“It sure didn't seem like something you'd do,” Vox replied. “But, I thought you had just cracked under the strain of not getting to see the kids and what not.”
“Why did she steal it?”
“She wanted to go see your mother,” Morgan replied, slipping down into his seat. “Stealing the pod was just step one. After that, she was crazy brilliant.”
“Whoever sent her was the brilliant one,” Cleo corrected. “You can be sure they had worked out what the clone was supposed to do before they sent it in.”
“How could it have seen my Mother without creating some kind of paradox?” Celeste asked.
“Baby...” Vox said before pausing a moment. “She went back to the day your Mama died. She meant to go on that last visit you missed.”
“But why?” she asked.
“We can only guess,” Doc replied, “but, had it appeared that you had changed the time-lines for your own personal benefit, it would have been a political windfall for those who want to put a stop to our work.”
“Like Doctor Sturm,” Morgan pointed out.
“Plus,” Doc continued, “you would have almost certainly gone to prison. Which, as you can imagine, would have done a great deal of damage to our morale and probably caused Vox to leave the team.”
“At least until she got out,” Vox nodded. “Either way, that doesn't matter now. We caught the clone and – because she tried to go in the first place – Rob figured out that he can actually take you back to see her.”
“He can?”
“He believes so,” Vox replied. “He'll have to ask for special permission but, this is Rob we're talking about – he'll get it.”
“I... I'm actually not sure what to say,” she said, taking a deep breath. “In fact, I don't even know what to think.”
“Think of yourself as very fortunate,” Doc smiled. “Not everyone has an opportunity such as this. When I first met Robert, I – like so many people when they first meet a time traveler – hoped I could change something in my past. Such was not the case.”
“What did you want to change?” Azure asked with a look of open curiosity on her face.
“Well...” he began, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “Morgan, do you remember asking me if I had ever made a mistake I couldn't fix?”
“I do,” he nodded.
“My sister – my half-sister – who was born to my father and his wife years after my own mother had passed away, was terribly injured in an accident. I was the first person with any medical training to arrive on the scene. She was less than half my age – almost still a child – and I saw her very much like my own daughter since our father and her mother had both died when she was an infant. As you can imagine, I was extraordinarily nervous. I couldn't force myself to feel the emotional detachment that is so often necessary in the world of medicine. I made a mistake. She died in my arms.
“Shortly after that, I dedicated my life to spiritual pursuits and wandered into the wilderness. Just days after I had taken up residence in my new home, well beyond the reach of the world – as I was bowed in prayer – Robert marched through my door and knelt down beside me. I had been praying for guidance, for enlightenment, for a new purpose. Robert literally appeared out of nowhere wanting to know if I'd like to help him save the universe.
“Although he still can't understand it, he was meant to find me. Sent by the heavens to lead me to my true calling. After several months of working with him, I got the courage up to ask him to save my sister's life; to save her from what I had done that day. He couldn't. It wasn't that he didn't try. Robert approached it from every angle. If she didn't die, I wouldn't wander into the wilderness, I would never meet him, and she would die. The choices I made had led me to the only man in the universe who could save her life but, they had done so in such a way that he couldn't.”
“Wow, Doc,” Morgan replied, shaking his head slowly, “no wonder you don't like to talk about it.”
“A lot of missing persons have rather unfortunate pasts, Morgan,” Doc pointed out. “Which is why many of us – much like Robert – live in the now. Still, this life is only the beginning. My sister and I will meet again and – when we do – we will never have to part again.”
“I believe that, as well, Doc,” Azure smiled. “I miss my mother terribly sometimes, but I know I'll see her again.”
“I honestly think it was better that I never met my parents,” Cleo replied.
“There are pros and cons to both situations, my dear,” Doc said with a sad smile.
“You know,” Morgan said, “it's weird but, I really don't remember much about my parents. I have a few memories from when I was really little but, after that, the next thing I remember...”
“What are we talking about?” Robert asked, stepping onto the bridge.
“Twenty-five minutes, Rob!” Cleo said, glancing at the clock.
“Doesn't seem like much of a subject.”
“You said you'd only be ten,” she pointed out.
“Ten, twenty-five, what's the difference?”
“Fifteen minutes!”
“So, are we playing poker or what?” Robert asked, ignoring his lady love's observation.
“No,” she replied, “we're playing hearts.”
“Why hearts?”
“You don't always win at hearts,” she explained.
After hearts, they did end up playing a few hands of poker. They then spent the next hour or so utilizing a number a various recreations to induce relaxation. Less than a minute after break-time was over, Robert had them all back in the conference room digging through data.
This time, he had decided to take a different approach. As it was obvious that the red ship hadn't just sprung out of the ether, whoever built it had to have used parts. That being the case, they had to have gotten them from somewhere. It was theoretically possible that their enemies had gone into some region of time where nothing ever happened and built a fully working shipyard from scratch – which had somehow managed to escape the notice of the history department.
