Jaclyn the Ripper (12 page)

“Not quite,” he said, then smiled shrewdly. “I'm actually thirty-nine going on one hundred and forty-three.”

Surprised, she burst out laughing, glanced at him with awe and tenderness in her eyes before looking back at the highway, falling silent, touched by the moment. He hadn't noticed. His anxiety was gone, and he was enjoying his witticism, complemented by the marvelous ride, the speed, the red and blue lights from the car's dash suggesting a spaceship that he might want to build someday.
Of course, I'll need a bigger laboratory and—
He stopped, annoyed at his daydreaming when he still had yet to repair
The Utopia
's Destination Indicator, when he had no clue about Amy.

“We have to start looking for my wife.”

“I know. When we get to the hotel, I'll go online.”

“Online?”

“You know, computers. Cyberspace.”

“Ah, yes.” He gazed out at the lights, briefly preferring the primitive technology of 1906. “Citizens have become softheaded in this century. If they didn't have their ubiquitous electronic boxes, they wouldn't be able to function.”

She chuckled and said knowingly, “Soon, you'll be one of us.”

He recoiled. “Then I suppose I should thank God for
The Utopia
.”

“If you built it today, microchips and all, I'll bet it wouldn't be much bigger than my laptop.”

“God forbid.” Suddenly, he was nervous. “I say, where are you taking me?”

“Like I said, to the hotel.”

“Hotel?”

“Did you want to sleep in the car?”

“It wouldn't surprise me if it transformed into a shelter of some kind,” he said defensively.

“Some of them do,” she said smugly, then added, “We could've stayed in L.A. and looked for your wife online if you hadn't been so stubborn.”

“I never would've forgiven myself if I hadn't
flown
, my dear girl. Besides, you may be able to locate Amy through the magic of your Internet, but I doubt that you can shrink her to a speck of vapor and bring her back from San Francisco to Los Angeles.”

“Huh?”

“Somebody has to go get her, do they not?”

 

Amber had called ahead for a reservation at a Marriott, H.G. insisting on two rooms since he had no desire to sleep on a rollaway bed or on the floor. She had taken 527, and he was across the hall in 529, but now they were in her room at the desk-table, looking on the Internet for Amy. Amber played the keyboard like a virtuoso, methodically, yet quickly following result after result.

H.G. gaped at the process. This buffed black and gray laptop, this little crystal ball of a machine, had no parallel in his world.
Great Scott, it has no wires!
Indeed, he was familiar with Edison's alkaline storage battery—this laptop must run on a smaller version of same—so it wasn't the power source that baffled him. Rather: How had it connected with some infinitely complex spiderweb of similar computers? Unless all of these brightly colored “pages” as Amber called them were contained within its box, and if so, then they weren't really looking for anything—it was already here.

“Where the devil are those images . . . actually coming from?”

“Cyberspace.”

“Ah.”

He had no clue what she was talking about, yet went on staring and hoping for a glimmer of understanding.
The laptop must have connection nodes,
he thought,
which transmit radio or microwaves, hence information to this cyberspace which in turn sends them back or somewhere else. How very clever. I wonder where this cyberspace is?
He imagined an enormous Internet module that balanced and danced with radio waves and electrical impulses. Or perhaps it was thousands of similar modules stacked one on top of the next, housed in a gigantic building complex in one of our more enlightened cities.
London would be my guess. Or New York. . . . Maybe even Paris.

“Where exactly is cyberspace, Miss Reeves?”

Startled, she glanced at him, saw that he was serious and started giggling. She blushed at his naïveté, then couldn't help herself and burst out laughing.

 

Once his humiliation had passed, H.G. felt somewhat initiated into the Computer Age. If nothing else, he'd gotten past his reticence for this thing they called the Internet. All it had taken was Amber showing him he was already part of it. She had found a Web site about him in late nineteenth-century London, then—with a blur of keystrokes—transported him over a hundred years later to room service in the San Francisco Marriott, face-to-face with an electronic young woman who was asking him what he wanted. Now he couldn't contain his enthusiasm. He didn't consider the danger of homogeneity as he had when he'd first seen television—or the vile and corrupt nature of the human beast, long a staple of his speculative fiction. Blinded by positive thought and the brightly colored results of the process, he paced behind Amber's chair, his own brain fueled with grandiose notions. “This proves it.”

