Winston Chase and the Theta Factor

by Bodhi St John

  “All right.” Winston walked his bike over to the corner and up a small dirt embankment to the line of shrubs that lined the industrial park. Careful to keep his jacket between his bottom and the damp ground, he sat cross-legged and set his backpack in his lap. “Let’s try to do this the smart way.”

  Shade sat down beside him. “Remote recon. That works.”

  “I’ll try. Without Little e, doing this sort of stuff is harder. I have to push a lot more.”

  “Can I help?” asked Shade.

  Winston smiled and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I wish. Although, if you want to split a Snickers, that probably wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Now you’re talking,” said Shade, and he began to rummage about inside his pack.

  Winston excavated the geoviewer ring. Its polished black surface gleamed faintly with reflections of industrial-park lamps and distant house lights. He ran a fingertip along its glossy exterior and found it almost warm to the touch, as if it anticipated his use. He thought about adding the slightly larger chronoviewer ring, but he suspected that the more pieces he used, the more energy the Alpha Machine would drain from him.

  With a deep breath, Winston closed his eyes. Previously, he had operated the chronoviewer simply by holding it, but the experience had been stronger and easier when he’d used Little e, which allowed the ring to spin freely within its arms. As his mind connected with the geoviewer, it warmed further and seemed to apply the slightest pressure within his fingers. He brought his left hand up and rested the other side of the ring on his palm. As he opened his eyes, Winston extended his fingers and released his grip. The geoviewer balanced upright between his hands for a moment and then slowly, millimeter by millimeter, elevated into the air above them. The black ring began to turn and rotate, slowly cycling around and around like a coin spinning on a table, as its bulge gradually progressed around the circle.

  Shade whistled, impressed. “Not quite as creepy.”

  This close to their target, navigation was easy. Winston’s second perspective whisked down Blimp Boulevard. He crossed the parking lot and approached the main side door, above which hung a sign that read VISITOR ENTRANCE. He saw that two of the vehicles closest to the building were large, unmarked black vans. That wasn’t good.

  Feeling like a ghost, Winston pushed his spectral self, as he increasingly thought of it, through the building’s wall and into the main lobby. The room was dark and motionless. A few racks of tourist clothing crowded the main walkway. Beyond these sat a cash register counter. A gift shop sprawled away to the right while rows of glass counters filled with artifacts and explanatory cards stretched to the left. The only light spilled into the lobby from an open door beyond the register, and Winston pushed himself toward it.

  Even in this dim, slightly hazy form, the cavernous hangar was breathtaking. Winston felt like a flea inside a titanic Pringles can, except the inner wall, rather than being silvered and shiny, was dark and blanketed with dizzying, never-ending, X-shaped patterns of support beams. There must have been twenty or thirty planes scattered about. However, the room was so immense that all the planes together hardly seemed to take any space. Magnifying this effect, Winston noticed that the back third of the building was cordoned off and stocked with rank after rank of RVs and trailers wallowing in deep storage. Apparently, being a museum wasn’t quite enough to keep the operation in business.

  Winston’s first instinct was to pause and admire the beauty of these planes, all of which appeared to be decades old. He recognized an early fighter jet, probably from the 1950s. On the far side of the chamber, a red biplane beckoned. Placards announced names such as British Tiger Moth, A-26C Invader, F-14A Tomcat, and PV-2 Harpoon. Winston couldn’t help but notice a naked woman painted on the last plane’s nose, pistols in each hand raised overhead, with the golden words ROSE’S RAIDERS flanking her.

  Winston’s curiosity was cut short by the six suited men roaming about the hangar, and his heart sank. Four of them carried radiation scanners like the one Winston had seen in Agent Smith’s hands. Their attention remained glued to each scanner’s screen as they panned the flat end of the device slowly from side to side. In the middle of them, Agent Lynch stood with one arm in a sling. To Winston’s utter bewilderment, his other arm gripped a long, wine-bottle shaped object that glinted in the hanger’s many lights.

  Winston swore under his breath. “I see your buddy,” he muttered. “And he has Little e.”

