Voyages: A Science Fiction Collection Page 6

  You couldn’t leave someone like that on their own. Someone who needed help.

  No, he wasn’t obligated to help this strange guy, but… Crap.

  He saw no harm in leaving the guy down here for a little while so he could go upstairs and use the phone, since there was nothing around that he could hurt himself with. Over in the shadows, Toby could see a couple of big old wooden barrels and a stack of odd-shaped pieces of lumber. Three wooden crates were piled near the stairs. He supposed the guy could whack himself in the head with one of the pieces of lumber, but maybe that wouldn’t happen, not in just a few minutes.

  “I’m going upstairs,” he told the guy, and immediately started moving toward the stairs.

  To his surprise, the guy didn’t stop him.

  The stairs were in pretty bad shape – really rickety, creaking badly under Toby’s weight as he climbed, even though he was a serious lightweight – he only ever hit 140 pounds on the day after Thanksgiving. Frowning, he held on to the railing as he ascended the last few steps, afraid the whole staircase would crumble before he reached the top.

  It didn’t, but…

  “Wow,” he said as he emerged into the building above that mess of a basement.

  It was a house, clearly, one he supposed you could call a mansion. He’d come out into what had once been a kitchen, though all that was left of it was a huge, battered sink and a ruined table thrown onto its side. It was a mammoth room with a toweringly high ceiling, easily four times as big as the kitchen at home, and through the wide doorway at one end he could see into another colossal room he supposed was a dining room. There was no furniture in there at all, just what looked like a rolled-up carpet shoved off to one side.

  Everything was covered with dust. Little piles of dirt, dry leaves and bits of trash had accumulated in the corners.

  No one had lived here in forever, he decided.

  He kept walking, a burst of curiosity overwhelming his need to find help for the whack job downstairs. He kept his hand curled around his phone, though if someone had asked him whether he was trying to protect it, or intended to use it as a weapon, he probably could not have said. The floor creaked and squeaked as he progressed, and he noticed he was leaving footprints in the dust.

  He still had no idea how he could have gotten there.

  He prowled through a huge library that still had some old books lying on some of the shelves, though it looked like they’d been attacked by mice or squirrels, torn apart for use as nesting material. One chair remained in there, a big, battered wingback with a fatal rip in its seat cushion. From there he passed into what he decided was the living room, and from there he reached a room with three walls of windows. Several of the panes were broken, which he supposed had allowed for that accumulation of leaves and trash.

  His mom would like this place, he thought. It would fascinate her. She’d daydream about how she’d fix it up if she had the money.

  Each room had a fireplace. A real one, not gas. He thought that meant the house was crazy old, like the wall in Josie’s grandfather’s field. That made him twitch, because he didn’t know of any such house anywhere near home. Old houses, sure, but they only dated back to around the 1920s, maybe a little older. There was nothing like this, nothing that would have been a fabulous mansion back in its day.

  Nothing that…

  “SHIT!”

  Toby shrieked and jumped back, almost lost his balance, and pinwheeled his arms frantically to keep from flopping down into the dust. In the process his phone went flying and he watched in horror as it bounced off the brick of the fireplace.

  The crazy guy was standing there looking at him. His hair was all sticking straight out from his head, as if he’d walked into some giant field of static, but his expression was almost completely blank. Like he had a migraine, Toby thought. Like he was trying to function in the midst of terrible pain.

  “Don’t DO that!” Toby shrieked. “Jesus! Could you not sneak up on me like that?”

  The guy looked around. It seemed like it hurt him to move his head, so he kept shifting his feet a little at a time. Bit by bit, he examined the whole room, but what he was looking for, or trying to figure out, Toby couldn’t imagine.

  Finally, he said softly, sadly, “I suppose it’ll do.”

  “You suppose what will do? Do for what?”

  As if it were the most natural thing in the world, the guy sat down on the dirty floor and arranged himself crosslegged with his hands resting on his knees. It looked like a yoga position.

