One Second Per Second Read online

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “Shut up shag-bag.” Shag-bag? It’s an accent I can’t place. British maybe. “Are you he?” I’m thinking the moment I say ‘yes’ will be my last.

  “No,” I say. “You have the wrong guy.” He gets more agitated and glances again at his iPhone.

  “You are.” He takes a step forward and the gun muzzle is a yard from my face. He’s shaking.

  “I’m not whoever you said. My name’s Tom and I–”.

  “Y’are,” he says. I squeeze my eyes shut. Then I wince with the boom of the shot and wait for my senses to catch up–the senses that tell me I’m hit and then dead. Nothing yet. I open my eyes. I look down. He’s on the ground, his head in a pool of blood that’s swelling over the tarmac. I squeal an exclamation as a hand grips my arm and pulls me hard. It takes me a second to absorb that it’s Gerard Bruce, the red-faced TMA security guy.

  “You’re a prick,” he says.

  NINETEEN

  “You’re a prick,” Zhivov says as he and Bruce escort me to my onsite quarters. I sit on my bed and hear a hushed conversation between them outside. Zhivov reappears but only to pull my door closed. I’ve been a naughty boy, I guess. Fuck them. Thinking fuck them somehow calms me a little. I’m shivering and I lie back on my unmade bed, pulling a blanket over myself. A man was shot through the head right in front of me and all I feel is numb and cold. I turn on my radio and Alanis Morrissette is singing “And life has a funny, funny way of helping you out.” I shut down and drift off.

  A knock awakens me. Gallie walks in, pinching two foam coffee cups with one hand and holding a bottle of liquor in the other. I sit up and come to, squinting in the light. She fills the cups and invites me to take one. I take a swig of Scotch and cough. She sits on my single chair. “You’re not the only one who can break the rules,” she says. I raise my cup to that. “How you doing soldier?”

  “Oh, about how you’d expect.” Now, Foxy Brown is inviting me to touch her, tease her, and I turn down the radio.

  “What do you want to know?” Gallie asks.

  “I want to know everything, Gallie. Everything.” She nods.

  “Yeah.” She sips her whisky. “Of course.” She’s pondering something. Is it where to start. Is it if to start?

  “How about, why did Prasad call me ‘the awaited one.’? Let’s start there.”

  “Because we knew you were coming. Well, we knew someone was coming.”

  “How?”

  “Detected.” Detected? “The Detection Array can detect arrivals as well as departures. You probably didn’t know that.”

  “This is part of the inner-sanctum technology?” Gallie nods.

  “When you accelerate, there’s a whole bow wave of tachyons. They disperse over the timeline so we can guess when you’ll be arriving–give or take a month.” I’m impressed and I say it. “Same on the departure side. Enough of the tachyon burst goes up the timeline that we can detect a future departure. It’s how we know where and to when your team was sent.”

  “Centuries away,” I say. Gallie nods. That a guy from the future is learning about new technology is an irony I haven’t missed.

  “But that’s small stuff.” Gallie takes a sip. “All that’s just about improved detection algorithms.”

  “So what’s the big stuff?” I ask. Gallie takes or dramatic pause, or perhaps she’s just catching her breath after an ambitious swig.

  “Boris told you the mission space we’re in. Preventing the one-second-per-second rule being broken is TMA’s job, but our stealth business is remedying the fuck-ups when the rule is broken.”

  “Which calls for deliberate acceleration–for time travel,” I say. She jabs her finger at me as confirmation. I pour us a second round. “You really do break the rules, don’t you? I’m in the minor leagues for that, it seems.”

  “So, you’ll be impressed by this. The newest accelerators can place you with an accuracy of seven minutes in a century.” A spit take would have been justified but the whisky is too good to waste.

  “So, a lot better than the piece of garbage accelerator that flung me back a quarter of a century when I all I was targeting was a couple of days.”

  “A lot. And there’s another thing I think’ll impress you,” Gallie says. “An accelerator can now do temporal and spatial displacement.”

