by E W Barnes
They felt the car slowing down for the next stop, and several passengers folded up their papers and stood. When Caelen could see again, Kevin was next to the door, the Asian man was still sitting and now he had his eyes closed. There was no sign of either envelope.
They eased their way into the group getting out of the car and then followed Kevin as he took a route out of the station. Soon they were back in the rain. Kevin was moving faster than he had before and they had a harder time keeping up while still hiding behind the umbrella. It was just luck that Sharon saw a flash of his dark hair and blue windbreaker duck into another alley.
Caelen slowed them down. “I don’t want to follow him - if he’s spotted us, he could wait to ambush us if we go after him. Let’s walk by, as if we don’t know he’s there.”
He put his arm over her shoulder again and laughed as they passed the alley entrance as if they had shared a joke together.
On the far side of the alley was an apartment building. The front door was open; the old wood had swelled with the moisture and the last tenant hadn’t forced it closed. They slipped in and tiptoed down the hall.
“Perfect,” Caelen said as he saw there was a back entrance that opened onto the alley. He cracked the door open a fraction. They could see Kevin. He had opened the envelope and was looking through a sheaf of papers. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out a cell phone. He took photos of each of the pages and when he was done, he tossed them all into the garbage dumpster next to him.
Pocketing the phone, he pulled out another device. Sharon recognized it as a temporal amplifier remote, like the one Caelen had showed her. He pushed a button and vanished in a ripple.
“This is it,” Sharon said excitedly as Caelen opened the door and they stepped into the alley.
“How do you know?” Caelen looked puzzled.
“Mrs. Bower, the hologram of my grandmother, said to look for anachronisms.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone showing it to him with a grin.
“These don’t exist in 1980, remember? He took photos of the pages with a phone just like this one.”
“We need the pages from the dumpster,” Caelen said. The triumphant smile left Sharon’s face. The dumpster stank worse than the corridor in the subway.
◆◆◆
Even though the papers were sitting on the top of the garbage in the dumpster, they still carried the smells back with them to the library, emerging with the perfume of rotting food, soiled diapers, and wet cardboard.
“I need to take a shower,” Sharon said as she took a step towards the bathroom but stopped when she heard Caelen’s urgent “Shh!”
They both froze, listening. There were voices coming from the front porch. Someone was saying something about a key and there was a rattling sound — someone was jiggling the front doorknob.
Sharon ran to the crawlspace behind the bookcase and jabbed open the door. Caelen grabbed their sleeping gear and personal items and threw them in. Sharon ducked in after them, and Caelen, backing up on his knees, swung the bookcase shut.
With the crawlspace door open, the bookcase was not flush with the wall and the small gap let in light. Caelen twisted his arm around the crawlspace door to tap the open control panel in the bookcase, deactivating the magnetic levitation so it would be difficult to pull the bookcases back and find the crawlspace.
Not a moment too soon. Voices echoed as three men walked into the library.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“How long before the foreclosure proceedings are completed, and the house goes up for auction?” The voice was quiet, each word filled with a sense of personal power and authority.
“Only another few days. As you can see, the estate’s executor has been cleaning up as required.” The second voice was unpleasant. An oily yes-man, Sharon thought.
“And the bookcases are staying, correct?” Sharon stifled a gasp. It was Kevin’s voice, uncomfortably close. They heard his fingers sliding across the wood shelves. They held their breaths and Sharon clasped her hands together to stop them from shaking.
“Yes, I believe so,” the oily voice answered. “The executor can take them before the auction but seeing as they are still here while the rest of the furniture is gone, I believe they will stay with the house.” It was clear the oily yes-man did not like saying no and would work hard to turn a no into what sounded like a yes without technically crossing the line into a lie.
The voices faded as the tour continued into other rooms. Caelen and Sharon waited over 10 minutes after they heard the front door finally shut and the lock engage before they reactivated the maglev and emerged from the crawlspace. After 30 minutes the crawlspace was permeated with the stench of New York City dumpster, circa 1980. Sharon was glad for the clearer air of the library.
Caelen tiptoed over to the window and peeked through the curtains. She thought she heard a helicopter circling nearby, and then it faded away. He anxiously watched the street for five minutes before he relaxed.
“It looks like they’re gone,” he said. “Next time we’ll set our return for one hour later and hide everything in the crawlspace before we leave.”
◆◆◆
After quietly exploring the house and finding it empty, Sharon finally got the shower she desperately wanted.
Caelen had made more peanut butter sandwiches for them and she ate hers while he showered. She was exhausted and wanted to know about the papers which had merited a spy-like hand-off in a subway car and then ended up in a dumpster. After she finished her sandwich, she spread the papers on the floor with her elbows - the less she had to touch them the better.
They appeared to be design specifications for some kind of small machine. The writing was in Japanese kanji characters which she could not read. The drawings of the machine looked familiar, however…
“A fax machine?” she said out loud in her surprise.
“What?” said Caelen coming out of the bathroom.