  “Dude,” Toby groaned. “What the hell.”

  When the guy didn’t answer, Toby retrieved his phone. It hadn’t been wrecked, but there was a big crack in the case. It still seemed to work okay – he could open all the apps that didn’t need a WiFi connection – but there was still no signal.

  “We’re going to need to strategize.”

  The guy seemed to be talking to himself. His eyes were half-shut. His hands lay open on his knees, palms up.

  “Am I kidnapped?” Toby demanded.

  The guy lifted his head a little and blinked.

  “Am I? Is that what this is? What’d you do, drug me or something? I don’t know what this is about, man. I’m only fourteen years old. We – my family – we don’t have any money. And if you want me for a sex slave or something – I took self-defense, okay? They had a special thing through my school and the police department and some group this woman started because of her son. They taught all the kids how to defend ourselves. I’ll bite it off, dude. Don’t think I won’t.”

  “Go outside,” the guy said.

  “What?”

  “Go outside. If you like. Go out and look around, and tell me what you think your options are.”

  “Why, because you brought me out to the middle of nowhere? I go hiking with my dad and my uncle and my cousins all the time. I know how to find a main road. I know how to find help and how to find water and stuff to eat in the woods. You’re not messing with somebody who’s gonna fall apart. I can do this.”

  “Then go outside.”

  The guy seemed calm… but Toby had seen a lot of movies. He fully expected to reach the front steps only to have the guy haul him back inside and hack him to bits with an axe, or a huge old knife. He’d be left out in the woods, he figured, so animals could devour his corpse. Or maybe inside this old, dusty house, shoved into a closet or a cupboard, and someday someone would find his bones.

  On the other hand, even in those movies, someone usually got away.

  So he took off.

  He galloped through that row of huge rooms to the front door, pleading silently for it to be unlocked, giddy with gratitude when he found that it was. He hauled it open, flinging it so that it banged against the wall alongside the frame, and flew out onto the wide, sprawling front porch.

  There, he stopped.

  Not because the guy (or anyone else) had grabbed hold of him and hauled him back, but because he was utterly stunned by what lay beyond the front steps.

  Snow.

  Not a lot of it; most of it had melted, leaving the ground mostly brown and dead. But there was enough left to tell him it had been a good-sized storm, that maybe there’d been a foot or more to begin with – the drifts that lay in the shadows of the house were that deep.

  Snow.

  In August?

  Because he was sure the guy would be standing there behind him, he swung around, hands balled into fists. Sure, okay, there was likely to be a lot of snow somewhere in the world at any given time, but not in Pennsylvania. Not in August.

  So they’d taken him… where? Alaska? Siberia?

  Nothing nearby gave him any answers. There were some trees off in the distance, but everywhere else the ground was flat and featureless. There were no buildings other than the house, though he supposed there might be something out back. A garage, maybe, or a barn. Maybe there were other houses in that direction. Something. There had to be something.

  “Where am I?” he squeal
ed. “Where is this place?”

  The guy blinked at him from the doorway. “Not where,” he said on a long breath. “When.”

  “What?”

  Stuff like this just didn’t happen, Toby thought. Not outside of nightmares. Or movies. He’d been minding his own business, waiting for the Realtor to finish telling his parents about closet space and flooring and whether the stupid plumbing worked okay – and now he was here, with some nutball stranger in glowing coveralls. It made no kind of sense that he could fathom, even if he had been kidnapped. A psycho killer wouldn’t be sending him outside. Wouldn’t sit on that dirty floor like he was doing yoga, babbling about ribbons and strategies.

  He started to shiver. His long-sleeved t-shirt and cargo pants had been plenty warm enough for house hunting – too warm, really, inside that house with no AC. But here, where it was apparently… what? March? Not so much.

  “Mister…” he said, inching back toward the door. Inside, at least, it was a little warmer.

