Westward Weird

by Martin H. Greenberg

  At this point in history, my family’s mine, the Last Time Mine, was played out and abandoned. My great-great-grandfather Clarence Benson had left before last winter and boarded the place up when he left. It had taken me some work from the inside to knock out the boards.

  Great-great-grandfather wouldn’t be back for at least two more years, if his diary was correct and we hadn’t done anything to change this timeline, so we had more than enough time to do the research we were here to do.

  Of course, that was before we found the coffins.

  Only a few of the locals from the time had noticed me and had come up to ask what I was doing. I had just said I was my great-great-grandfather’s son coming to work the mine some more, hoping to find a new vein. That had only gotten laughs and we had been left alone so far by the residents of the valley. They all knew this mine was long past bringing out any ore.

  In the next month or so most of the locals would be leaving, heading away from this high mountain valley and the brutal Idaho winters. But we were here until the research was done. We didn’t have to try to make it over those rough roads and trails in deep snow. We had a much easier way out. We just stepped back into the future.

  “Donnie?”

  The voice echoed down the shaft behind me and I turned and shouted back, “At the mouth.”

  “They still fighting?” Brenda asked a moment later as she came up from behind me and put her arm around my waist, staring down toward the town below.

  “I think it’s over for now,” I said, laughing. “Glad we don’t need to go down for supplies.”

  I was teasing her. We had brought along everything we would ever need and could go back to 2016 and get more supplies much easier than even walking down the hill to town.

  I could feel her shudder. “Going into that ghost town with all those ghosts is the last thing I ever want to do.”

  “They are not ghosts,” I said, shaking my head. Since we had gotten here, she had insisted everyone in the town below were ghosts because they were dead in 2016. It was her way of trying to understand and grasp time travel. She could understand the theoretical math of it just fine, but would rather think of the people as just ghosts than think of them as actually being alive and able to hurt us.

  I didn’t blame her. Being able to travel in time was a very strange thing. And so far, only the two of us had done it to my knowledge.

  I turned and gave her a hug. Brenda stood not much over five-foot high and since I was only five-seven, we fit together perfectly. We both had dark brown hair, brown eyes, and the same skin tone. We were often asked if we were brother and sister. I thought that funny, Brenda thought it creepy.

  Brenda wore jeans and a thick plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She had on tennis shoes that we had painted an off-gray to hide their modern look in case a local did come by. She always wore a small, black jogging pack around her waist. She called it her purse for the past.

  I also wore jeans and a plaid shirt and cowboy boots that were scuffed and in the style of this time period. My hair was cut short and I had a beat-up old hat I wore when outside in the heat for any time at all. Luckily, the mine kept the air inside at a nice comfortable temperature even when it was a hundred outside.

  Brenda and I had met at CalTech in graduate school. She had one of the most brilliant minds in theoretical mathematics the school had ever seen and it fit well with my understanding of theoretical physics. Combining our two areas of focus, both in marriage and in study, had led us to this time in the past.

  That and the old family gold mine, of course.

  Together, leaving the heat of the afternoon, we walked back down the mine tunnel, hand-in-hand. It was wide enough for both of us to walk side-by-side and tall enough that we didn’t have to duck at all. It had been built that way to give enough room for a horse to pull a heavy ore cart.

  My distant grandfather had done a good job shoring up the rock walls with thick timbers every four feet, leaving very little rock showing between the huge uprights. Most of these timbers were still strong in 2016, although we had gone in and fixed a few of them before starting too much work.

  A narrow gauge railway track ran down the middle of the mine for the small ore cars to be pushed in and then pulled out.

  The track ran through the cabin in front of the mine opening, as was normal, and then out to the leading edge of the tailings. In the winter, or when it was raining, my great-great-grandfather had worked the rock from the ore car inside the cabin, making the place dusty and coated in rock dust.

  In 2016, the old cabin was long gone, destroyed by the extreme weather.

  At first Brenda had wanted to clean the cabin and set up our camp in there. But after a couple of hours of cleaning, we had given up and pitched our tents and set up camp at a wide area in the shaft about two hundred steps inside. We cooked with an electric stove using batteries we had brought with us; the area around our tent stayed fairly even in temperature because it was so far underground.

  We got to our camp and I handed her the bottle of water, grabbing a new one for myself. We were going deeper into the mine, heading for the “crystal room” as I called it, where all our research was going on.

  I snapped on the hologram that showed a rock-slide blocking the tunnel just in front of our camp to keep any stray locals from wandering in. It only came on when there was movement near the mouth of the tunnel; otherwise it would have taken far too much power to run. As it was, I had to change out the batteries regularly.

