Time Slip (3 page)

Then the feeling was gone, instantly replaced with a wave of emotions. It was the strangest of feelings; he was experiencing the emotions of a thousand different events at once. Each emotion was attached to an image or group of images —seemingly disjointed memories from another person’s life, or were they his? It was a life’s worth of movies in an instant. His brain ached and exhaustion consumed him; it was far worse than any multi-nighter research binge.

Then the weightlessness and flood of information abruptly stopped and everything around him was still and black.

As if he were in a dining room in which the dimmer switch was being turned up slowly to reveal the main course, he could start to see.
Perhaps my personal space and time are catching up with this future space and time?
Within a span of a few seconds his surroundings looked… normal.

He had a suspicion and turned around to confirm it. His assistant, Monty, was nowhere to be seen. There was no doorway to that place in time he had just come from—just a muddy blur where he stepped through, a distortion, but nothing more. Suspecting that Monty could see him through this one-way window in time, Dr. Ron gave him the thumbs-up. Then, as if on command, the blur disappeared. Ten seconds! Yet for him, at least two minutes had passed. His head hurt more as he considered this. He had work to do.

The space around him looked familiar, yet very different.

They had reasoned that he would end up five to ten years into the future, but at some unknown location; it could be down the street or in Poland, for all he knew. They could only assume he was years into the future—that was his hope anyway. Their data had confirmed three assumptions: this was some sort of laboratory similar to his own; it was ruined, damaged by some event they couldn’t possibly foresee—they just didn’t have the time to run more tests; and they knew that radiation increased the farther forward in the future they went. This final point they assumed had to do with the timing of their time slips, suspecting that they were looking at some point on the calendar farther along in the summer—albeit years ahead, when solar radiation levels would be greater.

The nausea finally passed, so he decided to take his first steps in this future world. He immediately had a sense of what the first astronauts must have felt like landing on the moon; it was at once both scary and exhilarating. There was very little light in this space, as there were no overheads and the natural light was mostly blocked by the boards covering the lab’s elevated window. He walked directly to it, tripping over debris along the way, intending to rip a board off and allow more light into this space. The debris included both drones he had sent previously, a little banged up, but otherwise untouched.

He yanked with both hands, poking his right hand with one of the hanging nails in the process.
Should have gotten a tetanus booster last time I was in to see Pete
. A creaking bray as the last nail gave up its fight, and the light poured in like a springtime flood. He saw it right away, between the slats, just outside the window: the billboard he had stared at for years, its advertisement changing every few months. Today, or rather the day he left in the past, the advertisement was—or had been?—exactly the same as he saw it now: a topless model, her back to her onlookers, with skin-tight blue jeans temptingly being pulled off by another woman. “But that can’t be, unless…” Words leapt out of his mouth as he pivoted in one motion and was hit at once with complete realization.

“It couldn’t be,” he mumbled out loud, his mouth agape.

This was his laboratory.

Monty watched Dr. Ron step into the time window, but it was far more surreal than him merely stepping through a window frame: he watched him step into a reality TV program, but through the television. Monty observed his friend look around first before Ron turned and gave him the thumbs up. Then the window disappeared, the machine abruptly stopped, and all the lab’s lights went out. Only the computer’s drive and the UPS’s warning beeps sounded, loud in the silence. Monty’s shadow was cast on the floor by the lab’s only light, coming from the computer monitor screens. At that moment, the only other sound was a slight ticking from the collider’s heated metal surfaces being cooled by liquid nitrogen.

The momentary quiet was shattered by a loud thumping on the outside door. Then he noticed the strobing blue and red lights flashing through the single chin-high basement window facing the highway outside. He
knew
what was coming next.

“This is the Dallas Police Department. Open up. You have ten seconds or we will break down this door.” The voice and banging were somewhat muffled by the door’s thickness. This lit a fire under Monty, who blasted out of his seat, grabbed the portable hard drive out of the computer, and pushed on a flat wall panel on the side of the laboratory beneath the stairwell. It gave way and he stepped through the opening into Dr. Ron’s hidden office, where they had been earlier. He pushed back against the bookcase, concealing the doorway, and it returned to its place, clicking satisfactorily. At the same time he heard, more faintly, “This is your last chance …”

The room was pitch black, but it didn’t take long for him to grope around for the exit and open it, the smell of grass and the hum of crickets immediately filling his senses. Monty ascended a flight of concrete steps with caution, looking around to make sure the police weren’t here. The field was dark as well, but he had a loose familiarity with it from their breaks of “fresh air” earlier today. Already his eyes were adjusting, and he could make out the shape of the ellipse and the electrified fence in the distance, where his safest escape route lay. He turned his head back to confirm that the overhead spots were out, and therefore the power, and jogged straight back, over the hump of the ellipse—the only part of the particle accelerator visible to the world—and over the electric security fence. He was thankful it was off and he had parked his car off the road, away from the laboratory and the police.

The rented Escalade was parked on the side of a frontage road beside a billboard telling highway motorists to buy some brand of blue jeans painted onto some mostly naked model. The vehicle was like some elegant but powerful black animal that had been stalking its prey, the Stoneridge Research Laboratory, and got bored waiting. So it rested, ready to spring when it was time. Its form was barely visible under the dusky light cast from the city’s reflections and the evening stars. This entire surrounding area was experiencing a blackout.

The man watched from behind the slick vehicle’s dark eyelids; a small flash of light from his lighter was the only indication the Caddy was occupied. Unconcerned about being seen, the man took a deep puff, lowering the side window slightly to let out his exhales. He peered at the scene in front of him, an experienced hunter waiting patiently for his moment to pounce.

The police were looking for the same man he was. Best to let them do his job for him and not get in their way. Sometimes, the police presence forced a target to move. In these cases, watching and waiting always worked best. He took another long drag from his Dunhill, eyes unblinking.

