Written in Time (43 page)

His wife had him there. He’d never felt their remarks were in good taste, let alone funny.
 

“All right, we’re out of here.” He snatched up his hat in one hand, taking his wife’s elbow in the other.
 

***

Without an injured girl to look after, and riding fresh horses at a steady trot, they were able to cover the sixteen or seventeen miles to Ellen’s last campsite in a little over an hour, resting the horses for fifteen minutes when they’d covered approximately half the distance.
 

Aside from Jack himself and his Marlin rifle, saddlebags with extra ammunition and a canteen comprised Barbie’s load. Ellen rode Victoria, one of the Palomino ponies Lizzie treated more like pets than anything else. Jack’s anachronistic .45 Colt Winchester was scabbarded on her saddle, and her saddlebags, too, carried extra cartridges. But slung from the right side of her saddle horn—her canteen was on the left—was a camera bag. It housed Ellen’s oldest and most trusted 35mm, surrounded by plastic bubble wrap, a wide-angle and a telephoto lens, each similarly cushioned, and three thirty-six-shot rolls of her precious film. Ellen had been about ready to give in to temptation and leave a note in the capsule at the time-transfer site, asking for more film to be sent back to her. But if the original time base from which Clarence and Peggy had shipped out was somehow compromised, such conveniences might be impossible or, at least, impossibly dangerous.
 

Peggy was the logical person to view this suspected time base in the subjective past, the objective present. But Peggy’s medical talents were too valuable to risk, especially with Lizzie having been wounded.
 

An errant gust of wind caught Ellen’s hair, blowing some strands across her lips. She pushed them away. A hat, complete with stampede string, hung from her saddle, but she’d be damned if she’d wear a hat; hats sucked even more than skirts.
 

“Jack?” Ellen asked her husband, giving Victoria a little heel to bring the palomino up alongside Barbie. “If there is a time base there—and it sure looked like one—then what do we do about it?”
 

Thumbing his hat back from his forehead, he slowed his mount a little. “Nothing. We get the pictures. After that, we go to the original time-transfer site where Clarence and Peggy arrived. We look in the capsule and see if there’s any message for us possibly explaining it. You develop your film, Peggy checks it out. We place a duplicate set of prints in the capsule and hope they don’t deteriorate too badly in almost a century. Black-and-white film was a good idea for this. If we get an answer back, we make our decision accordingly. If we get no answer, we’ll know that this second time transfer spot is even more menacing than we’re already imagining it to be. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”
 

Jack urged Barbie ahead with his knees. Ellen let her borrowed mount fall back a stride, then gave the palomino her heels. By merest chance, the contours of the terrain took them westward for a short distance. She felt like Dale Evans, riding off into the sunset beside her cowboy hero. The sun was, in fact, setting.
 

The moon was bright, the sky all but cloudless.
 

Thunder rumbled, it seemed, from within the mountains, not without. If a storm was brewing, as indeed it seemed one might be, the tempest would be manmade. “I was trying to figure in my head,” Jack Naile told his wife as they dismounted their horses.
 

“I still have some Tylenol for the headache.”
 

“Very funny.”
 

“What were you trying to figure out?”
 

“What time it is where we came from. I mean, the date.”
 

“Beats me,” Ellen declared. “Late 1990s, right? Like 1996.”
 

“I got as far as calculating that it was October, there. Here we are,” Jack told her, “about to reelect President McKinley, and there they are about to reelect President Clinton, at least if things haven’t changed since the last time we checked the time capsule.”
 

“It’s kind of sad about President McKinley,” Ellen blurted out. “You’d think we could warn him or something that there’s an assassin waiting out there for him next year.”
 

“If we did warn President McKinley that there’s a bullet with his name on it,” Jack mused, “then Theodore Roosevelt might never succeed him as president, might never be elected in 1904, and the history of the United States, of the whole world, could be changed in ways we could never imagine. Teddy Roosevelt was/will be one of the greatest presidents in American history,” Jack added superfluously.
 

“This isn’t fun, Jack. Knowing the future isn’t fun at all.”
 

Ellen’s camera bag was heavy as Jack Naile slung it to his left shoulder. With his right hand, he slipped the Marlin from its saddle scabbard.
 

Ellen repeated, “Not fun at all,” as she drew the Winchester from her saddle.
 

***

Ellen Naile was reminded of standing once near a very large, open field, the night very dark and still. She was a little girl at the time, visiting with one set out of several pairs of aunts and uncles. This particular aunt and uncle lived in Wisconsin and had a neat house that was well away from town. Fireflies were everywhere in the field, moving in seemingly random patterns, like beautiful shimmering stars in some crazy race through the heavens. Another uncle’s car started; time to go. The car’s headlights switched on, the flickering lights from the fireflies instantly vanishing. This night, the moon was so bright that it was almost painful to look at, the sky perfect and clear, and the stars that would have been visible close to the moon, like the fireflies in that long ago field, were lost in the glare.
 

The night would have been romantic, with Jack lying beside her beneath that moon and the hidden stars, but the guns, the camera and the time transfer base about a city block or so distant from the broad, flat rocks in which they hid negated all happy thoughts.
 

Jack had insisted. “We can’t get too close. We’re lucky we haven’t tripped perimeter alarms already.”
 

“The characters in our books can always neutralize stuff like that.”
 

“Knowing how to do it and being able to do it are two different things. I could write an article on how to swim. But can I swim?”
 

“You swim like a rock.”
 

“Pumice is rock. It floats. I swim worse than a rock.”
 

There was something visible in the spot below them that reminded Ellen of something she had researched for one of their novels. She saw it there within the time base behind the chain link fence, saw the picture from a research book in her mind’s eye. The connection eluded her. “What do you call that thing?”
 

“What thing?”
 

