Chapter 19

Moving down the timeline.

... A man near death, a beautiful young woman in shock, and a lunatic, all bound for nowhere, some part of Mack’s brain thought. He could almost hear his old drill sergeant snickering. We’re one hell of a team, he thought sardonically.

He hadn’t consciously thought about where he was going until now, only wanting to escape from the area and the certainty of disaster. Now, he suddenly knew where to go. A grin touched his lips as he pushed them harder.

Kathy tried to free herself enough to check on Thad. Although she could feel him next to her, she couldn’t see him. Her body felt strange — almost as if it didn’t have substance. That wasn’t right either. She was surrounded by green— a very delicate, light shade that, under other circumstances, would have been pleasing to the eye. She should have been able to see Mack. He had a leg and an arm across her, and she could feel them, but she couldn’t see either of the men or even her own hand as she held it in front of her face. Her eyes registered only the one color. A strange, almost rumbling sound surrounded them, and it had an eerie quality to it, almost an echo.

Something menacing seemed to move closer, but she couldn’t determine its direction. Intellectually, she knew that Mack was moving them through time — getting them away from the Others, but she couldn’t see. Was this normal? Had Mack somehow blinded her by snatching her through time in this crazy way? Her heart thudded in her chest as she tried to sit up. Mack’s arm tightened about her. Be calm, she told herself. You’re not a secretary anymore. Ops get used to danger and new things. I’ve had enough new adventures lately to last me a lifetime, and my ears are still ringing from the gunfight.

Kathy forced a measure of calm about her, compelling herself to remember the details of the last few minutes and hoping to help take her mind off her lack of vision. The trip had started with flashes of light that she had assumed were the days going past. A few seconds later, Mack moaned to himself, and the flashes came more quickly. Then, he yelled out and almost crushed her with his arm. The flashes were replaced by this color and this ... sound. Now, she couldn’t even feel the ground under her. Realizing that she wasn’t lying on anything brought a sensation of falling, followed by vertigo. Terror hovered about her, striving to engulf her soul. She wasn’t falling, and she could feel both men. She tightened her grip on Thad, shouting in her mind that she wasn’t falling, that this was what it felt like to travel through time — at least with Mack’s method. She must have moved her hand, because she felt something wet and sticky on it — Thad’s blood. Thad was bleeding to death, and she had completely forgotten about him. She fumbled blindly between them. Yes, the kit was still in place against his side. The kit made a weird, distorted beeping sound that went on and on, and she jerked her hand away. The kit is in place. What else can I do? Nothing but wait, she admonished herself.

What had she actually felt? She touched the area around the kit again, cautiously exploring more thoroughly. If she could only see. Trembling fingers detected wet stickiness, but it wasn’t warm. Fresh blood would be warm, surely. She inadvertently bumped the kit with her hand. Unseen, a thin tentacle snaked from the medkit’s side and wrapped around her fingers, tightening down painfully. She snatched her hand away to the accompaniment of the distorted chirping again. It wasn’t programmed for speech, but it communicated just the same. “Leave me alone,” couldn’t have been any clearer in any language. There was nothing she could do. Nothing ... except worry.

“Mack?”

Was that her voice? It didn’t sound human. She cleared her throat and tried again. “M-a-c-k?”

Her voice was distorted almost to the point of being unintelligible. The chamber froze an Op in stasis during the jump. Mack’s method didn’t seem to be much better. Well, she thought inanely, looks as if there are going to be drawbacks to time traveling with Mack also. Light conversation isn’t going to be on the travel agenda either. Of course, I can always open my eyes and stare at green.

Kathy caught herself before she started babbling and tried Mack’s name again. This time, he seemed to have heard her, because he squeezed her arm, but he still didn’t say anything. She started to call him again but thought better of it. Maybe he can’t answer while he’s doing his version of time travel with his mind. Didn’t he say that he had learned to concentrate by using hypnotism? Trying to talk to him now might get us all into even more trouble. I had better leave him alone for a while and try to be patient. Unfortunately, that left her nothing to do but think about that awful noise that seemed to surround them.

Time slipped away, both subjectively and to a much greater degree, on the timeline as well. Despite the tension, the danger and the adrenaline surges that had bombarded her body only a little while ago (or perhaps, because of them), Kathy eventually found herself becoming lethargic. Her mind was as sluggish as her voice. She would rest for a little while before trying to talk to Mack again...

Mack had discovered something. Before, he had ridden the thread by using a mental push. The method had worked — it had gotten him through time, but he had learned something when he had become frustrated at not being able to move them fast enough. Something else had pushed then. Something he had previously used only in part — and that incorrectly. He was now learning to channel that other push, to guide it in the direction he wanted. As before, the first method was the equivalent of pushing a car, instead of getting behind the wheel and using the power of the engine. The method had worked after a fashion until more mass was added. Then with Kathy, Thad, and the packs, Mack had been virtually helpless. Now, yet again, he felt the thread leap to his touch, flashing down-time at a speed that made his other passing seem a snail’s pace. The forks and turns flashed by, going past almost as if he were on a speedboat racing between the buoys in world record time. Power that responded to his slightest mental touch. The feeling was incredible, but he was barely in control at the first. Gradually, his efforts became more sure as he barreled down-time, but he had to concentrate fully.

