Against Time

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  Fisher had no doubt that those two were a couple for some time to come. Doc might not know it yet, but Kalinda knew what she was doing and would make it happen. And that made Fisher happy for his friend.

  So after killing a half hour with them, he decided to visit Jenny in the Seeder department and let Doc and Kalinda get back to their work.

  Jenny managed to get him a number of papers on theories as to why no evidence of the Seeders had ever been found.

  And Fisher took two of the top authorities on the theories of how the plants and animals were seeded, as well as how historical evidence was also planted to let cultures think they had been there a very long time. He figured Callie would really be interested in that, once she got over the entire idea of Seeders. And spaceflight. And humans on every planet.

  She had a way to go to get through an entire forest of shocking facts. Fisher just hoped he could help her some. And not drive her away by simply telling her some of the stuff.

  By the time he got back to The Lady, he had used two hours of the eighteen hours.

  Somehow he had to keep himself distracted to keep going through the rest of the day and eventually get some sleep before going back to the surface.

  So with one of the papers on Seeder evidence playing in his ear, he went to the gym on The Lady and worked out for almost two solid hours.

  Then after a shower, he cooked Doc and Kalinda and himself a dinner of fresh fish and a special potato dish he had gotten two planets back. They had a wonderful dinner conversation about trans-tunnel flight and how it might be possible to take the speed of a ship up a thousand times by opening tunnels inside of tunnels.

  Fisher tried to focus on the conversation and not think about how he wished Callie was sitting there with them. If he was lucky, that would happen at some point.

  He wasn’t sure when. But he was willing to go slow to make it happen.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CALLIE SPENT the rest of the afternoon sitting in the café, at the counter, just staring at the pictures Fisher had left with her.

  She had found a magnifying glass behind the main desk in a drawer and studied them up close. They didn’t seem to have been altered in any way.

  And the pictures seemed to be on some sort of paper she had never felt before. Under magnification, it didn’t really have a grain.

  Then, as the ravine outside the window got dark, she went up and turned on lights in the main area, put Fisher’s pack with the pictures behind the main counter, so she wouldn’t have to look at them, then started the fire in the big fireplace.

  She changed into the same sweats she had on in the picture and then made herself a light dinner. After that she just curled up on the couch, a blanket wrapped around her.

  She had no idea how long she sat there thinking about her friends at the university, and about her parents who had died three years ago.

  But it seemed that every other thought was about Fisher. And how he looked.

  And his smile.

  And how much she wanted to get to know him, just as he said he wanted to get to know her.

  Slowly, she felt like the memory of the night was coming back, but she honestly wasn’t sure if they were real memories or just her making something up from the pictures.

  It might have been hours, but she ended up dozing.

  Some whistling from the basement café area woke her up. The sun was up, but barely and the fire in the fireplace was nothing but embers.

  She looked at her watch. It was 7:30 in the morning.

  She scrambled for her room down the hall, took a quick shower, and put on clean jeans and one of her own blouses. The building was chilled, but she didn’t care. From the looks of it, the day was going to turn warm.

  She made it to the basement just at eight.

  It smelled wonderful, as if someone had been cooking for hours.

  The big wood table they had sat at yesterday now had napkins and silverware on it. There were two large glasses of orange juice at the table, something that the lodge did not have. He had brought the juice from somewhere.

  A moment later Fisher came out of the back room carrying two plates of food.

  “Good morning,” he said, his smile almost melting her. Oh, my god, how could one man be so damned good-looking?

  “Morning,” she said, so stunned that all she could do beyond that was nod back at him.

  “Grab a seat.”

  He sat two identical plates on the table, then he headed back to the kitchen. “Just have to get the toast.”

  She watched him go, then turned back to the table.

  Ham, eggs, hash browns, orange juice.

  She just shook her head as she took the same seat as the day before and he came back out of the kitchen smiling. “Pretty nice kitchen in there,” he said as he slid the toast onto the table. “Not as good as my kitchen on The Lady, but pretty close.”

  “The Lady?” she asked.

  “The ship my friend and I built on our home world about two years ago.”

  “Not one of the rescue ships?” she asked, almost afraid to touch her silverware, even though her stomach was rumbling and the food smelled wonderful.

  “Oh, heavens, no,” he said, laughing. “We thought our ship was big when Doc and I built it, but right now The Lady looks like a tiny flea in one of the big ship’s landing decks. The big ship is called The R-12 because they built it too fast to name it yet. It has about two thousand men, women, and children living on it.”

  Callie couldn’t imagine a ship that size.

  Fisher went on. “It held almost twenty thousand more, including you, in the rescue.”

  “Where is it from?”

  “From what I have been told, a very distant section of this galaxy.”

  “Wow,” she said, not really understanding or even imagining what he was trying to tell her in what seemed to be normal conversation.

  “Yeah,” Fisher said, nodding. “I honestly have no idea how really big that ship is.”

