by Chuck Dixon
“Dr. Tauber believes, and I also agree, that your areas of exploration may very well intersect,” he continued. “This machine you posit in your latest published pieces, this controlled temporal disruption, is something that he is convinced can be constructed and made functional.”
“We’re talking about a project that might take years and millions of dollars only to prove me wrong,” she said.
“Is that truly a financial concern?” His smile broadened. “Or are you worried that all of your work, and your academic reputation, might be made worthless? Are you committed to your theories, or are they simply fanciful imaginings that you know will never stand up to tests under real conditions?”
He sat waiting for her reply with the maddeningly calm certitude of someone who feels he’s already won every argument he would ever have in his life.
“I have a class scheduled, and I’m running late,” she said abruptly and clicked her laptop shut. She could feel those amused eyes on her back as she stormed from the cafeteria, book bag slapping on her thigh and eyes hot with anger.
7
The Real Neal
A Google search for “Neal Harnesh” under various spellings brought up a picture of the smiling, aggravating Asian man who interrupted her lunch that afternoon.
Sir Neal Harnesh, OBE.
Big freaking deal. You couldn’t throw a scone in this country without beaning a knight, baronet, earl, or duke. Three of the professors in her department had been knighted. The list for New Year’s honors was in the thousands each year. They gave them to pop stars and actors, after all.
But Sir Neal’s wiki page made him out to be the opposite of Caroline’s assumptions. She spent three hours in the enormous Victorian expanse of the college’s library reading the billionaire’s background and profile. First of all, he was seventy-six, more than twenty years older than Caroline’s outside estimate. He came from nothing in what amounted to the lower middle class in India. Or was that lower middle caste?
Born Neelam Harshadvarnum Guhathakurta, he began working as a telephone lineman in Hyderabad and eventually started his own private contracting firm doing work for the government post office that oversaw India’s infant phone service. By the Eighties, he was CEO and owner of a multi-national communications and entertainment empire under the umbrella of Gallant Ltd. He made nickels and dimes bringing phone, satellite, and cable service to the poorest corners of Asia and Africa.
Lots of nickels and dimes. Lots of rupees.
By the Nineties, he had the position and the capital to go all-in on web-based businesses and services, and his fortune built exponentially. He currently owned controlling interests in hundreds of tech companies, including search engines and word-processing programs for languages as varied as Hindi and Hmong, film and television production companies, real estate, construction, shipping, and energy.
There was scant information on his private life beyond the fact that he was very generous with charitable funds from a dozen foundations with offices all around the world. Not a word about parents or relatives other than wives and children. Nothing in his background displayed any kind of interest in the high sciences or even a curiosity about scientific applications beyond how they applied to profit generation. Even the technology he owned was merely purchased by him or created by brilliant and talented men and women under his employ.
What was his interest in Caroline’s work? Or in Morris’?
He left her no business card. She had no idea how to reach him. But she wanted to at least speak to him and assure him that her theories were provable, and she was fully committed to them. The fact that he had the last word, this jumped-up little manipulating smarty-pants, galled her and she would not allow it. As a know-it-all herself she was always rankled by other know-it-alls. She would tell him in no uncertain terms that she was not for sale and neither was her brother, and she wished that, if he was seeking to prove her life’s work wrong, he could buy his help elsewhere.
Caroline called the general number for his London offices and fully expected a runaround after being asked politely to remain on hold. She was taken aback when Sir Neal himself came on the line within twenty seconds.
“Ms. Tauber, I was hoping you would phone.”
He sounded pleased to hear from her in an open and friendly way that blunted the outrage she’d worked so hard to torque up before calling.
“Were you?” was all she could manage.
“I deeply apologize for offending you. It was not my intention. The one facet of scientific minds that I always fail to take into account is the passion you feel for what, to all of us unenlightened, appear to be only cold, sterile calculations. I wished only to offer a playful challenge. Believe me when I say that I deeply believe in your work and am prepared to make my commitment clear to you in a very tangible way.”
Listening to him, she could fully understand how he brought himself up from stringing line under the equatorial sun to a suite of offices overlooking the Thames.
“I have only one question for you, Sir Neal,” she said.
“Please,” he answered.
“Why would you be willing to spend potentially millions on my wild theories?”
“Curiosity,” he said without hesitation. That was enough for her.
“And you bought that?” Dwayne said.
“I know now it was bullshit,” Caroline said. “I know now that Morris and I were used. Harnesh held all our dreams out in front of us and gave us a chance to prove our life’s work.”
The sun had gone down behind the Rockies, and they ordered pizzas up to the room. Jimbo was napping on one of the beds, a can of Coors precariously balanced on his chest.
“People like us live on grants and gifts,” Morris said. “Here was a guy willing to foot the whole bill with no end of funding and no hard deadlines.”
“So, why boot you when your work proved itself out?” Chaz said.
