Ancient Fire (5 page)

“They make your time spheres stronger?”

“Exactly.”

“So if you had some WOMPERs…”

“That’s what Mr. Howe thought. Get some
WOMPERs and rev these time spheres up. Make them work at warp
speed.”

“Would it?”

“We don’t have to worry. WOMPERs don’t occur
naturally on Earth, or anywhere near it. Mr. Howe was able to get
some once, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing any more of them in
our lifetime.”

He grew quiet again, then had some more
spaghetti and some more red wine. Afterward, we bundled up in our
sleeping bags and got the last good night’s sleep we were going to
have in a very long time.

If not forever.

Chapter Five

Eli: WOMPERs and Wolf
House

June 30, 2019 C.E.

The next day, more men arrived. Some of them
belonged to a power crew, and got heavy-duty electrical lines up
and running to Moonglow by midafternoon.

I asked them where all the extra power was
coming from.

“It’s been arranged,” one of them said. They
didn’t ask us to sign anything.

Dad and I took a walk while they worked. He
didn’t want to be near them. That was the first time we discovered
Wolf House. Dad read the plaque about the writer, Jack London.

My dad stood and looked at the ruins of the
house. “Imagine everything you love going up in smoke like
that.”

When we got back from the walk, Mr. Howe was
waiting for us.

He just sat near the front door of Moonglow,
smiling again, this time like some out-of- town cousin who gets to
your house early and waits around for you to let him in.

Next to him, by his feet, was a green box.
Made out of metal.

“Sunny California,” Mr. Howe said. “At least,
when it isn’t raining. Good for you.” He stood up and held out the
box. “Housewarming present.”

Dad just looked at him.

“I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to see
you,” I said. Somebody had to say something. I pointed to the box.
“What’s in there?”

“Top secret, son,” Mr. Howe said, winking at
me. I
wasn’t
his son.

“I’m done with secrets,” Dad said.

“Not these secrets,” Mr. Howe replied
confidently. “Wait till you hear what they are.” He leaned over and
whispered in Dad’s ear.

“WOMPERs?” my dad said out loud.

“You have WOMPERs? I thought they didn’t
occur on Earth,” I added, looking at Mr. Howe suspiciously. He
looked at me, then back at Dad. “Do you tell him
everything
?”

“The fact is, I haven’t told him everything.”
Dad looked at me. “We used WOMPERs back in the lab at Princeton.
They did supercharge the time sphere. And that’s what caused the
explosion.”

“The one Mom was in?”

“Yeah.” He was sounding far away again. Then
he turned to Mr. Howe. “You already cost me my wife. I’m done with
your experiments. I don’t care how many old space rocks you
find.”

“These aren’t from space rocks. We have an
almost limitless supply now. Thanks to nanotechnology!”

I couldn’t understand what he was saying.
“Nano — what?”

“Nanotechnology.” Dad repeated the word,
looking at Mr. Howe, and looking a bit scared. “It’s when you build
things, Eli, molecule by molecule. A way to engineer living
machines, even new life forms.”

“We have a nanotechnology project at DARPA,
too. Didn’t I tell you? We don’t concentrate only on time
travel.”

“But a WOMPER isn’t a molecule. It’s not even
an atom.” Dad was giving Mr. Howe his don’t-lie-to-me look.

“We can make WOMPERs from other particles
now. Call it… hyper-nanotechnology. It’s not easy… but we can do
it. There’s nothing holding you back now.” Mr. Howe thrust the box
at my dad again. “Compliments of the house.”

“Nothing holding me back, except my disgust
for you.”

Dad took me by the arm, stomped into the
winery, and slammed the door.

I’m not sure how long we stood there blinking
at the soldiers who were already inside.

At some point, I became aware the front door
was opening and Mr. Howe was letting himself in. For some reason,
he started speaking to me.

“Your dad’s got to do it, Eli. Before
somebody else does. Somebody who might not be working for
us
. Besides, it’s
his
experiment.”

