Smith's Monthly #23

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  Bonnie knew a lot more about him than that as well, but in public they stayed in their parts, their lives.

  The four men pulled out chairs and sat at the table with him, their eyes down, trying to find the bottom of their shots of whiskey like there were answers there, clearly not liking what they had to report to him.

  He had stationed the four men on the hillsides above the parked ore train, two on one hillside, two on the other. He had paid them all good money to stay out there from sunset last night until the train moved this morning. Where they had been on the hillsides, all four of them should have seen the death.

  “So what happened?” Duster asked.

  Not a word as all four stared at their drinks. These men were miners, rough men, strong men, able to handle the dangers of deep rock tunnels, yet all four were afraid to talk at that very moment.

  He didn’t blame them. They were good men, not men used to seeing things that they didn’t understand. They had all seen death, he knew that. But how this death had happened they weren’t used to seeing and that was what was bothering them.

  They didn’t think he would believe what they had seen and then be mad at them and maybe even blame them.

  The silence in the dining room was broken by Bonnie coming back and bringing Duster his two large tumblers of ice water. The water was naturally cold from the spring up the hill above the hotel, but the ice made it even better.

  “Thanks,” he said to Bonnie, then took a long swig out of one. Then he pressed the sweating cold glass against his forehead.

  That felt wonderful. It had been even hotter out there than he had thought.

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped off his face, then took another drink.

  All the while the four big miners sat silently, not even bothering to take a drink of their whisky shots.

  “Well,” he finally said as Bonnie moved back over to her paper. She could hear from there clearly, which was good. She would need to know if this was what he thought it was.

  “You wouldn’t believe us, Marshal,” Dave Jennings said and the other three nodded, not looking up.

  Duster decided to just let them off the hook. “Benny just appeared on the tracks, right before he was run over. No one put him there. Am I correct?”

  All four of the miner’s heads snapped up to look at him like he had lost a screw.

  “That’s right,” Dave said. “One second he wasn’t there and I thought nothing would happen and the next moment he was on the tracks and the train was running him through like so much soft butter on a hot day. That vision will haunt my dreams, let me tell ya, Marshal.”

  The other men nodded in agreement, clearly seeing again what had happened out there on those tracks.

  “I was afraid of that,” Duster said, sighing. Damn it all, he had just settled into a nice routine in Boise.

  He glanced over at Bonnie who was just shaking her head as well. She knew they were in trouble.

  He reached into his breast pocket and took out four gold coins, each coin the equivalent of two-week’s work in the mines for these men. He had already paid them an equal amount for their night’s watch, but now he had to buy their silence, let things get back to normal here.

  He slid one coin each to the men. “This is to get you to forget what you saw and not mention it to anyone.”

  All four looked at him with a puzzled look.

  “I don’t think anyone would believe us even if we wanted to speak, Marshal,” Dave said, picking up the coin and looking at it.

  “There is another just like that for each of you if I don’t hear a word of what you saw for the next month. Understand? Not even a rumor.”

  All four nodded.

  Good, that would give things time to calm and change and be forgotten and winter would be that much closer by then.

  “So where did that guy come from, Marshal?” Dave asked, his voice a whisper. “How’d he get under those wheels? Do you know?”

  “Not exactly,” Duster said, being truthful. “But thanks to you four, I now have a lead. Now not a word.”

  All four nodded, picked up their coins, and headed back for the bar. He didn’t blame them for drinking after what they had just seen. It was bad enough a man had died like that. But just appearing out of thin air in that spot was something no sane man could grasp.

  At least not someone from 1898.

  After they had left, Bonnie came over and sat down beside him as he finished off his first glass of water and started on the second.

  “We going up to the mine?” she asked.

  “Looks like we have no choice,” Duster said. “Things are twisting bad around here.”

  She sighed and looked around. “I was really starting to enjoy this timeline.”

  “Yeah, me too. But it’s coming apart really fast,” Duster said. He knew that the moment he arrived in Dewey and saw the ore train. In the real timeline, the original timeline, Colonel Dewey had never managed to get the spur line up Jordon Creek.

  And those four men were still alive in 1898.

  FOUR

  At midnight, Duster and Bonnie left the Silver Nugget in Silver City arm in arm. A couple people saw them and tipped their hats to them as they passed. This time was such a polite society. It was one of the many charms Duster liked about it.

  They angled up the hill toward Florida Mountain to the west, following a wagon trail, pretending to just be out for a walk together under the spread of stars on the warm summer night.

  The slight moon and the sky painted with stars was enough to let them see where they were walking. After they were a distance from the buildings of town, they stopped talking and just walked in silence, her arm tucked into his left arm.

  To Duster it felt comfortable. They had done this walk many, many times over the decades and centuries. He hadn’t realized until just now how much he enjoyed it.

  And missed, really missed her company.

