Odd Apocalypse (41 page)

The only responses we can have to their viciousness are the courage to fight back or the cowardice to acquiesce. Well, one other option might be the pretense of acquiescence.

As the broken rib burned in my side and as waves of pain swelled through my battered face, I begged him not to hurt me any more, not to kill me. I pleaded, beseeched, implored, and groveled with my face pressed to the floor. The tears were easy to produce because the pain squeezed them from me, but he could mistake them for tears of terror and self-pity if he wished.

He grabbed me by the back of my sports-jacket collar. Commanding me to get up, he hauled me to my feet. He slammed me against the wall so hard that the pain in my chest seemed to drive a spike all the way into my skull to puncture awareness and let darkness flood my mind once more. I barely held on to consciousness, but the black wave passed.

Now Cloyce was singing “Anything Goes.” Not singing it so much as muttering it, snarling the words, his face right in mine. He was a tall man, muscular, strong. Having surprised the fight out of me with the shotgun butt, he was going to enjoy beating me to death with his fists. His breath smelled of something sour and vile. He grabbed a fistful of my hair and a handful of my crotch, and between words of the song, he suggested I should submit to him sexually as all the terrified women had done before he killed them.

My right hand fumbled its way into that pocket of my sports jacket, though there was nothing in there but a few spare rounds of ammunition and the pantry key on the stretchy pink plastic coil.

Suddenly Tesla loomed beside us, his gaunt face wild with rage. He reached for Cloyce but reached through him,
passed
through him as he had passed through me.

Perhaps thinking that I had hoped to be saved, Cloyce said, “It can’t help you. It’s not him. Just an aspect of him. Spun off in an experiment, bouncing around in time because it doesn’t belong anywhere.”

Twisting my hair, twisting a handful of my crotch, Cloyce began
laughing at me, highly amused by the tears that streamed down my face and by the helplessness they seemed to represent.

Pinching the bow of the key between thumb and forefinger, with all my strength I drove the serrated blade of it into the soft tissue behind his chin, as deep as it could go, perhaps into the underside of his tongue, and then twisted it violently.

As a gush of warm blood spilled over my hand, Cloyce reeled backward, clutching at his throat, keening in pain, probably sure that I had shoved a knife into him.

Before he might comprehend that he would survive the wound, I staggered away from him, snatched the shotgun off the floor, turned, pumped a round into the chamber, and delivered to him his second death.

JUDGING BY THE SILENCE, THE FREAKS HADN’T BEGUN chopping at the front door yet, but surely by now they had begun to examine it and fiddle with the doorknob. The axes would start to flash soon.

My jaw ached from ear to ear, the broken-off roots of two teeth throbbed, and the right side of my face was swelling, threatening to reduce that eye to a slit. I kept swallowing fresh blood that welled up in my mouth, and I was also bleeding a little from my nose. None of the elements that constituted my crotch felt good, either, but I could walk without whimpering.

Psychic magnetism works best when I’m trying to locate a person, wandering around with the face and name of my quarry in mind. But occasionally it functions as well when I’m searching for an object while conjuring a mental image of it.

I couldn’t picture the master switch of which Tesla had spoken, because I didn’t know what it looked like. I assumed, however, that anyone as obsessed with detail and order as Nikola Tesla would label the damn thing
MASTER SWITCH
in capital letters. I pictured
those two words in my mind’s eye, hoping that what I wanted was in this high room, which seemed to be the Grand Central Station of the time-management machinery.

For a minute I circled the chronosphere, but then I was compelled to move into it, through the larger fixed gimbal mounting, toward the arms of the inner mounting that scissored multiple lazy eights simultaneously from the air. Even closer, I was not able to see how they moved in such elaborate arcs yet continued to support the rotating egg—the passenger capsule—which was always floating at the center.

Later, I would read as much about gyroscopes as my fry-cook brain could tolerate. I didn’t absorb a lot, just enough to wonder if this had been an electrostatic gyro, in which the rotor—or in this case the egg—was supported by an electric or magnetic field. But if I understand correctly, the rotor of an electrostatic gyro has to be in a high vacuum, and the egg was not in a vacuum.

As I drew near to the swooping golden arms of the inner gimbal, they seemed to make an approach to the egg impossible. I would surely be battered to death if I tried to dart among them to the prize.

But then, as if sensing my approach, the great gold-plated arcs slid into new rhythms and patterns. As they wove among one another, describing lazy eights in the air, they still seemed to occupy some of the same places at the same times without catastrophe, but now an open path lay between me and the egg.

Trusting that those golden jawbones would not abruptly snap me in two, I moved toward the passenger capsule without fear or shadow. When I was within a few feet of the egg, its rotation slowed, slowed, stopped. The capsule seemed to float unsupported in the air, a foot off the floor, the top of it about two feet above my head.

A five-foot-high segment of the egg swung upward, an access
hatch invisibly hinged at the top. Within the capsule waited two leather cockpit chairs with a console between them.

When I stepped inside, turned, and sat in one of the chairs, the hatch closed, presenting me with what appeared to be a simple control panel.

At the top of the panel, a fourteen-window clock presented the current year in the first four windows; the month, day, hour, minute, and second were displayed in two windows each. Black numbers, painted on drums, rolled down like cherries and lemons in an old low-tech slot machine. As far as I could tell, the time was precisely correct.

Under the first clock, a second remained blank. Fourteen knobs, one below each window, allowed me to turn the drums until I dialed up the desired date to which I wanted to travel.

