CHAPTER
SEVEN
The helicopter wreckage, although only weeks old, looked to have been where it was for decades. The twisted metal of the rotor blades was rusted well more than half away. The upholstery for the seats was rotted to near nothingness. Clarence had demanded that the FAA officials show him photos of the pilot’s body (found buried in a shallow grave near to the wreckage site, a pile of stones used as a marker). These were Polaroids showing the open grave. There was no corpse, only bones—bones stripped clean by what could only have been decades of rot and decay. Even the dead man’s watch was covered with corrosion, Clarence was told. The pilot’s horsehide leather flight jacket, the FAA official admitted in strictest confidence, had been more rotted than unpreserved leather gear from World War I.
The condition of the wreckage and the solitary body were “inexplicable.”
Clarence Jones had flown to Nevada within hours of being notified by the film company that the helicopter carrying his aunt, his uncle, his niece and his nephew was missing. He’d taken the Chevy Suburban—Jack and Ellen had left him with the paperwork giving him power of attorney, and he’d always had a set of spare keys—and driven as close as he could to the approximate crash site, a one-hundred-twenty-five-square-mile area, mostly mountains and woods. He’d joined the state and local authorities in their search for the downed aircraft, working with them from dawn until dusk each day, the search slowed by unseasonably heavy rainfall in the mountains on the Nevada side.
After two exhausting weeks, the search had yielded nothing and would, in days or less, be called off. Clarence had already determined that he would not give up the search, no matter how long it took. But, on the afternoon of the fifteenth day of the search, a private pilot reported spotting something that could have been wreckage. Despite the fact that the area had already been searched, it was searched again.
Clarence found himself seventy-eight miles away from the crash site when it was finally, positively, located. He connived a ride with a volunteer helicopter pilot.
By the time he had reached the crash site, the pilot’s grave had been discovered, the body exhumed, gone.
But the Polaroids were enough—almost—to finalize the treatment his digestive system had suffered from the helicopter ride. Yet he held it in, realizing that it was hard to cry and throw up at the same time. He cried.
That the Suburban was left behind signified that something had gone terribly wrong for his loved ones.
Lighting a cigarette, staring through his tears at the helicopter wreckage, the nearly bare metal frames that had once been seats, evidence of catastrophic fire damage abundantly clear, Clarence Brown told himself that if anyone could have somehow escaped death here it would be his aunt and uncle. And David and Lizzie were tough, competent, smart survivors, taught to be so by their parents.
If they were alive in the past, they would need what they had somehow been forced to leave behind—the contents of the Suburban.
The search was continuing, looking for four more bodies.
Clarence’s search had ended.
His family had made it through the barrier of time, somehow. They were alive and well in the past, somehow, and needed his help. And they would get that help. They had never abandoned him. He would never abandon them.
It would take money, because he would have to quit his job. He was barely holding on to it even as he stood there, gone from it for more weeks than he had vacation time or sick leave. Despite the fact that it would take quite a long time for Jack and Ellen to be declared legally dead—no bodies, and there would be none—his power of attorney would enable him to utilize their remaining assets to help him to help them.
With intelligence work, when there was a blip or a sound that didn’t belong, there was always the means, however convoluted, of somehow identifying what had caused it. Thinking back to one time in Greece, he appended that to “almost always.”
But, here, specific things had taken place. The helicopter had left Atlas, Nevada, at a specific time, filed its last radio transmission at a specific time. Whatever other extraneous events had occurred, he would discern them, ascertain their effect. He would find a way.
The sounds and the blips were different, and he would not be reading an O-scope, consulting volumes of material, have precise logs to peruse. But the problem was the same.
If one time-travel incident were possible, then it could be duplicated—somehow.
By parlaying his old comrades in arms, he could make contacts in the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board, gain access to the analysis of the downed aircraft’s black box, its flight recorder. There had been no cockpit voice recorder.
Clarence shuddered as he lit a cigarette, exhaling smoke through his mouth and nostrils, shivering in the mid-morning chill as NTSB technicians started to move the wreckage.
His family was alive, he almost verbalized. No remains of their belongings had been discovered. Jack never traveled without a gun unless aboard a commercial aircraft. That would have meant that, had they died, the gun’s rusted remains would be discovered.
No such remains would be discovered.
There would be no dead bodies found miles away in the deep woods, no bones along the side of some animal trail.
Clarence looked hard at the helicopter’s wreckage, his heart filled with hatred for it because it had failed. Through clenched teeth, he swore an oath. “You didn’t get them, you fucking piece of aircraft shit! You didn’t get them! Not them! I’ll find them and I’ll come back here or wherever the hell the FAA puts you and I’ll piss all over you! Hear me!?! I’ll shit on you, dammit! My aunt and uncle and my niece and nephew aren’t gone, damn you!”
