The ceiling of the huge cavern was rock and a good fifty feet overhead and the floor was smooth and hard.
“I need something to drink,” Duster said, heading through the cavern toward a back corner. “Anyone else?”
“A bottle of water would be nice,” Bonnie said.
Brice nodded as he looked around, staring at the huge space and all the supplies.
“Make that two more,” she said, following Duster.
Brice turned and followed them both past a wall of rifles and pistols, all looking like they were fresh out of a museum, yet looking almost new.
In the back area of the big cave was what looked like a modern living room, with couches and chairs on a large carpet and a huge modern kitchen with a dining table that could hold at least ten. The cave floor in the kitchen had been tiled.
Duster dug into the fridge and then laughed as he pulled out three bottles of water. “Ryan and April were here and left us dinner for the evening.”
“I wonder why they didn’t stick around,” Bonnie said.
“They have a great-great-grandkid playing in a softball league, remember?” Duster said.
Brice was about to ask how that was possible, then just shut his mouth and took the bottle of water. He would just add that to the thousand other questions he was sure he was going to have.
“So this is the first big cavern your great-great-grandfather found?” Brice asked.
“This is the place,” Duster said. “We use it now for storage and meals and such.”
Brice took a drink of the bottle of cold water.
“Might want to leave that on the table,” Bonnie said, setting her bottle down as well. “We’ll be right back anyway.”
Brice took another drink, set the bottle down, and turned to follow her and Duster back across the cavern. A huge metal door was locked on the far side of the cavern. It looked like it had filled in a mine tunnel.
Duster opened it quickly and on the other side was a dead-end mine tunnel.
“Yet another hologram,” Duster said and walked forward and right on through.
“Do not touch anything in this room except the ground,” Bonnie said.
Then she walked forward and vanished through the wall.
He followed her, again managing to barely keep his eyes open as he stepped through the hologram that looked like a solid stone wall.
Beyond it, the huge cavern took him a moment to even see.
He took about five steps over the smooth dirt floor and then just stopped.
A long wooden table with a small wooden box set to one side of the cavern. The wooden box had some wires running from it.
The cavern had to be as large as some huge professional basketball arenas. Every inch of the massive cavern was covered with millions and millions of quartz crystals of all size and shapes. All of them seemed to be glowing with a light of their own, giving the room a soft, clear light. It was as if every crystal had a light behind it.
Never, in all his life, had he seen anything so beautiful.
Crystals seemed to grow in clumps and in some areas massive numbers of crystals seemed to almost form shapes jutting from the walls and down from the distant ceiling.
To one side of the huge room was an archway that seemed to lead off into another massive cavern of crystals and beyond that more and more and more caverns into the distance.
“Every crystal you can see is a major alternate timeline very close to our timeline,” Duster said.
“Millions and millions of microscopic timeline crystals are forming around each major crystal every second,” Bonnie said, “and then being absorbed back into the timeline if the decision does not change anything major. If it does, then the new crystal grows and might eventually be a major timeline as well.”
“It’s real,” Brice managed to say.
“It is very real,” Bonnie said. “The math does not lie.”
“Math never lies when you do it right,” Duster said.
With that Brice just sat down in the dirt, staring at all of time on the walls around him.
CHAPTER TEN
July 8th, 2016
Dixie’s Timeline
DIXIE MANAGED TO climb back to her feet after a few long moments of just sitting there staring at the massive cavern of crystals. Never had she imagined anything so beautiful. It was like she was standing inside a diamond.
She moved over to where Bonnie and Duster stood beside the big wooden table.
“Remember to never touch a crystal,” Duster said. “We’re not sure what would happen and we don’t want to find out. Luckily my great-great-grandfather wore gloves when he worked and broke through into here.”
Dixie nodded.
“This is the machine we invented to jump timelines,” Bonnie said, indicating the big ugly wooden box on the table with a dial on it and some wires leading out of it.
To Dixie it sure didn’t look like much more than what a kid could bang together in a garage.
“Not much to look at,” Duster said, “but it gets the job done.”
“What exactly does it do?” Dixie asked.
Duster picked up the two cords. “We attach one end of these two cords to a crystal on the wall and the other to the machine right there where the electrical terminals stick out the side. Whoever is touching the machine is transferred to that timeline for the date set on the dial above the terminals.”
“We can only go as far back as the mine is open,” Bonnie said. “So we’re limited to the late 1870s. We tend to like 1878 the best, since Silver City is past its first boom, yet still has a lot of supplies.”
“That’s also just after my great-great-grandfather boarded the place up for the last time,” Duster said.
Suddenly part of the math that Dixie had worked on concerned the variance of time and matter.
“How long did it take to build that lodge?” Dixie asked.
Duster shrugged. “A couple of years.”
