“Could they cure your cancer?” I asked.
Katherine nodded. “There has been a lot of progress in cancer research in the past few decades, but there will be much more about fifty years from now—assuming we can repair the timeline. If I was a patient in 2070, or even a bit earlier, my treatment would have been a fairly simple course of medication—they’d have caught it much earlier and it would be a bit like curing a difficult bacterial infection today. Instead, my body gets pumped full of much more dangerous chemicals and radiation. And they still miss the target.”
Katherine shrugged and then continued. “All of which matters not in the slightest in this timeline, since I’m dead already. The next morning, I visited CHRONOS Med and told them I fell down in the tub. I doubt they believed me. It was surely not the first time a woman had shown up with a similar story. But I didn’t want to do anything that might alert the rest of CHRONOS about Saul until I’d had a chance to discuss the situation with Angelo.”
“Who exactly was Angelo?” I’d given up trying to figure out the correct tense for these people. If he was in Katherine’s past, I was going to refer to him in the past tense, even though he wouldn’t be born for several centuries.
Katherine took another sip of her tea before she answered. “Angelo was our direct supervisor. He trained both me and Saul. He was a good man and I was, in many ways, closer to him than I was to my parents, because he… well, he had the CHRONOS gene, too. There were things I could ask him that would have been incomprehensible to my father or even to my mother. From the time I entered the program when I was ten years old, Angelo was the one who guided my studies. I understood the CHRONOS bureaucracy well enough to know that he would also be in very hot water over Saul’s actions. I wanted his advice, but I also wanted to warn him.
“After I finished at the med unit,” she said, “I went to costuming so that they could get me ready for the jump. It was around eight, and between wardrobe and hairstyling, they usually had me ready for a mid-1800s trip in about half an hour. But that day—I don’t think it had ever taken nearly that long. Several of the costuming staff had arrived late and they were backed up. I sat there in a chemise with my hair half up for nearly twenty minutes. The plan had been to give Angelo a few minutes to check his messages and then we could talk, but it was after nine forty-five when I finally got there. I was just going to stick my head in and say we’d talk after I returned.”
“You couldn’t have delayed the jump?” I asked. “It seems like a pretty important conversation to put off for several days.”
Katherine shook her head. “Not without a major upheaval. The jump schedule is set a year in advance. The crews put a lot of effort into getting things ready, and I’d already gone through costuming. And… you’re thinking linearly again, Kate.”
I was getting a bit tired of hearing that. “Sorry. Like most people, I’m used to moving through time in a single direction—forward.”
“My point is that the trip would, for me, seem to last the four days that it was scheduled,” she explained. “But I didn’t return four days later—that would have been a waste of time for the jump crew. We all left and returned from our jumps in batches. It was more expedient to set destinations for two dozen jumpers once or twice a week than to keep track of a bunch of individual travelers. When I got back to CHRONOS, only an hour would have passed for the crew, Angelo, and even Saul, since he was one of the dozen who wasn’t on the schedule. The first cohort—the day-trippers who didn’t need as much prep—had gone out at nine thirty and were scheduled to return at ten thirty. The twelve in my cohort would depart at ten with a set return for eleven o’clock.
“So it really wasn’t much of a delay for anyone at CHRONOS, and I kind of liked the idea of having a few days to myself, away from Saul, to think about exactly what I wanted to do. The idea of being a single mother and what it might mean for my career scared the hell out of me.”
Katherine shifted her gaze and stared out the window for a moment. “I don’t know what time Angelo got to the office,” she continued, “but when I got there, the door was open and one of his mugs was shattered on the floor. He always drank this really horrid herbal concoction in the mornings and the room smelled awful—there was a large puddle of the stuff on the carpet.
“I opened the closet to get a towel, and there was Angelo, shoved to the back, on the floor. There was a ring of adhesive wrapped around his mouth and his nose—the stuff is sort of like duct tape, but stronger. It’s been over forty years and I can still see his face sometimes—bluish purple and his eyes wide-open.”
“He was dead?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said in a small voice. “It was long past the point where the med unit could have resuscitated him. I’ve always wondered, however, if it would have been different if I had gone to see him before I went to costuming.”
I gave her a sympathetic look and shook my head. “More likely, Saul would have killed you as well, right?”
She shrugged and pulled her sweater closer around her shoulders. “Either way, I felt responsible. I knew I needed to call security, but I was fully dressed for 1853, with just my bag packed for travel, and I didn’t have a communicator on me—I couldn’t exactly take it on a jump to the 1850s, so I’d left it back in the locker with my other belongings. I walked down the hall to find another supervisor, but they had either stepped out or weren’t in the office yet. And then I saw Richard, coming out of wardrobe. He had on the most outrageous tie-dyed shirt and bell-bottoms that were nearly as wide as my skirt—and it was clear from his expression that he’d gotten my email. He was as devastated as I was when he saw Angelo.
