by Bob Blink
The remains of the camp were scattered over a wide area, bits and pieces lying at random. Much of the destruction was probably the result of the recent storm, spreading the damaged camp as the wind and rain attacked the scattered remains. It had clearly been looted, and whatever not taken destroyed or thrown around carelessly, courtesy of my adversaries of a week ago. We walked through the refuse, noting but not stopping to clean up for the moment. My eyes were on the river, down where Lisa had screamed and she and Pat had died. There first, I thought.
Karole started to follow me, and then realized where I was going and what I was seeking.
“I’ll start here,” she whispered quietly. “Call me if you find anything or need me,” the sympathy clear in her voice. I only nodded with a lump in my throat as I walked slowly across the pasture towards the river.
I found the spot. It wasn’t difficult. Three people had died here, all within a few feet of each other. I wondered if the native that had killed Lisa was one of the ones I had shot. It didn’t matter, really, and I would never know, but still I wondered. There were darkened spots on the ground, possibly blood. Pat’s or the Indian Lisa had killed I suspected. The rain had washed any obvious traces and soaked the ground so even there it was difficult to tell. An expert with the right equipment could have told me for sure, blood type and all. So what?
But this was the place. There were no bodies. Lisa had gone in the river, and was surely far downstream, especially after the swelling caused by the recent rains. Unlike the clear water and slow current on the days we had camped here, the water was now murky, a foot or so deeper, and moving swiftly. I had wondered if I would find Pat or the Indian. Maybe wild animals had gotten them, but I thought not. There were no bones, and no real signs of their presence. Tracks would have been washed away by the rain, but had anything come to feed I would have expected the ground to be more ripped up. Perhaps the survivors had pushed them both in the river. Maybe just Pat had been disposed of, with the others taking their friend somewhere for whatever rites they had for the dead. Perhaps they had taken them both. But they were gone. I hung my head for a moment and remembered the years of friendship. I had brought them here. A silent apology was all I could offer. I could have put up a marker, but they wouldn’t care, and no one would ever see it.
I walked a ways down stream, of course. Maybe just to compose myself, maybe hoping to find something. After a while I turned to head back and help Karole. I walked once more toward the spot where Pat had fallen, when a glint caught my eye from under a bush near the edge. Stooping to look, I gradually recognized the shape half covered with dirt and pine needles. Pat’s stainless revolver. It had been knocked from Lisa’s hand when she had been killed, and instead of going into the stream with her had fallen under the bush where it has been missed. Only a chance glimmer from the sunlight had brought it to my attention. I slowly brushed the dirt and dead needles from the surfaces. Pressing the cylinder latch with my thumb, I slipped the cylinder to the side and checked the loads. Two rounds fired, four ready to go. I doubted the rain and a few days in the open affected the remaining rounds. I closed the action as I stood up. Slipping the revolver into the left side of my belt, cross draw fashion, I started back to where my partner was making good headway gathering the remains of the broken camp into a couple of piles.
Karole scanned my face as I approached, trying to judge my reaction to being back where personal tragedy had struck. “Are you alright?”
I nodded, not ready to trust my voice. I looked at the piles she was assembling. The smallest pile we would carry out with us. It contained items that would last a while and we didn’t want found uptime. The two other piles contained items we could burn, and things that we could bury and which would decompose within a few years at most.
“Sleeping bags gone?” I asked surprised that my voice came out near normal.
“I’ve found nothing like you described earlier, so it looks like they took those, and I’m guessing some clothes.”
“It looks like the canteens and all of the utensils are missing also,” I added. “I’m surprised the tents are still here, although it looks like they shredded them pretty good.”
“I don’t think they knew how to take them down,” suggested Karole. “They tore open your food supplies, but didn’t know they required hydration, and didn’t seem to like them as they were. They were scattered all around, mostly torn open.”
The packs were all gone as well. I found a few items; Pat’s shattered GPS unit and Lisa’s cell phone in the pile of junk to carry out. The 20 round box of ammunition Pat had carried in his pack was nowhere to be found.
“Why don’t you check on the bikes,” she suggested. “I looked and they seem to be fine. They knocked them down, and one seems to have a speared tire, but otherwise I think they lost interest in them pretty quickly.”
I dumped the tent poles on the ground and handed her the pieces of cloth that had once been tent, and then headed over to where we had left the bikes. The trees under which we had parked them had provided good shelter from the rainstorm. It took only a moment to right them and run a quick inspection. Karole had been right. Lisa’s bike had a front tire that had been ripped through with some sharpened object. But, you always carry spare tubes, I thought, as I dug through the side carryall that the others had somehow missed completely. There were two spares, and it only took a short while to make the repair, most of the time spent using the hand pump to bring the tire up to a workable pressure. I checked the gas tanks, found them adequate but topped them both off with most of the remaining gas in the spare can. I left about a third in the can to help start the fire that we would set just before leaving to burn most of the rubbish. Both bikes started easily, so sitting out in the rain hadn’t hurt them a bit.
