Forty Leap (45 page)

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She shrugged. “You’ve associated leaping with
Jennie completely. I think you’re afraid that if you give up
leaping, you give up Jennie.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said. “Jennie’s
been gone for two hundred and fifty years.”

She smiled at me, that warm, motherly, 1950s,
Leave it to Beaver
smile. “And leaping is all you have
left.”

It was not the great revelation I was hoping
for. The notion left me more disturbed than anything else. I did
not give up on my pills, though. Despite all, I was happy with the
work at building the Foundation. With a week before the opening of
the museum, I was busier than ever. There was to be a gala event in
the main building and then invited guests would be led down in
small groups to view the headquarters. I would not be conducting
the tours.

We argued over the length of the tour. Five
minutes. Ten minutes. Jefferny and Carolyn ran through it a number
of times. She had been chosen as tour guide, at least for the
opening. After that, it was not a job she wished to do. Having an
actual Forty Leaper conduct the tour was a great attraction but it
wasn’t feasible. Especially since we only had two Forty Leapers on
hand and one of them wouldn’t set foot inside the complex.

The opening of the museum was scheduled for
May 20
^th
at 8:00 pm. All of the major players would be
invited. The banquet would be huge. I was asked to speak but I
couldn’t think of what to say. Whatever it was, I would be facing a
room of people who had no idea what it was like to leap through
time. My words would not touch them. Again, Carolyn came to the
rescue. She told me that it wasn’t about reaching them on my level.
It was about reaching them on their level. Throughout her time,
people had always supported causes which didn’t affect them. I
needed to play on their sympathies. I needed to tell them that
there were others like me out there in the world. They were
frightened and alone, often hungry and on the run. They were lost
souls.

In the end, she just wrote the speech.

I didn’t see much of Jefferny leading up to
the opening, but he was there on that day, running throughout the
main building and up and down from below. He was a bundle of
excited energy, giving orders and checking to make sure things were
going smoothly. I swear I thought he was going to leap himself. He
poked his head into my office several times just to make sure I was
”all right”. For me, the opening of the museum was secondary to the
fact that we were going public on that day. My speech would be
televised. Across the world posters would be placed up in the hopes
that Forty Leapers who were in hiding would come out and accept our
help.

Guests began to arrive at 7:30. I watched
them on a monitor, listening to snippets of their conversations.
Most of them were unconcerned with Forty Leapers and Forty Leaping
in general. They were just the filthy rich attending an evening
thrown by the filthy rich. The whole thing was very vogue. I was
interested mostly in the comments regarding the location of the
Foundation.
Nobody ever puts anything in Manhattan!
If only
they knew. But of course those memories were mine and mine alone.
Manhattan hadn’t been a true city for a very long time.

My speech was to come between the main course
and dessert. After most of the guests had filtered in, Jefferny
came up to my office to order me down to the party. I was dressed
and ready, though hardly eager. It’s not easy being the man of the
hour. I was known to a group of people who I didn’t know at all.
They would treat me with all of the familiarity of kin and I would
be expected to do the same. It just wasn’t in my nature. But I
didn’t want to disappoint. FLASH had invested a good portion of its
savings into this Foundation and, though it was hardly meant for
profit, it did need to pay off in other ways.

So I mingled. Carolyn, who was very good at
it and seemed very much at ease with her new surroundings, came to
rescue me from my blundering incompetence. Men and women introduced
themselves to me and I introduced myself back. But my social skills
were practically useless. They had been worthless in my own time.
Now, in an age where the etiquette I had learned was obsolete, I
was like a fish out of water. But Carolyn made it easy. She fielded
almost all of the small talk and let me handle the direct
questions. With her at my side, I was able to manage with some
degree of grace. We moved from guest to guest that way for about an
hour and a half. Finally it was time to give my speech.

