Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (20 page)

The rest of the team glanced at her in surprise. They had all sensed the evil field emanating from the shrinking darkness. No one had any desire to try to go into it.

Foreman shrugged. “You can go in. Coming out is the problem. No one, as far as I know, has ever come back after going into a gate. And I’ve been tracking them for around seventy years.”

“Let’s back up,” Moms said, trying to get this Gordian knot of information, or lack thereof, untangled. “What is the real threat here? That thing and others like it coming through the gate or the missing Time Patrol?”

“The missing Patrol,” Foreman said.

“Why?”

Foreman opened his mouth to answer but was cut off as the Keep hung up the phone and joined them. “Someone has just landed who can help us with Ms. Frobish’s memory problem.”

Nada went over to one of the windows and peered out. His face tightened as he recognized the person hustling up to the large van.

The door to the command post opened and Frasier came in, his sunglasses on.

“Great,” Scout muttered. “Men in Black.”

Frasier looked about and settled his glasses’ gaze on Edith. “Ms. Frobish?”

She nodded.

“I’m here—”

Frasier didn’t get the next word out before Nada had his machete against the shrink’s neck.

“What did you do to me?” Nada demanded.

Frasier didn’t seem perturbed. “What had to be done.” Surprisingly, he smiled, as best he could smile, which was really more a twitch. “The memory block has been done to others besides you.” He nodded toward Edith. “It was done to her, tethered to the alarm. Once that went off, the block went into place. She can remember generalities but not specifics. A security Protocol. We all understand the importance of Protocols.”

“My wife,” Nada growled. “My child. Those are specifics, not protocols.”

“Yes, they were,” Frasier said. “And the memory was destroying you. You were trying to kill yourself slowly with alcohol and, at times, quickly with your guns. You were a detriment to yourself and the team. You were reckless on missions, putting not only your life in danger but the lives of others. The choice was to either have you Sanctioned or to block the memories since you were considered a valuable asset. Ms. Jones chose to block you. She saved your life. It was her decision and you should be thankful for it.”

Moms reached out and placed her hand on Nada’s arm. She pulled on it, removing the machete from Frasier’s neck. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Nada, but we’ll deal with it later. Frasier must have been doing his job. We all did a lot of things upon Ms. Jones’s orders. Can you do your job now?”

Nada swallowed hard, and then sheathed the machete.

“How does this block work?” Doc asked, always on the search for knowledge. “It has to be selective.”

“It’s complicated,” Frasier said. “And you have to be preconditioned for it.”

“Ah,” Doc said. “So I assume we’re all preconditioned for it.”

“Enough.” Frasier didn’t waste any more time. He pulled a small device out of his pocket and stepped up to Edith. “It won’t hurt,” Frasier said with all the bedside charm of an axe murderer. He unreeled earbuds and told her to put them in her ears. Once she did that, he turned on the device.

Edith grimaced, disputing Frasier’s statement.

It lasted ten seconds, and then Frasier had her remove the pods and he put the device back in his pocket. “The block was an implanted protection initiated by the alarm in case your facility was breached and you survived and were captured. You
couldn’t
give up the details of what you know. But now you can tell us.”

Edith blinked rapidly several times, and then shook her head. She took a couple of deep breaths. “All right. All right.” She pressed her hands on both sides of her narrow head. “Oh my gosh. It’s crazy. Too much but I can’t remember everything.”

Scout placed an arm around her. “Take some deep breaths.”

Nada stepped forward, into Frasier’s personal space. “I want my memories back. All of them. I can remember being told of my wife’s and daughter’s deaths. And I can see their faces. But not much more. I don’t know how they died. I want the details. How? When? Where?”

Moms’s mouth dropped open in shock.

Scout let go of Edith and hugged him. “I’m so sorry!”

The Keep stepped up to Nada and Scout. She shoved her arms between the two. She grabbed Nada’s combat vest and looked up into his eyes, speaking in a flat, cold voice. “I am terribly sorry for your losses, team sergeant. But we have to deal with this problem. Here and now. If we don’t, there won’t ever be any dealing with anything else.”