Karole was just finishing up as I walked over to where she had piled the stuff we had to pack out. It really wasn’t much, and she had made a couple of workable bags out of pieces of tent. We could each easily carry one.
“Shall we start the fire, and get out of here? We still want to search the trail on the way back, and it will be getting dark in a while.”
I looked at the pile that would decay. We could bury it, but why bother. None of it would last through the next year, buried or not. I poured the small can of gas onto the pile slated for destruction, and started it with my lighter. We stood back and watched to be sure that the fire caught completely, then walked over to where the bikes waited. The fire might attract attention, but probably not. I felt better having Pat’s camp gun, but still it was time to be leaving. There was nothing more to do here. I led the way, stopping and looking back one last time towards the river as we crested the little hill from which we had first spotted the ruined campground. Karole followed on Lisa’s bike. She handled it well for her first time.
Chapter 8
Twelve and a half years ago
January, 1994
Seattle, Washington
The snow was falling lightly when we got to 1994, shortly after lunch, and something over two weeks since I had originally left with Pat and Lisa. The difference in time between the downtime base, it was still early morning there, and the two hours we had spent walking through the time matrix control center explained the lateness of the day. It looked like there had been a couple of minor storms since I had left, but nothing significant so the roads would be passable without too much difficulty. I watched the small flakes drifting down almost vertically in the absence of any wind, and thought about what we had seen in the control center.
With every trip into the center, a check for any sign of the return of the aliens was a priority. I had always made a check, as it turned out so had Karole, although she had investigated with a better idea what she was watching for. I had simply felt it expedient to see if there were signs the ‘Builders’ had returned, whereas she was checking for threats. Today was like every other time I had been here. Quiet, and no sign that anyone or anything had been here since I had last passed through.
We were standing at the solid door we had designated an airlock, the end of our ‘quick check’ walk-through. “Clear,” she said unnecessarily. We turned and walked back down the wide hallway that opened at the far end into the main room of the complex. From here it was possible to ‘see’ through the floor to the tunnel room below, allowing the viewer to see any activity of departing and arriving ‘travelers’. It was interesting that from below, one only detected a solid opaque ceiling, with no hint of the control area above. At the right side far end of this room as one walked into it from the direction of the large sealed door, was the top of the ramped walkway that led one down to the lower level tunnel room. We turned to our left and walked slowly by the banks of equipment that we had both concluded was the operator control of the tunnel complex. Karole had actually seen it in action when the creatures closed the way home for her. She had said that the grayish plate in one of the consoles had been active when she had arrived, covered with a variety of complex symbols, similar to the ones on our keys. It had remained active for about an hour, then gone dark. She had never seen any of the other panels active. But the equipment was powered. There was a faint hum and a variety of purple and blue lights scattered under the bottom of each plate in the half dozen consoles. Each console was surprisingly wide, maybe half again as wide as the typical console humans used. It would have suggested that the ‘Builders’ were built wider than humans were, if we didn’t have first hand experience to the contrary. Control pads, keyboards maybe, were set into the lower flat portion of the console, but had only twenty eight ‘keys’ which were arranged in three concentric circles, rather than rows. None of the ‘keys’ responded to touch. However they worked, there was no physical movement, and no apparent response to any attempted action. Although we had both been hesitant and nervous about pressing anything here, each of us admitted to have tried a least once over the past year.
“Work area,” she suggested, pointing to the flat table-like structure set into the floor behind the consoles. There were no seats, either around the table or behind the consoles, which probably explained the higher than normal elevation of everything. Whatever they did here, they must do it standing. On the wall behind the table was another of those flat gray screens, this one more than six feet long and four feet high. Inactive, of course, except for the ever present faint purple square underneath the center. There appeared to be no controls at all on this ‘monitor’ if that’s what it was.
At the far left was a short passageway that led back to the other areas. “Let’s compare notes and see if either has discovered anything the other hasn’t,” I suggested. “We have time. There is little to do once we get home to my time other than check into a hotel until tomorrow.”
With Pat overdue at work by now we couldn’t know if there was a search underway for him. As his friend, they would seek me out to see if I could shed any light on his disappearance. I was supposed to be out of town, so it wouldn’t be surprising they couldn’t contact me. But Pat’s car was sitting in my garage where he and Lisa had parked it after their return from their San Francisco Christmas visit. They hadn’t even gone home on their return, sleeping in my guestroom before we set out. We needed to ditch the car before others could witness my return. To that end, I had decided to sneak home early the second day of our return, and slip away with the car. I didn’t want any night work with telltale lights.
The whole complex occupied less space than my house. A second hallway ran at right angles to the long, wide walkway from the locked door. As we entered this hallway, we passed an empty room on our right. “What about the empty room,” she questioned.
“I have no idea. Perhaps some function they haven’t installed yet.” We passed the room by, but having explored it before I knew that it was another medium sized area, with four smooth empty walls.