I think that if it weren’t for the adrenal
inhibitors, giving that speech would have sent me flying through
the time stream again. I was so on edge, but again without the
physical side of it. There were no palpitations, no sense of
vertigo. I was frightened and had a queasy stomach, but the rush
wasn’t there. I was beginning to dislike the inhibitors. Most of
the time I didn’t notice them, but I began to realize that a man
could not subsist on the rational alone. Getting excited was a
great release of tension and it was as necessary as sleep. I
stepped up to the podium sweating in my faux tuxedo (The thing was
a T-shirt and a jacket and a pair of black pants. The shoes, though
black, were more like sneakers than dress shoes. I never did figure
out what the soles were made of. There was no tie and no
cummerbund). I looked out at the people there and read my speech.
My voice cracked once and my tone was slow and halting. It did not
get easier as it progressed but it did get closer to finished until
it got finished altogether. I was glad, thanked the crowd, and
stepped down from the podium. Jonatthew, who had introduced me,
gave me a big hug as I came down and then took my place once again.
There was more said, a plea for donations which played on the
historical significance of the site. I didn’t listen much. My eyes
were on nothing. My mind was on Jennie. How far away she seemed.
Then I was surrounded by applause, joined in, and was served
dessert and coffee.

The party began to disperse a bit as people
lined up for tours. That left me without Carolyn so I shrank into a
corner and was finally left alone with my thoughts for a few
moments. Those moments ended when I was approached by a woman. She
was an older woman. I would have placed her in her fifties which
meant she was probably closer to eighty. She walked with a
confident stride that seemed familiar.

“I’ve been waiting to get you alone,” she
said to me. That was when I put it all together.

“Natalie?”

She smiled an easy smile that I would never
have believed could have crossed her face. Now that I knew who she
was I could see it in her features. The young girl was long gone,
the fiery aggressiveness long since dissolved into a sure
confidence. That she smiled at me showed that she had given up all
of her animosity towards me. Although I already knew that. After
all it had been Natalie who had saved me from the soldiers during
the invasion.

I was wrong about you,
she had said.
You know how to help us. Maybe in two hundred years, you’ll be
able to pick up the pieces of Rogers’ war and finally save
us.

Is that what I had been doing these past few
weeks? Had I really become the savior they all thought I was?

“I knew it,” she said to me. “I wish I had
seen it sooner, but at least I saw it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said back. “What are
you doing here?”

“I came for the opening. After all, it was my
information and a good chunk of my money that made this
happen.”

“You’re a member of FLASH?”

She shook her head. “Of course not. But I
knew where the headquarters was and after FLASH found it and
started looking for financing for the Foundation, I started
channeling them money.”

Of course. The information that had led to my
rescue had come from an anonymous source. A lot of the financing,
too. Jefferny had discussed it with me but we had simply concluded
that it was coming from someone who was interested but didn’t
necessarily want to be connected. It never occurred to us that a
leaper, and a prestigious one at that, was behind it all. Clearly
Natalie had been grounded for some time. She had obviously built
herself a successful life here in the twenty fourth century.

“I almost died,” I said.

She nodded. “I heard. It took me a long time
to settle into this time period. After that, it took even longer to
find someone who was at all interested in opening up the old
headquarters. I was careful to maintain my anonymity.”

Something about her story didn’t feel right.
I didn’t detect a lie so to speak, but something was missing. I
thought back to our first brief meeting. Sitting in Dr. Philip
Kung’s lab she had berated me for not doing my part to see an end
to Forty Leaping. Sitting around a table in a conference room
dozens of feet below where we now stood, she had once again shown
animosity. But that had changed when I’d attacked Rogers. It was as
if she had been seeing him for the first time. Then she had found
me during the invasion and locked me in a hole so that I would
survive. While the others had perished in battle or leaped only to
find themselves buried alive, I had been scrunched up in a
cubby.

“How did you get out?” I asked. “During the
fight, how did you get out?”

