Winston Chase and the Theta Factor Read online

  The world froze into solidity out of the shifting mist. Winston recognized the sculpture of Florence, the mother and her child set in the midst of drinking fountains. The cars parked along the road ringing the park all looked modern. One of them was the silver, almost comically old Toyota Van his mom had showed up in after his “finches fly in the fall” message. She sat behind the steering wheel, staring into space, a worried crease between her eyebrows.

  The sun had just set, painting the distant mountaintops afire with orange and red. Winston could see the sparkling trails of tears on her cheeks. She slowly grabbed a couple of objects from beside her, thought for a moment, then put the two objects together. With sudden horror, Winston realized what she’d done. It was late. She had probably been waiting for him for hours and couldn’t stand it any longer. She needed to call him, no matter what, even though he had explicitly warned her not to. Why hadn’t he foreseen that?

  He wanted to reach out and hold her, to let her know he was fine and actually sitting only feet away from her old colleague and friend, Theo.

  Her mouth quivered as she listened to the phone.

  “Mom, no!” Winston moaned despite knowing they were deaf to each other.

  Amanda spoke to someone. Her face went even paler, and her lips hardly moved as she formed words. She had to be talking to them.

  Or him. Bledsoe himself.

  A hand gripped Winston’s shoulder. He looked up and saw the ghostly form of Theo standing over him, the sky — a different, cloud-speckled sunset that existed forty-seven years in the future — burning orange and purple through him. Trying to see both worlds clearly sent a pulse of nausea through Winston, and he felt his lunch rise toward his throat.

  “Winston,” Theo repeated. “Are you OK?”

  “Yes,” he whispered, feeling far from it. “It’s…my mom.”

  With the smallest movements he could muster, Winston pushed himself forward ever so gently through time, following along behind his mother. He watched her drive away, saw her followed by an unmarked black SUV, and ultimately park at a warehouse in northwest Portland. A man emerged to meet her, a man he recognized all too well. She followed him inside, and Winston thought his heart would shatter.

  “No, no, no!” he called to her. “Why would you do that?”

  Winston dropped Little e into his lap and covered his face with his hands.

  Theo gripped Winston’s shoulder. He expected the older man to tell him everything would be all right or something equally meaningless. Fortunately, Theo kept such sentiments to himself.

  “OK,” Winston said, pulling himself together and rubbing his cheeks. “OK. I can prevent this.”

  “Focus,” Theo said. “What needs to happen next?”

  Right. Shade needed to happen next. The freighter.

  Winston nodded and gripped Little e again. He only needed a bit of elevation to move from the museum to the Columbia’s shore and skim over the river toward the point where he had fallen from the freighter. He recognized the property from the flower-adorned gazebo set within a large back yard. Under different circumstances, the experience might have been thrilling. Winston imagined that this had to look a lot like flying. Unfortunately, his mounting desperation to return home and help both his family and Shade dwarfed any sort of out-of-body entertainment.

  Now that he was settled in the right place, Winston had to find the right time. To test his earlier theory about hard-wired shortcuts, he imagined his home time, his own present, and mentally pushed the time controls to execute his wish. The Alpha Machine obliged, and the world slid into a momentary gray chaos, then almost instantly settled into bright daytime. The scene looked much as he remembered, only the gravel boat launch had been replaced by concrete, and the tall grass in which he’d slept had given way to short, lush lawn. The chrono readout placed him at 15:28 — midafternoon in his true present.

  By then, of course, the freighter would be long gone. Winston eased the time slider to the left, slipping backward through the hours, until the unmistakable freighter appeared downriver in what had become darkness. Winston flew to meet the ship. He adjusted his height and position, shuddering with almost superstitious dread as he passed ghost-like through ranks of containers.

  At last, Winston found the pallet where he and Shade had hidden. With relief, Winston noted that when he released the geoviewer controls he continued to float along above the pallet rather than falling back behind the ship. Unfortunately, Shade was not on the pallet.