“These look like plans for a fax machine,” she said incredulously. “I don’t get it. Fax machines are ubiquitous. Why the cloak and dagger? Why time travel to get plans for a fax machine? It doesn’t make sense.”
“They are ubiquitous now, but what about in 1980?”
“Fair point. Still, I don’t see how plans for a fax machine could change the timeline so that the Soviet Union attends the Los Angeles Olympics. We must have missed something….”
“We need to do another kind of research.” He retrieved the temporal amplifier remote control from the pocket of his now dirty jeans, pushing buttons until the display glowed.
“The man on the train was the representative of a Japanese firm which designed the first standardized fax system that allowed different fax machines all over the world to communicate with each other.”
“Kevin bribed him for a copy of the specifications for this standardized system. It would be a reliable means of almost instant communication and information sharing on a global scale and it would be incredibly profitable. So, he did it for money?”
“Didn’t you say the Soviet Union had almost no technological advancements outside military and weapons development?”
“Yeah, I did,” Sharon said with dawning comprehension.
“If the Soviets became leaders in this kind of technology, it could bring them global economic success on a scale they never otherwise would have achieved.”
“And it might have enabled them to attend the Olympics in Los Angeles as a triumphant world power instead of boycotting in retaliation to a perceived insult.”
“Ok. As far as a hypothetical scenario, this could make sense. What’s the endgame? What does Kevin get out of the Soviets going to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 1984?” Caelen asked.
Sharon shook her head. “I don't know.” She sighed. “We traveled to the past and have found what might be a change in the timeline, and we have not fixed it. We’re still at square one, aren’t we?”
Caelen smiled encouragingly. “We know more than we did and soon the pattern
will become clearer. Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.”
The afternoon sun was setting, and they were hungry, and Sharon refused to eat any more peanut butter sandwiches.
“There’s a small shopping center within walking distance,” she said. “I can pick up more food and some money for our next… uh… shifts.”
She was trying to get comfortable with the terminology of a technology she still barely believed was real. Even though a trip to New York City in the 1980s still felt surreal, she had to admit, she was getting used to the idea.
She returned with two loaded bags, one with groceries, one with Chinese food for dinner, and at the bottom of the second bag was a clean pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.
“This way you can wash your jeans and still have something to wear,” she explained as she handed them to Caelen.
He looked down at the jeans he had to get back into after his shower, still smudged with New York City dumpster detritus, and grinned.
“Thanks,” he said as he headed to the bathroom to change.
They enjoyed the Chinese food while Caelen’s cleaned jeans hung over the rod above the bathtub to dry.
Not knowing what he liked, Sharon purchased a wide selection of dishes to choose from, and had gotten cash, asking for it in rolls of coins.
“We can go through the rolls to find coins from the 80s and 60s.” She paused. “I doubt we’ll find coins from the late 30s, though.”
“What is the phrase? We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Caelen answered.
When they had eaten their fill, Sharon surveyed the leftover food.
“Good thing the refrigerator is still here.”
“We’ll have to eat it in the morning,” Caelen answered. “Otherwise it won’t be here when we shift back to yesterday afternoon.”
“What about your new clothes, and the coins?” she asked, alarmed at the idea she might have to make the same shopping trip out over and over again.
“We can program the temporal penumbra to include them, but they need to be close to the temporal amplifier. The kitchen is too far away,” he answered.
“I don’t know how you keep your tenses straight,” Sharon said. Then she perked up. “That means I won’t have spent the money on the groceries, and we’ll still have them! That’s a bonus. We could do that every day. I hadn’t thought of that… someone could get rich that way… oh….” She stopped as she remembered the goals of the Chestnut Covin.
“That might be attractive to someone here, but less so for people in the future - there is less want, less need for struggling, and less need for greed and selfishness. Where I come from, no one goes hungry, no one goes homeless, illnesses are treated, and people can focus on what makes them happy. It is hard to understand what drives the members of the Chestnut Covin.”
Sharon looked at him for a long time.
“I guess it’s a character flaw, some kind of personal failing, but I have a harder time believing in your utopian future than I did in time travel,” she said finally.
◆◆◆
In the morning they discussed their next steps over cold Chinese food. Sharon was all for going back to New York City and intercepting the plans for the standardized fax communication system before Kevin got them. Caelen argued for going to 1968 to discover that year’s error in the timeline to determine the overall picture.
“We need to know the pattern,” he said. “If we figure out Kevin’s plan, we will be better prepared to find and correct the errors,” he explained. “The more we know, the more efficient we can be with our shifting, and the less likelihood we will cause errors ourselves.”
Sharon reluctantly agreed. It made her uncomfortable to not complete tasks before them before moving on to the next one. It was like going through a checklist out of order.
She sorted through the change she had picked up while shopping. There were only a few coins from the 60s.
“We won’t have much to work with,” she said, showing Caelen the handful.
“It will be enough,” he answered. “Remember, back then things were less expensive.”
