“Consider it a gift. I won’t say more.”
Blake couldn’t fathom why getting stomach pills was a gift, but apparently this discussion was coming to an end. “I’ll ask again, what happens now?”
“I die,” Ben said flatly. “You tell me.” He retrieved a lighter and brought a flame to life, lighting the cigarette between his fingers. He hesitated only slightly before bringing it to his mouth and taking a long pull.
As Ben puffed out the smoke, Blake moved away from the exhalation, turning to face the crashing waves. He closed his eyes, savoring the pleasant feel of the night breeze on his skin.
He had no clue what he should do next. Amhurst was alive, and the lab was ruined – but it could be fixed, right? They had a fragment of the meteorite, so if the doctor could figure out the process, Blake could still make it home. And that was how he planned to prove Ben wrong.
“I have another question,” he said. “What does the message you leave behind mean?”
There was no answer. Blake looked down. Ben’s respirations had ceased. He was now in the slumped position he would be found in by a local passerby in a few hours.
It felt eerie to be witnessing this past in the making. Blake looked back out at the coastline and stood there for a long time, reflecting on what had just happened. Then he remembered something Ben had said, and turned, walking away from the Somerton Man.
He had a train to catch.
44 Double Infact
December 1, 1948, 4:09 AM
Blake retrieved and donned the discarded overalls he’d left outside Amhurst’s place before heading to the station. It wasn’t too far away; in another five minutes he’d be there. Blake refused to believe Ben’s claim that his choices didn’t matter. He was going to change history if it was within his power. He just hoped he wasn’t late and the train hadn’t departed. Maybe that detour for the overalls wasn’t the best idea.
In moments he was there, walking through the front door and scanning the waiting area. Blake’s mind attempted to de-age the face of his uncle. What would he look like in his twenties?
Then, by the bathroom entrance, he saw a familiar jacket – the one worn by the courier who’d delivered the message to Amhurst. Had that messenger been Tobias himself?
Blake strode forward, ready to confront the man. He didn’t know if this was his uncle or not, but at this point he didn’t care. He clutched the man’s shoulder and pulled him around so they were facing each other.
Both men’s eyebrows rose in surprise, then their eyes simultaneously widened and narrowed in a combination of shock and confusion. Blake wasn’t looking into the eyes of his uncle – he was staring right at a mirror image of – himself.
Blake’s fingers curled, digging into his twin’s jacket. He bared his teeth, and with something resembling a growl, shoved the other man toward the bathrooms. The identical men entered the room in a flurry, one stumbling backward, and the other charging forward.
They collided with the sink and almost tripped over the toilet. Blake’s twin lost his footing and fell. The room was a one-occupant-only facility, which worked to Blake’s advantage. In a flash of movement he locked the door and spun around to glare at the man on the floor.
“What is this?” Blake shouted, pointing to his own face, then the identical one that gaped up at him.
His carbon copy blanched, but remained mute.
“What the fuck is going on?” Blake demanded, but with more reserve in his voice now. He’d made enough of a scene in the main lobby. It wouldn’t help matters for security of any kind to arrive.
“I … I don’t know,” the man stammered.
“So I am correct in assuming your name is Ethan Tannor?”
The name appeared to mean nothing to this man. A puzzled look crossed over his face and he said, “No, it’s Tobias. Tobias Keane.”
Blake froze. He couldn’t speak, just stared, uncomprehending. Finally, he managed to form words. “That’s impossible.”
Tobias was shaking by now, either from fear or adrenaline, or both. Blake didn’t know. But the sight of the man trembling sent him into a sudden, renewed anger. He hauled Tobias to his feet, jerking him up by the coat collar so they were face to face.
Now that the initial shock had worn off, Blake studied his double with fixed concentration, noticing small differences between them. Although their faces were the same, their bodies were different. Tobias had a leaner frame, and his face was gaunt. Of course, Tobias also had two fully functioning hands. By focusing, Blake could almost see it now: if this man’s face aged and grew the mangy beard he always remembered, it could be the face of the man he’d called uncle for so long.