Clarence stood there a moment longer, noticing only peripherally that all of the law-enforcement and FAA and NTSB personnel and volunteers were staring at him, fear in the eyes of some.
“Hey! Listen up, dammit! They’re alive. They’re fuckin’ alive, and I’m gonna find ‘em, go after them, find them! They’re fuckin’ alive, and no fuckin’ helicopter crash is killing them! Hear me? They’re fucking alive, and I’m fucking finding them, and I’m gonna piss all over this fucking helicopter and anybody who fucking tries to stop me!”
Clarence lit still another cigarette and walked away. He had work to do.
It had been almost a year since their first significant success with the transmission of electrical power through the air, many flickers of illumination from their lighting array, but none so brilliant as when the storm had so suddenly struck.
Sometimes, at night, Jane Rogers would awaken, haunted by a question she could not answer. The terrible helicopter crash about which she had read, had seen the aftermath of on the television news, seemed to have occurred at roughly the same time as that so-successful experiment. There was no reason to suppose that it had, but what if her experiment had somehow contributed to the deaths of five people, wiped out an entire family of four?
The driving force behind her research was to help mankind, not destroy.
Each time that she and Peggy Greer had returned to the high desert and, once again, attempted to project electricity on a laser carrier, a secret fear had consumed her, the fear that all scientists had at one point or another in their lives: Had her work, somehow, unintentionally, innocently, caused the loss or degradation of human life?
On several occasions, Jane Rogers had discussed this very trepidation with Peggy Greer. “It couldn’t have been anything that we did, could it?”
“You’re looking for assurance that I cannot give, Jane. Logic tells me that the answer is no, and logic tells you the same, but that’s not good enough to put your feelings to rest, is it?”
“No. Not really.”
“Do you want to stop the experiments?”
“No. Not really.”
“What if something else unexpected should happen?”
“I don’t know. Is it ego, dear, ego that drives me?”
“Ego drives us all,” Peggy answered.
At such a juncture, Jane Rogers would say nothing more than a pleasantry, perhaps good night, perhaps something else. The reason was that ego, of course, drove all men—and women—drove all who strove to do the undoable.
Such troublesome thoughts bothered her progressively more and more with each venturing into the high desert, with each equipment setup, with each test.
This day was no different.
As she began her by-rote examination of all data and equipment preparatory to another trial, another test, there was, this time, something different. It was not a dust devil, but a cloud of dust from some large vehicle coming toward their location.
“Do you see that?” Peggy asked her.
“Yes. I do.”
“You don’t think it’s some biker gang, like that time almost two years ago?”
“It looks like a small truck or a big car. See? It’s battleship gray, I think, or maybe blue. But it’s only one vehicle.”
“Who do you think it could be?”
Jane Rogers imagined that they would soon find out, so she made no response.
The vehicle proved to be a Suburban, similar to theirs, but with a fold-down rear deck as opposed to double doors. It seemed packed beyond endurance, even the front passenger seat loaded.
A man stepped from the driver’s side. He was quite tall by any standard, dark haired, with a drooping black mustache and several days’ growth of stubble on his cheeks and chin. He was dressed in white track shoes, blue jeans, a well-worn olive-drab military field jacket (the shadows of military patches subsequently removed were noticeable) and a black cowboy hat. Beneath the jacket, the tails of a light blue snap front cowboy shirt were visible.
“Right out of the pages of GQ,” Peggy Greer whispered beside Jane Rogers’ left ear. “But still kind of cute.”
He was somewhere in his early to middle thirties, Jane guessed. And if the military jacket was his originally, his last name was Jones and his first initial was C.
As he approached, he removed his sunglasses. The dark eyes beneath frightened her for an instant, a look of desperation and intensity in them that was most disconcerting. It was a look that she had seen in her own eyes when she had realized that her husband was dying and there was nothing that she could do to save him.
“I came to talk to you about the helicopter crash that took place up in the mountains almost a year ago. My name is Clarence Jones, and the four passengers in that helicopter were my family. My aunt and uncle and their two teenage children.” His voice was deep, but not overly so, and quite pleasant.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Jones. I assume that you know our names, since you’ve obviously come looking for us. Nonetheless, I’m Jane Rogers. This is my friend and assistant, Peggy Greer. How is it that you think that we can help you?”
“I just learned—you know how the government misfiles reports and stuff, sometimes—that you two were the first to report a possible crash, contacted the state police.”