“Don’t look at me.”

Over the next few days, Mr. Howe kept showing
up with different squads of men. Not soldiers, though there always
seemed to be a couple of those around to “guard” the place. And
keep an eye on Dad and me.

These new guys, Mr. Howe would introduce as
“fellow scientists.” When it became clear they were trying to set
up a kind of WOMPER reaction in the time sphere, Dad, who’d been
successfully ignoring them the whole time, finally marched into the
tasting room.

“I’ll do it.”

We all looked at him.

“I’ll do it,” Dad said again. “You’ll just
kill everybody.”

Mr. Howe smiled.

As Dad worked, he talked. “Don’t you worry
about what the neighbors might think out here?”

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Howe said. “We bought up
every house and ranch in a two-mile radius. Even took over that old
park and closed it down.” Which meant Wolf House and all the trails
around it.

Dad just shook his head.

“It was national security, Sandusky.
National security
. We have to keep
everybody safe.”

“We
didn’t keep
Margarite safe.”

Safety was on Dad’s mind, especially as he
got close to creating the WOMPER reaction, so he agreed to let one
of Mr. Howe’s men take me down to San Francisco for a day while he
brought the local spacetime field into a state of high
excitement.

It worked. My dad didn’t blow up the
neighborhood. In fact, it worked so well that when I got back,
something had already happened, causing everyone to stand around
and just stare at the machine. The greenish glow of the time sphere
was making their faces look even more pale than they already
were.

Everyone was staring at something on the
floor. Some kind of bundled paper.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The time sphere,” my dad said. But it just
sat there humming away, a perfectly normal time sphere from the
looks of it.

“What?”

“It’s a newspaper from 1937,” Mr. Howe said.
He was kneeling close to it, trying not to touch the little field
of spacetime that Dad had created. “It was like it was just spit
out from the past. It just
appeared
here.”

“Like it was tossed through a hole,” my dad
added. “This time, there wasn’t any explosion.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, right? I mean,
you’re still here.”

Dad shook his head slowly. “This might be
worse. We might’ve done something to the time stream. Things keep
popping through.”

“Like what?”

Dad was pointing. “That showed up right after
the newspaper. It’s an old —”

“Cool!”

I recognized the logo. I’d just seen one in a
sports museum down in the city: the San Francisco Seals. I was
considering making up a new Barnstormer squad called the Seals.

My first thought was,
Wow,
if this was from the thirties, then maybe this was Joe DiMaggio’s
actual baseball cap from when he was a Seal!
Without
thinking about it, I reached in to take a closer look — “Eli, no!”
— violating every rule my dad had ever given me about being near
the generator.

My hand went through the charged field to
clutch the cap, and I could feel the jolt run up my arm. My whole
body felt like Play-Doh being mashed around.

Somebody was screaming my name, and I think I
screamed back, right before everything went black. And then
exploded into color.

The colors stayed. But now I was sitting next
to a dinosaur.

Chapter Six

Clyne: Homework

Final Class Project: 10,271
S.E.

Find an alternate Earth to visit and report
on Saurian culture there. Summarize your experience, and be sure to
answer the questions below. Remember, you will get history, social
studies, and science credits for this project, and the final score
will help determine your herd placement when you leave middle
school for the upper grades. Good luck!

THE QUESTIONS:

1. Where did you
go?

2. Were the Saurians on
the other Earth helpful?

Why or why not?

3. How was this culture
different from your own?

Describe.

EXTRA CREDIT:

4. Would you recommend
this reality to other students?

1. Where did you
go?

As our science books teach, the Fifth
Dimension is that passageway that connects different universes and
different times to each other. My first trip through the Fifth
Dimension, like that of most Saurians my age, was scheduled so I
could finish my science research for graduation. I’d been told what
to expect: It’s as though you’re moving through a kaleidoscope full
of colors, sometimes traveling in slow motion. You feel like you’re
surrounded by warm mud, a nestling back in the egg, yet the egg is
cracking at the same time, shaken apart at top speed.

