Time Enough for Love (20 page)

“The year I turned ten, I was walking home from school one day, and a gang of high-school kids grabbed me and pulled me into an alley. They had knives and they threatened to use them if I didn’t hand over all my money. But I had none. I had nothing of value to anyone but me. I had a picture of Stevie in my wallet, and when they took that, I … lost it. I went ballistic and got myself slashed for my trouble. But even that didn’t stop me.”

Maggie could picture him, ten years old and wire thin, with that burning intensity turning him into a passionate windmill of pounding fists and kicking feet with no regard for his own safety.

“One of the kids pinned me to the ground while the other kids ran off with my wallet—with my picture of my brother. This kid who held me down—Boyd Rogers—was four years older than me, but it was all he could do to hold me there. I don’t know, maybe the way I fought won his respect, but he quieted me down by telling me that if I stopped fighting him, he’d go and get my wallet back. He told me we’d trade—he’d give me the wallet if I would tutor him in science and math.

“At first, I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was
probably making fun of me, but I would have done anything to get that picture back, so I agreed. And when Boyd upheld his part of the bargain, he held me to mine. It turned out he was serious. He wanted a tutor. So I met him at least three times a week after school, in the park. He got a lot of razzing from his friends for hanging out with a ten-year-old from the School of Gifted Geeks, but he didn’t give a damn. You see, he had this plan to join the Navy and become a SEAL the way his cousin had done. And his cousin told him that if he wanted to get into the SEAL units, he had to have a strong background in science and technology. And that’s what I helped him with.

“I worked with him for four years—right up until the day he enlisted. And he tutored me during that time too. He taught me how to fight, how to survive on the streets of the meanest city in the world. And he made it impossible for me to shut out the rest of the world. He gave me a life outside of that silent house.” He paused. “You know, I’ve never told any of this to anyone before.”

Maggie’s heart was in her throat. “I know,” she said softly.

“Boyd and I stayed tight, even after he joined the Navy. And when he finally got into the SEALs, back when I was finishing up my doctorate, he started
taking me out on survival training missions. He’s been like a brother.”

He paused again.

“Maggie, I don’t want to be responsible for his death.”

Maggie looked up to find him studying her face. His eyes were impossibly sad.

“Or yours, either,” he added softly. “Especially yours.”

She knew what Charles was going to say next, and sure enough, as she looked back toward the window, he said it.

“I’m going to do it.” His words seemed to hang in the stillness.

Maggie fixed her gaze firmly on the ever-lightening strip of sky as she nodded. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s what Chuck wants.” She straightened her back and forced herself to look at Charles. “It’s what
I
want too.”

He just gazed at her. He looked so tired, so unhappy, she wanted to reach for him, to comfort him. She wanted him to comfort her.

“He loves you, you know,” Charles finally said. “He has for years.”

Maggie shook her head. “He’s only known me for less than a week. The Maggie he’s known for years married some creep from accounting.”

“Albert Ford.” Charles gave her one of Chuck’s crooked half smiles.

“Do you know him?”

“Not well—but enough to advise you not to marry him.”

“All right,” Maggie said. “I won’t.”

“Good.” He smiled again. “Poor Albert. Little does he realize his entire destiny has just been altered.”

“Think of the aggravation—and alimony payments—we’ve just saved him.”

“Of course, it’s entirely possible you were earning more than he was. Maybe
you’re
the one who’s saved from making those alimony payments.”

Maggie laughed, and the smile Charles gave her was one of his own—full and warm and filled with pleasure.

But it faded too quickly as they sat for a moment in silence.

“Would you mind—” he started, then stopped.

Maggie didn’t say a word. She just waited.

“Would you mind very much if I admitted that I’m … scared?”

She shook her head. “No. I would be … honored … that you shared that with me.”

“I keep wondering if this is really the right thing to do. It feels so wrong to give up all those years of
research and … I can’t keep from thinking what if there’s something I’ve missed. What if there’s some way …? What if we all just disappeared? Chuck and I could develop the Wells Project on our own.”

