The Sphere: A Journey In Time (16 page)

I looked back up at him with a pleading interest. "Noah did?"

"Yep." He groaned a little as he got out of his chair and walked over to a desk. "Had to do it rather sneaky too. Came over asking about some plant I had mentioned a few weeks before, wanted to go out into the fields and see it. Talked about them the whole time while he slipped two notes into my pockets. Slid them into a book when I got inside and took it back out into the orchard a little later on." He was rummaging through a draw of some papers. "Read the one addressed to me like it was part of the book, just in case. Always knew they were watching but could never find the damn things." He pulled an old leather bound book out of a drawer and set it on the top of the desk then kept looking. "Told me about the other letter, which was addressed to you. Told me he believed at some point you'd return, that he thought he had worked out what happened. And if I was still around when you did, I was to give you this." He produced a folded piece of paper which was sealed shut at the edge. "I'll be off to the facilities for a little while. Give you a bit of privacy."

I sat back down at the table and took a deep breath. The letter opened easily enough and I recognized Noah’s writing.

Adelaide,

If you're reading this it means I was right and you were sent into the future. I have a guess about how far into the future, but I won't bore you with my stunning intellect by explaining it here. Things are bad here. They're furious. They think it was part of some plan on our parts. I'm pretty sure I'm being let go. I've heard rumors of what happens to people from here who disappear, and none of them are good. If they don't just kill me, it's likely they'll find some way to neutralize me. I think I'd prefer death, I've seen what happens to people who lose their memory. Addy, I'm sorry for that. Jim let me watch some of the videos of your meetings with him. Well...me. That must have been so hard. So before that happens, I'm going to kill myself. I don't want to lose the first half of my life to these people. I want to remember it all. So I'm sorry again. Though if it's the year I think it is I'd probably be dead by now anyway. I don't know what to suggest you do at this point. I guess return to society, live the best life you can. Don't give up like I did. You're free now, you can go wherever you like. Enjoy it. -Noah

The stress of the past week and losing Noah for good hit me all at once. I lowered my head onto my arm and cried. I hadn't cried in such a long time. Life had been great here. I loved learning about the past and getting to travel and everything about it. I hadn't minded giving up the freedom; to me, it was worth it. Now I had no friends, no job, no place to go. I thought about the sphere in my pocket. I wondered where it would take me if I tried it again. By the time I raised my head again Montgomery had returned to the chair. I sniffed and took another sip from the glass. "So what happened to this place?"

"Witches."

I barked out a laugh. "Witches don't exist, Noah proved that himself."

"Well no, not real witches per say. But you've heard of The Gard?"

"Not really."

"A religion of sorts. Worship mother earth and nature and crap like that, but with a nasty violent streak. That woman that Noah saw escape the fire, she was a Gardian."

I froze in my chair. I felt like an idiot for not realizing it before. That woman who saw us disappear in 1692, that's who she was. "She saw us. I didn't notice her in the window, I was just desperate to find a way back for both of us."

"Exactly. She saw you up and vanish in front of her eyes, then went inside to see what happened. She found this." He reached back over to the desk, grabbed the old leather bound book from the top of it and handed it to me.

I opened the cover and immediately recognized the same handwriting from the letter I had just read. "This is Noah’s journal. We left it in my haste. We left everything.” I flipped through a few of the pages.

"Noah was a wordy one. And having had those months there without a way back, he wrote all about it in there. She kept it, passed it down through generations and generations. And as you know, most people have lost their religion over the years but there were some fierce believers. And the one thing they hated most in the world were the fierce believers in Jesus Christ. The people who had persecuted them so endlessly through the years. So they bided their time, working on their plans. They broke into this place-"

"The hole in the glass dome of the living quarters?"

