Chapter 19
Six Days, Nine Hours, Ten Minutes
Approaching the glass wall, Bradley Talmadge fixed a grim look on his face. His first confrontation had ended in frustration. Given the very nature of BackStep Operations, he couldn't allow that to happen again.
"I thought we'd give this another try, Frank."
Sitting in the chair, Parker locked his arms across his chest. "Well, isn't this my lucky day?"
"Don't start with me, Frank."
"I'm not starting anything, Bradley," the chrononaut replied. "Like you, I'm only trying to figure this out. Unlike you, however, I'm the one stuck in the fishbowl breathing what your top men qualify as recycled air." Disgustedly, he shrugged. "Hell, Bradley, I've got nowhere to go. You know that. I know that. I'm certainly willing sit this one out on the bench so long as this game starts going somewhere real fast."
Agreeably, Talmadge nodded. "Why don't we work together?"
"I was hoping you'd say that," Parker stated, rising. "So how about a round of 'Let's Make A Deal'?"
"There are no deals, Frank."
"Come on, Bradley!"
"No deals, Frank. I won't repeat myself again."
"But you haven't even seen what's behind Door Number One!"
Pointing, the director barked, "You're behind Door Number One, Frank. You're going to stay there until I have some answers."
"Answers?"
"That's right."
"Who's asking the questions?"
"I am."
"I don't work that way."
"Then you aren't Frank Parker."
"No?"
"Absolutely not."
Curious, the younger man asked, "Well, the way I see things, you reached that conclusion as soon as I arrived here, Bradley."
"I'm doing my job, and the real Frank Parker would know that."
"How can you be so sure that I'm not him?"
Standing firm with one hand stamped against the glass, Talmadge said, "Because the Frank Parker that I knew always placed personal differences aside when it came to BackStep Operations. The Frank Parker I knew wasn't interested in cutting deals for the sake of personal gain. He was interested in doing his job, to the best of his abilities, and even surpassing those abilities when the situation required it." Pointing, he continued, "Now, you tell me: how can those traits possibly reconcile with your persistence in cutting a deal?"
"Knew," Parker said.
"What?"
"Knew," he repeated. The chrononaut held his hands out in a gesture of surrender. "Knew. You said the Frank Parker you 'knew.'"
Sighing, Talmadge brushed a hand across his forehead. "So I did."
"Past tense, Bradley," Parker proceeded to make his argument. "Not present tense, as is the case in my presently sitting right here, presently locked up behind this glass, and presently being treated like a mouse in a cage." He quickly rounded the table and approached the glass wall. "Now, you've slipped, and you've told me one thing that you can't deny: Frank Parker in this timeline is dead."
Talmadge didn't know what to say.
"What?" Parker tried. "You're not denying it, Bradley. A little bit of denial would be very good for my self esteem right now."
The director sighed. He lowered his eyes, staring at the floor. When he realized he had lost the first round, he conceded, "I never could play poker with you, Frank."
Restless, the younger man turned and walked around the sealed room. "No, you never could, Bradley." Parker fought back his anger, realizing he had misdirected much of it at the director. "Of course, that doesn't excuse the fact that Donovan and I made enough money off Ramsey to fund a BackStep Operation of our own, but I won't mince words. As a matter of fact, I don't want to mince words with anyone, Bradley. I'm not even sure that I know what the phrase 'mince words' means, but there is one thing that I do know." He sighed. "I'm sick and tired of being locked up like a lab animal waiting for the specialists to dissect me and hang what's left of my good body parts on their wall for the colleagues to admire!" He suppressed the urge to run at the glass, to slam himself against the barrier, to futilely try to break free. "If you don't want to bargain, that's fine with me. Instead, let me tell you what I know. Stop me when you've heard enough."
Quickly, Parker organized his thoughts as best as he could recall the salient points. "Roughly, I'm guessing around twelve hours ago, I arrived here ... though I'm not quite sure where here is. I do know that it sure as Hell isn't home."
"No," Talmadge agreed. "It isn't."
"Bradley, I followed protocol, like I always do."
With a smirk, the older man interrupted, "Like you always do?"
Pointing, Parker chirped, "That was a cheap shot."
"They were your words," the director explained, chuckling mildly. "I just wanted you to hear how they sounded."
Ignoring the argument, Parker approached the glass. "I telephoned in a 'conundrum,' and you acted like you were speaking to a ghost!"
"Frank, you have to understand ..."
"No, Bradley!" the man shouted. "What I have to understand is where I am, what I'm doing here, and whether or not the event I was sent back in time to stop is going to take place in this timeline or it isn't! Like you said, when it comes to the mission, I've always stayed true, and I can't do that while I'm locked up in here!"
