Forty Leap (44 page)

“A foundation?” Jefferny asked. “You want
FLASH to sponsor a foundation for Forty Leapers?”

I hesitated for a second and then nodded
vigorously. That was exactly what I wanted. It could contain the
histories of any of the Forty Leapers that passed through its
doors. It could provide that safe haven that we always craved.
There could be laboratories devoted to seeking out a cure. How
would it be for a Forty Leaper to step through those doors and be
handed the ticket out of their turmoil? It was perfect.

Jefferny thought so, too. His contemplation
turned into exuberance and he began to scribble furiously on his
PDA. All the while he was talking to me. But in his excitement, he
had lapsed back into the quick slang of English and I wasn’t
getting it all. All that I managed to understand was that I was to
be put in charge of organizing the whole thing and that it would be
called the Mathew Cristian Foundation.

I was honored.

So it was that a week after being released
from the hospital, I was brought back to headquarters in order to
view the progress. I remembered what Manhattan had looked like in
2189. Rupert and Larena had led me through the streets of the city,
some that looked like suburbs, others that looked like the city I
remembered. Now it was storage. Can you believe it? New York City
had been the greatest city in the world. Its landmarks had been
celebrated by people across the nations. Times Square was
the
place to be on New Year’s Eve. And now? Most of the
buildings were gone. They had leveled the place and set up
warehouses for storage. There were some small communities scattered
about the island, but these were mostly people who worked in the
warehouses. Travel throughout the city was completed mostly by
bicycle. The bikes looked different, but they were still powered by
human legs.

We, however, did not ride. We took a coach,
which actually looked like an old carriage and was pulled by three
cyclers. It was a return to the golden age of travel. It would have
been a great tour two hundred years before. I can only imagine
having been pedaled through the Manhattan rebuilt after the end of
the United Arab occupation. That image still stuck in my mind. The
pier. The highways. The lights and majesty of it all. This was
sad.

And it was all because of us.

The government started pushing people out of
the city right after the night of the invasions.

When we reached the site I was amazed at what
I saw. The building that had been built over the headquarters was
gone. Dirt and cement had been laid down in its place. I could see
that this blocky foundation dug deep and was probably as thick as
it appeared. Even had I managed to dig through the debris choking
the staircases, I would never have been able to get through that
slab of stone. No human being could. The crews that had rescued me
had tunneled into it from the edge. They had used old blueprints of
the building and searched using various algorithms and it had still
taken almost three months to find a suitable entrance. All of that
work had been going on while I was still out of existence,
travelling the fourth dimension in utter blindness. There was no
way for them to know how long I was down there so I never found out
my exact leap-in date. I suppose it didn’t matter.

In the week since our conclusion, they had
managed to erect a fairly large portion of the skeleton that would
serve as the main building of the Foundation. The plans called for
a sprawling complex composed of six buildings, each three stories
tall. Manhattan had been so flat for so long that the people
responsible for dispensing permits were unwilling to allow tall
buildings to once again dominate the view. Jefferny and the other
members of FLASH didn’t seem to care. Low to the ground was fine.
There was plenty of space.

The headquarters itself would remain largely
untouched. The idea of a museum still appealed to most of the FLASH
people. I wasn’t terribly opposed to this but again, if it was
going to be open to the public, we needed to recognize the danger
of someone leaping in fresh from that battle.

There was an elevator that led down to where
they had cleared the staircase. It was an entrance on the far west
side of the complex, set far away from the Map Room and the
barracks. Four of us boarded the elevator that would take us down.
In addition to Jefferny and myself was a young man named Johnatthew
and a worker whose name was never given to me. There was hushed and
quick conversation between Jefferny and Johnatthew as we descended.
It was pretty deep, deeper than I remembered. I guess I hadn’t
realized it before.

As soon as we stepped out of the elevator I
knew that I would have to leave immediately. I was besieged by
terrible emotions, fear and sickness. I felt as if I were dying of
thirst again and kept turning my head back around to make sure that
the elevator was still there.

Both Jefferny and Jonatthew asked after my
well-being but I couldn’t find the proper words to answer. Somehow
I managed to convey that I had to go back up immediately. They
helped me into the elevator, which had mercifully waited behind for
us. As soon as the doors closed and we began to rise I felt better.
But I knew that I was not going to go back down. Never again would
I set foot into that place that had entombed me.

My trauma did not preclude me from looking at
pictures though. Digital photos were mailed to my office regularly
and I was able to make comments on the work being done. Every photo
brought an uneasy feeling with it but in the safe confines of my
office I was able to master my fear. They were doing an excellent
job of restoring the place. The lights were back on. The bodies had
been removed. All of the blood and filth had been removed. Based on
my memories from a week spent there, it was beginning to take shape
as the place it had been. Often I wished for the company of some
other who had spent time there, more time than I. Rupert would have
been my first choice, but I would have accepted anyone who might
have been a kindred spirit. Still, though, no one came. I knew that
what I was doing was important work. I was doing my best to save
the people that had leaped from that place and into time. When they
came back, harried and feeling the dreadful excitement of battle,
they would be safe.

At length, we learned that there was really
no decisive way to guard against armed people coming through
shooting. I was adamant about keeping the installation closed to
the public. We estimated that somewhere between seventy five and
one hundred people had leaped from that location during the battle.
Some were accounted for but others were not. There was no way to
know where and how they would show up. As more arrived, we might be
able to reconstruct bits of what had gone on. That would make
things safer. We could then cordon off certain areas rather than
having to close the whole thing. But the members of FLASH were
unanimous in their desire to see it opened up. And they were the
ones with the money. My authority went only as far as they allowed
it to go. I resented them somewhat for that, but not entirely.

