Pinball (9 page)

Samuel looked up at Steven and a look of bewilderment came over his face.

“Hello, Samuel,” Steven said.

“Dad?” Sam replied hesitantly, getting up and approaching his father. “Oh, my God, Dad, is it really you?”

“It’s me, son,” Steven said. “It’s me.”

Samuel lashed out suddenly in a rage, grabbing Steven by the shoulders. “Where have you been? God
damn
you, where have you been? You’ve been gone for fifteen years!
Fifteen goddam years!
We waited for you, we watched that damned portal for
months
, but you never came back!
Why didn’t you come back?
” His voice was hoarse with emotion.

“Son…” Steven began, “You don’t understand…”

“I don’t understand? What is it that I don’t understand? You went off on an adventure and left your family behind — for
fifteen years!
”

“But… where I was, on the other side of the portal…” Steven tried to explain, “I was only gone for four hours.”

Samuel stared at him with glassy eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I found another gate, like the one up the hill… that led out of the void, to another place. There are dozens of them, maybe hundreds, even thousands, I don’t know how many there are. I was on another world, another planet, one where there was a small town. I met a man…” He stopped, gasping for breath, realizing just how farfetched the whole thing sounded.

There was a pause. Samuel looked at him, his eyes still cold. “Well?”

Steven hesitated, then realized his son was still willing to listen. “This man I met also went through one of the Gates — that’s what they call the vortexes — he went through, just like I did, in 1872, and he never went home. There were about fifty people there, whole families. There was at least one person from some other world, as well, not just humans.” He saw interest in Samuel’s eyes now.

“The man I met there — his name was Randolph. He had been in the Gatespace — the void — for
centuries
before he came out, and he’d been in this town, on this planet, for forty years. There was a little library of books that they had collected over the years, and even a computer, a…” He felt as if he were rambling, and suddenly fell silent, feeling as if he were about to burst into tears.

Samuel looked at him with something that resembled affection, if not yet love. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’ve spent the last two years studying that damned green swirl, sometimes sixty, seventy hours a week, hoping to find out whatever had become of you, and when you finally show up, I blow up at you like a pissed off old lady.”

Steven smiled at him. “I understand, son. It’s all right.”

“You should go see Mom,” Samuel said.

Steven choked on his words. “Where is she? Is she all right? I — I don’t know what I’ll say to her…”

“Calm down, Dad. I’ll take you to her. She lives over on the other side of town now.”

They went out to the parking area and got in Samuel’s car, a sporty black sedan. Steven didn’t recognize the logo on the steering wheel, a stylized
S
. “This is a beautiful car, son. What make is it?”

“It’s a Samsung. They’re made in Korea.” He gave a little laugh. “There aren’t any American carmakers anymore, Dad,” he said. “Oh, and by the way, it’s not the USA any more, it’s the—“

“United States of AmerAsia?” Steven interjected.

Samuel gave him a look. “Yeah. How did you—?”

“I told you there was a computer in the library. See, the Gates can move you through time as well as space. In this place where I was, it was 2769, and I spent a couple of hours reading about history 700 years into our future.” 

Samuel was silent. Steven wondered what he was thinking. After a moment, he started the car and pulled out of the drive. For about ten minutes all was quiet. Then Samuel broke the silence.

“Dad…” he began. “I missed you.”

Steven smiled at his now-grown son. “I missed you, too, Samwise.”

Chapter 18

Father and son rode together in silence for a while. They passed through the little town and Steven was both comforted and chagrined to see that not much had changed. Three Forks Market was still there. However, where Custer’s Last Root Beer Stand had been for years, there was now a McDonald’s, its drive-thru lane backed up with cars, the sign proclaiming “BILLIONS AND BILLIONS SERVED.” Some things never changed.

“”When did
that
go in?” Steven asked.

“Last year, I guess,” Samuel replied. “A franchisee from Bozeman bought the place, tore down Custer’s and built the Mickey D’s.”

