by Mack Maloney
Gordon stopped there for a moment. The President rarely showed emotion; it was his best political trait. He barely blinked when Gordon dropped the ET bombshell. Gordon plowed on.
"These gentlemen have been able to work a piece of unknown technology that had stymied us for years. And what I'm afraid I must report to you, sir, as a result of this, we have some information that is rather frightening to contemplate."
The President finally blinked. He knew Gordon fairly well. The CIA man was not one to speak foolishly.
"Mr. President, if what we have learned today proves to be true by any stretch of the imagination, then the people of this planet, as well as people who might be living on other planets in this solar system, have been the victims of a great injustice. An injustice of enormous, monumental proportions."
The President didn't move. "I wasn't aware that there were any other worlds out there," he said dryly. "I learned in grade school that our planet was the only one—"
"Sir, that is the prevalent opinion only because no one has ever bothered to invent something that could actually look for other things up there," Gordon said sharply. Then, curiously, he added, "Much beyond the moon, that is."
The remark went right over the President's head, so Gordon just kept on talking.
"Mr. President, as crazy as it sounds, there is a chance that we are prisoners in our own solar system. We are living in a concentration camp of sorts. We were sent here, thousands of years ago, by persons unknown. We have been kept here, and intentionally delayed in our cultural development, by these same jail keepers."
The President cleared his throat. Gordon is looking a little pale these days, he thought. He is one of our oldest civil servants. Maybe old Gordo has finally flipped his wig.
"Well, this is all very interesting stuff, Steve," the President finally replied, "but do you have any… ah, proof!"
Gordon saw the disbelief in the President's eyes, disbelief tinged with pity. Time for his secret weapon.
He looked over at Zarex, who simply snapped his fingers. Before any of the Secret Service men could react, the large holo-capsule was sitting on the President's desk. Zarex leaned over and punched the capsule's ancient controls. Two seconds later, the female holo-spy was standing in the center of the room.
A couple of the Secret Service men dropped their guns, stunned at the apparition. The President looked very startled, to say the least.
"Gordon, is this some kind of—"
But the President never finished his sentence. The holo-girl interrupted him.
"This is no joke," she told the President sternly, as Gordon had asked her to do. "What is happening here is real. Hard to believe, maybe, but real. You must come to grips with it."
The President's face went from pale to beet red.
"Is this our technology?" he demanded of Gordon.
The CIA man shook his head no. "This technology is actually from the very distant past. And a complicated one at that. We've spent the entire day trying to understand each other. Her extent of this knowledge is somewhat limited. But please, sir, listen to what she has to say."
The President shifted uncomfortably in his seat. This was not quite the sort of paranormal crap he'd been expecting.
"All right," he finally croaked. "By all means, go ahead."
The holo-girl snapped her fingers, and a three-dimensional map of outer space appeared in the air in front of her — another startling moment for the President and his security men. The map showed a star system with a yellow sun and many planets orbiting it, virtually along the same orbital plane.
"Your planet, all the planets in this system, even the star itself, are all part of an enormous prison," the holo-spy began. "This system was engineered thousands of years ago and towed way out here in what was, and still is, considered unknown space. Your decedents were transported here against their will, and space guards were hired to keep them from escaping. They did this by intentionally slowing down the rate by which your society would develop. The people who programmed me believed that every planet in this system was encompassed in a time bubble. Time bubbles do not stop time completely, but they do slow it down drastically. This would explain why you are less advanced than just about every other place in the Galaxy. However…"
She paused for a moment, eyes darting back and forth, obviously accessing other memory circuits.
"… even though you are probably being held back by this constraint, there have been times in your history when you have reached a certain pinnacle of advancement. When that happens, the people who imprisoned you here send their hired guards to wipe you out. They turn your civilization over as if it never happened, leaving very few survivors. Then you start life all over again."
The President's face was ashen by this time. His security team looked the same way.
"Why are you in prison?" she went on. "I don't know. I was not programmed with that information. Why didn't this oppressive civilization just kill you off eons ago? Again, I am not programmed to know. I do know they never wanted you to know why you are here or even that you were in a prison at all."
She paused. The President began fumbling for words.
"Do they come without warning?" he finally asked her. "These periodic apocalypses?"
The holo-spy's eyes began darting back and forth again. Accessing…
"One event triggers it," she said. "I am not programmed to know beyond that. It is a milestone, a technology advance of some kind. If anyone in this system manages to pass it, your doomsday is cued to strike. Automatically."
"But who is behind this?" the President demanded to know. "Who imposed such things on us?"
It was the most important question of all.
But the holo-spy just shook her head.
"I'm sorry I'm not programmed with more information on the subject. My memory circuits can't even tell me how / got here. My last activation was at a classified briefing regarding a combat-imminent situation within this system. I was told I'd be going into action on this planet. This could indicate that a battle was fought here several thousand years ago. An attempt to break you out. A futile one, for sure, though. Had it been successful, your civilization would have progressed to the point where you would have left this place a long time ago."