Still unconvinced, Blake grabbed at Tobias’s shirt and ripped it apart. Buttons popped off and pinged to the floor.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Tobias exclaimed, trying to pull away.
Blake didn’t answer, he just stood staring at the black tattooed ‘S’ between two stars on Tobias’s chest.
I’ll be damned.
Blake’s mind was in overdrive now, trying – but failing – to figure out this development. Here he was, existing twice in time. How can this be possible? He stepped away as Tobias attempted to pull his clothing together. Blake continued staring at the other man, waiting for an epiphany to strike.
So Tobias was back before on this mission and hadn’t been as successful as he’d thought. But he was forced to stay and live out the rest of his life in this time. And he took that opportunity to head to the U.S. and save his parents – or their parents, as it seemed – but they’d still died. In a car crash this time, instead of the plane crash.
A sense of amazement settled in as Blake realized that trying to stop his – their – parents’ deaths had been the underlying motive for both of them to accept this crazy mission.
“Why are you here?” Tobias asked.
“Same as you. To stop the Russians. The future isn’t going to look so bright if we don’t.”
Tobias frowned. “Amhurst didn’t run?”
“No, he had a moment of senility and thought he could take on three men in a vain attempt to get his codex out of their hands,” Blake said dryly.
The other man’s eyes widened at this news. “And?” he asked almost breathlessly.
“Gernot escaped with a large fragment of the rock. I can only assume he saved it and stashed it away for his friends in the future.” Tobias quietly absorbed the information, and Blake continued, “But nothing has changed this timeline, so perhaps pride got the best of him – or better yet, he was never able to get all of the information from Amhurst. It’s possible they have the fragment but still lack the correct process for traveling forward like they wanted.”
Tobias waved a hand. “That still doesn’t explain why you are here. Why not send someone else?” He stopped then, peering closely at Blake. “Are mother and father alive?”
The line of questioning caught Blake off guard, but he didn’t want to divulge the fate of his – their – parents to Tobias just yet.
“Yes, they’re fine,” he lied.
Tobias’s eyes brightened with hope. “They survived the crash?”
Blake swallowed over the sudden dryness in his throat. It was hard to play with the facts like that, even though it was technically true – they did survive the plane crash, after all; just not the car crash years later.
“No, they didn’t survive the plane crash, because they were never on the plane.” Well, that much is true, he thought, then went on, making the rest up as he went along. “You head back to the States and years from now manage to convince them not to board the plane.” After that lie passed his lips, he thought of something. Is that exactly what ends up happening … because I told him this?
The relief on Tobias’s face struck a chord of guilt in Blake, and he had to look away for a second.
“Thank God,” Tobias said. Then his eyes sharpened. “But again, that doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
Blake gave
a half shrug. “Wallace. He can be … convincing, can’t he?”
“That he can,” Tobias nodded, wearing an expression that resembled affection. “But he is a good friend.”
“Are you kidding me? Wallace is a snake. He manipulates people to serve his own personal cause.”
“He’s not all bad. He has made the sacrifice as well. Several times. You should try and understand his motives.”
“Too late for that. He’s dead.”
Tobias blinked and drew back. “You … you killed him?”
“No, he Hitlered himself with some poison.”
“He was going to leave this place,” Tobias said, looking suddenly very sad. “He felt like he was done with all of this – that it was always destined to be a failure. He would say, ‘Sometimes the man who comes out of the machine is not always the one that goes in’.”
Blake rolled his eyes at Tobias. “Obviously. Look at us,” he drawled.
“I led a different life than you, I assume,” Tobias said. “I was an orphan, malnourished, and desperate. It didn’t take much to persuade me there was a way out.” He smiled sadly. “And I’ve been here for close to two years now.”