Holding up his hands, Talmadge cautioned, "Take it easy."
"This isn't right, and you know it isn't right."
"What isn't right?"
"This ... this whole set-up," Parker explained.
"What isn't right, Frank?" Talmadge pressed. "What are you talking about?"
Flabbergasted, the young man threw his arms down at his side. "Look at me, Bradley."
"What?"
"I'm here. I'm the world's first time traveler – at least, so far as you and I know – and I'm sitting here in this cage."
"Frank, it's only a precaution."
"But I don't belong here."
"Frank, I can't be any more specific in telling you that this is only a necessary precaution."
"No, no," Parker interrupted. "That isn't what I mean. What I mean is ... I don't belong here. In this timeline." Frustrated, he brought one hand up and cupped his eyes. "Where am I, by the way?"
"Besides the planet Earth?"
"No," he corrected, slowly spinning around and once more taking in the whiteness. "This room. Where is this place?"
"You're in Never Never Land."
Surprised, Frank was taken aback. Slowly, he spun around, taking in every inch of the containment cell. "This? This room? You expect me to believe that this room is part of headquarters?"
Squinting, Talmadge finally understood. "You ... you don't have a quarantine area in your timeline? Is that what you're saying, Frank?"
"Bradley, you know as well as I do that I've broken into every crawlspace, every corridor, every crack, and every crevasse of this installation," the chrononaut explained. "There's nothing left swept under the rug, but I've never seen anything like this."
"Really?" Suddenly fascinated, Talmadge pulled the corridor chair close to the glass and sat down. "Frank, listen very close to what I'm about to tell you. You may find some of this – well – hard to believe, but I think we've made it our business of swallowing those things others find impossible to accept. Can you do that for me?"
Shrugging, Parker quipped, "As far as I'm concerned, you can drone on all day long, Bradley. It's not like I have a choice."
Smiling, Talmadge said, "Don't you dare disappoint me now, Frank. You've always had a choice. I could strongly argue that you've always had 'the' choice." The director could tell by his expression that the younger man wasn't following, so he continued. "You've held the fate of the entire world – if not the cosmos – in your hands, doing what you do, risking all that you have. Each and every time, you rose to the occasion. You did what was necessary to complete the mission. You've saved more lives than you'll ever possibly imagine, and that's always the choice you made, Frank. All I'm asking you to do is make that choice one more time."
At the risk of repeating himself, the younger man replied, "My point exactly, Bradley. Have I ever had any other choice?"
Dismissing the cynicism, the director asked, "In your adventures, in all of your travels, have you visited alternate timelines?"
"Alternate timelines?" Crossing his arms again, Parker nodded. "More than I care to remember."
"How many?"
"I don't know. Three. Four. Maybe a half-dozen."
"That many?"
Shrugging, Parker considered the idea. "Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Bradley, I had this exact same conversation with Olga once. We were talking about the business of BackStepping – while I was heavily drinking, of course – and she asked if I had ever thought about the fact that maybe one of the missions I had completed wasn't supposed to be successful. She was going on the way she does, sometimes, talking about Fate. Her point was that maybe I had stopped some catastrophe – halted some plague from falling into the wrong hands, kept some politician from being assassinated – when what Fate had truly intended was for the catastrophe to take place. Maybe I had kept an event from happening that was supposed to happen." He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to remember the significance those thoughts had over him, coming from someone he held so dear. "I remember telling her that, as far as I was concerned, each and every BackStep was a doorway to another possibility."
"What did she say?"
"I think her exact words were ... 'possibility shmossibility, Mr. Parker.'"
"BackStepping is the business of creating alternate timelines, Frank." Talmadge smiled. "But alternate dimensions? I can tell you without a doubt that, while we considered them mathematically before the NSA ever authorized a BackStep, we didn't imagine that you would ever stumble into one." Leaning forward, he asked, "Do you have no idea of what happened to those other realities – to the people you met, to the events you either caused, changed, or interrupted – once you left?"
Parker considered the question for a long moment before responding. "No, I don't," he finally concluded.
"Frank," Talmadge began, but then he stopped. He held up his hands, deliberately balling them into fists. Parker guessed that the man was struggling with finding what to say, how to say it, and what was safe to divulge. "Because I trust in the man before me, I'm going to take a risk and tell you a few things. I think it's definitely safe to conclude that, yes, you existed in our timeline. As you were quick to point out, I used the past tense." The director's expression darkened for a moment, and the young man wasn't sure of what to make of the troubled countenance. "Yes, you were our best chrononaut – you still are, as far as I'm concerned – but I speak of you in the past tense because ... you died."
