Ancient Fire (4 page)

“Time,” he said, “doesn’t really move in a
straight line at all. It moves in and around everything, and them
that know, know that everything really happens all at once. Or that
everything that went before is still happening somewhere else. I’m
putting it all down in the book I’m writing. I’m telling people
that nothing ever goes away.”

“What doesn’t?” I asked. Sometimes I just
don’t know what grownups mean about anything.

“Personally,” Dad said, putting the
unfinished half of his burger down, “I’d like to give time a little
rest. Maybe avoid it altogether, if I can.”

“How are you going to do that?” A.J.
asked.

“By going to California.”

“Might work.” He nodded, chewing
thoughtfully. “It’s worked for some.” Now it was his turn to put
down the burger. Then he pointed at me. “But it won’t work for the
boy. He’s touched.”

“Touched by what?”

“The hidden truth about time.”

Now it wasn’t just getting weird — it was
getting scary. The conversation kind of died down after that, and
after Dad took a couple more bites of his food, we went back to our
room. The TV was still on. It showed a man running on a beach,
being chased by a giant balloon.

As we stood there, there was a knock on the
door. It was A.J.

“I don’t mean to be inhospitable,” he said,
“but there’s a break in the storm. This might be a good chance to
move along to where you need to be.”

My dad looked back at him. “I guess it
might.”

A.J. helped us get our stuff back in the car.
“Hate to lose customers,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s for
the best.” The full moon was reflecting off his glasses, but you
could see how fierce and alive those eyes were.

“Let me pay you…” Dad took out his wallet and
held out a credit card.

“You probably know that your credit and your
money won’t work here.”

“I probably do,” my dad agreed. Then he did
something that really surprised me; he took out a picture of my
mom.

“I don’t suppose…” And he let the question
hang there for a while before finishing. “I don’t suppose you’ve
seen this woman anytime recently, have you?”

A.J. took the photo of Mom and squinted at it
under the moon.

“I haven’t seen anyone like that lately,” he
said at last.

“Lately?” Dad asked.

“It’s been a long life,” A.J. replied. Dad
kept looking at him. “But I’ll keep both eyes open for her.”

Dad handed A.J. a slip of paper. “This is
where we’ll be in California,” he said.

A.J. put it in his pocket without looking at
it. “That’s
where
you’ll be,” he said.
“But
when
will you be there?”

“Just as soon as we can.” And a minute later,
Dad was steering the truck through the Oklahoma night, while I
tried to stay awake in the seat next to him.

There was a lot I didn’t understand about
what had happened, but there was one question I had to ask first.
“Why did you show him Mom’s picture?”

“Because, honey…”
Honey
? He hadn’t called me
honey
in years. Since I was a kid. Now he was waving
his hand at the windshield, indicating the night, the stars, and
the moon. “I think your mother is still alive. Somewhere out there.
Someplace.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think the lab accident put her somewhere
else in time, Eli. Some
when
else.”

My stomach felt a little knotted up, like
when you get bad news. But maybe this was good news. How come he
never came out and told me any of this before?

“How?”

“There’s a lot to explain. Can we talk about
it in the morning, son?” He never called me
son
either. What was with him? “It’s a long night, and
I have a lot of driving to do. And you still have to get some
sleep.”

“That’s not fair.” I decided to stay up and
keep asking questions, but somewhere in Kansas, I let my guard down
and drifted off.

When I woke up, the sun was shining — it was
almost scorching hot — and we were a thousand miles down the road,
ready to eat a late breakfast in Arriba, Colorado.

Chapter Four

Eli: North of Joe
DiMaggio

June 19, 2019 C.E.

Thirty hours after Colorado — I had pancakes
there, even though it was near lunchtime — and more of my dad’s
high-speed driving (hydro-cell motors aren’t usually loud, but he
could really make ours scream), we arrived at the Valley of the
Moon.

Like with most of our arrivals, we got there
at night.

