Pinball (22 page)

What they were planning to do was open a Gate to Nigel’s office on a date prior to the time when Callie had placed her order for the Mini-Guardian and place a hold in North Central Positronic’s computer system that indicated that she was not to be permitted to lease the machine. That, they figured, would prevent any of the Guardian-related events from happening.

As far as Lynne’s accident, well, Callie was still working on that.    

Chapter 82

Irene pulled the Durango to a stop as they reached the parking lot exit. “Oh, my. I just remembered that Scotty asked me to get him some smokes on the way home. I better go back and get those.” She turned her truck around and headed back to the store.

Just as she parked in front of the store, a semi-tractor driven by one Melvin Settlemoir pulled in to the parking lot and stopped in front of the automotive service area. Settlemoir climbed out of the truck and went inside, looking for someone to mount a replacement tire on his rig.

Chapter 83

Steven and Callie watched as Nigel went through the Gate that the Gatekeeper created, which was the same color as the one Callie had pulled Steven through but the size of a double car garage door. Nigel waited until his past-office was vacant, then stepped through, swiftly entered a few characters on his computer’s touchscreen, and stepped back through the Gate.

“There we go,” he said.

Steven looked doubtful. “If all of that never happened, why are we still here?” he asked.

“We are standing inside a kronostabilizer field that the Gatekeeper generates,” Michael explained. “It keeps those inside its effect from doing what we call ‘rubberbanding,’ that is, immediately assuming the current timeline as it is ordered by whatever actions may have just occurred on the other side of the Gate. Now, once we power down the Gatekeeper — or we step out of the kronostabilizer field — then what will happen is it’ll be sort of like everything resets to whatever the point of divergence was, the point prior to which events are the same in both the old and new timelines. Steven looked a little dazed. “You may feel a little disoriented when that happens,” Michael added.

“Are we ready?” Nigel asked. Steven, Callie and Michael nodded. To Steven’s surprise, Callie reached over and took his hand.

Nigel pressed the power switch. Steven was not at all surprised to see that it was a very large red button.

Chapter 84

Irene pulled her truck into the Denver’s driveway and Lynne caught sight of the turquoise Jeep Cherokee. “Oh, good, it looks like Steve’s home,” Lynne said as they drove up the gravel driveway. “I wonder why he didn’t pick us up? Well, thanks for the —”

Just then Lynne realized that most of the front of the house was a pile of debris. “Oh, my God,” she exclaimed, “Oh, God!”

She threw open the door of Irene’s truck and ran to the house, looking into the huge hole that had been left by the Mini-Guardian. Nancy and Irene got out of the Durango and followed her, not knowing what to say. They stepped carefully through the wreckage where the front door used to be, scanning to see whether anyone was inside.

“Steve! Steve?” Lynne cried, terror in her voice.

“Maybe he wasn’t here,” said Nancy. “I don’t think the kids are home yet.”

Lynne glanced at her watch. “No, they won’t get home for a few minutes yet. My God, what do you think did this?”

“I have no idea,” Irene said. “It looks like it’d have to have been a backhoe or something.”

Nancy nodded her head in agreement. “This is crazy… we better make sure Steve’s not in there somewhere.”

The three women walked through the wreckage-strewn house, half expecting to discover Steven wounded or dead.

Chapter 85

As the Gatekeeper shut down, Steven expected to feel some kind of rush of disorientation like what he’d experienced when Callie had yanked him through the Gate to rescue him from the Mini-Guardian. Instead, Michael and Nigel seemed to fade away in a haze, but he and Callie were still standing in the staging area, her hand holding his tightly.

Steven looked around for a moment, then at Callie. “We’re still here?”

She smiled. “I grabbed your hand so that my kronostabilizer field would surround you, too. Even though the Gatekeeper’s field is gone, mine is keeping us here.” She reached into her pocket and handed Steven a small silver electronic device. “Put this in your pocket.” Once he had done so, she let go of his hand and he looked down and saw he was surrounded by the same soft golden glow that she possessed. “Now we can go back to my place and figure out exactly where and when to get you back home.”

