Drake, her brother, also on a break, came out of the store and sat next to his sister on the picnic table. While the shade of the cinderblock building was cool, it was already a sunny, warm morning, heading into a sweltering hot day.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“An editorial—a kind of opinion essay composed by the publication’s editors,” Cody replied. “They have three every issue, I notice, on the burning issues of the day.”
“And what is the topic today?”
“This one’s about how the resources directed to the space program and scientific research would be better spent on problems here on Earth—in the inner city fighting poverty, crime, and social injustice.”
“You’re able to read this dead language fluently?” asked Drake. “I can barely muddle through the signage—‘Men’s Room,’ ‘Ground beef, $2.45 lb.—whatever ‘lb’ means. The spoken language isn’t as difficult—Mr. Smash says we’re about as far from the language of these Earth people as they are from Latin and Greek, linguistically.” He watched his sister read on. “But of course, you’re fluent—you compiled an American English lexicon from the Prometheus signal we captured.”
“You helped publish those papers too,” Cody reminded her brother. “School children of the thirty-first century study Ancient American English now, thanks to us.”
“That’s the least of the contributions we could have made to our society,” said Drake. He picked up the pack of cigarettes and disposable butane lighter. “What are these? I’ve seen the Earth people use these, but we don’t sell them.”
“We don’t sell anything this vile,” said Cody. “They’re poisonous—and addictive. I’m sorry I started the habit. Just trying to fit in with the natives.”
“Astonishing,” said Drake, who had taken a cigarette out of the pack and was attempting to light it. “These Earth people actually circulate essays in their print publications arguing against science. But I can’t say I’m surprised, given the general barbarity of these times. Do you realize we could conceivably interfere with the launch of the Prometheus satellite, thereby changing the course of our own future history?”
“Prometheus won’t be launched for another half-century,” noted Cody. “It is unlikely we could interfere the American space program; it’s centered in a completely different region of the continent, and the scientists responsible are only now being born.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Drake, who puffed at the cigarette with his cheeks, then studied its burning tip. “The pregnant woman shopping earlier for rolled oats might be carrying one of those Prometheus scientists, who goes off to a university somewhere on the coast ends up working for NASA; another young gentleman who was asking another clerk if we sold condoms might them defective, and lead to another.”
“We don’t sell condoms in the food co-op,” said Cody. “That’s next door in the party store, along with cigarettes, liquor, and pornographic magazines. Besides, it’s impossible for us to alter our own future. You know Wertz’s Theorem, that time travel only creates alternate realities …”
“We might run into Dr. Wertz herself,” said Drake. “We might pass along some virus from our own century against which she has no natural immunity that leads to her premature demise … and she never writes her theorem.”
“Winifred Wertz lived in the twenty-second century,” Cody noted. “We’re in the late twentieth.”
“Ah, but you never read her memoir,” said Drake, pointing the lit cigarette at his sister. “In it, she claims to have been born and raised in the mid-twentieth-century. She might be among us now.”
Cody scowled at her brother. “The obscure details your mind retains,” she said. “That so-called memoir also asserts that as a young woman she was able to change her shape and size and wore a variety of costumes, from leotards to full body armor, and associated with other people in costumes and had harrowing adventures. Why you bother with such spurious esoterica instead of pure science is beyond me.”
“I’m a romantic,” said Drake. “I can’t contemplate nothing but astrophysics all the time, unlike you. Besides, if the theorem’s correct, we can never return to our own future—or, if we can, there will always be an alternate future to which we never return.”
“You’re thinking of that woman.”
“Jenny Woodlore. Of course I think of her. The two of us never had the chance to say goodbye—and we certainly didn’t use any contraception. I might have a child in the thirty-first century that I’ll never know. Anything else in that paper of yours?”
“Just an explosion at a high school,” said Cody, turning to the front page. “Nothing that concerns us.” She folded the paper and set it on the picnic table.
Drake frowned at the cigarette. “These things taste awful.”
“You’re not doing it right,” said Cody. “You’re supposed to inhale the smoke into your lungs, not just your cheeks.”
“Really? Good God.”
Drake took a long drag; then, erupting in a coughing fit, he doubled over.
“My break’s over,” said Cody, patting her brother consolingly on his back as he wipe tears from his eyes on his store apron, his coughing subsiding. “I’ll see you inside.”
The brother and sister had paid no attention as a rented car pulled into the lot and parked. Drake was still recovering for some minutes as the occupants of the car sat and studied him. Finally, gathering himself, he followed his sister back inside the food co-op.
“This is the place,” said Lemon Lime. “According to Jasper and Donna. Do you think that’s one of them?”
“Who, the good-looking guy with the wavy, blond hair?” said Preston Percy. “He does roughly matches the description the Phantom Jungle Girl gave us. But they don’t exactly look like saboteurs who would bomb a school.”
“We can assume the high school boiler room incident was an accident,” said Lemon. “Besides, extraterrestrials aren’t going to appear menacing if they’re acting as reconnaissance for some sort of extraterrestrial invasion; they’re going to be as innocuous in demeanor as possible.”