"That very one. Didn't see it happen but heard it. Sounded awful. People said it was some witchcraft but I think they were just freaked out by it all. So a handful of them came down with some powerful weapons. Knew exactly where to go, took out any guards that got in their way and demanded an audience with the powers that be. Said they were taking over the lab. They wanted to send someone back to disprove the existence of Jesus Christ and any miracles he might've done."

I smiled slightly in amusement. Noah and I had talked about this very sort of mission but from the different side of things, wanting to prove that it all happened. I wondered how The Gard would have felt if going back proved everything to be true instead.

"Well as you can imagine, the leaders of this place weren't too keen on being bossed around. They gave in all too quickly and set about getting a librarian ready to go on a mission to meet Jesus Christ. They decided the first trip would be to see his birth. Angels singing to the sheep and all that."

I had no idea what he was talking about but nodded for him to continue.

"I mean, these people had guns and were threatening the lives of their very important employees, of course they were going to cooperate. But the Gardians, they weren't having it quite so tidy. They wanted to send one of their own folks back in time. There were arguments about our people knowing the process, knowing how to not interfere and all that, but the Gardians didn't believe they’d be honest about it all. They thought the librarians would lie to them. Don't blame them myself.

"So they got one of their own people trained up a bit and sent back in time. Only things is, they didn't get sent back to the birth of Jesus, they got sent back much further than that. To a time when the earth was just plates of hot magma swirling about. Surely they died instantly, and the sphere was lost."

I thought about the sphere in my pocket. Though I trusted Montgomery and he must have known how I arrived there, I didn't want to broadcast there was still a sphere out there. "They stuck with their principles,” I said. “They always said they'd rather destroy the technology than hand it over to anyone else.”

"They told the Gardians immediately once their guy had gone, what they'd done. The Gardians got a bit upset as you might imagine, broke into some boardroom and killed the whole lot of them. Their leader was killed in the scuffle though. The followers weren’t sure what to do then. Probably would've killed a whole lot more of us too if some people hadn't talked them down. Told them we were practically slaves there and had nothing to do with the management's decisions. They let us go and left. A bunch of people hung around for a while, tried to find things to do, but without the sphere and all the management gone there wasn’t much for us. Things started falling into disrepair and more and more people left. I told them about the tunnel Noah had taken to get out."

"Noah who?"

"Noah. Our Noah. He left right when those Gardians came and stirred things up. Snuck out in the middle of the chaos of all of it."

My heart nearly exploded. "Noah’s alive!"

"Well of course he is. Er, well, he was when he left. But that was what...ninety something years ago? Could be though. I’m getting up there myself."

My heart fell again. Of course. Even if he was still alive he'd be an old man by now. Even still, a very old friend would be better than nothing. There was only one other place I knew to start. “Do you know of the island the lab owns?”

He nodded. “That I do.”

“Can I get in contact with them from here?”

He shook his head. “The link in here’s been down for years.”

I groaned in frustration. Even if I could find a working link outside of this place, I had no idea how to connect to the island to talk to anyone. I’d have to travel there myself. "I don't know where anything is outside of this place."

"Hang on, this might help." He grunted again as he got up from the table and moved over to the desk. He reached behind it and pulled out a large rolled up paper. "I found it while wandering around the departure chambers one day." He laid the roll down on a table and opened it.

It was a large printout of the complex. The domes were labeled and rooms were numbered. A key at one side detailed the purpose for each numbered room. I double checked the listing for my room and Noah’s. Mine was the same, but his listed someone else's name. I scanned the list to see if I could pinpoint a different room but couldn't find his name anywhere on the list. So this was a fairly recent map. And there it was to the right of the complex, past where the land ended. The island. The map wasn't drawn to scale but there were coordinates that would lead me to it. "Can I keep this?"

"Sure, not much use for it here anymore."

It had been a two hour flight from the shoreline. I had no idea what that would work out to in sailing speed. Come to think of it, I wasn't even sure Marina and Adam would still be alive either. "I'm going to need some food and provisions."

