“Bernie, how many layers do you see at once?”
Winston figured he would never be content with watching TV again, and he wondered what else he might be capable of if only he had the time to explore and experiment.
“How do you know where we’re going?”
“So, you can see whatever these sensor nodes see?>
“How many of them are there?”
That took a moment to sink in.
“Hold on. You’re saying that they’re around people…all the time? Everywhere?”
“And at all times? Even now? Around us way down here?>
Bernie lifted Little e and pointed it in the space before them. Three or four feet in front of Winston’s face, the air shimmered and pinched. The space darkened, forming dense areas that became lines and curves. After several seconds, Winston recognized the misty shape before him. It was the Greek letter omega: Ω. A couple of seconds later, the shape evaporated into nothingness.
“Shut up,” he said. “Those are sensor nodes?”
Winston edged up beside Bernie as the alien indicated an upcoming left turn. He peeked around the corner and saw no movement.
He stepped into the passage and said, “All clear.”
As Winston slowly opened the door, he listened while scanning up and down the stairs. Sure enough, a man banged through the doorway on the floor right below them. Winston’s first impulse was to retreat into the hall, but he forced himself to stay. The man leaped up the stairs two at a time. As soon as he rounded the corner, he would see them.
Winston reached back for Bernie, who clasped his hand.
Winston shook his head.
Careful to pull the energy for their jump from Little e rather than his own body, Winston jumped them six minutes back, leaving nothing but a flash of light and shadows to mark their passing.
***
After more than ten minutes of jogging and dodging through Area X, along with two more small time hops to avoid detection, Winston at last had them at the metalworking shop into which his parents, according to Bernie, had squeezed what was supposed to be a partially dismantled atomic bomb and then reassembled it to working order. Winston and Bernie remained in the hall beyond the room. Winston risked slowly poking his head around the door. For the moment, he seemed safe, as his parents were completely preoccupied.
Long workbenches dominated the space, each of which bore multiple heavy-duty tools, such as saws, lathes, presses, and rank upon rank of anvils and dapping punches. Electrical conduits and heavy-gauge wiring ran everywhere, dropping from the ceiling like jungle vines. Several lamps had been added into the room, but in a haphazard way, as if strewn about as quickly as possible. Hand tools lay scattered everywhere, and stray papers littered the floor and desktops. Even in the hallway, Winston could smell metal shavings and oil.
Claude and Amanda stood in the middle of the room. Claude wore khaki slacks, a white button-down shirt, and a thin black tie. Amanda now wore a light-gray, knee-length dress with short sleeves, a narrow black belt, and black flats — not the most practical garb for a nuclear apocalypse, Winston thought.
Both parents bore pinched, nervous expressions as they faced each other.
Behind them, resting ponderously on a rolling cart the size of Winston’s bed back home, was the bomb, chained and suspended from a steel crossbeam mounted to a similar upright girder. The bomb looked to be about eight feet long and three feet in diameter, with a rounded, blunt nose, straight body, tapering back end, and a tail of four fins surrounded by a wide steel circle that would help to stabilize the beast’s trajectory when dropped. The entire thing was painted matte black, punctuated by silver rivets. A large panel from the bomb’s middle lay on the platform under the device, leaving its innards of metal boxes and snaking black cables exposed.
Two coiled wires spilled down from the opening and attached to a small box resting just under the bomb. A light within the box illuminated a front window behind which lay a row of numbers, much like old clock radios Winston had seen from the 1970s. It was a timer, and the readout now stood at 2 minutes 6 seconds…and counting.
Winston could make out his parents’ words over the distant alarms.
“I don’t—” Claude said. His voice choked. He tried again. “Are you sure we should do this?”
“What do you mean? We’ve been over—” She paused. “You know what’s at stake.”
“I know,” he said. “Of course I know. But Bernie always says how the future is so slippery. What if it doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to? We could still slip away. I have family in Europe who would take us in.”
Amanda’s tone softened, and she managed a tender sigh. “If this is the biggest problem we ever face in our marriage, we’ll be the luckiest couple around.”
Claude answered her sigh with one of his own. Winston made out the low rumble of his chuckle, and he imagined them together in a long embrace.
At the sound of this tenderness between them, Winston felt his heart convulse. He had always dreamed that he might have caring parents like this, who loved each other and might show such affection toward him. He wanted so much to witness it with his own eyes, but he didn’t dare risk being seen.