“With what funding?” Maggie asked quietly. “According to Chuck, even Data Tech had to go to outside sources to get the money necessary to build the Runabout.”

“Maybe … private investors.” Charles was reaching for answers now. “I have some connections—”

“And if you used those connections, Ken Goodwin and Wizard-9 would be able to track you down. And then we’d be right back here, right where we started.”

Charles sat for a moment in silence. “It’s just … It’s hard for me to quit.”

“It’s not quitting. It’s foreseeing a dead end and choosing a different path.”

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. How I’m supposed to …”

“Just decide,” she said quietly. “Picture yourself taking another route to the future.”

“All right,” he said, straightening his shoulders, steeling himself. “I’ll submit my resignation to Data Tech first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll go back to school, finish up my medical degree. Do you think
that’s really all it’s going to take? A simple decision? Because I’ve done it. I’ve decided.”

It took all of Maggie’s willpower not to glance over her shoulder at the still-dark hallway that led to the bedrooms. Was Chuck already gone? Would it happen just like that? One moment he was there, and the next he was gone?

But then there was a bang as the bedroom door was pushed open.

Maggie turned as Charles jumped to his feet, ready to defend her, if necessary.

But it was Chuck who came into the hallway, hopping out to meet them. The movement jarred his injured leg and made lines of pain stand out around his mouth.

“It’s happened.” He looked from Maggie to Charles. “I can feel it. I feel … different. So why the hell am I still here?” he said, then collapsed onto the floor in a crumpled heap.

Maggie reached him first. “Oh, my God, he’s burning up!”

He was. As Charles touched Chuck his skin felt hot and dry. Feverish. And his wound had bled clear through his bandage. His jeans were saturated too. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”

“We’ve got to get him to a hospital!”

“We’ve got to figure out what I did wrong.”

Chuck roused, groaning, swearing softly. “Maggie! Oh, God, they shot her! Gotta get up—”

“No, you don’t.”

“I’m here, Chuck. I’m all right. You’re just having a nightmare.” The sound of Maggie’s voice seemed to soothe him and he quieted.

Charles took charge. “Grab his feet,” he told Maggie. “Help me get him back into bed.”

The sheets were stained a bright shade of red. Charles lowered Chuck down on top of them anyway.

Now what?

Chuck was in a great deal of pain, made worse by his feverish state. He drifted, hovering across the line of consciousness, on the edge of some terrible, nightmarish place, and he fought to stay awake.

“Get a towel,” Charles ordered Maggie, and as she vanished back into the hallway he glared down at Chuck. “For a registered genius, you are one hell of an idiot. How could you possibly have forgotten the basic rule of first aid? Apply pressure to stop bleeding.”

Chuck was pale, nearly gray looking, and his teeth chattered from a sudden chill. “I did. In the car. It stopped.”

“Yeah? It looks like it started again.”

“I didn’t think I’d be around long enough for it to matter.”

“Well, I’ve made my decision. No way am I following
your
path. But you’re still here, so it looks like I’m going to have to do more than simply make up my mind to change my future. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions?”

Silently, Maggie appeared, holding the towel out for Charles. He took it, using it to gently apply pressure over the makeshift bandage.

“I’ll find some blankets,” Maggie murmured, taking one look at the way Chuck was shivering.

“Thanks,” Charles said.

She met his eyes briefly before she left the room. Her own gaze was decidedly sober. She knew as well as he did that their situation had just dropped from bad to worse.

Chuck had drifted off again, before offering up any suggestions.

Charles had to answer for him as Maggie brought a pile of blankets into the room and began covering Chuck. “Maybe I have to take action,” he suggested, helping her. “Maybe I should call Randy Lowenstein. Tell him right now—today—that I’m leaving Data Tech. I could call John Fairfield at NYU. He always promised that he’d do whatever
was necessary to get me into the medical school at the university. He was a friend of my uncle’s,” he explained to Maggie, “who always wanted me to complete my degree and go into medical research.”