“Yes, but what kind of reconnaissance can they accomplish working at a food co-op?” Preston replied. “I think this is a red herring.”
“We won’t know until we feel them out,” said Lemon. “We’re not going to learn anything just sitting here.”
“What do you propose we do—just sidle up and ask them if they’re from outer space?”
“Sounds like a start,” said Lemon. “This is your mission, remember? Your call.”
Secret Agent Preston Percy pondered this for a moment. “Come to think of it, that’s not a bad pick-up line,” said Preston. “‘Hey, Space Man, what planet did you drop in from?’ Okay, I’ll give it a try.”
“If you’re trying to make me jealous, I’m not the jealous type,” said Lemon. “You do your thing; I’ll work the girl. By the way, we need lunch meat, pickles, and ground coffee.”
“We’ll see what they have,” said Preston, opening the car door. “This may be a vegetarian health food store.”
Inside the co-op, the agents separated; Lemon filled an arm basket with a few select groceries and headed for the checkout counter.
“Weird, that explosion at the high school,” said Lemon, pointing to the nearby rack of newspapers.
“Yes, I was just reading about that,” said Cody, keying the prices manually into the old cash register. “Lucky nobody was hurt—students, that is. Those poor janitors, though ….”
“What do you make of that unusual weapon they found at the scene?”
Cody looked at Lemon curiously. “There was no mention of any weapon at the scene,” said Cody.
“Yeah, some strange ray gun,” said Lemon. She described the spitfire. “About yay big,” she said, motioning with her hands.
Cody had handled a spitfire, although it was of a different design, but she recognized the general description. “That’s curious,” she said to Lemon, trying not to betray alarm. “You sound like you saw it with your own eyes. Why isn’t it in the newspaper?”
“There are a lot of things they don’t want you to know,” said Lemon, conspiratorially. She leaned in and whispered. “For example, do you know there’s a huge starship orbiting the Earth? Right now, this very minute, watching our every move. If you ask me, the two things—the starship and the explosion—are connected.”
Cody laughed. “Try the party store next door,” she said. “They have a rack of paperback books: “The Bermuda Triangle, Chariots of the Gods, The Late, Great Planet Earth. But you probably already have those, I’m guessing.”
“I do,” whispered Lemon. “And they’re all true.”
Back in the apartment, Drake and Cody Revell sat around the kitchen table with Rory Smash. Smash had been lying around the sweltering apartment all afternoon in a wife-beater undershirt, reading Don Quixote in the original vernacular Spanish. “You’d like it,” he told the Revells, the old hardcover, without a dustjacket, lying on the table in front of you. “No doubt you hear a lot of Spanish at the food co-op; you’d probably pick it up as fast as you have our American English. So, what’s new at the food co-op?”
“Something very curious,” said Cody. “An orange-haired woman in the red beret tried to get a rise out of me.”
“How so?”
Cody relayed the woman’s description of what sounded like a spitfire and how the explosion in a high school boiler room was connected with a phantom orbiting starship.
“That’s not all,” added Drake. “An unusually friendly gentleman asked me all sorts of questions, like whether I was new in town, while I was stocking chick peas.” Drake described how Preston had made non sequitur allusions to phantom objects orbiting the planet, and strange, phallic ray guns. “He claimed he wanted to know where he could buy a particular water pistol his nephew wanted for his birthday—but I’m sure he was describing a spitfire.”
“Did you give him your phone number?” Smash asked, laughing. “Just sounds like someone trying to pick you up, Drake. And you, Cody, were apparently accosted by an eccentric character who’s read too much cheap fantasy and science fiction—not unlike Alonso Quijano, the protagonist of this novel.” He held up the book. “You should be used to the overly-friendly, eccentric characters you meet at a health food store by now.”
“Friendly, yes, like that black girl who’s invited us to a backyard picnic this weekend,” said Cody. “But this was different; a lot of people find us curious because we have funny accents. But these two glommed onto us at the same time—none too subtly, I might add—and seemed to insinuate they knew we didn’t belong in the present. And they left together—I followed them out of the store and peeked around to the parking lot, and saw them get into the same car. I wrote down the license plate.”
Cody handed Rory Smash a slip of paper.
“What if there really is a Domain Fleet Ship orbiting the Earth, Mr. Smash?” asked Drake. “And what if a spitfire was involved in that explosion?”
“It would mean somebody followed us here from the future,” said Smash, suddenly somber. “And that the Domain Fleet is trying to find you. But that’s an impossibility—you’re just being paranoid. Nobody can trace my hotrod when it hops into hyperspace, let alone the timestream.”
“Are you sure about that?” asked Cody rhetorically. “Remember, Mr. Smash, you may be a very successful smuggler, but you’re talking to two of the most advanced scientists of the thirty-first century.”
“No, I’m not that certain,” Smash conceded. “But there’s one way to find out. You’re paying me to keep you hidden—I suppose it’s my turn now to play detective.”
Next: The Scene of the Crime
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| Cody and Drake Revell in Border Worlds (Dover Publications Inc., 2017). |
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| Cody and Drake Revell in Border Worlds (Dover Publications Inc., 2017). |
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