The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (4 page)

Garison was sixteen years old and lecturing at what had once been The Sorbonne when he got word that his parents had been presumed killed in a plane crash. Garison had flown home immediately as, being the only living relative, he was needed to make a positive identification of the bodies. So the lanky, privileged, smart-for-his-years, sixteen year old was shocked into the real world almost overnight.

In what was hailed as the fortitude and stoical demeanor of a properly trained and motivated communist, Garison refused to show grief, but it was at that moment that the façade of his privileged life began to crumble, at least in his own mind. He began to see the world as it truly was, not as it had been shown to him. In response to his grief, he threw himself completely into his work and athletics and, by the age of twenty he had under his belt one Nobel Prize in physics, a captaincy of a World Cup champion football team, an internationally reported debate in which he had successfully disproved everything Sartre had stood for, and no real friends. To his scientific colleagues he was a wunderkind, someone they put up with because of his genius but resented because he was so young. To his teammates, he was an excellent player with an impenetrable wall erected tightly about him; but they put up with what they perceived to be his snobbery for one simple reason: he was a winner. What he lacked in leadership—or even friendship—off the field, he more than compensated for with leadership and athleticism on the field.

Before he was twenty-five, Garison withdrew from the world of sports and virtually dropped off the face of the earth in science—with the exception of publishing an occasional paper in some obscure technical journal, written in language so archaic or technical itself that few in even the scientific community had any idea what he was talking about. Using his clout, Garison had slipped through the cracks of communism and bought land in La Plata Canyon, in the southwestern state of Marx. His disappearance was so quick and so complete, some in the media even reported his demise.

His disappearance had worried some people, for the most prominent scientist in the empire buying land less than thirty miles from the Republic of Texas and less than an hour's drive from Japan seemed a matter of national security. Garison had ignored the objections because it was where he had always wanted to live. Growing up in Durango, he had spent day after day fishing the La Plata and San Juan Rivers, hunting for old mine shafts, and simply enjoying the beauty of the canyon. With his father and mother lying side by side in a cemetery near Ouray, Garison thought of the canyon as his last living relative.

With a flash of light, Garison found himself exactly where he had never expected to be. His previous, though short, experience with interdimensional travel had been an experience of color and sound, just barely perceptible to the human mind but an overload on the nervous system. When he had been just on the verge of his mind opening up wide enough to comprehend what he was seeing, he had run out of power and been forced back into his laboratory.

This had been totally different.

One moment, he was looking at his laboratory from the inside of the machine. Suddenly, there was a blinding flash of light—no longer than the flash from a camera, but infinitely brighter and more disorienting. Just as suddenly, the light was gone, leaving no retinal imprints as a flash-bulb would have done—indeed, it seemed that there was no adjustment period for his corneas, either—and Garison found himself and the machine sitting in a pasture.

Garison's first glance told him he was no longer in La Plata Canyon. Not only were the steep slopes of the canyon gone, he was looking at entirely the wrong sort of vegetation for the San Juan Mountains. He was seeing coastal grass and flowers that should have been growing in a zone much more temperate than his canyon. The trees, too, were all wrong. Instead of the lodgepole pines and quaking aspens he would have found near the La Plata River, he was seeing elms, maples, and oaks.

He slowly slid the oxygen mask off his face and took a cautious breath. When nothing adverse happened to him immediately, Garison took a deeper breath. There was something on the air—or in it—he couldn't quite place at first. With a second deep breath, he realized he was detecting salt, as if he were near an ocean. There was also the taste of pollen that, he wasn't sure how he knew this, wasn't the pollen given off by columbines and the other natural flora of the Rocky Mountains. And the air was noticeably heavier.

Garison slowly unfastened the safety harness and put his foot lightly to the grass. He knew the ground had to be solid to support the weight of his machine, but the immense quantity of unknowns he was facing made his every move nervous. He briefly was assaulted with the idea that he was only safe while still in the machine—like a child who is convinced the only way to avoid the monsters is to stay in bed—but he realized instantly that the idea was ludicrous and extended his foot once more. The ground was solid.

