The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

  She was buried in a private ceremony at City Cemetery and he flew home, saddened but ready to resume his life with Holly.

  Looking back, Rick thought that this was the point when his marriage started deteriorating.

  CHAPTER 64

  Early on Saturday morning, as the three time travelers journeyed towards Berkeley, Stephanie and Vanessa sat on their respective beds in their dorm room, hashing out a disagreement over the events of the previous night.

  “I can’t believe that Caroline just immediately agreed to give me an envelope that was given to her by some stranger, a guy who’s not even our age, but some guy, like, in his forties, that says, ‘Here, give this to Stephanie.’ What if he was some total perv that was giving me Polaroids of his junk or something?”

  “But he wasn’t,” said Vanessa. “She said he seemed really nice, like maybe he was a professor or something.”

  “I know what she said,” Stephanie replied. “It still creeps me out. And why would he give me a note that says that I ought to get a hold of some guy who lives on the other side of the country? It’s just weird.”

  “I know,” Vanessa said. “It’s like some kind of cross-country matchmaking deal.”

  “And what if he’s still here? What if he’s hanging around someplace, down the street or something, waiting for me to walk out of the building? What if he’s… oh, God. I’ll never be able to leave this dorm again.”

  “Shit, Steph, this place doesn’t have any kind of security,” Vanessa said. “He could be getting ready to knock on that door any second.” There was a pause in the conversation, almost as if both girls were waiting for the knock at the door.

  “Do you think I’m being paranoid?” Stephanie asked.

  “Probably. But you know what they say, just because you’re paranoid does not mean that they aren’t out to get you.”

  Stephanie’s eyes became even wider. “Oh, God.”

  “Paranoia may destroy ya,” Vanessa said in a singsong voice.

  “I have to get out of here. I have to go home,” Stephanie said, really worried now.

  Vanessa leaned back and tilted her head, giving Stephanie a look of concern.

  “You’re really worried about this, aren’t you?” Vanessa asked.

  Stephanie nodded, her eyes welling up with tears.

  “Ah, jeez. I’m sorry, Steph. I thought you were just messing around. Tell you what — you can take my car. Go home to Oregon for a week or so. I’ll tell your professors there was a family emergency. By that time, the creepazoid is bound to be gone. Okay?”

  Stephanie nodded. “You’re a good friend, ‘Nessa.”

  “I know — I kick ass. Now come here and give me a hug.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Stephanie had packed a few things in her duffel, taken the car keys from Vanessa after receiving strict instructions to “Have the oil checked every 300 miles or the oil light will come on,” and headed out to the parking lot. She looked at her watch. It was nearly 9 AM. With any luck, she would be in Corvallis in time for dinner at her parents’ house.

  She started the engine of Vanessa’s rusty 1986 Honda Civic and sped out of the parking lot, in a hurry to get to Interstate 5 and on her way.

  CHAPTER 66

  Stefanie looked up at the windows of the third floor dormitory room that had once been hers — was her younger self’s residence, she reminded herself. The whole time travel thing would probably never catch on, she thought to herself, because it was simply too confusing.

  She started across the street toward the building. She never saw the oncoming Honda until it was too late.

  CHAPTER 67

  Stephanie was reviewing the note that the stranger had left for her in her mind, not focusing her full attention on the road. She slammed on the brakes when she realized there was someone in the crosswalk, but there was a sickening thud and the windshield starred and caved in as the body of a woman in jeans and a grey hoodie bounced off it and onto the street between the car and the curb.

  “Oh, my God, no,” Stephanie groaned.

  CHAPTER 68

  State of California

  Reckless Driving: Bodily Injury Vehicle Code 23104

  (a) Except as provided in subdivision (b), whenever reckless driving of a vehicle proximately causes bodily injury to any person other than the driver, the person driving the vehicle shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment in the county jail for not less than 30 days nor more than six months or by a fine of not less than two hundred twenty dollars ($220) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both the fine and imprisonment.

  (b) Any person convicted of reckless driving which proximately causes great bodily injury, as defined in Section 12022.7 of the Penal Code, to any person other than the driver, who previously has been convicted of a violation of Section 23103, 23104, 23109, 23152, or 23153, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison, by imprisonment in the county jail for not less than 30 days nor more than six months or by a fine of not less than two hundred twenty dollars ($220) nor more than one thousand dollars ($1,000) or by both the fine and imprisonment.

  Amended Ch. 216, Stats. 1984. Effective January 1, 1985.

  CHAPTER 69

  The Oakland Tribune, March 11, 2001

  Stephanie June Padgett, 21, a student at the University of California at Berkeley, was convicted Tuesday of reckless driving with bodily injury in a case involving a December 16 auto accident near the UC Berkeley campus in which a woman was struck while crossing Dana Street.

  She was sentenced to 30 days in the Alameda County Jail and a fine of $220.