That, however, was a long shot. It was much more likely that they – like Robert himself – had found some source of reasonably safe parts in the former present (which is another way of saying the past). Pulling on these threads led Vox to a rather interesting discovery.
“Rob, man,” he said, shaking his head, “we have seriously got to stop going to Karl's.”
“Why?” Robert replied, glancing up from his work. “Were the parts for the tractor-beam time-important.”
“It's not that, brother. Our reputation for only ever buying actual junk remains intact. We were the only ones stupid enough to grab that stuff from him.”
“Then what's the problem?”
“He's getting rich,” Vox laughed. “He was supposed to be a man of means by the time time stopped – that's a weird way to say that – at the point at which time stopped, maybe?”
“We know what you mean.”
“Either way, he's well beyond that now. He's just about filthy rich.”
“Did that commercial make that much difference?”
“It did,” Vox nodded. “In fact, it became kind of a cult-classic short film. All kinds of casting companies and modeling agencies tried to find out who the girls were. And, those posters they signed...”
“What posters?” Robert asked.
“Part of the original Shop at Karl's posters deal was that they sign two hundred of them,” Vox explained. “Those became such ridiculously valuable collectors’ items that – for a brief period of time – the market ended up flooded with forgeries.”
“That's something that should fill your soul with joy, Rob,” Morgan speculated.
“I generally only like fakes when I'm the one who made them.”
“The point is,” Vox continued, “that we can't just keep going to Karl's. For one thing – depending on when we were to show up now – there would be people snapping pictures all over the place. If there ever ends up bei
ng a future again, the girls are likely to be super stars and we'll be mobbed wherever we go.”
“The girls tend to create a sort of mob-fascination reaction already, in my opinion,” Robert said, shaking his head. “Still, I take your point. We'll have to avoid Karl's for a while – at the very least. If I can't come up with some workaround, we'll have to stop going completely until time starts moving again. Which is kind of a shame. I find his futile attempts to price gouge me very amusing.”
“You're just cheap,” Morgan asserted.
“What makes you say that? You don't know how much any of the stuff we buy is actually worth.”
“No, but I do know you.”
“Fair enough.”
After three hours of futile search, most of the crew knocked off for another break. Robert assured Cleo that this time; ten minutes means ten minutes. She gave him half-an-hour before sending Morgan to retrieve him. Morgan stepped into the conference room and explained to Robert that Cleo had decided that for every hour of break-time he missed she was going to delay turning the program back on for another day. This worked like a magic spell.
Moments later, Robert rushed onto the bridge explaining to Cleo that he had leapt up from his work well before the ten-minute mark, slipped and hit his head on the conference table with enough force to knock him out, had laid there for he didn't know how long, and had woken up with a giant knot on his head. As he didn't want to worry her – or interrupt their relaxing – he had gone to the medi-bay and fixed his massive bump – and whatever brain damage had been done by the concussion it had undoubtedly given him. He had then dashed – so he claimed – back to the conference room to make a quick note when Morgan had walked in and informed him that he was half-an-hour late.
This lie was so completely obvious (and amusing) – and the reason Robert told it so flattering – that Cleo decided to forgive him both for being late and for lying about why he had been, and assured him that she wouldn't tack any extra time onto the program being off. This time.
This was, in my humble opinion, a mistake. If you want your fiancé to stop lying to you, you can't let them off the hook just because they're 'cute' when they do it. Still, the truth is that Cleo – although one of the finest people it's ever been my privilege to know – has her own little foibles; as all of us do. Most of hers are centered around Robert. Which, I have to admit, is easy to understand. He's the kind of liar you can't help but want to believe. For that reason, I have omitted from these works any events or conversations that depended solely on Robert's testimony to establish their veracity. After all, a record such as this one becomes valueless if people begin to doubt its authenticity.
The break led to work, which led to TV, which led to bed. The following morning, Chairman Ross hailed the ship just as their first work period was coming to an end.
“What's up, Joe?” Robert asked.
“It's been an interesting morning,” the chairman replied. “Doctor Quail showed up right on schedule and was more than willing to talk about the project. It seemed obvious that he either felt he had nothing to hide or that he was a terrific actor. However, as the conversation went on, I got a weird vibe. As you know, I'm not exactly a slouch when it comes to clone-theory myself...”
“Not in the least,” Robert interjected.
“It was like he knew the subject matter, but that he didn't really understand it. So, I asked him a few questions about the future of the project and what he planned to do next. He got very vague – like he was talking to a layman rather than someone who could actually follow him. That made me suspicious.”
“Understandably.”
“To make a long story short; we scanned his brain. He was a clone.”
“That's not good,” Robert said.
“It gets better.”
“I take it you're being sarcastic.”
“No,” Joe replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We can't seem to find Sturm.”
“Yes!” Morgan cried. “You owe me a hundred bucks!”
“It was fifty,” Robert replied, “and, him being missing isn't proof that he's guilty of anything.”