The Iron Horse Café was still there, but the sign now read “Lewis & Clark’s.” Little else had changed; new street signs had been installed, and the sign painted on the front window of the town hall appeared to have been repainted fairly recently. Seller’s Hardware and Three Forks Ready Mix were unchanged. They passed the Sacagawea Hotel, which looked the same as always, its majestic white pillars gleaming.

There was a set of fuel pumps in front of the little convenience store in the center of town that hadn’t been there yesterday — well,
Steven’s
yesterday. “They put in new pumps,” he remarked.

“Oh, yeah,” Samuel laughed. “That’s been a while. Probably ten years or more. I wasn’t even driving yet.”

Steven turned his head and gazed at his son. The eleven-year-old he’d left behind was utterly gone, absorbed into this man that Samwise had become. “How did you come to work at the base, Sam?” he asked.

“It’s a long story… Mom can tell you about how the base came to be built, but as far as me working there, Mom encouraged me to take accelerated classes when I got into high school,” he said, “and I graduated when I was sixteen. I went to MSU in Bozeman for a year, studying aviation, and then got interested in physics, specifically the nature of time and space. I bet you can’t guess where I got interested in
that,
” he laughed. “I ended up at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and finished my Bachelor’s in two years, my Master’s in two more, and got my Doctorate when I was 23.

“That’s when I met Erica. We got married the summer I turned 24, the same year I got this job.” He gave a low laugh. “That was two years ago.”

“So when did they build this base?” Steven asked.

“They started not long after you disappeared. Like I said, Mom can tell you more about that than I can,” Samuel replied.

They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then Steven broke the silence.

“Where are your sisters?” he asked.

“Nicolette’s married to a guy from Canada that she met in school at Boise State. They live in Ontario. He works for an accounting house, I think, and Nikki’s doing pretty well for herself as a fashion designer. You might have figured that Dakota became an artist. She works for a comic book publisher — oh, shit, she’d kill me if she heard me say that,” he grinned, “they’re
graphic novels
. She’s got a sweet gig. She has a condo in Florida and just e-mails her stuff to the office.”

“What about Lianne?” Steven asked.

“Oh, dear, sweet Annie,” Samuel said. “We always said she’d be the boss, whatever she decided to do, remember?” Steven nodded. At ten years old, her temper had been legendary. “She’s got her own business right here in town,” Samuel explained. “It’s a craft shop. She’s had it a couple of years, I guess. Does a lot of business. Yarn, fabric, all of that stuff that Mom was always into. She still is. I think Mom’s probably the biggest customer Annie’s got,” he grinned. “I’ll call her when we get to Mom’s house.”

Chapter 19

They pulled into a long dirt driveway and approached a small white clapboard house. Steven found his stomach was churning. He wondered how Lynne would react, recalling Samuel’s initial rage. They got out of the car and walked to the front door.

Samuel opened the door and gave a light knock. “Mom? Are you here?” He stepped inside. “You’re not gonna believe just showed up at my office.” He gestured to Steven to follow.

Steven walked in, uncertain what to expect. He followed Samuel into the small kitchen, where he saw a slight figure with a long silvery braid down her back standing at the sink. It was Lynne, of course, but the fifteen years had affected her more than he had expected. She turned her head, saw Steven standing in the archway, and dropped the skillet she was scrubbing into the sink with a splash.

“Steve? Steve!” she cried, running to him. He enveloped her in his arms as she covered his face in kisses. Holding her, he realized that she was thinner, more fragile than he remembered. Her hair, which had been a lustrous chestnut brown, was now mostly silver. She looked at him with tears in her eyes. “It’s been so long! I thought you were dead…”

“I’m sorry, Lynne, I’m so sorry. I went through the void and came out somewhere else, and just spent a few hours there, and when I got back…”

“It’s been fifteen years,” she said. “But, Steve… oh, my God, look at you. You’re so
young!
”

“It doesn’t matter, Lynne. It doesn’t make any difference.”

She smiled at him. “You always were such a gentleman. That’s one of the things that made me fall for you. But look at me,” she said. “I look like your
mother.
”

“I’m gonna go call Annie,” Samuel said with a smile, going into the living room to find the phone.

