Pinball (20 page)

“Nancy.”

“
Drive her and Nancy to work and pick them up.
Maybe put URGENT in capital letters, underlined.”

He did as she directed, and looked at her. “Now what?”

“Now, I woiks mah magic,” Callie said with a smile.

She held up her arm. On her wrist was a silver device that resembled a watch. She held her wrist so that the “face” of the “watch” away from the both of them and pressed a tiny button on its side. A greenish beam shot out and began to move in circles, reminding Steven of a Pink Floyd laser light show he’d seen at the fair one year.

In the middle of the circle the beam described, a swirling whirlpool began to form. It became translucent and then nearly transparent, like an emerald colored lens.

“Take a look in there,” Callie said.

Steven cautiously moved toward the swirl, wondering if it was going to suck him in. He drew near and peered into the opening.

Through the strange green swirl he could see what seemed to be his desk at home. He saw his computer, his chair, everything he found familiar.

“If you leave the note on your desk, will you find it first thing in the morning, or maybe before you go to bed? It’s somewhere between 9 and 10 pm there,” Callie said.

“On what day?” Steven said, puzzled.

“The day before she dies,” Callie replied.

Suddenly everything clicked for Steven. “Yes. Yes!” he said. “I never go to bed until at least midnight, and I always check my e-mail before I do, so…”

“Then just reach through the Gate and put the note on your desk,” Callie told him. “Let me shift the view around a sec to make sure the room is empty.”

“If someone comes in, will they be able to see us?” asked Steven.

“This is a one-way Gate,” Callie replied. “That’s why you don’t wanna step all the way through it, because it’ll close behind you and you won’t be able to come back through. But it’s completely invisible from the other side, apart from the fact that if someone saw you reach through they’d see this disembodied arm reaching out of midair.”

She pressed another button and the view through the Gate revolved 360°. Just then the bedroom door opened and Lynne walked in with a basket of laundry in her arms. She looked tired, but Steven thought she was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen in his life. They waited until she set the basket on the bed and left the room, and Callie quickly swiveled the view back around to the desk. Steven quickly reached through and laid the note on the computer keyboard where past-Steven would be sure to see it.      

He withdrew his arm and Callie closed the Gate.

“Now what?” he asked.

“We wait.”

Chapter 73

Steven stood in front of the open refrigerator, trying to decide what he wanted for a late night snack. There wasn’t a lot — it was a week before payday and while the cupboard wasn’t quite bare, pickings were a trifle slim.

He found some cream cheese and a slice of chopped ham. While he waited for the toaster to pop up, he poured a glass of tea and stood looking out the window at the lights in the distance.

Lynne came out of the bedroom and said, “Honey, there’s a basket of clothes on the bed. Would you put them away for me, please?”

Steven said, “Sure, baby doll. Let me make this sandwich and I’ll be in there.”

He finished assembling the sandwich, went into the bedroom, put the glass of tea on his desk and took a bite.
Hmm,
he thought,
what’s this?

He picked up the piece of legal paper, unfolded it, and read these words:

DO NOT LET LYNNE DRIVE TO WORK TOMORROW

YOU NEED TO DRIVE HER AND NANCY

VERY
VERY
VERY
URGENT
.

He frowned, wondering where the note had come from. He folded it back, put it in his shirt pocket, and proceeded to put the clothes away.

Later, after watching some television, Steven sat down to check his e-mail before getting ready for bed. He felt the paper in his pocket and pulled out the note. He sat for a moment, wondering whether he should ask Lynne about it, but he decided to follow his gut instinct and follow the note’s instructions. He sat on the edge of the bed, where she was propped up against the headboard reading a book.

“Lynne,” he said, “I need to run to Bozeman tomorrow to pick up a few things. Can I drive you and Nancy to work so that I can keep the car?”

She looked over at him and raised one eyebrow slightly. “Pick up a few things? Honey, we won’t have any money until next week.”

He hesitated only a split second. “I know, but I had something on back order. It’s important that I take care of it tomorrow.”

Lynne’s eyebrows wrinkled slightly and she said, “Well, sure, Steve. Whatever you need to do.”

He breathed a slow sigh of relief as he lay down next to his wife. He didn’t know why, but he felt an immense weight seem to lift off of his shoulders.

Chapter 74

In the morning, Steven awoke, got up and dressed and was ready to head out the door before anyone else, a spark of nervous energy propelling him. The kids got moving pretty quickly and made the bus when it arrived, which was a great relief.
One less thing to deal with this morning,
he thought.

The ride to work was uneventful, apart from having to wait several minutes for Nancy to come out of her house. The two women chatted all the way into town, and Steven dropped them off at the teachers’ entrance at 7:20 am. Kissing his wife goodbye, he said, “Have a great day, honey, and I’ll see you tonight.” He wondered what would have happened had he ignored the note and let her drive to work as usual, but decided that dwelling on that question might just drive him a little insane.
More insane than you are now,
he thought.

Steven stopped at the Town Pump convenience store on the way home and bought a large coffee (three sweeteners) and a sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich with his last three dollars.

He drove home, his mind wandering once again to the topic of where the mysterious note had come from. His writer’s imagination began to formulate all sorts of ideas as to its origin, envisioning everything from a mischievous prankster to a supernatural intervention. How someone might have gotten into the house unnoticed, however, or when it might have happened, he had no earthly idea. All that he knew was that he’d been on the computer until about six, and then gone to the kitchen to eat dinner; afterwards he had watched a movie with the entire family in the living room, and then he’d found the note at about 9:30 pm. That meant that the only realistic possibility was that one of the kids had left it, but what motivation would any of them have had to do something like that?

