Chapter Eleven
Eli: DARPA — The First Tunnel
August 2, 2019 C.E.
I keep looking at the picture of my mom. I don’t think my dad knows what to say, either. He just looks sad, drained, and even weirdly amused, all at once. “She always wanted more time for her music,” he says.
More time for her music? I get really impatient when grownups make bizarre jokes that only they understand. Especially in a situation where it makes more sense to be scared. “Well, is she all right?” I ask. “Does she still know who she is? Or where she really belongs?”
Dad adds a small shrug to his mixed-up expression. “No one knows, Eli. I wish I did. I’m sorry. I don’t think anybody’s ever been in a situation like this.”
Mr. Howe comes over. “The world has never been in a situation like this, and we have to try to fix it.” He turns to Thirty and the Twenty-Fives. “We have to fix this before it gets out of hand!” The Referees don’t respond.
“Dad? Before what gets out of hand?” Mr. Howe answers me before Dad can. “Time! If time, in fact, really doesn’t move in just one direction…if history can be rearranged behind our backs at a moment’s notice…then everything we know could be changed” — he snaps his fingers—“like that. I mean, what if George Washington suddenly loses the Revolutionary War, and there’s no America? Or for you, personally, one of your grandparents winds up married to somebody else, and you wink out of existence? Or worse, what if that happened to someone important? What then?”
“Who’s deciding who’s important, Howe? You? DARPA?” My dad is standing up now. “I mean, what if hydrogen bombs were never built? What about that?”
“What are you talking about now!?” Mr. Howe is sweaty and nervous, and turns back to the Referees. “What is he talking about now?”
Thirty looks at my dad. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s just that there are some things about history we might be better off changing.”
“We’re not here to play God, gentlemen,” Thirty says to both of them.
“Why not?” Mr. Howe snaps. Everyone stares at him. “I mean,” he adds, “if the mission requires it.”
Dad glares at him, getting more and more annoyed. “I think we need to remember the reason this is happening is that Mr. Howe kept pushing me to do the experiments before we knew where they would lead.”
Howe stares at my dad. “You told me once, Sandusky, that the part you loved best about your work was when something totally unexpected happened. You liked the surprise. Well, I’d say you got it.”
“Dad,” I say, loud enough so Mr. Howe can hear, “do you think you could both stop arguing? So we could figure out how to get Mom back?”
That actually shuts them up for a minute. Then Dad takes me by the shoulders. “In a way, that is what we’re trying to figure out. They brought me down last night, Eli, to brief me on the situation, and to ask my permission.”
“Permission for what?”
“They want to send you back to Alexandria.”
Now it’s my turn to shut up for a minute. I hear water dripping somewhere in the BART tunnel.
“Specifically, Mr. Howe wants to send you back.” It’s Thirty, speaking as the Twenty-Fives nod repeatedly. “It’s our job, as Referees, to decide if he has a case.”
“And then what?” I ask.
“We give the agency our approval to go ahead.”
“You can’t make him go against his will.” My dad says it out loud, just as I’m thinking it.
“It’s not just about trying to fix time and space anymore or even how to get Dr. Margarite Sands back to her family.” Before any of us can ask Thirty what it is about, the wall shimmers back to life with more images from Vinita.
Mr. Howe jumps as though he hasn’t seen these pictures before, either. Maybe DARPA is even keeping secrets from him.
The wall screen shows Andrew Jackson Williams and a bunch of other people being taken away by men in Thickskins — material that sticks to your real skin and protects it if you’re in an area where there’s something dangerous in the air. It covers your nose, too, and your eyes, but you can breathe and see through it. It makes people look like big, shiny bugs.
Only the government’s supposed to have it. But I touched some once—when Dad brought some of the material home.
“There’ve been outbreaks in Vinita and a few other places. As we did with the airplane incident, we’ve kept them out of the news. But not much longer.”
“Outbreaks of what?” I’m like Clyne with my questions.
“Slow pox. A disease that causes a slow withering of the nervous system. Usually irreversible. Toward the end, people are prone to violent outbursts. The last outbreak we know about was before the Middle Ages. Before the Black Plague, actually. In Alexandria, around the year four hundred.” Thirty looks straight at me. “But we thought slow pox had been eradicated —or died out on its own—a couple of centuries back.
“Then early this morning…this.” On the screen, there’s a section of a tile mosaic, a kind of landscape, or cityscape. The colors are still amazingly vivid, and I recognize the buildings, and the pink-blue light on the water. “This is an artist’s rendition of people fleeing a great fire in the library at Alexandria — done in tile about a hundred years or so after the actual event. It’s usually on display in the British Museum, in London. But not today. This was first discovered — rather excitedly, I might add — by a child visiting the museum on a field trip.”
The lower-right corner of the image has been enlarged. You can make out the robes and sandals on the people running from the blaze. There’s a rhino stampeding by.
And then, coming out of the library behind them is…Clyne. I don’t know how else to explain it. But it looks like Clyne. Running on his two legs, looking over what’s basically his shoulder at the flames behind him.
Thirty doesn’t know about Clyne. She has a different explanation.
“The two legs, the gray lizard-like skin, the big eyes. This might be a gray alien.”
“What?”