“Nada,” Moms said, half a request, half an order, both tentative.

Nada waved his hand about, letting go of the machete handle and indicating the others in the CP. “How many other people in here have memory blocks? As Doc noted, I’m sure we’re all preconditioned for them.”

“That’s not relevant right now,” Frasier said.

“I think it’s relevant,” Eagle said. “Maybe you have one,” he said to Frasier.

The team shrink twitched a smile. “Well, I wouldn’t know if that was true, would I?”

“Funny guy,” Scout muttered. “Not.”

Frasier heard her, but didn’t allow himself to be distracted. “Let’s focus on the job at hand, shall we?” He gestured at Foreman. “We need what Ms. Frobish knows, don’t we?”

Foreman nodded. “She’s worked directly with the Time Patrol for a long time and can explain it much better than I can.”

Edith looked at Foreman. “I remember you now. You visited occasionally. Met the Administrator.”

“I did,” Foreman said.

Edith took a deep breath. “All right. It’s coming back to me. Strobe-like, but settling down.”

Edith looked about, taking in everyone in the command post. As she did so, Roland and Mac came back in and silently joined the group. In the background they could hear a helicopter taking off and knew Kirk—Staff Sergeant Winthrop Carter—was en route to the morgue, and then would begin the long journey that would end in Parthenon, Arkansas.

In the back of each Nightstalker’s mind was the knowledge that they could be making a similar journey before this was over.

When Edith began speaking, her voice was level and focused. “I’m going to explain it to you the way it was explained to me as best I can remember. It’s still a little patchy but smoothing out.”

“Start at the beginning,” Moms said.

Edith shook her head. “What beginning? Okay. I’ll start where they began explaining it to me when I first joined the Patrol. I was given the explanation simply to help me do my job and understand the importance of it.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s a basic truism that if time travel is ever invented then it has always existed in our history. Which means it exists now.”

“Huh?” Roland muttered.

“Cool,” Scout said.

“Exactly,” Doc said, as if he’d thought of it himself, which he probably had, more than once.

“There are dangers to time travel, of course,” Edith continued. “The most glaring is interfering with the past. By the way, we can’t travel forward from our time for some reason.”

“Because it doesn’t exist yet,” Doc said.

Edith shrugged. “I don’t know. I also think it has something to do with math and physics, which isn’t my area of expertise.”

“Intriguing,” Doc said. “How far back can one travel?”

Edith shook her head. “I have no idea. I know I’ve researched things from the beginning of recorded history.” She shut her eyes for a moment and then opened them. “Getting beyond the clumsy paradoxes of what happens if you kill your own father, which is a non-starter because it can’t happen, because it’s a fundamental paradox loop, we have certain truths.”

“Say that again?” Roland said.

“If we wait for Roland to understand this,” Mac said, “then we’re going to be here forever.”

“Do
you
understand?” Roland challenged.

“Not yet,” Mac admitted. “But the pretty lady has just started.”

“Not now, Mac,” Moms said. “Continue,” she said to Edith.

“First. You have to accept that there is time travel. That’s a reality that just needs to be accepted.”

“When was it invented?” Eagle was unable to restrain himself. “By who?”

Edith shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does except maybe the techs who service the HUB or, more likely, the Administrator.”

“Who is that?” the Keep asked.

Edith seemed confused by the question. “He’s the Administrator. That’s the only name I’ve ever heard him called.”

The Keep turned to Foreman. “The Administrator?”

“He runs the Patrol,” Foreman said. “I’ve met him a few times. That’s the only name or title I know him by. I don’t meddle in the details of how he runs things or how things operate here. He’s rarely about. I’m his contact for funding and in DC.”

“So ultimately the Patrol works for you?” the Keep demanded.

“The Patrol works for mankind,” Foreman said.

Moms slapped one of the counters, rattling the phones lined up on it. “Stop it! We’re not playing a game here. We’ve been called in to this for a reason, but no one’s told us what it is. We’re not even sure what our mission is. And we’ve lost a member of our team. So, Mister Foreman, with all due respect to whatever you are and whatever position you hold, stop with the obfuscation!”

