Written in Time (12 page)

“Good. Good, darling. Now, Peggy dear, we may as well get started.”
 

Jane Rogers walked toward the open rear doors of the GMC Suburban, where Peggy Greer was inspecting the screens of various pieces of monitoring equipment. She seemed to be paying particularly intense attention to the oscilloscope which they had modified for their purposes.
 

Peggy announced, “Screen’s smudged. Got a tissue, Jane?”
 

Jane knew that she did not and said so. “Sorry.”
 

Peggy merely shrugged her little shoulders and whisked the green scarf from her head, attended to the smudge on the screen and began retying the bandanna over her hair. Her hair was just past shoulder length, so bright a strawberry blond that it was nearly red. Despite the almost constant sunshine and Peggy’s thorough dislike for any sort of hat that might shield her face, Peggy’s mid-twenties complexion was pale, very pretty, a perfect setting for her sparkling green eyes.
 

Jane had taken to wearing a flat-crowned cowboy hat, new when Frank had bought it for her but long since battered and faded. Sun brutalized her face, given half the chance, always had. Even when she was Peggy’s age, sitting poolside or at the beach, she’d always worn a hat, admittedly something more feminine in design. More than once, someone had likened her weathered Stetson to those worn by John Wayne in his myriad westerns. She hoped any physical resemblance ended there.
 

The wind was picking up, whistling down from the mountains and toward the desert. Jane hoped that—this time—her carrier wave would reach back into the mountains, where she and Peggy had positioned the receiver.
 

If it did, the light array set there would, at least, flicker. That had already been established. The solitary flicker their experiments had produced lasted so briefly that, had she blinked, she would have missed it. Yet witnessing it— nine months and six trials ago—was the first sign of hope since her experiments had gone from strictly controlled laboratory conditions into the field: the solitary glimpse of practical success since her work had begun.
 

Jane would be pleased if she and Peggy could duplicate it, ecstatic if they could better it.
 

“Ready, Jane?”
 

“Fire her up, Peggy.”
 

“Right!”
 

A casual glance over her shoulder at the equipment was all Jane allowed herself before stepping to the tripod-mounted refracting telescope. Peggy knew her stuff, didn’t require supervision.
 

Jane looked into the eyepiece, focus already achieved, nothing to do but pray that the objective lens sheltered within its sunshade cap would catch a flicker of light, showing that the carrier beam had done its work.
 

The generators hummed from the bed of the pickup truck parked a few feet from the Suburban, one generator to produce the electricity which the laser beam, powered by the second generator, would hopefully carry to target.
 

“On my mark,” Peggy called out. “Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . Mark!” The humming of the generators was, for a moment, like the sound of a hive of angry bees. A crackle, more crackles. A hum, louder than the others, at a different frequency. There was a popping sound, a microsecond later a sound like a clap of thunder. Would there be a second one?
 

Jane’s hands shook, and she dared not touch them to the telescope through which she peered toward the mountains.
 

But there was no second noise like thunder, there was no illumination—however brief—from the lighting array that was wired to the intended receiver.
 

There was nothing.
 

Jane looked away from the telescope. The humming from the generators was already subsiding. Peggy’s monitoring equipment had already announced their failure.
 

“It didn’t work. Were we any closer this time, Peggy?”
 

“I can’t tell, Jane, not until I run the program check. I can do it here. We don’t have to wait until we’ve traveled all the way—”
 

Jane cut off her young friend in mid-sentence. “That’s it!”
 

“What’s it?”
 

Jane Rogers ran toward Peggy, grabbed the girl by the shoulders and turned her around. “You have given us the answer, girl! It’s the traveling! That’s what it is! It’s the damned traveling, Peggy!” Peggy’s usually intelligent eyes stared blankly back. Jane hugged the girl, kissed her cheek. “You don’t see, do you?”
 

“I don’t under—”
 

“When we had our glimmer of light nine months ago?” Jane Rogers took the package of cigarettes from the pocket of her smock as she spoke. “Remember what happened? The cable—”
 

“The cable we used to connect the receiver to the lighting array had been chewed on by something and we substituted a piece of cable that was a foot shorter.”
 

“So?” Jane prodded.
 

“So if we shortened the cable still further, there’d be less distance—”
 

“Less distance for the electrical charge to travel. If we’re right, Peggy,” Jane said, hands trembling as she lit a cigarette with her husband’s old lighter, “when we had that flicker of light nine months ago and actually broadcast electrical energy, we had it right. If we go back to our figures from nine months ago and duplicate the experiment to the nth degree and use as short a cable as possible—”
 

“And better insulated than what we’ve been using,” Peggy interrupted.
 

“Exactly! And better insulated. Shorter and better insulated. Yes! If we do that and we duplicate all the settings—”
 

“And atmospheric conditions, too. Wait for a day with the right humidity—”
 

“Yes, weather conditions. If we duplicate that day as closely as humanly possible, with the shorter—”
 

“And better insulated!”
 

“And better insulated,” Jane agreed. “Shorter and better insulated cable and close to identical atmospherics, we should be able to get more than a damned flicker! We’ll light up the array!”
 

“Yes!” Peggy threw her arms around Jane and hugged her so hard that Jane thought one of them would surely break a bone.
 

It was at once frightening yet miraculous that time could go by so quickly. Through some artful finagling— Jack was very good at that sort of thing, Ellen readily admitted—instead of getting their movie money at the commencement of principal photography, as per contract, they had the check in their hands twelve days before the cameras would roll. Part of the deal to get the money early involved an intentional misdirection—not a lie, of course—that the entire family would be taking a much anticipated trip, perhaps within days of the film getting under way. There would be no time to put the money to work for them. In exchange for the production company’s acquiescence, Jack promised that, before the commencement of principal photography, he and Ellen would have found a way to cut eight pages from the last third of the script. Successful shortening of the script had, so far, eluded the professional writing staff assigned to the screenplay. Without it, the film would be at least one million dollars over budget, before it was ever started.
 

