Time's Enemy: A Romantic Time Travel Adventure (Saturn Society Book 1) (46 page)

Beneath the photo, glass covered a yellowed, handwritten letter. Tony leaned closer. The note was dated August 9, 1968, right after the U.S. had taken Viet Nam with solar-powered explosive devices. Tony’s head swam. Weapons? He forced himself to read the rest of the note, in which Dorothy Charlotte Henderson announced her retirement. Appalled by the use of her work to kill, she stated her intention to live the rest of her life in solitude.

Tony wandered away in shock. Before he’d gone back in time, he’d never heard of Dorothy Charlotte Henderson. What had happened? Mute horror flowed over his body, as if someone had poured a bucket of thick liquid over his head, slowing his motions, clouding his vision, dulling his senses.

Had his visit to Charlotte brought about this solar-powered new world?

He’d never know. He didn’t want to know. He wouldn’t warp again. He’d live with the questions, and the memory of Charlotte’s warm body close to his, and her lies—

Someone bumped into him. A girl in the tour group mumbled “sorry” and ambled away.

He rubbed his eye, and his hand came away wet. Crying. He’d been standing there, staring at her picture with tears running down his face and he didn’t even realize it. He surreptitiously rubbed his cheeks, snatched off his glasses—an old pair he’d fortunately kept—and wiped them, then hung at the fringe of the school group.

“...this is what Henderson claimed started it all,” the tour guide said. “We’re very lucky to still have it. As you might know, much of the museum’s collection was lost when S
pa
S
tar
fell. But this piece, along with a few others, was on loan to the Smithsonian at the time. If you’ll follow me...” Her words faded as the group moved away.

Tony approached the glass-topped, cylindrical pedestal. He clutched the glass, mouth agape, when he saw the object inside.

His calculator.

The one he’d dropped while shopping with Charlotte. The one he’d forgotten all about. He’d left it in his wallet, in the pocket of the pants he’d left on her kitchen floor.

His hands squeaked as they slid down the glass, and he slumped to the floor, crumpled into a ball. It was his fault. All his fault...

Tony didn’t remember driving—or rather, riding—home, or even leaving the museum. He didn’t remember anything until he found himself traipsing down the path through the woods behind the apartment complex. His footsteps crunched in the dry leaves, and the black walnut trees loomed menacingly, as if their leafy canopy concealed something sinister.
Come on, Solomon,
Tony chided himself.
You walk through this woods all the time, there’s nothing there.
The trail was the quickest way to Mulroney’s, Bernie, and a cold beer. Tony could sure as hell use a drink, even though he wouldn’t be warping back to re-do his week with Charlotte for almost another year. He had to get away from his apartment, away from the news that the Dayton Sniper was targeting dark-haired, white businessmen in their mid-thirties.

The crackling leaves on the trail gave out to pine needles, and when his footsteps became muffled thuds, the reason for his sense of foreboding became apparent. No birds chirped in the treetops above. No chatter of squirrels, or rustle of leaves as they leapt from tree to tree. Tony stopped.

Shards of blue sky showed through the treetops. Leaves fluttered in a light breeze, enough he could see but not hear. Then another presence settled into his mind, alien yet not...
Get off the path!

Huh? “Who—” He cut off his own words. No one had spoken, that other...
person
in his head had.
Get off the path!

He dove for a clump of undergrowth as a gunshot rang out. A puff of dirt rose from where the slug impacted the dry earth.

Good God, right where he’d been standing.

Move
!
the other presence urged. He scuttled a few feet away, toward a bush. Another shot. Twigs snapped from the bullet’s passage in the underbrush where he’d just been. His throat felt full of gravel. At another urging from that other presence he ran back toward the path. Two more gunshots.

He crouched under a low-lying tree.
Okay, chill out here. But only for a minute,
the other voice in his head said. Himself, from the future. Like when he’d sold all those technology stocks right before the market bombed. He panted, the sound loud in the still woods. The little voice was silent, and his present thoughts kicked back in.
Sniper. After me. Bob Standley wasn’t a random hit.
Tony dug into his pocket and whipped out his cell phone. “Police,” he said in a low voice. His future self remained quiet, though Tony still sensed his presence. Leaves rustled in the treetops down the path, where he’d run from. The shooter was coming.

The emergency operator picked up. “Someone’s shooting at me!” Tony tried to catch his breath. “They’ve fired five times—”

“Police are on the way,” the operator said. “Please stay on the line...”

Move
!

Tony darted for the underbrush. Another shot rang out. Closer. He squeezed the phone. “Sir? Are you all right?” Tony’s hand muffled the emergency operator’s voice.

“Yeah,” Tony whispered. But for how long?

Sirens wailed in the distance. Guided by his future self, Tony ran in a crouch, then doubled back on the path. The gunman fired another shot. Tony’s erratic route was all that was keeping him alive. “Sir?” the emergency operator said.

He crouched under a bush. “I’m here.”

The sirens grew nearer. There must’ve been a unit already in the area. The little voice remained silent. Tony’s legs were starting to cramp when blue lights flashed through the wood. Something at the entrance to the path crashed through the trees.

“Mr. Solomon!” a man yelled. The cops, thank God. Tony turned toward the voice and started to rise, then stumbled as dizziness swamped him. He was warping? Now? But the vertigo dissipated as suddenly as it had come. He struggled to his feet as two police officers tramped through the trees toward him. “Mr. Solomon! Are you all right?”