“I didn’t know that we were the first,” Peggy volunteered. “But, yeah, we saw it, or we think that we did.”
“How do you mean that?” the young man asked, a hint of a smile appearing for only a split second as he turned his gaze toward Peggy.
Jane kept quiet, letting Peggy answer him. This might prove interesting. Peggy didn’t have a beau, and hadn’t been on a date for better than a year. She was pretty, personable, intelligent, just never seemed to meet men.
“Well,” Peggy answered after a too-long pause, “I can’t really explain it. We were conducting one of our electrical experiments, and there was a lightning strike at the same time. Jane saw the aircraft, and then it was gone.”
The young man refocused the intensity of his gaze. “I read the police report. You said it was there one minute and gone the next. How did you mean that?”
Jane Rogers answered him. “Exactly what I said. I was looking through the telescope—that one over there near our equipment. It was set up in exactly the same spot, aimed at precisely the same place in the mountains that it is aimed at today.
“There was a sudden electrical storm,” she went on, “and our experiment was already in progress.”
“What kind of experiment?” Clarence Jones asked.
Maybe she would show him later, if he remained pleasant. For the moment, she gave him a basic explanation. “We generate a laser beam, and we generate electricity. We’re trying to use the laser beam as a carrier wave for the electricity, to broadcast the electricity, as it were, through the air. We have a lighting apparatus up in the mountains. The laser carrier is aimed at a receiver near the lighting array. If we have success with a particular trial, I can see the lighting array fire through the telescope.
“On the day of the helicopter crash,” Jane Rogers continued, “there was a clap of thunder just as we fired the carrier beam. In answer to the question which you are bound to ask, the laser beam could not have struck the aircraft carrying your family. Had it done so, the lighting array would never have flashed to indicate that we had broadcast electricity for a few microseconds or so. As I was looking for the light array to fire, I saw an aircraft—it turned out to have been the helicopter, from everything I understand. It was there one second, then gone the next. And just before it vanished—”
“The word you used,” Clarence Brown began.
“It vanished,” Jane Rogers reiterated. “But there was something more.”
“What?” the young man asked.
“The lightning streaked across the sky and my eye just naturally followed it, but the lens of the telescope was locked into position, so I couldn’t turn the telescope. It was the brightest, biggest flash of lightning I’d ever seen in my life. I would have remembered it even without what happened next. I caught sight of the aircraft, as I said. Simultaneously with all of that there was a clap of thunder, extremely loud, and I saw the aircraft. Then the aircraft vanished into something black, blacker than night, and there was another clap of thunder, possibly from the earlier lightning bolt. The black thing, whatever it was, vanished. And there was nothing in the sky where the aircraft had been. It was as if the aircraft had gone into some sort of hole, and the hole closed up around it.” Jane laughed indisbelief, “Which is, of course, almost certainly impossible.”
“Don’t black holes suck things in?” Clarence Brown asked her.
Peggy answered, “If there were a black hole close enough for us to see with the naked eye, Mr. Brown, we wouldn’t be seeing it. All light and time and matter would be distorted, falling into it. Just because something is a hole and it’s black doesn’t mean that it’s a ‘black hole.’”
“Then what the hell was it? Because it distorted time, was an opening into the past.”
The young man, despite his nice looks, had to be demented, Jane realized. What a pity. She wondered if he might become violent.
“You think I’m crazy,” he offered unbidden, echoing Jane’s thoughts. “I’ve spent almost a year investigating this thing. When I learned about the electrical storm around the time of the helicopter’s disappearance—”
“It was found, Mr. Jones,” Jane insisted.
“It disappeared from this time, Dr. Rogers.”
“What an interesting notion. But, we have work to do, my assistant and I, Mr. Jones. So if you’ll excuse us, we—”
“I thought it was just the electrical storm. But when I learned what you were doing out here, it made sense.”
“It makes no sense at all, I’m afraid, young man.”
“Yes, it does. Are you aware of the condition of the helicopter when it was found?”
Jane felt uncomfortable. She’d heard rumors, like something out of a supermarket tabloid.
Peggy told him, “Metal can be oddly affected by extreme heat, Mr. Jones—”
“I’ve read the FAA and NTSB reports, Dr. Greer. The wreckage was in a condition indicating prolonged exposure to the elements.”
“That proves nothing, sir,” Jane declared, starting to feel at once angry and stupid—angry with his imbecilic notion about time and black holes and stupid for continuing the conversation.
“The pilot’s body? The best forensic pathologists the government could find examined it and, despite the fact that such a thing had to be impossible, independently they all reached the same conclusion. The body had been in the ground for nearly a hundred years.”
“Then they unearthed the wrong body,” Jane told him.
