By the Bay (19 page)

Three people walked into the room. They were dressed in the same glittering, sterile white that the room wore. The one who had entered slightly
ahead of the others
the other
spoke to him.

Monsieur
de Beauvois, your situation is critical with internal bleeding and other damage that must be repaired immediately. We are taking you into surgery within minutes.”

Fixing him inside. He couldn’
t
imagine the skill that would take and had no faith in it. These were kind people, but they didn’t understand that though he had lived a harsh life, he was still a man of faith. He was dying. What he needed was not a doctor, but a priest.

“No time,” the woman said brusquely when he made his request. No time to make peace with God before he died! He tried to protest, but they wouldn’t listen.

Hands forced him down in bed and needles were placed in his arms. This time there was no sense of going. He was simply gone.

Dying didn’t turn out to be as easy as he’d hoped. In and out, he kept coming to consciousness and then moving out again. He was in a terrible state of ebb and flow and the worst, the very worst was when he was caught in between, hovering between life and death. He tried to beg them to just let him go to God, but his tongue would form neither English or French words.

He was helpless, locked in pain and heavy with drugs—he guessed they’d given him
laudanum
. Floating in misery, he thought he heard Jillian’s voice, but when with great effort her reached out to her, the hand he touched was not her own.

“He’s not Philippe!” he heard her voice again, denying him.

And then he awakened, relatively clear headed and free of pain, and the woman who looked like Jillian was at his side. He could almost believe she was Jillian until she touched him. The touch was not Jillian’s, not his wife’s.

Chapter Twenty
Six

She felt as though she’d made a bargain with the devil himself. Apparently these people were right and each person had a price
at
which he would sell out.

Her price had been a chance at happiness for her mother and Philippe’s life. In return she had agreed to do what she could to help stabilize this reality, something she had no idea how to do.

Terrified for Philippe’s safety, she had spent days working with the Timing team, absorbing knowledge. She’d even learned that they were not all
as
alike as she’d first thought and she and
Sherlyn
had formed a friendship of sorts. The woman from the future was not so different from her. She looked different with her perfected appearance, she sounded different with her well trained voice. They didn’t have accents here, or at least not the varied ones of her youth, but instead had all been refined to similar sound-alike tones. She noticed that some of them frowned slightly when they heard her speak, as though the Texas cadence to her voice offended their ears.

Still they treated her well enough and she knew that was because they were frightened, not sure
but
that each ripple, moving across time like the tide sweeping up on the sand of the island
, could erase them and everything
they
knew.

She was back on the island now, but a greatly changed island. Now in this future, it was a tourist retreat with tall hotels and condominiums, plush restaurants where long lines waited each evening to pay what seemed to her an exorbitant price for dinner.

Instead of a picturesque ferry ride across the bay, people drove across
a
causeway, more long lines of them, and those that didn’t stay in the condos or hotels, lived in trailer houses, some of which had their own motors.

The beach which she and her family had usually had to themselves was crowded now with visitors, some of them Texans, but more of them from the cold northern states. They called themselves snowbirds and said they came here every
winter
.

At least that was what was happening now. A week ago when she
traveled
here, the island was abandoned, its tall buildings lying in ruins from the pounding it was being given from
the weaponry of
ships at sea. But then she’d felt the quiver of time shaking itself and then it was now, a world where the war was faraway and everybody was having a good time on the beach.

It made her head hurt. Oh, she could accept the idea that change happened, that by the time she was old, the world around her might be one she would hardly recognize. But this changing from minute to minute from hour to hour was beyond the human ability to adjust.

And she was right at the center of it. She’d told them at Timing that she didn’t know any
more than they did, that she had no special abilities to save them. Sometimes she suspected that Davis Blake, who had been part of this from the first beginning experiments, was clutching at her presence desperately to relieve himself of responsibility for the failure that the company had made of its reality.

It was their fault, Jillian was very certain of that. They’d started tinkering with their dancing light machines, they’d moved people around willy-nilly until they’d thrown time itself out of sync. 

Dad wanted her to put the genie that was time back into the bottle. Oh, he didn’t want to lose his experiments or the good they’d done
, he wasn’t ready to give up on that. But he recognized they were all in danger from the interventions they’d done over the years.

Maybe it was one to
o many
visit
s
to make sure she and Mom were all right that broke the last straw and sent this reality reeling. Maybe it was something bigger and larger like setting off those terrible bombs he talked about that America had loosed on its enemies.

Or, depending on the latest ripple across the surface of time, the bombs their enemies had loosed on America. She shivered at the thought of that vision she’d briefly seen a couple of days ago of damaged and dying people and
humanity
irredeemably
changed.

Thank goodness that one hadn’t lasted long and the latest ripple
had washed it away.

Each time she felt that quiver and knew something new was about to start, she feared that she or these people who were almost like her family would be erased.