A North Central Positronics employee saw them standing there and walked over. “Can I help you?” he asked. They came up with an excuse for being there and made for the exit, laughing as they went. They got into Callie’s car and returned to her condo.

Steven waited while Callie booted her computer. “Okay,” she said. “Let me verify that things are getting back to normal at the old homestead.” She squinted at the screen.

She looked up at Steven, her eyes huge. “Uhm… I don’t know why, but the records I am seeing show that as of November 2009, your address is, and
always has been,
a vacant lot.”

Chapter 86

Steven was pacing the room now, frantic with worry as Callie continued to work at her computer.

“What do you mean a vacant lot?” Steven said. “It’s
always been
a vacant lot? What the hell did we do? Jimmy Two Eagles’ grandparents lived in that house for, like,
forty years
before we bought it in 1995.
What did we do?
” 

“I don’t know, but try to stay calm,” Callie said. “There’s nothing we can do that can’t be undone. Nothing we can break that we can’t fix.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Steven as a chill ran up his spine.

Chapter 87

Marcus Aurelius Valens was a soldier in the Legio III Brittania of the Roman Army. His father, Fabius Valens of Anagnia had been the commander of Legio I Germanica based in Germania Inferior, and had fathered a child to one of the servant women in his household. The boy was raised as a Roman, and entered the Roman Army at the age of seventeen.

He was assigned to III Brittania at the age of twenty, and was part of the force that was sent into the western part of the isle which later came to be the nation of Wales.

In the second year of his assignment there, Valens was sent to deliver a message from his field commander to the Roman governor of the island. As he rode the long journey from Glevum to Londinium, he stopped near Verulamium for the night.

Searching for a suitable camping site, he happened across a cave mouth which flickered with a curious green aura. Climbing into the cave to investigate, he encountered loose footing when he stepped on some broken rock in the cave floor and fell into the cave. He fell directly into the vortex which had formed there and found himself trapped in the void. 

Chapter 88

Callie worked tirelessly at her computer screen for over an hour, muttering to herself under her breath in that Midwestern accent that Steven now found tremendously endearing, although part of him wanted to strangle her for screwing up his timeline.
On the other hand, if she hadn’t intervened, who knows how things might have gone?
he thought.

He watched her as she peered intently at something on her screen, then tapped in more data. He didn’t know whether she was typing in text, or numeric codes, or what, and he figured he was probably better off not knowing. Still, he was insatiably curious.

At one point, when it seemed as if Callie’s mood was lighter, he dared to ask, “Are things getting back to normal?”

“Not quite yet. But I did find out why the land had always been vacant.”

“Really?” Steven perked up.

“Yeah. It was supposed to be haunted,” Callie answered.

“Haunted?” Steven laughed. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. According to the records I found, the land where your house is — or was, or whatever — lies at what is considered the northern end of the Gallatin Valley.” Steven nodded. He was familiar with the geography of the area.

“According to these records, none of the Native American tribes in the area, which included the Blackfoot, the Crow, the Bannock, the Nez Percé, and several others, ever claimed the Valley as their own territory,” she continued. “The Blackfeet, however, had a name for the area. They called it ‘Ahkoto waktai sakum,’ which basically means, ‘Many come together country.’”

“And I’d guess that refers to the joining of the three rivers — the Jefferson, the Madison and the Gallatin — that form the Missouri,” Steven said. 

“Yup,” Callie said. Now here’s the interesting part. There was a legend among the tribes in the area that the Gallatin Valley, which they called the Valley of Flowers, was neutral territory. According to this, there’s a huge variety of wild flowers that grow in the area.”

“Yeah, Lynne loves to go looking at all the wildflowers,” said Steven. His face fell. “We’ve got to get things back on track,” he said in a strained tone. “I can’t lose her.”