“Same watch, same crucifix and old military dog tag around his neck. His wife identified his wedding ring and belt buckle. The body was clothed in a rotted horsehide bomber jacket. His wife got it for him in 1990 for a Christmas present. All that stuff was on the body they dug up, the pilot’s body which had been dead for a hundred years, even though the incident took place just weeks earlier.”
“What do you want from us?” Jane asked.
“I’ve got copies of the FAA and NTSB reports and the pathologists’ photos and their reports.”
“What is it that you want from us?” Jane insisted.
“I want to recreate what happened. I want to join my family.”
Jane felt a tear start at the corner of her left eye. Perhaps Clarence Jones wasn’t crazy, only very, very sad and terribly lonely. She knew the feeling well.
David Naile had found the thing that would change their lives for ever, alter their expectations and destroy their hopes. He had found it by accident only that morning. His father, still wearing the badge of town marshal after well over a year, did not know of it yet. Neither did Liz, nor their mother.
There had been no claim to the property on which they gradually built their house. They’d filed a claim and ridden out to Tom Bledsoe’s place, asking if he would help with the carpentry—there was no such thing as hiring a construction company out of the telephone book. Phones existed, patented in 1876, but they did not exist in Atlas.
Work on the house went slowly, and by design. Because they had discovered a solitary wall outlet when they had visited the ruins of the house almost a hundred years in the future, they all clung to the notion that, somehow, the Suburban and its contents would magically time-warp to them. In turn, because of that, they slowed the construction process in order to be able to accommodate the electrical wiring and outlets to come.
Hope sustained them, electricity only a part of that and a very small part, but a symbol of normalcy. Hope translated as meaning some semblance of what had once been their reality, their life: light, music, videos, a few modern conveniences, a jump up on the primitive amenities of the world around them. The battery in the video camera was long since drained and dead. It was impossible to recharge it. The record which they had hoped to make—for themselves to find in the future?—consisted of two hours or so of tape. From what David had read, even stored with great care, the tape would likely be useless after fifteen years or so. All plans to continually copy the videos until they could be transferred to film were dashed. And what did it matter, anyway?
Hope meant having some of their own carefully selected things, treasures packed away in the Suburban. For his mother, that would be cherished photos of the family, and the memories those photos recalled.
For Liz, photos, too, but also something as silly as her two-foot-tall brown teddy bear, a possession she had kept on her bed since childhood. Liz was a grown woman of sixteen, the town’s substitute school teacher for Margaret Diamond, who was increasingly more frequently ill.
David didn’t quite know what it was that he wanted from the Suburban, and the issue had become instantly academic. If this were a continuous time loop from which they would never be fully extricated, as his father theorized, the Suburban would never come because it had never come.
The solitary electrical outlet that had become the talisman upon which their future was based had traveled with them into the past by accident, and that alone accounted for its being discovered in the ruins of the house in the last decade of the twentieth century.
Fate.
Fate had caused them to discover the outlet when they had surveyed the ruins of the house in 1992, and Fate had made David Naile drop the charred outlet into his pocket. Fate had made him wear the same jacket on the day of the helicopter crash that he had worn that day when they inspected the ruins. Everybody in the family had always razzed him about having so many clothes, jackets in particular.
There was a hole in the pocket of the jacket, and the outlet had slipped through the hole and into the padded lining, never to be found until he had taken the coat out of the trunk into which it had been placed, never to be found until this very morning when he had decided to wear the jacket when he rode off to practice his shooting.
His mom was experimenting with what, for 1897, was a modern camera. His sister was filling in for Margaret Diamond once again, as she had for the last week. His father was patrolling the town, perhaps for one of the last times—the services of a professional peace officer for Atlas had finally, it seemed, been engaged.
Instead of riding out of town to practice his marksmanship with the old blued Colt .45 (which would not actually be produced at the Colt factory until 1957, sixty years in the future), he’d put on his city clothes, left the tiny house they’d purchased down the street from Margaret for a mere eight hundred dollars and gone to look for his father.
The wall socket was in his vest pocket.
Jess Fowler’s men still came to town, their eyes and holsters hate-filled. Whenever they spied any member of the Naile family, they would walk away, robotlike, as if their actions were programmed into them. But there had been no repercussions from the night more than a year ago when his father had killed the two men who had accosted his mother and sister and left him unconscious.
The only tangible results of the encounter were his father wearing the town marshal badge and David’s own pursuit of heightened marksmanship skills. Had he been as good with a gun then as he was now, he might have taken both of Fowler’s range detectives himself, and his father might not be wearing that badge.