  Beyond our camp, deeper into the mine, we had strung motion-sensitive lights along the tunnel that came on as we moved deeper into the mountain and then shut off behind us.

  The lights actually gave the place a very comfortable feel. I had never thought I would feel comfortable in a mine a thousand feet under a mountain, but here I did.

  “Why did you come looking for me?” I asked as we walked.

  “I thought I saw something strange behind a set of crystals,” Brenda said, “right at the end of the main tunnel.”

  “Strange in what way?”

  “Artificial strange,” she said, which made me glance at her.

  She was paying attention to where she was stepping along the railway in the tunnel and didn’t notice my look.

  Beyond the end of the tunnel was nothing but more rock. There would be a tunnel there in the future, an extension, but that tunnel just hadn’t been dug yet in 1870 and wouldn’t be for another thirty years or more.

  At least that was what I had thought. My grandfather had reopened the mine in the late 1920s for a reason he never stated in his diary and I had always assumed he had dug the tunnel. That might be a false assumption.

  Maybe Brenda and I dug the tunnel.

  Or more accurately, maybe we were about to.

  The mineshaft suddenly opened up into a massive natural cave with vaulted high ceilings. The cave had a seemingly-unnatural flat floor and was large enough to hold completely a very large 2016 suburban two-story home without touching any side or the ceiling. The ceiling was almost forty feet above the floor.

  Every inch of the entire cave was covered with crystals.

  Every inch.

  In fact, my great-great-grandfather had to break through the crystals to even get into the huge room and then break through the wall of crystals on the other side to start a new tunnel where he thought gold might be.

  The crystals were of all sizes. Just a single light shining in the room seemed to produce a thousand reflections.

  Brenda had described it as being inside a giant geode, and I think she was right. The crystals in this room in modern times would be worth far more than the gold taken out of the mine in the first place. My family just never knew what kind of fortune they had found. And therefore had never disturbed any of the crystals, luckily for us.

  We had strung very low voltage lights around the crystal room and had set up tables and a ton of machines needed for our work in the middle of the room. It had taken many trips fro
m the future to get it all here and in place. And we were constantly going back for fresh batteries and taking the used batteries to be recharged.

  We just didn’t dare set up any kind of generator system in the room because of ventilation and not having any idea what higher levels of power put into the crystal room would do.

  It seemed, from what we could tell, that every crystal in the room, every one, even crystals not more than a quarter inch long, had the power to shift in time. Working in the middle of a few-hundred-thousand or more time-travel crystals was stressful enough without taking undue chances.

  We headed across the big room, following the old rail tracks into the tunnel that had been cut in the far side of the room. Great-great-grandfather had just left the crystals he took off the walls in a pile to one side of the tunnel. I don’t think he had even bothered to take a crystal out of the room, which was more than lucky for all of humanity as far as I could figure.

  And more than likely he had handled them all with gloves, which had also saved him from ending up in some unknown time or place.

  We went into the mine tunnel on the other side and followed the tunnel the twenty steps to where it again ran into a wall full of crystals. It was at that point that great-great-grandfather had decided it wasn’t worth working the mine anymore and had shut it down.

  Brenda and I had talked a lot about what was on the other side of those crystals, but to be honest, we were both scared to death to even try to dig any deeper. We wanted more information about the nature of how the crystals worked and so far, in three months of research, we had made no progress at all.

  How the crystals worked, how they allowed us to just step through time and end up exactly where we wanted to be was beyond us. And that was driving both of us crazy.

  As we reached the back wall, Brenda took out of the small pack she carried on a belt what looked like an old spyglass. She handed it to me.

  “I’ve been working on this to help see through the crystals,” she said as I looked at the simple, almost childlike telescope. There were lenses screwed in on both ends and one end was slightly larger than the other.

  “Nifty” I said. “Magnification?”

  “None,” she said. “Just looking for a way to first study the insides of the crystals at normal size. I can adjust it later for magnification.”

  I was impressed. But a lot of things Brenda did impressed me. And I loved that about her.

  She pointed to an exposed crystal on the wall on the back of the tunnel. “I thought I might try to see through the crystal to the other side. It’s fairly clear here. Take a look.”

  I glanced at the bottom of the scope. It had a rubber rim, so it would be safe to touch the crystal with. I gently pressed it against the crystal, then put my eye to the scope.

  “Adjust the focus with the center tube on the scope.”

  I used my right hand to do just that, slowly moving the center of the scope first to the left, then easing it back to the right until suddenly the image cleared up.

  And I still had no idea what I was looking at.