  “Lynch?” replied Shade. “Dang. I hate that guy. How’d he get your thing out of the river?”

  “Who knows? But he probably hates you, too. I think you broke his arm.”

  “Ha! Wait — how did he know to get here? They can’t have known to come here based just on tracking us.”

  “Working on it…” Winston studied the other agents more closely. “He’s got several men with him. They’re using radiation scanners, searching around… But…”

  Shade waited as Winston paused, then prompted, “But?”

  “I don’t think they’re getting a signal. They’re all looking in different directions and moving slowly.”

  “So…” Shade gripped the thick curls atop his head. “There’s no piece?”

  Winston grimaced. “I could go back a few hours and figure out how long they’ve been looking, but I don’t think so.”

  “Well, that sucks.”

  “We came here for nothing.”

  Winston felt a knot of desperation coil and tense within his chest. Shade bowed his head, deep in thought.

  “Should we go back into town and find somewhere to sleep for the night?” he asked at last. “Eventually, someone is gonna grab us if we stay here.”

  Winston fought the urge to release the geoviewer and pound his hands into the earth. He’d made it so far — the Astoria bridge, the freighter, the clues that seemed to point here. For that matter, they’d come here only to find Lynch ahead of them. That had to mean they were on the right track. And the only way Lynch would have known to come here was from Bledsoe, who could have only gotten the information from Winston’s dad, assuming there wasn’t another copy of the clues somewhere.

  Unless Elvis and Phaedra were spies, Winston thought.

  That felt all wrong. The couple had pointed them to the hangar, after all.

  Winston cursed under his breath and was on the verge of breaking away from the geoviewer when he noticed one of the agents pass his scanner along the length of a strangely shaped plane. It was a white biplane with a long, banana-shaped curve that jutted out and up from under the nose’s single propeller. It had to be a pontoon of some sort for water landings. A smaller pontoon hung from under each of the lower wings, and a white star in a black circle adorned the fuselage near the cockpit. A sign by the plane’s landing gear labeled it as a J2F-6 Duck.

  Winston moved closer, reading the sign over and over.

  “No way,” he whispered.

  “What?” asked Shade.

  The agent finished sweeping the plane and moved on.

  Winston struggled to solve the puzzle.

  “No frickin’ way. But…it has to be.”

  “What?!” demanded Shade.

  “There’s a plane called a Duck.”

  Shade thought it over, then shrugged. “A Duck. So?”

  “Grumman J2F-6 Duck.” Winston peered closer at the sign mounted under glass a few feet from the plane. “Single-engine amphibious biplane… Used by the U.S. armed forces from 1936 through World War II.”

  “There’s that connection,” said Shade.

  “Over three hundred units made for the Navy and Coast Guard. Used for mapping, submarine patrols, rescue work. Fitted with underwing bomb racks. Sometimes coated with beeswax for protection against seawater and the elements.”

  “Wait — beeswax?”

  “Beeswax. Like in my dad’s picture. And what makes a V in the sky?”

  “Ducks! Dude!”

  Winston shook his head. “But there’s no piece in the plane.
The guy just scanned it.”

  “Maybe the battery is dead.”

  “While the other pieces are fine? Not likely.”

  “Maybe the plane came here from somewhere else,” Shade suggested. “What if the piece is there?”

  Then Winston had it. “Not somewhere else. Some when.”

  “Another time?” Shade asked.

  Winston smiled grimly. “I’ll bet you another Snickers that my dad picked that Led Zeppelin cover on purpose. He could’ve used any Hindenburg photo. Why that one?”

  “The release date,” said Shade. “It was 1969. January…?”

  “Twelfth,” said Winston. “January twelfth. I almost never forget a number. We’re in the right place, but the wrong time.”

  Shade put his head back and laughed. “Oh, Mr. A! You tricky old goat. There’s no way to finish the trail to the piece without already having the chronojumper.”

