Thunder Mountain

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  Dawn looked at Madison. “Is this weird or am I just dreaming.”

  “If you’re dreaming,” he said, “I wish you’d come up with better things for us to do. I could think of a few thousand right off the top of my head.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she said, laughing slightly as they turned to follow Bonnie and Duster out of the fantastic cave of crystals.

  Madison noticed that even though they had left the door open to the outer chamber, Duster had to open it again. Then he went toward a rack of men’s clothes while Bonnie went toward some women’s clothes.

  Duster handed Madison a men’s jacket clearly from the mid-1870s.

  Bonnie handed Dawn a woman’s dress from the same period. “Just slip this over your clothes.”

  “We’re only going as far as the cabin in front of the mine,” Duster said. “but in case someone sees us from a distance, we want to generally look like we are just two couples out for a stroll.”

  Madison looked at Duster. “Are you seriously trying to tell us we really are in 1878?”

  He really liked Bonnie and Duster as friends, and he loved that amazing cavern full of crystals, but traveling in time wasn’t possible and the fact that Duster and Bonnie both thought it was worried him a great deal.

  “Just slip this on,” Duster said, “and we’ll show you. I won’t need to tell you.”

  He slipped on the jacket as Duster put on a long oilcloth duster and a cowboy hat. He gave Madison a cowboy hat as well.

  Bonnie and Dawn took a moment longer, slipping on the dresses over their clothing, but not bothering to even button them up in the back.

  They all then headed down the mine tunnel toward the surface.

  At the big iron door, Duster looked through a type of scope, then showed both Dawn and Madison how to do it as well.

  Through the scope Madison could see that there was no one outside the mine on the tailings or anywhere near the old cabin. Strangely, that old cabin now didn’t look so old and still had doors and windows.

  Duster showed them both the button that would open the door and then he pushed it.

  The big metal door slid inward and out of the way and they stepped outside.

  The air was biting cold and the sky overcast. The mountain was no longer covered in trees and near one edge of the mine tailing there was a small drift of snow that hadn’t melted yet.

  The air smelled of rain and wood smoke.

  Madison could not let himself believe any of that, but yet his eyes told him it was right in front of him.

  He had gone into that mine on a hot, summer morning. Now it was cold out here, the cabin looked far newer, and there was still snow on the ground. They had not been inside long enough for someone to do that much work out here as a practical joke.

  Madison took a dozen steps out onto the flat top of the mine tailings to a spot near the edge and just stopped.

  He could not believe what he was seeing. And his legs would not allow him to move another foot.

  Finally he just sat down on the dirt and rocks, staring at the most impossible site he could ever imagine.

  Behind him Dawn just gasped and said softly, “Not possible.”

  Across the slope where they had parked the Cadillac in a stand of pine trees, there was nothing but open hillside. The car, the trees, everything was gone.

  All over the hills were new mine tailings, clearly freshly dug. But what was spread out below Madison was what he couldn’t believe.

  His mind would not accept what his eyes were seeing.

  “Silver City just after its prime,” Duster said. “May 1st, 1878.”

  “How?” Dawn asked softly from beside Madison as she too sat down on the dirt mine tailings, staring at the valley below.

  Spread out below Madison was a bustling city with hundreds of buildings and smoke curling up from many chimneys. The sounds of people working and horses and activity echoed through the valley.

  Somehow, below him, Madison had no doubt he was looking at Silver City, Idaho, in its prime. Not a ghost town as it had been when they arrived.

  Bonnie laughed as she moved over beside Dawn and sat down on the dirt as well. “As I said, welcome to 1878.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DAWN WALKED in what felt like a stunned stagger back into the mine and then through the holograms and back to the big room. Her mind would not let her grasp what she had just seen.

  None of it was possible. It had to be some sort of major illusion or some drug that Bonnie and Duster had given them.

  Madison looked as stunned as she felt. She caught a glimpse of his eyes and they looked almost haunted. She had no doubt her eyes looked the same way.

  She really just wanted to go over to Madison and lean into him for comfort.

  Bonnie helped her slip out of the dress she had put over her clothes, then she followed Duster and Bonnie back into the crystal room.

  “We’re still in 1878,” Duster said.

  Dawn would not have believed it before, and she wasn’t sure if she did yet, even after seeing what had been outside the mine.

  The endless crystal cavern was as stunning as the first time, maybe more so on this second time into the room. The scale and the beauty of it just took her breath away.

  What she saw outside wasn’t possible, but neither were this fantastic cavern and all the beauty of the crystals.

  On the wooden table in the middle of the room the machine still sat, wires running over to a wall and attaching to a small crystal there. She had to admit, the table looked slightly newer, but nothing else was different.

  “Everyone ready to go back to 2014?” Bonnie asked.

  “Might as well,” Duster said, smiling. “Now focus on where I put my watch on the table in 2014.”

  He then took off one connection.

  There was a slight shimmering and the big watch appeared on the table again.

  The moment before he did that, Dawn had been standing next to Madison just inside the room. Suddenly she found herself leaning against the machine next to Madison without any sense of being moved.