“A gray alien. Look at the large head. Oh, don’t be surprised, Eli. We’re not alone in the universe. Mr. Howe can show you the reports sometime. By the way, Howe, does he know he’s sworn to secrecy about all this?”
“Yes.”
Well, I do now.
“Do you mean,” Mr. Howe says slowly, “that an alien race is trying to invade us…by invading our history first?” He’s worked himself up into a sweat.
“It’s possible.” Thirty stays calm. “The WOMPERs may have created a breach in spacetime around our whole planet. Everything we thought we knew about our history could be changed, or changing, with unimaginable consequences. Like ancient diseases reappearing as new plagues. And it’s possible that other races, other beings, who already know how to travel in spacetime…are taking advantage of our predicament to make these things happen. A gray alien suddenly appears in a museum picture, when he wasn’t there before, because he decides to surprise us by getting here about sixteen hundred years early.”
Thirty sure seems satisfied with herself, getting all that figured out. I want to tell her it wasn’t an alien, just a two-legged dinosaur. From a parallel Earth. And he’s not invading. Or making anyone get sick. He’s just trying to do his homework.
“And what do you think my son can do about any of this?” Dad is sweating, too.
“Alexandria seems to be one of the keys. He needs to go back there.”
“And do what?” I ask.
“Find out what you can about treating slow pox. See if you find any aliens.” That’s Thirty’s advice.
“Fix what’s wrong.” Mr. Howe is less helpful.
“I don’t know how. I’m just a kid.” Nobody seems to be listening to me. “And anyway, what if I just want to go back and find my mom?”
Dad gets his sad look back. “The truth is, Eli, we’re not a hundred percent sure where you’ll wind up. Or if you’ll go anywhere at
all. I’ve been running calculations, and I think since the WOMPER accident, your whole body is like a supercharged particle traveling backward in time.”
“But I’m here now. I’m staying here. I’m not moving.” I look around at all the grownup faces. “Right?”
A cart with a metal box on top is wheeled over to me. Mr. Howe puts on some Thickskin gloves, opens the box, and takes out my Seals cap.
How did that get here?
“It’s the baseball cap, Eli,” Dad says. “For some reason, that’s what carries the particular WOMPER charge that sets you off. Completes it. Turns you into a kind of giant positron.”
“Just me? Can’t someone else do it?”
Dad glares at Mr. Howe. “Apparently, Mr. Howe had the same question. He found three different soldiers to volunteer to put it on.”
“What happened?”
“Their bodies flickered like Christmas lights before they were thrown across the room by a burst of energy.”
“Are they all right?”
“Two of them, Eli, are in a psychiatric ward.”
“And the third?”
From the look my dad gives Mr. Howe, he obviously thinks it’s Howe’s turn to answer. But he doesn’t.
“You don’t have to go,” Dad says softly. “You don’t have to do any of this.” Then, in a louder voice, he speaks to Thirty and the Twenty-Fives.
“You can’t make him do any of this! And I won’t. This has to stop somewhere. And it stops now! With my son.”
Thirty flips on the newspaper image of Mom, stuck in 1937. I think that’s a mean thing to do to my dad.
“Dr. Sands. It is our job to decide if Mr. Howe can go ahead with his operation. But our decision was made before we got here. We’re in a dangerous situation. And as far as we know, your son is the best chance we have to keep it from getting worse. Eli, if something happened to Earth history back in Alexandria, to change things, to make them different for us now, you need to find a way to change it back.”
“How do I know I’d go back to Alexandria?”
“There’s a chance…” My dad lets that trail off.
“What?” I ask him.
He doesn’t really want to say. “There’s a chance, it seems, that whatever attracted you there in the first place will pull you back. You may have created a kind of particle trail connecting our time to Alexandria. Or at least connecting you.”
“You think we’re so heartless, Sands. Look.” Mr. Howe holds up a Thickskin that looks about my size. “We’ve got protection for him when he gets there.”
“He’s not going!” It looks like Dad is about to lunge for the suit, but a couple of DARPA men block his path.
“Dad? What if I don’t go?”
I look up at the wall, see Mom’s face staring out from the old newspaper photograph, see it change to the pictures of the confused and scared-looking airplane passengers, then see it change again to Andrew Jackson Williams being led away by the DARPA team. Thirty can play that screen like a violin.
“What happens to the world, Dad?”
“I don’t care what happens to the world anymore. I care what happens to you, Eli.”
But if people are getting sick, or planes are disappearing and reappearing in the sky, or ghosts are wandering the streets, and history is spinning more and more out of control, it’s not going to be much of a world for me or him, anyway. And I don’t want my mom trying to survive things that happened before she was even born. I didn’t ask to get all tangled up in time like this, but now, I guess, that tangling is part of me.
I reach for the hat in the metal case.
“Put on the Thickskin,” Mr. Howe says.
He holds it up, and as I take a corner in my hand, Dad yells, “Eli, no!” He breaks free of the guards and runs toward the cart holding the Seals cap.
He smashes into it, fighting with the DARPA men, with Mr. Howe, even one of the Twenty-Fives. But no one notices the cap has been knocked loose and landed by my feet.
I can already feel the tingling in my toes. For the second time in my life, I reach for it.
Then everything winks out, I cross the Fifth Dimension like a dream, and when I come to, the fire in Alexandria has already begun.