  The guy blinked at him again, eyelids fluttering in a way that made Toby dizzy. Then he heaved a sigh and said, “Asher.”

  “That’s your name?”

  The guy groaned and rolled his eyes. “Of course it’s my name.” Then he turned and strode back into the house. When Toby had joined him, he pushed the massive door shut and leaned against it. “John Asher,” he said. “Doctor John Asher. I suppose I shouldn’t tell you that, but the damage has already been done. We won’t be able to undo any of this. The best we can do is avoid any further tampering.”

  “With what? The house? We didn’t–”

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  The sharpness in Asher’s tone made Toby flinch. “Toby Cobb. What kind of doctor? A medical doctor? Or–”

  “Temporal physics.”

  “Then, like, what, a PhD doctor?”

  “Yes,” Asher said. “Like a PhD doctor.”

  “And what? That gives you the right to snark at me like you found me making a mess in your lab? Like I… I don’t even know what. I don’t know you, dude. I was waiting for my mom and dad in some house. Not this one. A new one, one of those ones where they all look the same. All of a sudden something hit me and I ended up here. Well, not right here. I was someplace else first, and then I was here. But none of it’s my fault, okay?”

  All of that had come out in a burst, and it left Toby a little breathless. Glowering at Asher as ferociously as he could, he sucked in a couple of deep breaths. “This isn’t fair,” he said when he felt a little less lightheaded. “I don’t know what you think I did, but I didn’t do anything. Not guilty, okay? So back off.”

  For a moment, Asher didn’t say anything. Then he shook his head. It wasn’t an apology, not anywhere near one, but he’d stopped snarking, and Toby was willing to take what he could get.

  “You weren’t supposed to be there,” Asher said.

  “What? Where?”

  “Wherever it was that you were. In another house, you said.”

  “Not my idea, man. My parents dragged me along.”

  Asher started to pace back and forth. His shoulders began to slump more and more, in a way that made it look like he was giving up. Exactly what he might be surrendering, Toby had no idea.

  “You were in the way,” Asher said after a minute.

  “Of what?”

  Instead of answering, Asher wandered into the room with the chewed-up books and looked at a couple of them. One of them fell apart in his hand. On the shelf where it had been sitting, Toby could see a forest of mouse turds leading to what looked like a little nest of paper. It wasn’t something he’d stick his hand into, but it didn’t seem to bother Asher when he put the remains of the book back where he’d found it. Finally he turned back to Toby, and for the first time he looked sorry.

  “The ribbon,” he said quietly.

  Toby frowned. “Ribbon of what?”

  Asher sighed and leaned back against the wall. Again, he looked around the room, taking it all in one small arc at a time.

  “The ribbon is… a pathway,” he said. “It was calculated out to an infinitesimal degree – a process that took years to complete. There was not supposed to be any living being between the origin point and the destination point. I allowed for the possibility of an insect, maybe a number of insects, but nothing larger than that. Certainly not a human being. You were not supposed to be there.”

  “Huh,” Toby said.

  “That’s your response? ‘Huh’?”

  “I’m supposed to – I don’t even know what you want me to think. Unless this is for some TV show? One of those things with the hidden cameras? My friends aren’t cool enough – or insane enough – to put together something this extreme. They’re more like, ‘hide my bike’ kind of crap. So I don’t know what to do with all this. If it’s a joke, you went too far. I don’t know how to play along. Can I just go home now? Game over, okay?”

  “No,” Asher said.

  “No?”

  “No. You can’t go home.”

  “Dude,” Toby said.

  Something in Asher’s expression made his stomach roll. The man wasn’t really insane; somehow, Toby was sure of that. He was stressed out, kind of frantic, maybe even really frantic, but not rubber-room-and-heavy-meds crazy. That was enough to let Toby decide that Asher wasn’t likely to produce a gun or a knife.

  Instead, Asher looked scared. And sorry. Still sorry.