I was moving through the Fifth Dimension,
thinking about the various Earths described in our alternate
history and geography texts, and wondering which one I should
choose. There were the other known Saurian worlds such as Earth
Fanda Rex, ruled by the child king, Fanda, and Earth Hydro, that
planet covered almost entirely by water and populated by swimming
beings who engage routinely in aquatic competitions and
mermaid-themed costume balls.

But these Earths have been reported on in
other classes, and I think one of my nest-mates even did his
middle-school project on Fanda Rex, so maybe it’s just as well
things worked out the way they did.

Here’s what happened: I was in my timeship,
charting a course toward one of the known alternate Earths, moving
through the crosscurrents of the Fifth Dimension, when all of a
sudden there appeared in the seat next to me a boy.

The boy was a growing hatchling like me. But
he had skin that was monocolored and odd fur on top of his head,
and he wasn’t really any type or species of advanced Saurian at
all. When I figured out what he was, I was as shocked as you will
be when you read my answer to question two. But first let me tell
you
where
I went.

I call it Earth Orange, because that is where
I discovered you can taste colors! There, the color orange can be
found in a sweet fruit tasting like a bright afternoon, though it
can be hard on the Saurian stomach. The planet also reminds me of
the orange lava that flows from our volcanoes. Not only in color
but also because things always seem to be in danger of blowing up,
exploding, or otherwise falling apart on this version of Earth.

The actual colors of this Earth, by the way,
are similar to the blues, greens, browns, and yellows of our own
planet. But I’m calling it Earth Orange because I want to, and
because I get to. As far as I know, I discovered it. It’s not
mentioned in any of our texts or histories or on our maps.

Do I get extra credit for that?

You might well ask how I got pulled into an
altogether undiscovered Earth. It turns out, I began my field trip
at precisely the same moment three of their people were discovering
the basic principles of time travel. On their Earth, they thought
they belonged to “different” times, but as we Saurians know, time
bends. They were actually working on opposite sides of a curve.

Or maybe different sides of a triangle. I
entered the Fifth Dimension at precisely the moment a female,
Hypatia, who comes from the city Alexandria, and two males,
Sandusky and Eli the Boy, who come from Valley of the Moon, solved
the first basic step of rendering light into its component parts.
Just as their own signals sparked through the Fifth Dimension
toward each other, I entered the time stream in the ship I checked
out from the school supply room.

At that precise instant, we were all fused
together. Separate Earths, separate times, but suddenly a single
destiny — that was how the moment was structured. We were like
Saurians making a triple-jump move over each other’s cranio-tops on
the field of battle during a particularly tail-curling game of
Cacklaw — a move that can never be taken back.

The reason this Earth was unknown before was
because no one on it had deduced how to time-travel. Until now.
They aren’t aware of the alternate Earths that surround them in
multiple dimensions. On their planet, many act as if all truth and
reality were immediately apparent. And easily known.

But as we know, the universe is more like a
Cacklaw field than anything else, with its nooks, crannies,
confusions, and unexpected connections.

The arrival of the Eli boy in my time-ship
was proof of that. He appeared quite suddenly, and he was
frightened — he had no idea where we were.

After his first long scream, he spoke. My
lingo-spot took a moment to adjust. He spoke a kind of crude,
guttural language filled with long, wheezy breathing sounds like
heeee
and
ahhh
and
wehhh,
with occasional tongue clicking
thrown in to stop all the gasping. But at last some sense was made
of all the noise.

“Where am I?”

“What are you?” I thought that was a
reasonable question, since he was in my vessel. But he just stared
at me as if I was speaking with a mouth full of petrified
eggshells. Which, from his standpoint, I was. He couldn’t
understand me. I peeled off a little of my lingo-spot and dabbed it
behind his ear. I hoped that, because of its plasmechanical
properties, the substance would adapt to my guest’s nervous system
and biology in short order so that we could converse.