A smoldering anger bubbled up inside him. His handlers hadn’t told him police were involved, and he doubted it was a coincidence. It certainly was not a complication he had accounted for when quoting his fee. The simplicity of the job was heavily weighted by his target: a pudgy scientist who did little else aside from testing his research at his lab or spending time at home with his wife, and on a rare occasion teaching a class at the university. He knew his target well, having successfully completed another job for the same handler over a decade ago, involving simply the theft of some “trade secrets about gamma radiation.” Now he was back and his target was older and pudgier but better funded this time. This bred complications, but none he hadn’t accounted for: increased security and questions about the target’s benefactors and their own motives. For all he knew, his own handlers paid for the doctor’s research and they wanted a return on their money now; perhaps it was the competition. It really didn’t matter who was funding him or what the research was about. He just hated the police being involved.

More arrived, rolling past him with their sirens silent, telling him what he suspected; his target was not here. He could always return if he had to, when there were only one or two officers, to find the data his handler wanted. He would go to the target’s home next. Most likely the researcher was on the run and would quickly gather a few things to hide out somewhere. He had to move before he lost his target’s scent.

The man took a final drag and flicked his cigarette onto the road as he slowly turned the black predator around, lights still out, and stalked off in the other direction.

What had happened to his lab in just a few short years since he left? Fear started to take hold… Maybe it was much later in the future than they had calculated.

Dr. Ron’s mind searched for an answer as he stared at the ruins of what was his laboratory. Time travel was far from an exact science. They had only been guessing that by pushing an increasing amount of power to the collider, the fields would reach light speed quicker, thereby generating a doorway leading farther into the future.

He was now terrified that he had arrived so far into the future that he would have no chance of finding Dr. Mendelson, much less the cure for his wife’s cancer. As crazy as his plan must have seemed, failure had never been a consideration. He had just assumed that he would make this work. Now doubt and a nagging fear crept through his veins… and there was something else: the world was silent.

He instinctively reached for his hearing aids, assuming he had turned them off during the machine’s noisy routine and forgot to turn them back on. He reached behind his curly hair to the one in his right ear—the one he could better hear from—-and switched the on/off back and forth, then did the same with the volume.
Nothing
. He pulled it out and was rewarded with the subdued ambient noises surrounding him: the slight breeze squeezing through the single window slat; the echo of a cricket off in the dark recesses of his lab; a piece of debris sliding farther off a pile he had disturbed a moment ago. His hearing aids must be dead.

He pulled out the other to receive a little more sound, although he hadn’t heard much of anything out of that ear since a lab accident took about 70% of his total hearing over a decade before he went though the time slip. Both looked fine but obviously something was wrong. Perhaps more important was his right hand, which he had already forgotten and now was pulsing out a nice flow of blood. Slipping the aids into his pocket, he squeezed his fingers against his damaged palm and held his hand above his head, like one of his students asking to be called on in class.

Time to get down to business
, he thought, willing his fear away and focusing on getting to Dr. Mendelson’s lab. Dr. Ron touched his inside back pocket and confirmed the presence of the paper containing Dr. Gregory Mendelson’s information. He stepped gingerly over and around the debris, navigating his way to his side office door to get the keys to the facility’s truck and drive to Mendelson’s laboratory. His gaze swept around his own lab to find a clue as to what may have happened.

The two ends of the accelerating tubes looked completely intact. But the area beyond this appeared to have been damaged by an explosion and then a fire. The computer terminal was covered in a blanket of black; the monitors slumped, as if they had melted. Shards of papers on the floor, their edges gone, replaced by uneven black borders, also spoke of a fire. Almost to the wall, a large power cable hung from the ceiling; below and surrounding it pooled a blackened stain covering everything from the cable end to the walls, as if it had been severed and poured out oil, coating everything in this part of the lab. He reached down and touched the stain. It had no substance. Then he knew it was soot, from a fire: a flash fire that came from this line, like some sort of lightning bolt, his mind now making sense of the zig-zag patterns that would be more consistent with lightning. Only this lightning had come out of a power cable.
Strange
. Farther up, at the front wall and the far left side of the laboratory, it appeared that the propane tank had exploded. But that fire had remained in that area, from the look of the markings, and was not part of the flash fire that seemed to have blanketed much of the rest of the lab.

At the side office doorway panel, a secret entrance only his wife, Monty, and the builders of his office knew about, he took a deep breath and pushed. It wouldn’t give. He pushed harder and it still wouldn’t budge. Something must be blocking it on the other side. Then, he noticed them.

Bullet holes?
“What the hell?” he bellowed at the obstacle. There were half a dozen bullet holes in the panel he was pushing on, like someone with bad aim had used the wall for target practice. He stepped back and saw that his beloved Keurig—one of his favorite presents from Betsy—had also been the victim of this aggressor’s gunfire, a hole in its head. He suspected if he looked he would see the bullet had taken out an empty Donut Shop flavored K-cup, his favorite coffee brand.
Betsy!
His mind returned to the task at hand; he would have to figure out this puzzle later. He bounded up the stairs to the mezzanine walkway and to the double doorway, partially blocked by a desk that had resided farther to the right. More puzzles.

After cleaning and wrapping his wound liberally using the first aid supplies from the supply closet, he grabbed the second set of keys to the truck from the otherwise empty receptionist’s desk, and then headed to the side of the building to get the truck and drive to Mendelson’s. The first thing he noticed when he left the building was the heat. The sun was high in the sky, indicating it must be noon, but it was as hot a day as he could remember.
It must be the middle of summer.
Turning the corner and expecting to see the white pickup with Stoneridge Research Laboratory painted on its sides, he stopped and stared at an empty space instead.