  Winston started to release his mental grip on the geoviewer, but he paused as a pair of headlights swung into the hangar’s gargantuan outer door. He could see the vehicle from two perspectives, a distant one from where he sat at the road’s edge and a much closer vantage from his spectral position near the Duck. The vehicle stood nearly as tall as a double-decker bus and looked to be even longer than one. Its sides were painted black, and its windows were tinted impenetrably dark.

  Lynch waited as the RV approached and came to a stop several feet before him. The passenger side door swung open, and Devlin Bledsoe hopped out of the cab. Bledsoe stretched for a brief moment, then walked up to Lynch, face scowling and back rigid. Lynch handed Little e over. Bledsoe hardly gave it a second glance as the two began to talk, although Winston couldn’t hear them.

  Winston wondered why he would need such a huge rig for the trip to Tillamook and could only arrive at one terrible conclusion.

  Heart in his throat as he pushed into the RV, Winston saw his worst fear confirmed. Whereas most RVs had furniture and refrigerators and shelves loaded with camping goods, this one had been stripped to the walls and stocked with computing gear and medical equipment. A small hospital bed stood strapped to one wall, and a woman in blue medical scrubs sat next to it, forehead furrowed as she watched the nearby monitors, which pulsed out vital sign graphs and numbers.

  A figure lay on the bed under a white blanket. Winston had to know. He moved through the cabin until he could see the face of the man resting there.

  His father barely breathed. His closed eyes didn’t twitch. Winston discerned no rise and fall of his chest. If not for the slow pulse of the cardiogram, he might have taken the man’s chalky pallor as death. Worst of all, a terrible scar, still oozing blood, ran across his father’s shaved scalp, and Winston felt his stomach convulse as he realized that the top of his father’s skull had been reattached with staples.

  Finally, Winston noticed the piece of paper taped to the sheet over his dad’s chest. On it, scrawled in black marker, were the words: Winston, your time is almost up. Simple deal — your pops for the pieces at midnight. Do it or he dies.

  With a wrenching jolt, Winston gripped the geoviewer in his hands. The second world on which he’d been so focused dissolved in the space of one racing heartbeat.

  “What?” asked Shade, picking up Winston’s urgency.

  “What time is it?” Winston asked.

  Shade checked his watch. “A little after eight. Why?”

  “Bledsoe has my dad in that RV that just went in the hangar. There’s a note that says they’re going to kill him at midnight — in four hours.”

  Shade’s jaw dropped, and his bright eyes grew large in the night. “What?! How did they know to come here?”

  Winston realized the only possible answer. “They operated on my dad’s brain. Bledsoe must have gotten the information from him somehow.”

  “But if he did that…and knew to come here…” Shade trailed off.

  “Yeah.” As that sank in, Winston finally did strike the ground with his fist. “Agh! Then he probably knows everything. That note shows that he knows what I can do with the pieces. And he probably knows exactly where we need to go.”

  “Well…does he?” asked Shade. “You just said that they’re not finding the next piece, right?”

  That was true. Winston forced himself to take a deep breath and try to think clearly. The stress and exhaustion were catching up to him. He felt scattered and unable to completely control his emotions.

  It’s OK, he thought. Just figure out the next step.

  “Right,” Winston said. “They’re still looking.”

  “So, they don’t know the when like we do.” Shade gripped Winston’s shoulder and gave it a reassuring shake. “We’re still in the game, man.”

  Winston stared at him for a moment, then nodded slowly. Shade was right. “We can outflank them. In the past.”

  “Outflank them. Exactly. Now…” Shade’s brow assumed the deep folds of thought. “Four hours… All the guards are armed?”

  “I saw one with a shoulder holster under his jacket, so it’s probably a safe bet.”

  “Armed.” Shade gazed up at the sky and wiped damp clumps of hair back from his forehead. “It’s pretty wet now. What if we forced them out with fire?”

  Winston blinked at him, wondering if the sight of his father had scrambled his ability to understand. “What fire?”

  “We set the building on fire.”

  “Dude.” Winston shook his head. “That is your all-time worst idea. Ever.”

  “It wouldn’t spread fast, and the fire department—”

  “No! We’re not burning down the hangar. Next idea.”

