The back half of last chapter, so to speak. I had got sidetracked by a hockey game. Re-extra-edited.
12: Near Miss
Early spring, 2058-
At the appointed time, Jeff Tracy met with his chief engineer in the island's largest subterranean laboratory. Hackenbacker was nervous, insisting that his employer sign a detailed 'hold harmless' waiver before taking this dangerous, terribly difficult step.
Big as it was (and the place would easily have held the average suburban shopping mall) the concrete-walled lab crackled with energy; pulsed with it.
At the far end was a slowly twisting helix of light, large enough that a man might stand (or be dropped) within. Upward it widened, disappearing through the ceiling and into the misty future. Downward, it became narrower and better defined before plunging through the floor and into the recent past. Once it had featured a set of space-farmed crystal generators, but these had vanished along with the power source, sinking through floor and time together. At this point, it might have been impossible even to turn the thing off. Hackenbacker had no idea; he'd never tried.
Mighty electro-magnetic fields kept the light constrained to its swirling path, filling the chamber with dancing shadows and a bug-zapper hum. Tiny, glowing motes drifted away from the spinning helix like sparks from a heatless bonfire. Eerie, to say the least.
A hard plastic gantry had been erected beside the thing, fitted with an extensible walkway that would allow a man to step within. Jeff wanted to take that step… here, now… but even after he'd signed the damn paper his engineer held him back, still pleading.
"M- Mr. Tracy," Hackenbacker insisted, raising his voice to be heard over the time machine's tooth-rattling buzz.
"Sir… I d- don't think that you, ah… you realize quite how d- dangerous…"
"Brains," Jeff snapped, lifting hard brown eyes from a last-minute equipment check (he'd planned and dressed for a cold weather rescue… trained privately and thoroughly as an EMT). "…with or without your preferred level of comfort, I'm going through with my plans."
…Because nothing else really mattered but saving Lucinda.
Hackenbacker tried again, one ink-spotted hand firmly clutched to his employer's padded sleeve.
"Sir, it, ah… it is not p- possible for this time machine to access events p- prior to its own, ah… own c- construction. If pressed, it m- may simply vanish from, ah… from this universe, entirely."
What Jeff couldn't grasp was that time wasn't merely a line, or even a cross-hatched plane. It was a limitless, 4-D matrix, with versions of himself extending in all directions; each a little odder, a little more 'off'.
Could his mind have allowed him to see it, Jeff would have viewed himself as one tiny speck in an infinitely clear, omni-directional hall of mirrors. But, all he saw, as usual, was what he wanted. There was simply no coming between Jeff Tracy and his goal. Perhaps he was, as his employer liked to put it, 'The Brains of this outfit', but Hackenbacker didn't sign the checks or make the final decisions. Mister Tracy did.
He released Jeff's sleeve, wondering what he was going to say to the man's stockholders when they asked why in hell he'd stood by and let their CEO destroy himself.
"G- Good luck, Sir," he mumbled, accepting a quick, firm handshake.
"I plan ahead, Brains. I don't need luck."
"Of c- course not, Mr. T- Tracy."
Brains directed him up the gantry lift, silently willing the man good fortune, anyhow. At the very top, Jeff donned a harness and set of goggles, and then gave the engineer a confident, NASA-style, thumbs up.
Nodding, Hackenbacker hit the walkway extension switch and sent his wealthy employer gliding into a barely-tested time machine. For just an instant, from his perspective, the shifting helix seemed to freeze in place. (And ultimately to fail, leaving Jeff just standing there, past unplumbed.)
Aboard the walkway, Jeff saw the spiraling beam draw nearer; saw it grow searing, world-filling bright as it did so. His heart was racing, his throat dry, but somewhere at the end of that walk was Lucy, and Jeff would allow nothing to prevent him from reaching her, now. Not Hackenbacker, not time, not death itself.
Taking a deep breath, he paced through the coils of deadly, spacetime-warping light, and then he stepped off. At first he dropped under the normal acceleration of gravity, but soon that sensation vanished, to be replaced by a new, weirder other. A floor, or something very like it, seemed to materialize beneath him. The spiral faded, but did not quite disappear. Through it, he glimpsed, not the lab, but a swift rewinding of his own past.
Scenes, images and people flicked by, some of which he was pleased to recall. Board meetings and land buys… a few vacations to the ranch, even. But there were others. Through the glowing tornado he saw things he didn't care so much to relive. The wasp's-nest humming lessened, the glow dimming further as Brains' time machine came to the end of its reach. Jeff wouldn't budge, though; wouldn't step through. Not yet.
There were differences, now, as the machine flashed from his own past and into a nearby other. Eye and hair colors were subtly altered here, events slightly disordered, but Jeff hardly noticed. He'd come to the funeral.
In Kansas, under steel-wool skies, another version of Jeff Tracy stood with a knot of mourners beside an open grave. His boys (each in a small, beautifully tailored black suit) were at his side, Grant and Victoria Tracy just behind them. One of the boys, blond as his dead mother, attempted to pull away.
Jeff… this Jeff… cringed inwardly as he saw his other self seize the boy's thin shoulder and yank him sharply back. Far off, in that distant other Kansas, his double slapped the struggling boy. Here, Jeff heard himself whispering the words that the far-off figure was angrily mouthing.
"Be still, dammit! People are staring!"
But he hadn't meant… he'd been just as grief-stricken as everyone else, only…
Further back, then; to a private hospital room in the pediatric intensive care ward, where a broken, red-haired toddler lay connected by tube and monitor to the machines that kept him alive. He saw himself at the baby's bedside with his widowed cousin, Kathleen.
"They told me he was dying," Jeff whispered, hands fisted, trembling, at his sides. "What else was I supposed to do? I didn't know."
And further still, to the spuming, snow-filled air over a Geneva ski resort. A man's body fell past; his own. Reflexively, Jeff started to catch at the flailing form. Then, looking up, he spotted the cable car twisting from its guide wire over a flood of snow and rock and tumbling people. Weirdly, there was no sound except that in his head. That deeply guttural, never-forgotten roar.
A second figure dangled from the car's shattered picture window, her hands leaving bloody smears on plastic and metal as she slipped toward ruin. Lucy. Something was wrong, though. She was awkward, heavily weighted, but there wasn't time to decide why.
She lost her grip, began falling; her pitifully silent shriek filled in by memory. This time, Jeff acted. He broke the barrier of time and space and whirling light to seize the plummeting woman. Almost, they both plunged to their deaths, but Jeff Tracy was harnessed and tethered by more than just rope. Howling winds and Lucy's weight dragged at him, but he shifted his grip and stance, hauling them both upward with all the strength that fitness machines and long practice could give him. At last, gasping with pain and effort, he pulled her into the dim helix. It collapsed, leaving them, briefly, nowhere at all. But Lucy was safe beside him. Wasn't she?
No. Not Lucy. Or… not quite.
Reality altered itself around them, placing Jeff and his pregnant new wife beside a wrecked car, on a stretch of lonely Wyoming highway less than six months after the funeral. Off to one side was another vehicle, this one upside-down and smoldering.
Gennine began to sob; shaking with terror and shock as Jeff (already forgetting) set her aside to see what could be done for the others.
"Jeff…" she cried, cradling her swollen belly. "What happened?"