David turned onto the main street and walked past the general store. Its balding proprietor, Carlton Smithfield, had agreed in principle to a deal for his store. As David passed the open double doors, Smithfield smiled and said good morning. David, who didn’t like Smithfield at all, smiled back. “Good morning, sir. A beautiful morning, yes.”
David was searching for his father and in no mood for useless chatter. He passed the breezeway where his father had shot to death Fowler’s two range detectives. David walked on, along the board sidewalk and under the porch roof which shielded the windows and doors fronting the Merchant’s Café. He opened the near door and looked inside. Two of Fowler’s men, drinking what passed for coffee. Dave, the waiter. Dave was a good guy, if not too terribly bright. No sign of his father.
“See my dad around, Dave?”
“Yeah, Dave! He was walkin’ up the street not more’n fifteen minutes ago. That ways!”
Dave the waiter always called David “Dave” and seemed to get a kick out of that. David liked to be called “David,” tolerated his parents occasionally calling him “Davey” as a sign of affection. But Dave the waiter was an exception to the rule. “Thanks, pal. Catch you later.”
There was a nasty look from the two Fowler men. David gave a nasty look back, closing the door and pacing off toward the edge of town.
After walking half again the length of the street, David finally spied his father. Jack Naile stood, leaning against the corral on the same side of the street along which David walked, essentially invisible from a distance. Maybe this was the first speed trap, David wondered absently.
“Marshal Jack Naile,” David said under his breath.
“The Law East of the Sierras. Shit.”
The clothing problem had pretty much been solved via catalogue, his mother and sister having decent, albeit uncomfortable-looking, dresses. They were getting into making their own, almost as a means of self-defense. He and his father had also found a source for attire that was, at least, more acceptable than that found at the general store. But that would change. As it had been in the future and continued to be in the past, David Naile’s taste in clothes was far more sophisticated than that of his father.
Jack Naile wore his black Stetson from the twentieth century, one of his half-dozen black on black vested suits and black cowboy boots with a medium heel. Visible above the collar of his jacket was the collar of a white shirt. He would be wearing a black tie, knotted just as it would have been a hundred years or so in the future.
The only jewelry he would be wearing was his gold wedding ring and the gold chain he had acquired for his Rolex.
His father had solved the wristwatch problem uniquely. The town blacksmith also repaired tack, making him the closest thing to a leather worker. Jack had removed the Rolex from its wristband and commissioned the blacksmith to cut and sew a pouch that would hold the Rolex in securely. A small brass grommet was affixed to the top of the leather case. With a gold watch chain added, the Rolex would pass for a period piece unless given more than a casual glance by someone who really knew watches.
“I heard those boards in the sidewalk creak when you walked across them,” David Naile’s father announced, turning around quickly, his right hand not reaching for his revolver, but near it.
It seemed as if this fall would be cooler than the last, and a brisk breeze cut along the main street out of the high ridgeline of the nearer Sierras, across the plain and toward the low mountains beyond Atlas. “I’ve gotta tell you something, Dad.”
“Everything okay?”
“Everybody’s fine. Look at this.” David reached into his vest pocket, extracted the wall outlet and tossed it to his father. Jack Naile had always been pretty miserable when it came to catching things, and David actually felt proud of his father for catching the object he’d thrown to him, albeit a little awkwardly.
“Where’d you get this?”
“You know what it means, Dad? That’s the wall outlet that we found in—” And David glanced around them, to make certain no passerby could hear. “It’s the one we found in 1992, in the ruins of the house. Don’t you see? That’s how we were able to find it in the house. I brought it by accident. The Suburban never gets here.”
Jack Naile dropped the outlet in his coat pocket, taking the makings for a cigarette from his other pocket. “Shit,” David heard his father say before turning away and looking off toward the mountains again.
Clarence had not worn a suit since leaving his job as a theater manager in suburban Atlanta a year and a half earlier. Thinking back, he could have worn a suit at the small memorial service held at the site of the helicopter wreckage, the memorial service arranged by the movie company. But he chose not to attend the service. To have done so would have been to tacitly accept the idea that his aunt, uncle and teenage cousins were dead, or at least gone from him forever.
Always somewhat claustrophobic, even when managing a movie theater, he had never particularly enjoyed being in one, always staying toward the back of the theater so that he could egress quickly.
It was, then, with considerable reluctance that he allowed Peggy Greer to talk him into going to see Angel Street when it hit the theaters. They sat in the very back row, Clarence sitting in the aisle seat, Peggy holding his hand. Angel Street was a bizarre western, a mixture of classic oater and occult suspense with a strong dash of mystery and romance. Professionally speaking, he thought the film was “okay” and little more than that. The male lead was a well-known supporter of liberal causes and the female lead simply didn’t turn him on. The action sequences were good enough, but not as good as those from the old John Wayne movies, which he had loved since his boyhood.
