[2013] Life II Read online

  “That sounds good.”

  Max paused, looked around the café, then started.

  “You enter 37 Minona Street. What city?”

  “Athens.”

  They looked at each other, studying each other’s faces.

  Max continued, “You go up to Room 300.”

  “And find a door.”

  “What does the door say?’

  “M. Tempus.”

  “And ring the doorbell.”

  “And wait and wait.”

  “Who answers?”

  “Dr. Time.”

  “She walks over to where?”

  “The far wall.”

  “And gets?”

  “A silver cube.”

  “And places it where?”

  “Onto a square inscribed on the floor.”

  Max sat back and stared. “Okay, that’s good enough.”

  “Not yet,” Lucinda said. “I need to make sure you’re not an alien.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need to make sure you’re not an alien.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?”

  “You’ll allow me to observe you taking a sample of your own blood.”

  Max blinked hard and laughed. “Oh, right! I have absolutely no intention of doing that.”

  “Watch me,” Lucinda said. She took out a pen needle, the type purchased at drug stores for do-it-yourself blood tests. She tore off the sterilized wrapping. She then stabbed the needle into the tip of her index finger, and extracted a drop of blood. “There. You see? I have blood. That proves I am a human.” She looked at him. “Now you do it.”

  Max narrowed his eyes at her, and hesitated. Oh, for the love of Pete! If she’s really that paranoid, maybe I should just get up and walk away. On the other hand, Max had never met a fellow time traveler, and she definitely knew about the Time Weaver. It can’t be a ruse. He slid forward in his seat and swallowed. He was in a public place. What harm could happen from pricking his index finger?

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll do it.”

  He took the needle, and pricked the tip of his index finger. A drop of blood formed onto the skin.

  “Excellent,” Lucinda approved. “I will now convey the information.” She stared at him, as Max picked up his glass of water. “I need your help.”

  “With what?”

  “We have to destroy Dr. Time and the Time Weaver.”

  Chapter Eighty

  November 17, 2010 at 12:07 p.m.

  Max choked as he sipped his water. He coughed three or four times, spraying water on his lap, then straightened himself out. He couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. He cocked his head and looked at her as if not sure he hadn’t stumbled into the wrong place, and asked:

  “Say it again.”

  “We have to overpower Dr. Time, killing her, and then demolish the Time Weaver.”

  Max’s stomach lurched.

  “That’s what I thought you said. Why?”

  “Allow me to demonstrate.”

  Lucinda took a round globe of glass from her backpack. Inside was a small ball of liquid, perfectly suspended in the middle. Max thought it was all solid glass, but the ball jerked around within the glass, in reaction to the movement of its sphere. The further the ball strayed from the center, the more severe the force pulling it back to the original position in the center.

  Lucinda took her glass of water, and then poured out as much as she could to completely cover the orb. Water splashed onto the table. Max was fascinated. He noticed some odd glances aimed at them from other tables, but people stayed generally polite and avoided eye contact.

  “Uh. What exactly are you doing?” Max whispered.

  “I am demonstrating the evidence.”

  To Max’s amazement, the thin glass—or whatever substance it was—forming the sphere started to disintegrate. It was like watching glass shatter. Except that instead of the pieces falling and flying away, the pieces shrank and disintegrated until they disappeared. Freed of the gravitational forces within the orb, the ball of liquid—it looked as dense as mercury, but was a shimmering brilliant green—splatted onto the table. Max turned his face away as the blob smacked on the table, expecting splatter from the blob.

  Instead, with a mind of its own, the ball of liquid spread itself uniformly across the table, keeping one millimeter away from objects on the table such as the vase of flowers, the salt and pepper shakers, and the menu holder. Max gaped in astonishment.

  All at once the green liquid stopped spreading out and consolidated into a flat, smooth surface. It appeared like the screen of a computer. Patterns, like computer graphics, started forming on the surface.

  Max was spellbound.

