“Then why are you even attempting it?” Ryan asked, braving another confrontation.
“Why did you allow Charlie in on Morales’s prison extraction?” Jack leaned against the trailer and looked up into the foggy night. “Why did you go back after Will in Chato’s Crawl when you knew the Destroyer was in those tunnels? Hell, for that matter, why didn’t you return to naval aviation after the board of inquiry cleared you in the incident over the Pacific?”
“Because Will and Charlie are friends; I know what they can do. As for naval aviation, I found out I care for the people at Group and didn’t want to leave.”
Jack smiled and looked at Ryan and Mendenhall. “That is why I’m going. I have a friend out there somewhere who’s lost and I intend to try to bring him home. No matter how crappy the odds.”
“Then why are you pissed at me?” Ryan asked, wanting the truth.
“Your performance during the prison break was outstanding. You took the people you trusted, and as things do with good people, it worked out. I wasn’t mad at you, I was mad at me because I saw myself in you and our shortcomings. We truly respect, admire, and trust the friends we have around us and that is why I am going after Carl. I sat back and allowed others to seal his fate. The fate he encountered doing what he did when any one of a thousand men could have done the same. When you take this department over, and someday you will because I saw what you are capable of, you’ll know what you have to do at the most horrific of times — protect the people under you. I don’t intend to lose one more person on my watch if I can at all help it. So, you stay, I go.”
“But you just said that friendship—”
“You stay, I go. Someday you’ll understand, Jason, believe me.” He smiled and then slapped Mendenhall on the back on his way by. “I figure if the worst happens, I could be leaving the department in far less capable hands than yours and Will’s.”
The two watched Jack vanish into the fog. “I absolutely hate his object lessons.”
Will Mendenhall had to agree.
On the large monitor situated above the dimensional collider, as Jenks liked calling the doorway, was a strange graphic supplied by Europa and Morales. It was a multiplaned series of levels. They undulated, changed positions, and then re-formed. In between these colored planes a single line of light emerged, vanished, and then appeared on another multicolored level. Morales had explained that each line represented what Europa was reading as dimensional planes. She was able to track the light source as it split among different forms of atoms that made up the universe. Differing atomic structure that could only be seen by Europa and her wide sweeping band of sound waves. The signal reached out, penetrated, and then wormed into another level searching for its sister signal on the escape pod. The doorway had been searching and listening for the better part of two hours with no return bounce of the pulsating rescue beacon.
“Hell, I don’t know,” Jenks said louder than he wanted to. The noise of the open doorway made communication without headsets impossible. He found it hard to communicate with Virginia sitting right next to him. “Morales and that damnable computer are speaking a language never taught at MIT or the navy. Give a call out to Stephen Hawking or Einstein, maybe they can explain this differing planes of existence crap. I sure as hell can’t. I see a bunch of lines and then another bunch of lines and I only have Europa’s calculations that it’s even feasible for us to locate that beacon.”
“My God, how many different planes of existence can there be?” Virginia asked, mostly to herself as she studied the animation on the screen. It looked like a sewing needle as it thread from one line to the next, sometimes up and then down.
“Just think of it as a universe that has expanded beyond the control of its creator. With no more universe, it has to expand in some direction. Same space, multilevels of that space. It’s trapped in a way. Without the dimensional planes our universe would die.”
Both Virginia and Jenks turned to see Moira Mendelsohn sitting in her chair, watching the undulating lines on the monitor. He adjusted the small mic on her headset. “If only I had had access to this marvelous machine you call Europa, oh, what I could have done.”
They saw the wonder in the old scientist’s face as she studied the graph on the monitor.
“And just what would you have done?” Jenks asked as he removed the cold cigar and looked from the Traveler to Virginia with worry.
A faraway look came into the gray eyes of Moira. “I could have maybe—”
“We have a bounce back!” A technician said excitedly into his mic.
“Yes, confirmed at zero two ten hundred hours and forty-six seconds we have a return signal. Muted, but sustained. A little weak, but it’s there,” called out a female voice on all receivers.
On the overhead speaker and over the noise created by the false wind of the doorway, they heard it: the steady beeping of Everett’s transponder. Smiles were exchanged all around the technical area at the surreal spectacle of the windblown doorway and the haunting signal that pulsed through the air.
Moira looked at the monitor and there it was. Sandwiched between a red line and a green. The monitor changed views and a series of numbers started to be placed on the screen by Europa, who was calculating longitude and latitude of the signal. The amazing Blue Ice system of Europa started to use her NASA and European Space Agencies star charts and her own time and distance tables to calculate where and when the signal originated. She accomplished this by using strength of signal versus known star positioning and then she figured the closest area by mere inches as to the location of the pod. Finally the coordinates appeared and steadied. All eyes went to the second monitor and the view of the computer center in Nevada. Morales was there and he was smiling.
“The odds just went down… it’s Antarctica calling back. She’s calling collect, but she is calling!”
A cheer erupted and even Niles Compton smiled through his discomfort, and then he realized that the science fiction of the past had become a sudden reality. Most stomachs in the room rolled as they realized what a potential world changer this could become.
The Einstein-theorized time machine became operational at 0210 hours and forty-six seconds.
The presidential protection clock was still running. And that was one thing the machine could not control.
Jenks tried his best to inventory the team’s supplies and at the same time avoid the accusing eyes of Virginia as she glared at him from the sealed-off area where the extraction team prepared. The master chief finally huffed and then removed the cold cigar stub and returned the look.
“You’re the one who brought me into this historical menagerie, and now that I might get a boo-boo you want me to back out?”
“You’re too damned old for this crap and you know it,” Virginia said as she picked up a case of MREs and handed it to a questioning Jenks.
“So you want me to stay behind with the broads and the geeks and let you go in my place?”
“I am more capable of getting the doorway in Antarctica up and running far better and faster than you.”
“Well, that dog just won’t hunt, Slim. Call me all the names you want, but I will not let someone who I care”—Jenks stumbled—“I won’t stay behind and let you go in my place. I don’t care if it’s what you call, ‘not very PC,’ but you can go to hell.” He angrily placed the stub of cigar into his mouth and then reached past Virginia for the illuminating signal devices and plopped it hard onto the trailer transport. “I suppose you have a retort or whatever you eggheads make for an argument?”