Their current novel—and, quite probably, their last, certainly written in the present—was, finally, complete. In the morning, they would set out by car for California. David, surprising both Ellen and her husband, suggested something quite bizarre. “Why don’t you guys continue writing once we’ve entered the past—I mean, if there is anything to this goofy time-travel crap. But on the off chance it does happen, you guys should think about it. You guys could be the next Jules Verne, right? What did Verne have? He imagined things like nuclear submarines and stuff like that,” David had gone on, answering his own question. “You guys wouldn’t have to imagine a damn thing! Just use your imaginations to come up with some science fiction story line and throw all the stuff from our present day into the story. Like microwave ovens, compact discs, personal computers—stuff like that. Even a trip to the Moon and satellites orbiting the Earth. You guys would still be able to do what you like and make a lot of money.”
 

Elizabeth had pointed out, “But they can’t do that, Davey. Because they didn’t, or else those books would already exist, just like the photograph of the store exists. It might be a terrific idea, but for some reason or another, they won’t do it, because the books you’re talking about would have been published already, see? Right, Daddy?” And Elizabeth had turned to her father, who was sitting at his computer, all the while staring at her almost worshipfully as she pelted her brother with the logic of time travel.
 

“You’re a hundred percent on the money, babe. The reason the photo which started this whole thing—alerted us to it in the first place—exists is because we had already built or bought the store and put up that sign: Jack Naile— General Merchandise.” Then Jack looked at David. “The reason those books will never be written—or published at least—is because they haven’t already been published, David.”
 

“So, Dad, you’re saying that everything we do once we get to the past—if this stupid thing happened—is predetermined, written somewhere.”
 

Ellen said it. “Written in time, David. It’s already written in time, and if something did change that, the consequences would be incalculable. You’ll probably start carrying a gun, for example. You were/will be in that photograph. If you had to shoot somebody and you killed a person or you didn’t kill a person, but in the past you had already not killed or killed that person—”
 

“I don’t follow you,” David volunteered in a moment of rare candor.
 

Jack chimed in. “What your Mom’s trying to say, David, is that if something any of us were to do were somehow something we hadn’t already done—from our perspective now—we could screw up the present and the future. The smallest thing that would alter the past might have enormous consequences in years to come.”
 

Elizabeth had offered an example, and a very good one Ellen had thought at the time. “Like if Hitler had been killed in some kind of accident when he was a little boy, then maybe World War Two might never have happened, but some guy who was killed during World War Two might have lived instead and fathered a child who blew up the world or something and none of us would be here right now. Right?”
 

“Exactly,” Ellen agreed.
 

“Okay, how do we know what to do and what not to do, then?” David asked, slipping into sarcasm. “Do we just do only the things we know the Nailes did—and we don’t know much of that—and the rest of the time sit around afraid to leave the house or whatever because we might screw up the future?”
 

“No, we just try to behave rationally,” Jack said, “and we hope for the best.”
 

“We do what this family has always done,” Ellen declared. “We fly by the seat of our pants. And at least you and your father will still be able to wear pants,” she added.
 

CHAPTER
THREE
 

By the time they reached the hotel outside Bakersfield, California, near the site where principal photography on Angel Street would begin the next day, they had driven over two thousand miles, carried the attaché case with the diamonds and their modest supply of gold in and out of seven motels and nearly twenty restaurants, taught Lizzie how to drive quite well and eliminated a little over nine pages from the screenplay. Regardless of whether or not those pages stayed out of the script, their obligation to the production company was officially fulfilled.
 

Jack Naile had always considered himself somewhat anal retentive (convincing himself that attention to detail was prudent thoroughness, therefore a virtue rather than a psychological quirk). Consequently, he felt perfectly justified getting up a few times each evening, going to the window of whatever hostelry happened to be their abode of the moment and checking that the Suburban was as it should be.
 

The contents of the Suburban were vital to their success in the past. Certainly, it would be possible to survive without these items, but impossible to maintain any semblance of a normal late twentieth century lifestyle.
 

“Come to bed, Jack. The Suburban’s just fine.”
 

“Coming, kiddo.”
 

“What’s bugging you, Jack?”
 

“I’m just hoping that we didn’t forget something. And I don’t mean movies on videotape. It’s like that kit we thought of that we can install so we can run the Suburban on grain alcohol.”
 

“That was a good idea, seeing as we didn’t have enough money or time to get a diesel engine put in.”
 

“Yeah. With the right filter, we could have run the car off the equivalent of home heating oil.”
 

From the semidarkness of the bed, Ellen said reassuringly, “There will obviously be some things that we forgot or couldn’t anticipate needing, Jack. That’s just the way that life is.”
 

“What do you think the kids are talking about?” They were in the next room, an unlocked adjoining door connecting to it.
 

“David’s probably sleeping. If he doesn’t get his eight hours, he’s a grouch. Liz is probably watching a talk show or a movie and keeping the sound low so she won’t awaken David.”
 

Jack Naile nodded, glanced once more at the Suburban and then walked back to the bed. The attaché case with their stash of gold and diamonds was beside the bed, between it and the nightstand. In front of the nightstand, abutting the leading edge of the attaché case was an aircraft aluminum case, larger and heavier. Inside it were all but one of the personal sidearms he had brought for their anticipated travel into the objective past.