  Still… What was it people always said about serial killers? They seemed normal. Quiet. Nobody was ever suspicious about them.

  “Where are we?” Toby asked in a small voice.

  “I’m not sure. I think… eastern Colorado? Or western Kansas.”

  “You’re not sure.”

  “It’s my best guess. I could be wrong.”

  “How did we–” This time, Toby cut himself off. He’d seen no sign of a vehicle outside. There was no food in the house, no blankets, and his phone wasn’t getting any service. Maybe, he thought, they’d both been kidnapped and dumped here, he and this guy who claimed he was a physicist.

  Dumped out here to die.

  “How did we get here?” he squeaked.

  “I told you. You were in my path. You… disrupted my transit.”

  Toby thought of dogs – the way they’d sometimes run around in circles when they got overexcited. Run and run and run, until they tired themselves out, or until they got the treat they’d thought they were going to get. He thought he might want to run around in circles like that, but not because he thought he was going to get a treat.

  “Transit,” he said. “Like… you were traveling somewhere?”

  “I was.”

  “Where were you supposed to go?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “On a ribbon.”

  “Yes.”

  Something twanged inside Toby’s head, and he started to laugh. That was the only thing he could do, he figured. Just laugh, because… how ridiculous was this? This guy with the hair and the glowing coveralls – though, Toby noticed, they didn’t seem to glow now that the guy was upstairs in the daylight. Traveling on ribbons? Being sucked up into a tornado that apparently hadn’t even happened? It was beyond ridiculous. So he laughed and laughed, until his belly hurt and his head hurt in big pounding throbs and he thought he might actually pee in his pants for the first time since he was six years old.

  He was only mildly surprised when Asher started to laugh too.

  They both looked pretty grimy, Toby realized when the two of them had fallen mostly silent again. Their hands, their clothing…

  He was quiet for a minute, which was enough of a respite that he began to feel a little thirsty. No, very thirsty. There seemed to be a low hum running throughout his body; he understood that it was nerves, but it made him feel as if he were standing in the midst of some massive electrical field.

  Not quite looking at Asher, he whispered, “When were you supposed to go to?”

  “Two days before the earthquake,”
Asher said.

  Toby had to think for a moment. San Francisco… “You mean that one during the World Series?”

  That’d been long before Toby was born, but his dad had told him about it – about the TV coverage of the game being interrupted all of a sudden when the stadium started to shake. Because Toby was curious, his dad had pulled up a bunch of pictures and some video on the Internet. He remembered images of pancaked houses, streets full of rubble, a collapsed section of bridge. And because his dad loved following an idea wherever it led, Toby also remembered pictures of the aftermath of a much earlier quake, one that had destroyed much of the city.

  “No,” Asher said.

  “You mean the older one. The famous one?”

  Asher nodded.

  “Why would you want to do that?” Toby asked, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

  “To find someone. Before she died.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone who might have… changed a great deal.”

  Toby snorted softly. “You can’t change history, dude. Known fact. You can’t mess with things. Create paradoxes. You could muck everything up so you don’t even exist, like in Back to the Future. And, like, every time travel story known to man. You shouldn’t even be telling me this.”

  “No,” Asher agreed. “I shouldn’t.”

  “Then why are you?”

  For a second, Asher looked like he wanted to give Toby a hug, something that weirded Toby out more than a little. To Toby’s great relief, he did nothing other than heave a huge sigh and mess with his hair some more.

  “Because we’re in this together,” Asher said.

  “Yeah. Well. Until I go home. They’re probably out looking for me right now. I bet there’s one of those AMBER Alert things out on me. You know, on TV, and all over the Internet. I’m not gonna be in this for long. And I hate to tell you, but in jail? They don’t really like people who kidnap kids.”

  The voice in Toby’s head suggested that threatening Asher probably wasn’t a good idea, especially if he had serial killer tendencies. Readying himself to run again, he took a long look at the man.