He stepped out of the machine, stood fully erect, and looked around. Wishing he had brought binoculars, he scanned the area—beginning with the horizon and working his way slowly inwards. As the next best thing to human vision and for future reference, he dismounted the Teslavision camera and used its zoom lens to focus on the horizon, recording as he looked.

What he saw at studied glance was the same thing he had seen at first glance: a pasture. It was a green pasture, probably thirty acres in all, surrounded by a forest on three sides and a small stream on the fourth, with more woods beyond the stream. The stream was not far away but he could just barely hear it over the symphony of birds, cicadas and other insects. It was certainly a living meadow, a living meadow that appeared to contain sounds familiar to his dimension if not familiar to his usual spot in his dimension.

Garison saw on the ground evidence that cattle had been kept in the meadow at some time, though it had obviously been a while. He wondered why such lush ground was being left fallow, and then he noticed it was missing a key ingredient: a fence. He gazed as deeply into the forest as he could, but could find no evidence of a fence. He knew from experience that a barbed wire fence was not very visible from any kind of distance, but one was usually able to catch a glimpse of sunlight reflecting off a strand, or a post standing incongruously in amongst the trees—or something. He saw no such evidence and this puzzled him greatly.

Garison had lived all his life in a socialist country and could not imagine a field that was not clearly delineated as to ownership. He suddenly began to wonder if he had somehow been transported to one of the few government land or wildlife preserves. Still, he thought, even those usually have some fences to separate the predatory animals from the prey—and to keep the tourists from certain restricted areas. Were there any areas in those parks with unfenced pastures as large as the one he was in? He thought there must be—for areas inhabited by large predators—and that thought further disquieted him.

For no reason other than that the entire situation had him spooked, Garison walked slowly across the meadow to the stream. It was bubbling cheerfully and seemed to be slightly rimmed with ice, though the rest of the meadow pointed clearly to spring time. In fact, Garison suddenly acknowledged, his leather jacket was starting to get warm in the sun.

Garison touched the stream lightly with a finger and found it exceedingly cold. He guessed it was probably run-off from snow-fields or spring rains, but he hesitated to taste it. So many of the streams were polluted with industrial waste, thanks to the communists and their "use it and discard it" mentality, that Garison knew better than to trust the appearance of clear water. And, even though it had only been minutes since he had last had a drink, seeing the bubbling, clear stream made him suddenly thirsty.

He walked around the perimeter of the meadow, but was careful not to get out of sight of the machine. He wasn't sure why he took this precaution. It was somewhat as if he were a cosmonaut on a space walk and afraid to go beyond the limits of his tether because to do so would mean catastrophe. And, wherever he was, Garison had a gut feeling that his only way back to the laboratory somehow involved the machine and he couldn't, therefore, afford to be separated from it.

Garison finally made it back to his machine, coat in hand, and sat down. He put the camera back in its mounting bracket and switched it off. What he had so far was about an hour's worth of real pretty meadow scenery on video tape and no idea where he was.

Judging by the sun, Garison guessed that it was now late afternoon. Providing he was still in the same hemisphere, nightfall should come in about two hours. He toyed with the idea of venturing farther afield, in an attempt to find a telephone, but nixed the idea on the grounds that he might not be able to find his way back after dark. So he set to the laborious task of trying to drag the machine a little closer to the woods so that he might be able to conceal it when he did go off in search of help the next day.

Using the large knife, what the Texans called a “Bowie knife”, he cut some branches from the trees and spread them over his machine. By the time he had the machine as concealed as he could get it with the tools at hand, dusk was rapidly giving way to night. He gathered some sticks and built a fire, for the temperature was dropping more rapidly than the sun. He sat on the ground with his back against a log and his feet towards the fire as he ate from the tin of canned meat he had wisely brought along. He wished he had packed some bread, but he admitted he had never really anticipated using what food he had packed.