“I can’t figure that one out for the life of me,” Caroline said. “If he was going to take the Tauber Tube away from us, there’d be a transition period. We never even presented our results or provided a demonstration. We can’t even publish now without access to the Tube and the permission of the Gallant Corporation.”
“And he’s still interested in your work,” Dwayne said. “He bothered to cart it all off.”
“Who built the compound for you?” Jimbo said without opening his eyes.
“Sir Neal hired local contractors,” Morris said. “They built the huts to our specifications. The Tesla Tower we put up ourselves as well as shielding the reactor building and burying the Tube chamber in dirt to insulate it. Parviz and Quebat did all that.”
“And where are our runaway Iranian friends?” Dwayne asked.
Parviz and Quebat were Iranian nationals brought into the country illegally to run and maintain the baby nuclear reactor that powered the Tauber Tube project. When the project was shut down the pair had cut a hole in the side of the container building and loaded the reactor onto a semi and took it who knows where.
“I have contact with them through a throwaway cell they gave me before they left,” Caroline said. “I don’t know where they are, and I don’t ask.”
“Why’d you ask about who built the compound?” Chaz said.
“They wired it for audio and video surveillance,” Jimbo said and plucked the Coors from his chest before sitting up. “They were watching you, monitoring your progress as you went along. They didn’t need you to show them how it all worked because they were following your process all along.”
“I didn’t see any cameras,” Morris said.
“You wouldn’t,” Jimbo said. “You weren’t meant to.”
“Did you check it out, Jimbo?” Dwayne asked.
“Yeah. After we got back from The Then, I snooped around. They had full coverage of the Tube building. They saw and heard everything we did. Probably had the same deal in the reactor building.”
“And the resident hut?” Caroline asked in a lo
w voice.
“I didn’t see anything there,” Jimbo lied.
“You wait till now to mention this?” Dwayne said.
“I thought it was them.” Jimbo gestured with the beer to Caroline and Morris.
Caroline began to object and Dwayne stood to cut her off.
“We were talking about gold, right?”
8
Desert High
They left the vehicles in a dry streambed and covered them with camo netting. It was a three-mile hike from the two four-wheel-drive trucks to the cave site and the Rangers timed it so the march was in the cooler hours of the early evening. The group of five followed a wall of rock around to the natural bowl of land where, a thousand centuries ago, a village of protohumans thrived.
The setting sun threw their shadows ahead of them as dark streaks on the blazing ground. They kept their boots on the rock scree to prevent any chance of a dust cloud that might give them away to anyone watching the horizon.
“Is all this really necessary?” Caroline said. She was having no trouble keeping up with Dwayne and Chaz. Jimbo walked point and Dr. Morris Tauber brought up the rear, struggling under his forty-pound pack.
“All what?” Dwayne said.
“This,” she said and gestured to take in the weaponry and the ammo vests the Rangers were wearing over their civilian clothes. This was traveling light for them. M4 rifles with four mags each for Dwayne and Chaz. Jimbo shouldered his favorite Winchester bolt-action with the 30x scope.
“Yes,” Dwayne said and picked up his pace to join Jimbo.
“If they were surveilling the compound electronically, they could have left some eyes behind,” Chaz said and slowed his pace to allow Caroline to keep up more easily and let her brother close the gap. “And tracks show they did make some patrols around their perimeter before they took off. They might want to discourage lookee-loos. They’d do more than that to us.”
“More than what?”
“Discourage.”
“Seems overly cautious,” she said.
“And who’s been hiding under an assumed name the last month?” Chaz said. “You sure seem squirrely about this Sir Neal. And we think you’re right. It wouldn’t take much to make him decide it was a mistake to let us all walk away.”
“And he’s got to be pissed about the reactor.”
“That, too.”
The path along the foot of the natural wall turned south to reveal a wide, flat plain of sand and scrub enclosed by a half-ring of rock face extending out from below the looming mesa. It was in blue shadow now as the sun fell. The temperature was dropping along with the sun. The sand and rocks cooled quickly as the night moved in. Twenty minutes brought them to the mouth of the cave and it was full dark by then.
In the failing light, Jimbo checked the ground all around. The only sign of recent human activity was the tracks left weeks ago by Morris when he excavated the cave with the help of the pair of Iranians. Piles of fresh earth were heaped before the cave mouth in a berm.
They unpacked in the gloom and set up a rudimentary camp before putting on NODs―night-vision lenses. They couldn’t risk a fire, the light of it would be seen for miles.
Caroline fought a chill she knew had nothing to do with the falling temperature. She was standing at the edge of what would have been a collection of huts all those years ago; the village that was home to hundreds of primitives now long gone and forgotten by history.
There was, of course, no sign of the aborigines who killed her friends and held her captive. Time had erased their existence. The place they once inhabited was barely recognizable, bare rock and desert sand where there was once forest running down to the shore of a massive lake. Only the half-circle of cliffs that once sheltered the village remained to remind her of the time and place where she had expected her life to end. And even they had been stunted and worn smooth by wind and time.