They questioned him and searched the woods for an hour. The only evidence of the sniper they found was the spent shells.

As Tony had expected. Because the sniper had warped away.

“Mr. Solomon, do you have any reason to believe you might have been targeted? Any motive someone might have?” one of the policemen asked as they emerged from the woods to the apartment parking lot where their cruiser sat.

“None,” Tony said. At least none he could explain to them.

And none he could explain to himself. Unless Theodore Pippin had friends in the future.

The police reminded Tony to contact them if he saw anything suspicious, then departed. He trudged back into his apartment, no longer in the mood for a beer or company.

It was his fault. All of it. Everything that was wrong in this timeline. His fault. Maybe those snipers were executioners from the future, sent back to kill him—no, punish him, take him to the Saturn Society to be turned into a mindless zombie, his penance for leaving the calculator in 1933. He had to go back. Had to retrieve the calculator, now. In the other timeline, there were no snipers gunning for him. No S
pa
S
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. No sixteen thousand people—and his sister—dead. The memorial, the fields full of solar collectors and the deforestation crisis—everything.
All my fault.
All so totally, completely, wrong. He had to fix it. Had to warp one last time. He couldn’t put it off until next year, couldn’t simply redo his visit to Charlotte, because the calculator would still exist in 1933.

And because if he waited a year, he might not be alive.

Tony tossed and turned all night. The red glow of his alarm clock numbers etched into his brain. 2:13. 2:17. 2:31. Light seeped around his curtains from the apartment’s parking lot, casting shadows in the textured ceiling, patterns he’d memorized.
There has to be another way.
The lines in the ceiling were rivers on a map, flowing on an inexorable path to nowhere.

Maybe Charlotte did lead the Society to him, but he couldn’t bear the thought of going back and ensuring her death.
You have to.

What was it that Everly had said in the hospital, after Tony returned from 1913? Something to the effect that if he went back to correct one mistake, he could fuck up something else, maybe make things worse.

Charlotte had said that, too.

But he had to take the chance. He couldn’t leave things the way they were.

Dwindling rainforests and global warming, far worse in this timeline due to the deforestation brought about by the premature consumption of land for solar collectors, the technology having developed too soon, too fast. And with the fall of S
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S
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, sixteen thousand people dead.

His life played out in mental sound bites. The time when he was a kid, playing in the park down the street from his house, and a strange woman had scooped him into a car. “I’m not going to hurt you. We’re just going for a ride,” she’d said. At age ten, Tony knew better than to get into a car with a stranger, even a tall, pretty lady with long, blond hair, but a little voice in his head had told him it was OK.

Ten minutes later, the tornado ripped through, leveling the park, the homes around it, and half the city. He and the woman—she’d told him to call her Alpha—went to a McDonald’s a few miles away. Then she took him to his home, which had been mercifully spared—

He bolted upright. The dog lady! The woman whose intervention had saved him from being blown away in the tornado was following him even now, decades later.

And she looked hardly any different.

There was another time, when he’d been in Boston, meeting with a client, and another driver—who looked amazingly like Alpha—had cut him off on the way to the airport, causing an accident that made him miss his flight.

A flight that went down in rural Missouri, with no survivors.

Who was Alpha? Was she from the future? And what of the little voice? The one that had compelled him to sell his stocks and buy real estate? The one that had told him where to run to elude the shooter?

Should he change the past again?

Everly’s warning rang in his ears. C
hances are you’ll screw things up even more.

He had no choice. Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.

At six-thirty he got up and showered. By the time he donned a collared knit shirt and khaki shorts (ironically, the same outfit he’d worn that day in Mexico, in the other timeline), he decided on a course of action.

He’d start the day with his usual at Bernie’s, his car safely ensconced in the Seventh Street parking garage. Hope and pray the guy who’d shot at him was sometime in the future, recovering, and wouldn’t be gunning for him today. Hope and pray the guy was working alone.

He shoved a wad of bills into his pocket. The woman at the bank yesterday had given him an odd look—few people used cash any more but the rare coin shop didn’t take thumbprint-initiated funds transfer.

The Buick’s canned female voice greeted him when he climbed in. He wanted to snarl at its too-pleasant tone. “Bernie’s.”

The car started and backed out of Tony’s parking space. “Music?” it asked.

He’d been listening to some thirties swing on the way to the museum. Something Charlotte would have liked. Hadn’t noticed it on the way home, he’d been so distraught.

“Yeah.” Music would be good. But not something she’d like. “Select by artist. Metallica. ‘Don’t Tread on Me.’”

The car complied, and heavy metal filled its interior. The anthem had come out years ago, but it seemed fitting.

Tony leaned back and closed his eyes as thoughts of Lisa rushed through his memory. The time when he was six and just gotten his first pair of glasses. Lisa was eight, and she’d faced down the bully on the school bus for him—and gotten the snot beat out of her for her trouble. Then there was the bottle of wine she and Tony had shared an hour before her wedding, when she’d been so nervous she could barely speak. The dinner she’d cooked at his parents’ house, when her marriage had almost fallen apart—and Tony’s had.

He thought of other people he knew who’d died in the fall of S
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S
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. A guy he went to high school with. One of his neighbors in the apartment complex, who’d been stuck in traffic. Dora’s brother’s wife. Everyone knew someone. In the Dayton area, most people knew several who’d died that day.