  What appeared to be genealogical family charts appeared on the luminescent surface, moving down into more patterns. Max found the pace of information too hard to read, but the scrolling patterns appeared to be family names and years. He saw the numbers 1910, 1846, 1759, 1605, 1481, and hundreds more. Still the flashing of information was far too rapid for his brain to absorb.

  There was a strange language being voiced from the shimmering tablet. The patterns of sounds appeared to be as highly structured as classical music. The crescendo was composed of complex sounds that varied and overlapped in pitch, rhythm, melody, harmonic function, form, and texture to such extent he’d never heard before from any of Earth’s spoken languages.

  Max broke off his attention suddenly, realizing they were in a public environment. People had stopped pretending not to notice—now they were all captive observers, lapping up all the detail with their eyes and ears. They all stared at the organic compound on the table.

  “Uh, Lucinda,” Max whispered feverishly, through clenched teeth.

  “Yes, Max?”

  “People are staring at us.”

  “What do you wish me to do?”

  “Get rid of it!”

  Lucinda nodded, and then poured the rest of the water from her glass onto the impromptu computerized tablet. Upon sensing the flow of water onto it, the substance retreated and pulled back from the boundaries of the table, and became more and more round and dense until it formed a ball once more. Lucinda then placed the orb back into her backpack.

  A girl from the next table came up to Lucinda and said, “Can you do that magic trick again?”

  Before Lucinda could answer, Max leaped up, grabbed her arm, and pulled her out of the restaurant. He said, “Let’s disappear inside the shopping mall. Maybe they won’t follow us.”

  They walked quickly into one of the stores, took the elevator down to another promenade, and then headed out the other side of the building out onto the main street.

  Max was exasperated. “Where the hell did you get this stuff?”

  “I got it from Dr. Time’s office.”

  “You stole it from Dr. Time?”

  “She was focused on programming the Time Weaver. I pretended I was observing her. Little did she know I was using concealed moves to slip these items into my backpack.”

  “She?” Max asked. “It was a female Dr. Time?”

  “Yes, Max.”

  “With blonde hair?”

  “The very same one. There is only one Dr. Time.”

  “No, there isn’t,” Max grumbled. “There’s a male Dr. Time. Tall and thin. I remember that Dr. Time the female said she took over from him in the middle of 2005. She’s the one who lied to me about the consequences.”

  “Damn!” Lucinda said intensely, pounding her fist into the air. “It’s worse than I thought!”

  “Oh, really?” cried out Max. “You’re the one advocating we commit a murder, and destroy an incredible time-travel device, which is far more advanced than anything we have invented to date!”

  “Would you do it, if it meant saving the Earth from an alien invasion?”

  Max squinted at her, his brain about to explode. “Look, how do you know the aliens want to take over?”

  “First of all, do you agree Dr. Time
is an alien?”

  “Of course,” Max said. “She admitted as much. She told me about her worlds. She demonstrated skills and thoughts that are far more advanced than anything we’re capable of.”

  “Then you know.”

  “But so what? She seems benevolent enough. She said they’re here for peaceful purposes and that she is the only one on our planet.”

  Lucinda growled at him. “You said she lied to you, though. Don’t you want revenge? Don’t you want vengeance for how she destroyed your life?”

  Again, Max’s brain bubbled over. He stopped and looked up at the sky. His thoughts went to the children he’d never see again. His throat closed up and his insides went dry.

  “Trusting her is dangerous,” Lucinda said sharply. “Why do you believe her?”

  Max was taken aback. He’d been concerned about his own life, his own future, his own past, that he hadn’t even considered the bigger picture of what these aliens’ true purpose might have been. He watched kids riding up and down the street on their bicycles, and felt his legs get all wobbly.

  Lucinda stared hard at Max. “I had a long conversation with Dr. Time after I went back into Time. Dr. Time said their worlds are actually spread out among dozens of galaxies. Guess how many worlds they had.”

  “I give up.”

  “Try, Max.”

  “Two?”

  Lucinda cocked her head to the side. “Thirty-five.”

  His mouth hung open. “Thirty-five planets?”

