Written in Time (31 page)

“Going back is simply a matter of figuring how to reverse the process, if it can be done,” Peggy volunteered.
 

“And if it can’t be reversed,” Ellen Naile said, “you and Clarence can’t go off and be hermits, never interacting with anyone.”
 

“Well, shit!” Clarence swore.
 

“Clarence,” Lizzie said, “you’ll just have to do your best to, well, do your best. And rely on that to get you through and not cause anything bad to happen that wouldn’t have happened already. You’re a good man, so the chances of you doing good are greater than the chances of you causing something evil or terrible to happen.”
 

“Well put, kiddo,” Jack Naile told his daughter.
 

Peggy wondered if she had—somehow—done something which would unravel history, merely for her own selfish ends. And, if the process couldn’t be reversed, if they couldn’t even at least communicate with the future, they’d never even know . . .
 

“It’s so damned obvious!” Alan declared. “God, I’m stupid,” he told Marc Cole and Morton Hardesty. Morton Hardesty was his chief scientific advisor, privy to anything that had to do with Horizon Enterprises and technology. They sat in Alan’s trailer, the note Clarence and Peggy had left inside the crate-shaped capsule on a round table around which they all sat. “It’s a fricken mailbox to us, the capsule, but we can send stuff out by express. We can communicate with the past and the past can communicate with the future. They still use the capsule as a mail drop. What we do is periodically send smaller capsules back, with mail from here.”
 

“You know what it costs, Alan, every time we send something back?” Morton Hardesty queried.
 

“Yeah, and I bet you do, too, Mort. Hell, it’s worth it. We can pass messages through time.” Alan looked at Marc Cole. “Did you find out if your great-grandfather had a twin brother who died?”
 

Marc Cole ran his fingers back through his long blond hair. “I got my mom on the phone and she called my aunt Clarisse, who was named after my great grandmother. Great grandpa Jim had a brother named Al. Al turned up missing a year or so before the turn of the century.”
 

“My God, what have we done?” Alan murmured, not expecting a direct, immediate answer . . .
 

Bethany Kaminsky paced back and forth in front of her enormous and spotless desk, her hands thrust into the pockets of pleated, loose-fitting, charcoal-gray slacks. She wore a silk blouse with long, full sleeves and deep cuffs with multiple buttons covered in the same material, the blouse nearly as dark a gray as her slacks, unbuttoned to her cleavage, a solitary—and large—diamond visible, pendant from a thin gold chain. This and a Jubilee band Rolex—he couldn’t see it, but she always wore it, even in bed—were her only jewelry.
 

Morton Hardesty couldn’t take his eyes off her, hadn’t been able to take his mind off her since their first clandestine meeting six months earlier. In all that time, this was the first time they’d met in her penthouse office at Lakewood Industries’ world headquarters. Because it was Sunday morning, she had insisted that it would be safe.
 

Bethany Kaminsky’s blonde hair formed a perfect bell shape, barely touching her shoulders, moving as she moved, thick, gorgeous, beautiful, in control, as she was. Her blue eyes sparkled under a brow that was knit in concentration and—he’d seen the look before—anger. “So,” she said at last, looking at him, “you cannot bring them back from here.”
 

“I don’t think so, Bethany.”
 

“You either think or you know, Mort! What is it?”
 

“Given current technology, I know that we can’t. See, as I’ve told you ever since Lakewood Industries approached me about this, Dr. Rogers didn’t invent time-travel. All she did was unwittingly participate in an accident, and her equipment kept a nearly perfect record of what transpired. She would have been the first person to tell you that time-travel, given our current level of technology, is impossible, if it would ever be possible. All she wanted to do was broadcast electricity without wires. On the plus side, we’re close to achieving that; maybe another decade’s worth of work and Horizon Enterprises will be able to bring electricity to every corner of the globe. Or,” Hardesty digressed, “if you keep paying me, Lakewood Industries will beat Horizon to the punch and get the patents and the loot that goes with them.
 

