Mercury Shrugs

by Robert Kroese

  “Hey!” called a voice. “Who are you?” It was the voice of a teenage boy. His body was barely visible at the edge of the penumbra of light cast by the lanterns, but his blond hair shone in the dim light. There were obviously more people out there, judging by the sound, but only this one boy was within range of the lanterns. Odd.

  The three Mercurys, at a loss to explain what was happening, turned toward Balderhaz, who simply shrugged. “Don’t ask me,” said Balderhaz. “I’m a master of the occult secrets of the multiverse. People confuse the hell out of me.”

  “Are they campers?” asked Blue Mercury. “Hunters, maybe?”

  “What’s with the lights, though?” asked Green Mercury.

  “Are you sure you got the coordinates right?” asked Red Mercury.

  “Of course,” sniffed Balderhaz. “Four years in the past, exactly.”

  “I’m going to try talking to them,” said Green Mercury. “Balderhaz, get to work on that shard adapter. We need to be ready to leave if this goes south.” Balderhaz nodded and set to work.

  Green Mercury turned and walked to one of the lanterns, removed it from its pole, and held it out in front of him. He cleared his throat and said, “Is this planet Hooston?”

  The boy remained silent. The crowd murmured uncertainly in the dark beyond the lanterns.

  “Um, what?” said the boy after a moment.

  “I asked if this is planet Hooston,” said Green Mercury. “It’s a joke.”

  “Oh,” said Lucas. “I, um, don’t get it.”

  “Can’t you see the kid is like twelve?” said Blue Mercury, coming up next to him. “When Superman II came out, he wasn’t even...” He trailed off and the two exchanged glances. Then they said, in unison, “Wait, what’s the date?”

  “April 29,” replied Lucas.

  “The year!” cried Green Mercury. “Tell me the year!”

  “Um, 2013,” said Lucas.

  “Then it worked,” said Red Mercury.

  “That was the easy part,” said Green Mercury.

  “Why are you people on our land?” said Balderhaz.

  “It’s not ours yet,” said Green Mercury.

  “Get out of our yard!” yelled Balderhaz, ignoring him.

  “Balderhaz, can you please get to work?” said Green Mercury.

  Balderhaz grumbled something and went back to assembling the shard adapter.

  Green Mercury held the lantern out in front of him again, peering at the throng of people that was slowly beginning to gather around the plateau. “Say, what’s going on out here?” he said.

  “Some kind of campout?” asked Blue Mercury.

  “Um, it’s a kind of religious thing, I guess,” said the boy. “Supposed to be the end of the world. But I think it’s over now.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Red Mercury. “The big Apocalypse scare. I almost forgot.”

  “Where did you guys come from?” the boy asked.

  “Not where,” said Blue Mercury. “When.”

  “We’re from the future,” said Red Mercury. “But don’t worry, we don’t intend to stay long. This is just a pit stop.”

  “We’ll be out of your hair in a jiffy,” said Green Mercury. “And you can get back to your apocalyptic ritual. Although, spoiler alert: the world is still here four years from now.”

  “We can’t go on,” said a man who was approaching from behind the boy.

  “Sure you can,” said Green Mercury. “Seriously, we’ll be gone as soon as we get the shard adapter connected to the portal generator. Twenty minutes, max. Then you can get on with your primitive dumbfuckery. Not that I’m judging.”

  “You killed our leader,” said the man. “First Prophet Jonas Bitters. I’m his brother, Noah. Technically I’m Second Prophet, but he was entrusted with divine secrets to which I am not privy. We can’t continue the ceremony without him.”

  “Well,” said Red Mercury, “That sucks. Usually the portal generator will adjust its target location to avoid solid objects. The universe must have had it in for your leader.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Green Mercury said, “killing him was an accident. We honestly thought this whole area would be uninhabited.”

  “Who are you people?” demanded Noah Bitters.