“I told you, don’t worry,” Callie said. “At any rate, there’s a story I found in a local newspaper from 1944 that may explain the anomaly. It says that a small group of Blackfoot families settled in the area, following the relaxation of some of the stricter regulations that had made most Native Americans prefer to remain on the established reservations. They bought a pretty large parcel of land — about 1100 acres — from a rancher who was retiring. Several of the families built homes up and down the various rivers, but — get this — the area where your house is, or was… there were several times between 1877 and 1940 that people reported seeing a ‘spirit door’ there, described as looking like the entrance of a tipi but ‘shining with the color of grass.’ What does that sound like to you?”

Steven gasped. “A Gate?”

“It’s been proven that events that affect space-time can cause echoes of themselves that can show up in other times, usually at or near the same location. You don’t think…?” Callie’s blue eyes were huge now.

“When the Gate closed that the Guardian had come through, it somehow made a copy of itself that showed up almost a hundred years earlier?” Steven said.

“That’s what it sounds like,” Callie frowned. “I’ve been trying to avoid this, because the less interaction you have with people from our time, the better, but I’m gonna call in my Uncle Andrew. He’s way better at this kinda stuff than I am.”

She pressed in something on her computer screen and waited. There was a brief chiming sound, and then a man’s voice. Callie kept her eyes on the screen; Steven surmised it was a video call.

“Hello, Lulu,” it said. The voice was husky, like that of someone who’s smoked for forty years. Did people still smoke in Callie’s time? Steven had no idea. “What’s going on?”

“Well, you know how I have been trying to pinball Greatfather Steven’s writing career,” Callie replied.

“Right,” said Andrew. “I heard that there were some anomalies.”

“You could say that,” she said, smiling at Steven. “Greatfather… uh… he’s here with me right now.”

“What? Oh, Lulu, you know that can cause all sorts of issues.”

“Yeah, I know, but it was kind of unavoidable… and now we have what I think is a Gate echo anomaly causing more problems. Could you come and help?”

There was a pause. “Yes, I think that’d be the best way to handle it. I’ll see you in 20.” Steven heard a faint blip, evidently Andrew disconnecting the call. 

“Lulu?” Steven smiled.

Callie sighed. “That’s what everyone in my family calls me. My full name is Calliope Louise. I don’t much care for it, but what can you do?”

They sat quietly for a while, waiting for Andrew to arrive. Steven became hesitant to initiate much in the way of conversation, after being told twice by Callie that she couldn’t answer questions he posed because it could affect the timeline.
You certainly didn’t seem to have a problem telling me about the future earlier,
he thought, but upon reflection he realized that perhaps that could have contributed to their present problems and maybe that was why she was now hesitant to tell him anything more. 

There was a chime and Callie got up to let her uncle in. They returned shortly, and Steven looked at Andrew with the practiced eye of a writer figuring out how he would describe Andrew if he were a character in a book.

He was short, rather swarthy, with cropped black hair, silver at the temples. His pudgy cheeks bore the scars of what Steven supposed had once been a teenager’s acne problem.
They still get acne 600 years in the future,
he thought. He wore a burnt orange collarless shirt and pants and a cloaklike garment of a fabric similar to that of Callie’s robe, although his was a metallic charcoal color.

Andrew walked across the room and bowed to Steven, Japanese-style. “Welcome, Greatfather.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d speak to me,” said Steven, “Butterfly wings begetting hurricanes as they do.”

Andrew smiled a thin smile. “The damage has been done, but since the remainder of our family doesn’t seem to have been snuffed out like a candle flame, I don’t think it’s too terribly serious. Let’s see if we can’t get you back to your proper point in space-time and remedy any of the effects all this may have caused.”

Callie began to detail for Andrew the various events that had transpired: her initial transaction with North Central Positronics; Steven’s excursions to Centra and the subsequent enslavement of both he and Samuel; the auto accident that had taken Lynne’s life and alternate-Steven’s eventual suicide; the efforts they had made to undo everything else that had happened, and finally the apparent echo in space-time that had caused the family that had built Steven and Lynne’s house never to have done so.

This was the first time Steven had heard many of the details of the past events that had been deleted from his mind by the various recycles of the timeline, and he sat looking a little shellshocked.