* * * * * * *
The wedding was as grand as even a princess could have wished for, at one of the grandest cathedrals in town and with no expenses spared. Annabelle wore Lisa McGrath’s silver sixpence in her shoe, and then afterwards took to wearing it as a necklace as Mike had once done. In a kinder and gentler time the wedding probably would have received a double-page spread in the society section of the Tampa Tribune, but as it was the Defense Department suppressed even the slightest mention of it. They didn’t want one of their prize researchers attracting any attention to himself.
There was no more talk of honeymoons or exotic trips, either. The look on Luke Bartow’s face the first time Mike mentioned that had been enough to convince him never to bring up the subject again. He did indeed live in a golden cage, and it did no good at all to rattle the bars. They ended up going to a resort in Tarpon Springs for two weeks, and Mike privately felt glad to be given even that much leeway.
Annabelle seemed not to notice the restrictions. She gladly moved into his lonely house and soon transformed it from a cold and quiet place into something warm and welcoming; a feat which truly amazed him. In spite of the prison he found himself living in, Annabelle was a comfort.
Toward the end of February, Joan announced that she was pregnant for the second time, and three days later Annabelle discovered likewise. The two sisters were enthusiastic about the prospect of having babies at the same time, but at first Mike was less than keen about the whole idea. It wasn’t that he didn’t want children, but it saddened him that one should be born into a jail cell. The baby was one more tool his handlers could use to manipulate and control him, and that was unfair to all of them.
He did his best not to think of that, though, or at least not to show it. On the surface he was excited and happy as could be, even while his heart sank.
But in the way of many others before him, Mike soon discovered that babies have a way of changing things, even before they arrive. He found himself more anxious about the future than he’d ever been, for one thing. Not so much financially; they had more money than they could have spent in ten lifetimes. And it wasn’t even so much his situation with the Defense Forces, actually. He knew exactly what he had to deal with in that case, even if he didn’t like it.
No, what really worried him was Joey. He still remembered with crystal clarity what he’d seen when his friend disappeared from the parking garage in Rockport. The possibility of something similar happening to Mike himself had been lurking in the back of his mind ever since, but now it truly haunted him. It hadn’t even been quite so bad when it was only him and no one else involved, but things were very different now that he had a family to think about. If Mike suddenly disappeared, then what might happen to them? The uncertainty was almost unbearable.
His research offered him few clues as to what could have happened, and it wasn’t till he confided his fears to Annabelle that he got any kind of break.
“Let me see your notes; maybe together we can figure something out,” she suggested.
“Do you have any idea what Lieutenant Bartow would say if he knew I was sharing classified information, even with you?” Mike asked.
“Yeah, I’ve got a pretty good idea, actually. But if nobody tells him then it won’t ever come to that, will it?” she countered.
“Meet me at the library tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock, then. I’ll bring my lab journal and we’ll see if you can spot anything I overlooked,” he said. He didn’t dare bring it home, let alone take Annabelle to the lab. Both those locations almost certainly had bugs in place, as compulsive as the NADF were about security. Mike wouldn’t have been surprised to find out they kept logs of every keystroke he made on the computer. But they couldn’t very well spy on him everywhere, could they?
He met her on the top floor of the library, in an empty study cubicle. The whole floor had been deserted when he arrived, so he had good reason to think they wouldn’t be discovered there.
“Here it is,” he said in a low voice, pulling the journal out from under his shirt. She didn’t comment about the secrecy; she knew as well as he did what the stakes could be if they got caught. She opened the book and started reading.
“Here’s your problem,” she said, pointing to an equation on page thirty-four.
“Wow, that was fast,” he said dryly, and she ignored the irony in his voice.
“This equation implies that the tachometer’s bubble ring is unstable if you try to make it larger than a certain value, contingent on your power supply. It’ll shrink back and pop like a rubber band if your settings don’t match up, dragging everything right back where it came from. Doesn’t matter so much if you’re using mass conversion because then the size is almost limitless, but if you’re using power from the electrical grid or conversion of enthalpy then it’s severely limited. Do you happen to know what it was set on?” she asked.
“No, it wasn’t even switched on. I was right in the middle of trying to replace a faulty capacitor when my screwdriver slipped and caused a static discharge. It could’ve been set on anything,” he said, feeling foolish that he hadn’t spotted the implications himself. But then again she was the math whiz, not him.
“Well, if you want my theory, it’s this. I bet when you discharged the capacitor, it fried the tachometer’s computer and switched it on with incompatible settings. It was probably set on either power grid or enthalpy mode and then tried to make the bubble too big, so it was unstable and started to decay almost immediately. So if that’s true then Joey ought to be back in the past,” Annabelle said.
“So why didn’t I disappear too, then?” he pointed out, and she furrowed her brow, thinking.
“It’s only a guess, but it’s possible the bubble takes a while to completely decay, and in that case it wouldn’t surprise me if the outer edges disappeared first. Joey would have been near the outer edge of the bubble when the accident first happened, wouldn’t he?” she said.