  CHAPTER 70

  Sarah Rhodes was a bundle of nerves this morning. It was the first day of September, 2011, and she had a meeting with the admissions committee of the graduate program at Caltech, where she intended to earn her Ph.D. in Astrophysics; her ultimate aim was to become an observational astronomer with a position either at the Hale Observatory on Mount Palomar in Southern California, the Mauna Kea observatories in Hawaii or the Large Binocular Telescope observatory in Arizona.

  She had barely slept last night, and finally threw in the towel and gotten up at a quarter till seven, though her interview wasn’t scheduled until ten o’clock. She showered, made her hair look attractive, and dressed in her most conservative blouse and skirt, and made sure she was at the university forty-five minutes early.

  At twenty minutes till eleven she was back in her car with red-rimmed eyes; somehow, things had gone horribly wrong during the interview.

  It had started out well enough; the members of the committee had gone over her academic resume, noted the fact that she had earned her Bachelor of Science degree at Oberlin, her master’s at Ohio State, and that her grades were top notch.

  Then they had questioned her about what her goals were, why she wanted to study astrophysics, why she wanted to study at Caltech, why she felt as though she was Caltech material… then, almost imperceptibly, she had felt a shift in their attitudes.

  There was an older man, probably in his mid-fifties, who sat at the far end of the table. He asked probing questions about where Sarah wanted to be ten, twenty, thirty years from now. No matter what her answer, he seemed to be dissatisfied with her responses.

  Gradually, it seemed as if the mood in the entire room gradually changed until Sarah felt as if she were sitting in the middle of a winter storm. Cold? Yes, and then some. Cold and hostile. It was all she could do to maintain her composure until she reached the privacy of her car.

  She had been behind the wheel of her parked car, tears streaming down her cheeks, for twenty minutes when there was a tap tap tap on her driver’s window.

  She looked up to find the older man that had been on her admissions committee — Randall someone.

  She rolled the window down slightly.

  “Yes?” she sniffed.

  “Miss Rhodes, may I have thirty minutes of your time to offer you a very special opportunity?” he asked.

  And
that was how Randall Warren stole Sarah Rhodes’ prodigious talents away from Caltech and put her on the payroll of ChroNova.

  CHAPTER 71

  Stefanie had been taken to Alta Bates Medical Center following the accident. She was unconscious and carried no identification. She was stabilized and then transported to the Trauma Center at San Francisco General Hospital. She underwent two surgeries to repair a broken right femur and right ulna, as well as a severe concussion and of the right eye socket.

  She was kept sedated for nearly five days, and when the doctors gradually weaned her off her pain medications and asked her who she was and who they should notify, she discovered that she had no recollection of her identity.

  After her discharge from the hospital ten days later — the day after Christmas, in fact — she was sent to a homeless shelter in San Francisco, where she remained for the maximum 12 weeks permitted.

  CHAPTER 72

  “She can’t be dead,” Rick said. “None of us have forgotten her the way we started to the first time she went into the Gate.”

  The senior ChroNova staffers, including Randall, Rick, Terry and Sarah, were sitting around a conference table in the upstairs meeting room, discussing the ramifications of what they were calling the Incident.

  It had been three days since Rick had come back from 2000, and Stefanie had still not returned.

  “I know,” Randall said, “but something’s obviously happened. You said that she was going to go and find her younger self, talk to her, and then come back to the gate. That shouldn’t have taken any more than an hour, right?”

  “I’d say so,” Rick agreed. “So, then, the question remains: where is she?”

  The room was silent. Then Sarah spoke up.

  “I know you’re all concerned about her presence in the past causing… what did you call it, Terry? ‘Ripples’?”

  Terry nodded. He had postulated that the longer they remained in the past, interacting with people and events there, the greater and greater the effect on the past would become, and the more significant its effect on the present. He theorized that, given enough time and an unrestricted amount of activity, a single individual interacting with past events could change events so much as to render the present virtually unrecognizable.

  As an example, he had drawn a diagram that indicated how one man could, by going back to, say, 1500 A.D, put events in motion that would prevent the discovery of electricity, or the independence of the United States, or he invention of the airplane. If someone were to go back far enough, he said — say, 40,000 BCE, with an M-4 automatic rifle, and kill enough Cro-Magnons, they might wipe out modern humanity as a whole.

  Rick had disputed this, pointing out that if modern humans had never evolved, then no one would have existed who was capable of discovering the Gates, and therefore no one could have gone back to kill the Cro-Magnons.

  Time travel was full of contradictions.

  “So,” Sarah continued, “I know you think it’s dangerous to go back to 2000 again, but isn’t it just as dangerous to leave Stefanie there?”

  Looks were exchanged among the team.

  “You’re right,” said Randall.

  They all put their heads together to brainstorm a solution.

  CHAPTER 73

  During her time at the shelter, Stefanie had prevailed upon the kindness of a charitable organization to put together some presentable clothing so that she could go out job hunting.

