Chapter Nine
Eli: DARPA
August 2, 2019 C.E.
The van is making that vibrating sound, like we’re going over a bridge. I bet we’re heading back toward San Francisco. But with blacked-out windows, it’s hard to tell for sure.
Mr. Howe is sitting on the seat next to me, along with a couple of his uniformed goons. I guess they’re trying to figure out what to do with me, now that they know I’m unstuck in time.
I’ve been back awhile. I’ve told them a little about Alexandria, what I remember. I described the lighthouse. And the zoo. I haven’t told them about Clyne, though. Or his ship. They’d probably just think I’m crazy, which might make the situation worse. Besides, I don’t know if I want them to know about Clyne. That might be dangerous for him.
Anyway, why should I trust them? They still haven’t told me where my dad is. I nearly made it all the way to Wolf House yesterday, but no sign of Dad anywhere. “I guess you’ll just have to voluntarily stay inside from now on,” was Mr. Howe’s only comment when they brought me back.
But I don’t get to “voluntarily” use a vidpad, or a roam box here in the van. So I can’t do any Barnstorming. So many free choices and all for my own good.
“Devices like that can be tracked electronically. We can’t take any chances.” That’s Mr. Howe again, explaining for about the twenty-hundredth time why I have to be bored out of my skull.
Don’t they know I need something to distract me? When you’ve been time-traveling…you’re left kind of…haunted by things. Like the colors and eerie quiet of the Fifth Dimension. Or the fact that I left a couple people behind in Alexandria who were in big trouble…a week ago. And who knows what shape they’re in now?
“Here. Use these to pass the time. On us.” Mr. Howe hands me a pack of baseball cards. I don’t know why they still call them cards. Tradition, I guess. They’re more like small circuit boards, with moving holograms on the front.
Howe’s given me a “Hall Heroes” pack—in other words, ’grams of players recently drafted into the Hall of Fame. I got a Barry Bonds, a Ken Griffey Jr., and a Mark McGwire. Not bad. There’s Bonds, hitting number 700 by the same bay I’m probably being driven over right now. There’s McGwire, breaking the single-season home run record, which Bonds would break again.
I’ve seen old cards in collectors’ shops, of course. They don’t move at all. With the ’grams, you get to watch a bunch of career highlights over and over again, so you don’t get bored quite as fast.
Now if I can just imagine Barry Bonds as a werewolf, I’ll have a Barnstormer game.
They woke me up this morning to come here. I’d been dreaming again. I keep seeing the colors spilling out from the lighthouse. And the rhino charging the time-ship. That seems to be another problem with time travel—you get less and less sure where your dreams leave off and your actual life begins.
My dad still wasn’t anywhere around. Mr. Howe said he would take me to meet him.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“We can’t tell you. But you need to come with us.”
“Why? Are you taking me to him?”
“It’s only an hour’s drive,” he said. But that didn’t answer my question.
He tried to give me what he thought was a reassuring smile, but it didn’t sit right on his face. Instead, he looked like someone waking up from surgery, when the knockout gas hasn’t quite worn off. Like the smile came from outside him and wasn’t an expression he could make on his own.
Now we seem to be going down, driving on a long ramp, or in an echoey tunnel. The windows may be blacked out, but you can still feel slopes. And hear sound.
We stop and the sliding door is flung open. More uniformed guys are standing around. I step out, and the air feels damp. It’s some kind of giant underground garage with rows of lights way overhead. Lots of cement. Pipes running along the walls. We’re walking toward what seems like a complex of offices behind a large Plexiglas window. Why put in a window? What’s so great about a view of a dark, damp cement garage?
I see some more guys in DARPA jumpsuits running around. “Where are we?”
“We can’t really tell you,” Mr. Howe tells me, and I’m starting to wonder why I bother asking any questions at all.
“It’s an old BART tunnel,” a voice says. “But since the train doesn’t come through here anymore, it’s like our own private station.”
It’s a woman’s voice. I turn, and she’s stepping out of a private train that whooshed in silently from one of the dark tubes. She’s in a blue business suit, and her hair is blond, streaked with gray. She wears it loose. When she smiles, at least, it seems more real than when Mr. Howe tries it. “They had to build several different subway tunnels after the last earthquake. This was one of the old ones they left behind. A real fixer-upper. But office space is so expensive aboveground. This was a steal.” I stare at her a moment. She seems so different from Mr. Howe that I’m beginning to think it was less strange running into a dinosaur. “Who are you?”
She shrugs. “Number Thirty.” She gives me the smile again, like she has warm cookies for me, but of course she doesn’t.
“That’s your name?”
She points to my baseball cards. “That was Griffey’s number. It’ll be my name for today.” Two men in dark blue suits step out of the train car, and the shadows, to stand next to her. “And we’ll call these two Twenty-Five.”
I look back at the cards: Both Bonds and McGwire wore number twenty-five. I consider asking Mr. Howe something, and decide it’d be useless. Instead, I say to Number Thirty, “Don’t tell me you people brought me this far for some kind of Barnstormer game.”
“Me and the two Twenty-Fives, here. We’re the Referees.”
“Baseball has umpires.”
“Well, we’re known here as Referees. We kind of do what the Supreme Court does. Except they make public decisions.”
She lets that hang there.
“And you make secret ones?”