Bonnie smiled. “Starting to apply the math you’ve been working on, huh?”
Dixie just nodded.
“You can stay in another timeline as long as you want,” Duster said. “You can age and even die there.”
“But you will only be gone from this timeline for two minutes and fifteen seconds,” Bonnie said. “And if you die in another timeline, you return here very much alive.”
Before Dixie could ask another question on that impossible fact, Duster said, “Look at it this way. The power of the machine only allows one hundred and thirty-five seconds in this timeline to pass. When you are in the other timeline, you become a part of that timeline. By your very arrival there, you change that timeline and more timelines branch off.”
“You can have children, raise a family, die of old age in the other timeline,” Bonnie said. “Your family and everyone you influenced stay in that timeline when you return. Only two minutes and fifteen seconds elapse here.”
“How many other timelines have you visited?” Dixie asked, trying to get her mind to form even a solid thought.
“Hundreds and hundreds,” Duster said.
He pointed to the wall of crystals closest to the table. Dixie could see small hairband-like bands on many of the crystals. “April suggested we start marking crystals we have attached to, but that’s only been in the last year or so.”
Dixie had to ask, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
“How many years have you two lived?”
Duster shrugged and looked at Bonnie. “You still keeping track of that sort of thing?”
“I stopped about a year ago when we went past a thousand years,” she said. “Counting it just made me feel old.”
Before Dixie could even catch her breath, Duster put on a pair of thick leather gloves and attached the wire ends to a glowing rose crystal on the wall that seemed to be a major one and had to be a good ten inches long.
“Bonnie, why don’t you take Dixie on a little test run and I’ll start working on that mea
l April and Ryan left us.”
Dixie wanted to scream and run from the room.
“It will be fun and we’ll be right back, I promise,” Bonnie said. “Just touch the box.”
Dixie touched the smooth polished wood on the side of the box. It wasn’t hot or cold. Just wood.
Duster adjusted the dial on one side of the wooden box and then Bonnie touched the box beside Dixie with her bare hand and picked up one of the wires leading to the wall with a glove-covered hand.
Duster attached one wire to the box, then smiled at Dixie. “See you in two minutes and fifteen seconds.”
Bonnie attached the other wire and Duster vanished.
“Where did he go?” Dixie asked, the panic filling her voice.
Duster had just vanished from the big crystal room.
How was that possible?
The big wooden table was still there, the wires were attached to the wood box, but no Duster.
“He didn’t go anywhere,” Bonnie said, smiling and putting her arm around Dixie to both give her support and turn her toward the now closed metal door leading back into the cavern. “We did. Welcome to 1878.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
October 14, 1878
Brice’s Timeline
BRICE LOOKED AT Duster. Bonnie had just vanished out of the crystal cavern.
“What do you mean we moved? What do you mean 1878?”
Duster laughed. “Don’t worry, it freaked me out beyond words the first few times I jumped timelines. Bonnie is still back in July in 2016 in our home timeline.”
Duster pointed to the wire leading from the machine over to a crystal on the wall. “We are now in the timeline contained in that crystal. If we change something, other timelines will start forming because we are now a part of that crystal’s timeline.”
Brice managed to nod, but he wasn’t really believing what Duster was saying.
“Come on, I’ll show you,” Duster said, heading toward the now-closed metal door that led out into the other cavern. The lights in that cavern came up as they entered. Brice noticed his bottle of water was not on the table where he had left it.
Brice followed him to a rack of clothes where Duster grabbed a long coat off the rack for Ryan and a cowboy hat. “Slip this on in case anyone spots us.”
Brice did as Duster headed for the mine tunnel leading to the entrance.
Brice just stumbled along behind him, doing his best to even form a clear thought.
And failing.
Brice prided himself in thinking clearly in emergency situations, but this was something different. Duster was trying to get him to believe that all the work Brice had done in theoretical math and alternate timelines had actually been about a reality.
Brice was a mathematician.
He didn’t deal in reality.
He dealt in theory.
At the entrance to the mine, Duster showed him the scope that let Duster check out the hillside for people close by. Brice looked through it as well and could see no one.
It looked strange out there. Almost dark, and with gray overcast.
Duster closed the door and hit the big button to open the outside door.
The blast of intense cold air caught Brice by surprise and snapped some thinking back into place.
There was a moderate wind and it was snowing lightly as they stepped out onto the flat area of the mine tailing. The old shack now had windows in it and an ore car sat between it and the boarded up mine entrance.
“The Cadillac is parked over on that hillside in 2016,” Duster said, pointing to a barren ridgeline with no car that in one hundred and thirty-eight years would hold a stand of trees.
Duster moved over to the edge of the mine tailings and pointed downward.
It took Brice a moment to realize what he was seeing through the blowing snow.