At the very beginning of the end titles appeared a dedication, naming Jack, Ellen, David and Elizabeth Naile and the pilot, Evan Soderstroum, as the victims of a terrible tragedy and stating that all five would be remembered fondly.
That got Clarence to get up and walk out of the theater, Peggy Greer at his heels. “Didn’t you want to see the end titles, Clarence?”
“No, baby. That just pissed me off. They’re not dead.”
“Even if they aren’t, sweetheart, wasn’t it kind of sweet that they dedicated the movie to them?”
“Let ‘em dedicate something that’s gonna make money to them, then. You watch and see. This thing is gonna bomb.”
“You’re angry, Clarence.”
“You’re right, Peggy.”
As he later explained to Peggy, another one of the myriad things wrong with Angel Street was the music. Jack was a movie-music aficionado, had collected sound tracks. Jack would definitely not have liked the music. It needed the music of a Jerry Goldsmith or a John Williams, not some guy nobody had ever heard of. And, Clarence went on to explain, Jack would not have liked the gunfire. “Take The Magnificent Seven, for example. Jack explained it to me once, that the gunfire was too soft sounding. He didn’t know for sure, but he guessed that they actually recorded the sound of the blanks and didn’t edit in live gunfire with full-charge loads. He learned all about that stuff when he did one of those movie articles he wrote. Nowadays, they edit in the sounds of real gunfire.” They’d talked throughout the evening about the film and about the work they’d been doing out in the desert. And about what lay before them on the following day.
For a little over six months, Clarence had assisted Peggy and Jane Rogers with their experiments, his background in electronic intelligence making the use of the equipment simple to learn. The math behind the experiments was something he only vaguely understood. He’d mastered trigonometry for his work in electronic intelligence, but it was Jack who had pumped fractions and decimals into Clarence’s short term memory before he had taken his preinduction aptitude test.
The experiments now, almost routinely, would fire the light array for as long as a few seconds, that record achieved during a fortuitous thunderstorm with intense lightning activity. It was in the aftermath of packing up from that touch of success that Jane Rogers had announced, “Curse my age and stupidity!” She slammed shut the double doors of her Suburban. “There was something I had forgotten, that I saw just before your family’s helicopter vanished. It was ball lightning.”
“And what the hell is that?” Clarence had demanded.
The instant that he spoke, it began to rain, rain hard, but neither Clarence nor Peggy nor Jane made any move to get out of the rain. As calmly as a teacher in a classroom patiently explaining in simplified terms something quite complex to a group of dim students, Jane began, “Ball lightning is extraordinarily rare, so rare that no photos are known to exist which conclusively have captured it. The only time that ball lightning can be witnessed is usually in association with a conventional streak of lightning, the ball lightning found at or near its termination point. Like the conventional lightning bolt which I saw just as the aircraft carrying your family disappeared, ball lightning also moves laterally, at somewhere between five and six miles per hour, it’s estimated. That was the first time that I had ever actually seen ball lightning.
“Those with more experience relating to the phenomenon have indicated that ball lightning has a number of extremely peculiar properties. It can enter a structure through a closed surface, for example, without precipitating damage to the surface through which it has passed. There is frequently sound accompanying the phenomenon, often described as like unto air slowly exiting a membrane through a tiny puncture.
“Considering that ball lightning is almost certainly superheated plasma gas,” Jane continued, “it should, logically, rise in air, but it doesn’t. It’s of short duration, or seems to be, and as the particular manifestation of the phenomenon concludes, there is frequently the sound of an explosion accompanied by the smell of something burning in its immediate aftermath.
“Its physical appearance seems not to be confined to one particular coloration, but several. That may relate to temperature or other variables. Size is usually seven plus inches in diameter—close to the size of a regulation basketball, I should think. The duration of the phenomenon is a matter of several seconds only.”
“About the same amount of time that we’re able to fire up the lighting array when the experiment really works?” Clarence suggested.
“Yes, about,” Jane agreed.
The rain beat against them and the ground on which they stood with the intensity of a high-pressure car wash. Still, none of them moved toward shelter, the equipment long since packed safely away and their bodies long since soaked to the skin.
“There is no universally accepted theory as to the exact nature of ball lightning, other than that it is composed of superheated plasma, as I believe I mentioned. Nothing, as of yet, satisfactorily explains its peculiar mobility or the source of its energy,” Jane concluded.
“And you saw this stuff when the helicopter disappeared?”
