dugway in her timeline. It sounds to me like things were going even worse there. And if she’d already found a significantly better timeline, why didn’t she take something back with her to help at home?”

Clara chewed a lip. She turned her head and stared up at the lieutenant colonel. “Let me talk to her anyway. What have we got to lose?”


The two women—duplicates from across the quantum fissioning of multiple universes—sat across from each other in Home Plate’s tiny cafeteria. The Clara from the twice-nuked Home Plate timeline ate ravenously from her heaping tray, while the Clara who thought of herself as the original Clara, sipped at a cup of hot coffee. It was midnight outside, but since hardly anyone at Home Plate ever bothered to risk going out into the open air, time didn’t mean much. The hands on the clock spun around and around. Twenty-four-hour operations meant nobody paid much attention to the time, save for mission tracking purposes. They’d been getting ready to send Clara out on another mission in fourteen hours, but not before she’d had a chance to interrogate her alternative self first.

“We’ll have to figure something out,” Clara said to her quantum twin as the woman forked yet another mouthful of spaghetti into her face. She’d claimed to have not eaten a real meal in over a week, and the blood work from her checkup had confirmed her malnourishment.

“Thing One and Thing Two,” hungry Clara said to herself after she cleared her mouth with a long drink from a bottle of frosty cold soda. Soft drinks had become almost unheard of in hungry Clara’s timeline, while the Home Plate consumables in original Clara’s timeline were still fairly well stocked. Beijing had not managed to completely wipe out manufacturing and logistics. Though if something didn’t change for the better, and soon, both the contents of the cafeteria and Home Plate’s one-room post exchange would become priceless.

“Doctor Seuss,” Clara said, allowing herself a small smile. “I like it.”

“You should. You hated seeing them ban the Doctor.”

“I hated seeing them ban a lot of shit before the war,” Clara said.

Before inhaling another mouthful of spaghetti, the hungry Clara put her fingers to the bridge of her nose, and thought.

“For real, let’s try this. I’ll be Clara Louise,” she said. “You be Clara-Bear.”

“Dad used to call me that.”

“I know. It was the last thing he said to me over the phone before he died.”

“Dad’s dead in your timeline?”

“Isn’t he in yours??”

Clara-Bear—she liked it instantly, though she was horrified by the news that Dad was gone in her counterpart’s world—shook her head.

“I don’t know to be honest. Dad was with many of the evacuees they hustled into the Sierra Nevadas. Our communications with that part of the country aren’t great. And there are millions of names unaccounted for.”

“In my timeline,” said Clara Louise—using her birth middle name—“Dad and the other evacuees never made it that far.”

“Jesus,” Clara-Bear said. “Beijing must have attacked much earlier in your world.”

“Not earlier,” Clara Louise said. “Just more concentrated. More nukes. Many, many more nukes. They signed that nonaggression deal with Russia, so they had missiles and warheads to spare.”

“No such deal in our world,” Clara-Bear said. “Moscow got it just like D.C. got it. And London. And other places. To this day I still have no idea what precisely Beijing thought they could gain from this war. If it was world domination China wanted, it already had America’s major corporations and far too many of America’s politicians eating out of Beijing’s hand. Why destroy what you can clearly buy?”

“We never could figure it out, either,” Clara Louise admitted. Then she went back to wolfing down hearty mouthfuls of noodles and ground beef, with spicy tomato sauce.

Clara-Bear sipped her coffee, watching her alternate up close. It still made CB’s skin crawl, thinking this was in fact her, but also not her. What would Clara’s grandmother—the devout Baptist—have made of the situation? Could the same soul exist in two separate bodies in the same place at the same instant? Wasn’t there some fundamental violation of God’s orderly universe?

Of course, Clara and the others involved with Home Plate from the beginning had been forced to check their conventional notions of religion at the door. The eventual validation of the MIT theory—that alternative timelines not only existed, but could be reached temporarily—had blown apart a lot of old questions. If it was theoretically possible for any number of alternative selves to make any number of alternative choices, how would God judge? Any God? Which way did the axe fall? Was one person on the hook for all choices simultaneously? It kinda sank the notion of free agency.

Not that many people working Home Plate had spared time to write it all up. They talked and joked about the problem between shifts, while a shattered and bombarded United States of America waited and wondered when the next wave of destruction would come. This really was it. The war for the whole enchilada. Whichever major nation remained standing at the end would be the world power for decades—even centuries. After the ensuing devastation on virtually every continent, the losers would have too steep a hill to climb too quickly, to ever post a threat to the victor. Not in CB’s lifetime, anyway.