"Look," Parker tried, dragging his chair around the table and placing it in front of the glass, directly across from Talmadge, "Bradley, if you're afraid of talking to me about being dead, then let me tell you: I've been dead. If it isn't a fringe benefit of this business, then it's definitely an occupational hazard. I've been dead. I've come back. I've killed myself. I've seen my friends die, and I've seen them come back through the miracle of time travel. I've hiccupped backward through my own existence. I've met myself more times than Elvis gets spotted at a Dunkin Donuts. Hell, I've even kicked my own ass. If that isn't something that would require serious therapy then I don't know what is!"
"Your world and mind, Frank," Talmadge offered, "aren't so very different, but there are some differences. Key differences. Critical changes. Looking at them from one perspective, they may seem minor. However, when you see them from the outside, you realize what a delicate house of cards what you do really is. Like your being here. Our version of you died some time ago, as you so aptly deduced."
"Why?" he asked. "What happened to me?"
"No," the director muttered. "I'm sorry, Frank. That isn't what we need to discuss."
Finally at ease with the conversation, the chrononaut nodded. He had always trusted in Bradley Talmadge to make decisions, and many of those decisions required even more that Frank would have to carry out. Whether this was the real Bradley Talmadge or not, Parker decided he'd had to trust the man.
What other choice did he have?
"What we need to discuss is how you were brought you here," Talmadge explained, "into this alternate reality. For that, we're going to need some help."
"Help?" Parker asked. "Who did you have in mind?"
"I've sent for Isaac Mentnor."
"Isaac?" Parker appreciated hearing another familiar name. "What do you mean you sent for him? Isn't Isaac a part of BackStep?"
Inclining his head, Talmadge warned, "Be careful what you ask for, Frank. There are things that you have to know. There are things that you must know. But now isn't the time to get into those."
Slowly, Parker nodded. "All right," he agreed, trusting in his boss. "All right, Bradley. But ... I want to know everything."
"I give you my word, Frank, that I'll tell you everything," Talmadge offered. "First, however, you and I have a puzzle to solve, and the only man who can help us should be here within the hour."
End of Chapter 19
Six Days, Nine Hours, Ten Minutes
Approaching the glass wall, Bradley Talmadge fixed a grim look on his face. His first confrontation had ended in frustration. Given the very nature of BackStep Operations, he couldn't allow that to happen again.
"I thought we'd give this another try, Frank."
Sitting in the chair, Parker locked his arms across his chest. "Well, isn't this my lucky day?"
"Don't start with me, Frank."
"I'm not starting anything, Bradley," the chrononaut replied. "Like you, I'm only trying to figure this out. Unlike you, however, I'm the one stuck in the fishbowl breathing what your top men qualify as recycled air." Disgustedly, he shrugged. "Hell, Bradley, I've got nowhere to go. You know that. I know that. I'm certainly willing sit this one out on the bench so long as this game starts going somewhere real fast."
Agreeably, Talmadge nodded. "Why don't we work together?"
"I was hoping you'd say that," Parker stated, rising. "So how about a round of 'Let's Make A Deal'?"
"There are no deals, Frank."
"Come on, Bradley!"
"No deals, Frank. I won't repeat myself again."
"But you haven't even seen what's behind Door Number One!"
Pointing, the director barked, "You're behind Door Number One, Frank. You're going to stay there until I have some answers."
"Answers?"
"That's right."
"Who's asking the questions?"
"I am."
"I don't work that way."
"Then you aren't Frank Parker."
"No?"
"Absolutely not."
Curious, the younger man asked, "Well, the way I see things, you reached that conclusion as soon as I arrived here, Bradley."
"I'm doing my job, and the real Frank Parker would know that."
"How can you be so sure that I'm not him?"
Standing firm with one hand stamped against the glass, Talmadge said, "Because the Frank Parker that I knew always placed personal differences aside when it came to BackStep Operations. The Frank Parker I knew wasn't interested in cutting deals for the sake of personal gain. He was interested in doing his job, to the best of his abilities, and even surpassing those abilities when the situation required it." Pointing, he continued, "Now, you tell me: how can those traits possibly reconcile with your persistence in cutting a deal?"
"Knew," Parker said.
"What?"
"Knew," he repeated. The chrononaut held his hands out in a gesture of surrender. "Knew. You said the Frank Parker you 'knew.'"
Sighing, Talmadge brushed a hand across his forehead. "So I did."