“Private ones. For DARPA, and other agencies. When things happen that there aren’t any rules for yet. We help make up those rules.”
“But then who gets to know what they are?”
She doesn’t answer, turning to Mr. Howe instead. “You’re right. He is a smart boy.” Then she leans in close to me. “Come on, Eli Sands. Let’s find out what we should do with you. And whether there’s any chance of getting your mother back.”
She turns and walks toward the Plexiglas office, with the Twenty-Fives in tow. She’s whistling a little song—from a Disney movie, I think, but I’ve been too old for those since at least 2015. It’s an ancient one, about being happy while you work. I wonder how much she really cares about my mom.
Soon, I’m in a soft, fancy chair—like the kind you might find on an airplane—looking up at a blank white wall. The wall brightens and shimmers into life with a series of 3-D images.
There’s a picture of Andrew Jackson Williams, standing in front of the CABIN CREEK sign — except there’s no motel on that corner now. The sign says CABIN CREEK CLEANERS. But Dad and I were just there in June.
And how did they find out, anyway? Were they following us?
“This is from the Daily Oklahoman site. Headlines from a few days ago. A town named Vinita. You’ve heard of it?”
I don’t say anything.
Number Thirty keeps talking. “It’s a man named Andrew Jackson Williams. He wrote a book called The Time Problem. About time travel. Have you heard of that?”
“No.”
“No, we didn’t think so. It was published in 1969. The hippies back then really liked the book. They thought it was ‘far-out’ and ‘cosmic.’ But A.J. never really liked hippies.”
“What’s a hippie?” I ask.
“Never mind.” Now it’s Mr. Howe’s turn. I guess the Twenty-Fives are just going to keep quiet. “The point is, Eli, Andrew Jackson Williams died in 1969, too. Right after his book came out.”
It’s a go
od thing everyone’s looking at the wall screen, and not my face. I’m feeling pretty nervous. “He died?”
“Apparently. In the middle of a thunderstorm. According to the news stories we could find. Except that suddenly, he’s been seen again all over his hometown of Vinita.”
More shots of him go by, posing with a vidpad — like it’s some strange object from space— and standing in front of a church, giving a lecture. You can tell all the pictures are recent.
“Is he a ghost?”
“He doesn’t seem to think so. He claims that during the storm, he just walked out of the motel he owned, and when the storm broke, here he is, fifty years later.” There’s another picture of him in front of the cleaners. There’s still no motel.
“Mr. Williams says it has to do with a sudden disturbance in time. Though when local authorities asked him about it, he said they’d have to read his book.” Mr. Howe shrugged. “Except the book’s been out of print for nearly fifty years.”
There’s a thunk as a copy lands on the table near me. Even in the dark, I can see it’s old and beat-up. The whole thing is printed on paper. “We’ve read it,” Howe added. “It didn’t answer any of our questions.”
“Look at this.” Now it’s Thirty’s turn again. On the wall screen, a group of airline passengers stand around a busy airport terminal, looking confused and worried like they could all use a nap.
“This just happened yesterday,” she says. “A flight from L.A. to New York. It’s supposed to take three and a half hours, nonstop.”
“Yeah?”
“According to everybody’s watches, and every clock we could check, and every way we could measure…it took fifteen minutes.”
“What?”
“That’s right. They left Los Angeles, and before they had time to finish hearing about the inflatable life rafts in case of emergency, they were over Manhattan. This one we’ve kept out of the news. For now. The crew and passengers are still being debriefed in a hotel.”
“They get a hotel? And I’m stuck in a tunnel?” No one’s laughing, and I’m not sure I meant it as a joke. “So what does ‘debriefed’ mean?”
“It means held against their will.” That was a new voice. Dad’s.
He’s come in the room and is standing in the back. “Daddy!”
I haven’t called him that in about five years. Since around the time I stopped watching Disney movies.
I can feel my cheeks get a little red, then he walks up and hugs me and I don’t care…except he’s wearing latex gloves, so it feels a little funny.
“I’m sorry, buddy, but I came down here late last night. Mr. Howe told you this morning, right?”
“No.”
We both try to glare at Mr. Howe, but he just won’t feel embarrassed about anything. “I wasn’t sure you’d be finished,” he claimed. “I didn’t want to promise the boy he’d see you if you weren’t going to be here. I didn’t want to upset him.”
There are times when Mr. Howe makes me want to barf.
“You should have told me you were leaving, Dad.” I let go of him so I can stand back and look him in the eyes.
“Eli, we discovered something…and I didn’t want to get your hopes up too much. I was in a sealed room farther down the tunnel. You couldn’t have come in there, anyway.”
I realize Dad is dressed in a special jump- suit, too, like some of the DARPA guys. He doesn’t look right in the uniform.
“What’s going on?”
Dad peels off the gloves and takes a small vidpad out of his pocket. “We just scanned these in. Nobody can touch it directly, of course. We had to be very careful.”
They were pages from the old San Francisco Chronicle that popped up in his lab at the same time the baseball cap did.
“Funny things have been going on with time, Eli.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Then I lower my voice so only he can hear. “Are you talking about the motel we stopped at?”
“No. Look.” He scans through the newspaper pages, then stops, enlarging an article about an orchestra playing in San Francisco back in 1937.
There’s a picture of one of the flute players looking toward the camera. Margarite Sands. My mom.