  Winston scooted earlier in time until Shade’s back appeared to Winston’s right, flanked by two crewmen. One of them carried Winston’s backpack. The other talked sporadically into a small walkie-talkie.

  Winston followed behind them as they guided Shade through the container stacks and into the ship’s control tower. Winston expected them to take Shade to the top, presumably to explain himself and the odd disappearance of his stowaway companion to the captain. Instead, they led Shade down two flights of corrugated metal stairs, along a dimly lit hallway, and into a small, empty chamber. The room couldn’t have been more than five paces wide and even narrower in depth. The white paint on its walls flaked off in several splotches to reveal dark concrete, and a lone, flickering fluorescent tube dangled from two short chains mounted in the ceiling.

  Shade smiled the whole time they directed him into the room, but as soon as they had seized his backpack and locked him alone in the room, his expression fell into fear. He ran a hand along the walls, knocking every so often to confirm that it was solid. He looked out the door’s tiny, wire-reinforced window, looking one way and then the other with eyes growing more panicked by the moment.

  “I’m sorry, Shade,” Winston whispered.

  Shade settled himself into the farthest corner from the door — the most defensible position, Winston knew — and sat on the floor to wait.

  Winston had seen enough, and he released Little e. “I have to go,” he said as he opened his eyes.

  Theo waited a moment before replying, “There’s no need to rush. You can go when and where you need.”

  Winston wanted to believe he was right, but he knew better. There were so many places and times he wanted to see. But he also knew from his mom that time travel came with a price. Every hour spent in the past was an hour elapsed from his true present, and every time jump took a physical toll. Winston sensed it was now or never, that if he started down the rabbit hole of hopping around his timeline to buy ever more time to investigate and plan, he would end up like his father: stuck outside of himself, forever researching and preparing for a life he would never get to live. The trap of “just one more day” dangled before him like an animal snare, filled with enticement and waiting to close around him forever.

  “I must be insane to think that I can do this,” he said shakily.

  Theo backed away and looked down on him with something like reprimand. “Is there any reason to think you can’t do it? You got here, didn’t you?”

  Winston shook his head. “It was an accident.”

  “Yet here we are. Claude told me you might come.” Theo held out his hand to Winston. “You came. I wouldn’t call this an accident.”

  It was an accident. And it wasn’t. Time was slippery, and his father had obviously prepared for many possibilities.

  Winston nodded and accepted Theo’s hand to get to his feet. “I don’t think I’ll ever be ready, but I’m going to try.”

  “Do you know how?” Theo asked.

  “I have an idea. It’s kinda funny.”

  Theo gave him a quizzical glance. “Oh?”

  Winston crossed the basement to the several coils of rope stacked among some crates. Some of the lengths looked long and thick enough to support, say, a hundred and sixty–pound teenager.

  He could not be seriously considering this.

  “I got a message from a friend,” Winston said. “Well, I don’t know if she’s a friend. I was hoping for girlfriend, but…anyway. She told me to go drop off a bridge.�
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  Theo pursed his lips. “That’s generally a bad sign with girlfriends.”

  “Yeah,” said Winston. “Unless she meant it literally.”

  15

  Midnight March

  The midnight walk to the Astoria-Megler Bridge felt like a marathon. With so much elevation to reach the main span arcing across the water, engineers had built the on-ramp almost like a paper clip with one arm jutting out over the water. The turn for the bridge lay nearly a half mile past the bridge itself. Then came the toll booth to enter the on-ramp, followed by a loop back over the highway and another half-mile backtrack, ascending all the way. Finally, the road once more crossed the highway, now far below, and set out more than four miles across the Columbia.

  The Oregon side of the Astoria-Megler reached nearly two hundred feet over the water, tall enough to let seemingly any ship pass underneath. Punctuated by two steel peaks, the bridge then sloped gently down to skim just above the water on the long stretch to the Washington shore. Much of the tall, green trusses remained covered in white construction canvas. No lights adorned the bridge.

