He took the cigar out of his mouth and examined it. “An’ another difference between you and me: I don’t hide behind some clay pigeon Chief and act like he runs the whole show and not me, shadow puppetin’ him alls the time. That’s what losers do. Winners run their own show.” He hooked his thumb at the Chief. “I had one of them when I started my first day in my Agency. Next day I was Chief and Jersey had some new landfill.”
He stubbed out the cigar and started reaching under his jacket. “I figger your Jersey could use more landfill, too.” He looked at the Chief, then looked at me. “Maybe even a double donation. See, I figger if I were you and you are, I’d be a bit too dangerous to leave around as a loose end, even shot full of ‘Or Elses.’ Your versions of Lenny and Guido outside were more than happy to agree to take over this chicken feed operation and run it for me once I told them I’d firmly ensconce you in a Jersey dirt mattress.”
I tried struggling against my bonds, but the other me just laughed.
“Jitterbug all you want,” he gloated. “I dialed up a special trank just for you and your augments.” That’s when I noticed that on the Chief’s desk, along with my gat he’s got a manila folder with my Agency files open in front of him on the desk. He’d countered them all with that special trank. No wonder I felt weak as a kitten.
He made a big show of looking at his watch.
“Time’s up,” he laughed.
His hand pulled his gat all the way out of his jacket. It looked exactly like mine only the trigger was a lot more worn, which didn’t cheer me up none. This guy meant business.
“Too bad youse was so small-time and never learned to work wholesale. You coulda been where I’m sittin’.” He cocked back the hammer. “Arrivederci, loser.”
Maizie picked that exact moment to burst into her daddy’s office, bless her heart, crying all the way through the door about what a jerk I’d been. The other me took his eyes off me to take in the US Navy for just a second, but a second was all I needed.
Didn’t I say she was the best Distracter in the business?
I fired up my special augments, the ones neither my file nor that other me knew I had, the ones that weren’t completely tranked. I burst those heavy ropes holding me like they wasn’t nothing but tissue paper in a flophouse outhouse and leapt across the room before the other me could swivel his eyes back my direction.
Mid-leap I snatch up my gat and take care of him quick like. And by take care, I don’t mean none of that sissy nano nonsense neither. I mean the Valentine’s Day in Chicago kind of take care.
Maizie was a little slow on the uptake, her having only Agency augments and all. “What—?” she seymoured. “Who—?”
Then she saw the rictused face of the other me bleedin’ all over the carpet. “Say, Vince, honey. He looks like you!” She peered closer. “He is a you!”
“Naw,” I said, holstering my gat. “Just some loser wearing my face. I ain’t never been a loser, have I?” I kicked the nearest foot of the dead carcass. “An’ in answer to your previous question, I still ain’t never met another me, present corpse included.”
That’s when Maize saw her father. “Oh, Daddy,” she scolded, “You got beaten up and captured again!” She wet the tip of her hanky with her tongue and started dabbing at his bruises.
She gave me the fish eye. “Vince, honey, it don’t seem right you letting daddy take your Chief lumps all the time. He don’t know nuttin’ about being no Chief. He needs to be down in Florida playing bingo and the ponies.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled like I was listenin’ to her yammerings.
I kicked the expensive Italian shoe on my double again, stared at it for a minute, then started to laugh.
Maizie looked up from fussing with her father and glared. “Something funny wit’ the way I talk or something?”
“Naw, Maizie,” I said, smiling. “Just suddenly waxin’ philosophical on the job. Think it’s time to maybe start getting the pepto about who’s president and such like.”
***
It was my forty-fourth collar this month, and my last.
My last ever, I mean.
I had eased the Chief into retirement. It wasn’t right to keep using him as a clay duck, and besides, I had to give up field work. Things were too busy with our new business model for me to play agent anymore. Only reason I was on this last collar was to run this trainee through an easy case to show him how it’s done.
That other me had been right, the sonuvagun. I’d been chasing chicken feed with my agency instead of following the money.
The big money.
Maizie wasn’t doing field work, neither. She was busy, too, knitting little booties for Vincent Junior and the stork. She yammers at home as much as I thought she would, but since a) being the Chief now, I can do something about that if I want to, and b) I kinda realized I’d gotten used to it. Go figure.
Anyways that’s beside the point. It’s my last collar, see, and I’m sitting in the Oval Office and the chump I got sitting tranked is behind the Resolute Desk— only here it’s the Redoubtable Desk—and he’s giving me the pepto.
He was doing the same drowning fish act as Seymour. At least this chump wasn’t so beige.
New presidents just sworn in, see, they’re easy collars on accounts of them always having the pepto up about Their Place In The History Books. Plus, this particular chump was from Chicago, so he oughta know how the rules go down.
Instead, he was arguing like a professor and trying to welch out on forking over his Initial Membership Fee—and him with the confetti from his inauguration still in his hair yet.
“—but I can’t just hand over one-point-six trillion dollars to you. The public—”
“The public don’t signify,” I said. “‘Specially not if they get their own cut of the action. Like I showed you, we got it all worked out for you.”