  The stars seemed to just fill every ounce of the sky, cutting out the dark shape of Florida Mountain to the west and War Eagle Mountain to the east like a cookie cutter cut out shapes from white dough on a black table.

  The temperature had dropped from the high of the day, but it was still a warm night with very little breeze.

  The climb soon winded both of them.

  “Not used to this altitude,” Bonnie said.

  “How long were you working at the hotel before I got here?” Duster asked.

  “Just a month. Came up here from San Francisco when I noticed some history going wrong. Small things, but enough to send me here.”

  “Amazing how two people can change so much in just a few short decades,” Duster said, laughing.

  “It never seems to fail, does it?” Bonnie said. “Luckily there are an unlimited number of timelines.”

  “Infinite number,” Duster said.

  “So how come the mine is killing people this time around? It’s never done that before.”

  “Not that we know of,” Duster said.

  “Yeah, good point,” Bonnie said. “But is someone in there running the deaths?”

  “Infinite timelines,” Duster said. “Remember? How could anyone from the future even find us?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said.

  “I just think it’s the timeline trying to adjust is all. Spit us out in a manner of speaking.”

  She laughed. “Sometimes I do feel like something stuck in someone’s tooth.”

  He laughed. “You always know how to kill a good metaphor.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice,” she said, also laughing. Her wonderful laugh carried over the barren mountainside and faded under the stars.

  They walked the rest of the way in silence, both sweating slightly and panting from the climb.

  At about eight hundred feet up the open face of the mountain above the mining town, they moved off the main wagon trail to the right and followed what was not much more than a trail up a gulley.

  At one point a lot of Flor
ida Mountain had been covered in different trees, but all of them were gone at this point in history, used in building the towns along the creek and stoking the ore mill fires.

  Now they were walking along in scrub brush, following a trail that was left over from when the Trade Dollar had been a going concern. It had been closed down now for over forty years, the gold vein officially pinched off.

  Actually, when they came back into a timeline, Duster always bought the mine and then willed it to his grandfather. This very afternoon he had sent the deed to Boise to be delivered to his grandfather in twenty years.

  Duster always felt it was better to get the mine in control when he could and then lock it up.

  “I’ll never get used to the difference,” Bonnie said, indicating the hillside around them.

  “Me neither,” Duster said.

  In their original time in 2014, all the trees had grown back over this mountain, at least most of it. Silver City was only a ghost town with a few buildings left and a tourist trap in the summer. The Trade Dollar Mine was only a name on a map and a tailing pile covered in scrub brush.

  Duster’s father had taken him to the mine when Duster turned twenty-one and showed him what the mine was capable of doing.

  And how to do it.

  Duster and Bonnie had been married at the time for only a year, and when they first started going back in time, they went as a couple, him working as a marshal, her the marshal’s wife.

  But after a dozen timelines and a few hundred or so of their own years, they decided to go their own ways. For the last ten timelines and two hundred plus years or more, they had gone in different directions.

  Often they didn’t see each other for decades, until the end of each timeline that is, when their very presence started to unbalance things.

  And cause things like those poor men’s deaths for no reason.

  When Duster and Bonnie left, the timelines stabilized.

  They finally reached the top of the old mine tailings. A small shack sat to one side of the tunnel entrance and small ore car rail tracks came out of the mine tunnel, went through the shack and to the end of the tailing pile.

  Nothing looked disturbed as far as Duster could tell in the dark, even though neither of them had been up here in thirty years.

  But he didn’t feel the need to check. Besides, up here on the mountain he had no plan on shining a light on anything. A dozen people around the valley would see it and wonder and maybe investigate and that was the last thing they needed.

  This mine just needed to sit abandoned until his grandfather came to investigate it and follow the instructions Duster had given him with the deed to get in.

  Duster and Bonnie moved over to the mine entrance. It looked like it was solidly boarded up and in the starlight and faint moonlight nothing had bothered the old wood.

  Duster took a skeleton key from the lining of his coat.

  Bonnie had two of the very same thing and Duster had another sewn into his hat as well. They had also hidden a key a couple hundred yards from the mine just in case.

  Duster pointed the skeleton key at the door and then turned the top head of the key.

  There was a click and a slice of rock moved aside near the entrance. Duster moved over and put his palm print on the exposed panel.

  Another click and what looked like a boarded-up mine entrance swung open. The wood was attached on the outside to a vault-like metal door that would withstand a lot of dynamite blasts.

  Bonnie and Duster stepped inside and the door slid closed behind them, plunging them for a moment into blackness before the automatic light came up.

  It still looked like an old mine tunnel inside at this point, even though Duster had reinforced the walls completely when they first came back to this timeline. The ore car tracks ran down the middle of the tunnel and lights strung along one side gave the tunnel a golden look.

  “Good to be home,” Duster said.

  “I liked my place in San Francisco,” Bonnie said.

