Pinball (15 page)

Lynne’s eyes grew wide. She gazed at the little house. “Oh, god, Steve. Our own place? Our very own house?” She began to cry. Steven took her in his arms and held her.

Now, sitting in her little blue Toyota in the driveway of that same house thirty-three years later, she remembered how it felt to have her husband’s arms around her.

She had raised her four children in this house, cooked untold thousands of meals, fought with Steve, made love with him — for that matter, they had conceived three of those children in this house. Then, when he had gone into that damned green swirl fifteen years ago, the house had seemed so cold. She’d stayed until the last of the children was ready to move out, then given the house to Samuel.

But now he was gone too, and she wondered whether she’d ever see him or Steve again. Erica had packed her things and gone to her parent’s house, and the old place was standing empty.

Well, she wasn’t going to be left alone any longer. She steered the car onto the grass and drove overland toward the northeast, guiding it up the slope toward the place where her husband had disappeared fifteen years before. Within a couple of minutes she saw the familiar landscape ahead. She pulled the car to a stop and got out.

There was the cold green whirlpool, just the same as she remembered it. She didn’t have any cans of compressed air or a fire extinguisher to propel herself around in there, but somehow she still knew this was the right thing to do. She thought of Steve’s tale of the old man that had spent 800 years floating in the void, and a chill ran down her spine, but the thought to herself,
If that’s what happens to me, it happens.

She stood in front of the vortex — the Gate, Steve had called it — took a deep breath, and stepped into the green maelstrom.

Chapter 44

“As mindbending as your plan is, it might just succeed,” said Michael. He and Steven stared at Samuel. Michael had a look of admiration in his eyes, while Steven glowed with a father’s love for his son. “I knew there was a reason I always called you Samwise,” Steven said.

The logic behind Samuel’s idea was impeccable. He and Steven had entered the void together; if Steven boarded the Guardian and engaged the Rollback function, and it didn’t work properly — and wiped him out of existence — according to the theories set forth by the Guardian’s designers, it wouldn’t just mean it destroyed him in the present. It would be as if he had never existed
at all,
in any location of the space/time continuum, in which case Samuel would never have existed either, nor the girls, and young Lynne  would never have become Lynne Denver.

At any rate, Samuel would
also
blink out of existence as he stood in the Guardian warehouse. In that situation, the Guardian staff would still remember the Denvers and would know that the Restore function was flawed and should not be used in the future — or
would
they?

On the other hand, if in fact Restore did work and put Steven back where he had come from, erasing the entire history of his journeys through Gatespace, then not only would he never have visited the Guardian offices and had this discussion with Michael, but neither would Samuel. Either way, Samuel would disappear from the warehouse. However, in that case, the Guardian personnel would have no memory that they had ever been there — because it would never have happened.

It was giving all three of them a major headache.

As an attempt to remedy the confusion, Samuel got a piece of paper and wrote the following note:

Dear Michael,

My father and I would like to thank you for your outstanding assistance while we were at the Guardian service center. You made sure that our Guardian (the Bat, incidentally) was in perfect condition and helped to fill in the gaps in our understanding of how to operate it.

If you don’t remember us, it means that the Restore function on the Guardians works perfectly and that you should not hesitate to recommend its use.

On the other hand, if you remember wishing us Bon Voyage not too long ago, we’re very likely dead and it would be a good idea not to use Restore; in fact, if there’s a way to disable that function, it would probably be a good idea.

Either way, thank you so much for all your help.

Sincerely,

Sam & Steven Denver

Samuel folded the note in half and placed it on Michael’s desk. “There you go,” Sam said. “If you find that in a little while, and you still remember us, it’ll mean that the two of us will likely be interdimensional dust; if you don’t know where it came from, it’ll tell you that Restore apparently works all right. Just think of us as your guinea pigs.”

