Implant

by J. Grace Pennington

  He ate as Neil talked.

  “I can understand your fear, Gordon. Honestly. But you have to understand how much we need you.”

  Gordon gulped down a too-hot spoonful and choked a little. “Why me?”

  Neil smiled a little, and just said, “You’ve seen the Academy for yourself now. What did you think?”

  “Um… big? Kind of dirty?” He spooned more soup into his mouth and gulped it down. “Just how do you expect me to destroy it…?”

  Neil rested both elbows on the table and leaned forward, his large, round eyes fixed seriously on Gordon’s. “This plan isn’t commonly known. Doc and I and maybe six or seven others know about it. We’d like to keep it that way.”

  Gordon nodded.

  “What I’m working on is a firing sequence and a rigged detonator to set it off. We’ve been smuggling explosives into the base for weeks—just a tiny bit here and there so you can set off a chain reaction when the time comes. But the final step is to get something into the Control Center itself—and we need someone without an Implant for that. Doc knows how you can get up to the door without being seen. From inside there, you can set up the firing sequence, then detonate it from outside the building and escape. Once the center is destroyed, the Implants will still function, but the detonators won’t. We still won’t be able to remove them, but we should be safe.”

  Gordon chewed and swallowed as he thought about this. Then, “You said up to the door…?”

  “Exactly. Therein lies our one problem.”

  Neil didn’t go on, so Gordon prodded him. “What’s that?”

  “We can’t get in! There’s an entry code, and the only people who know it are the Head and Dagny Dalton.”

  Gordon frowned. “But… I thought the only people allowed to see the Head were Dagny Dalton and Doc.”

  “True,” Neil nodded. “Doc is allowed in, but he’s not allowed to have the code.”

  Gordon narrowed his eyes. “That’s what he says?”

  Neil didn’t miss the implication. He shrugged. “He hasn’t steered us wrong yet, however unfeeling he may be.” He stood, pushing his chair back, but Gordon hurried to speak again.

  “You said you couldn’t send me back for a week even if you wanted to. Why not?”

  “Time travel isn’t simple, Gordon,” he smiled. Looking at him from this angle, Gordon could see the dark circles under his eyes more clearly. “I have no power to send you back, because—it’s hard to explain to a layman, and as Doc will tell you in no uncertain terms, I’m not the best at explaining. But essentially, I’ve bent time back on itself. The loop will last a week to the nanosecond, and then it unbends and you end up right where you started. I know it’s confusing…”

  Gordon stared blankly.

  Neil sighed. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time. I have to get back to work.” He turned, pushed his chair back in, and left.

  Gordon continued sitting for a few minutes, though he was finished eating. His stomach, comfortably full, still had an empty pocket in it somewhere, a bubble of unrest.

  What would happen if he died here? Would he drop dead in the Academy waiting room the moment he went back?

  Or—had Neil and Doc known he would die soon back in his time, and had chosen him for that reason? If he would be dead soon anyway, his new experience and possible death couldn’t change their history in any dangerous ways. Every time-travel film he’d seen had been very concerned with paradoxes. Make a wrong move in history, and you could wipe yourself or someone else from existence very easily.

  “Finished?”

  He looked up to see Doc standing over him, arms crossed, waiting.

  “Yes.” He scrambled up, tossing a grateful look at the middle-aged woman clearing the table, and followed Doc out of the emptying tent.

  “Did you take care of the patient?” he asked.

  “Patient? Oh… yes.” One corner of Doc’s mouth turned up very slightly. “I suppose Neil told you about that.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s no secret. He might as well just have said he needed to see me.”

  “So there’s nothing really wrong with him?”

  “Not a thing but big-headedness.”

  Gordon hesitated before asking his next question. “What did you tell him?”

  “Lies,” Doc answered. “Told him we’d buried you, of course. That was the main thing he was asking about. I gave him some garbage about lack of food and fighting among the rebels, and one little gem about how Neil Crater was working on a bomb that can be dropped through a force-field.” He laughed.

