Ancient Fire (8 page)

I look back at the cards: Both Bonds and
McGwire wore number twenty-five. I consider asking Mr. Howe
something, and decide it’d be useless. Instead, I say to Number
Thirty, “Don’t tell me you people brought me this far for some kind
of Barnstormer game.”

“Me and the two Twenty-Fives, here. We’re the
Referees.”

“Baseball has umpires.”

“Well, we’re known here as Referees. We kind
of do what the Supreme Court does. Except they make public
decisions.”

She lets that hang there.

“And you make secret ones?”

“Private ones. For DARPA, and other agencies.
When things happen that there aren’t any rules for yet. We help
make up those rules.”

“But then who gets to know what they
are?”

She doesn’t answer, turning to Mr. Howe
instead. “You’re right. He is a smart boy.” Then she leans in close
to me. “Come on, Eli Sands. Let’s find out what we should do with
you. And whether there’s any chance of getting your mother
back.”

She turns and walks toward the Plexiglas
office, with the Twenty-Fives in tow. She’s whistling a little
song—from a Disney movie, I think, but I’ve been too old for those
since at least 2015. It’s an ancient one, about being happy while
you work. I wonder how much she really cares about my mom.

Soon, I’m in a soft, fancy chair—like the
kind you might find on an airplane—looking up at a blank white
wall. The wall brightens and shimmers into life with a series of
3-D images.

There’s a picture of Andrew Jackson Williams,
standing in front of the
CABIN CREEK
sign
— except there’s no motel on that corner now. The sign says
CABIN CREEK CLEANERS.
But Dad and I were
just there in June.

And how did they find out, anyway? Were they
following us?

“This is from the
Daily
Oklahoman
site. Headlines from a few days ago. A town named
Vinita. You’ve heard of it?”

I don’t say anything.

Number Thirty keeps talking. “It’s a man
named Andrew Jackson Williams. He wrote a book called
The Time Problem
. About time travel. Have you heard of
that
?”

“No.”

“No, we didn’t think so. It was published in
1969. The hippies back then really liked the book. They thought it
was ‘far-out’ and ‘cosmic.’ But A.J. never really liked
hippies.”

“What’s a hippie?” I ask.

“Never mind.” Now it’s Mr. Howe’s turn. I
guess the Twenty-Fives are just going to keep quiet. “The point is,
Eli, Andrew Jackson Williams died in 1969, too. Right after his
book came out.”

It’s a good thing everyone’s looking at the
wall screen, and not my face. I’m feeling pretty nervous. “He
died?”

“Apparently. In the middle of a thunderstorm.
According to the news stories we could find. Except that suddenly,
he’s been seen again all over his hometown of Vinita.”

More shots of him go by, posing with a vidpad
— like it’s some strange object from space— and standing in front
of a church, giving a lecture. You can tell all the pictures are
recent.

“Is he a ghost?”

“He doesn’t seem to think so. He claims that
during the storm, he just walked out of the motel he owned, and
when the storm broke, here he is, fifty years later.” There’s
another picture of him in front of the cleaners. There’s still no
motel.

“Mr. Williams says it has to do with a sudden
disturbance in time. Though when local authorities asked him about
it, he said they’d have to read his book.” Mr. Howe shrugged.
“Except the book’s been out of print for nearly fifty years.”

There’s a
thunk
as a
copy lands on the table near me. Even in the dark, I can see it’s
old and beat-up. The whole thing is printed on paper. “We’ve read
it,” Howe added. “It didn’t answer any of
our
questions.”

“Look at this.” Now it’s Thirty’s turn again.
On the wall screen, a group of airline passengers stand around a
busy airport terminal, looking confused and worried like they could
all use a nap.

“This just happened yesterday,” she says. “A
flight from L.A. to New York. It’s supposed to take three and a
half hours, nonstop.”

“Yeah?”

“According to everybody’s watches, and every
clock we could check, and every way we could measure…it took
fifteen minutes.”

“What?”

