Written in Time (23 page)

Clarence shuddered as he lit a cigarette, exhaling smoke through his mouth and nostrils, shivering in the mid-morning chill as NTSB technicians started to move the wreckage.
 

His family was alive, he almost verbalized. No remains of their belongings had been discovered. Jack never traveled without a gun unless aboard a commercial aircraft. That would have meant that, had they died, the gun’s rusted remains would be discovered.
 

No such remains would be discovered.
 

There would be no dead bodies found miles away in the deep woods, no bones along the side of some animal trail.
 

Clarence looked hard at the helicopter’s wreckage, his heart filled with hatred for it because it had failed. Through clenched teeth, he swore an oath. “You didn’t get them, you fucking piece of aircraft shit! You didn’t get them! Not them! I’ll find them and I’ll come back here or wherever the hell the FAA puts you and I’ll piss all over you! Hear me!?! I’ll shit on you, dammit! My aunt and uncle and my niece and nephew aren’t gone, damn you!”
 

Clarence stood there a moment longer, noticing only peripherally that all of the law-enforcement and FAA and NTSB personnel and volunteers were staring at him, fear in the eyes of some.
 

“Hey! Listen up, dammit! They’re alive. They’re fuckin’ alive, and I’m gonna find ‘em, go after them, find them! They’re fuckin’ alive, and no fuckin’ helicopter crash is killing them! Hear me? They’re fucking alive, and I’m fucking finding them, and I’m gonna piss all over this fucking helicopter and anybody who fucking tries to stop me!”
 

Clarence lit still another cigarette and walked away. He had work to do.
 

It had been almost a year since their first significant success with the transmission of electrical power through the air, many flickers of illumination from their lighting array, but none so brilliant as when the storm had so suddenly struck.
 

Sometimes, at night, Jane Rogers would awaken, haunted by a question she could not answer. The terrible helicopter crash about which she had read, had seen the aftermath of on the television news, seemed to have occurred at roughly the same time as that so-successful experiment. There was no reason to suppose that it had, but what if her experiment had somehow contributed to the deaths of five people, wiped out an entire family of four?
 

The driving force behind her research was to help mankind, not destroy.
 

Each time that she and Peggy Greer had returned to the high desert and, once again, attempted to project electricity on a laser carrier, a secret fear had consumed her, the fear that all scientists had at one point or another in their lives: Had her work, somehow, unintentionally, innocently, caused the loss or degradation of human life?
 

On several occasions, Jane Rogers had discussed this very trepidation with Peggy Greer. “It couldn’t have been anything that we did, could it?”
 

“You’re looking for assurance that I cannot give, Jane. Logic tells me that the answer is no, and logic tells you the same, but that’s not good enough to put your feelings to rest, is it?”
 

“No. Not really.”
 

“Do you want to stop the experiments?”
 

“No. Not really.”
 

“What if something else unexpected should happen?”
 

“I don’t know. Is it ego, dear, ego that drives me?”
 

“Ego drives us all,” Peggy answered.
 

At such a juncture, Jane Rogers would say nothing more than a pleasantry, perhaps good night, perhaps something else. The reason was that ego, of course, drove all men—and women—drove all who strove to do the undoable.
 

Such troublesome thoughts bothered her progressively more and more with each venturing into the high desert, with each equipment setup, with each test.
 

This day was no different.
 

As she began her by-rote examination of all data and equipment preparatory to another trial, another test, there was, this time, something different. It was not a dust devil, but a cloud of dust from some large vehicle coming toward their location.
 

“Do you see that?” Peggy asked her.
 

“Yes. I do.”
 

“You don’t think it’s some biker gang, like that time almost two years ago?”
 

“It looks like a small truck or a big car. See? It’s battleship gray, I think, or maybe blue. But it’s only one vehicle.”
 

“Who do you think it could be?”
 

Jane Rogers imagined that they would soon find out, so she made no response.
 