  Green Mercury, still holding the lantern, walked to the edge of the plateau and stepped off. Gasps went up from the crowd, but Green Mercury floated gracefully to the ground, landing a few paces in front of the boy. The other two Mercurys stepped off a moment later, floating to the ground as well.

  “Behind me,” said Green Mercury, holding up the lantern, “is the famed inventor Balderhaz.”

  Balderhaz gave a wave from the plateau.

  “My name is Mercury,” Green Mercury went on. Then he moved the lantern in front of Blue Mercury, on his left, and said, “This is my friend Mercury.” He moved the lantern in front of Red Mercury, on his right, and said, “And this is my other friend Mercury.”

  The people in the crowd had begun to cautiously converge on the four men. They spoke amongst themselves in hushed tones, obviously in awe at the mysterious manifestation—and particularly at the three identical men with silver hair.

  “Is one of you Jesus?” shouted someone in the darkness, and from the encouraging murmurs that followed, it was clear that he wasn’t the only one wondering this.

  “It can’t be Jesus,” said someone else. “There are three of them, and they’re all the same!”

  “Demons!” cried a woman to their left. “False gods!”

  “No!” growled an older man near the front. He turned to face the crowd. “Don’t you people know your Bible? We are witnesses to the return of Jesus and the Prophets! He pulled a small, tattered book from his back pocket and took a moment to find a particular page. He cleared his throat and then read aloud:

  “After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.’ Then a cloud appeared and covered them, and a voice came from the cloud: ‘This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!’ Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus.”

  “It’s Jesus, Elijah and Moses!” a woman near him shrieked. “And…”

  “Balderhaz,” called Balderhaz, still working on the adapter.

  “It’s Jesus, Elijah, Moses and Balderhaz!” the woman cried. “Reverend Jonas was right after all! He sacrificed his own life so that Jesus could return!”

  Noah Bitters nodded, rubbing his chin. “The Transfiguration is said to be a foretaste of the Second Coming. Perhaps it is true.”

  “But which one is Jesus?” asked someone else.

  “Demons!” cried someone else. “False gods! Stone them!”

  The three Mercurys and Balderhaz traded glances, not certain whether it was better to try to communicate the truth or to push the Second Coming angle. These people were obviously predisposed to believe that something either very wonderful or very terrible was happening; it didn’t seem likely that they would be satisfied with the explanation that they were angels on a time traveling pit stop. This is why the scripture writers used metaphors and parables, Red Mercury thought. If anybody tried to explain the actual truth to such people, they’d never understand it. And really, was the Second Coming thing really so far off from the truth? They were, after all, a trinity of angels (plus Balderhaz) on a mission to save the world from Lucifer. If it kept these people happy long enough to allow Balderhaz to install the shard adapter on the portal, what was the harm?

  The murmuring in the crowd had intensified; as far as Red Mercury could tell, those assembled were evenly divided on whether the three Mercurys were prophets or demons. It didn’t se
em to occur to any of them to ask the newcomers themselves for clarification on the matter.

  “And look!” a man yelled from somewhere on their left. “They brought the Ark of the Covenant!” He was clearly referring to the portal generator. Excited murmurs and chatter followed.

  “Okay,” said Green Mercury, having evidently decided things had gone far enough. “This isn’t what it looks like. I’m not sure what it looks like exactly, but whatever it is, it isn’t that.”

  “I admit it’s an odd coincidence, us showing up like this,” added Blue Mercury, “and maybe there’s some kind of weird synchronicity involved, but trust me, we’re not what you’re waiting for.”

  “So you are demons!” yelled a woman near the front. This was followed by an assortment of gasps, boos, and chattering.

  “No,” said Green Mercury. “We’re not important. As disappointing as the fact may be, our arrival here has no particular significance. We just had to stop here on the way to somewhere else. We’ll be on our way shortly.”

  “Don’t leave us, Jesus!” cried a woman to their right, addressing Green Mercury.