“That’s something else I don’t understand. I’ve only been here two days. What took you so long to get to Amhurst?”
“He wasn’t my first mission. Technically, I didn’t even have a mission.”
“You had no mission?”
Tobias shrugged. “I was approached by Wallace in 1986; he said he could send me into the past.”
“He just approached you? Out of the blue?”
“I’m ashamed to say I was living on the streets, and he presented me with an offer. You know – the kind I couldn’t refuse. As I said, it didn’t take much. I was hungry to escape my situation, and the things I had to do to survive.” He reddened with humiliation.
Tobias. Poor and living on the streets. It seemed Wallace did more than make a simple proposal; he’d used a vagrant as his own personal crash test dummy to see if the machine worked. Better to attempt it on a worthless street person than one of his trained recruits.
Blake wondered how many others Wallace had snared like that and how many didn’t make it through the portal. He had believed in the man, and yet Wallace was turning out to be no better than the Commie thugs Blake himself was sent to dispatch.
Why did I trust him? Blake had no answer. Now that it was evident bribery, blackmail, and the possible murder of innocents were not beyond Wallace’s methods, Blake felt like an idiot for having had any semblance of faith in him. Not that it had been a lot to begin with, but it had been enough to make him jump into this mess too, hadn’t it?
The sound of Tobias’s voice penetrated his thoughts and Blake tuned back in to hear him say, “Wallace got some new information and we got started on this mission two days ago as well. He said they sent back another operative as a failsafe, but he didn’t mention it would be you.” Tobias shook his head. “Or – I guess me, it appears.”
“Like I said, Wallace is a prick.”
Tobias offered no reply.
It was true Wallace had a silver tongue. Blake remembered wondering if Uncle Tobias was clairvoyant, given his pre-existing knowledge that Blake would accept the mission to travel back. But no, his uncle hadn’t been psychic. He’d already lived this life and knew from this moment right here and now that they would meet in the past.
“So what was your scheme after failing miserably here – and me having to clean up this mess?” Blake waved his stump of a left arm in Tobias’s face. “I’m not sure if you noticed, it cost me an arm.” Then he added as an afterthought, “And nearly a leg.”
Maybe it was the stunned surprise of hearing about Ben Wallace’s suicide, or that he’d just been attacked by an identical twin and interrogated in the water closet, but at the sight of Blake’s missing arm, Tobias reacted with horror. “My God,” he gasped, “what happened?”
“Satoshi happened.”
Tobias cringed and shuddered. “I was just purchasing a ticket to leave town and head to the U.S. After that, it would be a waiting game until I could warn my … our parents.”
Blake’s eyes glittered, and he smiled like a man who had a secret to tell. “How would you like to screw the game and get home faster?”
45 The Last Deployed Scout
December 1, 1948, 5:27 AM
Blake and Tobias walked up the steps to Amhurst’s house and let themselves in. Blake knew right away that something was off; there were no muffled screams, no whistling of the air hose, not even the whining of a drill.
He ran to the makeshift torture room and found Amhurst sitting on a stool, hands covered in blood. Splatters of red marked his face, even though there were no visible wounds. A brow-wiped smear of it was streaked across his forehead.
Tobias came up behind Blake and sucked in a sharp breath. Blake ignored him and addressed the old man. “Amhurst, are you okay? What happened?”
“He’s dead.” The doctor pointed a red finger at Mikhail. The Russian was still sitting in the makeshift operating chair, head dipped down, chin resting on an unmoving chest.
Amhurst realized there was another visitor in the room and blinked at Tobias. “Who is that?”
“I’ll explain later. First explain this.” Blake waved an arm at Mikhail’s body. “I wanted him alive, dammit!”
Amhurst looked like he was still bewildered by what had happened. “I was preparing to drill more holes into his teeth when the strap holding his head broke.”