“My boss said if you’d found anything that could help with the war, you’d have never come here,” Clara-Bear said.

“So far as I knew when I was coming back, this was here. And our boss had been dead for weeks.”

“Right,” Clara-Bear said. “But was Lieutenant Colonel Garcia correct? You didn’t find anything worth bringing back?”

Clara Louise barked bitter laughter.

“When do we ever? You know how it is. You’ve been there. The damned machine launches us into some timeline where America’s trashed or never existed in the first place.”

“Spanish America was interesting,” Clara-Bear said.

“What?” her counterpart said, startled.

“I didn’t get to stay for long, and they were barely up to nineteenth-century industrial-revolution standards, but Mexico never got its independence, and Catholic Spain ruled everything from the Puget Sound to Baja, and all the way to the banks of the Mississippi. I gathered they were at war with the Vatican. Something like a second schism had occurred in the church. Again, I wasn’t there for very long.”

“We still haven’t figured that problem out,” Clara Louise said. “For the mission to be successful, we need more damned time. To explore. To make a thorough assay of the timeline. What can we possibly hope to get from the hours or even mere minutes we’re allowed to leave the sideways car and look around, or talk to people? We’re lucky they reinforced the cars against small-arms fire. On one mission, I had some roughnecks dressed like Genghis Khan try to spear me. Needless to say, I stayed in the car for that one.”

Clara-Bear almost laughed. In another time and place—another fissioning of the quantum universes—it would have been amusing. But not here. And not now.

“I wish I could say our timeline is doing any better than yours,” CB said, sighing. “But it sounds like we’re only just a few months better off. Beijing’s war in our world is a wider war, yes, but they’re still going all out. And some of the United States’ former allies have split off and tried to cut deals of their own. We look like a losing horse. Not out of the race yet. But falling further and further behind.”

Clara Louise paused eating, wiped her mouth and chin thoroughly with a paper napkin, then slouched back into her seat. Looking exhausted.

“I should have stayed where I was that last trip.”

“The car always comes back,” Clara-Bear reminded.

“Yeah, the car comes back. But if you’re me—and we’re agreed that you are—then I know for a fact you’ve been tempted to get out of the car and just . . . let it vanish behind you. Stay where you are, in whatever timeline you’re in at that moment.”

“Like Bud Abbell and Scott Thomas,” Clara-Bear said ruefully.

“Those guys died with Lieutenant Colonel Garcia,” Clara Louise said.

“Not in my timeline they didn’t,” Clara-Bear said. “In my world, their cars came back, but they never did. Missing In Action, their files say. Garcia suspects that Abbell and Thomas both decided to stay put. Either out of pure fear about coming back to a world where Beijing is on the brink of winning, or because whatever it was they found—on some other version of Earth—was simply too appealing to leave.”

“Or . . . they just got a spear in the chest,” Clara Louise said.

This time Clara-Bear did laugh—and hated herself for it. Chief Thomas and Chief Abbell had been good people. Friends. She’d trusted them. And they’d all made a solemn promise—each and every sideways pilot—to never cut and run. Home Plate wasn’t about letting one person bail out on history. It was about bailing the world out of perhaps the worst jam it had been in, in as many as a thousand years. Or more?

“Yeah,” Clara-Bear admitted. “It is a tempting idea. But only to a point. Who’s to say any of those other worlds are in fact better than this one? Especially the ones with radically less advanced technology? I don’t know about you but I certainly don’t want to die from an abscessed tooth, or skin cancer, or go blind from cataracts, or die from starvation because the people of North America haven’t advanced much beyond hunter-gatherer societies. And the bombed-out worlds are worse. One time I showed up and the Geiger counter starts pinging like I’ve landed on Chernobyl the day after it blew. Never even bothered to look around. Dugway was rubble in every direction. Like the old Soviet Union had nuked it again, and again, and again, and again. I just sat there hoping the rad-hardening on the car was good enough to stop me from getting cancer. When I got back, the recovery team had to pressure wash and decon the car for an hour. We couldn’t use the reaction chamber for a month, while they scrubbed off every last speck of radioactive dust they could find.”