  I think through the implications through the fog of the whisky. “So you can wind up wherever, as well as whenever you want?”

  “Accuracy of an inch in a hundred miles,” Gallie says. I shake my head. “Ram was behind it all, of course,” then adds in a whisper more to herself than to me “incredible man.” I notice that I’m rocking fetally so I stop.

  “So where are they? My team?” Gallie is up and raiding my food cupboard. She’s happy with a large bag of potato chips and pops it open, grabbing a handful before throwing the bag at me.

  “The silhouette portrait Boris showed you. Do you remember what–”

  “I remember, yes.” I posted her a get on with it look through my whisky haze.

  “Well, you weren’t the only awaited one. We detected another arrival a few days before you, but all we wound up finding at the arrival site was that portrait. No one with it.”

  “So someone’s at large?”

  Gallie shakes her head. “Not now.” It takes me a few seconds of liquor-soaked befuddlement to think this through.

  “The parking lot assassin.” I say and Gallie nods. “Where was he from?”

  “Don’t know, but the portrait frame design turns out to be American, late eighteenth century.” Now I remember his language. Was that late eighteenth century? As if I’d know.

  “That’s where they are? My team?” Gallie nods.

  “But why? Why eighteenth century? Why are they there? Who sent them?”

  TWENTY

  The whisky is going down too smoothly, too quickly. One pour follows another.

  “The picture isn’t clear,” Gallie says. “But if you’re asking for my opinion, your guy Kasper Asmus is a classic time vandal. And he’s in the big leagues. I’ve never seen anyone trying to screw up the timeline on the scale I think he’s going for.” She takes another sip of the single malt. “Time vandals are usually jerks who’ve gotten their hands on the technology and decide to find out what mischief they can do. Go back, warn a friend off a future spouse. Bed a great-great-grandparent.” I grimace. “Yeah, that one’s sick, but common. One woman put a bullet into her husband’s father before his sperm could cause her a problem.” I chuckle. Can’t help it. “A divorce of sorts, I suppose. Guy survived though. But the theory is, the timeline somehow has a way of healing itself, of getting back to the main flow. Perturbations tend to be short-lived. That’s the theory at least.”

  “So the butterfly effect doesn’t apply.”

  “Exactly. Where that theory lies on the spectrum between incontrovertible and pure bullshit is open to debate. But even if it’s valid, time does seem to have an elastic limit. Pull on it too hard and it snaps–like whatever caused your Risley park and vanishing wife.”

  “Snaps,” I echo. “But what’s a park in the scheme of things, I suppose? I doubt that’ll change the big picture. Maybe it all settles down and the park was just part of the temporary perturbation.”

  “And your wife. Bess?”

  “She was definitely a perturbation. Every fucking day.” Gallie laughs and I do, too. “But then, so was I.”

  I hadn’t seen Gallie laugh before. Not a real, convulsive laugh. Her face folds in on itself, her shoulders shake and she radiates.

  “Anyhow,” Gallie continues, “if we’re right, Asmus is no petty time vandal. He’s going for gold–a mass destruction of the timeline.”

  “But he’d be his own victim more likely than not, wouldn’t he?”

  “He’s a psychopath. The power outweighs the risk for someone like him.” She swirls the liquid in her cup.

  “So what’s he’s doing? What nuclear-grade vandalism is
he up to?” Gallie goes quiet. I sense she’s giving pause to what she should tell me, maybe even regretting what she already had.

  “A theory?” she says.

  “I’ll settle for a theory.”

  “We know where your team wound up. Late eighteenth century, Pennsylvania.” Gallie looks for my reaction, which turns out to be a gormless stare. “Maybe just coincidence, but that time and place give the clue.”

  Even my thin knowledge of history yields a result. “The Revolutionary War?”

  “If you wanted to shake things up just for the sake of shaking them up, you could do worse than mess with the founding of today’s most powerful state.”

  “Shake up? How?”