“If that's your attitude,” Morgan said, “I want to raise it to a hundred.”
“Me, too,” Azure added.
Everyone except Celeste – who never bet real money – upped their wager with Robert.
“I'm tempted to get in on that myself,” Joe chuckled, “but, you're right, Rob; we don't know anything yet. He could be relaxing at a spa somewhere for all we know. Sturm doesn't have a regular day job any more than you do.”
“What's the plan?”
“The first thing we have to do – other than trying to track down Sturm – is to start discretely checking to find out who on the island is and isn't a clone. There can't be that many of them around, people would have noticed. However, isolated individuals of some importance – like Doctor Quail – might well have been replaced without us being any the wiser. Until we know who is who, we have to be very cautious.”
“Agreed,” Robert nodded. “While you're handling that, we'll keep up our search.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks. We're going to need it.”
Robert switched off the comm with a sigh.
“Better and better...” he observed aloud.
“We may be going about this the wrong way,” Morgan mused.
“What do you mean?” Doc asked.
“Well, when we were chasing Celeste, Rob was able to figure out what she was going to do because he knew she would be trying to think like him so he needed to think like himself in order to think like her, right?”
“Basically,” Robert agreed.
“However, he wasn't really trying to think like Celeste thinking like him because it wasn't actually Celeste, it was a clone.”
“That's true,” Celeste nodded.
“So, in reality, Rob managed to out-think the person behind the clone, by thinking like them thinking like him.”
“I can see that,” Cleo asserted.
“As there's a good chance that – we'll say whoever for Rob's sake – whoever sent the clone, hid the ship. That being the case, Rob shouldn't be trying to think like them to find out where they've hidden it, he should just think like himself. Where would you hide it, Rob?”
“Brilliant!” Azure smiled.
“Morgan,” Robert laughed, “that is completely insane. For one thing, if I were trying to hide the ship, I would simply...”
Here the traveler paused.
“Alright,” he said after several seconds, “that is brilliant. It may not be right but, it is brilliant, nonetheless. If I were trying to hide from me, I would hide here; in Never Never Land.”
“You couldn't,” Cleo asserted. “The security system would pick you up the moment you dropped into real-space.”
“Not if Vox and I modified the stealth-field. Like we had to when we did what we did to make that video.”
“Oh, right; obviously,” she replied, clearly surprised that she hadn't considered that before.
“Even so, boss,” Vox replied, “you couldn't stay hidden for long. The stealth-generators would drain the ship in a matter of days.”
“What if you had to do it, Vox?” Robert asked. “What if Celeste's life depended on it? What would you do then?”
“Let me think,” Vox replied thoughtfully. “I suppose... under the circumstances... I would sneak in – hidden by the modified stealth-field – park under the island, and then reset the stealth-generators back to normal. The ship would be beyond the reach of Never Never Land's security system and completely undetectable to any ships that just happened to fly under the island – which almost no one ever does.”
“That's exactly what I would do,” Robert nodded.
“So, it's just that easy?” Morgan said.
“It is,” Cleo asserted, “provided you have a couple of super-geniuses to help you do it – one of whom was actually involved in designing the security system.”
“Have you been involved in everything that's ever been done here?” Morgan asked.
“Almost,” Robert replied. “I am the smartest man who ever lived, bro. They kind of let me give things a final inspection.”
“Point taken.”
“It may take us a couple of days to scan the entire underside of the island,” Robert observed, “but, it will still be a lot faster than digging through endless piles of data. So, we're going to give it a shot.”
Robert got Chairman Ross back on the comm and told him that he and Vox had decided to take a short break from data mining to test a new stealth-field configuration. He claimed that they were going to jump into non-space and then back into Never Never Land cloaked. Robert said that he was letting him know so that he could inform security that they were just conducting a series of tests and that they didn't need to respond to the alarm.
“Why did you lie to him?” Morgan asked. “Other than the fact that you enjoy lying, I mean.”
“I don't enjoy lying,” Robert lied, “but, I had several valid reasons for doing so. First, we don't know that we can trust Joe at the moment. He could have been kidnapped this morning. For all we know, we were just talking to clone-Joe. Second, I want us to be cloaked while we're looking for old red. We won't be able to detect them unless we hit them directly with the scanner. If they see us coming, they could slink out of Dodge before we find them. The sensors in Never Never Land can see through our normal cloak and we don't want the council to know that we can come and go whenever we want – undetected.”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
Robert sent the ship into non-space, turned on the stealth-generators, and dropped back into Never Never Land. For several hours, they moved slowly beneath the island, scanning every square inch of the suspended earth and rock that made up its foundation.
“That's it!” Vox cried suddenly. “That is definitely...”
As he said this, the ship was rocked by laser blasts.
“Return fire!” Morgan cried.
“Belay that order!” Robert immediately said, “Hit 'em with the tractor-beam, Vox.”
Bad Behavior (The Last Time Traveler Book 3) Page 27
