The Time Hackers (8 page)

Frank held up his hand and then, realizing Dorso couldn't see it in the dark alcove, said, “Just a minute. If they could transport people, wouldn't they be doing just that? Maybe it only works when's it's used for time travel somehow.”

“Maybe, but even so, they can still do it just for moving people and not have anything to really do with time travel. Just make it a minute in the past. Let's say we're in London, which we are, but it's present day, and we want to transport ourselves to our houses in the present. All we do is transport ourselves a minute into the past—”

“Or a second, or a half a second,” Frank cut in. “A tenth of a second.”

“Exactly. We go a tenth of a second in the past and bang, we're home and haven't lost any time. We've been transported, essentially, within the present.”

“They've done it. They've figured out how to transport.”

“And all
we've
got to do is figure it out and we can end this whole thing. Get back to the authorities and tell them that everything in the whole world is different now.”

“Oh, wow. I just thought of something. If we can transport—”

Another blinding flash, even brighter in the darkness of the London smog.

“Dorso, you didn't have to do that!”

“It wasn't me!” Dorso just had time to yell. “It wasn't me! There's somebody else!”

This time they were in a room.

There was one electric light hanging from the ceiling, two wooden chairs and a wooden table. None of it looked very old or very new. The boys, and their laptops, arrived in the corner of the room furthest from the table.

There was a solid door with no glass in it, and there were no windows in the room, but to the left of the door a small speaker was mounted in the wall.

Frank stepped across to the door and tried the knob. “It's locked.”

“I'm not surprised.”

There was a rasping sound from the speaker. “Sit at the chairs by the table.” The voice was not loud but low and modulated. Not human. Or perhaps human but spoken through a filter or scrambler or amplifier.

The boys stood for a few seconds without moving and the voice came on again.

“Sit
down!
If you do not, you will be relocated into a pool of water filled with piranhas.”

“How can they see us?” Frank said.

“Microcameras,” Dorso answered. “A tiny dot on the wall.”

“You're very bright,” the voice said. “Yes, we can see you, and hear you. Now sit down. It's for your comfort. We may be here for some time.”

“We might as well.” Dorso knelt and looked beneath the furniture. “I can't see anything wrong.”

The boys moved to the chairs and sat at the table.

“How did you find the players?”

It was a strange voice, but it also seemed to have feeling.

“What do you mean?” Dorso asked.

“Don't be cute,” the voice said. “You know what I'm talking about.”

I'm
, Dorso thought. It's a single person. Of course, he could be anywhere, or, Dorso thought, smiling, any
time
, but something about the voice made him think the person was nearby; almost as if he wanted to meet the boys, to come in and talk to them.

“I see the camera,” Frank whispered without moving his lips. “Over the doorjamb. A dark spot.”

The voice said nothing and Dorso answered the whisper in an even lower voice. “It's not a good mike. He can't hear us if we talk this low.”

“So what do we do?”

“I repeat, how did you find the players?”

“It wasn't intentional,” Dorso said aloud, then whispered to Frank, “Get up and move around so you're blocking me from the camera. Do it slowly, like you're examining the room.”

Frank spoke low. “What are you doing?”

“I'm going to cut off all three laptops so he can't control
us.” Then, in a louder tone: “It was all a mistake. Somehow …”

Frank got up and stood to the side, looking at the table and then the wall, humming. When he was directly in front of Dorso he paused, looking up at the camera.

“Move away, move away from the door and back to your seat!”

Dorso had the three laptops rolled in his hand. He unrolled them, hit the pressure power pads on each, and cut them off. There, he thought, now we shall see what we shall see. “Come on,” he whispered to Frank, “sit back down.”

“Somehow,” he went on loudly, “my laptop was modified to react to your signal. It was all an accident. And you're wrong, we really don't know what's happening. We just keep getting bounced around to all sorts of places without wanting to.”

There was a pause; then, in an exasperated tone, the voice said, “You've turned off the computers.”

“He tried,” Dorso whispered to Frank. “He tried to time-jump us and it didn't work.”

“So now what?”

“Now we wait,” Dorso said softly.

“For what?”

“For the door to open,” Dorso said. “I think he's close and he'll come in to get the laptops. Be ready to run.”

But for a long time it seemed that Dorso was wrong.

There was nothing. No sound from the speaker, no movement at the door. The boys got up and moved around, stretched, whispered.

“Where do you think we are?” Frank asked.

“I think the question might be more
when
do I think we are,” Dorso said. “But either way, I don't have a clue. The walls are drywall, there's electricity, the furniture is modern, so I'd guess we aren't too far in the past, but other than that, who knows? We could be anywhere in the world. I think I know one thing: for this guy to do any more damage to us he's got to get hold of these laptops, and to do
that
he's got to come in here.”

He stopped. The knob on the door turned. The door began to swing open.

“Get ready,” Dorso breathed. “Get ready to run.”

When the door swung open it revealed Darling holding the cat.

“Darling?!” Dorso said. “What are
you
doing here?”