  Duster didn’t say anything. This time around he hadn’t settled down anywhere, but instead had just kept moving around, living in luxury hotels and being waited on. But even that had gotten old now that he thought about it.

  They headed deeper into the mountain, the lights in front of them turning on as the lights behind them shut off.

  The tunnel and the ore car tracks along the floor at one point turned right, but both Bonnie and Duster kept walking straight and through a wall that was nothing more than a hologram. Another level of protection in case someone got inside.

  Beyond the hologram was a large chamber with tables and supplies stacked along the walls. Supplies they hadn’t needed.

  They just kept walking in silence into another small tunnel on the other side of the room and through another hologram that looked like the tunnel had dead-ended.

  Beyond that was a large metal door that Duster unlocked and pushed open and then stepped through.

  The lights came on and they were greeted with a sight very few people had ever seen.

  They faced all of time.

  The sight always took his breath away.

  Seemingly every inch of the huge chamber walls were covered in crystals that reflected the light into a thousand colors over and over. The human mind couldn’t really hold everything it saw in this room.

  The chamber stretched slightly downward into the distance as far as anyone could see. The ceiling was a dome thirty feet over his head, the floor flat and dirt-covered. Every inch covered in those fantastic crystals.

  His father had told Duster the chamber just kept on going and going and going since his grandfather had tried to hike it and gotten lost and never returned.

  Duster had studied the physics of time and space at MIT for three years after his father had shown him this chamber the first time. Duster had come to figure that more than likely the chamber went through many dimensions of space and just expanded as it needed to.

  The crystals looked like quartz crystals on first glance, only rose colored and multi-sized. They were of no mineral anyone had ever heard of and could not be removed from the walls. Some crystals were huge, others smaller than a tiny finger.

  The amazing thing was that every crystal was an alternate timeline.

  Every time anyone made a decision, a new crystal was formed for that timeline and that decision. If the decision was minor, the crystal stopped growing and was absorbed back into the larger crystal.

  But when decisions had an impact down through time, then the crystal kept growing and millions and millions of new crystals were formed from it.

  An infinite number of alternate universes, an infinite number of chambers stretching into infinite numbers of universes.

  And every alternate timeline represented by a single crystal somewhere in this vast and unending cave.

  It made Duster’s mind hurt every time he thought about it.

  In the middle of the room near the door was a long wooden table and on the table was a simple-looking machine. It drew power from the crystals when attached.

  Duster often wondered in how many other timelines his father or someone else had discovered this room, built a machine like the one he and his father had built.

  More than likely millions or billions.

  And he kept thinking someday he and Bonnie would meet up with themselves if they kept living like this long enough.

  But with an infinite number of alternate timelines, the odds were so large, it would be hard to calculate.

  Duster moved to the machine and then glanced at Bonnie. “You ready?”

  “As always,” she said, moving over and holding onto the edge of the machine near his hand. If they were touching the machine, they would keep the memories from that timeline.

  He flipped the switch on the machine and then carefully unhooked the wire that led from the machine across the floor to a crystal about head-high on the wall. When they had hooked the machine up to that crystal, it had been a tiny side crysta
l off a larger one. Now it covered most of fifty feet of wall with hundreds of thousands and thousands of smaller crystals around it.

  As they watched, many crystals were absorbed into the larger crystals as that alternate universe reset itself because of their absence.

  Basically, that alternate universe had spit them out like a watermelon seed.

  Duster glanced around at Bonnie. Even though she was still wearing the waitress uniform of the Dewey Hotel, it no longer fit her. She was back to her twenty-five-year-old body.

  They were now back in 2014. In this time, this timeline, they hadn’t been gone for more than a few minutes, even though he had clear memories of living for over thirty years in that other timeline.

  He stared at Bonnie. She looked damned good, he had to admit that. He had missed her.

  He still had on the duster and his hat, but it felt larger as well. He was also in his twenty-five-year-old body.

  “You want to head home?” he asked, smiling at her. Home being their house in Boise in 2014. He could barely remember what it looked like, they had been gone so long. “Get caught up on what has happened to each other the last few decades?”

  She smiled back, her eyes gleaming. “You know it’s been almost three hundred years our time since we went home?”

  “Really?” he asked, then realized she was right. No wonder he could barely remember their house and this modern world. The last five times they had just reset, connected to a new alternate universe crystal and gone back. And each time had lasted over thirty years. Once they had actually made it long enough for their presence to not sink the Titanic in 1912.

  “Really,” she said, glancing at a watch she had left on the table. “We’ve aged here about five hours, but been gone almost two hundred years. Wild, huh?”

  “Then we really have some catching up to do,” he said, pulling off his duster and laying it across one end of the table, then taking off his hat and dropping it on the table as well.

  She took off her apron and tossed it beside his coat and hat.

  He offered her his arm. “Think you can remember how to drive after two hundred years?”