In the end, people would be allowed to visit
if they submitted to being clothed head to foot in bullet proof
uniforms. Can you imagine? But such suits existed and were
virtually impervious to the weapons of the twenty second century.
So the headquarters would be outfitted as a museum with the main
building serving as an administrative complex. The only access to
the installation below would be through heavily secured entrances
from the main building. The other buildings would provide food,
shelter, and medicine to errant Forty Leapers. I insisted they pay
urgent attention to those buildings and one was completed and open
in less than two weeks.

The first leaper came through two days after
that. She was not from our headquarters, nor even from New York.
There was a lone installation in Kentucky that had been found even
after the headquarters in New York. It had been excavated quickly.
Due to its size, the workers had had no problems digging into the
ground and finding it. She came through swinging a broom handle of
all things. When she told her story, she told of being surrounded
by three soldiers who had decided to put away their guns. I guess
that sort of fear could have driven anyone to the edge and back.
Carolyn Lynn was her name.

It was hard for her to trust anyone, of
course. She was suffering from the same paranoia as any of us. The
people hired by FLASH helped to calm her down and reassure her. I
was awakened in the middle of the night so that I could get onto a
camera and speak directly with her. At first there was doubt on her
face. Why should she believe anything I said? Why should she even
believe that I was Mathew Cristian? And since I didn’t know her, I
had nothing to tell her to prove my identity. But I did my best and
I think the complete lack of personal attachment was what
eventually won her trust. I invited her to New York, to come stay
at the Foundation. She was hesitant at first but there really
wasn’t anything for her in Kentucky. There hadn’t been for a long
time. Carolyn Lynn had left behind a husband and two teen aged
children in 1952. Once her decision was made, she didn’t want to
wait. She was in New York the following evening after a good meal
and a good sleep. When we were introduced, she ran up to me and
hugged me tightly. I instantly felt the connection brought on by
our situations and hugged her back. What I felt at that moment was
relief. I was no longer alone. There was someone else like me in
the world.

Carolyn Lynn added a very important
perspective to the preparations of the Foundation. It wasn’t the
female touch
, although I think that was part of it. Once she
had recovered from her harrowing leap, she proved herself to be an
incredibly sharp and intelligent woman. As a housewife in the early
1950s, she had been stifled, her creative instinct focused on home
building and cooking. With the Foundation her intellect was set
loose and things began to move much more quickly. She was much
better than I at organizing living and administrative space. But
her primary contribution was the
Intro
. A million trained
psychiatrists could never have put together what she did from her
own experience. She worked tirelessly at devising a way for regular
people of the twenty fourth century to approach and win the trust
of Forty Leapers from countless eras behind.

The first opportunity to use this came on May
1
^st
. It was a great trial because the man who leaped
into reality had not fought during the invasion. He was simply a
regular guy who had been fortunate enough to miss all of the
action. He appeared in the middle of Las Vegas. It had been four
hundred years since his leap. That meant that he had last leaped in
1942, before I was even born. I remember being amazed during my
early leaps when I had missed important world changing events. I
had missed my mother’s death and Morty’s death. I had missed the
United Arab invasion. This man, Phinneas Scot was his name, had
missed the entire war. I so envied him.

The result was that Phinneas Scot was not in
fear during his leap. In fact, he had just won a huge hand of
blackjack, which had been the impetus for his leap. Unfortunately,
he was not going to collect. When the
Leap Patrol
as we
called the people who volunteered to be on hand for arriving Forty
Leapers caught wind of him, they used the Intro. He laughed at
them. When they talked to him about the war, he thought they were
talking about World War II.

Phinneas was a great character who took
everything in stride. His world of the eighteenth century had been
left far behind for him and he had embraced Forty Leaping, a new
term to him, like a member of the family. He took a trip to the
Foundation to meet me and Carolyn and see what it was all about. It
was refreshing for me to meet someone who didn’t know who I
was.

“You seem like a good lad,” he said to me.
“But I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

At that I broke up laughing, which was the
second such laugh since I had landed in the twenty fourth century.
I kind of liked it.

Phinneas spent a week with us, reading
through all of the compiled data and touring the city. He was a
gambler and spent some time teaching me how to play poker and
blackjack. He talked about betting on the horses, too, but didn’t
recommend it. And then he left. He said his goodbyes, knowing that
we would not see each other again. He had refused the adrenal
inhibitors saying that he never put anything into his body except
rich food and hard liquor.

“No sense being shackled to \the world by a
stopwatch, Mathew,” he said. “You think that through every time you
chew a pill.”

I found myself buoyed by Phinneas Scot’s
attitude toward life and leaping. I have often thought of and
written about that sense of freedom brought on by leaping through
time. I had been given opportunity after opportunity to cast off
the shackles of responsibility clapped on by everyday life. But I
had never truly done so. My quest had always been for a sense of
normalcy. I had sought out and now found a stable life. But
Phinneas rejected it. I admired him for that. In a way, I even
envied him. Every day I would look at my adrenal inhibitor pill and
silently curse it and silently praise it at the same time. I think
it troubled me more than I realized. As the work in the
headquarters progressed toward a gala opening, Carolyn noticed a
change in my attitude. We had become quite close, working together
every day and we had shared many of our stories and personal
secrets. I spoke often of Jennie and Carolyn never seemed to tire
of hearing about her.

“Mathew,” she said to me one day. “I wonder
if you realize that you’re afraid that ending your leaping will
close a door that’s become very important to you.”