I hooked a thumb at the holographic display I’d showed him of dozens of other timelines under our new business model.
He didn’t doubt what I’d showed him was real, not with every Secret Service agent in the joint floating midair, time-froze in a glittery glob of chronoflux. He just didn’t like being on the receiving end of the Chicago Way was all.
I sighed and went through it again, tryin’ to remember them elocution lessons Maizie made me take so I sounded more Chief-like. “Look, you dress it up as a ‘Stimulus Package.’ Dribs and drabs here, dribs and drabs there. Make it hard to track down where it all went: like pork for non-existent Congressional Districts; overseas loans ta China maybe; phoney-baloney companies that don’t actually make nothin’—solar power maybe. Nobody knows nuthin’, nobody can trace nuthin’, nobody squawks nuthin’. Just follow the script like we wrote down for you.”
“But fifteen percent of federal outlays on top of that—!”
“Who cares? Not like it’s your money, right? Don’t go waxin’ philosophical on the job. It ain’t healthy.”
I don’t know from philosophical, but he started to wax all petulant and glowery.
I don’t let chumps give me the fish eye, so I lowered the boom. Showed him with the holo what we could really do if he didn’t play ball, showed him how we could easily change things up if we was a mind to so that what’s-her-name wins his election instead.
That did the trick, you betchum. The Baked Alaska look on his face was priceless.
He reached for the pen.
“After all, Mr. President,” I said, as my trainee scooped up the signed contract. “Nice presidency youse got here. Be a real shame if anythin’ wuz to happen to it…”
Introduction to “The Highlight of a Life”
Jeffrey A. Ballard calls himself a nomadic Yankee who currently lives in the Texas Hill Country. His seven-month-old daughter inspired “The Highlight of a Life.”
“The idea of balancing careers and family had been heavy on my mind,” he writes. “Time travel opens up so many possibilities and in this case, it opened up the possibility of exploring the consequ
ences of that balancing, of choosing one over the other. Time travel also opened up the wonderful possibility of a second chance.”
This heartwarming tale marks Jeffrey’s very first sale.
The Highlight of a Life
Jeffrey A. Ballard
“Reuben, have a seat,” Dr. Anthony Landau said. The Director’s tone was at odds with the warm sitting area that contained an aged oak table and padded benches.
“Thank you.” Dr. Reuben Rutherford sat and waited for the Director to finish whatever email correspondence he was working on. The sight of the six-foot-one Director standing at his workstation made Reuben’s back ache. Standing while working was the latest fad, a younger man’s game that Reuben had no interest in. The Director even still had all his hair, though there were just the beginnings of speckles of gray dotted throughout his tightly cropped brown hair and well-maintained mustache.
“No, cellphone?” the Director asked.
A chill went through Reuben. No cellphone meant going classified, which could only mean one project. How much does he already know? he wondered. “No, sir.” What’s done is done. There’s no going back now.
The Director clicked a mouse key with finality then turned around and hit some type of switch Reuben couldn’t see. Plastic shades made of some meta-material and coated with acoustic dampening foam descended down over the windows, cutting off the view—Chicago’s Washington Park—a sea of green covered in patches of white and gray snow in an endless urban sprawl.
“No electronic devices of any kind, right?” The Director sat down across from Reuben.
“No, sir.”
“Good.” The Director seemed to hesitate, but then came to a decision. “Your wife, uh, will not be able to reach you during this period. That switch was a communication kill switch for this office, including an electronic jammer.”
Reuben leaned back in surprise. Jammers were illegal by the FCC. No signals could go out, but neither could they come in. If his wife tried to get a hold of him through the Director, someone would have to physically knock on the door and the Director invariably told his secretary not to be disturbed. “Is it really that bad?”
The Director nodded. “The Chinese are relentless in trying to penetrate this lab. I swear they try to steal everything that isn’t nailed down.” His tone changed to concern, “No word yet from your wife?”
The question was genuine. This more than anything is why Reuben was loyal to the Director. He cared. Not only about the projects and health of the lab, but the people. “No, sir. We’ve been on the adoption waiting list for a few years now, but received a call last week that it could be any day.”
“I remember.”
“Kayla needs a playmate.” Reuben broke into a large smile. “Rambunctious little girl. We’d really wanted another child here soon, so they could be close in age.” His voice fell. “But it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.”
“I’m sorry, Reuben,” the Director said softly. “Please let me know if there’s anything we can do to help.” He took a deep breath and continued, a tone of command slipping into his voice, “Reuben, I need to know what’s going on with Project Itho.”
“Yes, sir.” The name Itho was meaningless, a random name chosen to confuse anyone who might learn of it. Its very name was a top-secret code word. “You remember the briefing?”
“Multiverse, yes. I’ll confess though, Charlie’s slides filled with equations left something to be desired.”
Reuben chuckled. “Yes, sir. I can agree with that. But that’s Charlie, it’s easier to communicate with him in equations than words.” The smell of dry erase markers hit Reuben hard at that moment. The thought of standing in Charlie’s office in front of a white board as fresh as if he just came from there. “It’s actually not all that hard to understand conceptually. Remember manifolds?”
