Dragon Sword (9 page)

“
You got noticed, Mr. DiMaggio,” I
point out to him.

“
And you know what, kid? All I
wanted was to play ball well enough so I could avoid putting in all
those hours on my old man’s fishing boat. Here’s what they used to
say to me when I was starting out…”

And then, to my surprise, he grabs
the hat off my head. He turns it around in his hands. “Why is it
all sticky like this?”

Of course I can’t tell about the
Thickskin, the synthetic coating that prevents direct contact with
the cap, which has become some kind of supercharged,
backward-traveling time particle. When I touch the cap, I get
tangled up in time, heading off somewhere usually
not
of my
own choosing.

“
It’s to protect it,” I tell him.
“It’s valuable.”

“
We just sweat in ’em. Here.” He
takes a pen out of his coat, looks under the cap, and rubs away
some of the Thickskin with his fingers. He writes on the band. Two
initials: a
D
and a
B
.

“
That stands for ‘DiMaggio,
buon
.’ That’s how the old-timers wish me good luck.” He
hands the cap back to me, then walks over to where the squad cars
are parked and taps one of the policemen on the
shoulder.

“
In a minute, mister, I’m still
with — oh, it’s you, Mr. DiMaggio.”

“
I really have to go
now.”

“
Uh, did we get your
statement?”

“
I’ve been trying to tell you guys.
I didn’t see anything. I got here late.”

The cop makes a note. “Well, okay.
We just want to make sure they weren’t targeting any of the
celebrities.”

DiMaggio makes a show of patting
himself down. “I’m not missing a thing. But hey”— he nods toward me
—“make sure that kid gets a ride wherever he wants to
go.”

“
He lost?”

DiMaggio looks at me, then back at
the cop. “I don’t think so. Just misplaced.”

Boy, I’ll say!

“
Okay, Mr. DiMaggio,” the cop says.
“Happy holidays.”

“
You, too.” DiMaggio looks at me.
“And you, too, kid.”

I tap my Seals cap. “Thanks for the
autograph.”

He starts walking away, then pauses
in the shadows. “Thanks for not asking for it.”

I look at my cap a moment. Then I
take a little wad of Thickskin from my pocket — I’m running low, I
have to be careful — and smear it over the signed letters. I can’t
let any part of the cap come into contact with my skin — not until
I’m ready to go.

D.B.

Danger Boy.

“
DiMaggio! Joe
DiMaggio!”

Someone’s shouting, and I turn.
It’s Sign Man, who’s being held by the cop DiMaggio had just talked
to. Apparently he just realized Joe was here and is trying to
follow him.

“
Look, back off,
mister.”

But Sign Man ignores the cop and
continues to yell after DiMaggio, even though he’s disappeared from
view. “Time is short! We’re in bigger trouble than we know! Wake
up!”

“
Knock it off, buddy. I mean
it.”

“
See for yourself!” He holds out
one of the flyers, but the cop won’t take it.

And then I recognize him: The
bristly haircut on top of two intense eyes behind a pair of
wire-rim glasses.

Andrew Jackson Williams. Who I met
— meet — one night in Vinita, Oklahoma, when my dad and I were —
are — driving cross-country.

To this day, I don’t know what year
that night took place in.

Chapter Ten

Thea: Flight and Fire

2019 C.E.

“
Thea! A good time to meet!” K’lion
was so excited after I crashed into his prison that he gave me what
I believe to be the Saurian equivalent of a kiss — a tongue dragged
up the nose toward the eyes. It leaves you a bit damp.

I told him I’d been sent to rescue
him. “And you did!” he replied. “Passing grade!
Skt!
But how
did you find me?”

“
The ship ... the
vessel
found you, K’lion. This is a prototype, a test model.”

“
Oh, very dangerous.
Snk!
Could be a sneak test. Or might just not work.”

“
I volunteered to pilot it. I
wanted to return to Earth, to this time, to find you and
Eli.”

“
Was this your science
project?”

“
It is science, but even its
inventors, such as Gennt, aren’t sure whose anymore: They’ve made
the ship mostly plasmechanical now, like the lingo-spots. It
feels
. It
reacts
. It belongs, more and more, to
itself
. When I was in the Fifth Dimension, the vessel began
anticipating my piloting moves, as if it were coming to…to
understand
me. At one point, space was stretched out so far
around me and I seemed to be moving so slowly, that I fell asleep
briefly. When I awoke, the ship was
humming
.”

“
Humming?”

“
Making music.”

“
A rousing Cacklaw grind
march?”

“
No, a lullaby my mother used to
sing to me. I’d been dreaming of it. But how did the ship
know?”

“
Not sure either,” he replied.
“Stranded here myself
bt! bt!
being an outlaw and a troodon.
I’m badly behind with science and engineering journals. How does
the new
kp! kp!
compass work?”

“
It’s no longer based only on known
coordinates. After what happened to you, they realized that
sticking only to the known was too limiting. It allowed them no
room for surprises.”

“
They’re courting surprise?
Kww!
What an eruption! Normally, our teachers wish to save
us from true surprises until the upper-grade curriculum. And even
then
snkt!
it’s all kept within limits.”

“
Well,” I told K’lion, “when you
get back home, you may find that I have disrupted several syllabi
and course descriptions. As for the compass…Gennt showed me how it
works. Though I wonder if he was completely sure himself. You begin
by agitating the plasma, get it to focus on the object or location
being sought.”

“
But how?”

“
Atomic structure, I believe,
K’lion. The ship
knew
to seek you out. You put in…tissue
from the person or place you seek.”

“
The vibrations!”

“
What?”

“
Vibrations!” K’lion repeated.
“
Pwwt!
” He was excited. “Gennt always had a theory about
vibrations humming through the universe — that each being, each
planet had a different…
t-t-tnh!
hum
. So if you had a
sample of someone’s atomic structure, you would have a sample of
their personal…music.”