Silence descended on the Oval Office. If what the holograph was saying proved accurate, then the planet's culture, already a bit weird, would be turned completely on its head. But could this really be? Had the people of this planet been prisoners for more than three thousand years? Kept here by some unknown power, all without ever realizing it? Even worse, had someone not had the foresight, three millennia before, to carefully hide the artifacts that the CIA and others before them had uncovered, would all of this have been unknown to them forever?
It was a bit hard to swallow.
Finally, the President addressed the holo-spy directly.
"Are you asking me to believe that all this time someone has been watching us from… out there! Keeping us penned within an invisible jail? Anchored to this planet? For thousands of years? How would that be possible?"
The holo-girl began accessing again. Then she put her finger across the 3-D map and drew a series of circles above the planets that stretched to infinity. The meaning was clear. These were the mysterious heavenly bodies.
"That's what these things are for," she said simply.
Everyone shifted uncomfortably. The President looked up at Gordon.
"Do you know how to shut that thing off?" he asked. Gordon nodded to Zarex, who then leaned over and hit the control panel's deact panel. The holo-girl disappeared in a flash.
The room fell dead silent. The wind was suddenly howling outside. Rain was on its way.
"How much of this do you believe, Steve?" the President asked Gordon directly.
The CIA man replied, "By her own admission, she is a spy. It is an essential business of spies to spread lies. Believe me, I know. And it seems impossible to know where she came from, much beyond what she tol
d us. So, she could be programmed to tell lies as easily as she could be to tell the truth. Even she wouldn't know the difference. But here's the problem: Her information is so grave, so dire, we must take even a suggestion of it seriously. Plus, it does fill in a lot of empty spaces in our past. And, according to our three new friends here, such shifting around of planets and stars is quite common. Everywhere else but here."
The President took off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes.
"OK, Steve, I'll ask you this just one time: Do you really want me to believe such outrageous claims by a bunch of people dressed like comic book characters?"
Gordon did not hesitate.
"Yes sir," he said. "I do."
The President threw his glasses on the desk and ran a hand through his thinning, uncombed hair. He was extremely agitated now, for real.
"Well," he finally said. "Is there any way we can confirm any of this? Some way to check* it out? See if any of it is true?"
That's when Hunter stepped forward and spoke for the first time.
"Excuse me, sir," he said. "But I believe there is."
15
The place was called Andrews Field.
It was in a fairly isolated area just outside Washington, D.C., once a huge working farm, now abandoned. Hunter had been out here for two hours now, working on the flying machine with his electron torch. The idea he'd put forth to the President was simple: Let him leave the planet in his aircraft and investigate whether the holo-girl was telling the truth.
Weary and confused, the President agreed. His only caveat was that Hunter take off from a location that was isolated from public view. The last thing they needed now was more UFO stories in the newspapers. So Andrews Field was found and quickly cordoned off by armed CIA agents. That had been around four a.m.
It was now almost six. Hunter had watched the stars blink out above the field, and then the storm clouds started to gather. A convenient downpour would further mask his ascent, which was just minutes away. Though the woods were crawling with CIA agents, for the most part they left him alone to work. He'd reduced his cockpit back to its original proportions, before he'd taken to carrying Tomm, Zarex, and 33418 around with him. This enabled him to shave three feet off the fuselage and shorten his wingtips as well. He'd be battling winds and a lot of rain once he got aloft, "inclement weather," as Tomm had called it. The sleeker his plane's aerodynamic profile, the better. He'd also fabricated an oxygen tank and a breathing system, and, for the first time, there was a safety harness attached to his seat.
Hunter was taking these precautions because he was not intending to launch in his normal split-second fashion.
Why? Because of the "missing two seconds."
He had a theory as to why he'd caused time to stop twice that night back in Mayfield. Though it came to him after hearing the holo-girl's claims the second time around, the spark actually went back to his early days in the X-Forces. The key weapon in the Fourth Empire's vast inventory was the Time Shifter technology employed by the Kaon Bombardment ships. Once in orbit, they had the ability to literally freeze time on the battlefield below, allowing Empire troops to touch down and make quick work of their foes. During his short stint as an X-Forces officer, Hunter had heard someone mention that Time Shifters worked by encompassing their target inside a kind of bubble in which all time stopped. Be it a city or an enemy stronghold or even an entire planet. Once the enemy was vanquished, the bubble was dissolved, and time went back to normal.
The science of shifting was a closely held secret, possessed by the Fourth Empire alone. Hunter was now wondering if this technology and what the holo-spy called time bubbles were distantly related, similar somehow. Could a time bubble be an ancient form of time shifting, something left in place, rather than being dissipated once a battle was won? If so, would everything inside the bubble remain more or less frozen in time? Is that really what happened here on this tiny planet? According to the holo-spy, it was.
All mis led to a second question: What if a long-standing time bubble was disturbed in any way? How? By operating another time-shifting device within it. That's the other thing Hunter recalled someone mentioning to him. That shifting time inside time that's already been shifted was not a prudent thing to do. The person had said, "It can screw up a lot of things in a lot of different ways."