She was only alive thanks to the arrival of the same men who were now quietly setting up gear by the cave mouth. They were total strangers to her then and she knew little more about them now. She knew they were tough and smart and, from all she had seen, fearless.
Caroline didn’t like relying on others. But she realized that she would have been killed and eaten or even worse without their violent intervention. And she and Morris needed them even more now to protect them from the present-day threat of Sir Neal and the global reach of Gallant Ltd. She hoped she was right about the gold still being here. These men weren’t helping out of any interest in the advancement of quantum theory.
The Rangers had been promised ten million dollars to split but had only received an advance on that. While that advance made them all tax-free millionaires, they certainly felt as though Morris Tauber had shortchanged them. This primordial gold stash would make up the balance and then some.
“You okay to show us where to dig?” Dwayne held out NODs gear to her. Night vision lenses fixed to a head harness.
“Sure,” she said.
“I understand if going back to that cave is difficult for you.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said and snatched the goggles from his hand.
A month before, Morris and the pair of Iranians came to the cave during some downtime while waiting for the reactor to power up for another field opening. They were led here by a transmission back through the open field from Dwayne in the world of prehistoric Nevada. Morris, Parviz, and Quebat used a backhoe to clear a trench down the right wall of the cave that allowed access. But the ceiling was still low with tight confines that only allowed for single-file.
Caroline led the way, with Dwayne behind her and her brother bringing up the rear. Jimbo and Chaz stayed outside to keep an eye out for anything on the horizon.
To augment the night-vision lenses, they each broke glow sticks once they were inside the cave. This feeble light couldn’t be seen from outside the cave but was more than enough to illuminate their search. Every detail of the cave’s interior leaped into sharp contrast through the magic of digitized light amplification.
Caroline gasped. There was a depression in the floor of the trench, and skeletal remains lay there.
“Morry, these are the remains you uncovered?” she said.
Dwayne shifted to allow Morris to brush past him in the narrow passage the trench allowed. Morris crouched by Caroline.
There in the garish light were a single skull and set of ribs. The skull was broad, with wide-set eyes and inhumanly large orbital sockets and a pronounced brow ridge. The upper jaw was split in a jagged line leading down from a small hole punched through the occipital bone just below the left eye. A plate in the back of the skull was missing.
“That’s the shaman,” Caroline said. “I shot him with the gun Dwayne gave me, and he’s been lying here all this time.”
Morris couldn’t speak. The last time he had been here, there were three skeletons lying in a jumble. One of the skulls had a porcelain cap on a molar; the same crown a dentist put in place when Caroline was in her sophomore year in Chicago. That skull also had a round hole drilled through the temple; a hole much like the one in the face of the remains lying there now.
Here was proof that the past is changeable, that time is a malleable element that shifts and warps if interfered with. The universe is not a constant, and the evidence was here before them. Five weeks ago, he discovered this cave and uncovered what was clearly the suicide of his little sister, committed one hundred thousand years before her birth. Since then, the Rangers had gone back through the Tube to that same day and rescued Caroline and changed those events. It meant there existed, for a time, an alternate reality in which the Rangers’ rescue failed. It was baffling even to a mind as used to working in a non-linear fashion as Morris’ was.
“Isn’t that astounding?” Caroline said in a rush. “I hardly know what to think of it.”
“Yeah,” was all Morris could manage.
“This confirms that the Tube holds the key to proving String,” she gushed.
“Bu
t we’d need to reproduce similar results and record them,” Tauber said.
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer asshole,” Dwayne cut in. “We’re here for the gold, right?”
“Dig here.” Caroline shifted mental gears. She patted the left wall of the trench. “Extend this back into this niche and the gold should be here. Might be here. Theoretically.”
“Based on what?” Dwayne said.
“Based on the fact that the head witch doctor’s body is still here,” she said with a touch of frost. “They left him here where he died. Maybe the aborigines thought the cave was cursed and the gold along with it.”
“So, they just left their own treasure behind?”
“Why not, Dwayne? It’s not like the gold had actual value to them. It’s useless for tools or weapons. They obviously didn’t even have the means to alloy or refine it. They liked it because it was pretty and shiny and easy to work into trinkets and beads.”
“Listen!” Morris raised his voice, anxious to set his mind to anything but the anomalies his mind was struggling to get around.
Caroline and Dwayne turned to him.
“We came all this way,” he said. “Let’s dig and find out if it’s idle supposition or millions in gold, okay?”
The five of them took turns through the night, clearing away dirt and sand and rock with shovels and picks. They handed back buckets to be dumped outside the cave. They reached a layer of packed pebbles and shells that would take real work to scrape away.
Caroline, her clothes and hair and skin brown with dirt, crawled far back into the niche on her belly. She used a trowel and rock hammer to chop at the impacted detritus layered there through the millennia.