  “Yes. How do you suppose they got that many?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe through an interplanetary federation?”

  Lucinda crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes at Max. Max stared at the sky again, wavering.

  “Look,” he said, “I agree with you something doesn’t add up. They’re here, they say everything back home’s perfect, and they’re perversely interested in us.”

  “Don’t take everything they say for granted. I’ll bet you there are thousands of them on Earth already. I think ultimately, they want not only to select militants among us humans to go back into Time upon their instructions, but they also want to find a way to send their own people back into our Time.”

  “Okay. You’ve convinced me there are lots of questions to clear up. What do we do now?”

  Lucinda stared back, her crossed arms rigid. “As I said, we go in to kill Dr. Time, and disable the Time Weaver so that it never can be used again.”

  Max held his hands up. “Whoa! Slow down! Dr. Time’s powerful. There’s no way you can kill her.”

  “We have to try.”

  “How?”

  “Trust me. I have a way. I’ve been preparing for six years. I’ve left nothing to chance.”

  “What’s my role in all this?”

  “You’re here to act as my witness. Should I die, you must finish the job.”

  “But wouldn’t she kill me, too?” Max thought some more. “Look, what about getting a special fighting force to do this?”

  “I’ve already alerted the U.S. authorities.”

  “You did? And?”

  “They don’t believe me.” She took out a newspaper clipping. Handwritten in the margin was the date, Nov. 19, 2005. There was a black and white, poorly executed shot of her speaking to a startled U.S. President Al Gore, who was wide-eyed in disbelief. Two Secret Service men were dragging Lucinda away. The headline read, UFO Cultist Accosts Gore.

  Angrily Lucinda tucked the article back into her backpack. Max gulped.

  “So it’s just the two of us?”

  “Yes. Only a fellow time traveler would understand.”

  Max thought it over. His mind was spinning in a horrified whirl. Everything around him seemed blurred and ghostly. He rubbed the back of his neck and said, “Listen. Will you agree not to attack Dr. Time until we have proof of her intentions? If you agree, I’ll go with you.”

  Lucinda’s eyes narrowed at Max like she didn’t understand the language he was speaking. Finally, without altering her expression one bit, she said, “As you wish, Mr. Thorning. But we can’t outrun the past much longer. Remember that.”

  Chapter Eighty-One

  January 2, 2011 at 10:54 a.m.

  Max waited at the mysterious apartment complex at 37 Minona Street in Athens, Greece, just outside the imposing iron gate. He looked at his watch. Almost eleven o’clock. What was taking Lucinda so long? They agreed to meet at this time and place. Max did not tell Margaret of Lucinda’s plans. He just told her he was going to pay a visit to Dr. Time.

  Max dug at his memory and realized the fears with which he had lived every day for decades—foreboding fears he’d shoved into mental recesses and never uttered to anyone—had now come alive, and were throbbing in the air around him. He rolled cautiously closer to the gate, and peered over. Seeing the place rising up over him, a range of emotion burst out of his brain, pouring forth and cutting into him and making him feel guilty and tiny. He looked at his watch again, watching the time tick past. Suddenly Max didn’t know who to fear more—Dr. Time, or that crazy Lucinda with her lunatic plan to kill Dr. Time.

  Finally, he saw Lucinda running up the street to him. She was wearing a white cotton turtleneck shirt, hunter green khaki pants, and leather boots. She also had a black vest containing several pockets.

  Max held her gaze as she came running up. He tried to smile and look relaxed and calm—until he noticed the butt of a handgun sticking out of her pocket.

  Oh my God, he thought, feeling the smile melt from his face.

  Lucinda maintained a dour expression. “Hi, Mr. Thorning.”

  “Hello, Lucinda.” Max gulped, and extended his hand toward the front door. “Shall we?”

  They both took the stairs and entered the hallway for the third floor. Max’s finger stretched out and rang the doorbell.

  “Dr. Time always takes about thirty seconds to answer,” said Lucinda.