“Richard said everyone was probably already in the jump room, which made sense. We usually gathered around the platform—a large circular area—for ten minutes or so before getting into place, chugging a last cup of decent coffee or whatever. Richard and I were actually late—we only had three or four minutes before the jump.”
“But the crew would cancel a jump in case of a murder, right?” I asked.
“Yes. But they never got the chance to cancel it. Richard and I told the jump coordinator—his name was Aaron—about Angelo. Richard also mentioned that he had seen Saul a little after eight, outside the building with a few of his friends from the Objectivist Club. Two of them were part of CHRONOS—a middle-aged historian who was scheduled to retire in a couple of years and one of the guys in the research section.”
She gave me a little smile. “But I’m getting sidetracked. At any rate, Aaron was calling in this information to security headquarters, which was two buildings over, and we were just about to tell the others, when Saul came into the room—although I don’t think anyone realized it was Saul at first. I know I didn’t. He was dressed in a burqa—you know, the Middle Eastern head-to-toe covering?”
I nodded.
Her face was pale as she continued. “He was holding our colleague, Shaila, right in front of him, with a knife to her neck. And there was something odd strapped to her chest—a small square box.
“Saul ordered Aaron to cut off the call to security and told everyone to get into their places for the jump. And, of course, we all did what he said—I mean, the others didn’t know about Angelo yet, but some crazy person in a burqa was holding a knife to Shaila.” She shuddered. “He was staring straight at me the entire time, Kate, with the same expression I’d seen in his eyes the night before, like he was wishing the knife was at my throat. Richard saw it, too, and I think that’s why he moved into my spot on the platform. I don’t know if Saul noticed we switched or not—he was in Shaila’s space, still keeping the knife to her neck.”
Katherine gave me a rueful smile. “And the burqa was a very smart choice on his part.”
“Because no one could see who he was?” I asked.
“Yes, it definitely kept him from being immediately identified, except for me and Richard, and we might not have recognized him if we weren’t already forewarned—just the eyes through that tiny space? But,” she said, “that’s not the only reason. With all of the rest of us, you could make an educated guess as to when we were headed. Maybe not where, at least not after the mid-1900s when fashions became more global, but you could generally tell the era within a few decades from the way we were dressed. The burqa, however—women have worn that in many countries for thousands of years. It was still worn in a few isolated communities in my era. Shaila studied changes in Islamic culture over time and I knew she’d made jumps that ranged from the mid-1800s to the mid-2100s. So who knows when or where Saul landed? He could have been fully dressed for any era under that wrap.
“And it all happened so fast,” she added. “When Aaron pushed the button to launch the jump, Saul shoved Shaila face-first into the center of the circle. She hit the platform and the very last thing I saw was a flash of white light and a loud whooshing sound, before I landed, hard, in the cabin just north of the field where they were holding the Woodstock festival. A hard landing is not normal—usually you just appear in the new location in whatever position you started. If you were scratching your nose in 2305, you’d still be scratching when you landed in 1853. But I landed flat on my back on the dirt floor, with my hoopskirt quite nearly inside out. The thing Saul strapped to Shaila’s chest must have been an explosive—and I can only assume it was a powerful one since no one, to my knowledge, has been able to connect to CHRONOS since.”
The apple slices were still untouched on Katherine’s plate and I realized that my own sandwich was barely half eaten. I took a few more bites and then asked, “Why did Saul think that destroying headquarters would make him able to jump from one time to the next, if he hadn’t done that before?”
“I wondered that myself,” Katherine said. “We all knew that we couldn’t jump between stable points, without a trip back to CHRONOS. In training, they said this was an institutional check—a way for CHRONOS to keep tabs on our temporal location. The medallion reads the genetic structure of the jumper as you depart and Saul must have believed, with headquarters out of the picture, that he’d be a free agent, so to speak. Without the anchor at headquarters pulling him back, he assumed that he would be able to travel between stable points whenever he wanted. But the medallions were locked to return to CHRONOS—the only thing he did was ensure that we couldn’t use them at all. I wasn’t pleased at being stranded in an earlier century, and I didn’t know when or where Saul landed, but it was at least nice to know that his plan hadn’t worked.”
“Kind of poetic justice,” I said.
“Right. All of that changed, however, when Prudence disappeared—or, I suspect, when Prudence found Saul, whenever or wherever he was. Once he realized that the CHRONOS gene could be inherited, then it was only a matter of time before he found a way to manipulate that knowledge to breed people who could go where he could not.”