Timecaster: Supersymmetry (17 page)

“This won’t do at all! I hate this!”

There was the sound of a twig snapping, just beyond the fence.

“Harry, be quiet.” I peered into the woods. “I heard something.”

“You heard clumps of my hair being torn out!”

Another crackling sound. I planted my feet and squared my shoulders.

“Snappy doodle fuck! How did I get burrs down my pants?!”

I felt that tingle, like I was being watched. The canopy was thick, and my eyes couldn’t penetrate the darkness.

“There are burrs stuck to jimbo and the twins!”

“Harry, STF up!”

“I don’t care if the world is ending! I shouldn’t have come along! I should have stayed home and died with sex doll pizza tramp!”

I tapped my eyelid, my All Vision Contact Lens going to night vision, and immediately saw a man, expertly camouflaged in a ghillie suit, standing right in front of me.

Before I could raise my fists his hand shot out, thrusting an old-fashioned revolver under my chin.

“Wicked,” Dark Alter-Talon said
. They were in Alter-Talon’s armory. “Do you have two of these like I do? Or like I did, before my earth disintegrated?”

Alter-Talon nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got two.”

“We’re going to be invincible.”

“That’s the plan.”

They did a wet high five, making a sound like two raw steaks being slapped together. Each felt pain. Neither one cared.

They’d harvest their new hands in less than two hours.

“Grandpa?”

But it couldn’t be him. Ev digital tablett glancesped at the same time.

en though his face was smeared with brown and green greasepaint, and he was wearing a mesh camouflage suit that had colored strings, sticks, and leaves woven into the fabric, I could still see this was a younger man. My Grandfather would be in his nineties. This guy was maybe half of that.

“What the hell are you doing here, Talon?”

That voice.

Unmistakable.

It had to be…

Grandpa.

Hearing it again, after all these years, made me choke up. I couldn’t get a word out.

“Mr. Troutt, my name is Michio Sata. I was your grandson’s superior in the timecasting program at the Chicago Peace Department. This is not the Talon Avalon you know. He, and I, are from an alternate dimension.”

The man narrowed his eyes. “Sure you are.”

“You sound exactly like my grandpa,” Talon 2 said. “But you’re still young.”

“Anti-aging pills. Just because I’m disenfranchised doesn’t mean I can’t barter. You from another dimension too?”

“Same dimension. Sata-san invented a device that illuminates dark matter. I’m dark matter to you, you’re dark matter to me. Normally we can’t see each—”

Grandpa pulled back the hammer on his revolver, shutting Talon 2 up.

“Why are you on my property?”

“Mr. Troutt, sir? I’m Harry McGlade.” McGlade raised his hand up and waved, even though he wasn’t facing the right way. “I used to be friends with your grandson years ago, before he became a raging dick. Remember I met you at—”

“I remember you,” Grandpa interrupted. “Christ, do I ever.”

“We need your help, Mr. Troutt,” Sata continued. “Some very bad men are going to destroy this world in less than an hour, unless we stop them.”

I cleared the knot out of my throat. “We need weapons, Grandpa.”

“Don’t call me Grandpa, Talon. I know what you did to Boise. You turned out to be a real bad egg.”

Talon 2 and I both said, “That wasn’t me.”

Grandpa shoved me back, keeping the gun on me. “All of you, get off my property. Now.”

I took a deep breath, tried to keep the fear, the desperation, the emotion, all in check.

“Gran… Mr. Troutt. I don’t know you. My grandparents died when I was a kid. But I know the exact same things can sometimes happen in alternate dimensions, so maybe they happened here like they happened on my earth. I remember the week of my ninth birthday, you and Grandma too much woman for that.”

“m get new stuff.”

pveryone came over, we all went up to Wisconsin to your place, and I hooked that huge Northern Pike on a Lucky 13 lure.”

I closed my eyes, let the memory come back to me.

“It was too big for me to pull in, and I begged you to help me. But you told me I could do it. Kept urging me on. You stood by me the whole time I was battling that fish.”

“I have the same memory,” Talon 2 said. “You were holding the net. Telling me when to reel in, when to let out line. Must have played that fish for twenty minutes. My muscles were shaking. I was sweating so hard. I wanted you to take the pole because I was sure I’d lose it. You told me—”

“You told me it was my fish, not yours,” I said. I could practically smell the lake, sense the rocking of the boat under my feet. “You said it would be okay if the fish got away. The important thing was to see the battle to the end.”