“That’s right. They left Los Angeles, and
before they had time to finish hearing about the inflatable life
rafts in case of emergency, they were over Manhattan. This one
we’ve kept out of the news. For now. The crew and passengers are
still being debriefed in a hotel.”

“They get a hotel? And I’m stuck in a
tunnel?” No one’s laughing, and I’m not sure I meant it as a joke.
“So what does ‘debriefed’ mean?”

“It means held against their will.” That was
a new voice. Dad’s.

He’s come in the room and is standing in the
back. “Daddy!”

I haven’t called him that in about five
years. Since around the time I stopped watching Disney movies.

I can feel my cheeks get a little red, then
he walks up and hugs me and I don’t care…except he’s wearing latex
gloves, so it feels a little funny.

“I’m sorry, buddy, but I came down here late
last night. Mr. Howe told you this morning, right?”

“No.”

We both try to glare at Mr. Howe, but he just
won’t feel embarrassed about anything. “I wasn’t sure you’d be
finished,” he claimed. “I didn’t want to promise the boy he’d see
you if you weren’t going to be here. I didn’t want to upset
him.”

There are times when Mr. Howe makes me want
to barf.

“You should have told me you were leaving,
Dad.” I let go of him so I can stand back and look him in the
eyes.

“Eli, we discovered something…and I didn’t
want to get your hopes up too much. I was in a sealed room farther
down the tunnel. You couldn’t have come in there, anyway.”

I realize Dad is dressed in a special jump-
suit, too, like some of the DARPA guys. He doesn’t look right in
the uniform.

“What’s going on?”

Dad peels off the gloves and takes a small
vidpad out of his pocket. “We just scanned these in. Nobody can
touch it directly, of course. We had to be very careful.”

They were pages from the old
San Francisco Chronicle
that popped up in his lab at
the same time the baseball cap did.

“Funny things have been going on with time,
Eli.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Then I lower
my voice so only he can hear. “
Are you talking
about the motel we stopped at?
”

“No. Look.” He scans through the newspaper
pages, then stops, enlarging an article about an orchestra playing
in San Francisco back in 1937.

There’s a picture of one of the flute players
looking toward the camera. Margarite Sands. My mom.

Chapter Ten

Clyne: The Rhino and the Time-Vessel

Final Class Project: 10,271
S.E.

3. How was this culture
different from your own? Describe.

Since I’ve already described this planet as
being dominated by evolved mammals, I have, in a way, already
answered the question. What could be more unusual than that? But
you still may not believe me, and may even be thinking that when I
get home, the school nurse should immediately prescribe a volcano
cure for me to let me sweat out these bad visions. But our motto,
as Saurians, has always been “Science is deep truth,” and science
is on my side here.

Even though the truth is that
everything
is different, and what we thought we knew
about evolution has been turned into mush-fern stew.

For example, there are nearly as many types
of mammal species as there are Saurians! Not just the two-legged,
mostly sentient kind like Eli the Boy, or Thea, the daughter of the
scholar Hypatia (and a scholar in her own right), but many other
strange creatures with equally strange names: rhinos, monkeys,
tigers. They have “birds,” too. These birds even resemble our own
winged Saurians.

I met many of these firsthand, when they
tried to overrun my vessel in the middle of something called a
“zoo.” The human mammals evidently keep other mammals imprisoned,
like the Ring of No Escape in Cacklaw. And, like Cacklaw, it’s for
entertainment. But not for a few mere sun-cycles as in our own
sporting events, with the gates open after the game. No, these zoos
are permanent. Does this mean, for mammals, that
their
games don’t end? It seems more serious for the
ones behind bars. I will continue to investigate.

My introduction to the culture, of course,
was when Eli the Boy wound up in my ship as a result of a poorly
plotted experiment on time dynamics. Their mature beings, called
“grownups” or “adults,” possess roughly the scientific knowledge of
a Saurian in secondary studies. As a result of this rough science,
my settings were thrown completely off.

We know from our own studies that certain
beings can potentially act as “lightning poles,” magnets if you
will, for time energy—with the slightest disturbance in spacetime
focused on and channeled through them. As the saying goes, “Some
hatch differently.” The boy is like that. Apparently, his unique
reactions are triggered by the wearing of headgear, or a “cap”.