Immediately to the left as we walked down the hallway was another room, this one considerably larger than the ‘control room’. Once again there was a central table with a number of what I presumed to be workstations along the far wall, and what appeared to be lab benches along the other two walls. A variety of odd-looking equipment was built into the walls and stacked on the benches. On one bench one of the units was opened, but the innards looked like slabs of carbon composite rather than electronics. Behind us as we entered were a number of shelves with a hand full of ‘books’ filled with more of the odd symbolic writing. Not a single illustration was present to help and the plastic-like ‘paper’ looked like it would last for centuries. The writing in the books was not precise, appearing more like a form of handwriting than something printed. No clues there.
Across the hall from the workroom was a small room with a single metal structure. No apparent function, but Karole suggested it was some form of toilet or the equivalent. It was the only indication of personal comfort in the center. Clearly absent was any facility for sleeping, resting, or eating. There was no sign of any type of food, or liquids for drinking. However the aliens used the control area, they had not equipped it to support living here.
Further down the hall we came to the final two areas. On the left was a large room with transparent walls with multiple large blocky units inside. Heavy transparent cables led from the equipment and disappeared into the walls in the back. We both felt this was the source of power for the complex, but still could not find access to the area. The wall seemed a continuous smooth, transparent surface, although strong enough that it responded more like thick steel when we tapped on the surface. Unable to access the power room, we walked into the smaller room to the right side of the hallway. Here were shelves loaded with a variety of equipment. I would swear that along one wall were the equivalents of laptop portable computers, maybe a half dozen with their typical gray screen and circular input pad. There were additional units of a variety of sizes and shape. All were portable, and resembled some of the units arranged on the lab benches in the other room. Nothing in this room was powered, and there was no obvious means to connect anything to them, even had we understood anything about the power system.
We found only one item that was out of place in all the starkness. It was roughly ten inches square, and perhaps an inch thick. It hosted a three-dimensional image; a picture of somewhere, perhaps home for one of the aliens. A mountain range filled the background, very orange in color against a pale blue sky, filled with a few thin clouds. The foreground showed a thick brownish grass, dead or natural color we couldn’t tell. A stream, appearing a light blue in color and looking entirely natural to us, flowed through the center of the picture and disappeared behind a rise in the landscape. It could have been somewhere on earth, but I doubted it. But it told us nothing useful and we left it on the shelf where we found it.
Back in the control room we stopped at the head of the ramp and checked the small bin that contained a number of the keys that activated the entryway to the complex. They were loosely gathered in a pile, and I had to dig them out in order to count. “Eighteen,” I said, “The same as always. If they came through they brought additional keys with them.” Karole had noted the aliens seemed to dump the keys in the bin when they returned, and assumed they must grab one as needed before going out of the complex.
“There were twenty the first time I checked,” she noted.
I looked at her. “Twenty?”
“I took one a long time ago which left nineteen. That gives me two. I always take two of the keys with me when I go through the tunnels. I hide one somewhere when I get on the other side, and keep the other with me. Insurance,” she continued. “I was always worried that I might lose the one I was carrying, or maybe it could be taken from me. At least I would have a way back if I could get to the one I had hidden.”
“I took one also,” I admitted.
A smile touched her eyes, as if I had answered something for her. “You knew?” I asked.
“I suspected. I told you I had evidence that someone else had entered the complex. About a year ago I noticed that one of the keys had d
isappeared since my previous visit. I always counted them as well. I was curious if you would tell me.”
“I was always afraid if one was missing, it would be noticed,” I said still thinking about what she had said. “But I took one anyway because I worried about being cut off if I lost mine.”
“The approach is too casual. The aliens appear to have just dumped them in the bin here. I think if most were gone, or all, then it could be a problem if they returned. But one or two, I don’t think so. I decided it was a safe gamble.”
Down in the tunnel room, directly opposite the bottom of the ramp, was the only room in this part of the complex. It was small in comparison to the other areas and held a number of the tripod flyers. I had never known what they were before meeting Karole, only noting that there were ten of the small devices. Other than what I had recognized as footpads early on, the slim structures only other distinguishing feature was a series of small opaque cylinders, slightly flared at one end.
“I can’t see how these could fly,” I observed out loud. “There is nothing here that is large enough to provide power or fuel.”
“I think the power is provided by the harness pack the aliens wore. It looks like there is a contact where the hands would grasp for support, and it is possible that the power is transferred that way. It would make sense. The units are useless to anyone else, but each time they would bring a fully charged system with them. Grab any unit and go. No need for much in terms of maintenance.”
We backed out of the tiny room and stood looking at the elliptical room that collected the many tunnels together. The tunnel to home was most of the way around the room, and as we walked towards it Karole noted when and where each tunnel went as we passed by. “That one goes the farthest uptime of all the tunnels; about 5200 years from your time. It’s where I buried my roommate. The next goes downtime about two hundred and fifty years, and then the closed tunnel you realized earlier was once the one that went to my time. The next tunnel goes downtime over two thousand years, followed by an uptime of ninety years.”