  So he says. “Doesn’t anyone ever watch you to make sure you’re not really giving good information?”

  Doc didn’t appear offended. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Neil doesn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “For one thing, he was at lunch with you.”

  He didn’t offer anything else, and Gordon knew this was true, so he said nothing for the rest of the walk.

  “Cough better?” Doc stopped to ask a fifty-something man with dark bags under his eyes.

  “Yes,” the man muttered, not meeting Doc’s quiet gaze. “How was your friend from the Academy?”

  “You mean my patient?” Doc said, looking steadily at the man’s face.

  “You can say whatever you want about it.”

  “True. I guess that’s my business, isn’t it?”

  The man turned and walked away. Gordon looked at Doc, waiting for comment, but none came. Doc just led him quietly back to the lab.

  They found Neil bending over the detonator again, alone in the room now. This time, he stood immediately and faced them.

  “Not here, Doc,” he said. “We can show Gordon to his room and talk there.”

  Doc nodded, and they started off, neither of them asking Gordon to follow. He hesitated, then hurried to catch up to them, wondering if Neil would ask Doc what he’d said to the goon. But they didn’t speak to each other at all during the walk to the eastern side of the base.

  They entered a section Gordon hadn’t yet seen. The main building looked like half a hotel; three stories high, with the roof and part of one side missing. It had been rebuilt with simple wooden planks, as had several smaller buildings in the vicinity.

  The men led him in, and Gordon looked around as he walked, taking in every detail. The lobby, instead of being filled with luxurious furniture, gift shops, or any of the things Gordon was used to seeing, contained crates full of machinery, food, weapons, and other supplies piled against each wall. Two men, a woman and a young boy were busy sorting yet more of the equipment littering the soft, floral carpet.

  Neil stopped to greet them and ask how the work was going, and they answered readily. Gordon watched their eyes widen with awe and admiration for their leader, but when Doc nodded at them, they just glanced at each other, and went back to work.

  Without commenting on this, the two men led Gordon into a normal-looking elevator.

  Normal-looking on the outside, at least. The inside was a different story. The whole button panel had been removed, and a system of wires lay bare, all connected to a large lever screwed to the wall.

  Neil pulled the lever to the middle notch, and the elevator jerked up slowly.

  Gordon stared at the apparatus, and Neil chuckled. “We’ve had to rig our own system for just about everything. Our power system is a combination of solar and atomic energy, effective, but not very…”

  “Neil, the kid’s not a scientist. Leave him alone.”

  Neil jerked his head towards Doc. “If he wants me to stop explaining, he can ask me himself.”

  “You know very well that nobody but me dares to tell you anything.”

  Neil’s pale face flushed, and the redness made his bug-eyes look even bigger. “That’s not true! What are you trying to say?”

  “Nothing, except that you’re a spoiled technoblab.”

  “Oh is that all?” Neil took a step closer to Doc. “And I suppose you’re a pe
rfect specimen of humanity yourself?”

  “Closer than some.”

  “I have more than half a mind to confine you to the cells!” Neil stiffened until he was perfectly erect, his entire body aligned to an invisible vertical standard.

  “Go ahead. I’d like to see you run the show without me.”

  Neil clenched both his fists. “I’d like to try it!”

  The elevator groaned to a stop, and Gordon shifted towards the exit, heartbeat slightly accelerated. The men ignored him.

  “All right then, I’ll just pack up and take myself back to the Academy. I’m sure you can manage the boy and everything else just fine without me.”

  Neil swore, and jammed his thumb onto a white button beside the lever. The door slid open, and Gordon was only too glad to step out, stumbling over his shoelaces in his eagerness to do so.

  “This way,” Neil snapped, and led him down a hall to the left.