Michael looked grim. “I —”

“We’re not staying here, Michael, and we really don’t have any desire to move on to another Gate,” said Steven. “We’re doing this.” He walked out into the warehouse and stood looking at the Bat. Michael and Samuel followed.  

Steven clambered up onto the Bat’s back and took his seat, staring at the buttons on the GRACE remote. “Are you ready?” he called down to Samuel.

“Ready for possible annihilation? Hell,
yeah,
” Samuel laughed. “Dad —”

Steven’s mouth tightened. “Yeah, Samwise?”

“See you at home.”

Steven smiled grimly and thumbed the Restore button.

Chapter 45

Wilkerson raced out of Cooper Union, bent on reaching the vortex in New Jersey and escaping this place and time. He headed west, crisscrossing from one street to the other, detouring up side streets and retracing his route in an effort to avoid the authorities. The people in attendance at Cooper Union were frozen in shock and fear, but they would not stay that way for long.

He stopped in the alley where he’d hidden his equipment and shed his overcoat, frock coat and hat. He put the cMMU back on as well as his pack, and strapped his helmet on his head. Soon he reached the Hudson and ran onto the deck of the ferryboat that would take him to the Jersey shore. His strange attire drew looks from the ferrymen, but Wilkerson was beyond caring about that. He stood gathering his strength; he had been on the run for nearly an hour.

Soon the ferry pulled away from its dock and Wilkerson knew that he would make it to his goal. As he stood watching the waves, however, he heard hoofbeats and turned to see a group of armed men on horseback approaching on the shore.

“Stop!” cried the man in the lead. “I order you to stop!”

Wilkerson turned and made for the bow of the ferry in an attempt to put as much distance as possible between him and his pursuers. One of the men leveled a rifle at him and fired. He felt the bullet impact, but realized he was uninjured; evidently the cMMU had shielded him from harm.

He raced through the night, running until he was weary, and finally located the vortex. Triumphant in his success, he leapt into the void and immediately discovered that he had a serious problem. The cMMU failed to respond when he squeezed its control triggers. The policeman’s bullet must have damaged it somehow.

He was trapped in the void, with no way to maneuver. 

Chapter 46

The void is cold,
thought Lynne.
It’s cold and green and it goes on forever.

She’d been floating in Gatespace for a couple of weeks, she thought.
I wonder how many hundreds of years have passed by back home? Thousands, maybe.
She’d watched for the orange glow that Steven had described, the backside of a vortex, but she hadn’t encountered a single one yet.

She’d had plenty of time to contemplate her decision to enter the void since she’d stepped through the Gate. She had come to the conclusion that perhaps it wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done. In fact, on her Top Ten List of stupid things she’d done in her life, stepping through the Gate had to be up there near the top. Maybe not #1 — there was, after all, that time she’d gotten into a catfight with Maureen Dellasandro at the block plant’s 4
of July picnic because she’d told Steve that he could “put his hot dog in her bun anytime.” Maureen had been drunk and was shooting her mouth off, so maybe jumping on her back and screaming, “You fucking little
bitch!”
wasn’t the best way to handle things, but she was a new mom at the time. Chalk it up to the post-partum emotional roller coaster.

Steve’s face floated before her eyes most of the time. She saw his 40-year old face as she remembered it from the day before she’d entered the Gate, his 22-year old face in his wedding tux, his 30-year old face topped by a ball cap, coaching girl’s little league softball… his face, and the idea that she might never see it again, haunted her. She thought that if she floated in this green hell much longer she’d go completely insane.

She thought of her children; Samuel was gone, too, of course, but she’d left behind Annieleigh and Dakota and Nicolette…
This is like someone committing suicide,
she thought,
except in this case the suicide has the ability to regret what she’s done… maybe forever. I guess maybe people who actually
do
kill themselves get the chance to regret it, too, depending on what you believe.

