“I think Carl and Jack are a bad influence on you,” Sarah said as she used the officer’s handcuffs to secure him to the inside bars of the ornate gate as the semiconscious man kept mumbling incoherently. Sarah reached down and removed the guard’s radio and threw it five feet away into a stand of overgrown bushes lining the gate. Both women went back to the car in silence and then drove through and closed the gate to keep outside curiosity to a manageable level.
The mansion was large and only a few lights burned purely for fire department safety. Moira, through her management firm, had kept the grounds immaculate and they hoped the same could be said for the interior. They parked the car in the front and used the large set of keys stolen from the guard to open the double front doors. The dreams of finding the inside as glorious as the outside were quickly and distinctly quashed.
“Boy, the housekeeping staff must have been the first employees let go when this place closed,” Sarah said as she ran a hand through thirty years of dust on a sideboard table near the front door. Sarah started to reach for the light switch and Anya stayed her hand. She just shook her head. She clicked on a flashlight and gave it to Sarah.
“The guard may have a few friends.”
Sarah nodded and they started looking — for what, they didn’t know.
The machine up close was gorgeous in its design if not daunting in its construction. Virginia, Jenks, and the entire nuclear sciences and engineering departments were crawling all over the doorway and its support systems. With the assistance of Europa they had devised that the time machine was in complete working order even though Europa was having a hard time saying the apparatus would or could actually work. The science was just too impossible, even for the Cray system as she was also having trouble without the right programs on quantum physics.
The daunting problems remaining were not in the control of Jenks or Virginia, but mostly fell to the responsibility of Morales and Europa in finding a corresponding signal from what might be as far back as 250,000 years, that coupled with the fact that they could not even power up the Wellsian Doorway without blacking out the entire eastern seaboard. Moira had explained that exact same thing had happened causing the famous 1969 New York blackout. She had even smiled when recalling the debacle she had spent millions upon millions of dollars to cover up.
The Event Group’s duplicate, reverse-engineered, and far more portable Wellsian Doorway was now under construction next to the existing one. It would be able to be broken into components for transport to Antarctica to be reassembled there for the team’s dimensional return — if there was one.
“Yeah, well I can’t see anything working until we get some electricity in here that has enough umph to fire this damn thing up,” Jenks said as he removed the stub of his cigar and nearly spit the foul taste from his mouth until he saw Virginia waiting to pounce on him for doing so. He swallowed instead. “Well, are you going to let me in on your little secret on how you plan to accomplish that particular electrical miracle since the portable power unit we have at the complex has to go with the field team into the past”—he smirked at Virginia—“if that’s even possible.”
The look down at Moira by an unbelieving Jenks was unmistakable as she sat and smiled at the master chief and his continuing doubts about the sciences involved. Moira knew engineers had very small imaginations.
“Look, there is only one portable power unit in existence capable of generating the output of the hundred and fifty megawatts we need. Bringing in the power lines from the city will cause a lot of eyes to look our way and even then we would probably blow every circuit from here to Montreal in doing so. So, maybe you should let old Jenksy in on your solution, huh, Slim?”
Virginia shook her head while she used a nonconductive acrylic wrench to twist a bolt on the old doorway as they were now in the process of adding their own features to the technology. “I’m working on that, Harold.”
“What did I tell you about calling me—”
“Virginia, you’re needed outside, the harbormaster is waiting on you.”
Both Virginia and Jenks stopped bickering and turned to see Niles Compton and Jack Collins standing by the wheelchair of Moira Mendelsohn, who was looking up at them.
Virginia looked at Jenks and gave him a smug smile and then stepped down from the top of the doorway where she had been analyzing the lens cuts on the eighteen laser apertures in the rounded circle of the door’s opening.
“Unlike engineers, my people know how the world really works,” Virginia said as she hopped down the last few steps of the erected scaffolding.
“Smart-ass,” Jenks grumbled as he snapped the last laser lens into place.
Niles watched the assistant director exit the platform area and then waited as Jenks climbed from the erected scaffolding and confronted Moira for further instructions on how the doorway operated. Niles then pulled Jack aside.
“I had to bring the president in on this request from Virginia and I’m guessing the Department of the Navy and General Dynamics are going to start asking some serious questions soon.”
“We knew it wouldn’t last as long as we needed. Do we still have the eighty-eight-hour window the president promised?”
Niles pursed his lips and then limped to a chair and sat, staring up at the Wellsian Doorway and its newly born and much smaller reverse-engineered sister rising next to her.
“Yes, and those remaining hours are ticking away fast,” Compton said as his eyes roamed over the most amazing machine he had ever seen outside of the magical Leviathan, the futuristic submarine they encountered during a harrowing field mission a few years back that was so appreciated by the members of the Event Group.
“Has Morales and Europa had any luck with the escape pod signal?”
“He seems convinced if we can get the doorway up and running he and Europa can find a corresponding signal from Mr. Everett’s escape pod. Pete Golding Junior says that according to Professor Mendelsohn’s figures, Europa should be able to shoot signals into every dimensional plain, no matter how many that may be.” Niles smirked. “Hell, I don’t know if the kid knows what he’s talking about. I’m like Jenks there, this is so far beyond me that it hurts my head thinking about it.” Niles smiled and looked up at Jack. “Europa was right in her choice of her new boss, our Dr. Morales seems more than capable despite his youth. Pete was right to want him on his team.”
Jack knew discussing the replacement for Pete Golding always put the director in a funk. Pete was not only close to Charlie Ellenshaw, he had also learned most everything from the man sitting next to him — Niles Compton. Collins placed a hand on Niles’s shoulder and then looked around the PIT and the hundred technicians who sat at consoles and had wrenches and welders in their hands.
“Have you seen Sarah and Anya?”
12
The many upstairs rooms were divided into boys’ and girls’ dormitories that were appointed in richly woven carpet and had the finest built-in woodwork. Sarah and Anya could see that this was not your ordinary home for abandoned or orphaned children. The house was empty and as lonely a place as either woman could ever remember seeing before. The once childish laughter of its residents echoed in empty corridors and rooms. Not one stick of furniture was left behind and the office areas had been cleaned out of all paperwork and sent to the state offices of child welfare when the house closed its doors in 1982. With the last place they had to check being the basement, they were fast losing hope as to just what the Traveler had hidden from the Group, and for that matter, the world.