The only unusual thing that happened in that
last part of the drive was that I finally got a message from Andy.
We were driving through Nevada, and I was surfing around on my
vidpad when I saw I had some new mail. I’d been expecting a package
— a bunch of new Barnstormer character animations that Andy had
made himself or gotten on his roamer, or maybe a clip of him
talking to the screen. Instead, I was surprised to see that it was
just a typed sentence:

How you doing?

It wasn’t even his voice. Just the printed
words.

“This whole trip has felt like the end of a
game,” I said, watching the words pop up on the vidpad as I
composed a reply. “Like the way Barnstormers always have to flee
town.” It was on account of a low tolerance for monsters in most of
the places they played. I was feeling a little bit on the run
myself.

“But overall, not bad,” I added to the
message.

Looking at those short sentences made me feel
farther from Andy, and from home, than the actual miles did.

And anyway, the big game I was getting sucked
into was really just starting. Beginning with our arrival at
Moonglow.

But what do you call a game that gets way too
serious?

On the way out, since we were going to live
near San Francisco, I read up on local baseball history. Turns out
Joe DiMaggio came from there and played for an old minor-league
team called the Seals, and of course Willie Mays played for the
Giants in the old days, sixty or more years ago. Baseball
historians say being a Giants fan is almost as hard as being a fan
of the Cubs or the Indians. But at least they won the series when I
was little.

Maybe that’s a bad omen, deliberately moving
fifty miles north of such a run of hard luck. Apparently the person
in our family who started Moonglow wrestled a lot with his luck,
too.

It was some great-uncle of mine, Solomon, I
think — in any case, a brother of my granddad, Silas Sands (and
boy, am I glad my dad broke the “S” chain and didn’t give me a name
like Sam or Sylvester) — who tried to start the winery, with some
money he made way back by investing in a company that made clunky
old desktop computers that you couldn’t even fold up.

I never met Solomon or my granddad, but when
Dad was a kid, he spent part of a summer working at the winery
before it went bust.

That’s where the lucky streak started to wind
down; a couple of plant diseases wiped out a lot of the grapes, and
when the fruit recovered, my great-uncle found out nobody wanted to
buy a wine called Moonglow, at least not one with a creepy picture
of a glowing glass of green wine on the label.

That was my great-uncle again: He thought he
was an artist, and insisted on designing the label himself.

So the winery sat there, and Solomon had some
kids who grew up and eventually planned to use the land for a
shopping center or something, but never got around to it. Both of
them died, without kids of their own, so Moonglow wound up in my
dad’s hands, and sat there until the time that he needed to escape.
When that tax bill came, reminding him of the winery’s existence, I
heard him laugh. It was the first time he laughed since Mom
vanished.

The winery itself was kind of falling apart;
the roof had holes, and water was getting inside.

Our first night there, we just took sleeping
bags out of the car and found a dry spot on the wood floor in what
used to be the tasting room.

On the morning of the third day, Dad drove to
Sonoma in search of some basic roofing supplies. His idea was that
he and I would fix up Moonglow and wait things out.

Which things?

I don’t think he was sure. Life itself,
maybe, so that no more bad stuff could happen to us.

I don’t know why he thought that would
work.

By the seventh day, we’d patched up several
holes in the roof and polished the floors. We cleaned up a small
dinette table and some chairs we’d found in an old employees’
lunch- room and made that our kitchen.

There’d never been many employees — my dad,
that summer, was one of the few — but there was a lunchroom.

The building sat next to a hill, and there
were caves dug out of the side, which you entered from the winery.
They were made of limestone and were used to store the wine at a
cool temperature.

By the ninth day, I was really beginning to
think that this wasn’t just a phase my dad was going through, and
maybe I could stay out of school for the whole rest of my life,
since he hadn’t gotten around to even
talking
about where I might want to go.

On the tenth day, a package arrived.

Now, Dad hadn’t told anybody where we were
going — well, nobody but A.J., but I’m not sure if that counted —
but it wasn’t necessarily a huge secret. We weren’t trying to hide.
I mean, I told Andy. And anyway, between stuffing a vidpad into
your pocket and carrying a cell card, it’s not like anyone was hard
to locate.

