“So, Egghead Man,” Jake said. “Do you have any idea where we are? Or, when?”
April said, “It’s Mastermind.”
Scott was ignoring them both, looking into the screen of a small device, a hand-held scanning and recording unit he could not resist calling a tricorder. “The location is exactly where I intended it to be. Southern France.”
“This is France?” Rick said.
“The question is – when. Looks like the year 5,136 B.C. Approximately.”
Jake said, “What day of the week is it?”
Scott was about to search out the answer, then caught himself and shot Jake a scolding glance.
“I’ve never been to southern France,” Rick said, “but this isn’t quite how I pictured it. Looks more like something you might see in northern Canada.”
Jake said, “The scenery would be different in this time. The European forests were still largely un-cut. And the climate is much cooler because the last ice age is still receding, just like it is on our Earth at this time.”
“Indeed,” Scott said.
Rick shot Jake a quizzical look.
Jake said, “Hey, I read.”
Scott said, “The first course of business is to find human life forms. Essentially, we must avoid contact with them, or even letting them see us. We can’t take a chance on disturbing their natural course of history.”
“I thought you said you can’t change the past,” Rick said.
“Theoretically, you can’t. But it’s best to play it safe.”
April beamed a smile. “And for scouting around, I’m best suited for the job.”
Scott returned the smile. “But please, be careful.”
“Don’t worry. Nothing can hurt me when I go all quantum.”
“Nothing we’ve encountered seems to be able to. But just for my sake, be careful.”
She planted a kiss on his cheek. “Will do, Mastermind. Back in a flash.”
Jake didn’t know if the pun was intended or not.
With the proverbial flash, pun or not, she disappeared.
“I still think it’s freaky when she does that,” Rick said.
“Tell me about it.” Scott focused his gaze back onto his hand-held device. “She and I have been together for more than a year, and I still can’t get used to it.”
Scott was staring into his scanning device as he spoke. Jake thought he was doing it more intently than it seemed like he should be, and a subtle frown had begun to form.
Jake said, “Scott, something wrong?”
“I’m detecting tachyon waves. Lots of them.”
“Well.., we did just emerge from the time stream.”
“Yes, but these aren’t emanating from us. This seems to be centering some place east of us. Maybe a few miles. Hard to tell exactly. And it looks like three life forms have just materialized.”
With a flash of light, April again stood among them.
“Scott, Jake,” she said, her normally bubbly smile gone, her brow furrowed with urgency. “We have a problem. A big one.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
They took to the air, following April. Rather than transform once again to light, she remained solid so she could communicate with the team, and relied on the anti-gravitational field generated by her battle suit for flight.
“Based on what you’ve told us about this time period,” April said, raising her voice above the winds at this altitude, “and what I’ve read in our preparation for this mission, these people I saw should not be here.”
They flew over an extensive pine forest, which gave way after a few miles to a grassy glade. There, in the center of the glade, stood three people. One was a man with a long, flowing headdress, reminding Scott of historical Egyptian fashion. The man was tall and wore no shirt. About his hips was a white sort of kilt that fell to his knees. He appeared to be wearing sandals. The man was muscled like an Olympic swimmer, and his skin was dark, though Scott could not tell from the distance if the coloring was due to genetics or just a really good tan.
A woman was with them. Her hair was a jet black, and cut straight above the brows. She wore only a white strip of cloth wrapped about her breasts and tied behind the back, and a white loin cloth. What looked to be a sword was strapped to her back. She was also dark-skinned, and had an athletic look.
The third was a man, and he also had long hair, though it was lighter colored. It was hard to tell from this distance, but he appeared to have a beard falling a few inches below his chin. He wore a robe and was also in sandals.
“Follow my lead,” Scott said.
Jake said, flying beside him, “Follow your lead? Do you have any idea at all what you’re going to do?”
“Play it by ear.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
The three below saw Scott and his team approach, and they took what seemed to be a defensive posture, with the bearded man and the woman standing maybe ten feet apart, and the shirtless man taking a position behind them.
Scott landed in the grass a few yards from them, with Jake setting down beside him, and the rest of the team behind them both.
“Try to relax,” Scott said. “Let’s not look like we’re expecting trouble.”
“Are we?” Rick asked.
“I don’t know.” To Jake, Scott said, “Are you powering-up?”
Jake said, “Oh yeah. I powered-up a little as soon as we materialized.”
“You might want to power-up some more, just to be on the safe side.”
The bearded man spoke a few words, and though they were unintelligible by the standards of the team, there was a sort of poetic flow to them.
Scott said, “What I wouldn’t give right now for a Universal Translator.”
Jake said, “Can’t we leave the geek jokes back in the future?”
“Actually, I’ve been working on one. One of my many projects. But that won’t help us now.”
Scott raised his right hand palm out, in what he understood as the universal sign for I come in peace. At least it was universal on their Earth. He hoped the same would be true on this one.
The man said a few words, and then returned the hand gesture.
Scott said, “I sure hope this means we’re making some sort of progress.”