"I may be able to help with that as well. In here." I followed him into another room. There were random pieces of equipment lining the walls. "I collected things I thought might be of value. Intended on maybe selling some of them to the outside world, but never got up the courage to leave.”

“Why did you stay after all this time?”

“At first for Noah. He was so sure you’d come back he wanted someone to be here. He couldn’t hang around, even after things fell apart. Then as the years went on I forgot about you. This place had just been my home for so long, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Ah, this one here," he patted a dusty looking box, "is the one they used to make money for you guys on your missions." He smiled broadly as though he enjoyed the idea of ripping off the leaders of the lab yet again, even though they were long gone.

"You are magnificent!"

He plugged it in and punched in a few numbers. "How much you think you'll need?"

"Let's say $5,000,000."

He whistled through his teeth and typed in the total. He hit a button and large bills starting pouring out of the bottom of the box. "That's an awful lot of money for a young lady. What are you going to do with it?"

"First off, I'm going to find myself a sailboat."

Chapter 16

Montgomery insisted on fixing us a meal and having me spend the night in his second bedroom. I was anxious to get on my way, but appreciated that I was the only person he had seen in at least seventy years, and obliged him. I also hadn't slept in at least a day, and with a long road ahead of me, probably needed the rest.

He loaded me up with some food, supplies and my new money in a backpack he had handy, and he found me a sturdy pair of shoes. I had the map of the facility folded up in one of my pockets and the sphere in another. It wasn't clear which way the tunnel from the root cellar would lead me out. It ended in a field surrounded by roads. It was supposed to be inconspicuous. The coast was about twenty miles east of the complex, and Montgomery suspected I'd be able to find sailboats in Rehoboth Bay. Supposedly I would be able to see the tops of the trees of a state forest not far away to the South, which should give me enough orientation when I exited the tunnel to get to a major road.

Montgomery offered me a disintegrator pistol after giving me a hug in the root cellar. I took it and shoved it into the back of my pants, hoping I wouldn't actually need it for any reason. I walked to the back of the root cellar and opened a fairly plain looking wood door. A long, dark hallway stretched out before me. I pulled out the light disc Montgomery had provided for me in my backpack and headed down the hallway. After about twenty minutes of walking, the floor started to slope up slightly. It went up for another ten minutes before the hallway ended with a large hatch, like one might find in a submarine. I struggled to get the wheel turning, pulling with all my weight on one side before it started to budge. I pushed open the door and had to close my eyes against the light that poured in.

I stepped out into the field and shut the hatch again. It was concealed inside a mound of hay, the handle barely visible on it. I stood up and looked around, feeling rather out of place and unprotected. On all my missions I had been prepared for being out in the real world, but it never really felt like the real world. In some ways, it wasn't real. I was a fake person in a time long past. And all I had to do to get back to reality was push a button. But now here I was out in the real world, in the future no less. I didn't have weeks of research under my belt to help me deal with the culture and any surprises that might come up. I stood there for a moment, wondering if this was the best course of action. I could just push the button again, see where I end up. “No,” I said, steeling myself against the fear of the unknown. I had to make some attempt to fix things, I had decided that. Somewhere, someone must know how this sphere works. I would start at the island and see where that took me. I saw the trees that Montgomery had talked about straight ahead of me. I loosened the straps on my backpack slightly and set off, keeping the forest trees to my right.

I got to the edge of the field and took a right on the road. I was definitely in a rather rural area. I walked along the road until I reached an intersection. Neither road was marked, so I took a left again, heading further to the East. It was still rather early in the morning, which I assumed accounted for the lack of travelers on the roads. Since the proliferation of self-driving vehicles the need for road sign upkeep had dropped significantly. Being now ninety years into the future, I imagined they were fairly non-existent. A person walking down a country road was probably unheard of. Had a vehicle driven up behind me, I'm not sure the passengers would even know how to stop and pick me up.