  “I’m balancing theory on top of more theory, but say you wanted a different outcome to that war. How would you do it?”

  I ponder this and know my answer is banal. “Kill George Washington?”

  “Maybe. But that’d take some luck. What we’re thinking is that you’d load the dice.”

  “Load? How?” Now some of the dots start to connect themselves. “The bastard who was about to put a bullet in me. It was a semi-automatic handgun.”

  “Seriously asymmetric warfare, wouldn’t you say?”

  I shake my head. “You’re kidding. That’s crazy.”

  “Oh yes. Majorly crazy.”

  “You think Asmus is in the arms trafficking business?”

  “Not so much a business. He’d be in it for the chaos, not the money.” I lie back and close my eyes. The room threatens to rotate so I open them quickly. “This is all theory, Joad. We could be way off.”

  I wish I were sober to think this through. “And why kidnap the TMA team?”

  “Don’t know. Perhaps a cherry on the chaos–killing the capability to detect and stop accelerations. Maybe he just held a grudge.”

  “I believe that. I should have inserted some of his theory papers into his windpipe.”

  “And what his plans are, don’t know. That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  “We?”

  Gallie shrugs. “It’s what you’re here for, right?” I take a deep breath. There must be a hundred questions in me but they’re drowned in fine single malt. I look at the wall clock and it’s gone midnight.

  “Don’t you have a family to get home to?” I ask, bracing for seismic disappointment. Now is when I’m going to hear about the successful businessman husband and three beautiful kids in private school.

  “I left my cat with a can opener. He’ll be fine.” Her head is tilted and she’s curling her hair around a finger in contemplation of something.

  “Thank you.” I say. “Thanks for telling me all this.” She shrugs an of course. Bill Withers begins to lament that there ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone and I turn up the radio. “I dance to this. It’s just what I do.” I stand and begin to sway. Gallie stands looking like she’s about to join me, but then lurches sideways and I catch her by the shoulders. Eyes lock for an instant then she pulls away.

  She exits without ceremony and “need to lie down” are her trailing words.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I’m not built for hard liquor and never have been. And I only ever remember this when I’m hugging porcelain. It’s a long night of thought, punctuated by unconsciousness, Saharan desiccation, and a nuclear headache. What Gallie told me seems insane even by recent standards. Loading the dice in the American Revolutionary War? Chronistically asymmetric warfare? A TMA team abducted to the eighteenth century? And Kasper Asmus behind it all? Is this really the most straightforward explanation of what’s happened to me? If it is, what would be the far-fetched explanation?

  The pounding inside my skull is not helping. So, is Asmus giving twenty-first century arms to British loyalists to change the outcome of the war? Goodbye US of A? A thought hits me as I lurch forward. Did his tampering cause the patriots to win? Is that it? Am I just like the kids in the Risley park who were oblivious to the fact that everything had changed? But for Kasper Asmus, we’d all be British. We all were British until he vandalized the timeline?

  This doesn’t seem like the place for analytical thought. Newton was sitting under an apple tree and Einstein in a patent office when they had their epiphanies. Not a single scientist I can think of was recorded as being draped over a toilet bowl during their eureka moment. I walk back to my cot and lie down with care.

  No answers. No answers that don’t double the number of questions. Gallie’s laugh. Tom. My mother. Her husband. George Washington. Gallie’s laugh. I pass out.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “C’mon, we’re moving,” I hear as I come to in a brutal jog. “Fifteen minutes,” Zhivov says and vanishes. I walk dizzily to the sink, stopping midway to question the wisdom of even this short journey. I down a glass of water. Then another.