Talon 2 smiled. “When I landed that sucker, you let out a yell that could be heard all the way to Canada.”

“One of the proudest days of my life,” I said.

Grandpa stared at me, hard.

“Mine too,” he said.

He was silent for a long ten seconds. Then he spoke again.

“Come with me.”

Alter-Vicki took Harry’s hand, and Grandpa led us through some dense woods to a partial clearing. There was a well-tended vegetable garden and a wire coop for chickens. I heard a snort and followed the sound, seeing some pigs in a pen adjacent to the log cabin in the center of the property. A creek flowed ten meters beyond that, an old hydroelectric waterwheel spinning fast. There were several windmills on aluminum poles, stretching up above the canopy, and a bank of solar panels on the cabin’s roof.

I also noticed something odd on the other side of the cabin. A patch of daisies. They were in a rectangular formation, obviously maintained, completely incongruous to the surroundings. I was about to ask about it when I saw the tombstone.

JACK
I MISS YOU
EVERY DAY

Grandpa held the door for us, and we trudged inside, McGlade walking straight into the door jamb and falling onto his ass.

“Someone help me!” he whined.

Harry sure whined a lot.

Alter-Vicki and Sata got Harry upright and we all piled into the kitchen. The cabin was sparsely furnished. The main room consisted of a wooden rocking chair, a fireplace with an old chainsaw hanging over it, and a bookcase filled with paper books, an antique radio occupying part of one shelf. There were some pictures on the walls. One of my grandmother. One of me, Grandma, and Mom. The windows all had metal shutters.

In the kitchen was a woodburning stove, a refrigerator, a wash basin that had been converted into a sink, some cabinets and drawers. And above the sink, hanging on the wall…ering pizzas.”

ed to ?” Sata asked.G

A mounted Northern Pike.

“Is that…?” I pointed.

“Twelve pounds, seven ounces. Yep, it’s yours. But not literally. From what I understand about parallel universes, there could be an infinite number of those pikes caught on an infinite number of earths.” He jerked a thumb at Harry. “What happened to this moron? Crawled into a cocklebur bush?”

“Fell in,” Talon 2 said.

“They’re sticky,” Harry moaned.

“I knew you grandfather,” Grandpa told him. “He was an idiot, too.”

He motioned for Alter-Vicki to sit Harry down at the only chair in the kitchen, and then he rummaged through a drawer and found a knife, handing it to her handle first.

“So you understand the multiverse theory, Mr. Troutt?” Sata asked.

“I’m a hermit, not an idiot. I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject. And don’t call me Mr. Troutt. Or Grandpa,” he said, looking pointedly at me and Talon 2. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that. Call me Phin.”

“Thanks for helping us, Phin,” I said.

“I haven’t agreed to yet.”

He stripped off the ghillie suit, stripping down to jeans and a white tee shirt. They looked to be real cotton. After hanging the camo gear on a wall hook he used a towel to wipe the greasepaint from his face. Sans makeup, Phin didn’t appear to be more than fifteen years older than I was.

“We don’t have anti-aging pills on my earth,” Talon 2 said.

I nodded. “Mine neither.”

“Officially, neither do we. The government doesn’t want anyone to know about them. Fears overpopulation. But I know a guy. Now someone give me the Reader’s Digest version of what’s going on.”

“The what?”

He sighed. “The abridged version.”

Sata gave a quick explanation, and Phin surprised me by being able to follow along. But I suppose living to ninety you learn a few things. While Sata talked, I wandered over the bookcase and noticed it was crammed with science titles. He also had an antique digital tablet, a Kindle Fire. Amazingly, it could still power up. It was full of ebooks about astrophysics, quantum mechanics, the TOE, and even a few about the TEV and timecasting technology.

“So not only will this earth be destroyed,” Talon 2 said, “But Alter-Talon is going to kill my wife. Well,
his
wife.”

I came back into the kitchen. “I love my wife more than anything, Phin. I can’t let her die. Please help us.”

Phin’s mouth formed a thin, tight line flamethrowerELoet. “I’ve got guns. A lot of them. But I want something in return.”

