City of Ruins (21 page)

“She’s good,” A.J. whispered to me. “A long
time ago, I was against women preachers. But she’s good. If I still
had my pulpit in Vinita, I’d invite her to speak some gospel.

“Well, no sense havin’ ears if you’re not
gonna listen to what’s bein’ said. I’m gonna finish my rebuildin’
project.”

He walked over to where we’d started to build
an altar earlier. Some of the stones had been knocked over again.
He picked one up, and set it on top of another.

Huldah saw him, and then she lifted up a
smaller rock and put it on top of where there had once been a
wall.

The Gehenna woman picked up a rock. For just
a second, I thought she might throw it at one of us. “There’s
nothing left to lose by trying,” she said. Then she laid it on the
remains of the wall, next to Huldah’s.

After that, everyone else started to pick up
rocks and stones and pieces of rubble, too.

By the time we stopped, it was late
afternoon, and everyone had worked up a sweat, even in the cool
winter air.

It looked like a section of one of the
temple’s walls was halfway standing again, in a kind of lopsided
way. And leading from that, was a lined pathway up to the altar
that A.J. had finished.

Now A.J. wants to put that altar to use. “I
guess it’d only be right to make an offerin’, since it’s the New
Year, and all.” A.J. looks around, then takes something out of his
pocket. It’s a little scrap of cloth, I guess, but it’s old and
muddy. All I can see is the word
REACH
on
it.

He lays it on the altar.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Piece of an old baseball. Made by the A.J.
Reach Company. They’re out of business now.”

“Why are you leaving it here?”

“That baseball, son, is the reason I’m back
here, in Jerusalem. With you. It’s what got me started on this
whole time-travel business. Since I’m not sure if any of us are
gettin’ back now, especially since your cap is gone and all, well,
I thought I’d try to make my peace with things.”

Neither of us says anything for a moment.

“There’s a lot you haven’t told me, isn’t
there?”

“Well, for starters, that’s all that’s left
of a baseball once used by Satchel Paige.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Well, it all starts with Green Bassett.”

“That’s not what I meant, either.”

“Actually, son, it kind of is.” He looks
around — people are quiet now, at least in the sense they’ve
stopped actively trying to kill us or drive us away. “Let’s take a
walk and try to find Jeremiah.”

“If he’s gone, we shouldn’t try to bring him
back. That’s not how history is supposed to play out.”

“I just want to say good-bye, son.”

I look around to see if Naftali or James want
to come with us, but they’re gone. “I think she took ’em back down
to the cave,” A.J. says, watching me turning my head. “The boys. I
think Thea went back down there to wash ’em up, get ’em away from
all the riotin’ folks up here.”

“I should see her.”

“You should. But you should find out some
things first.”

We walk down the stone path, past the newly
rebuilt wall, out toward the fields. We pass the remains of what
Naftali told me used to be the palace. A.J. points to it.

“That’s where the kings lived. They’re all
gone now. The very last one had to watch his own children die.
After that, they blinded him.”

“Jeez. That’s horrendous.” I think of Thea,
who had to go through something like that, but in reverse. “History
is really awful.”

“Lotta scary things in the Bible, son, I
won’t kid you. It can be a fearsome book. Did Huldah ever tell you
about the king she worked for?”

“No.”

“Name of Josiah. He was a bit earlier. Called
on her to interpret one of the Bible scrolls they’d found, stashed
away in the temple. Make sense of the word of God, as it were.”

“Did she?”

“As much as anyone can. They added a lot of
new laws to the books after that, trying to keep people on the
straight and narrow. But laws only work for a while, if people
don’t feel things” — and now it’s his turn to tap his chest — “in
here.”

“Why is everyone tapping their hearts so
much?”

“I guess we’re all havin’ lots of strong
feelings, back here in the Holy Land.”

“Is that why you became a preacher, ’cause
you believe everything happened just like it says in the Bible?
What about all the things it doesn’t explain? Like where my mom is
or whether we’re ever going to get back? Are we stuck here forever?
What about that?”