  Zhivov returns when he said he would and I follow him out of the building, navigating the bustle of TMA cubicles. We get in his car and he pulls out while I’m still shutting the door. Exiting the parking lot, he takes a turn but in the wrong direction–away from the site gate. We drive for half an hour across the arid landscape that slopes down to the Columbia River, the morning sun flooding the land with pink and making the river glitter. There’s a structure ahead of us shimmering in the sunlight. If it’s there in 2021, I’ve never visited it. It’s smaller than the TMA building, but otherwise made from the same trailer materials. We park and enter. Zhivov shows his credential to one of several guards sitting inside the entrance and we pass through a turnstile facing an open elevator. We go down. The elevator control panel acknowledges only two floors but the journey seems more like a skyscraper’s worth. We must be getting as deep as the detection array. The door opens to an large, open space maybe a hundred yards square. The floor is a concrete pad and the ceiling is a hundred feet above us, crisscrossed by I-beams and cranes. In the center of the room is a large, cylindrical metal structure, maybe half the height of the room and fifty feet across. The room is lined with doors and Zhivov leads me to one of them.

  The large, round conference table in the room is sparsely populated–Prasad, Bruce, three people I don’t recognize, and Gallie. She and I exchange a glance. She looks luminescent, robust and well. I don’t know how that’s possible when I’m a gray, loosely bound bag of foul guts and pain.

  “Given events, Dr. Bevan, time is of the essence,” Prasad says. Is that a joke I wonder? No, this doesn’t seem like the place for a joke. “It’s only a matter of time before one of these attempts on your life is successful, so we should act. That’s our thinking.” He points to a chair and I sit. “This is Dr. Abioye,” he says, nodding toward a woman maybe in her fifties with tight gray hair, dark skin and an expensive gray suit. “And Morales and Byrne, security.” I nod and they stare. “Dr. Abioye has given us the go-head for a reconnaissance mission.” Prasad doesn’t explain who she is, but she looks like someone who’s generally in charge, probably from D.C.

  “Reconnaissance only,” she says in a metered, soft voice, practiced to demand attention. “Not a rescue mission.”

  “Yes,” Prasad agrees. “Right now we just need to understand the lay of the land. Find out where your colleagues are. What condition they’re in. If they’re captive. We’re giving you four hours in the field to find out what you can. Maybe you won’t find out enough to answer all those questions, or even any of them, but what we’re going to do is send you to the coordinates your colleagues were sent to. That’s no guarantee you’ll find them of course, and if that’s the case, so be it. This is a preliminary mission.” I glance at Gallie whose looking down, arms folded.

  “Mission team of four,” Zhivov says. “Galois is team lead. What she says, you do.” I nod. “Bevan, you’ll help identify anyone from your TMA team. Byrne and Morales are security.”

  “Do we know they’re not dead?” I ask.

  “No,” Zhivov replies coldly.

  “But I’d think it’s easier to kill someone than accelerate them,” Prasad says. “So le
t’s be optimistic.”

  “They could be miles from wherever they touched down.”

  “Yes,” says Zhivov.

  “There are a lot of ways this mission could be useless, or worse, but it’s where we start,” Gallie says.

  “Or worse?”

  “Sure, “ Zhivov says. “If whoever abducted your team is expecting us–if they detected the tachyon bow wave - they could have a nasty surprise in store.

  “And we can’t mask the arrival tachyon burst.”

  “No. We can shroud the departing acceleration blast, but not the arrival bow wave unless we happen to be arriving right in the middle of shielding facility,” Zhivov answers. I nod toward the door.

  “Is that what the thing out there is?” I ask. Zhivov nods.

  “Can we communicate after we arrive?”

  “With us? No.”

  “So, the first question is,” Prasad says, “are you onboard with this?” My nausea has subsided, likely making way for the fear.

  “Yes, I’m onboard,” I reply. This took little thought. It’s why I’m here, plus given how I feel, death will have no sting. Prasad nods at Zhivov who then slides matte charcoal gray boxes about six inches cubed along the table, saloon style, to each of the mission team. The top lid hinges open and I know what I’m seeing is an accelerator. It very sleek compared to the jerry-built collection of components that had flung me here. A strap indicates it’s intended to be worn like a watch so I put it on. A screen and touch pad curve around my wrist with what I assume to be the chemical and reaction chambers forming arm bracers like hoplite armor.