  “So how did you get on it?” she asked, clearly not believing she was having this conversation.

  He indicated that she should eat, then he dug into his eggs before answering her.

  “They saved us just as they saved you and all the survivors on this planet.”

  She shook her head and nibbled at a piece of wonderful toast, made from fresh bread, something she had convinced herself she would not see in any near future.

  He was eating, clearly hungry. And he seemed to be in a wonderful mood.

  “You said there were almost two million survivors on this planet. How could one ship save them all?”

  Again he laughed softly. “There were almost one hundred of the huge ships in orbit, built just for the rescue by over fifty different human planets’ cultures. The R-12 just had over twenty thousand of the people from here.”

  “And not your planet?” she asked, tasting the wonderful eggs. He had a slight pepper taste on them which made them perfect.

  “My planet doesn’t even know Doc and I are gone. My planet is about at the same place as your planet was before this tragedy, maybe ten or twenty years behind. All the planets we visited in this area are at the same level in development, or behind where your planet was before this tragedy.”

  She started to ask him something and he held up his hand with his fork in it for her to stop. Then he smiled that wonderful smile. “Trust me, don’t ask. Doc and I flew around out there for two years and visited almost two hundred human worlds. And I don’t believe the answer to what you were about to ask. But it’s part of the project I could really use your help on if you decide to take a look.”

  “So what is your friend doing while you are down here slumming?”

  He waved an arm around the place. “Far from slumming and great company.”

  She smiled and kept eating, enjoying every bite. And enjoying company more than she wanted to admit, even with the strange conversations.

  “Doc is working with the engineers of the
big ship, more specifically a young head engineer named Kalinda. He’s learning how to make our ship even faster and I have a hunch he’s going to be helping them out as well.”

  “He’s that good?”

  “Better,” Fisher said.

  “And why aren’t you there working with him?” she asked.

  “Trans-tunnel drives and warp-space calculations are past me for the most part. I tend to like working to find things that are clear, but not seen in both mathematics and the real world.”

  “I like to do that as well, only without the mathematics,” she said, smiling.

  “I know,” he said. “You told me that during the first night, which is another reason I think you could help me on my little quest.”

  “But first I have to agree to transport with you to the ship.”

  “Not really,” he said. “You can stay right here if you want. I can bring down supplies and some very powerful computers and everything we would need to see if we can find some answers. If you wouldn’t mind some company at times, that is. This place is really special and very comfortable.”

  “It won’t be when the power goes off shortly,” she said, trying to comprehend what he had said about not really needing her to go back with him if she didn’t want.

  He laughed. “My specialty is seeing things between other things. Between light and dark matter there is unlimited energy. The big ship uses it, I invented it for my planet, but no one took me seriously. So we built what we thought was a big spaceship and left. No one noticed.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device that looked to be no bigger than an apple, with two square sides on it and terminals.

  He set it on the table between them. “When the power goes off, we hook this up to the power grid for the lodge and we’ll have unlimited power for as long as needed.”

  She stared at the small device for a moment, then said, “Why are you making this offer?”

  “I’ll give you full honesty,” he said.

  “Please.”

  He nodded. “Same two reasons I said yesterday. I am really attracted to you and would like a chance to get to know you better.”

  “Flattering,” she said, and it was. Her heart was beating faster than she could remember. She was scared to death of this stranger, yet wanted to get to know him as well.

  She had never been the type to go for dangerous types. And no warning signal about him was going off for her. Even though he was telling very strange and unbelievable stories, he didn’t seem dangerous in the slightest.

  “Second,” he said, “I could really use your help on something I feel is wrong with what I have seen on that big ship and during the two years that Fisher and I flew around before coming here.”

  “Wrong how?” she asked, suddenly even more worried.

  “Wrong with the history they are telling me and that they all believe. Since I am an outsider and you are an outsider, I think we can see things that they are not seeing, even though they are hundreds and hundreds of years more advanced than we are.”

  “And you wouldn’t mind staying down here and working?”

  “Not in the slightest,” he said, smiling. “In fact, the more I’m here, the more I like this place and after seeing it yesterday, was going to suggest that even if you came back to the ship with me, we work here.”

  “Seriously?” she asked.

  “Seriously,” he said, smiling at her with that wonderful smile of his. “It will keep us from being influenced by the ‘truths’ they have built up in their belief systems.”

  “Then let’s work here,” she said, smiling at him. “But on a couple of conditions.”

  “Name them,” he said, smiling as well.

  “You and your people help me move the bodies that are within a half mile of this building to someplace safe and respectful to them.”

  He nodded, now serious. “I don’t really have any people to speak of, but I think the people on the ship can do that. I would have to check.”

  “Good,” she said. “Secondly, you show me the big ship and your ship.”

  At that his smile looked like it was going to break out of his face.

  “When?” he asked.

  “How about now, before I chicken out?”