  By the time her twelve weeks were up, close to the end of March, she had managed to impress three different potential employers; each in turn reluctantly declined to hire her, despite her skills, because of her lack of verifiable identity.

  She was treated by a psychologist at a clinic affiliated with San Francisco Regional in an attempt to help her recall who she was. She eventually was diagnosed as having dissociative fugue disorder.

  Finally, she took a position that was offered by the organization that operated the homeless shelter where she had spent the initial twelve-week stay, working as one of two assistant kitchen managers.

  ~~~~~

  Rick stood in the now-familiar alley, alone this time. Terry had theorized that they could avoid the phenomenon of meeting the previous iterations of time traveling Rick and Stefanie by sending Rick into the San Francisco Gate by propelling him into it through the Gatespace rather than docking the local and remote Gates; apparently he was right.

  “Terry, you’re a fricking genius,” Rick said softly.

  Rick had been cautioned, however, that going through the Gatespace also meant that the usual time sync would be absent; in other words, it wouldn’t be December 15th, 2000 as it had been in the past. Rick only hoped it was at least close. He had visions of emerging from the alley to discover a Jetsons-style world of flying cars and robotic servants.

  He walked out of the alley onto the street. Everything looked normal so far.

  Rick crossed the street to check the date on the newspapers in the vendor that was still in its usual spot.

  He breathed a sigh of relief.

  The date on the newspaper was Wednesday, September 5th, 2001. Three days had passed back home, while nine months had gone by here; not ideal, he reasoned, because it meant that poor Stef had been stuck here for all that time, but it could have been worse, he reasoned; it could have been years.

  It occurred to him that his own younger self had made a change, as well; since this last nine months had passed, he’d applied and been accepted to Caltech, and in the next several weeks would be making the move to Pasadena.

  Nine months, however, was a long enough period of time that it was possible that it would prove a problem for him to locate Stefanie. After all, something had to have gone wrong; otherwise she’d have come home on her own.

  He had a pretty good idea where to start.

  ~~~~~

  Stephanie Doe sat on a chair in her walkup apartment in the low rent district of the city. It was Wednesday, ostensibly her day off, but she was going in to help with preparing the midday meal because the other assistant manager, Rose, was out with the creeping crud.

  She looked at her watch. It was a little after nine, so she had a couple of hours before she needed to be at the shelter.

  She gazed out of the window at the cool September rain and let her thoughts wander back across the last nine months. She remembered waking up in the hospital and being told she’d been in an accident; that she’d been struck by a car.

  At first, she’d had no memories of what had come before; none whatsoever. It was like a blank slate. Tabula rasa. That meant ‘blank slate,’ she thought, but she couldn’t remember where she’d learned it.

  After a few days, she had told the doctors that her name was Stephanie. She remembered that much, although everything else was just a smear, a homogenous fog.

  The truth was that she did remember a few facts, but what she recalled didn’t make any sense at all. It was all in bits and pieces, but it involved a green shimmering light, and the city of St. Louis, and a pair of gorgeous brown eyes, and the name Rick… and something about the number sixteen.

  CHAPTER 74

  Stephanie arrived at the shelter at 11:15 AM and immediately jumped in to assist with fixing the noontime meal. Her kitchen staff had already begun the base preparations, and they made small talk as the stew simmered and the trays of grilled cheese sandwiches came out from under the broiler and into the warmer.

  At 12 noon, they opened the serving line and the city’s homeless, the poor, and the indigent came in a line, holding their mess trays, receiving a warm meal.

  After a few minutes, she saw a face that had become familiar.

  “Hi, Artie,” she said.

  CHAPTER 75

  1982

  Arthur Harper sat behind the wheel of his 1982 Chevrolet Caprice and cursed the early morning traffic. He was a sales representative for a medical supply company and he had an eight o’clock appointment at a pediatrics clinic in in San Jose; it was now 7:02 by the dashboar
d clock. What should have been an easy 45-minute commute via I-80 and I-680 was being snarled by road construction into a series of detours and roadblocks that was going to put him at least a half hour behind.

  The word ‘frustrated’ did not even begin to cover this situation.

  This customer had the potential to become a regular, so this drive was probably going to become something Arthur had to do every three or four weeks. He figured he’d better get used to it.

  He just hoped that the State of California would finish tearing up the Interstate sometime before 1983 arrived.

  ~~~~~

  2001

  “Artie, you want some juice?”

  Artie nodded his head almost imperceptibly. In the nine months that she’d been around the shelter, first as a resident and then an employee, Stephanie thought she had probably hadn’t heard Artie utter ten words out loud.

  Today Artie, wearing the same stained, worn overcoat that he wore every single day, had shuffled down the line with his tray, receiving a bowlful of the thin stew and a grilled cheese sandwich, until he stood in front of Stephanie’s table, filled with cups of various juices. “Orange or V-8?” she asked him.

  His eyes were downcast. He didn’t say a word, but timidly gestured toward the orange juice. He placed a cup on his tray, and he carefully made his way to a nearby table.