She seemed to be taken unawares by the
question, as if it hadn’t even occurred to her that I might ask it.
Natalie had lost a step. “What do you mean?”

I shook my head. “No one got out. All of the
exits were blocked and they forced us inward. How did you get past
them?”

“I got lucky.”

I looked her dead in the eye, buoyed by a
sudden conviction. “You didn’t get lucky.”

My thoughts had taken me down a dangerous
path. I had no proof of my theory yet I was certain of its
accuracy.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You were their informant,” I said. “We
wondered how they had found the headquarters. It was you. You were
his right hand and you turned him over to them.”

“It’s not like that.” Her voice had lowered
to a whisper, but also taken on an edge.

“What is it like?”

“You were right. The whole time, you were
right. Rogers perpetuated that war to feed his ego. When you said
it I felt like such a fool. I had followed him like some mesmerized
child. It had to end.”

“Turning us in was the way you ended it?”

“I saved your life,” she said.

“
They pulled forty bodies out of that
hole!”

It happened in an instant. The anger burst
through my defenses. How dare she claim to have saved my life when
the danger had been her fault in the first place? All at once I
knew that the power of my body had broken past the protection of
the adrenal blockers. I could feel the rush in my head and in my
muscles. I wanted to reach out and shake her.

The room went virtually silent. I can’t even
say how loud I had yelled. Maybe they heard me in Australia.

“People were dying every day,” she said to
me.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was
she really trying to justify her method of ending the war. Never
once had I suggested that the slaughter of all of the Forty Leapers
was the solution.

“What was the deal? How much did you tell
them?” But I already knew the answer to that. Natalie knew just
about everything there was to know. She knew the location of not
only Rogers Clinton’s headquarters but the locations of
installations all over the world. She knew where people were
assigned. There wasn’t a leaper involved with the movement that she
couldn’t lead them to.

I think she tried to explain it again. I
think she tried to tell me that her actions had led to this good.
Without her there would be no Foundation. And I realized that
Natalie had not grown up as she had grown old. She had just
redirected her misguided convictions. Still a fighter, she was
convinced of the rightness and righteousness of her actions. There
was no telling her that she had done the wrong thing because the
events had led to this right thing. But although she was no
different, I had changed considerably. I shouted at her. It was not
a dignified reprimand. I screamed bloody murder. I was so outraged
at her refusal to accept responsibility for murdering all of those
people. It wasn’t only those that had died buried inside the
complex. It was about the ones who had been killed during the
invasion. I thought of the man I had seen leap out and then leap
back in moments later. He had never stood a chance.

The entire party had gone silent now.
Everyone was staring at me and I caught someone whispering to
someone else and then someone run off. As I continued the verbal
barrage, I could feel the quickening in my muscles. The effect of
the adrenal inhibitors had been completely nullified. I knew I was
going leap. Natalie had gone quiet. I think she was as mystified at
my reaction as everyone else. As I was myself.

“Mathew!”

I turned to see Carolyn rushing from the
direction of the elevator. I don’t try to imagine what she saw.

“
Mathew!
” her cry turned to one of
anguish and then she was gone.

Or, more accurately, I was. So much for the
temporary cure. I guess I had never truly trusted it anyway. After
all, I still carried my journal everywhere. I patted my breast
pocket to reassure myself that it had made the trip with me. It
had.

To my surprise, I was still inside the main
building of the Foundation. It didn’t look all that different. Of
course, it was late at night, later I think than when I had leaped.
The lights were off and only a drop of moonlight came in through
the windows. I waited for a bit so that my eyes could adjust. A
stage had been set up in the rear of the room. I couldn’t imagine
what had gone on in that room, but on closer inspection I noted
that it was in a state of disrepair. In fact, most of what I was
seeing hadn’t been effectively maintained in quite a while. It
saddened me to think that the Foundation had come to its end. But
then again, I had no way of knowing what good it had done in my
absence. I could only hope that my absence hadn’t brought about its
ruin.