Chapter 3

Hello, I am William Wilkerson." I had no idea what this was about or who she was other than she was gorgeous.

"My name is Jasmine Caretaker and I am from Cassandra."

"Cassandra? I don't understand. Where are we?"

"At the moment, we are on Crossroads. It is a planet between Earth, Cassandra and Chaos."

"What is Chaos?"

"As the name implies, it is a world where the basis of might makes right prevails in most cases."

"I still don't understand."

"It is the place where 'The Grand Adventure' is played out."

"What 'Grand Adventure'?" This was getting bothersome, but I was willing to give it some time to try to understand it.

"I'm not much for guessing about this. Why don't you explain it to me?"

"A woman from Cassandra chooses to go to Chaos where a man from Earth goes to rescue her. The woman is called a Damsel and the situation she is in puts her in Distress. Since the man coming from Earth is going to rescue her, he is her Hero."

"Just to make certain I understand this correctly, a woman from Cassandra willingly places herself in distress in a world called Chaos where she could be injured or more and then a man from Earth goes there to rescue her. That does not sound like much of a 'Grand Adventure' and what is the point of it?"

"That is the basis for it, the point of it all. That will take more time to explain."

"Speaking of time, right before I left, Charles said that I would be gone for only fifteen minutes. What did he mean?"

"Time runs at different speeds or stops altogether on these planes. So, no matter how long you're on a mission or recovering from one with a Damsel, you are only gone for fifteen minutes on Earth." I looked at Jasmine like she was high on something. Who the hell would believe that load of shit?

"That just does not make any sense."

"Which part?"

"Let's just start with the time issue. How can the time be only fifteen minutes on Earth yet be longer here?"

"It is how the Powers that Be created this."

"Whoa, Powers that Be, who the hell are they?"

"They are as the name implies, the Powers that Be and the ones that created 'The Grand Adventure'."

"So they do this for their amusement? That's what this is for, amusement, right?"

"If you think the possibility of being killed is an amusement then, yes it is just that."

"What if someone dies on Chaos? Are they just are taken back to Earth or Cassandra?"

"Sorry no. Dead is dead on Chaos, Cassandra, Crossroads or Earth."

"So men volunteer to go and rescue a Damsel for what end?"

"To create life," I shook my head at that answer.

"I don't understand."

"The Hero's reward is to impregnate the Damsel he rescued on Chaos when they return here on Crossroads."

"That sounds like rape to me."

"I am afraid that some of the Damsels almost do rape their Heroes for awhile when they first return."

"I don't understand."

She took a deep breath and from the look on her face was not happy having to explain it to me like I was a child. "The women of Cassandra have a difficult time getting pregnant. So to that end the Damsel looks to have a Hero from Earth and it all turns out well her getting pregnant with his child is the reason that she volunteers to be on Chaos."

"Why can't she get pregnant with a man on Cassandra?"

"There is a genetic malfunction with the men there, and so it is nearly impossible to do that," she shook her head and gave me that head cock attitude all men have seen at one time or another.

"So a woman on Cassandra chooses of her own free will to be placed on Chaos and no doubt possibly die while she is there. All of her hope resides in a Hero coming to rescue her, so she can become pregnant with his child."

"That is correct." She shook her head in agreement.

"So when she is, does she return to Earth with him or does he go back to Cassandra or do they stay here on Crossroads?"

"She returns to Cassandra and he returns to Earth."

"What? He never gets to be a parent to that child?"

"That is correct. He will never see his child."

"That's so FUBAR."

"Fubar?" She was looking at me now.

"It's an acronym for 'Fucked Up Beyond All Repair'."

"I see. But it is how 'The Grand Adventure' is played out," her attitude was not expressing joy at this point.

"So they either die or they come back and create a child and then go their separate ways forever."

"Yes, those are the only results. She might die, he might die, they both could die, or they return here and create a new life inside her and then never see each other again."

"You know, I don't think I want to be anyone or anything's pawn in this. How do I return to Charles's office?"

"I don't understand," she had a look on her face like, I had slapped her.

"What's not to understand? You want me to risk death for nothing more than a piece of ass, in the end. I can get that on Earth without the possibility of dying to do it."

"Yes, I guess you could if that was all you want."

"It's the reward that is being offered. A one-night stand, in effect, that all I have to do is risk being killed for."

"Would you risk your life if you were a woman on Cassandra for just a one-night stand as you call it?" An exasperated Jasmine asked.

"I have no idea what they would risk their lives for," I shot her a cold stare as I didn't know a damn thing about this, and she was copping some attitude because I was not jumping and down for joy at the idea about how great she seemed to think this game was.

