Читать книгу THE BETTER PART OF VALOR - Morgan Mackinnon - Страница 21

Chapter 14

Once their boss exited the conference room, Cresta stuck her head into the outer office. “Stacie? We’re going to the bullpen. If anyone calls or shows up, take a message. If it’s urgent and can’t wait, give us a buzz. Okay?”

With that, the CATE team, along with George Montoya, left the conference room through the tiny display lab and walked into a coat closet. Door shut, lights blinked on overhead, and George Montoya touched a small switch hidden on the side of a wooden panel. Steadily and quietly, the elevator hummed its way down into the bowels of the building, down to what would have been the 25th basement-level floor had anyone been numbering them. When the door opened, they entered a small vestibule containing a monstrous print of the god Cronos eating his young. It was a grotesque painting by Peter Paul Reubens, which the old janitor, Carl Hennessey, had found in a junk shop and hung in the vestibule. Turns out, Hennessey had gotten Cronos mixed up with the Greek Titan named Chronos, who was a personification of time and governed linear chronological time. No one wanted to hurt Carl’s feelings, so they said nothing, and by now, the print seemed to somehow fit.

At a recessed door opposite the elevator was a small box set up on the wall at about five and a half feet. It was an optic scanner that scanned the retina of anyone seeking to enter. If a match was made in the computer, this door slid open and a second door contained a fingerprint scanner. Jim Sanford did the honors on the retinal scan, then on the fingerprint scan. Only the seven primary team members plus George Montoya’s engineers had the ability to open these two doors. The men and woman walked into a small lobby; on the door was the sign CATE PROJECT: CHRONPORTALIZATION AUXILLARY TRANSPLACEMENT EFFECT. Team members used their official identification badges to open this final door.

The CATE project, at least the one the CIA regulars knew about or had heard of, was a new-wave technology theory that experimented with the minor time travel of small objects like toothpicks. The CATE project buried twenty-five floors below the Department of Defense building was something else. They had cracked the secrets to traveling back and forth in time months ago, but no one, not even their boss, Rick Berstem, knew that. What Berstem also did not know was that the team had progressed to the level where they had successfully sent life to the past and then recalled it safely. George Montoya’s pit bull, Boomer, had visited the year 2001 just two months ago. Boomer had a sophisticated year and time stamp attached to his collar; one minute he was drooling all over the lab floor in January of 2002 and two minutes later came back (peeing on the transplacement chamber floor in the process) with December 22, 2001, on the time stamp. Montoya muttered, “Damn dog.”

It was now late March, and in that space of time, there had been three more transplacements attempted. Engineer Danny Convers bravely volunteered to try the past and spent an hour in 1975, documenting said time with not only his time stamp wrist watch but with a photo of a date and time board outside a local bank. Archivist Sammy Chen made two trips to the future. First, he tried a year just to be cautious and, when that was successful, traveled seven years forward to 2009. Upon return, Chen reported that on February 1, 2003, the spaceship Columbia exploded, killing all seven astronauts aboard. July 4, 2004, saw the initial ground breaking for the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero. On December of that same year, a tsunami in southeast Asia resulted in more than 290,000 casualties. And on November 4, 2008, in a landslide victory, the United States elected Barack H. Obama as the first African American president in US history. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of Louisiana with 1,300 people losing their lives, it being one of the worst natural disasters in US history at that time.

For the third time jaunt, Chen decided to transplace to 2018, which was also successful, reporting in a debrief world climate events were on the rise, the polar ice caps were melting, and Superstorm Sandy unexpectedly struck New Jersey and New York in 2012, causing $65.6 billion in damages. The deterioration of climate patterns also knocked the hell out of Puerto Rico in September 2017. And in the fall of 2016, an outsider, a nonpolitician, won the US presidential election, beginning a chain of events that would have future ramifications.

Intrigued, a week ago, Chen received permission to try for a date further out and picked 2037.

During the interval between Boomer and Chen’s joy-riding, the engineers under George Montoya made a modification to the transplacement process, and that was to reengineer the time/stamp watch to include a ‘retrieve’ feature. Should a “traveler” be out of his own time and suddenly need to return quickly or, conversely, remain longer, this feature would alert someone in the present to manually activate the retrieval mechanism in the present and bring the traveler home or to wait for retrieval until the volunteer indicated it was time. Basically, a retrieve and delay indicator. Before, the team in the present made the decision when to retrieve the traveler and this change would give more flexibility and judgement to the team member who was out of his or her time. It would also eliminate the messy possibility of jerking someone back from the past or future with a witness present. The team had not yet found a way to allow a “traveler” to communicate directly by voice or text to the support team based in the present.

With volunteers gaining the ability to go further and further into the future, in particular, was the catalyst where the expertise of Dr. Leigh began to come into play. Dr. Cresta Leigh was a clinical psychologist, and it was her job to monitor the psychological impact on these travelers to make sure there were no adverse effects. For instance, when Sammy Chen returned the last time, he was quite upset with photos he’d seen of some of the dead bodies after the Asian tsunami. Cresta talked him down off the ledge by assuring him there was nothing he nor anyone else could do to prevent the tragedy. It was also acknowledged that as their research and development progressed, there might even be an occasion to bring someone from the past to the present. It would be highly unlikely, but it would be Cresta’s job to facilitate that process with no harm done to the subject or traveler.

All of them had been waiting for Chen to reappear. His target was a week and that was up as of 5:16 p.m. today. If he didn’t come back voluntarily, the team would wait twenty-four hours and then send a rescue volunteer to the same time. Sure enough, promptly at 5:16 p.m., the “retrieve” mechanism beeped and Montoya flipped a switch. What had been an ordinary square, empty chamber with a sliding door, filled with a pale golden glow, and there stood Sammy Chen with a small briefcase in one hand and a duffle in the other. Even time travelers needed a change of socks and underwear.

When the door slid back to free Chen, the man stepped out, looking somewhat dazed. Sanford, alarmed, grabbed a bottle of mineral water from a small ice chest and thrust it toward the archivist. After Chen took a long swallow and steadied himself, he looked solemnly at Cresta Leigh.

“Honey, you’ve got your work cut out for you on this one.”