“There’s not a lot of time—”

Phin cut me off. “Time is something I’ve had way too much of, Talon. I also love my wife more than anything. When Jacqueline—your grandmother—when she died, I didn’t want to go on. But I forced myself to. I forced myself to live as long as I could. I always held out hope, with technology advancing as quickly as it has, that I might see Jack again someday.”

Sata nodded. “I understand. You want to find her.”

Phin set his jaw. “If there are infinite earths, there is one almost identical to this one, except on that earth I died and Jack lived.”

He folded his arms across his chest, his biceps bulging.

“I want Jack back.”

Sata had his TEV out and was typing on the display screen. “I’m using the modified UFSE to locate a parallel earth where your wife, Jacqueline Daniels, is still alive. Boolean terms include a history similar to this earth, you dead, and anti-aging technology so she’ll be the same age as you. We won’t have time to travel a far distance.”

“We built this cabin together. If I died on another earth, she could still be living here.”

“Understood,” Sata said.

I put a hand on my grandfather’s shoulder. “Phin. The weapons?”

“We get Jack first.”

“Phin, we’re searching infinite worlds. It could take some time to find one we’re looking for.”

“How much time?”

Sata cleared his throat. “Theoretically, it could take infinity. But I expect it to be quicker than that. My evil counterpart did a respectable job with the UFSE modification.”

“Please, Phin.” I squeezed, feeling tight muscle.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!”

The shirt came free of McGlade’s head with a violent tug from Alter-Vicki. He was missing several patches of hair, and as he’d predicted, his left eyebrow. He still had an unruly mohawk of burrs in the hair that remained.

“I hate burrs,” Harry said.

Phin didn’t even glance at him.

“Thirty years ago, right before CWII, your grandmother and I hid a cache of weapons on the property. We’d run across a few bad people in our time, and we wanted to have access to firearms if we needed them. There’s a shovel in the closet there.”

He pointed. Talon 2 grabbed a shovel, handed me a pick axe, and we followed Phin outside, Sata trailing behind. Phin walked to Grandma’s headstone, then took ten paces east, to the antidote for the nanopoisonemated via traumatic inseminationut the p a patch of wild grass.

“Here.”

Talon 2 and I went at it, working up a sweat in the cool, forest air, and less than half a meter down my pick struck something solid. Phin got on his knees, scooping loose dirt away, uncovering footlocker. He probed around until he found a padlock and hasp. Then he pulled a lanyard off his neck, a key hanging on the end, and inserted it into the lock.

Nothing happened.

“Jammed,” he said.

“Let me try.”

I knelt next to him, twisting the key as hard as I could.

The lock was frozen tight.

“Move,” Talon 2 said, hefting the pick ax.

Phin shook his head. “The lock and the hasp are made of nanotubes.”

Carbon nanotubes were the strongest substance in the universe, sixty times the tensile strength of diamonds. They were grown, molecule by molecule, in labs. Nothing could break them, not even other material made from nanotubes.

“What’s the locker made of?”

“Carbon steel. Alloy 1090. An inch and a half thick.”

“How many centimeters is that?” I asked.

“Almost four.”

Sata chimed in. “Alloy 1090 is rated a 9 on the Mohs scale of hardness. That pick won’t do anything.”

“A blowtorch?” Talon 2 asked.

Sata shook his head solemnly. “It’s rated to 1500 degrees Celsius. Cutting through something that thick would take a long time.”

“Chainsaw?” I asked, remembering the one hanging on the wall in the cabin.

“Can’t cut metal.”

I checked my DT. The world was going to end in ninety minutes.

“What about that revolver you had?” I asked Phin.

He tugged it out of the back of his jeans, aimed at the box, and fired.

Nothing happened.

“I ran out of ammo for this fifteen years ago. Got more in the locker there, but that won’t help us now.”

“Got oil? Maybe we can lube the lock.”

“I have some in the cabin.”

Phin trotted off. We felt each second as it slowly ticked by.

He returned with a rusty can of WD40 and a pair of pliers. After dripping some lubricant into the lock mechanism he slid the key in and out a few times.#emated via traumatic inseminationut the p

Tried to turn it.

Nothing.

He added more oil.