“Will do,” Jimbo said. He was already stripping down the one in his hands.
“How about explosives?” Renzi said.
“Doc thinks Semtex won’t be a problem,” Dwayne said. “If we have to use it, it means it’s been detonated. Any chemical traces that survive are likely to be negligible. Think you could work up some quick and dirty grenades for us?”
“Satchel charges do?” Renzi said. “They’re easy to make and use.”
“As long as it goes boom, bro,” Dwayne replied, “make up a dozen.”
“You have pictures of who we’ll be looking for?” Chaz said to Dr. Tauber.
“They shouldn’t be hard to find,” Tauber said. “They’ll be the only three humans on the continent. It won’t be a matter of picking them out of a crowd.”
“Just wanted to put faces to the names,” Chaz said. “See who’s who.”
“I’m kind of curious, too,” Dwayne said.
Tauber pulled up a photo file on one of the monitors.
“These are the most recent photos,” Tauber said. “I can print some up.” He began scrolling through the file, and there were shots of Doc Tauber with two other men. One was a heavyset man in his forties. Balding with the kind of thick beard some balding guys grow to compensate. It had to be Kemp. The other man was rangy and thin and in his twenties. Longish hair, goatee. Phillip Worth, the graduate student. They were happy in the photos. Dressed in outdoor wear and obviously on some kind of short hike. Phillip wore a Batman t-shirt.
“We took these on one of our excursions to scout out the ground the team would be traveling over,” Tauber said. The others stood close behind him. “The plant life and water table would be different at the destination. But the topography would be basically the same as it is now.”
More pictures of the three men in and around the facility.
“Where’s your sister?” Dwayne said.
“She took most of the photos,” Tauber said.
He moved the mouse and opened another file.
A series of images showing a woman of about twenty-five who looked even younger when she smiled. The smiles were rare, though. Mostly candid shots of her intently studying monitors in the room they now stood in or making adjustments to their gear. Her posture betrayed a serious demeanor. Not the fussy type, her shoulder-length blonde hair pulled back in a simple ponytail. But in one shot the camera caught her unawares. It was from the earlier series of shots from the hiking expedition. A hand holding a beer and an arm thrown up to shade her face. An embarrassed smile or caught in mid-laugh. A band of zinc on her nose barely concealing a field of light freckles.
“Let’s get to work,” Dwayne said.
HNTGHRNS MST HDE
“This is it?” Chaz said. “You call this intel?”
“That’s the text message my sister sent back through the wave transmitter,” Dr. Tauber said. “It followed after a message telling me the local temperature and conditions. Then the transmissions stopped.”
It was the night before the step-off date they all agreed on. The reactor was heating up and could provide the jolt the Tube needed by early the next morning.
The rocket guns had all been tested, stripped, and cleaned. They tried out one of Renzi’s hemp-bag, eco-friendly satchel charges. It created enough shock and awe to satisfy all of them. They packed power bars in soy-based edible wrapping, leather botas for water, and a small medical kit with no plastic and a minimum of metal parts. They wouldn’t need any radios as the unit was small and would stay tight. They’d take a wave transmitter with them. Doc worked another one up for them. They could send voice and texts back as long as the field was open. It had a record and re-send feature as well.
They were chowing down on pizza and beer and cooling out before the Big Day around a fire Jimbo laid in the desert beyond the huts.
“The first word is gibberish,” Dwayne said. “I’m guessing the second phrase is ‘must hide.’ Hide from what?”
“We go find where they’re hiding,” Renzi said.
“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” Dwayne said. “If hiding got them out of their trouble they’d have come back through the tube already when the field re-opened. They missed three opportunities. At the very least they would have sent another message. They’re either in deep shit somehow or cut off from the field area.”
“Or dead,” Renzi said. Dwayne shot Renzi a look.
“So, Doc, what’s the point of this whole thing?” Chaz said.
“I’m not sure I understand,” said Tauber after a moment.
“The time machine,” Chaz said. “You gonna hunt dinosaurs, rob a pharaoh's tomb, take a peek at Jesus, or what?”
“It’s purely a scientific endeavor,” Tauber said. “Frankly, Caroline, Dr. Kemp, and I weren’t thinking much past the math. We were focused on proving the theory and building the Tube. We chose the first destination era because it was similar enough to present conditions with no risk of encountering any human population or catastrophic conditions.”
“What’s the money man’s interest in your Tube?” Chaz asked. “He’s laying down some serious cash here. I started with the ownership papers on that G-5 we flew in on but ran into a jungle of shell corps. A few of them