“Yes, circling around the aircraft. I remember now thinking that it reminded me of electrons circling a nucleus. Most peculiar motion pattern for ball lightning. And they all vanished into the black spot into which the helicopter seemed to disappear as well.”
“Then it’s hopeless,” Peggy Greer declared, raising her voice to be heard over the drumming of the rain.
“Why?” Clarence demanded.
“We can’t make ball lightning, and the phenomenon occurs with such irregularity that we might have to wait indefinitely. Lightning experiments in laboratories produce pretty puny stuff by comparison to the real thing, and that’s conventional lightning,” Peggy went on. “And experiments of the type we’d need to conduct even to attempt to produce a laboratory equivalent of ball lightning, even if they were possible, would cost a fortune—a large fortune.”
It was then that Clarence Jones had decided to find the owner of Horizon Enterprises, the company Ellen had told him, in their last conversation, owned the property in Nevada on which the ruined house stood—the company started by David Naile. One hundred percent of the stock in Horizon Enterprises was owned by a man named Alan Naile. Alan, if Clarence remembered correctly, was David’s middle name.
Wearing one of his theater suits—he had almost a dozen of them, this one gray—Clarence waited with Peggy Greer in a side office for Alan Naile to arrive. The secretary, a pretty girl, but not as pretty as Peggy, had apologized, telling them, “Mr. Naile called on his cell phone that he was detained in traffic. He should only be a few moments. May I get you something?”
As neither Clarence nor Peggy wanted anything but information and help, and neither of those could be provided by the secretary, she left to go back to the outer office.
It had taken Clarence nearly a month to find the means by which to contact Alan Naile, evidently a very private person, and this only after utilizing his ex-military buddies once again for their information gathering talents.
Yet once he got a phone number where Alan Naile could be reached, it was almost as if Clarence had been expected and the appointment was arranged within days.
There was an ashtray. Clarence lit a Winston. Peggy didn’t smoke, but didn’t seem to mind it when he smoked.
In the instant that Clarence pocketed the Bic lighter, the door at the side of the room opened and Clarence almost dropped the lit cigarette from his mouth. It was David’s face, David’s height and build, but this David looked to be about thirty years old, immaculately and expensively tailored, the steel gray suit he wore an obvious Armani.
“I’m Alan Naile, Clarence. And, you must be Doctor Greer.” Clarence stood up. Alan Naile offered a firm, dry handclasp to Clarence, then held Peggy’s hand briefly, almost as if he were about to raise it to his lips. Peggy had remained seated.
Alan Naile had David’s dark, wavy hair; but, unlike David, who habitually kept his hair short and brushed the waves as straight as possible, Alan Naile’s hair was grown out to where it was brushed back above his ears and, at the neck, it went slightly over the collar of his jacket.
Alan Naile got right to the point. “I have debated with myself since I first learned of the time anomaly when I was twenty-one whether or not I’d interfere with it someday, especially since, for the bulk of the time I would be running Horizon, I’d have no knowledge of future history. I even brought my oldest son—my youngest was born nine months ago—to an autographing session at a science fiction convention so that he could meet Jack and Ellen. I knew I look like my great-grandfather, David, quite a bit, so I prepared by growing a beard and getting some fake glasses. It would have been awkward to explain looking almost identical to their son. What was I going to say? Your son is my great grandfather?
“And you’re here because you want my help, perhaps with those experiments Dr. Greer has been conducting with Dr. Rogers. You guys have come up with the same conclusion that I reached as soon as I learned that your experiments with electricity and the helicopter’s disappearance may have been related. It could be done again—maybe.”
Clarence realized that the cigarette was burning his fingers. He stubbed it out and lit another one. “Smoking’s bad for you, Clarence. And please, don’t mind my calling you Clarence, because we are related.” Alan Naile sat on the edge of the desk for a second, and then stood. “Follow me, will you? We’ll all be more comfortable in my office.”
Alan Naile opened the door through which he had just entered, turned into a narrow, carpeted corridor with sconced bulbs providing the illumination. The hallway looked like something out of an old movie, the frosted glass covers over the lights having what his aunt Ellen would have called an art-deco look.
Halfway along the corridor, Alan Naile put a key into a lock and opened a mahogany-colored door. “Please,” he beckoned, letting Peggy, then Clarence, inside ahead of him.
Alan Naile’s office was large enough to hold an intimate dance party. There was a huge, dark wooden desk at the far side of the room that fronted enormous windows with soft-looking white sheers over them; the sheers diffused the sunlight, filtering it.
