“I have to work on something,” she said. “I have to get my brain firing on more problems. There are modifications I’ve worked out for the Tube. I think I can fine-tune it more closely to open windows in the past with a variable under sixty minutes.”
“And what’s the point of that now?” Morris said. He was tired of this exchange. They’d been over it and over it for weeks. He wished she had a hobby. All Caroline had in her life for the past couple of years was the challenge of building and proving the theoretical device that had been in her head from childhood. And she brought her older brother along to bring it to life. The pair of them had spent every waking moment laser-focused on its completion. But Morris could walk away now. Caroline could never do that even if her life depended on it. And her brother was certain that it did.
“This is the point.” She sat forward and spoke to her brother as though speaking to a child even though he was four years older, even though he had a wall of degrees and awards in a wide array of sciences and engineering. “If our first Tube had the kind of controls that would have allowed you to send Dwayne Roenbach and his team back to just after I ran into those aborigines, they could have interceded. The point is that Phillip and Miles would still be alive now.”
“You can’t change that now. What happened has happened.”
“You know that’s not true, Mo. You told me about finding that skull. My skull. I died back there with a bullet in my head. But sending the Rangers back changed all that, and they saved me. They changed the events in that cave a hundred thousand years ago, and here I am today back in the twenty-first century in Lottie’s Diner, Highway Ninety-Five, Moscow, Idaho.”
“That’s true, sis. This is the proof of all our theorems, that time is not immutable. But, for whatever reason, we can’t open the Tube within the same window we’ve used previously or at any time before the first field we opened. Creating the open temporal field creates a barrier we can’t breach. We can only go back to times after our last breach. We can never go back and rescue Phillip and Miles. Their fate is written. I’m just grateful we were able to save you.”
Her expression softened, her brow smoothed out, and the flare of irritation in her eyes melted away. She reached across the table to take his hands in hers.
“I know it was hard on you, too,” she said. “All you could do was stay behind and freak out.”
“And, even though you were gone for three days I had a whole month to deal with it,” he said. The Tube blew a hole in time that could remain open for, at most, thirty minutes. And it took a full forty-eight hours between each shot to power up the system. With setup and the time spent finding and recruiting the rescue team, Morris sometimes had almost a week between field openings. The stress had been nearly unbearable.
“That’s why, next time, we have more control over the situation and closer, constant communication,” Caroline said. “We can do it more safely, with more redundancies built in. More fail-safes.”
“Hold on.” Morris yanked his hands from her grasp. “Next time?”
“We’re going to build another Tauber Tube,” she beamed. “A beta prototype, and this time we’re going to do it right.”
2
Widow and Orphans
“Hey, Mom! There’s some beat-up guy asking for you!”
The little boy left Dwayne standing on the front step to run back into the house, calling for his mother at the top of his voice. Dwayne stood waiting, aware that the kid was dead on about his appearance. He was still showing signs of the recent action. A livid bruise turning to yellow on his forehead. Scratches on his face healing to white scar tissue. The tattoo of freshly withdrawn stitches across his chin. The sunglasses hid the deep set of his eyes. He was still recovering from the punishment he took back in Nevada all those long, long years ago.
It took him a few days to find Rick Renzi’s wife, now his widow. She and the three kids were living with her sister outside Cleveland in a neighborhood of split-levels that had seen better days, probably when Johnson was president. He told her on the phone that Rick wouldn’t be coming home. He didn’t offer details, and he was glad she didn’t ask for any. They had some unfinished business, and she told him to come by the next day.
Lynn Renzi’s eyes were red, but she looked all cried out as she unlatched the storm door and let him in.
“Sorry about Ricky,” she said in an off-hand way. It took Dwayne a beat to realize she was talking about the little boy. Richard Renzi, Jr.
“Kids tell it like it is.” He shrugged and entered the pocket-sized living room. “I do look a little used up.”
“You get that way going somewhere with Rick?” When she leaned back on the arm of a chair, Dwayne could see the swell of her belly under her cotton top. She didn’t invite him to take a seat, and he didn’t move to do so.
“Yeah.” He waited, but she didn’t ask for more. “You told me you had something for me?” she said. “From Rick?”
He took a fat manila envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. It was folded over and secured with a pair of rubber bands.
She took it and unsnapped the bands. Her eyes widened as she looked at the stacks of banded cash inside.
“It’s a hundred thousand,” he said. “It’s twenties and fifties, mostly.