The other controls consisted of just five labeled push keys as big as those on a toy for little children. The first, on the left, advised
LOCK DATE
.

Beside that one was a key marked
TRAVEL ONLY
. Below it, a third key offered
PARK
. Between those two keys, painted on the console, was the word
OR
. I assumed that if the Roselanders wanted to take forty years off their appearance, they punched
TRAVEL ONLY
. If they wanted to get out of the capsule in spite of the risks known and unknown, they punched
PARK
instead of the key above it.

Aligned with the first two keys was another labeled
LAUNCH
. Beside that one, the fifth and final key promised
RETURN
.

Time travel for dummies.

While wandering around the chronosphere before approaching the egg, I had taken the Gypsy Mummy fortune-teller’s card from my wallet without realizing what I was doing. I stared at it in my hand:
YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER
.

If I went back in time to the day before the act of terrorism that
took her life, I could park the capsule, slip quietly out of the Roseland of that period—where I was not yet known—and make my way to Pico Mundo.

I could warn Stormy that she was going to be shot dead the following day. Although my story would have fantastic elements, she would believe me for two reasons: First, she knew well that my life has always been
riddled
with the bizarre and the absurd, and she’d been involved in many such moments with me; second, we never lied to each other, and we never doubted each other.

YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER
.

But because nothing I could do in the past would change the present from which I traveled, I would return to a world in which Stormy remained dead. Yet the Stormy I brought with me would be
her
, not some kind of clone or soulless automaton, but Stormy Llewellyn complete. Like Timothy, she would be a living paradox.

I would be able to hear her voice again, her laughter. Her hand in mine once more. Her lovely, loving eyes. Her face, such a face. Her kiss.

She would never age. But if I found a way to take Roseland for my own, I would have this machine, and therefore I would never age, either. We could fulfill the destiny that Gypsy Mummy had promised us. We could live here together forever.

The pain of my injuries was unrelenting, and I found myself in tears again, though not because of that pain. They might even have been tears of joy.

My psychic magnetism might not have brought me to the master switch I sought, but it had brought me to what I wanted, what I so needed, to what my heart demanded.

I entered my destination date in the second clock. I pressed
LOCK DATE
.

I made my selection between
TRAVEL ONLY
and
PARK
.

I hesitated, considering the risks, which were incalculable, and the implications, which were many and some devastating. I considered how much I might come to regret my choice, and I urgently reminded myself that people should never be treated like toys. I warned myself that the human heart is a great deceiver, deceitful above all things. Still I wept.

And then I pushed
LAUNCH
.

If the capsule began to rotate at high speed again, I had no awareness of spinning. I had no sensation either of moving up or down, or side to side, or back and forth. I
did
feel some motion but one I had never experienced before: a turning inward, as if I were a slack watch spring being wound tight again. That isn’t an accurate description of the feeling, although it’s the only one I am capable of giving.

During this, as I moved backward in time, my pain relented. I could feel my ribs knit again and the blood recede from my mouth. My tongue found all my teeth where they belonged, and the swelling in my face quickly declined until my eye was no longer pinched to a slit.

I knew instantly when the capsule slipped sideways, out of time. My heart no longer beat, and I drew no air into my lungs. Neither the ebb and flow of breath nor the rush of blood was required to sustain life in this timeless realm.

I wished the capsule had windows, that I might see what lay around me, but no sooner had this thought occurred to me than I realized how wrong and dangerous it was. Whatever might lie outside of time, it would astonish and amaze. It would inspire a sense of wonder beyond conception. But the awe aroused by the sight might be of an intensity so exhilarating
and
so terrifying, so profound, that no living person was ever meant to see it—or could remain sane and go on living after having seen it.

The shift back into time set my heart beating again, and once more the bellows of my lungs labored automatically.

I hadn’t needed to press the
RETURN
button to come back to the present, because I had never pressed
PARK
. I had not gone back to a time when Stormy Llewellyn was still alive, but only back one day, not to grow that much younger, but to reverse the damage that Constantine Cloyce had inflicted on me, just as the Roselanders had used the machine to reverse the aging process.

Stormy believed that this life is boot camp, preparing us for a life of service and great adventure that comes between this world and our third and final one, which some call Heaven. Although she was Catholic, her theology was certainly not orthodox. But if she might indeed be engaged now in some grand exploit, my love for her, even as deep and enduring as it was, did not give me the right to disturb the time line of her life and thereby possibly diminish, in ways I could not fathom, the joy she might take from that adventure in which she currently found herself.

When it seemed that the egg had come to a rest, out of curiosity I attempted to set the destination calendar to a future year. But as I expected, it wouldn’t allow me to do so.

Because we have free will, our tomorrows are never determined until we make them day by day. I couldn’t travel into the future because one didn’t exist, only many
possible
ones. The past is as locked in stone as a Jurassic fossil, but by our daily actions, we continuously change the future.

As the hatch lifted, before I could get up, I was startled by the appearance of someone in the seat beside me. Tesla. His hawkish face, his proud nose, his eyes as penetrating as radiation.

“Sir,” I said, in such awe of him that no other words occurred to me.

“A great and terrible mistake, all of this,” he declared, and then he
went into a rant, though a solemn and dignified one. “But J. P. Morgan, Westinghouse, all the financiers, they underfund your research, nevertheless make
fortunes
from it, then penny-pinch the budget on your
next
project! There are no
visionaries
among them!”