The Director nodded. “Yeah. The earth appears as a flat two-dimensional manifold to a person on its surface, but it’s actually a sphere in three-dimensional space.”
“Exactly, our universe is a four-dimensional manifold in an eleven-dimensional space.”
The Director rolled his eyes. “Why couldn’t Charlie just lead off with that?”
“It gets even easier, sir.” Reuben found himself enjoying the explanation. “Think of a newspaper. Each page is a two-dimensional manifold in a three dimensional space. But they’re all stacked on top of one another. That’s like the multiverse. And just like if you punch a hole through one page, you can peer through the hole to read the next, we can punch a hole in our universe and look into another.”
“Or travel.”
Reuben gulped. He wasn’t enjoying himself anymore. “Yes, sir. Or travel.”
“And nothing has been sent back? No data, nothing.”
“No, sir.”
“Where’s Charlie?”
He knows. “Uh— Sir?” he faltered.
“When did you do it?”
Reuben considered lying. But the Director was a good man, a man he admired even though he was twelve years his junior. He looked at his watch. “Twenty-three minutes ago.”
The Director shot out of his chair and started pacing. Anger, wonder, frustration, worry all passed over the Director’s face. He didn’t respond for several minutes as he worked through the implications of sending Charlie to another universe, as he considered the very likely scenario that Charlie was dead, since there was no evidence the device had ever even worked.
The Director remained standing and asked a wholly unexpected question, “Why Charlie?”
“Sir?”
“There’s four of you on the project. Why Charlie?”
Any of them could have gone. The idea was to send someone through that could then build a communication device to send information back through. Once that was done they could come back themselves.
Reuben couldn’t look the Director in the eye. “Charlie was a widower with no next of kin. The closest thing he had to family was an orphaned niece who died of a drug overdose several years ago. And he didn’t even learn of that until several months after it happened. He was never the same again after that.”
“That’s when he had his incident and I had to put him on administrative leave, right?”
“Yes, sir. He never talked about his niece. All I ever got from him was that she was in foster care and that he felt responsible for leaving her there. I tried talking to him about it but ... all he ever said was his hubris killed her. Up to that point, the project had been his whole life. It was all he ever talked about, the highlight of his life he called it. It wasn’t until we jokingly talked about sending someone through that he reengaged. He volunteered, and since he had no ties ... we agreed.”
“Do you realize the position you’re putting me in? If the Dean catches wind of this—”
Pounding on the office door cut him off, followed by indistinguishable muffled yelling.
The Director strode over to the door and opened it.
Dr. Jason Heyse, a researcher in his mid-thirties, stood there panting. “Reuben—” He glanced about the office and saw the shades down. “Anthony, you’ve got to see this.”
***
“Ma’am, please, remain calm.” Charlie approached an older woman sitting on a bench enjoying the summer sun, in Chicago’s Jackson Park. “I need some help.”
She turned at the inquiry and said nothing for a moment as she clearly processed what she saw. A naked man in his sixties, covered in white hair, cupped his crotch and was slowly approaching. She got up and started to back away.
“Ma’am, please—”
“Stay back!”
“Ma’am—”
“Don’t. Move.”
Charlie didn’t listen.
“Help! Rape! Rape!” She started screaming in a high pitch that rattled around in Charlie’s head.
Charlie sat down on the vacated bench and tried to tune her out. It hadn’t gone as he hoped, but figured the end result of this would be suitable for his needs.
He was silently thankful it was summer here, the warm sun rested on his shoulders and a light breeze from the lake kept it from burning. Charlie used the intervening time to when the police showed up to enjoy the nice weather and to think of a strategy.
About fifteen minutes later Charlie estimated, two policemen approached him. The older and more senior one was smaller with broad shoulders and kept his brown hair short and parted down the side—a gentleman, Charlie thought. The younger one’s mullet spilled out over the top of his collar, and its spindly nature matched his lanky arms and legs reminding Charlie of a greasy spider.
The older one led with, “How we doin’ Ace?”
“I am doing quite well, thank you. But I do seem to be missing some clothes.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” the younger one said.
The older one raised a hand at the younger one. “Allens, cool it. Where are your clothes?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long you been out here?”
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What do you know?” the younger one asked.
“Not to approach a woman for help in the park when you happen to be inexplicably naked.”
The older one smiled. “What’s your name, Ace?”
“I’m guessing I’m not famous and it’s Ace is it?”
“Not likely. Do you have anyone we can call?”
“Not that I know of. I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s all right. Allens, go call it in. Send an ambulance out and have dispatch check to see if any elderly men were reported missing.”
Allens walked a little bit away and talked into a rather large walkie-talkie, “I got a freakin’ naked, elderly space cadet here.”
The older one rolled his eyes. “Allens! We talked about this.”
Allens flushed and walked off before Charlie could hear the garbled response.
“Sorry about him. Young officers. They all seem to think they have to swear constantly to be a cop. I’m Sergeant Beckett.”
Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Page 12