"Past tense, Bradley," Parker proceeded to make his argument. "Not present tense, as is the case in my presently sitting right here, presently locked up behind this glass, and presently being treated like a mouse in a cage." He quickly rounded the table and approached the glass wall. "Now, you've slipped, and you've told me one thing that you can't deny: Frank Parker in this timeline is dead."
Talmadge didn't know what to say.
"What?" Parker tried. "You're not denying it, Bradley. A little bit of denial would be very good for my self esteem right now."
The director sighed. He lowered his eyes, staring at the floor. When he realized he had lost the first round, he conceded, "I never could play poker with you, Frank."
Restless, the younger man turned and walked around the sealed room. "No, you never could, Bradley." Parker fought back his anger, realizing he had misdirected much of it at the director. "Of course, that doesn't excuse the fact that Donovan and I made enough money off Ramsey to fund a BackStep Operation of our own, but I won't mince words. As a matter of fact, I don't want to mince words with anyone, Bradley. I'm not even sure that I know what the phrase 'mince words' means, but there is one thing that I do know." He sighed. "I'm sick and tired of being locked up like a lab animal waiting for the specialists to dissect me and hang what's left of my good body parts on their wall for the colleagues to admire!" He suppressed the urge to run at the glass, to slam himself against the barrier, to futilely try to break free. "If you don't want to bargain, that's fine with me. Instead, let me tell you what I know. Stop me when you've heard enough."
Quickly, Parker organized his thoughts as best as he could recall the salient points. "Roughly, I'm guessing around twelve hours ago, I arrived here ... though I'm not quite sure where here is. I do know that it sure as Hell isn't home."
"No," Talmadge agreed. "It isn't."
"Bradley, I followed protocol, like I always do."
With a smirk, the older man interrupted, "Like you always do?"
Pointing, Parker chirped, "That was a cheap shot."
"They were your words," the director explained, chuckling mildly. "I just wanted you to hear how they sounded."
Ignoring the argument, Parker approached the glass. "I telephoned in a 'conundrum,' and you acted like you were speaking to a ghost!"
"Frank, you have to understand ..."
"No, Bradley!" the man shouted. "What I have to understand is where I am, what I'm doing here, and whether or not the event I was sent back in time to stop is going to take place in this timeline or it isn't! Like you said, when it comes to the mission, I've always stayed true, and I can't do that while I'm locked up in here!"
Holding up his hands, Talmadge cautioned, "Take it easy."
"This isn't right, and you know it isn't right."
"What isn't right?"
"This ... this whole set-up," Parker explained.
"What isn't right, Frank?" Talmadge pressed. "What are you talking about?"
Flabbergasted, the young man threw his arms down at his side. "Look at me, Bradley."
"What?"
"I'm here. I'm the world's first time traveler – at least, so far as you and I know – and I'm sitting here in this cage."
"Frank, it's only a precaution."
"But I don't belong here."
"Frank, I can't be any more specific in telling you that this is only a necessary precaution."
"No, no," Parker interrupted. "That isn't what I mean. What I mean is ... I don't belong here. In this timeline." Frustrated, he brought one hand up and cupped his eyes. "Where am I, by the way?"
"Besides the planet Earth?"
"No," he corrected, slowly spinning around and once more taking in the whiteness. "This room. Where is this place?"
"You're in Never Never Land."
Surprised, Frank was taken aback. Slowly, he spun around, taking in every inch of the containment cell. "This? This room? You expect me to believe that this room is part of headquarters?"
Squinting, Talmadge finally understood. "You ... you don't have a quarantine area in your timeline? Is that what you're saying, Frank?"
"Bradley, you know as well as I do that I've broken into every crawlspace, every corridor, every crack, and every crevasse of this installation," the chrononaut explained. "There's nothing left swept under the rug, but I've never seen anything like this."
"Really?" Suddenly fascinated, Talmadge pulled the corridor chair close to the glass and sat down. "Frank, listen very close to what I'm about to tell you. You may find some of this – well – hard to believe, but I think we've made it our business of swallowing those things others find impossible to accept. Can you do that for me?"
Shrugging, Parker quipped, "As far as I'm concerned, you can drone on all day long, Bradley. It's not like I have a choice."
Smiling, Talmadge said, "Don't you dare disappoint me now, Frank. You've always had a choice. I could strongly argue that you've always had 'the' choice." The director could tell by his expression that the younger man wasn't following, so he continued. "You've held the fate of the entire world – if not the cosmos – in your hands, doing what you do, risking all that you have. Each and every time, you rose to the occasion. You did what was necessary to complete the mission. You've saved more lives than you'll ever possibly imagine, and that's always the choice you made, Frank. All I'm asking you to do is make that choice one more time."
