Written in Time (24 page)

Work on the house went slowly, and by design. Because they had discovered a solitary wall outlet when they had visited the ruins of the house almost a hundred years in the future, they all clung to the notion that, somehow, the Suburban and its contents would magically time-warp to them. In turn, because of that, they slowed the construction process in order to be able to accommodate the electrical wiring and outlets to come.
 

Hope sustained them, electricity only a part of that and a very small part, but a symbol of normalcy. Hope translated as meaning some semblance of what had once been their reality, their life: light, music, videos, a few modern conveniences, a jump up on the primitive amenities of the world around them. The battery in the video camera was long since drained and dead. It was impossible to recharge it. The record which they had hoped to make—for themselves to find in the future?—consisted of two hours or so of tape. From what David had read, even stored with great care, the tape would likely be useless after fifteen years or so. All plans to continually copy the videos until they could be transferred to film were dashed. And what did it matter, anyway?
 

Hope meant having some of their own carefully selected things, treasures packed away in the Suburban. For his mother, that would be cherished photos of the family, and the memories those photos recalled.
 

For Liz, photos, too, but also something as silly as her two-foot-tall brown teddy bear, a possession she had kept on her bed since childhood. Liz was a grown woman of sixteen, the town’s substitute school teacher for Margaret Diamond, who was increasingly more frequently ill.
 

David didn’t quite know what it was that he wanted from the Suburban, and the issue had become instantly academic. If this were a continuous time loop from which they would never be fully extricated, as his father theorized, the Suburban would never come because it had never come.
 

The solitary electrical outlet that had become the talisman upon which their future was based had traveled with them into the past by accident, and that alone accounted for its being discovered in the ruins of the house in the last decade of the twentieth century.
 

Fate.
 

Fate had caused them to discover the outlet when they had surveyed the ruins of the house in 1992, and Fate had made David Naile drop the charred outlet into his pocket. Fate had made him wear the same jacket on the day of the helicopter crash that he had worn that day when they inspected the ruins. Everybody in the family had always razzed him about having so many clothes, jackets in particular.
 

There was a hole in the pocket of the jacket, and the outlet had slipped through the hole and into the padded lining, never to be found until he had taken the coat out of the trunk into which it had been placed, never to be found until this very morning when he had decided to wear the jacket when he rode off to practice his shooting.
 

His mom was experimenting with what, for 1897, was a modern camera. His sister was filling in for Margaret Diamond once again, as she had for the last week. His father was patrolling the town, perhaps for one of the last times—the services of a professional peace officer for Atlas had finally, it seemed, been engaged.
 

Instead of riding out of town to practice his marksmanship with the old blued Colt .45 (which would not actually be produced at the Colt factory until 1957, sixty years in the future), he’d put on his city clothes, left the tiny house they’d purchased down the street from Margaret for a mere eight hundred dollars and gone to look for his father.
 

The wall socket was in his vest pocket.
 

Jess Fowler’s men still came to town, their eyes and holsters hate-filled. Whenever they spied any member of the Naile family, they would walk away, robotlike, as if their actions were programmed into them. But there had been no repercussions from the night more than a year ago when his father had killed the two men who had accosted his mother and sister and left him unconscious.
 

The only tangible results of the encounter were his father wearing the town marshal badge and David’s own pursuit of heightened marksmanship skills. Had he been as good with a gun then as he was now, he might have taken both of Fowler’s range detectives himself, and his father might not be wearing that badge.
 

David turned onto the main street and walked past the general store. Its balding proprietor, Carlton Smithfield, had agreed in principle to a deal for his store. As David passed the open double doors, Smithfield smiled and said good morning. David, who didn’t like Smithfield at all, smiled back. “Good morning, sir. A beautiful morning, yes.”
 

David was searching for his father and in no mood for useless chatter. He passed the breezeway where his father had shot to death Fowler’s two range detectives. David walked on, along the board sidewalk and under the porch roof which shielded the windows and doors fronting the Merchant’s Café. He opened the near door and looked inside. Two of Fowler’s men, drinking what passed for coffee. Dave, the waiter. Dave was a good guy, if not too terribly bright. No sign of his father.
 

“See my dad around, Dave?”
 

“Yeah, Dave! He was walkin’ up the street not more’n fifteen minutes ago. That ways!”
 

Dave the waiter always called David “Dave” and seemed to get a kick out of that. David liked to be called “David,” tolerated his parents occasionally calling him “Davey” as a sign of affection. But Dave the waiter was an exception to the rule. “Thanks, pal. Catch you later.”
 

There was a nasty look from the two Fowler men. David gave a nasty look back, closing the door and pacing off toward the edge of town.
 

After walking half again the length of the street, David finally spied his father. Jack Naile stood, leaning against the corral on the same side of the street along which David walked, essentially invisible from a distance. Maybe this was the first speed trap, David wondered absently.
 

“Marshal Jack Naile,” David said under his breath.
 

“The Law East of the Sierras. Shit.”
 

The clothing problem had pretty much been solved via catalogue, his mother and sister having decent, albeit uncomfortable-looking, dresses. They were getting into making their own, almost as a means of self-defense. He and his father had also found a source for attire that was, at least, more acceptable than that found at the general store. But that would change. As it had been in the future and continued to be in the past, David Naile’s taste in clothes was far more sophisticated than that of his father.
 

Jack Naile wore his black Stetson from the twentieth century, one of his half-dozen black on black vested suits and black cowboy boots with a medium heel. Visible above the collar of his jacket was the collar of a white shirt. He would be wearing a black tie, knotted just as it would have been a hundred years or so in the future.
 

The only jewelry he would be wearing was his gold wedding ring and the gold chain he had acquired for his Rolex.
 