  This hallway, also softly carpeted, featured the hot smell of dust and mildew. Gordon wrinkled his nose. Doc followed them as they made their way to a room at the end of the hall. There was a slot on the door for a card key, but above it had been rigged a large, discolored padlock. Neil pulled a key from his pocket, then turned it in the rusty lock. He swung the door open and walked in, and Gordon followed.

  The room looked so much like every other hotel room he’d seen, it threw him off. There were a couple of holes in the sheetrock that had been filled in, and the bedding and furnishings were slightly faded, but it still looked untouched by current events compared to everything else he’d seen. Nightstand, bed, bathroom—even the radiator under the window and the vague watercolors on the wall.

  “I don’t have an extra key with me,” Neil apologized, “but I’ll get one for you tonight.”

  Doc spoke up from the doorway. “Don’t we have things to discuss with him?”

  Without answering directly, Neil turned to Gordon. “I told you the basics of what you’ll be doing… was that clear, as far as it went?”

  Gordon nodded, and swallowed. The bubble returned to his gut again, but he tried to ignore it and focus on the steady tone of Neil’s voice.

  “Tomorrow morning, Doc is going to take you out to the Academy and show you how you’ll be getting in once we have the code.”

  “All right.”

  “We managed to obtain a disguise for you,” Neil went on. “But you’ll still have to be extra careful. There are a few people who’ll be able to recognize you from your… well…”

  “Your brainless, irresponsible caper,” Doc finished bluntly. Neil didn’t even argue.

  Gordon bit his lip. “I’ll watch out,” he promised.

  Something on Neil’s belt beeped, and he pulled out a large walkie-talkie. “Neil Crater here.”

  “Electron microscope in the lab is malfunctioning. We need to fix it or shift the schedule around.”

  “Be right there.” He clipped the radio back again, and turned to Doc. “You’d better come along.”

  Doc nodded, and they hurried back down the hall. Neil called back over his shoulder, “I’ll meet you at dinner.”

  After the sounds of first their footsteps and then the elevator died away, Gordon stood in the silence in the middle of the room for a moment.

  It was so familiar. So normal.

  He could almost forget the Implants, the rebel base, the force-field, Dagny Dalton—all of it.

  Almost.

  He walked to the bed and sat on the edge of it, savoring the way his body sank into the mattress. Then he fell back, and just stared at the textured white ceiling.

  He closed his eyes, and stopped thinking.

  When he opened them again, he couldn’t tell whether he’d been asleep, but his stomach rumbled, indicating a greater passage of time than he’d thought. Heaving a sigh, he forced himself to get up and go back to the elevator.

  Finding an empty space where the elevator should have been, he spotted a large red button on the wall and pushed it, hoping that would bring it back. A subsequent rumble and drawn-out creaking affirmed his efforts. When it reached him, he stepped in. He timidly gripped the lever and pulled it down, and with a jolt, the elevator moved towards the ground level again.

  The people from the lobby were gone when he reached it. He wandered out into the alley, trying to remember how to get to the mess hall.

  The streets were empty, aside from one man who passed him on the hard dirt path. Everyone else must be in the mess hall already. He’d better not keep Neil waiting.

  He looked up toward the top of the dome and found the highest point, then headed in that direction. That should lead him to the center of the base, or close enough to find the tent, at least.

  As he walked, the ground darkened around him for an instant, startling him. It lightened again as a shadow moved past him, then stopped a few feet away. A low hum shook the air, and Gordon looked up towards the sound.

  Above the dome hovered a black drone; Gordon couldn’t tell how big. There was something hanging from it; a white, rectangular, shoebox-sized object. The object was lowered, very slowly, through the barrier, and dropped. The drone shot away.

  As the object fell, Gordon’s thoughts raced to conclusions before it thumped to the ground three feet away from him. The sound it made verified his fears.

  It was ticking.

  He darted to it and grasped the strangely skin-like surface, then ran. The ticking sped up rapidly, no doubt designed not to give anyone time to get to it. That’s why they’d dropped it while everyone was in the mess hall.