Anyway, reluctantly and with much self-doubt she’d become a member of the Timing committee working to slow or even stop these frequent changes that left history an unknowable quantity and the future a terror.

Today was a nice day, relatively speaking. The south Padre beach was full of winter travelers in a holiday mood. The world they lived in was a peaceful one.

Roderick had a theory that Jillian’s very presence might have a stabilizing effect. He’d told her the ripples had been statistically less frequent since her arrival in their time.

She’d had to come alone. Only talented in
di
viduals like Dad ever left Timing headquarters
except in extreme emergencies. It was too dangerous.
. Dad had the ability to keep himself steady in a changing timescape, one that Jillian seemed to have also. The others had to stay inside the buffered building or they would lose perspective, their memories different with each ripple change so they would have no way of knowing anything was
wrong
.

She remembered Philippe saying that it wasn’t fair that they didn’t have appropriate memories when they moved in
time
.
They should have new memories, the old ones left behind.
She
now knew that was the one saving factor in their experience. She and Philippe and people like them stood outside the experience. They always knew when something was
altered
with their reality. They recognized the ripples that passed across them.

Indulging in a little personal daydream, she wondered if that was what had brought
she
and Philippe together, their common talent. She was sure it was more than that, that something in their very chemistry called so they found each other even across the barriers of time.

He had sw
u
m across the bay and decades of time to come to her and when he went back, she’d simply had to go with him. Being together was essential in some way to their basic being and good health. Even now at this moment when she was so seriously occupied with a terrible problem, she longed to be with him.

Davis assured her daily of his continued improvement under modern medical management. Philippe would live, he promised her. The only problem was that she didn’t quite trust the man who was standing in for her own long dead father.

They absolutely refused to let her see him until he was recovered, insisting that seeing her would only confuse and worry him.
They insisted
her presence might send his already delicate recovery backward.

She didn’t believe it for a minute. Philippe would only feel better for having her at his side. But she didn’t know a darn thing to do about it. She didn’t know where they were keeping him and even if she did, she wouldn’t know how to get there.

             
Thought of  him was always in her mind, but it slipped to the back of her
thinking
as she felt the quiver and knew a ripple was moving across her and all the people on this beach.

Jillian watched as three small children, a girl and two little boys, building a sand castle just in
front
of her, wavered in the air and then vanished. The joyous yelling and laughter of children on the beach died away and she found herself alone.

The tall buildings lay in ruins just up the beach. The town that had been on Padre Island was gone. The Gulf as far as she could see sparkled blue in the winter sun with no ships in sight.

She guessed at what had happened in the recent past. The war was over, leaving the lovely little sandy isle a forgotten, no-man’s zone.

She had to find a way to get back to headquarters, but as she walked back to the bay side of the long, narrow island, she saw that the causeway had been bombed into the water, its elegant structure crumpled and broken.

She was only briefly stranded. In less than ten minutes, a weary and discouraged looking Davis Blake stood at her side, brought here by the traveling method nobody had bothered to explain to her.

It was how he’d brought her to this reality. One minute they’d been in one place. In the next in another.

He stood looking at the destroyed causeway.

“So much for the theory that my presence changes things,” she said in a wry tone.

He shook his head. “Who knows? Perhaps it would have happened a dozen times in the last hour instead of just once.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Now, Jillian . . .”

“Face facts, Dad.
Let
us go back to where we belong. I need to check on Mom and I must see Philippe.”

“Jillian, I’ve told you . . .”

“Just tell me this, how do I know that he isn’t already dead and you’re not just stringing me along to make me help you out here.” It was an idea that had just hit her mind, but suddenly it was a horrifying possibility. Sharp actual pain cut through her at the thought.

“My dear, you know I wouldn’t do that to you!”

She stamped her foot. “How can I know anything about you? You’re a stranger to me, Davis.”

Faded blue eyes stared at her. He looked older than his actual age, she thought now, more like seventies than his actual fifties. She wondered if all this time motion didn’t demand payment in its own way.

Everything eventually balanced out. You didn’t play games with basic scientific principals without results and sometimes those were happenings you might not like.

She resolved at that moment to keep the timers out of her own reality if at all possible. Though she had to consider the possibility that she, with the talent Dad said she possessed, was the greatest risk to her own world.

“I want to go home,” she demanded abruptly.

Dad seemed to sink in on himself, to be become smaller and older. “Let’s go talk to your Philippe,” he said and reached out to take her hand.

Chapter Twenty
Seven

Still feeling newborn weak, Philippe shifted slightly in bed so that he could look into Jillian’s face, puzzled by something he didn’t see there.

She interpreted this as meaning that he needed something and went over to pour cold water in his glass, leaning over so he could sip from the straw. He took advantage of this opportunity to lightly touch the hand that held the glass.

Nothing happened. No magic. No tingle as though lightning passed through his body.

She pulled back slightly, as though she couldn’t bear his touch.

Something was
wrong
here. Something was very
wrong
.