His father had solved the wristwatch problem uniquely. The town blacksmith also repaired tack, making him the closest thing to a leather worker. Jack had removed the Rolex from its wristband and commissioned the blacksmith to cut and sew a pouch that would hold the Rolex in securely. A small brass grommet was affixed to the top of the leather case. With a gold watch chain added, the Rolex would pass for a period piece unless given more than a casual glance by someone who really knew watches.
 

“I heard those boards in the sidewalk creak when you walked across them,” David Naile’s father announced, turning around quickly, his right hand not reaching for his revolver, but near it.
 

It seemed as if this fall would be cooler than the last, and a brisk breeze cut along the main street out of the high ridgeline of the nearer Sierras, across the plain and toward the low mountains beyond Atlas. “I’ve gotta tell you something, Dad.”
 

“Everything okay?”
 

“Everybody’s fine. Look at this.” David reached into his vest pocket, extracted the wall outlet and tossed it to his father. Jack Naile had always been pretty miserable when it came to catching things, and David actually felt proud of his father for catching the object he’d thrown to him, albeit a little awkwardly.
 

“Where’d you get this?”
 

“You know what it means, Dad? That’s the wall outlet that we found in—” And David glanced around them, to make certain no passerby could hear. “It’s the one we found in 1992, in the ruins of the house. Don’t you see? That’s how we were able to find it in the house. I brought it by accident. The Suburban never gets here.”
 

Jack Naile dropped the outlet in his coat pocket, taking the makings for a cigarette from his other pocket. “Shit,” David heard his father say before turning away and looking off toward the mountains again.
 

Clarence had not worn a suit since leaving his job as a theater manager in suburban Atlanta a year and a half earlier. Thinking back, he could have worn a suit at the small memorial service held at the site of the helicopter wreckage, the memorial service arranged by the movie company. But he chose not to attend the service. To have done so would have been to tacitly accept the idea that his aunt, uncle and teenage cousins were dead, or at least gone from him forever.
 

Always somewhat claustrophobic, even when managing a movie theater, he had never particularly enjoyed being in one, always staying toward the back of the theater so that he could egress quickly.
 

It was, then, with considerable reluctance that he allowed Peggy Greer to talk him into going to see Angel Street when it hit the theaters. They sat in the very back row, Clarence sitting in the aisle seat, Peggy holding his hand. Angel Street was a bizarre western, a mixture of classic oater and occult suspense with a strong dash of mystery and romance. Professionally speaking, he thought the film was “okay” and little more than that. The male lead was a well-known supporter of liberal causes and the female lead simply didn’t turn him on. The action sequences were good enough, but not as good as those from the old John Wayne movies, which he had loved since his boyhood.
 

At the very beginning of the end titles appeared a dedication, naming Jack, Ellen, David and Elizabeth Naile and the pilot, Evan Soderstroum, as the victims of a terrible tragedy and stating that all five would be remembered fondly.
 

That got Clarence to get up and walk out of the theater, Peggy Greer at his heels. “Didn’t you want to see the end titles, Clarence?”
 

“No, baby. That just pissed me off. They’re not dead.”
 

“Even if they aren’t, sweetheart, wasn’t it kind of sweet that they dedicated the movie to them?”
 

“Let ‘em dedicate something that’s gonna make money to them, then. You watch and see. This thing is gonna bomb.”
 

“You’re angry, Clarence.”
 

“You’re right, Peggy.”
 

As he later explained to Peggy, another one of the myriad things wrong with Angel Street was the music. Jack was a movie-music aficionado, had collected sound tracks. Jack would definitely not have liked the music. It needed the music of a Jerry Goldsmith or a John Williams, not some guy nobody had ever heard of. And, Clarence went on to explain, Jack would not have liked the gunfire. “Take The Magnificent Seven, for example. Jack explained it to me once, that the gunfire was too soft sounding. He didn’t know for sure, but he guessed that they actually recorded the sound of the blanks and didn’t edit in live gunfire with full-charge loads. He learned all about that stuff when he did one of those movie articles he wrote. Nowadays, they edit in the sounds of real gunfire.” They’d talked throughout the evening about the film and about the work they’d been doing out in the desert. And about what lay before them on the following day.
 

For a little over six months, Clarence had assisted Peggy and Jane Rogers with their experiments, his background in electronic intelligence making the use of the equipment simple to learn. The math behind the experiments was something he only vaguely understood. He’d mastered trigonometry for his work in electronic intelligence, but it was Jack who had pumped fractions and decimals into Clarence’s short term memory before he had taken his preinduction aptitude test.
 

The experiments now, almost routinely, would fire the light array for as long as a few seconds, that record achieved during a fortuitous thunderstorm with intense lightning activity. It was in the aftermath of packing up from that touch of success that Jane Rogers had announced, “Curse my age and stupidity!” She slammed shut the double doors of her Suburban. “There was something I had forgotten, that I saw just before your family’s helicopter vanished. It was ball lightning.”
 

“And what the hell is that?” Clarence had demanded.
 

The instant that he spoke, it began to rain, rain hard, but neither Clarence nor Peggy nor Jane made any move to get out of the rain. As calmly as a teacher in a classroom patiently explaining in simplified terms something quite complex to a group of dim students, Jane began, “Ball lightning is extraordinarily rare, so rare that no photos are known to exist which conclusively have captured it. The only time that ball lightning can be witnessed is usually in association with a conventional streak of lightning, the ball lightning found at or near its termination point. Like the conventional lightning bolt which I saw just as the aircraft carrying your family disappeared, ball lightning also moves laterally, at somewhere between five and six miles per hour, it’s estimated. That was the first time that I had ever actually seen ball lightning.