“So let me get this straight,” Sherri said. “In 2016, Duster and Bonnie will allow others besides me to travel in time. And one of those others is you. Correct?”
“They will,” Carson said, nodding. “Historians, mostly. I have a number of degrees on various aspects of the American West. Duster invited me to go back with him at one point to see if some of my research had been right.”
“So at some point in another timeline, you two will meet again. Correct?” Sherri asked.
“Only that time I won’t remember it,” Carson said, smiling, “because at that point I won’t have yet come back here and built this place.”
Sherri just shook her head and muttered something about how time travel could give her a headache.
“You’re not the only one,” Duster said.
“So how does this work now?” Sherri asked. “Or at least in your future now?”
Carson nodded to her. She was really, really smart, of that he had no doubt, and he liked that a lot about her.
“Since each trip into the past only takes a few minutes of real time, even though the traveler can be gone for thirty or forty years, Duster and Bonnie didn’t need to set up any new devices. We all just use the one. I think at one point, Duster, you told me there were fifty people back in the past living at the same time, doing research. But not all of them left at the same time in the present.”
“Wow,” Duster said, smiling at his wife. “Who knew we would do that?”
Bonnie shook her head. “We’ve been talking about it, which was why we decided to test this on Sherri. She’s the first.”
“Oh, yeah,” Duster said, laughing.
“So, had you met me before?” Sherri asked Carson, holding his gaze.
“No,” he said. “I had never had the pleasure until now, in this timeline.”
Carson watched as her eyes suddenly filled with panic. She turned to Duster. “When we go back, am I going to remember all this?”
Duster nodded. “When you touch the time travel device as we turn it off, you remember the timeline, even though it pretty much resets and pretends you never existed when you leave it.”
She looked relieved and Carson felt good about that. For a moment she had been afraid of not remembering him. He liked that.
She turned back to face Carson. “So what happens if you don’t leave tonight and let people think you killed yourself? Will I be able to buy the house in the future?”
“If you came from a timeline where you bought the house, then yes,” Carson said and Duster nodded.
“So in how many timelines do we both exist?” Sherri asked.
Both Duster and Carson shrugged.
“More billions and billions and billions than I want to try to think about,” Carson said. “In some we meet, in some we don’t.”
“Now I have a headache,” she said.
Carson just smiled. “Put it to you this way. In this timeline we met. Which means we will meet in many millions of other timelines. And I like the sound of that, to be honest.”
“As do I,” she said, blushing slightly and holding his gaze.
Five
Sherri was disappointed that the three experienced time travelers had decided after a few more hours of talking they had better all head back to the time travel machine. And that Carson had better go ahead with his plan to fake his own suicide and leave the home.
Sherri had wanted to spend time with Carson, to even just stay with him that night, really get to know him. But she hadn’t said anything and all of them had decided to meet up back in Silver City in three days.
She and Bonnie and Duster had left Carson’s home, with Carson holding Sherri’s hand for a moment and promising he would see her soon. But in this new world of time travel, she had no idea what soon would mean.
The coach ride back into Boise along the dirt road at night had been one of the longest and roughest Sherri had ever experienced. And her sour mood had not made it any better. She had finally met the man of her dreams, a man she wanted to spend time with, live with, talk with, and then she had been forced to leave him.
Of course, she met him over one hundred years in both their pasts, and as Duster said, that needed to be fixed in real time before anything could last.
She had no idea what he had meant and didn’t much care. She just wanted to stay with Carson and time and logic was making it so that she couldn’t.
That night she lay awake in the big feather bed of the Boise Hotel, hoping that somehow Carson would knock lightly on her door and come in. She finally dozed off just before dawn and Bonnie woke her an hour later for breakfast.
That afternoon, with no sign of Carson, they left on horseback for Silver City.
Two rough and painful and hot days later they finally reached the old mining town high in the Idaho Owyhee Mountains.
That night she was so tired and sore from two days of horseback riding, she just passed out in her bed in the old Silver City hotel. The next morning at breakfast, she still felt as if she was walking in a haze. Bonnie and Duster seemed to be enjoying themselves, but she felt just empty.
She was picking at the pancakes she had been given for breakfast when a voice beside her asked, “Is this seat taken, Miss Sherri?”
Her head snapped around and she found herself looking into the wonderful, deep-brown eyes of Carson.
He had on a fake moustache and a dirty brown beard, and he wore a gray cowboy hat that looked like it had seen far better years. His jacket was dusty and soiled and his pants and boots clearly worn and old. But the smile and laugh that reached his eyes were what she loved.
“It is not taken,” she said, smiling at him and indicating that he should join them.
Across the table Bonnie and Duster were both smiling.
As he sat down, he took off his hat and coat, putting both on the floor at his feet.
“Did you have a good ride?” he asked, smiling after he gave his order to one of the hotel wait staff who had been called over by Duster.
She smiled back. “I’ll let you know as soon as I can actually walk normally again.”
Carson laughed and she just tried to memorize every sound of it. “Not used to being on horses?”
“Not since I had a pony at ten,” she said. “Trust me, not the same thing.”
Again he laughed.
And again she felt whole having him beside her, again. How was it possible that she had avoided any long-term relationships with any man for years, and now after only talking with a man for a short number of hours, she didn’t feel complete unless he was with her?