He tried to block the firefight out of his mind, but the image of the aliens kept coming back and interfering with his concentration. He thought of them as aliens — surely, they were that. What else could they be? At best, they resembled a human only remotely. Where had they come from, and why? They had started firing on sight, seemingly overly-anxious to kill them. Probably, it was just as well that they had. If they had waited, with their firepower, they would surely have killed everyone. If these beings were the Others that Thad and Kathy talked about — and they must be — then the three humans were lucky, indeed, to have come out of the confrontation alive. Was Thad still alive? Mack didn’t know and didn’t have any way to find out at the moment.

Mack’s own breathing was ragged from the excitement, and his hands still shook from the adrenalin surge. What if he had missed with the bow? Or if Kathy had missed, would any of them be alive now? Mack wasn’t the only one who had the shakes, since he could feel Kathy trembling as well.

She had been squirming around and now called his name, but he couldn’t spare the concentration to answer her. He squeezed her arm, and even that had almost been enough to cause him to lose the path. Like a speedboat correcting after taking a turn too widely, he fought back toward the center of the green thread, and shaken, had continued on — still at an increased pace but with even more caution now. He was simply going too fast to do anything other than guide them, but he was becoming a little better at it.

Thad said that Mack couldn’t change the past in his own timeline. But Thad had to use a chamber to go anywhere in time. What did he know? Once Thad and Kathy were safe, a trip to the good old U.S. of A. in the twenty-third century would be easy.

“You’re kidding yourself again, Boy. They know a lot more about this than you do, and they say it can’t be done,” he said barely above a whisper, but the weird sound of his voice caused him to overcorrect as he came out of a curve. He easily corrected himself and centered on his favorite timeline again. I’m getting better. Once I become proficient with this, maybe I’ll be able to do a better job of staying on the timeline while simultaneously thinking of something else. Surely, it’s like riding a bicycle; in the beginning, you have to concentrate, but after a while, you do it automatically.

I’m going to have to stop dwelling on Janie too. How many times have I tried to convince myself of that? But his mind wandered through his memory, nonetheless. They had met at a party. He was ten years older, and because of that, he had almost not talked to her, thinking he didn’t stand a chance. But she looked at him and smiled — three months later, they were married. The honeymoon, contrary to what their friends told them about marriage, was never over. Then some stupid, damn, good-for-nothing drunk killed her and made a time machine out of me.

He concentrated on the thread as it streamed past, knowing they were approaching their goal by the trace of his previous passage. The trace was not visible to the naked eye. It could be neither heard nor smelled, yet, somehow, he could see it with his mind’s eye. How do you describe to a blind man what color looks like? Any color. The trace was the same — there, but not describable with any terms in Mack’s vocabulary. He slowed them abruptly. When he could see the trace entering/leaving the timeline in the distance, he moved a little closer, then turned off, cautious because of what the Ops had said about entering his own timeline. He cycled the night into day and stopped just after dawn.

The cave formed around them with light from the rising sun streaming in through the entrance. The bars were still in place, but the fire had burned out, leaving white ashes and a few partially burned chunks of wood.

This time, with his having maintained control, there was no skidding along the ground. Mack disentangled himself and stood up, fatigued and thirsty; otherwise, none the worse for wear. Sweat-soaked, the borrowed shirt clung to his back, but the shaking had stopped. His eyes darted around the cave. All seemed in order, but the place had a stench of rotten meat.

When Kathy didn’t move, Mack knelt by her side and shook her arm. When she awakened, she struggled into a sitting position. After staring at him for a moment with an uncomprehending expression on her face, she wrinkled her forehead and asked, “What is that terrible smell?” Before Mack could answer, she glanced at her surroundings and hurriedly keyed the medkit for an update.

Apparently, it had realized there wasn’t a medical facility available this time, because it didn’t ask for the patient to be transported to one. The screen lit up with vital signs and the extent of damage to Thad’s side. Kathy gave a running commentary, translating for Mack as the lettering scrolled down the screen. Small sections of two ribs had been vaporized by the alien’s beam and a three-centimeter-wide gash opened in Thad’s side. The beam had passed at a slight angle (his assailant had been below him on the slope), causing the path of the wound to run slightly upward as it crossed his side. The edges of the wound had been cauterized by the laser, stopping some of the bleeding from small veins and capillaries before it had started, but the more prominent veins were not stopped that easily. The right lung had been hit also, probably from exploding bits of rib, causing even more bleeding. If the beam had been only a laser, Thad would have been all right. There would have been a burn the width of the beam, but the Others had also discovered that a particle beam enhanced the laser’s ability to kill. Subatomic particles accelerated to just under the speed of light impacting upon living tissue were devastating. The beam’s kinetic energy had exploded tissue and bone alike, driving tiny fragments of the latter into Thad’s lung and widening the initial beam width. Kathy trained a light on the wound. Even with the medkit blocking the view of most of the area, the injury was gruesome, but the bleeding had stopped.

She moved Thad’s arms into a more normal position and wiped dirt off his cheek. Irritated, the AI in the medkit let loose its usual chirps. The screen scrolled with its favorite color in admonishment for having dared to touch its patient.

Ignoring the scolding, her voice still soft, “The kit says he’s stable, but that looks awful,” she said barely above a whisper.

Mack wanted to ask if “stable” meant that Thad would live but thought better of it. Instead, he crouched by the fire pit he had made by forming a circle of stones (it seemed like yesterday) and began laying out kindling. “If a wound like that had happened in my time, the person would have been dead before he ever reached a hospital.” Kathy started to say something, but Mack continued. “I know, Thad would have been too, had it not been for the medkit, but after one look at the wound, I’m still amazed that thing was able to save him.”