“The last timeline I visited before being pulled back here,” said Clara Louise, “might have made for a good home. I know they had radio, because I picked it up and could listen to the music. Didn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard, from any country. Dugway looked to me like it had never been developed. There were no people. But the hills were green with trees and grass. And there was a healthy rain shower, too. The climate was a lot wetter for this part of the country, I assume. Which makes you wonder what else was different, right? Different climate cycles mean different migration patterns. Maybe nobody ever crosses that land bridge in Alaska, because it never exists? First people to settle North America come by boat. From Hawaii, maybe? Who knows? But I should have given it a shot. My timeline was toast anyway. They sent me out hoping I’d wind up at a version of Home Plate which was better off. Told me to be sure to share their story to whomever cared to listen.”

“And in countless other timelines,” Clara-Bear said, “this conversation is never happening, because you and I don’t exist. Home Plate doesn’t exist. China doesn’t exist, or at least doesn’t exist like it does now. Or the Aztecs never fell and now rule all of North America. Or the Vikings crossed en masse and went west of the Missouri. Or . . . or any and all of it happened. And simultaneously none of it happened, because there’s no way for us to ever goddamned know.”

“Too bad the reaction chamber can’t send us backward,” Clara Louise said, rubbing at her stomach and yawning. “What we need to be able to do is go back three years and warn those assholes at the Pentagon what’s coming.”

“Like those assholes would have listened,” Clara-Bear said bitterly. “I sometimes think all the Joint Chiefs ever cared about—before the war—was feathering their political beds for their postretirement appointments.”

“Maybe you’re right. Alas, MIT said it would never work that way.”

Clara-Bear dipped her chin to her chest and let a long silence elapse between them.

“Which doesn’t answer the biggest question facing you and me—or should I say, me and me? What do we do in a timeline where there are two of us? What’s the boss gonna do, just add you to the pilot roster and start sending out double missions?”

“Knowing Garcia,” Clara Louise said, “that’s exactly what he’s got in mind.”

“But . . . how is this supposed to work? Both of us here? Now? My ex-husband used to joke that if ever I’d known what it was like to be married to me, I’d have killed me in the process. What if he’s right?”

Our ex-husband was right,” Clara Louise said. “We probably will kill each other. Or get so much on each other’s nerves we’ll want to kill each other. Bad news. One of us has got to go her own way.”

“And go where exactly?” Clara-Bear said, exasperated.

Then she caught sight of the little curl of a grin going up the side of Clara Louise’s mouth.


“No,” Lieutenant Colonel Garcia said.

“Boss—” both Claras said in unison, as they sat across the table from Garcia in the mission briefing room.

“I said no, and I mean it,” he barked, cutting them off. “I’ve still got rank here.”

“And I’m not convinced I technically fall into your chain of command, sir,” Clara Louise said. “You may boss around your Clara, but you can’t boss around this Clara.”

“The hell I can’t!” Garcia said, slapping his palm down on the table. “Maybe the war was going to shit for you in your timeline, but it’s not going completely to hell for us yet in ours. Now I’ve got one extra sideways car—do either of you have any idea how difficult it is to build or replace those under the circumstances?—and one extra sideways pilot. I’m putting both to good use. And because I know you, Clara—both of you—I know you won’t flake on me in the clutch. I can send more missions, faster, and double the chances one of you can bring us back something which will make all the difference in the war.”

“You can keep the car, sir,” Clara Louise said. “It comes back regardless. And so do I, unless I decide not to.”

“I know you,” Garcia said. “You’re too damned loyal to skip out on us.”

“But I’m not skipping out,” she said, and pointed a finger at Clara-Bear.

Garcia took a deep breath, and ran both hands over his shaved head.

“God,” he said, puffing out his cheeks. “This is so damned crazy.”

“The MIT people warned us we were in for a philosophical headache,” Clara-Bear reminded him.

“Yeah,” Garcia said. “Maybe I should assign myself to one of these damned trips and then I should bail the fuck out. How about that?”

Both Claras looked at each other, then at the boss, then back at each other.

“If this technology had been developed sooner,” Clara-Bear said, “and if it had become more widespread, boatloads of people would probably be clawing and scratching for a chance to bail to other timelines.”

“How do we know people aren’t bailing to our timeline?” Garcia asked sarcastically.

“No dice,” Clara Louise said. “Anyone who discovered what’s going on in this timeline would know it’s a shitshow and opt for something else.”