  Duster, Bonnie, Madison were also touching the machine in the same way they had been when Duster plugged in the machine.

  How did she get those ten feet across the room?

  Madison coughed.

  “We’re back in 2014,” Duster said.

  Dawn didn’t know what to think. She just stepped back trying to make herself take long, slow breaths.

  Duster carefully removed the other cable, then with gloves on, he moved over and took the ends of the wires off the crystal on the wall.

  “We were gone for exactly two minutes and fifteen seconds,” Bonnie said.

  “We have no idea why it is always one-hundred-and-thirty-five seconds,” Duster said, picking up his watch and slipping it back on. “It doesn’t matter how long we are in the past, we only age two minutes and fifteen seconds in our regular timeline.”

  “It took us about thirty minutes to get out there, look at everything, and get back,” Madison said. “But we only aged two minutes and fifteen seconds?”

  “Actually, in that timeline,” Duster said, pointing to the crystal on the wall where he had attached the crystal, “we all aged about thirty minutes. We just reset when we came back here, to this timeline. But we remember that timeline because we were touching the machine when we started.”

  “You built that?” Madison asked, pointing at the machine.

  “We did,” Duster said, nodding and indicating Bonnie as well. “We both have degrees in physics, math, and theoretical physics.”

  “We both have a number of doctorates in physics and math, actually,” Bonnie said, smiling at her husband. “That’s how we met, down at Stanford.”

  “Is there some place we can sit down and talk about this?” Dawn asked. Her knees were feeling weak and her mind was reeling just trying to get some sort of hold on what she thought she had seen. And what they were claiming had happened.

  And the massive
beauty of the crystals around her wasn’t helping. She just kept wanting to stare at them.

  Bonnie said, “Sure, this way.”

  Thankfully, Bonnie took Dawn’s arm and together they left the crystal room, moving back into the large storage cavern. All Dawn focused on was putting one foot in front of the other.

  That seemed like a massive task at the moment.

  “Stunning, isn’t it?” Bonnie asked. “We worked our way into understanding it slowly, over a few years. We were worried that it would be too much for anyone to grasp at once.”

  “It might be,” Dawn said, her voice soft as she worked to keep herself moving forward. She normally prided herself on being firm and solid in reality, even though her friends and parents and few former boyfriends accused her of living far too much in the past.

  Now she had actually seen the past, or that’s what Bonnie was trying to get her to believe. And by actually seeing the past, Dawn had lost all footing and belief in the here and now.

  There were sounds of a couple switches flipping and an area off to the back of the big supply cavern lit up that she hadn’t noticed before. There was a seating area with three couches, a coffee table, and a large reading chair and lamp. Slightly closer to the cavern was a large dining table with six chairs around it and a stove and fridge in a kitchen area. It was all tucked into a side nook in the cavern.

  Bonnie moved her over to the table and Dawn sat with a sigh of relief. At least now she wouldn’t have to worry about her legs giving out under her.

  Madison dropped into a chair across from her.

  He looked as stunned and shaken as she felt. His handsome chiseled face not hiding any of the emotions he was feeling. He just stared at the table in front of him.

  They were both in a form of shock. Dawn had no doubt about that.

  Bonnie got them both a cold bottle of water, then asked if they would like some lunch. “I know it’s just a little after ten in the morning, but we ate breakfast early. I have cold meat sandwiches and chicken soup.”

  Dawn asked for both. Madison only wanted a sandwich. Duster opted for both.

  “So,” Duster said after taking a long drink from a bottle of cold water. “That’s our little secret. See why we couldn’t tell you ahead of time. You wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I honestly don’t believe it now,” Madison said.

  Dawn nodded. “I’m afraid I don’t either. Or another way of putting it, I don’t know what I believe at the moment.”

  “Figured that would be the case,” Bonnie said, laughing. She looked at Duster. “I know it’s been a long time, but remember how we felt when we discovered what those crystals could do and then took the first trip in time?”

  “I do,” Duster said, nodding. “Scared me to death.”

  “Me too,” Bonnie said, laughing.

  “So how about starting from the beginning?” Madison asked, shaking his head slowly from side-to-side.

  Dawn glanced up at the man she so wanted to spend time with. She just hadn’t expected this kind of adventure.

  “It’s time travel,” Duster said, smiling, a twinkle in his eye. “There is no beginning.”

  Madison actually smiled weakly at that, but Dawn wasn’t sure if she liked the sound of that concept at all. But she was going to let Madison lead this questioning. He seemed like he was slightly ahead of her in grasping what had just happened. She was just trying to not drop to the floor and curl into a ball.

  “So you own this mine? Right?” Madison asked.

  “In this timeline, my great-great-grandfather bought it in 1877,” Duster said. “He actually planned on opening it back up, but never got around to it. My great-grandfather took a hand at it in 1902, and found this cave. His son, my grandfather, during the Depression, took another shot at finding gold and opened up the crystal part of the cave.”

  “Luckily he was wearing gloves when he touched those crystals,” Bonnie said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have been born.”