  “What the hell?” said Red Mercury, turning to face Green Mercury. “Why do you get to be Jesus?”

  “I call Moses,” said Blue Mercury.

  “We’re not doing this,” said Red Mercury. “And Elijah’s Kung-Fu is more powerful than Moses’ anyway.”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Blue Mercury. “Moses parted the Red Sea.”

  “Elijah raised the dead,” said Red Mercury.

  “One time,” said Blue Mercury.

  “How many seas did Moses part?”

  “As many as he needed to. People died around Elijah all the time and he didn’t do shit.”

  “Demons!” shouted someone in the crowd. “They’re going to drag us all to hell! Don’t look at them!”

  “That’s actually a good idea,” said Green Mercury. “Everybody stop looking at us. Hey, what are you doing here?” He had just noticed Balderhaz had come up next to him.

  “Portal generator is ready,” said Balderhaz. “I’m just waiting for you guys to stop chattering.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Red Mercury.

  “Agreed,” said Green Mercury.

  “Well, it’s been fun,” said Blue Mercury, “but we need to be on our way.”

  “Don’t leave us, Jesus!” the woman called again.

  “Look,” said Green Mercury, “I’m not Jesus, and these guys aren’t Elijah and Moses.”

  “But if we were,” muttered Blue Mercury, “my Kung-Fu would be stronger.”

  “Can we just go?” said Red Mercury.

  “Yes,” said Green Mercury. “Let’s go.”

  The four of them floated back onto the plateau as the crowd continued to scream an unnerving combination of supplication, adoration, and malediction. As they walked back to the portal generator, they saw a middle-aged woman scampering away down the slope of the plateau.

  “Hey!” Red Mercury shouted. “What are you doing?” But the woman disappeared into the darkness without a sound. The woman seemed strangely familiar, he thought. He wondered if the others had noticed the same thing. She looked almost like—

  “Okay, let’s see what this baby can do!” Balderhaz hollered. He began tapping away at the keyboard. While the crowd continued to yell and murmur below, the portal flickered to life in front of them.

  “Caveman times, here we come!” yelled Blue Mercury. But as he stepped toward the portal, the edges of the ellipse began to blur and expand outward.

  “Um, Balderhaz,” said Red Mercury. “What’s going on?”

  The ellipse continued to grow, inching closer to their feet.

  “The portal’s unfocused,” said Balderhaz. “That should be impossible. I know I installed the—”

  “I got a relic!” cried a woman’s voice in the dim light below. “From the Ark of the Covenant!”

  Looking down, they saw it was the woman who had been near the portal generator a moment earlier. She was holding a small, cylindrical part in her hand.

  “Uh-oh,” said Balderhaz.

  “That bitch stole a part!” cried Red Mercury.

  “The focusing reticule,” said Balderhaz. “This could be interesting.”

  “Does she look familiar to you?” asked Blue Mercury. “Because I swear, if I didn’t know better—”

  But before he could finish the thought, the portal’s edge reached their feet. In a blink of an eye, they were gone.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Somewhere in North Africa; c. 5,000 B.C.

  The three Mercurys, along with Balderhaz, found themselves on a familiar African plain—familiar except for the glaring absence of the massive domed structure of Eden II. Assembled in a rough semicircle around them were several hundred people, who were standing around, blinking in the sunlight, speechless or whispering quietly in awe. The young blond kid was still standing at the head of the crowd, in relatively the same place he had been when they had disappeared, but Noah Bitters was nowhere to be found.

  The Mercurys stared at the assembled masses in disbelief.

  “Um, Balderhaz,” said Red Mercury. “When are we?”

  “Seven thousand years ago,” said Balderhaz. “Give or take. The miracle detector is still orienting itself.”

  “I thought we were going back to the present day first,” said Blue Mercury.

  “That was the plan,” said Green Mercury. “We were supposed to get the other portal generator and bring it back with us.”