“
The ship finds people by listening
to their music?”

“
Can’t say. I’m not the pilot. But
it seems to have adapted
p-chw!
to you.
Tk-tk-tk!
What did you use for my atomic structure, since most of my atoms
were here with me?”

“
A bit of the eggshell that hatched
you.” And here he seemed to grow nostalgic.

“
Ah, yes. They always save our
shells. Do you have anything
klng!
of Eli’s?”

It was that question that led us to
Eli’s father. We thought the laboratory would be a logical place to
start the search for our missing friend. Until K’lion modified his
position.

“
Sandusky-sire won’t be there,” he
said. “They keep driving him out of his nest.”

“
Then how will we find Eli if we
can’t find his father?”

“
We can find the sire,” K’lion
said. “He’s not lost
kww!
in time. Just in sorrow. Pop us
into Dimension Five, Thea. We should skip-jump through and arrive
at night.”

“
Arrive where?”

“
I hazard guesses.” And he set the
controls for some terrestrial coordinates.

We disappeared briefly into the
Fifth Dimension — so quickly that there was no napping or ship
music. When we reappeared, the moon was out.

We were above a low range of
mountains. It was cold, but there was a campfire burning. Eli’s
father, Sandusky, sat next to it.

He looked up at us and smiled a
little. “You got out, K’lion. That’s good. And you, Thea.” He stood
up and took my hands in his. “You’re back.”

“
I don’t know if I am back,” I told
him. “I might just be visiting.” Then I realized he had no
lingo-spot and couldn’t understand me. K’lion would have to speak
for us both.

“
How’d you find me?” Sandusky
asked.

“
Factored in the heart,” K’lion
said. “Knew about the satelli-T-T-T-e overhead. Knew you’d want to
stay away from the lab awhile, even Wolf House, if they could
monitor you. But knew too you would not want to forget. Charted
perimeter of the satellite’s surveillance grid. And decided you
would be just outside it, unseen but seeing.” K’lion pointed down
the ridge, and there below, in the distance, in the Valley of the
Moon, was a glimpse of the Wolf House ruins.

Sandusky sipped something from a
round, metallic cup. “Eli’s gone, K’lion.”

“
I know.”

“
Back in time someplace, like his
mother. He thought he could find her and bring her back home. It’s
been almost a month, and there’s no sign.”

“
Me and Thea wish to fetch-get
him.”

“
How?”

“
Tell us when he is.”

Eli’s father smiled at this.
Momentarily. “I have reason to believe Eli’s mother might be in the
city of San Francisco, during a period of one of our worst Earth
wars. Eli tried to go back to find her. I hope…he’s someplace
safe.”

Then he looked at me. I believe he
knew I could understand him. “The slow pox is getting worse here.
They’re talking about quarantines soon. …I hope we haven’t done
something terrible by breaking apart time like this. Not just ‘we’
as in all people. But ‘we’ as in my family, specifically. As in
me.
Specifically.” He sipped again from his cup. “It doesn’t
feel like anything…can be
controlled
anymore.”

Slow pox. The epidemic that was
raging in my city of Alexandria when Eli and K’lion first appeared
out of time. Apparently the authorities here wanted Eli to
deliberately bring a sample of the disease back, so they could
study it. Mother always said the only reliable part of an
experiment was its unpredictable side. The virus
escaped.

It appears the very act of creating
virus cultures from the scrolls and animal skins they brought
forward in time created the same epidemic that compelled them to go
look for the virus in the first place. Like a big circle, or the
giant mirrors in Pharos’s lighthouse back home, endlessly
reflecting each other. But I wanted to tell Sandusky his time
experiments brought good results, too. If Eli had not come back in
time, they would have surely taken my life when they took Mother’s.
I have no home, but I am alive.

“
Our ship needs direction,” K’lion
said. “Specific to
f-chng!
finding Eli.”

“
Well, in Earth terms, I think the
year would be 1940 or 1941. Or maybe, by now, ’42. I can’t be quite
sure.”

“
More, please,” K’lion
requested.

“
You mean a season? A month?” Eli’s
father asked.

“
An object. This is a new vessel,
with new gears. Thea
t-t-t-ttt!
knows it. Vessel itself
sniffs out beings in spacetime. Just needs a little atomic
structure from the thing being sought.”

Eli’s father nodded. “WOMPER
radiation.”

“
What is WOMPER?” K’lion
asked.

“
Wide Orbital Massless Particle
Reverser,” Sandusky said. “Your scientists probably have a
different name. Fundamental particles of the universe that
determine the ‘time change’ of everything. Forward or backward.
We’re just —
I’m
just — now learning how to track them, to
use them. Everything — every being, emits a slightly
different…WOMPER halo, we could call it. Because everything —
living or not — is just a little somewhere different in spacetime
than everything else. Like a cosmic fingerprint. No two are alike.”
He shrugged and sat down by the fire. “All these splendid theories,
yet our families have been torn apart.”

“
Particles come together in strange
hkk-kk-khh!
ways. Me and Thea now with you. Three beings,
three different times, two separate species, two parallel planets.
Who knows how many dimensions between us before? Odd com-
binations, yet here we are. Let us search
kt!
for
Eli.”

Sandusky sipped from his cup again
and looked at both of us. “Well, if you’re really going after him…”
He reached in carefully to the pocket of his garment and drew out a
small piece of parchment. “I found an old paper of his when I was
cleaning up. I’ve been carrying it around.”

He handed it to K’lion, and we both
looked at it in the firelight. I couldn’t read the markings of
their language, but K’lion could. “Barnstormer Robot Man!” he said
aloud. Below it was a child’s drawing of a mechanical
man.