  Despite his mounting nervousness at this insane plan and their continuing climb up the on-ramp, Winston couldn’t help but yawn. He’d lost track of how long it had been since he’d enjoyed more than a catnap, and now, sometime shy of 1:00 in the morning, the fog of exhaustion worked to obscure his thinking. Astoria might as well have been a ghost town after 9:00. Winston hadn’t seen a car on the highway for at least ten minutes.

  “I told you we wouldn’t have to worry,” Theo said.

  Each of them bore a hundred-foot length of coiled, one-inch sisal rope across their bodies, much like the stuff Winston always saw wrapped around cat scratching posts. While Winston found its fibers horribly itchy against his neck, he was glad that the rope didn’t weigh much — and, according to Theo, would hold just shy of a thousand pounds. Theo had worn black, just to avoid tempting fate and any curious glances, but he’d been right. There were no street surveillance cameras in 1966. Nobody approached to question them. Theo merely used a set of bolt cutters on the lock securing the toll gate fence, then threw the lock and his cutters behind some nearby bushes. Once they’d quickly walked up the ramp and passed above the highway, they were all but invisible from view in the darkness.

  “Theo,” Winston said at last. “Do you wish the QVs had worked? Or was it better to stay in your own time?”

  In the dim light of a waxing moon obscured by the gauze of high clouds, Theo glanced away. He stuck his hands in his pockets as he trudged up the long concrete slope.

  “I try not to think about it,” he admitted. “Of course, I wonder about the future and what sort of life I might have found there. It’s not like I’ve done much with the life I kept. Hiding isn’t living.”

  Winston thought of his own life, how he and his mom did as little as possible, always keeping the lowest profile, doing nothing, going nowhere. Other kids got to visit Canada or Hawaii or at least go to Disneyland. The farthest Winston could ever remember traveling was to the Tagaloas’ lakeside cabin — less than two hours from home. He recalled the excitement he’d felt only a few days ago over being in the regional robotics competition and realized for the first time how nervous that must have made his mom. What if he’d won? Imagine how much attention he would have drawn.

  “I get that,” said Winston. “But maybe we can fix it, you know? I’m trying.”

  Theo patted him on the shoulder, lips pursed in thought.

  Far below lay the silent, black water of the Columbia. Behind them, the glowing yellow windows scattered across Astoria’s hillsides looked like distant stars brought to earth. It was quiet and beautiful here. Part of Winston wished he could stay.

  “Fix it how?” Theo asked.

  “That’s the big question. I’m not exactly sure.” Winston studied the moon as they walked.

  “Well, you must have some plan.”

  “Just a little one.” He looked at Theo, who watched him expectantly. “I’m going to go back and make sure Bledsoe doesn’t come forward with my parents.”

  Theo waited several seconds, brow furrowing. “And?”

  “And…that’s it.”

  The curator stared at him a moment longer, then burst out laughing.

  “What?” Winston couldn’t help but bristle with indignation.

  “That’s your plan? No offense, Winston, but I’m amazed you’ve made it this far.”

  “Well, excuse me! It’s not like I had a lot of time to prepare, you know?”

  Theo shook his head and waved one hand apologetically. “Of course not.”

  “So…”

  Winston knew the question he should ask. Theo was older. His dad had obviously liked and trusted him.

  “What would you do?” Winston asked.

  Theo rubbed the back of his neck. “You’re going to — what? Kill him?”

  “No!”

  Although the truth was that Winston had almost killed Bledsoe once already. The guy was crazy for power, had the hots for Winston’s mom, and was probably torturing his father right now in 2013. It was like the age-old science fiction question: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler before World War II, would you? Only now, Winston found himself in that exact position. For that matter, he realized, he could also go back and try to kill Hitler.

