In the carefully filtered air of this office, his lungs missed not just the cigarette smoke, but the dry air of the desert.And he missed looking up at the test aircraft shooting across the clear blue sky.He’d liked 1954.He’d like Edwards Air Force Base—Muroc it had been then—and the people there.
He’d liked Alice Merriweather.Not in a romantic way.It felt vaguely wrong with her mother somewhat in the picture.
She hadn’t liked him.That was just as well, since he’d had to let her die again.Funny that the more they tried to change, the less they’d managed.Was it the other time travelers getting in their way?Or was it time itself?
He turned his back on the drab view, his hands shoved in the pockets of his drab suit pants.
She studied him for several seconds and he wondered if she sensed his disillusioned thoughts.There was no going back now.He knew that, perhaps better than she did.You had to move through time to see the scared, dark patches from their rough handling.
Stella shoved back her chair and rose, her flat shoes making a light tap as she walked to the screen that dominated one side of the office.He knew every inch of that screen, and he knew there was nothing new to see.Still, he walked over to stand next to her.It was expected.
The screen was both high tech and curiously vintage.On it they were tracking—or trying to track—the other set of time travelers.
Her hand pointed to what they believed was the first contact with them in that dry and dusty desert where smoking was allowed.
Her hands, and her fingers were long and narrow, the nails a permanent and discreet match for her skin.She tapped her chin, a sign the gears in her head were turning.
The instability around the event was impressive—and had been impressively dangerous.It had almost swallowed them up in it, too.He didn’t want to go through that again if he could help it.
She shifted so that she looked at a different part of the screen.
“Is that the real first time event for us?”she asked.
There was no answer to this question.Not really.Time was complicated.What little they did know, it had been both clumsy and messy, but its impact had been small—again, as far as they could know.
That Stella kept coming to back to it puzzled him.
Had that event been what caught the attention of those other time travelers?They hadn’t been able to identify anyone anomalous from the available data.And it was too dangerous to send someone back there to try and find out.The situation was too uncontrolled and the risk of unintended consequences too high.
Even with an image of the man who had disappeared with Alice, they hadn’t been able to make a facial recognition match around the possible initial event—or a useful match any time since.He hadn’t been able to get a DNA sample from the man, and everyone had someone who looked like them out there.All he knew was, they had both vanished as if they’d never been.And it was possible they had been erased.It wasn’t like they could ask time what it had done with them.
With time travel, he wondered, was there such a thing as a first event?
“They never found her body,” she said.“She wasn’t supposed to disappear.”
John knew his face muscles tightened.“I’ve found that everything can change, but the ending.”
If someone were meant to die, they did.If they were meant to live, it was oddly hard to kill them.Was Alice still alive out there somewhere?
Her lips compressed.Stella didn’t like the truth, but she always insisted on it.
Removing someone from their time, and then deleting them, seemed to be a more effective procedure.If time were somehow living and aware, did this confuse it?They didn’t really know, not even that they’d succeeded.The bodies didn’t tend to hang around.
The upside, people tended to blame disappearances on aliens.It was a handy out.
“Could we try again?”
John wanted to agree.He could go back as many times as she wanted.He could go live there, maybe.He didn’t think it would change anything.
“We need to eliminate the competition first,” he said.
“And how do we do that?”She asked.
“We set a trap for them,” John said.
“How…” Alice stopped.
“We give them an agent,” he said.“We can equip her with tracking they shouldn’t be able to detect.”