Jake was having trouble keeping his eyes from the woman. She was breathtaking. Her legs were well muscled, like those of a female gymnast. A green tattoo that looked serpentine wound its way up one leg. Her stomach was flat and her hips gently curved. She stood with her feet apart, her weight equally balanced. Like a fighter.
She caught him looking her way and they made eye contact for a moment. He thought he saw the beginning of a smile, and then she seemed to catch herself and snapped her attention back to the bearded man and Scott.
Scott said, “The language has a sort of North African sound to it, but almost prehistoric.”
“And you know prehistoric African language...how?” Jake said. “Wait, don’t tell me.”
April said, “Are you, like really powered-up? I have a bad feeling about this.”
Jake nodded. He had powered-up to an extent when they first materialized from the future, but he was now amping up further. It felt like the Earth’s gravitational field was diminishing by the heartbeat, and he felt the strange sensation that came on when he no longer needed oxygen. At this level of powering-up, breathing was necessary only because he needed air to exhale in order to speak.
His senses were taking on a superhuman acuity. At the edge of the field, two thousand feet away, a hummingbird was flitting about. Jake could hear its wings buzzing as they whipped through the air, and he could have visually counted its feathers. He could hear Scott’s heartbeat – a little fast, but a first contact with an alien culture is bound to bring on some anxiety as well as pure excitement. After all, Scott was a scientist.
Jake could also hear the girl’s heartbeat. She tossed a glance to him, and it quickened just a smidge. Some things are universal, whether you und
erstand each other’s words or not.
He decided to throw caution to the wind, and gave her a smile. Without responding, she returned her gaze to her bearded leader. At least, she gave no outward response. He could hear her heart rate increase even more.
Jake continued to power-up, and within moments could hear the blood rushing through Scott’s veins and arteries. He could hear gas rumbling in Rick’s lower abdomen – you eat the way Rick does, and gas is going to rumble.
Scott nodded toward the man he presumed to be their leader, and allowed a smile. He then touched his hand to his chest, and said, “Scott Tempest.”
“Mastermind,” April whispered.
“Tempest,” Scott repeated.
The man made the same gesture, and said, “Kontar.”
“Kontar,” Scott said. Then, to Jake, “I hope that’s his name. For all I know, he just swore at me.”
“No. I don’t think so. I think they’re as tentative of us as we are of them, but just as curious.” Jake had to make an effort at this point to keep his voice at a normal, human level. Powered-up as he was, he could easily blow out the eardrums of the people around him. “Body language tends to be more or less universal.”
Scott nodded. “If we only had time to learn their language.”
The three strangers were now talking among themselves, also.
Jake said, “Are you really sure you don’t have any concerns about polluting the timeline? Butterfly effect, and all that? Maybe it was a mistake to let them see us.”
“I don’t think these three are natives to this time period. Their method of dress for one thing.”
“Any speculations as to where they might be from?”
“Aliens?” April said.
Scott shrugged. “It’s way too early to make any serious speculations. I do wish Sammy were here. He is a living encyclopedia of information, even moreso than I, and can calculate odds much faster.”
That says a lot, Jake thought. He liked to razz Scott, but he understood Scott’s intelligence level was so incredibly high that Jake could not even wrap his own mind around the concept.
Suddenly, the belt attached to Scott’s battle suit beeped.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” April asked.
“Don’t know. This is a proximity alarm.”
It began a series of fast-paced beeps at him. Binary code. Longer beeps for one, short ones for zero.
“It’s coming from space,” he said, translating the beeps.
He reached to his belt and removed the tricorder he had clipped there, and gazed into the tiny view screen. The three strangers were now looking at Scott curiously.
Jake said, “You have their attention.”
“We have a problem,” Scott said. “A real one.”
“What other kind do we ever have?”
“A huge asteroid is out there. How the hell did that get there? It’s roughly the size and shape of Phobos..,”
“And” Jake said, “just what is –“
“One of the moons of Mars. Much smaller than ours, but still big. It seems to be on a collision course with this Earth, and its size is large enough that a collision could be catastrophic. It is roughly two hundred million kilometers away, but it’s moving fast. I estimate the impact to be – and it’s purely an estimate mind you, almost a guess – to be in about a week.”
“Where?”
“North America. I’m not sure where.”
“I’d be willing to bet it might be somewhere around Quebec. The cause of the crater we saw in our time.”
“Too early for guesses, but I think you’re probably right.”
April and Rick couldn’t help but look skyward, as though they could see the asteroid beyond Earth’s blue sky. Jake found himself doing the same.
The three strangers were looking upward with alarm, following their gazes, and then back at Scott and his team.
“Uh, Scott,” April said, “I think they somehow know what we’re talking about.”
“Impossible. Their language is too different from ours. And judging by their dress, their level of technological development is –“
“Scott,” Jake said, “she’s right. Somehow, they know what we’re talking about.”
The bearded man was looking intently at Scott, and waving his hands in a kind of gesture that might have meant to slow down. Or, Jake thought, he might have been signaling a field goal was good, or a base runner was safe.
