Time Bandits

by Dean C. Moore

  “Well, can you?” the farmer’s wife said, warily scrutinizing Exo-Man.

  Kardassian nodded. “I calculated for the fact that I’d have to make do with what was on hand.”

  Torin nodded. “Brilliant.” He’d seen into Kardassian’s mind.

  ***

  Kendra, Torin, Davenport, Kardassian, the farmer, and his wife in male form now, the two locals hugging one another, observed the volcanic eruption from a safe distance off.

  It was epic, all right, a planet killer more so than a planet saver. But Kardassian had assured them otherwise.

  “I don’t know, Kard,” Davenport said. “Sure seems like we’re pulling the wool over their eyes, literally.” He glanced up at the grey skies, the volcanic detritus covering everything, blocking out the sun, the two moons, the stars, hiding everything under a pall of dim backlit illumination.

  “I calculated the blast so that it would occur at exactly the right interval in the wobble,” Kardassian said. “It’ll be enough to settle the planet down. Not all at once. It’ll go through wobbles of diminishing severity over the next few years, but the seasonal extremes will mellow, and grow longer.”

  “How did you get the volcano to erupt on cue?” the farmer’s wife asked.

  “Considering we had to go low-tech,” Kardassian explained, “I took advantage of a natural gas reservoir strategically placed so that once ignited it would serve as a catalyst. The borehole itself was provided by your well-drilling doo-dad.”

  “How did you know the gas reservoir was there?”

  “Those kinds of psychic probes are very much in my bailiwick,” Kardassian informed her.

  “Soon, not just the planet will be born again, but us, too,” the farmer’s husband said. It was the first time he’d said anything since the earthlings first arrived.

  “After a while, the rituals stop centering you,” the wife confessed. “They stop getting you in touch with everything you love about life, and start reminding you that you’re among the walking dead now.”

  As soon as she’d said that, Torin suddenly understood the reason for the farmer’s silence all this time. He must have been thinking the same thing, just ashamed to say as much before his wife.

  Kendra smiled and squeezed Torin around the waist, drawing him close to her side. “You’re very pleased with yourself for solving a problem not in any way related to a crime,” he said.

  “I don’t know. This strikes me as just as much a crime against humanity as any other. Besides,” she said, glancing away from the couple and into his eyes, “it’s about helping people. Not about proving how smart I am. I think if I can keep that in mind I’ve found the way to my promised land.”

  Torin smiled. “Looks like you got there ahead of me. Who’d have figured?”

  “Care to join me?” she said.

  “Think I will. Just switch the focus of our detective work to helping others and away from proving how smart we are, huh? Where do you think that comes from anyway?”

  “Still trying to prove ourselves to our parents, I imagine. With the two of us, it always comes down to child psychology.”

  “Still, it can’t be that easy.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the still erupting volcano, and neither could she.

  Kendra squeezed his hand. “Easy in principle, hard in practice. We’ll likely fall into the old patterns before too long.”

  “That is why we have each other, to put an end to the sleepwalking with a dash of water to the face.” He gave her a wet kiss on the lips. “Or two,” he said, kissing her again.

  “Time to get going,” Davenport said, tightly clasping hands with Kardassian and locking eyes with him. “Clyde Barker’ll be arriving any moment now, and I’d just as soon avoid that drama. Had my fill for one day.”

  “So what do we do?” Kendra asked. “Click our heels together?”

  “Nah. My god status has been reinstated,” Davenport said, “now that we’re back to serving the greater good. Just say the word and we’re out of here.”

  “Word,” Torin and Kendra said at the same time.

  ***

  The farmer stepped back from his restored front window with pride, enjoying his own craftsmanship. The latest blow out had been on account of the erupting volcano. The double-pane construction would help seal out the cold. “Glad we held on to some of our old world skills. Nothing like playing god to make you forget anything worthwhile come time to fight for your survival.” The pronouncement caused him to think of his glass-blowing workshop out back.

  He was about to return the finishing tool to his work area when he saw the apparition outside the window. His wife, still in male form, saw it too. She gravitated to his side, as he decided it best he hold on to his tool; it might make a serviceable, if pitiful weapon.

  ***

  The window shattered like delicate crystal. By the time the pieces hit the floor, they were powdered enough to walk on, like fine, Bermuda coral beach sand. Notchka wanted to get the sand between her toes. But for right now, she was levitated off the ground, alongside Clyde. She figured it would play better to their audience if the scene went this way.

  Clyde regarded the two male farmers, his face broadcasting dejection. “Which one of you is the female? Most of the time?”

  The two farmers regarded one another then returned their eyes to Clyde. It was clear they weren’t going to answer him. Notchka raised her hand, and pieces of the décor exploded, starting with what was on the mantelpiece.

  “You won’t survive the cold that’s coming if she blows up the house,” Clyde said.

  “Fine, you win,” the one on the left said. “I’m the female, most of the time.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind showing me?” Clyde said.

  “It’s not that easy. We have to…”

  “Yes, I know. Notchka, go build sand castles with the powdered window panes. I can tell you’re aching to run your toes through it.”