“True,” Garcia said. He drummed his fingers on the table. Like his counterparts, he was tired. None of them had slept since Clara Louise’s arrival. And he still had to make a decision on Clara-Bear’s next mission. She’d proposed they go out together. Two Claras in one car. Double the people to look around. The cars had never been built for two, but there was nothing to indicate a passenger—sitting in the pilot’s lap—wasn’t possible. Just because it hadn’t been done before didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. But was it wise? In the end, Clara-Bear knew Clara Louise had a point. Her version of Lieutenant Colonel Garcia had been dead for a long time. Her chain of command in her timeline had cast her into the quantum ether. Did he really have the right to give her orders? Now?

“I still have to justify this to the generals at Cheyenne Mountain,” he finally said. “What’s the tactical or strategic benefit? Especially if I know fully well there’s a strong chance you, Miss Louise, will not be coming back. It takes an absurd amount of energy and no small amount of reactor fuel to send a sideways car on a trip. I can’t justify burning that fuel on a whim.”

“What if,” Clara-Bear said, “instead of us looking for some kind of wonder-thing to change the war, we instead leave behind an ambassador who can convince the people of that timeline to send help?”

The colonel sat up. “What do you mean?”

“We have the plans and documents on digital, sir,” Clara-Bear said. “We make some copies in several formats, including hard copy. If we come across a timeline that looks promising, Clara Louise stays put—copies in hand—and uses them to get the people of that timeline to marshal reinforcements.”

“You’d have to stumble across a United States not already at war,” Garcia said. “And not already in the grip of all that pure bullshit that was making the country crazy before the conflict. All that ‘woke’ garbage, and worse. Our society was coming apart, and the Chinese took advantage of it. You’d need an America not only much better off, but also able and willing to take the kernel of technology we give them and rapidly produce entire fleets of sideways vehicles, able to navigate to our timeline, and then go to bat on our behalf. And that’s just crazy.”

“No crazier than the original plan,” Clara Louise said firmly. “Think about it, sir. What have you got to lose?”

Garcia shot a knowing glance at Clara-Bear, who smiled.

He groaned, but pulled out his computer pad and began assembling the orders.


Fissioning of the quantum universes. Earths unending.

The two Claras visited many. Some were war-torn iterations of the world they’d left behind. Others seemed to be wildernesses where humanity had never risen above bones and stones. In one instance, the pair were accosted by a troop of olive-skinned Latin-speaking legionnaires on horseback armed with black-powder muskets, and the reinforced sideways car got a real test. Meanwhile, back home—Clara-Bear’s timeline—Lieutenant Colonel Garcia had opted to double up using Clara Louise’s car, sending two other pilots on similar missions, each seeking some alternative iteration of North America where the United States—or some nation a lot like it—had not only managed to survive into the twenty-first century, but also was thriving enough to make it a place worth winning over to the besieged timeline’s cause.

After returning from one particularly fruitless mission, the two Claras received word that Beijing had landed troops in what was left of California. And while some Californians were going out fighting, far too many of California’s political class were welcoming the Communists with open arms. Better red than dead, it seemed.

“Suppose it actually works,” Clara-Bear said one afternoon while she, Clara Louise, and Colonel Garcia—now promoted to full bird—were eating rations in the cafeteria. Hot chow was becoming less frequent, now that the West Coast was in enemy hands. The Texas supply chain was still intact, but Texas had its own problems, and the days of frosty cold sodas were over.

“The plan?” Garcia said, poking his brown plastic spoon into a foil pouch.

“Right,” Clara-Bear said. “If some other America rides to our rescue, and we’ve got this sideways arsenal at our disposal . . . what’s to prevent us from rescuing the other timelines, too?”

“I don’t get it,” Garcia confessed.

“Think about it, boss,” she said. “Clara Louise’s timeline. There are still people there. Beijing may have bombed that America out, but the timeline itself is not lost. With sufficient technology and manpower, you could get a beachhead there, too, and roll the Chinese back.”

“A thousand fronts in a thousand timelines,” Clara Louise murmured over her own ration pouch.

“Whoa,” Garcia said. “We’re not even sure we can reliably find our way back to specific timelines with our current tech.”