But we weren’t going out of our way to let
anyone know where we were headed, either. We just locked up the
house and drove straight out of Jersey.

And now here we were. Between our drive out
and nailing tarpaper on the roof together, Dad and I were the
closest we’d been since the accident. And then the package
came.

From Mr. Howe.

There was no announcement, no preparation. An
unmarked delivery truck just whizzed up our road, and a man stepped
out, tapping a vidpad.

“You Mr. Sandusky?”

“I’m Sandusky Sands.”

“Package. Sign here.”

Dad looked at the pad, then up at him.
“Why?”

The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’m
supposed to deliver it anyway.” And with that, he opened the back
and eased an enormous wooden crate onto his hover-dolly, then
lowered it onto the ground.

“You want this somewhere?”

Dad shrugged back. He was beginning to slip
back into his gray, blank sadness already.

The delivery man glided the crate over to the
tasting room, where we’d spent our first night. When it still felt
like camping and the start of a new adventure.

After the truck hummed away, I went up to
look at the box. Dad hadn’t moved.

I could see the label:

DR. SANDUSKY SANDS

MOONGLOW REMOTE LAB

VALLEY OF THE MOON

SONOMA CO., CALIFORNIA

On the top, instead of a return address, were
some familiar initials:

DARPA

Dad didn’t even open the crate. He just
walked inside, sat down in a plastic chair in the old lunchroom,
and started to cry.

Not for long, but just enough to scare me.
Not that I think guys shouldn’t ever cry, or anything. But this was
my dad.

Then suddenly he got up.

He walked to our truck and took out a crowbar
and began popping slats off the box. Sure enough, there was a
sphere generator inside. They wanted Dad to keep making the time
spheres. And because he knew how to make them, no matter where he
went, there wouldn’t be any escape from Mr. Howe.

Now, instead of crying, Dad was smiling.
Grownups’ emotions are always so unpredictable.

“They’ll never be able to make me use it,”
Dad said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“No WOMPERs,” he replied.

“What are ‘WOMPERs’?” They sounded like some
creatures from a Barnstormer game. Like a Frankenstein monster who
could swing a mean bat.

“I’ll tell you while we make dinner.”

“Making dinner” was opening a couple cans of
spaghetti and uncorking some wine. Well, Dad had the wine, and I
had some chocolate rice milk. Sandusky had found a few cases of
unopened Moonglow wine a couple days back and, for the first time,
decided to crack open a bottle.

He was feeling pretty good again, all things
considered, and told me about WOMPERs between bites of noodles and
tomato sauce.

“WOMPERs stands for ‘Wide Orbital Massless
ParticlE Reversers,’” Dad said, writing it out on the side of a
wine label so I could see where the capital letters fell to make up
its nickname. “They’ve only been recently discovered, in the
farthest parts of space. The
oldest
parts.
We theorized about them, but couldn’t prove they really existed. We
thought they were only around for a little while after the big
bang, then disappeared.”

“Why?”

“It takes too much concentrated energy to
make a WOMPER. And the universe has been spreading itself pretty
thin lately.”

“What’s a WOMPER do?”

My dad must’ve been excited by me asking all
these questions. I usually left the science to him and Mom.

“If it passes through an electron or a
proton, it reverses the charge. It can do this so rapidly that
around any concentration — any buildup — of matter, it acts almost
like an agitator in a washing machine.” He was holding up his hand
and waving it back and forth. “It does even stranger things to a
positron.”

“You mean the positrons you use for the time
spheres?”

Those were the backward-traveling particles
Dad used as the “fuel” for his, well, his time machines. Though he
hates it when they’re called that.

“Right. Since a positron is already a
reversed particle — a backward electron — when it’s hit by a
WOMPER, the positron’s properties are speeded up, made more
intense. It blasts backward through time faster, with more
energy.”