  The past was a bottomless pit of opportunity. Of course, that was why his father had scattered and hidden the Alpha Machine. There were no free lunches, his mom always said. As a diner waitress, she would know. Somebody always pays a price, and the bigger the sandwich, the higher the cost. Winston sensed that it was his place to fix this Bledsoe mess because he was fundamentally a part of it. Beyond that? No. That would be like playing God, and Winston was pretty sure that no one, especially a fourteen-year-old kid who wanted nothing more than to build robots and date Alyssa Bauman, qualified for that job.

  “You should,” said Theo, and his flat, matter-of-fact tone brought Winston up short. “Look. I’m not a violent man. I run a museum in a little town. I’m the kind of guy who sits like a mother hen on a lump of metal for fifteen years because a friend asked me to. But I know Devlin. I worked with him for a long time, and I’ve had even longer to think about him. There’s a vein of greed and insecurity deep inside him. He’s dangerous in a way I’ve never found in anyone else.”

  Winston recalled Bledsoe fighting with that younger FBI agent, Smith, on the dock below the Portland utility building. Bledsoe hadn’t hesitated to electrocute one of his own men with his bare hands for interfering.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen that already,” said Winston. He resumed walking up the bridge, forcing Theo to follow him. “But I can’t kill him. Not like that.”

  “Then like what?” Theo snapped his fingers. “The blast. Do you know about that?”

  Winston shook his head. “Mom only mentioned a fire or something.”

  “Area X had a plutonium fission bomb on hand for emissions testing. Before your parents went into the future, we picked a holiday and staged a widespread fire disaster in the complex, which triggered an evacuation of the few people left. Bernie helped us to seal off the entrances, so the place was essentially empty. I stayed home, but Bledsoe had somehow figured things out, so he hid inside.” The bitterness and guilt was plain on Theo’s face. “Bernie helped to trigger the bomb. If you just incapacitate Bledsoe before the blast, your parents can still escape, and Bledsoe will vanish along with the research and everything else in the detonation.”

  “That’s still killing him,” said Winston, and he could hear the desperation in his own voice. “I can’t just beat him unconscious, knowing that he’s going to get vaporized a few minutes later because I beat him unconscious!”

  “Winston. You don’t understand what your presence here means — the fact that there’s still a world and people in 2013. Children in schools today do nuclear blast drills where they’re taught to hide under their desks when the alarm sounds. Only four years ago, w
e all thought nuclear war was imminent when Russia wanted to put its missiles in Cuba, right off the Florida coast. Every day, we wake up and wonder if this will be the day when some politician goes insane and decides to kill us all. The only thing that keeps that from happening is the knowledge that nuclear war is unwinnable. If one side presses its launch button, everybody dies, everywhere, on every side.”

  It was strange, Winston thought, that the same danger still existed in his time, but no one ever thought about it. If anything, there were more missiles, all faster and more accurate, but no one seemed to worry or talk about them.

  “If either side thought there was even a chance that it might have an advantage,” Theo continued, “it would strike. There’s so much fear and hate between America and Russia now. If Khrushchev thought that we weren’t watching them for just five minutes, he’d launch his missiles without hesitation. And we would do the same.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Winston. “What does this have to do with—”

  “Because!” cried Theo, and this time, he took two quick steps ahead and blocked Winston. “Because if you give him those five minutes, if you even blink, Bledsoe will kill you. He will kill us all. He won’t stop until he has the Alpha Machine, and my guess is that if he gets it we’ll all wish we were dead.” Theo extended his hands, pleading. “Winston. You have to kill him first.”

  Deep down, Winston knew the man was right. That was how nature worked. Dog eat dog. Kill or be killed. The Brian Steinhoffs of the world understood that. Some kids led the ring, and some got beat up inside it. Life was just one big middle school.

  This time, though, Shade wouldn’t be there to run in with an epic tackle. Shade couldn’t go back with him to take care of Bledsoe. Nobody could. Winston had to do it alone because he was the only one who could use the Alpha Machine.

  Winston’s legs went weak with dread and hopelessness.

  “I don’t know if I can, Theo. But I’ll try.”

  The curator’s eyes narrowed. After a moment, he nodded ruefully and continued up the bridge.