“That thing! There!” Her mother had always told her that it was impolite to point, but if she’d heeded her mother’s advice, she never would have married Jack. “That!”
 

That at which she pointed was a large object about three times the size of a passenger elevator, sheathed in gray metal. It hadn’t been at the time-transfer base when she had observed the site fewer than twenty-four hours earlier.
 

“That? It looks like it’s an industrial-sized generator, but it can’t be, because there wouldn’t be any purpose for it. You wouldn’t need something that large for lights, computers, like that.”
 

“What if this is designed to be a revolving door, Jack?”
 

“A revolving door? Like in a department store? What— oh, shit.”
 

“To generate enough electrical power to really do some serious time-traveling back and forth, but in this period in history . . .”
 

Ellen let the words hang.
 

Jack finished the sentence for her. “You’d go nuclear. You’re not powering a couple of states or even a city, so you wouldn’t need a large reactor. You’d need plenty of shielding for the safety of the personnel.”
 

“What did Three Mile Island look like that time you were in Harrisburg?” Ellen asked.
 

“A lot bigger,” he advised. “What you’d probably need—we’ll have to ask Peggy—but it would be something maybe the size of the reactor package that would go into a nuclear powered surface vessel.”
 

Ellen had the old Pentax camera to her eye and was playing with the light meter and the film speed. She upped the shutter speed. The time-transfer base was well-illuminated, but surrounded by blackest night, no moonlight filtering down yet into the still-shadowy dish-shaped depression in which it was set. It was the classic case of what she could see the camera might not be able to see. She would push the film as much as possible, bracketing the shots so that—hopefully—she’d get something.
 

As she steadied the camera for the first shot, there was so brilliant a flash of light that it momentarily blinded her, a thunder clap so loud in the next instant that she could have sworn the ground shook with it. “Jack!”
 

“It’s alright! I think.”
 

Ellen blinked her eyes, blinked again, squeezing them tightly shut for an instant. When she looked again toward the time base, coronas of light appearing and disappearing everywhere within the facility, her eyes were drawn beyond the generator-looking thing to the flat surface at the precise center of the fenced-off area, in size and appearance looking like a helicopter landing pad. She brought the camera up and started clicking, hoping for at least one shot to come out.
 

Materializing out of the still wildly flickering light, shimmering as if, somehow, it weren’t fully formed, was a capsule about the size of a 1960s Volkswagen bus but shaped and metallic in appearance like an Airstream trailer without wheels.
 

The shimmering stopped. Jack murmured, “Holy shit.”
 

A side of the capsule opened, a doorway appearing in what had seemed seamless. A manshape, hooded, arms bound with heavy leather straps, tumbled from inside the capsule. As the manshape slammed hard against the flat surface of concrete, Ellen noticed that the person’s hands were cuffed from behind. Someone very dangerous, or someone in very serious trouble. She guessed the latter.
 

A tall man stepped out of the capsule. Six feet or better in stature, he was one of those men whose build made it appear that he was suited up for a football game beneath his street clothes; his shoulders, chest and thighs were so massive, it was as if they were not muscle and bone but heavy padding. The clothes he wore were almost nondescript, expensive looking but bland. A tweed sportcoat, a black polo shirt, faded once-black jeans.
 

Through the telephoto lens, she saw that he had a gun stuffed in the waistband of his trousers. As he bent over the hooded figure on the concrete apron, he adjusted the position of the weapon.
 

Rolling the hapless person over, the big man tore the hood away. Ellen said the word as a gasp. “David!”
 

She looked away, at Jack. His binoculars—to be more precise, his maternal grandfather’s French-made binoculars dating from 1886—were trained on the tableau below. “It’s not David. He looks like David, but he isn’t David.”
 

Ellen snapped another photo, put down the camera, and picked up the rubber-armored Bushnell binoculars from beside her camera case. As she brought them into focus, seeing the figure on the ground in greater definition, she realized that Jack was right. The prisoner of this mountain-sized brute was not David, but enough like him to be . . . “He could be David’s brother or son, they look so much—”
 

“Try David’s great-grandson, our great-great-grandson. That’s gotta be Alan Naile. And that brick-shithouse-sized fucker just brought him here to kill him, I bet.”
 

“What’ll we do? We’ve got to stop it, Jack!”
 

“It’s perfect, perfect, a perfect crime. Take somebody ninety-six years into the past and kill him. By the time the guy turns up missing, his body will have been rotted away for almost a century. The body couldn’t be identified in the past because the victim hasn’t been born yet.”
 

“This is creepy, Jack. We’ve got to do something.”
 

“I’m thinking. Let’s watch for a minute.”
 

That was a sensible decision, Ellen thought, tacitly agreeing with her husband, however irritated she was by his patience.
 

This was her great-great-grandson. At her age, that was scary enough to consider. And it appeared he was in imminent danger of losing his life, which made matters worse.
 

The hulking villain of the piece hauled Alan Naile to his feet, backhanded him across the face, then shoved him into the waiting arms of three men, all of whom were dressed in cowboy clothes. A fourth man walked up behind them, leading six horses and not seeming to have such an easy time of it. The big man walked over and grabbed the reins for two of the horses, keeping the animals in check while Alan was all but thrown into the saddle of an uncharacteristically small buckskin.
 

Alan’s hands were still manacled behind him, arms still strapped close to his sides. An ordinary rope was looped around his waist and secured to the saddle horn.
 

The big man—awkwardly—mounted an overweight-looking chestnut mare with black mane and tail, an animal evidently chosen because it was docile and the man riding it would be inexperienced. The other four men clambered up into their saddles, none of them looking exactly comfortable on horseback.
 

Jack’s lips were suddenly beside her left ear. “Odds are, they’re taking him some distance away to kill him and ditch the body.”