When the first tin was gone he was still hungry, but decided he had better conserve his food until he had a clue where he was and where his next meal might come from. So, with eating sort of dispensed of, he found himself with nothing to do other than go to sleep and he wasn't the least bit sleepy. He wished he had packed one of Tex's books in the knapsack, but he had certainly never expected to have enough time on his trip to read.

As he leaned back against the log, looking up at the stars, he decided to try and get an idea where he was. He had taken some courses in astronomy while in college and it had been somewhat of a hobby of his ever since. He had often told himself he could navigate by the stars as well as any sailor, though the only times he had tried had been occasions when he had a pretty good idea where he was to begin with so it was more of a reverse-engineered navigation. Now, he thought it time to put the boast to the test. He found the north star first and, with a piece of paper and a pencil, began to try and make his calculations. They were crude, as he knew they would be, but he thought he could get a pretty fair idea of his locale. If nothing else, he could at least tell which hemisphere he was in.

After half an hour of checking and rechecking his figures, leaning closer to the fire for light because he had brought no lamp, he was fairly certain he was somewhere on the east coast of North America. He realized his deduction was partly clouded by the smell of the salt air in the distance, but he still thought his figures to be fairly accurate.

He finally leaned back against the log and chuckled, "I didn't do what I set out to do, but I think I just made the airlines obsolete."

He stood up, thinking he could at least recheck the figures on his computer as it wouldn't run out of power for, roughly, two or three centuries as long as it was connected to the nuclear power plant. When he powered up the computer, the first thing he got was the journal prompt he had programmed in long before with the idea that he would record his thoughts before doing anything important. Thinking he might be on the verge of a momentous discovery, and wanting something to do to kill time until he became sleepy anyway, he didn't ignore the journal prompt as he so often had in the past.

Date Unknown (but presumed to still be March 15, 2005)

I cannot help but wonder about things back home. Since I have, apparently, just traveled across country rather than into another dimension, my video cameras will be running out of tape some time soon. They should be almost to the end of their sixteen hours. And they have spent it recording an empty room.

And now that I have nothing else to think about until the morning when I can try to sort things out and get home, how is the situation with the Japanese shaping? Will I be able to get transportation back to the La Plata or is the country on the verge of marshal law? All modes of heavy transportation might be currently engaged to bring supplies and armaments to the front—which wouldn't be far from my house. Or, it may have all been another case of national posturing and there may be no reason for alarm at all.

I have never realized how disquieting it is to have no idea where you are.

Garison could think of nothing else to write, and he had suddenly lost interest in calculating his position with complicated mathematical formula, so he saved the entry, then shut off the computer and tried to find a comfortable place to lie down. He first hollowed out a little depression in the ground for his hip, then tried to convince himself that his knapsack made a suitable pillow. He made sure he had plenty of firewood handy to feed into the flames through the night then wrapped himself as tightly as he could in his leather jacket and tried to close his mind to the endless sounds of the meadow at night.

Excerpt from
A Fitch Family History by Maureen Fitch Carnes

Darius traveled the Tennessee mountains—those far, blue hills on the farthest reaches of the frontier that few white men had even heard of, let alone seen—and found no other white people after a little settlement its inhabitants didn't even have a name for. It was late summer, by this time, edging into fall, and there was starting to be a hint of crispness to the air early of a morning.

Somewhere in the woods about half way between where Knoxville and Nashville are now, Darius came upon an Indian brave. The brave was covered with blood, lying motionless, and Darius at first thought him dead. Closer inspection proved that the young warrior was not dead, at least not yet. Darius wrote in his diary that the young man looked to have been shot with a willow arrow. The arrow had only pierced the man's shoulder, but the impact had apparently knocked him down a bluff. The brave's leg had been broken during the fall and the Indian had passed out either from the loss of blood or the shock for he didn't appear to have sustained any sort of head wound.