“Play cat,” she said, smiling, looking at Dorso and yet somehow through him. “Play cat,” and then there was a hiss and a glimmer of light. Smiling, she said, “Play cat…”

“It's a trick, a hologram!” Frank yelled. “Jump through it.
Move!
” With the yell he practically climbed Dorso's back and drove him through the door …

… into what looked like Dorso's living room, with his mother standing there.

“Mom?”

“It's another hologram. Keep moving, past the blurry edge, run!”

But Dorso was with him now, knew it was all fake, and he dove through his mother's image, through the replica of his living room, then his own room, then a hologram of his
bicycle (My
bicycle
? he thought), then a montage of blurry images of everything from Custer to Beethoven to his locker and cadavers and finally a wall, with another door, and they piled through
that
door to find themselves not in a living room but a garage, a plain old garage on the side of a house that had been turned into a workshop. There, at a high work chair by a workbench, sat what Dorso could only think of as the perfect 1990s computer geek: a thin, semibald man of about forty with a pocket protector in his shirt pocket full of pens (nobody used pens anymore; very few people wrote at all except electronically). He had thick glasses (nobody wore glasses anymore, since they had corrective eye surgery). On the bench in front of him was a laptop.

“Wait a minute!” Frank stopped dead.
“You're
the game master? You look like Elmer Fudd from those old cartoons!”

But Dorso was moving too fast to stop and he hit the man full on, knocking him sideways. The chair went down with the man on top of it. He had grabbed at his laptop on the way down and held one side of it with Dorso catching the other, his own three laptops flying off into a pile in the corner near where Frank stood.

There was a beat when everything seemed to stop. Frank stood, the man lay on the floor with his laptop in his hand, Dorso on top of him holding the other side of the laptop, the keyboard twisted. Then the man looked at him and smiled a sad little smile and said in a soft voice, “Thank you, and goodbye.” Then he pushed Dorso five or six feet away and hit F1 and WS on the keyboard. There was a brief flash
of light—though not nearly as intense as before—and he was gone.

Dorso and Frank were still there in the workshop, but the man was gone.

“Man,” Frank said, “you almost had that laptop!”

Some seconds passed while Dorso thought about what had just happened. Then he stood and brushed his knees where they had ground into the dirty garage floor. “He's gone.”

“I know. I saw him vanish.”

“No. I saw his eyes. Something was there, something … not quite right. The way he smiled and said ‘Thank you, and goodbye.' Like he was really sad. I think he's gone, and what's more—”

He was interrupted by a rustling in the corner where he'd thrown the three laptops. As he and Frank watched there was a blur of light and a wiggle and the two captured laptops vanished. Dorso's, which had been resting on top of them, dropped an inch to the floor.

“I mean, he's gone.”

“Where?”

“It will be like he was never here. The chip in my computer is gone, all of the images, the changes in time are gone.”

“I'll bet he went back,” Frank said, “and killed his grandfather.”

“Maybe. Something like that. Maybe. Heck,
I
don't know. Nothing like this has ever happened before—how could anybody know?”

“But if he's gone, I mean, like he really wasn't there to
begin with, then how come we still know about him? How can he be in our memories …” Frank trailed off. “I just had a really bad thought.”

Dorso smiled, a small smile not unlike the one the man had given him. “Just one? I've had about four hundred, and that's just in the last three or four minutes. Like how about all the good that could have been done instead of just a game and all the silly pranks? We could have saved Lincoln, saved JFK, could have maybe ended wars before they began, stopped the plague—”

“Where are we?” Frank cut in. “Not just when, but where? With that whole transporter thing we could be anywhere in the world.”

“I think I know, but let's step outside to make sure.”

They went to the side door in the garage. Dorso opened it and they moved out into a bright, sunshiny day. Birds were singing, small clouds moved serenely across a blue sky, and before they had taken two steps Frank yelped.

“We're on Fourth Street! There's Anderson's Funeral
Parlor…. ”

Dorso nodded. “And more to the point, we're in the present. He just used this garage as a place to meet us. It's not really his workshop. He doesn't live here. It was just a place to bring us so he could get the laptops.”

“But he didn't need to,” Frank said. “All he had to do was go back in time and make them not happen.”

“Right,” Dorso said, smiling. “I'd forgotten that.” He sighed, tired now—exhausted—but more too: sad. Why, he thought, am I sad? “Maybe he just wanted to meet us.”

“Sure. Man cheats time, makes a game of destroying the
universe and then wants to meet a couple of podunk kids from a small town. Happens all the time. I'll tell you what I think, I think he's vanished in time and we'll never see him again, and I'm glad it's that way. He scared me half to death with those eyes and pens and pocket protector. I mean, you don't know
what
he might do.”

“I don't know. I'd like to meet him again. There was something in his eyes that I kind of liked. But I suppose you're right—we'll never hear from him again.”

But this time Frank was wrong.

Weeks passed, then months, and at first there was some investigating because the time security officer remembered that he had jumped through time and a whole bunch of people had shot his desk full of arrows and then the arrows had strangely disappeared. But there was no odd chip in Dorso's computer, and the factory had no indication of anything strange happening, and there was no sign anywhere of the little man with the pocket protector and the ballpoint pens.

In time the security man's memory faded and when there was no evidence and no further strange happenings even Dorso and Frank stopped talking about it.