"That's true; what they risk their lives for is the possibility to carry a Hero's child. Then to have a lifetime of love with a child, remembering her Hero when she created it with him. Reliving the risk she willingly took to have her Hero rescue her. She has a onetime chance that will include memories of pain and joy with the reward being a child to love for the rest of her life," She gave me a set of looks with her eyes that lead me to believe she hoped I was finally getting it.

Instead I asked."So what happens if she or I am injured so badly there can be no reward for her?"

"We have a healing chamber here. When you and she return from Chaos, both of you will spend time in it before you are together."

"So it magically just heals us. Why not have it return us from the dead then too."

"Dead is dead and nothing can heal that; but you can be near death and can be healed.

"So you spend months or years healing."

"Hours, in the worst case."

"That does not make any sense. I can be near death and then be healed in hours," the more I heard about the more I was lost or pissed off.

"Yes, that is how it works. It is the way the rules were set by the Powers that Be."

"Always everything is with these Powers that Be," I relived a moment from 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' when they are being chased by a posse, and they keep asking each other "Who are those guys?"

"Yes, without them, there would be none of this."

"So that is all there is to it?"

"No, there is a Caretaker for you."

"What Caretaker?"

"You choose a Caretaker from three candidates I present to you. She will be the one to greet you when you arrive. She will show you the Damsels who need to be rescued, advise you more about Chaos and be here when you return."

"How do I know how to choose her?"

"That is your decision to make. I present you with a file about each one, and you choose one from them."

"What if I don't like any of the choices?"

"I will bring you three more files if that is the case. But you must choose a Caretaker," she seemed to be back to being agitated.

"Is there a problem?" I asked.

"I don't know, I had expected someone with your background to have been more enthusiastic about this."

"What do you mean my background, what the hell do you know about me?"

"I have a file on you from birth to now. The Powers that Be provide it for each Hero."

"Who the hell said they could do that?"

"It is how this is done when a new Hero meets with their approval."

"We call that invasion of privacy where I come from. And I have had more than enough going on in my life at the moment to even consider adding anymore drama to it. If you would be so kind to show me the door back to Charles's office now."

"It's not a door, it's a portal, and if you want to return there then by all means, that is your right. I might suggest something though."

"What would that be?"

"Take these three profiles for the Caretakers. If you come back to Crossroads, you are required to select a Caretaker and go on a mission to save a Damsel on Chaos. You need to look them over. You could come back here and look at others, but if you just picked a random name out of the air it would be suicidal."

I took the three folders that she offered and then walked back through the portal. There, sitting at his desk, was Charles.

"Welcome back, Hero Willy."

"Hero Willy my ass. You're fucking nuts if you think I am going to risk my life for a simple piece of ass. I don't know what you thought sending me there, but I have more than enough to deal with now. I set the files down on his desk, put the ring on it, picked up my documents, and walked out the door.

I don't know what he thought and didn't much care at this point. Someone had a file on me and had shared it. Jasmine, if she really existed, had said as much. I didn't like it one damn bit when the cops were screwing with me and having someone else decide to do that wasn't any better.

I drove home thinking about it all. The only one who could have gathered all of it was Charles, and only if he had Matt's help. Between the two of them, they could likely do it. I got back to the house and found the twelve-pack in the refrigerator. It came in that little stay-cold case and so it and I went out to the garage. There was not a damn way I was going to turn on that television, but I would pound out the stress on the weight machines while I finished off the beer.

I had drunk five of them when Cal showed up pizza in hand. He sat it down on the work bench and watched me finish the end of the set. "I got a call from your attorney."

"Pamela called you?"

"No, Charles"

"That SOB is a nutcase." I grabbed the beer I had next to me and took a gulp out of it.

"He seemed worried about you after you left his office. He suggested that I check up on you."

"I think I am done with him."

"Okay, what changed since last time when I met him?"

So I told Cal what had happened. At first he shook his head, and then he was slack jawed, more shaking of his head in disbelief. Finally, when I ended my rant, he asked, "So what are you going to do then?"

"I'm going to fire his ass."

"You are?" Came the voice from the doorway. There stood the nut job looking at me and Cal.

"You're damn right. I don't know what your game is, but I am not playing it."

"Life-and-death is never a game."

"Who said that you could provide a file on me to anyone and did Matt help you?"

"I did not provide anything to anyone. And since I provided nothing no one helped me provide that."

"That's bullshit." I took another drink from my beer.

"I gave no information to anyone about you. The portal allowed you to enter of its own choice. It could have just as well barred you. I have no control over it one way or another. You can choose to believe what you want to believe. You can fire me if you wish. But I am telling you the truth, and what you heard was the truth. Like it or not, it exists. If you do not want to be a part of it then that is your choice."