  His heart kept pace with the wild ticking as he pumped his legs faster. With every step it grew warmer against his palms, and it shook, but he didn’t know whether to blame his hands or his vision. He just had to run, get it outside the shield—

  There was the force-field. Just twenty feet away. It was ticking so fast it was almost one continuous sound. He was out of time. He’d have to throw it.

  Summoning the last dregs of strength to his arms, he threw it with all his might towards the sparkling blue, but the instant the hot surface left his hands a wave of panic jolted through him. “No!”

  He couldn’t throw it! It would just bounce back!

  He watched it sail through the air in slow motion, towards the blue shield. It stopped beeping when it was ten feet away, and burst open. Smoke and flames shot out in vibrating slow motion.

  “Gordon!” he heard Neil shout.

  He gritted his teeth as the explosion hit the field and bounced off of it.

  The slow motion effect stopped, and waves of heat and pressure licked towards him. He turned and ran, but flames reached his back. He screamed as he felt the heat intensify on his skin, then a spasm of energy threw him to the ground.

  The last thing he felt was big hands under his armpits jerking him up.

  Chapter Five

  Pain. He was in pain, but something told him it was not as much pain as it should be. His legs ached, his head throbbed, and dull waves of pain moved over his back in a circle.

  Warm air brushed against his bare chest, slowly fanning him into consciousness.

  The hard cot again. In the medical tent. Why had they bothered to get him a hotel room?

  Neil’s voice droned on nearby, but he was too groggy to make out the words. Something about building—working—computers—

  The words came into focus. “…analyzing the missile now. It seems to be wrapped in some kind of organic material that kept our sensors from locating it. Is it a prototype, or…?”

  “I told you I don’t know,” Doc’s voice insisted. “Looks like they’re keeping me out of the loop.”

  “You think? This would be a huge project!”

  Doc grunted. The familiar pressing of fingers on Gordon’s neck followed.

  “Open your eyes,” Doc ordered. “It’s not nice to eavesdrop.”

  How could Doc tell when he was awake? “I’m trying,” he murmured. His eyelids were heavy, but he forced them open, a little
at a time, until he could see the tent clearly.

  “Next time try harder,” Doc growled.

  Gordon tried flexing his shoulders to push himself up, but found the throbbing pain across his back increased that way. “How much damage?” he asked.

  “To you, or to the base?” Neil smiled.

  “Both…?”

  “I’ll let Doc explain about you, but as for the base, one building was destroyed. There was minor damage to the surrounding structures, but nothing serious. Two men working in the building were killed. There was some construction equipment I would rather not have lost—and of course I’d rather not have lost the men.” He sighed, shoulders sagging, and Gordon envisioned the invisible weight of command resting on him. “But it was nothing compared to what would have happened.”

  Gordon knew this to be true, but remorse still twisted his gut and sent shivers over his skin, triggering the pain again. If he’d managed to run just a little faster, if he’d just carried the thing out instead of throwing it like an idiot, there would have been no damage at all.

  Doc reached down and gripped his shoulder with a force that made him wince. “Stop blaming yourself, kid. That was one of the best things you did in your life, and there was nothing else you could have done. Got it?”

  Gordon nodded, but felt no different. “What about me?” he asked.

  Doc let his shoulder go. “Second degree burns on your back, with a couple spots of third degree, mild concussion, and some general jarring. I’ve taken care of the burns, they’ll be all right by morning. The rest will take care of itself.”

  Gordon opened his mouth to ask how Doc had treated the burns, but decided he didn’t care. Instead, he asked, “Am I still going to the Academy tomorrow?”

  “Of course! I just said you’ll be all right. But I want you in the jeep at eight, whether you are or not.”

  Gordon nodded and closed his eyes, too weary to protest or inquire further. Most of the cigarette smell left with Doc’s heavy footsteps. Neil just said “Thank you, Gordon. Get some sleep,” and left.