Chapter 56

Time: January 2, 204894 3:17 PM local time outside the Nebraska channel, 4 hours, 17 minutes after injection.

A lot can happen in 200,000 years. Nebraska used to be famous for its cornfields, but the area around the channel entrance was now a deep forest. After A'moth dropped us off, Jim and I spent some time hiking around a bit until I nailed the exact location of the entrance. The trick is to probe lightly. Too deep a mind-presence in the channel and I'd slide down without being able to stop.

The area is really different, all sorts of hardwood trees. It's mid-winter and the leaves are gone, but the sun is out and it's almost over freezing, not too bad at all. One of my favorite trees looks very much like a redwood, maybe with a slightly more dense and oily grain. I think it would make superb furniture wood. I idly thought I'd like to try to build something with Isabelle, if we ever got the chance. Maybe a nice desk. Isabelle once confided to me that she likes to work with wood...

I looked around and breathed deeply of the cold air. I'll say one thing for the WFM, they keep a nice planet.

I thought again about the Nebraska channel. I could have Jim and me down it in a moment. Then a quick jump to the center of Antelope Freeway, Jim dreaming me to the edge of the arctic home, a quick run across the polar ice from the peninsula... I could be back on Earth with Jim safe with Cindy in a couple of minutes of perceived time... Perceived... That's the key. Would there be a temporal shift using the Nebraska channel? What year would I return to Earth? We just couldn't risk it... I looked at my watch and idly reset it to local time, 3:20 PM...

A'moth popped into existence beside Jim and me. I locked eyes with her. "Isabelle?"

She nodded. "There's hope!" She turned her head. "Jim! No time to explain! I need to jump Gary to China. You'll be safe here for a couple of hours. One of us will be back by then, I promise!"

Jim spoke one word. "Go!"

A'moth nodded and grabbed me. We jumped once. I sort of recognized the area. I certainly have studied it enough. But I must say, the shipyards sure looked different as a lava pit. I turned to A'moth and asked, "Martian Planetia, right? The Great Circle arc from Nebraska was 5808 kilometers."

"Yes. I want to take a minute, to explain something here. I'm timing the speed of the shockwave."

I nodded. "I can scan. It won't sneak up on us."

A'moth nodded back. "Keep alert! In deep water, it can cover your twenty-three kilometers in less than forty seconds, about a minute if it's coming over land. But Pearl Harbor faces south, and the island is a mountain top dropping down steeply into the ocean. You'll sense the wave forty-some seconds before it gets here."

I gulped and nodded. "Isabelle?" I noticed A'moth had two pair of high-precision binoculars around her neck. She took one pair off and handed it to me.

"Earlier today, I knew of a few airplanes just about to land that landed after the net outage. All the others seemed to have disappeared. No crashes, no maydays, nothing. Then, a short time ago, a plane landed in Ulsan from Jakarta. It had just taken off before the net outage."

I thought for a moment and looked up at the sky. "Ah... You're thinking low flying planes might be okay..."

"Yes! And Isabelle's plane lifted"

"Wait! I feel it. Not the wave. The ocean! It's retreating!" A moment later the ocean began to bubble and rapidly recede. I had never seen an ocean move so fast. In less than a minute we seemed to be standing before an expanse of mud stretching to the horizon.

A'moth continued. "Isabelle plane lifted twelve minutes before Black Hole injection. I'm hoping she's okay. My poor child! She doesn't even realize the danger! I have her detailed flight plan from Venice. In a few minutes, I'm hoping we can intercept her in Korea, near the top of the Yellow Sea."

"Oh... How about picking her up in Tokyo, after the plane lands?"

A'moth shook her head. "Tokyo will cease to exist a half hour before Isabelle's plane is scheduled to land. Feel up to jumping into a supersonic jet?"

"Uh... Supersonic huh? Well..." A'moth stared at me as my face turned white and I started to tremble.

"My gosh Gary! I was hoping it wouldn't be a problem!"

After a few seconds, I finally found my voice. "No... Not that... The wave! It's... It's unbelievable! A'moth! Get us out of here!"

It was just starting to become visible on the southern horizon. Its speed and size were beyond imagination. With less than twenty seconds between us and eternity, A'moth hugged me and jumped.

We were in a deserted part of the Tokyo airport. It was a nice, easy jump-line of 5963 km for A'moth. She looked at her watch. "Four hours and twenty-four minutes after injection. The wave hit Honolulu right on schedule. It's not slowing down at all."

I looked at Tokyo in the pre-dawn darkness. "How long?" I whispered.

A'moth whispered back, "Tokyo and Ulsan will be hit almost simultaneously, forty-four minutes from now. It'll be about forty minutes before sunrise for Tokyo. They'll never see it coming. With the net down, they're completely blind."

"And Isabelle?"

"Her plane is scheduled to cross into Korea at 5:36 AM local time, eleven minutes from now, near where Seoul used to be. We'll intercept her there." A'moth stepped close and hugged me. We were in Korea a second later, at the coast with the dark waters of the Korean Bay to our west.

It was cold! Fortunately the air was clear and dry, and WFM jets travel with a lot of lights. Looking at A'moth's flight maps, I hopped A'moth around until we were at the exact location to catch the plane. We were right at the rocky edge of the coast, with thick snow covered trees to our east. We spotted the jet right on schedule heading for our intercept about six minutes later. A'moth and I turned to each other and let out a brief burst of laughter in relief. Our daughter!

The jet was moving close to Mach 2. And as I scanned, I realized they were also higher than we were expecting. "About 19,000 meters above sea-level," I called out, realizing with a jolt that the seas were everything but level right now.

A'moth frowned. "Their flight plan was for 16,000 meters... 19,000 is right at the upper limit for these planes. I wonder if anything's wrong."

"We'll find out soon enough," I said confidently.

Maybe too confidently. Mach two is fast, about a kilometer every 1.7 seconds. And we would be more than nineteen kilometers below them at the closest. The bird was moving fast! I scanned the plane and found Isabelle in the pilot cabin with another woman. The plane would be in and out of my range in about twenty seconds. I prepared to remote- teleport Isabelle to us, and then I realized in horror that I couldn't do it without her slamming into the surrounding trees at Mach 2.

So I thought up a chemical taste and jumped a microdot of saliva, just as the plane left my range. I frowned grimly at A'moth. "Come on! We have to move east!" At twenty kilometers per second I could easily outrace the plane. But that wasn't my problem...

Time: 4 hours 37 minutes after injection, one hour before Flight-1704's scheduled landing in Tokyo, thirty-one minutes before destruction of Tokyo and Ulsan...

Isabelle sat quietly in the control seat, monitoring the burn rates. They were definitely burning fuel at a slower rate than projected, and at first Isabelle was very happy to have picked the higher altitude. But then she realized the weight of all the children was considerably less than an adult payload would have been, and guessed most of the savings were due to that.