“What proves what?” she murmured.

“This thing that you call cyberspace, my dear, proves that the ultimate in communication is upon us which suggests in turn that mankind is
basically good. And if man is basically good, then utopia and the world-state must be on the horizon.”

She gave him a strange look. “You're kidding.”

“I suppose I am being a touch simplistic.” He paused, then continued. “I am curious about the names for these so-called dot-coms and URLs, however. . . . What was that one we started with? ‘We will find any-body right now dot com' or something like that?” He threw up his hands. “They strike me as twenty-first-century adulterations of German nouns.”

“You're not kidding.”

She went back to her laptop, and he sat in the chair beside her and peered over her shoulder. She gave him a sidelong glance, then a smile. “Want to try it?”

“Why not?”

She pushed the computer mouse toward him. He slid it back and forth, and on the screen the arrow shot every which way, an electronic jumping bean.

“Whoa . . . !” she exclaimed.

“Sorry.”

“It's not a nineteenth-century skateboard.”

She put her hand over his and led him in small, precise movements that propelled the arrow onscreen. So intent was he on the process, he didn't notice her breath catch when she touched him, didn't notice her hand trembling slightly. Eventually, she stopped the arrow over a search result. “Now click.”

“Click?”

“The buttons.”

He did something that resembled pounding a telegraph key, something indecipherable, and the laptop crashed in a myriad of colors. She gawked at the screen, then giggled and soon was laughing hysterically.

“What in God's name happened?”

“I'm not sure, but I think we're a long way from utopia and a world-state—at least with you pushing the buttons.”

Mortified, he watched Amber reboot her laptop. Then she excused herself and went to the bathroom. Alone with the machine, apprehensive,
he gazed at the screen—a dark-green glow upon which the word “
VISTA
” swam in a three-dimensional sea. Infinite knowledge and communication—enlightened tools for citizens of the world—were but a keystroke or a click away despite what Amber or the rest of the human race might think. There were worlds beyond this screen, this portal that rivaled hopscotching along the fourth dimension in his time machine. Giddy, he chuckled. There really wasn't much difference except this little rectangular box with the beveled edges was more convenient. A few magical keystrokes and it whisked your mind wherever in the past, present or future you wanted to go—complete with travel accommodations.

I wonder if I thought of it?

He pressed several keys arbitrarily. The machine went all agog with lurid colors, flashing boxes, jittery sidebars, and then words sliced across the center of the screen informing H.G. that he could lower his home mortgage to 1% by clicking on the button below.

Fortunately, Amber came back in the room, sat down and without even looking went back to “Google” and their search. He read nothing into her aloof behavior, was unaware that he had touched her deeply, and she was trying to restrain herself.

“Okay.”

“Where are we?”

“At the San Francisco public library skipping over an abstract of
The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan,” she said flatly, “and don't ask me how this got in my queue.” She took a breath. “There are fourteen hundred and twenty-six copies of her book in the system.”

“Who is Amy Tan?”

“Someone who's sold more books than you have.”

“Really?”

“Do you mind . . . ? I'm trying to concentrate.”

An hour later, despite his wonder at this new technology, H.G. began nodding off, yet there was an edge to his weariness that went beyond looking for Amy in cyberspace. He couldn't shake the nagging reality that he was alone in a strange world and might never see his home again. If he couldn't fix his machine and was indeed stuck in 2010, he hadn't yet seen a place he'd want to call home other than the
Getty Museum.
I could always write speculative articles for them—as I did for the
Pall Mall Gazette
and the
National Observer.