“Yeah, our house was right at the edge, and as far as I know that’s where he was,” Mike agreed.
“And you were at the very center, so it might make sense that he disappeared sooner than you would,” she said.
“So that means I’ll still disappear at some point,” Mike said. It was the very thing he’d feared most and hoped to refute.
“I don’t know, baby,” Annabelle said, reluctantly meeting his eyes.
Mike considered it. They were rapidly getting into uncharted waters with all this; theories were nice, but what they really needed were some hard facts. Lots of things sounded good at first blush and then turned out to be utterly laughable when the rest of the story came out. He hoped that’s what happened this time, actually; he’d never in his entire life been so anxious to prove a theory wrong.
Nevertheless, he forced himself to be scientific about it.
“It sounds like a reasonable theory, but there’s got to be some way to test it,” Mike finally said.
“The only way I can think of to do that is to go look and see if the bubble ring is smaller now than it was before,” she said.
“That’s a pretty long trip, just to find out something like that. Surely there are records or studies that have been done on that place in the past hundred years, wouldn’t you think?” he asked.
“I doubt it. Almost all the public records from before the Union War got destroyed, especially in places close to the border like Arkadelphia. The ones that are left are pretty spotty. Cyber-war was awfully popular back then; they loved to wipe out each other’s databases. And then the NADF has kept a pretty tight lid on anything since then,” she said.
She was right, of course; the Containment Zone might as well have been one of those blank spots on old maps where the mapmakers knew so little that they could only scribble Here there be monsters.
“Then I’ll have to go in person. I can’t stand not knowing,” he said. And that was the simple truth; he’d go crazy thinking a
bout it, if he had to constantly wonder if he might disappear at any moment. Annabelle only nodded, so maybe the question was bothering her as much as it was him.
“But how would you get there? You know they watch us all the time,” she finally said.
“Yeah, but we might be able to use that against them, if we’re smart,” he said.
“Like how?” she asked.
“Well, you know the house is bugged, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, I figured as much,” she agreed.
“So let’s wait till there’s a break when the University is closed so they won’t expect me to be at work for a few days, and then I’ll slip away. Play some of our home videos now and then so they’ll hear my voice inside the house and maybe they won’t suspect anything,” he said.
“That’s a big maybe, sugar daddy,” she said.
“I know it’s risky, but I think it’ll work. They wouldn’t think I’d run off without you, after all. Make sure you step outside to check the mail or stuff like that now and then and I’m pretty sure it’ll work,” he said, and she bit her lip as she considered all the various aspects.
“When do you want to try it?” she finally asked.
“Spring Break is coming up next week. That’s as good a time as any,” he said.
“But how will you get out of the house without them seeing you leave?” she pointed out.
“Pack me in a box and let Philip come pick me up like we’re giving him some old clothes or something. Nobody will care what’s inside a cardboard box you’re sending to your sister’s house,” he said, and she laughed.
“Seriously?” she asked.
“Sure. Why not?” he asked.
“Well. . . I guess there’s really no reason why it wouldn’t work like that. Just seems silly, that’s all,” she said.
“Exactly. Which is why I hope nobody will ever think twice about it. I can come back the same way,” he said.
“All right, then. Let’s do it,” she agreed.
“I’ll still have to talk to Philip and Joan about it. None of this will work if they don’t help,” he said.
“They’ll help,” she said confidently.
He had to get back to the lab not long afterward, but that very evening he and Annabelle went over to Philip and Joan’s house to discuss the issue.
“Sure, I’ll take you,” Philip agreed immediately, when he heard the situation.
“I was afraid you’d be a little harder to convince,” Mike admitted. Christopher was playing with blocks on the carpet, and Mike picked him up while they talked. Chris had no objections; he simply sat on Mike’s knee and kept playing with one block in each hand, knocking them together to see how much noise he could make. Philip watched him with a softness in his eyes that wasn’t usually there.
“Well. . . I’d like to make sure Joey is all right, myself. I’ve been wondering about it ever since you first got here. I really do love the little booger, you know,” he said, and Mike almost laughed. The idea of anybody calling Joey a little booger was too funny. If he’d been there, Mike would have rubbed his nose in it without mercy. But he wasn’t, and never would be again, and that was enough to wipe out Mike’s incipient mirth.
“All right, then. If you’ll come over to the house at nine o’clock Saturday morning, I’ll be packed up in the box. Do you think you can carry me out to the car?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think so. You’re not that heavy, and it won’t be very far, anyway,” Philip agreed.
So that’s what they did, and the whole thing went off so flawlessly that Mike had to marvel at how easy it had been. He waited inside the box till they got safely out of the city, and then Philip pulled over on a deserted road to let him out of the trunk. He clambered out, stretching his cramped limbs, and took his place in the passenger seat.
Then they were on their way.