Jake said, “That thing has to be destroyed.”
“We’ll have to go back to our time,” Scott said. “Get some equipment. But I don’t know..,” his mind was working too fast for words to form. “We have a real problem. If that thing isn’t destroyed within the next three hours, and I mean completely pulverized, then its momentum will still carry the fragments toward Earth. Some of the fragments will be still be large enough to wreak havoc.”
“Well, we go back to our world, you and Sammy can build the weapon necessary, then we come back here, arriving just a moment after we left.”
Scott shook his head. “I’m still trying to figure this time travel stuff out, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Time seems to move in eddies and currents. I’m not sure why or even how, but that’s what I’ve observed. If we go back to our world for three hours, and then we return here, we can’t return any less than three hours from now.”
“And yet you went back in time a couple hours and shook hands with yourself.”
“It has something to do with when you enter the time stream. When I shook hands with myself, I couldn’t return to the future any earlier than when I left. I was in the past for thirty seconds, so I had to return thirty seconds from when I had left.
“You’re going to make my head start hurting.”
“Suffice it to say, Sammy and I would have to build this thing in less than three hours. And I don’t even know what we would use for a power source.”
“I know how to stop it,” Jake said, suddenly increasing his rate of power-up.
“No, Jake. It’s too dangerous.”
“You said I could survive the vacuum of space.”
“I said theoretically you could. We haven’t run any tests.”
“Time to run one. Right now.” And he took to the air.
“Jake. No!”
April said, “Do you think I should stop him?”
Scott focused his tricorder on Jake. “At his current rate of power, I don’t really think anything on Earth, this one or ours, could stop him.”
Rick was thinking fast. “How about that pulse you use to make him power-up when he’s been knocked unconscious. Can you work it in reverse?”
“Normally yes, but he’s already powered-up beyond the point that any pulse of any kind could affect his brain. My God..,” he could not take his eyes from the screen of his tricorder, “he’s already beyond anything he has ever achieved before. And increasing at a rate of..,”
“Uh, boss,” Rick said, “I think our problems are about to get worse.”
The man with the beard raised both hands into the air, and fired what looked a like a blast of blue lightning from each hand. He was firing at Jake.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Chuck was sitting in a swivel chair beside Sammy. His feet were resting on the console, his ankles crossed. A beer was in one hand. On one of the screens, per his request, a Cleveland Indians game was starting up.
“You gotta love ‘em,” he said. “They don’t win too many games, but I guess it’s just the curse of coming from Cleveland.”
“We have a problem,” Sammy said, suddenly alarmed.
“Yeah, I guess we do. They have this shortstop, hits for power and average. Almost won the triple crown last year. But now, with him being eligible for arbitration at the end of the season, you know they’re gonna be trading him.”
“No, I mean a real problem.”
“Well, dude, I know you don’t come from Cleveland but..,”
Sammy was tapping away at switches and buttons with each hand, glancing from one screen to another as he did so. He hit the override, and when it didn’t respond he decided to access the computer’s programming directly. Find out what the hell was going on.
He shook his head with frustration. “I just can’t move fast enough. Before, I could have done this with the speed of thought.”
“Hey, dude,” Chuck said. “It looks like you got a real problem going on.”
“I’ve lost contact with the away team.”
Chuck chuckled. “Away team. I love the Star Trek talk you guys are always using. Who’d’a thought a genius like Scott would be such a dork.”
“Geek,” Sammy said. “The word is geek. He’s a geek, not a dork.”
“What’s the difference, dude?”
“Geeks can have girlfriends, dorks can’t,” Sammy said, tapping away at membrane switches, the central computer responding with a stream of binary code only Sammy could hear.
“Why not?”
“What girl would want to be with a dork?”
Chuck squinted as he tried to process that one.
Sammy said, “Listen, we’ve lost contact with the away team. What part of that do you not understand? I don’t have time for your inane babble.”
“Inane?” Chuck was about to be offended, but then his beer-fuzzed mind caught up with what Sammy had said. “You lost contact with the away team? I didn’t know you were in contact with them. I mean, how do you remain in contact with someone in an alternate universe, seven thousand years in the past?”
“We have two wormholes open, and we bounce a signal from our universe to theirs, and off of a satellite we put in orbit. Then, from the satellite, through the second wormhole, to the past. The signal is expected to be a bit degraded and warped, but it’s still there. Or at least it should be. It was until a moment ago.”
“Degraded and warped? I’ve been called a few things like that. There’s an ex-wife, and a couple former girlfriends..,”
“Somehow, I’m not surprised.”
“Did you say wormhole? More Star Trek talk?”
“No. Well, yes, but no. A wormhole is a multidimensional gateway...oh, forget it. The thing is, I’ve lost all contact. There appeared to be a sudden spike in zeta energy, which could cause such a contact to be lost. Something about the relationship between zeta energy and tachyon waves. For reasons Scott and I have yet to fully understand, zeta seems to neutralize tachyon in every test we’ve conducted. In fact, it seems to disrupt pretty much every energy field we’ve tested it against.”
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