It had become urgent to find the opposition.It felt like they knew Jack and the rest of them were out here somewhere, so they would try to erase them again if they could just find them.
It felt very evil-overlord-ish of the opposition, as if they wanted to be the only ones traveling through time.She just hoped it didn’t turn out to be their descendants or something.The grandfather paradox on steroids, though it would also be very ironic.
There was also a lot of ironic in time travel.
It was Alice who had postulated that the rogue time travelers were in the future.This was why they hadn’t been able to track them back to their source.It did make sense.It felt reasonable to assume they weren’t time traveling from, say, the 1890s.
Alice’s theory might have been what triggered Jack’s hyper-focus on creating a machine equipped with his time travel device, instead of dropping people out of planes without a parachute.
She agreed with him in theory.It was hard to recruit people with that pitch.
Alice cleared her throat and Mel came back to the present with a start.
“Sorry,” she said.
Despite her modern clothes, Alice still managed to appear very buttoned down—unless Tyson Granger was around.
He wasn’t.He was out at the hangar bay with Jack.If this first test flight into the future was successful?They just needed somewhere and some when to point Con at.
Had Alice found that something?
“It’s all right,” Alice said, meeting her gaze with a rueful smile.“I think I get too caught up in all the tech, but I wanted you to see what I saw.I could be wrong,” she added.
She probably wasn’t.If Mel hadn’t liked Alice so much, she would have found this annoying.
Alice settled next to Mel and clicked her keyboard so that the first screen appeared.
It was a question.
How do we find someone who lives in the future?
After the question, the slide changed to an image of the man Alice had known as John Phillips, the man who tried to lure Alice and her father to what would become Area 51.
They didn’t know if he’d been trying to save her or if he was the one who had caused her death.Time travel was tricky.
Mel half frowned.This John annoyed her.He had to be related to, or working for the entity that had tried to erase them, but there’d been no sign of him back when Mel and Jack had found what was—to them—their first incursion.
She ought to know.She’d looked at every photograph she could find around that event.
That incursion into the past had been a curiously clumsy attempt.She’d thought so at the time.What had they hoped to accomplish by planting some infrared goggles in World War II?And whose bright idea had it been to give them to the Germans?Had they intended to change the outcome of the war?Or had they been looking for a way to track their impact on the timeline?A time traveling joy-rider who dropped his goggles by accident?
Any of them was as much a possibility as the other, though any attempt that involved a war seemed to cross off the joy rider theory.But other than the interaction with Alice, they’d found no other signs of timeline interference.Unless they were using the so-called alien events to hide their tracks.And if they were?There were a significant number of UFO intrusions happening out there for them to use.
“There’s no way for us to find him in the future,” Alice said, “but when I started running facial recognition for him in the past, I began to see a pattern.”
The slides changed, with just enough of a pause for Mel to find the elusive John in the various images—from what appeared to be different times in history.
“I know we all have a twin,” Alice said, “but these images span about one hundred years.And the face is too consistent for generational differences, in my opinion.”
“And?”Mel knew there was one.
“And about ninety percent of the time, I found him in images related to suspected alien incursions.”
“So we were right,” Mel said.
“Well,” Alice amended her, “there is strong evidence to suggest we’re right that they are either using the events, or they caused the events.”
Oh right, Alice was a scientist, a researcher who didn’t deal in absolutes.