  “What happens when you touch the crystals with your bare hands?” Dawn asked before Madison could, trying to clear her mind and find some answers, no matter what those answers might be.

  “We’re not sure,” Bonnie said. “We think it might vaporize a person from all the power. We’ve never tested it.”

  Duster nodded and went on. “My father showed me this place the year after Bonnie and I met and because of our background in physics and theoretical math, we started to realize what it might be. So together we spent the next two years working on that machine and testing it.”

  “What exactly is that machine?” Dawn asked, almost afraid of the answer.

  “Well, there’s no easy answer for that,” Bonnie said, sliding a sandwich in front of her and Madison. Dawn glanced at it, but honestly didn’t feel much like eating.

  Duster leaned forward looking at both of them with those intense dark eyes of his. “You understand the principle of the conservation of matter and energy? Right?”

  Dawn nodded. Basic high school stuff.

  Madison also nodded.

  “There are theories that time is connected to that rule as well,” Duster said. “Matter, time, and energy are all linked and must be conserved when moving from one state to another.”

  “So every crystal in that crystal cave is the physical representation of another timeline,” Bonnie said. “When you decided to come up here, an alternate timeline started where you decided to not come with us.”

  “And because of all the small and larger decisions made by others ahead of us,” Madison said, “in billions of timelines we decided to come here and in billions we didn’t.”

  “Exactly,” Duster said, smiling. “We believe those caverns in there go off into other dimensions, extend basically forever. This cavern, under this mountain is just a physical location of the crystals in this tiny area of this universe.”

  “Oh, God, my head hurts,” Dawn said. She was actually understanding most of what they were saying and that bothered her. She didn’t want any of this to be real. She wanted to wake up in her bed and shake her head and wonder where this dream came from.

  She forced herself to take a bite of the ham sandwich to try to ground her body and mind in the moment. She had done all right in physics, but hadn’t really needed to go that far since her love was history. Timelines and alternate history had never been her interest. She had a hunch that after today she was going to be studying up on it some.

  “So,” Madison said, shaking his head to clearly try to manage a thought,” you figured out a way to travel back in time by touching that machine, inside one of the varied timelines already existing on the wall?”

  “We did,” Duster said, nodding. “Exactly right. We have even gotten it close enough to set dates of arrival within a week or so.”

  “So how does the machine exist back in 1878?” Madison asked.

  Dawn was impressed. Madison was asking questions she never would have thought about. Ever.

  “My grandfather, my great-grandfather, my dad, and the two of us built all of the precautions you see to protect this mine back in 1877. We set the table up and locked it into position. The machine is our connection and travels with us in some fashion or another. We are not sure how, exactly.”

  “So you could visit millions of timelines that look exactly like this?” Dawn asked. “Actually, there are millions of timelines where we are sitting here talking?”

  “There must be billions,” Madison said, nodding.

  “Exactly,” Duster said. “Actually, unlimited amounts. Every small decision every person makes creates an alternate timeline. The crystals in the area around the table are just all close to these events. If you went deeper and deeper into the cavern, the events and alternate histories might move slightly away from this one.”

  “Have you tried that?” Madison asked.

  “Nope, no real interest yet,” Duster said. “Exploring our own history is just too much fun.”

  Dawn just couldn’t gras
p numbers like that, so she changed the focus. She had a couple of human questions she needed answers to.

  “How many times have you gone back to the past?” Dawn asked as Bonnie put the chicken soup in front of her.

  The soup smelled wonderful and even though she had choked down one bit of the sandwich, now she felt hungry.

  “I looked it up because I figured you would ask that,” Bonnie said. “We’ve made four hundred and nine trips into the past, four hundred and ten if you count the one a few minutes ago.”

  “A number of the trips were building this place and protecting it all,” Duster said. Then he looked up at his wife. “You figure out how old we really are? Wait, I’m not sure I want to know.”

  Bonnie smiled at her husband. “Will you still love me if I tell you?”

  “Forever,” he said, laughing.

  Dawn really liked their relationship. She just hoped she could find one like it. She glanced at Madison and he had been looking at her. He smiled and that wonderful dimple of his appeared, then he turned back to face Bonnie.

  Bonnie sat down at the table, a sandwich and bowl of soup in front of her. “We are both 35 in this world, just a couple years older than both of you. In thirty-to-fifty-year increments in the past, we have lived just under two thousand years as best as I can figure. We’ve done that in the last two years real time.”

  “Great years, I might add,” Duster said, smiling at his wife.

  “For the most part,” Bonnie said, smiling back at her husband and winking.

  “Two thousand years?” Madison asked, his voice soft.

  Dawn could see that if he wasn’t in shock before, now he really was. She was feeling the same way.

  How could she actually be sitting here with two people who had lived for two thousand years? How was that possible?

  Then it finally sunk in.

  She put down her spoon and just sat there staring into her soup, letting the reality of it all wash over her.

  There was living history right outside that mine opening. Not just book history, but the actual thing.

  And the door to that history, to living in that history, was that machine in the crystal cavern.