  Notchka levitated them both to the ground, turned her back on the adults, and did as she was told.

  The farmers held one another for support and reassurance. They kissed that way at first, and ran their hands through one another’s hair, their eyes watering. As the intent shifted from consoling one another to romancing one another, the male on the left shifted into female form.

  “Very nice,” Clyde said. “Now, don’t be alarmed. I just have to inject you both with my serum.”

  “You don’t want to do this,” the male farmer said.

  “Trust us on that,” the female farmer said.

  “You don’t even know what I mean to do!” Clyde barked.

  “You wish to free us from all mortal restraints, like the little girl.”

  Clyde’s eyes widened. “That’s right. What possible objection could you have to that?”

  “We were there once before. We evolved into gods. We found the state highly unstable.”

  Clyde sighed. “I guess that explains the throwback lifestyle. Fine, it’ll be a make-a-wish world when I’m done. You can go back to this lifestyle if you choose. But it’ll be a choice, for you and for everyone else, as opposed to a condition that’s forced on most people.”

  The male farmer sighed. His shoulders slouched. His head sagged. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

  Clyde rolled up the farmer’s sleeve and gave him the shot. Then he rolled up the woman’s sleeve and gave her hers. Then he took a step back. “This should be interesting.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Notchka whispered, making the sand castle rise up out of the sand with her telekinetic powers. “You should have listened.”

  “I guess now we wait and see how long it takes for the transformations to take effect,” Clyde said. “And if they’re as remarkable in the woman as in the man.”

  “Trust me, we want to get to hell out of dodge, now,” Notchka said. She was still seated on the floor with her back to the three adults, molding and remolding her sand castle, replete with tiny period-appropriate soldiers. T
hey manned the perimeter and fired upon their attackers rising up out of the sands surrounding the fortress.

  “I have to know if the experiment works for certain, Notchka.” Clyde’s eyes remained riveted on the couple of farmers. “Besides, the future you see is just made up of probabilities until it manifests. And outside of the four timelines I have you monitor, much of what happens in those other timelines is beyond even your grasping with any detail.”

  Notchka hit him with one of her big dramatic sighs. “Adults have such rigid minds, I swear. I suppose that at least speaks well for what you’re trying to do.”

  The husband’s sagging head, hiding his eyes, finally tilted up. His eyes were so bright you couldn’t see anything in them besides a blinding white light. He stretched a thin, close-lipped smile across his face, one that looked almost like an apology. His wife’s eyes fired up before he was finished stretching the smile across his face.

  “Notchka!” Clyde barked. “Maybe now’s the time to leave.”

  She stood and took in the couple of farmers. “Too late.”

  The house exploded. It was as if an atomic bomb had gone off. The mushroom cloud was still rising. Much of the surrounding farm was gone.

  In the crater in the center of the explosion stood Clyde and Notchka, holding hands. And the two farmers. “Hate to break it to you,” Notchka said, “but I don’t know how many more hits like that I can take.”

  “Beam us out of here, now!”

  Notchka did as asked. They materialized somewhere else on the planet. “I didn’t mean off the farm!” Clyde shouted. “I meant off the planet!”

  “They’re too strong. They’re holding us here. They don’t much like your idea of turning people into gods before they’re ready. They mean to put a stop to you once and for all.”

  She looked up at the sky as she heard the shrieks. The farmers had morphed into winged angels. Or so it appeared to her. Though, the warring kind. Their wings looking more armored than feathery. They fired lasers from their eyes down at Clyde and Notchka.

  When Clyde and Notchka both raised their hands impotently in defense, Notchka made sure they were bandying energy shields, sticking with her medieval theme of earlier, when building the castle.

  “Try to deflect the lasers back at them,” Clyde said, as they ran for cover.

  “You work out the angles of deflection off the shields. I’m too busy running.”

  The male angel threw glow balls of energy at them, emitted from the palm of his hand. Each one that landed blew up so much land around them, Notchka had no choice but to throw an energy ball forcefield around her and Clyde and bounce them out of harm’s way, like a couple of hamsters rolling in their exercise cage. “These people have way more experience at playing god than I do. Why can’t I ever come up with stuff to do half as good?”

  “That’s my bad,” Clyde eked out, huffing and puffing. “I should have built you with more imagination.” Clyde stilled himself in his energy ball, securing his footing with his hands and feet spread wide and up against the edges of the energy shield. He refused to take his eyes off his attackers. “Can you make us invisible? That might buy us some time.”

  “Duh! Why didn’t I think of that?” She made them invisible.

  The wife angel soaring overhead held out her hand and lightning struck the ground, hitting Clyde and Notchka’s energy balls, which Notchka was rather glad she’d chosen to keep around them.

  The sky erupted next like a crying god. Rain fell around them, acid rain, scorching the earth, killing the plants on contact. “Maybe I should get them to adopt me,” Notchka said. “Living with these two as parents might be kind of cool.”

  “Concentrate, Notchka! They must be drawing their power from somewhere. Is the focal point their minds, like a prism breaking down light, in this case universal chi energy, to shape it and direct it? Are they drawing the chi up through the planet’s chakras and energy meridians? Or is it something else?”

