No Other Story (17 page)

“What is this thing?” asked Big, and I began to wonder just what type of sheltered existence the girl had lived up to this point.

“This is an airplane,” said Jason. “Remember, I told you
about the giant birds that fly through the sky? This is one of them.”

As we boarded the plane, Jason informed me that Big was from the year 1668, and suddenly everything made perfect sense. Wait a minute, what am I saying? This made no sense at all, but there was no time to dwell upon it.

When all had buckled up for the ride ahead and the animals had climbed into awaiting laps, I pulled the hatch closed and took my seat in the cockpit, with Ethan taking the copilot's seat. Believe me when I say there's nothing in this world quite so satisfying as firing up a jet engine. The sheer power that one can summon with the simple press of a button is awe-inspiring, to say the least.

“I don't mean to insult you,” said Ethan as we began our taxi to the runway, “but my entire family is aboard this plane. Are you absolutely sure you know what you're doing?”

“Listen, Einstein,” I said, which was not a smart-aleck remark, but rather Ethan's nickname in college.
Einstein Cheeseman
we called him, because of the fact that he rarely found time to comb his hair. “You're more likely to be struck by lightning than to be involved in a plane crash.”

Just then, a bolt of lightning shot across the sky, followed by a sharp crack of thunder. “See?” I said. “Now do you trust me?”

Good old Einstein stuttered something about how that did not prove anything, but my concentration was consumed by the task of taking off on a runway with no lights.

As the Concorde Grape careened down the tarmac,
another charge of lightning shivered across the sky, affording me a good view of the runway and alerting me to the fact that it was unexpectedly about to end.

“Uh-oh,” I said, which is something that should never be uttered by a pilot whose credentials and abilities are in question.

“Uh-oh?” Ethan repeated.

I pulled back on the stick, and the plane took to the stormy sky.

You have to understand how exciting this was for me. Of all the times I had flown the Concorde Grape, I had never done so with passengers in the back, and had never before had cause to use the P.A. system.

“Good evening from the cockpit, ladies and gentlemen,” I said in my deepest, most piloty voice. “This is your captain, Dr. Cuthbert Soup. I'll be assisted today by my copilot, Ethan Cheeseman, and we'll be cruising at an altitude of anywhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand feet, depending on where the lightning is. Barring any unexpected delays, we should be arriving at our destination in approximately two hours and fifty-five minutes, local time 4:51 a.m.”

“That's cutting it close,” said Ethan.

“Sorry,” I replied. “If it hadn't been for that cop I would've been able to stay on the main road longer. If we get a good tailwind, we can probably make up a little time.”

As luck would have it, we did not get a tailwind, but we did get wind and plenty of it to go along with the thunder and lightning that menaced the skies that night. What
followed was one of the bumpiest flights I've ever had the displeasure of being a party to. How my passengers in back were handling the turbulent ride I couldn't be sure, but I did notice that my copilot was, for most of the flight, pale as a vampire's ghost. Still, he kept his wits about him and his eyes on the chronometer.

“I don't know,” he said. “Our house is a good thirty-minute drive from the airport.”

“Airport?” I said. “We haven't filed a flight plan, so technically we're not cleared to land at the airport, I'm afraid. But my GPS is telling me that the local university has a very nice soccer field. Artificial turf, I believe.”

“You're going to land on a soccer field?”

“Actually, I'm going to
try
to land on a soccer field. We'll see how it goes. The good news is it's just a ten-minute walk from your house. Or a six-minute jog. Or a four-minute sprint.”

One way in which soccer fields are not at all like landing strips is that they are not nearly as long. Due to this one little factor, our landing would require a very steep descent and a fair amount of luck. Still, I looked forward to the challenge and to saying that I may be the only person to have ever completed a touchdown on a soccer field.

Before an actual attempt at landing, I would first have to perform a flyover, a low pass over the makeshift airstrip. It was important to know whether there were hazards near the field, such as power lines, tall trees, or policemen. Luckily, the skies had cleared and our view of the field was sharp and unobstructed as we dropped in for a closer look.

“No problem,” I said, with more confidence in my voice than in my gut.

I took it back up and made a sharp bank left, circling over houses where, undoubtedly, the sleepy residents were curious as to why a jet airplane was buzzing overhead at such a ridiculously early hour. I thought it best to inform my passengers of the latest developments to prepare them for the sudden drop that awaited them, and I once more switched on the intercom.

“Good morning from the cockpit, ladies and gentlemen. We're currently at one thousand feet, dropping to zero feet in the next thirty seconds or so. Please make sure that your seat belts are securely fastened and that your pockets are free of all sharp objects or anything that might explode on impact.”

For the record, this was not the first time I had attempted an unconventional landing such as this. Once, when flying from Montreal to Albuquerque, one of the Concorde Grape's engines caught fire, forcing me to make an unscheduled stop in a Kansas cornfield. No one was hurt, but the heat from the fire did result in about six hundred pounds of popcorn, which is why I always make sure the Concorde Grape is well stocked with plenty of salted butter.

Compared to that little episode, this landing would be a six-hundred-pound piece of cake. I lowered the nose, taking a sharp trajectory toward the ground. We dropped from a thousand feet to a hundred feet in just seconds.

“Pull up!” yelled Ethan as the earth raced up to meet us. “Pull up!”

He was right. I pulled back hard on the stick and the plane leveled out just as the wheels hit the artificial turf, giving us all a wicked jolt. Quickly, I activated the reverse thrusters and hit the brakes as hard as I could without losing control of the aircraft. The sudden force caused Ethan to lurch forward in his seat, while I myself had to fight to remain in position to guide the speeding plane along the ground.