  “Yeah, Dr. Time told me once that he always disables the Time Weaver first.”

  “Very secretive,” Lucinda said. “Very clever. Hide the evidence.”

  Reaching behind her vest, Lucinda took out two pistols from different hidden pockets. The one she kept was a SIG Sauer P220 Combat semi-automatic pistol. The other she displayed to Max was a SIG Sauer P225.

  “You’ll need this,” she said, walking around behind him and tucking it carefully under his shirt and behind his belt.

  “Wait! Whoa! What are you doing?” Max cried out, feeling the cold steel muzzle of the gun press against his spine. Suddenly he heard footsteps behind the door. Startled, he felt no choice but to play along.

  Dr. Time opened the door—and it was the lovely woman in the lab coat again, with the blonde tresses. She hadn’t changed one bit. She recognized them both. “Well, well. Do come on in.”

  Max’s first instinct was to grab her around the throat and throttle her and squeeze down tight on her neck until she’d stopped breathing, and then demand to know why she’d lied to him about his own personal timeline. But he was merely a part of a larger plot, one that didn’t care about his never-born children, or the course of his future. So he tamped down his anger and followed Lucinda inside.

  Once inside, the female Dr. Time eyeballed Max and announced, “Dr. Max Thorning. Born July 5, 1971. Departed Time October 27, 2013. Entered Time September 16, 1987. Departed Time May 1, 1997. Entered Time April 26, 1997.” She turned around and narrowed her gaze at Lucinda. “Lucinda Rosa Cedrera. Born February 3, 1974. Departed Time September 15, 2015. Entered Time September 15, 2005.”

  Max’s angry eyes rolled across Dr. Time’s face. She stiffened her shoulders, as if she could feel his rage rising up at her.

  “Well! Dr. Max Thorning,” she said. “How do you like being called doctor now? It feels good, doesn’t it?”

  Max didn’t answer.

  Dr. Time cleared her throat, and tried again. “How do you like your new life so far?”

  Max grunted and dropped his eyes to the floor, suddenly worried th
at Dr. Time would suspect the gun behind his back. He shifted left, keeping her directly in front of him.

  Dr. Time smiled, seeing the hurt in his face. “Are you glad you went back into Time?”

  Max reflected. He sneered back, “Oh, it’s been wonderful, doc. Seriously, I’ve learned a lot about choices and how they affect you. We are all a product of the thousands of decisions we make. Like missing my two children from my original timeline, every single minute since I made the jump.”

  Dr. Time looked solemn. “Max, for your two children from your original timeline, I have only one recommendation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You have to grieve and move on. Treat the two incidents as deaths.”

  “Deaths?” Max was aghast.

  “Yes. You have rituals for observing death on Earth. Every culture has a different way of dealing with death. Use them.”

  Max couldn’t restrain himself any further. His resolve snapped. The cords in his neck bulged. “I wouldn’t have to do anything like that,” he said, his voice blowing up, “if you had just told me the truth!”

  “What truth is that?”

  “That going into my past would kill my children’s existence. You never told me that! You didn’t let me know the consequences!”

  “All human life has consequences. Why would you think you’d be any different?”

  Max wanted to lunge at her. He was now, beyond any doubt, ready to kill her, but Lucinda held him back.

  Max screamed out as the flames of anger licked the insides of his head, “You killed my children!”

  Lucinda also yelled out loud, startling both Max and Dr. Time. “How many other deaths are you planning, Dr. Time?”

  Dr. Time turned to face Lucinda, appearing chagrined. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

  “Do you not deny that you are an alien?”

  “No, I don’t deny.”

  “And you have colonized thirty-four other planets.”

  Dr. Time snickered. “Colonized is such a harsh word. We have conferred benefits upon the other planets that significantly advanced their resources and society.”

  “You have assimilated them!”

  “If you want to say it that way,” Dr. Time retorted, “then I would answer ‘yes.’ These planets agreed to unite with us in the furtherance of the common good. We do not harm other societies through war or attrition.”