“But a more advanced America might find a way, right?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But that’s so far ahead of where we’re at now, I don’t even want to think about it. It will take a literal miracle to help us win this damned war, CB. Much less CL’s war, and any other war on any other Earth we find. If you go all the way with that idea, there are an infinite number of Earths, any number of which might all need saving. What country in their right mind would have the will or the resources?”

“What country indeed?” Clara-Bear said.


The Claras popped into existence as they always had—flat in the middle of the Utah desert—and immediately noticed something quite different. They were sitting on pavement, as in Clara-Bear’s timeline, but instead of landing in the reaction chamber, they were parked in the midst of a forest of huge gantries. Strange wheeled vehicles rumbled around the tarmac carrying freight containers of various sizes as well as cryogenic tanks and busloads of men and women clad in helmets and pressure suits.

“Holy shit,” Clara Louise exclaimed, popping the door to the sideways car. “This is one hell of an airport.”

“It’s not an airport,” Clara-Bear said as she got out and looked. “It’s . . . it’s a spaceport!”

A thunderous rumbling from miles away—across the endless pavement—caught their attention. They turned and watched as one of the far gantries lit up with fire. A massive rocket—larger by far than anything the United States had ever launched in either CB’s or CL’s timeline—pushed its way into the blue sky. It’s earthquake-inducing engines roared magnificently as the mighty vehicle boosted up, and up, and up, until it was no longer visible to the naked eye, and only a drifting column of fume was left to dissipate in the morning air.

“This is it,” Clara Louise said, and began to hurriedly empty the sideways car’s contents.

“But we haven’t even talked to anybody yet,” Clara-Bear said. “For all we know this is Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany!”

“Maybe or maybe not,” Clara Louise said. “Whoever they are, they’re putting stuff into orbit that would give Elon Musk a wet dream. This has to be it. It’s either these people, or it’s nobody. I have to take the chance. We’ve never seen anything like this during any of our trips.”

“Assuming you can even talk to them,” Clara-Bear said. “Look at that big rocket over there. What’s the lettering on the side?”

“Eureka,” Clara Louise said. “Did we forget our Greek?”

Clara-Bear opened her mouth to object, then realized her counterpart was dead right. The script on the rocket was Greek. And somebody from spaceport security had obviously noticed their presence, because several rapidly moving vehicles with flashing lights and loud sirens had jetted out of a small hangar. They quickly moved across the countless acres of concrete.

“Get back in and punch the emergency recall,” Clara Louise said. “Hurry, before they get here.”

“But you could get dragged off in cuffs. Or worse!”

“It’s the risk of the job,” Clara Louise said. “But I have a feeling that’s not going to happen.”

CL jumped up and down and waved her hand in the direction of the sirens, smiling.

“I don’t know,” Clara-Bear said, slowly getting back into the sideways car—which suddenly felt empty after this many trips with a companion in tow.

“You will know. And hopefully soon. If these are the right people, the cavalry will be coming to your timeline. Get back to Colonel Garcia and tell him the good news.”

“I don’t want to spread false hope,” Clara-Bear said, still skeptical.

“False hope?” Clara Louise said, and turned to stare at her mirror self. “What could possibly be false about any of this? We saw that rocket take off. A rocket with Greek lettering. What if this is the timeline when the scientific method took root a thousand years before the Enlightenment? What if these people have colonies on the moon, and Mars, and maybe elsewhere in the solar system? Think of what they might do, equipped with the sideways plans. They’ve clearly devoted their energies to conquering space. Conquering the timelines might seem like a next logical step.”

“Assuming we would even want them to conquer!”

“Just get back to Colonel Garcia and let him know we may have hit the jackpot. Either nothing happens, and you’ll have to keep trying with more missions to other timelines, or this timeline is the answer—the one we’ve been hoping for since we first spoke over dinner.”

Clara-Bear sighed and strapped herself back into her seat.

“Okay,” she said, taking one last look around at the massive gantries and the swiftly approaching vehicles. “You know, I admit I am more than a little jealous. By the looks of things, this is one hell of a future.”

“Indeed,” Clara Louise said. “And if I am right—and we’ve been lucky—this will be all our futures. Beijing can’t compete with this!”

Chief Abernathy—who still quietly thought of herself as the original—snapped her alternate self a quick salute, which Clara Louise returned in kind. Then she shut the airtight door in the sideways car and hit the big green control which bypassed the car’s ordinary wait-it-out return protocol, and zapped the car instantly back to its point of origin.


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Framed