“Come on,” said Claude. “Let’s get ready.”
Another duality exception, Winston realized. Of course, the Omega Mesh had known this was coming.
Winston’s heart raced. He resisted the intense urge to step into the doorway and watch his parents directly. Bledsoe would be here any second, and he wanted to warn them, to help them, to give them some sort of reprieve from the pain and fear he knew they were about to endure.
“It’s like…” Claude began, voice tight with concentration. “Like trying to push through a wall, a brilliant, infinite wall. So thin but…so strong.”
“Do you see our target?” Amanda asked. “Golden Gate Park? New Year’s of 2000?”
“I—I’ve got it. I’m ready.”
“I love you, honey. We need to go in thirty seconds.”
Winston felt a bolt of fear spike through him, suddenly struck by how much he’d been distracted. He wanted to help his parents, but if he didn’t have a jump ready very soon, he and Bernie would die in the bomb blast.
He desperately wished he hadn’t lost the geo pieces. They needed to be far away from here. If he went forward in time in this spot, he was likely to be buried under a mountain of radioactive rubble. Backward would send him to the time before Area X, when this place was solid rock.
Winston glared at the alien, who apparently didn’t have a death wish, because he said,
That made sense. If the Area X complex wasn’t completely pulverized, at least Winston should be able to deal with the ambient radiation left after so many years.
Not knowing when to go, he slid the chrono control straight to his true present in 2013. The second reality layer was completely dark. At first, Winston took that to mean that, as he’d feared, the blast had collapsed the desert’s bedrock down onto the cave complex. Strangely, though, the chrono controls showed green, indicating that the jump was allowed and safe.
That was when Bledsoe appeared in the far doorway and bellowed, “It’s all true!”
Amanda screamed, and Winston jumped in surprise where he stood. Bernie, who would have seen the man approaching, was ready for Winston’s response and set a firm, restraining hand on his arm.
Winston heard the clear, unmistakable crack of a blow landing on flesh. Amanda cried out in shock and pain. Steps stumbled. A body collided with something large and metallic.
That was it. Winston had to see what was happening.
He glanced at the hallway about him, lifted Little e, and reached his senses toward the lamps running down the hallway. Winston didn’t wait for a blueprint to form in his mind. In one instant, he searched, and in the next, he sent a pulse of energy down the hallway that overheated and burnt out the filaments of every bulb before him. He heard them expire with a series of pops that ran along the passage.
Careful not to let his face fall directly into the light from the workshop, Winston leaned out until he could peer into the room.
Bledsoe’s eyes were wide, frantic, and full of rage, his breath coming in gasps as if he had been running laps through the complex. His white shirt, streaked with dirt, hung open at the chest, as several buttons were missing. One of the knees in his black slacks bore a long, jagged tear.
Amanda slumped against the bomb, one hand held protectively to her head.
Claude turned to confront their attacker just as Bledsoe crashed into him and enveloped Claude in an arm-pinning bear hug.
Winston almost stopped thinking. His mom was going to die — again. And because of the same man.
He took one step forward, intending to charge Bledsoe. Arcs of blue electricity formed around his fist. He never got to take a second step.
For an instant, Winston felt his entire body lock, as if every muscle had turned to stone. He wanted to cry out in shock and indignation, because somehow this had to be Bernie’s doing. Then the alien’s hand clenched tightly on Winston’s arm, and he regained control of his body. Bernie yanked him back into the hall.
Winston tried to fight.
Bernie held Winston in place, his strength shocking from such a thin frame. The force of his words took on a sudden, imperative weight in Winston’s mind.
That last command struck Winston like a slap to the face. He winced, but the mental pain snapped him out of his tunnel vision.
Yes, think.
They had to be ready to jump away. He still perceived the second reality layer of total black, and the controls still showed green.
And what of his father? His dad had been ready, but then Bledsoe charged in, attacking, disrupting…
No, Claude did not look ready at all.
“Get off him!” Amanda screamed. “I’ll kill you!”
Winston closed his eyes. Bernie was right. He could offer no help in a fight, but he could help make sure they got away and survived the blast.
Or so he hoped. Bernie had helped to nudge Winston’s use of the Alpha Machine from a distance. Maybe Winston could do the same for his father.