A thousand feet below him, Silver City was a live and flourishing town, with hundreds of buildings. Many of the buildings had lights coming through windows and smoke from chimneys mixed with the blowing snow.
“That’s still a pretty rough mining town at this point in history,” Duster said. “Just in the middle of its first boom phase.”
The cold air made Brice pull the long coat in tight around his body.
He had no idea how this was possible.
None.
Brice looked around. The big rock was closed back up, the old mining shack looked like it had only been built a few years before. The boards over the mine were fresh and the dirt they were standing on looked recently dug, not settled and packed by years of weather.
And below Brice was the booming town of Silver City, Idaho. A place he had read and heard about as a ghost town his entire life.
Only the town below was far, far from a ghost town.
“How about we head back in and get that food Bonnie’s started on,” Duster said. “Damn cold out here.”
“That’s real?” Brice asked, pointing down the hill at the town.
“Very real,” Duster said. “This is 1878, identical in all ways to the 1878 of our timeline. Maybe in this timeline someone got stuck in traffic and in our timeline they didn’t.”
“No differences at all?” Brice asked as they turned back to the rock and Duster, with a quick look around, opened it.
“I’ve been into the past in hundreds of different timelines,” Duster said, “and never once saw a difference from ours, until I returned to our timeline after building the lodge and someone had built it in our timeline as well.”
Duster stepped through the door.
Brice followed with one last look around at the blowing snow and the barren hillside where the Cadillac should be parked in trees.
He had about a thousand questions, he was sure.
As soon as his mind returned and started to actually work again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
October 14, 1878
Dixie’s Timeline
“THESE THIN COTTON dresses are far too light for this weather,” Bonnie said. “This is dangerous. Ready to head in?”
Dixie had been shivering for the entire time they had been out in the snowstorm, but she wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or the shock of what she was seeing. Bonnie had had her put on an 1880s style dress over her clothes without buttoning it in the back.
Bonnie had done the same thing, saying it was just in case someone saw them from a distance.
Dixie just couldn’t believe they were actually going out of the mine into 1878, but she was still numb from Duster disappearing in the big crystal cavern.
After Bonnie checked to see if anyone was nearby through a scope and showed Dixie how to use it, she had opened the door and they had stepped out into blowing snow.
And out there Dixie had seen things that didn’t seem possible, such as a real town where a ghost town had been before. And no trees where the Cadillac had been, and the cabin looked much newer and still had windows.
Bonnie quickly checked around for anyone watching and opened back up the rock and they stepped back inside.
For a moment they were in pitch darkness before the light came up and the door to the mine opened.
“Wow, was that cold,” Bonnie said. “Duster could have dialed us in a summer month just as easy.”
“It wouldn’t have been as believable,” Dixie said, following Bonnie down the mine tunnel and into the mountain.
“Maybe not,” Bonnie said, “but it would have been warmer.”
They quickly put the dresses back on the rack, then headed back out into the beautiful crystal cavern.
Dixie was still shivering from the cold and was blowing on her hands when she followed Bonnie into the big glowing cavern.
She made it two steps before stopping and just staring again.
“Come on,” Bonnie said. “Hot drinks are waiting for us in our timeline in the future.”
Dixie nodded and got herself moving and over to the table.
“Put your hand on the box,” Bonnie said.
&nb
sp; Dixie put her hand beside Bonnie’s hand.
Bonnie pulled a wire from the box, then quickly slipped on some leather gloves and removed one wire clamp from the crystal.
“I’ll label it later,” she said.
She came back over to the box and unhooked the other wire, then took Dixie by the arm. “Let’s get something warm, what do you say?”
“Where is Duster?” Dixie asked.
“He better damn well be two minutes and fifteen seconds into making us some food and something warm to drink.”
“Oh,” was all Dixie could say.
She was still shaking and she still wasn’t sure if it was from the cold or information overload.
She had just taken a round trip to 1878.
In another timeline.
How in the hell was that even possible?
She knew the math she had worked on for the last year said it was possible.
In theory.
But reality was another matter all together.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
July 8th, 2016
Brice’s Timeline
BRICE FOLLOWED DUSTER out of the crystal cavern and into the storage cavern. Part of Brice’s mind wasn’t allowing him to accept what he had just seen, and the other part of him was slowly getting excited.
He had just traveled in time, traveled to another alternate timeline. How incredible was that?
But it couldn’t really have happened.
It just couldn’t.
Bonnie was in the modern kitchen area of the big cavern, working at the counter with her back to them.
There was a steaming mug of hot chocolate in front of one chair at the big table and Duster took that chair and wrapped his hands around the mug. Brice’s bottle of water was still sitting where he had left it.
“Wasn’t sure if you wanted some hot chocolate, tea, or coffee,” Bonnie said, glancing over her shoulder at Brice. “Coffee is going to be instant.”
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