I wanted to avoid strangers as much as possible anyway, so my plan was to stick to as many back roads as I could. It came to an end about half a mile later and I made a right. After a short way I finally came to a highway. The road I was on passed under it and I stuck to that, but from the distance and direction I had traveled I was fairly certain this was the highway that went Northeast to the coastline. I pulled out my map and checked again. Just below the highway I would reach the remains of a railroad, and I could follow that until it crossed the highway again. I had decided to head a few more miles on the road from that point and then stop for the evening. It would be well over half way, and I wanted to regroup and plan my next day from there.

“Hello there!” called a pleasant sounding voice.

I stopped walking and looked around, trying to find the source of the call.

“Nice day for a walk.”

My mind went to the small of my back where I could feel the pistol pressing against my skin. My breathing accelerated with nervousness, wondering why I couldn’t see the man. “Yes, it is.” I tried to relax; I was being paranoid. “Where are you?”

“Right here.”

I heard rustling in the field to my left and backed off slightly from it. A young man emerged in overalls with a stalk of wheat hanging out of his mouth. I could tell it was for show, nothing about him suggested years of working in fields, even with technology making it a relatively simple job these days. In fact, he seemed one big cliché of a farmer. Something I would’ve expected to see in the 20th century. “You startled me, I didn’t expect to run into anyone on my journey.”

“Where is it that you’re journeying to?”

Even his accent sounded fake. Though he seemed harmless, I wasn’t about to trust anyone. “Just heading to a relative’s house a bit south of here.”

“Why don’t you come on up to the house, and I’ll give you a ride.”

I tried to play to his character. “I don’t think a tractor would make for a comfy ride.”

He laughed, but it was overblown and clearly for effect. “Well if you don’t like the tractor I’ve got a real car too. Not one of them fancy modern ones, but smooth enough.”

“That’s kind of you, but it’s really not far and I’m enjoying the walk.”

“Come in for a rest then. I’ll have the missus make us up some coffee.”

“No thank you, I’d really rather get back to it.” I gestured down the road past him, trying to indicate that I would like him to move aside. Over the course of our conversation he had moved into my path.

“Well... if you’re sure.”

“Yes, my aunt is expecting me soon. I don’t want to be late and make her worry.”

“Nope, certainly don’t want to worry that Aunt.” He gave me a shallow smile but still stood in my way. I didn’t want to walk past him but it would seem rude to take a wide arc around him. “Say, if she’s not far from here, could be I know her. What’s her name?”

I couldn’t think how to get out of this conversation. Perhaps rudeness would be called for after all. I said the first name that came to mind, my old hair dresser. “Vanessa Parker.”

His features froze and his voice took on a brief air of malignance. “Why yes, I know Vanessa Parker.”

Either he was lying or that was a very strange coincidence. Vanessa was old enough ninety years ago that she should be long dead, even if she did settle in this area. “Well it really is a small world!”

“Why don’t you come in. I’ll give her a call and let her know you’re stopping for a rest. She’ll be thrilled to know you gave an old farmer friend of hers some company for a few hours.”

“You don’t look terribly old.” He looked about my age, perhaps a little younger. Definitely no older than forty-five. I had no idea what the age expectancy was these days.

“I meant we’re longtime, old friends.”

“Funny, she’s never mentioned a farmer friend from the area.”

“When is the last time you talked to her?”

He had shifted even closer and I realized his farmer drawl had been becoming a faster metropolitan form of speech. He looked healthy, as though he would put up a good fight. I didn’t need authorities coming after me, so trying to knock him out and leave him out in the field didn’t sound like a smart option. I had gone beyond politeness, I would just have to plow on ahead. “This morning, and she has plans for us that can’t be changed, so I really must be moving on. Good day.” I tensed myself as I brushed past him, ready to fight back if he grabbed me.

“You have a safe journey then, miss.”

I waved back but kept my gaze forward and determined. I walked as quietly as possible, listening for him following me, but couldn’t hear anything.