The vehicle proved to be a Suburban, similar to theirs, but with a fold-down rear deck as opposed to double doors. It seemed packed beyond endurance, even the front passenger seat loaded.
 

A man stepped from the driver’s side. He was quite tall by any standard, dark haired, with a drooping black mustache and several days’ growth of stubble on his cheeks and chin. He was dressed in white track shoes, blue jeans, a well-worn olive-drab military field jacket (the shadows of military patches subsequently removed were noticeable) and a black cowboy hat. Beneath the jacket, the tails of a light blue snap front cowboy shirt were visible.
 

“Right out of the pages of GQ,” Peggy Greer whispered beside Jane Rogers’ left ear. “But still kind of cute.”
 

He was somewhere in his early to middle thirties, Jane guessed. And if the military jacket was his originally, his last name was Jones and his first initial was C.
 

As he approached, he removed his sunglasses. The dark eyes beneath frightened her for an instant, a look of desperation and intensity in them that was most disconcerting. It was a look that she had seen in her own eyes when she had realized that her husband was dying and there was nothing that she could do to save him.
 

“I came to talk to you about the helicopter crash that took place up in the mountains almost a year ago. My name is Clarence Jones, and the four passengers in that helicopter were my family. My aunt and uncle and their two teenage children.” His voice was deep, but not overly so, and quite pleasant.
 

“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Jones. I assume that you know our names, since you’ve obviously come looking for us. Nonetheless, I’m Jane Rogers. This is my friend and assistant, Peggy Greer. How is it that you think that we can help you?”
 

“I just learned—you know how the government misfiles reports and stuff, sometimes—that you two were the first to report a possible crash, contacted the state police.”
 

“I didn’t know that we were the first,” Peggy volunteered. “But, yeah, we saw it, or we think that we did.”
 

“How do you mean that?” the young man asked, a hint of a smile appearing for only a split second as he turned his gaze toward Peggy.
 

Jane kept quiet, letting Peggy answer him. This might prove interesting. Peggy didn’t have a beau, and hadn’t been on a date for better than a year. She was pretty, personable, intelligent, just never seemed to meet men.
 

“Well,” Peggy answered after a too-long pause, “I can’t really explain it. We were conducting one of our electrical experiments, and there was a lightning strike at the same time. Jane saw the aircraft, and then it was gone.”
 

The young man refocused the intensity of his gaze. “I read the police report. You said it was there one minute and gone the next. How did you mean that?”
 

Jane Rogers answered him. “Exactly what I said. I was looking through the telescope—that one over there near our equipment. It was set up in exactly the same spot, aimed at precisely the same place in the mountains that it is aimed at today.
 

“There was a sudden electrical storm,” she went on, “and our experiment was already in progress.”
 

“What kind of experiment?” Clarence Jones asked.
 

Maybe she would show him later, if he remained pleasant. For the moment, she gave him a basic explanation. “We generate a laser beam, and we generate electricity. We’re trying to use the laser beam as a carrier wave for the electricity, to broadcast the electricity, as it were, through the air. We have a lighting apparatus up in the mountains. The laser carrier is aimed at a receiver near the lighting array. If we have success with a particular trial, I can see the lighting array fire through the telescope.
 

“On the day of the helicopter crash,” Jane Rogers continued, “there was a clap of thunder just as we fired the carrier beam. In answer to the question which you are bound to ask, the laser beam could not have struck the aircraft carrying your family. Had it done so, the lighting array would never have flashed to indicate that we had broadcast electricity for a few microseconds or so. As I was looking for the light array to fire, I saw an aircraft—it turned out to have been the helicopter, from everything I understand. It was there one second, then gone the next. And just before it vanished—”
 

“The word you used,” Clarence Brown began.
 

“It vanished,” Jane Rogers reiterated. “But there was something more.”
 

“What?” the young man asked.
 