Then he studied Amber's profile lit by the glow from the screen, her cute, upturned nose, full lips and ivory skin. He took comfort in the presence of someone who had been a stranger, deciding that she was much more appealing than his fear or false leads from cyberspace. Impulsive, he leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek.

She looked at him, surprised, and it was all she could do not to kiss him back, full on the lips.

“Thank you for all your help.”

Her cheek burned where his lips had touched, and she was speechless. She managed a nod.

“I'm going to my room.” He stood up. “I'm quite done in, I must say.” He turned at the door and grinned. “I haven't slept in over a century.”

 

At the window, H.G. gazed at the city and remembered it fondly from 1979, when he'd met Amy. He frowned, stroked his mustache, then lifted his chin. Hopefully, 2010 would be an easier time, despite the strong possibility of an earthquake, despite the tedious process of trying to find Amy, despite his nagging fear that she might be injured. His anger that she had left him was fading, and now he missed her sorely. He had to turn away from the window lest San Francisco memories bring on tears and recriminations. He swore to himself that when they were reunited he would make a supreme effort to spend more time with her and the boys and especially to include her in his life away from home instead of automatically looking for some comely lass when he stepped off the train at Charing Cross. Yes, she had been cold and fragile for years, but he hadn't been a loving husband in her company, either. He sighed. Would not a gentle caress, a loving embrace make her strong and beautiful again?

“I love you, Amy,” he whispered to the room.

He smiled and resumed his gaze out the window. Yes, they'd fallen in love in this city despite the horror of Dr. Leslie John Stephenson one step ahead and leaving a trail of corpses for them and the San Francisco
police. When H.G. was being cynical, he'd think of that time as one of those mystery cruises with whodunit games in the parlor except who in their right mind would want to honeymoon with Jack the Ripper as best man? He chuckled. That was over, thank God. Abruptly, he thought of the murder at the museum.

Or was it?

What if his machine had traveled to infinity? If so, Jack could be back in this fair city, and despite whatever universe they were in, history could be repeating itself, grotesquely so.

Her cheek still burned.

Amber stared over her laptop at the sheer curtains on the window, lit by a multicolored glow from the city lights. Aside from a harmless kiss that left her glowing, she was astounded by the events which had brought her to this place. From a crime scene at the Getty to this man materializing from a time machine—from following him to LAX to insinuating herself in his search for his wife because he was . . . he was a miraculous alternative to her gritty, unsatisfying existence.
He is more than a man
. She nodded.
He is a gatekeeper to the cosmos. Already he has totally changed my life. I can't even look out the damned window without knowing that no matter how familiar or pretty the view is, there is pure magic on the other side, undiscovered realities in the beyond.

She was lost in her thoughts: they had no common thread, no logic, no shape. They were images from earlier in the day mixed with memories from years ago—all confused by figments of her imagination.
Am I losing my mind?
Suddenly, she started hyperventilating. She clutched the table and fought the panic that rose up inside, and then a professor from one of her literature classes popped in her brain, reminding her: There are no hard distinctions between what is real and unreal, between
what is true and what false. Nodding firmly, her lips moving, she repeated the words, made them a mantra, and finally her panic subsided. She closed her laptop, shut her eyes and leaned over the table, yet the kaleidoscope of images wouldn't stop, and she was afraid that some airborne vapor or aura from H. G. Wells had affected both her perceptions and her brain. She frowned and tried to tell herself that his lips on her cheek had been a simple good-night kiss, and that her stupid brain was running with it because it had been months since anyone had touched her or done anything nice for her or . . .
What has this man done to me?
She started crying.

Minutes later, she snuffled and stopped, got a hold of herself, went in the bathroom and peered in the mirror.
I'm a mess.
She washed her face and automatically put on fresh makeup and perfume, was suddenly irritated at being alone, as if solitude were an enemy. She opened her phone, but wasn't sure who to call. She scrolled down her directory, surprised there were so many people in her phone she didn't want to talk to, finally settled on her friend, Marilyn, who worked as a buyer for Barnes & Noble.