I continued along the road and found the railroad tracks. I turned to the left to follow them and glanced to my left to reassure myself he wouldn’t be standing right there. The encounter left me nervous. I knew he was lying, I just wasn’t sure about what. Everything about him had seemed off. I tried to push it out of my head, telling myself he was just an oddity as I continued down the tracks.

Trains had become obsolete in my time, but it had been decided that it wasn't worth the effort and expense to tear up the infrastructure. The tracks had been left to become overgrown with weeds, quite dense in a few parts. It slowed my progress down but I was fairly assured I wouldn't run into anyone else this way, and it was a very easy map symbol to follow. I stopped a little ways onto the tracks to rest and have some lunch. With the farmer a few miles behind me, I was feeling more relaxed. I hadn’t heard or seen any indication that he was following me.

I could just barely hear vehicles on the highway zooming past a few hundred yards away, but it was otherwise peaceful. The tall grass hid me quite well from anyone who might be walking along nearby roads. I had taken a few containers of the vegetables from the root cellar and Montgomery gave me some preserved meat he had made. His livestock had long since died, but he would sometimes go out into the woods just north of the tunnel and hunt wild game. I was eating some jerked venison he had made to keep my protein levels up for the remainder of the walk today.

I didn't linger after finishing my meal, I was anxious to settle in for the night and plan for my arrival at the bay. I figured with enough money I could dissuade anyone from asking too many questions. Most of the planks between the rails had decomposed long ago, but there were a few sections where I could methodically place one foot on each plank. It slowed down my pace a little, but I found it mentally soothing. I figured it was about five miles from where I had stopped for lunch to the next highway crossing. Even taking about half an hour to make it a mile along the track, I would have plenty of time to get back to the road, walk a few more miles, then find a secluded spot to set up the shallow shelter in my pack.

I thought about Adam and Marina as I walked along. They were definitely fit, but also well-seasoned in the hospitality business. I never asked, but my guess was they were in their fifties, which would put them in their one hundred forties now. Definitely old, but not an unheard of age. The fact that they led such a healthy lifestyle might have helped. Or perhaps I was wrong and they had been younger when I met them. Regardless, it was the only lead I had to go on for now. A fair number of people had been sent there to unwind. My only hope was that a few of them thought it would also be a good place to retire. Specifically, Jim.

I came to the highway crossing and left the railroad tracks on a road that headed south. This shortly joined another road that took me further east. After about an hour I knew I would start to approach civilization again, so I decided to call it a day. I wandered off into another field and pulled out the shelter. I unlatched the cover and threw it a few feet from me. It popped open into a low tent that was not visible above the tall stalks of wheat. I threw my pack inside and crawled in after it. The floor was cushioned enough to sleep on comfortably and I would throw some of the extra clothes I packed over top of me if I got too cold at night. I pulled out the map again and checked my progress. From here I could head mostly Southeast through the fields, then skirt along the North side of the bay to a marina just off the main area of Dewey Beach. I was hoping I would be able to find a boat for sale somewhere at that marina.

I put the map away and pulled off my shoes to let my feet air out a little. I flexed and rotated them and gave them a good squeeze. It felt good to get the shoes off and put my feet up for a while. I dug around in my pack for some dinner. I had some carrots, more of the jerked venison, and took a hydration cube. I was pretty exhausted and wanted another early start, so I stretched out on the floor of the tent and was asleep almost instantly.

I woke up once, when I heard some rustling in the field near me. As quietly as possible I grabbed the pistol from where I had left it by my pack, and brought it up under my pillow, listening to my surroundings. My other hand almost instinctively checked for the sphere. A grunt broke through the rustling noise, and I relaxed a bit as I listened to the animal wander off again. I kept my hand on the gun under my pillow as I went back to sleep. In my dream I found the farmer beyond the door at the end of a dark hall.