  He laughed. “I remember saying that exact same thing before I transported down here yesterday.”

  He reached for her arm.

  His touch was gentle and sent shivers up her spine.

  “Two to transport.”

  And the old diner around her vanished.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CALLIE FOUND HERSELF standing next to Fisher on a wide platform in a large room. The place was the size of two large gymnasiums and had a large number of the platforms around the outside of the space. The fact that she was standing there like that scared her more than she wanted to admit.

  The big room had a clean, antiseptic smell and was colored in tans and whites, with a soft surface of some sort on the floor. It was in a very, very stark contrast to the old wooden lodge they had just been sitting in.

  A short-haired woman wearing sandals and jeans came running over to the platform from a door into another room. The smile on her face seemed to be almost infectious.

  “You must be Doctor Callie Sheridan,” she said, extending her hand to Callie. “I’m Raina, the transport advisor who’s been helping Fisher. Welcome to The R-12.”

  “Nice to meet you as well,” Callie said, shaking the woman’s firm hand and then stepping down from the platform with Fisher.

  Callie couldn’t believe she could even talk, but her politeness gene must have kicked in overcoming the sheer terror she was feeling.

  “Let me call The Chairman,” Raina said, turning to a podium that had come up out of the floor facing the platform. “So he can get you special crew status and into the system.”

  Her fingers moved over the slick board, then Raina looked at Callie again. “Fisher can show you as much of the ship as you like, but if you ever need anything, or need to go to the planet again, just come to me.”

  Before Callie could say anything, Fisher asked, “Is there any way that we can get special permission to just transport to the lodge below and back, kind of like my return button under my arm, without coming in here?”

  “Planning on staying there?” Raina asked, that infectious smile of hers making Callie relax just a little.

  Fisher smiled. “It’s beautiful in the lodge, an amazing place. A good place for us to both work.”

  Raina nodded. “I think we can work that out, but I’ll have to get permission.”

  “Permission granted,” a man said as he appeared out of thin air beside Raina.

  Callie knew it was going to take some time for her to get used to people doing that. If Fisher hadn’t gently held her elbow, she would have stumbled back right there.

  The man who had just appeared looked directly at Raina. “And permission for them to take to the surface the instruments they need for their work as well.”

  “Understood,” Raina said, smiling. “I’ll work with them for whatever they need.”

  The new man who was clearly in charge was about Fisher’s height, but a lot older, with silver hair and a wonderful smile. He extended his hand to Callie. “Welcome back to The R-12, Doctor Sheridan. Just call me Benson or Chairman. We were all hoping you would come and tour our little ship.”

  “I hear it’s not so little,” Callie said, smiling at Benson as she shook his hand. Her stomach was so tight, she felt she needed to just sit down. But everyone was being so nice, she did her best to stay with them, as if this were just a normal event.

  “Thank you,” Fisher said to Benson.

  Benson laughed. “All of us on this ship are going to owe you and your partner a great amount by the time he and Kalinda are finished.”

  Fisher laughed. “Yeah, set Doc loose and you just never know what’s going to happen.

  “It’s clear why you two
are the first ones to explore this area of the galaxy,” Benson said. “With your energy device and his grasp of trans-tunnel mechanics, no planet was ever going to hold you.”

  “Thank you,” Fisher said, nodding and from what Callie could see, he seemed slightly embarrassed. She liked that. He didn’t take compliments well.

  She forced herself to take a deep breath and try to focus on what was going on.

  “I have you into the system as a special crew status, Dr. Sheridan,” Benson said, looking at her. “And the rest of the crew is getting a notice to answer any questions or help you in any fashion you like.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And it’s just Callie.”

  “Welcome aboard, Callie,” he said. “I hope we can get a chance to talk at some point in the future.”

  With that he just vanished and Fisher again had to hold her elbow slightly to keep her from stepping back. She was never, ever going to get used to people just vanishing like that.

  Raina was smiling as she went back to the board on the podium. “Go take the tour and I’ll have your special transport buttons ready in about an hour.”

  “Thank you,” Callie said, not knowing what to feel or say.

  “I’m just glad that we could find you,” Raina said, “and that you were courageous enough to come look around.”

  “As am I,” Fisher said, smiling at Callie.

  “Now, go take a tour,” Raina said, turning back to her board. “I got work to do.”

  Fisher led them out the door and through an office with about twenty people working. Some of the closer ones looked up and said, “Welcome aboard.”

  And they were all smiling and actually seemed happy to have her on board. They all looked like just normal office workers, but unless Fisher was pulling a very large scam on her, this office was in orbit over her planet.

  And every one of these people were aliens.

  Fisher led her through to what looked like a reception area and to a wall panel. There he explained the simple commands on the panel, showing her how to find her location on the big ship.

  “Now this is the fun part,” Fisher said, smiling. “How about we go meet Doc and Kalinda in Engineering?”