The desk itself was clearly one belonging to a wealthy and busy man. Several telephones, a computer monitor and keyboard, stacks of files and several notebooks littered the desk in patterns that seemed neither haphazard nor perfectly organized. Either his secretary knew Alan extremely well, or Alan maintained full responsibility for his own clutter.
Alan crossed behind his desk. “Sit down, guys. Can I have Cecily get you anything? Coffee, a Coke, a beer if you want.”
“I’m fine,” Clarence volunteered.
“Me, too,” Peggy added.
“See this?” Alan picked up a Lucite block from the front of his desk and crossed around his desk again, showing it to them. “This is the first money that actually came into Jack Naile’s General Merchandise. Ellen Naile saved it. Great-grandpa would have invested it.” He laughed. “It’s an 1853 half-dime. Can you imagine that? A half dime, contemporaneous, since it was still in circulation in 1897, with the nickel. Amazing. So, you want me to finance your trip back through time, Clarence, if it can be managed? Right?”
“You get right to the point, don’t you?” Peggy Greer observed.
“I have to, Doctor. Anyway, it would seem, since there was never a mention of you in anything Jack and Ellen left behind, or my great-grandfather, for that matter, that you are a new element into the mix, Clarence. Perhaps your mother died during childbirth, or your father died before you were conceived.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Clarence demanded.
“Simple. Every time Jack and Ellen Naile make the trip—and don’t ask me to explain it, because I don’t understand it myself, only that it happens. But every time they make the trip, history changes a little. In documents they left behind the last time, the most glaring example is that eight million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War Two. Yet we all know that six million were killed. Something that my great-grandfather did—likely the private-intelligence organization he put together— helped to alter history and save two million lives.
“Anything that any of us could accomplish would pale in comparison, I’m sure you’d both agree. Who knows? Maybe one of the Jews who didn’t die did something that somehow in some way we could never figure out allowed you to be born, Clarence. Who can say?” He shrugged his Armanied shoulders, went back around his desk and plunked down into the insanely expensive-looking leather swivel chair.
“At any event, Clarence,” Alan went on, “you’re here in the first quarter of 1994, and you want to go back to there, which, judging from what they left behind, is probably the spring of 1898. That means that your grandfather, who was also named Clarence, is just a month or two old somewhere in New York, and his older sister hasn’t taken up her profession as a madam in East St. Louis, just probably still is some cute little girl about to become an orphan.
“We could change history in a radical way here, Clarence, maybe for the better . . . or maybe we’ll just fuck everything up. Your call.”
“Oh, thanks a fucking lot!” Clarence exploded. “If I go back in time, I could alter history?”
“Of course. Jack and Ellen have gone back in history I don’t know how many times, because the last time, they found a partially destroyed wall outlet in the wreckage of their house, which means that they had gone to the past before. This could be a time loop that never ends. Think about that for a while, Clarence, and see if you don’t get yourself the gigantic headache that attacked Cleveland.”
“‘Those who don’t learn the lessons of history . . .’” Peggy began.
“Perhaps that’s why they and we are doomed to relive it. We failed to learn history’s lessons or some crap like that. At any event, I’m not going to play God. My wife tells me that my ego is big enough already. No. If you go back, Clarence, you might bring about great good, you might bring about great evil, and you might break the cycle of the time loop. God knows and He isn’t telling me.
“If you want my help,” Alan said flatly, “you’ve got it to the limit of Horizon Enterprises’ resources, and those have virtually no limit at all. We make more than a number of not-so-small countries, Clarence. I don’t have the notoriety, because I don’t want it, but I’m one of the two dozen or so wealthiest men in the world. Take all the time that you want and let me know, or tell me now. Whatever. Even though your mother was Ellen’s adopted sister, I still consider us blood, which in fact, if not in hemoglobin, we are. So you name it and it’s yours. I don’t envy you the decision. And, it might not work, anyway.”
Clarence looked at Peggy sitting beside him. She wore a pale blue sweater set and a dark blue straight skirt. Her hair was up. She wore makeup, which she rarely did. She was really way too pretty a girl, but he asked her anyway, “Would you go with me? I mean, marry me first?”
“Yes. Twice.” And she reached out and took his hand and rested it over her thigh.
Clarence looked at his newfound relative and benefactor. “Let’s try and book two passages into the past, Alan. What do you say?”
“I’ll have my best people on it by tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, let me buy you guys the finest dinner in Chicago. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to join you, but I’ll see you guys tomorrow right here at eight a.m. I’ll send a car around. Consider the dinner an engagement present. You guys are staying at the airport Hilton. Let’s say a driver will pick you up in the lobby at quarter to seven, traffic and all. Now, let’s schedule that dinner, shall we?”