He paused, but Blake said nothing, waiting for the rest of the story. He continued, “I thought nothing of it and was going to reattach the strap, but it all happened so fast.” His eyes grew sad.
“Come on you geriatric old man – out with it!”
Amhurst drew in a shuddering breath. “He killed himself.”
“How?” Blake threw his single arm wide in the air, frustration mounting. “You’re not explaining how he went from alive to dead in this story arc.”
“The drill.” Amhurst blinked up at him with dull eyes. “It was still spinning, and he jerked his head at it on purpose. Tore right through his eye in an instant and the bit went into his brain.”
Blake’s jaw dropped; he couldn’t help himself – this was too far-fetched to believe. Swallowing a cyanide capsule to induce death was one thing, but this was gnarly. Talk about dedication.
“The ocular nerve must’ve severed and then the frontal –”
“I get it!” Blake snapped. “It killed him.”
“I am sorry,” Amhurst said with genuine remorse.
Blake gritted his teeth on the profanities that wanted to erupt. “This is why I said we should go for his stones first!” He moved away from both men to pull his thoughts together. “We’ll have to dispose of the body. He’s useless to us now.”
“Bodies. Satoshi is still in the lab,” Amhurst reminded him.
“It’s a good thing we have an extra pair of hands then,” Blake said, turning around to face them. “Tobias, I need you to get rid of the bodies.”
It had been strange enough to start referring to himself as Blake, but looking at a man who shared his own face and calling him by his uncle’s name was something Blake didn’t know he could ever get used to.
Tobias nodded in mute understanding and Blake started to leave. “Wait – where are you going?” Tobias called out with a quavering voice.
“I’m going back to Ben’s body. It’s a long shot, but it occurred to me that he might have had his time traveling device on him, and we may need it.”
“What should I do?” Amhurst asked.
“Try not to die of old age while we’re gone.”
Blake went to the front foyer and headed for the small table in the entryway. He withdrew the empty gun from his belt and opened a drawer to put it inside. Some objects clinked together when he pulled on the handle and he looked down. Nine bullets rolled around inside the drawer, clattering into each other. Amhurst. He was a man of sc
ience, after all, and against having a dangerous loaded gun in the house. Yet the man’s ineptitude with weapons left him without the sense to remove the round that had been in the chamber. Was it the old doctor’s morality, or was it the stubborn nature of time holding him back from changing the course of history? He tossed Mikhail’s gun into the drawer and pushed it shut.
***
December 1, 1948, 6:18 AM
Approaching the beach, Blake heard the commotion up ahead before his eyes found it. Shit. The body had already been found. It would be impossible to search Ben’s remains with the herd of onlookers and police officers – or Bobbies, or whatever the Australian cops were called – gathered around.
He came up behind the circle of bystanders. Ben Wallace’s body was just as he had left it hours ago. Blake cursed his stupidity; he should have searched through Ben’s pockets and belongings earlier. Now the opportunity was gone.
The sun was spreading its glow across the beach and a breeze caressed his face. He looked up at the early morning sky, wishing he could just sit here all day and enjoy the view of the ocean, feel the crashing waves sweep up to tickle his feet, to bask in the rays …
A man walked over to Blake and stood directly in front of him. He returned a fixed stare. What the hell does he want? Blake’s silent question was answered the instant the man pulled up a camera and put the crowd – Blake included – in his sights.
In a moment of panic, Blake threw up his good arm to cover his face as best he could just before he heard the flash bulb, and the area lit up around him.
Dr. Cunningham’s words about memories being summoned in an instant came back to him like a jolt of electricity, almost as if sparked by the illumination of the bulb. He remembered sitting in a New York library in 1986, pouring through his assumed uncle’s belongings. He’d been staring at a newspaper article that documented the mysterious Somerton Man case. A photo in the paper from the scene of the body showed a crowd of people, and in the midst of that crowd, one individual stood shielding his face. A circle of red ink had been drawn around the unknown man.