One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  Shane could not explain away the many personal messages on his smartphone from a pre-med co-ed named Kimberly any more than early man could have articulated his reasons for abducting females of child-birthing age from a neighboring tribe. He had even less to say about his oh-so-sexy replies to Kimberly. Like his hunting and gathering forebears, Shane’s penis called the shots, and Caroline found that a disheartening and painful realization.

  She dropped Shane faster than matter degenerated inside a black hole but continued on with anthropology to a bachelor’s just to show everyone that she was no quitter. Bitter experience, and the realization that she no longer wished to associate with devotees of an area of study that lacked romance and wonder, turned her to physics as her sole major.

  From Chicago, she migrated to Cal-Tech, where she created some interest in her ideas about finding physical proof of the theorems that formed the basis of string theory, in particular, the supposition that ours is only one of an endless number of realities or universes. She was sought out and recruited by UCL and moved to London at the age of nineteen to continue her work while teaching lower classmen her same age and older about the building blocks of the universe.

  IT WAS THERE, in the student cafeteria at UCL, that Caroline met Sir Neal Harnesh.

  She enjoyed the break each day between her morning classes and afternoon labs in the Old-World surroundings of that cavernous space. Her lunch was unaltered each day: a salad and tea with cream. On Fridays, she allowed herself a biscuit. With her mind fully occupied with algorithms, three-dimensional models, and hazy conclusions just out of reach, she had little brain power left even for as simple a complication as, “What’s for lunch?” So, she kept it simple and repetitive and found comfort in that routine.

  The room was always crowded at midday during the week, so she had no cause to look up from her open Notebook when someone took a seat directly across from her. It wasn’t until he politely cleared his throat four times that she glanced up to see a very expensively dressed man of Asian descent who appeared to be in his fifties smiling at her across the table.

  “Caroline Tauber?” he said in a West End accent with a hint of Mumbai as their eyes met.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “My name is Neal Harnesh, and I’ve been quite anxious to speak to you.”

  “Me?” Who was this guy? Administration? Or maybe a head-hunter from another university. She got offers all the time but was happy in London with no plans of relocating anytime soon.

  “Your papers on the multiverse have been brought to my attention.” He smiled. She was paying attention now. It was something in his easy manner. It was also the very tall men with radio earpieces standing by the pillars of the cafeteria entrance trying to blend in and keeping a constant eye on her visitor. This Neal Harnesh was Someone Important.

  “Which papers in particular?” she said cautiously. This guy was government. Or corporate. Or both.

  “All of them, actually. I do not have the education to fully understand the subject, but I have been supplied with reviews that assure me that you are on track to some very important breakthroughs. Your address to the Perimeter Institute in Ontario was one I was able to follow with some clarity. I digested enough of it to find it intriguing, even exciting. You have promising ideas about the construction of a device that would provide practical proof that this reality we call home is not the only one.”

  “Well, it’s strictly theoretical,” she said. “I’m not sure how practical any of my theorems might be. And I certainly don’t have the funding to turn my findings into workable hardware. Thinking is free, but labs cost money. And I’m not sure of what I’d do with it if I had the cash. I don’t claim to be an engineer.”

  “Your brother is quite talented as well,” the man said. “And in the area of engineering.”

  “You’ve done your research,” Caroline said. “Caltech. MIT. He’s made his own name in his own area, as you have in yours. And he’s followed your work quite closely.”

  This was a surprise to Caroline. Both the revelation that Morris was even aware of her efforts and that this stranger had obviously spoken to her brother at length. Caroline was aware of a little of what Morris was working on these days. The last they’d spoken, at a Christmas gathering at Uncle Maynard’s in New Jersey, he was into alternative energy sources involving the Earth’s electromagnetic field. She thought it sounded like wishful thinking and a dead end but said nothing to him other than platitudes of encouragement.

  “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 of “Neal Harnesh” under various spellings brought up a picture of the smiling and 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 80s, 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 90s, 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 interest 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 t
o 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. 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 said. “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 low 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 to 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. 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 thei
r existence. The place they once inhabited was barely recognizable. It was 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. She knew a 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 do 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 access.