As a living time particle himself, Eli the
Boy was drawn to another time experiment in Alexandria, a place
that was “ancient” for him, since it reached the height of its
glory some sixteen hundred years before he was born. Thea’s female
parent, Hypatia, had retreated to a lighthouse after solving
several equations about the composition of light and time, and how
each measures and affects the other. She was trying to demonstrate
the results for the whole city, perhaps because she thought some
citizens might appreciate what would be a great forward stomp in
mammalian knowledge.

Hypatia’s experiment acted as a kind of
homing beacon for us. Since I found myself back in a fairly normal,
compressed atmosphere, I stuck my head out of the ship’s portal to
get a better view of our surroundings, and to bring the standard
time-traveler’s greeting to the crowd below: “A good time to
meet!”

But I never got that far. They began throwing
projectiles and chanting at us. Apparently, they were not fond of
Hypatia or her experiments.

As the ship was still wobbly, Eli the Boy and
I looked for a place to put down. When we found open space in this
“zoo,” we were attacked first by the rhino, and then by other
creatures, who presumably thought, as had the humans, that their
territory was being invaded.

After getting out of the ship, I just stood
there transfixed, watching these amazing creatures come at us. The
rhino might’ve speared me dead center in my abdo-bilious if Eli the
Boy hadn’t shoved me away. A rude gesture for a kind purpose.

In their own way, these Earth Orange animals
are wondrous. Like creatures you might find in a hatchling’s tale.
But they also have appetites — and tempers.

“I think we made him mad,” Eli the Boy said
as the rhino turned around to face us again.

Now it was my turn to help. Holding the boy,
I jumped to safety, hearing behind me the distressing
thud
of the rhino colliding with my ship. My leaping
seemed to amaze the other humans scrambling for safety around us.
Apparently, human legs are slow and spindly.

I leaped across the great grounds of these
Royal Quarters, over fountains, pillars, and arches, trying to keep
ahead of the strange riot that was brewing between the interplay of
mammals—the animals who were loose, and the various humans running
from them in panic. Even in this confusion, I had time to notice
that Alexandria, in all its pink, sandy tones, is very much like a
Saurian city!

But our first task was getting to safety. So
I cleared the walls, still holding on to Eli the Boy, thinking we’d
be safe once we were away from all the stampedes.

Instead of tigers and lions, we found more
humans. The angry mob had chased the girl up from the lighthouse
and into the public market, where they had her surrounded. Then I
saw Eli the Boy do an amazing thing.

After my appearance caught them off guard
once more, Eli declined to continue our escape and instead released
himself from my arms.

“Get her away from here,” he instructed me.
Here I’d just arrived on their planet, and they were already
getting me involved in their fights. This certainly wasn’t a
typical school assignment!

But I trusted Eli, and had a sense that the
girl —for I didn’t know her as Thea yet — could use a helping claw.
I took her, and, as we jumped away, caught sight of something
extraordinary:

Eli voluntarily put himself in danger,
drawing the wrath of the mob, giving Thea and me a better chance to
escape. Then he put his cap on and disappeared back into the Fifth
Dimension.

Meanwhile, I took the girl and returned over
the wall into the Royal Quarters, since the four-legged mammals
suddenly seemed less dangerous than the two-legged ones.

I heard another distant
thump
as the rhino kept charging at my poor ship. The
girl spoke to me, but in a tongue different from the boy.
Apparently Earth Orange is so early in its development that it is
still multilingual! I could see I would need the lingo-spot again
to learn how to converse with her.

I had some of the plasmechanical substance in
the emergency kit in my uniform, and I quickly applied some. She
was pointing frantically toward some buildings on the edge of the
great lawn, and I jumped in that direction.

After we landed, she turned to me. “Are you a
lizard god? Or just a lizard man?”

I responded, but she couldn’t understand me.
I reached out to give her a lingo-spot, but she stepped back. I
could understand her caution, but it would take me at least a few
minutes to pick up some words in her language.