by Gene P. Abel
Sue grinned, then started hobbling along faster. “Just remember I like my banana pudding,” she said.
And so, watched by a nurse peeking out from the ER and a couple of passing soldiers making way for them, the pair started a cane race toward the end of the hall, where it joined up with another one perpendicular to it. At first Dr. Weiss took the lead with his stately, dignified walk, but a determined Agent Harris powered through any lingering weaknesses she may have been suffering and set herself into a fast-paced hobble that had her pulling ahead of Dr. Weiss.
“That dignified walk of yours is going to get you a distant second.” She grinned.
“A gentleman never corrects a lady, but in this case . . . not if I can help it.”
Sue was a full three feet in front and nearly to the end of the hall when something literally appeared in a twinkle of prismatic lights at the intersection ahead. Three men that Dr. Weiss immediately recognized and to which the nearest soldiers instantly reacted.
“Those are the same three as before,” Dr. Weiss gasped. “Where did you take my niece, you Russian thugs?” He raised his cane, trying to wave it about threateningly.
Agent Harris immediately sized up the situation and changed her course into a half tackle of her friend, bowling Dr. Weiss off to the side and against a wall, then down to the floor. “Stay down,” she ordered. Turning around as quickly as her condition would allow, she glanced over to see what was going on.
Three soldiers already lay on the ground twitching, each one having fallen victim to the electrified bullets, while three more were charging down from the other hall with pistols aimed and shouting threats for the Russians’ surrender.
Agent Harris flattened herself against the wall and started creeping her way closer to the intersection. The soldiers fired their guns only to see their bullets be deflected once a foot away from the Russians, followed by the Russians then getting off their return fire. Three more soldiers quickly joined the others napping on the ground.
One of the Russians called out to the other two while taking out a small palm-sized device for a quick glance at its display. Agent Harris tapped a finger to her right ear and the small device hidden within it and whispered, “Harris here. If my Russian’s not too rusty, these guys are here to sabotage the time chamber and shut it down. I’ll do what I can up here.”
Message sent, she removed her finger and crept around the corner and positioned herself against the wall, with one hand gripping tightly the head of her cane. A moment later the central Russian snapped another order and they spun around and jogged directly past Agent Harris’s position. They took no notice of the invalid with the cane, judging her as obviously harmless, and Agent Harris did her best to look weak and helpless, at least until they were about halfway past her, at which point her cane suddenly whipped out into a swift arc that took the middle one to her left behind the knee on its way up to the back of the head of the one just to her right. The left one fell back into the third behind him, while the right one bowled over to hit the ground unconscious. Agent Harris turned slower than her normal but still fast enough to face the one on the ground just as he was getting to his feet, while his companion behind him was also getting back up and getting a few feet of distance from the encounter.
Agent Harris’s cane smacked the rising figure straight in the center of his forehead like a pool stick hitting a cue ball. This time when the man fell back he did not stir. This left the third one at the back to face Agent Harris alone, who suddenly did not seem quite as helpless as her cane and condition might imply. The remaining Russian eyed who it was that was facing him, then suddenly widened his eyes a bit in alarm and quickly brought up his pistol.
“Agent Susan Harris,” he said in thickly accented English.
She was leaning against her cane, obviously still recovering from her experience in time travel, yet her face was set with determination, while the one conscious Russian found that his hand gripping his pistol was shaking a little. Then he found that his hand had gone suddenly numb, and his pistol dropped to his feet from brief contact with Agent Harris’s cane. She had stepped one foot forward, swung her cane round, and, before her body could sway too much to one side or the other, smashed the end of her cane down hard across the other’s hand, bringing her cane back into place in time to catch herself.
A few choice words escaped the Russian’s lips, none of which can be translated in polite company. Then, with his good hand, he quickly reached into a pocket and drew out a round disk. More soldiers were just racing down the hall.
“I did not sign up to face you, Agent Harris.”
A press of his disc and he, his two companions lying unconscious, and even his fallen pistol shimmered in rainbow flickers and vanished before all eyes.
“Coward,” Agent Harris muttered under her breath. “Can’t even face an invalid with a cane.”
While the new guards came in to examine the six fallen victims of the futuristic bullets and scour the area for anything that might have been left behind, Sue hobbled back around the corner to where she had left Dr. Weiss. He was midway to his feet, still struggling with his cane, when her free hand reached out to help him the rest of the way up.
“Are you all right, Sam? Sorry I had to shove you away like that, but the way they were going with those guns of theirs, you might have gotten hurt.”
“Why, thank you, Sue.” Then, once fully on his feet with cane in place, he turned the subject around. “But what about you? You could have landed back in the infirmary again. You should not have been fighting them in your condition.”
“What fight? This may be my first encounter with these guys, but these future Russians seem to rely too much on their high-tech widgets and neglect good old-fashioned training. Pathetic, really. They should be embarrassed.”
“That one looked more terrified,” Dr. Weiss said with a little grin. “It looked like he recognized you, and not for the better I might add.”
“I guess I have a reputation in the future,” she said with a shrug. “Now let’s head back. We still have a cane race to finish.”