  “You see, this is why I think they would make better parents for me. I bet they wouldn’t make me run thought experiments in the middle of having fun.”

  “Focus, Notchka!”

  They were still bouncing on the ground inside the energy balls like crazy. And each time the lightning struck them, it erased their invisibility, and it weakened the shields enough for the acid rain to burn both of them. Clyde kept biting his tongue, but Notchka felt no shame about screaming.

  “Think past the pain or we’re both dead!” Clyde shouted.

  “Stop shouting at me! My head hurts enough already from expending all this psychic energy.”

  She gazed up at her parents-to-be knowing that it was never to be. She’d just remind them too much of everything they chose to leave behind. Another moment to dry her tears and she said, “I think I see what we need to do.”

  Notchka allowed the energy bubbles to float up to the angel people, and made Clyde and herself visible again. She merged their bubbles into one. The winged angel people beamed the lasers from their eyes at them with more and more power. Drawing the chi up through the earth through the chakras in their feet. They blasted the energy at them now, not just through their eyes, but through their palm chakras, and the chakras running along their spine.

  The energy hitting them was just too much. Notchka just had but a split-second to do what she needed to do before they were goners.

  And then they were gone.

  “What did you do?” Clyde asked.

  “I redirected the energy hitting the shields to my psychic centers, used the extra current to teleport us out of there.”

  “Where are we now?”

  “Not exactly in space and time. I fried a lot of my neurons. It’s going to take me a while to rewire. We’re going to be stuck in limbo until then. I suggest you use the time wisely to think about the error of your ways. Worlds of battling gods? Shyster! Does that sound like evolution to you? Or like one of the Buddhist hell realms they discovered in their meditations? You know, that they tried to warn us about?”

  “I never should have let you scan the internet to further your spiritual education. It was a mistake.”

  Notchka grunted. “Yeah, right. More like you should have heeded your own advice.”

  THIRTY

  “Who’s this guy?” Charles Atlas said. Charles, Torin reminded himself, was the Tree Man, the genetic hybrid, looking more like a man each day, being as he’d grown in height to six feet and uprooted himself from the pot he was in. “You’ve been two-timing me?” He started pelting away at Kardassian, who had no choice but to defend himself, using his exo-skeleton.

  The battle royal was epic, tearing up the office, as Torin and Kendra and Davenport stood by helplessly. The desks got pushed around from the rebounding bodies, distracting Torin with the Jackson Pollock being etched in the floor from all the scratch marks. Quite an impressive work of art, all in all. The lamps, knocked from the tables, formed a flotilla of box lights set adrift on the ocean of hardwood like one of those Hawaiian ceremonies. The drifting on the ocean analogy was propped up by the lamps’ self-correcting feature, compelling them to glide about in search of text to illuminate, occasionally getting confused by the scratch marks on the floor.

  The Invisible Men, harshly awakened from their slumber by a body falling on top of them, awoke, and as they did, so their equally perturbed doppelgangers started fading from view. “What the hell?” said one. “I was in the middle of something over here,” said another at his desk. The no-longer-invisible sleeping-on-the-job detectives, joined the melee. The fracas spun even more out of control when the contestants started materializing weapons out of thin air, turning their office into a game of laser tag, with real lasers.

  Kendra reached for the psychic dampeners she kept in her desk, threw Torin a few. They both proceeded to put the collars on their otherwise oblivious combatants, too lost in their fighting to notice someone dangling off of them and reaching for their necks, so long as they weren’t being so meddlesome as to
interrupt their laser tag.

  Finally, the two of them had their fellow detectives more or less hogtied. Once stripped from them, the absence of ordinance helped them to finish reining themselves in.

  “If it weren’t for these psychic dampeners, we’d have lost this city a long time ago,” Torin said, panting.

  “And Clyde Barker wants to make the entire multiverse of multiverses that much more psychically impressionable?” Kendra balked. “Yeah, right. Please tell me I’ve graduated from wanting to play the victim in that scenario. That’s all I need is to wake up in one of those timelines because I can no longer find my way to the confident, self-empowered me.”

  “Hear, hear,” Torin said, supporting his upper body on his knees, still unable to get his breathing under control.

  “It’s time you faced some hard facts about your life, Davenport,” Kendra said.

  “Look, you two self-improvers do your thing, and I’ll do mine. Let me go and see what I can do to make this ménage a trois work,” he said, shoe-leathering it over to where the boxing match had moved on to, now no longer involving the entire office, just the original twosome of angered paramours.

  “Nice to be home, huh?” Torin said giddily, a stupid grin on his face, no doubt, to communicate how happy he was to be experiencing the new him.

  “Don’t look so satisfied with yourself,” she said. “This is the old you, not the new you.” She must have been reading his mind, or reading his face, or whatever it was that detectives did to get at the truth. He hugged her and kissed her, all the same. “Come on. No time like the present. Let’s throw ourselves into a case, put the new versions of ourselves through their paces.”

  “You mean the ones who are playing detective and coroner, no longer as some ego aggrandizing scheme because they have something to prove to themselves, but out of a genuine desire to serve the greater good with the unique talents and temperaments at their disposal?”