Chapter 20

They sat in silence at the kitchen table, looking at each other. She was still the same Lynne. Steven still felt the same way about her as he always had. They’d been married for eighteen years — well, they had before his trip to Centra, anyway. He didn’t know how to figure it now. Should they count it as 33 years? He shook his head, smiling. “What are you thinking?” she asked him.

“I was just thinking that I used to say you’d still be just as hot when you were 60, and now I’ve been proven right,” he grinned.

“I am
not
60,” she retorted, smiling back at him. “I’m only 53, for your information.”

“Well, you’re a sexy 53,” he growled in a bad imitation of Antonio Banderas.

They were still laughing when the door burst open and a strikingly beautiful young woman with waist-length brown hair walked in, wearing a crocheted top, jeans and boots. She saw Steven and her brown eyes grew huge. “DADDY!” she screamed, running to him and jumping into his lap.

“Oh, Annieleigh,” he said, “God, look at you.”

“Nobody’s called me Annieleigh in… well, since you left. Fifteen y—” she stopped suddenly. “Daddy, look at
you,
” she said. “You’ve been gone, what, fifteen years? You’re still so young!”

“It’s gonna sound weird, Lianne,” he said. “But while it was fifteen years for you guys, to me it was only about four hours.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending.

He spent the
next
four hours telling the tale in great detail while Lynne, Samuel and Lianne listened.

They told their side as well; they’d waited for two weeks, knowing that he’d been gone that long on his earlier excursion, then two more. Lynne was reluctant to report him missing, knowing what he’d told her about the way that the timestream seemed to vary in the void.

“But finally, after you’d been gone for three months, I felt I had no choice but to call the police. Of course, I didn’t mention the fact that you’d gone through some kind of gateway in space,” she said, rolling her eyes, “but it wasn’t long before the police discovered the portal — the Gate, you called it, up on the hill. They questioned me and the kids about it and wound up calling in the Federal government.”

“They immediately declared it top secret and began this black ops program to study the portal and also to keep its existence a secret,” said Samuel.

Over the fifteen years since then, the base, once just a temporary outpost, had grown into a facility covering nearly a square mile. It was officially listed on the Army’s records as the South Central Montana Military Vehicle Depot, but in reality it had been established specifically to monitor and study the Gate. Initially, the base was staffed strictly by military personnel, and the Denver family was ordered to move out of the house. Lynne balked at this, however, and contacted both of Montana’s U.S. Senators and the Congressman for the district; since the Army couldn’t give a valid reason for trying to evict the family without revealing the secret of the Gate, they relented and let them stay in the house, though the base was built around it. After five years, the decision was made to bring civilian scientists in to study the Gate, which the Army labeled Project STAMINA, for
S
pace-
T
ime
A
nomaly/
M
ontana
I
ncident/
N
orth
A
merica.

After Samuel earned his Doctorate in 2022, he applied for a job at the facility, and his dissertation on a topic remarkably relevant to the work being done there won him the position of Senior Research Assistant. Eighteen months later, the head researcher retired, and at the age of 25, Dr. Samuel Denver was promoted to the top job there.

Chapter 21

Steven woke up the next morning and looked over at Lynne’s sleeping form beneath the sheet. She was curled up on her side, facing away from him. Things seemed almost the same as they had been the previous morning, apart from the fact that the thick braid that trailed down her back was mostly silver, and the layout and décor of the room was different. He kissed her bare shoulder as she slept, got up, and went into the kitchen.

He got a cup of coffee and wandered into the living room, staring out the window. Had he really lost fifteen years in just a few hours? It didn’t seem possible. But his wife was lying in bed in the other room, and clearly, for her as well as his children, time had moved on.

Jesus.
The word was half expletive and half prayer. He really didn’t know what his future held now.

“Steve?”

He turned and saw Lynne in a thick maroon terrycloth bathrobe, standing in the archway. “Good morning, baby,” he said, smiling. She smiled back, but it was a sad smile.