She started off once again in her cane-assisted hobble, tossing one last comment over her shoulder as she went.
“And you were right: the workout was good for me.”
Dr. Weiss replied with a chuckle and then hobbled along after her.
14
Time to Think
In the London of the future, the group was seated in a corner of the Persian deli and café, a small cluster of tables to themselves, while the rest of the crowded café was festooned with groups of chatting college students, the occasional college professor, and others just off work coming in for a quick bite to eat or a relaxing drink. Every table had a flat screen built onto its surface, above which projected various displays, though most seemed filled with views of space and charging vessels of one fanciful design or another.
“They’re all playing GOW,” Jeffery assured them. “Don’t worry, no one’ll notice anything we say or do. And my friend tells me that our trackers have been put off the scent for a while.”
“Good,” Agent Hessman replied. “Now, according to my timepiece, it’s eleven fifteen New Mexico time, and about . . .”
“Four fifteen London time,” Jeffery supplied.
“Thank you, Mr. Nezsmith. I want to get this finished up as quickly as we can, and Samantha rescued. Now, I recall you saying something about finding our Russians.”
“We traced their IDs to an orbital station,” Jeffery supplied.
“Orbital?” Captain Beck remarked.
“As in up in space?” Claire asked. “How are we ever going to get up there?”
“We’ll never get to them in time,” Ben said with a shake of his head.
But just as hopes were starting to fall, Jeffery put in a suggestion with such nonchalance that the rest nearly missed it: “Just take the subo
rbital. Have you up there within the day.”
“You say that like hopping up into space is an everyday occurrence,” Agent Hessman said, eyeing him suspiciously.
“It is. Flights to orbit are pretty common nowadays. In fact, the station I traced the Russians to is a major tourist trap. Space Vegas. Been there a couple times myself . . . uh, for school projects, of course.”
“Space Vegas?” Ben grinned.
“Yeah,” Jeffery said. “It’s like the original Las Vegas only . . . spacier.”
“Okay, given that’s a thing,” Agent Hessman stated, “we still have no way of paying for a trip like that.”
“It’s not all that expensive,” Jeffery told them. “The university maintains a private shuttle for students going up there for various projects, but we also use it for holiday breaks. I can use my school pass to get you guys up there.”
“Why, that would be great!” Claire exclaimed. “Then we can rescue Samantha. Thank you so much!” She reached out and nearly smothered Jeffery in a tight hug, after which his response was midway between embarrassment and fan-boy gratitude.
“Claire Hill just hugged me. I’m not going to take a bath for a week.”
“You’re a college student. Why change things?” Captain Beck quipped with a grin.
“Hold on, let me check my expense account.”
It took only a moment of Jeffery’s entranced look for him to return with an answer.
“I have enough university credit for one or two of you, but I’ll have to get some help for the rest.”
“Do what you can, Mr. Nezsmith. It is imperative that we rescue our missing party as quickly as we can.”
“I’ll see if a few of my friends can help. Hold on.”
While Jeffery once again went into his trance, the rest finally had time to consult with one another about what they had seen.
“So many questions,” Ben remarked.
“See?” Claire told him. “This is how it feels every day for me.”
“As much as the rules may say that we need to minimize our knowledge of the future,” Agent Hessman told them all, “we need to get as much information as we can. We still do not know why they kidnapped Samantha. Any piece of information could be pertinent, so let’s start spitballing. What are some of the things that you all have noticed?”
“Oh, so many things,” Claire said, marveling. “Of course, I’m still not entirely sure what the rest of you would consider new and amazing. Those floating signs, the clean alleys, how ridiculously tall the buildings have gotten. And the cars: they make barely a sound, and yet I don’t see any of that awful smoke coming from the back ends of them like back in 2020.”
“They must be electric cars,” Ben told her. “The only problem with electric cars in our own time was the batteries. The things weigh a ton and take up a lot of resources to make.”
A flicker of his eyelids and Jeffery was back with them in time to catch the tail end of Claire’s statement.
“Oh, you’d be surprised how small and cheap car batteries have become,” he answered. “Once they found out how to do that everything came out electric.”
“Okay, what else?” Agent Hessman prompted.
“The spy craft,” Agent Stevens remarked. “As small as they can apparently make their equipment, I can think of a number of places where they could be placed.”
“Weapons,” Chief Duke put in. “They would be a lot better. Wouldn’t mind getting my hands on some.”
“Those walls along the Thames,” Ben put in. “I was in London once, and they never had dykes there before. Nor was the weather quite so . . . unpredictable.”
“Use to be worse,” Jeffery casually remarked. “There was quite a bit of flooding before they got the dyke system built, and the weather satellites work wonders to reduce the incidence of class-six hurricanes around the world. Not to mention the carbon-capture machines.”
“I still like how clean some of the streets look,” Claire remarked. “And the air smells so fresh and clean. Not like New York back in 2020.”
A look at Claire and then to Jeffery as the college student suddenly began looking a little nervous, and Captain Beck put in his own observation on the matter: “I think our Miss Hill has once again brought attention to something crucial. My young man, I would like to hear more about how the environment was so miraculously cleaned up.”
