JUST IN TIME
by
Gail Gardner
"When….?"
"Right after the accident…"
"Keep the message simple then."
"Aye, Captain."
He had stopped talking. Except to his family But no one really noticed. Everyone else was sunk in their own misery and pain. Teachers at school nodded about trauma and gave the boy leeway, as long as he did the work and paid some attention, it seemed okay.
Then he stopped listening. To people anyway.
"The stars are talking to me." He whispered in confidence to his brothers. "They told me to listen."
His brothers recognized the trust in them and didn't repeat the information to their distracted father or worried grandmother.
Teachers finally brought the deficiency to the attention of his father.
"The boy can hear termites chewing at the wood." The audiologist explained. "No physical reason for lack of hearing or talking."
"It has been almost a year…" His father explained to the psychologist.
"Some children take longer to recover, Mr. Tracy. The loss of a parent is very traumatic."
"His brothers are doing all right."
"Give him time."
"Are we in time?" The last jump had been spectactularly horrid and the medics in sick bay had their hands full.
"The comet is right ahead of us, sir. Navigation is dead on target."
"I'm not dead yet." The navigator muttered darkly.
"None of us are." Trust the Captain to pick up that remark.
"John! John Tracy! Listen to us! Listen to the stars! Listen to your…g'daya!" The captain swore.
"What are you going to name the comet?" The reporter asked the teenager. "After my mother. Lucille Tracy." He said quietly. John had eventually broken his time of silence, but he would never be a chatterer like Alan or Gordon or smooth talker like Virgil and Scott.
A young man who had three new comets to his name and best seller (among the academic community at least) was a shoo-in for the SETI job. Too bad it was in the Chilean Andes in one of the most remote corners of the earth. Communication with his family was sparse. But the voices, they were never clearer.
"Engineering! Report!"
"The L'Engle drives are running wild Captain, we are tesseracting all over the place!"
"Hold the jump! Hold the jump!" There was a sound of a sizzle and boom, not unlike a lightning strike with thunder to follow.
He recognized their voices. The telemetry and other bits of information gleaned over the years began to make a picture. Proof. He had no proof, other than a few short recordings. And they called him by name. It was no more logical than Scott's invisible friend in third grade.
Thunderbird Five drifted serenely through space circling the planet, soon International Rescue would be up and running.. Every communication device ever thought of studded the outside of the space station. One piece of sensitive equipment was trained deliberately at a certain patch of space and was set to a very, very, very, accurate frequency. The amount of gold used in the dish alone would cost more than half the arrays together. John Tracy himself had set it in place. Brains had raised an eyebrow when helping the astro-physicist build the receiver.
"I need it." The young man explained briefly. "I have to hear everything. Everything, you understand?" The set of the young man's jaw and the flash of his blue eyes was enough for the scientist. He understood, if anyone, the driving force of needing to know.
"Mayday! Mayday! This is the Federation shortship Asyyl. Our L'Engle drives are mis-firing. We are tesseracting without volition. Our next jump is timed for 3.5 standard…"
" This is International Rescue, please state the nature of your emergency again."
"Captain. Incoming message on a very low frequency, I'm trying to boost it now!"
"International Rescue? Anyone heard of them? Navigator?"
The navigator grinned. Her phenomenal memory for trivia would again save their skins. "Human. Twenty-first Century, for their time International Rescue was way ahead scientifically than any other agency or nation."
"Can they fix our L'Engles? Put us back in time and space where we belong?" The first officer as usual was being pessimistic. Of course, his whole race was pessimistic. He was a good foil for the flamboyant captain.
"Maybe..." The Navigator's 14 digits flew over the controls bringing up data.
"International Rescue, I am Captain of a deep space scout ship. Our drive engines are causing us to tesseract, ah jump, in time warps. We are barely holding position now."
"Captain of the Asyyl. I think..." John Tracy's voice hesitated for a fraction of a second then he spoke boldly."You will be jumping back in time. You must send messages to me so that I will be here to listen. I am John Glenn Tracy. I'm sending you all relevant material to you now in a micro waved blip. You mustcontact me..."
The connection faded. They would be in touch again. Maybe not this year or the next. John could wait. International Rescue would be there for them in the future.
*Note: The L'Engle drives and the tesseract (a fold in time and space) are from the writer Madeline L'Engle. She was the author of the first sci-fi book I ever read, A Wrinkle in Time, and started a lifelong passion for the genre. G'daya is a Klingon curse.