FIVE
I approach the site gate at the legal speed limit. I need to play this cool–to get out and think. Should I have already called the other Washington? I can’t remember the procedure, but I’m pretty sure that I haven’t followed it. I need to think. Just think.
I pass the guard house through the exit lane and wave without taking my eyes from the road. They must have felt what just happened and they must see the plumes, but no one tries to stop me. Maybe they’re frantically calling the Risley Fire Department. Good luck with that. A fleet of four fire trucks dealing with the aftermath of colossal explosions half a mile deep. That’s not one of their drills.
Once there are miles between me and the site fence I take out my cell and call Bess. She may be hearing news of ground-shaking explosions from the site and I need to let her know I’m okay.
“Must be party time!” It’s not her. It’s a man’s voice.
“Who’s this?”
“Party Loft. Is it time for a party?” asks the voice without curiosity.
“Sorry,” I say and hang up. But that was speed dial. How did I get the ... Party Loft? This time I key in the numbers.
“Must be time for a party–” I hang up and decide to figure this one out later. Now I need to do my job. So what is that? I bring up the roster for last night’s and this morning’s shifts. I start calling, Jenn first. Voice mail. The next name, voice mail. The next name rings out. I look for names that were off-shift. Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail. No one there. No one. I tap the cell on my chin. I have to make the call. Protocol requires that only a director can call this number, but protocol probably didn’t anticipate this. I take a deep breath and mentally compose a sane opening sentence as I call the number. It rings. It keeps ringing. And keeps ringing. My fear deepens a fathom. This is THE number, our communication trunk with HQ. This number can’t just ring out.
So if I’d been on time for my shift ... would my phone be ringing-out too? Where the hell is everyone? Who’d be snatching TMA staff and why? And where are they? I not going to think the worst.
I need to be somewhere I can think. I can’t go home. Why can’t I? Because something may be waiting for me there. I used to fear that that something was Den. That was a simpler time. Joe Alvarez has a small place on the river, and now that he’s probably wherever the rest of the TMA team are, it’ll be available.
I park in his drive and walk around the back of his bungalow. It overlooks the Yakima River, just a few feet from its bank. I shield my eyes to look into the glass porch door. There’s no one there and no obvious sign of a struggle. I sit on a porch chair and look at my bloodied arm. There’s nothing for it but to break in and find something to clean the wound. It seems security was not at the top of Joe’s mind because breaking-in consists of sliding open the porch door and taking a step. The wound is easy to deal with - a couple of band aids. Barely any seepage out of the sides.
I collapse onto the couch and a bag of chips crunches beneath me. I look out the window and the river is serene, oblivious to the circumstances. It flows steadily and calmly while seagulls hover above and a family of ducks paddles by.
So someone has taken out the TMA Tachyon Array team. Why? Do they know what we do? They must; otherwise, why do it? But why do it? What’s the motivation? Jenn had always described us as the time police. We enforce the one second per second rule. So with us out of the way, the rule can be broken with impunity. But why would you? I walk to the window and stare out as a dingey of raucous kids passes by. The why is obvious. I’m so conditioned to think of time acceleration as a disaster to be avoided that I’ve never given clear thought to what someone might consider an up-side. But the answers are obvious. You could go back a decade with perfect knowledge of the future and make a fortune. I shake my head. But that’s wrong thinking, isn’t it? One thing TMA has ingrained in me is the complex, inter-related, chaotic, unpredictable consequences of tinkering in the past. Yet someone who hasn’t been trained to think that way just wouldn’t ... think that way. They’d see the vista of possibilities.
But surely everyone has heard about the paradoxes. Paradox 1: I go back in time and kill my grandfather as a child. So then where did I, the killer, come from? The fact of the matter is that we know all about these paradoxes, but as we look around ourselves, there’s no evidence of any weirdness going on. Then again, what would evidence look like? Do we somehow adjust to accommodate it? Maybe these paradoxes are resolving themselves continually right under our noses and we’ve no way of seeing it. Maybe understanding what’s happening means understanding time itself, and we’re close to clueless about that. The great Einstein gave us a little false hope for a while, telling us that time is no more than an extra dimension–the fourth one–but all that fell apart, at least for those of us in the know.
So because time’s this mystery, what TMA is protecting us from isn’t clear. But we know our mission: one second per second, whatever it takes. If we