“Well, it’s nothing spectacular, really, just the way things are now,” Jeffery replied. “The weather may still be a little off-center, and they’re still trying to figure out how much of that is due to sunspots or whatever, but the oceans are pristine and there’s very little trash lying around on the ground.”
“I realize much of that can be bundled under the general classification of ‘progress,’” Ben said, “but how in the world did you manage to clear up the oceans?”
“Just the old plastic-eating bug. Once it was released, it went to work and cleaned it all up. Of course that did result in that global catastrophe. Here, I can show you a few videos of how the oceans look now. Pretty stormy, though, so it might be hard to tell the difference.”
As Jeffery started to reach out to the screen at the center of their table, Hessman grabbed his arm and held it in place.
“I would rather hear about this ‘global catastrophe’ if you don’t mind. What happened?”
The young man hesitated, glancing around at a small circle of eyes that suddenly were all focused rather intently on himself alone. Even Claire was looking at him less with her previous smile and more with the intense glare of a reporter on the trail of a fresh lead.
“I . . . really don’t know how much I should tell you. The rules of cross-temporal interactions and all.”
Agent Stevens looked as if he was ready to put the man under a spotlight and start grilling him, Chief Duke was balling up one fist suggestively, and Agent Hessman had the dispassionate stare of the robots they had been encountering. Claire’s, though, was the hardest gaze to meet. She gazed at him first with a studied look, then broke out into a slight smile and pleasant voice.
“Oh, please tell us. It might make the difference in rescuing our friend.”
“I, uh . . . Well, that is . . . Okay, but . . . Well, this guy named Dillon Marshal of Caltech came up with this bug that eats plastic; then they set it loose into the oceans. Oh, it did a great job of breaking down all sorts of plastics, even handling the microplastics. And for a while it worked. But then the bug escaped onto land and started wreaking havoc on plastics still in use. Even before that there were incidents in the oceans, though. Things like diving suits had just enough plastics in them to make breaking down while in a deep dive pretty fatal, or components in submarines and underwater structures. On land, though, we’re talking everything from medical equipment to airplanes. Those planes would be sitting in their hangers and then, when being towed out to get ready for flight, would just fall apart.”
“That sounds like a disaster,” Claire gasped.
“Oh, it was, some fifty-odd years ago. Fortunately, once outside of the ocean the bug had a pretty limited range of environments in which it could survive.”
“Hmmm.” Agent Hessman was beginning to get a thoughtful look that Ben had come to recognize as meaning he was catching on to something. “Allow me to guess, Mr. Nezsmith: on land it can survive only where it is pretty cold.”
“Cold and cloudy, yes,” Jeffery replied, now a bit puzzled. “But how did you know?”
“Just continue, Mr. Nezsmith.”
“Yes, well, anyway, while it wreaked havoc on the world in general, it was especially hard in a few places. Places like major parts of Canada, the Scandinavian countries, and”—he looked up at Agent Hessman with a look of wonder dawning across his face—“Russia. In fact, it was such a disaster for Russia that they were instantly reduced to third-world status. Their industry, military equipm
ent, the works got hit. Even after all this time they still haven’t recovered.”
“Russia,” Agent Hessman repeated with a knowing nod. “Now we know how they fit into this. At least in part. What about the bug now?”
“Oh, they have new plastics that the bug won’t eat; made them out of hemp, I think. And they have better ways of breaking them down once they’re no longer in use.”
“But from the sounds of it,” Ben said, “Russia must have been left pretty devastated.”
“They can barely find a couple of working planes to get off the ground,” Jeffery sadly reported, “while the rest of the world has suborbital flights that can take you around the world in under an hour . . . Hey, I may have said too much. I’m really not sure how much of this you guys should know.”
Claire reached out a hand to briefly hold one of his own as her soothing words touched his ears. “It’s okay. You’ve told us enough, I’m sure.”
To Claire’s look Agent Hessman replied with a nod. Jeffery visibly sighed in relief; then the uncomfortable moment was suddenly interrupted as he went briefly back into his trance.
“Russia was left devastated,” Captain Beck remarked. “So we know they’re desperate, but for what? What does Miss Weiss have that they want?”
“Another piece of the puzzle we have yet to discover, Robert,” Agent Hessman stated. “Once we have enough pieces, then we can unravel the rest.”
Suddenly Jeffery perked up, all signs of his guilty look gone.
“Just heard back from my hacker friend. She managed to pool together enough university credits from her school chums to get passes for most of you, but two will have to stay behind. I’m sorry, but that’s the best we can do.”
“We’ll just have to make sure that it’s enough then, Mr. Nezsmith. Obviously, anyone staying behind on the ground would be in far too much danger by themselves doing nothing. “The possibilities,” Agent Stevens blandly began to recite, “would include being tracked down by the time cops, displaying undo lack of familiarity with current customs, running afoul of one problem or another due to the lack of a chip or other device, not to mention the possibilities of encountering hidden observation devices . . .”