“All that we did when we sent inanimate objects and the like into the past,” he explained, “then eventually sent Dr. Rogers and the Nailes’ nephew, Clarence, and Dr. Greer with him into the past was to artificially duplicate the energy waves Dr. Rogers had accidentally created during the thunderstorm. Horizon Enterprises still doesn’t have a clue as to why it works. We’ve gotten really efficient at duplicating the process, however, like a dog that just keeps getting better and better at performing the same popular trick. But all that we can do is send someone or something back in time a period of ninety-six years, sixty-eight days, four hours, twenty-three minutes and sixteen seconds. We can only send someone or something to the same place and nowhere else. The whole thing is probably a research blind alley as far as real time-travel might be concerned. No way to tell.”
 

“So, if you time-traveled somebody from my office—” Bethany Kaminsky almost sprang onto her desk, crossing her legs Indian fashion like a child sitting on the floor, waiting for someone to tell her a story. But she was doing the talking. “So, if you time-traveled me right now, I’d wind up in exactly the same place.”
 

She had such tiny feet and tiny shoes. “Which,” Morton Hardesty pointed out, allowing himself to laugh a little, “would be very bad for you, Bethany. Ninety-six years and sixty-eight days ago, Lakewood Industries hadn’t yet built a high-rise office building in the Chicago Loop. Therefore, you’d wind up in the air hundreds of feet over turn-of-the-century Chicago, and you’d fall to your death.”
 

“I get the point, Mort. What’s the exact problem with making it a two-way street?”
 

“Okay, Bethany, you’re not a physicist, but this is the general idea. We can’t reverse the wave pattern fully unless we have equipment in place at the point of origination for the persons or things that we wish to bring back.”
 

“You mean there, there, ahh, back in the past.”
 

“Bingo! In theory, if we were to send duplicate equipment ninety-six years back in time, and we had it perfectly synchronized with the equipment here in the present day, we could probably do it.”
 

“Then why hasn’t Horizon done it? What’s Alan Naile afraid of?” Bethany Kaminsky lit a cigarette, climbed off the desk and took an ashtray from the glass coffee table in front of the couch. She set the ashtray on the desk and resumed her cross-legged seated position, this time kicking her shoes halfway across the office. She wore semi-transparent black stockings. He wondered if they were pantyhose or if she used a garter belt.
 

“A couple of things. First, Alan’s afraid he’ll fuck up history. I told you about the thing with the dead cowboy and our mission control guy, Cole. We don’t know if it happened, but if it did, the consequences of any further deaths in the past might prove devastating, people disappearing all over the place and we’d—for the most part, at least—never even know they were gone, because they never would have been here . . . in a way, at least. You need the damn math to even talk about this, Bethany. This is—”
 

“What else?”
 

“That’s the principal thing,” Hardesty told her. “As much as he’d like to get Clarence and Peggy Greer back, and Alan Naile feels he needs to before history is further disrupted, there’s an even bigger problem.”
 

“Which is?” Bethany Kaminsky lit a second cigarette from the glowing tip of the first. He could almost taste her lipstick on the filter.
 

“To do it—and we never really shared this point with Dr. Rogers—we needed a small nuclear-powered generator. We were extremely careful and nothing ever happened out of the ordinary. To bring them back from the past, if we could, we’d have to ship the identical apparatus, about which I spoke a moment ago, into the past. Including a duplicate nuclear-powered generator. If something went wrong and we lost control of the device, we could be responsible for something incalculable.
 

“You have to remember,” Hardesty continued patiently, “that there were whole bunches of really sharp scientists around ninety-six years ago. Once we shipped the equipment into the past, there’d be no way of retrieving it, since the equipment itself would be needed to transport the equipment. Somebody would have to stay behind, and then there’d still be potential problems, maybe worse than those that Clarence and Peggy Greer might cause or have caused already. And, if some really good and creative scientists from 1898—well, it’s 1899 there, now—got hold of that generator, instead of the first atomic bombs coming at the end of World War Two, hell, a nuclear weapon might have been dropped— Here,” he said, motivated by a flash of inspiration. “Let’s say that all of that happened and the right German scientists got their hands on fissionable material. Instead of everybody slogging back and forth through the mud of no-man’s-land in France during World War One, the Germans could have used biplanes to fly cover and dropped a nuclear weapon over Paris or something, out of a dirigible, or smuggled a nuke into London to force the British out. Hell, when America joined the war in 1917, the Germans could have sent a bomb to New York or Washington and cleaned our clocks for good.
 