“The lightning streaked across the sky and my eye just naturally followed it, but the lens of the telescope was locked into position, so I couldn’t turn the telescope. It was the brightest, biggest flash of lightning I’d ever seen in my life. I would have remembered it even without what happened next. I caught sight of the aircraft, as I said. Simultaneously with all of that there was a clap of thunder, extremely loud, and I saw the aircraft. Then the aircraft vanished into something black, blacker than night, and there was another clap of thunder, possibly from the earlier lightning bolt. The black thing, whatever it was, vanished. And there was nothing in the sky where the aircraft had been. It was as if the aircraft had gone into some sort of hole, and the hole closed up around it.” Jane laughed indisbelief, “Which is, of course, almost certainly impossible.”
 

“Don’t black holes suck things in?” Clarence Brown asked her.
 

Peggy answered, “If there were a black hole close enough for us to see with the naked eye, Mr. Brown, we wouldn’t be seeing it. All light and time and matter would be distorted, falling into it. Just because something is a hole and it’s black doesn’t mean that it’s a ‘black hole.’”
 

“Then what the hell was it? Because it distorted time, was an opening into the past.”
 

The young man, despite his nice looks, had to be demented, Jane realized. What a pity. She wondered if he might become violent.
 

“You think I’m crazy,” he offered unbidden, echoing Jane’s thoughts. “I’ve spent almost a year investigating this thing. When I learned about the electrical storm around the time of the helicopter’s disappearance—”
 

“It was found, Mr. Jones,” Jane insisted.
 

“It disappeared from this time, Dr. Rogers.”
 

“What an interesting notion. But, we have work to do, my assistant and I, Mr. Jones. So if you’ll excuse us, we—”
 

“I thought it was just the electrical storm. But when I learned what you were doing out here, it made sense.”
 

“It makes no sense at all, I’m afraid, young man.”
 

“Yes, it does. Are you aware of the condition of the helicopter when it was found?”
 

Jane felt uncomfortable. She’d heard rumors, like something out of a supermarket tabloid.
 

Peggy told him, “Metal can be oddly affected by extreme heat, Mr. Jones—”
 

“I’ve read the FAA and NTSB reports, Dr. Greer. The wreckage was in a condition indicating prolonged exposure to the elements.”
 

“That proves nothing, sir,” Jane declared, starting to feel at once angry and stupid—angry with his imbecilic notion about time and black holes and stupid for continuing the conversation.
 

“The pilot’s body? The best forensic pathologists the government could find examined it and, despite the fact that such a thing had to be impossible, independently they all reached the same conclusion. The body had been in the ground for nearly a hundred years.”
 

“Then they unearthed the wrong body,” Jane told him.
 

“Same watch, same crucifix and old military dog tag around his neck. His wife identified his wedding ring and belt buckle. The body was clothed in a rotted horsehide bomber jacket. His wife got it for him in 1990 for a Christmas present. All that stuff was on the body they dug up, the pilot’s body which had been dead for a hundred years, even though the incident took place just weeks earlier.”
 

“What do you want from us?” Jane asked.
 

“I’ve got copies of the FAA and NTSB reports and the pathologists’ photos and their reports.”
 

“What is it that you want from us?” Jane insisted.
 

“I want to recreate what happened. I want to join my family.”
 

Jane felt a tear start at the corner of her left eye. Perhaps Clarence Jones wasn’t crazy, only very, very sad and terribly lonely. She knew the feeling well.
 

David Naile had found the thing that would change their lives for ever, alter their expectations and destroy their hopes. He had found it by accident only that morning. His father, still wearing the badge of town marshal after well over a year, did not know of it yet. Neither did Liz, nor their mother.
 

There had been no claim to the property on which they gradually built their house. They’d filed a claim and ridden out to Tom Bledsoe’s place, asking if he would help with the carpentry—there was no such thing as hiring a construction company out of the telephone book. Phones existed, patented in 1876, but they did not exist in Atlas.