"Why the hell, with my life the way it is, would you have shown me that?"

"Your life, how it is, will continue to be how it is until all of this weaves its way through the courts. That is a long slow process, and while you're feeling better about it now, that will not always be the case. I offered you something more than this. I can't make you choose it if you don't want to. I would ask that you refrain from telling anyone else about it. I was a little hasty in advising Cal to come and see you, but I thought you would likely tell him, even if I had advised you not to."

"From the look on Cal's face, he thinks I am as nuts as you are about this place actually existing," I said.

"I don't know what to think. It doesn't make any sense to me," Cal said.

"If both of you would be so kind not mention it, I would be in your debt," Charles said.

"You think they would let me stay out on the streets if I told that story to anyone?" Cal replied.

"Someone would come to check it out no matter what, and I wouldn't care for that," Charles said.

"So you're a Hero then?" Cal asked.

"Yes, I have been one for many years."

"How many missions have you been on?" I asked.

"More than I can count but my days of doing that are ending soon."

"Why?"

"My wife is afraid of growing old without me."

"Your wife knows about your being a Hero?" Cal asked.

"Yes, she has known from almost the beginning."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"She was my first Caretaker actually," Charles smiled.

"I thought Caretakers were from Cassandra," I offered.

"Yes they are, but if we are going to talk any more about this, I would like to do it in the house if that is all right with you," Charles nodded.

So we got up and headed into the house, taking the pizza and the beer with us. Once there, Charles asked, "Could I have some of that pizza and a beer? Beth won't let me have it at the house."

"Beth is your wife from Cassandra?" I asked.

"It's a long story," he said.

"It doesn't look like we're going anywhere anytime soon."

"I need to call Beth then so she doesn't worry. I didn't know if you would toss me out or have me stay when I called her before. I told her I'd call her if I were staying." Charles called on the phone and told her not to wait up for him.

Cal sat there in wide-eyed amazement as the tale unfolded. I admit it seemed all too unreal. The man sitting in front of us was not Charles Vincent but John Smithers.

How he came to be Charles Vincent was almost as interesting as the rest that he told us that night and onto daybreak. It seems that as an Attorney, John was constantly upsetting the Powers that Be. He wouldn't break the rules, but he would bend them in his favor every time the need arose. It got to the point that whenever he felt like he could, he would. So they had a meeting a short time after he had taken Beth back with him. She was pregnant with their first child.

He had understood that once she was pregnant, the portal would no longer let her pass back to Crossroads. It had caused an uproar within the Cassandra women who were Caretakers. The problem became so huge that they had to change the portals to keep the other Heroes from being able to do that. But they were unwilling to modify the protective programs that would keep anyone who was sick or pregnant from going through from Earth to Crossroads.

He was certain that they could have taken her and simply transported her back. But then John would have responded in ways that they didn't want to think about.

So they reached a compromise that, until the day he turned eighty on Earth, he would possess all the health, mental capacity and vitality that he had when he first began as a Hero. After that, they would slowly allow nature to take its course just as it would have when he was in his fifties. It would be a slow decline where he and Beth would age together so their lives would likely be finished within years of each other.

Cal asked him what he meant by that and his answer was the women of Cassandra had a much longer life-span than those of Earth. But he wouldn't go into much more about it, deferring to his agreement.

He was sad that he would likely not be going back any longer but at his age of eighty six, the effects were beginning to show and Beth was not as certain about him going any longer. They had spent decades together and had eight children and twenty nine grandchildren and thirty seven great grand children so far. While she understood the need to rescue a Damsel, she finally told him that she was getting too selfish to risk losing him.

We talked for hours about why he did it. How he felt about never seeing any of his other children or being in their lives. There were no easy answers to any of it. He had a life here and over the many centuries that he had been on Chaos, he had built a life there.

Cal questioned the centuries issue and John explained that he would at times be gone a year or more. Beth had kept the records of it all for him. When last he looked, it was over three centuries of time, he had spent doing this.

John spoke of the people who had died that he knew and the families of the people who he would never see again. He had not understood how the man Samuel Smithers had felt so lost when his time to be on Chaos was ending. But he understood it now since he was standing in those same shoes.

It was so much more than just a piece of ass the way he explained it. There was meaning to what he did, and what he had accomplished. There was a real sense of accomplishment in what he did have how that felt. There were drawbacks like never seeing the women or the children again. The drawback issues were mostly mental because we have a linear mind for time. The adding and subtracting of sometimes years was difficult adjusting to.

He did say how he had started off better than most Heros because of how he took Samuel back with him but how he had lost a part of starting out from scratch at being a Hero.