“Alan is right, I’m afraid,” Hardesty concluded. “There’s just too much risk in this thing for any rational person to take.”
 

Bethany Kaminsky seemed unfazed, and Hardesty was more than slightly unnerved at the thought. “So, if we went back in time to—1899 now?—to 1899, and, let’s say, we set up the initial equipment at a spot somewhere in present-day Germany or England or wherever, we could ship all the equipment we needed back in time to that same spot in Germany or England. And we could just travel back and forth between now and the past, however we wanted, like going through a damn revolving door. And, if we had a cadre of personnel armed with state-ofthe-art modern weaponry, nobody back then could hope to win against us and seize the stuff. Right?”
 

“In theory, yeah—but, Beth, you can’t—” And Morton Hardesty suddenly shivered, because he realized that what he feared was exactly what she was thinking.
 

“Think of the possibilities, Morty. Hmm,” Bethany purred. “The reason Horizon Enterprises has always been a jump ahead of Lakewood Industries isn’t because the Nailes were such sharp business people. No! Hell, no! They knew what was going to happen. So, what if we went back and made a deal, long before Horizon Enterprises became anything more than a fucking fancy variety store and a pissy little ranch? We offered the future’s technology to the three countries which would have the capability and the balls to use it, the manufacturing infrastructure to make it happen to our specifications. The United States, England and Germany. The only three contenders, with France a distant number four.
 

“Whichever one came out as the best deal,” Bethany enthused, “gets us under contract with a shitload of money and real power in exchange for us giving them the tech stuff to take over the whole fucking world. And they can’t double cross us, because we still control superior technology that they want and we can use to crush them like fucking bugs if we have to. And they’ll be terrified we’ll make a deal with their enemies. It’s perfect. It’s a marriage made in Heaven, Morty.”
 

“Look, Bethany. I’m nuts about you. You know that. But you’re talking crazy stuff now. What you’re proposing could just as easily be a marriage made in Hell.”
 

“Well, if the fucking’s good, who cares, right?” Bethany didn’t glare at him, only smiled. “By the 1920s, we’d be the ultimate power in the whole world, Mort. By now, 1995, we’d flat-out rule the whole fucking planet.”
 

“You might obliterate your own existence, too, Bethany. Or you might destroy the whole population of the planet with just one mistake.”
 

“Then again,” Bethany smiled almost wistfully, “I might pull it off. We might, Morty,” and she drew her feet up under her then, catlike, and sprang from her desk. She crossed to his chair in two long, easy strides and sat down in Morton Hardesty’s lap. Bethany Kaminsky’s hands grabbed his face roughly, and her mouth crushed his lips under her own.
 

CHAPTER
TEN
 

The Nugget, Atlas’ optimistically renamed newspaper, had dispatched its top-flight photographer—who was also the editor, the copy boy, the reporter and the paper delivery person—to take their picture. “All of you should remember that this photo will help build business for Jack Naile—General Merchandise, so you should smile because of all the money you’ll be bringing in.”
 

This was the photo, her daughter and herself with absurd picturebook hats, hourglass-waisted long dresses worn over heavy-boned corsets, David in a pinchback suit, spats and a derby, Jack wearing a black vested suit, white shirt and tie and the black Stetson he’d painstakingly shaped to match the one worn by Richard Boone. Jack and David were armed, of course. And this was the photo Arthur Beach had sent them in the future, confirming that an impossible set of ircumstances was about to alter their lives forever, an impossible set of circumstances that had become their lives.
 

Ellen Naile had watched this scene in countless western movies she’d seen on television on Saturday afternoons with her father (when Jack Brickhouse wasn’t doing play-by-play for a Chicago Cubs game), seen it also in western movies her Jack had talked her into watching over the years of their life together. Given their present circumstances, the threat of watching a western movie had passed; she lived a western movie, instead.