The end of the field was coming up fast, and though the plane had slowed considerably, we were still a long way from coming to a complete and final stop. Beyond the field was a road, and across that road was a track-and-field practice facility.

We reached the end of the soccer field and the plane skipped over the road, narrowly missing a parked car and a
No Parking
sign, then bounded onto the infield of the track, where, finally, we crawled to a stop. Ethan and I sat, unable to speak. I wondered how the children had come through the harrowing experience. I imagined they were nothing less than traumatized. Suddenly, there was a thumping on the cabin door. My face and hands mottled with beads of cold sweat, I peeled myself off the captain's chair and opened the cockpit to find Catherine and the other children standing at the entrance.

“What time is it?” she demanded. Traumatized indeed. I forgot that these children were the spawn of Ethan and Olivia Cheeseman.

“It's 5:05,” I said with a quick check of the cockpit chronometer.

“Five after five?” exclaimed Jason.

“Yes,” I confirmed. “I strongly advise you to run like the wind.” As quickly as I could, I opened and lowered the door, the inside of which served as a stairwell to the ground. My passengers leaped from the aircraft one by one, except for Simon and Gravy-Face Roy, who leaped two by two. The others, Jason, Catherine, Big, Pinky, and Digs, hit the frozen ground and took off in a desperate sprint against time.

“Thanks, Bertie,” said Ethan over his shoulder as he raced off after the others and never looked back.

“Good luck!” I called. “Let me know how it turns out!” I watched Ethan disappear into the darkness just as suddenly as he had shown up on my doorstep only four hours before. Then I looked at that giant purple jet plane parked on the grass in the middle of a university sports center a thousand miles from my home and thought, “Now what?”

They say that the early bird catches the worm, whereas birds that are later to rise must be content with eating birdseed, bread crumbs, and fat, lazy worms who also enjoy sleeping in. Olivia Cheeseman was an early bird by nature. She rarely slept past five o'clock, and this morning she had been awake for hours after being jostled from unconciousness by a crank phone call.

She lay next to her snoring husband, thinking. But it wasn't the thought of bread crumbs or birdseed that filled her mind; she had remained quite disturbed by the strange phone call and the questionable people who had visited her house in recent days. She feared for the safety of her family.

Two government agents dressed all in gray had shown up at the front door and strongly suggested that she and her husband hand over the yet-to-be-finished LVR. They should do so, the men explained, for their own protection from those who might be willing to do anything to get their hands on it.

While she and Ethan had been out celebrating their
wedding anniversary, another strange man came to the house claiming to be selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, which sounded entirely plausible, except for the fact that the man spoke in a strange accent and was accompanied by a monkey.

But the most unnerving of all the occurrences was when she and Ethan returned home from dropping the children off at school to find a long white limousine parked out front. Upon entering the house, they were startled and frightened to find, sitting in their living room, a large man with rings on each of his meaty fingers and a small woman with fingers as thin and bony as the man's were thick and meaty.

The woman announced that they worked for Plexiwave and that they were there with the purpose of offering high-paying jobs to Ethan and Olivia in exchange for the LVR and the secret codes necessary to operate it. To further entice the two scientists, the woman instructed the ring-fingered man to open and display the contents of a briefcase he was holding. It was full of cash; two million dollars, to be exact.

Some people might have salivated at the sight of so much money. The fact that it came from a company responsible for manufacturing deadly weapons, which had killed millions of people around the world, made Olivia nauseous, and she angrily ordered the intruders out of her house.

What made these multiple encounters all the more strange was that Ethan and Olivia had told no one, not even their own children, that they were working on a device that
could very well enable time travel. Still, somehow, these strange visitors seemed to know all about the LVR.

She watched the digital readout on the nightstand clock snap from 4:59 to 5:00. She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She grabbed her robe from a hook on the back of the door and quietly slipped out of the room.

She walked to the front door, as she did every morning, with the intention of bringing in the daily newspaper. For the first time ever, she changed her routine, deciding to leave the paper for later, when the sun would take away the darkness and all of the unknown that goes with it.

She flipped on the kitchen light and, with squinting eyes, fetched her coffee from the pantry. From the drawer below the coffeemaker, she retrieved a filter that, unfortunately, would do nothing to filter out the poison with which the coffee had been laced.

Olivia liked her coffee strong, and she loaded up the filter with several heaping spoonfuls of the ground, tainted beans. She added the water and hit the start button. The clock on the coffeemaker told her it was 5:05.

Jason felt as if his heart might pop right out of his chest, the blood pounding in his ears, his feet pounding the frozen earth as he sprinted toward the house he had called home for the first twelve years of his life. Closely on his heels were Catherine and Ethan, with Big, Digs, and Pinky lagging behind to stay with Simon, who had no hope of keeping pace with the group.

Though it had been two years, Jason had no problem remembering the quickest route to the house. Like an Olympian, he hurdled a short picket fence that encircled the front yard of the Baldersons' house on Musgrave Street. He ignored the
Beware of Dog
sign on the back gate, emboldened by the knowledge that the dog of which he was to beware was a fourteen-year-old schnauzer named Muffin with bad teeth and irritable bowel syndrome.

Jason raced through the backyard and scaled the much taller fence, paying no attention to the fact that he had, in the process, scraped his left forearm raw on the rough, unfinished wood. He felt no pain, only the sting of frustration from not being able to will his legs to go any faster.