At the risk of repeating himself, the younger man replied, "My point exactly, Bradley. Have I ever had any other choice?"
Dismissing the cynicism, the director asked, "In your adventures, in all of your travels, have you visited alternate timelines?"
"Alternate timelines?" Crossing his arms again, Parker nodded. "More than I care to remember."
"How many?"
"I don't know. Three. Four. Maybe a half-dozen."
"That many?"
Shrugging, Parker considered the idea. "Well, to be perfectly honest with you, Bradley, I had this exact same conversation with Olga once. We were talking about the business of BackStepping – while I was heavily drinking, of course – and she asked if I had ever thought about the fact that maybe one of the missions I had completed wasn't supposed to be successful. She was going on the way she does, sometimes, talking about Fate. Her point was that maybe I had stopped some catastrophe – halted some plague from falling into the wrong hands, kept some politician from being assassinated – when what Fate had truly intended was for the catastrophe to take place. Maybe I had kept an event from happening that was supposed to happen." He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to remember the significance those thoughts had over him, coming from someone he held so dear. "I remember telling her that, as far as I was concerned, each and every BackStep was a doorway to another possibility."
"What did she say?"
"I think her exact words were ... 'possibility shmossibility, Mr. Parker.'"
"BackStepping is the business of creating alternate timelines, Frank." Talmadge smiled. "But alternate dimensions? I can tell you without a doubt that, while we considered them mathematically before the NSA ever authorized a BackStep, we didn't imagine that you would ever stumble into one." Leaning forward, he asked, "Do you have no idea of what happened to those other realities – to the people you met, to the events you either caused, changed, or interrupted – once you left?"
Parker considered the question for a long moment before responding. "No, I don't," he finally concluded.
"Frank," Talmadge began, but then he stopped. He held up his hands, deliberately balling them into fists. Parker guessed that the man was struggling with finding what to say, how to say it, and what was safe to divulge. "Because I trust in the man before me, I'm going to take a risk and tell you a few things. I think it's definitely safe to conclude that, yes, you existed in our timeline. As you were quick to point out, I used the past tense." The director's expression darkened for a moment, and the young man wasn't sure of what to make of the troubled countenance. "Yes, you were our best chrononaut – you still are, as far as I'm concerned – but I speak of you in the past tense because ... you died."
"Look," Parker tried, dragging his chair around the table and placing it in front of the glass, directly across from Talmadge, "Bradley, if you're afraid of talking to me about being dead, then let me tell you: I've been dead. If it isn't a fringe benefit of this business, then it's definitely an occupational hazard. I've been dead. I've come back. I've killed myself. I've seen my friends die, and I've seen them come back through the miracle of time travel. I've hiccupped backward through my own existence. I've met myself more times than Elvis gets spotted at a Dunkin Donuts. Hell, I've even kicked my own ass. If that isn't something that would require serious therapy then I don't know what is!"
"Your world and mind, Frank," Talmadge offered, "aren't so very different, but there are some differences. Key differences. Critical changes. Looking at them from one perspective, they may seem minor. However, when you see them from the outside, you realize what a delicate house of cards what you do really is. Like your being here. Our version of you died some time ago, as you so aptly deduced."
"Why?" he asked. "What happened to me?"
"No," the director muttered. "I'm sorry, Frank. That isn't what we need to discuss."
Finally at ease with the conversation, the chrononaut nodded. He had always trusted in Bradley Talmadge to make decisions, and many of those decisions required even more that Frank would have to carry out. Whether this was the real Bradley Talmadge or not, Parker decided he'd had to trust the man.
What other choice did he have?
"What we need to discuss is how you were brought you here," Talmadge explained, "into this alternate reality. For that, we're going to need some help."
"Help?" Parker asked. "Who did you have in mind?"
"I've sent for Isaac Mentnor."
"Isaac?" Parker appreciated hearing another familiar name. "What do you mean you sent for him? Isn't Isaac a part of BackStep?"
Inclining his head, Talmadge warned, "Be careful what you ask for, Frank. There are things that you have to know. There are things that you must know. But now isn't the time to get into those."
Slowly, Parker nodded. "All right," he agreed, trusting in his boss. "All right, Bradley. But ... I want to know everything."
"I give you my word, Frank, that I'll tell you everything," Talmadge offered. "First, however, you and I have a puzzle to solve, and the only man who can help us should be here within the hour."
End of Chapter 19