Trouble was, the propulsion unit for Hunter's flying machine was based on time-shifter technology. He didn't know how it worked exactly; no one did. But its critical components had come from a Kaon Bombardment ship he'd found crashed on Fools 6. The wreck proved to be a treasure trove of time-shifter secrets.
He knew the way his aircraft moved was partly an illusion: It only appeared to be going incredibly fast in ultradrive. In reality, it was shifting through time. But was this enough to affect a time bubble?
That's what he suspected. When he activated his flying machine those two times back in Mayfield, it might have caused a ripple across the time bubble. In those two seconds, the entire planet froze, and therein lay the problem: If the two little hops had produced such an effect here, what would have happened had he booted up to full power? What if the ripples had suddenly become a tidal wave? One that lasted an hour or two? Would he have popped the time bubble completely? Would that have thrown this planet back to where it was ages ago? What happens when an entire planet reverts back several thousand years in just a second or two? When there are suddenly rivers where no rivers had been, high ocean waves instead of beachfront property. No electricity, no power, no roads, no bridges. The potential for widespread devastation would seem very high.
So what did all this mean? Especially for the upcoming flight? Safe to say, taking off would be a little more complicated than just revving his machine up to near full volume, disappearing in a microsecond. He would have to be very careful with his velocity. He'd used just the barest fraction of his aircraft's ultradrive power during the two Mayfield flights. He couldn't even come close to those speeds again, at least until he reached orbit and presumably escaped the invisible membrane of the time bubble. This meant that for the upcoming mission he would have to take off and ascend slowly, building to a maximum speed less than that of his Mayfield trips.
The fastest he'd gone on that night was fifteen miles a second — with all those seconds of both trips actually reduced to about 1/lOOOth of a second, the miniscule time-frame in which his flying machine operated whenever he engaged his power systems. If he cut that number in half, and only rose to the max gradually, things should be all right. And here he was lucky. In the real world, half fifteen miles a second was about 18,000 miles an hour, or seven miles a second.
That was almost the exact velocity he needed to break free of this planet.
Dawn came, and so did the rain. Hunter was ready for takeoff.
Hunter took a deep breath from his oxygen mask — a bulky necessity for this unusual ascent — and did one last check of his flight instruments. Everything was reading green.
This was going to be different right from the start; that much was evident now. Usually, he needed just an infinitesimal amount of roll-off to get his machine off the ground. But because of the two-second problem, even the takeoff would have to be done in a more conventional manner: rolling down the long field, building up speed, and getting some lift under his wings. Flight should soon follow.
He positioned the flying machine at the far end of the field. One more deep breath, helmet visor down. He glanced to either side of him. Small groups of CIA agents were watching him from the woods. He looked at the long, grassy airstrip in front of him; two miles away was a large grove of trees. He gripped his control tighter. Did he really know how to do this?
The last modification he'd made had been to his throttle bar. He'd stretched a piece of very low-tech electrical tape across the mechanism's gear channel. This would block the throttle from moving forward more than a half inch, the speed he'd determined would be safe enough to use, until he got to orbit at least. Then he could finally let
it rip.
The rain was splattering on his canopy now. One of the CIA men in the woods was sending him a hand signal. The immediate area was clear of civilians. Time to go. Hunter pulled his safety harness tight, took one last gulp of oxygen, and then edged the throttle ahead about the width of a hair. Bam! He was thrown back against his seat with such force his helmet strap broke. The flying machine went zooming down the field at a violent, heavy speed. Those trees two miles away were on him in an instant. Only by pure instinct did Hunter yank back on his control stick and jerk the flying machine into the air, clipping off the tops of several pines in the process.
He banked hard left to avoid even more trees; in retrospect, he should have gone right. That would have put him out over the water in just a few seconds. Instead, he found himself streaking right above a highway that was crowded with morning commuters heading into D.C. The aircraft was traveling at nearly two miles a second, much faster than he'd anticipated, but there really wasn't anything he could do about it. That was its lowest speed.
Hunter finally adjusted full right and tried once again to ease back the speed, but it was impossible. So he simply yanked his control stick again and pulled on the nose of the aircraft until he was pointing straight up.
That's when the voice inside asked a very simple question: Had he done this before?
Had he, in his distant past, strapped on a machine like this and pointed its nose skyward, ascending so lightly as if in a dream? The sensations washing through him as he shot up through the rain clouds, into the blue morning sky — they seemed so familiar. This was not like flying at two light-years a second. Moving at that speed wasn't flying at all. It was just that: moving. From here to there, through time and hence the illusion of great speed. But it was not flying.
Flying was when the atmosphere had an effect on what your aerial machine could and could not do. Flying was wind. Flying was heat. Flying was metal and cold air crashing into each other, head-on, and turning that metal sizzling hot. Flying was actually a battle against the resistance of flight. With power and skill and daring and a touch of insanity — from that mix, somehow winning the war.