  Shade stood and began pacing. “We could call the cops.”

  “FBI trumps cops. They’ll intercept the call and turn them around.”

  “Well…crap. Oh, wait!” Shade spun and pointed a finger at Winston’s chest. “You go back in time a few hours, right before they close the museum. Then you wait for the goon squad to show up. Everybody is wandering around looking for the next piece, like they are now. I create a diversion and—”

  “What diversion?”

  A guilty expression flashed across Shade’s features. “I dunno.”

  “No fire. No explosions.”

  Shade opened his mouth to object, then closed it with an audible snap. “Fine. I’ll think of something else.”

  “And you’re forgetting — what am I supposed to do when you distract everybody?”

  Shade arched his eyebrows and raised his palms toward the clouds. “Steal the RV, of course!”

  Winston laughed bitterly. “One, I can’t drive. Two, I can’t go back to a time I’ve already been in. And three, even if I could, you think I could outrun battle vans and who knows what else in that hippopotamic landmass? Oh, and I forgot to mention: My dad is strapped to a bunch of medical stuff, and he looks mostly dead. I mean, the top of his skull is stapled on. There’s a nurse in the RV watching over him. What do we do with all that?”

  Shade gave an exasperated sigh. “Well, obviously, it would have helped to have that information.”

  Winston shoved the geoviewer into his pack and squeezed the straps repeatedly in his fists. “It’s too bad this isn’t all happening back home,” he mused. “I’d like to give them the same treatment we gave Agent Smith when he tried to get into the Shack.”

  “RIP Smith,” Shade said, then he paused and stared off into the darkness down Blimp Boulevard.

  It was Winston’s turn to ask, “What?”

  “We have four hours?”

  Winston nodded.

  “Yeah.” Shade lifted his bulging backpack and weighed it in his hand. “I can work with that. You go do 1969. I’m gonna take a little field trip in the forest.”

  25

  Have Duck, Will Dad

  Winston felt a moment of vertigo as he let go of one layer of reality and jumped into the other. The night of October 2013 snapped into the midafternoon of January 1969. He squinted against the brightness and almost immediately be
gan to shiver. The sky was leaden, and a misty drizzle still fell on Winston’s head and shoulders, but the temperature dropped by at least ten degrees. Winston’s breath billowed in white plumes. All the nearby trees shifted from shades of green and gold to being barren, and many of them changed positions. The industrial park transformed into an empty field.

  Most notably, of course, Shade was gone. Again. In one instant, he was a few feet away, pack on his back and bike at his side, staring at Winston with a forlorn grimness, and in the next he blinked out of existence as the blue-white sheet of energy and sparks fell away.

  Winston took a deep breath and grimaced. Even forty-four years in the past, the air smelled unmistakably of cow dung. As the Alpha Machine fell motionless in his hands, he settled the pieces into the bag still slung on his shoulder.

  He fixed his gaze on the hangar, only to discover that it now had a twin. The identical structure, built at a perpendicular angle to its sibling, sat several hundred feet farther away. Winston didn’t know which hangar would contain his Grumman Duck, but he needed to find out before he froze to death. Using two Alpha Machine pieces and making a jump without Little e had indeed sapped much of his energy. He sensed a deep weariness that left him feeling more vulnerable than ever.

  Not surprisingly, the bicycle that had been lying at Winston’s feet had not made the time jump with him. He set out down Blimp Boulevard, glad that at least he didn’t have miles to hike.

  As the hangars drew closer, Winston watched a two-seater, single-prop plane approach from the north. It settled gradually lower over the plain until it cleared the fence and skidded onto a runway near the hangars.

  This wasn’t a museum, Winston realized, nor was it a U.S. Navy facility — otherwise, there would be much stronger fences and probably perimeter guards. Apparently, in 1969, the facility was a local airport. Of course. His dad wouldn’t have made him sneak into a military facility. That would have been begging to get captured. Apart from the one plane taxiing to a stop, nothing else moved on the airport grounds. This was a sleepy operation in the middle of nowhere, and that made it an ideal meeting place.