A.J. picks up a stick from the ground — a
long piece of wood, not a tree branch, but a piece of what used to
be a wall or a pillar. “I became a preacher ’cause I think there’s
something bigger than all of us out there, a Great Mystery that we
all need to tend to.”

“Well, I have plenty of mysteries.”

A.J. takes a rock and throws it in the air,
then swings the stick at it. He gives it a pretty good hit, and it
skitters into the desert.

“Your mother, son. She disappeared in the
late 1960s.”

I wish I wasn’t so used to my stomach falling
all the time. “So is my mom still around, still in this world, or
not?

“She’d come out to Vinita to see me.”

“She still knew you?”

“She stayed with Project Split Second, after
the war. All through the ’50s and ’60s. The whole cold war. She
never wanted time travel to be used as a weapon.”

He throws another rock and hits it.

“She was with the project all the way
through, trying to make sure it never got out of hand, was never
used to hurt people.”

“Well, how far did they get?”

“They got as far as sending a couple of test
subjects through time.”

“Really?” That doesn’t necessarily sound like
she kept it from hurting anyone. “Who?”

“Me, for starters. And Rolf.”

Now it’s so weird, I have to sit down. A.J.
keeps taking batting practice, stopping for a moment to stare at
the wood in his hand. “This thing I’m usin’ for a bat actually came
from a palace, son. A place the kings inside probably thought would
last forever. Nothin’ lasts forever.”

Not even Project Split Second, apparently. He
tells me that Rolf was put in charge of the program after the war,
because, as part of the
Drachenjungen
, he was supposed to
know a lot about time travel. It didn’t matter how he got the
knowledge.

“It was that Operation Paperclip stuff
again,” A.J. says. “Puttin’ Nazis all over our own government.”

But my mom stayed on as one of the research
scientists. She was the one always saying they weren’t ready to
“test on humans” yet. “But ol’ Rolfie always wondered what the
point was if you
didn’t
test it on humans. What was it gonna
be used for, anyway? So he started to look for volunteers.

“And finally, he had one. Me.” A.J. swings
the wood, and hits another single.

“Why you?”

“It got me out of an Army hospital, where I’d
been for a few years.”
Whack!
A foul tip.

“Why were you there?”

“It was the kind of place they keep people
who claim to have ‘seen things.’ People who might cause a certain
kind of trouble.”

Apparently, a lot of the trouble started
after I’d jumped into the dimensional rift at Fort Point, where my
mom was. A.J. tried to jump in after me. “I didn’t think you should
go alone, son. It didn’t seem right.”

But my mom held on to him, by his heels, and
pulled him back out. He’d been halfway in the time stream. In
spacetime.

“Halfway in?” I ask. “What was that
like?”

A.J. shakes his head. “It just confirmed the
mysteries. But they kept me in Army hospitals for years after that,
for ‘observation,’ as they called it. Occasionally, Rolf would come
and ask me what I knew.”

And apparently, just when Rolf was ready to
get A.J. his release, to do a “volunteer jump” through time, a
small paper, the
National Weekly Truth
, published a story
about Rolf’s background as a Nazi.

“Some kind of tabloid or something,” A.J.
says.
Whack!
“But then the regular papers picked it up, and
our government was so embarrassed, they had to let Rolf go.”

“So what happened then?”

“He tried to steal some WOMPERs and do his
own experiments, his own time travel. Your mom thought that might
be a good time to shut down the program. She leaked some more
details to the press, some people in Congress were gettin’ upset…”
Whack!
“And she arranged to get my release from the
hospital. I had to sign all these forms, swearin’ never to tell
what I’d seen.”

“But you did.”

“In my book.
The Time Problem
.
Published by the same folks that publish that
Truth
paper.
But I thought people had the right to know. Your mom thought I was
in danger. So she came out to Oklahoma to see me. I’d gone home by
then, to get out of government service, and start preachin’. But
that didn’t pay well, and I had to find a way to support it. So I
opened a motel.”

Whack!

“Turns out somebody else followed your mom
out there, too.”

My stomach can’t really fall any further.
“Rolf.”

“Your mother was bringin’ somethin’ she
wanted me to have, for safekeeping.”