He made the phone calls quickly, from the telephone on the bedside table, as he continued to apply pressure to Chuck’s still-bleeding leg. He turned slightly away, because he didn’t want to see Maggie sit down next to Chuck, on the edge of the bed. But she didn’t. Instead, she sat quietly on the floor, away from both of them, leaning back against the wall. She tucked the shortened skirt of her dress in and pulled her knees tightly to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.

He could feel her watching him as he spoke on the phone, and he felt a pang of longing so sharp, he had to clear his throat before he could talk. Chuck loved her enough to die for her. How could he possibly compete with that? After all this was over, what would happen? Would Maggie even want to see him again, or would he remind her too much of Chuck?

And if he asked her, would she come with him to New York? He honestly didn’t know. But he wanted her to. He wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything.

More than he wanted to find a way to travel through time.

He dropped the phone back into the receiver, and Chuck fought to open his eyes. “I’m still here,” he whispered.

Randy Lowenstein had expressed regrets about Charles’s decision to leave Data Tech, but he’d been supportive and had wished him luck. Dr. John Fairfield, a man whose anatomy classes Charles had audited while still only a child, had been overjoyed that he was intending to complete his medical degree. Fairfield had never understood that Charles had needed to know enough about the human body to make sure that his time-travel device delivered a living, breathing person rather than some compressed bundle of protoplasm to the past. That was Charles’s sole purpose for studying medicine. Achieving a medical degree to dangle off the end of his name meant nothing to him. At least not until now.

But despite the sense of forward motion he’d gotten from his phone calls, nothing—apparently—had changed.

“Maybe I need to do more.” Charles rubbed his eyes with his free hand, wishing there was time to lie down, to take a nap. He wanted to sit down next to Maggie and pull her into his arms. But he wouldn’t do that. Not in front of Chuck. “Maybe I need to
erase my hard drive. Maybe I need to delete the files of my research notes.”

It would damn near kill him to wipe out nearly three decades’ worth of research. But he was going to have to do it—because he didn’t want to end up lying on that bed with a bullet in his leg, filled with vividly violent dreams caused by extremely nonresidual memories of Maggie bleeding to death as he held her in his arms.

“Maybe,” Maggie said quietly from where she was sitting on the floor, “Chuck hasn’t left because Ken Goodwin is still out there somewhere. Maybe this has to do with him. Maybe until we confront him …”

Charles turned to look at Chuck. “Confront Goodwin …?”

Chuck didn’t answer, held prisoner by his feverish dreams.

And then the doorbell rang.

C
HARLES TURNED TOWARD
the living room and froze, a look of intense concentration on his face, as if he were waiting for something, listening—for what?

Maggie’s heart was pounding so loudly, it seemed impossible that he could hear anything over it at all.

“Who do you think it is?” she breathed.

He shook his head very slightly, his eyes still unfocused, still listening.

“Charlie, do you think it’s …?” Ken Goodwin. She couldn’t bring herself to say the name. It was impossible, anyway. How could he have found them here?

Charles unfroze, glancing first at Chuck, who tossed feverishly on the bed, then turning to meet her gaze. She knew what he was thinking. If it
was
Ken Goodwin, he was virtually on his own. Chuck was out for the count.

“I don’t think he’d stop to ring the doorbell,” he said. But just the same, he held out his hand for hers, hoisting her to her feet. “Help me move Chuck into the closet. I want you in there with him until I know for sure what’s—”

On the other side of the room, a window shattered with a crash, the curtain billowing as the figure of a man kicked his way through.

Maggie heard herself scream, a scream that ended abruptly as the weight of Charles’s body pushed her down onto the floor and knocked all of the air from her lungs. But then Charles was up again, reaching for Chuck, pulling him off the bed and down, nearly on top of them, as the gunman opened fire.

The noise was deafening in the small bedroom. Again, Charles covered her. The mirror on the wall above them shattered, raining shards of glass down on top of them.

But then the shooting stopped.

“I think that’s enough,” a voice said. “Don’t you?”

Charles shifted slightly, and Maggie could see the leader of Wizard-9, Ken Goodwin, standing in the doorway of the room, holding a gun. From his vantage point, he could easily kill them all. He must’ve come in through the front door.