When we talked about that more, he said having a network of friends there who were Samuel's friends had made it less risky because he had people he could count on. There was no doubt why he had not died there since he had no training for any of it.

He laughed at how he bent the rules to the point of having the Powers that Be cry uncle. He told of the penalty they dreamed up for that first breach.

We spoke of death, up close and personal. He had killed with sharp weapons in hand to hand combat. He told us about how the death rattles of many men still could be heard when he sat back and let his mind drift.

We saw the sun come up and went to breakfast. We didn't discuss anymore of it there but just enjoyed the food. He took us back to his house and Beth met us at the door. She looked to be his age, but we knew she was older. How much older we didn't ask, and it wasn't important. It was obvious that they shared a deep love and respect for each other.

They lived in an older section of town in a house that seemed much too large for it. There were pictures of what must have been their children, grand children, and great grand children with Beth and John everywhere. I had seen some of these people on the covers of magazines and billboards when I was growing up. Others I had seen on television or the movie screen. The women were as gorgeous as Beth and Jasmine. The men were good-looking too.

Beth sat me down while John took Cal to his basement. "Willy, if I maybe so forward, I want to speak with you about the women of Cassandra."

"Beth, please, you may call me Willy any time."

"Thank you, now I want to help clear up any misunderstanding you might have about them and their motives for being a Damsel."

"It is hard to understand why they would do that." She took my hand as she sat next to me on the couch.

"We live in a world where being a strong man is respected. You are raised to be that from the time you are a child. Every man on Earth, no matter his level of being a man, is more than a man whose DNA originated there will ever be on Cassandra."

"Even with all the women who have been Damsels over all of these years," I asked.

"They are an insignificant drop in the ocean of people who make up Cassandra. Oh there are men and no doubt some virile ones from all the Heroes' children. But with every woman longing for a man like that and there being so few of them, they would not marry but would move from woman to woman. It is not to be judged as wrong or right but more accepted as what it is."

"It is hard to fathom that," I sat shaking my head.

"So a woman wants to have a man for her own. She would want to do that for all her life, and while I have been blessed with that, it will not happen for the rest. So 'The Grand Adventure', as they call it, was invented. Yes the costs are high but women wait for years just to be given the opportunity. So many that they only issue the opportunity to go by lottery. Sadly, some never got chosen because their number never came up before they were deemed too old to go."

"I didn't know that."

"Your Caretaker would have told you about this and so much more, if you had chosen one."

"It is still difficult to understand it all. It does not fit anything I have been taught to believe in."

"I will tell you that John and I love each other deeply and keep no meaningful secrets from each other. He told me he was going to offer to send you to Crossroads. I knew he meant well, but I had my misgivings with what he said your life is like now."

I thought about that, and while John had broken the attorney-client privilege with Beth, there was no way to expect him not to when he was thinking I was someone who could be a Hero.

"He told me nothing of the particulars of your legal dealings with him. But he told me of the person he thought you to be. And he did tell me what he knew about your run-in with the police. That was very funny and not too bright of you in the long run. But John has what you might call a disdain for authority and the rules. It is not that he doesn't understand them but if he can, he will push them when he needs or wants to." She gave me that warm smile of hers.

"You mean like how you came to be here?"

"I am not surprised that he told you about that. You should know the children do not know about that. It speaks of how much he truly feels for you."

I sat there and no doubt shook my head. John had told me about him and Beth, but he had not told me he had withheld this from their family. "I don't understand why he would do that."

"You need to understand John the man and his frailties here. He worries about the children more than I do. Because of their looks, everything comes easier to them. It is the way of this world. If he sat them down and told them their mother was what you would call a space alien, what do you think their reactions would be?"

"It would fracture your family."

"To John and I, family is everything. He would not risk them. It is part of him to continue missions until he either died there or here. He will stop now that he has two things. One is me pushing him to stop and the second one is very selfish of both of us, but he wants someone to continue in his stead. And I sadly agree with him because I know that he can live with this decision then."

I shook my head and looked back at her again. "He wants me to continue in his stead."

"He will not tell you, but he needs to have a Hero to take his place. You won't have the advantages he told you about when he began, but you will be his legacy there."

"You will forgive me but I don't understand why he would choose me. I mean nothing in my life here is what you would call stable. A whirlwind of disaster is more like it."

"You are a consummate professional in what you do. He told me of your profession and how you retired from it. You have been trained as a warrior for many years. All of John's experience was learned by the seat of his pants, so to speak."

"But..." I couldn't think of anything else to say then.

"There are no buts to this. You have to either accept what is asked of you or decide not to do this. Only you can make that decision. John has told you and I have told you. You have two points of view on the same subject. That is more than most who have chosen to do this." She leaned over and kissed my cheek.