But that’s how she felt. She just hoped like hell it was how he felt about her as well. Because she had a hunch that this time travel stuff wasn’t going to make any kind of relationship getting started easy by any means.
After breakfast, Bonnie and Duster and Sherri headed at a leisurely pace up the hill toward the old Trade Dollar Mine. The mine, officially, had ran out of gold in 1871 and been closed down. But Duster’s family had owned it and it was inside that mine that they had found the crystals on the walls that allowed for time travel.
Duster and Bonnie had to invent the machine that hooked to the crystals that actually allowed it to happen.
With rests, it took them over an hour to climb the seven hundred feet up the side of mountain. In 2015, a lot of the trees had grown back, but now the hills were mostly just covered with scrub brush and the trail often almost overgrown.
The dress she was forced to wear with all the strange undergarments didn’t make the climb any easier. Sherri was going to be very happy to get back to the old mine and be able to change into some decent modern jeans, bra and underwear, and a t-shirt.
Carson had said he would take another trail around the long way and meet them at the mine. There were not that many people living in Silver City in 1898, but no point in raising any kind of question.
As they approached, single file toward the old mining shack on the mine tailings, Carson appeared from inside the shack and smiled, pulling off his fake beard and moustache and taking off his coat.
“You look much better without the facial hair,” Sherri said, smiling at him.
“Stuff itched like crazy,” he said, shaking his head. “Great to be rid of it.”
Duster went through a ritual of unlocking what looked like a boarded-up mine. Sherri was impressed how hidden this opening really was, and how protected.
Instead of pulling down the old boards over the mine opening, a large steel door slid aside, letting them enter.
They went inside and the door slid closed behind them, again making the mine outside look abandoned and boarded over.
For a moment they were in the dark, then the lights came up.
Duster and Bonnie started down the old mine tunnel side-by-side. The roof of the tunnel was a couple feet over Sherri’s head and large timbers that looked old supported the rock.
The first time she had come in here, the place had awed her. She had never felt the dampness of an old mine before. She had worried about the timbers coming down, but Duster had assured her he had rebuilt everything completely.
The second time she had come here, she saw more details, like the old rail track down the center for ore cars, and how water dripped in a couple of places from the rock.
Carson reached over and took Sherri’s hand as they walked along behind Duster and Bonnie.
“This place never stops amazing me,” Carson said, pretending he wasn’t really holding her hand.
She squeezed his hand and agreed as Bonnie and Duster walked through what seemed to be a wall ahead of them as the mine tunnel turned to the right. They just kept walking straight ahead.
“Now that’s creepy,” Sherri said. “I’ve seen it twice before and it still creeps me out. Talk about ghosts. They look like ghosts walking through that wall like that.”
“Hologram,” Carson said, stepping into the wall and through it, pulling Sherri along before she had time to object or even think about it.
On the other side the mine tunnel stretched forward for a ways until it seemed to dead-end. Duster stopped, did something, and another massive steel door slid back.
Duster really, really had the place secured. More than she had realized the first two times here.
After Carson and Sherri stepped through, the door slid closed behind them.
They were now in a huge storage area filled with boxes and supplies and so much more, including all types of clothing.
Bonnie and Duster started undressing. Carson did the same, moving over to a pile of boxes on the right. It seemed they were going to have no shame, so Sherri sure wouldn’t either. She had spent many a night with Duster and Bonnie drinking in hot tubs over the years, but letting Carson see her almost nude made her feel like a young girl on a first date.
“A little help with these clasps?” she said.
“Gladly,” Carson said and Bonnie just smiled at Sherri as Carson undid the clasps on the back of her dress.
Sherri moved over beside Bonnie and Duster and dug out the clothes she had been wearing weeks ago, undressing and dressing quickly, all the while watching Carson out of the corner of her eye.
And what she saw almost made her light-headed. His body was better than she had even imagined. If this was how he looked after aging twenty years in the past, what was he going to look like in the present?
That thought made her breath catch in her throat.
After they were dressed, Duster turned and led them down another short tunnel and through another steel door and into a room that once again took Sherri’s breath away.
Every inch of the huge cavern was covered with what looked like beautiful quartz crystals. And the cavern seemed to go on into the mountain for as far as she could see.
Duster had told her that there was no end to the cavern. He said he believed that every crystal on the wall was a timeline. And that every time a choice is made, another crystal starts to grow. Sometimes the decisions are minor and the crystal merges back into the original, but other times the choices are major.
When they had left to go back in time, Duster had hooked two wires from a small machine sitting in the middle of a rough table to a crystal on one wall.
For a short time while he was gone, Sherri and Bonnie had watched crystals form and grow around the small crystal that Duster had hooked the wire to. Bonnie had told her that was Duster changing things in the past.
Now the four of them stood there in that large room staring at it, looking at the billions and billions of different timelines in only this one area of the cavern.
It was almost impossible for any human mind to grasp and Sherri felt no different. It made her realize how really, really big the universe and all of time was.
After a moment she turned to Carson. “What day do you arrive back?” she asked.
“December 16
th
, 2016, at about 2:30 in the afternoon.”
She took his hand, then reached up and kissed him, something she had been wanting to do from the very first moment she had met him.
And it had been worth it. She lost herself into his kiss, into his soft lips and wonderful taste.