He held the Alpha Machine up with one hand and pushed his other hand against the wall separating him from his parents. He pushed all of his concentration into the room, searching for his Alpha Machine’s clone. At first, he was thrown off by the intense energy of the atomic bomb, which felt like a gigantic flare disrupting his heat-seeking sensors. But the Alpha Machine used a different type of energy. The alpha particles had their own feel. He could sense them in much the same ways as Bledsoe’s modified scanners. Once he focused on that, Claude’s Alpha Machine snapped into clear focus.
Winston reached into it and willed its controls to come up in another layer. The controls for his own present in 2013 turned pale as Claude’s controls slid about, no doubt reflecting his torn concentration as he worked to break free of Bledsoe and help his fiancée in her struggle. Winston didn’t understand what Claude had meant about a wall of light, and he didn’t have time to dig deeper and figure it out. He only imagined doing the equivalent of holding a steering wheel steady after it had dropped dropped by the driver.
He gripped Claude’s chrono controls, confirmed that they were locked on the future — he had a fleeting impression of the year 1989 — and leaned back into the metal shop’s doorway. Bernie allowed him to do so.
Winston had one last glimpse of his parents. Bledsoe had one hand around Claude’s throat, the other reaching behind him, entangled in Amanda’s hair. In turn, her nails dug deep into Bledsoe’s face.
That was all Winston needed or could stomach. He willed his father’s Alpha Machine to execute.
The three of them were engulfed in an explosion of blue and white sparks and vanished.
Awash in equal measures of satisfaction and grief, Winston realized that this was exactly why Bernie had brought him here. Without Winston’s intuition and help, everything would have been lost.
One more leap of faith, he thought — and then executed his own jump with Bernie into blackness.
21
An Alien-Made Alliance
As Winston drew his first breath in 2013, he nearly collapsed with relief. They had not materialized into endless tons of solid rubble. Winston didn’t know how that could be yet, but he wasn’t complaining. As the last sparks fell away about them, he could only see that they stood on a smooth stone floor. The air was cool and dry. The scent of smoke that had filled his nostrils until a moment ago had thankfully vanished. For the moment, that would do.
He felt as if the sight of his parents locked in combat with Bledsoe had burned itself into the inside of his eyelids. The scene was all he could picture. The red welt blossoming under his mom’s cheekbone. The blood welling around her fingertips as she clawed into Bledsoe’s face. The expression of rage and desperation on his father’s face as he found himself increasingly unable to manage their situation.
Winston felt tears threaten to rise as he struggled with the welling of emotion within himself. Had he done the right thing?
As if reading his mind, Bernie said,
Compliments sounded so strange coming from Bernie that Winston felt this must be the alien’s closest approximation of a hug and reassuring words.
Winston appreciated the kind words, but he wasn’t in the mood for flattery. He had stood by as his parents were assaulted, and he knew that even now, seconds later in their relative present of 1989, they were still terrified and fighting for their lives. No matter how much he
rationalized the success, he still felt like a failure.
“Let’s see what’s what,” he said as he pushed new energy into Little e and caused its tube tips to glow with a soft but gradually increasing pale blue.
The wall that had separated the hallway from the metal workshop was gone, but otherwise the space appeared remarkably intact — and completely empty. All trace of the equipment that had filled the room was gone. There were no burn marks on the walls or even so much as a few stray pebbles on the floor to mark what was supposed to have been ground zero for an atomic blast.
“It didn’t go off,” moaned Winston. “Bernie, what happened? If there was no explosion, then all of the research and stuff would still be with the government, which would mean…what? Did they do the super-soldier plan? What do we do?”
Bernie stared patiently at Winston as his predictions of doom swelled.
“Are you synchronizing? Say something.”
Bernie only replied,
“Renovated?”
As the adrenaline from their encounter ebbed, Winston started to shiver. For sure, it was colder now than it had been before their time jump, but Winston also wondered if he might be dealing with a pinch of shock. He had, after all, assumed that he was mere seconds from being vaporized. The thought of the blast wave enveloping him, stripping his body down to bones in a blink and then turning those bones into atomized nothingness, was almost too much to ponder.
“Renovation, like swept the floor and installed some new cabinets? What are you talking about? This place ought to be nothing but fused gravel. We shouldn’t be standing here.”
Winston wrapped his arms around himself for warmth and reassurance.
The alien appeared completely comfortable and unfazed by having nearly died. Whatever he used to achieve that level of emotional control, Winston wished he could have two.
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 16