Maybe there is a valid reason that the note was left,
he thought,
but what could it have been?
Pulling into his driveway, he parked the car and sat for a moment, still puzzling over it. Finally he got out of the car and walked into the house to find that the kids had left the television on and Spongebob was having his typical issues. He left it on as background noise and carried his coffee and sandwich in to the computer.

“Oh, I am
way
the hell behind,” he thought to himself, looking at the calendar on the computer screen. The deadline that had been set by his publisher for initial completion of his third novel was less than 90 days away. He’d made a number of false starts, but the insanely busy day he’d had yesterday, not to mention the mysterious note, had completely distracted him from the project at hand.

He sat eating the sandwich and stared out the window at the Bridger Mountains in the distance. He was not quite in full panic mode. Not yet.
I can do this,
he told himself, running his hand through his thick brown hair.

If I can maintain 1,700 words a day,
Steven thought to himself,
That’s over 50,000 words a month, and 150,000 in three months.
His actual goal for this book was 100,000 words, which would leave him a month or so to revise and edit it.

I may sometimes fall short of that,
he thought, humans becoming easily distracted as they… He laughed at some kind of inane comment on the TV.
Oh, wait. Must concentrate on writing.

He thought to himself, “What would Hemingway do in this situation?” Well, first of all, Hemingway would likely have been drinking something substantially stronger than the coffee he was sipping, even though it was only 8:32 am.
I like a little nip now and then, but I’m not the type to get my wick lit this early in the morning.

He stared at the keyboard and frowned. He’d had an idea for a tale about a pathetic little man named Arthur Ball who woke up one morning and decided to change his life, but now that idea seemed insipid.
What the hell am I going to write about?

Now there was a knock at the door. What the fuck, he thought. No one ever came to the door. If it’s a Jehovah’s Witness, he thought, I swear to God I’m gonna go find something sharp and pointed.

It wasn’t a Jehovah’s Witness, though. It was the UPS delivery guy. Steven had ordered some guitar strings the week before from an online supplier and felt a surge of anticipation. It would cut into his writing time, but changing his guitar strings would be a decent excuse for putting off writing, particularly since he still didn’t have any real idea of what he was going to write about.

He answered the door, but much to his disappointment, the package wasn’t his strings, but a shipment of yarn that Lynne had ordered several weeks before. He signed for the package and headed back to his computer.
Now can I get back to writing? Please?

Suddenly there was a roaring sound outside like some kind of monster construction project was going on in the front yard. It sounded as if someone was digging up a sewer line. He went to the living room window and peeked out through the blinds.

He stared in shock at what he saw. There was some kind of huge monster machine devouring the ground right down to the bedrock, and was headed right this way. It looked like a huge ostrich or maybe a dodo bird, and as he stared, frozen to the spot, it turned and seemed to stare directly at him with its gleaming red solitary eye, then charged directly for the window, its metal beak opening wide like that of a hungry bird of prey as if it intended to burst through and devour him.

As Steven let out a terrified scream, a shimmering green aura exploded around him and he suddenly found himself somewhere else. He stood, still in the defensive crouch that he had instinctively assumed as the thing had approached, but as he looked around in wonder, he realized that his house, the yard, the nearby hills, all were gone.

He stood up and gazed around at a room that was pure white. It reminded him of the scene late in
2001: A Space Odyssey
where astronaut Dave Bowman finds himself in a white room, but instead of encountering himself as an old man, there was a young blonde woman in a sort of gold kimono sitting on a white cylinder.

“Third time’s a charm,” she said with a weary half-smile.

Chapter 75

Back in 2013 Montana, the front window of the small white house and the siding and studs that made up the front wall exploded inward as the mechanical bird-thing ripped into them with its beak, intent on destroying the biological target it had sensed inside. The sensor array in its “eye” detected a flash of kronos particles which indicated a Gate had been opened. The Mini-Guardian went into idle mode as it processed the fact that its prey had escaped.

Breaking off its attack, the mechanical bird did a sudden turnabout, moving to a clear area. Its mission batch program moved on to its next assignment, and it engaged its own kronos generator, opening an emerald green vortex in midair and disappearing into it.

Chapter 76

“That was a close one,” Callie said. “If I’d have been a few seconds later — well, but then I suppose I’d have just created another Gate and aimed for a minute earlier.”

Steven stared at her in disbelief. “Who are you, and where the fuck
are
we?” he demanded.

“Every time I show up, you’re so full of questions,” she chirped, “And I just jabber on, forgetting that you don’t know what’s going on.”  

Steven stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

“I hope the fact that I keep telling you about the future isn’t what’s making everything go bad over and over,” she said. “But here goes nothing. I’ve been to see you before, but you don’t remember it.”

“I don’t understand,” Steven said.

“Of course you don’t. You never do,” she smiled. “You don’t remember those other visits because each time, things take just a little different course, and we
change
things slightly — or sometimes more than slightly, but the point is that we change things in a way that makes the other visits unnecessary, so according to the flow of time that you’re experiencing, it’s like they never even happened. The first time, I just tried to give you some inspiration that would make your book more successful, because in my time you have a pretty decent legacy as a writer,” she smiled, “unfortunately, the programming in the Mini-Guardian that I leased was on the fritz and it decided to actually try to eat you instead of just acting big and bad.”

“
You
sent that thing after me?”

“Well, technically. But it wasn’t supposed to actually
hurt
anything. We think it must have run into a singularity on its way to your timepoint — what you’d call a black hole. They mess with time
and
space, and if there’s one too close to a location adjacent to a Gate, well… let’s just say it can cause some weird anomalies. Mighta fused one of the positronic logic chips in its brain.”

Steven stood staring at her. “Who
are
you?”