“What about clothes?” she asked. “Should we find something more, uh, sixties?”
“No need,” Caelen answered. “We don’t need tie dye and flowers in our hair - lots of people wore jeans and t-shirts in the 1960s. We’ll stand out less if we look ordinary and boring.”
Heeding this advice, Sharon selected a tee shirt without a logo or design on it. Though, she admitted, fashion rules were thrown so much to the side in the 1960s, she doubted anyone would pay attention to a logo from the 21st century. Caelen’s jeans were still a little damp and smelled immeasurably better and he chose the new tee shirt she had bought for him to complete his look.
Sharon put the coins in a front pocket and, with a glance at Caelen which was half-sheepish, half-defiant, tucked her phone into the other one. She opted to go without the baseball cap this time, instead leaving her hair loose. It wasn’t exactly the style they wore in the 60s, but she thought Caelen’s 2-weeks growth of stubbly beard would probably stand out more than her hair.
As a precaution in case someone else might come into the house unexpectedly, they moved all evidence of their staying there into the crawlspace, leaving only the box full of cleaning supplies against the library wall. Caelen positioned the bookcase so that the control panel was easily accessible and still close to the wall and nodded to it.
“It’s all yours,” he said.
Sharon stood before the control panel. This would be the first time she programmed the temporal amplifier on her own. Pleased that her fingers only shook a little, she tapped the controls.
“Long Beach… 1968… five minutes before the previous shift,” she muttered to herself. “Back here… yesterday afternoon… 1 hour later than before.” She popped out the remote control and handed it to Caelen.
“Nope, you hang onto it. Put it in a pocket - if you have room,” he added with a sarcastic grin.
She moved the coins to a back pocket, keeping her phone and the remote control in the front pockets. I need a utility belt, like Batman.
“Ready?”
Caelen nodded. With a deep breath she pushed the button. What was becoming a familiar hum filled her ears and seemed to resonate gently on her skin. The cool shade of the library shimmered redly into bright sunlight and loud noises.
◆◆◆
They emerged next to a large building. Seconds later, a group came around a nearby corner, almost running into Sharon and Caelen. Unperturbed, they smiled and nodded as they continued past in flowery clothes with long hair, some singing softly, some dancing a little as they walked.
“We need to find a place out of sight to watch who shifts in,” Caelen said looking around. Off to their right was a grassy space under some trees where people were sitting in the shade. Sharon and Caelen moved towards it.
“I think this is a college campus,” Sharon chuckled. “I thought I would stand out because of my clothes, not my age.”
Caelen pointed to a spot under a tree where the trunk would partially hide them from view while they watched for Kevin’s appearance. She sat down in the shade.
“You fit in just fine,” he said as he sat down next to her. The others already sitting there smiled at them as they stretched out their legs and then went back to what they were doing: Some reading, some talking, some kissing, some listening to music on a small transistor radio.
Blanketing this quiet area were loud noises in the distance - the thrum of a large crowd and amplified voices - close enough to be noticeable and not so close as to be overwhelming. The protest where the photo was taken was obviously on the other side of the large building.
“There,” murmured Caelen.
Kevin had just materialized. With all the people around surely they would notice his sudden appearance - but they didn't. So focused on what they were doing, they were oblivious to a man appearing out of thin air within feet of them.
Kevin surveyed
the area and then hurried around the building in the direction of the protest. Keeping their distance, Sharon and Caelen followed.
As they turned the corner, they saw a grassy expanse filled with people. There was a raised platform at one end where speakers were entreating the group using hand-held megaphones. There was a line of police and security people standing tense and stone-faced in contrast with the glowing, exuberant faces of the protesters.
They saw Kevin walking behind the row of officers to the right of the main bulk of the crowd. Sharon and Caelen weaved around people trying to keep him in sight. The crowd grew denser the closer to the platform they got.
There was a roar, and a segment of the crowd to their left surged towards them through the line of police officers. No longer were the faces glowing and exuberant. They were angry and energized. The tension exploded and suddenly it was a melee.
There were screams and shouts and dull thuds as police used batons to protect themselves and get control of the chaos. Sharon and Caelen were pushed back helplessly, like fighting a wave rushing up the sand, until they were painfully shoved against a building by the whirling mass of bodies.
Then it was over. Sharon and Caelen stood blinking, their backs still against the hard wall, the mass gone.
“Are you ok?” Caelen asked, almost in a whisper. Sharon was bruised and felt the sting of scraped skin where her elbows and arms dragged against the rough wall of the building. The power of the crowd had been terrifying, almost like a living thing against which there had been no defense. But that was not what frightened her the most.
“I am ok,” she whispered back. “But we lost Kevin.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“What are we going to do?” Sharon asked. They were sitting on some steps in the shade, examining their scrapes and bruises. “Should we go back to the library and try again?”
“No,” Caelen answered slowly. “I don’t think we need to do that. We know Kevin is in the photo of the protest. If we can find where the photo was taken, we can find him.”