“Huh?” Roland whispered.

“She means stop with the bullshit,” Eagle said to him.

“Yeah,” Roland said in a louder voice. “Stop obfuscationing.” He stepped up right behind Moms’s shoulder, a hulking presence to punctuate her statement.

Foreman held up his hands in surrender. “The Patrol
does not
work for me. It exists for its mission.”

Everyone took that in for a moment.

Nada shook his head. “I’m not buying that. Someone formed the Time Patrol. Everyone works for someone.”

Foreman indicated Edith. “Let the lady speak. She knows more than I do.”

Everyone turned back to Edith.

“The HUB was in the center of the base, in the cavern.” Her forehead furrowed as she tried to remember. “I can’t remember what it looks like yet. But it drew a lot of power. There was a legend that the HUB caused the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965.”

“There were power cables in the floor of the cavern,” Doc said. “Connected to the grid.” He turned to Edith. “When was it invented?”

“Frankly,” Edith said, “
when
it was invented doesn’t matter. As I said. If it’s ever invented then it was always invented. The Patrol used the HUB. That’s the bottom line.” She sighed. “It’s so much easier just to write things up in a report and turn it in. Even in just six pages.”

“My head hurts,” Roland said.

“This is really cool,” Scout said.

“Just tell me how to kill those things,” Nada muttered.

“Wait a second everyone,” Doc said, weighing in on his area of expertise: science. A difficult undertaking given the Nightstalkers’ propensity to shoot first and ask questions later. “We’ve got to understand this.”

“No,” the Keep interrupted. “You don’t need to understand it. Because it seems even the Patrol didn’t understand the HUB. They used it. We need to solve the immediate problem, the Time Patrol being missing, and fix it. Because the clock is ticking.”

“But they had to get the technology somehow,” Doc argued. “It had to come from somewhere and sometime. From our own future? Invented in our present? Actually that would be our past since it existed already and you insinuated it was active during the ’65 blackout.”

No one answered Doc’s questions.

Moms stepped into the silence. “The Patrol didn’t just up and decide to disappear. Someone made them disappear. Most likely that thing we killed in the cavern. And its buddies.”

“Why don’t we just listen.” The Keep wasn’t asking.

So Edith continued. “Time travel is dangerous. Both the actual mechanics of it, which, again, I am
not
familiar with, not being an agent or a scientist, and the possible effects a time traveler could have, or someone coming into our timeline and changing it could have. The latter was the focus of the Patrol’s mission.

“It’s not a case of stepping on a butterfly a thousand years ago and changing the course of history. The way it was explained to me is that our history, our timeline, is a powerful river churning through deep banks that it has cut through the space-time continuum.” She cupped her long hands together to emphasize her point. “If a time traveler or infiltrator into our timeline changes something in the past, we call that a ripple. Like throwing a pebble into that river. Almost always it won’t have any effect. The flow of history will absorb the change and the ripple sooner or later fades away into nothing.

“But if it’s a major change—think Hannibal killing Scipio Africanus—that might have an effect.”

“Who killed who?” Roland muttered, perking up at the hint of violence, but everyone ignored him.

Edith plowed ahead, trying to explain the unexplainable. “Note I say
might
because generally one person or one event isn’t enough. People can be replaced by like-minded people. Very rarely is one person that important. And rarely is one event so important. But in such cases where they are, the Patrol has dealt with those attempts to change time and negated them.”

That got everyone’s attention.

“Who is making these attempts to change history?” the Keep asked.

“That’s the problem,” Edith said. “We don’t know. We assume they are from a parallel Earth timeline. One at least.”

Moms turned to Foreman. “So that’s your connection to the Patrol.”

“Yes,” Foreman said. “Our research overlapped, but we still know so very little on either side.”

“That thing down in the cavern,” Scout said. “It was from another Earth timeline?”

“It’s possible,” Edith said.

“Maybe it might be other time travelers from our own timeline,” Doc said.

“Does anyone else on the planet, our Earth,” Moms asked, “have time travel capability?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Edith said.

Moms turned to Foreman. “Do you know?”

“The same—no one else as far as I know,” Foreman said.