  From what I could tell there was a metal case or something on the other side of the crystal. And it looked very modern and very alien.

  I stepped back and handed the scope to Brenda.

  “Stunned” wasn’t really what I was feeling. “Scared to death” described it a lot better. I wanted to run back to the crystal room and head back to our own time and forget we had even found this room in the old family mine.

  “So now what do we do?” Brenda asked as I leaned against a mine timber and tried to think.

  When I didn’t answer she went and looked through the scope again. “I can’t tell what it is,” she said after a moment. “But it clearly doesn’t belong this deep and this buried in this mountain.”

  I wouldn’t argue with that.

  “We need to look at this tunnel from the future,” I said. “Before we try anything else. Neither of us have given this tunnel even a slight look before now.”

  She nodded and started back down the mine tunnel taking very large steps. I knew exactly what she was doing. She was measuring the length of this tunnel and so that in 2016 we would know where the wall had been.

  I followed her. Back in the middle of the crystal room I picked up a rubber glove and put it on my left hand, then picked up a crystal from near one wall. It had been a crystal left to the side of the mine when my great-great-grandfather broke into this room for the first time. It had been the only crystal we had used.

  Thinking of 2016 I turned to Brenda. “Ready?”

  She nodded and at the same time we both touched the crystal with our bare hands.

  Traveling through time for those who wanted something special would be a huge disappointment. One instant we were standing in 1870 and the next instant we were standing in 2016, with no sense of movement at all.

  We just shifted times.

  In 2016 we had filled the crystal cavern with supplies, from food to batteries to everything else we could imagine we might need.

  And our camp was in the same place in both times. Only in this time we had a concrete wall in front of the mine with major locks and danger warning signs blocking the tunnel. Too many tourists around the town in the summer to take any chances.

  Brenda led the way toward the back tunnel and once there started stepping off with her very long paces until she stopped. “This was where we were standing,” she said, looking around at me.

  Ahead in the tunnel for another twenty feet was just more mine tunnel through solid rock until it just ended.

  There were no sign of crystals on the ground where the crystals had been. Nothing.

  “That is so weird,” I said. “The crystal wall was right here.”

  I moved my hand to indicate where the wall had been and banged into something metal that sort of echoed. I yanked my hand back and looked at it. Rust had streaked on my hand.

  “That’s a hologram,” I said as Brenda and I both stepped back.

  I instantly started searching for the connection and the projectors and after a moment found them tucked up in a hollow in the ceiling, just as we had placed the ones in 1870 showing a rockslide in front of our camp.

  And the power line went to a set of large batteries hidden above a timber. Again, the set-up of the batteries and the wiring was just the same as we had done in 1870.

  Exactly.

  “Did we do this?” Brenda asked, her voice soft.

  I reached above the now very old timber where I would have put the switch and found it and clicked it off.

  “I think we did,” I said. “I have no idea when we did it, but we will travel back to a time before this and put them in at some point in our future.”

  When I flipped off the hologram of a mine tunnel that dead-ended, a very large and very old metal door appeared, surrounded by concrete. It looked also very similar and then I realized it was the same kind of door that my father built on the front of the mine in 1990. My guess is that my father had built it the year before I was born.

  “This is like the one your father built out in front of the mine,” Brenda said, confirming what I thought.

  I had no idea how that was possible. None.

  No records or conversations I had with Dad had indicated he knew anything about this mine other than he always repeated over and over that it was dangerous. My mother would never talk about the mine, ever.

  And my grandfather called the family mine a family curse. And he never once explained that either, other than saying it cost them taxes every year to keep it.

  I hadn’t told any of my family that Brenda and I were going to the mine for the summer. They thought we were in Europe studying.

  “So now what do we do?” Brenda asked.

  I pointed at the holographic projector and the batteries. “It seems that whatever we do, we survive to put that in at some point.”

  “Or at least one of us does,” she said.

  I ignored that comment and said
what I was thinking. “We dig this out in 1870 and find out what’s back there behind the door my dad built.”

  “You are going to need some help,” my father said from behind me.

  Brenda and I spun around. My dad, my mother, and my grandfather were all standing at the mouth of the tunnel from the crystal room, smiling at us.

  ~ * ~

  Instead of staying inside, my mother insisted we all go back out in front of the mine, to where the old shack used to be and eat lunch and talk. The day was warm, but not hot. And the sun had just dipped behind the ridge to the west.

  Two minutes after we had reached the outside and my mother was unloading a meal she had packed for this, a man with a heavy moustache walked out of the mine and joined us, followed a few seconds later by a skinny man in 1880s clothes.