  “Oh,” said Balderhaz. “Whoops. Those people distracted me.”

  “Yeah, about that,” said Blue Mercury. “We seem to have taken those people with us.”

  Balderhaz looked around, as if noticing the cultists for the first time. “Huh,” he said. “Unfocused portal.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Blue Mercury. “We’ve transported a bunch of crazy people back in time.”

  “And we have no way to return them to the present,” said Green Mercury.

  The other two Mercurys nodded as they realized what he was saying: there was no portal in sight. It must have closed after they went through.

  “The portal generator probably overheated,” said Balderhaz. “Without a focusing reticule, the energy surge would have overwhelmed the capacitor. That thing is probably just a heap of melted metal and plastic. Or will be, in seven thousand years.”

  “So we’re stuck here,” said Blue Mercury. “With all these nuts. Fantastic.”

  “Do these people look familiar to you?” asked Green Mercury.

  “You mean other than that chick who sabotaged our portal generator?” said Blue Mercury. “She was the spitting image of Tiamat. Where is she, anyway? Did she get sucked back in time with the rest of them?”

  “I don’t see her,” said Green Mercury. “But check out that girl in the front.” He was pointing to a brown-skinned teenager with long, curly black hair. There weren’t many children in the crowd, but a small group of them had gathered around the brown-skinned girl, as if instinctively turning to her for safety. Several of the children, obviously frightened by their trip through the portal, had begun to cry, and the girl was methodically, authoritatively reassuring them.

  “Okay, now that’s just weird,” said Blue Mercury.

  “It’s her, right?” said Green Mercury. “I’m not imagining it.”

  “It’s Michelle,” said Red Mercury. “It has to be.”

  “And that guy, over here,” said Green Mercury, pointing at a balding man to their left. “Isn’t that Uzziel?”

  “Holy crap,” said Blue Mercury. “It is. And there’s what’s-his-name. The dim one. Nisroc.”

  “What the hell is going on?” asked Red Mercury. “Why do so many of these people look like angels?”

  They stood for a moment, regarding the baffled congregants. The immediate shock of being transported through a mystical portal seemed to have given way to a general confusion. A few people seemed to be tr
ying to determine where they were, but many more were looking around in puzzlement as if they had lost someone. After a moment, it became clear that the entire crowd hadn’t been sucked through the portal. Noah Bitters, for one, seemed to have been left behind. He had been standing right next to the blond kid, and now he was gone. Those who had been closer to the portal generator seemed to have been more likely to be sucked through; the crowd grew progressively sparser as distance from the epicenter increased. Those who had come through were mostly men—had the portal generator discriminated? No, thought Red Mercury. More likely it was the result of attempts to get the women and children away from the rift that had torn their leader apart.

  “Uh-oh,” said Balderhaz again.

  “Now what?” asked Green Mercury. “What else could possibly go wrong?”

  They turned to see Balderhaz staring at the miracle detector. “The energy signature is off,” Balderhaz said. “Losing focus on the portal must have drained some of the energy. We didn’t go back as far as we were supposed to.”

  “So when are we?” asked Red Mercury. “Did we beat Lucifer here or not?”

  “The amount of available interplanar energy gradually decreases over time,” said Balderhaz. “It’s known as the Balderhaz coefficient. By calculating the Balderhaz coefficient, I can pinpoint exactly when we are.” He closed his eyes and moved his mouth silently for several seconds while they waited. “Well,” he said, “we beat Lucifer.”

  “Great!” said Blue Mercury. “How long until he arrives?” asked Blue Mercury.

  “As near as I can figure,” said Balderhaz, “about an hour.”

  “You have to be shitting me,” said Green Mercury.

  Balderhaz shrugged. “At least we beat him here.”

  “What are we supposed to do in an hour?” asked Blue Mercury.

  “What were we going to do in four years?” asked Red Mercury.

  “Warn the other angels,” said Green Mercury. “Get them prepared.”