“What was that?”

“One of the last known captured WOMPER
particles. Which the Split Second folks needed, to trigger a
time-reaction.”
Whack!

Even though Rolf was officially out of
Project Split Second by then, he was still doing work for the
government. “Unauthorized” experiments that were actually,
according to A.J., completely authorized. By somebody with
power.

But something went wrong when Rolf followed
my mom. “Maybe there was a fight and the WOMPER got loose, but
whatever it was, they triggered a time reaction right there in
Vinita. I was runnin’ my motel at the time, and didn’t quite
realize what had happened till later. Till right after a couple of
guests in particular checked into my place, who didn’t even seem to
know what time they were in.”

“Me and my dad? On that trip we were taking
cross-country?”

Whack!

“Yeah.”

“And my mom was there, in Vinita? When we
were? When we were so close?”

“Turns out, she’d disappeared, along with
Rolf, in another time reaction. They must’ve been closest to
whatever it was that happened, because they pretty much vanished
for a while. Well, not Rolf. He popped up again in the early
2000’s, but had to keep a low profile, till he could get his hands
on another WOMPER.”

“So my mom is gone again, too?”

“Last I knew, she was in the ’60s for a
while. Maybe you can catch her back there.”

“And what about you?”

Whack!
A.J. could’ve maybe gone into
baseball to support his preaching. But then again, with so much
going on, how can you concentrate on baseball? The House of David
guys must have always known where their families were, in order to
do it.

“As for me, son, I guess I had a little
accident of my own, after that. The government guys, DARPA and some
of the other agencies, tried to put me back in the hospital after
your mom disappeared, so I wouldn’t talk about what I knew. But I
still had something they hadn’t counted on.”

“What was that?”

“A baseball?”

“The one you left on the altar?”

“Yup.”

“The one from Satchel Paige?”

“And Green Bassett. Yup.”
Whoosh!

For the first time, he misses. The rock falls
straight down into the sand.

“When did you meet him?”

“When he came to Vinita, for some exhibition
games.”
Whack!
A.J. hits the next one, and it flies over
some nearby rocks, disappearing from view.

Someone says “
OW!
”

A.J. and I look at each other, then we
scramble over to see who it is.

It’s Jeremiah, in the late-afternoon sun. He
stands up when he sees us, rubbing his head. “Someone’s always
throwing stones at me.”

“It was an accident,” A.J. tells him. In
Hebrew. “We didn’t know anyone else was here.”

“I came out to start planting, like I said I
would.” There’s a cloth bag near Jeremiah’s feet, full of seeds. “I
found these in the wreckage of the granary, in the midst of all
that confusion. Hopefully, there’ll be enough wheat and barley and
beans by next spring.”

“We have to make it through winter first,”
A.J. tells him.

“Did you try rebuilding the temple again?”
Jeremiah asks.

“A little,” A.J. replies. “Everybody needs
something to look forward to.”

“God doesn’t really worry about our
buildings,” Jeremiah says. “That isn’t where my people need to
rebuild.”

I expect him to start tapping his chest
again, but he just looks at A.J.

“I know. But sometimes, you gotta take people
there one step at a time.”

Jeremiah looks away from us, out over the
horizon.

“I expect you’re takin’ a few steps of your
own,” A.J. continues. “You’re still plannin’ on leavin’.” He
doesn’t ask it as a question.

“After I finish planting, yes. Jerusalem is
better off without me now. I bring up too many old memories, of
pasts that can’t be changed.”

“But —” I start in English. A.J. shakes his
head at me. I guess he’s right. Even if I could tell Jeremiah that
maybe the past can be changed all kinds of ways after all, that
might not make him feel any better. He might even want to start
time-traveling!

And we don’t need another one of those.

“I believe I will head toward Egypt,” he
says. A.J. nods. “Perhaps no one will know me there. And what about
you?”

A.J. looks at me. “I think we’re stuck with
Jerusalem for a while, and Jerusalem’s stuck with us.”

I’ve been trying not to think about this. But
with my cap gone, and no one here with WOMPERs, or a lab full of
experiments, I realize he’s right.