Lynne knew from what Steven had told her that time seemed not to actually exist in here, which she confirmed by managing to get a glimpse of the face of her watch, frozen at 1:17 pm, the time she’d entered the Gate. Either that, or the Gate had broken her watch; she didn’t know. Despite this, she was aware of how long she seemed to have been floating here, and she watched the various other inhabitants — if you could call them that — of Gatespace float by, wondering in many cases just how long they had been lost in here.

There was a mountain lion, some sort of satellite bristling with antennae, and a flight of seventeen or eighteen Canadian geese. There were two pieces of sheet metal, each three or four feet square, which were scorched and bent. She wasn’t sure, but she thought they might have once been part of some spacecraft that met with disaster. Apollo 13, or perhaps one of the Space Shuttles that had been lost, or maybe a piece of an airliner? If she could have shrugged, she would have.

She wondered where Steve was, whether he still thought of her, or whether he was still alive.

Chapter 47

Lianne Denver drove her Dodge Caravan down the main street of Three Forks, having just picked up a shipment of craft goods at the local UPS outlet. The back of the van was stacked with cardboard cartons containing a rainbow of Quiviut yarns; her regular clientele, which included craftspeople from more than 200 miles away, eschewed acrylic yarns and she found that “the good stuff,” as they called it, was very much in demand. “If I wanted acrylic,” said one 76-year old knitter from Bozeman, her fingers still nimble, “I’d go to Wal-Mart.”  

Lianne pulled up in front of her storefront, looking at the large wooden sign that adorned it.
Knitsville,
it read. A friend of hers had painted it for her when she first opened the shop. It had been nearly six years, and the paint was faded and some of it was peeling.
I need to ask Brent to repaint it for me when he has the time,
she thought.

Brent Laramie had been a good friend when she was in high school, and he still remained so today. They’d tried to date, but it seemed as though their relationship was always more like having a best friend she could confide in. She was closer to Brent than she was to any of her female friends.

After Brent went away to art college in Colorado, they kept in touch via email and frequent phone calls and texts. He’d been there only a couple of months when she got an e-mail telling her that he needed to call her that afternoon with some huge news; when he finally called, he was breathless with excitement, explaining to her in disjointed sentences that he had finally found love — with a drafting major named Chuck. He was a senior, and while the “revelation” that Brent was gay didn’t really surprise Annie much, the idea that Chuck would graduate at the end of the school year and be ready to move on concerned her greatly. She was worried about what Brent would do if, as she suspected, Chuck left him behind to take a job in Los Angeles, or Dallas, or somewhere else far away from the area.

Much to Annieleigh’s surprise, Brent was the one who dumped Chuck and left him desolate. Brent came back to Montana during the summer break and they went out drinking to celebrate his newfound sense of self.

Now, ten years later, Brent was still her best friend. He had moved back to Three Forks after graduation, and operated a graphic design company that, if not the largest around, did superb work that adorned billboards and signage all over the Midwest.

He was pretty much the only person she socialized with; after the disappearance of her brother and her mother four years ago, not to mention her father’s all-too-brief reappearance after his fifteen year absence, she really had no one else. She didn’t date; she liked men and occasionally spent weekends in Denver or Seattle to go to clubs and do what Brent jokingly referred to as “satisfying her primal urges,” but she had no interest in a long term relationship of that sort.

She sat for a moment, suddenly moved at the thought of her missing parents and sibling. Tears welled up in her eyes and she struck the steering wheel with her fist in frustration.
Damn you, why’d you have to go?
She got out of the van and began unloading her merchandise.

Chapter 48

Dakota Denver stood on the shoreline a mile from her two bedroom condo in Steinhatchee, Florida and looked out over Deadman Bay. She often drove out to this place, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, to think about her life and make plans for her future. More often than not, her thoughts turned to her father, evoked by the name of this place. For fifteen years she’d thought he was dead, swallowed up by something she might have invented for her anime-styled cosmic war graphic novel, and then she’d gotten the phone call from her little sister four years ago that changed her life.